On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

Two designs which I never see without wanting them are the most vivacious of Moreau’s series. They are the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra’ and ‘C’est un fils, Monsieur!’ Others, even among the most admirable, are more limited in their aim. The ‘Grande Toilette,’ for instance, as its name implies, is occupied more particularly with raiment. It is a very summary of fashion. It is the great lord, or the consummate petit-maître, displayed to us when dressing is completed. The edifice, it seems, has just been crowned. ‘Monseigneur,’ vividly writes Restif de la Bretonne, ‘Monseigneur is dressed; for some minutes already he has been standing; his cordon bleu is assumed; they have just given him his purse, and he has his bouquet.’ Yes, the edifice has been crowned: Monseigneur is ready; for—and the touch is untranslatable—they have achevé de le chausser. You see the neat shoes, the garter, the closely drawn stocking, the whole paraphernalia of the leg he was proud of. ‘Achevé de le chausser’—it is all in the phrase. And now he is free, no doubt, to enjoy the idleness of the morning, to do a service to a comedian, and, after an author has had audience of him, to accept the dedication of a book.

‘La Petite Loge’ is just as characteristic. What one sees is the inside of an opera-box, of which the tenants are a couple of bachelors of fashion. A dance is over, on the stage, and a girl who has taken part in it has been brought into the box, to be encouraged—to be touched under the chin. And here is an epitome of Restif’s story. A Prince, struck with the beauty of a ragged little child in the street, determined that she should be educated—pensioned her and her mother. Soon, however, busied with the greatest business of his class and day—‘occupied with intrigue,’ the story-teller tells us—he forgot his little protégée. She had her money regularly—all that she was promised—but he was too busy to think of her. Then, one night, at the Opera, smitten with the charm of a new dancer, he inquired who the dancer was, and ordered her to be brought to him. As soon as she was in the box, ‘Il lui passa sous le menton une main un peu libre’; but then it was disclosed to him that she was the child he had been struck with. Coulon, the famous dancing-master, had by this time taught her to some purpose. As for her future, her mother—an ancestress, I take it, of Halévy’s ‘Madame Cardinal’—had already a register of one hundred and twenty pages, filled with the propositions of the Court and the town. ‘Sa mère se reservait le droit de les comparer,’—for nothing, it seems, even by a Madame Cardinal, should be done in a hurry. Well, among the girl’s many lovers there was one who was unselfish. What did he want but to marry her! The Prince—not minded now to be outdone in chivalry—generously urged that he should be accepted, and Isabelle was glad to consent. But the King ordered the lover’s arrest, and the young people were separated. The girl lived prudently, in London and in Paris. She and her art were admired; but she died of a sudden illness. ‘Her young lover was in absolute despair, and the Prince, her protector, wept for her.’

In the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra’ we see the elegant and famous crowd that surged out of the theatre after a performance long looked forward to. ‘Gluck’s new Operas—it is essential to see them,’ said a writer who knew what it was that a fashionable woman could not afford to neglect. The ‘all Paris’ of the day was there; and at the end, when the crowd was in the lobbies, and the aboyeur was calling the carriages, and the flower-girl was a messenger of intrigue—that was the moment that gave birth to plans for dainty suppers eaten away from home, the time when ‘abbés without a family learned the secret of how they might belong to all.’ What a bustle of flirtation! What a passing about of love-letters! The elegance of the scene must make amends, as best it can, for its light-hearted naughtiness.

‘C’est un fils, Monsieur!’ has no such forgiveness to ask of us. It is the blithest picture that we need to be shown of the home joys of the refined. A young husband, who is known already as ‘le Président,’ and who is a student and a fortunate collector of Art as well as a man of the world, rises from his study chair with outstretched hands and radiant face, as the newly born baby is carried in to him in triumph, followed by a procession of household retainers, and preceded by the lively Miss Rozette, the President’s foster-sister. Nothing is more expressive than the joyous pantomime of this privileged young woman, and the answering gestures of the newly made father; and delightful is the sentiment of the piece. In England, popular Art has sometimes made the joys of domesticity a little dull; but here the respectable is actually gay, and nothing but sunshine lies upon the path of duty.

Of the many writers whom Moreau avowedly illustrated, as distinguished from those who furnished a text for his designs, Rousseau was the one in whom he most believed, and for Rousseau much of his best work was executed. His designs for the Nouvelle Héloïse were among the last of the important drawings wrought by him before he made that journey into Italy which his daughter speaks of as having ‘opened his eyes,’ but which, to whatever it may have ‘opened’ them, certainly closed them to the aspects of that France it was his truest mission to portray. The types of Julie and Saint-Preux are types which Moreau understood—he understood their impulse and their sentiment; and how many faults he would have forgiven them for their grace! To illustrate Rousseau was of course to have the opportunity—and in Moreau’s case it was also to profit by it—of representing both a deeper and a more immediate sensitiveness than most of that which claimed interpretation in the sometimes callous figures of the ‘Monument du Costume.’ Moreau was grateful for so fortunate an occasion, and he thoroughly responded to it. His Julie is ‘un type de Greuze honnête,’ with her ‘bouche entr’ouverte,’ her ‘regard profond,’ her ‘gorge couverte en fille modeste, et non pas en dévote,’ her ‘petite figure de blonde, mouvante et sensible.’ Moreau read Rousseau again and again: he genuinely cared for him, and when Rousseau died, the death-scene was not suffered to pass unrecorded, and of the grave in the Ile des Peupliers, by Geneva, he made a little etching.

Presently, however, Moreau was to be led away from the very sentiment of the scenes he had understood the best. His individuality was lessened, his flexibility arrested by the journey to Italy, undertaken with Dumont, the architect, in 1786. And his association with David—‘le peintre de Marat assassiné et le membre de la Convention’—operated to make more certain his style’s divorce from all the natural grace and flowing sentiment and homely unheroic dignity with which it had lived so fruitfully for more than twenty years. The illustrator of Rousseau was already less happy as the illustrator of Voltaire; and in 1791 Moreau was received into the Academy; the drawing which procured him the distinction being that of ‘Tullie faisant passer son char sur le corps de son père.’ Wille, the engraver, writes, in his published journal, how he went to the Academical Assembly when Moreau was received. ‘There was an Academician to receive: it was Monsieur Moreau, draughtsman and engraver. He had begged me to be his sponsor, and I presented him to the Assembly with a great deal of pleasure.’ But Moreau’s entrance into the Academy was the signal for his exit from the regions of his native art. The bibliophile may seek with avidity for the editions of Renouard, which years afterwards Moreau illustrated. But his verve had deserted him; his talent was gone; his originality had yielded up the ghost. And somehow, too, in his last years, and in his old age, poverty overtook him. In February 1814, he wrote to M. Renouard that he was penniless—‘Je n’ai pas le sou.’ Friends he had, though; and one of the first acts of Louis XVIII. was to reappoint him to the old office—‘draughtsman to the King.’ He held the place for but a short time; for on the 30th November, in the same year, Moreau died. With his later style both he and his daughter, and the group, too, by whom they were surrounded, were content—no one assailed it then or looked back regretfully to the earlier—but it is by the work of the first half of his career as an artist that Moreau finally takes rank as one of the most precise and flexible of draughtsmen, and as the closest possible observer of the gay, great world that he portrayed.

(The Art Journal, 1885.)

GAINSBOROUGH AT THE GROSVENOR GALLERY

‘If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire for us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the art, among the very first of that rising name.’ So wrote, in his Fourteenth Discourse, Sir Joshua Reynolds—a lover of pomp and ceremony even in the art of Literature—doing therein ‘untimely justice’ to the merits of his contemporary, whom he survived. Since then the English School, whose separate existence this accomplished admirer of the Roman and the Bolognese did but doubtfully and modestly look forward to, has become an accomplished fact, and all but a hundred years after his death, ‘the talents of the late Mr. Gainsborough’ are honoured at the Grosvenor Gallery. In the two large rooms and in the vestibule there are to-day exhibited about a couple of hundred pieces from his brush; the great Sir Joshua Exhibition of last winter is felt to be successfully rivalled; and an opportunity is given to the student to perceive the range, the flexibility, the spontaneity of Gainsborough’s art.

Gainsborough, like any other distinct individuality in Art or Letters, is best understood when he is taken simply on his merits, without reference to other personalities who happened to be of his time. To institute a perpetual comparison between him and Sir Joshua is to make the sterile blunder that is made when Dickens is pitted against Thackeray, the epic of Copperfield against the satire of Vanity Fair. In each case it was only accident that brought the men into juxtaposition; and as regards Gainsborough, it is rather with Velasquez or Vandyke, or with some French Eighteenth Century Master of familiar grace, that we should compare him. These were his kindred, with these he had something in common, as the Romans, the Bolognese, and sometimes the Venetians, were the kindred of Sir Joshua. And yet, to a certain extent, comparison between Gainsborough and Sir Joshua is even now unavoidable. Living at the same period and in the same great town, painting the same people, and—save for the briefer apparition of Romney—dividing between them, though dividing unequally, the applause of polite Society, that choice which the men of their time had to make of one of them, has still to a certain extent to be made by us. Often, of course, we are liberated from the necessity of any such narrow alternative; but when we look at the portraits, by the two artists, of Johnson, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, the characteristics of each—what each lacked and what each brought to the accomplishment of his task—cannot but suggest themselves. And it will then be apparent that Reynolds painted with a more obvious learning, Gainsborough with a more spontaneous grace; Reynolds often with a more determined adherence to the particular character, Gainsborough with a keener enjoyment of the suggestions that character afforded for translating a sometimes uncouth nature into an exquisite art. Take, for instance, the two portraits of Mrs. Siddons: the learning and tradition of the Schools, the disposition towards a dignity that may be well-nigh pompous, are in Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic Muse’; the spontaneous grace, the disposition towards simplicity are in the Mrs. Siddons of Gainsborough. Further, again, to compare the portraits of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua with that one by Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery, is to see that here is an instance in which the fidelity—the unflattering fidelity—is on Reynolds’ side, and the idealisation on Gainsborough’s. Yet it is hardly needful to declare of so great a man as Gainsborough that he never idealised merely that he might flatter. He idealised because his vision of the world was bound to be poetic. He was a poet above all things. The ideal was his atmosphere. But Sir Joshua, with all his accomplishments, lived with the prose of the world, and, as a rule, was but in vain ambitious to reach to its poetry.