Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
DELAUNAY.DIANA.DELAUNAY.BOYS SINGING.

Toudouze painted the “Fall of Sodom” with a dozen copper-coloured Abyssinians, larger than life, rolling on the ground in convulsions, while Lot’s wife, dying and half-consumed by fire, gnashes her teeth as she raises the corpse of her child over her head. In a picture of George Becker’s were represented the corpses of King Saul’s sons, delivered over by David to the Gibeonites, hanging alongside of each other in a dark forest scene on a cross-shaped framework, like butcher’s meat from the shambles. Their mother stands beneath the scaffold, swinging a knotted club to protect the corpses from an antediluvian vulture. In a painting by Bréhan, Cyaxares, King of the Medes, gives a banquet, and by way of dessert has his guests the Scythian leaders massacred by his mercenaries. In one by Matthieu, Heliogabalus has hit upon a yet happier idea, for at the conclusion of the meal he sets half-starved lions and tigers upon his guests. Aimé Morot depicted in a large picture “The Wives of the Ambrones” in the battle of Aquæ Sextiæ. They are hurling themselves like a horde of furies upon the Roman horsemen who are attacking the camp. Half-naked, or entirely so, with their hair flowing behind them, they throw themselves upon the Romans, catch hold of the swords by the blade, tear their eyes out, and are trampled beneath the horses’ hoofs. Especially popular were the voluptuous and cruel wild beasts from the menagerie of the Cæsars. Nero in particular suited the atmosphere of the period; his ghost haunted the novel, the stage, sculpture, and painting, and there seemed to be a general agreement to immortalise him and the morally monstrous personality of Locusta. In a picture by Sylvestre he is represented with florid cheeks, glowing with fat, and gloating over the mortal agony of a slave lying on the ground, upon whom Locusta has tested the poison intended for Britannicus. Aublet varied the same theme by making a negro lad the victim, while several corpses of negroes lying in the background suggest that the Emperor was not quite satisfied with Locusta’s first experiments. Round Nero, the more entirely to fill his magnificent Golden House, the charming shades of his congenial comrades in crime weave their flitting dances. Pelez depicted the strangling of the Emperor Commodus by the gladiator to whom the Empress had entrusted the task, and painted with tender interest the marks caused by suffusion of blood which the athlete’s hand had left upon the unhappy prince’s neck. A very familiar figure is that of Seneca, with distorted features, uttering his last words of wisdom while the blood pours from his opened veins. After the madness of the Cæsars comes the atrocious history of the Merovingian kings. Luminais, the painter of Gauls and barbarians, represented in his large picture “Les Énervés de Jumièges” the sons of King Clovis II, who, after the muscles of their knees have been destroyed by fire, are set helplessly adrift in a boat on the Seine. Then followed torture scenes from the time of the Inquisition, and saints burning at the stake. The conception which this post-Romantic generation had of the East was of cruelty and voluptuousness mixed, a thing pieced together out of white bodies, purple streams of blood, and brown backgrounds. Here, the favourite Sultana contemplates the severed head of her rival, which stares at her out of its glassy eyes; there, eunuchs are making ready to strangle a woman condemned to death. In works such as these the genius, powerful in composition, of Benjamin Constant, celebrates its triumphs.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
DELAUNAY.   MADAME TOULMOUCHE.

Yet, notwithstanding all the means of allurement furnished by such themes, these paintings almost invariably fail to produce the anticipated effect. Not that it is the brutality of the subjects that makes them unpleasant. Art in all times has busied itself with the horrible. How voluptuously does Dante depict the horrors of Hell! What imagination was ever peopled with figures more dreadful than those conceived by Shakespeare? Cruelty and death have a poetry of their own: why should Art prudishly abstain from depicting them? Only, if the result is to be a good picture, the subject must be in strict congruity with the talent employed upon it, and in the majority of these works this conformity is lacking. The subjects alone had become more savage and brutal. In the manner of treatment there is none of the wild effect which the Neapolitans of the seventeenth century gave to their scenes of martyrdom. Spirits truly wild, like Delacroix and Caravaggio, are not to be met with every day. The painters who launched out upon these bloodthirsty themes took absolutely no inward “enjoyment in tragical subjects,” but simply painted them as if after precepts learned at school. And as they were also deficient in that knowledge of nature which is acquired only by direct study of life, not one of them was in a position to give to his historical scenes that naturalistic weight which alone gives to such themes a character of convincing probability. True, these pictures compel respect on account of their unusual ability. These naked bodies, twisting themselves in the most varying postures of pain, give proof by their correct draughtsmanship of the most painstaking anatomical studies, yet after all they are nothing more than inverted Laocoöns. The Classical spirit haunts them still, and a discordant effect is produced when subjects so full of wild passion are tranquilly depicted according to cold conventional rules. Over all these figures and scenes, even the most horrible, lies the veil of a Classical embellishment, which deprives them altogether of that directness which lays hold on the imagination. The pictures are good studies of costume, and make an admirable impression by their resplendent glow of colour; they are show-pieces, brilliant stage effects, as happily conceived as any of Sardou’s. But the recipe for their production is still that of the school of Delaroche: avoidance of all extremes, generalised forms, careful composition, crude lukewarmness, or the affectation of daring. Scarce one of these painters has given to his wild subject an equal wildness of treatment; not one has raised himself from the paltry level of Delaroche to the artistic height of Delacroix.

L’Art.
SYLVESTRE.LOCUSTA TESTING IN NERO’S PRESENCE POISON PREPARED FOR BRITANNICUS.

Laurens alone, surnamed by his comrades “the Benedictine,” because his predilection was for forgotten themes from ecclesiastical history, constitutes in a certain sense an exception to the rule. He too belongs to the group of historical painters whose theory is that a picture should represent an historical fact with absolute accuracy. But he is more masculine than Delaroche. His personages are truer to nature, or, if one will, less banal; the general effect is warmer and fuller of life; he has a greater power of attracting attention. There is nothing great in his work, but there is no cold pedantry: the art of combination is more adroit, so that one is less aware of calculation, and may sometimes observe a grim earnestness. He really loves the terrible, while the others merely made use of it for the manufacture of what are nothing more than tableaux. To the Inquisition especially he was indebted for notable successes, and at times he was able to depict its dark scenes of horror in a very subtle manner. When he heaps up, in front of a church, corpses to which the priests have refused burial; when he disinters popes in order to place them in the dock before their accusers; when he opens coffins to reveal the decomposed features of some erstwhile beauty, he sets even blunted nerves on the stretch; and as he has therein attained the goal he had proposed to himself, his art is not without its justification.

L’Art.
LUMINAIS.LES ÉNERVÉS DE JUMIÈGES.

Among the younger generation, Rochegrosse, an artist of daring genius, appeared for a while to have taken to such themes by free choice, and not solely through the traditions of the studio. One seemed to observe in his works a truly emotional temperament flaming behind the trammels of conventionality, and was almost inclined to rank him among the spirits of storm and stress who trace their descent from Delacroix. After his first picture, in which “Vitellius” is represented dragged through the streets of Rome and ill treated by the populace, he achieved success with a scene taken from the destruction of Troy. Here “Andromache,” raging with impotent anguish, is struggling against a number of Greeks who have snatched her child from her arms to throw it down from the ramparts. This brutal strife is depicted with the highest naturalistic power. Neither the heroine nor the warriors belong to the ideal figures of the style of compromise. Andromache is of a fulness of form almost approaching corpulence, and the Greeks remind one of Indians on the warpath. Mangled corpses complete the picture, and on the bare wall to the left, over the stairs, hang dead bodies abandoned to corruption and the birds of prey. In his third picture he took for his theme the horrors of the barbarous and ferocious Peasants’ War in the fourteenth century, as Mérimée had described them in his book entitled La Jacquerie; and his work is all the more effective as there lurks in the subject a certain grim modern touch which reminds one of the Social Democracy, of the insurrection of the Commune, of something which might happen even to-day. The insurgents break into the hall, where the ladies of the castle have taken refuge with their children. One alone stands erect, the grandmother in her nun-like widow’s dress, and stretches her arms behind her with a gesture of energy, as if to shield the younger ones at her back. The foremost intruder ironically takes off his cap. Another lifts up on his pike the fair-haired, bleeding head of the lord of the castle; a third has similarly transfixed his reeking heart. Others are pressing in from without, breaking the window panes with their weapons, which are yet dripping with blood. Beneath frightful figures are seen, the most horrible that of a woman standing on the window-sill, her hands propped upon her knees, gazing with insane laughter upon the mortal terror of the aristocratic ladies.

Baschet.
LAURENS.THE INTERDICT.

In his subsequent pictures Rochegrosse did not go so far afield. His “Murder of Julius Cæsar” was a work of art in white upon white, full of crude imagination, with white walls, white reflections of light, white togas, and dark red blotches of blood. His grass-eating “Nebuchadnezzar” proved that from the sublime to the ridiculous there is often only a step. Between times he painted archæological trifles for ladies of literary culture, such as the “Battle of the Sparrows” of 1890; but in his great “Fall of Babylon” he has proved once more what he can do. No doubt it is not a fine work: it is a mere decorative piece, but an astonishingly spirited performance. The scene is the palace of the Babylonian kings, the decorative construction of which the recovered monuments and the recent scientific investigations had rendered it possible to reproduce. Rochegrosse consulted with the zeal of an archæologist all the treasures of the Louvre and the British Museum,—Assyrian friezes, ornaments, and costumes,—and then set forth in these surroundings the famous banquet at which the Prophet Daniel explained the words “Mene, Tekel, Peres.” The day begins to break; in the distance the army of the Medes advancing to attack the palace has burst open the gate; Belshazzar leaves the table in terror, and takes to his weapons; the naked women, still intoxicated, stretch their limbs, or remain lazily indifferent lying on the ground; around is a dazzling confusion of mosaics, of polychrome architecture, of fantastic images of animals, of glittering tapestries shot with many hues and pleasing to the eye; of flowers, vases, fruits, pastry, and nude bodies of women. The grey light of morning strives to overcome that of the half-extinguished lamps, and rests with leaden weight upon the gigantic still-life below.