CHAPTER XII
THE POST-ROMANTIC GENERATION
Fouryears after Couture painted his “Roman Orgy,” NapoleonIIIascended the throne, and the Parisian orgy began. It was a remarkable spectacle that the capital offered in those days—a spectacle of fairy-like, flashing and sparkling splendour. Even to-day, when Republican Paris endeavours as much as possible to obliterate every memory of the Empire, Napoleon’s spirit lives in the external appearance of the city and hovers over every conspicuous point. Augustus might say that he had found his capital a city of plaster and lime, and left it one of stone and bronze; Napoleon has the right to maintain that he raised palaces where there had been barracks.
Notwithstanding all the imprecations uttered against his rule, the most thorough-going Republicans reluctantly concede to him the possession of one good quality: he knew how to bring prosperity to the shop; “il faisait marcher le commerce.” One hears it said that the beautiful city on the Seine is but the shadow of what it then was. “Le niveau a baissé!” says the Parisian, when he calls to mind the gorgeous days of the Empire. The extravagant elegance, the magnificent luxury, which used to roll in superb carriages along the Boulevards and the Champs Elysées towards the Bois de Boulogne, and exhibited itself in the evening in the boxes of the theatres; the lustre which emanated from the Court, and the concourse of all the nabobs of the world,—all this must in those days have given to Parisian life a sparkling splendour, a something stupefying and intoxicating, an alacrity of enjoyment which had no parallel elsewhere. To the respectable, pedanticbourgeoisiewhich ruled under Louis Philippe had succeeded a new generation of men of the world, which drank to the lees all the refined pleasures that a modern great city has to offer. The gentlefolk of the Empire understood the art of living better, cultivated and exhausted it after a more inventive fashion, than any generation that had gone before. In the Tuileries sat the man of the Second of December, the connoisseur and promoter of all refined tastes. In his person the age was embodied, that age depicted by Zola inLa Curée, in the passage where he describes the halls, illumined as if by enchantment, of the imperial palace. There, all the splendour of over-civilisation glitters and gleams, with its bright eyes and sparkling jewels, with its breath of intoxicating perfumes floating from naked shoulders and arms and half-veiled voluptuous bosoms; while the green, sphinx-like eye of NapoleonIIIrests indifferently on the alabaster sea ofwhite shoulders bowing before him, as he reviews all that he has possessed and all that he can yet enjoy. Dumas’Dame aux Camélias,Diane de LysandLe Demi-monde, Barrière’sFilles de Marbre, Augier’sMariage d’Olympe, give the impress of the period upon literature, and the single phrase “The Lady of the Camelias” conjures up a world of forms and of scenery.La Nouvelle Babyloneis the title of the fine book in which Joseph Pelletan depicted the mysterious Paris of those years, the great city which cherished in its bosom the lowest and highest extremes of a refined world of pleasure, and was at the same time an inexhaustible fountain of arduous work.
One would have imagined that these new conditions of Imperial France would have left their impress, in some way or other, upon the art of painting also; just as in the works of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Terborg, Ostade, Pieter de Hooch, and Van der Meer of Delft the entire seventeenth century is reflected, clearly and with animation, treated with charming familiarity or else with grandiose effect, in its spirit, its manner of feeling, its habits and costumes. What a domain painting would have had; from the official festivals and the bustle of public life down to the complete delineation of the family home! Literature had entered into this course a quarter of a century before, and had shown the path—a path leading to new worlds. But in French art French society is not reflected. Not a single painter has left us a picture of this splendid Paris, dancing on a volcano and yet so amiably delightful. Classicism and historical painting still held the field, as if turned to stone, and show, in essentials, hardly any modification.
So far back as in 1833, Charles Lenormant wrote of the school of David: “Even the great painter Ingres was not able to rejuvenate a school which was breaking up from old age, or to restore their full resonance to the slackened and worn-out chords; his only office was to give the old synagogue honourable burial. Take away this last scion of the Classical school, and the curtain may fall—the farce is ended.” He might have said the same thing forty years later, for with Cabanel and Bouguereau Classicism has limped on, almost unchanged, to our own days. Its art was a correct, conventional picture-stencilling, which might just as well have flourished a generation earlier. Classicism—which in David was hard and Spartan, in Ingres cold and correct—has become pretty in Cabanel and Bouguereau, and is completely dissolved in the scent of roses and violets. Only a certain perfume of thedemi-mondebrings the persons who appear as Venus, asnaiads, as Aurora or Diana, into complete accord with the epoch which produced them. For Ingres the female body itself was the exclusive canon of beautiful form; now the swelling limbs begin to stretch themselves voluptuously forth. Ingres still treats the human eye as it was treated in ancient sculpture, as something animal, soulless, and dead; now it begins to twinkle provocatively. A modern refined taste plays round the classical scheme.
Alexandre Cabanel, the incarnation of the academician, was, under NapoleonIII, the head of the École des Beaux Arts. He was a fortunate man. Born at Montpellier, the city of professors, nourished from his earliest youth on academic milk, winner of the Grand Prix de Rome in 1845, awarded the first medal at the Universal Exhibition of 1855, he went on his way, laden with orders and offices, amid the tumultuous applause of the public. Among the artists of the nineteenth century none attained in so high a degree all those honours which lie open to a painter in our days. Yet, as an artist, he remained all his life on the plane of the school of Ingres. Even his “Death of Moses,” the first picture which he sent from Rome to the Salon, was entirely pieced together out of Raphael and Michael Angelo. After that he laid himself out to provide England and America with those women, more or less fully attired, who bore sometimes biblical, sometimes literary names: Delilah, the Shulamite woman, Jephthah’s daughter, Ruth, Tamar, Flora, Echo, Psyche, Hero, Lucretia, Cleopatra, Penelope, Phædra, Desdemona, Fiammetta, Francesca da Rimini, Pia dei Tolomei—an endless procession. But the only variety in this poetical seraglio lay in the inscriptions on the labels; the way in which the figures were represented was always the same. His works are pictures blamelessly drawn, moderately well painted, which leave one cold and untouched at heart. They possess that unusual polish and that dexterity of exposition which, like good manners in society, create a favourable impression, but are insufficient in themselves to make a man a pleasant companion. Nowhere is there anything that takes hold upon the soul, nowhere any touch to prove that the artist has felt anything in his painting, or force the beholder to feel for himself. The unvarying faces of his figures, with their eternal dark-rimmed eyes, resemble not living human beings but painted plaster casts. One would take his “Cleopatra,” apathetically observing the operation of the poison, to be stuffed, like the panther at her feet. One seeks in vain for a figure that is sincere or interesting, for a face alluring in its truth to nature. His “Venus” of 1862 made him the favourite painter of the Tuileries, and the insipid, rosy tints of that picture became more and more feeble in the course of years, until his works resembled wearisome cartoons, coloured by no matter what process. He was Picot’s pupil, it is true, but in reality Ingres was his grandfather, a grandfather far, far greater than himself, whose portraits alone show the entire littleness of Cabanel. All his life long Ingres was in his portraits a fresh, animated, and admirable realist. Cabanel indeed also painted in his earliest days likenesses of ladies which were full of serious grace, uniting a powerful fidelity to nature with considerable elegance. But his success was fatal to him. Moreover, as a portrait-painter, he became the depicter of society, and societyruined him. In order to please his distinguished customers, he devoted himself far more than is good for portrait-painting to smooth rosy flesh, large glassy eyes, and dainty fine hands, and over-idealised his sitters till they lost every appearance of life.
William Bouguereau, who industriously learnt all that can be assimilated by a man destitute of artistic feeling but possessing a cultured taste, reveals even more clearly, in his feeble mawkishness, the fatal decline of the old schools of convention. He has been compared to Octave Feuillet, who also never extricated himself from the scented atmosphere of distinguished society; but the comparison is unjust to Feuillet. Bouguereau is in his Madonna-painting a perfumed Ary Scheffer, in his Venus-pictures a greater Hamon; and in his perfectly finished and faultless stencilling style of beauty he became from year to year more and more insupportable. His art is a kind of painting on porcelain on a large scale, and he gives to his Madonnas and his nymphs the same smooth rosy tints, the same unreal universalised forms, until at last they become ajuste-milieubetween Raphael’s “Galatea” and the wax models one sees in hairdressers’ shops. Only in one sense can his religious painting be called modern; it is an elegant lie, like the whole of the Second Empire.
Close by Bouguereau’s “Venus” in the Luxembourg hangs the well-known colossal figure of a beautiful nude woman with unnaturally over-developed thighs, which by the shining mirror in its uplifted right hand proclaims itself to be “Truth.”Jules Lefébure, the painter of this picture, is also completely a slave to tradition; he came from Cogniet’s studio, and won the Prix de Rome in 1861. But he at least possesses more taste, elegance, and character; his painting of the nude is more distinguished, truer, and more powerful. He is in the broader sense of the word a worshipper of nature, and was so in his youth especially. His “Sleeping Girl” of 1865 and his “Femme couchée” of 1868 are smooth and honest studies from the nude, of delicate, sure draughtsmanship, and have therefore not become antiquated even to-day. Unfortunately he did not find this masculine accent again, when at a later time he grouped ideal figures together to make pictures of them. His “Diana surprised” of 1879 was a very clever composition of well-ordered lines, possessing even fine details, especially one or two charming heads, but as awhole it is lifeless and uninteresting. Like Bouguereau, he lacks power, and, notwithstanding his distinction and his capacity for arrangement, he is not painter enough to be truthfully entitled a “painter of the nude.”
In general, French art, however willingly it took to this sphere during the period we are considering, is rich indeed in well-drawn documents, but poor in works which, considered as painting, can bear the most distant comparison with Fragonard and Boucher. The Revolution had put an end to the joyous flesh-painting of French art. At the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century the painter of tender and life-like flesh-colour was not the reformer David, but the despised Prudhon. The former found his ideal in statues, and turned flesh to stone. The latter, a direct descendant of Correggio, gave expression to life with a tender mellowness. Ingres was again, like David, a very mediocre flesh-painter, and the Romanticists entered this sphere but seldom. Delacroix indeed has in his “Massacre” a couple of excellent touches, but they are isolated phenomena in his work. After 1850 the approved system was to give nude female figures the appearance of being made of terra-cotta, biscuit, or ivory. The forgotten art of painting velvety, soft flesh, and of making it vibrate in light, had to be learned over again, and to this meritorious taskHennerdevoted himself—the modern Correggio from Alsace, who stands to Cabanel in the same relation as Prudhon to David. Even Henner in his later days has become very much a mannerist, and has done some very bad work. To-day he prefers a heavy, pasty, buttery style of painting, with faces which look as if they had been pickled in oil, and have an unreal expression; his contrasts of light and shade, once so delicate, have become raw and forced. Yet beside Cabanel he still appears the true poet of female flesh-painting, the dreamy graceful depicter of refined sensuality.Prudhon’s delicate ideal and his language of vibrating tenderness are revived in Henner. His “Nymph resting” in the Luxembourg has the same softmorbidezza, the same delightful mystery, in which Prudhon before him had enveloped the sweetness of smiling faces and the beauty of female forms. He too chose the Lombards as his guides. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1858, he sent to the Salon of 1865 a “Susanna,” which already shows his ability as a flesh-painter and his relationship to Correggio. And a Lombard he has remained all his life. One could with difficulty find a more delicate and smooth study of the nude than his “Biblis” of 1867.
Since that time another tendency highly characteristic of Henner has shown itself in his work. In his endeavour to render the tint and tender softness of flesh as delicately as possible, he sought at the same time for light which should intensify the clear tone of the nude body. These he found in that time of evening, which one might call Henner’s hour, when the landscape, overshadowed by the twilight, gradually loses colour, and only a small blue space in the sky or a silent forest-lake still for a moment preserves the reflection of vanishing daylight. In this tranquil harmony of nature after sunset, the white pallor of the human body seems to have absorbed all the daylight and to be giving it forth again, while the surrounding landscape is already merging into colourless shadow. This is Henner’s “second manner,” and he raised it into a system. Every year since then there has appeared in the Salon one of those pale nymphs, standing out so mistily against the dark green of an evening landscape, or one of those Virgilian eclogues, in which the gloaming rests caressingly upon nude white bodies. And by this method of painting flesh and of throwing light upon it, Henner has won for himself an important place in modern art.
Paul Baudry, the powerful decorator of the Grand Opera House at Paris, marks the close of this tendency. In his work the endeavours of all those talented artists who sought to found a new school of “ideal painting” upon the basis of the study of the Italian Classicists came to a crowning height; and at the same time Baudry took a further step onward, in that he vivified the classical scheme with a yet more marked cast of “modernity.”
His first picture, on the murder of Marat, was feeble. What David hadexecuted smoothly and forcibly in his dead “Marat,” Baudry spoiled in his “Charlotte Corday.” The bath, the night-table with the inkstand on it, the map on the wall, and all the fittings of the room, are painted with the greatest finish, but the young heroine in her petrified idealism has no more life in her than there is in the furniture.
His “Pearl and Wave,” which is hung in the Luxembourg close to Cabanel’s and Bouguereau’s “Birth of Venus,” gave proof of progress. A deep-blue wave, towering on high and crowned with foam, has washed a charming woman ashore like a costly pearl. She seems to have just awakened out of slumber, and her roguish, moistly gleaming eyes are smiling. Saucily she leans forward her fair-haired head under her bended arms, and stretches out in easy motion her youthfully slender yet fully proportioned body. Bouguereau’s and even Cabanel’s female beauties are waxen and spoiled by retouching, but Baudry’s Cypris is a living being, and preserves some of the individual charm of the model.
It is this breath of realism which gives their attractiveness to Baudry’s pictures in the Paris Opera House. He cannot indeed be ranked as a truly great master of decorative painting, as the Fragonard of the nineteenth century; he was too eclectic. The five years, from 1851 to 1856, which as winner of the Prix de Rome he spent in the Villa Medici, were the happiest of his life. He saw in the Italian galleries neither Holbein nor Velasquez, neither Rembrandt nor Botticelli nor Caravaggio. He saw nothing and revered nothing save the pure tradition of the Cinquecento, which was to him the Alpha and Omega of art. He dreamed of great decorative works which should place him on an equality with those old masters. It was therefore joyful news to him when, at the suggestion of his old comrade Charles Garnier, he was commissioned to adorn the Opera House. Baudry was then thirty-five years old,in possession of his full powers, and yet he thought it necessary to go back to Italy to interrogate the masters of the Renaissance anew. For a full year he worked ten hours daily in the Sistine Chapel. As soon as he knew Michael Angelo by heart, he betook himself to England to copy Raphael’s cartoons, and then in 1870 for the third time to Italy, before he felt himself capable of covering the five hundred square metres of canvas. The task took him four years, and when it was exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1874, prior to being placed in its final resting-place, there was general astonishment at a single man’s power to produce so much and such great work.
To-day his praise cannot be sounded so high. The place to which he aspired, by the side of the great masters of the Renaissance, will not fall to Baudry’s lot; he is hardly to be reckoned even among the great French masters of the nineteenth century. To rise even so far he lacked the first and most essential gift—originality. He was a model pupil in his youth, and a pupil he remained all his life. He always saw nature through the medium of art, and never had the courage to take a fresh breath and plunge into its fountain of youth. Between him and reality there was ever the prism of the old pictures that he loved; brush in hand, he devoted himself, turn by turn, and with equal enthusiasm, to Michael Angelo, Titian, Correggio, Bronzino, and even Ingres. As soon as he returned from Italy for the first time, as holder of the Prix de Rome, he exhibited several pictures which were altogether Titian in colouring, altogether Raphael in style. Each of them, even the most important, calls some other painting to one’s mind. His “Fortune and the Child” is a variation upon Titian’s “Divine and Earthly Love”; his “Death of a Vestal Virgin” a reminiscence of the “Death of Peter Martyr”; his “Warrior” in the Opera House is the painted double of Rude’s “Marseillaise.” How many gestures, attitudes, and figures could, by a close analysis, be shown to be borrowed in turn from Veronese, Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, or Raphael! Hisworks are a synthesis of the favourite forms of the Cinquecento; they are the testament of the Cinquecento masters. He was a Parisian Primaticcio, a posthumous member of the old school of Fontainebleau. In him was embodied the last smile of the Renaissance, the results of which he assimilated and reduced to formulæ. He lacked creative imagination, and his pictures are wanting in individual character. The nervous movement and sinewy stretchings of his young men’s bodies would never have been painted but for Donatello’s “David.” Of his women, the powerful and muscular are descended from Michael Angelo’s “Eve,” the more slender and elegant come down from Rosso. His palette, with its blue and white tints, is bright and flowery, but it is no less artificial than his composition.
Nevertheless, it would be unjust to speak of Baudry’s work as merely faded Classicism, or as Michael Angelo and water. He was not merely a pupil of the Italians; he contributed something Parisian of his own, something pretty, mannered, refined, graceful, seductive, and smiling, and felt himself independent enough to give to his conventional figures this sprightly addition of genuinely modern nervosity. The birth-certificates of his young men were drawn up in Florence, those of his young women in Rome, three hundred and fifty years ago; yet there is in the latter something of theParisienne, in the former something of the modern dandies who know the fevered life of the Boulevards. In his delightful art there is French wit, there is a touch of the piquant, of the feminine, of the ambiguous, which almost amounts to indecency. One can still recognise the charming model in the figures of his dancers and Muses; you can see that Music’s or Poetry’s waist was laced up in a close-fitting corset before she sat for the picture. One may meet these women at any moment, trailing their dresses along the sidewalks of the Boulevards, or riding negligently in their carriages back from the Bois deBoulogne. And still more modern than the wasp-like form of the body is the character of the face and the smile on the lips. Thus Baudry has given a new shade to the manner in which one can obtain inspiration from the old masters. To all that he borrowed he added a personal and charming note. He possesses an elegance and grace which are neither Correggio’s, nor Raphael’s, nor Veronese’s, but French and Parisian. His Muses and Cupids, his “Comedy” and his “Judgment of Paris,” are documents of the French spirit in the nineteenth century, and—together with a few small and fine portraits on a green or blue backgroundà laClouet, among which that of his friend About takes the first rank—they will always assure him an important place in the history of French art.
Another artist who worked with Baudry at the decoration of the Grand Opera House wasÉlie Delaunay, who painted in a hall leading out of the foyer three large pictures on the myths of Apollo, Orpheus, and Amphion, and was at that time less appreciated than he deserved. Delaunay was born in the same year as Baudry, and, like him, was a Breton. In their genius also they are very similar. He shared in Baudry’s admiration of the masters of the Renaissance, but his worship was less for the Cinquecento than the fourteenth century. It was in Flandrin’s studio that he prepared himself for his entry into the École des Beaux Arts. His first picture, in 1849, “Christ healing a Leper,” was, with respect to its Roman manner of conceiving form and its bronze-like firm draughtsmanship, still entirely in the style of Ingres. It was not till he went to Italy in 1856, as winner of the Prix de Rome, that he turned from the works of the Roman school to those of the early Renaissance masters,to whom he was attracted by their rigorous study of form and their manly severity. His sketch books were filled with drawings after Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Pollajualo, Ghirlandajo, Botticelli, Gozzoli, and Signorelli. It was just at this time that French sculpture was making its significant revolt against the antique and in favour of Donatello, Verrocchio, and Della Robbia; that the Prix de Florence was founded, and that Paul Dubois’ “Florentine Singer” appeared. Delaunay became as a pupil of the Quattrocento masters one of the greatest draughtsmen of the century, a healthy Naturalist in the sense in which the Primitives were so, with a concise and firm power of design which only Ingres amongst modern French painters shares with him. The bodies of his nude male figures are strained in nerve and muscle like those of Donatello; they have the essential elegance and powerful rhythm of Dubois’ statues. Even the two pictures which he sent from Italy to the Salon, “The Nymph Hesperia fleeing from the Pursuit of Æsacus,” and the “Lesson on the Flute” in the Museum at Nantes, were works of great taste and sincerity, studied with respectful and patient devotion to nature, without striving after sentimental effect and without conventional reminiscences. When in 1861 he returned from Rome, he completed the frescoes in the church of St. Nicholas in Nantes, which, in their strict severity, remind one of Signorelli’s Cycle at Orvieto. In 1865 appeared in the Salon his “Plague at Rome,” which afterwards passed into the Luxembourg, and which is not devoid of tragic accent. In that collection hangs also his “Diana” of 1872, a proud nude figure drawn with firm and manly lines, and full of grave dignity, after the manner of Feuerbach. At the same time as his “Diana” he exhibited his portrait of a Mlle. Lechat, seated like one of Botticelli’s Madonnas in front of a trellis of roses—in the style of the old masters, and yet modern, naturalistic, and in excellent taste. Thenceforth he took his place among the first portrait painters of his time. There is an inexorable love of truth, a something bronze-like and stony in his pictures, finished as they are with the firm impress of medals. Instances of this may be found in his fine portrait of Mme.Toulmouche, whom he has represented in a white summer costume, with black gloves, seated in the midst of cheerful landscape; and also in several male heads drawn with that firmness of modelling which Bronzino in his best days alone possessed. After the completion of the Opera paintings he finished, in 1876, twelve decorative pictures for the great hall of the Council of State in the Palais Royal. His last works, which remained unfinished, were designs for the Pantheon—scenes from the life of St. Geneviève—in which he followed in the footsteps of the great fresco colourists of Upper Italy, Gaudenzio Ferrari and Pordenone. Élie Delaunay was no original genius, and as a pupil of the painters of the Quattrocento has not enriched the history of art in any way, but he stands forth, in a time which cared for nothing but external effect, as a very loyal, serious, and honest artist, whose works all bear the stamp of a healthy, manly spirit.
Though in the works of these masters the Classicism of Ingres passes away, in part enfeebled and in part imbued with modern elements and vivified by a more direct study of nature, yet on the whole Paul Delaroche dominates this period also. Historical painting takes the highest places in the Salon, and shows itself altered only in this respect, that, instead of Delaroche’s tameness of style, we have sensational subjects, arguments which revel in scenes of horror and display of corpses. Literature had already entered upon this path. Even Mérimée in his last novel,Lokis, was clearly the forerunner of that tendency in taste which Taine characterised by the words, “Depuis dix ans une nuance de brutalité complète l’élégance.” Flaubert himself, in hisSalambo, was to some extent carried away by the stream. Consider, for instance, the descriptions of Gisko crawling, a maimed, shapeless stump, out of the ditch into Matho’s tent, and of how his head is sawn off; of the tortures inflicted by the Carthaginian people upon the captured Matho; or of how the mercenaries are starved to death in the rocky valley where they were imprisoned. Vying with this tendency of literature, painting attained in its chosen themes anover-excitation which reached the limits of the possible. While Delaroche had only in a very timid manner led the way to the tragedies of history, the younger artists hunted up all the most horrible deeds of blood to be found in the great Book of Martyrs of the story of man, and elaborated them on gigantic canvases. It would be quite impossible to draw up a catalogue of all the murders at that time perpetrated by French art. They might be arranged under various headings, as biblical, historical, political murders; murders in connection with robbery, and murders arising out of revenge; with subdivisions corresponding to the means employed, as poison, the dagger, the halter, broadsword and rapier, the bowstring, strangling, burning, etc. This was the time when, on account of this dominance of the “Genre féroce,” the public used to call the Salon the Morgue.
Toudouzepainted the “Fall of Sodom” with a dozen copper-coloured Abyssinians, larger than life, rolling on the ground in convulsions, while Lot’s wife, dying and half-consumed by fire, gnashes her teeth as she raises the corpse of her child over her head. In a picture ofGeorge Becker’swere represented the corpses of King Saul’s sons, delivered over by David to the Gibeonites, hanging alongside of each other in a dark forest scene on a cross-shaped framework, like butcher’s meat from the shambles. Their mother stands beneath the scaffold, swinging a knotted club to protect the corpses from an antediluvian vulture. In a painting byBréhan, Cyaxares, King of the Medes, gives a banquet, and by way of dessert has his guests the Scythian leaders massacred by his mercenaries. In one byMatthieu, Heliogabalus has hit upon a yet happier idea, for at the conclusion of the meal he sets half-starved lions and tigers upon his guests.Aimé Morotdepicted in a large picture “The Wives of the Ambrones” in the battle of Aquæ Sextiæ. They are hurling themselves like a horde of furies upon the Roman horsemen who are attacking the camp. Half-naked, or entirely so, with their hair flowing behind them, they throw themselvesupon the Romans, catch hold of the swords by the blade, tear their eyes out, and are trampled beneath the horses’ hoofs. Especially popular were the voluptuous and cruel wild beasts from the menagerie of the Cæsars. Nero in particular suited the atmosphere of the period; his ghost haunted the novel, the stage, sculpture, and painting, and there seemed to be a general agreement to immortalise him and the morally monstrous personality of Locusta. In a picture bySylvestrehe is represented with florid cheeks, glowing with fat, and gloating over the mortal agony of a slave lying on the ground, upon whom Locusta has tested the poison intended for Britannicus.Aubletvaried the same theme by making a negro lad the victim, while several corpses of negroes lying in the background suggest that the Emperor was not quite satisfied with Locusta’s first experiments. Round Nero, the more entirely to fill his magnificent Golden House, the charming shades of his congenial comrades in crime weave their flitting dances.Pelezdepicted the strangling of the Emperor Commodus by the gladiator to whom the Empress had entrusted the task, and painted with tender interest the marks caused by suffusion of blood which the athlete’s hand had left upon the unhappy prince’s neck. A very familiar figure is that of Seneca, with distorted features, uttering his last words of wisdom while the blood pours from his opened veins. After the madness of the Cæsars comes the atrocious history of the Merovingian kings.Luminais, the painter of Gauls and barbarians, represented in his large picture “Les Énervés de Jumièges” the sons of King Clovis II, who, after the muscles of their knees have been destroyed by fire, are set helplessly adrift in a boat on the Seine. Then followed torture scenes from the time of the Inquisition, and saints burning at the stake. The conception which this post-Romantic generation had of the East was of cruelty and voluptuousness mixed, a thing pieced together out of white bodies, purple streams of blood, and brown backgrounds. Here, the favourite Sultana contemplates the severed head of her rival, which stares at her out of its glassy eyes; there, eunuchs are making ready to strangle a woman condemned to death. In works such as these thegenius, powerful in composition, of Benjamin Constant, celebrates its triumphs.
Yet, notwithstanding all the means of allurement furnished by such themes, these paintings almost invariably fail to produce the anticipated effect. Not that it is the brutality of the subjects that makes them unpleasant. Art in all times has busied itself with the horrible. How voluptuously does Dante depict the horrors of Hell! What imagination was ever peopled with figures more dreadful than those conceived by Shakespeare? Cruelty and death have a poetry of their own: why should Art prudishly abstain from depicting them? Only, if the result is to be a good picture, the subject must be in strict congruity with the talent employed upon it, and in the majority of these works this conformity is lacking. The subjects alone had become more savage and brutal. In the manner of treatment there is none of the wild effect which the Neapolitans of the seventeenth century gave to their scenes of martyrdom. Spirits truly wild, like Delacroix and Caravaggio, are not to be met with every day. The painters who launched out upon these bloodthirsty themes took absolutely no inward “enjoyment in tragical subjects,” but simply painted them as if after precepts learned at school. And as they were also deficient in that knowledge of nature which is acquired only by direct study of life, not one of them was in a position to give to his historical scenes that naturalistic weight which alone gives to such themes a character of convincing probability. True, these pictures compel respect on account of their unusual ability. These naked bodies, twisting themselves in the most varying postures of pain, give proof by their correct draughtsmanship of the most painstaking anatomical studies, yet after all they are nothing more than inverted Laocoöns. The Classical spirit haunts them still, and a discordant effect is produced when subjects so full of wild passion are tranquilly depicted according to cold conventional rules. Over all these figures and scenes, even the most horrible, lies the veil of a Classical embellishment, which deprives them altogether of that directness which lays hold on the imagination. The pictures are goodstudies of costume, and make an admirable impression by their resplendent glow of colour; they are show-pieces, brilliant stage effects, as happily conceived as any of Sardou’s. But the recipe for their production is still that of the school of Delaroche: avoidance of all extremes, generalised forms, careful composition, crude lukewarmness, or the affectation of daring. Scarce one of these painters has given to his wild subject an equal wildness of treatment; not one has raised himself from the paltry level of Delaroche to the artistic height of Delacroix.
Laurensalone, surnamed by his comrades “the Benedictine,” because his predilection was for forgotten themes from ecclesiastical history, constitutes in a certain sense an exception to the rule. He too belongs to the group of historical painters whose theory is that a picture should represent an historical fact with absolute accuracy. But he is more masculine than Delaroche. His personages are truer to nature, or, if one will, less banal; the general effect is warmer and fuller of life; he has a greater power of attracting attention. There is nothing great in his work, but there is no cold pedantry: the art of combination is more adroit, so that one is less aware of calculation, and may sometimes observe a grim earnestness. He really loves the terrible, while the others merely made use of it for the manufacture of what are nothing more than tableaux. To the Inquisition especially he was indebted for notable successes, and at times he was able to depict its dark scenes of horror in a very subtle manner. When he heaps up, in front of a church, corpses towhich the priests have refused burial; when he disinters popes in order to place them in the dock before their accusers; when he opens coffins to reveal the decomposed features of some erstwhile beauty, he sets even blunted nerves on the stretch; and as he has therein attained the goal he had proposed to himself, his art is not without its justification.
Among the younger generation,Rochegrosse, an artist of daring genius, appeared for a while to have taken to such themes by free choice, and not solely through the traditions of the studio. One seemed to observe in his works a truly emotional temperament flaming behind the trammels of conventionality, and was almost inclined to rank him among the spirits of storm and stress who trace their descent from Delacroix. After his first picture, in which “Vitellius” is represented dragged through the streets of Rome and ill treated by the populace, he achieved success with a scene taken from the destruction of Troy. Here “Andromache,” raging with impotent anguish, is struggling against a number of Greeks who have snatched her child from her arms to throw it down from the ramparts. This brutal strife is depicted with the highest naturalistic power. Neither the heroine nor the warriors belong to the ideal figures of the style of compromise. Andromache is of a fulness of form almost approaching corpulence, and the Greeks remind one of Indians on the warpath. Mangled corpses complete the picture, and on the bare wall to the left, over the stairs, hang dead bodies abandoned to corruption and the birds of prey. In his third picture he took for his theme the horrors of the barbarous and ferociousPeasants’ War in the fourteenth century, as Mérimée had described them in his book entitledLa Jacquerie; and his work is all the more effective as there lurks in the subject a certain grim modern touch which reminds one of the Social Democracy, of the insurrection of the Commune, of something which might happen even to-day. The insurgents break into the hall, where the ladies of the castle have taken refuge with their children. One alone stands erect, the grandmother in her nun-like widow’s dress, and stretches her arms behind her with a gesture of energy, as if to shield the younger ones at her back. The foremost intruder ironically takes off his cap. Another lifts up on his pike the fair-haired, bleeding head of the lord of the castle; a third has similarly transfixed his reeking heart. Others are pressing in from without, breaking the window panes with their weapons, which are yet dripping with blood. Beneath frightful figures are seen, the most horrible that of a woman standing on the window-sill, her hands propped upon her knees, gazing with insane laughter upon the mortal terror of the aristocratic ladies.
In his subsequent pictures Rochegrosse did not go so far afield. His “Murder of Julius Cæsar” was a work of art in white upon white, full of crude imagination, with white walls, white reflections of light, white togas, and dark red blotches of blood. His grass-eating “Nebuchadnezzar” proved that from the sublime to the ridiculous there is often only a step. Between times he painted archæological trifles for ladies of literary culture, such as the “Battle of the Sparrows” of 1890; but in his great “Fall of Babylon” he has proved oncemore what he can do. No doubt it is not a fine work: it is a mere decorative piece, but an astonishingly spirited performance. The scene is the palace of the Babylonian kings, the decorative construction of which the recovered monuments and the recent scientific investigations had rendered it possible to reproduce. Rochegrosse consulted with the zeal of an archæologist all the treasures of the Louvre and the British Museum,—Assyrian friezes, ornaments, and costumes,—and then set forth in these surroundings the famous banquet at which the Prophet Daniel explained the words “Mene, Tekel, Peres.” The day begins to break; in the distance the army of the Medes advancing to attack the palace has burst open the gate; Belshazzar leaves the table in terror, and takes to his weapons; the naked women, still intoxicated, stretch their limbs, or remain lazily indifferent lying on the ground; around is a dazzling confusion of mosaics, of polychrome architecture, of fantastic images of animals, of glittering tapestries shot with many hues and pleasing to the eye; of flowers, vases, fruits, pastry, and nude bodies of women. The grey light of morning strives to overcome that of the half-extinguished lamps, and rests with leaden weight upon the gigantic still-life below.
If some portion of Delacroix’s wild genius appears to have descended upon Rochegrosse, yet wasHenri Regnault, as a colourist, the greatest of Delacroix’s heirs—even allowing for the exaggerated renown which came to him in France, from the fact that he was the last to fall in the war of 1870. His portrait of “General Prim” of 1869, which, rejected by the sitter, came eventually to the Louvre, is somewhat reminiscent of Velasquez and Delacroix, but is nevertheless, with those of Géricault, amongst the finest equestrian portraits of the century. In his “Salome” he has depicted a black-haired girl with twitching feet, resting upon a stool after her dance, and contemplating with the cruelty of a tigress the platter which she holds ready for the head of John the Baptist, while her glowing red mouth with its dazzling teeth smiles like that of an innocent child. In her he has embodied with infernal subtlety the demon ofvoluptuous wantonness, and has composed a symphony in yellow of seductive and dazzling charm. She is attired in transparent gold-inwoven robes, which have a caressing congruity with the resplendent texture of the background.
His “Moorish Headsman” is a symphony in red. In his pale rose-red garb the tall Moor stands in majestic dignity, wipes a few drops of blood from the blade of his sword, and glances with careless indifference—a type of the dreamy cruelty of Oriental fatalism—without anger and without pity, without hatred and without satisfaction, upon the severed head with its distorted eyes, which, rolling down a couple of steps, has stained the white marble with purple patches of blood. “I will cause the genuine Moors to rise again, at once rich and great, terrible and voluptuous,”—so the voice of Delacroix speaks out of this picture by Regnault. His paintings, like those of his master, have the effect of splendid Oriental costumes; they are shot with every hue, they lighten and glisten, they are inwoven with magnificent arabesques of gold and silver, with sparkling embroideries and precious stones. The “Orlando Furioso” of art lives once more in these fascinating harmonies, in the power, splendour, and lustre of the colouring. Just as Baudry at the close of the Classical period produced in his paintings for the Opera House the noblest work after the idealist formulæ, so Regnault in his “Salome” and his “Prim” has completed the last defiant works of the formulæ of Romanticism.
We have thought it advisable to follow this development of the art of painting down to its close, just as in treating of the older periods we have proceeded, not upon chronological principles, but upon those of historical style. Now that the old art has been followed to the grave, it will be all the easier, later on, to perceive clearly how the new arose slowly out of its invisible depths. And as France since 1830 has become the high school of art for other nations, those paths have at the same time been indicated along which the art of painting was proceeding during these years in other countries.