Beside this group who adapted French localities for classical landscapes there arose in the meantime another group, and they proceeded in the opposite direction. Their highest aim was to go on pilgrimage to sacred Italy, the classic land, which, with their literary training and their one-sided æsthetics, they invariably thought more beautiful and more worthy of veneration than any other. But they tried to break with Valenciennes’ arbitrary rules of composition, and to seize the great lines of Italian landscape with fidelity to fact. In going back from Valenciennes to Claude they endeavoured to pour new life into a style of landscape painting which was its own justification, compromised as it had been by the Classic school. They made a very heretical appearance in the eyes of the strictly orthodox pupils of Valenciennes. They were called the Gothic school, which was as much as to say Romanticists, and the names of Théodore Aligny and Edouard Bertin were for years mentioned with that of Corot in critiques. They brought home very pretty drawings from Greece, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and Bertin did this especially. Aligny is even not without importance as a painter. He aimed at width of horizon and simplicity of line more zealously than the traditional school had done. He is, indeed, a man of sombre, austere, and earnest talent, and the solemn rhythm of his pictures would have more effect if the colour were not so dry, and if a fixed and monotonous light were not uniformly shed over everything in place of a vibrating atmosphere.

Alexandre Desgoffe, Paul Flandrin, Benouville, Bellel, and others drew from the same sources with similar conviction and varying talent. Paul Flandrin, in particular, was in his youth a good painter in the manner of 1690. His composition is noble and his execution certain, recalling Poussin. Ingres, his master, said of him, “If I were not Ingres I would be Flandrin.” It was only later that the singular charm of Claude Lorrain and the Roman majesty of Poussin were transformed under the brush of Flandrin into arid still-life, into landscapes of pasteboard and wadding.

L’Art.
VICTOR HUGO.   RUINS OF A MEDIÆVAL CASTLE ON THE RHINE.

But not from this quarter could the health of a school which had become anæmic be in any way restored. French landscape had to draw a new power of vitality from the French soil itself. It was saved when its eyes were opened to the charms of home, and this revelation was brought about by Romanticism. In the Salon notices, from 1822 onwards, the complaints of critics are repeated with increasing violence—complaints that, instead of fair regions, noble character, and monumental lines, nothing but “malarious lakes, desolate wastes, and terrible cliffs” should be painted, which, in the language of Classicism, means that French landscape painting had taken firm hold of the soil in France. The day when Racine was declared by the young Romanticists to be a maker of fine phrases put an end to the whole school of David and to Classical landscape at the same time. It fell into oblivion, as, sooner or later, every artistic movement which does not rest on the nature and personality of the artist inevitably must. The young revolutionaries no longer believed that an alliance with mythological subjects and “grand composition” could compensate for the lack of air and light. They were tired of pompous, empty, and distant scenery. They only thought of nature, and that amid which they lived seemed the less to forego its charms the more Italy came under suspicion as the home of all these ugly, unpleasant, and academical pictures. That was the birthday of French landscape. At the very time when Delacroix renewed the répertoire of grand painting, enriching art with a world of feeling which was not merely edited, a parallel movement began in landscape. “Dante’s Bark” was painted in 1822, “The Massacre of Chios” in 1824. Almost at the same hour a tornado swept through the branches of the old French oaks, and bent the rustling corn; the sky was covered with clouds, and the waters, which had been hard-bound for so long, sped purling once more along their wonted course. The little paper temples, built on classic heights, toppled down, and there rose lowly rustic cottages, from the chimneys of which the smoke mounted wavering to the sky. Nature awoke from her wintry sleep, and the spring of modern landscape painting broke with its sadness and its smiles.

This is where the development of French art diverges from that of German. After it had stood under the influence of Poussin, the German long continued to have a suspicious preference for scenery that was devoid of soul, for beautiful views, as the phrase is, and it penetrated much later into the spirit of familiar nature. But as early as the twenties this spirit had revealed itself to the French. It was only in the province of poetry that they went through the period of enthusiasm for exotic nature—and even there not to the same extent as Germany. Only in Chateaubriand’s Atala are there to be found pompously pictorial descriptions of strange landscapes which have been in no degree inwardly felt. Chiefly it was the virgin forests of North America that afforded material for splendid pictures, which he describes in grandiloquent and soaring prose. A nature which is impressive and splendid serves as the scenery of these dramas of human life. But with Lamartine the reaction was accomplished. He is the first amongst the poets of France who conceived landscape with an inward emotion, and brought it into harmony with his moods of soul. His poetry was made fervent and glorified by love for his home, for his own province, for South Burgundy. Even in the region of art a poet was the first initiator.

Baschet.
MICHEL.A WINDMILL.

Baschet.
DE LA BERGE.LANDSCAPE.

Victor Hugo, the father of Romanticism in literature, cannot be passed over in the history of landscape painting. Since 1891, when that remarkable exhibition of painter-poets was opened in Paris—an exhibition in which Théophile Gautier, Prosper Merimée, the two de Goncourts, and others were represented by more or less important works—the world learnt what a gifted draughtsman, what a powerful dramatist in landscape, was this great Romanticist. Even in the reminiscences of nature—spirited and suggestive of colour as they are—which he drew with a rapid hand in the margin of his manuscripts, the fiery glow of Romanticism breaks out. The things of which he speaks in the text appear in black shadows and ghostly light. Old castles stand surrounded by clouds of smoke or the blinding glare of fire, moonrise makes phantom silhouettes of the trees, waves lashed by the storm dash together as they spout over vessels; and there are gloomy seas and dark unearthly shores, fairy palaces, proud citadels, and cathedrals of fabled story. Whenever one of his finished drawings is bequeathed to the Louvre, Hugo is certain to receive a place in the history of art as one of the champions of Romanticism.

The movement was so universal amongst the painters that it is difficult at the present time to perceive the special part that each individual played in the great drama. This is especially true of Georges Michel, a genius long misunderstood, a painter first made known in wider circles by the World Exhibition in 1889, and known to the narrower circle of art lovers only since his death in 1843. At that time a dealer had bought at an auction the works left behind by a half-famished painter—pictures with no signature, and only to be identified because they collectively treated motives from the surroundings of Paris. A large, wide horizon, a hill, a windmill, a cloudy sky were his subjects, and all pointed to an artist schooled by the Dutch. Curiosity was on the alert, inquiry was made, and it was found that the painter was named Georges Michel, and had been born in 1763; that at twelve years of age he had shirked school to go drawing, had run away with a laundress at fifteen, was already the father of five children when he was twenty, had married again at sixty-five, and had worked hard to his eightieth year. Old men remembered that they had seen early works of his in the Salon. It was said that Michel had produced a great deal immediately after the Revolution, but exceedingly tedious pictures, which differed in no respect from those of the other Classicists; for instance, from Demarne and Swebach, garnished with figures. It was only after 1814 that he disappeared from the Salon; not, as has been now discovered, because he had no more pictures to exhibit, but because he was rejected as a revolutionary. During his later years Michel had been most variously employed: for one thing, he had been a restorer of pictures.