Studio: international art (65.1915)

The Paris Salon of Fifty Years Ago

Our frontispiece is a study for the Vintage, the
panel to the left of the vast Ave Picardia Nutrix
on the staircase at Amiens, which was first seen at
the Salon of 1865. The other illustration carries
the artist’s autographic note that it is the sketch for
his Salon picture of 1864.

The two figures in the frontispiece are more
academic in drawing than the single figure in the
earlier sketch, and they are curiously traditional in
treatment. They might, indeed, have been drawn by
one of the more severely trained draughtsmen of the
period. The 1864 figure from PAutomne is a jewel
of the first water, and the movement of line is
masterly in the highest degree. It looks like a
sketch very rapidly made, but with that complete
power which full knowledge of the subject, pre-
viously gained, alone is able to produce.

Our frontispiece is, moreover, a lesson to our
young artists to emphasize what every one will tell
them is the only path to mastery : the precise and
careful study of each detail of the composition.
Puvis’ draughtsmanship was never seen to better
advantage than in this masterly, if somewhat over-
careful, drawing.

Our next illustration is by an artist but little
known outside France, but his picture, Les Enerves
de Junieges, was long in the Luxembourg. Our
sketch by E. V. Luminais (1822-1896) was for his
picture of Seaweed Gatherers, and the picture has
its pathetic as well as a poetic side. Every one
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agrees that the gleaner in the field of corn can be
a majestic figure, full of dignity and charm, but the
poor seaweed gatherers possess an added pathos
because of the poverty of their miserable harvest,
hardly repaying their strenuous labour to bring it
to their poor cabins.

Now we have the works of Honore Daumier
(1808-1879), an artist whose great qualities have
only come to be generally acknowledged since the
turn of the present century. Indeed, at the time
The Studio brought out a Special Number on his
work and that of Gavarni,* some ten years ago,
comparatively few people outside France were
familiar with his work. Here and there, before his
death, an art critic gifted with special foresight
strove to bring him fame, but in his lifetime his
success was very limited.

Daumier is an artist closely akin in his manner
of observing things to Jean Francois Millet, and
what Millet did for the French peasant, Daumier
has done for the small shopkeeper and the humbler
professional man. Daumier hated all limbs of the
law, and many of his pictures and sketches of them
descend almost to caricature when portraying
judges and lawyers in the Courts.

It is also to be noted that Daumier’s drawings
are not very far away from the sketches of Michael

* “Daumier and Gavarni,” with Critical and Bio-
graphical Notes by Henri Frantz and Octave Uzanne.
1904.