In his pictures the Englishman is clearly revealed, an Englishman of that delicacy and noble refinement which is present to a unique degree in the works of English painters of the present day.
The passage from Hogarth to Gainsborough marks a chapter in the history of English culture. Hogarth is the embodiment of John Bull; you can hear him growl, like some savage bull-dog. That brutal, indecorous robustness of England’s aggressive youth becomes, in Gainsborough’s hands, agreeable, refined, gentle, and seductive. Reynolds, with his robustness as of the old masters, might be best compared with Tintoretto; Gainsborough, in his quite modern and fantastic elegance, is a more tender, subtle, and mysterious spirit, poet and magician at once, like Watteau. There one listened to the full, swelling chords of the organ; here to the soft, dulcet, silvery notes of the violin. Reynolds loved warm, brown and red tones; Gainsborough essayed for the first time, in a series of his happiest creations, that scale of colour, coldly green and blue, in which to-day the majority of English pictures are still painted. Everything with him is soft and clear; the tone of those blue or light yellow silks, which he loved especially, is that of the most transparent enamel; the background fades away into dreamy vapour, the figures are surrounded with an atmosphere of seduction. What a masterpiece he has created in the “Blue Boy,” his most popular and most individual picture. One can describe every piece of the clothing,but it is impossible to reproduce the harmony of the painting, the rich, pure blue of the costume, which stands out against a lustrous, brown background of landscape. How the stately youth stands, noble from head to foot, in the brown and green autumn landscape, with its canopy of sky! Master Bootall was by far the most elegant portrait painted in England since Van Dyck, and withal of a nervosity quite new. See that youthful pride in the gaze, that mobile sensibility in the pose!
Have men grown different, then, or does the painter see further? One finds in Van Dyck no such expressivelynervousphysiognomy. The suggestion of melancholy, the deep reverie, the noble, aristocratic haughtiness,—Gainsborough was the first to discover that, and give it its full expression. And the same man who painted the noble elegance of this youthfulgrand seigneurdepicted also peasant children coming fresh from the green fields and woodlands of their village homes. In Sir Joshua’s children there was often something borrowed from Correggio; the children of Gainsborough breathe a rustic charm, an untamed savagery; they are the very offshoots of nature, who disport themselves as freely as the wild things in the woods. But his women in particular are creatures altogether adorable. While Reynolds, the historical painter, liked to promote his into heroines, those of Gainsborough, with their pure, transparent skins, their sweet glances (in which there lies so admirable a mixture of languishing fragility, innocence, and coquetry), are the true Englishwomen of the eighteenth century. His “Mrs. Siddons” is not in theatrical costume, but in a simple walking-dress; no Tragic Muse, but the passionate, loving woman who once, a romantic, impulsive miss, escaped from a convent at the risk of her life, to join a handsome young actor of her father’s troupe who had entirely fascinated her. What a charming grace in the pose, what fine taste in the arrangement, what wonderful purity of colouring! With the exception of Watteau, I know of no older master who could have painted such moist, dreamy, sensuous, tender eyes. The marvellous “Mrs. Graham,” in the National Gallery of Scotland, is, from the purely pictorial standpoint, perhaps the greatest of all his works. Yet how beautiful is the double portrait of that young married couple, the Halletts, who, tenderly holding hands, pass along a deserted path in some secluded garden; or that pale, languishing “Mrs. Parsons,” with her enchanting smile, and that mysterious language of the eyes. Gainsborough was no keen observer, but he was a susceptible, sensitive spirit who intercepted the soul itself, the play of the nerves, the slightest suggestion of spiritual commotion. There moves through the majority of his portraits a pathetic tenderness, a breath of dreamy melancholy, that the personsthemselves hardly possessed, but which he transfused into them out of himself. Melancholy is the veil through which he saw things, as Reynolds saw them through the medium of erudition. Reynolds was all will and intelligence, Gainsborough all soul and temperament; and nothing can show the difference between them better than the fact that Reynolds, who had formed his style on early models, when he had no sitters painted historical pictures; whilstGainsborough in like circumstances painted landscapes. Herein he was a pioneer, whilst Reynolds was an issue of the past.
In the domain of landscape painting, too, the new germs of naturalism, which had ventured above ground on all sides in the fifteenth century, had been again stunted in the Great Renaissance. The theory had been promulgated in the sixteenth century—in accordance with the idealistic methods of the age—that it behoved the painter to improve upon nature just as much as upon the human body. With the lofty style of the great figure painters, and their artfully pondered composition, there corresponded a school of landscape which was likewise conceived of, in the first degree, as an honourable, architectural framing for a mythological episode. England too possessed, inRichard Wilson, a believer in this doctrine, which became so widely promulgated in the seventeenth century through the influence of Claude Lorraine. The home of his soul was Italy. He scraped together a small sum of money by portrait painting, borrowed the rest, and felt himself in his element for the first time when he had reached Venice. Here, at the instance of Zucarrelli, he became a painter of landscapes, and was aided in his endeavours by JosephVernet in Rome. He was on the way to become a painter in great request, and in many of his pictures he shows a most delicate notion of well-balanced and gracious composition in the manner of Claude. But his success was of no long duration. Wilson, like so many other of his contemporaries, had the fixed idea that the Creator had only made nature to serve as a framework for the “Grief of Niobe” and as a vehicle for classical architecture. The interpolated stage scenery of trees and the classic temples of this English Claude, contain nothing which had not been already painted better by the Frenchman. When the king, in order to assist him, asked him on one occasion to represent Kew Gardens in a picture, he composed an entirely imaginary landscape and illuminated it with the sun of Tivoli. The king sent him back the picture, mordant epigrams appeared in the journals, and Reynolds scoffed at him in his Discourses. After that Wilson spent his days in the alehouse, until he got delirium, and died half starved at the age of seventy.
The patriotic English were too much bound up with their own soil to acquire a taste for the exotic, ideal scenery of Wilson. There existed in them that patriotism, that feeling for home, which had turned the Dutch of the seventeenth century into landscape painters. In this province also they were destined to step in, as the inheritors of the Dutch, to bring the germ of intimate landscape to its full fruition. Lovely and luxuriant valleys with their soft grass, sweet woodlands with their vari-coloured foliage, golden, swaying cornfields and picturesque little cottages, with that indescribable softness of atmosphere, must of themselves direct the eye of the writer and the painter to all these beauties. It was an Englishman who in the eighteenth century wrote the most memorablebook upon the charms of nature. James Thomson, in hisSeasons, is the first great nature painter amongst the poets. Taine finds the whole of Rousseau anticipated in him. “Thirty years before Rousseau, Thomson had forestalled all the sentiments of Rousseau, almost in the same style.” He has not only, like Rousseau, a profound feeling for the great wild aspects of nature, for the forms of clouds, effects of light and contrasts of colour, but he delights also in the smell of the dairy, in small birds, in the woodland shadows, and the light on the meadows,—in all things sequestered and idyllic.
“Nature! great parent! whose unceasing handRolls round the Seasons of the changeful year,How mighty, how majestic are thy works!With what a pleasing dread they swell the soulThat sees astonished and astonished sings.”
“Nature! great parent! whose unceasing hand
Rolls round the Seasons of the changeful year,
How mighty, how majestic are thy works!
With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul
That sees astonished and astonished sings.”
It was a remarkable chance which ordained that Thomas Gainsborough, the first man who as a painter depicted the gracious charms of the country of his birth, the comeliness of its expanses of deep green lush meadows, the strength of the lofty, wide-spreading trees, as seen with the eyes of a lover, should be born in the spring of the same year in which Thomson’sSpringappeared. That he knew and admired Thomson is proved by his dedication to him of that delightful “Musidora” in the National Gallery, a lovely woman bathing her feet in some shady forest pool. It is said that he only sent half a dozen landscapes to the Academy during the eighteen years that he exhibited there. On the other hand, they hung in his house in Pall Mall in long rows on the walls of his studio. After his death his widow held a sale, at which fifty-six landscapes were sold. Gainsborough must be accounted one of the moderns, so naïve and intimate is the impression which his pictures produce. He, who passed his whole youth in the idyllic loveliness of the woods, was fitted to be the delineator of that mellow English nature. He understood the murmur of the brooks and the sighing of the winds. Like his own life, so regular and peaceful, gentlyswaying as though to the friendly elements, are the trees in his pictures, with their peaceful tranquillity; no storm disturbs the calm of a Gainsborough picture. His was a contented, harmonious spirit, like Corot’s. His landscapes know no tempestuous grandeur; they are a playground for children, a place for shepherds to rest. “The calm of mid day, the haze of twilight, the dew and the pearls of morning,” said Constable, “are what we find in the pictures of this good, kindly, happy man.... As we look at them the tears spring to our eyes, and we know not whence they come. The solitary shepherd with his flock, the peasant returning from the wood with his bundle of faggots, whispering woods and open dales, sweet little peasant children with their pitchers in springtime,—that is what he loved to paint and what he painted, with as much sought-out refinement as with tender truth to nature.” His landscapes are like windows opening on the country, not compositions, but pieces taken straight out of that fruitful English nature. Every year he used to return to his green pastures, and paint very early, when the sun rose. Before him rose a cluster of trees, all round the farm the flocks were grazing, thousands of busy bees flew buzzing from flower to flower; goats, with their kids, were feeding in the meadows, wild doves cooed, and the birds in the wood sang their praises to the Creator. Thus do the landscapes of Gainsborough affect us. They are soft and tender as some sweet melody in their discreet intimacy, without colorist effects, as wonderfully harmonious as nature herself. A thatched cot, that peeps timidly from between the great trees, a silvery dale shut in by weeping willows, a bridge leading to some lush, green meadow,—those are Gainsborough’s materials. The famous “Cottage Door” is now at Grosvenor House. A young peasant woman, with her youngest child in her arms, is standing by the door of a country cottage, before which her other children are playing, some half naked; deepcontentment is all around, huge old oaks spread their sheltering branches over the roof on both sides; golden rays of sunshine dance across the meadow. Only Frederick Walker has, in later days, painted such peasant women and such children, at once so tender and so natural. Of the four pictures in the National Gallery, “The Wood Scene,” “The Watering Place,” “Market Carts,” and “Peasant Children,” “The Watering Place” is the most celebrated. In the foreground a quiet pasture with cows, close by the herdsman, a Suffolk labourer; in the background a noble old Norman castle, perhaps Hedingham Castle, near Sudbury. It is through pictures like these that England has become the native-land of intimate landscape—paysage intime.
As figure painters, as well as landscape painters, the English in the eighteenth century laid a course of their own, and it was not long before the other nations followed them.
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF ART ON THE CONTINENT
Goethecompared the history of knowledge with a great fugue: the parts of the nations first come to light, little by little; and this analogy, already once made by Hettner, holds true in a very high degree of the history of art during the eighteenth century. The three great nations of culture—the German, the English, and the French—take up their parts in turn, and through all there sounds one common, equal, dominant note. England was in the vanguard of that great period of struggle known as the age of enlightenment. Since the middle of the eighteenth century English influences had begun to fertilise the Continent. The truth and naturalness of English ideas were introduced as models, and England became in her whole culture the schoolmistress of the Continent. In every region war was declared against the pedantry brought over from the past, while new conditions were aimed at. Obviously it was not so easy for other nations to take their stand on the basis of modern society. England had accomplished her revolution in the seventeenth century; France was only preparing herself for hers. For all other nations, too, the eighteenth century was a transition period, in which the old and the new civilisation of culture were parting—an age of prodigious controversy, full ofSturm und Drang. Men did homage to every kind of extravagance, and went into ecstasies over virtue. The sarcasm of scoffers went hand in hand with the deepest sentimental feeling for nature; superstition flourished by the side of enlightenment and learning; in thesalonsof the aristocracy courtly abbés file past with the greatest thinkers, glowing with a holy zeal for the rights of man. And, in the midst of all this contradiction, there exists that simple, virtuous middle class which is preparing to make the ascent which will lead it to power.
One may imagine oneself in a salon of theancien régime, in which wit is lord, and laughter and merriment reign. Into that salon enters abruptly a rough plebeian, with none of the fine tact of that company, yet a great, aristocratic spirit, a man who despised such a society and would make the world anew. Such is one’s impression of the effect produced at the time by the appearance of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire was the first on the Continent to break through social barriers, but none the less he coined his heart for gold in society. Rousseau signifies a great advance: he gave up his place, laid aside rapier, silk stockings, and perruque, and clothed himself after the mannerof a common man in order to earn his bread as a copier of music. He is, as Weigandt has called him, the first man of thebourgeoiscentury, the first pioneer of the new age. Against the traditions bequeathed by the past, which in the course of time had become over-refined and corrupt, he set up the natural conditions demanded by reason. His fight against inequalities of rank is, as it were, a foretaste of the revolution. “What hellish monsters are these prejudices. I know no dishonourable inferiority other than that of character or education. A man who is trained to an honourable mind is the equal of the world; there is no rank in which he would not be in his place. It is better to look down upon nobility than upon virtue, and the wife of a charcoal-burner is worthy of more respect than the mistress of a prince.” Those were words in which the coming revolution was presaged.
TheNouvelle Heloiseappeared in 1761. Thirteen years later followed Goethe’sWerther, that history of a young Titan whose zeal for liberty felt all the partition walls of Society to be prison walls, and who rose against everything that was ceremonial, against all the subordinations of the social hierarchy, against all trivial and rigid rules of prudent everyday life. Werther abhorred rules in every sphere. “One can say much in favour of rules, about as much as one can say in praise ofbourgeoissociety.” He scoffed at the Philistines, who daily went along the same measured way. He saw in “Society,” having hitherto moved in the simple world of thebourgeois, “the most sacred and the most pitiful emotions wholly without clothing.” And this Society outraged him, and sent him with contumely from its midst. “Working folk carried him to the grave, and no minister of religion followed him.”
Soon afterwards young Schiller came upon the scene with his first works, which were a declaration of war against all the foundations of human society, those manifestoes of revolution which, were they new writings to-day, no Court Theatre would dare to produce. The fierce, rampant lion, with the inscription “In Tyrannos,” which was displayed on the title-page of the second edition of theRobbers, was an intimate symbol of the deep revolutionary spirit that inspired the whole age. “I grew disgusted with this ink-stainedage, when I read in myPlutarchof great men. Fie, fie upon the flaccid, castrated century, that has no other use than to chew over again the deeds of the past. Let me imagine an army of fellows like you, and I see a republic arising in Germany, in comparison with which those of Rome and Sparta would be convents of nuns.” In a loud voiceFicscoproclaims itself on the very title-page to be a “republican” tragedy.Intrigue and Loveeven aims full at the rottenness and corruption of the actual time. It can be traced—and Brandes has done it in hisHaupströmungen—how in the literature of the age, the life of sensibility and idealism prevailing in the previous century gradually dwindles, and in its stead quite modern progressive views—religious, political, and social—surge up in an ever-increasing wave. The authors were the bold inciters to the battle. They were all leaders in the battle for liberty against fossilised tradition,—some in the field of poetry only, others in the whole sphere of intellectual life. These are they who gave the signal for the war-cry of the Revolution—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; who rent asunder the old society, inaugurated the age of citizenship, and were at the same time the first to lose, as quite modern spirits, their faith in another world.
A wonderful chance ordained that, in the province of art, the most powerful figure of that storm and tumult, the one artist of the age of the race of Prometheus, to which belonged the young Goethe and the young Schiller, should be born in the most mediæval country in Europe, on Spanish soil. Against an art that was more catholic than catholicism, courtly and mystical, there came by far the greatest reaction in Goya. From Roelas, Collantes, and Murillo to him there is hardly any transition.
Francisco Goyapreached Nihilism in the home of belief. He denied everything, believed nothing, doubted of everything, even of that peace and liberty which he hoped to be at hand. That old Spanish art of religion and dogma was changed under his hands to an art of negation and sarcasm. His attitude is not that of an insolent and impetuous youth, who puts out histongue at the Academy and strikes with audacious hand at the academicians’ high powdered perruques; it is the attitude of the modern spirit, which begins by doubting all things which have been honoured hitherto. His Church pictures are devoid of religious feeling, and his etchings replete with sneers at everything which was previously esteemed as authority. He scoffs at the clerical classes and the religious orders, laughs at the priestly raiment which covered the passions of humanity. Spanish art, which began in a blind piety, becomes in Goya revolutionary, free, modern.
Goya is, in his whole nature, a modern man, a restless, feverish soul; nervous as adécadent; temperament to his finger-tips. His style in portraiture, his art of composition, his whole method,—all speak to our artists to-day in a language easily understood, and on many of them the influence of Goya is unmistakable. He is one of the most fascinating figures of the beginning of the century. As audacious as he was clever, as versatile as he was fantastic, a keen observer as well as a strong creative spirit, he fascinates and astonishes in his pictures, just as in his wonderful etchings, by a remarkable mixture of the bizarre and the original. His pictures, whether they be violent or eccentric, tender or hard, gloomy or joyous, nearly always move and palpitate with life itself, and they will always keep their attraction. There is no one of Goya’s pictures, not even the flimsiest sketch, at which one can look coldly.
He was born in a village in the province of Aragon, the son of a small landed proprietor, in 1746. At the age of fourteen, having already painted frescoes in the church of his native-place, he went to Saragossa as an apprentice; and there he showed himself to be vivacious and passionate, and soon became the champion among his comrades in all their pastimes and brawls. Restless, and always thinking of adventure, he refused everyregular kind of education, disarranged everything in his master’s studio, worked when he could, drew his sword when he had a mind to, nourished in his head dark thoughts on liberty, came and went and loved, dallied with his knife, snapped his fingers at the Inquisition, which was after him, and fled from Madrid,—such was he at twenty, and such he remained all his life.
Italy, whither he fled on account of a duel, did not alter him. There were new love quarrels. He fought, stabbed a rival, was wounded himself, amused himself extremely, studied little, observed, admired, but neither painted nor copied anything. It was thanks to this indolence that the great past did not take him prisoner. He did not know much, but for what he knew he could thank himself. He loved the old painters, but platonically; their works did not lead him astray. In this lies the explanation of his qualities and his faults: that marvellous mixture of seductive grace and visible weakness, of subtlety and brutality, of refinement and ignorance. He merits equally sympathy and blame, is as genial as he is unequal. But one would not wish him to be otherwise: if there had been more order and proportion in his works his good qualities would have been lost. He would have suffered in spontaneity, vivacity, originality, and quietly taken his anchorage in the sleepy haven of mediocrity. As he is, he is wholly the child of his country: from head to foot a Spaniard of the eighteenth century, a son of that downfallen Spain that was dying from loss of blood. For hundreds of years a black cloud, extinguishing all joy, had hung over Spanish life, a cloud out of which, only here and there in dismal lightning flashes, there emerged obscure figures of sombre despots, sick ascetics, and silent martyrs. All mundane inclinations were suppressed, all sensuous desires prohibited. Men spent their nights with their eyes fixed upon the gory histories and passionateexhortations of the Old Testament, hearing in imagination the menacing, thunderous voice of a dreadful God, until at last in their own hearts the fanatical inspiration of the prophetic seer awoke anew, and their feverish forms were torn asunder by ecstatic visions and religious hallucinations. When Goya began his career the sinister country of the Inquisition had grown frivolous. A breath of revolution was passing over men’s minds. An intoxicating odour of mundane voluptuousness penetrated everywhere, even into the convents themselves; the figures of the French Rococo Olympus had brought confusion into the Christian paradise. Spain no longer believed; it laughed at the Inquisition, trembled no more when it was threatened with the pains of Hell. It had grown frivolous, wanton, epicurean, full of grace and laughter. The rosy-red and blue shepherds of the Trianon had made an entry into the sombre Court of Aranjuez. Literature, taste, and art were infected by French influences, Parisian sparks of wit, lightningesprit, and Parisian immorality; and the same rumbling earthquake which wrecked the throne of France was soon to shatter that of Spain. In Goya’s works there is a refulgence of all this. But, like every great artist, he is not only the expression of his epoch, but also its leader; he almost anticipates the age which shall succeed it. Like a figure of Janus, on the border-line between two centuries, standing in a manner between two worlds, he was the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns—even in that special sense in which we employ the word to-day.
Through a commission to design cartoons for the Spanish manufactories of tapestry, he was brought into contact with the Court. Member of the Academy of San Fernando in 1780, Pintor del Rey, with an income of 12,500 francs in 1786, he became soon afterwards the Director of the Madrid Academy—the drollest Director of an Academy that man can imagine! Goya, the peasant youth, with his bull neck and matador-like strength, lived at the SpanishCourt in the midst of the enervated scions of a dissolute aristocracy, who, with their sickly and anæmic features, indolent and impotent, skulked through life, young men prematurely old. Naturally he was the idol of the women, hated by the courtiers on account of his caustic wit, a terror to all husbands because of his perpetual intrigues, and at the same time feared as the best swordsman in Madrid, who drew his rapier with the indifference with which we light a cigarette.
It is only as the outcome of such a personality that his works are to be understood.
Goya was far too great a sceptic to put a religious sentiment into matters in which he no longer believed; his talent was far too modern for the religious abstraction to be able to seize him. His “Christ on the Cross,” therefore, in the Museo del Prado, is simply tedious, a bad academical study. His frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida, at Madrid, exhibit a pretty, decorative motive—considerable movement, grace, and spirit. But amongst them are angels who sit there most irreverently, and, with a laugh of challenge, throw out their legsà laTiepolo. The chief picture represents St. Antony of Padua raising a man from the dead. But all that interested him in it were the lookers-on. On a balustrade all around he has brought in the lovely, dainty faces of numerous ladies of the court, hisbonnes amies, who lean their elbows on the balcony and coquette with the people down below. Their plump, round, white hands play meaningly with their fans; a thick cluster of ringlets waves over their bared shoulders; their sensual eyes languish with a seductive fire; a faint smile plays round their voluptuous lips. Several seem only just to have left their beds, and their vari-coloured, gleaming silks are crumpled. One is just arranging her coiffure, which has come undone and falls over her rosy bosom; another, with a languishing unconsciousness and a careless attitude, is opening her sleeve,whose soft, deep folds expose a snow-white arm. There is muchchicin this Church picture. One very immodest angel is supposed to be the portrait of the Duchess of Alba, who was famed for her numerous intrigues.
In his portraits, too, he is unequal. He became the fashionable painter at the court. The politicians, poets, scholars, great ladies, actresses, all the famous folk of his epoch, sat to him. He daubed more than two hundred portraits; but they were good only when the subject amused him. His portraits of the Royal Family have something vicious and plebeian. He is too little in earnest, too little of an official, to paint court pictures. One might imagine that he with difficulty restrained himself from laughing at the pompous futility which stood before him. It irritated him to be obliged to paint these great lords and ladies in poses so ceremonial, instead of making them, like the angels of San Antonio, throw up their legs and skip over parapets. The Queen, Marie Louise, is frankly grotesque; and the family of CharlesIVlook like the family of a shopkeeper who have won the big prize in a lottery, and been photographed in their Sunday clothes. But, ah! when something gives him pleasure! In the Exhibition of Portraits at Paris, in 1885, there was the portrait of a young man, dressed in gray, which excelled Gainsborough for grace. With what a noble nonchalance this young elegant stands there, reminding one, in attitude and costume, of theincroyablesof Charles Vernet. With what equanimity does he look out on life, in his satisfaction at the good fit of his clothes. The wonderful harmony of the grey tones was rendered with all Gainsborough’s delicacy. The same man who in those pictures of ceremony let himself go in a manner so brusque and frenzied, here revelled, a very Proteus in his chameleon-like qualities, in soft and mellow and seductive tones. One might say that he has thought here of Prudhon and Greuze, and joined their study to the cult of Velasquez.
Still more charming was he in his pictures of young girls, when he was himself fascinated by the attractions of his subjects. The infantile Donna Maria Josefa (at the Prado) and the twelve-year-old Queen Isabella of Sicily (at Seville) are admirable pictures. In them the candour and grace of budding youth, the whole poetry of young maidenhood, have won life and expression from the enamoured tenderness of an artist hand. Seduced by beauty, he renounced all irony, thought only of those big, wide-opened eyes of velvet, those rosy young lips; of that warm carnation and the elegant slimness of that soft young neck that rose in delicate contour from the shoulders. Or again, that marvellous double portrait of La Maja in the Academy of San Fernando: a young girl painted once clothed and once nude, both pictures in exactly the same pose, and both flooded with the same extraordinary sensuous charm. This is not the uncertain, sarcastic painter of those State pictures. It is an attentive observer, who depicts with sensitive devotion the harmonious lines of the irradiating, young, human body so worthy of celebration. The transparent stuff that covers the body of “La Maja clothed” reveals all that it hides; in the other picture the unveiled nudity sings the high pæan of the flesh. The drawing is sure, the modelling of a marvellous tenderness. The heaving bosom, the slender limbs, the tantalising eyes—every part of that nervous body, with its ivory whiteness, stretched out on the milk-white couch made for love, breathes of pleasure and voluptuousness.
In pictures of this kind Goya is wholly one of us. Grown independent of every traditional rule, he abandoned himself entirely to his own impressions, and produced enduring works, vibrating with life, because he was himself fascinated with nature. He showed here an idea of modernity that almost makes him seem a contemporary of our own—that zeal for the pictorial, for colour and light, which attracts us so much to-day. Very characteristic also of the changed aspectof the age are his designs for the famous tapestry in Santa Barbara, with which he made his début at Madrid. They are very crude in decoration. Two or three neat young girls, with big, black, moist eyes, here and there pleasing details—a couple of men carrying a wounded companion—are unable to gloss over the heaviness of the composition and colour. But it was of great consequence that Goya should have had courage for so bold a step as to make use of character scenes in decorative painting at a time when everywhere else, without exception,fêtes champêtrespredominated.
In his oil paintings he went much further in this direction. In that impetuous manner peculiar to him he endeavoured to get a firm grip on the pictorial side of Spanish life, at home and in the streets, wherever he found it. The most fearful subjects—such as the two great slaughter scenes in the French invasion, painted with such breadth and fierceness—alternate with incidents of the liveliest character. Everything is jotted down, under the immediate influence of what has been observed, by rapid methods, and on this account produces an effect of sketches taken with complete directness from nature. In those careless pictures, swept with large strokes of the brush, there rises before us the mad drama of public holiday in the streets and in the circus: processions, bull-fights, brigands, the victims of the plague, assassinations, scenes of gallantry, national types—all observed with the acuteness of a Menzel. The Majas on the balcony in the Montpensier Gallery, the “Breakfast on the Grass,” the “Flower Girl,” the “Reaper,” the “Return from Market,” the “Cart attacked by Brigands,” are the most piquant, vividly coloured of these pictures. The “Romeria de San Isidoro” is full of such a sparkling, stirring life as the most modern of the impressionists alone have learned again to paint. A few dashes of colour, a few well-placed, bold strokes of the brush, and at once one sees the procession move, the groups passing each other by just as, in the marvellous sketches of thefuneral of Sardina, in the Academy of San Fernando, one can see the young couples revolve madly in the dance, and the lances of the bull-fighters redden the sand of the arena.
The superabundance of such phantasy could not, of course, be achieved by the tardy brush. He required a quicker medium, that would permit him to express everything. Therefore he executed his numerous etchings, by which he was rendered famous, before people had learnt to appreciate him as a painter: the “Capriccios,” the “Malheurs de la Guerre,” the “Bull-fights,” the “Captives”—those marvellous and fantastic pages in which he expressed everything that his feverish, satirical soul had accumulated for contempt, and hatred, and anger, and scorn. The etcher’s needle was the poisoned dagger with which he attacked all that he wished to attack: tyranny, superstition, intrigue, adultery, honour that is sold and beauty that lets itself be bought, the arrogance of the great and the degrading servility of the little. He made an awful and jovial hecatomb of all the vices and the scandals of the age. Whomsoever he pilloried was laid bare in all respects; physically and morally, no single trait of him was forgotten. And he did it so wittily that he compelled even the offended person to laugh. Neither CharlesIVhimself, nor the Court, nor the Inquisition, which bled most beneath his thrusts, dared to complain.
In his “Capriccios” Goya stands revealed as a figure without even a forerunner in the history of art. Satirical representations of popular superstitions, bitter, mordant attacks on the aristocracy, the government, and all social conditions, unprecedented assaults on the crown, on religion and its doctrines, inexorable satires upon the Inquisition and the monastic orders, make up this most remarkable book. It had hardly appeared in 1796 before the Inquisition seized it. Goya parried this stroke, however, by dedicating the plates to the king.
A painter and a colorist,in this book he displays his genius as an etcher. The outlines are drawn with light and genial strokes only; then comes theaquatinta, the colouring which overspreads the background, and gives localisation, depth, and light. A few scratches of the needle, a black spot, a light produced by a spot of white ingeniously left blank—that sufficed to give life and character to his figures.
The “Misères de la Guerre” are intrinsically more serious. All the scenes of terror that occurred in Spain as a sequel to the French invasion and the glory of Napoleon here utter their cry of lamentation. A few plates amongst them are worthy of comparison with the finest of Rembrandt’s,—the sole classic for whom Goya cherished a veneration. All the undertakings which followed these—the “Bull-fights,” the “Proverbs,” the “Captives,” the fantastic landscapes—tell of a long study of the great Dutch master. Especially celebrated were the seventeen new plates which he added to the “Malheurs de la Guerre” in 1814, at the time of the restoration of FerdinandVII. They are the political and philosophical testament of the old liberal, the keen free-thinker, the last and utmost fight for all that he loved against all that he hated. With sacred wrath and biting irony he waged war against the intrigues and hypocrisy of the obscurantists who throttle progress and suppress freedom of thought. With passionate wrath he rushed upon kings, priests, and dignitaries. It seems incredible that the plate entitled “Nada”—a dead man, who comes out of his grave and writes with his corpse-fingers the word “Nada” (nothing)—that this plate can be the work of a Spaniard of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there is the same hatred of tyranny, of social injustice, of human stupidity, the same incredulous effort after a dimly conceived ideal of truth and liberty.
It is neither the amiable fairyland of Callot nor thebourgeoispessimismof Hogarth. Goya is more inexorable and acute; his phantasy, borne on larger wings, takes a higher flight. He sees direful figures in his dreams, his laugh is bitter, his anger rancorous. He is a revolutionist, an agitator, a sceptic, a nihilist. Hischronique scandaleusegrows into the epos of the age. One understands why such a man should no longer feel secure in Spain, and, towards the close of his life, go into exile in France.
There, too, in the home of the revolution, art, ever since the beginning of the century, had freed herself more from the tradition of the Renaissance, and betaken herself to the new way, which the Dutch, and soon afterwards the English, had laid down in the seventeenth century.
All that had been produced in Paris, up to the close of the seventeenth century, had had its birthplace in the Italy of LeoX. The light of the Italian Renaissance had suffused France ever since the appearance of Rosso and Primaticcio. Rome had been the cradle of Simon Vouet and Nicolas Poussin. France endeavoured, in rich decoration and masterly swing of lines, to overtop the Italians, whose formulæ were studied partly in Rome and partly in the Palace of Fontainebleau, that Romein petto. Those religious pictures of Lebrun, arranged in panels, appeared with their theatrically elegant attitudes and their flowing drapery, with their slim, oscillating limbs and their florid gestures. All Olympus, all the saints and the heroes, were set to work to do honour to the great king. Was it necessary to glorify his acts, then it was done by portraying him as Cyrus or Alexander. The people of the seventeenth century did not exist for painters. Lebrun and Mignard, as inheritors of Roman culture, hovered over life without seeing it. Their ideals were a hundred and fifty years old, ingenious variations on the sixteenth-century pattern.
Then came the death of theGrand Monarque, and with him the tradition of the Renaissance went also to its grave. The oldage was outworn, and the new began to supersede it. The world was weary of the majestic, the stiff, and the pompous, whose glamour had blinded it for sixty years. The sun-king was dead, and the sun of the Italian Renaissance had set. French society breathed once more. The ostentation of the court had become an onerous ceremony, the monarchical principle an unendurable constraint. The nightmare that had oppressed it, the ennui that had come from Versailles, disappeared. Air and light and mirth penetrated the salons. People shook off the heavy yoke of majesty from their shoulders, abandoned their heroic, ostentatious palaces, and bought themselvespetites maisonsin theBois. They had suffered, they wished to be glad; they had been bored, they wished to be amused. Enough of pater-nosters and stately etiquette! they wished to live. Away with the antique temples and goddesses of Poussin! away with those devoted martyrs who mortified themselves and killed the flesh! Away with the semblance of the heroic, with pomp and glamour, with the service of God and the service of lords! Here’s to the service of the ladies. Here’s to the thatched roofs of farmhouses; the woods in whose thickets one can lose one’s way and exchange a kiss; rosy flesh and little turned-up noses; everything which gave a thrill of voluptuousness after the unapproachable, icy-cold nobility of the past. Long live Love!
So thought France when LouisXIVwas dead, and the man was already grown up in the Low Countries who was chosen to give a shapeto these dreams, to abolish the ascendency of gods and kings and heroes, and to show the upper classes their own image reflected in the mirror of art.
Antoine Watteau, who guided the stream of French art into this new channel—of the Netherlands—was by birth and training a Fleming. His birthplace, Valenciennes, although French territory since the Peace of Nymeguen, resembled in its whole character a Flemish town. In the church here he first saw any of Rubens’ pictures. Here, through Gérin, he became instructed in Flemish traditions. Rubens and Teniers are the two masters from whom his own art sprang. During the years when the war of the Spanish Succession had changed the French frontier provinces into a huge military camp, he painted soldiers and camp scenes, such as the “March” in the collection of Edmund Rothschild, where a party of recruits are straggling along a high plain in a fierce storm. Later came pictures of country life in the manner of Teniers, like the “Retour de Guinguette,” engraved by Chedel, a landscape in which on the right a party of rustics are carousing at a table in front of a farmyard, while on the other side half-drunken men and women are going home. LouisXIVhad made before the pictures of Teniers his well-knownmot: “Otez moi ces magots.” Now, through Watteau, themagotmakes its entrance into French art. Thus in his chief picture in this manner, “La Vraie Gaieté,” the figures are unmistakably after Teniers. The men are short and sturdy, entirely Flemish. Only the costumes have changed with the mode. But the women are not in the least Flemish. The clean caps and tidy kerchiefs, the freshly ironed aprons, and neat little feet that trip so lightly and quickly along the street that no dirt seems to soil them, give these peasant girls a certain desirability in which it is not hard to discover the transition to French grace. The elegant motions and fine heads point to that Watteau who was to become soon afterwards the unsurpassable delineator of feminine coquetry.
Gillot and Rubens led him into the new road. The Teniers-like character of his figures disappeared, they became gracious and noble. In place of themagotcame elegant French society. Gillot was the first in Paris to break with the pompous LouisXIVstyle, and to begin the representation of the cheerful life of comedians, to replace the dwellers in Olympus by characters of the French and Italian stage. Rubens had been the first in his “Garden of Love,” of the Dresden and Madrid Galleries, to invite to the embarkation for the Island of Cythera. Watteau acquired something from everyone he studied, and yet resembles none. After having hitherto sought his personages on the highways and in camps, he was now to become the painter offêtes galantes, the painter of “Society.” For in his shepherds and shepherdesses there lives the elegance of France. The gods of the Renaissance, in whom no one any longer believed, glided into the costumes of Harlequin and Pierrette. In lieu of the great and the pathetic there came the small, the gay, the graceful, the dainty. The architectural symmetry of composition disappeared, and the stiff stage-scenery character of landscape vanished.The grave formality of geometrical construction is changed into freedom and joyousness, just as the rhetorical, exact, measured periods of Boileau were relaxed, under the hands of Voltaire, into sentences unconstrained, buoyant, and crisp. Watteau’s art betokened the triumph of naturalism over the mannerism into which the French art of the seventeenth century, based on the Italian Renaissance, had dwindled. As it is said in an old poem—
“Parée à la Françoise, un jour Dame NatureEut le desir coquet de voir sa portraiture.Que fit la bonne mère? Elle enfanta Watteau.”
“Parée à la Françoise, un jour Dame Nature
Eut le desir coquet de voir sa portraiture.
Que fit la bonne mère? Elle enfanta Watteau.”
Watteau became for French art what, a hundred years before, Rubens had been for Flemish—the deliverer. He delivered them from the oppressive yoke of the Italian tradition. In his world, where there were no longer any naked goddesses, but where the corset was opened only just wide enough to reveal a rosy bosom, there was nothing more left of the past. It is no longer antique beauty, no longer the plastic cold of the “Venus di Milo,” no longer the marble perfection of Raphael’s “Galatea.” Into those tender, feminine hands, into those lace sleeves, out of which snow-white arms come languishingly forth, into those slender waists, and teasing, dimpled chins, something of coquetry, of sensibility, something subtle and spiritual, has entered, that seems to transcend physical beauty. His young men are tall and supple, his women entirely indescribable, with their air of quiet roguishness and their exquisite coiffures. Quite modern is that distinguished sense for costume which made him a leader of fashion. Mysterious landscapes, that exhale peace and happiness all around! Rightly has Edmond de Goncourt called him a lyric poet, the great poet of the eighteenth century.
In this way the development proceeded. The pompous representation which portrait painting had practised hitherto was gone. People would no longer be masters of the ceremonies, but human beings. New forms of technique were discovered, such as pastel painting. No other material was capable of rendering the peculiar fragrance of this fugitive flower nature, the graceful appearance of thisrococostyle, of these ladies with the touch of powder in their hair, and their moist, dreamy eyes, as Maurice Latour, Rosalba Carriera, and later the Swiss, Liotard, painted them. Of those who endeavoured,on the model of Watteau’s style, to depict the life of the fashionable world, none approached the delicacy of that national genius.LancretandPaterfollowed him, but more roughly, more soberly, more drily. Lancret in his whole conception, compared with Watteau, is a homely, often a somewhat cumbrous journeyman; Pater, an artist of greater elegance, has the fickleness of the virtuoso. Both in conviction and in art they lacked that poetic, glorifying breath which pervades Watteau’s creations. In Watteau onebelievesthat these gracious beings, these tall and nervous cavaliers, these amiable coquettes and comely women, actually represent originals in noble society; whereas in the works of his disciples it often happens that the paid model, selected from a lower circle of society, appears to us to be not congruous with the elegance of her wardrobe. These dancers, huntsmen, and noble maidens are not wholly what they should represent. But how delicious they are, these French gossips, so long as one is mindfulnotto think of Watteau! What grace is theirs too! What innate tact! With what a pleasant adroitness do they understand how to rivet our attention, and to keep far, far away from the tedium in which their classical ancestors, with their natural heaviness, waded! Instinctively and without effort they rejected therhythmically balanced composition and correct nobility of form of the classics, and found a characteristic expression for unconstrained gestures, pleasing movements, and refined elegance.
Even the decorative painters abandoned more and more the much-worn paths of the Italians.François Lemoinegave them, by Rubens’ aid, the transition to a manner peculiarly French, elegant, sensuous, charming. His pupil,François Boucher, followed him. Like the sons of the seventeenth century, he made exhaustive use of mythological subjects and was often a superficial artist, and in his later works he became entirely a mannerist; but he was not so at the beginning. It was a great advance for France when Boucher gave his pupils the advice to abstain from imitation of the great Italian masters, and not to grow “as cold as ice.” And what a great naturalist he is in his numerous drawings and etchings, and in those marvellous groups of chubby children who are playing and tumbling about on clouds, or playing musical instruments shooting arrows, or sporting with flowers! “It is not every one who has the stuff to make a Boucher” even his great antagonist David has said of him.
InFragonard, again, there was summed up all the joy of life and the frivolity, the lustrous, luxurious talent, the charming amiability and nimble sureness, of French art in the eighteenth century. Fragonard has painted everything. His great decorations are careless inspirations, sparkling with spirit and life. With him pastoral scenes alternate with episodes of everyday life—children, guitar players, women reading. Fragonard is a piquant, ingenious painter. Perhaps hardly any other painter has so much kissing in his pictures. His etching, “L’armoire,” of 1778, is well known. In that he already stood on the sure ground of popular life. The old rustic, who is armed with a formidable cudgel, is beating open, with the assistance of his wife, the doors of a great clothes cupboard, in which a handsome young fellow has hidden himself; close by is a pretty farm girl, weeping in confusion into her apron; in the background the curious and amazed little sisters are looking on.
J. F. de Troyhad, at the same time, abandoned himself to a more frolicsome manner, had played upon painting in pictures such as “The Proposal of Marriage” and “The Garter” with something of that frivolity which later came into fashion through Baudouin. That, however, was only for a very short time. Life was beginning to be in earnest—that is rather the impression one receives much earlier, from turning over the engravings of those years. Amongst the elders of the actualrococoage, contentment and gaiety still rule. As the heirs of an old civilisation, the aristocracy understood, with a refined and unique understanding, how to turn lifeinto a feast. Silk trains rustle over the parquet, silk shoes trip, eyes gleam, diamonds flash, white bosoms heave. Tall cavaliers advance to their sprightly partners, gossip and smiles fly around, Knights of Malta and abbés hang over the chairs and pay their court. Yes, this autumn of the old French culture was of a marvellous beauty for the fortunate, and those fortunate ones knew, as no other generation has ever done, how to enjoy life with serenity, in a fairy glamour of rooms gleaming with Venetian chandeliers, where rosy Cupidons laughed down bewitchingly from their light, gold moulded panels. Under Louis XVI the French salon acquired another aspect. Its walls, its whole architecture, were more sombre. The Cupidons still sported on the ceiling, but they were forgotten, like ghosts of the past; their shafts were already impotent. The vivacious, dancing couples have disappeared. Festivity has been banished from the big rooms: here and there is seen an earnest conversational party; gentlemen playing cards or ladies reading philosophical books. Social and political interests have sprung up with which people of education prefer to occupy themselves. Numerous works on commerce and constitutional methods have appeared during the last fifty years. In place of scandal there crop up arguments, for and against the Parliament, for and against the Jesuits. Enlightenment had won its victory. Henceforth development is no longer compatible with sensuous delight. It is still the same society as before, but without pleasure. One almost breathes the air of 1789. Gaming is only a struggle against ennui; the foreheads of women are furrowed with reading. Society has grown serious and sombre, as it were, with a presentiment of what is to come, as though destiny might thus be set aside. The writings of Diderot afford the clearest instance of this changed spirit of the age, and art too must become virtuous, and work for the amelioration of the world. Thus Diderot upheld the sentimental and emotional subject against thefêtes galantesof therococopainter. Boucher derived his inspiration from the slough of prostitution; only a moral upheaval could tend to a high style. With Boucher the idea of honour, of innocence, has become something strange; the new age requires virtue,bonnes mœurs. But where are the virtues to be found? Naturally, there alone, where Rousseau had discovered them. Rousseau taught that man by nature was good, that he was noble, conscious of his moral obligations, self-sacrificing and uncorrupted when he came fromthe hands of his Maker, and that it was civilisation which first corrupted him. It followed that the most civilised are the most corrupt, and virtues are to be met with, if anywhere, amongst the lower orders, who are the least affected by culture. Not beneath an embroidered waistcoat, only beneath a woollen smock, can a noble heart beat. The happy ignorance of the young Savoyard, eating his cheese or his oranges in a church porch, lies nearer to the original perfection of mankind than the most subtle erudition of the most ingenious of the encyclopædists. Amongst nature’s noblemen one must seek for the secret of virtue, which has been lost by the aristocracy in the stream of civilisation. Thus beneath the ægis of Rousseau’s philosophy the Third Estate makes its entry into French salons. From the man of the people society wanted to learn how to become once more simple, unassuming, and virtuous; and it was a gruesome irony of fate that this “man of the people” should reveal himself later, when the guillotine stood in the Place de la Concorde, as by no means so lamblike, modest, and self-sacrificing as that noble society had imagined him.
Greuzerepresented this phase of French art when the riotous carnival ofrococohad come to an end, and the Ash Wednesday of rule and fasting and penitence had ensued. It was considered that the aim of art must be to instruct and elevate, not merely to amuse; it should set an example to raise and inspire the good, to serve as a warning for the bad. “Rendre la vertu aimable, le vice odieux, le ridicule saillant, voilà le projet de tout honnête homme qui prend la plume, le pinceau ou le ciseau.” In these words Diderot formulated his programme. It was his wish that the corrupt man, when he went to an exhibition, should feel pricks of conscience at the pictures and read in them his own condemnation. “Si ses pas le conduisent au Salon, qu’il craigne d’arrêter ses regards sur la toile.” Educational effects, “moral stories told in pictures,” that is the keynote of Diderot’s demands upon the painter, and of the accomplishment of Greuze in answer to this claim. He is the French Hogarth, whether he paints in sombre colours the misery that the drunkard brings upon his family, and the horrors of poverty, or depicts in brighter tones the love of children for their parents and the works of charity; and with him too, as with the Englishman, his title was chosen with a didactic after-thought to heighten the effectof his picture. Thus such scenes as these occurred: “The Father’s Curse,” “The Consolation of Age,” “The Son’s Correction,” “The Ungrateful Son,” “The Beloved Mother,” “The Spoilt Child,” “The Lame Man tended by his Relations,” and “The Results of Good Education.” He had this, too, in common with Hogarth: he liked to develop his moral stories in long series, which invariably ended with the triumph of virtue and the punishment of vice. The didactic story ofBazile et Thibautattempted to relate in twenty-six chapters the influence of a good education on the formation of a whole life; and, just as in Hogarth’s story of the two apprentices, here too, at the conclusion, the well-educated Thibaut pronounces sentence of death over his old friend Bazile, the badly educated, and now condemned murderer. The fact that in other things the two moral apostles differ greatly from each other is accounted for by the difference in the national characteristics of those to whom they variously appealed.
Hogarthscourgedthe vices of the Third Estate in order to raise them to morality. Rape, bloodshed, debauchery, disorderliness, gluttony, and drunkenness—that was the channel through which in England at that day the furious flood of the uncontrolled spirit of the populace poured itself, foaming and raging with fearful natural force. Hogarth swung over these human animals the stout cudgel of morality in the manner of a sturdy policeman and Puritanbourgeois. With such people a delicate forbearance would have been misplaced. At the foot of every prison-scene he inscribed the name of the vice that he had pilloried there, and subjoined the predicted damnation from Holy Writ. He reveals it in its hideousness, he steeps it in its filth, traces it to its retribution, so that even the most vitiated conscience must recognise it and the most hardened abhor it.
Greuze employs the Third Estate as amirror of virtue, sets forth its noble qualities as an edification to an aristocracy that has grown vicious. Less primitive and, for that very reason, less original than Hogarth, he never forgets that he lives in the most refined social period in history. He does not strangle his culprits to provide terrifying examples, but nearly always leaves a corner open for repentance. He knew that he dared not exact too much from the nerves of his noble public; he merely wished to stir them to a soft vibration. He did not paint for drunken English people, but for those perfumed marquises who, later on, bowed with socourtly an elegance before the guillotine; for those sensitive ladies in whom virtue now excited the same sensual delight that vice had done before. They welcomed in him the high priest of a sort of orgie of virtue, to whose festivals they had grown reconciled. The century which in its first half had danced as light-heartedly as any other the can-can of life, becomes, in its second half, sad of soul, enthusiastic over the reward of justice, the punishment of transgressors, over honour and the naïveté of innocence. Time after time do his contemporaries praise precisely that sense of virtue in the art of Greuze. So that in France, as in England, the burden of interest was laid no longer upon the art, but upon an accessory circumstance. For since, in the hands of Greuze, the picture had been turned into an argument, in France, as in England, art ceased to be an end—it became only a means. He made painting a didactic poem, the more melodramatic the better, and was driven thereby on the same sandbank upon which Hogarth, and allgenrepainters whowould bemore than painters, have made shipwreck. In order to bring out his story with the utmost possible distinctness, he was too frequently compelled unduly to accentuate his point. The effect became affected, the pathos theatrical. His picture of the “Father’s Curse” in the Louvre, with the infuriated old man, the son hurrying wildly away, and the weeping sisters, resembles the last act of a melodrama. “The Country Wedding,” where the father-in-law has given the young bridegroom the purse with the dowry, and now pathetically observes, “Take it, and be happy,” might just as well have been entitled “The Father’s Last Blessing.” In the picture in which a noble dame takes her daughter to the bedside of two poor persons who are ill, to accustom her in early life to works of charity, the personages in the picture, arranged exactly as if upon a stage, must have been themselves uncommonly moved by the touching and praiseworthy action. Greuze was the father ofgenrepainting in France—that barbaric, story-telling art which replacedtableaux vivantsbased upon the literary idea by the Dutchmen’s picturesque and well-observed selections from nature. Beyond that, however, it must not be forgotten that he, like Hogarth, psychologically opposed to the earlier art, showed practical progress in many of his works. There were few in French art before him who depicted the emotions of the soul with such refinementas Greuze in his “Reading of the Bible.” In proportion to the understanding and character of the individual is the impression of the listener reflected on his countenance. That was something new in comparison with the laughing gods of Boucher. And that Greuze was also capable of the most highlypictorialmagic when he could once bring himself to lay aside the moral teacher is proved by his rosy, inspired heads of young girls. He never grew weary of painting these pretty children in every situation and attitude at that seductive age which hides the charming feet beneath the first long gown. Blonde or brunette, with a blue ribbon in the hair, a little cluster of flowers in the bodice, they gaze out upon life with their big, brown child eyes, full of curiosity and misgiving. A light gauze covers the soft lines of the neck, the shoulders are as yet hardly rounded, the pouting lips are fresh as the morning dew, and only the two rosy, budding breasts, that fight lustily against their imprisonment, and seem, like Sterne’s starling, to cry, “I cannot get out,” betray that the woman is already awake in the child. Greuze’s name will always be associated with these girl types, just as that of Leonardo is with the dreamy, smiling sphinx-like head of Mona Lisa. In them he has given an unsurpassable expression to the ideal of innocence at the end of the eighteenth century, and provided in them a new thrill of beauty for his contemporaries. And ablasésociety which had indulged in every licence bathed itself with passionate delight in the unknown mystery of this surging flood. Yes, after the stimulating champagne ofrococo, people had even come to delight in simple black bread. And so, out ofbourgeoisieitself, a school of painting was developed as fresh and healthy as this.
Chardin, the carpenter’s son, is at the head of this domestic art in the eighteenth century. After Greuze, the painter of refined taste, he seems, a comfortable, healthy,bourgeoismaster in whom the Dutchman of the best period once more appears upon earth.
After the king had, up to the close of the seventeenth century, been the centre round which everything turned, the solitary personality which dared to appear independent, and upon which the rest of the world formed itself; after the circles round the court had next freed themselves, and gained the right to enjoy life and art for themselves, there still remained a third step to surmount. “Society” abdicates in favour of a free and healthybourgeoisie.
A surgeon’s sign was the first work which brought the young man, who had received no systematic education, into notice. The surgeon is in his shop attending to a manwho has been wounded in a duel, grouped around are curious bystanders, while the commissary of police investigates the case with a grave countenance. It is the first picture of the Parisian life of the people. And Chardin, with his middle-class origin, remained the advocate of middle-class domestic life. He is the Watteau of the Third Estate. Greuze owes his success, in the first place, to the ingenious manner in which he made himself the spokesman of the moral tendency of his age. It interested contemporary society to be told that it is beautiful to see married folk live together in happiness; that young mothers do a good action in nursing their children, when it is possible, themselves; that man should repent of his sins; and that he who honours his father and mother lives long in the land. Nowadays we thank him for these wise counsels, but say, at the same time, that we could have done without them. We no longer see the necessity of illustrating the ten commandments, and notice now all the more the mannerisms, the rhetorical strokes of advocacy which the painter must employ in order to plead successfully. Chardin’s effect is as fresh to-day as it was a hundred years ago, because he was a sheer artist, who did not seek to tell a story, but only to represent,—a realist of the finest stamp, belonging in his exquisite sense of colour values to the illustrious family of the Terburgs. His pictures have no “purpose.” The washerwoman, the woman scraping carrots, the housewife at her manifold tasks—that is Chardin’s world; the atmosphere in which these figures move, the shimmering light that floats in the half-dark kitchen, the wealth of sun-rays that play upon the white tablecloths and brown-panelled walls—those are his fields of study. Chardin lived in an old studio, high up near the roof, a quiet, dark room that was usually full of vegetables which he used for his “still life.” There was something picturesque about the dusty walls where the moist green of vegetables mingled so harmoniously with the time-worn, sombre brown of the wainscoting, and the white table-cloth was flooded with the silvery green which poured in from a little skylight. In this peaceful and harmoniously toned chamber were laid those small domestic scenes, which he so loved to paint, and which were called by the French, in contrast to theFétes Galantes, “Amusements de la Vie Privée.” The clock ticks, the lamp burns, water is boiling on the homely tiled stove. There is an effect in every one of his pictures, as though he had lived them himself, as if they were reminiscences of something dear to him and familiar. In contrast to Greuze he shunned all critical moments, and depicted only the quiet life of custom, everyday life as it befell in a constant, regular routine. There are no hasty movements with him, no catastrophes nor complications; he has a preference for “still life” in the world of men, just as in nature. He ispar excellencethe painter ofIntimität(intimate life); which is not the same asa genrepainter. Painters who in the manner ofgenrehave depicted domestic scenes in rooms are to be found in every school; but how few have known how to depict the poetry of the family life with such truth, with suchan absence of affectation and insipidity! With Chardin art and life are interfused.