Part 5

Germany, owing perhaps to her long civil wars and political troubles, had produced no great artist since Holbein, and the English school was as yet non-existent, so we may easily comprehend the very low level to which art sank toward the beginning of the eighteenth century. When I say that the English school was non-existent in the seventeenth century, I do not mean that there were no painters in England. The Stuart princes were generally liberal patrons of art, but all the best painters patronized by them were foreigners. Vandyke, Sir Peter Lely, and even Sir G. Kneller, were all foreigners, and the country was inundated with third-rate Flemish and Italian painters. Of the latter, Verrio is a good typical example. Charles II employed him to cover the ceilings and walls of his palaces with tasteless sprawling allegories, and we learn from Walpole that the sums paid by the king, or rather by the unfortunate country, for these wretched parodies of Italian decorative painting, were very considerable.

I think that of late years Sir Peter Lely has had scant justice done to his talent. A contemporary of Vandyke, his portraits have many points of resemblance with those of that master. His inferiority is chiefly noticeable in the hands, dresses, and accessories of his portraits, but his female heads are often very beautiful, and are singularly characteristic of the period.

Sir Godfrey Kneller, although he lived well into the eighteenth century, must be looked upon as a seventeenth-century painter, all his best work having been done when he was comparatively young. He is another of those predecessors of Reynolds whom it has been the fashion to villify and decry. I have seen portraits by Kneller which were infinitely better than much of the highly-praised portraiture of the last century; but unfortunately this clever though intensely vain artist regarded painting more as a lucrative trade than as a liberal profession. No one can wish that Kneller had devoted his talents to the stupid allegorical style then in fashion, instead of sticking to portraits; but what may be wished is that he had been more conscientious, and less greedy for money, in the particular branch of art to which he devoted himself.

In speaking of court patronage I noticed that the painters encouraged by the Stuarts were all foreigners, but this does not seem to have been done from systematic neglect of native talent, but simply because no painters worthy of the name were born in England. The only real Englishman of the century who rose above mediocrity was William Dobson, and he had no reason to complain of want of royal patronage, for King Charles appointed him at a very early age to be court painter on the death of Vandyke, and used to call him the English Tintoretto.

From what I have seen of Dobson’s I don’t think I should have compared him to Tintoretto. Nevertheless I consider him as a genuine artist, and had he not died at the age of thirty-six he would probably have achieved much greater fame.

I ought not to omit mentioning John Riley, whose work was often taken for Lely’s. Walpole describes him as having been humble and modest, and adds that with a quarter of Kneller’s vanity he might have persuaded the world that he was as great a master. I think the anecdote told of him greatly in his favor, that Charles II, after sitting to him, exclaimed, on seeing the picture, “Is this like me? then, oddsfish! I am an ugly fellow.” In such an age of flattery and falsehood it is quite refreshing to meet with an honest painter.

To give you an idea of the deplorable state of the art of painting toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, I will quote from Horace Walpole, who, although by no means a good art-critic, was a man of great taste and shrewdness. Speaking of the accession of the House of Hanover, he says:--“We are now arrived at the period in which the arts were sunk to the lowest ebb in Britain. From the stiffness introduced by Holbein and the Flemish masters we were fallen into a loose and (if I may use the word) dissolute kind of painting. Sir Godfrey Kneller still lived, but only in name, which he prostituted by suffering the most wretched daubings of hired substitutes to pass for his works, while at most he gave himself the trouble of painting the face of the person who sat to him. His successors thought they had caught his free manner when they neglected drawing and finishing.”

Walpole goes on to deplore the frightful fashions of the period, and remarks that Dahl, D’Agar, Richardson, Jervas, and others, “rebuffed by such barbarous forms, and not possessing genius enough to deviate from what they saw, clothed all their personages with a loose drapery and airy mantles, which not only _were_ not but _could_ not be the dress of any age or nation. All these casual and loose wrappings were imitated from nothing; they seldom have any folds or chiaroscuro, drawing and color being equally forgotten.”

There are hundreds of these portraits still in existence, but they are generally relegated to attics and dark corridors of old country-seats, and no one ever thinks of looking at them. The owner does not like to make a bonfire of the effigies of his ancestors, but he stows them away where they will not be seen. Setting aside all questions of art, these insipid productions are valueless as likenesses. We feel that not only the dresses, but the faces themselves could not be of any age or nation.

Walpole, like most men of his time, cared but little about historical or decorative painting, and his remarks on the decadence of art relate solely to portraiture, but there is no doubt that figure-painting had deteriorated just as much.

George I, was totally devoid of taste, and the second George (as is well known) hated “boetry and bainting.” The only employers of artists (I cannot call them patrons) were country gentlemen and a few noblemen who wanted their portraits painted. The wonder to me is, not that the portraits of Richardson and Jervas are so bad, but that they are not worse.

As the century proceeded, portrait-painting in England did not improve. We find that, between 1730 and 1750, Thomas Hudson was at the head of the profession, and no words can express better than this fact how deep the art had sunk. The only representative of large historical painting at the beginning of the century was Sir James Thornhill. I do not feel for this artist the same antipathy that I do for his predecessors, Verrio and Laguerre.

Indeed, I think that had Sir James lived at any other period he would have become a really great artist.

He was a very fair draughtsman, and understood the art of grouping with taste and dignity; but he had not the genius necessary to break away altogether from the ignoble style of his day.

It would be a profitless task to enumerate the crowd of insipid foreign painters who found a market for their work in England during the first half of the eighteenth century. I prefer passing on at once to Hogarth, who stands up like a giant amongst his dwarfish contemporaries. _He_ at any rate possessed original genius, and his manual skill, though inferior to that of the best Dutchmen, was by no means contemptible. His portraits are amongst the best and most characteristic of the century, and I can find nothing in his attempts at a higher kind of art, as illustrated by his “Sigismunda” (in the National Gallery), to justify either the savage onslaught of Walpole or the contemptuous pity of Reynolds. On the contrary, it appears to me that this much-abused picture is a very respectable performance, and I fail to see any presumption in a skilful and accomplished artist like Hogarth seeking to escape from the loathsome task of always painting scenes of vice, misery, or folly.

Sir Joshua ought to have recollected his own “Death of Dido,” and other attempts in what he calls “the great historical style,” before taxing Hogarth with imprudence and presumption.

As in these lectures I have often ventured to criticise, and, as some may think, to speak disrespectfully of our first President and his discourses, I should like to state that though I do not admire his pictures as universally as some do, I consider him to have been a thorough artist; by which I mean that he was saturated with love for his profession. To him, painting, instead of being a task, was the greatest pleasure in life, and in pursuit of this pleasure he was indefatigable. We owe him a deep debt of gratitude as the great regenerator of art in this country.

The great French art-reformer, David, went back to the antique, and to nature (who is older still); and this seems to me the more logical method. But there is no doubt that, practically (considering Sir Joshua’s own idiosyncrasies and the state in which he found English portraiture), an intelligent study of the old masters was the best rope for hauling British art off the mudbank on which she had so long been stranded.

The name of Reynolds as a portrait-painter is almost as much respected abroad as it is here. Most of his work is faded and otherwise much deteriorated, but fortunately the excellent engravings of his portraits will to all ages preserve his fame as a man of great power, taste, and refinement.

I confess myself quite unable to appreciate Gainsborough’s pictures as they are at present appreciated. I don’t mean to say that I undervalue _all_ his work. I have seen heads by him which I admired exceedingly, but I must protest against the blind fetishism which would compel us to accept as good work any weak, trashy picture which bears his name. I have read laudatory notices both of him and Romney which would tempt one to say with Borachio, “See what a deformed thief this Fashion is!”

I would recommend young artists to bear in mind a pithy old saying, to the effect that “One man may steal a horse while another may not look over the hedge”; and to beware of treating landscape, or portraiture either, in the Gainsborough style. Should they be misled into any thing of the kind, they will find to their cost that the loose, flimsy manner which is greatly admired in the fashionable painter of the last century, will not be tolerated for one instant in a modern picture.

Amongst the early members of this Academy, Cotes, Dance, and Ramsay were all portrait-painters, who have, in my opinion, fully as good a right to celebrity as Gainsborough; but their merits are ignored, whilst inferior works attributed to Gainsborough fetch thousands of pounds.

Amongst the figure-painters of the eighteenth-century academicians, I consider Copley to have been far the best. When I compare his honest, manly work with that of his contemporaries, Angelica Kaufman and West, I am always struck by its immeasurable superiority. Indeed, considering that portraiture had been the only branch of the art cultivated in England since the days of Holbein, and bearing in mind how figure-drawing had been neglected, I look upon Copley’s pictures with something like admiration.

I cannot feel the same respect for Barry’s paintings at the Adelphi, although the effort evinced in these paintings is worthy of all praise. It was a much-needed protest against the all-absorbing fashionable portraiture of the day; but unfortunately the artist’s drawing was neither correct nor refined enough for this kind of work, and I fear it must be allowed that the execution of these heroic subjects is both weak and pretentious. In my opinion there are but two English figure-painters of the eighteenth century whose merit would be acknowledged by an intelligent foreign critic--by one, in short, who was ignorant of the market value of pictures, and whose judgment was, therefore, wholly unbiased. These two painters would be Hogarth and Copley. We will now see what sort of artists this century of puff and powder produced in France.

In France the seventeenth century had been a very remarkable period for art, for it was then that Poussin, Lesueur, Claude Gelée, and Lebrun all lived and died. Thus, while in England all historical and landscape painting was a complete blank, France produced some of the greatest artists that have ever lived. They (at least three of them, Poussin, Lesueur, and Claude) were great in the largest sense of the word. Classic, religious, and landscape painting must always, _ceteris paribus_, take precedence of homely genre and prosaic portraiture. Invention is a higher quality than power of imitation, particularly when, as in the case of these three painters, the inventive power flowed without effort and was exercised with rare taste and judgment. With these three great artists I coupled Lebrun, not because I consider him by any means their equal, but because he was the founder of a good deal of the art which found favor in France during the eighteenth century. It is with this century that we have to deal; so, without further preamble, I will begin with Jean Jouvenet.

This artist (but little known out of France) narrowly escaped becoming a great painter. His early pictures have a good deal of Poussin’s classical manner about them. Lebrun thought so highly of the young artist that he employed him as an assistant in the large battle-pieces he was executing for Louis XIV at Versailles.

Here he no doubt acquired a good deal of Lebrun’s vigor and facility, but lost the pure taste and classical feeling he had derived from Poussin. He was a very prolific painter, and all his works are either life-size or larger than life. They are remarkably well drawn and vigorously colored, but they lack the one quality which makes Lesueur’s work so attractive, viz., simplicity and reverential feeling.

It is by no means necessary that the painter of religious subjects should be an ascetic, nor even what is commonly called a religious man, but it is necessary that he should import into his work some of the spirit of Christianity, just as it is necessary for the painter of pagan heroes and nymphs to imbue himself with the spirit of classical art until it becomes a second nature to him.

In Jouvenet’s numerous pictures of New Testament subjects the action is too violent, and the painter has evidently thought more about displaying his own skill than doing justice to his subject.

In Rubens’ Biblical pictures we often find the same kind of vulgar bustle and common types, but every thing is pardoned to Rubens on account of his brilliant color.

Jouvenet’s color, though fairly good, was not of that transcendent quality which would condone his very unbiblical style of composition.

With all his faults, Jouvenet is rather a favorite of mine. I like his thoroughly masculine style of work, and I admire his indomitable pluck and industry. It is related of him that some ten years before his death he became afflicted with paralysis, which completely crippled his right arm. He then took to painting with his left, and on recovering partially the use of his right fingers he used to hold his brush in his right hand and guide it with his left. It is said that the work thus done is hardly inferior to what he produced before his paralysis. Contrast this devotion and love for his art with the tradesman-like indifference of the English face-painters, of the Knellers, the Jervases, and the Richardsons, and others who, as soon as they had acquired wealth, shirked work as much as possible.

Antoine Watteau is another artist of great power and originality, who made a very marked impression on the Continental schools of the eighteenth century. Although he died at the early age of thirty-seven he became quite a _chef d’école_. Lancret was the best of his imitators, but dexterous and clever as Lancret’s pictures are, they hardly equal the best of Watteau’s. We have often read and heard about the humble beginnings of artists, who subsequently became famous, but the poverty and squalor of Watteau’s student life have, I should think, never been rivalled. He left his native town, Valenciennes, for Paris without money and with hardly a rag to cover him. With difficulty he obtained work at a kind of sign-painter’s, whose principal business was in the religious votive picture line. A number of young students were employed by this dealer, and quantity was more insisted on than quality. Watteau got three francs a week, and as he was an excellent workman he had a bowl of soup given him every day. He did not stay very long with this man, but for many years his poverty compelled him to work for others. During all this time he never ceased taking every opportunity of sketching from nature, and thus laid the foundations of his subsequent extraordinary facility. Ultimately he was fortunate enough to meet with the best kind of patron, not a pompous big-wig who condescended to sit for his portrait, but a gentleman who possessed a first-class collection of drawings by the old masters, and who allowed Watteau to sketch and copy to his heart’s content. This completed our artist’s education. He formed his style of color on P. Veronese and Rubens, but his elegant and _spirituel_ drawing and the crisp dexterity of his touch were all his own. It may surprise some to hear that the painter of the frivolous, masquerading scenes and of the foppish humors of his day was of a mild and rather melancholy disposition, longing for the quiet of a country life, and the unsophisticated joys of a poultry-yard and cabbage-garden. Watteau’s fame increased after his death, when it was found that not one of his numerous imitators could equal him. This fame was completely swept away by the great classical wave which deluged France toward the close of the century. This wave in its turn receded, and Watteau is now again at high-water mark.

The able French critic, M. Villot, asks apropos of this flux and reflux of popular estimation--“Pourquoi ne pas rendre justice en tout temps (quel que soit le genre, quelle que soit la forme) à l’originalite, à la force, au sentiment, en un mot au vrai génie?” The answer is, Who is to determine what “vrai génie” is? It is just because the art-world in the time of David could see no genius in Watteau that they treated his work with the most ignominious contempt, and it is because the present French school is intensely anticlassical that the paintings of the first Empire are looked upon with loathing. I am afraid that fashion rules public opinion in art as much as she does in dress.

There are very few artists and still fewer critics who can (like M. Villot) give an unprejudiced opinion about two such dissimilar painters as Watteau and David.

They (like politicians) take either one side or the other. They are swayed by party, and we all know what that means. We all know the respectful homage paid by Liberals to Conservatives, and _vice versâ_.

I now come to the painters who are most typical of the eighteenth century. These were the brothers Vanloo and Boucher. I group them together, as their style and the subjects they treated were so similar that for my purpose these three or four painters may be treated as one.

Gifted with a marvellous facility of brush, with great industry, and with no scruples about purity of style, these facile decorative painters got through an incredible amount of work. Boucher especially fairly glutted the market with pictures and drawings of every conceivable subject, and as (although a man of pleasure) he made it a rule to work ten hours a day, it may be understood that a good deal of this work was mechanical and commonplace.

The color of all the pictures of this school is as fictitious as the drawing, but for all that it is not disagreeable from a decorative point of view; and none but very clever men could have ignored nature with so little impunity. When I was a student in Paris, the traditions of the David school had not died out, and to call an artist a Boucher or a Vanloo was the _ne plus ultra_ of insult. Old David himself, however, seems to have been more just to Boucher, for when one of his fanatical classical followers was railing against that master, “I can tell you,” says David, “that it is not given to every one to be a Boucher.” No doubt he was right. It is _not_ given to every one to produce over 10,000 works of art, none of which can be said to be much below mediocrity, and some greatly above it.

Boucher, and even the much-abused Vanloo, were infinitely better painters in every respect than any artist Italy could produce at this period. They at any rate had a style of their own, which is more than can be said for Maratti, Pomponi, and the other miserable followers of the once great Italian school.

The style was neither noble nor pure, but it was all the better suited for the decoration of Louis XV apartments. Another figure-painter contemporary with Boucher and the Vanloos was Greuze.

This artist is a very striking illustration of the power of fashion over the popularity of a painter. It is not many years ago since a good specimen of Greuze was worth more than a fine Rembrandt or Van der Helst. This strange Greuze mania lasted a few years, and then happily died gradually away.

There is a certain prettiness about his female heads, and I have seen portraits by him which were remarkably good; but his pictures, such as “The Malédiction paternelle” and the “Fils puni,” are a curious mixture of nambypambyism and melodrama.

There were two popular engravings of these pictures, which in Louis Philippe’s time were great favorites with the lower bourgeoisie; and it was curious to note how universally they were disliked by all artists, and how universally admired by all retired grocers, pork-butchers, and shopkeepers in general.

His _chef-d’œuvre_ is supposed to be the “Cruche cassee” at the Louvre; and during the Greuze epidemic, hundreds of copies were made of this (to me) rather offensive picture.

I shall reserve David and his school for my next lecture, but before finishing what I have to say about the French artists of the eighteenth century, I wish to mention the portrait-painter Rigaud, and one or two landscape-painters. Portrait-painting in France was never debased to a trade as it was in England. Many of the historical painters I have mentioned executed portraits, and very fine ones too, but the best portraitist of the century was Hyacinthe Rigaud. His full-length of Louis XIV is really a grand work. His biographer informs us that he worked with his brush for sixty-two years, and averaged thirty portraits a year during the whole of that period. In addition to this he made a point of retouching the numerous copies and replicas which were made of his royal portraits. He painted five kings and innumerable princes and scions of royal blood. Probably no artist ever lived who painted so many great personages, or who gave such general satisfaction. No man, however, could possibly get through such a colossal amount of work without the quality suffering, and there is in Rigaud’s portraits of minor personages a monotony and mechanical sameness which is very tiresome, although I never yet saw a portrait by Rigaud which was ill drawn or badly posed.

It appears that this excellent artist distinguished himself in early life by his careful academical studies--studies which he continued long after he became well known as a portrait-painter; and the good results of this training are evident from the masterly treatment of the hands and all the accessories in his portraits. It is strange that Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was liberal enough (at any rate toward artists who were no longer living), should never have mentioned the portraits of Rigaud.