FRENCH ARTISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES

“What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”

After Claude Lorraine came the group of painters that represented the eighteenth century. This strange century was a mingling of sentiment and wit; life was a perpetual comedy of love, but the hearts of men and women were as a rule untouched. It was all a charming drama. Everything was most aptly said and demeanour was invariably courtly. Society alone existed at the time. Antoine Watteau resumes the genius of that century. It is a great miss in the National Gallery to have no picture by this master, for he was the founder of the eighteenth-century art; he may be said to have been its poet. His landscape is idealised; it was always peopled by men and women, in silken attire, who were the embodiment of cultured artificiality. Watteau died at thirty-seven, and already he dominated all the art of that time; but his art, perfect as it was, had in it the seeds of decay. We will not speak of Fragonard, another great representative painter, because he too has no painting in the National Gallery.

Boucher (1704–1770) has one picture; Lancret (1690–1743), Watteau’s other pupil has four—“The Four Ages of Man.” The art of both Boucher and Lancret was clever, graceful, and degraded in aim. Boucher earned a large fortune, and was the favourite painter of the ignoble Madame de Pompadour. Lancret fashioned himself on the art of Watteau, and followed the advice of the master to “imitate nature.” Pleasure is the object of life in Lancret’s philosophy, and you will see it illustrated in his four pictures in the National Gallery (101, 102, 103, 104).

We must now look at Chardin’s two pictures. This painter stands for sincerity in a period of artificiality. He was born in Paris on the 2nd November, in the last year of the seventeenth century (1699–1779). His father was an upholsterer, and he is the painter of the lower middle-class. He seeks his inspiration in the humble world from which he sprang, a world very far removed from that of the court and society. His pictures contrast with those of Watteau and his followers. He is the only wholesome painter of a time when life was insincere and its pleasures far removed from the innocence of nature. He never looked for inspiration away from his own rank. The life of the tradesman class, its modest ambition, its fatigues, the order of its interiors, the joys of family life, the duties of motherhood—these are his themes. He first began by painting still-life, and he painted it always, but at first it was his exclusive study. He did not give himself the trouble to compose his groups. He threw on the canvas the objects he found to his hand, but what splendours of colour, what marvels of light are his!

Sometimes it was a silver goblet surrounded by fruit, sometimes, as here in (1258), it is a black bottle and a tumbler half filled with wine, a knife placed on a bit of newspaper. “Oh! it is not colour alone that you mix,” writes the critic Diderot to Chardin; “it is the very substance of the objects; it is light and air that you render.” Then he began to paint children, after that the mothers and women of the people. “La Fontaine” (1664) is a dazzling little canvas, rich in broken tints. A woman is turning the tap of a fountain. She is a healthy woman; we see the blood coursing in her veins; the texture of her linen apron and of her woollen skirt is rendered with extraordinary precision. All the hundred details of the picture are Chardin’s own properties. The fountain from which she is drawing water, the pots and pans, are all as he saw them in his own kitchen. His painting lets nature into the artificiality of the eighteenth century. He is a great painter of still-life, a great painter of the quiet, lower middle-class. He was received by the French Academy in 1728 as a painter of flowers and fruit.

Looking at Greuze’s pictures (1725–1805), we can understand the enthusiasm they aroused in Diderot, that remarkable man, who wrote criticisms of art while he was attending to the interests of the French nation. Diderot was sick of the immoralities about him; he hated Boucher and Lancret; he was weary of mythology; and when Greuze came with his homely pathos and his lovely girls, there was no limit to the enthusiasm with which he hailed them. Now we can see Greuze’s pictures with cooler judgment, and we see there is a certain consciousness in his unconsciousness, and that his pretty girls are not altogether the simple creatures he depicts. The “Head of a Girl” (206) and his other two pictures, “Girl with an Apple” (1020)—a sad little head with wistful eyes—and “Head of a Girl Looking Up” (1019) are full of girlish charm. It was the time when Rousseau wrote, and Rousseau, as you will know later, was a reformer who fought against the vices around him. He preached the return to nature. He was one of the forces that brought on the Revolution, and he, too, saw in Greuze’s pictures the glorification of simplicity.

Greuze died in great poverty; he had squandered his money. The time of the Revolution was over; another art than his was now the fashion. He was far from the time in which Diderot had written, “Courage, my good Greuze; introduce morality into painting.”

We come to Madame Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), whose portrait of herself in her twenty-seventh year (1653) is a wonderful work. The shadow cast by her hat over her face is an imitation of that in Rubens’ “Chapeau de Paille.” She was a great favourite of Marie Antoinette, whose portrait she painted many times. It is difficult to imagine the terrors of the Revolution eddying about this lovely woman. She left Paris in haste and travelled, going from one great town to another always painting. The eighteenth century had sounded its last stroke—the nineteenth had come. Madame Le Brun spent many years in St. Petersburg away from her country.

The darkness of the Revolution had passed away, and the Empire, with its pseudo-classic taste, was a reigning power not only over French society, but over French art. David is the painter of the Empire.

We will pass over that time and come to the more modern period. Diaz de la Pena (1809–1876) was born at Bordeaux, and, from his earliest years, he studied nature. He was always out in the woods looking at the trees, at their shadows cast on the ground, at the effect of the clouds, at the rocks in the great forest of Fontainebleau. He would follow Rousseau, the landscape painter, studying and painting the landscapes that ultimately won him fame. “Sunny Days in the Forest” (2058) is a glade near a shallow pool, where the trees are lit by the afternoon sun.

Here is a fine portrait group, by Fantin Latour, of Mr. and Mrs. Edwards (1952). The artist is better known in England as a flower painter. He was born in Grenoble on January 14, 1836, and he died two or three years ago. This picture brings down the French school to the present time. Have you ever seen, I wonder, Fantin Latour’s exquisite pictures of roses and pansies, of gorgeous peonies and humble stocks? He was the greatest flower painter of our day—greater perhaps than any flower painter of any period. The illustrious artist Whistler, writing to Fantin Latour, says of one of the Frenchman’s flower pieces, “The effect is bewildering, and it seems to me you have discovered something new in the boldness of your colouring.” Fantin loved flowers. “I have a garden outside Paris,” he said, “and a tiny house in it, and there I get up at four o’clock on a summer morning and paint the flowers as they wake.” He painted flowers for England and portraits for France. This portrait group of his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, is an exception to the rule. Mr. Edwards had begun life as a lawyer; he retired from his profession when he was thirty-eight, and cultivated painting and etching. In this picture he is represented seated, his left hand on a portfolio, examining an engraving, which he holds in his right hand. How finely Fantin has seized the scrutinising expression of his sitter’s face. How splendidly he has painted the grey hair and rendered the beard. Behind him is Mrs. Edwards, standing with folded arms, dressed in black. It is an interesting picture, a study of life itself.

I want you to look particularly at “The Marsh Arleux-du-Nord” (2135) not so much because it is a fine example of the artist’s work, as because it is the work of Corot—the dreamer—the poet Corot. He was a man to whom the birds sang as he painted; the wind stirred the leaves about him, and he transferred to the canvas all the emotions they called up. Corot (1796–1875) was the son of parents in somewhat humble circumstances. His father held a small post under government, his mother was a milliner. When he was sixteen years of age he was apprenticed to a draper. He served him for seven years, and at last the desire of his heart was gratified, for all the time that he served his master his soul was absorbed in the love of art. He left his employer, and wrung from his father a grudging promise that he would not oppose his wish to become a painter.

It was at the Ville d’Avray, a delicious spot near Paris, that Corot mostly lived and mostly worked, but he made many excursions in Italy especially, also in the South of France. At the beginning of his career there was something conventional in his methods, but he soon after reached his ideal, and this ideal was to study nature herself. I wish I could quote to you some of his letters telling of his happy love of art, of his humble spirit, ever seeking to learn from nature herself. He was delightfully simple. The folk of the Ville d’Avray called him “_Le père Corot_.” He would go about in a peasant’s blouse and paint out of doors, setting his canvas, preparing his brushes, smiling to the birds as they twittered around him, keeping his appointments with the dawn and with the sunset. He always painted the effects of soft light, of the quiet dusk; he never cared for the garish light of noon-day or for the splendours of sunset. Look at his pictures; you will see how subdued they are in tone, how light is the foliage of the trees. “It must be light for the birds to fly through,” Corot would say. When you look at a picture by Corot, a picture of broad, subdued masses of colour, you must think of the simple artist happy at his work, happy in his love of nature. When Corot lay on his death-bed, he had visions of exquisite landscape; and, as he died, he moved his hands as if he were painting still.

“The Horse Fair,” by Rosa Bonheur, which is now placed in the Tate Gallery, but which is not to remain permanently there, is a magnificent work, one full of energy. Rosa Bonheur differed very much in her conception of animal life from that held by our painter Landseer. He made his beasts the comrades of man, sympathising, understanding all his moods. Rosa Bonheur painted hers as a distinct creation. In this picture we seem to hear the tramp of the horses’ hoofs, we seem to feel their wild delight at the touch of the free air, and to sympathise with their acquiescence in man’s power over them. All her life she was devoted to the study of animals. As a girl she used to spend hours in the Paris slaughter-houses, drawing from the poor creatures in their agony, learning anatomy from their bodies. Her studio in Fontainebleau had a number of stables.

When I was quite a little girl in Paris, I remember going to see Rosa Bonheur with my father and mother and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. It all comes back to me so dimly. There was a big studio with the pictures on easels and among others was this “Horse Fair.” I remember that, when we came, Rosa Bonheur was not there to receive us, and yet we had come by appointment. We all looked at the pictures, and I remember how my father drew the attention of his little daughter to the vigorous hoof of a strong white horse.

“THE HORSE FAIR”

BY ROSA BONHEUR

This picture has been recently removed to the Tate Gallery (601)

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Still Rosa Bonheur did not come. Presently there was a noise, and I remember the start I gave when I saw creeping from under the table a laughing, brilliant woman in a costume that struck me as very masculine. It was Rosa Bonheur. She had fallen asleep under the table, resting after her lecture at the Jardin des Plantes, and she had overslept herself. I can never look at that wonderful picture without the memory of that day coming back to me.