Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
GÉRARD.MADAME VISCONTI.GÉRARD.MLLE. BRONGNIART.

The background, too, that colonnade “leading nowhither,” is characteristic of the change in the manner of regarding things. The older schools of painting had, in the case of portraits, managed the treatment of the background in two different ways. The old Dutch and Germans—Jan van Eyck and Holbein—aimed at showing a man, not only portrayed with the subtlest fidelity to truth, but also in the surroundings in which he was usually or by preference to be found. The Italians renounced all representation of such scenes, and gave only a quiet, neutral tone to the background. Gorgeous decorative scenery was introduced by the court painter Van Dyck, and since the second half of the seventeenth century had continually risen in popular favour. Mignard, Lebrun, and Rigaud had brought into fashion, for portraits of princely personages, that stately pillared architecture, with broad velvet curtains swelling and descending in ample folds, which at that time was so remarkably in keeping with the whole cut of the costumes, with the enormous full-bodied wigs and the theatrical attitudinising of that epoch. For the likenesses of generals and warlike princes the favourite background was one which represented, by means of a number of small figures, entire battles, marches, sieges, and so forth. Both these methods, and, together with them, that of an ideal, lightly indicated park landscape, were put an end to by the Revolution, under the influence of which all extravagant pomp, not only in life, but even in portrait painting, was replaced by an ascetic sobriety. Gérard, the Court painter of the Bourbons, who on their return had “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing,” reintroduced the gorgeous pillar decoration, which still remained the authoritative style under Stieler and Winterhalter, and has only in the bourgeois era of to-day given way to the simple, neutral-toned background of the Italians.

David, by the way, never forgave Mme. Récamier for having preferred his pupil to himself. When, in 1805, after the completion of Gérard’s likeness of her, she approached David on the subject of finishing his, he answered drily: “Madame, artists have their caprices as well as women; now it is I who will not.”

As an historical painter Gérard was an imitator of the mannerist Girodet. Paintings such as “Daphnis and Chloe,” or the famous “Psyche” receiving Cupid’s first kiss (1798), made indeed a great sensation among the ladies, who for some time afterwards painted their faces white, to resemble the gentle Psyche; but from the artistic point of view they do not rise above the ordinary level of the Classical school. As an historical painter he took much the same course as David; he began as a Revolutionist in 1795 with the usual “Belisarius,” and ended as a Royalist with a “Coronation of Charles X.”

The more stiff and sober the antique style of David became, the sooner a counter-current was likely to arise, and the change of taste showed itself first in the circumstance that, from 1810 on, a master came more and more to the front who, already old, had hitherto lived in obscurity, almost despised by his contemporaries. This was the amiable, sympathetic, charming, sweet, and great Prudhon, the lineal descendant of Correggio, a solitary painter, the gracefulness of whose art was at first unappreciated, but who, as the orthodox academicians began to be more and more tedious, exercised a correspondingly greater influence over the younger generation. He is the one refreshing oasis in the desert wilderness of the Classical school.

What a difference between him and David! When the elegant grace of Watteau fled from the French school, and the new Spartans dreamed of founding a Greek art, David was the hero of this buskined theatrical school of painting. He painted “The Horatii” and “Brutus,” and thought to bring ancient Rome back to life by copying the shapes of old Roman chairs and old Roman swords. That was the antique style of his first period. Later, having made the discovery that, compared with the Greeks, the Romans were semi-barbarians, he abandoned the Roman style, and thought to make a great stride forwards by copying Greek statues and carefully transferring them to his pictures. This “pure Grecian character” is represented in his “Rape of the Sabines.” Later again, he turned to the more ancient Greeks, and the result was the most academic of his pictures, his “Leonidas.” A mixture of dryness and declamatory pathos; diligence without imagination; able draughtsmanship and an absolute incapacity of drawing anything whatever without a model; careful arrangement without the slightest trace of that gift of the inner vision whereby the whole is brought complete and finished before the eye,—these exhaust the list of David’s qualities. By means of casting and copying he thought to come near to that art of the antique whose soul he dreamed of embracing, when he held but its skeleton in his hands.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.Cassell & Co.
GÉRARD.CUPID AND PSYCHE.GÉRARD.MADAME RÉCAMIER [DETAIL].

And meanwhile, away from the broad high-road, and almost unnoticed, was living that painter whom David contemptuously called “the Boucher of his time.” He it was who truly cherished the gods of Greece in his heart, under whose brush the dead statues began to breathe and to feel the blood flowing in their veins, as in the old days when the Renaissance dug them out of the ground. His appearance on the stage indicates the first protest against the rigid system pursued by the painter of the Horatii and of Brutus. Prudhon also believed in the antique, but he saw therein a grace which no Classicist had ever seen; he also contrasted the simplicity of the Grecian profile with the capricious, wrinkled forms of the rococo style; he too had spent his youth in Italy, but had not thought it criminal to study Leonardo and Correggio; he did not bind himself either to cold sculpture or to the delicate morbidezza of the Lombards as the only means of grace. He remained a Frenchman heart and soul, in that he inherited from Watteau’s age its womanly softness and elegance. In a cold, ascetic age he still believed in tenderness, gaiety, and laughter—he who as a man had but little reason to take delight in life.

Prudhon was ten years younger than David, and was born at Cluny, the tenth child of a poor stone cutter. He grew up in miserable circumstances, cherished only by a mother who devoted the whole of her love to this her youngest born, and to whom the child, a delicate pliant creature, clung with girl-like tenderness. His parents used often to send him out with the other poor children of the little town to gather faggots for the winter in the wood belonging to the neighbouring Benedictine monastery. There the handsome, sprightly boy with the large melancholy eyes attracted the notice of the priest, Père Besson, who made him a chorister and gave him some instruction. Here, in the old abbey of Cluny, surrounded by venerable statues carved in wood, by old pictures of saints and artistic miniatures, he recognised his vocation. An inner voice told him that he was to be a painter. And now his Latin exercise books began to fill with drawings, and he carved little images with his penknife out of wood, soap, or whatever came to his hand. He squeezed out the juice of flowers, made brushes of horsehair, and began to paint. He was inconsolable on finding that he could not hit off the colouring of the old church pictures. It was a revelation to him when one of the monks said to him one day: “My boy, you will never manage it so: these pictures are painted in oils”; and he straightway invented oil painting for himself. With the help of the instruction which he now received at Dijon from an able painter, Devosge, he made rapid progress.

Nevertheless a generation was yet to pass before he was really to become a painter. His marriage, on 17th February 1778, with the daughter of the notary of Cluny, became the torment of his life. A linen-weaver and three of his father-in-law’s clerks were present at the wedding. His wife was quarrelsome, their income small, and their family rapidly increasing. He betook himself to Paris to seek his fortune, with a letter of introduction to the engraver Wille. “Take pity on this youngster, who has been married for the last three years, and who, were he to come under some low fellow’s influence, might easily fall into the most terrible abyss”; so ran the letter, which a certain Baron Joursanvault had given him. He hired himself a room in the house of M. Fauconnier, the head of a firm engaged in the lace trade, who lived in the Rue du Bac with his wife and a pretty sister. The latter, Marie, was eighteen years of age, and, like Werther’s Lotte, was always surrounded by her brother’s children, whom she looked after like a little housewife. Prudhon, himself young, sensitive, and handsome, loved and was loved, and made her presents of small flattering portraits and pretty allegorical drawings, in which Cupid was represented scratching the initials M. F. (Marie Fauconnier) on the wall with his arrow. That he was married and several times a father she never knew, till one day Madame Prudhon arrived with the children. “And you never told me!” was her only word of reproach.