The end of the seventeenth century marked the complete decadence of the Spanish school, which was precipitated and received its final seal by the advent in 1692 of the Neapolitan Luca Giordano, whose rare facility in the production of showy, flashy, meretricious works earned for him the sobriquet “Fa Presto,” and whose prodigious success was a powerful incentive to emulation. More fatal even than the influence of Luca Giordano was that of the German artist Raphael Mengs, an uninspired eclectic who became Court Painter to Charles iii., and who is referred to in the chapter dealing with the German pictures at the Louvre.
GOYA
In this time of complete stagnation the fascinating personality of Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) flashes like a bright meteor through the dark night of Spanish art. Goya takes a unique position in the art of his country—or, indeed, of the world. He was as much the last of the old masters as he is the first of the moderns. A man of fiery temperament, impulsive, unruly, opposed to authority, he was terribly unequal in his performance. It is as unnecessary to state who were his masters as it is impossible to speak of his style in general terms, for there probably never was an artist who worked in so many different styles, experimented in so many different mediums, and treated so vast a range of subjects as Goya. He was a creature of moods, and changed his method of painting as easily as his political allegiance from Bourbon to Bonaparte and back again to Bourbon.
His four pictures at the Louvre are without exception portraits, and do not therefore illustrate his highly developed sense of the dramatic. But they serve admirably to show his active protest against the classicist affectation prevalent at his time, and his return to the healthy realism which is the heritage of his race. The Portrait of F. Guillemardet, Ambassador of the French Republic to Spain (No. 1704), is an admirably honest piece of portraiture, dignified but perfectly natural in pose, strong in expression and pleasing in colour. It was bequeathed to the Louvre by Guillemardet, together with the Young Spanish Woman (No. 1705) in a black mantilla, standing with crossed arms against a pearly-grey landscape background. The seated half-figure of the rather corpulent Young Spanish Woman (No. 1705a) was bought at the Kums sale at Antwerp for £1276; and the portrait of Don Perez de Castro (No. 1705b) was acquired in 1902 for £1200. Goya was an isolated figure in Spanish art of the time. He left no “school,” but his influence was one of the leading factors in the rise of the modern movement in France.
THE DUTCH SCHOOL
WE have already followed the development of the early Flemish or Netherlandish art during the fifteenth century, and observed how it eventually passed under the Italianising influences which are unmistakable in the pictures of Barend van Orley (1495?–1542) and his contemporaries. The early painters of Holland as distinct from Flanders cannot be traced with any certainty much farther back than Albert von Ouwater (fl. 1420–1460), who worked at Haarlem from 1430 to 1460. As we have already seen, the early Flemish painter, Gerard David (1460?–1523), was born at Ouwater, which may well have had its school of painters. Neither Albert von Ouwater, who is represented to-day by a single work, the Raising of Lazarus in the Berlin Gallery, nor his unidentifiable contemporary who painted the Exhumation of St. Hubert, in the National Gallery (No. 783), are included in the collection of pictures at the Louvre.
GERARD OF HAARLEM
The influence of these painters and Dierick Bouts is seen in the rare works of Geertgen tot S. Jans, or Gerard of Haarlem (1465–1493) whose Raising of Lazarus (No. 2563a) in this collection is an achievement of the highest order, and was purchased as recently as 1902 for £4000 from Baron d’Albenas, after having been for many years in Spain. This pupil or follower of the Ouwater master was a native of Leyden, and worked at Haarlem. He took his name from the commandery of the Knights of St. John at Haarlem for whom he worked, as we see from the careful inscription, “Gerardus Leydanus pictor ad S. Io. Baptist. Harlem pinxt,” on his triptych at Vienna.
Among his contemporaries were Cornelis Engelbrechtsen, who was born in 1468 at Leyden, where he died in 1533, and Lucas van Leyden (1494–1533). The latter played an important part as an engraver quite as much as a painter in the university town of Leyden, which now possesses his large Last Judgment and became famous as the birthplace of Rembrandt in 1606. The Louvre possesses no picture by either Engelbrechtsen or Lucas van Leyden.