Part 9 (1/2)

The Madonna of Albrecht Durer in her sad and soracefulness, with her tired features, interesting rather than beautiful, her air of a eoise_ frankness, her tight garments and her symmetrically broken folds, alh soue memory of Germanic pantheism, may she not be the woman whom he would have loved and preferred to all others, and does she not also exceedingly well represent the very genius of the artist? As she is his Madonna, she ht easily be his Muse

The same resemblance exists in Raphael The type of his Madonna, in wholed with old memories, the features of the Fornarina are always found, soested, sometimes copied, most frequently idealized, is she not the raceful, and penetrated throughout with a chaste voluptuousness? The Christian nourished on Plato and Greek Art, the friend of Leo X, the dilettante Pope, the artist who died of love while painting the _Transfiguration_, did he not live entirely in theseon their knees a child who is Love? If ished to syorical picture, would it be any other than the angel of Urbino?

The Virgin of the _assunta_, big, strong, highly-coloured, with her robust and beautiful grace, her fine bearing, and her si with all its qualities? We ht carry our researches still further; but we have said enough as a suggestion

Thanks to the dusty shroud which covered it for so long, the _assunta_ gloith a quite youthful brilliancy; the centuries have not elapsed for it, and we enjoy the supre a picture of titian's just it cae en Italie_ (new ed, Paris, 1884)

THE NIGHT WATCH

(_REMBRANDT_)

EUGeNE FROMENTIN

We kno the _Night Watch_ is hung It faces the _Banquet of Arquebusiers_ by Van der Helst, and, no matter what has been said, the two pictures do not hurt each other They oppose each other like day and night, like the transfiguration of things and their literal iar and clever Admit that they are as perfect as they are celebrated and you will have before your eyes a unique antithesis, what La Bruyere calls ”opposition truths that illuminate one another”

I shall not astonish anyone in saying that the _Night Watch_ possesses no char the fine works of pictorial art It is a, but it absolutely lacks that insinuating quality that convinces us, and it almost always fails to please us at first In the first place, it shocks our logical sense and that habitual visual rectitude that loves clear for warns us that our iination as well as our reason will be only half satisfied and that even the mind that is most easily won over will not submit till the last and will not surrender without dispute This is due to various causes that do not all arise froht is detestable; the fra is drowned spoils its middle values, and its bronze scale of colour, and its force, and makes it look much encies of the place prevent the picture froainst all the laws of the e you to look at it from the same level

[Illustration: THE NIGHT WATCH

_Rehtly or wrongly, passes for an almost incoe

Perhaps it would have made far less noise in the world, if for two centuries people had not kept up the habit of trying to find out itsitsit as a picture enig it literally, e know of the subject seems to me sufficient

In the first place, we know the naes, thanks to the care hich the painter has inscribed them on a plate at the bottom of the picture; which proves that if the painter's fancy has transfigured s, the chief idea at least deals with the customs of local life It is true that we cannot tell for what purpose theseto practise shooting, or on parade, or what; but, as there is no matter here for the deeper mysteries, I am persuaded that if Rembrandt has failed to be more explicit it is because either he did not wish or he did not kno to be, and there is a whole series of hypotheses that ht be very simply explained by some such matter as inability or intentional reticence As for the time of day (the most vexed question of all and the only one, moreover, that could have been settled when first it arose), for fixing that we have no need to discover that the Captain's outstretched arm casts a shadow upon the skirt of his coat It suffices to reht otherwise; that nocturnal obscurity is his habit; that shadow is the ordinary for and his usual means of dramatic expression; and that in his portraits, in his interiors, in his legends, in his anecdotes, in his landscapes, and in his etchings, as in his paintings, it is generally with night that he reed that the composition does not constitute the principal merit of the picture The subject had not been selected by the painter, and the manner in which he intended to treat it did not allow of its first sketch being very spontaneous, nor very lucid Therefore the scene is indecisive, the action alreatly divided Fro is betrayed an inherent vice in the first idea, and a kind of irresolution in theit So his , a dru his instrument, a somewhat theatrical standard-bearer, and, finally, a crowd of figures fixed in the requisite immobility of portraits,--so far as action is concerned, these, if I am not

Is this indeed sufficient to give it the facial, anecdotal, and local feeling that we expect fros, andhis arquebusiers had made them iven us the truest if not the finest indications of their ways And as for Frans Hals, you ine hat clearness and order, and how naturally he would have disposed the scene; how piquant, lively, ingenious, abundant, and nificent he would have been The idea conceived by Rembrandt then is one of the most ordinary, and I would venture to say that the majority of his contemporaries considered it poor in resources; some because its abstract line is uncertain, scanty, syularly incoherent; others, the colourists, because this coaps and ill-occupied spaces, did not lend itself to that broad and generous employment of colours which is usual with able palettes

Thus there is no truth and very little pictorial invention in the general disposition Is there ures?

What immediately strikes us is that they are unreasonably disproportioned and that s and so to speak an e can justify The captain is too big and the lieutenant too small, not only by the side of Captain kock, whose stature crushes hiives this sorown athe two as portraits, they are scarcely successful ones of doubtful likeness and thankless physiogno in a portrait-painter who had made his mark in 1642, and which affords so a little later applied to the infallible Van der Helst Is the guard loading his musket rendered any better? Moreover, what do you think of his right-hand neighbour, and of the druht say that all these portraits lack hands, so vaguely are they sketched and so insignificant is their action It follows that what they hold is also ill rendered: -pole; and that the gesture of an arht to act does not do so clearly, quickly, or with energy, precision, or intelligence I will not speak of the feet, which, in most cases, are lost in shadow Such in reality are the necessities of the system of envelopone conclusion of his eneral dark cloud invades the base of the picture and that the forreat detriment of their points of support

Must we add that the clothes are very similar to the likenesses, soid and rebellious to the lines of the body? One would say that they are not worn properly The helracefully worn The scarfs are in their place and yet they are aardly tied

Here is none of that unique ease of carriage, that natural elegance, that _neglige_ dress, caught and rendered to the life in which Frans Hals kno to attire every age, every stature, every stage of corpulence, and, certainly also, every rank We are not reassured on this point more than on many others We ask ourselves whether there is not here a laborious fantasy, like an atte

Some of the heads are very handsome, I have mentioned those that are not The best, the only ones in which the hand of the nized, are those which, froue eyes and the fine spark of their lances at you; do not severely examine their construction, nor their plan, nor their bony structure; accustoreyish pallor of their complexion, question them from afar as they also look at you from a distance, and if you want to kno they live, look at theies, attentively and long, at their lips and eyes

There reure which has hitherto baffled all conjectures, because it seee, its odd splendour, and its inappropriateness, to personify the , or, if you prefer, the misrepresentation of the picture; I e, child-like and crone-like at the saliding auards for no apparent reason, and who, a not less inexplicable detail, has a white cock, that at need irdle

Whatever right she has to join the troop, this little figure see human about her She is colourless and alait is auto like dia rays You would say that she came from so froular of all worlds She has the light, the uncertainty, and the wavering of a pale fire The rasp the subtle lineaments that serve as envelope for her uncorporeal existence We end by seeing in her nothing but a kind of extraordinarily strange phosphorescence which is not the ordinary light of things, nor yet the ordinary brilliance of a well-regulated palette, and this adds more sorcery to the peculiarities of her countenance Notice that in the place she occupies, one of the dark corners of the canvas, rather low in the middle distance, between a man in deep red and the captain dressed in black, this eccentric light has hbouring tint, and without extreht would have sufficed to disorganize the whole picture