Chapter 6

Before leaving Goya for men whose works are their only history, a characteristic incident, which caused his flight from Spain to Bordeaux in France, must be told. In 1814 Wellington was in Madrid and sat for his portrait to Goya. After the first sitting, the soldier presumed to criticise the work; whereat Goya, seizing a cutlass, attacked him, causing the future hero of Waterloo to flee for his life from the maniacal fury of the painter. It is said that, later, peace was made between the two men, and that the portrait was achieved; but for the moment Goya found safety in France, together with his long-suffering wife, who had incidentally borne him twenty children. At the green old age of eighty-two Goya died at Bordeaux, April 16, 1828.

No greater contrast could be devised than the four works which follow, either in the character of the art or in the uneventful respectability of the painters' lives. They are all typical of a class of pictures which has been popular in England, from the time of Hogarth to the present day. The earliest of them is the "Blind Fiddler" of Sir David Wilkie, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1807. The dates at which the others, by Mulready, Webster, and Leslie, were painted would preclude their appearance here, if strict chronological sequence were imposed, as they were painted about 1840. It is instructive, however, to group them together, to show that these artists and their followers, who were legion, thought at least as much of subject as of method. Not that the latter quality is lacking. On the contrary, it is only too evident; but it is a method of convention. No one would imagine for a moment, in looking at any one of these pictures, that he was admitted an unseen spectator to some scene of intimate family life. It is this quality which the great Dutchmen in all their scenes of familiar life preserved; and when we look at a Pieter de Hooge, for instance, there is no suspicion that the homely scene has been arranged for our delectation. In its transplantation from Holland, however, English art lost just this quality.

David Wilkie, born in Scotland, at Cults in Fifeshire, November 18, 1785, came to London in 1805 to enter the Royal Academy schools, after some preliminary training at Edinburgh. His first picture, in the exhibition of 1806, "The Village Politicians," attracted attention, and was followed the next year by "The Blind Fiddler." The work of a youth of twenty-two, it is remarkable for its close observation of character and the skilful use made of what may be termed the theatrical faculty of grouping the personages so that their action tells the story. This is not a merit, and there is little doubt that the scene would be greater as art were it more consistently human. Character is well and pictorially rendered; but by its insistence in every figure, we feel that it is but a moment since the curtain was withdrawn and the _tableau vivant_ shown. This and the pictures following it met with the most unbounded popular approval, were reproduced by engraving, and exercised an influence increased by the honors and fortune which were showered on the painter.

In 1825 Wilkie made an extended continental tour, and three years later, after his return to England, changed his class of subjects for historical and portrait painting, bringing to these later themes the same ability and the same lack of _naïveté_ which characterized his former work. A Royal Academician since 1811, he was appointed first painter in ordinary to the king, on the death of Lawrence, in 1830. He was knighted in 1836, and died at sea on June 1, 1841, while returning from Egypt.

William Mulready was of Irish birth, having come into the world at Ennis, in the County Clare, April 1, 1786. In 1809, after a period in the schools of the Royal Academy, he exhibited there a picture entitled "Fair Time," which gave him almost instant success; and until his death, July 7, 1863, though producing fewer pictures than Wilkie, he worked on very much the same class of subjects. His color is less agreeable than that of the Scot, and his execution very much more labored. His life was uneventful, occupied exclusively with his work, which he loved; so much so that two days before his death, an old man of seventy-seven, he sat drawing in the evening life class at the Royal Academy. He had been a member of the Academy since 1816. The picture here reproduced is (even without the quotation from the "Vicar of Wakefield" which accompanies it in the catalogue of the South Kensington Museum) a simple story simply told. It is free from the mannerisms which mar much of Mulready's work, especially in the portrayal of children, and in the original is more agreeable in color than are many of his pictures.

Thomas Webster, born March 20, 1800, in London, and dying at Cranbrook in Kent, September, 1886, was another painter whose work had enjoyed the full meed of popularity, from 1825 to the time of his retirement from the Royal Academy in 1877. Pictures like the one here reproduced (from the original in the South Kensington Museum, painted in 1843, and entitled "Contrary Winds"), pictures depicting homely rustic life, were his specialty. His work had gained him the title of Royal Academician in 1846.

Through all this time, and in the work of many painters unnoticed here, the qualities are evident of an honest endeavor to paint the simple life of the country. With a higher standard of taste, and better preliminary instruction, painting would have gained; and the defect with which British art has been so often reproached, of being too literary, might have been lessened. Charles Robert Leslie, whose works are almost uniformly inspired by literature, was born at Clerkenwell in England, of American parents, October 19, 1794. He was taken to Philadelphia when five years of age, but returned to England in 1811, to study at the Royal Academy. Washington Allston and Benjamin West, both Americans--the latter at the time President of the Royal Academy--aided Leslie by advice.

After a preliminary stage as a portrait painter, Leslie exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819 a picture of "Sir Roger de Coverley Going to Church," the first of a long series of pictures dependent on books for their subjects. In 1825 he painted "Sancho Panza and the Duchess," which procured him his election as an Academician the following year. The picture here reproduced is a repetition, with some slight changes, of the same subject, but was painted in 1844. Leslie may be said to have originated this style of subject in England, where he has had many followers; and, given the requisite knowledge of literature, his pictures tell their story with directness and humor. In painting, his work is rather hard; but in grace and style of drawing he was much superior to his contemporaries. Among his pictures are many suggested by Shakespeare, which have been popularized by engraving.

Leslie returned to this country in 1833 to accept the professorship of drawing at the West Point Military Academy, but remained only a few months. After returning to London, he enjoyed a successful career until his death, May 5, 1859. He was one of the first and most consistent admirers of Constable's work, and wrote his life. He also published lectures on painting, delivered at the Royal Academy, where he had been appointed lecturer in 1848.

The consideration of the two men whose portraits face each other here, and who stood thus opposed, during their lives, as the leaders of all that constituted art in their time and country, takes us back to France. Frequent returns of this character will be necessary in the course of these papers; for, without undue prejudice in favor of the French, it must be said that they alone have through the century maintained a consistent attitude in regard to art. Other countries have from time to time encouraged painting, with as frequent lapses of interest or lack of men who could legitimately inspire interest. Although transplanted bodily from Italy to France, in the time of Francis the First, art had taken so firm a root by the commencement of this century that, as we have seen, it grew and flourished though watered by the red blood of revolution. As a national institution, following the prescribed rules of the Academy, it has, of course, met with frequent assaults at the hands of men for whom prescribed academic law was as naught in comparison with the higher law of genius. In 1819 such a man appeared, with a picture which violated the unwritten law formulated by David: "Look in your Plutarch and paint!"

Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault, born at Rouen, September 26, 1791, came to Paris in 1808, and entered the studio of Guérin, where his method of painting displeased his master to such a degree that he advised him to abandon the study of art. Guérin had thoroughly imbibed the defects of the David method; and the spectacle of a youth who obstinately persisted in trying to paint the model as he really appeared, instead of making a pink imitation of antique sculpture, seemed to him to be of little promise.

Géricault, however, persisted; and with the exception of about a year, when the halo of military glory seduced him from his work, he worked so well and earnestly that, after two years' sojourn in Italy, he returned to Paris, a few weeks before the Salon of 1819, equipped with the knowledge of a master.

Taking a canvas about fifteen feet high by twenty in length, using the green-room of a theatre for a studio, he set to work. Disdaining the prevailing taste for mythology and classic themes, he took from the journals of the time the moving recital of the sufferings of the crew of the frigate "Medusa," abandoned on a raft in mid-ocean. Choosing the moment when the fifteen survivors of the hundred and forty-nine men who had embarked on the raft sighted the sail in the offing which meant their deliverance, he worked with an energy and fire which have remained remarkable in the annals of art. Certain of the figures, all of which are more than life size, were painted in a day, and when the Salon of 1819 opened, the picture was finished.

Seen as it is to-day in the Louvre, blackened by time and the neglect from which it suffered for six or seven years before it was placed there, it remains one of the capital pages in the history of modern art. The effect on the younger generation who saw it fresh from the hand of the master, accustomed as they were to the lifeless effigies of the classic school, was puzzling, and none but the most revolutionary dared approve of it. With the older painters there was a similar distrust of the impression which it caused. Yet David--an artistic kernel encased in an academic husk--admired it; and so did a swarthy youth who was soon to make his mark and who was a friend and former comrade of Géricault in the _atelier_ Guérin--Eugène Delacroix.

Géricault received a recompense of the fourth class, and, disgusted with his lot, took the immense canvas to London, where it was exhibited with success. During his sojourn in England he executed a number of pictures in oil and water color, and many lithographs, which are to-day eagerly sought by collectors. Returning to France full of projects for work, his health began to give way, and on the 18th of January, 1824, he died. The influence which he exercised had, however, borne its fruits. Already in the Salon of 1822 Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, born at Charenton, near Paris, April 26, 1799, had shown his "Dante and Virgil."

Before considering Delacroix, however, it is best to return to the earlier years of the century, and give J. Dominique Auguste Ingres, whose stern face confronts Delacroix's portrait, the precedence to which his age entitles him.

"Monsieur" Ingres, as the iconoclastic leaders of the romantic school called him in mock deference, was born at Montauban, August 29, 1780. His life was fortunate, and his history, which is chiefly that of his works, can be told in few words. A pupil of David, he received the Prix de Rome in 1801. He remained in Rome much longer than the allotted four years to which his prize entitled him, and returned there often during his life as to the source of all art. By portraiture and the constant patronage of the government, the material conditions of his life, which was of a simple character, befitting a man who viewed his mission as that of an apostle preaching the doctrine of pure classicism, were made easy; and the official titles of Member of the Institute, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, and Senator of the Empire all came to him with the lapse of years.

More royalist than the king, and the last of David's disciples, Ingres pursued throughout his life the even tenor of a man convinced that the source of all inspiration in art was Greek sculpture as amplified, transmuted, and translated to the realm of painting by Raphael. Painting in his hands became almost purely a matter of form. The element of color was virtually ignored, and form, chastened in contour and modelling, became through the magic of his genius the almost sufficient quality. The qualification is necessary. For though too great a man to lose, as too many of his master's pupils did, the grasp on nature; and while, therefore, his works, seen as they are through the glamour of the antique, never lack an intimate relation to existing life, it is impossible to resist the feeling before them that it is life beautified, of exquisite yet virile choice, but of life arrested. The reproach of his opponents of the romantic school that he was an "embalmer" has a foundation of truth.

For all this, it is hardly superlative to say that, since art began, no man has ever felt the exquisite and subtle harmony of line to the same degree as Ingres. Naturally the best examples of this, his greatest quality, are to be found in his rendering of the nude human form; and from the "Oedipus and the Sphinx," of 1808, to "La Source," of 1856, both of which are now in the Louvre, he returned again and again to its study, producing each time a masterpiece. His portraits, again, are most masterly, occasionally rising through sheer force of rendering each characteristic trait of his model (as in the portrait of M. Bertin, the editor of the "Débats"), to the extreme exactitude of Holbein, coupled with an _allure_ so thoroughly modern that the whole epoch of Louis Philippe lives before us. In the slighter drawings of his earlier years in Rome, one of which is reproduced here, only the most typical details are chosen, and these are indicated with a delicacy of touch, a sureness of hand, that not only indicates the master, but lends a distinctive charm of truthful delicacy of which none but Ingres has known the secret. It is in such works that his influence will be felt the longest; for, as with his master, the great pictures in which he exemplified his principles remain cold and uninteresting. The "Homer Deified," reproduced here, was originally intended as a ceiling for the Louvre, and from a decorative point of view would excite a pitying smile from Veronese or Tiepolo. Taken bit by bit, as a beautiful exhibition of supreme knowledge, of the evasive quality of style in drawing, it is, however, admirable, and as a whole it has the merits of grave, balanced composition. It was the spirit of work like this which the master sought to force upon his epoch, rather than that of his portraits or of pictures like the "Source;" and the austerity of these principles met with more submission in the earlier years of the century than when later Géricault had shown the path in which the audacious Delacroix threw himself at the head of a band of romantic followers.