I. PAINTING
At no period since the Renaissance has there been such marked progress in certain walks of art as during the period of reconstruction in the political, social, economic, and æsthetic world immediately following the French Revolution of 1798. The armies of France, returning from the conquest of Europe, brought home to Paris the treasures of art ravished from the great capital cities. The vast public galleries and numerous private collections established under the first Empire contained accumulations of pictures, marbles, bronzes, tapestries, decorations, and bric-à-brac brought from Italy, from Germany, from the Low Countries, from Spain, and even from Russia and Egypt, of extent and value unparalleled in the history of the human race. These treasures were dispersed under the Restoration and returned to their former owners; but, in the meantime, their educational influence upon the people of France, and especially of Paris, had produced profound and permanent impressions which abide to this day. To this practical education afforded by the models and examples of all that is noble and exalted, gathered from the galleries and safe deposits of the civilized world, France is primarily indebted for that cultured skill and that refinement of good taste which have enabled her to take and hold her acknowledged position as the leading nation in the realm of art in the nineteenth century.
At the beginning of the century the art of France was resting inert in the bonds of classic tradition. Academic conventionality held almost undisputed sway; only a few painters of portraits, as, for example, Madame Vigée-Lebrun, Isabey, and decorative artists like Greuze, venturing beyond the limits of the hard and fast rules prescribed by scholastic pedants. The only subjects regarded as legitimate for artistic treatment were illustrations of mythology or of Greek or Roman literature. Sacred pictures illustrating the Biblical narratives and lives of the saints were permitted for church adornment and for religious purposes; but historic and story-telling pictures of the order now known as genre were classic in subject and academic in treatment. Even in portraiture, where a likeness was the main consideration, military heroes were represented in Greek armor and distinguished civilians were invested with the dignity of the Roman toga.
The high priest of ancient pagan worship in France during the first quarter of the century was Jacques Louis David (1748–1825). David was a master of such real power that he was court painter to Louis XVI., director of Fine Arts under the Republic, and again court painter to the Emperor Napoleon. His great work, “The Oath of the Horatii,” now in the Louvre, first exhibited in 1784, was universally admired and is still highly esteemed. This was followed by a triumphal procession of classic compositions, the most notable of which were “The Rape of the Sabines,” usually considered to be his masterpiece, “The Death of Socrates,” “Paris and Helen,” and “Brutus and His Sons,” all of which have been reproduced many times in prints. David was influenced, late in his career, by the romantic reaction, as shown by his “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” and his “Floating Martyr,” but he championed classic art all his life, his last words expressing an aspiration to paint the head of Leonidas.
The downfall of the classic dominion in France was brought about by the revolt of Géricault and Delacroix, about 1820. Jean Louis Géricault (1791–1824) was declared by Viardot to have revealed an era when liberty in art was revived together with political liberty, joining the general movement of the human spirit in the march of progress toward independence. His epoch-marking picture, “The Raft of the Medusa,” in the Salon of 1819, created an intense excitement not only in artistic circles, where it opened the battle between romance and classic tradition, but also among the people. Instead of Greek heroes, posing like antique statues, this thrilling picture portrayed a group of French sailors, perishing amid the horrors of shipwreck and starvation, the subject being a scene in the awful tragedy incident to the loss of the frigate Medusa in 1816, a calamity which the nation was then mourning with unspeakable grief. Women wept and strong men paled before this terrible illustration of human agonies endured unto death, but the academicians attacked the work and the artist with almost savage fury. Géricault, a genius, sensitive and nervous, quailing before the storm which beat upon him, fled to England, but, pining in exile, returned home, only to die, crushed and broken-hearted.
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was a man of firmer fibre than his friend and fellow-student, and his was the strong hand to take up the gage of battle when Géricault fell in the fight. For daring to depart from the classic traditions, these two young painters of the commonplace subjects of every-day human tragedy and romantic drama were savagely denounced by the academicians as traitors, as charlatans, as assassins seeking to murder art. The persecution killed Géricault, but Delacroix laughed at it. As Théophile Souvestre said of him: “The blindness of ignorance, the intrigues and clamors of envy, have not arrested him for an instant in his valiant and glorious course.” By the splendor of his genius and the virility of his work, as shown in his great pictures, “The Bride of Abydos,” “The Two Foscari,” “The Amende Honorable,” and the magnificent series of Oriental studies by which he is best known, he established the romantic school on a firm basis and attracted to it nearly all the talented and promising young painters of Paris.
Among these students and unknown painters were many whose names subsequently became famous, as Horace Vernet, Paul Delaroche, Baron Gros, Ary Scheffer, Alexandre Decamps,—artists whose noble productions gave to the romantic school its finest triumphs. In the mean time, classic art was ably and effectively supported by the distinguished labors of Doménique Ingres, pupil and successor of David, Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, Hippolyte Flandrin, and Jean Baptiste Regnault. The Academy, though defeated, still lives, and modern lovers of art find that, especially in decorative design, there is much to admire in classic subjects.
After the revolt of the romanticists the most important movement in the world of art also took place in France, and is known as the “Revolution of 1830.” To understand this movement it is necessary to consider the state of art in England, as the “men of 1830” in France derived their inspiration from John Constable, an English landscape painter. At the beginning of the century the two great artists of England were Sir David Wilkie and J. M. W. Turner. David Wilkie (1785–1841) was a portrait, historic, and genre painter, and no English artist up to his time had ever attained such wide popularity as he enjoyed. His pictures are all known the world over, as witness such titles as “The Rent Day,” “Village Politicians,” “The Blind Fiddler,” “King Alfred in the Neatherd’s Cottage,” “The Village Festival,” “Reading the Will,” “The Chelsea Pensioners,” “Blind Man’s Buff,” “The Village School,” and “John Knox preaching.”
THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE TOMB.