Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

One of them is his mastery of still-life—his great and exceptional nobility in the treatment of it. There is just a hint of that, it is true, in the delicate engraving of L’Œconome, and the broader, richer engraving of La Pourvoyeuse; but for any real indication of it, and even that is but a partial one, we must come to Jules de Goncourt’s etching of the Gobelet d’Argent, which suggests the luminousness, the characteristic reflets, and the touche grasse of the master. The other side of Chardin’s talent which the engravings do not represent, is his later skill in professed portraiture, and especially in portraiture in pastel, to which the fashionable but well-merited triumphs of Latour directed him in his old age. But the deliberate limitations of the Eighteenth Century prints do not in any way invalidate the excellence, the completeness even, of their performance. The collector should address himself to their study. A little diligence, a little patience, and a hundred pounds, and it would not be impossible to form a collection in which nothing should be wanting. I remember that I gave M. Lacroix or M. Rapilly, in Paris, not more than seventy-five francs an impression for pieces in extraordinarily fine condition, and with margins almost intact.

Chardin went on working till he was eighty years old. He enjoyed popularity, and he outlived it. From 1738 to 1757, there were issued, in close succession, the engravings, about fifty in number, which, with all their differences, and with all sorts of interesting notes about them, M. Emanuel Bocher has conscientiously and lovingly catalogued. They were published at a couple of francs or so apiece; their appearance was wont to be welcomed in little notices in the Mercure de France, just as the Standard or the Times to-day might applaud a new Cameron or a new Frank Short; and they hung everywhere on bourgeois walls. The canvases which they translated were owned, some by a King of France, and some by a foreign Sovereign. Little in the work of the whole century had greater right to popularity than the Jeu de l’Oye, with its exquisite and homely grace—Surugue has perfectly engraved it—L’Etude du Dessein, austere and masterly (Le Bas has rendered well the figure’s attitude of absorption), Le Bénédicité, with the unaffected piety, the simple contentment of the narrow home, and La Gouvernante, with the young woman’s friendly camaraderie and yet solicitude for the boy who is her charge.

At last Fashion shifted. Chardin was in the shade. Even Diderot got tired of him; though it was only the distaste of a contemporary for an excellence too constantly repeated—and the artist betook himself, with vanished popularity, to changed labours. But the vogue had lasted long enough for his method to be imitated. Jeaurat tried to look at common life through Chardin’s glasses. But Jeaurat did not catch the sentiment of Chardin as successfully as Lancret and Pater had caught the sentiment of Watteau. And along with a little humour, of which the print of the Citrons de Javotte affords a trace, he had some coarseness of his own which assorted ill with Chardin’s homely but unalloyed refinement. Chardin was profound; Jeaurat, comparatively shallow. You look not without interest at the productions of the one; you enter thoroughly into the world of the other. The creation of Chardin—which his engravers pass on to us—has a sense of peace, of permanence, a curious reality.

Reality is that which to us of the present day seems above all things lacking to the laboured and obvious moralities of Greuze, who was voluptuous when he posed to be innocent, and was least convincing when he sought to be moral. Yet Greuze, when he was not the painter of the too seductive damsel, but of family piety and family afflictions, must have spoken to his own time with seeming sincerity. Even a liberal philosophy—the philosophy of Diderot—patted him gently on the back, and invited him to reiterate his commendable and salutary lessons. But the philosophy was a little sentimental, or it would scarcely have continued to Greuze the encouragement it had withdrawn from Chardin. The Greuze pictures chiefly engraved in his own time were his obtrusive moralities. They now find little favour. But Levasseur’s print of La Laitière and Massard’s of La Crûche cassée—elaborate, highly wrought, and suggesting that ivory flesh texture which the master obtained when he was most dexterously luxurious—these will fascinate the Sybarite, legitimately, during still many generations.

Before the first successes of the painter of that Laitière and that Crûche cassée, there was flourishing at Court, under the Pompadour’s patronage, the “rose-water Raphael,” the “bastard of Rubens.” This was François Boucher. The region of his art lay as far indeed from reality as did Watteau’s “enchanted isle,” and it had none of the rightful magnetism of that country of poetic dream. It was not, like Watteau’s land, that of a privileged and fortunate humanity, but of

“False Gods, and Muses misbegot.”

Where Boucher tried to be refined, he was insincere; and where he was veracious, he was but picturesquely gross. His notion of Olympus was that of a mountain on which ample human forms might be undraped with impunity. That Olympus of a limited imagination he frequented with industry. But, as a decorative painter, there is no need to undervalue his fertility and skill, his apparently inexhaustible though trivial impulse; and if few of his larger compositions have deserved those honours which they have obtained, of translation into elaborate line-engraving, hosts of the chalk studies which are so characteristic of his facile talent were appropriately reproduced in fac-simile by the ingenious inventions of Demarteau. These fac-similes were very cheap indeed not many years ago, nor are they to-day expensive. Of Boucher’s more considered work, engraved in line, La Naissance de Vénus, by Duflos, and Jupiter et Léda, by Ryland, are important and agreeable, and, as times go, by no means costly instances.

Fragonard, besides being a nobler colourist than Boucher—as the silvery pinks and creamy whites of the Chemise en levée, at the Louvre, would alone be enough to indicate—was at once a master of more chastened taste and of less impotent passion. He was of the succession of the Venetians. Fragonard came to Paris from the South—from amidst the olives and the flowers of Grasse—and he retained to the end a measure of the warmth and sunshine of Provence. The artistic eagerness, the hurried excitement, of some of his work, is much in accord with his often fiery themes; but in L’Heureuse Fecondité, Les Beignets, and La Bonne Mère (all of them engraved by De Launay) the collector can possess himself of compositions in which Fragonard depicted domestic life in his own lively way. That is only one side of his mind, and, like his love of dignified and ordered artificial Landscape, it is little known. Elsewhere he showed himself a skilled and an appreciative observer of wholly secular character, and he embodied upon many a canvas his conception of Love—it was not to him the constant devotion of a life, but the unhesitating tribute of an hour. Le Verre d’Eau and Le Pot au Lait are good gay prints, but not for every one. In Le Chiffre d’Amour, Affection, which with Fragonard is rarely inelegant, becomes for a moment sentimental.

Contemporary with Fragonard were a group of artists who, more than Fragonard, left Allegory aside, and exercised their imagination only in a rearrangement of the real. These were the French Little Masters: amongst them, Lavreince, the Saint-Aubins, Baudouin, Eisen, Moreau le jeune. They had seen the life of Paris—Baudouin, the debased side of it; but even Baudouin had some feeling for elegance and comedy. Eisen was above all an illustrator. Augustin de Saint-Aubin, a man of various talents, displayed in little things, is studied most agreeably in those two pretty and well-disposed interiors, Le Concert and Le Bal Paré. They are his most prized pieces; and prettiness having often more money value than greatness, they are worth more than any Watteaus—they are worth full twenty pounds the pair. And that is all I can afford to say of Augustin de Saint-Aubin. Lavreince and Moreau must be spoken of a little more fully.

Nicholas Lavreince was by birth a Swede, but, educated in Paris and practising his art there, he was more French than the French. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the best historians of the Painting of the time, do not much appreciate him: at least in comparison with Baudouin. They say that Baudouin’s method was larger and more artistic than Lavreince’s, whose way was generally the way of somewhat painful finish. I have seen by Lavreince one agreeable water-colour which has all the impulse of the first intention, and, so far, belies the De Goncourts’ judgment. But the judgment is doubtless true in the main. That does not make Lavreince a jot less desirable for the collectors of prints. Both he and Baudouin wrought to be engraved, but Lavreince’s work was done with a much larger measure of reference to that subsequent interpretation. The true gouaches of Lavreince are of extraordinary rarity; and if their method is in some respects less excellent than that of the companion-works of Baudouin, their themes are more presentable. Lavreince, in his brilliant portrayal of a luxurious, free-living Society, sometimes allowed himself a liberty our century might resent; but Baudouin’s license—save in such an exquisite subject as that of La Toilette, which depicts the slimmest and most graceful of his models—was on a par with that of Rétif de la Bretonne. A proof before all letters of the delightful Toilette—engraved so delicately by Ponce—is worth, when it appears, some twelve or fifteen pounds: a more ordinary, a less rare impression, is worth perhaps three or four.