To return to the English galleries. It would be impossible to retail to you the unfavorable remarks that were made without becoming disagreeably personal. This adverse criticism of a few pictures gave perhaps more value to the verdict that, speaking generally, the English school was distinguished by its intellectual, refined, and, above all, thoroughly national character.
Let us hope that as years roll on we may gain more power in drawing and more manliness of execution, without losing any of those national qualities which have carried us so creditably through the ordeal of an International Exhibition.
We will now leave the British section, and proceed to the French galleries. French art seems to me to be in a transition state. Public taste has been unsettled by the enormous success of Fortuny, Regnault, Corot, Daubigny, and other still more eccentric painters. Eccentricity is too often mistaken for genius, and coarseness for power. The last Salon (or annual exhibition) was the worst I ever saw. Of course, the French section of the International was rich both in quantity and quality, but I did not notice a single really fine picture that had been painted within the last three years. To what are we to attribute this unsatisfactory state of things? Although it has often been said that republicanism is fatal to art, it is difficult to believe that the present French Government can have any influence either for good or evil on artists’ studios. Indeed, French sculpture, which is certainly improving, is there to negative any such theory.
The reason of the decline of the older men is obvious enough. They have ceased to paint for fame; they paint for money. Country-houses, carriages, horses, and last, but perhaps not least, madame’s toilette, must be paid for, and the consequence is the production of what in a humbler sphere of art would be called pot-boilers. These inferior works are eagerly purchased at very high prices, and the artist, finding he can coin as much money as he likes, takes less and less pains, till finally decadence sets in, and the men who from their age ought to be in the zenith of their artistic power, find themselves quite incapable of rivalling the productions of their youth.
The cause for the manifest dearth of rising talent amongst the younger men must be looked for elsewhere. That this dearth really exists there can be no doubt. The French themselves allow it. Medals which used to be given at the close of the Salon for painting are now given for sculpture. There must be some reason for this marked decline. My old friends shrug their shoulders and say: “Oh, the kind of teaching which we had in our youth is now voted rococo. Sensational art” (by which they mean art that will produce a sensation) “is now the fashion.” The press has great power in France, and French critics, with few exceptions, like what is strange and eccentric. There are symptoms, however, that this quackery in art has had its day. The last two Salons have been too queer even for the new school of critics, and we may therefore hope that the sensational fit is over, and that the school may return again to the sound principles of design and drawing for which it has hitherto always been distinguished. I wish it understood that the deterioration I have been mentioning was not very noticeable on the walls of the International Exhibition. We had there the cream of all that had been painted in France for the last ten years; and although the pictures bearing the greatest names were rather disappointing, there was evidence of abundance of talent in all departments of oil-painting.
The last years of the Empire and the first years of the Republic seem to have been particularly prolific in good work. The portraits of that period, the battle episodes, the nude figures, the still-life pictures, are all characterized by a solidity and thoroughness which we rarely find now. The most unsatisfactory feature in the work of this period is, to my mind, the landscape. I confess to a want of appreciation of either Corot or Daubigny; and as almost every landscape-painter is an imitator of either one or the other, as a matter of course I cannot like their pictures.
The landscape school of which I am speaking appears to me never to get beyond a sketch, and le culte du laid (the worship of ugly subjects) is carried too far.
The greatest modern landscape-painters France ever had were Marillat and Theodore Rousseau, and I think they are much better models to follow than Corot or Daubigny.
As I am criticising, I may observe that much as I admire French pictures of a few years back, I must say that I think the key in which these works are painted too low; and there is another more serious fault which I have often noticed; namely, the want of naïveté. The colors are simple enough, but the execution is obtrusive. In the portraits especially, one thinks more of the artist than of the sitter, whereas in certain portraits of the Belgian and German galleries at the International, the artist and his execution were completely forgotten, so life-like and natural were the heads.
In speaking of French painting it is as difficult to generalize as it would be of English. One man paints his whole picture in a low key, another paints white figures on a black background, one plasters his color on with a trowel, another models it rather thin. Still I think I may safely say that the majority of French pictures are painted with thick, opaque color and in a very low key.