Fromentin

IV. – THE MASTER: HIS PERSONALITY AND HIS DESTINY

One of the masters of to-day, of a generous and impulsive nature, who does not wish to be quoted by name, but whose works may be admired in the Luxembourg, consented to give me some information regarding Fromentin, whose pupil he once was. I should like, as a conclusion to this study, to be able to transcribe literally what he told; but at least I shall draw a pious inspiration from his words.

Fromentin laid on his colours very thickly. His solid grounds were always most carefully prepared and his composition calculated in advance down to the smallest detail. At the start, he came under the influence of Decamps, Marilhat, and more especially Delacroix, and in consequence neglected line work, devoting himself solely to the distribution of colours. Delacroix and the romantic school of his time did not interpret Algeria well, because they failed to see it well. They saw it through the black holes of windows, in all the violence of its whites and reds, in the picturesqueness of its costumes and the long stretches of its dusty streets. But Fromentin had visited Italy, and during his excursions across this museum of diverse aspects he made a special study of the effects of sunshine upon the handiwork of man. It was while still saturated with the brilliance and with the art treasures of Italy that he first saw the land of Africa, or rather that he first conceived the desire to learn to know its secrets. Fromentin never put upon his canvases the Africa of the desert, in which there is nothing but the white of the burnoose and the gray of the dune, but Algeria the Fair, Algeria already civilized. He was enraptured by the sight of it and by the penetrating conception, full of eager curiosity, which he had already formed of it. For Fromentin does not command by the audacity of his colours; he commands by the charm of his apportionment of light and shadow, and by the precision of a style which seeks, irrespective of form, to show us the soul of people and of things. He sees with the eyes of a poet, he expresses himself in the manner of a philosopher, he forces us to reflect. He detests all that is vulgar, superfluous, and extravagant. All that pertains to reality has for him a significance, of which he seeks the cause, and for which he frequently discovers a definitive expression.

Through his habit of studying the inner workings of the mind of man, he reached a point, toward the end of his life, when he ceased to compose, even in painting, any works other than those of a man of letters. The keenest intellectual alertness was always ceaselessly pulsating within him. Furthermore, he made a sort of religious cult of life in all its forms, even the most humble, and imbued them with an ennobling charm. And for the purpose of understanding the psychology of a race which enwraps itself jealously in a pride of attitude, the works of Fromentin offer testimony that bears the stamp of rare sincerity and clear-sighted sympathy. His mind never wastes time over the eccentricities of a tribe or a people, but bends its whole effort to gathering up, through a choice of typical details, the general idea, the embodiment of a human group.

Fromentin knew, better than anyone else, how great his lack was of elementary training in painting. He knew that no natural gift can replace those initial steps in craftsmanship in any and all forms of production, and that works which are truly beautiful and worthy of being held in honour through the centuries obtain their right to live solely from having obeyed the laws of order and of clearness. These laws, as related to pictorial art, are taught in the studio and the school. A naturally gifted artist may undoubtedly evolve, out of his own personal inspiration, an amusing or interesting work; but that work, if not constructed according to the syntactic rules peculiar to his art, will have merely an ephemeral charm, like the costly baubles of a passing fashion. What proves the necessity of rules of technique is that the masters themselves have not been contented with the possession of genius or talent alone. They have learned their craft down to its profoundest secrets; and the greatest of these masters are the ones who have succeeded best in practising the methods transmitted by past experience, and have even in their turn discovered new laws.

How many times, with touching modesty, Fromentin deplored his total lack of the essential studies of apprenticeship! Beneath the colour of forms and objects, he grasped the course and movement of life. But his restless hands did not succeed completely, to his own satisfaction, in transferring them to his canvas. Nevertheless, his pictures, because imbued with an emotion, the contagion of which was communicated to their colours, far from resembling, as so many others do, a sort of clever and inert photograph, are evocations, and often magnificent ones, of some historic hour, of the destiny of a race, or the soul of a landscape.

Under the influence of the romantic school, as I have already said, Fromentin’s brush sought at first chiefly to dazzle. But one day he awoke to a comprehension of Corot. The inward emotion which he underwent affected him like the discovery of a new light. A transformation followed rapidly, not in his ability to feel, but in his fashion of reproducing what he felt. Yielding joyfully to the authority of Corot, he began to make use of gray, and before long it became his dominant tone. Like a frail cloud interspersed with invisible rays of red and azure, enveloping the atmosphere of his scenes and characters, and blending into his minutely wrought skies, this gray of his, which borrowed something of its hue from each of the primary colours, pleased him by the very discreetness of its opulence. Discreetness is one of the hallmarks of refinement; and Fromentin was nothing, if not refined, in his manners, his thoughts, and his speech. “Just as his painting was never heavy and his writing never dull,” says Emile Montégut, “his physical build was slender, graceful, delicate; yet his slenderness was in no way weakness, nor his delicacy affectation. No objectionable professional mannerism proclaimed the craft he practised; still less did he ape the manners of the man of fashion, in order to hide the fact that he was a man of toil. With all his frankness, he had the good taste to refrain from betraying his intimate personality to the world at large.”

It was precisely this use which he made of gray that enabled him, by its play of half-tones, to explore the mystery of souls. And quite unconsciously he revealed his own, a noble soul, enamoured of all that is great and eternal in civilization and in life. When face to face with an actual scene, he frequently gave up the attempt to transfer it with his brush. It was not until much later, after long reflection over the material conditions of a scene whose beauty had delighted his eye, that he was ready to begin work.

Consequently there are other artists who have more accurately rendered the colour of this African land: there are, for instance, Guillaumet and Regnault. With a somewhat austere, yet precise, touch, after the fashion of an extremely well-informed commentator rather than a deeply moved poet, Guillaumet shows us, in all their picturesque authenticity, the history and architecture of buildings ravaged by the sun, and outlined against them the stately silhouettes of Arabs to whom silence appears to be a sort of religious rite. Yet the sublime poetry of the desert has also touched his painter’s heart in The Evening Meal, now in the collection in the Luxembourg; the thin blue smoke, melting away into the calm atmosphere, is typical of the immobility of the Sahara, the sullen oppressiveness of daytime amid the sands. Henri Regnault, in works that are scarcely more than sketches and have never been exhibited, transcribed, with all the ardour of his age, during too brief a sojourn in Morocco, the symphony of divine colours which exhales from the soil of Africa and from its sky, that burns like living coals.

Fromentin did not always dare to undertake to paint his own conceptions. His timidity is betrayed by the very modesty of his canvases, which scarcely exceed two yards. Nevertheless, the painter whom he loved the most was Rubens: Rubens, the prodigal dispenser of light, who poured his inexhaustible and gorgeous imaginings, like the waters of a mighty river, over canvases without number.

Fromentin did not find it easy to give forth the treasures of his brain, excepting through the medium of writing. He delighted in sumptuousness, and he found it in Rubens, whom he eulogized, in his Masters of Yesterday, in a truly lyric strain. He did not understand Rembrandt and despaired of ever understanding him. He studied him constantly, with a sort of impatience, striving to glimpse, through his veils of half-shadows, the spirit of a genius who was too alien in nature, country, and race.

Among Fromentin’s pupils was Cormon, an intractable pupil with a marked individuality; yet while he ignored his professional authority, he always proclaimed him, and with real feeling, the most intelligent of masters and the most loyal of men. Fromentin did not exactly conduct a regular art-school. He had gathered around him seven or eight young artists, in whom he foresaw a prosperous future: Gervex, extremely brilliant, Thirion, the most temperamental of them all, Lhermitte and Humbert, who was the master’s favourite. Fromentin saw in Humbert a second self, more fortunate in having a chance to learn at the outset the indispensable rules of his craft, and therefore capable later on of achieving works which he himself could never carry out. Without effort, he won the adoration of his pupils. With an eloquence which came from his heart quite as much as from his brain, he preached to them the doctrine of sincere labour, of disinterested ideals, and of reverence for the past because it has produced the present. He had a combative spirit. He never hesitated to express his opinion about works or about men, since the nobility of his character forbade that he should be suspected of maliciousness or envy. Certain works of his time, that are still discussed and that our own age has consecrated, were displeasing to him: Millet’s, for example. He professed a profound esteem for the man, but he did not admit the technical value of the artist nor the importance of his ideas.