Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Volume 2

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Here is his celebrated picture of the Assumption of the Virgin, which we have seen circulated in print shops in America, but which appears of a widely different character in the painting. The Virgin is rising in a flood of amber light, surrounded by clouds and indistinct angel figures. She is looking upward with clasped hands, as in an ecstasy: the crescent moon is beneath her feet. The whole tone of the picture— the clouds, the drapery, her flowing hair—are pervaded with this amber tint, sublimated and spiritual. Do I, then, like it? No. Does it affect me? Not at all. Why so? Because this is a subject requiring earnestness; yet, after all, there is no earnestness of religious feeling expressed. It is a surface picture, exquisitely painted—the feeling goes no deeper than the canvas. But how do I know Murillo has no earnestness in the religious idea of this piece? How do I know, when reading Pope's Messiah, that he was not in earnest—that he was only most exquisitely reproducing what others had thought? Does he not assume, in the most graceful way, the language of inspiration and holy rapture? But, through it all, we feel the satisfied smirk of the artist, and the fine, sharp touch of his diamond file. What is done from a genuine, strong, inward emotion, whether in writing or painting, always mesmerizes the paper, or the canvas, and gives it a power which every body must feel, though few know why. The reason why the Bible has been omnipotent, in all ages, has been because there were the emotions of GOD in it; and of paintings nothing is more remarkable than that some preserve in them such a degree of genuine vital force that one can never look on them with indifference; while others, in which every condition of art seems to be met, inspire no strong emotion.

Yet this picture is immensely popular. Hundreds stand enchanted before it, and declare it imbodies their highest ideal of art and religion; and I suppose it does. But so it always is. The man who has exquisite gifts of expression passes for more, popularly, than the man with great and grand ideas who utters but imperfectly. There are some pictures here by Correggio—a sleeping Venus and Cupid—a marriage of the infant Jesus and St. Catharine. This Correggio is the poet of physical beauty. Light and shadow are his god. What he lives for is, to catch and reproduce fitting phases of these. The moral is nothing to him, and, in his own world, he does what he seeks. He is a great popular favorite, since few look for more in a picture than exquisite beauty understood between us that his sphere is to be earth, and not heaven; were he to attempt, profanely, to represent heavenly things, I must rebel. I should as soon want Tom Moore to write me a prayer book.

A large saloon is devoted to the masters of the French school. The works of no living artists are admitted. There are some large paintings by David. He is my utter aversion. I see in him nothing but the driest imitation of the classics. It would be too much praise to call it reproduction. David had neither heart nor soul. How could he be and artist?—he who coolly took his portfolio to the guillotine to take lessons on the dying agonies of its victims—how could he ever paint any thing to touch the heart?

In general, all French artists appear to me to have been very much injured by a wrong use of classic antiquity. Nothing could be more glorious and beautiful than the Grecian development; nothing more unlike it that the stale, wearisome, repetitious imitations of it in modern times. The Greek productions themselves have a living power to this day; but all imitations of them are cold and tiresome. These old Greeks made such beautiful things, because they did not imitate. That mysterious vitality which still imbues their remains, and which seems to enchant even the fragments of their marbles, is the mesmeric vitality of fresh, original conception. Art, built upon this, is just like what the shadow of a beautiful woman is to the woman. One gets tired in these galleries of the classic band, and the classic headdress, and the classic attitude, and the endless repetition of the classic urn, and vase, and lamp, as if nothing else were ever to be made in the world except these things.

Again: in regard to this whole French gallery, there is much of a certain quality which I find it very difficult to describe in any one word—a dramatic smartness, a searching for striking and peculiar effects, which render the pictures very likely to please on first sight, and to weary on longer acquaintance. It seems to me to be the work of a race whose senses and perceptions of the outward have been cultivated more than the deep inward emotions. Few of the pictures seem to have been the result of strong and profound feeling, of habits of earnest and concentrated thought. There is an abundance of beautiful little phases of sentiment, pointedly expressed; there is a great deal of what one should call the picturesque of the morale; but few of its foundation ideas. I must except from these remarks the very strong and earnest painting of the Méduse, by Géricault, which C. has described. That seems to me to be the work of a man who had not seen human life and suffering merely on the outside, but had felt, in the very depths of his soul, the surging and earthquake of those mysteries of passion and suffering which underlie our whole existence in this world. To me it was a picture too mighty and too painful—whose power I confessed, but which I did not like to contemplate.

On the whole, French painting is to me an exponent of the great difficulty and danger of French life; that passion for the outward and visible, which all their education, all the arrangements of their social life, every thing in their art and literature, tends continually to cultivate and increase. Hence they have become the leaders of the world in what I should call the minor artistics—all those little particulars which render life beautiful. Hence there are more pretty pictures, and popular lithographs, from France than from any other country in the world; but it produces very little of the deepest and highest style of art.

In this connection I may as well give you my Luxembourg experience, as it illustrates the same idea. I like Paul de la Roche, on the whole, although I think he has something of the fault of which I speak. He has very great dramatic power; but it is more of the kind shown by Walter Scott than of the kind shown by Shakspeare. He can reproduce historical characters with great vividness and effect, and with enough knowledge of humanity to make the verisimilitude admirably strong; but as to the deep knowledge with which Shakspeare searches the radical elements of the human soul, he has it not. His Death of Queen Elizabeth is a strong Walter Scott picture; so are his Execution of Strafford, and his Charles I., which I saw in England.

As to Horace Vernet, I do not think he is like either Scott or Shakspeare. In him this French capability for rendering the outward is wrought to the highest point; and it is outwardness as pure from any touch of inspiration or sentiment as I ever remember to have seen. He is graphic to the utmost extreme. His horses and his men stand from the canvas to the astonishment of all beholders. All is vivacity, bustle, dazzle, and show. I think him as perfect, of his kind, as possible; though it is a kind of art with which I do not sympathize.

The picture of the Décadence de Rome indicates to my mind a painter who has studied and understood the classical forms; vitalizing them, by the reproductive force of his own mind, so as to give them the living power of new creations. In this picture is a most grand and melancholy moral lesson. The classical forms are evidently not introduced because they are classic, but in subservience to the expression of the moral. In the orgies of the sensualists here represented he gives all the grace and beauty of sensuality without its sensualizing effect. Nothing could be more exquisite than the introduction of the busts of the departed heroes of the old republic, looking down from their pedestals on the scene of debauchery below. It is a noble picture, which I wish was hung up in the Capitol of our nation to teach our haughty people that as pride, and fulness of bread, and laxness of principle brought down the old republics, so also ours may fall. Although the outward in this painting, and the classical, is wrought to as fine a point as in any French picture, it is so subordinate to the severity of the thought, that while it pleases it does not distract.

But to return to the Louvre. The halls devoted to paintings, of which I have spoken, give you very little idea of the treasures of the institution. Gallery after gallery is filled with Greek, Roman, Assyrian, and Egyptian sculptures, coins, vases, and antique remains of every description. There is, also, an apartment in which I took a deep interest, containing the original sketches of ancient masters. Here one may see the pen and ink drawings of Claude, divided into squares to prepare them for the copyist. One compares here with interest the manners of the different artists in jotting down their ideas as they rose; some by chalk, some by crayon, some by pencil, some by water colors, and some by a heterogeneous mixture of all. Mozart's scrap bag of musical jottings could not have been more amusing.