L’Art.
THOMAS COUTURE.

Already in his first notable works, in 1831, “The Princes in the Tower” and “Oliver Cromwell,” he has fully assumed his lukewarm manner. He might have represented the murder of the princes, but fearing that the public would not stand it, he preferred merely to suggest the approaching death of the weeping and terrified children by placing in front of the bed a small dog, which is looking uneasily towards the door, where the red light of torches indicates the approach of the assassins,—a Düsseldorf picture with improved technique. It is just the same with his melodramatic and lachrymose “Cromwell.” It would be hardly possible to represent one of the greatest figures in universal history in a more paltry manner, and to this day it is not quite certain whether the picture was intended to be serious or humorous. The great statesman in whom was embodied the political and ecclesiastical revolution of England must have been extremely busy on the day of Charles I’s funeral, and have had better things to do than stealthily to open the coffin and contemplate, with a mixture of childish curiosity and sentimental pity, the corpse of the king whom he had fought and conquered. Eugène Delacroix had treated this subject in a sketch, in which Cromwell, at the funeral of Charles, gazes in quiet contempt upon the weak monarch who had not known how to keep either his crown or his head. As a work of art this little water-colour is worth ten times as much as Delaroche’s great, long-meditated, carefully executed painting. From the very beginning he had no sense for the passionate or dramatic. From the first day, had the tailor who prepared costumes struck work, his artistic greatness would have fallen away to nothing; from the commencement he produced nothing but large, clumsily conceived illustrations for historical novels. Planché pointed out long ago that all the costumes are glaringly new, that all the victims look as if they had got themselves up for a masked ball, that this sort of painting is much too clean and pretty to give the argument the appearance of probability. Théophile Gautier, who had proclaimed the powerful originality of Delacroix, fumed with rage against these “saliva-polished representations, this art for the half-educated, disguised in false, Philistine realism, this art of historical illustration for the familiar use of the bourgeois.” To rank timorous, half-hearted talent higher than reckless and awe-inspiring genius—this was in Gautier’s eyes the sin against the Holy Ghost, and he sprang like a tiger upon the popularity of talents such as these. He could, as he himself said, have swallowed Delaroche, skin, hair, and all, without remorse; meanwhile, the public raised him upon the shield as its declared favourite.

He won the intellectual middle class over to himself with a rush, as he industriously went on rummaging in manuals of French and English history for royal murders and battle-deaths of kings. With his “Richelieu,” “Mazarin,” and “Strafford,” but especially with his “Execution of Lady Jane Grey” and “Murder of the Duke of Guise in the Castle of Blois,” he made hits such as no other French artist of his time could put to his account. Just then, in his youthful work, The States-General at Blois, Ludovic Vitet had put the murder of the Duke of Guise upon the stage. Nothing could be better-timed than to transform this operatic scene into colour. The historians of civilisation admired the historical accuracy of the courtiers’ dress, all the upholstery of the room, the lofty mantelpiece, the carved wardrobes, the praying-stool with the altar-piece over it, the canopy-bed with its curtains of red silk embroidered with lilies and the king’s initials in gold. Playgoers compared the scene with that which they had witnessed on the stage in Vitet’s piece, and the comparison was not unfavourable to the painter. For Delaroche, in order to be as far as possible in keeping with the stage representation, was accustomed to commission Jollivet, the chief mechanician of the Opera House, to prepare for him small models of rooms, in which he then arranged his lay-figures.

That is the further great difference between Delaroche and Delacroix, between the vagrant painter of history and the artist. The latter had the gift of the inner vision, and only painted things which had intellectually laid hold upon him and had assumed firm shape in his imagination. It was while the organ was playing the Dies iræ that he saw his “Pietà” in a vision—that mighty work which in power of expression almost approaches Rembrandt. “Is not Tasso’s life most interesting?” he writes. “You weep for him, swaying restlessly from side to side on your chair, when you read the story of his life; your eyes assume a threatening aspect, and you grind your teeth with rage.” Such passionate emotion was wholly unknown to Delaroche; he painted deeds of murder with the wildness of Mieris. Delacroix everywhere grasps what is essential, and gives to every scene its poetical or religious character. A couple of lines are for him sufficient means wherewith to produce a deep impression. In presence of his pictures one does not think of costumes; one sees everywhere passion overflowing with love and anger, and is intoxicated with the harmony of sentiment and colour. Delaroche, like Thierry, had merely a predilection for the historical anecdote which, dramatically pointed, keeps the beholder in suspense, or else, simply narrated, amuses him. The colour and spirit of events had no power over his imagination; he merely apprehended them with a cool understanding, and put them laboriously together in keeping with it. Delacroix sought counsel from nature; but in the moment of creation, in front of the canvas, he could not bear direct contact with it. “The influence of the model,” he wrote, “lowers the painter’s tone; a stupid fellow makes you stupid.” Delaroche draped his models as was required, made them posture and pull faces, and while he was painting, laboriously screwed them up to the pathos demanded by the situation. Such a method of procedure must necessarily become theatrical.

Just as in his historical pictures he endeavoured to transform Delacroix’s passion into operatic scenes, so he perfected his position as a man of compromise by imitating the academic style in his “Hemicycle.” Here it was Ingres’ laurels which robbed him of his sleep. The fame which this picture has acquired is mainly due to Henriquel Dupont’s fine engraving. It does not attain to any kind of solemn or serious effect. One might imagine one’s self in some entirely prosaic waiting-room, where all the great men of every age have agreed to meet together for no matter what ceremonial purpose; one sees there a carefully chosen collection of costumes of all epochs, with well-studied but expressionless portraits of the leaders of civilisation. Here also Delaroche has not risen above respectable mediocrity, and his characteristics remain, as ever, thoroughly middle-class.

COUTURE.THE LOVE OF GOLD.

His likeness of Napoleon is perhaps that which shows most clearly how paltry a soul this painter possessed. It is not Devastation in human shape, not the man in whom his officers saw the “God of War” and of whom Mme. de Staël said, “There is nothing human left in him.” The intellect of that Corsican, with his great thoughts striding as in seven-leagued boots, thoughts each of which would give any single German writer material for the rest of his life, was hidden to the inquisitive glance of a painter who had never seen in the whole of human history anything more than a series of petty episodes. And one who is not able to paint a good portrait is not justified in intruding into other regions of art.

For similar reasons the religious paintings with which he busied himself in his last days have likewise enriched art with no new element. They are a Philistine remodelling of the Biblical drama, in the same style as his historical pictures. In the end he appears himself to have become conscious how little laborious compilations of this kind have in common with art, and since with the best will in the world he could produce nothing better than he had painted in the thirties, he lost all pleasure in his vocation and abandoned himself to gloom and pessimism, from which death set him free in 1856.

Thomas Couture, who after Delaroche was most in vogue as a teacher in the fifties, was of greater importance as an artist, and in his “Romans of the Decadence” produced a work which, from the point of view of the Juste-milieu, is worthy of consideration even to-day. He was a remarkable man. His parents, shoemakers at Senlis, seem to have regarded the thick-headed, slowly developing boy as a kind of idiot, and are said to have treated him with no excessive gentleness. He was sent away from school because he could not understand the simplest things, and studied without success in the studios of Gros and Delaroche. And yet, after he had made his début in the Salon of 1843 with the “Troubadour,” a fine picture in the style of Devéria, his “Orgie Romaine” of 1847 made him at one stroke the most celebrated painter in France. Pupils thronged to him from every quarter of the globe, and he left a deep and enduring impression upon every one of them. A very short, corpulent, broad-shouldered, thick-set, proletarian figure, with thick disorderly hair, a blouse, a short pipe, and a gruff manner, he used to stride through the lines of his pupils, who regarded him with wonder on account of his ability as a teacher and his remarkable powers.