Spring by the Artists' Brush

With the coming of this month, spring wakes from its long slumber, spreading its perfumes, its colors, and its shades...
Let us listen here to our true artist, our friend Mr. Moustafa Farroukh, as he speaks to us of "Spring by the Artists' Brush."

The season of spring is one of the seasons of the year most beloved to man, his favorite among them. He awaits it every year with bated breath and makes ready for it, for in it he finds hope after despair, movement after stillness, and light after darkness; and at last he feels in it life stirring its stir and coursing through his veins.

The season of spring has inspired a great deal in men of letters and poets, who have composed upon it their most delicate verses and entrusted to it their tenderest feelings and their loveliest expressions, so that spring, in their verse and their prose, stands fresh and radiant across the ages; we echo its refrain from the folds of their splendid works, and so we live and draw life.

Nor was spring's fortune in the world of the art of painting and the power of the brush any less than in poetry — each is the echo of the other. Could the masters of art fail to be moved by spring and its blossoms, its perfume and its colors, when spring is the symbol of light, the emblem of color, the picture of life and the heart's beat, the lord of the seasons?... And are not artists those who live in constant harmony with nature, sharing with her her winter and her summer, her autumn and her spring? So show us spring in winter, and summer in autumn?!

Spring in their eyes is color and light. The artist is enamored of color, bewitched by its delicacy, its harmony, and the gradations of its tones; and then there is light — and light is the substance of his inspiration, the element of his art, and the cause of his vision.

Spring is, moreover, inspiration and fragrance; it is a poem which bountiful nature sings to us, to renew our love for her and our attachment to her.

The spring of art is the everlasting spring, and for this reason the artists of old did not leave it out of their art. Botticelli, that genius, immortalized it in a great painting he named "Spring," in which he mingled flowers with fair maidens dancing amid the blossoms of spring on a carpet colored with every manner of plant; by the maidens he signified the breeze, the blossom, the fragrance, and love, and beneath their feet the flowers sprang up and spread the earth with their beautiful carpet.

The artist Botticelli's love of flowers goes back to the city of Florence, which is a paradise and a spring — the city of flowers, whose light greets you wherever your eye falls upon the sweet hills and the open expanses, in the city of Dante, poet of Paradise, and the city of Beatrice, lady of the fair and princess of exalted love.

In this painting of Spring the fair maidens appear circling round Spring and playing with him, letting their blond hair stream out behind them with the breeze, so that the whole scene gains in gaiety and delight. This painting counts among the most beautiful and celebrated paintings on this theme.

And the painting of the artist Fra Angelico — he too gave spring a place apart in his art, and his flowers, in their delicacy, their gentleness, and their color, have been the wonder of the botanists of our own age. So likewise the artist Filippo Lippi and many others of the artists of the Renaissance and beyond, who colored numerous canvases representing spring and describing its marvels and the freshness of its airs.

Then came the Flemish school, whose artists — men known for precision and skill — composed splendid things upon spring and its blossoms, in a sweet manner and with a delicate spirit; and the works of theirs in the European museums bear witness to it.

Nor was the English school any less attentive to spring than the others, especially as we know something of the English love of flowers and greenery, and we know English nature and her green fields of perpetual spring. We know, too, what the writer Ruskin breathed into his nation of a spirit enamored of nature, and his stubborn defense of her, so that the sons of his country might enjoy all the beauty of that captivating nature — a beauty that never fails to awaken in them the love of life and the feeling of life. The flower, simple in appearance to some, is great in the power of its meaning, strong in its effect: it is the sign of a refined life, the sign of civilization and culture; and whoever turns away from the sight of flowers and forgets them has forgotten much of his humanity and much of the meaning of his life. The English men of art took particular care in the painting of spring, foremost among them the artists Constable and Gainsborough, and many others besides. As for the French school, it shared to a great degree in coloring splendid canvases of this beautiful season. We mention at the head of its artists Watteau, who in his paintings sang to us the beauty of nature and the freshness of spring in its prime, giving us of his art what may rightly be counted immortal masterpieces — the more so since the conditions of life and the customs of the generation in his day were favorable, for the people of his age would go out to the gardens and pleasure-grounds to spend sweet, contented hours amid music, drink, and the company of fair women, all of which paved the way for the artist to paint spring in its most beautiful attire and its most radiant images. Fragonard matched him in this, representing spring in the gardens of Versailles and the groves of Fontainebleau, adding to nature's gaiety and her laughter — he the merry, joyous artist who adored nature and fair women alike. And are not spring and the fair one and the same thing, a picture of beauty and of youth?

But the artist Corot devoted nearly his whole life to the painting of nature, and of spring above all. In his painting of spring in the morning, in its laughing scenes and green plains, the girls fall to dancing and singing, delighting in its pleasures and taking shade beneath its lofty trees, while the sunbeams show upon its boughs and the gleaming palms of its leaves, adding to their charms and bringing out their beauties — thanks to the magic brush of this genius of an artist who stood alone in revealing the charms of nature. He is a poet in the tongue of his lines and his colors, making us hear the sweetest melodies and the most plaintive strains through color, movement, and the pouring out of light. In his canvases we feel the light and the breeze, we breathe in the fragrance, and we feel the deepest meaning, magic, and enchantment that life holds.

And when we speak of these artists of the West, we must not fail to mention that the Lebanese artists have not forgotten Spring, living as they do in Lebanon and in its captivating nature, teeming with every kind of loveliness, arrayed in the most splendid robes of beauty and the brightest delights of life. And if the harsh conditions of their lives have not allowed them to produce an abundant number of pictures of spring, still they have never failed to steal glimpses of its beauty whenever occasion offered — whether on the summits of its snow-crowned mountains, or on its slopes and valleys adorned with green and with flowers, or on its laughing, merry shores.

For in spring, in Lebanon, we witness the wedding of nature, one of the feasts of beauty, and a generous, gracious invitation — one of those invitations which nature extends to those of her children who love beauty and adore life.