International studio (23.1904)

Modern French Pastellists



' LE DECLASSE

FROM THE PASTEL BY J. F. RAFFAELLI

interest and pity for the poor, the humble, the
outcast, those who had fallen on life’s road, the
pariahs whom the artists who have done sublime
work have never disdained to know. Tramps and
labourers, vendors of chestnuts, rag-pickers, and
prowlers—all the homeless, foodless, shoeless troop
of sorrow and vice, of resignation and crime, of ill-
chance and despair—these
were his models, and they
have been depicted by him
with extraordinary justness
and eloquent sincerity.
Faithful and intelligent
adept as he is of the
naturalist doctrine, the
painter has placed these
figures in their true sur-
roundings, against the
background and in the
atmosphere which are their
own, the mysterious har-
mony of things being thus
complete. With marvel-
lous intuition he has divined
the melancholy poetry
springing from the outcast
landscape of the Fortifica-
tions, with its grass affected
as it were by scutf, and its
trees as by the green-sick-
ness. And this he peoples
with a world of unhappy
creatures, dirty, degraded,
rickety, sickly, despised,
which—it is not proud —
148

makes itself at home amid
the broken bottles, the
sardine tins the rubbish,
the cinders, and the filth,
whose faint odours unite
under the pale sky with
the mouldy stench of the
Parisian dung-heaps.
One must not suppose,
however, that this most
strange historiographer of
the banlieue—of which, as
was Ajalbert in literature,
he has been the Chris-
topher Columbus — is ab-
solutely hypnotised on the
subject of these social
shallows, for he has also
shown his love of that
which has grace and charm. Fashionable, lux-
urious Paris, too, has attracted him, and the
brilliant kaleidoscope of the Square de la Trinitd,
the Place de l’Opera, the carrefour of St. Germain-
des-Pres, and the Boulevard des Italiens has pro-
vided him with delightful opportunities of revealing
the facility and suppleness of his brush.

FROM THE FASTEL BY J. F. RAFFAELLI

LA VOITURE SUR LA ROUTE