LEFÉBURE.TRUTH.
(By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of thecopyright.)
L’Art.
HENNER.   SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS.

William Bouguereau, who industriously learnt all that can be assimilated by a man destitute of artistic feeling but possessing a cultured taste, reveals even more clearly, in his feeble mawkishness, the fatal decline of the old schools of convention. He has been compared to Octave Feuillet, who also never extricated himself from the scented atmosphere of distinguished society; but the comparison is unjust to Feuillet. Bouguereau is in his Madonna-painting a perfumed Ary Scheffer, in his Venus-pictures a greater Hamon; and in his perfectly finished and faultless stencilling style of beauty he became from year to year more and more insupportable. His art is a kind of painting on porcelain on a large scale, and he gives to his Madonnas and his nymphs the same smooth rosy tints, the same unreal universalised forms, until at last they become a juste-milieu between Raphael’s “Galatea” and the wax models one sees in hairdressers’ shops. Only in one sense can his religious painting be called modern; it is an elegant lie, like the whole of the Second Empire.

Close by Bouguereau’s “Venus” in the Luxembourg hangs the well-known colossal figure of a beautiful nude woman with unnaturally over-developed thighs, which by the shining mirror in its uplifted right hand proclaims itself to be “Truth.” Jules Lefébure, the painter of this picture, is also completely a slave to tradition; he came from Cogniet’s studio, and won the Prix de Rome in 1861. But he at least possesses more taste, elegance, and character; his painting of the nude is more distinguished, truer, and more powerful. He is in the broader sense of the word a worshipper of nature, and was so in his youth especially. His “Sleeping Girl” of 1865 and his “Femme couchée” of 1868 are smooth and honest studies from the nude, of delicate, sure draughtsmanship, and have therefore not become antiquated even to-day. Unfortunately he did not find this masculine accent again, when at a later time he grouped ideal figures together to make pictures of them. His “Diana surprised” of 1879 was a very clever composition of well-ordered lines, possessing even fine details, especially one or two charming heads, but as a whole it is lifeless and uninteresting. Like Bouguereau, he lacks power, and, notwithstanding his distinction and his capacity for arrangement, he is not painter enough to be truthfully entitled a “painter of the nude.”

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
HENNER.THE SLEEPER.
PAUL BAUDRY.

In general, French art, however willingly it took to this sphere during the period we are considering, is rich indeed in well-drawn documents, but poor in works which, considered as painting, can bear the most distant comparison with Fragonard and Boucher. The Revolution had put an end to the joyous flesh-painting of French art. At the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century the painter of tender and life-like flesh-colour was not the reformer David, but the despised Prudhon. The former found his ideal in statues, and turned flesh to stone. The latter, a direct descendant of Correggio, gave expression to life with a tender mellowness. Ingres was again, like David, a very mediocre flesh-painter, and the Romanticists entered this sphere but seldom. Delacroix indeed has in his “Massacre” a couple of excellent touches, but they are isolated phenomena in his work. After 1850 the approved system was to give nude female figures the appearance of being made of terra-cotta, biscuit, or ivory. The forgotten art of painting velvety, soft flesh, and of making it vibrate in light, had to be learned over again, and to this meritorious task Henner devoted himself—the modern Correggio from Alsace, who stands to Cabanel in the same relation as Prudhon to David. Even Henner in his later days has become very much a mannerist, and has done some very bad work. To-day he prefers a heavy, pasty, buttery style of painting, with faces which look as if they had been pickled in oil, and have an unreal expression; his contrasts of light and shade, once so delicate, have become raw and forced. Yet beside Cabanel he still appears the true poet of female flesh-painting, the dreamy graceful depicter of refined sensuality. Prudhon’s delicate ideal and his language of vibrating tenderness are revived in Henner. His “Nymph resting” in the Luxembourg has the same soft morbidezza, the same delightful mystery, in which Prudhon before him had enveloped the sweetness of smiling faces and the beauty of female forms. He too chose the Lombards as his guides. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1858, he sent to the Salon of 1865 a “Susanna,” which already shows his ability as a flesh-painter and his relationship to Correggio. And a Lombard he has remained all his life. One could with difficulty find a more delicate and smooth study of the nude than his “Biblis” of 1867.

Since that time another tendency highly characteristic of Henner has shown itself in his work. In his endeavour to render the tint and tender softness of flesh as delicately as possible, he sought at the same time for light which should intensify the clear tone of the nude body. These he found in that time of evening, which one might call Henner’s hour, when the landscape, overshadowed by the twilight, gradually loses colour, and only a small blue space in the sky or a silent forest-lake still for a moment preserves the reflection of vanishing daylight. In this tranquil harmony of nature after sunset, the white pallor of the human body seems to have absorbed all the daylight and to be giving it forth again, while the surrounding landscape is already merging into colourless shadow. This is Henner’s “second manner,” and he raised it into a system. Every year since then there has appeared in the Salon one of those pale nymphs, standing out so mistily against the dark green of an evening landscape, or one of those Virgilian eclogues, in which the gloaming rests caressingly upon nude white bodies. And by this method of painting flesh and of throwing light upon it, Henner has won for himself an important place in modern art.

Paul Baudry, the powerful decorator of the Grand Opera House at Paris, marks the close of this tendency. In his work the endeavours of all those talented artists who sought to found a new school of “ideal painting” upon the basis of the study of the Italian Classicists came to a crowning height; and at the same time Baudry took a further step onward, in that he vivified the classical scheme with a yet more marked cast of “modernity.”

His first picture, on the murder of Marat, was feeble. What David had executed smoothly and forcibly in his dead “Marat,” Baudry spoiled in his “Charlotte Corday.” The bath, the night-table with the inkstand on it, the map on the wall, and all the fittings of the room, are painted with the greatest finish, but the young heroine in her petrified idealism has no more life in her than there is in the furniture.