MOREAU
Oneof the prettiest chapters of the volume in which French artists of the Eighteenth Century have recorded with grace and freedom the lighter manners of their age, is that certainly which was written by Moreau le Jeune. He employed, with extreme diligence, half a life in writing it. Born in March 1741, he died in November 1814. The son of a Parisian wigmaker, of the parish of St. Sulpice—which was also Chardin’s—he, with his brother, Moreau l’Aîné, a painter not greatly known, was drawn early into the circle of the producers of Art. He was a pupil of Louis de Lorrain, a now forgotten painter, whom he followed, at seventeen years old, to St. Petersburg. Coming back to Paris, he was in the workroom of Le Bas, the engraver, and there he learned the secret of the burin’s expression. He engraved with delicate skill. It was but slowly, however, that in his own designs he showed himself an accomplished draughtsman; for though his daughter,Madame Carle Vernet—who wrote an account of him—lets us understand that he was born drawing, there is much of his early work that is obviously laboured. Suddenly, the De Goncourts tell us—those critics who, with M. Maherault, the industrious collector, have studied him the best—suddenly his power of draughtsmanship declared itself—the individuality of his vision and method. It was in a drawing commissioned by Le Bas, who sought to engrave it, the ‘Plaine des Sablons’—a review by Louis XV. In it he was revealed as the successful draughtsman of festivals, the historian of lively ceremonies. And such success was rewarded. For, with commendable promptitude, in 1770—the year after the drawing was executed—he was appointed ‘Dessinateur des Menus-plaisirs,’ and five years later, when Cochin retired, ‘Dessinateur du Cabinet du Roi.’ Thus, while still a young man, Moreau’s position was assured, and he was left free to use much of his time in works on which it was possible to bestow a more exquisite grace than any which could be fitly employed upon labours in which official portraiture counted for much. Moreau was free to invent for himself, and free to illustrate the best literary inventions of a literary age. His career was before him, and the day not distant when he would produce‘L’Histoire des Mœurs’ and the illustrations to the ‘Nouvelle Héloïse.’
I have indicated now, by a brief line or two, the direction in which Moreau le Jeune must chiefly be studied, and the places in which he may be seen if men would see him at his prime. Perhaps it may be a matter of taste, and a matter of taste only, whether one prefers him in his more spontaneous or in his more official work. The draughtsman is the same in either labour, though the inspiration is different. For me his greatest achievement is ‘L’Histoire des Mœurs,’ or, in another phrase, ‘Le Monument du Costume,’ which must be spoken of in detail later on. For many, and above all, for the lovers of curiosities, the seekers in byways of history, his celebrity hangs chiefly on his performance of the various ‘Sacres’; his records of the public functions, his ‘Fêtes at Versailles for the Marriage of the Dauphin and of Marie Antoinette’; his ‘Crowning of Voltaire’—at the Théâtre Français—in 1788; his ‘Fêtes at the Hôtel de Ville,’ on the birth of a new Dauphin to LouisXVI.Among these we may look perhaps principally at the ‘Crowning of Voltaire,’ for it has the virtues of them all. The drawing was engraved by Gaucher, who has preserved in the print the lively touchof the original. But what, one asks, was the occasion of the ceremony, what the cause of the ‘crowning’? At the Théâtre Français, Voltaire’sIrènehad been performed for sixteen nights. In those days of limited audiences that was a brilliant success. The bust of the poet is placed then in the middle of the stage, to be adorned and declaimed before. Madame Vestris—another, of course, than the Vestris known to Englishmen—reads aloud, and with emphasis, the lines of which the Marquis de Saint-Maur has hurriedly been delivered. Other performers, in more or less classic garb, cluster about her with garlands in their hands, ready to bestow them on the bust. In a box, high up on one side of the theatre, sits the demi-god, with two fair friends—one of whom is his niece, Madame Denis, and the other that Marquise de Villette to whom the print that represents the occasion is dedicated. The playhouse is full. The clapping of hands is lusty and enthusiastic. People rise in their boxes. Men stare upwards from the pit. Fine ladies crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the hero with the thin angular face, with its tell-tale lines of wit and mockery and observation.
Moreau must have seen the sight himself, and borne away the vivid recollection of it. Never wasl’actualité—the thing that passes, the thing that may be insignificant to-day, but is to be History to-morrow—never wasl’actualitédesigned with a more fitting mixture of grace and precision. But in the more important work next to be spoken of, there was greater room for invention. Therein was Moreau, in the true sense, dramatist as well as draughtsman, for even if the outline of the subject was suggested to him by the speculator who undertook the publication, it was Moreau alone who gave veracity and character to the head and gesture of each person in the play.
The ‘Suite d’Estampes pour servir à l’histoire des Mœurs et du Costume dans le Dix-huitième Siècle’ began to be published in 1775 by Prault, of Paris, though it has been of late suggested that it was really conceived and undertaken by a German of the name of Eberts. The notion was to give a series of plates in which the most correct and fashionable manners, and the dress of the moment, and the furniture in vogue, should be together portrayed. The artist first pitched upon to recall them was, strangely enough, a foreigner. Freudeberg, a Bernese settled in Paris, a draughtsman of grace and charm undoubtedly, but of a closely bounded talent, had found favour with the public, and it washe who was chosen to make—and he did make—the first dozen drawings. The best engravers of the day were forthwith to engrave them. But by the time the first series was finished—and two odd pieces, I believe, not generally taken account of as belonging to the set—Freudeberg became home-sick and resolved to depart, and the business of continuing the work, which in the view of its promoter was to be a practical guide to fashion, was assigned to Moreau. Moreau did the second series, and then the third. The second dealt with the fortunes of a lady; the third with those of agrand seigneur, who was likewise something of apetit-maître. And for each there was a text, bald, it may be, but in a measure appropriate. It was anonymous, and chiefly descriptive. A little later, in a new issue, it was sought to associate the work with popular literature, and Restif de la Bretonne—a free-spoken ‘realist,’ whom, after long neglect, it is now, not altogether without cause, the fashion to enjoy—was invited to write his commentary, and his commentary took the form of quite a new interpretation. ‘Restif,’ says M. Anatole de Montaiglon, ‘au lieu de respecter le sentiment des trois suites, a isolé chaque motif et chaque planche.’ Restif, that is, has invented for each plate some fresh little story.
In life, the mind associates with a given and chosen landscape the more magnetic and memorable of the figures that people it. These alone bestow on it the reality of its human interest, and the others may be ignored. And so, among the masses of description and criticism of the arts of design, the writings which we really associate with the works they endeavour to vivify are those generally which have a charm of their own—the charm of the literary touch. Restif de la Bretonne’s stories, with all their faults, have just that charm. There is that in them which permits their author to take possession of the theme, so that the theme belongs no longer at all to whatever dullard chanced to be the first to treat it.
Two designs which I never see without wanting them are the most vivacious of Moreau’s series. They are the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra’ and ‘C’est un fils, Monsieur!’ Others, even among the most admirable, are more limited in their aim. The ‘Grande Toilette,’ for instance, as its name implies, is occupied more particularly with raiment. It is a very summary of fashion. It is the great lord, or the consummatepetit-maître, displayed to us when dressing is completed. The edifice, it seems, has just been crowned. ‘Monseigneur,’ vividly writesRestif de la Bretonne, ‘Monseigneur is dressed; for some minutes already he has been standing; his cordon bleu is assumed; they have just given him his purse, and he has his bouquet.’ Yes, the edifice has been crowned: Monseigneur is ready; for—and the touch is untranslatable—they haveachevé de le chausser. You see the neat shoes, the garter, the closely drawn stocking, the whole paraphernalia of the leg he was proud of. ‘Achevé de le chausser’—it is all in the phrase. And now he is free, no doubt, to enjoy the idleness of the morning, to do a service to a comedian, and, after an author has had audience of him, to accept the dedication of a book.
‘La Petite Loge’ is just as characteristic. What one sees is the inside of an opera-box, of which the tenants are a couple of bachelors of fashion. A dance is over, on the stage, and a girl who has taken part in it has been brought into the box, to be encouraged—to be touched under the chin. And here is an epitome of Restif’s story. A Prince, struck with the beauty of a ragged little child in the street, determined that she should be educated—pensioned her and her mother. Soon, however, busied with the greatest business of his class and day—‘occupied with intrigue,’ the story-teller tells us—he forgot hislittle protégée. She had her money regularly—all that she was promised—but he was too busy to think of her. Then, one night, at the Opera, smitten with the charm of a new dancer, he inquired who the dancer was, and ordered her to be brought to him. As soon as she was in the box, ‘Il lui passa sous le menton une main un peu libre’; but then it was disclosed to him that she was the child he had been struck with. Coulon, the famous dancing-master, had by this time taught her to some purpose. As for her future, her mother—an ancestress, I take it, of Halévy’s ‘Madame Cardinal’—had already a register of one hundred and twenty pages, filled with the propositions of the Court and the town. ‘Sa mère se reservait le droit de les comparer,’—for nothing, it seems, even by a Madame Cardinal, should be done in a hurry. Well, among the girl’s many lovers there was one who was unselfish. What did he want but to marry her! The Prince—not minded now to be outdone in chivalry—generously urged that he should be accepted, and Isabelle was glad to consent. But the King ordered the lover’s arrest, and the young people were separated. The girl lived prudently, in London and in Paris. She and her art were admired; but she died of a sudden illness. ‘Her young lover was inabsolute despair, and the Prince, her protector, wept for her.’
In the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra’ we see the elegant and famous crowd that surged out of the theatre after a performance long looked forward to. ‘Gluck’s new Operas—it is essential to see them,’ said a writer who knew what it was that a fashionable woman could not afford to neglect. The ‘all Paris’ of the day was there; and at the end, when the crowd was in the lobbies, and theaboyeurwas calling the carriages, and the flower-girl was a messenger of intrigue—that was the moment that gave birth to plans for dainty suppers eaten away from home, the time when ‘abbés without a family learned the secret of how they might belong to all.’ What a bustle of flirtation! What a passing about of love-letters! The elegance of the scene must make amends, as best it can, for its light-hearted naughtiness.
‘C’est un fils, Monsieur!’ has no such forgiveness to ask of us. It is the blithest picture that we need to be shown of the home joys of the refined. A young husband, who is known already as ‘le Président,’ and who is a student and a fortunate collector of Art as well as a man of the world, rises from his study chair with outstretched hands andradiant face, as the newly born baby is carried in to him in triumph, followed by a procession of household retainers, and preceded by the lively Miss Rozette, the President’s foster-sister. Nothing is more expressive than the joyous pantomime of this privileged young woman, and the answering gestures of the newly made father; and delightful is the sentiment of the piece. In England, popular Art has sometimes made the joys of domesticity a little dull; but here the respectable is actually gay, and nothing but sunshine lies upon the path of duty.
Of the many writers whom Moreau avowedly illustrated, as distinguished from those who furnished a text for his designs, Rousseau was the one in whom he most believed, and for Rousseau much of his best work was executed. His designs for theNouvelle Héloïsewere among the last of the important drawings wrought by him before he made that journey into Italy which his daughter speaks of as having ‘opened his eyes,’ but which, to whatever it may have ‘opened’ them, certainly closed them to the aspects of that France it was his truest mission to portray. The types of Julie and Saint-Preux are types which Moreau understood—he understood their impulse and their sentiment; andhow many faults he would have forgiven them for their grace! To illustrate Rousseau was of course to have the opportunity—and in Moreau’s case it was also to profit by it—of representing both a deeper and a more immediate sensitiveness than most of that which claimed interpretation in the sometimes callous figures of the ‘Monument du Costume.’ Moreau was grateful for so fortunate an occasion, and he thoroughly responded to it. His Julie is ‘un type de Greuze honnête,’ with her ‘bouche entr’ouverte,’ her ‘regard profond,’ her ‘gorge couverte en fille modeste, et non pas en dévote,’ her ‘petite figure de blonde, mouvante et sensible.’ Moreau read Rousseau again and again: he genuinely cared for him, and when Rousseau died, the death-scene was not suffered to pass unrecorded, and of the grave in the Ile des Peupliers, by Geneva, he made a little etching.
Presently, however, Moreau was to be led away from the very sentiment of the scenes he had understood the best. His individuality was lessened, his flexibility arrested by the journey to Italy, undertaken with Dumont, the architect, in 1786. And his association with David—‘le peintre de Marat assassiné et le membre de la Convention’—operated to make more certain his style’s divorce from allthe natural grace and flowing sentiment and homely unheroic dignity with which it had lived so fruitfully for more than twenty years. The illustrator of Rousseau was already less happy as the illustrator of Voltaire; and in 1791 Moreau was received into the Academy; the drawing which procured him the distinction being that of ‘Tullie faisant passer son char sur le corps de son père.’ Wille, the engraver, writes, in his published journal, how he went to the Academical Assembly when Moreau was received. ‘There was an Academician to receive: it was Monsieur Moreau, draughtsman and engraver. He had begged me to be his sponsor, and I presented him to the Assembly with a great deal of pleasure.’ But Moreau’s entrance into the Academy was the signal for his exit from the regions of his native art. The bibliophile may seek with avidity for the editions of Renouard, which years afterwards Moreau illustrated. But his verve had deserted him; his talent was gone; his originality had yielded up the ghost. And somehow, too, in his last years, and in his old age, poverty overtook him. In February 1814, he wrote to M. Renouard that he was penniless—‘Je n’ai pas le sou.’ Friends he had, though; and one of the first acts of LouisXVIII.was to reappoint him to the old office—‘draughtsman to the King.’He held the place for but a short time; for on the 30th November, in the same year, Moreau died. With his later style both he and his daughter, and the group, too, by whom they were surrounded, were content—no one assailed it then or looked back regretfully to the earlier—but it is by the work of the first half of his career as an artist that Moreau finally takes rank as one of the most precise and flexible of draughtsmen, and as the closest possible observer of the gay, great world that he portrayed.
(The Art Journal, 1885.)