His “Pearl and Wave,” which is hung in the Luxembourg close to Cabanel’s and Bouguereau’s “Birth of Venus,” gave proof of progress. A deep-blue wave, towering on high and crowned with foam, has washed a charming woman ashore like a costly pearl. She seems to have just awakened out of slumber, and her roguish, moistly gleaming eyes are smiling. Saucily she leans forward her fair-haired head under her bended arms, and stretches out in easy motion her youthfully slender yet fully proportioned body. Bouguereau’s and even Cabanel’s female beauties are waxen and spoiled by retouching, but Baudry’s Cypris is a living being, and preserves some of the individual charm of the model.

Baschet.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
BAUDRY.CHARLOTTE CORDAY.BAUDRY.TRUTH.

It is this breath of realism which gives their attractiveness to Baudry’s pictures in the Paris Opera House. He cannot indeed be ranked as a truly great master of decorative painting, as the Fragonard of the nineteenth century; he was too eclectic. The five years, from 1851 to 1856, which as winner of the Prix de Rome he spent in the Villa Medici, were the happiest of his life. He saw in the Italian galleries neither Holbein nor Velasquez, neither Rembrandt nor Botticelli nor Caravaggio. He saw nothing and revered nothing save the pure tradition of the Cinquecento, which was to him the Alpha and Omega of art. He dreamed of great decorative works which should place him on an equality with those old masters. It was therefore joyful news to him when, at the suggestion of his old comrade Charles Garnier, he was commissioned to adorn the Opera House. Baudry was then thirty-five years old, in possession of his full powers, and yet he thought it necessary to go back to Italy to interrogate the masters of the Renaissance anew. For a full year he worked ten hours daily in the Sistine Chapel. As soon as he knew Michael Angelo by heart, he betook himself to England to copy Raphael’s cartoons, and then in 1870 for the third time to Italy, before he felt himself capable of covering the five hundred square metres of canvas. The task took him four years, and when it was exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1874, prior to being placed in its final resting-place, there was general astonishment at a single man’s power to produce so much and such great work.

To-day his praise cannot be sounded so high. The place to which he aspired, by the side of the great masters of the Renaissance, will not fall to Baudry’s lot; he is hardly to be reckoned even among the great French masters of the nineteenth century. To rise even so far he lacked the first and most essential gift—originality. He was a model pupil in his youth, and a pupil he remained all his life. He always saw nature through the medium of art, and never had the courage to take a fresh breath and plunge into its fountain of youth. Between him and reality there was ever the prism of the old pictures that he loved; brush in hand, he devoted himself, turn by turn, and with equal enthusiasm, to Michael Angelo, Titian, Correggio, Bronzino, and even Ingres. As soon as he returned from Italy for the first time, as holder of the Prix de Rome, he exhibited several pictures which were altogether Titian in colouring, altogether Raphael in style. Each of them, even the most important, calls some other painting to one’s mind. His “Fortune and the Child” is a variation upon Titian’s “Divine and Earthly Love”; his “Death of a Vestal Virgin” a reminiscence of the “Death of Peter Martyr”; his “Warrior” in the Opera House is the painted double of Rude’s “Marseillaise.” How many gestures, attitudes, and figures could, by a close analysis, be shown to be borrowed in turn from Veronese, Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, or Raphael! His works are a synthesis of the favourite forms of the Cinquecento; they are the testament of the Cinquecento masters. He was a Parisian Primaticcio, a posthumous member of the old school of Fontainebleau. In him was embodied the last smile of the Renaissance, the results of which he assimilated and reduced to formulæ. He lacked creative imagination, and his pictures are wanting in individual character. The nervous movement and sinewy stretchings of his young men’s bodies would never have been painted but for Donatello’s “David.” Of his women, the powerful and muscular are descended from Michael Angelo’s “Eve,” the more slender and elegant come down from Rosso. His palette, with its blue and white tints, is bright and flowery, but it is no less artificial than his composition.

Baschet.
BAUDRY.THE PEARL AND THE WAVE.
(By permission of Mr. W. H. Stewart, the owner of the picture.)

Nevertheless, it would be unjust to speak of Baudry’s work as merely faded Classicism, or as Michael Angelo and water. He was not merely a pupil of the Italians; he contributed something Parisian of his own, something pretty, mannered, refined, graceful, seductive, and smiling, and felt himself independent enough to give to his conventional figures this sprightly addition of genuinely modern nervosity. The birth-certificates of his young men were drawn up in Florence, those of his young women in Rome, three hundred and fifty years ago; yet there is in the latter something of the Parisienne, in the former something of the modern dandies who know the fevered life of the Boulevards. In his delightful art there is French wit, there is a touch of the piquant, of the feminine, of the ambiguous, which almost amounts to indecency. One can still recognise the charming model in the figures of his dancers and Muses; you can see that Music’s or Poetry’s waist was laced up in a close-fitting corset before she sat for the picture. One may meet these women at any moment, trailing their dresses along the sidewalks of the Boulevards, or riding negligently in their carriages back from the Bois de Boulogne. And still more modern than the wasp-like form of the body is the character of the face and the smile on the lips. Thus Baudry has given a new shade to the manner in which one can obtain inspiration from the old masters. To all that he borrowed he added a personal and charming note. He possesses an elegance and grace which are neither Correggio’s, nor Raphael’s, nor Veronese’s, but French and Parisian. His Muses and Cupids, his “Comedy” and his “Judgment of Paris,” are documents of the French spirit in the nineteenth century, and—together with a few small and fine portraits on a green or blue background à la Clouet, among which that of his friend About takes the first rank—they will always assure him an important place in the history of French art.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
BAUDRY.CYBELE.
(By permission of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, the owner of the picture.)
Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
BAUDRY.LEDA.BAUDRY.EDMOND ABOUT.

Another artist who worked with Baudry at the decoration of the Grand Opera House was Élie Delaunay, who painted in a hall leading out of the foyer three large pictures on the myths of Apollo, Orpheus, and Amphion, and was at that time less appreciated than he deserved. Delaunay was born in the same year as Baudry, and, like him, was a Breton. In their genius also they are very similar. He shared in Baudry’s admiration of the masters of the Renaissance, but his worship was less for the Cinquecento than the fourteenth century. It was in Flandrin’s studio that he prepared himself for his entry into the École des Beaux Arts. His first picture, in 1849, “Christ healing a Leper,” was, with respect to its Roman manner of conceiving form and its bronze-like firm draughtsmanship, still entirely in the style of Ingres. It was not till he went to Italy in 1856, as winner of the Prix de Rome, that he turned from the works of the Roman school to those of the early Renaissance masters, to whom he was attracted by their rigorous study of form and their manly severity. His sketch books were filled with drawings after Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Pollajualo, Ghirlandajo, Botticelli, Gozzoli, and Signorelli. It was just at this time that French sculpture was making its significant revolt against the antique and in favour of Donatello, Verrocchio, and Della Robbia; that the Prix de Florence was founded, and that Paul Dubois’ “Florentine Singer” appeared. Delaunay became as a pupil of the Quattrocento masters one of the greatest draughtsmen of the century, a healthy Naturalist in the sense in which the Primitives were so, with a concise and firm power of design which only Ingres amongst modern French painters shares with him. The bodies of his nude male figures are strained in nerve and muscle like those of Donatello; they have the essential elegance and powerful rhythm of Dubois’ statues. Even the two pictures which he sent from Italy to the Salon, “The Nymph Hesperia fleeing from the Pursuit of Æsacus,” and the “Lesson on the Flute” in the Museum at Nantes, were works of great taste and sincerity, studied with respectful and patient devotion to nature, without striving after sentimental effect and without conventional reminiscences. When in 1861 he returned from Rome, he completed the frescoes in the church of St. Nicholas in Nantes, which, in their strict severity, remind one of Signorelli’s Cycle at Orvieto. In 1865 appeared in the Salon his “Plague at Rome,” which afterwards passed into the Luxembourg, and which is not devoid of tragic accent. In that collection hangs also his “Diana” of 1872, a proud nude figure drawn with firm and manly lines, and full of grave dignity, after the manner of Feuerbach. At the same time as his “Diana” he exhibited his portrait of a Mlle. Lechat, seated like one of Botticelli’s Madonnas in front of a trellis of roses—in the style of the old masters, and yet modern, naturalistic, and in excellent taste. Thenceforth he took his place among the first portrait painters of his time. There is an inexorable love of truth, a something bronze-like and stony in his pictures, finished as they are with the firm impress of medals. Instances of this may be found in his fine portrait of Mme. Toulmouche, whom he has represented in a white summer costume, with black gloves, seated in the midst of cheerful landscape; and also in several male heads drawn with that firmness of modelling which Bronzino in his best days alone possessed. After the completion of the Opera paintings he finished, in 1876, twelve decorative pictures for the great hall of the Council of State in the Palais Royal. His last works, which remained unfinished, were designs for the Pantheon—scenes from the life of St. Geneviève—in which he followed in the footsteps of the great fresco colourists of Upper Italy, Gaudenzio Ferrari and Pordenone. Élie Delaunay was no original genius, and as a pupil of the painters of the Quattrocento has not enriched the history of art in any way, but he stands forth, in a time which cared for nothing but external effect, as a very loyal, serious, and honest artist, whose works all bear the stamp of a healthy, manly spirit.

Though in the works of these masters the Classicism of Ingres passes away, in part enfeebled and in part imbued with modern elements and vivified by a more direct study of nature, yet on the whole Paul Delaroche dominates this period also. Historical painting takes the highest places in the Salon, and shows itself altered only in this respect, that, instead of Delaroche’s tameness of style, we have sensational subjects, arguments which revel in scenes of horror and display of corpses. Literature had already entered upon this path. Even Mérimée in his last novel, Lokis, was clearly the forerunner of that tendency in taste which Taine characterised by the words, “Depuis dix ans une nuance de brutalité complète l’élégance.” Flaubert himself, in his Salambo, was to some extent carried away by the stream. Consider, for instance, the descriptions of Gisko crawling, a maimed, shapeless stump, out of the ditch into Matho’s tent, and of how his head is sawn off; of the tortures inflicted by the Carthaginian people upon the captured Matho; or of how the mercenaries are starved to death in the rocky valley where they were imprisoned. Vying with this tendency of literature, painting attained in its chosen themes an over-excitation which reached the limits of the possible. While Delaroche had only in a very timid manner led the way to the tragedies of history, the younger artists hunted up all the most horrible deeds of blood to be found in the great Book of Martyrs of the story of man, and elaborated them on gigantic canvases. It would be quite impossible to draw up a catalogue of all the murders at that time perpetrated by French art. They might be arranged under various headings, as biblical, historical, political murders; murders in connection with robbery, and murders arising out of revenge; with subdivisions corresponding to the means employed, as poison, the dagger, the halter, broadsword and rapier, the bowstring, strangling, burning, etc. This was the time when, on account of this dominance of the “Genre féroce,” the public used to call the Salon the Morgue.