CHAPTER XIII
THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL OF PAINTING IN BELGIUM
Belgian art had gone through the same history as French art since David. When the French patriarch came to Brussels to pass the remainder of his days there in honour, he found the ground already well prepared. The Classicists had long since made their way into art, and the old Flemish tradition was dying out. Lens and Herreyns are the last colourists in the sense of the good old time, but they are associated with the good old time only through the qualities of their colouring. As a degenerate descendant of Van Dyck, _Lens_ painted with a feeble brush sweet, insipid, sugary work for boudoirs and _prie-dieu_ chairs; and had lost his feeling for nature to such a degree that he gave the aged the same flesh tint as children, and men the full breasts of hermaphrodites. _Herreyns_, appointed director of the Antwerp Academy in 1800, was more masculine; and although likewise conventional and wanting in individuality, he was none the less a painter of breadth and boldness. He was most enraptured with a model with a copper-coloured skin and knotted muscles, or with pretty and ruddy children, and fat nurses with swelling breasts. This bold worker embodied in his own person the art of a great epoch, but did nothing to renew it. These painters, indeed, only mixed for a new hash the crumbs fallen from the table at which giants had once sat. They looked backwards instead of around them, and lighted their modest little lamp at the sun of Rubens. France was the only country where art followed the great changes of culture in the age. Hence Flemish painting had been crossed with French elements long before David's arrival. And Paris was for the artists of 1800 what Italy had been for those of 1600. They made their pilgrimage in troops to the studio of Suvée, who had originally come from Bruges, but had lived since 1771 on the Seine. There, and there only, recipes for the composition of great figure pictures were to be obtained. And thus art completed what the Empire had in a political sense begun. The artistic barriers fell as the geographical ones had done before, and the Belgian painters went back to Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges as men annexed by France.
David on his arrival needed only to shake the tree and the fruit fell ripe into his lap. He entered Flanders like a conqueror, and left the signs of ravage behind him on his triumphal progress. In Brussels a court gathered round him as round a banished king, and a gold medal was struck in memory of his arrival. He took Flemish art in his powerful hands and crushed it. For, needless to say, he saw nothing but barbarism in the genius of Rubens, and inoculated Flemish artists with a genuine horror of their great prince of painters. He continued to teach in Brussels what he had preached in Paris, and became the father-in-law of a deadly tiresome Franco-Belgian school, to which belonged a succession of correct painters; men such as Duvivier, Ducq, Paelinck, Odevaere, and others. For the aboriginal, sturdy, energetic, and carnal Flemish art was prescribed the mathematical regularity of the antique canon. The old Flemish joyousness of colour passed into a consumptive cacophony. And then was repeated in Belgium the tragedy which Classicism had played in France. Everything became a pretext for draperies, stiff poses, sculptural groupings, and plaster heads. Phædra and Theseus, Hector and Andromache, Paris and Helen, were, as in Paris, the most popular subjects. And so great a confusion reigned, that a sculptor from whom a wolf was ordered included the history of Romulus and Remus gratuitously.
The only one whose works are still partially enjoyable is _Navez_. He was, like Ingres in France, the last prop of this art, chiselled, as it were, out of stone; and even after the fall of Classicism he remained in esteem, because, like Ingres, he knew how to steer a prudent course between David, the Italians, and a certain independent study of nature. A touch of realism was mingled with his mania for the Greeks; only to a limited extent did he correct "ugly" nature; he would have ventured to represent Socrates with his negro nose and Thersites with his hump, and, again, like Ingres he has left behind him enduring performances as a portrait painter. His correct, cold, and discreet talent grew warm at the touch of human personality, and his drawings, in particular, prove that he had warmth of feeling as an artist. As his biographer tells us, he seldom laid down the sketch-book in which he fixed his impressions as he talked. Every page was filled with sketches of a group, a figure, or a gesture seen in the street and rapidly dashed off, "as realistically as even Courbet could desire." And these he transferred, when he painted in the "noble style."
As Navez had importance as an artist, so had _Matthias van Bree_--Herreyns' successor in the directorate of the Antwerp Academy--importance as a teacher. He worked in Belgium, like Gros in Paris, only in another way. While Gros as an artist was the forerunner of Romanticism, and as a teacher an orthodox Classicist, Van Bree is tedious as an artist, but as a teacher he fanned in the young generation a glowing love for old Flemish art. No one spoke of Rubens, Van Dyck, and the great art of the seventeenth century with so much warmth and understanding; and whilst with the charcoal in his hand he composed buckram cartoons, he dreamt of a youth who should arise to renew the old Flemish tradition.
Before long this young man had grown up. He had seen the artistic treasures of Antwerp and Paris. Here Rubens had delighted his eyes, and there Paul Veronese. As he admired both in the Louvre, he heard behind him the voice of the young Romanticists who, like him, had an enthusiasm for colour and movement, and blasphemed the stiff, colourless old David. _Gustav Wappers_, also, had paid toll to Classicism, and painted in 1823 a "Regulus" after the well-known recipe. All the greater was the astonishment when, in 1830, he came forward with his "Burgomaster van der Werff": "Burgomaster van der Werff of Leyden, at the siege of the town in 1576, offers his own body as food to the famished citizens." The very subject could not fail to create enthusiasm in the great body of the people, excited as they were by ideas of liberty: the brilliant method of presentation did this no less. What the old Van Bree looked for, the return to the splendour of colour and sensuous fulness of life of the old masters, was achieved in this picture. In the same year, when Belgium had won her nationality and independence once more, a painter also ventured to break away from the French formulæ of Classicism, and to treat a national theme in the manner of those painters who in former centuries had been the glory of Flanders. Wappers was greeted as a national hero; his part it was to bring to an issue with the brush that good fight which others had fought with the musket and sabre. His picture was a sign of the delivery of Flemish art from the French house of bondage. Whilst older men were horrified, as the followers of the school of Delaroche were afterwards horrified at the "Stone-breakers" of Courbet, the younger generation looked up to Wappers as a Messiah. Everything in the Brussels Salon faded before the freshness of the new work; a springtide in painting seemed to be at hand, and the wintry rigidity of Classicism was warmed by a burst of sunshine, the old gods trembled and felt their Olympus quake. Gustav Wappers was held to be the leader of a new Renaissance. In him the great era of the seventeenth century was to be continued. The iridescence of silken stuffs, the whole colour and festal joyousness of the old masters, were found once more. As in France there rose the shout, "An Ingres, a Delacroix!" so there resounded in Belgium the battle-cry, "A Navez, a Wappers!" The picture was bought by King William II of Holland, and in 1832 Wappers was made Professor of the Antwerp Academy.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
GUSTAV WAPPERS.]
The Exhibition of 1834 confirmed him in his new position as head of a school. This was a genuine triumph, which he gained by his "Episode in the Belgian Revolution of 1830." A scene out of the blood-stained days of the street fights in Brussels--that glorious final chapter of the struggle of the Belgian people for freedom from the French yoke--was nothing less than an event in which every one had recently taken part. At a period when so few realised how closely the great masters of the past were bound to their own time and imbibed from it their strength and nourishment, this new painter, in defiance of all theories, had drawn boldly from life. This picture was regarded as "a hymn of jubilation for what was attained and a threnody for the sacrifice it had cost." And the neighbourhood of the church, where he had laid the action, stamped it almost as the votive picture of the Belgian people for its dead. On the right an artisan standing aloft upon a newly thrown up earthwork is reading to his attentive comrades the rejected proclamation of the Prince of Orange. On the left a reinforcement is coming up. In the foreground boys are tearing up the pavement or beating the drum; and here and there are enacted various tragical family scenes. Here a young wife with a child on her arm clings with all the strength of despair to her husband, who resists her and finally tears himself from her grasp and hurries to the barricade--the cry of love is drowned amid the clash of arms. There, supported on the knee of his grey-headed father, rests a handsome young fellow with closing eyes and the death-wound in his heart. It seems as though the Horatian _dulce et decorum est_ might be said to wander over his features and to glorify them. For patriotism as well as for mere sentiment, here are noble scenes enough and to spare. Not only all Brussels, but all Belgium, made a pilgrimage to Wappers' creation. Every mother beheld her lost son in the youth in the foreground whose life has been sacrificed; every artisan's wife sought her husband, her brother, or her father amongst the figures of the fighting-men on the barricades. All the newspapers were full of praise, and a subscription was set on foot to strike a medal in commemoration of the picture. If, up to this time, Wappers had been merely praised as the renewer of Belgian art, he was now placed alongside of the greatest masters. Thiers induced him to exhibit in Paris the much discussed work, the fame of which had passed beyond the boundaries of Belgium. The "Episode" made a triumphal tour of all the great towns of Europe before it found its home in the Musée Moderne; and Wappers' fame abroad increased yet more his celebrity in Flanders. Thanks to him, the neighbouring nations began to interest themselves in the Belgian school. All were united in admiration of "the mighty conception and the harmonious scheme of colour." The German _Morgenblatt_ published a study of him in 1836. Wappers counted as the leading painter of his country.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
WAPPERS. THE SACRIFICE OF BURGOMASTER VAN DER WERFF AT THE SIEGE OF LEYDEN.]
Yet the same year brought him his first rivals. His entry on the stage had given strength to a group of young painters belonging to the same courageous movement, and the Brussels Salon of 1836 concentrated their efforts. _Nicaise de Keyzer_ made his appearance in heavy armour. As early as 1834 he had come forward with a great picture, a Crucifixion, in which he desired to compete with Rubens, as it seemed, in the latter's most special province. Yet the work merely testified to its author's excellent memory: the majority of the heads, gestures, and draperies had been made use of in old pictures in precisely the same fashion. Consciously or not, he had copied fragments direct, and welded them together in a new composition. If, in spite of this, the name of de Keyzer already flew from mouth to mouth, he owed it to the nimbus of romance which irradiated his person. The story went that an Antwerp lady on one of her walks had seen a young man drawing in the sand, while his flock was at pasture not far off. She stepped up and offered him a pencil, and he, a new Cimabue, began forthwith to sketch a picture of the Madonna. The drawing was so beautiful (so the tale ran) that the lady would have held it a sin to allow the genius to end his days as a shepherd. He came to town, received instruction, and learned to paint. A little idyll illuminated by the amiability of a lady was quite enough to prepare a friendly reception for De Keyzer. And since he, like a tractable, modest young man, hearkened attentively to criticism, he satisfied all desires when, in 1836, he came forward with his "Battle of the Spurs at Courtrai, 1302." In its quiet elegance the work answered to the peaceful mood which prevailed once more after the days of revolt and political insurrection. He was given special credit for clearness of composition and antiquarian exactness. De Keyzer had chosen the moment when the Count of Artois was expiring on the knees of a Flemish soldier; another Fleming had his arm raised to protect his general from the approaching French. For the rest, there is a lull in the fight, though the battlefield in the background is indicated with the minuteness of an historian: none of those carnages of blood and smoke of which the world was grown once more weary, but a correct, well-disciplined battle, a skilful composition of fine gestures, helmets, cuirasses, and halberts. Even the Count's spur, says Alvin, is drawn after the original, the only remaining spur out of seven hundred which lay scattered on the field after the day of Courtrai.
In the same year _Henri Decaisne_ completed his "Belges Illustres." The famous past was supposed to give its blessing to the great present. The artist, who in Paris had painted portraits with success, had been esteemed there by Lamartine, and celebrated by Alfred de Musset in a brilliant article in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, now gratified a long cherished desire of the Belgian national pride when he united the heroes of the land in an ideal gathering.
Soon afterwards _Gallait_ and _Bièfve_ trod the stage of Belgian painting. In point of size their pictures surpassed all that that age, accustomed as it was to vast canvases, had yet witnessed. "The Abdication of Charles V" measured twenty feet; it was hung in the Salon Carré of the Louvre above Paul Veronese's "Marriage at Cana." An entire court of great ladies and gentlemen, clad in velvet and brocade, move in the gorgeous hall of state of a king's castle. The solemn moment is represented when Charles V, erect and dominating the entire assembly, cedes the government of his possessions to Philip: and here is a mine of profound criticism of the philosophy of history. This old man, with one foot in the grave, whose forceful head still bears, like a Caryatid, the heavy burden of empire, embodies the splendour, fame, and might of bygone days. Faltering, he steps down from the throne, as though hesitating at the last moment whether he should appoint as his successor this son whom he both loves and fears; and, lifting to heaven his tired, sunken eyes, he commends unto God the future of the realm. Philip, the only one in the assembly entirely clothed in black, who receives the gift of dominion with an icy coldness, is transformed by the able exegesis of the critics into the satanic demon conjuring up the powers of hell. The picture even gives a glimpse into the future. For as he speaks Charles leans his left hand upon the shoulder of another young man, William of Orange. This indicates that soon the nation will wrest their independence from the double-tongued Jesuitical policy of Philip. To the left of this central group, robed in velvet and silk, stand the ladies around Margaret, the sister of the Emperor; she, in the garb of a nun, sits in her chair as in a _prie-dieu_. To the right, near the throne, are pages and priests, and amidst them Egmont and Horn, standing aloof and silent, look upon the scene. "The Abdication" had a grand success. It confirmed the hopes which had been set on Gallait ever since the completion of his "Tasso," and it was proudly ranked amongst those works which did special honour to the young nation. Wappers saw himself eclipsed, and Louis Gallait took the lead.
[Illustration: WAPPERS. THE DEATH OF COLUMBUS.]
_Edouard de Bièfve's_ "Treaty of the Nobles" formed the historical supplement to this work; after the triumph of the kingdom came the triumph of the people. The picture represents the signing of the defensive league, against the Inquisition and other breaches of privilege, which the nobility of the Netherlands entered into in 1566, in the Castle of Cuylenburg, near Brussels; it was hailed by the _Berliner Staatszeitung_ as "a landmark in the chronicle of historical painting."
This heroic era of Belgian painting was brought to a close in 1848 by _Ernest Slingeneyer_, who, as early as 1842, obtained a brilliant success with his "Sinking of the French Battleship _Le Vengeur_." His "Battle of Lepanto" was the last great historical picture, and the entire vocabulary of admiration known to art criticism was showered upon it by the Brussels press.
Even a new period of religious painting seemed about to dawn. German art, up to that time little regarded in Belgium, had since the fifties been discussed with considerable detail in the journals, and such names as Overbeck, W. Schadow, Veit, Cornelius, and Kaulbach had speedily acquired a favourable reputation. An exhibition of German cartoons instituted in Brussels in 1862 served--strangely enough--to sustain this high appreciation. The young nation believed that it could not afford to lag behind France and Germany, and commissioned two Antwerp painters, Guffens and Swerts, who had early made themselves familiar with the technique of fresco, to found a Belgian school of monumental painting. To this end they entered into a correspondence with the German artists, and, after long studies in Italy and Germany, adorned with frescoes the Church of Notre Dame in St. Nicolas in East Flanders, St. George's Church in Antwerp, the town halls of Courtrai and Ypres, a few churches in England, and the Cathedral of Prague; and on these frescoes Herman Riegel, in 1883, published a book in two volumes.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
DE KEYZER.]
At the present day this religious fresco painting, which handed on the doctrine of the German Nazarenes--the doctrine that nothing remained to the nineteenth-century artist except to imitate the old Italians as well as he could--can no longer command such exhaustive disquisition. And not it alone: the whole "Belgian artistic revival of 1830" appears in a somewhat dubious light. After the disconsolate wilderness of Classicism this period marked an advance. Every Salon brought some new name to light. The State had contributed a big budget for art, and extended its protecting hand over the "great painting" which was the glory of the young nation. What could not be got into the Musée Moderne, founded in 1845, was divided amongst the churches and provincial museums. The number of painters and exhibitions increased very noticeably. Beside the great triennial exhibitions in Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent, there were others in the smaller towns, such as Mons and Mechlin. The Belgian painters of 1830 appear, no doubt, as great men, when one considers to what a depth art had sunk before their advent. Wappers especially widened the horizon, by breaking the formula of Classicism and renewing the tradition of the brilliant colourists of the seventeenth century. De Bièfve, De Keyzer, Slingeneyer, severally contributed to the Belgian Renaissance. The old Flemish race knew itself once more in this fond quest of beautiful and radiant colouring. The historical painting had even a certain actual interest. Standing so near to the glorious September days when the country won its independence, the painters wished to draw a parallel between the glorious present and the great past, and to waken patriotic memories by the apotheosis of popular heroes. And yet the Musée Moderne of Brussels is not one of those collections in which one willingly lingers. The works in the old museum, hard by, have remained fresh and living and in touch with us; those in the new gallery seem to be divided from us by centuries. For the mischief with pictures which do not remain for ever young is precisely this--they grow old so very soon. Posterity speaks the language of cold criticism; and those powers must be great which are even favoured with a verdict. The luxuriant wreaths of laurel which fall upon the living are no guarantee of enduring fame, while in the crowns awarded after death every leaf is numbered. In how few of these once lauded works there dwells the power to speak in an intelligible language to a generation which tests them, not for their patriotism, but for their intrinsic art. The Belgian school of 1830 has left behind it the trace of respectable industry, but a supreme work is what it has not brought forth.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
DE KEYZER. THE BATTLE OF WOERINGEN.]
How hard it is to see anything epoch-making in Wappers' "Van der Werff." How theatrically the figures are posturing, how improbable is the composition, and what an unwholesome dose of sentimentality is to be found in that burgomaster, who is offering himself as a prey to the multitude! The heads are those of troubadours. And these jerkins brought fresh out of the wardrobe, these neatly ironed white ruffles, all this rich velvet and glittering pomp, how little it resembles the torn rags of a half-starved people after a nine months' siege! His revolutionary picture of 1834 is an unfortunate transposition into a sentimental key of the "Freedom on the Barricades" by Delacroix. Here also are play-actors rather than men and women of the people. This old man who is kissing the banner, the wife who winds her arms about her husband as Venus does about Tannhäuser, the pale girl who has fallen in a faint, the warrior who, with his eyes turned up to Heaven, is breaking his sword--these are figures out of a melodrama, not revolutionaries storming the barricades, nor famishing artisans fighting for their very existence. And the thin, spick-and-span colouring is in just as striking a contrast with the forceful action of the scene. An idyll could not be carried out with more prettiness of manner than is this picture which represents the rising of a people. The artisans are as white as alabaster. A light rouge rests upon the cheeks of the women, as when Boucher paints the faltering of virtue. And afterwards Wappers' course went further and further down hill. Only in these two early works, in which he responded to a political movement by an artistic endeavour, does he seem, in a certain sense, individual and powerful. All the others are stereotyped productions which, having nothing to do with the Belgian national movement, have all the more to do with the Parisian _École du bon sens_. Even his "Christ in the Grave," painted in 1833, and now in St. Michael's Church at Louvain, with its artificial grace and pietistical sentimentality, might have been painted by Ary Scheffer. The pathetic scenes from English and French history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which followed this merely reflect that painting of historical anecdote which was invented by Delaroche. Agnes Sorel and Charles VII, Abelard and Eloise, Charles I taking leave of his children, Anne Bullen's parting from Elizabeth, Peter the Great presenting to his ministers the model of a Dutch ship, Columbus in prison, Boccaccio reading the _Decameron_ to Joanna of Naples, the brothers De Witt before their execution, André Chénier in the prison of Saint-Lazare, Louis XVII at Simon the shoe-maker's, the poet Camoens as a beggar, Charles I going to the scaffold--all are subjects treated by others before him in France, and neither in their conception nor their technique have they anything original. In the last-mentioned picture, exhibited in Antwerp in 1870, he attained the limit of sugary affectation: a young girl has sunk on her knees, and, with dreamily uplifted eyes, offers to the Stuart King who is going to his death--a rose! Wappers is merely a reflex of French Romanticism, although he cannot be brought into direct comparison with any Parisian master. The passion of Delacroix stirred him but little: nothing points to a relationship between him and that great spirit. One is rather reminded of Alfred Johannot, whom he resembles in his entire gamut of emotion as in his treatment and selection of subjects. In both may be found elegance of line, Byronic emphasis, histrionic gestures, and the same stage properties borrowed from the theatre; never the genuine movement of feeling, only empty and distorted grimaces.
Of the others who appeared with him the same may be said. All Belgian matadors of the forties and fifties came to grief, and are interesting in the history of art only as symptomatic phenomena, as members of that school of Delaroche which encompassed the world. They abandoned the antique marble, the chlamys, and the leaden forms of the Classicists, to set in their place a motley picture of the Middle Ages, made up of cuirasses, mail-shirts, fleshings, and velvet and silken doublets. One convention followed the other, and pedantic dryness was replaced by melancholy sentimentalism. As skilled practitioners they understood the sleights of their art, but never rose to individual creation. Amongst many painters there was not a single artist.
As regards _De Keyzer_, it seems as if throughout his whole life he had wished to remain true to the memory of his benefactress: a simpering feminine trait runs with enervating sweetness through all his works, even through that "Battle of the Spurs" which founded his reputation. According to old writers, the athletic bodies of the Flemings were the terror of the French chivalry at Courtrai. De Keyzer has made of them mere plaster figures, and the pale, meagre colouring is in keeping with the languid conception. In the battles of Woeringen, of Senef, and Nieuwpoort, which followed on this picture, and were executed for the Belgian and Dutch Government, he succeeded still less in overcoming his affectation; and he first found the fitting province for his mild and correct talent when in later years he began to render little anecdotes of the Emperor Maximilian or Justus Lipsius out of the studio of Rubens or Memlinc. For these there was need of little but a certain superficial play of colour and an elegant painting of textures.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
SLINGENEYER. THE AVENGER.]
_Ernest Slingeneyer_ is stronger and more masculine. Yet what an unrefreshing chaos of blue, red, saffron, and citron-yellow is that "Sea-fight at Lepanto"! Slingeneyer felt that the _chiaroscuro_ with which Wappers saturated his "Episode" was not in keeping with this
## action under open sky. But rightly as he felt this, he had not the
strength to solve the problem of open-air painting. What a barbaric effect these red, brown, and yellow bodies make in their motley theatrical pomp! How the composition of the picture savours of apotheosis! As for his later work, his thirteen gigantic pictures, "_gloires de la Belgique_," in the great hall of the Brussels Academy, like De Keyzer's mural paintings above the staircase of the Antwerp Museum, they would never have been painted had they not had Delaroche's hemicycle as their forerunner.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
LOUIS GALLAIT.]
And _Gallait's_ "Abdication of Charles V"--one fails to understand how it was possible that so much able disquisition was suggested by this picture. How slight a smattering of the erudition of a stage manager is necessary for the representation of such a scene: the throne on one side; before it the lords and gentlemen in a semicircle, to the left front the ladies to make a fine effect for the eye, and in the background balconies with curious spectators, to widen out the spectacle. It is all pure theatre; an icy ceremony with prettily got up supernumeraries. All the heads have the discreditable appearance of family portraits painted after death, and then washed over with a faint conventional tinge of red. The whole thing is like a huge piece of still-life, which an adroit painter has put together out of a mixture of heads, gold, jewels, mantles, and perukes. Delaroche seems to have contributed the composition, Devéria the sumptuous costumery; and as for the colouring, Isabey, with his sunbeams shimmering in gold and silver, may not improbably have had something to do with that. What was spontaneous in Wappers is replaced in Gallait by cold calculation. Once and once only did this correct and frigid painter give evidence of a certain dramatic vein; it was when in 1851 he painted "The Brussels Guild of Marksmen paying the Last Honours to Egmont and Horn." With a brutal audacity the decapitated heads are set to their bodies. Bloodless and livid, with clotted and tangled beards, they both really look as if they had been studied direct from nature. But the rest of the picture, the surrounding of theatrical attractions, parade costumes, and false pathos, is all the less in keeping with this study of death. How Zurbaran or Caravaggio would have treated the theme! They would have veiled the unessential figures in darkness, and irradiated the heads only with a trenchant light. What Gallait has made of it is the final tableau of an opera of costume. The two sergeants of Alva who are on guard, and the men who are showing their reverence, tread the stage like bad actors, scrupulously arrayed and making pathetic gestures. Their
## action has been studied from drawing-school copies; no genuine cry of
passion ever breaks through. Heads, hands, and outlines have all a sickly idealism; a studious and sedulously polished manner of painting has ruined the intrinsic spirit of the work as a whole. Théophile Gautier was right when he wrote of Gallait: "_Tout le talent_ _qu'on peut acquérir avec du travail, du goût, du jugememt, et de la volonté, M. Gallait le possède._" Gallait's "Last Obsequies," hung in that same Salon of 1850 which contained Courbet's "Stone-breakers," and the words of recognition accorded to it, were the last obsequies given to the
## parting genius of historical painting. A few years went by, and
Gallait's fame died away. After 1851 he painted fourteen other great historical pictures ("Egmont's Last Moments," "Johanna the Mad by the Corpse of her Husband," "Alva at the Window during the Execution of the two Counts," etc.), and, occasionally, sentimental _genre_ pictures, such as "The Oblivion of Sorrow" in the Berlin National Gallery; in this a small boy is playing the fiddle for the consolation of his sister, who had sunk upon the high-road exhausted by hunger. He also painted many portraits. But nothing gave him a niche in the memory of his contemporaries. "The Pest at Tournai," painted in 1882, was a work extremely creditable to his old age; it was nevertheless a picture which appeared to another generation merely as a phantom; and when, on 20th November 1887, the announcement of his death passed through the land, it came unexpectedly, like that of a person already believed to have been long dead.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
GALLAIT. EGMONT'S LAST MOMENTS.]
Finally, _Edouard de Bièfve_, who in 1842 shared Gallait's triumph in Germany, and was afterwards named in the same breath with him, is the man who marks the complete corruption of this tendency. If the sturdy Wappers, the emasculate De Keyzer, and the eclectic Gallait tricked out their pathetic heroes with noble heads like that of the Antinous, and offered their contemporaries an adroit theatrical art, a parade, and a hollow pathos, the incapable Bièfve never got beyond the painting of _tableaux vivants_ laboriously presented. Terrible and of Shakespearian impressiveness is the scene in which the half-famished Ugolino hurls himself upon his son in an appalling ecstasy of frenzy, a curse against God and man upon his lips. Upon the canvas, six metres wide, which Bièfve in 1836 devoted to this theme, there is represented an old gentleman, who, though certainly a little pale, contrives to maintain in perfection the punctilious bearing of a cavalier, and in the midst of his fasting cure has picturesquely draped round his shoulders an ermine mantle, as if he had been asked out to dinner. Before him stands a young man, possessing that graceful outline beloved of Paul Delaroche. Devéria, Ary Scheffer, and Johannot were better painters of such monumental illustrations of the classics. As yet the shivering art of Belgium had learnt only to warm itself at the Parisian fireside. Even Bièfve's "League of the Nobles of the Netherlands," despite its national subject-matter, was no more than a lucky hit, which he owed to his long residence in Paris. And how tiresomely is the scene played out! One would wish to catch the mutterings of insurrection from these men who personify the Belgian people; but Bièfve's picture is restful and dignified. Egmont and Horn, the lions of the occasion, are conducting themselves like honest citizens who are bored at a party. Seated in his chair, the handsome Egmont thinks merely of showing his fine profile to the ladies in the gallery, and Horn, who steps towards the table to make his signature, does it with the elegance of a lover inscribing verses in a young lady's album. Three brothers with clasped hands swear the well-known oath to die together.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
EDOUARD BIÈFVE.]
It is a little irony in the history of art that in 1842 these two same pictures set all Germany in tumult, and diverted the whole stream of painting into a new course. But how was it possible that the German painters stood before them as if struck by lightning? It must be remembered that for a whole generation Germany had seen nothing but coloured cartoons, and that the enthusiasm for Franco-Belgian art had been so prepared that the least touch was enough to set it in flames.
[Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._
BIÈFVE. THE LEAGUE OF THE NOBLES OF THE NETHERLANDS.]
Since the wars of liberation Germany had been very reserved in her attitude towards the French. Until the year 1842 original works of the French and Belgian school had never been hung in any German exhibition. But in spite of this, a high, even enthusiastic, appreciation of French and Belgian painting was being spread, especially amongst the younger generation. Even in engravings and lithographs after French pictures it was believed that qualities of colour were discoverable which were wanting in German painting. Heine and other authors, who had wandered to Paris, "the lofty tower of Freedom," to escape from the depressing condition of German affairs, had done what in them lay for the dissemination of this cult. The rising generation of the forties had been driven by Heine's notices of the Salon into an almost hostile attitude towards the dominant art schools of Germany, the schools of Düsseldorf and Munich. The stylists on the Isar and the sentimental elegiac painters on the Rhine met with the same antipathy from the younger generation. The appearance of the two Belgian historical pictures, which were really nothing more than offshoots of the great French school, gave nourishment of doubled strength to this tendency to seek salvation in Paris. The German painters were startled out of contentment with their beloved cartoons, and to many a man it seemed as if the scales had fallen from his eyes. They perceived what an admirable thing it is that a painter should be able to paint. What they could have learnt long before from any good old picture, and in their turbulent enthusiasm for ideas had not learnt, was made suddenly clear to them by these new paintings. They came to the conclusion that it was impossible for God Almighty to have poured light and colour over the objective world with the intention that painters should transform it into a world of shadowless contours. They recognised that the style of cartoon work had led away from all painting, and that it was therefore necessary to do honour once more to the despised handiwork and technique of art, as the fundamental condition of its well-being. However much the æsthetic party might warn them not to renounce "the Reformation of painting, which had been begun and perfected forty years before," and not "with modern technique to sink back into the pre-Cornelian, ornamental model painting," the demand for colour, which had been so long neglected, asserted its rights more and more loudly. King Ludwig's saying was repeated as though it were a new revelation: "The painter must be able to paint." Colour was the battle-cry of the day, the battle-cry of youth, to whom the world belongs. In place of the ideal of contour came the ideal of hue and pigment. Cartoons, in the sense of the old cartoon school, no one would draw any longer. To paint pictures, finished pictures, was the tendency of the day. And since painting is to be learnt from the living only, and such as could paint lived in Germany no longer, they packed their trunks, and set out to learn from the "go-ahead neighbour." As Rome had been hitherto, so was Paris now, the high school of German art. "To Paris!" and "Painting!" were the cries throughout all Germany.
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