THE LUXEMBOURG GALLERY
Racine’s poetry, and Shakspeare’s, however wide apart, do not absolutely
prove that the French and English are a distinct race of beings, who can
never properly understand one another. But the Luxembourg Gallery, I
think, settles this point forever—not in our favour, for we have nothing
(thank God) to oppose to it, but decidedly against _them_, as a people
incapable of any thing but the little, the affected, and extravagant in
works of imagination and the FINE ARTS. Poetry is but the language of
feeling, and we may convey the same meaning in a different form of
words. But in the language of painting, words become _things_; and we
cannot be mistaken in the character of a nation, that, in thus
expressing themselves, uniformly leave out certain elements of feeling,
and greedily and ostentatiously insert others that they should not. The
English have properly no school of art, (though they have one painter at
least equal to Molière,)—we have here either done nothing worth speaking
of, compared with our progress in other things, or our faults are those
of negligence and rusticity. But the French have done their utmost to
attain perfection, and they boast of having attained it. What they have
done is, therefore, a fair specimen of what they can do. Their works
contain undoubted proofs of labour, learning, power; yet they are only
the worse for all these, since, without a thorough knowledge of the
scientific and mechanical part of their profession, as well as profound
study, they never could have immortalized their want of taste and genius
in the manner they have done. Their pictures at the Luxembourg are
‘those faultless monsters which the _art_ ne’er saw’ till now—the
‘hand-writing on the wall,’ which nothing can reverse. It has been said,
that ‘Vice to be hated needs but to be seen,’ and the same rule holds
good in natural as in moral deformity. It is a pity that some kind hand
does not take an opportunity of giving to ashes this monument of their
glory and their shame, but that it is important to preserve the proofs
of such an anomaly in the history of the human mind as a generation of
artists painting in this manner, and looking down upon the rest of the
world as not even able to appreciate their paramount superiority in
refinement and elegance. It is true, strangers know not what to make of
them. The ignorant look at them with wonder—the more judicious, with
pain and astonishment at the perversion of talents and industry. Still,
they themselves go on, quoting one another’s works, and parcelling out
the excellences of the several pictures under different heads—_pour les
coloris_, _pour le dessein_, _pour la composition_, _pour l’expression_,
as if all the world were of accord on this subject, and Raphael had
never been heard of. It is enough to stagger a nation, as well as an
individual, in their admiration of their own accomplishments, when they
find they have it all to themselves; but the French are blind,
insensible, incorrigible to the least hint of any thing like
imperfection or absurdity. It is this want of self-knowledge, and
incapacity to conceive of any thing beyond a certain conventional
circle, that is the original sin—the incurable error of all their works
of imagination. If Nature were a French courtezan or Opera-dancer, their
poetry and painting would be the finest in the world.[20]
The fault, then, that I should find with this Collection of Pictures is,
that it is equally defective in the imitation of nature, which belongs
to painting in general; or in giving the soul of nature-expression,
which belongs more particularly to history-painting. Their style of art
is false from beginning to end, nor is it redeemed even by the vices of
genius, originality, and splendour of appearance. It is at once tame and
extravagant, laboured and without effect, repulsive to the senses and
cold to the heart. Nor can it well be otherwise. It sets out on a wrong
principle, and the farther it goes, nay, the more completely it succeeds
in what it undertakes, the more inanimate, abortive, and unsatisfactory
must be the performance. French painting, in a word, is not to be
considered as an independent art, or original language, coming
immediately from nature, and appealing to it—it is a bad _translation_
of sculpture into a language essentially incompatible with it. The
French artists take plaster-casts from the antique, and colour them by a
receipt; they take plaster-casts and put them into action, and give
expression to the features according to the traditional rules for
composition and expression. This is the invariable process: we see the
infallible results, which differ only according to the patience, the
boldness, and ingenuity of the painter in departing from nature, and
caricaturing his subject.
For instance, let us take the _Endymion_ of Girodet, No 57. It is a
well-drawn, though somewhat effeminate Academy-figure. All the rest is
what I have said. It is a waste of labour, an abuse of power. There is
no repose in the attitude; but the body, instead of being dissolved in
an immortal sleep, seems half lifted up, so as to produce a balance of
form, and to make a display of the symmetry of the proportions. Vanity
here presides even over sleep. The head is turned on one side as if it
had not belonged to the body (which it probably did not) and discovers a
meagre, insignificant profile, hard and pinched up, without any of the
genial glow of youth, or the calm, delighted expansion of the heavenly
dream that hovered so long over it. The sharp edges of the features,
like rims of tin, catch the moonlight, but do not reflect the benign
aspect of the Goddess! There is no feeling (not a particle) of the
poetry of the subject. Then the colouring is not natural, is not
beautiful, is not delicate, but that of a livid body, glittering in the
moon-beams, or with a cloud of steel-filings, glimmering round it for a
veil of light. It is not left as _dead-colouring_ in an evidently
unfinished state, or so as to make a blank for the imagination to fill
up (as we see in Fuseli’s pictures); but every part is worked up with
malicious industry, not to represent flesh, but to be as like marble or
polished steel as possible. There is no variety of tint, no reflected
light, no massing, but merely the difference that is produced in a
smooth and uniformly coloured surface, by the alterations proper to
sculpture, which are given with a painful and oppressive sense of effort
and of difficulty overcome.
This is not a natural style. It is foppish and mechanical; or just what
might be expected from taking a piece of stone and attempting to colour
it, not from nature, not from imagination or feeling, but from a mere
wilful determination to supply the impressions of one sense from those
of another, by dint of perseverance and a growing conceit of one’s-self.
There is, indeed, a progress to perfection; for by the time the work is
finished, it is a finished piece of arrogance and folly. If you are
copying a yellow colour, and you resolve to make it blue, the more blue
you make it, the more perfectly you succeed in your purpose; but it is
the less like yellow. So the more perfectly French a work of art is, the
less it is like nature! The French artists have imitated the presumption
of the tyrant Mezentius, who wished to link dead bodies to living
ones.—Again, in the same artist’s picture of _Atala at the Tomb_ (which
I think his best, and which would make a fine bas-relief[21]) the
outline of the countenance of Atala is really noble, with a beautiful
expression of calm resignation; and the only fault to be found with it
is, that, supported as the head is in the arms of the Priest, it has too
much the look of a bust after the antique, that we see carried about the
streets by the Italian plaster-cast-makers. Otherwise, it is a classical
and felicitous stroke of French genius. They do well to paint Sleep,
Death, Night, or to approach as near as they can to the verge of
_still-life_, and leaden-eyed obscurity! But what, I believe, is
regarded as the master-piece of this artist, and what I have no
objection to consider as the triumph of French sublimity and pathos, is
his picture of the _Deluge_, No. 55. The national talent has here broken
loose from the trammels of refinement and pedantry, and soars
unconstrained to its native regions of extravagance and bombast. The
English are willing to abide by this as a test. If there be in the whole
of this gigantic picture of a gigantic subject any thing but distortion,
meanness, extreme absurdity and brute force, we are altogether mistaken
in our notions of the matter. Was it not enough to place that huge,
unsightly skeleton of old age upon the shoulders of the son, who is
climbing a tottering, overhanging precipice, but the farce of imposture
and improbability must be systematically kept up by having the wife
clinging to him in all the agony of the most preposterous theatrical
affectation, and then the two children dangling to her like the
_fag-end_ of horror, and completing the chain of disgusting, because
impracticable and monstrous distress? _Quod sic mihi ostendis,
incredulus odi._ The principle of gravitation must be at an end, to make
this picture endurable for a moment. All the effect depends on the fear
of falling, and yet the figures could not remain suspended where they
are for a single instant (but must be flung ‘with hideous ruin and
combustion down,’) if they were any thing else but grisly phantoms. The
terror is at once physical and preternatural. Instead of death-like
stillness or desperate fortitude, preparing for inevitable fate, or
hurrying from it with panic-fear at some uncertain opening, they have
set themselves in a picturesque situation, to meet it under every
disadvantage, playing off their antics like a family of tumblers at a
fair, and exhibiting the horrid grimaces, the vulgar rage, cowardice,
and impatience of the most wretched actors on a stage. The painter has,
no doubt, ‘accumulated horror on horror’s head,’ in straining the
credulity or harrowing up the feelings of the spectator to the utmost,
and proving his want of conception no less by the exaggeration, than his
want of invention by the monotony of his design. Real strength knows
where to stop, because it is founded on truth and nature; but
extravagance and affectation have no bounds. They rush into the vacuum
of thought and feeling, and commit every sort of outrage and excess.[22]
Neither in the landscape is there a more historic conception than in the
actors on the scene. There is none of the keeping or unity that so
remarkably characterizes Poussin’s fine picture of the same subject, nor
the sense of sullen, gradually coming fate. The waters do not rise
slowly and heavily to the tops of the highest peaks, but dash
tumultuously and violently down rocks and precipices. This is not the
truth of the history, but it accords with the genius of the composition.
I should think the painter might have received some hints from M.
Chateaubriand for the conduct of it. It is in his frothy, fantastic,
rhodomontade way—‘It out-herods Herod!’
David’s pictures, after this, are tame and trite in the comparison; they
are not romantic or _revolutionary_, but they are completely French;
they are in a little, finical manner, without beauty, grandeur, or
effect. He has precision of outline and accuracy of costume; but how
small a part is this of high history! In a scene like that of the _Oath
of the Horatii_, or the _Pass of Thermopylæ_, who would think of
remarking the turn of an ancle, or the disposition of a piece of
drapery, or the ornaments of a shield? Yet one is quite at leisure to do
this in looking at the pictures, without having one’s thoughts called
off by other and nobler interests. The attempts at expression are meagre
and constrained, and the attitudes affected and theatrical. There is,
however, a unity of design and an interlacing of shields and limbs,
which seems to express one soul in _the Horatii_, to which considerable
praise would be due, if they had more the look of heroes, and less that
of _petit-maitres_. I do not wonder David does not like Rubens, for he
has none of the Fleming’s bold, sweeping outline. He finishes the
details very prettily and skilfully, but has no idea of giving magnitude
or motion to the whole. His stern Romans and fierce Sabines look like
young gentlemen brought up at a dancing or fencing school, and taking
lessons in these several elegant exercises. What a fellow has he made of
Romulus, standing in the act to strike with all the air of a modern
dandy! The women are in attitudes, and contribute to the eloquence of
the scene. Here is a wife, (as we learn from the Catalogue) there a
sister, here a mistress, there a grandmother with three infants. Thus
are the episodes made out by a genealogical table of the relations of
human life! Such is the nature of French genius and invention, that they
can never get out of leading-strings! The figure of Brutus, in the
picture of that subject, has a fine, manly, unaffected character. It has
shrunk on one side to brood over its act, without any strut or
philosophic ostentation, which was much to be dreaded. He is wrapt in
gloomy thought, as in a mantle. Mr. Kean might have sat for this figure,
for, in truth, it is every way like him. The group of women on the
opposite side of the canvass, making a contrast by their lively colours
and flimsy expression of grief, might have been spared. These pictures
have, as we were told, been objected to for their too great display of
the naked figure, in some instances bordering on indecency. The
indecency (if so it is) is not in the nakedness of the figures, but in
the barrenness of the artist’s resources to clothe them with other
attributes, and with genius as with a garment. If their souls had been
laid bare as well as their limbs, their spirits would have shone through
and concealed any outward deformity. Nobody complains of Michael
Angelo’s figures as wanting severity and decorum.
Guerin’s _Phædra and Hippolitus_ I have already treated of, and I see no
reason to alter my opinion. It was just painted when I last saw it, and
has lost some of its freshness and the gloss of novelty. Modern pictures
have the art of very soon becoming old. What remains of it has the merit
of very clever studies after the antique, arranged into a subject. The
rest is not worth speaking of. A set of school-boys might as well come
with their portfolios and chalk-drawings under their arms, and set up
for a school of Fine Art. A great nation ought to know better, and
either strike out something original _for others to imitate_, or
acknowledge that they have done nothing worthy of themselves. To arch an
eye-brow, or to point a finger, is not to paint history. The study of
nature can alone form the genuine artist. Any thing but this can only
produce counterfeits. The tones and colours that feed the eye with
beauty, the effects of light and shade, the soul speaking in the eyes or
gasping on the lips, the groups that varying passion blends, these are
the means by which nature reveals herself to the inspired gaze of
genius, and that, treasured up and stamped by labour and study on the
canvass, are the indispensable materials of historical composition. To
take plaster-casts and add colour to them by an act of the will; or to
take the same brittle, inanimate, inflexible models, and put life and
motion into them by mechanical and learned rules, is more than
Prometheus or Iris could pretend to do. It is too much for French genius
to achieve. To put a statue into motion, or to give appropriate,
natural, and powerful expression to set features of any kind, is at all
times difficult; but, in the present instance, the difficulty is
enhanced, till it amounts to a sort of contradiction in terms; for it is
proposed to engraft French character and expression (the only ones with
which the artists are acquainted, or to which they can have access as
living studies) on Greek forms and features. Two things more abhorrent
in nature exist not. One of two consequences necessarily happens: either
the original model is given literally and entire, without any attempt to
disguise the awkward plagiarism, and inform it with a new character; or
if the artist, disdaining such servile trammels, strives to infuse his
own conceptions of grace and grandeur into it, then the hero or God of
antiquity comes down from his pedestal to strut a French dancing-master
or tragedian. For simplicity and unexampled grace, we have impertinence
and affectation; for stoic gravity and majestic suffering, we have
impatience, rage, womanish hysterics, and the utmost violence of
frenzied distortion. French art (like all other national art) is either
nothing, or a transcript of the national character. In the _Æneas and
Dido_, of the same artist, the drawing, the costume, the ornaments, are
correct and classical; the toilette of the picture is well made; the
Æneas is not much more insipid than the hero of Virgil, and there is an
exceedingly pretty girl, (like a common French peasant girl,) a supposed
attendant on the Queen. The only part of the picture in which he has
attempted an extraordinary effect, and in which he has totally failed,
is in the expression of enamoured attention on the part of the Queen.
Her eyes do not, ‘like stars, shoot madly from their spheres,’ but they
seem to have no sort of business in her head, and make the _doucereuse_
in a most edifying manner. You are attracted to the face at a distance
by the beauty of the outline (which is Greek) and instantly repelled by
the grossness of the filling up of the expression (which is French). The
Clytemnestra is, I think, his _chef d’œuvre_. She is a noble figure,
beautiful in person, and deadly of purpose; and there is that kind of
breathless suppression of feeling, and noiseless moving on to her end,
which the rigid style of French art is not ill-adapted to convey. But
there is a strange tone of colouring thrown over the picture, which
gives it the appearance of figures done in stained porcelain, or of an
optical deception. There is nothing to remind you that the actors of the
scene are of flesh and blood. They may be of steel or bronze, or glazed
earthenware, or any other smooth, unfeeling substance. This hard,
_liny_, metallic, tangible character is one of the great discriminating
features of French painting, which arises partly from their habitual
mode of study, partly from the want of an eye for nature, but chiefly, I
think, from their craving after precise and definite ideas, in which, if
there is the least flaw or inflection, their formal apprehension loses
sight of them altogether, and cannot recover the clue. This incrusted,
impenetrable, stifling appearance is not only unpleasant to the eye, but
repels sympathy, and renders their pictures (what they have been
asserted to be) _negations_ equally of the essential qualities both of
painting and sculpture.
Of their want of _ideal_ passion, or of the poetry of painting, and
tendency to turn every thing either into comic or tragic pantomime, the
picture of _Cain after the Murder of Abel_, by Paul Guerin, is a
striking example. This composition does not want power. It would be
disingenuous to say so. The artist has done what he meant in it. What,
then, has he expressed? The rage of a wild beast, or of a maniac
gnashing his teeth, and rushing headlong down a precipice to give vent
to a momentary frenzy; not the fixed inward anguish of a man, withered
by the curse of his Maker, and driven out into the wide universe with
despair and solitude and unavailing remorse for his portion. The face of
his wife, who appears crouched behind him, possesses great beauty and
sweetness. But the sweetness and beauty are kept quite distinct. That
is, grief absorbs some of the features, while others retain all their
softness and serenity. This hypercriticism would not have been possible,
if the painter had studied the expression of grief in nature. But he
took a plaster-model, and tried to melt it into becoming woe!
I have said enough to explain my objections to the grand style of French
art; and I am sure I do not wish to pursue so unpleasant a subject any
farther. I only wish to hint to my countrymen some excuse for not
admiring these pictures, and to satisfy their neighbours that our want
of enthusiasm is not wholly owing to barbarism and blindness to merit.
It may be asked then, ‘Is there nothing to praise in this collection?’
Far from it. There are many things excellent and admirable, with the
drawbacks already stated, and some others that are free from them. There
is Le Thiere’s picture of the _Judgment of Brutus_; a manly, solid, and
powerful composition, which was exhibited some years ago in London, and
is, I think, decidedly superior to any of our West’s. In Horace Vernet’s
_Massacre of the Mamelukes_, no English critic will deny the expression
of gloomy ferocity in the countenance of the Sultan, or refuse to extol
the painting of the drapery of the Negro, with his back to the
spectator, which is, perhaps, equal to any thing of the Venetian School,
and done (for a wager) from real drapery. Is not ‘the human face divine’
as well worth studying in the original as the dyes and texture of a
tunic? A small picture, by Delacroix, taken from the Inferno, _Virgil
and Dante in the boat_, is truly picturesque in the composition and the
effect, and shews a real eye for Rubens and for nature. The forms
project, the colours are thrown into masses. Gerard’s _Cupid and Psyche_
is a beautiful little picture, and is indeed as beautiful, both in
composition and expression, as any thing of the kind can well be
imagined; I mean, that it is done in its essential principles as a
design _from_ or _for_ sculpture. The productions of the French school
make better prints than pictures. Yet the best of them look like
engravings from antique groups or cameos.[23] There is also a set of
small pictures by Ducis, explaining the effects of Love on the study of
Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry, taken from appropriate subjects, and
elegantly executed. Here French art appears in its natural character
again, courtly and polished, and is proportionably attractive. Perhaps
it had better lay aside the club of Hercules, and take up the distaff of
Omphale; and then the women might fairly beat the men out of the field,
as they threaten almost to do at present. The French excel in pieces of
light gallantry and domestic humour, as the English do in interiors and
pig-styes. This appears to me the comparative merit and real bias of the
two nations, in what relates to the productions of the pencil; but both
will scorn the compliment, and one of them may write over the doors of
their Academies of Art—‘_Magnis excidit ausis_.’ The other cannot even
say so much.