Romantic Painting, Part V

Mike G. on 12 31, 2009

Dupré and Diaz are the decorative painters of the Fontainebleau group.
They are, of modern painters, perhaps the nearest in spirit to the old
masters, pictorially speaking. They are rarely in the grand style,
though sometimes Dupré is restrained enough to emulate if not to achieve
its sobriety. But they have the _bel air_, and belong to the aristocracy
of the painting world. Diaz, especially, has almost invariably the
patrician touch. It lacks the exquisiteness of Monticelli’s, in which
there is that curiously elevated detachment from the material and the
real that the Italians–and the Provençal painter’s inspiration and
method, as well as his name and lineage, suggest an Italian rather than
a French association–exhibit far oftener than the French. But Diaz has
a larger sweep, a saner method. He is never eccentric, and he has a
dignity that is Iberian, though he is French rather than Spanish on his
æsthetic side, and at times is as conservative as Rousseau–without,
however, reaching Rousseau’s lofty simplicity except in an occasional
happy stroke. Both he and Dupré are primarily colorists. Dupré sees
nature through a prism. Diaz’s groups of dames and gallants have a
jewel-like aspect; they leave the same impression as a tangle of
ribbons, a bunch of exotic flowers, a heap of gems flung together with
the felicity of haphazard. In general, and when they are in most
completely characteristic mood, it is not the sentiment of nature that
one gets from the work of either painter. It is not even _their_
sentiment of nature–the emotion aroused in their susceptibilities by
natural phenomena. What one gets is their personal feeling for color and
design–their decorative quality, in a word.
The decorative painter is he to whom what is called “subject,” even in
its least restricted sense and with its least substantial suggestions,
is comparatively indifferent. Nature supplies him with objects; she is
not in any intimate degree his subject. She is the medium through which,
rather than the material of which, he creates his effects. It is her
potentialities of color and design that he seeks, or at any rate, of all
her infinitely numerous traits, it is her hues and arabesques that
strike him most forcibly. He is incurious as to her secrets and calls
upon her aid to interpret his own, but he is so independent of her, if
he be a decorative painter of the first rank–a Diaz or a Dupré–that
his rendering of her, his picture, would have an agreeable effect, owing
to its design or color or both, if it were turned upside down.
Decorative painting in this sense may easily be carried so far as to
seem incongruous and inept, in spite of its superficial attractiveness.
The peril that threatens it is whim and freak. Some of Monticelli’s,
some of Matthew Maris’s pictures, illustrate the exaggeration of the
decorative impulse. After all, a painter must get his effect, whatever
it be and however it may shun the literal and the exact, by rendering
things with pigments. And some of the decorative painters only escape
things by obtruding pigments, just as the _trompe-l’oeil_ or optical
illusion painters get away from pigments by obtruding things. It is the
distinction of Diaz and Dupré that they avoid this danger in most
triumphant fashion. On the contrary, they help one to see the decorative
element in nature, in “things,” to a degree hardly attained elsewhere
since the days of the great Venetians. Their predilection for the
decorative element is held in leash by the classic tradition, with its
reserve, its measure, its inculcation of sobriety and its sense of
security. Dupré paints Seine sunsets and the edge of the forest at
Fontainebleau, its “long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight,” in a
way that conveys the golden glow, the silvery gleam, the suave outline
of spreading leafage, and the massive density of mysterious boscage with
the force of an almost abstract acuteness. Does nature look like this?
Who knows? But in this semblance, surely, she appeared to Dupré’s
imagination. And doubtless Diaz saw the mother-of-pearl tints in the
complexion of his models, and is not to be accused of artificiality,
but to be credited with a true sincerity of selection in juxtaposing his
soft corals and carnations and gleaming topaz, amethyst, and sapphire
hues. The most exacting literalist can hardly accuse them of solecism in
their rendering of nature, true as it is that their decorative sense is
so strong as to lead them to impose on nature their own sentiment
instead of yielding themselves to absorption in _hers_, and thus, in
harmonious and sympathetic concert with her, like Claude and Corot,
Rousseau and Daubigny, interpreting her subtle and supreme significance.

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