Studio: international art (65.1915)

The Paris Salon of Fifty Years Ago

Angelo, and although apparently so revolutionary
in his methods Daumier is really traditional in his
expression. At Windsor is the very remarkable
drawing by Michael Angelo of the Bersaglio (one
of his very finest), and therein are some figures
which Daumier’s Combatants resemble. The Italian,
it must be said, was a more consummate master of
the pencil, and his knowledge of figures surpasses
the Frenchman’s, but Daumier has the greater gift
of making his figures stand more firmly on their
feet.

Fifty years ago Daumier was at the height of
his power, and the sketches here reproduced are
characteristic of his work. Like J. F. Millet and
Theo. Rousseau, Daumier appears to have favoured
warmly the idea of these autographic reproductions,
and in an 1865 publication he has filled a large
page with nearly a dozen different pieces. The
Peasants and the Pipe might be a character-sketch
from Balzac, full of rough vigour and altogether
alive as it is.

The Souvenirs du Palais de Justice are sketches
of a kind Daumier made in dozens, mostly in black
and white, often in colour, and occasionally in oil
painting. Many of his lawyer pictures rise to the
highest point of his vigorous art.

In these Souvenirs Daumier is in his glory, and
the life of the Parisian Law Courts was never more
perfectly portrayed. The avocat with his brief,
walking in the Salle de Pas Perdus to let every one
see the size of his fee and the importance of his
task, is the most solemn; for the other three
sketches show his colleagues in the act of protest-
ing, pleading, and of pouring wrath upon an unfor-
tunate witness. The avocat in the act of pleading

was afterwards elaborated into a splendid water-
colour drawing, which is now in a well-chosen
collection in England.

In all these drawings not a single line or portion
thereof is set down which does not carry its full
weight of power in the production. Only the
veriest essentials are indicated, and the power of
the master is most fully shown in these apparently
hasty drawings, which were, however, as Whistler
would have said, the product of thirty or forty
years of training.

Adolphe Hervier (1827-1879) was a man of
entirely different calibre from Daumier, or of
Millet, whom we shall presently discuss. Many
times he was refused at the Salon—it is said more
than twenty in all; but he had his admirers, although
it is certain his life was never an easy one. The
sketch of the Fishing Boat is not at all a usual
subject for Hervier, as he mostly painted interiors
of courtyards or old-fashioned houses.

We now come to Jean Francois Millet (1814-
1875), who was delighted with the new process
which gave to the world his drawings, and he, like
Daumier, covered a whole folio page with sketches,
and of these we render the greater number. Not
only does he make drawings, but he also sets forth
in writing the true charms of the country, and of
the flowers of the field, and he quotes, as he was
fond of doing, that “ Solomon in all his glory was
not arrayed like one of these.”

It was in May 1863 that Millet wrote the letter re-
produced on p. 84. At that time his famous picture
The Man with the Hoe was on exhibition at the Salon;
the critics united in a great majority to condemn that
painting, but altogether for the subject and not for

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