Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.  
DEBUCOURT.   IN THE KITCHEN.

Oberländer, without whom it would be impossible to imagine Fliegende Blätter, has not fallen silent. He works on, “fresh and splendid as on the first day.” A gifted nature like Busch, he possesses, at the same time, that fertility of which Dürer said: “A good painter is inwardly complete and opulent, and were it possible for him to live eternally, then by virtue of those inward ideas of which Plato writes he would be always able to pour something new into his works.” It is now thirty years ago that he began his labours for Fliegende Blätter, and since that time some drawing of his, which has filled every one with delight, has appeared almost every week. Kant said that Providence has given men three things to console them amid the miseries of life—hope, sleep, and laughter. If he is right, Oberländer is amongst the greatest benefactors of mankind. Every one of his new sketches maintains the old precious qualities. It might be said that, by the side of the comedian Busch, Oberländer seems a serious psychologist. Wilhelm Busch lays his whole emphasis on the comical effects of simplicity; he knows how to reduce an object in a masterly fashion to its elemental lines, which are comic in themselves by their epigrammatic pregnancy. He calls forth peals of laughter by the farcical spirit of his inventions and the boldness with which he renders his characters absurd. He is also the author of his own letterpress. His drawings are unimaginable without the verse, without the finely calculated and dramatic succession of situations growing to a catastrophe. Oberländer gets his effect purely by means of the pictorial elements in his representation, and attains a comical result, neither by the distorted exaggeration of what is on the face of the matter ridiculous, nor by an elementary simplification, but by a refined sharpening of character. It seems uncanny that a man should have such eyes in his head; there is something almost visionary in the way he picks out of everything the determining feature of its being. And whilst he faintly exaggerates what is characteristic and renders it distinct, his picture is given a force and power of conviction to which no previous caricaturist has attained, with so much discretion at the same time. No one has attained the drollness of Oberländer’s people, animals, and plants. He draws à la Max, à la Makart, Rethel, Genelli, or Piloty, hunts in the desert or theatrical representations, Renaissance architecture run mad or the most modern European mashers. He is as much at home in the Cameroons as in Munich, and in transferring the droll scenes of human life to the animal world he is a classic. He sports with hens, herrings, dogs, ducks, ravens, bears, and elephants as Hokusai does with his frogs. Beside such animals all the Reinecke series of Wilhelm Kaulbach look like “drawings from the copybook of little Moritz.” And landscapes which in their tender intimacy of feeling seem like anticipations of Cazin sometimes form the background of these creatures. One can scarcely err in supposing that posterity will place certain plates from the work of this quiet, amiable man beside the best which the history of drawing has anywhere to show.

DEBUCOURT.THE PROMENADE.

The Charivari takes its place with Punch and Fliegende Blätter.

In the land of Rabelais also caricature has flourished since the opening of the century, in spite of official masters who reproached her with desecrating the sacred temple of art, and in spite of the gendarmes who put her in gaol. Here, too, it was the draughtsmen who first broke with æsthetic prejudices, and saw the laughing and the weeping dramas of life with an unprejudiced glance.

Quantin, Paris.
MONNIER.   A CHALK DRAWING.

Debucourt and Carle Vernet, the pair who made their appearance immediately after the storms of the Revolution, are alike able and charming artists, who depict the pleasures of the salon in a graceful style; and they rival the great satirists on the other side of the Channel in the incisiveness of their drawing, and frequently even surpass them by the added charm of colour.

Carle Vernet, originally an historical painter, remembered that he had married the daughter of the younger Moreau, and set himself to portray the doings of the jeunesse dorée of the end of the eighteenth century in his incroyables and his merveilleuses. Crazy, eccentric, and superstitious, he divided his time afterwards between women and his club-fellows, horses and dogs. He survives in the history of art as the chronicler of sport, hunting, racing, and drawing-room and café scenes.

Louis Philibert Debucourt was a pupil of Vien, and had painted genre pictures in the spirit of Greuze before he turned in 1785 to colour engraving. In this year appeared the pretty “Menuet de la Mariée,” with the peasant couples dancing, and the dainty châtelaine who laughingly opens the ball with the young husband. After that he had found his specialty, and in the last decade of the eighteenth century he produced the finest of his colour engravings. In 1792 there is the wonderful promenade in the gallery of the Palais Royal, with its swarming crowd of young officers, priests, students, shop-girls, and cocottes; in 1797 “Grandmother’s Birthday,” “Friday Forenoon at the Parisian Bourse,” and many others. The effects of technique which he achieved by means of colour engraving are surprising. A freshness like that of water colour lies on these yellow straw hats, lightly rouged cheeks, and rosy shoulders. To white silk cloaks trimmed with fur he gives the iridescence of a robe by Netscher. If there survived nothing except Debucourt from the whole art of the eighteenth century, he would alone suffice to give an idea of the entire spirit of the time. Only one note would be wanting, the familiar simplicity of Chardin. The smiling grace of Greuze, the elegance of Watteau, and the sensuousness of Boucher—he has them all, although they are weakened in him, and precisely by his affectation is he the true child of his epoch. The crowd which is promenading beneath the trees of the Palais Royal in 1792 is no longer the same which fills the drawing-rooms of Versailles and Petit Trianon in the pages of Cochin. The faces are coarser and more plebeian. Red waistcoats with breloques as large as fists, and stout canes with great gold tops, make the costume of the men loud and ostentatious, while eccentric hats, broad sashes, and high coiffures bedizen the ladies more than is consistent with elegance. At the same time, Debucourt gives this democracy an aristocratic bearing. His prostitutes look like duchesses. His art is an attenuated echo of the rococo period. In him the décadence is embodied, and all the grace and elegance of the century is once more united, although it has become more bourgeois.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.L’Art.
MONNIER.JOSEPH PROUDHOMME.HONORÉ DAUMIER.