Studio: international art (24.1902)

Le Sidaner

attached, more importance to that which he has to
say than to his method of saying it, and that he
has wisely striven to enrich and refine his mind
and his taste, instead of devoting all his efforts to
mere matters of execution and practice. Thus
the emotional faculties play the chief part in all he
does. They have developed in him those gifts of
tenderness and intimite which veil his canvases
with a soft atmosphere of seductiveness, and
deck reality with a new and infinite charm.
They have enabled him to appreciate and to
reproduce the subtlest, lightest, most fugitive
impressions, to realise the minutest differences of
tone or feeling in a way that might seem well-nigh
impossible by plastic means. Emotions such as
these, others before him—for these emotions are
essentially human—have doubtless felt, but I
doubt if anyone has succeeded in communicating
them as he has done.

He has in abundance that precious gift—precious
especially for a modern artist—persuasion. He con-
vinces one subtly but surely. There is none of the
shouting of the rhetoricians of art; none of the
roulades of the tenors of painting ; no noisy appeals
to the crowd; no haranguing outside the booth
door at the fair. All these things pass away and leave
scarce an echo, for the morrow is not for the false,
but rather for the true and the sincere. " Tout le
reste est litterature "—that is to say, " art for art's
sake "—mere empty words, a jingling of more or
less harmonious syllables, quite devoid of thought
or inspiration of heart.

I love and admire the work of M. Le Sidaner
because I find it quivering with human sensibility.
From the very outset of his career down to the
present day, with the artist in full possession of his
powers, we see him pursuing his ideal, ever striving
to avoid external influences, listening only to the
voice of his instinct, disdaining all easy roads
to technical success, mastering new methods in
order the more fully to express his meaning, his
dreams, his sensations, his emotions.

The first ten years of his life were spent in the
He Maurice, where he was born in 1862, his
parents being Breton fisher-folk of He Brehat and
Saint Malo. " While quite young," wrote M.
Paul Riff, in his preface to the catalogue of an
exhibition of Le Sidaner's works held at the
Galerie Mancini in 1897, "he came to live in
Dunkerque, beside the murmuring North Sea,
with its melancholy mists. The shock he felt
at the change made him absolutely pensive.
It was as though, half alarmed, he were taking
refuge within himself the better to express the

flame of Creole tenderness which burned within
him."

Contrary to general custom Le Sidaner's artistic
inclinations were not opposed by his family, and
he had no experience of the struggle against
parental authority which is so often the hard lot of
the beginner. His father, who was himself some-
thing of a painter and a sculptor, gave him every
encouragement. At fifteen he had his box of
colours, and as he showed much promise his father
took him away from school and sent him to study
at the classes of the Ecole des Beaux Arts at
Dunkerque. There he was taught by a master
thoroughly impregnated with the doctrines of the
Antwerp School.

" How long it took," remarked the artist sadly
to me one day, " to rid myself of those evil
influences ! Yet they were not worse, after all,
than those forced on me at the Beaux Arts in
Paris, where from eighteen to twenty-three or
twenty-four I studied under the illustrious Cabanel.
My first year at the Ecole I spent at the Jardin
des Plantes and at the Louvre; at the Gardens I
did studies of lions and tigers, and at the Louvre
I copied Delacroix and Jordaens. It was this
same year, if I mistake not, that Manet displayed
his portraits of Pertuiset, le tueur de lions, and of
Rochefort. The first of these pleased me infinitely,
but the second gradually filled me with alarm ; it
was so different from that which I had hitherto
seen. Nevertheless I remember well that the
famous Bar des Folies-Bergere by this same
Manet made the profoundest impression on me.
Yet the rules of the Ecole forbade me to consider
all this as beautiful as I could have wished to
consider it. When I look back on those days it
really seems as though I was poisoned. Etaples—
that is to say, Nature—revived me, and drove the
drug from my system.

"Every year I used to spend my holidays with
my family, and in 1881 chance took me to Etaples.
I stayed there all the summer doing sea-scapes.
It is a fine type of country, with beautiful simple
lines and harmonious horizons of sea and shore,
something like the stern scenery our great Cazin
has immortalised. I lived herefrom 1884 to 1893,
eight full years of sane, happy existence, and there
I made and cemented some of my closest friend-
ships. Eugene Vail, Thaulow and Henri Duhem
often paid long visits to Etaples, while Alexander
Harrison and Midleton Jameson, brother of the
famous Jameson, also worked there.

" Meantime I had been to Holland, where
Rembrandt, Pieter de Hoogh and Vermeer