CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS WORK
There is so little variety in the works of Greuze that if one divides them into two main classes, nearly all his pictures, with the exception of the portraits, may be placed in one or other of these two divisions. In one class there are his genre pictures, containing as a rule many figures; and then, better known than these, and of greater merit, are his single heads of girls and boys, which constitute the other principal category.
His first great success was achieved with his picture of the genre class, Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants, and this book contains an illustration from another popular work of this sort called L'Accordée de Village. A section of this volume explains the relative position of Greuze in the history of art, and reasons are given which account for the great acclamation with which this and similar works were received in Paris when first they were exhibited. Meanwhile we will consider the intrinsic merits of these pictures without reference to the novelty of their appearance—an appearance in which a number of adventitious circumstances are involved.
THE VILLAGE BRIDE.
(L'Accordée de Village.)
In painting pictures of scenes in the life of humble people, Greuze had an aim other than the representation of some beauty of nature by which his own emotions had been profoundly stirred. He wished to play the schoolmaster, and the history of painting has demonstrated that, whatever may be the immediate effect of pictures that have been wrought in this mood, they have never been the pictures that have endured for all time the test of a comparison with the severest standards of excellence in art, and they have invariably sunk into their own place—amongst pictures not in the first class.
Again and again it has been shown that a man cannot be a preacher or a story-writer on canvas and at the same time an artist of the first rank. The reason for this is that it is not the function of pictorial art to tell tales, nor to preach sermons, though artists can do both, and yet be very popular.
"Sir," said Dr. Johnson, "a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs: it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." And one may apply the same remark to the pulpiteering of the painter with much less risk of evoking a protest.
During recent years this truth has begun to receive recognition. Théophile Gautier has written strenuously against story-telling pictures, and Whistler has argued that Art "is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only—having no desire to teach—seeking and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all times."
While these opinions of modern critics upon anecdotal art are in our minds, it will be appropriate to mention Greuze's own views as revealed in what he called "une note historique" upon his painting of La Belle-Mère. "For a long time I had wished," he says, "to paint that character, but in each sketch the expression of the stepmother always appeared to me to be feeble and unsatisfactory. One day, however, when I was crossing the Pont-Neuf, I saw two women, who spoke to one another with much vehemence. One of them began to shed tears, and she exclaimed, 'Such a stepmother too! Yes, she gave me bread, but in giving it to me she broke my teeth.' That was a coup de lumière for me; I returned to the house, and I made the sketch for my picture, which contains five figures: the step-mother, the daughter of the dead mother, the grandmother of the orphan, the daughter of the stepmother, and a child of three years. I have supposed in my picture that it is the dinner-hour, and that the poor little girl goes to take a seat at the table with the other children. Then the stepmother takes a piece of bread from the table, and, holding the orphan back by her apron, thrusts the bread roughly into her mouth. I have set myself the task of showing in that action the deliberate hate of the woman. The child seeks to evade her stepmother's violence, and seems as one who would say, 'Why would you ill-use me? I have done you no harm.' The child's expression is a mixture of shyness and of fear. Her grandmother is at the other end of the table. Harrowed by grief, she lifts her eyes to heaven, and, with hands trembling, seems to say, 'Ah! my daughter, where are you? What misfortunes! what bitterness!' The daughter of the stepmother, not at all sympathetic concerning the lot of her sister, laughs to witness the despair of the poor old woman, and, in ridicule, draws her mother's attention to her gestures. The infant of the family, whose heart has not yet been corrupted, gratefully stretches out her arms towards the sister who has bestowed so much kindness upon her. I have wished to paint a woman who maltreats a child that does not belong to her, and who, by a double crime, has also corrupted the heart of her own daughter."
Here, then, we see an anecdotal painting in the making. Although this rehearsal is very touching, as a revelation of the kind heart of the man, it yet seems to-day a particularly naïve exposition of the motive for a work of art. Nothing could show with greater clearness the wide gulf that, in the art world, lies between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of a century which closed with discussions of the theories of impressionists, vibrists, symbolists and pointillists, and with the theories of those who, denying that art is primarily moral, or even intellectual, have contended that it is simply a means by which we are made to respond to an artist's emotion.
If Whistler, to mention an artist representative of some newer movements than those of the eighteenth century, had been on the Pont-Neuf, from what a different source would have come any coup de lumière which might have flashed into his brain! Not during high noon, nor in the gossip of the people, would he have found the motive for his paintings. His coup de lumière would have come "when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; and the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her."
Whistler's eyes would have been directed towards the beauties of colour and of tone that he might find on the river or on its banks; and the Isle de France, as it is seen by the tired journalist as he makes his way to the Latin Quarter at dawn of day, with its tender grays, and its evasive charms of exquisite light and colour, would be of more account to him than all the conversations in the world, however vehement they might be. The idea of preaching or moralizing on canvas would never have entered his head for a moment.
When Greuze, in harmony with the raw notions of Diderot upon art, did preach, his homilies were singularly unimpressive. The pictures which he painted when in this sermonizing vein have all the elements that go to the making of what is now called melodrama. The scenes are not the result of a discriminating observation of real life; are not, to use Zola's phrase, "Nature seen through a temperament." They are founded upon conventions, upon the artificial and sentimental ideas of life that have by some curious freak of the human mind established themselves in books and plays and pictures.
The figures in Greuze's genre pictures pose before the spectators; they gesticulate and overdo their parts like barn-stormers. Pity becomes maudlin, morality degenerates into sanctimoniousness, and humility is degraded into utter abasement. The sentimentality in Un Paralytique Soigné par sa Famille, ou le Fruit de la Bonne Education, and in La Mère Paralytique is particularly nauseating, and in La Mère bien Aimée the exaggeration of what is in actual life a very tender sentiment makes of that picture a very significant example of Greuze's stilted manner. The six children—all of them about the same age—who have flung themselves upon their mother, seem so numerous, and are so involved in a confused heap of humanity that Madame Geoffrin spoke of the picture as a "fricassee of children," and incurred thereby the fulminations of the artist. In his genre pictures, too, as is usual in melodrama elsewhere, the humble cottage is the headquarters of all the virtues.
Greuze, it is true, made sketches for his pictures in the streets and in the market-places; but there is none of the freshness of the sketch when the figure appears on the canvas, and De Goncourt has complained that little tatterdemalions with their split breeches have become on their way to Greuze's canvases the Cupids of Boucher dressed as Savoyards; and further, he has put in a mild demurrer that the artist's washerwomen do not wash!
In strong contrast to Greuze's melodramatic, affected, domestic scenes are those by Chardin, another French artist of the eighteenth century. No ethical teaching is obtruded in his pictures; there is no pose, and the spectator can enjoy the real poetry of life, the sweetness and simplicity of well-ordered homes, undisturbed by the poseurs who clamour for our regard in many of the pictures by Greuze.
THE PRETTY LAUNDRESS.
(La Belle Blanchisseuse.)
Another fault of Greuze's genre pictures is their poverty and feebleness of colour. There is a general deadness, and in parts an abuse of purple and violet. Some of the tints have a dirty muddled look, and the shadows are heavy and brown. Still the chief fault is that art in these pictures is relegated to a second place; the pictures are a means, and not an end.
To see many of his genre pictures together is to receive an impression of monotony. It is clear that the range of the artist is narrow, that he is making a few ideas cover a great area of canvas, and that he ceased to grow intellectually at an early stage of his career.
Greuze and Hogarth have often been compared, but there are many essential differences between the two men. There was dissimilarity in their temperaments, and while Greuze has adopted the attitude of a mild-mannered Sabbath-school superintendent, towards those whose immorality he would correct, Hogarth, as Professor Muther has written, has "swung over this human animal the stout cudgel of morality in the manner of a sturdy policeman and Puritan bourgeois." Charles Normand explains the difference with some disregard for international amenity. Greuze, he says, "did not paint for the English, at once drunkards and theologians, maundering on through life, with a pot of gin in one hand and a Bible in the other."
And yet Greuze is no Puritan, even when he preaches most. There is often an air of coquetry and voluptuousness in his most serious pictures. Charles Blanc has written that Greuze is a moralist who is passionately fond of beautiful shoulders, a preacher who loves to see and to reveal to us the bosoms of young girls; and Lady Dilke has pointed out that "even in Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants ... the instinct which bade him associate with his lessons of grace and morality the stimulus of voluptuous charm has tempted him to give prominence to the girl whose thoughts are far away, and whose kerchief is torn just where it should hide the budding breast."
But when criticism has said all it can say in dispraise of Greuze's pictures, even of his genre pictures, it may be seen that Greuze was by temperament an artist. The melodramatic moralist was only part of the man and not the whole. Even Robert Louis Stevenson had "something of the Shorter-Catechist" in his constitution, and yet remains the most romantic and interesting figure of the latter-day world of letters.
It need not be forgotten that in the most theatrical works of Greuze there are many beauties. There is often a figure in these otherwise imperfect pictures which indicates his love for the beautiful, and in some of his paintings, for instance in Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants, the melodramatic element, though present, is not obtrusive, and is more than compensated by the other qualities of tenderness and graceful composition.
We may now consider the other class of Greuze's paintings, the heads of children, and it is in these that Greuze is seen at his best; it is in these that he redeems himself, and reveals more of the artist. To-day, though his other works are scarcely ever mentioned, his heads of girls and boys are treasured in the most costly collections, and are known far and wide by means of photographs and other reproductions.
In many an art gallery the beautiful eyes of these pretty, rosy-cheeked children meet our own, and we stay yet again to admire their fresh lips and their brown hair, in which the piece of blue ribbon nestles with such harmony of colouring. Often a light gauze has been thrown round their necks or upon their shoulders, and often, too, a posy of flowers tucked into the tops of their bodices emulates the carnation and white of their complexions. There are few pictures that are more sweet and alluring than these heads of children.
In London it is an easy matter to study Greuze's child portraits, because there are a few examples at the National Gallery, and more at Hertford House. Standing before these canvases the general effect is one of sweetness and delicacy, one colour melting into another in almost imperceptible gradations, and giving an impression very unlike the one we receive from the hard edges of a painting by Maclise for example. The colours are not positive, but have been softened and harmonized. For instance, if a piece of white paper is held against what may seem to be a piece of white drapery, it will be found that the white has been modified into a beautiful delicate pearly gray. The same test may be applied to the other colours. Hold a piece of positive blue near to one of Greuze's seemingly blue ribbons, and it will be noticed that a similar modification has been effected.
The forms, too, have been rounded, and have been freed from all angularities. Indeed, Greuze has carried this process as far as it is possible. Too much of this smoothing and the picture would lose in character, and would become but a vapid piece of work.
THE LISTENING GIRL.
In the long series of heads of girls and boys that Greuze painted, some of the pictures are conspicuously better than the rest. Of these may be mentioned the Head of a Young Girl Veiled in Black, which belongs to M. Leopold Goldschmidt, and two more which are in the Museum at Besançon, Paul Strogonoff, Infant, and the Head of a Young Girl. Also characteristic of Greuze at his best, and more available to the people of this country, is A Girl with Doves. In the year 1800 he exhibited at the Salon L'Innocence tenant Deux Pigeons. It has not been definitely ascertained, but it is possible that this is the beautiful picture that hangs now in the Wallace Gallery. Few paintings by Greuze are more pleasing than this one. The picture is well painted, and it is quite free from Greuze's besetting sins. Where in other pictures one finds posturing and affectation, one finds here the simplicity and sweetness of nature. The painting was a commission from a Mr. Wilkinson, and Greuze received 4,500 francs for it. When Mr. Wilkinson's pictures were sold in 1828, Mr. Nieuwenhuys became the purchaser, and he paid 245 guineas for the painting. Later the work became the property of Mr. W. Wells, of Redleaf, and when, in 1848, his pictures were dispersed, the Marquis of Hertford gave £787 10s. for this one, and thus it has become part of the splendid collection at Hertford House, now belonging to the nation. During the Manchester Exhibition of 1857 the public had a chance to see it there, and it was exhibited again at Bethnal Green in 1874. Another picture in which Greuze's style may be studied is A Girl's Head, draped with a Scarf. In England this is one of the best-known of the artist's works. Thirty and more years ago it was reproduced in popular publications, and it has been reproduced many times since by various processes. By the bequest of Mr. R. Simmons, the original picture has become the property of the nation, and it is now the most characteristic example of Greuze amongst those that hang in the National Gallery. Upon this canvas one may see many of the qualities to which we have already referred. There is more than a suspicion of mannerism in the way that the hands are held, and one feels, concerning the shoulder, that, beautiful as it is, it has been obtruded upon the notice of the spectator with a somewhat free anatomical license. The half-open mouth also gives an impression of affectation; and yet, when criticism has pronounced its last word, the picture still remains graceful and seductive.
Some of the faults of Greuze's manner which have been noted in his genre pictures appear also in his heads of children. The girls in a number of the pictures are too self-conscious and affected, imperfections that one may see prominently illustrated in Fidelity and in Ariadne, in the Wallace Collection.
A few, indeed, of Greuze's heads can scarcely be called paintings of children at all, so many of the elements of womanhood has he mingled with what is otherwise typical of childhood. As representations of the charm and the insouciance of childhood, a painting by Greuze would ill bear comparison, for example, with a work by Chardin amongst his own compatriots, with works by Reynolds and Gainsborough; or, to come to our time, with some of the children of Millais, with Watts' Agathoniké Hélène Ionides, Whistler's Miss Alexander, Mouat Loudan's Isa, John Lavery's A Girl in White, or with Edward Arthur Walton's The Girl in Brown.
Most of the French critics who have written of Greuze have drawn attention to this imperfection in the artist's paintings of children. De Goncourt in some passages of searching criticism has written regarding a number of these heads that they represent "the innocence of Paris and of the eighteenth century, an easy innocence which is near its fall." And De Goncourt, Diderot, and other writers have pointed out that in many the head is the head of a girl on the body of a woman; that Greuze has, in fact, put "young heads on old shoulders." Charles Blanc has written of Une Jeune Fille qui pleure la Mort de son Oiseau, that the head is the head of a child, but the grief is the grief of a woman; and he has added to this criticism that it is rare to find in Greuze's pictures of this class the head in harmony with the body.
Despite all these shortcomings, however, the pictures are charming, but the appeal of Greuze will be specially to the young, who mark the beauty only, and are unconscious of any pose or any incongruity.
In addition to the kinds of paintings we have mentioned, Greuze showed that he was not quite free from the conventions of the period by painting a few mythological, religious, and allegorical works, but these are pictures which are not of any importance.
"Keep yourself free from formulas," he said to Count Henry Costa, but therein he did not follow his own bidding. A writer in the Nouvelle Biographie Générale has recorded that during this era it was accepted and taught that a sphere should be represented as though it had many sides. Greuze at one time accepted this absurd dogma, and in some of his pictures the chubby cheeks of children have been painted as though they had facets. His most finished works, however, are free from this blemish. Greuze's desire to be an historical painter is more evidence that he was not without the conventional ideas which have strangled art with such persistency.
Although Greuze sometimes sketched rapidly, yet his works are usually the result of slow and laborious effort renewed again and again. His plan was to return to his picture when he was at his best, and to paint and repaint, no matter how often, until he felt that the work was as free from faults as he could make it.