Part 3
If Whistler, to mention an artist representative of some newer movements than those of the eighteenth century, had been on the Pont-Neuf, from what a different source would have come any _coup de lumière_ which might have flashed into his brain! Not during high noon, nor in the gossip of the people, would he have found the motive for his paintings. His _coup de lumière_ would have come "when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us--then the wayfarer hastens home; and the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master--her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her."
Whistler's eyes would have been directed towards the beauties of colour and of tone that he might find on the river or on its banks; and the Isle de France, as it is seen by the tired journalist as he makes his way to the Latin Quarter at dawn of day, with its tender grays, and its evasive charms of exquisite light and colour, would be of more account to him than {35} all the conversations in the world, however vehement they might be. The idea of preaching or moralizing on canvas would never have entered his head for a moment.
When Greuze, in harmony with the raw notions of Diderot upon art, did preach, his homilies were singularly unimpressive. The pictures which he painted when in this sermonizing vein have all the elements that go to the making of what is now called melodrama. The scenes are not the result of a discriminating observation of real life; are not, to use Zola's phrase, "Nature seen through a temperament." They are founded upon conventions, upon the artificial and sentimental ideas of life that have by some curious freak of the human mind established themselves in books and plays and pictures.
The figures in Greuze's _genre_ pictures pose before the spectators; they gesticulate and overdo their parts like barn-stormers. Pity becomes maudlin, morality degenerates into sanctimoniousness, and humility is degraded into utter abasement. The sentimentality in _Un Paralytique Soigné par sa Famille_, _ou le Fruit de la Bonne Education_, and in _La Mère Paralytique_ is particularly nauseating, and in _La Mère bien Aimée_ the exaggeration of what is in actual life a very tender sentiment makes of that picture a very significant example of Greuze's stilted manner. The six children--all of them about the same age--who have flung themselves upon their mother, seem so numerous, {36} and are so involved in a confused heap of humanity that Madame Geoffrin spoke of the picture as a "fricassee of children," and incurred thereby the fulminations of the artist. In his _genre_ pictures, too, as is usual in melodrama elsewhere, the humble cottage is the headquarters of all the virtues.
Greuze, it is true, made sketches for his pictures in the streets and in the market-places; but there is none of the freshness of the sketch when the figure appears on the canvas, and De Goncourt has complained that little tatterdemalions with their split breeches have become on their way to Greuze's canvases the Cupids of Boucher dressed as Savoyards; and further, he has put in a mild demurrer that the artist's washerwomen do not wash!
In strong contrast to Greuze's melodramatic, affected, domestic scenes are those by Chardin, another French artist of the eighteenth century. No ethical teaching is obtruded in his pictures; there is no pose, and the spectator can enjoy the real poetry of life, the sweetness and simplicity of well-ordered homes, undisturbed by the poseurs who clamour for our regard in many of the pictures by Greuze.
Another fault of Greuze's _genre_ pictures is their poverty and feebleness of colour. There is a general deadness, and in parts an abuse of purple and violet. Some of the tints have a dirty muddled look, and the shadows are heavy and brown. Still the chief fault is that art in {37} these pictures is relegated to a second place; the pictures are a means, and not an end.
To see many of his _genre_ pictures together is to receive an impression of monotony. It is clear that the range of the artist is narrow, that he is making a few ideas cover a great area of canvas, and that he ceased to grow intellectually at an early stage of his career.
Greuze and Hogarth have often been compared, but there are many essential differences between the two men. There was dissimilarity in their temperaments, and while Greuze has adopted the attitude of a mild-mannered Sabbath-school superintendent, towards those whose immorality he would correct, Hogarth, as Professor Muther has written, has "swung over this human animal the stout cudgel of morality in the manner of a sturdy policeman and Puritan _bourgeois_." Charles Normand explains the difference with some disregard for international amenity. Greuze, he says, "did not paint for the English, at once drunkards and theologians, maundering on through life, with a pot of gin in one hand and a Bible in the other."
And yet Greuze is no Puritan, even when he preaches most. There is often an air of coquetry and voluptuousness in his most serious pictures. Charles Blanc has written that Greuze is a moralist who is passionately fond of beautiful shoulders, a preacher who loves to see and to reveal to us the bosoms of young girls; and Lady Dilke has pointed out that "even in _Un {38} Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants_ ... the instinct which bade him associate with his lessons of grace and morality the stimulus of voluptuous charm has tempted him to give prominence to the girl whose thoughts are far away, and whose kerchief is torn just where it should hide the budding breast."
But when criticism has said all it can say in dispraise of Greuze's pictures, even of his _genre_ pictures, it may be seen that Greuze was by temperament an artist. The melodramatic moralist was only part of the man and not the whole. Even Robert Louis Stevenson had "something of the Shorter-Catechist" in his constitution, and yet remains the most romantic and interesting figure of the latter-day world of letters.
It need not be forgotten that in the most theatrical works of Greuze there are many beauties. There is often a figure in these otherwise imperfect pictures which indicates his love for the beautiful, and in some of his paintings, for instance in _Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants_, the melodramatic element, though present, is not obtrusive, and is more than compensated by the other qualities of tenderness and graceful composition.
We may now consider the other class of Greuze's paintings, the heads of children, and it is in these that Greuze is seen at his best; it is in these that he redeems himself, and reveals more of the artist. To-day, though his other works are scarcely ever mentioned, his heads {39} of girls and boys are treasured in the most costly collections, and are known far and wide by means of photographs and other reproductions.
In many an art gallery the beautiful eyes of these pretty, rosy-cheeked children meet our own, and we stay yet again to admire their fresh lips and their brown hair, in which the piece of blue ribbon nestles with such harmony of colouring. Often a light gauze has been thrown round their necks or upon their shoulders, and often, too, a posy of flowers tucked into the tops of their bodices emulates the carnation and white of their complexions. There are few pictures that are more sweet and alluring than these heads of children.
In London it is an easy matter to study Greuze's child portraits, because there are a few examples at the National Gallery, and more at Hertford House. Standing before these canvases the general effect is one of sweetness and delicacy, one colour melting into another in almost imperceptible gradations, and giving an impression very unlike the one we receive from the hard edges of a painting by Maclise for example. The colours are not positive, but have been softened and harmonized. For instance, if a piece of white paper is held against what may seem to be a piece of white drapery, it will be found that the white has been modified into a beautiful delicate pearly gray. The same test may be applied to the other colours. Hold a piece of positive blue {40} near to one of Greuze's seemingly blue ribbons, and it will be noticed that a similar modification has been effected.
The forms, too, have been rounded, and have been freed from all angularities. Indeed, Greuze has carried this process as far as it is possible. Too much of this smoothing and the picture would lose in character, and would become but a vapid piece of work.
In the long series of heads of girls and boys that Greuze painted, some of the pictures are conspicuously better than the rest. Of these may be mentioned the _Head of a Young Girl Veiled in Black_, which belongs to M. Leopold Goldschmidt, and two more which are in the Museum at Besançon, _Paul Strogonoff_, _Infant_, and the _Head of a Young Girl_. Also characteristic of Greuze at his best, and more available to the people of this country, is _A Girl with Doves_. In the year 1800 he exhibited at the Salon _L'Innocence tenant Deux Pigeons_. It has not been definitely ascertained, but it is possible that this is the beautiful picture that hangs now in the Wallace Gallery. Few paintings by Greuze are more pleasing than this one. The picture is well painted, and it is quite free from Greuze's besetting sins. Where in other pictures one finds posturing and affectation, one finds here the simplicity and sweetness of nature. The painting was a commission from a Mr. Wilkinson, and Greuze received 4,500 francs for it. When Mr. Wilkinson's pictures were sold in 1828, Mr. Nieuwenhuys became {41} the purchaser, and he paid 245 guineas for the painting. Later the work became the property of Mr. W. Wells, of Redleaf, and when, in 1848, his pictures were dispersed, the Marquis of Hertford gave £787 10s. for this one, and thus it has become part of the splendid collection at Hertford House, now belonging to the nation. During the Manchester Exhibition of 1857 the public had a chance to see it there, and it was exhibited again at Bethnal Green in 1874. Another picture in which Greuze's style may be studied is _A Girl's Head, draped with a Scarf_. In England this is one of the best-known of the artist's works. Thirty and more years ago it was reproduced in popular publications, and it has been reproduced many times since by various processes. By the bequest of Mr. R. Simmons, the original picture has become the property of the nation, and it is now the most characteristic example of Greuze amongst those that hang in the National Gallery. Upon this canvas one may see many of the qualities to which we have already referred. There is more than a suspicion of mannerism in the way that the hands are held, and one feels, concerning the shoulder, that, beautiful as it is, it has been obtruded upon the notice of the spectator with a somewhat free anatomical license. The half-open mouth also gives an impression of affectation; and yet, when criticism has pronounced its last word, the picture still remains graceful and seductive.
Some of the faults of Greuze's manner which {42} have been noted in his _genre_ pictures appear also in his heads of children. The girls in a number of the pictures are too self-conscious and affected, imperfections that one may see prominently illustrated in _Fidelity_ and in _Ariadne_, in the Wallace Collection.
A few, indeed, of Greuze's heads can scarcely be called paintings of children at all, so many of the elements of womanhood has he mingled with what is otherwise typical of childhood. As representations of the charm and the insouciance of childhood, a painting by Greuze would ill bear comparison, for example, with a work by Chardin amongst his own compatriots, with works by Reynolds and Gainsborough; or, to come to our time, with some of the children of Millais, with Watts' _Agathoniké Hélène Ionides_, Whistler's _Miss Alexander_, Mouat Loudan's _Isa_, John Lavery's _A Girl in White_, or with Edward Arthur Walton's _The Girl in Brown_.
Most of the French critics who have written of Greuze have drawn attention to this imperfection in the artist's paintings of children. De Goncourt in some passages of searching criticism has written regarding a number of these heads that they represent "the innocence of Paris and of the eighteenth century, an easy innocence which is near its fall." And De Goncourt, Diderot, and other writers have pointed out that in many the head is the head of a girl on the body of a woman; that Greuze has, in fact, put "young heads on old shoulders." {43} Charles Blanc has written of _Une Jeune Fille qui pleure la Mort de son Oiseau_, that the head is the head of a child, but the grief is the grief of a woman; and he has added to this criticism that it is rare to find in Greuze's pictures of this class the head in harmony with the body.
Despite all these shortcomings, however, the pictures are charming, but the appeal of Greuze will be specially to the young, who mark the beauty only, and are unconscious of any pose or any incongruity.
In addition to the kinds of paintings we have mentioned, Greuze showed that he was not quite free from the conventions of the period by painting a few mythological, religious, and allegorical works, but these are pictures which are not of any importance.
"Keep yourself free from formulas," he said to Count Henry Costa, but therein he did not follow his own bidding. A writer in the _Nouvelle Biographie Générale_ has recorded that during this era it was accepted and taught that a sphere should be represented as though it had many sides. Greuze at one time accepted this absurd dogma, and in some of his pictures the chubby cheeks of children have been painted as though they had facets. His most finished works, however, are free from this blemish. Greuze's desire to be an historical painter is more evidence that he was not without the conventional ideas which have strangled art with such persistency.
{44}
Although Greuze sometimes sketched rapidly, yet his works are usually the result of slow and laborious effort renewed again and again. His plan was to return to his picture when he was at his best, and to paint and repaint, no matter how often, until he felt that the work was as free from faults as he could make it.
{45}
HIS POSITION IN FRENCH ART
During the seventeenth century France had not an art of her own. The native painters derived their pictures from Roman or Grecian traditions. They shut their eyes upon the beauties of Nature, painted tedious repetitions of other people's notions, and could not so much as paint their own King, Louis XIV., except as Cyrus or as Alexander!
This period of dulness, pomposity, and general boredom was succeeded by one of light and gaiety, when the joy and the colour of life received recognition. To this consummation the supreme genius of Watteau contributed some of the most exquisite and poetical pictures of all time, and delivered France "from the oppressive yoke of the Italian tradition." Watteau had many imitators, and his style dominated art for many years, but eventually freedom degenerated into license, and even into sheer obscenity. Count Henry Costa, visiting Paris during this period, wrote in a letter to his parents in Savoy: "Greuze, I think, is not partial to Boucher; and rightly loathes the filthiness in fashion now, which desecrates art and ruins morality." Boucher he described as {46} "an old worldling, more dissipated and done up than you can imagine."
It is in the writings of Diderot that one can see, as well as in any other place, an indication that towards the end of the eighteenth century influential people in France were growing more and more studious and serious. The ideas of Rousseau were taking possession of the minds of other people. The nation must study Nature, and discover her laws. Prejudices, authority, tradition, must all be examined in the light of this new idea. Vice must be subdued, artificiality, insincerity, luxury, false refinements, must be swept away, and the people must return to a life of greater simplicity. Man, by nature moral, had been corrupted by civilization, and it was therefore the least civilized who were the least corrupt.
Ideas like these, set forth with the power and the burning zeal of Rousseau, and with the deftness of Diderot, had prepared the minds of the Parisians to receive the _genre_ pictures of Greuze, for to some extent he is an advocate of these ideas in his pictures, seeing that virtues are attributed in a generous measure to the poor and downtrodden of the people.
It is thus that, breaking away from the style of the painters who did little more than pander to the French Court, the pictures of Greuze mark with perfect clearness the beginning of a new tendency which was making itself felt in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of adding to the great store of _fêtes {47} galantes_, and the triumphs of love of the time, Greuze looked for his subjects upon the quays, and boulevards, and market-places, and in the cottages of humble people.
"Courage, my good Greuze," said Diderot of one of Greuze's pictures of domestic drama; "introduce morality into painting. What! has not the palette been long enough, and too long, consecrated to debauchery and vice? Ought we not to be delighted at seeing it at last, united with dramatic poetry, in instructing, correcting us, and inviting us to virtue?"
Living amidst such ideas as these, Greuze founded in France, in the words of De Goncourt, "the deplorable school of the literary painter, and the moralizing artist," or of "that barbaric, story-telling art," as Muther, writing in a similar strain, has described it.
It was this manner of painting that brought out what similarity there is between Hogarth and Greuze, who has been called "a sentimental Hogarth." Like the painter of _The Rake's Progress_, Greuze told moral tales in a series of pictures in which virtue is exalted and vice abashed, a kind of painting quite different from the pictures which had hitherto been exhibited in Paris. Truly, as Charles Normand has written, "the hour of the reaction against the pastorals and the mythological insipidities of Boucher had sounded. It was Greuze who was the pioneer in the new departure, and he reaped the reward. His fault is that he replaced one convention by another." Hitherto {48} the Court had been all in all, but now had arrived, in the phrase of Charles Blanc, "l'usurpation bourgeoise."
Yet though Greuze thus parted from his predecessors, and, at his best, went along the line of progress towards a study of Nature at first hand, he brought about no violent change such as was seen in England when Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites broke in upon the complacent mediocrities who represented art in England during early Victorian times.
Though he preached against the ardent sensuality of his era, his own pictures were not wholly free from it, and in the collection at Hertford House his _L'Offrande a l'Amour_, and particularly _La Bacchante_, strike no new note amongst the other paintings of the same period. There is not the great difference that would be noticed if an early Millais were to be hung amidst a collection of the works of Maclise, Landseer, Collins, Newton, Leslie, Mulready, and Webster. Greuze did not free France in the same way that the Pre-Raphaelites loosed the bonds of convention and tradition in our own country.
Greuze founded no school, and indeed outlived his own movement; for he and Fragonard were left in hopeless isolation when the Revolution overwhelmed France. There are few more pathetic passages in the lives of painters than those which relate how, for the sake of their daily bread, these poor old men made {49} ineffectual attempts, Fragonard with his _Le Grand Prêtre Corésus se sacrifie pour sauver Callirrhoé_, and Greuze with his _Ariadne at Naxos_, to adapt themselves to the new situation.
The Revolution, so far from freeing art in France, brought about, under David--excellent as he was as a painter of portraits--a reaction to a "barren, wearisome classicism," represented by pictures which are now absolutely without attraction. Instead of studying Nature, the painters studied the statues and the friezes of the ancients. They became antiquaries and geometricians, and left the open air to weary themselves in musty libraries, in the pursuit of archæological accuracy. Formulas and conventions, traditions and self-constituted authority were once more exalted upon pedestals, and the century which opened with the "pipes and timbrels" of Watteau closed with the prosing of the most tedious bores.
So successfully did David put back the clock, that it was not until the nineteenth century was nearly thirty years of age that the artists of France, inspired, as we love to think, by our own John Constable, issued from the house of bondage to study Nature in the forest of Fontainebleau.
{50}
OUR ILLUSTRATIONS
_The Kiss_ (_Le Baiser Jeté_).--Although this work has not been reproduced so many times as _La Cruche Cassée_, it yet ranks with that painting as one of the most fascinating of the works of Greuze. A young woman looks from the window of her room. She has received a letter from the hands of her lover, to whom she throws a kiss as he departs. In his treatment of this subject Greuze has shown that it was not a lack of capacity that caused him sometimes to lapse into melodrama. His acute feeling for what is beautiful has been expressed on this canvas with remarkable skill. Writing of the painting in 1765, Diderot called it "a charming picture," and Charles Normand, in giving a description of the work, has written: "The eighteenth century, amorous and unrestrained, has been made to live again in that woman, who, her eyes full of longing, her mouth partly opened, her throat scarcely veiled by a light gauze, throws from her window a kiss to her lover. The seductive shapeliness of her neck, the expression of love, the hand carried tenderly to her lips, the whole effect of her beautiful figure, which palpitates at the sight of her lover, justifies the title of _La {51} Voluptueuse_ which the painter has also given to the picture." A copy of this painting, by C. Turner, was sold in London in 1902 for £136.