Believing he could do any form of subject equally well, he chose a grandiloquent historical subject, a style absolutely unsuited to his limitations. “Septime Sévère reprochant à son fils Caracalla d’avoir attenté à sa vie dans les défilés d’Écosse, et lui disant, Si tu désires ma mort, ordonne à Papinien de me la donner” was its title; and if you look at it where it hangs skied in the Louvre above the violently outstretched arms of “La Malédiction paternelle,” you see that it is a most faulty and insignificant production. The Academy could not refuse it, but they told him frankly what they thought of it.
“Monsieur,” said the Director, calling him in from the room where he awaited the congratulations of the associates, whose approval he believed he had now fully earned, “the Academy receives you as peintre de genre. It has taken into account your former productions, which are excellent, and has shut its eyes on this one, which is worthy neither of them nor you.”
The disappointment of Greuze, who had counted on the dignity and material advantages conferred by the title of Historical Painter, can be imagined, but amazement and fury dominated. For days he could neither sleep nor eat; and he covered reams of paper in writing to the papers to prove by technical laws and logical arguments that the picture was not only good, but a masterpiece. But for once the adoring public remained unresponsive. The last straw was his friend Diderot’s criticism, published in the usual way.
“The figure of Septime Sévère is ignoble in character. It has the dark, swarthy skin of a convict; its action is uncertain. It is badly drawn, it has the wrist broken; the distance from the neck to the breast-bone is exaggerated. Neither do you see the beginning of the right knee nor where it goes to beneath the covering of the bed. Caracalla is even more ignoble than his father, a wooden figure, without suppleness or movement. Those who force their talent do nothing with grace.”
PLATE VI.—LES DEUX SŒURS
“Les Deux Sœurs,” or “The Two Sisters,” has been until recently in the private collection of Baron Arthur de Rothschild, who bequeathed it to the Louvre, where it now hangs. If it lacks some of the charm of Greuze’s other pictures of girls, it possesses many of his most charming qualities—delicacy of colouring, graceful figures, appealing gesture. The arrangement of the scarves and draperies is essentially “Greuze.”
Having exhausted all other means of protest, Greuze took refuge in the sulkiness of a naughty child, and more or less independent now that he was at last to have the coveted logement in the Louvre, he declared he would never again send a picture to the Academy.
Nor did he, for when, years later, he was obliged to fall back on its aid, the Academy as he had known it was swallowed up in the whirlpool of the Revolution.