Henner by Frederick Wedmore — Read

The first thing to remember of the painter Henner is that he is above all a poet. Has he then created stories or narrated them pathetically? Has he made it the business of painting to do literary work? He has done nothing of the kind. Even where he has used classical mythology and Biblical tradition as the excuse for his canvases, the derived subject seems to have taken hold of him but lightly; he has been dramatic to the extent to which -- well, shall I say? -- to the extent to which a reciter in a drawing-room is permissibly dramatic -- gracefully indicating action and character, never violently insisting on them. Henner's poetry -- his gift of creating, of idealising, in restrained and refined ways -- is never shown by the usurpation of another's functions. It is shown in part by his choice of beautiful, artistic themes; by the exceptional fulness of his appreciation of lovely form and hue; by the combinations of faultless and harmonious colour which occur upon his canvases; by the associations these somehow evoke; by the high pleasure they bestow. To define it much further is impossible. I feel myself, in describing his art, to be ineffective and faltering; but the analyst does not exist who could account completely for his charm.

Henner, it will be allowed by those who are most qualified to notice, is a great painter of the Nude. The Nude, according as you treat it, can rise to poetic heights and address itself to the refined, or can sink to more than prosaic depths. There is the high and there is the low, and there are many levels for the painter to stay at and live upon between them; and to the real artistic instinct, to the real fineness of taste, in looking at the Nude, there is permitted that immediate ease of judgment and decision by which the work is classed at once, and its motive appraised. When the true judges appraise the Nude of Monsieur Henner, the decision is a happy one. He is refinement to the finger-tips -- as refined as Burne-Jones, yet not sexless. Painters whom only the Puritanic could accuse of vulgarity -- Benner, say, in France, with his ‘Dormeuse' of Amiens; Ingres, a generation ago, with his ‘Source' and her ‘_âme végétale_'; Etty, say, in England, with his daylight flesh-colour, which the sunshine suffers to be neither creamy nor grey, but rose and opal -- they, and how many others, may be named with praise. But Monsieur Henner's work has somehow, in this matter, a reticence and a distinction -- a part of his Alsatian Poetry -- which one is apt to think unique. And it is worthy of notice -- it throws a little light on the undramatic, the simply painter-like method of Henner's work -- that the undraped figure is there, not seldom, as a necessary note of colour, and nothing besides: a note of ivory, telling, in some picture of evening, against that olive green of the embrowned woodland which rises, massed and darkening, against the last turquoise of the sky.