Meissonier’s best pupil was Jean Baptiste Detaille, the famous painter of battle-pieces. There is a picture of his at Chantilly entitled Les Grenadiers à cheval à Eylau,[140] where a gallant French officer with the cry “Haut les Têtes” leads his regiment on to victory. This is one of the chef d’œuvres of this artist, whose recent death is so much to be deplored.
Of quite a different nature are the allegorical paintings of P. J. Aimé Baudry. The excellence of this master lies principally in decoration, as may be seen by his Vision of St. Hubert in the Galerie des Cerfs; and he may be considered one of the most talented of the French artists who flourished during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Winterhalter, who, although a native of Baden, acquired his artistic education in Paris and Rome, was one of the Court Painters to both Louis Philippe and Napoleon III. His portrait of the Duc d’Aumale at the age of eighteen, as Commander of his regiment before his victorious campaign in Algiers, is at Chantilly; and there is here also a companion portrait of the Duchesse as a young bride. She is clad in white, with a single rose in her fair hair, and her face is full of refinement and delicacy.
Landscape-painting in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century had undeniably become conventional and tame; but quite suddenly this stagnant condition came to an end, and a revolution set in, caused by the exhibition of Constable’s paintings The Hay Wain and A View near London in the Paris Salon of 1827. These pictures, purchased and exhibited in Paris by a French connoisseur, created intense interest in the French World of Art; and it is alleged that they were the immediate cause whereat French artists suddenly emerged from the studios wherein they had lingered so long and proceeding to the woods of Fontainebleau, began working from Nature herself. They awoke to recognise their own defects, already denounced by Chateaubriand, who had declared that French landscape-painters ignored Nature.
Throughout the studios French artists warmly discussed the work of Constable, upon whom Charles X, at their special desire, conferred the Médaille d’Or; and it was suggested that the Charette (The Hay Wain, now in the National Gallery) should be acquired by the French Nation.
S. W. Reynolds, Constable’s friend and pupil, whose exquisite little picture of the Pont de Sèvres hangs in the Tribune at Chantilly, at this time also removed to Paris in order to satisfy the general demand for engravings of his master’s works.
But if the Barbizon School owed much to Constable, it is also certain that Constable and Wilson owed an equal debt to Claude Lorraine; and Turner perhaps even more so.
By Corot there is but one painting at Chantilly, but it is one of his finest works. Everything in this picture breathes a spirit of peace and joy; the sky, the earth and the graceful young women—one of whom is playing a viola and another singing, whilst their companions listen or are plucking fruit—give a cheerful note to this vision of content.
Plate LXXVII.