Studio: international art (65.1915)

The Paris Salon of Fifty Years Ago

In the year 1867, when the Great Exhibition
was held in the French metropolis, both Manet
and Courbet, who also was popularly disliked,
obtained permission to hold personal exhibitions.
A shed-like structure was erected near the Pont de
l’Alma, and there in May 1867 Manet exhibited
about fifty of his pictures, practically all he had
produced. As M. Duret relates, “the greater part
of this magnificent collection has now found its
way into various public and private collections of
note in Europe and America.” But the Parisian
public and their visitors refused to see any good in
Manet’s work, and it has remained for the present
generation to place him on the high level where he
properly belongs. The catalogue of the Exhibition
of 1867 contained a lengthy statement by Manet,
“ Reasons for holding a Private Exhibition,” setting
forth the artist’s position in a remarkable way.

The necessity to exhibit he emphasises very
strongly : “ The matter of vital concern for the
artist is to exhibit; for it happens, after some
looking at a thing, that one becomes familiar with
what was surprising, or, if you will, shocking. Little
by little it becomes understood and accepted. . . .
By exhibiting, an artist
finds friends and sup-
porters who encourage
him in his struggle.

M. Manet has no pre-
tensions either to over-
throw an established
mode of painting or to
create a new one. He
has simply tried to be
himself and not
another.”

The sketches of
Puvis de Chayannes
(1824-1898) are several
of the many which the
artist prepared for his
great decorative panels
at Amiens Museum,
which have been men-
tioned in the preceding
article (p. 77). The
present figures are a
little difficult to disen-
tangle, but they show
studies of children in
various attitudes of
rest, with a mother’s

hand or arm supporting

hem. SKETCHES FOR “ LES PECHEURS” (MUSkE D’AMIENS). BY P. PUVIS DE CHAVANNES

l66

Puvis de Chavannes had two studios, one in
Paris, Place Pigalle, and the other outside the
Western walls, and he spent the time occupied in
going from one to the other (as he did every day
for years) in considering and deciding how his
work was to proceed. He executed only a few
easel pictures or tableaux de chevalet, as his mural
decorations engaged most of his thoughts. Some
think that his great series at Amiens constituted
his chief work, but the mural pictures in the Paris
Pantheon are naturally much better known. He
was essentially a painter of the joys of the peasant
in his life and in his work, and in this respect is
a contrast to J. F. Millet who so divinely chose
the graver and even the more tragic aspect of the
peasant’s existence.

Our final illustration is a reproduction of a
sketch Le Brouillard by Jules Dupre (1812-1889),
and it is accompanied by a note from the artist
which declares that it was always a great affair for
him to put pen to paper. The subject of the
sketch of itself is nothing, he says ; it is the “cote
symphonique ” which is the great thing and indeed
the highest expression of art. D. C. T.