Kenyon Cox - Artist and Public
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Kenyon Cox >> Artist and Public
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For Millet is neither a revolutionary nor a sentimentalist, nor even a
romanticist; he is essentially a classicist of the classicists, a
conservative of the conservatives, the one modern exemplar of the grand
style. It is because his art is so old that it was "too new" for even
Corot to understand it; because he harked back beyond the
pseudoclassicism of his time to the great art of the past, and was
classic as Phidias and Giotto and Michelangelo were classic, that he
seemed strange to his contemporaries. In everything he was conservative.
He hated change; he wanted things to remain as they had always been. He
did not especially pity the hard lot of the peasant; he considered it
the natural and inevitable lot of man who "eats bread in the sweat of
his brow." He wanted the people he painted "to look as if they belonged
to their place--as if it would be impossible for them ever to think of
being anything else but what they are." In the herdsman and the
shepherd, the sower and the reaper, he saw the immemorial types of
humanity whose labors have endured since the world began and were
essentially what they now are when Virgil wrote his "Georgics" and when
Jacob kept the flocks of Laban. This is the note of all his work. It is
the permanent, the essential, the eternally significant that he paints.
The apparent localization of his subjects in time and place is an
illusion. He is not concerned with the nineteenth century or with
Barbizon but with mankind. At the very moment when the English
Pre-raphaelites were trying to found a great art on the exhaustive
imitation of natural detail, he eliminated detail as much as possible.
At the very beginning of our modern preoccupation with the direct
representation of facts, he abandoned study from the model almost
entirely and could say that he "had never painted from nature." His
subjects would have struck the amiable Sir Joshua as trivial, yet no one
has ever more completely followed that writer's precepts. His confession
of faith is in the words, "One must be able to make use of the trivial
for the expression of the sublime"; and this painter of "rustic genre"
is the world's greatest master of the sublime after Michelangelo.
[Illustration: Plate 4.--Millet. "The Spaders."]
The comparison with Michelangelo is inevitable and has been made again
and again by those who have felt the elemental grandeur of Millet's
work. As a recent writer has remarked: "An art highly intellectualized,
so as to convey a great idea with the lucidity of language, must needs
be controlled by genius akin to that which inspired the ceiling
paintings of the Sistine Chapel."[A] This was written of the Trajanic
sculptors, whose works both Michelangelo and Millet studied and admired,
and indeed it is to this old Roman art, or to the still older art of
Greece, that one must go for the truest parallel of Millet's temper and
his manner of working. He was less impatient, less romantic and
emotional than Michelangelo; he was graver, quieter, more serene; and if
he had little of the Greek sensuousness and the Greek love of physical
beauty, he had much of the antique clarity and simplicity. To express
his idea clearly, logically, and forcibly; to make a work of art that
should be "all of a piece" and in which "things should be where they
are for a purpose"; to admit nothing for display, for ornament, even for
beauty, that did not necessarily and inevitably grow out of his central
theme, and to suppress with an iron rigidity everything useless or
superfluous--this was his constant and conscious effort. It is an ideal
eminently austere and intellectual--an ideal, above all, especially and
eternally classic.
[A] Eugenie Strong, "Roman Sculpture," p. 224.
Take, for an instance, the earliest of his masterpieces, the first great
picture by which he marked his emancipation and his determination
henceforth to produce art as he understood it without regard to the
preferences of others. Many of his preliminary drawings and studies
exist and we can trace, more or less clearly, the process by which the
final result was arrived at. At first we have merely a peasant sowing
grain; an everyday incident, truly enough observed but nothing more.
Gradually the background is cut down, the space restricted, the figure
enlarged until it fills its frame as a metope of the Parthenon is
filled. The gesture is ever enlarged and given more sweep and majesty,
the silhouette is simplified and divested of all accidental or
insignificant detail. A thousand previous observations are compared and
resumed in one general and comprehensive formula, and the typical has
been evolved from the actual. What generations of Greek sculptors did in
their slow perfectioning of certain fixed types he has done almost at
once. We have no longer a man sowing, but "The Sower" (Pl. 2),
justifying the title he instinctively gave it by its air of permanence,
of inevitability, of universality. All the significance which there is
or ever has been for mankind in that primaeval action of sowing the seed
is crystallized into its necessary expression. The thing is done once
for all, and need never--can never be done again. Has any one else
had this power since Michelangelo created his "Adam"?
[Illustration: Plate 5.--Millet. "The Potato Planters."
In the Quincy A. Shaw Collection.]
If even Millet never again attained quite the august impressiveness of
this picture it is because no other action of rustic man has so wide or
so deep a meaning for us as this of sowing. All the meaning there is in
an action he could make us feel with entire certainty, and always he
proceeds by this method of elimination, concentration, simplification,
insistence on the essential and the essential only. One of the most
perfect of all his pictures--more perfect than "The Sower" on account of
qualities of mere painting, of color, and of the rendering of landscape,
of which I shall speak later--is "The Gleaners" (Pl. 3). Here one figure
is not enough to express the continuousness of the movement; the utmost
simplification will not make you feel, as powerfully as he wishes you to
feel it, the crawling progress, the bending together of back and
thighs, the groping of worn fingers in the stubble. The line must be
reinforced and reduplicated, and a second figure, almost a facsimile of
the first, is added. Even this is not enough. He adds a third figure,
not gathering the ear, but about to do so, standing, but stooped forward
and bounded by one great, almost uninterrupted curve from the peak of
the cap over her eyes to the heel which half slips out of the sabot, and
the thing is done. The whole day's work is resumed in that one moment.
The task has endured for hours and will endure till sunset, with only an
occasional break while the back is half-straightened--there is not time
to straighten it wholly. It is the triumph of significant composition,
as "The Sower" is the triumph of significant draughtsmanship.
Or, when an action is more complicated and difficult of suggestion, as
is that, for instance, of digging, he takes it at the beginning and at
the end, as in "The Spaders" (Pl. 4), and makes you understand
everything between. One man is doubled over his spade, his whole weight
brought to bear on the pressing foot which drives the blade into the
ground. The other, with arms outstretched, gives the twisting motion
which lets the loosened earth fall where it is to lie. Each of these
positions is so thoroughly understood and so definitely expressed that
all the other positions of the action are implied in them. You feel the
recurrent rhythm of the movement and could almost count the falling of
the clods.
So far did Millet push the elimination of non-essentials that his heads
have often scarcely any features, his hands, one might say, are without
fingers, and his draperies are so simplified as to suggest the witty
remark that his peasants are too poor to afford any folds in their
garments. The setting of the great, bony planes of jaw and cheek and
temple, the bulk and solidity of the skull, and the direction of the
face--these were, often enough, all he wanted of a head. Look at the
hand of the woman in "The Potato Planters" (Pl. 5), or at those of the
man in the same picture, and see how little detail there is in them, yet
how surely the master's sovereign draughtsmanship has made you feel
their actual structure and function! And how inevitably the garments,
with their few and simple folds, mould and accent the figures beneath
them, "becoming, as it were, a part of the body and expressing, even
more than the nude, the larger and simpler forms of nature"! How
explicitly the action of the bodies is registered, how perfectly the
amount of effort apparent is proportioned to the end to be attained! One
can feel, to an ounce, it seems, the strain upon the muscles implied by
that hoe-full of earth. Or look at the easier attitude of "The
Grafter" (Pl. 6), engaged upon his gentler task, and at the monumental
silhouette of the wife, standing there, babe in arms, a type of eternal
motherhood and of the fruitfulness to come.
[Illustration: Plate 6.--Millet. "The Grafter."
In the collection of William Rockefeller.]
Oftener than anything, perhaps, it was the sense of weight that
interested Millet. It is the adjustment of her body to the weight of the
child she carries that gives her statuesque pose to the wife of the
grafter. It is the drag of the buckets upon the arms that gives her
whole character to the magnificent "Woman Carrying Water," in the
Vanderbilt collection. It is the erect carriage, the cautious, rhythmic
walk, keeping step together, forced upon them by the sense of weight,
which gives that gravity and solemnity to the bearers of "The New-Born
Calf" (Pl. 7), which was ridiculed by Millet's critics as more befitting
the bearers of the bull Apis or the Holy Sacrament. The artist himself
was explicit in this instance as in that of the "Woman Carrying Water."
"The expression of two men carrying a load on a litter," he says,
"naturally depends on the weight which rests upon their arms. Thus, if
the weight is equal, their expression will be the same, whether they
bear the Ark of the Covenant or a calf, an ingot of gold or a stone."
Find that expression, whether in face or figure, render it clearly,
"with largeness and simplicity," and you have a great, a grave, a
classic work of art. "We are never so truly Greek," he said, "as when we
are simply painting our own impressions." Certainly his own way of
painting his impressions was more Greek than anything else in the whole
range of modern art.
In the epic grandeur of such pictures as these there is something akin
to sadness, though assuredly Millet did not mean them to be sad. Did he
not say of the "Woman Carrying Water": "I have avoided, as I always do,
with a sort of horror, everything that might verge on the sentimental"?
He wished her to seem "to do her work simply and cheerfully ... as a
part of her daily task and the habit of her life." And he was not always
in the austere and epical mood. He could be idyllic as well, and if he
could not see "the joyous side" of life or nature he could feel and make
us feel the charm of tranquillity. Indeed, this remark of his about the
joyous side of things was made in the dark, early days when life was
hardest for him. He broadened in his view as he grew older and
conditions became more tolerable, and he has painted a whole series of
little pictures of family life and of childhood that, in their smiling
seriousness, are endlessly delightful. The same science, the same
thoughtfulness, the same concentration and intellectual grasp that
defined for us the superb gesture of "The Sower" have gone to the
depiction of the adorable uncertainty, between walking and falling, of
those "First Steps" (Pl. 8) from the mother's lap to the outstretched
arms of the father; and the result, in this case as in the other, is a
thing perfectly and permanently expressed. Whatever Millet has done is
done. He has "characterized the type," as it was his dream to do, and
written "hands off" across his subject for all future adventurers.
Finally, he rises to an almost lyric fervor in that picture of the
little "Goose Girl" bathing, which is one of the most purely and
exquisitely beautiful things in art. In this smooth, young body
quivering with anticipation of the coolness of the water; in these
rounded, slender limbs with their long, firm, supple lines; in the
unconscious, half-awkward grace of attitude and in the glory of
sunlight splashing through the shadow of the willows, there is a whole
song of joy and youth and the goodness of the world. The picture exists
in a drawing or pastel, which has been photographed by Braun, as well as
in the oil-painting, and Millet's habit of returning again and again to
a favorite subject renders it difficult to be certain which is the
earlier of the two; but I imagine this drawing to be a study for the
picture. At first sight the figure in it is more obviously beautiful
than in the other version, and it is only after a time that one begins
to understand the changes that the artist was impelled to make. It is
almost too graceful, too much like an antique nymph. No one could find
any fault with it, but by an almost imperceptible stiffening of the line
here and there, a little greater turn of the foot upon the ankle and of
the hand upon the wrist, the figure in the painting has been given an
accent of rusticity that makes it more human, more natural, and more
appealing. She is no longer a possible Galatea or Arethusa, she is only
a goose girl, and we feel but the more strongly on that account the
eternal poem of the healthy human form.
[Illustration: Plate 7.--Millet. "The New-Born Calf."
In the Art Institute, Chicago.]
The especial study of the nineteenth century was landscape, and Millet
was so far a man of his time that he was a great landscape painter; but
his treatment of landscape was unlike any other, and, like his own
treatment of the figure, in its insistence on essentials, its
elimination of the accidental, its austere and grand simplicity. I have
heard, somewhere, a story of his saying, in answer to praise of his work
or inquiry as to his meaning: "I was trying to express the difference
between the things that lie flat and the things that stand upright."
That is the real motive of one of his masterpieces--one that in some
moods seems the greatest of them all--"The Shepherdess" (Pl. 9), that
is, or used to be, in the Chauchard collection. In this nobly tranquil
work, in which there is no hint of sadness or revolt, are to be found
all his usual inevitableness of composition and perfection of
draughtsmanship--note the effect of repetition in the sheep, "forty
feeding like one"--but the glory of the picture is in the infinite
recession of the plain that lies flat, the exact notation of the
successive positions upon it of the things that stand upright, from the
trees and the hay wain in the extreme distance, almost lost in sky,
through the sheep and the sheep-dog and the shepherdess herself,
knitting so quietly, to the dandelions in the foreground, each with its
"aureole" of light. Of these simple, geometrical relations, and of the
enveloping light and air by which they are expressed, he has made a hymn
of praise.
The background of "The Gleaners," with its baking stubble-field under
the midday sun, its grain stacks and laborers and distant farmstead, all
tremulous in the reflected waves of heat, indistinct and almost
indecipherable yet unmistakable, is nearly as wonderful; and no one has
ever so rendered the solemnity and the mystery of night as has he in the
marvellous "Sheepfold" of the Walters collection. But the greatest of
all his landscapes--one of the greatest landscapes ever painted--is his
"Spring" (Pl. 10), of the Louvre, a pure landscape this time, containing
no figure. In the intense green of the sunlit woods against the black
rain-clouds that are passing away, in the jewel-like brilliancy of the
blossoming apple-trees, and the wet grass in that clear air after the
shower; in the glorious rainbow drawn in dancing light across the sky,
we may see, if anywhere in art, some reflection of the "infinite
splendors" which Millet tells us he saw in nature.
[Illustration: Plate 8.--Millet. "The First Steps."]
In the face of such results as these it seems absurd to discuss the
question whether or not Millet was technically a master of his trade, as
if the methods that produced them could possibly be anything but good
methods for the purpose; but it is still too much the fashion to say and
think that the great artist was a poor painter--to speak slightingly of
his accomplishment in oil-painting and to seem to prefer his drawings
and pastels to his pictures. We have seen that he was a supremely able
technician in his pot-boiling days and that the color and handling of
his early pictures were greatly admired by so brilliant a virtuoso as
Diaz. But this "flowery manner" would not lend itself to the expression
of his new aims and he had to invent another. He did so stumblingly at
first, and the earliest pictures of his grand style have a certain
harshness and ruggedness of surface and heaviness of color which his
critics could not forgive any more than the Impressionists, who have
outdone that ruggedness, can forgive him his frequent use of a warm
general tone inclining to brownness. His ideal of form and of
composition he possessed complete from the beginning; his mastery of
light and color and the handling of materials was slower of acquirement;
but he did acquire it, and in the end he is as absolute a master of
painting as of drawing. He did not see nature in blue and violet, as
Monet has taught us to see it, and little felicities and facilities of
rendering, and anything approaching cleverness or the parade of
virtuosity he hated; but he knew just what could be done with thick or
thin painting, with opaque or transparent pigment, and he could make his
few and simple colors say anything he chose. In his mature work there is
a profound knowledge of the means to be employed and a great economy
in their use, and there is no approach to indiscriminate or meaningless
loading. "Things are where they are for a purpose," and if the surface
of a picture is rough in any place it is because just that degree of
roughness was necessary to attain the desired effect. He could make mere
paint express light as few artists have been able to do--"The
Shepherdess" is flooded with it--and he could do this without any
sacrifice of the sense of substance in the things on which the light
falls. If some of his canvases are brown it is because brown seemed to
him the appropriate note to express what he had to say; "The Gleaners"
glows with almost the richness of a Giorgione, and other pictures are
honey-toned or cool and silvery or splendidly brilliant. And in whatever
key he painted, the harmony of his tones and colors is as large, as
simple, and as perfect as the harmony of his lines and masses.
[Illustration: Plate 9.--Millet. "The Shepherdess."
In the Chauchard collection, Louvre.]
But if we cannot admit that Millet's drawings are better than his
paintings, we may be very glad he did them. His great epic of the soil
must have lacked many episodes, perhaps whole books and cantos, if it
had been written only in the slower and more elaborate method. The
comparative slightness and rapidity of execution of his drawings and
pastels enabled him to register many inventions and observations that we
must otherwise have missed, and many of these are of the highest value.
His long training in seizing the essential in anything he saw enabled
him, often, to put more meaning into a single rapid line than another
could put into a day's painful labor, and some of his slightest sketches
are astonishingly and commandingly expressive. Other of his drawings
were worked out and pondered over almost as lovingly as his completest
pictures. But so instinctively and inevitably was he a composer that
everything he touched is a complete whole--his merest sketch or his most
elaborated design is a unit. He has left no fragments. His paintings,
his countless drawings, his few etchings and woodcuts are all of a
piece. About everything there is that air of finality which marks the
work destined to become permanently a classic.
[Illustration: Plate 10.--Millet. "Spring."
In the Louvre.]
Here and there, by one or another writer, most or all of what I have
been trying to say has been said already. It is the more likely to be
true. And if these true things have been said, many other things have
been said also which seem to me not so true, or little to the purpose,
so that the image I have been trying to create must differ, for better
or for worse, from that which another might have made. At least I may
have looked at the truth from a slightly different angle and so have
shown it in a new perspective. And, at any rate, it is well that true
things should be said again from time to time. It can do no harm that
one more person should endeavor to give a reason for his admiration of a
great and true artist and should express his conviction that among the
world's great masters the final place of Jean Francois Millet is not
destined to be the lowest.
III
THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS[B]
[B] Read before the joint meeting of The American Academy of Arts and
Letters and The National Institute of Arts and Letters, December 13, 1912.
In these days all of us, even Academicians, are to some extent believers
in progress. Our golden age is no longer in the past, but in the future.
We know that our early ancestors were a race of wretched cave-dwellers,
and we believe that our still earlier ancestors were possessed of tails
and pointed ears. Having come so far, we are sometimes inclined to
forget that not every step has been an advance and to entertain an
illogical confidence that each future step must carry us still further
forward; having indubitably progressed in many things, we think of
ourselves as progressing in all. And as the pace of progress in science
and in material things has become more and more rapid, we have come to
expect a similar pace in art and letters, to imagine that the art of the
future must be far finer than the art of the present or than that of the
past, and that the art of one decade, or even of one year, must
supersede that of the preceding decade or the preceding year, as the
1913 model in automobiles supersedes the model of 1912. More than ever
before "To have done is to hang quite out of fashion," and the only
title to consideration is to do something quite obviously new or to
proclaim one's intention of doing something newer. The race grows madder
and madder. It was scarce two years since we first heard of "Cubism"
when the "Futurists" were calling the "Cubists" reactionary. Even the
gasping critics, pounding manfully in the rear, have thrown away all
impedimenta of traditional standards in the desperate effort to keep up
with what seems less a march than a stampede.
But while we talk so loudly of progress in the arts we have an uneasy
feeling that we are not really progressing. If our belief in our own art
were as full-blooded as was that of the great creative epochs, we should
scarce be so reverent of the art of the past. It is, perhaps, a sign of
anaemia that we have become founders of museums and conservers of old
buildings. If we are so careful of our heritage, it is surely from some
doubt of our ability to replace it. When art has been vigorously alive
it has been ruthless in its treatment of what has gone before. No
cathedral builder thought of reconciling his own work to that of the
builder who preceded him; he built in his own way, confident of its
superiority. And when the Renaissance builder came, in his turn, he
contemptuously dismissed all mediaeval art as "Gothic" and barbarous, and
was as ready to tear down an old facade as to build a new one. Even the
most cock-sure of our moderns might hesitate to emulate Michelangelo in
his calm destruction of three frescoes by Perugino to make room for his
own "Last Judgment." He, at least, had the full courage of his
convictions, and his opinion of Perugino is of record.
Not all of us would consider even Michelangelo's arrogance entirely
justified, but it is not only the Michelangelos who have had this belief
in themselves. Apparently the confidence of progress has been as great
in times that now seem to us decadent as in times that we think of as
truly progressive. The past, or at least the immediate past, has always
seemed "out of date," and each generation, as it made its entrance on
the stage, has plumed itself upon its superiority to that which was
leaving it. The architect of the most debased baroque grafted his
"improvements" upon the buildings of the high Renaissance with an
assurance not less than that with which David and his contemporaries
banished the whole charming art of the eighteenth century. Van Orley and
Frans Floris were as sure of their advance upon the ancient Flemish
painting of the Van Eycks and of Memling as Rubens himself must have
been of his advance upon them.
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