preach, his homilies were singularly unimpressive. The pictures
which he painted when in this sermonizing vein have all the elements
that go to the making of what is now called melodrama. The scenes
are not the result of a discriminating observation of real life; are
not, to use Zola's phrase, "Nature seen through a temperament." They
are founded upon conventions, upon the artificial and sentimental
ideas of life that have by some curious freak of the human mind
established themselves in books and plays and pictures.
The figures in Greuze's _genre_ pictures pose before the spectators;
they gesticulate and overdo their parts like barn-stormers. Pity
becomes maudlin, morality degenerates into sanctimoniousness, and
humility is degraded into utter abasement. The sentimentality in _Un
Paralytique Soigné par sa Famille_, _ou le Fruit de la Bonne
Education_, and in _La Mère Paralytique_ is particularly nauseating,
and in _La Mère bien Aimée_ the exaggeration of what is in actual
life a very tender sentiment makes of that picture a very significant
example of Greuze's stilted manner. The six children--all of them
about the same age--who have flung themselves upon their mother, seem
so numerous, {36} and are so involved in a confused heap of humanity
that Madame Geoffrin spoke of the picture as a "fricassee of
children," and incurred thereby the fulminations of the artist. In
his _genre_ pictures, too, as is usual in melodrama elsewhere, the
humble cottage is the headquarters of all the virtues.
Greuze, it is true, made sketches for his pictures in the streets and
in the market-places; but there is none of the freshness of the
sketch when the figure appears on the canvas, and De Goncourt has
complained that little tatterdemalions with their split breeches have
become on their way to Greuze's canvases the Cupids of Boucher
dressed as Savoyards; and further, he has put in a mild demurrer that
the artist's washerwomen do not wash!
In strong contrast to Greuze's melodramatic, affected, domestic
scenes are those by Chardin, another French artist of the eighteenth
century. No ethical teaching is obtruded in his pictures; there is
no pose, and the spectator can enjoy the real poetry of life, the
sweetness and simplicity of well-ordered homes, undisturbed by the
poseurs who clamour for our regard in many of the pictures by Greuze.
[Illustration: THE PRETTY LAUNDRESS. (La Belle Blanchisseuse.)]
Another fault of Greuze's _genre_ pictures is their poverty and
feebleness of colour. There is a general deadness, and in parts an
abuse of purple and violet. Some of the tints have a dirty muddled
look, and the shadows are heavy and brown. Still the chief fault is
that art in {37} these pictures is relegated to a second place; the
pictures are a means, and not an end.
To see many of his _genre_ pictures together is to receive an
impression of monotony. It is clear that the range of the artist is
narrow, that he is making a few ideas cover a great area of canvas,
and that he ceased to grow intellectually at an early stage of his
career.
Greuze and Hogarth have often been compared, but there are many
essential differences between the two men. There was dissimilarity
in their temperaments, and while Greuze has adopted the attitude of a
mild-mannered Sabbath-school superintendent, towards those whose
immorality he would correct, Hogarth, as Professor Muther has
written, has "swung over this human animal the stout cudgel of
morality in the manner of a sturdy policeman and Puritan
_bourgeois_." Charles Normand explains the difference with some
disregard for international amenity. Greuze, he says, "did not paint
for the English, at once drunkards and theologians, maundering on
through life, with a pot of gin in one hand and a Bible in the other."
And yet Greuze is no Puritan, even when he preaches most. There is
often an air of coquetry and voluptuousness in his most serious
pictures. Charles Blanc has written that Greuze is a moralist who is
passionately fond of beautiful shoulders, a preacher who loves to see
and to reveal to us the bosoms of young girls; and Lady Dilke has
pointed out that "even in _Un {38} Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à
ses Enfants_ ... the instinct which bade him associate with his
lessons of grace and morality the stimulus of voluptuous charm has
tempted him to give prominence to the girl whose thoughts are far
away, and whose kerchief is torn just where it should hide the
budding breast."
But when criticism has said all it can say in dispraise of Greuze's
pictures, even of his _genre_ pictures, it may be seen that Greuze
was by temperament an artist. The melodramatic moralist was only
part of the man and not the whole. Even Robert Louis Stevenson had
"something of the Shorter-Catechist" in his constitution, and yet
remains the most romantic and interesting figure of the latter-day
world of letters.
It need not be forgotten that in the most theatrical works of Greuze
there are many beauties. There is often a figure in these otherwise
imperfect pictures which indicates his love for the beautiful, and in
some of his paintings, for instance in _Un Père de Famille qui lit la
Bible à ses Enfants_, the melodramatic element, though present, is
not obtrusive, and is more than compensated by the other qualities of
tenderness and graceful composition.
We may now consider the other class of Greuze's paintings, the heads
of children, and it is in these that Greuze is seen at his best; it
is in these that he redeems himself, and reveals more of the artist.
To-day, though his other works are scarcely ever mentioned, his heads
{39} of girls and boys are treasured in the most costly collections,
and are known far and wide by means of photographs and other
reproductions.
In many an art gallery the beautiful eyes of these pretty,
rosy-cheeked children meet our own, and we stay yet again to admire
their fresh lips and their brown hair, in which the piece of blue
ribbon nestles with such harmony of colouring. Often a light gauze
has been thrown round their necks or upon their shoulders, and often,
too, a posy of flowers tucked into the tops of their bodices emulates
the carnation and white of their complexions. There are few pictures
that are more sweet and alluring than these heads of children.
In London it is an easy matter to study Greuze's child portraits,
because there are a few examples at the National Gallery, and more at
Hertford House. Standing before these canvases the general effect is
one of sweetness and delicacy, one colour melting into another in
almost imperceptible gradations, and giving an impression very unlike
the one we receive from the hard edges of a painting by Maclise for
example. The colours are not positive, but have been softened and
harmonized. For instance, if a piece of white paper is held against
what may seem to be a piece of white drapery, it will be found that
the white has been modified into a beautiful delicate pearly gray.
The same test may be applied to the other colours. Hold a piece of
positive blue {40} near to one of Greuze's seemingly blue ribbons,
and it will be noticed that a similar modification has been effected.
The forms, too, have been rounded, and have been freed from all
angularities. Indeed, Greuze has carried this process as far as it
is possible. Too much of this smoothing and the picture would lose
in character, and would become but a vapid piece of work.
[Illustration: THE LISTENING GIRL.]
In the long series of heads of girls and boys that Greuze painted,
some of the pictures are conspicuously better than the rest. Of
these may be mentioned the _Head of a Young Girl Veiled in Black_,
which belongs to M. Leopold Goldschmidt, and two more which are in
the Museum at Besançon, _Paul Strogonoff_, _Infant_, and the _Head of
a Young Girl_. Also characteristic of Greuze at his best, and more
available to the people of this country, is _A Girl with Doves_. In
the year 1800 he exhibited at the Salon _L'Innocence tenant Deux
Pigeons_. It has not been definitely ascertained, but it is possible
that this is the beautiful picture that hangs now in the Wallace
Gallery. Few paintings by Greuze are more pleasing than this one.
The picture is well painted, and it is quite free from Greuze's
besetting sins. Where in other pictures one finds posturing and
affectation, one finds here the simplicity and sweetness of nature.
The painting was a commission from a Mr. Wilkinson, and Greuze
received 4,500 francs for it. When Mr. Wilkinson's pictures were
sold in 1828, Mr. Nieuwenhuys became {41} the purchaser, and he paid
245 guineas for the painting. Later the work became the property of
Mr. W. Wells, of Redleaf, and when, in 1848, his pictures were
dispersed, the Marquis of Hertford gave £787 10s. for this one, and
thus it has become part of the splendid collection at Hertford House,
now belonging to the nation. During the Manchester Exhibition of
1857 the public had a chance to see it there, and it was exhibited
again at Bethnal Green in 1874. Another picture in which Greuze's
style may be studied is _A Girl's Head, draped with a Scarf_. In
England this is one of the best-known of the artist's works. Thirty
and more years ago it was reproduced in popular publications, and it
has been reproduced many times since by various processes. By the
bequest of Mr. R. Simmons, the original picture has become the
property of the nation, and it is now the most characteristic example
of Greuze amongst those that hang in the National Gallery. Upon this
canvas one may see many of the qualities to which we have already
referred. There is more than a suspicion of mannerism in the way
that the hands are held, and one feels, concerning the shoulder,
that, beautiful as it is, it has been obtruded upon the notice of the
spectator with a somewhat free anatomical license. The half-open
mouth also gives an impression of affectation; and yet, when
criticism has pronounced its last word, the picture still remains
graceful and seductive.
Some of the faults of Greuze's manner which {42} have been noted in
his _genre_ pictures appear also in his heads of children. The girls
in a number of the pictures are too self-conscious and affected,
imperfections that one may see prominently illustrated in _Fidelity_
and in _Ariadne_, in the Wallace Collection.
A few, indeed, of Greuze's heads can scarcely be called paintings of
children at all, so many of the elements of womanhood has he mingled
with what is otherwise typical of childhood. As representations of
the charm and the insouciance of childhood, a painting by Greuze
would ill bear comparison, for example, with a work by Chardin
amongst his own compatriots, with works by Reynolds and Gainsborough;
or, to come to our time, with some of the children of Millais, with
Watts' _Agathoniké Hélène Ionides_, Whistler's _Miss Alexander_,
Mouat Loudan's _Isa_, John Lavery's _A Girl in White_, or with Edward
Arthur Walton's _The Girl in Brown_.
Most of the French critics who have written of Greuze have drawn
attention to this imperfection in the artist's paintings of children.
De Goncourt in some passages of searching criticism has written
regarding a number of these heads that they represent "the innocence
of Paris and of the eighteenth century, an easy innocence which is
near its fall." And De Goncourt, Diderot, and other writers have
pointed out that in many the head is the head of a girl on the body
of a woman; that Greuze has, in fact, put "young heads on old
shoulders." {43} Charles Blanc has written of _Une Jeune Fille qui
pleure la Mort de son Oiseau_, that the head is the head of a child,
but the grief is the grief of a woman; and he has added to this
criticism that it is rare to find in Greuze's pictures of this class
the head in harmony with the body.
Despite all these shortcomings, however, the pictures are charming,
but the appeal of Greuze will be specially to the young, who mark the
beauty only, and are unconscious of any pose or any incongruity.
In addition to the kinds of paintings we have mentioned, Greuze
showed that he was not quite free from the conventions of the period
by painting a few mythological, religious, and allegorical works, but
these are pictures which are not of any importance.
"Keep yourself free from formulas," he said to Count Henry Costa, but
therein he did not follow his own bidding. A writer in the _Nouvelle
Biographie Générale_ has recorded that during this era it was
accepted and taught that a sphere should be represented as though it
had many sides. Greuze at one time accepted this absurd dogma, and
in some of his pictures the chubby cheeks of children have been
painted as though they had facets. His most finished works, however,
are free from this blemish. Greuze's desire to be an historical
painter is more evidence that he was not without the conventional
ideas which have strangled art with such persistency.
{44}
Although Greuze sometimes sketched rapidly, yet his works are usually
the result of slow and laborious effort renewed again and again. His
plan was to return to his picture when he was at his best, and to
paint and repaint, no matter how often, until he felt that the work
was as free from faults as he could make it.
{45}
HIS POSITION IN FRENCH ART
During the seventeenth century France had not an art of her own. The
native painters derived their pictures from Roman or Grecian
traditions. They shut their eyes upon the beauties of Nature,
painted tedious repetitions of other people's notions, and could not
so much as paint their own King, Louis XIV., except as Cyrus or as
Alexander!
This period of dulness, pomposity, and general boredom was succeeded
by one of light and gaiety, when the joy and the colour of life
received recognition. To this consummation the supreme genius of
Watteau contributed some of the most exquisite and poetical pictures
of all time, and delivered France "from the oppressive yoke of the
Italian tradition." Watteau had many imitators, and his style
dominated art for many years, but eventually freedom degenerated into
license, and even into sheer obscenity. Count Henry Costa, visiting
Paris during this period, wrote in a letter to his parents in Savoy:
"Greuze, I think, is not partial to Boucher; and rightly loathes the
filthiness in fashion now, which desecrates art and ruins morality."
Boucher he described as {46} "an old worldling, more dissipated and
done up than you can imagine."
It is in the writings of Diderot that one can see, as well as in any
other place, an indication that towards the end of the eighteenth
century influential people in France were growing more and more
studious and serious. The ideas of Rousseau were taking possession
of the minds of other people. The nation must study Nature, and
discover her laws. Prejudices, authority, tradition, must all be
examined in the light of this new idea. Vice must be subdued,
artificiality, insincerity, luxury, false refinements, must be swept
away, and the people must return to a life of greater simplicity.
Man, by nature moral, had been corrupted by civilization, and it was
therefore the least civilized who were the least corrupt.
Ideas like these, set forth with the power and the burning zeal of
Rousseau, and with the deftness of Diderot, had prepared the minds of
the Parisians to receive the _genre_ pictures of Greuze, for to some
extent he is an advocate of these ideas in his pictures, seeing that
virtues are attributed in a generous measure to the poor and
downtrodden of the people.
It is thus that, breaking away from the style of the painters who did
little more than pander to the French Court, the pictures of Greuze
mark with perfect clearness the beginning of a new tendency which was
making itself felt in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century.
Instead of adding to the great store of _fêtes {47} galantes_, and
the triumphs of love of the time, Greuze looked for his subjects upon
the quays, and boulevards, and market-places, and in the cottages of
humble people.
"Courage, my good Greuze," said Diderot of one of Greuze's pictures
of domestic drama; "introduce morality into painting. What! has not
the palette been long enough, and too long, consecrated to debauchery
and vice? Ought we not to be delighted at seeing it at last, united
with dramatic poetry, in instructing, correcting us, and inviting us
to virtue?"
Living amidst such ideas as these, Greuze founded in France, in the
words of De Goncourt, "the deplorable school of the literary painter,
and the moralizing artist," or of "that barbaric, story-telling art,"
as Muther, writing in a similar strain, has described it.
It was this manner of painting that brought out what similarity there
is between Hogarth and Greuze, who has been called "a sentimental
Hogarth." Like the painter of _The Rake's Progress_, Greuze told
moral tales in a series of pictures in which virtue is exalted and
vice abashed, a kind of painting quite different from the pictures
which had hitherto been exhibited in Paris. Truly, as Charles
Normand has written, "the hour of the reaction against the pastorals
and the mythological insipidities of Boucher had sounded. It was
Greuze who was the pioneer in the new departure, and he reaped the
reward. His fault is that he replaced one convention by another."
Hitherto {48} the Court had been all in all, but now had arrived, in
the phrase of Charles Blanc, "l'usurpation bourgeoise."
Yet though Greuze thus parted from his predecessors, and, at his
best, went along the line of progress towards a study of Nature at
first hand, he brought about no violent change such as was seen in
England when Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites broke in upon the
complacent mediocrities who represented art in England during early
Victorian times.
Though he preached against the ardent sensuality of his era, his own
pictures were not wholly free from it, and in the collection at
Hertford House his _L'Offrande a l'Amour_, and particularly _La
Bacchante_, strike no new note amongst the other paintings of the
same period. There is not the great difference that would be noticed
if an early Millais were to be hung amidst a collection of the works
of Maclise, Landseer, Collins, Newton, Leslie, Mulready, and Webster.
Greuze did not free France in the same way that the Pre-Raphaelites
loosed the bonds of convention and tradition in our own country.
Greuze founded no school, and indeed outlived his own movement; for
he and Fragonard were left in hopeless isolation when the Revolution
overwhelmed France. There are few more pathetic passages in the
lives of painters than those which relate how, for the sake of their
daily bread, these poor old men made {49} ineffectual attempts,
Fragonard with his _Le Grand Prêtre Corésus se sacrifie pour sauver
Callirrhoé_, and Greuze with his _Ariadne at Naxos_, to adapt
themselves to the new situation.
The Revolution, so far from freeing art in France, brought about,
under David--excellent as he was as a painter of portraits--a
reaction to a "barren, wearisome classicism," represented by pictures
which are now absolutely without attraction. Instead of studying
Nature, the painters studied the statues and the friezes of the
ancients. They became antiquaries and geometricians, and left the
open air to weary themselves in musty libraries, in the pursuit of
archæological accuracy. Formulas and conventions, traditions and
self-constituted authority were once more exalted upon pedestals, and
the century which opened with the "pipes and timbrels" of Watteau
closed with the prosing of the most tedious bores.
So successfully did David put back the clock, that it was not until
the nineteenth century was nearly thirty years of age that the
artists of France, inspired, as we love to think, by our own John
Constable, issued from the house of bondage to study Nature in the
forest of Fontainebleau.
{50}
OUR ILLUSTRATIONS
_The Kiss_ (_Le Baiser Jeté_).--Although this work has not been
reproduced so many times as _La Cruche Cassée_, it yet ranks with
that painting as one of the most fascinating of the works of Greuze.
A young woman looks from the window of her room. She has received a
letter from the hands of her lover, to whom she throws a kiss as he
departs. In his treatment of this subject Greuze has shown that it
was not a lack of capacity that caused him sometimes to lapse into
melodrama. His acute feeling for what is beautiful has been
expressed on this canvas with remarkable skill. Writing of the
painting in 1765, Diderot called it "a charming picture," and Charles
Normand, in giving a description of the work, has written: "The
eighteenth century, amorous and unrestrained, has been made to live
again in that woman, who, her eyes full of longing, her mouth partly
opened, her throat scarcely veiled by a light gauze, throws from her
window a kiss to her lover. The seductive shapeliness of her neck,
the expression of love, the hand carried tenderly to her lips, the
whole effect of her beautiful figure, which palpitates at the sight
of her lover, justifies the title of _La {51} Voluptueuse_ which the
painter has also given to the picture." A copy of this painting, by
C. Turner, was sold in London in 1902 for £136.
[Illustration: THE KISS. (Le Baiser Jeté.)]
_The Village Bride_ (_L'Accordée de Village_).--This is the short
title of the work "Un Mariage à l'instant où le père de l'accordée
délivre la dot à son gendre." The first title was _Un Père qui vient
de payer la dot de sa Fille_. The scene is a great country kitchen,
which has a freedom from furniture that is refreshing in these days
of senseless overcrowding. Stone steps lead from the kitchen to an
upper chamber. A shelf, a gun, a lantern, a great cupboard, and a
few chairs and a table, would almost complete an inventory of the
movables. Twelve people, arranged as though they were on the stage
of a theatre, or for a _tableau vivant_, take part in the scene. The
parish official, sitting at a small table, has registered the
marriage, and one of the children toys with the document. The father
of the bride, a venerable old man with white hair, has just handed to
his son-in-law a small leather bag, containing his daughter's
marriage portion, and he is now holding forth in true melodramatic
style, his face to the gallery, and, as one may fancy, the limelight
streaming on his head. The bridegroom, a tall, handsome fellow,
listens in a respectful attitude; and the pretty bride, whose eyes
are downcast, has her arm linked in his, and the fingers of one hand
are laid lovingly upon one of his hands. Her other arm is held by
her mother, {52} a comely matron, dressed in simple and picturesque
attire. The bride's sisters and brother watch with intense interest,
except one little girl of five or six years, who feeds a hen and
chickens on the kitchen floor. Another sister has her head upon the
bride's shoulder, and a third is weeping. In the incident of one of
the chickens, balanced on the edge of the dish of water, trying its
wings, some writers have seen an allegorical reference to the
marriage. It is said that the head of the bride is a portrait of
Mademoiselle Ducreux when she was fifteen years of age. In this
painting Greuze's tendency to cause his figures to assume
self-conscious poses is apparent; but there is not so much of
theatricality here as to spoil the picture, and thus one may still
derive some pleasure from a contemplation of the scene. It is
interesting to remember that this is the picture which caused such a
sensation during the last few days of the Salon of 1761. It was
bought by Monsieur de Marigny for 3,000 livres, and at the sale of
his pictures, twenty years later, the price paid for it was 16,650
livres. The picture is now in the Louvre in Paris. It has often
been reproduced. During the life of the artist it was engraved by
Flipart, and then was reproduced in colours by Alix. Greuze also
painted a replica of the picture.
[Illustration: ROBESPIERRE.]