Greuze was in high favour with the Royal Family, and it is believed that he painted a portrait of the Dauphin at the Tuileries after the unfortunate flight to Varennes, and another of his elder sister, Madame Royale, when in the Temple. The great upheaval of the Revolution struck Greuze also, and as a painter he became no longer the fashion. His wife squandered his fortune and he died in poverty, slaving to the very last.
The portraits at Chantilly of Marie Antoinette (in 1795) and of Madame de Pompadour, two of the loveliest women of their day, are by Drouais, a pupil of Van Loo and Boucher. The happy days of Trianon were not yet over when these were painted, and the Dauphine of France, presented here as Hebe, seems to be at the height of her glory and charms. How different to the careworn and haggard woman whose portrait hangs in the Musée Carnevalet over the very bed occupied by her in the Temple before her execution!
Madame Vigée Le Brun carried the style of Greuze, at one time her master, into the middle of the nineteenth century. She is represented in the Musée Condé (Cabinet Clouet) by several small portraits: Marie Caroline, Queen of Naples, painted in 1768, and her two daughters, Marie Thérèse Caroline, wife of Francis II Emperor of Austria, and Marie Louise Josephine, wife of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Whilst the first two of these appear to be copies of already existing pictures the portrait of Marie Louise Josephine, Queen of Etruria, shows special merits and seems to be taken directly from life, probably during one of Madame Le Brun’s tours in Italy. A strong vitality is expressed in her beautiful face, forming a marked contrast to the portrait of her mother, the Queen of Naples. Madame Le Brun, who, in spite of her sex became a member of the French Academy, was one of Marie Antoinette’s favourite painters. After the Revolution she established herself in St. Petersburg and did not return to Paris until 1801, when she was enthusiastically welcomed. She painted many of the most celebrated beauties of her day, but all these portraits seem to bear the mark of a period then fast disappearing.
Louis Joseph de Bourbon, about 1787, commissioned Fragonard to paint small portraits of the Princes and Princesses of the Royal House[138] of Bourbon and the House of Bourbon Condé. Among these are portraits of the Dauphin Louis, son of Louis XVI, and of the Duc d’Enghien by whose tragic death the Condé family became extinct. Fragonard was a pupil of both Boucher and Chardin. He went to Italy with the Prix de Rome and in 1765 was elected a member of the Academy. He excelled in every style of painting—genre, landscape, portraits, interiors, and historical subjects. When in 1765 he exhibited his Callirhoé and Corésus (a subject taken from the poet Roy) Diderot and Grimm thought for a moment that he might resuscitate the art of historical painting in France. This picture was bought by King Louis XV but was never paid for, and Fragonard returned to his portrait-painting, which he accomplished with very great brilliance and rapidity. There is a series of these portraits in the La Caze section of the Louvre, chiefly representing the actors and actresses of his day. His remarkable talent for decorative painting reveals itself in certain designs destined for Madame Du Barry’s pavilion, but stupidly condemned by her advisers. When the Revolution broke out, the artist fled to Grasse to escape imprisonment and the scaffold taking these paintings with him, and there completed the series by a fifth composition. The whole set are now in the collection of the late Mr. J. F. Pierpont Morgan.
Fragonard in some of his work rose to the level of Watteau and he certainly surpassed Boucher: but, like Greuze, he suffered the humiliation of seeing himself pass out of fashion, supplanted by the rising sun of Louis David.
It certainly is to be regretted that Fragonard was not also commissioned to paint the above-mentioned life-size portrait of Louis Joseph de Bourbon at the Musée Condé. This privilege was given to a Madame de Tott, an artist quite unknown in the history of Art. She was a contemporary of Bartolozzi, who engraved her picture, and thus handed down her name to posterity; for we read upon it, “Madame de Tott pinxit—Bartolozzi sculpsit.”
Louis Petit, another indifferent painter of the same period, executed a portrait of the last Prince de Conti in hunting costume. This Prince left France with his Orleans cousins during the Revolution and died in Spain. To the same artist is attributed the portrait of Louis Henri de Bourbon, Duc d’Enghien. He has an interesting face, recalling that of his ancestor the Great Condé, but there is a touch of melancholy in his expression, telling of adversity endured and apparently foreshadowing his tragic death. His father, the last Prince de Condé, who during the French Revolution lived chiefly in England, was painted by Danloux, a Frenchman who had also sought shelter on the hospitable shores of Great Britain. This Prince is here represented as leader of the Condé forces, that is, of the French émigrés; and we can detect the influence of Reynolds and Gainsborough in the light, harmonious colouring of the composition, which was bought by the Duc d’Aumale from a descendant of Robert Claridge, in whose house the last Condé lived during his exile.
By Charles Vernet, son of the celebrated marine painter Joseph Vernet, there is at Chantilly a large landscape with a hunting scene. It was painted during the Directoire, and Philippe Egalité and his son the Duc de Chartres (afterwards Louis Philippe) may be distinguished in the foreground. Charles Vernet delighted in depicting horses and scenes of sport, a style rendered even more famous by his son Horace Vernet. There are no less than four pictures by the latter in the Musée Condé: The Duc d’Orleans (Louis Philippe) asking for hospitality from the Monks of St. Bernard; a portrait of Louis Philippe, while still Duc d’Orléans; Le Parlementaire et le Medjeles, in which the various Algerian types are represented in glowing colours; and Louis Philippe entering the gates of Versailles attended by his sons. This latter is a reduced copy by Perrault of the large original at Versailles, painted to commemorate the occasion when Louis Philippe handed over the Palace of Versailles, with all its treasures of art and historical reminiscences, to the French Nation as a Public Museum.
We now come to an artist whose place is upon the threshold of the nineteenth century—namely, Pierre Prudhon. A sketch of a Venus at Chantilly is a study for the picture Venus and Adonis, which made his name at the Salon of 1812. Most fascinating are Le Sommeil de Psyché, Homage à Beauté, and a sketch[139] of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife: elegant and graceful creations recalling the style of Greuze; who in point of fact admired his work greatly, and said of him, “This man will go farther than I have done.” David and his set contemptuously designated him as the “Boucher of to-day”; but Napoleon commissioned him to paint portraits of both his Empresses, Josephine and Marie Louise, and conferred upon him the Cross of the Legion of Honour.
For his own portrait the Emperor chose his official painter, Gérard, who was at that time considered so great an exponent of this branch of art that he was styled “the painter of kings” and “the king of painters.” Napoleon is represented by him as First Consul; and the expressive eyes, the mouth displaying power to command and the broad forehead partially concealed by a mass of hair, recall the great Roman whom he emulated and with whom he loved to be compared. The painter, no doubt, purposely accentuated in this portrait such facial resemblances as he was able. This commission was executed at the Tuileries in 1803.