Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

one whose hand has become dyed with the colors that his mind worked in. And
it will be safe to assume that if his inspiration be not drawn from the common
earth on which he lives and find not a logicality in the sun or in the stars that
lend him their light, his work will be unearthly and so unreal, or unaspiring
and so unideal. That we may not hope to find such qualities in all who call
themselves artists is obvious; while it is at least equally obvious that not all
who set themselves up to be the critics of art will be ready in those virtues which
they are so fain to deny to others.
Wm. D. MacColl.

THE FIGHT FOR RECOGNITION
IT was in the early sixties that Edouard Manet sent to the Paris Salon
his famous “Breakfast on the Grass,” painted before he was thirty,
depicting nudes among clothed figures, a favorite theme with the
Old Masters. It was rejected with a howl of moral derision. Several years
before the jury had refused his “Fifer” on the ground of technical brutality.
His paintings had the same effect on the critics as a red flag has on a bull.
He was roared at as though he were a horned beast of the Apocalypse. It
had become fashionable to gibe and sneer at Manet. Everything was good
for an attack on him, everything was a pretext.
He shrugged his shoulders and tossed the gauntlet to his critics. He
hurled immortal blasphemies at academic authority; and brandished his
brush in the face of official painters many of whom should have been pastry
cooks and laundry men. He attacked everything that represented routine.
He fought the petty and pallid taste in art, the artificial admiration of the
connoisseur. He knew he had something original to say and fought to say it.
He felt himself as a reformer and was proud of his innovations. He talked
himself hoarse in the evening among his friends in the obscure Cafe Berguois
defending his theories. He told the same story to his intimate friends Whist-
ler, Eegros and Fantin-Latour who came to see him at his studio in the rue
Guyot. Fie devoted as much time to repudiate prejudice as to painting.
Every incident he utilized to gather strength and power. His friends
of the press, among them Baudelaire, Gautier, Zola and Mallarme, made the
most of it. They dragged the impressionist canvases out of obscurity. The
public laughed, and hailed these efforts with mockery and hisses. He was
generous enough to take upon himself all the reproaches and bursts of anger
levelled not only against his work but theirs. For he fought alone.
Monet, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Pissaro, Jongkind, Besnard had no fighting
blood in them. They were resigned to their unpopularity. They despised
glory. Indifferent to the public, they went their colorful way. They faced
ignorance and hostility with serene impassibility, disdainfully wrapped their
cloaks about them and returned to their easels and their dreams.
Manet enjoyed rowing against the stream. He never tired of assuming
a fighting attitude. Like some hildago, he tried to sword-prick his opponents

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