The three collections of pictures at the Louvre, the Luxembourg, and
the Ecole des Beaux Arts, contain a number of specimens of French art,
since its commencement almost, and give the stranger a pretty fair
opportunity to study and appreciate the school. The French list of
painters contains some very good names—no very great ones, except
Poussin (unless the admirers of Claude choose to rank him among great
painters),—and I think the school was never in so flourishing a
condition as it is at the present day. They say there are three
thousand artists in this town alone: of these a handsome minority paint
not merely tolerably, but well understand their business: draw the
figure accurately; sketch with cleverness; and paint portraits,
churches, or restaurateurs’ shops, in a decent manner.
To account for a superiority over England which, I think, as regards
art, is incontestable—it must be remembered that the painter’s trade,
in France, is a very good one; better appreciated, better understood,
and, generally, far better paid than with us. There are a dozen
excellent schools which a lad may enter here, and, under the eye of a
practised master, learn the apprenticeship of his art at an expense of
about ten pounds a year. In England there is no school except the
Academy, unless the student can afford to pay a very large sum, and
place himself under the tuition of some particular artist. Here, a
young man, for his ten pounds, has all sorts of accessory instruction,
models, &c.; and has further, and for nothing, numberless incitements
to study his profession which are not to be found in England:—the
streets are filled with picture-shops, the people themselves are
pictures walking about; the churches, theatres, eating-houses,
concert-rooms are covered with pictures: Nature itself is inclined more
kindly to him, for the sky is a thousand times more bright and
beautiful, and the sun shines for the greater part of the year. Add to
this, incitements more selfish, but quite as powerful: a French artist
is paid very handsomely; for five hundred a year is much where all are
poor; and has a rank in society rather above his merits than below
them, being caressed by hosts and hostesses in places where titles are
laughed at and a baron is thought of no more account than a banker’s
clerk.
The life of the young artist here is the easiest, merriest, dirtiest
existence possible. He comes to Paris, probably at sixteen, from his
province; his parents settle forty pounds a year on him, and pay his
master; he establishes himself in the Pays Latin, or in the new quarter
of Notre Dame de Lorette (which is quite peopled with painters); he
arrives at his atelier at a tolerably early hour, and labors among a
score of companions as merry and poor as himself. Each gentleman has
his favorite tobacco-pipe; and the pictures are painted in the midst of
a cloud of smoke, and a din of puns and choice French slang, and a roar
of choruses, of which no one can form an idea who has not been present
at such an assembly.
You see here every variety of coiffure that has ever been known. Some
young men of genius have ringlets hanging over their shoulders—you may
smell the tobacco with which they are scented across the street; some
have straight locks, black, oily, and redundant; some have toupets in
the famous Louis-Philippe fashion; some are cropped close; some have
adopted the present mode—which he who would follow must, in order to do
so, part his hair in the middle, grease it with grease, and gum it with
gum, and iron it flat down over his ears; when arrived at the ears, you
take the tongs and make a couple of ranges of curls close round the
whole head,—such curls as you may see under a gilt three-cornered hat,
and in her Britannic Majesty’s coachman’s state wig.
This is the last fashion. As for the beards, there is no end of them;
all my friends the artists have beards who can raise them; and Nature,
though she has rather stinted the bodies and limbs of the French
nation, has been very liberal to them of hair, as you may see by the
following specimen. Fancy these heads and beards under all sorts of
caps—Chinese caps, Mandarin caps, Greek skull-caps, English
jockey-caps, Russian or Kuzzilbash caps, Middle-age caps (such as are
called, in heraldry, caps of maintenance), Spanish nets, and striped
worsted nightcaps. Fancy all the jackets you have ever seen, and you
have before you, as well as pen can describe, the costumes of these
indescribable Frenchmen.
In this company and costume the French student of art passes his days
and acquires knowledge; how he passes his evenings, at what theatres,
at what guinguettes, in company with what seducing little milliner,
there is no need to say; but I knew one who pawned his coat to go to a
carnival ball, and walked abroad very cheerfully in his blouse for six
weeks, until he could redeem the absent garment.
These young men (together with the students of sciences) comport
themselves towards the sober citizen pretty much as the German bursch
towards the philister, or as the military man, during the empire, did
to the pékin:—from the height of their poverty they look down upon him
with the greatest imaginable scorn—a scorn, I think, by which the
citizen seems dazzled, for his respect for the arts is intense. The
case is very different in England, where a grocer’s daughter would
think she made a misalliance by marrying a painter, and where a
literary man (in spite of all we can say against it) ranks below that
class of gentry composed of the apothecary, the attorney, the
wine-merchant, whose positions, in country towns at least, are so
equivocal. As, for instance, my friend the Rev. James Asterisk, who has
an undeniable pedigree, a paternal estate, and a living to boot, once
dined in Warwickshire, in company with several squires and parsons of
that enlightened county. Asterisk, as usual, made himself
extraordinarily agreeable at dinner, and delighted all present with his
learning and wit. “Who is that monstrous pleasant fellow?” said one of
the squires. “Don’t you know?” replied another. “It’s Asterisk, the
author of so-and-so, and a famous contributor to such and such a
magazine.” “Good heavens!” said the squire, quite horrified! “a
literary man! I thought he had been a gentleman!”
Another instance: M. Guizot, when he was Minister here, had the grand
hotel of the Ministry, and gave entertainments to all the great de par
le monde, as Brantôme says, and entertained them in a proper
ministerial magnificence. The splendid and beautiful Duchess of Dash
was at one of his ministerial parties; and went, a fortnight
afterwards, as in duty bound, to pay her respects to M. Guizot. But it
happened, in this fortnight, that M. Guizot was Minister no longer;
having given up his portfolio, and his grand hotel, to retire into
private life, and to occupy his humble apartments in the house which he
possesses, and of which he lets the greater portion. A friend of mine
was present at one of the ex-Minister’s soirées, where the Duchess of
Dash made her appearance. He says the Duchess, at her entrance, seemed
quite astounded, and examined the premises with a most curious wonder.
Two or three shabby little rooms, with ordinary furniture, and a
Minister en retraite, who lives by letting lodgings! In our country was
ever such a thing heard of? No, thank heaven! and a Briton ought to be
proud of the difference.
But to our muttons. This country is surely the paradise of painters and
penny-a-liners; and when one reads of M. Horace Vernet at Rome,
exceeding ambassadors at Rome by his magnificence, and leading such a
life as Rubens or Titian did of old; when one sees M. Thiers’s grand
villa in the Rue St. George (a dozen years ago he was not even a
penny-a-liner: no such luck); when one contemplates, in imagination, M.
Gudin, the marine painter, too lame to walk through the picture-gallery
of the Louvre, accommodated, therefore, with a wheel-chair, a privilege
of princes only, and accompanied—nay, for what I know, actually
trundled—down the gallery by majesty itself—who does not long to make
one of the great nation, exchange his native tongue for the melodious
jabber of France; or, at least, adopt it for his native country, like
Marshal Saxe, Napoleon, and Anacharsis Clootz? Noble people! they made
Tom Paine a deputy; and as for Tom Macaulay, they would make a DYNASTY
of him.
Well, this being the case, no wonder there are so many painters in
France; and here, at least, we are back to them. At the Ecole Royale
des Beaux Arts, you see two or three hundred specimens of their
performances; all the prize-men, since 1750, I think, being bound to
leave their prize sketch or picture. Can anything good come out of the
Royal Academy? is a question which has been considerably mooted in
England (in the neighborhood of Suffolk Street especially). The
hundreds of French samples are, I think, not very satisfactory. The
subjects are almost all what are called classical: Orestes pursued by
every variety of Furies; numbers of little wolf-sucking Romuluses;
Hectors and Andromaches in a complication of parting embraces, and so
forth; for it was the absurd maxim of our forefathers, that because
these subjects had been the fashion twenty centuries ago, they must
remain so in saecula saeculorum; because to these lofty heights giants
had scaled, behold the race of pigmies must get upon stilts and jump at
them likewise! and on the canvas, and in the theatre, the French frogs
(excuse the pleasantry) were instructed to swell out and roar as much
as possible like bulls.
What was the consequence, my dear friend? In trying to make themselves
into bulls, the frogs make themselves into jackasses, as might be
expected. For a hundred and ten years the classical humbug oppressed
the nation; and you may see, in this gallery of the Beaux Arts, seventy
years’ specimens of the dulness which it engendered.
Now, as Nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave
him a character of his own too; and yet we, O foolish race! must try
our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit
us no more than their breeches! It is the study of nature, surely, that
profits us, and not of these imitations of her. A man, as a man, from a
dustman up to Æschylus, is God’s work, and good to read, as all works
of Nature are: but the silly animal is never content; is ever trying to
fit itself into another shape; wants to deny its own identity, and has
not the courage to utter its own thoughts. Because Lord Byron was
wicked, and quarrelled with the world; and found himself growing fat,
and quarrelled with his victuals, and thus, naturally, grew
ill-humored, did not half Europe grow ill-humored too? Did not every
poet feel his young affections withered, and despair and darkness cast
upon his soul? Because certain mighty men of old could make heroical
statues and plays, must we not be told that there is no other beauty
but classical beauty?—must not every little whipster of a French poet
chalk you out plays, “Henriades,” and such-like, and vow that here was
the real thing, the undeniable Kalon?
The undeniable fiddlestick! For a hundred years, my dear sir, the world
was humbugged by the so-called classical artists, as they now are by
what is called the Christian art (of which anon); and it is curious to
look at the pictorial traditions as here handed down. The consequence
of them is, that scarce one of the classical pictures exhibited is
worth much more than two-and-sixpence. Borrowed from statuary, in the
first place, the color of the paintings seems, as much as possible, to
participate in it; they are mostly of a misty, stony green, dismal hue,
as if they had been painted in a world where no color was. In every
picture, there are, of course, white mantles, white urns, white
columns, white statues—those obligé accomplishments of the sublime.
There are the endless straight noses, long eyes, round chins, short
upper lips, just as they are ruled down for you in the drawing-books,
as if the latter were the revelations of beauty, issued by supreme
authority, from which there was no appeal? Why is the classical reign
to endure? Why is yonder simpering Venus de’ Medicis to be our standard
of beauty, or the Greek tragedies to bound our notions of the sublime?
There was no reason why Agamemnon should set the fashions, and remain
[Greek text omitted] to eternity: and there is a classical quotation,
which you may have occasionally heard, beginning Vixere fortes, &c.,
which, as it avers that there were a great number of stout fellows
before Agamemnon, may not unreasonably induce us to conclude that
similar heroes were to succeed him. Shakspeare made a better man when
his imagination moulded the mighty figure of Macbeth. And if you will
measure Satan by Prometheus, the blind old Puritan’s work by that of
the fiery Grecian poet, does not Milton’s angel surpass
Æschylus’s—surpass him by “many a rood?”
In the same school of the Beaux Arts, where are to be found such a
number of pale imitations of the antique, Monsieur Thiers (and he ought
to be thanked for it) has caused to be placed a full-sized copy of “The
Last Judgment” of Michel Angelo, and a number of casts from statues by
the same splendid hand. There IS the sublime, if you please—a new
sublime—an original sublime—quite as sublime as the Greek sublime. See
yonder, in the midst of his angels, the Judge of the world descending
in glory; and near him, beautiful and gentle, and yet indescribably
august and pure, the Virgin by his side. There is the “Moses,” the
grandest figure that ever was carved in stone. It has about it
something frightfully majestic, if one may so speak. In examining this,
and the astonishing picture of “The Judgment,” or even a single figure
of it, the spectator’s sense amounts almost to pain. I would not like
to be left in a room alone with the “Moses.” How did the artist live
amongst them, and create them? How did he suffer the painful labor of
invention? One fancies that he would have been scorched up, like
Semele, by sights too tremendous for his vision to bear. One cannot
imagine him, with our small physical endowments and weaknesses, a man
like ourselves.
As for the Ecole Royale des Beaux Arts, then, and all the good its
students have done, as students, it is stark naught. When the men did
anything, it was after they had left the academy, and began thinking
for themselves. There is only one picture among the many hundreds that
has, to my idea, much merit (a charming composition of Homer singing,
signed Jourdy); and the only good that the Academy has done by its
pupils was to send them to Rome, where they might learn better things.
At home, the intolerable, stupid classicalities, taught by men who,
belonging to the least erudite country in Europe, were themselves, from
their profession, the least learned among their countrymen, only
weighed the pupils down, and cramped their hands, their eyes, and their
imaginations; drove them away from natural beauty, which, thank God, is
fresh and attainable by us all, to-day, and yesterday, and to-morrow;
and sent them rambling after artificial grace, without the proper means
of judging or attaining it.
A word for the building of the Palais des Beaux Arts. It is beautiful,
and as well finished and convenient as beautiful. With its light and
elegant fabric, its pretty fountain, its archway of the Renaissance,
and fragments of sculpture, you can hardly see, on a fine day, a place
more riant and pleasing.
Passing from thence up the picturesque Rue de Seine, let us walk to the
Luxembourg, where bonnes, students, grisettes, and old gentlemen with
pigtails, love to wander in the melancholy, quaint old gardens; where
the peers have a new and comfortable court of justice, to judge all the
émeutes which are to take place; and where, as everybody knows, is the
picture-gallery of modern French artists, whom government thinks worthy
of patronage.
A very great proportion of the pictures, as we see by the catalogue,
are by the students whose works we have just been to visit at the Beaux
Arts, and who, having performed their pilgrimage to Rome, have taken
rank among the professors of the art. I don’t know a more pleasing
exhibition; for there are not a dozen really bad pictures in the
collection, some very good, and the rest showing great skill and
smartness of execution.
In the same way, however, that it has been supposed that no man could
be a great poet unless he wrote a very big poem, the tradition is kept
up among the painters, and we have here a vast number of large
canvases, with figures of the proper heroical length and nakedness. The
anticlassicists did not arise in France until about 1827; and, in
consequence, up to that period, we have here the old classical faith in
full vigor. There is Brutus, having chopped his son’s head off, with
all the agony of a father, and then, calling for number two; there is
Æneas carrying off old Anchises; there are Paris and Venus, as naked as
two Hottentots, and many more such choice subjects from Lemprière.
But the chief specimens of the sublime are in the way of murders, with
which the catalogue swarms. Here are a few extracts from it:—
7. Beaume, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. “The Grand Dauphiness
Dying.”