Part 5

The author of these pictures—one of the greatest painters that ever lived—is only known as the Master of Moulins, or the Painter of the Bourbons. His name was probably Jean Perréal, but there is no certainty about it. Only a few definite names have come down to us from the beginnings of modern art. We must search for them in the inventories and account books of princely households or cathedral chapters. The artists did not yet sign their works; they indulged in no dreams of immortality. They did not yet feel they were the supermen, that the Renaissance, later on, made of them, and that, in the estimation of the upper class, especially of its feminine and effeminate portion, they have remained till the present day. They were honest and genuine artisans, just like other respectable artisans; and in France they, for the most part, enrolled themselves in the Saddlers’ Guild, perhaps because they, like the latter, had originally, as miniature painters, to do with parchment, _i.e._, a species of leather. They regarded it as a special distinction to be appointed servant,—_valet_ or _varlet_—of a prince, on whose commissions for church and palace they lived. Jean Malouel and his pupils, Jacques Cone and Jean Mignot, Jehan Fouquet, his sons Jean and François, and his great pupil Jean Bourdichon, Enguerrand Charonton and Nicolas Froment, perhaps also Perréal and King René the Good (1409-80), are perhaps the only painters whose personality stands out clearly outlined in the dawn of art history before Clouet, and his contemporary Corneille of Lyons. Perhaps a number of forgotten names may yet be dug up from archives. The obscurity of the few who have either been handed down to us, or been rescued from oblivion by industrious investigators in recent years is a heavy injustice. They deserve to shine with the same glory as the most illustrious that Vasari has preserved for us in a work of amusing studio gossip.

Jehan Fouquet stands in a line with the greatest portrait painters of all times. He may be named in the same breath with Holbein—nay, with Velasquez. His portrait of a man in the Liechtenstein Gallery at Vienna, which shone as one of the gems of the exhibition, is perhaps the most powerful work that the great master created, and the “Man with the Wine-glass,” in the Vienna collection of Count Wilczek, is hardly inferior to it in significance.

Of the numerous suggestions of an artistic, moral, and psychological nature that were the outcome of this unique exhibition, the deepest and most abiding—at least for me—was that one felt the spiritual condition of the artists who created these works on commission and, for the most part, according to precise instructions from princes and prelates, lords and governments of cities. In nearly every one of them is played the great drama of the struggle of souls thirsting for freedom with the fearful oppression of intellect of the darkest Middle Ages. Secret corners and angles, easily overlooked backgrounds of the pictures, suggest already the future art, untrammelled by the world, which will overcome this art of the guilds, with its fixed, dogmatic formulæ. A Fouquet, a Bourdichon, a Clouet who, in kings and princes sees, and paints with horrible realism, poor, sick, ugly, dull fools, stands no longer under the control of royalty. He is inwardly a disrespectful rebel, and is, in his way, a prelude to the procession of the market-women to Versailles, which, two or three centuries later, was destined to overthrow the kingdom. A master of the “Mount Calvary” (1460), who makes the holy women and disciples stare with such unmoved, wooden countenances at the Body of Christ, not because he is incapable of painting sorrow-stricken faces—all the details of the painting witness to his artistic power—but because he contemplates the incident with coldness of heart, and expresses his unbelief to the initiate as plainly as the rack and stake of the period allowed. In these early works there is a very soft and very weak rumble of thunder of a very far-off storm. They are a first indistinct announcement of the Revolutions that are slowly preparing.

V

A CENTURY OF FRENCH ART

Sincerity did not rule in all parts of the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900, but a quickening air of freedom was breathed in the great palace of art. The temporary proprietors of this colossal building, the French artists, did not pretend to any motive that they did not possess. “Make room! Out of the way! Out!” we fancied we heard from all the dusky corners of the vast halls in a voice of thunder. “Foreigners from both worlds? To the south wing with them! In the corner! Under the staircase! That’s quite too good for them. The dead? The famous of yesterday? What do the disturbers want? Haven’t they had their share of ribbons, titles, commissions from the State, and other forms of the artist’s ideals? Back with you! To the furthermost building in the rear! If any one wants to make journeys of discovery, he can steer away. The chief buildings, the foregrounds, the splendid halls for us, the _chers maîtres_ of to-day. We are the strongest, therefore we need do no violence to our feelings. We are alive, therefore we are right.”

Certainly, certainly. I do not contradict this; but it suits my inclination to wander past the conquerors of the day to the shadows in the back premises, into the remote and also, as to equipment, significantly neglected halls of the Century Exhibition, to the great vault in which is collected that which was to make plain the development of French art from the Revolution to Carnot, the grandson. What remains when the human being who gives dinners, haunts antechambers, has cousins in the Ministry of the Fine Arts, whispers malice in one’s ear, ceases to acknowledge greetings, and writes flattering letters, has fallen to dust; when rivals and parasites have disappeared; when the puffs of toadies, and the no less valuable ones of envious men and poison-boilers, are hushed and forgotten?

Not much, and there lies the melancholy humour of such wanderings through the realm of shadows. The only feature that always wounded me somewhat in the “Divine Comedy,” is that Dante awards his curses and execrations on the departed according to the rank they occupied among the living. The invectives on the poor soul of a pope have three stripes, those on a prince, two, and on a lord, one. That is an inartistic forgetfulness of the frame chosen by Dante for his poem. If he remained always mindful of his programme of death and hell, he would not be able to distinguish crowns or purple mantles in the red illumination of the under-world. The laughing and sighing philosophy of Hamlet—alas, poor Yorick!—stands higher than the resentful fury of the passionate Italian, who makes the hierarchy overstep the threshold of the grave. It is perhaps the most profound usage of the French language that they deprive the dead of the “Monsieur,” to which every living man, with the exception of those criminally prosecuted and condemned, has a claim. The dead has no longer a title—so much more sorry a fate for him, if, when he was alive, he was nothing more than a title.

The practice is even here somewhat different from the pure theory. The deceased is no longer “Excellency,” “Professor,” not even “Mr.” But the usage of contemporaries to give him a title is still expressed in the respectful tone in which they pronounce his now naked name, and in which one possessed with a delicate sense of hearing perceives the rustle of all the tinsel that surrounded him when alive. In this tone, however, the name becomes familiar to the younger ones, who, without thinking, continue this veneration, unconscious that their accent expresses respect because the bearer of the name so pronounced was once a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and an Academician. Thus, my dear Schiller, are your confident words to be understood, you who would never perceive the weft of vulgarity in the ways of man: “He who has satisfied the best men of his time has lived for all time.” Certainly, if by “best” we would understand the best placed, best paid, invested with the best office, or the best decorated. He who during his lifetime has belonged to those favoured by the grace of official newspapers, who has been gauged by them and provided with a “full” mark, will be recognised for all time as full without further test. The Pantheon is the continuation of the minister’s official rooms, the golden book of spiritual history an anthology from the Official Gazette and the Army List, for the use of the children of later centuries. If I must emphasise the essential: the appraisement even of the artist, therefore of the most individual man that exists, is the outcome of social, not individual, factors, or of the latter only when they are socially successful, and, therefore, themselves become social factors. There are, I admit, always proud—perhaps only haughty—natures with an anarchistic, anti-social trait, who will not recognise any arrangement or fixing of the community, not even its hierarchy of fame, and clench their fists against laurel crowns just as they do against crowns. Their rebellion, however, is seldom successful. I know of no case of a bomb-thrower having destroyed a Pantheon.

But as we do not take ourselves tragically, do not begin our own verdict with the threatening formula, “In the name of the Law,” and do not exact any submission from others, we are always entitled to be of our own opinion, and to let the dead influence us without prejudice, untroubled by the distinctions of rank which were bestowed on them in life, and were buried with them. Such a method of observation is unhistorical, but subjectively fruitful; it leads to self-emancipation from many superstitions.

The Century Exhibition of French painting was far from being complete; it was incomparably more fragmentary than the Louvre Museum, which is also not without gaps. But it afforded a general view of the art development of the period represented, and it gave the independent man the chance of correcting numerous opinions which had taken hold of him from study and reading.

It began with the masters who created and flourished before the deluge of 1789—Watteau, Greuze, Fragonard, Vigée-Lebrun. The three first had, for two generations, sunk deeply in general estimation. Then the force of fashion raised them up again to dizzy heights of fame. I do not believe that they will maintain themselves there. It pleases the reactionaries to glorify the _ancien régime_ at the expense of the Revolution, and to this planned and deliberate toil belongs also the unmeasured overestimate of eighteenth century art and artistic work. But it is politics, not æsthetics—no taste for art, but a tendency. In reality, the darlings of the age of the Pompadour and Louis XVI. were petty masters, mere fillings of a particular frame, and, lifted out of this, they lose their best qualities.

Watteau still holds his ground most easily, for he is an amiable teller of stories that are agreeable if nothing of a more serious character occupies one’s mind. He draws elegantly, although without pedantry; his colouring is cheerful, and suits admirably his hushed, silken carpets, coquettish Gobelins, and light lacquered furniture. He is the painter of joyous days wherein life seems an eternal feast. Gracious spring bedecks the earth, his men and women are all young and handsome, his ladies wear entrancing toilettes and _coiffures_, and his gentlemen silk doublets and lace shirt-frills. Even if they dress as shepherds, they are laughingly addressed thus: “I know you, fair masque; you are a marquis in disguise with your charming friend, the duchess.” Rosy angels hover about them, and mingle familiarly in their pastimes. They have nothing on earth to do except pay each other witty compliments and play at love. I understand why American multi-millionaires pay any price to be surrounded by Watteaus. It is really honourable to the artists of our time that the Trust magnates have not yet succeeded in finding or rearing painters who would flatter their egotism through servile suggestions of a Watteau aspect of the world.

Fragonard appears in a secondary position besides Watteau. He is drier, and with less “swing.” He is not really present in his heart at the pastimes he paints. Watteau is himself a guest at his festivals; Fragonard takes part in the _soirées_ only under a sealed order. The former amuses himself, the latter amuses the person who gives him the commission.

Greuze lives on the fame bestowed on him by the grateful Diderot. He was enthusiastic for Diderot’s tearful _bourgeois_ tragedy, and Diderot repaid him with enthusiasm for his painting; but we have no longer any grounds, I suppose, for regarding him with Diderot’s eyes. When he paints his eternal model of the “Broken Pitcher” in the Louvre, and of his sundry counterparts of it in the Century Exhibition, he is pitilessly pretty. When he sets great dramatic scenes in the Diderot style on the stage—the “Village Betrothal,” the “Father’s Curse,” etc.—he is depressingly melodramatic. His young maiden is marvellously pretty and tame, and will always delight childlike spectators with the charm of her blooming girlhood. He suffered himself to be infected in Italy by Guido Reni’s sweetness, and only transplanted his soft beauties, rolling their eyes, from paradise to the middle-class earth. He is simply the Bouguereau of his age. That name comprises all that can be said of him in praise or blame. Greuze is Bouguereau’s superior in so far as he paints more vigorously, and forms his pretty _ingénues_ of real flesh—not, like Bouguereau, of alabaster and sugar-candy.

Beside the softness of Greuze, Madame Vigée-Lebrun seems a man and a fighter. In a century of gallantry she alone was not gallant. She painted women’s likenesses, and did not pay court to her models; but she elevated them, and gave them meaning. Where the male painters of the period saw only beauty-patches, she suspected she saw a soul. If we look at these women with curiously poised heads, gazing boldly out of their frames, they say proudly and calmly: “I am no trying-on hand; I am no creature of luxury; I am no flesh for lust; I am a personage.” At a distance of a hundred years Vigée-Lebrun is a forerunner of the now innumerable American painters of emancipated womanhood. This brave woman, who was beautiful, and did not overprize, nay, hardly prized her beauty, was an asserter of women’s rights long before the word or the thing was invented.

Prudhon was represented by a “Zephyr,” which has the same peculiarities as his “Crucifixion” and “Crime and Punishment” in the Louvre. He models a human body so that one must take one’s hat off to it. He has the infallible feeling of the great Spaniards for the value of light and shade; but what will always stand in the way of his being loved and not merely respected is his hatred of colour. He confines himself to a strict black and white style, which banishes all gladness and discourages the most willing admiration.

And now the great deluge breaks in, and, like a sea-god David emerges over the raging waves. It is really with him that the century begins, for what preceded him was the art of the _ancien régime_ and of the Trianon. He had at the Exhibition a “Distribution of the Colours,” an “Ugolino,” some portraits; all of the most genuine David in choice of subject as well as treatment. Everywhere the capricious “seeing yellow” which seems to have been a peculiarity of his eye; everywhere the grandly imposing, professorial infallibility of drawing which knows no first trying, no anxious searching, no hot struggle with the never quite attainable Nature. David compels with an imperious Medusa-glance the ever-stirring, the ever-flowing, so that it becomes fixed, and he can shackle the now immovable vision in brazen outlines. So his human beings appear statues, or mimes, which maintain a pose, and his most blameless anatomies acquire a tendency towards the artificial. David’s mood is always uniformly high-pitched. Good-humoured people, who would like to see the majestic man in shirt sleeves for once, lurk in vain for him to unbutton himself. He never forsakes the decoration and costume of high tragedy. At first he sought the drama in ancient history or world-famed poetry. Afterwards, he found it in his immediate surroundings. Fate vouchsafed him the favour of living in a time, the pathos of which was mightier than that of Athens, Sparta, or Rome. He satisfied his deepest longings when, in the “Sabine Women,” he preached to the murderous factions among his people reconciliation and brotherly love, and, in “The Distribution of the Colours” and the “Coronation,” he made Napoleon the equal of the heroes of mythology. He is, therefore, always genuine, even when he may seem to the superficial gaze theatrical. It is the difference between a tone naturally sustained during moments of life at high pressure, and declamation learnt from a teacher of rhetoric.

His pupils, imitators, and rivals have, on the contrary, not succeeded in avoiding declamation. Gérard, Gros, Riesener, and Drolling were, consciously or unconsciously, the greatest flatterers that ever painted portraits. Because David represented Napoleon in the character of an Alexander of Macedon, or an ancient god of war, the others, the smaller painters, in their portraits gave to even the ordinary men of the period the deportment of Olympian gods. Only Gérard’s “Letitia,” who, too, bore apotheosis most easily, is a good modest human being. All the other women are Juno or Pallas Athene; all the men Mars or Achilles. The contrast between the commonplace physiognomies and the magnificence of their appearance is now and then so violent that one is led to surmise that the painter wanted to make fun of his models. “Charles X. in his Coronation Robes,” by Ingres, seems, for example, virtually a parody of David’s “Coronation of Napoleon.”

Géricault stands an examination of his title to fame badly. He has not so correct an eye for the figures of horses as was believed before instantaneous photographs. His portraits of soldiers are really more crude than powerful. Even the sketch for the “Raft of the Medusa,” reveals evidence of straining after effect which our pious admiration refused to notice in the colossal work in the Louvre. On the other hand, the figure of Louis Leopold Boilly gained strangely in the Century Exhibition. Up till then I knew only his “Arrival of a Diligence at a Posting-house,” in the Louvre, and I did not rate him very highly on account of the affected _atelier_ light of this otherwise prettily studied little picture. Here he disclosed himself as a great philosopher and satirist. One picture represents a popular merry-making with wine _gratis_, another a free performance at the Ambigu-Comique Theatre. There the crowd is fighting murderously over a drink that can be had for nothing; half-grown hobbledehoys throttle bestial greybeards; bullies claw hold of furies; dreadful feet trample on faces and necks in the mad storming of the wine supplies, and the victors in this struggle have their reward: they lie on the ground bestially drunk. The scenes at the entrance of the theatre are not quite so vulgar. There is a less dogged scramble for intellectual enjoyment than for that of the palate. Yet here, too, the most brutal lack of consideration and greedy selfishness triumph; here, too, the strong man overmasters the weak; here, too, among beings who seem to belie their human form, the law of the jungle holds good; and here, too, poor people pay for a little doubtful pleasure with the sufferings, dangers, and exertions of a storming of the Malakoff. In the foreground of both pictures stands a group of well-dressed persons who, half in pity, half in disgust, look at the disorderly pushing of the rabble from a respectful distance. These rich people have the _rôle_ of teaching the moral of the fable. They express the sociological thought of the painter. Boilly deplores the low moral condition of the masses, and reproaches the dominant class with having degraded them to beasts, when it pretends to give them a feast. He rejects with utter disdain the dogma of equality, yet without haughtiness, for he has for the disinherited the somewhat condescending, yet warm pity of a genuine patrician. These are extremely modern—I might call them Toynbee-feelings—and they are expressed with an exact, judicious brush that can conjure forth the confused turmoil of a great, raging multitude, and, nevertheless, remain faithful in all details. Boilly was decidedly a master.

The Century Exhibition also gave the opportunity for a discovery, not only to me, but also to all who brought to it an open mind. There is a painter, Trutat, of whom no one had ever heard anything. Seekers who investigated the provincial newspaper of 1840-60 succeeded in discovering one or two articles about him. That is all. He once or twice exhibited in the “Salon,” but the “Salon” reports of the time make no mention of him. He lived in the first half of the last century, and died at the age of twenty-four. Before his picture—one single picture—men were amazed, and women stood with moist eyes. It is a double picture; in the foreground, a fair young man, pale with sickness, with deep blue eyes and a proud, wild mane; his firm forehead full of impatient dreams of joyous creations, fame, and happiness, yet, in his hollow cheeks, faint shadows of death. Behind him, half obscured in dusk, a woman’s profile, his mother’s head; a good Samaritan with tender gaze, and lips closed in sadness, which once sang cradle-songs, but have learnt silence in the sick-room. In its composition there is a reminiscence of Ary Scheffer’s “St Augustin and St Monica,” in the Louvre. But it is incomparably more profound, for Trutat depicts himself, not saints whom the power of imagination has first to bring before him. The painting is wonderful, firm and full as that of Franz Hals—I deliberately utter this strong statement—so surely and organically matured that one traces beneath the skin all the most delicate muscles and bones. And add to this technique, of which one does not discern how he could have acquired it in a fleeting morning of life, the intensity of feeling which has raised the work to the rank of those high creations in which a soul is revealed. The picture is full as a swan’s song, of foreboding and love. The great youth does not understand himself alone, without his mother—the dear mother must be with him, if he goes out to the market among people. Shall she nurse him? Shall she protect him? Can he dispense with her for a moment as he must be taken away from her so soon? All this is in that mysterious picture, and it was in it when Trutat, though he did not know it, painted his own requiem. Only nobody then understood the riddle; Trutat as little as the rest. He is another Regnault, only a still more genuine one. And no one has made lamentation about him, although his tragedy is more painful than Regnault’s. For the latter attained immortality in the apotheosis of death in battle, whilst miserable consumption slew Trutat ingloriously.