A Hint for Manchester and Glasgow

The Speaker, 6 August 1892, pages 166-168, 1,930 words

I said last week that the "Bon Bock" had been hung next to a Hals in the exhibition of Les cent chefs d'oeuvre. Without seeing it, I know that the Hals is nobler, grander; I know, supposing the Hals to be a good one, that its flight is that of an eagle as compared with the flight of a hawk. The comparison is exaggerated; but, then, so are all comparisons. I also know that Hals does not tell us more about his old woman than Manet tells us about the man who sits so gravely by his glass of foaming ale, so clearly absorbed by it, so oblivious to all other joys but those that it brings him. Hals never placed anyone more clearly in his favourite hour of the day, the well-desired hour, looked forward to, perhaps, since the beginning of the afternoon. In this marvellous portrait we read the age, the rank, the habits, the limitations, physical and mental, of the broad-faced man who sits so stolidly, his fat hand clasping his glass of foaming ale. Nothing has been omitted. We look at the picture, and the man and his environment becomes part of our perception of life. We may forget our friends and relations, but that stout middle-aged man of fifty, who works all day in some small business and goes every evening to his café to drink beer, will abide with us for ever. His appearance, and his mode of life which his appearance so admirably expresses, can never become completely dissociated from our understanding of life. For Manet's "Bon Bock" is one of the eternal types, a permanent national conception, as inherent in French life as Polichinelle, Pierrot, Monsieur Prud'homme, or the Baron Hulot. I have not seen the portrait for fifteen or eighteen years, and yet I see it as well as if it were hung on the wall opposite the table on which I am writing this article. I can see that round flat face, a little swollen with beer, the small eyes, the spare beard and moustaches. His feet are not in the picture, but I know perfectly well how much he pays for his boots, and how they fit him. Nor did Hals ever paint a better; I mean that nowhere in Hals will you find finer handling, or a more direct luminous or simple expression of what the eye saw. It has all the qualities I have enumerated, and yet it falls short of Hals. It has not the breadth and scope of the great Dutchman. There is a sense of effort, on sent le souffle, and in Hals one never does. It is more bound together, it does not flow with the mighty and luminous ease of the chefs d'oeuvre at Haarlem.

And yet in many ways this portrait is Manet's highest achievement. It was painted early in the sixties, I should say, about the same period as the Luxembourg picture, when the effects of his Spanish travel were wearing off, and Paris was beginning to command his art. Manet used to say, "When Degas was painting Semiramis I was painting modern Paris." It would have been more true to have said modern Spain. For it was in Spain that Manet found his inspiration. He had not been to Holland when he painted his Spanish pictures. Velasquez clearly inspired them; but there never was in his work any of the noble delicacies of the Spaniard; it was always nearer to the plainer and more – forgive the phrase – yokel-like eloquence of Hals. The art of Hals he seemed to have divined; it seems to have come instinctively to him. There is, it is true, some of Velasquez' delicacy in a Spanish picture in the possession of Mr. Van Wesselingh, 26, Old Bond Street; but this picture is exceptional in his art.

Manet went to Spain after a few months spent in Couture's studio. Like all the great artists of our time, he was self-educated – Whistler, Degas, Courbet, Corot, and Manet wasted little time in other men's studios. Very soon after his return from Spain, by some piece of good luck, Manet was awarded une mention honorable at the Salon for his portrait of a toreador. Why this honour was conferred upon him it is difficult to guess. It must have been the result of some special influence exerted at a special moment, for ever after – down to the year of his death – his pictures were considered as an excrescence on the annual exhibitions at the Salon. Every year – down to the year of his death – the jury, M. Bouguereau et Cie., lamented that they were powerless to reject these ridiculous pictures. Manet had been placed hors concours, and they could do nothing. They could do nothing except stand before his pictures and laugh. Oh, I remember it all very well. We were taught at the Beaux-Arts to consider Manet an absurd person or else an épateur, who, not being able to paint like M. Gérôme, determined to astonish. I remember perfectly well the derision with which those chefs d'oeuvre, ''Yachting at Argenteuil" and "Le Linge," were received. They were in his last style – that bright, clear painting in which violet shadows were beginning to take the place of the conventional brown shadows, and the brush-work, too, was looser and more broken up; in a word, these pictures were the germ from which sprung a dozen different schools, all the impressionism and other isms of modern French art. Before these works, in which the real Manet appeared for the first time, no one had a good word to say. To kill them more effectually, certain merits were even conceded to the "Bon Bock" and the Luxembourg picture; but such a picture as "Le Linge" was simply disgraceful. So if it had not been for his fortunate hors concours and considerable private fortune, Manet would not have succeeded in revolutionising French painting. During his lifetime Manet's pictures were unsaleable. He once sold two thousand pounds' worth of pictures to Durant Ruel, but afterwards little or nothing; and at the time of his death I know that he had spent nearly his entire fortune on his art.

As I have already explained, Whistler, Degas, and the rest, have qualities, apart from the mere quality of the paint, which enabled them after long resistance to conquer the opposition of the public. But there is nothing in Manet's work except good painting; therefore he still lags behind the others in commercial value, although his merit as an artist is no longer contested by anyone. Since his death his pictures have gone up hardly fifty per cent. – that they will go up five hundred per cent. there is not the faintest doubt. And if they have not gone up in value more than fifty per cent. in the last ten years, it is because they very rarely come into the market; they are the possessions of art lovers who will not part with them. Mr. Van Wesselingh will sell you Courbets and Corots galore, but he will not sell you his Spanish Manet. The owner of "Le Linge" is, I hear, willing to sell his picture. I believe it can be had for about seven or eight hundred pounds; in twenty years' time it will be worth double that, and the first object of this article is to tell the administrators of the fine art galleries in Manchester and Glasgow that the chance is at hand to buy a picture that will celebrate the gallery that possesses it. There are two Manets that can be purchased for trifling sums – "Le Linge" and "The Death of Maximilian." Of the two pictures "Le Linge" is what I personally would prefer to buy. It used to hang in his studio, and for three or four years I may say I lived with it. I regard it as the most perfect and the most personal of all Manet's works. The "Bon Bock," as we have seen, at once challenges comparison with Hals. But in "Le Linge" no challenge is sent forth to anyone; it is Manet, all Manet, and nothing but Manet. In this picture he expresses all his love of the gaiety and pleasure of Parisian life. Few have ever loved life so frankly and unaffectedly as Manet, and this bright-faced, simple-minded woman, who stands in a garden crowded with the tallest sunflowers, the great flower-crowns drooping above her, her blue cotton dress rolled up to the elbows, her hands plunged in a small wash-tub in which she is washing some small linen, habit-shirts, pocket-handkerchiefs, collars, expresses all the joy of homely life in the French suburb – a purely pagan joy in the beauty of natural life. Her home is one of good wine, excellent omelettes, soft beds; and the sheets, if they are a little coarse, are spotless, and retain an odour of lavender-sweetened cupboards. Her little child, about four years old, is with his mother in the garden; he has strayed into the foreground of the picture, just in front of the wash-tub, and he holds a great sunflower in his tiny hand. Beside this picture of such bright and happy aspect, the most perfect example of that genre known as la peinture claire, invented by Monet, and so infamously and absurdly practised by subsequent imitators – beside this picture so limpid, so fresh, so unaffected in its handling, a Courbet would seem heavy and dull, a sort of mock old master; a Corot would seem ephemeral and cursive; a Whistler would seem thin; beside this picture of such elegant and noble vision a Stevens would certainly seem odiously common. But if the gaud of the sunflowers and the blueness of the blouses frightens the administrators of both the Manchester and Glasgow galleries, I will ask them – and perhaps this would be the more practical project – to consider the purchase of Manet's first and last historical picture, the death of the unfortunate Maximilian in Mexico. Under a high wall, over which some Mexicans are looking, Maximilian and two friends stand in front of the rifles. The men have just fired, and death is on the unfortunate man's face. On the right a man stands cocking his rifle. Look at the movement of the hand, how well it draws back the hammer. The face is nearly in profile, how intent it is on the mechanism. And is not the drawing of the legs, the boots, the gaiters, the arms lifting the heavy rifle with slow deliberation, more massive, firm, and concise than any modern drawing? How ample and how exempt from all trick, how well it places things, and how

well it says just what the painter wanted to say! This picture, too, used to hang in his studio. But the greater attractiveness of "Le Linge" prevented me from discerning its more solemn beauty. But last May I came across it unexpectedly, and after looking at it for some time the thought that came into my mind was,"No one ever painted better than that, and no one ever will paint better."

The National Gallery is a museum. Besides, in London taste is hardly as advanced as in Glasgow and Manchester; so I very seriously invite the administrators of the art galleries of both these towns to consider the advisability of availing themselves of the present opportunity of purchasing at a low price two masterpieces by the great painter of the century. G.M.