THE PORTRAITS OF EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT
EDMOND DE GONCOURT.
Drawn from life by Will Rothenstein, 1894.
Like Dickens, Théophile Gautier, Mérimée, and some other literary celebrities, the brothers Goncourt tried their hands at drawing and engraving before devoting themselves to letters. Sometimes in their hours of leisure they further made essays in water-colour and pastel. Thanks to Philippe Burty, Jules de Goncourt's "Etchings," collected in a volume, and some of Edmond's sepia and washed drawings, allow us to glean certain of the earliest of those records in which the faithful Dioscuri endeavoured to portray each other with a care both affectionate and touching. A very pretty "Portrait of Jules as a child, in the costume of a Garde Française," a drawing heightened with pastel, is described by Burty as one of Edmond's best works, but one, unfortunately, which it was not possible to reproduce. "In the swallow-tail coat of the French Guard," says Burty, "starting for a fancy dress ball, the brilliance of his eyes heightened by the powder, his hand on his sword-guard, at the age of ten, plump and spirited as one of Fragonard's Cupids." Here we have the younger of the Goncourts, delineated with all the subtlety of a delicate mannerism. Edmond was eighteen at the time. Scarcely free of the ferule of his pedagogues, he already looked at life with that air of keen astonishment which was never to leave him, and which was to kindle in his eye the sort of phosphorescent reflection that shone there to his last hour. It was the elder and more observant of the two who first attempted to represent his young brother, the one who was to be the greater artist of the pair, as if the compact had already been entered upon, as if both by tacit consent accepted the prolific life in common, then only at its dawn. A great delight to the two brothers was their meeting with Gavarni, at the offices of L'Eclair, a paper founded towards the end of 1851 by the Comte de Villedeuil.
EDMOND DE GONCOURT.
From an etching by Jules de Goncourt, 1860.
From that first meeting dated the strong friendship between the trio, a friendship that verged on worship on the side of the Goncourts, and on tenderness on that of Gavarni. Two years later, on April 15, 1853, in the series called Messieurs du Feuilleton which he began in Paris, the master draughtsman of the lorette and the prodigal gave a delicious sketch of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. In his Masques et Visages, M. Alidor Delzant, a bibliophile very learned in the iconography of the Goncourts, declares these to be the best and most faithful of all the portraits of the two brothers. We give a reproduction of this fine lithograph. Seated in a box at the theatre in profile to the right, an eye-glass in his eye, Jules, apparently intent on the play, leans forward from beside Edmond, who sits in a meditative attitude, his hands on his knees. M. Delzant compares these portraits to those of Alfred and Tony Johannot by Jean Gigoux. And do they not also recall another group of two literary brothers, older, it is true, the delicate faces of Paul and Alfred de Musset in the delicious frame of the Musée Carnavalet? Gavarni's drawing is a perfect master-piece of expression and subtlety.
EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT.
From a lithograph by Gavarni, 1853.