CHAPTER XV
THE VICTORY OVER PSEUDO-IDEALISM
Immediatelyupon the epoch-making labours of the historians followed the first romances that were archæological and dealt with the history of civilisation; and hand in hand with these literary productions there was developed—by the side of historical painting proper, in France, Belgium, and Germany—a tendency to represent the life of the past, not in its grand dramatic action, but in its familiar concerns. In the one case there was history in its state uniform, in the other history in undress. And while the former class of painters saw the past only in a condition of unrest and violent movement, the latter began to enter into the details of daily life, and to represent it as it flowed by in times of peace. Those who had the romantic bias turned to the old artistic crafts. As yet that bias consisted only in an enthusiasm for the tasteful civilisation of a bygone age, with its polished charm of luxurious household appointments and pleasing costume. Rooms were filled with Gobelins and rich stuffs, handsome furniture and old pictures. By the rapid sale of their productions painters were placed in a position to acquire for themselves at the second-hand dealers all the beautiful things they painted. They placed their dressed-up models in front of their tapestries, and between their cabinets and tables. Stress was laid on historical accuracy in the representation of the usages and costumes of the past, not on dramatic action, and in this respect the historical picture of manners, as opposed to historical painting, marked an advance towards intimacy of feeling. The latter still worked from the abstract. The painter read a book and looked out for telling passages. He idealised models, to lend his picture the character of “great art.” It was always the illustration of underlying ideas.
In this new kind of picture, on the contrary, the conception of a work of art was given, by the perfected representation of any part of the visible world, were it only the corner of a studio elaborately and artificially arranged. The historical picture of manners no longer depicted “the meeting of hostile forces,” but either the heroes of history or the nameless men of the past in their daily act and deed, and so accustomed the public gradually to interest themselves in people who did not act with histrionic passion, but conducted themselves quietly and soberly like men of the present time. The place of the dramatic was taken by those phases of life which are pleasant and smooth. At the same time there was no need to be thrown back on conventionalidealisation, and it was possible to bring people dressed up for the occasion directly into the picture, just as they sat there, since the contrast between the professional model and the old-fashioned dress made itself less felt on this smaller scale of art. Thus was achieved the transition from the heroic historical art of the first half of the nineteenth century to that familiar and more human art of the second half, which no longer fled for help to the past, but sought a simpler ideal in reality.
First of all in France, from the side of the solemnly earnest group of Academicians, there stepped forward certain artists who moved in the old world quite at their ease, and began to paint simple little pictures from the daily life of antiquity, instead of the great ostentatious canvases of David and Ingres. In literature their parallels are Ponsard and Augier, who in their comedies brought antique life upon the stage, the one inHorace et Lydie, the other inLa CiguëandLe Joueur de Flûte.
Charles Gleyreapproached nearest to the strict academical style of Ingres. Not even by a tour in the East did he allow himself to be led away from the Classical manner, and as head of a great and leading studio he recognised it as the task of his life to hand on to the present generation the traditions of the school of Ingres. Gleyre was a man of sound culture, who during a sojourn in Italy which lasted for years, had examined Etruscan vases and Greek statues with unintermittent zeal, studied the Italian classics, and copied all Raphael. Having come back to Paris, he never drew a line without having first assured himself how Raphael would have proceeded in the given case. And this striving after purity of form has robbed his works (“Nymph Echo,” “Hercules at the Feet of Omphale,” and the like) almost entirely of ease, freshness, and naturalness. Gleyre became, like Ary Scheffer, a victim to style. He had in him—his “Evening” of 1843 is sufficient to show it—a tender, dreamy, and contemplative spirit. The feelings to which he wished to give expression were his own, and the more fragrant, romantic, and vaporously indistinct they were, the more did they suffer from the stiff academical line in which he so mercilessly bound them. Only in his “Orpheus torn by the Bacchantes” has he raised himself to a certain neo-Greek elegance.
Louis Hamonstands at the end of this path, which led gradually from the strictness of form characteristic of the idealism of Ingres to incidents thought out in perfectly modern fashion and laid in a primitive era only because of the advantages of costume offered by the antique. The grace of his pictures is modern; their Classicism is a disguise. To robust natures his art can make but little appeal. He has deprived nature of her strength and marrow, and painting of its peculiar qualities, transforming them into a coloured dream, a tinted mist. In Hamon’s modelling there is an uncertainty, in his colour a sickly weakness and meagre effeminacy, which give to his figures and landscapes the appearance of being dissolved in vapour. Everything firm is taken from them; the stones look like wadding, the plants like soap, the figures like china dolls which would fly into the air at the least gust ofwind. Nevertheless there are times when his confectionery has a sympathetic grace. What distinguishes him is something simple, pure, youthful, fresh, and childlike. His colour is lighter and more delicate than Gleyre’s. None but blended colours such as light blue and light yellow mingle in the harmony of white tones. The severe antique style has been given a prettyrococoturn: his Greek girls, women, and children are like figures of Sèvres porcelain; the scenes in which he groups them are pleasing,—sports of fancy brought forward in a Grecian garb, of an affected sensuousness and a coquettish grace. His prettiest picture was probably “My Sister’s not at Home”—Greece seen through a gauze transparency in the theatre.
Léon Gérômehas also a taste for borrowing his subjects from the antique; being a pupil of Delaroche, however, he has treated not mythological but historical episodes of antiquity. His “Cock-fight,” “Phryne before the Areopagus,” “The Augurs,” “The Gladiators,” “Alcibiades at the House of Aspasia,” and “The Death of Cæsar,” together with pictures from Egypt, are his most characteristic works: Ingres and Delaroche upon a smaller scale. He shares with the one his learnedly pedantic composition, and with the other his taste for anecdote. It may be remarked that in these same years Emile Augier was active in literature, but that Augier, living in the same epoch of modern life, is far more powerful and animated in his Classical pieces.Gérôme’s art is an intelligent, frigid, calculating art. In execution he does not rise above a petty study of form and an academic discipline. His drawing is accurate, and he has even succeeded in giving his figures a certain natural truth which is in advance of the generalisation of the classic ideal; yet from first to last he is wanting in every quality as a painter. His pictures of the East are hard landscapes, in which men or animals, harder still—unfortunate, eternally petrified beings—stand out abruptly. He draws and stipples, he works like an engraver in line, and goes over what he has painted again and again with a fine and feeble brush. He has an eye for form, but the effect of light upon the body escapes him. His pictures therefore give the impression of china, and his colour is hard and dead. What distinguishes him is a watchful observation, a chilling correctness, enclosing everything in characterless outlines. And this marble coldness remained with him later when, moving with the development of historical painting, he gradually took to working on more tragical subjects. Even the most violent subjects are depicted with a dainty grace, and with a smile he serves up decapitated heads, prepared with a paintingà la maitre d’hôtel, upon a gold-rimmed porcelain plate as smooth as glass.
Another painter of archæologicalgenreisGustave Boulanger, who after extensive studies in Pompeii gave a vogue to those antique interiors and scenes of Pompeian street life now associated with the name of Alma-Tadema.
Direct descendants of Delaroche and Robert Fleury were those who threw themselves enthusiastically into treating the physiognomy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and devoted the most ardent study to the weapons, costumes, and furniture of those epochs. They never wearied in representing FrançoisIand HenriIVin the most varied situations of life, nor in searching the biographies of great artists and scholars for episodes worth painting. Especially popular subjects were those of celebrated painters at their meeting with contemporaries of high station: Raphael and Michael Angelo coming across each other in the Vatican, Murillo as a boy, the young Ribera found drawing in the street by a Cardinal, Bellini in his studio amid all manner of precious objects, CharlesVand Titian, Michael Angelo tending his servant, and others of the same kind. The number of painters who were active in this province is as great as the number of anecdotes which are told of distinguished men. They spread themselves over various countries, like the swarms of insects hatched on a summer’s day amid luxuriant vegetation, and thereby they render the task of selection more difficult to the historian. In France there workedAlexander Hesse,Camille Roqueplan, andCharles Comte; in Belgium,Alexander MarkelbachandFlorent Willems. Markelbach, a pupil of Wappers, in addition to episodes from English history, specially devoted himself to painting the shooting festivals of the old Netherlandish city guards, in which enterprise the Doelen pieces of Frans Hals did him excellent service in the matter of costume. Florent Willems, who, as a restorer, saturated himself with the manner of the old masters, was particularly popular on account ofthe smooth finish he gave to his modish ladies, cavaliers, soldiers, painters, soubrettes, and patrician matrons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All the richly coloured satin, brocade, and velvet costumes of these personages, together with the tapestry, the curtains, and the furniture of their dwellings, he had the secret of reproducing in such a fashion that he was long esteemed a modern Terborg. Amongst the Germans,L. von Hagnwas the most delicate of these artists, and the graceful comedies of real life which he painted, transplanting them into the Italian Renaissance or the Frenchrococoperiod, have often great distinction of colouring.Gustav Spangenberg, after the lucky but isolated success he had made with “The Track of Death,” devoted himself to the Reformation period; andCarl Beckerto the Venetian Renaissance, from which he occasionally made an excursion into the German. These and many others could be discussed with more particularity if their pictures, smooth as coloured prints, and neatly finished in their own paltry way, were not so much below the standard of galleries. For them also the incident to be represented, with the personages concerned in it, was the principal matter, and not pure painting. These fetters upon true art were first shaken off by the hands of the following painters.
Of the generation of the eminent Flemish artists of 1830Hendrik Leysis the one whose fame has been most enduring. Born in Antwerp on 18th February 1815, at first destined for the priesthood, and then in 1829 admitted to the studio of Ferdinand de Braekeleers, he had made his début in the beginningof the thirties with a pair of historical pictures. These indeed revealed little of the power which he evinced later, but they furnished some indication of what he was aiming at. Here were none of the skirmishes—so popular at the time—in which blood flows as from the pipes of a fountain; the combatants fought with decorum and moderation, and less from conviction than to justify the helmets and cuirasses which had been fetched from the wardrobe. In both of them, on the other hand, the background—a mediæval town with tortuous alleys, lanterns, and picturesque taverns—was most lovingly treated. Here was revealed a thoroughly German delight in minute detail. Instead of subordinating the accessories as others did, with the object of throwing the principal personages into relief, Leys represented an entire corner of the world at once, giving full distinctness to the smallest things, down to the implements of daily life, the grasses and flowers of the landscape, and the variegated corner-stones of the old house-fronts, whose picturesque porches and lattices bulge into the crooked lanes. His next picture, “The Massacre of the Löwen Magistrates,” was a still further departure from precedent, since—quite in Callot’s manner—it mingled with the principal drama a mass of grotesque episodes. The borngenrepainter was announced by these traits; and not less striking was the form of the art, which was a thorough departure from the manner of the “painters of the grand style.”
The resuscitation of a national art, which had been the life-long aim of Gustav Wappers, who was twelve years his senior, was what Leys also set up as the goal of his artistic endeavours. But their ways divided. Wappers was principally inspired by Rubens, while Leys attached himself at first to the Dutch painters. A visit made to Amsterdam in 1839 had helped him to an understanding of Rembrandt and Pieter de Hoogh. He followed them when, in 1845, he painted his “Wedding in the Seventeenth Century”—a rich display of gleaming hangings, golden plate, and red-plush furniture, amid which move handsomely dressed people, wedding guests, and violin players. The effort to approach Pieter de Hoogh or Jan van der Meer is apparent in the management of light; the treatment of drapery reminds one of Mieris and Metsu. Another pair of anecdotic pictures from the seventeenth century allow one to follow the progress by which Leys, under the influence of Dutch models, gradually developed that power and mastery of colouring, that completeness of pictorial effect, and that soft treatment of subdued light which were justly admired in his first works. In particular, certain works founded on the legends of painters and monarchs—Rubens, Rembrandt, or Frans Floris visited in their studio by some personage of high station—made him the lion of the Paris Salon. In 1852 he stood at the summit of his fame; he was recognised as one of the first of painters, both in Belgium and in other countries, and was everywhere loaded with honours. Then he cast his slough and entered on his “second manner.”
After he had followed Rembrandt for more than a decade he turnedfrom him to cast himself suddenly into the arms of the German masters of the sixteenth century, and, according to his own saying, “from that time forward to become an artist.” During a tour through Germany, in 1852, he had become familiar with Dürer and Cranach; in Dresden, Wittenberg, and Eisenach there hovered round him the great figures of the Reformation period. Half-effaced memories of his countrymen, the brothers Van Eyck and Quentin Matsys, became once more fresh, and drove him decisively forward on his new course. “The Festival at Otto Venius’s” and “Erasmus in his Study” were the first steps in this direction, and when soon afterwards he came forward with his costume pictures, “Luther as a Chorister in Eisenach” and “Luther in his Household at Wittenberg,” every one was enraptured with the exquisite truthfulness of his portrayal of archaic life. At the World’s Exhibition of 1855 he had another magnificent success with three pictures executed in old German style. These were “The Mass in Honour of the Antwerp Burgomaster Barthel de Haze,” “The Walk before the Gate,” and “New Year’s Day in Flanders.” His return from Paris, where he was the only foreigner except Cornelius who had received the great gold medal, took the form of a triumphal progress in Antwerp, where he was greeted with illuminations, torchlight processions, and laurel wreaths made in gold. He was held to be the most eminent master since Quentin Matsys, the Jan van Eyck of the nineteenth century. In the Brussels Salon he appeared as a prince of art, before whom criticism made obeisance, and for whose pictures special shrines were erected. He was striking, not merely as an artist, but as a man: his stately figure was known to every one in Antwerp, and was pointed out to strangers as one of the sights of the place. In 1867, when he again received the medal in Paris, the Antwerp Cercle Artistique had a medal struck to commemorate an event of such importance in Belgian art. His decease, on 25th August 1869, threw the whole town into mourning; the windows in the town hall, where he had painted his last pictures, were hung with black, and the announcement of his death pasted up on great placards at the street corners. “Leys is ons” ran the phrase in the speech made by the burgomaster over his open grave. To-day his statue stands on the Boulevard Leys, and his house is noted down in Baedecker, like those of Matsys and Floris, Rubens and Jordaens.
Leys was thus a favourite child of fortune. Enthusiastic applause showeredhim with fame and laurels. But it is natural that posterity should find a good deal to cancel in these titles of honour.
Through Leys the history of art was not enriched with anything new. His delicate art—severe in outline—which goes back directly to the peculiar manner of the fifteenth century, is in itself not without merit. But how much of it belongs to the nineteenth century? To what extent has the painter stood independent and on his own peculiar ground? He could draw a Van Eyck which might be taken for an original. He seems like an old master gone astray by chance amongst the moderns. His knowledge of the sixteenth century is marvellous. In fact, he was a visionary who saw the past as clearly as though he had lived in the midst of it. The men he paints are his contemporaries. He has drawn them from life in the year of grace 1493, and they make no gesture nor grimace which might not be four hundred years old. Yet that means that he was not an original genius, but merely one who gave an adroit reproduction of a formula already in existence. And much as he affected to be the contemporary of Lucas Cranach and Quentin Matsys, he had not their simplicity: where they painted life he painted the shadow of their realism. Surrounded by old pictures, breviaries, and missals, he contented himself with copying the still forms of Gothic miniatures instead of living nature. He went so deeply into the pictures of the Antwerp townhall that he followed the old masters in their very errors of perspective; and though even the most childish confusion between foreground and background does not disturb one’s pleasure in them, because they knew no better, it is an affectation in him, with his modern knowledge, intentionally to make the same mistakes. Instead of being an imitator of nature, he is an imitator of their imitation—agourmetin pictorial archaism.
Yet it was exactly this uncompromising archaism which was of importance for his time, and amongst his contemporaries it gives him significance as a reformer. He is the only one amongst them who really represents the Flemish race. Wappers was merely a Fleming from Paris, who shook off the yoke of the Greeks to bear that of the French. Delaroche lived again in Louis Gallait, the pupil of David. Their works had the sentiment of French tragedies, and an artificial neatness which completely departed from the truth of nature; the figures were combed and washed and brushed and polished, the gestures were histrionic, the colours toned in a stereotyped fashion to effect a pleasingensemble. Leys endeavoured to be true. In his pictures he had no wish to express ideas, but merely to bring back a fragment of “the good old time” in all its brightness of life and colour. And whilst as a colourist he was bent upon avoiding uniformity of tone and giving everything its natural character, as a draughtsman, too, he set up, in opposition to the more patrician fluency of others, the citizen-like angularity of an art uninfluenced by the Cinquecento. As in Cranach, Dürer, and Holbein, one finds in his pictures profiles that are vividly true; harsh and often unwieldy heads, wrinkled faces, and heavy, massive shoulders resting on stunted bodies. The human form, with fat stomach and great horny hands, seems almost deformed. Everything which the struggle for existence has made of the image of God is expressed in the works of Leys for the first time since David. Even his “Massacre of the Löwen Magistrates” showed sharp, naturalistic physiognomies in the midst of its confused composition, and his “Barthel de Haze,” fifteen years after, fully exemplified this striving aftercharacteristic and truthful expression. None of his contemporaries has shown himself more cool and indifferent to conventional and graceful profile and “beauty” in the drawing of heads. Hatred of the academic model made Leys bring art back to its sources. The hideousness, so often childish, in primitive pictures was dearer to him than all Raphael. By this emphasising of the characteristic in attitude and the expression of the face he shows himself, although he painted historical subjects, the very antipode of the painter of the historical school, and, at the same time, one of those who effected the transition which led to the modern style. In setting up quaintness and far-fetched archaism against the mannerism of the idealists, Leys accustomed the eye again to recognise that there was something truer than nobility of line and aristocratic pose; and, as he appealed to the old masters as accomplices, it was impossible for æsthetic criticism to be offended.
In France the transition from the absolutely beautiful to the characteristic, from types to individuals, was brought about from various sides. On the one side Romanticism had opposed to the antique style that of the Flemish painters. On the other side, within Classicism itself, there had been a change from the antique and the Cinquecento to the early Italian renaissance. A new world was opened to sculpture by the “Florentine Singer” of Paul Dubois. The more artists buried themselves in the study of those early pioneers of realism, Donatello, Verrochio, della Robbia, and the other masters of the Quatrocento, the more they found themselves fascinated by the sparkling animation of these creations, and sought to transfer it freely into their own work. The fifteenth century, with the energetic force of its figures, its close grasp of nature, and its pithy characterisation, which did not even shrink from ugliness, induced painters to go back more than they had formerly done to the sources of real life and to bring something of its directness into their creations. Élie Delaunay began to look on nature with an eye less bent on making abstractions and regarding all things from the standpoint of style; he began to apprehend more clearly her individual peculiarities and to reproduce them more truly than had been done by the frigid school which cast everything into the mould of Classicism. ButErnestMeissonierwent a step further when by hisrococopictures he set the Dutch tradition on a level with the Flemish and Early Italian as a formative influence.
A picture must either be very big or very small if it is to attract attention amid the bustle of exhibitions. This was probably the consideration which led Meissonier to his peculiar class of subjects, and induced him to come forward with minute Netherlandish cabinet-pieces at the time when the Romanticists were issuing their huge manifestoes. He came of a family of petty tradespeople, and in his youth he is said to have taken over his father’s business, a trade in colonial produce. Every morning at eight o’clock punctual he was at the shop desk, and kept the books and copied business letters, and in this way accustomed himself to that painstaking and uniform carefulness which was characteristic of him to the end of his life. His teacher, Cogniet, was without influence on him. Even in his youth, when there went forth the battle-cry of “A Guelf, a Ghibelline! A Delacroix, an Ingres!” Meissonier sat quietly in the Louvre and copied Jan van Eyck’s Madonna from Autun. And a Netherlandish “little master” did he remain all his days. He first earned his bread as an illustrator, but after 1834 he began to exhibit all manner of pieces from the time of LouisXIVand LouisXV—the “Bourgeois hollandais rendant Visite au Bourgmestre” of 1834, the “Chess Players of Holbein’s Time,” 1835, the “Monk at the Sickbed,” 1838, the “English Doctor” and the “Man Reading,” 1840. The Salon of 1841 was for him what that of 1824 had been for Delacroix and Ingres, and that of 1831 for Delaroche: the cradle of his fame. “The Chess Party” (17 cm. high and 11 cm. broad) was the most celebrated picture of the exhibition. The great Netherlandish “little masters” of the seventeenth century, till then scarcelyknown and little appreciated, were brought out for comparison. “Has Terborg or Mieris or Meissonier done the greater work?” was the question. People marvelled at the sharpness of this short-sighted eye which had a perception for the smallest details. “Good heavens! look at the way that’s been done,” said the Philistine, taking a magnifying glass; and felt himself a connoisseur if the curator at his elbow called out, “Not too near!” Even his first pictures had an accuracy and finish which defies description. It seemed as if a most admirable Netherlandish painter in miniature scale had arisen. The execution of his design in colours was as slow, careful, and laborious as were his preparatory studies for costume: every touch was altered and altered again; many a picture which was almost ready was thrown aside, scraped out, and completely recast. Not hot-headed enthusiasts, but “connoisseurs,” has Meissonier conquered in this fashion. Those readers, philosophers, card-players, drinkers, smokers, flute-players and violin-players, engravers, painters and amateurs, horsemen and farm-servants, brawlers and bravoes, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which he painted year after year, were soon the most coveted pictures in every superior private collection. In 1884 he was able to celebrate his jubilee as an artist with an exhibition of one hundred and fifty pictures of the kind. And as they would have gone dirt cheap if they had been bought for their weight in gold, the public accustomed itself to buy them for their weight in thousand-franc notes.
The present age no longer looks up to these exercises of patience with the same vast admiration, but it should not therefore be forgotten what Meissonier was for his time.
To begin with, though painted at a time when painting was regarded as an auxiliary, and an invaluable one, to history, his pictures tell no story. These personages of Meissonier’s take part in no comedy; they occupy themselves, some in smoking, some in drinking, others in playing cards, and others again in doing nothing whatever. Whether they made their entry as musketeer or philosophers, as lackeys or gallants,as scholars orbonvivants, they did not pose and had no ambition to seem men of wit and spirit, they plunged into no adventurous deeds and related no anecdotes: they were content to be well painted. And so amongst all the French painters of the historical picture of manners Meissonier was the one who had the secret of giving his works an entirely peculiarcachetof striking and realistic truth to nature. His figures, marvellously painted, and at the same time animated and natural in expression, wear the costume of our ancestors with the utmost self-possession, and fit into their modishrococosurroundings as if they had been poured into a mould. Meissonier reached the truth of nature in the total effect of his pictures by first in reality arranging his interiors, and the still-life they contained, as a congruous whole. The rooms, window niches, and firesides which he reproduced in his pictures were in his own house and his studios, with every detail ready to hand. He bought bronzes, trinkets, and ornaments, genuine productions of therococoperiod, by the hundred thousand, and kept them by him. His models were obliged, for weeks and often for months, actually to wear the velvet and silken costumes in which he made use of them; then he painted them with the greatest fidelity to nature, and without troubling himself about anecdotic incident. What he rendered was not a story invented and put together piecemeal, but a wholesome piece of reality, pictorially conceived. And if this was primarily composed of costumes and furniture belonging to the eighteenth century, the transition to the natural treatment of modern life was at the same time made possible, and was accomplished by Meissonier himself, at a later period, in his battle pieces.
But he had only painted men: the physiognomy of the feminine Sphinx remained for him an eternal riddle. A wide field was here offered to his followers. Fauvelet, Chavet, and Brillouin stepped into Meissonier’s shoes, and gave hisrococofine gentlemen their better halves. The first two made simple imitations. Brillouin devoted himself to the comicgenre: he arranged hispictures prettily, was a good observer, and painted tolerably well. The last of these Meissonierists is Vibert, chiefly known in the present day by his cardinals and other scarlet dignitaries, whom he represents in water-colours and oils with a certain touch of malice. He paints them gouty, gluttonising, or tipsy, in one or more cases in every picture—which does not contribute to make his works interesting. But originally he had a sympathetic superior talent, and will always claim a modest place in the group of the modern “little masters.” His “Gulliver Bound,” and also the Spanish and Turkish scenes which occupied him after a tour in the East, are extremely pleasing and delicately painted costume pieces, gleaming in sunlight; and in their sparkling, capricious workmanship they sometimes almost verge on Fortuny.
On the German side of the RhineAdolf Menzelwas the great pioneer of truth. The history of German art must do him honour as one who first had the genius and courage to break away from conventional forms of phrasing, and bring the truth of nature into art: at first, as in the case of Meissonier, it was nature in masquerade; but it was nature seen and rendered with all the sincerity of a man to whom the art of pose was wanting from the very first.
Even in the thirties, at a time when “The Sorrowing Royal Pair” and the “Leonora” by Lessing, “The Soldier and his Child,” “The Sick Councillor,” and “The Sons of Edward” by Hildebrandt, and “The Lament of the Jews” by Bendemann, together with the works of Cornelius, met with the enthusiastic applause of the million, Menzel looked into the world with a sharp glance, undisturbed by idealism; and what enabled him to do this was his unwavering and thoroughly Prussian healthiness, which knew no touch of sentimentalism—a certain coldness and hardness, that sensible, reflective North German trait, which often expresses itself in these days (when German art has become subtle and superior) by a crude naturalism in the Berlin painting. In the beginning of the century, however, it set the Berlin painting, as art of the healthy human understanding, in salutary contrast to the sickliness of Munich and Düsseldorf. Even eighty years ago the people of Berlin were too acute and practical to be Romanticists. The artists whom Menzel found active and honoured at his arrival were Schadow and Rauch, and beside them, as representatives of thegrande peinture, Begas and Wach. But even these, who were most under the influence of the sentimental tendency, were justly recognised by the thorough-goingRomanticists on the Rhine as never having given an unqualified homage to their flag. A clear, realistic method was dominant in the art of Berlin. And in this respect it was as much a corrective—and one by no means to be undervalued—against the inflated sentiment of Munich as against the weak and sickly sentimentalism of Düsseldorf, with its knights and monks and noble maidens. Even Cornelius, who had been called to Berlin by Frederick William IV—that King of the Romanticists on the throne of the eminently unromantic Hohenzollerns—found himself helpless against the ruling taste. And here only, in the stronghold of sharply accentuated common sense, where the old Prussian sobriety set bounds to the twilight kingdom of Romanticism, could Adolf Menzel attain to greatness. His Berlinism kept him from lingering in empty space. To the taste of to-day, formed from Fontainebleau, he will seem too much a creature of the understanding and too little a creature of feeling. Boecklin hit him off admirably when, on being asked what he thought of Menzel, he answered: “He is a great scholar.” A comparison between him and Mommsen especially suggests itself—a great scholar, a mordant satirist, and a brilliantjournalist. But this sober scepticism, this cool spirit of investigation, this “heartlessness” observing all things with the eye of a judge in a court of judicial inquiry, were what cleared the ground for modern art. No one has done more than Menzel for those rulers in the kingdom of dreams who from pure dreaming have never been able to learn anything. He has helped to set them steadily on their feet, and to accustom their sight, vitiated by idealism, once more to truth and nature.
Menzel was almost the only one in Germany who could draw and paint in the time before the French influence had made itself felt. The struggle for existence had forced him to learn. In the year of Bismarck’s birth there was born in Breslau the man destined to glorify, first the greatness of the old kingdom of the Fredericks, and then that of new imperial Prussia. Cast out at an early age on the inhospitable wilderness of life, he came to Berlin, poor and lonely, and not so much for the sake of art as for gain. There he sat in his cheerless attic, without a servant; and wrapped up in his plaid, with a coffee-pot on one side and a pencil on the other, he looked out over the roofs of the vast town, the most brilliant epoch of which he was predestined to depict and to conquer by his art. Since it brought in profit sooner than anything else, he had made himself familiar with the technique of reproduction; and having devoted himself in particular to the newly discovered art of lithography, he turned outménus, New Year cards, vignettes for occasional poems, etc., and in things of this sort displayed a genuine affinity of spirit with Chodowiecki and Gottfried Schadow. From his twelfth year onwards he had not only assured his own existence, but even supported his family by such work; and in the hours he spent over it he laid the groundwork for becoming the master of masters amongst the moderns. Menzel is not merely a man who owed to himself everything which he afterwards became, who learnt to draw by his own unassisted endeavours, who mastered oil-painting without a teacher,and went further in it than any one of his generation—a man who found out entirely by himself new methods and combinations in water-colours and gouache; but if it is asked who was the greatest German illustrator, the man who did most in Germany to advance the art of woodcut engraving, the one German historical painter of the century who was entirely original, who really knew a bygone period so exactly that he could venture on painting it, the name of Menzel is invariably uttered.
Even in the twelve simple lithographs which appeared in 1837, “Memorable Events from Prussian History in the Brandenburg Era,” the “scholar” Menzel stands ready as the actual historian of the Prussian kingdom. In an age which took its pleasure in a vaporous, sentimental enthusiasm for the mediæval splendour of the empire, he was the one who as a youth of twenty pointed to the corner-stones of Prussian history in the Brandenburg times; he was the only man of his age who refused to blow the horn of the mawkish Romanticists, and still less that of the impassioned historical painters who came after them. For his were no theatrically tricked out scenes of tragedy, no touching situations; they had nothing poetical; and just as little were they tedious pictures of ceremonies or spectacular pieces. Striking characterisation and sparkling vividness were united here to the most painstaking study of nature and history, carried down to the peculiarities of costume and weapons. History was not arranged in accordance with academic formulæ, but delineated as if from life with absorbing truthfulness. Everything was expressed simply and sincerely, without exciting passages, and without conventional sentiment pumped out of models. Every epoch had its historical physiognomy, and costume was reduced to its proper subordinate place.
Franz Kugler was the first who understood this sincere and pithy art.
The Life of Napoleon had appeared, at that time, in Paris, with illustrations by Horace Vernet, and it had a considerable sale in Germany also. This gave a Berlin publisher the idea of a similar German work, and Kugler commissioned Menzel to illustrate his biography of Frederick the Great. It is almost impossible to pay sufficient honour to the influence which this book on Frederick has had on German art. It made an epoch in the history of wood engraving. The technique of this craft had been completely forgottenin Germany ever since the beginning of the century, or used only for the production of rough trade-marks for tobacco; Menzel had to invent it afresh and teach an engraving school of his own before the four hundred masterly plates of the book were made possible.
But it became more revolutionary still for the æsthetic ideas of the time. Menzel had not set himself to produce a sequence of pictures, displaying events and heroes in the most ideal situations possible, but made it his business to sift the entire life of Frederick the Great to its minutest particulars. And here began that philological study of records which Menzel has carried on with the strenuous labour of an archivist down to the present day. Old Fritz had been caught by Chodowiecki in the way in which he has since lived in the popular imagination: as the old man on horseback, with his bent shoulders and his crutch-stick, holding a review, and as the philosopher, the statesman, the warrior and hero in the most manifold situations. Menzel, in whom the spirit of Chodowiecki lived again, only needed to begin where the latter left off. Stepping on the antiquarian material of Chodowiecki, he worked his way into the great period on which Frederick and Voltaire have set the stamp of their spirit, as Mommsen worked his way into Roman history. He read through whole libraries; he copied all attainable portraits. With scientific pedantry he did not forget to study the buttons and the cut of the trousers in the uniforms, and did not rest until he knew the old grenadiers as a corporal knows his men. Using these labours as preparation, he proceeded to call up old Fritz and his time with the objectivity of an historian, just as they were, and not as they had better have been. Sureness of treatment even in the finest details, accurate mastery of the surroundings, and everything which had made Meissonier’s appearance so important for France, was attained at one stroke for Germany. But the very simplicity of what was offered—both in style and technique—prevented Menzel from being at the beginning accepted in his own country as an “historical painter.” He was blamed for disregarding “beauty,” and it was said that a “higher” artistic perception was sealed from him. On the other hand, the book laid the foundation of Menzel’s position in France, and was, moreover, the work on which, for a long time, the appreciation of modern German art in foreign countries was based.
Thenceforth Menzel had a kind of monopoly in this subject, and when in 1840 Frederick WilliamIVhad the works of the great king published in anédition de luxe, Menzel, amongst others, was entrusted with the illustration. Every one of the thirty volumes contains portraits of Frederick’s contemporaries which were engraved byMandel and others after original pictures of the period. Menzel had an apparently subordinate task. He was commissioned to make two hundred drawings for wood engraving; these, however, do not appear on separate pages, but were destined to be incorporated in the text as tail-pieces, vignettes, and the like. This was the great work which occupied him during the forties; and in these headings and tail-pieces to the works of Frederick the Great he showed, for the first time, that he was not merely a learned investigator of sources, but was full of brilliantaperçus.One has to read Frederick the Great before one can do full justice to the acuteness and ready resource, the subtlety and pungency of the artist’s pencil. All æsthetic categories of realistic and idealistic art are scattered like dust before these creations, in which the most fantastic ideas are embodied with the whole force of the realistic power of our days.
When he had done honour to the military comrades of the great ruler in his work of wood engraving, “Heroes of War and Peace in the Time of King Frederick,” and thus made the epoch his own through a decade of busy labour, Menzel, draughtsman though he was, turned round and became the painter of Frederick the Great. In the history of art there have never been two names more intimately connected with each other. Menzel was a strenuous worker, who never knew the passion for woman, either because he had no time for it, or because he despised women after being despised by them as a poor, hard-featured student of art; a man whose great bald head appeared at Berlin subscription-balls amid groups of brilliant cavaliers and queens of beauty, fashion, and grace, surrounded by the rustle of their silks and in the whirlpool of a dancing throng, gleaming with colour and sparkling with gold and jewels; and appeared there simply because this world interested him as something to be painted. He was a recluse who went into society solely to make observations for his art, and when there was chary of speech and much feared. He was always a busy experimentalist, so that his two hands gradually became equally dexterous; at the age of eighty he could still sketch with firm and accurate strokes while travelling in a railway carriage.
Though he had hitherto devoted himself to drawing, he had also by his own independent study made himself familiar with the technique of oils; and he now became such a master of colour as few were at that time. In the middle of the century were painted those two masterpieces which now hang in the Berlin National Gallery, “The Round Table at Sans-Souci” and “The Concert of Frederick the Great.” These are historical pictures, the authority and importance of which cannot be shaken by even the most modern of critics. If what is called the spirit of an age has ever been embodied in pictures, it is embodied here, where the master-minds of the eighteenth century are assembled at their genial round table. The scene is the oval dining-room of the castle. The meal is over, and there reigns a genial after-dinner mood, champagne sparkles in the glasses and a smart rivalry of wit is in progress. Afternoon has crept on, and a cold, subdued daylight floods the room, in which every fragment of the architecture, from the inlaid floor to the gilded capitals of the pillars and the stucco of the arched ceiling, every piece of furniture and every chandelier, bears the wayward grace of the high-rococoperiod; all is comprehended with the most intimate knowledge. In the second picture a fine candlelight is glimmering over the scene. Frederick is just beginning to play the flute, and the musicians of the string quartet pause, to strike in again after the solo. The Court is grouped to the left: the ladies in gilded easy-chairs, and their cavaliers behind them. The tapers of the chandelier and the sconces branchingfrom the wall shed over everything their prismatic, broken light reflected by the mirrors, and fill the fantastic, capricious, graceful, comfortable apartment, here with streaming brightness, there with a finely modulated twilight. Only Menzel could have conjured up in so convincing a manner the brilliancy of this Court festival of the past.
Here is that exactness which an historical picture must have if it makes any claim to intrinsic worth. Whilst the ordinary historical painters were content to transmute dressed-up models into types of the universally human, and to put historical labels on their frames, Menzel succeeded in really penetrating a bygone age in an artistic spirit, and in making it live again for the present generation. He did not burrow to discover another dim historical personage every year, but confined himself to one hero—to the figure of the Prussian hero-king, familiar to every child, and still living in the popular imagination; and he learnt to master the time of this favourite hero as if he had been old Fritz himself. Menzel had never heard him blowing on his flute, and never sat at table with him in Sans-Souci, but the painting of these scenes comes out true and life-like in the artist’s work, because the past history of his country had become as vivid to him as his own age. His “Battle of Hochkirch” rises to tragical grandeur, precisely because everything that is outwardly impassioned is far from him. His “Frederick the Great on a Journey,” where the king is inspecting territories alter the war and ordering the rebuildingof demolished houses, his “Frederick’s Meeting with Joseph II in Niesse,” and all the other pictures of the sequence, by their marvellous naturalness and intense vividness, and by their freedom from pompous phrasing, stand alone in an age dominated by empty sentiment. Menzel, who never laid his sketch-book down from the time he was twelve years old, found a subject of pictorial interest in everything that he saw around him, until finally he acquired the power of moving with natural self-possession in a period that was not his own. By the roundabout way through therococoperiod he has taught us to understand ourselves. In his pictures an apparently paradoxical problem has been solved. An intense feeling for modern reality waked to new life the past, that same past which no one had approached with success by the way of idealism.
And if we look over the whole development of modern art it strikes us as a remarkable fact that the most concrete spirits, the most thorough masters of technique, like Meissonier and Menzel, were precisely those who ventured to advance into the present. When they had crossed the province of therococoperiod, avoided by all scholastic art, they had arrived again at the epoch when Mengs and David had interrupted the natural course of the history of art, one hundred years before. About 1750 the fateful movement towards the antique had been accomplished; in 1820 the Middle Ages had the upper hand; in 1830 the Cinquecento was in the ascendant with Cornelius and Ingres; in 1840 the seventeenth century was awakened through Delacroix and Wappers; and in 1850, after “the courses of the centuries were sphered”—to use the phrase of Cornelius—Meissonier and Menzel painted things which had not appeared worth representing to the painters of 1750, blinded, as they were, by the glory of the antique. Not less striking is it that the nearer the historical subject came to the present the truer to nature did the picture become, and the more did it outwardly change in its features. It has shrivelled from the huge scale of David and Cornelius to the miniature scale of Meissonier and Menzel, and to some extent it thus leaves its further development to be guessed. At no distant time the historical picture will be overthrown, and the picture from modern life, hitherto but shyly handled and on the smallest scale, will swell to life size. History itself, serious history, clings merely to the rock-bed of old costume. One generation had used it with an abstract purpose as a substratum for philosophical ideas; others had made scenical pieces with its aid; a third generation turned it over for piquant traits and anecdotes. The last and greatest generation had finally come to handle it quite familiarly and humanly and without affected dignity. Their works protested against all idealism; and this expressed itself, in drawing, by their making use of the true instead of the “beautiful” line; in colour, by a fresher tint corresponding with nature rather than with the conventional ideal of beauty.
Nobility of line was paramount in Gallait and Piloty, movement with grand, kingly gestures, lofty dignity, aristocratic bearing, knightliness, and a conventional piling up of rich stuffs, alluring to the eye. Leys, Menzel, and Meissonier were the first who sacrificed beauty to truth, or, more properly, who perceived that a beauty without truth is not really beautiful. They came gradually and by an indirect way to this knowledge as they studied German and Netherlandish masters instead of the Italians, and set up the angular, natural outlines of the Germans against the grace of the Latin masters, which had become banal through a lengthy course of imitation. And thus a return was made to the manner of our true ancestors, which had been forgotten during half a century. The place of the Antinous heads of Gallait was taken by physiognomies of vigorous characterisation; gesticulating heroes made way for peaceful, quiet persons, who did not consider themselves under an obligation to acquire artistic citizenship by a parade of attitude, but appeared in their picture as they were in reality. Impassioned movement yielded quietly to arms hanging downwards and natural postures. Even the traditional rules of concave and convex composition were broken so that the free play of life might more easily come to its rights. Not less did all three show themselves true painters by preferringrightness of observation and truth and delicacy of reproduction to anecdote and richness of invention, and by feeling the need of painting figures in their real surroundings. Instead of the conventional velvet and brocade stuffs, and the folios everywhere and nowhere in place, the settles and the brass caskets, there was a naturally painted fragment of reality, authentically reflecting the whole atmosphere of the period. The treatment of nature, hitherto idealistic and arbitrary, became synthetic and naturalistic. There was no more abstraction, but direct observation of the man and hismilieu. And if, for the time being, thismilieuwas arococo milieu, artificially reconstructed so that it could be realistically transferred to the picture, Menzel and Meissonier, even on account of this realism, would have to be reckoned as outposts of the modern tendency, and as having very decided points of contact with it; and this, even if they had not themselves actually become the pioneers of modernity, forcing their way through against the literary and historical movement. It is owing to their works in the past that the preference of the public turned less and less to compositions of fine sentiment, even though grounded on more attentive observation, and that artists began to regard reality as the most important element, the point of departure for every picture. Thus life itself came to be painted, and preparation was made for the coming demand of a new generation, who wished no more to see old heroes, but themselves, in the mirror of art.