Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
PIERRE PAUL PRUDHON.   PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.

Prudhon himself now went to Italy—a journey accompanied by serious difficulties. At Dijon he had competed for the Prix de Rome, and had been so simple as to make a sketch for one of his rivals. He owed it to the latter’s honesty that the scholarship nevertheless fell to himself. He started on his journey; but when he reached Marseilles, and was ready to embark, the vessel was unable to weigh anchor for several weeks, owing to stormy weather. And even on the voyage it became necessary to disembark again, so that months had elapsed before he arrived in Rome, penniless, and having embraced, according to classical custom, the land he had come to conquer; for he had fallen out of the carriage on the way. Fortunately his dearly bought sojourn in Italy did him no harm. He had indeed intended to draw only from the antique and after Raphael; but after the lapse of a very few weeks he found his ideal in Leonardo. Him he calls “his Master and Hero, the inimitable father and prince of all painters, in artistic power far surpassing Raphael!”

In a small sketch-book, half torn up, dating from this time, and still in existence, we have already the whole Prudhon. It contains copies of ancient statues, made laboriously and without pleasure in the work; then comes Correggio’s disarmed “Cupid,” a delicious little sketch, and with the same pencil that drew it he has written down the names of the pictures he purposes painting later on: “Love,” “Frivolity,” “Cupid and Psyche.” It is as it were the secret confession of his fantasy, a preliminary announcement of his future works. Here and there are found sketches hastily dashed off of beautiful female forms in the graceful attitude which had excited his admiration in the women of the “Aldobrandini Wedding.” But, above all, the young artist observed all that was around him. He lived in unceasing intercourse with the beautiful, and his soul was nurtured by the spirit of the works which surrounded him. He accumulated pictures, not in his sketch-book, but in himself; so much so that, when he was afterwards interrogated as to his Italian studies, his only answer was: “I did nothing but study life and admire the works of the masters.” He avoided association even with scholars who had taken the Prix de Rome. The elegant and graceful sculptor Canova was the only one with whom he permitted himself any intercourse.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
PRUDHON.JOSEPH AND POTIPHAR’S WIFE.

When his scholarship had run its course, at the end of November 1789, he found himself again in Paris, and the struggle against poverty began once more. Even while in Italy he had sent all his savings to his wife, who had straightway squandered them in drink with her brother, a sergeant in a cavalry regiment. At Paris he had to act as parlour-maid and nursery-maid. The faces of two more women rise up in his life like fleeting stars, and both of them died before his eyes. The first was the mysterious stranger who appeared one day in his studio and commissioned him to paint her portrait. She was young, scarcely twenty years of age, with great blue eyes, but her face was weary and wan as though from long sleepless nights. “Your portrait?” asked Prudhon, “with features so troubled and sad?” He set to work, silent and indifferent; but with every stroke of his brush he felt himself more mystically attracted to this young girl, evidently as unhappy and as persecuted by fate as himself. She promised to return on the morrow; but neither on that day nor on the next did she appear. One afternoon he was wandering dreamily along the street, thinking of the unknown fair one, when his eye almost mechanically caught sight of the guillotine, and he recognised in the unhappy victim at that very moment ending her days the mysterious visitor of his studio.

To keep the wolf from the door, Prudhon was obliged for some years to draw vignettes on letter-sheets for the Government offices, business cards for tradesmen, and even little pictures for bonbonnières. For this the representatives of high art held him in contempt. Greuze alone treated him amicably, and even he held out no hopes for his future. “You have a family and you have talent, young man; that is enough in these days to bring about one’s death by starvation. Look at my cuffs.” Then the old man would show him his torn shirt-sleeves—for even he could no longer find means of getting on in the new order of things. To his anxieties about the necessities of life were added dissensions with his wife. He became the prey of a continual melancholy; he was never seen to smile. Even when a separation had been effected his tormentor persecuted him still, until she was relegated to a madhouse. But now a change comes over the scene with the entrance of Constance Mayer.

PRUDHON.STUDY DIRECTS THE FLIGHT OF GENIUS.PRUDHON.LE COUP DE PATTE DU CHAT.

This amiable young painter, his pupil, was the star that lighted up his old age. She was ugly. With her brown complexion, her broad flat nose, and her large mouth, she had at first sight the appearance of a mulatto. Yet to this large mouth belonged voluptuous lips ever ready to be kissed; above this broad nose there were two eyes shining like black diamonds, which by their changeful expression made this irregular, gamin’s face appear positively beautiful. She was seventeen years his junior, and he has painted her as often as Rembrandt painted his Saskia. He has immortalised the dainty upturned nose of his little gipsy, as he called her, in pictures, sketches, pastels, all of which have the same piquant charm, the same elegant grace, the same joyous and merry expression. In her he had found his type, as his namesake Rubens did in Hélène Fourment. Constance Mayer became the muse of his delicate, graceful work. And she too died before his eyes, having cut her throat with a razor.

The master and the pupil loved each other. As sentimental as she was passionate, as gay as she was piquant, nervous and witty, she possessed every quality that was likely to captivate him, as she chattered to him in her lively and original way, and flattered his pride as an artist. This love seemed to promise him rest and a bright ending for his days. He entered into it with the passion of a young man in love for the first time. Mlle. Mayer, after her father’s death, was dependent on no one. Her studio in the Sorbonne was separated from her master’s only by a blind wall. She was with him the entire day, worked at his side, was his housekeeper, and saw to the education of his daughter, to whom she was at once a mother and an elder sister; and Prudhon transferred to her all the tender love which as a child he had cherished for his mother. In his gratitude he wished to share his genius with his friend, and to make her famous like himself. It is pathetic to note in Mlle. Mayer’s studies with what patience and devotion he instructed her, how he strove to animate her with his own spirit, and to give her something of his own immortality. Even his own work was influenced by the new happiness. To the period of his connection with Constance belong his masterpieces, “Justice and Vengeance,” “The Rape of Psyche,” “Venus and Adonis,” and “The Swinging Zephyr.”