DOI Heft:
Special winter-number 1896-7
DOI Artikel:Mourey, Gabriel: Some French artists at home
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.17298#0352
Some French Artists at Home
A. BESNARD IN HIS STUDIO
He was certainly ill at ease in dealing with enormous
canvases .like Le Centenaire de 1789 and Les Joies
de la Vie. Here his style acquired a feebleness
hitherto unknown in him, a hesitating manner quite
foreign to his custom—merely a momentary weak-
ness, let us hope.
The man himself is entirely simple and unaffected.
Big and square-shouldered, with the greyish fair hair
and fan-shaped beard of vigorous middle-age, his
keen, intelligent glance proclaims him essentially a
man, sympathetic but undemonstrative, a frank,
sincere nature of solid quality. Paris is his birth-
place, and his studio is in Rue Alphonse de Neu-
ville, near the fortifications, where a warm shake of
the hand awaits all his friends. He affects a high
flat-brimmed hat.
M. Besnard.
Physically not at all the man one would imagine
from his works. Not a trace of nervosity no sign
of subtlety or over-refinement in this tall, thickly-
built form, in which everything proclaims the true
sanguine temperament.
The truth is, this subtle, delicate artist is in reality
a personality of prodigious energy and will-power.
Despite all his peculiarities, he has the true artistic
saneness ever combatting his strange ideas, never
weary, but ever ready to renew the struggle. The
irresistible attraction of his work lies in this un-
ceasing pursuit of higher things. And how curious
have been some of the points in his career. With
his passion for colour, he has tried to render with
his brush all the mysteries of light, attempting
effects which no one, it may safely be said, had
attempted before him. And in his half-tints, in the
whole range of twilight shades, with their subdued
tones, as in the wild blaze of Oriental colouring
under the blinding sun, he has always succeeded in
creating new and unexpected impressions without
any concession to convention, and with all the force
of a confident personality which, by dint of sheer
hard work, has earned the right to assert itself in
opposition to all.
Besnard has indeed a complex nature, now de-
voted to the weird and the extravagant, losing itself
at times in excess of cleverness, now bursting forth
into poems of purest harmony of line and colour.
What power and feeling in his frescoes in the Ecole
de Pharmacie, for example, and what a marvellous
comprehension of the art of mural painting ! And
what an exquisite sense of nature in his work at
the " Art Nouveau," in which he paints the poetry
29
A. BESNARD IN HIS STUDIO
He was certainly ill at ease in dealing with enormous
canvases .like Le Centenaire de 1789 and Les Joies
de la Vie. Here his style acquired a feebleness
hitherto unknown in him, a hesitating manner quite
foreign to his custom—merely a momentary weak-
ness, let us hope.
The man himself is entirely simple and unaffected.
Big and square-shouldered, with the greyish fair hair
and fan-shaped beard of vigorous middle-age, his
keen, intelligent glance proclaims him essentially a
man, sympathetic but undemonstrative, a frank,
sincere nature of solid quality. Paris is his birth-
place, and his studio is in Rue Alphonse de Neu-
ville, near the fortifications, where a warm shake of
the hand awaits all his friends. He affects a high
flat-brimmed hat.
M. Besnard.
Physically not at all the man one would imagine
from his works. Not a trace of nervosity no sign
of subtlety or over-refinement in this tall, thickly-
built form, in which everything proclaims the true
sanguine temperament.
The truth is, this subtle, delicate artist is in reality
a personality of prodigious energy and will-power.
Despite all his peculiarities, he has the true artistic
saneness ever combatting his strange ideas, never
weary, but ever ready to renew the struggle. The
irresistible attraction of his work lies in this un-
ceasing pursuit of higher things. And how curious
have been some of the points in his career. With
his passion for colour, he has tried to render with
his brush all the mysteries of light, attempting
effects which no one, it may safely be said, had
attempted before him. And in his half-tints, in the
whole range of twilight shades, with their subdued
tones, as in the wild blaze of Oriental colouring
under the blinding sun, he has always succeeded in
creating new and unexpected impressions without
any concession to convention, and with all the force
of a confident personality which, by dint of sheer
hard work, has earned the right to assert itself in
opposition to all.
Besnard has indeed a complex nature, now de-
voted to the weird and the extravagant, losing itself
at times in excess of cleverness, now bursting forth
into poems of purest harmony of line and colour.
What power and feeling in his frescoes in the Ecole
de Pharmacie, for example, and what a marvellous
comprehension of the art of mural painting ! And
what an exquisite sense of nature in his work at
the " Art Nouveau," in which he paints the poetry
29