Greuze

by Harold Armitage

In painting pictures of scenes in the life of humble people, Greuze had an aim other than the representation of some beauty of nature by which his own emotions had been profoundly stirred. He wished to play the schoolmaster, and the history of painting has demonstrated that, whatever may be the immediate effect of pictures that have been wrought in this mood, they have never been the pictures that have endured for all time the test of a comparison with the severest standards of excellence in art, and they have invariably sunk into their own place—amongst pictures not in the first class.

Again and again it has been shown that a man cannot be a preacher or a story-writer on canvas and at the same time an artist of the first rank. The reason for this is that it is not the function of pictorial art to tell tales, nor to preach sermons, though artists can do both, and yet be very popular.

"Sir," said Dr. Johnson, "a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs: it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." And one may apply the same remark to the pulpiteering of the painter with much less risk of evoking a protest.

During recent years this truth has begun to receive recognition. Théophile Gautier has written strenuously against story-telling pictures, and Whistler has argued that Art "is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only—having no desire to teach—seeking and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all times."

While these opinions of modern critics upon anecdotal art are in our minds, it will be appropriate to mention Greuze's own views as revealed in what he called "une note historique" upon his painting of La Belle-Mère. "For a long time I had wished," he says, "to paint that character, but in each sketch the expression of the stepmother always appeared to me to be feeble and unsatisfactory. One day, however, when I was crossing the Pont-Neuf, I saw two women, who spoke to one another with much vehemence. One of them began to shed tears, and she exclaimed, 'Such a stepmother too! Yes, she gave me bread, but in giving it to me she broke my teeth.' That was a coup de lumière for me; I returned to the house, and I made the sketch for my picture, which contains five figures: the step-mother, the daughter of the dead mother, the grandmother of the orphan, the daughter of the stepmother, and a child of three years. I have supposed in my picture that it is the dinner-hour, and that the poor little girl goes to take a seat at the table with the other children. Then the stepmother takes a piece of bread from the table, and, holding the orphan back by her apron, thrusts the bread roughly into her mouth. I have set myself the task of showing in that action the deliberate hate of the woman. The child seeks to evade her stepmother's violence, and seems as one who would say, 'Why would you ill-use me? I have done you no harm.' The child's expression is a mixture of shyness and of fear. Her grandmother is at the other end of the table. Harrowed by grief, she lifts her eyes to heaven, and, with hands trembling, seems to say, 'Ah! my daughter, where are you? What misfortunes! what bitterness!' The daughter of the stepmother, not at all sympathetic concerning the lot of her sister, laughs to witness the despair of the poor old woman, and, in ridicule, draws her mother's attention to her gestures. The infant of the family, whose heart has not yet been corrupted, gratefully stretches out her arms towards the sister who has bestowed so much kindness upon her. I have wished to paint a woman who maltreats a child that does not belong to her, and who, by a double crime, has also corrupted the heart of her own daughter."

Here, then, we see an anecdotal painting in the making. Although this rehearsal is very touching, as a revelation of the kind heart of the man, it yet seems to-day a particularly naïve exposition of the motive for a work of art. Nothing could show with greater clearness the wide gulf that, in the art world, lies between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of a century which closed with discussions of the theories of impressionists, vibrists, symbolists and pointillists, and with the theories of those who, denying that art is primarily moral, or even intellectual, have contended that it is simply a means by which we are made to respond to an artist's emotion.

If Whistler, to mention an artist representative of some newer movements than those of the eighteenth century, had been on the Pont-Neuf, from what a different source would have come any coup de lumière which might have flashed into his brain! Not during high noon, nor in the gossip of the people, would he have found the motive for his paintings. His coup de lumière would have come "when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; and the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her."

Whistler's eyes would have been directed towards the beauties of colour and of tone that he might find on the river or on its banks; and the Isle de France, as it is seen by the tired journalist as he makes his way to the Latin Quarter at dawn of day, with its tender grays, and its evasive charms of exquisite light and colour, would be of more account to him than all the conversations in the world, however vehement they might be. The idea of preaching or moralizing on canvas would never have entered his head for a moment.

When Greuze, in harmony with the raw notions of Diderot upon art, did preach, his homilies were singularly unimpressive. The pictures which he painted when in this sermonizing vein have all the elements that go to the making of what is now called melodrama. The scenes are not the result of a discriminating observation of real life; are not, to use Zola's phrase, "Nature seen through a temperament." They are founded upon conventions, upon the artificial and sentimental ideas of life that have by some curious freak of the human mind established themselves in books and plays and pictures.

The figures in Greuze's genre pictures pose before the spectators; they gesticulate and overdo their parts like barn-stormers. Pity becomes maudlin, morality degenerates into sanctimoniousness, and humility is degraded into utter abasement. The sentimentality in Un Paralytique Soigné par sa Famille, ou le Fruit de la Bonne Education, and in La Mère Paralytique is particularly nauseating, and in La Mère bien Aimée the exaggeration of what is in actual life a very tender sentiment makes of that picture a very significant example of Greuze's stilted manner. The six children—all of them about the same age—who have flung themselves upon their mother, seem so numerous, and are so involved in a confused heap of humanity that Madame Geoffrin spoke of the picture as a "fricassee of children," and incurred thereby the fulminations of the artist. In his genre pictures, too, as is usual in melodrama elsewhere, the humble cottage is the headquarters of all the virtues.