CHAPTER X
THE GENERATION OF 1830
Duringthe years which elapsed between 1820 and 1848 France produced a great and admirable school of art. After the convulsions of the Revolution and the wars of the Empire, that generation had arisen, daring and eager for action, which de Musset describes in hisConfessions d’un Enfan du Siècle. And these young men, born between the thunders of one battle and another, who had grown up in the midst of greatness and glory, had to experience, as they ripened into manhood, the ignominy of CharlesX’s reign, the period of clerical reaction. They saw monasteries re-erected, laws of mediæval severity made against blasphemy and the desecration of churches and saints’ days, and the doctrine of the divine origin of the monarchy proclaimed anew. “And when young men spoke of glory,” says de Musset, “the answer was, ‘Become priests!’ And when they spoke of honour, the answer was, ‘Become priests!’ And when they spoke of hope, of love, of strength and life, ever the same answer, ‘Become priests!’” The only result of this pressure was to intensify all the more the impulse towards freedom. The political and intellectual reaction could only have the effect of impelling the poetic and artistic emotions of young and unquiet spirits into opposition, on principle, to all that was established, into a fiery contempt for public opinion, into the apotheosis of unrestrained passion and unfettered genius. The French Romanticists were anti-Philistines who regarded the word “bourgeois” as an insult. For them Art was the one supreme consideration; it was to them a light and a flame, and its beauty and daring the only things worth living for. For those who put forward such demands as these, the “eunuchism of the Classical”—an expression of George Sand’s—could never suffice. They dreamed of an art of painting which should find its expression in blood, purple, light, movement, and boldness; they held in sovereign contempt the correct, pedantic, colourless tendency of their elders. An inner flame should glow through and liberate the forms, absorb the lines and contours, and mould the picture into a symphony of colour. What was desired and sought for, in poetry and in music, in plastic art and in painting, was colour and passion: colour so energetic, that drawing was, as it were, consumed by it; passion so vehement, that lyrical poetry and the drama were in danger of becoming feverish and convulsive. A movement which reminds one of the Renaissance took possession of all minds. It was asthough there were something intoxicating in the very air that one breathed. On a political background of grey upon grey, consisting of the cowls of the Jesuits of the Restoration, there arose a flaming, refulgent, blustering literature and art, scintillating with sparks and bright hues, full of the adoration of passion and of fervid colour. Romanticism is Protestantism in literature and art—such is Vitet’s definition of the movement.
Literature, which, adapting itself to the politics of the government, had begun in Chateaubriand with an enthusiastic fervour for Catholicism, Monarchy, and Mediævalism, had in the twenties become revolutionary; and the description of its battles is one of the most glowing chapters in George Brandes’ classic work. There was a revolt against the pseudo-antique, against the stiff handling of the Alexandrine metre, against the yoke of tradition. Then arose that mighty race of Romantic poets who proclaimed with Byronic fire the gospel of nature and passion. De Musset, the famous child of the century, the idol of the young generation, the poet with the burning heart, who rushed through life with such eagerness and haste that at the age of forty he broke down altogether, worn out like a man of seventy, deliberately wrote bad rhymes in his first poems, for the purpose of thoroughly infuriating the Classicists. So, too, he wrote his dramas, in which love is glorified as a serious and terrible power with which one may not trifle, as the fire with which one must not play, as the electric spark that kills. So George Sand, the female Titan of Romanticism, published her novels, with their subversive tendencies and their sparkling animation of narrative. Between these two rises the keen bronze-like profile of Prosper Mérimée, who prefers to describe the life of gypsies and robbers, and to depict the most violent and desperate characters in history. Finally, Victor Hugo, the great chieftain of the Romantic school, the Paganini of literature, unrivalled in imposing grandeur, in masterly treatment of language, and in petty vanity, found submissive multitudes to listen to him when he rose in fierce and fiery insurrection against the rigid laws of the bloodless Classical style, and substituted for the actionless and ill-contrived declamatory tragedies of his time his own romantic dramas, breathing passion and full of diversified movement.
The conflict was deadly. The young generation hailed with applause the new Messiah of letters, and grew intoxicated with the harmony of Hugo’s phrases, which sounded so much fuller and fierier than the measured speech of Corneille and Racine. The Théâtre Français, recently benumbed as with the quiet of the grave, became all at once a tumultuous battlefield. There they sat, when Hugo’sCromwellandHernaniwere produced on the stage, correct, well dressed, gloved, close shaven, with their neat ties and shirt collars, the representatives of the old generation, whose blameless conduct had raised them to office and place. And in contrast to them, in the pit were crowded together the young men, the “Jeune France,” as Théophile Gautier described them, one with his waving hair like a lion’s mane, another with his Rubens hat and Spanish mantle, another in his vest of bright red satin. Their commonuniform was the red waistcoat introduced by Théophile Gautier—not the red chosen for their symbol by the men of the Revolution, but the scarlet-red which represented the hatred felt by these enthusiastic young men for all that was grey and dull, and their preference for all that is luminous and magnificently coloured in life. They held that the contemplation of a beautiful piece of red cloth was an artistic pleasure. A similar change took place at the same time in ladies’ toilettes. As the Revolution had in ladies’ costumes rejected all colour in favour of the Grecian white, so now dresses once more assumed vivid, and especially deep red hues; deep red ribbons adorned the hat and encircled the waist.
Deep red—that was the colour of the Romantic school; the flourishing of trumpets and the blare of brass its note. Flashes of passion and ferocity, rivers of sulphur, showers of fire, glowing deserts, decaying corpses in horrible phosphorescence, seas at night-time in which ships are sinking, landscapes over which roaring War shakes his brand, and where maddened nations fall furiously upon one another—such are the subjects, resonant with shout of battle and song of victory, which held sway over French Romanticism. At the very time when at Düsseldorf the young artists of Germany were painting with the milk of pious feeling their lachrymose, susceptible, sentimental pictures, utterly tame and respectable; when the Nazarene school were holding their post-mortem on the livid corpse of old Italian art, and seeking to galvanise it, and with it the Christian piety of the Middle Ages, into life again; at that very time there arose in France a young generation boiling over with fervour, who had for their rallying cry Nature and Truth, but demanded at the same time, and before all else, contrast, pictorial antithesis, and passion at once lofty and of tiger-like ferocity. In those very years, when in Germany, the cartoon style of Carstens having died away, progress was limited to a timid and unsuccessful pursuit of that revelry of colour which marked the Quattrocentisti, the French took at once, as with the seven-leagued boots of the fairy-tale, the great stride onward towards the Flemings.
Through Napoleon, France had grown richer, not only in glory, but in art treasures, gathered together from all countries into Paris, as trophies ofthe victorious general. The abundant collections thus accumulated brought to bear upon that generation the quickening influence of the best that had been done in the art of painting. Nowhere could one study either the Venetian colourists or Rubens to greater advantage than in the Louvre, and it was by virtue of this unrestrained intercourse with the masters who represent the most perfect blossom of colouring that the Byronic spirits of 1830 succeeded in giving full expression to the glowing full-coloured life of things which hovered before their heated imagination. It is unnecessary to say that this was accompanied by a great widening of the range of subjects treated. The Romantic school showed that there were other heroes in history and poetry besides the Greeks and Romans. They painted everything, if only it possessed colour and character, flame, passion, and exotic perfume. Romanticism was the protest of painting against the plastic in art, the protest of liberty against the academic teaching of the Classical school, the revolution of movement against stiffness.
It was in the studio of Guérin, the tame and timid Classicist, that the young assailants grew up, “the daubers of 1830,” who called the Apollo Belvidere a shabby yellow turnip, and who spoke of Racine and Raphael as of street arabs. They were tired of copying profiles of Antinous. The contemplation of a picture by Girodet was wearisome to them. It wasThéodore Géricault, a hot, hasty passionate nature, of Beethoven-like unruliness and of heaven-storming boldness, who spoke the word of deliverance.
He was a Norman, sturdily built and serious in manner. Even while he was studying in Guérin’s studio he had already grasped some of the ideas which Gros had in his mind, and, although not his pupil, Géricault may be said to have continued his work, or at least would have been able to do so had he lived longer. Like him, he had from his youth up contemplated, full ofwonder, the rolling sea and the thunder-laden skies; like him, he had a predilection for fine horses; and, being of a somewhat melancholy disposition, he preferred to treat of the darker aspects of life. His aspiration was to paint the surging sea, proud steeds rushing past at a gallop, suffering and striving humanity, great deeds, pathos and frenzy in every form. His first works were splendid horsemen, whose every muscle twitches with nervous movement. During his short stay in Charles Vernet’s studio he had already taken an interest in cavalry, and begun the studies of such subjects, which he continued to the day of his death. Afterwards, while he was working under Guérin and before his visit to Italy in 1817, he often went to the Louvre, copied pictures and studied Rubens, to the great annoyance of his teacher, who with horror beheld him entering upon so perilous a path.
Here again he followed in the steps of Gros, whose portrait of General Fournier Sarlovése was hung in the Salon of 1812 close by Géricault’s “Mounted Officer.” This picture, a portrait of M. Dieudonné, an officer in the Chasseurs d’Afrique, crossing the battlefield sword in hand on a rearing horse, was the first work exhibited by Géricault, then twenty-one years of age. It was an event. Gros found himself supported, if not surpassed, by a beginner who had his own enthusiasm for colour and movement, for profiles broadly and boldly delineated. In 1814 followed the “Wounded Cuirassier,” staggering across the field of battle and dragging his horse behind him. These were no longer warriors seated on classical steeds foaming with rage, but real soldiers in whom there was nothing of the Greek statue. Then Géricault went to Italy, but in this case also it was not to pursue archæological studies in the museums, but to see the race of thebarberiduring carnival. To this time belong those studies of horses, for the possession of which collectors viewith one another to-day, sketches made in the open air, out in the street or in the stables. “The Horses at the Manger” and “Horses fighting” were among the pearls of the collection of French drawings in the Paris Exhibition of 1889.
In 1819 he completed his greatest picture, that which most people alone call to mind—not quite fairly—when his name is mentioned—“The Raft of the Medusa.” What a tragedy is there represented! For twelve days the unfortunate wretches have been on the deep, starving, in utter despair and ready to lift their hands against each other. They were a hundred and fifty, now they are but fifteen. One old man holds upon his knees the corpse of his son; another tears his hair out, left alone in life after seeing all his dear ones perish. In the foreground lie dead bodies which the waves have not yet swept away. But far away in the distance a sail appears. One points it out to another: yes, it is a sail! A mariner and a negro mount upon an empty barrel and wave their handkerchiefs in the air. Will they be seen? The anxiety is terrible. And ever higher and higher the grey waves roll on.
How must such a scene have impressed a generation which for long years had seen nothing in the Salon but dry mythology and painted statues! Géricault was the first to free himself from the tyranny of the plaster-of-Paris bust, and once again to put passion and truth to nature in the place of cold marble.Just as he commissioned the ship’s carpenter who had constructed the raft and was one of the saved to make him a model of it, so also he moved into a studio close to the hospital, for the purpose of studying the sick and dying, of sketching dead bodies and single limbs. It must be admitted that one would wish for a yet firmer grasp of the subject. In form, Géricault still belongs to the school of David. A good deal of Classicism shows itself in the fact that he thought it necessary to depict the majority of the figures naked, in order to avoid “unpictorial” costumes. There is still something academic in the figures, which do not seem to be sufficiently weakened by privation, disease, and the struggle with death; but what man can free himself at one stroke from the influence of his time and environment? Even in the colouring there lingers some touch of the Classical school. It offends no one, a fact to be insisted on in comparing him with the Nazarenes; but as yet it plays no part in expressing the meaning of the picture. From the distance, indeed, whence the rescuing ship is drawing near, a bright light shines forth upon a scene otherwise depicted in dull brown. Save for this, the intention of the picture is not expressed by means of colour, and it even shows some retrogression as compared with Géricault’s earlier works. He had begun with Rubens, yet these studies in colouring did not last. In the “Wounded Cuirassier” of 1814 dark tones took the place of the former cheerfulness, andso in the “Raft of the Medusa” he imagined the tragedy could be represented only in sombre hues. He spread over the whole scene a monotonous unpleasant brown shade, and in his endeavour to lay all weight upon human emotion he went so far as almost to suppress the sea, which nevertheless played the chief part in the drama, and whose deep blue would have afforded a splendid contrast. Discoveries are not to be made all at once, but only when their hour is come.
The next step in French art was to be that of reinstating the significance of colour in the full rights conquered for it by Titian, so that it should no longer be merely a tasteful tinting of the figures, but should become truly that which gives its temper to the picture. It was not reserved for Géricault to effect this. A trip to London, which he made in 1820, in company with his friend Charlet, was the last event of his life. There the sportsman awoke in him once more, and he painted the “Race for the Derby at Epsom.” Soon after his return he was thrown from his horse while riding, but lingered on for two years longer, suffering from a spinal complaint. With a few more years in which to develop he should have been one of the great masters of France, but he died when scarcely in his thirty-second year.
Yet he lived long enough to observe, in the Salon of 1822, the début of one of his comrades from Guérin’s studio. A greater than himself, to whom with dying voice he had given a few words of advice, arose as the intellectual heir of the young painter so prematurely carried off, and carried to its issue the struggle which he had begun. It was on 26th April 1799, at midday, that the first genuine painter’s eye of the century saw the light, at Charenton Saint-Maurice. Géricault had made a beginning, but it was the impetuous, powerful genius ofEugène Delacroixwhich entered in and completed his work. What Gros had dimly perceived, but had not dared to express, what Géricault had barely had time with a courageous hand to point out, a hand too soon stiffened in death—the modern poetry of colour, of fever, and of quivering emotion—it was reserved for Delacroix to write.
“That child will grow up to be a famous man; his life will be extremely laborious, but also extremely agitated, and always exposed to opposition.” Thus had a madman prophesied of the boy one day when he and his nurse were taking a walk near the lunatic asylum at Charenton. And he was right.
Delacroix was another of the pupils who had grown up in Guérin’s studio, but he became the latter’s antipode. Even in his student years he took counsel, not of the antique, but of Rubens and Veronese; and when Géricault was painting his “Raft of the Medusa,” Delacroix belonged to the little band of enthusiastic admirers which gathered round the young master. He served as model for the half-submerged man to the left in the foreground of that picture. After busying himself at first almost entirely with caricatures, and studies of horses, and with Madonnas in the Classical style, he exhibited in 1822 his “Dante’s Bark,” in a pictorial sense the first characteristic picture of the century. One is inclined even to-day to repeat David’s exclamation when he caught sight of the work, the first great epoch-making life-utterance of the revolutionary Romanticists: “D’où vient-il? Je ne connais pas cette touche-la.” There were thoughts in it which had not been conceived and expressed in the same manner since the time of Tintoretto. Dante and Virgil, ferried by Phlegyas over Acheron, are passing among the souls of the damned, who grasp hold of the boat with the energy of despair. A theme taken from a mediæval author; an antique figure, that of Virgil, but seen through the prism of modern poetry. While the Florentine, stiff with horror, gazes upon the swimming figures which cling to the boat with teeth and nails, Virgil, tranquil and serious, turns on them a face which the emotions of life can no longer affect.
The work obtained a decisive success. A carpenter in Delacroix’s house had made for the young painter an inartistic frame of four boards. When he went to the exhibition and looked for his picture in the side-rooms he could not find it. The frame had fallen to pieces during removal, but the picture had been hung in an honourable place in the Louvre, in a rich frame ordered for it by Baron Gros. “You must learn drawing, my young friend, and then you will become a second Rubens,” was the salute which this remarkable man, whose theory ever gave the lie to his practice, gave the young master. Naturally Delacroix would not now have been admitted into the school of David, or would have been placed there in the lowest rank—with Rubens and a few other immortals, who drew no better than he did. He was absolutely opposed to all the exact, regular, well-balanced, colourless traditions which held sway in David’s school with their pedantic erudition andbourgeoisdiscretion. The principle of the Classicists was the Greek type of beauty, and the translation of sculpture into painting. In Delacroix’s picture there was no longer anything of that sort. Géricault had already broken away from the academic stencilling of form, and had substituted natural expression, life, and emotion for conventional types; Delacroix now set aside the sullen colouring of the Classical school, and its painted statues made way for the colour-symphonies of the Venetians.
These reforming qualities found in his second work, a few years later, a much fuller expression than in the “Dante’s Bark.” At that time the Greeks, that heroic nation, struggling and dying for its religion and independence, had excited everywhere the deepest sympathy and enthusiasm. Delacroix was the very man to be inspired by such a theme. From the agitationcaused by the martyrdom of Greece, and from his taste for Byron’s poetry, resulted in 1824 the celebrated “Massacre of Chios,” on which he was already employed in 1821, before the completion of his “Dante’s Bark,” and in which his power of expression as well as of colour was carried much further than in the earlier picture. In the “Dante’s Bark” there were still, both in form and colour, reminiscences of the great Florentine masters; as, for instance, in the female figure in the foreground, which is almost an exact reproduction of Michael Angelo’s “Night.” The event depicted was comparatively quiet and tranquil, and the well-balanced composition would have done honour to the most rigorous follower of David. The only novelty lay in the treatment of colour, and in the substitution of the individual and characteristic for the typical and ideal. But undoubtedly it was now possible not only to produce in colour more powerful chords, but also in expression to strike notes more dramatic, for the academic plaster-of-Paris heads of the David school had depicted human emotion only in icy immobility. Delacroix had put all these possibilities into the new picture. The pyramidal configuration has resolved itself into an unconstrained grouping of figures. Here we have for the first time the artistic spirit intoxicated with colour, the “Orlando Furioso of colourists,” the pupil of Rubens, Delacroix. An entire world of deep feeling and of painfully passionate poetry, an entire world of tones, which the master under whose eyes he painted his “Dante” could not have conceived, lies enclosed within the frame of this picture. The figures, sitting, kneeling, partly reclining, with their half-starved bodies and their gloomy, brooding, hopeless faces; the desperate struggle between the conquerors and their victims in the far distance; the contrast between this scene of horror and the luminous splendour of the atmosphere, and the wealth of colour in the whole, made and still make this fine painting one of the most impressive pictures in the Louvre. It is a work which flames in glow of colour more than any that had appeared inFrance since the days of Rubens. The English had been his teachers. “It is here only that colour and effect are understood and felt,” Géricault had previously written from London. Delacroix’s work had already been sent off to the Salon when Constable’s first pictures were just arriving there, and the impression which they made upon him was so powerful that, at the very last moment, and in the Louvre itself, he gave his picture a brighter and more luminous colouring.
And indeed it was not till now that the Classicists perceived how great an opponent had arisen against them. Not only did the aged Gros call the “Massacre of Chios” “le massacre de la peinture,” but all the critics talked about barbarism, and prophesied that on this path French painting would hasten to its destruction. The prize of the Salon was awarded, not to the “Massacre,” but to Sigalon’s “Locusta,” an unimportant work of compromise, though very clever and well studied in draughtsmanship. It was said that Delacroix’s picture was lacking in symmetrical arrangement, that he showed too great a contempt for the beautiful, that indeed he appeared systematically to prefer the ugly—that is to say, he was blamed for the veryqualities wherein lay his importance as a reformer. Accustomed as they had been for many years to an art in which intellect, correctness, and moderation held sway, not one of the critics was in a position to perceive all at once the value of this fiery spirit. Delécluze, the indefatigable defender of the sacred dogmas of the Classical school, characterised “dramatic expression and composition marked by action” as the reef whereon the grand style of painting must inevitably be wrecked. The modern schools of art, he taught as late as 1824, exist, flourish, and have their being only by the utilisation of what we can learn from the Greeks. Even acknowledging the progress in colour which the work showed, it nevertheless belonged, he said, to an inferior genus, and all its excellences in colouring could not outweigh the ugliness of its form.
Therewith began the battles of the Romantic school, and all the daring of Théophile Gautier, Thiers, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, Bürger-Thoré, Gustave Planche, Paul Mantz, and others had to be called upon in order to storm the heights held by the batteries of the Classical critics. Count Forbin gave proof of no less courage when he bought the picture, torn to shreds as it was by hostile criticism, for the State, at the price of six thousand francs. This enabled Delacroix to visit England. He spent the time from spring to autumn of 1825 in London, where he consorted amicably with all the artists of the day. And he took an interest not only in English art, but also in literature and the drama. His preference for Shakespeare, Byron, and Walter Scott, who were already his favourite poets, found new sustenance. An English opera made him acquainted with Goethe’sFaust; and henceforth these poets entered into the foreground of his works. A picture of “Tasso” (the poet in a cell of the madhouse, through the window of which two grinning lunatics look in upon him) in 1826, the “Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero” and the “Death of Sardanapalus,” both after Byron, in 1827, and “Faust in his Study” in 1828, followed the “Massacre”—all of them obviously the works of a painter who loved bright, glowing colour, had studied Rubens and had recently returned from England. In 1828 was published, in seventeen plates, his cycle of illustrations toFaust, to accompany a translation of the poem into French; and this was followed by a number of lithographs on Shakespearian subjects.
And here we may notice a singular exchange of parts. When the word “Romantic” was first heard in Germany it had originally much the same sense as “Roman.” The German Romanticists were moved to enthusiasm by Roman Catholicism and Roman church painting. But when Romanticism reached France, the word came to mean exactly the opposite: a preference for the German and English spirit as compared with the Greek and Latin, and an enthusiasm for the great Anglo-Saxon and German poets, Shakespeare and Goethe, in whom, contrasting with Racine’s correctness, were to be found unrestrained genius and glowing passion. This influence of poetry over art may easily become dangerous, if painters sponge, so to speak, upon the poet, as the Düsseldorf school did, and make use of his work only for the purposeof enabling works, in themselves valueless, to keep their heads, artistically speaking, above water, by means of their extrinsic poetical interest. But Delacroix had no need of any such support. He was not the poets’ pupil, but their brother. He did not study them in order to illustrate their works, but was imbued with their spirit and possessed by their souls. He lived with them; he did not borrow his subjects from them, but rather made use of them to express in his own powerful language the strongest emotions of the human heart. Nor did he ever forget that painting must, before all, be painting. Endowed as he was with a poet’s soul, he conceived things as a painter, not laboriously translating passages from the poets, but simply thinking in colour. What the musician hears, what the poet imagines, he saw. The scenes of which he read appeared at once before his eyes as sketches, in great masses of colour. For him, composition, action, and colour ever united together into one inseparable whole.
The journey to Morocco, which he made in the spring of 1832, in company with an embassy sent by Louis Philippe to the Emperor Muley Abderrahman, is noteworthy for a further progress in his ability as a colourist and a new broadening of his range of subjects. Whenhe returned to the port of Toulon, on 5th July 1832, he had seen Algiers and Spain, and had assimilated an abundance of sunshine and colour. It is in his Oriental pictures that his painting first reaches its zenith, just as Victor Hugo’s mastery over language was at its highest point in hisOrientales. Goethe, in hisWest-östliches Divan, celebrated what is quiet and contemplative in the Oriental view of life. Obermann sang of the land of legend, of buried treasures, of Aladdin and the wonderful lamp; but for Byron (who was practically the first to introduce into Europe the perfume and colour of the East), for Hugo, and for Delacroix, it was the distant, bright-hued, barbaric land of the rising sun, the land of sanguinary warfare and overthrow, the home of light and colour. Here it was that the French Romanticists found the world that realised their dreams of colour. The East became for them what Rome had been for the Classical school. From the feeble and misty sun of Paris, and from the grey skies of the Boulevard des Italiens, they turned to Africa.
His enthusiasm for this newly discovered world resounds, full and clear, in Delacroix’s letters. “Were I to leave the land in which I have found them,” he wrote, during his stay in Morocco, of the men whom he saw about him there, “they would seem to me like trees torn up by the roots. I should forget the impressions I have received, and should be able only in an incomplete and frigid manner to reproduce the sublime and fascinating life which fills the streets here, and attracts one by the beauty of its appearance. Think, my friend, what it means to a painter to see lying in the sunshine, wandering about the streets and offering shoes for sale, men who have the appearance of ancient consuls, of the reincarnated spirits of Cato and Brutus, who lack not even that proud, discontented look which those lords of the world must have had. They possess nothing save a blanket in which they walk, sleep, and are buried, and yet they look as dignified as Cicero in his curule chair. What truth, what nobility in these figures! There is nothing more beautiful in the antique. And all in white, as with Roman senators or at the Greek Panathenæa.”
His palette was thus further enriched in lucid tints, the contrasts he formerly delighted in became less sharp and glaring, the gloomy background hitherto preferred was superseded by a bright serenity and a golden lustre. The colour-effect of his “Algerian Women” has been not unaptly compared to the impression produced by a glance into an open jewel casket. In his “Convulsionaries of Tangier” he has depicted with wild, demoniac energy the religious frenzy of a Turkish sect. Green, blue, red, and violet hues unite to produce an effect as of a sounding flourish of trumpets, recalling the music of the janizaries. The “Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople” resembles an old delicately tinted carpet, full of powerful, tranquil harmony. Even in his old age he wrote: “The aspect of that country will be for ever before my eyes; the types of that vigorous race will move in my memory as long as I live; in them I truly found the antique beauty again.”
The contemplation of such scenes induced Delacroix to undertake the representation of antique subjects, which he had hitherto avoided, not because he disliked the antique, but because of the aversion he felt for David’s treatment of it. During his sojourn in Africa he had come to the conclusion that the painting of scenes from ancient history should not be based upon the imitation of statues and bas-reliefs, as with David and his pupils; but that it should be imbued with the movement and passion of modern life, since the ancient Greeks were men of flesh and blood like ourselves. Therefore it is that he snatches the marble mask from the faces of David’s puppets. Flemish blood begins to move in the Greek statues, Flemish passion to break through their inflexible rhythm. Paintings such as the “Justice of Trajan” of 1840 represent the antique in a thoroughly personal and modern paraphrase, just as Shakespeare or Byron had seen it. The mad “Medea” is, from the point of view of colour, certainly the chief work of this group.
It was of course impossible that a man so highly endowed with emotional pathos should pass untouched the tragedy of the life of Christ and the sufferings of the Christian martyrs. By the Revolution religious themes had been absolutely excluded from representation, and up to this time the younginnovators of the Restoration period had also felt an aversion for them. Their ideas were as little attuned to Catholic as to academic tradition. Delacroix was the first to treat once more of biblical subjects, so far as they are imbued with dramatic and passionate movement. Like Rubens, he regarded the lives of the saints, the story of the Gospels, and the tragedy on Golgotha as a poetical narrative like any other. His Mary, like that of the Flemish painters, is a sorrowing woman, the embodiment of unending grief.
Alongside of these easel pictures he produced, during a period of more than twenty-five years, a long list of monumental and decorative works; and they too were the most inventive, the boldest, and the most original which monumental painting produced during this epoch, not in France only, but in Europe. In this sphere also, where, under the pressure of old traditions and conventional types, it is so difficult to avoid plagiarism, Delacroix maintained his individuality. In 1835, at the suggestion of his friend Thiers, he was commissioned to paint the interior of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon—the most important commission which had fallen to the lot of any French artist since Gros painted the cupola of the Pantheon. Not long afterwards he decorated with verve and enthusiasm the ceiling of the Louvre, choosing for his subject the “Triumph of Apollo.” In the Library of the Luxembourg he had recourse to theDivina Commedia, and treated in a masterly manner the theme so familiar and sympathetic to him. In his works there is something of the joyous and sportive energy of Rubens’ allegorical pictures, but not the least trace of imitation. He understood decorative painting in the sense of the great old masters, Giulio Romano and Veronese, not as wall didactics and lectures on archæology; he knew that descriptive prose has nothing whatever to do with the walls of a building, but that the sole aim of such paintings is to fill the house with their solemn grandeur, to make the whole building resound as it were with sacred organ music. Between 1853 and 1861 came also the wall paintings in the Church of Saint Sulpice, and one would almost think that Delacroix finished them in feverish excitement, to show for the last time how enormous a store of passion and power still lay in the soul of a sexagenarian. Shortly after their completion, on 13th August 1863, he died, who was, in the words of Silvestre, “the painter of the genuine race, who had the sun in his head and a thunderstorm in his heart, who in the course of forty years sounded the entire gamut of human emotion, and whose grandiose and awe-inspiring brush passed from saints to warriors, from warriors to lovers, from lovers to tigers, from tigers to flowers.”
In these words Delacroix is very aptly characterised. His range of subjects included everything: decorative, historical, and religious painting, landscape, flowers, animals, sea pieces, classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, the scorching heat of the south and the mists of the north. He left no branch of the art of painting untouched; nothing escaped his lion’s claws. But there is one bond uniting all: to all the figures for which he won the citizenship of art he gave passion and movement. His predominant quality is a passionfor the terrible, a kind of insatiability for wild and violent action. His over-excited imagination heaps pain, horror, and pathos one upon another. The critics called him “the tattooed savage who paints with a drunken broom.” There is nothing pretty or lovable about his art; it is a wild art. He depicted passion wherever he found it, in the shape of wild animals, stormy seas, or battling warriors; and he sought it in every sphere, in nature no less than in poetry and the Bible. Hardly any painter—not even Rubens—has depicted with equal power the passions and movements of animals: lions in which he is own brother to Barye; fighting horses, in which he stands side by side with Géricault. No other artist painted waves more grand, wind-beaten, foaming, dashing, towering on high. Looking at them, one divines all the horrors concealed beneath the roar of the blue surface, horrors which were as yet so insufficiently suggested in Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa.” In his historical pictures there reigns now terror and despair, as in the “Massacre of Chios”; now gloomy horror, as in the “Medea”; now feverish movement, as in the “Death of the Bishop of Liège.” He passes from Dante to Shakespeare, from Goethe to Byron, but only to borrow from them their most moving dramatic situations—Hamlet at Yorick’s grave, his fight withLaertes, Macbeth and the Witches, Lady Macbeth, Gretchen, Angelica, the Prisoner of Chillon, the Giaour, and the Pasha. All time is his domain, all countries are open to him; he hurries through the broad fields of imagination, a lordly reaper of all harvests.
And at the same time, in all his great human tragedies, he compels the elements to obey him as if they were his slaves. The passions of men set heaven and earth in motion. The agonising cries of victims find in his paintings an echo in the sullen shadows and the leaden, heavy clouds of the sky. The gloomy shores which Dante’s boat is approaching are as desolate as the spirits who wander through the night. But where splendour and glory reign, as in the “Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople,” the air, too, glistens and shines as though saturated with dust of gold. In his pictures a human soul which was great and full of meaning, and which possessed such combustibility that it took fire of itself, expressed itself recklessly, with the volcanic strength of an elemental power.
This proud self-reliance explains also how it was that this painter of unruly genius was, as a man, very far from being a revolutionist. For Delacroix the outer world had no existence; that world alone existed which was within him. After his picture of “The Barricades” in 1831 he avoided all political allusions, painted, read, and led a tranquil, measured, uniform life. In society polite and reserved, of aristocratic coldness, gentlemanly in appearance, and well-bred; in his speech curt, mordant, emphatic, and occasionally witty, he could nevertheless show himself, when he chose, an amiable, original talker, full of piquant ideas. Moreover, he was a great writer and critic, whose essays in theRevue des Deux Mondeshave the perfect classic stamp. Nevertheless, he was always displeased when any one put him forward as the chief of official Romanticism, and saluted him as the Victor Hugo of painting. Surrounded as he was by young assailants of tradition who would allow no merit to anything old, he found pleasure in acknowledging his admiration for Racine, whom he knew by heart, and whom, when need was, he defended against the younger generation. He was too diplomatic to stir up againsthimself unnecessarily the hatred of those whom the long-haired Samsons of Romanticism called Philistines.
So far as in him lay, his quiet and methodical life should suffer no interruption. Worshipper though he was of light and colour, he was almost always shut up in his gloomy studio, and it was only when he found himself brush in hand that the reserved man became the passionate, vibrating painter. Then the memories with which his study of the poets had stored his mind grew in his fantasy into grand pictures glowing with life. By these visions he was excited, set on fire, and filled with enthusiasm. His studio was open but to few, for the intrusion of visitors chilled his inspiration, and he found it difficult to recover the proper frame of mind. Not till evening did he take his first meal, for he thought he could work with greater intensity when hungry. During a period of forty years he lived in his various studios, quiet and solitary, inventing, drawing, and painting without intermission, his door always bolted, so that when it suited him he could give out that he was ill of a fever. Every morning before work he drew an arm, a hand, or a piece of drapery after Rubens. He had formed the habit of taking Rubens to himself when other people were drinking their coffee.
Indeed, when one speaks of Delacroix, the name of Rubens rises almost involuntarily to one’s lips; and yet there is a profound difference between him and the great Flemish master. Rubens has the same passion, the same ever-active fancy; yet all his pictures rest in triumphant repose, while every one of Delacroix’s seems to resound as with a cry of battle. Looking at Rubens’ works you feel that he was a happy, healthy man; but by the time you have seen half a score of Delacroix’s it is borne in upon you that the life of the artist was one of strife and suffering. Rubens was the very essence of strength, Delacroix was a sick man; the former full of fleshly joyous sensuality, the latter consumed by a feverish internal fire.
His portrait of himself in the Louvre, with its pale forehead, its large dark-rimmed eyes, its lean, hollow face, its parchment-like skin stretched tightly over the bones, explains his pictures better than any critical appreciation. Delacroix was one of theâmes maladives, the spirits sick unto death, to whom Baudelaire addresses himself in hisFleurs du Mal. Delicate from his youth up, thoroughly nervous by nature, he prolonged his sickly existence throughout his life by sheer energy of will. Even in his childhood he passed through serious illnesses, and later on he suffered in turn from his stomach, throat, chest, and kidneys. Like Goethe in his old age, he felt well only when the temperature was high. He was short in stature. A leonine head, with a lion’s mane, surmounted a body that seemed almost stunted. With his eyes flashing like carbuncles, and his disordered prickly moustache, his was the fascinating ugliness of genius.
It was only by the strictest dieting in his quiet retreat at Champrosay that he prolonged his life for the last few years. In his youth he hovered like a butterfly from flower to flower; when grown old and hypochondriacal he withdrew into solitary retirement, work was the only medicine for diseased conditions of all kinds, to which he found himself daily more and more a victim. Only thus could this sickly man, doomed from his very birth, come to produce no less than two thousand pictures—a number all the more astonishing as Delacroix, even when his health permitted him to work at his easel, by no means possessed Rubens’ sovereign facility of production. The fever of work alternated, in his case, with the extremest exhaustion. There was something morbid, nervous, over-excited in all he did. “Even work,” he writes, “is merely a temporary narcotic, a distraction; and every distraction, as Pascal has said in other words, is only a method which man has invented to conceal from himself the abyss of his suffering and misery. In sleepless nights, in illness, and in certain moments of solitude, when the end of all things discloses itself in its utter nakedness, a man endowed with imagination must possess a certain amount of courage, not to meet the phantom half-way, not to rush to embrace the skeleton.”
The feverish disposition which he brought with him into the world was heightened by the acrimonious feuds in which, as a painter, he was forced to engage, and which left great bitterness behind them in his mind. His life and his art were in accord, in as much as both were battles. It is not easy to live when one is always ill; not easy to meet with recognition when one proclaims the exact opposite of that which for a generation past all the world has held to be true. And Delacroix took not a single step to meet his opponents half-way. He did not trouble himself for a single moment to please the public; and therefore the public did not come to him. Controversies such as that which took place over the “Massacre of Chios” continued decade after decade, and the exhibition of each of his pictures was the signal for a battle. “No work of his,” writes Thoré, “but called forth deafening howls, curses, and furious controversy. Insults were heaped uponthe artist, coarser and more opprobrious than one would be justified in applying to a sharper.” At Charenton, where he was born, is the Bedlam of France. Hence the epithet continually hurled at him by the critics, who called him the runaway from Charenton.
Until the year 1847 his pictures could without difficulty be excluded from the Salon. He irritated people by his violence, by the abruptness of his compositions, by his arrangement of figures with a view to pathos at the expense of plastic elegance; he displeased by the incompleteness of his works, which were regarded as sketches, not finished paintings. When Louis Philippe ordered a picture from his brush, it was on the express condition that it should be as little a Delacroix as possible. There was general ill-humour among the academicians when, at Thiers’ suggestion, he was commissioned to decorate the Palais Bourbon. And Delacroix, ambitious and sensitive as he was, was deeply hurt by every mortification of this kind, and affected by every gust of criticism as by a change of wind. Continually denounced in the newspapers, attacked, wounded, delivered over to the wild beasts, as he called it, he never had a moment of rest—he who, with his irritable temperament and fragile health, needed rest more than any man. It was not until almost all his works were brought together in the Universal Exhibition of 1885 that it became evident how great an artist this Delacroix was, whom his country for forty years had not understood, and to whom the Institute had closed its doors to the last. Yet he was no sooner dead than all with one voice proclaimed him a genius; his smallest drawing is to-day worth its weight in gold, while during his lifetime he seldom got more than two thousand francs for his largest paintings. His sketches, great works in small frames, have for the most part found their way to America. The sale of the pictures he left behind him produced three hundred and sixty thousand francs.
Delacroix, therefore, was victorious, but not as Rubens was; and his ceiling of the Louvre, with the “Triumph of Apollo,” one of his most remarkable works, strikes one almost as an allegory of his own life. What especially attracted and inspired the artist in this painting were the spasms and convulsions of the misshapen monsters which the god expels from the earth—the serpent twisting itself in movements of pain and fury, raising its head on high, hissing rage, and vomiting venom and blood. The god himself, who in the midst of a sea of light ascends into heaven in a golden chariot drawn by radiant steeds, shows in his sturdy limbs and attitude ready for defence, and in his wrathful face, no trace of the proud majesty and joyous splendour which Greece connected with the name of Apollo. He is a mortal who has fought and conquered, not a god who triumphs in tranquil power. He is Delacroix, not Rubens; a Titan, not an Olympian god.
The artistic power in Delacroix could in no wise submit to the confinement imposed by the French spirit of his time. It was not possible for a single man, though endowed with the most splendid courage, to overthrowin a moment all the traditions of French art. Any one who knows the French must feel that David’s Latin style could not so suddenly disappear out of their art, that it was not possible at a blow to banish all that had hitherto held sway and to replace it by its opposite. Ever since Poussin they had sought in Roman antiquity the formulæ of their art. The predilection which the Parisians have even to-day for the representation of Racine’s and Corneille’s tragedies, the admiration which even the most extreme Naturalists bestow upon Poussin and Lesueur, prove abundantly how deep Classicism is rooted in the flesh and blood of the French people. Brandes has remarked, very acutely, that, strictly speaking, even Romanticism was on French soil in many respects a Classical phenomenon, a product of French Classical rhetoric. “They never saw the dances of the elves, never heard the delicate harmony of their roundelays.” In Victor Hugo, the great opponent of Corneille, Corneille himself was re-embodied. He too is a draughtsman, constructs his poems like architectural works, chisels the form, polishes the verse, and confines his colouring within powerfully conceived Michelangelesque outlines.
Once the first eager impulse of the Romantic school had subsided, these old Classical tendencies showed themselves anew and with all the greater vehemence. Even Hugo’s dramas, with their predilection for all that is exuberant and monstrous, with their overflowing lyricism and sonorous pathos, became in the long run wearisome. He, who had hitherto been the idol of the young generation, was now called the Pater Bombasticus of the literature of the world.
Classicism found its poet and its muse. An unknown but very worthy young man, not endowed with wealth of imagination, but imbued with the most honourable intentions, came to Paris from the provincial town where he had grown to manhood, with a manuscript in his pocket. And François Ronsard’sLucrèce, a tragedy from the antique, in its style sober and severe, reminding one of Racine, was represented amid thunders of applause, shortly after Hugo had been hissed off the stage. Enthusiastic admirers saw in it a glorious return to the great tragic drama of France, an emanation from the spirit of Corneille, and praised its clear, measured, and at once “classic and familiar” language. Together with its poet, the Classical reaction found its actress. In 1838 a young untrained child made her début at the Théâtre Français—a Jewish girl who had sung in the streets to the accompanimentof her harp. Rachel appeared upon the boards, and restored its former power of attraction to the old Classical repertoire, to the very tragedies which the Romantic school had banished from the theatre amid mockery and derision.The Cid,Mérope,Chimène, andPhèdrerecovered their place upon the stage.
Painting took the same course. In opposition to the young painters who had burst into the arena with their gay-coloured uniforms, their gilded helmets and waving banners,Ingrescame forth in the great tournament of Romanticism in the character of the Black Knight. An old gentleman, aman who in all his being belonged to the generation that was passing away, who was fifty years of age at the time of the Revolution of July, stations himself suddenly as the angel of the flaming sword, or, in the phrase of his opponents, as the gendarme of Classicism, at the gates of the Academy, barring them against every suspicious-looking person. And the young men, eccentric, eager for action as they were, who had recently fought with so much fury, had to retreat before him. Golden sunshine and glow of colour were once more tabooed, and their representative heroes, Veronese, Rubens, and Delacroix, regarded as flickering Will o’ the Wisps, whom every aspiring beginner should avoid as serpents and firebrands. One day when Ingres was taking his pupils through the Louvre he said, on entering the Rubens gallery: “Saluez, messieurs, mais ne regardez pas.” The acrimony of the strife was so great that it extended even to the personal relations of the rival chiefs, and Ingres was attacked by convulsive spasms whenever he heard the name of the painter of the “Massacre of Chios.” When in 1855 he had had a separate room prepared for his own pictures in the Universal Exhibition of that year, and observed Delacroix in the distance, just before the opening ceremony, he asked the attendant: “Has not somebody been here?—there is a smell of brimstone.” “Now the wolf is in the sheepfold” was his observation when Delacroix was elected to the Institute. He regarded him as the “hangman,” as the Robespierre of painting. “I used to love that young man, but he has sold himself to the evil one” (Rubens), said he, in righteous indignation, to his pupils.
“This famous thing, the Beautiful,” Delacroix had once written, “must be—every one says so—the final aim of art. But if it be the only aim, what then are we to make of men like Rubens, Rembrandt, and, in general, all the artistic natures of the North, who preferred other qualities belonging to their art? Is the sense of the beautiful that impression which is made upon us by a picture by Velasquez, an etching by Rembrandt, or a scene out of Shakespeare? Or again, is the beautiful revealed to us by the contemplation of the straight noses and correctly disposed draperies of Girodet, Gérard, and others of David’s pupils? A satyr is beautiful, a faun is beautiful. The antique bust of Socrates is full of character, notwithstanding its flattened nose, swollen lips, and small eyes. In Paul Veronese’s ‘Marriage at Cana’ I see men of various features and of every temperament, and I find them to be living beings, full of passion. Are they beautiful? Perhaps. But in any case there is no recipe by means of which one can attain to what is called the ideally beautiful. Style dependsabsolutely and solely upon the free and original expression of each master’s peculiar qualities. Wherever a painter sets himself to follow a conventional mode of expression he will become affected and will lose his own peculiar impress; but where, on the contrary, he frankly abandons himself to the impulse of his own originality, he will ever, whether his name be Raphael, Michael Angelo, Rubens, or Rembrandt, be sure master of his soul and of his art.”
As compared with the principles thus laid down, Ingres represents the revulsion towards that formalism which had borne sway over the greater part of the history of French art. “Painting is nothing more than drawing,” said Poussin. “Had God intended to place colour at the same height as form,” wrote Charles Blanc, “He would not have failed to furnish His masterpiece, Man, with all the hues of the humming-bird.” Once more, instead of the glowing colour of the Romantic school, absorbing the form into itself, the firm stroke of the outline was set forth; instead of its pathos, breathing forth passionate emotion, men returned to study the chill tranquillity of stone. Once more dramatic composition and mastery over movement were held in abhorrence, as incompatible with that pursuit of plastic beauty which was the highest goal of art. The only point in question was, how to avoid the one-sidedness of Classicism. David, as a child of the Revolution, had naturally been limited to Ancient Rome; but now that the legitimate monarchy had been re-established there was no reason why one should not revere, not only pagan, but also Christian Rome, and in Raphael and Michael Angelo the maturest blossom of the latter. Thus the Classical school was enriched by Ingres with features of greater vivacity. He entered into a direct relationship with the great Italian masters, while David had none save with the rigid Roman antique. By him the Classical severity of David was relaxed, the refractory sharpness of the outlines relieved by a treatment of form which had the effect of making every figure appear to be worked in metal.
Ingres was born in 1781, under theAncien Régime. As a young man he lived through the triumphs of the Empire and the Classical school, and it was only natural that he should become David’s pupil. In 1796 he entered his studio, and studied there with such assiduity that he never noticed what was taking place in that of Gros. When he went to Italy he studied there the masters whom his own teacher had arrogantly despised. He learned from the Cinquecento how to draw and modelmore accurately, more firmly, and at the same time with a more intimate grasp of the subject than was usual in the school of David. This innovation made him a progressive Classicist, and gave him, during the early years of the Restoration, almost the appearance of an assailant and revolutionary. Himself the incarnation of the academic spirit, he had to resign himself to see his first works rejected by the Salon, a fact which did not deter him from continuing to work obstinately at his easel. “Je compte sur ma vieillesse; elle me vengea.” And this revenge was granted him in the fullest measure.
When one has seen the outward appearance of a man, one knows his character, his spirit, and his genius. Ingres’ portrait of himself contains the analysis of his art. He was quite a small man, of a swarthy complexion, with features sharp and as if cast in bronze. His thick black hair stood up stubbornly on end, so that he had to grease it carefully every day. Under hair of this kind there is almost always an obstinate brain. The jaws projected, as is the case with men endowed with a strong will. The eyes were large and piercing, with that bold eagle-glance which fills parents with fond hopes, but does not touch the hearts of young women. When he appeared to be excited, it was only the excitement of work expressing itself in him. This little man, in his large cloak, seemed to say when he stood at his easel, pencil in hand: “I shall be a great painter, for I am determined to be one.” He kept his word. Strength of will, hard work, study, obstinacy, patience—these are the elements of which Ingres’ talent is compounded. “Vouloir, c’est pouvoir,” was his motto. One would think Buffon had had him in mind in that passage in which he defines genius as patience. The trinity-in-unity of his qualities consisted of correctness, balance, exactness; qualities which go to make rather a great architect or mathematician than an interesting painter.
Ingres’ range of subjects was unusually wide. Pictures on themes taken from antiquity (“Œdipus and the Sphinx” and “Virgil reading the Æneid”); costume pictures (“HenryIVand his Children” and the “Entry of CharlesVinto Paris”); religious paintings (Madonnas, “Christ giving the Keys to St. Peter,” and “St. Symphorian”); nude female figures (the “Odalisque,” the “Liberation of Angelica,” and “The Source”); allegories (“The Apotheosis of Homer” and “The Apotheosis of Napoleon”); pictures of public functions (“Bonaparte as First Consul” and “Napoleon on the Throne”); and even a painting taken from the life (“PiusVIIin the Sistine Chapel”), are included in the list. Yet, notwithstanding his astonishing diversity of themes, there is hardly an artist more one-sided in his principles. Ingres thought exclusively of purely plastic art: beauty of form and harmony of line alone attracted him; he was insensible to the charm of colour. His standpoint was the Institute of Rome; the Italian Cinquecento the exclusive object of his worship. He carried this study as far as plagiarism, and as director of the Roman Academy made free with the intellectual property of the Cinquecento masters, as if they had lived only on his account.
When Delacroix was painting the “Expulsion of Heliodorus” in SaintSulpice, he put forth the whole strength of his creative genius to avoid all reminiscence of Raphael’s fresco. Ingres’ power of invention consisted in discovering, with a weird certainty, whether the subject of which he wished to treat had already been painted by an Italian or other Classical master. The picture “Jupiter and Thetis,” of 1811, is put together after a design on a Greek vase, and represents in its studied archaism the Æginetan period of his art. The “Vow of LouisXIII,” of 1824, was his confession of faith as regards the Cinquecento. The motive was taken from the Madonna di Foligno, the curtains from the Madonna di San Sisto, the floating angels from the Madonna del Baldacchino, and the candlesticks as well as the little angels with the inscribed tablet are from the same source. It is all beautiful, of course, for it is all Raphael; only, it would have been more rational if Ingres had lived in the time of Raphael instead of in the nineteenth century. One would take the picture to have been painted under Raphael’s eyes, and it bears to his works the same relation as Raphael’s earlier pictures do to Perugino’s. The “Christ giving the Keys to St. Peter” is also put together out of elements derived from the school of Urbino. In his “St. Symphorian,” which was belauded as thene plus ultraof style, he turned by way of variety to the imitation of Michael Angelo: the action is violent, the muscles swollen. The “Apotheosis of Homer” is an admirable lecture in archæology, a sitting of the great academy of genius, in which the poses are so fine and the heads so full of marble idealism that in comparison with it Raphael’s “School of Athens” has the effect of the wildest naturalism.
Thus Father Ingres stands forth as a cold, stiff, academic painter, as a doctrinaire who has not progressed much further than the much-reviled David. He represents, as Th. Rousseau said, only to a moderate degree the good oldart which we have lost. In the words of Diaz: “Let him be shut up with me in a tower, without engravings, and I wager that his canvas will remain untouched, whilst I shall succeed in producing a picture.” He possessed an arid ability which leaves one cold in presence of even his most important works. How lifeless is the effect produced by his paintings of nude single figures, his “Odalisque” and his “Freeing of Andromeda,” which brought him especial fame! Ingres could not paint flesh, and in this respect he is indicative of an enormous retrogression as compared with Prudhon. The striving after sculpturesque beauty, and, in connection therewith, the repression of all individuality, became in him almost a religion.
One finds it difficult to-day to account for the fame which once belonged to his picture of “The Source,” the nude figure of a standing girl pouring water out of an urn that rests on her left shoulder and is steadied by her right arm raised over her head. The picture undoubtedly exhibits qualities of draughtsmanship which in recent days Ingres alone possessed in so high a degree. But when, in pursuit of his Classical conception, he had eliminated every touch of nature, he proceeded to destroy the rest of the impression by the cold violet tones which are not only condemned by colourists, but which even Raphael would have considered false and ugly. Here, as in all his female figures, he attains to a certain grace, but it is an animal, expressionless grace. Skilful as he was in delineating the muscles of the human body, he was yet absolutely incapable of painting heads expressive of feeling or emotion. He depicted the form in itself, the abstract, typical, absolute form. He was dominated only by a love for thebeauté suprême, so that when he was in presence of nature he could not refrain from purifying and generalising. Everywhere we see beautiful lines, bodies modelled with admirable skill, but we never enter into any closer relationship with his figures. They do not live our life or breathe our atmosphere; they have not our thoughts: they are foreign to all that is human. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Member of the Institute, Senator, etc., the stylist held in honour as a superior being, the high-priest of pure form and outline, will in all times command the esteem, and in some respects the admiration, of the student of the history of art; the enthusiasm, never.
And yet, notwithstanding all this, I am an enthusiastic admirer of Ingres. Indeed, it has happened to me, in the collection of engravings at the Louvre, to catch myself saying: “Ingres! great, beloved Master! I have much to ask your pardon; for you were one of the greatest and most refined spirits to whom the century has given birth.” For I doubt whether any one down to the present time has rightly understood the mysterious figure of Ingres, the man who in his youth was enraptured by “l’esprit, la grâce, l’originalité de Vataux et la délicieuse couleur de ses tableaux,” and who, at a later time, not because of failing powers but deliberately and of set purpose, adopted a calmer system of colour tones; of this Classicistpar excellence, who is counted among the greatest artists, in the familiar and graceful style, in the history of art.
Ingres is one of the rare masters whom even their opponents are forced to admire. In the stern, sculpturesque modelling of his naked figures he displays remarkable power. His painting, also, has a curiously intimate appeal, due to its cool, metallic harmonies of colour—light blue, rose, and pale yellow in particular.
But above all Ingres commands attention by his portraits. From his first residence at Rome, that is, from the beginning of the century, he painted portraits which imprint themselves on the memory like medals struck in metallic sharpness in the style of Mantegna. Here too he is unequal, at times cold and commonplace, but usually quite admirable. In these paintings, cast as it were in bronze, there is something that comes from the fresh original source of all art; they have that vein of realism by which the vigorous idealism of Raphael is distinguished from the conventional idealism of a professor of historical painting. Here one finds real treasures, creations of remarkable vital power, and in admirable taste. They show that Ingres, apparently so systematic, had a profound love for living nature, and they ensure the immortalityof his name. His historical pictures are works which compel our esteem, but his portraits are splendid creations which can truly stand comparison with the great old masters.