THE PICTURE WITH A SOCIAL PURPOSE
That modern life first entered art, in all countries, under the form of
humorous anecdote is partly the consequence of the one-sided æsthetic
ideas of the period. In an age that was dominated by idealism it was
forgotten that Murillo had painted lame beggars sitting in the sun,
Velasquez cripples and drunkards, and Holbein lepers; that Rembrandt had
so much love for humble folk, and that old Breughel with a strangely
sombre pessimism turned the whole world into a terrible hospital. The
modern man was hideous, and art demanded "absolute beauty." If he was to
be introduced into painting, despite his want of _beauté suprême_, the
only way was to treat him as a humorous figure which had to be handled
ironically. Mercantile considerations were also a power in determining
this form of humour. At a time when painting was forced to address
itself to a public which was uneducated in art, and could only
appreciate anecdotes, such comicalities had the best prospect of favour
and a rapid sale. The object was to provoke laughter, at all hazards, by
drollness of mien, typical stupidity, and absurdity of situation. The
choice of figures was practically made according as they were more or
less serviceable for a humorous purpose. Children, rustics, and
provincial Philistines seemed to be most adapted to it. The painter
treated them as strange and naïve beings, and brought them before the
public as a sort of performing dogs, who could go through remarkable
tricks just as if they were human beings. And the public laughed over
whimsical oddities from another world, as the courtiers of Louis XIV had
laughed in Versailles when M. Jourdain and M. Dimanche were acted by the
king's servants upon the stage of Molière.
Meanwhile painters gradually came to remark that this humour _à l'huile_
was bought at too dear a price. For humour, which is like a soap-bubble,
can only bear a light method of representation, such as Hokusai's
drawing or Brouwer's painting, but becomes insupportable where it is
offered as a laborious composition executed with painstaking realism.
And ethical reasons made themselves felt independently of these artistic
considerations.
The drollness of these pictures did not spring from the characters, but
from an effort to amuse the public at the expense of the painted
figures. As a general rule a peasant is a serious, square-built, angular
fellow. For his existence he does battle with the soil; his life is no
pleasure to him, but hard toil. But in these pictures he appeared as a
figure who had no aim or purport; in his brain the earnestness of life
was transformed into a romping game. Painters laughed at the little
world which they represented. They were not the friends of man, but
parodied him and transformed life into a sort of Punch and Judy show.
And even when they did not approach their figures with deliberate irony,
they never dreamed of plunging with any sincere love of truth into the
depths of modern life. They painted modern matter without taking part in
it, like good children who know nothing of the bitter facts that take
place in the world. When the old Dutch painters laughed, their laughter
had its historical justification. In the pictures of Ostade and Dirk
Hals there is seen all the primitive exuberance and wild joy of life
belonging to a people who had just won their independence and abandoned
themselves after long years of war with a sensuous transport to the
gladness of existence. But the smile of these modern _genre_ painters is
forced, conventional, and artificial; the smile of a later generation
which only took the trouble to smile because the old Dutch had laughed
before them. They put on rose-coloured glasses, and through these gaudy
spectacles saw only a gay masque of life, a fair but hollow deception.
They allowed their heroes to pass such a merry existence that the
question of what they lived upon was never touched. When they painted
their tavern pictures they anxiously suppressed the thought that people
who drained their great mugs so carelessly possibly had sick children at
home, hungry and perishing with cold in a room without a fire. Their
peasants are the favoured sons of fortune: they sowed not, neither did
they reap, nor gathered into barns, but their Heavenly Father fed them.
Poverty and vice presented themselves merely as amiable weaknesses, not
as great modern problems.
Just at this time the way was being paved for the Revolution of 1848:
the people fought and suffered, and for years before literature had
taken part in this struggle. Before the Revolution the battle had been
between the nobility and the middle class; but now that the latter had
to some extent taken the place of the nobility of earlier days, there
rose the mighty problem of strife between the unproductive and the
productive, between rich and poor.
In England, the birthplace of the modern capitalistic system, in a
country where great industry and great landed property first ousted the
independent yeomanry and called forth ever sharper division between
those who possessed everything and those who possessed nothing, the
unsolved problem of the nineteenth century found its earliest utterance.
More than sixty years ago, in the year of Goethe's death, a new
literature arose there, the literature of social politics. With Ebenezer
Elliott, who had been himself a plain artisan, the Fourth Estate made
its entry into literature; a workman led the train of socialistic poets.
Thomas Hood wrote his _Song of the Shirt_, that lyric of the poor
sempstress which soon spread all over the Continent. Carlyle, the
friend and admirer of Goethe, came forward in 1843 as the burning
advocate of the poor and miserable in _Past and Present_. He wrote there
that this world was no home to the working-man, but a dreary dungeon
full of mad and fruitless plagues. It was an utterance that shook the
world like a bomb. Benjamin Disraeli's _Sybil_ followed in 1845. As a
novel it is a strange mixture of romantic and naturalistic chapters, the
latter seeming like a prophetic announcement of Zola's _Germinal_. As a
reporter Charles Dickens had in his youth the opportunity of learning
the wretchedness of the masses in London, even in the places where they
lurked distrustfully in dark haunts. In his Christmas stories and his
London sketches he worked these scenes of social distress into thrilling
pictures. The poor man, whose life is made up of bitter weeks and scanty
holidays, received his citizenship in the English novel.
In France the year 1830 was an end and a beginning--the close of the
struggles begun in 1789, and the opening of those which led to the
decisive battle of 1848. With the _roi bourgeois_, whom Lafayette called
"the best of republicans," the Third Estate came into possession of the
position to which it had long aspired; it rose from the ranks of the
oppressed to that of the privileged classes. As a new ruling class it
made such abundant capital with the fruits of the Revolution of July
that even in 1830 Börne wrote from Paris: "The men who fought against
all aristocracy for fifteen years have scarcely conquered--they have not
yet wiped the sweat from their faces--and already they want to found for
themselves a new aristocracy, an aristocracy of money, a knighthood of
fortune." To the same purpose wrote Heine in 1837: "The men of thought
who, during the eighteenth century, were so indefatigable in preparing
the Revolution, would blush if they saw how self-interest is building
its miserable huts on the site of palaces that have been broken down,
and how, out of these huts, a new aristocracy is sprouting up which,
more ungraciously than the old, has its primary cause in money-making."
There the radical ideas of modern socialism were touched. The
proletariat and its misery became henceforward the subject of French
poetry, though they were not observed with any naturalistic love of
truth, but from the romantic standpoint of contrast. Béranger, the
popular singer of _chansons_, composed his _Vieux Vagabond_, the song of
the old beggar who dies in the gutter; Auguste Barbier wrote his Ode to
Freedom, where _la sainte canaille_ are celebrated as immortal heroes,
and with the scorn of Juvenal "lashes those who drew profit from the
Revolution, those _bourgeois_ in kid gloves who watched the sanguinary
street fights comfortably from the window." In 1842-43 Eugène Sue
published his _Mystères de Paris_, a forbidding and nonsensical book,
but one which made an extraordinary sensation, just because of the
disgusting openness with which it unveiled the life of the lower strata
of the people. Even the great spirits of the Romantic school began to
follow the social and political strife of the age with deep emotion and
close sympathy. Already in the course of the thirties socialistic ideas
forced their way into the Romantic school from every side. Their source
was Saint Simon, whose doctrines first found a wide circulation under
Louis Philippe.
According to Saint Simon, the task of the new Christianity consisted in
improving as quickly as possible the fate of the class which was at once
the poorest and the most numerous. His pupils regarded him as the
Messiah of the new era, and went forth into the world as his disciples.
George Sand, the boldest feminine genius in the literature of the world,
mastered these seething ideas and founded the artisan novel in her
_Compagnon du Tour de France_. It is the first book with a real love of
the people--the people as they actually are, those who drink and commit
deeds of violence as well as those who work and make mental progress. In
her periodical, _L'Éclaireur de l'Indre_, she pleads the cause both of
the artisan in great towns and of the rustic labourer; in 1844 she
declared herself as a Socialist, without qualification, in her great
essay _Politics and Socialism_, and she brought out her celebrated
_Letters to the People_ in 1848.
The democratic tide of ideas came to Victor Hugo chiefly through the
religious apostle Lamennais, whose book, written in prison, _De
l'Esclavage Moderne_, gave the same fuel to the Revolution of 1848 as
the works of Rousseau had done to that of 1789. "The peasant bears the
whole burden of the day, exposes himself to rain and sun and wind, to
make ready by his work the harvest which fills our barns in the late
autumn. If there are those who think the lighter of him on that account,
and will not accord him freedom and justice, build a high wall round
them, so that their noisome breath may not poison the air of Europe."
From the forties there mutters through Hugo's poems the muffled sound of
the Revolution which was soon to burst over Paris, and thence to move,
like a rolling thunderstorm, across Europe. In place of the tricolor
under which the _bourgeoisie_ and the artisan class had fought side by
side eighteen years before, the banner of the artisan was hoisted
blood-red against the ruling _bourgeoisie_.
This _Zeitgeist_, this spirit of the age which had grown earnest,
necessarily guided art into another course; the painted humour and
childlike optimism of the first _genre_ painters began to turn out a
lie. In spite of Schiller, art cannot be blithe with sincerity when life
is earnest. It can laugh with the muscles of the face, but the laughter
is mirthless; it may haughtily declare itself in favour of some
consecrated precinct, in which nothing of the battles and struggles of
the outside world is allowed to echo; but, for all that, harsh reality
demands its rights. Josef Danhauser's modest little picture of 1836,
"The Gormandizer," is an illustration of this. In a sumptuously
furnished room a company of high station and easy circumstances are
seated at dinner. The master of the house, a sleek little man, is
draining his glass, and a young dandy is playing the guitar. But an
unwelcome disturbance breaks in. The figure of a beggar, covered with
rags and with a greasy hat in his hand, appears at the door. The ladies
scream, and a dog springs barking from under a chair, whilst the flunkey
in attendance angrily prepares to send the impudent intruder about his
business. That was the position which art had hitherto taken up towards
the social question. It shrank peevishly back as soon as rude and brutal
reality disturbed its peaceful course. People wished to see none but
cheerful pictures of life around them.
[Illustration: DANHAUSER. THE GORMANDIZER.]
For this reason peasants were invariably painted in neat and cleanly
dress, with their faces beaming with joy, an embodiment of the blessing
of work and the delights of country life. Even beggars were harmless,
peacefully cheerful figures, sparkling with health and beauty, and
enveloped in æsthetic rags. But as political, religious, and social
movements have always had a vivid and forcible effect on artists,
painters in the nineteenth century could not in the long run hold
themselves aloof from this influence. The voice of the disinherited made
itself heard sullenly muttering and with ever-increasing strength. The
parable of Lazarus lying at the threshold of the rich man had become a
terrible reality. Conflict was to be seen everywhere around, and it
would have been mere hardness of heart to have used this suffering
people any longer as an agreeable subject for merriment. A higher
conception of humanity, the entire philanthropic character of the age,
made the jests at which the world had laughed seem forced and tasteless.
Modern life must cease altogether before it can be a humorous episode
for art, and it had become earnest reality through and through. Painting
could no longer affect trivial humour; it had to join issue, and speak
of what was going on around it. It had to take its part in the struggle
for aims that belonged to the immediate time.
Powerfully impressed by the Revolution of July, it made its first
advance. The Government had been thrown down after a blood-stained
struggle, and a liberated people were exulting; and the next Salon
showed more than forty representations of the great events, amongst
which that of _Delacroix_ took the highest place in artistic
impressiveness. The principal figure in his picture is "a youthful
woman, with a red Phrygian cap, holding a musket in one hand and a
tricolor in the other. Naked to the hip, she strides forward over the
corpses, giving challenge to battle, a beautiful vehement body with a
face in bold profile and an insolent grief upon her features, a strange
mixture of Phryne, _poissarde_, and the goddess of Liberty." Thus has
Heine described the work while still under a vivid impression of the
event it portrayed. In the thick of the powder smoke stands "Liberty"
upon the barricade, at her right a Parisian gamin with a pistol in his
hand, a child but already a hero, at her left an artisan with a gun on
his arm: it is the people that hastens by, exulting to die the death for
the great ideas of liberty and equality.
The painter himself had an entirely unpolitical mind. He had drawn his
inspiration for the picture, not from experience, but out of _La Curée_,
those verses of Auguste Barbier that are ablaze with wrath--
"C'est que la Liberté n'est pas une comtesse
Du noble faubourg Saint-Germain,
Une femme qu'un cri fait tomber en faiblesse,
Qui met du blanc et du carmin;
C'est un forte femme aux puissantes mamelles,
À la voix rauque, aux durs appas,
Qui, du brun sur la peau, du feu dans les prunelles,
Agile et marchant à grands pas,
Se plait aux cris du peuple, aux sanglantes mêlées,
Aux longs roulements des tambours,
À l'odeur de la poudre, aux lointaines volées
Des cloches et des canons sourds."
And by this allegorical figure he has certainly weakened its grip and
directness; but it was a bold, naturalistic achievement all the same. By
this work the great Romanticist became the father of the naturalistic
movement, which henceforward, supported by the revolutionary democratic
press, spread more and more widely.
The critics on these journals began to reproach painters with troubling
themselves too little about social and political affairs. "The actuality
and social significance of art," it was written, "is the principal
thing. What is meant by Beauty? We demand that painting should influence
society, and join in the work of progress. Everything else belongs to
the domain of Utopias and abstractions." The place of whimsicalities is
accordingly taken by sentimental and melodramatic scenes from the life
of the poor. Rendered enthusiastic by the victory of the people, and
inspired by democratic sentiments, some painters came to believe that
the sufferings of the artisan class were the thing to be represented,
and that there was nothing nobler than work.
[Illustration: LELEUX. MOT D'ORDRE.]
One of the first to give an example was _Jeanron_. His picture of "The
Little Patriots," produced in connection with the Revolution of July,
was a glorification of the struggle for freedom; his "Scene in Paris" a
protest against the sufferings of the people. He sought his models
amongst the poor of the suburb, painted their ragged clothes and their
rugged heads without idealisation. For him the aim of art was not
beauty, but the expression of truth--a truth, no doubt, which made
political propaganda. It was Jeanron's purpose to have a socialistic
influence. One sees it in his blacksmiths and peasants, and in that
picture "The Worker's Rest" which in 1847 induced Thoré's utterance: "It
is a melancholy and barren landscape from the neighbourhood of Paris, a
plebeian landscape which hardly seems to belong to itself, and which
gives up all pretensions to beauty merely to be of service to man.
Jeanron is always plebeian, even in his landscapes: he loves the plains
which are never allowed to repose, on which there is always labour;
there are no beautiful flowers in his fields, as there is no gold
ornament on the rags of his beggars and labourers."
And afterwards, during the early years of the reign of Louis Philippe,
when the tendency became once more latent, the Revolution of February
worked out what the Revolution of July had begun. Mediocre painters like
_Antigna_ became famous because they bewailed the sorrows of the "common
man" in small and medium-sized pictures. Others began to display a
greater interest in rustics, and to take them more seriously than they
had done in earlier works. _Adolphe Leleux_ made studies in Brittany,
and discovered earnest episodes in the daily life of the peasant, which
he rendered with great actuality. And after sliding back into
Romanticism, as he did with his Arragon smugglers, he enjoyed his chief
success in 1849 with that picture at the Luxembourg to which he was
incited by the sad aspect of the streets of Paris during the rising of
1848. The men who, driven by hunger and misery, fought upon the
barricades may be found in Leleux's "Mot d'Ordre."
After the _coup d'état_ of 1851 even _Meissonier_, till then exclusively
a painter of _rococo_ subjects, encroached on this province. In his
picture of the barricades (2 December 1851) heaps of corpses are lying
stretched out in postures which could not have been merely invented. The
execution, too, has a nervous force which betrays that even so
calculating a spirit as Meissonier was at one time moved and agitated.
In his little smokers and scholars and waiting-men he is an adroit but
cold-blooded painter: here he has really delivered himself of a modern
epic. His "Barricade" (formerly in the Van Praet Collection) is the one
thrilling note in the master's work, which was elsewhere so quiet.
_Alexandre Antigna_, originally an historical painter, turned from
historical disasters to those which take place in the life of the lower
strata of the people. A dwelling of a poor family is struck by
lightning; poor people pack up their meagre goods with the haste of
despair on the outbreak of fire; peasants seek refuge from a flood upon
the roof of their little house; petty shopkeepers are driving with their
wares across the country, when their nag drops down dead in the shafts;
or an old crone, cowering at the street corner, receives the pence which
her little daughter has earned by playing on the fiddle.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ OCTAVE TASSAERT.]
But the artist in whose works the philanthropic if sentimental humour of
the epoch is specially reflected is that remarkable painter, made up of
contradictions, _Octave Tassaert_. Borrowing at one and the same time
from Greuze, Fragonard, and Prudhon, he painted subjects mythological,
ribald, and religious, boudoir pictures, and scenes of human misery.
Tassaert was a Fleming, a grandson of that Tassaert who educated
Gottfried Schadow and died as director of the Berlin Academy in 1788.
His name has been for the most part forgotten; it awakes only a dim
recollection in those who see "The Unhappy Family" in the Luxembourg
_Musée_. But forty years ago he was amongst the most advanced of his
day, and enjoyed the respect of men like Delacroix, Rousseau, Troyon,
and Diaz. He took Chardin and Greuze as his models, and is a real master
in talent. He was the poet of the suburbs, who spoke in tender
complaining tones of the hopes and sufferings of humble people. He
painted the elegy of wretchedness: suicide in narrow garrets, sick
children, orphans freezing in the snow, seduced and more or less
repentant maidens--a sad train. He was called the Correggio of the
attic, the Prudhon of the suburbs. His labours are confined to eleven
years, from 1846 to 1857. After that he sent no more to the Salon and
sulkily withdrew from artistic life. He had no wish ever to see his
pictures again, and sold them--forty-four altogether--to a dealer for
two thousand francs and a cask of wine. With a glass in his hand he
forgot his misanthropy. He lived almost unknown in a little house in the
suburbs with a nightingale, a dog, and a little shop-girl for his sole
companions.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
TASSAERT. AFTER THE BALL.]
But his nightingale died, and then the dog, who should have followed at
his funeral. He could not survive the blow. He broke his palette, threw
his colours into the fire, lit a pan of charcoal that he might die like
"The Unhappy Family," and was found suffocated on the following day. On
a scrap of paper he had written, without regard to metre or orthography,
a few verses to his nightingale and his dog.
There is much that is magniloquent and sentimental in Tassaert's
pictures. His poor women perish with the big eyes of the heroines of Ary
Scheffer. Nevertheless he belongs to the advance line of modern art, and
suffered shipwreck merely because he gave the signal too early. The sad
reality prevails in his work. Merciless as a surgeon operating on a
diseased limb, he made a dissecting-room of his art, which is often
brutal where his brush probes the deepest wounds of civilisation. There
is nothing in his pictures but wretched broken furniture, stitched rags,
and pale faces in which toil and hunger have ploughed their terrible
furrows. He painted the degeneration of man perishing from lack of light
and air. Himself a Fleming, he has found his greatest follower in
another Netherlander, _Charles de Groux_, whose sombre pessimism
dominates modern Belgian art.
In Germany, where the socialistic writings of the French and English had
a wide circulation, _Gisbert Flüggen_, in Munich known as the German
Wilkie, was perhaps the first who as early as the forties went somewhat
further than the humorous representation of rustics, and entered into a
certain relation with the social ideas of his age in such pictures as
"The Interrupted Marriage Contract," "The Unlucky Gamester," "The
_Mésalliance_," "Decision of the Suit," "The Disappointed Legacy
Hunter," "The Execution for Rent," and the like. Under his influence
Danhauser in Vienna deserted whimsicalities for the representation of
social conflicts in middle-class life. To say nothing of his
"Gormandizer," he did this in "The Opening of the Will," where in a
somewhat obtrusive manner the rich relations of the deceased are grouped
to the right and the poor relations to the left, the former rubicund,
sleek, and insolent, the latter pale, spare, and needily clad. An
estimable priest is reading the last testament, and informs the poor
relatives with a benevolent smile that the inheritance is theirs,
whereon the rich give way to transports of rage.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
TASSAERT. THE ORPHANS.]
Yet more clearly, although similarly transposed into a sentimental key,
is the mood of the time just previous to 1848, reflected in the works of
_Carl Hübner_ of Düsseldorf. Ernest Wilkomm in the beginning of the
forties had represented in his sensational _genre_ pictures,
particularly in the "White Slaves," the contrast between afflicted serfs
and cruel landlords, between rich manufacturers and famishing artisans;
Robert Prutz had written his _Engelchen_, in which he had announced the
ruin of independent handicraft by the modern industrial system. Soon
afterwards the famine among the Silesian weavers, the intelligence of
which in 1844 flew through all Germany, set numbers of people reflecting
on the social question. Freiligrath made it the subject of his verses,
_Aus dem Schlesischen Gebirge_, the song of the poor weaver's child who
calls on Rübezahl--one of his most popular poems. And yet more
decisively does the social and revolutionary temper of the age find an
echo in Heine's _Webern_, composed in 1844. Even Geibel was impelled to
his poem _Mene Tekel_ by the spread of the news, though it stands in
curious opposition to his manner of writing elsewhere. Carl Hübner
therefore was acting very seasonably when he likewise treated the
distress of the Silesian weavers in his first picture of 1845.
Hübner knew the life of the poor and the heavy-laden; his feelings were
with them, and he expressed what he felt. This gives him a position
above and apart from the rest in the insipidly smiling school of
Düsseldorf, and sets his name at the beginning of a new chapter in the
history of German _genre_ painting. His next picture, "The Game Laws,"
sprang from an occasion which was quite as historical: a gamekeeper had
shot a poacher. In 1846 followed "The Emigrants," "The Execution for
Rent" in 1847, and in 1848 "Benevolence in the Cottage of the Poor."
These were works in which he continued to complain of the misery of the
working classes, and the contrast between ostentatious wealth and
helpless wretchedness, and to preach the crusade for liberty and human
rights. In opposition to the usual idyllic representations, he spoke
openly for the first time of the material weight oppressing large
classes of men. Undoubtedly, however, the artistic powers of the painter
corresponded but little to the good intentions of the philanthropist.
[Illustration: TASSAERT. THE SUICIDE.]
In 1853 even the historical painter Piloty entered this path in one of
his earliest pictures, "The Nurse": the picture represents a peasant
girl in service as a nurse in the town, with her charge on her arm,
entering the dirty house of an old woman with whom she is boarding her
own child. The rich child, already dressed out like a little lady, is
exuberant in health, whilst her own is languishing in a dark and cold
room without food or warm clothing.
In Belgium _Eugène de Block_ first took up these lines. The artistic
development of his character is particularly interesting, inasmuch as he
went through various transformations. First he had come forward in 1836
with the representation of a brawl amongst peasants, a picture which
contrasted with the tameness of contemporary painting by a native power
suggestive of Brouwer. Then, following the example of Madou and
Braekeleer, he occupied himself for a long time with quips and jests. At
a time when every one had a type to which he remained true as long as he
lived, Block chose poachers and game-keepers, and represented their
mutual cunning, now enveloping them, after the example of Braekeleer, in
the golden light and brown shadows of Ostade, now throwing over them a
tinge of Gallait's cardinal red. But this forced humour did not satisfy
him long; he let comicalities alone, and became the serious observer of
the people. A tender compassion for the poor may be noticed in his
works, though without doubt it often turns to a tearful sentimentalism.
He was an apostle of humanity who thundered against pauperism and set
himself up as spokesman on the social question; a tribune of the people,
who by his actions confirmed his reputation as a democratic painter.
This it is which places him near that other socialistic agitator who in
those days was filling Brussels with his fame.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
FLÜGGEN. THE DECISION OF THE SUIT.]
It was in 1835 that a young man wrote to one of his relatives from Italy
the proud words: "I will measure my strength with Rubens and Michael
Angelo."
[Illustration: HÜBNER. JULY.]
Having gained the _Prix de Rome_, he was enabled to make a sojourn in
the Eternal City. He was thinking of his return. He was possessed of a
lofty ambition, and dreamt of rivalling the fame of the old masters. As
a victor he made an entry into his native land, into the good town of
Dinant, which received him like a mother. He was accompanied by a huge
roll of canvas like a declaration of war. But he needed a larger
battle-field for his plans. "I imagine," said he, "that the universe has
its eyes upon me." So he went on to Paris with his "Patroclus" and a few
other pictures. No less than six thousand artists had seen the work in
Rome: a prince of art, Thorwaldsen, had said when he beheld it: "This
young man is a giant." And the young man was himself of that opinion.
With the gait of a conqueror he entered Paris, in the belief that
artists would line the streets to receive him. But when the portals of
the _Salon_ of 1839 were opened he did not see his picture there. It was
skied over a door, and no one noticed it. Théophile Gautier, Gustave
Planché, and Bürger-Thoré wrote their articles without even mentioning
it with one word of praise or blame.
For one moment he thought of exhibiting it out of doors in front of the
Louvre, of calling together a popular assembly and summoning all France
to decide. But an application to the minister was met with a refusal,
and he returned to Brussels hanging his head. There he puffed his
masterpiece, "The Fight round the Body of Patroclus," in magniloquent
phrases upon huge placards. A poet exclaimed, "Hats off: here is a new
Homer." The _Moniteur_ gave him a couple of articles. But when the
Exhibition came, artists were again unable to know what to make of it.
The majority were of an opinion that Michael Angelo was brutally
parodied by these swollen muscles and distorted limbs. And no earthquake
disturbed the studios, as the painter had expected. However, he was
awarded a bronze medal and thanked in an honest citizen-like fashion
"for the distinguished talent which he had displayed." Then his whole
pride revolted. He circulated caricatures and cried out: "This medal
will be an eternal blot on the century." Then he published in the
_Charivari_ an open letter to the king. "Michael Angelo," he wrote,
"never allowed himself to pass final judgment on the works of
contemporary artists, and so His Majesty, who hardly understands as much
about art as Michael Angelo, would do well not to decide on the worth of
modern pictures after a passing glance."
_Antoine Wiertz_, the son of a gendarme who had once been a soldier of
the great Republic, was born in Dinant in 1806. By his mother he was a
Walloon, and he had German blood in him through his father, whose family
had originally come from Saxony. German moral philosophy and treatises
on education had formed the reading of his youthful years. He had not to
complain of want of assistance. At the declaration of Belgian
independence he was five-and-twenty; so his maturity fell in the proud
epoch when the young nation laid out everything to add artistic to
political splendour. Even as a boy, their only child, he was idolised by
his parents, the old gendarme and the honest charwoman. His first
attempts were regarded by his relations as marvels. The neighbours went
into raptures over a frog he had modelled, "which looked just as if it
were alive." The landlord of a tavern ordered a signboard from him, and
when it was finished the whole population stood before it in admiration.
A certain Herr Maibe, who was artistically inclined, had his attention
directed to the young genius, undertook all the expenses of his
education, and sent him to the Antwerp Academy. There he obtained a
government scholarship, and gained in 1832 the _Prix de Rome_. From the
first he was quite clear as to his own importance.
[Illustration: _American Art Review._
WIERTZ. THE ORPHANS.]
Even as a pupil at the Antwerp Academy he wrote in a letter to his
father contemptuously of his fellow-students' reverence for the old
masters. "They imagine," said he, "that the old masters are invincible
gods, and not men whom genius may surpass." And instead of admonishing
him to be modest, his father answered with pride: "Be a model to the
youth of the future, so that in later centuries young painters may say,
'I will raise myself to fame as the great Wiertz did in Belgium.'" Such
dangerous flattery would have affected stronger characters. It needed
only the Italian journey to send him altogether astray. Michael Angelo
made him giddy, as had been the case with Cornelius, Chenavard, and many
another. With all the ambition of a self-taught man he held every touch
of his brush to be important, and was indignant if others refused to
think the same. After his failures in Paris and Brussels he began to
find high treason in every criticism, and started a discussion on "the
pernicious influence of journalism upon art and literature." We find him
saying: "If any one writes ill of me when I am dead, I will rise from
the grave to defend myself."
In his hatred of criticism he resolved to exhibit no more, lived a
miserable existence till his death in 1865, and painted hasty and
careless portraits, _pour la soupe_, when he was in pressing need of
money. These brought him at first from three to four hundred, and later
a thousand francs. He indulged in colossal sketches, for the completion
of which the State built him in 1850 a tremendous studio, the present
_Musée Wiertz_. It stands a few hundred paces from the Luxembourg
station, to the extreme north of the town, in a beautiful though rather
neglected little park, a white building with a pillared portico and a
broad perron leading up to it. Here he sat in a fantastically gorgeous
costume, for ever wearing his great Rubens hat. Philanthropic lectures
on this world and the next, on the well-being of the people and the
diseases of modern civilisation, were the fruits of his activity.
Whoever loves painting for painting's sake need never visit the museum.
There there are battles, conflagrations, floods, and earthquakes; heaven
and earth are in commotion. Giants hurl rocks at one another, and try,
like Jupiter, to shake the earth with their frown. All of them delight
in force, and bring their muscles into play like athletes. But the
painter himself is no athlete, no giant as Thorwaldsen called him, and
no genius as he fancied himself to be. _Le singe des génies_, he
conceived the notion of "great art" purely in its relation to space, and
believed himself greater than the greatest because his canvases were of
greater dimensions. When the ministry thought of making him Director of
the Antwerp Academy, after the departure of Wappers, he wrote the
following characteristic sentences: "I gather from the newspapers that I
may be offered the place of Wappers." If in the moment when the profound
philosopher is pondering over sublime ideas people were to say to him,
"Will you teach us the A, B, C? I believe that he whose dwelling-place
is in the clouds would fall straight from heaven to earth." Living in an
atmosphere of flattery at home, and overpowered by the incense which was
there offered to his genius, he could not set himself free from the
fixed idea of competing with Michael Angelo and Rubens. Below his
picture of "The Childhood of Mary" he placed the words: "Counterpart to
the picture by Rubens in Antwerp treating the same subject." He offered
his "Triumph of Christ" to the cathedral there under the condition of
its being hung beside Rubens' "Descent from the Cross." "The Rising up
of Hell" he wished to exhibit of an evening in the theatre when it was
opened for a performance. During the waits the audience were to
contemplate the picture while a choir sang with orchestral
accompaniment. But all these offers were declined with thanks.
Such failures make men pessimists; but it was through them that Wiertz,
after being an historical painter, became the child of his age. He began
to hurl thunderbolts against the evils of modern civilisation. He
preaches and lashes and curses and suffers. The forms of which he makes
use are borrowed from the old masters. The man of Michael Angelo, with
his athletic build, his gigantic muscles, his nude body, the man of the
Renaissance and not the man of the nineteenth century, strides through
his works; it is only in the subject-matter of his pictures that the
modern spirit has broken through the old formula. All the questions
which have been thrown out by the philosophy and civilisation of the
nineteenth century are reflected as vast problems in his vast pictures.
He fashions his brush into a weapon with which he fights for the
disinherited, for the pariahs, for the people. He is bent on being the
painter of democracy--a great danger for art.
[Illustration: WIERTZ. THE THINGS OF THE PRESENT AS SEEN BY FUTURE
AGES.]
He agitates in an impassioned way against the horrors of war. His
picture "Food for Powder" begins this crusade. A cannon is lying idle on
the wall of a fortress, and around this slumbering iron monster children
are playing at soldiers, with no suspicion that their sport will soon be
turned into bitter earnest, and that in war they will themselves become
food for this demon. In another picture, "The civilisation of the
Nineteenth Century," soldiers intoxicated with blood and victory have
broken into a chamber by night and are stabbing a mother with her child.
A third, "The Last Cannon Shot," hints dimly at the future pacification
of the world. "A Scene in Hell," however, is the chief of the effusions
directed against war. The Emperor Napoleon in his grey coat and his
historical three-cornered hat is languishing in hell; wavering flames
envelop him as with a flowing purple mantle, and an innumerable
multitude of mothers and sisters, wives and betrothed maidens, children
and fathers, from whom he has taken their dearest are pressing round
him. Fists are clenched against him, and screams issue from toothless,
raging mouths. He, on the other hand, with his arms crossed on his
breast, and his haughty visage stern and gloomy, stands motionless,
looking fixedly with satanic eyes upon the thousands whose happiness he
has destroyed.
[Illustration: WIERTZ. THE FIGHT ROUND THE BODY OF PATROCLUS.]
In his "Thoughts and Visions of a Decapitated Head", Wiertz, moved by
Victor Hugo's _Le dernier jour d'un condamné_, makes capital punishment
a subject of more lengthy disquisition. The picture, which is made up of
three parts, is supposed to represent the feelings of a man, who has
been guillotined, during the first three minutes after execution. The
border of the picture contains a complete dissertation: "The man who has
suffered execution sees his body dried up and in corruption in a dark
corner; and sees also, what it is only given to spirits of another world
to perceive, the secrets of the transmutation of matter. He sees all the
gases which have formed his body, and its sulphurous, earthy, and
ammoniacal elements, detach themselves from its decaying flesh and serve
for the structure of other living beings.... When that abominable
instrument the guillotine is one day actually abolished, may God be
praised," and so on.
Beside this painted plea against capital punishment hangs "The Burnt
Child," as an argument in favour of _crêches_. A poor working woman has
for one moment left her garret. Meanwhile a fire has broken out, and she
returns to find the charred body of her boy. In the picture "Hunger,
Madness, and Crime" he treats of human misery in general, and touches on
the question of the rearing of illegitimate children. There is a young
girl forced to live on the carrots which a rich man throws into the
gutter. In consequence of a notification to pay taxes she goes out of
her mind, and with hellish laughter cuts to pieces the baby who has
brought her to ruin. Cremation is recommended in the picture "Buried too
soon": there is a vault, and in it a coffin, the lid of which has been
burst open from the inside; through the cleft may be seen a clenched
hand, and in the darkness of the coffin the horror-stricken countenance
of one who is piteously crying for help.
In the "Novel Reader" he endeavours to show the baneful influence of
vicious reading upon the imagination of a girl. She is lying naked in
bed, with loosened hair and a book in her hand; her eyes are reddened
with hysterical tears, and an evil spirit is laying a new book on the
couch, _Antonine_, by Alexandre Dumas _Fils_. "The Retort of a Belgian
Lady"--an anticipation of Neid--glorifies homicide committed in the
defence of honour. A Dutch officer having taken liberties with a Belgian
woman, she blows out his brains with a pistol. In "The Suicide" the
fragments of a skull may be seen flying in all directions. How the young
man who has just destroyed himself came to this pass may be gathered
from the book entitled _Materialism_, which lies on his table. And thus
he goes on, though the spectator feels less and less inclined to take
any serious interest in these lectures. For although the intentions of
Wiertz had now and then a touch of the sublime, he was neither clear as
to the limits of what could be represented nor did he possess the
capacity of expressing what he wished in artistic forms. Like many a
German painter of those years, he was a philosopher of the brush, a
scholar in disguise, who wrote out his thoughts in paint instead of ink.
Wiertz made painting a vehicle for more than it can render as painting:
with him it begins to dogmatise; it is a book, and it awakens a regret
that this rich mind was lost to authorship. There he might, perhaps,
have done much that was useful towards solving the social and
philosophical questions of the day; as he is, he has nothing to offer
the understanding, and only succeeds in offending the eye. A human brain
with both great and trivial ideas lays itself bare. But, like Cornelius,
from the mere fulness of his ideas he was unable to give them artistic
expression. He groped from Michael Angelo to Rubens, and from Raphael to
Ary Scheffer, without realising that the artistic utterance of all these
masters had been an individual gift. The career of Wiertz is an
interesting psychological case. He was an abnormal phenomenon, and he
cannot be passed over in the history of art, because he was one of the
first who treated subjects from modern life in large pictures. Never
before had a genuinely artistic age brought forth such a monster, yet it
is impossible to ignore him, or deny that he claims a certain degree of
importance in the art history of the past century.