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"1812" NAPOLEON I IN RUSSIA

INTRODUCTION

The following pages are not offered to the reader as a history of the invasion of Russia by Napoleon. They are but the statement of the basis of observation on which M. Verestchagin has founded his great series of pictures illustrative of the campaign. These pictures are now to be exhibited in this country, and the painter has naturally desired to show us from what point of view he has approached the study of his subject--one of the greatest subjects in the whole range of history--especially for a Russian artist. The point of view is--inevitably in his case--that of the Realist; and this consideration gives unity to the conception of his whole career and endeavour. He has ever painted war as it is, and therefore in its horrors, as one of its effects, though not necessarily as an effect sought in and for itself. He has tried to be "true" in all his representations of the battle-field. His work may thus be said to constitute a powerful plea in support of the Tsar's Rescript to the Nations in favour of peace. My meaning will be best illustrated by a short sketch of M. Verestchagin and his work, as painter, as soldier, and as traveller.

He was born in the province of Novgorod, in 1842, of a well-to-do family of landowners. The son wished to be an artist; the father wished to make him an officer of marines. As the shortest way out of the difficulty, he became both. He passed his work-hours at the naval school, and his play-hours at a school of design, working at each so well that he left the naval school as first scholar, and eventually won a silver medal at the Academy of Fine Arts. He entered the service, but only for a short time, and he was still three years under twenty when he quitted it to devote himself wholly to art.

He was a hard-working student, though he always showed a strong disposition to insist on working in his own way. When G?r?me sent him to the antique, he was half the time slipping away to nature. He played truant from the Athenian marbles to flesh and blood. In the meantime he was true to the instinct--as yet you could hardly call it a principle--of wandering from the beaten track in search of subjects. Every vacation was passed, not at Asni?res or Barbizon, but in the far east of Europe, or even in Persia, among those ragged races not yet set down in artistic black and white. He had been on the borders of a quite fresh field of observation in these journeys; and he was soon to enter it for a full harvest of new impressions. It was in 1867; Russia was sending an army into Central Asia, to punish the marauding Turkomans for the fiftieth time, and General Kauffman, who commanded it, invited the painter to accompany him as an art volunteer. He was not to fight, but simply to look on. It was the very thing; Verestchagin at once took service on these terms with the expedition, and in faithfully following its fortunes, with many an artistic reconnaissance on his own account, he saw Asia to its core.

He returned from a second Asiatic journey to settle at Munich for three years; and here he built his first "open-air studio." "If you are to paint out-door scenes," he says, "your models must sit in the open;" and so he fashioned a movable room on wheels, running on a circular tramway, and open to sun and air on the side nearest the centre of the circle, where the model stood. The artist, in fact, worked in a huge box with one side out, while the thing he saw was in the full glare of day; and by means of a simple mechanical contrivance he made his room follow the shifting light.

After a long rest at Munich, he was impatient for action once more, and in 1873 he set off for British India.

Verestchagin filled one entire exhibition with his Indian studies. They form a definite part of his collection, a section of his life-work. Amazing studies they are. The end of his sojourn coincided with the visit of the Prince of Wales, and he saw India both at its best and at its worst. In one immense canvas he has represented the royal entry into Jeypore, the Prince and his native entertainer on a richly-caparisoned elephant, and a long line of lesser magnates similarly mounted in the rear. A scene of prayer in a mosque is noble in feeling, and it exhibits an amazing mastery of technique. The Temple of Indra, the Caves of Ellora--all the great show-places--are there, with their furniture of priests, deities, monsters, and men-at-arms. He made a prodigious journey, from St. Petersburg by Constantinople to Egypt, Hindostan, the Himalayas, and Thibet.

This incident nearly finished Verestchagin's artistic career. He lay between life and death for weeks, but a devoted Russian nurse brought him round. Of course he went back to work again as soon as he could move, and in one way or other saw and painted nearly all of the campaign, especially Shipka, and the final rush on Constantinople.

De Lonlay gives us a characteristic picture of Verestchagin at this time.

As a war-painter Verestchagin is a great moralist, and he is a great moralist because he is quite sincere. He paints exactly what he sees on the battle-field, and he is far in advance of the French, who are the fathers of this species of composition, in his rendering of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about this bloody sport of kings. There was a whole wide world of difference in spirit between his little military gallery and the big one at Versailles. The earlier Frenchmen give us pretty uniforms, a monarch prancing on his steed in the moment of victory, an elegantly wounded warrior or two in the foreground, obviously in the act of crying, "Vive la France!" a host in picturesque flight, a host in picturesque pursuit, waving banners, and a great curtain of smoke to hide the general scene of butchery, with supplementary puffs for every disgusting detail. Verestchagin's manner, on the contrary, passing like a breeze of wholesome truthfulness, lifts this theatrical vapour, and shows us what is below--men writhing out their lives in every species of agony by shot and bayonet wounds, by the dry rot of fever, by the wet rot of cold and damp; and finding their last glance to heaven intercepted by the crows or the vultures, waiting for a meal. All this is very shocking, but looked at in the right way it is supremely moral.

His work is his biography. He has lived every one of his pictures, and he has often had to study at almost the cost of his life. All that he represents he has seen; all that he relates with his pencil he has lived. These pictures are just so many chapters detached from his history. They are the work of an artist of an exceptional nature; and are worthy of a book written on the critical method of Sainte-Beuve, a book wherein the man would occupy a place at least as considerable as the work itself; for the one and the other are inseparable. He is the first Russian painter who has given his countrymen a true impression of war--something besides those official pictures where victory is displayed and never defeat. Even when he paints victory he never separates it from its sadness, its ruin, its misery, its mourning beyond relief. I seem to have always before my eyes, as in a dream, that pyramid of piled-up skulls which he met with somewhere in his wanderings, and of which he has made one of his most striking pictures. He wrote underneath it, "Dedicated to the conquerors."

Verestchagin had done nothing but draw; painting had frightened him. G?r?me and Bida in vain tried to persuade him to begin. When he returned from his second journey to the frontiers of Persia, among those nomadic tribes with changeless manners, who must have descended from Abraham, he showed his album and note-books to the two painters, and they pressed him all the more. Bida said, "No one draws like you," and he accepted a few sketches, one of which is to be found in his famous Bible.

As a traveller he saw Samarcand when the sight was almost as rare and strange as that from the famous "peak in Darien." "Samarcand," he says, "was occupied by the Russians. Our armies had taken it without assault, after having routed the troops of the Emir. On reaching the summit of the hill I stopped there, dazzled, and, so to speak, awed by astonishment and admiration. Samarcand was there under my eyes, bathed in verdure. Above its gardens and its houses were reared ancient and gigantic mosques, and I who had come from so far was going to enter the city, once so splendid, which was the capital of Tamerlane."

I may now leave the painter to speak for himself in regard to his own guiding principles in art. The theory of them will be found in what he has written on Progress in Art, and on Realism. The practice, in so far as it relates to right methods of historic study for the painter, is, in all that follows relating to the Campaign of Moscow, his latest and his greatest series of works.

RICHARD WHITEING.

Footnote 1:

The cross of St. George, the highest military distinction in Russia, is not given in the usual way on a mere order of the sovereign, but only after a special inquiry into the circumstances of each case by the Council of the Order.

ON PROGRESS IN ART

We artists always learn too little, and if we have recourse to books it is only cursorily, and without a system, as though we held a solid education to be quite unnecessary for the development of our talents. It must be allowed that herein lies one of the principal, if not the chief, reasons why art in its fuller and more complete development is checked, and has not yet succeeded in throwing off its hitherto thankless part of serving only as the pliable and pleasing companion to society, and in taking the lead, not merely in the aesthetic, but essentially also in the more important psychological development of mankind. While in all other regions of intellectual life it is admitted that new ideas arise, and with these the means of realizing and perfecting them, yet, in art, especially in sculpture and painting, and to a degree also in music, the old phrase still asserts itself--"The great masters have done thus, and therefore must we also do the same." In the handling of every subject, an advance in thought may be remarked. Our view of the world is far from being what it was a few centuries ago; our handiwork itself, in its execution, has changed and improved. Under such circumstances one would think that in the region of art--for instance in painting--either a new idea or a more truthful and natural style might be possible. But no! One is always met by the same assertion--that, "Not only in the perfect construction of their pictures, but also in the sublimity of conception, the old masters stand on an unapproachable height, and we can only strive after them."

The culture of the individual, as well as of society itself, has far overstepped its former level. On the one hand science and literature, on the other improved means of communication, have disclosed a new horizon, have presented new problems to artists. These ought also to have stimulated to some new efforts. But, again the same assertion blocks the way--"The old masters have done thus, and therefore...."

In the art of painting, this excessive veneration and imitation show themselves to a certain degree in representations of the nude and in portraits, for both these branches of art reached a high stage of development among the old masters. But, even here, we are struck by the one-sidedness in the execution--the effect is always one and the same: a very bright light on a very dark and sometimes black ground--an effect often startling, but artificially produced, unnatural, and untrue.

Painters' studios were formerly, it is true, small and, owing to the costliness of gas, dimly lighted. But close to these studios there were courtyards, gardens, and fields, with a beautiful background, and an abundance and variety of light, which would have been as effective, and would have made the black tones clearer and less monotonous.

We know that the darkness of the ground in old portraits is only partly attributable to the influence of age, and that in most cases it is intentional. On studying a series of old portraits one can only regret that so much technical ability in representing the body, face, clothes, lace, jewels, etc., should have been harmonized, not with the light, airy shadows of a summer's day as we all sufficiently know and see it, but with a thick artificial black. Undoubtedly the new school of painters will render a service to art by taking men out of the darkness of attics and cellars into the clear light of gardens. It is indisputable that the monotonous early style, which showed everything in the same light of the studio, spares the artist many difficulties and embarrassments; but in art there ought to be even less hesitation than in anything else in the face of technical difficulties.

Turning to historical pictures, we are struck by the more thoroughly intellectual and characteristic handling of the subject at the present time. History is certainly still illustrated more or less by amusing anecdotes, and artists content themselves by depicting that which science has established, instead of contributing the results of their own researches; but even now there is a very marked advance on the usual adulation and the uncritical traditions, legends, and assertions of the old school.

If painters were to study history, not in a fragmentary way from this to that page, if they would understand that the imitation of dramatic exaggeration on canvas has become obsolete, they would begin to arouse the interest of society in the past quite in a different way from that which is possible by means of anecdote, picturesque costumes, and types that are for the most part fables of history. It is a fact, that hitherto the treatment of memorable events by artists has been of a nature to draw a smile from the educated. But by changing the sunny holiday of the historical picture into a more acceptable workday, truth and simplicity would certainly be the gainers.

It seems superfluous to mention the extraordinary advance made at the present day in landscape painting, an advance due to very many causes, but chiefly, of course, to the development of natural science. It is not too much to say that the landscapes of the old masters are mere childish essays, as compared with the works of the leading living artists in this field. And it is really difficult to understand how and in what direction landscape painting can be brought to greater perfection.

In the so-called religious painting, imitation of the old masters is nearly as great as in portraits. But this is fully explained by the gradual disappearance of religious perception, and the consequent preference for an old ideal, rather than the creation of a new one without the strong faith of olden times.

We will not digress too far with our investigations, and only venture to ask whether it occurred to no one at that time to demand so much from the artist? No; they were not asked. But these niceties, are they not required in these days from the artist? Yes, they are.... Then the advance is evident.

In like manner, we cannot suppose that another shortcoming in the artistic conception of such masters could have escaped their acuteness. For instance, in the representations of the Apostles, whose personalities are so clear and convincing in the Gospels, we recognize in their forms, faces, and attitudes--particularly in Titian's pictures--not modest, humble fishermen, but fine Italian models of athletic appearance. This error was evidently acknowledged even then by the artists themselves, with their usual tact and good sense; and Rembrandt went so far as to introduce into his religious subjects Dutch market-figures. But there is still a long stride from this to the true rendering of the types and costumes recognized at the present day as indispensable. Is this not an advance? Certainly it is. We deny that study has ever yet created talent; but, on the other hand, we do not for a moment doubt that it stimulates it.

As regards time and place, the worshippers of the earlier style of painting go to such lengths in their imitation, that they not only work with the same colours and in the same manner as their adored masters, but also aim at lending to their pictures that peculiar tint which time has produced on the canvas. They cover their pictures with some dark shiny colour, in order to give an appearance of age, as if they were painted one, two, or three centuries ago. This tendency is even taught in many modern schools, and individual artists have gained great reputation as colourists merely because they can impart to their productions a resemblance to those of Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, or Velasquez. Let us hope that the new school will go to work with greater deliberation, not only as regards the conception of their subject, but also in colouring; for it is impossible to treat this aright by imitating, with a quantity of varnish, a canvas which has become yellowish or reddish through time. The young school will make it a strict rule to bring every event into harmony with the time, place, and light selected, in order to benefit by all the modern acquisitions of science, in relation to the characteristics, costumes, and every psychological and ethnographical detail.

A scene which takes place in heaven or on earth should positively not be painted within four walls, but in the true light of morning or mid-day, evening or night. The illusion and effect produced by the picture cannot but gain by this, and the language of painting will become more expressive and intelligible.

Perhaps the same might be said, with little variation, of sculpture, and even of music. All the arts are now, more than ever, brothers and sisters, and long ago should have been united in one temple of taste, intellect, and talent.

REALISM

"Realism--realism!" How very often do we hear this term, and yet how seldom does it appear to be applied understandingly.

"What do you take realism to be?" I asked a well-educated lady in Berlin, who had been talking a great deal about realism and the realists in art. The lady did not seem to be ready with an answer, for she could only reply that "A realist is he who represents subjects in a realistic manner."

I hold, though, that the art of representing subjects in a realistic manner does not entitle a person to the name of realist. And, in order to illustrate my meaning, I may present the following example--

When the war of the British with the Zulus came to an end, there could be found no man among the prominent English artists who would take upon himself the task of committing to canvas that epopee enacted between the whites and blacks, and so the English had to have recourse to a very talented French artist. They gave him money, and explained to him that such and such were the uniforms and the arms of the English soldiers, and such and such were the clothes, or what represents clothes, among the Zulus. Then, eye-witnesses to the military encounters told the Frenchman of what the background consisted in each case, probably supplementing their accounts with photographic views. Armed with this information the artist set to work, without having the least personal knowledge of the country he was going to reproduce, nor of the types, the peculiarities, nor the customs of Zululand. With much assurance the artist went on with his task, and turned out several lively pictures in which there are a great many men attacking an enemy--defending itself; a great number of dead and wounded; much blood; much gunpowder-smoke, and all that kind of thing; yet, with all this, there is total lack of the principal thing: there are no British nor Zulus to be found in the pictures. Instead of the former we behold Frenchmen dressed up in British uniforms, and instead of Zulus, the ordinary Parisian negro-models, reproduced in various more or less warlike attitudes.

Well, is that realism? No.

Most artists, besides, do not take sufficient pains to reproduce the true light under which the events they treat have really taken place. Thus, such scenes as are taken up in the just-mentioned pictures--scenes of battles under the intolerably torrid sun of Africa, are being painted by the greyish light of European studios. Of course the sunlight, and the numerous peculiar effects dependent on it, cannot prove successful in such a case, and the effect is lost.

Is that realism, then? Certainly not.

Now, can any one bring the reproach against me that there is no idea, no generalization in my works? Hardly.

Can any one say that I am careless about the types, about the costumes, about the landscape of the scenes represented by me? That I do not study out beforehand the personages, the surroundings figuring in my works? Hardly so.

Can any one say that, with me, any scene, taking place in reality in the broad sunlight, has been painted by studio light--that a scene, taking place under the frosty skies of the North, is reproduced in the warm enclosure of four walls? Hardly so.

Consequently, I can claim to be a representative of realism--such realism as requires the most severe manipulating of all the details of creation, and which not only does not exclude an idea, but implies it.

That I am not alone in such an estimate of my work, is proved by the following lines, from a correspondent to an American paper, sent from Paris at the time of the last exhibition of my paintings in that city--

"These paintings are the work of a Russian, Verestchagin, a painter equal to any of his contemporaries in artistic ability, and beyond any painter who ever lived in the grandeur of his moral aims and the application of his lessons to the consciences of all who take the least pains to understand him....

"I will only say that he who misses seeing these paintings will miss the best opportunity he may ever have of understanding the age in which he lives; for if ever the nineteenth century has had a prophet, it is the Russian painter, Verestchagin."

I repeat it: I cite this last passage expressed in consideration of its character, as an opinion emitted by a specially religious organ, an opinion made all the more significant in view of the attacks to which I had been submitted by people striving to prove themselves greater papists than the Pope.

Realism is not antagonistic to anything that is held dear by the contemporary man--it does not clash with common sense, with science, nor with religion. Can any one have anything but the deepest reverence for the teachings of Christ concerning the Father and Creator of all that exists--for the golden rule of Christian charity?

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