Vastly superior as regards pictorial quality and the whole conception, is the Abduction of Psyche by Zephyrus (No. 756). In the Crucifixion (No. 744), his last picture, Prud’hon rises to telling dramatic effectiveness of colour, and heralds the advent of Delacroix. But the most masterly of his seventeen paintings at the Louvre is the magnificent Portrait of a Young Man (No. 753), which the Louvre was fortunate enough to secure for £35 in 1895. It is a strangely living evocation of a personality, searching, intimate, and mysterious—a portrait not so much of the superficial features, but of the inner life of the sitter. The large Portrait of the Empress Joséphine (No. 751) suffers from comparison with this masterpiece. The pose is affected, the background dingy, and the red of the shawl introduces a harsh and disconnected note of colour.
THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH SCHOOL
GÉRICAULT
THE revolutionary movement of the Romanticists, which was to find a strong leader in Eugène Delacroix, may be said to have been initiated by Géricault’s epoch-making picture The Raft of the Medusa (No. 338, [Plate XLVI.]). Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), a pupil of Carle Vernet and Guérin, was an unusually gifted draughtsman, who from the outset strove to go beyond the dead perfection of the David school, and to infuse into his work the spark of life. The Raft of the Medusa, which caused an enormous stir at the Salon of 1819, was inspired by a tragic incident from actual life; and Géricault was the first who dared to represent in all its horrible reality this scene of human suffering—the survivors of a shipwreck driven by hunger to madness and mutual destruction. He set aside all arbitrarily ignored canons of formal beauty and the “grand style,” and applied himself to depicting fierce passions and emotions.
Géricault was a passionate lover of horses; but his knowledge of equine anatomy did not prevent him, in his portrait of an Officer of the Guard (No. 339), from exaggerating the action of the charging horse to a point dangerously near the border-line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Most of his other pictures at the Louvre are studies of soldiers, and horses on the race-course or in the stable. He died in 1824 from the effects of a fall from a horse.
DELACROIX
The topical interest of the Raft of the Medusa had caused the public to receive this picture with favour, in spite of its daring departure from the generally accepted canons of the “grand style.” The case was different when Delacroix showed at the Salon of 1822 the Dante and Virgil (No. 207, [Plate XLVII.]), which was inspired by Géricault’s great picture, but applied that artist’s principles to a subject taken from literature,—from Dante’s “Inferno,”—and was therefore considered as a direct challenge to the academic host. To-day it is difficult to understand the indignation aroused by the young artist, who became forthwith the acknowledged head of the so-called Romanticist school, although he refrained from taking part in any propaganda. In this, his first important exhibited picture, he proved himself a true painter in the sense in which Rubens was a painter—that is to say, he no longer gave primary importance to drawing, with colour added afterwards in the manner of a tinted cartoon. In the Dante and Virgil colour and the actual sweep of the brush assumed at once a vital and constructive function, no longer separable from drawing and design.
PLATE XLVI.—JEAN LOUIS ANDRÉ THÉODORE GÉRICAULT
(1791–1824)
No. 338.—THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA
(Le Radeau de la Méduse)