PRUDHON.CUPID AND PSYCHE.

CONSTANCE MAYER.

These brought him at last even outward success. In 1808 the Emperor gave him the Cross of the Legion of Honour for his picture of “Justice and Vengeance,” and he became, if not the official, at least the familiar painter of the Court. The fine portrait of the Empress Josephine belongs to this period. When the new Empress Marie Louise wished to learn the art of painting, Prudhon, in 1811, became her drawing master; and when on the birth of the King of Rome the city of Paris presented to the Emperor the furniture for a room, he was commissioned to provide the artistic decoration. Criticism began to bow its head when his name was mentioned; and the younger generation of painters soon discovered in him, once so contemptuously reviled, the founder of a new religion, the want of which had long been felt. He began to make money. Constance Mayer seemed to bring him luck: her death affected him all the more deeply.

By nature nervous and highly strung, jealous and keenly conscious of her equivocal position, she could not make up her mind, when the painters were ordered to move their studios from the Sorbonne, either to leave Prudhon or openly to live with him. On the morning of 26th March 1821 she left her model, the little Sophie, alone, after giving her a ring. Soon afterwards a heavy fall was heard, and she was found lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Prudhon lingered on for two years more, two long years spent as it were in exile. Solitary, tortured by remorse of conscience, and with continual thoughts of suicide, he lived on only for his recollections of her, in tender converse with the memorials she had left, insensible to the renown which began gradually to gather round his name. The completion of the “Unfortunate Family,” which Constance had left unfinished on her easel, was his last tête-à-tête with her, his last farewell. He left his studio only to visit her grave in Père-Lachaise, or to wander alone along the outer boulevards. An “Ascension of the Virgin” and a “Christ on the Cross” were the last works of the once joyous painter of ancient mythology: the Mater Dolorosa and the Crucified—symbols of his own torments. Death at length took compassion upon him. On the 16th of February 1823 France lost Prudhon.

His art was the pure expression of his spiritual life. His life was swayed by women, and something feminine breathes through all his pictures. In them there speaks a man full of soul, originally of a joyous nature, who has gone through experiences which prevented him ever being joyous again. He has inherited from the rococo style its graces and its little Cupids, but has also already tasted of all the melancholy of the new age. With his smiles there is mingled a secret sadness. He has learnt that life is not an unending banquet and a perpetual pleasure; he has seen how tragic a morrow follows upon the voyage to the Isle of Cythera. The bloom has faded from his pale cheeks, his brow is furrowed—he has seen the guillotine. He, the last rococo painter and the first Romanticist, would have been truly the man to effect the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century by a path more natural than that followed by David.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
CONSTANCE MAYER.THE DREAM OF HAPPINESS.

Even his fugitive sketches, thrown off in the days of his poverty, have a quite peculiar charm and a thoroughly individual sentiment. There are vignettes of his for letter-sheets, done for the Government offices, which in a few pencil touches contain more manly elegance and poetry than do David’s most pretentious compositions with all their borrowed Classicism. Prudhon was the only painter who at that time produced anything of conspicuous merit in the art of ornament. Even drawings such as “Minerva uniting Law and Liberty,” which from their titles would lead one to expect nothing more than frozen allegories, are imbued, not with David’s coldness, but with Correggio’s charm. French grace and elegance are united, without constraint, to the beauty of line found in ancient cameos. He it was who first felt again the living poetry of that old mythology, which had become a mere collection of dry names. He is commissioned to draw a card of invitation for a ball, and he sends a tender hymn on music and dancing. In extravagant profusion he scatters forth, no matter where, poetic invention and grace such as David in his most strenuous efforts sought for in vain. It was during this time that Prudhon became the admirable draughtsman to whom the French school have awarded a place among their greatest masters. These drawings and illustrations were the necessary preparation for the great works which brought him to the front at the beginning of the century.

Even his first picture, painted in 1799—to-day half-destroyed—“Wisdom bringing Truth upon the earth, at whose approach Darkness vanishes,” must, to judge from early descriptions, have been marked by a seductive and delicate grace. And the celebrated work of 1808, “Justice and Vengeance pursuing Crime,” belongs certainly, so far as colouring is concerned, rather to the Romantic than to the Classical era. For during the latter, one faculty especially had been lost, and that was the art of painting flesh. Prudhon, by deep study of Leonardo and Correggio, masters at that time completely out of fashion, won back this capacity for the French school. In wild and desolate scenery, above which the moon, emerging from behind heavy clouds, shines with a ghostly light upon the bare rocks, the murderer is leaving the body of his victim. He strides forth with hasty steps, purse and dagger in hand, glancing back with a shudder at the naked corpse of a young man which has fallen upon a ledge of rock, lying there stiff and with outstretched arms. Above, like shapes in the clouds, the avenging goddesses are already sweeping downwards upon him. Justice pursues the fugitive with threatening, wrathful glance; while Vengeance, lighting the way with her torch, stretches out her hand to grasp the guilty one. In that epoch this picture stands alone for the imposing characterisation of the persons, for its powerful pictorial execution, and the stern and grandiose landscape which serves as setting to the awful scene.