Watteau, one of the greatest of French painters, has a biography of only a page and a quarter; Largillière, half a column; Rigaud, less than half a column; Lancret, a third of a column; and Boucher has only fifteen lines—a mere note with no criticism. (Jonathan Boucher, an English divine, whose name follows that of Boucher, is accorded three times the space!) La Tour and Nattier have half a column each. Greuze, another one of France’s great eighteenth-century painters, is given only a column and a half with unfavorable comment. Greuze’s brilliant reputation seemed to have been due, “not to his requirements as a painter” but to the subjects of his pictures; and he is then adversely accused of possessing that very quality which in an English painter, as we have seen, is a mark of supreme glory—namely, “bourgeois morality.” Half a column only is required to comment on Horace Vernet and to tell us that his most representative picture “begins and ends nowhere, and the composition is all to pieces; but it has good qualities of faithful and exact representation.”
Fragonard, another French painter whom we had always thought possessed of at least a minor greatness, is accorded no more than a column, less than half the space given to B. R. Haydon, the eighteenth-century English historical painter, and only one-third of the space devoted to David Wilkie, the Scotch painter. Fragonard’s “scenes of love and voluptuousness,” comments that art critic of the London Daily Mail, who has been chosen to represent this French painter in the Encyclopædia, “are only made acceptable by the tender beauty of his color and the virtuosity of his facile brushwork.” Alas! that Fragonard did not possess the “grave moral purpose” of Watts! Had his work been less voluptuous he might have been given more than a fourth of the space devoted to that moral Englishman, for surely Fragonard was the greater painter.
Géricault, one of the very important innovators of French realism, is given half a column, about an equal amount of space with such English painters as W. E. Frost, T. S. Cooper, Thomas Creswick, Francis Danby and David Scott; only about half the amount of space given to John Gilbert, C. L. Eastlake, and William Mulready; and only one-third of the space given to David Cox. One or two such disparities in space might be overlooked, but when to almost any kind of an English painter is imputed an importance equal to, if not greater than, truly significant painters from France, bias, whether conscious or unconscious, has been established.
Again regard Poussin. This artist, the most representative painter of his epoch and a man who marked a distinct step in the evolution of graphic art, is given less than half a page, about equal to the space devoted to W. P. Frith, J. W. Gordon, Samuel Cousins, John Crome, William Strang, and Thornhill; and only half the space given to Holman Hunt, and only one-third the space given to Millais! There is almost no criticism of Poussin’s art; merely a statement of the type of work he did; and of Géricault there is no criticism whatever. Herein lies another means by which, through implication, a greater relative significance is conferred on English art. Generally British painters—even minor ones—are criticised favorably, from one standpoint or another; but only now and then is a Frenchman given specific complimentary criticism. And often a Frenchman is condemned for the very quality which is lauded in a British artist.
Of David it is written: “His style is severely academic, his color lacking in richness and warmth, his execution hard and uninteresting in its very perfection,” and more in the same derogatory strain. Although this criticism may be strictly accurate, the same qualities in certain English painters of far less importance than David are made the basis for praise. The severely academic style in the case of Harding, for instance, becomes an “elegant, highly-trained” characteristic. And perfection of execution makes Birket Foster’s work “memorable for its delicacy and minute finish,” and becomes, in Paul Wilson Steer’s pictures, “great technical skill.”
Ingres, truly one of the giants of his day, is given little or no criticism and his biography draws only a little over half the space which is given to Watts (with his “grave, moral purpose”), and only a trifle more space than is given Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite who was “devoted to his family.” In Guerin’s short biography we read of his “strained and pompous dignity.” Girodet’s biography contains very adverse criticism: his style “harmonized ill” with his subjects, and his work was full of “incongruity” even to the point sometimes of being “ludicrous.” Gros, exasperated by criticism, “sought refuge in the grosser pleasures of life.” Flandrin also is tagged with a moral criticism.
Coming down to the more modern painters we find even less consideration given them by the Britannica’s editors. Delacroix, who ushered in a new age of painting and brought composition back to art after a period of stagnation and quiescence, is nailed to France as follows: “As a colorist and a romantic painter he now ranks among the greatest of French artists.” Certainly not among the greatest English painters, for Constable is given more space than Delacroix; and Turner, the other precursor of the new era, is “like the British fleet among the navies of the world.”
Courbet, the father of modern painting and the artist who revolutionized æsthetics, is given half a column, equal space with those contemporaries of his from across the Channel, Francis Grant, Thomas Creswick and George Harvey. Perhaps this neglect of the great Frenchman is explained by the following early-Victorian complaint: “Sometimes, it must be owned, his realism is rather coarse and brutal.” And we learn that “he died of a disease of the liver aggravated by intemperance.” Courbet, unable to benefit by the pious and elegant esthétique of the Encyclopædia Britannica, was never deeply impressed by the artistic value of “daintiness and pleasantness of sentiment,” and as a result, perhaps, he is not held in as high esteem as is Birket Foster, who possessed those delicate and pleasing qualities.
The palpable, insular injustice dealt Courbet in point of space finds another victim in Daumier whose biography is almost as brief as that of Courbet. Most of it, however, is devoted to Daumier’s caricature. Although this type of work was but a phase of his development, the article says that, despite his caricatures, “he found time for flight in the higher sphere of painting.” Not only does this create a false impression of Daumier’s tremendous importance to modern painting, but it gives the erroneous idea that his principal métier was caricature. The entire criticism of his truly great work is summed up in the sentence: “As a painter, Daumier, one of the pioneers of naturalism, was before his time.” Likewise, the half-page biography of Manet is, from the standpoint of space, inadequate, and from the critical standpoint, incompetent. To say that he is “regarded as the most important master of Impressionism” is a false statement. Manet, strictly speaking, was not an Impressionist at all; and the high place that he holds in modern art is not even touched upon.
Such biographies as the foregoing are sufficiently inept to disqualify the Encyclopædia as a source for accurate æsthetic information; but when Renoir, who is indeed recognized as the great master of Impressionism, is dismissed with one-fifth of a page, the height of injustice has been reached. Renoir, even in academic circles, is admittedly one of the great painters of all time. Not only did he sum up the Impressionists, close up an experimental cycle, and introduce compositional form into the realistic painting of his day, but by his colossal vision and technical mastery he placed himself in the very front rank of all modern painters, if not of ancient painters as well. Yet he is accorded just twenty-seven lines and dismissed with this remark: “Though he is perhaps the most unequal of the great Impressionists, his finest works rank among the masterpieces of the modern French school.” Critical incompetency could scarcely go further. We can only excuse such inadequacy and ignorance on the ground that the Encyclopædia’s English critic has seen none of Renoir’s greatest work; and color is lent this theory when we note that in the given list of his paintings no mention is made of his truly masterful canvases.