Four French Painters
Chardin. By Bernard Denvir. Delacroix. By Jacques Lassaigne. (Longmans. Masters of Painting Series. los. 6d. each.) Gauguin. Introduction by Jean Taralon. Manet. Introduction by Douglas
HERE are four books reproducing the work of French painters. One painter, Chardin, was born in the last year of the- seventeenth century ; another, Gauguin, died in the third year of the twentieth century. The one never travelled further- from Paris than to Fontainebleau, and the other, turning his back on his family, his civilisation and his epoch, attempted to find in the Pacific a " new Jerusalem " many thousands of miles from his home. The fact that both were French would seen, to be all that these men have in common. However, their various extremes underline trends in French painting that have always existed, either side by side or fused together, in each century. Delacroix and Manet, the middle men represented in these volumes, are not at such extremes from each other. In Delacroix there is certainly some of the romantic, savage approach of Gauguin, but there is also, in his quieter moments, an interest, from an ornamental or textural point of view, in everyday things, such as is shown in the magnificent " still life with lobsters " (here reproduced) or in his flower pictures.
Mr. Denvir points out in his introduction to Chardin that Delacroix greatly admired him and even borrowed one of his pictures to copy. Manet, alternately in his flower-pieces and still-lifes, has the subtle tone-values of Chardin, but he also attempts, in works like " Olympia " (here reproduced) or the " Dejeuner sur l'Herbe," subjects that would have interested Delacroix or even Gauguin. Whereas Gauguin can push overstatement to the point where it becomes vulgar and Chardin can be so reticent as to pass at times almost unnoticed, both Delacroix and Manet can carry on a pictorial conversation that seldom becomes even an argument, and is never overbalanced on the one side or the other. The span between Chardin and Gauguin, that is as wide as that between the classical eighteenth-century furniture of Riesener and the barbaric negro masks of Benin, can be suitably supported by Delacroix and Manet as pilasters. (If Chardin can be compared with other craftsmen of his century, it seems that comparison is only= possible with the Transitional and Louis XVI cabinet-makers, such as Riesener. not with other painters.) A student who wants the briefest precis of the change in outlook that took place in French painting between the beginning of the eighteenth century,and the end of the nineteenth century could not do better than ponder' at length over the illustra- tions in these four volumes.
Coloured reproductions, unless done, by expensive facsimile methods, never seem, especially to an aitist, to have much connec- tion with the original. This is partly because of the impossibility of reproducing on paper the tactile 'propoirties of a canvas oil painting. Whereas a square inch of flab in a painting may have " twenty or more colours suffused into it, the reproduction only has at the most three or four. Delicate gradations of tone are inevitably lost, and the best one can hope for is at approximation that does not contain tonal " howlers." Judged from this limited angle, few of the coloured plates in these volumes offend, and the enormous progress made in recent years canoted, Some plates are obviously more faithful to the original tigeOthers. Manet's wonder- ful portrait sketch of Madame Lepine from Captain .Molyneux's collection is as exact as could ever be hoped for, but Lady Aber- conway's " Bords de la Seine a Argenteuil " in the same volume is merely a blurred travesty of the original. On the whole, the coloured plates in the Edition du Chene volumes are the more suc- cessful, but then the " Masters of Painting " make up for short- comings by- having over thirty black-and-white reproductions of each master, as well as the eight coloured plates.
Each of the four introductions appears admirable. None is too erudite for a wide public, and yet each is written by a scholar who, though he may not present new material, does in the short essay give some stimulating conception of "the painter he writes on- Chardin the calm craftsman whose works were largely forgotten by the public after his death until he was rehabilitated by the Goncourt brothers at the time of the Impressionists, and who has " lived " to influence a variety of artists from Fantin-Latour to Vuillard and Braque ; Delacroix, whose theories on colour have influenced Impressionist and post-Imprekonist masters, even though his own canvases, that must have once Ztanced with colour, are now covered in bistre-coloured blobs of paint, occasioned by his use of bitumen and copal varnish as mediums ; Manet, thought by Mr. Douglas Cooper to be unjustly neglected today, and in his opinion the most representative painter among the great figures of his age ; and lastly Gauguin, the revolutionary solitary whose influence (par- ticularly in the northern countries) has been more pronounced than that of any of his contemporaries, the painter of sunlit " mysteries " who caught the imagination of so many Gothic sunless minds
DEREK HILL.
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