DOI Heft:
No. 52 (July, 1897)
DOI Artikel:Sparrow, Walter Shaw: Constantin Meunier: the artist of the Flemish collieries
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18389#0097
Constantin Mauiici
social reformers; her mission has happily nothing terically. It is a very different grief that Meunier
in common with Exeter Hall and the cant of shows us. The husband he keeps out of sight, and
humanitarianism. Vet we are told that (Jon- the wife, bending awkwardly forward, her arms
stantin Meunier is "a saviour of society," and that dangling weakly by her side, seems the Niobe of
his art is eminently fitted to make us all set about Toil, turned into bronze by the sudden horror of
the task of turning the collier into a man of means. the catastrophe.
That Meunier has been a true friend to the The noble reticence of feeling in this work, as
(-oilier I do not for a moment doubt. At the time in Ecce Homo, is not a Flemish quality as a rule,
when he began drawing his inspiration from the Perhaps it is the result of the artist's own sufferings.
Belgian Black Country, no laws of State regulated We meet with it again, as with the rest of Meunier's
the working of the mines. The coal trade was qualities, in another masterpiece in bronze, An Old
then, in Belgium, a horrible child-sweating industry, Colliery Horse, which I should describe on my
by which young girls were brutalised and lads de- own account, were it not that M. Octave Mirbeau
formed. All this M. Meunier painted; and his has made the pleasant task unnecessary. M. Mir-
pictures not only provoked remark, they stimulated beau's description has been thus done into English
reform. But the real point is this: that his methods by Miss Florence Simmonds:
were all honestly artistic \ they had no affinity with " How weary he is, this poor old colliery horse !
those which the late Mrs. Beecher
Stowe made so popular, when calling
attention to another and less de-
graded kind of " black " slavery. In
other words, M. Meunier has never
been a man with a mission—a Millet,
half-poet unwittingly, and wittingly
half-preacher. The ethical and
socialistic interests of his work,
about which so much nonsense has
been talked, owe their origin to an
impressive truthfulness to nature,
and not to a highly self-conscious
kind of humanitarian teaching.
Meunier understands the life of the
mining poor in Belgium; he works
because he has something to say,
and that something he gives expres-
sion to in a style all his own, rugged,
masculine, reticent, and filled with
an uncouth dignity and pathos.
Michel Angelo might have painted
thus if he had been at heart a
collier.
In Fire Damp, a bronze group in
the Brussels Museum, Constantin
Meunier has made real for us the
dazed terror of a collier's wife when
she first beholds her husband's dead
body. Here, indeed, is a subject to
make any inferior artist melo-drama-
tic. Guido Mazzoni, for instance,
who has left us some very curious
Good Friday religious dramas in
coloured clay, would have repre-
sented the poor woman in the act of the Belgian black country
tearing her hair and shrieking hys- from a drawing by constantin meunier
80
social reformers; her mission has happily nothing terically. It is a very different grief that Meunier
in common with Exeter Hall and the cant of shows us. The husband he keeps out of sight, and
humanitarianism. Vet we are told that (Jon- the wife, bending awkwardly forward, her arms
stantin Meunier is "a saviour of society," and that dangling weakly by her side, seems the Niobe of
his art is eminently fitted to make us all set about Toil, turned into bronze by the sudden horror of
the task of turning the collier into a man of means. the catastrophe.
That Meunier has been a true friend to the The noble reticence of feeling in this work, as
(-oilier I do not for a moment doubt. At the time in Ecce Homo, is not a Flemish quality as a rule,
when he began drawing his inspiration from the Perhaps it is the result of the artist's own sufferings.
Belgian Black Country, no laws of State regulated We meet with it again, as with the rest of Meunier's
the working of the mines. The coal trade was qualities, in another masterpiece in bronze, An Old
then, in Belgium, a horrible child-sweating industry, Colliery Horse, which I should describe on my
by which young girls were brutalised and lads de- own account, were it not that M. Octave Mirbeau
formed. All this M. Meunier painted; and his has made the pleasant task unnecessary. M. Mir-
pictures not only provoked remark, they stimulated beau's description has been thus done into English
reform. But the real point is this: that his methods by Miss Florence Simmonds:
were all honestly artistic \ they had no affinity with " How weary he is, this poor old colliery horse !
those which the late Mrs. Beecher
Stowe made so popular, when calling
attention to another and less de-
graded kind of " black " slavery. In
other words, M. Meunier has never
been a man with a mission—a Millet,
half-poet unwittingly, and wittingly
half-preacher. The ethical and
socialistic interests of his work,
about which so much nonsense has
been talked, owe their origin to an
impressive truthfulness to nature,
and not to a highly self-conscious
kind of humanitarian teaching.
Meunier understands the life of the
mining poor in Belgium; he works
because he has something to say,
and that something he gives expres-
sion to in a style all his own, rugged,
masculine, reticent, and filled with
an uncouth dignity and pathos.
Michel Angelo might have painted
thus if he had been at heart a
collier.
In Fire Damp, a bronze group in
the Brussels Museum, Constantin
Meunier has made real for us the
dazed terror of a collier's wife when
she first beholds her husband's dead
body. Here, indeed, is a subject to
make any inferior artist melo-drama-
tic. Guido Mazzoni, for instance,
who has left us some very curious
Good Friday religious dramas in
coloured clay, would have repre-
sented the poor woman in the act of the Belgian black country
tearing her hair and shrieking hys- from a drawing by constantin meunier
80