It is a broad, well-lighted hall, flanked by two small galleries of greater height, which form a semicircle, and filled with pictures of all the schools, some of which are excellent. A Murillo, representing St. Diego and his Monks; you recognize in it the monastic harshness, the master’s sentiment of reality, his originality of expression and earnest vigor. A Martyrdom of St. Andrew, by Caravaggio, black and horrible. Several pictures by the Caracci, Guercino and Guido. A Ceremony of the Order of the Holy Ghost in 1635, by Philip de Champagne. These most real, delicate and noble faces are portraits of the time; you see the contemporaries of Louis XIII. in life. Here are the correct drawing, temperate color, conscientious but not literal exactness of a Fleming become a Frenchman.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
A charming Marquise dc Largillere with a wasp waist in blue velvet, elegant and haughty. A Christ Crucified, by Rubens, the eyes glassy, flesh livid—a powerful sketch, wherein the cold whiteness of the faded tints exhales the frightful poetry of death.
I name only the most striking; but the liveliest sensation comes from the modern pictures. They transport the mind all at once to Paris, into the midst of our discussions, into the inventive and troubled world of the modern arts, the immense laboratory where so many fruitful and opposing forces weave the work of a renewing century: A celebrated picture by Glaize, the Death of St. John the Baptist; the half-naked butcher who holds the head is a superb brute, a careless instrument of death which has just done its work well. An elegant and affected painting by Schoppin, Jacob before Laban and his two Daughters. The daughters of Laban are pretty drawing-room misses who have just disguised themselves as Arabs. Muley Abd-el-Rhaman, by Eugene Delacroix. He is motionless on a bluish and melancholy horse. Files of soldiers are presenting arms, packed in masses in a stifling atmosphere; dull heads, stupid and real, hooded with the white bournous; ruined towers are piled behind them under a leaden sun. The crude colors, the heavy garments, bronzed limbs, massive parasols, that lifeless and animal expression are the revelation of a land where thought sleeps overwhelmed and buried under the weight of barbarism, of the religion and the climate. In a corner of the small gallery is the first brilliant stroke of Couture, The Thirst of Gold. All misery and every temptation come to solicit the miser: a mother and her starving child, an artist reduced to beggary, two half-nude courtesans. He gazes at them with sorrowful ardor, but the hooked fingers cannot let go the gold. His lips shrivel, his cheeks glow, his burning eyes are fastened to their wanton bosoms. It is the torture of the heart torn by the rebellion of the senses, the concentrated despair of repressed desire, the bitter tyranny of the ruling passion. Never did face better express the soul. The drawing is bold, the color superb, more daring than in the Romans of the Decadence, so lively that you forget to notice a few crude tones, hazarded in the transport of composition.
It is perhaps too much praise. All these moderns are poets who have determined to be painters. One has sought out dramas in history, another scenes of manners; one translates religions, another a philosophy. Such an one imitates Raphael, such another the early Italian masters; the landscapist employs trees and clouds to compose odes or elegies. No one is simply a painter; they are all archaeologists, psychologists, giving setting to some memory or theory. They please our learning, our philosophy. Like ourselves, they are full and overflowing with general ideas, Parisians uneasy and curious. They live too much by the brain, and too little by the senses; they have too much wit and too little artlessness. They do not love a form for its own sake, but for what it expresses; and if they chance to love it, it is voluntarily, with an acquired taste, from an antiquary’s superstition.