There is plenty of variety in the Exhibition which the Academy proffers
to the Londoner this winter; and that was desirable--we may almost
say, necessary--for the Old Masters proper--such of them as are
shown--have not nearly the attractiveness and importance that have been
customary. This, under the circumstances, is scarcely to be wondered
at, for while of the Venetian painting there is but the most doubtful
or the scantiest trace, the great Dutch and Flemish Masters of the
Seventeenth Century are altogether unrepresented. Rembrandt and Rubens,
Hobbema and Snyders, De Hooch and Nicholas Maas, are as if they were
not. The Second Room, in which they are wont to be gathered together,
makes not a sign of them; and the Third or Great Gallery contains a
not quite happy or well-balanced representation of the masters of the
larger canvas, although we note already one exceptional Claude, one
faultless Vandyke, and one superb Velasquez. Even the First Room, which
is exclusively English, is not so attractive as it has sometimes been;
though here and there a late Turner or an early Cotman, a Hogarth
‘conversation piece,’ vivacious and sterling, or a William Dobson
portrait, honest at least and capable, asserts unmistakably the hand of
a master. Much of the interest is concentrated upon the newer occupants
of the Second Room. Most of them are clever, but many hopelessly
incompatible.
This Second Room is given over to the French of two periods. But what
have the French of the Eighteenth Century in common with the French
of the Nineteenth? They have not even a tradition--they have only a
name. In England, as you pass from Richard Wilson to Turner, from
Hogarth to the elder Leslie, from Reynolds and Romney, even to Etty
and James Ward, the break of continuity is never complete; the elders
were in a certain sense the ancestors of the younger men. But in France
the incomparable grace of Watteau found no reflection of itself in
the powerful brutality of Delacroix. Imagine Corot as the successor
of Boucher--or Millet’s vision of the peasantry succeeding to the
suave dream of Prud’hon. Yet it is with these juxtapositions of the
essentially incompatible--with this momentary joining together of those
whom Heaven (or, indeed, the peculiarity of their different genius) has
put asunder--that we are face to face at Burlington House. Yet, even as
it is, there may be a certain interest in the comparison; and if it is
made fairly, the result will be an enhanced appreciation of those great
masters of the Eighteenth Century, who were French in spirit as well as
in name. Briefly and slightly we will speak of these, and these almost
alone.
As the authorities of the National Gallery have never yet been so
fortunate as to possess a Watteau, it is well for the nation that we
have, at Dulwich, one beautiful and unexceptionable example of his
art, and it is well too that that picture is now at Burlington House.
This is the canvas known as a ‘Ball under a Colonnade’--the scene an
arcade overlooking a garden; a lady and gentleman dancing a minuet in
the foreground, and, to right and to left of them, groups of gay, happy
people, disposed with Watteau’s naturalness and Watteau’s consummate
skill. The condition of the picture is faultless, but this--with the
great master of Valenciennes--is scarcely rare. Watteau’s method was
not a method of experiment; his technique was as sound as his spirit
was vivacious. What is more remarkable--what would be remarkable
anywhere--is the perfection of accomplished workmanship, the carrying
out to the end, with all the vividness of a sketch, of a conception
definite and elaborate from the beginning. The colouring comes as an
inheritance from the Venetian--as Watteau’s adaptation of the palette
of the supreme decorators. There are many canvases by the master spirit
of the French Eighteenth Century larger of touch than this one; there
are few more happily intricate or truer to the graceful side of life,
in a world finely imagined as well as finely seen.
Next to this admirable picture, which only the Louvre, or Edinburgh,
or, it may be, Potsdam, can surpass, hangs a beautiful and interesting
work, avowedly by the pupil with whom Watteau was once angered, but
with whom in his declining days he was generously reconciled, calling
him to him, and imparting to him, as a final gift, what he could of
the secrets of his art. To Mr. Alfred de Rothschild belongs ‘The
Pleasure Barge,’ a work in which the foreground figures are on a larger
scale than in the Watteau, and in which the handling is neat and
obviously careful, even while it is broad. If Pater himself had been
the inventor of the _genre_, or even, perhaps, if he had practised
it in any fashion recognisably his own, this piece of delicate and
painter-like work--which, as it is, no one with any true appreciation
of the graceful can possibly dispraise--would have had a higher rank.
As it is, we recognise the dexterous handiwork, the pupil’s strangely
complete reception of his master’s spirit; but feel, at the same
moment, that Pater is an echo rather than a voice--that his talent
glowed only at the fire that Watteau lit.
Lord Rosebery is the possessor of a portrait of Robespierre, by Jean
Baptiste Greuze. It is a direct, good portrait; very sound, and only
perhaps a little nattering; the ‘sea-greenness’ of the revolutionary,
having, it may be, been apparent but to the imagination of Carlyle.
A second Greuze, highly and daintily finished, and so appropriately
small in scale, is the ‘À Vous’ of Mr. Clementi Smith, an interior,
with three friendly figures, and the glass genially passing. Thus,
though in both cases Greuze is represented creditably, in neither
is he represented by the kind of picture which in our own day is
associated with his name--in neither is there the too seductive or
too adroitly planned presentation of womanhood with its lines refined
to the slenderness of the child, or the child with, too early upon
her, and too consciously and evidently, the contours of the woman.
Fragonard’s ‘Letter,’ belonging to Lady Wallace, is an engraved
picture, small and of undoubted quality--the ‘Lettre d’Amour,’ it
should be called, properly--that is indeed its name in the print--for
the impulsiveness of the scribe, the earnestness of her glance, the
fire of her action, are due to no urgency of everyday business, but to
the ecstasy of love. Small as the thing is, in its touch and spirit we
recognise the southern temperament of sunshine and storm, and remember
that Provence was the land of Fragonard’s birth, and that of its
half-Italian landscape he has been till now one of the most sympathetic
of depictors. From the same gallery--from Lady Wallace’s--we might
conceivably have had the loan of a more important Fragonard,
‘L’Escarpolette.’ To Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild belongs the
life-size portrait of Madame de Pompadour, seen somewhat from below,
lounging upon a sofa, and dressed in the colours whose particular
combination Boucher so much affected--sky blue and rose. The picture
has little restfulness, and not too much of character--the mistress
rather than the dilettante, was it, perhaps, at the moment, the
courtier’s business to paint. It is in a high key, yet not precisely
garish; a clever _tour de force_, agreeable, gay.
Two interesting, since somewhat unusual, examples of Prud’hon come
from Hertford House; one of them, a little nude boy inadequately
described as ‘Le Zéphyr,’ a work in which a master of tender sentiment,
and graceful, even if somewhat monotonous, design, betrays some debt
to Correggio; the other the singular allegory of ‘The Triumph of
Bonaparte’--Napoleon surrounded by female figures and by Cupids in a
triumphal car--a picture in which Prud’hon shows something, indeed, of
himself, and much of his obligation to the Greeks. It is a work more
characteristic than the first, and less ambitious than the second; but
it is in his simple designs most of all that we can discern best the
real Prud’hon, with just a touch of a Classicism never austere, and a
world of tenderness never actually effeminate.
In the ‘Odalisque,’ a sketch of an Oriental nudity, we see for once
that which is rather surprising in work of Ingres’s--a picture, that
is, in which, at the stage now reached, the colour is better than the
design, if it is not better than the draughtsmanship. The curved line
of the right arm repeats, surely, only awkwardly the curve of the
wide-hipped figure; and in the left arm, and in the modelling of some
portions of the trunk, there is little indication of the ‘correctness
of form’ which, to borrow Gautier’s phrase, was, at least with Ingres,
‘virtue.’ We are glad, of course, to see any canvas of Ingres’s at
Burlington House, because it is a sight vouchsafed but seldom, and
again, because Ingres is a master in whose labours there is, alike in
France and England, some right revival of interest. But it would have
been well had it been possible to represent him, not semi-romantic and
luxurious, limp in line, impoverished of colour, but rather, as in ‘The
Apotheosis of Homer,’ august of conception, or, as in ‘The Source,’
refined and exquisite of form.
(_Standard_, 4th January 1896.)