Studio: international art (69.1916)

Henri Harbignies: In Memoriam

Dumas, then Minister of the Interior—to leave artist himself was well aware of this and cast aside
for Paris, where, with an allowance of 150 francs his pinceaux for flat brushes. But the perfect
a month, which made him, like Manet, in the eyes handling of these came only through long
of his studio comrades, a veritable fils de familk, practice. Early evidence that he was mastering
he becafte a pupil of Achard, the landscape their use is seen in the pictures which he painted
painter and etcher. He was then twenty-seven. about 1856 on the plains bordering the Rhine.

A curious example of an artist who made a tardy Corot and Theodore Rousseau were the two
beginning with the serious study of the principles great sources whence the art of Harpignies sprang,
of art and whose development was remarkably The poetry of the one, the strength and correctness
slow, Harpignies did not begin to paint his first of design of the other constantly inspired him until
pictures or to exhibit seriously until he was well he had formed a style which was wholly his own.
over thirty. Having worked with Achard from But development, as I have said, was remarkably
1846 to 1849, he went, at his master's suggestion, slow. It was not until he was forty-seven—in 1866
to Italy, where, in Rome, Naples and Capri, he —that he received his first medal for a picture,
spent two years.

Italy, as Harpignies
often used to tell those
who went to see him at his
studio in the Rue Coet-
logen, in Paris, exercised
a great influence on his
talent and imagination.
" It was Rome which
formed, created, sustained
me—and which sustains
me still; it is to Rome
that I owe not only my
most noble emotions but
also my finest inspira-
tions," he told his friends.
" That is what should be
said above everything,
so that all who desire to
learn can go there and,
face to face with beauty,"
realise how enchanting
it is."

So far so good; but it
was not until' much later
that the artist wholly
benefited by his visions
and the spirit of Italy.
Viewing his work as a
whole, it is easy to detect
that he was for a long
time hampered, like all
the landscape painters of
the First Empire, by the
tools at his disposal, to
wit the very fine brushes
then used, and which
resulted in a petty and

cold interpretation of "winter woodland scene in the allier "

water-colour by henri harpignies

Nature. Moreover, the {Zoubalof Collection, Petit-Palais, Paris)

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