L’Art.
ARY SCHEFFER.

A curious position, half-way between the Romantic and the Classical schools, was occupied by Ary Scheffer, who was, a generation ago, the favourite of the greater part of the aristocracy of Europe, but is now known, to the German public at least, only because he is said to have painted “with snuff and green soap”—a phrase of Heine’s, which, however, gives a very false impression of him. A German-Dutchman by birth, a Classicist by training, Scheffer in his youth came also in contact with the leading spirits of the Romantic school; and these various influences, of race, education, and intercourse, are clearly reflected in the faces of his figures. His forms are thoroughly classic and generalised; only the expression of the face is ideal, while the eye is romantic, and, Scheffer’s German blood making itself felt—sentimental. It was precisely this mid-way position which his contemporaries found so much to their liking. They called his painting a great art full of style, uniting the sentiment of ideal beauty with a captivating power of expression. But history cares but little for these men of compromise, and regards this indecision as the chief defect of his genius. Scheffer’s draughtsmanship is dry and hard, his colouring without tenderness or charm. These failings are ill-assorted with the attitudes and physiognomy of his figures, which have always an affectation of weakness, exhaustion, and moral suffering. He is a sentimental Classicist, and his subjects the antithesis of the Græco-Roman ideal to which he does homage in his technique. His “Suliote Women” was already, in sentiment, form, and colour, only a subdued and weakened reminiscence of the “Massacre of Chios.” At a later time he entirely forsook historical subjects (such as “Gaston de Foix” and others), and attached himself with enthusiasm to the Gospels and to the works of the poets, especially of one poet. When he had recourse to the Bible as a source of inspiration, he selected tender episodes, the sadness of which he transmuted into tearfulness. So also, when he represented scenes from Faust or Wilhelm Meister, he gave to Goethe’s animated and impassioned characters something melancholy, suffering, and contemplative. Heine said of his “Gretchen”: “You are no doubt Wolfgang Goethe’s Gretchen, but you have read all Friedrich Schiller.” Even before her fall, before she is in love, Marguerite is pensive and sad like a fallen angel. Mignon, Francesca da Rimini, and St. Monica were also favourite figures for his delicate and contemplative spirit. He alone in French art inclines a little, in his tearful sentimentality, to the Romantic school of Düsseldorf.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
ARY SCHEFFER.MARGUERITE AT THE WELL.CHASSERIAU.APOLLO AND DAPHNE.

Hippolyte Flandrin was the French counterpart of the German Nazarenes. He is an example of how Ingres’ teaching resulted in stiff conventionality. Ingres was a dangerous master to follow. His pupils formed round him a small, faithful, and submissive band, swore like those of Cornelius by the master’s doctrines, and for that very reason never attained to any distinctive character of their own. None of them possessed Ingres’ many-sided talent. His empire, like that of Alexander the Great, was divided among his successors, each of whom governed his own little realm with greater or less ability. Hippolyte Flandrin devoted himself to religious painting, which in his hands for the first time regained a greater importance in French art; but he followed much more slavishly than Ingres in the paths of the Italian masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This painter, worthy of respect, full of conviction, learned and of sterling worth, but colourless and cold, who decorated the churches of St. Vincent de Paul and St. Germain des Prés, has enriched the history of art by no new gift. An indefatigable worker, but endowed with little intellectual power, he went no further than to follow out strictly the rules which Ingres taught his pupils and had himself acquired from the old masters. After Flandrin, as winner of the Prix de Rome in 1831, had become intimately acquainted with the art treasures of Italy, he seldom met with any difficulty. His cartoons are flowingly and correctly executed with a firm hand, like the fair copy of a school essay. Of draughtsmanship he knew all that is to be learned; he remembered much, arranged his reminiscences, and thought little for himself. He was a miniature copy of his master, at once more poorly endowed and more fanatical, a purely mathematical genius; his art is a cold geometrical knowledge, the adaptation of anatomical studies to conventional forms, an arrangement of groups and draperies in strict accordance with celebrated exemplars. Had not the primitive Italian masters, the painters of the ancient Christian catacombs, the saintly Fra Angelico, and the mosaic artists of Ravenna done their work long before him, Flandrin’s paintings would never have seen the light, any more than those of the Nazarene school. In both cases one can assign almost every face and figure to its original in the pictures of the Italian masters. Only a certain blond, tender, slightly melancholy, modern face of a Christian maiden is Flandrin’s peculiar property. He transferred these same ascetic and pure principles to portrait painting, and thereby acquired for himself a large practice as the painter of the femme honnête. These women conversed with him and blushed in his presence; in his pictures we find grace and delicacy, eyes sparkling or meek, tenderness and mocking laughter, all translated into a nun-like, unapproachable appearance, which under the Second Empire gained the greater approbation among ladies, since it was seldom found in real life.

Alongside of this Overbeck, endowed with greater artistic powers than his German congener, there stands as the French Cornelius Paul Chenavard, a man who revolved in his fertile brain philosophical conceptions deeper almost than those of the German master. He dreamed of broad, symbolical, decorative pieces, embracing all time and all space, wherein all the cosmogonies of the universe should be united. Like Cornelius, he wished to be a Michael Angelo, but he succeeded no better than the German. He spent fifteen years in the churches and museums of Italy, pencil in hand, accumulating a vast collection of studies, from which his great painted history of the world was to be built up. But when he went back to Paris his materials from the old masters had grown upon him to such an extent that he never recovered his individuality. For four years he worked with feverish diligence, and completed eighteen cartoons, each six metres in height and four in breadth, intended for the walls of the Pantheon. So far as colour is concerned, they have attained no greater success than the Campo Santo frescoes of Cornelius. Chenavard could draw much better than the German, but was not much better as a painter; the works of both have a literary rather than an artistic value.

Brief and brilliant was the career of Théodore Chassériau, who shot across the heavens of art like a gleaming meteor, first as a devotee of form, in Ingres’ sense of the word, and afterwards, like Delacroix, as an enthusiastic lover of sunshine and the clear light of Africa. Born in 1819 at St. Domingo, he followed his teacher Ingres in 1834 to the Villa Medici; but even in his first picture, the “Susanna” of 1839, now in the Louvre, he proved himself by no means an orthodox pupil. “He has not the least understanding for the ideas or the changes which have entered into art in our time, and knows absolutely nothing of the poets of recent days. He will live on as a reminiscence and a reproduction of certain ages in the art of the past, without having created anything to hand down to the future. My wishes and my ideas do not in the least correspond with his.” In these words Chassériau has himself pointed out what it was that distinguished him from Ingres. Unfortunately he produced but little. Personally a very elegant, blasé gentleman, he plunged on his return from Italy into the whirlpool of Parisian life. He was remarkably ugly; but his black, piercing eyes made him the idol of the ladies, and he hurried through life with such haste that he broke down altogether at the age of thirty-six. Beyond various decorative paintings for the church of Saint Méry and for the Salle des Comptes in the Palais d’Orsay, only a few Eastern pictures, and, best and most characteristic, a couple of lithographs, remain to represent his work. In these delicate mythological compositions a chord is struck which found no echo until, a generation later, it was heard again in the work of the French New Idealists and the English Pre-Raphaelites: there speaks in them a Romantic Hellenism, a something dreamily mystic, which makes him a remarkable link between Delacroix and the most refined spirit in the modern school, Gustave Moreau. It was purely an act of gratitude in Moreau when he affixed the dedication “To Théodore Chassériau” to his fine picture of “The Young Man and Death.”

Léon Benouville will be remembered only for his picture of the “Death of St. Francis,” in the Louvre, a good piece of work in the manner of the Quattrocento. Léon Cogniet deserves to be mentioned because in the fifties he brought together in his studio so many foreign pupils, especially Germans. He enjoyed above all others the reputation of being able to initiate beginners both quickly and with certainty into the peculiar mysteries of craftsmanship. All that a master can teach, and that can be learned from his example, was to be obtained from this kind and fatherly instructor. Even after he had long given up painting, his grateful pupils used to meet together yearly at a banquet given in the patriarch’s honour. As an artist he belongs to the list of the great men who have paid for overpraise in their lifetime by oblivion after their death. His “Massacre of the Innocents” of 1824—a woman who, mad with terror, thinks to hide herself and her child from the assassins of Bethlehem under an open stairway—could give pleasure only in a time which hailed with enthusiasm Ary Scheffer’s heads resembling plaster busts full of expression. Occasionally, too, he painted landscapes—the chimerical, vague creations of a man who had lived but little in the open air. His finest picture, “Tintoretto Painting his Dead Daughter by Lamplight,” of 1843, the engravings of which once enraptured France and Germany, has to-day a somewhat insipid effect, and shows whither his genius was leading him—in technique a coarser Schalcken, in sentiment a weaker Delaroche.

COGNIET.TINTORETTO PAINTING HIS DEAD DAUGHTER.

Delaroche was the Titian of Louis Philippe’s age, the spoiled child of the Juste-milieu, one of the most insignificant and at the same time one of the most famous painters of the century; and in this double capacity is an interesting proof that in art the “Vox populi” is seldom the “Vox Dei.” What a difference between him and the great spirits of the Romantic school! They were enthusiastic poets; their predilection for Mediævalism was concerned only with its æsthetic charm, with the twilight shadows of its picturesque churches, the sounding presage of its bells, the motley processions of that world gleaming bright with uninterrupted colour. And what further allured their imaginative powers was the unruly character of certain epochs, the destructive war of wild factions, and the blazing, consuming power of passion. The historical motive, as such, was with them only a pretext for launching forth into flashing orgies of colour, according to the example, which they followed merely in externals, of the Venetian and Flemish masters. They knew, as genuine painters, that only in the pigment on their palette slumbers that power of exciting emotion by means of which the art of painting touches the chords of men’s souls. Enthusiasts of colour and of passion, they raved about the poets merely because the latter more readily enabled them, by means of the fierce vehemence of the awakened powers of nature, to invest with form the feverish, agitated, and terrible dreams of their fantasy. So it was that Delacroix told of conflagration, of battle and warfare, of murder and pillage, of the bitterness and pains of love. At the same time, no doubt, he studied the vari-coloured costumes of past ages—his drawings show as much—but he made use of them simply as a storehouse of bright hues, as a lexicon by means of which he might embody his visions of colour. To manufacture historical vignettes and play the part of a teacher of history would have been in his eyes a thing to be held in contempt as the work of subservient illustrators. Yet perhaps it was by taking this very course that far greater successes were to be attained, so far as the verdict of the multitude is considered.

The decade following upon 1820 was a season of brilliant blossom for the art of writing history in France. By his History of the English Revolution, in 1826, Guizot won for himself a place in the foremost rank of French authors. He began in 1829 his famous lectures at the Sorbonne, and commenced in 1832 the publication of his Sources of French History. Even before him, Augustin Thierry had written in 1825 his History of the Conquest of England by the Normans, followed by Stories from the Merovingian Times, and was now engaged in the preparation of his great work, the History of the Origin and Progress of the Third Estate. Not unworthy to be compared with these writers, and soon to stand beside them, were two young men working in collaboration—Mignet and Thiers—who came to the front in 1823-24 with their History of the Revolution. At the impulse thus given, historical societies and unions had arisen in every province of France, and were developing an ever-increasing activity.