On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

Next to this admirable picture, which only the Louvre, or Edinburgh, or, it may be, Potsdam, can surpass, hangs a beautiful and interesting work, avowedly by the pupil with whom Watteau was once angered, but with whom in his declining days he was generously reconciled, calling him to him, and imparting to him, as a final gift, what he could of the secrets of his art. To Mr. Alfred de Rothschild belongs ‘The Pleasure Barge,’ a work in which the foreground figures are on a larger scale than in the Watteau, and in which the handling is neat and obviously careful, even while it is broad. If Pater himself had been the inventor of the genre, or even, perhaps, if he had practised it in any fashion recognisably his own, this piece of delicate and painter-like work—which, as it is, no one with any true appreciation of the graceful can possibly dispraise—would have had a higher rank. As it is, we recognise the dexterous handiwork, the pupil’s strangely complete reception of his master’s spirit; but feel, at the same moment, that Pater is an echo rather than a voice—that his talent glowed only at the fire that Watteau lit.

Lord Rosebery is the possessor of a portrait of Robespierre, by Jean Baptiste Greuze. It is a direct, good portrait; very sound, and only perhaps a little nattering; the ‘sea-greenness’ of the revolutionary, having, it may be, been apparent but to the imagination of Carlyle. A second Greuze, highly and daintily finished, and so appropriately small in scale, is the ‘À Vous’ of Mr. Clementi Smith, an interior, with three friendly figures, and the glass genially passing. Thus, though in both cases Greuze is represented creditably, in neither is he represented by the kind of picture which in our own day is associated with his name—in neither is there the too seductive or too adroitly planned presentation of womanhood with its lines refined to the slenderness of the child, or the child with, too early upon her, and too consciously and evidently, the contours of the woman. Fragonard’s ‘Letter,’ belonging to Lady Wallace, is an engraved picture, small and of undoubted quality—the ‘Lettre d’Amour,’ it should be called, properly—that is indeed its name in the print—for the impulsiveness of the scribe, the earnestness of her glance, the fire of her action, are due to no urgency of everyday business, but to the ecstasy of love. Small as the thing is, in its touch and spirit we recognise the southern temperament of sunshine and storm, and remember that Provence was the land of Fragonard’s birth, and that of its half-Italian landscape he has been till now one of the most sympathetic of depictors. From the same gallery—from Lady Wallace’s—we might conceivably have had the loan of a more important Fragonard, ‘L’Escarpolette.’ To Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild belongs the life-size portrait of Madame de Pompadour, seen somewhat from below, lounging upon a sofa, and dressed in the colours whose particular combination Boucher so much affected—sky blue and rose. The picture has little restfulness, and not too much of character—the mistress rather than the dilettante, was it, perhaps, at the moment, the courtier’s business to paint. It is in a high key, yet not precisely garish; a clever tour de force, agreeable, gay.

Two interesting, since somewhat unusual, examples of Prud’hon come from Hertford House; one of them, a little nude boy inadequately described as ‘Le Zéphyr,’ a work in which a master of tender sentiment, and graceful, even if somewhat monotonous, design, betrays some debt to Correggio; the other the singular allegory of ‘The Triumph of Bonaparte’—Napoleon surrounded by female figures and by Cupids in a triumphal car—a picture in which Prud’hon shows something, indeed, of himself, and much of his obligation to the Greeks. It is a work more characteristic than the first, and less ambitious than the second; but it is in his simple designs most of all that we can discern best the real Prud’hon, with just a touch of a Classicism never austere, and a world of tenderness never actually effeminate.

In the ‘Odalisque,’ a sketch of an Oriental nudity, we see for once that which is rather surprising in work of Ingres’s—a picture, that is, in which, at the stage now reached, the colour is better than the design, if it is not better than the draughtsmanship. The curved line of the right arm repeats, surely, only awkwardly the curve of the wide-hipped figure; and in the left arm, and in the modelling of some portions of the trunk, there is little indication of the ‘correctness of form’ which, to borrow Gautier’s phrase, was, at least with Ingres, ‘virtue.’ We are glad, of course, to see any canvas of Ingres’s at Burlington House, because it is a sight vouchsafed but seldom, and again, because Ingres is a master in whose labours there is, alike in France and England, some right revival of interest. But it would have been well had it been possible to represent him, not semi-romantic and luxurious, limp in line, impoverished of colour, but rather, as in ‘The Apotheosis of Homer,’ august of conception, or, as in ‘The Source,’ refined and exquisite of form.

(Standard, 4th January 1896.)

CHARDIN

Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin—a man of the bourgeoisie, as original as Hogarth—was born on the 2nd November 1699. It was in Paris, in the quarter of St. Sulpice, in the trading quarter where shopkeepers and skilled artisans wait on the wants of the neighbouring Faubourg St. Germain. He was of humble, decent parentage, as befitted the place; and he had for godmother, when he was christened, one Anne Bourgine, wife of Jacques Riche, who declared herself unable to sign her name in attestation of the event. Chardin’s father was a cabinet-maker; a dexterous craftsman, with a speciality which, along with such honour as it afforded, he passed on to one of his sons. He made, as Chardin’s best biographer has told us, ‘ces billards monumentaux dont une planche de Bonnart nous a gardé le dessin,’ and he made them for the King. But though he worked successfully and well, the burden of a family weighed on his fortunes, and his thought about his children was chiefly that they might find means of support. Chardin was given little education, and he was to have followed his father’s trade, but he showed, in his quite early youth, enough of promise as a painter for it to be held reasonable that he should enter M. Cazes’ painting-room. Cazes was not at this time an unknown artist, but Chardin learned almost nothing from him. The inventor of a genre, Chardin must needs be his own best teacher. Time and his own individuality alone could allow him his sturdy facility of touch. Only in working for himself could he acquire the schemes of colour, the tones, the delicate justice of expression, for which we admire him to-day. And if he was already independent of a master in the selection of his method, still more his own was his choice of the world which he observed to record.

That world, of which Chardin has given us so veracious yet so poetic a chronicle, was indeed the world of his daily life. His art concerned itself with the familiar pursuits of the lower middle class, homely because it was bound to be frugal, but refined because it was French. The grosser manners which reflected accurately—as manner is wont to do—the duller thoughts of our English lower middle class of a hundred years since, would never have afforded to an artist who desired inspiration from that class alone, such an opportunity as was offered to Chardin by the lower bourgeoisie of France. The ruder civilisation of the London of that period provoked from English art no such exquisite transcript. And had it come, it could hardly have been welcomed, for in the two countries the taste of the day was different—the one was finer than the other. A similarity in coarseness, in imaginative Literature—the unquestioned grossness of Rétif de la Bretonne, placed by the side of the grossness of Smollett—may seem to deny it. But pictorial art makes the contrast evident. In France it was possible not only for Chardin to exist, but for him to be valued.

In a life that was eighty years long—a life mainly calm, and filled with peaceful work—Chardin was of course able to accomplish much, and to labour with variety; but whatever may have been his great successes in other departments of Art than that of genre painting, it is by his mastery and originality in that that he may be expected most to interest us. It was to that that he chiefly devoted the middle years of his career. Other successes established his fame; other successes came happily to its support, long afterwards, when he was failing. We do not note, indeed, in Chardin, rapid transitions, sudden transformations—the one occupation was apt to overlap the other—but until we are to look into his course in great detail it may be accepted as roughly true that it was first still-life that engrossed him, then scenes of the domestic interior, and then, in the late days, portraiture. Of the two first, he was a painter in oil. For the third he employed pastel.

That, putting it briefly, was the course of his work. What was the course of his life apart from work?—the course, I mean, of that second life of the artist in painting or literature which is separate from his production, yet must affect it so much? How about the people who were nearest to him?—those whose society gave him his pleasure or withheld it? Chardin was twice married. While he was still engaged in the struggles of his youth, before his position was assured, he met a young girl, Marguerite Saintar, at some modest merrymaking, where his parents had planned that he should find her. Whether or not he knew of their aims, his own wishes seemed to have been at one with theirs. He liked Marguerite Saintar, who liked him in return. The attachment appears indeed to have been so mutual that in their loves there was no place for the proverb of the ‘one who kisses’ and ‘the other who holds out the cheek.’