But however highly one must estimate the importance of such a work, Ingres is nevertheless at his highest, not in his painted likenesses, but in his portrait drawings. In the former the hard colouring is still, at times, offensive. Almost always the flesh looks like wood, the dress like metal, blue robes like steel. His drawings, from which this defect is absent, are to be admired without criticism. Ingres lived in his youth, at Rome, as a drawer of portraits. For eight scudi he did the bust, for twelve the whole figure, raging inwardly the while at being kept from “great art” by such journey-work. There is a story told of him, that when one day an Englishman knocked at his door and asked, “Does the draughtsman who makes the small portraits live here?” he shut the door in his face, with the words: “No; he who lives here is a painter.” To-day these small masterpieces of which he was ashamed sell for their weight in gold. In the Paris Exhibition of 1889 there was Mme. Chauvin with her Chinese eyes; Mme. Besnard on the terrace of the Pincio with her broad hat and her elegant sunshade; Mrs. Henting with her innocent smile of an “honnête femme”; Mrs. Cavendish, an affected young blonde, with her overladen travelling dress and her crazy coiffure. Strange, that a man like Ingres should rave so about new fashions and pretty toilettes!
In these pieces an artistic eye which was now inexorable, now tender and full of fancy, has looked on nature, and, in flowing pencil-strokes, has caught with spirit and with the certain touch of direct feeling the real fulness of life in what he saw. These drawings, especially the portrait of Paganini and “The Forestier Family,” show that Father Ingres possessed not only a highly cultivated intelligence and an iron strength of will, not only the genius of industry, but also a heart, a genuine, warm, and fine-feeling heart; that he was in his innermost being by no means the cold academician, the stiff doctrinaire he appears in his large pictures, and which he became by his opposition to the Romantic school. Here we have an enchanter such as the Primitives were and the Impressionists are, like Massys and Manet, like Dürer and Degas, like all who have looked Nature in the face. And while these drawings, at once occasional and austere, place him as a draughtsman on a level with the greatest masters in the history of art, they also show him, the reactionary, to be at the same time a man of progress, the connecting link between the great art of the first half and the familiar art which rules over the second half of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER XI
JUSTE-MILIEU
As is usually the case, the heroes were succeeded by a generation less heroic and more practical. In this, art was in keeping with the deliberate and tranquil course of the state itself, which had fallen back again into the old groove, and with the homely, Philistine character assumed in the course of years by the citizen monarchy of the tricolour. The bourgeoisie which had effected the Revolution of 1830 was soon appalled at its own temerity. Even in literature it inclined towards a temperate and lukewarm mediocrity. It was astonished to find itself admiring Casimir Delavigne. It found in Auber and Scribe its ideal of music and comedy, as in Guizot, Duchâtel, Thiers, and Odilon Barrot its ideal of politics. The intellectual exaltation which had gone before and followed after the Revolution of July had calmed down, and that which was to rise out of the Revolution of February was as yet latent. The same elder generation which had looked upon Napoleon Bonaparte’s stony Cæsarian eye, when, like a god of war, unapproachable in his power he rode by at the head of his staff, now saw the Roi Citoyen, the long-exiled ex-school-master, homely and fond of law and order, as every day at the same hour he passed alone on foot and in plain clothes through the streets of Paris, the famous umbrella in his hand, rewarding each “Vive le Roi!” with a friendly smile and a grateful hand-shake. The umbrella became the symbol of this deedless monarchy, and the word “Juste-milieu,” which Louis Philippe had once employed to indicate the course to be followed, became the nickname of all that was weak and without energy, lustreless and undignified, in the age. The golden mean was triumphant in politics, literature, and painting.
The artists who gave this period its peculiar stamp constitute, as compared with the heaven-assaulting generation of 1830, only, as it were, a collateral female branch of that elder male line of good painting. To reconcile opposite tendencies, to avoid harshness, in short, to bring about an artistic compromise between Ingres and Delacroix, was the end towards which their efforts were chiefly directed.
Jean Gigoux, a remarkable artist, has the merit of having given the most effective support which Delacroix received in his battle against the beauté suprême of the Classical school. When, in the Universal Exhibition of 1889 at Paris, his picture of “The Last Moments of Leonardo da Vinci,” painted in 1835, emerged from the seclusion of a provincial museum, its healthy fidelity to nature was the cause of general astonishment. The personages indeed wear costly costumes, and are surrounded by wealth and magnificence, but they themselves are common, ugly human beings. Here there is no trace of idealism, not even in the sense of Géricault, who, notwithstanding his love of truth, remained faithful to the heroic type. The faces are, with religious devotion, painted exactly after nature by a man who evidently loved the youthful works of Guercino and had zealously studied Dürer. At the same time was exhibited the portrait of the Polish “General Dwernicki,” painted in 1833, whom also Gigoux depicts as a man, not as a hero. War has made him not lean but fat, and in Gigoux’s picture his red nose and prominent stomach are reproduced with cruel fidelity to nature. It is a declaration of war against every kind of idealism. Even in his religious paintings in Saint Germain l’Auxerrois he held fast to this principle, and this circumstance gives him a place to himself, apart from all the productions of his contemporaries. In a period which, with the solitary exception of Delacroix, was still absolutely devoted to the doctrine Exagérer la beauté, his works are of a healthy, soul-refreshing ugliness.
A portion of Delacroix’s charm in colour descended to Eugène Isabey. He is certainly not a great artist, but a delightful, sympathetic individuality, a painter who affords one pleasure even at this day. Amid the group of Classicists of his time he has the effect of a beautiful patch of colour, of a palette on which shades of tender blue, mauve, lilac, brilliant green, silver-grey, red faded by sunshine, and opalescent mother-of-pearl combine in subtle harmony. His pretty, picturesquely costumed ladies are grouped together in luminous gardens, sheltered by delicate half-shadows, or ascend and descend the castle stairs, letting their long trains sweep behind them, and toying gracefully with fan or sunshade; while gallant cavaliers do them homage, and with bent head whisper sweet nothings in their ears. The slender greyhound plays a special part in these aristocratic comedies; its straight lines give a counterpoise to the soft flowing costumes of his figures. Isabey is altogether in his element when he has to portray a ceremony requiring rich attire. Then he binds together, as it were, a bouquet sparkling with colour, shot with the hues of ample damask folds and heavy gold-embroidered silk. Now his colouring is chic, capricious, and coquettish, now it is that of the most delicate faded Gobelin tapestry. If he has to paint a sea-view, he rumples the waves about like a ball-dress and pranks the ships up in bridal attire. His very storms have a festal appearance, like the anger of a beautiful woman. One must not look for life in his pictures; they are to the truth much what Gounod’s Faust is to Goethe’s. Watteau is his spiritual ancestor; but he is not so full of life and wit as the painter of the gallant world of the eighteenth century. He does not depict his contemporaries, but the life of a vanished age; yet he has the same predilection for scenes of high life, and a studied, mannered gracefulness which is often charming and always pleasant to the eye. He shares with Delacroix the latter’s broad style, freedom from constraint, and delight in colour. But where Delacroix is rough and violent, Isabey is caressing and insinuating: they are not brothers, but distant cousins. And, like Delacroix, he had no imitators; he went on his bright and delightful path in solitude, and remained without companions in the little gilded house, lit up with fantastic lanterns, which he assigned to be the coquettish home of charming beings of both sexes.