Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.L’Art.
REGNAULT.SALOME.REGNAULT.THE MOORISH HEADSMAN.
(By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright.)

If some portion of Delacroix’s wild genius appears to have descended upon Rochegrosse, yet was Henri Regnault, as a colourist, the greatest of Delacroix’s heirs—even allowing for the exaggerated renown which came to him in France, from the fact that he was the last to fall in the war of 1870. His portrait of “General Prim” of 1869, which, rejected by the sitter, came eventually to the Louvre, is somewhat reminiscent of Velasquez and Delacroix, but is nevertheless, with those of Géricault, amongst the finest equestrian portraits of the century. In his “Salome” he has depicted a black-haired girl with twitching feet, resting upon a stool after her dance, and contemplating with the cruelty of a tigress the platter which she holds ready for the head of John the Baptist, while her glowing red mouth with its dazzling teeth smiles like that of an innocent child. In her he has embodied with infernal subtlety the demon of voluptuous wantonness, and has composed a symphony in yellow of seductive and dazzling charm. She is attired in transparent gold-inwoven robes, which have a caressing congruity with the resplendent texture of the background.

His “Moorish Headsman” is a symphony in red. In his pale rose-red garb the tall Moor stands in majestic dignity, wipes a few drops of blood from the blade of his sword, and glances with careless indifference—a type of the dreamy cruelty of Oriental fatalism—without anger and without pity, without hatred and without satisfaction, upon the severed head with its distorted eyes, which, rolling down a couple of steps, has stained the white marble with purple patches of blood. “I will cause the genuine Moors to rise again, at once rich and great, terrible and voluptuous,”—so the voice of Delacroix speaks out of this picture by Regnault. His paintings, like those of his master, have the effect of splendid Oriental costumes; they are shot with every hue, they lighten and glisten, they are inwoven with magnificent arabesques of gold and silver, with sparkling embroideries and precious stones. The “Orlando Furioso” of art lives once more in these fascinating harmonies, in the power, splendour, and lustre of the colouring. Just as Baudry at the close of the Classical period produced in his paintings for the Opera House the noblest work after the idealist formulæ, so Regnault in his “Salome” and his “Prim” has completed the last defiant works of the formulæ of Romanticism.

We have thought it advisable to follow this development of the art of painting down to its close, just as in treating of the older periods we have proceeded, not upon chronological principles, but upon those of historical style. Now that the old art has been followed to the grave, it will be all the easier, later on, to perceive clearly how the new arose slowly out of its invisible depths. And as France since 1830 has become the high school of art for other nations, those paths have at the same time been indicated along which the art of painting was proceeding during these years in other countries.

HENRI REGNAULT.GENERAL PRÍM.

CHAPTER XIII

THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL OF PAINTING IN BELGIUM

Belgian art had gone through the same history as French art since David. When the French patriarch came to Brussels to pass the remainder of his days there in honour, he found the ground already well prepared. The Classicists had long since made their way into art, and the old Flemish tradition was dying out. Lens and Herreyns are the last colourists in the sense of the good old time, but they are associated with the good old time only through the qualities of their colouring. As a degenerate descendant of Van Dyck, Lens painted with a feeble brush sweet, insipid, sugary work for boudoirs and prie-dieu chairs; and had lost his feeling for nature to such a degree that he gave the aged the same flesh tint as children, and men the full breasts of hermaphrodites. Herreyns, appointed director of the Antwerp Academy in 1800, was more masculine; and although likewise conventional and wanting in individuality, he was none the less a painter of breadth and boldness. He was most enraptured with a model with a copper-coloured skin and knotted muscles, or with pretty and ruddy children, and fat nurses with swelling breasts. This bold worker embodied in his own person the art of a great epoch, but did nothing to renew it. These painters, indeed, only mixed for a new hash the crumbs fallen from the table at which giants had once sat. They looked backwards instead of around them, and lighted their modest little lamp at the sun of Rubens. France was the only country where art followed the great changes of culture in the age. Hence Flemish painting had been crossed with French elements long before David’s arrival. And Paris was for the artists of 1800 what Italy had been for those of 1600. They made their pilgrimage in troops to the studio of Suvée, who had originally come from Bruges, but had lived since 1771 on the Seine. There, and there only, recipes for the composition of great figure pictures were to be obtained. And thus art completed what the Empire had in a political sense begun. The artistic barriers fell as the geographical ones had done before, and the Belgian painters went back to Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges as men annexed by France.