THE MILITARY PICTURE
While English painting from the days of Hogarth and Wilkie embraced
rustic and middle-class life, the victory of modernity on the Continent
could only be accomplished slowly and by degrees. The question of
costume played an important part in it. "Artists love antiquated costume
because, as they say, it gives them greater sweep and freedom. But I
should like to suggest that in historical representations of their own
age an eye should be kept on propriety of delineation rather than on
freedom and sweep. Otherwise one might just as well allow an historian
to talk to us about phalanxes, battlements, triarii, and argyraspids in
place of battalions, squadrons, grenadiers, and cuirassiers. The
painters of the great events of the day ought, especially, to be more
true to fact. In battle-pieces, for example, they ought not to have
cavalry shooting and sabreing about them in leather collars, in round
and plumed hats, and the vast jack-boots which exist no longer. The old
masters drew, engraved, and painted in this way because people really
dressed in such a manner at the time. It is said that our costume is not
picturesque, and therefore why should we choose it? But posterity will
be curious to know how we clothed ourselves, and will wish to have no
gap from the eighteenth century to its own time."
[Illustration: VERNET. THE WOUNDED ZOUAVE.]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
CHARLET. UN HOMME QUI BOÎT SEUL N'EST PAS DIGNE DE VIVRE.]
These words, which the well-known Vienna librarian Denis wrote in 1797
in his _Lesefrüchte_, show how early came the problem which was at
high-water mark for a generation afterwards. The painting of the
nineteenth century could only become modern when it succeeded in
recognising and expressing the characteristic side of modern costume.
But to do that it took more than half a century. It was, after all,
natural that to people who had seen the graceful forms and delicate
colours of the _rococo_ time, the garb of the first half of the century
should seem the most unfortunate and the least enviable in the whole
history of costume. "What person of artistic education is not of the
opinion," runs a passage in Putmann's book on the Düsseldorf school in
1835,--"what person of artistic education is not of the opinion that the
dress of the present day is tasteless, hideous, and ape-like? Moreover,
can a true style be brought into harmony with hoop-petticoats and
swallow-tail coats and such vagaries? In our time, therefore, art is
right in seeking out those beautiful fashions of the past, about which
tailors concern themselves so little. How much longer must we go about,
unpicturesque beings, like ugly black bats, in swallow-tail coats and
wide trousers? The peasant's blouse, indeed, can be accepted as one of
the few picturesque dresses which have yet been preserved in Germany
from the inauspicious influence of the times." The same plaint is sung
by Hotho in his history of German and Netherlandish painting; the
costume of his age he declares to be thoroughly prosaic and tiresome. It
is revolting to painters and an offence to the educated eye. Art must
necessarily seek salvation in the past, unless it is to wait, and give
brush and palette a holiday, until that happy time when the costume of
nations comes to its pictorial regeneration. Only one zone, the realm of
blouse and military uniform, was beyond the domain of tail-coat and
trousers, and still furnished art with rich material.
Since it was by working on uniform that plastic artists first learnt how
to treat contemporary costume, so it was the military picture that first
entered the circle of modern painting. By exalting the soldier into a
warrior, and the warrior into a hero, it was here possible, even in the
times of David and Carstens, to effect a certain compromise with the
ruling classical ideas. Gérard, Girodet--to some extent even Gros--made
abundant use of the mask of the Greek or Roman warrior, with the object
of admitting the battle-piece into painting in the grand style. The real
heroes of the Napoleonic epoch had not this plastic appearance nor these
epic attitudes. Classicism altered their physiognomies and gave them,
most illogically, the air of old marble statues. It was Horace Vernet
who freed battle painting from this anathema. This, but little else,
stands to his credit.
Together with his son-in-law Paul Delaroche, _Horace Vernet_ is the most
genuine product of the _Juste-milieu_ period. The king with the umbrella
founded the Museum of Versailles, that monstrous depôt of daubed canvas,
which is a horrifying memory to any one who has ever wandered through
it. However, it is devoted _à toutes les gloires de la France_. In a few
years a suite of galleries, which it takes almost two hours merely to
pass through from end to end, was filled with pictures of all sizes,
bringing home the history of the country, from Charlemagne to the
African expedition of Louis Philippe, under all circumstances which are
in any way flattering to French pride. For miles numberless
manufacturers of painting bluster from the walls. As _pictor celerrimus_
Horace Vernet had the command-in-chief, and became so famous by his
chronicle of the conquest of Algiers that for a long time he was held by
trooper, Philistine, and all the kings and emperors of Europe as the
greatest painter in France. He was the last scion of a celebrated
dynasty of artists, and had taken a brush in his hand from the moment he
threw away his child's rattle. A good deal of talent had been given him
in his cradle: sureness of eye, lightness of hand, and an enviable
memory. His vision was correct, if not profound; he painted his pictures
without hesitation, and is favourably distinguished from many of his
contemporaries by his independence: he owes no one anything, and reveals
his own qualities without arraying himself in those of other people.
Only these qualities are not of an order which gives his pictures
artistic interest. The spark of Géricault's genius, which seems to have
been transmitted to him in the beginning, was completely quenched in his
later years. Having swiftly attained popularity by the aid of
lithography which circulated his "Mazeppa" through the whole world, he
became afterwards a bad and vulgar painter, without poetry, light, or
colour; a reporter who expressed himself in banal prose and wounded all
the finer spirits of his age. "I loathe this man," said Baudelaire, as
early as 1846.
[Illustration: AUGUSTE MARIE RAFFET.]
Devoid of any sense of the tragedy of war, which Gros possessed in such
a high degree, Vernet treated battles like performances at the circus.
His pictures have movement without passion, and magnitude without
greatness. If it had been required of him, he would have daubed all the
boulevards; his picture of Smala is certainly not so long, but there
would have been no serious difficulty in lengthening it by half a mile.
This incredible stenographical talent won for him his popularity. He was
decorated with all the orders in the world. The _bourgeois_ felt happy
when he looked at Vernet's pictures, and the paterfamilias promised to
buy a horse for his little boy. The soldiers called him "_mon colonel_,"
and would not have been surprised if he had been made a Marshal of
France. A lover of art passes the pictures of Vernet with the sentiment
which the old colonel owned to entertaining towards music. "Are you fond
of music, colonel?" asked a lady. "Madame, I am not afraid of it."
[Illustration: RAFFET. THE PARADE.]
The trivial realism of his workmanship is as tedious as the unreal
heroism of his soldiers. In the manner in which he conceived the
trooper, Vernet stands between the Classicists and the moderns. He did
not paint ancient warriors, but French soldiers: he knew them as a
corporal knows his men, and by this respect for prescribed regulation he
was prevented from turning them into Romans. But though he disregarded
Classicism, in outward appearance, he did not drop the heroic tone. He
always saw the soldier as the bold defender of his country, the warrior
performing daring deeds, as in the "Battle of Alexander"; and in this
way he gave his pictures their unpleasant air of bluster. For neither
modern tactics nor modern cannon admit of the prominence of the
individual as it is to be seen in Vernet's pictures. The soldier of the
nineteenth century is no longer a warrior, but the unit in a multitude;
he does what he is ordered, and for that he has no need of the spirit of
an ancient hero; he kills or is killed, without seeing his enemy or
being seen himself. The course of a battle advances, move by move,
according to mathematical calculation. It is therefore false to
represent soldiers in heroic attitudes, or even to suggest deeds of
heroism on the part of those in command. In giving his orders and
directing a battle a general has to behave pretty much as he does at
home at his writing-table. And he is never in the battle, as he is
represented by Horace Vernet; on the contrary, he remains at a
considerable distance off. Therefore, even with the dimensions of which
Vernet availed himself, the exact portrait of a modern battle is
exclusively an affair for panorama, but never for the flat surface of a
picture. A picture must confine itself, either to the field-marshal
directing the battle from a distance upon a hill in the midst of his
staff, or else to little pictorial episodes in the individual life of
the soldier. The gradual development from unreal battle-pieces to simple
episodic paintings can be followed step by step in the following works.
[Illustration: RAFFET. 1807.]
What was painted for the Versailles Museum in connection with deeds of
arms in the Crimean War and the Italian campaign kept more or less to
the blustering official style of Horace Vernet. In the galleries of
Versailles the battles of Wagram, Loano, and Altenkirche (1837-39), and
an episode from the retreat from Russia (1851), represent the work of
_Hippolyte Bellangé_. These are huge lithochromes which have been very
carefully executed. _Adolphe Yvon_, who is responsible for "The
Taking of Malakoff," "The Battle of Magenta," and "The Battle of
Solferino," is a more tedious painter, and remained during his whole
life a pupil of Delaroche; he laid chief stress on finished and rounded
composition, and gave his soldiers no more appearance of life than could
be forced into the accepted academic convention. The fame of _Isidor
Pils_, who immortalised the disembarkation of the French troops in the
Crimea, the battle of Alma, and the reception of Arab chiefs by Napoleon
III, has paled with equal rapidity. He could paint soldiers, but not
battles, and, like Yvon, he was too precise in the composition of his
works. In consequence they have as laboured an effect in arrangement as
they have in colour. He was completely wanting in sureness and
spontaneity. It is only his water-colours that hold one's attention; and
this they do at any rate by their unaffected actuality, and in spite of
their dull and heavy colour. _Alexandre Protais_ verged more on the
sentimental. He loved soldiers, and therefore had the less toleration
for war, which swept the handsome young fellows away. Two pendants, "The
Morning before the Attack" and "The Evening after the Battle," founded
his reputation in 1863. The first showed a group of riflemen waiting in
excitement for the first bullets of the enemy; the second represented
the same men in the evening delighted with their victory, but at the
same time--and here you have the note of Protais--mournful over the loss
of their comrades. "The Prisoners" and "The Parting" of 1872 owed their
success to the same lachrymose and melodramatic sensibility.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
RAFFET. POLISH INFANTRY.]
[Illustration: RAFFET. THE MIDNIGHT REVIEW.
C'est la grande revue
Qu'aux Champs-Elysées
A l'heure de minuit
Tient César décédé.]
A couple of mere lithographists, soldiers' sons, in whom a repining for
the Napoleonic legend still found its echo, were the first great
military painters of modern France. "Charlet and Raffet," wrote
Bürger-Thoré in his _Salon_ of 1845, "are the two artists who best
understand the representation of that almost vanished type, the trooper
of the Empire; and after Gros they will assuredly endure as the
principal historians of that warlike era."
_Charlet_, the painter of the old bear Napoleon I, might almost be
called the Béranger of painting. The "little Corporal," the "great
Emperor" appears and reappears in his pictures and drawings without
intermission; his work is an epic in pencil of the grey coat and the
little hat. From his youth he employed himself with military studies,
which were furthered in Gros' studio, which he entered in 1817. The
Græco-Roman ideal did not exist for him, and he was indifferent to
beauty of form. His was one of those natures which have a natural turn
for actual fact; he had a power for characterisation, and in his many
water-colours and lithographs he was merely concerned with the proper
expression of his ideas. How it came that Delacroix had so great a
respect for him was nevertheless explained when his "Episode in the
Retreat from Russia," in the World Exhibition of 1889, emerged from the
obscurity of the Lyons Museum; it is perhaps his best and most important
picture. When it appeared in the Salon of 1836, Alfred de Musset wrote
that it was "not an episode but a complete poem"; he went on to say that
the artist had painted "the despair in the wilderness," and that, with
its gloomy heaven and disconsolate horizon, the picture gave the
impression of infinite disaster. After fifty years it had lost none of
its value. Since the reappearance of this picture it has been recognised
that Charlet was not merely the specialist of old grey heads with their
noses reddened with brandy, the Molière of barracks and canteens, but
that he understood all the tragical sublimity of war, from which Horace
Vernet merely produced trivial anecdotes.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
ERNEST MEISSONIER.]
Beside him stands his pupil _Raffet_, the special painter of the _grande
armée_. He mastered the brilliant figure of Napoleon; he followed it
from Ajaccio to St. Helena, and never left it until he had said
everything that was to be said about it. He showed the "little Corsican"
as the general of the Italian campaign, ghastly pale and consumed with
ambition; the Bonaparte of the Pyramids and of Cairo; the Emperor
Napoleon on the parade-ground reviewing his Grenadiers; the triumphal
hero of 1807 with the Cuirassiers dashing past, brandishing their sabres
with a hurrah; the Titan of Beresina riding slowly over the waste of
snow, and, in the very midst of disaster, spying a new star of fortune;
the war-god of 1813, the great hypnotiser greeted even by the dying with
a cry of "Long life to the Emperor"; the adventurer of 1814, riding at
the head of shattered troops over a barren wilderness; the vanquished
hero of 1815, who, in the midst of his last square, in the thick of his
beloved battalions, calls fickle fate once more into the lists; and the
captive lion who, from the bridge of the ship, casts a last look on the
coast of France as it fades in the mist. He has called the Emperor from
the grave, as a ghostly power, to hold a midnight review of the _grande
armée_. And with love and passion and enthusiasm he has followed the
instrument of these victories, the French soldiers, the swordsmen of
seven years' service, through bivouac and battle, on the march and on
parade, as patrols and outposts. The ragged and shoeless troops of the
Empire are portrayed in his plates, with a touch of real sublimity, in
defeat and in victory. The empty inflated expression of martial
enthusiasm has been avoided by him; everything is true and earnest.
In a masterly fashion he could make soldiers deploy in masses. No one
has known in the same way how to render the impression of the multitude
of an army, the notion of men standing shoulder to shoulder, the welding
of thousands of individuals into one complete entity. In Raffet a
regiment is a thousand-headed living being that has but one soul, one
moral nature, one spirit, one sentiment of willing sacrifice and heroic
courage. His death was as adventurous as his life; he passed away in a
hotel in Genoa, and was brought back to French soil as part of the cargo
of a merchant ship. For a long time his fame was thrown into the shade,
at first by the triumphs of Horace Vernet, and then by those of
Meissonier, until at length a fitting record was devoted to him by the
piety of his son Auguste.
Never had _Ernest Meissonier_ to complain of want of recognition. After
his _rococo_ pictures had been deemed worth their weight in gold he
climbed to the summit of his fame, his universal celebrity and his
popularity in France, when he devoted himself in the sixties to the
representation of French military history. The year 1859 took him to
Italy in the train of Napoleon III. Meissonier was chosen to spread the
martial glory of the Emperor, and, as the nephew was fond of drawing
parallels between himself and his mighty uncle, Meissonier was obliged
to depict suitable occasions from the life of the first Napoleon. His
admirers were very curious to know how the great "little painter" would
acquit himself in such a monumental task. First came the "Battle of
Solferino," that picture of the Musée Luxembourg which represents
Napoleon III overlooking the battle from a height in the midst of his
staff. After lengthy preparations it appeared in the Salon of 1864, and
showed that the painter had not been untrue to himself: he had simply
adapted the minute technique of his _rococo_ pictures to the painting of
war, and he remained the Dutch "little master" in all the battle-pieces
which followed.
Napoleon III had no further deeds of arms to record, so the intended
parallel series was never accomplished. It is true, indeed, that he took
the painter with the army in 1870; but after the first battle was lost,
Meissonier went home: he did not wish to immortalise the struggles of a
retreat. Henceforward his brush was consecrated to the first Napoleon.
"1805" depicts the triumphant advance to the height of fame; "1807"
shows Napoleon when the summit has been reached and the soldiers are
cheering their idol in exultation; "1814" represents the fall: the star
of fortune has vanished; victory, so long faithful to the man of might,
has deserted his banners. There is still a look of indomitable energy on
the pale face of the Emperor, as, in utter despair, he aims his last
shot against the traitor destiny; but his eyes seem weary, his mouth is
contorted, and his features are wasted with fever.
[Illustration: MEISSONIER. 1814.
(_By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MEISSONIER. THE OUTPOST.
(_By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright._)]
Meissonier has treated all these works with the carefulness which he
expended on his little _rococo_ pictures. To give an historically
accurate representation of Napoleon's boots he did not content himself
with borrowing them from the museum. Walking and riding--for he was a
passionate horseman--he wore for months together boots of the same make
and form as those of the "little Corporal." To get the colour of the
horses of the Emperor and his marshals, in their full-grown winter coat,
and to paint them just as they must have appeared after the hardships
and negligence of a campaign, he bought animals of the same race and
colour as those ridden by the Emperor and his generals, according to
tradition, and picketed them for weeks in the snow and rain. His models
were forced to wear out the uniforms in sun and storm before he painted
them; he bought weapons and harness at fancy prices when he could not
borrow them from museums. And there is no need to say that he copied all
the portraits of Napoleon, Ney, Soult, and the other generals that were
to be had, and read through whole libraries before beginning his
Napoleon series. To paint the picture "1814," which is generally
reckoned his greatest performance--Napoleon at the head of his staff
riding through a snow-clad landscape--he first prepared the scenery on a
spot in the plain of Champagne, corresponding to the original locality,
just as he did in earlier years with his interiors of the _rococo_
period; he even had the road laid out on which he wished to paint the
Emperor advancing. Then he waited for the first fall of snow, and had
artillery, cavalry, and infantry to march for him upon this snowy path,
and actually contrived that overturned transport waggons, discarded
arms, and baggage should be decoratively strewn about the landscape.
From these laborious preparations it may be understood that he spent
almost as many millions of francs upon his pictures as he received. In
his article, _What an Old Work of Art is Worth_, Julius Lessing has
admirably dealt with the hidden ways of taste and commerce applied to
art. Amongst all painters of modern times Meissonier is the only one
whose pictures, during his own lifetime, fetched prices such as are only
reached by the works of famous old masters of the greatest epochs. And
yet he sold them straight from his easel, and never to dealers.
Meissonier avenged himself magnificently for the privations of his
youth. In 1832, when he gave up his apprenticeship with Menier, the
great chocolate manufacturer, to become a painter, he had fifteen francs
a month to spend. He had great difficulty in disposing of his drawings
and illustrations for five or ten francs, and was often obliged to
console himself with a roll for the want of a dinner. Only ten years
later he was able to purchase a small place in Poissy, near St. Germain,
where he went for good in 1850, to give himself up to work without
interruption. Gradually this little property became a pleasant country
seat, and in due course of time the stately house in Paris, in the
Boulevard Malesherbes, was added to it. His "Napoleon, 1814," for which
the painter himself received three hundred thousand francs, was bought
at an auction by one of the owners of the "Grands Magasins du Louvre"
for eight hundred and fifty thousand francs; "Napoleon III at Solferino"
brought him two hundred thousand, and "The Charge of the Cuirassiers"
three hundred thousand. And in general, after 1850, he only painted for
such sums. It was calculated that he received about five thousand francs
for every centimetre of painted canvas, and left behind him pictures
which, according to present rate, were worth more than twenty million
francs, without having really become a rich man; for, as a rule, every
picture that he painted cost him several thousand.
And Meissonier never sacrificed himself to money-making and the trade.
He never put a stroke on paper without the conviction that he could not
make it better, and for this artistic earnestness he was universally
honoured, even by his colleagues, to his very death. As master beyond
dispute he let the Classicists, Romanticists, Impressionists, and
Symbolists pass by the window of his lonely studio, and always remained
the same. A little man with a firm step, an energetic figure, eyes that
shone like coals, thick, closely cropped hair, and the beard of a
river-god, that always seemed to grow longer, at eighty years of age he
was as hale and active as at thirty. By a systematic routine of life he
kept his physique elastic, and was able to maintain that unintermittent
activity under which another man would have broken down. During long
years Meissonier went to rest at eight every evening, slept till
midnight, and then worked at his drawings by lamplight into the morning.
In the course of the day he made his studies from nature and painted.
Diffident in society and hard of access, he did not permit himself to be
disturbed in his indefatigable diligence by any social demands. A sharp
ride, a swim or a row was his only relaxation. In 1848, as captain of
the National Guard, he had taken part in the street and barricade
fighting; and again in 1871, when he was sixty-six, he clattered through
the streets of the capital, with the dangling sword he had so often
painted and a gold-laced cap stuck jauntily on one side, as a smart
staff-officer. Even the works of his old age showed no exhaustion of
power, and there is something great in attaining ripe years without
outliving one's reputation. As late as the spring of 1890, only a short
time before his death, he was the leader of youth, when it transmigrated
from the Palais des Champs Elysées to the Champ de Mars; and he
exhibited in this new Salon his "October 1806," with which he closed his
Napoleonic epic and his general activity as a painter. Halting on a
hill, the Emperor in his historical grey coat, mounted on a powerful
grey, is thoughtfully watching the course of the battle, without
troubling himself about the Cuirassiers who salute him exultantly as
they storm by, or about the brilliant staff which has taken up position
behind him. Not a feature moves in the sallow, cameo-like face of the
Corsican. The sky is lowering and full of clouds. In the foreground lie
a couple of dead soldiers, in whose uniform every button has been
painted with the same conscientious care that was bestowed on the
buttons of the _rococo_ coats of fifty years before.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ ALPHONSE DE NEUVILLE.]
Beyond this inexhaustible correctness I can really see nothing that can
be said for Meissonier's fame as an artist. He, whose name is honoured
in both hemispheres, was most peculiarly the son of his own work. The
genius for the infinitesimal has never been carried further. He knew
everything that a man can learn. The movements in his pictures are
correct, the physiognomies interesting, the delicacy of execution
indescribable, and his horses have been so exactly studied that they
stand the test of instantaneous photography. But painter, in the proper
sense, he never was. Precisely through their marvellous minuteness of
execution--a minuteness which is merely attractive as a trial of
patience and as an example of what the brush can do--his pictures are
wanting in unity of conception, and they leave one cold by the hardness
of their contours, the aridness of their colour, and the absence of all
vibrating, nervous feeling. In a cavalry charge, with the whirling dust
and the snorting horses, who thinks of costume? And who thinks of
anything else when Meissonier paints a charge? Here are life and
movement, and there a museum of military uniforms. When Manet saw
Meissonier's "Cuirassiers" he said, "Everything is iron here except the
cuirasses."
His _rococo_ pictures are probably his best performances; they even
express a certain amount of temperament. His military pictures make one
chilly. Reproduced in woodcuts they are good illustrations for
historical works, but as pictures they repel the eye, because they lack
air and light and spirit. They rouse nothing except astonishment at the
patience and incredible industry that went to the making of them. One
sees everything in them--everything that the painter can have seen--to
the slightest detail; only one does not rightly come into contact with
the artist himself. His battle-pieces stand high above the scenic
pictures of Horace Vernet and Hippolyte Bellangé, but they have nothing
of the warmth of Raffet or the vibrating life of Neuville. There is
nothing in them that is contagious and carries one away, or that appeals
to the heart. Patience is a virtue: genius is a gift. Precious without
originality, intelligent without imagination, dexterous without verve,
elegant without charm, refined and subtile without delicacy, Meissonier
has all the qualities that interest, and none of those which lay hold of
one. He was a painter of a distinctness which causes astonishment, but
not admiration; an artist for epicures, but for those of the second
order, who pay the more highly for works of art in proportion as they
value their artifice. His pictures recall the unseasonable compliment
which Charles Blanc made to Ingres: "_Cher maître, vous avez deviné la
photographie trente ans avant qu'il y eut des photographes._" Or else
one thinks of that malicious story of which Jules Dupré is well known as
the author. "Suppose," said he, "that you are a great personage who has
just bought a Meissonier. Your valet enters the salon where it is
hanging. 'Ah! Monsieur,' he cries, 'what a beautiful picture you have
bought! That is a masterpiece!' Another time you buy a Rembrandt, and
show it to your valet, in the expectation that he will at any rate be
overcome by the same raptures. _Mais non!_ This time the man looks
embarrassed. 'Ah! Monsieur,' he says, '_il faut s'y connaître_,' and
away he goes."
_Guillaume Regamey_, who is far less known, supplies what is wanting in
Meissonier. Sketchy and of a highly strung nervous temperament, he could
not adapt himself to the picture-market; but the history of art honours
him as the most spirited draughtsman of the French soldier, after
Géricault and Raffet. He did not paint him turned out for parade, ironed
and smartened up, but in the worst trim. Syria, the Crimea, Italy, and
the East are mingled with the difference of their types and the
brightness of their exotic costumes. He had a great love for the
catlike, quick-glancing chivalry of Turcos and Sapphis; but especially
he loved the cavalry. His "Chasseurs d'Afrique" are part and parcel of
their horses, like centaurs, and many of his cavalry groups recall the
frieze of the Parthenon. Unfortunately he died at thirty-eight, shortly
before the war of 1870, the historians of which were the younger
painters, who had grown up in the shadow of Meissonier.
[Illustration: DE NEUVILLE. LE BOURGET.
(_By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: DÉTAILLE. SALUT AUX BLESSÉS.
(_By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of the copyright._)]
The most important of the group, _Alphonse de Neuville_, had looked at
war very closely as an officer during the siege of Paris, and in this
way he made himself a fine illustrator, who in his anecdotic pictures
specially understood the secret of painting powder-smoke and the
vehemence of a fusillade. The "Bivouac before Le Bourget" brought him
his first success. "The Last Cartridges," "Le Bourget," and "The
Graveyard of Saint-Privat" made him a popular master. Neuville is
peculiarly the French painter of fighting. He did not know, as Charlet
did, the soldier in time of peace, the peasant lad of yesterday who only
cares about his stomach and has little taste for martial adventure. His
soldier is an elegant and enthusiastic youthful hero. He even neglected
the troops of the line; his preference was for the Chasseur, whose cap
is stuck jauntily on his head and whose trousers fall better. He loved
the plumes, the high boots of the officers, the sword-knots, canes, and
eye-glasses. Everything received grace from his dexterous hand; he even
saw in the trooper a gallant and ornamental _bibelot_, which he painted
with chivalrous verve.
The pictures of Aimé Morot, the painter of "The Charge of the
Cuirassiers," possibly smell most of powder. Neuville's frequently
over-praised rival, Meissonier's favourite pupil, _Edouard Détaille_,
after he had started with pretty little costume pictures from the
_Directoire_ period, went further on the way of his teacher with less
laboriousness and more lightness, with less calculation and more
sincerity. The best of his works was "Salut aux Blessés"--the
representation of a troop of wounded Prussian officers and soldiers on a
country road, passing a French general and his staff, who with graceful
chivalry lift their caps and salute the wounded men. Détaille's great
pictures, such as "The Presentation of the Colours," and his panoramas
were as accurate as they were tedious and arid, although they are far
superior to most of the efforts which the Germans made to depict scenes
from the war of 1870.
[Illustration: _Soldan, Nürnberg._ ALBRECHT ADAM AND HIS SONS.]
In Germany the great period of the wars of liberation first inspired a
group of painters with the courage to enter the province of
battle-painting, which had been so much despised by their classical
colleagues. Germany had been turned into a great camp. Prussian, French,
Austrian, Russian, and Bavarian troops passed in succession through the
towns and villages: long trains of cannon and transport waggons came in
their wake, and friends and foes were billeted amongst the inhabitants;
the Napoleonic epoch was enacted. Such scenes followed each other like
the gay slides in a magic lantern, and once more gave to some among the
younger generation eyes for the outer world. There was awakened in them
the capacity for receiving impressions of reality and transferring them
swiftly to paper. Two hundred years before, the emancipation of Dutch
art from the Italian house of bondage had been accomplished in precisely
the same fashion. The Dutch struggle for freedom and the Thirty Years'
War had filled Holland with numbers of soldiery. The doings of these
mercenaries, daily enacted before them in rich costume and with manifold
brightness, riveted the pictorial feeling of artists. Echoes of war,
fighting scenes, skirmishes and tumult, the incidents of camp life,
arming, billeting, and marauding episodes are the first independent
products of the Dutch school. Then the more peaceable doings of soldiers
are represented. At Haarlem, in the neighbourhood of Frans Hals, were
assembled the painters of social pieces, as they are called; pieces in
which soldiers, bold and rollicking officers, make merry with gay
maidens at wine and play and love. From thence the artist came to the
portrayal of a peasantry passing their time in the same rough, free and
easy life, and thence onward to the representation of society in towns.
[Illustration: ADAM. A STABLE IN TOWN.]
German painting in the nineteenth century took the same road. Eighty
years ago foreign troops, and the extravagantly "picturesque and often
ragged uniforms of the Republican army, the characteristic and often
wild physiognomies of the French soldiers," gave artists their first
fresh and variously hued impressions. Painters of military subjects make
their studies, not in the antiquity class of the academy, but upon the
parade-ground and in the camp. Later, when the warlike times were over,
they passed from the portrayal of soldiers to that of rustics; and so
they laid the foundation on which future artists built.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
HESS. THE RECEPTION OF KING OTTO IN NAUPLIA.]
In Berlin Franz Krüger and in Munich Albrecht Adam and Peter Hess were
figures of individual character, belonging to the spiritual family of
Chodowiecki and Gottfried Schadow; and, entirely undisturbed by
classical theories or romantic reverie, they penetrated the life around
them with a clear and sharp glance. They lacked, indeed, the temperament
to comprehend either the high poetic tendencies of the old Munich school
or the sentimental enthusiasm of the old Düsseldorf.
On the other hand, they were unhackneyed artists, facing facts in a
completely unprejudiced spirit: entirely self-reliant, they refused to
form themselves upon any model derived from the old masters; they had
never had a teacher and never enjoyed academic instruction. This naïve
straightforwardness makes their painting a half-barbaric product;
something which has been allowed to run wild. But in a period of
archæological resuscitations, pedantic brooding over the past and
slavish imitation of the ancients, it seems, for this very reason, the
first independent product of the nineteenth century. As vigorous,
matter-of-fact realists they know nothing of more delicate charms, but
represented fact for all it was worth and as honestly and
conscientiously as was humanly possible. They are lacking in the
distinctively pictorial character, but they are absolutely untouched by
the Classicism of the epoch. They never dream of putting the uniforms
of their warriors upon antique statues. It is this downright honesty
that renders their pictures not merely irreplaceable as documents for
the history of civilisation, and in spite of their unexampled frigidity,
hardness, and gaudiness, lends them, even from the standpoint of art, a
certain innovating quality. In a pleasantly written autobiography
_Albrecht Adam_ has himself described the drift of historical events
which made him a painter of battles.
He was a confectioner's apprentice in Nördlingen when, in the year 1800,
the marches of the French army began in the neighbourhood. In an inn he
began to sketch sergeants and Grenadiers, and went proudly home with the
pence that he earned in this way. "Adam, when there's war, I'll take you
into the field with me," said an old major-general, who was the
purchaser of his first works. That came to pass in 1809, when the
Bavarians went with Napoleon against Austria. After a few weeks he was
in the thick of raging battle. He saw Napoleon, the Crown-Prince Ludwig,
and General Wrede, was present at the battles of Abensberg, Eckmühl, and
Wagram, and came to Vienna with his portfolios full of sketches. There
his portraits and pictures of the war found favour with the officers,
and Eugène Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, took him to Upper Italy and
afterwards to Russia. He was an eye-witness of the battles at Borodino
and on the Moskwa, and saved himself from the conflagration of Moscow by
his courage and determination. A true soldier, he mounted a horse when
he was sixty-two years of age to be present on the Italian expedition of
the Austrian army under Radetzky in 1848. His battle-pieces are
therefore the result of personal experience. When campaigning he led the
same life as the soldiers whom he portrayed, and as he proceeded in this
portrayal with the objective quietness and fidelity of an historian, his
artistic productions are invaluable as documents. Even where he could
not draw as an eye-witness he invariably made studies afterwards,
endeavouring to collect the most reliable material upon the spot, and
preparing it with the utmost conscientiousness. The ground occupied by
bodies of troops, the marshalling of them, and the conflict of masses,
together with the smallest episodes, are represented with simplicity and
reality. In the portrayal of the soldier's life in time of peace he was
inexhaustible. Just as vividly could he render horses undergoing the
strain of the march and in the tumult of battle as in the stall, the
farm-horse of the transport waggon no less than the noble creature
ridden for parade. That his colour was sharp and hard, and his pictures
therefore devoid of harmony, is to be explained by the helplessness of
the age in regard to colouring. Only his last pictures, such as "The
Battle on the Moskwa," have a certain harmony of hue; and there is no
doubt that this is to be set to the account of his son Franz.
After Adam, the father of German battle-painters, _Peter Hess_ made an
epoch by the earnestness and actuality of his pictures. He too
accompanied General Wrede on the 1813-15 campaigns, and has left behind
him exceedingly healthy, sane, and objectively viewed Cossack scenes,
bivouacs, and the like, belonging to this period; though in his great
pictures he aimed at totality of effect just as little as Adam. Confused
by the complexity of his material, he only ventured to single out
individual incidents, and then put them together on the canvas after the
fashion of a mosaic; and, to make the nature of the action as clear as
possible, he assumed as his standpoint the perspective view of a bird.
Of course, pictures produced in this way make an effect which is
artistically childish, but as the primitive endeavours of modern German
art they will keep their place. The best known of his pictures are those
inspired by the choice of Prince Otto of Bavaria as King of Greece,
especially "The Reception of King Otto in Nauplia," which is to be found
in the new Pinakothek in Munich. In spite of its hard, motley, and quite
impossible colouring, and its petty pedantry of execution, this is a
picture which will not lose its value as an historical source.
Vigorous _Franz Krüger_ had been long known in Berlin, by his famous
pictures of horses, before the Emperor of Russia in 1829 commissioned
him to paint, on a huge canvas, the great parade on the _Opernplatz_ in
Berlin, where he had reviewed his regiment of Cuirassiers before the
King of Prussia. From that time such parade pictures became Krüger's
specialty; especially famous is the great parade of 1839, with the
likenesses of those who at the time played a political or literary part
in Berlin. In these works he has left a true reflection of old Berlin,
and bridged over the chasm between Chodowiecki and Menzel: this is
specially the case with his curiously objective water-colour portrait
heads. Mention should be made of Karl Steffeck as a pupil of Krüger, and
Theodor Horschelt--in addition to Franz Adam--as a pupil of Adam. By
_Steffeck_, a healthy, vigorous realist, there are some well-painted
portraits of horses, and by _Th. Horschelt_, who in 1858 took part in
the fights of the Russians against the Circassians in the Caucasus,
there survive some of the spirited and masterly pen-and-ink sketches
which he published collectively in his _Memories from the Caucasus_.
_Franz Adam_, who first published a collection of lithographs on the
Italian campaign of 1848 in connection with Raffet, and in the Italian
war of 1859 painted his first masterpiece, a scene from the battle of
Solferino, owes his finest successes--although he had taken no part in
it--to the war of 1870. In respect of harmony of colouring he is perhaps
the finest painter of battle-pieces Germany has produced. As I shall
later have no opportunity of doing so, I must mention here the works of
_Josef Brandt_, the best of Franz Adam's pupils. They are painted with
verve and chivalrous feeling. There is a flame and a sparkle, both in
the forms of his warriors and of his horses, in his pictures of old
Polish cavalry battles. Everything is aristocratic: the distinction of
the grey colouring no less than the ductile drawing with its chivalrous
sentiment. In everything there breathes life, vigour, fire, and
freshness: the East of Eugène Fromentin translated into Polish.
_Heinrich Lang_, a spirited draughtsman, who had the art of seizing the
most difficult positions and motions of a horse, embodied the wild
tumult of cavalry charges ("The Charge of the Bredow Brigade," "The
Charge at Floing," etc.) in rapid pictures of incisive power, though
otherwise the heroic deeds of the Germans in 1870 resulted in but few
heroic deeds in art.
[Illustration]