THE LOUVRE: II. MODERN PICTURES
The Early French Painters--Richard Parkes
Bonington--Chardin--Historical Paintings--Bonington
again--The Moreau Collection--The Thomy-Thierret
Collection--The Chauchard Collection.
French pictures early and late now await us. On our way down the
Grande Galerie we passed on the right two entrances to other rooms.
Taking that one which is nearer the British School, we find ourselves
in Salle IX., leading to Salle X. and so on to Galerie XVI., which
completes the series. In Salle X. the beginnings of French art may be
studied, and in particular the curious Japanese effects of the Ecole
d'Avignon. Here also is very interesting work by Le Maitre de Moulins
and a remarkable series of drawings in the case in the middle,
representing the Siege of Troy. Salle XI. is notable for its portraits
by Clouet and others; in Salle XII. we find Le Sueur, and in Salle
XIII. the curious brothers Le Nain, of whom there are very interesting
examples at the Ionides collection at South Kensington, but nothing
better than the haymaking scene here, No. 542.
French painting of the seventeenth century bursts upon us in the great
Salle XIV. or Galerie Mollien, of which Nicolas Poussin and Ausonian
Claude are the giants, thus completing Landor's pleasant list with
which we entered the Grande Galerie in the last chapter. There are
wonderful things here, but so crowded are they that I always feel lost
and confused. There is, however, compensation and relief, for the room
also contains one minute masterpiece which perhaps not more than five
out of every thousand visitors have seen, and yet which can be studied
with perfect quietness and leisure. This is a tiny water-colour in the
revolving screen in the middle. There is much delicate work in this
screen, dainty aquatint effects by the Dutchmen Ostade and Van der
Heyden, Weenix and Borssom, and so forth; but finest of all (as so
often happens) is a little richly-coloured drawing of Nottingham by
Bonington, who, as we shall see, has a way of cropping up
unsuspectedly and graciously in this great collection--and very
rightly, since he owed so much to that Gallery. He was one of the
youngest students ever admitted, being allowed to copy there at the
age of fifteen, while at the Beaux Arts. That was in the year after
Waterloo. There may in the history of the Gallery have been copyists
equally young, but there can never have been one more distinguished or
who had deeper influence on French art. Paris not only made
Bonington's career but ended it, for it was while sketching in its
streets ten years or more later that he met with the sunstroke which
brought about his death when he was only twenty-seven, and stilled the
marvellous hand for ever.
Salle XV. is given up to portraits, among them--and shall I say chief
of them, certainly chief of them in point of popularity--the adorable
portrait of Madame Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun and her daughter,
painted by herself, which is perhaps the best-known French picture,
and of which I give a reproduction opposite page 246. On a screen in
this room are placed the latest acquisitions. When last I was there
the more noticeable pictures were a portrait by Romney of himself,
rich and melancholy, recalling to the mind Tennyson's monologue, and a
sweet and ancient religieuse by Memling. There were also some Corot
drawings, not perhaps so good as those in the Moreau collection, but
very beautiful, and a charming old-world lady by Fragonard. These
probably are by this time distributed over the galleries, and other
new arrivals have taken their place. I hope so.
Galerie XVI., which leads out of the Salle des Portraits, brings us to
French art of the eighteenth century--to Greuze and David, to
Fragonard and Watteau, to Lancret and Boucher, and, to my mind, most
charming, most pleasure-giving of all, to Jean Baptiste Simeon
Chardin, who is to be seen in perfection here and in the distant room
which contains the Collection La Caze. It is probable that no painter
ever had quite so much charm as this kindly Frenchman, whose loving
task it was to sweeten and refine homely Dutch art. Chardin is the
most winsome of all painters: his brush laid a bloom on domestic life.
The Louvre has twenty-eight of his canvases, mostly still-life,
distributed between the Salle La Caze and Salle No. XVI., where we now
are. The most charming of all, which is to be seen in the Salle La
Caze, is reproduced opposite page 234.
Having walked down the left wall of the Salle, it is well to slip out
at the door at the end for a moment and refresh oneself with another
view of Botticelli's fresco, which is just outside, before returning
by the other wall, as we have to go back through the Salle des
Portraits in order to examine Salle VIII., a vast room wholly filled
with French paintings of the first half of the nineteenth century,
bringing the nation's art to the period more or less at which the
Luxembourg takes it up, though there is a certain amount of
overlapping. No room in the Louvre so wants weeding and re-hanging as
this, for it is a sad jumble. Search, however, for the magnificent
examples by the great _plein-airistes_. They are lost in this
wilderness; but there they are for those that seek--the two vast
Troyons; Corot's magic "Souvenir de Castel-Gondolfon"; a great
Daubigny, "Les Vendances de Bourgogne," very hard and fine, and the
same gigantic painter's large and lovely harvest scene, "Le Moisson";
Rousseau's "Sortie de Foret," not unlike the Rousseau in the Wallace
Collection in London, with its natural archway of branches and rich
tenderness of colour; the sublime "La Vague," by Courbet; lastly
Millet's "Les Glaneuses," the three stooping women in the cornfield
who come to the inward eye almost as readily as the figures in the
"Angelus". The red, blue and yellow of their head-kerchiefs alone
would make this picture worth a millionaire's ransom.
We leave the room by the door opposite that through which we came and
find ourselves again in the Grande Galerie. The way now is to the
left, through the Italian Schools, through the Salon Carre (why not
stay there and let French art go hang?) through the Galerie d'Apollon
(of which more anon), through the Rotunda and the Salle des Bijoux
(whither we shall return), to another crowded late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century French room chiefly notable for David's
Madame Recamier on her joyless little sofa. (Why didn't we stay in the
Salon Carre?) In this room also are two large Napoleonic pictures--one
by Gros representing General Bonaparte visiting the plague victims at
Jaffa in 1799; the other, by David, of the consecration service in
Notre Dame, described in an earlier chapter. To see this kind of
picture, at which the French have for many years been extremely apt,
one must of course go to Versailles, where the history of France is
spread lavishly over many square miles of canvas.
From this room--La Salle des Sept Cheminees--we pass through a little
vestibule, with Courbet's great village funeral in it, to the very
pleasant Salle La Caze, containing the greater part of the collection
of the late Dr. La Caze, and notable chiefly for the Chardins of which
I have already spoken, and also, by the further door, for a haunting
"Buste de femme" attributed to the Milanese School. But there are
other admirable pictures here, including a Velasquez, and it repays
study.
Leaving by the further door and walking for some distance, we come to
the His de la Salle collection of drawings, from which we gain the
Collection Thiers, which should perhaps be referred to here, although
there is not the slightest necessity to see it at all. The Thiers
collection, which occupies two rooms, is remarkable chiefly for its
water-colour copies of great paintings. The first President of the
Republic employed patient artists to make copies suitable for hanging
upon his walls of such inaccessible works as the "Last Judgment" of
Michael Angelo and Raphael's Dresden Madonna. The results are
certainly extraordinary, even if they are not precisely la guerre. The
Arundel Society perhaps found its inspiration in this collection.
Among the originals there is a fine Terburg.
On leaving the Thiers collection, one comes to a narrow passage with a
little huddle of water-colours, very badly treated as to light and
space, and well worth more consideration. These pictures should not be
missed, for among them are two Boningtons, a windmill in a sombre
landscape, which I reproduce opposite page 274, and next to it a
masterly drawing of the statue of Bartolomme Colleoni at Venice, which
Ruskin called the finest equestrian group in the world. Bonington, who
had the special gift of painting great pictures in small compass (just
as there are men who can use a whole wall to paint a little picture
on), has made a drawing in which the original sculptor would have
rejoiced. It would do the Louvre authorities good if these Boningtons,
which they treat so carelessly, were stolen. Nothing could be easier;
I worked out the felony as I stood there. All that one would need
would be a few friends equally concerned to teach the Louvre a lesson,
behind whose broad backs one could ply the diamond and the knife. Were
I a company promoter this is how I should spend my leisure hours. Such
theft is very nigh virtue.
Among other pictures in these bad little rooms--Nos. XVII. and
XVIII.--are some Millets and Decamps.
Three more collections--and these really more interesting than
anything we saw in Galeries XIV. or XVI., or the Salle des Sept
Cheminees--await us; but two of them need considerable powers of
perambulation. Chronology having got us under his thumb we must make
the longer journey first--to the Collection Moreau. The Collection
Moreau is to be found at the top of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, the
entrance to which is in the Rue de Rivoli. In the lower part of this
building are held periodical exhibitions; but the upper parts are
likely at any rate for a long time to remain unchanged, and here are
wonderful collections of furniture, and here hang the few but select
canvases brought together by Adolphe Moreau and his son, and presented
to the nation by M. Etienne Moreau-Nelaton.
In the Thomy-Thierret collection in another top storey of the same
inexhaustible palace (to which our fainting feet are bound) are Corots
of the late period; M. Moreau bought the earlier. Here, among nearly
forty others, you may see that portrait of Corot painted in 1825, just
before he left for Rome, which his parents exacted from him in return
for their consent to his new career and the abandonment of their rosy
dreams of his success as a draper. Here you may see "Un Moine," one of
the first pictures he was able to sell--for five hundred francs
(twenty pounds). Here is the charming marine "La Rochelle" painted in
1851 and given by Corot to Desbarolles and by Desbarolles to the
younger Dumas. Here is the very beautiful Pont de Mantes, reproduced
opposite page 252, belonging to his later manner, and here also is an
exceptionally merry little sketch, "Bateau de peche a maree basse". I
mention these only, since selection is necessary; but everything that
Corot painted becomes in time satisfying to the student and
indispensable to its owner. Among the pencil drawings we find this
exquisite lover of nature once more, with fifteen studies of his
Mistress.
One of the most interesting of the Moreau pictures is Fantin-Latour's
"Hommage a Delacroix," with its figures of certain of the great and
more daring writers and painters of the day, 1864, the year after
Delacroix's death. They are grouped about his framed portrait--Manet,
red haired and red bearded, a little like Mr. Meredith in feature;
Whistler, with his white feather black and vigorous, and his hand on
the historical cane; Legros (the only member of the group who is still
living, and long may he live!) and Baudelaire, for all the world like
an innocent professor. Manet himself is represented here by his famous
"Dejeuner sur l'herbe," which the scandalised Salon of 1863 refused to
hang, and three smaller canvases. Among the remaining pictures which
gave me most pleasure are Couture's portrait of Adolphe Moreau the
younger; Daumier's "La Republique"; Carriere's "L'enfant a la
soupiere" (notice the white bowl); Decamps' "La Battue," curiously
like a Koninck; and Troyon's "Le Passage du Gue," so rich and sweet.
From the Collection Moreau, with its early Barbizon pictures, one
ought to pass to the Chauchard with its middle period, and then to the
Collection Thomy-Thierret; but let us go to the Thomy-Thierret now. It
needs courage and endurance, for the room which contains these
exquisite pictures is only to be reached on foot after climbing many
stairs and walking for what seem to be many miles among models of
ships and other neglected curiosities on the Louvre's topmost floor.
But once the room is reached one is perfectly happy, for every picture
is a gem and there is no one there. M. Thomy-Thierret, who died quite
recently, was a collector who liked pictures to be small, to be rich
in colour, and to be painted by the Barbizon and Romantic Schools.
Here you may see twelve Corots, all of a much later period than those
bequeathed by M. Moreau, among them such masterpieces as "Le Vallon"
(No. 2801), reproduced opposite the next page, "Le Chemin de Sevres"
(No. 2803), "Entree de Village" (No. 2808), "Les Chaumieres" (No.
2809), and "La Route d'Arras" (No. 2810). Here are thirteen Daubignys,
including "Les Graves de Villerville" (No. 28,177), and one sombre and
haunting English scene--"La Tamise a Erith" (No. 2821). Here are ten
Diazes, most beautiful of which to my eyes is "L'Eploree" (No. 2863).
Here are ten Rousseaus, among them "Le Printemps" (No. 2903), with
its rapturous freshness, which I reproduce opposite page 120, and "Les
Chenes" (No. 2900), such a group of trees as Rousseau alone could
paint. Here are six Millets, my favourite being the "Precaution
Maternelle" (No. 2894), with its lovely blues, which again reappear in
"Le Vanneur" (No. 2893). Here are eleven Troyons, of which "La
Provende des poules" (No. 2907), with its bustle of turkeys and
chickens around the gay peasant girl beneath a burning sky, reproduced
opposite page 266, is one of the first pictures to which my feet carry
me on my visits to Paris. Here are twelve Dupres, most memorable of
which is "Les Landes" (No. 2871). And here also are Delacroix',
Isabeys and Meissoniers.
The Chauchard pictures--140 in number--which are now hanging in five
rooms leading from the Salle Rubens, were bequeathed to the nation by
M. Alfred Chauchard, proprietor of the Magasins du Louvre (which some
visitors to Paris have considered the only Louvre). Among the pictures
are twenty-six by Corot, twenty-six by Meissonier, eight by Millet
(including "L'Angelus") and eight by Daubigny.
[Illustration: LE VALLON
COROT
_(Louvre: Thomy-Thierret Collection)_]
I may say at once that the Chauchard Collection does not compare with
the Thomy-Thierret in courage. M. Thomy-Thierret liked his pictures to
be small and exquisite and happy. Within the limits imposed the
Barbizon painters never did anything more delightful or indeed better.
The whole collection--and it is beyond price--is homogeneous: it
embodies the taste of one man. M. Moreau and his son had a robuster
taste, a bolder eye. They wanted strength as well as sweetness, or
strength alone. Their collection has not quite the homogeneity of the
Thomy-Thierret, but one feels here also that personality has honestly
been at work bringing together things of beauty and power that pleased
it, and nothing else. But M. Chauchard....
It is perfectly evident in a moment that M. Chauchard had neither
knowledge nor taste. He merely had acumen. At a certain moment in his
successful life, one feels, M. Chauchard extended himself before the
fire-place, stroked his spreading _favoris_ (so like those of our own
Whiteley), and announced "I must have some pictures". Other prosperous
men saying the same thing have forthwith taken their courage in their
hands and bought pictures; but M. Chauchard as I see him (both in his
dazzling marble bust and in the portrait by Benjamin Constant), was
not like that. "I must have some pictures," he announced, and then
quickly reverted to type and cast about as to the best means of
discovering whose pictures were most worth buying. That is how the
Chauchard Collection came about, if I am not mistaken: it was the
venture of an essentially commercial man--an investor-in-grain--who
also desired a reputation of virtuosity but did not want to lose money
over it.
As it happens M. Chauchard was well advised. But wonderful as they
are, beautiful as they are, valuable as they are, there is not a
picture here which suggests to the visitor that it ever brought a real
gladness to the eyes of its owner in his own home.
But I can convince you only too easily that M. Chauchard had no taste.
Do you remember when driving out to Longchamp, through the Bois,
either to the Races or to Suresnes, just after you pass the Cascade,
you come on the left to a windmill overlooking the course, and on the
right to a white villa, all alone and unreal? A club house, one
naturally thinks it, for the French Jockey Club, or something of that
kind. You may have forgotten the villa, but you will recall it when I
say that on the very trim vivid lawn in front of it, scattered about,
supposed to be counterfeiting life, are various animals in stone--a
stag, a doe, some dogs, all white and motionless, in the best mortuary
manner, and all, to you and me, outrageous. Well, that was one of M.
Chauchard's homes. M. Chauchard was the owner of that lawn and its
occupants. The man who looking out of his window could feast his eye
on these triumphs of the monumental mason was the same man who bought
for his walls sheep by Jacque and Millet, and cattle and dogs by
Troyon....
No matter. M. Chauchard acquired pictures and left them to the French
Nation, and they are now on view for ever (always excepting the fatal
Continental Mondays) for all to rejoice in. The first really
compellingly beautiful work as one enters--the first picture to touch
the emotions--is Rousseau's "La Charrette". It was painted in 1862,
five years before the painter's death, which left the villagers of
Barbizon the richer by a studio-chapel. It is a mere trifle and it is
as wonderful as a summer day: a forest glade, in the midst of which a
tiny wagon and white horse with blue trappings are seen beneath a
burning sky, such a picture as ought to have a wall if not a room to
itself: such a picture as I should like to see placed above an altar.
It is the same subject--a forest wagon--that provided what in some
ways is the best or most attractive Corot here. His "La Charrette" is
a large easy landscape lit by the gracious light of which he alone had
the secret. In the foreground is a deep sandy road with the charrette
labouring through it. But before we came to this we had stood before
one of the finest of the seven Daubignys, "La Seine a Bezons," a river
scene of almost terrible calm, with Mont Valerien in the distance and
geese and boats on the near shore, and implicit in it the sincerity,
strength and humility of this great man.
At the end of the room hang two large and busy Troyons, one on each
side of M. Chauchard himself, the donor of the feast, whose bust in
the whitest Carrara, with the whiskers in full fig and the _croix de
grand officier du Legion d'honneur_ meticulously carved upon it,
stands here, as stipulated in the will. These two Troyons, of which
there are eighteen in all, are I think the largest. One represents
cows sauntering lazily down to drink; the other the return from the
market of a mixed herd of cattle and sheep, with a donkey in panniers,
being driven by a man on a white horse. As was his wont, Troyon chose
a road on the edge of a cliff with a very green border of turf and an
exquisite glimpse of sea to the left. None of the new Troyons perhaps
is as fine as those in Salle VIII. of the Louvre proper, but this is a
superb thing. The "Boeufs se rendant au labour" and the "Le Retour a
la ferme" in Salle VIII. should be visited after the Chauchards.
And so we leave the first and largest room, in the midst of which are
two cases of Barye's bronzes--lions and tigers, bears and deer, snakes
and birds--and enter the first room on the left as we came in; and
here we begin to see for the first time pictures with special knots of
people before them. For the Meissoniers begin here. And of Meissonier
what am I to say? For Meissonier leaves me cold. He is marvellous; but
he leaves me cold. He painted with a fidelity and spirit that border
on the magical; but those qualities that I want in a picture, those
callings of deep to deep, one seeks in vain. Hence I say nothing of
Meissonier, except that he was a master, that there are twenty-six of
his masterpieces here, and that the crowd opposite his "1814" extends
to the opposite side. How can one spend time over "Le cheval de
l'ordonnance" and the "Petit Poste de Grand'-Garde" when Daubigny's
"Les Laveuses (effet de soleil couchant)" hangs so near--this great
placid green picture, so profoundly true as to be almost an act of
God? Corot's "Etang de Ville d'Avray" is here too, liquid and tender.
The little room that leads out of this is usually almost unenterable
by reason of the press before Meissonier's "1814". This undoubtedly is
one of the little great pictures of the world, and I can understand
the enthusiasm of the French sightseer, whose blood is still stirrable
by the enduring personality of the saturnine man on the white horse.
Neighbouring pictures are a rich cattle piece by Diaz, immediately
over "1814"; Rousseau's "La Mare," which is not a little like the
Koninck in the Ionides Collection at South Kensington, and the same
painter's "La Mare au pied du coteau" with its lovely middle distance.
Here too is one of Corot's many _pecheurs_, who little knew as they
fished on so quietly in the still gentle light that they were being
rendered immortal by the quaint little bourgeois with the long pipe,
sketching on the bank. One of the finest of the Dupres is also
here--"La Vanne," a deep green scene of water.
In the last room we come at last to that painter whose work, next
perhaps to Meissonier's, is the magnet which draws such a steady
stream of worshippers to this new shrine of art--to Jean Francois
Millet. M. Chauchard had eight Millets, including the "Angelus," but
though it is the "Angelus" which is considered of many to be the very
core of this collection, I find more pleasure in "La Bergere gardant
ses moutons" (reproduced opposite page 308), which I would call, I
think, the best picture of all. It has been remarked that no picture
containing sheep can ever be a bad picture; but when Millet paints
them, and when they are grazing beneath such a sky, and when one of
those grave sweet peasant women--a monument of patient acceptance and
the humility that comes from the soil--is their shepherdess, why then
it is almost too much; and the brave ardent Jacque, whose "Moutons au
Paturage" hangs close by, is half suspected of theatricalism. Millet
is so great, so full of large elemental simplicity and truth that one
regrets that his eight pictures have not a room to themselves. That
they should be elbowed by the neat dancing-master _chefs d'oeuvre_
of Meissonier is something of a catastrophe.
Thinking over the collection, I have very strongly the feeling already
expressed that it was wrongly assembled. The investor rather than the
enthusiast is too apparent. M. Chauchard, it is true, refrained from
making money by his acquisitions, since he gave them to the nation,
and this is eternally to his credit. None the less I find it difficult
to esteem him as perhaps one should even in the light of a generous
testator. One so wants pictures to be loved. And of all pictures that
are lovable and that long to pass into their owner's being--to
engentle his eyes and enrich his experience and deepen his
nature--none equal those that were painted by the little group of
friends who in the middle of the last century made the white-walled
village of Barbizon their head-quarters and the Forest of
Fontainebleau their happy hunting-ground and a Wordsworthian passion
for nature their creed.
Such pictures deserve the most faithful owners and the most thoughtful
hospitality....
But if we cannot get all as we wish it, at least we must be grateful
for the next best thing, and to M. Chauchard and the Louvre
authorities we must all be supremely grateful.
The Louvre is to-day the most wonderful museum in the world; but what
would one not give to be able to visit it as it was in 1814, when it
was in some respects more wonderful still. For then it was filled with
the spoils of Napoleon's armies, who had instructions always to bring
back from the conquered cities what they could see that was likely to
beautify and enrich France. It is a reason for war in itself. I would
support any war with Austria, for example, that would bring to London
Count Czernin's Vermeer and the Parmigianino in the Vienna National
Gallery; any war with Germany that would put the Berlin National
Gallery at our disposal. Napoleon had other things to fight for, but
that comprehensive brain forgot nothing, and as he deposed a king he
remembered a blank space in the Louvre that lacked a Raphael, an empty
niche waiting for its Phidias. The Revolution decreed the Museum, but
it was Napoleon who made it priceless and glorious. After the fall of
this man a trumpery era of restitution set in. Many of his noble
patriotic thefts were cancelled out. The world readjusted itself and
shrank into its old pettiness. Priceless pictures and statues were
carried again to Italy and Austria, Napoleon to St. Helena.