VAN MARCKE.LA FALAISE.

The representation of grazing animals plays a great part in the art of almost all of these painters. Some carried the love of animal painting so far that they never painted a landscape without introducing into the foreground their dearly loved herds of cows or flocks of sheep. The key of the landscape, the cheerful and sunny brilliancy of colour or the still melancholy of the evening dusk, is harmoniously repeated in the habits and being of these animals. Thus, too, new paths were opened to animal painting, which had suffered, no less than landscape, from the yoke of conventionality.

Up to the close of the eighteenth century French artists had contented themselves with adapting to French taste the light and superficial art of Nicolaus Berghem. Demarne, one of the last heirs of this Dutch artist, brought, even in the period of the Revolution, a little sunshine, blitheness, and country air amongst the large pictures in the classical manner. The animal painting of the ancien régime expired in his arms, and the “noble style” of Classicism obstructed the rise of the new animal painting. The fact that the great Jupiter, father of gods and men, assumed the form of a four-footed creature when he led weak, feminine beings astray had no doubt given a certain justification to the animal picture during the reign of the school of David. But the artists preferred to hold aloof from it, either because animals are hard to idealise in themselves, or because the received antique sculpture of animals was difficult to employ directly in pictures. In landscapes, which gods and heroes alone honoured with their presence, idealised animals would have been altogether out of place. Only animals which are very difficult to draw correctly, such as sphinxes, sirens, and winged horses—beings which the old tragedians were fond of turning to account—are occasionally allowed to exist in the pictures of Bertin and Paul Flandrin. Carle Vernet, who composed cavalry charges and hunting scenes, had not talent enough seriously to make a breach, or to find disciples to follow his lead. Géricault, the forerunner of Romanticism, was likewise the first eminent painter of horses; and although his great “Raft of the Medusa” is heavily fettered by the system of Classicism, his jockey pictures and horse races are as fresh, as vivid, and as unforced as if they had been painted yesterday instead of seventy years ago. In dashing animation, verve, and temperament Géricault stands alone in these pictures; he is the very opposite of Raymond Brascassat, who was the first specialist of animal pieces with a landscape setting, and was much praised in the thirties on account of his neat and ornamental style of treatment. Brascassat was the Winterhalter of animal painting, neither Classicist nor Romanticist nor Realist, but the embodiment of mediocrity; a man honestly and sincerely regarding all nature with the eyes of a Philistine. His fame, which has so swiftly faded, was founded by those patrons of art who above all demand that a picture should be the bald, banal reproduction of fact, made with all the accuracy possible.

CHARLES JACQUE.THE RETURN TO THE BYRE (ETCHING).
(By permission of M. Frédéric Jacque, the owner of the copyright.)

L’Art.
CHARLES JACQUE.A FLOCK OF SHEEP ON THE ROAD.
(By permission of M. Frédéric Jacque, the owner of the copyright.)

It was only when the landscape school of Fontainebleau had initiated a new method of vision, feeling, and expression that France produced a new great painter of animals. As Dupré and Rousseau tower over their predecessors Cabat and Flandrin in landscape, so Constant Troyon rises above Brascassat in animal painting. In the latter there may be found a scrupulous pedantic observation in union with a thin, polished, academic, and carefully arranged style of painting; in the former, a large and broad technique in harmony with wild nature, and a directness and force of intuition without parallel in the history of art. Brascassat belongs to the same category as Denner, Troyon to that of Frans Hals and Brouwer.

There would be no purpose in saying anything of his labours in the china manufactory of Sèvres, of his industrial works, and of the little classical views with which he made a first appearance in the Salon in 1833, or of the impulse which he received from Roqueplan. He first found his own powers when he made the acquaintance of Théodore Rousseau and Jules Dupré, and migrated with them into the forest of Fontainebleau. At the headquarters of the new school his ideas underwent a revolution. Here, in the first instance, as a landscape painter, he was attracted by the massive forms of cattle, which make such a harmonious effect of colour in the atmosphere and against verdure, and the philosophic quietude of which gives such admirable completion to the dreamy spirit of nature. A journey to Holland and Belgium in 1847, in the course of which he became more familiar with the old animal painters, confirmed him in the resolve of devoting himself exclusively to this province. He was captivated not so much by Paul Potter as by Albert Cuyp, with his rich and powerful colouring, and his technique, which is at once so virile and so easy. But above all Rembrandt became his great ideal, and filled him with wonder. In his first masterpiece of 1849, “The Mill,” the influence of the great Dutch artist is clearly recognisable, and from that time up to 1855 it remained dominant. In this year, during a prolonged sojourn in Normandy, he became Troyon, and painted “Oxen going to their Work,” that mighty picture in the Louvre which displays him in the zenith of his creative power. Till then no animal painter had rendered with such a combination of strength and actuality the long, heavy gait, the philosophical indifference, and the quiet resignation of cattle, the poetry of autumnal light, and the mist of morning rising lightly from the earth and veiling the whole land with grey, silvery hues. The deeply furrowed smoking field makes an undulating ascent, so that one seems to be looking at the horizon over the broad face of the earth. A primitive, Homeric feeling rests over it.

Troyon is perhaps not so correct as Potter, nor so lucid as Albert Cuyp, but he is more forcible and impressive than either. No one has ever seized the poetry of these heavy masses of flesh, with their strong colour and largeness of outline, as he has done. What places him far above the old painters is his fundamental power as a landscapist, a power unequalled except in Rousseau. His landscapes have always the smell of the earth, and they smack of rusticity. At one time he paints the atmosphere, veiling the contours of objects with a light mist recalling Corot, and yet saturated with clear sunshine; at another he sends his heavy, fattened droves in the afternoon across field-paths bright in the sunlight and dark green meadows, or places them beneath a sky where dense thunderclouds are swiftly rolling up. Troyon is no poet, but a born painter, belonging to the irrepressibly forceful family of Jordaens and Courbet, a maître peintre of strength and plastic genius, as healthy as he is splendid in colour. His “Cow scratching Herself” and his “Return to the Farm” will always be counted amongst the most forcible animal pictures of all ages.

When he died in 1865, after passing twelve years with a clouded intellect, Rosa Bonheur sought to fill the place which he had left vacant. She had already won the sympathies of the great public, as she united in her pictures all the qualities which were missed in Troyon, and had the art of pleasing where he was repellent. For a long time Troyon’s works were held by amateurs to be wanting in finish. They did not acknowledge to themselves that “finish” in artistic creations is, after all, only a work of patience, rather industrial than artistic, and at bottom invented for the purpose of enticing half-trained connoisseurs. Rosa Bonheur had this diligence, and is indebted to it for the spread of her fame through all Europe, when Troyon was only known as yet to the few. The position has now been altered. Without doubt it is a pleasure to look at her fresh and sunny maiden picture of 1840, “Ploughing in Nivernois,” with its yoke of six oxen, its rich red-brown soil turned up into furrows, and its wide, bright, simple, and laughing landscape beneath the clear blue sky. She had all the qualities which may be appreciated without one’s being an epicure of art—great anatomical knowledge, dexterous technique, charming and seductive colouring. And it is an isolated fact in the history of art that a woman has painted pictures so good as the “Hay Harvest in Auvergne” of 1853, with its brutes which are almost life-size, or the “Horse Fair” of 1855, which is perhaps her most brilliant work, and for which she made studies, going in man’s clothes for eighteen months, at all the Parisian manèges, amongst stable-boys and horse-dealers. Until her death, from the Château By, between Thomery and Fontainebleau, she carried on an extensive transpontine export, and her pictures are by no means the worst of those which find their way from the Continent to England and America. She was perhaps the only feminine celebrity of the century who painted her pictures, instead of working at them like knitting. But Troyon is a strong master who suffers no rival. His landscapes, with their deep verdure, their powerful animals, and their skies traversed by heavy clouds, are the embodiment of power. Rosa Bonheur is an admirable painter with largeness of style and beauty of drawing, whose artistic position is between Troyon and Brascassat.