Finally the famous Port Royal is here represented in the persons of Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, who raised such a storm in church circles of that time; Arnauld d’Andilly, the head of the great family of that name and the protector of Port Royal; and Jean Du Verger de Houranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran, its confessor, a man worthy of the first centuries of Christianity. They were famous men in their day, and their names were on everybody’s lips; their story spells the most serious chapter of the history of their age, and still they are all but forgotten in comparison with the great personages of the court, and even their painted portraits are relegated to obscurity.
In these masterly prints of Morin, however, they appear to us just as they looked in their day, with much of their strength and weakness, their aspirations and their secret ambitions. So much animation is there in their faces that it is no hard matter to feel like the old monk in the Spanish monastery who, left alone of all his brothers, said, as he looked on the new pictures by Velasquez, “I sometimes think we are the shadows.”
ROBERT NANTEUIL
1630-1678
By LOUIS R. METCALFE
IT is a curious fact that in these days of exhaustive research in everything which concerns the fine arts, Robert Nanteuil, the portrait-engraver of Louis XIV, has remained until so recently both illustrious and unknown. To be sure, his name has been mentioned in all the histories of art, and in the text-books of engraving he is dwelt upon at some length and given a prominent place among the engravers of his time; but he was never found worthy of any especial study, of the least little brochure. His name has been familiar only to the connoisseurs and the print-collectors; to them it has always been synonymous with the greatest excellence attained by the lost art of line-engraving.
This silence was broken finally in the artist’s own birthplace. In 1884 Mr. Charles Loriquet, curator of the library of the city of Rheims, who had just completed a collection of Nanteuil’s portraits for the city museum, addressed the Academy at one of its public sittings and eloquently pleaded with the authorities to erect a monument to him whom he considered second only to the great Colbert as the most illustrious son of Rheims. His description of the artist and his work created such enthusiasm that he was later induced to publish it, together with some interesting documents concerning Nanteuil. The unique little book found its way into many libraries, private as well as public, and has ever since been unfindable.
Many new books on engraving have appeared since that day which have devoted as much as two or three pages to this brilliant artist without, however, giving his work more than a superficial criticism. It was not until Mr. T. H. Thomas published his recent work “French Portrait Engravers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” that the artist received proper recognition. Nanteuil is here frankly recognized as one of the most admirable figures in the history of art, and proclaimed not only prince of portrait-engravers but also a great artist among the portrait-makers of all times. The thirty pages which are devoted to him constitute the most brilliant and thorough criticism that has ever been made of a line-engraver,—they are a splendid analysis of the artist’s technique, his development, his influence on his contemporaries, and the exalted position which he occupied among them. Without doubt many readers of that interesting work will wonder why they never had before heard of such an important artist.
It was only four years ago that I for one made his acquaintance. While I was looking through a large collection of old engraved portraits, one head in particular arrested my attention; it was drawn with such rare precision, modeled with such maestria, it had such expressive eyes and mouth, that it made all the other portraits seem flat and lifeless. My admiration turned into wonderment when I saw by the signature that the artist had drawn it from life as well as engraved it. I had known the work of only those showy engravers who, in the time of Louis XV, were content to copy the work of the leading painters of the day and improve on it if they could. There was no traduttore traditore about this expressive portrait; here was something of a very different order. The artist was a real portrait-maker, a student of character, a worthy comrade of Holbein, a draughtsman whose ambition it was first to represent the subject as he really looked, then to make as fine an engraved plate as possible.
The text-books on engraving which fell into my hands informed me of the rank he had occupied in that famous school of engraving established by Louis XIV and of the great number of prominent people he had drawn from life. That was enough to whet my curiosity to the limit, for my interest in physiognomy had become a passion, and whenever I had found in the galleries of Europe a convincing portrait of a well-known historical personage, my delight had been keen. Holbeins, Van Dycks, Mierevelts and Quentin de Latours had been for years the objects of my enthusiasm; they were living documents, revelations of personalities such as few memoirs provided. When the catalogue of Robert-Dumesnil, the only complete list of Nanteuil’s portraits, had informed me that Nanteuil’s models had been in great part the men who had given so much greatness to the reign of the most splendid of modern potentates, I felt that the collection must constitute an historical document of no mean interest, if the likenesses of those celebrities were as convincing as that of the obscure Louis Hesselin, Président de la Chambre des Deniers, which I now owned.