ARTICLE I.-SOME CRITICISMS ON FRENCH LANDSCAPE-PAINTING SUGGESTED BY THE RECENT EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK. FRENCH landscape painting does not differ so essentially from any other that stress should be laid upon it, but as its modern phase is the best that exists, there must be some secret of power in it and much may be learned from its history. The aesthetics of landscape might be described in a word as the product of sentiment awakened by communion with nature. Nature's aspects of the picturesque, the cheerful, and the tender find an answer in the soul of man. Nature is sympathetic with man's mental conditions. The artist is only poet of another sort, who tells us in color as the poet in words, what nature teaches him. This is the more important because nature, or the physical universe, is divine, and we ourselves are part of it, inframed in its subtle organism. The artist becomes interpreter. The power of the landscape-painter is that of one who finds in nature this responsive image of the soul, and interprets to us what the divine-the source of truth and beauty-speaks to us. We are softened, taught, elevated. It is a prophetic art, the most blameless of all, and one which seems to be peculiarly in the line of American art, that has not (perhaps fortunately) much besides nature-sweet and divine nature to draw from; and the landscapists, whether American or French, whose brilliant and charming pictures so delight us, are our true benefactors, bringing the universe into a narrow room. But simple as this philosophy of landscape-art may seem, it would not be well for the student to commence with landscapepainting, which is a difficult kind of art-production, since it combines accurate drawing with picturesque effect-always a hard combination. The lines of landscape are more complex than those used in the drawing of simple objects, and a certain indefiniteness and confusion of lines even are allowable in landscape-painting, so that it is only the skillful artist who can at the same time be truthful to nature and produce the effect which the varied objects of landscape convey to the eye.* It is a mistake to think that this can be easily done, or by the novice; therefore the pupil should first learn to represent with perfect correctness simple objects standing separate one from another, and afterwards he may learn to combine and compose, and by an effort of imagination to bring even a vast natural scene, with its numberless details, into one picture. Yet if landscape drawing and painting directly from nature be too long deferred, the danger is of making academicians and not artists of students, just as in linguistic pursuits grammar may be so exclusively studied, that the literature, which is the end of literary study, and all its rich fruits, may be lost. But it took a long time to find out the true source and method of landscape-painting, which has been called by DeQuincey, the Christian art, and, certainly, it is a modern one. The Greeks did not comprehend its power, or if they studied landscape it is seen more in their literature than in their art -more in Theocritus than in Pheidias. It is only now, that the significance of nature in its correspondence with the soul, both in art and philosophy, has been profoundly recognized, and that nature has been accepted as the teacher of man who *P. Hamerton. is child and pupil of nature. Goethe did much towards this. Man, heretofore, has been teaching nature and not letting nature teach him; and landscape-painting-that one would think brought man nearest to nature of any art—has had to go through many phases, and its evolution has been slow from form to reality, from conventional ideas of nature to nature itself. In France, landscape-painting had its beginnings in the Italian classic school of art, which was also the beginning of French painting in all departments-the source and river, so to speak, of French art flowing through imaginary fields of Greece and Rome, before it reached the soil of France, or real nature. Nicolas Poussin, the first great name, in point of time, of French landscape, and who would be great now and in any period, was nurtured on Roman soil. He was imbued with classic ideas. Poussin became well acquainted with the best antique models then known, and with the older Italian masters, having been himself a pupil of Domenichino; but his was a profound mind drawing from original sources, thoughtful, a philosophic painter of landscape whose light, though cold, fell upon forms partly ideal and partly of nature -a grand serious painter, and whose pictures are widely scattered through all the galleries of Europe. His own portrait in the Louvre always arrested me with something of power in it not altogether divine but demonic, like the face of Michel Angelo; but one could not carelessly go by his great yellowish landscapes, hard in tone, cool poetic scenes where real sunshine does not sleep nor winds blow. His picture, in the Louvre, of "Diogenes," is a noble piece of landscape-painting of dark green color, and many others might be mentioned. But the beautiful painting of "The Arcadian Shepherds" is, perhaps, the most typical of Poussin's pictures. It is of moderate size, a poem in the Homeric vein, sweet and deep, having something infinite in its lines and sentiment. There is, in the foreground of the picture, a tomb surrounded by rocks and autumn-reddened leaves like the spirit of gentle death; and there are a company of Arcadian shepherds, who are saddened in the midst of their happy life by the sudden discovery of a moss-overgrown inscription on the tomb in these words: "Et in Arcadia ego"-"And I too am in Arcadia." It is a picture of the imagination, a preconceived scene that never existed, a poem in color drawn from the realm of the Ideal. But Poussin though one of the earliest is one of the foremost names of the French school because his genius was of a lofty type without an effeminate trait, which is rare among his countrymen. He did not paint merely to please, but to express the thought of a heroic, poetic, and sublime imagination. A little after Poussin, or about contemporary with him, was Claude Lorraine, long held to be chief of landscape-painters and who, too, was more of Italy than France. All know, who have read Ruskin's works, how this eloquent but self-opinionated critic, excited by his discovery of Turner's genius, has seen fit to depreciate the merits of Claude Lorraine as a landscapepainter by the side of his English idol, entirely unnecessarily, for both are great masters. Ruskin says in his Stones of Venice (vol. i., p. 26): "The base school of landscape which gradually usurped the place of historical painting and sunk into prurient pedantry-the Alsatian sublimities of Salvator Rosa, the confectionery idealities of Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar Canaletto"-which is especially unjust of Claude, whose poetic imagination, though it did throw an unreality over landscape, yet touched it with such beauty that he was called the painter of the "Golden Age." The atmosphere of his pictures, their aerial perspectives which carry the eye and mind into the illimitable, the coloring not always serene but sometimes sombre with deeper tints, the tender gradations of light and shade,-of evening and morn and fiery noon,the breadth of composition, and, above all, the exquisite finish that makes even Turner's pictures that hang defiantly by the side of the Claudes in the National Gallery of London look a bit imperfect, muddy, and dull-brown,-these cannot lose their charm under the most advanced criticism; but that they are the highest conceptions of nature in its real beauty, significance, and force, with clouds as they are in the sky floating lightly in space and bearing the thunder in them, of nature varied with dull scenes, with striking contrasts and grim ugliness in which also there is power,-Claude gives us little. He belongs to the past in which there was genius to work with, but a more imperfectly developed theory of art, especially of landscape, to work upon. After the day of classicism where the greatest genius breathed a thin air, it is refreshing to come to a more ample region where real nature-atmosphere, color, space, and life-enter in and we breathe freely again. The landscape-painter, if no other, must come in contact with nature, and so it was in France; and the nature of riverseamed France, especially of the central provinces of the Loire and Touraine, is beautiful though of a gentle beauty, mostly river and meadow scenery; but landscape is a fresh field open to the student of all nations, for if there were nothing more to see, learn, or obtain from nature, nature, I think, would close her book, and this life would hardly be worth living. It is true that in the first periods of French landscape the classic principle of painting, where the scene is drawn not so much from nature as from an idea of nature, indescribably confined and limited it. The landscapes of Claude Lorraine and Poussin, and, in a later day, even of Leopold Robert who posed his magnificent Roman scenes and figures after the antique and whose rhythmic lines were those of sculpture, were scenes that existed in the artist's thought, and composed to fit the heroic life of the ancients, made up of every imaginable element of beauty. They were idyllic vales of Tempe and Gardens of the Hesperides, boundless vistas, sublime mountains that were the seats of gods, or cities and harbors of god-sprung peoples. They were not trees, rivers, hills, pastures, rough rocks, thistles, weeds, mud, fogs; nor were the figures common men and women in fields and villages. All was transformed by the law of the beautiful inexorably applied, like a beautiful and deadly Medusa-head. It was nature according to Claude Gelée, who, fortunately, happened to be a man of genius. This thrust landscape-painting into a knowledge-press. The art was no larger than the idea of the artist. The range of nature's divine plan and everlasting variety was diminished to the knowledge of an infant. With smaller painters the coloring too suffered; it was artificial, hard, and dry, as is the case of some recent classic painters |