Baschet.
COUTURE.THE ROMANS OF THE DECADENCE.

Yet, when a few years had elapsed, no one heard of him again. After his “Love of Gold” and a couple of portraits, he felt that he was unfruitful, and gave up the battle. “The Falconer,” an excellent picture, with charming qualities of colour, was the last work to give any proof of Couture’s technical mastery. He fell out with Napoleon, who wished to employ him; made many enemies by his writings, especially among the followers of Delacroix, whom he criticised beyond measure; and finally, embittered, and abandoning all artistic work, he buried himself in his country place at Villers de Bel, near Paris. Thither Americans and Englishmen used to come to order pictures of him, and were much astonished to hear that the old gardener’s assistant, as they took him to be, sitting on the grass and mending shoes or old kettles, was Couture. The news of his death in 1879 caused general astonishment; it was as if one long buried had come to life again. It had meanwhile become evident that even his “Romans of the Decadence” was only a work of compromise, the whole novelty of which consisted in forcing the results attained by the Romantic school in colouring into that bed of Procrustes, the formulæ of idealism. The work is undoubtedly very noble in colouring, but what would not Delacroix have made of such a theme! or Rubens, indeed, whose Flemish “Kermesse” hangs not far from it in the Louvre. Couture’s figures have only “absolute beauty,” nothing individual; far less do they exhibit the unnerved sensuality of Romans of the decline engaged in their orgies. They are merely posing, and find their classical postures wearisome. They are not revelling, they do not love; they are only busied in filling up the space so as to produce an agreeable effect, and in disposing themselves in picturesque groups. Even the faces have been vulgarised by idealism: everything is as noble as it is without character. There is something of the hermaphrodite in Couture’s work. His art was male in its subjects, female in its results. His “Decadence” was the work of a decadent, a decadent of Classicism.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
COUTURE.THE TROUBADOUR.
(By permission of M. Charles Sedelmeyer, the owner of the picture.)

CHAPTER XII

THE POST-ROMANTIC GENERATION

Four years after Couture painted his “Roman Orgy,” Napoleon III ascended the throne, and the Parisian orgy began. It was a remarkable spectacle that the capital offered in those days—a spectacle of fairy-like, flashing and sparkling splendour. Even to-day, when Republican Paris endeavours as much as possible to obliterate every memory of the Empire, Napoleon’s spirit lives in the external appearance of the city and hovers over every conspicuous point. Augustus might say that he had found his capital a city of plaster and lime, and left it one of stone and bronze; Napoleon has the right to maintain that he raised palaces where there had been barracks.