CHAPTER XVI

THE DRAUGHTSMEN

Inasmuch as modern art, in the beginning of its career, held commerce

almost exclusively with the spirits of dead men of bygone ages, it had

set itself in opposition to all the great epochs that had gone before.

All works known to the history of art, from the cathedral pictures of

Stephan Lochner down to the works of the followers of Watteau, stand in

the closest relationship with the people and times amid which they have

originated. Whoever studies the works of Dürer knows his home and his

family, the Nuremberg of the sixteenth century, with its narrow lanes

and gabled houses; the whole age is reflected in the engravings of this

one artist with a truth and distinctness which put to shame those of the

most laborious historian. Dürer and his contemporaries in Italy stood in

so intimate a relation to reality that in their religious pictures they

even set themselves above historical probability, and treated the

miraculous stories of sacred tradition as if they had been commonplace

incidents of the fifteenth century. Or, to take another instance, with

what a striking realism, in the works of Ostade, Brouwer, and Steen, has

the entire epoch from which these great artists drew strength and

nourishment remained vivid in spirit, sentiment, manners, and costume.

Every man whose name has come down to posterity stood firm and unshaken

on the ground of his own time, resting like a tree with all its roots

buried in its own peculiar soil; a tree whose branches rustled in the

breeze of its native land, while the sun which fell on its blossoms and

ripened its fruits was that of Italy or Germany, of Spain or the

Netherlands, of that time; never the weak reflection of a planet that

formerly had shone in other zones.

It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that this

connection with the life of the present and the soil at home was lost to

the art of painting. It cannot be supposed that later generations will

be able to form a conception of life in the nineteenth century from

pictures produced in this period, or that these pictures will become

approximately such documents as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

possess in the works of Dürer, Bellini, Rubens, or Rembrandt. The old

masters were the children of their age to the very tips of their

fingers. They were saturated with the significance, the ideals, and the

aims of their time, and they saturated them with their own aims, ideals,

and significance. On the other hand, if any one enters a modern picture

gallery and picks out the paintings produced up to 1850, he will often

receive the impression that they belong to earlier centuries. They are

without feeling for the world around, and seem even to know nothing of

it.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BOILLY. THE TOILETTE.]

Even David, the first of the moderns, has left no work, with the

exception of his "Marat," which has been baptized with the blood of the

French Revolution. To express the sentiment of Liberty militant he made

use of the figures of Roman heroes. The political freedom of the people,

so recently won, so fresh in men's minds, he illustrated by examples

from Roman history. At a later time, when the allied forces entered

Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, he made use of the story of Leonidas

at Thermopylæ. Only in portrait painting was any kind of justice done to

modern life by the painters in "the grand style." True it is that there

lived, at the time, a few "little masters" who furtively turned out for

the market modest little pictures of the life around them, paintings of

buildings and kitchen interiors. The poor Alsatian painter _Martin

Drolling_, contemptuously designated a "dish painter" by the critics,

showed in his kitchen pictures that, in spite of David, something of the

spirit of Chardin and the great Dutchmen was still alive in French art.

But he has given his figures and his pots and pans and vegetables the

pose and hard outline of Classicism. A few of his portraits are better

and more delicate, particularly that of the actor Baptiste, with his

fine head, like that of a diplomatist. At the exhibition of 1889, this

picture, with its positive and firmly delineated characterisation, made

the appeal of a Holbein of 1802. Another "little master," _Granet_,

painted picturesque ruins, low halls, and the vaults of churches; he

studied attentively the problem of light in inner chambers, and thereby

drew upon himself the reproach of David, that "his drawing savoured of

colour." In _Leopold Boilly_ Parisian life--still like that of a country

town--and the arrival of the mail, the market, and the busy life of the

streets, found an interpreter,--_bourgeois_ no doubt, but true to his

age. In the time of the Revolution he painted a "Triumph of Marat," the

tribune of the people, who is being carried on the shoulders of his

audience from the _palais de justice_ in Paris, after delivering an

inflammatory oration. In 1807, when the exhibition of David's Coronation

picture had thrown all Paris into excitement, Boilly conceived the

notion of perpetuating in a rapid sketch the scene of the exhibition,

with the picture and the crowd pressing round it. His speciality,

however, was little portrait groups of honest _bourgeois_ in their stiff

Sunday finery. Boilly knew with accuracy the toilettes of his age, the

gowns of the actresses, and the way they dressed their heads; he cared

nothing whatever about æsthetic dignity of style, but represented each

subject as faithfully as he could, and as honestly and sincerely as

possible. For that reason he is of great historical value, but he is not

painter enough to lay claim to great artistic interest. The execution of

his pictures is petty and diffidently careful, and his neat, Philistine

painting has a suggestion of china and enamel, without a trace of the

ease and spirit with which the eighteenth century carolled over such

work. The heads of his women are the heads of dolls, and his silk looks

like steel. His forerunners are not the Dutchmen of the good periods,

Terborg and Metsu, but the contemporaries of Van der Werff. He and

Drolling and Granet were rather the last issue of the fine old Dutch

schools, rather descendants of Chardin than pioneers, and amongst the

younger men there was at first no one who ventured to sow afresh the

region which had been devastated by Classicism. Géricault certainly was

incited to his "Raft of the Medusa" not by Livy or Plutarch, but by an

occurrence of the time which was reported in the newspapers; and he

ventured to set an ordinary shipwreck in the place of the Deluge or a

naval battle, and a crew of unknown mortals in the place of Greek

heroes. But then his picture stands alone amongst the works of the

Romanticists, and is too decidedly transposed into a classical key to

count as a representation of modern life.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BOILLY. THE NEWSVENDOR.]

[Illustration: _Baschet._ BOILLY. THE MARIONETTES.]

In its striving after movement and colour, Romanticism put forward the

picturesque and passionate Middle Ages in opposition to the stiff and

frigid neo-Greek or neo-Roman ideal; but it joined with Classicism in

despising the life of the present. Even the political excitement at the

close of the Restoration and the Revolution of July had but little

influence on the leading spirits of the time. Accustomed to look for the

elements of pictorial invention in religious myths, in the fictions of

poets, or in the events of older history, they paid no attention to the

mighty social drama enacted so near to them. The fiery spirit of

Delacroix certainly led him to paint his picture of the barricades, but

he drew his inspiration from a poet, from an ode of Auguste Barbier, and

he gave the whole an air of romance and allegory by introducing the

figure of Liberty. He lived in a world of glowing passions, amid which

all the struggles of his age seemed to have for him only a petty

material interest. For that reason he has neither directly nor

indirectly drawn on what he saw around him. He painted the soul, but not

the life of his epoch. He was attracted by Teutonic poets and by the

Middle Ages. He set art free from Greek subject-matter and Italian form,

to borrow his ideas from Englishmen and Germans and his colour from the

Flemish school. He is inscrutably silent about French society in the

nineteenth century.

[Illustration: Queen Charlotte. George III.

GILLRAY. AFFABILITY.

"Well, Friend, where a' you going, hay?--what's your name, hay?--where

d'ye live, hay?--hay?"]

And this alienation from the living world is even more noticeable in

Ingres. His "Mass of Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel" is the only one of

his many works which deals with a subject of contemporary life, and it

was blamed by the critics because it deviated so far from the great

style. As an historical painter, and when better employed as a painter

of portraits, Ingres has crystallised all the life and marrow of the

past in his icy works, and he appears in the midst of the century like a

marvellous and sterile sphinx. Nothing can be learnt from him concerning

the needs and passions and interests of living men. His own century

might writhe and suffer and struggle and bring forth new thoughts, but

he knew nothing about them, or if he did he never allowed it to be seen.

[Illustration: CRUICKSHANK. MONSTROSITIES OF 1822.]

Delaroche approached somewhat nearer to the present, for he advanced

from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century; and the

historical picture, invented by him, virtually dominated French art

under Napoleon III, in union with the dying Classicism. Even then there

was no painter who yet ventured to portray the manners and types of his

age with the fresh insight and merciless observation of Balzac. All

those scenes from the life of great cities, their fashion and their

misery, which then began to form the substance of drama and romance, had

as yet no counterpart in painting.

[Illustration: ROWLANDSON. HARMONY.]

[Illustration: BUNBURY. RICHMOND HILL.]

The Belgians preserved the same silence. During the whole maturity of

Classicism, from 1800 to 1830, François, Paelinck, van Hanselaere,

Odevaere, de Roi, Duvivier, etc., with their coloured Greek statues,

ruled the realm of figure painting as unmitigated dictators; and amongst

the historical painters who followed them, Wappers, in his "Episode,"

was the only one who drew on modern life for a subject. There was a

desire to revive Rubens. Decaisne, Wappers, de Keyzer, Bièfve, and

Gallait lit their candle at his sun, and were hailed as the holy band

who were to lead Belgian art to a glorious victory. But their original

national tendency deviated from real life instead of leading towards it.

For the sake of painting cuirasses and helmets they dragged the most

obscure national heroes to the light of day, just as the Classicists had

done with Greeks and Romans. German painting wandered through the past

with even less method, taking its material, not from native, but from

French, English, and Flemish history. From Carstens down to Makart,

German painters of influence carefully shut their eyes to reality, and

drew down the blinds so as to see nothing of the life that surged below

them in the street, with its filth and splendour, its laughter and

misery, its baseness and noble humanity. And from an historical point of

view this alienation from the world is susceptible of an easy

explanation.

[Illustration: LEECH. THE CHILDREN OF MR. AND MRS. BLENKINSOP.]

[Illustration: LEECH. LITTLE SPICEY AND TATER SAM.]

In France, as in all other countries, the end of the _ancien régime_,

the tempest of the Revolution, and the consequent modification of the

whole of life--of sentiments, habits, and ideas, of dress and social

conditions--at first implied such a sudden change in the horizon that

artists were necessarily thrown into confusion. When the monarchy

entered laughingly upon its struggle of life and death, the survivors

from the time of Louis XVI, charming "little masters" who had been great

masters in that careless and graceful epoch, were suddenly made

witnesses of a revolution more abrupt than the world had yet seen.

Savage mobs forced their way into gardens, palaces, and reception-rooms,

pike in hand, and with the red cap upon their heads. The walls echoed

with their rude speech, and plebeian orators played the part of oracles

of freedom and brotherhood like old Roman tribunes of the people. What

was there yesterday was no longer to be seen; a thick powder-smoke hung

between the past and the present. And the present itself had not yet

assumed determinate shape; it hovered, as yet unready, between the old

and the new forms of civilization. The storms of the Revolution put an

end to the comfortable security of private life. Thus it was that the

ready-made and more easily intelligible shapes and figures of a world

long buried out of sight, with which men believed themselves to have an

elective affinity, at first seemed to the artists to have an infinitely

greater value than the new forms which were in the throes of birth.

Painters became Classicists because they had not yet the courage to

venture on the ground where the century itself was going through a

process of fermentation.

[Illustration: LEECH. FROM "CHILDREN OF THE MOBILITY."]

[Illustration: _Magazine of Art._

SIR JOHN MILLAIS PINXT. GEORGE DU MAURIER.]

The Romanticists despised it, for they thought the fermenting must had

yielded flat lemonade instead of fiery wine. The artist must live in art

before he can produce art. And the more the life of nations has been

beautiful, rich, and splendid, the more nourishment and material has art

been able to derive from it. But when they came the Romanticists

found--in France as in Germany--everything, except a piece of reality

which they could deem worthy of being painted. The whole of existence

seemed to this generation so poor and bald, the costume so inartistic

and so like a caricature, the situation so hopeless and petty, that they

were unable to tolerate the portrayal of themselves either in poetry or

art. It was the time of that wistfully sought phantom which, as they

believed, was to be found only in the past. The powerful passions of the

Middle Ages were set in opposition to a flaccid period that was barren

of action.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

DU MAURIER. THE DANCING LESSON.]

And then came the overwhelming pressure of the old masters. After the

forlorn condition of colouring brought about by David and Carstens, it

was so vitally necessary to restore the artistic tradition and technique

of the old masters, that it was at first thought necessary to adopt the

old subject-matter also--especially the splendid robes of the city of

the lagoons--in order to test the newly acquired secrets of the palette.

Faltering unsteadily under influences derived from the old artists,

modern painting did not yet feel itself able to create finished works of

art out of the novel elements which the century placed at its disposal.

It still needed to be carried in the arms of a Venetian or Flemish

nurse.

And æsthetic criticism bestowed its blessing on these attempts. The

Romanticists had been forced to the treatment of history and the

deification of the past by disgust with the grey and colourless present;

the younger generation were long afterwards held captive in this

province by æsthetic views of the dignity of history. To paint one's own

age was reckoned a crime. One had to paint the age of other people. For

this purpose the _prix de Rome_ was instituted. The spirit which

produced the pictures of Cabanel and Bouguereau was the same that

induced David to write to Gros, that the battles of the empire might

afford the material for occasional pictures done under the inspiration

of chance, but not for great and earnest works of art worthy of an

historical painter. That æsthetic criticism which taught that, whatever

the subject be, and whatever personages may be represented, if they

belong to the present time the picture is merely a _genre_ picture,

still held the field. Whilst the world was laughing and crying, the

painter, with the colossal power of doing everything, amused himself by

trying not to appear the child of his own time. No one perceived the

refinement and grace, the corruption and wantonness, of modern life as

it is in great cities. No one laid hold on the mighty social problems

which the growing century threw out with a seething creative force.

Whoever wishes to know how the men of the time lived and moved, what

hopes and sorrows they bore in their breasts, whoever seeks for works in

which the heart-beat of the century is alive and throbbing, must have

his attention directed to the works of the draughtsmen, to the

illustrations of certain periodicals. It was in the nineteenth century

as in the Middle Ages. As then, when painting was still an

ecclesiastical art, the slowly awakening feeling for nature, the joy of

life was first expressed in miniatures, woodcuts, and engravings, so

also the great draughtsmen of the nineteenth century were the first who

set themselves with their whole strength to bring modern life and all

that it contained earnestly and sincerely within the range of art, the

first who held up the glass to their own time and gave the abridged

chronicle of their age. Their calling as caricaturists led them to

direct observation of the world, and lent them the aptitude of rendering

their impressions with ease; and that at a time when the academical

methods of depicting physiognomy obtained elsewhere in every direction.

It necessitated their representing subjects to which, in accordance with

the æsthetic views of the period, they would not otherwise have

addressed themselves; it led them to discover beauties in spheres of

life by which they would otherwise have been repelled. London, the

capital of a free people ruling in all quarters of the globe, the home

of millions, where intricate old corners and back streets left more

space than in other cities for old-fashioned "characters," for odd,

eccentric creatures and better-class charlatans of every description,

afforded a ground peculiarly favourable for caricature. In this

province, therefore, England holds the first place beyond dispute.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

DU MAURIER. A RECOLLECTION OF DIEPPE.]

[Illustration: _L'Art._

DU MAURIER. DOWN TO DINNER.]

Direct from Hogarth come the group of political caricaturists, in whom

the sour, bilious temper of John Bull lives on in a new and improved

edition. Men like _James Gillray_ were a power in the political warfare

of their time; bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom with a

divine rage and slashing irony, while at the same time they were

masterly draughtsmen in a vehement and forceful style. The worst of it

is, that the interest excited by political caricature is always of a

very ephemeral nature. The antagonism of Pitt and Fox, Shelburne and

Burke, the avarice and stupidity of George III, the Union, the conjugal

troubles of the Prince of Wales, and the war with France, seem very

uninteresting matters in these days. On the other hand, _Rowlandson_,

who was not purely a politician, appeals to us in an intelligible

language even after a hundred years have gone by.

Like Hogarth, he was the antithesis of a humorist. Something bitter and

gloomily pessimistic runs through all he touches. He is brutal, with an

inborn power and an indecorous coarseness. His laughter is loud and his

cursing barbarous. Ear-piercing notes escape from the widely opened lips

of his singers, and the tears come thickly from the eyes of his

sentimental old ladies who are hanging on the declamation of a tragic

actress. His comedy is produced by the simplest means. As a rule any

sort of contrast is enough: fat and thin, big and little, young wife and

old husband, young husband and old wife, shying horse and helpless rider

on a Sunday out. Or else he brings the physical and moral qualities of

his figures into an absurd contrast with their age, calling, or

behaviour: musicians are deaf, dancing masters bandy-legged, servants

wear the dresscoats and orders of lords, hideous old maids demean

themselves like coquettes, parsons get drunk, and grave dignitaries of

state dance the cancan. And so, when the servant gets a thrashing, and

the coquette a refusal, and the diplomatist loses his orders by getting

a fall, it is their punishment for having forgotten their proper place.

They are all of them "careers on slippery ground," with the same

punishments as Hogarth delighted to depict. But Rowlandson became

another man when he set himself to represent the life of the people.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

DU MAURIER. A WINTRY WALK.]

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

KEENE. FROM "OUR PEOPLE." THE PERILS OF THE DEEP.]

Born in July 1756, in a narrow alley of old London, he grew up amidst

the people. As a young man he saw Paris, Germany, and the Low Countries.

He went regularly to all clubs where there was high play. As man,

painter, and draughtsman alike, he stood in the midst of life. Street

scenes in Paris and London engage his pencil, especially scenes from

Vauxhall Gardens, the meeting-place of fashionable London, and there is

often a touch of Menzel in the palpitating life of these pictures--in

these lords and ladies, fops and ballad-singers, who pass through the

grounds of the gardens in a billowy stream. His illustrations include

everything: soldiers, navvies, life at home and in the tavern, in town

and in village, on the stage and behind the scenes, at masquerades and

in Parliament. When he died at seventy, on 22nd April 1827, the

obituaries were able to say of him with truth that he had drawn all

England in the years between 1774 and 1809. And all these leaves torn

from the life of sailors and peasants, these fairs and markets, beggars,

huntsmen, smiths, artizans, and day labourers, were not caricatures, but

sketches keenly observed and sharply executed from life. His countrymen

have at times a magnificent Michelangelesque stir of life which almost

suggests Millet. He was fond of staying at fashionable watering-places,

and came back with charming scenes from high life. But his peculiar

field of observation was the poor quarter of London. Here are the

artizans, the living machines. Endurance, persistence, and resignation

may be read in their long, dismal, angular faces. Here are the women of

the people, wasted and hectic. Their eyes are set deep in their sockets,

their noses sharp and their skin blotched with red spots. They have

suffered much and had many children; they have a sodden, depressed,

stoically callous appearance; they have borne much, and can bear still

more. And then the devastations of gin! that long train of wretched

women who of an evening prostitute themselves in the Strand to pay for

their lodging! those terrible streets of London, where pallid children

beg, and tattered spectres, either sullen or drunken, rove from

public-house to public-house, with torn linen and rags hanging about

them in shreds! The cry of misery rising from the pavement of great

cities was first heard by Rowlandson, and the pages on which he drew the

poor of London are a living dance of death of the most ghastly veracity.

But, curiously enough, this same man, who as an observer could be so

uncompromisingly sombre, and so rough and brutal as a caricaturist, had

also a wonderfully delicate feeling for feminine charm. In the pages he

has devoted to the German waltz there lives again the chivalrous

elegance of the period of Werther, and that peculiarly English grace

which is so fascinating in Gainsborough. His young girls are graceful

and wholesome in their round straw hats with broad ribbons; his pretty

little wives in their white aprons and coquettish caps recall Chardin.

One feels that he has seen Paris and appreciated the fine fragrance of

Watteau's pictures.

[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._

SIR GEO. REID. PORTRAIT OF CHARLES KEENE.]

Mention should also be made of _Henry William Bunbury_, who excelled in

the drawing of horses and ponies. "A long Story" is an excellent example

of his powers as a caricaturist pure and simple. The variations rung on

the theme of boredom and the self-centred and animated stupidity of the

narrator have been vividly observed, and are earnestly rendered.

Rowlandson has the savage indignation of Swift; Bunbury is not savage,

but he has the same English seriousness and something of the same

brutality. The faces here are crapulous and distorted, and the subject

is treated without lightness or good-nature. Perhaps the English do not

take their pleasures so very seriously, but undoubtedly they jest in

earnest. Yet Bunbury's incisiveness and his thorough command of what it

is his design to express assure him a distinct position as an artist.

His "Richmond Hill" shows the pleasanter side of English character. The

breeze billowing in the trees, the little lady riding by on her cob, the

buxom dames in the shay, and the man spinning past on his curricle,

give the scene a spirit of life and movement, besides rendering it an

historical document of the period of social history that lies between

_The Virginians_ and _Vanity Fair_.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

KEENE. FROM "OUR PEOPLE."]

As a political caricaturist _George Cruikshank_ has the same

significance for England as Henri Monnier has for France, and the

drawings of the latter often go straight back to the great English

artist. But his first works in 1815 were children's books, and such

simple delineations from the world of childhood and the life of society

have done more to preserve his name than political caricatures. Their

touch of satire is only very slight. Cruikshank's ladies panting under

heavy chignons, his serious and exceedingly prosy dames pouring out tea

for serious and not less ceremonious gentlemen, whilst the girls are

galloping round Hyde Park on their thoroughbreds, accompanied by a

brilliant escort of fashionable young men--they are all of them not so

much caricatures as pictures freshly caught from life. He had a great

sense for toilettes, balls, and parties. And he could draw with

artistic observation and tender feeling the babbling lips and shining

eyes of children, the shy confidence of the little ones, their timid

curiosity and their bashful advances. And thus he opened up the way

along which his disciples advanced with so much success.

[Illustration: KLEIN. A TRAVELLING LANDSCAPE PAINTER.]

The style of illustration has adapted itself to the altered character of

English life. What at first constituted the originality of English

caricaturists was their mordant satire. Everything was painted in

exceedingly vivid colours. Whatever was calculated to bring out an idea

in comic or brutal relief--great heads and little bodies, an absurd

similarity between persons and animals, the afflorescence of

costume--was seized upon eagerly. These artists fought for the weary and

heavy-laden, and mercilessly lashed the cut-throats and charlatans. They

delighted in spontaneous obscenity, exuberant vigour, and undisguised

coarseness. Men were shaken by a broad Aristophanic laughter till they

seemed like epileptics. At the time when the Empire style came into

England, Gillray could dare to represent by speaking likenesses some of

the best-known London beauties, in a toilette which the well developed

Madame Tallien could not have worn with more assurance. Such things were

no longer possible when England grew out of her awkward age. After the

time of Gillray a complete change came over the spirit of English

caricature. Everything brutal or bitterly personal was abandoned. The

clown put on his dress-clothes, and John Bull became a gentleman. Even

by Cruikshank's time caricature had become serious and well-bred. And

his disciples were indeed not caricaturists at all, but addressed

themselves solely to a delicately poetic representation of subjects.

They know neither Rowlandson's innate force and bitter laughter, nor the

gallows humour and savagery of Hogarth; they are amiable and tenderly

grave observers, and their drawings are not caricatures, but charming

pictures of manners.

_Punch_, which was founded in 1841, has perhaps caught the social and

political physiognomy of England in the middle of the nineteenth century

with the greatest delicacy. It is a household paper, a periodical read

by the youngest girls. All the piquant things with which the Parisian

papers are filled are therefore absolutely excluded. It scrupulously

ignores the style of thing to which the _Journal Amusant_ owes

three-fourths of its matter. Every number contains one big political

caricature, but otherwise it moves almost entirely in the region of

domestic life. Students flirting with pretty barmaids, neat little

dressmakers carrying heavy bonnet-boxes and pursued by old

gentlemen--even these are scenes which go a little too far for the

refined tone of the paper which has been adapted to the drawing-room.

[Illustration: JOHANN CHRISTOPH ERHARD.]

Next to Cruikshank, the Nestor of caricature, must be mentioned _John

Leech_, who between 1841 and 1864 was the leading artist on _Punch_. In

his drawings there is already to be found the high-bred and fragrant

delicacy of the English painting of the present time. They stand in

relation to the whimsical and vigorous works of Rowlandson as the fine

_esprit_ of a rococo abbé to the coarse and healthy wit of Rabelais. The

mildness of his own temperament is reflected in his sketches. Others

have been the cause of more laughter, but he loved beauty and purity.

Men are not often drawn by him, or if he draws them they are always

"pretty fellows," born gentlemen. His young women are not coquettish and

_chic_, but simple, natural, and comely. The old English brutality and

coarseness have become amiable, subtle, refined, mild, and seductive in

John Leech. He is a fine and delicate spirit, who seems very ethereal

beside Hogarth and Rowlandson, those giants fed on roast-beef; he

prefers to occupy himself with sport and boating, the season and its

fashions, and is at home in public gardens, at balls, and at the

theatre. Here a pretty baby is being taken for an airing in Hyde Park by

a tidy little nurse-maid, and there on mamma's arm goes a charming

schoolgirl, who is being enthusiastically greeted by good-looking boys;

here again a young wife is sitting by the fireside with a novel in her

hand and her feet out of her slippers, while she looks dreamily at the

glimmering flame. Or a girl is standing on the shore in a large straw

hat, with her hand shading her eyes and the wind fluttering her dress.

Even his "Children of the Mobility" are little angels of grace and

purity, in spite of their rags. The background, be it room, street, or

landscape, is merely given with a few strokes, but it is of more than

common charm. Every plate of Leech has a certain fragrance and lightness

of touch and a delicacy of line which has since been attained only by

Frederick Walker. His simplicity of stroke recalls the old Venetian

woodcuts. There is not an unnecessary touch. Everything is in keeping,

everything has a significance.

[Illustration: ERHARD. A PEASANT SCENE.]

Leech's successor, _George du Maurier_, is less delicate--that is to

say, not so entirely and loftily æsthetic. He is less exclusively

poetic, but lives more in actual life, and suffers less from the raw

breath of reality. At the same time, his drawing is pithier and more

incisive; one discerns his French training. In 1857 du Maurier was a

pupil of Gleyre, and returned straight to England when Leech's place on

_Punch_ became vacant by his death. Since that time du Maurier has been

the head of the English school of drawing--of the diarists of that

society which is displayed in Hyde Park during the season, and found in

London theatres and dining-rooms, and in well-kept English pleasure

grounds, at garden parties and tennis meetings, the leaders of clubs and

drawing-rooms. His snobs rival those of Thackeray, but he has also a

special preference for the fair sex--for charming women and girls who

race about the lawn at tennis in large hats and bright dresses, or sit

by the fire in fashionable apartments, or hover through a ball-room

waltzing in their airy skirts of tulle. The coquettishness of his little

ones is entirely charming, and so too is the superior and comical

exclusiveness of his æsthetically brought-up children, who will

associate with no children not æsthetic.

[Illustration: ERHARD. A PEASANT FAMILY.]

But the works of _Charles Keene_ are the most English of all. Here the

English reveal that complete singularity which distinguishes them from

all other mortals. Both as a draughtsman and as a humorist Keene stands

with the greatest of the century, on the same level as Daumier and

Hokusai. An old bachelor, an original, a provincial living in the vast

city, nothing pleased him better than to mix with the humbler class, to

mount on the omnibus seat beside the driver, to visit a costermonger, or

sit in a dingy suburban tavern. He led a Bohemian life, and was,

nevertheless, a highly respectable, economical, and careful man. Trips

into the country and little suppers with his friends constituted his

greatest pleasures. He was a member of several glee clubs, and when he

sat at home played the Scotch bagpipes, to the horror of all his

neighbours. During his last years his only company was an old dog, to

which he, like poor Tassaert, clung with a touching tenderness. All the

less did he care about "the world." Grace and beauty are not to be

sought in his drawings. For him "Society" did not exist. As du Maurier

is the chronicler of drawing-rooms, Keene was the fine and unsurpassed

observer of the people and of humble London life, and he extended

towards them a friendly optimism and a brotherly sympathy. An endless

succession of the most various, the truest, and the most animated types

is contained in his work: mighty guardsmen swagger, cane in hand, burly

and solemn; cabmen and omnibus drivers, respectable middle-class

citizens, servants, hairdressers, the City police, waiters, muscular

Highlanders, corpulent self-made City men, the seething discontent of

Whitechapel; and here and there amidst them all incomparable old

tradesmen's wives, and big, raw-boned village landladies in the

Highlands. Keene has something so natural and self-evident in his whole

manner of expression, that no one is conscious of the art implied by

such drawing. Amongst those living in his time only Menzel could touch

him as a draughtsman, and it was not through chance that each, in spite

of their differences of temperament, greatly admired the other. Keene

bought every drawing of Menzel's that he could get, and Menzel at his

death possessed a large collection of Keene's sketches.

[Illustration: LUDWIG RICHTER.]

In the beginning of the century Germany had no draughtsmen comparable

for realistic impressiveness with Rowlandson. At a time when the great

art lay so completely bound in the shackles of the Classic school,

drawing, too, appeared only in traditional forms. The artist ventured to

draw as he liked just as little as he ventured to paint anything at all

as he saw it; for both there were rules and strait-waistcoats. Almost

everything that was produced in those years looks weak and flat to-day,

forced in composition and amateurish in drawing. Where Rowlandson with

his brusque powerful strokes recalls Michael Angelo or Rembrandt, the

Germans have something laboured, diffident, and washed out. Yet even

here a couple of unpretentious etchers rise as welcome and surprising

figures out of the tedious waste of academic production, though they

were little honoured by their contemporaries. In their homely sketches,

however, they have remained more classic than those who put on the

classical garment as if for eternity. What the painter refused to paint,

and the patrons of art who sought after ideas would not allow to count

as a picture, because the subject seemed to them too poor, and the form

too commonplace and undignified--military scenes at home and abroad,

typical and soldierly figures from the great time of the war of

Liberation, the life of the people, the events of the day--was what the

Nuremberg friends, _Johann Adam Klein_ and _Johann Christoph Erhard_,

diligently engraved upon copper with sympathetic care, and so left

posterity a picture of German life in the beginning of the century that

seems the more sincere and earnest because it has paid toll neither to

style in composition nor to idealism. This invaluable Klein was a

healthy and sincere realist, from whom the æsthetic theories of the time

recoiled without effect, and he had no other motive than to render

faithfully whatever he saw. Even in Vienna, whither he came as a young

man in 1811, it was not the picture galleries which roused him to his

first studies, but the picturesque national costumes of the Wallachians,

Poles, and Hungarians, and their horses and peculiar vehicles. A sojourn

among the country manors of Styria gave him opportunity for making a

number of pretty sketches of rural life. In the warlike years 1813 and

1814, with their marching and their bivouacs, he went about all day long

drawing amongst the soldiers. Even in Rome it was not the statues that

fascinated him, but the bright street scenes, the ecclesiastical

solemnities, and the picturesque caravans of country people. And when he

settled down in Nuremburg, and afterwards in Munich, he did not cease to

be sensitive to all impressions that forced themselves on him in varying

fulness. The basis of his art was faithful and loving observation of

life as it was around him, the pure joy the genuine artist has in making

a picture of everything he sees.

[Illustration: L. RICHTER. HOME.]

Poor Erhard, who at twenty-six ended his life by suicide, was a yet more

delicate and sensitive nature. The marching of Russian troops through

his native town roused him to his first works, and even in these early

military and canteen scenes he shows himself an exceptionally sharp and

positive observer. The costumes, the uniforms, the teams and waggons,

are drawn with decision and accuracy. From Vienna he made walking tours

to the picturesque regions of the Schneeberg, wandered through Salzburg

and Pinzgau, and gazed with wonder at the idyllic loveliness of nature

as she is in these regions, on the cosy rooms of the peasants with their

great tiled stoves and the sun-burnt figures of the country people. He

had a heart for nature, an intimate, poetic, and profound love for what

is humble and familiar--for homely meadows, trees, and streams, for

groves and hedgerows, for quiet gardens and sequestered spots. He

approached everything with observation as direct as a child's. Both

Klein and he endeavoured to grasp a fragment of nature distinctly, and

without any kind of transformation or generalisation; and this fresh,

unvarnished, thoroughly German feeling for nature gives them, rather

than Mengs and Carstens, the right to be counted as ancestors of the

newer German art.

[Illustration: L. RICHTER. THE END OF THE DAY.]

Klein and Erhard having set out in advance, others, such as Haller von

Hallerstein, L. C. Wagner, F. Rechberger, F. Moessmer, K. Wagner, E. A.

Lebschée, and August Geist, each after his own fashion, made little

voyages of discovery into the world of nature belonging to their own

country. But Erhard, who died in 1822, has found his greatest disciple

in a young Dresden master, whose name makes the familiar appeal of an

old lullaby which suddenly strikes the ear amid the bustle of the

world--in _Ludwig Richter_, familiar to all Germans. Richter himself has

designated Chodowiecki, Gessner, and Erhard as those whose contemplative

love of nature guided him to his own path. What Leech, that charming

draughtsman of the child-world, was to the English, Ludwig Richter

became for the Germans. Not that he could be compared with Leech in

artistic qualities. Beside those of the British artist his works are

like the exercises of a gifted amateur: they have a petty correctness

and a _bourgeois_ neatness of line. But Germans are quite willing to

forget the artistic point of view in relation to their Ludwig Richter.

Sunny and childlike as he is, they love him too much to care to see his

artistic failings. Here is really that renowned German "_Gemüth_" of

which others make so great an abuse.

[Illustration: L. RICHTER. SPRING.]

"I am certainly living here in a rather circumscribed fashion, but in a

very cheerful situation outside the town, and I am writing you this

letter (it is Sunday afternoon) in a shady arbour, with a long row of

rose-bushes in bloom before me. Now and then they are ruffled by a

pleasant breeze--which is also the cause of a big blot being on this

sheet, as it blew the page over." This one passage reveals the whole

man. Can one think of Ludwig Richter living in any town except Dresden,

or imagine him except in this dressing-gown, seated on a Sunday

afternoon in his shady arbour with the rose-bushes, and surrounded by

laughing children? That profound domestic sentiment which runs through

his works with a biblical fidelity of heart is reflected in the

homeliness of the artist, who has remained all his life a big,

unsophisticated child; and his autobiography, in its patriarchal

simplicity, is like a refreshing draught from a pure mountain spring.

Richter survived into the present as an original type from a time long

vanished. What old-world figures did he not see around him as a boy,

when he went about, eager for novelty, with his grandfather, the

copperplate printer, who in his leisure hours studied alchemy and the

art of producing gold, and was surrounded by an innumerable quantity of

clocks, ticking, striking, and making cuckoo notes in his dark workroom;

or as he listened to his blind, garrulous grandmother, around whom the

children and old wives of the neighbourhood used to gather to hear her

tales. That was in 1810, and two generations later, as an old man

surrounded by his grandsons, he found once more the old, merry child

life of his own home. And it was once more a fragment of the good old

times, when on Christmas Eve the little band came shouting round the

house of gingerbread from _Hansel and Gretel_ which grandfather had

built out of real gingerbread after his own drawing.

[Illustration: L. RICHTER. AFTER WORK IT'S GOOD TO REST.]

"If my art never entered amongst the lilies and roses on the summit of

Parnassus, it bloomed by the roads and banks, on the hedges and in the

meadows, and travellers resting by the wayside were glad of it, and

little children made wreaths and crowns of it, and the solitary lover of

nature rejoiced in its colour and fragrance, which mounted like a prayer

to Heaven." Richter had the right to inscribe these words in his diary

on his eightieth birthday.

Through his works there echoes a humming and chiming like the joyous cry

of children and the twitter of birds. Even his landscapes are filled

with that blissful and solemn feeling that Sunday and the spring produce

together in a lonely walk over field and meadow. The "_Gemüthlichkeit_,"

the cordiality, of German family-life, with a trait of contemplative

romance, could find such a charming interpreter in none but him, the old

man who went about in his long loose coat and had the face of an

ordinary village schoolmaster. Only he who retained to his old age that

childlike heart--to which the kingdom of heaven is given even in

art--could really know the heart of the child's world, which even at a

later date in Germany was not drawn more simply or more graciously.

His illustrations present an almost exhaustive picture of the life of

the German people at home and in the world, at work and in their

pleasure, in suffering and in joy. He follows it through all grades and

all seasons of the year. Everything is true and genuine, everything

seized from life in its fulness: the child splashing in a tub; the lad

shouting as he catches the first snowflake in his hat; the lovers seated

whispering in their cosy little chamber, or wandering arm in arm on

their "homeward way through the corn" amid the evening landscape touched

with gold; the girl at her spinning-wheel and the hunter in the forest,

the travelling journeyman, the beggar, the well-to-do Philistine. The

scene is the sitting-room or the nursery, the porch twined with vine,

the street with old-fashioned overhanging storeys and turrets, the

forest and the field with splendid glimpses into the hazy distance.

Children are playing round a great tree, labourers are coming back from

the field, or the family is taking its rest in some hour of relaxation.

A peaceful quietude and chaste purity spread over everything. Certainly

Richter's drawing has something pedantic and unemphatic, that weak,

generalising roundness which, beside the sharp, powerful stroke of the

old artists, has the spirit of a drawing-master. But what he has to give

is always influenced by delicate and loving observation, and never

stands in contradiction to truth. He does not give the whole of nature,

but neither does he give what is unnatural. He is one of the first of

Germans whose art did not spring from a negation of reality, produced by

treating it on an arbitrary system, but rested instead upon tender

reverie, transfigured into poetry. When in the fifties he stayed a

summer in pleasant Loschwitz, he wrote in his diary: "O God, how

magnificent is the wide country round, from my little place upon the

hill! So divinely beautiful, and so sensuously beautiful! The deep blue

heaven, the wide green world, the bright and fair May landscape alive

with a thousand voices."

[Illustration: WILHELM BUSCH.]

In all that generation, to whom existence seemed so sad, Ludwig Richter

is one of the few who really felt content with the earth, and held the

life around them to be the best and healthiest material for the artist.

And that is the substance of the plate to which he gave the title "Rules

of Art." A wide landscape stretches away with mighty oaks slanting down,

and a purling spring from which a young girl is drawing water, whilst a

high-road, enlivened by travellers young and old, runs over hill and

dale into the sunny distance. In the midst of this free rejoicing world

the artist is seated with his pencil. And above stands the motto written

by Richter's hand--

"Und die Sonne Homer's, siehe sie lächelt auch uns."

By the success of Richter certain disciples were inspired to tread the

same ground, although none of them equalled him in his charming human

qualities. And least of all _Oskar Pletsch_, whose self-sufficient smile

is soon recognised in all its emptiness. Everything which in Richter was

genuine and original is in him flat, laboured, and prearranged. His

landscapes, which in part are very pretty, are derived from R. Schuster;

what seems good in the children is Richter's property, and what Pletsch

contributed is the conventionality. _Albert Hendschel_ also stood on

Richter's shoulders, but his popularity is more justifiable. Even in

these days one takes pleasure in his sketch-books, in which he

immortalised the joy and sorrow of youth in such a delicious way.

[Illustration: _Braun, Munich._

OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.

RETHEL.]

_Eugen Neureuther_ worked in Munich, and as an etcher revelled in the

charming play of arabesques and ornamental borders, and told of pleasant

little scenes from the life of the Bavarian people in his pretty peasant

quatrains.

[Illustration: _Braun, Munich._

OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.

GABRIEL MAX.]

The rise of caricature in Germany dates from the year 1848. Though there

are extant from the first third of the century no more than a few

topical papers of no artistic importance, periodical publications, which

soon brought a large number of vigorous caricaturists into notice, began

to appear from that time, owing to the political agitations of the

period. _Kladderadatsch_ was brought out in Berlin, and _Fliegende

Blätter_ was founded in Munich, and side by side with it _Münchener

Bilderbogen_. But later generations will be referred _par excellence_ to

_Fliegende Blätter_ for a picture of German life in the nineteenth

century. What the painters of those years forgot to transmit is here

stored up: a history of German manners which could not imaginably be

more exact or more exhaustive. From the very first day it united on its

staff of collaborators almost all the most important names in their own

peculiar branch. Schwind, Spitzweg, that genial humorist, and many

others whom the German people will not forget, won their spurs here, and

were inexhaustible in pretty theatre scenes, satires on German and

Italian singing, memorial sketches of Fanny Elsler, of the inventor of

the dress coat, etc., which enlivened the whole civilized world at that

time. This elder generation of draughtsmen on _Fliegende Blätter_ were,

indeed, not free from the guilt of producing stereotyped figures. The

travelling Englishman, the Polish Jew, the counter-jumper, the young

painter, the rich boor, the stepmother, the housemaid, and the nervous

countess are everywhere the same in the first volumes. In caricature,

just as in "great art," they still worked a little in accordance with

rules and conventions. To observe life with an objective unprejudiced

glance, and to hold it fast in all its palpitating movement, was

reserved for men of later date.

[Illustration: _Braun, Munich._

OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.

HANS MAKART.]

[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ ADOLF OBERLÄNDER.]

Two of the greatest humorists of the world in illustrative art, _Wilhelm

Busch_ and _Adolf Oberländer_, stand at the head of those who ushered in

the flourishing period of German caricature. They are masters, and take

in with their glance the entire social world of our time, and in their

brilliant prints they have made a history of civilisation for the epoch

which will be more vivid and instructive for posterity than the most

voluminous works of the greatest historians. Their heads are known by

Lenbach's pictures. One has an exceptionally clever, expressive

countenance--a thorough painter's head. The humorist may be recognised

by the curious narrowing of one eye, the well-known eye of the humorist

that sees everything, proves everything, and holds fast every absurdity

in the gestures, every eccentricity in the bearing of his neighbour.

That is Wilhelm Busch.

[Illustration: _Braun, Munich._

OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.

GENELLI.]

[Illustration: _Braun, Munich._

OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.

ALMA TADEMA.]

In the large orbs of the other--orbs which seem to grow strangely wide

by long gazing as at some fixed object--there is no smile of deliberate

mischief, and it is not easy to associate the name of Oberländer with

this Saturnian round face, with its curiously timid glance. One is

reminded of the definition of humour as "smiling amid tears."

Even in those days when he came every year to Munich and painted in

Lenbach's studio, Busch was a shy and moody man, who thawed only in the

narrowest circle of his friends: now he has buried himself in a

market-town in the province of Hanover, in Wiedensahl, which, according

to Ritter's _Gazetteer_, numbers eight hundred and twenty-eight

inhabitants. He lives in the house of his brother-in-law, the clergyman

of the parish, and gives himself up to the culture of bees. His laughter

has fallen silent, and it is only a journal on bees that now receives

contributions from his hand. But what works this hermit of Wiedensahl

produced in the days when he migrated from Düsseldorf and Antwerp to

Munich, and began in 1859 his series of sketches for _Fliegende

Blätter_! The first were stiff and clumsy, the text in prose and not

particularly witty. But the earliest work with a versified text, _Der

Bauer und der Windmüller_, contains in the germ all the qualities which

later found such brilliant expression in _Max und Moritz_, in _Der

Heilige Antonius_, _Die Fromme Helene_, and _Die Erlebnisse Knopps,_

_des Junggesellen_, and made Busch's works an inexhaustible fountain of

mirth and enjoyment.

Busch unites an uncommonly sharp eye with a marvellously flexible hand.

Wild as his subjects generally are, he solves the greatest difficulties

as easily as though they were child's play. His heroes appear in

situations of the most urgent kind, which place their bodily parts in

violent and exceedingly uncomfortable positions: they thrash others or

get thrashed themselves, they stumble or fall. And in what a masterly

way are all these anomalies seized, the boldest foreshortenings and the

most flying movements! Untrained eyes see only a scrawl, but for those

who know how to look, a drawing by Busch is life itself, freed from all

unnecessary detail, and marked down in its great characteristic lines.

And amid all this simplification, what knowledge there is under the

guise of carelessness, and what fine calculation! Busch is at once

simpler and more inventive than the English. With a maze of flourishes

run half-mad, and a few points and blotches, he forms a sparkling

picture. With the fewest possible means he hits the essential point, and

for that reason he is justly called by Grand Cartaret the classic of

caricaturists, _le roi de la charge et la bouffonnerie_.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

DEBUCOURT. IN THE KITCHEN.]

_Oberländer_, without whom it would be impossible to imagine _Fliegende

Blätter_, has not fallen silent. He works on, "fresh and splendid as on

the first day." A gifted nature like Busch, he possesses, at the same

time, that fertility of which Dürer said: "A good painter is inwardly

complete and opulent, and were it possible for him to live eternally,

then by virtue of those inward ideas of which Plato writes he would be

always able to pour something new into his works." It is now thirty

years ago that he began his labours for _Fliegende Blätter_, and since

that time some drawing of his, which has filled every one with delight,

has appeared almost every week. Kant said that Providence has given men

three things to console them amid the miseries of life--hope, sleep, and

laughter. If he is right, Oberländer is amongst the greatest benefactors

of mankind. Every one of his new sketches maintains the old precious

qualities. It might be said that, by the side of the comedian Busch,

Oberländer seems a serious psychologist. Wilhelm Busch lays his whole

emphasis on the comical effects of simplicity; he knows how to reduce an

object in a masterly fashion to its elemental lines, which are comic in

themselves by their epigrammatic pregnancy. He calls forth peals of

laughter by the farcical spirit of his inventions and the boldness with

which he renders his characters absurd. He is also the author of his own

letterpress. His drawings are unimaginable without the verse, without

the finely calculated and dramatic succession of situations growing to a

catastrophe. Oberländer gets his effect purely by means of the pictorial

elements in his representation, and attains a comical result, neither by

the distorted exaggeration of what is on the face of the matter

ridiculous, nor by an elementary simplification, but by a refined

sharpening of character. It seems uncanny that a man should have such

eyes in his head; there is something almost visionary in the way he

picks out of everything the determining feature of its being. And whilst

he faintly exaggerates what is characteristic and renders it distinct,

his picture is given a force and power of conviction to which no

previous caricaturist has attained, with so much discretion at the same

time. No one has attained the drollness of Oberländer's people, animals,

and plants. He draws _à la_ Max, _à la_ Makart, Rethel, Genelli, or

Piloty, hunts in the desert or theatrical representations, Renaissance

architecture run mad or the most modern European mashers. He is as much

at home in the Cameroons as in Munich, and in transferring the droll

scenes of human life to the animal world he is a classic. He sports with

hens, herrings, dogs, ducks, ravens, bears, and elephants as Hokusai

does with his frogs. Beside such animals all the Reinecke series of

Wilhelm Kaulbach look like "drawings from the copybook of little

Moritz." And landscapes which in their tender intimacy of feeling seem

like anticipations of Cazin sometimes form the background of these

creatures. One can scarcely err in supposing that posterity will place

certain plates from the work of this quiet, amiable man beside the best

which the history of drawing has anywhere to show.

[Illustration: DEBUCOURT. THE PROMENADE.]

The _Charivari_ takes its place with _Punch_ and _Fliegende Blätter_.

In the land of Rabelais also caricature has flourished since the opening

of the century, in spite of official masters who reproached her with

desecrating the sacred temple of art, and in spite of the gendarmes who

put her in gaol. Here, too, it was the draughtsmen who first broke with

æsthetic prejudices, and saw the laughing and the weeping dramas of life

with an unprejudiced glance.

Debucourt and Carle Vernet, the pair who made their appearance

immediately after the storms of the Revolution, are alike able and

charming artists, who depict the pleasures of the salon in a graceful

style; and they rival the great satirists on the other side of the

Channel in the incisiveness of their drawing, and frequently even

surpass them by the added charm of colour.

[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._

MONNIER. A CHALK DRAWING.]

_Carle Vernet_, originally an historical painter, remembered that he had

married the daughter of the younger Moreau, and set himself to portray

the doings of the _jeunesse dorée_ of the end of the eighteenth century

in his _incroyables_ and his _merveilleuses_. Crazy, eccentric, and

superstitious, he divided his time afterwards between women and his

club-fellows, horses and dogs. He survives in the history of art as the

chronicler of sport, hunting, racing, and drawing-room and café scenes.

_Louis Philibert Debucourt_ was a pupil of Vien, and had painted _genre_

pictures in the spirit of Greuze before he turned in 1785 to colour

engraving. In this year appeared the pretty "Menuet de la Mariée," with

the peasant couples dancing, and the dainty châtelaine who laughingly

opens the ball with the young husband. After that he had found his

specialty, and in the last decade of the eighteenth century he produced

the finest of his colour engravings. In 1792 there is the wonderful

promenade in the gallery of the Palais Royal, with its swarming crowd of

young officers, priests, students, shop-girls, and _cocottes_; in 1797

"Grandmother's Birthday," "Friday Forenoon at the Parisian Bourse," and

many others. The effects of technique which he achieved by means of

colour engraving are surprising. A freshness like that of water colour

lies on these yellow straw hats, lightly rouged cheeks, and rosy

shoulders. To white silk cloaks trimmed with fur he gives the

iridescence of a robe by Netscher. If there survived nothing except

Debucourt from the whole art of the eighteenth century, he would alone

suffice to give an idea of the entire spirit of the time. Only one note

would be wanting, the familiar simplicity of Chardin. The smiling grace

of Greuze, the elegance of Watteau, and the sensuousness of Boucher--he

has them all, although they are weakened in him, and precisely by his

affectation is he the true child of his epoch. The crowd which is

promenading beneath the trees of the Palais Royal in 1792 is no longer

the same which fills the drawing-rooms of Versailles and Petit Trianon

in the pages of Cochin. The faces are coarser and more plebeian. Red

waistcoats with _breloques_ as large as fists, and stout canes with

great gold tops, make the costume of the men loud and ostentatious,

while eccentric hats, broad sashes, and high coiffures bedizen the

ladies more than is consistent with elegance. At the same time,

Debucourt gives this democracy an aristocratic bearing. His prostitutes

look like duchesses. His art is an attenuated echo of the _rococo_

period. In him the _décadence_ is embodied, and all the grace and

elegance of the century is once more united, although it has become more

_bourgeois_.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

MONNIER. JOSEPH PROUDHOMME.]

The Empire again was less favourable to caricature. Not that there was

any want of material, but the censorship kept a strict watch over the

welfare of France. Besides, the artists who made their appearance after

David lived on Olympus, and would have nothing to do with the common

things of life. Neither draughtsmen nor engravers could effect anything

so long as they saw themselves overlooked by a Greek or Roman phantom as

they bent over their paper or their plate of copper, and felt it their

duty to suggest the stiff lines of antique statues beneath the folds of

modern costume.

[Illustration: _L'Art._ HONORÉ DAUMIER.]

_Bosio_ was the genuine product of this style. Every one of his pictures

has become tedious, because of a spurious classicism to which he adhered

with inflexible consistency. He cannot draw a grisette without seeing

her with David's eyes. It deprives his figures of truth and interest.

Something of the correctness of a schoolmistress is peculiar to them.

His grace is too classic, his merriment too well-bred, and everything in

them too carefully arranged to give the idea of scenes rapidly depicted

from life. Beauty of line is offered in place of spontaneity of

observation, and even the character of the drawing is lost in a pedantic

elegance which envelopes everything with the uniformly graceful veil of

an insipidly fluent outline.

As soon as Romanticism had broken with the classic system, certain great

draughtsmen, who laid a bold hand on modern life without being shackled

by æsthetic formulæ, came to the front in France. _Henri Monnier_, the

eldest of them, was born a year after the proclamation of the Empire.

Cloaks, plumes, and sabretasches were the first impressions of his

youth; he saw the return of triumphant armies and heard the fanfare of

victorious trumpets. The Old Guard remained his ideal, the inglorious

kingship of the Restoration his abhorrence. He was a supernumerary clerk

in the Department of Justice when in 1828 his first brochure, _Moeurs

administratives dessinées d'aprés nature par Henri Monnier_, disclosed

to his superiors that the eyes of this poor young man in the service of

the Ministry had seen more than they should have done. Dismissed from

his post, he was obliged to support himself by his pencil, and became

the chronicler of the epoch. In Monnier's prints breathes the happy

Paris of the good old times, a Paris which in these days scarcely exists

even in the provinces. His "Joseph Proudhomme," from his shoe-buckles to

his stand-up collar, from his white cravat to his blue spectacles, is as

immortal as _Eisele und Beisele_, _Schulze und Müller_, or Molière's

_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_. Monnier himself is his own Proudhomme. He is

the Philistine in Paris, enjoying little Parisian idylls with a

_bourgeois_ complacency. With him there is no distinction between

beautiful and ugly; he finds that everything in nature can be turned to

account. How admirably the different worlds of Parisian society are

discriminated in his _Quartiers de Paris_! How finely he has portrayed

the grisette of the period, with her following of young tradesmen and

poor students! As yet she has not blossomed into the fine lady, the

luxurious _blasée_ woman of the next generation. She is still the

bashful _modiste_ or dressmaker's apprentice whose outings in the

country are described by Paul de Kock, a pretty child in a short skirt

who lives in an attic and dresses up only when she goes to the theatre

or into the country on a Sunday. Monnier gives her an air of

good-nature, something delightfully childlike. In the society of her

adorers she is content with the cheapest pleasures, drinks cider and

eats cakes, rides on a donkey or breakfasts amid the trees, and hardly

coquets at all when a fat old gentleman follows her on the boulevards.

These innocent flirtations remind one as little of the more recent

_lorettes_ of Gavarni as these in their turn anticipate the drunken

street-walkers of Rops.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

DAUMIER. THE CONNOISSEURS.]

Under Louis Philippe began the true modern period of French caricature,

the flourishing time when really great artists devoted themselves to it.

It never raised its head more proudly than under the _bourgeois_ king,

whose onion head always served the relentless Philippon as a target for

his wit. It was never armed in more formidable fashion; it never dealt

more terrible blows. Charles Philippon's famous journal _La Caricature_

was the most powerful lever that the republicans used against the "July

government"; it was equally feared by the Ministry, the _bourgeoisie_,

and the throne. When the _Charivari_ followed _La Caricature_ in 1832,

political cartoons began to give way to the simple portraiture of

manners in French life. The powder made for heavy guns exploded in a

facile play of fireworks improvised for the occasion.

French society in the nineteenth century has to thank principally

_Daumier_ and _Gavarni_ for being brought gradually within the sphere of

artistic representation. These men are usually called caricaturists, yet

they were in reality the great historians of their age. Through long

years they laboured every week and almost every day at their great

history, which embraced thousands of chapters--at a true zoology of the

human species; and their work, drawn upon stone in black and white,

proves them not merely genuine historians, but really eminent artists

who merit a place beside the greatest.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

DAUMIER. THE MOUNTEBANKS.

(_By permission of M. Eugène Montrosier, the owner of the picture._)]

When in his young days Daubigny trod the pavement of the Sistine Chapel

in Rome, he is said to have exclaimed in astonishment, "That looks as if

it had been done by Daumier!" and from that time Daumier was aptly

called the Michael Angelo of caricature. Even when he is laughing there

is a Florentine inspiration of the terrible in his style, a grotesque

magnificence, a might suggestive of Buonarotti. In the period before

1848 he dealt the constitutional monarchy crushing blows by his

drawings. "Le Ventre legislatif" marks the furthest point to which

political caricature ever ventured in France. But when he put politics

on one side and set himself free from Philippon, this same man made the

most wonderful drawings from life. His "Robert Macaire" giving

instructions to his clerk as a tradesman, sending his patients

exorbitant bills as doctor to the poor, lording it over the bourse as

banker, taking bribes as juryman, and fleecing a peasant as land-agent,

is the incarnation of the _bourgeois_ monarchy, a splendid criticism on

the money-grubbing century. Politicians, officials, artists, actors,

honest citizens, old-clothes-mongers, newspaper-boys, impecunious

painters, the most various and the basest creatures are treated by his

pencil, and appear on pages which are often terrible in their depth and

truthfulness of observation. The period of Louis Philippe is accurately

portrayed in these prints, every one of which belongs to the great

volume of the human tragicomedy. In his "Émotions parisiennes" and

"Bohémiens de Paris" he deals with misfortune, hunger, the impudence of

vice, and the horror of misery. His "Histoire ancienne" ridiculed the

absurdity of Classicism _à la_ David at a time when it was still

regarded as high treason to touch this sacred fane. These modern figures

with the classical pose, which to some extent parodied David's pictures,

were probably what first brought his contemporaries to a sense of the

stiffness and falsity of the whole movement; and at a later period

Offenbach also contributed his best ideas with much the same result.

Moreover, Daumier was a landscape-painter of the first order. No one has

more successfully rendered the appearance of bridges and houses, of

quays and streets under a downpour, of nature enfeebled as it is in the

precincts of Paris. He was an instantaneous photographer without a

rival, a physiognomist such as Breughel was in the sixteenth century,

Jan Steen and Brouwer in the seventeenth, and Chodowiecki in the

eighteenth, with the difference that his drawing was as broad and

powerful as Chodowiecki's was delicate and refined. This inborn force of

line, suggestive of Jordaens, places his sketches as high, considered as

works of art, as they are invaluable as historical documents. The

treatment is so summary, the outline so simplified, the pantomime,

gesticulation, and pose always so expressive; and Daumier's influence on

several artists is beyond doubt. Millet, the great painter of peasants,

owes much to the draughtsman of the _bourgeois_. Precisely what

constitutes his "style," the great line, the simplification, the

intelligent abstention from anecdotic trifles, are things which he

learnt from Daumier.

During the years when he drew for the _Charivari_, _Gavarni_ was the

exact opposite of Daumier. In the one was a forceful strength, in the

other a refined grace; in the one brusque and savage observation and

almost menacing sarcasm, in the other the wayward mood of the butterfly

flitting lightly from flower to flower. Daumier might be compared with

Rabelais; Gavarni, the _spirituel_ journalist of the _grand monde_ and

the _demi-monde_, the draughtsman of elegance and of _roués_ and

_lorettes_, might be compared with Molière. Born of poor parentage in

Paris in 1801, and in his youth a mechanician, he supported himself from

the year 1835 by fashion prints and costume drawings. He undertook the

conduct of a fashion journal, _Les Gens du Monde_, and began it with a

series of drawings from the life of the _jeunesse dorée_: _les

Lorettes_, _les Actrices_, _les Fashionables_, _les Artistes_, _les

Étudiants de Paris_, _les Bals masqués_, _les Souvenirs du Carnaval_,

_la Vie des Jeunes Hommes_. A new world was here revealed with bold

traits. The women of Daumier are good, fat mothers, always busy,

quick-witted, and of an enviable constitution; women who are careful in

the management of their household, and who go to market and take their

husband's place at his office when necessary. In Gavarni the women are

piquant and given to pouting, draped in silk and enveloped in soft

velvet mantles. They are fond of dining in the _cabinet particulier_,

and of scratching the name of their lover, for the time being, upon

crystal mirrors.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

DAUMIER. IN THE ASSIZE COURT.]

[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._

DAUMIER. "LA VOILÀ ... MA MAISON DE CAMPAGNE."]

Gavarni was the first who seized the worldly side of modern life; he

portrayed elegant figures full of _chic_, and gave them a garb which

fitted them exactly. In his own dress he had a taste for what was

dandified, and he plunged gaily into the enjoyment of the Parisian life

which eddied around in a whirl of pleasure. The present generation feels

that the air in such old journals of fashion is heavy. In every work of

art there is, in addition to what endures, a fine perfume that

evaporates after a certain number of years, and is no longer perceptible

to those who come afterwards. What is fresh and modern to-day looks

to-morrow like the dried flowers which the botanist keeps in a

herbarium. And those who draw the fashions of their age are specially

liable to this swift decay. Thus many of Gavarni's lithographs have the

effect of pallid pictures of a vanished world. But the generation of

1830 honoured in him the same _charmeur_, the same master of enamoured

grace, which that of 1730 had done in Watteau. He was sought after as an

inventor of fashions, whom the tailor Humann, the Worth of the "July

Monarchy," regarded as his rival. He was the discoverer of all the fairy

costumes which formed the chief attraction at masquerades and theatres,

the delicate _gourmet_ of the eternal feminine; and having dangled much

after women, he knew how to render the wave of a petticoat, the

seductive charm of a well-proportioned leg, and the coquettishness of a

new _coiffure_ with the most familiar connoisseurship. He has been

called the Balzac of draughtsmen. And the sentences at the bottom of his

sketches, for which he is also responsible, are as audacious as the

pictures themselves. Thus, when the young exquisite in the series "La

Vie des Jeunes Hommes" stands with his companion before a skeleton in

the anthropological museum, the little woman opines with a shudder,

"When one thinks that this is a man, and that women love _that_"!

[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._

DAUMIER. MENELAUS THE VICTOR.]

But that is only one side of the sphinx. He is only half known when one

thinks only of the draughtsman of ladies' fashions who celebrated the

free and easy graces of the _demi-monde_ and the wild licence of the

carnival. At bottom Gavarni was not a frivolous butterfly, but an artist

of a strangely sombre imagination, a profound and melancholy philosopher

who had a prescience of all the mysteries of life. All the mighty

problems which the century produced danced before his spirit like

spectral notes of interrogation.

The transition was made when, as an older man, he depicted the cold,

sober wakening that follows the wild night. _Constantin Guys_ had

already worked on these lines. He was an unfortunate and ailing man, who

passed his existence, like Verlaine, in hospital, and died in an

almshouse. Guys has not left much behind him, but in that little he

shows himself the true forerunner of the moderns, and it is not a mere

chance that Baudelaire, the ancestor of the _décadence_, established

Guys' memory. These women who wander aimlessly about the streets with

weary movements and heavy eyes deadened with absinthe, and who flit

through the ball-room like bats, have nothing of the innocent charm of

Monnier's grisettes. They are the uncanny harbingers of death, the

demoniacal brides of Satan. Guys exercised on Gavarni an influence which

brought into being his _Invalides du sentiment_, his _Lorettes

vieilles_, and his _Fourberies de femmes_. "The pleasure of all

creatures is mingled with bitterness." The frivolous worldling became a

misanthrope from whom no secret of the foul city was hidden; a pessimist

who had begun to recognise the human brute, the swamp-flower of

over-civilisation, the "bitter fruit which is inwardly full of ashes,"

in the queen of the drawing-room as in the prostitute of the gutter.

Henceforth he only recognises a love whose pleasures are to be reckoned

amongst the horrors of death. His works could be shown to no lady, and

yet they are in no sense frivolous: they are terrible and puritanic.

If Daumier by preference showed mastery in his men, Gavarni showed it in

his women as no other has done. He is not the powerful draughtsman that

Daumier is; he has not the feeling for large movement, but with what

terrible directness he analyses faces! He has followed woman through all

seasons of life and in every grade, from youth to decay, and from

brilliant wealth to filthy misery, and he has written the story of the

_lorette_ in monumental strophes: café chantant, villa in the Champs

Elysées, equipage, grooms, Bois de Boulogne, procuress, garret, and

radish-woman, that final incarnation which Victor Hugo called the

sentence of judgment.

[Illustration: GAVARNI.]

And Gavarni went further on this road. His glance became sharper and

sharper, and the seriousness of meditation subdued his merriment; he

came to the study of his age with the relentless knife of a

vivisectionist. Fate had taught him the meaning of the struggle for

existence. A journal he had founded in the thirties overwhelmed him with

debts. In 1835 he sat in the prison of Clichy, and from that time he

meditated on the miserable, tattered creatures whom he saw around him,

with other eyes. He studied the toiling masses, and roamed about in

slums and wine-caves amongst pickpockets and bullies. And what Paris had

not yet revealed to him, he learnt in 1849 in London. Even there he was

not the first-comer. Géricault, who as early as 1821 dived into the

misery of the vast city, and brought out a series of lithographs, showed

him the way. Beggars cowering half dead with exhaustion at a baker's

door, ragged pipers slouching round deserted quarters of the town, poor

crippled women wheeled in barrows by hollow-eyed men past splendid

mansions and surrounded by the throng of brilliant equipages--these are

some of the scenes which he brought home with him from London. But

Gavarni excels him in trenchant incisiveness. "What is to be seen in

London gratis," runs the heading of a series of sketches in which he

conjures up on paper, in such a terrible manner, the new horrors of this

new period: the starvation, the want, and the measureless suffering that

hides itself with chattering teeth in the dens of the great city. He

went through Whitechapel from end to end, and studied its drunkenness

and its vice. How much more forcible are his beggars than those of

Callot! The grand series of "Thomas Vireloque" is a dance of death in

life; and in it are stated all the problems which have since disturbed

our epoch. By this work Gavarni has come down to us as a contemporary,

and by it he has become a pioneer. The enigmatical figure of "Thomas

Vireloque" starts up in these times, following step by step in the path

of his prototype: he is the philosopher of the back streets, the ragged

scoundrel with dynamite in his pocket, the incarnation of the _bête

humaine_, of human misery and human vice. Here Gavarni stands far above

Hogarth and far above Callot. The ideas on social politics of the first

half of the century are concentrated in "Thomas Vireloque."

[Illustration: _Baschet._

GAVARNI. THOMAS VIRELOQUE.]

Of course the assumption of government by Napoleon III marked a new

phase in French caricature. It became more mundane and more highly

civilised. All the piquancy and brilliance, waywardness and corruption,

looseness and amenity, mirth and affectation of this refined city life,

which in those days threw its dazzling splendour over all Europe, found

intelligent and subtle interpreters in the young generation of

draughtsmen. The _Journal pour rire_ comes under consideration as the

leading paper. It was founded in 1848, and in 1856 assumed the title of

_Journal amusant_, under which it is known at the present day.

[Illustration: _Hetzel, Paris._

GAVARNI. FOURBERIES DE FEMMES.

_Au premier Mosieu._--"Attendez-moi ce soir, de quatre à cinq heures,

quai de l'Horloge du Palais.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE."

_Au deuxième Mosieu._--"Ce soir, quai des Lunettes, entre quatre et

cinq heures.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE."

_Au troisième Mosieu._--"Quai des Morfondus, ce soir, de quatre heures

à cinq.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE."

_À un quatrième Mosieu._--"Je t'attends ce soir, à quatre

heures.--_Ton_ AUGUSTINE."]

_Gustave Doré_, to the lessening of his importance, moved on this ground

only in his earliest period. He was barely sixteen and still at school

in his native town Burg, in Alsace, when he made an agreement with

Philippon, who engaged him for three years on the _Journal pour rire_.

His first drawings date from 1844: "Les animaux socialistes," which were

very suggestive of Grandville, and "Désagréments d'un voyage

d'agrément"--something like the German _Herr und Frau Buchholz in der

Schweiz_--which made a considerable sensation by their grotesque wit. In

his series "Les différents publics de Paris" and "La Ménagerie

Parisienne" he represented with an incisive pencil the opera, the

_Théâtre des Italiens_, the circus, the _Odéon_ and the _Jardin des

Plantes_. But since that time the laurels of historical painting have

given him no rest. He turned away from his own age as well as from

caricature, and made excursions into all zones and all periods. He

visited the Inferno with Dante, lingered in Palestine with the

patriarchs of the Old Testament, and ran through the world of wonders

with Perrault. The facility of his invention was astonishing, and so too

was the aptness with which he seized for illustration on the most vivid

scenes from all authors. But he has too much Classicism to be

captivating for very long. His compositions dazzle by an appearance of

the grand style, but attain only an outward and scenical effect. His

figures are academic variations of types originally established by the

Greeks and the Cinquescentisti. He forced his talent when he soared into

regions where he could not stand without the support of his

predecessors. Even in his "Don Quixote" the figures lose in character

the larger they become. Everything in Doré is calligraphic, judicious,

without individuality, without movement and life, composed in accordance

with known rules. There is a touch of Wiertz in him, both in his

imagination and in his design, and his youthful works, such as the

"Swiss Journey," in which he merely drew from observation without

pretensions to style, will probably last the longest.

In broad lithographs and charming woodcuts, _Cham_ has been the most

exhaustive in writing up the diary of modern Parisian life during the

period 1848-78. The celebrated caricaturist--he has been called the most

brilliant man in France under Napoleon III--had worked in the studio of

Delaroche at the same time as Jean François Millet. After 1842 he came

forward as Cham (his proper name was Count Amadée de Noë) with drawings

which soon made him the artist most in demand on the staff of the

_Charivari_. Neither so profound nor so serious as Gavarni, he has a

constant sparkle of vivacity, and is a draughtsman of wonderful _verve_.

In his reviews of the month and of the year, everything which interested

Paris in the provinces of invention and fashion, art and literature,

science and the theatre, passes before us in turn: the omnibuses with

their high imperials, table-turning and spirit-rapping, the opening of

the _Grands Magasins du Louvre_, Madame Ristori, the completion of the

Suez Canal, the first newspaper kiosks, New Year's Day in Paris, the

invention of ironclads, the tunnelling of Mont Cenis, Gounod's _Faust_,

Patti and Nilsson, the strike of the tailors and hat-makers, jockeys and

racing. Everything that excited public attention had a close observer

in Cham. His caricatures of the works of art in the Salon were full of

spirit, and the International Exhibition of 1867 found in him its

classic chronicler. Here all the mysterious Paris of the third Napoleon

lives once more. Emperors and kings file past, the band of Strauss

plays, gipsies are dancing, equipages roll by, and every one lives,

loves, flirts, squanders money, and whirls round in a maëlstrom. But the

end of the exhibition betokened the end of all that splendour. In Cham's

plates which came next one feels that there is thunder in the air.

Neither fashions nor theatres, neither women nor pleasure, could prevent

politics from predominating more and more: the fall of Napoleon was

drawing near.

[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._

GAVARNI. PHÈDRE AT THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS.]

[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._

GAVARNI. "CE QUI ME MANQUE À MOI? UNE 'TITE MÈRE COMME ÇA, QU'AURAIT

SOIN DE MON LINGE."]

There was a greater division of labour amongst those who followed Cham,

since one chose "little women" as a speciality, another the theatre,

and another high-life. Assisted by photography, _Nadar_ turned again to

portraiture, which had been neglected since Daumier, and enjoyed a great

success with his series "Les Contemporains de Nadar." _Marcellin_ is the

first who spread over his sketches from the world of fashions and the

theatre all the _chic_ and fashionable glitter which lives in the novels

of those years. He is the chronicler of the great world, of balls and

_soirées_; he shows the opera and the _Théâtre des Italiens_, tells of

hunting and racing, attends the drives in the Corso, and at the call of

fashion promptly deserts the stones of Paris to look about him in

châteaux and country-houses, seaside haunts in France, and the little

watering-places of Germany, where the gaming-tables formed at that time

the rendezvous of well-bred Paris. Baden-Baden, where all the lions of

the day, the politicians and the artists and all the beauties of the

Paris salons, met together in July, offered the draughtsman a specially

wide field for studies of fashion and _chic_. Here began the series

"Histoires des variations de la mode depuis le XVI siècle jusqu'à nos

jours." In a place where all classes of society, the great world and the

_demi-monde_, came into contact, Marcellin could not avoid the latter,

but even when he verged on this province he always knew how to maintain

a correct and distinguished bearing. He was peculiarly the draughtsman

of "society," of that brilliant, pleasure-loving, tainted, and yet

refined society of the Second Empire which turned Paris into a great

ball-room.

[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._

GUYS. STUDY OF A WOMAN.]

_Randon_ is as plebeian as Marcellin is aristocratic. His speciality is

the stupid recruit who is marched through the streets with his "squad,"

or the retired tradesman of small means, as Daudet has hit him off in M.

Chèbe, the old gentleman seated on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne: "Let

the little ones come to me with their nurses." His province includes

everything that has nothing to do with _chic_. The whole life of the

Parisian people, the horse-fairs, the races at Poissy, and all the more

important occurrences by which the appearance of the city has been

transformed, may be followed in his drawings. When he travelled he did

not go to watering-places, but to the provinces, to Cherbourg and

Toulon, or to the manufacturing towns of Belgium and England, where he

observed life at the railway stations and the custom-house, at markets

and in barracks, at seaports and upon the street. Goods that are being

piled together, sacks that are being hoisted, ships being brought to

anchor, storehouses, wharfs, and docks--everywhere there is as much life

in his sketches as in a busy beehive. Nature is a great manufactory, and

man a living machine. The world is like an ant-hill, the dwelling of

curious insects furnished with teeth, feelers, indefatigable feet, and

marvellous organs proper for digging, sawing, building, and all things

possible, but furnished also with an incessant hunger.

Soon afterwards there came _Hadol_, who made his début in 1855, with

pictures of the fashions; _Stop_, who specially represented the

provinces and Italy; _Draner_, who occupied himself with the Parisian

ballet and designed charming military uniforms for little dancing girls.

_Léonce Petit_ drew peasants and sketched the charms of the country in a

simple, familiar fashion--the mortal tedium of little towns, poor

villages, and primitive inns, the gossip of village beldames before the

house-door, the pompous dignity of village magistrates or of the head of

the fire brigade. He is specially noteworthy as a landscape artist. The

trees on the straight, monotonous road rise softly and delicately into

the air, and the sleepy sameness of tortuous village streets is

pregnantly rendered by a few strokes of the pencil. The land is like a

great kitchen garden. The fields and the arable ground with their dusty,

meagre soil chant a mighty song of hard labour, of the earnest, toilsome

existence of the peasant folk.

[Illustration: _Journal Amusant._

GRÉVIN. NOS PARISIENNES.

"Tiens! ne me parle pas de lui, je ne peux pas le souffrir, même en

peinture!"

"Cependant, s'il t'offrait de t'epouser?"

"Ça, c'est autre chose."]

_Andrieux_ and _Morland_ discovered the _femme entretenue_, though

afterwards her best known delineator was _Grévin_, an able, original,

facile, and piquant draughtsman, whom some--exaggerating beyond a

doubt--called the direct successor of Gavarni. Grévin's women are a

little monotonous, with their ringleted chignons, their expressionless

eyes which try to look big, their perverse little noses, their defiant,

pouting lips, and the cheap toilettes which they wear with so much

_chic_. But they too have gone to their rest with the grisettes of

Monnier and Gavarni, and have left the field to the women of Mars and

Forain. In these days Grévin's work seems old-fashioned, since it is no

longer modern and not yet historical; nevertheless it marks an epoch,

like that of Gavarni. The _bals publics_, the _bals de l'Opéra_, those

of the _Jardin Mabille_, the _Closerie des Lilas_, the races, the

promenades in the _Bois de Vincennes_, the seaside resorts, all places

where the _demi-monde_ pitched its tent in the time of Napoleon III,

were also the home of the artist. "How they love in Paris" and "Winter

in Paris" were his earliest series. His finest and greatest drawings,

the scenes from the Parisian hotels and "The English in Paris," appeared

in 1867, the year of the Exhibition. His later series, published as

albums--"Les filles d'Ève," "Le monde amusant," "Fantaisies

parisiennes," "Paris vicieux," "La Chaîne des Dames"--are a song of

songs upon the refinements of life.

It does not lie within the plan of this book to follow the history of

drawing any further. Our intention was merely to show that painting had

to follow the path trodden by Rowlandson and Cruikshank, Erhard and

Richter, Daumier and Gavarni, if it was to be art of the nineteenth

century, and not to remain for ever dependent on the old masters.

Absolute beauty is not good food for art; to be strong it must be

nourished on the ideas of the century. When the world had ceased to draw

inspiration from the masterpieces of the past merely with the object of

depicting by their aid scenes out of long-buried epochs, there was for

the first time a prospect that mere discipleship would be overcome, and

that a new and original painting would be developed through the fresh

and independent study of nature. The passionate craving of the age had

to be this: to feel at home on the earth, in this long-neglected world

of reality, which hides the unsuspected treasure of vivid works of art.

The rising sun is just as beautiful now as on the first day, the streams

flow, the meadows grow green, the vibrating passions are at war now as

in other times, the immortal heart of nature still beats beneath its

rough covering, and its pulsation finds an echo in the heart of man. It

was necessary to descend from ideals to existing fact, and the world had

to be once more discovered by painters as in the days of the first

Renaissance. The question was how by the aid of all the devices of

colour to represent the multifarious forms of human activity: the phases

and conditions of life, fashion as well as misery, work and pleasure,

the drawing-room and the street, the teeming activity of towns and the

quiet labour of peasants. The essential thing was to write the entire

natural history of the age. And this way, the way from museums to

nature, and from the past to the world of living men, was shown by the

English to the French and German painters.

[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._

ROMNEY. SERENA.]