GREUZE.THE MILKMAID.

J. F. de Troy had, at the same time, abandoned himself to a more frolicsome manner, had played upon painting in pictures such as “The Proposal of Marriage” and “The Garter” with something of that frivolity which later came into fashion through Baudouin. That, however, was only for a very short time. Life was beginning to be in earnest—that is rather the impression one receives much earlier, from turning over the engravings of those years. Amongst the elders of the actual rococo age, contentment and gaiety still rule. As the heirs of an old civilisation, the aristocracy understood, with a refined and unique understanding, how to turn life into a feast. Silk trains rustle over the parquet, silk shoes trip, eyes gleam, diamonds flash, white bosoms heave. Tall cavaliers advance to their sprightly partners, gossip and smiles fly around, Knights of Malta and abbés hang over the chairs and pay their court. Yes, this autumn of the old French culture was of a marvellous beauty for the fortunate, and those fortunate ones knew, as no other generation has ever done, how to enjoy life with serenity, in a fairy glamour of rooms gleaming with Venetian chandeliers, where rosy Cupidons laughed down bewitchingly from their light, gold moulded panels. Under Louis XVI the French salon acquired another aspect. Its walls, its whole architecture, were more sombre. The Cupidons still sported on the ceiling, but they were forgotten, like ghosts of the past; their shafts were already impotent. The vivacious, dancing couples have disappeared. Festivity has been banished from the big rooms: here and there is seen an earnest conversational party; gentlemen playing cards or ladies reading philosophical books. Social and political interests have sprung up with which people of education prefer to occupy themselves. Numerous works on commerce and constitutional methods have appeared during the last fifty years. In place of scandal there crop up arguments, for and against the Parliament, for and against the Jesuits. Enlightenment had won its victory. Henceforth development is no longer compatible with sensuous delight. It is still the same society as before, but without pleasure. One almost breathes the air of 1789. Gaming is only a struggle against ennui; the foreheads of women are furrowed with reading. Society has grown serious and sombre, as it were, with a presentiment of what is to come, as though destiny might thus be set aside. The writings of Diderot afford the clearest instance of this changed spirit of the age, and art too must become virtuous, and work for the amelioration of the world. Thus Diderot upheld the sentimental and emotional subject against the fêtes galantes of the rococo painter. Boucher derived his inspiration from the slough of prostitution; only a moral upheaval could tend to a high style. With Boucher the idea of honour, of innocence, has become something strange; the new age requires virtue, bonnes mœurs. But where are the virtues to be found? Naturally, there alone, where Rousseau had discovered them. Rousseau taught that man by nature was good, that he was noble, conscious of his moral obligations, self-sacrificing and uncorrupted when he came from the hands of his Maker, and that it was civilisation which first corrupted him. It followed that the most civilised are the most corrupt, and virtues are to be met with, if anywhere, amongst the lower orders, who are the least affected by culture. Not beneath an embroidered waistcoat, only beneath a woollen smock, can a noble heart beat. The happy ignorance of the young Savoyard, eating his cheese or his oranges in a church porch, lies nearer to the original perfection of mankind than the most subtle erudition of the most ingenious of the encyclopædists. Amongst nature’s noblemen one must seek for the secret of virtue, which has been lost by the aristocracy in the stream of civilisation. Thus beneath the ægis of Rousseau’s philosophy the Third Estate makes its entry into French salons. From the man of the people society wanted to learn how to become once more simple, unassuming, and virtuous; and it was a gruesome irony of fate that this “man of the people” should reveal himself later, when the guillotine stood in the Place de la Concorde, as by no means so lamblike, modest, and self-sacrificing as that noble society had imagined him.

Cassell & Co.Cassell & Co.
GREUZE.HEAD OF A GIRL.GREUZE.GIRL CARRYING A LAMB.

Greuze represented this phase of French art when the riotous carnival of rococo had come to an end, and the Ash Wednesday of rule and fasting and penitence had ensued. It was considered that the aim of art must be to instruct and elevate, not merely to amuse; it should set an example to raise and inspire the good, to serve as a warning for the bad. “Rendre la vertu aimable, le vice odieux, le ridicule saillant, voilà le projet de tout honnête homme qui prend la plume, le pinceau ou le ciseau.” In these words Diderot formulated his programme. It was his wish that the corrupt man, when he went to an exhibition, should feel pricks of conscience at the pictures and read in them his own condemnation. “Si ses pas le conduisent au Salon, qu’il craigne d’arrêter ses regards sur la toile.” Educational effects, “moral stories told in pictures,” that is the keynote of Diderot’s demands upon the painter, and of the accomplishment of Greuze in answer to this claim. He is the French Hogarth, whether he paints in sombre colours the misery that the drunkard brings upon his family, and the horrors of poverty, or depicts in brighter tones the love of children for their parents and the works of charity; and with him too, as with the Englishman, his title was chosen with a didactic after-thought to heighten the effect of his picture. Thus such scenes as these occurred: “The Father’s Curse,” “The Consolation of Age,” “The Son’s Correction,” “The Ungrateful Son,” “The Beloved Mother,” “The Spoilt Child,” “The Lame Man tended by his Relations,” and “The Results of Good Education.” He had this, too, in common with Hogarth: he liked to develop his moral stories in long series, which invariably ended with the triumph of virtue and the punishment of vice. The didactic story of Bazile et Thibaut attempted to relate in twenty-six chapters the influence of a good education on the formation of a whole life; and, just as in Hogarth’s story of the two apprentices, here too, at the conclusion, the well-educated Thibaut pronounces sentence of death over his old friend Bazile, the badly educated, and now condemned murderer. The fact that in other things the two moral apostles differ greatly from each other is accounted for by the difference in the national characteristics of those to whom they variously appealed.

Hogarth scourged the vices of the Third Estate in order to raise them to morality. Rape, bloodshed, debauchery, disorderliness, gluttony, and drunkenness—that was the channel through which in England at that day the furious flood of the uncontrolled spirit of the populace poured itself, foaming and raging with fearful natural force. Hogarth swung over these human animals the stout cudgel of morality in the manner of a sturdy policeman and Puritan bourgeois. With such people a delicate forbearance would have been misplaced. At the foot of every prison-scene he inscribed the name of the vice that he had pilloried there, and subjoined the predicted damnation from Holy Writ. He reveals it in its hideousness, he steeps it in its filth, traces it to its retribution, so that even the most vitiated conscience must recognise it and the most hardened abhor it.

Cassell & Co.Cassell & Co.
GREUZE.GIRL LOOKING UP.GREUZE.GIRL WITH AN APPLE.

Greuze employs the Third Estate as a mirror of virtue, sets forth its noble qualities as an edification to an aristocracy that has grown vicious. Less primitive and, for that very reason, less original than Hogarth, he never forgets that he lives in the most refined social period in history. He does not strangle his culprits to provide terrifying examples, but nearly always leaves a corner open for repentance. He knew that he dared not exact too much from the nerves of his noble public; he merely wished to stir them to a soft vibration. He did not paint for drunken English people, but for those perfumed marquises who, later on, bowed with so courtly an elegance before the guillotine; for those sensitive ladies in whom virtue now excited the same sensual delight that vice had done before. They welcomed in him the high priest of a sort of orgie of virtue, to whose festivals they had grown reconciled. The century which in its first half had danced as light-heartedly as any other the can-can of life, becomes, in its second half, sad of soul, enthusiastic over the reward of justice, the punishment of transgressors, over honour and the naïveté of innocence. Time after time do his contemporaries praise precisely that sense of virtue in the art of Greuze. So that in France, as in England, the burden of interest was laid no longer upon the art, but upon an accessory circumstance. For since, in the hands of Greuze, the picture had been turned into an argument, in France, as in England, art ceased to be an end—it became only a means. He made painting a didactic poem, the more melodramatic the better, and was driven thereby on the same sandbank upon which Hogarth, and all genre painters who would be more than painters, have made shipwreck. In order to bring out his story with the utmost possible distinctness, he was too frequently compelled unduly to accentuate his point. The effect became affected, the pathos theatrical. His picture of the “Father’s Curse” in the Louvre, with the infuriated old man, the son hurrying wildly away, and the weeping sisters, resembles the last act of a melodrama. “The Country Wedding,” where the father-in-law has given the young bridegroom the purse with the dowry, and now pathetically observes, “Take it, and be happy,” might just as well have been entitled “The Father’s Last Blessing.” In the picture in which a noble dame takes her daughter to the bedside of two poor persons who are ill, to accustom her in early life to works of charity, the personages in the picture, arranged exactly as if upon a stage, must have been themselves uncommonly moved by the touching and praiseworthy action. Greuze was the father of genre painting in France—that barbaric, story-telling art which replaced tableaux vivants based upon the literary idea by the Dutchmen’s picturesque and well-observed selections from nature. Beyond that, however, it must not be forgotten that he, like Hogarth, psychologically opposed to the earlier art, showed practical progress in many of his works. There were few in French art before him who depicted the emotions of the soul with such refinement as Greuze in his “Reading of the Bible.” In proportion to the understanding and character of the individual is the impression of the listener reflected on his countenance. That was something new in comparison with the laughing gods of Boucher. And that Greuze was also capable of the most highly pictorial magic when he could once bring himself to lay aside the moral teacher is proved by his rosy, inspired heads of young girls. He never grew weary of painting these pretty children in every situation and attitude at that seductive age which hides the charming feet beneath the first long gown. Blonde or brunette, with a blue ribbon in the hair, a little cluster of flowers in the bodice, they gaze out upon life with their big, brown child eyes, full of curiosity and misgiving. A light gauze covers the soft lines of the neck, the shoulders are as yet hardly rounded, the pouting lips are fresh as the morning dew, and only the two rosy, budding breasts, that fight lustily against their imprisonment, and seem, like Sterne’s starling, to cry, “I cannot get out,” betray that the woman is already awake in the child. Greuze’s name will always be associated with these girl types, just as that of Leonardo is with the dreamy, smiling sphinx-like head of Mona Lisa. In them he has given an unsurpassable expression to the ideal of innocence at the end of the eighteenth century, and provided in them a new thrill of beauty for his contemporaries. And a blasé society which had indulged in every licence bathed itself with passionate delight in the unknown mystery of this surging flood. Yes, after the stimulating champagne of rococo, people had even come to delight in simple black bread. And so, out of bourgeoisie itself, a school of painting was developed as fresh and healthy as this.

”Gaz. des Beaux Arts.”
CHARDIN.   PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF

Chardin, the carpenter’s son, is at the head of this domestic art in the eighteenth century. After Greuze, the painter of refined taste, he seems, a comfortable, healthy, bourgeois master in whom the Dutchman of the best period once more appears upon earth.

After the king had, up to the close of the seventeenth century, been the centre round which everything turned, the solitary personality which dared to appear independent, and upon which the rest of the world formed itself; after the circles round the court had next freed themselves, and gained the right to enjoy life and art for themselves, there still remained a third step to surmount. “Society” abdicates in favour of a free and healthy bourgeoisie.