FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PAINTING
Thereis 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 oneexceptional 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 thesejuxtapositions 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 assound 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 thegenre,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 consciouslyand 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 clevertour 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’sphrase, 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.)