A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

I may say at once that the Chauchard Collection does not compare with the Thomy-Thierret in courage. M. Thomy-Thierret liked his pictures to be small and exquisite and happy. Within the limits imposed the Barbizon painters never did anything more delightful or indeed better. The whole collection—and it is beyond price—is homogeneous: it embodies the taste of one man. M. Moreau and his son had a robuster taste, a bolder eye. They wanted strength as well as sweetness, or strength alone. Their collection has not quite the homogeneity of the Thomy-Thierret, but one feels here also that personality has honestly been at work bringing together things of beauty and power that pleased it, and nothing else. But M. Chauchard....

It is perfectly evident in a moment that M. Chauchard had neither knowledge nor taste. He merely had acumen. At a certain moment in his successful life, one feels, M. Chauchard extended himself before the fire-place, stroked his spreading favoris (so like those of our own Whiteley), and announced "I must have some pictures". Other prosperous men saying the same thing have forthwith taken their courage in their hands and bought pictures; but M. Chauchard as I see him (both in his dazzling marble bust and in the portrait by Benjamin Constant), was not like that. "I must have some pictures," he announced, and then quickly reverted to type and cast about as to the best means of discovering whose pictures were most worth buying. That is how the Chauchard Collection came about, if I am not mistaken: it was the venture of an essentially commercial man—an investor-in-grain—who also desired a reputation of virtuosity but did not want to lose money over it.

As it happens M. Chauchard was well advised. But wonderful as they are, beautiful as they are, valuable as they are, there is not a picture here which suggests to the visitor that it ever brought a real gladness to the eyes of its owner in his own home.

But I can convince you only too easily that M. Chauchard had no taste. Do you remember when driving out to Longchamp, through the Bois, either to the Races or to Suresnes, just after you pass the Cascade, you come on the left to a windmill overlooking the course, and on the right to a white villa, all alone and unreal? A club house, one naturally thinks it, for the French Jockey Club, or something of that kind. You may have forgotten the villa, but you will recall it when I say that on the very trim vivid lawn in front of it, scattered about, supposed to be counterfeiting life, are various animals in stone—a stag, a doe, some dogs, all white and motionless, in the best mortuary manner, and all, to you and me, outrageous. Well, that was one of M. Chauchard's homes. M. Chauchard was the owner of that lawn and its occupants. The man who looking out of his window could feast his eye on these triumphs of the monumental mason was the same man who bought for his walls sheep by Jacque and Millet, and cattle and dogs by Troyon....

No matter. M. Chauchard acquired pictures and left them to the French Nation, and they are now on view for ever (always excepting the fatal Continental Mondays) for all to rejoice in. The first really compellingly beautiful work as one enters—the first picture to touch the emotions—is Rousseau's "La Charrette". It was painted in 1862, five years before the painter's death, which left the villagers of Barbizon the richer by a studio-chapel. It is a mere trifle and it is as wonderful as a summer day: a forest glade, in the midst of which a tiny wagon and white horse with blue trappings are seen beneath a burning sky, such a picture as ought to have a wall if not a room to itself: such a picture as I should like to see placed above an altar. It is the same subject—a forest wagon—that provided what in some ways is the best or most attractive Corot here. His "La Charrette" is a large easy landscape lit by the gracious light of which he alone had the secret. In the foreground is a deep sandy road with the charrette labouring through it. But before we came to this we had stood before one of the finest of the seven Daubignys, "La Seine à Bezons," a river scene of almost terrible calm, with Mont Valerien in the distance and geese and boats on the near shore, and implicit in it the sincerity, strength and humility of this great man.

At the end of the room hang two large and busy Troyons, one on each side of M. Chauchard himself, the donor of the feast, whose bust in the whitest Carrara, with the whiskers in full fig and the croix de grand officier du Legion d'honneur meticulously carved upon it, stands here, as stipulated in the will. These two Troyons, of which there are eighteen in all, are I think the largest. One represents cows sauntering lazily down to drink; the other the return from the market of a mixed herd of cattle and sheep, with a donkey in panniers, being driven by a man on a white horse. As was his wont, Troyon chose a road on the edge of a cliff with a very green border of turf and an exquisite glimpse of sea to the left. None of the new Troyons perhaps is as fine as those in Salle VIII. of the Louvre proper, but this is a superb thing. The "Boeufs se rendant au labour" and the "Le Retour à la ferme" in Salle VIII. should be visited after the Chauchards.

And so we leave the first and largest room, in the midst of which are two cases of Barye's bronzes—lions and tigers, bears and deer, snakes and birds—and enter the first room on the left as we came in; and here we begin to see for the first time pictures with special knots of people before them. For the Meissoniers begin here. And of Meissonier what am I to say? For Meissonier leaves me cold. He is marvellous; but he leaves me cold. He painted with a fidelity and spirit that border on the magical; but those qualities that I want in a picture, those callings of deep to deep, one seeks in vain. Hence I say nothing of Meissonier, except that he was a master, that there are twenty-six of his masterpieces here, and that the crowd opposite his "1814" extends to the opposite side. How can one spend time over "Le cheval de l'ordonnance" and the "Petit Poste de Grand'-Garde" when Daubigny's "Les Laveuses (effet de soleil couchant)" hangs so near—this great placid green picture, so profoundly true as to be almost an act of God? Corot's "Etang de Ville d'Avray" is here too, liquid and tender.

The little room that leads out of this is usually almost unenterable by reason of the press before Meissonier's "1814". This undoubtedly is one of the little great pictures of the world, and I can understand the enthusiasm of the French sightseer, whose blood is still stirrable by the enduring personality of the saturnine man on the white horse. Neighbouring pictures are a rich cattle piece by Diaz, immediately over "1814"; Rousseau's "La Mare," which is not a little like the Koninck in the Ionides Collection at South Kensington, and the same painter's "La Mare au pied du coteau" with its lovely middle distance. Here too is one of Corot's many pêcheurs, who little knew as they fished on so quietly in the still gentle light that they were being rendered immortal by the quaint little bourgeois with the long pipe, sketching on the bank. One of the finest of the Duprés is also here—"La Vanne," a deep green scene of water.

In the last room we come at last to that painter whose work, next perhaps to Meissonier's, is the magnet which draws such a steady stream of worshippers to this new shrine of art—to Jean François Millet. M. Chauchard had eight Millets, including the "Angelus," but though it is the "Angelus" which is considered of many to be the very core of this collection, I find more pleasure in "La Bergère gardant ses moutons" (reproduced [opposite page 308]), which I would call, I think, the best picture of all. It has been remarked that no picture containing sheep can ever be a bad picture; but when Millet paints them, and when they are grazing beneath such a sky, and when one of those grave sweet peasant women—a monument of patient acceptance and the humility that comes from the soil—is their shepherdess, why then it is almost too much; and the brave ardent Jacque, whose "Moutons au Pâturage" hangs close by, is half suspected of theatricalism. Millet is so great, so full of large elemental simplicity and truth that one regrets that his eight pictures have not a room to themselves. That they should be elbowed by the neat dancing-master chefs d'œuvre of Meissonier is something of a catastrophe.

Thinking over the collection, I have very strongly the feeling already expressed that it was wrongly assembled. The investor rather than the enthusiast is too apparent. M. Chauchard, it is true, refrained from making money by his acquisitions, since he gave them to the nation, and this is eternally to his credit. None the less I find it difficult to esteem him as perhaps one should even in the light of a generous testator. One so wants pictures to be loved. And of all pictures that are lovable and that long to pass into their owner's being—to engentle his eyes and enrich his experience and deepen his nature—none equal those that were painted by the little group of friends who in the middle of the last century made the white-walled village of Barbizon their head-quarters and the Forest of Fontainebleau their happy hunting-ground and a Wordsworthian passion for nature their creed.