Concerning painting; by Cox Kenyon 1856-

Author:Cox, Kenyon, 1856- [from old catalog]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Painting
Publisher: New York, C. Scribner's sons
Published: 1917-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

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NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM

retained something of the spirit of their older art, and even Israels was a sound naturalistic painter, if not a very great one, before, in his addiction to sentimentality, he almost ceased to be a painter at all. But it is the Belgian Alfred Stevens who gave to the nineteenth century its nearest equivalent for the sober and admirable art of Ter Borch and Metsu. It was in this same wonderful time of the sixties when the Barbizon men were still living and painting, when Courbet was at the height of his power, when Manet and Whistler, though young, were doing their best work; it was in this silvern age—^the brazen was yet to come—^that he produced a series of little pictures of the Parisienne in her habit, and her habitat, as she lived. They are marked by a mingling of delicate sentiment and yet more delicate humor which gives them a slight literary flavor—^a flavor advantageous to them, though Ter Borch would not have appreciated it—^but they are seen almost as the old Dutchman saw things, with the same breadth of effect and the same sharpness of realization, and they are painted with almost the old Dutch feeling for beauty of surface and grace

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CONCERNING PAINTING

of handling, making the very paint a precious and delectable thing. But the love of painting for its own sake, which in these early works is balanced by a thorough observation of nature, end to a mere disp more human and t side of his talent U from a little master called a master wit came an astonishir clothes and bric-4-bi

It is virtuosity tha section of modem much as they care \ representation, hav

say than that "things look so to me," but diflfering from the refined realists we have been considering in that they care less for the things represented, or even for the truth of their own observations, than for the brilliancy of the language in which their observations are set down. If there were no painters who care more for painting than for what is painted, there would be no pictures of still-life; but not all still-life painters are virtuosi.

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Plate 19.—"Toils les Bonheurs,'' by Alfred Stevens.

In the BruHseU Museum.

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NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM

Chardin was a pure painter who could find enough occasion in a jug, a bunch of grapes, and a home-made loaf for the expenditure of his best powers, but there is nothing of the virtuoso in him. His observation is close, attentive, almost humble; his painting exquisite but with no display^— rather with a careful hiding—of his dexterity. With Vollon or our own Chase you feel that the immense brio, the evident delight of the painter in the wielding of his tools and in the exercise of his skill, is the principal source of your own enjoyment, and that the truthfulness and acuteness of observation, acute and truthful as it is, is a secondary matter. Of course neither Vollon nor Chase is a

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