Studio: international art (45.1909)

Albert Lechat, a Painter of Old French Towns

the calm surrounding these dead cities, wherein
survives the spirit of tradition proclaiming itself
everywhere, a spirit hovering like a will-o’-the-wisp
in the light, throwing into relief houses and far-off
perspectives alike.

In noting his souvenirs of his adorable Mont-
reuil-sur-Mer, the steep rue Saint-Firmin, the
Grande Rue, the Place Verte with its fountain, the
rue de la Boucherie—where dwelt the lamented
Thaulow—the ramparts seen from the outside, and
the river Canche, there came over me a sense of
the enveloping melancholy of these placid provin-
cial spots ; I felt the morbid intoxication of a peace-
fulness like that of the b'eguitiages of old-time.

In other works we find Bergnes, with its superb
belfry, its canals, its doorways sunk in the city
walls ; then Abbeville, with its glorious church of
Saint Wulfran, with the Somme intersecting the
town, and the broad rue Notre-Dame. Next we
come to Doullens, with the rue de la Sous-préfec-
ture, and the town promenade by the river banks.
In all these representations of our Northern pro-
vinces M. Lechat has given us a series of moving
pictures, delightfully coloured, bathed in an
exquisite light, in an imponderable and mysterious
atmosphere of silence and meditation befitting
these remote retreats, exiled, as it were, from the
bustle and the traffic of modern life which enters
therein only after filtering through the delightful,
magical vestiges of the days gone by.

These evocative works might almost be styled
works of philosophic instruction, for, even more
clearly than the purely
rustic landscape, they show
one that progress must
pause respectfully in pre-
sence of the death agonies
of these little towns, and
that our civilisation, of
which we make such a
fuss, has hardly made any
way — for all its tumul-
tuous incoherence — in
certain urban centres such
as these, where the Ram-
part Walk still tells of the
languor, the mystic cha-
racter of the old cloisters,
and almost asserts itself as
the “ chemin de ronde ”
of the citizens imprisoned
within the old, old walls.

Albert Lechat was born
at Lille in 1863, in the

centre of the town, near that admirable seventeenth
century monument, the Bourse de Lille, once the
Aldermanic Hall. During his childhood he was
seldom away from this part of Old Lille, which at
that time—even more than now—was full of small
houses of great antiquity. He took his walks on
the fortifications or in the suburbs of the big town.
It may well be that from this time dates his affec-
tion for the little towns or villages which have not
been smitten by the vanity of aggrandisement, and
have thus been able to preserve their antique
charm. In any case, directly M. Lechat began to
paint he sped towards the outskirts, where the
scenery, although somewhat sad, flat, and mono-
tonous, nevertheless gave him more air and sun-
shine. Lille itself, however, had been transformed,
and its queer, poetical, picturesque and mysterious
corners were becoming more and more rare.

Eventually Lechat left Lille, and took up his
abode in the Pas-de-Calais. By chance he found
himself close to Montreuil-sur-Mer. Captivated
at once by the really incomparable charm of this
little dead city, he endeavoured to realise in paint
the feelings that arose within him as he strolled
along the old ramparts or the tortuous streets. At
that time he made use of a process which he had
long employed in his country sketches—a mixture
of water-colours and crayon. By means of this
technique he succeeded in transcribing, just as he
felt it, the picturesque side of Montreuil and its
surroundings. Next to the melancholy ramparts
of the old fortified town, what attracted him most

“the pool” by a■ D- peppercorn

(Society of 25 Painters—See London Studio- Talk)

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