Part 11

I have indicated now, by a brief line or two, the direction in which Moreau le Jeune must chiefly be studied, and the places in which he may be seen if men would see him at his prime. Perhaps it may be a matter of taste, and a matter of taste only, whether one prefers him in his more spontaneous or in his more official work. The draughtsman is the same in either labour, though the inspiration is different. For me his greatest achievement is ‘L’Histoire des Mœurs,’ or, in another phrase, ‘Le Monument du Costume,’ which must be spoken of in detail later on. For many, and above all, for the lovers of curiosities, the seekers in byways of history, his celebrity hangs chiefly on his performance of the various ‘Sacres’; his records of the public functions, his ‘Fêtes at Versailles for the Marriage of the Dauphin and of Marie Antoinette’; his ‘Crowning of Voltaire’--at the Théâtre Français--in 1788; his ‘Fêtes at the Hôtel de Ville,’ on the birth of a new Dauphin to Louis XVI. Among these we may look perhaps principally at the ‘Crowning of Voltaire,’ for it has the virtues of them all. The drawing was engraved by Gaucher, who has preserved in the print the lively touch of the original. But what, one asks, was the occasion of the ceremony, what the cause of the ‘crowning’? At the Théâtre Français, Voltaire’s _Irène_ had been performed for sixteen nights. In those days of limited audiences that was a brilliant success. The bust of the poet is placed then in the middle of the stage, to be adorned and declaimed before. Madame Vestris--another, of course, than the Vestris known to Englishmen--reads aloud, and with emphasis, the lines of which the Marquis de Saint-Maur has hurriedly been delivered. Other performers, in more or less classic garb, cluster about her with garlands in their hands, ready to bestow them on the bust. In a box, high up on one side of the theatre, sits the demi-god, with two fair friends--one of whom is his niece, Madame Denis, and the other that Marquise de Villette to whom the print that represents the occasion is dedicated. The playhouse is full. The clapping of hands is lusty and enthusiastic. People rise in their boxes. Men stare upwards from the pit. Fine ladies crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the hero with the thin angular face, with its tell-tale lines of wit and mockery and observation.

Moreau must have seen the sight himself, and borne away the vivid recollection of it. Never was _l’actualité_--the thing that passes, the thing that may be insignificant to-day, but is to be History to-morrow--never was _l’actualité_ designed with a more fitting mixture of grace and precision. But in the more important work next to be spoken of, there was greater room for invention. Therein was Moreau, in the true sense, dramatist as well as draughtsman, for even if the outline of the subject was suggested to him by the speculator who undertook the publication, it was Moreau alone who gave veracity and character to the head and gesture of each person in the play.

The ‘Suite d’Estampes pour servir à l’histoire des Mœurs et du Costume dans le Dix-huitième Siècle’ began to be published in 1775 by Prault, of Paris, though it has been of late suggested that it was really conceived and undertaken by a German of the name of Eberts. The notion was to give a series of plates in which the most correct and fashionable manners, and the dress of the moment, and the furniture in vogue, should be together portrayed. The artist first pitched upon to recall them was, strangely enough, a foreigner. Freudeberg, a Bernese settled in Paris, a draughtsman of grace and charm undoubtedly, but of a closely bounded talent, had found favour with the public, and it was he who was chosen to make--and he did make--the first dozen drawings. The best engravers of the day were forthwith to engrave them. But by the time the first series was finished--and two odd pieces, I believe, not generally taken account of as belonging to the set--Freudeberg became home-sick and resolved to depart, and the business of continuing the work, which in the view of its promoter was to be a practical guide to fashion, was assigned to Moreau. Moreau did the second series, and then the third. The second dealt with the fortunes of a lady; the third with those of a _grand seigneur_, who was likewise something of a _petit-maître_. And for each there was a text, bald, it may be, but in a measure appropriate. It was anonymous, and chiefly descriptive. A little later, in a new issue, it was sought to associate the work with popular literature, and Restif de la Bretonne--a free-spoken ‘realist,’ whom, after long neglect, it is now, not altogether without cause, the fashion to enjoy--was invited to write his commentary, and his commentary took the form of quite a new interpretation. ‘Restif,’ says M. Anatole de Montaiglon, ‘au lieu de respecter le sentiment des trois suites, a isolé chaque motif et chaque planche.’ Restif, that is, has invented for each plate some fresh little story.

In life, the mind associates with a given and chosen landscape the more magnetic and memorable of the figures that people it. These alone bestow on it the reality of its human interest, and the others may be ignored. And so, among the masses of description and criticism of the arts of design, the writings which we really associate with the works they endeavour to vivify are those generally which have a charm of their own--the charm of the literary touch. Restif de la Bretonne’s stories, with all their faults, have just that charm. There is that in them which permits their author to take possession of the theme, so that the theme belongs no longer at all to whatever dullard chanced to be the first to treat it.

Two designs which I never see without wanting them are the most vivacious of Moreau’s series. They are the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra’ and ‘C’est un fils, Monsieur!’ Others, even among the most admirable, are more limited in their aim. The ‘Grande Toilette,’ for instance, as its name implies, is occupied more particularly with raiment. It is a very summary of fashion. It is the great lord, or the consummate _petit-maître_, displayed to us when dressing is completed. The edifice, it seems, has just been crowned. ‘Monseigneur,’ vividly writes Restif de la Bretonne, ‘Monseigneur is dressed; for some minutes already he has been standing; his cordon bleu is assumed; they have just given him his purse, and he has his bouquet.’ Yes, the edifice has been crowned: Monseigneur is ready; for--and the touch is untranslatable--they have _achevé de le chausser_. You see the neat shoes, the garter, the closely drawn stocking, the whole paraphernalia of the leg he was proud of. ‘_Achevé de le chausser_’--it is all in the phrase. And now he is free, no doubt, to enjoy the idleness of the morning, to do a service to a comedian, and, after an author has had audience of him, to accept the dedication of a book.

‘La Petite Loge’ is just as characteristic. What one sees is the inside of an opera-box, of which the tenants are a couple of bachelors of fashion. A dance is over, on the stage, and a girl who has taken part in it has been brought into the box, to be encouraged--to be touched under the chin. And here is an epitome of Restif’s story. A Prince, struck with the beauty of a ragged little child in the street, determined that she should be educated--pensioned her and her mother. Soon, however, busied with the greatest business of his class and day--‘occupied with intrigue,’ the story-teller tells us--he forgot his little protégée. She had her money regularly--all that she was promised--but he was too busy to think of her. Then, one night, at the Opera, smitten with the charm of a new dancer, he inquired who the dancer was, and ordered her to be brought to him. As soon as she was in the box, ‘Il lui passa sous le menton une main un peu libre’; but then it was disclosed to him that she was the child he had been struck with. Coulon, the famous dancing-master, had by this time taught her to some purpose. As for her future, her mother--an ancestress, I take it, of Halévy’s ‘Madame Cardinal’--had already a register of one hundred and twenty pages, filled with the propositions of the Court and the town. ‘Sa mère se reservait le droit de les comparer,’--for nothing, it seems, even by a Madame Cardinal, should be done in a hurry. Well, among the girl’s many lovers there was one who was unselfish. What did he want but to marry her! The Prince--not minded now to be outdone in chivalry--generously urged that he should be accepted, and Isabelle was glad to consent. But the King ordered the lover’s arrest, and the young people were separated. The girl lived prudently, in London and in Paris. She and her art were admired; but she died of a sudden illness. ‘Her young lover was in absolute despair, and the Prince, her protector, wept for her.’

In the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra’ we see the elegant and famous crowd that surged out of the theatre after a performance long looked forward to. ‘Gluck’s new Operas--it is essential to see them,’ said a writer who knew what it was that a fashionable woman could not afford to neglect. The ‘all Paris’ of the day was there; and at the end, when the crowd was in the lobbies, and the _aboyeur_ was calling the carriages, and the flower-girl was a messenger of intrigue--that was the moment that gave birth to plans for dainty suppers eaten away from home, the time when ‘abbés without a family learned the secret of how they might belong to all.’ What a bustle of flirtation! What a passing about of love-letters! The elegance of the scene must make amends, as best it can, for its light-hearted naughtiness.

‘C’est un fils, Monsieur!’ has no such forgiveness to ask of us. It is the blithest picture that we need to be shown of the home joys of the refined. A young husband, who is known already as ‘le Président,’ and who is a student and a fortunate collector of Art as well as a man of the world, rises from his study chair with outstretched hands and radiant face, as the newly born baby is carried in to him in triumph, followed by a procession of household retainers, and preceded by the lively Miss Rozette, the President’s foster-sister. Nothing is more expressive than the joyous pantomime of this privileged young woman, and the answering gestures of the newly made father; and delightful is the sentiment of the piece. In England, popular Art has sometimes made the joys of domesticity a little dull; but here the respectable is actually gay, and nothing but sunshine lies upon the path of duty.

Of the many writers whom Moreau avowedly illustrated, as distinguished from those who furnished a text for his designs, Rousseau was the one in whom he most believed, and for Rousseau much of his best work was executed. His designs for the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ were among the last of the important drawings wrought by him before he made that journey into Italy which his daughter speaks of as having ‘opened his eyes,’ but which, to whatever it may have ‘opened’ them, certainly closed them to the aspects of that France it was his truest mission to portray. The types of Julie and Saint-Preux are types which Moreau understood--he understood their impulse and their sentiment; and how many faults he would have forgiven them for their grace! To illustrate Rousseau was of course to have the opportunity--and in Moreau’s case it was also to profit by it--of representing both a deeper and a more immediate sensitiveness than most of that which claimed interpretation in the sometimes callous figures of the ‘Monument du Costume.’ Moreau was grateful for so fortunate an occasion, and he thoroughly responded to it. His Julie is ‘un type de Greuze honnête,’ with her ‘bouche entr’ouverte,’ her ‘regard profond,’ her ‘gorge couverte en fille modeste, et non pas en dévote,’ her ‘petite figure de blonde, mouvante et sensible.’ Moreau read Rousseau again and again: he genuinely cared for him, and when Rousseau died, the death-scene was not suffered to pass unrecorded, and of the grave in the Ile des Peupliers, by Geneva, he made a little etching.

Presently, however, Moreau was to be led away from the very sentiment of the scenes he had understood the best. His individuality was lessened, his flexibility arrested by the journey to Italy, undertaken with Dumont, the architect, in 1786. And his association with David--‘le peintre de Marat assassiné et le membre de la Convention’--operated to make more certain his style’s divorce from all the natural grace and flowing sentiment and homely unheroic dignity with which it had lived so fruitfully for more than twenty years. The illustrator of Rousseau was already less happy as the illustrator of Voltaire; and in 1791 Moreau was received into the Academy; the drawing which procured him the distinction being that of ‘Tullie faisant passer son char sur le corps de son père.’ Wille, the engraver, writes, in his published journal, how he went to the Academical Assembly when Moreau was received. ‘There was an Academician to receive: it was Monsieur Moreau, draughtsman and engraver. He had begged me to be his sponsor, and I presented him to the Assembly with a great deal of pleasure.’ But Moreau’s entrance into the Academy was the signal for his exit from the regions of his native art. The bibliophile may seek with avidity for the editions of Renouard, which years afterwards Moreau illustrated. But his verve had deserted him; his talent was gone; his originality had yielded up the ghost. And somehow, too, in his last years, and in his old age, poverty overtook him. In February 1814, he wrote to M. Renouard that he was penniless--‘Je n’ai pas le sou.’ Friends he had, though; and one of the first acts of Louis XVIII. was to reappoint him to the old office--‘draughtsman to the King.’ He held the place for but a short time; for on the 30th November, in the same year, Moreau died. With his later style both he and his daughter, and the group, too, by whom they were surrounded, were content--no one assailed it then or looked back regretfully to the earlier--but it is by the work of the first half of his career as an artist that Moreau finally takes rank as one of the most precise and flexible of draughtsmen, and as the closest possible observer of the gay, great world that he portrayed.

(_The Art Journal_, 1885.)

GAINSBOROUGH AT THE GROSVENOR GALLERY

‘If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire for us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the art, among the very first of that rising name.’ So wrote, in his Fourteenth Discourse, Sir Joshua Reynolds--a lover of pomp and ceremony even in the art of Literature--doing therein ‘untimely justice’ to the merits of his contemporary, whom he survived. Since then the English School, whose separate existence this accomplished admirer of the Roman and the Bolognese did but doubtfully and modestly look forward to, has become an accomplished fact, and all but a hundred years after his death, ‘the talents of the late Mr. Gainsborough’ are honoured at the Grosvenor Gallery. In the two large rooms and in the vestibule there are to-day exhibited about a couple of hundred pieces from his brush; the great Sir Joshua Exhibition of last winter is felt to be successfully rivalled; and an opportunity is given to the student to perceive the range, the flexibility, the spontaneity of Gainsborough’s art.

Gainsborough, like any other distinct individuality in Art or Letters, is best understood when he is taken simply on his merits, without reference to other personalities who happened to be of his time. To institute a perpetual comparison between him and Sir Joshua is to make the sterile blunder that is made when Dickens is pitted against Thackeray, the epic of _Copperfield_ against the satire of _Vanity Fair_. In each case it was only accident that brought the men into juxtaposition; and as regards Gainsborough, it is rather with Velasquez or Vandyke, or with some French Eighteenth Century Master of familiar grace, that we should compare him. These were his kindred, with these he had something in common, as the Romans, the Bolognese, and sometimes the Venetians, were the kindred of Sir Joshua. And yet, to a certain extent, comparison between Gainsborough and Sir Joshua is even now unavoidable. Living at the same period and in the same great town, painting the same people, and--save for the briefer apparition of Romney--dividing between them, though dividing unequally, the applause of polite Society, that choice which the men of their time had to make of one of them, has still to a certain extent to be made by us. Often, of course, we are liberated from the necessity of any such narrow alternative; but when we look at the portraits, by the two artists, of Johnson, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, the characteristics of each--what each lacked and what each brought to the accomplishment of his task--cannot but suggest themselves. And it will then be apparent that Reynolds painted with a more obvious learning, Gainsborough with a more spontaneous grace; Reynolds often with a more determined adherence to the particular character, Gainsborough with a keener enjoyment of the suggestions that character afforded for translating a sometimes uncouth nature into an exquisite art. Take, for instance, the two portraits of Mrs. Siddons: the learning and tradition of the Schools, the disposition towards a dignity that may be well-nigh pompous, are in Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic Muse’; the spontaneous grace, the disposition towards simplicity are in the Mrs. Siddons of Gainsborough. Further, again, to compare the portraits of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua with that one by Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery, is to see that here is an instance in which the fidelity--the unflattering fidelity--is on Reynolds’ side, and the idealisation on Gainsborough’s. Yet it is hardly needful to declare of so great a man as Gainsborough that he never idealised merely that he might flatter. He idealised because his vision of the world was bound to be poetic. He was a poet above all things. The ideal was his atmosphere. But Sir Joshua, with all his accomplishments, lived with the prose of the world, and, as a rule, was but in vain ambitious to reach to its poetry.

The poetic character of Gainsborough’s mind and work is, then, the first thing to be realised, if we are to understand his pictures. For otherwise we shall be offended at exaggerations and astonished at suppressions, both of which are the result of a method he adopted in obedience to his temperament, which combined, of course, a gentle and genuine love of Nature with a consuming thirst to see that Nature was never deprived of the assistance of Art. Gainsborough has been written of as the earliest Master of Naturalism--save, indeed, Hogarth--in the English School. Nor is the description untrue; in the sense that he sought his inspiration from Nature, instead of from academies, and that his landscape had more than a suggestion of Suffolk or of Somerset. Yet Morland carried Naturalism much further than Gainsborough, and Constable much further than Morland. Gainsborough was never a mere copyist of Nature. From the first he composed and arranged, but his artifices were seldom very apparent, and his control over actual form--his artistic modification of it--was gentle and tempered, and this is most of all made evident by the display of his Landscape. With the permanent exhibition at the National Gallery and the annually recurring winter shows at Burlington House, no one of course has any need to be ignorant of the fact that one of the most fascinating of the painters of portraits was also a landscape painter. But the display at the Grosvenor Gallery will bring home to people a truth some may have overlooked, because at the Grosvenor Gallery Gainsborough’s range in landscape work is seen to have been extensive. No single early painting there, indeed, can claim to be quite the equal of the ‘Great Cornard’ picture in Trafalgar Square, but the paintings are so many, and the subjects so varied, that the impression they produce must be great. In the East Room, the smaller room, are some of the most interesting of these landscapes. There--to begin with only a minor example--is the ‘Landscape with Figures against a Tree’: one of the very few dated pictures. It is of the year 1775, or just about the time that the painter left Bath for London. It is interesting as seeming to belong to an earlier period, as carrying on to a time when most of his work had changed character, the features of his more youthful work. It is a bit of every day English scenery, accepted for what it is, with a tolerance of the commonplace rare with him, indeed in any day, but, as one would have thought, quite impossible to his later life. Here, too, is one of his few failures to attain what was really beautiful, ‘A Landscape with Cows,’ lent by the trustees of the Duke of Newcastle--an artificial scene of blue distance and of hot and ‘unconvincing’ foreground. ‘A View in Shropshire’ is in character not less classical, not less suggestive of Claude, but it is far more successful. The foreground is of wooded country, brown and gold; behind it, a richly illuminated champaign ends abruptly in a conical hill, which is the Wrekin beheld in the light of a selected hour. The Catalogue of the Exhibition--full of industriously compiled detail and of quaint anecdote, carefully burrowed for in half-forgotten places--might, perhaps, have chronicled the fact that the great picture we are speaking of is repeated, feature by feature, in another. But this other happens to be hung so high that its merits we can hardly estimate. Its pedigree, however, is unimpeachable. The little ‘Landscape with Horses Ploughing’ recalls, in the disposition of its objects, Turner’s ‘Windmill and Lock,’ and Turner, who was never above taking suggestions--who took them from every one--may possibly have seen it. Lord Bateman’s ‘Boys and Fighting Dogs,’ though by no means among the most attractive things, is at least memorable. It shares with several other pictures the business of proving that as a draughtsman of animals--certainly as a draughtsman of dogs--Gainsborough had few rivals; and it is one of the rare instances of Gainsborough’s painting what is properly called a subject picture--a picture in which the portrayal of an incident has been the first care. Furthermore, the boys here--like that uncouth child, ‘Jack Hill, in a Cottage’--are, at all events, perfectly natural examples of everyday folk. Generally his cottage urchins, though they have rustic grace and rustic wildness, though they roll on the greensward and dabble in the brook, are not profound studies of a real peasantry; and, though Leslie indeed said of the ‘Girl with a Pitcher’ that nothing more beautiful had ever been painted, we may remember that this lavish appreciation by a brother artist who was invariably generous was bestowed at a time when the graver aspects of the peasant’s life had, as far as pictorial art is concerned, been mirrored only in the art of Turner. The student of to-day, the student of Millet, can hardly single out for truthfulness, though he can always single out for grace, the rustics of Gainsborough. Into the realities of peasant life, Gainsborough scarcely even essayed to have any deep entrance.