Immediately upon the epoch-making labours of the historians followed the first romances that were archæological and dealt with the history of civilisation; and hand in hand with these literary productions there was developed—by the side of historical painting proper, in France, Belgium, and Germany—a tendency to represent the life of the past, not in its grand dramatic action, but in its familiar concerns. In the one case there was history in its state uniform, in the other history in undress. And while the former class of painters saw the past only in a condition of unrest and violent movement, the latter began to enter into the details of daily life, and to represent it as it flowed by in times of peace. Those who had the romantic bias turned to the old artistic crafts. As yet that bias consisted only in an enthusiasm for the tasteful civilisation of a bygone age, with its polished charm of luxurious household appointments and pleasing costume. Rooms were filled with Gobelins and rich stuffs, handsome furniture and old pictures. By the rapid sale of their productions painters were placed in a position to acquire for themselves at the second-hand dealers all the beautiful things they painted. They placed their dressed-up models in front of their tapestries, and between their cabinets and tables. Stress was laid on historical accuracy in the representation of the usages and costumes of the past, not on dramatic action, and in this respect the historical picture of manners, as opposed to historical painting, marked an advance towards intimacy of feeling. The latter still worked from the abstract. The painter read a book and looked out for telling passages. He idealised models, to lend his picture the character of “great art.” It was always the illustration of underlying ideas.

In this new kind of picture, on the contrary, the conception of a work of art was given, by the perfected representation of any part of the visible world, were it only the corner of a studio elaborately and artificially arranged. The historical picture of manners no longer depicted “the meeting of hostile forces,” but either the heroes of history or the nameless men of the past in their daily act and deed, and so accustomed the public gradually to interest themselves in people who did not act with histrionic passion, but conducted themselves quietly and soberly like men of the present time. The place of the dramatic was taken by those phases of life which are pleasant and smooth. At the same time there was no need to be thrown back on conventional idealisation, and it was possible to bring people dressed up for the occasion directly into the picture, just as they sat there, since the contrast between the professional model and the old-fashioned dress made itself less felt on this smaller scale of art. Thus was achieved the transition from the heroic historical art of the first half of the nineteenth century to that familiar and more human art of the second half, which no longer fled for help to the past, but sought a simpler ideal in reality.

First of all in France, from the side of the solemnly earnest group of Academicians, there stepped forward certain artists who moved in the old world quite at their ease, and began to paint simple little pictures from the daily life of antiquity, instead of the great ostentatious canvases of David and Ingres. In literature their parallels are Ponsard and Augier, who in their comedies brought antique life upon the stage, the one in Horace et Lydie, the other in La Ciguë and Le Joueur de Flûte.

Charles Gleyre approached nearest to the strict academical style of Ingres. Not even by a tour in the East did he allow himself to be led away from the Classical manner, and as head of a great and leading studio he recognised it as the task of his life to hand on to the present generation the traditions of the school of Ingres. Gleyre was a man of sound culture, who during a sojourn in Italy which lasted for years, had examined Etruscan vases and Greek statues with unintermittent zeal, studied the Italian classics, and copied all Raphael. Having come back to Paris, he never drew a line without having first assured himself how Raphael would have proceeded in the given case. And this striving after purity of form has robbed his works (“Nymph Echo,” “Hercules at the Feet of Omphale,” and the like) almost entirely of ease, freshness, and naturalness. Gleyre became, like Ary Scheffer, a victim to style. He had in him—his “Evening” of 1843 is sufficient to show it—a tender, dreamy, and contemplative spirit. The feelings to which he wished to give expression were his own, and the more fragrant, romantic, and vaporously indistinct they were, the more did they suffer from the stiff academical line in which he so mercilessly bound them. Only in his “Orpheus torn by the Bacchantes” has he raised himself to a certain neo-Greek elegance.

Louis Hamon stands at the end of this path, which led gradually from the strictness of form characteristic of the idealism of Ingres to incidents thought out in perfectly modern fashion and laid in a primitive era only because of the advantages of costume offered by the antique. The grace of his pictures is modern; their Classicism is a disguise. To robust natures his art can make but little appeal. He has deprived nature of her strength and marrow, and painting of its peculiar qualities, transforming them into a coloured dream, a tinted mist. In Hamon’s modelling there is an uncertainty, in his colour a sickly weakness and meagre effeminacy, which give to his figures and landscapes the appearance of being dissolved in vapour. Everything firm is taken from them; the stones look like wadding, the plants like soap, the figures like china dolls which would fly into the air at the least gust of wind. Nevertheless there are times when his confectionery has a sympathetic grace. What distinguishes him is something simple, pure, youthful, fresh, and childlike. His colour is lighter and more delicate than Gleyre’s. None but blended colours such as light blue and light yellow mingle in the harmony of white tones. The severe antique style has been given a pretty rococo turn: his Greek girls, women, and children are like figures of Sèvres porcelain; the scenes in which he groups them are pleasing,—sports of fancy brought forward in a Grecian garb, of an affected sensuousness and a coquettish grace. His prettiest picture was probably “My Sister’s not at Home”—Greece seen through a gauze transparency in the theatre.

Gaz des Beaux-Arts.
HAMON.MY SISTER’S NOT AT HOME.
(By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the copyright.)

Léon Gérôme has also a taste for borrowing his subjects from the antique; being a pupil of Delaroche, however, he has treated not mythological but historical episodes of antiquity. His “Cock-fight,” “Phryne before the Areopagus,” “The Augurs,” “The Gladiators,” “Alcibiades at the House of Aspasia,” and “The Death of Cæsar,” together with pictures from Egypt, are his most characteristic works: Ingres and Delaroche upon a smaller scale. He shares with the one his learnedly pedantic composition, and with the other his taste for anecdote. It may be remarked that in these same years Emile Augier was active in literature, but that Augier, living in the same epoch of modern life, is far more powerful and animated in his Classical pieces. Gérôme’s art is an intelligent, frigid, calculating art. In execution he does not rise above a petty study of form and an academic discipline. His drawing is accurate, and he has even succeeded in giving his figures a certain natural truth which is in advance of the generalisation of the classic ideal; yet from first to last he is wanting in every quality as a painter. His pictures of the East are hard landscapes, in which men or animals, harder still—unfortunate, eternally petrified beings—stand out abruptly. He draws and stipples, he works like an engraver in line, and goes over what he has painted again and again with a fine and feeble brush. He has an eye for form, but the effect of light upon the body escapes him. His pictures therefore give the impression of china, and his colour is hard and dead. What distinguishes him is a watchful observation, a chilling correctness, enclosing everything in characterless outlines. And this marble coldness remained with him later when, moving with the development of historical painting, he gradually took to working on more tragical subjects. Even the most violent subjects are depicted with a dainty grace, and with a smile he serves up decapitated heads, prepared with a painting à la maitre d’hôtel, upon a gold-rimmed porcelain plate as smooth as glass.

Another painter of archæological genre is Gustave Boulanger, who after extensive studies in Pompeii gave a vogue to those antique interiors and scenes of Pompeian street life now associated with the name of Alma-Tadema.

Direct descendants of Delaroche and Robert Fleury were those who threw themselves enthusiastically into treating the physiognomy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and devoted the most ardent study to the weapons, costumes, and furniture of those epochs. They never wearied in representing François I and Henri IV in the most varied situations of life, nor in searching the biographies of great artists and scholars for episodes worth painting. Especially popular subjects were those of celebrated painters at their meeting with contemporaries of high station: Raphael and Michael Angelo coming across each other in the Vatican, Murillo as a boy, the young Ribera found drawing in the street by a Cardinal, Bellini in his studio amid all manner of precious objects, Charles V and Titian, Michael Angelo tending his servant, and others of the same kind. The number of painters who were active in this province is as great as the number of anecdotes which are told of distinguished men. They spread themselves over various countries, like the swarms of insects hatched on a summer’s day amid luxuriant vegetation, and thereby they render the task of selection more difficult to the historian. In France there worked Alexander Hesse, Camille Roqueplan, and Charles Comte; in Belgium, Alexander Markelbach and Florent Willems. Markelbach, a pupil of Wappers, in addition to episodes from English history, specially devoted himself to painting the shooting festivals of the old Netherlandish city guards, in which enterprise the Doelen pieces of Frans Hals did him excellent service in the matter of costume. Florent Willems, who, as a restorer, saturated himself with the manner of the old masters, was particularly popular on account of the smooth finish he gave to his modish ladies, cavaliers, soldiers, painters, soubrettes, and patrician matrons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All the richly coloured satin, brocade, and velvet costumes of these personages, together with the tapestry, the curtains, and the furniture of their dwellings, he had the secret of reproducing in such a fashion that he was long esteemed a modern Terborg. Amongst the Germans, L. von Hagn was the most delicate of these artists, and the graceful comedies of real life which he painted, transplanting them into the Italian Renaissance or the French rococo period, have often great distinction of colouring. Gustav Spangenberg, after the lucky but isolated success he had made with “The Track of Death,” devoted himself to the Reformation period; and Carl Becker to the Venetian Renaissance, from which he occasionally made an excursion into the German. These and many others could be discussed with more particularity if their pictures, smooth as coloured prints, and neatly finished in their own paltry way, were not so much below the standard of galleries. For them also the incident to be represented, with the personages concerned in it, was the principal matter, and not pure painting. These fetters upon true art were first shaken off by the hands of the following painters.

Cassell & Co.
GÉRÔME.THE COCK-FIGHT.