The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

ounger brother of Edward Armitage, the Royal Academician; the popular atelier at that time for the English and American students being that of Couture. Yvon had about thirty pupils

thusiasm in the face of their weekly failures, and patience in following an arid path, were most interesting as a social phenomenon. I have always found more to wonder at in the failures than in the great successes of artist life-seeing the content and even happiness which some of the hopelessly enthusiastic found in their futile and endless labor. We used to go to work at six in the morning, draw two hours and then go to a little laiterie and take our bowl of café au lait and a small loaf of bread, and then draw till noon, whe

, and thus I saw some of the famous actors, Rachel and Frédéric Lema?tre being still vividly impressed on my memory. The afternoons of the week days were given to the galleries and visiting the studios of the painters whose work attracted me, and who admitted visitors. I thus made the acquaintance of Delacroix, Gér?me, Théodore Rousseau, and by a chance met Delaroche and Ingres; but Delacroix most interested me, and I made an application to him to be received as a pupil, which he in a most am

ons of his art. The fact is recognized, that the education of a violinist must begin in the early years, when the will and hand are flexible, and not merely the training, but the occupation, is almost exclusive, for the specialist is made only by a special and relatively exclusive devotion to the particular faculties which are desired to be trained. It is useless to attempt to develop the finest qualities

oachim or a Sarasate. For it is just in the last refinement of touch of a Raphael drawing or the rapid and expressive outline of a Mantegna that we find the analogy between the two arts, in a refinement of touch which is lost on the public, and appreciated only by the practiced student either of music or painting. This final attainment of the hand is only possible to a man who has been trained as a boy to his work. We find it in a water-color drawing of Turner, as in a pencil drawing of Raphael, and in the outli

ison, where, besides Rousseau, I knew J.F. Millet, and a minor, but in his way a very remarkable, painter, Charles Jacque. Rousseau was a most instructive talker on art, beyond the sphere of which he hardly seemed to care to go in his thinking. He had never been out of France, had never seen the Alps, and did not care for mountain scenery, but concentrated all his feelings and labor on what he used to call "sujets

c unity as opposed to the fragmentary manner of treatment of most of their contemporaries; the lyric passion in line and tint; the same originality which often became waywardness in the conception of subject in itself; the same revolt from all precedent; and the same passion for subtle gradation and infinite space, air, and light-and some of Rousseau's skies were the most vaporous I have ever seen. These are the fundamental agreements of the art of the two great masters, an

w. He showed me his studies from nature, mere notes of form and of local color and pastel. It was to me always a puzzle that, even in the educated art circles of Paris, Corot should have found so great a popularity as compared to that of Rousseau. Without in the least disparaging the greatness of Corot's best work, such for instance as the St. Sebastian and some other classical subjects, the names of which I cannot recall, the range of conception and treatment is limited as

sented it to him, not as the model served him. The form is of his own day, the spirit of his art that of all time and of all good art, the elaboration of a type and not merely the reproduction of a picturesque model. It is the custom now to class all peasant subjects, emulating the forms of Millet, as belonging to his art. Nothing is more absurd, for the art of Millet was subjective, not realistic; it was in the feeling of the art of Phidias and the Italian renaissance, not in the modern pose plastique. The peasant in it was merely incidental to his sympathy with ideal life. Millet was himself a peasant, he used to say, and

st, while Rousseau used to talk in the subtlest vein of critical appreciation of his rivals among the landscape painters, the Duprés, Ziem, Troyon, and others, so that I regre

of it till outsiders pointed to them. Troyon told me that for the first ten years of his career he had never sold a picture, but lived by painting for Sèvres; the prosperity of Millet came from the patronage of American collectors, led by the appreciation of a Bostonian painter, William Hunt, and I well remember his famous "Sowers" on the highest line in the Salon, so completely skied that only one who looked for a Mill

g instruction without compensation, while his English colleague of equal distinction gave instruction only at a price impracticable for a poor artist, if indeed he would give it at any price. And even thus, the English drawing-master did not teach art, but facile tricks of the brush. Need one seek any other reason for the curious fact that, with a marked superiority in the occasional highest attainment of rare and original abilities which English art shows, France has become the school of Europe, than that in England the master will teach only on terms which are prohibitive of the formation of a school, while in France, with few exceptions, the most eminent painters regard it as a du

der that if I died without paying the debt, it would neither weigh on him nor on my conscience. I kept up my regular round of economy and work, and one Saturday, when I had paid for my dinner at the Palais Royal restaurant, I found myself with fifty centimes in my pocket, and went on a long walk in the streets of Paris, to meditate on my immediate future. Mrs. Coxe, one of the kindest of friends, would, I knew, gladly lend me what I needed, but I did not allow her to know that I needed, and how to pay for my next day's dinner

ey?" His grandfather, just dead, had left him a legacy, and he had come to Paris, artist-like, to spend it. I took from him, as I would have given him the half of my last dollar, a hundred francs, and on this I lived my normal life until, some weeks later, a friend of my brother arriving from New York with instructions to find me out and provi

valley of the Mohawk is one of the earliest settled and least unpicturesque sections of the Eastern States, with its old Dutch farmhouses and the winding of the beautiful river; but I had explored it on foot and in every direction for miles around my birthplace, and found nothing that seemed to "make up" save trees and water. I spent one summer after my return amongst these familiar scenes, but found the few subjects which repaid study too remote from any habitable centre to repay the labor needed to get at them. I made long

in this case the missile was a huge block of frozen snow-crust, which flattened my nose on my face and broke the upper maxillary inclosing all the front teeth. I modeled the nose up on the spot, for it was as plastic as clay, but the broken bone became carious, and, after enduring for two years the fear of having my h

s absolutely unconventional, and the old stagers did not know what to say of a picture which was all foreground. There was much discussion, and, amongst the younger painters, much subsequent emulation; but it did not find a purchaser at my price-$250. Anything so thoroughly realistic that, as President Durand said, "The stones seemed to be, not painting, but the real thing," puzzled the ordinary picture buyer; and the American Art Union, which was the principal buyer of the day, and the dernier ressort of the young artist, was managed by a committee of ordinary picture buyers. The picture gave rise to a hot discussion when exhibited, the old school of painters denouncing such slavish imitation of nature. As the negative photographic process had just then been introduced in America, I had the picture photographed, and a friend took a print of it to the head of the old school, without any explanation