JULES JACQUEMART.
THERE died, in September, 1880, at his mother’s house in the high road
between the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois, a unique artist whose death
was for the most part unobserved by the frequenters of picture
galleries. He had contributed but little to picture galleries. There had
not been given to Jules Jacquemart the pleasure of a very wide
notoriety, but in many ways he was happy, in many fortunate. He was
fortunate, to begin with, in his birth; for though he was born in the
_bourgeoisie_, it was in the cultivated _bourgeoisie_, and it was in the
_bourgeoisie_ of France. His father, Albert Jacquemart, the known
historian of pottery and porcelain, and of ancient and fine furniture,
was of course a faithful and diligent lover of beautiful things, so that
Jules Jacquemart was reared in a house where little was ugly and much
was precious; a house organized, albeit unconsciously, on William
Morris’s admirable plan, “Have nothing in your home that you do not know
to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Thus his own natural
sensitiveness, which he had inherited, was highly cultivated from the
first. From the first he breathed the liberal and refining air of Art.
He was happy in the fact that adequate fortune gave him the liberty, in
health, of choosing his work, and in sickness, of taking his rest. With
comparatively rare exceptions, he did precisely the things which he was
fitted to do, and did them perfectly, and being ill when he had done
them, he betook himself to the exquisite South, where colour is, and
light—the things we long for the most when we are most tired in
cities—and so there came to him towards the end a surprise of pleasure
in so beautiful a world. He was happy in being surrounded all his life
long by passionate affection in the narrow circle of his home. His
mother survives him—the experience of bereavement being hers, when it
would naturally have been his. For himself, he was happier than she, for
he had never suffered any quite irreparable loss. And in one other way
he was probably happy—in that he died in middle age, his work being
entirely done. The years of deterioration and of decay, in which first
the artist does but dully reproduce the spontaneous work of his youth,
and then is sterile altogether—the years in which he is no longer the
fashion at all, but only the landmark or the finger-post of a fashion
that is past—the years when a name once familiar is uttered at rare
intervals and in tones of apology as the name of one whose performance
has never quite equalled the promise he had aforetime given—these years
never came to Jules Jacquemart. He was spared these years.
But few people care, or are likely to care very much, for the things
which chiefly interested him, and which he reproduced in his art; and
even the care for these things, where it does exist, does,
unfortunately, by no means imply the power to appreciate the art by
which they are retained and diffused. “Still-life,” using the expression
in its broadest sense—the pourtrayal of objects, natural or artificial,
for the objects’ sake, and not as background or accessory—has never been
rated very highly or very widely loved. Here and there a professed
connoisseur has had pleasure from some piece of exquisite workmanship; a
rich man has looked with idly caressing eye upon the skilful record of
his gold plate or of the grapes of his forcing-house. There has been
praise for the adroit Dutchmen, and for Lance and Blaise Desgoffe. But
the public generally—save perhaps in the case of William Hunt, his
birds’ nests and his primroses—has been indifferent to these things, and
often the public has been right in its indifference, for often these
things are done in a poor spirit, a spirit of servile imitation or
servile flattery, with which Art has nothing to do. But there are
exceptions, and there is a better way of looking at these things.
William Hunt was often one of these exceptions; Chardin was always—save
in a rare instance or so of dull pomposity of rendering—Jules
Jacquemart, take him for all in all, was of these exceptions the most
brilliant and the most peculiar. He, in his best art of etching, and his
fellows and forerunners in the art of painting, have done something to
endow the beholders of their work with a new sense, with the capacity
for new experiences of enjoyment—they have pourtrayed not so much matter
as the very soul of matter. They have put matter in its finest light: it
has got new dignity. Chardin did this with his peaches, his pears, his
big coarse bottles, his copper saucepans, his silk-lined caskets. Jules
Jacquemart did it—we shall see in more of detail presently—very
specially with the finer work of artistic men in household matter and
ornament; with his blue and white porcelain, with his polished steel of
chased armour and sword-blade, with his Renaissance mirrors, with his
precious vessels of crystal and jade and jasper. But when he was most
fully himself, his work most characteristic and individual, he shut
himself off from popularity. Even untrained observers could accept the
agile engraver as an interpreter of other men’s pictures—of Meissonier’s
inventions, or Van der Meer’s, or Greuze’s—but they could not accept him
as the interpreter at first hand of the treasures which were so
peculiarly his own that he may almost be said to have discovered them
and their beauty. They were not alive to the wonders that have been done
in the world by the hands of artistic men. How could they be alive to
the wonders of this their reproduction—their translation, rather, and a
very free and personal one—into the subtle lines, the graduated darks,
the soft or sparkling lights, of the artist in etching?
On September 7th, 1837, Jacquemart was born, in Paris, and the
profession of Art, in one or other of its branches, came naturally to a
man of his race. A short period of practice in draughtsmanship, and only
a small experience of the particular business of etching, sufficed to
make him a master. As time proceeded, he of course developed; he found
new methods—ways not previously known to him. But little of what is
obviously tentative and immature is to be noticed even in his earliest
work. He springs into his art an artist fully armed, like Rembrandt with
the wonderful portrait of his mother “lightly etched.” In 1860, when he
is but twenty-three, he is at work upon the illustrations to his
father’s _Histoire de la Porcelaine_, and though in that publication the
absolute realisation of wonderful matter is not, perhaps, so noteworthy
as in the _Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne_—the touch is not so large,
so energetic, and so free—there is evident already the hand of the
delicate artist and the eye that can appreciate and render almost
unconsidered beauties. Exquisite matter and the forms that Art has given
to common things have found their new interpreter. The _Histoire de la
Porcelaine_ contains twenty-six plates, most of which are devoted to
Oriental china, of which the elder Jacquemart possessed a magnificent
collection at a time when the popular rage for “blue and white” was
still unpronounced. Many of Albert Jacquemart’s pieces figure in the
book; they were pieces the son had lived with and which he knew
familiarly. Their charm, their delicacy, he perfectly represented, and
of each individual piece he appreciated the characteristics, passing
too, without sense of difficulty, from the _bizarre_ ornamentation of
the East to the ordered forms and satisfying symmetry which the high
taste of the Renaissance gave to its products. Thus, in the _Histoire de
la Porcelaine_, amongst the quaintly naturalistic decorations from
China, and amongst the ornaments of Sèvres, with their pretty boudoir
graces and airs of light luxury fit for the Marquise of Louis Quinze and
the sleek young _abbé_, her pet and her counsellor, we find, rendered
with just as thorough an appreciation, a _Brocca Italienne_, the Brocca
of the Medicis, of the sixteenth century, slight and tall, where the
lightest of Renaissance forms, the thin and reed-like lines of the
_arabesque_—no mass or splash of colour—is patterned with measured
exactitude, with rhythmic completeness, over the smoothish surface. It
is wonderful how little work there is in the etching, and how much is
suggested. The actual touches are almost as few as those which
Jacquemart employed afterwards in some of his light effects of
rock-crystal, the material which he has interpreted perhaps best of all.
One counts the touches, and one sees how soon and how strangely he has
got the power of suggesting all that he does not actually give, of
suggesting all that is in the object by the little that is in the
etching. On such work may be bestowed, amongst much other praise, that
particular praise which, to fashionable French criticism, delighted
especially with the feats of adroitness, and occupied with the evidence
of the artist’s dexterity, seems the highest—_Il n’y a rien, et il y a
tout._
[Illustration]
Execution so brilliant can hardly also be faultless, and without
mentioning many instances among his earlier work, where the defect is
chiefly noticeable, it may be said that the roundness of round objects
is more than once missing in his etchings. Strange that the very quality
first taught to, and first acquired by, the most ordinary pupil of a
Government School of Art should have been wanting to an artist often as
adroit in his methods as he was individual in his vision! The _Vase de
Vieux Vincennes_, from the collection of M. Léopold Double, is a case to
the point. It has the variety of tone, the seeming fragility of texture
and ornament, the infinity of decoration, the rendering of the subtle
curvature of a flower, and of the transparency of the wing of a passing
insect. It has everything but the roundness—everything but the quality
that is the easiest and the most common. But so curious a deficiency,
occasionally displayed, could not weigh against the amazing evidence of
various cleverness, and Jacquemart was shortly engaged by the publishers
and engaged by the French Government.
The difference in the commissions accorded by those two—the intelligent
service which the one was able to render to the nation in the act of
setting the artist about his appropriate work, and, broadly speaking,
the hindrance which the other opposed to his individual
development—could nowhere go unnoticed, and least of all could go
unnoticed in a land like ours, too full of a dull pride in _laissez
faire_, in private enterprise, in Government inaction. To the initiative
of the Imperial Government, as Mr. Hamerton well pointed out when he was
appreciating Jacquemart as long as twelve years ago, was due the
undertaking by the artist of the colossal task, by the fulfilment of
which he secured his fame. Moreover, if the Imperial Government had not
been there to do this thing, this thing would never have been done, and
some of the noblest and most intricate objects of Art in the possession
of the State would have gone unrecorded—their beauty unknown and
undiffused. Even as it is, though the task definitely commissioned was
brought to its proper end, a desirable sequel that had been planned
remained untouched. The hand that recorded the ordered grace of
Renaissance ornament would have shown as well as any the intentions of
more modern craftsmen—the decoration of the Eighteenth Century in
France, with its light and luxurious elegance.
The _Histoire de la Porcelaine_, then—begun in 1860, and published in
1862 by Techener, a steady friend of Jacquemart—was followed in 1864 by
the _Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne_. The _Chalcographie_ of the
Louvre—the department which concerns itself with the issue of
commissioned prints—undertook the publication of the _Gemmes et Joyaux_.
In the series there were sixty subjects, or at least sixty plates, for
sometimes Jacquemart, seated by his window in the Louvre (which is
reflected over and over again at every angle in the lustre of the
objects he designed), would etch in one plate the portraits of two
treasures, glad to give “value” to the virtues of the one by
juxtaposition with the virtues of the other; to oppose, say, the
brilliant transparency of the rock-crystal ball to the texture, sombre
and velvety, of the vase of ancient sardonyx. Of all these plates M.
Louis Gonse has given an account, sufficiently detailed for most
people’s purposes, in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ for 1876. The
catalogue of Jacquemart’s etchings there contained was a work of
industry and of very genuine interest on M. Gonse’s part, and its
necessary extent, due to the artist’s own prodigious diligence in work,
sufficiently excuses, for the time at least, an occasional
incompleteness of description, making absolute identification sometimes
a difficult matter. The critical appreciation was warm and intelligent,
and the student of Jacquemart must always be indebted to Gonse. But for
the quite adequate description of work like Jacquemart’s, there was
needed not only the French tongue—the tongue of criticism—but a Gautier
to use it. Only a critic whose intelligence gave form and definiteness
to the impressions of senses preternaturally acute, could have given
quite adequate expression to Jacquemart’s dealings with beautiful
matter—to his easy revelry of colour and light over lines and contours
of selected beauty. Everything that Jacquemart could do in the rendering
of beautiful matter, and of its artistic and appropriate ornament, is
represented in one or other of the varied subjects of the _Gemmes et
Joyaux_, save only his work with delicate china. And the work represents
his strength, and hardly ever betrays his weakness. He was never a
thoroughly trained academical draughtsman. A large and detailed
treatment of the nude figure—any further treatment of it than that
required for the beautiful suggestion of it as it occurs on Renaissance
mirror-frames or in Renaissance porcelains—might have found him
deficient. He had a wonderful feeling for the unbroken flow of its line,
for its suppleness, for the figure’s harmonious movement. Perhaps he was
not the master of its most intricate anatomy; but, on the scale on which
he had to treat it, his suggestion was faultless. By the brief shorthand
of his art in this matter, we are brought back to the old formula of
praise. Here, indeed, if anywhere—_Il n’y a rien, et il y a tout._
And as nothing in his etchings is more adroit than his treatment of the
figure, so nothing is more delightful, and, as it were, unexpected. He
feels the intricate unity of its curve and flow, how it gives value by
its happy accidents of line to the fixed and invariable ornament of
Renaissance decoration—an ornament as orderly as well-observed verse,
with its settled form, its repetition, its refrain. I will mention two
or three instances which seem the most notable. One of them occurs in
the drawing of a Renaissance mirror—_Miroir Français du Seizième
Siècle_—elaborately carved, but its chief grace, after all, is in its
fine proportions; not so much in the perfection of the ornament as in
the perfect disposition of it. The absolutely satisfactory filling of a
given space with the enrichments of design, the occupation of the space
without the crowding of it—for that is what is meant by the perfect
disposition of ornament—has always been the problem for the decorative
artist. Recent fashion has insisted, quite sufficiently, that it has
been best solved by the Japanese; and they indeed have solved it, and
sometimes with a singular economy of means, suggesting rather than
achieving the occupation of the space they have worked upon. But the
best Renaissance design has solved the problem quite as well, in
fashions less arbitrary, with rhythm more pronounced, and yet more
subtle, with a precision more exquisite, with a complete comprehension
of the value of quietude, of the importance of rest. If it requires “an
Athenian tribunal” to understand Ingres and Flaxman, it needs, at all
events, some education in beautiful line to understand the art of
Renaissance ornament. Such art Jacquemart of course understood
absolutely, and against its ordered lines the free play of the nude
figure is indicated with touches dainty, faultless, and few. Thus it is,
I say, in the _Miroir Français du Seizième Siècle_. And to the
attraction of the figure has been added almost the attraction of
landscape and landscape atmosphere in the plate No. 27 of the _Gemmes et
Joyaux_, representing scenes from Ovid, as an artist of the Renaissance
had pourtrayed them on the delicate liquid surface of _cristal de
roche_. And, not confining our examination wholly to the _Gemmes et
Joyaux_—of which obviously the mirror just spoken of cannot form a
part—we observe there or elsewhere in Jacquemart’s work how his
treatment of the figure takes constant note of the material in which the
first artist, his original, was working. Is it raised porcelain, for
instance, or soft ivory, or smooth cold bronze, with its less close and
subtle following of the figure’s curves, its certain measure of
angularity in limb and trunk, its many facets, with somewhat marked
transition from one to the other (instead of the unbroken harmony of the
real figure), its occasional flatnesses? If it is this, this is what
Jacquemart gives us in his etchings—not the figure only, but the figure
as it comes to us through the medium of bronze. See, for instance, the
_Vénus Marine_, lying half extended, with slender legs, long a
possession of M. Thiers, I believe. You cannot insist too much on
Jacquemart’s mastery over his material—_cloisonné_, with its many low
tones, its delicate patterning outlined by metal ribs; the coarseness of
rough wood, as in the _Salière de Troyes_; the sharp clear sword-blade,
as the sword of François Premier, the signet’s flatness and delicate
smoothness—_C’est le sinet du Roy Sant Louis_—and the red porphyry,
flaked, as it were, and speckled, of an ancient vase, and the clear soft
unctuous green of jade.
And as the material is marvellously varied, so are its combinations
curious and wayward. I saw, one autumn, at Lyons, the sombre little
church of Ainay, a Christian edifice built of no Gothic stones, but
placed, already ages ago, on the site of a Roman temple—the temple used,
its dark columns cut across, its black stones rearranged, and so the
church completed—Antiquity pressed into the service of the Middle Age.
Jacquemart, dealing with the precious objects he had to pourtray, came
often upon such strange meetings: an antique vase of sardonyx, say,
infinitely precious, mounted and altered in the twelfth century for the
service of the Mass, and so, beset with gold and jewels, offered by its
possessor to the Abbey of Saint Denis.
It was not a literal imitation, it must be said again, that Jacquemart
made of these things. These things sat to him for their portraits; he
posed them; he composed them aright. Placed by him in their best lights,
they revealed their finest qualities. He loved an effective contrast of
them, a comely juxtaposition; a legitimate accessory he could not
neglect—that window, by which he sat as he worked, flashed its light
upon a surface that caught its reflection; in so many different ways the
simple expedient helps the task, gives the object roundness, betrays its
lustre. Some people bore hardly on him for the colour, warmth, and life
he introduced into his etchings. They wanted a colder, a more
impersonal, a more precise record. Jacquemart never sacrificed precision
when precision was of the essence of the business, but he did not care
for it for its own sake. And the thing that his first critics blamed him
for doing—the composition of his subject, the rejection of this, the
choice of that, the bestowal of fire and life upon matter dead to the
common eye—is a thing which artists in all Arts have always done, and
will always continue to do, and for this most simple reason, that the
doing of it is Art.
Not very long after the _Gemmes et Joyaux_ was issued, as we now have
it, the life of Frenchmen was upset by the war. Schemes of work waited
or were abandoned; at last men began, as a distinguished Frenchman at
that time wrote to me, “to rebuild their existence out of the ruins of
the past.” In 1873, Jacquemart, for his part, was at work again on his
own best work of etching. The _Histoire de la Céramique_, a companion to
the _Histoire de la Porcelaine_, was published in that year. To an
earlier period (to 1868) belong the two exquisite plates of the light
porcelain of Valenciennes, executed for Dr. Le Jeal’s monograph on the
history of that fabric. And to 1866 belongs an etching already
familiarly known to the readers of the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ and to
possessors of the first edition of _Etching and Etchers_—the Tripod—a
priceless thing of jasper, set in golden carvings by Gouthière, and now
lodged among the best treasures of the great house in Manchester Square.
But it is useless to continue further the chronicle of the triumphs that
Jacquemart won in the translation, in his own free fashion of black and
white, of all sorts of beautiful matter. Moreover, in 1873, the year of
the issue of his last important series of plates, Jules Jacquemart,
stationed at Vienna, as one of the jury of the International Exhibition
there, caught a serious illness, a fever of the typhoid kind, and this
left him a delicacy which he could never overcome; and thenceforth his
work was limited. Where it was not a weariness, it had to be little but
a recreation, a comparative pause. That was the origin of his
performances in water colour, undertaken in the South, whither he
repaired at each approach of winter. There remains, then, only to speak
of these drawings and of such of his etched work as consisted in the
popularisation of painted pictures. As a copyist of famous canvasses he
found remunerative and sometimes fame-producing labour.
As an interpreter of other men’s pictures, it fell to the lot of
Jacquemart, as it generally falls to the lot of professional engravers,
to engrave the most different masters. But with so very personal an
artist as he, the interpretation of so many men, and in so many years,
from 1860, or thereabouts, onwards, could not possibly be always of
equal value. Once or twice he was very strong in the reproduction of the
Dutch portrait painters; but as far as Dutch painting is concerned, he
is strongest of all when he interprets, as in one now celebrated
etching, Jan van der Meer of Delft. _Der Soldat und das lachende
Mädchen_ was one of the most noteworthy pieces in the rich cabinet of M.
Léopold Double. The big and somewhat blustering trooper common in Dutch
Art, sits here engaging the attention of that pointed-faced, subtle, but
vivacious maiden peculiar to Van der Meer. Behind the two, who are
occupied in contented gazing and contented talk, is the bare sunlit
wall, spread only with its map or chart—the Dutchman made his wall as
instructive as Joseph Surface made his screen—and by the side of the
couple, throwing its brilliant, yet modulated light on the woman’s face
and on the background, is the intricately patterned window, the airy
lattice. Rarely was a master’s subject or a master’s method better
interpreted than in this print. Frans Hals once or twice is just as
characteristically rendered. But with these exceptions it is
Jacquemart’s own fellow-countrymen whom he renders the best. Seldom was
finish so free from pettiness or the evidence of effort as it is in the
_Défilé des populations lorraines devant l’Impératrice à Nancy_. _Le
Liseur_ is even finer—Meissonier again; this time a solitary figure,
with bright, soft light from window at the side, as in the Van der Meer
of Delft. The suppleness of Jacquemart’s talent—the happy speed of it,
rather than its patient elaboration—is shown by his renderings of
Greuze, the _Rêve d’amour_, a single head, and _L’Orage_, a sketchy
picture of a young and frightened mother kneeling by her child exposed
to the storm. Greuze, with his cajoling art—which, if one likes, one
must like without respecting—is entirely there. So, too, Fragonard, the
whole ardent and voluptuous soul of him, in _Le Premier Baiser_. Labour
it is possible to give in much greater abundance; but intelligence in
interpretation cannot go any further or do anything more.
Between the etchings of Jacquemart and his water-colour drawings there
is little affinity. The subjects of the one hardly ever recall the
subjects of the other. The etchings and the water colours have but one
thing in common—an extraordinary lightness of hand. Once, however, the
theme is the same. Jacquemart etched some compositions of flowers; M.
Gonse has praised them very highly: to me, elegant as they are, fragile
of substance and dainty of arrangement, they seem inferior to that
last-century flower-piece which we English are fortunate enough to know
through the exquisite mezzotint of Earlom. But in the occasional
water-colour painting of flowers—especially in the decorative
disposition of them over a surface for ornament—Jacquemart is not easily
surpassed; the lightness and suggestiveness of the work are almost equal
to Fantin’s. A painted fan by Jacquemart, which is retained by M. Petit,
the dealer, is dexterous, yet simple in the highest degree. The theme is
a bough of the apple-tree, where the blossom is pink, white, whiter,
then whitest against the air at the branch’s end.
But generally his water colour is of landscape, and a record of the
South. Perhaps it is the sunlit and flower-bearing coast, his own refuge
in winter weather. Perhaps, as in a drawing of M. May’s, it is the
mountains behind Mentone—their conformation, colours, and tones, and
their thin wreaths of mist—a drawing which M. May, himself an habitual
mountaineer in those regions, assures me is of the most absolute truth.
Or, perhaps, as in another drawing in the same collection, it is a view
of _Marseilles_; sketchy at first sight, yet with nothing unachieved
that might have helped the effect; not the Marseilles, sunny and
brilliant, parched and southern, of most men’s observation—the
Marseilles even of the great observer, the Marseilles of _Little
Dorrit_—but the busy port, with its ever-shifting life, under an effect
less known; the Marseilles of an overcast morning: all its houses, its
shipping and its quays, grey or green and steel-coloured. Such a work is
a masterpiece, with the great quality of a masterpiece, that you cannot
quickly exhaust the restrained wealth of its learned simplicity. To
speak about it one technical word, we may say that while it belongs by
its frank sketchiness to the earlier order of water-colour art, an art
of rapid effect, as practised best by Dewint and David Cox, it belongs
to the later order—to contemporary art—by its unhesitating employment of
body colour.
The true source of the diversity of Jacquemart’s efforts, which I have
now made apparent, is perhaps to be found in a vivacity of intellect, a
continual alertness to receive all passing impressions. That alone makes
a variety of interests easy and even necessary. That pushes men to
express themselves in art of every kind, and to be collectors as well as
artists, to possess as well as to create. Jacquemart inherited the
passion of a collector; it was a queer thing that he set himself to
collect. He was a collector of shoe-leather; foot-gear of every sort and
of every time. His father, Albert Jacquemart, had held that to know the
pottery of a nation was to know its history. Jules saw many histories,
of life and travel, and the aims of travel, in the curious objects of
his collection. Their ugliness—what would be to most of us the extreme
distastefulness of them—did not repel him. Nor were his attentions
devoted chiefly to the dainty slippers of a dancer—souvenirs, at all
events, of the art of the ballet, very saleable at fancy fairs of the
theatrical profession. He etched his own boots, tumbled out of the worst
cupboard in the house. He looked at them with affection—_souvenirs de
voyage_. The harmless eccentricity brings down, for a moment, to very
ordinary levels, this watchful and exquisite artist, so devoted
generally to high beauty, so keen to see it.
What more would he have done had the forty-three years been greatly
prolonged, a spell of life for further work accorded, Hezekiah-like, to
a busy labourer upon whom Death had laid its first warning hand? We
cannot answer the question, but it must have been much, so variously
active was his talent, so fertile his resource. As it is, what may he
hope to live by, now that the most invariably fatal of all forms of
consumption, the most fatal while the least suspected, _la phthisie
laryngée_, has arrested his effort? A very gifted, a singularly agile
and supple translator of painters’ work, he may surely be allowed to be,
and a water-colour artist, perfectly individual, yet hardly actually
great; his strange dexterity of hand at the service of fact, not at the
service of imagination. He recorded nature; he did not exalt or
interpret it. But he interpreted Art. He was alive, more than any one
has been alive before, to all the wonders that have been wrought in the
world by the hands of artistic men.
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