On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

Contemporary criticism, and especially the criticism of Diderot, was favourable to Chardin, and may have assisted his fame. There were years in which ‘the father of modern criticism,’ occupied as much with intellectual charm and moral teaching as with technical perfection, fairly raved over the painter whose work was the eulogium of the tiers état. Lafont de St. Yonne, in 1746, places him very high in the ranks ‘des peintres compositeurs et originaux.’ In 1753, the Abbé le Blanc writes of him—‘Il prend la nature sur le fait.’ And a few years later it is Diderot who says: ‘It is always nature and truth. M. Chardin is a man of mind. He understands the theory of his art.’ Again, ‘M. Chardin is not a painter of history, but he is a great man.’ Then there dawns upon the critical mind some sense that the painter is repeating himself. From the old mint he reissues, with but slight modification, the old coins. Still-life apart, he can give us no new subjects; and the familiar ends by being undervalued, and the excellent is held cheaply. At last, from Diderot, in 1767, there comes the undisguised lamentation, ‘M. Chardin s’en va!’

Fortunately, however, though popularity passed from him, the old man was able to interest himself in a fresh department of work. He had painted a few portraits at an earlier time, but now his attention was attracted to portraiture in pastel—that was the medium in which an artist as masculine as himself, and as penetrating, had obtained an admitted triumph; and why should Chardin fail where Quentin Latour had brilliantly succeeded? Nor did he fail altogether. He was able to draw back upon himself, in the last years, a little of the old attention. And the pastel portraits, if they had the ‘fragilité’ had also the ‘éclat,’ which a well-known verse attributes to the then fashionable method. And in subjects which were portraits only, the flesh tints were no longer, by any possibility, effaced by the stronger reality which somehow Chardin had been wont to bestow upon the accessories in his pictures.

Pleasant to him and well merited as must have been that slight return of appreciation which came to Chardin in his eighth decade, it is not by the labour of that time that we are now likely to class him. With the galvanised revival of a classical ideal, his name, after his death, fell into dishonour. Some of his worthiest pictures tumbled, neglected, about the quays of Paris. Only within the last quarter of a century has there been evident the sign of an intention to do justice to his work; and for us his principal distinction is, as I have said already, that he is not only foremost, but was for years alone, in the perception of the dignity and beauty of humble matter, and of the charm which Art may discover in the daily incidents of the least eventful life.

(The Art Journal, 1885.)

MOREAU

One of the prettiest chapters of the volume in which French artists of the Eighteenth Century have recorded with grace and freedom the lighter manners of their age, is that certainly which was written by Moreau le Jeune. He employed, with extreme diligence, half a life in writing it. Born in March 1741, he died in November 1814. The son of a Parisian wigmaker, of the parish of St. Sulpice—which was also Chardin’s—he, with his brother, Moreau l’Aîné, a painter not greatly known, was drawn early into the circle of the producers of Art. He was a pupil of Louis de Lorrain, a now forgotten painter, whom he followed, at seventeen years old, to St. Petersburg. Coming back to Paris, he was in the workroom of Le Bas, the engraver, and there he learned the secret of the burin’s expression. He engraved with delicate skill. It was but slowly, however, that in his own designs he showed himself an accomplished draughtsman; for though his daughter, Madame Carle Vernet—who wrote an account of him—lets us understand that he was born drawing, there is much of his early work that is obviously laboured. Suddenly, the De Goncourts tell us—those critics who, with M. Maherault, the industrious collector, have studied him the best—suddenly his power of draughtsmanship declared itself—the individuality of his vision and method. It was in a drawing commissioned by Le Bas, who sought to engrave it, the ‘Plaine des Sablons’—a review by Louis XV. In it he was revealed as the successful draughtsman of festivals, the historian of lively ceremonies. And such success was rewarded. For, with commendable promptitude, in 1770—the year after the drawing was executed—he was appointed ‘Dessinateur des Menus-plaisirs,’ and five years later, when Cochin retired, ‘Dessinateur du Cabinet du Roi.’ Thus, while still a young man, Moreau’s position was assured, and he was left free to use much of his time in works on which it was possible to bestow a more exquisite grace than any which could be fitly employed upon labours in which official portraiture counted for much. Moreau was free to invent for himself, and free to illustrate the best literary inventions of a literary age. His career was before him, and the day not distant when he would produce ‘L’Histoire des Mœurs’ and the illustrations to the ‘Nouvelle Héloïse.’

I have indicated now, by a brief line or two, the direction in which Moreau le Jeune must chiefly be studied, and the places in which he may be seen if men would see him at his prime. Perhaps it may be a matter of taste, and a matter of taste only, whether one prefers him in his more spontaneous or in his more official work. The draughtsman is the same in either labour, though the inspiration is different. For me his greatest achievement is ‘L’Histoire des Mœurs,’ or, in another phrase, ‘Le Monument du Costume,’ which must be spoken of in detail later on. For many, and above all, for the lovers of curiosities, the seekers in byways of history, his celebrity hangs chiefly on his performance of the various ‘Sacres’; his records of the public functions, his ‘Fêtes at Versailles for the Marriage of the Dauphin and of Marie Antoinette’; his ‘Crowning of Voltaire’—at the Théâtre Français—in 1788; his ‘Fêtes at the Hôtel de Ville,’ on the birth of a new Dauphin to Louis XVI. Among these we may look perhaps principally at the ‘Crowning of Voltaire,’ for it has the virtues of them all. The drawing was engraved by Gaucher, who has preserved in the print the lively touch of the original. But what, one asks, was the occasion of the ceremony, what the cause of the ‘crowning’? At the Théâtre Français, Voltaire’s Irène had been performed for sixteen nights. In those days of limited audiences that was a brilliant success. The bust of the poet is placed then in the middle of the stage, to be adorned and declaimed before. Madame Vestris—another, of course, than the Vestris known to Englishmen—reads aloud, and with emphasis, the lines of which the Marquis de Saint-Maur has hurriedly been delivered. Other performers, in more or less classic garb, cluster about her with garlands in their hands, ready to bestow them on the bust. In a box, high up on one side of the theatre, sits the demi-god, with two fair friends—one of whom is his niece, Madame Denis, and the other that Marquise de Villette to whom the print that represents the occasion is dedicated. The playhouse is full. The clapping of hands is lusty and enthusiastic. People rise in their boxes. Men stare upwards from the pit. Fine ladies crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the hero with the thin angular face, with its tell-tale lines of wit and mockery and observation.

Moreau must have seen the sight himself, and borne away the vivid recollection of it. Never was l’actualité—the thing that passes, the thing that may be insignificant to-day, but is to be History to-morrow—never was l’actualité designed with a more fitting mixture of grace and precision. But in the more important work next to be spoken of, there was greater room for invention. Therein was Moreau, in the true sense, dramatist as well as draughtsman, for even if the outline of the subject was suggested to him by the speculator who undertook the publication, it was Moreau alone who gave veracity and character to the head and gesture of each person in the play.

The ‘Suite d’Estampes pour servir à l’histoire des Mœurs et du Costume dans le Dix-huitième Siècle’ began to be published in 1775 by Prault, of Paris, though it has been of late suggested that it was really conceived and undertaken by a German of the name of Eberts. The notion was to give a series of plates in which the most correct and fashionable manners, and the dress of the moment, and the furniture in vogue, should be together portrayed. The artist first pitched upon to recall them was, strangely enough, a foreigner. Freudeberg, a Bernese settled in Paris, a draughtsman of grace and charm undoubtedly, but of a closely bounded talent, had found favour with the public, and it was he who was chosen to make—and he did make—the first dozen drawings. The best engravers of the day were forthwith to engrave them. But by the time the first series was finished—and two odd pieces, I believe, not generally taken account of as belonging to the set—Freudeberg became home-sick and resolved to depart, and the business of continuing the work, which in the view of its promoter was to be a practical guide to fashion, was assigned to Moreau. Moreau did the second series, and then the third. The second dealt with the fortunes of a lady; the third with those of a grand seigneur, who was likewise something of a petit-maître. And for each there was a text, bald, it may be, but in a measure appropriate. It was anonymous, and chiefly descriptive. A little later, in a new issue, it was sought to associate the work with popular literature, and Restif de la Bretonne—a free-spoken ‘realist,’ whom, after long neglect, it is now, not altogether without cause, the fashion to enjoy—was invited to write his commentary, and his commentary took the form of quite a new interpretation. ‘Restif,’ says M. Anatole de Montaiglon, ‘au lieu de respecter le sentiment des trois suites, a isolé chaque motif et chaque planche.’ Restif, that is, has invented for each plate some fresh little story.

In life, the mind associates with a given and chosen landscape the more magnetic and memorable of the figures that people it. These alone bestow on it the reality of its human interest, and the others may be ignored. And so, among the masses of description and criticism of the arts of design, the writings which we really associate with the works they endeavour to vivify are those generally which have a charm of their own—the charm of the literary touch. Restif de la Bretonne’s stories, with all their faults, have just that charm. There is that in them which permits their author to take possession of the theme, so that the theme belongs no longer at all to whatever dullard chanced to be the first to treat it.