CARICATURES AND LITHOGRAPHY IN PARIS
FIFTY years ago there lived at Munich a poor fellow, by name Aloys Senefelder, who was in so little repute as an author and artist, that printers and engravers refused to publish his works at their own charges, and so set him upon some plan for doing without their aid. In the first place, Aloys invented a certain kind of ink, which would resist the action of the acid that is usually employed by engravers, and with this he made his experiments upon copper plates, as long as he could afford to purchase them. He found that to write upon the plates backwards, after the manner of engravers, required much skill and many trials; and he thought that, were he to practise upon any other polished surface—a smooth stone, for instance, the least costly article imaginable—he might spare the expense of the copper until he had sufficient skill to use it.
One day, it is said that Aloys was called upon to write—rather a humble composition for an author and artist—a washing-bill. He had no paper at hand, and so he wrote out the bill with some of his newly invented ink upon one of his Kilheim stones. Some time afterwards he thought he would try and take an impression of his washing-bill: he did, and succeeded. Such is the story, which the reader most likely knows very well; and having alluded to the origin of the art, we shall not follow the stream through its windings and enlargement after it issued from the little parent rock, or fill our pages with the rest of the pedigree. Senefelder invented Lithography. His invention has not made so much noise and larum in the world as some others, which have an origin quite as humble and unromantic; but it is one to which we owe no small profit and a great deal of pleasure; and, as such, we are bound to speak of it with all gratitude and respect. The schoolmaster, who is now abroad, has taught us, in our youth, how the cultivation of art ‘emollit mores nec sinit esse’—(it is needless to finish the quotation); and lithography has been, to our thinking, the very best ally that art ever had; the best friend of the artist, allowing him to produce rapidly multiplied and authentic copies of his own works (without trusting to the tedious and expensive assistance of the engraver); and the best friend to the people likewise, who have means of purchasing these cheap and beautiful productions, and thus having their ideas ‘mollified’ and their manners ‘feros’ no more.
With ourselves among whom money is plenty, enterprise so great, and everything matter of commercial speculation, lithography has not been so much practised as wood or steel engraving, which, by the aid of great original capital and spread of sale, are able more than to compete with the art of drawing on stone. The two former may be called art done by machinery. We confess to a prejudice in favour of the honest work of hand, in matters of art, and prefer the rough workmanship of the painter to the smooth copies of his performances which are produced, for the most part, on the wood block or the steel plate.
The theory will possibly be objected to by many of our readers: the best proof in its favour, we think, is, that the state of art amongst the people in France and Germany, where publishers are not so wealthy or enterprising as with us,[4] and where lithography is more practised, is infinitely higher than in England, and the appreciation more correct. As draughtsmen, the French and German painters are incomparably superior to our own; and with art, as with any other commodity, the demand will be found pretty equal to the supply: with us, the general demand is for neatness, prettiness, and what is called effect in pictures, and these can be rendered completely, nay, improved, by the engraver’s conventional manner of copying the artist’s performances. But to copy fine expression and fine drawing, the engraver himself must be a fine artist; and let anybody examine the host of picture-books which appear every Christmas, and say whether, for the most part, painters or engravers possess any artistic merit? We boast, nevertheless, of some of the best engravers and painters in Europe. Here, again, the supply is accounted for by the demand; our highest class is richer than other aristocracy, quite as well instructed, and can judge and pay for fine pictures and engravings. But these costly productions are for the few, and not for the many, who have not yet certainly arrived at properly appreciating fine art.
Take the standard ‘Album,’ for instance—that unfortunate collection of deformed Zuleikas and Medoras (from the ‘Byron Beauties,’ the Flowers, Gems, Souvenirs, Caskets of Loveliness, Beauty, as they may be called); glaring caricatures of flowers, singly, in groups, in flower-pots, or with hideous deformed little Cupids sporting among them; of what are called ‘mezzotinto’ pencil-drawings, ‘poonah-paintings,’ and what not. ‘The Album’ is to be found invariably upon the round rosewood brass-inlaid drawing-room table of the middle classes, and with a couple of ‘Annuals’ besides, which flank it on the same table, represents the art of the house; perhaps there is a portrait of the master of the house in the dining-room, grim-glancing from above the mantelpiece; and of the mistress over the piano upstairs; add to these some odious miniatures of the sons and daughters, on each side of the chimney-glass; and here, commonly (we appeal to the reader if this is an overcharged picture), the collection ends. The family goes to the Exhibition once a year, to the National Gallery once in ten years: to the former place they have an inducement to go; there are their own portraits, or the portraits of their friends, or the portraits of public characters; and you will see them infallibly wondering over No. 2645 in the catalogue, representing ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ or of the ‘First Mayor of Little Pedlington since the Passing of the Reform Bill;’ or else bustling and squeezing among the miniatures, where lies the chief attraction of the Gallery. England has produced, owing to the effects of this class of admirers of art, two admirable, and five hundred very clever portrait-painters. How many artists? Let the reader count upon his five fingers, and see if, living at the present moment, he can name one for each.
If, from this examination of our own worthy middle classes, we look to the same class in France, what a difference do we find! Humble cafés in country towns have their walls covered with pleasing picture papers, representing, ‘Les Gloires de l’Armée Française,’ the ‘Seasons,’ the ‘Four Quarters of the World,’ ‘Cupid and Psyche,’ or some other allegory, landscape, or history, rudely painted, as papers for walls usually are; but the figures are all tolerably well drawn; and the common taste, which has caused a demand for such things, undeniable. In Paris, the manner in which the cafés and houses of the restaurateurs are ornamented, is, of course, a thousand times richer, and nothing can be more beautiful, or more exquisitely finished and correct, than the designs which adorn many of them. We are not prepared to say what sums were expended upon the painting of ‘Véry’s’ or ‘Verfour’s,’ of the ‘Salle Musard,’ or of numberless other places of public resort in the capital. There is many a shopkeeper whose sign is a very tolerable picture; and often have we stopped to admire (the reader will give us credit for having remained outside) the excellent workmanship of the grapes and vine-leaves over the door of some very humble, dirty, inodorous shop of a marchand de vin.
These, however, serve only to educate the public taste, and are ornaments, for the most part, much too costly for the people. But the same love of ornament which is shown in their public places of resort, appears in their houses likewise; and every one of our readers who has lived in Paris, in any lodging, magnificent or humble, with any family, however poor, may bear witness how profusely the walls of his smart salon in the English quarter, or of his little room au sixième in the Pays Latin, has been decorated with prints of all kinds. In the first, probably, with bad engravings on copper from the bad and tawdry pictures of the artists of the time of the Empire; in the latter, with gay caricatures of Granville or Monnier; military pieces, such as are dashed off by Raffet, Charlet, Vernet (one can hardly say which of the three designers has the greatest merit, or the most vigorous hand); or clever pictures from the crayon of the Deverias, the admirable Roqueplan, or Decamp. We have named here, we believe, the principal lithographic artists in Paris; and those—as doubtless there are many—of our readers who have looked over Monsieur Aubert’s portfolios, or gazed at that famous caricature-shop window in the Rue du Coq, or are even acquainted with the exterior of Monsieur Delaporte’s little emporium in the Burlington Arcade, need not be told how excellent the productions of all these artists are in their genre. We get in these engravings the loisirs of men of genius, not the finikin performances of laboured mediocrity, as with us: all these artists are good painters, as well as good designers; a design from them is worth a whole gross of ‘Books of Beauty;’ and if we might raise a humble supplication to the artists in our own country of similar merit—to such men as Leslie, Maclise, Herbert, Cattermole, and others—it would be, that they should, after the example of their French brethren and of the English landscape painters, take chalk in hand, produce their own copies of their own sketches, and never more draw a single ‘Forsaken One,’ ‘Rejected One,’ ‘Dejected One,’ at the entreaty of any publisher, or for the pages of any Book of Beauty, Royalty, or Loveliness whatever.
Can there he a more pleasing walk in the whole world than a stroll through the Gallery of the Louvre on a fête-day? not to look so much at the pictures as at the lookers-on. Thousands of the poorer classes are there: mechanics in their Sunday clothes, smiling grisettes, smart dapper soldiers of the line, with bronzed wondering faces, marching together in little companies of six or seven, and stopping every now and then at Napoleon or Leonidas as they appear in proper vulgar heroics in the pictures of David or Gros. The taste of these people will hardly be approved by the connoisseur, but they have a taste for art. Can the same be said of our lower classes, who, if they are inclined to be sociable and amused in their holidays, have no place of resort but the taproom or tea-garden, and no food for conversation except such as can be built upon the politics or the police reports of the last Sunday paper? So much has Church and State puritanism done for us—so well has it succeeded in materialising and binding down to the earth the imagination of men, for which God has made another world (which certain statesmen take but too little into account)—that fair and beautiful world of art, in which there can be nothing selfish or sordid, of which Dulness has forgotten the existence, and which Bigotry has endeavoured to shut out from sight—
‘On a banni les démons et les fées,
Le raisonner tristement s’accrédite:
On court, hélas! après la vérité:
Ah! croyez-moi, l’erreur a son mérite!’