Part 13

Some of the master’s most precious works at the Louvre belong to his second Antwerp period, which extended from his return from Genoa in 1628 to his departure for England in 1632. It was probably then that he painted _The Virgin and Child, with the Penitent Sinners_ (No. 1961) (Mary Magdalen, David, and the Prodigal Son), in which the influence of the Venetian colourists is so clearly to be noticed. Indeed, the bosom of the female penitent is copied from the nymph in Titian’s _Education of Cupid_ at the Borghese Gallery, of which there is a drawing in the Chatsworth Sketch-book with the comment in the artist’s handwriting, “_quel admirabil petto_.” Shortly after his return from Italy he also painted _The Virgin and Child with Donors_ (No. 1962), one of his greatest masterpieces. The Madonna is of a youthful, pure type, vastly different from the buxom Flemish women so often depicted by his master in saintly characters. The painting of the Infant’s body is as admirable as that of the kneeling Donors, and a spiritual connection is established by the action of the Child and the expression of the man towards whom He is holding out His hand.

The companion groups _A Gentleman and a Child_ (No. 1973) and _A Lady and her Daughter_ (No. 1974), date from about 1630. They are full of that aristocratic distinction which is the hall-mark of Van Dyck’s Genoese portraits, and which in his later English period was apt to degenerate into effeminacy. This air of distinction is also to be noted in the children, although they are perfectly natural in action and expression, and have none of that stiffness which makes so many of the earlier masters’ portraits of children look like undergrown men and women. The imposing equestrian portrait of _Francisco d’Aytona, Marqués de Moncada_ (No. 1971), Generalissimus of the Spanish troops in the Netherlands, which in its general disposition recalls the portrait of Charles I. at Windsor Castle; the small study for it of the same sitter’s head and shoulders (No. 1972); and the portrait of _The Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, Regent of the Netherlands_ (No. 1970), in the costume of the Sisters of St. Clare, whom she had joined after the death of her husband the Archduke Albrecht, belong to the same period. Then also was painted the _Rinaldo in the Garden of Armida_ (No. 1966), which is probably the picture bought from the artist at Antwerp by Endymion Porter, on behalf of King Charles I., in March 1629, for the price of £78.

“LE ROI À LA CHASSE”

Van Dyck’s manner of life in England, as the petted Court painter of Charles I., and the factory-like output of his well-organised studio at Blackfriars, are too well known to need further comment. In justice to his fair fame it is necessary to draw a clear distinction between the innumerable replicas turned out by his assistants under his guidance, and such magnificent original works from the master’s own brush as the glorious _Portrait of King Charles I. of England_ (No. 1967, Plate XXIII.), known as “_Le Roi à la Chasse_,” which is one of the proudest possessions of the French national collection. The king is seen, resting his gloved hand on a stick, in a glade, with the sea in the distance. Behind him are two attendants and his white charger pawing the ground in impatient action. The king’s noble, quiet dignity is such as to dominate the entire composition, without, however, the slightest hint of the theatrical. Here, as in most of his English portraits, Van Dyck has departed from the glowing sumptuousness of his earlier Venetian palette, and arrived at a cooler, mellow, and more personal harmony of decorative colour. As if conscious of the superior merit of this picture, which is more than a mere portrait of the king, and depicts the very personification of royalty, the artist, who was not in the habit of signing his pictures, inscribed on a stone the lettering

CAROLUS I REX MAGNÆ BRITANNIÆ · VAN DIICK F.

Painted for the king in 1635 for £100, it passed through many hands before it was bought by Louis XV. for Mme du Barry, by whom it was ceded in 1775 to his successor for 24,000 _livres_.

To Van Dyck’s English period, which only terminated with his death in 1641, belong the group of _Charles Louis, Elector Palatine, and Rupert, Prince of Bavaria_ (No. 1969), and the _Portrait of James Stuart, Duke of Lennox_ (No. 1975)—not the _Duke of Richmond_, as stated in the official Catalogue—in the character of Paris. Another twelve pictures are catalogued under Van Dyck’s name, but they are either of minor importance, or, like the _Three Children of Charles I._ (No. 1968), mere studio repetitions.

FRANS SNYDERS

The powerful personality of Rubens dominated the art of Flanders during the seventeenth century. His direct or indirect influence is traceable in the art of most of his contemporaries and of the painters of the next generation, who divided his artistic heritage without attaining to his universality. Thus his collaborator Frans Snyders (1579-1657), after studying under “Hell Brueghel” and H. van Balen, acquired the bravura of his brushwork and his unrivalled skill in depicting animals in violent movement from Rubens, in whose pictures of the chase he frequently painted the animals, whilst he often had to seek the assistance of other painters for the figures introduced into his own compositions. Among the thirteen pictures from his brush at the Louvre (Nos. 2141-2153) the _Wild Boar Hunt_ (No. 2144) serves best to illustrate Snyders’s power to suggest the furious onrush and wild excitement of the chase. His skill as a still-life painter may be judged from the masterly treatment of the wet glittering fish in the large _Fish Merchants_ (No. 2145).

JACOB JORDAENS

Whatever appears coarse in the art of Rubens is accentuated to the point of grossness in the paintings by his fellow-student under Van Noort, Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678). He is the painter of _Le Roi boit_ (No. 2014) or _The Twelfth Night Feast_, which is by no means the best of his many versions of his favourite subject. He was a realist who, as may be seen from this picture and from the _Concert after a Meal_ (No. 2015), found his most congenial subjects in the carousals of Flemish merrymakers, which he depicted with more than a touch of coarse humour. That his temperament and limitations debarred him from achieving success in the higher flights of art is clearly shown by his large but by no means noble canvas _Christ driving the Moneylenders from the Temple_ (No. 2011). On the other hand, his firm grasp of character stood him in good stead in portraiture. The so-called _Portrait of Admiral de Ruyter_ (No. 2016), which was bought in 1824 for £800, is a good example.

We can only briefly refer to a number of seventeenth-century Antwerp painters, who were either pupils of Rubens or close followers of his tradition. Gonzales Coques (1614-1684), the painter of the admirably lighted _Family Party_ (No. 1952), was essentially a portrait painter who became known as “the little Van Dyck,” although his manner had more in common with that of the Dutch “small masters” than with the tempered elegance of Charles I.’s Court-painter.

FOLLOWERS OF RUBENS

Gaspar de Crayer (1584-1669), a pupil of Raphael van Coxie, modelled his art entirely on Rubens, and was equally successful as a portrait painter and in his religious compositions. Both phases of his art figure in the Louvre collection, which owns the _St. Augustin in Ecstasy_ (No. 1953) and the life-size _Equestrian Portrait of the Infante Ferdinand, Governor of the Netherlands_ (No. 1954). It was a portrait of the same sitter that led to Crayer’s appointment to the position of Painter to the Infante’s Court, accompanied by considerable emoluments.

Abraham van Diepenbeeck (1596-1675), Pieter van Mol (1599-1650), and Paul de Vos (1593-1676) need not here detain us. They are all capable followers of their master’s style, without any personal distinction. David Ryckaert (1612-1661), the third of four artists of the same family that bore this name, is outside the immediate circle of Rubens. His _Interior of a Studio_ (No. 2137), which bears the signature “D. RYC. f. 1638,” is of peculiar interest as a document illustrating the _milieu_ in which a Flemish artist of that period lived and worked.

Gerard Seghers (1591-1651), the painter of _St. Francis in Ecstasy_ (No. 2140), although a pupil of Van Balen and Abraham Janssens, and indirectly, through Manfredi, of Caravaggio, must be counted among those who were influenced by the dominating personality of Rubens. An important pupil of Snyders was Jan Fyt (1611-1661), who excelled as an animal painter and colourist. He was at his best when he treated animals more in the manner of still life, but remained vastly inferior to his master when he tried to emulate his hunting scenes. Not all the five pictures catalogued under his name can be accepted as his own work. His great skill in rendering the varied textures of furs and feathers may be judged from _Game in a Larder_ (No. 1993), which is unquestionably authentic although it does not bear the signature which testifies to his authorship of _A Dog devouring Game_ (No. 1994).

ADRIAEN BROUWER

Both the Flemish school and the Dutch have an equal right to claim Adriaen Brouwer (1605 or 6-1638), who, born at Oudenarde, carried on the tradition of Bouts and the elder Brueghel. While still young, he was at Haarlem powerfully impressed by the art of Frans Hals, although it is extremely doubtful that he ever actually worked in his studio. Finally, having settled at Antwerp in 1631, he benefited by the example of Rubens. _The Smoker_ (No. 1916), in spite of the doubts that have been cast upon it, is a characteristic work of his at the time when, inspired by Frans Hals, he adopted a full impasto instead of his earlier glazes. It is signed with his initials “AB” in the bottom corner on the right. The handling is far coarser than that of the later _Interior of a Tavern_ (No. 1912), which is quite Rembrandtesque in the rendering of light and chiaroscuro. His inclination towards grimacing expression often made him depict such scenes as _The Operation_ (No. 1915), in which the patient’s face is contorted with pain, while the surgeon is bandaging his left shoulder.

Brouwer was the master of Joos van Craesbeeck (1606-1654?), who not only closely followed his teaching, but actually painted many replicas of Brouwer’s pictures which still pass under the better known artist’s name. _The Artist painting a Portrait_ (No. 1952D) was supposed to represent, and to be from the brush of, Brouwer, when the picture was bought for the Louvre. But on technical grounds it must be given to Craesbeeck—quite apart from the extreme improbability that the dissolute Brouwer, who spent most of his time in low taverns, should have lived in the elegant, not to say luxurious, surroundings here depicted, and died young. There can be no doubt that the painter seated before his easel, to whom a man-servant is offering a glass of wine, is Joos van Craesbeeck.

DAVID TENIERS

There is at the Louvre no picture by the elder David Teniers (1582-1649), who therefore only interests us here as the father and first master of the much greater artist David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), who completed his artistic education under Rubens, without, however, abdicating his own personality. Indeed, those of his pictures which reflect the manner of Rubens too closely are of little account in the achievement of the younger Teniers, who only begins to be himself when he devotes his prolific brush to the social life of his contemporaries, and especially of the lower classes. His pictures constitute the most realistic and convincing record of the tastes, manners, and amusements of his time. His types are full of character, but without the exaggerations so often found in Brueghel and Brouwer. What he retained of Rubens, even in his Village Fêtes, Tavern Scenes, Dances, and Carousals is the application of the great master’s principles of light and harmonious colour. But apart from this, he rejected the “grand style” and the conscious search for beauty. The ugliness of his types and gestures led Louis XIV. to exclaim in front of his pictures, “_Ôtez-moi ces magots-là!_”

Few painters are as exhaustively represented at the Louvre as the younger Teniers. The Catalogue includes no fewer than thirty-nine entries under his name, two of which, in the La Caze collection (Nos. 2189 and 2190), are copies after pictures by Lotto and Titian respectively in the collection of the Archduke Leopold William, Governor of the Netherlands, to whom Teniers was appointed Court painter. It would serve no purpose here to enumerate the long list of Kermesse, Village Fête, and Alehouse Scenes in the French national collection. Among his most deservedly famous masterpieces is _The Return of the Prodigal Son_ (No. 2156), which belongs to a series of which another scene is to be seen at the Dulwich Gallery. The subject is really only a thinly veiled excuse for the painting of a _genre_ piece of the contemporary life of the better classes of his country. The scene of the feast is laid outside a country inn that figures in many of Teniers’s pictures. Fully signed, and dated 1644, the picture belongs to the beginning of Teniers’s very best period. In _The Temptation of St. Anthony_ (No. 2158) he rivals Bosch in the invention of grotesquely fantastic monsters. Among other important works by the master in the Louvre must be mentioned _The Denial of St. Peter_ (No. 2155), a painting of exquisite silvery quality, signed and dated

DAVID TENIERS, f. AN. 1646;

_The Works of Mercy_ (No. 2157); the _Village Fête_ (No. 2159); and the _Peasants dancing by an Inn Door_ (No. 2161), which was stolen from the collection in 1815 and returned in the following year with a letter explaining that it had been removed by a Frenchman who feared that it might fall into the hands of the Allied Forces.

By Teniers’s pupil, François Duchatel (1616?-1694?) is the excellent _Portrait of a Gentleman_ (No. 1960). Duchatel is a very rare master, whose style in portraiture so closely resembles that of Gonzales Coques that his pictures have been at times ascribed to that painter. Jacob van Artois (1613-1684?), the painter of the _Landscape_ (No. 1901) in the La Caze room, was one of the leading Flemish landscape painters of his time, and frequently collaborated with Teniers, who added the figures to some of his landscapes. He was the master of Cornelis Huysmans (1648-1727), who frequently assisted the battle painter, Van der Meulen, and is here represented by eight pictures (Nos. 2002-2009). Among the landscape painters of that period must also be mentioned Jan Siberechts (1627-1703), who spent the closing years of his life in England, but does not seem to have had much influence on the evolution of the English landscape school. By him is the _Rustic Scene_ (No. 2140A).

PHILIPPE DE CHAMPAIGNE

Both Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674) and Adam Frans van der Meulen (1634-1690), though born at Brussels, resided in France the best part of their life, and are therefore generally classed with the painters of the French school, which accounts for their being represented at the Louvre in a manner which is quite out of proportion to their artistic significance. Still, if Philippe de Champaigne appears second-rate when compared with Rubens and Van Dyck, he is unquestionably the leading portrait painter of the contemporary French school in which he received his training. His powers were insufficient for the higher flights of imagination, and when his ambition led him to such compositions as _Christ in the House of Simon_ (No. 1927) or _Christ celebrating Easter with His Disciples_ (No. 1928), he was as dull and bombastic as most of his French contemporaries, whom he far excelled as a colourist. His portraits, on the other hand, are painted in a broad, honest, straightforward manner which has nothing in common with the monotonous pompousness of his age, as may be seen from the admirable group of two nuns in prayer, _Mother Catherine Agnes Arnaud and Sister Catherine de Sainte-Suzanne_ (No. 1934). The younger of the two nuns represents the artist’s daughter, who was healed from paralysis by a miracle recorded by a Latin inscription on the wall. The twenty pictures from Philippe de Champaigne’s brush, which are actually on view, also include the fine group of the two architects _François Mansard and Claude Perrault_ (No. 1944), bought in 1835 for the low price of £80; _The Provost and Aldermen of Paris_ (No. 1945); and the signed and dated portrait of _Robert Arnaud d’Andilly_ (No. 1939).

VAN DER MEULEN

Van der Meulen, a native of Brussels and pupil of Snayers, was the historiographer of Louis XIV.’s campaigns and victories. He was invited by Colbert to come to Paris, and was first employed to furnish designs for the Gobelins manufactory. Afterwards he accompanied Louis XIV. on his warlike expeditions, which he immortalised in numerous large paintings, most of which are now at the Louvre and in the Château at Versailles. His paintings are of considerable topographical interest, as they give accurate representations of the aspect of famous towns and fortresses in the seventeenth century, as in the _Entry of Louis XIV. and Marie-Thérèse into Arras_ (No. 2035), a similar scene at _Douai_ (No. 2033), and the _Arrival of the King in the Camp before Maastricht_ (No. 2040). It was Van der Meulen who founded the “tactical school” of battle painting, which substituted the orderly movement of masses for the wild mêlée of the hand-to-hand combat. Whole armies are seen advancing or retreating in long lines from a high vantage-ground which is generally occupied by the considerably larger figures of the army-leaders on rearing and caracoling horses, and looking for all the world like “_gens de qualité qui joueraient aux échecs avec des soldats de plomb_.” The official Catalogue mentions no fewer than twenty pictures by Van der Meulen.

MINOR FLEMISH PAINTERS

With the exception of Justus Sustermans (1597-1681), who was Van Dyck’s fellow-student under H. van Balen and afterwards rose to great fame as Court painter to Grand-Duke Cosimo II. of Tuscany (whose kinsman _Leopold de’ Medici_ is portrayed in No. 2154), and Pieter Neefs (1577?-1661?), whose _Church Interiors_ (Nos. 2059-2064) are remarkable for the faultless accuracy and precision of his architectural drawing, there are no other painters of the Flemish school whose works at the Louvre require close attention. We must content ourselves with the mere mention of the landscape painters Jan Frans van Bloemen, called Orizonte, a follower of Poussin and Claude; Jan van Breda, Francisque Millet, and Mathys Schoevaerts; Carl van Falens and Anton Grief, painters of hunting scenes; Jan Miel, who worked most of his life in Italy and was completely influenced by the masters of that country; the still-life painter Gaspard Pieter Verbruggen; the battle painter Sebastiaen Francken; and the prolific painter of large altarpieces, Jacob van Oost the Elder. With Balthasar Paul Ommeganck (1755-1826) and the still-life painter Jan Frans van Dael (1764-1840) we reach the beginning of the nineteenth century, a period of absolute stagnation in Flemish art which preceded the brilliant revival of the modern Belgian school.

THE GERMAN SCHOOL

Of all the important European schools of painting, the Early German school is the one of which it is almost impossible to gain anything like an adequate idea from the pictures that have found their way into the Galleries of foreign countries. The fact is that with the exception of two or three leading masters, like Holbein and Dürer, the Early Germans found but scant favour beyond the confines of their own country until comparatively recent years—that is to say, until the majority of important examples had been systematically gathered in by the museums of Germany. Now that the importance of the German primitives and Early Renaissance painters has been generally recognised, it will be practically impossible to regain the lost ground and to fill up the serious gaps which prevent our forming an adequate idea of the evolution of German art in the museums of other countries. The Louvre is no exception to this rule. The numerical weakness of the German section is unfortunately not atoned for by the importance of the examples included, which, with but few exceptions, are of little artistic account.

Under the circumstances it would be useless to attempt a consecutive narrative of the evolution of German art as illustrated by the pictures at the Louvre, and we must confine ourselves to a brief discussion of the few noteworthy works in the collection.

“THE MASTER OF THE BARTHOLOMEW ALTAR”

The first picture of importance belongs to the period when the idealism of the Early Gothic primitives was already replaced by a strong naturalism, and the creation of types by that of clearly characterised individualities. This picture, the _Descent from the Cross_ (No. 2737), by the unknown “Master of the Bartholomew Altar,” is so called, in accordance with German custom, from his best known work, the great altarpiece in the Pinakothek at Munich. In the large Louvre picture, which bears a close resemblance to the precious little panel by the same master in the possession of the Hon. Edward Wood, at Temple Newsam, the Saviour is being lowered from the Cross by Nicodemus into the hands of one of the Holy Women on the left, and of Joseph of Arimathæa on the right. The group is completed by St. John supporting the Virgin on the extreme left, the Magdalen and another Holy Woman on the right, and a Disciple seated on a ladder above the central group. The figures are shown, as in the Temple Newsam painting of the same subject, against a gold background framed with rich Gothic tracery. This altarpiece is believed to be the last picture by this Cologne master, who flourished between 1490 and 1515, and was in his later manner influenced by Rogier van der Weyden and other Flemish masters. This eminently important Early German picture was painted for a Jesuit establishment in the rue St. Antoine, Paris, which accounts for its presence in the French national collection.

COLOGNE PAINTERS

The “Master of the Death of Mary,” to whose school belongs the _Descent from the Cross_, with a predella representing _The Last Supper_, and a lunette with _St. Francis receiving the Stigmata_ (No. 2738), has been identified by Wauters and Aldenhoven with the early-sixteenth-century Flemish painter Joos van Cleef the Elder, and belongs to the Antwerp rather than the Cologne school. The “Master of St. Severin,” to whom the official Catalogue ascribes the two _Scenes from the Life of St. Ursula_ (Nos. 2738C and 2738D), was probably a Flemish painter who worked at Cologne at the beginning of the sixteenth century. But the two panels at the Louvre, which were formerly at the Cluny Museum, are not from his brush. They are the work of his pupil, the “Master of the Ursula Legend,” and belong to a series of which other panels can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum and at Cologne.