Absence of Narrowness in England.
The English are not narrow in opposition to French artistic influences. Rosa Bonheur’s reputation in England was made quite as easily as if she had been an Englishwoman. The French Gallery in London has extended the fame of many a foreign artist. Meissonier, Gérôme, Edouard Frère, are appreciated in London as in Paris. So it has been with the best French etchers, Méryon, Rajon, Waltner.
C. R. Leslie, R.A., on Continental Art.
Haydon.
Etty on French Painters.
Still, there exists or has existed amongst some Englishmen a prejudice against French art. The older Leslie was so patriotic as to believe that before the peace “the British school had possessed the wine and the other schools the water only of art, and that the peace, by mingling these, had strengthened the art of the continent exactly in the degree in which it had diluted art with us.” The French got the wine of art from England and mixed it with their water. Leslie thought too that it would be time enough for the French to talk of “high art” when they produced pictures that would bear even a distant comparison with the works of the great old masters, whereas those of a dozen English painters, including Fuseli’s and the best of Haydon’s, could “hang with credit amongst those of the greatest painters that ever lived.” Haydon himself said, “The present French artists have immense knowledge but their taste is bad, they know not how to avail themselves of what they know, how to marshal, order, and direct it.” Etty said of the French, “It is lamentable, the narrow nationality of their school; Titian, Correggio, Paolo, Rubens, throw down their pearls in vain. The husks of their own school are preferred.” In the five volumes of Modern Painters, modern French painters are treated as if they did not exist.
Advantage to Artists of belonging to weak States.
Italian and Dutch masters had the immense advantage of belonging to nations that excited no political jealousy. If Titian and Correggio belonged to the Italy of to-day, the Italy that has a fleet and an army, and a place in the councils of Europe, they would be judged in the same hostile spirit as the English. In like manner it was an advantage for Italian musical composers, as to their fame in France, that they belonged to feeble principalities. No English musical composer has a chance of recognition in France. When Germany was feeble her music was judged on its own merits; since she became strong it has been found impossible to represent the works of her most recent musical genius on the French stage; and when an attempt was made to do so there was almost an émeute, whilst his talents and even his morals became objects of violent attacks in the French press.
French Patriotic Bias.
The powerful effects of the French patriotic bias have been noticed already by Herbert Spencer. He observed, as examples, that in the picture by Ingres of the “Crowning of Homer” French poets are conspicuous in the foreground, while the figure of Shakespeare in one corner is half in and half out of the picture, and the name of Newton is conspicuous by its absence from those of great men on the string-course of the Palais de l’Industrie, though many unfamiliar French names are engraved upon it.