In the nineteenth century, painting had altogether broken away from the Church, and so it had to fight its own battles out in the street, or in the law courts. That is what has given it such a swagger and strength. It no longer looks to its protector, it will hit you in the face before you know where you are. The feeble kind, only, looks to Academies for support, and thereby becomes feebler still.
In the present chapter, accordingly, we shall hear no more of the Madonnas, the Holy Families, and all the sacred and profane subjects on which the old masters exercised their genius. Five centuries of painting had established the art in a position of independence; and in a sixth—that is to say, the nineteenth—it began to assert itself, and to prove that its education was not in itself an end, but only a means to various ends. Instead of following out the fortunes of each painter, therefore, and attempting to set in any sort of order the reputations of artists before sufficient time has elapsed for them to cool, I propose to confine myself in the remaining pages to the broad issues raised during this period between the painters, the critics, and the public.
II
EUGÈNE DELACROIX
The man who began all this street fighting was a Frenchman—Eugène Delacroix. While still a youth he was bullied, and the bully was such a redoubtable giant that it took somebody with the grit and genius of Delacroix to tackle him, but tackle him he did. The story of the fight, which is a long and glorious one, is so admirably told in Madame Bussy's life of Delacroix, that I have obtained permission to give the essence of it in her own words.
In the Salon of 1822 was exhibited Delacroix's picture of Dante and Virgil, which is now in the Louvre, and evoked the first of those clamours of abuse which were barely stilled before the artist's death. For nearly thirty years all French painters, with the exception of Gros and Prudhon; had shown themselves unquestioning disciples of the school founded by Jacques Louis David, whose masterful character and potent personality had reduced all art to a system; and Delacroix himself spoke of him with sympathy and admiration. The chief dogma of David's school was that the nearest approach to the beau ideal permitted to the human race had been attained by the Greeks, and that all art must conform as closely as possible to theirs. Unfortunately, the chief specimens of Greek art known at that time were those belonging to a decadent period—neither the Elgin marbles nor the Venus of Milo were accessible before 1816—so that the works from which they drew their inspiration were without character in themselves, or merely the feeble and attenuated copies of ancient Rome. In the pictures of this school, accordingly, we find only the monotonous perfection of rounded and well-modelled limbs, classical features and straight noses. Colour, to the sincere Davidian, was a vain and frivolous accessory, serving only to distract attention from the real purpose of the work, which was to aim at moral elevation as well as at ideal beauty. Everything in the picture was to be equally dwelt upon; there was no sacrifice, no mystery. "These pictures," says Delacroix, "have no epidermis ...they lack the atmosphere, the lights, the reflections which blend into an harmonious whole, objects the most dissimilar in colour."
By the untimely death of Géricault, whose Raft of the Medusa had already caused a flutter in 1819, Delacroix was left at the head of the revolt against this pseudo-classicism; and amid the storm that greeted the Dante and Virgil it is interesting to find Thiers writing of him in the following strain:—"It seems to me that no picture [in the Salon] reveals the future of a great painter better than M. Delacroix's, in which we see an outbreak of talent, a burst of rising superiority which revives the hopes that had been slightly discouraged by the too moderate merits of all the rest.... I think I am not mistaken; M. Delacroix has genius; let him go on with confidence, and devote himself to immense labour, the indispensable condition of talent." Delécluze, by the by, the critic-in-chief of the Davidian School, had characterised the picture as une véritable tartouillade.
In 1824 the Salon included two pictures which may be regarded as important documents in the history of painting. One of these was Constable's Hay Wain—now
