Part 22

Whilst such painters as Jean Restout (1692-1768) still continued to follow the tradition of the Bolognese eclectics, as may be seen in his _Herminia and the Shepherd_ (No. 775), the art of the Louis XV. period was given its final stamp by François Boucher (1703-1770). This favourite of Mme. de Pompadour, having gained the Prix de Rome in 1723, went to Italy in 1727, whence he returned to Paris four years later. At the age of thirty his _Rinaldo and Armida_ (No. 38A) caused him to be “received” by the Academy—the first of many honours that fell to his share, as he became in turn First Painter to the King, Director of the Academy, and Inspector of the Beauvais Tapestry Manufactory. He was the ideal painter of the age that was dominated by the personality of the Pompadour, who kept him employed with commissions for the decoration of her boudoir. Boucher was the true child of his time—licentious, pleasure-loving, light-hearted, and without moral scruples. The astonishing thing is that his pursuit of pleasure did not affect his enormous productivity. His art is in perfect harmony with his character—frankly sensual, exuberant, and unreliable; at times rising to superb decorative splendour of the airy, graceful type demanded by his patrons, and then again careless to the point of slovenliness.

Boucher was not a great colourist in the sense in which this term is applied to masters like Titian or Rubens. Indeed, more often than not his application of purely local colours unaffected by their surroundings is apt to result in the crudeness noticeable in his _Pastoral_ (No. 33), and in the domestic scene called _The Breakfast_ (No. 50A). Other pictures like the _Pastoral_ (No. 34) owe their present tapestry-like mellowness to the fading of the pigments. But it would be unfair to disregard the artist’s intention and to judge his capacity as a colourist from the present appearance of his works at the Louvre or in their usual environment in a public gallery. They were intended for definite decorative purposes, and in their proper Louis XV. setting fulfilled their function in admirable fashion. Few artists excelled Boucher in rhythmic harmony of composition, although it must be confessed that his emphatic insistence on triangular design is apt to become monotonous. This predilection is to be noted in the _Rinaldo and Armida_ (No. 38A), _Venus disarming Cupid_ (No. 44), _The Rape of Europa_ (No. 39), the _Pastorals_ (Nos. 33, 34, and 35), _Vulcan presenting Arms to Venus_ (No. 36, Plate XL.), and, indeed, in the vast majority of his twenty-two exhibited pictures at the Louvre. His mastery in flesh painting is best illustrated by the more unconventionally designed _Diana leaving the Bath_ (No. 30), and the brilliant sketch of _The Three Graces_ (No. 47) in the La Caze Room. Among his other masterpieces at the Louvre, _Venus demanding Arms from Vulcan_ (No. 31), which like No. 36 was designed for execution in tapestry, and the charming _Portrait of a Young Woman_ (No. 50), deserve special attention. It is unfortunate that they are not hung in the rooms that contain the magnificent furniture of the period, instead of being piled sky-high among pictures that seem to be primarily regarded by the officials as mere museum specimens of the art of painting. Boucher is better hung, and so may be much more effectively studied in the Wallace collection in London.

A little drier in touch than Boucher’s nudes, and considerably less coherent in design, but still painted with remarkable ability, are the figures of the goddess and her attendants in _The Triumphs of Amphitrite_ (No. 863), by Boucher’s contemporary, Hugues Taraval (1728-1785).

SIMÉON CHARDIN

If Boucher and the army of painters of _fêtes galantes_ and boudoir decorations reflect the tastes of the corrupt society of Louis XV.’s age, Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) is the painter _par excellence_ of the lower bourgeoisie. His was an uneventful, colourless life of unremitting work after the completion of his studies under Cazes and N. N. Coypel. He never went to Rome; he never sought after distinction in the “grand manner”; he never hankered after Court patronage. He simply devoted himself to recording with the utmost technical perfection the peaceful and domestic life of the lower middle class, to which he himself belonged, with all his tastes and habits of life, and to the painting of still-life, in which branch of art he stands without a rival. There are among his thirty-two pictures at the Louvre twenty paintings of _Still-life_ (Nos. 89, 90, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 105-116, and the doubtful No. 118), all equally remarkable for their inimitable skill in the rendering of the most varied textures and reflections; for subtle observation of the mutual effect of coloured objects upon each other through the interchange of coloured rays; and, above all, for that “sense of intimacy, of life behind the scene,” with which he knew how to invest even inanimate objects.

This same sense of intimacy and of absolute pictorial unity is also the great merit of his domestic genre pieces, into which enters, in addition, the element of spiritual unity, of the absorption of each person in his or her occupation. In the deservedly famous _Grace before Meat_, at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, of which the Louvre owns two admirable replicas (No. 92, Plate XLI., and No. 93), the most casual observer cannot fail to notice that intimate bond between the mother and the two children, which gives the impression of a scene accidentally overlooked, without anybody being aware of the intruder’s presence. _La Mère laborieuse_ (No. 91), _La Pourvoyeuse_ (No. 99), and even the cat in the still-life piece _The Cat in the Larder_ (No. 89), are equally innocent of “posing,” and absorbed in their respective occupations. _The Boy with the Top_ (No. 90A) and the _Young Man with the Violin_ (No. 90B), under which titles we have the portraits of the two children of the jeweller Charles Godefroy, were bought by the Louvre in 1907 for £14,000. These two pictures and the _Castle of Cards_ (No. 103) are sufficient to establish Chardin’s supremacy in child portraiture.

FRAGONARD

Chardin for but a few months, and Boucher for two years, were the masters who taught Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) before, having gained the Prix de Rome in 1752 and worked three years under Van Loo, he set out for Rome, where under Natoire’s guidance he applied himself to the copying of old masters. More important for the formation of his style were the sketches he made in the company of his friend Hubert Robert in the romantic gardens of the Villa d’Este, and the deep impression created upon his mind by Tiepolo’s decorative paintings in Venice, which city he visited before his return to Paris in 1761. He scored his first great success in 1765 with the large and still somewhat academic composition _Coresus and Calirrhoë_ (No. 290), which was bought by Louis XV. for 24,000 livres for reproduction at his tapestry works.

Patronised by Mme. du Barry, the dancer Marie Guimard, and other priestesses of Venus, Fragonard now devoted his exceptionally facile and spontaneous talent to subjects that in licentious frivolity, voluptuousness, and suggestiveness had never been equalled even by his master Boucher. It is only his marvellous technique, ranging from the liquid transparency of his swift oil sketches to the rich luminous impasto of the _Sleeping Bacchante_ (No. 294); from the elegant arabesque of the _Bathing Women_ (No. 293), so full of _joie de vivre_ and youthful fire, to the almost brutal strength of the portrait of a writer or poet, known under the title of _Inspiration_ (No. 298). But in all these, as well as in the charming _Music Lesson_ (No. 291, Plate XLII.), _The Student_ (No. 297) and the _Young Woman_ (No. 300), Fragonard proves himself one of the greatest colourists produced by the French School. It was Fragonard’s sad fate to outlive his fame, to witness the collapse of the ancient régime and the triumph of his pupil David’s classicism, and to die in obscurity and neglect.

GREUZE

Twenty-three paintings represent at the Louvre the art of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), who trod the safe path of flattering the taste of the multitude by the mawkish sentimentality of his genre-pieces and the prettiness and half-concealed sensuality of his “fancy portraits” of young women, which in their suggestiveness are perhaps more insidious than the frank improprieties of Boucher and Fragonard. The sentimental and melodramatic side of Greuze’s art is strikingly revealed in _The Village Engagement_ (No. 369), in _The Paternal Curse_ (No. 370), and in _The Punished Son_ (No. 371), which aroused the enthusiasm of that singularly misguided critic Diderot. But it is the painting of pictures like _The Broken Pitcher_ (No. 372, Plate XLIII.), _The Milkmaid_ (No. 372A), and _The Dead Bird_ (No. 372C; a replica of the picture in the Scottish National Gallery), that has made him the idol of a certain undiscriminating section of the public, and established him among the world’s most popular painters.

PORTRAIT PAINTERS

The leading position among the portrait painters of Louis XV.’s corrupt Court was occupied by Jean Marc Nattier (1685-1766), who was a good colourist, but was utterly lacking in sincerity, and placed his able brush at the service of the basest flattery. He has left a whole gallery of Court beauties posing as, and invested with the attributes of, Greek goddesses and allegorical personifications in the manner of the group of _Mdlle. de Lambesc and the Comte de Brienne_ (No. 659) as Minerva preparing the hero for warlike exploits. The _Magdalen_ (No. 657) is probably another contemporary portrait in fancy costume. His best picture at the Louvre is the _Portrait of a Young Woman_ (No. 661A).

François Hubert Drouais (1725-1775), the painter of the group of the _Comte d’Artois (afterwards Charles X.) and Madame Clotilde, afterwards Queen of Sardinia_ (No. 266), who received a good share of Court patronage, showed considerable ability when he had sufficient strength to resist the temptation to flatter his sitters. But unfortunately he too often followed the example of Nattier in this respect.

TOCQUÉ, VESTIER, AND LÉPICIÉ

A portrait painter of a very different stamp was Nattier’s son-in-law, Louis Tocqué (1696-1772). Although he, too, was a favourite not only at the French, but also at the Russian and Danish Courts, the examples of his art at the Louvre suggest that he was but indifferently successful—from the artistic point of view—with his “official” portraits, like the _portrait d’apparat_ of _Marie Leczinska, Queen of Louis XV._ (No. 867), or the affected _Portrait of the Dauphin Louis at the age of ten_ (No. 868). On the other hand, when he was not weighed down by the importance of his task, he attained to a solidity of style, strength of character painting, and beauty of technique that place him at the head of the French portraitists of his period. Tocqué was apparently never in England, but such masterpieces from his brush as the _Mme. Danger embroidering_ (No. 868A), and the supposed portrait of _Mme. de Graffigny_ (No. 869), show distinct affinity with Allan Ramsay and Hogarth, with superadded French _finesse_ and suavity.

In the case of Antoine Vestier (1740-1824) the pronounced leaning towards the English style of the period is to be accounted for by that artist’s lengthy sojourn in England. The _Portrait of a Young Woman_ (No. 961), in the La Caze Room, might on superficial inspection pass for a work of Francis Cotes. Even in the _Portrait of the Painter’s Wife_ (No. 959), which was painted in 1787, long after Vestier’s return to his native country, the figure of a boy caressing a dog has a curiously English flavour.

Honesty of purpose and serious concern with artistic problems mark the art of Nicolas Bernard Lépicié (1735-1784), whose _Portrait of Carle Vernet_ (549A) is a picture of precious quality. He devoted himself more particularly to the domestic genre, which he treated without the sentimentality and theatricality of a Greuze. Indeed, if there is any contemporary painter with whom he shows affinity, it is Siméon Chardin. That he was a landscape painter of no mean ability may be gathered from his _Farmyard_ (No. 549), which, in spite of the predominating brown, is remarkable for its luminous transparency.

M^{ME.} VIGÉE LE BRUN

Before turning to the landscape painters Joseph Vernet and Hubert Robert, we must close the chapter of eighteenth-century portraiture with Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), since her art, although her life extended far into the nineteenth century, belongs essentially to the degenerate days of the _ancien régime_—an art not devoid of grace, but exceeding in shallowness and insipidity the shallowest and most insipid productions of pre-Davidian days. Of the many masters from whom Vigée, herself the daughter of a painter, received advice, Greuze appears to be the one with whom she was most in sympathy. Married at an early age to Le Brun, a painter and picture-dealer from whom she was divorced after many years of wretched conjugal life, her career, of which she has left a full account in her autobiography, was one of adventure and truly extraordinary professional success.

She was the favourite painter of Marie Antoinette, had to leave Paris during the Terror, and made an almost triumphal progress from Court to Court before she definitely settled in Paris in 1809. At Naples, Vienna, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, and other centres, Royalty and the world of fashion crowded to her studio; and her art even gained the unstinted approval of a judge like Sir Joshua Reynolds, which is the more surprising as Vigée Le Brun’s colour was almost invariably cold and unsympathetic. Her personal charms may have been partly responsible for her universal success, if reliance is to be placed on the questionable honesty of her flattering brush from which the Louvre owns two _Portraits of the Artist and her Daughter_ (No. 521 and No. 522, Plate XLIV.). Among her other pictures in the Louvre are the _Peace bringing Abundance_ (No. 520), her reception piece at the Academy, and a portrait of her early friend and master, _Joseph Vernet_ (No. 525).

JOSEPH VERNET

One has to realise that the art of landscape painting had become almost extinct in France, and that the art of seascape had never existed, if one wishes to account for Diderot’s enthusiasm with regard to Claude Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), which made him exclaim, “What pictures! He rivals the Creator in celerity, Nature in truth!” Our cooler judgment cannot so easily pass over all that is cold and formal in his art. But, taken in relation to his contemporaries, he deserves respect for his emotional attitude towards nature, for a sense of the dramatic that approaches Salvator Rosa’s, and for his admirable drawing of the figures introduced into his landscapes. Vernet’s love of the sea awoke when at the age of eighteen he journeyed to Rome, where he became imbued with the classic tradition. He only returned to Paris in 1752, and soon afterwards received from Louis XV. the commission to paint the large series of _French Seaports_ (Nos. 940-954) which are now to be seen in the rooms in this collection given up to the Musée de Marine. In his other marines and landscapes (Nos. 912-939), not all of which are actually exhibited, he allowed his imagination freer play than in the _Seaports_, which were naturally of more topographic character.

Both his son Carle Vernet (1758-1836), a historical painter who excelled in the rendering of horses in movement, and his grandson Horace Vernet (1789-1863), a popular battle painter, are represented at the Louvre, the former by the _Stag Hunt in the Forest of Meudon_ (No. 955), and the latter by the _Barrière de Clichy (Defence of Paris in 1814)_ (No. 956), and the uninspired _Judith and Holofernes_ (No. 957).

HUBERT ROBERT

Hubert Robert (1733-1808), of whose classic landscapes the collection contains nineteen examples (Nos. 797-815), was not, as might be imagined from the general character of his paintings, influenced by the art of Claude Lorrain, but derived his love of antique buildings and landscapes peopled with classic figures from the general atmosphere of archæological enthusiasm engendered by the excavations on the site of Herculaneum, which prevailed in Rome when the young artist arrived at that Mecca of his profession in 1754. Robert lived and worked in Italy for twelve years, and became thoroughly imbued with this antiquarian spirit. Unlike Claude, he rarely, if ever, drew upon his imagination for the details of his classic landscapes, which are faithful transcripts of existing ruined or half-ruined buildings, though not infrequently they are arranged for greater pictorial effect. Of this half-realistic, half-classic nature—the introduction of people in classic garb among the ruins of buildings, which in classic times wore a very different aspect, is a pardonable anachronism—are the _Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes_ (No. 799), and several similar pieces at the Louvre. In his smaller pictures, of which the best are the _Fountain under a Portico_ (No. 812) and the _Winding Staircase, with three Figures_ (No. 813), in the La Caze Room, he rivals the rich quality of pigment and mellow tone of Guardi at his best. Robert was Fragonard’s constant companion in Rome, and exercised considerable influence upon his friend, as may be seen from Fragonard’s landscape drawings.

There is scarcely a trace of Italian classicism in the superb _View in the Neighbourhood of Paris_ (No. 650), by Louis Gabriel Moreau (1740-1806), which in its silvery-grey tonality, in its sense of atmosphere, and in the treatment of the receding distances, rather recalls the manner of the Dutchman Philips de Koninck. That Moreau, who also worked in England, was not always free from conventionality, is proved by the rather formal composition of the _View of the Hills of Meudon from Saint-Cloud_ (No. 651).

LOUIS DAVID

The boudoir art of the _ancien régime_ came to a natural end through the great social upheaval of the Revolution, of which Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) is the very personification in the realm of painting. As a pupil of Boucher, David in his early years was essentially a child of the eighteenth century. That he became the founder and head of a new classicist school, as tyrannical in his sway as had been Le Brun during the reign of Louis XIV., was due to the teaching of Joseph Marie Vien, whom he accompanied to Rome in 1775, the year in which Vien was appointed Director of the École de Rome. Vien was an eclectic and a purist of greater ability than would appear from his two dull pictures at the Louvre, _St. Germain and St. Vincent_ (No. 964) and _The Sleeping Hermit_ (No. 965).

David’s participation in the events of the year 1789 and his ardent republicanism did not, as has often been stated, attract him to subjects from Republican Roman history. Indeed, he had already painted _The Oath of the Horatii_ (No. 189) and _The Lictors taking to Brutus the Corpse of his Sons_ (No 191), for Louis XVI., and was only following the current of taste in devoting himself to the study of the antique and to antiquarian research. These two pictures, in spite of their cold classicism and theatricality, met with sensational success on their first appearance at the Salon. It is not in such works as these, nor in the _Rape of the Sabine Women_ (No. 188), compared with which even Poussin’s version of the same theme appears like a glimpse of actual life, that David’s talent found its happiest expression, but in the unaffected and irresistibly charming _Portrait of Mme. Récamier_ (No. 199, Plate XLV.) reclining on an Empire sofa. Whatever this picture may owe to the sitter’s grace and beauty and to the fact that it was never finished, and thus retained the freshness of a sketch, it is certainly one of the most attractive masterpieces of the French school. Here, as in the group of _Three Ladies of Ghent_ (No. 200A), in which the luminous quality of the fresh tones is enhanced by the general greyness of the scheme, we have the work of a real painter, whilst David’s bombastic historical compositions are scarcely more than tinted cartoons.

THE “CORONATION” PICTURE