International studio (59.1916)

Studio-Talk

On the leaves of his sketch-book, or even some
odd scrap of paper, or the margin of a letter or
diary, he recorded what he saw. Here we become
acquainted with him in the third phase of his career.
He has done with his humanitarian reveries. He
has learnt to know and understand the soul of
the French soldier, that is, France itself, and has
devoted his crayon or his burin to its celebration.
Doubtless many readers of this magazine have seen
the posters which the French Government commis-
sioned him to design for the ingathering of gold, the
diploma issued by the Bank of France in exchange
for the yellow metal, and the programmes he has
designed for various schemes of benevolence.
Without ceasing to be a soldier he has gone on
with his work. The best of all these drawings are
certainly those in which he has recorded his direct
observations, sometimes

soldier in a state of rest, and Naudin, too, has
occasionally got his comrades to pose for a
composition, but it is his great merit also to
have essayed to depict the soldier in movement as
he emerges from the trench, advances at the double,
throws himself down or creeps stealthily forward :
and the result is very striking—it is war as it
really is. A. S.
The Paris Museums, which on the outbreak of
war two years ago were all closed, have now for
the most part re-opened their doors to the public.
At the Louvre, however, only certain of the-
sculpture galleries have been re-opened, its most
important possessions being still in the provinces.
At the Petit Palais the tapestries of Rheims
Cathedral are on view.

with singular fluency of
stroke and brevity of
manipulation. One of these
is the lithograph entitled
E'Exode, executed during
an interval of rest after
the tragic spectacle of the
retreat from Flanders, and
to the same category be-
long a number of striking
sketches, jotted down at
random in the trenches.
M. Helleu, after piously
gathering together a collec-
tion of these slight notes,
has had them reproduced
in a small number of im-
pressions for distribution
among amateurs. They are
indeed wonderful in the
sense of movement and
the heroic spirit which
animates them. Unfortu-
nately the soldier-artist had
such an inferior crayon to
work with that reproduc-
tion by the usual means is
quite impossible. Still, not-
withstanding their cursive
and unfinished character,
they reveal the hand of
a great draughtsman.
Practically all the artists
who have painted war
pictures up to the present
have represented the


“ l’exode

LITHOGRAPH BY BERNARD NAUDIN

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