Rarely has the numbing and corrupting influence of royal patronage of art been more clearly demonstrated than in the group of painters who interpreted the hollow state, the sensuality and the more pleasant vices of the courts of Louis XIV., of the Regency, and of Louis XV. But among them, yet not of them, Watteau (1641-1721) stands alone—Watteau the melancholy youth from French Flanders, who invented a new manner of painting, and became known as the Peintre des Scènes Galantes. These scenes of coquetry, frivolity and amorous dalliance, with their patched, powdered and scented ladies and gallants, toying with life in a land where, like that of the Lotus Eaters, it seems always afternoon, he clothes with a refined and delicate vesture of grace and fascination. He has a poetic touch for landscape and a tender, pathetic sense of the tears in mortal things which make him akin to Virgil in literature, for over the languorous and swooning air and sun-steeped glades the coming tempest lours. His success, as Walter Pater suggests, in painting these vain and perishable graces of the drawing-room and garden comedy of life with the delicate odour of decay which rises from the soil, was probably due to the fact that he despised them. The whole age of the Revolution lies between these irresponsible and gay courtiers in the scènes galantes of Watteau and the virile peasant scenes in the “epic of toil” painted by Millet. Among the dozen paintings by Watteau in the Louvre may be especially noted his Academy picture, the Embarkation for Cythera (No. 982). His pupils, Pater and Lancret, imitated his style, but were unable to soar to the higher plane of their master’s idealising spirit.
The eminent portrait painter, Rigaud (1659-1743), whose admirable Louis XIV. (No. 781) has been called “a page of history,” is represented by fifteen works, among them his masterpiece, the portrait of Bossuet (No. 783). A page of history too is the flaunting sensuality of Boucher (1703-1770) and of Fragonard (1732-1806), who lavished facile talents and ignoble industry in the service of the depraved boudoir tastes of the Pompadours and Du Barrys that ruled at Versailles. Productions of these artists in the Louvre are numerous and important. A somewhat feeble protest against the prevailing vulgarity and debasement of contemporary art was made by Chardin (1699-1779) and by the super-sentimental Greuze (1725-1805) in their portrayal of scenes of simple domestic life, of which many examples may be noted in the Louvre.
But from the studio of Boucher there issued towards the end of the century the virile and revolutionary figure of David (1748-1825), who burst like a thunderstorm from the corrupt artistic atmosphere of the age, sweetening and bracing French art for half a century. The successive phases of this somewhat theatrical but potent genius may be followed in the Louvre from the Horatii (No. 189) and the Brutus (No. 191)—the revolutionary flavour of which saved the painter’s life during the Terror—to the later glorifications of Napoleonic splendours. The candelabrum in David’s best-known work, the portrait of Madame Récamier, is said to have been painted by his pupil Ingres (1780-1867), a commanding personality of the post-revolutionary epoch. To him and to his master is due the tradition of correct and honest drawing which ever since has characterised the modern French school of painting. Besides La Source, the most famous figure drawing of the school, the Louvre possesses many of his portraits and subject paintings. To appreciate duly the artist’s power, however, the drawings in the Salle des desseins d’Ingres should be studied. No master has evoked more reverence and admiration among students. More than once Professor Legros has told the writer of the thrill of emotion that passed through him and all his fellow-students when they saw the aged master enter the Ecole des Beaux Arts at Paris. Flandrin, the chief religious painter of the school, is poorly represented in the Louvre, and must be studied in the churches of St. Germain des Prés and St. Vincent de Paul.
A two-fold study of absorbing interest to the artistic mind may be prosecuted in the Louvre—the development of the modern Romantic school of French painters from Gericault’s famous Raft of the Medusa, painted in 1819, through the works of Delacroix and Delaroche; and the revival of landscape painting, under the stimulus of the English artists Bonnington and Constable, by Rousseau (1812-1867), the all-father of the modern French landscape school, and the little band of enthusiasts that grouped themselves around him at Barbizon. Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, Troyon and the grand and solemn Millet, once despised and rejected of men, have now won fame and appreciation. No princely patronage shone upon them nor smoothed their path; they wrought out the beauty of their souls under the hard discipline of poverty and in loving and awful communion with nature. They have revealed to the modern world new tones of colour in the air and the forest and the plain, and a new sense of the pathos and beauty in simple lives and common things.