United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


They suggest, too, those less remote but perhaps even more aloof spaces of solitude which were ever Courbet's theme in his deeper hours, that haunting sense of subtle habitation, that acute invasion of either wind or soft fleck of light or bright presence in a breadth of shadow, as if a breath of living essences always somehow pervaded those mystic woodland or still lowland scenes.

As we set out for Besancon, a splendid glow of sunset lights up Courbet's birth and favourite abiding place, clothing in richest gold the hills and hanging woods he portrayed with so much vigour and poetic feeling. The glories of the sinking sun lingered long, and, when the last crimson rays faded, a full pearly moon rose in the clear heavens, lighting us on our way.

Many of the early pictures have a joyousness of frank workmanship, a directness of attack and a simplicity of arrangement that appeal to the world at large more freely than the subtler blonde harmonies of the later years. The Profil de Femme in which M. Lambotte discerns the influence of Rembrandt, is more suggestive to the present writer of familiarity with Courbet's bold, heavy impasto and sharp transitions from light to shadow. The Réverie of the preceding year has also its suggestions of Courbet, in spite of the delicately painted flowers in the Japanese vase; but in the pictures of the next few years, the robust freshness of the painter's Flemish vision finds expression in color-schemes that resemble nothing so much as the gardens of Belgium in springtime, filled with hardy blossoms and tended by skillful hands; La Consolation of 1857, for example, in which the two black-robed women form the heavy note of dead color against which are relieved the pink and white of their companion's gown, the pale yellow of the wall, the blue of the floor and the low, softly brilliant tones of the beautiful tapestry curtain. Another painting of about the same time has almost the charm of Fantin-Latour's early renderings of serious women bending over their books or their sewing. In La Liseuse the girl's face is absorbed and thoughtful, the color harmony is quiet, the white dress, the dull red of the chair, the blue and yellow and green wools on the table, forming a pattern of closely related tones as various in its unity as the motley border of an old-fashioned dooryard. In other examples we have reminiscences of that time of excitement and esthetic riot when the silks and porcelains and enamels of the Far East came into the Paris of artists and artisans and formed at once a part of the baggage of the Parisian atelier. L'Inde

He threw back his head and muttered between his teeth: 'Dash it all! it's very black still. I can't get Delacroix out of my eye, do what I will. And then the hand, that's Courbet's manner. Everyone of us dabs his brush into the romantic sauce now and then. We had too much of it in our youth, we floundered in it up to our very chins. We need a jolly good wash to get clear of it.

Let the reader now follow me to Ornans, Courbet's birth and favourite abiding place, and the lovely Valley of the Loue.

"You know Mr. Seaborne is here?" she added. "I have met him two or three times at Madame Courbet's, whom I was surprised to find he has known for several years. She translated his book on the revolutions of '48 into French." Never a word now of Elgar. The Spences noted this cheerlessly, and could not but remark a bitterness that here and there revealed itself in her short, dry letters.

But highly populate as these pictures of Courbet's are with the spirit of ever-passing feet that hover and hold converse in the remote wood, the remoter plain, they never quite surrender to that ghostliness which possesses the pictures of our Ryder. At all times in his work one has the feeling of there having lately passed, if ever so fleetly, some bodily shape seeking a solitude of its own.

Fortnoye is an exploded speculator, dismissed from the French Board: obliged to beat a retreat to Belgium, he soon found himself in Baden, where he had good luck at the green table shortly before the war. Fourth, and last. He belongs to the innermost circle of the Commune and to all the French and Italian secret associations. He is represented in the background of several of Courbet's pictures.

Indeed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, Why so much interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import? Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your amassing of "documents" turned to any account? Where is the realistic tragedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet's "Cantonniers," Manet's "Bar," or Bastien-Lepage's "Joan of Arc," perhaps.

Dramatic always, I do not call them theatric excepting in the case of one picture that I know, called "Morro Castle" I think, now in the Metropolitan Museum, reminding me much of the commonplace, "Chateau de Chillon" of Courbet's, neither of these pictures being of any value in the careers of their authors.