(In the Louvre)
This picture was one of the first-fruits of Delacroix's journey to
Morocco with Count Mornay's mission. It was painted in 1833, the year
after his return to France, commissioned by the State at the price of
3000 frs. The handling of the upright figure of the negress suggests
Spanish influence, and was in turn obviously well known to Manet when
he painted his "Olympia."
[Illustration: PLATE II.--ALGERIAN WOMEN IN THEIR APARTMENT]
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Italianism became paramount in French painting when, in the fourth
decade of the sixteenth century, Rosso and Primaticcio followed the
call of Francis I. and founded the School of Fontainebleau. From about
1532 right into the nineteenth century, the official art of France,
that is to say, the art favoured by the rulers and encouraged by the
Academy, was based on the imitation of Raphael and the Italians of the
decline--an art that was essentially intellectual, cold, and dominated
by drawing and design, not by colour. In the reign of Louis XIV., when
Le Brun became the art despot of his country, the foundation of the
Academy, and subsequently of the French School at Rome, led to the
formulating of definite canons of formal beauty and of the "grand
style." Evolution on these lines was impossible. French art was only
saved from stagnation by the influence of Northern art, from which it
continued to derive its vitality. It was saved by painters who, like
Philippe de Champaigne and Watteau, had come from the North, or who,
like the brothers Le Nain, Chardin, Boucher, Fragonard, and finally
Delacroix, had drawn their inspiration either from the Dutchmen or from
Rubens and the Flemings.
During the "grand" century there are only isolated instances of
painters who resisted the tyranny of academic rule and the exclusive
worship of classic antiquity. But whilst the professional painters
meekly submitted to Le Brun's tyranny, the revolt which was to
transform the art of painting in France in the eighteenth century was
heralded, nay initiated, in the field of polemic literature. A fierce
battle was waged between the traditional advocates of the supremacy of
line and the champions of colour, or rather of paint that fulfils a
more vital function than the colouring of spaces created by linear
design. It was the battle of the "Poussinistes" and the "Rubenistes,"
the two factions deriving their names from the great masters whose art
was the supreme embodiment of the two opposed principles: Poussin and
Rubens. Felibien was the leader of those who espoused the cause of
academic design with superimposed colour as a secondary consideration;
and Roger de Piles became the chief defender of colour as a
constructive element.
The dawn of the eighteenth century, and the advent of Watteau, brought
the signal victory of the Rubenistes. The pompous style of the
seventeenth century ebbed away with the life of the _grand monarque_.
The new age demanded a new art--the graceful and dainty art of the
boudoir. At the very outset, Watteau carried the emotional
expressiveness of pigment to a point where it could not be maintained
by his followers and imitators. He had never been to Italy; and though
he had studied the works of the Venetian colourists, his art was mainly
derived from Flemish sources. But the Academy continued to send its
most promising pupils to its branch school in Rome, where they were
taught to worship at the shrine of Raphael and his followers, and
whence they returned to continue the tradition of the School. Thus
Italianism did not die, though it became transformed by the ascendency
of the Rubens influence and by the new social conditions. Mythology
and allegory continued to rule supreme in the art of Boucher, which is
the most typical expression of the French eighteenth century, but they
are adapted to the decoration of the boudoir, and colour and brushwork
are no longer subordinated to design. Boucher, the most French of all
French painters, is inconceivable without two centuries of the Italian
tradition of design and without Rubens's example of handling paint. In
the art of Fragonard, that great virtuoso of the brush, the influence
of Rubens becomes absolutely paramount. Only a few youthful failures
recall his study of the Italians.
Fragonard witnessed the end of the _ancien regime_ and the great
political upheaval of the French Revolution. With the monarchy died
the sensuous art of the _fetes galantes_. The painting that flourished
in the Napoleonic era was more formal, cold, and academic than at any
previous epoch. David and his followers sought their inspiration in
Roman history, and set purity of line and the dogmas of the School
higher than ever. Their idealism was of a bombastic, rhetorical order;
their painting absolutely uninspired tinting of pseudo-classic designs.
At no period had French art sunk to such a level of dulness. The death
of David left his great pupil Ingres, the most perfect draughtsman of
the nineteenth century, the undisputed leader of the School. But the
day of freedom was at hand--and the liberating word was to be
pronounced by Delacroix. The seventeenth-century war between the
"Poussinistes" and the "Rubenistes" was to be resumed, although the two
parties were now re-christened "Classicists" and "Romanticists." But
this time the war was one of deeds, and not of words. Ingres was the
leader of an army; Delacroix fought almost single-handed. And, for
once, victory did not favour the large battalions.