Quantin, Paris.Journal Amusant.
GUYS.STUDY OF A WOMAN.GRÉVIN.NOS PARISIENNES.
“Tiens! ne me parle pas de lui, je ne peux pas le souffrir,
 même en peinture!”
“Cependant, s’il t’offrait de t’epouser?”
“Ça, c’est autre chose.”

Randon is as plebeian as Marcellin is aristocratic. His speciality is the stupid recruit who is marched through the streets with his “squad,” or the retired tradesman of small means, as Daudet has hit him off in M. Chèbe, the old gentleman seated on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne: “Let the little ones come to me with their nurses.” His province includes everything that has nothing to do with chic. The whole life of the Parisian people, the horse-fairs, the races at Poissy, and all the more important occurrences by which the appearance of the city has been transformed, may be followed in his drawings. When he travelled he did not go to watering-places, but to the provinces, to Cherbourg and Toulon, or to the manufacturing towns of Belgium and England, where he observed life at the railway stations and the custom-house, at markets and in barracks, at seaports and upon the street. Goods that are being piled together, sacks that are being hoisted, ships being brought to anchor, storehouses, wharfs, and docks—everywhere there is as much life in his sketches as in a busy beehive. Nature is a great manufactory, and man a living machine. The world is like an ant-hill, the dwelling of curious insects furnished with teeth, feelers, indefatigable feet, and marvellous organs proper for digging, sawing, building, and all things possible, but furnished also with an incessant hunger.

Soon afterwards there came Hadol, who made his début in 1855, with pictures of the fashions; Stop, who specially represented the provinces and Italy; Draner, who occupied himself with the Parisian ballet and designed charming military uniforms for little dancing girls. Léonce Petit drew peasants and sketched the charms of the country in a simple, familiar fashion—the mortal tedium of little towns, poor villages, and primitive inns, the gossip of village beldames before the house-door, the pompous dignity of village magistrates or of the head of the fire brigade. He is specially noteworthy as a landscape artist. The trees on the straight, monotonous road rise softly and delicately into the air, and the sleepy sameness of tortuous village streets is pregnantly rendered by a few strokes of the pencil. The land is like a great kitchen garden. The fields and the arable ground with their dusty, meagre soil chant a mighty song of hard labour, of the earnest, toilsome existence of the peasant folk.

Andrieux and Morland discovered the femme entretenue, though afterwards her best known delineator was Grévin, an able, original, facile, and piquant draughtsman, whom some—exaggerating beyond a doubt—called the direct successor of Gavarni. Grévin’s women are a little monotonous, with their ringleted chignons, their expressionless eyes which try to look big, their perverse little noses, their defiant, pouting lips, and the cheap toilettes which they wear with so much chic. But they too have gone to their rest with the grisettes of Monnier and Gavarni, and have left the field to the women of Mars and Forain. In these days Grévin’s work seems old-fashioned, since it is no longer modern and not yet historical; nevertheless it marks an epoch, like that of Gavarni. The bals publics, the bals de l’Opéra, those of the Jardin Mabille, the Closerie des Lilas, the races, the promenades in the Bois de Vincennes, the seaside resorts, all places where the demi-monde pitched its tent in the time of Napoleon III, were also the home of the artist. “How they love in Paris” and “Winter in Paris” were his earliest series. His finest and greatest drawings, the scenes from the Parisian hotels and “The English in Paris,” appeared in 1867, the year of the Exhibition. His later series, published as albums—“Les filles d’Ève,” “Le monde amusant,” “Fantaisies parisiennes,” “Paris vicieux,” “La Chaîne des Dames”—are a song of songs upon the refinements of life.

It does not lie within the plan of this book to follow the history of drawing any further. Our intention was merely to show that painting had to follow the path trodden by Rowlandson and Cruikshank, Erhard and Richter, Daumier and Gavarni, if it was to be art of the nineteenth century, and not to remain for ever dependent on the old masters. Absolute beauty is not good food for art; to be strong it must be nourished on the ideas of the century. When the world had ceased to draw inspiration from the masterpieces of the past merely with the object of depicting by their aid scenes out of long-buried epochs, there was for the first time a prospect that mere discipleship would be overcome, and that a new and original painting would be developed through the fresh and independent study of nature. The passionate craving of the age had to be this: to feel at home on the earth, in this long-neglected world of reality, which hides the unsuspected treasure of vivid works of art. The rising sun is just as beautiful now as on the first day, the streams flow, the meadows grow green, the vibrating passions are at war now as in other times, the immortal heart of nature still beats beneath its rough covering, and its pulsation finds an echo in the heart of man. It was necessary to descend from ideals to existing fact, and the world had to be once more discovered by painters as in the days of the first Renaissance. The question was how by the aid of all the devices of colour to represent the multifarious forms of human activity: the phases and conditions of life, fashion as well as misery, work and pleasure, the drawing-room and the street, the teeming activity of towns and the quiet labour of peasants. The essential thing was to write the entire natural history of the age. And this way, the way from museums to nature, and from the past to the world of living men, was shown by the English to the French and German painters.

Mansell Photo
ROMNEY.SERENA.

CHAPTER XVII

ENGLISH PAINTING TO 1850