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.

PLATE XLII.—JEAN HONORÉ FRAGONARD
(1732–1806)
FRENCH SCHOOL
No. 291.—THE MUSIC LESSON
(La Leçon de Musique)

A fair-haired young girl in a low-cut white dress is seated, in profile towards the right, before a spinet. A youth, standing at her left, behind the instrument, is holding with his left hand the score, whilst his right is clasping the back of the girl’s chair. In the foreground a chair on which are a cat and a mandoline.

Painted in oil on canvas.

3 ft. 9½ in. × 3 ft. 11½ in. (1·10 × 1·20.)

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.

Mme. 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).

PLATE XLIII.—JEAN-BAPTISTE GREUZE
(1725–1805)
No. 372.—THE BROKEN PITCHER
(La Cruche Cassée)

A young girl, in white dress and gauze fichu, stands facing the spectator, holding with both hands some loose flowers in the gathered-up folds of her dress. She carries a broken pitcher on her right arm. In the background, on the right, is a fountain with a crouching lion.

Painted in oil on canvas.

Oval, 3 ft. 10½ in. × 2 ft. 9½ in. (1·18 × 0·85.)