The American in Paris; vol. 2 of 2

by John Sanderson

I have passed the morning in the Louvre, and have nothing in my head but galleries and pictures; and you must expect nothing else through the whole of this letter. You may dread a long letter too, for you know, the less one is conversant with a subject the more one is likely to reason upon it. In the Louvre, the pictures occupy both walls of a room, thirty feet wide by a quarter of a mile long, and consist of about twelve hundred pieces of native and foreign artists. In the same building also is the Musée des Antiques containing 736 statues, with bronzes and precious vases; also the Musée des Desseins, with 25,000 engravings; the Musée de la Marine, with models of vessels; and the Musée Egyptien, with collections of Egyptian, Roman and Grecian antiquities. An exhibition too is held here, from the first of March till May every year, of the works of living artists, painters, sculptors, engravers, architects, and lithographers.

Paris, in patronising the fine arts, has taken the lead of all the cities of Europe. The government spends annually large sums, and extensive purchases are made by the royal family, and wealthy individuals. They do not hoard their pictures in private houses, as in England, but place them, as in ancient Greece, in the public collections. They improve, therefore, the public taste and embellish their city. It is one of the means by which they entice amongst them rich foreigners, who always pay back with usurious interest the money spent for their entertainment.

There is, besides, a public gallery in the palace of the Luxembourg, which contains collections of paintings and sculpture of living French artists since 1825. The other museums are those of Natural History at the Garden of Plants, and the Musée d’Artillerie, containing all kinds of military weapons, used by the French from the remotest periods of their history; also the “Conservatory of Arts and Trades,” where models of every French invention, from a doll-baby to an orrery and steam-engine, have been preserved—the greatest museum of gimcracks, they say, in the world. This gives two courses of gratuitous lectures under distinguished professors, and has a free school in which young men are taught the arts.

To these you may add the “Palais des Beaux Arts,” begun in 1820, and now near its completion, which is destined to be one of the splendid miracles of Paris. The “Gallery of Architecture,” which is already rich, is to be increased with copies of the choice sculpture, statuary, and architecture of all the world, so that students will have no longer to run after the originals into foreign countries.

There are two manufacturing establishments here with galleries of their produce, which have dignity enough to be mentioned even with the Louvre; the Sêvres Porcelain, and the weaving of the Gobelins. In the gallery of the porcelain, some of the specimens are inconceivable. There was scarcely less difference between mother Eve and the clay that made her than there is between the original materials, and one of these exquisite vases. Gold blushes to see itself outdone by the rude earth at the tables of the Rothschilds and other lords. Plate of the precious metals is mean in comparison. Porcelain has fragility in its favour. The best mine, which sleeps between the Broad and Sharp Mountains would scarce buy you a dinner-set. I priced you breakfast plates at 2,000 francs each, and a table to set them on at 30,000; and a vase with American scenery, as if Iris herself had painted it, 35,000. But why, after all, put this exquisite art upon matter so destructible, and upon objects destined to mean services? Why bake Vandykes upon your cream jugs, and Raffaelles and Angelos on your wash-basin, and the Lord knows what else? There are things which admit of ornament only to a certain extent.

At the Gobelins the most intricate groups of paintings are interwoven in the carpets and tapestry, of churches and palaces. The great Peter superintending the battle at Pultawa, the Duke d’Epernon carrying off the queen, and St. Stephen pouring out his soul towards Heaven are all under the shuttle or starting into life, from the woof and chain of a weaver’s web. And here is Marie de Medicis, and two other ladies, just out of the loom. The most effeminate tints, the nicest features, have a glow and delicacy equalled but by the best paintings upon canvass. Only think! the charms of the divinest female; her arched eye-brows, her lips, like the opening flower, gently parted, as if going to speak; her graceful smile, which steals away the senses, and all the heaven of her features, may be expressed in wool.

Here are carpets to be trodden on only by queens, and to be purchased only with queens’ revenues. One of the cheapest is 8,000 dollars. Two hundred years have been employed upon a single piece. All that you have read about the “weaving of the Dardan Dames,” of the webs of Penelope and other ladies, is nothing but mythology. Here is a Bonaparte in the plague of Egypt, so natural and so animate, of such questionable shapes and features, one is almost ready to exclaim with Hamlet, “Be thou a spirit”—(the temptation to a pun is not quite so bad as the offence.) You are tempted almost to speak to him, so full is he of expression and vitality. The workmen of the Gobelins require six years’ apprenticeship, and twenty years to become proficients. Under the ancient government they were locked up for life, like old Dædalus, within the walls, and no one is now permitted to buy or sell without an order of the king. A dyeing establishment is kept up under an able chemist, expressly to supply this factory with colours.

The doors of all the French galleries are opened on certain days of the week to every body, and a special favour of every day is extended to strangers. Minerva, like the others of her sex in Paris, cares not to be rumpled a little by the crowd, or stared at by the vulgar. The rich are refined always sufficiently for their own will and resources; but in the condition of the poor man—his poverty, the contempt which follows poverty, every thing tends to debasement. It is surely then wise in a government to devise such institutions, and encourage such modes and fashions as may ennoble the motives, refine the tastes, and employ innocently the idle hours of the poor; and since one member of a community cannot be badly affected without injury to the rest, it is the proper business of the rich to second such measures of policy. It is certain that no city in the world contains so many violent principles of corruption as Paris, and it is equally certain that the common people have an air of neatness and decency, not equalled by the same class in any other country. As for grace, it is here (and it is no where else) a mere bourgeois and plebeian quality. The distinction too is as remarkable in conversation as in manners. There is not a milliner or shop-girl at fifteen sous a-day, whose head is not a little museum of pictures; she will converse with you too of the Malibrans, and Taglionis, and Scribes, with nearly the same sense and the same phraseology as the Journal des Spectacles. But the Frenchman seeks his recreation in the dance, the theatre, in the pure air of his gardens, and in these galleries of statues and paintings, whilst the Englishman skulks into his gin-shop. No one can walk into these galleries on the public days, and not see, that there is in man a natural attraction for the arts which exalt and refine his nature. We follow our mother country in many things, and we follow her especially in her whims and her vices. She shuts out the public from her pictures, and then complains that there is no public taste. And she imports her Lelys and Godfrey Knellers from abroad. We have a gallery in Philadelphia, and though there is but one picture in it, the admission to this one picture is a shilling sterling. It is the “Last Supper;” and we have puffed in all the newspapers the religious impressions which it inspires (for a shilling.) I ask pardon of the “Academy of Fine Arts;” it also has pictures, which are visited by fashionable people once a-year, admission twenty-five cents.

The ancients set more value upon this silent kind of instruction than we moderns. A Spartan mother rocked her baby in a shield, and she dressed the household gods in armour, that her little Leonidas might have the image of war before his eyes, even in his prayers. She even commenced this course of education before the child’s birth. For she took care to have bucklers and helmets, and portraits of Castor and Pollux, and other heroes, hung around her chamber, and to have some martial air played over her couch of a morning, that she might not, by pusillanimous dreams, spoil her child. The “city councils” too of that country, employed certain grave old men, good for nothing else, to inspect the public morals, and especially to take care that the recreations of the youth should be public. In a word, they thought it better, by such impressions and such vigilance, to anticipate the dispositions of men to be bad, than to build “Houses of Refuge,” and “Penitentiaries” to correct them.

We prefer to connive at the opportunity of sin, till men have become rogues, and then hang them. But, to take the example of a people nearer our own manners, there can be no doubt that the excellent specimens of the Fine Arts, exhibited daily to the Athenians in the embellishment of their city, with the pomp of their games and festivals, gave them that exquisite taste, that grace of movement, language, dress and manner, in which they had an acknowledged superiority over all other people in the world.