Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/15

From "La Mist'en Laire," in "Vieilles Chansons."

and change, have taught us to see the big, significant outlines. His fortune from the beginning was to see fundamentals, and experience taught him to depict what he saw with means as simple and choice as his vision. A few lines, a few dots, make a face. There is no smartness of presentation, there is only a meaning, and nothing to obscure the meaning. As in all true art, his technical processes are not obtruded, and will be seen only by those who look for them; while the things represented are patent to all. For such a nature there could be no better subject than the child, for all the elements of human life are in him, and only the elements, out of which later the sifting, expanding, and crushing experience will make the human drama.

Boutet de Monvel, choosing without hesitation art as a career, entered the studio of Cabanel when he was a little over twenty. He joined the army after Sedan, and came out of his war experiences with a sadness which still overpowers him when speaking of nos malheurs. After some work in the less conventional studio of Julian, dissatisfied with its restrictions, he entered, in 1875, the studio of Carolus Duran. Almost immediately the need of money forced him into illustration, the field in which we know him best and in which his originality took such striking form. M. de Monvel himself thus describes the change, in conversation: "At first I painted pictures like the rest of the painters, and perhaps I should be doing that still if I had not been driven to illustration. When I took that up, having only the pen with which to work, I was obliged always to study the difficulties of reproduction, to do something that would come out well when printed. Of course, I found out directly that I could not put in the mass of little things which I had elaborated on my canvases. Gradually, through a process of elimination and selection, I came to put in only what was necessary to give the character. I sought in every little figure, every group, the essence, and worked for that alone."

The secret taught him by the difficulties in reproduction has helped him in all that he has done. There is no unnecessary detail in the old couple on the beach, one of his early pictures, the reproduction of which heads this article, any more than there is in the face of the boy bent upon the table, on page 202, or in the gay pictures of the gracefully grotesque and amusing side of childhood. His books have ranged over rather a wide field. "Old Songs for Little Children" (Vieilles Chansons et Rondes pour les petits enfants) appeared first. In it De Monvel's humor is apparent, bordering now on caricature and now on comedy. "French Songs for Little Frenchmen" (Chansons de France pour les petits Français) followed, with the same gaiety, but with freer expression.

From "La Civilité Puérile et Honnête"