The History of Modern Painting, Volume 1 (of 4)
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Title: The History of Modern Painting, Volume 1 (of 4)
Author: Richard Muther
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF MODERN PAINTING, VOLUME 1 (OF 4) ***
THE HISTORY OF MODERN PAINTING
[Illustration: ANTON GRAFF PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST]
THE HISTORY OF
MODERN PAINTING
BY RICHARD MUTHER
PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY
AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF BRESLAU
IN FOUR
VOLUMES
[Illustration]
VOLUME
ONE
REVISED EDITION
CONTINUED BY THE AUTHOR
TO THE END OF THE XIX CENTURY
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. MCMVII
_Printed by_
MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED
_Edinburgh_
CONTENTS
PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
INTRODUCTION
Old and new histories of art.--Seeming "restlessness" of the
nineteenth century.--To recognise "style" in modern art, and to
prove the logic of its evolution, the principles of judgment in the
old art-histories are also to be employed for the new.--The
question is, what new element the age brought into the history of
art, not what it borrowed eclectically from earlier ages 1
BOOK I
THE LEGACY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
COMMENCEMENT OF MODERN ART IN ENGLAND
The commencement of modern art in England.--Two divisions of modern
art since the sixteenth century.--Classic and naturalistic
schools.--English succeed the Dutch in the seventeenth
century.--William Hogarth: his purpose and his inartistic
methods.--Sir Joshua Reynolds.--Thomas Gainsborough.--Comparison
between them.--Reynolds, an historical painter; Gainsborough, a
painter of landscape.--Pictures of Richard Wilson show the end of
classical landscape.--Those of Gainsborough, the beginning of
"paysage intime" 9
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF ART ON THE CONTINENT
English influence upon the art of the Continent from the middle of
the eighteenth century.--Sturm-und-Drang period in
literature.--Rousseau.--Goethe's "Werther."--Schiller's
"Robbers."--Spain: Francis Goya, his pictures and
etchings.--France: Antoine Watteau frees himself from "baroque"
influences, and directs the tendency of French art towards the Low
Countries.--Pastel: Maurice Latour, Rosalba Carriera,
Liotard.--Society painters: Lancrat, Pater.--The decorative
painters: François Lemoine, François Boucher, Fragonard.--"Society"
turns virtuous.--Jean Greuze.--Middle-class society and its
depicter, Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin.--Germany: Lessing frees the
drama from the classical yoke of Boileau, and, following the
English, produces in "Minna" the first domestic tragedy.--Daniel
Chodowiecki as the portrayer of the German middle class.--Tischbein
goes back to the national past.--Posing disappears in portrait
painting.--Antoine Pesne.--Anton Graff.--Christian Lebrecht
Vogel.--Johann Edlinger.--The revival of landscape.--Rousseau's
influence.--English garden-style succeeds the French
style.--Disappearance of "nature choisie" in painting.--Hubert
Robert.--Joseph Vernet.--Salomon Gessner.--Ludwig Hess.--Philip
Hackert.--Johann Alexander Thiele.--Antonio Canale.--Bernardo
Canaletto.--Francesco Guardi.--Don Petro Rodriguez de Miranda.--Don
Mariano Ramon Sanchez.--The animal painters: François Casanova,
Jean Louis de Marne, Jean Baptiste Oudry, Johann Elias
Riedinger.--An event in the history of art: in place of the
prevailing Cinquecento and the "sublime style of painting" degraded
at the close of the seventeenth century, a simple and sincere art
succeeds throughout the whole of Europe.--Return to what Dürer and
the Little Masters of the sixteenth century and the Dutch of the
seventeenth century originated 41
CHAPTER III
THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN GERMANY
The influence of the antique at the end of the eighteenth century
shows no advance, but an unnatural retrograde movement, and notes
in Germany the beginning of the same decadence which had happened
in Italy with the Bolognese, in France with Poussin, and in Holland
with Gérard de Lairesse.--The teachings of Winckelmann, Anton
Rafael Mengs, Angelica Kauffmann.--The younger generation carries
out the classical programme in the value it sets upon technical
traditions.--Asmus Jacob Carstens.--Buonaventura Genelli 80
CHAPTER IV
THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN FRANCE
In France also the classical tendency in art was no new thing, but
a revival of the antique which was restored to life by the
foundation of the French Academy in Rome in 1663.--Influence of
archæological studies.--Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun.--The Revolution
heightens the enthusiasm for the antique, and once more gives
Classicism an appearance of brilliant animation.--Jacques Louis
David.--His portraits and his pictures in relation to contemporary
history.--David as an archæologist.--Jean Baptiste
Regnault.--François André Vincent.--Guérin 98
BOOK II
THE ESCAPE INTO THE PAST
CHAPTER V
THE NAZARENES
Influence of literature.--Wackenroder.--Tieck.--The
Schlegels.--Instead of the antique, the Italian Quattrocento
appears as the model for the schools.--Frederick Overbeck.--Philip
Veit.--Joseph Führich.--Edward Steinle--Julius Schnorr von
Carolsfeld.--Their pictures and their drawings 117
CHAPTER VI
THE ART OF MUNICH UNDER KING LUDWIG I
Peter Cornelius.--Wilhelm Kaulbach.--Their importance and their
limitations 141
CHAPTER VII
THE DÜSSELDORFERS
On the Rhine, a school of painting instead of a school of
drawing.--Wilhelm Schadow, Carl Friedrich Lessing, Theodor
Hildebrandt, Carl Sohn, Heinrich Mücke, Christian Koehler, H.
Plüddemann, Eduard Bendemann, Theodor Mintrop, Friedrich Ittenbach,
Ernest Deger.--Why their pictures, despite technical merits, have
become antiquated 157
CHAPTER VIII
THE LEGACY OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM
Alfred Rethel and Moritz Schwind oppose the Roman with the German
tradition.--Their pictures and drawings 167
CHAPTER IX
THE FORERUNNERS OF ROMANTICISM IN FRANCE
Last years of the David school wearisome and without character,
except in portrait painting.--François Gérard, the "King of
Painters and Painter of Kings"; his portraits of the Empire and
Restoration periods.--Commencement of the revolt: Pierre Paul
Prudhon; his pictures and the story of his life; Constance
Mayer.--Revival of colouring.--Antoine Jean Gros and his pictures
of contemporary life; discrepancy between his teaching and his
practice 189
CHAPTER X
THE GENERATION OF 1830
The revolt of the Romanticists against Classicism in literature and
art.--Théodore Géricault and his early works.--"The Raft of the
Medusa."--Eugène Delacroix: protest against the conventional, and
renewed importance of colour.--Delacroix's pictures; influence of
the East upon him.--His life and struggles.--The Classical
reaction.--J. A. D. Ingres and the opposition to Romanticism.--His
classical pictures.--Excellence of his portraits and drawings 219
CHAPTER XI
JUSTE-MILIEU
Moderation the watchword of Louis Philippe's reign, in politics,
literature, and art.--Jean Gigoux, a follower of Delacroix and an
inexorable realist.--Eugène Isabey.--Middle position occupied by
Ary Scheffer between the Classical and the Romantic schools;
decline of his popularity.--Hippolyte Flandrin, as a religious
painter a French counterpart to the Nazarenes.--Paul Chenavard,
compared to Cornelius.--Théodore Chassériau; his short and
brilliant career.--Léon Benouville.--Léon Cogniet and his
pictures.--Transition from the Romantic school to the historical
painters.--The great writers of history: renewed activity in this
field: historical tragedies and romances.--Art takes a similar
course: popularity and facility of historical painting.--Eugène
Devéria; Camille Roqueplan.--Nicolaus Robert Fleury; Louis
Boulanger.--Paul Delaroche; his popularity and its causes; his
defects as a painter.--Delaroche's pictures.--Thomas Couture 255
CHAPTER XII
THE POST-ROMANTIC GENERATION
France under the Second Empire; the society of the period not
represented in French art.--Continuation of the old traditions
without essential change.--Alexandre Cabanel.--William
Bouguereau.--Jules Lefébure.--Henner.--Paul Baudry: his pictures;
decoration of the Grand Opera House.--Élie Delaunay: his pictures,
decorative painting, and portraits.--The "Genre féroce";
predilection for the horrible in art.--Numerous painters of this
school.--Laurens.--Rochegrosse and his pictures.--Henri Regnault 278
CHAPTER XIII
THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL OF PAINTING IN BELGIUM
Belgium to 1830.--David and his school.--Navez, Matthias van
Bree.--Gustav Wappers, Nicaise de Keyzer, Henri Decaisne, Gallait,
Bièfve.--Ernest Slingeneyer, Guffens and Swerts.--The Exhibition of
Belgian pictures in Germany 301
CHAPTER XIV
THE REVOLUTION OF THE GERMAN COLOURISTS
Anselm Feuerbach, Victor Müller.--The Berlin school: Rudolf
Henneberg, Gustav Richter, Knille, Schrader, and others.--The
Munich school: Piloty, Hans Makart, Gabriel Max.--The historical
painters and the end of the illustrative painting of history 317
CHAPTER XV
THE VICTORY OVER PSEUDO-IDEALISM
The Historical Picture of Manners as opposed to Historical
Painting, an advance in the direction of intimacy of feeling.--The
Antique Picture of Manners: Charles Gleyre, Louis Hamon, Gérôme,
Gustave Boulanger.--The Picture of Costume from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.--France: Charles Comte, Alexander Hesse,
Camille Roqueplan.--Belgium: Alexander Markelbach, Florent
Willems.--Germany: L. v. Hagn, Gustav Spangenberg, Carl
Becker.--The importance of Hendrik Leys, Ernest Meissonier, and
Adolf Menzel as mediators between the past and ordinary life,
between the heroic art of the first half of the nineteenth century
and the intimate art of the second half 363
BIBLIOGRAPHY 391
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES IN COLOUR
PAGE
ANTON GRAFF: Portrait of Himself _Frontispiece_
REYNOLDS: Mrs. Siddons 20
GAINSBOROUGH: The Sisters 38
GREUZE: The Milkmaid 58
CHARDIN: The House of Cards 64
WATTEAU: Fête Champêtre 74
ANGELICA KAUFFMANN: Portrait of a Lady as a Vestal 86
ELIZABETH VIGÉE-LEBRUN: Portrait of the Painter with her
Daughter 100
CORNELIUS: "Let there be Light" 144
SCHWIND: The Wedding Journey 182
REGNAULT: General Prim 300
MEISSONIER: A Cavalier 378
IN BLACK AND WHITE
BAUDRY, PAUL.
Portrait of Baudry 286
Charlotte Corday 287
Truth 288
The Pearl and the Wave 289
Cybele 290
Leda 291
Edmond About 292
BENDEMANN, EDUARD.
The Lament of the Jews 165
BIÈFVE, EDOUARD.
Portrait of Bièfve 314
The League of the Nobles of the Netherlands 315
BOUGUEREAU, WILLIAM ADOLPHE.
Brotherly Love 281
CABANEL, ALEXANDRE.
Portrait of Cabanel 279
The Shulamite 280
CARSTENS, ASMUS JACOB.
Portrait of Himself 88
Scylla and Charybdis 90
Argo Leaving the Triton's Mere 91
Children of the Night 92
Priam and Achilles 93
CHARDIN, JEAN SIMÉON.
Portrait of Himself 63
Grace before Meat 65
CHASSÉRIAU, THÉODORE.
Apollo and Daphne 259
CHODOWIECKI, DANIEL.
Portrait of Chodowiecki 66
The Family Picture 67
All Sorts and Conditions of Women 68, 69
The Morning Compliment 70
The Artist's Nursery 71
COGNIET, LÉON.
Tintoretto Painting his Dead Daughter 261
The Massacre of the Innocents 263
CORNELIUS, PETER.
Portrait of Cornelius 143
From the Frescoes in the Friedhofshalle, Berlin 145
Marguerite in Prison 146
The Apocalyptic Host 147
The Fall of Troy 149
COUTURE, THOMAS.
Portrait of Couture 271
The Love of Gold 273
The Romans of the Decadence 275
The Troubadour 277
DAVID, JACQUES LOUIS.
Portrait of David 102
Madame Récamier 103
The Oath of the Horatii 105
The Rape of the Sabines 107
Helen and Paris 109
Belisarius asking Alms 111
The Death of Marat 113
DELACROIX, EUGÈNE.
Portrait of Delacroix 226
Dante's Bark 227
Hamlet and the Grave-diggers 230
Tasso in the Mad-house 231
Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople 233
Jesus on Lake Gennesaret 235
Horses Fighting in a Stable 237
Medea 238
The Expulsion of Heliodorus 239
DELAROCHE, PAUL.
Portrait of Delaroche 264
The Assassination of the Duke of Guise 265
The Princes in the Tower 267
Strafford on his Way to Execution 269
DELAUNAY, ÉLIE.
Diana 293
Boys Singing 294
Madame Toulmouche 295
FEUERBACH, ANSELM.
Portrait of Himself 318
Hafiz at the Well 319
Pieta 321
Iphigenia 322
Portrait of a Roman Lady 323
Mother's Joy 325
Medea 327
Dante Walking with High--born Ladies of Ravenna 329
FÜHRICH, JOSEPH.
Portrait of Führich 126
From the "Legend of St. Gwendolin" 127
Ruth and Boaz 128
The Departure of the Prodigal Son 129
Jacob and Rachel 130
GAINSBOROUGH, THOMAS.
Portrait of Gainsborough 34
Mrs. Siddons 35
Wood Scene, Village of Cornard, Suffolk 36
The Market Cart 37
The Duchess of Devonshire 38
The Watering Place 39
GALLAIT, LOUIS.
Portrait of Gallait 312
Egmont's Last Moments 313
GENELLI, BONAVENTURA.
The Embassy to Achilles 94
Thetis lamenting the Fate of Hector 95
Odysseus and the Sirens 96
Portrait of Genelli 97
GÉRARD, FRANÇOIS.
Portrait of Gérard 190
Mlle. Brongniart 191
Madame Visconti 192
Cupid and Psyche 193
Madame Récamier 194
GÉRICAULT, THÉODORE.
Portrait of Géricault 221
The Wounded Cuirassier 222
Chasseur 223
The Raft of the Medusa 224
The Start 225
GÉRÔME, LÉON.
The Cock-fight 367
GESSNER, SALOMON.
Landscape 75
Landscape 76
GOYA, FRANCISCO.
Portrait of Himself 42
The Majas on the Balcony 43
The Maja Clothed 44
The Maja Nude 45
De Que Mal Morira (from "Los Capriccios") 46
Soplones (from "Los Capriccios") 47
Se Repulen (from "Los Capriccios") 48
Que Pico de Oro (from "Los Capriccios") 49
Volaverunt (from "Los Capriccios") 50
Quien lo Creyera (from "Los Capriccios") 51
Linda Maestra (from "Los Capriccios") 52
Devota Profesion (from "Los Capriccios") 53
Otres Leyes por el Pueblo 54
GREUZE, JEAN BAPTISTE.
Portrait of Greuze 58
Head of a Girl 59
Girl carrying a Lamb 60
Girl looking up 61
Girl with an Apple 62
GROS, ANTOINE JEAN (BARON).
Saul 215
Portrait of Gros 216
The Battle of Eylau 217
GUARDI, FRANCESCO.
Venice 77
HAMON, LOUIS.
My Sister's not at Home 365
HENNEBERG, RUDOLF.
The Race for Fortune 330
HENNER, JEAN JACQUES.
Susanna and the Elders 284
The Sleeper 285
HILDEBRANDT, THEODOR.
The Sons of Edward 161
HOGARTH, WILLIAM.
Portrait of Himself 12
The Harlot's Progress (Plate VI.) 13
The Rake's Progress (Plate II.) 14
The Rake's Progress (Plate VII.) 15
The Rake's Progress (Plate VIII.) 16
Marriage à la Mode (Plate V.) 17
The Enraged Musician 18
Gin Lane 19
INGRES, JEAN AUGUSTE DOMINIQUE.
Portrait of Ingres 242
The Maid of Orleans at Rheims 243
Portrait of Himself as a Youth 244
Bertin the Elder 245
Study for the Odalisque in the Louvre 247
The Source 248
Oedipus and the Sphinx 249
Paganini 251
Mlle. de Montgolfier 252
The Forestier Family 253
KAUFFMANN, ANGELICA.
Portrait of Herself 86
KAULBACH, WILHELM.
Portrait of Kaulbach 151
The Deluge 152
Prince Arthur and Hubert 153
Marguerite 156
DE KEYZER.
Portrait of de Keyzer 308
The Battle of Woeringen 309
LAURENS, JEAN PAUL.
The Interdict 298
LEFÉBURE, JULES.
Truth 283
LESSING, CARL FRIEDRICH.
The Sorrowing Royal Pair 164
The Hussite Sermon 335
LEYS, HENDRIK.
Portrait of Leys 369
A Family Festival 370
The Armourer 371
Mother and Child 372
LUMINAIS, EVARISTE.
Les Énervés de Jumièges 297
MAKART, HANS.
Portrait of Makart 341
The Espousals of Catterina Cornaro 343
The Feast of Bacchus 345
MAX, GABRIEL.
Portrait of Max 347
A Nun in the Cloister Garden 349
The Lion's Bride 351
Light 353
The Spirit's Greeting 355
Adagio 356
A Winter's Tale 357
Madonna 359
MAYER, CONSTANCE.
Portrait of Mayer 201
The Dream of Happiness 202
The Tomb of Prudhon and Constance Mayer at
Père-Lachaise 203
MEISSONIER, ERNEST.
The Man at the Window 373
A Man reading 374
Reading the Manuscript 375
Polcinello 376
A Reading at Diderot's 377
A Halt 378
MENGS, ANTON RAFAEL.
Portrait of Himself 84
Mount Parnassus 85
MENZEL, ADOLF.
Portrait of Menzel, 1837 379
Frederick the Great and his Tutor 380
The Round Table at Sans-Souci 381
Frederick the Great on a Journey 383
Illustration to Kugler's History of Frederick the
Great 384
Portrait of Frederick the Great 385
Reifspiel 387
When will Genius Awake? 388
OVERBECK, FREDERICK.
Portrait of Overbeck 118
The Annunciation 119
The Naming of St. John 120
Christ Healing the Sick 121
Christ's Entry into Jerusalem 122
The Resurrection 123
The Seven Lean Years 124
Portrait of Himself and Cornelius 140
PESNE, ANTOINE.
Portrait of Himself and Daughters 72
PILOTY, CARL.
Portrait of Piloty 336
Girdonists on the Road to the Guillotine 337
Under the Arena 339
PRUDHON, PIERRE PAUL.
Portrait of Himself 195
Joseph and Potiphar's Wife 196
Study directs the Flight of Genius 197
Le Coup de Patte du Chat 198
Cupid and Psyche 199
The Unfortunate Family 204
The Rape of Psyche 205
Le Midi 206
La Nuit 207
L'enjouir 208
Marguerite 209
Les Petits Dévideurs 210
The Vintage 211
The Virgin 212
Christ Crucified 213
Madame Copia 214
REGNAULT, HENRI.
Salome 299
The Moorish Headsman 300
RETHEL, ALFRED.
The Emperor Otto at the Tomb of Charlemagne 169
The Destruction of the Pagan Idols 170
Hannibal's Passage over the Alps 171
Death at the Masked Ball 172
Death the Friend of Man 173
REYNOLDS, SIR JOSHUA.
Portrait of Himself 20
Dr. Johnson 21
Garrick as Abel Drugger 22
Heads of Angels 23
Samuel Richardson 24
Miss Reynolds 25
Edmund Burke 26
Mrs. Abington 27
Edmund Malone 28
Oliver Goldsmith 29
Lady Cockburn and her Daughters 30
Bishop Percy 31
The Girl with the Mousetrap 32
Dr. Burney 33
RICHTER, GUSTAV.
Portrait of Himself 331
A Gipsy 332
SCHEFFER, ARY.
Portrait of Scheffer 257
Marguerite at the Well 258
SCHNORR VON CAROLSFIELD, JULIUS.
Portrait of Schnorr 125
Adam and Eve after the Fall 125
SCHRADER, JULIUS.
Cromwell at Whitehall 333
SCHWIND, MORITZ.
Portrait of Schwind 175
From the Wartburg Frescoes 176
From the Wartburg Frescoes 177
Wieland the Smith 178
From the Story of the Seven Ravens 179
A Hermit leading Horses to a Pool 181
Nymphs and Stag 184
Rübezahl 185
The Fairies' Song 187
SLINGNEYER, ERNEST.
The Avenger 311
SOHN, CARL.
The two Leonoras 163
The Rape of Hylas 166
STEINBRUCK, EDUARD.
Elves 162
STEINLE, EDUARD.
The Raising of Jarius' Daughter 131
"I have trodden the Winepress alone" 132
Portrait of Steinle 133
Book Illustration 134
The Violin Player 135
SYLVESTRE, JOSEPH NOËL.
Locusta Testing in Nero's Presence the
Poison prepared for Britannicus 296
VEIT, PHILIP.
Portrait of Veit 136
The Arts introduced into Germany by Christianity 137
The two Marys at the Sepulchre 139
WAPPERS, GUSTAV.
Portrait of Wappers 303
The Sacrifice of Burgomaster van der Werff
at the Siege of Leyden 305
The Death of Columbus 307
WATTEAU, ANTOINE.
Portrait of Watteau 56
La Partie Carrée 57
The Music Party 73
The Return from the Chase 74
INTRODUCTION
The historian who wishes to relate the history of painting in the
nineteenth century is confronted with quite other demands than await him
who undertakes the art of an earlier period. The greatest difficulty
with which the latter has to cope is the deficiency of sources. He
manifestly gropes in the dark with regard to the works of the masters as
well as to the circumstances of their lives. After he has searched
archives and libraries in order to collect his biographical material,
the real critical problem awaits him. Even amongst the admittedly
authentic works, those which are undated confront those whose chronology
is certain. To these must be added those nameless ones, as to whose
history there is a doubt; to these again, those whose origin is to be
ascertained. It needs a quick eye to separate the schools and groups,
and finally to recognise the notes which are peculiar to the master.
With none of these difficulties is the historian of modern art
confronted. The painters of the nineteenth century have very seldom
forgotten to attach a name and date to their works, and the
circumstances of their lives are related with an accuracy that was,
earlier, rarely the lot of the foremost men in history. It is all the
more difficult, face to face with such a chaos of pictures, to discover
the spiritual bond which connects them all, to construct a building out
of the immense supply of accumulated bricks, the piled-up mass of rough
material. The evolution of modern painting is more complicated and
varied than that of the art of an earlier period, just as modern life
itself is more complicated and varied than that of any previous age.
How quietly, slowly, and surely was the evolution of that older period
carried out. One simple proportion was maintained between art and the
universal life of culture. Customs, views of life and art, were so
intimately bound up together, that the knowledge of the age in general
naturally comprises that of art. Standing before some old altar-piece of
the school of Cologne, it is as though one were watching in some broad
high dome; everything is quiet all round, and the august figures in the
picture lead their calm, grave existence in illustrious grandeur. The
message of Christianity, "My kingdom is not of this world," meets in
art, too, with a clear expression. Humility and devotion are joined
together, making for a refinement in the feeling of life that is
unsurpassed in its hieratic tenderness and gracious innocence. In the
fifteenth century, the age of discoveries, a new spirit entered the
world. Commerce and navigation discovered new worlds, painting
discovered life. The human spirit grew freer and more joyous; it was no
longer satisfied with yearning for the other world alone, it felt itself
at home also in this world, in the glory of the earth. Pictures, too,
were inspired with some of those joyous perceptions with which the
citizens of the fifteenth century issued from their narrow walls out
under God's free heaven, something of that Easter Day mood in _Faust_.
People still went on painting Madonnas and saints, subjects of a
religion which had spread from the far East over the whole West; but
with the severe simplicity of the heavenly, there was universal
awakening of all the charm and roguery and energy of the earthly. It is
the first virginal contact of the spirit with nature. On men's works
there rests the first morning-dew of spiritual life; they remind one of
woodlands in spring: Botticelli, Van Eyck, Schongauer.
After the Italians had become vigorous realists in the fifteenth
century, they rose in the sixteenth, the century of inspired humanism,
to majesty. The time of hard grappling with the overwhelming fulness of
actuality is over. Those great masterpieces ensue in which the
unlaboured effort shines forth in the most felicitous achievement:
Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian. At the same time the German manner is
most directly opposed to the Romance. They disdain to ingratiate
themselves into men's minds by outward grace of form, but win the heart
by their deep religious feeling and intimate sensibility. They are
German to the core, racial even to the stiffness of the German
character, but full of feeling and truth to life. Dürer in his woodcuts
and copper engravings is "_inwendig voller figur_"; in them he offers
the "concentrated, homely treasure of his heart." Holbein is great by
the incomparably real art of his portraits. The century of that joyous
revival of Paganism, the Olympian vivacity of the Renaissance, is
followed by the age to which the Jesuits gave life and character. For
those stately churches in the Jesuit style, with their _fortissimo_
effect, their huge, sculptured ornaments and their gleaming, gold
decorations, the classic quietness of the old masters ceases to be
appropriate. It is a question of a more stirring and impressive
treatment of sacred subjects, wherein the whole passion of renewed
Catholicism should be brought to expression. Spain, the country of the
Inquisition, set the classic stamp on this enhanced religious feeling.
Here all that monarchical and sacerdotal impulse which founded and
aggrandised the Spanish nation, founded too its true representative in
painting. Painters endowed their church pictures with a passionate
fervour and a flush of extravagant sensuousness of the national,
Spanish, local colour, such as are found united in the art of no other
age or country. Necessarily, moreover, such a feudal system as that of
Spain, with its grandees and princes of the Church, involved also an art
of portrait painting which ranks with the highest that has issued in
this kind from any country whatever: Murillo, Velasquez. In Flanders,
the second stronghold of the Jesuits, we have the titan Rubens. A
joyously fleshly Fleming, he seizes nature by the throat and drags her
there where he stands erect, as though he were lord of the world.
Freedom had found its way into victorious and Protestant Holland. Here
there flourished an art neither courtly nor fostered by the Church. It
stood in the closest connection with the burgesses, showed clear signs
of the struggle through which country and people had won independence.
In the first place, painting celebrated as its worthiest subject the
free burgher, the tighter in the heroic struggle for freedom. At no time
was portrait-painting practised to such an extent, and the sitters not
aristocratic courtiers, but proud burgesses of a free community; the men
grave, strong, self-reliant; the women faithful, pure, and modest. The
workmanship is correspondent: simple, solid, domestic; and soon there
followed the glorification of that which they prized the more after
their struggles had been accomplished: the quiet, comfortable delight of
hearth and home.
During the War of Independence the Dutch had learnt to love their
fatherland, and they were the first, as artists, fully to grasp the
poetry of landscape. Art now no longer shines only upon the eyes of Mary
and the Hosts of Heaven: it settles upon arid country hills, streams
upon the sea waves, is at home in peasants' houses and the dark woods,
wanders through the streets and alleys, makes a temple of every market.
The religious sentiments, however, which stirred Protestant Holland had
to find appropriate expression; the living essence of biblical subjects
was to be released from a narrow, ecclesiastical sphere, and approached
anew with all the deep, German inwardness. These tendencies were all
united in Rembrandt--perhaps of all masters, since the Christian era,
the mightiest proclaimer of the great Pan; to him the cosmic powers of
light and air signified the divinity that Michael Angelo had painted
under a beautiful human form.
Finally, in the eighteenth century, comes _rococo_, with its rustling
_frou-frou_ and its delicate charm. The whole life of that noble
society, which exchanged court costume for silken pastoral garments,
formality and rank for charm and grace, was a lively play, an
extravagant game. The king played with his crown, the priest with his
religion, the philosopher with his wisdom, the poet with the art of
rhyme. They did not hear as yet the hoarse threatening voice of the
disinherited, "_Car tel est notre plaisir_." What this age possessed of
beauty and charm, its peculiar grace and wanton vivacity, its reckless,
inassailable frivolity, was proper also to its art. Light and gracious
as the whole life of that harmless, merry generation, it glided through
the age untroubled, led by Cupidons, and kissed by the wandering winds.
It is only to-day that we understand once more the charming masters of
that elegant century.
The painters of every epoch looked at nature with their own eyes, and
also with the eyes of their age and of their country. So the art of
every period appears as "the mirror and abstract chronicle" of its age.
With irresistible majesty, and conscious of its inspiration, it lays
hold of the external world, and gives back to it its own picture
infinitely exalted. It is the enlightened expression of the age, as
upright, as fresh, as fanatic, or as unnatural as its generation.
Therein lies the strength of the painters of _rococo_, that they painted
the artificiality of the time with such unsurpassable naturalness. It is
just these infinitely various manners of paying court to
nature--unceasingly throughout the course of centuries, now violently,
now softly and tenderly, at times, too, not without passing
infidelity,--it is just these which determine the beauty and value, the
mystery and essence of art, and are in the history of art all that tends
to its variety and unsurpassable charm.
The nineteenth century not only shows a new age, but probably begins a
new section of universal history. It is probable that in contrast with
this epoch of stirring movement, during which the readjustment of all
political and social relations, the new discoveries in the instruments
of commerce, trade, and industry have given an entirely new aspect to
the world, the next thousand years will sum up all the previous
centuries as the "old world." New men require a new art. One would be
inclined to surmise from this that the art of the nineteenth century
presented itself as something essentially personal, with a sharply
distinctive style. Instead of this it offers at first view, in contrast
with those old ages of uniform production, a condition like that of
Babylon. The nineteenth century has no style--the phrase that has been
so often quoted as to have become a commonplace. In architecture the
forms of all the past ages live again. The day before yesterday we built
Greek, yesterday Gothic; here _Baroque_, there Japanese: but amidst all
these products of imitative styles there rise up stations and
market-places which, with the robust elegance of their iron colonnades,
herald the greatness of fresh conquests. In the province of painting
there are similar extremes. In no other age have minds so diverse
flourished side by side as Carstens and Goya, Cornelius and Corot,
Ingres and Millet, Wiertz and Courbet, Rossetti and Manet. And the
existing histories excite a belief that the nineteenth century is a
chaos into which it is possible only for some later age to bring order.
Perhaps, however, it is already quite possible, if one only resolves
uncompromisingly to apply to the new age those principles which have
been tested in the treatment of the _old_ histories of art, if one
endeavours to study those artists who are in part still our
contemporaries as objectively as though they were masters long dead.
That is to say: one is wont, in a review of an older period in art, not
to inquire what it had caught from an earlier age, but rather what it
had introduced that was new. It was not because they imitated in their
turn that the old masters became great; not because they looked
backwards, but rather because they went forwards, that they made the
history of art. We are not grateful, for instance, to the Dutchmen of
the middle of the sixteenth century--Frans Floris and his
contemporaries--that they forsook Dutch naturalism, and bootlessly
exerted themselves in the way of Michael Angelo and Raphael. We can see
no remarkable merit in the fact that the Bolognese at the beginning of
the seventeenth century gathered their honey from the flowers of the
Cinquecento. And we are even less inclined to see in the contemporaries
of Adrian van der Werff, who endeavoured to refine the rugged, primeval
Dutch art by the study of the Italians, more than clumsy imitators.
Just as much will the interest of the historian of the art of the
nineteenth century be bestowed in the first degree upon the works which
have really created something independent and transcending all the
earlier ages. He will not give especial prominence to those domains
which had their flowering-time in other days than our own, but he will
ask: Where is that distinctive element which appertains to the
nineteenth century only? What are the new forms which it has found, the
new sentiments to which it has given expression? Not those whose
activity lay in clothing--however cleverly--the artistic necessities of
the age in the store of already transmitted forms, but the pathfinders,
who went forwards and created anew, require our attention. Even if,
after the old masters, they can only be granted a place in the third or
fourth class, they must nevertheless always take precedence of those
others, because they exhibited themselves as they were, instead of
making themselves large by standing on the shoulders of the dead. Many
of those who were once valued highly, who, thriving on the inheritance
of the past, accomplished what was apparently of importance, measured by
this standard will arouse little interest, because their artistic
speech, depending on a foundation of the established canonical works of
old, is not their own but borrowed. In others, on the contrary, who,
apart from the dominating tendency, had the courage rather to be
insignificant, and yet remain themselves, observing with their own eyes
nature which surrounded them, or naïvely abandoning themselves to the
disposition of their artistic fantasy, in them will be seen the
essential vehicles of the modern spirit. And then it will be apparent
that the art of the nineteenth century as well as that of every earlier
period had its peculiar garment, even if for official occasions it
preferred to unpack from its wardrobe the state costumes of earlier
ages. It is only because this distinction between the eclectic and the
personal, the derived and the independent, has not yet been carried out
with sufficient strictness, that it has hitherto, in my opinion, been
found so difficult to discover the distinctive _style_ of modern art,
and to make clear the logic and sequence of its evolution.
BOOK I
THE LEGACY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
COMMENCEMENT OF MODERN ART IN ENGLAND
If the question arises, why modern art has been compelled to find
expression for itself in a form different from that of the art of the
earlier centuries, we must first call attention to the change that has
taken place in the fundamental conditions of society. Formerly, the
chief supporters of art were the two leading powers of Church and King.
The most noted works of Raphael and Michael Angelo, of Velasquez and
Murillo, of Rubens and Van Dyck, were executed either for the churches
or for the reigning princes of their country. The patron of modern art
is the citizen. The old culture of the clerics and aristocrats has been
superseded by that of the middle classes, and the beginnings of modern
art must therefore be sought in the country in which this class first
developed its distinctive character--in England.
England, as early as the eighteenth century, was already a land of
citizens. At a time when there was to be found on the Continent acute
mockery of what was old and outworn, conjoined with the most
enthusiastic and joyous faith in the future, the great and wealthy
England had established herself in the van of the new age. Here Voltaire
saw with astonishment for the first time, when he arrived in London as
an exile at the age of thirty-two, the free, open life of a great
people; here he learnt to know a country where there is "much difference
of rank, but none that is not based on merit; where one could think
freely without being restrained by slavish terror." Here was the idea of
a modern free state already accomplished at a time when, upon the
Continent, the thunderclouds of the impending storm hardly cast their
first shadow. Here the notion of a united family life had first
developed, upon the foundation of a civil order and security. Here,
therefore, were first broken down those barriers around the territory of
literature and art within which the spirit of the Renaissance had raised
its wonderful flowers, and the road was begun along which the nineteenth
century should advance.
Simultaneously with the growth of the middle classes there arose the
need for a domestic, practical literature. Books were required which
people could read by their fireside, in the seclusion of the family
circle, in country districts. For that, the stiff and antiquated poetry
of courtiers and academicians, which had hitherto been poured out upon
the world from France, was hardly suitable.
To the cold Classicism represented by Pope, there succeeded in English
literature--far earlier than was the case elsewhere--the delineation of
what was immediately contemporary. At the same time that Mdlle. de
Scudéry--when it was a question of describing the court of the Great
King, the society of Louis XIV--felt herself bound to translate her
theme into the antique and write a _Cyrus_, the English novel had taken
its motives from actual life. Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ is the first
book in which man and nature are depicted without the introduction of
antique types or fairies; the first novel in which the details of real
life are displayed, and what had been hitherto neglected is granted an
exact delineation. At a time when people in other countries were
occupied with representations of the antique, the English novelists had
embarked on the intimacy of the family circle. After Richardson, who
laboriously yet with animation described everyday life, followed
Fielding, with his sharp observation, homely and humorous; then
Goldsmith, with his serene outlook of untroubled equanimity, his
unsurpassed miniatures; Smollett, with his crude and satirical character
sketching; and the audacious and witty Laurence Sterne, whom Nietzsche
has called the most "gallant" of all authors. At the same time tragedy,
too, descended from the court and the nobility into the sphere of
domestic life; showing that here too were significant fortunes and
conflicts, which stories strike a truer human note than those of kings
and heroes.
Painting moved along the same road; and whilst in other countries, with
the beginning of the century, the high, aristocratic art, which was the
offspring of the Renaissance, gradually waned, the plebeian paintings of
Hogarth laid the foundations of that art which prevailed in the
_bourgeois_ nineteenth century. English art had this advantage in
playing a pioneering part, that it had no old traditions to stand in its
way; it had no great past. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
England had been content to offer hospitality to Holbein and Van Dyck,
and to collect the works of foreign masters in her galleries. Her art
sprang into existence suddenly and unexpectedly at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, and thence developed exclusively on native lines.
Since the English could not lean either upon an old or a foreign model,
nor enter into a round of subjects that had already been brought to
perfection, they turned from the outset quite naturally into the road
which was only to be trodden later by the other nations still in the
bondage of tradition. They took up, to a certain extent, the thread
which the Dutch, who appeared in the seventeenth century as the most
modern people in art, had let drop: the progressive ideas of Holland had
come over to England with the "glorious revolution," with William of
Orange and Queen Anne; whilst in Holland itself the French invasion of
1672 had caused a reaction to the courtly idea, against which the
English took up an attitude of conscious and rigid protest. This
opposition is clearly expressed by the English æsthetic writers.
The most important name to be mentioned is that of Shaftesbury. Beneath
the favour of the court in France, he says, art has suffered. We
Englishmen live in an age in which freedom has arisen. Such a people
does not require, in order that art may prosper, an ambitious king to
breed, by means of his pensions, a race of flattering Court painters.
Our civil liberty affords us a sufficient foundation, and our liberty
leads us to _absolute verity_ in art.
Thus did Shaftesbury enunciate his leading æsthetic doctrine; it was his
constant message, and it was constantly repeated with great emphasis:
"All beauty is truth." "The search after truth leads you to nature."
"Truth is the mightiest thing in the world, since it exercises sovereign
rights over the creations of the imagination."
But what must art be in order to produce truth? "The strictest imitation
of nature." By this word Shaftesbury does not understand what we
understand by the word "nature"; not, in the first instance, so much the
nature surrounding us, in its outward manifestations, but, above all, an
intimate human reality. Let the painter represent the reality of human
_inwardness_. Still life, the animal world, landscape,--all that,
Shaftesbury explains, is most valuable. But another and a higher life
exists in man than in the beasts and the woods, and there is the true
object of art. In no case should the artist proceed from external
vision; for then he will obtain fashionable attitudes, theatrical
unreality, or, in the most favourable instance, a formal, decorative
embellishment. Of what value is that in comparison with a single real
presentation of character? How insignificant would every external form
seem in contrast to each single feature of this intimate manner! Here is
the second characteristic of English painting. It proceeds neither, like
that of the sixteenth century, from formulas, nor, like the Dutch, from
the picturesque, but, like to the English novel of character, from an
intellectual impulse; it strives not after beauty of form and physical,
sensuous grace, but, in the first place, after intellectual expression.
And from this there follows immediately a third trait. If art is to make
the inwardness of man its subject, the artist cannot remain an
indifferent portrayer. He will make great distinctions, will bring into
prominence what is meritorious or censurable in every character--he will
become a moralist. Only so can he conform to that last and highest
function which Shaftesbury assigns to the painter.
The liberty which the English nation had fought for in the "glorious
Revolution" brought forth, in the course of years, while Shaftesbury was
writing, a fruitful crop of dissoluteness and licence. The mortification
of the flesh of the Puritans was followed by so violent a recrudescence
of sensuality that it was as though the whole menagerie of the passions
had been unchained. London swarmed with criminals; drunkenness was an
epidemic. The moral idea awoke amongst the cultivated classes. Might it
not be possible, with the help of education, for that to be overcome?
And so Shaftesbury's view of art comprised a third, and very dangerous,
element; namely, that to fulfil the most serious mission of that culture
which had ensued from the free and natural conditions in England--even
in the realm of æsthetics--the painter, like the poet, must appear as
the moral teacher of his age. Imagine an artist who fulfils these
conditions and you have, as a result, _Hogarth_, with all his qualities
and defects.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
What marks the greatness of Hogarth is his freedom from foreign and
ancient influences. The eighteenth century came in as an academic age in
art. Turning away from life, it spent itself in allegory and the
imitation of typical figures that had been inherited from the
Renaissance and petrified into academic work. Gods, in whom no one any
longer believed, hovered, at least in paint, over a race which was
without enthusiasm. Then came Hogarth, and his quick vision discovered
the new way. He looked out upon the life surrounding him, with its
manifold idiosyncrasies, and felt himself with pride to be the son of a
new age, in which rigid, conventional forms were everywhere penetrated
by the modern ideas of free thought, the rights of man, conformity to
nature in morals and manners. This world which confronted him he
depicted truly as it was, in all its beauty and its ugliness. With him
was the origin of modern art. Before his paintings and engravings pale
idealism disappeared. It was he who resolved and set out to bring into
the world a new and independent observation of life. He was a painter
who, with as little aid from foreign influences as from those of the
past, went his own way and kept to it, and devoted his art, unblemished
by the pallor of a borrowed ideal of beauty, soberly and exclusively to
the realities of surrounding life.
"It seemed to me unlikely," writes he, "that by copying old compositions
I could acquire facility for those new designs which were my first and
greatest ambitions." Works of old Italian masters, artistic
contemplations, which went back to Raphael and the Caracci, were
ignored and ridiculed by him. His rude strength of painting, directed to
the living truth, was a protest against all that idealism which was the
heritage of the Renaissance, and had grown quite bombastic under the
hands of its imitators. Nature, he writes, is simple, plain, and true in
all her works; and with this principle he has founded a strong English
school on the solid foundation of truth to nature.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. THE HARLOT'S PROGRESS, PLATE VI.]
An Englishman by birth, character, and disposition, he depicted his
fellow-countrymen; he made his sketches in the midst of the hubbub of
the street. His world is London, the world-city, "old merry England,"
which, in contrast with the Puritanism of to-day, still lived through
its golden age of riot. In such a world--a world existing to this day,
only more decently berouged--moved Hogarth; in the company of
wine-bibbers, in gambling hells, in rooms of poets, in cellars of
highwaymen, in the death-chambers of fallen maidens. "The Harlot's
Progress," which he produced in a series of pictures, brought him his
first success. He then published further series of similar careers over
crooked courses--"The Rake's Progress," "Marriage à la Mode." He painted
the rabble of London, their society and their morals; those who went in
cotton and rags and those in satin and silk. In his writings he censures
the old painters plainly because in their historical style they had
quite passed over the middle classes. And he went with great knowledge
to these new subjects. In the National Gallery, which possesses the
originals of "Marriage à la Mode," one is astounded at the technical
qualities of Hogarth's painting. Whoever has been misled by the engraved
reproductions, and looks for bad, distorted drawing, may here learn to
know him as a painter in the fullest sense of the word. There is no sign
left of the defective caricature which disfigures the engravings; there
is a severe, unadorned manifestation of realism, of an art that has from
the outset rooted itself in modern life. Under the manners and graces of
the age Hogarth stands a "self-made" man, a healthy Anglo-Saxon
personality, full of sturdy independence and impeccable common sense. He
attracts by a sharpness of observation, a penetration into
idiosyncrasies of character, a grip upon the most trivial changes in
men's emotions and play of features, the like of which is to be found in
hardly one of his predecessors.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, PLATE II.]
Against these qualities it must be understood that an equal number of
defects is to be set off. The inartistic part of him was that he
followed the æsthetic theories of the age, and looked upon art as merely
a means to ends alien to itself. With him painting was an instrument to
disseminate the inventions of his poetic-satiric humour; it was a form
of speech to him. He is not unjustly called on that account a comedian
of the pencil, the Molière of painting. We look at other pictures, but
his we read. The commentaries on them are in some respects the rendering
back of the pictures into their proper element. Lessing called the drama
his pulpit; with Hogarth his art was a pulpit. He wanted, like Hamlet,
to "hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn
her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and
pressure." Pictures beneath his hands became moral sermons.
In the six pictures in "The Harlot's Progress," with which he started in
1733, and which to-day, since the originals have perished, can be
considered only in the copper engravings after them, all these
attributes are recognisable. Mary Hackabout comes innocent from the
country to the town with the intention of seeking a situation as a
servant-girl. She speedily falls a victim to temptation, becomes the
mistress of a Jewish banker, whom she soon loses by her infidelity,
descends to be a thief, and comes to the work-house. Released from
there, she becomes the companion of a highwayman, until she ends her
pitiful life in a disorderly house, leaving behind her a poor crippled
boy, who, at his mother's funeral, is playing with a top. The conclusion
of the paintings shows how the other women bid farewell to the corpse,
and buoy themselves up for their coming pleasures by drinking from the
spirit bottle, which stands on the coffin, while the priest, who is come
to give the blessing, announces his visit for the evening.
The second series, which is to be seen to-day in the Soane Museum,
describes in eight tableaux the somewhat similar life of a young man,
the "Rake." As an Oxford student he has promised marriage to a pretty
but poor girl, when suddenly the death of a wealthy uncle throws him
into the vortex of London life. He wishes to buy himself freedom from
his sweetheart, but she disdainfully refuses the money and supports
herself and her child honestly with the labour of her hands. The
seducer, winning fame in the world of women and sport, rapidly paces the
road to ruin; yet he repairs his finances once again by a marriage with
a rich and one-eyed old lady. Once more on his feet, he flings himself
into games of chance, and comes to the sponging-house, whither his
better half follows him. It is the last straw when a play which he has
offered to a manager is refused, and he can no longer buy himself a pint
of ale; there remains only the final fall into the misery of frenzy, and
in the last picture we find him amongst the lunatics bound in chains as
a madman. Only his student love, Sarah Young, of Oxford, whom he had
treated so scurvily, cannot forget him, and, with tears, seeks him out
again in the madhouse.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, PLATE VII.]
The third and most famous series was completed many years after the
"Rake"--in 1745. Hogarth has admittedly taken particular pains with the
six oil paintings of "Marriage à la Mode," which have been placed in the
National Gallery; and these painted novels reveal in strength and beauty
of execution the high-water mark of his work as a painter. The whole is
quieter, simpler, less overloaded with ingenious accessories. The
impoverished lord has married his son, who is already worn out with
excesses, to the strong and healthy daughter of a city alderman. A girl
is born; then they go their separate ways. The husband surprises the
wife with a lover, and is stabbed by him; the unfaithful wife, moved by
this, begs her dying husband for forgiveness. As a young widow, deprived
of her woman's honour, she goes back to the _bourgeois_, Philistine
ennui of her father's house, and when she learns of her lover's
condemnation she escapes from the burden of her misery by means of
poison. The father is sufficiently provident to take the wedding ring
off her finger before the body is cold, lest it should be stolen from
the corpse. In the last sequence Hogarth passed over completely to the
moral sermon and the study of crime. The series "Industry and Idleness,"
in 1747, was comprised in twelve sheets, which he produced only in rough
engravings, as he wished exclusively to influence the masses. Two
apprentices enter a cloth-weaving business at the same time, of whom one
rises, through his zeal for the interests of the business, to a marriage
with his master's beautiful daughter, to the rank of alderman, and
finally to be Lord Mayor of London. The idle apprentice grows, on the
down grade, from a gambler into a vagabond. He is transported, comes
back again, and ends on the scaffold. The two comrades meet for the last
time when the honest man announces his death-warrant to the knave.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, PLATE VIII.]
Garrick, as we can see from his epitaph on Hogarth, has not unjustly
characterised his art, in these words--
"Farewell, great painter of mankind!
Who reached the noblest point of art,
Whose pictured morals charm the mind,
And through the eye correct the heart."
[Illustration: HOGARTH. MARRIAGE À LA MODE, PLATE V.]
Hogarth painted stirring and humorous scenes, full of effective
morality, with which he sought to cheer, terrify, and improve humanity.
His five-act tragedies end always with the triumph of Virtue and the
punishment of Vice. As one of his contemporaries said, he exercised the
art of "hanging in colours." The twelve plates of the parallel
biographies of "Industry and Idleness" he employed as an illustrated
weekly sermon for the benefit of the working classes, and he was able to
observe with satisfaction that they had an actual influence on the
conduct of the people, as instanced in the diminution of gin shops. Yet
for all that, in the elevation of public morality, the highest aim of
art is not, as Garrick asserted, fulfilled. Who has ever seen such a
painter? Would he be a painter? It is exactly by this moralising with
the brush that Hogarth stands in such abrupt opposition to his
predecessors, the Dutch. They were painters, nothing but painters, and
in their painting reckoned on eyes which could appreciate their
pictorial subtilty. Man was for them a patch of colour; the real delight
of their eyes was the rich light that came mellowed through the shadows,
and played upon the ruffed garments and the clumsy forms. With Hogarth,
in the place of the idea of colour, the anecdote is brought in. He saw
the world not so much with the eyes of the painter, as with those of the
physician, the criminologist, the pastor. The familiar element, that
serene and comfortable observation of an everyday occurrence upon which
Dutch art was based, has altogether disappeared in his pictures. He did
not paint because something pictorial urged him, but saw in men the
actors of the parts which he had in his mind. This departure from the
purely picturesque is in part explained by the predominance of
literature in England at that time. In a country where the tragedy of
familiar life as well as the domestic novel had arisen there was
imminent peril that a young school of painting working without
traditions should branch off also on to those lines. Hogarth desired to
give painting a new manner; he seized upon what was epic or dramatic,
and painted the pictorial counter parts to Smollett's and Richardson's
novels. In the age of enlightenment the painter makes way for the
writer. With this idea he himself wrote: "I have endeavoured to treat my
subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, my men and women
my players, who, by means of certain actions and gestures, are to
exhibit a dumb show."
[Illustration: HOGARTH. THE ENRAGED MUSICIAN.]
Moreover, to explain the growth of this sort of literary hybrid, one is
forced to consider the changed conditions under which painting was
introduced into England at large. Art, which hitherto had shone forth
her enchantment upon the few, was conducted from the first in free
England along the broad road of popularity, and given over to a public
which had to be educated to art by degrees; and this admission of the
mass of the people to the enjoyment of art, in a proportion hitherto
unheard of, must inevitably have a retrogressive effect upon painting
itself. Instead of the earlier amateur of really distinguished culture,
there stood "the People."
But just as in the Middle Ages works of art were seen to be a sort of
picture-writing for the people--_picturis eruditur populus_, said
Gregory the Great,--so now the new patrons could hardly require other
than those works of art in which a story was pictorially told. These
could be understood even by the man whose understanding was otherwise
wholly closed to matters of art; and hence it came about that almost all
the _genre_ painters--for very nearly a century--followed with more or
less intelligence in the footsteps of Hogarth. To treat him, as is
frequently done, because of this popularisation of art, because of this
transformation of the picture into the picture story, as a pattern
instance of tastelessness, would lead to very dangerous consequences,
and should be the less employed because Hogarth's pictures are, at
least, comparatively well painted, whereas many of his successors could
escape the deluge only in the Noah's Ark of their talent for narration.
What Hogarth could do when he put off the schoolmaster, he has shown
moreover in his portraits. There he is an entirely great painter. His
pictures have none of that Van Dyck elegance, which had become the mode
in England before him; they are robust, crude, Anglo-Saxon, strongly and
broadly painted withal, sketches, in the best sense of the word. His
"Shrimp Girl," in the National Gallery, for instance, is a masterpiece
to which the nineteenth century can hardly produce a rival.
In the history of painting it is notorious that the latter half of the
last century belongs especially to portraiture, and here the English
occupy the first rank. Neither Hogarth nor Reynolds nor Gainsborough was
a genius like Titian, Velasquez, or even Frans Hals. Their art is not to
be compared with that of the greatest of all portrait painters, but they
surpassed all the painters of the eighteenth century; they were not only
the greatest in England since Van Dyck, but the first portrait painters
in Europe at the time.
[Illustration: HOGARTH. GIN LANE.]
Reynolds and Gainsborough lived almost at the same period. The former,
born in 1723, died in 1792; the latter, born in 1727, died in 1788. They
had as models men and women of the same society. They went the same
road, side by side. Many celebrities strayed from one studio to the
other, and were painted by Reynolds as well as by Gainsborough. These
are just the pictures which show us so distinctly how widely the two,
who were usually mentioned in the same breath, differed from each other
in spite of having grown up on the same soil. Even their outward man
displays this dissimilarity.
Reynolds appears in his "Portrait of Himself" in the Uffizzi Gallery at
Florence, in the red mantle of the President of the Academy, the
official cap on his head, while the hand resting on the table holds a
copy of his _Discourses_; close by is a bust of Michael Angelo. The
complexion is that of a man who sits much within doors. A pair of
spectacles with large, round glasses leads one to conclude that he
injured his eyesight early with much reading. Gainsborough, with his
refined Roman nose, the haughty, curved sensuous lips, and the
expression of his face which speaks at once of innocence and refinement,
gives an impression far more than Reynolds of the child of nature and
the gentleman. His cheeks are fresh and rather ruddy; a depth of soul
lies within the large blue eyes, that are somewhat melancholy, yet have
such a free outlook upon life.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
_Joshua Reynolds'_ father was a clergyman, a most learned man, who kept
a Latin school. He gave the boy, it is recorded, that most uncommon
Christian name, for the remarkable reason that he hoped thereby to draw
the attention of a great personage, who bore the same name, towards his
young namesake. His son was to become a physician. But books on other
subjects which he read at his desk at school made a greater impression
on the boy. In the well known _Treatise on Painting_, by Richardson, he
discovered his vocation. From the perusal of this book he developed a
taste for things artistic, studied the works on perspective of Pater
Pozzo, read everything he could find on art, and copied as a preliminary
all that fell into his hands in the way of woodcuts and copper
engravings. One of the earliest drawings which remain from his childhood
represents the interior of a library. At the age of nineteen he came to
London to a well-known master, Hudson, the favourite painter with the
gentry of the day, who required £120 with a pupil. He was already
convinced that only in London could he find the means to attain fame,
and even as early as 1744 he took a fine establishment and kept open
house in order to attract attention. He was soon in a position to
complete his artistic education by means of residence in Italy. In 1746
he had painted the portrait of a Captain Keppel, who shortly afterwards
was appointed Commodore of the Mediterranean squadron, and invited the
young painter to go for a cruise in his ship. They sailed in 1749, and
Reynolds was able to spend three years in Italy.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
REYNOLDS. MRS SIDDONS.]
His first impression was one of bitter disappointment. Where was that
rich colouring in the Italian classics which he had been led to expect
from English mezzotints? Everything struck him as lifeless, pale,
insipid. Whereupon he affected the opinion that there was no more to
be seen in Rome. Raphael, in particular, appeared to him to be a
mediocre painter, whom only a remarkable chance had brought to such a
pitch of fame. Surrounded by the great masterpieces of the Cinquecento,
he employed himself in drawing caricatures, and made a sort of travesty
of the _School of Athens_, in which he drew caricatures of the English
colony in Rome at that time, in the attitudes of figures in the pictures
of Raphael. But he very speedily changed his opinion, and began to
follow the paths of the great dead. He went indefatigably through the
galleries of Rome, from Rubens to Titian, from Correggio to Guido and
Raphael. He studied so hard in the Vatican, that he took a chill in the
cold rooms, which left him all his life a little deaf. That sojourn at
Rome was to Reynolds what, a hundred years later, his visit to Spain was
to Lenbach.
He had already at Hudson's acquired great facility as a copyist, and of
Guercino, in particular, he had made numerous copies. During this
Italian tour, however, he became the greatest connoisseur of old masters
that the eighteenth century possessed.
It is related that the Chevalier Van Loo, when he was in England in
1763, vaunted himself one day, in Reynolds' presence, upon his unfailing
discrimination in telling a copy from an original. Whereupon Reynolds
showed him one of his own studies of a head, after Rembrandt. The
Chevalier judged it to be, indisputably, a masterpiece by the great
Dutchman.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. DR. JOHNSON]
He left Rome in April 1752, and made a further visit to Naples, to the
cities of Tuscany, and to Venice. The careless notes of travel that he
made on this journey show the clear insight which he had attained into
the Italian schools. They all deal with questions of technique, on
effects of light and shadow, on the mystery of _chiaroscuro_. For
Titian, in particular, he had an extravagant devotion,--he would ruin
himself, he said, if he might only possess one of the great works of
Titian.
When he returned to England in 1752, at the age of thirty, his talent
was fully developed, and the connoisseurs were unanimous in hailing him
as a new Van Dyck. With the portrait of Miss Gunning, afterwards the
Duchess of Hamilton, he appeared in 1753 as a power in English art. As
early as 1755, when Hogarth was compelled to give up portrait painting
for lack of patrons, one hundred and twenty-five persons sat for
Reynolds, and after that about one hundred and fifty people were painted
by him annually; and this brought him in a yearly income of about
£16,000.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. GARRICK AS ABEL DRUGGER.]
At first he took up his quarters in St. Martin's Lane, which was then
the most fashionable place of residence for artists; but in 1760 he
bought a house, No. 47 Leicester Square, the most select quarter of
London, and furnished it with the most palatial splendour. The studio,
which he built for himself, was as large as a ballroom, and furnished
with a quite modern luxury. The large corridor that led to it had a
gallery of pictures by old masters. It was the age of the great literary
and dramatic revival in England. Garrick stood at the zenith of his
popularity, Burke had already made himself a name, Johnson had produced
his _Dictionary_, Richardson had reached the summit of his fame,
Smollett had written _Peregrine Pickle_, Gray had attracted notice by
his verse. All these and others who set the vogue in literature and the
drama, the principal figures in politics, the leaders of fashion,
lounged in that luxurious studio and gossiped with Reynolds of the
theatre, both before and behind the scenes, of the doings in Parliament
and the scandal of the Court, of literature and of art. At the time when
Goldsmith was putting the finishing touches to his _Travels_ he was a
guest of the house. Gibbon, the historian, and Sterne, whose
_Sentimental Journey_ was just then the talk of the town, spent their
vacant hours with him; and Burke as well, while he discussed with him
his treatise on the _Sublime and the Beautiful_. All these claimed a
niche in Reynolds' portrait gallery, where all the talents were met
together. The whole English nobility also flocked to him. For forty
years onwards from 1752 it was considered the proper thing to be painted
by him. His pictures were multiplied immediately at the hands of the
engravers. In the complete catalogue of Reynolds' works, Hamilton
counts, so far back as 1820, no fewer than 675 plates, engraved after
Reynolds by more than a hundred artists, and amongst these the
mezzotints of Samuel Cousins are by far the finest. Only an incredible
industry, enabling him for a long succession of years to paint almost
without intermission with a facility and regularity like that of Rubens,
rendered it possible for Reynolds to complete, exclusive of portraits,
quite a number of religious and mythological pictures, of which he
himself was especially proud. He painted with great speed and dexterity,
rose very early, breakfasted at nine o'clock, was in his studio
punctually at ten; and there till eleven he worked on pictures which had
been commenced. On the stroke of eleven the first sitter arrived, who
was succeeded by another an hour later. Thus he painted till four
o'clock, when he made his toilette, and thenceforward belonged to
society, for in spite of his scholarly temperament one can by no means
consider Reynolds as a solitary eccentric. Although he remained a
bachelor after Angelica Kauffmann had declined his hand, his house was a
central gathering-point for noble London. He gave balls to which the
whole of "Society" was invited, and drove in a magnificent carriage,
with coachmen in blue and silver liveries. The Literary Club was founded
at his instigation, where with Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and
Garrick he shared in conversation both profound and brilliant. He was
made a baronet, and when the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, became
its first president. The dinners of the Academy, which he organised at
the distribution of prizes, play a part in the history of English
cookery. Reynolds had promised that on each of these reunions he would
speak on some question of art. In this manner originated, during his
twenty-three years of office, those fifteen discourses upon painting
which show the highest result of his literary energy. They were not his
maiden essays. As far back as 1758 Johnson had invited him to publish an
article upon Art in a journal which he had founded, _The Idler_. In 1781
he made a journey through Holland and Flanders, upon which, anticipating
Fromentin, he wrote an exceedingly fine book. In his _Discourses_ so
high a degree of literary talent was displayed that they were at one
time said to be the work of Johnson or Burke.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. HEADS OF ANGELS.]
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. SAMUEL RICHARDSON.]
They are æsthetic treatises and essays in the history of art, of an
enduring value. Originating from a vast insight, and expressed in a
precise style, they treat of the laws of classic art, the variation in
styles, the causes of the finest bloom in art. Certainly eclecticism is
preached too. The modern artist, it is declared, can only stand on the
shoulders of his forebears. The great Italians must be his models, and
of these the greatest is Michael Angelo. His last essay closes with
these words: "I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear
testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man, and I should desire
that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy, and from
this place, might be the name of Michael Angelo."
When he died, his friend Edmund Burke wrote in the funeral oration which
he dedicated to him: "Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on many accounts, one of
the most memorable men of his time. He was the first Englishman who
added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his
country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the
richness and harmony of colouring, he was equal to the greatest masters
of the renowned ages.... In full affluence of foreign and domestic fame,
admired by the expert in art and by the learned in science, courted by
the great, caressed by sovereign powers and celebrated by distinguished
poets, ... the loss of no man of his time can be felt with more sincere,
general, and unmixed sorrow." He was buried with great pomp in St.
Paul's Cathedral. The pictures left unfinished at his death fetched at
auction £37,000; the whole fortune which he left is estimated at
£80,000.
The biography of _Thomas Gainsborough_ reads quite differently.
The traveller who rides from London to Birmingham passes through some of
the fairest scenery in the island. He finds himself in the heart of
fresh and tender English nature. Small rivulets flow through the gently
undulating country. Wide meadows clothe the soft hollows in the valleys
with abundant green. In grassy enclosures deer and roes are feeding;
they push forwards inquisitively as the train passes. Fragrant linden
trees rise dreamily in the suave, park-like landscape, through which the
Stour winds along like a riband of silver. On the bank of this
enchanting stream Thomas Gainsborough, the son of a simple clothier, was
born. Reynolds' vocation had been brought about through the perusal of a
book. In the scenery and the woods that were in the neighbourhood of his
home, Gainsborough, who was so alive to all the beauty of nature,
received the decisive impression of his life. Here he roamed as a boy,
while he neglected his school lessons. "Tom will be hung some day,"
reflected his schoolmaster; "Tom will be a genius," thought his parents.
He sketched the parks and castles of the neighbourhood. In his later
life he used to say that there was no picturesque old tree trunk, no
meadow or woodland glade or stream within a four-mile radius of Sudbury,
that he did not retain a recollection of from his childish years. Like
Constable, when he was an old man, he still thought with gratitude of
his home, of all that beauty upon which he had looked, and which had
made him a painter. Here, in the green woods and fresh pastures of his
birthplace, he trained himself. At the age of ten he was a painter.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. MISS REYNOLDS.]
A sojourn of four years in London seems to have added little to his
ability. Elegant in his manners, lively in his conversation, a born
gentleman, he might have become completely the man of fashion. But he
was far too diffident, with his naïve simplicity, to force himself
amongst the stars of the world of art in London, far too distinguished
and retiring to join in the race after the favour of the public, and so
at the age of eighteen he returned to his native place with the
unencouraging prospect of playing the part of a simple painter in the
provinces. First and last, the woods remained his chief delight. One
morning, as he was painting there, he looked up from his easel and saw a
young and beautiful girl in a light summer dress, peeping coquettishly
from behind the trunk of a tree. She blushed, he spoke to her shyly.
Soon afterwards Margaret Burr became his wife, and the whole history of
his life with her remains a charming idyll, like the spring morning on
which he made her acquaintance. Married at the age of nineteen, he
installed himself at Ipswich, his wife's native place, and there he
spent fifteen years in great happiness, firm in the conviction that he
would end his days there. There he painted his first portraits, which,
from 1761, were forwarded by a carrier's cart to London for exhibition
in the Royal Academy. From Ipswich he went to Bath, the fashionable
watering-place, where he painted the visitors who came in the summer for
the cure. Finally, in the end his portraits met with approval in London.
That gave him courage in 1764 to proceed thither himself; and there he
took very modest rooms. On his arrival he was as yet very little known;
he came from the provinces, which he had till then never left, at a time
when Reynolds stood at the pinnacle of his fame, and had visited Italy
and Spain. Yet he gradually won a reputation. Franklin was one of the
first to sit to him. Soon he became the favourite painter of the king
and the royal family. George III was painted eight times by him, Pitt
seven times, Garrick five. Lord Chancellor Camden, Sir William
Blackstone, Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Richardson, Burke, Sheridan, Mrs.
Graham, Lady Montagu, Mrs. Siddons, Lady Vernon, Lady Maynard, and the
names of many other celebrities and beauties are bound up with his. His
life-work, excluding sketches, consists of no more than three hundred
pictures, of which two hundred and twenty are portraits--a very small
number in comparison with the four thousand paintings of Joshua
Reynolds. Thomas Gainsborough painted irregularly. Even when he was in
his studio he might be seen standing for hours gazing out of his window
dreamily at the grass. In other features of his life too he was equally
different from Reynolds: unaccountably, he was one moment a brilliant,
animated companion, the next plunged in melancholy. He dreamed much,
while Reynolds painted and wrote. In the evenings he usually sat at home
with his dear little wife, completed no treatises or discourses on his
art, but made sketches or sometimes music. Reynolds was a
scholar-painter, Gainsborough a painter-musician. It was said of him
that he painted portraits for money and landscapes for amusement, but
that he made music because he needs must. He collected musical
instruments as Reynolds did a library. Even in his pictures he gives his
people, for preference, violins in their hands. To the Musical Club
which he had founded in Ipswich he remained faithful all his life, and
in that neighbourhood, or in Richmond or Hampstead, he spent the summer
every year. Here amidst that green nature it was also his wish to be
buried. His funeral was a very quiet one. In the peaceful graveyard at
Kew, Thomas Gainsborough sleeps tranquilly under the shady willows, far
from the noise and tumult of the great city. Sir Joshua said at his
grave: "Should England ever become so fruitful in talent that we can
venture to speak of an English school, then will Gainsborough's name be
handed down to posterity as one of the first." Yes, one might say
to-day, as the first of all.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. EDMUND BURKE.]
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. MRS. ABINGTON.]
Joshua Reynolds is certainly a great painter, and deserves the high
veneration in which his compatriots hold him. It is not without a
certain awe that, in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy, one can
look upon the armchair that he used during his sittings, upon which all
who were famous in eighteenth-century England have sat. Reynolds is one
of the greatest English portrait painters, and, resembling most the
classical masters, showed in the highest degree the qualities we admire
in them. His colouring is of an amazing softness, depth, and strength;
his _chiaroscuro_ is warm and vaporous. There are portraits by him
which, in the subtlety of their tone, resemble the best of Rembrandt's;
others, whose noble colouring approaches the _chef-d'oeuvres_ of Van
Dyck. Master of the whole mechanism of the human body, he possessed in
the highest degree the rare art of setting persons surely and
unconstrainedly on their feet. His portraits are pictures; one needs no
whit to be acquainted with the persons they represent; they satisfy as
works of art in themselves, and as psychological studies by a man who
had the capacity of sounding the depths of the human heart. The complete
catalogue of all those who sat for Sir Joshua during the space of half a
century forms an uninterrupted commentary on the contemporary history of
England.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. EDMUND MALONE.]
There we see the skilful portrait of Sterne, with his look of witty
mockery; the marvellous Bohemian, Oliver Goldsmith, who even then had
the manuscript of his _Vicar of Wakefield_ in his pocket; Johnson, who,
in one, sits at his writing-table, on which stands an ink-pot and a
volume of his _English Dictionary_, and in another is peering into a
book with his short-sighted eyes screwed up tightly, and his whole
posture awkward and unwieldy. Garrick, who went from one studio to the
other, appears also more than once in Reynolds' portrait gallery.
Amongst his portraits of military dignitaries, that of General Lord
Heathfield, the famous defender of Gibraltar, whom he painted in full
uniform, is one of the most noticeable. Strong as a rock he stands
there, with the key of the fortress in his hand. What a contrast between
these figures and those of the contemporary French portraits! There,
those friendly and smiling ministers, those gallant and dainty
ecclesiastics, those scented, graceful marquises, who move with such
elegant ease about the parquet floor, and from whose faces a uniform
refinement has erased all the roughness of individuality; here,
expressive, thoughtful heads, characters hardened in the school of life,
many of the faces coarse and bloated, the glance telling of cold
resolution, the attitude full of self-reliant dignity and gnarled,
plebeian pride. The same _bourgeois_ element predominates in the
pictures of the ladies. Van Dyck's noble, eminently intellectual figures
always wore the glamour of the Renaissance. In the background an
artistically arranged curtain, a column, or the view of the quiet
avenues of some broad park. From Reynolds we get strong active women in
their everyday clothes, and with thoughtful countenances: good mothers,
surrounded by their children, whom they kiss and enfold in a tender
embrace. The idea of half-symbolical representation has vanished, and in
its place is introduced the idea of home and the family. The pictures of
children by this childless old bachelor were an artistic revelation to
the existing generation, and are the delight of the world of to-day. In
other portraits of ladies, that noticeable characteristic of the English
nation, their predilection for domestic animals and for sport, finds an
expression. The beautiful Duchess of Devonshire he painted as she gently
restrained with her finger her little daughter's caresses, which would
fain have disordered her _coiffure_; a whole gallery of noble ladies he
represented feeding their poultry or petting their lap-dogs; Lady
Spencer in her riding-habit, her whip in her hand, her horse reined in,
her cheeks flushed from her gallop. Nelly O'Brien looks an actress, a
woman who turned men's heads, and she does it still to-day in Reynolds'
picture. There lurks something enigmatic, perplexing in the smile of
this sphinx--only Monna Lisa had such a smile, but Nelly's eyes are
deeper, more desirous. One feels that in the three centuries since Monna
Lisa love has taken on a new and subtler _nuance_. The portrait of Mrs.
Siddons is the most famous of the pictures of actresses which Reynolds
painted, and Mrs. Siddons, of all the women of that time, is the one
whose portrait occupied the painters most. She was the daughter of Roger
Kemble, the actor, and sister of that pretty actress, Mrs. Twiss, whose
portrait by Reynolds (in 1784) we also have, and of the famous John
Philip Kemble, who figures so often in the portrait gallery of Lawrence,
as Hamlet, Cato, Coriolanus, Richard III, etc. Born to the boards, as it
were, she had, when still a child, joined her parents on their Thespian
pilgrimages, and had had many engagements in the provinces, at
Birmingham, Manchester, and Bath, before she was recruited by the
playwright Sheridan for the Drury Lane company in London. She made her
_début_ there on 10th October 1782, and was hailed forthwith as the
greatest actress of her time. Lady Macbeth was her great part; in that
she was painted both by Romney and Lawrence. Reynolds painted her as the
Tragic Muse. A diadem encircles her hair, she sits upon a throne, the
throne rests upon clouds. Behind her stand two allegorical beings, Crime
and Remorse, two quite unfortunate figures. But the principal figure is
truly great, in its noble, regal attitude, and quite unconstrained in
its dramatic pose. Reynolds had the composition in his mind many weeks
before Mrs. Siddons sat for him in the autumn of 1783. "Take your seat
upon the throne for which you were born, and suggest to me the idea of
the Tragic Muse." With these words he conducted her to the pedestal. "I
made a few steps," the actress relates, "and then took at once the
attitude in which the Tragic Muse has remained." When the picture was
finished, says Sir Joshua, gallant as ever: "I cannot lose this
opportunity of sending my name to posterity on the hem of your garment."
And he, who hardly ever signed his pictures, wrote in large characters
his name and the date on the gold-embroidered border of the dress. The
original picture has been in the possession of the Grosvenor family
since 1822; a second copy is in the gallery at Dulwich.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. OLIVER GOLDSMITH.]
Reynolds loved to depict his sitters in mythological or historical
settings. Thus he painted Mrs. Hartley, her son as a nymph and the
youthful Bacchus, the three Misses Montgomery as the Three Graces
crowning a term of Hymen, a little girl sitting on the grass as the "Age
of Innocence," Lady Spencer as a gipsy telling her brother's fortune,
Mrs. Sheridan as St. Cecilia. The five "Heads of Angels," as they are
called, in the National Gallery, are five different studies of the
lovely child-head of little Isabella Gordon. Garrick, in one of his
pictures, is set between the allegorical figures of Tragedy and Comedy.
Reynolds himself was frankly proud of these portraits in the mood of
history. He was, as he said, in general only a portrait painter because
the world required it; that which he aspired after was the great manner
of historical painting. Nevertheless, pictures, such as the "Little
Hercules with the Serpent," "Cupid unfastening the Girdle of Venus,"
"The Death of Dido," "The Forbearance of Scipio," "The Childhood of the
Prophet Samuel," or "The Adoration of the Shepherds," do not cause us to
deplore too bitterly that he rarely found time for such mythological and
historical pictures. His _putti_ are derived from Correggio; in the
arrangement of drapery he resembles Guido; in his "Venus" he is a
coarser Titian. Reynolds' own manner in these pictures is merely the
eclectic accumulation of the peculiarities of the old masters--he
brought no new element into historical painting.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. LADY COCKBURN AND HER DAUGHTERS.]
And herein lies his principal weakness. Hogarth declared: "There is only
one school, that of nature." Reynolds: "There is only one doorway to the
school of nature, and of that the old masters hold the key." The great
men of old were for him the object of constant and conscious thought. He
has endeavoured in his writings to propound a sort of general foundation
of painting, has adopted the principles of the best painters in every
land, was indefatigable in exploring the secrets of the old
masterpieces, and has therefore won the praise of having set the English
school, which had hitherto possessed no perfected tradition of painting,
technically on firm feet. He was the founder of a scientific technique
of painting derived from the ancients,--the Lenbach of the eighteenth
century. Upon the mixture of colours, the gradations of light and shade,
technically and æsthetically, no artist has pondered more than he, who
knew the great Netherlanders, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt, as well
as, or better than, his particular favourites, the Italians. He made
experiments all his life long to discover the stone of the wise
Venetians; but he met with the same experience as Lenbach. And these
experiments in the direction of the colour effects of the old masters
were the bane of his pictures' durability. It was well said by Walpole:
"If Sir Joshua is content with his own blemished pictures, then he is
happier than their possessors, or posterity. According to my view, he
ought to be paid in annual instalments, and only so long as his works
last." And Haydon opined that "Reynolds sought by tricks to obtain
results which the old masters attained by the simplest means." He
endeavoured by means of asphaltum to give his pictures the artistic
tones of the galleries, with the result that, to-day, the majority have
lost every sign of freshness.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. BISHOP PERCY]
With regard to the pose also, and similar conceptions, one can never
quite get away from the thought of Van Dyck and other old masters.
Reynolds' chief endeavour, not only as regards colouring, but also in
other respects, was to resemble the ancients, and this has brought into
his pictures something imitative and laboured. He dearly loved the
Romans and Venetians; we believe to-day that he loved almost too dearly
the Bolognese. And just that fine, artistic education which he received
in Italy and Holland, and the scientific method in which he practised
his art, did harm to Reynolds, and brought into his pictures too much
reminiscence, too many alien touches. He has in most cases understood
it--how to bring into uniformity the numerous borrowings of his palette,
all that he had taken from Leonardo, Correggio, Velasquez, and
Rembrandt. Yet he has never quite forgotten the old masters and looked
only at his model, for the sake of the very daintiest lady or the
freshest English boy. For his children he thought of Correggio's
"Cherubim," for his schoolboys of Murillo, for the portrait of Mrs.
Hartley of Leonardo da Vinci, for that of Mrs. Sheridan of Raphael.
There lacked in him that spontaneity which denotes the great master. By
his erudition in art, Sir Joshua elevated himself on the shoulders of
all who had preceded him. He obtained thereby the piquant effects in his
portraits, but it was at the price of the penalty that from many of his
works it is rather a rancid odour of oil and varnish which exhales than
the breath of life.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. THE GIRL WITH THE MOUSETRAP.]
Gainsborough can certainly not be compared with Reynolds in the mass of
his work. He was master neither of his powers of industry nor of his
smooth and brilliant methods of painting that were always sure of their
effect. In many of his pictures he gives the impression of a self-taught
man, who sought to help himself to the best of his power. Just as little
has he the psychological acuteness of Reynolds. A portrait painter puts
no more into a head than he has in his own; thus the acute thinker,
Reynolds, was able to put a great deal into his heads, whilst
Gainsborough, the dreamer, was often enough quite helpless when he
confronted a conspicuously manly character. In his whole temperament a
painter of landscape, before his model too he sat as before a landscape,
with eyes that perceived but did not analyse. What, with Reynolds, was
sought out and understood, was felt by Gainsborough; and therefore the
former is always good and correct, while Gainsborough is unequal and
often faulty, but in his best pictures has a charm to which those of the
President of the Academy never attained. Gainsborough, too, at his death
murmured the name of an old master. "We are all going to Heaven, and Van
Dyck is of the company." But what distinguishes him from Reynolds, and
gives him a character of greater originality, is just his naïve
independence of the ancients, which resulted partly from the different
nature of his education in art. Reynolds had lived for two years in Rome
and explored all the principal cities of Italy, had visited Flanders and
Holland, learnt to wonder at Rembrandt, and developed an enthusiasm for
_chiaroscuro_. Gainsborough in his rural seclusion had been able neither
by travel on the Continent to study the great masters of the past, nor
to assimilate the traditions of the studio. He contented himself with
the beauties which he saw in his native country, studied them in their
touching simplicity, without troubling himself about academic rules. He
lived in London until his death, without once leaving England; and that
gives to his pictures a distinct _nuance_. The one studied pictures and
books, the other only the "book of nature." His portraits never aim at
any external effect, nor are they raised into the historical; they seek
to give no other impression than that of a quite subjective truth to
nature, both in arrangement and in colouring. Nothing intruded between
his model and himself, no "sombre old master" obscured his canvas. His
execution is more personal, his colour fresher and more transparent. The
very personages seem with him to be more elegant, more gracious, more
modern than with Reynolds, in whose work, through their kinship to the
Renaissance, they received a suggestion of style, classical and ancient.
In his pictures the Englishman is clearly revealed, an Englishman of
that delicacy and noble refinement which is present to a unique degree
in the works of English painters of the present day.
[Illustration: REYNOLDS. DR. BURNEY.]
The passage from Hogarth to Gainsborough marks a chapter in the history
of English culture. Hogarth is the embodiment of John Bull; you can hear
him growl, like some savage bull-dog. That brutal, indecorous robustness
of England's aggressive youth becomes, in Gainsborough's hands,
agreeable, refined, gentle, and seductive. Reynolds, with his robustness
as of the old masters, might be best compared with Tintoretto;
Gainsborough, in his quite modern and fantastic elegance, is a more
tender, subtle, and mysterious spirit, poet and magician at once, like
Watteau. There one listened to the full, swelling chords of the organ;
here to the soft, dulcet, silvery notes of the violin. Reynolds loved
warm, brown and red tones; Gainsborough essayed for the first time, in a
series of his happiest creations, that scale of colour, coldly green and
blue, in which to-day the majority of English pictures are still
painted. Everything with him is soft and clear; the tone of those blue
or light yellow silks, which he loved especially, is that of the most
transparent enamel; the background fades away into dreamy vapour, the
figures are surrounded with an atmosphere of seduction. What a
masterpiece he has created in the "Blue Boy," his most popular and most
individual picture. One can describe every piece of the clothing, but
it is impossible to reproduce the harmony of the painting, the rich,
pure blue of the costume, which stands out against a lustrous, brown
background of landscape. How the stately youth stands, noble from head
to foot, in the brown and green autumn landscape, with its canopy of
sky! Master Bootall was by far the most elegant portrait painted in
England since Van Dyck, and withal of a nervosity quite new. See that
youthful pride in the gaze, that mobile sensibility in the pose!
[Illustration: THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH.]
Have men grown different, then, or does the painter see further? One
finds in Van Dyck no such expressively _nervous_ physiognomy. The
suggestion of melancholy, the deep reverie, the noble, aristocratic
haughtiness,--Gainsborough was the first to discover that, and give it
its full expression. And the same man who painted the noble elegance of
this youthful _grand seigneur_ depicted also peasant children coming
fresh from the green fields and woodlands of their village homes. In Sir
Joshua's children there was often something borrowed from Correggio; the
children of Gainsborough breathe a rustic charm, an untamed savagery;
they are the very offshoots of nature, who disport themselves as freely
as the wild things in the woods. But his women in particular are
creatures altogether adorable. While Reynolds, the historical painter,
liked to promote his into heroines, those of Gainsborough, with their
pure, transparent skins, their sweet glances (in which there lies so
admirable a mixture of languishing fragility, innocence, and coquetry),
are the true Englishwomen of the eighteenth century. His "Mrs. Siddons"
is not in theatrical costume, but in a simple walking-dress; no Tragic
Muse, but the passionate, loving woman who once, a romantic, impulsive
miss, escaped from a convent at the risk of her life, to join a handsome
young actor of her father's troupe who had entirely fascinated her. What
a charming grace in the pose, what fine taste in the arrangement, what
wonderful purity of colouring! With the exception of Watteau, I know of
no older master who could have painted such moist, dreamy, sensuous,
tender eyes. The marvellous "Mrs. Graham," in the National Gallery of
Scotland, is, from the purely pictorial standpoint, perhaps the greatest
of all his works. Yet how beautiful is the double portrait of that young
married couple, the Halletts, who, tenderly holding hands, pass along a
deserted path in some secluded garden; or that pale, languishing "Mrs.
Parsons," with her enchanting smile, and that mysterious language of the
eyes. Gainsborough was no keen observer, but he was a susceptible,
sensitive spirit who intercepted the soul itself, the play of the
nerves, the slightest suggestion of spiritual commotion. There moves
through the majority of his portraits a pathetic tenderness, a breath of
dreamy melancholy, that the persons themselves hardly possessed, but
which he transfused into them out of himself. Melancholy is the veil
through which he saw things, as Reynolds saw them through the medium of
erudition. Reynolds was all will and intelligence, Gainsborough all soul
and temperament; and nothing can show the difference between them better
than the fact that Reynolds, who had formed his style on early models,
when he had no sitters painted historical pictures; whilst Gainsborough
in like circumstances painted landscapes. Herein he was a pioneer,
whilst Reynolds was an issue of the past.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. MRS. SIDDONS.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. WOOD SCENE, VILLAGE OF CORNARD, SUFFOLK.]
In the domain of landscape painting, too, the new germs of naturalism,
which had ventured above ground on all sides in the fifteenth century,
had been again stunted in the Great Renaissance. The theory had been
promulgated in the sixteenth century--in accordance with the idealistic
methods of the age--that it behoved the painter to improve upon nature
just as much as upon the human body. With the lofty style of the great
figure painters, and their artfully pondered composition, there
corresponded a school of landscape which was likewise conceived of, in
the first degree, as an honourable, architectural framing for a
mythological episode. England too possessed, in _Richard Wilson_, a
believer in this doctrine, which became so widely promulgated in the
seventeenth century through the influence of Claude Lorraine. The home
of his soul was Italy. He scraped together a small sum of money by
portrait painting, borrowed the rest, and felt himself in his element
for the first time when he had reached Venice. Here, at the instance of
Zucarrelli, he became a painter of landscapes, and was aided in his
endeavours by Joseph Vernet in Rome. He was on the way to become a
painter in great request, and in many of his pictures he shows a most
delicate notion of well-balanced and gracious composition in the manner
of Claude. But his success was of no long duration. Wilson, like so many
other of his contemporaries, had the fixed idea that the Creator had
only made nature to serve as a framework for the "Grief of Niobe" and as
a vehicle for classical architecture. The interpolated stage scenery of
trees and the classic temples of this English Claude, contain nothing
which had not been already painted better by the Frenchman. When the
king, in order to assist him, asked him on one occasion to represent Kew
Gardens in a picture, he composed an entirely imaginary landscape and
illuminated it with the sun of Tivoli. The king sent him back the
picture, mordant epigrams appeared in the journals, and Reynolds scoffed
at him in his Discourses. After that Wilson spent his days in the
alehouse, until he got delirium, and died half starved at the age of
seventy.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. THE MARKET CART.]
The patriotic English were too much bound up with their own soil to
acquire a taste for the exotic, ideal scenery of Wilson. There existed
in them that patriotism, that feeling for home, which had turned the
Dutch of the seventeenth century into landscape painters. In this
province also they were destined to step in, as the inheritors of the
Dutch, to bring the germ of intimate landscape to its full fruition.
Lovely and luxuriant valleys with their soft grass, sweet woodlands with
their vari-coloured foliage, golden, swaying cornfields and picturesque
little cottages, with that indescribable softness of atmosphere, must of
themselves direct the eye of the writer and the painter to all these
beauties. It was an Englishman who in the eighteenth century wrote the
most memorable book upon the charms of nature. James Thomson, in his
_Seasons_, is the first great nature painter amongst the poets. Taine
finds the whole of Rousseau anticipated in him. "Thirty years before
Rousseau, Thomson had forestalled all the sentiments of Rousseau, almost
in the same style." He has not only, like Rousseau, a profound feeling
for the great wild aspects of nature, for the forms of clouds, effects
of light and contrasts of colour, but he delights also in the smell of
the dairy, in small birds, in the woodland shadows, and the light on the
meadows,--in all things sequestered and idyllic.
"Nature! great parent! whose unceasing hand
Rolls round the Seasons of the changeful year,
How mighty, how majestic are thy works!
With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul
That sees astonished and astonished sings."
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. THE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. THE SISTERS.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GAINSBOROUGH. THE WATERING PLACE.]
It was a remarkable chance which ordained that Thomas Gainsborough, the
first man who as a painter depicted the gracious charms of the country
of his birth, the comeliness of its expanses of deep green lush meadows,
the strength of the lofty, wide-spreading trees, as seen with the eyes
of a lover, should be born in the spring of the same year in which
Thomson's _Spring_ appeared. That he knew and admired Thomson is proved
by his dedication to him of that delightful "Musidora" in the National
Gallery, a lovely woman bathing her feet in some shady forest pool. It
is said that he only sent half a dozen landscapes to the Academy during
the eighteen years that he exhibited there. On the other hand, they hung
in his house in Pall Mall in long rows on the walls of his studio. After
his death his widow held a sale, at which fifty-six landscapes were
sold. Gainsborough must be accounted one of the moderns, so naïve and
intimate is the impression which his pictures produce. He, who passed
his whole youth in the idyllic loveliness of the woods, was fitted to be
the delineator of that mellow English nature. He understood the murmur
of the brooks and the sighing of the winds. Like his own life, so
regular and peaceful, gently swaying as though to the friendly
elements, are the trees in his pictures, with their peaceful
tranquillity; no storm disturbs the calm of a Gainsborough picture. His
was a contented, harmonious spirit, like Corot's. His landscapes know no
tempestuous grandeur; they are a playground for children, a place for
shepherds to rest. "The calm of mid day, the haze of twilight, the dew
and the pearls of morning," said Constable, "are what we find in the
pictures of this good, kindly, happy man.... As we look at them the
tears spring to our eyes, and we know not whence they come. The solitary
shepherd with his flock, the peasant returning from the wood with his
bundle of faggots, whispering woods and open dales, sweet little peasant
children with their pitchers in springtime,--that is what he loved to
paint and what he painted, with as much sought-out refinement as with
tender truth to nature." His landscapes are like windows opening on the
country, not compositions, but pieces taken straight out of that
fruitful English nature. Every year he used to return to his green
pastures, and paint very early, when the sun rose. Before him rose a
cluster of trees, all round the farm the flocks were grazing, thousands
of busy bees flew buzzing from flower to flower; goats, with their kids,
were feeding in the meadows, wild doves cooed, and the birds in the wood
sang their praises to the Creator. Thus do the landscapes of
Gainsborough affect us. They are soft and tender as some sweet melody in
their discreet intimacy, without colorist effects, as wonderfully
harmonious as nature herself. A thatched cot, that peeps timidly from
between the great trees, a silvery dale shut in by weeping willows, a
bridge leading to some lush, green meadow,--those are Gainsborough's
materials. The famous "Cottage Door" is now at Grosvenor House. A young
peasant woman, with her youngest child in her arms, is standing by the
door of a country cottage, before which her other children are playing,
some half naked; deep contentment is all around, huge old oaks spread
their sheltering branches over the roof on both sides; golden rays of
sunshine dance across the meadow. Only Frederick Walker has, in later
days, painted such peasant women and such children, at once so tender
and so natural. Of the four pictures in the National Gallery, "The Wood
Scene," "The Watering Place," "Market Carts," and "Peasant Children,"
"The Watering Place" is the most celebrated. In the foreground a quiet
pasture with cows, close by the herdsman, a Suffolk labourer; in the
background a noble old Norman castle, perhaps Hedingham Castle, near
Sudbury. It is through pictures like these that England has become the
native-land of intimate landscape--_paysage intime_.
As figure painters, as well as landscape painters, the English in the
eighteenth century laid a course of their own, and it was not long
before the other nations followed them.
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF ART ON THE CONTINENT
Goethe compared the history of knowledge with a great fugue: the parts
of the nations first come to light, little by little; and this analogy,
already once made by Hettner, holds true in a very high degree of the
history of art during the eighteenth century. The three great nations of
culture--the German, the English, and the French--take up their parts in
turn, and through all there sounds one common, equal, dominant note.
England was in the vanguard of that great period of struggle known as
the age of enlightenment. Since the middle of the eighteenth century
English influences had begun to fertilise the Continent. The truth and
naturalness of English ideas were introduced as models, and England
became in her whole culture the schoolmistress of the Continent. In
every region war was declared against the pedantry brought over from the
past, while new conditions were aimed at. Obviously it was not so easy
for other nations to take their stand on the basis of modern society.
England had accomplished her revolution in the seventeenth century;
France was only preparing herself for hers. For all other nations, too,
the eighteenth century was a transition period, in which the old and the
new civilisation of culture were parting--an age of prodigious
controversy, full of _Sturm und Drang_. Men did homage to every kind of
extravagance, and went into ecstasies over virtue. The sarcasm of
scoffers went hand in hand with the deepest sentimental feeling for
nature; superstition flourished by the side of enlightenment and
learning; in the _salons_ of the aristocracy courtly abbés file past
with the greatest thinkers, glowing with a holy zeal for the rights of
man. And, in the midst of all this contradiction, there exists that
simple, virtuous middle class which is preparing to make the ascent
which will lead it to power.
One may imagine oneself in a salon of the _ancien régime_, in which wit
is lord, and laughter and merriment reign. Into that salon enters
abruptly a rough plebeian, with none of the fine tact of that company,
yet a great, aristocratic spirit, a man who despised such a society and
would make the world anew. Such is one's impression of the effect
produced at the time by the appearance of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Voltaire was the first on the Continent to break through social
barriers, but none the less he coined his heart for gold in society.
Rousseau signifies a great advance: he gave up his place, laid aside
rapier, silk stockings, and perruque, and clothed himself after the
manner of a common man in order to earn his bread as a copier of music.
He is, as Weigandt has called him, the first man of the _bourgeois_
century, the first pioneer of the new age. Against the traditions
bequeathed by the past, which in the course of time had become
over-refined and corrupt, he set up the natural conditions demanded by
reason. His fight against inequalities of rank is, as it were, a
foretaste of the revolution. "What hellish monsters are these
prejudices. I know no dishonourable inferiority other than that of
character or education. A man who is trained to an honourable mind is
the equal of the world; there is no rank in which he would not be in his
place. It is better to look down upon nobility than upon virtue, and the
wife of a charcoal-burner is worthy of more respect than the mistress of
a prince." Those were words in which the coming revolution was presaged.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF GOYA. BY HIMSELF.
_From: "Los Capriccios."_]
The _Nouvelle Heloise_ appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later followed
Goethe's _Werther_, that history of a young Titan whose zeal for liberty
felt all the partition walls of Society to be prison walls, and who rose
against everything that was ceremonial, against all the subordinations
of the social hierarchy, against all trivial and rigid rules of prudent
everyday life. Werther abhorred rules in every sphere. "One can say much
in favour of rules, about as much as one can say in praise of
_bourgeois_ society." He scoffed at the Philistines, who daily went
along the same measured way. He saw in "Society," having hitherto moved
in the simple world of the _bourgeois_, "the most sacred and the most
pitiful emotions wholly without clothing." And this Society outraged
him, and sent him with contumely from its midst. "Working folk carried
him to the grave, and no minister of religion followed him."
Soon afterwards young Schiller came upon the scene with his first works,
which were a declaration of war against all the foundations of human
society, those manifestoes of revolution which, were they new writings
to-day, no Court Theatre would dare to produce. The fierce, rampant
lion, with the inscription "In Tyrannos," which was displayed on the
title-page of the second edition of the _Robbers_, was an intimate
symbol of the deep revolutionary spirit that inspired the whole age. "I
grew disgusted with this ink-stained age, when I read in my _Plutarch_
of great men. Fie, fie upon the flaccid, castrated century, that has no
other use than to chew over again the deeds of the past. Let me imagine
an army of fellows like you, and I see a republic arising in Germany, in
comparison with which those of Rome and Sparta would be convents of
nuns." In a loud voice _Ficsco_ proclaims itself on the very title-page
to be a "republican" tragedy. _Intrigue and Love_ even aims full at the
rottenness and corruption of the actual time. It can be traced--and
Brandes has done it in his _Haupströmungen_--how in the literature of
the age, the life of sensibility and idealism prevailing in the previous
century gradually dwindles, and in its stead quite modern progressive
views--religious, political, and social--surge up in an ever-increasing
wave. The authors were the bold inciters to the battle. They were all
leaders in the battle for liberty against fossilised tradition,--some in
the field of poetry only, others in the whole sphere of intellectual
life. These are they who gave the signal for the war-cry of the
Revolution--Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; who rent asunder the old
society, inaugurated the age of citizenship, and were at the same time
the first to lose, as quite modern spirits, their faith in another
world.
[Illustration: GOYA. THE MAJAS ON THE BALCONY.]
A wonderful chance ordained that, in the province of art, the most
powerful figure of that storm and tumult, the one artist of the age of
the race of Prometheus, to which belonged the young Goethe and the young
Schiller, should be born in the most mediæval country in Europe, on
Spanish soil. Against an art that was more catholic than catholicism,
courtly and mystical, there came by far the greatest reaction in Goya.
From Roelas, Collantes, and Murillo to him there is hardly any
transition.
_Francisco Goya_ preached Nihilism in the home of belief. He denied
everything, believed nothing, doubted of everything, even of that peace
and liberty which he hoped to be at hand. That old Spanish art of
religion and dogma was changed under his hands to an art of negation and
sarcasm. His attitude is not that of an insolent and impetuous youth,
who puts out his tongue at the Academy and strikes with audacious hand
at the academicians' high powdered perruques; it is the attitude of the
modern spirit, which begins by doubting all things which have been
honoured hitherto. His Church pictures are devoid of religious feeling,
and his etchings replete with sneers at everything which was previously
esteemed as authority. He scoffs at the clerical classes and the
religious orders, laughs at the priestly raiment which covered the
passions of humanity. Spanish art, which began in a blind piety, becomes
in Goya revolutionary, free, modern.
[Illustration: (_Laurent, photo._)
GOYA. THE MAJA CLOTHED.]
Goya is, in his whole nature, a modern man, a restless, feverish soul;
nervous as a _décadent_; temperament to his finger-tips. His style in
portraiture, his art of composition, his whole method,--all speak to our
artists to-day in a language easily understood, and on many of them the
influence of Goya is unmistakable. He is one of the most fascinating
figures of the beginning of the century. As audacious as he was clever,
as versatile as he was fantastic, a keen observer as well as a strong
creative spirit, he fascinates and astonishes in his pictures, just as
in his wonderful etchings, by a remarkable mixture of the bizarre and
the original. His pictures, whether they be violent or eccentric, tender
or hard, gloomy or joyous, nearly always move and palpitate with life
itself, and they will always keep their attraction. There is no one of
Goya's pictures, not even the flimsiest sketch, at which one can look
coldly.
He was born in a village in the province of Aragon, the son of a small
landed proprietor, in 1746. At the age of fourteen, having already
painted frescoes in the church of his native-place, he went to Saragossa
as an apprentice; and there he showed himself to be vivacious and
passionate, and soon became the champion among his comrades in all their
pastimes and brawls. Restless, and always thinking of adventure, he
refused every regular kind of education, disarranged everything in his
master's studio, worked when he could, drew his sword when he had a mind
to, nourished in his head dark thoughts on liberty, came and went and
loved, dallied with his knife, snapped his fingers at the Inquisition,
which was after him, and fled from Madrid,--such was he at twenty, and
such he remained all his life.
[Illustration: (_Laurent, photo._)
GOYA. THE MAJA NUDE.]
Italy, whither he fled on account of a duel, did not alter him. There
were new love quarrels. He fought, stabbed a rival, was wounded himself,
amused himself extremely, studied little, observed, admired, but neither
painted nor copied anything. It was thanks to this indolence that the
great past did not take him prisoner. He did not know much, but for what
he knew he could thank himself. He loved the old painters, but
platonically; their works did not lead him astray. In this lies the
explanation of his qualities and his faults: that marvellous mixture of
seductive grace and visible weakness, of subtlety and brutality, of
refinement and ignorance. He merits equally sympathy and blame, is as
genial as he is unequal. But one would not wish him to be otherwise: if
there had been more order and proportion in his works his good qualities
would have been lost. He would have suffered in spontaneity, vivacity,
originality, and quietly taken his anchorage in the sleepy haven of
mediocrity. As he is, he is wholly the child of his country: from head
to foot a Spaniard of the eighteenth century, a son of that downfallen
Spain that was dying from loss of blood. For hundreds of years a black
cloud, extinguishing all joy, had hung over Spanish life, a cloud out of
which, only here and there in dismal lightning flashes, there emerged
obscure figures of sombre despots, sick ascetics, and silent martyrs.
All mundane inclinations were suppressed, all sensuous desires
prohibited. Men spent their nights with their eyes fixed upon the gory
histories and passionate exhortations of the Old Testament, hearing in
imagination the menacing, thunderous voice of a dreadful God, until at
last in their own hearts the fanatical inspiration of the prophetic seer
awoke anew, and their feverish forms were torn asunder by ecstatic
visions and religious hallucinations. When Goya began his career the
sinister country of the Inquisition had grown frivolous. A breath of
revolution was passing over men's minds. An intoxicating odour of
mundane voluptuousness penetrated everywhere, even into the convents
themselves; the figures of the French Rococo Olympus had brought
confusion into the Christian paradise. Spain no longer believed; it
laughed at the Inquisition, trembled no more when it was threatened with
the pains of Hell. It had grown frivolous, wanton, epicurean, full of
grace and laughter. The rosy-red and blue shepherds of the Trianon had
made an entry into the sombre Court of Aranjuez. Literature, taste, and
art were infected by French influences, Parisian sparks of wit,
lightning _esprit_, and Parisian immorality; and the same rumbling
earthquake which wrecked the throne of France was soon to shatter that
of Spain. In Goya's works there is a refulgence of all this. But, like
every great artist, he is not only the expression of his epoch, but also
its leader; he almost anticipates the age which shall succeed it. Like a
figure of Janus, on the border-line between two centuries, standing in a
manner between two worlds, he was the last of the old masters and the
first of the moderns--even in that special sense in which we employ the
word to-day.
[Illustration: GOYA. DE QUE MAL MORIRA.
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
Through a commission to design cartoons for the Spanish manufactories of
tapestry, he was brought into contact with the Court. Member of the
Academy of San Fernando in 1780, Pintor del Rey, with an income of
12,500 francs in 1786, he became soon afterwards the Director of the
Madrid Academy--the drollest Director of an Academy that man can
imagine! Goya, the peasant youth, with his bull neck and matador-like
strength, lived at the Spanish Court in the midst of the enervated
scions of a dissolute aristocracy, who, with their sickly and anæmic
features, indolent and impotent, skulked through life, young men
prematurely old. Naturally he was the idol of the women, hated by the
courtiers on account of his caustic wit, a terror to all husbands
because of his perpetual intrigues, and at the same time feared as the
best swordsman in Madrid, who drew his rapier with the indifference with
which we light a cigarette.
It is only as the outcome of such a personality that his works are to be
understood.
[Illustration: GOYA. SOPLONES.
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
Goya was far too great a sceptic to put a religious sentiment into
matters in which he no longer believed; his talent was far too modern
for the religious abstraction to be able to seize him. His "Christ on
the Cross," therefore, in the Museo del Prado, is simply tedious, a bad
academical study. His frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida, at Madrid,
exhibit a pretty, decorative motive--considerable movement, grace, and
spirit. But amongst them are angels who sit there most irreverently,
and, with a laugh of challenge, throw out their legs _à la_ Tiepolo. The
chief picture represents St. Antony of Padua raising a man from the
dead. But all that interested him in it were the lookers-on. On a
balustrade all around he has brought in the lovely, dainty faces of
numerous ladies of the court, his _bonnes amies_, who lean their elbows
on the balcony and coquette with the people down below. Their plump,
round, white hands play meaningly with their fans; a thick cluster of
ringlets waves over their bared shoulders; their sensual eyes languish
with a seductive fire; a faint smile plays round their voluptuous lips.
Several seem only just to have left their beds, and their vari-coloured,
gleaming silks are crumpled. One is just arranging her coiffure, which
has come undone and falls over her rosy bosom; another, with a
languishing unconsciousness and a careless attitude, is opening her
sleeve, whose soft, deep folds expose a snow-white arm. There is much
_chic_ in this Church picture. One very immodest angel is supposed to be
the portrait of the Duchess of Alba, who was famed for her numerous
intrigues.
[Illustration: GOYA. SE REPULEN.
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
In his portraits, too, he is unequal. He became the fashionable painter
at the court. The politicians, poets, scholars, great ladies, actresses,
all the famous folk of his epoch, sat to him. He daubed more than two
hundred portraits; but they were good only when the subject amused him.
His portraits of the Royal Family have something vicious and plebeian.
He is too little in earnest, too little of an official, to paint court
pictures. One might imagine that he with difficulty restrained himself
from laughing at the pompous futility which stood before him. It
irritated him to be obliged to paint these great lords and ladies in
poses so ceremonial, instead of making them, like the angels of San
Antonio, throw up their legs and skip over parapets. The Queen, Marie
Louise, is frankly grotesque; and the family of Charles IV look like the
family of a shopkeeper who have won the big prize in a lottery, and been
photographed in their Sunday clothes. But, ah! when something gives him
pleasure! In the Exhibition of Portraits at Paris, in 1885, there was
the portrait of a young man, dressed in gray, which excelled
Gainsborough for grace. With what a noble nonchalance this young elegant
stands there, reminding one, in attitude and costume, of the
_incroyables_ of Charles Vernet. With what equanimity does he look out
on life, in his satisfaction at the good fit of his clothes. The
wonderful harmony of the grey tones was rendered with all Gainsborough's
delicacy. The same man who in those pictures of ceremony let himself go
in a manner so brusque and frenzied, here revelled, a very Proteus in
his chameleon-like qualities, in soft and mellow and seductive tones.
One might say that he has thought here of Prudhon and Greuze, and joined
their study to the cult of Velasquez.
[Illustration: GOYA. QUE PICO DE ORO!
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
Still more charming was he in his pictures of young girls, when he was
himself fascinated by the attractions of his subjects. The infantile
Donna Maria Josefa (at the Prado) and the twelve-year-old Queen Isabella
of Sicily (at Seville) are admirable pictures. In them the candour and
grace of budding youth, the whole poetry of young maidenhood, have won
life and expression from the enamoured tenderness of an artist hand.
Seduced by beauty, he renounced all irony, thought only of those big,
wide-opened eyes of velvet, those rosy young lips; of that warm
carnation and the elegant slimness of that soft young neck that rose in
delicate contour from the shoulders. Or again, that marvellous double
portrait of La Maja in the Academy of San Fernando: a young girl painted
once clothed and once nude, both pictures in exactly the same pose, and
both flooded with the same extraordinary sensuous charm. This is not the
uncertain, sarcastic painter of those State pictures. It is an attentive
observer, who depicts with sensitive devotion the harmonious lines of
the irradiating, young, human body so worthy of celebration. The
transparent stuff that covers the body of "La Maja clothed" reveals all
that it hides; in the other picture the unveiled nudity sings the high
pæan of the flesh. The drawing is sure, the modelling of a marvellous
tenderness. The heaving bosom, the slender limbs, the tantalising
eyes--every part of that nervous body, with its ivory whiteness,
stretched out on the milk-white couch made for love, breathes of
pleasure and voluptuousness.
In pictures of this kind Goya is wholly one of us. Grown independent of
every traditional rule, he abandoned himself entirely to his own
impressions, and produced enduring works, vibrating with life, because
he was himself fascinated with nature. He showed here an idea of
modernity that almost makes him seem a contemporary of our own--that
zeal for the pictorial, for colour and light, which attracts us so much
to-day. Very characteristic also of the changed aspect of the age are
his designs for the famous tapestry in Santa Barbara, with which he made
his début at Madrid. They are very crude in decoration. Two or three
neat young girls, with big, black, moist eyes, here and there pleasing
details--a couple of men carrying a wounded companion--are unable to
gloss over the heaviness of the composition and colour. But it was of
great consequence that Goya should have had courage for so bold a step
as to make use of character scenes in decorative painting at a time when
everywhere else, without exception, _fêtes champêtres_ predominated.
[Illustration: GOYA. VOLAVERUNT.
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
In his oil paintings he went much further in this direction. In that
impetuous manner peculiar to him he endeavoured to get a firm grip on
the pictorial side of Spanish life, at home and in the streets, wherever
he found it. The most fearful subjects--such as the two great slaughter
scenes in the French invasion, painted with such breadth and
fierceness--alternate with incidents of the liveliest character.
Everything is jotted down, under the immediate influence of what has
been observed, by rapid methods, and on this account produces an effect
of sketches taken with complete directness from nature. In those
careless pictures, swept with large strokes of the brush, there rises
before us the mad drama of public holiday in the streets and in the
circus: processions, bull-fights, brigands, the victims of the plague,
assassinations, scenes of gallantry, national types--all observed with
the acuteness of a Menzel. The Majas on the balcony in the Montpensier
Gallery, the "Breakfast on the Grass," the "Flower Girl," the "Reaper,"
the "Return from Market," the "Cart attacked by Brigands," are the most
piquant, vividly coloured of these pictures. The "Romeria de San
Isidoro" is full of such a sparkling, stirring life as the most modern
of the impressionists alone have learned again to paint. A few dashes of
colour, a few well-placed, bold strokes of the brush, and at once one
sees the procession move, the groups passing each other by just as, in
the marvellous sketches of the funeral of Sardina, in the Academy of
San Fernando, one can see the young couples revolve madly in the dance,
and the lances of the bull-fighters redden the sand of the arena.
The superabundance of such phantasy could not, of course, be achieved by
the tardy brush. He required a quicker medium, that would permit him to
express everything. Therefore he executed his numerous etchings, by
which he was rendered famous, before people had learnt to appreciate him
as a painter: the "Capriccios," the "Malheurs de la Guerre," the
"Bull-fights," the "Captives"--those marvellous and fantastic pages in
which he expressed everything that his feverish, satirical soul had
accumulated for contempt, and hatred, and anger, and scorn. The etcher's
needle was the poisoned dagger with which he attacked all that he wished
to attack: tyranny, superstition, intrigue, adultery, honour that is
sold and beauty that lets itself be bought, the arrogance of the great
and the degrading servility of the little. He made an awful and jovial
hecatomb of all the vices and the scandals of the age. Whomsoever he
pilloried was laid bare in all respects; physically and morally, no
single trait of him was forgotten. And he did it so wittily that he
compelled even the offended person to laugh. Neither Charles IV himself,
nor the Court, nor the Inquisition, which bled most beneath his thrusts,
dared to complain.
[Illustration: GOYA. QUIEN LO CREYERA!
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
In his "Capriccios" Goya stands revealed as a figure without even a
forerunner in the history of art. Satirical representations of popular
superstitions, bitter, mordant attacks on the aristocracy, the
government, and all social conditions, unprecedented assaults on the
crown, on religion and its doctrines, inexorable satires upon the
Inquisition and the monastic orders, make up this most remarkable book.
It had hardly appeared in 1796 before the Inquisition seized it. Goya
parried this stroke, however, by dedicating the plates to the king.
A painter and a colorist, in this book he displays his genius as an
etcher. The outlines are drawn with light and genial strokes only; then
comes the _aquatinta_, the colouring which overspreads the background,
and gives localisation, depth, and light. A few scratches of the needle,
a black spot, a light produced by a spot of white ingeniously left
blank--that sufficed to give life and character to his figures.
[Illustration: GOYA. LINDA MAESTRA!
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
The "Misères de la Guerre" are intrinsically more serious. All the
scenes of terror that occurred in Spain as a sequel to the French
invasion and the glory of Napoleon here utter their cry of lamentation.
A few plates amongst them are worthy of comparison with the finest of
Rembrandt's,--the sole classic for whom Goya cherished a veneration. All
the undertakings which followed these--the "Bull-fights," the
"Proverbs," the "Captives," the fantastic landscapes--tell of a long
study of the great Dutch master. Especially celebrated were the
seventeen new plates which he added to the "Malheurs de la Guerre" in
1814, at the time of the restoration of Ferdinand VII. They are the
political and philosophical testament of the old liberal, the keen
free-thinker, the last and utmost fight for all that he loved against
all that he hated. With sacred wrath and biting irony he waged war
against the intrigues and hypocrisy of the obscurantists who throttle
progress and suppress freedom of thought. With passionate wrath he
rushed upon kings, priests, and dignitaries. It seems incredible that
the plate entitled "Nada"--a dead man, who comes out of his grave and
writes with his corpse-fingers the word "Nada" (nothing)--that this
plate can be the work of a Spaniard of the eighteenth century.
Everywhere there is the same hatred of tyranny, of social injustice, of
human stupidity, the same incredulous effort after a dimly conceived
ideal of truth and liberty.
It is neither the amiable fairyland of Callot nor the _bourgeois_
pessimism of Hogarth. Goya is more inexorable and acute; his phantasy,
borne on larger wings, takes a higher flight. He sees direful figures in
his dreams, his laugh is bitter, his anger rancorous. He is a
revolutionist, an agitator, a sceptic, a nihilist. His _chronique
scandaleuse_ grows into the epos of the age. One understands why such a
man should no longer feel secure in Spain, and, towards the close of his
life, go into exile in France.
There, too, in the home of the revolution, art, ever since the beginning
of the century, had freed herself more from the tradition of the
Renaissance, and betaken herself to the new way, which the Dutch, and
soon afterwards the English, had laid down in the seventeenth century.
[Illustration: GOYA. DEVOTA PROFESION.
_From "Los Capriccios."_]
All that had been produced in Paris, up to the close of the seventeenth
century, had had its birthplace in the Italy of Leo X. The light of the
Italian Renaissance had suffused France ever since the appearance of
Rosso and Primaticcio. Rome had been the cradle of Simon Vouet and
Nicolas Poussin. France endeavoured, in rich decoration and masterly
swing of lines, to overtop the Italians, whose formulæ were studied
partly in Rome and partly in the Palace of Fontainebleau, that Rome _in
petto_. Those religious pictures of Lebrun, arranged in panels, appeared
with their theatrically elegant attitudes and their flowing drapery,
with their slim, oscillating limbs and their florid gestures. All
Olympus, all the saints and the heroes, were set to work to do honour to
the great king. Was it necessary to glorify his acts, then it was done
by portraying him as Cyrus or Alexander. The people of the seventeenth
century did not exist for painters. Lebrun and Mignard, as inheritors of
Roman culture, hovered over life without seeing it. Their ideals were a
hundred and fifty years old, ingenious variations on the
sixteenth-century pattern.
Then came the death of the _Grand Monarque_, and with him the tradition
of the Renaissance went also to its grave. The old age was outworn, and
the new began to supersede it. The world was weary of the majestic, the
stiff, and the pompous, whose glamour had blinded it for sixty years.
The sun-king was dead, and the sun of the Italian Renaissance had set.
French society breathed once more. The ostentation of the court had
become an onerous ceremony, the monarchical principle an unendurable
constraint. The nightmare that had oppressed it, the ennui that had come
from Versailles, disappeared. Air and light and mirth penetrated the
salons. People shook off the heavy yoke of majesty from their shoulders,
abandoned their heroic, ostentatious palaces, and bought themselves
_petites maisons_ in the _Bois_. They had suffered, they wished to be
glad; they had been bored, they wished to be amused. Enough of
pater-nosters and stately etiquette! they wished to live. Away with the
antique temples and goddesses of Poussin! away with those devoted
martyrs who mortified themselves and killed the flesh! Away with the
semblance of the heroic, with pomp and glamour, with the service of God
and the service of lords! Here's to the service of the ladies. Here's to
the thatched roofs of farmhouses; the woods in whose thickets one can
lose one's way and exchange a kiss; rosy flesh and little turned-up
noses; everything which gave a thrill of voluptuousness after the
unapproachable, icy-cold nobility of the past. Long live Love!
[Illustration: "_L'Art._"
GOYA. OTRES LEYES POR EL PUEBLO.]
So thought France when Louis XIV was dead, and the man was already grown
up in the Low Countries who was chosen to give a shape to these dreams,
to abolish the ascendency of gods and kings and heroes, and to show the
upper classes their own image reflected in the mirror of art.
_Antoine Watteau_, who guided the stream of French art into this new
channel--of the Netherlands--was by birth and training a Fleming. His
birthplace, Valenciennes, although French territory since the Peace of
Nymeguen, resembled in its whole character a Flemish town. In the church
here he first saw any of Rubens' pictures. Here, through Gérin, he
became instructed in Flemish traditions. Rubens and Teniers are the two
masters from whom his own art sprang. During the years when the war of
the Spanish Succession had changed the French frontier provinces into a
huge military camp, he painted soldiers and camp scenes, such as the
"March" in the collection of Edmund Rothschild, where a party of
recruits are straggling along a high plain in a fierce storm. Later came
pictures of country life in the manner of Teniers, like the "Retour de
Guinguette," engraved by Chedel, a landscape in which on the right a
party of rustics are carousing at a table in front of a farmyard, while
on the other side half-drunken men and women are going home. Louis XIV
had made before the pictures of Teniers his well-known _mot_: "_Otez moi
ces magots_." Now, through Watteau, the _magot_ makes its entrance into
French art. Thus in his chief picture in this manner, "La Vraie Gaieté,"
the figures are unmistakably after Teniers. The men are short and
sturdy, entirely Flemish. Only the costumes have changed with the mode.
But the women are not in the least Flemish. The clean caps and tidy
kerchiefs, the freshly ironed aprons, and neat little feet that trip so
lightly and quickly along the street that no dirt seems to soil them,
give these peasant girls a certain desirability in which it is not hard
to discover the transition to French grace. The elegant motions and fine
heads point to that Watteau who was to become soon afterwards the
unsurpassable delineator of feminine coquetry.
Gillot and Rubens led him into the new road. The Teniers-like character
of his figures disappeared, they became gracious and noble. In place of
the _magot_ came elegant French society. Gillot was the first in Paris
to break with the pompous Louis XIV style, and to begin the
representation of the cheerful life of comedians, to replace the
dwellers in Olympus by characters of the French and Italian stage.
Rubens had been the first in his "Garden of Love," of the Dresden and
Madrid Galleries, to invite to the embarkation for the Island of
Cythera. Watteau acquired something from everyone he studied, and yet
resembles none. After having hitherto sought his personages on the
highways and in camps, he was now to become the painter of _fêtes
galantes_, the painter of "Society." For in his shepherds and
shepherdesses there lives the elegance of France. The gods of the
Renaissance, in whom no one any longer believed, glided into the
costumes of Harlequin and Pierrette. In lieu of the great and the
pathetic there came the small, the gay, the graceful, the dainty. The
architectural symmetry of composition disappeared, and the stiff
stage-scenery character of landscape vanished. The grave formality of
geometrical construction is changed into freedom and joyousness, just as
the rhetorical, exact, measured periods of Boileau were relaxed, under
the hands of Voltaire, into sentences unconstrained, buoyant, and crisp.
Watteau's art betokened the triumph of naturalism over the mannerism
into which the French art of the seventeenth century, based on the
Italian Renaissance, had dwindled. As it is said in an old poem--
"Parée à la Françoise, un jour Dame Nature
Eut le desir coquet de voir sa portraiture.
Que fit la bonne mère? Elle enfanta Watteau."
Watteau became for French art what, a hundred years before, Rubens had
been for Flemish--the deliverer. He delivered them from the oppressive
yoke of the Italian tradition. In his world, where there were no longer
any naked goddesses, but where the corset was opened only just wide
enough to reveal a rosy bosom, there was nothing more left of the past.
It is no longer antique beauty, no longer the plastic cold of the "Venus
di Milo," no longer the marble perfection of Raphael's "Galatea." Into
those tender, feminine hands, into those lace sleeves, out of which
snow-white arms come languishingly forth, into those slender waists, and
teasing, dimpled chins, something of coquetry, of sensibility, something
subtle and spiritual, has entered, that seems to transcend physical
beauty. His young men are tall and supple, his women entirely
indescribable, with their air of quiet roguishness and their exquisite
coiffures. Quite modern is that distinguished sense for costume which
made him a leader of fashion. Mysterious landscapes, that exhale peace
and happiness all around! Rightly has Edmond de Goncourt called him a
lyric poet, the great poet of the eighteenth century.
[Illustration: ANTOINE WATTEAU.]
[Illustration: WATTEAU. LA PARTIE CARRÉE.]
In this way the development proceeded. The pompous representation which
portrait painting had practised hitherto was gone. People would no
longer be masters of the ceremonies, but human beings. New forms of
technique were discovered, such as pastel painting. No other material
was capable of rendering the peculiar fragrance of this fugitive flower
nature, the graceful appearance of this _rococo_ style, of these ladies
with the touch of powder in their hair, and their moist, dreamy eyes, as
Maurice Latour, Rosalba Carriera, and later the Swiss, Liotard, painted
them. Of those who endeavoured, on the model of Watteau's style, to
depict the life of the fashionable world, none approached the delicacy
of that national genius. _Lancret_ and _Pater_ followed him, but more
roughly, more soberly, more drily. Lancret in his whole conception,
compared with Watteau, is a homely, often a somewhat cumbrous
journeyman; Pater, an artist of greater elegance, has the fickleness of
the virtuoso. Both in conviction and in art they lacked that poetic,
glorifying breath which pervades Watteau's creations. In Watteau one
_believes_ that these gracious beings, these tall and nervous cavaliers,
these amiable coquettes and comely women, actually represent originals
in noble society; whereas in the works of his disciples it often happens
that the paid model, selected from a lower circle of society, appears to
us to be not congruous with the elegance of her wardrobe. These dancers,
huntsmen, and noble maidens are not wholly what they should represent.
But how delicious they are, these French gossips, so long as one is
mindful _not_ to think of Watteau! What grace is theirs too! What innate
tact! With what a pleasant adroitness do they understand how to rivet
our attention, and to keep far, far away from the tedium in which their
classical ancestors, with their natural heaviness, waded! Instinctively
and without effort they rejected the rhythmically balanced composition
and correct nobility of form of the classics, and found a characteristic
expression for unconstrained gestures, pleasing movements, and refined
elegance.
[Illustration: GREUZE. "_L'Art._"]
Even the decorative painters abandoned more and more the much-worn paths
of the Italians. _François Lemoine_ gave them, by Rubens' aid, the
transition to a manner peculiarly French, elegant, sensuous, charming.
His pupil, _François Boucher_, followed him. Like the sons of the
seventeenth century, he made exhaustive use of mythological subjects and
was often a superficial artist, and in his later works he became
entirely a mannerist; but he was not so at the beginning. It was a great
advance for France when Boucher gave his pupils the advice to abstain
from imitation of the great Italian masters, and not to grow "as cold as
ice." And what a great naturalist he is in his numerous drawings and
etchings, and in those marvellous groups of chubby children who are
playing and tumbling about on clouds, or playing musical instruments
shooting arrows, or sporting with flowers! "It is not every one who has
the stuff to make a Boucher" even his great antagonist David has said of
him.
In _Fragonard_, again, there was summed up all the joy of life and the
frivolity, the lustrous, luxurious talent, the charming amiability and
nimble sureness, of French art in the eighteenth century. Fragonard has
painted everything. His great decorations are careless inspirations,
sparkling with spirit and life. With him pastoral scenes alternate with
episodes of everyday life--children, guitar players, women reading.
Fragonard is a piquant, ingenious painter. Perhaps hardly any other
painter has so much kissing in his pictures. His etching, "L'armoire,"
of 1778, is well known. In that he already stood on the sure ground of
popular life. The old rustic, who is armed with a formidable cudgel, is
beating open, with the assistance of his wife, the doors of a great
clothes cupboard, in which a handsome young fellow has hidden himself;
close by is a pretty farm girl, weeping in confusion into her apron; in
the background the curious and amazed little sisters are looking on.
[Illustration: GREUZE. THE MILKMAID.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GREUZE. HEAD OF A GIRL.]
_J. F. de Troy_ had, at the same time, abandoned himself to a more
frolicsome manner, had played upon painting in pictures such as "The
Proposal of Marriage" and "The Garter" with something of that frivolity
which later came into fashion through Baudouin. That, however, was only
for a very short time. Life was beginning to be in earnest--that is
rather the impression one receives much earlier, from turning over the
engravings of those years. Amongst the elders of the actual _rococo_
age, contentment and gaiety still rule. As the heirs of an old
civilisation, the aristocracy understood, with a refined and unique
understanding, how to turn life into a feast. Silk trains rustle over
the parquet, silk shoes trip, eyes gleam, diamonds flash, white bosoms
heave. Tall cavaliers advance to their sprightly partners, gossip and
smiles fly around, Knights of Malta and abbés hang over the chairs and
pay their court. Yes, this autumn of the old French culture was of a
marvellous beauty for the fortunate, and those fortunate ones knew, as
no other generation has ever done, how to enjoy life with serenity, in a
fairy glamour of rooms gleaming with Venetian chandeliers, where rosy
Cupidons laughed down bewitchingly from their light, gold moulded
panels. Under Louis XVI the French salon acquired another aspect. Its
walls, its whole architecture, were more sombre. The Cupidons still
sported on the ceiling, but they were forgotten, like ghosts of the
past; their shafts were already impotent. The vivacious, dancing couples
have disappeared. Festivity has been banished from the big rooms: here
and there is seen an earnest conversational party; gentlemen playing
cards or ladies reading philosophical books. Social and political
interests have sprung up with which people of education prefer to occupy
themselves. Numerous works on commerce and constitutional methods have
appeared during the last fifty years. In place of scandal there crop up
arguments, for and against the Parliament, for and against the Jesuits.
Enlightenment had won its victory. Henceforth development is no longer
compatible with sensuous delight. It is still the same society as
before, but without pleasure. One almost breathes the air of 1789.
Gaming is only a struggle against ennui; the foreheads of women are
furrowed with reading. Society has grown serious and sombre, as it were,
with a presentiment of what is to come, as though destiny might thus be
set aside. The writings of Diderot afford the clearest instance of this
changed spirit of the age, and art too must become virtuous, and work
for the amelioration of the world. Thus Diderot upheld the sentimental
and emotional subject against the _fêtes galantes_ of the _rococo_
painter. Boucher derived his inspiration from the slough of
prostitution; only a moral upheaval could tend to a high style. With
Boucher the idea of honour, of innocence, has become something strange;
the new age requires virtue, _bonnes moeurs_. But where are the virtues
to be found? Naturally, there alone, where Rousseau had discovered them.
Rousseau taught that man by nature was good, that he was noble,
conscious of his moral obligations, self-sacrificing and uncorrupted
when he came from the hands of his Maker, and that it was civilisation
which first corrupted him. It followed that the most civilised are the
most corrupt, and virtues are to be met with, if anywhere, amongst the
lower orders, who are the least affected by culture. Not beneath an
embroidered waistcoat, only beneath a woollen smock, can a noble heart
beat. The happy ignorance of the young Savoyard, eating his cheese or
his oranges in a church porch, lies nearer to the original perfection of
mankind than the most subtle erudition of the most ingenious of the
encyclopædists. Amongst nature's noblemen one must seek for the secret
of virtue, which has been lost by the aristocracy in the stream of
civilisation. Thus beneath the ægis of Rousseau's philosophy the Third
Estate makes its entry into French salons. From the man of the people
society wanted to learn how to become once more simple, unassuming, and
virtuous; and it was a gruesome irony of fate that this "man of the
people" should reveal himself later, when the guillotine stood in the
Place de la Concorde, as by no means so lamblike, modest, and
self-sacrificing as that noble society had imagined him.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GREUZE. GIRL CARRYING A LAMB.]
_Greuze_ represented this phase of French art when the riotous carnival
of _rococo_ had come to an end, and the Ash Wednesday of rule and
fasting and penitence had ensued. It was considered that the aim of art
must be to instruct and elevate, not merely to amuse; it should set an
example to raise and inspire the good, to serve as a warning for the
bad. "_Rendre la vertu aimable, le vice odieux, le ridicule saillant,
voilà le projet de tout honnête homme qui prend la plume, le pinceau ou
le ciseau._" In these words Diderot formulated his programme. It was his
wish that the corrupt man, when he went to an exhibition, should feel
pricks of conscience at the pictures and read in them his own
condemnation. "_Si ses pas le conduisent au Salon, qu'il craigne
d'arrêter ses regards sur la toile._" Educational effects, "moral
stories told in pictures," that is the keynote of Diderot's demands upon
the painter, and of the accomplishment of Greuze in answer to this
claim. He is the French Hogarth, whether he paints in sombre colours the
misery that the drunkard brings upon his family, and the horrors of
poverty, or depicts in brighter tones the love of children for their
parents and the works of charity; and with him too, as with the
Englishman, his title was chosen with a didactic after-thought to
heighten the effect of his picture. Thus such scenes as these occurred:
"The Father's Curse," "The Consolation of Age," "The Son's Correction,"
"The Ungrateful Son," "The Beloved Mother," "The Spoilt Child," "The
Lame Man tended by his Relations," and "The Results of Good Education."
He had this, too, in common with Hogarth: he liked to develop his moral
stories in long series, which invariably ended with the triumph of
virtue and the punishment of vice. The didactic story of _Bazile et
Thibaut_ attempted to relate in twenty-six chapters the influence of a
good education on the formation of a whole life; and, just as in
Hogarth's story of the two apprentices, here too, at the conclusion, the
well-educated Thibaut pronounces sentence of death over his old friend
Bazile, the badly educated, and now condemned murderer. The fact that in
other things the two moral apostles differ greatly from each other is
accounted for by the difference in the national characteristics of those
to whom they variously appealed.
Hogarth _scourged_ the vices of the Third Estate in order to raise them
to morality. Rape, bloodshed, debauchery, disorderliness, gluttony, and
drunkenness--that was the channel through which in England at that day
the furious flood of the uncontrolled spirit of the populace poured
itself, foaming and raging with fearful natural force. Hogarth swung
over these human animals the stout cudgel of morality in the manner of a
sturdy policeman and Puritan _bourgeois_. With such people a delicate
forbearance would have been misplaced. At the foot of every prison-scene
he inscribed the name of the vice that he had pilloried there, and
subjoined the predicted damnation from Holy Writ. He reveals it in its
hideousness, he steeps it in its filth, traces it to its retribution, so
that even the most vitiated conscience must recognise it and the most
hardened abhor it.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GREUZE. GIRL LOOKING UP.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
GREUZE. GIRL WITH AN APPLE.]
Greuze employs the Third Estate as a _mirror of virtue_, sets forth its
noble qualities as an edification to an aristocracy that has grown
vicious. Less primitive and, for that very reason, less original than
Hogarth, he never forgets that he lives in the most refined social
period in history. He does not strangle his culprits to provide
terrifying examples, but nearly always leaves a corner open for
repentance. He knew that he dared not exact too much from the nerves of
his noble public; he merely wished to stir them to a soft vibration. He
did not paint for drunken English people, but for those perfumed
marquises who, later on, bowed with so courtly an elegance before the
guillotine; for those sensitive ladies in whom virtue now excited the
same sensual delight that vice had done before. They welcomed in him the
high priest of a sort of orgie of virtue, to whose festivals they had
grown reconciled. The century which in its first half had danced as
light-heartedly as any other the can-can of life, becomes, in its second
half, sad of soul, enthusiastic over the reward of justice, the
punishment of transgressors, over honour and the naïveté of innocence.
Time after time do his contemporaries praise precisely that sense of
virtue in the art of Greuze. So that in France, as in England, the
burden of interest was laid no longer upon the art, but upon an
accessory circumstance. For since, in the hands of Greuze, the picture
had been turned into an argument, in France, as in England, art ceased
to be an end--it became only a means. He made painting a didactic poem,
the more melodramatic the better, and was driven thereby on the same
sandbank upon which Hogarth, and all _genre_ painters who _would be_
more than painters, have made shipwreck. In order to bring out his story
with the utmost possible distinctness, he was too frequently compelled
unduly to accentuate his point. The effect became affected, the pathos
theatrical. His picture of the "Father's Curse" in the Louvre, with the
infuriated old man, the son hurrying wildly away, and the weeping
sisters, resembles the last act of a melodrama. "The Country Wedding,"
where the father-in-law has given the young bridegroom the purse with
the dowry, and now pathetically observes, "Take it, and be happy," might
just as well have been entitled "The Father's Last Blessing." In the
picture in which a noble dame takes her daughter to the bedside of two
poor persons who are ill, to accustom her in early life to works of
charity, the personages in the picture, arranged exactly as if upon a
stage, must have been themselves uncommonly moved by the touching and
praiseworthy action. Greuze was the father of _genre_ painting in
France--that barbaric, story-telling art which replaced _tableaux
vivants_ based upon the literary idea by the Dutchmen's picturesque and
well-observed selections from nature. Beyond that, however, it must not
be forgotten that he, like Hogarth, psychologically opposed to the
earlier art, showed practical progress in many of his works. There were
few in French art before him who depicted the emotions of the soul with
such refinement as Greuze in his "Reading of the Bible." In proportion
to the understanding and character of the individual is the impression
of the listener reflected on his countenance. That was something new in
comparison with the laughing gods of Boucher. And that Greuze was also
capable of the most highly _pictorial_ magic when he could once bring
himself to lay aside the moral teacher is proved by his rosy, inspired
heads of young girls. He never grew weary of painting these pretty
children in every situation and attitude at that seductive age which
hides the charming feet beneath the first long gown. Blonde or brunette,
with a blue ribbon in the hair, a little cluster of flowers in the
bodice, they gaze out upon life with their big, brown child eyes, full
of curiosity and misgiving. A light gauze covers the soft lines of the
neck, the shoulders are as yet hardly rounded, the pouting lips are
fresh as the morning dew, and only the two rosy, budding breasts, that
fight lustily against their imprisonment, and seem, like Sterne's
starling, to cry, "I cannot get out," betray that the woman is already
awake in the child. Greuze's name will always be associated with these
girl types, just as that of Leonardo is with the dreamy, smiling
sphinx-like head of Mona Lisa. In them he has given an unsurpassable
expression to the ideal of innocence at the end of the eighteenth
century, and provided in them a new thrill of beauty for his
contemporaries. And a _blasé_ society which had indulged in every
licence bathed itself with passionate delight in the unknown mystery of
this surging flood. Yes, after the stimulating champagne of _rococo_,
people had even come to delight in simple black bread. And so, out of
_bourgeoisie_ itself, a school of painting was developed as fresh and
healthy as this.
[Illustration: _"Gaz. des Beaux Arts."_
CHARDIN. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
_Chardin_, the carpenter's son, is at the head of this domestic art in
the eighteenth century. After Greuze, the painter of refined taste, he
seems, a comfortable, healthy, _bourgeois_ master in whom the Dutchman
of the best period once more appears upon earth.
After the king had, up to the close of the seventeenth century, been the
centre round which everything turned, the solitary personality which
dared to appear independent, and upon which the rest of the world formed
itself; after the circles round the court had next freed themselves, and
gained the right to enjoy life and art for themselves, there still
remained a third step to surmount. "Society" abdicates in favour of a
free and healthy _bourgeoisie_.
A surgeon's sign was the first work which brought the young man, who had
received no systematic education, into notice. The surgeon is in his
shop attending to a man who has been wounded in a duel, grouped around
are curious bystanders, while the commissary of police investigates the
case with a grave countenance. It is the first picture of the Parisian
life of the people. And Chardin, with his middle-class origin, remained
the advocate of middle-class domestic life. He is the Watteau of the
Third Estate. Greuze owes his success, in the first place, to the
ingenious manner in which he made himself the spokesman of the moral
tendency of his age. It interested contemporary society to be told that
it is beautiful to see married folk live together in happiness; that
young mothers do a good action in nursing their children, when it is
possible, themselves; that man should repent of his sins; and that he
who honours his father and mother lives long in the land. Nowadays we
thank him for these wise counsels, but say, at the same time, that we
could have done without them. We no longer see the necessity of
illustrating the ten commandments, and notice now all the more the
mannerisms, the rhetorical strokes of advocacy which the painter must
employ in order to plead successfully. Chardin's effect is as fresh
to-day as it was a hundred years ago, because he was a sheer artist, who
did not seek to tell a story, but only to represent,--a realist of the
finest stamp, belonging in his exquisite sense of colour values to the
illustrious family of the Terburgs. His pictures have no "purpose." The
washerwoman, the woman scraping carrots, the housewife at her manifold
tasks--that is Chardin's world; the atmosphere in which these figures
move, the shimmering light that floats in the half-dark kitchen, the
wealth of sun-rays that play upon the white tablecloths and
brown-panelled walls--those are his fields of study. Chardin lived in an
old studio, high up near the roof, a quiet, dark room that was usually
full of vegetables which he used for his "still life." There was
something picturesque about the dusty walls where the moist green of
vegetables mingled so harmoniously with the time-worn, sombre brown of
the wainscoting, and the white table-cloth was flooded with the silvery
green which poured in from a little skylight. In this peaceful and
harmoniously toned chamber were laid those small domestic scenes, which
he so loved to paint, and which were called by the French, in contrast
to the _Fétes Galantes_, "_Amusements de la Vie Privée_." The clock
ticks, the lamp burns, water is boiling on the homely tiled stove. There
is an effect in every one of his pictures, as though he had lived them
himself, as if they were reminiscences of something dear to him and
familiar. In contrast to Greuze he shunned all critical moments, and
depicted only the quiet life of custom, everyday life as it befell in a
constant, regular routine. There are no hasty movements with him, no
catastrophes nor complications; he has a preference for "still life" in
the world of men, just as in nature. He is _par excellence_ the painter
of _Intimität_ (intimate life); which is not the same as _a genre_
painter. Painters who in the manner of _genre_ have depicted domestic
scenes in rooms are to be found in every school; but how few have known
how to depict the poetry of the family life with such truth, with such
an absence of affectation and insipidity! With Chardin art and life
are interfused.
[Illustration: J. B. S. CHARDIN THE HOUSE OF CARDS]
[Illustration: CHARDIN. GRACE BEFORE MEAT.]
No Dutchman, however, had penetrated into the nursery. Chardin, in
surprising the child-world at their games, in their joys and sorrows,
has opened out to art a new province. And with what affectionate
devotion has he not absorbed himself in the spirit of the little people!
I know of no one before him who has painted the unconscious spiritual
life of the child with such discreet tenderness: the little hands that
grasp at something, the lips that a mother would like to kiss, the
dreamy wide-open young eyes. In this Chardin is a master. It is not only
obvious expressions of joy and sorrow, but those refined shades, so
difficult to seize, of observation, thoughtfulness, consideration, calm
reflection, quaintness, obstinacy or sulking, which he analyses in the
eyes of the child. There is the little girl playing with her doll, and
lavishing on her all the love and care of a tender mother. There is an
elderly, half-grown-up little lady teaching her younger brother the
mysteries of the alphabet. Then come the games and the tasks. They build
card-houses, blow bubbles, or are wholly engrossed in their
drawing-books and home-lessons. How attentive the little girl is whose
mother has just given her her first embroidery materials. How charmingly
embarrassed is the small boy whom she hears his lesson. And what trouble
she takes in the morning, that her darling shall be clean and tidy when
he goes to school. In one picture the cap on the little girl's head is
crooked, and her mother is putting it straight, whilst the child with a
pretty pride is peeping curiously in the glass. Again, there is the boy
just saying good-bye. He is neat and well combed; his playthings, too,
have been nicely tidied up, and his books are under his arm. His mother
takes his three-cornered hat off again in order to brush it properly.
When school is over, you see them sitting at dinner. The table is laid
with a snow-white cloth, and the cook is just bringing in a steaming
dish. It is touching to see how prettily the small boy clasps his hands
and says his grace. And when they are again off to afternoon school the
mother sits alone. She looks charming in her simple house-dress, with
the loose sleeves, her clean white apron and kerchief, her striped
petticoat and coquettish cap. Soon she takes her embroidery on her lap
and stoops forward to take a ball of wool out of her basket. Next she
sits before the fire in a cosy corner against a folding screen. A
half-opened book rests in her hand, a tea-cup stands close by, a homely
atmosphere of the living room hovers round her. Then, like a true
housewife, she takes up her house-keeping book, or goes into the kitchen
to help the cook, while she scrapes carrots or scrubs the cooking
utensils or brings in the meat from the larder. It is all rendered with
such truth and simplicity that one acquires an affection for Chardin,
who with his art got to the root of family life and bestowed upon it the
subtlest gifts of observation and generous comprehension, while none the
less his domesticity never became commonplace.
[Illustration: DANIEL CHODOWIECKI.]
His contemporary, _Étienne Jeurat_, painted scenes at country fairs, and
_Jean Baptiste le Prince_ pictures of guardrooms and similar subjects.
In Holland _Cornelis Troost_ went on parallel lines with him. He
depicted the life of his age and of his nation--comic scenes, banquets,
weddings, and the like--in pastels or water colours, and that without
seeking inspiration from any of the Dutch classics, but with a vivid,
intelligent comprehension. Even Italian art ended in two "_genre_
painters," the Venetians Rotari and Pietro Longhi, who have bequeathed
to us such charming little pictures of the life of that
age--fortune-tellers, dancing-masters, tailors, apothecaries, little
boys and girls at play or at their tasks.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
CHODOWIECKI. THE FAMILY PICTURE.]
Germany presented no such great manifestation as Chardin, although there
too the tendency was the same. There too, after the devastation of the
Thirty Years' War, a moral, active _bourgeoisie_ had at last sprung up
that was prepared to take up the line which had been already laid down
by the English. Lessing was the first in this magnificent struggle for
evolution. He wrote, in his _Miss Sarah Sampson_, the first German
tragedy without the support of great mythical or historical heroes, and
without the stiff ponderousness of the Alexandrine. He declared, like
Moore, that helmets and diadems do not make tragic heroes; he even in
his _Minna_ set vividly before the eyes of his contemporaries something
in the immediate present, the Seven Years' War. And just as Lessing
liberated the German drama from the jurisdiction of Boileau, so art
began to mutiny against the classicism which had come in through the
medium of France, and which had been inherited from the age when it was
the pride of German courts to be small copies of Versailles.
"How exceedingly abhorrent to me are our berouged puppet painters,"
cries the young Goethe, in his essay on German style and art, "I could
not sufficiently protest; they have caught the eyes of the women with
theatrical poses, false complexions, and gaudy costumes; the wood
engravings of manly old Albrecht Dürer, at whom tyros scoff, are more
welcome to me.... Only where intimacy and simplicity exist is all
artistic vigour to be found, and woe to the artist who leaves his hut to
squander himself in academic halls of state."
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
CHODOWIECKI. ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF WOMEN.]
_Daniel Chodowiecki_, with all his commonplaceness, is a genuine
expression of this phase of German art. He in Germany, Hogarth in
England, and Chardin in France, are products of the same tendency of the
age. After Lessing had produced in _Minna_ the first domestic German
tragedy, Chodowiecki, following the road of Hogarth and Chardin, was
able to become the painter of the German middle class. He is not a
master of such penetrating strength as they were, but he is no less an
artist of notable merit. He is certainly no genius--in fact almost a
handicraftsman, sober and philistine, but, like Hogarth, a self-made man
who in his whole artistic and personal outlook was rooted in the soil of
his city and of his age. Berlin society of that day was the basis of his
art, the daily life of house and street his domain. He began by
illustrating poems and depicting scenes out of the _Seven Years' War_
and the _History of Charles the Great_, and went on from that to the
pleasant, homely life of the small _bourgeoisie_. Himself of the middle
classes, he chiefly worked for them, and with his sensitive and
dexterous graving tool he kept the liveliest and most exhaustive
chronicle of the German _bourgeoisie_ of that age. At times almost too
reasonable and prosaic, a genuine Nicolai, he has in other plates an
enchanting freshness, and--which should not be forgotten--is more of an
artist than Hogarth, since he is neither moralist nor satirist. His
object, without any moral after-thought, was the true and kindly
observation of life as displayed in the world around him. He took the
wholly naïve delight of the genuine artist in turning everything he saw
into a picture. These chronicles of his have some, it may be but a
particle, of the spirit of Dürer. Simultaneously, the young _Tischbein_
delved into the past of the nation, the age of Conradin and the
Hohenstaufen, with the intention of finding there the simplicity which
the academic pictures had come to lack; and, later on, he painted in
Hamburg extremely realistic historical pictures of his own period, such
as that which is to be found in the Oldenburg Gallery: "Entry of General
Benigsen into Hamburg, 1814." He did good work too as a portrait
painter. In his best picture, "Goethe amongst the Ruins of Rome," the
head of the poet is energetic and full of strength, the colouring of an
excellent clear grey.
In portrait painting in general, the revolution is reflected with
especial clearness. The artificial manner that had been copied from the
seventeenth century, the age of long perukes, gives way, slowly but
surely, to an ever-growing naturalness, simplicity, and originality. At
that time, while the spirit of Louis XIV still hovered over everything,
the passion of the individual to be king in his own sphere had
penetrated into the family. The honest citizen, therefore, would not let
himself be painted as such, but only as a prince,--he, himself, in gala
dress, with a pompous air, as stately as though he were giving an
audience to the spectator, his wife in silk and gold and lace; she has a
great mantle of state worn loose over her shoulders and hips, and looks
down with an assumption of grandeur on her grandchild, who is half
respectful and half inclined to make fun. The frame is as rich as the
costume, and probably bears a crown. We are with difficulty persuaded
that these are pictures of simple citizens, that the man, apart from the
hours during which he sat to the painter, is an industrious tradesman,
and the wife, glancing out so haughtily, most probably darned his
stockings. Their portraits seem to form part of an ancestral gallery.
This age of princely state was followed by that of fraternity. In place
of berouged and postured portraits with allegorical accessories, there
appeared simple, unpretentious likenesses of human beings in their
work-a-day clothes; in place of stiff attitudes, _genre_ motives with
the easy naturalness of everyday life.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
CHODOWIECKI. THE MORNING COMPLIMENT.]
In Berlin, ever since 1709, _Antoine Pesne_ had been for half a century
the centre of artistic life, and in his works the revolution may be
traced. Something familiar and intimate takes the place of that stately
pomp. The princes, hitherto, had liked to be represented in mediæval
armour or antique equipment; Pesne painted them in the costume of the
time. And in his portraits of his friends and his family circle he has
been still more unconstrained. There is the charming picture of 1718, in
the New Palace at Potsdam, which shows the painter himself with his wife
and his two children; the portrait of Schmidt the engraver, in the
Berlin Museum; and the beautiful picture of 1754 in the collection of
Colonel Von Berke, at Schemnitz, which depicts him again at the age of
seventy-one with his two daughters. Pesne is revealed in these
characteristic portraits, as well as in his character pictures in the
Dresden Gallery ("The Girl with the Pigeons," 1728, "The Cook with the
Turkey-hen," 1712), as a thoroughly sane and strong realist, of a kind
which became almost extinct in Berlin a hundred years later.
In the next generation, in the _Sturm-und-Drang_ period, _Anton Graff_,
the Swiss, took the lead with his simple, domestic, honest, real
portraits. It was a happy disposition of fate that Graff's activity
just corresponded with the great period of the awakening of intellectual
life in Germany, that Lessing and Schiller, Bodmer and Gessner, Wieland
and Herder, Bürger and Gellert, Christian Gottfried Körner and Lippert,
Moses Mendelssohn and Sulzer, and a long succession of other poets and
scholars of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century,
found in him a portrait painter whose quick and agile hand left us their
features in the truest and most authentic manner. What and how robust
his art is, how clear and plastic the execution of the heads, how adroit
and infallible the technique!
Besides Graff, there worked in Dresden _Christian Leberecht Vogel_,
likewise a most independent, picturesque, and sensitive artist, who, if
only for his pictures of children, deserves a place of honour in the
history of art in the eighteenth century. In the portrait of his two
boys, in the Dresden Gallery, the naïveté of child-life is observed with
such tenderness and rendered with such vigour as only Reynolds
understood. The boys are sitting close together on the ground. One, in a
brown frock, is holding a book on his knees, which the other, in a red
frock, with a whip in his hand, is looking at. The thoughtful expression
of the little ones is quite charming; the execution broad and strong,
the colour treatment delightful and tender.
In Munich lived the excellent _Johann Edlinger_, the most industrious of
these sturdy masters, who were so modest and yet so capable.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
CHODOWIECKI. THE ARTIST'S NURSERY.]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux Arts._
ANTOINE PESNE. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AND DAUGHTERS.]
In the domain of landscape the Continent produced no one who could be
compared with Gainsborough; but here, too, the English influence made
itself felt. It can be traced how the same feeling for nature which had
given birth to Thomson's _Seasons_ and Gainsborough's landscapes,
afterwards found expression in France and Germany, and dissipated the
prevailing taste in gardens. The seventeenth century--with the exception
of the Dutch--had set nature in order with the garden shears. As Lebrun
in his historical compositions endeavoured to outdo the Italians, so
Lenôtre's garden style exemplified the perfection and exaggeration of
the gardens of the Italian Renaissance, which themselves again were laid
out on the plan of the old Roman gardens from existing descriptions. A
garden reminded one more of state apartments, which one could only walk
through with measured steps, quietly and respectfully, than of nature,
where one is, and dares to be, human. Corresponding to this formally
planned, correctly measured style of garden there was a school of
landscape which improved nature on "artistic" principles, and, by the
arrangement of bits of nature, produced a world peculiarly full of
style. Landscapes were nicely laid-out parks, which, like the figure
pictures, made for an abstract beauty of mass and lines, and which, by
means of accessories, such as classical ruins, would turn one's thought
to the ancient world. Nature must not, as Batteux taught, be the
instructor of the artist, but the artist must select the parts and build
up his picture. Out of many leaves he takes only the most perfectly
developed, puts only such perfect leaves on one tree, and so obtains a
perfect tree. Let the essential of his production be _nature choisie_, a
selection of objects that "are capable of producing agreeable
impressions"; his aim "_le beau vrai qui est représenté comme s'il
existait réellement et avec toutes les perfections qu'il peut
recevoir_." The eighteenth century went back from this "noble,"
improved nature, step by step to the divine beauty of unimproved nature;
just as those masters untouched by the Romans, Dürer and Altdorfer,
Titian and Rubens, Brouwer and Velasquez, had painted her. The great
Watteau, too, was here for the most part in advance of his age, in that,
instead of the stiffly designed stage scenery of Poussin, he gave
Elysian landscapes,--abodes of love, that now glisten in the sunshine of
the young morning, now are suffused with golden light and the misty
shadows of the evening twilight. The rose in her young bud is odorous,
the nightingale sings, the doves coo, the light boughs whisper to the
soft west wind, bright silver rivulets ripple, the wind sighs through
the tall branches. Watteau knew nature and loved her, and rendered her
in her transparent beauty with the intoxicated eyes of a lover. The
spirit of nature, not of humanity, dominates in his pictures. It is only
because nature is so lovely that man is so happy.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ _Photo, Mansell._
WATTEAU. THE MUSIC PARTY.]
But still more modern is the effect, when instead of painting Elysian
landscapes with happy inhabitants, he drew mere bits of rural nature,
poor solitary regions in the neighbourhood of big towns, where
bricklayers are working on the scaffolding of some house, or peasants
are riding with their horses over some stony byway. Out of a number of
spirited drawings, this side of his perception in landscape is
especially notable in the picture in the New Palace at Potsdam, in the
left background of which a small stream flows past a farmhouse, whilst
in front a peasant is laboriously dragging a two-wheeled cart over the
rough ground.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ _Photo, Mansell._
WATTEAU. THE RETURN FROM THE CHASE.]
It is interesting to observe, at that time, after Watteau and his
English predecessors, the widespread growth of this new feeling for
nature. Thomson was followed by Rousseau, who, on his lonely wanderings,
looked with moved eyes at "the gold of the corn crop, the purple of the
heather, the majesty of the trees, and the wonderful variety of flowers
and grasses." He delighted in the blossoming of spring, the copses and
rivulets, the song of birds, shady woods, and the landscapes of autumn,
where the reapers and vine-dressers were working. He is the author of
that lively feeling for nature that henceforth was aroused through the
whole of Europe. A breath of pure mountain air, a wholesome draught of
fresh water from Lake Leman, were brought suddenly into the sultry
atmosphere of salons, and filled people's hearts with a new and charming
sensation when Rousseau's works appeared. It was over with all efforts
of "stylists" as soon as Rousseau declared that everything was good just
as it came out of the lap of the universal mother, nature.
[Illustration: WATTEAU. FÊTE CHAMPÈTRE.]
Goethe, the pupil of Rousseau, presages, in his whole conception of
nature, something of the manifestation of the school of Fontainebleau.
He had something of Daubigny when, as Werther, he lies on the bank of
the stream and looks down thoughtfully at the worms and small
insects. He makes one think of Dupré or Corot when he says: "As nature
declines upon autumn, within me and around me it grows autumn"; or, "I
could not now draw so much as a stroke, and I have never been a greater
painter than at the present moment"; or, "Never have I been happier, nor
has my perception of nature, down to the pebble or the grass beneath me,
been fuller and more intimate. Yet,--I know not how I can express
myself, everything swims and oscillates before my soul, so that I can
seize no outline. A great, shadowy whole waves before my soul, my
perception grows indistinct before it, even as my eyes do."
[Illustration: GESSNER. LANDSCAPE (ETCHING).]
Thus were the French gardens delivered by the English. Just as figure
painting renounced lofty, architectural, formal composition, so those
bisected and upholstered gardens were supplanted by irregular and, as it
were, accidental bits of nature. People took no more trouble, in
Rousseau's phrase, "to dishonour nature by seeking to beautify her," but
laid out gardens in harmony with Goethe's remark in _Werther_: "A
feeling heart, not a scientific art of gardening, suggested the plan."
Close to Versailles, near the box-tree patterns of Lenôtre, lay the
Petit Trianon, with its pond, its brook, and its dairy, where the
unfortunate Marie Antoinette used to dream. And if painting still
loitered on its preliminary return to nature, that only implied that the
great artists--they only came in 1830!--were not yet born. Great artists
can only raise themselves on the shoulders of their predecessors, whose
value lies in their utility. The French landscapes of the eighteenth
century, seen in the light of historical development, are of no
importance; but, nevertheless, they gave a considerable stimulus in
that they sought to animate the style of Poussin with a closer
perception of nature. Hubert Robert is certainly strongly decorative,
but he has a light touch; one cannot take him at his word, but he is
intelligent, and has sometimes grey and green tones that are soft and
beautiful. Joseph Vernet painted coast scenery, views of harbours,
storms at sea, likewise with decorative, superficial effects of light;
he let flashes of lightning streak black clouds, sun-rays dance over
lightly ruffled waves, silver moonshine play mysteriously upon the
water, and caused conflagrations to break out and red flames to shoot up
to heaven. He is somewhat inane and motley in his colouring. But he had
ceased to see in the parts of nature nothing but materials for the
construction of nicely fitting scenery. He no longer attempted to speak
to the reason by means of lines, but to touch the soul through humour,
and he employed in his scenery not only buildings and ruins, gods and
ancient shepherds, but also modern groups of every kind.
In Switzerland, the charming etchings and water-colours of _Solomon
Gessner_ must be especially mentioned. Ludwig Richter, indeed, pointed
them out as the eighteenth century works which, after the engravings of
Chodowiecki, he loved the best. Gessner venerated Claude, and had an
enthusiasm for Poussin, but his pictures have no traces of the lofty
style of the heroic school of landscape. He sketched his native meadows,
trees, and brooks; he loved all that was small and secluded and cosy,
arbours and hedges, quiet little gardens and idyllic nooks. He
approached everything with a very childlike and faithful observation of
nature. A second Swiss, Ludwig Hess, dedicated a similar subtile sense
of nature and loving zeal as much to his native Switzerland as to the
Roman Campagna.
[Illustration: GESSNER. LANDSCAPE (ETCHING).]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
GUARDI. VENICE.]
The German _Philip Hackert_ has been prejudiced rather than profited by
the monument which Goethe erected to him. As Goethe's enthusiasm was not
in due proportion with Hackert's importance, he ceased later to attract
attention, though this he did not merit, as he was always a vigorous and
healthy landscape painter. He did not see nature with the tender
sensibility of the Swiss. He looked at a landscape somewhat insipidly,
as Chodowiecki at his models. But his drawing is sober, the atmosphere
of his pictures clear and fresh; he cannot be tedious in his
composition. In Dresden there lived Johann Alexander Thiele, who roamed
through Thüringen and Mecklenburg as a landscape painter. Even in Italy
landscapes were the most independent performances which the eighteenth
century had brought forth there. There worked in Rome the Netherlander,
Vanvitelli, who depicted in graceful water-colours Roman and Neapolitan
street life; and Giovanni Paolo Pannini, the _peintre des fêtes
publiques_, in whose pictures groups of richly coloured figures moved
through splendid palaces. Venice was the home of the Canaletti. In
_Antonio Canale's_ town pictures of Venice, Rome, and London there is at
once so subtle an atmospheric movement, the water is so clear, the air
so transparent, that even if they represent mere streets and buildings,
they yet leave an impression of landscape achieved in a broad, pictorial
method. _Bernardo Canaletto_ produces an effect by the fine, cool, damp
light of his northern studies even simpler and more intimate, while by
his discovery that sunshine does not--as it was hitherto believed--gild
but silver the object it falls on, he became one of the fathers of
realistic landscape. The most ingenious, however, of the school of
Canale, not to say one of the cleverest landscape painters of the
century, was _Francesco Guardi_. Antonio Canale was a great artist, and
shows it never better than in his distinguished etchings, but as a
painter he interests the collector more than the connoisseur. There his
qualities are too often petrified into an excessive formality; he shows
something too much of the _camera obscura_. Guardi is ingenious and
startling. Where you have accuracy in Canale, in him you find spirit.
Canale shows us the real Venice, Guardi shows it as we have dreamed it
to be. He has not Canale's knowledge of perspective and architecture,
but he fascinates us. He is a musician and a poet whose palette resounds
with the purest harmonies. In his pictures the whole seductive legend of
the fallen Queen of the Adriatic abides. Garlanded gondolas glide
peaceful and fairy-like, majestic as vessels in some distant wonderland,
over the clear, green water of the canals, beneath the high, marble
palaces, which mirror their columns and balconies, their arches and
their loggias in the stream. Foreign ambassadors pass in great state
through the Piazza di San Marco; all that proud, Venetian nobility
greets them; and thick throngs of people in their Sunday attire move to
and fro beneath the Hall of the Procuration. Gay bands of musicians row
along the Piazzetta and the Riva. A moist breeze sweeps over the water;
the sunshine, now subdued and mellow, now dancing coquettishly, plays
upon the water or on the houses. Francesco Guardi, the magician of
Venice, is an animated, exquisite, always ingenious _improvisatore_,
strong as few others are in the direct transference of his personal
impression to canvas. Every stroke of his brush takes effect,--in each
one of his pictures one sees the nervous exaltation of the hand; and
that gives him a power of attraction which, compared with Canale, is
like that of the clay model, in which the hand of the sculptor is still
perceptible, compared with the cold, marble statue.
Even Spain, which, except for the colossal figure of Velasquez, had so
far produced no painters of landscape--even Spain, after the middle of
the century, turned into this road. _Don Pedro Rodriguez de Miranda_
painted his broad, clear, and vigorously observed highland studies; _Don
Mariano Ramon Sanchez_ his small views of towns and harbours.
And, as in England, hand in hand with that came paintings of animals.
In France, _François Canova_ was working, the painter of huge battle
scenes and small pictures of animals; _Jean Louis de Marne_, who was
famous for his cattle, market scenes, village pictures, and the like;
and the great _Jean Baptiste Oudry_, who painted with breadth and
freedom animals alive and dead, wild and tame, still-life of every kind.
In Augsburg lived _Johann Elias Riedinger_, whose field of activity
embraced the entire animal world, dogs and horses, stags and roes, wild
boars, chamois, bears, lions, tigers, elephants, and the
hippopotamus--which he depicted with fine observation, both in their
proud solitude and at strife with men.
If we cast one more glance back to the road which art had travelled
since the commencement of the century, we can have no doubt as to the
end which was proportionately aimed at in all countries. Until quite
recently a courtly, aristocratic art had shed its light upon the whole
of Europe. In the seventeenth century the Dutch alone had maintained
their isolation. They who entered fresh into art, and had to break with
no tradition, gave at that time the first expression to the new spirit,
in that they resolutely recalled art from its courtly surroundings to
the humbler dwellings of the middle classes. They _painted_ what Dürer
and the "little masters" had only graved upon wood blocks and copper
plates. Still, they wished to paint these things less for their own
sakes than because so intimate a light was shed upon them. Through
elements of light they contrived to cast over everyday moments a sort of
fairy inspiration. Watteau and his successors made a further advance in
the conquest of the visible world, in that they desired to paint their
age, for its own sake, in all its grace; and by the middle of the
century we find this new, intimate, familiar art, independent of ancient
tradition, triumphing all along the line. "Sublime" painting is more and
more forsaken. Art becomes more and more indigenous to her world and
age. Aristocratic Watteau is succeeded by Hogarth, Greuze, Chardin, and
Chodowiecki, who treat the Third Estate no longer in the Dutch
_chiaroscuro_, but in all its heavy reality as a valid object of art.
Instead of that lofty, majestic, vainglorious painting of mere
representations, which was the outcome of Cinquecento, and which at the
expiration of the seventeenth century had sunk, through abstraction,
into something uniform, trivial, and tedious, there appeared on all
sides an art which was simple and sincere, which plunged into the life
of every
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