Studio: international art (45.1909)

Albert Léchât, a Painter of Old French Towns

torpor of a life untouched by external influences,
the melancholy streets, as though meditating ini
silence and neglect; these squares beneath the
Cathedral’s shade, where here and there one
meets the figure of some stray worshipper going
to devotions ; these rampart corners, where the
glories of the place lie buried, to all seeming ;
where the futility, the nothingness, of human
carnage may be read in the oblivion of men and
things ; these hollow byeways, dark and high like
tunnels, and opening out into the dazzling sun-
light, azured and verdant; these cattle markets,
these canals winding their way amid the corbelled
line of decayed and irregular houses—all these
enticing scenes, expressed with an emotion and
a sincerity so intense as to produce a sensation
of absolute artlessness, captivated me to such a
degree as to make me long to know their author,
the poet-artist who has succeeded so completely
in realising the pathetic, whimsical spirit of these
ancient towns, despoiled of their erstwhile pros-
perity when Flanders, in the grip of Spain, made
frequent warlike incursions into this Picardy of


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“APRÈS LA PLUIE, ABBEVILLE” BY A. LECHAT

ours.

It was not alone the artist’s talent in water-
colours, nor his skilful workmanship, nor his vir-
tuosity, that captured my attention here, but rather
the simple honesty, the absolute frankness, the
ambient poetry in the atmosphere of these paint-
ings, which are simply impregnated with luminous
truth, with delicate comprehension of values—they

might almost be termed mystical—and with a rest-
ful sense of picturesque beauty.

To be sure, there is nothing boisterous about
M. Lechat’s palette ; noise and violence would be
altogether out of place in these tranquil scenes,
where existence murmurs on in a gentle whisper,
seldom bursting forth, save at fair times or in rustic
assemblies, whose passing
excitements he does not
consider worth reproducing.

M. Lechat’s talent is not
essentially material ; by
solid methods, without
“faking” of any sort, he
has the art of firmly plant-
ing his motifs and making
them live, and, as with the
hand of a visionary, a clair-
voyant, of imparting to
them all kinds of emotion,
condensed but fuily ex-
pressed, thanks to the con-
scientiousness, the sensi-
tiveness, and the honesty
of his interpretation. In a
word, the artist grasps,
analyses, and expresses the
harmony of his subjects ;
his picturesque translations
by a. léchât give one a deep sense of

UNE PLACE, DOULLENS, SOMME

136