The Studio mar. 14. 1914 [antikvár]

TM. Aman Jearís Recent WorkHE RECENT WORK OF AMAN JEAN. BY ACHILLE SEGARD.At the present moment M. Aman Jean is at his zenith. He is in the full tide of his maturity, of his experience, of his talent, and he has succeeded in retaining a youthful sensitiveness which awakens ever anew before all the varied spectacles of nature. Úrban and rural scenes, humán faces and domestic interiors, sky efifects or the sight of objects bathed in the intimé atmosphere of rooms in which one can feel the aura of those who inhabit themall such are for this artist motives to arouse his wonder, and each new vision imposes itself through the médium of his eyes upon his ever-sensitive imagination. Here we have no reálist in the narrow sense that is customarily attributed to that word. He does not copy actuality with that devotion to rigorous exactitude adopted by those painters who are devoid of imagination. What he depicts is a reflection of the emotion which nature, which humán faces and inanimate objects arouse in himself. Nevertheless, since that emotion is always of a pictorial order, we never find stretched beyond reasonable bounds in his pictures that requisite and indis-pensable link with reality which every work of art must establish and maintain.Nor does M. Aman Jean cling to that ob-jective reality to which philosophers have given the designation of Primary Reality. Through and beyond this observation of actualities he desires to attain to thatSecondary Reality which in the case of a painter is always of an emotional nature.While suggested, in-deed, by his entire txuvre, this fundamental distinc-tion is particularly in evi-dence in his portraits. The likeness, such anLXI. No. 251.March 1914essential factor in this class of picture, constrains the artist to maintain very closely the contact with objective reality. It is absolutely necessary that his observation should be serious, profound, and attentive ; that it should seize upon all the expres-sive characteristics of the physiognomy, of the attitűdé, of the gestures of the sitter, and that the observer should be able to recognise in the portrait the construction of the head and of the body, the just proportions of the masses, the peculiarities of the natural colouring, and even those characteristic details or idiosyncrasies such as, for instance, any asymmetry of the features or chance deforma, tion of the hands, the shoulders, or the body in generál. And yet a portrait possessed of no further merit beyond such exactitude as this would not be a fine portrait. Over and above the outward semblance of the sitter, M. Aman Jean strives always to capture such elusive essentials as hisstudy of a woman seated