French Line-Engravers of the Eighteenth Century render well
its original Art--The Prints from Watteau, Lancret, and
Pater--Watteau’s Characteristics--Chardin’s Interiors and
Studies of the Bourgeoisie--Success of his Domestic Themes--His
Portraits and Still-Life are never rendered--The lasting
popularity of Greuze--Boucher Prints at a discount--Fragonard and
Baudouin--Lavreince and Moreau.
The Eighteenth Century in France witnessed the rise, the development,
and the decay or fall of a great School of Art of which the English
public remains, even to this day, all but completely ignorant. The
easy seductiveness of the maidens of Greuze, with gleaming eyes and
glistening shoulders, has indeed secured in England for a certain
side of that artist’s work a measure of notice in excess of its real
importance; and a succession of accidents and the good taste of two
or three connoisseurs out of a hundred--they were men of another
generation--have made this country the home and resting-place of
some of the best of the pictures and drawings of Watteau. But even
Watteau is not to be found within our National Gallery. There Greuze
and Lancret--Chardin having but lately joined them with but a single
pleasant but inadequate picture--there Greuze and Lancret, seen at
least in what is adequate and characteristic, share the task of
representing French Art of the period when it was most truly French.
They are unequal to the mission. And until some can join them who will
fulfil it better, the painted work of the French Eighteenth Century
will hardly receive its due.
Fortunately, however, French Eighteenth Century artists fared well
at the hands of the line-engravers. Even of a painter who possessed
more than many others the charm of colour, it could be said by one of
the keenest of his critics that the originality of his work passed
successfully from the picture to the print. That is what Denis Diderot
wrote of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, and it is true of them all,
from Watteau downwards. Theirs was the century of Line-Engraving in
France, as it was that of Mezzotint in England. And the practitioners
of Line-Engraving and of Mezzotint were something beyond craftsmen. Not
only were they artists in their own departments--some of them painted,
some of them designed: they were in sympathy with Art and possessed
by its spirit. Hence the peculiar excellence of their work with burin
or scraper--the high success of labours which their intelligence and
flexibility forbade to be simply mechanical.
An Exhibition which at my suggestion the Fine Art Society was good
enough to venture on, eleven years ago--but which attracted so little
attention from the great public we wanted to engage, that it must
some day, I suppose, be repeated--aimed to show those engravings
in which, with fullest effect, the line-engravers of the Eighteenth
Century rendered the thought and the impression of painters or of
draughtsmen who were, in most cases, their contemporaries. Watteau was
the first of these painters. The prints after his pictures were chiefly
wrought in the years directly following his far too early death. His
friend, M. de Julienne, planned and saw closely to the execution
of that best monument to Watteau’s memory. Cochin and Aveline, Le
Bas and Audran, Surugue and Brion, Tardieu and Laurent Cars, worked
dexterously or nobly, as the case might be, in perpetuation of the
master’s dignity and grace. Lancret and Pater were often translated
by the same interpreters. Chardin’s work was popularised--as far as
France is concerned--a very few years after, and with substantially
the same effect. Later in the century, some changes which were not
all improvements, began to be discernible in the newer plates. The
manly method of which Laurent Cars was about the most conspicuous
master, yielded a little to the softer practice of the interpreters
of Lavreince or to the airy yet not inexact daintiness of the method
of the translators of Moreau. The later style of engraving was suited
to the later draughtsmanship and painting. Probably indeed it was
adopted with a certain consciousness of their needs. Anyhow, not
one of the conspicuous figures in the history of French Eighteenth
Century Design--except Latour, who practically has not been reproduced
at all--can be said to have suffered seriously at the hands of his
translators. What French pictorial artists thought and saw and tried to
tell, upon their canvases and drawing papers, is, in the main, to be
read in the prints after their works. In these prints we may note alike
the triumphs and the failures of the real French School. There is no
denying its deficiencies. But it is as free from conventionality as the
great School of Holland--as independent of tradition--and it is as true
to the life that it essays to depict.
Along the whole of the Eighteenth Century--not in France only--Watteau,
who lived in it but twenty years, is the dominating master. To put the
matter roughly and briefly, he is the inventor of familiar grace in
Art. His treatment of the figure had its perceptible influence even
upon the beautiful design of Gainsborough; and the way in which he
saw his world of men and women dictated a method to his successors
in France, down to the revival of the more academic Classicism.
Artists--when they have been so comprehensive as to occupy themselves
with other people’s Art--have known generally that Watteau’s name has
got to stand among only ten or a dozen of the greatest, but the English
amateurs, or rather English picture and print buyers, are still but few
who are acquainted with his range and feel the sources of his power.
He has not been very popular, because, according to ordinary notions,
there is but scanty subject in his designs. The characters in his drama
are doing little--they are doing nothing, perhaps. But as the knowledge
of what real Art is, extends, and as our sensibility to beauty becomes
more refined, we shall ask less, in presence of our pictures, what
the people are doing, and shall ask more, what they are. Are they
engaging?--we shall want to know. Are they pleasant to live with?
Watteau placed a real humanity in an ideal landscape; but it was still
a chosen people that entered into his Promised Land, and the chosen
people were ladies of the Court and Theatre, and winning children, and
presentable men. His pictures--all the large, elaborate, finely wrought
prints after them--are the record of what was in some measure in these
people’s daily lives, yet it was even more in his own dream. “Toute
une création de poëme et de rêve est sortie de sa tête, emplissant son
œuvre de l’élégance d’une vie surnaturelle.” Through all his art he
takes his pleasant company to the selected places of the world, and
there is always halcyon weather.
Sometimes it is only the comedians of his day--whose mobile
faces Watteau had seen behind the footlights of the stage--who
make modest picnic, as in the _Champs Elysées_ (the engraving by
Tardieu)--find shade as in the _Bosquet de Bacchus_ (the engraving
by Cochin), or enjoy at leisure the terraced gardens, the vista,
the great trees of the _Perspective_ (the engraving by Crepy). And
sometimes--inhabitants no more of a real world--the persons of his
drama prepare, with free bearing, to set out upon long journeys. It
is now a pilgrimage to Cythera (_L’Embarquement pour Cythère_, or the
_Insula Perjucunda_)--suddenly they have been transported indeed to
the “enchanted isle” (Le Bas’s drawing of the distant mountains in
_L’Ile Enchantée_, is, I may say in an underbreath, a little indefinite
and puzzling). In any case the land that Watteau’s art has made more
beautiful than ordinary Nature, is peopled by a Humanity keenly and
finely observed, and portrayed with an unlimited control of vivacious
gesture and of subtle expression.
The unremitting study that made not only possible but sure an unvarying
success, in themes so manifestly limited, is evidenced best in such
collections of Watteau’s drawings as that acquired gradually by the
British Museum, and that yet finer one inherited by the late Miss
James, and now, alas! dispersed. There the complete command of line
and character is best of all made clear, and the solid groundwork for
success in Watteau’s pictures is revealed. Elsewhere--in the “Masters
of Genre Painting”--I have found space to explain more fully than
can be done in these pages, that however manifestly limited were
his habitual themes, his range was really great enough, since--not
to speak of the “Elysian Fields”--it covered the landscape and the
life of the France he knew. He has drawn beggars as naturally as did
Murillo; negroes as fearlessly as Rubens; people of the _bourgeoisie_
as faithfully almost as Chardin. And, far from the cut chestnut-trees
on whose trimmed straightness there falls in an unbroken mass the
level light of his gardens, Watteau draws at need the open and common
country, peasants and the soldiery, the baggage-train passing along
the endless roads from some citadel that Vauban planned. What Watteau
saw was the sufficient and the great foundation of all that he
imagined, and his art’s abandonment of the everyday world was to exalt
and to refine, rather than to forget it.
The line-engravings after Watteau--largeish, decorative, vigorous while
delicate--remain comparatively inexpensive. A rare impression “before
letters” attains, perhaps, now and then a fancy price; but Time has
very little affected the money value of the impressions with full
title, which, if reasonable care is exercised, can be secured in fine
condition, of such a dealer as Colnaghi, here in England, and in Paris,
of Danlos, say, or of Bouillon--occupied though they all of them are,
habitually, with more costly things. Often two or three sovereigns
buy you an excellent Watteau, clean and bright, and not bereft of
margin. To have to give as much as £5 for one, would seem almost a
hardship. And the work of Lancret and Pater--ingenious, interesting
practitioners in Watteau’s School--may be annexed at an expense even
less considerable.
Lancret was but a follower of Watteau: Pater was confessedly a pupil.
We shall have to come to Chardin to find in French Art the next man
thoroughly original. And Chardin was a great master. But Lancret
and Pater, though they are but secondary, are still interesting
figures. Neither of them, imitative though they were in varying
degrees--neither of them made any pretentions to their forerunner’s
inspired reverie. Lancret, as far as his invention was concerned,
was at one time satisfied with a symbolism that was obvious, not to
say bald. At another, as in the sedate _L’Hiver_ (engraved by Le
Bas), and the charming pictures of the games of children, _Le Jeu de
Cache-cache_ and _Le Jeu des Quatre Coins_ (both of them engraved by
De Larmessin), he was gracefully real, without effort at a more remote
imagination than the themes of reality in gentle or in middle-class
life exacted. At another time again, he lived so much in actual things,
that he could make the portraits, not of deep grave men indeed such
as the Bossuets and the Fénelons of the Seventeenth Century, but
of the lighter celebrities of his careless day. That day was Louis
the Fifteenth’s--“c’était le beau temps où Camargo trouvait ses
jupes trop longues pour danser la gargouillade.” And Lancret painted
Mdlle. Camargo (and Laurent Cars engraved her), springing to lively
airs. Voltaire had said to her, distinguishing all her alacrity and
fire from the more cautious graces of Sallé, the mistress of poetic
pantomime--Voltaire had said to her--
“Les nymphes sautent comme vous,
Et les Graces dansent comme elle.”
And the truth of the description is attested by Lancret’s picture, and
by the rosy and vivacious pastel in Latour’s Saint-Quentin Gallery.
Pater, a fellow-townsman of Antoine Watteau’s, was his pupil only
in Watteau’s later years. At that time Watteau suffered from an
irritability bred of an exhausting disease and of a yet more
exhausting genius. Master and pupil fell out. But, in his last days
of all, Watteau summoned to him the painter who had come from his own
town, and in a month, for which the younger artist was ever grateful,
Pater was taught more than he had ever been taught before. The pupil
had the instinct for prettiness and grace, and in cultivating it
Watteau was useful. But there was one thing the master could not teach
him--originality. And his record of the engaging trivialities of
daily life, where pleasure was most gracious and life most easy, was
undertaken by a mind wholly contented with its task. The mind aspired
no farther. The faces of Watteau, especially in his studies, are often
faces of thoughtful beauty; sometimes, of profound and saddening
experience. But, like a lesser Mozart--and the Mozart of a particular
mood--Pater proffers us his engaging _allegro_. The aim of all his
art--its light but successful endeavour--is summed up in the title of
one of the prettiest of his prints and pictures. It is, _Le désir de
plaire_.
Presently we leave that world of graceful fantasy, which Watteau
invented, and his pupils prolonged--a world in which dainty
refreshments are served to chosen companies under serene skies--and,
still in the full middle of the Eighteenth Century, we are face to face
with the one great artist of that age whom Watteau never affected.
Chardin was the painter of the _bourgeoisie_. With a persistence just
as marked as that of the most homely Dutchmen, but with a refinement
of feeling to which they were generally strangers and which gave
distinction to his treatment of his theme, he devoted himself to the
chronicle of prosaic virtues. In his Art, no trace of the selected
garden, of the elegant gallantries, of the excitement of Love, in the
gay or luscious weather. The honest townspeople know hardly a break
in their measured sobriety. They are mothers of families; the cares
of the _ménage_ press on them; house-work has to be got through;
children taught, admonished, corrected. Never before or since have
these scenes of the kitchen, the schoolroom, or the middle-class
parlour, been painted with such dignity, such truth, such intimacy,
and such permissible and fortunate reserve. We see them to perfection
in Chardin’s prints--in the prints, I mean, that were made after him,
for he himself engraved never. There are two other sides of his Art
which the contemporary line-engravings do not show. One of them is
his mastery of still-life--his great and exceptional nobility in the
treatment of it. There is just a hint of that, it is true, in the
delicate engraving of _L’Œconome_, and the broader, richer engraving of
_La Pourvoyeuse_; but for any real indication of it, and even that is
but a partial one, we must come to Jules de Goncourt’s etching of the
_Gobelet d’Argent_, which suggests the luminousness, the characteristic
_reflets_, and the _touche grasse_ of the master. The other side
of Chardin’s talent which the engravings do not represent, is his
later skill in professed portraiture, and especially in portraiture
in pastel, to which the fashionable but well-merited triumphs of
Latour directed him in his old age. But the deliberate limitations
of the Eighteenth Century prints do not in any way invalidate the
excellence, the completeness even, of their performance. The collector
should address himself to their study. A little diligence, a little
patience, and a hundred pounds, and it would not be impossible to form
a collection in which nothing should be wanting. I remember that I gave
M. Lacroix or M. Rapilly, in Paris, not more than seventy-five francs
an impression for pieces in extraordinarily fine condition, and with
margins almost intact.
[Illustration:
CHARDIN: _Le Jeu de l’Oye_.
]
Chardin went on working till he was eighty years old. He enjoyed
popularity, and he outlived it. From 1738 to 1757, there were issued,
in close succession, the engravings, about fifty in number, which,
with all their differences, and with all sorts of interesting notes
about them, M. Emanuel Bocher has conscientiously and lovingly
catalogued. They were published at a couple of francs or so apiece;
their appearance was wont to be welcomed in little notices in the
_Mercure de France_, just as the _Standard_ or the _Times_ to-day might
applaud a new Cameron or a new Frank Short; and they hung everywhere on
_bourgeois_ walls. The canvases which they translated were owned, some
by a King of France, and some by a foreign Sovereign. Little in the
work of the whole century had greater right to popularity than the _Jeu
de l’Oye_, with its exquisite and homely grace--Surugue has perfectly
engraved it--_L’Etude du Dessein_, austere and masterly (Le Bas has
rendered well the figure’s attitude of absorption), _Le Bénédicité_,
with the unaffected piety, the simple contentment of the narrow home,
and _La Gouvernante_, with the young woman’s friendly camaraderie and
yet solicitude for the boy who is her charge.
At last Fashion shifted. Chardin was in the shade. Even Diderot got
tired of him; though it was only the distaste of a contemporary for
an excellence too constantly repeated--and the artist betook himself,
with vanished popularity, to changed labours. But the vogue had lasted
long enough for his method to be imitated. Jeaurat tried to look at
common life through Chardin’s glasses. But Jeaurat did not catch the
sentiment of Chardin as successfully as Lancret and Pater had caught
the sentiment of Watteau. And along with a little humour, of which
the print of the _Citrons de Javotte_ affords a trace, he had some
coarseness of his own which assorted ill with Chardin’s homely but
unalloyed refinement. Chardin was profound; Jeaurat, comparatively
shallow. You look not without interest at the productions of the one;
you enter thoroughly into the world of the other. The creation of
Chardin--which his engravers pass on to us--has a sense of peace, of
permanence, a curious reality.
Reality is that which to us of the present day seems above all things
lacking to the laboured and obvious moralities of Greuze, who was
voluptuous when he posed to be innocent, and was least convincing when
he sought to be moral. Yet Greuze, when he was not the painter of the
too seductive damsel, but of family piety and family afflictions, must
have spoken to his own time with seeming sincerity. Even a liberal
philosophy--the philosophy of Diderot--patted him gently on the back,
and invited him to reiterate his commendable and salutary lessons. But
the philosophy was a little sentimental, or it would scarcely have
continued to Greuze the encouragement it had withdrawn from Chardin.
The Greuze pictures chiefly engraved in his own time were his obtrusive
moralities. They now find little favour. But Levasseur’s print of
_La Laitière_ and Massard’s of _La Crûche cassée_--elaborate, highly
wrought, and suggesting that ivory flesh texture which the master
obtained when he was most dexterously luxurious--these will fascinate
the Sybarite, legitimately, during still many generations.
Before the first successes of the painter of that _Laitière_ and that
_Crûche cassée_, there was flourishing at Court, under the Pompadour’s
patronage, the “rose-water Raphael,” the “bastard of Rubens.” This was
François Boucher. The region of his art lay as far indeed from reality
as did Watteau’s “enchanted isle,” and it had none of the rightful
magnetism of that country of poetic dream. It was not, like Watteau’s
land, that of a privileged and fortunate humanity, but of
“False Gods, and Muses misbegot.”
Where Boucher tried to be refined, he was insincere; and where he
was veracious, he was but picturesquely gross. His notion of Olympus
was that of a mountain on which ample human forms might be undraped
with impunity. That Olympus of a limited imagination he frequented
with industry. But, as a decorative painter, there is no need to
undervalue his fertility and skill, his apparently inexhaustible though
trivial impulse; and if few of his larger compositions have deserved
those honours which they have obtained, of translation into elaborate
line-engraving, hosts of the chalk studies which are so characteristic
of his facile talent were appropriately reproduced in fac-simile by the
ingenious inventions of Demarteau. These fac-similes were very cheap
indeed not many years ago, nor are they to-day expensive. Of Boucher’s
more considered work, engraved in line, _La Naissance de Vénus_, by
Duflos, and _Jupiter et Léda_, by Ryland, are important and agreeable,
and, as times go, by no means costly instances.
Fragonard, besides being a nobler colourist than Boucher--as the
silvery pinks and creamy whites of the _Chemise en levée_, at the
Louvre, would alone be enough to indicate--was at once a master of more
chastened taste and of less impotent passion. He was of the succession
of the Venetians. Fragonard came to Paris from the South--from amidst
the olives and the flowers of Grasse--and he retained to the end a
measure of the warmth and sunshine of Provence. The artistic eagerness,
the hurried excitement, of some of his work, is much in accord with his
often fiery themes; but in _L’Heureuse Fecondité_, _Les Beignets_, and
_La Bonne Mère_ (all of them engraved by De Launay) the collector can
possess himself of compositions in which Fragonard depicted domestic
life in his own lively way. That is only one side of his mind, and,
like his love of dignified and ordered artificial Landscape, it is
little known. Elsewhere he showed himself a skilled and an appreciative
observer of wholly secular character, and he embodied upon many a
canvas his conception of Love--it was not to him the constant devotion
of a life, but the unhesitating tribute of an hour. _Le Verre d’Eau_
and _Le Pot au Lait_ are good gay prints, but not for every one. In _Le
Chiffre d’Amour_, Affection, which with Fragonard is rarely inelegant,
becomes for a moment sentimental.
Contemporary with Fragonard were a group of artists who, more than
Fragonard, left Allegory aside, and exercised their imagination only
in a rearrangement of the real. These were the French Little Masters:
amongst them, Lavreince, the Saint-Aubins, Baudouin, Eisen, Moreau le
jeune. They had seen the life of Paris--Baudouin, the debased side of
it; but even Baudouin had some feeling for elegance and comedy. Eisen
was above all an illustrator. Augustin de Saint-Aubin, a man of various
talents, displayed in little things, is studied most agreeably in those
two pretty and well-disposed interiors, _Le Concert_ and _Le Bal paré_.
They are his most prized pieces; and prettiness having often more money
value than greatness, they are worth more than any Watteaus--they are
worth full twenty pounds the pair. And that is all I can afford to say
of Augustin de Saint-Aubin. Lavreince and Moreau must be spoken of a
little more fully.
Nicholas Lavreince was by birth a Swede, but, educated in Paris and
practising his art there, he was more French than the French. Edmond
and Jules de Goncourt, the best historians of the Painting of the time,
do not much appreciate him: at least in comparison with Baudouin.
They say that Baudouin’s method was larger and more artistic than
Lavreince’s, whose way was generally the way of somewhat painful
finish. I have seen by Lavreince one agreeable water-colour which
has all the impulse of the first intention, and, so far, belies the
De Goncourts’ judgment. But the judgment is doubtless true in the
main. That does not make Lavreince a jot less desirable for the
collectors of prints. Both he and Baudouin wrought to be engraved,
but Lavreince’s work was done with a much larger measure of reference
to that subsequent interpretation. The true _gouaches_ of Lavreince
are of extraordinary rarity; and if their method is in some respects
less excellent than that of the companion-works of Baudouin, their
themes are more presentable. Lavreince, in his brilliant portrayal of a
luxurious, free-living Society, sometimes allowed himself a liberty our
century might resent; but Baudouin’s license--save in such an exquisite
subject as that of _La Toilette_, which depicts the slimmest and most
graceful of his models--was on a par with that of Rétif de la Bretonne.
A proof before all letters of the delightful _Toilette_--engraved so
delicately by Ponce--is worth, when it appears, some twelve or fifteen
pounds: a more ordinary, a less rare impression, is worth perhaps three
or four.
[Illustration:
BAUDOUIN: _La Toilette_.
]
Baudouin--in too much of his work--was the portrayer of coarse intrigue
in humble life and high: Lavreince and Moreau, masters of polite Genre,
with subjects wider and more varied, the chroniclers of conversations
not inevitably _tête-à-tête_. For vividness and intellectual
delicacy of expression in the individual heads, one must give the
palm to Moreau. The De Goncourts claim for him also pre-eminence in
composition; but in one piece at least--in the _Assemblée au Concert_,
engraved by Dequevauviller--Lavreince runs Moreau hard. And Lavreince,
I can’t help thinking, has an invention scarcely less refined. What
can be gentler, yet what if gentle can be more abundant comedy than
his, in the _Directeur des Toilettes_?--the scene in which a prosperous
Abbé, an arbiter of Taste in women’s dress, dictates the choice to
his delightful friend, or busily preserves her from the chances of
error. And very noteworthy is Lavreince’s way of availing himself of
all the opportunities for beautiful design--beautiful line, at all
events--which were afforded him by the noble interiors in which there
passed the action of his drama. Those interiors are of the days of
Louis Seize, and are a little more severe, a little less intricate,
than the interiors of Louis Quinze. Musical instruments, often
beautiful of form--harp, harpsichord, and violoncello--play their part
in these pictorial compositions. Prints from Lavreince, like prints
from Moreau, are too gay and too agreeable not to be always valued.
England and America will surely take to them, as France has done long
ago.
It has been claimed for Moreau--Moreau “le jeune,” to distinguish him
from his less eminent brother--that he is yet more exact than Lavreince
is, in his record of the fashions of his period in furniture and dress.
And sometimes, on this very account, his effect is more prosaic--just
as at the contemporary theatre the accessories are apt to dominate or
dwarf the persons of the drama. Yet Moreau’s people have generally some
interest of individuality and liveliness, and these characteristics
are nowhere better seen than in the two series which he designed to
show the life of a great lady from the moment of motherhood and the
daily existence of a man of fashion. These prints--such as _C’est un
Fils, Monsieur_; _La Sortie de l’Opéra_; _La Grande Toilette_--should
be possessed, let me tell the collector, with the “A.P.D.Q.” still
upon them: not in a later state. Moreau, besides being a charming and
observant draughtsman, was himself a delicate engraver; but he left
to others (Romanet, Baquoy, and Malbeste amongst them) the business
of reproducing his story of the ruling classes--of the leaders of
Society--and it was sufficiently popularised. Having regard to what
it was--a story, to some people, of irritating even though of elegant
triviality--perhaps it was as well for those ruling classes of the
_Ancien Régime_ that it did not go further--that it was not actually
broadcast. Of Beaumarchais’s pungent comedy the saying has since passed
round, that it was the Revolution “_en action_.” So envy or contempt
might surely have been fostered by the wide-spread perusal of Moreau’s
exquisite, unvarnished record, and the Revolution have been advanced
by a day.
With Moreau’s art, the Eighteenth Century closes. There is an end of
its luxury and its amenity--an end of the lover who insists and the
lady who but lightly forbids. There followed after it the boneless,
nerveless, still eminently graceful pseudo-classicism of Prud’hon, and
the sterner pseudo-classicism of David, which recalled the ideal of
men to a more strenuous life. But that life was not of the Eighteenth
Century. The inflexible David, like the dreamy Prud’hon, was an artist
for another age. The graceful, graceless Eighteenth Century--with its
own faults, and no less with its own virtues--had said its last word.
Familiar and luxurious, tolerant and engaging, it had expressed through
Art the last of its so easily supported sorrows and its so easily
forgotten loves.