Spring in the Eyes of the Artists

The season of spring has inspired a great deal in men of letters, and especially in the poets, who composed in its honor their most delicate verses and entrusted to it their gentlest feelings and most beautiful expressions; and so spring, in their verse, stands fresh and radiant across the ages, its echo resounding from the folds of their works, so that we are refreshed by it and live.

Nor was spring's portion from the world of the art of painting and the power of the brush any less than its portion of poetry — each is an echo of the other. And how could the masters of art fail to be moved by spring, its blossoms, its perfume, and its colors? Artists are the first to live in constant touch with nature, sharing with her her winter and her summer, her autumn and her spring!...

Spring, in their eyes, is color, and the artist is enamored of color, bewitched by its gentleness, its harmony, and the gradations of its shades. And spring is inspiration and fragrance; it is a poem that bountiful nature recites to us to renew our love for her and our attachment to her.

The artists of old did not leave spring out of their art. Botticelli immortalized it in a great painting in which he mingled flowers with fair maidens dancing amid the blossoms of spring upon a carpet colored with every kind of plant; by the maidens he symbolized the breeze, the flowers, the fragrance, love, and youth, all of them surrounding 'Spring' and caressing him, letting their hair stream out behind them, so that the scene grows all the more joyous and genial. It is one of the most beautiful and most famous paintings on this theme. Likewise Fra Angelico, that ascetic monk, devoted his art to it, and his flowers, in their fineness, delicacy, and color, have been a source of astonishment to the botanists of our own age.

So too the artist Giorgione glorified spring and nature in his canvases and lavished upon it much of the splendor of his art; and like him Filippo Lippi and many others among the artists of the Renaissance, who painted numerous canvases representing 'Spring' with consummate artistry in depicting its marvels and freshness. Nor let us forget the most famous colorist of Venice, Tiziano, and his painting 'Adonis and Astarte,' the two of them amid the groves and in the arms of spring, flowers spilling over them while Cupid, the god of love and youth, smiles upon them.

Then came the Flemish school, whose artists set down with their brushes marvelous things on spring and its blossoms, with a fineness that confounds the mind; the museums of Europe bear witness to it.

Nor was the English school any less attentive to it, especially as we know something of English nature and its green fields, and of the good that the man of letters Ruskin did the English by instilling in them a spirit that adores nature, and by his championing of her, so that they might behold in her beauties beyond number. Hence we see the care their artists took over spring and its representation in their canvases, among them the artist Constable and many others, of whom we now mention only a few by way of example.

As for the French school, it took part to a very great extent in painting brilliant canvases of 'Spring.' We mention at their head the artist Watteau, who sang to us in his splendid canvases the beauty of nature and the freshness of spring in its full flowering, giving us of his art what may rightly be counted masterpieces — especially since the circumstances of life and the traditions of the age were then such that people would go out to the orchards and groves to pass sweet, contented hours in the lap of nature amid music and drink and the company of fair women, all of which prepared the way for the artist to paint nature and spring in their loveliest raiment and brightest images. Like him in this was Fragonard, who portrayed the scenes of spring amid the gardens of Versailles and the groves of Fontainebleau, adding to nature's brilliance and her laughter — that merry, laughing artist who was enamored of painting nature and fair women alike. And are not spring and fair women one and the same thing, the very image of beauty and youth?

But the artist Corot devoted nearly his whole life to painting nature, and spring above all. In his painting 'Spring in the Morning,' in its laughing glades, the girls go here and there, dancing, singing, and delighting in its pleasures and its surpassing marvels beneath the shade of towering trees, the rays of the sun playing upon their boughs and glistening leaves and adding to their charms under the magic of the brush of this genius, who stood alone in bringing out the charms of nature and her spring. He is a poet in the language of his lines, his colors, and his feeling, and he has granted us the sweetest of melodies in color, movement, and harmony.

In his canvases we feel the light and the breeze, we breathe in the fragrance, and we sense the deepest meaning and enchantment there is in life, and all the magic and beauty that God has placed within it.

And such is the case with the Lebanese artists, who have not forgotten 'Spring,' living as they do in Lebanon, with its artistic nature teeming with every kind of loveliness, arrayed in the most splendid robes of beauty and enchantment — God's paradise on His earth, whether on the snowy summits of its mountains, on its slopes and in its valleys, or on its laughing shores. Spring there is nature's wedding feast, one of the festivals of beauty, and a gracious invitation extended by nature to the lovers of beauty.