THE HISTORY OF MODERN PAINTING
[Illustration: ANTON GRAFF PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST]
THE HISTORY OF
MODERN PAINTING
BY RICHARD MUTHER
PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY
AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF BRESLAU
IN FOUR
VOLUMES
[Illustration]
VOLUME
ONE
REVISED EDITION
CONTINUED BY THE AUTHOR
TO THE END OF THE XIX CENTURY
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. MCMVII
_Printed by_
MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED
_Edinburgh_
CONTENTS
PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
INTRODUCTION
Old and new histories of art.--Seeming "restlessness" of the
nineteenth century.--To recognise "style" in modern art, and to
prove the logic of its evolution, the principles of judgment in the
old art-histories are also to be employed for the new.--The
question is, what new element the age brought into the history of
art, not what it borrowed eclectically from earlier ages 1
BOOK I
THE LEGACY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
COMMENCEMENT OF MODERN ART IN ENGLAND
The commencement of modern art in England.--Two divisions of modern
art since the sixteenth century.--Classic and naturalistic
schools.--English succeed the Dutch in the seventeenth
century.--William Hogarth: his purpose and his inartistic
methods.--Sir Joshua Reynolds.--Thomas Gainsborough.--Comparison
between them.--Reynolds, an historical painter; Gainsborough, a
painter of landscape.--Pictures of Richard Wilson show the end of
classical landscape.--Those of Gainsborough, the beginning of
"paysage intime" 9
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF ART ON THE CONTINENT
English influence upon the art of the Continent from the middle of
the eighteenth century.--Sturm-und-Drang period in
literature.--Rousseau.--Goethe's "Werther."--Schiller's
"Robbers."--Spain: Francis Goya, his pictures and
etchings.--France: Antoine Watteau frees himself from "baroque"
influences, and directs the tendency of French art towards the Low
Countries.--Pastel: Maurice Latour, Rosalba Carriera,
Liotard.--Society painters: Lancrat, Pater.--The decorative
painters: François Lemoine, François Boucher, Fragonard.--"Society"
turns virtuous.--Jean Greuze.--Middle-class society and its
depicter, Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin.--Germany: Lessing frees the
drama from the classical yoke of Boileau, and, following the
English, produces in "Minna" the first domestic tragedy.--Daniel
Chodowiecki as the portrayer of the German middle class.--Tischbein
goes back to the national past.--Posing disappears in portrait
painting.--Antoine Pesne.--Anton Graff.--Christian Lebrecht
Vogel.--Johann Edlinger.--The revival of landscape.--Rousseau's
influence.--English garden-style succeeds the French
style.--Disappearance of "nature choisie" in painting.--Hubert
Robert.--Joseph Vernet.--Salomon Gessner.--Ludwig Hess.--Philip
Hackert.--Johann Alexander Thiele.--Antonio Canale.--Bernardo
Canaletto.--Francesco Guardi.--Don Petro Rodriguez de Miranda.--Don
Mariano Ramon Sanchez.--The animal painters: François Casanova,
Jean Louis de Marne, Jean Baptiste Oudry, Johann Elias
Riedinger.--An event in the history of art: in place of the
prevailing Cinquecento and the "sublime style of painting" degraded
at the close of the seventeenth century, a simple and sincere art
succeeds throughout the whole of Europe.--Return to what Dürer and
the Little Masters of the sixteenth century and the Dutch of the
seventeenth century originated 41
CHAPTER III
THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN GERMANY
The influence of the antique at the end of the eighteenth century
shows no advance, but an unnatural retrograde movement, and notes
in Germany the beginning of the same decadence which had happened
in Italy with the Bolognese, in France with Poussin, and in Holland
with Gérard de Lairesse.--The teachings of Winckelmann, Anton
Rafael Mengs, Angelica Kauffmann.--The younger generation carries
out the classical programme in the value it sets upon technical
traditions.--Asmus Jacob Carstens.--Buonaventura Genelli 80
CHAPTER IV
THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN FRANCE
In France also the classical tendency in art was no new thing, but
a revival of the antique which was restored to life by the
foundation of the French Academy in Rome in 1663.--Influence of
archæological studies.--Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun.--The Revolution
heightens the enthusiasm for the antique, and once more gives
Classicism an appearance of brilliant animation.--Jacques Louis
David.--His portraits and his pictures in relation to contemporary
history.--David as an archæologist.--Jean Baptiste
Regnault.--François André Vincent.--Guérin 98
BOOK II
THE ESCAPE INTO THE PAST
CHAPTER V
THE NAZARENES
Influence of literature.--Wackenroder.--Tieck.--The
Schlegels.--Instead of the antique, the Italian Quattrocento
appears as the model for the schools.--Frederick Overbeck.--Philip
Veit.--Joseph Führich.--Edward Steinle--Julius Schnorr von
Carolsfeld.--Their pictures and their drawings 117
CHAPTER VI
THE ART OF MUNICH UNDER KING LUDWIG I
Peter Cornelius.--Wilhelm Kaulbach.--Their importance and their
limitations 141
CHAPTER VII
THE DÜSSELDORFERS
On the Rhine, a school of painting instead of a school of
drawing.--Wilhelm Schadow, Carl Friedrich Lessing, Theodor
Hildebrandt, Carl Sohn, Heinrich Mücke, Christian Koehler, H.
Plüddemann, Eduard Bendemann, Theodor Mintrop, Friedrich Ittenbach,
Ernest Deger.--Why their pictures, despite technical merits, have
become antiquated 157
CHAPTER VIII
THE LEGACY OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM
Alfred Rethel and Moritz Schwind oppose the Roman with the German
tradition.--Their pictures and drawings 167
CHAPTER IX
THE FORERUNNERS OF ROMANTICISM IN FRANCE
Last years of the David school wearisome and without character,
except in portrait painting.--François Gérard, the "King of
Painters and Painter of Kings"; his portraits of the Empire and
Restoration periods.--Commencement of the revolt: Pierre Paul
Prudhon; his pictures and the story of his life; Constance
Mayer.--Revival of colouring.--Antoine Jean Gros and his pictures
of contemporary life; discrepancy between his teaching and his
practice 189
CHAPTER X
THE GENERATION OF 1830
The revolt of the Romanticists against Classicism in literature and
art.--Théodore Géricault and his early works.--"The Raft of the
Medusa."--Eugène Delacroix: protest against the conventional, and
renewed importance of colour.--Delacroix's pictures; influence of
the East upon him.--His life and struggles.--The Classical
reaction.--J. A. D. Ingres and the opposition to Romanticism.--His
classical pictures.--Excellence of his portraits and drawings 219
CHAPTER XI
JUSTE-MILIEU
Moderation the watchword of Louis Philippe's reign, in politics,
literature, and art.--Jean Gigoux, a follower of Delacroix and an
inexorable realist.--Eugène Isabey.--Middle position occupied by
Ary Scheffer between the Classical and the Romantic schools;
decline of his popularity.--Hippolyte Flandrin, as a religious
painter a French counterpart to the Nazarenes.--Paul Chenavard,
compared to Cornelius.--Théodore Chassériau; his short and
brilliant career.--Léon Benouville.--Léon Cogniet and his
pictures.--Transition from the Romantic school to the historical
painters.--The great writers of history: renewed activity in this
field: historical tragedies and romances.--Art takes a similar
course: popularity and facility of historical painting.--Eugène
Devéria; Camille Roqueplan.--Nicolaus Robert Fleury; Louis
Boulanger.--Paul Delaroche; his popularity and its causes; his
defects as a painter.--Delaroche's pictures.--Thomas Couture 255
CHAPTER XII
THE POST-ROMANTIC GENERATION
France under the Second Empire; the society of the period not
represented in French art.--Continuation of the old traditions
without essential change.--Alexandre Cabanel.--William
Bouguereau.--Jules Lefébure.--Henner.--Paul Baudry: his pictures;
decoration of the Grand Opera House.--Élie Delaunay: his pictures,
decorative painting, and portraits.--The "Genre féroce";
predilection for the horrible in art.--Numerous painters of this
school.--Laurens.--Rochegrosse and his pictures.--Henri Regnault 278
CHAPTER XIII
THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL OF PAINTING IN BELGIUM
Belgium to 1830.--David and his school.--Navez, Matthias van
Bree.--Gustav Wappers, Nicaise de Keyzer, Henri Decaisne, Gallait,
Bièfve.--Ernest Slingeneyer, Guffens and Swerts.--The Exhibition of
Belgian pictures in Germany 301
CHAPTER XIV
THE REVOLUTION OF THE GERMAN COLOURISTS
Anselm Feuerbach, Victor Müller.--The Berlin school: Rudolf
Henneberg, Gustav Richter, Knille, Schrader, and others.--The
Munich school: Piloty, Hans Makart, Gabriel Max.--The historical
painters and the end of the illustrative painting of history 317
CHAPTER XV
THE VICTORY OVER PSEUDO-IDEALISM
The Historical Picture of Manners as opposed to Historical
Painting, an advance in the direction of intimacy of feeling.--The
Antique Picture of Manners: Charles Gleyre, Louis Hamon, Gérôme,
Gustave Boulanger.--The Picture of Costume from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.--France: Charles Comte, Alexander Hesse,
Camille Roqueplan.--Belgium: Alexander Markelbach, Florent
Willems.--Germany: L. v. Hagn, Gustav Spangenberg, Carl
Becker.--The importance of Hendrik Leys, Ernest Meissonier, and
Adolf Menzel as mediators between the past and ordinary life,
between the heroic art of the first half of the nineteenth century
and the intimate art of the second half 363
BIBLIOGRAPHY 391
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES IN COLOUR
PAGE
ANTON GRAFF: Portrait of Himself _Frontispiece_
REYNOLDS: Mrs. Siddons 20
GAINSBOROUGH: The Sisters 38
GREUZE: The Milkmaid 58
CHARDIN: The House of Cards 64
WATTEAU: Fête Champêtre 74
ANGELICA KAUFFMANN: Portrait of a Lady as a Vestal 86
ELIZABETH VIGÉE-LEBRUN: Portrait of the Painter with her
Daughter 100
CORNELIUS: "Let there be Light" 144
SCHWIND: The Wedding Journey 182
REGNAULT: General Prim 300
MEISSONIER: A Cavalier 378
IN BLACK AND WHITE
BAUDRY, PAUL.
Portrait of Baudry 286
Charlotte Corday 287
Truth 288
The Pearl and the Wave 289
Cybele 290
Leda 291
Edmond About 292
BENDEMANN, EDUARD.
The Lament of the Jews 165
BIÈFVE, EDOUARD.
Portrait of Bièfve 314
The League of the Nobles of the Netherlands 315
BOUGUEREAU, WILLIAM ADOLPHE.
Brotherly Love 281
CABANEL, ALEXANDRE.
Portrait of Cabanel 279
The Shulamite 280
CARSTENS, ASMUS JACOB.
Portrait of Himself 88
Scylla and Charybdis 90
Argo Leaving the Triton's Mere 91
Children of the Night 92
Priam and Achilles 93
CHARDIN, JEAN SIMÉON.
Portrait of Himself 63
Grace before Meat 65
CHASSÉRIAU, THÉODORE.
Apollo and Daphne 259
CHODOWIECKI, DANIEL.
Portrait of Chodowiecki 66
The Family Picture 67
All Sorts and Conditions of Women 68, 69
The Morning Compliment 70
The Artist's Nursery 71
COGNIET, LÉON.
Tintoretto Painting his Dead Daughter 261
The Massacre of the Innocents 263
CORNELIUS, PETER.
Portrait of Cornelius 143
From the Frescoes in the Friedhofshalle, Berlin 145
Marguerite in Prison 146
The Apocalyptic Host 147
The Fall of Troy 149
COUTURE, THOMAS.
Portrait of Couture 271
The Love of Gold 273
The Romans of the Decadence 275
The Troubadour 277
DAVID, JACQUES LOUIS.
Portrait of David 102
Madame Récamier 103
The Oath of the Horatii 105
The Rape of the Sabines 107
Helen and Paris 109
Belisarius asking Alms 111
The Death of Marat 113
DELACROIX, EUGÈNE.
Portrait of Delacroix 226
Dante's Bark 227
Hamlet and the Grave-diggers 230
Tasso in the Mad-house 231
Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople 233
Jesus on Lake Gennesaret 235
Horses Fighting in a Stable 237
Medea 238
The Expulsion of Heliodorus 239
DELAROCHE, PAUL.
Portrait of Delaroche 264
The Assassination of the Duke of Guise 265
The Princes in the Tower 267
Strafford on his Way to Execution 269
DELAUNAY, ÉLIE.
Diana 293
Boys Singing 294
Madame Toulmouche 295
FEUERBACH, ANSELM.
Portrait of Himself 318
Hafiz at the Well 319
Pieta 321
Iphigenia 322
Portrait of a Roman Lady 323
Mother's Joy 325
Medea 327
Dante Walking with High--born Ladies of Ravenna 329
FÜHRICH, JOSEPH.
Portrait of Führich 126
From the "Legend of St. Gwendolin" 127
Ruth and Boaz 128
The Departure of the Prodigal Son 129
Jacob and Rachel 130
GAINSBOROUGH, THOMAS.
Portrait of Gainsborough 34
Mrs. Siddons 35
Wood Scene, Village of Cornard, Suffolk 36
The Market Cart 37
The Duchess of Devonshire 38
The Watering Place 39
GALLAIT, LOUIS.
Portrait of Gallait 312
Egmont's Last Moments 313
GENELLI, BONAVENTURA.
The Embassy to Achilles 94
Thetis lamenting the Fate of Hector 95
Odysseus and the Sirens 96
Portrait of Genelli 97
GÉRARD, FRANÇOIS.
Portrait of Gérard 190
Mlle. Brongniart 191
Madame Visconti 192
Cupid and Psyche 193
Madame Récamier 194
GÉRICAULT, THÉODORE.
Portrait of Géricault 221
The Wounded Cuirassier 222
Chasseur 223
The Raft of the Medusa 224
The Start 225
GÉRÔME, LÉON.
The Cock-fight 367
GESSNER, SALOMON.
Landscape 75
Landscape 76
GOYA, FRANCISCO.
Portrait of Himself 42
The Majas on the Balcony 43
The Maja Clothed 44
The Maja Nude 45
De Que Mal Morira (from "Los Capriccios") 46
Soplones (from "Los Capriccios") 47
Se Repulen (from "Los Capriccios") 48
Que Pico de Oro (from "Los Capriccios") 49
Volaverunt (from "Los Capriccios") 50
Quien lo Creyera (from "Los Capriccios") 51
Linda Maestra (from "Los Capriccios") 52
Devota Profesion (from "Los Capriccios") 53
Otres Leyes por el Pueblo 54
GREUZE, JEAN BAPTISTE.
Portrait of Greuze 58
Head of a Girl 59
Girl carrying a Lamb 60
Girl looking up 61
Girl with an Apple 62
GROS, ANTOINE JEAN (BARON).
Saul 215
Portrait of Gros 216
The Battle of Eylau 217
GUARDI, FRANCESCO.
Venice 77
HAMON, LOUIS.
My Sister's not at Home 365
HENNEBERG, RUDOLF.
The Race for Fortune 330
HENNER, JEAN JACQUES.
Susanna and the Elders 284
The Sleeper 285
HILDEBRANDT, THEODOR.
The Sons of Edward 161
HOGARTH, WILLIAM.
Portrait of Himself 12
The Harlot's Progress (Plate VI.) 13
The Rake's Progress (Plate II.) 14
The Rake's Progress (Plate VII.) 15
The Rake's Progress (Plate VIII.) 16
Marriage à la Mode (Plate V.) 17
The Enraged Musician 18
Gin Lane 19
INGRES, JEAN AUGUSTE DOMINIQUE.
Portrait of Ingres 242
The Maid of Orleans at Rheims 243
Portrait of Himself as a Youth 244
Bertin the Elder 245
Study for the Odalisque in the Louvre 247
The Source 248
Oedipus and the Sphinx 249
Paganini 251
Mlle. de Montgolfier 252
The Forestier Family 253
KAUFFMANN, ANGELICA.
Portrait of Herself 86
KAULBACH, WILHELM.
Portrait of Kaulbach 151
The Deluge 152
Prince Arthur and Hubert 153
Marguerite 156
DE KEYZER.
Portrait of de Keyzer 308
The Battle of Woeringen 309
LAURENS, JEAN PAUL.
The Interdict 298
LEFÉBURE, JULES.
Truth 283
LESSING, CARL FRIEDRICH.
The Sorrowing Royal Pair 164
The Hussite Sermon 335
LEYS, HENDRIK.
Portrait of Leys 369
A Family Festival 370
The Armourer 371
Mother and Child 372
LUMINAIS, EVARISTE.
Les Énervés de Jumièges 297
MAKART, HANS.
Portrait of Makart 341
The Espousals of Catterina Cornaro 343
The Feast of Bacchus 345
MAX, GABRIEL.
Portrait of Max 347
A Nun in the Cloister Garden 349
The Lion's Bride 351
Light 353
The Spirit's Greeting 355
Adagio 356
A Winter's Tale 357
Madonna 359
MAYER, CONSTANCE.
Portrait of Mayer 201
The Dream of Happiness 202
The Tomb of Prudhon and Constance Mayer at
Père-Lachaise 203
MEISSONIER, ERNEST.
The Man at the Window 373
A Man reading 374
Reading the Manuscript 375
Polcinello 376
A Reading at Diderot's 377
A Halt 378
MENGS, ANTON RAFAEL.
Portrait of Himself 84
Mount Parnassus 85
MENZEL, ADOLF.
Portrait of Menzel, 1837 379
Frederick the Great and his Tutor 380
The Round Table at Sans-Souci 381
Frederick the Great on a Journey 383
Illustration to Kugler's History of Frederick the
Great 384
Portrait of Frederick the Great 385
Reifspiel 387
When will Genius Awake? 388
OVERBECK, FREDERICK.
Portrait of Overbeck 118
The Annunciation 119
The Naming of St. John 120
Christ Healing the Sick 121
Christ's Entry into Jerusalem 122
The Resurrection 123
The Seven Lean Years 124
Portrait of Himself and Cornelius 140
PESNE, ANTOINE.
Portrait of Himself and Daughters 72
PILOTY, CARL.
Portrait of Piloty 336
Girdonists on the Road to the Guillotine 337
Under the Arena 339
PRUDHON, PIERRE PAUL.
Portrait of Himself 195
Joseph and Potiphar's Wife 196
Study directs the Flight of Genius 197
Le Coup de Patte du Chat 198
Cupid and Psyche 199
The Unfortunate Family 204
The Rape of Psyche 205
Le Midi 206
La Nuit 207
L'enjouir 208
Marguerite 209
Les Petits Dévideurs 210
The Vintage 211
The Virgin 212
Christ Crucified 213
Madame Copia 214
REGNAULT, HENRI.
Salome 299
The Moorish Headsman 300
RETHEL, ALFRED.
The Emperor Otto at the Tomb of Charlemagne 169
The Destruction of the Pagan Idols 170
Hannibal's Passage over the Alps 171
Death at the Masked Ball 172
Death the Friend of Man 173
REYNOLDS, SIR JOSHUA.
Portrait of Himself 20
Dr. Johnson 21
Garrick as Abel Drugger 22
Heads of Angels 23
Samuel Richardson 24
Miss Reynolds 25
Edmund Burke 26
Mrs. Abington 27
Edmund Malone 28
Oliver Goldsmith 29
Lady Cockburn and her Daughters 30
Bishop Percy 31
The Girl with the Mousetrap 32
Dr. Burney 33
RICHTER, GUSTAV.
Portrait of Himself 331
A Gipsy 332
SCHEFFER, ARY.
Portrait of Scheffer 257
Marguerite at the Well 258
SCHNORR VON CAROLSFIELD, JULIUS.
Portrait of Schnorr 125
Adam and Eve after the Fall 125
SCHRADER, JULIUS.
Cromwell at Whitehall 333
SCHWIND, MORITZ.
Portrait of Schwind 175
From the Wartburg Frescoes 176
From the Wartburg Frescoes 177
Wieland the Smith 178
From the Story of the Seven Ravens 179
A Hermit leading Horses to a Pool 181
Nymphs and Stag 184
Rübezahl 185
The Fairies' Song 187
SLINGNEYER, ERNEST.
The Avenger 311
SOHN, CARL.
The two Leonoras 163
The Rape of Hylas 166
STEINBRUCK, EDUARD.
Elves 162
STEINLE, EDUARD.
The Raising of Jarius' Daughter 131
"I have trodden the Winepress alone" 132
Portrait of Steinle 133
Book Illustration 134
The Violin Player 135
SYLVESTRE, JOSEPH NOËL.
Locusta Testing in Nero's Presence the
Poison prepared for Britannicus 296
VEIT, PHILIP.
Portrait of Veit 136
The Arts introduced into Germany by Christianity 137
The two Marys at the Sepulchre 139
WAPPERS, GUSTAV.
Portrait of Wappers 303
The Sacrifice of Burgomaster van der Werff
at the Siege of Leyden 305
The Death of Columbus 307
WATTEAU, ANTOINE.
Portrait of Watteau 56
La Partie Carrée 57
The Music Party 73
The Return from the Chase 74
INTRODUCTION
The historian who wishes to relate the history of painting in the
nineteenth century is confronted with quite other demands than await him
who undertakes the art of an earlier period. The greatest difficulty
with which the latter has to cope is the deficiency of sources. He
manifestly gropes in the dark with regard to the works of the masters as
well as to the circumstances of their lives. After he has searched
archives and libraries in order to collect his biographical material,
the real critical problem awaits him. Even amongst the admittedly
authentic works, those which are undated confront those whose chronology
is certain. To these must be added those nameless ones, as to whose
history there is a doubt; to these again, those whose origin is to be
ascertained. It needs a quick eye to separate the schools and groups,
and finally to recognise the notes which are peculiar to the master.
With none of these difficulties is the historian of modern art
confronted. The painters of the nineteenth century have very seldom
forgotten to attach a name and date to their works, and the
circumstances of their lives are related with an accuracy that was,
earlier, rarely the lot of the foremost men in history. It is all the
more difficult, face to face with such a chaos of pictures, to discover
the spiritual bond which connects them all, to construct a building out
of the immense supply of accumulated bricks, the piled-up mass of rough
material. The evolution of modern painting is more complicated and
varied than that of the art of an earlier period, just as modern life
itself is more complicated and varied than that of any previous age.
How quietly, slowly, and surely was the evolution of that older period
carried out. One simple proportion was maintained between art and the
universal life of culture. Customs, views of life and art, were so
intimately bound up together, that the knowledge of the age in general
naturally comprises that of art. Standing before some old altar-piece of
the school of Cologne, it is as though one were watching in some broad
high dome; everything is quiet all round, and the august figures in the
picture lead their calm, grave existence in illustrious grandeur. The
message of Christianity, "My kingdom is not of this world," meets in
art, too, with a clear expression. Humility and devotion are joined
together, making for a refinement in the feeling of life that is
unsurpassed in its hieratic tenderness and gracious innocence. In the
fifteenth century, the age of discoveries, a new spirit entered the
world. Commerce and navigation discovered new worlds, painting
discovered life. The human spirit grew freer and more joyous; it was no
longer satisfied with yearning for the other world alone, it felt itself
at home also in this world, in the glory of the earth. Pictures, too,
were inspired with some of those joyous perceptions with which the
citizens of the fifteenth century issued from their narrow walls out
under God's free heaven, something of that Easter Day mood in _Faust_.
People still went on painting Madonnas and saints, subjects of a
religion which had spread from the far East over the whole West; but
with the severe simplicity of the heavenly, there was universal
awakening of all the charm and roguery and energy of the earthly. It is
the first virginal contact of the spirit with nature. On men's works
there rests the first morning-dew of spiritual life; they remind one of
woodlands in spring: Botticelli, Van Eyck, Schongauer.
After the Italians had become vigorous realists in the fifteenth
century, they rose in the sixteenth, the century of inspired humanism,
to majesty. The time of hard grappling with the overwhelming fulness of
actuality is over. Those great masterpieces ensue in which the
unlaboured effort shines forth in the most felicitous achievement:
Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian. At the same time the German manner is
most directly opposed to the Romance. They disdain to ingratiate
themselves into men's minds by outward grace of form, but win the heart
by their deep religious feeling and intimate sensibility. They are
German to the core, racial even to the stiffness of the German
character, but full of feeling and truth to life. Dürer in his woodcuts
and copper engravings is "_inwendig voller figur_"; in them he offers
the "concentrated, homely treasure of his heart." Holbein is great by
the incomparably real art of his portraits. The century of that joyous
revival of Paganism, the Olympian vivacity of the Renaissance, is
followed by the age to which the Jesuits gave life and character. For
those stately churches in the Jesuit style, with their _fortissimo_
effect, their huge, sculptured ornaments and their gleaming, gold
decorations, the classic quietness of the old masters ceases to be
appropriate. It is a question of a more stirring and impressive
treatment of sacred subjects, wherein the whole passion of renewed
Catholicism should be brought to expression. Spain, the country of the
Inquisition, set the classic stamp on this enhanced religious feeling.
Here all that monarchical and sacerdotal impulse which founded and
aggrandised the Spanish nation, founded too its true representative in
painting. Painters endowed their church pictures with a passionate
fervour and a flush of extravagant sensuousness of the national,
Spanish, local colour, such as are found united in the art of no other
age or country. Necessarily, moreover, such a feudal system as that of
Spain, with its grandees and princes of the Church, involved also an art
of portrait painting which ranks with the highest that has issued in
this kind from any country whatever: Murillo, Velasquez. In Flanders,
the second stronghold of the Jesuits, we have the titan Rubens. A
joyously fleshly Fleming, he seizes nature by the throat and drags her
there where he stands erect, as though he were lord of the world.
Freedom had found its way into victorious and Protestant Holland. Here
there flourished an art neither courtly nor fostered by the Church. It
stood in the closest connection with the burgesses, showed clear signs
of the struggle through which country and people had won independence.
In the first place, painting celebrated as its worthiest subject the
free burgher, the tighter in the heroic struggle for freedom. At no time
was portrait-painting practised to such an extent, and the sitters not
aristocratic courtiers, but proud burgesses of a free community; the men
grave, strong, self-reliant; the women faithful, pure, and modest. The
workmanship is correspondent: simple, solid, domestic; and soon there
followed the glorification of that which they prized the more after
their struggles had been accomplished: the quiet, comfortable delight of
hearth and home.
During the War of Independence the Dutch had learnt to love their
fatherland, and they were the first, as artists, fully to grasp the
poetry of landscape. Art now no longer shines only upon the eyes of Mary
and the Hosts of Heaven: it settles upon arid country hills, streams
upon the sea waves, is at home in peasants' houses and the dark woods,
wanders through the streets and alleys, makes a temple of every market.
The religious sentiments, however, which stirred Protestant Holland had
to find appropriate expression; the living essence of biblical subjects
was to be released from a narrow, ecclesiastical sphere, and approached
anew with all the deep, German inwardness. These tendencies were all
united in Rembrandt--perhaps of all masters, since the Christian era,
the mightiest proclaimer of the great Pan; to him the cosmic powers of
light and air signified the divinity that Michael Angelo had painted
under a beautiful human form.
Finally, in the eighteenth century, comes _rococo_, with its rustling
_frou-frou_ and its delicate charm. The whole life of that noble
society, which exchanged court costume for silken pastoral garments,
formality and rank for charm and grace, was a lively play, an
extravagant game. The king played with his crown, the priest with his
religion, the philosopher with his wisdom, the poet with the art of
rhyme. They did not hear as yet the hoarse threatening voice of the
disinherited, "_Car tel est notre plaisir_." What this age possessed of
beauty and charm, its peculiar grace and wanton vivacity, its reckless,
inassailable frivolity, was proper also to its art. Light and gracious
as the whole life of that harmless, merry generation, it glided through
the age untroubled, led by Cupidons, and kissed by the wandering winds.
It is only to-day that we understand once more the charming masters of
that elegant century.
The painters of every epoch looked at nature with their own eyes, and
also with the eyes of their age and of their country. So the art of
every period appears as "the mirror and abstract chronicle" of its age.
With irresistible majesty, and conscious of its inspiration, it lays
hold of the external world, and gives back to it its own picture
infinitely exalted. It is the enlightened expression of the age, as
upright, as fresh, as fanatic, or as unnatural as its generation.
Therein lies the strength of the painters of _rococo_, that they painted
the artificiality of the time with such unsurpassable naturalness. It is
just these infinitely various manners of paying court to
nature--unceasingly throughout the course of centuries, now violently,
now softly and tenderly, at times, too, not without passing
infidelity,--it is just these which determine the beauty and value, the
mystery and essence of art, and are in the history of art all that tends
to its variety and unsurpassable charm.
The nineteenth century not only shows a new age, but probably begins a
new section of universal history. It is probable that in contrast with
this epoch of stirring movement, during which the readjustment of all
political and social relations, the new discoveries in the instruments
of commerce, trade, and industry have given an entirely new aspect to
the world, the next thousand years will sum up all the previous
centuries as the "old world." New men require a new art. One would be
inclined to surmise from this that the art of the nineteenth century
presented itself as something essentially personal, with a sharply
distinctive style. Instead of this it offers at first view, in contrast
with those old ages of uniform production, a condition like that of
Babylon. The nineteenth century has no style--the phrase that has been
so often quoted as to have become a commonplace. In architecture the
forms of all the past ages live again. The day before yesterday we built
Greek, yesterday Gothic; here _Baroque_, there Japanese: but amidst all
these products of imitative styles there rise up stations and
market-places which, with the robust elegance of their iron colonnades,
herald the greatness of fresh conquests. In the province of painting
there are similar extremes. In no other age have minds so diverse
flourished side by side as Carstens and Goya, Cornelius and Corot,
Ingres and Millet, Wiertz and Courbet, Rossetti and Manet. And the
existing histories excite a belief that the nineteenth century is a
chaos into which it is possible only for some later age to bring order.
Perhaps, however, it is already quite possible, if one only resolves
uncompromisingly to apply to the new age those principles which have
been tested in the treatment of the _old_ histories of art, if one
endeavours to study those artists who are in part still our
contemporaries as objectively as though they were masters long dead.
That is to say: one is wont, in a review of an older period in art, not
to inquire what it had caught from an earlier age, but rather what it
had introduced that was new. It was not because they imitated in their
turn that the old masters became great; not because they looked
backwards, but rather because they went forwards, that they made the
history of art. We are not grateful, for instance, to the Dutchmen of
the middle of the sixteenth century--Frans Floris and his
contemporaries--that they forsook Dutch naturalism, and bootlessly
exerted themselves in the way of Michael Angelo and Raphael. We can see
no remarkable merit in the fact that the Bolognese at the beginning of
the seventeenth century gathered their honey from the flowers of the
Cinquecento. And we are even less inclined to see in the contemporaries
of Adrian van der Werff, who endeavoured to refine the rugged, primeval
Dutch art by the study of the Italians, more than clumsy imitators.
Just as much will the interest of the historian of the art of the
nineteenth century be bestowed in the first degree upon the works which
have really created something independent and transcending all the
earlier ages. He will not give especial prominence to those domains
which had their flowering-time in other days than our own, but he will
ask: Where is that distinctive element which appertains to the
nineteenth century only? What are the new forms which it has found, the
new sentiments to which it has given expression? Not those whose
activity lay in clothing--however cleverly--the artistic necessities of
the age in the store of already transmitted forms, but the pathfinders,
who went forwards and created anew, require our attention. Even if,
after the old masters, they can only be granted a place in the third or
fourth class, they must nevertheless always take precedence of those
others, because they exhibited themselves as they were, instead of
making themselves large by standing on the shoulders of the dead. Many
of those who were once valued highly, who, thriving on the inheritance
of the past, accomplished what was apparently of importance, measured by
this standard will arouse little interest, because their artistic
speech, depending on a foundation of the established canonical works of
old, is not their own but borrowed. In others, on the contrary, who,
apart from the dominating tendency, had the courage rather to be
insignificant, and yet remain themselves, observing with their own eyes
nature which surrounded them, or naïvely abandoning themselves to the
disposition of their artistic fantasy, in them will be seen the
essential vehicles of the modern spirit. And then it will be apparent
that the art of the nineteenth century as well as that of every earlier
period had its peculiar garment, even if for official occasions it
preferred to unpack from its wardrobe the state costumes of earlier
ages. It is only because this distinction between the eclectic and the
personal, the derived and the independent, has not yet been carried out
with sufficient strictness, that it has hitherto, in my opinion, been
found so difficult to discover the distinctive _style_ of modern art,
and to make clear the logic and sequence of its evolution.
BOOK I
THE LEGACY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
COMMENCEMENT OF MODERN ART IN ENGLAND
If the question arises, why modern art has been compelled to find
expression for itself in a form different from that of the art of the
earlier centuries, we must first call attention to the change that has
taken place in the fundamental conditions of society. Formerly, the
chief supporters of art were the two leading powers of Church and King.
The most noted works of Raphael and Michael Angelo, of Velasquez and
Murillo, of Rubens and Van Dyck, were executed either for the churches
or for the reigning princes of their country. The patron of modern art
is the citizen. The old culture of the clerics and aristocrats has been
superseded by that of the middle classes, and the beginnings of modern
art must therefore be sought in the country in which this class first
developed its distinctive character--in England.
England, as early as the eighteenth century, was already a land of
citizens. At a time when there was to be found on the Continent acute
mockery of what was old and outworn, conjoined with the most
enthusiastic and joyous faith in the future, the great and wealthy
England had established herself in the van of the new age. Here Voltaire
saw with astonishment for the first time, when he arrived in London as
an exile at the age of thirty-two, the free, open life of a great
people; here he learnt to know a country where there is "much difference
of rank, but none that is not based on merit; where one could think
freely without being restrained by slavish terror." Here was the idea of
a modern free state already accomplished at a time when, upon the
Continent, the thunderclouds of the impending storm hardly cast their
first shadow. Here the notion of a united family life had first
developed, upon the foundation of a civil order and security. Here,
therefore, were first broken down those barriers around the territory of
literature and art within which the spirit of the Renaissance had raised
its wonderful flowers, and the road was begun along which the nineteenth
century should advance.
Simultaneously with the growth of the middle classes there arose the
need for a domestic, practical literature. Books were required which
people could read by their fireside, in the seclusion of the family
circle, in country districts. For that, the stiff and antiquated poetry
of courtiers and academicians, which had hitherto been poured out upon
the world from France, was hardly suitable.
To the cold Classicism represented by Pope, there succeeded in English
literature--far earlier than was the case elsewhere--the delineation of
what was immediately contemporary. At the same time that Mdlle. de
Scudéry--when it was a question of describing the court of the Great
King, the society of Louis XIV--felt herself bound to translate her
theme into the antique and write a _Cyrus_, the English novel had taken
its motives from actual life. Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ is the first
book in which man and nature are depicted without the introduction of
antique types or fairies; the first novel in which the details of real
life are displayed, and what had been hitherto neglected is granted an
exact delineation. At a time when people in other countries were
occupied with representations of the antique, the English novelists had
embarked on the intimacy of the family circle. After Richardson, who
laboriously yet with animation described everyday life, followed
Fielding, with his sharp observation, homely and humorous; then
Goldsmith, with his serene outlook of untroubled equanimity, his
unsurpassed miniatures; Smollett, with his crude and satirical character
sketching; and the audacious and witty Laurence Sterne, whom Nietzsche
has called the most "gallant" of all authors. At the same time tragedy,
too, descended from the court and the nobility into the sphere of
domestic life; showing that here too were significant fortunes and
conflicts, which stories strike a truer human note than those of kings
and heroes.
Painting moved along the same road; and whilst in other countries, with
the beginning of the century, the high, aristocratic art, which was the
offspring of the Renaissance, gradually waned, the plebeian paintings of
Hogarth laid the foundations of that art which prevailed in the
_bourgeois_ nineteenth century. English art had this advantage in
playing a pioneering part, that it had no old traditions to stand in its
way; it had no great past. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
England had been content to offer hospitality to Holbein and Van Dyck,
and to collect the works of foreign masters in her galleries. Her art
sprang into existence suddenly and unexpectedly at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, and thence developed exclusively on native lines.
Since the English could not lean either upon an old or a foreign model,
nor enter into a round of subjects that had already been brought to
perfection, they turned from the outset quite naturally into the road
which was only to be trodden later by the other nations still in the
bondage of tradition. They took up, to a certain extent, the thread
which the Dutch, who appeared in the seventeenth century as the most
modern people in art, had let drop: the progressive ideas of Holland had
come over to England with the "glorious revolution," with William of
Orange and Queen Anne; whilst in Holland itself the French invasion of
1672 had caused a reaction to the courtly idea, against which the
English took up an attitude of conscious and rigid protest. This
opposition is clearly expressed by the English æsthetic writers.
The most important name to be mentioned is that of Shaftesbury. Beneath
the favour of the court in France, he says, art has suffered. We
Englishmen live in an age in which freedom has arisen. Such a people
does not require, in order that art may prosper, an ambitious king to
breed, by means of his pensions, a race of flattering Court painters.
Our civil liberty affords us a sufficient foundation, and our liberty
leads us to _absolute verity_ in art.
Thus did Shaftesbury enunciate his leading æsthetic doctrine; it was his
constant message, and it was constantly repeated with great emphasis:
"All beauty is truth." "The search after truth leads you to nature."
"Truth is the mightiest thing in the world, since it exercises sovereign
rights over the creations of the imagination."
But what must art be in order to produce truth? "The strictest imitation
of nature." By this word Shaftesbury does not understand what we
understand by the word "nature"; not, in the first instance, so much the
nature surrounding us, in its outward manifestations, but, above all, an
intimate human reality. Let the painter represent the reality of human
_inwardness_. Still life, the animal world, landscape,--all that,
Shaftesbury explains, is most valuable. But another and a higher life
exists in man than in the beasts and the woods, and there is the true
object of art. In no case should the artist proceed from external
vision; for then he will obtain fashionable attitudes, theatrical
unreality, or, in the most favourable instance, a formal, decorative
embellishment. Of what value is that in comparison with a single real
presentation of character? How insignificant would every external form
seem in contrast to each single feature of this intimate manner! Here is
the second characteristic of English painting. It proceeds neither, like
that of the sixteenth century, from formulas, nor, like the Dutch, from
the picturesque, but, like to the English novel of character, from an
intellectual impulse; it strives not after beauty of form and physical,
sensuous grace, but, in the first place, after intellectual expression.
And from this there follows immediately a third trait. If art is to make
the inwardness of man its subject, the artist cannot remain an
indifferent portrayer. He will make great distinctions, will bring into
prominence what is meritorious or censurable in every character--he will
become a moralist. Only so can he conform to that last and highest
function which Shaftesbury assigns to the painter.
The liberty which the English nation had fought for in the "glorious
Revolution" brought forth, in the course of years, while Shaftesbury was
writing, a fruitful crop of dissoluteness and licence. The mortification
of the flesh of the Puritans was followed by so violent a recrudescence
of sensuality that it was as though the whole menagerie of the passions
had been unchained. London swarmed with criminals; drunkenness was an
epidemic. The moral idea awoke amongst the cultivated classes. Might it
not be possible, with the help of education, for that to be overcome?
And so Shaftesbury's view of art comprised a third, and very dangerous,
element; namely, that to fulfil the most serious mission of that culture
which had ensued from the free and natural conditions in England--even
in the realm of æsthetics--the painter, like the poet, must appear as
the moral teacher of his age. Imagine an artist who fulfils these
conditions and you have, as a result, _Hogarth_, with all his qualities
and defects.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
What marks the greatness of Hogarth is his freedom from foreign and
ancient influences. The eighteenth century came in as an academic age in
art. Turning away from life, it spent itself in allegory and the
imitation of typical figures that had been inherited from the
Renaissance and petrified into academic work. Gods, in whom no one any
longer believed, hovered, at least in paint, over a race which was
without enthusiasm. Then came Hogarth, and his quick vision discovered
the new way. He looked out upon the life surrounding him, with its
manifold idiosyncrasies, and felt himself with pride to be the son of a
new age, in which rigid, conventional forms were everywhere penetrated
by the modern ideas of free thought, the rights of man, conformity to
nature in morals and manners. This world which confronted him he
depicted truly as it was, in all its beauty and its ugliness. With him
was the origin of modern art. Before his paintings and engravings pale
idealism disappeared. It was he who resolved and set out to bring into
the world a new and independent observation of life. He was a painter
who, with as little aid from foreign influences as from those of the
past, went his own way and kept to it, and devoted his art, unblemished
by the pallor of a borrowed ideal of beauty, soberly and exclusively to
the realities of surrounding life.
"It seemed to me unlikely," writes he, "that by copying old compositions
I could acquire facility for those new designs which were my first and
greatest ambitions." Works of old Italian masters, artistic
contemplations, which went back to Raphael and the Caracci, were
ignored and ridiculed by him. His rude strength of painting, directed to
the living truth, was a protest against all that idealism which was the
heritage of the Renaissance, and had grown quite bombastic under the
hands of its imitators. Nature, he writes, is simple, plain, and true in
all her works; and with this principle he has founded a strong English
school on the solid foundation of truth to nature.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. THE HARLOT'S PROGRESS, PLATE VI.]
An Englishman by birth, character, and disposition, he depicted his
fellow-countrymen; he made his sketches in the midst of the hubbub of
the street. His world is London, the world-city, "old merry England,"
which, in contrast with the Puritanism of to-day, still lived through
its golden age of riot. In such a world--a world existing to this day,
only more decently berouged--moved Hogarth; in the company of
wine-bibbers, in gambling hells, in rooms of poets, in cellars of
highwaymen, in the death-chambers of fallen maidens. "The Harlot's
Progress," which he produced in a series of pictures, brought him his
first success. He then published further series of similar careers over
crooked courses--"The Rake's Progress," "Marriage à la Mode." He painted
the rabble of London, their society and their morals; those who went in
cotton and rags and those in satin and silk. In his writings he censures
the old painters plainly because in their historical style they had
quite passed over the middle classes. And he went with great knowledge
to these new subjects. In the National Gallery, which possesses the
originals of "Marriage à la Mode," one is astounded at the technical
qualities of Hogarth's painting. Whoever has been misled by the engraved
reproductions, and looks for bad, distorted drawing, may here learn to
know him as a painter in the fullest sense of the word. There is no sign
left of the defective caricature which disfigures the engravings; there
is a severe, unadorned manifestation of realism, of an art that has from
the outset rooted itself in modern life. Under the manners and graces of
the age Hogarth stands a "self-made" man, a healthy Anglo-Saxon
personality, full of sturdy independence and impeccable common sense. He
attracts by a sharpness of observation, a penetration into
idiosyncrasies of character, a grip upon the most trivial changes in
men's emotions and play of features, the like of which is to be found in
hardly one of his predecessors.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, PLATE II.]
Against these qualities it must be understood that an equal number of
defects is to be set off. The inartistic part of him was that he
followed the æsthetic theories of the age, and looked upon art as merely
a means to ends alien to itself. With him painting was an instrument to
disseminate the inventions of his poetic-satiric humour; it was a form
of speech to him. He is not unjustly called on that account a comedian
of the pencil, the Molière of painting. We look at other pictures, but
his we read. The commentaries on them are in some respects the rendering
back of the pictures into their proper element. Lessing called the drama
his pulpit; with Hogarth his art was a pulpit. He wanted, like Hamlet,
to "hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn
her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and
pressure." Pictures beneath his hands became moral sermons.
In the six pictures in "The Harlot's Progress," with which he started in
1733, and which to-day, since the originals have perished, can be
considered only in the copper engravings after them, all these
attributes are recognisable. Mary Hackabout comes innocent from the
country to the town with the intention of seeking a situation as a
servant-girl. She speedily falls a victim to temptation, becomes the
mistress of a Jewish banker, whom she soon loses by her infidelity,
descends to be a thief, and comes to the work-house. Released from
there, she becomes the companion of a highwayman, until she ends her
pitiful life in a disorderly house, leaving behind her a poor crippled
boy, who, at his mother's funeral, is playing with a top. The conclusion
of the paintings shows how the other women bid farewell to the corpse,
and buoy themselves up for their coming pleasures by drinking from the
spirit bottle, which stands on the coffin, while the priest, who is come
to give the blessing, announces his visit for the evening.
The second series, which is to be seen to-day in the Soane Museum,
describes in eight tableaux the somewhat similar life of a young man,
the "Rake." As an Oxford student he has promised marriage to a pretty
but poor girl, when suddenly the death of a wealthy uncle throws him
into the vortex of London life. He wishes to buy himself freedom from
his sweetheart, but she disdainfully refuses the money and supports
herself and her child honestly with the labour of her hands. The
seducer, winning fame in the world of women and sport, rapidly paces the
road to ruin; yet he repairs his finances once again by a marriage with
a rich and one-eyed old lady. Once more on his feet, he flings himself
into games of chance, and comes to the sponging-house, whither his
better half follows him. It is the last straw when a play which he has
offered to a manager is refused, and he can no longer buy himself a pint
of ale; there remains only the final fall into the misery of frenzy, and
in the last picture we find him amongst the lunatics bound in chains as
a madman. Only his student love, Sarah Young, of Oxford, whom he had
treated so scurvily, cannot forget him, and, with tears, seeks him out
again in the madhouse.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, PLATE VII.]
The third and most famous series was completed many years after the
"Rake"--in 1745. Hogarth has admittedly taken particular pains with the
six oil paintings of "Marriage à la Mode," which have been placed in the
National Gallery; and these painted novels reveal in strength and beauty
of execution the high-water mark of his work as a painter. The whole is
quieter, simpler, less overloaded with ingenious accessories. The
impoverished lord has married his son, who is already worn out with
excesses, to the strong and healthy daughter of a city alderman. A girl
is born; then they go their separate ways. The husband surprises the
wife with a lover, and is stabbed by him; the unfaithful wife, moved by
this, begs her dying husband for forgiveness. As a young widow, deprived
of her woman's honour, she goes back to the _bourgeois_, Philistine
ennui of her father's house, and when she learns of her lover's
condemnation she escapes from the burden of her misery by means of
poison. The father is sufficiently provident to take the wedding ring
off her finger before the body is cold, lest it should be stolen from
the corpse. In the last sequence Hogarth passed over completely to the
moral sermon and the study of crime. The series "Industry and Idleness,"
in 1747, was comprised in twelve sheets, which he produced only in rough
engravings, as he wished exclusively to influence the masses. Two
apprentices enter a cloth-weaving business at the same time, of whom one
rises, through his zeal for the interests of the business, to a marriage
with his master's beautiful daughter, to the rank of alderman, and
finally to be Lord Mayor of London. The idle apprentice grows, on the
down grade, from a gambler into a vagabond. He is transported, comes
back again, and ends on the scaffold. The two comrades meet for the last
time when the honest man announces his death-warrant to the knave.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, PLATE VIII.]
Garrick, as we can see from his epitaph on Hogarth, has not unjustly
characterised his art, in these words--
"Farewell, great painter of mankind!
Who reached the noblest point of art,
Whose pictured morals charm the mind,
And through the eye correct the heart."
[Illustration: HOGARTH. MARRIAGE À LA MODE, PLATE V.]
Hogarth painted stirring and humorous scenes, full of effective
morality, with which he sought to cheer, terrify, and improve humanity.
His five-act tragedies end always with the triumph of Virtue and the
punishment of Vice. As one of his contemporaries said, he exercised the
art of "hanging in colours." The twelve plates of the parallel
biographies of "Industry and Idleness" he employed as an illustrated
weekly sermon for the benefit of the working classes, and he was able to
observe with satisfaction that they had an actual influence on the
conduct of the people, as instanced in the diminution of gin shops. Yet
for all that, in the elevation of public morality, the highest aim of
art is not, as Garrick asserted, fulfilled. Who has ever seen such a
painter? Would he be a painter? It is exactly by this moralising with
the brush that Hogarth stands in such abrupt opposition to his
predecessors, the Dutch. They were painters, nothing but painters, and
in their painting reckoned on eyes which could appreciate their
pictorial subtilty. Man was for them a patch of colour; the real delight
of their eyes was the rich light that came mellowed through the shadows,
and played upon the ruffed garments and the clumsy forms. With Hogarth,
in the place of the idea of colour, the anecdote is brought in. He saw
the world not so much with the eyes of the painter, as with those of the
physician, the criminologist, the pastor. The familiar element, that
serene and comfortable observation of an everyday occurrence upon which
Dutch art was based, has altogether disappeared in his pictures. He did
not paint because something pictorial urged him, but saw in men the
actors of the parts which he had in his mind. This departure from the
purely picturesque is in part explained by the predominance of
literature in England at that time. In a country where the tragedy of
familiar life as well as the domestic novel had arisen there was
imminent peril that a young school of painting working without
traditions should branch off also on to those lines. Hogarth desired to
give painting a new manner; he seized upon what was epic or dramatic,
and painted the pictorial counter parts to Smollett's and Richardson's
novels. In the age of enlightenment the painter makes way for the
writer. With this idea he himself wrote: "I have endeavoured to treat my
subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, my men and women
my players, who, by means of certain actions and gestures, are to
exhibit a dumb show."
[Illustration: HOGARTH. THE ENRAGED MUSICIAN.]
Moreover, to explain the growth of this sort of literary hybrid, one is
forced to consider the changed conditions under which painting was
introduced into England at large. Art, which hitherto had shone forth
her enchantment upon the few, was conducted from the first in free
England along the broad road of popularity, and given over to a public
which had to be educated to art by degrees; and this admission of the
mass of the people to the enjoyment of art, in a proportion hitherto
unheard of, must inevitably have a retrogressive effect upon painting
itself. Instead of the earlier amateur of really distinguished culture,
there stood "the People."
But just as in the Middle Ages works of art were seen to be a sort of
picture-writing for the people--_picturis eruditur populus_, said
Gregory the Great,--so now the new patrons could hardly require other
than those works of art in which a story was pictorially told. These
could be understood even by the man whose understanding was otherwise
wholly closed to matters of art; and hence it came about that almost all
the _genre_ painters--for very nearly a century--followed with more or
less intelligence in the footsteps of Hogarth. To treat him, as is
frequently done, because of this popularisation of art, because of this
transformation of the picture into the picture story, as a pattern
instance of tastelessness, would lead to very dangerous consequences,
and should be the less employed because Hogarth's pictures are, at
least, comparatively well painted, whereas many of his successors could
escape the deluge only in the Noah's Ark of their talent for narration.
What Hogarth could do when he put off the schoolmaster, he has shown
moreover in his portraits. There he is an entirely great painter. His
pictures have none of that Van Dyck elegance, which had become the mode
in England before him; they are robust, crude, Anglo-Saxon, strongly and
broadly painted withal, sketches, in the best sense of the word. His
"Shrimp Girl," in the National Gallery, for instance, is a masterpiece
to which the nineteenth century can hardly produce a rival.
In the history of painting it is notorious that the latter half of the
last century belongs especially to portraiture, and here the English
occupy the first rank. Neither Hogarth nor Reynolds nor Gainsborough was
a genius like Titian, Velasquez, or even Frans Hals. Their art is not to
be compared with that of the greatest of all portrait painters, but they
surpassed all the painters of the eighteenth century; they were not only
the greatest in England since Van Dyck, but the first portrait painters
in Europe at the time.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. GIN LANE.]
Reynolds and Gainsborough lived almost at the same period. The former,
born in 1723, died in 1792; the latter, born in 1727, died in 1788. They
had as models men and women of the same society. They went the same
road, side by side. Many celebrities strayed from one studio to the
other, and were painted by Reynolds as well as by Gainsborough. These
are just the pictures which show us so distinctly how widely the two,
who were usually mentioned in the same breath, differed from each other
in spite of having grown up on the same soil. Even their outward man
displays this dissimilarity.
Reynolds appears in his "Portrait of Himself" in the Uffizzi Gallery at
Florence, in the red mantle of the President of the Academy, the
official cap on his head, while the hand resting on the table holds a
copy of his _Discourses_; close by is a bust of Michael Angelo. The
complexion is that of a man who sits much within doors. A pair of
spectacles with large, round glasses leads one to conclude that he
injured his eyesight early with much reading. Gainsborough, with his
refined Roman nose, the haughty, curved sensuous lips, and the
expression of his face which speaks at once of innocence and refinement,
gives an impression far more than Reynolds of the child of nature and
the gentleman. His cheeks are fresh and rather ruddy; a depth of soul
lies within the large blue eyes, that are somewhat melancholy, yet have
such a free outlook upon life.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
_Joshua Reynolds'_ father was a clergyman, a most learned man, who kept
a Latin school. He gave the boy, it is recorded, that most uncommon
Christian name, for the remarkable reason that he hoped thereby to draw
the attention of a great personage, who bore the same name, towards his
young namesake. His son was to become a physician. But books on other
subjects which he read at his desk at school made a greater impression
on the boy. In the well known _Treatise on Painting_, by Richardson, he
discovered his vocation. From the perusal of this book he developed a
taste for things artistic, studied the works on perspective of Pater
Pozzo, read everything he could find on art, and copied as a preliminary
all that fell into his hands in the way of woodcuts and copper
engravings. One of the earliest drawings which remain from his childhood
represents the interior of a library. At the age of nineteen he came to
London to a well-known master, Hudson, the favourite painter with the
gentry of the day, who required £120 with a pupil. He was already
convinced that only in London could he find the means to attain fame,
and even as early as 1744 he took a fine establishment and kept open
house in order to attract attention. He was soon in a position to
complete his artistic education by means of residence in Italy. In 1746
he had painted the portrait of a Captain Keppel, who shortly afterwards
was appointed Commodore of the Mediterranean squadron, and invited the
young painter to go for a cruise in his ship. They sailed in 1749, and
Reynolds was able to spend three years in Italy.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
REYNOLDS. MRS SIDDONS.]
His first impression was one of bitter disappointment. Where was that
rich colouring in the Italian classics which he had been led to expect
from English mezzotints? Everything struck him as lifeless, pale,
insipid. Whereupon he affected the opinion that there was no more to
be seen in Rome. Raphael, in particular, appeared to him to be a
mediocre painter, whom only a remarkable chance had brought to such a
pitch of fame. Surrounded by the great masterpieces of the Cinquecento,
he employed himself in drawing caricatures, and made a sort of travesty
of the _School of Athens_, in which he drew caricatures of the English
colony in Rome at that time, in the attitudes of figures in the pictures
of Raphael. But he very speedily changed his opinion, and began to
follow the paths of the great dead. He went indefatigably through the
galleries of Rome, from Rubens to Titian, from Correggio to Guido and
Raphael. He studied so hard in the Vatican, that he took a chill in the
cold rooms, which left him all his life a little deaf. That sojourn at
Rome was to Reynolds what, a hundred years later, his visit to Spain was
to Lenbach.
He had already at Hudson's acquired great facility as a copyist, and of
Guercino, in particular, he had made numerous copies. During this
Italian tour, however, he became the greatest connoisseur of old masters
that the eighteenth century possessed.
It is related that the Chevalier Van Loo, when he was in England in
1763, vaunted himself one day, in Reynolds' presence, upon his unfailing
discrimination in telling a copy from an original. Whereupon Reynolds
showed him one of his own studies of a head, after Rembrandt. The
Chevalier judged it to be, indisputably, a masterpiece by the great
Dutchman.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. DR. JOHNSON]
He left Rome in April 1752, and made a further visit to Naples, to the
cities of Tuscany, and to Venice. The careless notes of travel that he
made on this journey show the clear insight which he had attained into
the Italian schools. They all deal with questions of technique, on
effects of light and shadow, on the mystery of _chiaroscuro_. For
Titian, in particular, he had an extravagant devotion,--he would ruin
himself, he said, if he might only possess one of the great works of
Titian.
When he returned to England in 1752, at the age of thirty, his talent
was fully developed, and the connoisseurs were unanimous in hailing him
as a new Van Dyck. With the portrait of Miss Gunning, afterwards the
Duchess of Hamilton, he appeared in 1753 as a power in English art. As
early as 1755, when Hogarth was compelled to give up portrait painting
for lack of patrons, one hundred and twenty-five persons sat for
Reynolds, and after that about one hundred and fifty people were painted
by him annually; and this brought him in a yearly income of about
£16,000.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. GARRICK AS ABEL DRUGGER.]
At first he took up his quarters in St. Martin's Lane, which was then
the most fashionable place of residence for artists; but in 1760 he
bought a house, No. 47 Leicester Square, the most select quarter of
London, and furnished it with the most palatial splendour. The studio,
which he built for himself, was as large as a ballroom, and furnished
with a quite modern luxury. The large corridor that led to it had a
gallery of pictures by old masters. It was the age of the great literary
and dramatic revival in England. Garrick stood at the zenith of his
popularity, Burke had already made himself a name, Johnson had produced
his _Dictionary_, Richardson had reached the summit of his fame,
Smollett had written _Peregrine Pickle_, Gray had attracted notice by
his verse. All these and others who set the vogue in literature and the
drama, the principal figures in politics, the leaders of fashion,
lounged in that luxurious studio and gossiped with Reynolds of the
theatre, both before and behind the scenes, of the doings in Parliament
and the scandal of the Court, of literature and of art. At the time when
Goldsmith was putting the finishing touches to his _Travels_ he was a
guest of the house. Gibbon, the historian, and Sterne, whose
_Sentimental Journey_ was just then the talk of the town, spent their
vacant hours with him; and Burke as well, while he discussed with him
his treatise on the _Sublime and the Beautiful_. All these claimed a
niche in Reynolds' portrait gallery, where all the talents were met
together. The whole English nobility also flocked to him. For forty
years onwards from 1752 it was considered the proper thing to be painted
by him. His pictures were multiplied immediately at the hands of the
engravers. In the complete catalogue of Reynolds' works, Hamilton
counts, so far back as 1820, no fewer than 675 plates, engraved after
Reynolds by more than a hundred artists, and amongst these the
mezzotints of Samuel Cousins are by far the finest. Only an incredible
industry, enabling him for a long succession of years to paint almost
without intermission with a facility and regularity like that of Rubens,
rendered it possible for Reynolds to complete, exclusive of portraits,
quite a number of religious and mythological pictures, of which he
himself was especially proud. He painted with great speed and dexterity,
rose very early, breakfasted at nine o'clock, was in his studio
punctually at ten; and there till eleven he worked on pictures which had
been commenced. On the stroke of eleven the first sitter arrived, who
was succeeded by another an hour later. Thus he painted till four
o'clock, when he made his toilette, and thenceforward belonged to
society, for in spite of his scholarly temperament one can by no means
consider Reynolds as a solitary eccentric. Although he remained a
bachelor after Angelica Kauffmann had declined his hand, his house was a
central gathering-point for noble London. He gave balls to which the
whole of "Society" was invited, and drove in a magnificent carriage,
with coachmen in blue and silver liveries. The Literary Club was founded
at his instigation, where with Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and
Garrick he shared in conversation both profound and brilliant. He was
made a baronet, and when the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, became
its first president. The dinners of the Academy, which he organised at
the distribution of prizes, play a part in the history of English
cookery. Reynolds had promised that on each of these reunions he would
speak on some question of art. In this manner originated, during his
twenty-three years of office, those fifteen discourses upon painting
which show the highest result of his literary energy. They were not his
maiden essays. As far back as 1758 Johnson had invited him to publish an
article upon Art in a journal which he had founded, _The Idler_. In 1781
he made a journey through Holland and Flanders, upon which, anticipating
Fromentin, he wrote an exceedingly fine book. In his _Discourses_ so
high a degree of literary talent was displayed that they were at one
time said to be the work of Johnson or Burke.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. HEADS OF ANGELS.]
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. SAMUEL RICHARDSON.]
They are æsthetic treatises and essays in the history of art, of an
enduring value. Originating from a vast insight, and expressed in a
precise style, they treat of the laws of classic art, the variation in
styles, the causes of the finest bloom in art. Certainly eclecticism is
preached too. The modern artist, it is declared, can only stand on the
shoulders of his forebears. The great Italians must be his models, and
of these the greatest is Michael Angelo. His last essay closes with
these words: "I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear
testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man, and I should desire
that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy, and from
this place, might be the name of Michael Angelo."
When he died, his friend Edmund Burke wrote in the funeral oration which
he dedicated to him: "Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on many accounts, one of
the most memorable men of his time. He was the first Englishman who
added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his
country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the
richness and harmony of colouring, he was equal to the greatest masters
of the renowned ages.... In full affluence of foreign and domestic fame,
admired by the expert in art and by the learned in science, courted by
the great, caressed by sovereign powers and celebrated by distinguished
poets, ... the loss of no man of his time can be felt with more sincere,
general, and unmixed sorrow." He was buried with great pomp in St.
Paul's Cathedral. The pictures left unfinished at his death fetched at
auction £37,000; the whole fortune which he left is estimated at
£80,000.
The biography of _Thomas Gainsborough_ reads quite differently.
The traveller who rides from London to Birmingham passes through some of
the fairest scenery in the island. He finds himself in the heart of
fresh and tender English nature. Small rivulets flow through the gently
undulating country. Wide meadows clothe the soft hollows in the valleys
with abundant green. In grassy enclosures deer and roes are feeding;
they push forwards inquisitively as the train passes. Fragrant linden
trees rise dreamily in the suave, park-like landscape, through which the
Stour winds along like a riband of silver. On the bank of this
enchanting stream Thomas Gainsborough, the son of a simple clothier, was
born. Reynolds' vocation had been brought about through the perusal of a
book. In the scenery and the woods that were in the neighbourhood of his
home, Gainsborough, who was so alive to all the beauty of nature,
received the decisive impression of his life. Here he roamed as a boy,
while he neglected his school lessons. "Tom will be hung some day,"
reflected his schoolmaster; "Tom will be a genius," thought his parents.
He sketched the parks and castles of the neighbourhood. In his later
life he used to say that there was no picturesque old tree trunk, no
meadow or woodland glade or stream within a four-mile radius of Sudbury,
that he did not retain a recollection of from his childish years. Like
Constable, when he was an old man, he still thought with gratitude of
his home, of all that beauty upon which he had looked, and which had
made him a painter. Here, in the green woods and fresh pastures of his
birthplace, he trained himself. At the age of ten he was a painter.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. MISS REYNOLDS.]
A sojourn of four years in London seems to have added little to his
ability. Elegant in his manners, lively in his conversation, a born
gentleman, he might have become completely the man of fashion. But he
was far too diffident, with his naïve simplicity, to force himself
amongst the stars of the world of art in London, far too distinguished
and retiring to join in the race after the favour of the public, and so
at the age of eighteen he returned to his native place with the
unencouraging prospect of playing the part of a simple painter in the
provinces. First and last, the woods remained his chief delight. One
morning, as he was painting there, he looked up from his easel and saw a
young and beautiful girl in a light summer dress, peeping coquettishly
from behind the trunk of a tree. She blushed, he spoke to her shyly.
Soon afterwards Margaret Burr became his wife, and the whole history of
his life with her remains a charming idyll, like the spring morning on
which he made her acquaintance. Married at the age of nineteen, he
installed himself at Ipswich, his wife's native place, and there he
spent fifteen years in great happiness, firm in the conviction that he
would end his days there. There he painted his first portraits, which,
from 1761, were forwarded by a carrier's cart to London for exhibition
in the Royal Academy. From Ipswich he went to Bath, the fashionable
watering-place, where he painted the visitors who came in the summer for
the cure. Finally, in the end his portraits met with approval in London.
That gave him courage in 1764 to proceed thither himself; and there he
took very modest rooms. On his arrival he was as yet very little known;
he came from the provinces, which he had till then never left, at a time
when Reynolds stood at the pinnacle of his fame, and had visited Italy
and Spain. Yet he gradually won a reputation. Franklin was one of the
first to sit to him. Soon he became the favourite painter of the king
and the royal family. George III was painted eight times by him, Pitt
seven times, Garrick five. Lord Chancellor Camden, Sir William
Blackstone, Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Richardson, Burke, Sheridan, Mrs.
Graham, Lady Montagu, Mrs. Siddons, Lady Vernon, Lady Maynard, and the
names of many other celebrities and beauties are bound up with his. His
life-work, excluding sketches, consists of no more than three hundred
pictures, of which two hundred and twenty are portraits--a very small
number in comparison with the four thousand paintings of Joshua
Reynolds. Thomas Gainsborough painted irregularly. Even when he was in
his studio he might be seen standing for hours gazing out of his window
dreamily at the grass. In other features of his life too he was equally
different from Reynolds: unaccountably, he was one moment a brilliant,
animated companion, the next plunged in melancholy. He dreamed much,
while Reynolds painted and wrote. In the evenings he usually sat at home
with his dear little wife, completed no treatises or discourses on his
art, but made sketches or sometimes music. Reynolds was a
scholar-painter, Gainsborough a painter-musician. It was said of him
that he painted portraits for money and landscapes for amusement, but
that he made music because he needs must. He collected musical
instruments as Reynolds did a library. Even in his pictures he gives his
people, for preference, violins in their hands. To the Musical Club
which he had founded in Ipswich he remained faithful all his life, and
in that neighbourhood, or in Richmond or Hampstead, he spent the summer
every year. Here amidst that green nature it was also his wish to be
buried. His funeral was a very quiet one. In the peaceful graveyard at
Kew, Thomas Gainsborough sleeps tranquilly under the shady willows, far
from the noise and tumult of the great city. Sir Joshua said at his
grave: "Should England ever become so fruitful in talent that we can
venture to speak of an English school, then will Gainsborough's name be
handed down to posterity as one of the first." Yes, one might say
to-day, as the first of all.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. EDMUND BURKE.]
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. MRS. ABINGTON.]
Joshua Reynolds is certainly a great painter, and deserves the high
veneration in which his compatriots hold him. It is not without a
certain awe that, in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy, one can
look upon the armchair that he used during his sittings, upon which all
who were famous in eighteenth-century England have sat. Reynolds is one
of the greatest English portrait painters, and, resembling most the
classical masters, showed in the highest degree the qualities we admire
in them. His colouring is of an amazing softness, depth, and strength;
his _chiaroscuro_ is warm and vaporous. There are portraits by him
which, in the subtlety of their tone, resemble the best of Rembrandt's;
others, whose noble colouring approaches the _chef-d'oeuvres_ of Van
Dyck. Master of the whole mechanism of the human body, he possessed in
the highest degree the rare art of setting persons surely and
unconstrainedly on their feet. His portraits are pictures; one needs no
whit to be acquainted with the persons they represent; they satisfy as
works of art in themselves, and as psychological studies by a man who
had the capacity of sounding the depths of the human heart. The complete
catalogue of all those who sat for Sir Joshua during the space of half a
century forms an uninterrupted commentary on the contemporary history of
England.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. EDMUND MALONE.]
There we see the skilful portrait of Sterne, with his look of witty
mockery; the marvellous Bohemian, Oliver Goldsmith, who even then had
the manuscript of his _Vicar of Wakefield_ in his pocket; Johnson, who,
in one, sits at his writing-table, on which stands an ink-pot and a
volume of his _English Dictionary_, and in another is peering into a
book with his short-sighted eyes screwed up tightly, and his whole
posture awkward and unwieldy. Garrick, who went from one studio to the
other, appears also more than once in Reynolds' portrait gallery.
Amongst his portraits of military dignitaries, that of General Lord
Heathfield, the famous defender of Gibraltar, whom he painted in full
uniform, is one of the most noticeable. Strong as a rock he stands
there, with the key of the fortress in his hand. What a contrast between
these figures and those of the contemporary French portraits! There,
those friendly and smiling ministers, those gallant and dainty
ecclesiastics, those scented, graceful marquises, who move with such
elegant ease about the parquet floor, and from whose faces a uniform
refinement has erased all the roughness of individuality; here,
expressive, thoughtful heads, characters hardened in the school of life,
many of the faces coarse and bloated, the glance telling of cold
resolution, the attitude full of self-reliant dignity and gnarled,
plebeian pride. The same _bourgeois_ element predominates in the
pictures of the ladies. Van Dyck's noble, eminently intellectual figures
always wore the glamour of the Renaissance. In the background an
artistically arranged curtain, a column, or the view of the quiet
avenues of some broad park. From Reynolds we get strong active women in
their everyday clothes, and with thoughtful countenances: good mothers,
surrounded by their children, whom they kiss and enfold in a tender
embrace. The idea of half-symbolical representation has vanished, and in
its place is introduced the idea of home and the family. The pictures of
children by this childless old bachelor were an artistic revelation to
the existing generation, and are the delight of the world of to-day. In
other portraits of ladies, that noticeable characteristic of the English
nation, their predilection for domestic animals and for sport, finds an
expression. The beautiful Duchess of Devonshire he painted as she gently
restrained with her finger her little daughter's caresses, which would
fain have disordered her _coiffure_; a whole gallery of noble ladies he
represented feeding their poultry or petting their lap-dogs; Lady
Spencer in her riding-habit, her whip in her hand, her horse reined in,
her cheeks flushed from her gallop. Nelly O'Brien looks an actress, a
woman who turned men's heads, and she does it still to-day in Reynolds'
picture. There lurks something enigmatic, perplexing in the smile of
this sphinx--only Monna Lisa had such a smile, but Nelly's eyes are
deeper, more desirous. One feels that in the three centuries since Monna
Lisa love has taken on a new and subtler _nuance_. The portrait of Mrs.
Siddons is the most famous of the pictures of actresses which Reynolds
painted, and Mrs. Siddons, of all the women of that time, is the one
whose portrait occupied the painters most. She was the daughter of Roger
Kemble, the actor, and sister of that pretty actress, Mrs. Twiss, whose
portrait by Reynolds (in 1784) we also have, and of the famous John
Philip Kemble, who figures so often in the portrait gallery of Lawrence,
as Hamlet, Cato, Coriolanus, Richard III, etc. Born to the boards, as it
were, she had, when still a child, joined her parents on their Thespian
pilgrimages, and had had many engagements in the provinces, at
Birmingham, Manchester, and Bath, before she was recruited by the
playwright Sheridan for the Drury Lane company in London. She made her
_début_ there on 10th October 1782, and was hailed forthwith as the
greatest actress of her time. Lady Macbeth was her great part; in that
she was painted both by Romney and Lawrence. Reynolds painted her as the
Tragic Muse. A diadem encircles her hair, she sits upon a throne, the
throne rests upon clouds. Behind her stand two allegorical beings, Crime
and Remorse, two quite unfortunate figures. But the principal figure is
truly great, in its noble, regal attitude, and quite unconstrained in
its dramatic pose. Reynolds had the composition in his mind many weeks
before Mrs. Siddons sat for him in the autumn of 1783. "Take your seat
upon the throne for which you were born, and suggest to me the idea of
the Tragic Muse." With these words he conducted her to the pedestal. "I
made a few steps," the actress relates, "and then took at once the
attitude in which the Tragic Muse has remained." When the picture was
finished, says Sir Joshua, gallant as ever: "I cannot lose this
opportunity of sending my name to posterity on the hem of your garment."
And he, who hardly ever signed his pictures, wrote in large characters
his name and the date on the gold-embroidered border of the dress. The
original picture has been in the possession of the Grosvenor family
since 1822; a second copy is in the gallery at Dulwich.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. OLIVER GOLDSMITH.]
Reynolds loved to depict his sitters in mythological or historical
settings. Thus he painted Mrs. Hartley, her son as a nymph and the
youthful Bacchus, the three Misses Montgomery as the Three Graces
crowning a term of Hymen, a little girl sitting on the grass as the "Age
of Innocence," Lady Spencer as a gipsy telling her brother's fortune,
Mrs. Sheridan as St. Cecilia. The five "Heads of Angels," as they are
called, in the National Gallery, are five different studies of the
lovely child-head of little Isabella Gordon. Garrick, in one of his
pictures, is set between the allegorical figures of Tragedy and Comedy.
Reynolds himself was frankly proud of these portraits in the mood of
history. He was, as he said, in general only a portrait painter because
the world required it; that which he aspired after was the great manner
of historical painting. Nevertheless, pictures, such as the "Little
Hercules with the Serpent," "Cupid unfastening the Girdle of Venus,"
"The Death of Dido," "The Forbearance of Scipio," "The Childhood of the
Prophet Samuel," or "The Adoration of the Shepherds," do not cause us to
deplore too bitterly that he rarely found time for such mythological and
historical pictures. His _putti_ are derived from Correggio; in the
arrangement of drapery he resembles Guido; in his "Venus" he is a
coarser Titian. Reynolds' own manner in these pictures is merely the
eclectic accumulation of the peculiarities of the old masters--he
brought no new element into historical painting.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. LADY COCKBURN AND HER DAUGHTERS.]
And herein lies his principal weakness. Hogarth declared: "There is only
one school, that of nature." Reynolds: "There is only one doorway to the
school of nature, and of that the old masters hold the key." The great
men of old were for him the object of constant and conscious thought. He
has endeavoured in his writings to propound a sort of general foundation
of painting, has adopted the principles of the best painters in every
land, was indefatigable in exploring the secrets of the old
masterpieces, and has therefore won the praise of having set the English
school, which had hitherto possessed no perfected tradition of painting,
technically on firm feet. He was the founder of a scientific technique
of painting derived from the ancients,--the Lenbach of the eighteenth
century. Upon the mixture of colours, the gradations of light and shade,
technically and æsthetically, no artist has pondered more than he, who
knew the great Netherlanders, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt, as well
as, or better than, his particular favourites, the Italians. He made
experiments all his life long to discover the stone of the wise
Venetians; but he met with the same experience as Lenbach. And these
experiments in the direction of the colour effects of the old masters
were the bane of his pictures' durability. It was well said by Walpole:
"If Sir Joshua is content with his own blemished pictures, then he is
happier than their possessors, or posterity. According to my view, he
ought to be paid in annual instalments, and only so long as his works
last." And Haydon opined that "Reynolds sought by tricks to obtain
results which the old masters attained by the simplest means." He
endeavoured by means of asphaltum to give his pictures the artistic
tones of the galleries, with the result that, to-day, the majority have
lost every sign of freshness.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. BISHOP PERCY]
With regard to the pose also, and similar conceptions, one can never
quite get away from the thought of Van Dyck and other old masters.
Reynolds' chief endeavour, not only as regards colouring, but also in
other respects, was to resemble the ancients, and this has brought into
his pictures something imitative and laboured. He dearly loved the
Romans and Venetians; we believe to-day that he loved almost too dearly
the Bolognese. And just that fine, artistic education which he received
in Italy and Holland, and the scientific method in which he practised
his art, did harm to Reynolds, and brought into his pictures too much
reminiscence, too many alien touches. He has in most cases understood
it--how to bring into uniformity the numerous borrowings of his palette,
all that he had taken from Leonardo, Correggio, Velasquez, and
Rembrandt. Yet he has never quite forgotten the old masters and looked
only at his model, for the sake of the very daintiest lady or the
freshest English boy. For his children he thought of Correggio's
"Cherubim," for his schoolboys of Murillo, for the portrait of Mrs.
Hartley of Leonardo da Vinci, for that of Mrs. Sheridan of Raphael.
There lacked in him that spontaneity which denotes the great master. By
his erudition in art, Sir Joshua elevated himself on the shoulders of
all who had preceded him. He obtained thereby the piquant effects in his
portraits, but it was at the price of the penalty that from many of his
works it is rather a rancid odour of oil and varnish which exhales than
the breath of life.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. THE GIRL WITH THE MOUSETRAP.]
Gainsborough can certainly not be compared with Reynolds in the mass of
his work. He was master neither of his powers of industry nor of his
smooth and brilliant methods of painting that were always sure of their
effect. In many of his pictures he gives the impression of a self-taught
man, who sought to help himself to the best of his power. Just as little
has he the psychological acuteness of Reynolds. A portrait painter puts
no more into a head than he has in his own; thus the acute thinker,
Reynolds, was able to put a great deal into his heads, whilst
Gainsborough, the dreamer, was often enough quite helpless when he
confronted a conspicuously manly character. In his whole temperament a
painter of landscape, before his model too he sat as before a landscape,
with eyes that perceived but did not analyse. What, with Reynolds, was
sought out and understood, was felt by Gainsborough; and therefore the
former is always good and correct, while Gainsborough is unequal and
often faulty, but in his best pictures has a charm to which those of the
President of the Academy never attained. Gainsborough, too, at his death
murmured the name of an old master. "We are all going to Heaven, and Van
Dyck is of the company." But what distinguishes him from Reynolds, and
gives him a character of greater originality, is just his naïve
independence of the ancients, which resulted partly from the different
nature of his education in art. Reynolds had lived for two years in Rome
and explored all the principal cities of Italy, had visited Flanders and
Holland, learnt to wonder at Rembrandt, and developed an enthusiasm for
_chiaroscuro_. Gainsborough in his rural seclusion had been able neither
by travel on the Continent to study the great masters of the past, nor
to assimilate the traditions of the studio. He contented himself with
the beauties which he saw in his native country, studied them in their
touching simplicity, without troubling himself about academic rules. He
lived in London until his death, without once leaving England; and that
gives to his pictures a distinct _nuance_. The one studied pictures and
books, the other only the "book of nature." His portraits never aim at
any external effect, nor are they raised into the historical; they seek
to give no other impression than that of a quite subjective truth to
nature, both in arrangement and in colouring. Nothing intruded between
his model and himself, no "sombre old master" obscured his canvas. His
execution is more personal, his colour fresher and more transparent. The
very personages seem with him to be more elegant, more gracious, more
modern than with Reynolds, in whose work, through their kinship to the
Renaissance, they received a suggestion of style, classical and ancient.
In his pictures the Englishman is clearly revealed, an Englishman of
that delicacy and noble refinement which is present to a unique degree
in the works of English painters of the present day.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. DR. BURNEY.]
The passage from Hogarth to Gainsborough marks a chapter in the history
of English culture. Hogarth is the embodiment of John Bull; you can hear
him growl, like some savage bull-dog. That brutal, indecorous robustness
of England's aggressive youth becomes, in Gainsborough's hands,
agreeable, refined, gentle, and seductive. Reynolds, with his robustness
as of the old masters, might be best compared with Tintoretto;
Gainsborough, in his quite modern and fantastic elegance, is a more
tender, subtle, and mysterious spirit, poet and magician at once, like
Watteau. There one listened to the full, swelling chords of the organ;
here to the soft, dulcet, silvery notes of the violin. Reynolds loved
warm, brown and red tones; Gainsborough essayed for the first time, in a
series of his happiest creations, that scale of colour, coldly green and
blue, in which to-day the majority of English pictures are still
painted. Everything with him is soft and clear; the tone of those blue
or light yellow silks, which he loved especially, is that of the most
transparent enamel; the background fades away into dreamy vapour, the
figures are surrounded with an atmosphere of seduction. What a
masterpiece he has created in the "Blue Boy," his most popular and most
individual picture. One can describe every piece of the clothing, but
it is impossible to reproduce the harmony of the painting, the rich,
pure blue of the costume, which stands out against a lustrous, brown
background of landscape. How the stately youth stands, noble from head
to foot, in the brown and green autumn landscape, with its canopy of
sky! Master Bootall was by far the most elegant portrait painted in
England since Van Dyck, and withal of a nervosity quite new. See that
youthful pride in the gaze, that mobile sensibility in the pose!
[Illustration: THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH.]
Have men grown different, then, or does the painter see further? One
finds in Van Dyck no such expressively _nervous_ physiognomy. The
suggestion of melancholy, the deep reverie, the noble, aristocratic
haughtiness,--Gainsborough was the first to discover that, and give it
its full expression. And the same man who painted the noble elegance of
this youthful _grand seigneur_ depicted also peasant children coming
fresh from the green fields and woodlands of their village homes. In Sir
Joshua's children there was often something borrowed from Correggio; the
children of Gainsborough breathe a rustic charm, an untamed savagery;
they are the very offshoots of nature, who disport themselves as freely
as the wild things in the woods. But his women in particular are
creatures altogether adorable. While Reynolds, the historical painter,
liked to promote his into heroines, those of Gainsborough, with their
pure, transparent skins, their sweet glances (in which there lies so
admirable a mixture of languishing fragility, innocence, and coquetry),
are the true Englishwomen of the eighteenth century. His "Mrs. Siddons"
is not in theatrical costume, but in a simple walking-dress; no Tragic
Muse, but the passionate, loving woman who once, a romantic, impulsive
miss, escaped from a convent at the risk of her life, to join a handsome
young actor of her father's troupe who had entirely fascinated her. What
a charming grace in the pose, what fine taste in the arrangement, what
wonderful purity of colouring! With the exception of Watteau, I know of
no older master who could have painted such moist, dreamy, sensuous,
tender eyes. The marvellous "Mrs. Graham," in the National Gallery of
Scotland, is, from the purely pictorial standpoint, perhaps the greatest
of all his works. Yet how beautiful is the double portrait of that young
married couple, the Halletts, who, tenderly holding hands, pass along a
deserted path in some secluded garden; or that pale, languishing "Mrs.
Parsons," with her enchanting smile, and that mysterious language of the
eyes. Gainsborough was no keen observer, but he was a susceptible,
sensitive spirit who intercepted the soul itself, the play of the
nerves, the slightest suggestion of spiritual commotion. There moves
through the majority of his portraits a pathetic tenderness, a breath of
dreamy melancholy, that the persons themselves hardly possessed, but
which he transfused into them out of himself. Melancholy is the veil
through which he saw things, as Reynolds saw them through the medium of
erudition. Reynolds was all will and intelligence, Gainsborough all soul
and temperament; and nothing can show the difference between them better
than the fact that Reynolds, who had formed his style on early models,
when he had no sitters painted historical pictures; whilst Gainsborough
in like circumstances painted landscapes. Herein he was a pioneer,
whilst Reynolds was an issue of the past.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. MRS. SIDDONS.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. WOOD SCENE, VILLAGE OF CORNARD, SUFFOLK.]
In the domain of landscape painting, too, the new germs of naturalism,
which had ventured above ground on all sides in the fifteenth century,
had been again stunted in the Great Renaissance. The theory had been
promulgated in the sixteenth century--in accordance with the idealistic
methods of the age--that it behoved the painter to improve upon nature
just as much as upon the human body. With the lofty style of the great
figure painters, and their artfully pondered composition, there
corresponded a school of landscape which was likewise conceived of, in
the first degree, as an honourable, architectural framing for a
mythological episode. England too possessed, in _Richard Wilson_, a
believer in this doctrine, which became so widely promulgated in the
seventeenth century through the influence of Claude Lorraine. The home
of his soul was Italy. He scraped together a small sum of money by
portrait painting, borrowed the rest, and felt himself in his element
for the first time when he had reached Venice. Here, at the instance of
Zucarrelli, he became a painter of landscapes, and was aided in his
endeavours by Joseph Vernet in Rome. He was on the way to become a
painter in great request, and in many of his pictures he shows a most
delicate notion of well-balanced and gracious composition in the manner
of Claude. But his success was of no long duration. Wilson, like so many
other of his contemporaries, had the fixed idea that the Creator had
only made nature to serve as a framework for the "Grief of Niobe" and as
a vehicle for classical architecture. The interpolated stage scenery of
trees and the classic temples of this English Claude, contain nothing
which had not been already painted better by the Frenchman. When the
king, in order to assist him, asked him on one occasion to represent Kew
Gardens in a picture, he composed an entirely imaginary landscape and
illuminated it with the sun of Tivoli. The king sent him back the
picture, mordant epigrams appeared in the journals, and Reynolds scoffed
at him in his Discourses. After that Wilson spent his days in the
alehouse, until he got delirium, and died half starved at the age of
seventy.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. THE MARKET CART.]
The patriotic English were too much bound up with their own soil to
acquire a taste for the exotic, ideal scenery of Wilson. There existed
in them that patriotism, that feeling for home, which had turned the
Dutch of the seventeenth century into landscape painters. In this
province also they were destined to step in, as the inheritors of the
Dutch, to bring the germ of intimate landscape to its full fruition.
Lovely and luxuriant valleys with their soft grass, sweet woodlands with
their vari-coloured foliage, golden, swaying cornfields and picturesque
little cottages, with that indescribable softness of atmosphere, must of
themselves direct the eye of the writer and the painter to all these
beauties. It was an Englishman who in the eighteenth century wrote the
most memorable book upon the charms of nature. James Thomson, in his
_Seasons_, is the first great nature painter amongst the poets. Taine
finds the whole of Rousseau anticipated in him. "Thirty years before
Rousseau, Thomson had forestalled all the sentiments of Rousseau, almost
in the same style." He has not only, like Rousseau, a profound feeling
for the great wild aspects of nature, for the forms of clouds, effects
of light and contrasts of colour, but he delights also in the smell of
the dairy, in small birds, in the woodland shadows, and the light on the
meadows,--in all things sequestered and idyllic.
"Nature! great parent! whose unceasing hand
Rolls round the Seasons of the changeful year,
How mighty, how majestic are thy works!
With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul
That sees astonished and astonished sings."
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. THE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. THE SISTERS.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. THE WATERING PLACE.]
It was a remarkable chance which ordained that Thomas Gainsborough, the
first man who as a painter depicted the gracious charms of the country
of his birth, the comeliness of its expanses of deep green lush meadows,
the strength of the lofty, wide-spreading trees, as seen with the eyes
of a lover, should be born in the spring of the same year in which
Thomson's _Spring_ appeared. That he knew and admired Thomson is proved
by his dedication to him of that delightful "Musidora" in the National
Gallery, a lovely woman bathing her feet in some shady forest pool. It
is said that he only sent half a dozen landscapes to the Academy during
the eighteen years that he exhibited there. On the other hand, they hung
in his house in Pall Mall in long rows on the walls of his studio. After
his death his widow held a sale, at which fifty-six landscapes were
sold. Gainsborough must be accounted one of the moderns, so naïve and
intimate is the impression which his pictures produce. He, who passed
his whole youth in the idyllic loveliness of the woods, was fitted to be
the delineator of that mellow English nature. He understood the murmur
of the brooks and the sighing of the winds. Like his own life, so
regular and peaceful, gently swaying as though to the friendly
elements, are the trees in his pictures, with their peaceful
tranquillity; no storm disturbs the calm of a Gainsborough picture. His
was a contented, harmonious spirit, like Corot's. His landscapes know no
tempestuous grandeur; they are a playground for children, a place for
shepherds to rest. "The calm of mid day, the haze of twilight, the dew
and the pearls of morning," said Constable, "are what we find in the
pictures of this good, kindly, happy man.... As we look at them the
tears spring to our eyes, and we know not whence they come. The solitary
shepherd with his flock, the peasant returning from the wood with his
bundle of faggots, whispering woods and open dales, sweet little peasant
children with their pitchers in springtime,--that is what he loved to
paint and what he painted, with as much sought-out refinement as with
tender truth to nature." His landscapes are like windows opening on the
country, not compositions, but pieces taken straight out of that
fruitful English nature. Every year he used to return to his green
pastures, and paint very early, when the sun rose. Before him rose a
cluster of trees, all round the farm the flocks were grazing, thousands
of busy bees flew buzzing from flower to flower; goats, with their kids,
were feeding in the meadows, wild doves cooed, and the birds in the wood
sang their praises to the Creator. Thus do the landscapes of
Gainsborough affect us. They are soft and tender as some sweet melody in
their discreet intimacy, without colorist effects, as wonderfully
harmonious as nature herself. A thatched cot, that peeps timidly from
between the great trees, a silvery dale shut in by weeping willows, a
bridge leading to some lush, green meadow,--those are Gainsborough's
materials. The famous "Cottage Door" is now at Grosvenor House. A young
peasant woman, with her youngest child in her arms, is standing by the
door of a country cottage, before which her other children are playing,
some half naked; deep contentment is all around, huge old oaks spread
their sheltering branches over the roof on both sides; golden rays of
sunshine dance across the meadow. Only Frederick Walker has, in later
days, painted such peasant women and such children, at once so tender
and so natural. Of the four pictures in the National Gallery, "The Wood
Scene," "The Watering Place," "Market Carts," and "Peasant Children,"
"The Watering Place" is the most celebrated. In the foreground a quiet
pasture with cows, close by the herdsman, a Suffolk labourer; in the
background a noble old Norman castle, perhaps Hedingham Castle, near
Sudbury. It is through pictures like these that England has become the
native-land of intimate landscape--_paysage intime_.
As figure painters, as well as landscape painters, the English in the
eighteenth century laid a course of their own, and it was not long
before the other nations followed them.
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF ART ON THE CONTINENT
Goethe compared the history of knowledge with a great fugue: the parts
of the nations first come to light, little by little; and this analogy,
already once made by Hettner, holds true in a very high degree of the
history of art during the eighteenth century. The three great nations of
culture--the German, the English, and the French--take up their parts in
turn, and through all there sounds one common, equal, dominant note.
England was in the vanguard of that great period of struggle known as
the age of enlightenment. Since the middle of the eighteenth century
English influences had begun to fertilise the Continent. The truth and
naturalness of English ideas were introduced as models, and England
became in her whole culture the schoolmistress of the Continent. In
every region war was declared against the pedantry brought over from the
past, while new conditions were aimed at. Obviously it was not so easy
for other nations to take their stand on the basis of modern society.
England had accomplished her revolution in the seventeenth century;
France was only preparing herself for hers. For all other nations, too,
the eighteenth century was a transition period, in which the old and the
new civilisation of culture were parting--an age of prodigious
controversy, full of _Sturm und Drang_. Men did homage to every kind of
extravagance, and went into ecstasies over virtue. The sarcasm of
scoffers went hand in hand with the deepest sentimental feeling for
nature; superstition flourished by the side of enlightenment and
learning; in the _salons_ of the aristocracy courtly abbés file past
with the greatest thinkers, glowing with a holy zeal for the rights of
man. And, in the midst of all this contradiction, there exists that
simple, virtuous middle class which is preparing to make the ascent
which will lead it to power.
One may imagine oneself in a salon of the _ancien régime_, in which wit
is lord, and laughter and merriment reign. Into that salon enters
abruptly a rough plebeian, with none of the fine tact of that company,
yet a great, aristocratic spirit, a man who despised such a society and
would make the world anew. Such is one's impression of the effect
produced at the time by the appearance of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Voltaire was the first on the Continent to break through social
barriers, but none the less he coined his heart for gold in society.
Rousseau signifies a great advance: he gave up his place, laid aside
rapier, silk stockings, and perruque, and clothed himself after the
manner of a common man in order to earn his bread as a copier of music.
He is, as Weigandt has called him, the first man of the _bourgeois_
century, the first pioneer of the new age. Against the traditions
bequeathed by the past, which in the course of time had become
over-refined and corrupt, he set up the natural conditions demanded by
reason. His fight against inequalities of rank is, as it were, a
foretaste of the revolution. "What hellish monsters are these
prejudices. I know no dishonourable inferiority other than that of
character or education. A man who is trained to an honourable mind is
the equal of the world; there is no rank in which he would not be in his
place. It is better to look down upon nobility than upon virtue, and the
wife of a charcoal-burner is worthy of more respect than the mistress of
a prince." Those were words in which the coming revolution was presaged.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF GOYA. BY HIMSELF.
_From: "Los Capriccios."_]
The _Nouvelle Heloise_ appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later followed
Goethe's _Werther_, that history of a young Titan whose zeal for liberty
felt all the partition walls of Society to be prison walls, and who rose
against everything that was ceremonial, against all the subordinations
of the social hierarchy, against all trivial and rigid rules of prudent
everyday life. Werther abhorred rules in every sphere. "One can say much
in favour of rules, about as much as one can say in praise of
_bourgeois_ society." He scoffed at the Philistines, who daily went
along the same measured way. He saw in "Society," having hitherto moved
in the simple world of the _bourgeois_, "the most sacred and the most
pitiful emotions wholly without clothing." And this Society outraged
him, and sent him with contumely from its midst. "Working folk carried
him to the grave, and no minister of religion followed him."
Soon afterwards young Schiller came upon the scene with his first works,
which were a declaration of war against all the foundations of human
society, those manifestoes of revolution which, were they new writings
to-day, no Court Theatre would dare to produce. The fierce, rampant
lion, with the inscription "In Tyrannos," which was displayed on the
title-page of the second edition of the _Robbers_, was an intimate
symbol of the deep revolutionary spirit that inspired the whole age. "I
grew disgusted with this ink-stained age, when I read in my _Plutarch_
of great men. Fie, fie upon the flaccid, castrated century, that has no
other use than to chew over again the deeds of the past. Let me imagine
an army of fellows like you, and I see a republic arising in Germany, in
comparison with which those of Rome and Sparta would be convents of
nuns." In a loud voice _Ficsco_ proclaims itself on the very title-page
to be a "republican" tragedy. _Intrigue and Love_ even aims full at the
rottenness and corruption of the actual time. It can be traced--and
Brandes has done it in his _Haupströmungen_--how in the literature of
the age, the life of sensibility and idealism prevailing in the previous
century gradually dwindles, and in its stead quite modern progressive
views--religious, political, and social--surge up in an ever-increasing
wave. The authors were the bold inciters to the battle. They were all
leaders in the battle for liberty against fossilised tradition,--some in
the field of poetry only, others in the whole sphere of intellectual
life. These are they who gave the signal for the war-cry of the
Revolution--Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; who rent asunder the old
society, inaugurated the age of citizenship, and were at the same time
the first to lose, as quite modern spirits, their faith in another
world.
[Illustration: GOYA. THE MAJAS ON THE BALCONY.]
A wonderful chance ordained that, in the province of art, the most
powerful figure of that storm and tumult, the one artist of the age of
the race of Prometheus, to which belonged the young Goethe and the young
Schiller, should be born in the most mediæval country in Europe, on
Spanish soil. Against an art that was more catholic than catholicism,
courtly and mystical, there came by far the greatest reaction in Goya.
From Roelas, Collantes, and Murillo to him there is hardly any
transition.
_Francisco Goya_ preached Nihilism in the home of belief. He denied
everything, believed nothing, doubted of everything, even of that peace
and liberty which he hoped to be at hand. That old Spanish art of
religion and dogma was changed under his hands to an art of negation and
sarcasm. His attitude is not that of an insolent and impetuous youth,
who puts out his tongue at the Academy and strikes with audacious hand
at the academicians' high powdered perruques; it is the attitude of the
modern spirit, which begins by doubting all things which have been
honoured hitherto. His Church pictures are devoid of religious feeling,
and his etchings replete with sneers at everything which was previously
esteemed as authority. He scoffs at the clerical classes and the
religious orders, laughs at the priestly raiment which covered the
passions of humanity. Spanish art, which began in a blind piety, becomes
in Goya revolutionary, free, modern.
[Illustration: (_Laurent, photo._)
GOYA. THE MAJA CLOTHED.]
Goya is, in his whole nature, a modern man, a restless, feverish soul;
nervous as a _décadent_; temperament to his finger-tips. His style in
portraiture, his art of composition, his whole method,--all speak to our
artists to-day in a language easily understood, and on many of them the
influence of Goya is unmistakable. He is one of the most fascinating
figures of the beginning of the century. As audacious as he was clever,
as versatile as he was fantastic, a keen observer as well as a strong
creative spirit, he fascinates and astonishes in his pictures, just as
in his wonderful etchings, by a remarkable mixture of the bizarre and
the original. His pictures, whether they be violent or eccentric, tender
or hard, gloomy or joyous, nearly always move and palpitate with life
itself, and they will always keep their attraction. There is no one of
Goya's pictures, not even the flimsiest sketch, at which one can look
coldly.
He was born in a village in the province of Aragon, the son of a small
landed proprietor, in 1746. At the age of fourteen, having already
painted frescoes in the church of his native-place, he went to Saragossa
as an apprentice; and there he showed himself to be vivacious and
passionate, and soon became the champion among his comrades in all their
pastimes and brawls. Restless, and always thinking of adventure, he
refused every regular kind of education, disarranged everything in his
master's studio, worked when he could, drew his sword when he had a mind
to, nourished in his head dark thoughts on liberty, came and went and
loved, dallied with his knife, snapped his fingers at the Inquisition,
which was after him, and fled from Madrid,--such was he at twenty, and
such he remained all his life.
[Illustration: (_Laurent, photo._)
GOYA. THE MAJA NUDE.]
Italy, whither he fled on account of a duel, did not alter him. There
were new love quarrels. He fought, stabbed a rival, was wounded himself,
amused himself extremely, studied little, observed, admired, but neither
painted nor copied anything. It was thanks to this indolence that the
great past did not take him prisoner. He did not know much, but for what
he knew he could thank himself. He loved the old painters, but
platonically; their works did not lead him astray. In this lies the
explanation of his qualities and his faults: that marvellous mixture of
seductive grace and visible weakness, of subtlety and brutality, of
refinement and ignorance. He merits equally sympathy and blame, is as
genial as he is unequal. But one would not wish him to be otherwise: if
there had been more order and proportion in his works his good qualities
would have been lost. He would have suffered in spontaneity, vivacity,
originality, and quietly taken his anchorage in the sleepy haven of
mediocrity. As he is, he is wholly the child of his country: from head
to foot a Spaniard of the eighteenth century, a son of that downfallen
Spain that was dying from loss of blood. For hundreds of years a black
cloud, extinguishing all joy, had hung over Spanish life, a cloud out of
which, only here and there in dismal lightning flashes, there emerged
obscure figures of sombre despots, sick ascetics, and silent martyrs.
All mundane inclinations were suppressed, all sensuous desires
prohibited. Men spent their nights with their eyes fixed upon the gory
histories and passionate exhortations of the Old Testament, hearing in
imagination the menacing, thunderous voice of a dreadful God, until at
last in their own hearts the fanatical inspiration of the prophetic seer
awoke anew, and their feverish forms were torn asunder by ecstatic
visions and religious hallucinations. When Goya began his career the
sinister country of the Inquisition had grown frivolous. A breath of
revolution was passing over men's minds. An intoxicating odour of
mundane voluptuousness penetrated everywhere, even into the convents
themselves; the figures of the French Rococo Olympus had brought
confusion into the Christian paradise. Spain no longer believed; it
laughed at the Inquisition, trembled no more when it was threatened with
the pains of Hell. It had grown frivolous, wanton, epicurean, full of
grace and laughter. The rosy-red and blue shepherds of the Trianon had
made an entry into the sombre Court of Aranjuez. Literature, taste, and
art were infected by French influences, Parisian sparks of wit,
lightning _esprit_, and Parisian immorality; and the same rumbling
earthquake which wrecked the throne of France was soon to shatter that
of Spain. In Goya's works there is a refulgence of all this. But, like
every great artist, he is not only the expression of his epoch, but also
its leader; he almost anticipates the age which shall succeed it. Like a
figure of Janus, on the border-line between two centuries, standing in a
manner between two worlds, he was the last of the old masters and the
first of the moderns--even in that special sense in which we employ the
word to-day.
[Illustration: GOYA. DE QUE MAL MORIRA.
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
Through a commission to design cartoons for the Spanish manufactories of
tapestry, he was brought into contact with the Court. Member of the
Academy of San Fernando in 1780, Pintor del Rey, with an income of
12,500 francs in 1786, he became soon afterwards the Director of the
Madrid Academy--the drollest Director of an Academy that man can
imagine! Goya, the peasant youth, with his bull neck and matador-like
strength, lived at the Spanish Court in the midst of the enervated
scions of a dissolute aristocracy, who, with their sickly and anæmic
features, indolent and impotent, skulked through life, young men
prematurely old. Naturally he was the idol of the women, hated by the
courtiers on account of his caustic wit, a terror to all husbands
because of his perpetual intrigues, and at the same time feared as the
best swordsman in Madrid, who drew his rapier with the indifference with
which we light a cigarette.
It is only as the outcome of such a personality that his works are to be
understood.
[Illustration: GOYA. SOPLONES.
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
Goya was far too great a sceptic to put a religious sentiment into
matters in which he no longer believed; his talent was far too modern
for the religious abstraction to be able to seize him. His "Christ on
the Cross," therefore, in the Museo del Prado, is simply tedious, a bad
academical study. His frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida, at Madrid,
exhibit a pretty, decorative motive--considerable movement, grace, and
spirit. But amongst them are angels who sit there most irreverently,
and, with a laugh of challenge, throw out their legs _à la_ Tiepolo. The
chief picture represents St. Antony of Padua raising a man from the
dead. But all that interested him in it were the lookers-on. On a
balustrade all around he has brought in the lovely, dainty faces of
numerous ladies of the court, his _bonnes amies_, who lean their elbows
on the balcony and coquette with the people down below. Their plump,
round, white hands play meaningly with their fans; a thick cluster of
ringlets waves over their bared shoulders; their sensual eyes languish
with a seductive fire; a faint smile plays round their voluptuous lips.
Several seem only just to have left their beds, and their vari-coloured,
gleaming silks are crumpled. One is just arranging her coiffure, which
has come undone and falls over her rosy bosom; another, with a
languishing unconsciousness and a careless attitude, is opening her
sleeve, whose soft, deep folds expose a snow-white arm. There is much
_chic_ in this Church picture. One very immodest angel is supposed to be
the portrait of the Duchess of Alba, who was famed for her numerous
intrigues.
[Illustration: GOYA. SE REPULEN.
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
In his portraits, too, he is unequal. He became the fashionable painter
at the court. The politicians, poets, scholars, great ladies, actresses,
all the famous folk of his epoch, sat to him. He daubed more than two
hundred portraits; but they were good only when the subject amused him.
His portraits of the Royal Family have something vicious and plebeian.
He is too little in earnest, too little of an official, to paint court
pictures. One might imagine that he with difficulty restrained himself
from laughing at the pompous futility which stood before him. It
irritated him to be obliged to paint these great lords and ladies in
poses so ceremonial, instead of making them, like the angels of San
Antonio, throw up their legs and skip over parapets. The Queen, Marie
Louise, is frankly grotesque; and the family of Charles IV look like the
family of a shopkeeper who have won the big prize in a lottery, and been
photographed in their Sunday clothes. But, ah! when something gives him
pleasure! In the Exhibition of Portraits at Paris, in 1885, there was
the portrait of a young man, dressed in gray, which excelled
Gainsborough for grace. With what a noble nonchalance this young elegant
stands there, reminding one, in attitude and costume, of the
_incroyables_ of Charles Vernet. With what equanimity does he look out
on life, in his satisfaction at the good fit of his clothes. The
wonderful harmony of the grey tones was rendered with all Gainsborough's
delicacy. The same man who in those pictures of ceremony let himself go
in a manner so brusque and frenzied, here revelled, a very Proteus in
his chameleon-like qualities, in soft and mellow and seductive tones.
One might say that he has thought here of Prudhon and Greuze, and joined
their study to the cult of Velasquez.
[Illustration: GOYA. QUE PICO DE ORO!
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
Still more charming was he in his pictures of young girls, when he was
himself fascinated by the attractions of his subjects. The infantile
Donna Maria Josefa (at the Prado) and the twelve-year-old Queen Isabella
of Sicily (at Seville) are admirable pictures. In them the candour and
grace of budding youth, the whole poetry of young maidenhood, have won
life and expression from the enamoured tenderness of an artist hand.
Seduced by beauty, he renounced all irony, thought only of those big,
wide-opened eyes of velvet, those rosy young lips; of that warm
carnation and the elegant slimness of that soft young neck that rose in
delicate contour from the shoulders. Or again, that marvellous double
portrait of La Maja in the Academy of San Fernando: a young girl painted
once clothed and once nude, both pictures in exactly the same pose, and
both flooded with the same extraordinary sensuous charm. This is not the
uncertain, sarcastic painter of those State pictures. It is an attentive
observer, who depicts with sensitive devotion the harmonious lines of
the irradiating, young, human body so worthy of celebration. The
transparent stuff that covers the body of "La Maja clothed" reveals all
that it hides; in the other picture the unveiled nudity sings the high
pæan of the flesh. The drawing is sure, the modelling of a marvellous
tenderness. The heaving bosom, the slender limbs, the tantalising
eyes--every part of that nervous body, with its ivory whiteness,
stretched out on the milk-white couch made for love, breathes of
pleasure and voluptuousness.
In pictures of this kind Goya is wholly one of us. Grown independent of
every traditional rule, he abandoned himself entirely to his own
impressions, and produced enduring works, vibrating with life, because
he was himself fascinated with nature. He showed here an idea of
modernity that almost makes him seem a contemporary of our own--that
zeal for the pictorial, for colour and light, which attracts us so much
to-day. Very characteristic also of the changed aspect of the age are
his designs for the famous tapestry in Santa Barbara, with which he made
his début at Madrid. They are very crude in decoration. Two or three
neat young girls, with big, black, moist eyes, here and there pleasing
details--a couple of men carrying a wounded companion--are unable to
gloss over the heaviness of the composition and colour. But it was of
great consequence that Goya should have had courage for so bold a step
as to make use of character scenes in decorative painting at a time when
everywhere else, without exception, _fêtes champêtres_ predominated.
[Illustration: GOYA. VOLAVERUNT.
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
In his oil paintings he went much further in this direction. In that
impetuous manner peculiar to him he endeavoured to get a firm grip on
the pictorial side of Spanish life, at home and in the streets, wherever
he found it. The most fearful subjects--such as the two great slaughter
scenes in the French invasion, painted with such breadth and
fierceness--alternate with incidents of the liveliest character.
Everything is jotted down, under the immediate influence of what has
been observed, by rapid methods, and on this account produces an effect
of sketches taken with complete directness from nature. In those
careless pictures, swept with large strokes of the brush, there rises
before us the mad drama of public holiday in the streets and in the
circus: processions, bull-fights, brigands, the victims of the plague,
assassinations, scenes of gallantry, national types--all observed with
the acuteness of a Menzel. The Majas on the balcony in the Montpensier
Gallery, the "Breakfast on the Grass," the "Flower Girl," the "Reaper,"
the "Return from Market," the "Cart attacked by Brigands," are the most
piquant, vividly coloured of these pictures. The "Romeria de San
Isidoro" is full of such a sparkling, stirring life as the most modern
of the impressionists alone have learned again to paint. A few dashes of
colour, a few well-placed, bold strokes of the brush, and at once one
sees the procession move, the groups passing each other by just as, in
the marvellous sketches of the funeral of Sardina, in the Academy of
San Fernando, one can see the young couples revolve madly in the dance,
and the lances of the bull-fighters redden the sand of the arena.
The superabundance of such phantasy could not, of course, be achieved by
the tardy brush. He required a quicker medium, that would permit him to
express everything. Therefore he executed his numerous etchings, by
which he was rendered famous, before people had learnt to appreciate him
as a painter: the "Capriccios," the "Malheurs de la Guerre," the
"Bull-fights," the "Captives"--those marvellous and fantastic pages in
which he expressed everything that his feverish, satirical soul had
accumulated for contempt, and hatred, and anger, and scorn. The etcher's
needle was the poisoned dagger with which he attacked all that he wished
to attack: tyranny, superstition, intrigue, adultery, honour that is
sold and beauty that lets itself be bought, the arrogance of the great
and the degrading servility of the little. He made an awful and jovial
hecatomb of all the vices and the scandals of the age. Whomsoever he
pilloried was laid bare in all respects; physically and morally, no
single trait of him was forgotten. And he did it so wittily that he
compelled even the offended person to laugh. Neither Charles IV himself,
nor the Court, nor the Inquisition, which bled most beneath his thrusts,
dared to complain.
[Illustration: GOYA. QUIEN LO CREYERA!
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
In his "Capriccios" Goya stands revealed as a figure without even a
forerunner in the history of art. Satirical representations of popular
superstitions, bitter, mordant attacks on the aristocracy, the
government, and all social conditions, unprecedented assaults on the
crown, on religion and its doctrines, inexorable satires upon the
Inquisition and the monastic orders, make up this most remarkable book.
It had hardly appeared in 1796 before the Inquisition seized it. Goya
parried this stroke, however, by dedicating the plates to the king.
A painter and a colorist, in this book he displays his genius as an
etcher. The outlines are drawn with light and genial strokes only; then
comes the _aquatinta_, the colouring which overspreads the background,
and gives localisation, depth, and light. A few scratches of the needle,
a black spot, a light produced by a spot of white ingeniously left
blank--that sufficed to give life and character to his figures.
[Illustration: GOYA. LINDA MAESTRA!
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
The "Misères de la Guerre" are intrinsically more serious. All the
scenes of terror that occurred in Spain as a sequel to the French
invasion and the glory of Napoleon here utter their cry of lamentation.
A few plates amongst them are worthy of comparison with the finest of
Rembrandt's,--the sole classic for whom Goya cherished a veneration. All
the undertakings which followed these--the "Bull-fights," the
"Proverbs," the "Captives," the fantastic landscapes--tell of a long
study of the great Dutch master. Especially celebrated were the
seventeen new plates which he added to the "Malheurs de la Guerre" in
1814, at the time of the restoration of Ferdinand VII. They are the
political and philosophical testament of the old liberal, the keen
free-thinker, the last and utmost fight for all that he loved against
all that he hated. With sacred wrath and biting irony he waged war
against the intrigues and hypocrisy of the obscurantists who throttle
progress and suppress freedom of thought. With passionate wrath he
rushed upon kings, priests, and dignitaries. It seems incredible that
the plate entitled "Nada"--a dead man, who comes out of his grave and
writes with his corpse-fingers the word "Nada" (nothing)--that this
plate can be the work of a Spaniard of the eighteenth century.
Everywhere there is the same hatred of tyranny, of social injustice, of
human stupidity, the same incredulous effort after a dimly conceived
ideal of truth and liberty.
It is neither the amiable fairyland of Callot nor the _bourgeois_
pessimism of Hogarth. Goya is more inexorable and acute; his phantasy,
borne on larger wings, takes a higher flight. He sees direful figures in
his dreams, his laugh is bitter, his anger rancorous. He is a
revolutionist, an agitator, a sceptic, a nihilist. His _chronique
scandaleuse_ grows into the epos of the age. One understands why such a
man should no longer feel secure in Spain, and, towards the close of his
life, go into exile in France.
There, too, in the home of the revolution, art, ever since the beginning
of the century, had freed herself more from the tradition of the
Renaissance, and betaken herself to the new way, which the Dutch, and
soon afterwards the English, had laid down in the seventeenth century.
[Illustration: GOYA. DEVOTA PROFESION.
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
All that had been produced in Paris, up to the close of the seventeenth
century, had had its birthplace in the Italy of Leo X. The light of the
Italian Renaissance had suffused France ever since the appearance of
Rosso and Primaticcio. Rome had been the cradle of Simon Vouet and
Nicolas Poussin. France endeavoured, in rich decoration and masterly
swing of lines, to overtop the Italians, whose formulæ were studied
partly in Rome and partly in the Palace of Fontainebleau, that Rome _in
petto_. Those religious pictures of Lebrun, arranged in panels, appeared
with their theatrically elegant attitudes and their flowing drapery,
with their slim, oscillating limbs and their florid gestures. All
Olympus, all the saints and the heroes, were set to work to do honour to
the great king. Was it necessary to glorify his acts, then it was done
by portraying him as Cyrus or Alexander. The people of the seventeenth
century did not exist for painters. Lebrun and Mignard, as inheritors of
Roman culture, hovered over life without seeing it. Their ideals were a
hundred and fifty years old, ingenious variations on the
sixteenth-century pattern.
Then came the death of the _Grand Monarque_, and with him the tradition
of the Renaissance went also to its grave. The old age was outworn, and
the new began to supersede it. The world was weary of the majestic, the
stiff, and the pompous, whose glamour had blinded it for sixty years.
The sun-king was dead, and the sun of the Italian Renaissance had set.
French society breathed once more. The ostentation of the court had
become an onerous ceremony, the monarchical principle an unendurable
constraint. The nightmare that had oppressed it, the ennui that had come
from Versailles, disappeared. Air and light and mirth penetrated the
salons. People shook off the heavy yoke of majesty from their shoulders,
abandoned their heroic, ostentatious palaces, and bought themselves
_petites maisons_ in the _Bois_. They had suffered, they wished to be
glad; they had been bored, they wished to be amused. Enough of
pater-nosters and stately etiquette! they wished to live. Away with the
antique temples and goddesses of Poussin! away with those devoted
martyrs who mortified themselves and killed the flesh! Away with the
semblance of the heroic, with pomp and glamour, with the service of God
and the service of lords! Here's to the service of the ladies. Here's to
the thatched roofs of farmhouses; the woods in whose thickets one can
lose one's way and exchange a kiss; rosy flesh and little turned-up
noses; everything which gave a thrill of voluptuousness after the
unapproachable, icy-cold nobility of the past. Long live Love!
[Illustration: "_L'Art._"
GOYA. OTRES LEYES POR EL PUEBLO.]
So thought France when Louis XIV was dead, and the man was already grown
up in the Low Countries who was chosen to give a shape to these dreams,
to abolish the ascendency of gods and kings and heroes, and to show the
upper classes their own image reflected in the mirror of art.
_Antoine Watteau_, who guided the stream of French art into this new
channel--of the Netherlands--was by birth and training a Fleming. His
birthplace, Valenciennes, although French territory since the Peace of
Nymeguen, resembled in its whole character a Flemish town. In the church
here he first saw any of Rubens' pictures. Here, through Gérin, he
became instructed in Flemish traditions. Rubens and Teniers are the two
masters from whom his own art sprang. During the years when the war of
the Spanish Succession had changed the French frontier provinces into a
huge military camp, he painted soldiers and camp scenes, such as the
"March" in the collection of Edmund Rothschild, where a party of
recruits are straggling along a high plain in a fierce storm. Later came
pictures of country life in the manner of Teniers, like the "Retour de
Guinguette," engraved by Chedel, a landscape in which on the right a
party of rustics are carousing at a table in front of a farmyard, while
on the other side half-drunken men and women are going home. Louis XIV
had made before the pictures of Teniers his well-known _mot_: "_Otez moi
ces magots_." Now, through Watteau, the _magot_ makes its entrance into
French art. Thus in his chief picture in this manner, "La Vraie Gaieté,"
the figures are unmistakably after Teniers. The men are short and
sturdy, entirely Flemish. Only the costumes have changed with the mode.
But the women are not in the least Flemish. The clean caps and tidy
kerchiefs, the freshly ironed aprons, and neat little feet that trip so
lightly and quickly along the street that no dirt seems to soil them,
give these peasant girls a certain desirability in which it is not hard
to discover the transition to French grace. The elegant motions and fine
heads point to that Watteau who was to become soon afterwards the
unsurpassable delineator of feminine coquetry.
Gillot and Rubens led him into the new road. The Teniers-like character
of his figures disappeared, they became gracious and noble. In place of
the _magot_ came elegant French society. Gillot was the first in Paris
to break with the pompous Louis XIV style, and to begin the
representation of the cheerful life of comedians, to replace the
dwellers in Olympus by characters of the French and Italian stage.
Rubens had been the first in his "Garden of Love," of the Dresden and
Madrid Galleries, to invite to the embarkation for the Island of
Cythera. Watteau acquired something from everyone he studied, and yet
resembles none. After having hitherto sought his personages on the
highways and in camps, he was now to become the painter of _fêtes
galantes_, the painter of "Society." For in his shepherds and
shepherdesses there lives the elegance of France. The gods of the
Renaissance, in whom no one any longer believed, glided into the
costumes of Harlequin and Pierrette. In lieu of the great and the
pathetic there came the small, the gay, the graceful, the dainty. The
architectural symmetry of composition disappeared, and the stiff
stage-scenery character of landscape vanished. The grave formality of
geometrical construction is changed into freedom and joyousness, just as
the rhetorical, exact, measured periods of Boileau were relaxed, under
the hands of Voltaire, into sentences unconstrained, buoyant, and crisp.
Watteau's art betokened the triumph of naturalism over the mannerism
into which the French art of the seventeenth century, based on the
Italian Renaissance, had dwindled. As it is said in an old poem--
"Parée à la Françoise, un jour Dame Nature
Eut le desir coquet de voir sa portraiture.
Que fit la bonne mère? Elle enfanta Watteau."
Watteau became for French art what, a hundred years before, Rubens had
been for Flemish--the deliverer. He delivered them from the oppressive
yoke of the Italian tradition. In his world, where there were no longer
any naked goddesses, but where the corset was opened only just wide
enough to reveal a rosy bosom, there was nothing more left of the past.
It is no longer antique beauty, no longer the plastic cold of the "Venus
di Milo," no longer the marble perfection of Raphael's "Galatea." Into
those tender, feminine hands, into those lace sleeves, out of which
snow-white arms come languishingly forth, into those slender waists, and
teasing, dimpled chins, something of coquetry, of sensibility, something
subtle and spiritual, has entered, that seems to transcend physical
beauty. His young men are tall and supple, his women entirely
indescribable, with their air of quiet roguishness and their exquisite
coiffures. Quite modern is that distinguished sense for costume which
made him a leader of fashion. Mysterious landscapes, that exhale peace
and happiness all around! Rightly has Edmond de Goncourt called him a
lyric poet, the great poet of the eighteenth century.
[Illustration: ANTOINE WATTEAU.]
[Illustration: WATTEAU. LA PARTIE CARRÉE.]
In this way the development proceeded. The pompous representation which
portrait painting had practised hitherto was gone. People would no
longer be masters of the ceremonies, but human beings. New forms of
technique were discovered, such as pastel painting. No other material
was capable of rendering the peculiar fragrance of this fugitive flower
nature, the graceful appearance of this _rococo_ style, of these ladies
with the touch of powder in their hair, and their moist, dreamy eyes, as
Maurice Latour, Rosalba Carriera, and later the Swiss, Liotard, painted
them. Of those who endeavoured, on the model of Watteau's style, to
depict the life of the fashionable world, none approached the delicacy
of that national genius. _Lancret_ and _Pater_ followed him, but more
roughly, more soberly, more drily. Lancret in his whole conception,
compared with Watteau, is a homely, often a somewhat cumbrous
journeyman; Pater, an artist of greater elegance, has the fickleness of
the virtuoso. Both in conviction and in art they lacked that poetic,
glorifying breath which pervades Watteau's creations. In Watteau one
_believes_ that these gracious beings, these tall and nervous cavaliers,
these amiable coquettes and comely women, actually represent originals
in noble society; whereas in the works of his disciples it often happens
that the paid model, selected from a lower circle of society, appears to
us to be not congruous with the elegance of her wardrobe. These dancers,
huntsmen, and noble maidens are not wholly what they should represent.
But how delicious they are, these French gossips, so long as one is
mindful _not_ to think of Watteau! What grace is theirs too! What innate
tact! With what a pleasant adroitness do they understand how to rivet
our attention, and to keep far, far away from the tedium in which their
classical ancestors, with their natural heaviness, waded! Instinctively
and without effort they rejected the rhythmically balanced composition
and correct nobility of form of the classics, and found a characteristic
expression for unconstrained gestures, pleasing movements, and refined
elegance.
[Illustration: GREUZE. "_L'Art._"]
Even the decorative painters abandoned more and more the much-worn paths
of the Italians. _François Lemoine_ gave them, by Rubens' aid, the
transition to a manner peculiarly French, elegant, sensuous, charming.
His pupil, _François Boucher_, followed him. Like the sons of the
seventeenth century, he made exhaustive use of mythological subjects and
was often a superficial artist, and in his later works he became
entirely a mannerist; but he was not so at the beginning. It was a great
advance for France when Boucher gave his pupils the advice to abstain
from imitation of the great Italian masters, and not to grow "as cold as
ice." And what a great naturalist he is in his numerous drawings and
etchings, and in those marvellous groups of chubby children who are
playing and tumbling about on clouds, or playing musical instruments
shooting arrows, or sporting with flowers! "It is not every one who has
the stuff to make a Boucher" even his great antagonist David has said of
him.
In _Fragonard_, again, there was summed up all the joy of life and the
frivolity, the lustrous, luxurious talent, the charming amiability and
nimble sureness, of French art in the eighteenth century. Fragonard has
painted everything. His great decorations are careless inspirations,
sparkling with spirit and life. With him pastoral scenes alternate with
episodes of everyday life--children, guitar players, women reading.
Fragonard is a piquant, ingenious painter. Perhaps hardly any other
painter has so much kissing in his pictures. His etching, "L'armoire,"
of 1778, is well known. In that he already stood on the sure ground of
popular life. The old rustic, who is armed with a formidable cudgel, is
beating open, with the assistance of his wife, the doors of a great
clothes cupboard, in which a handsome young fellow has hidden himself;
close by is a pretty farm girl, weeping in confusion into her apron; in
the background the curious and amazed little sisters are looking on.
[Illustration: GREUZE. THE MILKMAID.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GREUZE. HEAD OF A GIRL.]
_J. F. de Troy_ had, at the same time, abandoned himself to a more
frolicsome manner, had played upon painting in pictures such as "The
Proposal of Marriage" and "The Garter" with something of that frivolity
which later came into fashion through Baudouin. That, however, was only
for a very short time. Life was beginning to be in earnest--that is
rather the impression one receives much earlier, from turning over the
engravings of those years. Amongst the elders of the actual _rococo_
age, contentment and gaiety still rule. As the heirs of an old
civilisation, the aristocracy understood, with a refined and unique
understanding, how to turn life into a feast. Silk trains rustle over
the parquet, silk shoes trip, eyes gleam, diamonds flash, white bosoms
heave. Tall cavaliers advance to their sprightly partners, gossip and
smiles fly around, Knights of Malta and abbés hang over the chairs and
pay their court. Yes, this autumn of the old French culture was of a
marvellous beauty for the fortunate, and those fortunate ones knew, as
no other generation has ever done, how to enjoy life with serenity, in a
fairy glamour of rooms gleaming with Venetian chandeliers, where rosy
Cupidons laughed down bewitchingly from their light, gold moulded
panels. Under Louis XVI the French salon acquired another aspect. Its
walls, its whole architecture, were more sombre. The Cupidons still
sported on the ceiling, but they were forgotten, like ghosts of the
past; their shafts were already impotent. The vivacious, dancing couples
have disappeared. Festivity has been banished from the big rooms: here
and there is seen an earnest conversational party; gentlemen playing
cards or ladies reading philosophical books. Social and political
interests have sprung up with which people of education prefer to occupy
themselves. Numerous works on commerce and constitutional methods have
appeared during the last fifty years. In place of scandal there crop up
arguments, for and against the Parliament, for and against the Jesuits.
Enlightenment had won its victory. Henceforth development is no longer
compatible with sensuous delight. It is still the same society as
before, but without pleasure. One almost breathes the air of 1789.
Gaming is only a struggle against ennui; the foreheads of women are
furrowed with reading. Society has grown serious and sombre, as it were,
with a presentiment of what is to come, as though destiny might thus be
set aside. The writings of Diderot afford the clearest instance of this
changed spirit of the age, and art too must become virtuous, and work
for the amelioration of the world. Thus Diderot upheld the sentimental
and emotional subject against the _fêtes galantes_ of the _rococo_
painter. Boucher derived his inspiration from the slough of
prostitution; only a moral upheaval could tend to a high style. With
Boucher the idea of honour, of innocence, has become something strange;
the new age requires virtue, _bonnes moeurs_. But where are the virtues
to be found? Naturally, there alone, where Rousseau had discovered them.
Rousseau taught that man by nature was good, that he was noble,
conscious of his moral obligations, self-sacrificing and uncorrupted
when he came from the hands of his Maker, and that it was civilisation
which first corrupted him. It followed that the most civilised are the
most corrupt, and virtues are to be met with, if anywhere, amongst the
lower orders, who are the least affected by culture. Not beneath an
embroidered waistcoat, only beneath a woollen smock, can a noble heart
beat. The happy ignorance of the young Savoyard, eating his cheese or
his oranges in a church porch, lies nearer to the original perfection of
mankind than the most subtle erudition of the most ingenious of the
encyclopædists. Amongst nature's noblemen one must seek for the secret
of virtue, which has been lost by the aristocracy in the stream of
civilisation. Thus beneath the ægis of Rousseau's philosophy the Third
Estate makes its entry into French salons. From the man of the people
society wanted to learn how to become once more simple, unassuming, and
virtuous; and it was a gruesome irony of fate that this "man of the
people" should reveal himself later, when the guillotine stood in the
Place de la Concorde, as by no means so lamblike, modest, and
self-sacrificing as that noble society had imagined him.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GREUZE. GIRL CARRYING A LAMB.]
_Greuze_ represented this phase of French art when the riotous carnival
of _rococo_ had come to an end, and the Ash Wednesday of rule and
fasting and penitence had ensued. It was considered that the aim of art
must be to instruct and elevate, not merely to amuse; it should set an
example to raise and inspire the good, to serve as a warning for the
bad. "_Rendre la vertu aimable, le vice odieux, le ridicule saillant,
voilà le projet de tout honnête homme qui prend la plume, le pinceau ou
le ciseau._" In these words Diderot formulated his programme. It was his
wish that the corrupt man, when he went to an exhibition, should feel
pricks of conscience at the pictures and read in them his own
condemnation. "_Si ses pas le conduisent au Salon, qu'il craigne
d'arrêter ses regards sur la toile._" Educational effects, "moral
stories told in pictures," that is the keynote of Diderot's demands upon
the painter, and of the accomplishment of Greuze in answer to this
claim. He is the French Hogarth, whether he paints in sombre colours the
misery that the drunkard brings upon his family, and the horrors of
poverty, or depicts in brighter tones the love of children for their
parents and the works of charity; and with him too, as with the
Englishman, his title was chosen with a didactic after-thought to
heighten the effect of his picture. Thus such scenes as these occurred:
"The Father's Curse," "The Consolation of Age," "The Son's Correction,"
"The Ungrateful Son," "The Beloved Mother," "The Spoilt Child," "The
Lame Man tended by his Relations," and "The Results of Good Education."
He had this, too, in common with Hogarth: he liked to develop his moral
stories in long series, which invariably ended with the triumph of
virtue and the punishment of vice. The didactic story of _Bazile et
Thibaut_ attempted to relate in twenty-six chapters the influence of a
good education on the formation of a whole life; and, just as in
Hogarth's story of the two apprentices, here too, at the conclusion, the
well-educated Thibaut pronounces sentence of death over his old friend
Bazile, the badly educated, and now condemned murderer. The fact that in
other things the two moral apostles differ greatly from each other is
accounted for by the difference in the national characteristics of those
to whom they variously appealed.
Hogarth _scourged_ the vices of the Third Estate in order to raise them
to morality. Rape, bloodshed, debauchery, disorderliness, gluttony, and
drunkenness--that was the channel through which in England at that day
the furious flood of the uncontrolled spirit of the populace poured
itself, foaming and raging with fearful natural force. Hogarth swung
over these human animals the stout cudgel of morality in the manner of a
sturdy policeman and Puritan _bourgeois_. With such people a delicate
forbearance would have been misplaced. At the foot of every prison-scene
he inscribed the name of the vice that he had pilloried there, and
subjoined the predicted damnation from Holy Writ. He reveals it in its
hideousness, he steeps it in its filth, traces it to its retribution, so
that even the most vitiated conscience must recognise it and the most
hardened abhor it.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GREUZE. GIRL LOOKING UP.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GREUZE. GIRL WITH AN APPLE.]
Greuze employs the Third Estate as a _mirror of virtue_, sets forth its
noble qualities as an edification to an aristocracy that has grown
vicious. Less primitive and, for that very reason, less original than
Hogarth, he never forgets that he lives in the most refined social
period in history. He does not strangle his culprits to provide
terrifying examples, but nearly always leaves a corner open for
repentance. He knew that he dared not exact too much from the nerves of
his noble public; he merely wished to stir them to a soft vibration. He
did not paint for drunken English people, but for those perfumed
marquises who, later on, bowed with so courtly an elegance before the
guillotine; for those sensitive ladies in whom virtue now excited the
same sensual delight that vice had done before. They welcomed in him the
high priest of a sort of orgie of virtue, to whose festivals they had
grown reconciled. The century which in its first half had danced as
light-heartedly as any other the can-can of life, becomes, in its second
half, sad of soul, enthusiastic over the reward of justice, the
punishment of transgressors, over honour and the naïveté of innocence.
Time after time do his contemporaries praise precisely that sense of
virtue in the art of Greuze. So that in France, as in England, the
burden of interest was laid no longer upon the art, but upon an
accessory circumstance. For since, in the hands of Greuze, the picture
had been turned into an argument, in France, as in England, art ceased
to be an end--it became only a means. He made painting a didactic poem,
the more melodramatic the better, and was driven thereby on the same
sandbank upon which Hogarth, and all _genre_ painters who _would be_
more than painters, have made shipwreck. In order to bring out his story
with the utmost possible distinctness, he was too frequently compelled
unduly to accentuate his point. The effect became affected, the pathos
theatrical. His picture of the "Father's Curse" in the Louvre, with the
infuriated old man, the son hurrying wildly away, and the weeping
sisters, resembles the last act of a melodrama. "The Country Wedding,"
where the father-in-law has given the young bridegroom the purse with
the dowry, and now pathetically observes, "Take it, and be happy," might
just as well have been entitled "The Father's Last Blessing." In the
picture in which a noble dame takes her daughter to the bedside of two
poor persons who are ill, to accustom her in early life to works of
charity, the personages in the picture, arranged exactly as if upon a
stage, must have been themselves uncommonly moved by the touching and
praiseworthy action. Greuze was the father of _genre_ painting in
France--that barbaric, story-telling art which replaced _tableaux
vivants_ based upon the literary idea by the Dutchmen's picturesque and
well-observed selections from nature. Beyond that, however, it must not
be forgotten that he, like Hogarth, psychologically opposed to the
earlier art, showed practical progress in many of his works. There were
few in French art before him who depicted the emotions of the soul with
such refinement as Greuze in his "Reading of the Bible." In proportion
to the understanding and character of the individual is the impression
of the listener reflected on his countenance. That was something new in
comparison with the laughing gods of Boucher. And that Greuze was also
capable of the most highly _pictorial_ magic when he could once bring
himself to lay aside the moral teacher is proved by his rosy, inspired
heads of young girls. He never grew weary of painting these pretty
children in every situation and attitude at that seductive age which
hides the charming feet beneath the first long gown. Blonde or brunette,
with a blue ribbon in the hair, a little cluster of flowers in the
bodice, they gaze out upon life with their big, brown child eyes, full
of curiosity and misgiving. A light gauze covers the soft lines of the
neck, the shoulders are as yet hardly rounded, the pouting lips are
fresh as the morning dew, and only the two rosy, budding breasts, that
fight lustily against their imprisonment, and seem, like Sterne's
starling, to cry, "I cannot get out," betray that the woman is already
awake in the child. Greuze's name will always be associated with these
girl types, just as that of Leonardo is with the dreamy, smiling
sphinx-like head of Mona Lisa. In them he has given an unsurpassable
expression to the ideal of innocence at the end of the eighteenth
century, and provided in them a new thrill of beauty for his
contemporaries. And a _blasé_ society which had indulged in every
licence bathed itself with passionate delight in the unknown mystery of
this surging flood. Yes, after the stimulating champagne of _rococo_,
people had even come to delight in simple black bread. And so, out of
_bourgeoisie_ itself, a school of painting was developed as fresh and
healthy as this.
[Illustration: _"Gaz. des Beaux Arts."_
CHARDIN. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
_Chardin_, the carpenter's son, is at the head of this domestic art in
the eighteenth century. After Greuze, the painter of refined taste, he
seems, a comfortable, healthy, _bourgeois_ master in whom the Dutchman
of the best period once more appears upon earth.
After the king had, up to the close of the seventeenth century, been the
centre round which everything turned, the solitary personality which
dared to appear independent, and upon which the rest of the world formed
itself; after the circles round the court had next freed themselves, and
gained the right to enjoy life and art for themselves, there still
remained a third step to surmount. "Society" abdicates in favour of a
free and healthy _bourgeoisie_.
A surgeon's sign was the first work which brought the young man, who had
received no systematic education, into notice. The surgeon is in his
shop attending to a man who has been wounded in a duel, grouped around
are curious bystanders, while the commissary of police investigates the
case with a grave countenance. It is the first picture of the Parisian
life of the people. And Chardin, with his middle-class origin, remained
the advocate of middle-class domestic life. He is the Watteau of the
Third Estate. Greuze owes his success, in the first place, to the
ingenious manner in which he made himself the spokesman of the moral
tendency of his age. It interested contemporary society to be told that
it is beautiful to see married folk live together in happiness; that
young mothers do a good action in nursing their children, when it is
possible, themselves; that man should repent of his sins; and that he
who honours his father and mother lives long in the land. Nowadays we
thank him for these wise counsels, but say, at the same time, that we
could have done without them. We no longer see the necessity of
illustrating the ten commandments, and notice now all the more the
mannerisms, the rhetorical strokes of advocacy which the painter must
employ in order to plead successfully. Chardin's effect is as fresh
to-day as it was a hundred years ago, because he was a sheer artist, who
did not seek to tell a story, but only to represent,--a realist of the
finest stamp, belonging in his exquisite sense of colour values to the
illustrious family of the Terburgs. His pictures have no "purpose." The
washerwoman, the woman scraping carrots, the housewife at her manifold
tasks--that is Chardin's world; the atmosphere in which these figures
move, the shimmering light that floats in the half-dark kitchen, the
wealth of sun-rays that play upon the white tablecloths and
brown-panelled walls--those are his fields of study. Chardin lived in an
old studio, high up near the roof, a quiet, dark room that was usually
full of vegetables which he used for his "still life." There was
something picturesque about the dusty walls where the moist green of
vegetables mingled so harmoniously with the time-worn, sombre brown of
the wainscoting, and the white table-cloth was flooded with the silvery
green which poured in from a little skylight. In this peaceful and
harmoniously toned chamber were laid those small domestic scenes, which
he so loved to paint, and which were called by the French, in contrast
to the _Fétes Galantes_, "_Amusements de la Vie Privée_." The clock
ticks, the lamp burns, water is boiling on the homely tiled stove. There
is an effect in every one of his pictures, as though he had lived them
himself, as if they were reminiscences of something dear to him and
familiar. In contrast to Greuze he shunned all critical moments, and
depicted only the quiet life of custom, everyday life as it befell in a
constant, regular routine. There are no hasty movements with him, no
catastrophes nor complications; he has a preference for "still life" in
the world of men, just as in nature. He is _par excellence_ the painter
of _Intimität_ (intimate life); which is not the same as _a genre_
painter. Painters who in the manner of _genre_ have depicted domestic
scenes in rooms are to be found in every school; but how few have known
how to depict the poetry of the family life with such truth, with such
an absence of affectation and insipidity! With Chardin art and life
are interfused.
[Illustration: J. B. S. CHARDIN THE HOUSE OF CARDS]
[Illustration: CHARDIN. GRACE BEFORE MEAT.]
No Dutchman, however, had penetrated into the nursery. Chardin, in
surprising the child-world at their games, in their joys and sorrows,
has opened out to art a new province. And with what affectionate
devotion has he not absorbed himself in the spirit of the little people!
I know of no one before him who has painted the unconscious spiritual
life of the child with such discreet tenderness: the little hands that
grasp at something, the lips that a mother would like to kiss, the
dreamy wide-open young eyes. In this Chardin is a master. It is not only
obvious expressions of joy and sorrow, but those refined shades, so
difficult to seize, of observation, thoughtfulness, consideration, calm
reflection, quaintness, obstinacy or sulking, which he analyses in the
eyes of the child. There is the little girl playing with her doll, and
lavishing on her all the love and care of a tender mother. There is an
elderly, half-grown-up little lady teaching her younger brother the
mysteries of the alphabet. Then come the games and the tasks. They build
card-houses, blow bubbles, or are wholly engrossed in their
drawing-books and home-lessons. How attentive the little girl is whose
mother has just given her her first embroidery materials. How charmingly
embarrassed is the small boy whom she hears his lesson. And what trouble
she takes in the morning, that her darling shall be clean and tidy when
he goes to school. In one picture the cap on the little girl's head is
crooked, and her mother is putting it straight, whilst the child with a
pretty pride is peeping curiously in the glass. Again, there is the boy
just saying good-bye. He is neat and well combed; his playthings, too,
have been nicely tidied up, and his books are under his arm. His mother
takes his three-cornered hat off again in order to brush it properly.
When school is over, you see them sitting at dinner. The table is laid
with a snow-white cloth, and the cook is just bringing in a steaming
dish. It is touching to see how prettily the small boy clasps his hands
and says his grace. And when they are again off to afternoon school the
mother sits alone. She looks charming in her simple house-dress, with
the loose sleeves, her clean white apron and kerchief, her striped
petticoat and coquettish cap. Soon she takes her embroidery on her lap
and stoops forward to take a ball of wool out of her basket. Next she
sits before the fire in a cosy corner against a folding screen. A
half-opened book rests in her hand, a tea-cup stands close by, a homely
atmosphere of the living room hovers round her. Then, like a true
housewife, she takes up her house-keeping book, or goes into the kitchen
to help the cook, while she scrapes carrots or scrubs the cooking
utensils or brings in the meat from the larder. It is all rendered with
such truth and simplicity that one acquires an affection for Chardin,
who with his art got to the root of family life and bestowed upon it the
subtlest gifts of observation and generous comprehension, while none the
less his domesticity never became commonplace.
[Illustration: DANIEL CHODOWIECKI.]
His contemporary, _Étienne Jeurat_, painted scenes at country fairs, and
_Jean Baptiste le Prince_ pictures of guardrooms and similar subjects.
In Holland _Cornelis Troost_ went on parallel lines with him. He
depicted the life of his age and of his nation--comic scenes, banquets,
weddings, and the like--in pastels or water colours, and that without
seeking inspiration from any of the Dutch classics, but with a vivid,
intelligent comprehension. Even Italian art ended in two "_genre_
painters," the Venetians Rotari and Pietro Longhi, who have bequeathed
to us such charming little pictures of the life of that
age--fortune-tellers, dancing-masters, tailors, apothecaries, little
boys and girls at play or at their tasks.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
CHODOWIECKI. THE FAMILY PICTURE.]
Germany presented no such great manifestation as Chardin, although there
too the tendency was the same. There too, after the devastation of the
Thirty Years' War, a moral, active _bourgeoisie_ had at last sprung up
that was prepared to take up the line which had been already laid down
by the English. Lessing was the first in this magnificent struggle for
evolution. He wrote, in his _Miss Sarah Sampson_, the first German
tragedy without the support of great mythical or historical heroes, and
without the stiff ponderousness of the Alexandrine. He declared, like
Moore, that helmets and diadems do not make tragic heroes; he even in
his _Minna_ set vividly before the eyes of his contemporaries something
in the immediate present, the Seven Years' War. And just as Lessing
liberated the German drama from the jurisdiction of Boileau, so art
began to mutiny against the classicism which had come in through the
medium of France, and which had been inherited from the age when it was
the pride of German courts to be small copies of Versailles.
"How exceedingly abhorrent to me are our berouged puppet painters,"
cries the young Goethe, in his essay on German style and art, "I could
not sufficiently protest; they have caught the eyes of the women with
theatrical poses, false complexions, and gaudy costumes; the wood
engravings of manly old Albrecht Dürer, at whom tyros scoff, are more
welcome to me.... Only where intimacy and simplicity exist is all
artistic vigour to be found, and woe to the artist who leaves his hut to
squander himself in academic halls of state."
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
CHODOWIECKI. ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF WOMEN.]
_Daniel Chodowiecki_, with all his commonplaceness, is a genuine
expression of this phase of German art. He in Germany, Hogarth in
England, and Chardin in France, are products of the same tendency of the
age. After Lessing had produced in _Minna_ the first domestic German
tragedy, Chodowiecki, following the road of Hogarth and Chardin, was
able to become the painter of the German middle class. He is not a
master of such penetrating strength as they were, but he is no less an
artist of notable merit. He is certainly no genius--in fact almost a
handicraftsman, sober and philistine, but, like Hogarth, a self-made man
who in his whole artistic and personal outlook was rooted in the soil of
his city and of his age. Berlin society of that day was the basis of his
art, the daily life of house and street his domain. He began by
illustrating poems and depicting scenes out of the _Seven Years' War_
and the _History of Charles the Great_, and went on from that to the
pleasant, homely life of the small _bourgeoisie_. Himself of the middle
classes, he chiefly worked for them, and with his sensitive and
dexterous graving tool he kept the liveliest and most exhaustive
chronicle of the German _bourgeoisie_ of that age. At times almost too
reasonable and prosaic, a genuine Nicolai, he has in other plates an
enchanting freshness, and--which should not be forgotten--is more of an
artist than Hogarth, since he is neither moralist nor satirist. His
object, without any moral after-thought, was the true and kindly
observation of life as displayed in the world around him. He took the
wholly naïve delight of the genuine artist in turning everything he saw
into a picture. These chronicles of his have some, it may be but a
particle, of the spirit of Dürer. Simultaneously, the young _Tischbein_
delved into the past of the nation, the age of Conradin and the
Hohenstaufen, with the intention of finding there the simplicity which
the academic pictures had come to lack; and, later on, he painted in
Hamburg extremely realistic historical pictures of his own period, such
as that which is to be found in the Oldenburg Gallery: "Entry of General
Benigsen into Hamburg, 1814." He did good work too as a portrait
painter. In his best picture, "Goethe amongst the Ruins of Rome," the
head of the poet is energetic and full of strength, the colouring of an
excellent clear grey.
In portrait painting in general, the revolution is reflected with
especial clearness. The artificial manner that had been copied from the
seventeenth century, the age of long perukes, gives way, slowly but
surely, to an ever-growing naturalness, simplicity, and originality. At
that time, while the spirit of Louis XIV still hovered over everything,
the passion of the individual to be king in his own sphere had
penetrated into the family. The honest citizen, therefore, would not let
himself be painted as such, but only as a prince,--he, himself, in gala
dress, with a pompous air, as stately as though he were giving an
audience to the spectator, his wife in silk and gold and lace; she has a
great mantle of state worn loose over her shoulders and hips, and looks
down with an assumption of grandeur on her grandchild, who is half
respectful and half inclined to make fun. The frame is as rich as the
costume, and probably bears a crown. We are with difficulty persuaded
that these are pictures of simple citizens, that the man, apart from the
hours during which he sat to the painter, is an industrious tradesman,
and the wife, glancing out so haughtily, most probably darned his
stockings. Their portraits seem to form part of an ancestral gallery.
This age of princely state was followed by that of fraternity. In place
of berouged and postured portraits with allegorical accessories, there
appeared simple, unpretentious likenesses of human beings in their
work-a-day clothes; in place of stiff attitudes, _genre_ motives with
the easy naturalness of everyday life.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
CHODOWIECKI. THE MORNING COMPLIMENT.]
In Berlin, ever since 1709, _Antoine Pesne_ had been for half a century
the centre of artistic life, and in his works the revolution may be
traced. Something familiar and intimate takes the place of that stately
pomp. The princes, hitherto, had liked to be represented in mediæval
armour or antique equipment; Pesne painted them in the costume of the
time. And in his portraits of his friends and his family circle he has
been still more unconstrained. There is the charming picture of 1718, in
the New Palace at Potsdam, which shows the painter himself with his wife
and his two children; the portrait of Schmidt the engraver, in the
Berlin Museum; and the beautiful picture of 1754 in the collection of
Colonel Von Berke, at Schemnitz, which depicts him again at the age of
seventy-one with his two daughters. Pesne is revealed in these
characteristic portraits, as well as in his character pictures in the
Dresden Gallery ("The Girl with the Pigeons," 1728, "The Cook with the
Turkey-hen," 1712), as a thoroughly sane and strong realist, of a kind
which became almost extinct in Berlin a hundred years later.
In the next generation, in the _Sturm-und-Drang_ period, _Anton Graff_,
the Swiss, took the lead with his simple, domestic, honest, real
portraits. It was a happy disposition of fate that Graff's activity
just corresponded with the great period of the awakening of intellectual
life in Germany, that Lessing and Schiller, Bodmer and Gessner, Wieland
and Herder, Bürger and Gellert, Christian Gottfried Körner and Lippert,
Moses Mendelssohn and Sulzer, and a long succession of other poets and
scholars of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century,
found in him a portrait painter whose quick and agile hand left us their
features in the truest and most authentic manner. What and how robust
his art is, how clear and plastic the execution of the heads, how adroit
and infallible the technique!
Besides Graff, there worked in Dresden _Christian Leberecht Vogel_,
likewise a most independent, picturesque, and sensitive artist, who, if
only for his pictures of children, deserves a place of honour in the
history of art in the eighteenth century. In the portrait of his two
boys, in the Dresden Gallery, the naïveté of child-life is observed with
such tenderness and rendered with such vigour as only Reynolds
understood. The boys are sitting close together on the ground. One, in a
brown frock, is holding a book on his knees, which the other, in a red
frock, with a whip in his hand, is looking at. The thoughtful expression
of the little ones is quite charming; the execution broad and strong,
the colour treatment delightful and tender.
In Munich lived the excellent _Johann Edlinger_, the most industrious of
these sturdy masters, who were so modest and yet so capable.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
CHODOWIECKI. THE ARTIST'S NURSERY.]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux Arts._
ANTOINE PESNE. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AND DAUGHTERS.]
In the domain of landscape the Continent produced no one who could be
compared with Gainsborough; but here, too, the English influence made
itself felt. It can be traced how the same feeling for nature which had
given birth to Thomson's _Seasons_ and Gainsborough's landscapes,
afterwards found expression in France and Germany, and dissipated the
prevailing taste in gardens. The seventeenth century--with the exception
of the Dutch--had set nature in order with the garden shears. As Lebrun
in his historical compositions endeavoured to outdo the Italians, so
Lenôtre's garden style exemplified the perfection and exaggeration of
the gardens of the Italian Renaissance, which themselves again were laid
out on the plan of the old Roman gardens from existing descriptions. A
garden reminded one more of state apartments, which one could only walk
through with measured steps, quietly and respectfully, than of nature,
where one is, and dares to be, human. Corresponding to this formally
planned, correctly measured style of garden there was a school of
landscape which improved nature on "artistic" principles, and, by the
arrangement of bits of nature, produced a world peculiarly full of
style. Landscapes were nicely laid-out parks, which, like the figure
pictures, made for an abstract beauty of mass and lines, and which, by
means of accessories, such as classical ruins, would turn one's thought
to the ancient world. Nature must not, as Batteux taught, be the
instructor of the artist, but the artist must select the parts and build
up his picture. Out of many leaves he takes only the most perfectly
developed, puts only such perfect leaves on one tree, and so obtains a
perfect tree. Let the essential of his production be _nature choisie_, a
selection of objects that "are capable of producing agreeable
impressions"; his aim "_le beau vrai qui est représenté comme s'il
existait réellement et avec toutes les perfections qu'il peut
recevoir_." The eighteenth century went back from this "noble,"
improved nature, step by step to the divine beauty of unimproved nature;
just as those masters untouched by the Romans, Dürer and Altdorfer,
Titian and Rubens, Brouwer and Velasquez, had painted her. The great
Watteau, too, was here for the most part in advance of his age, in that,
instead of the stiffly designed stage scenery of Poussin, he gave
Elysian landscapes,--abodes of love, that now glisten in the sunshine of
the young morning, now are suffused with golden light and the misty
shadows of the evening twilight. The rose in her young bud is odorous,
the nightingale sings, the doves coo, the light boughs whisper to the
soft west wind, bright silver rivulets ripple, the wind sighs through
the tall branches. Watteau knew nature and loved her, and rendered her
in her transparent beauty with the intoxicated eyes of a lover. The
spirit of nature, not of humanity, dominates in his pictures. It is only
because nature is so lovely that man is so happy.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ _Photo, Mansell._
WATTEAU. THE MUSIC PARTY.]
But still more modern is the effect, when instead of painting Elysian
landscapes with happy inhabitants, he drew mere bits of rural nature,
poor solitary regions in the neighbourhood of big towns, where
bricklayers are working on the scaffolding of some house, or peasants
are riding with their horses over some stony byway. Out of a number of
spirited drawings, this side of his perception in landscape is
especially notable in the picture in the New Palace at Potsdam, in the
left background of which a small stream flows past a farmhouse, whilst
in front a peasant is laboriously dragging a two-wheeled cart over the
rough ground.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ _Photo, Mansell._
WATTEAU. THE RETURN FROM THE CHASE.]
It is interesting to observe, at that time, after Watteau and his
English predecessors, the widespread growth of this new feeling for
nature. Thomson was followed by Rousseau, who, on his lonely wanderings,
looked with moved eyes at "the gold of the corn crop, the purple of the
heather, the majesty of the trees, and the wonderful variety of flowers
and grasses." He delighted in the blossoming of spring, the copses and
rivulets, the song of birds, shady woods, and the landscapes of autumn,
where the reapers and vine-dressers were working. He is the author of
that lively feeling for nature that henceforth was aroused through the
whole of Europe. A breath of pure mountain air, a wholesome draught of
fresh water from Lake Leman, were brought suddenly into the sultry
atmosphere of salons, and filled people's hearts with a new and charming
sensation when Rousseau's works appeared. It was over with all efforts
of "stylists" as soon as Rousseau declared that everything was good just
as it came out of the lap of the universal mother, nature.
[Illustration: WATTEAU. FÊTE CHAMPÈTRE.]
Goethe, the pupil of Rousseau, presages, in his whole conception of
nature, something of the manifestation of the school of Fontainebleau.
He had something of Daubigny when, as Werther, he lies on the bank of
the stream and looks down thoughtfully at the worms and small
insects. He makes one think of Dupré or Corot when he says: "As nature
declines upon autumn, within me and around me it grows autumn"; or, "I
could not now draw so much as a stroke, and I have never been a greater
painter than at the present moment"; or, "Never have I been happier, nor
has my perception of nature, down to the pebble or the grass beneath me,
been fuller and more intimate. Yet,--I know not how I can express
myself, everything swims and oscillates before my soul, so that I can
seize no outline. A great, shadowy whole waves before my soul, my
perception grows indistinct before it, even as my eyes do."
[Illustration: GESSNER. LANDSCAPE (ETCHING).]
Thus were the French gardens delivered by the English. Just as figure
painting renounced lofty, architectural, formal composition, so those
bisected and upholstered gardens were supplanted by irregular and, as it
were, accidental bits of nature. People took no more trouble, in
Rousseau's phrase, "to dishonour nature by seeking to beautify her," but
laid out gardens in harmony with Goethe's remark in _Werther_: "A
feeling heart, not a scientific art of gardening, suggested the plan."
Close to Versailles, near the box-tree patterns of Lenôtre, lay the
Petit Trianon, with its pond, its brook, and its dairy, where the
unfortunate Marie Antoinette used to dream. And if painting still
loitered on its preliminary return to nature, that only implied that the
great artists--they only came in 1830!--were not yet born. Great artists
can only raise themselves on the shoulders of their predecessors, whose
value lies in their utility. The French landscapes of the eighteenth
century, seen in the light of historical development, are of no
importance; but, nevertheless, they gave a considerable stimulus in
that they sought to animate the style of Poussin with a closer
perception of nature. Hubert Robert is certainly strongly decorative,
but he has a light touch; one cannot take him at his word, but he is
intelligent, and has sometimes grey and green tones that are soft and
beautiful. Joseph Vernet painted coast scenery, views of harbours,
storms at sea, likewise with decorative, superficial effects of light;
he let flashes of lightning streak black clouds, sun-rays dance over
lightly ruffled waves, silver moonshine play mysteriously upon the
water, and caused conflagrations to break out and red flames to shoot up
to heaven. He is somewhat inane and motley in his colouring. But he had
ceased to see in the parts of nature nothing but materials for the
construction of nicely fitting scenery. He no longer attempted to speak
to the reason by means of lines, but to touch the soul through humour,
and he employed in his scenery not only buildings and ruins, gods and
ancient shepherds, but also modern groups of every kind.
In Switzerland, the charming etchings and water-colours of _Solomon
Gessner_ must be especially mentioned. Ludwig Richter, indeed, pointed
them out as the eighteenth century works which, after the engravings of
Chodowiecki, he loved the best. Gessner venerated Claude, and had an
enthusiasm for Poussin, but his pictures have no traces of the lofty
style of the heroic school of landscape. He sketched his native meadows,
trees, and brooks; he loved all that was small and secluded and cosy,
arbours and hedges, quiet little gardens and idyllic nooks. He
approached everything with a very childlike and faithful observation of
nature. A second Swiss, Ludwig Hess, dedicated a similar subtile sense
of nature and loving zeal as much to his native Switzerland as to the
Roman Campagna.
[Illustration: GESSNER. LANDSCAPE (ETCHING).]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
GUARDI. VENICE.]
The German _Philip Hackert_ has been prejudiced rather than profited by
the monument which Goethe erected to him. As Goethe's enthusiasm was not
in due proportion with Hackert's importance, he ceased later to attract
attention, though this he did not merit, as he was always a vigorous and
healthy landscape painter. He did not see nature with the tender
sensibility of the Swiss. He looked at a landscape somewhat insipidly,
as Chodowiecki at his models. But his drawing is sober, the atmosphere
of his pictures clear and fresh; he cannot be tedious in his
composition. In Dresden there lived Johann Alexander Thiele, who roamed
through Thüringen and Mecklenburg as a landscape painter. Even in Italy
landscapes were the most independent performances which the eighteenth
century had brought forth there. There worked in Rome the Netherlander,
Vanvitelli, who depicted in graceful water-colours Roman and Neapolitan
street life; and Giovanni Paolo Pannini, the _peintre des fêtes
publiques_, in whose pictures groups of richly coloured figures moved
through splendid palaces. Venice was the home of the Canaletti. In
_Antonio Canale's_ town pictures of Venice, Rome, and London there is at
once so subtle an atmospheric movement, the water is so clear, the air
so transparent, that even if they represent mere streets and buildings,
they yet leave an impression of landscape achieved in a broad, pictorial
method. _Bernardo Canaletto_ produces an effect by the fine, cool, damp
light of his northern studies even simpler and more intimate, while by
his discovery that sunshine does not--as it was hitherto believed--gild
but silver the object it falls on, he became one of the fathers of
realistic landscape. The most ingenious, however, of the school of
Canale, not to say one of the cleverest landscape painters of the
century, was _Francesco Guardi_. Antonio Canale was a great artist, and
shows it never better than in his distinguished etchings, but as a
painter he interests the collector more than the connoisseur. There his
qualities are too often petrified into an excessive formality; he shows
something too much of the _camera obscura_. Guardi is ingenious and
startling. Where you have accuracy in Canale, in him you find spirit.
Canale shows us the real Venice, Guardi shows it as we have dreamed it
to be. He has not Canale's knowledge of perspective and architecture,
but he fascinates us. He is a musician and a poet whose palette resounds
with the purest harmonies. In his pictures the whole seductive legend of
the fallen Queen of the Adriatic abides. Garlanded gondolas glide
peaceful and fairy-like, majestic as vessels in some distant wonderland,
over the clear, green water of the canals, beneath the high, marble
palaces, which mirror their columns and balconies, their arches and
their loggias in the stream. Foreign ambassadors pass in great state
through the Piazza di San Marco; all that proud, Venetian nobility
greets them; and thick throngs of people in their Sunday attire move to
and fro beneath the Hall of the Procuration. Gay bands of musicians row
along the Piazzetta and the Riva. A moist breeze sweeps over the water;
the sunshine, now subdued and mellow, now dancing coquettishly, plays
upon the water or on the houses. Francesco Guardi, the magician of
Venice, is an animated, exquisite, always ingenious _improvisatore_,
strong as few others are in the direct transference of his personal
impression to canvas. Every stroke of his brush takes effect,--in each
one of his pictures one sees the nervous exaltation of the hand; and
that gives him a power of attraction which, compared with Canale, is
like that of the clay model, in which the hand of the sculptor is still
perceptible, compared with the cold, marble statue.
Even Spain, which, except for the colossal figure of Velasquez, had so
far produced no painters of landscape--even Spain, after the middle of
the century, turned into this road. _Don Pedro Rodriguez de Miranda_
painted his broad, clear, and vigorously observed highland studies; _Don
Mariano Ramon Sanchez_ his small views of towns and harbours.
And, as in England, hand in hand with that came paintings of animals.
In France, _François Canova_ was working, the painter of huge battle
scenes and small pictures of animals; _Jean Louis de Marne_, who was
famous for his cattle, market scenes, village pictures, and the like;
and the great _Jean Baptiste Oudry_, who painted with breadth and
freedom animals alive and dead, wild and tame, still-life of every kind.
In Augsburg lived _Johann Elias Riedinger_, whose field of activity
embraced the entire animal world, dogs and horses, stags and roes, wild
boars, chamois, bears, lions, tigers, elephants, and the
hippopotamus--which he depicted with fine observation, both in their
proud solitude and at strife with men.
If we cast one more glance back to the road which art had travelled
since the commencement of the century, we can have no doubt as to the
end which was proportionately aimed at in all countries. Until quite
recently a courtly, aristocratic art had shed its light upon the whole
of Europe. In the seventeenth century the Dutch alone had maintained
their isolation. They who entered fresh into art, and had to break with
no tradition, gave at that time the first expression to the new spirit,
in that they resolutely recalled art from its courtly surroundings to
the humbler dwellings of the middle classes. They _painted_ what Dürer
and the "little masters" had only graved upon wood blocks and copper
plates. Still, they wished to paint these things less for their own
sakes than because so intimate a light was shed upon them. Through
elements of light they contrived to cast over everyday moments a sort of
fairy inspiration. Watteau and his successors made a further advance in
the conquest of the visible world, in that they desired to paint their
age, for its own sake, in all its grace; and by the middle of the
century we find this new, intimate, familiar art, independent of ancient
tradition, triumphing all along the line. "Sublime" painting is more and
more forsaken. Art becomes more and more indigenous to her world and
age. Aristocratic Watteau is succeeded by Hogarth, Greuze, Chardin, and
Chodowiecki, who treat the Third Estate no longer in the Dutch
_chiaroscuro_, but in all its heavy reality as a valid object of art.
Instead of that lofty, majestic, vainglorious painting of mere
representations, which was the outcome of Cinquecento, and which at the
expiration of the seventeenth century had sunk, through abstraction,
into something uniform, trivial, and tedious, there appeared on all
sides an art which was simple and sincere, which plunged into the life
of every day, observed man in his relations with nature, with his
fellows, with his faithful animals, and with his household goods--an art
which created the variety of its representations out of its own
experience. So with landscape, the most modern branch of art; it reached
in the schools of all nations a greater significance--at least, in
extent--than it had ever possessed in the history of art. And this
development proceeded without its being established that any one country
had direct influence on any other. The ideas hung in the atmosphere;
they were the ideas of the century. It is as though the departing age
would hold a mirror before us--a magic mirror--which foretells the
future; as though it would point out that nineteenth century art,
advancing further along this road, should be domestic-human, and that it
should find in landscape its most appropriate expression.
It was not given to painting to proceed straight forward in this course,
for through favour, partly of the changed current of literature, partly
of the revolution, the flame of reactionary classicism shot up brightly
once more before it expired.
CHAPTER III
THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN GERMANY
A hundred years ago there lived a man of the name of Asmus Carstens; and
he was the pioneer and founder of the new German art. That has become
since Fernow a standing maxim in manuals of the history of art.
Dilettantism, however, is not an element, but an end. It is on this
account, therefore, that later times will see in Carstens, not a
pioneer, but only one of the close followers of that tendency of which
the founders were the brothers Caracci, and the offshoots Lebrun,
Lairesse, and Van der Werff. It is, at all events, historically clear
that Hogarth and Gainsborough, Watteau, Greuze, Chardin, and Goya were
the men to whom the future belonged. Their art survived the overthrow of
the Classicalism represented by Mengs and Carstens, which, through
external circumstances, once more got the upper hand for a short time,
and it became the foundation on which, after the disappearance of this
tendency inherited from the past, the moderns built further. The former
represented progress, because they moved forwards; Carstens and David,
reaction, because they looked backwards--backwards to an age which had
long ago been buried.
There is always danger to a living art in the contact with any great art
of the past. Only those who are themselves highly gifted may hope to
emulate the great ones of the earlier centuries; lesser geniuses perish
in the attempt. Painters like Leonardo and Raphael, like Titian and
Poussin, taking the Greeks as their masters, produced immortal works,
and Goethe and Schiller proved to us that the Hellenic spirit is still
alive and active in our midst. But would anyone dare to mention Mengs
and Carstens in the same breath with these giants?
The close of the eighteenth century was a period of antiquarian revival.
The ruins of Pæstum had been brought to light, Greek vases and Roman
monuments had become known to the public by the works of Hamilton and
Piranesi. In 1762 Stuart and Revett published their splendid work on the
_Antiquities of Athens_. To a German, however, was to fall the honour of
becoming the hero of the archæological period. The _History of Ancient
Art_, by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, appeared in 1764, and this writer
devoted his literary energies to the hymning of the glories of the
re-discovered treasures of antiquity. In the realm of pictorial art he
may also be looked upon as the chosen of fate. Already, nine years
before the appearance of his _History of_ _Art_, he had given, at the
age of thirty-eight, his first writing to the world, _Thoughts upon the
Imitation of Greek Works_, in which the reformation motive is epitomised
in this sentence: "The sole means for us to become--ay, if possible,
inimitably great--is the imitation of the ancients."
From Winckelmann the stone kept on rolling. "In Greek sculpture the
painter can attain to the most sublime conception of beauty, and learn
what he must lend to nature in order to give dignity and propriety to
his imitation," writes Solomon Gessner in 1759. In 1762 Hagedorn of
Dresden deplored, in his _Treatise on Painting_, that "Terburg and Metsu
never showed us fair Andromache amongst her industrious women, instead
of Dutch sempstresses." In 1766 Lessing wrote his _Laocoön_, and, like
Winckelmann, saw in the sculpture of the Greeks the ideal to be
imitated. From this point forward he despised landscape and _genre_
painting, and especially everything which illustrates intimate emotions
and actions, and would confine the composition of pictures to an
arrangement of two or three "ideal figures which please by physical
beauty." Soon afterwards, with almost astonishing partiality, Goethe
intervened in a notable manner on behalf of Classicism with the most
flagrant contradiction of the ideas of his youth. "Nature alone," he had
said in _Werther_, "makes the great artist"; and in his essay upon
_German Method and Art_ he aimed this sentence at Winckelmann and his
followers: "You yourselves, admirable beings, to whom it was given to
enjoy the highest beauty, you are hurtful to genius; it will be raised
up and borne along on no strange wings, were they even the wings of the
dawn." In the same essay occurs the beautiful passage: "If art is
produced out of an inward, single, independent conception, untroubled
by, unconscious indeed, of, all that is extraneous, then whether she be
born of rough wildness or of cultivated sensibility, she is complete and
living." Soon afterwards he wrote again these great words: "Rembrandt
appears to me in his biblical subjects as a true saint who saw God
present everywhere, at every step, in the chamber and in the fields, and
did not need the surrounding pomp of temples and sacrifices to feel
drawn towards Him,"--an observation made at a time when the academic and
erudite writer on art was still for years to perceive in the biblical
pictures of the great Dutchman only a crude conception of form. In
another passage, upon the frescoes of Mantegna, in the Church of the
Anchorite, at Padua, there occur the following sentences, showing the
deepest historical perception: "How sharp and sure a modernity stands
out in these pictures! From this modernity, which is quite real, and not
merely seeming, with factitious effects, speaking only to the
imaginative faculty, but solid, detailed, and conscientiously
circumscribed, and which at the same time has something austere and
industrious and painstaking--from this issued subsequent painters such
as Titian; and now the liveliness of their genius, the energy of their
nature, enlightened by the spirit of their predecessors, built up
through their strength, was able to soar ever higher and higher, to rise
from earth and create divine but real figures." But, alas! later on he
did not draw the conclusion which followed quite logically from these
observations for the judgment of contemporary German art. He came back
from Italy as a disciple and follower of Winckelmann's writings on art.
"Art has once for all, like the works of Homer, been written in Greek,
and he deceives himself who believes that it is German."
Something pagan entered into his soul, a breath from the calm of
Olympus. He derided his earlier Gothic inclinations, contemptuous of all
that was opposed to Greek notions of form, mild and indulgent to all
that bore at least the outward semblance of the antique. He preferred a
cold ideal manner to what was natural, and held Greek art the absolutely
valid model. From it should be derived a fixed canon, a table of
accepted laws, to be the standard for the artist of our own days, and of
every age. The _Prize Essays_, which he published with Heinrich Meyer in
the _Propyläen_, and later in the _Jena Literary Journal_, required the
treatment of subjects exclusively from the Hellenic legendary cycles,
"whereby the artist should become accustomed to come out from his own
age and surroundings"; the composition of pictures was to correspond
strictly with the style of the antique frieze.
Amongst his contemporaries voices were not wanting to point out how
fatal this programme was. Notably, Wilhelm Heinse, in 1776, wrote this
golden sentence: "Art can only direct itself to the people with whom it
lives. Every one works for the people amongst whom fate has thrown him,
and seeks to plumb its heart. Every country has its own distinctive art,
just as it has its own climate, its scenery, its own taste, and its own
drink."
Similarly, Klopstock opposed Winckelmann's theories in these lines--
"Nachahmen soll ich nicht und dennoch nennet,
Dein ewig Lob nur immer Griechenland.
Wem Genius in seinem Busen brennet,
Der ahm' den Griechen nach!--der Griech' erfand."
Again, in the _German Republic of Letters_, in the chapter "On High
Treason": "It is high treason for any one to maintain that the Greeks
cannot be surpassed." In a letter to Goethe, in the year 1800, Schiller
wrote: "The antique was a manifestation of its age which can never
return, and to force the individual production of an individual age
after the pattern of one quite heterogeneous, is to kill that art which
can only have a dynamic origin and effect." Madame de Staël, in her book
on _Germany_, says: "If nowadays the fine arts should be confined to the
simplicity of the ancients, we should not then be able to attain to the
original strength which distinguished them, while we should lose that
intimate, composite feeling for life which is especially found in us.
Simplicity in art would easily turn with the moderns into coldness and
affectation, whereas with the ancients it was full of life." In 1797
Counsellor Hirth published in Schiller's _Horæ_ his well-known treatise
on _Beauty in Art_, which, in opposition to the inanimate type of beauty
of Winckelmann, upheld the characteristic as the first principle in art.
Most remarkable, however, is the breadth of historical outlook which was
peculiar to Herder, and the stern actuality with which in his _Plastik_,
and in the _Vierten_ _Kritischen Wäldchen_, he turned against "those
pitiful critics, those wretched and narrow rules of art, that
bitter-sweet prattle of universal beauty, through which the younger
generation is being ruined, which is nauseating to the master, and
which, nevertheless, the rabble of connoisseurs takes in its mouth as
words of wisdom.... Shadows and sunrise, lightning and thunder, the
brook and the flame the sculptor cannot model; but is that therefore to
be a reason why it should not be done by the painter? What other law has
painting, what other power and function, than to depict the great scheme
of nature with all her manifestations, in their great and beautiful
aspect? And with what magic it does this! They are not clever who
despise landscape painting, the fragments of nature of the great harmony
of creation, who depreciate it or entirely forbid it to the sincere
artist. Is a painter not to be a painter? Is he to turn statues with his
brush, and fiddle with his colours, just as it may please their antique
taste? To represent the scheme of creation seems vulgar to them; just as
though heaven and earth were not better than an old statue.... Doubtless
Greek sculpture stands in the sea of time like a lighthouse, but it
should be only a friend and not a commander. Painting is a scheme of
magic, as vast as the world and as history, and certainly not every
figure in it can or ought to be a statue. In a picture no single figure
is everything; and if they are all equally beautiful, no one then is
beautiful any longer. They become a dull monotony of long-limbed Greek
figures with straight noses, who all stand there and parade and take as
little part in the action as possible. Now, when this misrepresentation
of beauty cries scorn at the same time upon the whole conception, upon
history, upon character, upon action, and this openly attacks that as a
lie, there comes a discord, something insupportable, into painting,
which certainly the antique pedant is unaware of, but which is felt all
the more by the true friend of the antique. And finally, our own actual
age, the most fruitful subjects of history, the liveliest characters,
all feeling of a simple truth and precision, will be _antiquarianised_
away. Posterity will stand and gape at such fantasies in practice and
theory, and will not know what we were, in what age we lived, nor what
brought us to this wretched folly, to the wish to live in another age,
in another nation and climate, and thereby to abandon, or vitiate
deplorably, the whole order of nature and history."
These sentences, however, stood in isolation, or else they came too
late. Immediately after it had been heralded by the literary movement,
after the archæologists had verbally announced its aim, formulated its
principles and laws, German art turned into the new paths. "It happened
for the first time in the history of art," wrote Goethe, "that important
talents took pleasure in disciplining themselves by the past, and so
founding a new epoch in art."
"Des Deutschen Künstler's Vaterland,
Ist Griechenland, ist Griechenland"
was sung in the academies. And this violent grasping after the ideal of
a foreign race brought a bitter revenge, since not one of the artists
who now appeared had the genius to create anything new out of the old.
[Illustration: _Photo Union, Munich._
MENGS. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
The disciples of Winckelmann had not been, like Goethe and Schiller,
vigorous naturalists until the spirit of ancient times had looked upon
them, and they were consequently still less able to resist her glance.
They entered upon the new road not with that generative impulse of the
creative mind, whose superabundance did not know what course it should
take, what stream it should find. They adopted the forms, as they had
been provided by the greater ages, without any doubt as to their
absolute excellence, or the least attempt at any happy innovation. And
if they "have better understood" the Greeks than their predecessors in
Italy and France were able to do, then one is never less like an
original nature than when one imitates them faithfully. Winckelmann's
road to inimitability led not only to a more hollow and lifeless
Classicism than there ever had been, to a more cheerless and unpleasant
art than any which the school of Bologna had produced. It tended, above
all, since the thinking people had thought out the classic idea--which
the other nations had not--to the sacrifice of all pictorial technique,
of the whole knowledge which the age had up till then possessed. There
is a legend in the history of the Church, that at the time of the
donation of Constantine a voice was heard from Heaven: "This day has
poison entered into the body of the Church." To the German art of our
century this poison was the writings of Winckelmann.
First of all it was _Anton Rafael Mengs_, whose originally strong and
great talent was distorted by the counsels of the learned. As in the
works of the Caracci, those only are to-day of any interest which reveal
themselves least as eclectics and most as children of the seventeenth
century, so with Mengs--he is only enjoyable now where he did not try to
be antique, but sympathised without too much reflection on the
traditions of his age. He is particularly so in his fine pastel
portraits in the Dresden Gallery, which are wholly influenced by the
taste for _rococo_, and are its last expiring manifestation. They are a
testimony that it was not without some justice that the Apelles of
Dresden was called by his contemporaries the most remarkable German
painter of the eighteenth century. Rosalba Carriera and Liotard seem
weak and insipid beside him; Reynolds only at his best had that
characteristic clearness, that plastic energy of modelling, and that
life-like colouring. There is nothing insipid or affected, nothing of
that simpering affability that his successors brought into vogue. And
when we remember that they proceeded from a youth of sixteen, the
strength and simplicity of intuition seem incredible. In his later
portraits, too, painted in oil, the better ones are directly classic;
very noble in their clear, subtile, grey tone, strikingly alive, and,
withal, of an extraordinary independence which shows no leaning upon any
other master whatever. Mengs belongs to those portrait painters who look
into the souls of their sitters, and he ranks, in works like his
portrait of himself, in the Munich Gallery, amongst the best portrait
painters of the eighteenth century.
[Illustration: MENGS. MOUNT PARNASSUS.]
In his huge ecclesiastical paintings he is the son of that period which
had just commenced to be touched by the pallor of thought, and groped
eclectically now in this direction and now in that. "First of all must
the weeds be rooted up," wrote Zanotti in his _Directions to a Young Man
upon Painting_. "And then we must go back again to Cimabue and Giotto,
and again, a few years later, to Buonarotti and Sanzio, and their noble
successors whose footsteps are no longer sought or followed by any one.
But when such a happy resurrection will take place, God knows!" The old
Ismael Mengs believed that that was his concern; he chose Antonio da
Allegri and Rafael Sanzio as sponsors for his son. Anton Rafael should
become the eclectic reformer of art, and as he was probably the first
painter who, by the express permission of the Elector of Saxony, was
allowed to visit the hitherto inaccessible Dresden Gallery, this wish
was easy of accomplishment.
[Illustration: ANGELICA KAUFFMANN. _Cassell & Co._]
He was quick in freeing himself from the immediate tradition of the age,
and in harmony with the teaching of the Caracci, in returning to the
so-called "higher" models of painting. When one runs across such of his
pictures in some gallery--notably his altar pieces--they strike one as
the works of some good master of the seventeenth century whose name one
cannot, for the moment, recollect. His famous "Holy Night," in which he
wished to enter into rivalry with Correggio, has something of a Maratti
about it, only the heads are more vacant and insipid.
It is that unfortunate "Parnassus" in the Villa Albani which first marks
the collapse of this great talent. When, upon the advice of his friend
Winckelmann, he turned from the study of Raphael and Correggio to that
of the antique, Mengs forfeited not only the remnant of all that was
essentially natural, but even all the picturesque qualities which had
hitherto distinguished him. After painting had so long taken sculpture
in tow, now sculpture seemed anxious to be revenged on it, and there was
a manifestation of those prettily painted figures in plaster which for
some score years afterwards paraded in every German picture.
For Winckelmann's mistake, as Herder had already pointed out with great
justice, consisted not only in this, that he set up for imitation a
departed ideal for the consciousness of his contemporaries, but notably
in that he obtruded principles upon modern painting which might be valid
in ancient sculpture. Since the antique ideal was solely a plastic one,
and neither the Greek Prussian nor, later, Meister Ephraim was clear as
to the difference between sculpture and painting, they practically
recommended the painter to work after plastic models.
The fact that Lessing, in discussing the limits of painting in his
_Laocoön_, took a work of sculpture as his starting-point, proves that
to him the laws and conditions of both arts were valued as the same.
They denounced the confusion of the art of painting with poetry, and
instead advocated the confounding of painting with sculpture, which was
no less hazardous.
[Illustration: ANGELICA KAUFFMANN. PORTRAIT OF A LADY AS A VESTAL.]
In this manner there came an alien element into Mengs' hitherto quite
pictorial apprehension; a vain and exclusively reproductive ideality
deprived his figures of the last remnant of truth to nature which he had
formerly understood how to give them. It is difficult to believe that
Winckelmann's paroxysm of friendship should have burst out, upon the
completion of the "Parnassus," into this pæan: "During the whole of the
new age a more beautiful work has not appeared in painting; even Raphael
would have bowed his head." The whole is nothing more than a
_mélange_ of plagiarism and _banal_ reminiscences, without soul or
perception, without freshness or individuality; a mere plastic
warehouse, and not even a painted antique group, but a daubed
compilation of solitary statues, colder and more lifeless than any
Baltoni ever painted. There was an audacious, strong aim, genial
strength and an overwhelming flow of fantasy in the contemporary works
of the great _décorateur_ Tiepolo; here there is a mere work of
intellect which with philological aid builds up the composition entirely
of borrowed materials. The only thing which even still points in this
work to the good old times is a more solid study of form and colour than
all that which originated in Germany during the next fifty years. The
figures are painted with a strength and bloom which are still quite
worthy of the _rococo_.
The "good _Angelica_" is the second representative of this phase of
transition. She, too, at the persuasion of her friend Winckelmann,
clothed herself as an ancient Vestal, but her true woman's nature left
in her classical raiment still a neat fashion of _rococo_. Through her
intercourse with Winckelmann she became somewhat of a "blue-stocking,"
and studied the historians of antiquity in order to find there subjects
like Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, Agrippina with the urn of
Germanicus, Phryne, and the like. Still more there were the tender
legends of the ancients, out of whose store she satisfied her patrons:
Adonis at the chase, Psyche, Ariadne abandoned by Theseus or found by
Bacchus, the death of Alcestis, Hero and Leander. In these she is soft
to the point of sentimentality, and pleasant to the point of nausea.
Goethe says of her with justice: "The forms and traits of the figures
have little variety, the expression of the passions no force, the heroes
look like gentle boys, or girls in disguise." But he also says of her:
"The lightness, grace in form, colour, conception, and treatment is the
one ruling quality of the numerous works of our fair artist. No living
painter has surpassed her either in grace of representation or in the
taste and capacity with which she handles her brush." And this decision,
too, can still be endorsed. Angelica knew how to impart to those clear
lines and forms demanded by Winckelmann a grace now coquettish, now
sentimental, but always extremely lovable. She has struck soft
and--notably in her portraits of women--very tender colour chords.
She and Mengs were the last who still possessed considerable technical
knowledge. Almost everything which has survived of the tradition of
craftsmanship in Germany in the nineteenth century is traceable to
Mengs' influence, and that fact so offended his successors that they no
longer counted him as one of them, but put him contemptuously aside as a
"mannerist painter by recipe." "Such technical knowledge," wrote Goethe,
"hinders that complete abstraction and elevation over the real, which is
asked of identical representations in sculpture, which merely furnish
forms in their highest purity and beauty." "Colouring, light and
shadows, do not give such value to a painting as noble contour alone,"
wrote Winckelmann, and these sentences became the starting-point of the
next generation. Winckelmann's error when he recommended the imitation
of Greek sculpture to the modern painter consisted still further in
this, that he confused "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" with lack
of colour and coldness. Herder had written well: "In distinction to the
compact harmony of form in sculpture, painting has her harmonious unity
in colour and light. I do not know why many theorists should have spoken
so contemptuously of what is called _chiaroscuro_, the grouping of light
and shade; it is the instrument of genius with every scholar and master,
the eye with which he sees, the flashing, spiritual sea with which he
sprinkles everything, and on which, indeed, every outline also depends.
This divine, spiritual sea of light, this fairyland of adjusted light
and shade, is the business of painting: why should we fight against
nature, and not allow every art to do what it alone can do and do best?"
[Illustration: _Photographic Union, Munich._
CARSTENS. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
His words died away. The philosophic tendency of the century, which
sought to penetrate into the "soul" of things, and to recreate things
from the throne of the universe of the abstract, tried its hand also
upon painting. By abstracting from the manifestation of colour, and
touching upon form and line, it came to believe that in these plastic
elements it had discovered the Essential of which it was in search.
Once on the road to execute statues in paint, the question ensued, Ought
we to paint our statues? And as that age, following in Winckelmann's
track, understood no word of the significance which the specific,
picturesque principles had for the Greeks, it was only logical that they
should endeavour to reconcile the idea of immaculate whiteness with that
of classical beauty, to see pure beauty in absence of colour, and in
consequence to accentuate the question, Ought we to paint our
_pictures_? To painters the most suspicious element in a painting became
the paint! There is nothing more urgent for them to do than to deprive
themselves ascetically of all coloristic means of expression. Painting
is shown to be an essential form of corruption--"The brush is become
the ruin of our art," wrote Cornelius--and there commences the era of a
cartoon style hitherto unprecedented, which is to be carried on by the
most highly endowed in the most earnest fashion. While during the
_rococo_ the sense of colour had reached, through a piquant arrangement
of the most tender and variegated tones, its highest point of
refinement, there followed now as a reaction an absolute lack of colour.
The ideal is seen in an abstract beauty of line, colour as a secondary
matter and a vain show. It was of as much value as a vari-coloured
dress, which nature could put on or off, without being less nature
thereby. Amongst painters there was talk of nothing but outlines. This
line style, whose world is not the wall or the canvas, but white paper,
can do with a proportionately meagre study of nature. Why, therefore,
when the ideal was so easy of attainment, drudge in the academy, where,
moreover, since the introduction of Mengs' Classicism, universal
desolation of the spirit and doctrinaire pedantry reigned? As Mengs had
broken with the taste of the _rococo_, so the younger generation broke
with its technique, whilst they left the academy in open
dissatisfaction, and threw off in contempt the whole paraphernalia of
technical traditions.
_Carstens_ plays the momentous rôle in German art as the first who trod
this path. He has more individuality than Mengs; _antiquarianising_ with
him is not exclusively an external derivation and a cold imitation: he
lives in the antique; the world of the Greek poets is his spiritual
home, and their profound thoughts find in him a subtle interpreter. But
he has, at the same time, the melancholy fame of being the first of the
frivolous to renounce the national inheritance, the knowledge bequeathed
by the _rococo_ age, and so definitely to cut the chain which should
otherwise have connected German art of the nineteenth century with that
of the eighteenth.
Through the _Investigations of Beauty in Painting_, by Daniel Webb,
which was founded on Winckelmann's _Thoughts on Imitation_, the seed of
Hellenism was already sown in the youth's soul. He heard talk of the
dwarf intelligences of the age; how the studios of inferior artists were
full of gaping visitors, whilst the halls of the Vatican stood deserted.
"Learn the taste for beauty in the antique," the cooper's apprentice
learns from Webb's works. "Let us meditate upon the style of the
painter's art in the 'Laocoön,' with regard to the fighter. Notice the
sublimity in the divine character of Apollo. Let us stand hushed before
the exquisite beauty of the Venus di Medici. These are the extreme
incentives of the art of drawing.... The Belvedere Apollo and the
daughter of Niobe offer us an ideal of nobility and beauty. Raphael's
drawing never reached to such a height of perfection as we find in the
statues of the Greeks.... Whither do you carry me, gods and demigods and
heroes who live in marble? I follow your call, and, Imagination! thy
eternal laws. I go into the Villa Medici and breathe there the purest
air. I stretch myself on a flowery plot, the shadow of the orange trees
covers me;--there, unmolested, I gaze at a group full of the highest
feminine beauty. Niobe, my beloved, beautiful mother of beautiful
children, thou fairest among women, how I love thee!" So dreamed Asmus
Jacob in the wine-cellar at Eckernförde, or in his solitary chamber by
the dim light of his lamp, as he had been seized with giddiness before
all the great and marvellous revelations of art which this book had
afforded him. In his enraptured fantasy he painted the hour nearer and
nearer when he should attain to a sight of the works which were
described. Could he have looked into the future, what a picture would
have come before his eyes! Would he have recognised himself in the
broken-down man, with the pale countenance, the grief-marked expression,
and the decrepit figure, who in Rome gazed spellbound at the Colossus of
Monte Cavallo?
[Illustration: CARSTENS. SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS.]
Our Holsteiner was two-and-twenty years old when he discarded the
cooper's apron and entered the Copenhagen Academy, being then too old
for any regular training. His head was so full of "inventions" that "it
could not enter his mind to begin from the beginning." "Drawing from the
life did not satisfy me; the fellow, too, who sat as my model, although
he was for the rest well built, seemed to me, in contrast with the
antique from which I had attained a higher ideal of beauty, so petty and
imperfect that I thought I could easily learn to draw a better figure if
I only confined myself to that. I resolved not to visit the academy, in
spite of the other artists impressing upon me the importance and
utility of academic study." He stayed daily, instead, for hours together
before the casts in the antique room, and "a holy feeling of adoration,
almost compelling me to tears, pervaded me. There I never drew at all
after an antique. When I attempted it, it was as though all my emotion
was chilled by it. I thought that I should learn more if I gazed at them
with great studiousness."
[Illustration: CARSTENS. ARGO LEAVING THE TRITON'S MERE.]
Thus he reached, as Fernow says, the method whereby he "did not tread
the ordinary way of imitation, gradually progressing to a special
invention, but began at once with invention." There he was the true
child of his age. At a period whose creative power found its highest
expression in philosophy and poetry, the painter strove for the
reputation only of being the _poet_ of his pictures. And Carstens
encountered the old tragedians and philosophic writers with a fine,
poetic understanding. "The Greek Heroes with Cheiron," "Helen at the
Skæan Gate," "Ajax," "Phoenix and Odysseus in the Tent of Achilles,"
"Priam and Achilles," "The Fates," "Night with her Children," "Sleep and
Death," "The passage of Megapenthes," "Homer before the People," "The
Golden Age"--all these prints have really something of the noble
simplicity and quiet harmony of Greek art.
[Illustration: CARSTENS. CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT.]
It can be understood, then, that such subjects should be in the highest
degree interesting to an archæologist. When Carstens, in April 1795, was
organising the famous exhibition of his collected works in Rome, Fernow
published in Wieland's _Deutscher Merkur_ a discourse in which he
celebrated him as the creator of a new epoch. From the very first,
however, an equally resolute opposition was excited in artistic circles.
The painter Müller, nicknamed "The Devil's Miller," who at that time
wandered about Rome as a cicerone, proves that Winckelmann's principles,
even at the threshold of the century, by no means met with universal
acceptance. The _Writing of Herr Müller, Painter in Rome, upon the
Exhibition of Herr Professor Carstens_, with the motto _Amicus Plato,
Amicus Socrates, magis amica veritas_, was published in 1797 in
Schiller's _Horæ_. Carstens imitated; he worked rather by reminiscence
and understanding than by fantasy. Isolated figures do not bring their
individuality to an expression. Then he pointed out the models,
discussed the lack of colour, and proved numerous sins of the
draughtsman against nature in detail. The artist must ever seek to find
characteristic expression; composition comes in the second degree.
Technique, even if the previous age has been an epoch of fabrication,
must always stand in the foreground; it is not only from the artist, but
from the connoisseur, that knowledge is demanded, and in consequence of
this exhibition Carstens is recommended to forbear from his fantastical
geniality, observe nature, and achieve a picture exactly, since it is
only from nature that the ideal springs, and consequently nothing can
be great and beautiful in the representation which is not right and
true. In almost similar words, later on, Koch, in his _Thoughts on
Painting_, and with him the majority of artists, has censured Carstens.
And posterity cannot but allow them to be in the right as against the
archæologists.
[Illustration: CARSTENS. PRIAM AND ACHILLES.]
Admirable in Carstens is the zeal with which he defended his ideal, the
sacred fire which burned within him and sustained him, even during those
years when his sickly frame was weakened by consumption. Art was, as he
wrote, his element, his religion, his beatitude, his existence. And it
is already something great to wear oneself out alone for the sake of an
ideal. Carstens was a sublime dreamer. It will not be forgotten of him
that, in an age when abundant mediocrity and manufacture were
all-prevailing, he once more pointed, unfaltering in his noble and pure
intention, to the sublimity of artistic creation. The history of art,
however, has not to deal with hearts, but to judge logically by results;
and it would not be doing justice to the old masters, nor to those
earnest _rococo_ painters who sat at their easels with less noble
intentions, but with so much greater knowledge of their craft, if one
were to proclaim Carstens, in consideration of the self-sacrifice and
renunciation which he showed in the fight for his ideal, as a martyr and
a genius, a pioneer of German art. He was not a genius, as he thought
himself, and announced so proudly to Heinitz, the Minister; for that he
possessed too little originality. It is not imagination, but
reminiscence, which created his works. The outlines of his plates are
done with fine sentiment, but sentiment taken from the Greeks, and he
required no genius to recognise in his recollection and his hand a
transcript of Greek forms. What pleases us in Carstens is in substance
not Carstens, but an echo of what we like in the Greek statues and
vases, in Michael Angelo and other old masters.
[Illustration: GENELLI. THE EMBASSY TO ACHILLES.]
He was not a martyr, because in his struggles he met with assistance and
encouragement such as were granted to no old master, and if, in spite of
that, he never rose above the cares of life, that is only a proof of the
limitations and partiality of his art. He had lost all decorative
facility; still more was the inheritance of oil painting first naturally
mislaid by him, and by draughtsmanship alone not even Dürer nor
Rembrandt could have lived.
This deficiency in technique must even debar him from claiming any
higher signification than that of a clever dilettante. He is not an
artist who does not in the midst of his exaltation think to put himself
in possession of the means which can turn the lispings of genius into a
fully intelligible language. Carstens' plates seduce by a certain wavy
treatment of the lines, but no one of them can sustain critical
appreciation. It is inconsistent to work in the beautiful and not to
become free of ugliness, to move in the great, in the sublime, and at
the same time to fall from one defect of form to another, from coarse
uncouthness into the most elementary sins against drawing and
proportion. Carstens was a draughtsman who could not draw, and, with
this limitation of his genius, by no manner of means a founder of German
art. One cannot call him a mannerist, because with him art and
individuality corresponded; but, nevertheless, like Mengs and Lairesse,
he gave art at second-hand, and only differs from them in that with him
commences that complete abandonment of the idea of colour which after
him disfigured German art. For the future it was quite indifferent that
Thorwaldsen took suggestions from Carstens, and Genelli trod in his
footprints as a draughtsman.
[Illustration: GENELLI. THETIS LAMENTING THE FATE OF HECTOR.]
_Bonaventura Genelli_, if one takes for once the standpoint of the
painters of his time, who desired to be the "poets" of their works, is
certainly a not unremarkable poet. In him, who was born in the year of
Carstens' death, the spirit of the little Holsteiner was raised to life,
and the figure which he assumed in this new incarnation actually made an
impression like a picture out of beauty-illuminated days of Hellas. The
muscular, thick-set figure of a youthful Hercules, with a broad chest
and sturdy neck, a head of short brown curly hair, full lips fringed by
the compact beard of a Sophocles, the short Greek nose, grave eyes
glancing out from beneath the strong brows--such was Genelli, a Hellene
left stranded in Germany, the last Centaur, as Heyse has depicted him in
his novel--"an antediluvian, mythological enigma on four sound legs
sprung upon our godless world." Thus he sat, as he himself writes, in
Rome, "in his dirty chamber, bare except for a chair or two, rickety or
quite broken down, and on the wall a pair of hawks nailed up, whose
pinions served as models for his winged figures." Thus he sat later in
his little house in the _Sendlingergasse_ at Munich, and lived in his
world of imagination. Perhaps, had he been the child of a more fortunate
period in art, he might have become a strong and memorable painter; as a
successor of Carstens he has left behind him a legacy of two suites of
copper prints--the two tragedies of the "Profligate" and the "Witch." He
existed, moreover, only in contour; he never rose above harmoniously
outlined silhouette. It was only to this point that his talent would
sustain him. The more he wished to produce shadow, water-colour, or even
oil, the more tedious and pale and vague did he become. And even in his
drawing he shares with Carstens the desolate generalisation of form, the
eternal euphony which so soon becomes wearisome and monotonous. To
beauty of line everything is offered up. The blank characterlessness of
the faces is even more noticeable with him than with Carstens, who had,
after all, in his youth drawn excellent portraits in crayons, and on
this account was able to give even to his Greeks more individual traits
and a certain variety of expression. With Genelli the heads are treated
as no more than parts of the body, and as they gave no opportunity for
flowing lines, they have not even the same graciousness as the limbs.
His women fared worst, for whilst he could be his own model for his men,
he created the _ewig Weibliche_ out of his inner consciousness. In men
and women the eyes, in particular, are merely animal.
[Illustration: GENELLI. ODYSSEUS AND THE SIRENS.]
Carstens' influence on German art has been then entirely a negative one.
It was not on such a foundation that a German art could arise. He
prepared no ground for his successors on which they could build further;
but through his abandonment of the whole capital which, since Stephen
Lochner, had been handed down at compound interest from one generation
of painters to another, he rather cut away the ground from under their
feet. "For very easily can art go astray, but it is a difficult and
lengthy process for her to recover herself."
The art which was born in that humble studio in Rome to the sickly,
neurotic man, the "famous draughtsman," needed later, in order to become
technically healthy again, an impulse replete with life from abroad.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
BONAVENTURA GENELLI.]
CHAPTER IV
THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN FRANCE
In France also modern art began with a stream of antiquarianism which
flowed from the same archæological source. De Brosses published a
history of the Roman Republic, and wrote on Herculaneum. Leroy produced
his _Ruines des plus anciens monuments de la Grèce_ in 1758. Shortly
afterwards the _Recueils d'Antiquité_ of Caylus and Hamilton were
published. The former undertook his great journeys, and presented the
Academy of Inscriptions with a succession of archæological treatises. He
is perhaps the first since Batteux and Coypel who again makes of the
modern painter a positive demand for a quiet beauty of lines after the
"_manière simple et noble du bel antique_." The architects begin to take
counsel of Vitruvius, and to work after some model borrowed from the
antique. Soufflot rebuilt the Pantheon, and produced the Temple of
Pæstum.
Even in 1763 Grimm could write: "For some years past we have been making
keen inquiry for antique ornaments and forms. The predilection for them
has become so universal that now everything is to be done _à la
Grecque_. The interior and exterior decorations of houses, furniture,
dress material, and goldsmiths' work all bear alike the stamp of the
Greeks. The fashion passes from architecture to millinery: our ladies
have their hair dressed _à la Grecque_, our fine gentlemen would think
themselves dishonoured if they did not hold in their hands _une boîte à
la Grecque_." Even Diderot's preference for the ethical and emotional,
as Greuze had painted it--and as Diderot himself had dramatised
it--veered round at the commencement of the sixties into an enthusiasm
for the antique. After 1761 he carried on in the salons a war of
extermination against poor old Boucher, and lectured him in a menacing
voice upon the "great and severe taste of antiquity." He twitted him
with possessing neither reality nor taste, and produced in proof the
fact that, in the whole catalogue of Boucher's figures, not four could
be found which could be employed in relief, or even as statues. The new
taste demanded pure and simple lines, the beauty of sculpture; it went
back to the antique. When a French translation of Winckelmann appeared
in 1765 he spoke out, on the occasion of a review of the book, clearly
and plainly: "_Il me semble qu'il faudrait étudier l'antique pour
apprendre à voir la nature_." In the same vein Watelet pronounced on
Boucher: "_Jamais artiste n'a plus ouvertement témoigné son mépris pour
la vraie beauté telle qu'elle a été sentie et exprimée par les
statuaires_ _de l'ancienne Grèce_." Thus the change in the artistic
outlook was heralded long before the curtain went up upon the events of
1789.
_Madame Vigée-Lebrun_, the French Angelica Kauffmann, possessed of a
tender, soft, sympathetic talent, is perhaps the truest representative
of this gracious, entirely French transition style, over which like a
breath, but only like a breath, hovers the antique. She has in her
portraits, in an especially refined manner, fixed that age when noble
ladies desired to forget the Marquise and Duchess, to exhibit only the
wife and mother, and believed that by unconstraint of attitude in their
simple white robe, the scarf thrown modestly over the shoulders, they
had effected a return to antique simplicity. Boucher, moved to the
depths of his consciousness by Diderot, resolved to paint a picture
taken from ancient history. Greuze painted "Severus and Caracalla,"
Fragonard "Choereas and Callirhöe." Hubert Robert grew more and more
archæological, and played in his landscapes with ancient remains and
classical ruins. Vien became enthusiastic over antique gems, and thought
he must draw the conclusion, from the noble calm of these figures, that
the amiable coquetry and capricious garments of _rococo_ were without
nobility. His plan was "to study the antique--Raphael, the Caracci,
Domenichino, Michael Angelo, and, in one word, all those masters whose
works convey the character of truth and grandeur."
But what gave far other significance to the French classicism of the
ensuing period was that great event in the world's history, of which
France became the theatre at the close of the eighteenth century. In the
secluded gardens of Versailles, where the goat-footed Pan embraced the
tall, white nymphs by an artificial water-fall, the noble lords and
ladies, clad as Pierrots and Columbines, overheard in the midst of their
whispered flirtations the menacing earthquake which was announced in
thunder from Paris. Soon they beheld the earth crack and burst asunder,
as that time came when the air was filled with the smoke of powder, when
the first notes of the Marseillaise rang out, and in the Place de la
Concorde, where to-day the loveliest fountains in the world are playing,
blood ran from a dozen guillotines. That "_après nous le deluge_" of the
Marquise de Pompadour had become a dire, prophetic truth, and in that
flood of blood and horrors the artistic ideal of the eighteenth century
was also washed away. The Revolution gave the death-blow to _rococo_. At
one stroke it overthrew the most pleasant of all French periods, the
truest presentiment of French grace and _esprit_, the noble and amiable
art of Louis XV, which the melancholy, life-emitting Watteau, Boucher,
and Fragonard cause to hover before us as in the clouds of a dream.
Classicism, however, attained through it a new and stronger basis, a
certain connection with modern life, since it was transposed by it from
the Museum of Antiquity into the middle of the Place de la Concorde
beneath the guillotine.
What the age of the Revolution demanded of art was at all events not a
"noble style," as Vien had required of it, but rather in the first place
a Spartan virtue. Various philosophical writers had drawn a parallel
between the organisation of the old and the modern state; they had
exerted themselves to show that the old Republics were models of an
almost absolute perfection, which the modern should, in so far as it was
possible, imitate. They had contrasted the moral conditions of Sparta
and the Roman Republic with the moral constitution of contemporary,
monarchical France. They had quoted on every opportunity the acts of
virtue, renunciation, courage, and patriotic sacrifice of the great men
of antiquity; they had used these deeds as a means of proving their
thesis, and their ideas aroused deep echoes in men's hearts.
[Illustration: ELISABETH VIGÉE-LEBRUN. PORTRAIT OF THE PAINTER WITH
HER DAUGHTER.]
The sentiment of Rome had entered into the people as a thing of flesh
and blood even before the catastrophe had ensued. "We were more
prepared," wrote Nodier, "for the particular tone of the language of the
Revolution than people would have believed, and it cost us little pains
to pass from the studies of our _gymnases_ to the strife of the forum.
In the schools we had prize compositions set of this kind: Who stands
higher, the elder Brutus who judged his children, or the younger Brutus
who judged his father? And so Livy and Tacitus have done more to
overthrow the monarchical system than Voltaire and Rousseau." It was
evident then that France, so soon as she had freed herself from her
kings, so soon as she had spoken the word "Republic," must take the
_Roman_ Republic as her pattern. People lived in an atmosphere of
antiquity; the great citizens of Rome and Athens were ranged with the
French National Convention; Scævola, Scipio, Cato, Cincinnatus, were the
idols of the populace. The speakers in the council cited the ancients in
preference; Madame Vigée-Lebrun gave _soupers à la Grecque_. "Everything
was ordered according to the _Voyage d'Anacharsis_--garments, viands,
amusements, and the table, all were Athenian. Madame Lebrun herself was
Aspasia; M. l'Abbé Barthélémy, in a Greek dress with a laurel wreath on
his head, recited a poem; M. de Cabierès played the golden lyre as
Memnon, and young boys waited at table as slaves. The table itself was
set entirely with Greek utensils, and all the viands were actually those
of ancient Greece." Children were given Greek and Roman names. People
called themselves "Romans." "_Mais, je l'aimais, Romains!_" cried Coulon
at the death of Mirabeau. Paris is Rome. In the theatre the bust of
Brutus is set opposite that of Voltaire, and the actor says: "_O buste
réveré de Brutus, d'un grand homme, transporté dans Paris tu n'as point
quitté Rome_." And as with the bust of Brutus in the theatre, that of
Mucius Scævola appears in the cafés, which Parisian journalists, still
full of remembrances of ancient history studied in the gymnasium, liken
to the Lyceum and the Porch. In every case ancient Rome is set up as the
exemplar. The Parisian collection of engravings on copper possesses a
reproduction of the guillotine, with the inscription: _A similar machine
was used for the execution of the Roman, Titus Manlius_. A valet
committed suicide, and quoted the illustrious example of Seneca. Had it
been possible, people would have gladly thrown themselves back eighteen
hundred years into the past, with all its grandeur, its simplicity, and
its ruthlessness. Political and social forms did not suffice; even the
implements and costume of the ancients were again brought into honour.
Furniture put on antiquarian shapes; the walls were decorated _à la
Grecque_. The lively frivolity of _rococo_, with its freaks and fancies,
was no longer adapted to the boudoir of the age of revolution, now
transformed into the political council-room. Twists and curves were no
longer permitted: everything had to be straightforward, logical,
ungenerous, inexorable. Men went clad wretchedly, with red Phrygian caps
and no breeches. Women and girls cast aside their ordinary attire and
put on straight, falling drapery, discarded their heeled shoes and bound
sandals round their feet, shook the powder from their locks and tied
their hair in a Greek knot. "Dressed in white raiment without adornment,
but decked in the virtue of simplicity," they appeared in the cabinet of
the president, in order to surrender their jewels for the salvation of
their country, like those Roman matrons in the time of Camillus.
And, in co-operation with the building up of this new world, painting
also advanced. It was only when it assisted to arouse civic virtue, it
was said at a sitting of the jury at the Salon of 1793, that painting
could possess a right to exist in the new state, and as the handmaid of
this patriotism might fulfil an even higher mission than it had done in
ancient Greece and Rome. "The Greeks and Romans were indeed only slaves,
but we French are by nature free, philosophers in character, virtuous in
our every perception, and artists through our taste." In proportion as
the French Republic transcended the old free states, so too must French
art take the lead of the antique. "All that stimulated art in Greece,
the gymnastic exercises, the public games, the national festivals, is
also accessible to the French, who possess above all that which the
Greeks lacked, the feeling for true liberty. To depict the history of a
free people is indeed quite another mission for the true genius than to
embody scenes out of mythology."
Through this fresh _nuance_, which classicism thus acquired, the ground
was cut from under the feet of those who devoted themselves to the study
of the antique as conceived by Diderot. The new moral age would have no
traffic with those artists in whom the last smile of the eighteenth
century was personified. Their pictures, full of grace and caprice, fell
into the same disrepute into which everything of yesterday had come, and
it was only with a bitter smile that they followed the course of events.
The younger Moreau, that animated master of _rococo_, became
academically cold and tedious when he designed his book on the French
costume of the Revolution. The good Fragonard, who was only fifty-nine
in 1789, and lived till 1806, saw himself hooted in spite of his
"Choereas." He, the true representative of frivolous tenderness, of fair
and roseate hues, had lost every right to exist in the new world, and
ended his life by a sad death when, after the Reign of Terror, there was
no longer a place for _fêtes galantes_. A delightful portrait of
himself, which he painted in the first period of the Revolution, shows
us an old man, clothed entirely in black, softly melancholy, standing in
a formal, dusky-brown salon. On the table on which his arm rests lies a
guitar, at his feet a portfolio of engravings; but he neither plays the
guitar nor looks at the prints. In the shadows of the falling evening
he reminds himself forlornly of past days, and his bald forehead, where
so many rose-coloured dreams have passed, is overcast with gloomy
shadows.
Greuze, too, outlived himself. It was no use for him to pretend more and
more to the utmost virtue, and to paint an "Ariadne at Naxos." He died
in misery and oblivion in 1805. The demands which this new classicism
made were able to be satisfied by no one any longer, not even by Vien.
However loudly he might proclaim himself a student of the Greeks, he,
nevertheless, remained a very timid and lukewarm revolutionary. An old
man, cold and peaceful and stolid, moderate in everything, he had
neither the energy nor the audacity of the reformer. He had been the
Court painter of Louis XVI, a most monarchically disposed and loyal man,
and was a suspect on this ground alone to those who were in power in
1789. His pictures, too, describe no more than the end of a world.
Greuze, Fragonard, and Vien, in spite of their assumed seriousness,
survived only as gallant phantoms in the new age, by the side of those
men of more rugged countenance who inaugurated the nineteenth century.
[Illustration: JACQUES LOUIS DAVID. _L'Art._]
_Jacques Louis David_ first satisfied the new requirements, and in so
doing lent to French classicism, if only for a few years, a certain
touch of far greater vivacity. He it was who carried through, in all its
consequence, that reformation in taste which Vien had sought in
externals, in costume, furniture and decoration; who inspired the gems
painted by Vien with republican pathos, and became in this way the great
herald of that age which read Plutarch and made Paris into a modern
Sparta. David, _Prix de Rome_ after three successive failures, still
came from that "corrupt epoch" against which Republican prudery was so
excited. At the age of twenty-six he had already painted Soffits, in the
manner of his kinsman "Boucher, to say it with respect." But the journey
to Rome converted Saul into Paul. In 1775 Vien, on his appointment as
director of the Roman Academy, had taken him to Italy as his best pupil,
and hardly dreamt at that time that this young man would strike out on
such an entirely new path from his Roman studies. He did not wait for
the Revolution to be converted; when the hour struck he was ready. Thus
his first pictures were in a manner the prelude to the Revolution. In
them he had already quite consciously entered upon the road along which
he was to go later. His "Oath of the Horatii" and his "Brutus," both
painted in Rome in 1784, proclaimed his programme. The little, rosy
loves, the doves of Venus, and all the charming frivolity and gallantry
of _rococo_, received their final dismissal, and rough men walked in
their stead. He broke his staff over all that he had previously
venerated, and declared loudly that he had sinned when in his youth he
had believed in the flowery palette of _rococo_, and completed in tender
tones those ceiling frescoes which Fragonard had commenced in the house
of Mdlle. Guimard. Capricious frivolities had to make way for a manlier
art, matter "that was worthy to rivet the gaze of a free nation upon
itself." Already, long before the taking of the Bastille, the painting
of young David was valued by the rising generation as the artistic
embodiment of their political ideas, imbibed while they were still at
school. When the "Horatii" was completed it was not only old Pompeo
Battoni who exclaimed, when he saw the picture in David's Roman studio,
"_Tu ed io soli siamo pittori, pel rimanente si puo gettarlo nel
fiume._" In Paris his success was universal; all the critics were
unanimous in praise; David was the man after the heart of the age, for
his picture was the first which spoke clearly and perceptibly of the
pathos of the revolution which stood at the threshold. People saw in it
an "example of patriotism which knew no obstacles," since not even love
for their sister, who was betrothed to the enemy, prevailed upon the
Horatii to refrain from combat with the Curiati. His next picture,
"Brutus" as he received the lictors, when they bring him the bodies of
his sons who have been implicated in a monarchical conspiracy, was
greeted as allegorical of the incorruptible justice of republicanism.
The populace saw in it the "glorification of the chastisement of all
traitors to liberty," and acclaimed David because he "had founded the
sinewy style which should characterise the heroic deeds of the
revolutionaries, children of liberty, equality, and fraternity." And one
understands--when one also adds the influence of Napoleon--this reaction
of military simplicity against the effeminacy of _rococo_.
[Illustration: DAVID. MADAME RÉCAMIER.]
David, at the outbreak of the Revolution, no longer a young man, but
forty years old, was the terrible painter of the age, its despotic
dictator. As a deputy in the Convention he not only ruled over painting,
but also imposed his taste upon sculpture, ivory work, goldsmiths' work,
and decoration. He designed the new costumes for the deputies and
ministers. As organiser of public fêtes, he brought to life again the
whole of republican Rome. He was one of those rare artists who are the
men of their hour. To a new plebeian race, to whose feverishly excited
patriotism the soft, luxurious, aristocratically reprehensible art of
_rococo_ must seem as a mockery of all the rights of men, he showed, for
the first time, the man, the hero who died for an idea or for his
country; and he gave this man huge and elastic muscles, like those of a
gladiator who struggles in the arena. He was a second Hercules,
cleansing the Augæan stables; with his own strong shoulders he thrust
back the petulant band of painters who had tarried too long in the
island of Cythera. He applied art to the heroism of the day, gave it the
martial attitude of patriotism, inspired it with the spirit of
Robespierre, St. Just, and Danton. The more obtrusively his heroes
paraded their patriotism, the more people saw in them a picture of the
French nation, as true as a transposition could hope to be. This
strained rhetorical pathos dwelt in the mind of the age. Talma moved the
people to enthusiasm when he played the "Horatii" of Corneille in the
classic cothurnus. When David painted, the state declamations of the
orators still rang in his ears. Robespierre is said to have spoken from
the tribune slowly, rhythmically, artistically: a Bossuet in his
rostrum, a Boileau in his chair, while the volcano quivered beneath his
very feet: his philippics were carefully divided into three sections,
like academic discourses: his patriotism resolved itself into tirades
with correctly composed periods. In David's pictures we have an exact
correspondence with all this: the rigid classicality of his composition,
figures grouped as though on parade; his cold pathos, the counterpart to
that of the orators' fine sentiments set forth in fine phrases.
The great distinction between the beginning of modern art in Germany and
in France is that in France the new style was not only called forth by
the influence of a scientific programme from outside, but stood in
conjunction with a great transformation in culture, and that it was
compelled at first to concern itself not only with imitation and
philological retrospect, but with the free expression of the
characteristically modern spirit. German art had no new pronouncement to
make through the medium of the antique; it followed, on the other hand,
the programme of an artistically barren scholar who forgot that
archæology is not art, recommended imitation as the path to perfection,
and perpetually reminded the artists who followed him how widely they
deviated from the correct lines of the model. "Afterwards they rebuke
it, and say it is not antique and consequently not good art," as
Albrecht Dürer had complained of such people. In the earnest sentiment,
the exalted Roman spirit, the declaiming over rugged, masculine virtues,
freedom and patriotism, that found expression in David's first pictures,
there lived something of the Catonian spirit of the Terror; and that
still gives them historical value. His enthusiasm was not, first and
foremost, for antique art, but for the ideas of country, duty, freedom,
progress. The words antiquity and democracy were of like meaning to him.
[Illustration: DAVID. THE OATH OF THE HORATII.]
And how thoroughly this man was permeated with the spirit of his age is
shown still more when he discarded the cothurnus, boldly attacked the
present, and gave himself up entirely to the delineation of what came
under his direct observation in his own life and experience. There he
became not only a rhetorician, a revolutionary agitator, but a really
great painter. Lepelletier on his death-bed, the assassinated Marat,
and the dead Barre, are works of a mighty _naturalist_. Lepelletier, one
of the many deputies who had voted for the death of Louis XVI, was
treacherously assassinated in Paris, on 20th January 1793, by a valet of
the king's. The body was publicly exhibited; David painted it, and on
29th March presented the picture to the Convention. As the portrait of
the "first Martyr of Liberty," it was hung in the Convention chamber. On
13th July 1793 Marat, the man-of-terror, fell a victim to the knife of
Charlotte Corday. David was presiding at the Jacobin Club when the news
was brought him, and he embraced the citizen who had arrested the girl.
Deputations of the people appeared in the Convention to express their
grief for the heavy loss. Suddenly a voice was heard to cry: "_Où es tu,
David? Tu as transmis à la posterité l'image de Lepelletier mourant pour
la patrie, il te reste encore un tableau à faire._" Silence succeeded in
the Assembly. Then David started up: "_Je le ferai._" On 11th October he
informed the Convention that his "Marat" was finished. "The people asked
for their murdered man back again, longed to look once more on the
features of their truest friend. They cried to me: 'David, take up your
brush, avenge Marat, so that the enemy may blanch when they perceive the
distorted countenance of the man who became the victim of his love for
freedom.' I heard the voice of the people, and obeyed." Thus David spoke
in the Assembly when he presented the Republic with the picture of the
murdered man--one of the most thrilling representations of that awful
age. The body is lying in the bath. Only the naked upper part of the
body, and the head, with a dirty cloth tied round it, and fallen back
upon the right shoulder, are visible; one hand, resting back on the side
of the bath, still holds a paper in a convulsive grip; the other hangs
down limp and dead to the ground. Over this head, with the half-closed
eyelids, and the mouth distorted from the death-throes, Caravaggio would
have rejoiced, there is such keen naturalism in every stroke of the
brush. Like Géricault, in later times, David was then a regular visitor
at the Morgue, attended at executions, and took an interest in the
convulsive muscular movements of the guillotined. And the colour, too,
like the drawing, is of a naturalistic strength to which he never again
attained. The light falls slantingly on the corpse from above and throws
the head, shoulder, and one arm into strong relief, while all the rest
is left in obscurity. In this awful _still-life_ of uncompromising
reality and tragical grandeur he has created a work in the midst of an
age of storm which will survive all storms and all changes of taste.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
DAVID. THE RAPE OF THE SABINES.]
[Illustration: DAVID. HELEN AND PARIS.]
His portraits have no less strikingly survived the fiery ordeal of time.
In them, too, he is neither rhetorical nor cold, but full of fire and
the freshness of youth. Face to face with his model, he forgot the
Greeks and Romans, saw life alone, was rejuvenated in the youth-giving
fount of nature, and painted--almost alone of the painters of his
generation--the truth. Here his effect, when otherwise he was lacking in
all naïveté, is actually naïve and intimate. The best painters have
never treated flesh better. He had an aversion to palette tones, and
sought after nature with unexampled attention. The fine pearl-grey of
his colouring is as delicate as it is distinguished; in his portraits,
especially, the relief-tones of blue and light rose seem almost to
anticipate the delicate, toned-down tints of modern Impressionism.
Himself an ardent Revolutionist, he was, as it were, created to be the
portrayer of those men of an austerity like Cato's, and those women with
their free, masculine, proud gaze; that valiant generation that felt
within itself a desire to begin civilisation again and found religion
anew. The portrait of Lavoisier and his wife reminds one in its
refinement of Madame Vigée-Lebrun. The chemist is sitting by a table
covered with instruments; his wife, in an elegant light gown, bends
attentively over him. The picture dates from 1788, and it still looks
like some good work of the age of Louis XVI. Again, how intimate is the
effect of the marvellous portrait of Michael Gérard and his family. The
good man, in his shirt-sleeves, seems to feel really at home; a small
boy is leaning against his knee, a girl is playing on the clavicorde.
There is not the slightest suggestion of pose or a conventional type of
beauty in this stout old gentleman sitting so comfortably in his
_bourgeois négligé_, and with honest eyes gazing out so inquisitively
round him. In a few other pictures the spiritual life of women is
portrayed with remarkable tenderness. One of the earliest is the
exceptionally fine portrait of his mother-in-law, Madame Pécoult, in
1783; then, in 1790, the portrait of the Marquise d'Orvilliers, with
that expression of dreamy languor which plays round the eyes of the
beautiful woman. The Louvre possesses, in the portrait of Madame
Récamier, perhaps the most charming and attractive woman's portrait that
David ever painted. The beautiful Juliette lies stretched on a divan of
antique pattern. She wears a white dress, her soft rosy feet are bare.
The arrangement of the room coquettes primly with that simplicity which
was paraded at the time. Apart from the divan, there is only a huge
bronze candelabra to be seen. Then there is Barere's portrait. He stands
on the tribune, and delivers the speech which is to cost Louis XVI his
life. The face is small and insignificant, the gaze cold and harsh, and
on the mouth there is a shadow of bitter hate and narrow fanaticism. But
the triumph of these portraits of men is that of Bonaparte. David was
one of the first of the men of the Revolution to come beneath the spell
of the Little Corporal. One day, while he was working in his studio at
the Louvre, a pupil rushed in breathlessly: "General Bonaparte is
outside the door!" Napoleon entered in a dark-blue coat "that made his
lean yellow face look leaner and yellower than ever." David dismissed
his pupils, and drew, in a sitting of barely two hours, the stern head
of the Corsican. Thus he passed into the service of Napoleon.
This man, who viewed himself only as the coping-stone of the
Republic--after the example of Augustus when he transformed the Roman
Republic into the Empire--was unwilling to show any opposition to the
republican tastes. The first painter of the Republic was appointed to be
the Imperial Court painter. What he had been under Robespierre he was
under Napoleon: the dictator of his age, who maintained a supremacy over
the whole of art similar to that which Lebrun held beneath Louis XIV.
The "Marat" was the great work of his revolutionary, the "Coronation" of
his monarchical period,--that colossal picture which, completed between
1806 and 1807, has handed down to posterity a true representation of the
ceremonial pageants that took place in Notre Dame on 2nd December 1804.
The moment selected is when Napoleon places the crown, which is carried
on a velvet cushion by the Duc de Berg, upon the head of the Empress,
who kneels before him in a white robe and a crimson mantle. The picture
contains portraits of all the personages present at the ceremony,
amongst them being David himself, as he stands on a platform and
sketches at a small table. The whole composition of this picture and the
grouping of the figures is full of stately gravity. Real energy and
patience must have been required to paint this immense picture, though
it shows not the least sign of fatigue. With the exception of Menzel's
"Coronation of William I," I know of no historical picture of the
century of as high an artistic value, with the like noble sublimity of
colour, with so tender, quivering a light. There are certain portions of
the "Coronation" in which the white robes, the deep-red velvet of the
mantles, and gold embroideries affect us like a symphony in colours.
When the picture was completed Napoleon visited David's studio,
accompanied by the Empress, his ministers, and his staff. The Court drew
up, and the Emperor moved up and down in front of the picture, hat in
hand, for more than half an hour, examining it in all its details.
Finally, with one of those dramatic effects of which he was so fond, he
lightly raised his hat: "_C'est bien, très bien; David, je vous salue_."
[Illustration: DAVID. BELISARIUS ASKING ALMS.]
David had now still better opportunities than at an earlier period of
proving his great capacity as a portrait painter. His portraits of the
Emperor, of the Pope, of Cardinal Caprara, and of Murat symbolise the
brutal greatness of an age which worshipped strength. Even at the close
of his life, when the Restoration had exiled him from France, there
resulted in Brussels graceful and tenderly observed portraits, such as
that of the daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, which will perpetuate his
name. One, in the Praet Collection at Brussels--three women of
indescribable ugliness--marks the pinnacle of his pictorial strength and
keen naturalism. They are the "Three Fates" of 1810, and he has painted
them with the true artist's delight, and with a massiveness like that of
Frans Hals.
When these works were brought together at the Paris Exhibition of 1889,
universal astonishment prevailed when it was discovered what a great
painter this Louis David was. He appeared in these pictures as an artist
who stood completely within his age, who shared its passions and was
permeated by its greatness; he even appeared as a _charmeur_ who handled
the phenomena of colour and light as few others have done. It is true,
David showed himself in this favourable light at the exhibition only
because the entirely archæological side of his talent was not
represented. For at the bottom of his heart he too was an archæologist.
Many of his works, such as "The Death of Socrates," "Brutus," "The Oath
in the Tennis Court," and "The Rape of the Sabines," are specimens of a
barren theory.
Against all the caprice of the eighteenth century, with its charming,
alluring grace, he opposed a strict, inexorable system, as he believed
he saw it in the antique. Simplicity, however, beneath his hands became
dryness, nobility formal. He saw in painting a sort of abstract geometry
for which there existed hard-and-fast forms. There was something
mathematical in his effort after dry correctness and erudite accuracy.
The infinite variety of life with its eternal changes was hidden from
his sight. The beautiful, he taught with Winckelmann, does not exist in
a single individual; it is only possible to create a type of it by
comparison and through composition. The human being of art ought always
to be a copy of that perfect being, primitive man, whom the Roman
sculptors had still before their eyes, but who had deteriorated in the
course of ages. Thus in France, too, the sensuous art of painting was
converted into an abstract science of æsthetics. The classic ideal
weighed upon French art and prescribed for all alike the same "heroic
style," the same elevation, the same marble coldness and monotony of
colour. _Jean-Baptiste Regnault_, and _François André Vincent_, whose
studios were most frequented after David's, worshipped the same gods.
After David's departure, _Guérin_, in particular, endeavoured to
bequeath to the students those genuinely academic rules which his pupil,
Delacroix, has summed up in these words: "In order to make an ideal head
of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the
profile of Antinous, and then say, 'We have done our utmost; if he is,
nevertheless, not beautiful, we must altogether abstain from this freak
of nature, with his squat nose and thick lips, so unendurable to the
eyes.'" When he had to paint his "Insurrection in Cairo," therefore,
Egyptians as well as Arabs must first be supplied with heads of Antinous
and transformed from modern soldiers into ancient warriors, Romans of
the time of Romulus, before they could enter into the kingdom of art.
Everything was sacrificed to line,--an inflexible, inexorable, correct,
and icy line, the conventional, ideal line,--not the true line which
follows from observation of the infinite variety of nature.
Nevertheless, even in works constructed as these were by rule and line,
we cannot fail to be impressed by the technical ability displayed by the
artist.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DAVID. THE DEATH OF MARAT.]
France, who in her outward relations has generally had a feverish
longing for change, has been in literary and artistic respects, as a
rule, exceedingly conservative, has upheld authority, supported an
academy, and prized limitations and proportion above everything. They
had upset the monarchy, murdered the hated aristocrats, built up the
republic, done away with Christianity before they ever thought of
touching the three unities of the drama. Voltaire, who had a reverence
for nothing in heaven or earth, respected the received treatment of the
Alexandrine verse. And David, the great painter of the Revolution, who
cast the pictures of Boucher out of the Louvre, and whose pupils used to
shoot bread-crumbs at Watteau's masterpiece, the "Voyage à Cythère," yet
conveyed with him into the new age, as an inheritance from _rococo_, its
prodigious knowledge. The good old traditions of the technique of French
painting were little shaken by him and his school. The Academy described
by Quatremère as the "eternal nursery garden of incurable prejudices,"
was indeed overthrown, but David became immediately the head of a new
one. This age of absorption in politics developed an art to correspond,
more disciplined than ever, girt round by an iron cuirass; and this art,
notwithstanding multifarious phases, at no time lost its touch,
technically, with the acquisitions of former epochs, but evolved itself
in its various directions from one centre, distracted from its path by
nothing brought into it from outside. Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, and
Manet, widely as they differ from one another, are links in one chain of
evolution. Art comes from knowledge. This maxim, which David held in
honour, has remained to the present day a dominant force in French art,
and by virtue of this knowledge, which David received from the old
masters and guarded as a sacred trust, France became in the nineteenth
century the chief school of technique for all other nations. From the
French the other nations learned their grammar and syntax; through them
they acquired a wider horizon and a deeper insight into the great
mystery of nature.
[Decoration]
BOOK II
THE ESCAPE INTO THE PAST
CHAPTER V
THE NAZARENES
Herein lies the great difference between France and Germany. Although
following along new lines, the art of France did not thereby suffer as
regards the quality of its execution; in spite of all Classicism it
remained the disciplined art of the schools. These favourable
preliminaries were lacking in Germany. It was not allotted to German
painting to grow up in naïve contentment with the technical inheritance
of its forefathers, but, on the contrary, at the entrance of its new
career it broke so completely with its predecessor--the art of the
eighteenth century--that it could no longer adopt even its technical
traditions. It arose out of the negation of earlier art, an absolute
negation such as the world had never seen before. It began with a
self-made man who had never acquired the charter of craftsmanship, who
never learnt to paint. In France, revolutionary pictures inspired with
intense pathos, and frankly naturalistic portraits of masterly
technique; with Carstens, outlines showing refined feeling, but faulty
very generally in execution, sketches drawn roughly with the pencil,
crayon, or red chalk.
It had taken many generations of painters, whose lives had been spent in
careful devotion to the work, to collect the technical capital which
Carstens so carelessly flung to the winds.
The next step along this way was taken by the Nazarenes.
Just as it was inevitable that cold and lifeless Classicism should
follow the brightness and animation of _rococo_, so it was necessary,
according to the law of extremes which alternate in every evolution of
culture, that, next to the antique, should come its exact opposite, the
Gothic or Middle Ages. The antique was so monotonous that people longed
for variety of colour again; it was so cold and statuesque that they
longed for something soulful, so Greek and pagan and severe that they
hankered again after something Christian, would believe again like
children.
Even in the young days of the old pagan, Goethe, religion formed the
favourite topic of the _beaux esprits_, and in the same year, 1797, that
Carstens died, this cult of the emotional life found, for the first
time, expression in literature. In every library one finds a dainty,
finely printed book in small octavo, without the author's name, with the
title _Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders_, and
with a sort of head of Raphael as a frontispiece, in which, with his
prominent eyes, full lips, and long neck, he looks like some
intellectual, Christ-inspired, consumptive enthusiast. It is the pale,
gentle face of Wackenroder.
[Illustration: FREDERICK OVERBECK.]
First Winckelmann, then Wackenroder. In the very personalities of these
two the whole opposition between Classicism and the Nazarenes is
reflected. A student barely twenty years old, a mild, modest,
contemplative soul, who had attached himself from early youth with
womanly devotion to his more energetic friend Tieck, and written letters
to him that read like a young girl's effusions to her sweetheart, he
entered the Erlanger University with his friend at the Easter of 1793.
They saw Nuremberg. More than once they made pilgrimages to the old
fashioned town, the treasury of German art; and the spirit of the past
powerfully inspired them. Whilst for Lessing and Winckelmann "Gothic"
art only meant barbarian art, the wonders of Nuremberg were now observed
with fresh eyes. In a sort of intoxication of art the friends wandered
through churches, stood by the graves of Albrecht Dürer and Peter
Vischer, and a vanished world rose before them. The spires and turrets
behind falling walls and ramparts, the old, stately, patrician houses,
which jutted out their oriel windows, as it were with curiosity, into
the crooked streets, were peopled to their imagination with picturesque
figures in bonnet and hose from that great time when Nuremberg was "the
living, swarming school of native art," when "an exuberant, artistic
spirit" governed within its walls, when Master Hans Sachs and Adam Kraft
and Peter Vischer and Albrecht Dürer and Willibald Pirkheymer were
alive. Shortly after that they came to Dresden, and devoted themselves
in the gallery there to an enthusiastic cult of the Madonna. The
_Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders_, which
appeared a year before Wackenroder's death in his twenty-sixth year, was
the result of these wanderings and studies. In this tender production of
a visionary youth the spirit of Romantic art found expression.
Winckelmann was an archæologist; Wackenroder, an enthusiast of the
Middle Ages; on the one side knowledge only, on the other all feeling;
for the one, paganism, for the other, Christ. For it is from the first a
leading principle of the "_Klosterbruder_," that "the finest stream of
life only issues from the streams of art and religion when they flow in
company." He valued the older painters "because they had made painting
the true handmaid of religion"; art was to him an object of devotion.
Picture galleries, he says, ought to be temples; he would liken the
enjoyment of works of art to prayer; let it be a holy feast day to him
if he go with a serious and composed mind to their observance; indeed,
reverence for art and reverence for God were so closely interwoven that
he was fain to kneel down before art, and offer it the homage of an
"eternal and boundless love." This devotion to art, of which he himself
was full, he found nowhere in his times. The age of enlightenment was to
him an undevout and inartistic age. Only in his wanderings through the
uneven streets of Nuremberg did the deepest yearning of his soul seem
satisfied. He applied himself to mediæval, and especially to German art.
His standpoint is the same which the young Goethe had adopted when he
intervened with Herder for "German style and art," and dedicated his
pamphlet on German architecture to the shade of Erwin von Steinbach. He
is reluctant that one should condemn the Middle Ages because they did
not build such temples as the Greeks, any more than that one should
condemn the Indians because they spoke their language and not our own.
"It is not only beneath Italian skies, under majestic domes and
Corinthian columns, that true art thrives, it lives too under pointed
arches, intricately decorated buildings, and Gothic spires."
[Illustration: OVERBECK. THE ANNUNCIATION.]
It was all said so simply and heartily that soon the whole world began
to be "Wackenroderite." The ingenious and enthusiastic youth was
succeeded by theoretic reasoners. Tieck, who published his _Phantasies
upon Art_ in 1799, after Wackenroder's death, and amplified it with his
own explanations, was no longer a genuine but a counterfeit
"_Klosterbruder_." He first played with Catholicism, and uttered the
momentous sentence: "The best of the later masters up to the most recent
times have had no other aim than to imitate some one of the primitive or
typical artists, or even several together; nor have they easily become
great by any other method than by having successfully imitated
somebody." His _Sternbald_ is still more haunted by the spirit of
monastic devotion.
[Illustration: OVERBECK. THE NAMING OF ST. JOHN.]
[Illustration: OVERBECK. CHRIST HEALING THE SICK.]
The particular starting-point was in this case too, as it had been
before for Winckelmann, the Dresden Gallery, where, at the turn of the
century, Augustus William and Frederick Schlegel, the two
"_Gotter-buben_," held their cultured rendezvous. "The Schlegels had
taken possession of the gallery," wrote Dora Stock, "and with Schelling
and Gries spent almost every morning there. It was a joy to see them
writing and teaching there. Sometimes they talked to me about art. I
felt myself often quite paltry, I was so far from any wisdom. Fichte,
too, they initiated into their secrets. You would have laughed if you
could have seen them drag him about and assail him with their
convictions." The journal _Europa_, founded by Frederick Schlegel in
1803, became the rallying-point of the new movement, and his articles
published therein contained the germs of all the efforts and errors of
the young school. In his discourse on Raphael he compares the
pre-Raphaelite period with that succeeding it, and considers the
proposition that "indubitably the corruption of art was originally
brought about by the newer school which was marked by Raphael, Titian,
Correggio, Giulio Romano, and Michael Angelo" so unquestionable that he
does not find it in the least necessary to prove it. He casually puts
forward as an _obiter dictum_ dropped in amongst a series of quite
opposed notions the idea that every art ought to have a national
foundation, and that any imitation of a foreign form of art is
deleterious. The result follows that it is to be deplored "that an evil
genius has alienated artists from the circle of ideas and the subjects
of the old painters. Culture can only attach itself to what has been
constituted. How natural it would be, then, if painters were to go on in
the old way, and cast themselves anew into the ideas and disposition of
the old painters." The artist should follow the painters prior to
Raphael, "especially the oldest," should strive to "copy carefully
their truth and simplicity long enough for it to become second nature to
his eye"; or he may "select the style of the old German school as a
pattern."
[Illustration: OVERBECK. CHRIST'S ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM.]
[Illustration: OVERBECK. THE RESURRECTION.]
The latter counsel originated from the discovery in 1804 of the Cologne
Cathedral picture, referred to by Schlegel in his _Europa_. Through the
secularisation of the monasteries, attention was again directed to the
old ecclesiastical pictures which people had hitherto passed by
unnoticed. From the monasteries, churches, guild halls, and castles
which the French had plundered, countless masses of paintings of every
sort were extricated. A great deal perished; nearly all, however, that
had hitherto been kept as heirlooms, and for the most part almost
inaccessible, now became movable, attainable property. The brothers
Boisserée began their celebrated collection, which is to be seen to-day
in the Munich _Pinakothek_. While hitherto one had, at the most, known
of Dürer, now one touched upon an age which lay behind the Reformation,
an age in which Catholicism was flourishing, in which "not great artists
but nameless monks represented art," and it was soon all fire and ardour
over the sweetness, naïveté, and faith of these pictures. Fernow had
still pronounced generally against the capacity of the "Catholic
religion, with its Jewish-Christian mythology and martyrology," to
satisfy the demands of a pure taste in art. Carstens had written down
for himself the sentence from Webb's work: "The art of the ancients was
rich in august and captivating figures: their gods had grace, majesty,
and beauty. How much meaner is the lot of the moderns! Their art is
subservient to the priests. Their characters are taken from the lowest
spheres of life--men of humble descent and uncouth manners. Even their
Divine Master is in painting nowhere to be seen according to a great
idea; His long, smooth hair, His Jewish beard and sickly appearance
would deprive the most exalted beings of any semblance of dignity.
Meekness and humility, His characteristic traits, are virtues edifying
in the extreme but in no way picturesque. This lack of dignity in the
subject renders it intelligible why we look so coldly at these works in
the churches and galleries. The genius of painting expends its strength
in vain on Crucifixions, Holy Families, Last Suppers, and the like." Not
five years had elapsed after Carstens' death when, according to an
impression of Dorothea Veit, "Christianity was once more the order of
the day." William Schlegel's poem, _The Church's Alliance with the
Arts_, from which, later, Overbeck borrowed the thought for his
picture, can be looked upon, as Goethe already wrote, as the true
profession of faith of the young school. Where previously Augustus
William had described in his sonnets the Io, Leda, and Cleopatra of the
Dresden Gallery, it was now the Madonna who received the homage of the
gallant poet. By Frederick, Christianity was recommended to the artist
as a formal model and a source of æsthetic enjoyment,--as it was, at the
same time, by Chateaubriand as _prédilection d'artiste_.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
OVERBECK. THE SEVEN LEAN YEARS.]
Even more profound did the tendency become during the War of
Independence, which at the same time gave the death blow to Classicism.
Distress taught how to pray. In those years of humiliation the young
generation abandoned the classic ideal for ever, and Schenkendorf cried
imperiously: "We would see no more pagan pictures on any German walls."
French "frivolity" was contrasted with German seriousness, German
Christianity with the free-thought of the French; there was a return
from the cold philosophy of enlightenment to the vigorous feeling of
mediæval faith.
Frederick Schlegel, the author of _Lucinde_, who had written as lately
as 1799:--
"Mein einzig Religion ist die,
Dass ich liebe ein schönes Knie,
Volle Brust und schlanke Hüften,
Dazu Blumen mit süssen Düften,"
was converted to Catholicism. Schelling wrote his _Philosophy of
Revelation_; Görres, the editor of the _Rothen Blut_, ended as the
author of the _Christian Mystic_.
Here set in the period of the Nazarenes. What Schlegel had said was to
become true, that the German artist has either no character at all or he
must have the character of the mediæval masters, true-hearted and
thoughtful, innocent withal, and somewhat maladroit. In architecture the
Hellenic school is succeeded by the Gothic, painting passes from the
reverence of the Greek statues to that of old Italian pictures.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
JULIUS SCHNORR VON CAROLSFELD.]
Rome remained for the Nazarenes, too, the centre of influence, only they
no longer made pilgrimages, like the Classicists, to ancient but to
Christian Rome. _Overbeck_ of Lübeck came in 1810 with Pforr of
Frankfort and Vogel of Zürich; the Düsseldorfer, Cornelius, followed in
1811, _Schadow_ and _Veit_ of Berlin in 1815, _Schnorr von Carolsfeld_
of Leipzig in 1818, the Viennese _Führich_ and _Steinle_ in 1827 and
1828. In all of them there lived the perception that in such a serious
age men should be of high moral endeavour, and art the expression of the
religious capacity of their lives.
[Illustration: _Wigand, Leipzig._
SCHNORR. ADAM AND EVE AFTER THE FALL.]
There still stands to-day, on a secluded hillock of the Monte Pincio a
small church, whose façade is adorned with the statues of St. Isidore,
the patron of husbandmen, and of St. Patrick, apostle of Ireland. A
court with weather-beaten cloisters and an old well separates the church
from the monastery which lies behind it, where the cells of the monks,
Irish and Italian Franciscans, are placed. Above, on the terrace of the
house, one has a charming view of Rome and the Campagna, of Monte Cavo
and the heights of Tusculum. Below stretch the gardens of the Capucin
Convent, and farther back the grounds and avenues of the Villa Ludovisi.
On the first floor is a large hall, the walls of which have been
decorated by the hand of some old monk with frescoes, and which,
formerly a refectory, is used to-day as a theological lecture-room. This
was the room where Overbeck and his friends in the first period after
their arrival stood for one another as models. Lethière, the director of
the French Academy, had obtained permission for them to install
themselves in the deserted rooms of the monastery of San Isidoro, which
had been spared by Napoleon, for which they paid the small sum of three
scudi monthly.
[Illustration: JOSEPH FÜHRICH. _Graphische Kunst._]
"We led a truly monastic life," relates Overbeck; "held ourselves aloof
from all, and lived only for art. In the morning we marketed together;
at midday we took it in turns to cook our dinner, which was composed of
nothing but a soup and a pudding, or some tasty vegetable, and was
seasoned only by earnest conversation on art." Overbeck, as a good
housekeeper, kept accounts; the principal items of the daily outlay
occurred for polenta and risotto, oranges and lemons; every now and then
oil, too, was noted down. The afternoons were dedicated to the study of
the creations of art in Rome. With "beating hearts and holy awe" they
passed over the threshold of the _Stanze_. In the chapel of San Lorenzo
they became "familiar with the seraphic Fiesole, whose frescoes
transcend everything in purity of conception." They shunned the paganism
of St. Peter's, and marvelled with all the more intimate devotion at the
old Christian monuments. The churches of San Lorenzo and San Clemente,
the cloisters of St. John Lateran and St. Paul's-without-the-Walls, made
an ineffaceable impression upon the young men. At the twilight hour they
wandered up on to Monte Cavo. "And of evenings we drew studies of
drapery--glorious folds!--from Pforr's big Venetian mantle, in which we
took turns to pose for one another." Their whole hearts, however, first
swelled when they undertook a journey to Tuscany. In Orvieto, Luca
Signorelli awaited them, whose frescoes especially impressed Cornelius
mightily. At Sienna they found teachers who were still more sympathetic
to them, Duccio and Simone Martino, those masters of a tender, intimate
spirit and a charming sweetness of expression. In the Campo Santo at
Pisa they turned their attention to Fiesole's pupil, Gozzoli. Those
became their great teachers in art. "Just as ardent Christians wander to
the grave of the princes of the apostles in order to confirm their faith
and quicken their zeal, so should zealous young artists derive strength
and illumination from the silent and yet so eloquent speech of the
sublime geniuses of art. An artist of real worth will find in the
masterpieces of painting at Rome everything necessary for him in order
to reach the right path. But, to be sure, a well-made plait of hair does
not certainly constitute one a Raphael, because Raphael, too, arranged
his hair with feeling. Study alone leads to nothing. If since Raphael's
age, as one can almost declare, there has been no painter, that is the
fault of nothing else than of the fact that art has been vanquished by
workmanship. One learnt at the academies to paint excellent drapery, to
draw a correct figure, learnt perspective, architecture--in short,
everything, and yet no painter was produced. There is one want in all
recent painting--heart, soul, sentiment. Let the young painter then
watch, before everything, over his sentiments: let him allow neither an
impure word on his lips nor an impure thought in his mind. But how can
he guard himself from that? By religion, by study of the Bible, the one
and only study which made Raphael. This view now certainly contradicts
the accustomed principles that everything must be systematically learnt;
mere learning produces certainly an instructed but also a cold artist.
On that ground it is not good either to study anatomy from dead bodies,
because one dwarfs thereby certain fine sensibilities, or to work from
female models, for the same reason. Let the painter be inspired by his
subject as those of old were, and the result will be the same. Like
those old painters, let every artist remind himself that the truest use
of art is that which leads it heavenwards, its one function that of
having a moral effect upon men." "How pure and holy," cries Cornelius to
Xeller, as late as 1858, "was the end at which we aimed! Unknown,
without encouragement, without aid, except that of our loving Father in
heaven."
[Illustration: FÜHRICH. FROM THE "LEGEND OF ST. GWENDOLIN."]
It is obvious that between the ascetics of the monastery and the
Classicists direct friction must ensue. To them the "ever repeated and
pale reflexions of Greek sculpture" said nothing, while the Classicists
scoffed at the religionists, for whom the sarcastic brawler, Reinhart,
invented the nickname of "Nazarenes," which has since become a
watchword. The opposition was historically immortalised when Bunsen, the
Prussian envoy, invited the whole colony to the christening of his
little daughter, and Niebuhr touched glasses with Thorwaldsen "to the
health of old Jupiter." Only Cornelius joined in; the others started and
looked upon the young Düsseldorfer as a heretic.
This positive Christian standpoint, which allowed art to be esteemed
only as a religious service, pictures only as a means of ecclesiastical
edification, irritated also the old man of Weimar at the first start.
The effort of the Nazarenes to make piety the foundation of true
artistic activity was to him a continual subject of contempt. Religion
no more bestows talent for the arts than it gives taste. He spoke with
irony of the "valiant artists and ingenious friends of art who had
resort to the honourable, naïve, yet somewhat coarse taste" of the
fourteenth and fifteenth-century masters. He constantly employed of them
the expression "star-gazing." He had already mockingly remarked of
Wackenroder's _Herzensergiessungen_ what an unwarrantable conclusion it
was, that because a few monks were artists, all artists should therefore
be monks. He called the life of the Nazarenes "a sort of masquerade
which stood in opposition to the actual day," and wrote in the pages of
_Art and Antiquity_ that manifesto, the _New German Religious-Patriotic
Art_, or _History of the New Pietistic False Art since the Eighties_,
which so deeply wounded the young enthusiasts. "The doctrine was that
the artist needed piety above everything to equal the work of the best.
What an attractive doctrine! How eagerly we should accept it! For in
order to become religious one need learn nothing." The whole movement
reached nothing beyond a slavish imitation of Giotto and his immediate
followers. Of course, it was inconsistent of Goethe to reproach
contemporary art for imitating that of the Middle Ages, and to praise
the latter only when it imitated the antique. Speaking as a man of
Mengs' school, and merely proposing Hellenic art as a canon instead of
early Italian, he had, after all, no right to be angry if Frederick
Schlegel opposed classical models with mediæval. Otherwise, however,
even to-day little can be added to Goethe's animadversions.
[Illustration: FÜHRICH. RUTH AND BOAZ.]
As with Carstens, so with the Nazarenes, we are warned by the idealistic
tendency which inspired the young enthusiasts. There are but few
painters with whom life and art have been in such complete agreement as
with the gentle, mild, and modest Overbeck, the "Apostle John," as he
got to be called, that young man, that serene soul who looked upon art
simply as a harp of David for the praise of the Lord, to whom the "hope
that through his works one soul had been strengthened in faith and piety
was of far more value than any fame," and who ended at last in a sort of
religious mania. With the Nazarenes, too, as with the Classicists, it
was pure exaltation which drove them to free themselves from the
trammels of the school, in order to get back from dead fabrications to
creations of art, which, proceeding out of the living spirit, once more
had a soul. Even the much-despised conversion of the Protestants among
them to the Catholic Church arose out of the deep conviction that they
also, as well as their art, must be united in religion.
[Illustration: FÜHRICH. THE DEPARTURE OF THE PRODIGAL SON.]
In a certain sense they even show an advance in art. They found between
themselves and the great painters of the eighteenth century a gulf that
could no longer be spanned. After Carstens had thrown overboard every
colouristic acquisition, it was indeed something that the Nazarenes no
longer saw the highest aim of painting in black and white design, but
turned, though with timidity and hesitation, to the study of the Italian
Quattrocento with its joyous delight in colour, and so became the first
real painters after the cartoon period. Only that was as yet simply an
advance for the nineteenth century, and not especially for the history
of art. This was as little enriched with new forms and discoveries by
the Nazarenes as by the Classicists. The former, too, were imitators,
and only changed masters when they fled from the antique to the Middle
Ages, and copied the old Italians in lieu of the Greeks. The Classicists
had imitated with a certain cold erudition; the Nazarenes out of the
depths of their emotion. As the former used Greeks, so did they use the
fourteenth-century painters, as patterns of calligraphy from which they
made their copies, cut their stencils after the Italian form, and, like
Mengs, were able to reproduce in their works only a very weak reflection
of those departed spirits. As eclectics they would stand on the same
rung with the academics of Bologna, except that the ideal of the latter
school was a combination from Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo,
Correggio, and Titian, and that it possessed an incomparably greater
facility in technique.
[Illustration: FÜHRICH. JACOB AND RACHEL.]
The Nazarenes abandoned on principle the employment of the model, from
fear lest it might entice them away from the ideal representation of the
character to be depicted. They sought in a dilettante manner to supply
the control over the material which alone makes the artist, by
enthusiasm for the material. Only Cornelius dared to draw from the
female form. Overbeck refused to do so, from modesty. The Virgin Mary
was to him the highest ideal of womanhood, the paler, the more virtuous,
the more akin to the Lamb of God; and he would have deemed it a
sacrilege to have depicted her as purely womanly. They therefore only
occasionally sat to one another for studies of drapery, and, for the
rest, "in order not to be naturalistic," painted their pictures from
imagination in the seclusion of their cells. As the Catholicism of
Schlegel was an anæmic system, so the painters, too, deprived their
figures of blood and being in order to leave them only the abstract
beauty of line. They are beings who are exalted above everything, even
above correctness of drawing, and who must expire of a lack of blood in
their veins. The command, "Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God,
and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you,"
was carried out by the Nazarenes only too well.
[Illustration: STEINLE. THE RAISING OF JAIRUS' DAUGHTER.]
They have created only two works which will survive, and which possess
an historical significance as pre-eminent, works of the whole movement
in common--the frescoes of the Casa Bartholdi and of the Villa Massini.
When the intelligence of the Battle of Waterloo had penetrated even into
the silent cells of the monks, they believed that art too should
participate in this universal elevation, and become a factor again in
the development of the German nation. It must not be used, wrote
Cornelius in his famous letter to Görres, as a mere plaything, or to
tickle the senses, not merely for the delectation and pomp of high and
rich Maecenases, but for the ennoblement and glorification of public
life. The means of this artistic elevation, and at the same time a new
means of popular culture, was to be the introduction of fresco painting.
[Illustration: STEINLE. "I HAVE TRODDEN THE WINEPRESS ALONE: AND OF
THE PEOPLE THERE WAS NONE WITH ME."]
And thus the Brothers of San Isidoro re-discovered what had, as a matter
of fact, always been quietly practiced by the "rustics painters," but
since Mengs' time had no longer been employed by the "art painters," and
had been forgotten for half a century. The Prussian consul at Rome,
Bartholdy, gave them the commission. An old mason, who had last arranged
wall-plastering under Mengs, was recruited as technical adviser; Carl
Eggers, of Neustrelitz, zealously made chemical researches; and it is
said to have been Veit who, at Cornelius' request ("Now, Philip, you
make the first attempt!"), was the first to paint the portrait of a head
in fresco, whilst his companions looked on with amazement and delight.
Then the others set to work, "and painted away at it in the name of
God." "Yes, believe me, my friend, it is a desperate matter to paint
over a whole room in a manner which one has never before practised
oneself nor seen practised by others. Every day we tell each other that
we are fine bunglers, and give each other a regular dressing down. You
can have no conception how strange it feels at first when one is
confronted by damp plaster and lime. And nevertheless we construct
daily fresh castles in the air for painting churches, monasteries, and
palaces in Germany."
The frescoes represent, in six mural paintings and two lunettes, the
history of Joseph in Egypt, from his sale to his recognition by his
brethren. The two latter are the work of Cornelius and Overbeck, the
others of Veit and Schadow. The work was prolonged through many years,
interrupted by manifold difficulties, and when one stands to-day before
the transferred pictures in the Berlin National Gallery one cannot
refrain from admiring them.
[Illustration: EDWARD STEINLE.]
There lives within them an unpretentiousness and sincerity of sentiment,
and, in spite of all deficiencies and lack of independence, somewhat of
that lofty inspiration which raises the pictures of really earnest
artists, even if they are faulty, far above any fabricated productions.
An association of young men, which, unconcerned about success and
material profit, contended only for ideal products, found here for the
first time an opportunity to display what it wanted. In the
interpretation of Pharaoh's dream and in the recognition by the
brethren, Cornelius, in formal language, full of character, and without
any phrases and posture, displayed all that he had derived from the
great Italians in nobility of grouping and fine arrangement of lines.
Overbeck reaches the same height in his allegory of the seven lean kine.
But it is not only as youthful works of artists, who, if they belonged
to a period of decadence, yet were, withal, the greatest representatives
of a period of German art, that these pictures are worthy of high
esteem; they are essentially the best that these masters have created.
Cornelius, notably, shows a study, a care for execution, indeed even a
harmony of colouring, that stands in surprising opposition to his later
negligence. From the conception that the artistic performance is
determined in the invention, and the design, but that the pictorial
execution is an indifferent, mechanical accessory which could be
supplied even by other people, he was at that time still free.
[Illustration: STEINLE. BOOK ILLUSTRATION.]
When the pictures had been unveiled in 1819 a festival of German artists
was held in Rome. Rückert, Bunsen, the Humboldts, the Herzes were there;
Cornelius, Veit, and Overbeck had arranged the transparencies. "The
centre of all," writes the Danish romantic Atterbom, was the Crown
Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, "the idol of every German artist, whose ruling
passion is for the fine arts and fair ladies. Everything was in old
German masques, the ladies in wide ruffs. The Crown Prince was in the
utmost good humour, and treated the artists as his equals. A toast was
drunk to German unity. The scene struck me like a beautiful dream out of
the Middle Ages." German unity at a Roman fancy ball! The German nation
a beautiful dream out of the Middle Ages! The Crown Prince Ludwig, when
he took Cornelius and Schnorr out of the Roman circle, at least created
a fatherland for German art, and later on the others also found at home
a suitable sphere of activity.
Philip Veit, who went to Frankfort in 1830 as Director of the Staedel
Institute, was the first to settle down, and for all his energy could
only for a very short time make that city into a seat of the Christian
tendency in art. Of his pictures there, the fresco painted for the
Staedel Institute, "The Introduction of Christianity into Germany by St.
Boniface," is by far the most important. The apostle has hewn down the
oak of Thor, and from where it once stood there flows forth the new
spring of Christianity. The old Germans shrink back timorously, but the
youths listen to the preacher, and follow his direction to the figure of
religion which approaches with the palm of peace. In the background a
church rises, and in the distance, by a limpid river, a flourishing
town, in contrast to the sombre, primeval forest to which the Germans
who reject religion are flying.
"The two Marys at the Sepulchre," in the Berlin National Gallery, and
the "Assumption," in the Frankfort Cathedral, date from a later period.
It was of no avail to him that he mingled with his Nazarenism a certain
air of the world, which found expression in a less ascetic language of
form and a somewhat stronger sense of colour. In 1841 he had already a
feeling that the restless, struggling age had passed him by. He
abandoned his post and went to meet oblivion as Director of the Gallery
at Mayence.
[Illustration: _Munich, Albert._
STEINLE. THE VIOLIN PLAYER.]
Overbeck, the only one who could not tear himself from Rome, remained,
till his death in 1869, the "Young German Raphael," as his father had
called him in a letter from Lübeck in 1811: a devout, religious poet,
pure of soul and of fine culture, as one-coloured and one-sided as he
was mild and tender. At the outset he knew, at least, how to extract
from the old masters a certain naïve piety without positive character,
whereas later he lost himself more and more in the arid formalism of
dead dogmas. What was in his power to give he has given in pictures such
as the "Entry of Christ into Jerusalem" and the "Weeping over the Body
of Christ"--both in the Marienkirche at Lübeck, in the "Miracle of
Roses," in Santa Maria Degli Angeli at Assisi, in the "Christ on the
Mount of Olives" in the Hospital at Hamburg, and the "Betrothal of Mary"
in the Berlin National Gallery--pictures which expressed nothing that
would not have been expressed better at the end of the fifteenth
century. His "Holy Family with St. John and the Lamb," of 1825, in the
Munich Pinakothek, is in composition and type a complete imitation of
the Florentine Raphael; his "Lamentation of Christ" in the Lübeck
Marienkirche is reminiscent of Perugino; his "Burial" would never have
existed but for Raphael's picture in the Borghese Gallery. His sentiment
coincided exactly in devotion and godliness with that of Fra Angelico or
of the old masters of Cologne, and when he devoted himself to
programme-painting he lost all intelligibility. In the "Triumph of
Religion in the Arts," which he completed in 1846 for the Staedel
Institute, and in which he wished to embody the favourite ideas of
Romanticism, that art and religion must flow together in one stream, he
has copied the upper part from the "Disputa," the lower part from the
"School of Athens," and worked up both into a tedious and scholastically
elaborated whole. It is only through a series of unpretentious sketches
which he prepared for engravings, lithographs, and woodcuts that his
name has still a certain lustre. Plates such as the "Rest in the
Flight," the "Preaching of St. John," or the series "Forty Illustrations
to the Gospel," the "Passion," the "Seven Sacraments," may be
contemplated even to-day, since in them at least no tastelessness of
colour stands in the way. These plates, too, like his pictures, are less
observed than felt--felt, however, with an innocence and cheerfulness of
heart often quite childlike.
[Illustration: PHILIP VEIT.]
It shows above all much self-understanding that all these masters in
their later years restricted themselves exclusively to design, which
better expressed their character. In compositions and sketches of this
kind, which were only _drawn_, and were thus untrammelled by the
fruitless struggle with the difficulties of the technique of painting
and a complete lack of the notion of colour, they moved more freely and
lightly. In their frescoes and oil-paintings, partly through
insufficient technique, partly through their all too servile imitation
of foreign ideals, they went astray. As draughtsmen, they had more
courage to be themselves, and while in the completer paintings many a
fine trait, many an intimate reflection of the soul was lost, or through
the obduracy of the material did not attain a right expression, here
their spiritual and emotional qualities can be better valued.
Joseph Führich, one of the most staunchly convinced champions of these
reactionary tendencies, has become, entirely owing to his extensive
activity as a draughtsman, somewhat more familiar to our modern
knowledge than most of his contemporaries. He had begun as a
draughtsman. As a student of the Prague Academy he was an enthusiast for
Schlegel, Novalis, and Tieck; and even before his journey to Rome he had
etched fifteen plates for Tieck's _Genoveva_. It was Dürer who exercised
the deciding influence upon his further development. He had been led to
him through Wackenroder, and had copied his "Marienleben" in 1821. "Here
I saw," he says in his Autobiography, "a form before me which stood in
trenchant opposition to that of the Classicists, who are anxious to palm
off as beauty their smoothness and pomposity borrowed from the
misunderstood antique, and their affected delicacy as grace. In contrast
with that absence of character which prevailing academic art mistakes
for beauty I saw here a keen and mighty characterisation which dominated
the figures through and through, making them, as it were, into old
acquaintances." The strong and godly German middle age took then in
Führich's heart the same place which the Italian Quattrocento had filled
in Overbeck's range of thought. And this old-German tendency was only
temporarily interrupted by his sojourn in Rome. After he came to Rome in
1826 he became a Nazarene, and was accustomed there to look back at the
tendencies of his youth as an error; and both at Prague, where he
returned in 1829, after collaborating at the frescoes in the Villa
Massini, and at Vienna, where from 1841 he held the post of professor in
the Academy, he found rich opportunity for putting into practice his
ecclesiastical and orthodox views of art.
[Illustration: VEIT. THE ARTS INTRODUCED INTO GERMANY BY CHRISTIANITY.]
His frescoes in the Johannis-und-Altleschenfelder Church in Vienna are,
perhaps, more harmonious in colour, but no more independent in form,
than the works of the others. In his old age he returned once more to
the impressions of his youth, and so found himself again.
As a boy, in his little native village of Kratzau, in Bohemia, he had
tended the cows in summer time and had acquired a certain sincere
knowledge of nature and shepherd-life. He had to thank Dürer for his
preference for the idyllic and patriarchal family scenes in Sacred
History, and these tendencies found pleasing expression in pictures like
"Jacob and Rachel," or "The Passage of Mary across the Mountains." No
matter that the figures in "Jacob and Rachel" are taken out of the early
pictures of Pinturicchio and Raphael, they are still interwoven, with
their background of landscape, into an idyll of great naïveté and charm.
More especially, however, did the qualities which he owed to Dürer
acquire value--a sturdy characterisation, a naïve art in telling the
story, and a great wealth of fresh traits, straight from nature--in the
serial compositions of his old age. There is no sentimental vagueness,
nothing academical. Führich had a keen eye for what was intimate,
familiar; a tender sense of the individualities of landscape in woodland
and meadow, of the charm of everyday life as well as of the animal
world; and though an idealist, he knew how to assimilate ingeniously
what he had observed with a certain realistic fulness. The old story of
Boaz and Ruth grew beneath his hands into a delicious idyll of country
life. From the story of the Prodigal Son he has extracted with
sensitiveness the purely human kernel, and as late as the winter of
1870-71, at the age of seventy-one, he illustrated the legend of St.
Gwendolen, in which he depicted with tender reverence the escape of a
human soul, withdrawn from the world and resigned to God's will, into
Nature and her peace.
Edward Steinle, who went from Rome to Vienna in 1833, and settled in
Frankfort in 1838, is called, not very appropriately, by his biographer,
Constantine Wuzbach, "a Madonna painter of our time." His name deserves
to come down to posterity rather for what he created outside the
essential characteristics of his art. In his frescoes in the minster at
Aachen, in the choir of the cathedrals of Strasburg and Cologne, he
stood firm on the standpoint of the Nazarenes; which is as much as to
say they contained nothing novel in the history of art. In his fairy
pictures, however, imagination broke through the narrow confines of
dogma, and entwined itself in creative enjoyment round the vague figures
of fable. His "Loreley," in the Schack Gallery, as she looks down, a
Medusa-like destroyer, from the tall cliff; his watchman who looks
dreamily into space over the houses of the old town; his violin player
on his tower who plays, forgetful of the world,--these have something
musical, poetical, that freshness of sentiment and unsought naïveté
which as an inheritance of his Viennese home was also peculiar in such a
high degree to Schwind.
The Romantic aspiration is revealed in Steinle, even, in a certain
"yearning after colour." There lives in his works a refined feeling for
colour that, especially in his water-colours, rarely forsakes him.
Take, for instance, the fresh, tinted pen-drawings, engraved by
Schaffer, in which he displayed with the naïveté of Memlinc the life of
St. Euphrosyne; the five aquarelles of Grimm's "Snow-White and
Rose-Red"; or his illustrations to Brentano's poems, such as the
_Chronicle of the Wandering Student_, and the _Fairy Tale of the Rhine
and Radlauf the Miller_, in which he developed a delight in the world
and an idea of landscape that in the ascetic Nazarene excite
astonishment.
[Illustration: VEIT. THE TWO MARYS AT THE SEPULCHRE.]
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld went, after the completion of the Ariosto
Room of the Villa Massini, first to Vienna, then in 1827 to Munich, in
order to paint the _Nibelungen_ in the halls of the royal residence of
that time, and in the imperial halls of the state palace the history of
Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, and Rudolf of Hapsburg. He also,
however, created his best work at the close of his life in Dresden,--the
forcible woodcuts of his _Picture Bible_, which narrated the world's
sacred history in strong and vigorous strokes.
Strangest to the present-day taste have become the drawings of
Cornelius. His plates to Goethe's _Faust_ have, indeed, a certain
austere strength of conception, which he learnt from Dürer; but also
faults of drawing, exaggerations, crudities, and errors in perspective,
which he did not find in Dürer.
In his second work, the Nibelungen cycle, an intentional old-German
angularity, with an unintentional modern clumsiness, has effected a
_mésalliance_ even less attractive.
[Illustration: OVERBECK. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AND CORNELIUS.]
CHAPTER VI
THE ART OF MUNICH UNDER KING LUDWIG I
More than seventeen hundred years ago there reigned a Roman emperor who
loved art passionately. He looked upon it from an intellectual altitude
which few have reached, and he valued it as the monumental consummation
of Græco-Roman culture. Standing upon a plane of intellectual elevation,
himself gifted with artistic intuition, he knew of no higher enjoyment
for a ruler than the cultivation of the architectural and other forms of
art. It was he who opened up to the energy of artists a field such as
has never been offered to them before or since. He spent upon his works
sums incalculable, so that his people grew restless under their
emperor's mania for building. His villa at Tivoli, which attained to the
extent of a town, was in itself a copy of everything that he most loved
and admired in the world. It united nearly all the renowned buildings of
Athens in one masterly reproduction. And then with architecture came the
other arts. The most magnificent collections of sculpture were formed,
for none had better opportunities of acquiring the antique masterpieces
of the Greek towns. Numberless frescoes, scenes from those cities and
regions which had most impressed him on his travels, adorned the walls.
And yet subsequent generations have viewed with unconcern this halcyon
period in the history of art. Though his contemporaries fancied that the
splendour of the Greek sun was still radiating over them, it was but a
borrowed lustre, which never went beyond the reproduction or copying of
classic examples. Whatever Greek temples the emperor might build and
decorate, he failed to summon into being a Phidias or a Polygnotes to
revive for him the forms of the antique. The names of the artists who
worked for him are forgotten. They had no originality; they copied the
types of the Grecian and Egyptian periods, and their art was but a
repetition of old ideals, without character of age or place. The fifteen
colossal columns of his Olympieion that are still standing impress one
as foreign to Athens, and would seem more in place at Baalbeck or
Palmyra than in this city of the Muses. Epictetus would have smiled at
the emperor diverting himself with an album of the wonders of the world,
as a piece of sentimentality. The age of Hadrian produced thousands of
buildings, statues, and pictures, but no original works.
Will a different judgment be pronounced in the lapse of time upon the
artistic creations of King Ludwig I? Ludwig also--his biography reads
like that of Hadrian--was an enthusiastic admirer of art. After the
Peace of Vienna, when the political aspirations of Germany had been
frustrated, he alone among the numerous German princes of the old
alliance fostered homeless art, and thus fulfilled a noble mission. The
king's splendid enthusiasm for the ideal significance of art, which he
hoped would lead the German people, then seeking to work out its
individuality, from out of its Philistine narrow-mindedness to nobler
and greater things--this enthusiasm will redound to his enduring honour.
Schiller's idea of educating humanity by æsthetic means had in him grown
into a living and powerful sentiment.
All that it was possible to accomplish in the cause of art, on the basis
of existing development, his endeavours have fully realised. In the
course of twenty-three years he spent more than £3,000,000 from his
privy purse, and made Munich what it is, the principal art centre of
Germany; changed it from a Boeotia into an Athens; founded its art
collections, and erected the buildings which give the town its
character. Then he offered those new walls to the painter Cornelius, and
commanded him to cover them. "You are my field-marshal, do you provide
generals of division." In 1814 Cornelius had written to Bartholdy: "The
most powerful and unfailing means to restore German art and bring it
into harmony with this great period and the spirit of the nation would
be a revival of fresco-painting as it existed in Italy from the days of
the great Giotto to those of the divine Raphael." And through this royal
command the dream was realised beyond all expectation. No such lively
artistic animation had been witnessed since the great periods of Italian
art; an animation which does not cut the worst figure in German history
in those sad times of political stagnation and reaction. But that there
was a living soul of art in those days posterity will no more
acknowledge than it does in the case of the age of Hadrian.
"Wie bei Bartholdy als Kind, so in Massimis Villa als Jüngling
Teutshes Fresco wir sehn, aber in München als Mann,"
sang King Ludwig. Now, after two generations, it can be seen that
fresco-painting at Munich from 1820 to 1840 produced less original
conceptions of the German art of the nineteenth than weak reflections of
the Italian art of the sixteenth century.
Various favourable circumstances combined at that time to cause
Cornelius to be specially looked upon by his contemporaries as an
incomparable master. Since Tiepoli, German monumental art had remained
dormant. The frescoes at Munich were the first attempts made to revive
it. And it seemed as though with Cornelius, German art had at once risen
to the dizzy heights to which Italian art had been led by Michael
Angelo. The lookers-on believed in Buonarotti's resurrection. As in the
Sistine "Last Judgment," the movement of his heroic figures appeared
plastic and pathetic, and his types, not excepting the women, gave that
impression of the terrible, which none but Signorelli and Michael Angelo
had attained before him. His advent, it was said, might almost make one
believe in a kind of metempsychosis; as though the spirit of the great
Florentine master, that giant of the Renaissance, had been restored to
humanity. At that very period the Italian art of the Cinquecento enjoyed
the exclusive favour of the German scholars. It alone was worthy of
imitation; in it the æsthetic philosophers sought for rules and laws to
govern the development of art. And as they thought that all the
qualities of this artistic method were to be found in the works of
Cornelius, it was only logical to arrive at the conclusion which the
Crown Prince Ludwig summed up in the following words: "There has been no
painter like Cornelius since the Cinquecento."
[Illustration: PETER CORNELIUS.]
At the same time the intellectual character of his work harmonised with
the wishes of a period in which the leaders of German thought tried to
forget the dreary dulness of life by plunging into the most profound
speculations. "What does it matter," writes Hallman, "if we lack all
joyous, independent national feeling? What though we do not even try to
resuscitate this feeling with wars and battles? We strive after
something higher! The world is beginning to respect German intellect and
learning. We believe that in this we are in advance of other nations,
and we seek a mode of expression, we want to give a form to that lofty
thought through our art, in order that we may bequeath to posterity an
image of our fortunate condition.... Therefore it is a remarkable sign
of the times that painting strives to make the weighty output of
intellectual thought a common treasure of all who are neither able nor
disposed to follow speculation to its dizzy heights, nor erudition to
its lowest depths; that painters try to transform the results of those
investigations into fresh and ever lively conceptions--the element of
art."
To accomplish this none was better fitted than Cornelius. What a weight
of thought and learning his works display!
In the Pinakothek, Cornelius' main idea was to paint the life and work
of Nature as illuminated by the figures of the Greek gods. For the
series of paintings in the Hall of the Gods, Hesiod's _Theogony_ offered
a basis upon which to demonstrate the idea of the triumph of the
creative mind in heaven and upon earth. In the second room, human
passion, power, and tyranny were illustrated in scenes of Greek heroic
life from the _Iliad_. The frescoes in the Ludwigskirche were to follow
the Christian apocalypse as a concatenation, and to depict it in
symbolic treatment from the Creation to the Last Judgment. The frescoes
for the Campo Santo at Berlin were meant to represent "the universal and
most exalted fortunes of humanity, the manifestation of divine grace
towards the sins of mankind, the redemption from sin, perdition, and
death, the triumph of life and eternity." Each of these paintings is a
treatise. Each fresco bears a definite relation to the other; deep
philosophic speculations weave their threads from one to the other. Or
else the painter revels in a suite of compositions which trace a network
of intellectual combinations from one picture to the other. As he
himself expressed it, he delivered his diploma lecture through his
paintings.
And this painted erudition harmonised with the requirements of those
times of dominating intellectual tendencies. The scholars saw in
Cornelius the poet, the doctor-in-philosophy; held that the principal
value of the work of art lay in its intellectual contents, and felt that
their loftiest mission was to express these contents still more
correctly than the painter himself. The idea, they said, was the alpha
and omega of the painter's art, and must be accepted at its full value,
even when represented in the most shadowy external form.
These opinions have now vanished entirely. A more extended intercourse
with the old masters and with the art of other countries has gradually
cured the Germans too of that mental hypertrophy from which they
suffered in their view of art--a complaint whose characteristic symptom
was the entire lack of sensuousness, of that sensibility to beauty of
form and external charm which always has been and always must be the
predominating mood of a society in which art is to flourish. They have
gradually reached the point at which one interests one's self in a
picture for the sake of the painting of it, looks first at the picture,
and only then asks what the painter's idea may have been, or what the
spectator is to gather from it. No poem will find favour which offers
acceptable thoughts in badly worded, halting, unmelodious verse; nor do
the loftiest thoughts in themselves suffice to make a work of art.
Profundity of thought is a thing that has little to do with pure art;
and the subject alone, however world-stirring the ideas in it may be,
never makes a thing artistic. We have learnt to find the most intense
enjoyment in the mere contemplation of Titian's "Earthly and Heavenly
Love," although we may not yet know what this picture is really meant to
convey. And we know none the less that what renders Raphael's "School of
Athens" immortal is not its catalogue of ideas, which has been drawn up
by an anonymous pedant, but the master's artistic power, the intensity
with which he expresses what was barely showing bud in the material, the
self-reliant strength and sureness with which the form and colour have
succeeded in outlining and creating every figure and every movement in
the picture.
[Illustration: PETER CORNELIUS. 'LET THERE BE LIGHT'.]
[Illustration: CORNELIUS. FROM THE FRESCOES IN THE FRIEDHOFSHALLE,
BERLIN.]
No less has the comparative study of art gradually refined people's
sensibility to originality. We are no longer compelled to place an
artist on the same level with a master of ancient art because of the
outer resemblance of their work. We have progressed so far as to respect
in art none but original genius, and to look upon imitation as a
_testimonium paupertatis_ though Praxiteles or Michael Angelo be the
model. In this we find the explanation of the low esteem in which some
of the old masters are now held. The contemporaries of Mabuse and Marten
Heemskerk thought that in these painters they had found again the great
primeval, Titanic nature of Michael Angelo, his vast motives and
majestic forms. To-day we say of them, and with justice, that they
produced nothing better than caricatures of Michael Angelo, that they
expressed themselves in shallow phrases, that their religious pictures
are cold and inflated, and that their mythological presentations with
naked figures impress us as bombastic and repellent. Houbraken, in his
biography of Gérard de Lairesse, wrote: "A whole book could be filled
with the description of his innumerable pictures and panels, ceilings
and frescoes." To-day we dismiss this unattractive mannerist in a few
lines. What his contemporaries described as his Michaelangelesque and
majestic fierceness appears to us, looking back, as a mere pale
imitation.
[Illustration: CORNELIUS. MARGUERITE IN PRISON.]
Measure Cornelius by the same rule, and the result is no less
melancholy. Merciless history paused for a moment to consider whether it
ever saw his equal, and then passed on to the order of the day, as it
did with his predecessors. To us he is no longer the original genius
that he was to his contemporaries, but an imitator. The retrospective
history of art marks a new epoch with him, Heinrich Hess, and Schnorr:
the advance from the paths of the early Italians, trodden by the
Nazarenes, to this link with the golden age of the Cinquecento. The
works of Cornelius are mighty shadows cast into our days by the gigantic
figures of Michael Angelo. But only shadows! There is no blood in them.
A direct line leads from Michael Angelo to Millet; but I doubt whether
the master would delight in Cornelius, who has only used him as a
_gradus ad Parnassum_. The works of Cornelius are the products of a
civilised yet artistically poor period. The idealism of Michael Angelo
had raised itself upon the naturalistic shoulders of Donatello and
Ghirlandaio; this new Cornelian idealism sprang into being full-grown
from reminiscences, and was therefore from the outset without backbone.
It is the fruit of a decadence, not the mature product of a full-blown
art, which has taken centuries to grow and ripen. In Michael Angelo the
aspirations of Italian art, from Giotto onward, attained their zenith.
Cornelius, standing solitary in an inartistic period that had lost every
tradition and all technical method, believed in the possibility of
rising to the same level by making the forms borrowed from Michael
Angelo convey scraps of modern knowledge. In doing this he could not but
confirm the experience, thus described by Goethe in his _Theory of
Colour_: "Even the most perfect models are delusive, by causing us to
pass over necessary decrees of culture, and thus generally carrying us
beyond the goal into a domain of boundless error."
[Illustration: CORNELIUS. THE APOCALYPTIC HOST.]
At the same time that Heinrich Hess was carrying on his calligraphic
exercises after Raphael and Andrea del Sarto in the Basilika at Munich,
Cornelius was making his schoolboy sketches after Michael Angelo. What
is great in his master is empty _pose_ in him; what is _furia_ in the
former is a laboured imitation in the latter. While the terrific
Florentine Master found within himself the expression of his superhuman
figures, his learned follower copies attitudes, gestures,
groups--familiar to anyone who has been to Italy and passed a few hours
in the Sistine Chapel. One seems to hear the old Florentine's great
voice toned down through the telephone, and irritating us with false
pathos at moments when pathos is quite superfluous. All the faces are
distorted with grimaces, heads of hair are puffed up as though with
serpents, garments fly about; people shout instead of speaking, open
their mouths wide as though they were giving the word of command to an
army, stretch out their arms as though they would embrace the world. A
mother bearing a child in her arms squeezes it to death. A cook
roasting a leg of mutton bastes it with a Herculean gesture, and a
butler emptying a leather bottle has the air of a river-god meditating a
flood. In order that his human beings may look vigorous and heroic, he
makes them walk in seven-league boots, dislocate their limbs, expand the
gigantic measurement of the body far beyond the human. Every head shows
a different colouring: one red as sealing-wax, another rose-pink, a
third _caput mortuum_. Added to this, the academic drapery arrangements,
those florid garments with their rolling, writhing folds, for which
there is no real justification, and which have no use but that of
ornament. "Ah," says Goethe, in one of his letters, "how true it is that
nothing is remarkable but what is natural: nothing grand but what is
natural: nothing beautiful, nothing, etc., etc., but what is natural."
Michael Angelo is not at all easy to understand; and Cornelius' study of
him resulted in the very same mannerism into which the Dutchmen had
fallen three hundred years earlier,--the only difference being that he
surpassed them in erudition. But although this quality would no doubt
have greatly helped him had he written books, we cannot take it into
account in discussing his artistic merits, any more than we can judge
Gérard de Lairesse by his literary achievements. Nay, more, as he had
elected to confine himself to painting, his erudition became a curse to
him, bringing him to disregard beauty of form in a manner as yet unknown
in the history of art. Not only was he filled with ardour for the
loftier thoughts, without allowing any other forms for their
presentation but those which were mere reminiscences of former art
periods--he did not even give himself leisure thoroughly to assimilate
the forms borrowed from Michael Angelo, and to animate them with fresh
life. Hence the fact that, as an artist, he remains greatly below the
level of the Dutch copyists, in whose work there is at least no faulty
drawing and tasteless colouring to be found. He asked for walls, not as
panels to paint on, but as tablets on which to inscribe his thoughts;
felt exclusively as a poet, a man of learning, brooding ideas. Engrossed
in developing these ideas, he valued form and colour no more than an
author would the embellishing of his manuscript with flowing letters and
an artistic arrangement of inks. It is only by this means that we can
explain the unjustifiable carelessness with which he surrendered his
cartoons to his pupils, and allowed them a free hand in the carrying
them out, or account for the evanescent colouring in the Glyptothek and
in the Ludwigskirche,--a colouring which was even at that time far below
the general level, and which could only be excused in the case of a
self-trained and quite untutored school.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
CORNELIUS. THE FALL OF TROY.]
A man of this kind, who had nothing to teach that was worth the
learning, and who excelled only in intellectual qualities which could
not be imparted to others, must needs prove the most dangerous
academy-principal Germany has had since she first boasted an academy. So
much the more as his pupils readily submitted to the personal
fascination of this earnest little man with his black clothes, his
pompous appearance, his flashing eagle eye, which made one believe
that, Dante-like, he had looked upon heaven and hell. "As there are men
born to command an army, so Cornelius was born to be the head of a
school of painting," said King Ludwig. We can scarcely help smiling at
Schwind's account of the trembling awe with which, upon his arrival from
Vienna, he presented himself to the master. The red-haired stripling, in
his outgrown clothes, timidly strolling round the rooms of the
Glyptothek suddenly sees Cornelius himself, high on a scaffolding, in
all his glory, in an effulgence such as surrounds the head of Phoebus
Apollo. Accustomed to seeing young artists stoop before him, now
stammering, now paling, now blushing, the demi-god descends to the level
of the unknown mortal. "He is quite a little man, in a blue shirt, with
a red belt. He looks very stern and distinguished, and his black,
gleaming eyes impress you. He descended from his throne, changed his
blue smock for an elegant frockcoat, drank a glass of water with an easy
manner, and made my flesh thrill with a short explanation of what had
been painted and what was still to be done, tucked a few writing books
under his arm, and went upon his business to the academy."
[Illustration: WILHELM KAULBACH.]
The reformation of the academy, instigated by him at Munich,
demonstrated the one-sidedness of his point of view. He turned it into a
school for fresco-painting. "A professorship in _genre_ and landscape
painting appears to me superfluous," he wrote to the king in 1825; "true
art knows no subdivision." But as he himself had only partially mastered
fresco painting, he did not even succeed in establishing a school of
fresco painters. It was only one of designers of cartoons.
"Read the great poets: Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe; do not forget to
include the Bible. The brush has become the ruin of our art. It has led
from Nature to Mannerism." By means of this teaching Cornelius infused
all his own defects into his academy, which for that reason was doomed
from the outset to an early decease. A war of extermination, often
leading to the most burlesque scenes, was declared by the Cornelians
against the Langerians, who were despised because they had retained a
few of the technical acquirements of the peruke period. When Cornelius's
attention was drawn to the fact that in one of his cartoons he had given
a Greek hero six fingers he answered with indifference: "Ay, and if he
had had seven, how would it affect the general idea?"
[Illustration: KAULBACH. THE DELUGE.]
It was only natural, therefore, that his pupils should feel above using
a model. It is said that at the time when they were turning Munich into
an Athens, and the painters were covering the city walls with frescoes,
Munich possessed but one model, and the poor fellow died of starvation.
And then, how they hated colours! They were so difficult to manage! Who,
pray, wanted to learn fresco painting by hard labour, and swallow the
chalk-dust? It was much easier to copy their lord and master, whose name
was on their lips, but not a spark of whose genius was in their heads,
with every sort of mannerism. "When nature once produces a new birth she
does so with a lavish hand. Talents, talents enough for centuries!" In
these words Cornelius himself did honour to his pupils--to Carl
Herrmann, Strähuber, Hermann Anschütz, Hiltensperger, and Lindenschmit
the elder, the mention of whose names evokes a painful memory of the
arcades in the palace garden at Munich.
What survives of Cornelius is only the man, the individual. Posterity
will doubtless always honour him for the unflinching energy with which
he upheld his ideal from youth to failing age; for his courage in
propounding and defending what seemed right to _him_; for refraining
from putting on velvet gloves with the multitude, but frankly showing
them his nails. This high-mindedness of Cornelius, and his lofty
conception of the aims of art, must always command our respect. All his
works are the product of a serene, great, and noble soul. His is a
physiognomy with a proud, vigorous profile, which expresses an
intellectual tendency, and can never be forgotten. He was a man--as a
painter, a curse to German art, but a self-conscious, aristocratic mind.
As he himself said: "Art has its high-priests and also its
hedge-priests"; and when at the end of his life he made his profession:
"Never, under any circumstance of my life, have I lost my pious
reverence for the divinity of art; never have I sinned against it," we
none of us refuse to accept his word.
[Illustration: KAULBACH. PRINCE ARTHUR AND HUBERT.]
This unfailing earnestness which suffuses Cornelius's work raises him
high above _Wilhelm Kaulbach_, and secures for him lasting fame, when
that of Kaulbach shall have been buried with the last of the "cultured"
patrons for whom he worked, and by whom he was placed on a pedestal.
Look at both of them from a purely artistic point of view, comparing
them with the old masters, and both of them sink equally into
insignificance. But if we come to accept the problem of art criticism as
a matter of psychology rather than of æsthetics, if we search for the
relations between the work of art and the soul of its author, we cannot
but look upon Kaulbach as by far the inferior. Cornelius endeavoured to
raise the masses to his level, paid for his idealism with unpopularity,
and was never understood. Kaulbach, the humble servant of the public,
changed the Spartan iron of the art of Cornelius for the base coin of
the art unions; to tickle the multitude, he clothed voluptuous
sensuality in the stately garment of the earnest Muse, and was hailed
with jubilation throughout his life. But the valise with which alone,
according to the fairy-tale, one can enter upon the journey to
immortality, was still lighter in his case. Idealistic painting, as
professed by Cornelius, had skimmed all the cream from religious and
mythological subjects; so Kaulbach tried to give something more actual
in its stead. He found this in the philosophy of history, in the images
of epochs in the history of the world which were then so much in vogue,
and handed his public, eager for knowledge, a printed programme upon
which he had catalogued the gigantic thoughts and even weightier
references which the picture was said to contain. As the masses were
awed by the severity of the Cornelian conception of forms, he softened
it down with superficial calligraphic elegance: what was sturdy and
angular in the former was by him changed into a coquettish effeminacy.
This he effected by daubing his pictures, which were in no way colour
conceptions, with insipid combinations of colour, and replaced with
oleographs Cornelius's illuminated monumental woodcuts. By these
concessions to the picturesque he drove the axe into the tree which the
designers of cartoons had planted. The part he plays is that of a man of
compromise between Cornelius and Piloty; his frescoes are too sugary;
his oil-paintings too faulty. It was he who buried the era of cartoons,
although the obsequies were conducted with all pomp.
A spiritual battle, an aerial battle, the "Battle of the Huns," is the
first of his works. Beneath, a real historical event; above, the same
reproduced in the spiritual world. The battle is over; the field is
hidden beneath the corpses of the slain; but the spirits continue the
combat in mid-air, and strive to turn the occasion to account for a
display of nudity. Next came the "Destruction of Jerusalem," crammed
with ingenious references, and elucidated with long, printed
commentaries. This programme-painting played its trump card on the
staircase of the Berlin Museum, where a space of 240 feet by 28 feet is
occupied by "the intellectual manifestations of the historical
_Weltgeist_"; "the total evolution of culture with every people of every
period in its principal historical phases"; those incidents "which, in
the evolution of universal history, mark the important knots with which
the closely entwined threads of the national dramas of the universe are
bound together." The "Battle of the Huns," the "Destruction of
Jerusalem," were included in the series; and to them were added the
"Tower of Babel," the "Rise of Greece," the "Crusades," and the
"Reformation." The whole of Hegel's philosophy was reproduced on the
walls. But as the pictures are not new through any novelty or greatness
of their conception, we need certainly not enter into the "astounding
profundity" of their philosophy. The eye is struck with mere
compositions, built up according to certain formulas, and _tableaux
vivants_, put together with more or less cleverness, theatrical in
effect and crude in colour.
Of his other large pictures, the "Naval Battle at Salamis" caused a
special stir through its sinking harem. In his "Nero" he contrasted the
orgies of the Romans of the decadence with the enthusiasm for death of
the early Christians. Again, in his great cartoon in charcoal of "Peter
Arbue," he inflated to monumental dimensions a drawing suitable for a
comic paper.
Kaulbach is not an artist to be taken seriously. Woltmann, who made the
same observation twenty years ago, tried at least to vindicate the
illustrator, and expressed his regret that a man who had the stuff in
him of a German Hogarth should unfortunately have been caught in the
toils of the Cornelian school. But this comparison does little justice
to Hogarth. There is nothing in the illustrations of Kaulbach which many
other artists could not have improved upon. In his "Reynard the Fox" he
adapted, for the benefit of the German public, Grandville's _Scènes de
la Vie privée et publique des Animaux_, published in 1842. His
illustrations for _éditions de luxe_ ("The Women of Goethe," etc.)
marked the first steps of the road which ended in Thuman. And Thuman
stands higher than Kaulbach. The faint, unaccented drawing, the oval
"beauty" of heads, declamatory and expressionless, the academic touch
are common to both of them. But only with Kaulbach do we find the
penetrating perfume of the demi-monde, the voluptuous, satirical
laughter which is not even stilled before Goethe, the pandering
sensuality which cannot touch the purest and tenderest figures in German
poetry without using them as a pretext to fling nudities to the public
like bones to a dog. In his "Dance of Death" suite, Kaulbach turned into
frivolity what Rethel had before expressed solemnly and earnestly. Like
the two augurs, who could not meet without laughing, so at last the
satirical designer began to laugh at his own monumental pictures. After
completing in his series of mural paintings at the Berlin Museum his
"Apotheosis of the Evolution of Human Culture," he explained in his
friezes that the whole was, after all, nothing but a dustbin and a
lumber-room. When he was commissioned to depict a suite of paintings for
the upper walls of the new Pinakothek at Munich, the artistic life of
that town, as glorified by King Ludwig--a suite which the weather has
since been kind enough to render almost invisible--he fulfilled his task
by mocking at what he should have glorified.
"All die Meister Kunstbahnbrecher, wie die Herren selbst sich nennen,
Wahrlich Widderköpfe sind sie, Mauern damit einzurennen.
Mit dem Loche in der Mauer ist's noch lange nicht geschehen,
Da muss erst der Held erscheinen, siegreich dadurch einzugehen.
Gegen jenes Ungeheuer ziehen sie zu Feld mit Phrasen,
Wie die sieben Schwaben einstmals ritterlich bekämpft den Hasen.
Voran zieht der edle Ritter Schnorr, der Künste Don Quixote,
Seine Rosinante setzt er, statt des Pegasus in Trotte;
Heiliger Hess, sein Sancho Pansa, Du nicht liebst das offene Streiten,
Und du lässt dich sachte, sachte, 'rab von Deinem Esel gleiten.
Was ist denn so grosses Neues in der Neuen Kunst geschehen?
Nichts, als was sie nicht der aften, längst vergangnen abgesehen.
Wände ich auch Lorbeerkränze all um diese Alltagsfratzen,
Würden sie sie doch nur zieren zu bedecken hohle Glatzen."
This is the commentary written by Kaulbach himself; and Théophile
Gautier called the suite _un carnaval au soleil_. "The king in his youth
spent millions in order to elevate art," says Schwind; "and now in his
old age he pays another thousand pounds in order to be laughed at for
it." Heine's loud, scornful laughter resounds over the grave of romantic
literature; and so the "monumental period of German art" ends in
self-derision.
Moreover, as the mural paintings of the new Pinakothek, like the
frescoes in the Arcades and most of the other monumental products of the
period, are falling into ruin, and only show traces of their past beauty
in a few faint spots of colour not yet entirely effaced, it is quite
clear that it was an inherent fallacy of Cornelius to expect a
_renovation_ of national German art from fresco painting. The Venetians
of the sixteenth century well knew why they did not take up fresco
painting. Monumental painting, as aimed at by Cornelius, must remain an
imported plant that cannot possibly thrive in a northern climate; and
oil-painting, since the Van Eycks the medium and basis of art-culture
among the Teutonic races, took its revenge upon his one-sidedness and
his Michaelangelesque disdain, in the fact that at Munich it had to be
learnt again right from the beginning.
[Illustration: KAULBACH. MARGUERITE.]
CHAPTER VII
THE DÜSSELDORFERS
On the Rhine there existed a school of painting instead of a school of
drawing, a fact which at that time placed Düsseldorf next in importance
to Munich. Wilhelm Schadow, its first director, was lacking in any
personal distinction as an artist, but he had received from his great
father a tendency towards perfection of technique, which brought him and
his school into direct opposition with the purely philosophical painters
of the severe Cornelian tradition, and which has even in our days been
able to exercise an authoritative influence. In Rome he was the only one
of the Nazarenes amenable to the French influence, while the others
nervously held aloof from the members of the French Academy. And this
formal bent of his talent later gave him the qualifications of a sound
teacher. Immediately upon his arrival at Düsseldorf, in November 1826,
he was escorted by a stately throng of students: Carl Friedrich Lessing,
Julius Hübner, Theodor Hildebrandt, Carl Sohn, H. Mücke, and Christian
Koehler, who were afterwards joined by Eduard Bendemann, Ernest Deger,
and others. These became the mainstay of the celebrated Old Düsseldorf
School, which was soon supported by the jubilant enthusiasm of its
contemporaries. At the Berlin exhibitions the new school of painting
passed from one triumph to the other. Young men fresh from school
suddenly made names that were honoured throughout Germany, by reason of
the remarkable manner in which their works succeeded in expressing the
sentimental romanticism of the time.
The Wars of Liberty of 1813, which had caused a gust of joyous
enthusiasm to penetrate even into the peaceful seclusion of the
Nazarenes, were not, like the wars of 1870, the outcome of careful
calculation, but the result of a sudden burst of ardour, and the
disillusion had now followed upon the enthusiasm. In 1810, with the
French bayonets gleaming outside the windows, and the French kettledrums
drowning the sound of his voice, Fichte delivered at the Berlin
University his famous speeches which sounded the réveillé for Germany.
At the same time Kleist wrote his _Hermannschlacht_: Napoleon was to be
treated as Hermann had treated Varus. "_Was blasen die Trompeten,
Husaren heraus_," pealed through the air; the song of "_Got, der Eisen
wachsen liess_" rose heavenwards in brazen accords. And not long after,
the same lions who had beaten the Corsican at Leipzig, and had with
Arndt conceived the idea of a great, united fatherland, had once more
become the same easy-going people, drinking their beer and smoking their
pipes in their little duodecimo principalities as of old. Those dreary
times, which saw no prospect of relief in their own days, must needs
nourish a devotion to the past. That haughty antiquity, which had been
possessed of the ideal to which the present had not been able to attain,
became the object of a fanatical adoration. Men lost themselves in the
old storehouses of faded German reminiscences, and fled for inspiration
to the times of a consolidated German Empire. This return to the ruins
of the past was a protest against the grey, colourless present. The
patriotic frenzy of the poets of freedom changed into enthusiasm for the
vanished glories of mediæval Germany. They remembered with longing and
yearning the days when the robber-knights ruled town and country from
their strongholds. Schenkendorff sang hymns inspired by the old
cathedrals, rummaged with holy horror among the skeletons of knights and
heroes in the chapel, and wrote a poem in memory of the thousandth
anniversary of the death of Charlemagne; Arndt, the bard of the wars of
freedom, violently attacked the "industrialism" of the time, declaiming
against steam and machinery; Zacharias Werner composed his poem, "_Das
Feldgeschrei sei: alte Zeit wird neu_."
This revival of romanticism opened up a wide field to science and
poetry. The apotheosis of the old imperial times was made manifest amid
fairy-like glamour. Poetry grasped the pilgrim's staff, or rode with
beauteous dames on milk-white palfreys through forest and glade.
Enchanted genii, elves, fairies, and goblins were encountered on the
road. Nowhere is there so sweet a scent of blossoms, so innocent a sound
of children's merriment, as in Tieck's delightful and dainty
fairy-tales, or in the works of Clemens Brentano, those precious stories
of Father Rhine, of the water-nymphs and the crystal castles at the
bottom of the green current, pictures full of charming wilfulness,
dreamily winsome, like summer evenings on the Rhine. Uhland sang, as
once had sung the knightly poets with the golden harps--
"Von Gottesminne, von kühner Helden Muth,
Von lindem liebesinne, von süsser Maiengluth."
To this day we seem to peep between the weather-beaten castles, standing
on their grey rocks along the Rhine Valley, into the realm of romance as
into an enigma propounded by mountain and dale. Rhine and romance!
No spot in Germany was better fitted to become the cradle of a romantic
art than Düsseldorf, the peaceful town on the legend-haunted banks of
the green river. In the fifteenth century, in addition to the school of
Florence, where flowed a rich current of political and human life, where
great buildings, monuments, and frescoes kept architects and sculptors
and painters uniformly busied, there existed in the remote Umbrian
valleys, in the land of miracles and visions, that school of painting in
oils which saw its only eternal ideal in the deep eyes and soft aspect
of the Madonna, and made the visionary aspirations of the soul,
emotions, and sentiment the exclusive subject of their pictures. In the
same manner, in the nineteenth century, we find in contrast with the
Munich school, with its numerous architectural products, its massive
statuary, and the epic-dramatic fresco painting of Cornelius--"wedding
the German to the Greek, and Faust to Helen"--that lyrico-sentimental
Düsseldorf school of painting which embraced Madonnas and prophets,
knights and robbers, gipsies and monks, water-nymphs and nuns with the
same languishing tenderness. In matter and technique it completes the
art of Cornelius and the Nazarenes; that of the Munich master by its
encouragement of oil-painting; that of the Nazarenes by the stress which
it lays upon the more worldly side of mediæval life, upon chivalry, and
in a less degree upon that other pillar of mediævalism the Church. The
Nazarenes are archæological and ascetic; the Düsseldorf school is
insipid in a modern way, feeble, colourless, and sentimental.
Count Raczynski and Friedrich von Uechtritz have given us interesting
descriptions of life at Düsseldorf at that time, and their story reads
like a chapter of Tacitus' _Germania_. "_Grand dieu! Bons et affectueux
allemands!_" exclaimed a Parisian critic of the Count's book in sad
emotion, and held up this virtuous German life, as an example worthy of
imitation, to his compatriots, the decadents of fashionable artistic
Paris, fallen into modern luxury. Undisturbed by the hum of a big city,
and without any communication with its surroundings, the Düsseldorf
colony of artists lived its life of seclusion. The painters saw none but
painters. They herded together in the studios, and the sole recreation
in the intervals of their work was a visit to another studio. The whole
of the day was devoted to painting; when the picture was complete it
went to the art union; and the hours of tediousness were overcome with
the assistance of a little intrigue. Hildebrandt possessed the nucleus
of a collection of beetles. Lessing, the hunter, collected pipes and
antlers, and only felt himself at home in the little room which he
occupied with Sohn when it assumed the appearance of a gamekeeper's
cottage. Convinced that politics were the ruin of character, they
allowed no questions of the day to interfere with the calmness of their
artistic life. Few of them ever read a newspaper. In the year of
revolution, 1830, their sole interest in the events around them was
concentrated in the fear that a war might disturb their idyllic life.
The end of the day's work saw them in summer-time bent on a pilgrimage
to the Stockkämpchen, to refresh themselves with a cup of buttermilk, to
play at bowls, or to enjoy a race among the cabbage patches of the
garden. In winter they made a point of meeting at seven o'clock every
Saturday night at the inn for a literary reading. Each taking his part
they recited the dramas of Tieck, of Calderon, and Lopez; or Uechtritz
read extracts from German history, the Crusades, the period of the
emperors, the riots of the Hussites. Every Sunday night there met at
Schadow's a very distinguished intellectual circle, consisting of Judge
Immermann (the reformer of the stage at Düsseldorf), Felix Mendelssohn
the composer, Kortum, author of the _Jobsiade_, and Assessor von
Uechtritz, with their ladies. But the great gala-days were the
theatrical performances which took place twice a week. Under the
leadership of Immermann the theatre had become the place whence the
young painters gathered their liveliest suggestions. Some of them went
even so far as to take part in amateur performances, conducted by
Immermann, and given in Schadow's house, under the auspices of the whole
of the distinguished society. And thus the pictures of this school were
not conceived under the influence of life, but of the theatre. The
Düsseldorf artists were youths whose productions were not rooted in
life, but in reading and culture; youths who always moved in good
society, and who had passed through the great ordeals of life, but only
on "the boards representing the universe."
_Theodor Hildebrandt_ became the Shakespeare of Düsseldorf. The
translation of the works of the English poet by Schlegel had been
published some time earlier, and Immermann, in Düsseldorf, had been the
first to offer Shakespeare a home on the German stage. The performances
of his tragedies were regarded as red-letter days. During the three
years of Immermann's leadership (1834-37), _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _King
John_, _King Lear_, _The Merchant of Venice_, _Romeo and Juliet_,
_Othello_, and _Julius Cæsar_ were performed on fifteen occasions in
all.[1] To give the titles of these plays is at once to characterise the
subject-matter of Hildebrandt's paintings. He very often had a hand in
the staging of the plays, and is said to have shown a remarkable
histrionic talent in the performances at Schadow's. He rarely went to
other poets for his inspiration, as in his "Pictures from Faust" and his
"Beware of the Water Nymph," where he honoured Goethe, and in his
"Brigands," where he may have been inspired by one of the many
variations on _Rinaldo Rinaldini_ that flooded the market at the time,
or perhaps also by Byron, whose influence was very marked on the
Düsseldorf school.
Goethe's _Frauengestalten_, more especially the Leonoras, were
reproduced in oils by old father _Sohn_. _Eduard Steinbruck_ painted
Genevièves, Red Riding Hoods, Elves, and Undines, after Tieck and
Fouqué; _H. Stilke's_ "Pictures from the Crusades" introduced Walter
Scott to the German public. Uhland's first ballads had brought into
fashion the damsels who from the ramparts of their castles wave a sad
farewell to the lonely shepherds; the ancestral tombs, in which the last
knight of his race takes his everlasting rest; the lists, where
melancholy heroes stab themselves. His _Love-song of the Shepherd to the
Shepherdess_--
"Und halt ich dich in den Armen
Auf freien Bergeshöhn,
Wir sehn in die weiten Lande
Und werden doch nicht gesehn,"
gave Bendemann the motive for his picture of the same name. Young
Lessing had to thank Uhland for the subject of his first success, "The
Sorrowing Royal Pair," which at one bound made his name one of the most
honoured in German art.
"Wohl sah ich die Eltern beide
Ohne der Kronen Licht
Im schwarzen Trauerkleide,
Die Jungfrau sah ich nicht."
After Bürger he painted a Leonora--of course in so-called mediæval
costume, in order "to avoid the unpicturesque attire in fashion during
the Seven Years' War"; and at the same time as Hildebrandt, "A Mourning
Brigand," who, in the full light of the evening sun, sits brooding on a
rock over the depravity of the world. That all of them were frantically
enthusiastic for the Hohenstaufens is due to the publication of Von
Rainer's History in 1823, which took a greater hold of the public than
did Schiller's _History of the Thirty Years' War_, and inspired numerous
dramas.
[Illustration: HILDEBRANDT. THE SONS OF EDWARD.]
[Illustration: STEINBRUCK. ELVES.]
Even the idyllic and touching scenes from the Old Testament and the
Hebrew elegies are easily traced back to theatrical inspirations. With
the exception of the frescoes of the Casa Bartholdy, the subjects of
which were selected with an eye to the religious belief of their
purchaser, the Nazarenes found all the subject-matter they wanted in the
New Testament. The Passion of Our Lord was unable to inspire the
Düsseldorf school. As compared to the few Christian paintings by W.
Schadow, and the dreamy Madonnas of Deger, Ittenbach, and little
Perugino Mintrop, we find a far greater number of scenes from the Old
Testament, which at the time gave birth to numerous dramas. Hübner,
always inclined to idyllic and melancholy scenes, painted Ruth and Boaz,
his first great picture, which established his reputation. After
Klingemann had utilised the whole life of Moses by turning it into a
theatrically effective sequence, Christian Koehler scored a success with
his "Moses hidden in the Bulrushes" and his "Finding of Moses," and
then, incited by Raupach's "Semiramis," abandoned his biblical heroines
for Oriental ones. Theodor Hildebrandt took Tieck's "Judith" as an
inspiration for his picture of this Jewish heroine. Kehren's "Joseph
reveals Himself to his Brethren" was begun after the opera _Joseph in
Egypt_ had been performed at Düsseldorf. Bendemann, in 1832, played his
trump card with his "Lament of the Jews," now in the Cologne Museum,
after Byron had made his propaganda, suggested by the sad lives of the
children of Israel, and Friedrich von Uechtritz had caused his drama,
_The Babylonians in Jerusalem_, to be performed, ending as it does with
the sending of the Jews into captivity in Babylon--
"Wein' über die die weinen fern in Babel,
Ihr Tempel brach, ihr Land ward, ach! zur Fabel!
Wein'! es erstart der heil 'gen Harfe Ton,
Im Haus Jehovas haust der Spötter Hohn."
And his oil-paintings of a later date, "Jeremiah on the Ruins of
Jerusalem" (1834), now in the German Emperor's collection, and the
"Sending of the Jews into Captivity in Babylon" (1872), in the Berlin
National Gallery, were variations on the same theme.
The productions of the Düsseldorf school were thus in perfect harmony
with the programme issued by Püttmann in his book. Pictorial
representations may be taken from two ranges, History or Poetry; the
painter may choose an historical fact as a subject for representation,
or reproduce in visible form the rhythmically shaped fancy of a
stranger. History shows him figures full of expression, and even a less
powerful artist will find it possible to make a true copy of them. If
the painter works from poems his representations are sure to meet with
approval, as they render the beautiful and the attractive in visible
shape. "But the greatest success lies in store for those works which
depict in harmony with the mood of the times historical or poetical
performances which express human suffering in its various stages, from
homely and everyday griefs to the silent sorrow of irretrievable
catastrophe."
[Illustration: SOHN. THE TWO LEONORAS.]
Thus the scale of sorrow from sad melancholy to painful suffering became
the speciality of the Düsseldorf school. At the foot of the scale we
find the pictures which "represent the common, yet keen sorrow of
parents at the death or the sad future of their children." Lessing's
"Royal Pair" mourn the death of their daughter; Hagar grieves because
she is forced to abandon her son Ishmael in the desert; Genoveva,
because the roe is so long in coming to the rescue. The mortal grief of
love is represented by Lessing's "Leonora"; grief of love at separation
by Sohn's and Hildebrandt's pictures of "Romeo and Juliet." Even the
murderers of the "Sons of Edward" mourn at their crime when they see the
children--
"Girdling one another
Within their innocent alabaster arms:
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
Which in their summer beauty kissed each other."
Job grieves at the downfall of his house; Hübner's "Ruth," because her
weeping mother-in-law entreats her to depart; Stilke's "Pilgrim in the
Desert," because his horse has died of thirst; Plüddeman's "Columbus,"
because he knows himself to be unworthy of the grace of God which
enabled him to discover America; Kiederich's "Charles V", because he has
retired too early to his monastery, and is plagued by the ticking of
his watch. The Hohenstaufens, of course, appealed more to the pity of
the public: the misfortunes of the beautiful Enzin, of Manfred and
Conrad, gave birth to a sentiment of profoundest sadness. Even brigands
mourn at the depravity of the world. The age had come to despise its own
Philistine situation so deeply that it looked up to the brigands, the
adversaries of civil order, as to representatives of justice. All
depravity, it was said, originated with the public functionaries, and to
the noble brigands was allotted the task of revolutionising existing
things. Their ally in this was to be the poacher. At a time when a
revision of the game-laws was the sole timid wish the people ventured to
lay before its princes, it was only logical that the poacher should be
looked upon as the victim of injustice, as the rescuer of the small man
from the claws of feudal despotism. The numerous pictures that glorify
him, as he falls weltering in his blood beneath the guns of the
gamekeepers, make pendants to Raupach's "Smugglers," and to the rest of
the highly esteemed literature which turned the life of the poacher into
sentimental dramas or novels.
[Illustration: LESSING. THE SORROWING ROYAL PAIR.]
Fortunately we, in our days, find great difficulty in entering into the
spirit which gave birth to these productions. A world lies between it
and the present, just as between the Germany of to-day and the Germany
of 1830. Men of the younger generation, who were still at school when
Bismarck spoke his word of blood and iron, can hardly understand how
this modern, realistic Germany can have been, two generations ago, a
sentimental Germany. Now the significance of the Düsseldorf school in
the history of civilisation lies in the fact that they are the real
representatives of that age of sentimentality. A generation that melted
away in tearful dreamings must needs enthusiastically recognise its own
flesh and blood in those knights and damsels, squires and pages, monks
and nuns, who, infinitely amorous or infinitely religious, were all
infinitely sentimental; and things that now only evoke a smile or a
shrug must needs have moved them to tears. Look where you will, you meet
the same world. It hung on the walls, it displayed itself in engravings,
lithographs, and coloured prints; if one lay down for a siesta, one
found a lovelorn knight and damsel or a praying nun stitched on the
cushion; if one put one's foot on a carpet, one trod upon noble
hunting-dames on horseback, falcon on wrist; one carried them in one's
pockets on cigar-cases and handkerchiefs; the traveller and the cheap
tripper took them abroad on their knapsacks.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
BENDEMANN. THE LAMENT OF THE JEWS.]
Technically, the pictures of this school were not without their merits.
"The greatness of Michael Angelo" may not have been Bendemann's, and
Sohn's carnations are far removed from "the melting colouring of
Titian." But as opposed to the one-sidedness to which fresco painting at
Munich was given up, the encouragement of oil-painting at Düsseldorf
must be looked upon as praiseworthy. These painters were the first in
Germany to try again to learn how to paint in oils. The extreme artistic
clumsiness that had reigned under Cornelius was followed by a period in
which, under Schadow, earnest studies and serious work were devoted to
an effort again to master a technical medium. Their friendly emulation
led to surprising progress, which assured to the Düsseldorf school a
technical superiority over all the other German schools of the period.
[Illustration: SOHN. THE RAPE OF HYLAS.]
If, nevertheless, their pictures have not maintained their position as
vital works of art, it is due to the fact that they were produced under
the pressure of that mechanical idealism which makes all their
productions so utterly unattractive to us. The ideal "line of beauty"
has turned the figures into bloodless shadows and washed-out theatrical
forms. As philosophy was to Cornelius, so to the Düsseldorfers was
poetry their Noah's Ark. The interest aroused by the poet was their
ally; the breath of the wind that set their boat afloat; the general
poetical tendency made up for the deficiency in artistic interest. Had
it not been for the support of the poets, their sugary, insipid figures
would have from the beginning been unable to hold their own. For after
having been retouched by "Idealism," nothing vital remained in those
romantic kings, fantastic knights, Jews, and stage princesses; nothing
particular and characteristic in their generalisation, nothing generally
human. With them a king is always an heroic prince in black harness, a
woolly beard, and a scarlet cloak. A queen is represented as proud and
dark, or tender and fair-haired. In the much-beloved "couples" from
poems, characterisation goes no further than general contrasts: the
_brunette_ in red attire with white sleeves; the tender _blonde_ with
the complementary garment of pale violet; the one with luxurious
_embonpoint_, the other languidly slender--men brown, women white,
youths rosy. Knights wear silvery helmets with or without plumes; now
with open, now with shut visor; sometimes they sit on poetic palfreys,
now of slender, now of sturdy build. The only impressions they are
subject to may be interpreted with the assistance of the plaster bust:
honour, fidelity, love. And as sentiment and heroism are national
virtues of the Germans, they are bound to show sentimental expression
whilst killing their adversaries. Even the brigands are generalised lay
figures. The Düsseldorf ideal of beauty aimed at a certain tender,
vaguely graceful swing of outline that anxiously avoided all manly and
strong, energetic and characteristic expression, all that could remind
one of nature. They rejected Leonardo da Vinci's advice, to tug at the
nipple of Mother Nature, but looked upon her merely as their aunt; and
for this, despised Nature took her revenge by making their figures
shapeless and phantom-like. And as their "dread of painted stupidities"
did not once bring them to make bold mistakes, we can neither praise nor
censure their pictures, cannot enjoy them or take offence at them, but
look at them _sine ira et studio_, with a lukewarm feeling of utter
indifference.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] As is still the case in most of the German theatres, the
programme changed every night. Two or three consecutive performances
of one play remain a rarity.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LEGACY OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM
It was reserved for two younger men to reach the aim that hovered in the
far distance before Cornelius and the Düsseldorfians. And, by one of
fortune's remarkable freaks, the greatest German monumental painter of
the nineteenth century came from the Düsseldorf, the greatest
Romanticist from the Munich school.
_Alfred Rethel_ was twenty-four years old when he received the
commission to paint the frescoes in the _Kaisersaal_ at Aachen, and had
previously worked in the Düsseldorf Academy, and then with Veit at
Frankfort. But the pictures are suggestive neither of his Düsseldorfian
nor of his Nazarene training. The deeds of Charlemagne, the ancestor of
the German Imperial dynasties, are nobly, and, at the same time,
vigorously embodied in them. Rethel had studied the harsh strength of
his Albrecht Dürer, but only as a kindred spirit studies his kin.
Neither Cornelius nor Schnorr has depicted the old German heroic might
and the vanished imperial grandeur, the great past, the iron Middle
Ages, with such notable traits. How plain in his heroic greatness stands
the mighty conqueror of the Saxons by the overthrown pagan idols; how
simply and majestically does he march into conquered Pavia. What an
inexorable and irresistible warrior he seems, as he rages amongst the
Moors who flock round the cars of their idols; and with what grave
phantom dignity does he gaze in death upon the young Emperor Otto, who
has forced his way into his vault, and kneels trembling before the
lifeless frame of his great forefather. There is no vestige of pose,
nothing superfluous; everywhere simplicity, compression, lucidity. Only
what is necessary is inscribed here, in the lapidary style. No
meaningless phrase interrupts his narrative; the inner meaning is never
sacrificed to any external beauty of line; his forms like his thoughts
are severe and precise. He draws with a sure hand in crisp lines, like a
writer who aims at the utmost brevity and so lays especial emphasis on
his sentences and words. The self-revelation in these pictures is
admirable--the illuminating clearness with which they tell what they
have to say without the aid of any commentator, the directness with
which they present in an artistic aspect the substance to be given. And
with this substance the painting corresponds.
It is to be deplored that Rethel himself could carry out in colour only
four of his designs, and that the completion of the rest was entrusted
to the painter Kehren, who spoilt by his effort after charm of colour
the collective impression of the series. The pictures painted by Rethel
himself are, in the simplicity of their colouring, in remarkable
accordance with the powerful style of his drawing. Rethel's _painting_
has something stern and grey, bare and sombre. He belongs to the
stylists whose implement is rather charcoal than the brush; but he had,
although no colourist, a free command of colour, and never committed any
fault of taste, but with a remarkably sure instinct used colour in the
mass, simply, but yet with significant effect. He might have been the
man to create a monumental German art. A tragic destiny! Heinrich von
Kleist, the greatest German poet of the post-classical age, who was
chosen for so high a vocation, the creation of a new dramatic style,
shot himself; and the giant, Alfred Rethel, was to end in madness.
Barely forty years old was he when he walked by the warder's side in the
courtyard at Düsseldorf, picking up flint-stones, a poor, simple madman.
Only two series of designs ensure, apart from the frescoes at Aix, the
immortality of his name: "Hannibal's Passage over the Alps," and the
"Dance of Death." As a draughtsman, just as a painter of frescoes, he is
the same Titan, sounds the same stern, manly note.
Here the heroic hosts of the Carthaginians stand anxious, yet resolved,
at the foot of the grim Alpine pass; steep, beetling cliffs, precipice,
ice and snow, tower before them. Now the climb begins, and the struggle
with the fierce, barbaric folk of the mountains, who swing themselves on
leaping-pole like wild animals over the gaping crevices in the ice.
Yonder are men, horses, an elephant, hurled into the abyss; some have
spitted themselves on jagged branches of trees in their fall, others
twine themselves together in horrible coils; at last the most advanced
have reached the heights, and the heroic figure of the commander points
out proudly to them, as they breathe once more, the plains of Italy.
Over his second work there broods the shadow of that mental darkness
which was to surround him. When, in the year 1848, the political storm
burst over the soil of Europe, Rethel's fantasy reaped a rich harvest.
He drew his "Dance of Death," represented Death the Leveller, who drives
poor fools behind the barricades. The ghostly and spectral, that horror
of death that breaks in upon us in the midst of life, had been the
propensity of German art since Dürer and Holbein. Like them, Rethel
loved the world of the diabolical, and similarly chose for his
embodiment of it the sturdy, simple contours of the old German wood
engravings. Death as the hero of revolution makes a commencement. There
he rides as the town-executioner, a cigar between his lips, his scythe
in his hand. He sits shambling in the saddle, his smock and tall boots
dangle on his bony figure. Dressed like a charlatan, he excites the
people before the tavern against the rulers, that he may earn his
harvest at the barricade. He himself stands firm and proud, like a
general on the field of battle, the flag in his hand, and the bullets of
the soldiers whistling harmlessly through his bony ribs. But the
artisans who follow him are not invulnerable as he is; the grape-shot
sweeps them down off the barricade. The contest is over; triumphant,
with a wreath of bay round his skull, mocking venom in his glance, Death
rides with his banner unfurled across the barricade, where the dying
writhe in their gaunt death-struggle, and children bewail their fallen
fathers. The plate, "Death as the Assassin," takes up the story of the
outbreak of cholera at a masked ball in Paris. In terrified haste the
dancers and musicians leave the hall. Only one mummy-like spectre, the
Cholera himself, a shape of horror, keeps his ground, as though turned
to stone, and holds the triumphant scourge like a sceptre in his bony
hand. Death, in a domino, with two bones for a fiddle, plays a call to
the dance; and beneath the awful sounds of his tune the people,
stretched on the ground, in sick convulsions, grinning with distorted
features, behind their jesters' masks, twist and turn.
[Illustration: RETHEL. THE EMPEROR OTTO AT THE TOMB OF CHARLEMAGNE.]
There is something of Th. A. Hofmann's wild fantasy of the ague-fit in
this picture,--something morbid, satanic, that suggests Félicien Rops;
yet, at the same time, something so pithy and virile, and in form so
compressed, well-balanced, and correct, that it brings the old Germans,
too, to our recollection. And the reconciliation with which the series
ends is pathetic. In the high steeple, lit by the rays of the setting
sun, the grey old bellringer, his worn hands clasped in prayer, has
fallen quietly asleep in his armchair. A calm peace rests upon his good,
old, devout countenance. The thin hands, with their marks and furrows,
tell a long tale of hard work, sorrow, and longing for rest. And the
weary veteran has made a pilgrimage for the health of his poor soul, as
prove the pilgrim's hat and staff by the wall; and now Death has really
come, the well-known presence indeed, but this time with no grin of
mockery, rather in profound pity. In his ingenious manner of giving an
expression of mockery, cold indifference, or compassion to the head of
the skeleton, Rethel stands on a level with Holbein. To the old ringer,
Death, who before had grinned so diabolically, is a gentle and trusted
friend. Quietly and pensively he performs the task that the old man has
done so often when he attended the departure of some pilgrim of earth
with the solemn notes of his bell. Rethel himself had still to drag
through many years in an obscure night of the spirit before for him,
too, Death, as the friend, rang the knell.
[Illustration: RETHEL. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE PAGAN IDOLS.]
And now for him who was the most admirable of them all, Lady Adventure's
true knight.
"Master _Schwind_, you are a genius and a Romanticist." This stereotyped
compliment was paid by King Ludwig to the painter on each occasion that,
without buying anything of him, he visited his studio. And with equal
regularity Schwind, when he had sat down again at his easel, after the
royal visit, to smoke his pipe, is said to have muttered something
extremely disloyal. In this trait the whole Schwind is already
revealed,--free from all ambition, every inch an artist.
W. H. Riehl has described a series of such episodes, which one must know
in order to understand Schwind, that highly gifted child of nature, who
separates himself from the group of philosophical, "meditative" artists
of his age, both as an individual and as an audacious, original genius
of effervescent wit.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
RETHEL. HANNIBAL'S PASSAGE OVER THE ALPS.]
When an æsthetic once hailed him as "the creator of an original, German
kind of ideal, romantic art," Schwind repeated very slowly, weighing
each word: "'An original, German kind of ideal, romantic art.' My dear
sir, to me there are only two kinds of pictures, the sold and the
unsold; and to me the sold are always the best. Those are my entire
æsthetics." Or a noble amateur comes to him with the request that he
would take him just for a few days into his school, and instruct him
especially in his masterly art of drawing in pencil. Whereupon Schwind:
"It does not require a day for that, my dear Baron; I can tell you in
three minutes how I do it, I can give you all the desired information at
once. Here lies my paper,--kindly remark it, I buy it of Bullinger, 6
Residenz Strasse; these are my pencils, A. W. Faber's, I get them from
Andreas Kaut, 10 Kaufinger Strasse; from the same firm I have this
indiarubber too, but I very seldom use it, so that I use this penknife
all the more, to sharpen the pencils; it's from Tresch, 10 Dienersgasse,
and very good value. Now, I have all these things lying together on the
table, and a few thoughts in my head as well; then I sit down here and
begin to draw. And now you know all that I can tell you." Again he asks
"to be decorated with an order," because he "is ashamed to mix in such a
naked condition with his bestarred confrères," and after the bestowal
of the desired decoration he says: "I wore it only once, at the last New
Year's levée, but I vowed at the same time that six horses should not
drag me there again. Before, there was at any rate a beautiful queen
there, and then the court ladies laughed at one; but amongst men only,
the stupidity of it is not to be endured." When he grumbles over
commissions which have been given to others, and adds good-temperedly,
"Indeed, I'm an envious fellow"; when he paints the most delicate
pictures and then growls, "What am I to do with the things, if nobody
buys them?" when he indulges in outbursts of wrath, and a minute later
has forgotten again the abusive words which the others spitefully bring
up against him years afterwards,--then here, too, his happy humour
forces its way everywhere, that divine naïveté which forms the soul of
his and of all true art.
[Illustration: RETHEL. DEATH AT THE MASKED BALL.]
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
RETHEL. DEATH THE FRIEND OF MAN.]
Schwind remains a personality by himself--the last of the Romanticists,
and one of the most amiable manifestations in German art. He was free
from the malady of that sham Romanticism which sought the salvation of
art in the resurrection of the Middle Ages, misunderstood, and grasped
sentimentally, and as it were by stencil. He was spiritually permeated
by that which had given Romanticism the capacity to exist: the sense of
that forgotten and imperishable world of beauty which it has again
discovered. The others sought for the "blue flower," Schwind found it;
resuscitated in all its faëry beauty that "fair night of enchantment
which holds the mind captive." He incorporated the romantic idea in
painting as Weber did in music, and his works, like the _Freischütz_,
will live for ever. Many a man listened to him holding forth upon
water-nymphs, gnomes, and tricksy kobolds, as of beings of whose
existence he appeared to have no doubt whatever. On one occasion, while
out walking near Eisenach in the Annathal, a friend laughingly observed
to him that the landscape really looked as if gnomes had made the
pathway and had had their dwellings there. "Don't you believe it was so?
_I_ believe it," answered Schwind in all seriousness. He _lived_ in the
world of legend and fairy-tale. If ever a fairy stood beside the cradle
of a mortal man, assuredly there was one standing by Schwind's; and all
his life long he believed in her and raved about her. Born in the land
where Neidhart of Neuenthal had sung and the Parson of the Kahlenberg
had dwelt, to his eyes Germany was overshadowed with ancient Teutonic
oaks: for him, elves hovered about watersprings and streams, their white
robes trailing behind them through the dewy grass; a race of gnomes held
their habitation on the mountain heights, and water-nymphs bathed in
every pool. In him part of the Middle Ages came back to life, not in
livid, corpse-like pallor, but fanned by the revivifying breath of the
present day.
For that is what is noteworthy about Schwind; he is a Romanticist, yet
at the same time a genuine, modern child of Vienna. There are three
things in each of which Vienna stands supreme: hers are the fairest
women, the sweetest songs, and the most beautiful waltzes. The
atmosphere of Vienna sends forth a soft and sensual breath which
encircles us as though with women's arms; songs and dances slumber in
the air, waiting only for a call to be awakened. Vienna is a place for
enjoyment rather than for work, for pensive dreaming rather than for
sober wakefulness of mind. Moritz Schwind was a child of this city of
beautiful women, songs, and dances, as may be observed in the feminine
nature of his art, in its melody and rhythm: in music, indeed, it had
its source. In song-singing, bell-ringing Vienna it was difficult for
him to guess in what direction his talents lay; but all his life long he
kept an open eye for the charms of beautiful womanhood. No artist of
that time has created lovelier forms of women, beings with so great a
charm of maidenly freshness and modest grace. Instead of the goddesses,
heroines, and nun-like female saints, whose appearance dated from the
Italy of the Cinquecento, Schwind depicted modern feminine charm. The
group of ladies in "Ritter Kurt" is, even to the movement of their
gloved fingers, graceful in the modern sense. He was a painter of
love--a breath of Walter von der Vogelweide's ideal perfection of
womanhood pervades his pictures.
"Durchsüsset und geblümet sind die reinen Frauen,
Es ward nie nichts so Wonnigliches anzuschauen,
In Lüften, auf Erden, noch in allen grünen Auen."
Schwind, too, painted frescoes, and in them he is very unequal. All his
life long he complained of the lack of important commissions; it was
fortunate for him that he did not get more of them. Such a painter as he
can execute no orders but his own,--just as good poems do not come to
order. A long list of wall paintings--the Tieck room and the
figure-frieze in the Habsburg Hall of the new palace at Munich, the
frescoes in the Kunsthall and in the Hall of Assembly of the Upper House
at Karlsruhe, those in the Castle of Hohenschwangau, even the theatre
pieces in the loggia and in the foyer of the Vienna Opera House--could
be easily struck out of Schwind's work, without detriment to his
reputation. Only when the subject permitted him to strike a simple note
of fairy music was he charming even in his wall-paintings, and therefore
those which depict scenes from the life of St. Elizabeth in the
Wartburg are rightly the most celebrated. Like Rethel in the field of
the heroic, so Schwind in that of romantic legend reached the goal which
the former kept before his eyes, for the revivifying of the time when
there was an enthusiasm for fresco painting. His paintings are poor in
colour, motley, magic-lantern views in the style of the heraldically
treated figures seen in the frescoes and stained glass of the Romanesque
and early Gothic Middle Ages, and yet in every line as delightful as the
man himself. Nowhere do we find glaring contrasts, nowhere any violent
agitation in the expression of the faces. It is by the avoidance of all
landscape accessories, and by a hardly noticeable change in the simple
plant-ornamentation in the background, that the events represented are
made to lose touch with actual reality. In the first picture,
bright-hued birds flit here and there among the rose-branches forming
the decorative work; in that which treats of St. Elizabeth's expulsion,
the Wartburg rises in the background, while little singing angels are
perched upon the boughs of the bare winter-stripped trees that overlook
the miserable cell in which St. Elizabeth dies. A touch of the
true-heartedness of the ancient Teuton, a breath of peacefulness,
permeates Schwind's Wartburg pictures like the waft of an angel's wings.
[Illustration: MORITZ SCHWIND. _Graphische Künste._]
Schwind, like Rethel, is numbered among the few artists of that period
who were able to preserve their absolute simplicity against the great
painters of Italy. "I went into the Sistine Chapel," he says of his
journey to Rome, "gazed upon Michael Angelo's work, and sauntered back
home to work at my 'Ritter Kurt.' I take the greatest possible pleasure
in my present picture, although the subject is absolutely crazy. I love
to paint trees and rocks and old walls, and I have put plenty of them
into it, besides a fellow on horseback and in full armour. What does it
matter? _One must work according to one's natural capacity. Even at the
time when I was studying at Munich I came to the conclusion that that of
which the mind of itself takes hold, and that which takes hold of it, is
the one only right thing for every man who has a vocation. Art consists
of this unconscious taking hold and being taken hold of. Deus in nobis._
And therefore the young artist will do well to be careful in visiting
the museums. You go to the galleries where the works of the great
masters are to be seen. There you see, all at once and all together in
confusion, works of every school and of every era. It is extremely
likely that you are overwhelmed by the mass, and beauties of every kind,
belonging to tendencies and epochs altogether diverse, shake the ground
under your budding vocation, and like fifty various climates influencing
a single plant, arrest a growth which is possible only in one, and that
a favourable one. _The imitation of the Italians in especial can as a
rule have only the effect of estranging us from our own individuality_,
a fact which was once again fully borne in upon me when I saw Overbeck's
new altar-piece in the Cathedral of Cologne. It may sound severe and
uncalled-for from me, but _every man who has forgotten his mother-tongue
is tottering on his feet. The imitation of foreigners is the dangerous
blind alley into which our art has betaken itself_. When I exhibited
'Ritter Kurt' people said, 'It is Old German,' and forthwith it stood
condemned, as if that were a disgrace, and as if one should not rather
have saluted the fact with joy, as the right thing for us Germans. The
art of painting which I follow is the German, and glass-painting must be
taken as its foundation."
[Illustration: SCHWIND. FROM THE WARTBURG FRESCOES.]
In Schwind one might imagine an old German master of the race of
Albrecht Altdorfer come to life again. In the small, simple pictures of
landscape and fairy-tale, which Count Schack has collected in his
private gallery for the quiet and devout enjoyment of thousands, he has
given us his best work as a painter.
Yet even _his_ pictures have the failings of his time. Compared with
Dürer, he seems like a gifted amateur; there are manifold empty, dead
spaces to be observed among his figures; their action is at times
misconceived and puppet-like; and his sense of colour was always
limited. One may be permitted to look forward to some master, at the
head of a coming epoch in art, who shall combine with Schwind's German
fairy imagination the sensuous, dashing colour-elf that possessed
Boecklin. There might a school of art arise, to follow for the future
the path which Franz Stuck has struck out. As to technique, Schwind was
a child of the cartoon era; as regards tenderness of feeling, he is a
modern. It is difficult to persuade a non-German of Schwind's greatness,
in presence of the _pictures_; but when they are reduced to
black-and-white they appeal to every one. The heliogravure enables one
to imagine what the original does not show; it incites the soul to
further poetic creation, it announces what Schwind would be were he
alive to-day. An elfland kingdom of enchantment, full of genuine poetry
and beauty, opens out before us; a fairy garden, where the "blue flower"
pours forth the whole of its sense-benumbing perfume. Count von
Gleichen; the boy's miraculous horn; the mountain spirit Rübezahl,
wandering along through the wild mountain forest; the hermits; the
elves' dance; the erlking; the knight and the water nymph,--they are
flooded with all the enchantment of Romanticism, they possess deep
feeling without mawkishness, the old-German note of fairy legend and
Hans Memlinc's childlike simplicity, yet at the same time the life of
the present day, full of feeling and rich in delicate shades. How strong
and brave are the men; how tender, noble, and charming the women! What a
modest, maidenly art it is! just as its master was an innocent,
harmless, and joyous being.
[Illustration: SCHWIND. FROM THE WARTBURG FRESCOES.]
His works, in comparison with those of his contemporaries, who were
devising systems by means of which art should be brought back to the
classical, bear the stamp of naïve creations in which no hypocrisy, no
decorative nothingness finds expression. As against the erudite
treatises of the Cornelius school, they preached for the first time the
doctrine, that in works of art what is important is not the quantity of
learning displayed therein, but the quality of the feeling exhibited.
With all their inequalities, all their incorrectness, all their weak
points, they are inspired, sung, dreamed, and not put together in cold
blood according to recipes: in them is the pulsation of a human heart, a
tender human heart full of delicate feeling. This it is which
constitutes his magical attraction to-day, which makes him the firm bond
of connection between the moderns. He was no imitator, no soulless
calligraphist performing laborious school exercises after the manner of
the old masters; he spoke the language of his time.
He was one of the first who at that time laid aside the prejudice
against modern costume, and in his "Symphony" turned to artistic
account, in one fantastic whole, even Franz Lachner's frockcoat and
Fräulein Hetzenecker's modern society toilette. "If you may paint a man
hidden in an iron stove--what is called a knight in armour--you may
still more permissibly paint a man in a frockcoat. In general, one can
paint what one will, provided always that one wills what one can." And
it was only by means of this present-day temper that Romanticism could
find so full-toned an expression in his works. Only because he was truly
a citizen of the present day and felt its blood beating in his veins,
could he feel the congenial elements of the past. To him the old-time
legends were no antiquarian, erudite, pedantic lumber; they were a part
of himself, and he interpreted them in more childlike simplicity of
manner and with more delicate feeling than any artist of former times,
because he observed them with the eye of the present age, with an eye
made keen with longing. Just as in his "Wedding Journey" he raised all
reality into the poetry of purest romance, so is his Romanticism
saturated with a sense of reality charged with memories of home. Out of
his fairy-tale pictures is breathed a charming fragrance of the
long-vanished days of earth's first springtide, and yet for that very
reason a breath of the most modern Décadence. He is distinguished from
Marées and Burne-Jones, from Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau, by a
very unmodern attribute--he is bursting with health. He is still naïvely
childlike, free from that elegiac melancholy, that temper of weary
resignation, which the end of the nineteenth century first brought into
the world.
[Illustration: SCHWIND. WIELAND THE SMITH.]
[Illustration: _Neft, Helio._
SCHWIND. FROM THE STORY OF THE SEVEN RAVENS.]
Yet Schwind was one of the first to feel and give expression to that
modern sense of longing desire which turns back from a nervous,
colourless age, from the prosiness of everyday life, towards a vanished
Saturnian era, when man still lived at peace and undisturbed in happy
union with nature. For even this proclaims him our contemporary, that
the temper of his pictures develops itself from the landscape. A
landscape painter through and through--almost in Boecklin's sense,
who transformed the temper of Nature into the contemplation of living
beings--he spoke of the rest and peace of German forests, of that hour
of summer's night when no wind blows, no leaflet moves, when to the
solitary wanderer in the woods the mists rising from the meadows are
transformed into white veils of the elves, and the gold-rimmed waves of
the sea into the yellow hair of mermaids frolicking in the moonlight to
the magic notes of their golden harps. He felt and loved his landscapes
rather than studied them, yet they are saturated with an entirely modern
sentiment for Nature. No German, at that time, had caught and understood
the interweaving of the forest boughs with such intimate familiarity.
The fresh sunshine of the morning breaks through the light green of the
young beeches, and leaps from bough to bough, transforming the
glittering dewdrops into diamonds, and the beetle, creeping comfortably
over the soft moss, into gold and precious stones. "_Da gehet leise nach
seiner Weise der liebe Herrgott durch den Wald_" ("The dear God holy, He
passeth slowly, as His wont is, through the wood"). With a few boldly
drawn lines and light colours we are transported into the midst of the
forest world, and all around us opening buds and verdurous green, sweet
scents, and the murmur of leaves. "When one has set one's love and joy
on a beautiful tree so fully," he said to Ludwig Richter, "one depicts
all one's love and joy with it, and then the tree looks quite different
from an ass's fine daub of what he thinks it should be."
[Illustration: _Albert, Helio._
SCHWIND. A HERMIT LEADING HORSES TO A POOL.]
Only so intimate a connection with Nature could enable Schwind to
imagine landscapes, which in their virginal old-world mood form at once
the echo of the figures and of their actions. These green meadows and
flower-besprent hills, these gloomy wooded slopes, these smooth valleys
through which glittering waters glide murmuring along, are fit and
suitable dwelling-places for the delicate fabulous beings of the
flower-entwined old fairy legends. Schwind _lived_ with Nature. He gave
the name of Tanneck (Fir-tree Corner) to the little country house which
he built for himself on the Starnberger See, and the fresh scent of
pinewood, the rustling sound of German forests, pour forth from his
pictures. Like young Siegfried, he understood the language of birds, and
went eavesdropping to hear what the pine trees whispered to one another.
[Illustration: SCHWIND. THE WEDDING JOURNEY.]
Still freer, more spontaneous, and lighter than in his oil paintings was
his touch in his water-colours, in which the colour is only breathed
over the forms like a delicate vapour; and quite especially in his
illustrations--so far as the word may be employed with respect to him,
for he never illustrated, he gave shape to his own thoughts, and that
only which moved his innermost being he brought fully formed before
one's eye. The _Bilderbogen_ and the _Fliegende Blätter_ of Munich
obtained from him witty and humorous inventions, such as "The Almond
Tree," "Puss in Boots," "The Peasant and the Donkey," "Herr Winter," and
"The Acrobat Games." His fairest legacy consists of three cyclic works:
"Cinderella," "The Seven Ravens," and "The Beautiful Melusina"; wherein
he glorified with praise the beauty and fidelity of women, and their
capacity for self-sacrifice. "Cinderella," which appeared in 1855, at
the Munich Exhibition, is a fairy-tale, than which poet has seldom,
indeed, narrated a chaster, tenderer, or more fragrant. In 1858 followed
the touching story of the good sister who releases her brothers by dint
of unspeakable suffering and endurance, to-day the priceless pearl among
the gems of the Weimar collection. For twenty years, as he said, the
work had been in his thoughts. So far back as in 1844 he wrote to
Genelli: "I believe that it will give something which may please people
who have a sense for love and faithfulness, and for a touch of the power
of enchantment." When an acquaintance of his gazed upon it with dismay,
and ingenuously asked for whom the thing was intended, and whither it
was to go, Schwind turned his penetrating, flashing little eyes upon
him, and then said: "Do you know, I painted that for myself; it is the
dream of my life; no one shall buy it; some day I shall give it to a
friend." It is an imperishable work, full of grace, modesty, and charm.
Schwind takes the story up at the fateful moment when the lonely maiden,
who is determined to release her enchanted brothers by assiduous
spinning and constant silence, is discovered by a hunting party. There,
amid the enchantment of the forest solitude, she sits in the hollow of a
tree and spins away at the seven shirts, to free her seven brothers.
Thus the king's son catches sight of her. The fire of love kindles in
his eyes. In one long kiss the maiden gives herself to him. The wedding
takes place, and like another St. Elizabeth she is seen standing, soon
afterwards, distributing alms to starving beggars. Yet, meanwhile, she
has fallen under suspicion owing to her continuous silence; even her
husband becomes distrustful, because in the quiet of night he has
observed that she is not resting by his side, but is quietly up and
spinning. And the catastrophe comes when the silent queen gives birth to
twins, who, to the horror of all around, fly off in the form of ravens.
Tranquil and affectionate, the young mother awaits her fate. Then follow
the sentence of the Vehm-tribunal, the pathetic parting from her
husband, the preparation for death. There is only one hour more to pass
by before the seven years are over and the spellbound brothers set free.
The good fairy appears in the air, hour-glass in hand, and brings solace
to the hard-pressed heroine. The beggars, too, whose benefactress she
had been, bring help, and hold the gate of the dungeon in force. So the
time runs out, the spell is broken, and the brothers hasten, on
milk-white horses, to save their sister from the stake. In Schwind's
marvellous drawings the story passes quickly on, stroke by stroke,
deeply moving and soul-stirring in its dramatic force.
The "Beautiful Melusina" was the kiss of the water-nymph, with which
Romanticism led her faithful knight to his death, only to disappear
together with him out of German art. "The winter has dealt me a sore
blow; I shall never be able to do anything more." Carl Maria von Weber
and Uhland had already gone before; Schwind was lying on his sick-bed
when the German victories created a German fatherland. He learned,
however, all the long series of glorious tidings that came from the
field of war, saw the tumultuous joy and the dazzling sea of fire which
surged through Munich in January 1871, and heard the joyful news that
Germany was at last united. Then he had a glass of champagne poured out
for him, and drank it to the new empire and the future of the nation.
In the middle of a wood of lofty beeches in Bernrieder Park, on the
Starnberger See, there stands a small rotunda, within is a prattling
fountain, right round the walls runs a frieze, depicting the legend of
the "Beautiful Melusina." It is Schwind's monument. With him German
Romanticism perished; reality itself had now become so marvellous. When,
in 1850, Hübner had to paint a figure of Germania for a page in King
Ludwig's album, he depicted a queenly woman, prone on the ground, with
her face in the dust, amidst a desolate landscape and under a cloudy
sky. The crown has fallen from her head and a skull lies by her side,
while on the frame are inscribed these words from the Book of
Lamentations: "Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the
destruction of the daughter of my people; the crown of our head is
fallen." When Schwind died, Germany had re-arisen. In the very year of
his death, Lenbach painted his first Bismarck pictures: in Bismarck was
embodied that power by means of which the dream of a nation was
fulfilled.
[Illustration: SCHWIND. NYMPHS AND STAG.]
Thus Schwind's works are not only the sign of a completed period in
German history, but also at the same time both the climax and the
conclusion of an art-epoch. Schwind had lived through the entire
revolution which German painting had at that time undergone. At his
death the sound of the hunting horns of Romanticism had died away. He
had lived long enough to have the opportunity of criticising neatly, as
follows, the dry, unpoetical school of historical painting then making
its appearance, as if introduced by gaudily costumed models, a school
which made its first hit with Lessing's "Ezzelino": "I will explain the
picture to you. Ezzelino is seated in his dungeon, and two monks are
attempting to convert him. One of them recognises that all pains are
thrown away upon the old sinner, and takes himself off, regretfully
desisting from all further endeavour; the other still has hopes, and
continues his exhortations. But Ezzelino only keeps his angry gaze fixed
before him, muttering, 'Leave me alone! Don't you see that I am--posing
as a model!'" He had had occasion to write to his friend Bauernfeld: "I
have seen so many schools of so-called painting in my time that it is an
absolute horror to me"; he had asked Piloty: "What calamity are you
preparing for us now?" and had thought it his duty to address to one of
the younger painters the question: "Are we then an academy of the Fine
or of the Ugly Arts?" "A man like me, with his ideas, walks like a ghost
amid the battle of the virtuosi, in which the whole life of art has gone
astray," he used sadly to say. His last wonderful works stand alone in
a time which was dazzled by the flash of arms characterising the
Franco-Belgian school of art. It was not till much later that Hans Thoma
took up the threads which connect the work of Schwind with the present
epoch. When he died he was a solitary, isolated man taking leave of a
generation in which he had no part. The period of historical painting
which followed him produced no single work distinguished by Schwind's
sense of fragrant legendary poetry. The charming forest fairy who had
appeared to him showed herself to no other; like the betrayed Melusina,
she had returned to rest again, solitary, in her fountain home. Fantasy,
tender soul that she is, had taken wings, whither none can tell. "That
is why nobody has a single idea," as Schwind said in his drastic way.
The Muse of Schwind, the last Romanticist, was a chaste, pensive,
soulful maiden; while that of Piloty, the first colourist, was a noisy,
bloodthirsty Megæra. Yet one can have no doubt as to the necessity of
this evolutionary change.
[Illustration: _Albert, Helio._
SCHWIND. RUBEZAHL.]
Schwind himself is among the masters "who have been, and are, and shall
be." He was different from all that was arising around him; he embodied
the spirit of the future, and exercises over the art of the present day
so great an influence that where two or three painters are gathered
together in the name of the beautiful, he has his place in the midst of
them, and is present, invisible, at every exhibition. But he exercises
this influence only spiritually. Young artists study him as if he were a
primitive master. Enraptured, they find in him all those qualities for
which there is to-day so ardent a longing--innocent purity and touching
simplicity, a mystic, romantic submersion in waves of old-time feeling
and a charming youthful fervour. They do not study him in order to
_paint_ like him.
"Our heads are full of poetry, but we cannot give it expression," are
the words with which Cornelius himself characterised this period.
Germany had original geniuses indeed, but no fully matured school to
compare with the French; as yet the Germans did not know how to paint.
Up to this time the course of painting in Germany had been a bold but
imprudent flight through the air; in its Kaulbach-like cloud-heights it
had melted away to a shadow, only to fall again, somewhat roughly, to
the ground. It died of an incurable disease--idealism. The painters of
that time, one and all, had never become real artists; strictly
speaking, they had always remained amateurs. He alone is a great artist
in whom the will and the performance, the substance and the form, are in
complete accordance. Painters who never knew exactly what is meant by
painting, artists whose most noticeable characteristic was that they had
no art-capacity, were only possible in the first half of the nineteenth
century in Germany, where for that very reason they were admired and
praised.
What now began was a necessary making good what had been so long
neglected. For craftsmanship is the necessary presupposition of all art,
which can no longer suffer any one to be called a master who has not
learnt his business. In the atmosphere of incense which surrounded
Cornelius in Munich, the dogma that salvation was to be found in German
art alone, and that the German nation was the chosen people of art, had
reached a height of self-adoration which came near to megalomania. In
the proud enthusiasm of those times, great in their aims as in their
errors, the Germans had as false an opinion as possible of the art of
foreign countries.
In the very years when the first railways were ousting the old
mail-coaches the mutual interchange of endeavour and ability between the
various nations was slower and scantier than ever before. How German
artists had wandered abroad in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in
that great age when Dürer crossed the Alps on Pirkheymer's pony, and
when Holbein obtained from Erasmus letters of introduction for England!
With what joy Dürer, in his letters and in his journal, gives an account
of the recognition accorded him in artistic circles in Italy and the
Dutch cities! Nearly all the German painters had, in the course of their
long wanderings, made acquaintance with either the Netherlands or Italy.
They knew exactly what was going on in the world around them. Dürer and
Raphael used to send drawings to each other, "so as to know each other's
handwriting." It was only in the first half of the nineteenth century
that the Germans, once proud in the consciousness of possessing the
finest comprehension of, and the greatest receptivity for, foreign
intellectual wares, lived apart in timid isolation. Into the suburban
still-life of the German schools of art not a sound made its way of what
was taking place elsewhere. Only thus was it possible for the Germans to
imagine that among all modern nations they alone had a vocation for Art.
No one had the least idea that in England, the land of machines and
beefsteaks, there were men who painted; and people went so far as to
proclaim piety, morality, thoroughness, accurate draughtsmanship, and
diligent execution the monopoly of German art; and superficiality,
frivolity, and "empty straining after effect" the ineradicable national
failing of that of France.
[Illustration: SCHWIND. THE FAIRIES' SONG.]
With some such ideas in their heads the majority of the German painters,
in the autumn of 1843, found themselves confronted by Gallait's
"Abdication of Charles V" and Bièfve's "Agreement of the Dutch
Nobility"; two Belgian pictures which at that time were going the round
of the exhibitions in all the larger towns of Germany. And it was not
long before the belief in the old gods, which had for thirty years held
sway in the city of King Ludwig, was completely undermined by the
younger generation. "Even for the great gods, day comes to an end. Night
of annihilation, descend with the dusk!" Diogenes expelled from his
philosophic tub could not have felt more uncomfortable than the German
painters in presence of the Belgian pictures. As till then the
incapacity to paint had been belauded as one of the strongest possible
proofs of the higher artistic nature and of genuine greatness, so now it
was perceived that nevertheless, on the banks of the Scheldt and of the
Seine, a much greater school of painting was in full bloom, and
producing splendid fruit.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IX
THE FORERUNNERS OF ROMANTICISM IN FRANCE
In France the first decade of the century gave no premonition of the
powerful development which was shortly to take place in French art. A
legion of characterless pupils issuing from David's studio wearied the
world with their aimless works, and hurled their thunderbolts against
all rising talent. The austere catalogue of the Salon was a pell-mell of
Belisarii, Télémaques, Phædras, Electras, Brutuses, Psyches, and
Endymions. Girodet and Guérin wearied themselves in putting on canvas
the chief scenes in the classical tragedies at that time so frequently
performed--Pygmalion and Galatea, the Death of Agamemnon, and the
like--and painted portraits between times; Girodet's dry and poor,
Guérin's solemnly vacant. The universal note was that of tedium.
_François Gérard_ alone, the "King of Painters and Painter of Kings,"
survives, at least in his portraits. Like David he is redeemed only by
his portrait painting, and his successes in that direction eclipse even
Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, the amiable, gifted, and graceful painter of Marie
Antoinette's days. At the outbreak of the Revolution she had left
France. Everywhere extolled and welcomed with open arms, she painted
Mme. de Staël in Switzerland, and at Naples Lady Hamilton, the famous
beauty of the time of the Directory. But when, in 1810, she returned to
Paris, she had been forgotten. The day on which Marie Antoinette picked
up her brush for her, as Charles V had done for Titian, was to remain
the happiest in her life. She belonged to the Ancien Régime, and
although her death did not take place till 1842, at the age of
eighty-seven, her work was already over in 1792. In her old age she
busied herself in writing memoirs of the splendour of her youthful days,
from the famous mythological dinner in the Rue de Cléry, where her
husband appeared in the character of Pindar and recited his translation
of Anacreon's odes, to the triumphs which accompanied her journey round
Europe.
Gérard took the place which she had left vacant at her departure, and
filled it well, especially in his youth. When, in the Exhibition of
Portrait Painting held at Paris in 1885, there appeared the likeness of
Mlle. Brongniart, from the collection of Baron Pichon, painted by Gérard
in 1795, at the age of twenty-five, there was general astonishment at
the familiar and intimate grasp of character it displayed. The portrait
of this young girl standing in her white dress, so tranquil and without
pose, has in the firmness of its draughtsmanship the austere charm and
dignity of a Bronzino. And later none could give to the aristocracy of
Europe a nobler or more natural bearing than did Gérard, who became
their tried and trusted depicter: yet in his last days he descended into
theatrical exaggeration. Endowed as he was with all the captivating
qualities of a cultured man of the world, he had from the beginning
avoided as the plague the revolutionary politics in which David was for
some time engaged, and when at the instance of the elder master he was
appointed a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal, he alleged illness in
order to be absent from its sessions. He was a man of the salons, the
born painter of the great world, his house the centre of a distinguished
circle of society. Not a celebrity, not an emperor or king, but wished
to be painted by Gérard. And just as he had been the chosen portrait
painter of the Bonaparte family, so after the Restoration he was still
the official favourite of the Court. Josephine took the fashionable
painter under her high protection, Napoleon's marshals defiled before
him, and the aristocracy which returned with Louis XVIII vied with one
another for his favour.
[Illustration: FRANÇOIS GÉRARD. _L'Art._]
Gérard's three hundred portraits are a continuous catalogue of all those
who in the first quarter of the century played any part in France upon
the political, military, or literary stage. A man of supple talent and
fine tastes, he completely satisfied the desires of a society which,
after the storm of the Revolution, opened its salons again and
re-established its former hierarchy of rank. The portrait with rich
background of upholstery, and the depicting of public ceremonies, were
reintroduced by him into the field of art. The people whom he painted
are no longer "citizens," as with David, but princes, generals,
princesses; and their surroundings allow of no doubt as to whether they
are to be addressed as Sir, as Your Serene Highness, or as Your
Excellency. No one knew how to flatter in so tactful a manner,
particularly in portraits of ladies. It was to him, therefore, that Mme.
Récamier had recourse when she was dissatisfied with David's likeness of
her. Gérard's, which she destined for Prince Augustus of Prussia, one of
her admirers, gave the "fair Juliette" the fullest satisfaction. In the
former she was represented reposing on a couch, austere and without
charm, like a tragic muse. Here she sits in a pleasant, lazy attitude
upon a chair, in a transparent robe which fully displays her form; about
her lips plays a half-melancholy, half-coquettish smile, and she, the
great actress who had turned so many men's heads, gazes with gentle
child-eyes as innocently upon the world as though she believed the story
about babies and the stork.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
GÉRARD. MLLE. BRONGNIART.]
The background, too, that colonnade "leading nowhither," is
characteristic of the change in the manner of regarding things. The
older schools of painting had, in the case of portraits, managed the
treatment of the background in two different ways. The old Dutch and
Germans--Jan van Eyck and Holbein--aimed at showing a man, not only
portrayed with the subtlest fidelity to truth, but also in the
surroundings in which he was usually or by preference to be found. The
Italians renounced all representation of such scenes, and gave only a
quiet, neutral tone to the background. Gorgeous decorative scenery was
introduced by the court painter Van Dyck, and since the second half of
the seventeenth century had continually risen in popular favour.
Mignard, Lebrun, and Rigaud had brought into fashion, for portraits of
princely personages, that stately pillared architecture, with broad
velvet curtains swelling and descending in ample folds, which at that
time was so remarkably in keeping with the whole cut of the costumes,
with the enormous full-bodied wigs and the theatrical attitudinising of
that epoch. For the likenesses of generals and warlike princes the
favourite background was one which represented, by means of a number of
small figures, entire battles, marches, sieges, and so forth. Both these
methods, and, together with them, that of an ideal, lightly indicated
park landscape, were put an end to by the Revolution, under the
influence of which all extravagant pomp, not only in life, but even in
portrait painting, was replaced by an ascetic sobriety. Gérard, the
Court painter of the Bourbons, who on their return had "learnt nothing
and forgotten nothing," reintroduced the gorgeous pillar decoration,
which still remained the authoritative style under Stieler and
Winterhalter, and has only in the _bourgeois_ era of to-day given way to
the simple, neutral-toned background of the Italians.
David, by the way, never forgave Mme. Récamier for having preferred his
pupil to himself. When, in 1805, after the completion of Gérard's
likeness of her, she approached David on the subject of finishing his,
he answered drily: "Madame, artists have their caprices as well as
women; now it is _I_ who will not."
As an historical painter Gérard was an imitator of the mannerist
Girodet. Paintings such as "Daphnis and Chloe," or the famous "Psyche"
receiving Cupid's first kiss (1798), made indeed a great sensation among
the ladies, who for some time afterwards painted their faces white, to
resemble the gentle Psyche; but from the artistic point of view they do
not rise above the ordinary level of the Classical school. As an
historical painter he took much the same course as David; he began as a
Revolutionist in 1795 with the usual "Belisarius," and ended as a
Royalist with a "Coronation of Charles X."
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
GÉRARD. MADAME VISCONTI.]
The more stiff and sober the antique style of David became, the sooner a
counter-current was likely to arise, and the change of taste showed
itself first in the circumstance that, from 1810 on, a master came more
and more to the front who, already old, had hitherto lived in obscurity,
almost despised by his contemporaries. This was the amiable,
sympathetic, charming, sweet, and great _Prudhon_, the lineal descendant
of Correggio, a solitary painter, the gracefulness of whose art was at
first unappreciated, but who, as the orthodox academicians began to be
more and more tedious, exercised a correspondingly greater influence
over the younger generation. He is the one refreshing oasis in the
desert wilderness of the Classical school.
What a difference between him and David! When the elegant grace of
Watteau fled from the French school, and the new Spartans dreamed of
founding a Greek art, David was the hero of this buskined theatrical
school of painting. He painted "The Horatii" and "Brutus," and thought
to bring ancient Rome back to life by copying the shapes of old Roman
chairs and old Roman swords. That was the antique style of his first
period. Later, having made the discovery that, compared with the Greeks,
the Romans were semi-barbarians, he abandoned the Roman style, and
thought to make a great stride forwards by copying Greek statues and
carefully transferring them to his pictures. This "pure Grecian
character" is represented in his "Rape of the Sabines." Later again, he
turned to the more ancient Greeks, and the result was the most academic
of his pictures, his "Leonidas." A mixture of dryness and declamatory
pathos; diligence without imagination; able draughtsmanship and an
absolute incapacity of drawing anything whatever without a model;
careful arrangement without the slightest trace of that gift of the
inner vision whereby the whole is brought complete and finished before
the eye,--these exhaust the list of David's qualities. By means of
casting and copying he thought to come near to that art of the antique
whose soul he dreamed of embracing, when he held but its skeleton in his
hands.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
GÉRARD. CUPID AND PSYCHE.]
And meanwhile, away from the broad high-road, and almost unnoticed, was
living that painter whom David contemptuously called "the Boucher of his
time." He it was who truly cherished the gods of Greece in his heart,
under whose brush the dead statues began to breathe and to feel the
blood flowing in their veins, as in the old days when the Renaissance
dug them out of the ground. His appearance on the stage indicates the
first protest against the rigid system pursued by the painter of the
Horatii and of Brutus. Prudhon also believed in the antique, but he saw
therein a grace which no Classicist had ever seen; he also contrasted
the simplicity of the Grecian profile with the capricious, wrinkled
forms of the _rococo_ style; he too had spent his youth in Italy, but
had not thought it criminal to study Leonardo and Correggio; he did not
bind himself either to cold sculpture or to the delicate _morbidezza_ of
the Lombards as the only means of grace. He remained a Frenchman heart
and soul, in that he inherited from Watteau's age its womanly softness
and elegance. In a cold, ascetic age he still believed in tenderness,
gaiety, and laughter--he who as a man had but little reason to take
delight in life.
Prudhon was ten years younger than David, and was born at Cluny, the
tenth child of a poor stone cutter. He grew up in miserable
circumstances, cherished only by a mother who devoted the whole of her
love to this her youngest born, and to whom the child, a delicate pliant
creature, clung with girl-like tenderness. His parents used often to
send him out with the other poor children of the little town to gather
faggots for the winter in the wood belonging to the neighbouring
Benedictine monastery. There the handsome, sprightly boy with the large
melancholy eyes attracted the notice of the priest, Père Besson, who
made him a chorister and gave him some instruction. Here, in the old
abbey of Cluny, surrounded by venerable statues carved in wood, by old
pictures of saints and artistic miniatures, he recognised his vocation.
An inner voice told him that he was to be a painter. And now his Latin
exercise books began to fill with drawings, and he carved little images
with his penknife out of wood, soap, or whatever came to his hand. He
squeezed out the juice of flowers, made brushes of horsehair, and began
to paint. He was inconsolable on finding that he could not hit off the
colouring of the old church pictures. It was a revelation to him when
one of the monks said to him one day: "My boy, you will never manage it
so: these pictures are painted in oils"; and he straightway invented oil
painting for himself. With the help of the instruction which he now
received at Dijon from an able painter, Devosge, he made rapid progress.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GÉRARD. MADAME RÉCAMIER [DETAIL].]
Nevertheless a generation was yet to pass before he was really to become
a painter. His marriage, on 17th February 1778, with the daughter of the
notary of Cluny, became the torment of his life. A linen-weaver and
three of his father-in-law's clerks were present at the wedding. His
wife was quarrelsome, their income small, and their family rapidly
increasing. He betook himself to Paris to seek his fortune, with a
letter of introduction to the engraver Wille. "Take pity on this
youngster, who has been married for the last three years, and who, were
he to come under some low fellow's influence, might easily fall into the
most terrible abyss"; so ran the letter, which a certain Baron
Joursanvault had given him. He hired himself a room in the house of M.
Fauconnier, the head of a firm engaged in the lace trade, who lived in
the Rue du Bac with his wife and a pretty sister. The latter, Marie, was
eighteen years of age, and, like Werther's Lotte, was always surrounded
by her brother's children, whom she looked after like a little
housewife. Prudhon, himself young, sensitive, and handsome, loved and
was loved, and made her presents of small flattering portraits and
pretty allegorical drawings, in which Cupid was represented scratching
the initials M. F. (Marie Fauconnier) on the wall with his arrow. That
he was married and several times a father she never knew, till one day
Madame Prudhon arrived with the children. "And you never told me!" was
her only word of reproach.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
PIERRE PAUL PRUDHON. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
Prudhon himself now went to Italy--a journey accompanied by serious
difficulties. At Dijon he had competed for the Prix de Rome, and had
been so simple as to make a sketch for one of his rivals. He owed it to
the latter's honesty that the scholarship nevertheless fell to himself.
He started on his journey; but when he reached Marseilles, and was ready
to embark, the vessel was unable to weigh anchor for several weeks,
owing to stormy weather. And even on the voyage it became necessary to
disembark again, so that months had elapsed before he arrived in Rome,
penniless, and having embraced, according to classical custom, the land
he had come to conquer; for he had fallen out of the carriage on the
way. Fortunately his dearly bought sojourn in Italy did him no harm. He
had indeed intended to draw only from the antique and after Raphael; but
after the lapse of a very few weeks he found his ideal in Leonardo. Him
he calls "his Master and Hero, the inimitable father and prince of all
painters, in artistic power far surpassing Raphael!"
In a small sketch-book, half torn up, dating from this time, and still
in existence, we have already the whole Prudhon. It contains copies of
ancient statues, made laboriously and without pleasure in the work; then
comes Correggio's disarmed "Cupid," a delicious little sketch, and with
the same pencil that drew it he has written down the names of the
pictures he purposes painting later on: "Love," "Frivolity," "Cupid and
Psyche." It is as it were the secret confession of his fantasy, a
preliminary announcement of his future works. Here and there are found
sketches hastily dashed off of beautiful female forms in the graceful
attitude which had excited his admiration in the women of the
"Aldobrandini Wedding." But, above all, the young artist observed all
that was around him. He lived in unceasing intercourse with the
beautiful, and his soul was nurtured by the spirit of the works which
surrounded him. He accumulated pictures, not in his sketch-book, but in
himself; so much so that, when he was afterwards interrogated as to his
Italian studies, his only answer was: "I did nothing but study life and
admire the works of the masters." He avoided association even with
scholars who had taken the Prix de Rome. The elegant and graceful
sculptor Canova was the only one with whom he permitted himself any
intercourse.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
PRUDHON. JOSEPH AND POTIPHAR'S WIFE.]
When his scholarship had run its course, at the end of November 1789, he
found himself again in Paris, and the struggle against poverty began
once more. Even while in Italy he had sent all his savings to his wife,
who had straightway squandered them in drink with her brother, a
sergeant in a cavalry regiment. At Paris he had to act as parlour-maid
and nursery-maid. The faces of two more women rise up in his life like
fleeting stars, and both of them died before his eyes. The first was the
mysterious stranger who appeared one day in his studio and commissioned
him to paint her portrait. She was young, scarcely twenty years of age,
with great blue eyes, but her face was weary and wan as though from long
sleepless nights. "Your portrait?" asked Prudhon, "with features so
troubled and sad?" He set to work, silent and indifferent; but with
every stroke of his brush he felt himself more mystically attracted to
this young girl, evidently as unhappy and as persecuted by fate as
himself. She promised to return on the morrow; but neither on that day
nor on the next did she appear. One afternoon he was wandering dreamily
along the street, thinking of the unknown fair one, when his eye almost
mechanically caught sight of the guillotine, and he recognised in the
unhappy victim at that very moment ending her days the mysterious
visitor of his studio.
To keep the wolf from the door, Prudhon was obliged for some years to
draw vignettes on letter-sheets for the Government offices, business
cards for tradesmen, and even little pictures for _bonbonnières_. For
this the representatives of high art held him in contempt. Greuze alone
treated him amicably, and even he held out no hopes for his future. "You
have a family and you have talent, young man; that is enough in these
days to bring about one's death by starvation. Look at my cuffs." Then
the old man would show him his torn shirt-sleeves--for even he could no
longer find means of getting on in the new order of things. To his
anxieties about the necessities of life were added dissensions with his
wife. He became the prey of a continual melancholy; he was never seen to
smile. Even when a separation had been effected his tormentor persecuted
him still, until she was relegated to a madhouse. But now a change comes
over the scene with the entrance of Constance Mayer.
[Illustration: PRUDHON. STUDY DIRECTS THE FLIGHT OF GENIUS.]
This amiable young painter, his pupil, was the star that lighted up his
old age. She was ugly. With her brown complexion, her broad flat nose,
and her large mouth, she had at first sight the appearance of a mulatto.
Yet to this large mouth belonged voluptuous lips ever ready to be
kissed; above this broad nose there were two eyes shining like black
diamonds, which by their changeful expression made this irregular,
_gamin's_ face appear positively beautiful. She was seventeen years his
junior, and he has painted her as often as Rembrandt painted his Saskia.
He has immortalised the dainty upturned nose of his little gipsy, as he
called her, in pictures, sketches, pastels, all of which have the same
piquant charm, the same elegant grace, the same joyous and merry
expression. In her he had found his type, as his namesake Rubens did in
Hélène Fourment. Constance Mayer became the muse of his delicate,
graceful work. And she too died before his eyes, having cut her throat
with a razor.
[Illustration: PRUDHON. LE COUP DE PATTE DU CHAT.]
The master and the pupil loved each other. As sentimental as she was
passionate, as gay as she was piquant, nervous and witty, she possessed
every quality that was likely to captivate him, as she chattered to him
in her lively and original way, and flattered his pride as an artist.
This love seemed to promise him rest and a bright ending for his days.
He entered into it with the passion of a young man in love for the first
time. Mlle. Mayer, after her father's death, was dependent on no one.
Her studio in the Sorbonne was separated from her master's only by a
blind wall. She was with him the entire day, worked at his side, was his
housekeeper, and saw to the education of his daughter, to whom she was
at once a mother and an elder sister; and Prudhon transferred to her all
the tender love which as a child he had cherished for his mother. In his
gratitude he wished to share his genius with his friend, and to make her
famous like himself. It is pathetic to note in Mlle. Mayer's studies
with what patience and devotion he instructed her, how he strove to
animate her with his own spirit, and to give her something of his own
immortality. Even his own work was influenced by the new happiness. To
the period of his connection with Constance belong his masterpieces,
"Justice and Vengeance," "The Rape of Psyche," "Venus and Adonis," and
"The Swinging Zephyr."
[Illustration: PRUDHON. CUPID AND PSYCHE.]
These brought him at last even outward success. In 1808 the Emperor gave
him the Cross of the Legion of Honour for his picture of "Justice and
Vengeance," and he became, if not the official, at least the familiar
painter of the Court. The fine portrait of the Empress Josephine
belongs to this period. When the new Empress Marie Louise wished to
learn the art of painting, Prudhon, in 1811, became her drawing master;
and when on the birth of the King of Rome the city of Paris presented to
the Emperor the furniture for a room, he was commissioned to provide the
artistic decoration. Criticism began to bow its head when his name was
mentioned; and the younger generation of painters soon discovered in
him, once so contemptuously reviled, the founder of a new religion, the
want of which had long been felt. He began to make money. Constance
Mayer seemed to bring him luck: her death affected him all the more
deeply.
[Illustration: CONSTANCE MAYER.]
By nature nervous and highly strung, jealous and keenly conscious of her
equivocal position, she could not make up her mind, when the painters
were ordered to move their studios from the Sorbonne, either to leave
Prudhon or openly to live with him. On the morning of 26th March 1821
she left her model, the little Sophie, alone, after giving her a ring.
Soon afterwards a heavy fall was heard, and she was found lying on the
ground in a pool of blood. Prudhon lingered on for two years more, two
long years spent as it were in exile. Solitary, tortured by remorse of
conscience, and with continual thoughts of suicide, he lived on only for
his recollections of her, in tender converse with the memorials she had
left, insensible to the renown which began gradually to gather round his
name. The completion of the "Unfortunate Family," which Constance had
left unfinished on her easel, was his last _tête-à-tête_ with her, his
last farewell. He left his studio only to visit her grave in
Père-Lachaise, or to wander alone along the outer boulevards. An
"Ascension of the Virgin" and a "Christ on the Cross" were the last
works of the once joyous painter of ancient mythology: the Mater
Dolorosa and the Crucified--symbols of his own torments. Death at length
took compassion upon him. On the 16th of February 1823 France lost
Prudhon.
His art was the pure expression of his spiritual life. His life was
swayed by women, and something feminine breathes through all his
pictures. In them there speaks a man full of soul, originally of a
joyous nature, who has gone through experiences which prevented him ever
being joyous again. He has inherited from the _rococo_ style its graces
and its little Cupids, but has also already tasted of all the melancholy
of the new age. With his smiles there is mingled a secret sadness. He
has learnt that life is not an unending banquet and a perpetual
pleasure; he has seen how tragic a morrow follows upon the voyage to
the Isle of Cythera. The bloom has faded from his pale cheeks, his brow
is furrowed--he has seen the guillotine. He, the last _rococo_ painter
and the first Romanticist, would have been truly the man to effect the
transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century by a path more
natural than that followed by David.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
CONSTANCE MAYER. THE DREAM OF HAPPINESS.]
Even his fugitive sketches, thrown off in the days of his poverty, have
a quite peculiar charm and a thoroughly individual sentiment. There are
vignettes of his for letter-sheets, done for the Government offices,
which in a few pencil touches contain more manly elegance and poetry
than do David's most pretentious compositions with all their borrowed
Classicism. Prudhon was the only painter who at that time produced
anything of conspicuous merit in the art of ornament. Even drawings such
as "Minerva uniting Law and Liberty," which from their titles would lead
one to expect nothing more than frozen allegories, are imbued, not with
David's coldness, but with Correggio's charm. French grace and elegance
are united, without constraint, to the beauty of line found in ancient
cameos. He it was who first felt again the living poetry of that old
mythology, which had become a mere collection of dry names. He is
commissioned to draw a card of invitation for a ball, and he sends a
tender hymn on music and dancing. In extravagant profusion he scatters
forth, no matter where, poetic invention and grace such as David in his
most strenuous efforts sought for in vain. It was during this time that
Prudhon became the admirable draughtsman to whom the French school have
awarded a place among their greatest masters. These drawings and
illustrations were the necessary preparation for the great works which
brought him to the front at the beginning of the century.
Even his first picture, painted in 1799--to-day half-destroyed--"Wisdom
bringing Truth upon the earth, at whose approach Darkness vanishes,"
must, to judge from early descriptions, have been marked by a seductive
and delicate grace. And the celebrated work of 1808, "Justice and
Vengeance pursuing Crime," belongs certainly, so far as colouring is
concerned, rather to the Romantic than to the Classical era. For during
the latter, one faculty especially had been lost, and that was the art
of painting flesh. Prudhon, by deep study of Leonardo and Correggio,
masters at that time completely out of fashion, won back this capacity
for the French school. In wild and desolate scenery, above which the
moon, emerging from behind heavy clouds, shines with a ghostly light
upon the bare rocks, the murderer is leaving the body of his victim. He
strides forth with hasty steps, purse and dagger in hand, glancing back
with a shudder at the naked corpse of a young man which has fallen upon
a ledge of rock, lying there stiff and with outstretched arms. Above,
like shapes in the clouds, the avenging goddesses are already sweeping
downwards upon him. Justice pursues the fugitive with threatening,
wrathful glance; while Vengeance, lighting the way with her torch,
stretches out her hand to grasp the guilty one. In that epoch this
picture stands alone for the imposing characterisation of the persons,
for its powerful pictorial execution, and the stern and grandiose
landscape which serves as setting to the awful scene.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
THE TOMB OF PRUDHON AND CONSTANCE MAYER AT PÈRE-LACHAISE.]
In general, Prudhon was not a tragic painter; his preference was for the
more joyous, light and dreamy, delicately veiled myths of the ancients.
His misfortunes taught him to flee from reality, and on the wings of Art
he saved himself, in the realm of legendary love and visionary
happiness. So we see Psyche borne aloft by Zephyr through the twilight
to the nuptial abode of Eros. A soft light falls upon her snowy body;
her head has fallen upon her shoulder, and one arm, bent backwards,
enframes her face. Silent like a cloud, the group moves onward--a
sweet-scented apparition from fairyland. Now, enraptured genii visit the
slumbering Fair One in forest-shadows, under the shimmering moon; now
she is stealing secretly down to bathe in a tranquil lake, and gazes
with astonishment upon her own likeness in the gloomy mirror. Here
Venus, drawing deep breaths of secret bliss, is seated, full of longing
love, by the side of Adonis. Who else, at that time, could draw nude
figures of such faultless beauty, so slender and pure, with lines so
supple and yet so firm, and enveloped in so full and soft a light? Or
again, he paints Zephyr swinging roguishly by the side of a stream. A
gentle breeze plays through his locks, and the cool darkness of the wood
breathes through all things round.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
PRUDHON. THE UNFORTUNATE FAMILY.]
Prudhon's work is never a laborious patchwork of fragments of antique
forms picked up here and there, never the insipid product of the reason
working in accordance with recipes long handed down; it is thoroughly
intuitive. Never keeping too closely to his model, he gave to his
creations the movement and the divine breath of life. In his hands with
dreamlike fidelity the Antique rose up again renewed, new in the sense
of his own completely modern sentiment, and in that of those great
masters of the Renaissance who had wakened it to life three hundred
years before. For Prudhon, as is shown by his landscape backgrounds, is
altogether Jean Jacques Rousseau's contemporary, the child of that epoch
in which Nature revealed itself anew; and, as is proved by his figures,
he is a congenial spirit to Antonio da Allegri and Vinci. In fresh
recollection of Correggio, he loves a soft exuberance of flesh and a
delicate semi-obscurity; in enthusiastic reverence for Leonardo, those
heads of women, with deep, sensuously veiled eyes, and that mysterious
delicate smile playing dreamily round the wanton mouth. Only, the
enchanting sweetness of the Florentine and the delicious ecstasy of the
Lombard are toned down by a gentle melancholy which is entirely modern.
The Psyche borne up to heaven by Zephyr changes in the end, when
purified and refined, into the soul itself, which, in the form of the
Madonna, ascends into heaven, transfigured with longing desire; and
Venus, the goddess of love, is transformed into Love immortal, "Who,
stretched upon the Cross, yet reacheth out His hand to thee."
[Illustration: PRUDHON. THE RAPE OF PSYCHE.]
This man, with his soft tenderness and fine feeling for the eternal
feminine, was as though fashioned by Nature to be the painter of women
of his time. If David was the chief depicter of male faces bearing a
strong impress of character, delicate, refined, womanly natures found
their best interpreter in Prudhon. His heads of women charm one by the
mysterious language of their eyes, by their familiar smile, and by their
dreamy melancholy. No one knew better how to catch the fleeting
expression in its most delicate shades, how to grasp the very mood of
the moment. How piquant is his smiling Antoinette Leroux with her dress
_à la_ Charlotte Corday, her coquettish extravagant hat, and all the
amusing "chic" of her toilette! Madame Copia, the wife of the engraver,
with her delicately veiled eyes, has become in Prudhon's hands the very
essence of a beautiful soul. A languishing weariness, a remarkable
mingling of Creole grace and gentle melancholy, breathes over the
portrait of the Empress Josephine. She is represented seated on a grassy
bank in a dignified yet negligent attitude, her head slightly bent, her
gaze wandering afar with a look of uncertain inquiry, as though she had
some faint presentiment of her coming misfortune; and the dreamy
twilight-shadows of a mysterious landscape are gathering around her.
[Illustration: PRUDHON. LE MIDI.]
Coming after a period of colour asceticism, Prudhon was the first to
show a fine feeling for colour. Even during the revolutionary era he
protested in the name of the graceful against David's formal stiffness.
He sought to demonstrate that human beings do not in truth differ very
widely to-day from those in whom Leonardo and Correggio delighted, that
they are fashioned out of delicate flesh and blood, not out of marble
and stone. Standing beside David, he appealed to the art of colour. But
as with André Chénier, a spirit congenial to his, it was long before he
attained success. His modesty and his rustic character could effect
nothing against the dictatorial power of David, on whom had been
showered every dignity that Art could offer. People continued to
ridicule poor Prudhon, who worked only after his own fantasy, who had
fashioned for himself in _chiaroscuro_ a poetic language of his own,
till the question was raised again from another side, and this time by a
young man who came directly out of David's studio.
_Antoine Jean Gros_ was one of David's pupils, and stood out among his
fellows as the one most submissively devoted to his master; yet it was
he who, without wishing it or knowing of it, was preparing the way for
the overthrow of David's school. He was born 17th March 1771, at Paris,
where his father was a miniature painter. His vocation was determined
in the studio of Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, who was a friend of his parents. In
the Salon of 1785, which contained David's "Andromache beside the Body
of Hector," he chose his instructor. He was then the handsome youth of
fifteen represented in his portrait of himself at Versailles, with
delicate features, full of feeling, on which lies an amiable, gentle
cast of sentimentality. Two large, dark-brown eyes look out upon the
world astonished and inquiring, dark hair surrounds the quiet, fresh
face, and over it is cocked a broad-brimmed felt hat. In this picture we
see a fine-strung, sensitive nature, a soul which would be plunged by
bitter experiences into depths of despair, in proportion as success
would raise it to heights of ecstasy. In 1792 he competed unsuccessfully
for the Prix de Rome, and this failure was the making of him.
[Illustration: PRUDHON. LA NUIT.]
He went to Italy on his own account, and was an eye-witness of the war
which Napoleon was there waging. There he beheld scenes in which
archæology had no part. For when Augereau's foot-soldiers carried the
bridge of Arcola by assault, they had little thought of imitating an
antique bas-relief. Gros observed armies on the march, and saw their
triumphant entry into festally decorated cities. He learnt his lesson on
the field of battle, and on his return placed on record what he had
himself gone through. In Italy he caught the poetry of modern life, and
at the same time was enabled as a painter to supplement David's lectures
with the teaching of another surpassing master. It was in Genoa that he
became acquainted with Rubens. As Prudhon's originality consisted in the
fact that he was the first of that period again to stand dreaming before
Leonardo and Correggio, so did Gros' lie in this, that he studied
Rubens at a time when the Antwerp master was also completely out of
fashion. His instinct as a painter had at the very commencement guided
him to Rubens' "St. Ignatius," which in his letters he described as a
"sublime and magnificent work." When he was subsequently appointed a
member of the Commission charged with the transference of works of art
to Paris, he had abundant opportunities of admiring critically the works
of the sixteenth and seventeenth century masters. The two impressions
thus received had a decisive effect upon his life. Gros became the great
colourist of the Classical school, the singer of the Napoleonic epos.
Compared with David's marmoreal Græco-Romans, Gros' figures seem to
belong to another world; his pictures speak, both in purport and in
technique, a language which must more than once have astonished his
master.
[Illustration: PRUDHON. L'ENJOUIR.]
He was fortunate enough to be presented to Josephine Beauharnais, and
through her to Bonaparte, in the Casa Serbelloni at Milan; and Gros,
whose earnest desire it was to paint the great commander, was appointed
a lieutenant on his staff. He had occasion, in the three days' battle of
Arcola, to admire the Dictator's impetuous heroism; and he made a sketch
of the General storming the bridge of Arcola at the head of his troops,
ensign in hand. It pleased Napoleon, who saw in it something of the
dæmonic power of the future conqueror of the world; and when the picture
was exhibited in Paris in 1801 it met there also with the most striking
success. The greater warmth of colour, the broader sweep of the brush,
and the life-like movement of the figures seemed, in comparison with
David's monotonous manner, to be far-reaching innovations.
With his "Napoleon on the Bridge of Arcola" Gros had found his peculiar
talent. What his teacher had accomplished as painter to the Convention,
Gros carried to a conclusion in that span of time during which Napoleon
lived in the minds of his people as a hero. He too made an occasional
excursion into the domain of Greek mythology, but he did not feel at
home there. His field was that living history which the generals and
soldiers of France were making. He won for contemporary military life
its citizenship in art. David, wishing to remain true to "history" and
to "style," had depicted contemporary events with reluctance. What
Gérard and Girodet had produced was interesting as a protest on the part
of reality against classical convention, but on the whole it was
unsatisfying and wearisome. Gros, the famous painter of the "Plague of
Jaffa" and of the "Battle of Eylau," was the first to attain to high
renown in this field.
[Illustration: PRUDHON. MARGUERITE.]
These are two powerful and genuine pictures, two pre-eminent works which
will endure. Gros stands far above David and all his rivals in his power
of perception. The elder painter is now out of date, while Gros remains
ever fresh, because he painted under the impulse given by real events,
and not under the ban of empty theories. A realist through and through,
he did not shrink from representing the horrible, which antique art
preferred to avoid. In an epoch when Rome and Greece were the only
sources of inspiration he had the courage to paint a hospital, with its
sick, its dying, and its dead. When in the Egypto-Syrian campaign the
plague broke out after the storming of Jaffa, Napoleon, accompanied by a
few of his officers, undertook, on 7th March 1799, to visit the victims
of the pestilence. This act deserved to be celebrated in a commemorative
picture. Gros took it in hand, and represented Napoleon, in the
character of consoler, amid the agonising torments of the dying;
deviating from historical accuracy only so far as to transfer the scene
from the wretched wards of the lazaretto to the courtyard of a pillared
mosque. In the shadows of the airy halls sick and wounded men twist and
writhe, stare before them in despair, rear themselves up half-naked in
mortal pain, or turn to gaze upon the Commander-in-Chief, a splendid
apparition full of youthful power, who is tranquilly feeling the plague
boils of one of their comrades. Here and there Orientals move in
picturesque costumes, distributing the food which negro lads are
bringing in. And beyond, over the battlements of the Moorish arcades,
one sees the town with its fortifications, its flat roofs and slender
minarets, over which flutter the victorious banners of the French. On
one side lies the distant, glittering blue sea, and over all stretches
the clear, glowing southern sky.
Like a new gospel, like the first gust of wind preceding the storm of
Romanticism, this picture standing in the Louvre, surrounded by its
stiff Classical contemporaries, excites a sensation of pleasure.
[Illustration: PRUDHON. LES PETITS DÉVIDEURS.]
Gros' heroes know, as David's do, that they are important, and show it
perhaps too much, but at least they act. The painter felt what he was
painting, and an impulse of human love, an heroic and yet human life,
permeates the picture. Moreover, Gros did not content himself with the
scanty palette and the miserable cartoon-draughtsmanship of his
contemporaries. This treatment of the nude, these despairing heads of
dying men, show none of the stony lifelessness of the Classical school;
this Moorish courtyard has no resemblance to the tragedy peristyle so
habitually employed up to that time; this Bonaparte laying his hand upon
the dying man's sores is no Greek or Roman hero. The sick men whose
feverish eyes gaze upon him as on the star of hope, the negroes going up
and down with viands, are no mere supernumeraries; the sea lying in
sunshine beyond, full of bustling sails, and the harbour gaily decked
with many-coloured flags, point in their joyous splendour of colouring
to the dawn of a new era. The young artists were not mistaken when, in
the Salon of 1804, they fastened a sprig of laurel to the frame of the
picture. The State bought it for sixteen thousand francs. A banquet at
which Vien and David presided was given in honour of the painter.
Girodet read a poem, of which the conclusion ran as follows--
"Et toi, sage Vien, toi, David, maître illustre,
Jouissez de vos succès; dans son sixième lustre,
Votre élève, déjà de toutes parts cité,
Auprès de vous vivra dans la postérité."
[Illustration: PRUDHON. THE VINTAGE.]
In his "Battle of Eylau," exhibited in 1808, Gros has given us a
companion picture to the "Plague of Jaffa": in one a visit to a
hospital, in the other the inspection of a field of battle after the
fight is over. The dismal grey hue of winter rests upon the white sheet
of snow stretching desolately away to the horizon, only interrupted here
and there by hillocks beneath which annihilated regiments sleep their
last sleep. In the foreground lie dead bodies heaped together, and
moaning wounded men; and in the midst of this horror of mangled limbs
and corrupting flesh he, the Conqueror, the Master, the Emperor, comes
to a halt, pale, his eyes turned towards the cities burning on the
horizon, in his grey overcoat and small cocked hat, at the head of his
staff, indifferent, inexorable, merciless as Fate. "_Ah! si les rois
pouvaient contempler ce spectacle, ils scraient moins avides de
conquêtes._" The classical posturing which still lingered, a disturbing
element, in the Plague picture, has been put aside completely. The
conventional horse from the frieze of the Parthenon, which David alone
knew, has given way to the accurately observed animal, and the colouring
too, in its sad harmony, has fully recovered its ancient right of giving
character to the picture. It was, beyond all controversy, the chief work
in the Salon of 1808, rich in remarkable pictures; neither Gérard's
"Battle of Austerlitz," nor Girodet's "Atala," nor David's Coronation
piece endangered Gros' right to the first place.
[Illustration: PRUDHON. THE VIRGIN.]
"Napoleon before the Pyramids," at the moment when he cries, "Soldiers,
from the summit of those monuments forty centuries contemplate your
actions," constitutes, in 1810, the coping-stone of the cycle. Gros
alone at that time understood the epic grandeur of war. He became, also,
the portrait painter of the great men from whom its events proceeded.
His picture of General Masséna, with its meditative, slily tenacious
expression, is the genuine portrait of a warrior; and how well is
heroic, simple daring depicted in the likeness of General Lasalle,
without the commonplace device of a mantle puffed out by the wind! His
portrait of General Fournier Sarlovèse, at Versailles, has a freshness
of colouring, the secret of which no one else possessed in those days
except the two Englishmen, Lawrence and Raeburn. Gros was far in advance
of his age. A painter of movement rather than of psychological analysis,
he brought out character by means of general effect, and gave the
essentials in a masterly way. His portraits, just as much as his
historical pictures, have a stormy exposition. In David all is
calculation; in Gros, fire. Almost alone among his contemporaries, he
had studied Rubens, and like him gave colour the place due to it. At
times there is in his pictures a natural flesh-colour and an animation
which make this warm-hearted man, who has not been sufficiently
appreciated, a genuine forerunner of the moderns. Surrounded as he was
by orthodox Classicists, he cried in a loud voice what Prudhon had
already ventured to say more timidly: "Man is not a statue--not made of
marble, but of flesh and bone."
[Illustration: PRUDHON. CHRIST CRUCIFIED.]
But as with Prudhon, so with Gros. This man, of exaggerated nervousness,
was lacking in that capacity for persistence which belongs to a strong
will conscious of its aim; he lacked confidence in himself and in the
initiative he had taken. So long as the great figure of Napoleon kept
his head above water he was an artist; but when his hero was taken from
him he sank. The Empire had made Gros great, its fall killed him. The
incubus of David's antique manner began once more to press upon him, and
when David after his banishment (in 1816) committed to him the
management of his studio in Paris, Gros undertook the office with pious
eagerness, on nothing more anxiously intent than as a teacher once more
to impose the fetters of the antique upon that Art which he had set free
by his own works. "It is not I who am speaking to you," he would say to
the pupils, "but David, David, always David." The latter had blamed him
for having taken the trouble to paint the battles of the Empire,
"worthless occasional pieces," instead of venturing upon those of
Alexander the Great, and thus producing genuine "historical works."
"Posterity requires of you good pictures out of ancient history. Who,
she will cry, was better fitted to paint Themistocles? Quick, my friend!
turn to your Plutarch." To depict contemporary life, which lies open
before our eyes, was, he held, merely the business of minor artists,
unworthy the brush of an "historical painter." And Gros, who reverenced
his master, was so weak as to listen to his advice: he believed in him
rather than in his own genius, in the strength of others rather than his
own. He searched his Plutarch, and painted nothing more without a
previous side-glance towards Brussels; introduced allegory into his
"Battle of the Pyramids"; composed in homage to David a "Death of
Sappho"; and painted the cupola of the Pantheon with stiff frescoes;
while between times, when he looked Nature in the face, he was now and
then producing veritable masterpieces.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
PRUDHON. MADAME COPIA.]
His "Flight of Louis XVIII" in the Museum at Versailles, shows him once
more at his former height. It is "one of the finest of modern works," as
Delacroix called it in 1848, in an essay contributed to the _Revue des
Deux Mondes_; at once familiar and serious. Napoleon had left Elba,
marched on Paris, and had reached Fontainebleau, when, in the night of
the 19th-20th March 1815, Louis XVIII determined to evacuate the
Tuileries with all speed. Accompanied by a few faithful followers and by
the officers of his personal service, he abandons his palace and takes
leave of the National Guards. There is something pathetic in this
sexagenarian with his erudite Bourbon profile, immortalised in the large
five-franc pieces of his reign, with his protruding stomach and small
thick legs, looking like a dropsical patient going to hospital. His
bearing is most unkingly. Gros has boldly depicted the scene, even to
the pathological appearance of the king, just as he saw it, forgetting
all that he knew of antique art. He had himself seen the staircase, the
murmuring crowd, the lackeys hurrying by, lantern in hand, at their
wits' end, and the fat, gouty king, who in his terror has forgotten all
kingly dignity.
That was an historical picture, and yet as he painted it he reproached
himself anew for having forsaken the "real art of historical painting."
At the funeral of Girodet in 1824 the members of the Institute talked of
their "irreparable loss," and of the necessity of finding a new leader
for the school who should avert with a strong hand that destruction
which hot-headed young men threatened to bring upon it. "You, Gros,"
observed one of them, "should be the man for the place." And Gros
answered, in absolute despair; "Why, I have not only no authority as
leader of a school, but, over and above that, I have to accuse myself of
giving the first bad example of defection from real art." The more he
thought of David, the more he turned his back upon the world of real
life. With his large and wearisome picture of "Hercules causing Diomedes
to be devoured by his own Horses" (1835) he sealed his own fate.
Conventionality had conquered nature.
[Illustration: GROS. SAUL.]
The painters overwhelmed him with ridicule, and a shrill shout of
derision rose from all the critics. Already, for some time past, a few
writers had risen to protest against the Classical school. They spoke
with fiery eloquence of the rights of humanity, the benefits of liberty,
the independence of thought, the true principles of the Revolution, and
found numerous readers. They fought against rigid laws in the
intellectual as well as the social sphere; they pointed out that there
were other worlds besides that of antiquity, and that even the latter
was not peopled exclusively by cold statues; they delighted in
describing the great and beautiful scenes of Nature, and opened out once
more a new and broad horizon to art and poetry. The Spring was
awakening; Gros felt that he had outlived himself. Arming himself
against the voices of the new era with the fatal heroism of the deaf, he
became the martyr of Classicism in French art. He was a Classic by
education, a Romantic by temperament; a man who took his greatest pride
in giving the lie as a teacher to the work he had accomplished as an
artist, and this discordance was his ruin.
On the 25th of June 1835, being sixty-four years of age, he took up his
hat and stick, left his house without a word to any one, and laid
himself face-downwards in a tributary of the Seine near Meudon. It was a
shallow place, scarce three feet deep, which a child could easily have
waded through. It was not till next day, when he had been dead for
twenty-four hours, that he was discovered by two sailors walking home
along the bank. One of them struck his foot against a black silk hat. In
it there was a white cravat marked with the initial G., carefully
folded, and upon it a short note to his wife. On a torn visiting-card
could still be read the name, Baron Gros. A little farther on they saw
the corpse, and as they were afraid to touch a drowned man, they drew
lots with straws to decide which of them should pull him out. "I feel it
within me, it is a misfortune for me to be alone. One begins to be
disgusted with one's self, and then all is over," he had once in his
youth written to his mother with gloomy foreboding. Such was the end of
a master every fibre of whose being was in revolt against Classicism,
and who had so great a love for colour, truth, and life.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
ANTOINE JEAN, BARON GROS.]
More important events were yet to take place before the signal of
deliverance could be expected. It was the young men who had grown up
amid the desolate associations of the Restoration who were to lead to
victory the new movement of which Prudhon and Gros had been the
forerunners. The dictatorship over art of that Classical school which
had been taken over from the seventeenth century was limited to a single
generation--from the birththroes of the Revolution to the fall of the
Napoleonic Empire. For although many of David's pupils survived until
the middle of the century, yet they were merely academic big-wigs, who,
compared with the young men of genius who were storming their positions,
represent that mediocrity which had indeed attained to external honours,
but had remained stationary, fast bound to antiquated rules. The future
belonged to the young, to a youth which from the standpoint of our own
days seems even younger than youth commonly is, richer, fresher, more
glowing and fiery--the Generation of 1830, the "_vaillants de dix-huit
cent trente_," as Théophile Gautier called them in one of his poems.
[Illustration: _Photo, Levi._
GROS. THE BATTLE OF EYLAU.]
CHAPTER X
THE GENERATION OF 1830
During the years which elapsed between 1820 and 1848 France produced a
great and admirable school of art. After the convulsions of the
Revolution and the wars of the Empire, that generation had arisen,
daring and eager for action, which de Musset describes in his
_Confessions d'un Enfan du Siècle_. And these young men, born between
the thunders of one battle and another, who had grown up in the midst of
greatness and glory, had to experience, as they ripened into manhood,
the ignominy of Charles X's reign, the period of clerical reaction. They
saw monasteries re-erected, laws of mediæval severity made against
blasphemy and the desecration of churches and saints' days, and the
doctrine of the divine origin of the monarchy proclaimed anew. "And when
young men spoke of glory," says de Musset, "the answer was, 'Become
priests!' And when they spoke of honour, the answer was, 'Become
priests!' And when they spoke of hope, of love, of strength and life,
ever the same answer, 'Become priests!'" The only result of this
pressure was to intensify all the more the impulse towards freedom. The
political and intellectual reaction could only have the effect of
impelling the poetic and artistic emotions of young and unquiet spirits
into opposition, on principle, to all that was established, into a fiery
contempt for public opinion, into the apotheosis of unrestrained passion
and unfettered genius. The French Romanticists were anti-Philistines who
regarded the word "bourgeois" as an insult. For them Art was the one
supreme consideration; it was to them a light and a flame, and its
beauty and daring the only things worth living for. For those who put
forward such demands as these, the "eunuchism of the Classical"--an
expression of George Sand's--could never suffice. They dreamed of an art
of painting which should find its expression in blood, purple, light,
movement, and boldness; they held in sovereign contempt the correct,
pedantic, colourless tendency of their elders. An inner flame should
glow through and liberate the forms, absorb the lines and contours, and
mould the picture into a symphony of colour. What was desired and sought
for, in poetry and in music, in plastic art and in painting, was colour
and passion: colour so energetic, that drawing was, as it were, consumed
by it; passion so vehement, that lyrical poetry and the drama were in
danger of becoming feverish and convulsive. A movement which reminds one
of the Renaissance took possession of all minds. It was as though there
were something intoxicating in the very air that one breathed. On a
political background of grey upon grey, consisting of the cowls of the
Jesuits of the Restoration, there arose a flaming, refulgent, blustering
literature and art, scintillating with sparks and bright hues, full of
the adoration of passion and of fervid colour. Romanticism is
Protestantism in literature and art--such is Vitet's definition of the
movement.
Literature, which, adapting itself to the politics of the government,
had begun in Chateaubriand with an enthusiastic fervour for Catholicism,
Monarchy, and Mediævalism, had in the twenties become revolutionary; and
the description of its battles is one of the most glowing chapters in
George Brandes' classic work. There was a revolt against the
pseudo-antique, against the stiff handling of the Alexandrine metre,
against the yoke of tradition. Then arose that mighty race of Romantic
poets who proclaimed with Byronic fire the gospel of nature and passion.
De Musset, the famous child of the century, the idol of the young
generation, the poet with the burning heart, who rushed through life
with such eagerness and haste that at the age of forty he broke down
altogether, worn out like a man of seventy, deliberately wrote bad
rhymes in his first poems, for the purpose of thoroughly infuriating the
Classicists. So, too, he wrote his dramas, in which love is glorified as
a serious and terrible power with which one may not trifle, as the fire
with which one must not play, as the electric spark that kills. So
George Sand, the female Titan of Romanticism, published her novels, with
their subversive tendencies and their sparkling animation of narrative.
Between these two rises the keen bronze-like profile of Prosper Mérimée,
who prefers to describe the life of gypsies and robbers, and to depict
the most violent and desperate characters in history. Finally, Victor
Hugo, the great chieftain of the Romantic school, the Paganini of
literature, unrivalled in imposing grandeur, in masterly treatment of
language, and in petty vanity, found submissive multitudes to listen to
him when he rose in fierce and fiery insurrection against the rigid laws
of the bloodless Classical style, and substituted for the actionless and
ill-contrived declamatory tragedies of his time his own romantic dramas,
breathing passion and full of diversified movement.
The conflict was deadly. The young generation hailed with applause the
new Messiah of letters, and grew intoxicated with the harmony of Hugo's
phrases, which sounded so much fuller and fierier than the measured
speech of Corneille and Racine. The Théâtre Français, recently benumbed
as with the quiet of the grave, became all at once a tumultuous
battlefield. There they sat, when Hugo's _Cromwell_ and _Hernani_ were
produced on the stage, correct, well dressed, gloved, close shaven, with
their neat ties and shirt collars, the representatives of the old
generation, whose blameless conduct had raised them to office and place.
And in contrast to them, in the pit were crowded together the young men,
the "Jeune France," as Théophile Gautier described them, one with his
waving hair like a lion's mane, another with his Rubens hat and Spanish
mantle, another in his vest of bright red satin. Their common uniform
was the red waistcoat introduced by Théophile Gautier--not the red
chosen for their symbol by the men of the Revolution, but the
scarlet-red which represented the hatred felt by these enthusiastic
young men for all that was grey and dull, and their preference for all
that is luminous and magnificently coloured in life. They held that the
contemplation of a beautiful piece of red cloth was an artistic
pleasure. A similar change took place at the same time in ladies'
toilettes. As the Revolution had in ladies' costumes rejected all colour
in favour of the Grecian white, so now dresses once more assumed vivid,
and especially deep red hues; deep red ribbons adorned the hat and
encircled the waist.
[Illustration: THÉODORE GÉRICAULT.]
Deep red--that was the colour of the Romantic school; the flourishing of
trumpets and the blare of brass its note. Flashes of passion and
ferocity, rivers of sulphur, showers of fire, glowing deserts, decaying
corpses in horrible phosphorescence, seas at night-time in which ships
are sinking, landscapes over which roaring War shakes his brand, and
where maddened nations fall furiously upon one another--such are the
subjects, resonant with shout of battle and song of victory, which held
sway over French Romanticism. At the very time when at Düsseldorf the
young artists of Germany were painting with the milk of pious feeling
their lachrymose, susceptible, sentimental pictures, utterly tame and
respectable; when the Nazarene school were holding their post-mortem on
the livid corpse of old Italian art, and seeking to galvanise it, and
with it the Christian piety of the Middle Ages, into life again; at that
very time there arose in France a young generation boiling over with
fervour, who had for their rallying cry Nature and Truth, but demanded
at the same time, and before all else, contrast, pictorial antithesis,
and passion at once lofty and of tiger-like ferocity. In those very
years, when in Germany, the cartoon style of Carstens having died away,
progress was limited to a timid and unsuccessful pursuit of that revelry
of colour which marked the Quattrocentisti, the French took at once, as
with the seven-leagued boots of the fairy-tale, the great stride onward
towards the Flemings.
Through Napoleon, France had grown richer, not only in glory, but in art
treasures, gathered together from all countries into Paris, as trophies
of the victorious general. The abundant collections thus accumulated
brought to bear upon that generation the quickening influence of the
best that had been done in the art of painting. Nowhere could one study
either the Venetian colourists or Rubens to greater advantage than in
the Louvre, and it was by virtue of this unrestrained intercourse with
the masters who represent the most perfect blossom of colouring that the
Byronic spirits of 1830 succeeded in giving full expression to the
glowing full-coloured life of things which hovered before their heated
imagination. It is unnecessary to say that this was accompanied by a
great widening of the range of subjects treated. The Romantic school
showed that there were other heroes in history and poetry besides the
Greeks and Romans. They painted everything, if only it possessed colour
and character, flame, passion, and exotic perfume. Romanticism was the
protest of painting against the plastic in art, the protest of liberty
against the academic teaching of the Classical school, the revolution of
movement against stiffness.
[Illustration: GÉRICAULT. THE WOUNDED CUIRASSIER.]
It was in the studio of Guérin, the tame and timid Classicist, that the
young assailants grew up, "the daubers of 1830," who called the Apollo
Belvidere a shabby yellow turnip, and who spoke of Racine and Raphael as
of street arabs. They were tired of copying profiles of Antinous. The
contemplation of a picture by Girodet was wearisome to them. It was
_Théodore Géricault_, a hot, hasty passionate nature, of Beethoven-like
unruliness and of heaven-storming boldness, who spoke the word of
deliverance.
He was a Norman, sturdily built and serious in manner. Even while he was
studying in Guérin's studio he had already grasped some of the ideas
which Gros had in his mind, and, although not his pupil, Géricault may
be said to have continued his work, or at least would have been able to
do so had he lived longer. Like him, he had from his youth up
contemplated, full of wonder, the rolling sea and the thunder-laden
skies; like him, he had a predilection for fine horses; and, being of a
somewhat melancholy disposition, he preferred to treat of the darker
aspects of life. His aspiration was to paint the surging sea, proud
steeds rushing past at a gallop, suffering and striving humanity, great
deeds, pathos and frenzy in every form. His first works were splendid
horsemen, whose every muscle twitches with nervous movement. During his
short stay in Charles Vernet's studio he had already taken an interest
in cavalry, and begun the studies of such subjects, which he continued
to the day of his death. Afterwards, while he was working under Guérin
and before his visit to Italy in 1817, he often went to the Louvre,
copied pictures and studied Rubens, to the great annoyance of his
teacher, who with horror beheld him entering upon so perilous a path.
[Illustration: GÉRICAULT. CHASSEUR.]
Here again he followed in the steps of Gros, whose portrait of General
Fournier Sarlovése was hung in the Salon of 1812 close by Géricault's
"Mounted Officer." This picture, a portrait of M. Dieudonné, an officer
in the Chasseurs d'Afrique, crossing the battlefield sword in hand on a
rearing horse, was the first work exhibited by Géricault, then
twenty-one years of age. It was an event. Gros found himself supported,
if not surpassed, by a beginner who had his own enthusiasm for colour
and movement, for profiles broadly and boldly delineated. In 1814
followed the "Wounded Cuirassier," staggering across the field of battle
and dragging his horse behind him. These were no longer warriors seated
on classical steeds foaming with rage, but real soldiers in whom there
was nothing of the Greek statue. Then Géricault went to Italy, but in
this case also it was not to pursue archæological studies in the
museums, but to see the race of the _barberi_ during carnival. To this
time belong those studies of horses, for the possession of which
collectors vie with one another to-day, sketches made in the open air,
out in the street or in the stables. "The Horses at the Manger" and
"Horses fighting" were among the pearls of the collection of French
drawings in the Paris Exhibition of 1889.
In 1819 he completed his greatest picture, that which most people alone
call to mind--not quite fairly--when his name is mentioned--"The Raft of
the Medusa." What a tragedy is there represented! For twelve days the
unfortunate wretches have been on the deep, starving, in utter despair
and ready to lift their hands against each other. They were a hundred
and fifty, now they are but fifteen. One old man holds upon his knees
the corpse of his son; another tears his hair out, left alone in life
after seeing all his dear ones perish. In the foreground lie dead bodies
which the waves have not yet swept away. But far away in the distance a
sail appears. One points it out to another: yes, it is a sail! A mariner
and a negro mount upon an empty barrel and wave their handkerchiefs in
the air. Will they be seen? The anxiety is terrible. And ever higher and
higher the grey waves roll on.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
GÉRICAULT. THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA.]
[Illustration: GÉRICAULT. THE START.]
How must such a scene have impressed a generation which for long years
had seen nothing in the Salon but dry mythology and painted statues!
Géricault was the first to free himself from the tyranny of the
plaster-of-Paris bust, and once again to put passion and truth to nature
in the place of cold marble. Just as he commissioned the ship's
carpenter who had constructed the raft and was one of the saved to make
him a model of it, so also he moved into a studio close to the hospital,
for the purpose of studying the sick and dying, of sketching dead bodies
and single limbs. It must be admitted that one would wish for a yet
firmer grasp of the subject. In form, Géricault still belongs to the
school of David. A good deal of Classicism shows itself in the fact that
he thought it necessary to depict the majority of the figures naked, in
order to avoid "unpictorial" costumes. There is still something academic
in the figures, which do not seem to be sufficiently weakened by
privation, disease, and the struggle with death; but what man can free
himself at one stroke from the influence of his time and environment?
Even in the colouring there lingers some touch of the Classical school.
It offends no one, a fact to be insisted on in comparing him with the
Nazarenes; but as yet it plays no part in expressing the meaning of the
picture. From the distance, indeed, whence the rescuing ship is drawing
near, a bright light shines forth upon a scene otherwise depicted in
dull brown. Save for this, the intention of the picture is not expressed
by means of colour, and it even shows some retrogression as compared
with Géricault's earlier works. He had begun with Rubens, yet these
studies in colouring did not last. In the "Wounded Cuirassier" of 1814
dark tones took the place of the former cheerfulness, and so in the
"Raft of the Medusa" he imagined the tragedy could be represented only
in sombre hues. He spread over the whole scene a monotonous unpleasant
brown shade, and in his endeavour to lay all weight upon human emotion
he went so far as almost to suppress the sea, which nevertheless played
the chief part in the drama, and whose deep blue would have afforded a
splendid contrast. Discoveries are not to be made all at once, but only
when their hour is come.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
EUGÈNE DELACROIX.]
The next step in French art was to be that of reinstating the
significance of colour in the full rights conquered for it by Titian, so
that it should no longer be merely a tasteful tinting of the figures,
but should become truly that which gives its temper to the picture. It
was not reserved for Géricault to effect this. A trip to London, which
he made in 1820, in company with his friend Charlet, was the last event
of his life. There the sportsman awoke in him once more, and he painted
the "Race for the Derby at Epsom." Soon after his return he was thrown
from his horse while riding, but lingered on for two years longer,
suffering from a spinal complaint. With a few more years in which to
develop he should have been one of the great masters of France, but he
died when scarcely in his thirty-second year.
Yet he lived long enough to observe, in the Salon of 1822, the début of
one of his comrades from Guérin's studio. A greater than himself, to
whom with dying voice he had given a few words of advice, arose as the
intellectual heir of the young painter so prematurely carried off, and
carried to its issue the struggle which he had begun. It was on 26th
April 1799, at midday, that the first genuine painter's eye of the
century saw the light, at Charenton Saint-Maurice. Géricault had made a
beginning, but it was the impetuous, powerful genius of _Eugène
Delacroix_ which entered in and completed his work. What Gros had dimly
perceived, but had not dared to express, what Géricault had barely had
time with a courageous hand to point out, a hand too soon stiffened in
death--the modern poetry of colour, of fever, and of quivering
emotion--it was reserved for Delacroix to write.
"That child will grow up to be a famous man; his life will be extremely
laborious, but also extremely agitated, and always exposed to
opposition." Thus had a madman prophesied of the boy one day when he and
his nurse were taking a walk near the lunatic asylum at Charenton. And
he was right.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DELACROIX. DANTE'S BARK.]
Delacroix was another of the pupils who had grown up in Guérin's studio,
but he became the latter's antipode. Even in his student years he took
counsel, not of the antique, but of Rubens and Veronese; and when
Géricault was painting his "Raft of the Medusa," Delacroix belonged to
the little band of enthusiastic admirers which gathered round the young
master. He served as model for the half-submerged man to the left in the
foreground of that picture. After busying himself at first almost
entirely with caricatures, and studies of horses, and with Madonnas in
the Classical style, he exhibited in 1822 his "Dante's Bark," in a
pictorial sense the first characteristic picture of the century. One is
inclined even to-day to repeat David's exclamation when he caught sight
of the work, the first great epoch-making life-utterance of the
revolutionary Romanticists: "_D'où vient-il? Je ne connais pas cette
touche-la._" There were thoughts in it which had not been conceived and
expressed in the same manner since the time of Tintoretto. Dante and
Virgil, ferried by Phlegyas over Acheron, are passing among the souls of
the damned, who grasp hold of the boat with the energy of despair. A
theme taken from a mediæval author; an antique figure, that of Virgil,
but seen through the prism of modern poetry. While the Florentine, stiff
with horror, gazes upon the swimming figures which cling to the boat
with teeth and nails, Virgil, tranquil and serious, turns on them a face
which the emotions of life can no longer affect.
The work obtained a decisive success. A carpenter in Delacroix's house
had made for the young painter an inartistic frame of four boards. When
he went to the exhibition and looked for his picture in the side-rooms
he could not find it. The frame had fallen to pieces during removal, but
the picture had been hung in an honourable place in the Louvre, in a
rich frame ordered for it by Baron Gros. "You must learn drawing, my
young friend, and then you will become a second Rubens," was the salute
which this remarkable man, whose theory ever gave the lie to his
practice, gave the young master. Naturally Delacroix would not now have
been admitted into the school of David, or would have been placed there
in the lowest rank--with Rubens and a few other immortals, who drew no
better than he did. He was absolutely opposed to all the exact, regular,
well-balanced, colourless traditions which held sway in David's school
with their pedantic erudition and _bourgeois_ discretion. The principle
of the Classicists was the Greek type of beauty, and the translation of
sculpture into painting. In Delacroix's picture there was no longer
anything of that sort. Géricault had already broken away from the
academic stencilling of form, and had substituted natural expression,
life, and emotion for conventional types; Delacroix now set aside the
sullen colouring of the Classical school, and its painted statues made
way for the colour-symphonies of the Venetians.
These reforming qualities found in his second work, a few years later, a
much fuller expression than in the "Dante's Bark." At that time the
Greeks, that heroic nation, struggling and dying for its religion and
independence, had excited everywhere the deepest sympathy and
enthusiasm. Delacroix was the very man to be inspired by such a theme.
From the agitation caused by the martyrdom of Greece, and from his
taste for Byron's poetry, resulted in 1824 the celebrated "Massacre of
Chios," on which he was already employed in 1821, before the completion
of his "Dante's Bark," and in which his power of expression as well as
of colour was carried much further than in the earlier picture. In the
"Dante's Bark" there were still, both in form and colour, reminiscences
of the great Florentine masters; as, for instance, in the female figure
in the foreground, which is almost an exact reproduction of Michael
Angelo's "Night." The event depicted was comparatively quiet and
tranquil, and the well-balanced composition would have done honour to
the most rigorous follower of David. The only novelty lay in the
treatment of colour, and in the substitution of the individual and
characteristic for the typical and ideal. But undoubtedly it was now
possible not only to produce in colour more powerful chords, but also in
expression to strike notes more dramatic, for the academic
plaster-of-Paris heads of the David school had depicted human emotion
only in icy immobility. Delacroix had put all these possibilities into
the new picture. The pyramidal configuration has resolved itself into an
unconstrained grouping of figures. Here we have for the first time the
artistic spirit intoxicated with colour, the "Orlando Furioso of
colourists," the pupil of Rubens, Delacroix. An entire world of deep
feeling and of painfully passionate poetry, an entire world of tones,
which the master under whose eyes he painted his "Dante" could not have
conceived, lies enclosed within the frame of this picture. The figures,
sitting, kneeling, partly reclining, with their half-starved bodies and
their gloomy, brooding, hopeless faces; the desperate struggle between
the conquerors and their victims in the far distance; the contrast
between this scene of horror and the luminous splendour of the
atmosphere, and the wealth of colour in the whole, made and still make
this fine painting one of the most impressive pictures in the Louvre. It
is a work which flames in glow of colour more than any that had appeared
in France since the days of Rubens. The English had been his teachers.
"It is here only that colour and effect are understood and felt,"
Géricault had previously written from London. Delacroix's work had
already been sent off to the Salon when Constable's first pictures were
just arriving there, and the impression which they made upon him was so
powerful that, at the very last moment, and in the Louvre itself, he
gave his picture a brighter and more luminous colouring.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DELACROIX. HAMLET AND THE GRAVE-DIGGERS.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DELACROIX. TASSO IN THE MAD-HOUSE.]
And indeed it was not till now that the Classicists perceived how great
an opponent had arisen against them. Not only did the aged Gros call the
"Massacre of Chios" "_le massacre de la peinture_," but all the critics
talked about barbarism, and prophesied that on this path French painting
would hasten to its destruction. The prize of the Salon was awarded, not
to the "Massacre," but to Sigalon's "Locusta," an unimportant work of
compromise, though very clever and well studied in draughtsmanship. It
was said that Delacroix's picture was lacking in symmetrical
arrangement, that he showed too great a contempt for the beautiful, that
indeed he appeared systematically to prefer the ugly--that is to say, he
was blamed for the very qualities wherein lay his importance as a
reformer. Accustomed as they had been for many years to an art in which
intellect, correctness, and moderation held sway, not one of the critics
was in a position to perceive all at once the value of this fiery
spirit. Delécluze, the indefatigable defender of the sacred dogmas of
the Classical school, characterised "dramatic expression and composition
marked by action" as the reef whereon the grand style of painting must
inevitably be wrecked. The modern schools of art, he taught as late as
1824, exist, flourish, and have their being only by the utilisation of
what we can learn from the Greeks. Even acknowledging the progress in
colour which the work showed, it nevertheless belonged, he said, to an
inferior genus, and all its excellences in colouring could not outweigh
the ugliness of its form.
Therewith began the battles of the Romantic school, and all the daring
of Théophile Gautier, Thiers, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire,
Bürger-Thoré, Gustave Planche, Paul Mantz, and others had to be called
upon in order to storm the heights held by the batteries of the
Classical critics. Count Forbin gave proof of no less courage when he
bought the picture, torn to shreds as it was by hostile criticism, for
the State, at the price of six thousand francs. This enabled Delacroix
to visit England. He spent the time from spring to autumn of 1825 in
London, where he consorted amicably with all the artists of the day. And
he took an interest not only in English art, but also in literature and
the drama. His preference for Shakespeare, Byron, and Walter Scott, who
were already his favourite poets, found new sustenance. An English opera
made him acquainted with Goethe's _Faust_; and henceforth these poets
entered into the foreground of his works. A picture of "Tasso" (the poet
in a cell of the madhouse, through the window of which two grinning
lunatics look in upon him) in 1826, the "Execution of the Doge Marino
Faliero" and the "Death of Sardanapalus," both after Byron, in 1827, and
"Faust in his Study" in 1828, followed the "Massacre"--all of them
obviously the works of a painter who loved bright, glowing colour, had
studied Rubens and had recently returned from England. In 1828 was
published, in seventeen plates, his cycle of illustrations to _Faust_,
to accompany a translation of the poem into French; and this was
followed by a number of lithographs on Shakespearian subjects.
And here we may notice a singular exchange of parts. When the word
"Romantic" was first heard in Germany it had originally much the same
sense as "Roman." The German Romanticists were moved to enthusiasm by
Roman Catholicism and Roman church painting. But when Romanticism
reached France, the word came to mean exactly the opposite: a preference
for the German and English spirit as compared with the Greek and Latin,
and an enthusiasm for the great Anglo-Saxon and German poets,
Shakespeare and Goethe, in whom, contrasting with Racine's correctness,
were to be found unrestrained genius and glowing passion. This influence
of poetry over art may easily become dangerous, if painters sponge, so
to speak, upon the poet, as the Düsseldorf school did, and make use of
his work only for the purpose of enabling works, in themselves
valueless, to keep their heads, artistically speaking, above water, by
means of their extrinsic poetical interest. But Delacroix had no need of
any such support. He was not the poets' pupil, but their brother. He did
not study them in order to illustrate their works, but was imbued with
their spirit and possessed by their souls. He lived with them; he did
not borrow his subjects from them, but rather made use of them to
express in his own powerful language the strongest emotions of the human
heart. Nor did he ever forget that painting must, before all, be
painting. Endowed as he was with a poet's soul, he conceived things as a
painter, not laboriously translating passages from the poets, but simply
thinking in colour. What the musician hears, what the poet imagines, he
saw. The scenes of which he read appeared at once before his eyes as
sketches, in great masses of colour. For him, composition, action, and
colour ever united together into one inseparable whole.
[Illustration: DELACROIX. ENTRY OF THE CRUSADERS INTO CONSTANTINOPLE.]
The journey to Morocco, which he made in the spring of 1832, in company
with an embassy sent by Louis Philippe to the Emperor Muley Abderrahman,
is noteworthy for a further progress in his ability as a colourist and a
new broadening of his range of subjects. When he returned to the port
of Toulon, on 5th July 1832, he had seen Algiers and Spain, and had
assimilated an abundance of sunshine and colour. It is in his Oriental
pictures that his painting first reaches its zenith, just as Victor
Hugo's mastery over language was at its highest point in his
_Orientales_. Goethe, in his _West-östliches Divan_, celebrated what is
quiet and contemplative in the Oriental view of life. Obermann sang of
the land of legend, of buried treasures, of Aladdin and the wonderful
lamp; but for Byron (who was practically the first to introduce into
Europe the perfume and colour of the East), for Hugo, and for Delacroix,
it was the distant, bright-hued, barbaric land of the rising sun, the
land of sanguinary warfare and overthrow, the home of light and colour.
Here it was that the French Romanticists found the world that realised
their dreams of colour. The East became for them what Rome had been for
the Classical school. From the feeble and misty sun of Paris, and from
the grey skies of the Boulevard des Italiens, they turned to Africa.
His enthusiasm for this newly discovered world resounds, full and clear,
in Delacroix's letters. "Were I to leave the land in which I have found
them," he wrote, during his stay in Morocco, of the men whom he saw
about him there, "they would seem to me like trees torn up by the roots.
I should forget the impressions I have received, and should be able only
in an incomplete and frigid manner to reproduce the sublime and
fascinating life which fills the streets here, and attracts one by the
beauty of its appearance. Think, my friend, what it means to a painter
to see lying in the sunshine, wandering about the streets and offering
shoes for sale, men who have the appearance of ancient consuls, of the
reincarnated spirits of Cato and Brutus, who lack not even that proud,
discontented look which those lords of the world must have had. They
possess nothing save a blanket in which they walk, sleep, and are
buried, and yet they look as dignified as Cicero in his curule chair.
What truth, what nobility in these figures! There is nothing more
beautiful in the antique. And all in white, as with Roman senators or at
the Greek Panathenæa."
His palette was thus further enriched in lucid tints, the contrasts he
formerly delighted in became less sharp and glaring, the gloomy
background hitherto preferred was superseded by a bright serenity and a
golden lustre. The colour-effect of his "Algerian Women" has been not
unaptly compared to the impression produced by a glance into an open
jewel casket. In his "Convulsionaries of Tangier" he has depicted with
wild, demoniac energy the religious frenzy of a Turkish sect. Green,
blue, red, and violet hues unite to produce an effect as of a sounding
flourish of trumpets, recalling the music of the janizaries. The "Entry
of the Crusaders into Constantinople" resembles an old delicately tinted
carpet, full of powerful, tranquil harmony. Even in his old age he
wrote: "The aspect of that country will be for ever before my eyes; the
types of that vigorous race will move in my memory as long as I live; in
them I truly found the antique beauty again."
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DELACROIX. JESUS ON LAKE GENNESARET.]
The contemplation of such scenes induced Delacroix to undertake the
representation of antique subjects, which he had hitherto avoided, not
because he disliked the antique, but because of the aversion he felt for
David's treatment of it. During his sojourn in Africa he had come to the
conclusion that the painting of scenes from ancient history should not
be based upon the imitation of statues and bas-reliefs, as with David
and his pupils; but that it should be imbued with the movement and
passion of modern life, since the ancient Greeks were men of flesh and
blood like ourselves. Therefore it is that he snatches the marble mask
from the faces of David's puppets. Flemish blood begins to move in the
Greek statues, Flemish passion to break through their inflexible rhythm.
Paintings such as the "Justice of Trajan" of 1840 represent the antique
in a thoroughly personal and modern paraphrase, just as Shakespeare or
Byron had seen it. The mad "Medea" is, from the point of view of colour,
certainly the chief work of this group.
It was of course impossible that a man so highly endowed with emotional
pathos should pass untouched the tragedy of the life of Christ and the
sufferings of the Christian martyrs. By the Revolution religious themes
had been absolutely excluded from representation, and up to this time
the young innovators of the Restoration period had also felt an
aversion for them. Their ideas were as little attuned to Catholic as to
academic tradition. Delacroix was the first to treat once more of
biblical subjects, so far as they are imbued with dramatic and
passionate movement. Like Rubens, he regarded the lives of the saints,
the story of the Gospels, and the tragedy on Golgotha as a poetical
narrative like any other. His Mary, like that of the Flemish painters,
is a sorrowing woman, the embodiment of unending grief.
Alongside of these easel pictures he produced, during a period of more
than twenty-five years, a long list of monumental and decorative works;
and they too were the most inventive, the boldest, and the most original
which monumental painting produced during this epoch, not in France
only, but in Europe. In this sphere also, where, under the pressure of
old traditions and conventional types, it is so difficult to avoid
plagiarism, Delacroix maintained his individuality. In 1835, at the
suggestion of his friend Thiers, he was commissioned to paint the
interior of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon--the most
important commission which had fallen to the lot of any French artist
since Gros painted the cupola of the Pantheon. Not long afterwards he
decorated with verve and enthusiasm the ceiling of the Louvre, choosing
for his subject the "Triumph of Apollo." In the Library of the
Luxembourg he had recourse to the _Divina Commedia_, and treated in a
masterly manner the theme so familiar and sympathetic to him. In his
works there is something of the joyous and sportive energy of Rubens'
allegorical pictures, but not the least trace of imitation. He
understood decorative painting in the sense of the great old masters,
Giulio Romano and Veronese, not as wall didactics and lectures on
archæology; he knew that descriptive prose has nothing whatever to do
with the walls of a building, but that the sole aim of such paintings is
to fill the house with their solemn grandeur, to make the whole building
resound as it were with sacred organ music. Between 1853 and 1861 came
also the wall paintings in the Church of Saint Sulpice, and one would
almost think that Delacroix finished them in feverish excitement, to
show for the last time how enormous a store of passion and power still
lay in the soul of a sexagenarian. Shortly after their completion, on
13th August 1863, he died, who was, in the words of Silvestre, "the
painter of the genuine race, who had the sun in his head and a
thunderstorm in his heart, who in the course of forty years sounded the
entire gamut of human emotion, and whose grandiose and awe-inspiring
brush passed from saints to warriors, from warriors to lovers, from
lovers to tigers, from tigers to flowers."
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DELACROIX. HORSES FIGHTING IN A STABLE.]
In these words Delacroix is very aptly characterised. His range of
subjects included everything: decorative, historical, and religious
painting, landscape, flowers, animals, sea pieces, classical antiquity
and the Middle Ages, the scorching heat of the south and the mists of
the north. He left no branch of the art of painting untouched; nothing
escaped his lion's claws. But there is one bond uniting all: to all the
figures for which he won the citizenship of art he gave passion and
movement. His predominant quality is a passion for the terrible, a kind
of insatiability for wild and violent action. His over-excited
imagination heaps pain, horror, and pathos one upon another. The critics
called him "the tattooed savage who paints with a drunken broom." There
is nothing pretty or lovable about his art; it is a wild art. He
depicted passion wherever he found it, in the shape of wild animals,
stormy seas, or battling warriors; and he sought it in every sphere, in
nature no less than in poetry and the Bible. Hardly any painter--not
even Rubens--has depicted with equal power the passions and movements of
animals: lions in which he is own brother to Barye; fighting horses, in
which he stands side by side with Géricault. No other artist painted
waves more grand, wind-beaten, foaming, dashing, towering on high.
Looking at them, one divines all the horrors concealed beneath the roar
of the blue surface, horrors which were as yet so insufficiently
suggested in Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa." In his historical
pictures there reigns now terror and despair, as in the "Massacre of
Chios"; now gloomy horror, as in the "Medea"; now feverish movement, as
in the "Death of the Bishop of Liège." He passes from Dante to
Shakespeare, from Goethe to Byron, but only to borrow from them their
most moving dramatic situations--Hamlet at Yorick's grave, his fight
with Laertes, Macbeth and the Witches, Lady Macbeth, Gretchen,
Angelica, the Prisoner of Chillon, the Giaour, and the Pasha. All time
is his domain, all countries are open to him; he hurries through the
broad fields of imagination, a lordly reaper of all harvests.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DELACROIX. MEDEA.]
And at the same time, in all his great human tragedies, he compels the
elements to obey him as if they were his slaves. The passions of men set
heaven and earth in motion. The agonising cries of victims find in his
paintings an echo in the sullen shadows and the leaden, heavy clouds of
the sky. The gloomy shores which Dante's boat is approaching are as
desolate as the spirits who wander through the night. But where
splendour and glory reign, as in the "Entry of the Crusaders into
Constantinople," the air, too, glistens and shines as though saturated
with dust of gold. In his pictures a human soul which was great and full
of meaning, and which possessed such combustibility that it took fire of
itself, expressed itself recklessly, with the volcanic strength of an
elemental power.
This proud self-reliance explains also how it was that this painter of
unruly genius was, as a man, very far from being a revolutionist. For
Delacroix the outer world had no existence; that world alone existed
which was within him. After his picture of "The Barricades" in 1831 he
avoided all political allusions, painted, read, and led a tranquil,
measured, uniform life. In society polite and reserved, of aristocratic
coldness, gentlemanly in appearance, and well-bred; in his speech curt,
mordant, emphatic, and occasionally witty, he could nevertheless show
himself, when he chose, an amiable, original talker, full of piquant
ideas. Moreover, he was a great writer and critic, whose essays in the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_ have the perfect classic stamp. Nevertheless, he
was always displeased when any one put him forward as the chief of
official Romanticism, and saluted him as the Victor Hugo of painting.
Surrounded as he was by young assailants of tradition who would allow no
merit to anything old, he found pleasure in acknowledging his admiration
for Racine, whom he knew by heart, and whom, when need was, he defended
against the younger generation. He was too diplomatic to stir up against
himself unnecessarily the hatred of those whom the long-haired Samsons
of Romanticism called Philistines.
So far as in him lay, his quiet and methodical life should suffer no
interruption. Worshipper though he was of light and colour, he was
almost always shut up in his gloomy studio, and it was only when he
found himself brush in hand that the reserved man became the passionate,
vibrating painter. Then the memories with which his study of the poets
had stored his mind grew in his fantasy into grand pictures glowing with
life. By these visions he was excited, set on fire, and filled with
enthusiasm. His studio was open but to few, for the intrusion of
visitors chilled his inspiration, and he found it difficult to recover
the proper frame of mind. Not till evening did he take his first meal,
for he thought he could work with greater intensity when hungry. During
a period of forty years he lived in his various studios, quiet and
solitary, inventing, drawing, and painting without intermission, his
door always bolted, so that when it suited him he could give out that he
was ill of a fever. Every morning before work he drew an arm, a hand, or
a piece of drapery after Rubens. He had formed the habit of taking
Rubens to himself when other people were drinking their coffee.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DELACROIX. THE EXPULSION OF HELIODORUS.]
Indeed, when one speaks of Delacroix, the name of Rubens rises almost
involuntarily to one's lips; and yet there is a profound difference
between him and the great Flemish master. Rubens has the same passion,
the same ever-active fancy; yet all his pictures rest in triumphant
repose, while every one of Delacroix's seems to resound as with a cry of
battle. Looking at Rubens' works you feel that he was a happy, healthy
man; but by the time you have seen half a score of Delacroix's it is
borne in upon you that the life of the artist was one of strife and
suffering. Rubens was the very essence of strength, Delacroix was a sick
man; the former full of fleshly joyous sensuality, the latter consumed
by a feverish internal fire.
His portrait of himself in the Louvre, with its pale forehead, its large
dark-rimmed eyes, its lean, hollow face, its parchment-like skin
stretched tightly over the bones, explains his pictures better than any
critical appreciation. Delacroix was one of the _âmes maladives_, the
spirits sick unto death, to whom Baudelaire addresses himself in his
_Fleurs du Mal_. Delicate from his youth up, thoroughly nervous by
nature, he prolonged his sickly existence throughout his life by sheer
energy of will. Even in his childhood he passed through serious
illnesses, and later on he suffered in turn from his stomach, throat,
chest, and kidneys. Like Goethe in his old age, he felt well only when
the temperature was high. He was short in stature. A leonine head, with
a lion's mane, surmounted a body that seemed almost stunted. With his
eyes flashing like carbuncles, and his disordered prickly moustache, his
was the fascinating ugliness of genius.
It was only by the strictest dieting in his quiet retreat at Champrosay
that he prolonged his life for the last few years. In his youth he
hovered like a butterfly from flower to flower; when grown old and
hypochondriacal he withdrew into solitary retirement, work was the only
medicine for diseased conditions of all kinds, to which he found himself
daily more and more a victim. Only thus could this sickly man, doomed
from his very birth, come to produce no less than two thousand
pictures--a number all the more astonishing as Delacroix, even when his
health permitted him to work at his easel, by no means possessed Rubens'
sovereign facility of production. The fever of work alternated, in his
case, with the extremest exhaustion. There was something morbid,
nervous, over-excited in all he did. "Even work," he writes, "is merely
a temporary narcotic, a distraction; and every distraction, as Pascal
has said in other words, is only a method which man has invented to
conceal from himself the abyss of his suffering and misery. In sleepless
nights, in illness, and in certain moments of solitude, when the end of
all things discloses itself in its utter nakedness, a man endowed with
imagination must possess a certain amount of courage, not to meet the
phantom half-way, not to rush to embrace the skeleton."
The feverish disposition which he brought with him into the world was
heightened by the acrimonious feuds in which, as a painter, he was
forced to engage, and which left great bitterness behind them in his
mind. His life and his art were in accord, in as much as both were
battles. It is not easy to live when one is always ill; not easy to meet
with recognition when one proclaims the exact opposite of that which for
a generation past all the world has held to be true. And Delacroix took
not a single step to meet his opponents half-way. He did not trouble
himself for a single moment to please the public; and therefore the
public did not come to him. Controversies such as that which took place
over the "Massacre of Chios" continued decade after decade, and the
exhibition of each of his pictures was the signal for a battle. "No work
of his," writes Thoré, "but called forth deafening howls, curses, and
furious controversy. Insults were heaped upon the artist, coarser and
more opprobrious than one would be justified in applying to a sharper."
At Charenton, where he was born, is the Bedlam of France. Hence the
epithet continually hurled at him by the critics, who called him the
runaway from Charenton.
Until the year 1847 his pictures could without difficulty be excluded
from the Salon. He irritated people by his violence, by the abruptness
of his compositions, by his arrangement of figures with a view to pathos
at the expense of plastic elegance; he displeased by the incompleteness
of his works, which were regarded as sketches, not finished paintings.
When Louis Philippe ordered a picture from his brush, it was on the
express condition that it should be as little a Delacroix as possible.
There was general ill-humour among the academicians when, at Thiers'
suggestion, he was commissioned to decorate the Palais Bourbon. And
Delacroix, ambitious and sensitive as he was, was deeply hurt by every
mortification of this kind, and affected by every gust of criticism as
by a change of wind. Continually denounced in the newspapers, attacked,
wounded, delivered over to the wild beasts, as he called it, he never
had a moment of rest--he who, with his irritable temperament and fragile
health, needed rest more than any man. It was not until almost all his
works were brought together in the Universal Exhibition of 1885 that it
became evident how great an artist this Delacroix was, whom his country
for forty years had not understood, and to whom the Institute had closed
its doors to the last. Yet he was no sooner dead than all with one voice
proclaimed him a genius; his smallest drawing is to-day worth its weight
in gold, while during his lifetime he seldom got more than two thousand
francs for his largest paintings. His sketches, great works in small
frames, have for the most part found their way to America. The sale of
the pictures he left behind him produced three hundred and sixty
thousand francs.
Delacroix, therefore, was victorious, but not as Rubens was; and his
ceiling of the Louvre, with the "Triumph of Apollo," one of his most
remarkable works, strikes one almost as an allegory of his own life.
What especially attracted and inspired the artist in this painting were
the spasms and convulsions of the misshapen monsters which the god
expels from the earth--the serpent twisting itself in movements of pain
and fury, raising its head on high, hissing rage, and vomiting venom and
blood. The god himself, who in the midst of a sea of light ascends into
heaven in a golden chariot drawn by radiant steeds, shows in his sturdy
limbs and attitude ready for defence, and in his wrathful face, no trace
of the proud majesty and joyous splendour which Greece connected with
the name of Apollo. He is a mortal who has fought and conquered, not a
god who triumphs in tranquil power. He is Delacroix, not Rubens; a
Titan, not an Olympian god.
The artistic power in Delacroix could in no wise submit to the
confinement imposed by the French spirit of his time. It was not
possible for a single man, though endowed with the most splendid
courage, to overthrow in a moment all the traditions of French art. Any
one who knows the French must feel that David's Latin style could not so
suddenly disappear out of their art, that it was not possible at a blow
to banish all that had hitherto held sway and to replace it by its
opposite. Ever since Poussin they had sought in Roman antiquity the
formulæ of their art. The predilection which the Parisians have even
to-day for the representation of Racine's and Corneille's tragedies, the
admiration which even the most extreme Naturalists bestow upon Poussin
and Lesueur, prove abundantly how deep Classicism is rooted in the flesh
and blood of the French people. Brandes has remarked, very acutely,
that, strictly speaking, even Romanticism was on French soil in many
respects a Classical phenomenon, a product of French Classical rhetoric.
"They never saw the dances of the elves, never heard the delicate
harmony of their roundelays." In Victor Hugo, the great opponent of
Corneille, Corneille himself was re-embodied. He too is a draughtsman,
constructs his poems like architectural works, chisels the form,
polishes the verse, and confines his colouring within powerfully
conceived Michelangelesque outlines.
[Illustration: J. A. D. INGRES. _L'Art._]
Once the first eager impulse of the Romantic school had subsided, these
old Classical tendencies showed themselves anew and with all the greater
vehemence. Even Hugo's dramas, with their predilection for all that is
exuberant and monstrous, with their overflowing lyricism and sonorous
pathos, became in the long run wearisome. He, who had hitherto been the
idol of the young generation, was now called the Pater Bombasticus of
the literature of the world.
Classicism found its poet and its muse. An unknown but very worthy young
man, not endowed with wealth of imagination, but imbued with the most
honourable intentions, came to Paris from the provincial town where he
had grown to manhood, with a manuscript in his pocket. And François
Ronsard's _Lucrèce_, a tragedy from the antique, in its style sober and
severe, reminding one of Racine, was represented amid thunders of
applause, shortly after Hugo had been hissed off the stage. Enthusiastic
admirers saw in it a glorious return to the great tragic drama of
France, an emanation from the spirit of Corneille, and praised its
clear, measured, and at once "classic and familiar" language. Together
with its poet, the Classical reaction found its actress. In 1838 a young
untrained child made her début at the Théâtre Français--a Jewish girl
who had sung in the streets to the accompaniment of her harp. Rachel
appeared upon the boards, and restored its former power of attraction to
the old Classical repertoire, to the very tragedies which the Romantic
school had banished from the theatre amid mockery and derision. _The
Cid_, _Mérope_, _Chimène_, and _Phèdre_ recovered their place upon the
stage.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
INGRES. THE MAID OF ORLEANS AT RHEIMS.]
Painting took the same course. In opposition to the young painters who
had burst into the arena with their gay-coloured uniforms, their gilded
helmets and waving banners, _Ingres_ came forth in the great tournament
of Romanticism in the character of the Black Knight. An old gentleman, a
man who in all his being belonged to the generation that was passing
away, who was fifty years of age at the time of the Revolution of July,
stations himself suddenly as the angel of the flaming sword, or, in the
phrase of his opponents, as the gendarme of Classicism, at the gates of
the Academy, barring them against every suspicious-looking person. And
the young men, eccentric, eager for action as they were, who had
recently fought with so much fury, had to retreat before him. Golden
sunshine and glow of colour were once more tabooed, and their
representative heroes, Veronese, Rubens, and Delacroix, regarded as
flickering Will o' the Wisps, whom every aspiring beginner should avoid
as serpents and firebrands. One day when Ingres was taking his pupils
through the Louvre he said, on entering the Rubens gallery: "_Saluez,
messieurs, mais ne regardez pas._" The acrimony of the strife was so
great that it extended even to the personal relations of the rival
chiefs, and Ingres was attacked by convulsive spasms whenever he heard
the name of the painter of the "Massacre of Chios." When in 1855 he had
had a separate room prepared for his own pictures in the Universal
Exhibition of that year, and observed Delacroix in the distance, just
before the opening ceremony, he asked the attendant: "Has not somebody
been here?--there is a smell of brimstone." "Now the wolf is in the
sheepfold" was his observation when Delacroix was elected to the
Institute. He regarded him as the "hangman," as the Robespierre of
painting. "I used to love that young man, but he has sold himself to the
evil one" (Rubens), said he, in righteous indignation, to his pupils.
[Illustration: INGRES. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AS A YOUTH.]
"This famous thing, the Beautiful," Delacroix had once written, "must
be--every one says so--the final aim of art. But if it be the only aim,
what then are we to make of men like Rubens, Rembrandt, and, in general,
all the artistic natures of the North, who preferred other qualities
belonging to their art? Is the sense of the beautiful that impression
which is made upon us by a picture by Velasquez, an etching by
Rembrandt, or a scene out of Shakespeare? Or again, is the beautiful
revealed to us by the contemplation of the straight noses and correctly
disposed draperies of Girodet, Gérard, and others of David's pupils? A
satyr is beautiful, a faun is beautiful. The antique bust of Socrates is
full of character, notwithstanding its flattened nose, swollen lips, and
small eyes. In Paul Veronese's 'Marriage at Cana' I see men of various
features and of every temperament, and I find them to be living beings,
full of passion. Are they beautiful? Perhaps. But in any case there is
no recipe by means of which one can attain to what is called the ideally
beautiful. Style depends absolutely and solely upon the free and
original expression of each master's peculiar qualities. Wherever a
painter sets himself to follow a conventional mode of expression he will
become affected and will lose his own peculiar impress; but where, on
the contrary, he frankly abandons himself to the impulse of his own
originality, he will ever, whether his name be Raphael, Michael Angelo,
Rubens, or Rembrandt, be sure master of his soul and of his art."
As compared with the principles thus laid down, Ingres represents the
revulsion towards that formalism which had borne sway over the greater
part of the history of French art. "Painting is nothing more than
drawing," said Poussin. "Had God intended to place colour at the same
height as form," wrote Charles Blanc, "He would not have failed to
furnish His masterpiece, Man, with all the hues of the humming-bird."
Once more, instead of the glowing colour of the Romantic school,
absorbing the form into itself, the firm stroke of the outline was set
forth; instead of its pathos, breathing forth passionate emotion, men
returned to study the chill tranquillity of stone. Once more dramatic
composition and mastery over movement were held in abhorrence, as
incompatible with that pursuit of plastic beauty which was the highest
goal of art. The only point in question was, how to avoid the
one-sidedness of Classicism. David, as a child of the Revolution, had
naturally been limited to Ancient Rome; but now that the legitimate
monarchy had been re-established there was no reason why one should not
revere, not only pagan, but also Christian Rome, and in Raphael and
Michael Angelo the maturest blossom of the latter. Thus the Classical
school was enriched by Ingres with features of greater vivacity. He
entered into a direct relationship with the great Italian masters, while
David had none save with the rigid Roman antique. By him the Classical
severity of David was relaxed, the refractory sharpness of the outlines
relieved by a treatment of form which had the effect of making every
figure appear to be worked in metal.
[Illustration: INGRES. BERTIN THE ELDER.
(_By permission of M. Jules Bapst, the owner of the picture._)]
Ingres was born in 1781, under the _Ancien Régime_. As a young man he
lived through the triumphs of the Empire and the Classical school, and
it was only natural that he should become David's pupil. In 1796 he
entered his studio, and studied there with such assiduity that he never
noticed what was taking place in that of Gros. When he went to Italy he
studied there the masters whom his own teacher had arrogantly despised.
He learned from the Cinquecento how to draw and model more accurately,
more firmly, and at the same time with a more intimate grasp of the
subject than was usual in the school of David. This innovation made him
a progressive Classicist, and gave him, during the early years of the
Restoration, almost the appearance of an assailant and revolutionary.
Himself the incarnation of the academic spirit, he had to resign himself
to see his first works rejected by the Salon, a fact which did not deter
him from continuing to work obstinately at his easel. "_Je compte sur ma
vieillesse; elle me vengea._" And this revenge was granted him in the
fullest measure.
When one has seen the outward appearance of a man, one knows his
character, his spirit, and his genius. Ingres' portrait of himself
contains the analysis of his art. He was quite a small man, of a swarthy
complexion, with features sharp and as if cast in bronze. His thick
black hair stood up stubbornly on end, so that he had to grease it
carefully every day. Under hair of this kind there is almost always an
obstinate brain. The jaws projected, as is the case with men endowed
with a strong will. The eyes were large and piercing, with that bold
eagle-glance which fills parents with fond hopes, but does not touch the
hearts of young women. When he appeared to be excited, it was only the
excitement of work expressing itself in him. This little man, in his
large cloak, seemed to say when he stood at his easel, pencil in hand:
"I shall be a great painter, for I am determined to be one." He kept his
word. Strength of will, hard work, study, obstinacy, patience--these are
the elements of which Ingres' talent is compounded. "_Vouloir, c'est
pouvoir_," was his motto. One would think Buffon had had him in mind in
that passage in which he defines genius as patience. The
trinity-in-unity of his qualities consisted of correctness, balance,
exactness; qualities which go to make rather a great architect or
mathematician than an interesting painter.
Ingres' range of subjects was unusually wide. Pictures on themes taken
from antiquity ("Oedipus and the Sphinx" and "Virgil reading the
Æneid"); costume pictures ("Henry IV and his Children" and the "Entry of
Charles V into Paris"); religious paintings (Madonnas, "Christ giving
the Keys to St. Peter," and "St. Symphorian"); nude female figures (the
"Odalisque," the "Liberation of Angelica," and "The Source"); allegories
("The Apotheosis of Homer" and "The Apotheosis of Napoleon"); pictures
of public functions ("Bonaparte as First Consul" and "Napoleon on the
Throne"); and even a painting taken from the life ("Pius VII in the
Sistine Chapel"), are included in the list. Yet, notwithstanding his
astonishing diversity of themes, there is hardly an artist more
one-sided in his principles. Ingres thought exclusively of purely
plastic art: beauty of form and harmony of line alone attracted him; he
was insensible to the charm of colour. His standpoint was the Institute
of Rome; the Italian Cinquecento the exclusive object of his worship. He
carried this study as far as plagiarism, and as director of the Roman
Academy made free with the intellectual property of the Cinquecento
masters, as if they had lived only on his account.
When Delacroix was painting the "Expulsion of Heliodorus" in Saint
Sulpice, he put forth the whole strength of his creative genius to
avoid all reminiscence of Raphael's fresco. Ingres' power of invention
consisted in discovering, with a weird certainty, whether the subject of
which he wished to treat had already been painted by an Italian or other
Classical master. The picture "Jupiter and Thetis," of 1811, is put
together after a design on a Greek vase, and represents in its studied
archaism the Æginetan period of his art. The "Vow of Louis XIII," of
1824, was his confession of faith as regards the Cinquecento. The motive
was taken from the Madonna di Foligno, the curtains from the Madonna di
San Sisto, the floating angels from the Madonna del Baldacchino, and the
candlesticks as well as the little angels with the inscribed tablet are
from the same source. It is all beautiful, of course, for it is all
Raphael; only, it would have been more rational if Ingres had lived in
the time of Raphael instead of in the nineteenth century. One would take
the picture to have been painted under Raphael's eyes, and it bears to
his works the same relation as Raphael's earlier pictures do to
Perugino's. The "Christ giving the Keys to St. Peter" is also put
together out of elements derived from the school of Urbino. In his "St.
Symphorian," which was belauded as the _ne plus ultra_ of style, he
turned by way of variety to the imitation of Michael Angelo: the action
is violent, the muscles swollen. The "Apotheosis of Homer" is an
admirable lecture in archæology, a sitting of the great academy of
genius, in which the poses are so fine and the heads so full of marble
idealism that in comparison with it Raphael's "School of Athens" has the
effect of the wildest naturalism.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
INGRES. STUDY FOR THE ODALISQUE IN THE LOUVRE.]
Thus Father Ingres stands forth as a cold, stiff, academic painter, as a
doctrinaire who has not progressed much further than the much-reviled
David. He represents, as Th. Rousseau said, only to a moderate degree
the good old art which we have lost. In the words of Diaz: "Let him be
shut up with me in a tower, without engravings, and I wager that his
canvas will remain untouched, whilst I shall succeed in producing a
picture." He possessed an arid ability which leaves one cold in presence
of even his most important works. How lifeless is the effect produced by
his paintings of nude single figures, his "Odalisque" and his "Freeing
of Andromeda," which brought him especial fame! Ingres could not paint
flesh, and in this respect he is indicative of an enormous retrogression
as compared with Prudhon. The striving after sculpturesque beauty, and,
in connection therewith, the repression of all individuality, became in
him almost a religion.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
INGRES. THE SOURCE.]
One finds it difficult to-day to account for the fame which once
belonged to his picture of "The Source," the nude figure of a standing
girl pouring water out of an urn that rests on her left shoulder and is
steadied by her right arm raised over her head. The picture undoubtedly
exhibits qualities of draughtsmanship which in recent days Ingres alone
possessed in so high a degree. But when, in pursuit of his Classical
conception, he had eliminated every touch of nature, he proceeded to
destroy the rest of the impression by the cold violet tones which are
not only condemned by colourists, but which even Raphael would have
considered false and ugly. Here, as in all his female figures, he
attains to a certain grace, but it is an animal, expressionless grace.
Skilful as he was in delineating the muscles of the human body, he was
yet absolutely incapable of painting heads expressive of feeling or
emotion. He depicted the form in itself, the abstract, typical, absolute
form. He was dominated only by a love for the _beauté suprême_, so that
when he was in presence of nature he could not refrain from purifying
and generalising. Everywhere we see beautiful lines, bodies modelled
with admirable skill, but we never enter into any closer relationship
with his figures. They do not live our life or breathe our atmosphere;
they have not our thoughts: they are foreign to all that is human. Jean
Auguste Dominique Ingres, Member of the Institute, Senator, etc., the
stylist held in honour as a superior being, the high-priest of pure form
and outline, will in all times command the esteem, and in some respects
the admiration, of the student of the history of art; the enthusiasm,
never.
[Illustration: _Baschet_.
INGRES. OEDIPUS AND THE SPHINX.]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
INGRES. PAGANINI.]
And yet, notwithstanding all this, I am an enthusiastic admirer of
Ingres. Indeed, it has happened to me, in the collection of engravings
at the Louvre, to catch myself saying: "Ingres! great, beloved Master! I
have much to ask your pardon; for you were one of the greatest and most
refined spirits to whom the century has given birth." For I doubt
whether any one down to the present time has rightly understood the
mysterious figure of Ingres, the man who in his youth was enraptured by
"_l'esprit, la grâce, l'originalité de Vataux et la délicieuse couleur
de ses tableaux_," and who, at a later time, not because of failing
powers but deliberately and of set purpose, adopted a calmer system of
colour tones; of this Classicist _par excellence_, who is counted among
the greatest artists, in the familiar and graceful style, in the history
of art.
Ingres is one of the rare masters whom even their opponents are forced
to admire. In the stern, sculpturesque modelling of his naked figures he
displays remarkable power. His painting, also, has a curiously intimate
appeal, due to its cool, metallic harmonies of colour--light blue, rose,
and pale yellow in particular.
But above all Ingres commands attention by his portraits. From his first
residence at Rome, that is, from the beginning of the century, he
painted portraits which imprint themselves on the memory like medals
struck in metallic sharpness in the style of Mantegna. Here too he is
unequal, at times cold and commonplace, but usually quite admirable. In
these paintings, cast as it were in bronze, there is something that
comes from the fresh original source of all art; they have that vein of
realism by which the vigorous idealism of Raphael is distinguished from
the conventional idealism of a professor of historical painting. Here
one finds real treasures, creations of remarkable vital power, and in
admirable taste. They show that Ingres, apparently so systematic, had a
profound love for living nature, and they ensure the immortality of his
name. His historical pictures are works which compel our esteem, but his
portraits are splendid creations which can truly stand comparison with
the great old masters.
So far back as 1806 there appeared in the Salon his likeness of Napoleon
I, with his bloodless, corpse-like face, enchased with such art that
Delécluze called it a Gothic medal. The Emperor is seated like a wax
figure upon the throne, surrounded by the attributes of majesty--stiff,
motionless as a Byzantine idol. It was followed in 1807 by the portrait
of Mme. Devauçay, which even to-day impresses the beholder most
pleasingly, notwithstanding the pedantic style in which it is painted.
One feels in it fire and youthfulness, the enthusiasm and ardour of a
new convert, who has for the first time discovered in nature beauties
other than those he had learnt to see in the Academy. Moreover, he
possessed a very distinguished and personal taste in drawing. The face
is of exquisite grace, the eyes tenderly seductive and delicately
veiled. Ingres is already announced as he was afterwards to be.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
INGRES. MLLE. DE MONTGOLFIER.]
In Holbein's portraits the whole German community of his time has been
handed down to us; in Van Dyck's, the aristocracy of England under
Charles I. So also Ingres has depicted for us, with all its failings and
all its virtues, the middle-class hierarchy of Louis Philippe's reign,
which felt itself to be the first estate, the summit of the nation, felt
sure of the morrow, was proud of itself, of its intelligence and energy,
which pursued with correctness its moral course of life, revered order
and hated all excess--including that of the colourist. The same spirit
animated this splendid _bourgeois_ of art. His "Bertin the Elder" is
justly his most celebrated, enduring work; not the mere painted
petrifaction of a newspaper potentate, but one of those portraits which
bring a whole epoch home to the mind. It tells of the triumph of the
_bourgeoisie_ under the Monarchy of July more fully and clearly than
does Louis Blanc's _Histoire de Dix Ans_. In the best of humours, with
the four-square solidity of a knowledge of his own worth, which is full
of character, this modern newspaper demi-god sits on his chair as on a
throne, the throne of the _Journal des Débats_, like a _bourgeois_
Jupiter Tonans, with his hands on his knees.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
INGRES. THE FORESTIER FAMILY.]
But however highly one must estimate the importance of such a work,
Ingres is nevertheless at his highest, not in his painted likenesses,
but in his portrait drawings. In the former the hard colouring is still,
at times, offensive. Almost always the flesh looks like wood, the dress
like metal, blue robes like steel. His drawings, from which this defect
is absent, are to be admired without criticism. Ingres lived in his
youth, at Rome, as a drawer of portraits. For eight _scudi_ he did the
bust, for twelve the whole figure, raging inwardly the while at being
kept from "great art" by such journey-work. There is a story told of
him, that when one day an Englishman knocked at his door and asked,
"Does the draughtsman who makes the small portraits live here?" he shut
the door in his face, with the words: "No; he who lives here is a
painter." To-day these small masterpieces of which he was ashamed sell
for their weight in gold. In the Paris Exhibition of 1889 there was Mme.
Chauvin with her Chinese eyes; Mme. Besnard on the terrace of the Pincio
with her broad hat and her elegant sunshade; Mrs. Henting with her
innocent smile of an "_honnête femme_"; Mrs. Cavendish, an affected
young blonde, with her overladen travelling dress and her crazy
coiffure. Strange, that a man like Ingres should rave so about new
fashions and pretty toilettes!
In these pieces an artistic eye which was now inexorable, now tender and
full of fancy, has looked on nature, and, in flowing pencil-strokes, has
caught with spirit and with the certain touch of direct feeling the real
fulness of life in what he saw. These drawings, especially the portrait
of Paganini and "The Forestier Family," show that Father Ingres
possessed not only a highly cultivated intelligence and an iron strength
of will, not only the genius of industry, but also a heart, a genuine,
warm, and fine-feeling heart; that he was in his innermost being by no
means the cold academician, the stiff doctrinaire he appears in his
large pictures, and which he became by his opposition to the Romantic
school. Here we have an enchanter such as the Primitives were and the
Impressionists are, like Massys and Manet, like Dürer and Degas, like
all who have looked Nature in the face. And while these drawings, at
once occasional and austere, place him as a draughtsman on a level with
the greatest masters in the history of art, they also show him, the
reactionary, to be at the same time a man of progress, the connecting
link between the great art of the first half and the familiar art which
rules over the second half of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER XI
JUSTE-MILIEU
As is usually the case, the heroes were succeeded by a generation less
heroic and more practical. In this, art was in keeping with the
deliberate and tranquil course of the state itself, which had fallen
back again into the old groove, and with the homely, Philistine
character assumed in the course of years by the citizen monarchy of the
tricolour. The _bourgeoisie_ which had effected the Revolution of 1830
was soon appalled at its own temerity. Even in literature it inclined
towards a temperate and lukewarm mediocrity. It was astonished to find
itself admiring Casimir Delavigne. It found in Auber and Scribe its
ideal of music and comedy, as in Guizot, Duchâtel, Thiers, and Odilon
Barrot its ideal of politics. The intellectual exaltation which had gone
before and followed after the Revolution of July had calmed down, and
that which was to rise out of the Revolution of February was as yet
latent. The same elder generation which had looked upon Napoleon
Bonaparte's stony Cæsarian eye, when, like a god of war, unapproachable
in his power he rode by at the head of his staff, now saw the Roi
Citoyen, the long-exiled ex-school-master, homely and fond of law and
order, as every day at the same hour he passed alone on foot and in
plain clothes through the streets of Paris, the famous umbrella in his
hand, rewarding each "Vive le Roi!" with a friendly smile and a grateful
hand-shake. The umbrella became the symbol of this deedless monarchy,
and the word "Juste-milieu," which Louis Philippe had once employed to
indicate the course to be followed, became the nickname of all that was
weak and without energy, lustreless and undignified, in the age. The
golden mean was triumphant in politics, literature, and painting.
The artists who gave this period its peculiar stamp constitute, as
compared with the heaven-assaulting generation of 1830, only, as it
were, a collateral female branch of that elder male line of good
painting. To reconcile opposite tendencies, to avoid harshness, in
short, to bring about an artistic compromise between Ingres and
Delacroix, was the end towards which their efforts were chiefly
directed.
_Jean Gigoux_, a remarkable artist, has the merit of having given the
most effective support which Delacroix received in his battle against
the _beauté suprême_ of the Classical school. When, in the Universal
Exhibition of 1889 at Paris, his picture of "The Last Moments of
Leonardo da Vinci," painted in 1835, emerged from the seclusion of a
provincial museum, its healthy fidelity to nature was the cause of
general astonishment. The personages indeed wear costly costumes, and
are surrounded by wealth and magnificence, but they themselves are
common, ugly human beings. Here there is no trace of idealism, not even
in the sense of Géricault, who, notwithstanding his love of truth,
remained faithful to the heroic type. The faces are, with religious
devotion, painted exactly after nature by a man who evidently loved the
youthful works of Guercino and had zealously studied Dürer. At the same
time was exhibited the portrait of the Polish "General Dwernicki,"
painted in 1833, whom also Gigoux depicts as a man, not as a hero. War
has made him not lean but fat, and in Gigoux's picture his red nose and
prominent stomach are reproduced with cruel fidelity to nature. It is a
declaration of war against every kind of idealism. Even in his religious
paintings in Saint Germain l'Auxerrois he held fast to this principle,
and this circumstance gives him a place to himself, apart from all the
productions of his contemporaries. In a period which, with the solitary
exception of Delacroix, was still absolutely devoted to the doctrine
_Exagérer la beauté_, his works are of a healthy, soul-refreshing
ugliness.
A portion of Delacroix's charm in colour descended to _Eugène Isabey_.
He is certainly not a great artist, but a delightful, sympathetic
individuality, a painter who affords one pleasure even at this day. Amid
the group of Classicists of his time he has the effect of a beautiful
patch of colour, of a palette on which shades of tender blue, mauve,
lilac, brilliant green, silver-grey, red faded by sunshine, and
opalescent mother-of-pearl combine in subtle harmony. His pretty,
picturesquely costumed ladies are grouped together in luminous gardens,
sheltered by delicate half-shadows, or ascend and descend the castle
stairs, letting their long trains sweep behind them, and toying
gracefully with fan or sunshade; while gallant cavaliers do them homage,
and with bent head whisper sweet nothings in their ears. The slender
greyhound plays a special part in these aristocratic comedies; its
straight lines give a counterpoise to the soft flowing costumes of his
figures. Isabey is altogether in his element when he has to portray a
ceremony requiring rich attire. Then he binds together, as it were, a
bouquet sparkling with colour, shot with the hues of ample damask folds
and heavy gold-embroidered silk. Now his colouring is _chic_,
capricious, and coquettish, now it is that of the most delicate faded
Gobelin tapestry. If he has to paint a sea-view, he rumples the waves
about like a ball-dress and pranks the ships up in bridal attire. His
very storms have a festal appearance, like the anger of a beautiful
woman. One must not look for life in his pictures; they are to the truth
much what Gounod's _Faust_ is to Goethe's. Watteau is his spiritual
ancestor; but he is not so full of life and wit as the painter of the
gallant world of the eighteenth century. He does not depict his
contemporaries, but the life of a vanished age; yet he has the same
predilection for scenes of high life, and a studied, mannered
gracefulness which is often charming and always pleasant to the eye. He
shares with Delacroix the latter's broad style, freedom from constraint,
and delight in colour. But where Delacroix is rough and violent, Isabey
is caressing and insinuating: they are not brothers, but distant
cousins. And, like Delacroix, he had no imitators; he went on his bright
and delightful path in solitude, and remained without companions in the
little gilded house, lit up with fantastic lanterns, which he assigned
to be the coquettish home of charming beings of both sexes.
[Illustration: ARY SCHEFFER. _L'Art._]
A curious position, half-way between the Romantic and the Classical
schools, was occupied by _Ary Scheffer_, who was, a generation ago, the
favourite of the greater part of the aristocracy of Europe, but is now
known, to the German public at least, only because he is said to have
painted "with snuff and green soap"--a phrase of Heine's, which,
however, gives a very false impression of him. A German-Dutchman by
birth, a Classicist by training, Scheffer in his youth came also in
contact with the leading spirits of the Romantic school; and these
various influences, of race, education, and intercourse, are clearly
reflected in the faces of his figures. His forms are thoroughly classic
and generalised; only the expression of the face is ideal, while the eye
is romantic, and, Scheffer's German blood making itself
felt--sentimental. It was precisely this mid-way position which his
contemporaries found so much to their liking. They called his painting a
great art full of style, uniting the sentiment of ideal beauty with a
captivating power of expression. But history cares but little for these
men of compromise, and regards this indecision as the chief defect of
his genius. Scheffer's draughtsmanship is dry and hard, his colouring
without tenderness or charm. These failings are ill-assorted with the
attitudes and physiognomy of his figures, which have always an
affectation of weakness, exhaustion, and moral suffering. He is a
sentimental Classicist, and his subjects the antithesis of the
Græco-Roman ideal to which he does homage in his technique. His "Suliote
Women" was already, in sentiment, form, and colour, only a subdued and
weakened reminiscence of the "Massacre of Chios." At a later time he
entirely forsook historical subjects (such as "Gaston de Foix" and
others), and attached himself with enthusiasm to the Gospels and to the
works of the poets, especially of one poet. When he had recourse to the
Bible as a source of inspiration, he selected tender episodes, the
sadness of which he transmuted into tearfulness. So also, when he
represented scenes from _Faust_ or _Wilhelm Meister_, he gave to
Goethe's animated and impassioned characters something melancholy,
suffering, and contemplative. Heine said of his "Gretchen": "You are no
doubt Wolfgang Goethe's Gretchen, but you have read all Friedrich
Schiller." Even before her fall, before she is in love, Marguerite is
pensive and sad like a fallen angel. Mignon, Francesca da Rimini, and
St. Monica were also favourite figures for his delicate and
contemplative spirit. He alone in French art inclines a little, in his
tearful sentimentality, to the Romantic school of Düsseldorf.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
ARY SCHEFFER. MARGUERITE AT THE WELL.]
_Hippolyte Flandrin_ was the French counterpart of the German Nazarenes.
He is an example of how Ingres' teaching resulted in stiff
conventionality. Ingres was a dangerous master to follow. His pupils
formed round him a small, faithful, and submissive band, swore like
those of Cornelius by the master's doctrines, and for that very reason
never attained to any distinctive character of their own. None of them
possessed Ingres' many-sided talent. His empire, like that of Alexander
the Great, was divided among his successors, each of whom governed his
own little realm with greater or less ability. Hippolyte Flandrin
devoted himself to religious painting, which in his hands for the first
time regained a greater importance in French art; but he followed much
more slavishly than Ingres in the paths of the Italian masters of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This painter, worthy of respect,
full of conviction, learned and of sterling worth, but colourless and
cold, who decorated the churches of St. Vincent de Paul and St. Germain
des Prés, has enriched the history of art by no new gift. An
indefatigable worker, but endowed with little intellectual power, he
went no further than to follow out strictly the rules which Ingres
taught his pupils and had himself acquired from the old masters. After
Flandrin, as winner of the Prix de Rome in 1831, had become intimately
acquainted with the art treasures of Italy, he seldom met with any
difficulty. His cartoons are flowingly and correctly executed with a
firm hand, like the fair copy of a school essay. Of draughtsmanship he
knew all that is to be learned; he remembered much, arranged his
reminiscences, and thought little for himself. He was a miniature copy
of his master, at once more poorly endowed and more fanatical, a purely
mathematical genius; his art is a cold geometrical knowledge, the
adaptation of anatomical studies to conventional forms, an arrangement
of groups and draperies in strict accordance with celebrated exemplars.
Had not the primitive Italian masters, the painters of the ancient
Christian catacombs, the saintly Fra Angelico, and the mosaic artists of
Ravenna done their work long before him, Flandrin's paintings would
never have seen the light, any more than those of the Nazarene school.
In both cases one can assign almost every face and figure to its
original in the pictures of the Italian masters. Only a certain blond,
tender, slightly melancholy, modern face of a Christian maiden is
Flandrin's peculiar property. He transferred these same ascetic and pure
principles to portrait painting, and thereby acquired for himself a
large practice as the painter of the _femme honnête_. These women
conversed with him and blushed in his presence; in his pictures we find
grace and delicacy, eyes sparkling or meek, tenderness and mocking
laughter, all translated into a nun-like, unapproachable appearance,
which under the Second Empire gained the greater approbation among
ladies, since it was seldom found in real life.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
CHASSERIAU. APOLLO AND DAPHNE.]
Alongside of this Overbeck, endowed with greater artistic powers than
his German congener, there stands as the French Cornelius _Paul
Chenavard_, a man who revolved in his fertile brain philosophical
conceptions deeper almost than those of the German master. He dreamed of
broad, symbolical, decorative pieces, embracing all time and all space,
wherein all the cosmogonies of the universe should be united. Like
Cornelius, he wished to be a Michael Angelo, but he succeeded no better
than the German. He spent fifteen years in the churches and museums of
Italy, pencil in hand, accumulating a vast collection of studies, from
which his great painted history of the world was to be built up. But
when he went back to Paris his materials from the old masters had grown
upon him to such an extent that he never recovered his individuality.
For four years he worked with feverish diligence, and completed eighteen
cartoons, each six metres in height and four in breadth, intended for
the walls of the Pantheon. So far as colour is concerned, they have
attained no greater success than the Campo Santo frescoes of Cornelius.
Chenavard could draw much better than the German, but was not much
better as a painter; the works of both have a literary rather than an
artistic value.
Brief and brilliant was the career of _Théodore Chassériau_, who shot
across the heavens of art like a gleaming meteor, first as a devotee of
form, in Ingres' sense of the word, and afterwards, like Delacroix, as
an enthusiastic lover of sunshine and the clear light of Africa. Born in
1819 at St. Domingo, he followed his teacher Ingres in 1834 to the Villa
Medici; but even in his first picture, the "Susanna" of 1839, now in the
Louvre, he proved himself by no means an orthodox pupil. "He has not the
least understanding for the ideas or the changes which have entered into
art in our time, and knows absolutely nothing of the poets of recent
days. He will live on as a reminiscence and a reproduction of certain
ages in the art of the past, without having created anything to hand
down to the future. My wishes and my ideas do not in the least
correspond with his." In these words Chassériau has himself pointed out
what it was that distinguished him from Ingres. Unfortunately he
produced but little. Personally a very elegant, _blasé_ gentleman, he
plunged on his return from Italy into the whirlpool of Parisian life. He
was remarkably ugly; but his black, piercing eyes made him the idol of
the ladies, and he hurried through life with such haste that he broke
down altogether at the age of thirty-six. Beyond various decorative
paintings for the church of Saint Méry and for the Salle des Comptes in
the Palais d'Orsay, only a few Eastern pictures, and, best and most
characteristic, a couple of lithographs, remain to represent his work.
In these delicate mythological compositions a chord is struck which
found no echo until, a generation later, it was heard again in the work
of the French New Idealists and the English Pre-Raphaelites: there
speaks in them a Romantic Hellenism, a something dreamily mystic, which
makes him a remarkable link between Delacroix and the most refined
spirit in the modern school, Gustave Moreau. It was purely an act of
gratitude in Moreau when he affixed the dedication "To Théodore
Chassériau" to his fine picture of "The Young Man and Death."
_Léon Benouville_ will be remembered only for his picture of the "Death
of St. Francis," in the Louvre, a good piece of work in the manner of
the Quattrocento. _Léon Cogniet_ deserves to be mentioned because in the
fifties he brought together in his studio so many foreign pupils,
especially Germans. He enjoyed above all others the reputation of being
able to initiate beginners both quickly and with certainty into the
peculiar mysteries of craftsmanship. All that a master can teach, and
that can be learned from his example, was to be obtained from this kind
and fatherly instructor. Even after he had long given up painting, his
grateful pupils used to meet together yearly at a banquet given in the
patriarch's honour. As an artist he belongs to the list of the great men
who have paid for overpraise in their lifetime by oblivion after their
death. His "Massacre of the Innocents" of 1824--a woman who, mad with
terror, thinks to hide herself and her child from the assassins of
Bethlehem under an open stairway--could give pleasure only in a time
which hailed with enthusiasm Ary Scheffer's heads resembling plaster
busts full of expression. Occasionally, too, he painted landscapes--the
chimerical, vague creations of a man who had lived but little in the
open air. His finest picture, "Tintoretto Painting his Dead Daughter by
Lamplight," of 1843, the engravings of which once enraptured France and
Germany, has to-day a somewhat insipid effect, and shows whither his
genius was leading him--in technique a coarser Schalcken, in sentiment a
weaker Delaroche.
[Illustration:
COGNIET. TINTORETTO PAINTING HIS DEAD DAUGHTER.]
Delaroche was the Titian of Louis Philippe's age, the spoiled child of
the Juste-milieu, one of the most insignificant and at the same time one
of the most famous painters of the century; and in this double capacity
is an interesting proof that in art the "Vox populi" is seldom the "Vox
Dei." What a difference between him and the great spirits of the
Romantic school! They were enthusiastic poets; their predilection for
Mediævalism was concerned only with its æsthetic charm, with the
twilight shadows of its picturesque churches, the sounding presage of
its bells, the motley processions of that world gleaming bright with
uninterrupted colour. And what further allured their imaginative powers
was the unruly character of certain epochs, the destructive war of wild
factions, and the blazing, consuming power of passion. The historical
motive, as such, was with them only a pretext for launching forth into
flashing orgies of colour, according to the example, which they followed
merely in externals, of the Venetian and Flemish masters. They knew, as
genuine painters, that only in the pigment on their palette slumbers
that power of exciting emotion by means of which the art of painting
touches the chords of men's souls. Enthusiasts of colour and of passion,
they raved about the poets merely because the latter more readily
enabled them, by means of the fierce vehemence of the awakened powers of
nature, to invest with form the feverish, agitated, and terrible dreams
of their fantasy. So it was that Delacroix told of conflagration, of
battle and warfare, of murder and pillage, of the bitterness and pains
of love. At the same time, no doubt, he studied the vari-coloured
costumes of past ages--his drawings show as much--but he made use of
them simply as a storehouse of bright hues, as a lexicon by means of
which he might embody his visions of colour. To manufacture historical
vignettes and play the part of a teacher of history would have been in
his eyes a thing to be held in contempt as the work of subservient
illustrators. Yet perhaps it was by taking this very course that far
greater successes were to be attained, so far as the verdict of the
multitude is considered.
The decade following upon 1820 was a season of brilliant blossom for the
art of writing history in France. By his _History of the English
Revolution_, in 1826, Guizot won for himself a place in the foremost
rank of French authors. He began in 1829 his famous lectures at the
Sorbonne, and commenced in 1832 the publication of his _Sources of
French History_. Even before him, Augustin Thierry had written in 1825
his _History of the Conquest of England by the Normans_, followed by
_Stories from the Merovingian Times_, and was now engaged in the
preparation of his great work, the _History of the Origin and Progress
of the Third Estate_. Not unworthy to be compared with these writers,
and soon to stand beside them, were two young men working in
collaboration--Mignet and Thiers--who came to the front in 1823-24 with
their _History of the Revolution_. At the impulse thus given, historical
societies and unions had arisen in every province of France, and were
developing an ever-increasing activity.
What learning had begun, poetry carried further. A number of writers,
young and old, began to consider what poetic use might be made of the
materials which these investigations had brought to light, and few years
had passed before the number of historical romances and dramas was
hardly to be computed. Vitet, the elder Dumas, and de Vigny put
historical tragedy in the place of classical, and the modern novel of
George Sand, Balzac, and Beyle was ousted by the historical romance.
During the same years was completed the process by which grand opera
forsook fantastic for historical subjects, such as Auber's _Muette de
Portici_ and Rossini's _Guillaume Tell_.
[Illustration: COGNIET. THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS.]
Art also sought to turn to account the new materials furnished by
historical science, and æsthetic minds hastened to enumerate the
advantages which were to be expected of it. On the one hand--and this
was nothing new--the artist, whose curse it was to be born in an
inactive and colourless age, would find here all that he sought, for
history offered him the contemplation of a magnificent life, full of
movement. On the other hand--and this was the chief point--painting
might also fulfil an important mission on behalf of culture, if by
virtue of its more easily understood method it could supplement the
science of history, and by recalling the great memories of the past keep
alive that patriotism which in unfavourable conjunctures is so
frequently found wanting. Guizot recommended French history, "the
history of chivalry," to painters, as the first and most important
source of inspiration. "We want historians in the art of painting,"
wrote Vitet; and his cry was not unheard.
While the Romanticists had seen in the old costumes nothing more than
elements out of which a dashing colour-symphony could be obtained,
troubling themselves little about the meaning or the narrative import of
their pictures, their successors went over, bag and baggage, into the
camp of the historians. In the place of pure painting, there arose an
art laden with scientific documents, which busied itself in
reconstructing former times with antiquarian exactness. While the former
had produced nought but genuinely artistic colour-improvisations, so now
a didactic aim, together with historical accuracy, became the main
consideration. The painter was commissioned as a chronicler, an official
of the state, to console citizens for the lamentable present by an
appeal to the glorious past. He became a professor of history, a
theatrical costumier who rummaged records, chose masks, cut out dresses,
arranged scenic backgrounds, for no other purpose than to depict
correctly and legibly on the canvas an historical event. And Mme. Tout
le Monde found in these pictures exactly what she required. On the one
hand, the didactic aim of historical painting, with its long
explanations in the catalogues, answered precisely to the needs of the
educated middle classes. Under the picture there was always a pretty
card on which was printed this or that quotation from some historical
writer. One read the description, and then satisfied one's self that
the corresponding picture was really there and that it was in keeping
with the description. One recalled to mind the lessons in history one
had learned at school, and was pleased to be reminded in so pleasant a
fashion that before the nineteenth century people did not wear trousers
and frock-coats, but knitted hose and mantles. On the other hand, there
still survived enough of the Romantic unruliness to allow one to be
shocked in a decorous and moderate manner, and with the help of the
catalogue a picture might be permitted to make one's flesh creep in an
agreeable way.
For the average painter of mediocre ability historical exercises of this
sort must also have been very alluring, inasmuch as they made no demand
upon specially artistic qualities--upon any peculiar aptitude of the
fancy, eye, or palette. The historian must indeed possess the power of
combination, but much more that of sober investigation; too much
imagination or too great a sense of humour would be dangerous to him. So
also the historical painter required neither fancy, sentiment, nor power
of perception; a certain capacity for compiling facts was all that was
necessary. It was enough to ferret out of some popular book on history
the story of a murder, and to possess a work upon costumes. By such
means, men of a certain ability could easily manage, with the help of
the studio technique founded by the Romantic school, to put together the
most imposing show-pieces. And even the critics allowed themselves
frequently to be so far misled as to give to those models who were
decked out in the finest costumes, and labelled with the names of the
most celebrated personages, precedence over their more modest
companions. Consequently it happened that in the time of the citizen
monarchy a great number of painters entirely devoid of talent, whose
only merit was that they attached to this or that chapter of universal
history pictures showing some laboured animation, became in the
twinkling of an eye leaders of the schools.
[Illustration: PAUL DELAROCHE. _L'Art._
"Paul Delaroche à la funèbre mine
S'entour avec plaisir de cadavres et d'os
Jane Grey, Mazarin, héros et héroine
Chez lui tout meurt ... excepté ces tableaux."]
_Eugène Devéria_ was the first and most important painter deliberately
to enter upon this course. When his picture of the "Birth of Henry IV"
was exhibited in the Salon of 1827 his appearance was welcomed as that
of a new Veronese, and his work joyfully saluted as the first historical
picture in which the local colour of the epoch represented was
accurately observed. Henceforth Devéria dressed always in the style of
Rubens, and his house became the headquarters of the Romantic school. He
was perhaps the only member of this group in whom some breath of
Delacroix's spirit survived, but unfortunately he never found again
either the Venetian tone or the male accent of his youth, and though he
painted many more pictures he never contributed a second notable work to
art.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
DELAROCHE. THE ASSASSINATION OF THE DUKE OF GUISE.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DELAROCHE. THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER.]
Shortly afterwards _Camille Roqueplan_ began to alter his manner. Up to
that time he had been exclusively a painter who, like Watteau and
Terborg, listened with a voluptuous shudder to the piquant rustle of
silk, velvet, and satin dresses; now he devoted himself to depicting
with perspicuity various scenes from history, renounced his airy and
radiant fantasies, and became, in his "Scene from the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew," nothing but a tedious schoolmaster.
_Nicolaus Robert Fleury_, the painter of "Charles V in the Monastery of
St. Just," of the "Massacre of St. Bartholomew," of the "Religious
Conference at Poissy," and of other historical anecdotes, carefully
conceived and laboriously executed, devoted himself, like Lessing, to
the propagation of noble ideas. His pictures were manifestoes against
religious fanaticism, and philanthropic discussions concerning the
trials and persecutions of the freethinkers. In order to give them the
stamp of historical verisimilitude, he buried himself with the zeal of
an archivist in the study of the period to be represented; often
directly transferred into his pictures figures from Diepenbeeck or
Theodor van Thulden; and having the faculty of seizing in old paintings
those tones of colour which belong rather to the epoch than the master,
he succeeded in giving his works a certain documentary and archaic
character for which, on his first appearance, he obtained ample credit.
_Louis Boulanger_, after his "Mazeppa" of 1827, was a famous painter.
But the highest success was that attained by Paul Delaroche, inasmuch as
he understood better than any other, not only how to cater for the
cultured public by the didactic nature and historical accuracy of his
pictures, but also how to touch the heart by means of a lachrymose
sentimentality.
_Paul Delaroche_ belongs, by the date of his birth, to the eighteenth
century. Being one of Gros' pupils, he had never borne the yoke of the
Classical school in its fullest weight, and therefore had never had
occasion to revolt against it. When the Romanticists came to the front,
he had gone or rather been dragged along with them, for to his
circumspect nature Romanticism was an abomination, and his cool and
deliberative spirit felt itself much more at home in the society of the
Classicists. The works of the historians opened to him a welcome outlet
by which to avoid a rupture with either party, and Delaroche found his
vocation. He assumed the rôle of a peacemaker between the quarrelling
brothers, placed himself as mediator between Montagues and Capulets, and
thus became--like Casimir Delavigne in literature--the head of that
"School of Common Sense" on whose banner glittered in golden letters
Louis Philippe's motto of the Juste-milieu. Ingres was cold, reserved,
and colourless; Delaroche aspired to an agreeable, sparkling, highly
seasoned, bituminous art of painting. Delacroix was genial and sketchy;
Delaroche inscribed carefulness and exactness on his banner. The former
had given offence by his boldness; Delaroche won the conservatives over
to himself by his well-bred bearing and moderate attitude. People
thought Delacroix too wild and poetical; Delaroche took care to give
them only a touch of the eagerness of Romanticism, and set himself to
reduce the passionate vehemence of Delacroix to rational, Philistine
limits, and to soften down his native unruliness into sentimental
pathos. This position which he assumed as a mediator made him the man of
his age. The life of Delacroix was a long struggle. But for the
commissions entrusted to him by the state he might have died of
starvation, for his sales to dealers and lovers of art brought him
scarcely five hundred francs a year. His studio held many pictures,
leaning mournfully against each other in corners. Delaroche, on the
other hand, was overwhelmed with praise and commissions. The
representatives of eclecticism in philosophy and of the Juste-milieu in
politics found themselves compelled to praise an artist who was neither
revolutionary nor reactionist, neither Romantic nor Classical, who had
bound himself over neither to draughtsmanship nor to colouring, but
united both elements in vulgar moderation.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
DELAROCHE. STRAFFORD ON HIS WAY TO EXECUTION.]
[Illustration: THOMAS COUTURE. _L'Art._]
Already in his first notable works, in 1831, "The Princes in the Tower"
and "Oliver Cromwell," he has fully assumed his lukewarm manner. He
might have represented the murder of the princes, but fearing that the
public would not stand it, he preferred merely to suggest the
approaching death of the weeping and terrified children by placing in
front of the bed a small dog, which is looking uneasily towards the
door, where the red light of torches indicates the approach of the
assassins,--a Düsseldorf picture with improved technique. It is just the
same with his melodramatic and lachrymose "Cromwell." It would be hardly
possible to represent one of the greatest figures in universal history
in a more paltry manner, and to this day it is not quite certain whether
the picture was intended to be serious or humorous. The great statesman
in whom was embodied the political and ecclesiastical revolution of
England must have been extremely busy on the day of Charles I's funeral,
and have had better things to do than stealthily to open the coffin and
contemplate, with a mixture of childish curiosity and sentimental pity,
the corpse of the king whom he had fought and conquered. Eugène
Delacroix had treated this subject in a sketch, in which Cromwell, at
the funeral of Charles, gazes in quiet contempt upon the weak monarch
who had not known how to keep either his crown or his head. As a work of
art this little water-colour is worth ten times as much as Delaroche's
great, long-meditated, carefully executed painting. From the very
beginning he had no sense for the passionate or dramatic. From the first
day, had the tailor who prepared costumes struck work, his artistic
greatness would have fallen away to nothing; from the commencement he
produced nothing but large, clumsily conceived illustrations for
historical novels. Planché pointed out long ago that all the costumes
are glaringly new, that all the victims look as if they had got
themselves up for a masked ball, that this sort of painting is much too
clean and pretty to give the argument the appearance of probability.
Théophile Gautier, who had proclaimed the powerful originality of
Delacroix, fumed with rage against these "saliva-polished
representations, this art for the half-educated, disguised in false,
Philistine realism, this art of historical illustration for the familiar
use of the _bourgeois_." To rank timorous, half-hearted talent higher
than reckless and awe-inspiring genius--this was in Gautier's eyes the
sin against the Holy Ghost, and he sprang like a tiger upon the
popularity of talents such as these. He could, as he himself said, have
swallowed Delaroche, skin, hair, and all, without remorse; meanwhile,
the public raised him upon the shield as its declared favourite.
He won the intellectual middle class over to himself with a rush, as he
industriously went on rummaging in manuals of French and English history
for royal murders and battle-deaths of kings. With his "Richelieu,"
"Mazarin," and "Strafford," but especially with his "Execution of Lady
Jane Grey" and "Murder of the Duke of Guise in the Castle of Blois," he
made hits such as no other French artist of his time could put to his
account. Just then, in his youthful work, _The States-General at Blois_,
Ludovic Vitet had put the murder of the Duke of Guise upon the stage.
Nothing could be better-timed than to transform this operatic scene into
colour. The historians of civilisation admired the historical accuracy
of the courtiers' dress, all the upholstery of the room, the lofty
mantelpiece, the carved wardrobes, the praying-stool with the
altar-piece over it, the canopy-bed with its curtains of red silk
embroidered with lilies and the king's initials in gold. Playgoers
compared the scene with that which they had witnessed on the stage in
Vitet's piece, and the comparison was not unfavourable to the painter.
For Delaroche, in order to be as far as possible in keeping with the
stage representation, was accustomed to commission Jollivet, the chief
mechanician of the Opera House, to prepare for him small models of
rooms, in which he then arranged his lay-figures.
That is the further great difference between Delaroche and Delacroix,
between the vagrant painter of history and the artist. The latter had
the gift of the inner vision, and only painted things which had
intellectually laid hold upon him and had assumed firm shape in his
imagination. It was while the organ was playing the _Dies iræ_ that he
saw his "Pietà" in a vision--that mighty work which in power of
expression almost approaches Rembrandt. "Is not Tasso's life most
interesting?" he writes. "You weep for him, swaying restlessly from side
to side on your chair, when you read the story of his life; your eyes
assume a threatening aspect, and you grind your teeth with rage." Such
passionate emotion was wholly unknown to Delaroche; he painted deeds of
murder with the wildness of Mieris. Delacroix everywhere grasps what is
essential, and gives to every scene its poetical or religious character.
A couple of lines are for him sufficient means wherewith to produce a
deep impression. In presence of his pictures one does not think of
costumes; one sees everywhere passion overflowing with love and anger,
and is intoxicated with the harmony of sentiment and colour. Delaroche,
like Thierry, had merely a predilection for the historical anecdote
which, dramatically pointed, keeps the beholder in suspense, or else,
simply narrated, amuses him. The colour and spirit of events had no
power over his imagination; he merely apprehended them with a cool
understanding, and put them laboriously together in keeping with it.
Delacroix sought counsel from nature; but in the moment of creation, in
front of the canvas, he could not bear direct contact with it. "The
influence of the model," he wrote, "lowers the painter's tone; a stupid
fellow makes you stupid." Delaroche draped his models as was required,
made them posture and pull faces, and while he was painting, laboriously
screwed them up to the pathos demanded by the situation. Such a method
of procedure must necessarily become theatrical.
Just as in his historical pictures he endeavoured to transform
Delacroix's passion into operatic scenes, so he perfected his position
as a man of compromise by imitating the academic style in his
"Hemicycle." Here it was Ingres' laurels which robbed him of his sleep.
The fame which this picture has acquired is mainly due to Henriquel
Dupont's fine engraving. It does not attain to any kind of solemn or
serious effect. One might imagine one's self in some entirely prosaic
waiting-room, where all the great men of every age have agreed to meet
together for no matter what ceremonial purpose; one sees there a
carefully chosen collection of costumes of all epochs, with well-studied
but expressionless portraits of the leaders of civilisation. Here also
Delaroche has not risen above respectable mediocrity, and his
characteristics remain, as ever, thoroughly middle-class.
[Illustration: COUTURE. THE LOVE OF GOLD.]
His likeness of Napoleon is perhaps that which shows most clearly how
paltry a soul this painter possessed. It is not Devastation in human
shape, not the man in whom his officers saw the "God of War" and of whom
Mme. de Staël said, "There is nothing human left in him." The intellect
of that Corsican, with his great thoughts striding as in seven-leagued
boots, thoughts each of which would give any single German writer
material for the rest of his life, was hidden to the inquisitive glance
of a painter who had never seen in the whole of human history anything
more than a series of petty episodes. And one who is not able to paint a
good portrait is not justified in intruding into other regions of art.
For similar reasons the religious paintings with which he busied himself
in his last days have likewise enriched art with no new element. They
are a Philistine remodelling of the Biblical drama, in the same style as
his historical pictures. In the end he appears himself to have become
conscious how little laborious compilations of this kind have in common
with art, and since with the best will in the world he could produce
nothing better than he had painted in the thirties, he lost all pleasure
in his vocation and abandoned himself to gloom and pessimism, from which
death set him free in 1856.
_Thomas Couture_, who after Delaroche was most in vogue as a teacher in
the fifties, was of greater importance as an artist, and in his "Romans
of the Decadence" produced a work which, from the point of view of the
Juste-milieu, is worthy of consideration even to-day. He was a
remarkable man. His parents, shoemakers at Senlis, seem to have regarded
the thick-headed, slowly developing boy as a kind of idiot, and are said
to have treated him with no excessive gentleness. He was sent away from
school because he could not understand the simplest things, and studied
without success in the studios of Gros and Delaroche. And yet, after he
had made his début in the Salon of 1843 with the "Troubadour," a fine
picture in the style of Devéria, his "Orgie Romaine" of 1847 made him at
one stroke the most celebrated painter in France. Pupils thronged to him
from every quarter of the globe, and he left a deep and enduring
impression upon every one of them. A very short, corpulent,
broad-shouldered, thick-set, proletarian figure, with thick disorderly
hair, a blouse, a short pipe, and a gruff manner, he used to stride
through the lines of his pupils, who regarded him with wonder on account
of his ability as a teacher and his remarkable powers.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
COUTURE. THE ROMANS OF THE DECADENCE.]
Yet, when a few years had elapsed, no one heard of him again. After his
"Love of Gold" and a couple of portraits, he felt that he was
unfruitful, and gave up the battle. "The Falconer," an excellent
picture, with charming qualities of colour, was the last work to give
any proof of Couture's technical mastery. He fell out with Napoleon, who
wished to employ him; made many enemies by his writings, especially
among the followers of Delacroix, whom he criticised beyond measure; and
finally, embittered, and abandoning all artistic work, he buried himself
in his country place at Villers de Bel, near Paris. Thither Americans
and Englishmen used to come to order pictures of him, and were much
astonished to hear that the old gardener's assistant, as they took him
to be, sitting on the grass and mending shoes or old kettles, was
Couture. The news of his death in 1879 caused general astonishment; it
was as if one long buried had come to life again. It had meanwhile
become evident that even his "Romans of the Decadence" was only a work
of compromise, the whole novelty of which consisted in forcing the
results attained by the Romantic school in colouring into that bed of
Procrustes, the formulæ of idealism. The work is undoubtedly very
noble in colouring, but what would not Delacroix have made of such a
theme! or Rubens, indeed, whose Flemish "Kermesse" hangs not far from it
in the Louvre. Couture's figures have only "absolute beauty," nothing
individual; far less do they exhibit the unnerved sensuality of Romans
of the decline engaged in their orgies. They are merely posing, and find
their classical postures wearisome. They are not revelling, they do not
love; they are only busied in filling up the space so as to produce an
agreeable effect, and in disposing themselves in picturesque groups.
Even the faces have been vulgarised by idealism: everything is as noble
as it is without character. There is something of the hermaphrodite in
Couture's work. His art was male in its subjects, female in its results.
His "Decadence" was the work of a decadent, a decadent of Classicism.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
COUTURE. THE TROUBADOUR.
(_By permission of M. Charles Sedelmeyer, the owner of the picture._)]
CHAPTER XII
THE POST-ROMANTIC GENERATION
Four years after Couture painted his "Roman Orgy," Napoleon III ascended
the throne, and the Parisian orgy began. It was a remarkable spectacle
that the capital offered in those days--a spectacle of fairy-like,
flashing and sparkling splendour. Even to-day, when Republican Paris
endeavours as much as possible to obliterate every memory of the Empire,
Napoleon's spirit lives in the external appearance of the city and
hovers over every conspicuous point. Augustus might say that he had
found his capital a city of plaster and lime, and left it one of stone
and bronze; Napoleon has the right to maintain that he raised palaces
where there had been barracks.
Notwithstanding all the imprecations uttered against his rule, the most
thorough-going Republicans reluctantly concede to him the possession of
one good quality: he knew how to bring prosperity to the shop; "_il
faisait marcher le commerce_." One hears it said that the beautiful city
on the Seine is but the shadow of what it then was. "_Le niveau a
baissé!_" says the Parisian, when he calls to mind the gorgeous days of
the Empire. The extravagant elegance, the magnificent luxury, which used
to roll in superb carriages along the Boulevards and the Champs Elysées
towards the Bois de Boulogne, and exhibited itself in the evening in the
boxes of the theatres; the lustre which emanated from the Court, and the
concourse of all the nabobs of the world,--all this must in those days
have given to Parisian life a sparkling splendour, a something
stupefying and intoxicating, an alacrity of enjoyment which had no
parallel elsewhere. To the respectable, pedantic _bourgeoisie_ which
ruled under Louis Philippe had succeeded a new generation of men of the
world, which drank to the lees all the refined pleasures that a modern
great city has to offer. The gentlefolk of the Empire understood the art
of living better, cultivated and exhausted it after a more inventive
fashion, than any generation that had gone before. In the Tuileries sat
the man of the Second of December, the connoisseur and promoter of all
refined tastes. In his person the age was embodied, that age depicted by
Zola in _La Curée_, in the passage where he describes the halls,
illumined as if by enchantment, of the imperial palace. There, all the
splendour of over-civilisation glitters and gleams, with its bright eyes
and sparkling jewels, with its breath of intoxicating perfumes floating
from naked shoulders and arms and half-veiled voluptuous bosoms; while
the green, sphinx-like eye of Napoleon III rests indifferently on the
alabaster sea of white shoulders bowing before him, as he reviews all
that he has possessed and all that he can yet enjoy. Dumas' _Dame aux
Camélias_, _Diane de Lys_ and _Le Demi-monde_, Barrière's _Filles de
Marbre_, Augier's _Mariage d'Olympe_, give the impress of the period
upon literature, and the single phrase "The Lady of the Camelias"
conjures up a world of forms and of scenery. _La Nouvelle Babylone_ is
the title of the fine book in which Joseph Pelletan depicted the
mysterious Paris of those years, the great city which cherished in its
bosom the lowest and highest extremes of a refined world of pleasure,
and was at the same time an inexhaustible fountain of arduous work.
One would have imagined that these new conditions of Imperial France
would have left their impress, in some way or other, upon the art of
painting also; just as in the works of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Steen,
Terborg, Ostade, Pieter de Hooch, and Van der Meer of Delft the entire
seventeenth century is reflected, clearly and with animation, treated
with charming familiarity or else with grandiose effect, in its spirit,
its manner of feeling, its habits and costumes. What a domain painting
would have had; from the official festivals and the bustle of public
life down to the complete delineation of the family home! Literature had
entered into this course a quarter of a century before, and had shown
the path--a path leading to new worlds. But in French art French society
is not reflected. Not a single painter has left us a picture of this
splendid Paris, dancing on a volcano and yet so amiably delightful.
Classicism and historical painting still held the field, as if turned to
stone, and show, in essentials, hardly any modification.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
ALEXANDRE CABANEL.]
So far back as in 1833, Charles Lenormant wrote of the school of David:
"Even the great painter Ingres was not able to rejuvenate a school which
was breaking up from old age, or to restore their full resonance to the
slackened and worn-out chords; his only office was to give the old
synagogue honourable burial. Take away this last scion of the Classical
school, and the curtain may fall--the farce is ended." He might have
said the same thing forty years later, for with Cabanel and Bouguereau
Classicism has limped on, almost unchanged, to our own days. Its art was
a correct, conventional picture-stencilling, which might just as well
have flourished a generation earlier. Classicism--which in David was
hard and Spartan, in Ingres cold and correct--has become pretty in
Cabanel and Bouguereau, and is completely dissolved in the scent of
roses and violets. Only a certain perfume of the _demi-monde_ brings the
persons who appear as Venus, as naiads, as Aurora or Diana, into
complete accord with the epoch which produced them. For Ingres the
female body itself was the exclusive canon of beautiful form; now the
swelling limbs begin to stretch themselves voluptuously forth. Ingres
still treats the human eye as it was treated in ancient sculpture, as
something animal, soulless, and dead; now it begins to twinkle
provocatively. A modern refined taste plays round the classical scheme.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
CABANEL. THE SHULAMITE.]
[Illustration: BOUGUEREAU. BROTHERLY LOVE.]
_Alexandre Cabanel_, the incarnation of the academician, was, under
Napoleon III, the head of the École des Beaux Arts. He was a fortunate
man. Born at Montpellier, the city of professors, nourished from his
earliest youth on academic milk, winner of the Grand Prix de Rome in
1845, awarded the first medal at the Universal Exhibition of 1855, he
went on his way, laden with orders and offices, amid the tumultuous
applause of the public. Among the artists of the nineteenth century none
attained in so high a degree all those honours which lie open to a
painter in our days. Yet, as an artist, he remained all his life on the
plane of the school of Ingres. Even his "Death of Moses," the first
picture which he sent from Rome to the Salon, was entirely pieced
together out of Raphael and Michael Angelo. After that he laid himself
out to provide England and America with those women, more or less fully
attired, who bore sometimes biblical, sometimes literary names: Delilah,
the Shulamite woman, Jephthah's daughter, Ruth, Tamar, Flora, Echo,
Psyche, Hero, Lucretia, Cleopatra, Penelope, Phædra, Desdemona,
Fiammetta, Francesca da Rimini, Pia dei Tolomei--an endless procession.
But the only variety in this poetical seraglio lay in the inscriptions
on the labels; the way in which the figures were represented was always
the same. His works are pictures blamelessly drawn, moderately well
painted, which leave one cold and untouched at heart. They possess that
unusual polish and that dexterity of exposition which, like good manners
in society, create a favourable impression, but are insufficient in
themselves to make a man a pleasant companion. Nowhere is there anything
that takes hold upon the soul, nowhere any touch to prove that the
artist has felt anything in his painting, or force the beholder to feel
for himself. The unvarying faces of his figures, with their eternal
dark-rimmed eyes, resemble not living human beings but painted plaster
casts. One would take his "Cleopatra," apathetically observing the
operation of the poison, to be stuffed, like the panther at her feet.
One seeks in vain for a figure that is sincere or interesting, for a
face alluring in its truth to nature. His "Venus" of 1862 made him the
favourite painter of the Tuileries, and the insipid, rosy tints of that
picture became more and more feeble in the course of years, until his
works resembled wearisome cartoons, coloured by no matter what process.
He was Picot's pupil, it is true, but in reality Ingres was his
grandfather, a grandfather far, far greater than himself, whose
portraits alone show the entire littleness of Cabanel. All his life long
Ingres was in his portraits a fresh, animated, and admirable realist.
Cabanel indeed also painted in his earliest days likenesses of ladies
which were full of serious grace, uniting a powerful fidelity to nature
with considerable elegance. But his success was fatal to him. Moreover,
as a portrait-painter, he became the depicter of society, and society
ruined him. In order to please his distinguished customers, he devoted
himself far more than is good for portrait-painting to smooth rosy
flesh, large glassy eyes, and dainty fine hands, and over-idealised his
sitters till they lost every appearance of life.
[Illustration: LEFÉBURE. TRUTH.
(_By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of the copyright._)]
_William Bouguereau_, who industriously learnt all that can be
assimilated by a man destitute of artistic feeling but possessing a
cultured taste, reveals even more clearly, in his feeble mawkishness,
the fatal decline of the old schools of convention. He has been compared
to Octave Feuillet, who also never extricated himself from the scented
atmosphere of distinguished society; but the comparison is unjust to
Feuillet. Bouguereau is in his Madonna-painting a perfumed Ary Scheffer,
in his Venus-pictures a greater Hamon; and in his perfectly finished and
faultless stencilling style of beauty he became from year to year more
and more insupportable. His art is a kind of painting on porcelain on a
large scale, and he gives to his Madonnas and his nymphs the same smooth
rosy tints, the same unreal universalised forms, until at last they
become a _juste-milieu_ between Raphael's "Galatea" and the wax models
one sees in hairdressers' shops. Only in one sense can his religious
painting be called modern; it is an elegant lie, like the whole of the
Second Empire.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
HENNER. SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS.]
Close by Bouguereau's "Venus" in the Luxembourg hangs the well-known
colossal figure of a beautiful nude woman with unnaturally
over-developed thighs, which by the shining mirror in its uplifted right
hand proclaims itself to be "Truth." _Jules Lefébure_, the painter of
this picture, is also completely a slave to tradition; he came from
Cogniet's studio, and won the Prix de Rome in 1861. But he at least
possesses more taste, elegance, and character; his painting of the nude
is more distinguished, truer, and more powerful. He is in the broader
sense of the word a worshipper of nature, and was so in his youth
especially. His "Sleeping Girl" of 1865 and his "Femme couchée" of 1868
are smooth and honest studies from the nude, of delicate, sure
draughtsmanship, and have therefore not become antiquated even to-day.
Unfortunately he did not find this masculine accent again, when at a
later time he grouped ideal figures together to make pictures of them.
His "Diana surprised" of 1879 was a very clever composition of
well-ordered lines, possessing even fine details, especially one or two
charming heads, but as a whole it is lifeless and uninteresting. Like
Bouguereau, he lacks power, and, notwithstanding his distinction and his
capacity for arrangement, he is not painter enough to be truthfully
entitled a "painter of the nude."
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
HENNER. THE SLEEPER.]
In general, French art, however willingly it took to this sphere during
the period we are considering, is rich indeed in well-drawn documents,
but poor in works which, considered as painting, can bear the most
distant comparison with Fragonard and Boucher. The Revolution had put an
end to the joyous flesh-painting of French art. At the close of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century the painter of
tender and life-like flesh-colour was not the reformer David, but the
despised Prudhon. The former found his ideal in statues, and turned
flesh to stone. The latter, a direct descendant of Correggio, gave
expression to life with a tender mellowness. Ingres was again, like
David, a very mediocre flesh-painter, and the Romanticists entered this
sphere but seldom. Delacroix indeed has in his "Massacre" a couple of
excellent touches, but they are isolated phenomena in his work. After
1850 the approved system was to give nude female figures the appearance
of being made of terra-cotta, biscuit, or ivory. The forgotten art of
painting velvety, soft flesh, and of making it vibrate in light, had to
be learned over again, and to this meritorious task _Henner_ devoted
himself--the modern Correggio from Alsace, who stands to Cabanel in the
same relation as Prudhon to David. Even Henner in his later days has
become very much a mannerist, and has done some very bad work. To-day he
prefers a heavy, pasty, buttery style of painting, with faces which look
as if they had been pickled in oil, and have an unreal expression; his
contrasts of light and shade, once so delicate, have become raw and
forced. Yet beside Cabanel he still appears the true poet of female
flesh-painting, the dreamy graceful depicter of refined sensuality.
Prudhon's delicate ideal and his language of vibrating tenderness are
revived in Henner. His "Nymph resting" in the Luxembourg has the same
soft _morbidezza_, the same delightful mystery, in which Prudhon before
him had enveloped the sweetness of smiling faces and the beauty of
female forms. He too chose the Lombards as his guides. After winning the
Prix de Rome in 1858, he sent to the Salon of 1865 a "Susanna," which
already shows his ability as a flesh-painter and his relationship to
Correggio. And a Lombard he has remained all his life. One could with
difficulty find a more delicate and smooth study of the nude than his
"Biblis" of 1867.
[Illustration: PAUL BAUDRY.]
Since that time another tendency highly characteristic of Henner has
shown itself in his work. In his endeavour to render the tint and tender
softness of flesh as delicately as possible, he sought at the same time
for light which should intensify the clear tone of the nude body. These
he found in that time of evening, which one might call Henner's hour,
when the landscape, overshadowed by the twilight, gradually loses
colour, and only a small blue space in the sky or a silent forest-lake
still for a moment preserves the reflection of vanishing daylight. In
this tranquil harmony of nature after sunset, the white pallor of the
human body seems to have absorbed all the daylight and to be giving it
forth again, while the surrounding landscape is already merging into
colourless shadow. This is Henner's "second manner," and he raised it
into a system. Every year since then there has appeared in the Salon one
of those pale nymphs, standing out so mistily against the dark green of
an evening landscape, or one of those Virgilian eclogues, in which the
gloaming rests caressingly upon nude white bodies. And by this method of
painting flesh and of throwing light upon it, Henner has won for himself
an important place in modern art.
_Paul Baudry_, the powerful decorator of the Grand Opera House at Paris,
marks the close of this tendency. In his work the endeavours of all
those talented artists who sought to found a new school of "ideal
painting" upon the basis of the study of the Italian Classicists came to
a crowning height; and at the same time Baudry took a further step
onward, in that he vivified the classical scheme with a yet more marked
cast of "modernity."
His first picture, on the murder of Marat, was feeble. What David had
executed smoothly and forcibly in his dead "Marat," Baudry spoiled in
his "Charlotte Corday." The bath, the night-table with the inkstand on
it, the map on the wall, and all the fittings of the room, are painted
with the greatest finish, but the young heroine in her petrified
idealism has no more life in her than there is in the furniture.
His "Pearl and Wave," which is hung in the Luxembourg close to Cabanel's
and Bouguereau's "Birth of Venus," gave proof of progress. A deep-blue
wave, towering on high and crowned with foam, has washed a charming
woman ashore like a costly pearl. She seems to have just awakened out of
slumber, and her roguish, moistly gleaming eyes are smiling. Saucily she
leans forward her fair-haired head under her bended arms, and stretches
out in easy motion her youthfully slender yet fully proportioned body.
Bouguereau's and even Cabanel's female beauties are waxen and spoiled by
retouching, but Baudry's Cypris is a living being, and preserves some of
the individual charm of the model.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
BAUDRY. CHARLOTTE CORDAY.]
It is this breath of realism which gives their attractiveness to
Baudry's pictures in the Paris Opera House. He cannot indeed be ranked
as a truly great master of decorative painting, as the Fragonard of the
nineteenth century; he was too eclectic. The five years, from 1851 to
1856, which as winner of the Prix de Rome he spent in the Villa Medici,
were the happiest of his life. He saw in the Italian galleries neither
Holbein nor Velasquez, neither Rembrandt nor Botticelli nor Caravaggio.
He saw nothing and revered nothing save the pure tradition of the
Cinquecento, which was to him the Alpha and Omega of art. He dreamed of
great decorative works which should place him on an equality with those
old masters. It was therefore joyful news to him when, at the suggestion
of his old comrade Charles Garnier, he was commissioned to adorn the
Opera House. Baudry was then thirty-five years old, in possession of
his full powers, and yet he thought it necessary to go back to Italy to
interrogate the masters of the Renaissance anew. For a full year he
worked ten hours daily in the Sistine Chapel. As soon as he knew Michael
Angelo by heart, he betook himself to England to copy Raphael's
cartoons, and then in 1870 for the third time to Italy, before he felt
himself capable of covering the five hundred square metres of canvas.
The task took him four years, and when it was exhibited at the Palais
des Beaux-Arts in 1874, prior to being placed in its final
resting-place, there was general astonishment at a single man's power to
produce so much and such great work.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
BAUDRY. TRUTH.]
To-day his praise cannot be sounded so high. The place to which he
aspired, by the side of the great masters of the Renaissance, will not
fall to Baudry's lot; he is hardly to be reckoned even among the great
French masters of the nineteenth century. To rise even so far he lacked
the first and most essential gift--originality. He was a model pupil in
his youth, and a pupil he remained all his life. He always saw nature
through the medium of art, and never had the courage to take a fresh
breath and plunge into its fountain of youth. Between him and reality
there was ever the prism of the old pictures that he loved; brush in
hand, he devoted himself, turn by turn, and with equal enthusiasm, to
Michael Angelo, Titian, Correggio, Bronzino, and even Ingres. As soon as
he returned from Italy for the first time, as holder of the Prix de
Rome, he exhibited several pictures which were altogether Titian in
colouring, altogether Raphael in style. Each of them, even the most
important, calls some other painting to one's mind. His "Fortune and the
Child" is a variation upon Titian's "Divine and Earthly Love"; his
"Death of a Vestal Virgin" a reminiscence of the "Death of Peter
Martyr"; his "Warrior" in the Opera House is the painted double of
Rude's "Marseillaise." How many gestures, attitudes, and figures could,
by a close analysis, be shown to be borrowed in turn from Veronese,
Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, or Raphael! His works are a synthesis of
the favourite forms of the Cinquecento; they are the testament of the
Cinquecento masters. He was a Parisian Primaticcio, a posthumous member
of the old school of Fontainebleau. In him was embodied the last smile
of the Renaissance, the results of which he assimilated and reduced to
formulæ. He lacked creative imagination, and his pictures are wanting in
individual character. The nervous movement and sinewy stretchings of his
young men's bodies would never have been painted but for Donatello's
"David." Of his women, the powerful and muscular are descended from
Michael Angelo's "Eve," the more slender and elegant come down from
Rosso. His palette, with its blue and white tints, is bright and
flowery, but it is no less artificial than his composition.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
BAUDRY. THE PEARL AND THE WAVE.
(_By permission of Mr. W. H. Stewart, the owner of the picture._)]
Nevertheless, it would be unjust to speak of Baudry's work as merely
faded Classicism, or as Michael Angelo and water. He was not merely a
pupil of the Italians; he contributed something Parisian of his own,
something pretty, mannered, refined, graceful, seductive, and smiling,
and felt himself independent enough to give to his conventional figures
this sprightly addition of genuinely modern nervosity. The
birth-certificates of his young men were drawn up in Florence, those of
his young women in Rome, three hundred and fifty years ago; yet there is
in the latter something of the _Parisienne_, in the former something of
the modern dandies who know the fevered life of the Boulevards. In his
delightful art there is French wit, there is a touch of the piquant, of
the feminine, of the ambiguous, which almost amounts to indecency. One
can still recognise the charming model in the figures of his dancers and
Muses; you can see that Music's or Poetry's waist was laced up in a
close-fitting corset before she sat for the picture. One may meet these
women at any moment, trailing their dresses along the sidewalks of the
Boulevards, or riding negligently in their carriages back from the Bois
de Boulogne. And still more modern than the wasp-like form of the body
is the character of the face and the smile on the lips. Thus Baudry has
given a new shade to the manner in which one can obtain inspiration from
the old masters. To all that he borrowed he added a personal and
charming note. He possesses an elegance and grace which are neither
Correggio's, nor Raphael's, nor Veronese's, but French and Parisian. His
Muses and Cupids, his "Comedy" and his "Judgment of Paris," are
documents of the French spirit in the nineteenth century, and--together
with a few small and fine portraits on a green or blue background _à la_
Clouet, among which that of his friend About takes the first rank--they
will always assure him an important place in the history of French art.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
BAUDRY. CYBELE.
(_By permission of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, the owner of the
picture._) ]
[Illustration: BAUDRY. LEDA.]
Another artist who worked with Baudry at the decoration of the Grand
Opera House was _Élie Delaunay_, who painted in a hall leading out of
the foyer three large pictures on the myths of Apollo, Orpheus, and
Amphion, and was at that time less appreciated than he deserved.
Delaunay was born in the same year as Baudry, and, like him, was a
Breton. In their genius also they are very similar. He shared in
Baudry's admiration of the masters of the Renaissance, but his worship
was less for the Cinquecento than the fourteenth century. It was in
Flandrin's studio that he prepared himself for his entry into the École
des Beaux Arts. His first picture, in 1849, "Christ healing a Leper,"
was, with respect to its Roman manner of conceiving form and its
bronze-like firm draughtsmanship, still entirely in the style of Ingres.
It was not till he went to Italy in 1856, as winner of the Prix de Rome,
that he turned from the works of the Roman school to those of the early
Renaissance masters, to whom he was attracted by their rigorous study
of form and their manly severity. His sketch books were filled with
drawings after Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Pollajualo, Ghirlandajo,
Botticelli, Gozzoli, and Signorelli. It was just at this time that
French sculpture was making its significant revolt against the antique
and in favour of Donatello, Verrocchio, and Della Robbia; that the Prix
de Florence was founded, and that Paul Dubois' "Florentine Singer"
appeared. Delaunay became as a pupil of the Quattrocento masters one of
the greatest draughtsmen of the century, a healthy Naturalist in the
sense in which the Primitives were so, with a concise and firm power of
design which only Ingres amongst modern French painters shares with him.
The bodies of his nude male figures are strained in nerve and muscle
like those of Donatello; they have the essential elegance and powerful
rhythm of Dubois' statues. Even the two pictures which he sent from
Italy to the Salon, "The Nymph Hesperia fleeing from the Pursuit of
Æsacus," and the "Lesson on the Flute" in the Museum at Nantes, were
works of great taste and sincerity, studied with respectful and patient
devotion to nature, without striving after sentimental effect and
without conventional reminiscences. When in 1861 he returned from Rome,
he completed the frescoes in the church of St. Nicholas in Nantes,
which, in their strict severity, remind one of Signorelli's Cycle at
Orvieto. In 1865 appeared in the Salon his "Plague at Rome," which
afterwards passed into the Luxembourg, and which is not devoid of tragic
accent. In that collection hangs also his "Diana" of 1872, a proud nude
figure drawn with firm and manly lines, and full of grave dignity, after
the manner of Feuerbach. At the same time as his "Diana" he exhibited
his portrait of a Mlle. Lechat, seated like one of Botticelli's Madonnas
in front of a trellis of roses--in the style of the old masters, and yet
modern, naturalistic, and in excellent taste. Thenceforth he took his
place among the first portrait painters of his time. There is an
inexorable love of truth, a something bronze-like and stony in his
pictures, finished as they are with the firm impress of medals.
Instances of this may be found in his fine portrait of Mme. Toulmouche,
whom he has represented in a white summer costume, with black gloves,
seated in the midst of cheerful landscape; and also in several male
heads drawn with that firmness of modelling which Bronzino in his best
days alone possessed. After the completion of the Opera paintings he
finished, in 1876, twelve decorative pictures for the great hall of the
Council of State in the Palais Royal. His last works, which remained
unfinished, were designs for the Pantheon--scenes from the life of St.
Geneviève--in which he followed in the footsteps of the great fresco
colourists of Upper Italy, Gaudenzio Ferrari and Pordenone. Élie
Delaunay was no original genius, and as a pupil of the painters of the
Quattrocento has not enriched the history of art in any way, but he
stands forth, in a time which cared for nothing but external effect, as
a very loyal, serious, and honest artist, whose works all bear the stamp
of a healthy, manly spirit.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
BAUDRY. EDMOND ABOUT.]
Though in the works of these masters the Classicism of Ingres passes
away, in part enfeebled and in part imbued with modern elements and
vivified by a more direct study of nature, yet on the whole Paul
Delaroche dominates this period also. Historical painting takes the
highest places in the Salon, and shows itself altered only in this
respect, that, instead of Delaroche's tameness of style, we have
sensational subjects, arguments which revel in scenes of horror and
display of corpses. Literature had already entered upon this path. Even
Mérimée in his last novel, _Lokis_, was clearly the forerunner of that
tendency in taste which Taine characterised by the words, "_Depuis dix
ans une nuance de brutalité complète l'élégance_." Flaubert himself, in
his _Salambo_, was to some extent carried away by the stream. Consider,
for instance, the descriptions of Gisko crawling, a maimed, shapeless
stump, out of the ditch into Matho's tent, and of how his head is sawn
off; of the tortures inflicted by the Carthaginian people upon the
captured Matho; or of how the mercenaries are starved to death in the
rocky valley where they were imprisoned. Vying with this tendency of
literature, painting attained in its chosen themes an over-excitation
which reached the limits of the possible. While Delaroche had only in a
very timid manner led the way to the tragedies of history, the younger
artists hunted up all the most horrible deeds of blood to be found in
the great Book of Martyrs of the story of man, and elaborated them on
gigantic canvases. It would be quite impossible to draw up a catalogue
of all the murders at that time perpetrated by French art. They might be
arranged under various headings, as biblical, historical, political
murders; murders in connection with robbery, and murders arising out of
revenge; with subdivisions corresponding to the means employed, as
poison, the dagger, the halter, broadsword and rapier, the bowstring,
strangling, burning, etc. This was the time when, on account of this
dominance of the "_Genre féroce_," the public used to call the Salon the
Morgue.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
DELAUNAY. DIANA.]
_Toudouze_ painted the "Fall of Sodom" with a dozen copper-coloured
Abyssinians, larger than life, rolling on the ground in convulsions,
while Lot's wife, dying and half-consumed by fire, gnashes her teeth as
she raises the corpse of her child over her head. In a picture of
_George Becker's_ were represented the corpses of King Saul's sons,
delivered over by David to the Gibeonites, hanging alongside of each
other in a dark forest scene on a cross-shaped framework, like butcher's
meat from the shambles. Their mother stands beneath the scaffold,
swinging a knotted club to protect the corpses from an antediluvian
vulture. In a painting by _Bréhan_, Cyaxares, King of the Medes, gives a
banquet, and by way of dessert has his guests the Scythian leaders
massacred by his mercenaries. In one by _Matthieu_, Heliogabalus has hit
upon a yet happier idea, for at the conclusion of the meal he sets
half-starved lions and tigers upon his guests. _Aimé Morot_ depicted in
a large picture "The Wives of the Ambrones" in the battle of Aquæ
Sextiæ. They are hurling themselves like a horde of furies upon the
Roman horsemen who are attacking the camp. Half-naked, or entirely so,
with their hair flowing behind them, they throw themselves upon the
Romans, catch hold of the swords by the blade, tear their eyes out, and
are trampled beneath the horses' hoofs. Especially popular were the
voluptuous and cruel wild beasts from the menagerie of the Cæsars. Nero
in particular suited the atmosphere of the period; his ghost haunted the
novel, the stage, sculpture, and painting, and there seemed to be a
general agreement to immortalise him and the morally monstrous
personality of Locusta. In a picture by _Sylvestre_ he is represented
with florid cheeks, glowing with fat, and gloating over the mortal agony
of a slave lying on the ground, upon whom Locusta has tested the poison
intended for Britannicus. _Aublet_ varied the same theme by making a
negro lad the victim, while several corpses of negroes lying in the
background suggest that the Emperor was not quite satisfied with
Locusta's first experiments. Round Nero, the more entirely to fill his
magnificent Golden House, the charming shades of his congenial comrades
in crime weave their flitting dances. _Pelez_ depicted the strangling of
the Emperor Commodus by the gladiator to whom the Empress had entrusted
the task, and painted with tender interest the marks caused by suffusion
of blood which the athlete's hand had left upon the unhappy prince's
neck. A very familiar figure is that of Seneca, with distorted features,
uttering his last words of wisdom while the blood pours from his opened
veins. After the madness of the Cæsars comes the atrocious history of
the Merovingian kings. _Luminais_, the painter of Gauls and barbarians,
represented in his large picture "Les Énervés de Jumièges" the sons of
King Clovis II, who, after the muscles of their knees have been
destroyed by fire, are set helplessly adrift in a boat on the Seine.
Then followed torture scenes from the time of the Inquisition, and
saints burning at the stake. The conception which this post-Romantic
generation had of the East was of cruelty and voluptuousness mixed, a
thing pieced together out of white bodies, purple streams of blood, and
brown backgrounds. Here, the favourite Sultana contemplates the severed
head of her rival, which stares at her out of its glassy eyes; there,
eunuchs are making ready to strangle a woman condemned to death. In
works such as these the genius, powerful in composition, of Benjamin
Constant, celebrates its triumphs.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
DELAUNAY. BOYS SINGING.]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
DELAUNAY. MADAME TOULMOUCHE.]
Yet, notwithstanding all the means of allurement furnished by such
themes, these paintings almost invariably fail to produce the
anticipated effect. Not that it is the brutality of the subjects that
makes them unpleasant. Art in all times has busied itself with the
horrible. How voluptuously does Dante depict the horrors of Hell! What
imagination was ever peopled with figures more dreadful than those
conceived by Shakespeare? Cruelty and death have a poetry of their own:
why should Art prudishly abstain from depicting them? Only, if the
result is to be a good picture, the subject must be in strict congruity
with the talent employed upon it, and in the majority of these works
this conformity is lacking. The subjects alone had become more savage
and brutal. In the manner of treatment there is none of the wild effect
which the Neapolitans of the seventeenth century gave to their scenes of
martyrdom. Spirits truly wild, like Delacroix and Caravaggio, are not to
be met with every day. The painters who launched out upon these
bloodthirsty themes took absolutely no inward "enjoyment in tragical
subjects," but simply painted them as if after precepts learned at
school. And as they were also deficient in that knowledge of nature
which is acquired only by direct study of life, not one of them was in a
position to give to his historical scenes that naturalistic weight which
alone gives to such themes a character of convincing probability. True,
these pictures compel respect on account of their unusual ability. These
naked bodies, twisting themselves in the most varying postures of pain,
give proof by their correct draughtsmanship of the most painstaking
anatomical studies, yet after all they are nothing more than inverted
Laocoöns. The Classical spirit haunts them still, and a discordant
effect is produced when subjects so full of wild passion are tranquilly
depicted according to cold conventional rules. Over all these figures
and scenes, even the most horrible, lies the veil of a Classical
embellishment, which deprives them altogether of that directness which
lays hold on the imagination. The pictures are good studies of costume,
and make an admirable impression by their resplendent glow of colour;
they are show-pieces, brilliant stage effects, as happily conceived as
any of Sardou's. But the recipe for their production is still that of
the school of Delaroche: avoidance of all extremes, generalised forms,
careful composition, crude lukewarmness, or the affectation of daring.
Scarce one of these painters has given to his wild subject an equal
wildness of treatment; not one has raised himself from the paltry level
of Delaroche to the artistic height of Delacroix.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
SYLVESTRE. LOCUSTA TESTING IN NERO'S PRESENCE POISON PREPARED FOR
BRITANNICUS.]
_Laurens_ alone, surnamed by his comrades "the Benedictine," because his
predilection was for forgotten themes from ecclesiastical history,
constitutes in a certain sense an exception to the rule. He too belongs
to the group of historical painters whose theory is that a picture
should represent an historical fact with absolute accuracy. But he is
more masculine than Delaroche. His personages are truer to nature, or,
if one will, less banal; the general effect is warmer and fuller of
life; he has a greater power of attracting attention. There is nothing
great in his work, but there is no cold pedantry: the art of combination
is more adroit, so that one is less aware of calculation, and may
sometimes observe a grim earnestness. He really loves the terrible,
while the others merely made use of it for the manufacture of what are
nothing more than tableaux. To the Inquisition especially he was
indebted for notable successes, and at times he was able to depict its
dark scenes of horror in a very subtle manner. When he heaps up, in
front of a church, corpses to which the priests have refused burial;
when he disinters popes in order to place them in the dock before their
accusers; when he opens coffins to reveal the decomposed features of
some erstwhile beauty, he sets even blunted nerves on the stretch; and
as he has therein attained the goal he had proposed to himself, his art
is not without its justification.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
LUMINAIS. LES ÉNERVÉS DE JUMIÈGES.]
Among the younger generation, _Rochegrosse_, an artist of daring genius,
appeared for a while to have taken to such themes by free choice, and
not solely through the traditions of the studio. One seemed to observe
in his works a truly emotional temperament flaming behind the trammels
of conventionality, and was almost inclined to rank him among the
spirits of storm and stress who trace their descent from Delacroix.
After his first picture, in which "Vitellius" is represented dragged
through the streets of Rome and ill treated by the populace, he achieved
success with a scene taken from the destruction of Troy. Here
"Andromache," raging with impotent anguish, is struggling against a
number of Greeks who have snatched her child from her arms to throw it
down from the ramparts. This brutal strife is depicted with the highest
naturalistic power. Neither the heroine nor the warriors belong to the
ideal figures of the style of compromise. Andromache is of a fulness of
form almost approaching corpulence, and the Greeks remind one of Indians
on the warpath. Mangled corpses complete the picture, and on the bare
wall to the left, over the stairs, hang dead bodies abandoned to
corruption and the birds of prey. In his third picture he took for his
theme the horrors of the barbarous and ferocious Peasants' War in the
fourteenth century, as Mérimée had described them in his book entitled
_La Jacquerie_; and his work is all the more effective as there lurks in
the subject a certain grim modern touch which reminds one of the Social
Democracy, of the insurrection of the Commune, of something which might
happen even to-day. The insurgents break into the hall, where the ladies
of the castle have taken refuge with their children. One alone stands
erect, the grandmother in her nun-like widow's dress, and stretches her
arms behind her with a gesture of energy, as if to shield the younger
ones at her back. The foremost intruder ironically takes off his cap.
Another lifts up on his pike the fair-haired, bleeding head of the lord
of the castle; a third has similarly transfixed his reeking heart.
Others are pressing in from without, breaking the window panes with
their weapons, which are yet dripping with blood. Beneath frightful
figures are seen, the most horrible that of a woman standing on the
window-sill, her hands propped upon her knees, gazing with insane
laughter upon the mortal terror of the aristocratic ladies.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
LAURENS. THE INTERDICT.]
In his subsequent pictures Rochegrosse did not go so far afield. His
"Murder of Julius Cæsar" was a work of art in white upon white, full of
crude imagination, with white walls, white reflections of light, white
togas, and dark red blotches of blood. His grass-eating "Nebuchadnezzar"
proved that from the sublime to the ridiculous there is often only a
step. Between times he painted archæological trifles for ladies of
literary culture, such as the "Battle of the Sparrows" of 1890; but in
his great "Fall of Babylon" he has proved once more what he can do. No
doubt it is not a fine work: it is a mere decorative piece, but an
astonishingly spirited performance. The scene is the palace of the
Babylonian kings, the decorative construction of which the recovered
monuments and the recent scientific investigations had rendered it
possible to reproduce. Rochegrosse consulted with the zeal of an
archæologist all the treasures of the Louvre and the British
Museum,--Assyrian friezes, ornaments, and costumes,--and then set forth
in these surroundings the famous banquet at which the Prophet Daniel
explained the words "Mene, Tekel, Peres." The day begins to break; in
the distance the army of the Medes advancing to attack the palace has
burst open the gate; Belshazzar leaves the table in terror, and takes to
his weapons; the naked women, still intoxicated, stretch their limbs, or
remain lazily indifferent lying on the ground; around is a dazzling
confusion of mosaics, of polychrome architecture, of fantastic images of
animals, of glittering tapestries shot with many hues and pleasing to
the eye; of flowers, vases, fruits, pastry, and nude bodies of women.
The grey light of morning strives to overcome that of the
half-extinguished lamps, and rests with leaden weight upon the gigantic
still-life below.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
REGNAULT. SALOME.
(_By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright._)]
If some portion of Delacroix's wild genius appears to have descended
upon Rochegrosse, yet was _Henri Regnault_, as a colourist, the greatest
of Delacroix's heirs--even allowing for the exaggerated renown which
came to him in France, from the fact that he was the last to fall in the
war of 1870. His portrait of "General Prim" of 1869, which, rejected by
the sitter, came eventually to the Louvre, is somewhat reminiscent of
Velasquez and Delacroix, but is nevertheless, with those of Géricault,
amongst the finest equestrian portraits of the century. In his "Salome"
he has depicted a black-haired girl with twitching feet, resting upon a
stool after her dance, and contemplating with the cruelty of a tigress
the platter which she holds ready for the head of John the Baptist,
while her glowing red mouth with its dazzling teeth smiles like that of
an innocent child. In her he has embodied with infernal subtlety the
demon of voluptuous wantonness, and has composed a symphony in yellow
of seductive and dazzling charm. She is attired in transparent
gold-inwoven robes, which have a caressing congruity with the
resplendent texture of the background.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
REGNAULT. THE MOORISH HEADSMAN.]
His "Moorish Headsman" is a symphony in red. In his pale rose-red garb
the tall Moor stands in majestic dignity, wipes a few drops of blood
from the blade of his sword, and glances with careless indifference--a
type of the dreamy cruelty of Oriental fatalism--without anger and
without pity, without hatred and without satisfaction, upon the severed
head with its distorted eyes, which, rolling down a couple of steps, has
stained the white marble with purple patches of blood. "I will cause the
genuine Moors to rise again, at once rich and great, terrible and
voluptuous,"--so the voice of Delacroix speaks out of this picture by
Regnault. His paintings, like those of his master, have the effect of
splendid Oriental costumes; they are shot with every hue, they lighten
and glisten, they are inwoven with magnificent arabesques of gold and
silver, with sparkling embroideries and precious stones. The "Orlando
Furioso" of art lives once more in these fascinating harmonies, in the
power, splendour, and lustre of the colouring. Just as Baudry at the
close of the Classical period produced in his paintings for the Opera
House the noblest work after the idealist formulæ, so Regnault in his
"Salome" and his "Prim" has completed the last defiant works of the
formulæ of Romanticism.
We have thought it advisable to follow this development of the art of
painting down to its close, just as in treating of the older periods we
have proceeded, not upon chronological principles, but upon those of
historical style. Now that the old art has been followed to the grave,
it will be all the easier, later on, to perceive clearly how the new
arose slowly out of its invisible depths. And as France since 1830 has
become the high school of art for other nations, those paths have at the
same time been indicated along which the art of painting was proceeding
during these years in other countries.
[Illustration: HENRI REGNAULT GENERAL PRÍM]
CHAPTER XIII
THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL OF PAINTING IN BELGIUM
Belgian art had gone through the same history as French art since David.
When the French patriarch came to Brussels to pass the remainder of his
days there in honour, he found the ground already well prepared. The
Classicists had long since made their way into art, and the old Flemish
tradition was dying out. Lens and Herreyns are the last colourists in
the sense of the good old time, but they are associated with the good
old time only through the qualities of their colouring. As a degenerate
descendant of Van Dyck, _Lens_ painted with a feeble brush sweet,
insipid, sugary work for boudoirs and _prie-dieu_ chairs; and had lost
his feeling for nature to such a degree that he gave the aged the same
flesh tint as children, and men the full breasts of hermaphrodites.
_Herreyns_, appointed director of the Antwerp Academy in 1800, was more
masculine; and although likewise conventional and wanting in
individuality, he was none the less a painter of breadth and boldness.
He was most enraptured with a model with a copper-coloured skin and
knotted muscles, or with pretty and ruddy children, and fat nurses with
swelling breasts. This bold worker embodied in his own person the art of
a great epoch, but did nothing to renew it. These painters, indeed, only
mixed for a new hash the crumbs fallen from the table at which giants
had once sat. They looked backwards instead of around them, and lighted
their modest little lamp at the sun of Rubens. France was the only
country where art followed the great changes of culture in the age.
Hence Flemish painting had been crossed with French elements long before
David's arrival. And Paris was for the artists of 1800 what Italy had
been for those of 1600. They made their pilgrimage in troops to the
studio of Suvée, who had originally come from Bruges, but had lived
since 1771 on the Seine. There, and there only, recipes for the
composition of great figure pictures were to be obtained. And thus art
completed what the Empire had in a political sense begun. The artistic
barriers fell as the geographical ones had done before, and the Belgian
painters went back to Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges as men
annexed by France.
David on his arrival needed only to shake the tree and the fruit fell
ripe into his lap. He entered Flanders like a conqueror, and left the
signs of ravage behind him on his triumphal progress. In Brussels a
court gathered round him as round a banished king, and a gold medal was
struck in memory of his arrival. He took Flemish art in his powerful
hands and crushed it. For, needless to say, he saw nothing but barbarism
in the genius of Rubens, and inoculated Flemish artists with a genuine
horror of their great prince of painters. He continued to teach in
Brussels what he had preached in Paris, and became the father-in-law of
a deadly tiresome Franco-Belgian school, to which belonged a succession
of correct painters; men such as Duvivier, Ducq, Paelinck, Odevaere, and
others. For the aboriginal, sturdy, energetic, and carnal Flemish art
was prescribed the mathematical regularity of the antique canon. The old
Flemish joyousness of colour passed into a consumptive cacophony. And
then was repeated in Belgium the tragedy which Classicism had played in
France. Everything became a pretext for draperies, stiff poses,
sculptural groupings, and plaster heads. Phædra and Theseus, Hector and
Andromache, Paris and Helen, were, as in Paris, the most popular
subjects. And so great a confusion reigned, that a sculptor from whom a
wolf was ordered included the history of Romulus and Remus gratuitously.
The only one whose works are still partially enjoyable is _Navez_. He
was, like Ingres in France, the last prop of this art, chiselled, as it
were, out of stone; and even after the fall of Classicism he remained in
esteem, because, like Ingres, he knew how to steer a prudent course
between David, the Italians, and a certain independent study of nature.
A touch of realism was mingled with his mania for the Greeks; only to a
limited extent did he correct "ugly" nature; he would have ventured to
represent Socrates with his negro nose and Thersites with his hump, and,
again, like Ingres he has left behind him enduring performances as a
portrait painter. His correct, cold, and discreet talent grew warm at
the touch of human personality, and his drawings, in particular, prove
that he had warmth of feeling as an artist. As his biographer tells us,
he seldom laid down the sketch-book in which he fixed his impressions as
he talked. Every page was filled with sketches of a group, a figure, or
a gesture seen in the street and rapidly dashed off, "as realistically
as even Courbet could desire." And these he transferred, when he painted
in the "noble style."
As Navez had importance as an artist, so had _Matthias van
Bree_--Herreyns' successor in the directorate of the Antwerp
Academy--importance as a teacher. He worked in Belgium, like Gros in
Paris, only in another way. While Gros as an artist was the forerunner
of Romanticism, and as a teacher an orthodox Classicist, Van Bree is
tedious as an artist, but as a teacher he fanned in the young generation
a glowing love for old Flemish art. No one spoke of Rubens, Van Dyck,
and the great art of the seventeenth century with so much warmth and
understanding; and whilst with the charcoal in his hand he composed
buckram cartoons, he dreamt of a youth who should arise to renew the old
Flemish tradition.
Before long this young man had grown up. He had seen the artistic
treasures of Antwerp and Paris. Here Rubens had delighted his eyes, and
there Paul Veronese. As he admired both in the Louvre, he heard behind
him the voice of the young Romanticists who, like him, had an enthusiasm
for colour and movement, and blasphemed the stiff, colourless old David.
_Gustav Wappers_, also, had paid toll to Classicism, and painted in 1823
a "Regulus" after the well-known recipe. All the greater was the
astonishment when, in 1830, he came forward with his "Burgomaster van
der Werff": "Burgomaster van der Werff of Leyden, at the siege of the
town in 1576, offers his own body as food to the famished citizens." The
very subject could not fail to create enthusiasm in the great body of
the people, excited as they were by ideas of liberty: the brilliant
method of presentation did this no less. What the old Van Bree looked
for, the return to the splendour of colour and sensuous fulness of life
of the old masters, was achieved in this picture. In the same year, when
Belgium had won her nationality and independence once more, a painter
also ventured to break away from the French formulæ of Classicism, and
to treat a national theme in the manner of those painters who in former
centuries had been the glory of Flanders. Wappers was greeted as a
national hero; his part it was to bring to an issue with the brush that
good fight which others had fought with the musket and sabre. His
picture was a sign of the delivery of Flemish art from the French house
of bondage. Whilst older men were horrified, as the followers of the
school of Delaroche were afterwards horrified at the "Stone-breakers" of
Courbet, the younger generation looked up to Wappers as a Messiah.
Everything in the Brussels Salon faded before the freshness of the new
work; a springtide in painting seemed to be at hand, and the wintry
rigidity of Classicism was warmed by a burst of sunshine, the old gods
trembled and felt their Olympus quake. Gustav Wappers was held to be the
leader of a new Renaissance. In him the great era of the seventeenth
century was to be continued. The iridescence of silken stuffs, the whole
colour and festal joyousness of the old masters, were found once more.
As in France there rose the shout, "An Ingres, a Delacroix!" so there
resounded in Belgium the battle-cry, "A Navez, a Wappers!" The picture
was bought by King William II of Holland, and in 1832 Wappers was made
Professor of the Antwerp Academy.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
GUSTAV WAPPERS.]
The Exhibition of 1834 confirmed him in his new position as head of a
school. This was a genuine triumph, which he gained by his "Episode in
the Belgian Revolution of 1830." A scene out of the blood-stained days
of the street fights in Brussels--that glorious final chapter of the
struggle of the Belgian people for freedom from the French yoke--was
nothing less than an event in which every one had recently taken part.
At a period when so few realised how closely the great masters of the
past were bound to their own time and imbibed from it their strength and
nourishment, this new painter, in defiance of all theories, had drawn
boldly from life. This picture was regarded as "a hymn of jubilation for
what was attained and a threnody for the sacrifice it had cost." And the
neighbourhood of the church, where he had laid the action, stamped it
almost as the votive picture of the Belgian people for its dead. On the
right an artisan standing aloft upon a newly thrown up earthwork is
reading to his attentive comrades the rejected proclamation of the
Prince of Orange. On the left a reinforcement is coming up. In the
foreground boys are tearing up the pavement or beating the drum; and
here and there are enacted various tragical family scenes. Here a young
wife with a child on her arm clings with all the strength of despair to
her husband, who resists her and finally tears himself from her grasp
and hurries to the barricade--the cry of love is drowned amid the clash
of arms. There, supported on the knee of his grey-headed father, rests a
handsome young fellow with closing eyes and the death-wound in his
heart. It seems as though the Horatian _dulce et decorum est_ might be
said to wander over his features and to glorify them. For patriotism as
well as for mere sentiment, here are noble scenes enough and to spare.
Not only all Brussels, but all Belgium, made a pilgrimage to Wappers'
creation. Every mother beheld her lost son in the youth in the
foreground whose life has been sacrificed; every artisan's wife sought
her husband, her brother, or her father amongst the figures of the
fighting-men on the barricades. All the newspapers were full of praise,
and a subscription was set on foot to strike a medal in commemoration of
the picture. If, up to this time, Wappers had been merely praised as the
renewer of Belgian art, he was now placed alongside of the greatest
masters. Thiers induced him to exhibit in Paris the much discussed work,
the fame of which had passed beyond the boundaries of Belgium. The
"Episode" made a triumphal tour of all the great towns of Europe before
it found its home in the Musée Moderne; and Wappers' fame abroad
increased yet more his celebrity in Flanders. Thanks to him, the
neighbouring nations began to interest themselves in the Belgian school.
All were united in admiration of "the mighty conception and the
harmonious scheme of colour." The German _Morgenblatt_ published a study
of him in 1836. Wappers counted as the leading painter of his country.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
WAPPERS. THE SACRIFICE OF BURGOMASTER VAN DER WERFF AT THE SIEGE OF
LEYDEN.]
Yet the same year brought him his first rivals. His entry on the stage
had given strength to a group of young painters belonging to the same
courageous movement, and the Brussels Salon of 1836 concentrated their
efforts. _Nicaise de Keyzer_ made his appearance in heavy armour. As
early as 1834 he had come forward with a great picture, a Crucifixion,
in which he desired to compete with Rubens, as it seemed, in the
latter's most special province. Yet the work merely testified to its
author's excellent memory: the majority of the heads, gestures, and
draperies had been made use of in old pictures in precisely the same
fashion. Consciously or not, he had copied fragments direct, and welded
them together in a new composition. If, in spite of this, the name of de
Keyzer already flew from mouth to mouth, he owed it to the nimbus of
romance which irradiated his person. The story went that an Antwerp lady
on one of her walks had seen a young man drawing in the sand, while his
flock was at pasture not far off. She stepped up and offered him a
pencil, and he, a new Cimabue, began forthwith to sketch a picture of
the Madonna. The drawing was so beautiful (so the tale ran) that the
lady would have held it a sin to allow the genius to end his days as a
shepherd. He came to town, received instruction, and learned to paint. A
little idyll illuminated by the amiability of a lady was quite enough to
prepare a friendly reception for De Keyzer. And since he, like a
tractable, modest young man, hearkened attentively to criticism, he
satisfied all desires when, in 1836, he came forward with his "Battle of
the Spurs at Courtrai, 1302." In its quiet elegance the work answered to
the peaceful mood which prevailed once more after the days of revolt and
political insurrection. He was given special credit for clearness of
composition and antiquarian exactness. De Keyzer had chosen the moment
when the Count of Artois was expiring on the knees of a Flemish soldier;
another Fleming had his arm raised to protect his general from the
approaching French. For the rest, there is a lull in the fight, though
the battlefield in the background is indicated with the minuteness of an
historian: none of those carnages of blood and smoke of which the world
was grown once more weary, but a correct, well-disciplined battle, a
skilful composition of fine gestures, helmets, cuirasses, and halberts.
Even the Count's spur, says Alvin, is drawn after the original, the only
remaining spur out of seven hundred which lay scattered on the field
after the day of Courtrai.
In the same year _Henri Decaisne_ completed his "Belges Illustres." The
famous past was supposed to give its blessing to the great present. The
artist, who in Paris had painted portraits with success, had been
esteemed there by Lamartine, and celebrated by Alfred de Musset in a
brilliant article in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, now gratified a long
cherished desire of the Belgian national pride when he united the heroes
of the land in an ideal gathering.
Soon afterwards _Gallait_ and _Bièfve_ trod the stage of Belgian
painting. In point of size their pictures surpassed all that that age,
accustomed as it was to vast canvases, had yet witnessed. "The
Abdication of Charles V" measured twenty feet; it was hung in the Salon
Carré of the Louvre above Paul Veronese's "Marriage at Cana." An entire
court of great ladies and gentlemen, clad in velvet and brocade, move in
the gorgeous hall of state of a king's castle. The solemn moment is
represented when Charles V, erect and dominating the entire assembly,
cedes the government of his possessions to Philip: and here is a mine of
profound criticism of the philosophy of history. This old man, with one
foot in the grave, whose forceful head still bears, like a Caryatid, the
heavy burden of empire, embodies the splendour, fame, and might of
bygone days. Faltering, he steps down from the throne, as though
hesitating at the last moment whether he should appoint as his successor
this son whom he both loves and fears; and, lifting to heaven his tired,
sunken eyes, he commends unto God the future of the realm. Philip, the
only one in the assembly entirely clothed in black, who receives the
gift of dominion with an icy coldness, is transformed by the able
exegesis of the critics into the satanic demon conjuring up the powers
of hell. The picture even gives a glimpse into the future. For as he
speaks Charles leans his left hand upon the shoulder of another young
man, William of Orange. This indicates that soon the nation will wrest
their independence from the double-tongued Jesuitical policy of Philip.
To the left of this central group, robed in velvet and silk, stand the
ladies around Margaret, the sister of the Emperor; she, in the garb of a
nun, sits in her chair as in a _prie-dieu_. To the right, near the
throne, are pages and priests, and amidst them Egmont and Horn, standing
aloof and silent, look upon the scene. "The Abdication" had a grand
success. It confirmed the hopes which had been set on Gallait ever since
the completion of his "Tasso," and it was proudly ranked amongst those
works which did special honour to the young nation. Wappers saw himself
eclipsed, and Louis Gallait took the lead.
[Illustration: WAPPERS. THE DEATH OF COLUMBUS.]
_Edouard de Bièfve's_ "Treaty of the Nobles" formed the historical
supplement to this work; after the triumph of the kingdom came the
triumph of the people. The picture represents the signing of the
defensive league, against the Inquisition and other breaches of
privilege, which the nobility of the Netherlands entered into in 1566,
in the Castle of Cuylenburg, near Brussels; it was hailed by the
_Berliner Staatszeitung_ as "a landmark in the chronicle of historical
painting."
This heroic era of Belgian painting was brought to a close in 1848 by
_Ernest Slingeneyer_, who, as early as 1842, obtained a brilliant
success with his "Sinking of the French Battleship _Le Vengeur_." His
"Battle of Lepanto" was the last great historical picture, and the
entire vocabulary of admiration known to art criticism was showered upon
it by the Brussels press.
Even a new period of religious painting seemed about to dawn. German
art, up to that time little regarded in Belgium, had since the fifties
been discussed with considerable detail in the journals, and such names
as Overbeck, W. Schadow, Veit, Cornelius, and Kaulbach had speedily
acquired a favourable reputation. An exhibition of German cartoons
instituted in Brussels in 1862 served--strangely enough--to sustain this
high appreciation. The young nation believed that it could not afford to
lag behind France and Germany, and commissioned two Antwerp painters,
Guffens and Swerts, who had early made themselves familiar with the
technique of fresco, to found a Belgian school of monumental painting.
To this end they entered into a correspondence with the German artists,
and, after long studies in Italy and Germany, adorned with frescoes the
Church of Notre Dame in St. Nicolas in East Flanders, St. George's
Church in Antwerp, the town halls of Courtrai and Ypres, a few churches
in England, and the Cathedral of Prague; and on these frescoes Herman
Riegel, in 1883, published a book in two volumes.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
DE KEYZER.]
At the present day this religious fresco painting, which handed on the
doctrine of the German Nazarenes--the doctrine that nothing remained to
the nineteenth-century artist except to imitate the old Italians as well
as he could--can no longer command such exhaustive disquisition. And not
it alone: the whole "Belgian artistic revival of 1830" appears in a
somewhat dubious light. After the disconsolate wilderness of Classicism
this period marked an advance. Every Salon brought some new name to
light. The State had contributed a big budget for art, and extended its
protecting hand over the "great painting" which was the glory of the
young nation. What could not be got into the Musée Moderne, founded in
1845, was divided amongst the churches and provincial museums. The
number of painters and exhibitions increased very noticeably. Beside the
great triennial exhibitions in Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent, there were
others in the smaller towns, such as Mons and Mechlin. The Belgian
painters of 1830 appear, no doubt, as great men, when one considers to
what a depth art had sunk before their advent. Wappers especially
widened the horizon, by breaking the formula of Classicism and renewing
the tradition of the brilliant colourists of the seventeenth century. De
Bièfve, De Keyzer, Slingeneyer, severally contributed to the Belgian
Renaissance. The old Flemish race knew itself once more in this fond
quest of beautiful and radiant colouring. The historical painting had
even a certain actual interest. Standing so near to the glorious
September days when the country won its independence, the painters
wished to draw a parallel between the glorious present and the great
past, and to waken patriotic memories by the apotheosis of popular
heroes. And yet the Musée Moderne of Brussels is not one of those
collections in which one willingly lingers. The works in the old museum,
hard by, have remained fresh and living and in touch with us; those in
the new gallery seem to be divided from us by centuries. For the
mischief with pictures which do not remain for ever young is precisely
this--they grow old so very soon. Posterity speaks the language of cold
criticism; and those powers must be great which are even favoured with a
verdict. The luxuriant wreaths of laurel which fall upon the living are
no guarantee of enduring fame, while in the crowns awarded after death
every leaf is numbered. In how few of these once lauded works there
dwells the power to speak in an intelligible language to a generation
which tests them, not for their patriotism, but for their intrinsic art.
The Belgian school of 1830 has left behind it the trace of respectable
industry, but a supreme work is what it has not brought forth.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
DE KEYZER. THE BATTLE OF WOERINGEN.]
How hard it is to see anything epoch-making in Wappers' "Van der Werff."
How theatrically the figures are posturing, how improbable is the
composition, and what an unwholesome dose of sentimentality is to be
found in that burgomaster, who is offering himself as a prey to the
multitude! The heads are those of troubadours. And these jerkins brought
fresh out of the wardrobe, these neatly ironed white ruffles, all this
rich velvet and glittering pomp, how little it resembles the torn rags
of a half-starved people after a nine months' siege! His revolutionary
picture of 1834 is an unfortunate transposition into a sentimental key
of the "Freedom on the Barricades" by Delacroix. Here also are
play-actors rather than men and women of the people. This old man who is
kissing the banner, the wife who winds her arms about her husband as
Venus does about Tannhäuser, the pale girl who has fallen in a faint,
the warrior who, with his eyes turned up to Heaven, is breaking his
sword--these are figures out of a melodrama, not revolutionaries
storming the barricades, nor famishing artisans fighting for their very
existence. And the thin, spick-and-span colouring is in just as striking
a contrast with the forceful action of the scene. An idyll could not be
carried out with more prettiness of manner than is this picture which
represents the rising of a people. The artisans are as white as
alabaster. A light rouge rests upon the cheeks of the women, as when
Boucher paints the faltering of virtue. And afterwards Wappers' course
went further and further down hill. Only in these two early works, in
which he responded to a political movement by an artistic endeavour,
does he seem, in a certain sense, individual and powerful. All the
others are stereotyped productions which, having nothing to do with the
Belgian national movement, have all the more to do with the Parisian
_École du bon sens_. Even his "Christ in the Grave," painted in 1833,
and now in St. Michael's Church at Louvain, with its artificial grace
and pietistical sentimentality, might have been painted by Ary Scheffer.
The pathetic scenes from English and French history of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries which followed this merely reflect that painting
of historical anecdote which was invented by Delaroche. Agnes Sorel and
Charles VII, Abelard and Eloise, Charles I taking leave of his children,
Anne Bullen's parting from Elizabeth, Peter the Great presenting to his
ministers the model of a Dutch ship, Columbus in prison, Boccaccio
reading the _Decameron_ to Joanna of Naples, the brothers De Witt before
their execution, André Chénier in the prison of Saint-Lazare, Louis XVII
at Simon the shoe-maker's, the poet Camoens as a beggar, Charles I going
to the scaffold--all are subjects treated by others before him in
France, and neither in their conception nor their technique have they
anything original. In the last-mentioned picture, exhibited in Antwerp
in 1870, he attained the limit of sugary affectation: a young girl has
sunk on her knees, and, with dreamily uplifted eyes, offers to the
Stuart King who is going to his death--a rose! Wappers is merely a
reflex of French Romanticism, although he cannot be brought into direct
comparison with any Parisian master. The passion of Delacroix stirred
him but little: nothing points to a relationship between him and that
great spirit. One is rather reminded of Alfred Johannot, whom he
resembles in his entire gamut of emotion as in his treatment and
selection of subjects. In both may be found elegance of line, Byronic
emphasis, histrionic gestures, and the same stage properties borrowed
from the theatre; never the genuine movement of feeling, only empty and
distorted grimaces.
Of the others who appeared with him the same may be said. All Belgian
matadors of the forties and fifties came to grief, and are interesting
in the history of art only as symptomatic phenomena, as members of that
school of Delaroche which encompassed the world. They abandoned the
antique marble, the chlamys, and the leaden forms of the Classicists, to
set in their place a motley picture of the Middle Ages, made up of
cuirasses, mail-shirts, fleshings, and velvet and silken doublets. One
convention followed the other, and pedantic dryness was replaced by
melancholy sentimentalism. As skilled practitioners they understood the
sleights of their art, but never rose to individual creation. Amongst
many painters there was not a single artist.
As regards _De Keyzer_, it seems as if throughout his whole life he had
wished to remain true to the memory of his benefactress: a simpering
feminine trait runs with enervating sweetness through all his works,
even through that "Battle of the Spurs" which founded his reputation.
According to old writers, the athletic bodies of the Flemings were the
terror of the French chivalry at Courtrai. De Keyzer has made of them
mere plaster figures, and the pale, meagre colouring is in keeping with
the languid conception. In the battles of Woeringen, of Senef, and
Nieuwpoort, which followed on this picture, and were executed for the
Belgian and Dutch Government, he succeeded still less in overcoming his
affectation; and he first found the fitting province for his mild and
correct talent when in later years he began to render little anecdotes
of the Emperor Maximilian or Justus Lipsius out of the studio of Rubens
or Memlinc. For these there was need of little but a certain superficial
play of colour and an elegant painting of textures.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
SLINGENEYER. THE AVENGER.]
_Ernest Slingeneyer_ is stronger and more masculine. Yet what an
unrefreshing chaos of blue, red, saffron, and citron-yellow is that
"Sea-fight at Lepanto"! Slingeneyer felt that the _chiaroscuro_ with
which Wappers saturated his "Episode" was not in keeping with this
action under open sky. But rightly as he felt this, he had not the
strength to solve the problem of open-air painting. What a barbaric
effect these red, brown, and yellow bodies make in their motley
theatrical pomp! How the composition of the picture savours of
apotheosis! As for his later work, his thirteen gigantic pictures,
"_gloires de la Belgique_," in the great hall of the Brussels Academy,
like De Keyzer's mural paintings above the staircase of the Antwerp
Museum, they would never have been painted had they not had Delaroche's
hemicycle as their forerunner.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
LOUIS GALLAIT.]
And _Gallait's_ "Abdication of Charles V"--one fails to understand how
it was possible that so much able disquisition was suggested by this
picture. How slight a smattering of the erudition of a stage manager is
necessary for the representation of such a scene: the throne on one
side; before it the lords and gentlemen in a semicircle, to the left
front the ladies to make a fine effect for the eye, and in the
background balconies with curious spectators, to widen out the
spectacle. It is all pure theatre; an icy ceremony with prettily got up
supernumeraries. All the heads have the discreditable appearance of
family portraits painted after death, and then washed over with a faint
conventional tinge of red. The whole thing is like a huge piece of
still-life, which an adroit painter has put together out of a mixture of
heads, gold, jewels, mantles, and perukes. Delaroche seems to have
contributed the composition, Devéria the sumptuous costumery; and as for
the colouring, Isabey, with his sunbeams shimmering in gold and silver,
may not improbably have had something to do with that. What was
spontaneous in Wappers is replaced in Gallait by cold calculation. Once
and once only did this correct and frigid painter give evidence of a
certain dramatic vein; it was when in 1851 he painted "The Brussels
Guild of Marksmen paying the Last Honours to Egmont and Horn." With a
brutal audacity the decapitated heads are set to their bodies. Bloodless
and livid, with clotted and tangled beards, they both really look as if
they had been studied direct from nature. But the rest of the picture,
the surrounding of theatrical attractions, parade costumes, and false
pathos, is all the less in keeping with this study of death. How
Zurbaran or Caravaggio would have treated the theme! They would have
veiled the unessential figures in darkness, and irradiated the heads
only with a trenchant light. What Gallait has made of it is the final
tableau of an opera of costume. The two sergeants of Alva who are on
guard, and the men who are showing their reverence, tread the stage like
bad actors, scrupulously arrayed and making pathetic gestures. Their
action has been studied from drawing-school copies; no genuine cry of
passion ever breaks through. Heads, hands, and outlines have all a
sickly idealism; a studious and sedulously polished manner of painting
has ruined the intrinsic spirit of the work as a whole. Théophile
Gautier was right when he wrote of Gallait: "_Tout le talent_ _qu'on
peut acquérir avec du travail, du goût, du jugememt, et de la volonté,
M. Gallait le possède._" Gallait's "Last Obsequies," hung in that same
Salon of 1850 which contained Courbet's "Stone-breakers," and the words
of recognition accorded to it, were the last obsequies given to the
parting genius of historical painting. A few years went by, and
Gallait's fame died away. After 1851 he painted fourteen other great
historical pictures ("Egmont's Last Moments," "Johanna the Mad by the
Corpse of her Husband," "Alva at the Window during the Execution of the
two Counts," etc.), and, occasionally, sentimental _genre_ pictures,
such as "The Oblivion of Sorrow" in the Berlin National Gallery; in this
a small boy is playing the fiddle for the consolation of his sister, who
had sunk upon the high-road exhausted by hunger. He also painted many
portraits. But nothing gave him a niche in the memory of his
contemporaries. "The Pest at Tournai," painted in 1882, was a work
extremely creditable to his old age; it was nevertheless a picture which
appeared to another generation merely as a phantom; and when, on 20th
November 1887, the announcement of his death passed through the land, it
came unexpectedly, like that of a person already believed to have been
long dead.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
GALLAIT. EGMONT'S LAST MOMENTS.]
Finally, _Edouard de Bièfve_, who in 1842 shared Gallait's triumph in
Germany, and was afterwards named in the same breath with him, is the
man who marks the complete corruption of this tendency. If the sturdy
Wappers, the emasculate De Keyzer, and the eclectic Gallait tricked out
their pathetic heroes with noble heads like that of the Antinous, and
offered their contemporaries an adroit theatrical art, a parade, and a
hollow pathos, the incapable Bièfve never got beyond the painting of
_tableaux vivants_ laboriously presented. Terrible and of Shakespearian
impressiveness is the scene in which the half-famished Ugolino hurls
himself upon his son in an appalling ecstasy of frenzy, a curse against
God and man upon his lips. Upon the canvas, six metres wide, which
Bièfve in 1836 devoted to this theme, there is represented an old
gentleman, who, though certainly a little pale, contrives to maintain in
perfection the punctilious bearing of a cavalier, and in the midst of
his fasting cure has picturesquely draped round his shoulders an ermine
mantle, as if he had been asked out to dinner. Before him stands a young
man, possessing that graceful outline beloved of Paul Delaroche.
Devéria, Ary Scheffer, and Johannot were better painters of such
monumental illustrations of the classics. As yet the shivering art of
Belgium had learnt only to warm itself at the Parisian fireside. Even
Bièfve's "League of the Nobles of the Netherlands," despite its national
subject-matter, was no more than a lucky hit, which he owed to his long
residence in Paris. And how tiresomely is the scene played out! One
would wish to catch the mutterings of insurrection from these men who
personify the Belgian people; but Bièfve's picture is restful and
dignified. Egmont and Horn, the lions of the occasion, are conducting
themselves like honest citizens who are bored at a party. Seated in his
chair, the handsome Egmont thinks merely of showing his fine profile to
the ladies in the gallery, and Horn, who steps towards the table to make
his signature, does it with the elegance of a lover inscribing verses in
a young lady's album. Three brothers with clasped hands swear the
well-known oath to die together.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
EDOUARD BIÈFVE.]
It is a little irony in the history of art that in 1842 these two same
pictures set all Germany in tumult, and diverted the whole stream of
painting into a new course. But how was it possible that the German
painters stood before them as if struck by lightning? It must be
remembered that for a whole generation Germany had seen nothing but
coloured cartoons, and that the enthusiasm for Franco-Belgian art had
been so prepared that the least touch was enough to set it in flames.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
BIÈFVE. THE LEAGUE OF THE NOBLES OF THE NETHERLANDS.]
Since the wars of liberation Germany had been very reserved in her
attitude towards the French. Until the year 1842 original works of the
French and Belgian school had never been hung in any German exhibition.
But in spite of this, a high, even enthusiastic, appreciation of French
and Belgian painting was being spread, especially amongst the younger
generation. Even in engravings and lithographs after French pictures it
was believed that qualities of colour were discoverable which were
wanting in German painting. Heine and other authors, who had wandered to
Paris, "the lofty tower of Freedom," to escape from the depressing
condition of German affairs, had done what in them lay for the
dissemination of this cult. The rising generation of the forties had
been driven by Heine's notices of the Salon into an almost hostile
attitude towards the dominant art schools of Germany, the schools of
Düsseldorf and Munich. The stylists on the Isar and the sentimental
elegiac painters on the Rhine met with the same antipathy from the
younger generation. The appearance of the two Belgian historical
pictures, which were really nothing more than offshoots of the great
French school, gave nourishment of doubled strength to this tendency to
seek salvation in Paris. The German painters were startled out of
contentment with their beloved cartoons, and to many a man it seemed as
if the scales had fallen from his eyes. They perceived what an admirable
thing it is that a painter should be able to paint. What they could have
learnt long before from any good old picture, and in their turbulent
enthusiasm for ideas had not learnt, was made suddenly clear to them by
these new paintings. They came to the conclusion that it was impossible
for God Almighty to have poured light and colour over the objective
world with the intention that painters should transform it into a world
of shadowless contours. They recognised that the style of cartoon work
had led away from all painting, and that it was therefore necessary to
do honour once more to the despised handiwork and technique of art, as
the fundamental condition of its well-being. However much the æsthetic
party might warn them not to renounce "the Reformation of painting,
which had been begun and perfected forty years before," and not "with
modern technique to sink back into the pre-Cornelian, ornamental model
painting," the demand for colour, which had been so long neglected,
asserted its rights more and more loudly. King Ludwig's saying was
repeated as though it were a new revelation: "The painter must be able
to paint." Colour was the battle-cry of the day, the battle-cry of
youth, to whom the world belongs. In place of the ideal of contour came
the ideal of hue and pigment. Cartoons, in the sense of the old cartoon
school, no one would draw any longer. To paint pictures, finished
pictures, was the tendency of the day. And since painting is to be
learnt from the living only, and such as could paint lived in Germany no
longer, they packed their trunks, and set out to learn from the
"go-ahead neighbour." As Rome had been hitherto, so was Paris now, the
high school of German art. "To Paris!" and "Painting!" were the cries
throughout all Germany.
CHAPTER XIV
THE REVOLUTION OF THE GERMAN COLOURISTS
From 1842 dates the pilgrimage of the German artists to Paris, Antwerp,
and Brussels. In Delaroche, Cogniet, and Couture, in Wappers and
Gallait, they believed they could discover the secrets of art which were
hidden from German teachers. The history of art can scarcely offer
another example of such a sudden overthrow of dogmas hitherto dominant
by dogmas directly opposed to them. During the first half of the century
the painters of Germany were pious men, humorous, witty, and intelligent
men; they had a sharply cut profile, and so enchained the multitude by
their human qualities that nobody remarked how little they understood of
their craft, or that they were too superior to learn to draw correctly,
held colour unchaste, and made virtues of all their failings. The next
generation was condemned to learn painting during the whole of its
natural life. The former were "problematic natures": beings who united
with a Titanic force of will an actual achievement which is hardly worth
mentioning; who regarded the mere handicraft of art as beneath their
dignity; who, in their revelations to mankind, were resolved to burden
their spirit as little as possible with any sensuous expression of their
genius, and, above all, meant not to degrade themselves by the manual
labour of learning to paint, and thereby wasting their valuable time.
The latter were not ashamed of painting. By devoting themselves with
vehemence to the colouring and technique of oil-painting, they
accomplished the necessary revolution against the abstract idealism of
the school of Cornelius. In their opulence of ideas the draughtsmen of
cartoons had made a notch in the history of art by casting the technical
tradition overboard. To have reinstated this as far as they could, with
the aid of the French, is the peculiar merit of the generation of 1850.
"_Règle générale: si vous rencontrez un bon peintre allemamd, vous
pouvez le complimenter en français._" So runs the motto--not
complimentary to Germany, but quite unassailable--which Edmond About
prefixed to his notices on the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855.
_Anselm Feuerbach_ was the first distinguished German artist who made
the journey to Paris with a proper knowledge of the necessity of this
step. In Germany he was the greatest representative of that Classicism
of which the principal master in France was Ingres, and the continuator
Thomas Couture. And he succeeded in accomplishing that which the German
Classicists of the beginning of the century strove after in vain. Whilst
they contented themselves with suggestions and an indeterminate
symbolisation of poetical ideas after the Greek writers, German
Classicism achieved in Feuerbach's "Symposium of Plato" a great, noble,
and faultless work, which will live. He moved upon classic ground more
naturally and freely and with more of the Hellenic spirit than even the
French. For the classic genius was begotten in him, and not inoculated
from without. In the _Vermächtniss_ the son calls his father's book the
prophetic seal of his own original being. He inherited the classic
spirit from the enthusiastic scholar, the subtile author of the Vatican
Apollo, to whom the genius of Greece had so fully and completely
revealed itself.
[Illustration: _Hanfstängl._
ANSELM FEUERBACH. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
A remarkable nature: philologer and dreamer, German and Greek, one who
rejoiced in beauty and in the life of the senses, and whose proud muse
strayed through life solitary and with leaden weights upon her
feet,--such was Anselm Feuerbach, and by that division of his being he
was ruined. Equipped with a superior education, an appearance of
singular nobility, and with proud family traditions, he emerged like a
shining meteor in Düsseldorf, when he began his career at the age of
sixteen, brilliant, precocious, and already a favourite amongst women.
This was in 1845. He ran through all the schools in Germany, Belgium,
and France. In regard to the living, he believed himself to be indebted
to the French alone, and eagerly claimed the merit of having been the
first to seek them out. But it was in Italy that he had passed through
his novitiate as an artist. A glorious hour it must have been when
Feuerbach, full-blooded and dedicated to the worship of beauty, entered
Venice in 1855, in company with that cheerful and convivial poet Victor
Scheffel. In the town of the lagoons, whither he had come on a
commission from the Court of Karlsruhe to copy the Assumption of Titian,
Feuerbach made the second determining step of his life. The third he
made when his stipendium was withdrawn, and, full of youthful
confidence in his luck and his good star, he undertook his journey to
Rome.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
FEUERBACH. HAFIZ AT THE WELL.]
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
FEUERBACH. PIETA.]
He was handsome, small, and refined, and rather pale and spare--of that
delicacy which in highly bred families is found in the last heirs with
whom the race dies out--and he had dark locks which clustered wildly
round his head. The moulding of his features was feminine, and his
complexion southern; his eyes, shadowed by long lashes, were brown,
sometimes fiery, sometimes sad and earnest, and his glance was swift. He
loved to sing Italian songs to the guitar in his fine, deep voice, and
Boecklin and Reinhold Begas would join in.
The impressions he received in Italy were formative of his life. For he
learnt to understand the divine simplicity and noble dignity of antique
art better than Couture was capable of understanding them; and he
achieved a simple amplitude to which the French Classicism had never
risen.
From his first works, to which the Düsseldorf egg-shell is still
sticking, down to the "Symposium of Plato"--what a route it is, and
through what phases he passes. "Hafiz at the Well," surrounded by
voluptuous, half-naked girls, painted at Paris in 1852, was his first
eminent achievement. In subject it is a late fruit from Daumer's study
of Hafiz: as a work of art it is one of the most genuine products of the
school of Couture. No other German artist has surrendered himself so
entirely to the French. With a large brush, never losing sight of the
complete effect, Feuerbach has painted his canvas, almost for the sake
of showing that he has assimilated everything that was to be learnt in
Paris. The same influence preponderates in the "Death of Pietro
Aretino," done in 1854. But, side by side with the Parisian master, the
later Venetians have an unmistakable share in this work. The capacity
to grasp things in a monumental largeness is already announced.
Evidently Feuerbach has studied Paul Veronese, and realised how high he
stands above the French painters. At the same time he has examined the
other Venetians for their technique, and discovered something which has
appealed to him in Bordone's colouring. But "Dante walking with
high-born Ladies of Ravenna," finished at Rome in 1857, was the ripest
fruit of his Venetian impressions. In sunny warmth of colour, fine
golden tone, and quiet simplicity of pictorial treatment, no modern has
come so near to Palma and Bordone. And in "Dante's Death," of 1858,
there predominates a still greater depth and golden glow, a grave and
devout beauty.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
FEUERBACH. IPHIGENIA.]
In the following works, however, Feuerbach, with a conscious purpose,
denies himself the quality to which the Dante pictures owe a principal
part of their powerful effect: the mild glow, the sunny beaming of
colour. He confines himself to a cool scheme of tone, reduced to grey,
almost to the point of colourlessness; to a glimmer of leaden blue, a
moonlight pallor. At the same time he has concentrated the whole life of
his figures in their inward being, whilst every movement has been taken
from their limbs. Even the expression of spiritual emotion in the eyes
and features has been subdued in the extreme. The "Pietà," both the
"Iphigenias," and the "Symposium of Plato" are the world-renowned
proofs of the height of classic inspiration which he touched in Italy.
Measure, nobility, unsought and perfected loftiness characterise the
"Pietà," that mother of the Saviour who bows herself in silent agony
over the body of her Divine Son, and those three kneeling women, whose
silent grief is of such thrilling power, precisely because of its
emotionlessness. For "Iphigenia" Feuerbach has given of his best. She is
in both examples--the first of 1862, the second of 1871--a figure
sublime beyond human measure, grand like the figure of the Greek
tragedy. But the "Symposium of Plato" will always assert its high value
as one of the finest pictorial creations of an imagination nourished on
the great art of the ancients, and filled brimful with the splendour of
the antique world. There is nothing in it superfluous, nothing
accidental. The noblest simplicity of speech, a Greek rhythm in all
gradations, the beautiful lines of bas-relief, decisive colour and
stringent form--that is the groundwork of Feuerbach's art. And through
it there speaks a spirit preoccupied with greatness and heroism. Thus he
created his "Medea" in the Munich Pinakothek, that picture of
magnificent, sombre melancholy that affects one like a monologue from a
Sophoclean tragedy. Thus he painted his "Battle of the Amazons," one of
the few "nude" pictures of the century which possesses the perfectly
unconcerned and unsexual nudity of the antique. Italy had set him free
from all the insincere and calculated methods which had deformed French
art since Delaroche; it had set him free from all theatrical sentiment,
by which he had accustomed himself to understand everything that was
forced in costume, pigment, pose and movement, light and scenery. In the
place of the ordinary treatment from the model, with its set gestures
and grimaces, he gave an expression of form which was great, simple, and
plastic. His study seems to have been an incessant exercise of the eye,
to see and to hold fast to the essential, to the great lines of nature
as of the human body.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
FEUERBACH. PORTRAIT OF A ROMAN LADY.]
In the full possession of these powers, which he acquired amid the
elementary simplicity and heroic majesty of Roman landscape by constant
intercourse with the great painters of the past, he determined in the
summer of 1873 to accept an invitation from the Vienna Academy. His
friends rejoiced. At last this worker, who had been abandoned in a
foreign land, seemed to have found in his native country a place which
offered him a new life. He was but little more than forty: yet all was
so soon to be over. From Rome he came to the restless capital which had
just lived through the birththroes of a new epoch; from the side of
Michael Angelo to the side of Makart! The sketches for a series on the
wars of the Titans, which he began after his arrival, promised the
greatest things. They display a sureness and majesty which find no
parallel in the German art of those years. But they were destined never
to be completed.
Feeling himself, like Antæus, strong only on Roman soil, he lost his
power in Vienna. Reserved, innately delicate, a mystical, ideal nature
like that of Faust, and one which only with reluctance permitted to a
stranger a glimpse of its inner being; in his life, as in his art,
high-bred and simple, hating both as painter and as man everything
overstrained or sentimental; in his judgment harsh, severe, and
uncompromising, lonely and proud, he was but little adapted to make
friends for himself. The indifference with which his study for the "Fall
of the Titans" was received in the Vienna Exhibition wounded him
mortally. Vienna, which is so much disposed to laughter, laughed.
Criticism was rough and unfavourable. He left Vienna and went to Venice.
The tragical fate of a party of voyagers, drowned as they were playing
and singing together on a night journey to the Lido, gave him the motive
for his last picture, "The Concert," which was found unfinished after
his death, and came into the possession of the Berlin National Gallery.
On 4th January 1882 he died, alone in a Venetian hotel.
"Hier ruht Anselm Feuerbach,
Der im Leben manches malte,
Fern vom Vaterlande, ach,
Das ihn immer schlecht bezahlte."
So runs the epitaph which he made for himself. And posterity might alter
it into--
"Hier ruht ein deutscher Maler,
Bekannt im deutschen Land;
Nennt man die besten Namen,
Wird auch der seine genannt."
However, one must not go too far. In familiar conversation Feuerbach
once said of himself that when the history of art in the nineteenth
century came to be written, mention would be made of him as of a meteor.
So isolated, and so much out of connection with the artistic striving of
his contemporaries, did he believe himself to be, that he held himself
justified in saying: "Believe me, after fifty years my pictures will
possess tongues, and tell the world what I was and what I meant." In
truth, he owes his resurrection less to his pictures than to the
_Vermächtniss_. A book has opened the eyes of Germany to Feuerbach's
greatness, and since that time the worship of Feuerbach has gone almost
into extremes. Throughout his lifetime--like almost every great artist
who has died before old age--he was handled by the Press without much
comprehension. The critics blamed his grey tones, the connoisseurs
complained of his unpatriotic subjects or missed the presence of
anecdote. His admirers were the refined, quiet people who do not praise
at the top of their voices. He never met with recognition, and that
poisoned his life. It is generous of posterity to make up for the want
of contemporary appreciation. But when he is set up as a pioneer, whose
work pointed out the art of the future, the judgment becomes one which a
_later_ posterity will subscribe to only with hesitation.
[Illustration: FEUERBACH. MOTHER'S JOY.]
Feuerbach presents a problem for psychological rather than artistic
analysis. Whoever has read the _Vermächtniss_ feels the personal element
in these works, sees in them the confessions of a proud, unsatisfied,
and suffering soul, and in their author no son of the Renaissance born
out of due season, but a modern who has been agitated through and
through by the _décadent_ fever. In his book Feuerbach appears as one of
the first who felt to his inmost fibre all the intellectual and
spiritual contradictions which are bred by the nineteenth century, and
who cherished them even with a sort of tenderness, as contributing to a
high and more subtilised condition of soul. He was one of the first who,
in the same way as Bourget and Verlaine, studied moral pathology under
the microscope, and who, with a tired soul and worn-out feelings, sought
for the last refinement of simplicity. And this weary resignations seems
also to speak from his pictures. Not one of the old painters has this
modern melancholy, this air of dejection which hovers over his works.
Even the ladies round Dante are filled with that sadness which comes
over youth on the evenings of sultry summer days, when it is struck by a
presentiment of the transitoriness of earthly things. It is as if these
figures would all some day or other vanish into the cloister, or, like
Iphigenia, sit lonely upon the shore of a sea, whither no ship should
ever come to release them. And it is certainly not by chance that
Iphigenia had such a hold upon the artist; he repeatedly set himself to
render her figure afresh, and, later, Medea steps beside her as the
impersonation of the still more intense sense of desertion which filled
the artist's spirit. The woman of Colchis, who sits shivering on the
shore of the sea, chilled through and through by the consciousness of
her abandonment; the daughter of Agamemnon, who in spirit is seeking the
land of the Greeks, with the boundless sea spreading wide and grey
before her, like her own yearning,--both are images of the lonely
Feuerbach, who, like Hölderlin, the Werther of Greece, flies to a dreamy
Hellas as to a happy shore, to find peace for his sick spirit. His
"Symposium of Plato" has not that exuberant sensuousness, that mixture
of _esprit_ and voluptuousness, of temperance and intemperance, which
marks the Athenian life under Pericles; nor has it the Olympian
blitheness with which Raphael would have executed the subject. A breath
of monkish asceticism is over every joy, subduing it. These Greeks have
tasted of the pains which Christianity brought into the world. Or take
his "Judgment of Paris" in Hamburg. Nude women life-size, Loves,
southern landscape, gay raiment, golden vessels, brilliant ornament,
beauty--those are the elements of the picture; and how little have such
words the power to render the impression! But Feuerbach's three
goddesses have an uneasiness, as if each one of them knew beforehand
that she would not receive the apple; Paris is sitting just as
cheerlessly there. And by borrowing his loves from Boucher, Feuerbach
has shown the more sharply the opposition between the Hellenic legend
which he interprets and the funereal mien with which he does it. The
blitheness of the antique spirit is tempered by the sadness of the
modern mind. He tells these old myths as never a Greek and never a
master of the Renaissance would have told them. Olympus is filled with
mist, with the colouring of the North, with the melancholy of a later
and more neurotic age, the moods of which are for that very reason more
rich in _nuances_--an age which is at once graver and more disturbed by
problems than was the old Hellas. Feuerbach's pictures are octaves in
the language of Tasso, but of a repining lyrical mood which Tasso would
not have given them. The brightest sunshine laughed over the Greece of
the Renaissance; over that of Feuerbach there rests a rainy, overcast
November mood. Even works of his like the "Children on the Sea-shore"
and the "Idyll" reveal a pained and suffering conception of nature, that
tender and subdued spirit that Burne-Jones has; it is as if these
blossoms of humanity were there to waste away in buds that never come to
fruition, as if it were no longer possible to breathe into creation the
true joyousness of youth. Even the five girls, making music out of
doors, in the picture "In Spring," look like young widows, putting the
whole tenderness of their souls into elegiac complaints for their lost
husbands.
[Illustration: _Hanfstängl._
FEUERBACH. MEDEA.]
To this resigned and mournful expression must be added the uncomfortable
motionlessness of his figures. They do not speak, and do not laugh, and
do not cry; they know no passions and sorrows which express themselves
by the straining of the limbs. Everything bears the impress of sublime
peace, of that same peace by which the works of Gustave Moreau, Puvis de
Chavannes, and Burne-Jones are to be distinguished from the ecstatic and
sentimental tirades of the Romanticists. In Feuerbach's works this is
the stamp of his own nature. The antique beauty becomes shrouded in a
mysterious veil; and life is illuminated as by a mournful light, which
rests over bygone worlds. What heart-rending keenness is often in the
effect of the melancholy tinge of these subdued bluish tones! That
colour is the genuine expression of the temperament reveals itself
clearly enough in Feuerbach. When he began his career, his head full of
ideals and his heart full of hopes, his pictures exulted in a Venetian
splendour, in full and luxuriant golden harmonies; as "joy after joy
was shipwrecked in the stream of time" they became leaden, sullen, and
corpse-like. As Frans Hals in his last days, when his fellow-creatures
allowed him only the bare necessities of life, accorded to the figures
in his pictures only so much colour as would give them the appearance of
living human beings; as Rembrandt's magical golden tone changed in the
sad days of his bankruptcy into a sullen, monotonous brown, so a deep
sadness broods over the pictures of Feuerbach,--something that savours
of memory and remorse, the mournful atmosphere and dark mood of evening
which the bat loves. Even as a colourist he has the melancholy lassitude
of the end of the century.
That is what distinguishes him from his contemporaries. The other
idealists of those years painted their pictures without hesitation and
with the facility of a professor of calligraphy; they remembered,
arranged their reminiscences, and rubbed their hands with
self-complacency when they came near their model. They did not yet feel
the throb of the nineteenth century, and impersonality was their note.
Feuerbach, the neurotic brooder, was a personality. After a long
mortification, the human spirit, the living, suffering, human spirit,
celebrated its renaissance in his works. Under its influence the jejune
painting of prettiness practised by others was changed to modern
pessimism and sorrowful resignation. The more he gave way to these moods
the more modern he became, the more he was Feuerbach and the further he
departed from the works of art which were regarded by his contemporaries
and himself as eternal exemplars. He has been reproached with oddities
and strange eccentricities. The critics reminded him how far he departed
from the lines of his models; indignantly they asked him why he, the
pale, delicate, sick, neurotic, and overstrained man, the uncertain,
faltering, and tortured spirit, did not paint like the blithe,
improvising Raphael, like the jubilant and convivial Veronese, like the
sensuous, exuberant Rubens. And Feuerbach himself becomes perplexed.
Like Gros in France, he is conscious both of his strength and his
weakness. He does not stand sovereign above the old painters, like
Boecklin and those other idealists of the present. He runs through life
in ever fresh astonishment at the novelty which is revealed to him in
the works of earlier centuries. The nerves of this latter day vibrate,
the blood of the nineteenth century throbs in him--yet he has the wish
to imitate. The history of every one of his works is a fight, a
desperate struggle, between the individuality of the artist, his own
inward feeling, and the "absolute Beauty" which hovered beyond him cold
and unpliable.
In his first drawings he begins boldly; one knows his hand and says:
"Only Feuerbach can have done that." And then one is able to trace, step
by step, and from sketch to sketch, what pains he takes that the
finished picture may be as little of a Feuerbach as possible. The
personal and individual element in the drawings is lost, what is
Feuerbachian in the composition, the personal contribution of the
artist, is effaced, and finally there is produced in the picture the
marvellous look of having been painted by a genuine old Venetian as a
ghost. And Feuerbach felt the dissonance. He feels that he fully
expresses himself no more, and also that he does not reach the level of
the old masters. He adds borrowed, conventional figure, like the Boucher
Cupids in the "Judgment of Paris"--figures against which every fibre of
his being revolts--just to arrive at an outward resemblance to the old
pictures, an impression of exultation and joyousness and the spirit of
the Renaissance. And when he stands opposite his work he seems to
himself like a gravedigger in a harlequin's jacket. He scrutinises
himself in despair, and one day comes to feel that his power of
production is exhausted. Splendid and unapproachable, from the walls of
the galleries, the art of the classic masters stares him in the face;
and he enters into a dramatic life-and-death struggle with it. He will
not be Feuerbach, and cannot become a Classic. The curtain falls and the
tragedy is over. Such destinies have been before in the world, no doubt;
but in our time they have multiplied, and seem so much the sadder
because they never come to the average man, but only to great and
peculiarly gifted natures.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
FEUERBACH. DANTE WALKING WITH HIGH-BORN LADIES OF RAVENNA.]
These matters--a silent historical sermon--one reads, with the help of
the _Vermächtniss_, out of Feuerbach's works. There "his pictures
possess tongues"; there comes out of them a sound like the cry of a
human heart; the whole tragedy of his career becomes present--what he
succeeded in doing and what remained unapproachable. Yet later
generations, which will judge him no longer psychologically, but only as
an artist, generations with which he no longer stands in touch through
his ethical greatness, will they also feel this in the presence of his
finished pictures? To them will he be pioneer or imitator, forerunner or
continuator? Will he take his place by Boecklin and Watts, or by Couture
and Ingres? It is perhaps a happy chance that in the history of art one
sometimes stumbles upon personalities that mock at all chemical
analysis. Feuerbach, at any rate, is a great figure in the German art of
these years. His is a high-bred, aristocratic art, free from any
illustrative undertone, and from loud and motley colour. It is true that
his figures also pose, but never clumsily or without expression, never
theatrically. At a time when declamation was universal he did not
declaim, at least he never did so with a forced pathos; and it is
principally this which gives him a very high and special place amongst
the German painters of the transitional period. He is always simple,
grave, majestic. Everything that he does has style, and that makes him
so peculiar in an art which is so often petty.
[Illustration: HENNEBERG. THE RACE FOR FORTUNE.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
But a different judgment is formed when one compares him with the French
and the old masters. A meteor Feuerbach was not; for he stood on the
ground of the Couture school, and raised himself later to yet greater
simplicity, going back to purer sources, to the Venetians and the
Romans. He is more austere and manly than Couture, but he is, as he
stands in his finished pictures, a Roman of the Cinquecento, who has
been in Venice; not an original genius of the nineteenth century, like
Boecklin. Boecklin paints the antique figures in their eternal fulness
and youth; but he is quite modern in sentiment and in his highly
developed technique. Feuerbach in regard to technique stands now on
French soil, now on Venetian or Roman; and in his sentiment he is an
imitator of the Cinquecentists, or, if you will, a phenomenon of
atavism. His writings and drawings show him concerned with the present,
his paintings with the past. The modern temperament, artistically
restrained, breaks out no more, the nerves have no rôle, no human sound
is forced from his figures. He learnt through the spectacles of the
great old masters to look away from everything petty in life, but he
never laid those spectacles down. This modern man, who was so neurotic
as a writer, sought as a painter, for the sake of the ideal, to have no
nerves at all. Before many of his pictures one wishes for a fire; they
make an effect so cold that one shivers. The quality in them which calls
for boundless admiration is his splendid artistic earnestness. There
speaks out of them a sacred peace. Yet, when he is set up as a pioneer,
it must never be forgotten that he is not self-sufficient as, shall we
say, Millet, but has attained his majesty of conception only in the
leading-strings of masterpieces of a great period, and precisely in the
leading-strings of those masterpieces from the numbing influence of
which modern art was forced to set itself free, before it could come to
the consciousness of itself.
[Illustration: GUSTAV RICHTER. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
Together with Feuerbach--and having, like him, previously received
enlightenment as to colouring at the Antwerp Academy--_Victor Müller_,
of Frankfort, had gone to Couture in 1849. He resided until 1858 on the
banks of the Seine, and was especially influenced by Delacroix, and
perhaps also a little affected by Courbet. At least his "Wood Nymph"--a
voluptuous woman lying in a wood--which first made him known in Germany
in 1863, seems but little removed from the healthy realism and exuberant
vigour of the master of Ornans. Otherwise, like Delacroix, he has
occupied himself almost exclusively with Shakespeare. "Hamlet at the
Grave of Yorick," "Ophelia," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hero and Leander,"
were pictures of a deep, sonorous glow of colour; the characters in them
were seized with great intellectual concentration, and the surrounding
landscape filled with that sombre poetry of nature which in the hands of
Delacroix so mystically heightens the impression of human tragedies.
Victor Müller was of a bold, uncompromising talent, full of southern
glow and wild Romanticism; a powerful, forcible realist, who never
sought the empty, sentimental, ideal beauty known to his age. In a
period dominated almost from end to end by a jejune and rounded beauty,
he gives pleasure by a healthy, refreshing "ugliness." All the heads in
his pictures were painted after nature with a religious devoutness;
painted by a man who openly loved the youthful works of Riberas and
Caravaggio. And just as surprising is the power of expression, the deep
and earnest sentiment, which he attained in gestures and physiognomy.
While Makart, in his balcony scene from _Romeo and Juliet_, never got
away from a hollow, theatrical affectation, Müller's picture glows
throughout with a sensuous passion that saps the blood. A new Delacroix
seemed to have been born; an extraordinary talent seemed to be rising
above the horizon of our art, but Germany had to follow to the grave her
greatest offshoot of Romanticism before he had spoken a decisive word,
just as she lost Rethel, the greatest son of the cartoon era, in the
flower of his age.
Of the others who made the pilgrimage to Paris with Feuerbach and
Müller, not one has a similar importance as an artist. Their merit was
that they made themselves comparatively able masters of technique, and
taught the new gospel when they returned to Germany. To their
superiority in technique and colour, given them by a sound French
schooling, they owed their brilliant success in the fifties. They were,
at the time, the best German painters, and great at a time when ability
was novel and infrequent. As soon as it became customary and
commonplace, there remained little to raise them above the average.
[Illustration: RICHTER. A GIPSY.]
That is true of the entire Berlin school of the fifties and sixties. The
most independent of the many artists who journeyed from the Spree to the
Seine is, probably, _Rudolf Henneberg_, who died young. His technique he
owed to Couture, in whose studio he worked from 1851, and his
subject-matter to the German classical authors. Born a Brunswicker, he
felt himself specially attracted by his countryman Bürger, and became a
Northern ballad painter with French technique. Movement, animation,
wildness, and a certain romantic eeriness, proper to the Northern
ballad--these are Henneberg's prominent features, as they are Bürger's.
His pictures have a bold caprice and a peculiarly powerful and sombre
poetry. The hunting party storm past irresistibly, like a whirlwind, in
his "Wild Hunt," the illustration to Bürger's ballad, which in 1856 won
him the gold medal in Paris.
"Und hinterher bei Knall and Klang
Der Tross mit Hund und Ross und Mann."
A Düsseldorfian Romanticism, from the Wolf's Glen, is united to
Couture's nobleness of colouring in his "Criminal from Lost Honour," of
1860. And a part--even if only a small one--of the spirit which created
Dürer's "The Knight, Death, and the Devil" lives in his masterpiece "The
Race for Fortune," a picture breathed on by the spirit of sombre,
mediæval Romanticism, which made his name the most honoured in the
Exhibition of 1868.
[Illustration: SCHRADER. CROMWELL AT WHITEHALL.]
The negation of power, an almost feminine painter of no distinctive
character, a new edition of Winterhalter, was _Gustav Richter_. His
popularity is connected with the fisher-boys and odalisques, the
reproduction of which every sempstress at one time used to wear on her
brooch, while in printed colours they added splendour to all the bonbon
and handkerchief boxes. The accomplished workmanship and sparkling
treatment of material which he acquired in Paris made him in 1860, after
Eduard Magnus had made his exit, the most famous painter of feminine
beauty. A pleasure-loving man of the world, elegant in appearance, fame,
honour, and distinction were showered upon him, and he became the
shining spoilt darling of society, the central point of an extensive and
animated convivial intercourse. His works were carried out in a style
which, at that time, had not been learnt in Berlin, and had an air of
Court life which was held to be exceedingly fashionable. It was later
that the banal emptiness and insipid taste of his toilette portraits
first became obvious, and that their everlastingly sweet and doll-like
smirk, and their kind and winning eyes, always the same, began to grow
tiresome. In all his life-size chromolithographs there is a distinction
of build and appearance, which in the originals was perhaps to have been
desired, although the originals unquestionably looked like something
that was more human and individual. In riper years, after the happiness
of family life had been given him, he executed works which assure his
name a certain endurance; this he did in some of his family
portraits,--for instance, in those of his boys and his wife. To this
last period belongs the ideal portrait of the Baroness Ziegler as Queen
Louisa, which became such a popular picture in Prussia. But Richter's
"great" compositions, which once charmed the visitors at exhibitions,
are now forgotten. In "Jairus's Daughter"--admired in 1856 as a fine
performance in colouring--what strikes one now that its colouring has
long been surpassed is the inadequacy and theatricality of its
characterisation, the outward show, and the banality of this handsome
young man who performs his miracle with a declamatory pose. The
"Building of the Pyramids," painted for the Maximilianeum in Munich,
with its swarming crowd of dark-coloured people, and the royal pair come
to inspect with an endless train, is a gigantic ethnographical
picture-sheet, which did not repay the expenditure of twelve long years
of work.
In Paris _Otto Knille_ learnt to approach huge canvas and wall spaces
with fearlessness, and by executing the many monumental commissions
which fell to his share in Prussia, he put this French talent to usury
in a manner which was as blameless as it was uninteresting. Some good
paintings by _Julius Schrader_, such as the historical pictures with
which his fame is associated, have remained fresh for a longer period.
The "Death of Leonardo da Vinci," as well as the "Surrender of Calais to
Edward III," "Wallenstein and Seni at their Astrological Studies," "The
Dying Milton," and "Charles I parting from his Children," are only a
collection of what the Parisian studios had transmitted to him.
Delaroche and the illustrative and theatrical painting of history,
having gone the rounds in Belgium, in the next decade demanded their
sacrifice in Germany.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
LESSING. THE HUSSITE SERMON.]
Here also similar political and literary conditions were prescribed. A
backward people, uncontent with itself, pined for deeds and glory.
Through the presentment of the great dramas of the past the spirit of
the present was to be quickened, as a relaxed body by massage. Here also
the knowledge of history levelled the ground for painting, as it did in
France. While, in the imagination of the Romanticists, different ages
melted dreamily into each other, and the Hohenstauffen period, because
of its tender melancholy character, gave the keynote for all German
history, the scientific writing of history had, since the thirties,
entered as a power into literature. Schlosser began his
_Universal-historische Uebersicht der Geschichte der alten Welt_, which
swelled to nine volumes, and represented with a completeness hitherto
unapproached the civilisation of antiquity. His history of the
eighteenth century was a still greater departure, for, after the example
of Voltaire, he included manners, science, and literature in his account
of political events. On the uncompromising subjectivity of Schlosser
followed the scientific objectivity of Ranke, who, a master of the
criticism of sources, delineated with delicate, silver-point portraits
the Papacy after the Reformation, the French Court, the policy of the
princes of the age of the Reformation, Cromwell, and the heroes of the
rising power of Prussia. Luden, Giesebrecht, Leo, Hurter, Dahlmann,
Gervinus, and many others began their great labours. German painting,
like French, sought to take advantage of the results of these scientific
investigations; and Schnaase was the first who, in the _Kunstblatt_ in
1834, described historical painting as the pressing demand of the age,
and the cultivation of the historical sense in such a disconsolate epoch
as a "truly religious necessity." Soon afterwards Vischer began to
preach historical painting as a new gospel. History, he says, is the
revelation of God. His Being is revealed in it as much as in the sacred
writings of religion. Historical painting is therefore the completion
and full exemplification of those principles which, five centuries back,
in Giotto, led to the movement of the new Christian painting. It is
called forth by the development of all forms of life and knowledge, and
is the last and highest step which sacred painting is able to reach: it
is the final completion of sacred painting itself. "Who represents the
Holy Ghost with more dignity? He who paints Him as a dove upon a sheaf
of sunbeams, or he who places before me a great and lofty man, a Luther
or a Huss in the flame of divine enthusiasm?"
Something of the sort had been in the mind of Strauss when he advocated
the worship of genius as a substitute for religion. The infidel
idealistic painting and satire had been followed by a religious art
which evaporated in Nazareanism; pure history in boots and spurs was
next preached as a religion. "We stand," says Hotho in his history of
German and Netherlandish painting, "with our knowledge, culture, and
insight, on a summit from which we overlook the whole past. The Orient,
Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and modern times,
with their religion, literature, and art, their deeds and their life,
spread like a universal panorama before us; and it is one that we must
grasp with a universal feeling for the distinctiveness of every people,
of every epoch, and of every character. In this fashion to bury one's
self in the past, to get at the most essential meaning of its life by
knowledge, to awaken what is dead, and by art to renew what is vanished,
and thus to elevate the present to the level of the still living,
kindred Mnemosyne of the past, such is the vivifying work of our time;
and to that work its best powers must be devoted."
[Illustration: CARL PILOTY.]
The first who worked with these principles in Germany was _Lessing_. He
was a great landscape painter, and a clever and amiable man, whose house
in Karlsruhe was for many years a meeting-place for the polite world,
and every beginner, every young man of talent, visited it to seek
protection. During the winter of 1832-33 Menzel's _Geschichte der
Deutschen_ fell into his hands. In it he read the story of Huss and the
Hussites, and with "The Hussite Sermon" he soon afterwards began the
sequence of pictures which had as their theme the battle between Church
and State, the struggle of the Popes with the Emperors, the conflict
between binding tradition and free personal conviction--a sequence to be
viewed in connection with the opposition between authority and freedom
which had actually arisen through Strauss' _Life of Jesus_. "Huss before
the Council," "Huss on his Way to the Stake," "The Burning of the Papal
Ban," were found on their appearance exceedingly seasonable by the
orthodox, Protestant side. For people were determined to see in them, at
one time, the protests of a Protestant against the Catholic art
tendencies of the Nazarenes, at another, biting epigrams on the Catholic
and pietistic bias, ruling in Prussia under Friedrich Wilhelm IV. They
are of historical interest in so far as Lessing, before the period of
French influence, anticipated in them the path on which the German
historical painting--whose centre through Piloty came to be
Munich--moved in the following years.
[Illustration: PILOTY. GIRONDISTS ON THE ROAD TO THE GUILLOTINE.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., owners of the
copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
PILOTY. UNDER THE ARENA.]
_Piloty's_ glory is to have planted the banner of colour on the citadel
of the idealistic cartoon drawers. True, it was only the discarded
fleshings of Delaroche; but since he possessed, side by side with a
solid ability, pedagogic capacities of the first rank, and thus brought
to German art, in his own person, all the qualities which it had wanted
during half a century, his appearance was none the less most important
in its consequences. Even to-day, beside Kaulbach's "Jerusalem" and
Schnorr's "Deluge" in the new Pinakothek, his "Seni" is indicative of
the beginning of a new period. Before him the most celebrated men of
the Munich school made a boast of not being able to paint, and looked
down upon the "colourers" with a contemptuous shrug; so here everything
was attained which the young generation had admired in Gallait and
Bièfve. This astounding revelation of colour was in 1855 praised in
Germany as something unheard of and absolutely perfect. There was no
more of the petty, motley, bodyless painting which had hitherto been
dominant. The manner in which the grey of morning falls upon the
murdered man in the eerie chamber, the way the clothes and the silken
curtains glimmer, were things which enchanted artists, whilst the lay
public philosophised with the thoughtful Seni over the greatness of
heroes and the destiny of the world. At one bound Piloty took rank as
the first German "painter"; he was the future, and he became the leader
to whom young Munich looked up with wonder. Before him no one had known
how to paint a head, a hand, or a boot in such a way. No one could do so
much, and by virtue of this technical strength he founded such a school
as Munich had never yet seen. The consequence of his advent was that the
town could soon boast of many painters who thoroughly understood their
business. What an academical professor can give his pupils (thorough
groundwork in drawing and colour), that the young generation received
from Piloty, who at his death might have said with more right than
Cornelius: "We have left a better art than we found." He who discovered
and guided so many men of talent, left behind him when he died a
well-drilled generation of painters; and far beyond the boundaries of
Munich they assure him the honourable title of a preceptor of Germany.
The Munich movement does not offer the example of passionate and
embittered battles, like those which the Parisian Romanticists
maintained against the Classicists of the school of David. The guard did
not die, but surrendered, and retired into an _otium cum dignitate_.
Without a contest the ground was left to the new generation, which was
united by no bond of tradition with that which had just been driven from
the field; it was left to an unphilosophic, unpoetic generation, whose
only endeavour was to bind together the threads of technical art which
had been torn by unalterable circumstances.
This revolution was accomplished with almost unnatural swiftness. In the
lifetime of Cornelius himself the Franco-Belgian dogma of colour reached
its end and summit in Makart, with whom colour is an elementary power,
overflowing and levelling everything with the might of absolutism. In
the same year that Cornelius died "The Pest in Florence" made its tour
through the world. Already Schwind and Steinle, those two children of
Vienna, had separated themselves from the thoughtful stringency of form
and plastic clearness of their German comrades, by a certain coloured
and lyrically musical element in their work. And now also it was an
Austrian who again habituated the colour-blind eyes of the Germans to
the splendour of pigment. Michael Angelo's expression of form, as it had
been imitated by Cornelius, was opposed by the colour-symphonies of the
Venetians: drapery and jewels, brocade and velvet, and the voluptuous
forms of women.
[Illustration: HANS MAKART.]
_Hans Makart_ was a genius most picturesque in his mode of life. Whether
this life was enacted in his studio, fitted up like a ballroom, in the
Ring-Strasse, converted into a stage, or upon his canvas, everything was
transformed for him into decoration gleaming with colour. And through
this delight in colour the most important impulses were given in the
most diverse provinces of life. Against the dowdy lack of taste and the
harsh gaiety of ladies' fashions in that era he set his distinguished
costume pictures, carried out in iridescent satin tones; and the
enterprising modistes translated them into fact. The Makart hat, the
Makart roses, the Makart bouquet--very old-fashioned, no doubt, at the
present time--were disseminated over the world. Under the influence of
Makart the whole province of the more artistic trades was regarded from
a pictorial point of view. Oriental carpets, heavy silken stuffs,
Japanese vases, weapons and inlaid furniture, became henceforth the
principal elements of decoration. The fashionable world surrounded
itself with brilliant colours; papers were supplemented by _portières_
and Gobelins, ceilings were painted, and gay umbrellas stood in the
fireplace. The bald, honest city-alderman style gave way, and a bright
triumph of colour took its place. In the studio of the master were the
finest blossoms of all epochs of art; richly ornamented German chests of
the Renaissance stood near Chinese idols and Greek terra-cotta, Smyrna
carpets and Gobelins, and old Italian and Netherlandish pictures were
mingled with antique and mediæval weapons. And amid this rich still-life
of splendid vessels, weapons, sculpture, and costly stuffs and costumes,
which crowded all the walls and corners, there rose to the surface as
further pieces of decoration a velvet coat, a pair of riding breeches,
and a smart pair of Wallenstein boots. Their wearer was a little man
with a black beard, two piercing dark eyes, and one of those splendid
broad-browed heads which are universally accepted as the sign of genius.
Makart's pictures are similar studies of still-life out of which human
figures rise to the surface. One hears the rustle of silk and satin, and
the crackle of costly robes of brocade; one sees velvet door-hangings
droop in heavy folds, but the figures which have their being in the
midst are merely bodies and not souls, flesh and no bones, colour and no
drawing. Sometimes he draws better and sometimes worse, but never well.
And therefore he seems unspeakably small by the side of the old
Venetians, who in such representation combined a highly developed
knowledge of form with luxuriant brilliancy of colour. But even his
colour, that flaunting, piquant, bituminous painting derived from
Delaroche, which once threw all Germany into ecstasies, no longer awakes
any cordial enthusiasm; and the fault is only partially due to the rapid
decay, the sadly dilapidated appearance of his pictures. There is not
much more remaining of them than of that shining festal procession which
for a forenoon set the streets of Vienna in uproar. Tone and colouring
have not become finer and more mellow with the years, as in old
Gobelins, but ever more spotty and dead. And even if they had remained
fresh, would they yet appeal to the present generation, so much more
discriminating in their appreciation of colour?
Makart, so much lauded as a painter of flesh, was never really able to
paint flesh at all. His feminine flesh tints are often bloodlessly
white, and often tinged by an unpleasant, sugary rose hue. The fresh
fragrance of life is not to be found in his figures, for they have been
begotten, not by contact with nature, but by commerce with old pictures.
He was often reproached with immorality by the prudish critics of
earlier years; Heaven knows how stagnant and stereotyped this nudity
seems in the present day, and how tame this sensuousness, even when
one's thoughts do not happen to have been raised to the great, carnal,
and divine sensuousness of Rubens. Like Robert Hamerling, allied to him
by his intoxication in colour, Makart had a great momentary success;
but, like the former, the brilliancy of his work has swiftly paled, and
it is now seen how poor and sickly was the theme hidden behind the
lavish instrumentation. Because a correct and solid anatomy was wanting
to his creations from their birth upwards, they can live no longer now
that their blooming flesh is withered. In fact, Makart's painting was a
weakly and superficial art. He had a sense for nothing but what was
external. It is said that in Chile there are huge and splendid façades
on which are written _Museo Nacional_, _Theatro Nacional_, and there is
nothing behind. And so for Makart the world was a house with a splendid
façade glowing with colour, but without dwelling-rooms in which the
sorrow and joy of humanity make their abode. His men do not think and do
not live; they are only lay figures for splendid garments, or materially
circumscribed spaces of rosy flesh colour; they make a stuffed,
brainless, animal effect. All his women heave up their eyes in the same
meaningless fashion, and have a vapid, doll-like trait about their white
teeth, laid bare as if for the dentist. It makes no difference whether
they are meant to be portraits or merely embody a feminine plastic
lyricism. It was not wise of Makart to paint a portrait. He might drape
his original after Palma Vecchio, after Rubens or Rembrandt, as
Semiramis or a Japanese; his intellectual incapacity remained always the
same; the poetry of the psychical nature evaporated from his art.
[Illustration: MAKART. THE ESPOUSALS OF CATTERINA CORNARO.]
But all that cannot alter the fact that Makart takes a very high place
amongst his contemporaries, in that epoch dominated by the historical
painting, and not yet arrived at an original conception of nature.
Poussin said of Raphael: if you compare him with the moderns he is an
eagle, but if you place him by the Greeks he is a sparrow. So when one
thinks of Veronese or Rubens, one finds on Makart the feathers of a
sparrow, but amongst his contemporaries in Germany he seems like an
eagle. While all those from whom he derived, those Pilotys, Gallaits,
and Delaroches, were no more than skilled historians in painting,
Makart, though much tamer and smaller, has a relationship with Delacroix
in his sovereign artistry. That joy in the purely pictorial which
expressed itself in the festal procession in the Ring-Strasse and in the
furnishing of his studio was, moreover, the ground-principle of his art.
With the naïveté of the old masters he has boldly set himself above all
historical truth; with absolute want of respect for books of history he
has committed anachronisms at which any critic would be irritated.
Revelling in splendid revelations of colour, all that he concerned
himself about was that his costumed figures should render a fine harmony
of hues. So exclusively was his eye organised for colour that every
picture was first conceived by him on the palette as a luxuriant mass of
colour, and he invented afterwards the theme which was proper for it. If
Delaroche transformed painting into the flat, sober, and scientifically
pedantic illustration of history, Makart gave it again a bright and
splendid play of colour. The Nazarenes were philosophers and
theosophers, the Romanticists revelled in lyrical sentiment. Kaulbach
was a philosophic historical student of the Hegelian school, Piloty a
prosaic and declamatory professor of history, Makart was the first
German _painter_ of the century. His personages weary themselves out in
the enjoyment of their own dazzling outward personality. Free as the
ancients with their gods and legends, he pours forth his Cupids,
beautiful women, genii, Bacchantes, and historical figures, and at the
same time draws into his kingdom of art all nature with its variety of
plants, flowers, and fruits, all civilisation with its fulness of
splendid vessels and jewels, of shining stuffs, emblems, weapons, and
masks. All that he created breathes the naïve, sensuous satisfaction of
the genuine painter.
"The Pest in Florence" undoubtedly had its origin in Boccaccio's
description of the great epidemic which visited the town on the Arno;
but the picture is a free fantasy of sensuous enjoyment and naked flesh,
a colour symposium in which there really lives an atom of the flaming
vital energy of Rubens.
Take "The Espousals of Catterina Cornaro," that gay procession of
representatives from Cyprus and Venice, of dignified men, of procurators
of St. Mark, of women in foreign garb, of bright colour, who crowd round
their young mistress, the queen of the feast, rejoicing amid the
splendid architecture of the piazza. To the anger of the historian, he
removes the scene from the fifteenth century to the blossoming period of
the sixteenth, when the creations of Sansovino, Titian, and Veronese
adorned the Queen of the Adriatic. "The Entry of Charles V into Antwerp"
derived only its external impulse from Dürer's Diary. The picture with
the naked girls strewing flowers might almost as well represent the
triumphal entry of Alexander into Babylon. In the magic land by the Nile
it is not the history of civilisation and ethnography that attracts him,
nor the monumental world of the pyramids and the temples of the gods,
but the sensuous glow of southern nature and the still-life and artistic
accessories out of which the beautiful serpent Cleopatra is seen to
rise. Female bodies, animals, and fruits, set in the midst of rich,
luxuriant landscapes, painted with oil and bitumen, such are the
elements of which his pictures of the old world of legend--the hunt of
the Amazons and of Diana--are composed.
With these capacities Makart was scenical painter _par excellence_. His
Abundantia pictures in the Munich Pinakothek and the ceiling-pieces of
the Palais Tumba in Vienna are among his best creations. There lives in
them something of the Olympian blitheness of the ancients, of that easy
joyousness which since Tiepolo seemed to have been buried in melancholy
reflection and constrained brooding. They fulfil their purpose, as an
invitation to the enjoyment of life, precisely because they carry no
intrinsic thought to burden the sensuous display. Moreover, the unctuous
and gorgeous colouring, with the animated contrasts of warm brown and
light blue, mediated by the deep, glowing Makart red, corresponds to the
mood they have been designed to awaken--one which called forth the joy
of life, luxuriant, full-blooded, and foaming over. The great, fiery red
flower, which sprouts out of the ground at the feet of the nymph in
"Spring," was the last thing touched by Makart's brush, the last flare
of the marvellous colour-demon by which he was possessed.
[Illustration: MAKART. THE FEAST OF BACCHUS.]
Was _possessed_! For Makart's whole artistic endeavour had something
unconscious. One might say in a variant reading from Lessing: "If Makart
had been born without a brain he would nevertheless have been a great
painter." It is as if one who lies buried in Antwerp had once more felt
the instinct of production, and let himself down into the great head of
the little Salzburger; and the head, being a somewhat imperfect medium,
only stammered out the intentions of the sublime master. There is
something remarkable in the career of this son of the poor servant, on
whom fortune showered with full hands all it had to offer a child of the
nineteenth century, and who in the midst of his splendour in Vienna
remained always the same harmless child of nature that he had been in
Munich, when, after receiving his first hundred florins, he drove in a
cab the two steps from Oberpollinger to the Academy.
One must take him as he is--a product of nature. Makart was a scene
painter, and that not in his scenical pictures only; but he was an
inspired scene painter, of an enviable facility, who poured forth in
play what others fabricate with pains. His merit it is to have announced
to the Germans afresh, in an overwhelming style, that revelation of
colour which had been forgotten since the Venetians and Rubens. He has
not advanced the history of art, as such. What he gave had been given
better before. But the history of German art in the nineteenth century
has to honour in him the most perfect representative of the period in
which colour-blindness was succeeded by exuberance of colour, and the
cartoon style by the delight in painting.
[Illustration: GABRIEL MAX. _Graphische Kunst._]
Beside Makart, the child of nature, _Gabriel Max's_ seems a calculating,
tormented, unhealthy talent. In the manner in which Makart did his work
there lay a certain elementary, logical necessity; in Max there is a
great deal of speculation and over-refinement. Makart's home was the
town on the lagoons. Max is by education and temperament a disciple of
Piloty--that is to say, a painter of disasters; by birth he was a
Bohemian. And that resulted in his case in a very interesting mixture.
When he exhibited his first pictures it was as if one heard a refined
music after the tom-tom of Piloty. In his "Martyr on the Cross," which
appeared in the spring of 1867 in the Munich Kunstverein, he first
struck that bitter-sweet, half-torturing, half-ensnaring tone in which
he afterwards continued to sound. It is dawn; a soft grey light rests,
beaming mildly, over the lonely Campagna. Here stands a cross on which a
girl-martyr has ended her struggles. A young Roman coming home from a
feast is so thrilled by the heavenly peace in the expression of the
unhappy girl's face that he lays a crown of roses at the foot of the
cross, and becomes a convert to the faith for which she has suffered.
The mysterious mortuary sentiment in the subject is strengthened by the
almost ghostly pallor of the colouring. Everything was harmonised in
white, except that one dark lock, falling across the pale forehead with
great boldness, sounded like a shrill dissonance in the soft harmony,
like a wild scream; it had come there apparently quite by chance, but
was nevertheless calculated to a hair's breadth. The terribly touching
vision of the martyr aroused in every visitor to the Kunstverein a
shudder of delight. It was even a fine variation, and one which invited
pity, that the victim should not have been a hero, as in conventional
catastrophes, but a soft and sweet girl, made for love and never for the
cross. And it was the more absorbing, too, because it was impossible to
say whether the young Roman was looking up to the beautiful woman with
the desecrating sensuality of a _décadent_ or with the fervid ecstasy of
a convert. The same horrified fascination was wakened again and again in
the presence of the later pictures of the painter. Almost every one
contained a scene of martyrdom, in which the tormented and sinking
heroine was a helpless child or a weak and defenceless woman. The
passion for tragic subjects brought into full swing by the historical
painters was directed in Max against the purest and tenderest, the most
chaste and the most lovely. The type was always the same, with its
Bohemian nose and one eye larger than the other, by which was attained a
curiously visionary or hysterically enthusiastic expression. And the
pictorial treatment corresponded to it: there was always a flesh-tint of
poignant mortal pallor, a white clinging drapery, a black veil, a light
grey background, all harmonised in one very delicate chord.
Goethe's Gretchen made the beginning. In the Zwinger she lifted up her
eyes in frightened anguish to the countenance of the Madonna. She sat in
her cell, her face altered by madness and lit up with a wild laughter,
and in a reverie passed her hand through Faust's locks. Or as a phantom
she wandered in the Walpurgis night, in her long, flowing shroud, with a
blood-red stripe round her throat. This picture, exhibited with electric
light, was especially effective. Max had brought into the earnest
corpse-like eyes an expression that was terribly demoniacal, and had
been attained to the same degree by no earlier illustrator of _Faust_. A
raven, pecking at the lost ring, was her ghostly escort.
Max showed great invention in hitting upon such things. Bürger's
_Pfarrertochter von Taubenhain_ gave him the material for his
"Child-murderess"--a young girl who, by the bank of a lonely pool,
overgrown with reeds, stabs her child to the heart with a needle, and in
a sudden rush of maternal love presses a kiss on the stiff little body
before committing it to the water. Here the sombre, disconsolate
character of the landscape accorded finely with the action, and the pale
body of the child made an exceedingly bright, pungent spot of colour on
the dark-green rushes. "The Lion's Bride" illustrated Chamisso's ballad
of the jealous lion who killed his mistress before her wedding, because
he would not give her over to another. Majestically he lies behind her,
with one paw on the arm of the slain, and the other struck into her
thigh. The stones of the floor are reddened with her blood. But far more
frequently than blood Max employed the tints of corruption, the true
_nature morte_. In its colour-values and subtle shades the dead human
body, just at the point where corruption begins, was better suited to
the painter's pallid scale of colour than the light and brutally
effective red of freshly poured-out blood. Among these paintings of
mortification must be reckoned "Ahasuerus by the Body of a Child" and
"The Anatomist"; the latter meditatively regards at the dissecting-table
the corpse, covered with white linen, of a young girl who has committed
suicide. In his "Raising of Jairus's Daughter" the effect of
mortification was most cleverly heightened by a small detail, which made
an extraordinary impression: this was a fly on the naked arm of the
girl, put there to remind the spectator of the unconsciousness of the
body.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
MAX. A NUN IN THE CLOISTER GARDEN.]
The secrets of death are always certain of their effect on the nerves;
but by means of the broken hearts of women, with annihilated hopes and
agonised hysterical sufferings, he succeeded again in calling forth a
bitter-sweet sympathy. "Mary Magdalene" and "The Maid of Orleans" were
the masterpieces of this group. The underlying idea of the picture
"Light" is that a blind young Christian girl, at the portal of the Roman
catacombs, offers lamps to the entering Christians for the illumination
of their dark way. The blind woman as the giver of light! Even in his
youth, with cruel irony, he had had sung by a blind quartet the song,
"_Du hast die schönsten Augen_." A touch of Delaroche is in the other
young martyr, who, between the bloodthirsty beasts of the Roman circus,
looks up amazed to the rows of spectators, from the midst of which a
young Roman has flung her a rose as a last greeting. In the next moment
she will be lying on the earth torn to shreds by the beasts.
As he succeeded here in giving a presentiment of the horrible, so in
another group of pictures Max attained a yet more demoniacal charm by
the ghostly. He had early made himself familiar with Schopenhauer and
Buddha and the Indian fakirs; the mystical and spiritualistic movement
had just at that time been set going by the writings of Carl Du Prels.
Justinus Kerner and the prophetess of Prevorst were the order of the
day. Max became the painter of hypnotism and spiritualism. "The Spirit's
Greeting" made a special sensation: the young girl at the piano, in this
picture, is interrupted in her playing by the touch of a materialised
ghostly hand, which stretches towards her from a soft cloudy mist. The
mixture of horror, joy, devotion, and ecstasy in the face of the young
player was very effective. In order to render effects of the kind he
made extensive studies from the hypnotised model, and in this way he
sometimes reached an extraordinary intensity of expression. He took a
decided position with regard to another question which at the time was
very acute--vivisection. This he did in the picture of the man of
science from whom an allegorical female figure, "The Genius of Pity,"
takes away a little dog doomed to be dissected, showing by a pair of
scales that the human heart has more weight than the human
understanding.
All this goes to show that Max is the opposite of artless. He knows how
to calculate an effect on the nerves with extreme subtlety, and most
skilfully at times to give his pictures the attraction of the freshly
printed newspaper. He appeals to compassion rather than imagination. He
would set the heart beating violently. He triumphs generally by his
subjects, and his effects are much purer in those few works in which he
renounces the piquant adjunct of the demoniacal, the tragical, and the
mystical, and becomes merely a painter. Amongst those works is to be
reckoned that beautiful "Madonna" on the altar, painted in 1886, and so
tenderly illustrating the verses of Heine--
"Und wer eine Wachshand opfert,
Dem heilt an der Hand die Wund,
Und wer ein Wachsherz opfert,
Dem wird das Herz gesund."
And so too does that charming "Spring Tale" of 1873, which breathes only
of gaiety, happiness, and peace; a young girl sits under the blossoming
bushes, and listens enraptured to the warbling of a nightingale.
[Illustration: _Hanfstängl._
MAX. THE LION'S BRIDE.]
Those pictures, the "mood" of which grows out of the landscape
around--"The Nun in the Cloister Garden," "Adagio," "The Spring Tale,"
and "Autumn Dance"--give Max a very high and peculiar place in the work
of his period. He appears in them as a tender poet who expresses his
emotions through a pictorial medium; as an adorer of nature of a soft
melancholy and subtle delicacy, which are to be found in like manner
only in the works of the Englishmen Frederick Walker, George Mason, and
George H. Boughton. Nature sings a hymn to the soul of the painter, and
through his figures it is breathed forth in low, vibrating cadences. A
tender landscape of earliest spring gave the ground-tone to his charming
picture "Adagio." Young trees with trembling stems raise their slender
crowns into the pale blue sky flecked with clouds. As yet the branches
are almost naked; only here and there appears the embroidery of fresh
yellowish green. And in this soft, tender nature which shyly reveals
itself as with a slight shudder after its long winter sleep, there are
seated two beings: a boy and his young mother--she looks almost a
child--dreamily meditating. Their eyes look strangely into vacancy, as
though their thoughts are wandering. Nature works on them, and a
melancholy _Warte nur balde_ runs through their souls. A spring
landscape of blissful gaiety, where nightingales warble, butterflies sip
at the flowers, and sunbeams play coquettishly round the budding
rosebushes, is the Setting of the "Spring Tale." Everything laughs and
rejoices, shines and scents the air in the early sunlight. Pearls of dew
sparkle on the meadows, gnats hum and leaves murmur. She thinks of him.
All the joy of a first love-dream sets her heart quivering with a
delicious tremor. In her heart as in nature it is spring. Yet even as a
landscape painter Max generally has that tender, suffering trait which
runs through his creative work elsewhere. Twilight, autumn, pale sky and
dead leaves have made the deepest impression on his spirit. Thin,
half-stunted trees, in the leaves of which the evening wind is playing,
grow upon an undulating, poverty-stricken soil. The landscape spreads
around with a kind of lyrical melancholy: a region which gives no
exuberant assurance of being beautiful, but which, in its poverty,
attunes the mind to melancholy; a region, however, which knows not of
storms and loneliness, but is the peaceful dwelling of quiet and
resigned men. These beings belong to no age; their costume is not
modern, but neither is it taken from any earlier period. They do not act
and they tell no story; they dream their time away meditatively and
gravely. Max has divested them of everything fleshly and vulgar, so that
only a shadow of them remains, a soul that vibrates in exquisite, dying,
elusive chords. "The Autumn Dance" is such an unearthly picture, and one
of indefinable magic. Children and women are dancing, yet one feels them
to be religious dreamers whom a melancholy world-weariness and a
yearning after the mystical have drawn together to this secret and
sequestered corner of the earth. The pale, transparent air, the tender
tints of the dresses, delicate as fading flowers, the flesh tint giving
the figures something ghostly and ethereal--it all strikes a note at
once blythe and sentimental, happy and sad. "The Nun in the Cloister
Garden" is in point of landscape one of his finest productions. In the
cloister garden, despite the budding spring, there reigns a disconsolate
dreariness. On the thin grass sits a young nun, who follows dreamily the
gay fluttering of two butterflies, which flit around at her feet. A
black dress, harshly and abruptly crossed by a white cape, envelops the
youthfully delicate form. The dying sapling on which she is leaning
bends helplessly against the stubborn paling to which it is fastened
with iron clamps. The weather-stained wall stretches along in a dreary
monotonous grey. An old sundial relentlessly indicates the slow dragging
hours. But the deep blue heaven, in which a pair of larks poise
exulting, looks in across the wall, from which a scrubby growth climbs
shivering in the breeze.
[Illustration: _Graphische Kunst._
MAX. LIGHT.]
In such pictures, too, Max has a morbid inclination to a mystical
delicacy of sentiment. He gives what is real an exquisite subtlety which
transplants it into the world of dreams, and his tender sense of pain
perhaps appeals only to spirits of an æsthetic temper. He is the
antithesis of robust health; and yet there lies in the excess of nervous
sensibility--in the pathological trait in his art--precisely the quality
which inspires the characteristic delicacy of his earlier works. Here is
no pupil of Piloty, but our contemporary. In their anæmic colour his
pictures have the effect of a song of high, fine-drawn, and tremulous
violin tones, at once dulcet and painful. With their refinement and
polish, their subtle taste and intimate emotion, so wonderfully mingled,
they reach the music of painting. They paint the invisible, they revel
in dreams. In a period which played only _fortissimo_, and was at pains
to drum on all the senses at once with a distorting passion, Max was,
next to Feuerbach, the first who prescribed for his compositions
_dolce_, _adagio_, and _mezza voce_; who sought for the refined, subdued
emotions in place of the _emotions fortes_.
[Illustration: _Hanfstängl._
MAX. THE SPIRIT'S GREETING.]
[Illustration: _Gräphische Kunst._
MAX. ADAGIO.]
These pictures, the more subdued the better, make him the forerunner of
the most modern artists, and assure his name immortality much more
certainly than the great figure resting on an historical or literary
basis. Their delicate black, green, and white simplicity has a nobleness
of colouring which stands quite alone in the German painting of the
century, and this, together with their refined musical sentiment, is
probably to be set rather to the account of his Bohemian blood than of
his Munich training. And whilst in the heads of his figures elsewhere a
certain monotonous vacuity disturbs one's pleasure, he appears here as a
psychic painter of the highest mark; one who analysed with the most
subtle delicacy all the fleeting _nuances_--so hard to catch--of
melancholy, silent resignation, yearning, and hopelessness. Only the
figures of the English new pre-Raphaelites have the same sad-looking,
dove-like eyes, the same spiritual lips, tremulous as though from
weeping. There must have been a divine moment in his existence when he
first filled the loveliest form with the expression of the holiest
suffering, the sweetest reverie, the deepest devotion, and the most rapt
ecstasy. And if later, when people could not weary of this expression,
he took to producing it without real feeling and by purely stereotyped
means, that is, at any rate, a weakness of temperament which he shares
with others.
Gabriel Max is an individuality, not of the first rank indeed, but he is
one; and there are not many painters of the nineteenth century of whom
that can be said. He has often underlined too heavily, printed too much
in italics, and done more homage to crude than to fine taste. But he
has, in advance of his contemporaries, in whose works the good was so
seldom new, the priceless virtue that he always gave something new, if
not something good. His art was without ancestry, an entirely personal
art; something which no one had before Max, and which after him few will
produce again. A province which had not yet been trodden, the province
of the enigmatic and ghostly, was opened up by him; he set foot in it
because he is a philosophic brooder, fascinated by the magic of the
uncanny. His studio is like a chapel in which a mysterious service for
the dead is being held, or the chamber of an anatomist, rather than the
workroom of a painter. The investigation of dead birds occupied him
after his Prague days just as much as the sounding of the life of the
human spirit. He lived at the time with his parents in an old, ghostly
house, and roamed about a great deal in the picture gallery of the
Strahow foundation; and here in lonely nights and mysterious
picture-rooms there arose that grave and sombre spirit which runs
through his work. As a child at the death of his father he had his first
"vision." His earliest picture, which he finished while at the Prague
Academy, and sold afterwards to the Art Union there for ninety florins,
showed that he had begun to move on his later course: "Richard the
Lion-heart steps to the Corpse of his Father and it bleeds." He was thus
inwardly ripe when, in 1863, he came to Piloty in Munich, and, equipped
with the technique of the latter, refined in so delicate a manner on the
traditional painting of disasters. And if a conscious design on the
nerves of the multitude frequently entered into his work, it was, as a
rule, veiled by captivating beauty and excellence of painting. His older
good pictures fascinate the most jaded eye by their remarkably tender
sentiment, and the mystical spirituality of his soft and lovely girlish
heads has been reached by few in his century. He is at the same time a
colourist of complete individuality, who made pigments the subtilised
and ductile means of expression for his visionary moods of soul. He has
brought into the world a numerous stock of works prepared for the
market; and he has not disdained to paint glorified wonders of the fair,
like the Christ's head upon the handkerchief of Veronica, whose eyes
seem to be closed by their lids and are looking out at the same time
wide open. But much as he sinned, he always remained an artist. A
curious, interesting, characteristic mind, one of the few who ventured
even forty years ago to give themselves out as children of their time,
in the firmament of German, and indeed of European art, he appears as a
star shining by its own and not by borrowed light, as one whose
incommensurable magnitude it is that his talent cannot be compared with
any other. That is what gives him his artistic importance.
[Illustration:
MAX. A WINTER'S TALE.]
All the less room can be claimed by the many who, likewise following in
their subject-matter the lines of Piloty, get no further than the
traditional catastrophe. Not Munich only, but all Germany, lay for more
than a decade after the middle of the century under the shadow of
historical painting, which here, as in other countries, came as the
logical product of an unhappy time, dissatisfied with its own existence
when Germany was merely a geographical expression, and in the pitiable
misery of that age of state-confederations, dreamt of a better future at
singing contests, athletic tournaments, and rifle meetings. The more
poverty-stricken the time was in real action, the more vehement was the
desire to read of action in books or to see it on canvas; and in this
respect historical painting rendered at that time important political
services, which are to be acknowledged with gratitude; just as the
historical drama, the historical ballad and the historical novel were,
all and several, means for the expression of the deep-seated longing of
a backward people for political labours, for deeds and for fame.
But the artistic yield was not greater than elsewhere.
When the learned in the thirties laid it down in doctrinaire fashion
that, with the destruction of religious fervour begun by science, the
old traditionary sacred painting would fall away of itself and the
painting of profane history take its place, they overlooked from the
very beginning the fact that, so long as the much discussed worship of
genius had not actually become a reality the painting of history had to
fight against insuperable obstacles. What constitutes the prime
condition of all art--that its contents must be some fact vivid in
consciousness--should, at any rate, determine its limitations, and ought
to have confined the historical picture to the nearest universally known
subjects. And what happened was just the contrary.
When Delaroche had skimmed the cream, his successors were forced to
search in the great martyr book of history for events which were more
and more unknown and indifferent. Piloty took from ancient history "The
Death of Alexander the Great," "The Death of Cæsar," "Nero at the
Burning of Rome," and "The Triumphal Progress of Germanicus"; and from
mediæval history, "Galileo in his Prison observing the Periodic Return
of a Solar Ray," and "Columbus sighting Land"; from the history of the
Thirty Years' War, "The Foundation of the Catholic League by Duke
Maximilian of Bavaria," "Seni before the Body of Wallenstein" (the
morning before the battle at the White Mountain, Seni has come to carry
away Wallenstein's body), "Wallenstein on the way to Eger," and "The
News of the Battle at the White Mountain"; from English history, "The
Death Sentence of Mary Stuart"; and from French history, "The Girondists
on their Way to the Scaffold."
After these pictures were painted and had had their success the turn
came, in the years immediately following, for subjects growing steadily
more and more dreary. And as Goethe held the historical to be "the most
ungrateful and dangerous field," so it now appeared as though laurels
were to be gathered there only. From the political dismemberment of the
present, German artists were glad to seek refuge as far back as possible
in the past, and they flung themselves on the new province with such
fiery zeal that, after a few decades, there was a really appalling
number of historical pictures, illustrating every page of Schlosser's
great history of the world. _Max Adamo_ painted "The Netherlandish
Nobles before the Tribunal of Alva," "The Fall of Robespierre in the
National Convention," "The Prince of Orange's Last Conversation with
Egmont," "Charles I meeting Cromwell at Childerley," "The Dissolution of
the Long Parliament," and "Charles I receiving the Visit of his Children
at Maidenhead"; _Julius Benczur_: "The Departure of Ladislaus Hunyadi,"
and "The Baptism of Vajk," afterwards King Stephen the Holy of Hungary;
_Josef Fluggen_: "The Flight of the Landgravine Elizabeth," "Milton
dictating Paradise Lost," and "The Landgravine Margarethe taking leave
of her Children"; by _Carl Gustav Hellquist_ there were "The Death of
the wounded Sten Sture after the Battle of Bogesund in the Mälarsee,"
"The Embarkment of the Body of Gustavus Adolphus," and the forced
contribution of "Wisby and Huss going to the Stake." _Ernst Hildebrand_
had the Electress of Brandenburg secretly taking the sacrament in both
kinds, and Tullia driving over the corpse of her father; _Frank
Kirchbach_ displayed "Duke Christopher the Warrior"; _Ludwig von
Langenmantel_: "The Arrest of the French Chemist Lavoisier under the
Reign of Terror," and "Savonarola's Sermon against the Luxury of the
Florentines"; _Emanuel Leutze_: a "Columbus before the Council of
Salamanca," "Raleigh's Departure," "Cromwell's Visit to Milton," "The
Battle of Monmouth," and "The Last Festival of Charles I"; _Alexander
Liezenmayer_: "The Coronation of Charles Durazzo in Stuhlweissenburg,"
and "The Canonisation of the Landgravine Elizabeth of Thüringen";
_Wilhelm Lindenschmit_: "Duke Alva at the Countess of Rudolstadt's,"
"Francis I at Pavia," "The Death of Franz Von Sickingen," "Knox and the
Scottish Image-breakers," "The Assassination of William of Orange,"
"Walter Raleigh visited in his Cell by his Family," "Luther before
Cardinal Cajetan," "Anne Boleyn giving her Child Elizabeth to the care
of Matthew Parker," and "The Entrance of Alaric into Rome"; _Alexander
Wagner_: "The Departure of Isabella Zapolya from Siebenbürgen," "The
Entry into Aschaffenburg of Gustavus Adolphus," "The Wedding of Otto of
Bavaria," "The Death of Titus Dugowich," "Matthias Corvinus with his
Hunting Train," and many more of the same description.
[Illustration: _Hanfstängl._
MAX. MADONNA.]
Was it at all possible to make works of art out of such material?
Perhaps it was. The real artist can do anything. What he touches becomes
gold, for he has the hand of Midas. But just as certain it is that the
"historical painting," carried on by a joint-stock company, almost never
got any further than stage pathos, tailoring, and glittering splendour
of material. Like many another thing which the nineteenth century
brought to birth, it was an artistic error, which countless persons paid
for by the waste of their lives. The older art knew nothing of such a
reconstruction of the past. If historical subjects were painted, the
artists were almost throughout contemporaries of the subject that was to
be treated; seldom did the materials belong to an epoch already past.
But in both cases the work was done by immediate intuition, since even
in the treatment of matters long gone by the painters never dreamed of
painting them in the spirit of past times. They might depict Jews, or
Greeks, or Romans, but they always represented their own countrymen in
the surroundings and costume of their own time. The scientific
nineteenth century made the first demand for historical accuracy. In
dress and furniture this could be attained with the assistance of a
cabinet of engravings and a work on costume. Whoever went to work in a
very scientific spirit could even borrow from a museum the genuine
costumes of Egmont and Wallenstein. But it was all the harder
artistically to quicken into life the men themselves who had felt,
lived, and suffered in the past. The painter could not proceed otherwise
than by draping a modern, professional model, having consulted
portraits, drawings, or busts, and having sought the aid of a peruke and
false beard. An entirely realistic reproduction of this masquerade,
however, made only too evident the contrast between the splendid old
garment and the member of the proletariat who was dressed up in it. For,
granted that men of the present have much in common with those of the
past, every period has none the less its own type, even its own
gestures, which no costume can make one forget. And speaking merely of
general humanity, there is no question that a statesman at all times
looked different from a professional model. In a very bad suit of
clothes, but in one which, at any rate, fitted him, and in which he was
able to behave himself naturally, the poor fellow came to the studio, to
feel, for a few hours, in satin hose and a velvet doublet, like a
carnival figure. Who was to give him the easy knightly bearing to play
his part suitably to the occasion? It was not possible in this way ever
to attain the naturalness and fulness of life of the old painters. In
Terborg's "Peace of Westphalia" everything is genuine and true and
simple; here wig and woollen beard have got the upper hand. And if the
painter proceeded not as a theatrical tailor, but as an historian of
civilisation, the result was an archaic dryness. For then he was merely
thrown back on the great masters of those periods in which the action
took place, and, while he enlarged and coloured old busts or engraved
portraits, his art was only second-hand.
And so the only way out of the difficulty was to use the model, but to
idealise him by generalising and sinking the individual in the
universally human, noble, and heroic. In this way the remarkable family
likeness of all these heads becomes comprehensible, and it is still
further heightened by that preference for a monotonous type of beauty
which, from the period of Classicism, entered, as it were, into the
blood of these painters. The human physiognomy, in reality so various,
had then only one mask for the many characters which life creates. There
was a fear of "ugliness," as if it were a spot of dirt, and the
personages portrayed received, one and all, an icy trait of "the
Beautiful." The various Egmonts, Wallensteins, and Charles the Firsts of
Gallait and Bièfve, Delaroche, and Piloty have not the blood of human
beings, they have not the scars which are made by fate, but are all
alike in their Byronic turn of the head. One knows the so-called
character-heads--Luther gazing upwards with the look of one strong in
faith, Columbus discovering America, and Milton in whose head are
seething all the thoughts which dying men are wont to have in their last
moments,--one knows them as thoroughly by heart as one knows all the
opened folios and overturned settles, the picturesquely draped tapestry
reserved for tragic funereal service, and that little box, covered with
brass and catching the flashing lights, which constitutes in Belgium,
France, and Germany the iron casket of all historical pieces. In the
place of the inward Shakespearian truth of the figures, peculiar to the
old masters, is the outward truth of costume; and the historical
"property man," whose highest aim is to "dress" the great moments of
universal history in the prescribed manner, has stepped into the place
of the artist. In the works of the old masters the historical figures
stand out with sincerity as characters of flesh and blood, despite the
want of "local colour," whilst in the moderns the costumes certainly are
correct, but the figures are so much the less credible and vital.
"Beautiful may be the folds of the garment, but more beautiful must be
that which they contain."
Clothes do not make people, and costumes heighten no passions. Thus
difficulties were heaped on difficulties, when impassioned situations
and moments of dramatic intensity were to be painted. Whoever has
reached that height of artistic power where the artist may with impunity
put his model out of his head--like Delacroix, grand, volcanic, stormy,
and excited to a fever heat by his inspiration,--that man will be
capable of giving the effect of truth to such scenes, and of running
through the whole gamut of emotion with a crushing power of conviction.
But the joint-stock historical painter had to get his models to pull
faces, and then no less laboriously to render with his oils those
grimaces so laboriously produced. Hence the monotonous and petrified
histrionic ecstasy of these pictures, the noble indignation put on for
show, and that distressing gesticulation. As the actor gives emphasis to
his words far more by gestures than is the case in ordinary life, so
here also the artificially impassioned air of the heads was
conventionally interpreted by corresponding motions of the arms. And
thus the closing tableau was made ready: the dancers lay their hands on
their hearts with tender and deep feeling; the tenor heroes sing that
they are prepared to die; the tyrants let their deep basses vibrate, and
the orchestra rages, to close with a shattering chord at the moment when
the hero sets his foot upon the chest of the traitor; then come the
Bengal lights, and then the curtain falls. What a spectacle!--but, alas,
a spectacle and nothing more. All the emotions are artificial; they are
opera emotions: the painters are only clever fellows, manufacturers of
librettos and gay canvas; they show a great deal of knowledge and
dexterity, but they have only a head and no heart. Stage requisites and
professional models can never take the place of the free, creative force
of imagination.
And if German pictures of this sort have an effect almost more insincere
and theatrical than the French, the reason probably is that
gesture--that external aid to the expression of feeling--is always more
natural to the Latin than the Teutonic races, and has therefore, of
itself, an effect of affectation in every German picture. We know that
Bismarck, the Teuton incarnate, even in the most excited of
parliamentary speeches, never made any other movement than to rap
nervously with his pencil. "The German only becomes impassioned when he
lies." The most genuine masters of German blood have felt that right
well, and they have been honest enough to say it out. A pervading trait
of old German art is simplicity, the avoidance of everything impassioned
even in the grandest conception, such as Dürer has. If in Leonardo's
"Last Supper" terror, indignation, curiosity, and sorrow are reflected
by twelve heads and twenty-four hands in movements of agitation which
are always new, in Dürer's woodcut all the limbs and senses of the
disciples are paralysed at the sorrowful revelation of the Saviour; it
seemed to them desecration to break the solemn, oppressive stillness by
noisy utterances of opinion and hasty gestures. And the same thing is to
be remarked in every similar picture of Rembrandt's; here too are only
quiet and subdued movements, delicate suggestions and silence. The
effect is great and sublime, the features of the Saviour earnest and
expressive, but His mien is without any ecstatic emphasis such as a
painter of Romance blood would have given Him. Only in the nineteenth
century--partly through imitation of the Italians in Cornelius and
Kaulbach, and then through imitation of the French in Piloty and his
disciples--has this impassionedness, so opposed to German nature,
entered into German art; and it has borrowed from the opera the
distortions by which it has expressed the agitations of the spirit. No
one works with impunity against the grain of his temperament.
Exaggerated and violent movements, "ostentatious gestures of false
dignity," have replaced the natural expressions of life.
Less pose, parade, and theatricality, more ease, truth, and quietude;
less insipid, generalised "beauty," more forcible, characteristic
"ugliness": if art was not to be drowned in a surge of phrases, this was
the path to be taken; and the transition was accomplished in "the
historical picture of manners."
CHAPTER XV
THE VICTORY OVER PSEUDO-IDEALISM
Immediately upon the epoch-making labours of the historians followed the
first romances that were archæological and dealt with the history of
civilisation; and hand in hand with these literary productions there was
developed--by the side of historical painting proper, in France,
Belgium, and Germany--a tendency to represent the life of the past, not
in its grand dramatic action, but in its familiar concerns. In the one
case there was history in its state uniform, in the other history in
undress. And while the former class of painters saw the past only in a
condition of unrest and violent movement, the latter began to enter into
the details of daily life, and to represent it as it flowed by in times
of peace. Those who had the romantic bias turned to the old artistic
crafts. As yet that bias consisted only in an enthusiasm for the
tasteful civilisation of a bygone age, with its polished charm of
luxurious household appointments and pleasing costume. Rooms were filled
with Gobelins and rich stuffs, handsome furniture and old pictures. By
the rapid sale of their productions painters were placed in a position
to acquire for themselves at the second-hand dealers all the beautiful
things they painted. They placed their dressed-up models in front of
their tapestries, and between their cabinets and tables. Stress was laid
on historical accuracy in the representation of the usages and costumes
of the past, not on dramatic action, and in this respect the historical
picture of manners, as opposed to historical painting, marked an advance
towards intimacy of feeling. The latter still worked from the abstract.
The painter read a book and looked out for telling passages. He
idealised models, to lend his picture the character of "great art." It
was always the illustration of underlying ideas.
In this new kind of picture, on the contrary, the conception of a work
of art was given, by the perfected representation of any part of the
visible world, were it only the corner of a studio elaborately and
artificially arranged. The historical picture of manners no longer
depicted "the meeting of hostile forces," but either the heroes of
history or the nameless men of the past in their daily act and deed, and
so accustomed the public gradually to interest themselves in people who
did not act with histrionic passion, but conducted themselves quietly
and soberly like men of the present time. The place of the dramatic was
taken by those phases of life which are pleasant and smooth. At the same
time there was no need to be thrown back on conventional idealisation,
and it was possible to bring people dressed up for the occasion directly
into the picture, just as they sat there, since the contrast between the
professional model and the old-fashioned dress made itself less felt on
this smaller scale of art. Thus was achieved the transition from the
heroic historical art of the first half of the nineteenth century to
that familiar and more human art of the second half, which no longer
fled for help to the past, but sought a simpler ideal in reality.
First of all in France, from the side of the solemnly earnest group of
Academicians, there stepped forward certain artists who moved in the old
world quite at their ease, and began to paint simple little pictures
from the daily life of antiquity, instead of the great ostentatious
canvases of David and Ingres. In literature their parallels are Ponsard
and Augier, who in their comedies brought antique life upon the stage,
the one in _Horace et Lydie_, the other in _La Ciguë_ and _Le Joueur de
Flûte_.
_Charles Gleyre_ approached nearest to the strict academical style of
Ingres. Not even by a tour in the East did he allow himself to be led
away from the Classical manner, and as head of a great and leading
studio he recognised it as the task of his life to hand on to the
present generation the traditions of the school of Ingres. Gleyre was a
man of sound culture, who during a sojourn in Italy which lasted for
years, had examined Etruscan vases and Greek statues with unintermittent
zeal, studied the Italian classics, and copied all Raphael. Having come
back to Paris, he never drew a line without having first assured himself
how Raphael would have proceeded in the given case. And this striving
after purity of form has robbed his works ("Nymph Echo," "Hercules at
the Feet of Omphale," and the like) almost entirely of ease, freshness,
and naturalness. Gleyre became, like Ary Scheffer, a victim to style. He
had in him--his "Evening" of 1843 is sufficient to show it--a tender,
dreamy, and contemplative spirit. The feelings to which he wished to
give expression were his own, and the more fragrant, romantic, and
vaporously indistinct they were, the more did they suffer from the stiff
academical line in which he so mercilessly bound them. Only in his
"Orpheus torn by the Bacchantes" has he raised himself to a certain
neo-Greek elegance.
_Louis Hamon_ stands at the end of this path, which led gradually from
the strictness of form characteristic of the idealism of Ingres to
incidents thought out in perfectly modern fashion and laid in a
primitive era only because of the advantages of costume offered by the
antique. The grace of his pictures is modern; their Classicism is a
disguise. To robust natures his art can make but little appeal. He has
deprived nature of her strength and marrow, and painting of its peculiar
qualities, transforming them into a coloured dream, a tinted mist. In
Hamon's modelling there is an uncertainty, in his colour a sickly
weakness and meagre effeminacy, which give to his figures and landscapes
the appearance of being dissolved in vapour. Everything firm is taken
from them; the stones look like wadding, the plants like soap, the
figures like china dolls which would fly into the air at the least gust
of wind. Nevertheless there are times when his confectionery has a
sympathetic grace. What distinguishes him is something simple, pure,
youthful, fresh, and childlike. His colour is lighter and more delicate
than Gleyre's. None but blended colours such as light blue and light
yellow mingle in the harmony of white tones. The severe antique style
has been given a pretty _rococo_ turn: his Greek girls, women, and
children are like figures of Sèvres porcelain; the scenes in which he
groups them are pleasing,--sports of fancy brought forward in a Grecian
garb, of an affected sensuousness and a coquettish grace. His prettiest
picture was probably "My Sister's not at Home"--Greece seen through a
gauze transparency in the theatre.
[Illustration: _Gaz des Beaux-Arts._
HAMON. MY SISTER'S NOT AT HOME.
(_By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
_Léon Gérôme_ has also a taste for borrowing his subjects from the
antique; being a pupil of Delaroche, however, he has treated not
mythological but historical episodes of antiquity. His "Cock-fight,"
"Phryne before the Areopagus," "The Augurs," "The Gladiators,"
"Alcibiades at the House of Aspasia," and "The Death of Cæsar," together
with pictures from Egypt, are his most characteristic works: Ingres and
Delaroche upon a smaller scale. He shares with the one his learnedly
pedantic composition, and with the other his taste for anecdote. It may
be remarked that in these same years Emile Augier was active in
literature, but that Augier, living in the same epoch of modern life, is
far more powerful and animated in his Classical pieces. Gérôme's art is
an intelligent, frigid, calculating art. In execution he does not rise
above a petty study of form and an academic discipline. His drawing is
accurate, and he has even succeeded in giving his figures a certain
natural truth which is in advance of the generalisation of the classic
ideal; yet from first to last he is wanting in every quality as a
painter. His pictures of the East are hard landscapes, in which men or
animals, harder still--unfortunate, eternally petrified beings--stand
out abruptly. He draws and stipples, he works like an engraver in line,
and goes over what he has painted again and again with a fine and feeble
brush. He has an eye for form, but the effect of light upon the body
escapes him. His pictures therefore give the impression of china, and
his colour is hard and dead. What distinguishes him is a watchful
observation, a chilling correctness, enclosing everything in
characterless outlines. And this marble coldness remained with him later
when, moving with the development of historical painting, he gradually
took to working on more tragical subjects. Even the most violent
subjects are depicted with a dainty grace, and with a smile he serves up
decapitated heads, prepared with a painting _à la maitre d'hôtel_, upon
a gold-rimmed porcelain plate as smooth as glass.
Another painter of archæological _genre_ is _Gustave Boulanger_, who
after extensive studies in Pompeii gave a vogue to those antique
interiors and scenes of Pompeian street life now associated with the
name of Alma-Tadema.
Direct descendants of Delaroche and Robert Fleury were those who threw
themselves enthusiastically into treating the physiognomy of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and devoted the most ardent study
to the weapons, costumes, and furniture of those epochs. They never
wearied in representing François I and Henri IV in the most varied
situations of life, nor in searching the biographies of great artists
and scholars for episodes worth painting. Especially popular subjects
were those of celebrated painters at their meeting with contemporaries
of high station: Raphael and Michael Angelo coming across each other in
the Vatican, Murillo as a boy, the young Ribera found drawing in the
street by a Cardinal, Bellini in his studio amid all manner of precious
objects, Charles V and Titian, Michael Angelo tending his servant, and
others of the same kind. The number of painters who were active in this
province is as great as the number of anecdotes which are told of
distinguished men. They spread themselves over various countries, like
the swarms of insects hatched on a summer's day amid luxuriant
vegetation, and thereby they render the task of selection more difficult
to the historian. In France there worked _Alexander Hesse_, _Camille
Roqueplan_, and _Charles Comte_; in Belgium, _Alexander Markelbach_ and
_Florent Willems_. Markelbach, a pupil of Wappers, in addition to
episodes from English history, specially devoted himself to painting the
shooting festivals of the old Netherlandish city guards, in which
enterprise the Doelen pieces of Frans Hals did him excellent service in
the matter of costume. Florent Willems, who, as a restorer, saturated
himself with the manner of the old masters, was particularly popular on
account of the smooth finish he gave to his modish ladies, cavaliers,
soldiers, painters, soubrettes, and patrician matrons of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. All the richly coloured satin, brocade, and
velvet costumes of these personages, together with the tapestry, the
curtains, and the furniture of their dwellings, he had the secret of
reproducing in such a fashion that he was long esteemed a modern
Terborg. Amongst the Germans, _L. von Hagn_ was the most delicate of
these artists, and the graceful comedies of real life which he painted,
transplanting them into the Italian Renaissance or the French _rococo_
period, have often great distinction of colouring. _Gustav Spangenberg_,
after the lucky but isolated success he had made with "The Track of
Death," devoted himself to the Reformation period; and _Carl Becker_ to
the Venetian Renaissance, from which he occasionally made an excursion
into the German. These and many others could be discussed with more
particularity if their pictures, smooth as coloured prints, and neatly
finished in their own paltry way, were not so much below the standard of
galleries. For them also the incident to be represented, with the
personages concerned in it, was the principal matter, and not pure
painting. These fetters upon true art were first shaken off by the hands
of the following painters.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GÉRÔME. THE COCK-FIGHT.]
Of the generation of the eminent Flemish artists of 1830 _Hendrik Leys_
is the one whose fame has been most enduring. Born in Antwerp on 18th
February 1815, at first destined for the priesthood, and then in 1829
admitted to the studio of Ferdinand de Braekeleers, he had made his
début in the beginning of the thirties with a pair of historical
pictures. These indeed revealed little of the power which he evinced
later, but they furnished some indication of what he was aiming at. Here
were none of the skirmishes--so popular at the time--in which blood
flows as from the pipes of a fountain; the combatants fought with
decorum and moderation, and less from conviction than to justify the
helmets and cuirasses which had been fetched from the wardrobe. In both
of them, on the other hand, the background--a mediæval town with
tortuous alleys, lanterns, and picturesque taverns--was most lovingly
treated. Here was revealed a thoroughly German delight in minute detail.
Instead of subordinating the accessories as others did, with the object
of throwing the principal personages into relief, Leys represented an
entire corner of the world at once, giving full distinctness to the
smallest things, down to the implements of daily life, the grasses and
flowers of the landscape, and the variegated corner-stones of the old
house-fronts, whose picturesque porches and lattices bulge into the
crooked lanes. His next picture, "The Massacre of the Löwen
Magistrates," was a still further departure from precedent, since--quite
in Callot's manner--it mingled with the principal drama a mass of
grotesque episodes. The born _genre_ painter was announced by these
traits; and not less striking was the form of the art, which was a
thorough departure from the manner of the "painters of the grand style."
The resuscitation of a national art, which had been the life-long aim of
Gustav Wappers, who was twelve years his senior, was what Leys also set
up as the goal of his artistic endeavours. But their ways divided.
Wappers was principally inspired by Rubens, while Leys attached himself
at first to the Dutch painters. A visit made to Amsterdam in 1839 had
helped him to an understanding of Rembrandt and Pieter de Hoogh. He
followed them when, in 1845, he painted his "Wedding in the Seventeenth
Century"--a rich display of gleaming hangings, golden plate, and
red-plush furniture, amid which move handsomely dressed people, wedding
guests, and violin players. The effort to approach Pieter de Hoogh or
Jan van der Meer is apparent in the management of light; the treatment
of drapery reminds one of Mieris and Metsu. Another pair of anecdotic
pictures from the seventeenth century allow one to follow the progress
by which Leys, under the influence of Dutch models, gradually developed
that power and mastery of colouring, that completeness of pictorial
effect, and that soft treatment of subdued light which were justly
admired in his first works. In particular, certain works founded on the
legends of painters and monarchs--Rubens, Rembrandt, or Frans Floris
visited in their studio by some personage of high station--made him the
lion of the Paris Salon. In 1852 he stood at the summit of his fame; he
was recognised as one of the first of painters, both in Belgium and in
other countries, and was everywhere loaded with honours. Then he cast
his slough and entered on his "second manner."
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
HENDRIK LEYS.]
After he had followed Rembrandt for more than a decade he turned from
him to cast himself suddenly into the arms of the German masters of the
sixteenth century, and, according to his own saying, "from that time
forward to become an artist." During a tour through Germany, in 1852, he
had become familiar with Dürer and Cranach; in Dresden, Wittenberg, and
Eisenach there hovered round him the great figures of the Reformation
period. Half-effaced memories of his countrymen, the brothers Van Eyck
and Quentin Matsys, became once more fresh, and drove him decisively
forward on his new course. "The Festival at Otto Venius's" and "Erasmus
in his Study" were the first steps in this direction, and when soon
afterwards he came forward with his costume pictures, "Luther as a
Chorister in Eisenach" and "Luther in his Household at Wittenberg,"
every one was enraptured with the exquisite truthfulness of his
portrayal of archaic life. At the World's Exhibition of 1855 he had
another magnificent success with three pictures executed in old German
style. These were "The Mass in Honour of the Antwerp Burgomaster Barthel
de Haze," "The Walk before the Gate," and "New Year's Day in Flanders."
His return from Paris, where he was the only foreigner except Cornelius
who had received the great gold medal, took the form of a triumphal
progress in Antwerp, where he was greeted with illuminations, torchlight
processions, and laurel wreaths made in gold. He was held to be the most
eminent master since Quentin Matsys, the Jan van Eyck of the nineteenth
century. In the Brussels Salon he appeared as a prince of art, before
whom criticism made obeisance, and for whose pictures special shrines
were erected. He was striking, not merely as an artist, but as a man:
his stately figure was known to every one in Antwerp, and was pointed
out to strangers as one of the sights of the place. In 1867, when he
again received the medal in Paris, the Antwerp Cercle Artistique had a
medal struck to commemorate an event of such importance in Belgian art.
His decease, on 25th August 1869, threw the whole town into mourning;
the windows in the town hall, where he had painted his last pictures,
were hung with black, and the announcement of his death pasted up on
great placards at the street corners. "_Leys is ons_" ran the phrase in
the speech made by the burgomaster over his open grave. To-day his
statue stands on the Boulevard Leys, and his house is noted down in
Baedecker, like those of Matsys and Floris, Rubens and Jordaens.
Leys was thus a favourite child of fortune. Enthusiastic applause
showered him with fame and laurels. But it is natural that posterity
should find a good deal to cancel in these titles of honour.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
LEYS. A FAMILY FESTIVAL.]
Through Leys the history of art was not enriched with anything new. His
delicate art--severe in outline--which goes back directly to the
peculiar manner of the fifteenth century, is in itself not without
merit. But how much of it belongs to the nineteenth century? To what
extent has the painter stood independent and on his own peculiar ground?
He could draw a Van Eyck which might be taken for an original. He seems
like an old master gone astray by chance amongst the moderns. His
knowledge of the sixteenth century is marvellous. In fact, he was a
visionary who saw the past as clearly as though he had lived in the
midst of it. The men he paints are his contemporaries. He has drawn them
from life in the year of grace 1493, and they make no gesture nor
grimace which might not be four hundred years old. Yet that means that
he was not an original genius, but merely one who gave an adroit
reproduction of a formula already in existence. And much as he affected
to be the contemporary of Lucas Cranach and Quentin Matsys, he had not
their simplicity: where they painted life he painted the shadow of their
realism. Surrounded by old pictures, breviaries, and missals, he
contented himself with copying the still forms of Gothic miniatures
instead of living nature. He went so deeply into the pictures of the
Antwerp town hall that he followed the old masters in their very errors
of perspective; and though even the most childish confusion between
foreground and background does not disturb one's pleasure in them,
because they knew no better, it is an affectation in him, with his
modern knowledge, intentionally to make the same mistakes. Instead of
being an imitator of nature, he is an imitator of their imitation--a
_gourmet_ in pictorial archaism.
[Illustration: LEYS. THE ARMOURER.]
Yet it was exactly this uncompromising archaism which was of importance
for his time, and amongst his contemporaries it gives him significance
as a reformer. He is the only one amongst them who really represents the
Flemish race. Wappers was merely a Fleming from Paris, who shook off the
yoke of the Greeks to bear that of the French. Delaroche lived again in
Louis Gallait, the pupil of David. Their works had the sentiment of
French tragedies, and an artificial neatness which completely departed
from the truth of nature; the figures were combed and washed and brushed
and polished, the gestures were histrionic, the colours toned in a
stereotyped fashion to effect a pleasing _ensemble_. Leys endeavoured to
be true. In his pictures he had no wish to express ideas, but merely to
bring back a fragment of "the good old time" in all its brightness of
life and colour. And whilst as a colourist he was bent upon avoiding
uniformity of tone and giving everything its natural character, as a
draughtsman, too, he set up, in opposition to the more patrician fluency
of others, the citizen-like angularity of an art uninfluenced by the
Cinquecento. As in Cranach, Dürer, and Holbein, one finds in his
pictures profiles that are vividly true; harsh and often unwieldy heads,
wrinkled faces, and heavy, massive shoulders resting on stunted bodies.
The human form, with fat stomach and great horny hands, seems almost
deformed. Everything which the struggle for existence has made of the
image of God is expressed in the works of Leys for the first time since
David. Even his "Massacre of the Löwen Magistrates" showed sharp,
naturalistic physiognomies in the midst of its confused composition, and
his "Barthel de Haze," fifteen years after, fully exemplified this
striving after characteristic and truthful expression. None of his
contemporaries has shown himself more cool and indifferent to
conventional and graceful profile and "beauty" in the drawing of heads.
Hatred of the academic model made Leys bring art back to its sources.
The hideousness, so often childish, in primitive pictures was dearer to
him than all Raphael. By this emphasising of the characteristic in
attitude and the expression of the face he shows himself, although he
painted historical subjects, the very antipode of the painter of the
historical school, and, at the same time, one of those who effected the
transition which led to the modern style. In setting up quaintness and
far-fetched archaism against the mannerism of the idealists, Leys
accustomed the eye again to recognise that there was something truer
than nobility of line and aristocratic pose; and, as he appealed to the
old masters as accomplices, it was impossible for æsthetic criticism to
be offended.
[Illustration: LEYS. MOTHER AND CHILD.]
In France the transition from the absolutely beautiful to the
characteristic, from types to individuals, was brought about from
various sides. On the one side Romanticism had opposed to the antique
style that of the Flemish painters. On the other side, within Classicism
itself, there had been a change from the antique and the Cinquecento to
the early Italian renaissance. A new world was opened to sculpture by
the "Florentine Singer" of Paul Dubois. The more artists buried
themselves in the study of those early pioneers of realism, Donatello,
Verrochio, della Robbia, and the other masters of the Quatrocento, the
more they found themselves fascinated by the sparkling animation of
these creations, and sought to transfer it freely into their own work.
The fifteenth century, with the energetic force of its figures, its
close grasp of nature, and its pithy characterisation, which did not
even shrink from ugliness, induced painters to go back more than they
had formerly done to the sources of real life and to bring something of
its directness into their creations. Élie Delaunay began to look on
nature with an eye less bent on making abstractions and regarding all
things from the standpoint of style; he began to apprehend more clearly
her individual peculiarities and to reproduce them more truly than had
been done by the frigid school which cast everything into the mould of
Classicism. But _Ernest_ _Meissonier_ went a step further when by his
_rococo_ pictures he set the Dutch tradition on a level with the Flemish
and Early Italian as a formative influence.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
MEISSONIER. THE MAN AT THE WINDOW.]
A picture must either be very big or very small if it is to attract
attention amid the bustle of exhibitions. This was probably the
consideration which led Meissonier to his peculiar class of subjects,
and induced him to come forward with minute Netherlandish cabinet-pieces
at the time when the Romanticists were issuing their huge manifestoes.
He came of a family of petty tradespeople, and in his youth he is said
to have taken over his father's business, a trade in colonial produce.
Every morning at eight o'clock punctual he was at the shop desk, and
kept the books and copied business letters, and in this way accustomed
himself to that painstaking and uniform carefulness which was
characteristic of him to the end of his life. His teacher, Cogniet, was
without influence on him. Even in his youth, when there went forth the
battle-cry of "A Guelf, a Ghibelline! A Delacroix, an Ingres!"
Meissonier sat quietly in the Louvre and copied Jan van Eyck's Madonna
from Autun. And a Netherlandish "little master" did he remain all his
days. He first earned his bread as an illustrator, but after 1834 he
began to exhibit all manner of pieces from the time of Louis XIV and
Louis XV--the "Bourgeois hollandais rendant Visite au Bourgmestre" of
1834, the "Chess Players of Holbein's Time," 1835, the "Monk at the
Sickbed," 1838, the "English Doctor" and the "Man Reading," 1840. The
Salon of 1841 was for him what that of 1824 had been for Delacroix and
Ingres, and that of 1831 for Delaroche: the cradle of his fame. "The
Chess Party" (17 cm. high and 11 cm. broad) was the most celebrated
picture of the exhibition. The great Netherlandish "little masters" of
the seventeenth century, till then scarcely known and little
appreciated, were brought out for comparison. "Has Terborg or Mieris or
Meissonier done the greater work?" was the question. People marvelled at
the sharpness of this short-sighted eye which had a perception for the
smallest details. "Good heavens! look at the way that's been done," said
the Philistine, taking a magnifying glass; and felt himself a
connoisseur if the curator at his elbow called out, "Not too near!" Even
his first pictures had an accuracy and finish which defies description.
It seemed as if a most admirable Netherlandish painter in miniature
scale had arisen. The execution of his design in colours was as slow,
careful, and laborious as were his preparatory studies for costume:
every touch was altered and altered again; many a picture which was
almost ready was thrown aside, scraped out, and completely recast. Not
hot-headed enthusiasts, but "connoisseurs," has Meissonier conquered in
this fashion. Those readers, philosophers, card-players, drinkers,
smokers, flute-players and violin-players, engravers, painters and
amateurs, horsemen and farm-servants, brawlers and bravoes, from the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which he painted year after year,
were soon the most coveted pictures in every superior private
collection. In 1884 he was able to celebrate his jubilee as an artist
with an exhibition of one hundred and fifty pictures of the kind. And as
they would have gone dirt cheap if they had been bought for their weight
in gold, the public accustomed itself to buy them for their weight in
thousand-franc notes.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MEISSONIER. A MAN READING.]
The present age no longer looks up to these exercises of patience with
the same vast admiration, but it should not therefore be forgotten what
Meissonier was for his time.
To begin with, though painted at a time when painting was regarded as an
auxiliary, and an invaluable one, to history, his pictures tell no
story. These personages of Meissonier's take part in no comedy; they
occupy themselves, some in smoking, some in drinking, others in playing
cards, and others again in doing nothing whatever. Whether they made
their entry as musketeer or philosophers, as lackeys or gallants, as
scholars or _bonvivants_, they did not pose and had no ambition to seem
men of wit and spirit, they plunged into no adventurous deeds and
related no anecdotes: they were content to be well painted. And so
amongst all the French painters of the historical picture of manners
Meissonier was the one who had the secret of giving his works an
entirely peculiar _cachet_ of striking and realistic truth to nature.
His figures, marvellously painted, and at the same time animated and
natural in expression, wear the costume of our ancestors with the utmost
self-possession, and fit into their modish _rococo_ surroundings as if
they had been poured into a mould. Meissonier reached the truth of
nature in the total effect of his pictures by first in reality arranging
his interiors, and the still-life they contained, as a congruous whole.
The rooms, window niches, and firesides which he reproduced in his
pictures were in his own house and his studios, with every detail ready
to hand. He bought bronzes, trinkets, and ornaments, genuine productions
of the _rococo_ period, by the hundred thousand, and kept them by him.
His models were obliged, for weeks and often for months, actually to
wear the velvet and silken costumes in which he made use of them; then
he painted them with the greatest fidelity to nature, and without
troubling himself about anecdotic incident. What he rendered was not a
story invented and put together piecemeal, but a wholesome piece of
reality, pictorially conceived. And if this was primarily composed of
costumes and furniture belonging to the eighteenth century, the
transition to the natural treatment of modern life was at the same time
made possible, and was accomplished by Meissonier himself, at a later
period, in his battle pieces.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MEISSONIER. READING THE MANUSCRIPT.]
But he had only painted men: the physiognomy of the feminine Sphinx
remained for him an eternal riddle. A wide field was here offered to his
followers. Fauvelet, Chavet, and Brillouin stepped into Meissonier's
shoes, and gave his _rococo_ fine gentlemen their better halves. The
first two made simple imitations. Brillouin devoted himself to the comic
_genre_: he arranged his pictures prettily, was a good observer, and
painted tolerably well. The last of these Meissonierists is Vibert,
chiefly known in the present day by his cardinals and other scarlet
dignitaries, whom he represents in water-colours and oils with a certain
touch of malice. He paints them gouty, gluttonising, or tipsy, in one or
more cases in every picture--which does not contribute to make his works
interesting. But originally he had a sympathetic superior talent, and
will always claim a modest place in the group of the modern "little
masters." His "Gulliver Bound," and also the Spanish and Turkish scenes
which occupied him after a tour in the East, are extremely pleasing and
delicately painted costume pieces, gleaming in sunlight; and in their
sparkling, capricious workmanship they sometimes almost verge on
Fortuny.
On the German side of the Rhine _Adolf Menzel_ was the great pioneer of
truth. The history of German art must do him honour as one who first had
the genius and courage to break away from conventional forms of
phrasing, and bring the truth of nature into art: at first, as in the
case of Meissonier, it was nature in masquerade; but it was nature seen
and rendered with all the sincerity of a man to whom the art of pose was
wanting from the very first.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
MEISSONIER. POLCINELLO.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MEISSONIER. A READING AT DIDEROT'S.
(_By permission of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, owner of the picture,
and of M. Georges Petit, owner of the copyright._)]
Even in the thirties, at a time when "The Sorrowing Royal Pair" and the
"Leonora" by Lessing, "The Soldier and his Child," "The Sick Councillor,"
and "The Sons of Edward" by Hildebrandt, and "The Lament of the Jews" by
Bendemann, together with the works of Cornelius, met with the enthusiastic
applause of the million, Menzel looked into the world with a sharp glance,
undisturbed by idealism; and what enabled him to do this was his
unwavering and thoroughly Prussian healthiness, which knew no touch of
sentimentalism--a certain coldness and hardness, that sensible, reflective
North German trait, which often expresses itself in these days (when
German art has become subtle and superior) by a crude naturalism in the
Berlin painting. In the beginning of the century, however, it set the
Berlin painting, as art of the healthy human understanding, in salutary
contrast to the sickliness of Munich and Düsseldorf. Even eighty years ago
the people of Berlin were too acute and practical to be Romanticists. The
artists whom Menzel found active and honoured at his arrival were Schadow
and Rauch, and beside them, as representatives of the _grande peinture_,
Begas and Wach. But even these, who were most under the influence of the
sentimental tendency, were justly recognised by the thorough-going
Romanticists on the Rhine as never having given an unqualified homage to
their flag. A clear, realistic method was dominant in the art of Berlin.
And in this respect it was as much a corrective--and one by no means to be
undervalued--against the inflated sentiment of Munich as against the weak
and sickly sentimentalism of Düsseldorf, with its knights and monks and
noble maidens. Even Cornelius, who had been called to Berlin by Frederick
William IV--that King of the Romanticists on the throne of the eminently
unromantic Hohenzollerns--found himself helpless against the ruling taste.
And here only, in the stronghold of sharply accentuated common sense,
where the old Prussian sobriety set bounds to the twilight kingdom of
Romanticism, could Adolf Menzel attain to greatness. His Berlinism kept
him from lingering in empty space. To the taste of to-day, formed from
Fontainebleau, he will seem too much a creature of the understanding and
too little a creature of feeling. Boecklin hit him off admirably when, on
being asked what he thought of Menzel, he answered: "He is a great
scholar." A comparison between him and Mommsen especially suggests
itself--a great scholar, a mordant satirist, and a brilliant journalist.
But this sober scepticism, this cool spirit of investigation, this
"heartlessness" observing all things with the eye of a judge in a court of
judicial inquiry, were what cleared the ground for modern art. No one has
done more than Menzel for those rulers in the kingdom of dreams who from
pure dreaming have never been able to learn anything. He has helped to set
them steadily on their feet, and to accustom their sight, vitiated by
idealism, once more to truth and nature.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MEISSONIER. A HALT.]
[Illustration: _Mansell._
MEISSONIER. A CAVALIER.]
Menzel was almost the only one in Germany who could draw and paint in
the time before the French influence had made itself felt. The struggle
for existence had forced him to learn. In the year of Bismarck's birth
there was born in Breslau the man destined to glorify, first the
greatness of the old kingdom of the Fredericks, and then that of new
imperial Prussia. Cast out at an early age on the inhospitable
wilderness of life, he came to Berlin, poor and lonely, and not so much
for the sake of art as for gain. There he sat in his cheerless attic,
without a servant; and wrapped up in his plaid, with a coffee-pot on one
side and a pencil on the other, he looked out over the roofs of the vast
town, the most brilliant epoch of which he was predestined to depict and
to conquer by his art. Since it brought in profit sooner than anything
else, he had made himself familiar with the technique of reproduction;
and having devoted himself in particular to the newly discovered art of
lithography, he turned out _ménus_, New Year cards, vignettes for
occasional poems, etc., and in things of this sort displayed a genuine
affinity of spirit with Chodowiecki and Gottfried Schadow. From his
twelfth year onwards he had not only assured his own existence, but even
supported his family by such work; and in the hours he spent over it he
laid the groundwork for becoming the master of masters amongst the
moderns. Menzel is not merely a man who owed to himself everything which
he afterwards became, who learnt to draw by his own unassisted
endeavours, who mastered oil-painting without a teacher, and went
further in it than any one of his generation--a man who found out
entirely by himself new methods and combinations in water-colours and
gouache; but if it is asked who was the greatest German illustrator, the
man who did most in Germany to advance the art of woodcut engraving, the
one German historical painter of the century who was entirely original,
who really knew a bygone period so exactly that he could venture on
painting it, the name of Menzel is invariably uttered.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
ADOLF MENZEL, 1837.]
Even in the twelve simple lithographs which appeared in 1837, "Memorable
Events from Prussian History in the Brandenburg Era," the "scholar"
Menzel stands ready as the actual historian of the Prussian kingdom. In
an age which took its pleasure in a vaporous, sentimental enthusiasm for
the mediæval splendour of the empire, he was the one who as a youth of
twenty pointed to the corner-stones of Prussian history in the
Brandenburg times; he was the only man of his age who refused to blow
the horn of the mawkish Romanticists, and still less that of the
impassioned historical painters who came after them. For his were no
theatrically tricked out scenes of tragedy, no touching situations; they
had nothing poetical; and just as little were they tedious pictures of
ceremonies or spectacular pieces. Striking characterisation and
sparkling vividness were united here to the most painstaking study of
nature and history, carried down to the peculiarities of costume and
weapons. History was not arranged in accordance with academic formulæ,
but delineated as if from life with absorbing truthfulness. Everything
was expressed simply and sincerely, without exciting passages, and
without conventional sentiment pumped out of models. Every epoch had its
historical physiognomy, and costume was reduced to its proper
subordinate place.
Franz Kugler was the first who understood this sincere and pithy art.
The Life of Napoleon had appeared, at that time, in Paris, with
illustrations by Horace Vernet, and it had a considerable sale in
Germany also. This gave a Berlin publisher the idea of a similar German
work, and Kugler commissioned Menzel to illustrate his biography of
Frederick the Great. It is almost impossible to pay sufficient honour to
the influence which this book on Frederick has had on German art. It
made an epoch in the history of wood engraving. The technique of this
craft had been completely forgotten in Germany ever since the beginning
of the century, or used only for the production of rough trade-marks for
tobacco; Menzel had to invent it afresh and teach an engraving school of
his own before the four hundred masterly plates of the book were made
possible.
But it became more revolutionary still for the æsthetic ideas of the
time. Menzel had not set himself to produce a sequence of pictures,
displaying events and heroes in the most ideal situations possible, but
made it his business to sift the entire life of Frederick the Great to
its minutest particulars. And here began that philological study of
records which Menzel has carried on with the strenuous labour of an
archivist down to the present day. Old Fritz had been caught by
Chodowiecki in the way in which he has since lived in the popular
imagination: as the old man on horseback, with his bent shoulders and
his crutch-stick, holding a review, and as the philosopher, the
statesman, the warrior and hero in the most manifold situations. Menzel,
in whom the spirit of Chodowiecki lived again, only needed to begin
where the latter left off. Stepping on the antiquarian material of
Chodowiecki, he worked his way into the great period on which Frederick
and Voltaire have set the stamp of their spirit, as Mommsen worked his
way into Roman history. He read through whole libraries; he copied all
attainable portraits. With scientific pedantry he did not forget to
study the buttons and the cut of the trousers in the uniforms, and did
not rest until he knew the old grenadiers as a corporal knows his men.
Using these labours as preparation, he proceeded to call up old Fritz
and his time with the objectivity of an historian, just as they were,
and not as they had better have been. Sureness of treatment even in the
finest details, accurate mastery of the surroundings, and everything
which had made Meissonier's appearance so important for France, was
attained at one stroke for Germany. But the very simplicity of what was
offered--both in style and technique--prevented Menzel from being at the
beginning accepted in his own country as an "historical painter." He was
blamed for disregarding "beauty," and it was said that a "higher"
artistic perception was sealed from him. On the other hand, the book
laid the foundation of Menzel's position in France, and was, moreover,
the work on which, for a long time, the appreciation of modern German
art in foreign countries was based.
[Illustration: MENZEL. FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS TUTOR.]
[Illustration: MENZEL. THE ROUND TABLE AT SANS-SOUCI.]
Thenceforth Menzel had a kind of monopoly in this subject, and when in
1840 Frederick William IV had the works of the great king published in
an _édition de luxe_, Menzel, amongst others, was entrusted with the
illustration. Every one of the thirty volumes contains portraits of
Frederick's contemporaries which were engraved by Mandel and others
after original pictures of the period. Menzel had an apparently
subordinate task. He was commissioned to make two hundred drawings for
wood engraving; these, however, do not appear on separate pages, but
were destined to be incorporated in the text as tail-pieces, vignettes,
and the like. This was the great work which occupied him during the
forties; and in these headings and tail-pieces to the works of Frederick
the Great he showed, for the first time, that he was not merely a
learned investigator of sources, but was full of brilliant _aperçus_.
One has to read Frederick the Great before one can do full justice to
the acuteness and ready resource, the subtlety and pungency of the
artist's pencil. All æsthetic categories of realistic and idealistic art
are scattered like dust before these creations, in which the most
fantastic ideas are embodied with the whole force of the realistic power
of our days.
When he had done honour to the military comrades of the great ruler in
his work of wood engraving, "Heroes of War and Peace in the Time of King
Frederick," and thus made the epoch his own through a decade of busy
labour, Menzel, draughtsman though he was, turned round and became the
painter of Frederick the Great. In the history of art there have never
been two names more intimately connected with each other. Menzel was a
strenuous worker, who never knew the passion for woman, either because
he had no time for it, or because he despised women after being despised
by them as a poor, hard-featured student of art; a man whose great bald
head appeared at Berlin subscription-balls amid groups of brilliant
cavaliers and queens of beauty, fashion, and grace, surrounded by the
rustle of their silks and in the whirlpool of a dancing throng, gleaming
with colour and sparkling with gold and jewels; and appeared there
simply because this world interested him as something to be painted. He
was a recluse who went into society solely to make observations for his
art, and when there was chary of speech and much feared. He was always a
busy experimentalist, so that his two hands gradually became equally
dexterous; at the age of eighty he could still sketch with firm and
accurate strokes while travelling in a railway carriage.
Though he had hitherto devoted himself to drawing, he had also by his
own independent study made himself familiar with the technique of oils;
and he now became such a master of colour as few were at that time. In
the middle of the century were painted those two masterpieces which now
hang in the Berlin National Gallery, "The Round Table at Sans-Souci" and
"The Concert of Frederick the Great." These are historical pictures, the
authority and importance of which cannot be shaken by even the most
modern of critics. If what is called the spirit of an age has ever been
embodied in pictures, it is embodied here, where the master-minds of the
eighteenth century are assembled at their genial round table. The scene
is the oval dining-room of the castle. The meal is over, and there
reigns a genial after-dinner mood, champagne sparkles in the glasses and
a smart rivalry of wit is in progress. Afternoon has crept on, and a
cold, subdued daylight floods the room, in which every fragment of the
architecture, from the inlaid floor to the gilded capitals of the
pillars and the stucco of the arched ceiling, every piece of furniture
and every chandelier, bears the wayward grace of the high-_rococo_
period; all is comprehended with the most intimate knowledge. In the
second picture a fine candlelight is glimmering over the scene.
Frederick is just beginning to play the flute, and the musicians of the
string quartet pause, to strike in again after the solo. The Court is
grouped to the left: the ladies in gilded easy-chairs, and their
cavaliers behind them. The tapers of the chandelier and the sconces
branching from the wall shed over everything their prismatic, broken
light reflected by the mirrors, and fill the fantastic, capricious,
graceful, comfortable apartment, here with streaming brightness, there
with a finely modulated twilight. Only Menzel could have conjured up in
so convincing a manner the brilliancy of this Court festival of the
past.
[Illustration: _Hanfstängl._
MENZEL. FREDERICK THE GREAT ON A JOURNEY.]
Here is that exactness which an historical picture must have if it makes
any claim to intrinsic worth. Whilst the ordinary historical painters
were content to transmute dressed-up models into types of the
universally human, and to put historical labels on their frames, Menzel
succeeded in really penetrating a bygone age in an artistic spirit, and
in making it live again for the present generation. He did not burrow to
discover another dim historical personage every year, but confined
himself to one hero--to the figure of the Prussian hero-king, familiar
to every child, and still living in the popular imagination; and he
learnt to master the time of this favourite hero as if he had been old
Fritz himself. Menzel had never heard him blowing on his flute, and
never sat at table with him in Sans-Souci, but the painting of these
scenes comes out true and life-like in the artist's work, because the
past history of his country had become as vivid to him as his own age.
His "Battle of Hochkirch" rises to tragical grandeur, precisely because
everything that is outwardly impassioned is far from him. His "Frederick
the Great on a Journey," where the king is inspecting territories alter
the war and ordering the rebuilding of demolished houses, his
"Frederick's Meeting with Joseph II in Niesse," and all the other
pictures of the sequence, by their marvellous naturalness and intense
vividness, and by their freedom from pompous phrasing, stand alone in an
age dominated by empty sentiment. Menzel, who never laid his sketch-book
down from the time he was twelve years old, found a subject of pictorial
interest in everything that he saw around him, until finally he acquired
the power of moving with natural self-possession in a period that was
not his own. By the roundabout way through the _rococo_ period he has
taught us to understand ourselves. In his pictures an apparently
paradoxical problem has been solved. An intense feeling for modern
reality waked to new life the past, that same past which no one had
approached with success by the way of idealism.
[Illustration: MENZEL. ILLUSTRATION TO KUGLER'S HISTORY OF FREDERICK
THE GREAT.]
And if we look over the whole development of modern art it strikes us as
a remarkable fact that the most concrete spirits, the most thorough
masters of technique, like Meissonier and Menzel, were precisely those
who ventured to advance into the present. When they had crossed the
province of the _rococo_ period, avoided by all scholastic art, they had
arrived again at the epoch when Mengs and David had interrupted the
natural course of the history of art, one hundred years before. About
1750 the fateful movement towards the antique had been accomplished; in
1820 the Middle Ages had the upper hand; in 1830 the Cinquecento was in
the ascendant with Cornelius and Ingres; in 1840 the seventeenth century
was awakened through Delacroix and Wappers; and in 1850, after "the
courses of the centuries were sphered"--to use the phrase of
Cornelius--Meissonier and Menzel painted things which had not appeared
worth representing to the painters of 1750, blinded, as they were, by
the glory of the antique. Not less striking is it that the nearer the
historical subject came to the present the truer to nature did the
picture become, and the more did it outwardly change in its features. It
has shrivelled from the huge scale of David and Cornelius to the
miniature scale of Meissonier and Menzel, and to some extent it thus
leaves its further development to be guessed. At no distant time the
historical picture will be overthrown, and the picture from modern life,
hitherto but shyly handled and on the smallest scale, will swell to life
size. History itself, serious history, clings merely to the rock-bed of
old costume. One generation had used it with an abstract purpose as a
substratum for philosophical ideas; others had made scenical pieces with
its aid; a third generation turned it over for piquant traits and
anecdotes. The last and greatest generation had finally come to handle
it quite familiarly and humanly and without affected dignity. Their
works protested against all idealism; and this expressed itself, in
drawing, by their making use of the true instead of the "beautiful"
line; in colour, by a fresher tint corresponding with nature rather than
with the conventional ideal of beauty.
[Illustration: MENZEL. PORTRAIT OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.]
[Illustration: MENZEL. REIFSPIEL.]
Nobility of line was paramount in Gallait and Piloty, movement with
grand, kingly gestures, lofty dignity, aristocratic bearing,
knightliness, and a conventional piling up of rich stuffs, alluring to
the eye. Leys, Menzel, and Meissonier were the first who sacrificed
beauty to truth, or, more properly, who perceived that a beauty without
truth is not really beautiful. They came gradually and by an indirect
way to this knowledge as they studied German and Netherlandish masters
instead of the Italians, and set up the angular, natural outlines of the
Germans against the grace of the Latin masters, which had become banal
through a lengthy course of imitation. And thus a return was made to the
manner of our true ancestors, which had been forgotten during half a
century. The place of the Antinous heads of Gallait was taken by
physiognomies of vigorous characterisation; gesticulating heroes made
way for peaceful, quiet persons, who did not consider themselves under
an obligation to acquire artistic citizenship by a parade of attitude,
but appeared in their picture as they were in reality. Impassioned
movement yielded quietly to arms hanging downwards and natural postures.
Even the traditional rules of concave and convex composition were broken
so that the free play of life might more easily come to its rights. Not
less did all three show themselves true painters by preferring
rightness of observation and truth and delicacy of reproduction to
anecdote and richness of invention, and by feeling the need of painting
figures in their real surroundings. Instead of the conventional velvet
and brocade stuffs, and the folios everywhere and nowhere in place, the
settles and the brass caskets, there was a naturally painted fragment of
reality, authentically reflecting the whole atmosphere of the period.
The treatment of nature, hitherto idealistic and arbitrary, became
synthetic and naturalistic. There was no more abstraction, but direct
observation of the man and his _milieu_. And if, for the time being,
this _milieu_ was a _rococo milieu_, artificially reconstructed so that
it could be realistically transferred to the picture, Menzel and
Meissonier, even on account of this realism, would have to be reckoned
as outposts of the modern tendency, and as having very decided points of
contact with it; and this, even if they had not themselves actually
become the pioneers of modernity, forcing their way through against the
literary and historical movement. It is owing to their works in the past
that the preference of the public turned less and less to compositions
of fine sentiment, even though grounded on more attentive observation,
and that artists began to regard reality as the most important element,
the point of departure for every picture. Thus life itself came to be
painted, and preparation was made for the coming demand of a new
generation, who wished no more to see old heroes, but themselves, in the
mirror of art.
[Illustration: WHEN WILL GENIUS AWAKE? MENZEL.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER I
General:
Rouquet: L'état des Arts en Angleterre Paris, 1755.
H. Walpole: Anecdotes of Painting in England. With Illustrations. 5
vols. London, Strawberry Hill, 1762-71. New Edition, London, Ward,
Lock & Co., 1879.
James Dalloway: Les Beaux-Arts en Angleterre. Paris, 1807.
Edward Edwards: Anecdotes of Painters who have resided or been born in
England. London, 1808.
J. D. Fiorillo, Geschichte der Malerei in Grossbritannien, vol. v.
Göttingen, 1808.
W. Carey: Progress of the Fine Arts in England and Ireland during the
Reigns of George II, III, IV. London, 1826.
William Fletcher: History of Painting in England. London, 1838.
G. Hamilton: Gallery of English Artists. London and Paris, 1839.
Edward Edwards: The Fine Arts in England. London, 1840.
W. B. Taylor: The Origin, Progress, and Present Condition of the Fine
Arts in Great Britain and Ireland. 2 vols. London, 1841.
G. Lombardi: Saggio dell' Istoria Pittorica d'Inghilterra. Firenze,
1843.
J. Dalloway: Anecdotes of Painting in England, with some Account of
the Principal Artists. 3 vols. London, 1849.
John Ruskin: Modern Painters. 5 vols. London, 1851-60.
G. F. Waagen: Treasures of Art in Great Britain. London, 1854.
Prosper Mérimée: Les Beaux-Arts en Angleterre, "Revue des Deux
Mondes," 1857.
T. Silvestre: L'Art, Les Artistes, etc., en Angleterre. London, 1857.
C. de Pesquidoux: L'École Anglaise, 1672-1851. Études biographiques et
critiques. Paris, 1858.
Our Living Painters: their Lives and Works. London, 1859.
T. Silvestre: Les Artistes Anglais, "L'Artiste," vol. vi, p. 81.
Paris, 1859.
W. Thornbury: British Artists from Hogarth to Turner. 2 vols. London,
1860-61.
J. Milsand: L'esthétique anglaise. Étude sur M. John Ruskin. Trad.
franç. Paris, 1864.
R. and S. Redgrave: A Century of Painters of the English School. 2
vols. London, 1866. New Edition, 1890.
W. F. Rae: The History of Painting in England, "The Fine Arts
Quarterly Review," vol. i, p. 241; vol. ii, p. 64. 1866-67.
W. C. Monkhouse: Masterpieces of English Art, with Sketches of some
Deceased Painters of the English School. London, 1869.
F. T. Palgrave: Gems of English Art. Plates. London, 1869.
Sarah Tytler: Modern Painters and their Paintings. London, 1873.
Frederick William Fairholt: Homes, Works, and Shrines of English
Artists. London, Virtue & Co., 1873.
Frederick Wedmore: The Rise of Naturalism in English Art, "Macmillan's
Magazine," March and June 1876.
John Ruskin: Lectures on Art, delivered before the University of
Oxford, 1870. London, Macmillan, 1876.
English Painters of the Georgian Era: Hogarth to Turner. Biographical
Notices of the Artists. With 48 permanent photographs of their most
celebrated pictures. London, Low, 1876.
Frederick Wedmore: Studies on English Art. London, Richard Bentley &
Son, 1876.
English Painters of the Victorian Era: Mulready to Landseer.
Illustrated with 48 photographs of their most popular works. With
biographical notices. London, Low, 1877.
James Dafforne: Modern Art. A series of line engravings from the works
of distinguished painters of the English and Foreign Schools, selected
from galleries and private collections in Great Britain. 60 plates,
with descriptive text by J. D. London, 1877.
Samuel Redgrave: A Dictionary of Artists of the English School. New
Edition. London, 1878.
The Reflection of English Character in English Art, "The Quarterly
Review," January 1879.
Allan Cunningham: The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters.
Revised edition, annotated and continued to the Present Time by Mrs.
Charles Heaton. 3 vols. London, Bell, 1879.
Frederick Wedmore: Studies on English Art. Second Series. (Romney,
David Cox, G. Cruikshank, W. Hunt, Prout, B. Jones, A. Moore.) London,
Bentley, 1880.
George H. Shepherd: A Short History of the British School of Painting.
London, Sampson Low, 1881.
Living Painters of France and England. Plates. London, 1882.
E. Chesneau: La peinture anglaise. Paris, 1882.
J. Faber: La peinture anglaise. "Fédération artistique," 1883. 11-15.
N. D'Anvers: An Elementary History of Modern Painting. New Edition.
London, Sampson Low, 1883.
Wilfrid Meynell: Some Modern Artists and their Work. (Leighton,
Boughton, Tadema, Watts, etc.) With portraits and illustrations.
London, Cassell & Co., 1883.
Modern Artists. Illustrated Biographies of Modern Artists, published
under the direction of F. G. Dumas. (Leighton, Millais, Herkomer,
Hook, etc.) 2 vols. London and Paris, 1882-84.
Feuillet de Conches: Histoire de l'école anglaise de peinture jusqu'à
Sir Thomas Lawrence et ses émules. Paris, Leroux, 1883.
H. J. Wilmot-Buxton and S. R. Köhler: English and American Painters.
Plates. London, 1883.
John Ruskin: The Art of England. Lectures given in Oxford. Orpington,
Kent, 1883-84.
Artists at Home. Photographed by J. R. Mayall. With Biographical
Notices by F. G. Stephens. London, 1884.
Lord Ronald Gower; Great Historic Galleries of England. London,
Sampson Low.
J. Comyns Carr: Papers on Art. London, Macmillan & Co., 1885.
(Contains studies of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Rossetti, etc.)
Allan Cunningham: Great English Painters. Selected Biographies from
Allan Cunningham's Lives of Eminent British Painters. Edited by
William Sharp. London, 1886.
J. E. Hodgson: Fifty Years of British Art. (Manchester Exhibition,
1887.) Manchester and London, John Heywood, 1887.
Charles Heaton: A Concise History of Painting. London, Bell & Daldy,
1873. Second Edition, 1888.
The Pictorial Record of the Royal Jubilee Exhibition at Manchester,
1887. By Walter Tomlinson. With special articles by Thomas W. Harris,
Charles Estcourt, and Joseph Nodal. Edited by John H. Nodal. With
Illustrations. Manchester, 1888.
Walter Armstrong: The Nineteenth Century School in Art, "Nineteenth
Century," April, 1887.
Walter Armstrong: Fine Art at the Royal Jubilee Exhibition at
Manchester, 1887. 1888.
William Hoe: English Artists of the Day. A Technical Directory.
London, 1888.
William Tirebuck: Great Minds in Art. (Studies of Wilson, Wilkie,
Landseer, and others.) London, 1888.
Harry Quilter: French and English Art, "Universal Review," 1888 and
1890.
W. E. Henley: A Century of Artists. A Memorial of the Glasgow
International Exhibition, 1888. With Illustrations. Glasgow, 1889.
Hermann Helferich: Ueber die Kunst in England, "Kunst für Alle," iv,
1888, pp. 161, 177.
Paul Meyerheim: Die englische Malerie in den letzten 50 Jahren, "Nord
und Süd," 1889, p. 17.
J. A. Crowe, Continental and English Painting, "Nineteenth Century,"
April 1890.
T. de Wyzewa: Les grands peintres de l'Espagne et de l'Angleterre.
Histoire sommaire de la peinture japonaise. Illustrations. Paris,
1891.
T. H. Shepherd: Short History of the British School of Painting.
London, 1891.
Robert de la Sizeranne: La peinture anglaise contemporaine. Paris,
1895.
G. Temple: The Art of Painting in the Queen's Reign. London, 1898.
Richard Muther: Die englische Malerei im 19 Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1902.
_See also_ H. Thomas Buckle: History of Civilisation in England.
H. Taine: Notes sur l'Angleterre. Paris, 1872.
H. Taine: Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise.
Periodicals: "Art Journal," "Portfolio," and "Magazine of Art,"
_passim._
Hogarth:
W. Hogarth: Analyse de la beauté. 2 vols. Paris, 1805.
John Nichols: Biographical Anecdotes of W. Hogarth. London, 1781.
Second Edition, 1785.
G. C. Lichtenberg: Erklärung der Hogarth'schen Kupferstiche, mit
verkleinerten Copien derselben v. Riepenhausen. Göttingen, 1794-1831.
W. Hogarth: Complete Works, Including the Analysis of Beauty. London,
1837.
Francis Wey: W. Hogarth. Londres il y a cent ans. Paris, 1859.
J. Hannay: Complete Works of Hogarth. Plates. London, 1860.
G. A. Sala: W. Hogarth, Painter, Engraver, and Philosopher.
Illustrations. London, 1866.
C. Justi: W. Hogarth, "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," vii, 1872.
A. Dobson: Hogarth. London, Low, New and Enlarged Edition, 1903.
(Illustrated Biographies of Great Artists.)
Th. Gautier: Guide de l'amateur, 1882.
Hogarth's Shrimp Girl, "Portfolio," 1886, p. 105.
F. Rabbe in the compilation, "Les artistes célèbres."
_Reproductions:_
The Original and Genuine Works of W. Hogarth. Atlas fol. London, 1790.
Graphic Illustrations of Hogarth: from Pictures, Drawings, etc. 2
vols. Royal 8vo. London, 1794-99.
The Works of W. Hogarth: from the original plates, restored by James
Heath, R.A. Atlas fol. London, 1822.
The Works of W. Hogarth: reproduced from the original engravings in
permanent photographs. With an Essay on Hogarth by Charles Lamb. 2
vols. Royal 8vo. London, 1872.
J. Ireland and J. Nichols: Hogarth's Works, with Life and Anecdotal
Descriptions of his Pictures. 3 vols. London. No date.
Reynolds:
J. Northcote: The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds. London. 1818.
Joseph Farrington: Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, with some
Observations on his Talent and Character. London, 1839.
Edm. Wheatley: A Descriptive Catalogue of all the Prints, etc., from
Original Portraits and Pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds. London, 1825.
New Edition, 1850.
Th. Reynolds: Life of Joshua Reynolds, by his Son. London, 1839.
Joshua Reynolds: Discourses on the Fine Arts. Edinburgh, 1840.
Joshua Reynolds: Discourses, illustrated by Explanatory Notes and
Plates by J. Burnet. London, 1842.
Edm. Malone: The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Seven
Editions. London, 1794-1824. New Editions by H. W. Beechey. London,
1846 and 1851.
W. Cotton: Sir Joshua Reynolds and his Works, edited by John Burnet.
London, 1856. New Edition, 1859.
J. Timbs: Anecdotal Biography. (Hogarth, Reynolds, etc.) 1860.
Ch. Rob. Leslie and Tom Taylor: Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
London, 1865.
Reynolds and the Portrait Painters of the Last Century: "Blackwood's
Magazine," November 1867.
Sidney Colvin: Joshua Reynolds, "Portfolio," 1873, pp. 66-82.
J. C. Collins: Sir Joshua Reynolds as a Portrait Painter. An Essay,
with 20 Portraits. London, 1874.
Edw. Hamilton: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Engraved Works of Joshua
Reynolds, 1755-1820. London, 1874.
Frederick Wedmore: Sir Joshua Reynolds, "Temple Bar," July 1876.
F. S. Pulling; Sir Joshua Reynolds. London, Sampson Low, 1880.
Th. Gautier; Guide de l'amateur, 1882.
F. G. Stephens: English Children as painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
London, 1884.
Th. Duret: Sir Joshua Reynolds et Gainsborough aux expositions de la
Royal Academy et de la Grosvenor Gallerie, "Gazette des Beaux Arts,"
1884, i 327. (The same reprinted and enlarged. Paris, 1885.)
Various articles in the "Athenæum," 1883 and 1884.
Helen Zimmern: Sir Joshua Reynolds, in "Westermanns Monatsheften," May
1884.
William Martin Conway: The Artistic Development of Reynolds and
Gainsborough. London, Seeley & Co., 1886.
Ernest Chesneau: Joshua Reynolds. With 18 Illustrations. Paris, 1887
(in the compilation "Les artistes célèbres").
Lady Blennerhasset: Joshua Reynolds' Discourses, "Allgemeine Zeitung,"
1889.
Ed. Leisching: Zur Aesthetik u. Technik der bildenden Künste.
Akademische Reden von Sir J. R., Uebersetzt u. mit Einleitung,
Anmerkungen, Register u. Textvergleichung versehen von Dr. E. L.
Leipzig, 1893.
C. Phillips: Sir Joshua Reynolds. With 9 Illustrations from Pictures
by the Master. London, 1894.
W. Armstrong: Sir Joshua Reynolds. With 78 Photogravures and 6
Lithographic Facsimiles in colour, 1900; Popular edition, with 52
Plates. London, 1905.
Lord Ronald Gower: Sir Joshua Reynolds. His Life and Art (with
Illustrations). British Artists' Series, 1902.
J. Sime: Reynolds. London, 1904.
F. Benoit: Reynolds. Paris, 1904.
Gainsborough:
Rob. Pratt: Sketch of the Life and Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough.
London, 1788.
George William Fulcher: Life of Thomas Gainsborough. London, 1856.
Sidney Colvin: Thomas Gainsborough, "Portfolio," 1872, pp. 169, 178.
J. Comyns Carr: Thomas Gainsborough, "The English Illustrated
Magazine," December 1884.
George M. Brock-Arnold: Gainsborough. London, Sampson Low, 1889.
Walter Armstrong in the compilation, "Les artistes célèbres."
Mrs. Bell: Thomas Gainsborough: a Record of his Life and Works, with
Illustrations, etc. London, 1897.
W. Armstrong: Gainsborough and his Place in English Art. With 62
Photogravures and 10 Lithographic Facsimiles in colour. London, 1898.
Popular edition (with 48 Plates), 1904.
Lord Ronald Gower: Thomas Gainsborough (with Illustrations). British
Artists' Series, 1903.
_Reproductions:_
Studies of Landscapes by Thomas Gainsborough. Engraved from the
Originals by L. Francia. London, 1810.
Studies of Figures by Gainsborough, in exact imitation of the
originals, by Richard Lane. London, 1825.
Selected Works of Thomas Gainsborough. One hundred engravings in
mezzotint. Fol. London, 1876.
Wilson:
The Works of Richard Wilson, R.A., Landscape Painter. A volume of
engravings. Fol. No date.
T. Wright: Some Account of the Life of Richard Wilson. London, 1824.