A short connecting room beyond (with gold Etruscan jewelery) gives access next to the Salle des Sept Cheminées, which contains many stiff but excellent works of the period of the Empire. The most noticeable of these are by David, whose formal classicism (a result of the revolutionary revolt from Christianity, with its reliance upon Greek, and still more Roman, morality and history) is excellently exemplified in his large picture of the *Sabine Women Intervening between their Husbands and their Fathers. This is considered his masterpiece. Its frigid style, not very distantly resembling that of a bas-relief, and its declamatory feeling do not blind us to the excellence of its general technique and its real advance on the art of the 18th century. David imitated the antique, but was always sculpturesque rather than pictorial in treatment. Among other fine examples of this classic period—the transitional stage between the 18th century and the distinctively modern spirit—attention may be called to Gérard’s Cupid and Psyché, and to his fine portrait of the Marquis Visconti. *Mme. Lebrun’s charmingly animated portrait of Mme. Molé-Raymond, the comedian, is full of real vigour. Two good portraits by David, of himself and Pius VII, deserve close inspection. Gros’s Bonaparte at Arcola, is also interesting. Mme. Lebrun’s earlier portrait of herself and her daughter is less beautiful than the one we have already examined. Several military portraits, such as Gros’s Fournier-Sarlovèze, reflect the predominant militarism of the epoch. David’s huge canvas of the Coronation of Napoleon I in Notre-Dame is typical of another side of the great artist’s development. Gradually, the frigidity of the early revolutionary period gave way to the growing romanticism of 1830. Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (sighting a sail after twelve days out), strikes the first keynote of the modern romantic movement. It created a great sensation in its own day, and gave rise to endless discussion and animadversion. It marks the advent of the emotional in modern art. Gros’s Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-stricken at Jaffa, also indicates in another way a marked modernising tendency. The school of blood and wounds, of the morbid and the ghastly, has here its forerunner. All the works in this room (which modernity forbids me to treat at adequate length) should be carefully studied in detail and comparison by those who wish to understand the various steps which led to the evolution of modern French painting. Guérin’s Return of Marcus Sextus, and Girodet’s Burial of Atala, in particular, mark special phases of transition from the coldly classical to the romantic tendency. This room, in one word, begins with the severe; it ends with the melodramatic.
The room beyond, known as the Salle Henri II, is so nearly modern in tone that the reader may be safely trusted to inspect it on his own knowledge. Giraud’s Slave-dealer and Chassériau’s Tepidarium are its most popular pictures. It lies outside the scope of the present handbook.
The Salle La Caze, however, still beyond, contains a collection kept separately apart by the express desire of the donor, and includes many works both of earlier schools and of the French 17th and 18th century, worthy of the greatest attention. It is especially rich in works of the rococo painters, better exemplified here than in the main collection. Beginning on the L, I will merely enumerate a few of the most important works. An excellent Hondekoeter, skied. A noble portrait by Tintoretto of a Venetian magnate. A most characteristic Fragonard, full of the morganatic sentiment of the 18th century. Portraits by Nattier, affording more pleasing examples of the early 18th century style than those we have hitherto examined. Above it, a mediocre Tintoretto of Susanna at the Bath, not good in colour. Centre of the hall, *Watteau’s Gilles, an excellent embodiment of the innocent fool of traditional French comedy. *Frans Hals’s sly figure of a Gipsy Woman is a fine piece of vulgar character-painting. A good Greuze, etc. Examine more particularly the works by Watteau, Fragonard, and other boudoir painters, whose pictures on this wall give a more pleasing and fuller idea of the temperament of their school than that which we obtained in other parts of the collection. R wall returning—several good Watteaus, Bouchers, Greuzes, etc. Excellent small Dutch pictures. Fine portrait by Rembrandt. Rembrandt’s Woman at the Bath is a characteristic example of his strikingly original conception of the nude. Ribera’s Club-footed Boy is a Spanish pendant to Frans Hals’s Gipsy. This room, containing as it does very mixed examples of all the schools, should only be visited after the spectator has obtained some idea of each in other parts of the collection. Its Dutch works, in particular, are admirable. I do not enumerate them, as enumeration is useless, but leave it to the reader to pick out for himself several fine examples.
Now traverse the Galerie d’Apollon, Salon Carré, and Long Gallery till you arrive at the
Hall of Painters of the 19th Century,
(Room VIII in Baedeker’s plan). This hall contains for the most part the works of artists of the period of Louis Philippe and the early Second Empire—almost our own contemporaries. I will therefore only briefly call attention here to the pictures of the romantic historical school, then so prevalent in France, of which Delaroche’s Death of Queen Elizabeth and Princes in the Tower and Delacroix’s Capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders are conspicuous examples. Devéria’s popular Birth of Henri IV belongs to the same category. These “picturesque” treatments of history answer in painting to the malign influence of Walter Scott and Victor Hugo in literature. Contrasted with them are such semi-classical works of the school of David, softened and modernised, as Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer—the great poet crowned by Fame, with the Iliad and Odyssey at the base of his pedestal, and surrounded by a concourse of ancient and modern singers. It is cold but dignified. Lethière’s Death of Virginia, and Couture’s Romans of the Decadence, represent to a certain extent a blending of these two main influences. I will not, however, particularise, as almost every picture in this room deserves some study from the point of view of the evolution of contemporary art. I will merely ask the reader not to overlook Flandrin’s famous nude figure, the typical landscapes by Rousseau and Millet, and David’s exquisite portrait of Mme. Récamier—sufficient in itself to immortalise both artist and sitter. The electric influence of a beautiful and pure-souled woman has here galvanised David for once into full perception and reproduction of truth and nature. Even the severe Empire furniture and background exactly accord with the character of the picture. Ary Scheffer’s religious works, in his peculiar twilight style, on a solid blue background, will strike every observer. Millet’s Gleaners and Troyon’s group of oxen strike each a new note in art at the period when they were painted. As a whole this Gallery represents all the various strands of feeling which have gone to the production of modern painting. It attains to the threshold of cosmopolitanism in its Arabs, its negroes, and its Algerian women: it is bloodthirsty and sensuous; it is calm and meditative; it dashes with Courbet; it refines with Millet; it oscillates between the world, the flesh, and the devil; it is pious and meretricious; it sums up in itself the endless contradictory and interlacing tendencies of the Nineteenth Century. As regards chronological sequence, one may say pretty fairly that it begins with classicism, passes through romanticism, and ends for the moment in religious reaction.
Come back often to the pictures in the Louvre, especially the Salle des Primitifs, the Salon Carré, and the first two bays of the Long Gallery.
Further Hints on the Paintings in the Louvre.
The reader must not suppose that these brief notes give anything like an adequate idea of the way in which pictures in such a gallery as the Louvre ought to be studied. My object in these Guides being mainly to open a door, that the tourist himself may enter and look about him carefully, I have given first this connected account of all the rooms in chronological order, for the use of those whose time is very limited, and who desire to go through the collection seriatim. But for the benefit of others who can afford to pay many successive visits, I will now take one or two particular pictures in detail, suggesting what seem to me the best and most fruitful ways in which to study them. Try for yourself afterwards to fill in a similar scheme, as far as you can, for most of the finest works in this Gallery.
I will begin with No. 251, in the Salle des Primitifs—Mantegna’s beautiful and glowing Madonna della Vittoria. And I take Mantegna first, because (among other reasons) he is a painter who can be fairly well studied by means of the pictures in this Gallery alone, without any large reference to his remaining works in Italy or elsewhere.