Books: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6
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Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6
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The beginner paints what he sees; or, more properly, he paints what
he thinks he sees. If he grows he will next paint what he imagines,
as Rubens did. Then there is another stage which completes the
spiral and comes back to the place of beginning, and the painter
will again paint what he sees.
This Velasquez did, and this is what sets him apart. The difference
between the last stage and the first is that the artist has learned
to see.
To write is nothing--to know what to write is much. To paint is
nothing--to see and know the object you are attempting to portray is
everything.
"Shall I paint the thing just as I see it?" asked the ingenue of the
great artist. "Why, yes," was the answer, "provided you do not see
the thing as you paint it."
The King and the Painter grew old together. They met on a common
ground of horses, dogs and art; and while the King used these things
to kill time and cause him to forget self, the Painter found horses
and dogs good for rest and recreation. But art was for Velasquez a
religion, a sacred passion.
Nominally the Court Painter ranked with the Court Barber, and his
allowance was the same. But Velasquez ruled the King, and the King
knew it not. Like all wasteful, dissolute men, Philip the Fourth had
spasms of repentance when he sought by absurd economy to atone for
folly.
We are all familiar with individuals who will blow to the four winds
good money, and much of it, on needless meat and drink for those who
are neither hungry nor athirst, and take folks for a carriage-ride
who should be abed, and then the next day buy a sandwich for dinner
and walk a mile to save a five-cent carfare. Some of us have done
these things; and so occasionally Philip would dole out money to buy
canvas and complain of the size of it, and ask in injured tone how
many pictures Velasquez had painted from that last bolt of cloth!
But Velasquez was a diplomat and humored his liege; yet when the
artist died, the administrator of his estate had to sue the State
for a settlement, and it was ten years before the final amount due
the artist was paid. After twenty years of devotion, Olivarez--
outmatched by Richelieu in the game of statecraft--fell into
disrepute and was dismissed from office. Monarchies, like republics,
are ungrateful.
Velasquez sided with his old friend Olivarez in the quarrel, and
thus risked incurring the sore displeasure of the King. The King
could replace his Minister of State, but there was no one to take
the place of the artist; so Philip bottled his wrath, gave Velasquez
the right of his private opinion, and refused to accept his
resignation.
There seems little doubt that it was a calamity for Velasquez that
Philip did not send him flying into disgrace with Olivarez. Had
Velasquez been lifted out on the toe of the King's displeasure,
Italy would have claimed him, and the Vatican would have opened wide
its doors. There, relieved of financial badgering, in the company of
his equals, encouraged and uplifted, he might have performed such
miracles in form and color that even the wonderful ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel would have faded into the mediocre.
And again he might not--what more idle and fascinating than such
speculation?
That the King endured the calm rebuke of Velasquez, when Olivarez
was deposed, and still retained the Painter in favor, was probably
because Rubens had assured the King that Velasquez as an artist was
the master of any man in all Europe.
Velasquez made two trips to Italy, being sent on royal embassies to
purchase statuary for the Prado Gallery, and incidentally to copy
pictures. So there is many a Veronese, Tintoretto and Titian now in
the Prado that was copied by Velasquez.
Think of the value of a Titian copied by Velasquez! And so
faithfully was the copying done, even to inserting the signature,
initials and date, that much doubt exists as to what pictures are
genuine and what copies.
When Rubens appeared at the Court of Madrid, sent by the Duke of
Mantua, with presents of Old Masters (done by himself), I can not
but imagine the quiet confession, with smiles and popping of corks,
that occurred when the wise and princely Rubens and the equally wise
and princely Velasquez got together in some private corner.
The advent of Rubens at Madrid sent a thrill through the entire
Court, and a lesser man than Velasquez would have quaked with
apprehension when he found the King sitting to Rubens for a portrait
in his own studio.
Not so Velasquez--he had done the King on canvas a score of times;
no one else had ever been allowed to paint the King's portrait--and
he was curious to see how the picture would come out.
Rubens, twenty-two years the senior of Velasquez, shrank a bit, it
seems, from the contest, and connoisseurs have said that there is a
little lack of the exuberant, joyous Rubensesque quality in the
various pictures done by the gracious Fleming in Spain.
The taunt that many of the pictures attributed to Rubens were done
by his pupils loses its point when we behold the prodigious amount
of work that the master accomplished at Madrid in nine months--a
dozen portraits, several groups, a score of pictures copied. And
besides this, there was time for horseback rides when the King,
Rubens and Velasquez galloped away together, when they climbed
mountains, and when there were fetes and receptions to attend.
Rubens was then over fifty, but the fire of his youth and that
joyous animation of the morning, the years had not subdued.
Velasquez had many pupils, but in Murillo his skill as a teacher is
best revealed. Several of his pupils painted exactly like him, save
that they neglected to breathe into the nostrils of their work the
breath of life. But Velasquez seems to have encouraged Murillo to
follow the bent of his moody and melancholy genius--so Murillo was
himself, not a diluted Velasquez.
The strong, administrative ability of Velasquez was prized by the
King as much as his ability as a painter, and he was, therefore,
advanced to the position of Master of Ceremonies. In this work, with
its constant demand of close attention to petty details, his latter
days were consumed. He died, aged sixty-one, a victim to tasks that
were not worth the doing, but which the foolish King considered as
important as painting deathless pictures.
So closely was the life of his wife blended with his own that in
eight days after his passing she followed him across the Border,
although the physicians declared that she had no disease. Husband
and wife were buried in one grave in a church that a hundred years
later was burned and never rebuilt. No stone marks their resting-
place; and none is needed, for Velasquez lives in his work. The
truth, splendor and beauty that he produced are on a hundred walls--
the inspiration of men who do and dare--the priceless heritage of us
who live today and of those who shall come after.
COROT
The sun sinks more and more behind the horizon. Bam! he throws his
last ray, a streak of gold and purple which fringes the flying
clouds. There, now it has entirely disappeared. Bien! bien! twilight
commences. Heavens, how charming it is! There is now in the sky only
the soft vaporous color of pale citron--the last reflection of the
sun which plunges into the dark blue of the night, going from green
tones to a pale turquoise of an unheard-of fineness and a fluid
delicacy quite indescribable.... The fields lose their color, the
trees form but gray or brown masses.... the dark waters reflect the
bland tones of the sky. We are losing sight of things--but one still
feels that everything is there--everything is vague, confused, and
Nature grows drowsy. The fresh evening air sighs among the leaves--
the birds, these voices of the flowers, are saying their evening
prayer.
--_Corot's Letter to Graham_
[Illustration: Corot]
Most young artists begin by working for microscopic effects, trying
to portray every detail, to see every leaf, stem and branch and
reveal them in the picture.
The ability to draw carefully and finish painstakingly is very
necessary, but the great artist must forget how to draw before he
paints a great picture; just as every strong writer must put the
grammar upon the shelf before he writes well. I once heard William
Dean Howells say that any good, bright High-School girl of sixteen
could pass a far better examination in rhetoric than he could--and
the admission did Mr. Howells no discredit.
"Would you advise me to take a course in elocution?" once asked a
young man with oratorical ambitions of Henry Ward Beecher.
"Yes, by all means. Study elocution very carefully, but you will
have to forget it all before you ever become an orator," was the
answer.
Corot began as a child by drawing very rude, crude, uncertain
pictures, just such pictures as any schoolboy can draw. Next he
began to "complete" his sketches, and work with infinite pains. If
he sketched a house he showed whether the roof was shingled or made
of straw or tile; his trees revealed the texture of the bark and
showed the shape of the leaf, and every flower contained its pistil
and stamens, and told the man knew his botany. Two of his pictures
done in Rome in his twenty-ninth year, "The Colosseum" and "The
Forum," now in the Louvre, are good pictures--complete in detail,
painstaking, accurate, hard and tight in technique. They are bomb-
proof--beyond criticism--absolutely safe. Have a care, Corot! Keep
where you are and you will become an irreproachable painter. That is
to say, you will paint just like a hundred other French painters.
There will be a market for your wares, the critics will approve, and
at the Salon your work will never be either enskyed nor consigned to
the catacombs. Society will court you, fair ladies will smile and
encourage. You will be a success; your name will be safely
pigeonholed among the unobjectionable ones, and before your wind-
combed shock of hair has turned to silver, you will be supplanted by
a new crop of fashion's favorites.
It is a fact worth noting that the two greatest landscape-painters
of all time were city-born and city-bred. Turner was born in London,
the son of a barber, and Fate held him so in leash that he never got
beyond the sound of Bow Bells until he was a man grown. Corot was
born in Paris, and his first outdoor sketch, made at twenty-two, was
done amidst the din and jostle of the quays of the Seine.
Five strong men made up the Barbizon School, and of these, three
were reared in Paris--Paris the frivolous, Paris the pleasure-
loving. Corot, Rousseau and Daubigny were children of the
Metropolis.
I state these facts in the interests of truth, and also to ease
conscience, for I am aware that I have glorified the country boy in
pages gone before, as if God were kind to him alone.
Turner made over a million dollars by the work of his hands
(reinforced by head and heart); and left a discard of nineteen
thousand sketches to the British Nation. Was ever such an example of
concentration, energy and industry known in the history of art?
Corot, six feet one, weight two hundred, ruddy, simple, guileless,
singing softly to himself as he walked, in peasant blouse, and
sabot-shod, used to come up to Paris, his birthplace, two or three
times a year, and the gamins would follow him on the streets, making
remarks irrelevant and comments uncomplimentary, just as they might
follow old Joshua Whitcomb on Broadway in New York.
British grandees often dress like farmers, for pride may manifest
itself in simplicity, but the disinterested pose of Camille Corot,
if pose it was, fitted him as the feathers fit a wild duck. If pose
is natural it surely is not pose: and Corot, the simplest man in the
world, was regarded by the many as a man of mannerisms. His work was
so quiet and modest that the art world refused to regard it
seriously. Corot was as unpretentious as Walt Whitman and just as
free from vanity.
During the War of the Rebellion, Whitman bankrupted himself in purse
and body by caring for the stricken soldiers. At the siege of Paris,
Corot could have kept outside the barriers, but safety for himself
he would not accept. He remained in the city, refused every comfort
that he could not divide with others, spent all the money he had in
caring for the wounded, nursed the sick by night and day, listened
to the confessions of the dying, and closed the eyes of the dead. To
everybody, especially the simple folk, the plain, the unpretentious,
the unknown, he was "Papa Corot," and everywhere did the stalwart
old man of seventy-five carry hope, good-cheer and a courage that
never faltered.
Corot, like Whitman, had the happiness to have no history.
Corot used paint just as if no one had ever painted before, and
Whitman wrote as if he were the first man who had ever expressed
himself in verse--precedent stood for naught. Each had all the time
there was; they were never in a hurry; they loafed and invited their
souls; they loved all women so well that they never could make
choice of one; both were ridiculed and hooted and misunderstood;
recognition came to neither until they were about to depart; and yet
in spite of the continual rejection of their work, and the stupidity
that would not see, and the ribaldry of those who could not
comprehend, they continued serenely on their way, unruffled, kind--
making no apologies nor explanations--unresentful, with malice
toward none, and charity for all.
The world is still divided as to whether Walt Whitman was simply a
coarse and careless writer, without either skill, style or insight;
or one with such a subtle, spiritual vision, such a penetration into
the heart of things, that few comparatively can follow him.
During forty years of Corot's career the critics said, when they
deigned to mention Corot at all, "There are two worlds, God's World
and Corot's World." He was regarded as a harmless lunatic, who saw
things differently from others, and so they indulged him, and at the
Salon hung his pictures in the "Catacombs" with many a sly joke at
his expense. The expression, "Corot Nature," is with us yet.
But now the idea has gradually gained ground that Camille Corot
looked for beauty and found it--that he painted what he saw, and
that he saw things that the average man, through incapacity, never
sees at all. Science has taught us that there are sounds so subtle
that our coarse senses can not recognize them, and there are
thousands of tints, combinations and variations in color that the
unaided or uneducated eye can not detect.
If Corot saw more than we, why denounce Corot? And so Corot has
gradually and very slowly come into recognition as one who had power
plus--it was we who were weak, we who were faulty, not he. The
stones that were cast at him have been gathered up and cemented into
a monument to his memory.
The father of Camille Corot was a peasant who drifted over to Paris
to make his fortune. He was active, acute, intelligent and
economical--and when a Frenchman is economical his economy is of a
kind that makes the Connecticut brand look like extravagance.
This young man became a clerk in a drygoods-store that had a
millinery attachment, as most French drygoods-stores have. He was
precise, accurate, had a fair education, and always wore a white
cravat. In the millinery department of this store was employed,
among many others, a Swiss girl who had come up to Paris on her own
account to get a knowledge of millinery and dressmaking. When this
was gained she intended to go back to Switzerland, the land of
liberty and Swiss cheese, and there live out her life in her native
village making finery for the villagers for a consideration.
She did not go back to Switzerland, because she very shortly married
the precise young drygoods-clerk who wore the white cravat.
The Swiss are the most competent people on this globe of ours, which
is round like an orange and slightly flattened at the poles. There
is less illiteracy, less pauperism, less drunkenness, more general
intelligence, more freedom in Switzerland than in any other country
on earth. This has been so for two hundred years: and the reason,
some say, is that she has no standing army and no navy. She is
surrounded by big nations that are so jealous of her that they will
not allow each other to molest her. She is not big enough to fight
them. Being too little to declare war, she makes a virtue of
necessity and so just minds her own business. That is the only way
an individual can succeed--mind your own business--and it is also
the best policy with a nation.
The way the Swiss think things out with their heads and materialize
them with their hands is very wonderful. In all the Swiss schools
the pupils draw, sew, carve wood and make things. Pestalozzi was
Swiss, and Froebel was more Swiss than German. Manual Training and
the Kindergarten are Swiss ideas. All of our progress in the line of
pedagogy that the years have brought has consisted in carrying
Kindergarten Ideas into the Little Red Schoolhouse, and elsewhere.
The world is debtor to the Swiss--the carmine of their ideas has
tinted the whole thought-fabric of civilization.
The Swiss know how.
Skilled workmen from Switzerland are in demand everywhere.
That Swiss girl in the Paris shop was a skilled needlewoman, and the
good taste and talent she showed in her work was a joy to her
employers. There are hints that they tried to discourage her
marriage with the clerk in the white cravat. What a loss to the art
world if they had succeeded! But love is stronger than business
ambition, and so the milliner married the young clerk, and they had
a very modest little nest to which they flew when the day's work was
done.
In a year a domestic emergency made it advisable for the young woman
to stay at home, but she kept right along with her sewing. Some of
the customers hunted her up and wanted her to do work for them.
When the stress of the little exigency was safely passed, the young
mother found she could make more by working at home for special
customers. A girl was hired to help her, then two--three.
The rooms downstairs were secured, and a show-window put in. This
was at the corner of the Rue du Bac and the Pont Royal, within sight
of the Louvre. It is an easy place to find, and you had better take
a look at the site the next time you are in Paris--it is sacred
soil.
Corot has told us much about his mother--a Frenchman is apt to
regard his father simply as a necessary though often inconvenient
appendage, possibly absorbing the idea from the maternal side of the
house--but his mother is his solace, comforter and friend. The
mother of Corot was intelligent, industrious, tactful; sturdy in
body and strong in mind.
In due course of time she built up a paying business, bought the
house in which they lived, and laid by a goodly dot for her son and
two daughters. And all the time Corot pere wore the white cravat, a
precise smile for customers and an austere look for his family. He
held his old position as floorwalker and gave respectability to his
good-wife's Millinery and Dressmaking Establishment.
The father's ambition for Camille was that he should become a model
floorwalker, treading in the father's footsteps; and so, while yet a
child, the boy was put to work in a drygoods-store, with the idea of
discipline strong in mind.
And for this discipline, in after-years Corot was grateful. It gave
him the habit of putting things away, keeping accurate accounts,
systematizing his work; and throughout his forty years or more of
artistic life, it was his proud boast that he reached his studio
every morning at three minutes before eight.
Young Corot's mother had quite a little skill as a draftsman. In her
business she drew designs for patterns, and if the prospective
customer lacked imagination, she could draw a sketch of the garment
as it would look when completed.
Savage tribes make pictures long before they acquire an alphabet; so
do all children make pictures before they learn to read. The
evolution of the child mirrors the evolution of the race. Camille
made pictures just as all boys do, and his mother encouraged him in
this, and supplied him copies.
When he was set to work in the drygoods-store he made sketches under
the counter and often ornamented bundles with needless hieroglyphics.
But these things did not necessarily mean that he was to be a great
artist--thousands of drygoods-clerks have sketched and been drygoods-
clerks to the end of their days. But good drygoods-clerks should not
sketch too much or too well, else they will not rise in their career
and some day have charge of a Department.
Camille Corot did not get along at haberdashery--his heart was not
in it. He was not quite so bad as a certain budding, artistic genius
I once knew, who clerked in a grocery-store, and when a woman came
in and ordered a dozen eggs and a half-bushel of potatoes, the
genius counted out a dozen potatoes, and sent the customer a half-
bushel of eggs.
Then there was that absent-minded young drug-clerk who, when a
stranger entered and inquired for the proprietor, answered, "He's
out just at present, but we have something that is just as good."
Corot hadn't the ability to make folks think they needed something
they did not want--they only got what they wanted, after much
careful diplomacy and insistence. These things were a great cross to
Corot pere, and the dulness of the boy made the good father grow old
before his time--so the father alleged. Were the woes of parents
written in books, the world would not be big enough to contain the
books. Camille Corot was a failure--he was big, fat, lazy, and
tantalizingly good-natured. He haunted the Louvre, and stood open-
mouthed before the pictures of Claude Lorraine until the attendants
requested him to move on. His mother knew something of art, and they
used to discuss all the new pictures together. The father protested:
he declared that the mother was encouraging the boy in his
vacillation and dreaminess.
Camille lost his position. His father got him another place, and
after a month they laid him off for two weeks, and then sent him a
note not to come back. He hung around home, played the violin, and
sang for his mother's sewing-girls while they worked. The girls all
loved him--if the mother went out and left him in charge of the
shop, he gave all hands a play-spell until it was time for Madame to
return. His good nature was invincible. He laughed at the bonnets in
the windows, slyly sketched the customers who came to try on the
frivolities, and even made irrelevant remarks to his mother about
the petite fortune she was deriving from catering to dead-serious
nabobs who discussed flounces, bows, stays, and beribboned gewgaws
as though they were Eternal Verities.
"Mamma is a sculptor who improves upon Nature," one day Camille said
to the girls." If a woman hasn't a good form Madame Corot can supply
her such amorous proportions that lovers will straightway fall at
her feet." But such jocular remarks were never made to the father--
in his presence Camille was subdued and suspiciously respectful. The
father had "disciplined" him--but had done nothing else.
Camille had a companion in Achille Michallon, son of the sculptor,
Claude Michallon. Young Michallon modeled in clay and painted fairly
well, and it was he who, no doubt, fired the mind of young Corot to
follow an artistic career, to which Corot the elder was very much
opposed.
So matters drifted and Camille Corot, aged twenty-six, was a flat
failure, just as he had been for ten years. He hadn't self-reliance
enough to push out for himself, nor enough will to swing his parents
into his way of thinking. He was as submissive as a child; and would
not and could not do anything until he had gotten permission--thus
much for discipline.
Finally, in desperation, his father said: "Camille, you are of an
age when you should be at the head of a business; but since you
refuse to avail yourself of your opportunities and become a
merchant, why, then, I'll settle upon you the sum of three hundred
dollars a year for life and you can follow your own inclinations.
But depend upon it, you shall have no more than I have named. I am
done--now go and do what you want."
The words are authentic, being taken down from Corot's own lips; and
they sound singularly like that remark made to Alfred Tennyson by
his grandfather, "Here is a guinea for your poem, and depend upon
it, this is the first and last money you will ever receive for
poetry."
Camille was so delighted to hear his father's decision that he burst
into tears and embraced the austere and stern-faced parent in the
white cravat.
Straightway he would begin his artistic career, and having so
announced his intention to the sewing-girls in an impromptu operatic
aria, he took easel and paints and went down on the towpath to paint
his first outdoor picture.
Soon the girls came trooping after, in order to see Monsieur Camille
at his work. One girl, Mademoiselle Rose, stayed longer than the
rest. Corot told of the incident in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight--a
lapse of thirty years--and added: "I have not married--Mademoiselle
Rose has not married--she is alive yet, and only last week was here
to see me. Ah! what changes have taken place--I have that first
picture I painted yet--it is the same picture and still shows the
hour and the season, but Mademoiselle Rose and I, where are we?"
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