CHAPTER IX
THE FORERUNNERS OF ROMANTICISM IN FRANCE
In France the first decade of the century gave no premonition of the powerful development which was shortly to take place in French art. A legion of characterless pupils issuing from David’s studio wearied the world with their aimless works, and hurled their thunderbolts against all rising talent. The austere catalogue of the Salon was a pell-mell of Belisarii, Télémaques, Phædras, Electras, Brutuses, Psyches, and Endymions. Girodet and Guérin wearied themselves in putting on canvas the chief scenes in the classical tragedies at that time so frequently performed—Pygmalion and Galatea, the Death of Agamemnon, and the like—and painted portraits between times; Girodet’s dry and poor, Guérin’s solemnly vacant. The universal note was that of tedium.
François Gérard alone, the “King of Painters and Painter of Kings,” survives, at least in his portraits. Like David he is redeemed only by his portrait painting, and his successes in that direction eclipse even Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, the amiable, gifted, and graceful painter of Marie Antoinette’s days. At the outbreak of the Revolution she had left France. Everywhere extolled and welcomed with open arms, she painted Mme. de Staël in Switzerland, and at Naples Lady Hamilton, the famous beauty of the time of the Directory. But when, in 1810, she returned to Paris, she had been forgotten. The day on which Marie Antoinette picked up her brush for her, as Charles V had done for Titian, was to remain the happiest in her life. She belonged to the Ancien Régime, and although her death did not take place till 1842, at the age of eighty-seven, her work was already over in 1792. In her old age she busied herself in writing memoirs of the splendour of her youthful days, from the famous mythological dinner in the Rue de Cléry, where her husband appeared in the character of Pindar and recited his translation of Anacreon’s odes, to the triumphs which accompanied her journey round Europe.
| FRANÇOIS GÉRARD. L’Art. |
Gérard took the place which she had left vacant at her departure, and filled it well, especially in his youth. When, in the Exhibition of Portrait Painting held at Paris in 1885, there appeared the likeness of Mlle. Brongniart, from the collection of Baron Pichon, painted by Gérard in 1795, at the age of twenty-five, there was general astonishment at the familiar and intimate grasp of character it displayed. The portrait of this young girl standing in her white dress, so tranquil and without pose, has in the firmness of its draughtsmanship the austere charm and dignity of a Bronzino. And later none could give to the aristocracy of Europe a nobler or more natural bearing than did Gérard, who became their tried and trusted depicter: yet in his last days he descended into theatrical exaggeration. Endowed as he was with all the captivating qualities of a cultured man of the world, he had from the beginning avoided as the plague the revolutionary politics in which David was for some time engaged, and when at the instance of the elder master he was appointed a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal, he alleged illness in order to be absent from its sessions. He was a man of the salons, the born painter of the great world, his house the centre of a distinguished circle of society. Not a celebrity, not an emperor or king, but wished to be painted by Gérard. And just as he had been the chosen portrait painter of the Bonaparte family, so after the Restoration he was still the official favourite of the Court. Josephine took the fashionable painter under her high protection, Napoleon’s marshals defiled before him, and the aristocracy which returned with Louis XVIII vied with one another for his favour.
Gérard’s three hundred portraits are a continuous catalogue of all those who in the first quarter of the century played any part in France upon the political, military, or literary stage. A man of supple talent and fine tastes, he completely satisfied the desires of a society which, after the storm of the Revolution, opened its salons again and re-established its former hierarchy of rank. The portrait with rich background of upholstery, and the depicting of public ceremonies, were reintroduced by him into the field of art. The people whom he painted are no longer “citizens,” as with David, but princes, generals, princesses; and their surroundings allow of no doubt as to whether they are to be addressed as Sir, as Your Serene Highness, or as Your Excellency. No one knew how to flatter in so tactful a manner, particularly in portraits of ladies. It was to him, therefore, that Mme. Récamier had recourse when she was dissatisfied with David’s likeness of her. Gérard’s, which she destined for Prince Augustus of Prussia, one of her admirers, gave the “fair Juliette” the fullest satisfaction. In the former she was represented reposing on a couch, austere and without charm, like a tragic muse. Here she sits in a pleasant, lazy attitude upon a chair, in a transparent robe which fully displays her form; about her lips plays a half-melancholy, half-coquettish smile, and she, the great actress who had turned so many men’s heads, gazes with gentle child-eyes as innocently upon the world as though she believed the story about babies and the stork.