ART.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN FRANCE.
TME French nineteenth century painters are at last having a good innings over here. The most important exhibition in the spring of 1922, that at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, was of their work, and this year we have seen them at the Lefovre Gallery, at the Knoedler Gallery (15 Old Bond Street), at Agnew's (43 Old Bond Street) and in the mixed French and Dutch show at the French Gallery (120 Pall Mall). The last three exhibitions are still open. Of the three, I prefer the smallest, that at Agnew's. There is a certain intimacy and lack of distraction which helps the pictures enormously. The luxuriousness of Knoedler's holds them aloof and the gloom of the French Gallery makes them terribly "serious." But even if we discount these adventitious effects, even after we have studied the pictures individually and carefully, I feel that the Agnew exhibition is a "picked lot" compared to the others. The official centrepiece of this collection is Manet's Le Bon Bock, but I find it less exciting than many of the others. It is so obviously a masterpiece, so complete an achievement. The placid, reflective petit bourgeois is per- fectly realized pictorially and psychologically. He is— and he is there on Manet's canvas. It is not a painting of him. It is his artistic equivalent in paint. And it is the very completeness of the achievement, I think, which makes the picture a little disappointing, a little unsatisfying. There is no struggle, no kick. Compare it, for example, with Cezanne's Bois des Soeurs. That is a superb picture. Tech- nically, it is almost incredibly wonderful. We have to go back close to it again and again to see how on earth it was done. It is so simple and so extraordinarily difficult, so baffling. The certainty with which the painter has applied the strokes of his palette knife (I could not find a brush mark in the whole picture), the daring and sureness of the composition, and the rich glow of the colour move me in a way which Mallet's lesser attempt can never do. It is a green picture, but so subtle and so varied is the melody played in greenness that the feeling is of infinitely complex colour. There is the quality of Limoges enamel about the picture. A fine Renoir La Tone de The hangs next to it. Here, again, colour is one of the predominant notes—hqt, flaming colour, based on salmon pink ; and I hate salmon pink. Although I revel in the amazing dexterity of the painting, the remarkable unity of rhythm, the altogether delightful handling of the flesh, and particularly the whole figure on the right, I still cannot like salmon pink and I cannot like Renoir's foliage. You find it in this and in La Liseuse. It seems to me vulgar and forrr:ess. Le Square de la Trinite at the Knoedler Gallery is, to my mind, a much pleasanter picture. I imagine it to he an earlier work, before Renoir's final plunge into hotness. It is an old belief that the critic's liver often accounts for his adverse judgments, and I sincerely hope that it may be the heat wave which, in a similar way, has made me fall out with Renoir at these two exhibitions. Certainly I have always admired him greatly before.
The centrepiece of the Knoedler exhibition is a very cool
picture. It is by the coolest of all great painters, Ingres. I am irritated that I cannot enjoy any Ingres at first sight. I know he is always a great painter and I know that in the end I shall always come to admire and feel all his work, but I still at first resist every new picture that I see. With Mdlle. Gonin I felt that this was an Ingres which would never beat down my aversion to his glaring superficial faults. But within five minutes Mdlle. Gonin had reduced me, and as I write I have in front of me a reproduction. Though it is a poor remembrancer, it gives me great pleasure. What infinite delicacy, what sympathy of line, what firmness of modelling and structure, what profound love ; and what a mercy that, in spite of all his efforts, Ingres could not spoil himself. The last centrepiece, that at the French Gallery, is a fine intel- lectual composition by Degas, L' Acrobate. It is, I think, a most striking picture, but his works at the other galleries seem thin and strained. They arc out of their depth in such high company. A painter who stands up to that company amazingly well is Sisley. His work is always sincere, con- vincing, luminous and poetic, perhaps a little too poetic. I do not suggest that he is in the category of Ingres or Menet, of Renoir or Cezanne, but among the lesser painters in these exhibitions he takes a very high rank.
I have confined myself in this notice to a few purely personal remarks. The importance and range of the exhibitions under consideration are too great tbr any comprehensive examination, however curt, in less than a volume, but if these -selected impressions have suggested a narrow field, I'must remedy that with a further selection from the list of painters whom I have not even mentioned. Among others there are, then, Corot, Courbet, Detainer, Millet, Monet, Pissarro, Puvis de Chavannes, Couture, Boudin, Diaz, Jongkind and Daubigny.
ANTHONY BERTRAM.
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