International studio (51.1913/1914)

Revolutions and Reactions in Painting

the

BY RODIN

art
too

Musee du Luxembourg
LA PENSEE

times, striving to render sensation, eager to shock
the eye into recognition of an unsuspected beauty,
to hold the mind with a thrill of new interest or to
lead it down a moonlit lane of fanciful suggestion.
When from the proper perspective the annals of
the period are written, the names of an amazing
host of talented painters will have to be reckoned
with. There have been romancers and symbol-
ists, decorators of surfaces great and small, clever
and concise analysts of outdoor and indoor light,
of men and women of all classes and types, of
woods and fields in every season, of city streets
and rock-bound
coasts. Art has
been indepen¬
dent and irre¬
pressible. Paint¬
ers have worked
side by side along
widely divergent
lines, and each
man true to his
own philosophy.
In this way our
children’s chil¬
dren shall know
us, the many-
sidedness of our
lives, the com¬
plex diversities
of our interests
as perhaps no
other age has
ever been known
before. Yet
through all this
varied achieve¬
ment a single
spirit has been
all pervasive, a spirit of joy in painting for paint-
ing’s sake, in the successful performance of tricks,
in the overcoming of self-imposed difficulties, in
the production of subtle and novel effects, in all
the excitements of virtuosity. Painters are in
danger nowadays of forgetting that the best art is
“the middle quality between a thought and a
thing.” Such mystical dreamers as Matthew
Maris have left us nothing but the thought, all
too subtly suggested for the sake of a special
sort of beauty. Such unemotional observers as
Claude Monet have left us nothing but the thing,
all too plainly presented for the sake of a special
sort of truth. But the union—the union of that
which is nature with that which is exclusively

human, this essential compromise, modern
seems for the most part too self-conscious,
self-sufficient, to ever quite attain.
Objectivity is the main characteristic of
contemporary naturalists, and this is true of the
portrait painters, the painters of genre and of
landscape. John S. Sargent is certainly one of
the great artists of all time. He has been likened
to Velasquez and the influence of that master is
indeed apparent. There is, however, in Sargent,
as in so many of his contemporaries, the display of
“bravura” in sheer pride of performance that one
never notices in
the more serious
art of the great
Spaniard. There
is more real affin-
ity to Hals,
whose impulsive
modeling by the
brush is at once
remembered,
also that swift
unhesitating
capture of the
first flash of im-
pression. Sar-
gent, it is true,
blurts out his
likes and dis-
likes, showing,
for example, the
dismal pride
that clings to
the fag ends of
ancient families
or ushering in
with mock dig-
nity the aristo-
his subjects in-

cracy of sudden wealth. When
terest him, as did Coventry Patmore and dear
little Beatrice Goelet, he makes them deeply
appealing. When, however, they bore or irritate
him, he attends to it that all who see his pic-
tures shall share his uncomplimentary impres-
sions. Yet he never paints what he does not
actually see. If there is a mask of false pretences
between him and his sitter he will not attempt to
penetrate it, choosing, rather, to paint it in with
particular care. This objectivity of vision is even
more a characteristic of our American landscape
painters, many of whom delight in the depiction
of the most uninteresting scenery. E. W. Red-
field paints little else than the slushy roads, the


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