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Author: Henri Barbusse Publisher: FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 54
Book Description
Meissonier : Masterpieces in Colour Series When Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier was born at Lyons in 1815, under the fading light of an Imperial sunset, these were scarcely the ideas that predominated in the national school of French art. Pictorial art, to confine ourselves to that, had, both before and during the First Empire, achieved at most a lumbering and trammelled flight; and the influence of antiquity, so perceptible in the language as well as in the manners and fashions at the close of the Eighteenth Century, served only to confine the inspiration of artists more strictly within the bounds of classic tradition. Roman characters, Roman costumes, Roman virtues,—such was the ideal to which each debutant who did not revolt openly must make surrender! To be sure, the commanding figure of David gave a magnificent prestige to this rather cold and dishearteningly classic programme. But, like all great artists, David was exceptional; and he stands today as the only one who, in an epoch sadly poor in genius, produced a host of living masterpieces, to swell the lists of a school so artificial that it would now be forgotten, save as an echo of his name. It is true that, by way of ransom, he spent much time in painting vast canvases that today hold but a small place in his life work. On the threshold of the Nineteenth Century, in 1799, Eugène Delacroix was born. It was he who brought a new spirit into French painting and, single-handed, wrought a great revolution. Such is not destined to be the rôle of Meissonier! His was neither so tragic a struggle, nor so immense a triumph. Unlike Delacroix, he did not restore the Beautiful nor hand down new forms to glory. He succeeded none the less in inscribing his name in modest yet precise characters—that will long remain legible—upon the marble of the temple. How did the artist get his start? According to the monotonous and mournful formula, “after a hard struggle.” The lives of all beloved and admired artists have this in common with fairy tales: they always begin badly and end happily (unluckily, they sometimes end a long time after the death of the principal hero!). The father of Meissonier was a dealer in colonial products and chemicals, and kept a drug and provision shop in the Rue des Ecouffes. Beneath the low ceiling of this shop and between walls lined with drawers, bearing strange labels, the childhood of Jean-Louis-Ernest was passed. His mother was a fragile woman. We are told further that she was sensitive to music and that she had learned to paint on porcelain and to make miniatures. Are we at liberty to attribute to the tender and brief contact of that mother, who died so young, with the life of her child, the origin of his artistic vocation? It is pleasant at least to fancy so and to try to believe it, even though we are told that parents bequeath to their children, not a vocation—a mysterious gift, of unknown origin—but rather a certain number of necessary aptitudes and qualities, which will enable them to profit by the gift, if perchance it falls to them from Heaven. Yet the fact remains that in the depths of a cupboard, in the house on the Rue des Ecouffes, there lay the paint-box which Mme. Meissonier once used, while taking miniature lessons from the authoritative hands of Mme. Jacottot. As joyously as other children would have appropriated a jar of jam, the boy possessed himself of the magic box, and on that selfsame day entered, with stumbling fingers, upon the laborious mission which was destined to cease only with his life.
Author: Henri Barbusse Publisher: FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 54
Book Description
Meissonier : Masterpieces in Colour Series When Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier was born at Lyons in 1815, under the fading light of an Imperial sunset, these were scarcely the ideas that predominated in the national school of French art. Pictorial art, to confine ourselves to that, had, both before and during the First Empire, achieved at most a lumbering and trammelled flight; and the influence of antiquity, so perceptible in the language as well as in the manners and fashions at the close of the Eighteenth Century, served only to confine the inspiration of artists more strictly within the bounds of classic tradition. Roman characters, Roman costumes, Roman virtues,—such was the ideal to which each debutant who did not revolt openly must make surrender! To be sure, the commanding figure of David gave a magnificent prestige to this rather cold and dishearteningly classic programme. But, like all great artists, David was exceptional; and he stands today as the only one who, in an epoch sadly poor in genius, produced a host of living masterpieces, to swell the lists of a school so artificial that it would now be forgotten, save as an echo of his name. It is true that, by way of ransom, he spent much time in painting vast canvases that today hold but a small place in his life work. On the threshold of the Nineteenth Century, in 1799, Eugène Delacroix was born. It was he who brought a new spirit into French painting and, single-handed, wrought a great revolution. Such is not destined to be the rôle of Meissonier! His was neither so tragic a struggle, nor so immense a triumph. Unlike Delacroix, he did not restore the Beautiful nor hand down new forms to glory. He succeeded none the less in inscribing his name in modest yet precise characters—that will long remain legible—upon the marble of the temple. How did the artist get his start? According to the monotonous and mournful formula, “after a hard struggle.” The lives of all beloved and admired artists have this in common with fairy tales: they always begin badly and end happily (unluckily, they sometimes end a long time after the death of the principal hero!). The father of Meissonier was a dealer in colonial products and chemicals, and kept a drug and provision shop in the Rue des Ecouffes. Beneath the low ceiling of this shop and between walls lined with drawers, bearing strange labels, the childhood of Jean-Louis-Ernest was passed. His mother was a fragile woman. We are told further that she was sensitive to music and that she had learned to paint on porcelain and to make miniatures. Are we at liberty to attribute to the tender and brief contact of that mother, who died so young, with the life of her child, the origin of his artistic vocation? It is pleasant at least to fancy so and to try to believe it, even though we are told that parents bequeath to their children, not a vocation—a mysterious gift, of unknown origin—but rather a certain number of necessary aptitudes and qualities, which will enable them to profit by the gift, if perchance it falls to them from Heaven. Yet the fact remains that in the depths of a cupboard, in the house on the Rue des Ecouffes, there lay the paint-box which Mme. Meissonier once used, while taking miniature lessons from the authoritative hands of Mme. Jacottot. As joyously as other children would have appropriated a jar of jam, the boy possessed himself of the magic box, and on that selfsame day entered, with stumbling fingers, upon the laborious mission which was destined to cease only with his life.
Author: François Crastre Publisher: FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 37
Book Description
Example in this ebook Jean-Jacques Henner was born, on the 15th of March, 1829, in the village of Bernwiller, not far from Belfort, on the confines of Alsace. This origin explains the strongly personal character of his talent. Offspring as he was of a land that once was German,--and that, alas, has once again become so, after having been impregnated for several centuries with the refinement and the good taste of France,--Henner unites in himself the dominant qualities of both races: from Germany he derives his laborious energy, his tenacity, his spirit of research, his poetic dreaminess; to the French imprint he owes the delicacy, the good taste, the grace, the subtlety, the careful weighing of effects, that distinguish all his work. Jean-Jacques Henner was the youngest child of a numerous family. His parents were modest tillers of the soil, who nevertheless had won the general esteem of the neighbourhood. Of little education, but honest and industrious, Henner's father was rewarded for his integrity and blameless life by being appointed to the office of village tax collector. With as little learning as her husband, his mother possessed a dreamy spirit and a very keen intelligence. It was she who first discerned in the thoughtful and rather backward boy the germs of his future talent; it was also she who encouraged and sustained him with her wise affection when the first promise of his future talent was revealed. His vocation manifested itself at an early age. Little Jean-Jacques could barely read when he had already begun to adorn the walls with charcoal figures that "fairly stood on their feet," and proved that the child possessed a precocious power of observation. In some of these sketches it was easy to recognize certain frequent visitors to the house, friends and neighbours; and the good-hearted villagers used to come and admire these attempts. Quite surprised at these proclivities, his father, instead of interfering with the boy's natural bent, did his best to encourage it. Being unable to provide him with a drawing-master,--and for that matter the child was still too young,--he supplied him with models, in the shape of the familiar Epinal coloured prints which little Jean-Jacques tried to reproduce to the best of his ability. It certainly was not through the aid of these naïve and rudimentary essays in colour work that Henner learned the art of drawing, but they at least served to strengthen his desire to learn, and gave him facility in handling his pencil. The father of little Jean-Jacques served him as best he could; it was he who laid the corner-stone of his son's future glory. In that humble household, where each member had his appointed task, from the father down to the frailest child, Jean-Jacques was the only one who took no part in the labour of the fields; he was exempted in order to continue his education and develop his taste for drawing. Even the neighbours, astonished at his precocity, aided him as best they could. One brought paper, another an old picture, another some prints found in an out-of-the-way corner of the house, still another a supply of paints. Thus equipped, the child worked with unflagging zeal, undertook to learn the use of colours, and in order to repay his benefactors, he made portraits of them, which are still preserved in those Alsatian households and which already reveal, in more than one of those likenesses that he always caught so well, the first germs of those qualities of a great portrait painter, such as he was one day destined to become. "You will be a great artist," his father used to say, as he kissed him; for the good man foresaw, almost by divination, the glorious destiny that awaited his son. And addressing his other sons, all of them older than little Jean-Jacques, and all of them destined to pass their days in the hard labour of tilling the soil, he told them: To be continue in this ebook
Author: Henri Barbusse
Author: Henri Barbusse
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Author: British Library
Author: Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Author: François Crastre
Author: State Library of Iowa
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Author: Chicago Public Library
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