NOTES BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL.—THE ART OF FRANCE IN THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.—DAVID AND HIS FOLLOWERS.
By Will H. Low.
HEN the potter's daughter of remote antiquity first drew the incised line around her lover's shadow cast upon the wall by the accomplice sun, art had its birth. Before that time primitive man had endeavored—with who knows what desire to leave behind him some trace of his passage upon earth—to make upon bones rude tracings of his surroundings. The proof of the universality of art is in these manifestations, of which the logical outcome was the complete and splendid art of Greece. Through the sequence of Byzantine art we come to Giotto, who, a shepherd's son under the skies of Italy, was reinspired at the source of nature, and became the first painter as we to-day know painting. From Giotto descends in direct line the great family of artists who, in the service of the spiritual and temporal sovereigns of the earth, shed illustration upon their craft and undying lustre on their names until the old order, changing, giving way to the new, enfranchised art in the great upheaval of the latter part of the eighteenth century.
It is well, in order to understand the position in which this great revolution left art, to briefly consider the conditions preceding it. Painting, up to the end of the seventeenth century, had been essentially the handmaiden of religion; and religion in its turn had been so closely allied to the state that, when declining faith let down the barriers, art took for the first time its place among the liberal professions whose first duty is to find in the necessities of mankind a reason for their existence. Small wonder, then, that, accustomed to be fostered and encouraged, to be held aloof from the material necessity of earning their daily bread, the artists of this period sought protection from the only class which in those days had the leisure to appreciate or the fortune to encourage them. The people, the "general public," as we say to-day, did not exist, except as a mass of patient workers in the first part, as a clamorous rabble demanding its rights in the latter part, of the century. Hence the patronage of art, its very existence, depended on the pleasure of the nobility, and naturally enough its themes were measured according to the tastes of its patrons. Much that was charming was produced, but never before did art portray its epoch with such great limitations. The persistent blindness to the signs and portents gathering thick about them which characterized the higher classes of the time, may be felt in its art; of the great outside world, of the hungry masses so soon to rise in rebellion, nothing is seen. One may walk through the palaces at Versailles, may search through the pictures of the epoch in the Louvre, or linger at Sans Souci in Potsdam—where Frederick filled his house with sculptured duchesses in classical costume playing at Diana, and covered his walls with Watteaus and his ceilings with decorations by Pesne, a less worthy Frenchman—and remain in complete ignorance of hungry Jacques, who, with pike-staff and guillotine, was so soon to change all that and usher in the period of the Revolution, Before the evil day dawned for the gilded gentry of France, however, the British colonies in America, influenced by the teachings of the precursors of the French Revolution, and aided by their isolation, were to establish their independence.
JACQUES LOUIS DAVID AS A YOUNG MAN. FROM A PAINTING BY HIMSELF.
The exact date of this picture is unknown; but it was, presumably, painted before 1775, when David, having received the Prix de Rome, went to Italy for the first time. It was given to the Louvre, where it now is, by the painter Eugene Isabey in 1852; David had presented it to the elder Isabey, also a painter.
It was undoubtedly at this time, when revolt was in the air and man was preoccupied with his primal right to liberty of existence, that art was given the bad name of a luxury. Until its long prostitution throughout the seventeenth century, its mission had been noble; but now, coincident to the fall of the old régime, the people, from an ignorance which was more their misfortune than their fault, confounded art with luxuries more than questionable, in which their whilom superiors had indulged while they lacked bread. With the curious assumption of Spartan virtue which rings with an almost convincing sound of true metal through so many of the resolutions passed by the National Convention of France, in the days following the holocaust of the Reign of Terror, there was serious debate as to whether pictures and statues were to be permitted to exist or their production encouraged.
This debate must have fallen strangely on the ears of one of the members of the Convention, who had already made his power as an artist felt, and who was from that time for more than forty years to be the directing influence, not only of French art, but of painting on the Continent in general. This man, Jacques Louis David, in point of fact was soon practically to demonstrate to his colleagues that art had as its mission other aims than those followed by the painters of the preceding generations. It fell that Lepelletier, one of the members of the Convention, was assassinated, and David's brush portrayed him as he lay dead; and the picture, being brought into the legislative hall, moved the entire assembly to a conviction that the art of the painter struck a human chord which vibrated deep in the heart of man.
MICHEL GÉRARD AND HIS FAMILY. FROM A PAINTING BY DAVID.
Michel Gérard was a member of the National Assembly, the body which ruled France in the first years of the Revolution, from 1789 to 1791. The picture represents him in the midst of his family, attired with the simplicity affected by the Revolutionary leaders at that time.
But a little later, when Marat, "the Friend of Man," was stricken down, a voice rose in the Convention, "Where art thou, David?" And again, responding to the call, he painted the picture of the dead demagogue lying in his bath, his pen in hand, a half-written screed on a rude table improvised by placing a board across the tub; and again the picture, more eloquent, more explanatory of character and of epoch than any written page of history, was a convincing argument that painting was not a plaything.
Born August 21, 1748, a man over fifty years of age when this century commenced, David may yet be considered entirely our own; for the ideas of his country, despite minor influences that have affected modern art, have prevailed in the art of all other countries, and these principles were largely formulated by him. France has been throughout this century the only country which has steadfastly encouraged art, with a system of education unsurpassed in any epoch, and by the maintenance of a standard which, however rebellious at times, every serious artist has been and is obliged to acknowledge. A cousin—or, as some authorities have it, a grand-nephew—of Boucher (the artist who best typifies the frivolity of the art of the eighteenth century, so that there is grim humor in the thought that this iconoclast was of his blood), David was twenty-seven years of age when, in 1775, he won the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to go to Italy for four years at the expense of the government. He was the pupil of Vien, a painter whose chief merit it was to have inspired his pupil with a hatred of the frivolous Pompadour art of the epoch; and David only obtained the coveted prize after competing five successive years. It is instructive to learn that of this first sojourn at Rome almost nothing remains in the way of painting; for the young artist, endowed with the patience which is, according to Goethe, synonomous with genius, devoted all his time to drawing from the antique.
It was here and during this time, doubtless, that he formed his conviction that painting of the highest type must conform to classical tradition—that all nature was to be remoulded in the form of antique sculpture. But it was also at this time, and owing to his stern apprenticeship to the study of form, that he acquired the mastery of drawing which served him so well when in the presence of nature; and with no other preoccupation than to reproduce his model, he painted the people of his time and produced his greatest works. For by a strange yet not unprecedented contradiction, David's fame to-day rests, not upon the great classical pictures which were the admiration of his time and by which he thought to be remembered, but on the portraits which, with his mastery of technical acquirement, he painted with surprising truth and reality.
The time was propitious, however, for David. France, the seeds of revolution germinating in its soil, looked upon the Republic of Rome as the type from which a system could be evolved that would usher in a new day of virtuous government; and when, after a second visit to Rome, David returned home with a picture representing the oath of the Horatii, Paris received him with open arms. The picture was exhibited, and viewed by crowds, burning, doubtless, in their turn to have weapons placed in their hands with which to conquer their liberties. This was in 1786; but years after, in the catalogue of the Salon of 1819, we read this note: "The Oath of the Horatii, the first masterpiece which restored to the French school of painting the purity of antique taste."
At the outbreak of the Revolution David abandoned painting; and on January 17, 1793, as a member of the Convention, voted for the execution of Louis XVI. It was during this period that were painted his pictures of Lepelletier and Marat, in which his cold, statuesque, and correct manner was revivified and warmed to life—paradoxically enough, to paint death. A friend of Robespierre, he was carried down at the overthrow of the "little lawyer from Arras," and imprisoned in the Luxembourg. His wife—who had left him at the outset of his political life, horrified at the excesses of the time—now rejoined him in his misfortune; and inspired by her devotion, David made the first sketch of the Sabine women.
Released from prison October 26, 1795, he returned to his art; and in 1800 the Sabines was exhibited in a room in the Louvre, where it remained for more than five years, during which time it constantly attracted visitors, and brought to the painter in entrance fees more than thirteen thousand dollars. Early in the career of Napoleon, David had attracted his attention; and he had vainly endeavored to induce the artist to accompany him on the Egyptian campaign. On the accession of Napoleon as Emperor, therefore, we find in the Salon catalogues, "Monsieur David, first painter to his Imperial Majesty," in place of plain "Citizen David" of the Revolutionary years.
Napoleon ordered from David four great paintings. The Coronation and the Distribution of Flags alone were painted when the overthrow of the Empire, and the loyalty of David to his imperial patron, caused him to be exiled in 1816. He went to Brussels, where, on December 29, 1825, he died. The Bourbons, masters of France, refused to allow his body to be brought back to his country; but Belgium gave him a public funeral, after which he was laid to rest in the Cathedral of Brussels.
POPE PIUS VII. FROM A PAINTING FROM LIFE BY DAVID, NOW IN THE LOUVRE.
Pius VII. was the Pope who, in 1804, consecrated Napoleon I. as Emperor of France. Later he opposed Napoleon's aggressions, and was imprisoned for it, first in Italy and afterwards in France. In 1814 he recovered his freedom and his dominions, temporal as well as spiritual. The above picture is, perhaps, the best example of what may be termed the official portrait (as the preceding picture is of the familiar portrait) of David. It was painted in 1805, in the apartment assigned to the Pope in the Tuileries.
This dominant artistic influence of France in the first quarter of this century is not entirely extinguished to-day. The classical spirit has never been entirely absent from any intellectual manifestation of the French; but in David and his pupils it was carried to an extremity against which the painters of the next generation were to struggle almost hopelessly. Time, which sets all things right, has placed David in his proper place; and while to-day we may admire the immense knowledge of the man as manifested in the great classical pictures, like the Horatii, the Sabines, or the Leonidas at Thermopylæ, we remain cold before their array of painted statues. His portraits—Marat, the charming sketch of Madame Recamier, his own portrait as a young man, the group of Michel Gérard and his family, and the Pope Pius VII.—give the touch of nature which is needed to kindle the fire of humanity in this man of iron.
JUSTICE AND DIVINE VENGEANCE PURSUING CRIME. FROM A PAINTING BY PRUD'HON.
This picture was painted for the Criminal Court of the Palace of Justice in Paris. At the time of the Restoration in 1816 the picture was replaced by a crucifix, and removed to the Luxembourg gallery, where it remained until 1823, when it was placed in the Louvre. It is considered Prud'hon's masterpiece.
It is as though nature had wished a contrast to this coldly intellectual type that there should have existed at the same time a painter who, seeking at the same inexhaustible fountain-head of classicism, found inspiration for an art almost morbid in excess of sentiment. Pierre Prud'hon was born at Cluny in Burgundy, April 4, 1758, the son of a poor mason who, dying soon after the boy's birth, left him to the care of the monks of the Abbey of Cluny. The pictures decorating the monastery visibly affecting the youth, the Bishop of Macon placed him under the tuition of one Desvoges, who directed the school of painting at Dijon. Here his progress was rapid, but at nineteen the too susceptible youth married a woman whose character and habits were such that his life was rendered unhappy thenceforward.
In 1780 Prud'hon went to Paris to prosecute his studies; and there, two years after, was awarded a prize, founded by his province, which enabled him to go to Rome. It is characteristic of the man that, in the competition for this prize, he was so touched by the despair of one of his comrades competing with him that he repainted completely his friend's picture—with such success that it was the friend to whom the prize was awarded, and who, but for a tardy awakening of conscience, would have gone to Rome in his place.
The judgment rectified, Prud'hon went to Rome, where he stayed seven years, studying Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and above all Correggio, whose influence is manifest in his work, and returned to Paris in 1789. Unknown, and timid by nature, he attracted little attention, and for some years gained his living by designing letter-heads, visiting cards, which were then of an ornate description, and the many trifles which constitute a present resource to the unsuccessful painter even to-day.
THE ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN. FROM A PAINTING BY PRUD'HON.
This picture was ordered by the Emperor Napoleon for the chapel of the Tuileries. It was exhibited in the Salon of 1819, and, after the Revolution of 1848, was removed from the Tuileries to the Louvre, where it has since remained.
It was not until 1796 that some of the charming drawings which he had made commenced to attract attention. A series of designs illustrating Daphnis and Chloe, for the publishing house of Didot ainé, were particularly noticeable; and through this work he made the acquaintance of M. Frochot, by whose influence he received a commission for a decoration for the palace of St. Cloud, which is now placed in the Louvre.
HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE. FROM A DRAWING BY PRUD'HON.
This charming drawing, which forms part of the collection in the Louvre, is a study for a projected painting, and is, by its grace of line and composition, peculiarly typical of the painter. Hector, about to depart for his combat with Ajax, and having bidden farewell to Andromache, his wife, desires to embrace his son. But the child, frightened at the emotion of which he is witness, takes refuge in his mother's arms.
Life now became somewhat easier, and in 1803—having long been separated from his wife—a talented young woman, Mlle. Mayer, became his pupil, and relations of a more tender character were established. The pictures of Mlle. Mayer are influenced by her master to a degree that makes them minor productions of his own; and her unselfish, though unconsecrated, devotion to him makes up the sum of the little happiness which he may have had.
In 1808 Prud'hon's picture of Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing Crime was ordered for the Palace of Justice, and was shown at the Salon of that year, where the presence of David's Sabines and its influence as shown in many of the productions of his pupils were not enough to rob Prud'hon of a legitimate success, and the cross of the Legion of Honor was accorded him. The Assumption of the Virgin was exhibited in 1819; but before that Prud'hon had been made a member of the Institute, and (it passed for a distinction) drawing-master to the Empress Marie Louise.
Many pictures, all characterized by a subtile charm, were produced during this happy period; but in 1821 Mlle. Mayer, preyed upon by her false position, committed suicide, and Prud'hon lingered in continual sorrow until February 16, 1823, when he died. The work of Prud'hon covers a wide range, of which not the least important are the drawings which he made with a lavish hand. As has been observed, he was a true child of his time, and the classic influence is strongly felt in his work; but translated through his temperament, it is no longer lifeless and cold. It is eloquent of the early ages of the world, when life was young and maturity and age bore the impress of a simple life, little perplexed by intricate problems of existence. Throughout his work, in the recreation of the myths of antiquity or in the rarer representation of Christian legend, his style is sober and dignified—as truly classic as that of David; but permeating it all is the indescribable essence of beauty and youth, the reflection, undoubtedly, of a man who, rarely fortunate, capable of grave mistakes, has nevertheless left much testimony to the love and esteem in which he was held.
François Gérard, one of the many faithful followers of David, was born May 4, 1770, at Rome, where his father had gone in the service of the ambassador of France. He went to France in his twelfth year, and at sixteen was enrolled in the school of David. As a docile pupil he entered the competition for the Roman prize in 1789; but Girodet having obtained the first place, a second prize was awarded, and the next year the death of his father prevented him from finishing his competition picture; so that he is one of the exceptions amongst David's pupils, inasmuch as he did not obtain the Prix de Rome. In 1790, however, he accompanied his mother, who was an Italian, to her native country. But his sojourn there was short, as in 1793 he solicited the influence of David to save him from the general conscription; which was done by naming him a member of the Revolutionary tribunal. By taking refuge in his studio and feigning illness, he avoided the exercise of his judicial functions; and the storm passing away, he exhibited in 1795 a picture of Belisarius which attracted attention.
PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN. FROM A PAINTING BY PRUD'HON, IN THE LOUVRE.
In 1806 Napoleon made him the official portrait painter attached to his court, and ordered the picture of the battle of Austerlitz, finished in 1810. This and indeed all of Gérard's pictures are marked by all the defects of David's methods, and lack the virile quality of his master. His portraits, however, have many qualities of grace and good taste, and his success in France was somewhat analogous to that of Lawrence in England. Under the Restoration his vogue continued; in 1819 he was given the title of baron; and, dying in Paris on January 11, 1837, he left as his legacy to the art of his time no less than twenty-eight historical pictures, many of great dimensions, eighty-seven full-length portraits, and over two hundred smaller portraits, representing the principal men and women of his time. The portraits of the Countess Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely and of the Princess Visconti are both excellent specimens of the work of this estimable painter.
PRUD'HON. FROM A PEN DRAWING BY HIMSELF.
Of the pictures which testify to the industry and talent of Louis-Léopold Boilly, who was born at La Bassée, near Lille, on July 5, 1761, the Louvre possesses but one specimen; namely, the Arrival of a Diligence before the coach-office in Paris. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that with the preoccupation of the public mind with the events of the time, and the prevailing taste for great historical pictures, Boilly's art, so sincere and so intimate in character, was underestimated. It is certainly not due to any lack of industry on the part of the painter. Even at the age of eleven years he undertook to paint, for a religious fraternity of his native town, two pictures representing the miracles of St. Roch. These still exist, and they are said to be meritorious. His facility in seizing the resemblance of his sitter was evidently native, for when only thirteen years of age, without instruction of any kind, he left his parents, and established himself as a portrait painter first at Douai and afterwards at Arras. In 1786 he went to Paris, where he lived until his death. Here he painted a great number of pictures of small size, representing familiar scenes of the streets and of the homes of Paris, and an incredible number of portraits.
THE PRINCESS VISCONTI. FROM A PAINTING BY FRANÇOIS-PASCAL-SIMON (BARON) GÉRARD.
The picture gives an interesting study of the costume of the First Empire, and is a work conceived in the style of the time when the recent publication of "Corinne" by Madame de Staël had influenced the popular taste. The original painting is now in the Louvre.
A valiant craftsman, happy in his work, following no school but that of nature, careless of official honor (which came to him only when, late in life, on the demand of the Academy, the government accorded him the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1833), his life was uneventful. But his little pictures pleased the people who saw themselves so truthfully depicted, and to-day they are more highly esteemed than are the works of many of his at-the-time esteemed contemporaries. He painted for seventy-two years, produced more than five thousand portraits, an incredible number of pictures and drawings, and died, his brush in hand, on January 5, 1845. The little picture of the Arrival of a Diligence presents, with exquisite truthfulness, a Paris unlike the brilliant city of our day, the Paris where Arthur Young in his travels in 1812 notes the absence of sidewalks; a city inhabited by slim ladies dressed à la Grecque, and by high-stocked gentlemen content to travel by post. It is a canvas of more value than the pretentious and tiresome historical compositions of the time, and suggests the reflection that many of the David pupils might have been better employed in putting their scientific accuracy of drawing to the service of rendering the life which they saw about them, instead of producing the arid stretches of academy models posing as Hector or Romulus.
Guillaume-Guillon Lethière, a painter in whose veins there was an admixture of negro blood, would hardly have echoed the sentiments of this last paragraph, as he lived and worked in the factitious companionship of the Greeks and Romans. So clearly, however, does the temperament of a painter inspire the character of his work that we may be glad that this was the case; for, of his school, Lethière alone infuses into his classicism something of the turbulent life which marked his own character.
THE COUNTESS REGNAULT DE SAINT-JEAN-D'ANGELY. FROM A PAINTING BY BARON GÉRARD, IN THE LOUVRE.
Born in Guadeloupe January 10, 1760, coming to Paris when very young, he took the second prize of Rome in 1784, with a picture of such merit that the regulation was infringed and he was given leave to go to Rome at the same time as the winner of the first prize. His first picture was exhibited in the form of a sketch in the Salon of 1801; and not until eleven years after was the great canvas of Brutus Condemning his Sons to Death shown at the Salon of 1812. The other picture by which he is best known, the Death of Virginia, is, like the preceding, in the Louvre; and though the sketch of this was exhibited in 1795, the picture only took definite form in 1828.
THE ARRIVAL OF A DILIGENCE. FROM A PAINTING BY LOUIS-LÉOPOLD BOILLY.
This picture, now in the Louvre, is the only example of this artist's work shown there, and is particularly interesting as showing the Paris of 1803, when the streets had no sidewalks. The scene is laid at the place of arrival and departure of the coaches which from Paris penetrated into all parts of France, and were the only means of transport or communication.
Meanwhile Lethière had travelled much in England and Spain, and had been for ten years director of the French School of Fine Arts in Rome. His life was adventurous, and it is told of him that he was often involved in quarrels, and fought a number of duels with military officers because, humble civilian that he was, he yet dared to wear the mustache! In 1822 he returned definitely to Paris, where he was made a member of the Institute and professor in the School of Fine Arts, and where he died April 21, 1832. The quality of his work is well characterized by Charles Blanc, who writes of it "as producing the effect of a tragedy sombre and pathetic."
The picture of the Burial of Atala, from Châteaubriand's well-known story, is interesting as showing the methods of the David school applied to subjects of less heroic mould than the master and his disciples were wont to treat. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy Trioson, born at Montargis January 3, 1767, was one of the most convinced adherents of his master David; and while competing for the Prize of Rome, which he won in 1789, was accustomed each morning before beginning his work to station himself in front of David's picture of the Horatii as before a shrine, invoking its happy influence. Such devotion received its official reward, and after five years spent in Rome his great (and tiresome) picture of the Deluge met with the greatest favor, and in 1810 was awarded the medal for the best historical picture produced in the preceding decade. The Burial of Atala, painted in 1808, is, however, a work of charm in composition and sentiment; and though in color it is dry and uninteresting, is not unworthy of the popularity which it has enjoyed from the vantage ground of the Louvre for more than four-score years. Girodet died in Paris, December 9, 1824, after having received all the official honors which France can award to a painter.
The charming face of Marie-Anne-Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who, with the arms of her daughter encircling her, smiles on us here, was undoubtedly not painted in this century, as the painter was born in Paris April 16, 1755, and it is as a young mother that she has represented herself. But as its author lived until March 30, 1842, she should undoubtedly figure among the painters of this century. From early girlhood until old age,
"Lebrun, de la beauté le peintre et le modèle."
as Laharpe sang, was, though largely self-taught, a formidable concurrent to painters of the sterner sex. Married when very young to Lebrun, a dealer in pictures and critic of art, a pure marriage of convention, she left France shortly before the Revolution, and went to Italy. Before her departure she was high in favor at the court, and painted no less than twenty portraits of Marie Antoinette.
BRUTUS CONDEMNING HIS SONS TO DEATH. FROM A PAINTING BY LETHIÈRE.
Brutus led in overthrowing the tyranny of Tarquin the Proud and establishing a republic in Rome. He was then elected one of the two consuls. His two sons were detected in a conspiracy to restore Tarquin, and he, as consul, himself condemned them to death.
THE BURIAL OF ATALA. FROM A PAINTING BY GIRODET, IN THE LOUVRE.
Atala, the heroine of a romance by Châteaubriand, was the daughter of a North American Indian chief, passionately in love with the chief of another tribe, with whom she fled into the desert. But having been religiously vowed to virginity by her mother, she remains faithful to the vow, and finally in despair poisons herself.
MADAME LEBRUN AND HER DAUGHTER. FROM A PAINTING BY MADAME LEBRUN HERSELF.
This picture, painted for a private patron, passed, at the period of the French Revolution, into the possession of the French nation, and is now in the Louvre. There is in the Louvre also another by Madame Lebrun, representing herself and her daughter, one which the artist bequeathed to the Louvre at her death, in 1842. Of the two, while both are charming, the one here printed represents the painter at her best.
Fortune favored her in Italy, whence she went to Vienna, Prague, Dresden, and Berlin. In each and every capital the same success, due to her talent, beauty, and amiability, followed her; and at last arriving in St. Petersburg, she remained there until 1801, when she returned to Paris. Some time after, she visited England, where she remained three years, and then returned by way of Holland to France in 1809. The Academy of France and the academies of all other European countries admitted her to membership.
Indefatigable as a worker during her long career, she produced an immense number of portraits; and while she painted comparatively few subject pictures, she arranged her models in so picturesque a fashion that, as in the example here given, her portraits have great charm of composition. With a virile grasp of form, tempered though it be with grace, Madame Lebrun offers an interesting example of woman's work in art; and, while she has nothing to concede to the painters of her time, is no less interesting as showing that by force of native talent the woman of the early part of the century had in her power the conquest of nearly all the desired rights of the New Woman. She has left extremely interesting memoirs of her life, written in her old age, and there are many anecdotes bearing testimony to her wit. One of these goes back to the time when Louis XVIII., then a youth, enlivened the sittings for his portrait by singing, quite out of tune. "How do you think I sing?" inquired he. "Like a prince," responded the amiable artist.
With Antoine Jean Gros we come to the last and the greatest of the pupils of David. Born in Paris March 16, 1771, he competed but once, in 1792, for the Prix de Rome, was unsuccessful, but undertook the voyage thither on his own slender resources the next year. Italy was in a troubled state—he who troubled all Europe in the early years of the century being there at the head of his army; and in 1796, at Genoa, Gros attracted the attention of Madame Bonaparte. It was she who proposed that Gros should paint Napoleon; and Gros consequently went to Milan, and after the battle of Arcole painted the hero carrying the tricolor across the bridge at the head of his grenadiers. The picture pleased Bonaparte, who had it engraved, and gave Gros a commission to collect for the Louvre the chief artistic treasures of Italy. These functions occupied him until 1801, during which period, however, he executed a number of successful portraits.
Returning to Paris after nine years, he painted the Hospital at Jaffa, representing Napoleon visiting the fever-stricken soldiers. The success of this picture, exhibited in 1804, was very great; and it remains Gros's best title to remembrance. In it is something of the reality poetized and seen through the eyes of an artist which characterizes the work of Eugene Delacroix.
The force of David, however, was too great for Gros; at fifty years of age we find him demanding counsel of the master, who sternly bids him leave his "futile subjects," and devote his time to great historical epochs of the past. When David was sent into exile in 1816, it was to Gros that he confided the direction of his school; and this task, and the production of immense canvases like the Battle of the Pyramids, filled his life. The picture here reproduced, the Visit of Charles the Fifth and Francis the First to the Tombs of the Kings in the Cathedral of St. Denis, was painted in 1812.
FRANCIS I., KING OF FRANCE, AND CHARLES V., EMPEROR OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, VISITING THE TOMBS OF THE FRENCH KINGS AT ST. DENIS. FROM A PAINTING BY BARON GROS, IN THE LOUVRE.
Between 1520 and 1545 all Europe was kept in distress and turmoil by a quarrel between Francis I. and Charles V., the chief subject of contention being the duchy of Milan, which Charles held and Francis claimed. Four separate wars were waged by Francis against Charles, all of them unsuccessful. But their majesties had intervals of outward friendship, and in one of these Francis invited Charles, then setting out from Spain for the Low Countries, to pass through France and visit him. The visit was duly paid, was one of great state and ceremony, and from it is derived the incident portrayed in the above picture. Francis is the figure in the centre; Charles, suited in black, standing at his right.
The revolt which was already making itself felt in French art was a thorn in the flesh of the sensitive Gros. In vain were all the artistic honors showered upon him. In 1824 he was made a baron; since 1816 he had been a member of the Institute; and the crosses of most of the orders of Europe, and the medals of all the exhibitions were his. Nevertheless, about him younger painters revolted. In his secret soul, doubtless, he felt sympathy with their methods. But the commands of the terrible old exile of Brussels were still in his ears.
Finally a portrait of King Charles X., the decorations in the Museum of Sovereigns, and a picture exhibited in the Salon of 1835 were in turn harshly criticized by the press, which looked with favor on the younger men; and Gros, full of years, and of honors which had brought fortune in their train, was found drowned in a little arm of the Seine near Meudon, June 26, 1835. In despair he had taken his own life. With him died David's greatest pupil and a part of David's influence. But that portion of the teachings of the master most consonant with French character is not without effect to-day. Less strong than in the generation following David, absolutely extinct if we are to believe the extremists among the men of to-day, it yet remains a leaven to the fermenting mass of modern production. Perhaps its healthy influence is the best monument to the man who "restored to France the purity of antique taste."
JAMES G. BLAINE.
From a photograph by Handy, Washington.