Part 8 (1/2)
This is how he painted angels: He made a portrait of himself, toothless and with a cotton cap on his head.
The first picture he painted from nature, by means of a looking gla.s.s.
He dreamt and dreamt, and his hand painted his portrait once again, but from imagination, and the impression became more harrowed and more harrowing.
Second picture. He continued to dream and dream and, how it happened I do not know, but just as Socrates and Muhammed had their guardian spirits, behind the h.o.a.ry patriarch who is not unlike himself, Rembrandt painted an angel with the enigmatical smile of a head by Leonardo....[25]{L} But now I am calling your attention to an artist who dreams and works from his imagination, after having declared that the characteristic feature of the Dutch painters is that they have no inventive genius and no imagination. Am I therefore illogical? No!
Rembrandt invented nothing; he knew and felt this angel and these peculiar saints perfectly well.
Delacroix painted a crucified Christ for us, by setting, quite unexpectedly, a light lemon-yellow tone on the canvas. This vivid note of colour lent the picture that indescribable and mysterious charm as of a solitary star in a dark evening sky. Rembrandt works with values in the same way as Delacroix does with colours. A long distance, however, separates Delacroix?' and Rembrandt?'s methods from those of all the rest of religious painting.
I have just finished the portrait of a little girl of twelve. Her eyes are brown, her hair and eyebrows are black, she has an olive skin, and stands before a white background containing a strong tinge of emerald green, in a blood-red jacket with violet stripes, a blue skirt with large orange-coloured spots, and an oleander flower between her dainty little fingers. This study has exhausted me to such an extent that my head does not feel like writing.
The Bible is Christ, for the Old Testament works up to this climax. St.
Paul and the Evangelists live on the other side of the Mount of Olives.
How small this history is! Heavens! here it is in a couple of words.
There seem to be nothing but Jews on earth--Jews who suddenly declare that everything outside their own race is unclean. Why did not all the other Southern races under the sun--the Egyptians, the Indians, the Ethiopians, the a.s.syrians and the Babylonians--write their annals with the same care? It must be fine to study these things, and to be able to read all this must be about as good as not being able to read at all.
But the Bible which depresses us so much, which rouses all our despair and all our deepest discontent, and whose narrow-mindedness and parlous folly{M} tear our hearts in two, contains one piece of consolation like a soft kernel in a hard sh.e.l.l, a bitter core, and that is Christ. The figure of Christ, as I conceive it, has been painted by Delacroix and Rembrandt, and only Millet painted Christ?'s teaching. At the rest of their religious painting I can only smile commiseratingly--not from the religious but from the pictorial standpoint. The early Italians, Flemings and Germans are, in my opinion, pagans, who interest me only as much as Velasquez and so many other naturalistic painters do.
Of all philosophers, sages, etc., Christ was the only one whose princ.i.p.al doctrine was the affirmation of immortality and eternity, the nothingness of death, and the necessity and importance of truth and resignation{N}. He lived serenely as an artist, as a greater artist than any other; for he despised marble, clay and the palette, and worked upon living flesh. That is to say, this marvellous artist, who eludes the grasp of that coa.r.s.e instrument--the neurotic and confused brain of modern man--created neither statues nor pictures nor even books; he says so himself quite majestically--he created real living men, immortals.
That is a solemn thing, more particularly because it is the truth. This great artist, then, wrote no books. There can be no doubt that Christian literature, on the whole, would only make him indignant. For how seldom is anything to be found among its productions that could find favour beside the Gospel of St. Luke and the Epistles of St. Paul, which are so simple in their austere and warlike form? But even if this great artist, Christ, scorned to write books about his ideas and sensations, he certainly did not despise either the spoken word or still less the parable. (What vigour there is in the parable of the sower, the harvest, and the fig tree!) And who would dare tell us that he lied when, in predicting the downfall of the Roman State, he declared: ”Heaven and earth shall pa.s.s away: but my words shall not pa.s.s away.?”
These spoken words which he, as a _grand seigneur_ did not even think it necessary to write down, are the highest pinnacle ever attained by art; in such pure alt.i.tudes art becomes a creative force, a pure creative power.
Such meditations lead us far afield, very far afield (they even elevate us above art). They give us an insight into the art of moulding life, and of being immortal in life itself, and still they are not unrelated to painting. The patron saint of painting, St. Luke--doctor, painter and evangelist, whose device, alas! is an ox--is there to give us hope. But our true and real life is really a humble one; we poor unhappy painters are vegetating beneath the besotting yoke of a craft which is barely practicable on this ungrateful planet, whereon the love of art makes us unable to taste of real love.
As, however, there is nothing to gainsay the supposition that there are similar lines, colours and forms on innumerable other planets and suns, we may be allowed to retain a certain amount of good spirits in view of the possibility that we shall be able to paint among higher conditions and in another and different life, and that we shall reach that life by a process which perhaps is not more incomprehensible or surprising than the transformation of a caterpillar into a b.u.t.terfly, or of a grub into a c.o.c.kchafer. The scene of this existence for the painter-b.u.t.terfly could be one of the innumerable stars which, when we are dead, might perhaps be as accessible to us as are the black spots that in this terrestrial life represent the cities and towns on our maps.
Science! Scientific reasoning seems to me to be a weapon which with time will develop in quite an unsuspected manner; in the old days, for instance, the world was supposed to be flat. This was perfectly right too. It is still flat between Paris and Asnieres. This, however, does not alter the fact that science proves the earth to be round--a fact no one any longer disputes. Now, in the same way, it is a.s.sumed that human life is flat and that it leads from birth to death. Probably, however, life also is round, and much vaster in its extent and its capacities than we have suspected heretofore. Later generations will probably enlighten us concerning this interesting problem, and then possibly science might--with all due respect to her--come almost to the same conclusions as those which Christ summed up in his doctrine concerning the other half of life. However this may be, the fact remains that we painters are living in the midst of reality, and that we should breathe our spirit into our creations as long as we ourselves continue to breathe.{O}
Oh, what a beautiful picture that is of Eugene Delacroix--”Christ on the Lake of Gennesaret!?” He, with his pale yellow halo--asleep and luminous, bathed in a glow of dramatic violet, dark blue, reddish blue--and the group of frightened disciples upon the terrible viridian sea, with waves reaching up to the top of the frame. What a splendid conception!
I would make a few sketches for you were it not for the fact that I have just been busy with a model for three days--drawing and painting a Zouave--and simply cannot do anything more. Writing, on the other hand, rests and distracts me. What I have done is hideous; a drawing of the Zouave sitting; then an oil sketch of him against a perfectly white wall; and then a portrait of him against a green door and a few yellow bricks of a wall--it is all hard, ugly, and badly done. Albeit, as I tackled real difficulties in its production, it may pave the way into the future. Any figure that I paint is generally dreadful even in my own eyes, how much more hideous it must be therefore in other people?'s! And yet one derives most experience from the study of the figure, when one sets about it in a manner that is different from that which M. Benjamin Constant used to teach us, for instance. I say, do you remember Puvis de Chavannes?' ”John the Baptist?”? I think it is simply wonderful and just as magic as Eugene Delacroix?' work.
My brother-in-law is at present holding an exhibition of Claude Monet?'s work--ten pictures painted at Antibes between February and May. It appears that it is extraordinarily beautiful. Have you ever read the life of Luther? It is necessary to do this in order to be able to understand Cranach, Holbein and Durer. He and his powerful personality are the high light of the Renaissance. If ever we happened to be in the Louvre together I should very much like to see the Primitives with you.
At the Louvre my greatest love is, of course, the Dutch school, Rembrandt above all, whom I studied so much in the past. Then Potter.
Upon a surface from about four to six metres he gives you a white stallion, neighing pa.s.sionately and desperately, with a dark and stormy sky above it, and the animal sadly isolated upon a pale green infinity of moist meadow land. Altogether there are glories to be found in these Dutchmen, which can be compared with nothing else.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
To-day I am sending you one or two sketches painted from oil studies. In this way you will become acquainted with themes drawn from the nature which inspired old Cezanne. For the _Crau_ near Aix is much the same as the country in the neighbourhood of Tarascon and the _Crau_ of this district. Camargue is even simpler still, for there vast stretches of waste ground are covered with nothing but tamarind bushes and stiff gra.s.ses, which bear the same relation to these lean meadows as alfa gra.s.s does to the desert.