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A clever boy artist
There is a young man living
at Lagny, a village no great distance from Paris, since an hour at the most in the train will enable you to
view its sylvan beauties, who may some day attain to great eminence as a painter.
Other young artists who have
been filled, like himself, with a profound love of Nature have won fame. Why
not M. Henri Cortès ? Certainly he has not made a bad start, for in this year's
Salon can be seen the first picture which he has had received at a really
important exhibition, and it must be remenbered he is not yet seventeen years
of age.
A number of celebrated
painters have had work received at important exhibitions when younger than
seventeen. Turner was only fifteen years of age when, in 1790, he had on view
at the Academy a water-colour of Lambeth Palace. But there is not great
difference between fifteen an seventeen - the noteworthy fact to be observed is
that a creditable piece of work has been done before manhood has been reached.
And I think anyone who has seen M. Henri Cortès "Le Labour" will
agree with the French crities in declaring it to be a picture of wich many
older and more experienced artists might well be proud. There is something
about this picture of a ploughman and his horses which reminds one of the
Barbizon School. The same flat, straight horizon is there as in Millet's
pictures painting on the Chailly Plain, and the upper part of the figure of the
man specially reminds us of the work of the painter of the "Angelus".
This is no "studio picture", but a work of a discipline of the
plein-air school to whom Nature is "un livre toujours ouvert devant mes
yeux et où il y a toujours a approfondir ses mystères" - " a book
ever open before my eyes and in which the mysteries of Nature are ever to be
fathomed".
The painter of "Le
Labour" was born on Aug.6, 1882. He
went to school at five years of age and left at the age of thirteen,
after having obtained the elementary education certificate. While at school,
his playthings were not tops and marbles, but paint-brushes and a palette. It
was evident, in fact, in wich direction his tastes lay, so his parents
encouraged him en every possible way. The boy entered the atelier of his
father, also an artist, and from that day to this he has had no other master
than he, unless that master be the book of mysteries of wich the young artist
writes so reverently in one of his letters to me.
I have said that Henri Cortès
may some day attain to great eminence as a painter.
Many who have become
celebrated in art have shown less promise than he shows at seventeen, and there
is a modesty about him which indicates that he is hardly likely to be so well
satisfied with early successes as to give up making greater efforts the older
he gets. Like the doyen of French landscape-painters, Henri Harpignies, may he
ever stive to paint better and better as time advances !
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