The Louvre: Fifty Plates in Colour

by Paul G. Konody; Maurice W. Brockwell

DAVID TENIERS

There is at the Louvre no picture by the elder David Teniers (1582–1649), who therefore only interests us here as the father and first master of the much greater artist David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690), who completed his artistic education under Rubens, without, however, abdicating his own personality. Indeed, those of his pictures which reflect the manner of Rubens too closely are of little account in the achievement of the younger Teniers, who only begins to be himself when he devotes his prolific brush to the social life of his contemporaries, and especially of the lower classes. His pictures constitute the most realistic and convincing record of the tastes, manners, and amusements of his time. His types are full of character, but without the exaggerations so often found in Brueghel and Brouwer. What he retained of Rubens, even in his Village Fêtes, Tavern Scenes, Dances, and Carousals is the application of the great master’s principles of light and harmonious colour. But apart from this, he rejected the “grand style” and the conscious search for beauty. The ugliness of his types and gestures led Louis xiv. to exclaim in front of his pictures, “Ôtez-moi ces magots-là!”

Few painters are as exhaustively represented at the Louvre as the younger Teniers. The Catalogue includes no fewer than thirty-nine entries under his name, two of which, in the La Caze collection (Nos. 2189 and 2190), are copies after pictures by Lotto and Titian respectively in the collection of the Archduke Leopold William, Governor of the Netherlands, to whom Teniers was appointed Court painter. It would serve no purpose here to enumerate the long list of Kermesse, Village Fête, and Alehouse Scenes in the French national collection. Among his most deservedly famous masterpieces is The Return of the Prodigal Son (No. 2156), which belongs to a series of which another scene is to be seen at the Dulwich Gallery. The subject is really only a thinly veiled excuse for the painting of a genre piece of the contemporary life of the better classes of his country. The scene of the feast is laid outside a country inn that figures in many of Teniers’s pictures. Fully signed, and dated 1644, the picture belongs to the beginning of Teniers’s very best period. In The Temptation of St. Anthony (No. 2158) he rivals Bosch in the invention of grotesquely fantastic monsters. Among other important works by the master in the Louvre must be mentioned The Denial of St. Peter (No. 2155), a painting of exquisite silvery quality, signed and dated

DAVID TENIERS, f. AN. 1646;

The Works of Mercy (No. 2157); the Village Fête (No. 2159); and the Peasants dancing by an Inn Door (No. 2161), which was stolen from the collection in 1815 and returned in the following year with a letter explaining that it had been removed by a Frenchman who feared that it might fall into the hands of the Allied Forces.

By Teniers’s pupil, François Duchatel (1616?–1694?) is the excellent Portrait of a Gentleman (No. 1960). Duchatel is a very rare master, whose style in portraiture so closely resembles that of Gonzales Coques that his pictures have been at times ascribed to that painter. Jacob van Artois (1613–1684?), the painter of the Landscape (No. 1901) in the La Caze room, was one of the leading Flemish landscape painters of his time, and frequently collaborated with Teniers, who added the figures to some of his landscapes. He was the master of Cornelis Huysmans (1648–1727), who frequently assisted the battle painter, Van der Meulen, and is here represented by eight pictures (Nos. 2002–2009). Among the landscape painters of that period must also be mentioned Jan Siberechts (1627–1703), who spent the closing years of his life in England, but does not seem to have had much influence on the evolution of the English landscape school. By him is the Rustic Scene (No. 2140a).

PHILIPPE DE CHAMPAIGNE

Both Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674) and Adam Frans van der Meulen (1634–1690), though born at Brussels, resided in France the best part of their life, and are therefore generally classed with the painters of the French school, which accounts for their being represented at the Louvre in a manner which is quite out of proportion to their artistic significance. Still, if Philippe de Champaigne appears second-rate when compared with Rubens and Van Dyck, he is unquestionably the leading portrait painter of the contemporary French school in which he received his training. His powers were insufficient for the higher flights of imagination, and when his ambition led him to such compositions as Christ in the House of Simon (No. 1927) or Christ celebrating Easter with His Disciples (No. 1928), he was as dull and bombastic as most of his French contemporaries, whom he far excelled as a colourist. His portraits, on the other hand, are painted in a broad, honest, straightforward manner which has nothing in common with the monotonous pompousness of his age, as may be seen from the admirable group of two nuns in prayer, Mother Catherine Agnes Arnaud and Sister Catherine de Sainte-Suzanne (No. 1934). The younger of the two nuns represents the artist’s daughter, who was healed from paralysis by a miracle recorded by a Latin inscription on the wall. The twenty pictures from Philippe de Champaigne’s brush, which are actually on view, also include the fine group of the two architects François Mansard and Claude Perrault (No. 1944), bought in 1835 for the low price of £80; The Provost and Aldermen of Paris (No. 1945); and the signed and dated portrait of Robert Arnaud d’Andilly (No. 1939).

VAN DER MEULEN

Van der Meulen, a native of Brussels and pupil of Snayers, was the historiographer of Louis xiv.’s campaigns and victories. He was invited by Colbert to come to Paris, and was first employed to furnish designs for the Gobelins manufactory. Afterwards he accompanied Louis xiv. on his warlike expeditions, which he immortalised in numerous large paintings, most of which are now at the Louvre and in the Château at Versailles. His paintings are of considerable topographical interest, as they give accurate representations of the aspect of famous towns and fortresses in the seventeenth century, as in the Entry of Louis XIV. and Marie-Thérèse into Arras (No. 2035), a similar scene at Douai (No. 2033), and the Arrival of the King in the Camp before Maastricht (No. 2040). It was Van der Meulen who founded the “tactical school” of battle painting, which substituted the orderly movement of masses for the wild mêlée of the hand-to-hand combat. Whole armies are seen advancing or retreating in long lines from a high vantage-ground which is generally occupied by the considerably larger figures of the army-leaders on rearing and caracoling horses, and looking for all the world like “gens de qualité qui joueraient aux échecs avec des soldats de plomb.” The official Catalogue mentions no fewer than twenty pictures by Van der Meulen.