Before leaving Goya for men whose works are their only history,
a characteristic incident, which caused his flight from Spain to
Bordeaux in France, must be told. In 1814 Wellington was in Madrid
and sat for his portrait to Goya. After the first sitting, the soldier
presumed to criticise the work; whereat Goya, seizing a cutlass,
attacked him, causing the future hero of Waterloo to flee for his life
from the maniacal fury of the painter. It is said that, later, peace
was made between the two men, and that the portrait was achieved;
but for the moment Goya found safety in France, together with his
long-suffering wife, who had incidentally borne him twenty children.
At the green old age of eighty-two Goya died at Bordeaux, April 16,
1828.
[Illustration: ST. JUSTINA AND ST. RUFINA. FROM A PAINTING BY GOYA IN
THE CATHEDRAL AT SEVILLE.
These are the patron saints of Seville. The legend has it that they
were the daughters of a potter and followed their father's trade,
giving away in charity, however, all that they earned more than was
sufficient to supply their simple wants. At the time of a festival
to Venus, they were requested to supply the vessels to be used in her
worship, and on their refusing, they were dragged before the prefect,
who condemned them to death, July 19, A.D. 304. They are generally
represented with earthen vessels and the palms of martyrdom; in this
case, the broken statue of Venus lies in the foreground. The Giralda
tower, the chief ornament of Seville, and the prototype of the Madison
Square tower in New York City, is their especial care, and it is
believed that its preservation from lightning is due to them.]
No greater contrast could be devised than the four works which follow,
either in the character of the art or in the uneventful respectability
of the painters' lives. They are all typical of a class of pictures
which has been popular in England, from the time of Hogarth to the
present day. The earliest of them is the "Blind Fiddler" of Sir David
Wilkie, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1807. The dates at
which the others, by Mulready, Webster, and Leslie, were painted would
preclude their appearance here, if strict chronological sequence were
imposed, as they were painted about 1840. It is instructive,
however, to group them together, to show that these artists and their
followers, who were legion, thought at least as much of subject as of
method. Not that the latter quality is lacking. On the contrary, it
is only too evident; but it is a method of convention. No one would
imagine for a moment, in looking at any one of these pictures, that
he was admitted an unseen spectator to some scene of intimate family
life. It is this quality which the great Dutchmen in all their scenes
of familiar life preserved; and when we look at a Pieter de Hooge,
for instance, there is no suspicion that the homely scene has been
arranged for our delectation. In its transplantation from Holland,
however, English art lost just this quality.
David Wilkie, born in Scotland, at Cults in Fifeshire, November 18,
1785, came to London in 1805 to enter the Royal Academy schools, after
some preliminary training at Edinburgh. His first picture, in the
exhibition of 1806, "The Village Politicians," attracted attention,
and was followed the next year by "The Blind Fiddler." The work of
a youth of twenty-two, it is remarkable for its close observation
of character and the skilful use made of what may be termed the
theatrical faculty of grouping the personages so that their action
tells the story. This is not a merit, and there is little doubt that
the scene would be greater as art were it more consistently human.
Character is well and pictorially rendered; but by its insistence in
every figure, we feel that it is but a moment since the curtain
was withdrawn and the _tableau vivant_ shown. This and the pictures
following it met with the most unbounded popular approval, were
reproduced by engraving, and exercised an influence increased by the
honors and fortune which were showered on the painter.
In 1825 Wilkie made an extended continental tour, and three years
later, after his return to England, changed his class of subjects for
historical and portrait painting, bringing to these later themes the
same ability and the same lack of _naïveté_ which characterized his
former work. A Royal Academician since 1811, he was appointed first
painter in ordinary to the king, on the death of Lawrence, in 1830. He
was knighted in 1836, and died at sea on June 1, 1841, while returning
from Egypt.
[Illustration: THE BLIND FIDDLER. FROM A PAINTING BY SIR DAVID WILKIE.
"An itinerant musician is entertaining a cottager and his family with a
tune on the fiddle; the father gayly snaps his fingers at an infant on
the knees of the mother, behind whom a mischievous boy, with the poker
and bellows in his hands, is mimicking the action of the musician.
With this exception, all, even the dog standing by the chair of its
mistress, appear to be intent upon the music of the blind fiddler."
This quotation, from the catalogue of the National Gallery where the
original picture is placed, accurately describes it.]
[Illustration: CHOOSING THE WEDDING GOWN. FROM A PAINTING BY WILLIAM
MULREADY IN THE SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM, LONDON.
To the title of this picture, the painter himself added, as expository
of his theme and the source of his inspiration, the following passage
from Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield": "I had scarcely taken orders
a year, before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my
wife, as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but
for such qualities as would wear well." The picture thus affords
a good instance of the dependence on literature of the painters of
Mulready's school. Its title alone would suffice, so well and simply
is the story told; but, apparently, with the British public, and in
the painter's mind, it gained an added grace by diverting the visual
impression of the observer to the realm of literature. The picture is
here reproduced from a copyrighted photograph by Frederick Hollyer,
Kensington.]
William Mulready was of Irish birth, having come into the world at
Ennis, in the County Clare, April 1, 1786. In 1809, after a period
in the schools of the Royal Academy, he exhibited there a picture
entitled "Fair Time," which gave him almost instant success; and until
his death, July 7, 1863, though producing fewer pictures than Wilkie,
he worked on very much the same class of subjects. His color is less
agreeable than that of the Scot, and his execution very much more
labored. His life was uneventful, occupied exclusively with his work,
which he loved; so much so that two days before his death, an old
man of seventy-seven, he sat drawing in the evening life class at the
Royal Academy. He had been a member of the Academy since 1816. The
picture here reproduced is (even without the quotation from the "Vicar
of Wakefield" which accompanies it in the catalogue of the South
Kensington Museum) a simple story simply told. It is free from the
mannerisms which mar much of Mulready's work, especially in the
portrayal of children, and in the original is more agreeable in color
than are many of his pictures.
[Illustration: CONTRARY WINDS. FROM A PAINTING BY THOMAS WEBSTER. The
happily chosen title explains sufficiently this pleasant scene. The
picture, painted in 1843, is now in the South Kensington Museum.]
Thomas Webster, born March 20, 1800, in London, and dying at Cranbrook
in Kent, September, 1886, was another painter whose work had enjoyed
the full meed of popularity, from 1825 to the time of his retirement
from the Royal Academy in 1877. Pictures like the one here reproduced
(from the original in the South Kensington Museum, painted in 1843,
and entitled "Contrary Winds"), pictures depicting homely rustic
life, were his specialty. His work had gained him the title of Royal
Academician in 1846.
Through all this time, and in the work of many painters unnoticed
here, the qualities are evident of an honest endeavor to paint the
simple life of the country. With a higher standard of taste, and
better preliminary instruction, painting would have gained; and the
defect with which British art has been so often reproached, of being
too literary, might have been lessened. Charles Robert Leslie,
whose works are almost uniformly inspired by literature, was born at
Clerkenwell in England, of American parents, October 19, 1794. He was
taken to Philadelphia when five years of age, but returned to England
in 1811, to study at the Royal Academy. Washington Allston and
Benjamin West, both Americans--the latter at the time President of the
Royal Academy--aided Leslie by advice.
After a preliminary stage as a portrait painter, Leslie exhibited at
the Royal Academy in 1819 a picture of "Sir Roger de Coverley Going to
Church," the first of a long series of pictures dependent on books
for their subjects. In 1825 he painted "Sancho Panza and the Duchess,"
which procured him his election as an Academician the following year.
The picture here reproduced is a repetition, with some slight changes,
of the same subject, but was painted in 1844. Leslie may be said to
have originated this style of subject in England, where he has had
many followers; and, given the requisite knowledge of literature, his
pictures tell their story with directness and humor. In painting, his
work is rather hard; but in grace and style of drawing he was much
superior to his contemporaries. Among his pictures are many suggested
by Shakespeare, which have been popularized by engraving.
[Illustration: SANCHO PANZA IN THE APARTMENT OF THE DUCHESS. FROM A
PAINTING BY C.E. LESLIE.
Sancho having, by the command of the Duchess, seated himself upon a
low stool, is saying, "Now, madam, that I am sure that nobody but the
company present hears us, I will answer without fear or emotion to all
you have asked and to all you shall ask me; and the first thing I tell
you is that I take my master, Don Quixote, for a downright madman."
The original picture is in the National Gallery, London.]
Leslie returned to this country in 1833 to accept the professorship
of drawing at the West Point Military Academy, but remained only a
few months. After returning to London, he enjoyed a successful
career until his death, May 5, 1859. He was one of the first and most
consistent admirers of Constable's work, and wrote his life. He also
published lectures on painting, delivered at the Royal Academy, where
he had been appointed lecturer in 1848.
The consideration of the two men whose portraits face each other here,
and who stood thus opposed, during their lives, as the leaders of
all that constituted art in their time and country, takes us back to
France. Frequent returns of this character will be necessary in the
course of these papers; for, without undue prejudice in favor of
the French, it must be said that they alone have through the century
maintained a consistent attitude in regard to art. Other countries
have from time to time encouraged painting, with as frequent lapses
of interest or lack of men who could legitimately inspire interest.
Although transplanted bodily from Italy to France, in the time of
Francis the First, art had taken so firm a root by the commencement
of this century that, as we have seen, it grew and flourished though
watered by the red blood of revolution. As a national institution,
following the prescribed rules of the Academy, it has, of course,
met with frequent assaults at the hands of men for whom prescribed
academic law was as naught in comparison with the higher law of
genius. In 1819 such a man appeared, with a picture which violated the
unwritten law formulated by David: "Look in your Plutarch and paint!"
[Illustration: THE RAFT OF THE "MEDUSA." FROM A PAINTING BY GÉRICAULT
IN THE LOUVRE.
The frigate "Medusa," accompanied by three other vessels, left France
June 17, 1816, heading for Saint-Louis (Senegal), with the governor
and principal officers of the colony as passengers. On July 2 the
vessel stranded on a reef, and after five days of ineffectual effort
to float her, was abandoned. A raft was constructed and one hundred
and forty-nine men embarked on it, the remainder of the crew and
passengers, four hundred all told, taking to the boats. For twelve
days, the raft floated at the will of the waves and winds; then it
was sighted by one of the convoys, the brig Argus. Only fifteen men
survived. The picture represents the moment of their deliverance.]
Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault, born at Rouen, September 26,
1791, came to Paris in 1808, and entered the studio of Guérin, where
his method of painting displeased his master to such a degree that he
advised him to abandon the study of art. Guérin had thoroughly imbibed
the defects of the David method; and the spectacle of a youth who
obstinately persisted in trying to paint the model as he really
appeared, instead of making a pink imitation of antique sculpture,
seemed to him to be of little promise.
Géricault, however, persisted; and with the exception of about a year,
when the halo of military glory seduced him from his work, he worked
so well and earnestly that, after two years' sojourn in Italy, he
returned to Paris, a few weeks before the Salon of 1819, equipped with
the knowledge of a master.
Taking a canvas about fifteen feet high by twenty in length, using the
green-room of a theatre for a studio, he set to work. Disdaining the
prevailing taste for mythology and classic themes, he took from the
journals of the time the moving recital of the sufferings of the crew
of the frigate "Medusa," abandoned on a raft in mid-ocean. Choosing
the moment when the fifteen survivors of the hundred and forty-nine
men who had embarked on the raft sighted the sail in the offing which
meant their deliverance, he worked with an energy and fire which have
remained remarkable in the annals of art. Certain of the figures, all
of which are more than life size, were painted in a day, and when the
Salon of 1819 opened, the picture was finished.
[Illustration: INGRES. FROM A PORTRAIT PAINTED BY HIMSELF.
Painted for the gallery of Painters' Portraits in the Uffizi,
Florence, in 1858, according to the inscription on the picture. This
most interesting collection, which is still being added to year by
year, comprises the portraits of the great painters, in most cases by
their own hands, from the time of the Renaissance to our day.]
Seen as it is to-day in the Louvre, blackened by time and the neglect
from which it suffered for six or seven years before it was placed
there, it remains one of the capital pages in the history of modern
art. The effect on the younger generation who saw it fresh from the
hand of the master, accustomed as they were to the lifeless
effigies of the classic school, was puzzling, and none but the most
revolutionary dared approve of it. With the older painters there was
a similar distrust of the impression which it caused. Yet David--an
artistic kernel encased in an academic husk--admired it; and so did a
swarthy youth who was soon to make his mark and who was a friend and
former comrade of Géricault in the _atelier_ Guérin--Eugène Delacroix.
[Illustration: DELACROIX. FROM A PORTRAIT PAINTED BY HIMSELF IN 1837.
This portrait was left by the painter at his death to Mlle. Jenny
Leguillon, his housekeeper, and by her was bequeathed to the Louvre in
1872.]
Géricault received a recompense of the fourth class, and, disgusted
with his lot, took the immense canvas to London, where it was
exhibited with success. During his sojourn in England he executed a
number of pictures in oil and water color, and many lithographs, which
are to-day eagerly sought by collectors. Returning to France full of
projects for work, his health began to give way, and on the 18th of
January, 1824, he died. The influence which he exercised had, however,
borne its fruits. Already in the Salon of 1822 Ferdinand Victor Eugène
Delacroix, born at Charenton, near Paris, April 26, 1799, had shown
his "Dante and Virgil."
Before considering Delacroix, however, it is best to return to the
earlier years of the century, and give J. Dominique Auguste Ingres,
whose stern face confronts Delacroix's portrait, the precedence to
which his age entitles him.
"Monsieur" Ingres, as the iconoclastic leaders of the romantic school
called him in mock deference, was born at Montauban, August 29, 1780.
His life was fortunate, and his history, which is chiefly that of his
works, can be told in few words. A pupil of David, he received
the Prix de Rome in 1801. He remained in Rome much longer than the
allotted four years to which his prize entitled him, and returned
there often during his life as to the source of all art. By
portraiture and the constant patronage of the government, the material
conditions of his life, which was of a simple character, befitting
a man who viewed his mission as that of an apostle preaching the
doctrine of pure classicism, were made easy; and the official titles
of Member of the Institute, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, and
Senator of the Empire all came to him with the lapse of years.
More royalist than the king, and the last of David's disciples, Ingres
pursued throughout his life the even tenor of a man convinced that
the source of all inspiration in art was Greek sculpture as amplified,
transmuted, and translated to the realm of painting by Raphael.
Painting in his hands became almost purely a matter of form. The
element of color was virtually ignored, and form, chastened in contour
and modelling, became through the magic of his genius the almost
sufficient quality. The qualification is necessary. For though too
great a man to lose, as too many of his master's pupils did, the grasp
on nature; and while, therefore, his works, seen as they are through
the glamour of the antique, never lack an intimate relation to
existing life, it is impossible to resist the feeling before them that
it is life beautified, of exquisite yet virile choice, but of life
arrested. The reproach of his opponents of the romantic school that he
was an "embalmer" has a foundation of truth.
[Illustration: A PORTRAIT OF INGRES, DRAWN IN ROME IN 1816.
This lovely drawing, from the collection in the Louvre, shows Ingres
in his most pleasing aspect. By the magic of a few lines faintly
traced, he has evoked for us the image of a charming person; and by
the slight indication of costume, has also fixed the epoch at which
the drawing was made. It was in the earlier years of the master, while
he was in Rome, that he drew many such little masterpieces as a means
of livelihood, drawings which he then made for a few francs, and which
are now eagerly sought by the museums of Europe.]
[Illustration: APOTHEOSIS OF HOMER. FROM A PAINTING BY INGRES.
Originally painted for a ceiling in the gallery of Greek and Roman
Antiquities, in the Louvre, where it is now replaced by a copy of the
same executed by Ingres's pupils. The picture represents Homer crowned
as Jupiter by Victory, and seated before his temple receiving the
homage of the poets, painters, sculptors, and architects of the
world.]
[Illustration: THE SEIZURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE BY THE CRUSADERS. FROM A
PAINTING BY EUGÈNE DELACROIX.
In 1203, through political intrigue, a French army, raised to take
part in the fourth crusade for the rescue of Jerusalem from
the Mohammedans, joined with a Venetian army in an attack on
Constantinople, then a Christian city, the capital of the Byzantine
Empire. The city fell, but later was recovered. Then, on April 12,
1204, the invaders secured it again, and subjected it to a despoilment
without parallel. Delacroix's picture portrays a scene in this
despoilment. One of the invading barons, attended by his escort, rides
on to a terrace, and the citizens fall before him, praying his mercy.
Behind lies the Bosphorous, and beyond it are the shores of Asia.]
For all this, it is hardly superlative to say that, since art began,
no man has ever felt the exquisite and subtle harmony of line to
the same degree as Ingres. Naturally the best examples of this, his
greatest quality, are to be found in his rendering of the nude human
form; and from the "Oedipus and the Sphinx," of 1808, to "La Source,"
of 1856, both of which are now in the Louvre, he returned again and
again to its study, producing each time a masterpiece. His portraits,
again, are most masterly, occasionally rising through sheer force of
rendering each characteristic trait of his model (as in the portrait
of M. Bertin, the editor of the "Débats"), to the extreme exactitude
of Holbein, coupled with an _allure_ so thoroughly modern that
the whole epoch of Louis Philippe lives before us. In the slighter
drawings of his earlier years in Rome, one of which is reproduced
here, only the most typical details are chosen, and these are
indicated with a delicacy of touch, a sureness of hand, that not
only indicates the master, but lends a distinctive charm of truthful
delicacy of which none but Ingres has known the secret. It is in such
works that his influence will be felt the longest; for, as with his
master, the great pictures in which he exemplified his principles
remain cold and uninteresting. The "Homer Deified," reproduced here,
was originally intended as a ceiling for the Louvre, and from a
decorative point of view would excite a pitying smile from Veronese
or Tiepolo. Taken bit by bit, as a beautiful exhibition of supreme
knowledge, of the evasive quality of style in drawing, it is, however,
admirable, and as a whole it has the merits of grave, balanced
composition. It was the spirit of work like this which the master
sought to force upon his epoch, rather than that of his portraits or
of pictures like the "Source;" and the austerity of these principles
met with more submission in the earlier years of the century than when
later Géricault had shown the path in which the audacious Delacroix
threw himself at the head of a band of romantic followers.
[Illustration: DANTE AND VIRGIL CROSSING THE LAKE WHICH SURROUNDS THE
INFERNAL CITY OF DITÉ. FROM A PAINTING BY EUGÈNE DELACROIX, IN THE
LOUVRE.
The subject is taken from Dante's "Inferno," and represents the poet
and his companions and guide standing in a bark conducted by Phlegyas,
while around them appear on the surface of the water the writhing
bodies of the condemned, among whom Dante recognizes certain
Florentines.]
I have used the term audacious in speaking of Delacroix, and
circumstances forced him to justify the epithet. Yet to a student of
his work, and still more of his character as revealed in his writings
(his recently published letters and the few articles published during
his life in the "Revue des Deux-Mondes"), he would appear to have been
by nature prepared to receive the full academic tradition, and
only because of what appeared a violation of the tradition _as he
understood it_, to have arrayed himself in violent opposition: a
situation which rendered him in work and in life contradictory to his
natural instinct. It is the old story of the defect of system. Even
the most cunningly devised cannot make a place for all the many
manifestations of temperamental activity. Like Géricault, a pupil of
Guérin, Delacroix found in his master and in the general spirit of
the school an insistence on the letter of the classic law to which his
richly endowed nature could not bend, and was thus forced to rebel;
whereas a more elastic application of received principles would have
found him an enthusiastic adherent. In this way he missed acquiring
the technical mastery over form, which proved a stumbling block to him
through life. At times his drawing is possessed of a vigor and life
which even Ingres never had; at others his work is almost lamentable
in its lack of constructive form. In respect to color in its finest,
most harmonic qualities, he is the greatest of French painters; and
at all times he is master of an intense dramatic force. It was with a
masterpiece--"Dante and Virgil"--that he made his first appearance at
the Salon in 1822. At a bound he found himself famous. Guérin, who had
counselled him against sending his picture to the Salon, grudgingly
acknowledged that he was wrong. Gros told him that it was like Rubens,
with more correctness of form--Rubens "chastened" was the word. The
government bought the picture, paying the artist two hundred and forty
dollars--twelve hundred francs--for it.
The same year Delacroix submissively made his final attempt for the
Prix de Rome, but came out sixtieth in the competition. Thenceforward
he was to be constantly before the public, constantly opposed,
misunderstood, criticised; but nevertheless, with all the energy which
shows in his portrait, constantly in the front. When his defenders had
sufficient influence to force the hand of the ministry of fine arts,
he was commissioned to paint for the state; and to this we owe the
decorations in the gallery of Apollon in the Louvre, the decorations
in the church of St. Sulpice, and others. When he received the order
for the entrance of the Crusaders to Constantinople for the Gallery of
Battles at Versailles, the good King Louis Philippe sent him word to
make it as little like his usual style as possible!
Among Delacroix's critics Ingres, with all the force of his
convictions, was the foremost. He to whom a sky had always served as
a simple background was not created to understand the almost purple
canopy of azure stretching far above the heads of the Crusaders; nor
to find barbaric delight in the rich trappings of horses and men,
since to him a drapery was simply a textureless covering adjusted to
accentuate the form beneath. Delacroix, whose intelligence was of a
higher order and who said of himself that he was "more rebellious than
revolutionary," treated Ingres when they met on official occasions,
as at the meetings of the Institute (where finally Delacroix had
penetrated), with a high and distant courtesy which his sturdy
adversary, strong in his pious devotion to classicism, hardly
returned. Delacroix had by far the most brilliant following,
reinforced as it was by the landscape painters, who from 1830 onwards
gave to this century its most notable school of painting. Added to
this was a fair measure of appreciation on the part of collectors.
Delacroix's genius found expression in many small pictures, all of
them characterized by a gem-like coloration (which is more than mere
color, however, for in it lies the secret of a powerful and direct
expression of sentiment) and by a vivid realization of movement. Proud
by nature, delicate in health, his life was far from happy; he never
ceased to feel the sting of adverse criticism. "For more than thirty
years I have been given over to the wild beasts," he said once. He
had warm friends, who have left many records of his sweetness of
disposition when the outer barrier of haughty reserve was broken
through; but they were few in number. He never married; painting,
he said, was his only mistress, and his passion for his art is felt
through all his work. His death occurred at Champrosay near Paris,
where he had a modest country house, on August 13, 1863; and four
years later, January 14, 1867, his great adversary, Ingres, followed
him.