Studio: international art (27.1903)

Nicolas Gysis

lent as is their delicate colouring and their indefin-
able air of distinction, they give the impression
of having been seen before. Their subjects were
most of them founded on sketches made in Greece
and Asia Minor, where the artist was, of course,
thoroughly at home, and the)' combine the fresh-
ness of imagination of an unspoiled nature, with
the new mastery of technique and expression gained
in his earnest studies at Munich. Amongst the
earliest of these paintings of the first period must
be specially noted the Grandmother's Story, the
Painter in the Orient, the Carnival, and the Stealer
of Poultry, whilst amongst the later the Joseph ex-
plaining the Dreams and the Judith are perhaps the
most characteristic, and reveal yet another influence
—that of Hans Makart—for in them Gysis may
be said to have almost trodden on the heels of
the gifted young Austrian.

None of these subjects were, however, the true
metier of the Greek master, who was not really in
sympathy with genre—or, for that matter, with
history. He began, after producing the pictures
just enumerated, to develop his own particular
style—to be, in fact, himself. He now forgot
Piloty and his studio, and remembered only that
he was Gysis, a Greek, born beneath the sky
which had witnessed the production of the greatest
masterpieces ever conceived in a human brain.
The most salient characteristics of his genius are
idealism, depth of emotional feeling, and intensity
of intellectual vision. He saw everything in
nature with the undimmed eyes of the poet; he

painted what he saw with the skilled hand of an
expert. Nature aroused in him feelings full of a
profound mystery, and evoked in his imagination
figures instinct with nobility, ideally beautiful, and
of sculpturesque majesty, incarnations of the re-
fined classicism and romanticism which brought
him, as it were, into direct touch with the very
spirit, the inner essence of the antique Greek art
from which his own is derived by right of direct
inheritance. The study of the work of Gysis, in
fact, recalls a certain definition of neo-idealism :
"After naturalism has taught artists to work from
actual impressions of real scenes in an independent
manner, a transition was brought about by some
amongst them who embodied impressions made
upon their own minds, in an original manner which
they had not borrowed from the old masters."

The Spring Symplwny was one of the first
pictures painted in the second and most prolific
period of Gysis' art life. It is almost impossible
to do justice by mere description to the delicate
finesse, the almost intangible grace, the charming
freshness, the incisive symbolism of this fascinat-
ing poem in colour, in which the young life of
the painter seems to be vividly reflected. Sprites
and Cupids are issuing from the calyces of flowers in
a diaphanous haze of exquisite colours, in an atmo-
sphere palpitating with ethereal loveliness. To
quote the words of the great critic of antique
times, Philostratus, " the flowers are painted
perfume and all, and the winged genii who are
rising from the midst of them are their very

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