PRUDHON.THE VINTAGE.

In his “Battle of Eylau,” exhibited in 1808, Gros has given us a companion picture to the “Plague of Jaffa”: in one a visit to a hospital, in the other the inspection of a field of battle after the fight is over. The dismal grey hue of winter rests upon the white sheet of snow stretching desolately away to the horizon, only interrupted here and there by hillocks beneath which annihilated regiments sleep their last sleep. In the foreground lie dead bodies heaped together, and moaning wounded men; and in the midst of this horror of mangled limbs and corrupting flesh he, the Conqueror, the Master, the Emperor, comes to a halt, pale, his eyes turned towards the cities burning on the horizon, in his grey overcoat and small cocked hat, at the head of his staff, indifferent, inexorable, merciless as Fate. “Ah! si les rois pouvaient contempler ce spectacle, ils scraient moins avides de conquêtes.” The classical posturing which still lingered, a disturbing element, in the Plague picture, has been put aside completely. The conventional horse from the frieze of the Parthenon, which David alone knew, has given way to the accurately observed animal, and the colouring too, in its sad harmony, has fully recovered its ancient right of giving character to the picture. It was, beyond all controversy, the chief work in the Salon of 1808, rich in remarkable pictures; neither Gérard’s “Battle of Austerlitz,” nor Girodet’s “Atala,” nor David’s Coronation piece endangered Gros’ right to the first place.

PRUDHON.THE VIRGIN.PRUDHON.CHRIST CRUCIFIED.

“Napoleon before the Pyramids,” at the moment when he cries, “Soldiers, from the summit of those monuments forty centuries contemplate your actions,” constitutes, in 1810, the coping-stone of the cycle. Gros alone at that time understood the epic grandeur of war. He became, also, the portrait painter of the great men from whom its events proceeded. His picture of General Masséna, with its meditative, slily tenacious expression, is the genuine portrait of a warrior; and how well is heroic, simple daring depicted in the likeness of General Lasalle, without the commonplace device of a mantle puffed out by the wind! His portrait of General Fournier Sarlovèse, at Versailles, has a freshness of colouring, the secret of which no one else possessed in those days except the two Englishmen, Lawrence and Raeburn. Gros was far in advance of his age. A painter of movement rather than of psychological analysis, he brought out character by means of general effect, and gave the essentials in a masterly way. His portraits, just as much as his historical pictures, have a stormy exposition. In David all is calculation; in Gros, fire. Almost alone among his contemporaries, he had studied Rubens, and like him gave colour the place due to it. At times there is in his pictures a natural flesh-colour and an animation which make this warm-hearted man, who has not been sufficiently appreciated, a genuine forerunner of the moderns. Surrounded as he was by orthodox Classicists, he cried in a loud voice what Prudhon had already ventured to say more timidly: “Man is not a statue—not made of marble, but of flesh and bone.”

But as with Prudhon, so with Gros. This man, of exaggerated nervousness, was lacking in that capacity for persistence which belongs to a strong will conscious of its aim; he lacked confidence in himself and in the initiative he had taken. So long as the great figure of Napoleon kept his head above water he was an artist; but when his hero was taken from him he sank. The Empire had made Gros great, its fall killed him. The incubus of David’s antique manner began once more to press upon him, and when David after his banishment (in 1816) committed to him the management of his studio in Paris, Gros undertook the office with pious eagerness, on nothing more anxiously intent than as a teacher once more to impose the fetters of the antique upon that Art which he had set free by his own works. “It is not I who am speaking to you,” he would say to the pupils, “but David, David, always David.” The latter had blamed him for having taken the trouble to paint the battles of the Empire, “worthless occasional pieces,” instead of venturing upon those of Alexander the Great, and thus producing genuine “historical works.” “Posterity requires of you good pictures out of ancient history. Who, she will cry, was better fitted to paint Themistocles? Quick, my friend! turn to your Plutarch.” To depict contemporary life, which lies open before our eyes, was, he held, merely the business of minor artists, unworthy the brush of an “historical painter.” And Gros, who reverenced his master, was so weak as to listen to his advice: he believed in him rather than in his own genius, in the strength of others rather than his own. He searched his Plutarch, and painted nothing more without a previous side-glance towards Brussels; introduced allegory into his “Battle of the Pyramids”; composed in homage to David a “Death of Sappho”; and painted the cupola of the Pantheon with stiff frescoes; while between times, when he looked Nature in the face, he was now and then producing veritable masterpieces.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
PRUDHON.   MADAME COPIA.

His “Flight of Louis XVIII” in the Museum at Versailles, shows him once more at his former height. It is “one of the finest of modern works,” as Delacroix called it in 1848, in an essay contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes; at once familiar and serious. Napoleon had left Elba, marched on Paris, and had reached Fontainebleau, when, in the night of the 19th-20th March 1815, Louis XVIII determined to evacuate the Tuileries with all speed. Accompanied by a few faithful followers and by the officers of his personal service, he abandons his palace and takes leave of the National Guards. There is something pathetic in this sexagenarian with his erudite Bourbon profile, immortalised in the large five-franc pieces of his reign, with his protruding stomach and small thick legs, looking like a dropsical patient going to hospital. His bearing is most unkingly. Gros has boldly depicted the scene, even to the pathological appearance of the king, just as he saw it, forgetting all that he knew of antique art. He had himself seen the staircase, the murmuring crowd, the lackeys hurrying by, lantern in hand, at their wits’ end, and the fat, gouty king, who in his terror has forgotten all kingly dignity.

That was an historical picture, and yet as he painted it he reproached himself anew for having forsaken the “real art of historical painting.” At the funeral of Girodet in 1824 the members of the Institute talked of their “irreparable loss,” and of the necessity of finding a new leader for the school who should avert with a strong hand that destruction which hot-headed young men threatened to bring upon it. “You, Gros,” observed one of them, “should be the man for the place.” And Gros answered, in absolute despair; “Why, I have not only no authority as leader of a school, but, over and above that, I have to accuse myself of giving the first bad example of defection from real art.” The more he thought of David, the more he turned his back upon the world of real life. With his large and wearisome picture of “Hercules causing Diomedes to be devoured by his own Horses” (1835) he sealed his own fate. Conventionality had conquered nature.

GROS.SAUL.

The painters overwhelmed him with ridicule, and a shrill shout of derision rose from all the critics. Already, for some time past, a few writers had risen to protest against the Classical school. They spoke with fiery eloquence of the rights of humanity, the benefits of liberty, the independence of thought, the true principles of the Revolution, and found numerous readers. They fought against rigid laws in the intellectual as well as the social sphere; they pointed out that there were other worlds besides that of antiquity, and that even the latter was not peopled exclusively by cold statues; they delighted in describing the great and beautiful scenes of Nature, and opened out once more a new and broad horizon to art and poetry. The Spring was awakening; Gros felt that he had outlived himself. Arming himself against the voices of the new era with the fatal heroism of the deaf, he became the martyr of Classicism in French art. He was a Classic by education, a Romantic by temperament; a man who took his greatest pride in giving the lie as a teacher to the work he had accomplished as an artist, and this discordance was his ruin.