So far back as 1806 there appeared in the Salon his likeness of NapoleonI, with his bloodless, corpse-like face, enchased with such art that Delécluze called it a Gothic medal. The Emperor is seated like a wax figure upon the throne, surrounded by the attributes of majesty—stiff, motionless as a Byzantine idol. It was followed in 1807 by the portrait of Mme. Devauçay, which even to-day impresses the beholder most pleasingly, notwithstanding the pedantic style in which it is painted. One feels in it fire and youthfulness, the enthusiasm and ardour of a new convert, who has for the first time discovered in nature beauties other than those he had learnt to see in the Academy. Moreover, he possessed a very distinguished and personal taste in drawing. The face is of exquisite grace, the eyes tenderly seductive and delicately veiled. Ingres is already announced as he was afterwards to be.
In Holbein’s portraits the whole German community of his time has been handed down to us; in Van Dyck’s, the aristocracy of England under CharlesI. So also Ingres has depicted for us, with all its failings and all its virtues, the middle-class hierarchy of Louis Philippe’s reign, which felt itself to be the first estate, the summit of the nation, felt sure of the morrow, was proud of itself, of its intelligence and energy, which pursued with correctness its moral course of life, revered order and hated all excess—including that of the colourist. The same spirit animated this splendidbourgeoisof art. His “Bertin the Elder” is justly his most celebrated, enduring work; not the mere painted petrifaction of a newspaper potentate, but one of those portraits which bring a whole epoch home to the mind. It tells of the triumph of thebourgeoisieunder the Monarchy of July more fully and clearly than does Louis Blanc’sHistoire de Dix Ans.In the best of humours, with the four-square solidity of a knowledge of his own worth, which is full of character, this modern newspaper demi-god sits on his chair as on a throne, the throne of theJournal des Débats, like abourgeoisJupiter Tonans, with his hands on his knees.
But however highly one must estimate the importance of such a work, Ingres is nevertheless at his highest, not in his painted likenesses, but in his portrait drawings. In the former the hard colouring is still, at times, offensive. Almost always the flesh looks like wood, the dress like metal, blue robes like steel. His drawings, from which this defect is absent, are to be admired without criticism. Ingres lived in his youth, at Rome, as a drawer of portraits. For eightscudihe did the bust, for twelve the whole figure, raging inwardly the while at being kept from “great art” by such journey-work. There is a story told of him, that when one day an Englishman knocked at his door and asked, “Does the draughtsman who makes the small portraits live here?” he shut the door in his face, with the words: “No; he who lives here is a painter.” To-day these small masterpieces of which he was ashamed sell for their weight in gold. In the Paris Exhibition of 1889 there was Mme. Chauvin with her Chinese eyes; Mme. Besnard on the terrace of the Pincio with her broad hat and her elegant sunshade; Mrs. Henting with her innocent smile of an “honnête femme”; Mrs. Cavendish, an affected young blonde,with her overladen travelling dress and her crazy coiffure. Strange, that a man like Ingres should rave so about new fashions and pretty toilettes!
In these pieces an artistic eye which was now inexorable, now tender and full of fancy, has looked on nature, and, in flowing pencil-strokes, has caught with spirit and with the certain touch of direct feeling the real fulness of life in what he saw. These drawings, especially the portrait of Paganini and “The Forestier Family,” show that Father Ingres possessed not only a highly cultivated intelligence and an iron strength of will, not only the genius of industry, but also a heart, a genuine, warm, and fine-feeling heart; that he was in his innermost being by no means the cold academician, the stiff doctrinaire he appears in his large pictures, and which he became by his opposition to the Romantic school. Here we have an enchanter such as the Primitives were and the Impressionists are, like Massys and Manet, like Dürer and Degas, like all who have looked Nature in the face. And while these drawings, at once occasional and austere, place him as a draughtsman on a level with the greatest masters in the history of art, they also show him, the reactionary, to be at the same time a man of progress, the connecting link between the great art of the first half and the familiar art which rules over the second half of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER XI
JUSTE-MILIEU
Asis usually the case, the heroes were succeeded by a generation less heroic and more practical. In this, art was in keeping with the deliberate and tranquil course of the state itself, which had fallen back again into the old groove, and with the homely, Philistine character assumed in the course of years by the citizen monarchy of the tricolour. Thebourgeoisiewhich had effected the Revolution of 1830 was soon appalled at its own temerity. Even in literature it inclined towards a temperate and lukewarm mediocrity. It was astonished to find itself admiring Casimir Delavigne. It found in Auber and Scribe its ideal of music and comedy, as in Guizot, Duchâtel, Thiers, and Odilon Barrot its ideal of politics. The intellectual exaltation which had gone before and followed after the Revolution of July had calmed down, and that which was to rise out of the Revolution of February was as yet latent. The same elder generation which had looked upon Napoleon Bonaparte’s stony Cæsarian eye, when, like a god of war, unapproachable in his power he rode by at the head of his staff, now saw the Roi Citoyen, the long-exiled ex-school-master, homely and fond of law and order, as every day at the same hour he passed alone on foot and in plain clothes through the streets of Paris, the famous umbrella in his hand, rewarding each “Vive le Roi!” with a friendly smile and a grateful hand-shake. The umbrella became the symbol of this deedless monarchy, and the word “Juste-milieu,” which Louis Philippe had once employed to indicate the course to be followed, became the nickname of all that was weak and without energy, lustreless and undignified, in the age. The golden mean was triumphant in politics, literature, and painting.
The artists who gave this period its peculiar stamp constitute, as compared with the heaven-assaulting generation of 1830, only, as it were, a collateral female branch of that elder male line of good painting. To reconcile opposite tendencies, to avoid harshness, in short, to bring about an artistic compromise between Ingres and Delacroix, was the end towards which their efforts were chiefly directed.
Jean Gigoux, a remarkable artist, has the merit of having given the most effective support which Delacroix received in his battle against thebeauté suprêmeof the Classical school. When, in the Universal Exhibition of 1889 at Paris, his picture of “The Last Moments of Leonardo da Vinci,” painted in 1835, emerged from the seclusion of a provincial museum, its healthyfidelity to nature was the cause of general astonishment. The personages indeed wear costly costumes, and are surrounded by wealth and magnificence, but they themselves are common, ugly human beings. Here there is no trace of idealism, not even in the sense of Géricault, who, notwithstanding his love of truth, remained faithful to the heroic type. The faces are, with religious devotion, painted exactly after nature by a man who evidently loved the youthful works of Guercino and had zealously studied Dürer. At the same time was exhibited the portrait of the Polish “General Dwernicki,” painted in 1833, whom also Gigoux depicts as a man, not as a hero. War has made him not lean but fat, and in Gigoux’s picture his red nose and prominent stomach are reproduced with cruel fidelity to nature. It is a declaration of war against every kind of idealism. Even in his religious paintings in Saint Germain l’Auxerrois he held fast to this principle, and this circumstance gives him a place to himself, apart from all the productions of his contemporaries. In a period which, with the solitary exception of Delacroix, was still absolutely devoted to the doctrineExagérer la beauté, his works are of a healthy, soul-refreshing ugliness.
A portion of Delacroix’s charm in colour descended toEugène Isabey. He is certainly not a great artist, but a delightful, sympathetic individuality, a painter who affords one pleasure even at this day. Amid the group of Classicists of his time he has the effect of a beautiful patch of colour, of a palette on which shades of tender blue, mauve, lilac, brilliant green, silver-grey, red faded by sunshine, and opalescent mother-of-pearl combine in subtle harmony. His pretty, picturesquely costumed ladies are grouped together in luminous gardens, sheltered by delicate half-shadows, or ascend and descend the castle stairs, letting their long trains sweep behind them, and toying gracefully with fan or sunshade; while gallant cavaliers do them homage, and with bent head whisper sweet nothings in their ears. The slender greyhound plays a special part in these aristocratic comedies; its straight lines give a counterpoise to the soft flowing costumes of his figures. Isabey is altogether in his element when he has to portray a ceremony requiring rich attire. Then he binds together, as it were, a bouquet sparkling with colour, shot with the hues of ample damask folds and heavy gold-embroidered silk. Now his colouring ischic, capricious, and coquettish, now it is that of the most delicate faded Gobelin tapestry. If he has to paint a sea-view, he rumples the waves about like a ball-dress and pranks the ships up in bridal attire. His very storms have a festal appearance, like the anger of a beautiful woman. One must not look for life in his pictures; they are to the truth much what Gounod’sFaustis to Goethe’s. Watteau is his spiritual ancestor; but he is not so full of life and wit as the painter of the gallant world of the eighteenth century. He does not depict his contemporaries, but the life of a vanished age; yet he has the same predilection for scenes of high life, and a studied, mannered gracefulness which is often charming and always pleasant to the eye. He shares with Delacroix the latter’s broad style, freedom from constraint, and delight in colour. But whereDelacroix is rough and violent, Isabey is caressing and insinuating: they are not brothers, but distant cousins. And, like Delacroix, he had no imitators; he went on his bright and delightful path in solitude, and remained without companions in the little gilded house, lit up with fantastic lanterns, which he assigned to be the coquettish home of charming beings of both sexes.
A curious position, half-way between the Romantic and the Classical schools, was occupied byAry Scheffer, who was, a generation ago, the favourite of the greater part of the aristocracy of Europe, but is now known, to the German public at least, only because he is said to have painted “with snuff and green soap”—a phrase of Heine’s, which, however, gives a very false impression of him. A German-Dutchman by birth, a Classicist by training, Scheffer in his youth came also in contact with the leading spirits of the Romantic school; and these various influences, of race, education, and intercourse, are clearly reflected in the faces of his figures. His forms are thoroughly classic and generalised; only the expression of the face is ideal, while the eye is romantic, and, Scheffer’s German blood making itself felt—sentimental. It was precisely this mid-way position which his contemporaries found so much to their liking. They called his painting a great art full of style, uniting the sentiment of ideal beauty with a captivating power of expression. But history cares but little for these men of compromise, and regards this indecision as the chief defect of his genius. Scheffer’s draughtsmanship is dry and hard, his colouring without tenderness or charm. These failings are ill-assorted with the attitudes and physiognomy of his figures, which have always an affectation of weakness, exhaustion, and moral suffering. He is a sentimental Classicist, and his subjects the antithesis of the Græco-Roman ideal to which he does homage in his technique. His “Suliote Women” was already, in sentiment, form, and colour, only a subdued and weakened reminiscence of the “Massacre of Chios.” At a later time he entirely forsook historical subjects (such as “Gaston de Foix” and others), and attached himself with enthusiasm to the Gospels and to the works of the poets, especially of one poet. When he had recourse to the Bible as a source of inspiration, he selected tender episodes, the sadness of which he transmuted into tearfulness. So also, when he represented scenes fromFaustorWilhelm Meister, he gave to Goethe’s animated and impassioned characters something melancholy, suffering, and contemplative. Heine said of his “Gretchen”: “You are no doubt Wolfgang Goethe’s Gretchen, but you have read all Friedrich Schiller.” Even before her fall, beforeshe is in love, Marguerite is pensive and sad like a fallen angel. Mignon, Francesca da Rimini, and St. Monica were also favourite figures for his delicate and contemplative spirit. He alone in French art inclines a little, in his tearful sentimentality, to the Romantic school of Düsseldorf.
Hippolyte Flandrinwas the French counterpart of the German Nazarenes. He is an example of how Ingres’ teaching resulted in stiff conventionality. Ingres was a dangerous master to follow. His pupils formed round him a small, faithful, and submissive band, swore like those of Cornelius by the master’s doctrines, and for that very reason never attained to any distinctive character of their own. None of them possessed Ingres’ many-sided talent. His empire, like that of Alexander the Great, was divided among his successors, each of whom governed his own little realm with greater or less ability. Hippolyte Flandrin devoted himself to religious painting, which in his hands for the first time regained a greater importance in French art; but he followed much more slavishly than Ingres in the paths of the Italian masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This painter, worthy of respect, full of conviction, learned and of sterling worth, but colourless and cold, who decorated the churches of St. Vincent de Paul and St. Germain des Prés, has enriched the history of art by no new gift. An indefatigable worker, but endowed with little intellectual power, he went no further than to follow out strictly the rules which Ingres taught his pupils and had himself acquired from the old masters. After Flandrin, as winner of the Prix de Rome in 1831, had become intimately acquainted with the art treasures of Italy, he seldom met with any difficulty. His cartoons are flowingly and correctly executed with a firm hand, like the fair copy of a school essay. Of draughtsmanship he knew all that is to be learned; he remembered much, arranged his reminiscences, and thought little for himself. He was a miniature copy of his master, at once more poorly endowed and more fanatical, a purely mathematical genius; his art is a cold geometrical knowledge, the adaptation of anatomical studies to conventional forms, an arrangement of groups and draperies in strict accordancewith celebrated exemplars. Had not the primitive Italian masters, the painters of the ancient Christian catacombs, the saintly Fra Angelico, and the mosaic artists of Ravenna done their work long before him, Flandrin’s paintings would never have seen the light, any more than those of the Nazarene school. In both cases one can assign almost every face and figure to its original in the pictures of the Italian masters. Only a certain blond, tender, slightly melancholy, modern face of a Christian maiden is Flandrin’s peculiar property. He transferred these same ascetic and pure principles to portrait painting, and thereby acquired for himself a large practice as the painter of thefemme honnête. These women conversed with him and blushed in his presence; in his pictures we find grace and delicacy, eyes sparkling or meek, tenderness and mocking laughter, all translated into a nun-like, unapproachable appearance, which under the Second Empire gained the greater approbation among ladies, since it was seldom found in real life.
Alongside of this Overbeck, endowed with greater artistic powers than his German congener, there stands as the French CorneliusPaul Chenavard, a man who revolved in his fertile brain philosophical conceptions deeper almost than those of the German master. He dreamed of broad, symbolical, decorative pieces, embracing all time and all space, wherein all the cosmogonies of the universe should be united. Like Cornelius, he wished to be a Michael Angelo, but he succeeded no better than the German. He spent fifteen years in the churches and museums of Italy, pencil in hand, accumulating a vast collection of studies, from which his great painted history of the world was to be built up. But when he went back to Paris his materials from the old masters had grown upon him to such an extent that he never recovered his individuality. For four years he worked with feverish diligence, and completed eighteen cartoons, each sixmetres in height and four in breadth, intended for the walls of the Pantheon. So far as colour is concerned, they have attained no greater success than the Campo Santo frescoes of Cornelius. Chenavard could draw much better than the German, but was not much better as a painter; the works of both have a literary rather than an artistic value.
Brief and brilliant was the career ofThéodore Chassériau, who shot across the heavens of art like a gleaming meteor, first as a devotee of form, in Ingres’ sense of the word, and afterwards, like Delacroix, as an enthusiastic lover of sunshine and the clear light of Africa. Born in 1819 at St. Domingo, he followed his teacher Ingres in 1834 to the Villa Medici; but even in his first picture, the “Susanna” of 1839, now in the Louvre, he proved himself by no means an orthodox pupil. “He has not the least understanding for the ideas or the changes which have entered into art in our time, and knows absolutely nothing of the poets of recent days. He will live on as a reminiscence and a reproduction of certain ages in the art of the past, without having created anything to hand down to the future. My wishes and my ideas do not in the least correspond with his.” In these words Chassériau has himself pointed out what it was that distinguished him from Ingres. Unfortunately he produced but little. Personally a very elegant,blaségentleman, he plunged on his return from Italy into the whirlpool of Parisian life. He was remarkably ugly; but his black, piercing eyes made him the idol of the ladies, and he hurried through life with such haste that he broke down altogether at the age of thirty-six. Beyond various decorative paintings for the church of Saint Méry and for the Salle des Comptes in the Palais d’Orsay, only a few Eastern pictures, and, best and most characteristic, a couple of lithographs, remain to represent his work. In these delicate mythological compositions a chord is struck which found no echo until, a generation later, it was heard again in the work of the French New Idealists and the English Pre-Raphaelites: there speaks in them a Romantic Hellenism, a something dreamily mystic, which makes him a remarkable link between Delacroix and the most refined spirit in the modern school, Gustave Moreau. It was purely an act of gratitude in Moreau when he affixed the dedication “To Théodore Chassériau” to his fine picture of “The Young Man and Death.”
Léon Benouvillewill be remembered only for his picture of the “Death of St. Francis,” in the Louvre, a good piece of work in the manner of the Quattrocento.Léon Cognietdeserves to be mentioned because in the fifties he brought together in his studio so many foreign pupils, especially Germans. He enjoyed above all others the reputation of being able to initiate beginners both quickly and with certainty into the peculiar mysteries of craftsmanship. All that a master can teach, and that can be learned from his example, was to be obtained from this kind and fatherly instructor. Even after he had long given up painting, his grateful pupils used to meet together yearly at a banquet given in the patriarch’s honour. As an artist he belongs to the list of the great men who have paid for overpraise in their lifetime by oblivion after their death.His “Massacre of the Innocents” of 1824—a woman who, mad with terror, thinks to hide herself and her child from the assassins of Bethlehem under an open stairway—could give pleasure only in a time which hailed with enthusiasm Ary Scheffer’s heads resembling plaster busts full of expression. Occasionally, too, he painted landscapes—the chimerical, vague creations of a man who had lived but little in the open air. His finest picture, “Tintoretto Painting his Dead Daughter by Lamplight,” of 1843, the engravings of which once enraptured France and Germany, has to-day a somewhat insipid effect, and shows whither his genius was leading him—in technique a coarser Schalcken, in sentiment a weaker Delaroche.
Delaroche was the Titian of Louis Philippe’s age, the spoiled child of the Juste-milieu, one of the most insignificant and at the same time one of the most famous painters of the century; and in this double capacity is an interesting proof that in art the “Vox populi” is seldom the “Vox Dei.” What a difference between him and the great spirits of the Romantic school! Theywere enthusiastic poets; their predilection for Mediævalism was concerned only with its æsthetic charm, with the twilight shadows of its picturesque churches, the sounding presage of its bells, the motley processions of that world gleaming bright with uninterrupted colour. And what further allured their imaginative powers was the unruly character of certain epochs, the destructive war of wild factions, and the blazing, consuming power of passion. The historical motive, as such, was with them only a pretext for launching forth into flashing orgies of colour, according to the example, which they followed merely in externals, of the Venetian and Flemish masters. They knew, as genuine painters, that only in the pigment on their palette slumbers that power of exciting emotion by means of which the art of painting touches the chords of men’s souls. Enthusiasts of colour and of passion, they raved about the poets merely because the latter more readily enabled them, by means of the fierce vehemence of the awakened powers of nature, to invest with form the feverish, agitated, and terrible dreams of their fantasy. So it was that Delacroix told of conflagration, of battle and warfare, of murder and pillage, of the bitterness and pains of love. At the same time, no doubt, he studied the vari-coloured costumes of past ages—his drawings show as much—but he made use of them simply as a storehouse of bright hues, as a lexicon by means of which he might embody his visions of colour. To manufacture historical vignettes and play the part of a teacher of history would have been in his eyes a thing to be held in contempt as the work of subservient illustrators. Yet perhaps it was by taking this very course that far greater successes were to be attained, so far as the verdict of the multitude is considered.
The decade following upon 1820 was a season of brilliant blossom for the art of writing history in France. By hisHistory of the English Revolution, in 1826, Guizot won for himself a place in the foremost rank of French authors. He began in 1829 his famous lectures at the Sorbonne, and commenced in 1832 the publication of hisSources of French History. Even before him, Augustin Thierry had written in 1825 hisHistory of the Conquest of England by the Normans, followed byStories from the Merovingian Times, and was now engaged in the preparation of his great work, theHistory of the Origin and Progress of the Third Estate. Not unworthy to be compared with these writers, and soon to stand beside them, were two young men working in collaboration—Mignet and Thiers—who came to the front in 1823-24 with theirHistory of the Revolution. At the impulse thus given, historical societies and unions had arisen in every province of France, and were developing an ever-increasing activity.
What learning had begun, poetry carried further. A number of writers, young and old, began to consider what poetic use might be made of the materials which these investigations had brought to light, and few years had passed before the number of historical romances and dramas was hardly to be computed. Vitet, the elder Dumas, and de Vigny put historical tragedy in the place of classical, and the modern novel of George Sand, Balzac, and Beyle was ousted by the historical romance. During the same years was completedthe process by which grand opera forsook fantastic for historical subjects, such as Auber’sMuette de Porticiand Rossini’sGuillaume Tell.
Art also sought to turn to account the new materials furnished by historical science, and æsthetic minds hastened to enumerate the advantages which were to be expected of it. On the one hand—and this was nothing new—the artist, whose curse it was to be born in an inactive and colourless age, would find here all that he sought, for history offered him the contemplation of a magnificent life, full of movement. On the other hand—and this was the chief point—painting might also fulfil an important mission on behalf of culture, if by virtue of its more easily understood method it could supplement the science of history, and by recalling the great memories of the past keep alive that patriotism which in unfavourable conjunctures is so frequently found wanting. Guizot recommended French history, “the history of chivalry,” to painters, as the first and most important source of inspiration. “We want historians in the art of painting,” wrote Vitet; and his cry was not unheard.
While the Romanticists had seen in the old costumes nothing more than elements out of which a dashing colour-symphony could be obtained, troubling themselves little about the meaning or the narrative import of their pictures, their successors went over, bag and baggage, into the camp of the historians. In the place of pure painting, there arose an art laden with scientific documents, which busied itself in reconstructing former times with antiquarian exactness. While the former had produced nought but genuinely artistic colour-improvisations, so now a didactic aim, together with historical accuracy, became the main consideration. The painter was commissioned as a chronicler, an official of the state, to console citizens for the lamentable present by an appeal to the glorious past. He became a professor of history, a theatrical costumier who rummaged records, chose masks, cut out dresses, arranged scenic backgrounds, for no other purpose than to depict correctly and legibly on the canvas an historical event. And Mme. Tout le Monde found in these pictures exactly what she required. On the one hand, the didactic aim of historical painting, with its long explanations in the catalogues, answered precisely to the needs of the educated middle classes. Under the picture there was always a pretty card on which was printed this or that quotation from some historical writer. One read the description, and then satisfiedone’s self that the corresponding picture was really there and that it was in keeping with the description. One recalled to mind the lessons in history one had learned at school, and was pleased to be reminded in so pleasant a fashion that before the nineteenth century people did not wear trousers and frock-coats, but knitted hose and mantles. On the other hand, there still survived enough of the Romantic unruliness to allow one to be shocked in a decorous and moderate manner, and with the help of the catalogue a picture might be permitted to make one’s flesh creep in an agreeable way.
For the average painter of mediocre ability historical exercises of this sort must also have been very alluring, inasmuch as they made no demand upon specially artistic qualities—upon any peculiar aptitude of the fancy, eye, or palette. The historian must indeed possess the power of combination, but much more that of sober investigation; too much imagination or too great a sense of humour would be dangerous to him. So also the historical painter required neither fancy, sentiment, nor power of perception; a certain capacity for compiling facts was all that was necessary. It was enough to ferret out of some popular book on history the story of a murder, and to possess a work upon costumes. By such means, men of a certain ability could easily manage, with the help of the studio technique founded by the Romantic school, to put together the most imposing show-pieces. And even the critics allowed themselves frequently to be so far misled as to give to those models who were decked out in the finest costumes, and labelled with the names of the most celebrated personages, precedence over their more modest companions. Consequently it happened that in the time of the citizen monarchy a great number of painters entirely devoid of talent, whose only merit was that they attached to this or that chapter of universal history pictures showing some laboured animation, became in the twinkling of an eye leaders of the schools.
Eugène Devériawas the first and most important painter deliberately to enter upon this course. When his picture of the “Birth of HenryIV” was exhibited in the Salon of 1827 his appearance was welcomed as that of a new Veronese, and his work joyfully saluted as the first historical picture in which the local colour of the epoch represented was accurately observed. Henceforth Devéria dressed always in the style of Rubens, and his house became the headquarters of the Romantic school. He was perhaps the only member of this group in whom some breath of Delacroix’s spirit survived, but unfortunately he never found again either the Venetian tone or the male accent of his youth, and though he painted many more pictures he never contributed a second notable work to art.
Shortly afterwardsCamille Roqueplanbegan to alter his manner. Up to that time he had been exclusively a painter who, like Watteau and Terborg, listened with a voluptuous shudder to the piquant rustle of silk, velvet, and satin dresses; now he devoted himself to depicting with perspicuity various scenes from history, renounced his airy and radiant fantasies, and became, in his “Scene from the Massacre of St. Bartholomew,” nothing but a tedious schoolmaster.
Nicolaus Robert Fleury, the painter of “CharlesVin the Monastery of St. Just,” of the “Massacre of St. Bartholomew,” of the “Religious Conference at Poissy,” and of other historical anecdotes, carefully conceived and laboriously executed, devoted himself, like Lessing, to the propagation of noble ideas. His pictures were manifestoes against religious fanaticism, and philanthropic discussions concerning the trials and persecutions of the freethinkers. In order to give them the stamp of historical verisimilitude, he buried himselfwith the zeal of an archivist in the study of the period to be represented; often directly transferred into his pictures figures from Diepenbeeck or Theodor van Thulden; and having the faculty of seizing in old paintings those tones of colour which belong rather to the epoch than the master, he succeeded in giving his works a certain documentary and archaic character for which, on his first appearance, he obtained ample credit.
Louis Boulanger, after his “Mazeppa” of 1827, was a famous painter. But the highest success was that attained by Paul Delaroche, inasmuch as he understood better than any other, not only how to cater for the cultured public by the didactic nature and historical accuracy of his pictures, but also how to touch the heart by means of a lachrymose sentimentality.
Paul Delarochebelongs, by the date of his birth, to the eighteenth century. Being one of Gros’ pupils, he had never borne the yoke of the Classical school in its fullest weight, and therefore had never had occasion to revolt against it. When the Romanticists came to the front, he had gone or rather been dragged along with them, for to his circumspect nature Romanticism was an abomination, and his cool and deliberative spirit felt itself much more at home in the society of the Classicists. The works of the historians opened to him a welcome outlet by which to avoid a rupture with either party, and Delaroche found his vocation. He assumed the rôle of a peacemaker between the quarrelling brothers, placed himself as mediator between Montagues and Capulets, and thus became—like Casimir Delavigne in literature—the head of that “School of Common Sense” on whose banner glittered in golden letters Louis Philippe’s motto of the Juste-milieu. Ingres was cold, reserved, and colourless; Delaroche aspired to an agreeable, sparkling, highly seasoned, bituminous art of painting. Delacroix was genial and sketchy; Delaroche inscribed carefulness and exactness on his banner. The former had given offence by his boldness; Delaroche won the conservatives over to himself by his well-bred bearing and moderate attitude. People thought Delacroix too wild and poetical; Delaroche took care to give them only a touch of the eagerness of Romanticism, and set himself to reduce the passionate vehemence of Delacroix to rational, Philistine limits, and to soften down his native unruliness into sentimental pathos. This position which he assumed as a mediator made him the man of his age. The life of Delacroix was a long struggle. But for the commissions entrusted to him by the state he might have died of starvation, for his sales to dealers and lovers of art brought him scarcely five hundred francs a year. His studio held many pictures, leaning mournfully against each other in corners. Delaroche, on the other hand, was overwhelmed with praise and commissions. The representatives of eclecticism in philosophy and of the Juste-milieu in politics found themselves compelled to praise an artist who was neither revolutionary nor reactionist, neither Romantic nor Classical, who had bound himself over neither to draughtsmanship nor to colouring, but united both elements in vulgar moderation.
Already in his first notable works, in 1831, “The Princes in the Tower” and “Oliver Cromwell,” he has fully assumed his lukewarm manner. He might have represented the murder of the princes, but fearing that the public would not stand it, he preferred merely to suggest the approaching death of the weeping and terrified children by placing in front of the bed a small dog, which is looking uneasily towards the door, where the red light of torches indicates the approach of the assassins,—a Düsseldorf picture with improved technique. It is just the same with his melodramatic and lachrymose “Cromwell.” It would be hardly possible to represent one of the greatest figures in universal history in a more paltry manner, and to this day it is not quite certain whether the picture was intended to be serious or humorous. The great statesman in whom was embodied the political and ecclesiastical revolution of England must have been extremely busy on the day of CharlesI’s funeral, and have had better things to do than stealthily to open the coffin and contemplate, with a mixture of childish curiosity and sentimental pity, the corpse of the king whom he had fought and conquered. Eugène Delacroix had treated this subject in a sketch, in which Cromwell, at the funeral of Charles, gazes in quiet contempt upon the weak monarch who had not known how to keep either his crown or his head. As a work of art this little water-colour is worth ten times as much as Delaroche’s great, long-meditated, carefully executed painting. From the very beginning he had no sense for the passionate or dramatic. From the first day, had the tailor who prepared costumes struck work, his artistic greatness would have fallen away to nothing; from the commencement he produced nothing but large, clumsily conceived illustrations for historical novels. Planché pointed out long ago that all the costumes are glaringly new, that all the victims look as if they had got themselves up for a masked ball, that this sort of painting is much too clean and pretty to give the argument the appearance of probability. Théophile Gautier, who had proclaimed the powerful originality of Delacroix, fumed with rage against these “saliva-polished representations, this art for the half-educated, disguised in false, Philistine realism, this art of historical illustration for the familiar use of thebourgeois.” To rank timorous, half-hearted talent higher than reckless and awe-inspiring genius—this was in Gautier’s eyes the sin against the Holy Ghost, and he sprang like a tiger upon the popularity of talents such as these. He could, as he himself said, have swallowed Delaroche, skin, hair, and all, without remorse; meanwhile, the public raised him upon the shield as its declared favourite.
He won the intellectual middle class over to himself with a rush, as he industriously went on rummaging in manuals of French and English history forroyal murders and battle-deaths of kings. With his “Richelieu,” “Mazarin,” and “Strafford,” but especially with his “Execution of Lady Jane Grey” and “Murder of the Duke of Guise in the Castle of Blois,” he made hits such as no other French artist of his time could put to his account. Just then, in his youthful work,The States-General at Blois, Ludovic Vitet had put the murder of the Duke of Guise upon the stage. Nothing could be better-timed than to transform this operatic scene into colour. The historians of civilisation admired the historical accuracy of the courtiers’ dress, all the upholstery of the room, the lofty mantelpiece, the carved wardrobes, the praying-stool with the altar-piece over it, the canopy-bed with its curtains of red silk embroidered with lilies and the king’s initials in gold. Playgoers compared the scene with that which they had witnessed on the stage in Vitet’s piece, and the comparison was not unfavourable to the painter. For Delaroche, in order to be as far as possible in keeping with the stage representation, was accustomed to commission Jollivet, the chief mechanician of the Opera House, to prepare for him small models of rooms, in which he then arranged his lay-figures.
That is the further great difference between Delaroche and Delacroix, between the vagrant painter of history and the artist. The latter had the gift of the inner vision, and only painted things which had intellectually laid hold upon him and had assumed firm shape in his imagination. It was while the organ was playing theDies iræthat he saw his “Pietà” in a vision—that mighty work which in power of expression almost approaches Rembrandt. “Is not Tasso’s life most interesting?” he writes. “You weep for him, swaying restlessly from side to side on your chair, when you read the story of his life; your eyes assume a threatening aspect, and you grind your teeth with rage.” Such passionate emotion was wholly unknown to Delaroche; he painted deeds of murder with the wildness of Mieris. Delacroix everywhere grasps what is essential, and gives to every scene its poetical or religious character. A couple of lines are for him sufficient means wherewith to produce a deep impression. In presence of his pictures one does not think of costumes; one sees everywhere passion overflowing with love and anger, and is intoxicated with the harmony of sentiment and colour. Delaroche, like Thierry, had merely a predilection for the historical anecdote which, dramatically pointed, keeps the beholder in suspense, or else, simply narrated, amuses him. The colour and spirit of events had no power over his imagination; he merely apprehended them with a cool understanding, and put them laboriously together in keeping with it. Delacroix sought counsel from nature; but in the moment of creation, in front of the canvas, he could not bear direct contact with it. “The influence of the model,” he wrote, “lowers the painter’s tone; a stupid fellow makes you stupid.” Delaroche draped his models as was required, made them posture and pull faces, and while he was painting, laboriously screwed them up to the pathos demanded by the situation. Such a method of procedure must necessarily become theatrical.
Just as in his historical pictures he endeavoured to transform Delacroix’spassion into operatic scenes, so he perfected his position as a man of compromise by imitating the academic style in his “Hemicycle.” Here it was Ingres’ laurels which robbed him of his sleep. The fame which this picture has acquired is mainly due to Henriquel Dupont’s fine engraving. It does not attain to any kind of solemn or serious effect. One might imagine one’s self in some entirely prosaic waiting-room, where all the great men of every age have agreed to meet together for no matter what ceremonial purpose; one sees there a carefully chosen collection of costumes of all epochs, with well-studied but expressionless portraits of the leaders of civilisation. Here also Delaroche has not risen above respectable mediocrity, and his characteristics remain, as ever, thoroughly middle-class.
His likeness of Napoleon is perhaps that which shows most clearly how paltry a soul this painter possessed. It is not Devastation in human shape, not the man in whom his officers saw the “God of War” and of whom Mme. de Staël said, “There is nothing human left in him.” The intellect of that Corsican, with his great thoughts striding as in seven-leagued boots, thoughts each of which would give any single German writer material for the rest of his life, was hidden to the inquisitive glance of a painter who had never seen inthe whole of human history anything more than a series of petty episodes. And one who is not able to paint a good portrait is not justified in intruding into other regions of art.
For similar reasons the religious paintings with which he busied himself in his last days have likewise enriched art with no new element. They are a Philistine remodelling of the Biblical drama, in the same style as his historical pictures. In the end he appears himself to have become conscious how little laborious compilations of this kind have in common with art, and since with the best will in the world he could produce nothing better than he had painted in the thirties, he lost all pleasure in his vocation and abandoned himself to gloom and pessimism, from which death set him free in 1856.
Thomas Couture, who after Delaroche was most in vogue as a teacher in the fifties, was of greater importance as an artist, and in his “Romans of the Decadence” produced a work which, from the point of view of the Juste-milieu, is worthy of consideration even to-day. He was a remarkable man. His parents, shoemakers at Senlis, seem to have regarded the thick-headed, slowly developing boy as a kind of idiot, and are said to have treated him with no excessive gentleness. He was sent away from school because he could not understand the simplest things, and studied without success in the studios of Gros and Delaroche. And yet, after he had made his début in the Salon of 1843 with the “Troubadour,” a fine picture in the style of Devéria, his “Orgie Romaine” of 1847 made him at one stroke the most celebrated painter in France. Pupils thronged to him from every quarter of the globe, and he left a deep and enduring impression upon every one of them. A very short, corpulent, broad-shouldered, thick-set, proletarian figure, with thick disorderly hair, a blouse, a short pipe, and a gruff manner, he used to stride through the lines of his pupils, who regarded him with wonder on account of his ability as a teacher and his remarkable powers.
Yet, when a few years had elapsed, no one heard of him again. After his “Love of Gold” and a couple of portraits, he felt that he was unfruitful, and gave up the battle. “The Falconer,” an excellent picture, with charming qualities of colour, was the last work to give any proof of Couture’s technical mastery. He fell out with Napoleon, who wished to employ him; made many enemies by his writings, especially among the followers of Delacroix, whom he criticised beyond measure; and finally, embittered, and abandoning all artistic work, he buried himself in his country place at Villers de Bel, near Paris. Thither Americans and Englishmen used to come to order pictures of him, and were much astonished to hear that the old gardener’s assistant, as they took him to be, sitting on the grass and mending shoes or old kettles, was Couture. The news of his death in 1879 caused general astonishment; it was as if one long buried had come to life again. It had meanwhile become evident that even his “Romans of the Decadence” was only a work of compromise, the whole novelty of which consisted in forcing the results attained by the Romantic school in colouring into that bed of Procrustes, the formulæ of idealism. The work is undoubtedly very noble in colouring, but what would not Delacroix have made of such a theme! or Rubens, indeed, whose Flemish “Kermesse” hangs not far from it in the Louvre. Couture’s figures have only “absolute beauty,” nothing individual; far less do they exhibit the unnerved sensuality of Romans of the decline engaged in their orgies. They are merely posing, and find their classical postures wearisome. They are not revelling, they do not love; they are only busied in filling up the space so as to produce an agreeable effect, and in disposing themselves in picturesque groups. Even the faces have been vulgarised by idealism: everything is as noble as it is without character. There is something of the hermaphrodite in Couture’s work. His art was male in its subjects, female in its results. His “Decadence” was the work of a decadent, a decadent of Classicism.