By far his most famous picture is the gigantic Funeral at Ornans (No. 143), which, as a study of the life and types in a small French provincial town, has aptly been compared with Flaubert’s great novel Madame Bovary. Each individual head in this vast composition is a marvellous study of facial expression. In his landscapes, again, he was by no means photographic, and he never failed to consider the decorative effectiveness of his pictures. His influence upon Whistler’s early work is to be judged from The Wave (No. 147a). If his landscapes retain to a certain extent the atmosphere of the studio, such pieces as La Remise des Chevreuils (No. 145a) and Le Ruisseau du Puits noir (No. 146a) clearly show that he possessed a sound understanding of the way in which colours react upon, and modify, each other. Courbet’s revolutionary tendencies made him take part in the political movement of the Commune, and forced him to leave his native country. He died in Switzerland in 1877.
MEISSONIER
It was realism of a very different kind that made public opinion place Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891) on a pinnacle, from which he has only in recent years been transferred to the more modest position due to him, for the exquisite minute care he bestowed upon the working out of insignificant details. Meissonier was a draughtsman and an illustrator rather than a painter. As a colourist he does not count. He had no appreciation of values, textures, substances, and surfaces. Nothing could be more to the point than Manet’s mordant remark that in Meissonier’s pictures “everything is of iron except the cuirasses.” Still, the mind that finds delight in small things will dwell with pleasure upon the microscopic details of his little costume pictures The Flute Player (No. 2887), The Poet (No. 2889), and several similar “gems” at the Louvre. Strangely enough the Portrait of Mme. Gerriot (No. 2965), which he painted at the age of nineteen, has more breadth and real character than any of his later works. The chief task of Meissonier’s life was the glorification of Napoleon i.’s campaigns. Of this famous series the Louvre includes no example. On the other hand, the collection owns three important historical pictures from his brush in Napoleon III. at Solferino (No. 2957), which long hung in the Luxembourg Gallery, Napoleon III. surrounded by his Staff (No. 2958), and The Siege of Paris (No. 2969), in the painting of which he had at least the advantage of personal experience, as he had followed the Emperor’s army on the Italian campaign, and was in Paris during the siege. Altogether the Louvre owns no fewer than twenty-nine paintings by Meissonier.
RICARD
If Meissonier is beginning to find his proper level after having been grossly overrated, Louis Gustave Ricard (1824–1873), one of the most remarkable portrait painters of his century, has only just in recent years been rescued from almost complete oblivion. A pupil of L. Cogniet, Ricard spent several years in copying the works and analysing the technical methods of the old masters, and in travelling in Italy, Belgium, Holland, and England. It was not before his return to Paris in 1850 that he began to exhibit. Ricard was exclusively a portrait painter. Technically his early studies enabled him to arrive at a method of singular morbidezza and warm luminosity. There is a certain truth in a modern critic’s description of Ricard’s pigments as being composed of “crushed jewels, flower juice, and gold and silver powder.” The great merit of Ricard’s portraits is, however, his extraordinary insight into his sitters’ psychology. To him a portrait meant more than a correct record of the model’s superficial aspect: he endeavoured to paint the very soul in so far as it can be read from eyes and lips. In this respect he is the descendant of Giorgione and the forerunner of Watts and Carrière. The portraits of The Painter Heilbuth (No. 778a), of Mme. de Calonne (No. 778e), of His Own Portrait (No. 778), and the badly cracked Portrait of Paul de Musset (No. 778b), may be quoted as admirable instances of his art.
MANET
We must close this necessarily fragmentary survey of French art at the Louvre with the mention of Edouard Manet (1832–1883), whose Olympia (No. 613a, [Plate LIII.]) is the first, and so far the only painting of the Impressionist school that has gained access to this gallery. It was formerly exhibited at the Luxembourg. Hung as it is now in Gallery VIII. amid the works of David, Gros, Ingres, Delacroix, Delaroche, and other early nineteenth-century painters, this Olympia fully explains the sensation, but certainly not the indignation, caused by its first appearance at the Salon of 1865. It sings out with such brilliant purity of colour and is so emphatic in the patterning of its design, so daring in the placing side by side of almost unmodulated but infallibly accurate colour masses, that everything around appears more or less dingy and artificial. Manet’s Olympia marks the dawn of a new era, not because it is based on a revolutionary rejection of tradition, but because it is true to the spirit of the best tradition, which is not carried on by literal and mechanical imitation, but by evolution and adaptation to modern life and thought.
PLATE LIII.—ÉDOUARD MANET
(1832–1883)
No. 613a.—OLYMPIA
A nude woman, with blue-edged yellow satin slippers on her feet, a narrow black riband round her neck, and a gold bracelet on her right arm, is reclining on a bed, her right arm resting on the cushion. Beneath her is spread a yellowish, flowered Indian shawl. A black cat with raised tail stands at her feet on the bed. Behind the bed is seen a negress, who brings a large bouquet of flowers to her mistress.