FAME IN PARIS
Popular as was this picture of L'Aveugle Trompé, its success was eclipsed by the fame of Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants, a work which advanced Greuze to the front rank of the leading painters of that time. Even when one remembers that this is a better picture than many which he painted afterwards, it is yet not easy to-day to understand the enthusiasm that it caused when it was first exhibited. One reason for our difficulty is that we do not feel the force of its novelty as the people of Paris felt it when they had become satiated with the painted pastorals, allegories, and coquetries of that voluptuous era.
The picture, pleasing as a whole, contains indications of the tendency towards artificiality which afterwards became so marked in many of Greuze's melodramatic paintings. But for the rest the scene is nature in a mirror compared with other canvases of the same century. The painter has represented the interior of a farm kitchen, and a devout and venerable farmer reads, from a large Bible, some chapters of the New Testament to the other members of the household. All these, from the grandmother to the child of three years, are picturesque and pleasing, and they are happily placed in the picture. This work was bought by Monsieur de la Live de Jully, a rich connoisseur, who invited artists and others interested in painting to go to his house, to see the new kind of picture which Greuze had introduced into Paris.
Even from artists and critics the picture won a generous meed of praise; but, containing as it does all the elements which still appeal to "the man in the street," it was not until 1755, when it was exhibited at the Salon, that it achieved its greatest triumph. As long as the exhibition was open the people crowded round this pious presentment of humble life which had strayed so unaccountably amongst the pictures of the Court painters—pictures which for many years, as we shall see, had been free from the suspicion of any odour of sanctity.
"Whence comes he? Whose pupil is he?" asked the bewildered Academicians, who, in the manner of Academicians, could not believe it possible for an artist outside their circle to attain either excellence or fame. The answer came, "He is a pupil of Diderot."
Although this answer did not contain the whole truth, it was yet significant of a change that was taking place in the aspirations of many French people. Diderot, a clever and copious man of letters, had commenced to write about pictures, and he was now advocating that art should be devoted to the cause of morality. Greuze's picture happening to coincide with his own idea, he at once wrote an enthusiastic, one may almost say a gushing, eulogy of this and other similar works of the artist; and in that way he helped to swell the renown which Greuze had now achieved.
Meanwhile, the artist, with that perversity which one has noted in the early life of other famous men, must now leave his own path to go to study art in Italy. Hundreds of years have been needed to convince painters that the Italian artists wrought great pictures because they expressed their own ideas of beauty, just as away from Italy Rembrandt "saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks." "I do not study the ancients," wrote Chantrey, heedless of syntax, "but I study where the ancients studied—nature."
The ambition of Greuze at this time was to belong to that singularly dreary and barren class of painters known as historical painters; and he wasted some years in the pursuit of a project which, in the end, brought him one of the most crushing humiliations of his whole life. "Woe to the artist," Goethe has written, "who leaves his hut to squander himself in academic halls of state!" and this woe fell upon Greuze in exceeding bitterness when his first historical picture was exhibited. But that incident belongs to the year 1769, and it was at the end of the year 1755, when he was thirty years of age, that he went to Italy.
Almost the only effect of his stay of two years in Italy was that for some time the figures in his pictures were arrayed in the "resplendent small clothes" of the people of that country, and had also Italian names. The painter who did really influence Greuze was Rubens, who was not an Italian, and whose pictures, no further away than the Luxembourg in Paris, it was in later years one of the great delights of his life to study.
In the list of Greuze's works for the year 1757 we notice amongst some pictures of the genre type—the representation, that is, of the life of the humble—a number of paintings which have Italian names; and then there are portraits, and the first of that long series of heads of girls and boys whose fame has outlasted the fame of all his more pretentious works.
Greuze's industry was now very great, and in 1761 there was exhibited one more of his greater triumphs, Un Mariage à l'instant où le Père de l'accordée delivre la dot à son gendre, a picture which created another sensation in Paris. It was unfinished when the Salon of that year was opened, and was hung only during the last few days of the exhibition. But all through these days people gathered round it with the same avidity with which they had elbowed one another for a peep at Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants.
During the next two years Greuze painted portraits and heads of children, and the year 1769 is notable because of his unhappy attempt to become a member of the Academy as an historical painter. He had, as we have seen, been made agréé, but he had not yet complied with the rule that required each member to provide the Academy with one of his pictures. The picture he now submitted bore the sufficiently comprehensive title of Septime-Sévère reprochant à son fils Caracalla d'avoir attenté à sa vie dans les défilés d'Ecosse et lui disant:—Si tu désires ma mort, ordonne à Papinien de me la donner. The members of the Academy assembled, and the picture was placed upon an easel that they might examine it, while Greuze awaited their verdict in another room. In an hour the artist was admitted.
"Monsieur Greuze," said the director, "the Academy receives you; come forward and take the oath." When this ceremony had been completed the director continued, "You have been received; but it is as a painter of genre. The Academy has considered your former productions, which are excellent, but it has closed its eyes upon this picture, which is worthy neither of the Academy nor of you."
Greuze was astounded and disappointed; and he commenced to stammer out a confused defence of the picture, the worst probably that he ever painted. Then Lagrenée, taking a pencil from one of his pockets, pointed out some of the mistakes in drawing on the canvas. Greuze, cut to the heart, went away, and continued a defence of his picture in the newspapers.
One of the letters which Greuze sent to the public journals is an interesting revelation of how little of what is understood now as art went to the making of an historical painting. Greuze wrote:
"In the continuation of your comments upon the pictures exhibited at the Salon in the last number of your journal you have been unjust towards me upon two points; and as an honourable man you would no doubt wish to remove these injustices in your next issue. In the first place, instead of treating me as you have treated the other artists, my confrères, to whom you have offered, in a few lines, the tribute of commendation which they have merited, you have gone out of your way to discuss, with the public, how, according to your opinion, Poussin would have painted the same subject. I do not doubt, sir, that Poussin, of the same subject, would have made a sublime work; but to a certainty he would have painted a very different picture from the one which you have imagined. I must ask you to believe that I have studied, as carefully as you have been able to study, the works of that great man, and I have, above all, sought to acquire the art of endowing my characters with dramatic expression. You have carried your views a long way, it is true, inasmuch as you have remarked that Poussin would have put the clasps of the cloaks upon the right side, while I have put that of the robe of Caracalla upon the left—surely a very grave error! But I do not surrender so easily concerning the character which you pretend that Poussin would have given to the Emperor. All the world knows that Severus was the most passionate, the most violent of men, and you would wish that when he says to his son, 'If thou desirest my death, order Papinian to kill me with that sword,' he should, in my picture, have an air as calm and as tranquil as Solomon had in similar circumstances. I ask all sensible men to judge whether that was or was not the expression which should have been put on the face of that redoubtable Emperor.
"Another injustice, much greater still, is that, after you had endeavoured to discover how Poussin would have treated this subject, you have assumed that I had the idea to paint Geta, the brother of Caracalla, in the personage that I have placed behind Papinian. First of all, Geta was not present at that scene; it was Castor the chamberlain, one of the most faithful servants of Severus. In the second place, in supposing gratuitously, as you have done, that I had the design to represent Geta, you would have been right to have reproached me if I had painted him too old, because he was the younger brother of Caracalla. Thirdly, I should still have been wrong if I had not painted him in his armour. You see, sir, what absurdities you have attributed to me in order that you might indulge your love of criticism. I believe you to be a man too honest to refuse me the satisfaction of making this letter public in your journal. It is due to me to be allowed to explain my own picture and to correct the interpretation which you have given to it without consulting me and without consulting history.
"Do you wish to discourage an artist who sacrifices all to merit the favours with which the public has so far honoured him? Why, upon my first essay, attack me so openly? This is to me a new kind of painting, but it is one in which I flatter myself that I shall become perfect as time goes on. Why compare me alone, amongst all my confrères, to the most learned painter of the French school? If you have done this to indulge me, you have not done it happily, for I can find nothing in all that article but a marked design to annoy me. Nor shall I be able to recognise any other than that design—a most unworthy one in a writer who ought to be impartial—until I have seen your willingness to print my letter in your journal."
It will be noticed that in this letter there is not a single word written about art. All the discussion turns upon archæological details. Poussin is not mentioned as an artist, but merely as a "learned painter," and we shall see, when we discuss the position held by Greuze amongst French artists, that scholars, excellent in their own place, came at length to push the painters "from their stools," with very disastrous results for the art of France.
Even Diderot turned upon this picture and condemned it; for he and his followers now saw that after all Greuze was not the painter of morality for whom they had been seeking. Greuze, it appeared, was ready "to pay homage to traditional conventions," and to become a backslider from the ideals which they had cherished. After this scene Greuze refused to exhibit any of his pictures at the annual exhibitions of the Academy until the Revolution swept away restrictions, and opened the doors of the Salon to all artists. He also shook the dust of Paris from his feet, and lived for a time in Anjou, where he painted a number of pictures, including that portrait of Madame de Porcin which is to-day one of the treasures of the museum of Angers.
When Greuze returned to Paris his repute was greater than it had ever been before. It was now the fashion to visit his studio, and royal princes, the nobility, the Emperor Joseph the Second and other foreign notabilities came to see La Cruche Cassée, La Malédiction Paternelle, La Dame de Charité, Le Fils Puni, and other paintings which happened at that time to be still in his possession. He amassed money notwithstanding the great losses caused by his wife's lawless extravagance. High prices were paid for his paintings, and the engravers Massard, Gaillard, Levasseur and Flipart were kept busy making plates, the impressions from which were in the houses of Paris, of the provinces, and of foreign countries. Moreover, curious dilettanti, people of the kind whose chief regard is for technical and accidental states of the plates, began to collect these engravings, and to compete with one another to possess them. One engraver, Jean Georges Wille, had always been the staunch friend of Greuze; and his son, Pierre Alexandre, became a pupil in Greuze's studio. At a time when the artist had been less known, it was Wille who disseminated a knowledge of his works, not only in France, but also in Germany.