Studio: international art (5.1895)

The Art of the Pastellist

England was not at that time maintained. It is
doubtful whether the public was ripe for it. It is
certain that the practitioner of Art was not ripe
for it.

In England, therefore, pastel has scarcely a
Present. But it has unmistakably a Future. A few
of the younger men—Mr. Guthrie in particular, if
I remember rightly—have made it the medium for
quite charming creations. Whistler's little pastels
are of course things apart, and a genius so sensitive
could scarcely have gone wrong. His little sunsets
and his tender and flexible nudities—his changing
pageant of the skies and his memoranda of the
lines of the figure in its exquisite rest—these are
delightful possessions. As creations, they are in-
dividual. But in France—and especially of late—
the pastellist has gone further and has done more.
The pastel of Mr. Whistler is a simple and
dexterous sketch, in which the complicated problem
is avoided. And that the pastel was in France, in
its first great days, which were those not so much of
La Rosalba as of Quentin Latour. " Preparations "
Latour modestly called those vivid penetrating
sketches of his distinguished contemporaries which
make the gallery at St. Quentin in the Aisne so
deserving of a pilgrimage. But they were more
than preparations ; they were performances. And
so, of course, are Mr. Whistler's. Yet in France,
of late, Thevenot and Helleu on the one hand,
Montenard, it may be, on the other, have under-
taken, so to say. with a fuller orchestra, perform-
ances more elaborate and as legitimate.

It may be asked, Why "Thevenot and Helleu on
the one hand," and " Montenard on the other ? "
I mean simply that their aims are different aims,
and that variously they realise their various effects.
Montenard is one of the few living landscape
painters—if we go back to the dead, even the long
dead, they are still but a few—who do something
to realise for us what Barbey d'Aurevilly in speak-
ing of Rousseau (and of Rousseau's avoidance of it)
once characterised as la terrible lumiere du Midi.
Southern light indeed—to treat which, in a way
that is convincing and satisfactory, must ever be
among Art's most difficult problems. The great
old masters conventionalised it. Rousseau, and so
many besides, never attempted it. Perhaps if it is
to be finally grasped, it will be not so much by
" taking thought" as by Goethe's " innate talent."
Montenard has a measure of that innate talent—
and he has taken thought besides. This year, at
the Pastellistes (not to speak of course of his work
in the medium of oil, at the Champ de Mars) he
had interesting instances of his skill in Environs

de Cassis, pres Marseille, and in UOratoire
Provence.

Helleu—whose name I have mentioned because
I admire his work so much—had nothing this year
in the Rue de Seze, where, however, Thevenot was
represented so perfectly that he was pronounced by
no mean judges to be hors pair. And while many
of his effects—in those polite garden scenes and
those elegant interiors for which he is famed—were
successfully intricate, he was pronounced "more
calm than he was wont to be." In any case he
showed himself true master of his material in its
most elaborate use. Very fine and important,
quite extraordinarily luminous, vivid yet not garish,
was his untitled pastel of a sunny-coloured woman
in pale but shining chiffons, with a parasol of sole
changeante, by a garden-seat. A study of light and
colour quite as remarkable, was his vision of a girl
in green on an Empire sofa, by firelight. The
talent of Jacques Emile Blanche has long been
recognised by the men of our newer School. He
represents modern humanity—one side of one
small world at all events—with singular distinction
and undisguised aplomb. But he has, it seems,
little sense either of joyous colour or of quiet
harmony. It is not indeed by colour at all that he
produces his effect.

Besnard, on the other hand, is a colourist above
everything ; and certain of his pastels for happy
vividness, for opulence of hue, for full attainment
of their desired aim, were at the very least upon a
level with his impressions in oil, which, with what-
ever were their inequalities, were a feature at the
Champ de Mars. But as at the Champ de Mars,
so at the Pastellistes, it was in his Algerian records
that I found his success most marked. The mauve-
draped, subtle, tired woman, beheld by firelight,
and called Co/ncdie, was a fine, even a delicate
technical exercise. Of that there can be no doubt.
But it does not dwell with you so much as the
Par niente, with its wonderful gamut of colour, or as
the marvellous and potent reds, the roses, the
greenish yellows of the Moorish girl, powdering,
painting, I forget precisely what, but " making up "
at all events, or as the Mauresque fumant, to name
not quite the last of these studies of intimate life in
Algiers.

I name—to finish with—two or three other pastel-
lists, as yet very much less known in England, but
masters, all of them already, of delicate and well-
considered effort. There is Armand Berton, for
one. For exquisite and light dexterity of handling,
for fulness of grace in the lines and pose of the
slight figure—done on a larger scale and modelled

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