International studio (35.1908)

The Scrip

some years in the Wilstach Collection. The new
picture is a homely episode of farm life in one of
those environs of Paris where the city seems to en-
croach more or less upon the rural physiognomy of
the landscape. An old peasant workman stands
with arms akimbo and spade at rest, looking full at
the spectator. The rugged face, the clumsy atti-
tude, the awkward clothes, the great shapeless tool,
the broken ground and distant cart and team are all
indicated with a precision of touch and vision, a dis-
criminating searching observation that leaves no
essential point in the little human story untold. We
know the age of the peasant and the degree of his
intelligence, what his virtues are and what his vices.
We know the kind of work he has been doing and
its difficulty and the small amount of enthusiasm he
feels for it, or would be justified in feeling. Noth-
ing is omitted and nothing is other than common-
place and somewhat dreary, yet the effect is that of
impressive beauty, because the energy of life is so
strongly suggested. In the art of representation
wherever we feel the sense of life we have a con-
sciousness of poetry—of the hand of the maker at
work infusing matter with spirit. On its technical
side the picture of the old peasant resembles Raf-
faelli’s manner in those amazingly clever colored
etchings by which he is well known in this country.
He has used a strong black outline and other lines
that define the inner modeling. The touch is sharp
and light, the drawing is sure and the figure is en-
veloped by a clear atmosphere. The expressive-
ness of the method, a certain terse adequacy of
statement, resembles what in the art of writing or
speaking we characterize as wit. One may almost
consider the brusque shorthand of Raffaelli’s
method in such work as this with its unconven-
tional conventions and its swift effects of a kind
not easily explained, but immediately understood,
a kind of argot which fits as the glove the hand
the subjects that are his favorites, the population
of the Paris suburbs and the landscape against
which it is seen.
Giuseppe de Nittis, Raffaelli’s contemporary,
was born in 1846 at Barletta, near Naples. He
came to Paris in 1868, the year in which Manet sent
to the Salon his portrait of Emile Zola and his
Woman with a Parrot, now in the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art. Manet at that time was still the joke
of Paris. People went to see his pictures only to
laugh at them. They treated him, says his biogra-
pher, M. Duret, “ en jort petit garcon.” Somewhat
recovered from the shock attending the famous
Olympia, they found a visit to his exhibits so amu-
sing that they felt almost tolerant of the poor, igno-

rant and misguided person thus essaying to practise
an art of which he knew nothing. Manet, never-
theless, had gathered about him a group of enthusi-
astic admirers, and of these de Nittis became one.
De Nittis, however, united to his French taste and
training an Italian elegance that pleased the public
better than Manet’s irritating bluntness of vision
and expression. He painted the gay life of the
brilliant city with a kind of gentle zest that cap-
tured the imagination, and chose for his themes
agreeable and lively incidents in an eminently social
world. If Raffaelli’s slouching peasants ere elo-
quent of common tasks and primitive pleasures, the
men and women who furnish de Nittis with pictorial
material engage only in the pastimes developed by
civilization carried as far as Paris carries it. The
picture that represents him in the Wilstach Collec-
tion is entirely worthy of his charming talent. The
subject is a Return from the Races. A group of
fashionably dressed people are sitting under the
trees at the left, watching the procession of car-
riages approach along the smooth, hard roadway.
The faces and figures are simplified in accordance
with the practice of the impressionists, but each is
painted with a closeness of characterization that
gives it a perceptible individuality however general-
ized its forms may be. The color harmony is deli-
cious—a general gray tone that warms into rose
and cools into blue, without anywhere becoming too
cool or too warm. There are touches of dainty-
color in the flower beds and parasols, and the sky is
dappled with gray clouds on a ground of pure, pale
blue, but the lady on the left in a gray ruffled gown,
holding a black fan and a white parasol, concen-
trates the main notes of the color composition which
passes in a delicate gradation from a gray that is al-
most white through a neutral middle tone to a dark
that has the value of black. For the rest, the draw-
ing is precise and lively, the perspective of the trees
and of the seated figures and the carriages in the
roadway gives the effect of great distance. The air
in which the scene is bathed is the very atmosphere
of Paris, clear and thin and brilliant, yet with a kind
of radiant summer haze that enlivens everything
near and far and obscures nothing. Those who
care intensely for the spirit of place in a picture and
are moved by the Parisian ideal will find endless
satisfaction in the competent execution and brisk,
happy spirit of this portrayal of a fleeting spectacle.
It will not yield any sentiment save that which
properly belongs to it—a sentiment the most sophis-
ticated and unromantic kind, yet adapted to exqui-
site manifestations. Only a painter with the most
sensitive of finger-tips could handle it without

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