Confidence and Conscience

in Two Centuries of Art

‘Corot,’ someone was saying, ‘the méconnu master who is respected only by good painters’. It was the kind of remark that leaves a trail of irritating questions. If there is one master who is understood, isn’t it Corot? He is respected, and doesn’t that tell the whole story? None of these supposed good painters is in any doubt that Corot is dead. What use is art to us if it is not in some disturbing sense alive? If there is one century we understand, surely it is the nineteenth century. The point about Corot the plein-airiste, not the picture-maker who took over when the outdoor painting season was over is that he unfolded in miniature the characteristic qualities of nineteenth-century painting. That in itself is enough to account for our attitude. Certainly Corot’s virtues were admirable and basic ones. The admission does not alter our view; it merely adds to it that tinge of guilt which is the common, hidden colour of what begins to bore us. Our fathers tired of hearing Corot called ‘Papa’.

It is like praising bread and butter. The simple and consistent standpoint in the face of nature, which Corot took up from the beginning, was the basic, original nourishment of modern painting. It supported all the great painting of the nineteenth century and it began with him, ‘Le beau dans l’art,’ he said, ‘c’est la verité baignée dans l’impression que nous avons reçue à l’aspect de la nature’. The translation that would avoid banality escapes one. It is the kind of maxim that comes to mean more than it said. Each word, ‘truth’, ‘nature’, ‘impression’ (even the sense of ‘immersion’), carries accumulated meanings that are the stuff of nineteenth-century painting, ‘The aspect of nature’, as it presented itself to Corot the sufficient source and impetus of painting is already akin to the ‘nature’ or, if you prefer it, the ‘spectacle that the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads before our eyes’, which inspired Cézanne.

Corot’s standpoint is evident from the moment he set foot in Italy in 1825, perhaps earlier. There are a few isolated precedents in neoClassicism and a sporadic tradition of oil-sketching goes back more than a century to François Desportes. Only one predecessor shared Corot’s consistent attachment to painting outdoors: Constable. Constable’s implicit dependence on nature and the freshness and force of the resulting style in the Hay Wain were more striking when it was shown at the Salon (at just the right moment) in 1824 than it is now. Possibly some of the smaller pictures which Constable sent to Paris were sketches from nature. The example certainly helped Corot; he recognised ‘a man who felt as I did’. Constable, he said, came to his aid.

But the comparison is not much help to us. Next to Constable’s sketches, those of Corot only reveal how distinct and separate from his sources and from the restless spirit of the time Corot’s essential attitude was. The quality of his plein-airisme as it developed from 1825 onward is quite different. It is possibly significant that, having had a glimpse of the luscious freshness which could be extracted from the Northern landscape, he made off in the opposite direction. His view of landscape is unrelated to Constable’s until at least ten years later. Neither freshness of colour, in itself, nor force of handling ever concerned him. His sketches, though as dependent on nature, are by contrast reticent, tonal, self-contained, with a delicate pictorial unity about them and a mysterious detachment.

Corot’s motto, he often said, was ‘Conscience et confiance’. No banner ever carried so innocent and humdrum a device. The conscience apparently concerned simply the conscientious rendering of the subject. His notebooks are full of memoranda about it: ‘The important thing is to do only what one sees and how one sees.’ The confidence required was confidence in oneself. No one speaks of confidence as often as Corot to whom quality, whatever it is, comes easily. History is full of timid men who took courage behind an easel, but Corot’s position is a special one. To understand him we should need to know a good deal about what confiance, and the lack of it, signified to the whimsical bachelor and (into his fifties) obedient son.

Confiance certainly included a confidence in whatever it was that prompted him to begin a picture. ‘While seeking conscientious imitation, I do not lose for one instant the emotion that seized me. Reality is a part of art; sentiment completes it.’ These dicta of Corot’s now seem commonplace. Is it possible that his conscience was really as comfortable as it appears? It was certainly comparatively comfortable in his old age, from which many of the apparently sedative maxims date. The earlier notes are sharper and more practical, and the assurance is more hardly won. He won it by applying himself to tonal painting from nature. ‘Do things look black? Conscientiously one will put everything into relationship, and with time one will draw nearer to nature day by day. The important thing is to do only what one sees.’

Can we recapture the original quality of Corot’s composure and restraint? His faith in the emotion that seized him and his injunctions not to lose ‘the first impression that moved one’ are certainly of their time; but by contrast Constable’s assertion that painting was for him another word for feeling is outrageously Romantic. We can still feel its compulsion, as if detecting a sympathetic inward unbalance that required the most extroverted objectivity to keep it in equilibrium. With Corot we have no hint of what it was that sometimes looked so black; we only know the situation could be retrieved by an unremitting effort to put everything that was seen luminously and precisely en rapport.

We can recognise in Corot’s composure a mood akin to obedience. It is an obedience both to nature and to art. His slightest studies are composed composed in every sense: with all the closeness and restraint of their visual transcription they are also designed in the classic French tradition. Constable’s tribute to the same tradition radiance and movement of an ideal southern milieu. Sometimes the theme was more mobile and flowing than anything he had painted for many years; the movement was like a dance. In the greatest of the papiers découpés, the soaring Souvenir of Oceania (1953), and the radiating spiral of The Snail (1953), the rhythm resides simply in the action and interaction of colours. The movement springs out of a progression that begins, characteristically, with emerald. It expands in every direction, moving in great lazy leaps out to the extremes of violet and orange-red. An ideal world was completely realised and the achievement, more than any other, discovered a new reality for painting.

Late in his life, a writer tried to persuade him to pronounce against the non-figurative tendencies of young painters. He answered:

It is always when I am in direct accord with my sensations of nature that I feel I have the right to depart from them, the better to render what I feel. Experience has always proved me right… For me nature is always present. As in love, all depends on what the artist unconsciously projects on everything he sees. It is the quality of that projection, rather than the presence of a living person, that gives an artist’s vision its life.51

Henri Matisse: Harmony in Red

In the manner of French masters a hundred years before him, Matisse at intervals punctuated his work with a demonstration picture, which was in the nature of a painted manifesto. With Matisse such pictures were not only large but largely conceived, and in a style unimaginable before, aimed both at extending current expectations from art and at realising a new potential in himself. None of these exploratory pictures was so unpredictable and ultimately so mind-stretching as that which we know as Harmony in Red.

As usual with Matisse, the story, which was to have this radiant and simple outcome, was more complicated than it first appears. Early in 1908 Matisse’s new patron, Sergei Shchukin, evidently mentioned the possibility of a decoration for the dining room of the Trubetskoy Palace in Moscow, where he lived. Whether or not a picture was explicitly commissioned, the canvas that eventually arrived fitted neatly between the wainscot and the cornice in the big rococo room.

At the same time, in the early spring of 1908, Matisse was moving from his apartment on the Quai St Michel and his studio in a former convent on the rue de Sèvres. He installed his family, his studio, and his school at the Hôtel Biron on the rue de Varenne, also lately a convent, into which Rodin moved at about the same time. (The rooms that Matisse occupied no longer exist and the mansion is now the Musée Rodin.)

The move from the quai, where Matisse had spent the whole of his adult life, is likely to have been disturbing. As usual to make himself at home he had recourse to painting his surroundings. So more than one factor contributed to his decision in the spring of 1908 to paint a domestic theme. The precise subject had deeper overtones than appear. Matisse’s first success, La Desserte, which he had painted 11 years before on the suggestion of his master, Gustave Moreau, had been a dining room in which a servant was clearing the table. Moreover, that picture, which was a considerable though fairly conventional effort, had gained an impetus from his chief picture of the summer before, which showed a Breton maid in a tall lace cap serving a meal at his lodgings in Brittany. Both these pictures had been sparkling perspectives of light and space across which obliquely placed tables led the eye into the shadowed depth, an arrangement essential to his earliest style.

Of course much had happened in the ensuing ten years. Colour had replaced the values of light and dark. Frontal planes had supplanted diagonal recessions, and the scattered accents of the intervening years had finally vanished in the simplicity of pictorial areas. Yet the cumulative development of an artist is never without its paradoxes. Though the new picture was the recognisable successor to the old ones, it was necessarily quite unlike them. The picture that Matisse began was also very different from the one we have. The design was already the now-familiar schematic dining room, but it was freely brushed in transparent blue-green; the colour is still visible at some points around the edges of this canvas. Though it is hard to be sure, the indications are that the inspired innovation of the design, the pattern (borrowed from a printed fabric), which extends up to cover the wall as well as the table, already constituted the continuum that we know. So the inspiration, which associated the flat unity of painting with a fantastic continuity of pattern, had already dawned, heralded by an all-embracing blue-greenness like verdure tapestry.

This tentative beginning was then swept aside and the Harmony in Green vanished under a Harmony in Blue. This was based on the actual colour of his turquoise cloth, patterned with flower baskets and scrolls in dark blue. The effect of a spreading indoor garden, the imagined continuation of the view outside, was replaced by a scheme that was evidently invented, extrapolated from the printed design of fabric. The all-over unity was now based on the omnipresence of an arbitrary colour. In this state the picture was seen by Matisse’s visitors in the late spring of 1908. It was framed and photographed by Druet, the dealer who had begun as a photographer. At this stage the whiteness of the trees in the garden was stippled sparingly around their contours and the garden and the pattern indoors (as well as the head of its denizen, the servant) were drawn in similar overlapping arcs, with a basically linear consistency.

The stippled whiteness of the tree at this stage had some appearance of blossoming fruit trees in the former convent garden; Matisse, when the photograph was put to him, ‘did not deny this’. The solid whiteness of the trees that now appear in Harmony in Red was said to have been painted, ‘as a spontaneous gesture after a late snowfall in the early spring’. Unfortunately, and I quote from a classic footnote in Alfred Barr’s book on the artist, Matisse and his wife confirmed the snow story but were: not entirely clear whether this occurred in the spring of 1909… or 1908, in which case Matisse would have carried it in his memory… That the Blue Harmony was completed in the first half of 1908 is confirmed by Max Weber in a very circumstantial anecdote of his being present in Matisse’s studio late in the spring of 1908 when Odilon Redon made a call. Weber, deeply impressed by this meeting of two masters, vividly remembers how Matisse deferentially turned the Harmony in Blue around so that the older painter could give his opinion which Weber, who had discreetly withdrawn to the other end of the studio, could not hear.

Both Matisse and Mme Matisse denied emphatically that Redon ever came to the studio. ‘Weber left Paris about 1 August 1908, but returned in time to see the Harmony in Blue, he feels absolutely sure, for a second time at the Salon d’Automne. In any case Harmony in Blue was certainly seen well before the 1 October opening of the Salon