PLATE VIII.—LA LAITIÈRE
“La Laitière,” or “The Milkmaid,” may perhaps be given as quite the most representative of Greuze’s works. The affected pose and simpering smile, the unsuitability and over-arrangement of the dress, are as characteristic of the painter as the perfect grace of the ensemble, the delicious coquetry of the attitude, the dimpled roundness of the form, and, above all, the sparkle in the clear eyes and the exquisite bloom of the flesh. The picture is in the Louvre.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ART OF GREUZE
When you think of the important place held by Greuze before the Revolution in the art of the eighteenth century, above all, when you reflect on how, being long dead, he still speaks in accents of such beauty, his pictures, valued at vast sums, finding honoured places in the art treasure-houses of the world, it comes almost as a shock to consider how far from being a really great artist he was.
Absence of sincerity is his chief fault. We read he used to talk much and very eloquently about studying Nature, and had at one time a habit of wandering about the streets in search of subjects, that he used even to make sketches and studies on the spot, but once home and at work on the composition of the picture, he evidently gave rein to the libertine imagination we know. In short, if he really Saw, he Interpreted his own way, and that way resulted in his eliminating all the Strength and most of the Truth. In the theatrical moral pictures, for example, it never seems to have occurred to him that each scene that would tell a story is composed of a whole series of emotions and gestures, and that to try to fix on one canvas a situation which of its nature must be mobile and composed of many changes, is to attempt the false as well as the impossible. Further, even taking him as Diderot’s disciple, “a painter who studied with a literary man,” he is grievously at fault, for the idea of life he conveys is that of a melodrama in which vice is invariably punished and virtue rewarded—and life is not thus.
He took liberties with Nature, too, when he supposedly copied his homely, familiar scenes direct from life. His peasant women take on attitudes and smirk as they feed the carefully placed children; no sweeping or labour of any sort seems to soil the hands of the busiest housewife; clinging children never succeed in disarranging the garments or hair of the mothers and nurses. By no stretch of the imagination could you see his milkmaids delivering milk; his servants look like ladies “making believe.” The attitudes of all his dramatis personæ are always affected, the naïveté of his girls and children mannered, their pathos conventional. Tears never redden their eyes; no emotion disarranges the kerchief carefully arranged to show more than is necessary of the throat and breast. And the head of a child of twelve is often placed on the throat and bosom of a girl of seventeen.
Except when he touches flesh his colour is rarely good, the scheme too grey, with undecided reds, dull violets, dirty blues, and muddy foundations. The draperies are often badly painted, a fault which he explained by saying he purposely neglected them to give more value to the painting of the flesh.
Then there is his monotony. No painter ever copied himself with more constancy and indefatigability. He has but three or four types, and these he copies and recopies till you never want to see them again. The father is always the same venerable man, much too old to be the father of such young children; the mother does not vary; it is always the same child a size or two smaller or larger, as the case may be. Although he nominally gives to his girls and women a profession by labelling them washerwomen, knitters, philosophers, chesnut-sellers, kitchen wenches, and so forth, they all have the air of being members of one family, and striking likenesses at that. And one and all have the appearance of posing in light opera rather than of playing a part in life. The peasant mothers of large families have that charming coquettishness which is the hall-mark of every female he painted. The picturesque interiors are equally wanting in variety.