When the potter's daughter of remote antiquity first drew the incised
line around her lover's shadow cast upon the wall by the accomplice
sun, art had its birth. Before that time primitive man had
endeavored--with who knows what desire to leave behind him some trace
of his passage upon earth--to make upon bones rude tracings of
his surroundings. The proof of the universality of art is in these
manifestations, of which the logical outcome was the complete and
splendid art of Greece. Through the sequence of Byzantine art we
come to Giotto, who, a shepherd's son under the skies of Italy, was
reinspired at the source of nature, and became the first painter as
we to-day know painting. From Giotto descends in direct line the great
family of artists who, in the service of the spiritual and temporal
sovereigns of the earth, shed illustration upon their craft and
undying lustre on their names until the old order, changing, giving
way to the new, enfranchised art in the great upheaval of the latter
part of the eighteenth century.
It is well, in order to understand the position in which this great
revolution left art, to briefly consider the conditions preceding
it. Painting, up to the end of the seventeenth century, had been
essentially the handmaiden of religion; and religion in its turn had
been so closely allied to the state that, when declining faith let
down the barriers, art took for the first time its place among the
liberal professions whose first duty is to find in the necessities
of mankind a reason for their existence. Small wonder, then, that,
accustomed to be fostered and encouraged, to be held aloof from the
material necessity of earning their daily bread, the artists of this
period sought protection from the only class which in those days
had the leisure to appreciate or the fortune to encourage them. The
people, the "general public," as we say to-day, did not exist, except
as a mass of patient workers in the first part, as a clamorous rabble
demanding its rights in the latter part, of the century. Hence the
patronage of art, its very existence, depended on the pleasure of the
nobility, and naturally enough its themes were measured according to
the tastes of its patrons. Much that was charming was produced, but
never before did art portray its epoch with such great limitations.
The persistent blindness to the signs and portents gathering thick
about them which characterized the higher classes of the time, may be
felt in its art; of the great outside world, of the hungry masses so
soon to rise in rebellion, nothing is seen. One may walk through the
palaces at Versailles, may search through the pictures of the epoch in
the Louvre, or linger at Sans Souci in Potsdam--where Frederick filled
his house with sculptured duchesses in classical costume playing
at Diana, and covered his walls with Watteaus and his ceilings with
decorations by Pesne, a less worthy Frenchman--and remain in complete
ignorance of hungry Jacques, who, with pike-staff and guillotine, was
so soon to change all that and usher in the period of the Revolution,
Before the evil day dawned for the gilded gentry of France, however,
the British colonies in America, influenced by the teachings of the
precursors of the French Revolution, and aided by their isolation,
were to establish their independence.
[Illustration: JACQUES LOUIS DAVID AS A YOUNG MAN. FROM A PAINTING BY
HIMSELF.
The exact date of this picture is unknown; but it was, presumably,
painted before 1775, when David, having received the Prix de Rome,
went to Italy for the first time. It was given to the Louvre, where it
now is, by the painter Eugene Isabey in 1852; David had presented it
to the elder Isabey, also a painter.]
It was undoubtedly at this time, when revolt was in the air and man
was preoccupied with his primal right to liberty of existence, that
art was given the bad name of a luxury. Until its long prostitution
throughout the seventeenth century, its mission had been noble; but
now, coincident to the fall of the old _régime_, the people, from an
ignorance which was more their misfortune than their fault, confounded
art with luxuries more than questionable, in which their whilom
superiors had indulged while they lacked bread. With the curious
assumption of Spartan virtue which rings with an almost convincing
sound of true metal through so many of the resolutions passed by the
National Convention of France, in the days following the holocaust of
the Reign of Terror, there was serious debate as to whether pictures
and statues were to be permitted to exist or their production
encouraged.
This debate must have fallen strangely on the ears of one of the
members of the Convention, who had already made his power as an artist
felt, and who was from that time for more than forty years to be the
directing influence, not only of French art, but of painting on the
Continent in general. This man, Jacques Louis David, in point of fact
was soon practically to demonstrate to his colleagues that art had
as its mission other aims than those followed by the painters of the
preceding generations. It fell that Lepelletier, one of the members of
the Convention, was assassinated, and David's brush portrayed him as
he lay dead; and the picture, being brought into the legislative hall,
moved the entire assembly to a conviction that the art of the painter
struck a human chord which vibrated deep in the heart of man.
[Illustration: MICHEL GÉRARD AND HIS FAMILY. FROM A PAINTING BY DAVID.
Michel Gérard was a member of the National Assembly, the body which
ruled France in the first years of the Revolution, from 1789 to 1791.
The picture represents him in the midst of his family, attired with
the simplicity affected by the Revolutionary leaders at that time.]
But a little later, when Marat, "the Friend of Man," was stricken
down, a voice rose in the Convention, "Where art thou, David?" And
again, responding to the call, he painted the picture of the dead
demagogue lying in his bath, his pen in hand, a half-written screed on
a rude table improvised by placing a board across the tub; and again
the picture, more eloquent, more explanatory of character and of
epoch than any written page of history, was a convincing argument that
painting was not a plaything.
Born August 21, 1748, a man over fifty years of age when this century
commenced, David may yet be considered entirely our own; for the ideas
of his country, despite minor influences that have affected modern
art, have prevailed in the art of all other countries, and these
principles were largely formulated by him. France has been throughout
this century the only country which has steadfastly encouraged art,
with a system of education unsurpassed in any epoch, and by the
maintenance of a standard which, however rebellious at times, every
serious artist has been and is obliged to acknowledge. A cousin--or,
as some authorities have it, a grand-nephew--of Boucher (the artist
who best typifies the frivolity of the art of the eighteenth century,
so that there is grim humor in the thought that this iconoclast was of
his blood), David was twenty-seven years of age when, in 1775, he won
the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to go to Italy for four years at
the expense of the government. He was the pupil of Vien, a painter
whose chief merit it was to have inspired his pupil with a hatred of
the frivolous Pompadour art of the epoch; and David only obtained the
coveted prize after competing five successive years. It is instructive
to learn that of this first sojourn at Rome almost nothing remains in
the way of painting; for the young artist, endowed with the patience
which is, according to Goethe, synonomous with genius, devoted all his
time to drawing from the antique.
It was here and during this time, doubtless, that he formed his
conviction that painting of the highest type must conform to classical
tradition--that all nature was to be remoulded in the form of antique
sculpture. But it was also at this time, and owing to his stern
apprenticeship to the study of form, that he acquired the mastery of
drawing which served him so well when in the presence of nature; and
with no other preoccupation than to reproduce his model, he painted
the people of his time and produced his greatest works. For by a
strange yet not unprecedented contradiction, David's fame to-day
rests, not upon the great classical pictures which were the admiration
of his time and by which he thought to be remembered, but on the
portraits which, with his mastery of technical acquirement, he painted
with surprising truth and reality.
The time was propitious, however, for David. France, the seeds of
revolution germinating in its soil, looked upon the Republic of Rome
as the type from which a system could be evolved that would usher in
a new day of virtuous government; and when, after a second visit to
Rome, David returned home with a picture representing the oath of the
Horatii, Paris received him with open arms. The picture was exhibited,
and viewed by crowds, burning, doubtless, in their turn to have
weapons placed in their hands with which to conquer their liberties.
This was in 1786; but years after, in the catalogue of the Salon
of 1819, we read this note: "The Oath of the Horatii, the first
masterpiece which restored to the French school of painting the purity
of antique taste."
At the outbreak of the Revolution David abandoned painting; and
on January 17, 1793, as a member of the Convention, voted for the
execution of Louis XVI. It was during this period that were painted
his pictures of Lepelletier and Marat, in which his cold, statuesque,
and correct manner was revivified and warmed to life--paradoxically
enough, to paint death. A friend of Robespierre, he was carried down
at the overthrow of the "little lawyer from Arras," and imprisoned
in the Luxembourg. His wife--who had left him at the outset of his
political life, horrified at the excesses of the time--now rejoined
him in his misfortune; and inspired by her devotion, David made the
first sketch of the Sabine women.
Released from prison October 26, 1795, he returned to his art; and
in 1800 the Sabines was exhibited in a room in the Louvre, where it
remained for more than five years, during which time it constantly
attracted visitors, and brought to the painter in entrance fees more
than thirteen thousand dollars. Early in the career of Napoleon, David
had attracted his attention; and he had vainly endeavored to induce
the artist to accompany him on the Egyptian campaign. On the accession
of Napoleon as Emperor, therefore, we find in the Salon catalogues,
"Monsieur David, first painter to his Imperial Majesty," in place of
plain "Citizen David" of the Revolutionary years.
Napoleon ordered from David four great paintings. The Coronation and
the Distribution of Flags alone were painted when the overthrow of the
Empire, and the loyalty of David to his imperial patron, caused him to
be exiled in 1816. He went to Brussels, where, on December 29, 1825,
he died. The Bourbons, masters of France, refused to allow his body to
be brought back to his country; but Belgium gave him a public funeral,
after which he was laid to rest in the Cathedral of Brussels.
[Illustration: POPE PIUS VII. FROM A PAINTING FROM LIFE BY DAVID, NOW
IN THE LOUVRE.
Pius VII. was the Pope who, in 1804, consecrated Napoleon I. as
Emperor of France. Later he opposed Napoleon's aggressions, and was
imprisoned for it, first in Italy and afterwards in France. In 1814
he recovered his freedom and his dominions, temporal as well as
spiritual. The above picture is, perhaps, the best example of what may
be termed the official portrait (as the preceding picture is of the
familiar portrait) of David. It was painted in 1805, in the apartment
assigned to the Pope in the Tuileries.]
This dominant artistic influence of France in the first quarter of
this century is not entirely extinguished to-day. The classical spirit
has never been entirely absent from any intellectual manifestation of
the French; but in David and his pupils it was carried to an extremity
against which the painters of the next generation were to struggle
almost hopelessly. Time, which sets all things right, has placed
David in his proper place; and while to-day we may admire the immense
knowledge of the man as manifested in the great classical pictures,
like the Horatii, the Sabines, or the Leonidas at Thermopylæ,
we remain cold before their array of painted statues. His
portraits--Marat, the charming sketch of Madame Recamier, his own
portrait as a young man, the group of Michel Gérard and his family,
and the Pope Pius VII.--give the touch of nature which is needed to
kindle the fire of humanity in this man of iron.
[Illustration: JUSTICE AND DIVINE VENGEANCE PURSUING CRIME. FROM A
PAINTING BY PRUD'HON.
This picture was painted for the Criminal Court of the Palace of
Justice in Paris. At the time of the Restoration in 1816 the picture
was replaced by a crucifix, and removed to the Luxembourg gallery,
where it remained until 1823, when it was placed in the Louvre. It is
considered Prud'hon's masterpiece.]
It is as though nature had wished a contrast to this coldly
intellectual type that there should have existed at the same time
a painter who, seeking at the same inexhaustible fountain-head of
classicism, found inspiration for an art almost morbid in excess of
sentiment. Pierre Prud'hon was born at Cluny in Burgundy, April 4,
1758, the son of a poor mason who, dying soon after the boy's birth,
left him to the care of the monks of the Abbey of Cluny. The pictures
decorating the monastery visibly affecting the youth, the Bishop of
Macon placed him under the tuition of one Desvoges, who directed
the school of painting at Dijon. Here his progress was rapid, but at
nineteen the too susceptible youth married a woman whose character and
habits were such that his life was rendered unhappy thenceforward.
In 1780 Prud'hon went to Paris to prosecute his studies; and there,
two years after, was awarded a prize, founded by his province, which
enabled him to go to Rome. It is characteristic of the man that, in
the competition for this prize, he was so touched by the despair of
one of his comrades competing with him that he repainted completely
his friend's picture--with such success that it was the friend to
whom the prize was awarded, and who, but for a tardy awakening of
conscience, would have gone to Rome in his place.
The judgment rectified, Prud'hon went to Rome, where he stayed seven
years, studying Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and above all Correggio,
whose influence is manifest in his work, and returned to Paris in
1789. Unknown, and timid by nature, he attracted little attention, and
for some years gained his living by designing letter-heads, visiting
cards, which were then of an ornate description, and the many trifles
which constitute a present resource to the unsuccessful painter even
to-day.
[Illustration: THE ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN. FROM A PAINTING BY
PRUD'HON.
This picture was ordered by the Emperor Napoleon for the chapel of
the Tuileries. It was exhibited in the Salon of 1819, and, after the
Revolution of 1848, was removed from the Tuileries to the Louvre,
where it has since remained.]
It was not until 1796 that some of the charming drawings which he had
made commenced to attract attention. A series of designs illustrating
Daphnis and Chloe, for the publishing house of Didot _ainé_,
were particularly noticeable; and through this work he made the
acquaintance of M. Frochot, by whose influence he received a
commission for a decoration for the palace of St. Cloud, which is now
placed in the Louvre.
[Illustration: HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE. FROM A DRAWING BY PRUD'HON.
This charming drawing, which forms part of the collection in the
Louvre, is a study for a projected painting, and is, by its grace of
line and composition, peculiarly typical of the painter. Hector, about
to depart for his combat with Ajax, and having bidden farewell to
Andromache, his wife, desires to embrace his son. But the child,
frightened at the emotion of which he is witness, takes refuge in his
mother's arms.]
Life now became somewhat easier, and in 1803--having long been
separated from his wife--a talented young woman, Mlle. Mayer, became
his pupil, and relations of a more tender character were established.
The pictures of Mlle. Mayer are influenced by her master to a degree
that makes them minor productions of his own; and her unselfish,
though unconsecrated, devotion to him makes up the sum of the little
happiness which he may have had.
In 1808 Prud'hon's picture of Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing
Crime was ordered for the Palace of Justice, and was shown at the
Salon of that year, where the presence of David's Sabines and its
influence as shown in many of the productions of his pupils were not
enough to rob Prud'hon of a legitimate success, and the cross of the
Legion of Honor was accorded him. The Assumption of the Virgin was
exhibited in 1819; but before that Prud'hon had been made a member of
the Institute, and (it passed for a distinction) drawing-master to the
Empress Marie Louise.
Many pictures, all characterized by a subtile charm, were produced
during this happy period; but in 1821 Mlle. Mayer, preyed upon by her
false position, committed suicide, and Prud'hon lingered in continual
sorrow until February 16, 1823, when he died. The work of Prud'hon
covers a wide range, of which not the least important are the drawings
which he made with a lavish hand. As has been observed, he was a true
child of his time, and the classic influence is strongly felt in his
work; but translated through his temperament, it is no longer lifeless
and cold. It is eloquent of the early ages of the world, when life was
young and maturity and age bore the impress of a simple life, little
perplexed by intricate problems of existence. Throughout his work,
in the recreation of the myths of antiquity or in the rarer
representation of Christian legend, his style is sober and
dignified--as truly classic as that of David; but permeating it all
is the indescribable essence of beauty and youth, the reflection,
undoubtedly, of a man who, rarely fortunate, capable of grave
mistakes, has nevertheless left much testimony to the love and esteem
in which he was held.
François Gérard, one of the many faithful followers of David, was born
May 4, 1770, at Rome, where his father had gone in the service of the
ambassador of France. He went to France in his twelfth year, and at
sixteen was enrolled in the school of David. As a docile pupil he
entered the competition for the Roman prize in 1789; but Girodet
having obtained the first place, a second prize was awarded, and the
next year the death of his father prevented him from finishing his
competition picture; so that he is one of the exceptions amongst
David's pupils, inasmuch as he did not obtain the Prix de Rome. In
1790, however, he accompanied his mother, who was an Italian, to
her native country. But his sojourn there was short, as in 1793
he solicited the influence of David to save him from the general
conscription; which was done by naming him a member of the
Revolutionary tribunal. By taking refuge in his studio and feigning
illness, he avoided the exercise of his judicial functions; and the
storm passing away, he exhibited in 1795 a picture of Belisarius which
attracted attention.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN. FROM A PAINTING BY PRUD'HON,
IN THE LOUVRE.]
In 1806 Napoleon made him the official portrait painter attached
to his court, and ordered the picture of the battle of Austerlitz,
finished in 1810. This and indeed all of Gérard's pictures are marked
by all the defects of David's methods, and lack the virile quality of
his master. His portraits, however, have many qualities of grace and
good taste, and his success in France was somewhat analogous to that
of Lawrence in England. Under the Restoration his vogue continued; in
1819 he was given the title of baron; and, dying in Paris on January
11, 1837, he left as his legacy to the art of his time no less
than twenty-eight historical pictures, many of great dimensions,
eighty-seven full-length portraits, and over two hundred smaller
portraits, representing the principal men and women of his time. The
portraits of the Countess Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely and of the
Princess Visconti are both excellent specimens of the work of this
estimable painter.
[Illustration: PRUD'HON. FROM A PEN DRAWING BY HIMSELF.]
Of the pictures which testify to the industry and talent of
Louis-Léopold Boilly, who was born at La Bassée, near Lille, on July
5, 1761, the Louvre possesses but one specimen; namely, the Arrival of
a Diligence before the coach-office in Paris. This is undoubtedly due
to the fact that with the preoccupation of the public mind with the
events of the time, and the prevailing taste for great historical
pictures, Boilly's art, so sincere and so intimate in character, was
underestimated. It is certainly not due to any lack of industry on the
part of the painter. Even at the age of eleven years he undertook to
paint, for a religious fraternity of his native town, two pictures
representing the miracles of St. Roch. These still exist, and they are
said to be meritorious. His facility in seizing the resemblance of
his sitter was evidently native, for when only thirteen years of age,
without instruction of any kind, he left his parents, and established
himself as a portrait painter first at Douai and afterwards at Arras.
In 1786 he went to Paris, where he lived until his death. Here
he painted a great number of pictures of small size, representing
familiar scenes of the streets and of the homes of Paris, and an
incredible number of portraits.
[Illustration: THE PRINCESS VISCONTI. FROM A PAINTING BY
FRANÇOIS-PASCAL-SIMON (BARON) GÉRARD.
The picture gives an interesting study of the costume of the First
Empire, and is a work conceived in the style of the time when the
recent publication of "Corinne" by Madame de Staël had influenced the
popular taste. The original painting is now in the Louvre.]
A valiant craftsman, happy in his work, following no school but that
of nature, careless of official honor (which came to him only when,
late in life, on the demand of the Academy, the government accorded
him the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1833), his life was
uneventful. But his little pictures pleased the people who saw
themselves so truthfully depicted, and to-day they are more highly
esteemed than are the works of many of his at-the-time esteemed
contemporaries. He painted for seventy-two years, produced more
than five thousand portraits, an incredible number of pictures and
drawings, and died, his brush in hand, on January 5, 1845. The
little picture of the Arrival of a Diligence presents, with exquisite
truthfulness, a Paris unlike the brilliant city of our day, the
Paris where Arthur Young in his travels in 1812 notes the absence of
sidewalks; a city inhabited by slim ladies dressed _à la Grecque_, and
by high-stocked gentlemen content to travel by post. It is a canvas of
more value than the pretentious and tiresome historical compositions
of the time, and suggests the reflection that many of the David pupils
might have been better employed in putting their scientific accuracy
of drawing to the service of rendering the life which they saw about
them, instead of producing the arid stretches of academy models posing
as Hector or Romulus.
Guillaume-Guillon Lethière, a painter in whose veins there was an
admixture of negro blood, would hardly have echoed the sentiments
of this last paragraph, as he lived and worked in the factitious
companionship of the Greeks and Romans. So clearly, however, does the
temperament of a painter inspire the character of his work that we
may be glad that this was the case; for, of his school, Lethière alone
infuses into his classicism something of the turbulent life which
marked his own character.
[Illustration: THE COUNTESS REGNAULT DE SAINT-JEAN-D'ANGELY. FROM A
PAINTING BY BARON GÉRARD, IN THE LOUVRE.]
Born in Guadeloupe January 10, 1760, coming to Paris when very young,
he took the second prize of Rome in 1784, with a picture of such merit
that the regulation was infringed and he was given leave to go to Rome
at the same time as the winner of the first prize. His first picture
was exhibited in the form of a sketch in the Salon of 1801; and not
until eleven years after was the great canvas of Brutus Condemning his
Sons to Death shown at the Salon of 1812. The other picture by which
he is best known, the Death of Virginia, is, like the preceding, in
the Louvre; and though the sketch of this was exhibited in 1795, the
picture only took definite form in 1828.
[Illustration: THE ARRIVAL OF A DILIGENCE. FROM A PAINTING BY
LOUIS-LÉOPOLD BOILLY.
This picture, now in the Louvre, is the only example of this artist's
work shown there, and is particularly interesting as showing the Paris
of 1803, when the streets had no sidewalks. The scene is laid at
the place of arrival and departure of the coaches which from Paris
penetrated into all parts of France, and were the only means of
transport or communication.]
Meanwhile Lethière had travelled much in England and Spain, and had
been for ten years director of the French School of Fine Arts in Rome.
His life was adventurous, and it is told of him that he was often
involved in quarrels, and fought a number of duels with military
officers because, humble civilian that he was, he yet dared to wear
the mustache! In 1822 he returned definitely to Paris, where he was
made a member of the Institute and professor in the School of Fine
Arts, and where he died April 21, 1832. The quality of his work is
well characterized by Charles Blanc, who writes of it "as producing
the effect of a tragedy sombre and pathetic."
The picture of the Burial of Atala, from Châteaubriand's well-known
story, is interesting as showing the methods of the David school
applied to subjects of less heroic mould than the master and his
disciples were wont to treat. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy Trioson,
born at Montargis January 3, 1767, was one of the most convinced
adherents of his master David; and while competing for the Prize
of Rome, which he won in 1789, was accustomed each morning before
beginning his work to station himself in front of David's picture of
the Horatii as before a shrine, invoking its happy influence. Such
devotion received its official reward, and after five years spent
in Rome his great (and tiresome) picture of the Deluge met with
the greatest favor, and in 1810 was awarded the medal for the best
historical picture produced in the preceding decade. The Burial of
Atala, painted in 1808, is, however, a work of charm in composition
and sentiment; and though in color it is dry and uninteresting, is
not unworthy of the popularity which it has enjoyed from the vantage
ground of the Louvre for more than four-score years. Girodet died in
Paris, December 9, 1824, after having received all the official honors
which France can award to a painter.
The charming face of Marie-Anne-Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who, with
the arms of her daughter encircling her, smiles on us here, was
undoubtedly not painted in this century, as the painter was born
in Paris April 16, 1755, and it is as a young mother that she has
represented herself. But as its author lived until March 30, 1842,
she should undoubtedly figure among the painters of this century. From
early girlhood until old age,
"_Lebrun, de la beauté le peintre et le modèle._"
as Laharpe sang, was, though largely self-taught, a formidable
concurrent to painters of the sterner sex. Married when very young
to Lebrun, a dealer in pictures and critic of art, a pure marriage of
convention, she left France shortly before the Revolution, and went
to Italy. Before her departure she was high in favor at the court, and
painted no less than twenty portraits of Marie Antoinette.
[Illustration: BRUTUS CONDEMNING HIS SONS TO DEATH. FROM A PAINTING BY
LETHIÈRE.
Brutus led in overthrowing the tyranny of Tarquin the Proud and
establishing a republic in Rome. He was then elected one of the
two consuls. His two sons were detected in a conspiracy to restore
Tarquin, and he, as consul, himself condemned them to death.]
[Illustration: THE BURIAL OF ATALA. FROM A PAINTING BY GIRODET, IN THE
LOUVRE.
Atala, the heroine of a romance by Châteaubriand, was the daughter of
a North American Indian chief, passionately in love with the chief
of another tribe, with whom she fled into the desert. But having been
religiously vowed to virginity by her mother, she remains faithful to
the vow, and finally in despair poisons herself.]
[Illustration: MADAME LEBRUN AND HER DAUGHTER. FROM A PAINTING BY
MADAME LEBRUN HERSELF.
This picture, painted for a private patron, passed, at the period of
the French Revolution, into the possession of the French nation, and
is now in the Louvre. There is in the Louvre also another by Madame
Lebrun, representing herself and her daughter, one which the artist
bequeathed to the Louvre at her death, in 1842. Of the two, while
both are charming, the one here printed represents the painter at her
best.]
Fortune favored her in Italy, whence she went to Vienna, Prague,
Dresden, and Berlin. In each and every capital the same success,
due to her talent, beauty, and amiability, followed her; and at last
arriving in St. Petersburg, she remained there until 1801, when she
returned to Paris. Some time after, she visited England, where she
remained three years, and then returned by way of Holland to France
in 1809. The Academy of France and the academies of all other European
countries admitted her to membership.
Indefatigable as a worker during her long career, she produced an
immense number of portraits; and while she painted comparatively few
subject pictures, she arranged her models in so picturesque a fashion
that, as in the example here given, her portraits have great charm of
composition. With a virile grasp of form, tempered though it be with
grace, Madame Lebrun offers an interesting example of woman's work
in art; and, while she has nothing to concede to the painters of her
time, is no less interesting as showing that by force of native
talent the woman of the early part of the century had in her power the
conquest of nearly all the desired rights of the New Woman. She has
left extremely interesting memoirs of her life, written in her old
age, and there are many anecdotes bearing testimony to her wit. One of
these goes back to the time when Louis XVIII., then a youth, enlivened
the sittings for his portrait by singing, quite out of tune. "How do
you think I sing?" inquired he. "Like a prince," responded the amiable
artist.
With Antoine Jean Gros we come to the last and the greatest of the
pupils of David. Born in Paris March 16, 1771, he competed but once,
in 1792, for the Prix de Rome, was unsuccessful, but undertook the
voyage thither on his own slender resources the next year. Italy was
in a troubled state--he who troubled all Europe in the early years
of the century being there at the head of his army; and in 1796, at
Genoa, Gros attracted the attention of Madame Bonaparte. It was she
who proposed that Gros should paint Napoleon; and Gros consequently
went to Milan, and after the battle of Arcole painted the hero
carrying the tricolor across the bridge at the head of his grenadiers.
The picture pleased Bonaparte, who had it engraved, and gave Gros a
commission to collect for the Louvre the chief artistic treasures of
Italy. These functions occupied him until 1801, during which period,
however, he executed a number of successful portraits.
Returning to Paris after nine years, he painted the Hospital at
Jaffa, representing Napoleon visiting the fever-stricken soldiers.
The success of this picture, exhibited in 1804, was very great; and
it remains Gros's best title to remembrance. In it is something of
the reality poetized and seen through the eyes of an artist which
characterizes the work of Eugene Delacroix.
The force of David, however, was too great for Gros; at fifty years of
age we find him demanding counsel of the master, who sternly bids him
leave his "futile subjects," and devote his time to great historical
epochs of the past. When David was sent into exile in 1816, it was to
Gros that he confided the direction of his school; and this task, and
the production of immense canvases like the Battle of the Pyramids,
filled his life. The picture here reproduced, the Visit of Charles the
Fifth and Francis the First to the Tombs of the Kings in the Cathedral
of St. Denis, was painted in 1812.
[Illustration: FRANCIS I., KING OF FRANCE, AND CHARLES V., EMPEROR OF
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, VISITING THE TOMBS OF THE FRENCH KINGS AT ST.
DENIS. FROM A PAINTING BY BARON GROS, IN THE LOUVRE.
Between 1520 and 1545 all Europe was kept in distress and turmoil by
a quarrel between Francis I. and Charles V., the chief subject of
contention being the duchy of Milan, which Charles held and Francis
claimed. Four separate wars were waged by Francis against Charles,
all of them unsuccessful. But their majesties had intervals of outward
friendship, and in one of these Francis invited Charles, then setting
out from Spain for the Low Countries, to pass through France and visit
him. The visit was duly paid, was one of great state and ceremony,
and from it is derived the incident portrayed in the above picture.
Francis is the figure in the centre; Charles, suited in black,
standing at his right.]
The revolt which was already making itself felt in French art was
a thorn in the flesh of the sensitive Gros. In vain were all the
artistic honors showered upon him. In 1824 he was made a baron; since
1816 he had been a member of the Institute; and the crosses of most of
the orders of Europe, and the medals of all the exhibitions were his.
Nevertheless, about him younger painters revolted. In his secret soul,
doubtless, he felt sympathy with their methods. But the commands of
the terrible old exile of Brussels were still in his ears.
Finally a portrait of King Charles X., the decorations in the Museum
of Sovereigns, and a picture exhibited in the Salon of 1835 were in
turn harshly criticized by the press, which looked with favor on the
younger men; and Gros, full of years, and of honors which had brought
fortune in their train, was found drowned in a little arm of the Seine
near Meudon, June 26, 1835. In despair he had taken his own life. With
him died David's greatest pupil and a part of David's influence. But
that portion of the teachings of the master most consonant with
French character is not without effect to-day. Less strong than in the
generation following David, absolutely extinct if we are to believe
the extremists among the men of to-day, it yet remains a leaven to the
fermenting mass of modern production. Perhaps its healthy influence
is the best monument to the man who "restored to France the purity of
antique taste."
[Illustration: JAMES G. BLAINE.