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The artist, to be sure, may give this, as when the landscapist paints some locality dear to his client or the portraitist paints the client himself; but he does not need to do this, and the aesthetic value of his work is independent of it; for the picture possesses its beauty even when we know nothing of its model.
He fought success as he conquered failure, and his continual dissatisfaction with himself, the true critical spirit, has led him to many fields he has been portraitist, genre painter, landscapist, delineator of nudes, a marine painter and a master of still-life. This versatility, amazing and incontrovertible, has perhaps clouded the real worth of Renoir for the public.
One critic writes: "The painting is firm and brilliant. The hands are especially beautiful; we scarcely know to whom we can compare Mme. Massip, unless to M. Paul Dubois. They have the same love of art, the same soberness of tone, the same scorn of artifice.... The woman who has signed such a portrait is a great artist." It is well known that the famous sculptor is a remarkable portraitist.
No doubt in bronze the Balzac will arouse less wrath from the unimaginative; in plaster it produces the effect of some surging monolith of snow. As a portraitist of his contemporaries Rodin is the unique master of character. His women are gracious, delicious masks; his men cover many octaves in virility and variety.
This experience was harrowing, but it prepared his mind for the seeds of wisdom. By the following morning he had chastened his spirit, forgotten the assurance breathed from the windy pages of the Boy Trapper Library, and was ready to learn. Have you ever watched a competent portraitist at work?
For the most part we have, however, to think of Alfred Stevens as a portraitist of the ponderable world; a Flemish lover of brilliant appearances, a scrupulous translator of the language of visible things into the idiom of art. In the picture entitled L'Atelier, which we reproduce, is a more or less significant instance of his artistic veracity.
With respect to portraits less than other subjects, can we expect to find them reflections of the artist’s personality. But some of the ablest, while interpreting another’s character, frequently add somewhere in it their own. The old masters rarely signed, feeling that they wrote themselves all through their works. The sure thing regarding the great portraitist is that he is a man of refinement.
Then, after some practice, he got together a kit of painting materials, and started to tramp about the country as a portraitist.
Wall D shows Whistler the portraitist, with "his faces and figures that emerge from a soft black background, very much as one sees a person in the gathering twilight." On walls A and B it is Whistler the colorist, and on wall B especially, Whistler the rediscoverer of Japanese color and figure composition.
He has exhibited at several Expositions, has done considerable municipal work the finest figure probably being his "Baron Steuben," of Washington and many fine portraits. His "Uncle Joe Cannon" in the Fine Arts Palace, shows his power as a portraitist. His work has brought him decorations from the German Emperor. Isidore Konti
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