Madou’s merit lies in having extended Belgian genre painting somewhat beyond these narrow bounds; he introduced a greater variety of types verging more on reality than that everlasting honest man painted by Ferdinand de Braekeleer. Madou was a native of Brussels. There he was born in 1796, and he died there in 1877. When he began his career Wappers had just made his appearance. Madou witnessed his successes, but did not feel tempted to follow him. Whilst the latter in his large pictures in the grand style aimed at being Rubens redivivus, Madou embodied his ideas in fleeting pencil sketches. A great number of lithographs of scenes from the past bore witness to his conception of history. There was nothing in them that was dignified, nothing that was stilted, no idealism and no beauty; in their tabards and helmets the figures moved with the natural gestures of ordinary human beings. By the side of great seigneurs, princes, and knights, and amid helmets and hose, drunken scoundrels, tavern politicians, and village cretins started into view, and grimaced and danced and scuffled. In Belgium his plates occupy a position similar to that of the first lithographs of Menzel in Germany. But Madou lingered for a still briefer period in the Pantheon of history; the tavern had for him a yet greater attraction. The humorous books which he published in Paris and Brussels first showed him in his true light. Having busied himself for several years exclusively with drawings, he made his début in 1842 as a painter. It is difficult to decide how much Madou produced after that date. The long period between 1842 and 1877 yields a crowded chronicle of his works. Even in the seventies he was just as vigorous as at the beginning, and though he was regarded as a jester during his lifetime he was honoured as a great painter after his death. At the auction of his unsold works, pictures fetched 22,000 francs, sketches reached 3200, water-colours 2150, and drawings 750. The present generation has reduced this over-estimation to its right measure, but it has not shaken Madou’s historical importance. He has a firm position as the man who conquered modern life in the interests of Belgian art, and he is the more significant for the genre painting of his age, as he eclipsed all his contemporaries, even in Germany and England, in the inexhaustible fund of his invention.

MADOU.IN THE ALE-HOUSE.
MADOU.THE DRUNKARD.

A merry world is reflected in his pictures. One of his most popular figures is the ranger, a sly old fox with a furrowed, rubicund visage and huge ears, who roves about more to the terror of love-making couples than of poachers, and never aims at any one except for fun at the rural justice, a portly gentleman in a gaudy waistcoat, emerging quietly at the far end of the road. He introduces a varied succession of braggarts, poor fellows, down-at-heel and out-at-elbows, old grenadiers joking with servant girls, old marquesses taking snuff with affected dignity, charlatans at their booth, deaf and dumb flute-players, performing dogs, and boys sick over their first pipe. Here and there are fatuous or over-wise politicians solemnly opening a newly printed paper, with their legs astraddle and their spectacles resting on their noses. Rascals with huge paunches and blue noses fall asleep on their table in the ale-house, and enliven the rest of the company by their snoring. At times the door is opened and a scolding woman appears with a broom in her hand. On these occasions the countenance of the toper is a comical sight. At the sound of the beloved voice he endeavours to raise himself, and anxiously follows the movements of his better half as he clings reeling to the table, or plants himself more firmly in his chair with a resigned and courageous “J’y suis, j’y reste.”

Being less disposed to appear humorous, Adolf Dillens makes a more sympathetic impression. He, too, had begun with forced anecdotes, but after a tour to Zealand opened his eyes to nature; he laid burlesque on one side, and depicted what he had seen in unhackneyed pictures: sound and healthy men of patriarchal habits. Even his method of painting became simpler and more natural; his colouring, hitherto borrowed from the old masters, became fresher and brighter. He emancipated himself from Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro, and began to look at nature without spectacles. There is something poetic in his method of observation: he really loved these good people and painted them in the unadorned simplicity of their life—cheery old age that knows no wrinkles and laughing youth that knows no sorrows. He is indeed one-sided, for a good fairy has banished all trouble from his happy world; but his pictures are the product of a fresh and amiable temperament. His usual themes are a friendly gathering at the ale-house, a conversation beneath the porch, skating, scenes in cobblers’ workshops, a gust of wind blowing an umbrella inside out; and if he embellishes them with little episodic details, this tendency is so innocent that nobody can quarrel with him.

In France it was François Biard, the Paul de Kock of French painting, who attained most success in the thirties by humorous anecdote. He devoted his whole life to the comical representation of the minor trespasses and misfortunes of the commonplace bourgeoisie. He had the secret of displaying his comicalities with great aptitude, and of mocking at the ridiculous eccentricities of the Philistine in an obvious and downright fashion. Strolling players made fools of themselves at their toilette; lads were bathing whilst a gendarme carried off their clothes; a sentry saluted a decorated veteran, whose wife gratefully acknowledged the attention with a curtsey; the village grandee held a review of volunteers with the most pompous gravity; a child was exhibited at the piano to the admiration of its yawning relatives. One of his chief pictures was called “Posada Espagnol.” The hero was a monk winking at a beauty of forty who was passing by while he was being shaved. Women were sitting and standing about, when a herd of swine dashing in threw everything over and put the ladies to flight, and so called forth one of those comic effects of terror in which Paul de Kock took such delight.

Biard was inexhaustible in these expedients for provoking laughter; and as he had travelled far he had always in reserve a slave-market, a primeval forest, or an ice-field to appease the curiosity of his admirers when there was nothing more to laugh at. From the German standpoint he had importance as an artist whose flow of ideas would have furnished ten genre painters; and if he is the only representative of the humorously anecdotic picture in France, the reason is that there earlier than elsewhere art was led into a more earnest course by the tumult of ideas on social politics.

CHAPTER XXI