THE HISTORY OF
MODERN PAINTING

ANTON GRAFF	PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

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Morrison & Gibb Limited
Edinburgh

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

The historian who wishes to relate the history of painting in the nineteenth century is confronted with quite other demands than await him who undertakes the art of an earlier period. The greatest difficulty with which the latter has to cope is the deficiency of sources. He manifestly gropes in the dark with regard to the works of the masters as well as to the circumstances of their lives. After he has searched archives and libraries in order to collect his biographical material, the real critical problem awaits him. Even amongst the admittedly authentic works, those which are undated confront those whose chronology is certain. To these must be added those nameless ones, as to whose history there is a doubt; to these again, those whose origin is to be ascertained. It needs a quick eye to separate the schools and groups, and finally to recognise the notes which are peculiar to the master.

With none of these difficulties is the historian of modern art confronted. The painters of the nineteenth century have very seldom forgotten to attach a name and date to their works, and the circumstances of their lives are related with an accuracy that was, earlier, rarely the lot of the foremost men in history. It is all the more difficult, face to face with such a chaos of pictures, to discover the spiritual bond which connects them all, to construct a building out of the immense supply of accumulated bricks, the piled-up mass of rough material. The evolution of modern painting is more complicated and varied than that of the art of an earlier period, just as modern life itself is more complicated and varied than that of any previous age.

How quietly, slowly, and surely was the evolution of that older period carried out. One simple proportion was maintained between art and the universal life of culture. Customs, views of life and art, were so intimately bound up together, that the knowledge of the age in general naturally comprises that of art. Standing before some old altar-piece of the school of Cologne, it is as though one were watching in some broad high dome; everything is quiet all round, and the august figures in the picture lead their calm, grave existence in illustrious grandeur. The message of Christianity, “My kingdom is not of this world,” meets in art, too, with a clear expression. Humility and devotion are joined together, making for a refinement in the feeling of life that is unsurpassed in its hieratic tenderness and gracious innocence. In the fifteenth century, the age of discoveries, a new spirit entered the world. Commerce and navigation discovered new worlds, painting discovered life. The human spirit grew freer and more joyous; it was no longer satisfied with yearning for the other world alone, it felt itself at home also in this world, in the glory of the earth. Pictures, too, were inspired with some of those joyous perceptions with which the citizens of the fifteenth century issued from their narrow walls out under God’s free heaven, something of that Easter Day mood in Faust. People still went on painting Madonnas and saints, subjects of a religion which had spread from the far East over the whole West; but with the severe simplicity of the heavenly, there was universal awakening of all the charm and roguery and energy of the earthly. It is the first virginal contact of the spirit with nature. On men’s works there rests the first morning-dew of spiritual life; they remind one of woodlands in spring: Botticelli, Van Eyck, Schongauer.

After the Italians had become vigorous realists in the fifteenth century, they rose in the sixteenth, the century of inspired humanism, to majesty. The time of hard grappling with the overwhelming fulness of actuality is over. Those great masterpieces ensue in which the unlaboured effort shines forth in the most felicitous achievement: Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian. At the same time the German manner is most directly opposed to the Romance. They disdain to ingratiate themselves into men’s minds by outward grace of form, but win the heart by their deep religious feeling and intimate sensibility. They are German to the core, racial even to the stiffness of the German character, but full of feeling and truth to life. Dürer in his woodcuts and copper engravings is “inwendig voller figur”; in them he offers the “concentrated, homely treasure of his heart.” Holbein is great by the incomparably real art of his portraits. The century of that joyous revival of Paganism, the Olympian vivacity of the Renaissance, is followed by the age to which the Jesuits gave life and character. For those stately churches in the Jesuit style, with their fortissimo effect, their huge, sculptured ornaments and their gleaming, gold decorations, the classic quietness of the old masters ceases to be appropriate. It is a question of a more stirring and impressive treatment of sacred subjects, wherein the whole passion of renewed Catholicism should be brought to expression. Spain, the country of the Inquisition, set the classic stamp on this enhanced religious feeling. Here all that monarchical and sacerdotal impulse which founded and aggrandised the Spanish nation, founded too its true representative in painting. Painters endowed their church pictures with a passionate fervour and a flush of extravagant sensuousness of the national, Spanish, local colour, such as are found united in the art of no other age or country. Necessarily, moreover, such a feudal system as that of Spain, with its grandees and princes of the Church, involved also an art of portrait painting which ranks with the highest that has issued in this kind from any country whatever: Murillo, Velasquez. In Flanders, the second stronghold of the Jesuits, we have the titan Rubens. A joyously fleshly Fleming, he seizes nature by the throat and drags her there where he stands erect, as though he were lord of the world. Freedom had found its way into victorious and Protestant Holland. Here there flourished an art neither courtly nor fostered by the Church. It stood in the closest connection with the burgesses, showed clear signs of the struggle through which country and people had won independence. In the first place, painting celebrated as its worthiest subject the free burgher, the tighter in the heroic struggle for freedom. At no time was portrait-painting practised to such an extent, and the sitters not aristocratic courtiers, but proud burgesses of a free community; the men grave, strong, self-reliant; the women faithful, pure, and modest. The workmanship is correspondent: simple, solid, domestic; and soon there followed the glorification of that which they prized the more after their struggles had been accomplished: the quiet, comfortable delight of hearth and home.

During the War of Independence the Dutch had learnt to love their fatherland, and they were the first, as artists, fully to grasp the poetry of landscape. Art now no longer shines only upon the eyes of Mary and the Hosts of Heaven: it settles upon arid country hills, streams upon the sea waves, is at home in peasants’ houses and the dark woods, wanders through the streets and alleys, makes a temple of every market. The religious sentiments, however, which stirred Protestant Holland had to find appropriate expression; the living essence of biblical subjects was to be released from a narrow, ecclesiastical sphere, and approached anew with all the deep, German inwardness. These tendencies were all united in Rembrandt—perhaps of all masters, since the Christian era, the mightiest proclaimer of the great Pan; to him the cosmic powers of light and air signified the divinity that Michael Angelo had painted under a beautiful human form.

Finally, in the eighteenth century, comes rococo, with its rustling frou-frou and its delicate charm. The whole life of that noble society, which exchanged court costume for silken pastoral garments, formality and rank for charm and grace, was a lively play, an extravagant game. The king played with his crown, the priest with his religion, the philosopher with his wisdom, the poet with the art of rhyme. They did not hear as yet the hoarse threatening voice of the disinherited, “Car tel est notre plaisir.” What this age possessed of beauty and charm, its peculiar grace and wanton vivacity, its reckless, inassailable frivolity, was proper also to its art. Light and gracious as the whole life of that harmless, merry generation, it glided through the age untroubled, led by Cupidons, and kissed by the wandering winds. It is only to-day that we understand once more the charming masters of that elegant century.

The painters of every epoch looked at nature with their own eyes, and also with the eyes of their age and of their country. So the art of every period appears as “the mirror and abstract chronicle” of its age. With irresistible majesty, and conscious of its inspiration, it lays hold of the external world, and gives back to it its own picture infinitely exalted. It is the enlightened expression of the age, as upright, as fresh, as fanatic, or as unnatural as its generation. Therein lies the strength of the painters of rococo, that they painted the artificiality of the time with such unsurpassable naturalness. It is just these infinitely various manners of paying court to nature—unceasingly throughout the course of centuries, now violently, now softly and tenderly, at times, too, not without passing infidelity,—it is just these which determine the beauty and value, the mystery and essence of art, and are in the history of art all that tends to its variety and unsurpassable charm.

The nineteenth century not only shows a new age, but probably begins a new section of universal history. It is probable that in contrast with this epoch of stirring movement, during which the readjustment of all political and social relations, the new discoveries in the instruments of commerce, trade, and industry have given an entirely new aspect to the world, the next thousand years will sum up all the previous centuries as the “old world.” New men require a new art. One would be inclined to surmise from this that the art of the nineteenth century presented itself as something essentially personal, with a sharply distinctive style. Instead of this it offers at first view, in contrast with those old ages of uniform production, a condition like that of Babylon. The nineteenth century has no style—the phrase that has been so often quoted as to have become a commonplace. In architecture the forms of all the past ages live again. The day before yesterday we built Greek, yesterday Gothic; here Baroque, there Japanese: but amidst all these products of imitative styles there rise up stations and market-places which, with the robust elegance of their iron colonnades, herald the greatness of fresh conquests. In the province of painting there are similar extremes. In no other age have minds so diverse flourished side by side as Carstens and Goya, Cornelius and Corot, Ingres and Millet, Wiertz and Courbet, Rossetti and Manet. And the existing histories excite a belief that the nineteenth century is a chaos into which it is possible only for some later age to bring order.

Perhaps, however, it is already quite possible, if one only resolves uncompromisingly to apply to the new age those principles which have been tested in the treatment of the old histories of art, if one endeavours to study those artists who are in part still our contemporaries as objectively as though they were masters long dead. That is to say: one is wont, in a review of an older period in art, not to inquire what it had caught from an earlier age, but rather what it had introduced that was new. It was not because they imitated in their turn that the old masters became great; not because they looked backwards, but rather because they went forwards, that they made the history of art. We are not grateful, for instance, to the Dutchmen of the middle of the sixteenth century—Frans Floris and his contemporaries—that they forsook Dutch naturalism, and bootlessly exerted themselves in the way of Michael Angelo and Raphael. We can see no remarkable merit in the fact that the Bolognese at the beginning of the seventeenth century gathered their honey from the flowers of the Cinquecento. And we are even less inclined to see in the contemporaries of Adrian van der Werff, who endeavoured to refine the rugged, primeval Dutch art by the study of the Italians, more than clumsy imitators.

Just as much will the interest of the historian of the art of the nineteenth century be bestowed in the first degree upon the works which have really created something independent and transcending all the earlier ages. He will not give especial prominence to those domains which had their flowering-time in other days than our own, but he will ask: Where is that distinctive element which appertains to the nineteenth century only? What are the new forms which it has found, the new sentiments to which it has given expression? Not those whose activity lay in clothing—however cleverly—the artistic necessities of the age in the store of already transmitted forms, but the pathfinders, who went forwards and created anew, require our attention. Even if, after the old masters, they can only be granted a place in the third or fourth class, they must nevertheless always take precedence of those others, because they exhibited themselves as they were, instead of making themselves large by standing on the shoulders of the dead. Many of those who were once valued highly, who, thriving on the inheritance of the past, accomplished what was apparently of importance, measured by this standard will arouse little interest, because their artistic speech, depending on a foundation of the established canonical works of old, is not their own but borrowed. In others, on the contrary, who, apart from the dominating tendency, had the courage rather to be insignificant, and yet remain themselves, observing with their own eyes nature which surrounded them, or naïvely abandoning themselves to the disposition of their artistic fantasy, in them will be seen the essential vehicles of the modern spirit. And then it will be apparent that the art of the nineteenth century as well as that of every earlier period had its peculiar garment, even if for official occasions it preferred to unpack from its wardrobe the state costumes of earlier ages. It is only because this distinction between the eclectic and the personal, the derived and the independent, has not yet been carried out with sufficient strictness, that it has hitherto, in my opinion, been found so difficult to discover the distinctive style of modern art, and to make clear the logic and sequence of its evolution.

BOOK I

THE LEGACY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

COMMENCEMENT OF MODERN ART IN ENGLAND

If the question arises, why modern art has been compelled to find expression for itself in a form different from that of the art of the earlier centuries, we must first call attention to the change that has taken place in the fundamental conditions of society. Formerly, the chief supporters of art were the two leading powers of Church and King. The most noted works of Raphael and Michael Angelo, of Velasquez and Murillo, of Rubens and Van Dyck, were executed either for the churches or for the reigning princes of their country. The patron of modern art is the citizen. The old culture of the clerics and aristocrats has been superseded by that of the middle classes, and the beginnings of modern art must therefore be sought in the country in which this class first developed its distinctive character—in England.

England, as early as the eighteenth century, was already a land of citizens. At a time when there was to be found on the Continent acute mockery of what was old and outworn, conjoined with the most enthusiastic and joyous faith in the future, the great and wealthy England had established herself in the van of the new age. Here Voltaire saw with astonishment for the first time, when he arrived in London as an exile at the age of thirty-two, the free, open life of a great people; here he learnt to know a country where there is “much difference of rank, but none that is not based on merit; where one could think freely without being restrained by slavish terror.” Here was the idea of a modern free state already accomplished at a time when, upon the Continent, the thunderclouds of the impending storm hardly cast their first shadow. Here the notion of a united family life had first developed, upon the foundation of a civil order and security. Here, therefore, were first broken down those barriers around the territory of literature and art within which the spirit of the Renaissance had raised its wonderful flowers, and the road was begun along which the nineteenth century should advance.

Simultaneously with the growth of the middle classes there arose the need for a domestic, practical literature. Books were required which people could read by their fireside, in the seclusion of the family circle, in country districts. For that, the stiff and antiquated poetry of courtiers and academicians, which had hitherto been poured out upon the world from France, was hardly suitable.

To the cold Classicism represented by Pope, there succeeded in English literature—far earlier than was the case elsewhere—the delineation of what was immediately contemporary. At the same time that Mdlle. de Scudéry—when it was a question of describing the court of the Great King, the society of Louis XIV—felt herself bound to translate her theme into the antique and write a Cyrus, the English novel had taken its motives from actual life. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is the first book in which man and nature are depicted without the introduction of antique types or fairies; the first novel in which the details of real life are displayed, and what had been hitherto neglected is granted an exact delineation. At a time when people in other countries were occupied with representations of the antique, the English novelists had embarked on the intimacy of the family circle. After Richardson, who laboriously yet with animation described everyday life, followed Fielding, with his sharp observation, homely and humorous; then Goldsmith, with his serene outlook of untroubled equanimity, his unsurpassed miniatures; Smollett, with his crude and satirical character sketching; and the audacious and witty Laurence Sterne, whom Nietzsche has called the most “gallant” of all authors. At the same time tragedy, too, descended from the court and the nobility into the sphere of domestic life; showing that here too were significant fortunes and conflicts, which stories strike a truer human note than those of kings and heroes.

Painting moved along the same road; and whilst in other countries, with the beginning of the century, the high, aristocratic art, which was the offspring of the Renaissance, gradually waned, the plebeian paintings of Hogarth laid the foundations of that art which prevailed in the bourgeois nineteenth century. English art had this advantage in playing a pioneering part, that it had no old traditions to stand in its way; it had no great past. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England had been content to offer hospitality to Holbein and Van Dyck, and to collect the works of foreign masters in her galleries. Her art sprang into existence suddenly and unexpectedly at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and thence developed exclusively on native lines. Since the English could not lean either upon an old or a foreign model, nor enter into a round of subjects that had already been brought to perfection, they turned from the outset quite naturally into the road which was only to be trodden later by the other nations still in the bondage of tradition. They took up, to a certain extent, the thread which the Dutch, who appeared in the seventeenth century as the most modern people in art, had let drop: the progressive ideas of Holland had come over to England with the “glorious revolution,” with William of Orange and Queen Anne; whilst in Holland itself the French invasion of 1672 had caused a reaction to the courtly idea, against which the English took up an attitude of conscious and rigid protest. This opposition is clearly expressed by the English æsthetic writers.

The most important name to be mentioned is that of Shaftesbury. Beneath the favour of the court in France, he says, art has suffered. We Englishmen live in an age in which freedom has arisen. Such a people does not require, in order that art may prosper, an ambitious king to breed, by means of his pensions, a race of flattering Court painters. Our civil liberty affords us a sufficient foundation, and our liberty leads us to absolute verity in art.

Thus did Shaftesbury enunciate his leading æsthetic doctrine; it was his constant message, and it was constantly repeated with great emphasis: “All beauty is truth.” “The search after truth leads you to nature.” “Truth is the mightiest thing in the world, since it exercises sovereign rights over the creations of the imagination.”

But what must art be in order to produce truth? “The strictest imitation of nature.” By this word Shaftesbury does not understand what we understand by the word “nature”; not, in the first instance, so much the nature surrounding us, in its outward manifestations, but, above all, an intimate human reality. Let the painter represent the reality of human inwardness. Still life, the animal world, landscape,—all that, Shaftesbury explains, is most valuable. But another and a higher life exists in man than in the beasts and the woods, and there is the true object of art. In no case should the artist proceed from external vision; for then he will obtain fashionable attitudes, theatrical unreality, or, in the most favourable instance, a formal, decorative embellishment. Of what value is that in comparison with a single real presentation of character? How insignificant would every external form seem in contrast to each single feature of this intimate manner! Here is the second characteristic of English painting. It proceeds neither, like that of the sixteenth century, from formulas, nor, like the Dutch, from the picturesque, but, like to the English novel of character, from an intellectual impulse; it strives not after beauty of form and physical, sensuous grace, but, in the first place, after intellectual expression.

And from this there follows immediately a third trait. If art is to make the inwardness of man its subject, the artist cannot remain an indifferent portrayer. He will make great distinctions, will bring into prominence what is meritorious or censurable in every character—he will become a moralist. Only so can he conform to that last and highest function which Shaftesbury assigns to the painter.

The liberty which the English nation had fought for in the “glorious Revolution” brought forth, in the course of years, while Shaftesbury was writing, a fruitful crop of dissoluteness and licence. The mortification of the flesh of the Puritans was followed by so violent a recrudescence of sensuality that it was as though the whole menagerie of the passions had been unchained. London swarmed with criminals; drunkenness was an epidemic. The moral idea awoke amongst the cultivated classes. Might it not be possible, with the help of education, for that to be overcome? And so Shaftesbury’s view of art comprised a third, and very dangerous, element; namely, that to fulfil the most serious mission of that culture which had ensued from the free and natural conditions in England—even in the realm of æsthetics—the painter, like the poet, must appear as the moral teacher of his age. Imagine an artist who fulfils these conditions and you have, as a result, Hogarth, with all his qualities and defects.

What marks the greatness of Hogarth is his freedom from foreign and ancient influences. The eighteenth century came in as an academic age in art. Turning away from life, it spent itself in allegory and the imitation of typical figures that had been inherited from the Renaissance and petrified into academic work. Gods, in whom no one any longer believed, hovered, at least in paint, over a race which was without enthusiasm. Then came Hogarth, and his quick vision discovered the new way. He looked out upon the life surrounding him, with its manifold idiosyncrasies, and felt himself with pride to be the son of a new age, in which rigid, conventional forms were everywhere penetrated by the modern ideas of free thought, the rights of man, conformity to nature in morals and manners. This world which confronted him he depicted truly as it was, in all its beauty and its ugliness. With him was the origin of modern art. Before his paintings and engravings pale idealism disappeared. It was he who resolved and set out to bring into the world a new and independent observation of life. He was a painter who, with as little aid from foreign influences as from those of the past, went his own way and kept to it, and devoted his art, unblemished by the pallor of a borrowed ideal of beauty, soberly and exclusively to the realities of surrounding life.

“It seemed to me unlikely,” writes he, “that by copying old compositions I could acquire facility for those new designs which were my first and greatest ambitions.” Works of old Italian masters, artistic contemplations, which went back to Raphael and the Caracci, were ignored and ridiculed by him. His rude strength of painting, directed to the living truth, was a protest against all that idealism which was the heritage of the Renaissance, and had grown quite bombastic under the hands of its imitators. Nature, he writes, is simple, plain, and true in all her works; and with this principle he has founded a strong English school on the solid foundation of truth to nature.

An Englishman by birth, character, and disposition, he depicted his fellow-countrymen; he made his sketches in the midst of the hubbub of the street. His world is London, the world-city, “old merry England,” which, in contrast with the Puritanism of to-day, still lived through its golden age of riot. In such a world—a world existing to this day, only more decently berouged—moved Hogarth; in the company of wine-bibbers, in gambling hells, in rooms of poets, in cellars of highwaymen, in the death-chambers of fallen maidens. “The Harlot’s Progress,” which he produced in a series of pictures, brought him his first success. He then published further series of similar careers over crooked courses—“The Rake’s Progress,” “Marriage à la Mode.” He painted the rabble of London, their society and their morals; those who went in cotton and rags and those in satin and silk. In his writings he censures the old painters plainly because in their historical style they had quite passed over the middle classes. And he went with great knowledge to these new subjects. In the National Gallery, which possesses the originals of “Marriage à la Mode,” one is astounded at the technical qualities of Hogarth’s painting. Whoever has been misled by the engraved reproductions, and looks for bad, distorted drawing, may here learn to know him as a painter in the fullest sense of the word. There is no sign left of the defective caricature which disfigures the engravings; there is a severe, unadorned manifestation of realism, of an art that has from the outset rooted itself in modern life. Under the manners and graces of the age Hogarth stands a “self-made” man, a healthy Anglo-Saxon personality, full of sturdy independence and impeccable common sense. He attracts by a sharpness of observation, a penetration into idiosyncrasies of character, a grip upon the most trivial changes in men’s emotions and play of features, the like of which is to be found in hardly one of his predecessors.

Against these qualities it must be understood that an equal number of defects is to be set off. The inartistic part of him was that he followed the æsthetic theories of the age, and looked upon art as merely a means to ends alien to itself. With him painting was an instrument to disseminate the inventions of his poetic-satiric humour; it was a form of speech to him. He is not unjustly called on that account a comedian of the pencil, the Molière of painting. We look at other pictures, but his we read. The commentaries on them are in some respects the rendering back of the pictures into their proper element. Lessing called the drama his pulpit; with Hogarth his art was a pulpit. He wanted, like Hamlet, to “hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Pictures beneath his hands became moral sermons.

In the six pictures in “The Harlot’s Progress,” with which he started in 1733, and which to-day, since the originals have perished, can be considered only in the copper engravings after them, all these attributes are recognisable. Mary Hackabout comes innocent from the country to the town with the intention of seeking a situation as a servant-girl. She speedily falls a victim to temptation, becomes the mistress of a Jewish banker, whom she soon loses by her infidelity, descends to be a thief, and comes to the work-house. Released from there, she becomes the companion of a highwayman, until she ends her pitiful life in a disorderly house, leaving behind her a poor crippled boy, who, at his mother’s funeral, is playing with a top. The conclusion of the paintings shows how the other women bid farewell to the corpse, and buoy themselves up for their coming pleasures by drinking from the spirit bottle, which stands on the coffin, while the priest, who is come to give the blessing, announces his visit for the evening.

The second series, which is to be seen to-day in the Soane Museum, describes in eight tableaux the somewhat similar life of a young man, the “Rake.” As an Oxford student he has promised marriage to a pretty but poor girl, when suddenly the death of a wealthy uncle throws him into the vortex of London life. He wishes to buy himself freedom from his sweetheart, but she disdainfully refuses the money and supports herself and her child honestly with the labour of her hands. The seducer, winning fame in the world of women and sport, rapidly paces the road to ruin; yet he repairs his finances once again by a marriage with a rich and one-eyed old lady. Once more on his feet, he flings himself into games of chance, and comes to the sponging-house, whither his better half follows him. It is the last straw when a play which he has offered to a manager is refused, and he can no longer buy himself a pint of ale; there remains only the final fall into the misery of frenzy, and in the last picture we find him amongst the lunatics bound in chains as a madman. Only his student love, Sarah Young, of Oxford, whom he had treated so scurvily, cannot forget him, and, with tears, seeks him out again in the madhouse.

The third and most famous series was completed many years after the “Rake”—in 1745. Hogarth has admittedly taken particular pains with the six oil paintings of “Marriage à la Mode,” which have been placed in the National Gallery; and these painted novels reveal in strength and beauty of execution the high-water mark of his work as a painter. The whole is quieter, simpler, less overloaded with ingenious accessories. The impoverished lord has married his son, who is already worn out with excesses, to the strong and healthy daughter of a city alderman. A girl is born; then they go their separate ways. The husband surprises the wife with a lover, and is stabbed by him; the unfaithful wife, moved by this, begs her dying husband for forgiveness. As a young widow, deprived of her woman’s honour, she goes back to the bourgeois, Philistine ennui of her father’s house, and when she learns of her lover’s condemnation she escapes from the burden of her misery by means of poison. The father is sufficiently provident to take the wedding ring off her finger before the body is cold, lest it should be stolen from the corpse. In the last sequence Hogarth passed over completely to the moral sermon and the study of crime. The series “Industry and Idleness,” in 1747, was comprised in twelve sheets, which he produced only in rough engravings, as he wished exclusively to influence the masses. Two apprentices enter a cloth-weaving business at the same time, of whom one rises, through his zeal for the interests of the business, to a marriage with his master’s beautiful daughter, to the rank of alderman, and finally to be Lord Mayor of London. The idle apprentice grows, on the down grade, from a gambler into a vagabond. He is transported, comes back again, and ends on the scaffold. The two comrades meet for the last time when the honest man announces his death-warrant to the knave.

HOGARTH.	THE RAKE’S PROGRESS, PLATE VIII.

Garrick, as we can see from his epitaph on Hogarth, has not unjustly characterised his art, in these words—

HOGARTH.	MARRIAGE À LA MODE, PLATE V.

Hogarth painted stirring and humorous scenes, full of effective morality, with which he sought to cheer, terrify, and improve humanity. His five-act tragedies end always with the triumph of Virtue and the punishment of Vice. As one of his contemporaries said, he exercised the art of “hanging in colours.” The twelve plates of the parallel biographies of “Industry and Idleness” he employed as an illustrated weekly sermon for the benefit of the working classes, and he was able to observe with satisfaction that they had an actual influence on the conduct of the people, as instanced in the diminution of gin shops. Yet for all that, in the elevation of public morality, the highest aim of art is not, as Garrick asserted, fulfilled. Who has ever seen such a painter? Would he be a painter? It is exactly by this moralising with the brush that Hogarth stands in such abrupt opposition to his predecessors, the Dutch. They were painters, nothing but painters, and in their painting reckoned on eyes which could appreciate their pictorial subtilty. Man was for them a patch of colour; the real delight of their eyes was the rich light that came mellowed through the shadows, and played upon the ruffed garments and the clumsy forms. With Hogarth, in the place of the idea of colour, the anecdote is brought in. He saw the world not so much with the eyes of the painter, as with those of the physician, the criminologist, the pastor. The familiar element, that serene and comfortable observation of an everyday occurrence upon which Dutch art was based, has altogether disappeared in his pictures. He did not paint because something pictorial urged him, but saw in men the actors of the parts which he had in his mind. This departure from the purely picturesque is in part explained by the predominance of literature in England at that time. In a country where the tragedy of familiar life as well as the domestic novel had arisen there was imminent peril that a young school of painting working without traditions should branch off also on to those lines. Hogarth desired to give painting a new manner; he seized upon what was epic or dramatic, and painted the pictorial counter parts to Smollett’s and Richardson’s novels. In the age of enlightenment the painter makes way for the writer. With this idea he himself wrote: “I have endeavoured to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, my men and women my players, who, by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb show.”

Moreover, to explain the growth of this sort of literary hybrid, one is forced to consider the changed conditions under which painting was introduced into England at large. Art, which hitherto had shone forth her enchantment upon the few, was conducted from the first in free England along the broad road of popularity, and given over to a public which had to be educated to art by degrees; and this admission of the mass of the people to the enjoyment of art, in a proportion hitherto unheard of, must inevitably have a retrogressive effect upon painting itself. Instead of the earlier amateur of really distinguished culture, there stood “the People.”

But just as in the Middle Ages works of art were seen to be a sort of picture-writing for the people—picturis eruditur populus, said Gregory the Great,—so now the new patrons could hardly require other than those works of art in which a story was pictorially told. These could be understood even by the man whose understanding was otherwise wholly closed to matters of art; and hence it came about that almost all the genre painters—for very nearly a century—followed with more or less intelligence in the footsteps of Hogarth. To treat him, as is frequently done, because of this popularisation of art, because of this transformation of the picture into the picture story, as a pattern instance of tastelessness, would lead to very dangerous consequences, and should be the less employed because Hogarth’s pictures are, at least, comparatively well painted, whereas many of his successors could escape the deluge only in the Noah’s Ark of their talent for narration. What Hogarth could do when he put off the schoolmaster, he has shown moreover in his portraits. There he is an entirely great painter. His pictures have none of that Van Dyck elegance, which had become the mode in England before him; they are robust, crude, Anglo-Saxon, strongly and broadly painted withal, sketches, in the best sense of the word. His “Shrimp Girl,” in the National Gallery, for instance, is a masterpiece to which the nineteenth century can hardly produce a rival.

In the history of painting it is notorious that the latter half of the last century belongs especially to portraiture, and here the English occupy the first rank. Neither Hogarth nor Reynolds nor Gainsborough was a genius like Titian, Velasquez, or even Frans Hals. Their art is not to be compared with that of the greatest of all portrait painters, but they surpassed all the painters of the eighteenth century; they were not only the greatest in England since Van Dyck, but the first portrait painters in Europe at the time.

Reynolds and Gainsborough lived almost at the same period. The former, born in 1723, died in 1792; the latter, born in 1727, died in 1788. They had as models men and women of the same society. They went the same road, side by side. Many celebrities strayed from one studio to the other, and were painted by Reynolds as well as by Gainsborough. These are just the pictures which show us so distinctly how widely the two, who were usually mentioned in the same breath, differed from each other in spite of having grown up on the same soil. Even their outward man displays this dissimilarity.

Reynolds appears in his “Portrait of Himself” in the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence, in the red mantle of the President of the Academy, the official cap on his head, while the hand resting on the table holds a copy of his Discourses; close by is a bust of Michael Angelo. The complexion is that of a man who sits much within doors. A pair of spectacles with large, round glasses leads one to conclude that he injured his eyesight early with much reading. Gainsborough, with his refined Roman nose, the haughty, curved sensuous lips, and the expression of his face which speaks at once of innocence and refinement, gives an impression far more than Reynolds of the child of nature and the gentleman. His cheeks are fresh and rather ruddy; a depth of soul lies within the large blue eyes, that are somewhat melancholy, yet have such a free outlook upon life.

Joshua Reynolds’ father was a clergyman, a most learned man, who kept a Latin school. He gave the boy, it is recorded, that most uncommon Christian name, for the remarkable reason that he hoped thereby to draw the attention of a great personage, who bore the same name, towards his young namesake. His son was to become a physician. But books on other subjects which he read at his desk at school made a greater impression on the boy. In the well known Treatise on Painting, by Richardson, he discovered his vocation. From the perusal of this book he developed a taste for things artistic, studied the works on perspective of Pater Pozzo, read everything he could find on art, and copied as a preliminary all that fell into his hands in the way of woodcuts and copper engravings. One of the earliest drawings which remain from his childhood represents the interior of a library. At the age of nineteen he came to London to a well-known master, Hudson, the favourite painter with the gentry of the day, who required £120 with a pupil. He was already convinced that only in London could he find the means to attain fame, and even as early as 1744 he took a fine establishment and kept open house in order to attract attention. He was soon in a position to complete his artistic education by means of residence in Italy. In 1746 he had painted the portrait of a Captain Keppel, who shortly afterwards was appointed Commodore of the Mediterranean squadron, and invited the young painter to go for a cruise in his ship. They sailed in 1749, and Reynolds was able to spend three years in Italy.

	Cassell & Co.
REYNOLDS	MRS SIDDONS

His first impression was one of bitter disappointment. Where was that rich colouring in the Italian classics which he had been led to expect from English mezzotints? Everything struck him as lifeless, pale, insipid. Whereupon he affected the opinion that there was no more to be seen in Rome. Raphael, in particular, appeared to him to be a mediocre painter, whom only a remarkable chance had brought to such a pitch of fame. Surrounded by the great masterpieces of the Cinquecento, he employed himself in drawing caricatures, and made a sort of travesty of the School of Athens, in which he drew caricatures of the English colony in Rome at that time, in the attitudes of figures in the pictures of Raphael. But he very speedily changed his opinion, and began to follow the paths of the great dead. He went indefatigably through the galleries of Rome, from Rubens to Titian, from Correggio to Guido and Raphael. He studied so hard in the Vatican, that he took a chill in the cold rooms, which left him all his life a little deaf. That sojourn at Rome was to Reynolds what, a hundred years later, his visit to Spain was to Lenbach.

He had already at Hudson’s acquired great facility as a copyist, and of Guercino, in particular, he had made numerous copies. During this Italian tour, however, he became the greatest connoisseur of old masters that the eighteenth century possessed.

It is related that the Chevalier Van Loo, when he was in England in 1763, vaunted himself one day, in Reynolds’ presence, upon his unfailing discrimination in telling a copy from an original. Whereupon Reynolds showed him one of his own studies of a head, after Rembrandt. The Chevalier judged it to be, indisputably, a masterpiece by the great Dutchman.

He left Rome in April 1752, and made a further visit to Naples, to the cities of Tuscany, and to Venice. The careless notes of travel that he made on this journey show the clear insight which he had attained into the Italian schools. They all deal with questions of technique, on effects of light and shadow, on the mystery of chiaroscuro. For Titian, in particular, he had an extravagant devotion,—he would ruin himself, he said, if he might only possess one of the great works of Titian.

When he returned to England in 1752, at the age of thirty, his talent was fully developed, and the connoisseurs were unanimous in hailing him as a new Van Dyck. With the portrait of Miss Gunning, afterwards the Duchess of Hamilton, he appeared in 1753 as a power in English art. As early as 1755, when Hogarth was compelled to give up portrait painting for lack of patrons, one hundred and twenty-five persons sat for Reynolds, and after that about one hundred and fifty people were painted by him annually; and this brought him in a yearly income of about £16,000.

At first he took up his quarters in St. Martin’s Lane, which was then the most fashionable place of residence for artists; but in 1760 he bought a house, No. 47 Leicester Square, the most select quarter of London, and furnished it with the most palatial splendour. The studio, which he built for himself, was as large as a ballroom, and furnished with a quite modern luxury. The large corridor that led to it had a gallery of pictures by old masters. It was the age of the great literary and dramatic revival in England. Garrick stood at the zenith of his popularity, Burke had already made himself a name, Johnson had produced his Dictionary, Richardson had reached the summit of his fame, Smollett had written Peregrine Pickle, Gray had attracted notice by his verse. All these and others who set the vogue in literature and the drama, the principal figures in politics, the leaders of fashion, lounged in that luxurious studio and gossiped with Reynolds of the theatre, both before and behind the scenes, of the doings in Parliament and the scandal of the Court, of literature and of art. At the time when Goldsmith was putting the finishing touches to his Travels he was a guest of the house. Gibbon, the historian, and Sterne, whose Sentimental Journey was just then the talk of the town, spent their vacant hours with him; and Burke as well, while he discussed with him his treatise on the Sublime and the Beautiful. All these claimed a niche in Reynolds’ portrait gallery, where all the talents were met together. The whole English nobility also flocked to him. For forty years onwards from 1752 it was considered the proper thing to be painted by him. His pictures were multiplied immediately at the hands of the engravers. In the complete catalogue of Reynolds’ works, Hamilton counts, so far back as 1820, no fewer than 675 plates, engraved after Reynolds by more than a hundred artists, and amongst these the mezzotints of Samuel Cousins are by far the finest. Only an incredible industry, enabling him for a long succession of years to paint almost without intermission with a facility and regularity like that of Rubens, rendered it possible for Reynolds to complete, exclusive of portraits, quite a number of religious and mythological pictures, of which he himself was especially proud. He painted with great speed and dexterity, rose very early, breakfasted at nine o’clock, was in his studio punctually at ten; and there till eleven he worked on pictures which had been commenced. On the stroke of eleven the first sitter arrived, who was succeeded by another an hour later. Thus he painted till four o’clock, when he made his toilette, and thenceforward belonged to society, for in spite of his scholarly temperament one can by no means consider Reynolds as a solitary eccentric. Although he remained a bachelor after Angelica Kauffmann had declined his hand, his house was a central gathering-point for noble London. He gave balls to which the whole of “Society” was invited, and drove in a magnificent carriage, with coachmen in blue and silver liveries. The Literary Club was founded at his instigation, where with Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and Garrick he shared in conversation both profound and brilliant. He was made a baronet, and when the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, became its first president. The dinners of the Academy, which he organised at the distribution of prizes, play a part in the history of English cookery. Reynolds had promised that on each of these reunions he would speak on some question of art. In this manner originated, during his twenty-three years of office, those fifteen discourses upon painting which show the highest result of his literary energy. They were not his maiden essays. As far back as 1758 Johnson had invited him to publish an article upon Art in a journal which he had founded, The Idler. In 1781 he made a journey through Holland and Flanders, upon which, anticipating Fromentin, he wrote an exceedingly fine book. In his Discourses so high a degree of literary talent was displayed that they were at one time said to be the work of Johnson or Burke.

REYNOLDS.	HEADS OF ANGELS.	REYNOLDS.	SAMUEL RICHARDSON.

They are æsthetic treatises and essays in the history of art, of an enduring value. Originating from a vast insight, and expressed in a precise style, they treat of the laws of classic art, the variation in styles, the causes of the finest bloom in art. Certainly eclecticism is preached too. The modern artist, it is declared, can only stand on the shoulders of his forebears. The great Italians must be his models, and of these the greatest is Michael Angelo. His last essay closes with these words: “I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man, and I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might be the name of Michael Angelo.”

When he died, his friend Edmund Burke wrote in the funeral oration which he dedicated to him: “Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on many accounts, one of the most memorable men of his time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and harmony of colouring, he was equal to the greatest masters of the renowned ages.... In full affluence of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert in art and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed by sovereign powers and celebrated by distinguished poets, ... the loss of no man of his time can be felt with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow.” He was buried with great pomp in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The pictures left unfinished at his death fetched at auction £37,000; the whole fortune which he left is estimated at £80,000.

The biography of Thomas Gainsborough reads quite differently.

The traveller who rides from London to Birmingham passes through some of the fairest scenery in the island. He finds himself in the heart of fresh and tender English nature. Small rivulets flow through the gently undulating country. Wide meadows clothe the soft hollows in the valleys with abundant green. In grassy enclosures deer and roes are feeding; they push forwards inquisitively as the train passes. Fragrant linden trees rise dreamily in the suave, park-like landscape, through which the Stour winds along like a riband of silver. On the bank of this enchanting stream Thomas Gainsborough, the son of a simple clothier, was born. Reynolds’ vocation had been brought about through the perusal of a book. In the scenery and the woods that were in the neighbourhood of his home, Gainsborough, who was so alive to all the beauty of nature, received the decisive impression of his life. Here he roamed as a boy, while he neglected his school lessons. “Tom will be hung some day,” reflected his schoolmaster; “Tom will be a genius,” thought his parents. He sketched the parks and castles of the neighbourhood. In his later life he used to say that there was no picturesque old tree trunk, no meadow or woodland glade or stream within a four-mile radius of Sudbury, that he did not retain a recollection of from his childish years. Like Constable, when he was an old man, he still thought with gratitude of his home, of all that beauty upon which he had looked, and which had made him a painter. Here, in the green woods and fresh pastures of his birthplace, he trained himself. At the age of ten he was a painter.

REYNOLDS.	MISS REYNOLDS.	REYNOLDS.	EDMUND BURKE.

A sojourn of four years in London seems to have added little to his ability. Elegant in his manners, lively in his conversation, a born gentleman, he might have become completely the man of fashion. But he was far too diffident, with his naïve simplicity, to force himself amongst the stars of the world of art in London, far too distinguished and retiring to join in the race after the favour of the public, and so at the age of eighteen he returned to his native place with the unencouraging prospect of playing the part of a simple painter in the provinces. First and last, the woods remained his chief delight. One morning, as he was painting there, he looked up from his easel and saw a young and beautiful girl in a light summer dress, peeping coquettishly from behind the trunk of a tree. She blushed, he spoke to her shyly. Soon afterwards Margaret Burr became his wife, and the whole history of his life with her remains a charming idyll, like the spring morning on which he made her acquaintance. Married at the age of nineteen, he installed himself at Ipswich, his wife’s native place, and there he spent fifteen years in great happiness, firm in the conviction that he would end his days there. There he painted his first portraits, which, from 1761, were forwarded by a carrier’s cart to London for exhibition in the Royal Academy. From Ipswich he went to Bath, the fashionable watering-place, where he painted the visitors who came in the summer for the cure. Finally, in the end his portraits met with approval in London. That gave him courage in 1764 to proceed thither himself; and there he took very modest rooms. On his arrival he was as yet very little known; he came from the provinces, which he had till then never left, at a time when Reynolds stood at the pinnacle of his fame, and had visited Italy and Spain. Yet he gradually won a reputation. Franklin was one of the first to sit to him. Soon he became the favourite painter of the king and the royal family. George III was painted eight times by him, Pitt seven times, Garrick five. Lord Chancellor Camden, Sir William Blackstone, Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Richardson, Burke, Sheridan, Mrs. Graham, Lady Montagu, Mrs. Siddons, Lady Vernon, Lady Maynard, and the names of many other celebrities and beauties are bound up with his. His life-work, excluding sketches, consists of no more than three hundred pictures, of which two hundred and twenty are portraits—a very small number in comparison with the four thousand paintings of Joshua Reynolds. Thomas Gainsborough painted irregularly. Even when he was in his studio he might be seen standing for hours gazing out of his window dreamily at the grass. In other features of his life too he was equally different from Reynolds: unaccountably, he was one moment a brilliant, animated companion, the next plunged in melancholy. He dreamed much, while Reynolds painted and wrote. In the evenings he usually sat at home with his dear little wife, completed no treatises or discourses on his art, but made sketches or sometimes music. Reynolds was a scholar-painter, Gainsborough a painter-musician. It was said of him that he painted portraits for money and landscapes for amusement, but that he made music because he needs must. He collected musical instruments as Reynolds did a library. Even in his pictures he gives his people, for preference, violins in their hands. To the Musical Club which he had founded in Ipswich he remained faithful all his life, and in that neighbourhood, or in Richmond or Hampstead, he spent the summer every year. Here amidst that green nature it was also his wish to be buried. His funeral was a very quiet one. In the peaceful graveyard at Kew, Thomas Gainsborough sleeps tranquilly under the shady willows, far from the noise and tumult of the great city. Sir Joshua said at his grave: “Should England ever become so fruitful in talent that we can venture to speak of an English school, then will Gainsborough’s name be handed down to posterity as one of the first.” Yes, one might say to-day, as the first of all.

REYNOLDS.	MRS. ABINGTON.	REYNOLDS.	EDMUND MALONE.

Joshua Reynolds is certainly a great painter, and deserves the high veneration in which his compatriots hold him. It is not without a certain awe that, in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy, one can look upon the armchair that he used during his sittings, upon which all who were famous in eighteenth-century England have sat. Reynolds is one of the greatest English portrait painters, and, resembling most the classical masters, showed in the highest degree the qualities we admire in them. His colouring is of an amazing softness, depth, and strength; his chiaroscuro is warm and vaporous. There are portraits by him which, in the subtlety of their tone, resemble the best of Rembrandt’s; others, whose noble colouring approaches the chef-d’œuvres of Van Dyck. Master of the whole mechanism of the human body, he possessed in the highest degree the rare art of setting persons surely and unconstrainedly on their feet. His portraits are pictures; one needs no whit to be acquainted with the persons they represent; they satisfy as works of art in themselves, and as psychological studies by a man who had the capacity of sounding the depths of the human heart. The complete catalogue of all those who sat for Sir Joshua during the space of half a century forms an uninterrupted commentary on the contemporary history of England.

There we see the skilful portrait of Sterne, with his look of witty mockery; the marvellous Bohemian, Oliver Goldsmith, who even then had the manuscript of his Vicar of Wakefield in his pocket; Johnson, who, in one, sits at his writing-table, on which stands an ink-pot and a volume of his English Dictionary, and in another is peering into a book with his short-sighted eyes screwed up tightly, and his whole posture awkward and unwieldy. Garrick, who went from one studio to the other, appears also more than once in Reynolds’ portrait gallery. Amongst his portraits of military dignitaries, that of General Lord Heathfield, the famous defender of Gibraltar, whom he painted in full uniform, is one of the most noticeable. Strong as a rock he stands there, with the key of the fortress in his hand. What a contrast between these figures and those of the contemporary French portraits! There, those friendly and smiling ministers, those gallant and dainty ecclesiastics, those scented, graceful marquises, who move with such elegant ease about the parquet floor, and from whose faces a uniform refinement has erased all the roughness of individuality; here, expressive, thoughtful heads, characters hardened in the school of life, many of the faces coarse and bloated, the glance telling of cold resolution, the attitude full of self-reliant dignity and gnarled, plebeian pride. The same bourgeois element predominates in the pictures of the ladies. Van Dyck’s noble, eminently intellectual figures always wore the glamour of the Renaissance. In the background an artistically arranged curtain, a column, or the view of the quiet avenues of some broad park. From Reynolds we get strong active women in their everyday clothes, and with thoughtful countenances: good mothers, surrounded by their children, whom they kiss and enfold in a tender embrace. The idea of half-symbolical representation has vanished, and in its place is introduced the idea of home and the family. The pictures of children by this childless old bachelor were an artistic revelation to the existing generation, and are the delight of the world of to-day. In other portraits of ladies, that noticeable characteristic of the English nation, their predilection for domestic animals and for sport, finds an expression. The beautiful Duchess of Devonshire he painted as she gently restrained with her finger her little daughter’s caresses, which would fain have disordered her coiffure; a whole gallery of noble ladies he represented feeding their poultry or petting their lap-dogs; Lady Spencer in her riding-habit, her whip in her hand, her horse reined in, her cheeks flushed from her gallop. Nelly O’Brien looks an actress, a woman who turned men’s heads, and she does it still to-day in Reynolds’ picture. There lurks something enigmatic, perplexing in the smile of this sphinx—only Monna Lisa had such a smile, but Nelly’s eyes are deeper, more desirous. One feels that in the three centuries since Monna Lisa love has taken on a new and subtler nuance. The portrait of Mrs. Siddons is the most famous of the pictures of actresses which Reynolds painted, and Mrs. Siddons, of all the women of that time, is the one whose portrait occupied the painters most. She was the daughter of Roger Kemble, the actor, and sister of that pretty actress, Mrs. Twiss, whose portrait by Reynolds (in 1784) we also have, and of the famous John Philip Kemble, who figures so often in the portrait gallery of Lawrence, as Hamlet, Cato, Coriolanus, Richard III, etc. Born to the boards, as it were, she had, when still a child, joined her parents on their Thespian pilgrimages, and had had many engagements in the provinces, at Birmingham, Manchester, and Bath, before she was recruited by the playwright Sheridan for the Drury Lane company in London. She made her début there on 10th October 1782, and was hailed forthwith as the greatest actress of her time. Lady Macbeth was her great part; in that she was painted both by Romney and Lawrence. Reynolds painted her as the Tragic Muse. A diadem encircles her hair, she sits upon a throne, the throne rests upon clouds. Behind her stand two allegorical beings, Crime and Remorse, two quite unfortunate figures. But the principal figure is truly great, in its noble, regal attitude, and quite unconstrained in its dramatic pose. Reynolds had the composition in his mind many weeks before Mrs. Siddons sat for him in the autumn of 1783. “Take your seat upon the throne for which you were born, and suggest to me the idea of the Tragic Muse.” With these words he conducted her to the pedestal. “I made a few steps,” the actress relates, “and then took at once the attitude in which the Tragic Muse has remained.” When the picture was finished, says Sir Joshua, gallant as ever: “I cannot lose this opportunity of sending my name to posterity on the hem of your garment.” And he, who hardly ever signed his pictures, wrote in large characters his name and the date on the gold-embroidered border of the dress. The original picture has been in the possession of the Grosvenor family since 1822; a second copy is in the gallery at Dulwich.

REYNOLDS.	OLIVER GOLDSMITH.	REYNOLDS.	LADY COCKBURN AND HER DAUGHTERS.

Reynolds loved to depict his sitters in mythological or historical settings. Thus he painted Mrs. Hartley, her son as a nymph and the youthful Bacchus, the three Misses Montgomery as the Three Graces crowning a term of Hymen, a little girl sitting on the grass as the “Age of Innocence,” Lady Spencer as a gipsy telling her brother’s fortune, Mrs. Sheridan as St. Cecilia. The five “Heads of Angels,” as they are called, in the National Gallery, are five different studies of the lovely child-head of little Isabella Gordon. Garrick, in one of his pictures, is set between the allegorical figures of Tragedy and Comedy. Reynolds himself was frankly proud of these portraits in the mood of history. He was, as he said, in general only a portrait painter because the world required it; that which he aspired after was the great manner of historical painting. Nevertheless, pictures, such as the “Little Hercules with the Serpent,” “Cupid unfastening the Girdle of Venus,” “The Death of Dido,” “The Forbearance of Scipio,” “The Childhood of the Prophet Samuel,” or “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” do not cause us to deplore too bitterly that he rarely found time for such mythological and historical pictures. His putti are derived from Correggio; in the arrangement of drapery he resembles Guido; in his “Venus” he is a coarser Titian. Reynolds’ own manner in these pictures is merely the eclectic accumulation of the peculiarities of the old masters—he brought no new element into historical painting.

And herein lies his principal weakness. Hogarth declared: “There is only one school, that of nature.” Reynolds: “There is only one doorway to the school of nature, and of that the old masters hold the key.” The great men of old were for him the object of constant and conscious thought. He has endeavoured in his writings to propound a sort of general foundation of painting, has adopted the principles of the best painters in every land, was indefatigable in exploring the secrets of the old masterpieces, and has therefore won the praise of having set the English school, which had hitherto possessed no perfected tradition of painting, technically on firm feet. He was the founder of a scientific technique of painting derived from the ancients,—the Lenbach of the eighteenth century. Upon the mixture of colours, the gradations of light and shade, technically and æsthetically, no artist has pondered more than he, who knew the great Netherlanders, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt, as well as, or better than, his particular favourites, the Italians. He made experiments all his life long to discover the stone of the wise Venetians; but he met with the same experience as Lenbach. And these experiments in the direction of the colour effects of the old masters were the bane of his pictures’ durability. It was well said by Walpole: “If Sir Joshua is content with his own blemished pictures, then he is happier than their possessors, or posterity. According to my view, he ought to be paid in annual instalments, and only so long as his works last.” And Haydon opined that “Reynolds sought by tricks to obtain results which the old masters attained by the simplest means.” He endeavoured by means of asphaltum to give his pictures the artistic tones of the galleries, with the result that, to-day, the majority have lost every sign of freshness.

REYNOLDS.	BISHOP PERCY.	REYNOLDS.	THE GIRL WITH THE MOUSETRAP.

With regard to the pose also, and similar conceptions, one can never quite get away from the thought of Van Dyck and other old masters. Reynolds’ chief endeavour, not only as regards colouring, but also in other respects, was to resemble the ancients, and this has brought into his pictures something imitative and laboured. He dearly loved the Romans and Venetians; we believe to-day that he loved almost too dearly the Bolognese. And just that fine, artistic education which he received in Italy and Holland, and the scientific method in which he practised his art, did harm to Reynolds, and brought into his pictures too much reminiscence, too many alien touches. He has in most cases understood it—how to bring into uniformity the numerous borrowings of his palette, all that he had taken from Leonardo, Correggio, Velasquez, and Rembrandt. Yet he has never quite forgotten the old masters and looked only at his model, for the sake of the very daintiest lady or the freshest English boy. For his children he thought of Correggio’s “Cherubim,” for his schoolboys of Murillo, for the portrait of Mrs. Hartley of Leonardo da Vinci, for that of Mrs. Sheridan of Raphael. There lacked in him that spontaneity which denotes the great master. By his erudition in art, Sir Joshua elevated himself on the shoulders of all who had preceded him. He obtained thereby the piquant effects in his portraits, but it was at the price of the penalty that from many of his works it is rather a rancid odour of oil and varnish which exhales than the breath of life.

Gainsborough can certainly not be compared with Reynolds in the mass of his work. He was master neither of his powers of industry nor of his smooth and brilliant methods of painting that were always sure of their effect. In many of his pictures he gives the impression of a self-taught man, who sought to help himself to the best of his power. Just as little has he the psychological acuteness of Reynolds. A portrait painter puts no more into a head than he has in his own; thus the acute thinker, Reynolds, was able to put a great deal into his heads, whilst Gainsborough, the dreamer, was often enough quite helpless when he confronted a conspicuously manly character. In his whole temperament a painter of landscape, before his model too he sat as before a landscape, with eyes that perceived but did not analyse. What, with Reynolds, was sought out and understood, was felt by Gainsborough; and therefore the former is always good and correct, while Gainsborough is unequal and often faulty, but in his best pictures has a charm to which those of the President of the Academy never attained. Gainsborough, too, at his death murmured the name of an old master. “We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company.” But what distinguishes him from Reynolds, and gives him a character of greater originality, is just his naïve independence of the ancients, which resulted partly from the different nature of his education in art. Reynolds had lived for two years in Rome and explored all the principal cities of Italy, had visited Flanders and Holland, learnt to wonder at Rembrandt, and developed an enthusiasm for chiaroscuro. Gainsborough in his rural seclusion had been able neither by travel on the Continent to study the great masters of the past, nor to assimilate the traditions of the studio. He contented himself with the beauties which he saw in his native country, studied them in their touching simplicity, without troubling himself about academic rules. He lived in London until his death, without once leaving England; and that gives to his pictures a distinct nuance. The one studied pictures and books, the other only the “book of nature.” His portraits never aim at any external effect, nor are they raised into the historical; they seek to give no other impression than that of a quite subjective truth to nature, both in arrangement and in colouring. Nothing intruded between his model and himself, no “sombre old master” obscured his canvas. His execution is more personal, his colour fresher and more transparent. The very personages seem with him to be more elegant, more gracious, more modern than with Reynolds, in whose work, through their kinship to the Renaissance, they received a suggestion of style, classical and ancient.

In his pictures the Englishman is clearly revealed, an Englishman of that delicacy and noble refinement which is present to a unique degree in the works of English painters of the present day.

The passage from Hogarth to Gainsborough marks a chapter in the history of English culture. Hogarth is the embodiment of John Bull; you can hear him growl, like some savage bull-dog. That brutal, indecorous robustness of England’s aggressive youth becomes, in Gainsborough’s hands, agreeable, refined, gentle, and seductive. Reynolds, with his robustness as of the old masters, might be best compared with Tintoretto; Gainsborough, in his quite modern and fantastic elegance, is a more tender, subtle, and mysterious spirit, poet and magician at once, like Watteau. There one listened to the full, swelling chords of the organ; here to the soft, dulcet, silvery notes of the violin. Reynolds loved warm, brown and red tones; Gainsborough essayed for the first time, in a series of his happiest creations, that scale of colour, coldly green and blue, in which to-day the majority of English pictures are still painted. Everything with him is soft and clear; the tone of those blue or light yellow silks, which he loved especially, is that of the most transparent enamel; the background fades away into dreamy vapour, the figures are surrounded with an atmosphere of seduction. What a masterpiece he has created in the “Blue Boy,” his most popular and most individual picture. One can describe every piece of the clothing, but it is impossible to reproduce the harmony of the painting, the rich, pure blue of the costume, which stands out against a lustrous, brown background of landscape. How the stately youth stands, noble from head to foot, in the brown and green autumn landscape, with its canopy of sky! Master Bootall was by far the most elegant portrait painted in England since Van Dyck, and withal of a nervosity quite new. See that youthful pride in the gaze, that mobile sensibility in the pose!

Have men grown different, then, or does the painter see further? One finds in Van Dyck no such expressively nervous physiognomy. The suggestion of melancholy, the deep reverie, the noble, aristocratic haughtiness,—Gainsborough was the first to discover that, and give it its full expression. And the same man who painted the noble elegance of this youthful grand seigneur depicted also peasant children coming fresh from the green fields and woodlands of their village homes. In Sir Joshua’s children there was often something borrowed from Correggio; the children of Gainsborough breathe a rustic charm, an untamed savagery; they are the very offshoots of nature, who disport themselves as freely as the wild things in the woods. But his women in particular are creatures altogether adorable. While Reynolds, the historical painter, liked to promote his into heroines, those of Gainsborough, with their pure, transparent skins, their sweet glances (in which there lies so admirable a mixture of languishing fragility, innocence, and coquetry), are the true Englishwomen of the eighteenth century. His “Mrs. Siddons” is not in theatrical costume, but in a simple walking-dress; no Tragic Muse, but the passionate, loving woman who once, a romantic, impulsive miss, escaped from a convent at the risk of her life, to join a handsome young actor of her father’s troupe who had entirely fascinated her. What a charming grace in the pose, what fine taste in the arrangement, what wonderful purity of colouring! With the exception of Watteau, I know of no older master who could have painted such moist, dreamy, sensuous, tender eyes. The marvellous “Mrs. Graham,” in the National Gallery of Scotland, is, from the purely pictorial standpoint, perhaps the greatest of all his works. Yet how beautiful is the double portrait of that young married couple, the Halletts, who, tenderly holding hands, pass along a deserted path in some secluded garden; or that pale, languishing “Mrs. Parsons,” with her enchanting smile, and that mysterious language of the eyes. Gainsborough was no keen observer, but he was a susceptible, sensitive spirit who intercepted the soul itself, the play of the nerves, the slightest suggestion of spiritual commotion. There moves through the majority of his portraits a pathetic tenderness, a breath of dreamy melancholy, that the persons themselves hardly possessed, but which he transfused into them out of himself. Melancholy is the veil through which he saw things, as Reynolds saw them through the medium of erudition. Reynolds was all will and intelligence, Gainsborough all soul and temperament; and nothing can show the difference between them better than the fact that Reynolds, who had formed his style on early models, when he had no sitters painted historical pictures; whilst Gainsborough in like circumstances painted landscapes. Herein he was a pioneer, whilst Reynolds was an issue of the past.

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GAINSBOROUGH.	MRS. SIDDONS.

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GAINSBOROUGH.	WOOD SCENE, VILLAGE OF CORNARD, SUFFOLK.

In the domain of landscape painting, too, the new germs of naturalism, which had ventured above ground on all sides in the fifteenth century, had been again stunted in the Great Renaissance. The theory had been promulgated in the sixteenth century—in accordance with the idealistic methods of the age—that it behoved the painter to improve upon nature just as much as upon the human body. With the lofty style of the great figure painters, and their artfully pondered composition, there corresponded a school of landscape which was likewise conceived of, in the first degree, as an honourable, architectural framing for a mythological episode. England too possessed, in Richard Wilson, a believer in this doctrine, which became so widely promulgated in the seventeenth century through the influence of Claude Lorraine. The home of his soul was Italy. He scraped together a small sum of money by portrait painting, borrowed the rest, and felt himself in his element for the first time when he had reached Venice. Here, at the instance of Zucarrelli, he became a painter of landscapes, and was aided in his endeavours by Joseph Vernet in Rome. He was on the way to become a painter in great request, and in many of his pictures he shows a most delicate notion of well-balanced and gracious composition in the manner of Claude. But his success was of no long duration. Wilson, like so many other of his contemporaries, had the fixed idea that the Creator had only made nature to serve as a framework for the “Grief of Niobe” and as a vehicle for classical architecture. The interpolated stage scenery of trees and the classic temples of this English Claude, contain nothing which had not been already painted better by the Frenchman. When the king, in order to assist him, asked him on one occasion to represent Kew Gardens in a picture, he composed an entirely imaginary landscape and illuminated it with the sun of Tivoli. The king sent him back the picture, mordant epigrams appeared in the journals, and Reynolds scoffed at him in his Discourses. After that Wilson spent his days in the alehouse, until he got delirium, and died half starved at the age of seventy.

	Cassell & Co.		Cassell & Co.
GAINSBOROUGH.	THE MARKET CART.	GAINSBOROUGH.	THE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE.

The patriotic English were too much bound up with their own soil to acquire a taste for the exotic, ideal scenery of Wilson. There existed in them that patriotism, that feeling for home, which had turned the Dutch of the seventeenth century into landscape painters. In this province also they were destined to step in, as the inheritors of the Dutch, to bring the germ of intimate landscape to its full fruition. Lovely and luxuriant valleys with their soft grass, sweet woodlands with their vari-coloured foliage, golden, swaying cornfields and picturesque little cottages, with that indescribable softness of atmosphere, must of themselves direct the eye of the writer and the painter to all these beauties. It was an Englishman who in the eighteenth century wrote the most memorable book upon the charms of nature. James Thomson, in his Seasons, is the first great nature painter amongst the poets. Taine finds the whole of Rousseau anticipated in him. “Thirty years before Rousseau, Thomson had forestalled all the sentiments of Rousseau, almost in the same style.” He has not only, like Rousseau, a profound feeling for the great wild aspects of nature, for the forms of clouds, effects of light and contrasts of colour, but he delights also in the smell of the dairy, in small birds, in the woodland shadows, and the light on the meadows,—in all things sequestered and idyllic.

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GAINSBOROUGH.	THE SISTERS.

It was a remarkable chance which ordained that Thomas Gainsborough, the first man who as a painter depicted the gracious charms of the country of his birth, the comeliness of its expanses of deep green lush meadows, the strength of the lofty, wide-spreading trees, as seen with the eyes of a lover, should be born in the spring of the same year in which Thomson’s Spring appeared. That he knew and admired Thomson is proved by his dedication to him of that delightful “Musidora” in the National Gallery, a lovely woman bathing her feet in some shady forest pool. It is said that he only sent half a dozen landscapes to the Academy during the eighteen years that he exhibited there. On the other hand, they hung in his house in Pall Mall in long rows on the walls of his studio. After his death his widow held a sale, at which fifty-six landscapes were sold. Gainsborough must be accounted one of the moderns, so naïve and intimate is the impression which his pictures produce. He, who passed his whole youth in the idyllic loveliness of the woods, was fitted to be the delineator of that mellow English nature. He understood the murmur of the brooks and the sighing of the winds. Like his own life, so regular and peaceful, gently swaying as though to the friendly elements, are the trees in his pictures, with their peaceful tranquillity; no storm disturbs the calm of a Gainsborough picture. His was a contented, harmonious spirit, like Corot’s. His landscapes know no tempestuous grandeur; they are a playground for children, a place for shepherds to rest. “The calm of mid day, the haze of twilight, the dew and the pearls of morning,” said Constable, “are what we find in the pictures of this good, kindly, happy man.... As we look at them the tears spring to our eyes, and we know not whence they come. The solitary shepherd with his flock, the peasant returning from the wood with his bundle of faggots, whispering woods and open dales, sweet little peasant children with their pitchers in springtime,—that is what he loved to paint and what he painted, with as much sought-out refinement as with tender truth to nature.” His landscapes are like windows opening on the country, not compositions, but pieces taken straight out of that fruitful English nature. Every year he used to return to his green pastures, and paint very early, when the sun rose. Before him rose a cluster of trees, all round the farm the flocks were grazing, thousands of busy bees flew buzzing from flower to flower; goats, with their kids, were feeding in the meadows, wild doves cooed, and the birds in the wood sang their praises to the Creator. Thus do the landscapes of Gainsborough affect us. They are soft and tender as some sweet melody in their discreet intimacy, without colorist effects, as wonderfully harmonious as nature herself. A thatched cot, that peeps timidly from between the great trees, a silvery dale shut in by weeping willows, a bridge leading to some lush, green meadow,—those are Gainsborough’s materials. The famous “Cottage Door” is now at Grosvenor House. A young peasant woman, with her youngest child in her arms, is standing by the door of a country cottage, before which her other children are playing, some half naked; deep contentment is all around, huge old oaks spread their sheltering branches over the roof on both sides; golden rays of sunshine dance across the meadow. Only Frederick Walker has, in later days, painted such peasant women and such children, at once so tender and so natural. Of the four pictures in the National Gallery, “The Wood Scene,” “The Watering Place,” “Market Carts,” and “Peasant Children,” “The Watering Place” is the most celebrated. In the foreground a quiet pasture with cows, close by the herdsman, a Suffolk labourer; in the background a noble old Norman castle, perhaps Hedingham Castle, near Sudbury. It is through pictures like these that England has become the native-land of intimate landscape—paysage intime.

As figure painters, as well as landscape painters, the English in the eighteenth century laid a course of their own, and it was not long before the other nations followed them.

CHAPTER II

THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF ART ON THE CONTINENT

Goethe compared the history of knowledge with a great fugue: the parts of the nations first come to light, little by little; and this analogy, already once made by Hettner, holds true in a very high degree of the history of art during the eighteenth century. The three great nations of culture—the German, the English, and the French—take up their parts in turn, and through all there sounds one common, equal, dominant note. England was in the vanguard of that great period of struggle known as the age of enlightenment. Since the middle of the eighteenth century English influences had begun to fertilise the Continent. The truth and naturalness of English ideas were introduced as models, and England became in her whole culture the schoolmistress of the Continent. In every region war was declared against the pedantry brought over from the past, while new conditions were aimed at. Obviously it was not so easy for other nations to take their stand on the basis of modern society. England had accomplished her revolution in the seventeenth century; France was only preparing herself for hers. For all other nations, too, the eighteenth century was a transition period, in which the old and the new civilisation of culture were parting—an age of prodigious controversy, full of Sturm und Drang. Men did homage to every kind of extravagance, and went into ecstasies over virtue. The sarcasm of scoffers went hand in hand with the deepest sentimental feeling for nature; superstition flourished by the side of enlightenment and learning; in the salons of the aristocracy courtly abbés file past with the greatest thinkers, glowing with a holy zeal for the rights of man. And, in the midst of all this contradiction, there exists that simple, virtuous middle class which is preparing to make the ascent which will lead it to power.

One may imagine oneself in a salon of the ancien régime, in which wit is lord, and laughter and merriment reign. Into that salon enters abruptly a rough plebeian, with none of the fine tact of that company, yet a great, aristocratic spirit, a man who despised such a society and would make the world anew. Such is one’s impression of the effect produced at the time by the appearance of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire was the first on the Continent to break through social barriers, but none the less he coined his heart for gold in society. Rousseau signifies a great advance: he gave up his place, laid aside rapier, silk stockings, and perruque, and clothed himself after the manner of a common man in order to earn his bread as a copier of music. He is, as Weigandt has called him, the first man of the bourgeois century, the first pioneer of the new age. Against the traditions bequeathed by the past, which in the course of time had become over-refined and corrupt, he set up the natural conditions demanded by reason. His fight against inequalities of rank is, as it were, a foretaste of the revolution. “What hellish monsters are these prejudices. I know no dishonourable inferiority other than that of character or education. A man who is trained to an honourable mind is the equal of the world; there is no rank in which he would not be in his place. It is better to look down upon nobility than upon virtue, and the wife of a charcoal-burner is worthy of more respect than the mistress of a prince.” Those were words in which the coming revolution was presaged.

The Nouvelle Heloise appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later followed Goethe’s Werther, that history of a young Titan whose zeal for liberty felt all the partition walls of Society to be prison walls, and who rose against everything that was ceremonial, against all the subordinations of the social hierarchy, against all trivial and rigid rules of prudent everyday life. Werther abhorred rules in every sphere. “One can say much in favour of rules, about as much as one can say in praise of bourgeois society.” He scoffed at the Philistines, who daily went along the same measured way. He saw in “Society,” having hitherto moved in the simple world of the bourgeois, “the most sacred and the most pitiful emotions wholly without clothing.” And this Society outraged him, and sent him with contumely from its midst. “Working folk carried him to the grave, and no minister of religion followed him.”

Soon afterwards young Schiller came upon the scene with his first works, which were a declaration of war against all the foundations of human society, those manifestoes of revolution which, were they new writings to-day, no Court Theatre would dare to produce. The fierce, rampant lion, with the inscription “In Tyrannos,” which was displayed on the title-page of the second edition of the Robbers, was an intimate symbol of the deep revolutionary spirit that inspired the whole age. “I grew disgusted with this ink-stained age, when I read in my Plutarch of great men. Fie, fie upon the flaccid, castrated century, that has no other use than to chew over again the deeds of the past. Let me imagine an army of fellows like you, and I see a republic arising in Germany, in comparison with which those of Rome and Sparta would be convents of nuns.” In a loud voice Ficsco proclaims itself on the very title-page to be a “republican” tragedy. Intrigue and Love even aims full at the rottenness and corruption of the actual time. It can be traced—and Brandes has done it in his Haupströmungen—how in the literature of the age, the life of sensibility and idealism prevailing in the previous century gradually dwindles, and in its stead quite modern progressive views—religious, political, and social—surge up in an ever-increasing wave. The authors were the bold inciters to the battle. They were all leaders in the battle for liberty against fossilised tradition,—some in the field of poetry only, others in the whole sphere of intellectual life. These are they who gave the signal for the war-cry of the Revolution—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; who rent asunder the old society, inaugurated the age of citizenship, and were at the same time the first to lose, as quite modern spirits, their faith in another world.

A wonderful chance ordained that, in the province of art, the most powerful figure of that storm and tumult, the one artist of the age of the race of Prometheus, to which belonged the young Goethe and the young Schiller, should be born in the most mediæval country in Europe, on Spanish soil. Against an art that was more catholic than catholicism, courtly and mystical, there came by far the greatest reaction in Goya. From Roelas, Collantes, and Murillo to him there is hardly any transition.

Francisco Goya preached Nihilism in the home of belief. He denied everything, believed nothing, doubted of everything, even of that peace and liberty which he hoped to be at hand. That old Spanish art of religion and dogma was changed under his hands to an art of negation and sarcasm. His attitude is not that of an insolent and impetuous youth, who puts out his tongue at the Academy and strikes with audacious hand at the academicians’ high powdered perruques; it is the attitude of the modern spirit, which begins by doubting all things which have been honoured hitherto. His Church pictures are devoid of religious feeling, and his etchings replete with sneers at everything which was previously esteemed as authority. He scoffs at the clerical classes and the religious orders, laughs at the priestly raiment which covered the passions of humanity. Spanish art, which began in a blind piety, becomes in Goya revolutionary, free, modern.

Laurent, photo.
GOYA.	THE MAJA CLOTHED.

Goya is, in his whole nature, a modern man, a restless, feverish soul; nervous as a décadent; temperament to his finger-tips. His style in portraiture, his art of composition, his whole method,—all speak to our artists to-day in a language easily understood, and on many of them the influence of Goya is unmistakable. He is one of the most fascinating figures of the beginning of the century. As audacious as he was clever, as versatile as he was fantastic, a keen observer as well as a strong creative spirit, he fascinates and astonishes in his pictures, just as in his wonderful etchings, by a remarkable mixture of the bizarre and the original. His pictures, whether they be violent or eccentric, tender or hard, gloomy or joyous, nearly always move and palpitate with life itself, and they will always keep their attraction. There is no one of Goya’s pictures, not even the flimsiest sketch, at which one can look coldly.

He was born in a village in the province of Aragon, the son of a small landed proprietor, in 1746. At the age of fourteen, having already painted frescoes in the church of his native-place, he went to Saragossa as an apprentice; and there he showed himself to be vivacious and passionate, and soon became the champion among his comrades in all their pastimes and brawls. Restless, and always thinking of adventure, he refused every regular kind of education, disarranged everything in his master’s studio, worked when he could, drew his sword when he had a mind to, nourished in his head dark thoughts on liberty, came and went and loved, dallied with his knife, snapped his fingers at the Inquisition, which was after him, and fled from Madrid,—such was he at twenty, and such he remained all his life.

Laurent, photo.
GOYA.	THE MAJA NUDE.

Italy, whither he fled on account of a duel, did not alter him. There were new love quarrels. He fought, stabbed a rival, was wounded himself, amused himself extremely, studied little, observed, admired, but neither painted nor copied anything. It was thanks to this indolence that the great past did not take him prisoner. He did not know much, but for what he knew he could thank himself. He loved the old painters, but platonically; their works did not lead him astray. In this lies the explanation of his qualities and his faults: that marvellous mixture of seductive grace and visible weakness, of subtlety and brutality, of refinement and ignorance. He merits equally sympathy and blame, is as genial as he is unequal. But one would not wish him to be otherwise: if there had been more order and proportion in his works his good qualities would have been lost. He would have suffered in spontaneity, vivacity, originality, and quietly taken his anchorage in the sleepy haven of mediocrity. As he is, he is wholly the child of his country: from head to foot a Spaniard of the eighteenth century, a son of that downfallen Spain that was dying from loss of blood. For hundreds of years a black cloud, extinguishing all joy, had hung over Spanish life, a cloud out of which, only here and there in dismal lightning flashes, there emerged obscure figures of sombre despots, sick ascetics, and silent martyrs. All mundane inclinations were suppressed, all sensuous desires prohibited. Men spent their nights with their eyes fixed upon the gory histories and passionate exhortations of the Old Testament, hearing in imagination the menacing, thunderous voice of a dreadful God, until at last in their own hearts the fanatical inspiration of the prophetic seer awoke anew, and their feverish forms were torn asunder by ecstatic visions and religious hallucinations. When Goya began his career the sinister country of the Inquisition had grown frivolous. A breath of revolution was passing over men’s minds. An intoxicating odour of mundane voluptuousness penetrated everywhere, even into the convents themselves; the figures of the French Rococo Olympus had brought confusion into the Christian paradise. Spain no longer believed; it laughed at the Inquisition, trembled no more when it was threatened with the pains of Hell. It had grown frivolous, wanton, epicurean, full of grace and laughter. The rosy-red and blue shepherds of the Trianon had made an entry into the sombre Court of Aranjuez. Literature, taste, and art were infected by French influences, Parisian sparks of wit, lightning esprit, and Parisian immorality; and the same rumbling earthquake which wrecked the throne of France was soon to shatter that of Spain. In Goya’s works there is a refulgence of all this. But, like every great artist, he is not only the expression of his epoch, but also its leader; he almost anticipates the age which shall succeed it. Like a figure of Janus, on the border-line between two centuries, standing in a manner between two worlds, he was the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns—even in that special sense in which we employ the word to-day.

Through a commission to design cartoons for the Spanish manufactories of tapestry, he was brought into contact with the Court. Member of the Academy of San Fernando in 1780, Pintor del Rey, with an income of 12,500 francs in 1786, he became soon afterwards the Director of the Madrid Academy—the drollest Director of an Academy that man can imagine! Goya, the peasant youth, with his bull neck and matador-like strength, lived at the Spanish Court in the midst of the enervated scions of a dissolute aristocracy, who, with their sickly and anæmic features, indolent and impotent, skulked through life, young men prematurely old. Naturally he was the idol of the women, hated by the courtiers on account of his caustic wit, a terror to all husbands because of his perpetual intrigues, and at the same time feared as the best swordsman in Madrid, who drew his rapier with the indifference with which we light a cigarette.

It is only as the outcome of such a personality that his works are to be understood.

From “Los Capriccios.”		From “Los Capriccios.”
GOYA.	SOPLONES.	GOYA.	SE REPULEN.

Goya was far too great a sceptic to put a religious sentiment into matters in which he no longer believed; his talent was far too modern for the religious abstraction to be able to seize him. His “Christ on the Cross,” therefore, in the Museo del Prado, is simply tedious, a bad academical study. His frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida, at Madrid, exhibit a pretty, decorative motive—considerable movement, grace, and spirit. But amongst them are angels who sit there most irreverently, and, with a laugh of challenge, throw out their legs à la Tiepolo. The chief picture represents St. Antony of Padua raising a man from the dead. But all that interested him in it were the lookers-on. On a balustrade all around he has brought in the lovely, dainty faces of numerous ladies of the court, his bonnes amies, who lean their elbows on the balcony and coquette with the people down below. Their plump, round, white hands play meaningly with their fans; a thick cluster of ringlets waves over their bared shoulders; their sensual eyes languish with a seductive fire; a faint smile plays round their voluptuous lips. Several seem only just to have left their beds, and their vari-coloured, gleaming silks are crumpled. One is just arranging her coiffure, which has come undone and falls over her rosy bosom; another, with a languishing unconsciousness and a careless attitude, is opening her sleeve, whose soft, deep folds expose a snow-white arm. There is much chic in this Church picture. One very immodest angel is supposed to be the portrait of the Duchess of Alba, who was famed for her numerous intrigues.

In his portraits, too, he is unequal. He became the fashionable painter at the court. The politicians, poets, scholars, great ladies, actresses, all the famous folk of his epoch, sat to him. He daubed more than two hundred portraits; but they were good only when the subject amused him. His portraits of the Royal Family have something vicious and plebeian. He is too little in earnest, too little of an official, to paint court pictures. One might imagine that he with difficulty restrained himself from laughing at the pompous futility which stood before him. It irritated him to be obliged to paint these great lords and ladies in poses so ceremonial, instead of making them, like the angels of San Antonio, throw up their legs and skip over parapets. The Queen, Marie Louise, is frankly grotesque; and the family of Charles IV look like the family of a shopkeeper who have won the big prize in a lottery, and been photographed in their Sunday clothes. But, ah! when something gives him pleasure! In the Exhibition of Portraits at Paris, in 1885, there was the portrait of a young man, dressed in gray, which excelled Gainsborough for grace. With what a noble nonchalance this young elegant stands there, reminding one, in attitude and costume, of the incroyables of Charles Vernet. With what equanimity does he look out on life, in his satisfaction at the good fit of his clothes. The wonderful harmony of the grey tones was rendered with all Gainsborough’s delicacy. The same man who in those pictures of ceremony let himself go in a manner so brusque and frenzied, here revelled, a very Proteus in his chameleon-like qualities, in soft and mellow and seductive tones. One might say that he has thought here of Prudhon and Greuze, and joined their study to the cult of Velasquez.

From “Los Capriccios.”		From “Los Capriccios.”
GOYA.	QUE PICO DE ORO!	GOYA.	VOLAVERUNT.

Still more charming was he in his pictures of young girls, when he was himself fascinated by the attractions of his subjects. The infantile Donna Maria Josefa (at the Prado) and the twelve-year-old Queen Isabella of Sicily (at Seville) are admirable pictures. In them the candour and grace of budding youth, the whole poetry of young maidenhood, have won life and expression from the enamoured tenderness of an artist hand. Seduced by beauty, he renounced all irony, thought only of those big, wide-opened eyes of velvet, those rosy young lips; of that warm carnation and the elegant slimness of that soft young neck that rose in delicate contour from the shoulders. Or again, that marvellous double portrait of La Maja in the Academy of San Fernando: a young girl painted once clothed and once nude, both pictures in exactly the same pose, and both flooded with the same extraordinary sensuous charm. This is not the uncertain, sarcastic painter of those State pictures. It is an attentive observer, who depicts with sensitive devotion the harmonious lines of the irradiating, young, human body so worthy of celebration. The transparent stuff that covers the body of “La Maja clothed” reveals all that it hides; in the other picture the unveiled nudity sings the high pæan of the flesh. The drawing is sure, the modelling of a marvellous tenderness. The heaving bosom, the slender limbs, the tantalising eyes—every part of that nervous body, with its ivory whiteness, stretched out on the milk-white couch made for love, breathes of pleasure and voluptuousness.

In pictures of this kind Goya is wholly one of us. Grown independent of every traditional rule, he abandoned himself entirely to his own impressions, and produced enduring works, vibrating with life, because he was himself fascinated with nature. He showed here an idea of modernity that almost makes him seem a contemporary of our own—that zeal for the pictorial, for colour and light, which attracts us so much to-day. Very characteristic also of the changed aspect of the age are his designs for the famous tapestry in Santa Barbara, with which he made his début at Madrid. They are very crude in decoration. Two or three neat young girls, with big, black, moist eyes, here and there pleasing details—a couple of men carrying a wounded companion—are unable to gloss over the heaviness of the composition and colour. But it was of great consequence that Goya should have had courage for so bold a step as to make use of character scenes in decorative painting at a time when everywhere else, without exception, fêtes champêtres predominated.

In his oil paintings he went much further in this direction. In that impetuous manner peculiar to him he endeavoured to get a firm grip on the pictorial side of Spanish life, at home and in the streets, wherever he found it. The most fearful subjects—such as the two great slaughter scenes in the French invasion, painted with such breadth and fierceness—alternate with incidents of the liveliest character. Everything is jotted down, under the immediate influence of what has been observed, by rapid methods, and on this account produces an effect of sketches taken with complete directness from nature. In those careless pictures, swept with large strokes of the brush, there rises before us the mad drama of public holiday in the streets and in the circus: processions, bull-fights, brigands, the victims of the plague, assassinations, scenes of gallantry, national types—all observed with the acuteness of a Menzel. The Majas on the balcony in the Montpensier Gallery, the “Breakfast on the Grass,” the “Flower Girl,” the “Reaper,” the “Return from Market,” the “Cart attacked by Brigands,” are the most piquant, vividly coloured of these pictures. The “Romeria de San Isidoro” is full of such a sparkling, stirring life as the most modern of the impressionists alone have learned again to paint. A few dashes of colour, a few well-placed, bold strokes of the brush, and at once one sees the procession move, the groups passing each other by just as, in the marvellous sketches of the funeral of Sardina, in the Academy of San Fernando, one can see the young couples revolve madly in the dance, and the lances of the bull-fighters redden the sand of the arena.

The superabundance of such phantasy could not, of course, be achieved by the tardy brush. He required a quicker medium, that would permit him to express everything. Therefore he executed his numerous etchings, by which he was rendered famous, before people had learnt to appreciate him as a painter: the “Capriccios,” the “Malheurs de la Guerre,” the “Bull-fights,” the “Captives”—those marvellous and fantastic pages in which he expressed everything that his feverish, satirical soul had accumulated for contempt, and hatred, and anger, and scorn. The etcher’s needle was the poisoned dagger with which he attacked all that he wished to attack: tyranny, superstition, intrigue, adultery, honour that is sold and beauty that lets itself be bought, the arrogance of the great and the degrading servility of the little. He made an awful and jovial hecatomb of all the vices and the scandals of the age. Whomsoever he pilloried was laid bare in all respects; physically and morally, no single trait of him was forgotten. And he did it so wittily that he compelled even the offended person to laugh. Neither Charles IV himself, nor the Court, nor the Inquisition, which bled most beneath his thrusts, dared to complain.

From “Los Capriccios.”		From “Los Capriccios.”
GOYA.	QUIEN LO CREYERA!	GOYA.	LINDA MAESTRA!

In his “Capriccios” Goya stands revealed as a figure without even a forerunner in the history of art. Satirical representations of popular superstitions, bitter, mordant attacks on the aristocracy, the government, and all social conditions, unprecedented assaults on the crown, on religion and its doctrines, inexorable satires upon the Inquisition and the monastic orders, make up this most remarkable book. It had hardly appeared in 1796 before the Inquisition seized it. Goya parried this stroke, however, by dedicating the plates to the king.

A painter and a colorist, in this book he displays his genius as an etcher. The outlines are drawn with light and genial strokes only; then comes the aquatinta, the colouring which overspreads the background, and gives localisation, depth, and light. A few scratches of the needle, a black spot, a light produced by a spot of white ingeniously left blank—that sufficed to give life and character to his figures.

The “Misères de la Guerre” are intrinsically more serious. All the scenes of terror that occurred in Spain as a sequel to the French invasion and the glory of Napoleon here utter their cry of lamentation. A few plates amongst them are worthy of comparison with the finest of Rembrandt’s,—the sole classic for whom Goya cherished a veneration. All the undertakings which followed these—the “Bull-fights,” the “Proverbs,” the “Captives,” the fantastic landscapes—tell of a long study of the great Dutch master. Especially celebrated were the seventeen new plates which he added to the “Malheurs de la Guerre” in 1814, at the time of the restoration of Ferdinand VII. They are the political and philosophical testament of the old liberal, the keen free-thinker, the last and utmost fight for all that he loved against all that he hated. With sacred wrath and biting irony he waged war against the intrigues and hypocrisy of the obscurantists who throttle progress and suppress freedom of thought. With passionate wrath he rushed upon kings, priests, and dignitaries. It seems incredible that the plate entitled “Nada”—a dead man, who comes out of his grave and writes with his corpse-fingers the word “Nada” (nothing)—that this plate can be the work of a Spaniard of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there is the same hatred of tyranny, of social injustice, of human stupidity, the same incredulous effort after a dimly conceived ideal of truth and liberty.

It is neither the amiable fairyland of Callot nor the bourgeois pessimism of Hogarth. Goya is more inexorable and acute; his phantasy, borne on larger wings, takes a higher flight. He sees direful figures in his dreams, his laugh is bitter, his anger rancorous. He is a revolutionist, an agitator, a sceptic, a nihilist. His chronique scandaleuse grows into the epos of the age. One understands why such a man should no longer feel secure in Spain, and, towards the close of his life, go into exile in France.

There, too, in the home of the revolution, art, ever since the beginning of the century, had freed herself more from the tradition of the Renaissance, and betaken herself to the new way, which the Dutch, and soon afterwards the English, had laid down in the seventeenth century.

All that had been produced in Paris, up to the close of the seventeenth century, had had its birthplace in the Italy of Leo X. The light of the Italian Renaissance had suffused France ever since the appearance of Rosso and Primaticcio. Rome had been the cradle of Simon Vouet and Nicolas Poussin. France endeavoured, in rich decoration and masterly swing of lines, to overtop the Italians, whose formulæ were studied partly in Rome and partly in the Palace of Fontainebleau, that Rome in petto. Those religious pictures of Lebrun, arranged in panels, appeared with their theatrically elegant attitudes and their flowing drapery, with their slim, oscillating limbs and their florid gestures. All Olympus, all the saints and the heroes, were set to work to do honour to the great king. Was it necessary to glorify his acts, then it was done by portraying him as Cyrus or Alexander. The people of the seventeenth century did not exist for painters. Lebrun and Mignard, as inheritors of Roman culture, hovered over life without seeing it. Their ideals were a hundred and fifty years old, ingenious variations on the sixteenth-century pattern.

Then came the death of the Grand Monarque, and with him the tradition of the Renaissance went also to its grave. The old age was outworn, and the new began to supersede it. The world was weary of the majestic, the stiff, and the pompous, whose glamour had blinded it for sixty years. The sun-king was dead, and the sun of the Italian Renaissance had set. French society breathed once more. The ostentation of the court had become an onerous ceremony, the monarchical principle an unendurable constraint. The nightmare that had oppressed it, the ennui that had come from Versailles, disappeared. Air and light and mirth penetrated the salons. People shook off the heavy yoke of majesty from their shoulders, abandoned their heroic, ostentatious palaces, and bought themselves petites maisons in the Bois. They had suffered, they wished to be glad; they had been bored, they wished to be amused. Enough of pater-nosters and stately etiquette! they wished to live. Away with the antique temples and goddesses of Poussin! away with those devoted martyrs who mortified themselves and killed the flesh! Away with the semblance of the heroic, with pomp and glamour, with the service of God and the service of lords! Here’s to the service of the ladies. Here’s to the thatched roofs of farmhouses; the woods in whose thickets one can lose one’s way and exchange a kiss; rosy flesh and little turned-up noses; everything which gave a thrill of voluptuousness after the unapproachable, icy-cold nobility of the past. Long live Love!

“L’Art.”
GOYA.	OTRES LEYES POR EL PUEBLO.

So thought France when Louis XIV was dead, and the man was already grown up in the Low Countries who was chosen to give a shape to these dreams, to abolish the ascendency of gods and kings and heroes, and to show the upper classes their own image reflected in the mirror of art.

Antoine Watteau, who guided the stream of French art into this new channel—of the Netherlands—was by birth and training a Fleming. His birthplace, Valenciennes, although French territory since the Peace of Nymeguen, resembled in its whole character a Flemish town. In the church here he first saw any of Rubens’ pictures. Here, through Gérin, he became instructed in Flemish traditions. Rubens and Teniers are the two masters from whom his own art sprang. During the years when the war of the Spanish Succession had changed the French frontier provinces into a huge military camp, he painted soldiers and camp scenes, such as the “March” in the collection of Edmund Rothschild, where a party of recruits are straggling along a high plain in a fierce storm. Later came pictures of country life in the manner of Teniers, like the “Retour de Guinguette,” engraved by Chedel, a landscape in which on the right a party of rustics are carousing at a table in front of a farmyard, while on the other side half-drunken men and women are going home. Louis XIV had made before the pictures of Teniers his well-known mot: “Otez moi ces magots.” Now, through Watteau, the magot makes its entrance into French art. Thus in his chief picture in this manner, “La Vraie Gaieté,” the figures are unmistakably after Teniers. The men are short and sturdy, entirely Flemish. Only the costumes have changed with the mode. But the women are not in the least Flemish. The clean caps and tidy kerchiefs, the freshly ironed aprons, and neat little feet that trip so lightly and quickly along the street that no dirt seems to soil them, give these peasant girls a certain desirability in which it is not hard to discover the transition to French grace. The elegant motions and fine heads point to that Watteau who was to become soon afterwards the unsurpassable delineator of feminine coquetry.

Gillot and Rubens led him into the new road. The Teniers-like character of his figures disappeared, they became gracious and noble. In place of the magot came elegant French society. Gillot was the first in Paris to break with the pompous Louis XIV style, and to begin the representation of the cheerful life of comedians, to replace the dwellers in Olympus by characters of the French and Italian stage. Rubens had been the first in his “Garden of Love,” of the Dresden and Madrid Galleries, to invite to the embarkation for the Island of Cythera. Watteau acquired something from everyone he studied, and yet resembles none. After having hitherto sought his personages on the highways and in camps, he was now to become the painter of fêtes galantes, the painter of “Society.” For in his shepherds and shepherdesses there lives the elegance of France. The gods of the Renaissance, in whom no one any longer believed, glided into the costumes of Harlequin and Pierrette. In lieu of the great and the pathetic there came the small, the gay, the graceful, the dainty. The architectural symmetry of composition disappeared, and the stiff stage-scenery character of landscape vanished. The grave formality of geometrical construction is changed into freedom and joyousness, just as the rhetorical, exact, measured periods of Boileau were relaxed, under the hands of Voltaire, into sentences unconstrained, buoyant, and crisp. Watteau’s art betokened the triumph of naturalism over the mannerism into which the French art of the seventeenth century, based on the Italian Renaissance, had dwindled. As it is said in an old poem—

Watteau became for French art what, a hundred years before, Rubens had been for Flemish—the deliverer. He delivered them from the oppressive yoke of the Italian tradition. In his world, where there were no longer any naked goddesses, but where the corset was opened only just wide enough to reveal a rosy bosom, there was nothing more left of the past. It is no longer antique beauty, no longer the plastic cold of the “Venus di Milo,” no longer the marble perfection of Raphael’s “Galatea.” Into those tender, feminine hands, into those lace sleeves, out of which snow-white arms come languishingly forth, into those slender waists, and teasing, dimpled chins, something of coquetry, of sensibility, something subtle and spiritual, has entered, that seems to transcend physical beauty. His young men are tall and supple, his women entirely indescribable, with their air of quiet roguishness and their exquisite coiffures. Quite modern is that distinguished sense for costume which made him a leader of fashion. Mysterious landscapes, that exhale peace and happiness all around! Rightly has Edmond de Goncourt called him a lyric poet, the great poet of the eighteenth century.

In this way the development proceeded. The pompous representation which portrait painting had practised hitherto was gone. People would no longer be masters of the ceremonies, but human beings. New forms of technique were discovered, such as pastel painting. No other material was capable of rendering the peculiar fragrance of this fugitive flower nature, the graceful appearance of this rococo style, of these ladies with the touch of powder in their hair, and their moist, dreamy eyes, as Maurice Latour, Rosalba Carriera, and later the Swiss, Liotard, painted them. Of those who endeavoured, on the model of Watteau’s style, to depict the life of the fashionable world, none approached the delicacy of that national genius. Lancret and Pater followed him, but more roughly, more soberly, more drily. Lancret in his whole conception, compared with Watteau, is a homely, often a somewhat cumbrous journeyman; Pater, an artist of greater elegance, has the fickleness of the virtuoso. Both in conviction and in art they lacked that poetic, glorifying breath which pervades Watteau’s creations. In Watteau one believes that these gracious beings, these tall and nervous cavaliers, these amiable coquettes and comely women, actually represent originals in noble society; whereas in the works of his disciples it often happens that the paid model, selected from a lower circle of society, appears to us to be not congruous with the elegance of her wardrobe. These dancers, huntsmen, and noble maidens are not wholly what they should represent. But how delicious they are, these French gossips, so long as one is mindful not to think of Watteau! What grace is theirs too! What innate tact! With what a pleasant adroitness do they understand how to rivet our attention, and to keep far, far away from the tedium in which their classical ancestors, with their natural heaviness, waded! Instinctively and without effort they rejected the rhythmically balanced composition and correct nobility of form of the classics, and found a characteristic expression for unconstrained gestures, pleasing movements, and refined elegance.

WATTEAU.	LA PARTIE CARRÉE.

Even the decorative painters abandoned more and more the much-worn paths of the Italians. François Lemoine gave them, by Rubens’ aid, the transition to a manner peculiarly French, elegant, sensuous, charming. His pupil, François Boucher, followed him. Like the sons of the seventeenth century, he made exhaustive use of mythological subjects and was often a superficial artist, and in his later works he became entirely a mannerist; but he was not so at the beginning. It was a great advance for France when Boucher gave his pupils the advice to abstain from imitation of the great Italian masters, and not to grow “as cold as ice.” And what a great naturalist he is in his numerous drawings and etchings, and in those marvellous groups of chubby children who are playing and tumbling about on clouds, or playing musical instruments shooting arrows, or sporting with flowers! “It is not every one who has the stuff to make a Boucher” even his great antagonist David has said of him.

In Fragonard, again, there was summed up all the joy of life and the frivolity, the lustrous, luxurious talent, the charming amiability and nimble sureness, of French art in the eighteenth century. Fragonard has painted everything. His great decorations are careless inspirations, sparkling with spirit and life. With him pastoral scenes alternate with episodes of everyday life—children, guitar players, women reading. Fragonard is a piquant, ingenious painter. Perhaps hardly any other painter has so much kissing in his pictures. His etching, “L’armoire,” of 1778, is well known. In that he already stood on the sure ground of popular life. The old rustic, who is armed with a formidable cudgel, is beating open, with the assistance of his wife, the doors of a great clothes cupboard, in which a handsome young fellow has hidden himself; close by is a pretty farm girl, weeping in confusion into her apron; in the background the curious and amazed little sisters are looking on.

GREUZE.	THE MILKMAID.

J. F. de Troy had, at the same time, abandoned himself to a more frolicsome manner, had played upon painting in pictures such as “The Proposal of Marriage” and “The Garter” with something of that frivolity which later came into fashion through Baudouin. That, however, was only for a very short time. Life was beginning to be in earnest—that is rather the impression one receives much earlier, from turning over the engravings of those years. Amongst the elders of the actual rococo age, contentment and gaiety still rule. As the heirs of an old civilisation, the aristocracy understood, with a refined and unique understanding, how to turn life into a feast. Silk trains rustle over the parquet, silk shoes trip, eyes gleam, diamonds flash, white bosoms heave. Tall cavaliers advance to their sprightly partners, gossip and smiles fly around, Knights of Malta and abbés hang over the chairs and pay their court. Yes, this autumn of the old French culture was of a marvellous beauty for the fortunate, and those fortunate ones knew, as no other generation has ever done, how to enjoy life with serenity, in a fairy glamour of rooms gleaming with Venetian chandeliers, where rosy Cupidons laughed down bewitchingly from their light, gold moulded panels. Under Louis XVI the French salon acquired another aspect. Its walls, its whole architecture, were more sombre. The Cupidons still sported on the ceiling, but they were forgotten, like ghosts of the past; their shafts were already impotent. The vivacious, dancing couples have disappeared. Festivity has been banished from the big rooms: here and there is seen an earnest conversational party; gentlemen playing cards or ladies reading philosophical books. Social and political interests have sprung up with which people of education prefer to occupy themselves. Numerous works on commerce and constitutional methods have appeared during the last fifty years. In place of scandal there crop up arguments, for and against the Parliament, for and against the Jesuits. Enlightenment had won its victory. Henceforth development is no longer compatible with sensuous delight. It is still the same society as before, but without pleasure. One almost breathes the air of 1789. Gaming is only a struggle against ennui; the foreheads of women are furrowed with reading. Society has grown serious and sombre, as it were, with a presentiment of what is to come, as though destiny might thus be set aside. The writings of Diderot afford the clearest instance of this changed spirit of the age, and art too must become virtuous, and work for the amelioration of the world. Thus Diderot upheld the sentimental and emotional subject against the fêtes galantes of the rococo painter. Boucher derived his inspiration from the slough of prostitution; only a moral upheaval could tend to a high style. With Boucher the idea of honour, of innocence, has become something strange; the new age requires virtue, bonnes mœurs. But where are the virtues to be found? Naturally, there alone, where Rousseau had discovered them. Rousseau taught that man by nature was good, that he was noble, conscious of his moral obligations, self-sacrificing and uncorrupted when he came from the hands of his Maker, and that it was civilisation which first corrupted him. It followed that the most civilised are the most corrupt, and virtues are to be met with, if anywhere, amongst the lower orders, who are the least affected by culture. Not beneath an embroidered waistcoat, only beneath a woollen smock, can a noble heart beat. The happy ignorance of the young Savoyard, eating his cheese or his oranges in a church porch, lies nearer to the original perfection of mankind than the most subtle erudition of the most ingenious of the encyclopædists. Amongst nature’s noblemen one must seek for the secret of virtue, which has been lost by the aristocracy in the stream of civilisation. Thus beneath the ægis of Rousseau’s philosophy the Third Estate makes its entry into French salons. From the man of the people society wanted to learn how to become once more simple, unassuming, and virtuous; and it was a gruesome irony of fate that this “man of the people” should reveal himself later, when the guillotine stood in the Place de la Concorde, as by no means so lamblike, modest, and self-sacrificing as that noble society had imagined him.

Cassell & Co.		Cassell & Co.
GREUZE.	HEAD OF A GIRL.	GREUZE.	GIRL CARRYING A LAMB.

Greuze represented this phase of French art when the riotous carnival of rococo had come to an end, and the Ash Wednesday of rule and fasting and penitence had ensued. It was considered that the aim of art must be to instruct and elevate, not merely to amuse; it should set an example to raise and inspire the good, to serve as a warning for the bad. “Rendre la vertu aimable, le vice odieux, le ridicule saillant, voilà le projet de tout honnête homme qui prend la plume, le pinceau ou le ciseau.” In these words Diderot formulated his programme. It was his wish that the corrupt man, when he went to an exhibition, should feel pricks of conscience at the pictures and read in them his own condemnation. “Si ses pas le conduisent au Salon, qu’il craigne d’arrêter ses regards sur la toile.” Educational effects, “moral stories told in pictures,” that is the keynote of Diderot’s demands upon the painter, and of the accomplishment of Greuze in answer to this claim. He is the French Hogarth, whether he paints in sombre colours the misery that the drunkard brings upon his family, and the horrors of poverty, or depicts in brighter tones the love of children for their parents and the works of charity; and with him too, as with the Englishman, his title was chosen with a didactic after-thought to heighten the effect of his picture. Thus such scenes as these occurred: “The Father’s Curse,” “The Consolation of Age,” “The Son’s Correction,” “The Ungrateful Son,” “The Beloved Mother,” “The Spoilt Child,” “The Lame Man tended by his Relations,” and “The Results of Good Education.” He had this, too, in common with Hogarth: he liked to develop his moral stories in long series, which invariably ended with the triumph of virtue and the punishment of vice. The didactic story of Bazile et Thibaut attempted to relate in twenty-six chapters the influence of a good education on the formation of a whole life; and, just as in Hogarth’s story of the two apprentices, here too, at the conclusion, the well-educated Thibaut pronounces sentence of death over his old friend Bazile, the badly educated, and now condemned murderer. The fact that in other things the two moral apostles differ greatly from each other is accounted for by the difference in the national characteristics of those to whom they variously appealed.

Hogarth scourged the vices of the Third Estate in order to raise them to morality. Rape, bloodshed, debauchery, disorderliness, gluttony, and drunkenness—that was the channel through which in England at that day the furious flood of the uncontrolled spirit of the populace poured itself, foaming and raging with fearful natural force. Hogarth swung over these human animals the stout cudgel of morality in the manner of a sturdy policeman and Puritan bourgeois. With such people a delicate forbearance would have been misplaced. At the foot of every prison-scene he inscribed the name of the vice that he had pilloried there, and subjoined the predicted damnation from Holy Writ. He reveals it in its hideousness, he steeps it in its filth, traces it to its retribution, so that even the most vitiated conscience must recognise it and the most hardened abhor it.

Cassell & Co.		Cassell & Co.
GREUZE.	GIRL LOOKING UP.	GREUZE.	GIRL WITH AN APPLE.

Greuze employs the Third Estate as a mirror of virtue, sets forth its noble qualities as an edification to an aristocracy that has grown vicious. Less primitive and, for that very reason, less original than Hogarth, he never forgets that he lives in the most refined social period in history. He does not strangle his culprits to provide terrifying examples, but nearly always leaves a corner open for repentance. He knew that he dared not exact too much from the nerves of his noble public; he merely wished to stir them to a soft vibration. He did not paint for drunken English people, but for those perfumed marquises who, later on, bowed with so courtly an elegance before the guillotine; for those sensitive ladies in whom virtue now excited the same sensual delight that vice had done before. They welcomed in him the high priest of a sort of orgie of virtue, to whose festivals they had grown reconciled. The century which in its first half had danced as light-heartedly as any other the can-can of life, becomes, in its second half, sad of soul, enthusiastic over the reward of justice, the punishment of transgressors, over honour and the naïveté of innocence. Time after time do his contemporaries praise precisely that sense of virtue in the art of Greuze. So that in France, as in England, the burden of interest was laid no longer upon the art, but upon an accessory circumstance. For since, in the hands of Greuze, the picture had been turned into an argument, in France, as in England, art ceased to be an end—it became only a means. He made painting a didactic poem, the more melodramatic the better, and was driven thereby on the same sandbank upon which Hogarth, and all genre painters who would be more than painters, have made shipwreck. In order to bring out his story with the utmost possible distinctness, he was too frequently compelled unduly to accentuate his point. The effect became affected, the pathos theatrical. His picture of the “Father’s Curse” in the Louvre, with the infuriated old man, the son hurrying wildly away, and the weeping sisters, resembles the last act of a melodrama. “The Country Wedding,” where the father-in-law has given the young bridegroom the purse with the dowry, and now pathetically observes, “Take it, and be happy,” might just as well have been entitled “The Father’s Last Blessing.” In the picture in which a noble dame takes her daughter to the bedside of two poor persons who are ill, to accustom her in early life to works of charity, the personages in the picture, arranged exactly as if upon a stage, must have been themselves uncommonly moved by the touching and praiseworthy action. Greuze was the father of genre painting in France—that barbaric, story-telling art which replaced tableaux vivants based upon the literary idea by the Dutchmen’s picturesque and well-observed selections from nature. Beyond that, however, it must not be forgotten that he, like Hogarth, psychologically opposed to the earlier art, showed practical progress in many of his works. There were few in French art before him who depicted the emotions of the soul with such refinement as Greuze in his “Reading of the Bible.” In proportion to the understanding and character of the individual is the impression of the listener reflected on his countenance. That was something new in comparison with the laughing gods of Boucher. And that Greuze was also capable of the most highly pictorial magic when he could once bring himself to lay aside the moral teacher is proved by his rosy, inspired heads of young girls. He never grew weary of painting these pretty children in every situation and attitude at that seductive age which hides the charming feet beneath the first long gown. Blonde or brunette, with a blue ribbon in the hair, a little cluster of flowers in the bodice, they gaze out upon life with their big, brown child eyes, full of curiosity and misgiving. A light gauze covers the soft lines of the neck, the shoulders are as yet hardly rounded, the pouting lips are fresh as the morning dew, and only the two rosy, budding breasts, that fight lustily against their imprisonment, and seem, like Sterne’s starling, to cry, “I cannot get out,” betray that the woman is already awake in the child. Greuze’s name will always be associated with these girl types, just as that of Leonardo is with the dreamy, smiling sphinx-like head of Mona Lisa. In them he has given an unsurpassable expression to the ideal of innocence at the end of the eighteenth century, and provided in them a new thrill of beauty for his contemporaries. And a blasé society which had indulged in every licence bathed itself with passionate delight in the unknown mystery of this surging flood. Yes, after the stimulating champagne of rococo, people had even come to delight in simple black bread. And so, out of bourgeoisie itself, a school of painting was developed as fresh and healthy as this.

Chardin, the carpenter’s son, is at the head of this domestic art in the eighteenth century. After Greuze, the painter of refined taste, he seems, a comfortable, healthy, bourgeois master in whom the Dutchman of the best period once more appears upon earth.

After the king had, up to the close of the seventeenth century, been the centre round which everything turned, the solitary personality which dared to appear independent, and upon which the rest of the world formed itself; after the circles round the court had next freed themselves, and gained the right to enjoy life and art for themselves, there still remained a third step to surmount. “Society” abdicates in favour of a free and healthy bourgeoisie.

A surgeon’s sign was the first work which brought the young man, who had received no systematic education, into notice. The surgeon is in his shop attending to a man who has been wounded in a duel, grouped around are curious bystanders, while the commissary of police investigates the case with a grave countenance. It is the first picture of the Parisian life of the people. And Chardin, with his middle-class origin, remained the advocate of middle-class domestic life. He is the Watteau of the Third Estate. Greuze owes his success, in the first place, to the ingenious manner in which he made himself the spokesman of the moral tendency of his age. It interested contemporary society to be told that it is beautiful to see married folk live together in happiness; that young mothers do a good action in nursing their children, when it is possible, themselves; that man should repent of his sins; and that he who honours his father and mother lives long in the land. Nowadays we thank him for these wise counsels, but say, at the same time, that we could have done without them. We no longer see the necessity of illustrating the ten commandments, and notice now all the more the mannerisms, the rhetorical strokes of advocacy which the painter must employ in order to plead successfully. Chardin’s effect is as fresh to-day as it was a hundred years ago, because he was a sheer artist, who did not seek to tell a story, but only to represent,—a realist of the finest stamp, belonging in his exquisite sense of colour values to the illustrious family of the Terburgs. His pictures have no “purpose.” The washerwoman, the woman scraping carrots, the housewife at her manifold tasks—that is Chardin’s world; the atmosphere in which these figures move, the shimmering light that floats in the half-dark kitchen, the wealth of sun-rays that play upon the white tablecloths and brown-panelled walls—those are his fields of study. Chardin lived in an old studio, high up near the roof, a quiet, dark room that was usually full of vegetables which he used for his “still life.” There was something picturesque about the dusty walls where the moist green of vegetables mingled so harmoniously with the time-worn, sombre brown of the wainscoting, and the white table-cloth was flooded with the silvery green which poured in from a little skylight. In this peaceful and harmoniously toned chamber were laid those small domestic scenes, which he so loved to paint, and which were called by the French, in contrast to the Fétes Galantes, “Amusements de la Vie Privée.” The clock ticks, the lamp burns, water is boiling on the homely tiled stove. There is an effect in every one of his pictures, as though he had lived them himself, as if they were reminiscences of something dear to him and familiar. In contrast to Greuze he shunned all critical moments, and depicted only the quiet life of custom, everyday life as it befell in a constant, regular routine. There are no hasty movements with him, no catastrophes nor complications; he has a preference for “still life” in the world of men, just as in nature. He is par excellence the painter of Intimität (intimate life); which is not the same as a genre painter. Painters who in the manner of genre have depicted domestic scenes in rooms are to be found in every school; but how few have known how to depict the poetry of the family life with such truth, with such an absence of affectation and insipidity! With Chardin art and life are interfused.

J. B. S. CHARDIN.	THE HOUSE OF CARDS.

CHARDIN.	GRACE BEFORE MEAT.	DANIEL CHODOWIECKI.

No Dutchman, however, had penetrated into the nursery. Chardin, in surprising the child-world at their games, in their joys and sorrows, has opened out to art a new province. And with what affectionate devotion has he not absorbed himself in the spirit of the little people! I know of no one before him who has painted the unconscious spiritual life of the child with such discreet tenderness: the little hands that grasp at something, the lips that a mother would like to kiss, the dreamy wide-open young eyes. In this Chardin is a master. It is not only obvious expressions of joy and sorrow, but those refined shades, so difficult to seize, of observation, thoughtfulness, consideration, calm reflection, quaintness, obstinacy or sulking, which he analyses in the eyes of the child. There is the little girl playing with her doll, and lavishing on her all the love and care of a tender mother. There is an elderly, half-grown-up little lady teaching her younger brother the mysteries of the alphabet. Then come the games and the tasks. They build card-houses, blow bubbles, or are wholly engrossed in their drawing-books and home-lessons. How attentive the little girl is whose mother has just given her her first embroidery materials. How charmingly embarrassed is the small boy whom she hears his lesson. And what trouble she takes in the morning, that her darling shall be clean and tidy when he goes to school. In one picture the cap on the little girl’s head is crooked, and her mother is putting it straight, whilst the child with a pretty pride is peeping curiously in the glass. Again, there is the boy just saying good-bye. He is neat and well combed; his playthings, too, have been nicely tidied up, and his books are under his arm. His mother takes his three-cornered hat off again in order to brush it properly. When school is over, you see them sitting at dinner. The table is laid with a snow-white cloth, and the cook is just bringing in a steaming dish. It is touching to see how prettily the small boy clasps his hands and says his grace. And when they are again off to afternoon school the mother sits alone. She looks charming in her simple house-dress, with the loose sleeves, her clean white apron and kerchief, her striped petticoat and coquettish cap. Soon she takes her embroidery on her lap and stoops forward to take a ball of wool out of her basket. Next she sits before the fire in a cosy corner against a folding screen. A half-opened book rests in her hand, a tea-cup stands close by, a homely atmosphere of the living room hovers round her. Then, like a true housewife, she takes up her house-keeping book, or goes into the kitchen to help the cook, while she scrapes carrots or scrubs the cooking utensils or brings in the meat from the larder. It is all rendered with such truth and simplicity that one acquires an affection for Chardin, who with his art got to the root of family life and bestowed upon it the subtlest gifts of observation and generous comprehension, while none the less his domesticity never became commonplace.

His contemporary, Étienne Jeurat, painted scenes at country fairs, and Jean Baptiste le Prince pictures of guardrooms and similar subjects. In Holland Cornelis Troost went on parallel lines with him. He depicted the life of his age and of his nation—comic scenes, banquets, weddings, and the like—in pastels or water colours, and that without seeking inspiration from any of the Dutch classics, but with a vivid, intelligent comprehension. Even Italian art ended in two “genre painters,” the Venetians Rotari and Pietro Longhi, who have bequeathed to us such charming little pictures of the life of that age—fortune-tellers, dancing-masters, tailors, apothecaries, little boys and girls at play or at their tasks.

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CHODOWIECKI.	THE FAMILY PICTURE.

Germany presented no such great manifestation as Chardin, although there too the tendency was the same. There too, after the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, a moral, active bourgeoisie had at last sprung up that was prepared to take up the line which had been already laid down by the English. Lessing was the first in this magnificent struggle for evolution. He wrote, in his Miss Sarah Sampson, the first German tragedy without the support of great mythical or historical heroes, and without the stiff ponderousness of the Alexandrine. He declared, like Moore, that helmets and diadems do not make tragic heroes; he even in his Minna set vividly before the eyes of his contemporaries something in the immediate present, the Seven Years’ War. And just as Lessing liberated the German drama from the jurisdiction of Boileau, so art began to mutiny against the classicism which had come in through the medium of France, and which had been inherited from the age when it was the pride of German courts to be small copies of Versailles.

“How exceedingly abhorrent to me are our berouged puppet painters,” cries the young Goethe, in his essay on German style and art, “I could not sufficiently protest; they have caught the eyes of the women with theatrical poses, false complexions, and gaudy costumes; the wood engravings of manly old Albrecht Dürer, at whom tyros scoff, are more welcome to me.... Only where intimacy and simplicity exist is all artistic vigour to be found, and woe to the artist who leaves his hut to squander himself in academic halls of state.”

CHODOWIECKI.	ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF WOMEN.	Cassell & Co.

Daniel Chodowiecki, with all his commonplaceness, is a genuine expression of this phase of German art. He in Germany, Hogarth in England, and Chardin in France, are products of the same tendency of the age. After Lessing had produced in Minna the first domestic German tragedy, Chodowiecki, following the road of Hogarth and Chardin, was able to become the painter of the German middle class. He is not a master of such penetrating strength as they were, but he is no less an artist of notable merit. He is certainly no genius—in fact almost a handicraftsman, sober and philistine, but, like Hogarth, a self-made man who in his whole artistic and personal outlook was rooted in the soil of his city and of his age. Berlin society of that day was the basis of his art, the daily life of house and street his domain. He began by illustrating poems and depicting scenes out of the Seven Years’ War and the History of Charles the Great, and went on from that to the pleasant, homely life of the small bourgeoisie. Himself of the middle classes, he chiefly worked for them, and with his sensitive and dexterous graving tool he kept the liveliest and most exhaustive chronicle of the German bourgeoisie of that age. At times almost too reasonable and prosaic, a genuine Nicolai, he has in other plates an enchanting freshness, and—which should not be forgotten—is more of an artist than Hogarth, since he is neither moralist nor satirist. His object, without any moral after-thought, was the true and kindly observation of life as displayed in the world around him. He took the wholly naïve delight of the genuine artist in turning everything he saw into a picture. These chronicles of his have some, it may be but a particle, of the spirit of Dürer. Simultaneously, the young Tischbein delved into the past of the nation, the age of Conradin and the Hohenstaufen, with the intention of finding there the simplicity which the academic pictures had come to lack; and, later on, he painted in Hamburg extremely realistic historical pictures of his own period, such as that which is to be found in the Oldenburg Gallery: “Entry of General Benigsen into Hamburg, 1814.” He did good work too as a portrait painter. In his best picture, “Goethe amongst the Ruins of Rome,” the head of the poet is energetic and full of strength, the colouring of an excellent clear grey.

In portrait painting in general, the revolution is reflected with especial clearness. The artificial manner that had been copied from the seventeenth century, the age of long perukes, gives way, slowly but surely, to an ever-growing naturalness, simplicity, and originality. At that time, while the spirit of Louis XIV still hovered over everything, the passion of the individual to be king in his own sphere had penetrated into the family. The honest citizen, therefore, would not let himself be painted as such, but only as a prince,—he, himself, in gala dress, with a pompous air, as stately as though he were giving an audience to the spectator, his wife in silk and gold and lace; she has a great mantle of state worn loose over her shoulders and hips, and looks down with an assumption of grandeur on her grandchild, who is half respectful and half inclined to make fun. The frame is as rich as the costume, and probably bears a crown. We are with difficulty persuaded that these are pictures of simple citizens, that the man, apart from the hours during which he sat to the painter, is an industrious tradesman, and the wife, glancing out so haughtily, most probably darned his stockings. Their portraits seem to form part of an ancestral gallery.

This age of princely state was followed by that of fraternity. In place of berouged and postured portraits with allegorical accessories, there appeared simple, unpretentious likenesses of human beings in their work-a-day clothes; in place of stiff attitudes, genre motives with the easy naturalness of everyday life.

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CHODOWIECKI.	THE MORNING COMPLIMENT.

In Berlin, ever since 1709, Antoine Pesne had been for half a century the centre of artistic life, and in his works the revolution may be traced. Something familiar and intimate takes the place of that stately pomp. The princes, hitherto, had liked to be represented in mediæval armour or antique equipment; Pesne painted them in the costume of the time. And in his portraits of his friends and his family circle he has been still more unconstrained. There is the charming picture of 1718, in the New Palace at Potsdam, which shows the painter himself with his wife and his two children; the portrait of Schmidt the engraver, in the Berlin Museum; and the beautiful picture of 1754 in the collection of Colonel Von Berke, at Schemnitz, which depicts him again at the age of seventy-one with his two daughters. Pesne is revealed in these characteristic portraits, as well as in his character pictures in the Dresden Gallery (“The Girl with the Pigeons,” 1728, “The Cook with the Turkey-hen,” 1712), as a thoroughly sane and strong realist, of a kind which became almost extinct in Berlin a hundred years later.

In the next generation, in the Sturm-und-Drang period, Anton Graff, the Swiss, took the lead with his simple, domestic, honest, real portraits. It was a happy disposition of fate that Graff’s activity just corresponded with the great period of the awakening of intellectual life in Germany, that Lessing and Schiller, Bodmer and Gessner, Wieland and Herder, Bürger and Gellert, Christian Gottfried Körner and Lippert, Moses Mendelssohn and Sulzer, and a long succession of other poets and scholars of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, found in him a portrait painter whose quick and agile hand left us their features in the truest and most authentic manner. What and how robust his art is, how clear and plastic the execution of the heads, how adroit and infallible the technique!

Besides Graff, there worked in Dresden Christian Leberecht Vogel, likewise a most independent, picturesque, and sensitive artist, who, if only for his pictures of children, deserves a place of honour in the history of art in the eighteenth century. In the portrait of his two boys, in the Dresden Gallery, the naïveté of child-life is observed with such tenderness and rendered with such vigour as only Reynolds understood. The boys are sitting close together on the ground. One, in a brown frock, is holding a book on his knees, which the other, in a red frock, with a whip in his hand, is looking at. The thoughtful expression of the little ones is quite charming; the execution broad and strong, the colour treatment delightful and tender.

In Munich lived the excellent Johann Edlinger, the most industrious of these sturdy masters, who were so modest and yet so capable.

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CHODOWIECKI.	THE ARTIST’S NURSERY.

In the domain of landscape the Continent produced no one who could be compared with Gainsborough; but here, too, the English influence made itself felt. It can be traced how the same feeling for nature which had given birth to Thomson’s Seasons and Gainsborough’s landscapes, afterwards found expression in France and Germany, and dissipated the prevailing taste in gardens. The seventeenth century—with the exception of the Dutch—had set nature in order with the garden shears. As Lebrun in his historical compositions endeavoured to outdo the Italians, so Lenôtre’s garden style exemplified the perfection and exaggeration of the gardens of the Italian Renaissance, which themselves again were laid out on the plan of the old Roman gardens from existing descriptions. A garden reminded one more of state apartments, which one could only walk through with measured steps, quietly and respectfully, than of nature, where one is, and dares to be, human. Corresponding to this formally planned, correctly measured style of garden there was a school of landscape which improved nature on “artistic” principles, and, by the arrangement of bits of nature, produced a world peculiarly full of style. Landscapes were nicely laid-out parks, which, like the figure pictures, made for an abstract beauty of mass and lines, and which, by means of accessories, such as classical ruins, would turn one’s thought to the ancient world. Nature must not, as Batteux taught, be the instructor of the artist, but the artist must select the parts and build up his picture. Out of many leaves he takes only the most perfectly developed, puts only such perfect leaves on one tree, and so obtains a perfect tree. Let the essential of his production be nature choisie, a selection of objects that “are capable of producing agreeable impressions”; his aim “le beau vrai qui est représenté comme s’il existait réellement et avec toutes les perfections qu’il peut recevoir.” The eighteenth century went back from this “noble,” improved nature, step by step to the divine beauty of unimproved nature; just as those masters untouched by the Romans, Dürer and Altdorfer, Titian and Rubens, Brouwer and Velasquez, had painted her. The great Watteau, too, was here for the most part in advance of his age, in that, instead of the stiffly designed stage scenery of Poussin, he gave Elysian landscapes,—abodes of love, that now glisten in the sunshine of the young morning, now are suffused with golden light and the misty shadows of the evening twilight. The rose in her young bud is odorous, the nightingale sings, the doves coo, the light boughs whisper to the soft west wind, bright silver rivulets ripple, the wind sighs through the tall branches. Watteau knew nature and loved her, and rendered her in her transparent beauty with the intoxicated eyes of a lover. The spirit of nature, not of humanity, dominates in his pictures. It is only because nature is so lovely that man is so happy.

Cassell & Co.	Photo, Mansell.
WATTEAU.	THE MUSIC PARTY.

But still more modern is the effect, when instead of painting Elysian landscapes with happy inhabitants, he drew mere bits of rural nature, poor solitary regions in the neighbourhood of big towns, where bricklayers are working on the scaffolding of some house, or peasants are riding with their horses over some stony byway. Out of a number of spirited drawings, this side of his perception in landscape is especially notable in the picture in the New Palace at Potsdam, in the left background of which a small stream flows past a farmhouse, whilst in front a peasant is laboriously dragging a two-wheeled cart over the rough ground.

Cassell & Co.	Photo, Mansell.
WATTEAU.	THE RETURN FROM THE CHASE.

It is interesting to observe, at that time, after Watteau and his English predecessors, the widespread growth of this new feeling for nature. Thomson was followed by Rousseau, who, on his lonely wanderings, looked with moved eyes at “the gold of the corn crop, the purple of the heather, the majesty of the trees, and the wonderful variety of flowers and grasses.” He delighted in the blossoming of spring, the copses and rivulets, the song of birds, shady woods, and the landscapes of autumn, where the reapers and vine-dressers were working. He is the author of that lively feeling for nature that henceforth was aroused through the whole of Europe. A breath of pure mountain air, a wholesome draught of fresh water from Lake Leman, were brought suddenly into the sultry atmosphere of salons, and filled people’s hearts with a new and charming sensation when Rousseau’s works appeared. It was over with all efforts of “stylists” as soon as Rousseau declared that everything was good just as it came out of the lap of the universal mother, nature.

WATTEAU.	FÊTE CHAMPÈTRE.

Goethe, the pupil of Rousseau, presages, in his whole conception of nature, something of the manifestation of the school of Fontainebleau. He had something of Daubigny when, as Werther, he lies on the bank of the stream and looks down thoughtfully at the worms and small insects. He makes one think of Dupré or Corot when he says: “As nature declines upon autumn, within me and around me it grows autumn”; or, “I could not now draw so much as a stroke, and I have never been a greater painter than at the present moment”; or, “Never have I been happier, nor has my perception of nature, down to the pebble or the grass beneath me, been fuller and more intimate. Yet,—I know not how I can express myself, everything swims and oscillates before my soul, so that I can seize no outline. A great, shadowy whole waves before my soul, my perception grows indistinct before it, even as my eyes do.”

GESSNER.	LANDSCAPE (ETCHING).

Thus were the French gardens delivered by the English. Just as figure painting renounced lofty, architectural, formal composition, so those bisected and upholstered gardens were supplanted by irregular and, as it were, accidental bits of nature. People took no more trouble, in Rousseau’s phrase, “to dishonour nature by seeking to beautify her,” but laid out gardens in harmony with Goethe’s remark in Werther: “A feeling heart, not a scientific art of gardening, suggested the plan.” Close to Versailles, near the box-tree patterns of Lenôtre, lay the Petit Trianon, with its pond, its brook, and its dairy, where the unfortunate Marie Antoinette used to dream. And if painting still loitered on its preliminary return to nature, that only implied that the great artists—they only came in 1830!—were not yet born. Great artists can only raise themselves on the shoulders of their predecessors, whose value lies in their utility. The French landscapes of the eighteenth century, seen in the light of historical development, are of no importance; but, nevertheless, they gave a considerable stimulus in that they sought to animate the style of Poussin with a closer perception of nature. Hubert Robert is certainly strongly decorative, but he has a light touch; one cannot take him at his word, but he is intelligent, and has sometimes grey and green tones that are soft and beautiful. Joseph Vernet painted coast scenery, views of harbours, storms at sea, likewise with decorative, superficial effects of light; he let flashes of lightning streak black clouds, sun-rays dance over lightly ruffled waves, silver moonshine play mysteriously upon the water, and caused conflagrations to break out and red flames to shoot up to heaven. He is somewhat inane and motley in his colouring. But he had ceased to see in the parts of nature nothing but materials for the construction of nicely fitting scenery. He no longer attempted to speak to the reason by means of lines, but to touch the soul through humour, and he employed in his scenery not only buildings and ruins, gods and ancient shepherds, but also modern groups of every kind.

In Switzerland, the charming etchings and water-colours of Solomon Gessner must be especially mentioned. Ludwig Richter, indeed, pointed them out as the eighteenth century works which, after the engravings of Chodowiecki, he loved the best. Gessner venerated Claude, and had an enthusiasm for Poussin, but his pictures have no traces of the lofty style of the heroic school of landscape. He sketched his native meadows, trees, and brooks; he loved all that was small and secluded and cosy, arbours and hedges, quiet little gardens and idyllic nooks. He approached everything with a very childlike and faithful observation of nature. A second Swiss, Ludwig Hess, dedicated a similar subtile sense of nature and loving zeal as much to his native Switzerland as to the Roman Campagna.

	L’Art.
GUARDI.	VENICE.

The German Philip Hackert has been prejudiced rather than profited by the monument which Goethe erected to him. As Goethe’s enthusiasm was not in due proportion with Hackert’s importance, he ceased later to attract attention, though this he did not merit, as he was always a vigorous and healthy landscape painter. He did not see nature with the tender sensibility of the Swiss. He looked at a landscape somewhat insipidly, as Chodowiecki at his models. But his drawing is sober, the atmosphere of his pictures clear and fresh; he cannot be tedious in his composition. In Dresden there lived Johann Alexander Thiele, who roamed through Thüringen and Mecklenburg as a landscape painter. Even in Italy landscapes were the most independent performances which the eighteenth century had brought forth there. There worked in Rome the Netherlander, Vanvitelli, who depicted in graceful water-colours Roman and Neapolitan street life; and Giovanni Paolo Pannini, the peintre des fêtes publiques, in whose pictures groups of richly coloured figures moved through splendid palaces. Venice was the home of the Canaletti. In Antonio Canale’s town pictures of Venice, Rome, and London there is at once so subtle an atmospheric movement, the water is so clear, the air so transparent, that even if they represent mere streets and buildings, they yet leave an impression of landscape achieved in a broad, pictorial method. Bernardo Canaletto produces an effect by the fine, cool, damp light of his northern studies even simpler and more intimate, while by his discovery that sunshine does not—as it was hitherto believed—gild but silver the object it falls on, he became one of the fathers of realistic landscape. The most ingenious, however, of the school of Canale, not to say one of the cleverest landscape painters of the century, was Francesco Guardi. Antonio Canale was a great artist, and shows it never better than in his distinguished etchings, but as a painter he interests the collector more than the connoisseur. There his qualities are too often petrified into an excessive formality; he shows something too much of the camera obscura. Guardi is ingenious and startling. Where you have accuracy in Canale, in him you find spirit. Canale shows us the real Venice, Guardi shows it as we have dreamed it to be. He has not Canale’s knowledge of perspective and architecture, but he fascinates us. He is a musician and a poet whose palette resounds with the purest harmonies. In his pictures the whole seductive legend of the fallen Queen of the Adriatic abides. Garlanded gondolas glide peaceful and fairy-like, majestic as vessels in some distant wonderland, over the clear, green water of the canals, beneath the high, marble palaces, which mirror their columns and balconies, their arches and their loggias in the stream. Foreign ambassadors pass in great state through the Piazza di San Marco; all that proud, Venetian nobility greets them; and thick throngs of people in their Sunday attire move to and fro beneath the Hall of the Procuration. Gay bands of musicians row along the Piazzetta and the Riva. A moist breeze sweeps over the water; the sunshine, now subdued and mellow, now dancing coquettishly, plays upon the water or on the houses. Francesco Guardi, the magician of Venice, is an animated, exquisite, always ingenious improvisatore, strong as few others are in the direct transference of his personal impression to canvas. Every stroke of his brush takes effect,—in each one of his pictures one sees the nervous exaltation of the hand; and that gives him a power of attraction which, compared with Canale, is like that of the clay model, in which the hand of the sculptor is still perceptible, compared with the cold, marble statue.

Even Spain, which, except for the colossal figure of Velasquez, had so far produced no painters of landscape—even Spain, after the middle of the century, turned into this road. Don Pedro Rodriguez de Miranda painted his broad, clear, and vigorously observed highland studies; Don Mariano Ramon Sanchez his small views of towns and harbours.

And, as in England, hand in hand with that came paintings of animals.

In France, François Canova was working, the painter of huge battle scenes and small pictures of animals; Jean Louis de Marne, who was famous for his cattle, market scenes, village pictures, and the like; and the great Jean Baptiste Oudry, who painted with breadth and freedom animals alive and dead, wild and tame, still-life of every kind. In Augsburg lived Johann Elias Riedinger, whose field of activity embraced the entire animal world, dogs and horses, stags and roes, wild boars, chamois, bears, lions, tigers, elephants, and the hippopotamus—which he depicted with fine observation, both in their proud solitude and at strife with men.

If we cast one more glance back to the road which art had travelled since the commencement of the century, we can have no doubt as to the end which was proportionately aimed at in all countries. Until quite recently a courtly, aristocratic art had shed its light upon the whole of Europe. In the seventeenth century the Dutch alone had maintained their isolation. They who entered fresh into art, and had to break with no tradition, gave at that time the first expression to the new spirit, in that they resolutely recalled art from its courtly surroundings to the humbler dwellings of the middle classes. They painted what Dürer and the “little masters” had only graved upon wood blocks and copper plates. Still, they wished to paint these things less for their own sakes than because so intimate a light was shed upon them. Through elements of light they contrived to cast over everyday moments a sort of fairy inspiration. Watteau and his successors made a further advance in the conquest of the visible world, in that they desired to paint their age, for its own sake, in all its grace; and by the middle of the century we find this new, intimate, familiar art, independent of ancient tradition, triumphing all along the line. “Sublime” painting is more and more forsaken. Art becomes more and more indigenous to her world and age. Aristocratic Watteau is succeeded by Hogarth, Greuze, Chardin, and Chodowiecki, who treat the Third Estate no longer in the Dutch chiaroscuro, but in all its heavy reality as a valid object of art. Instead of that lofty, majestic, vainglorious painting of mere representations, which was the outcome of Cinquecento, and which at the expiration of the seventeenth century had sunk, through abstraction, into something uniform, trivial, and tedious, there appeared on all sides an art which was simple and sincere, which plunged into the life of every day, observed man in his relations with nature, with his fellows, with his faithful animals, and with his household goods—an art which created the variety of its representations out of its own experience. So with landscape, the most modern branch of art; it reached in the schools of all nations a greater significance—at least, in extent—than it had ever possessed in the history of art. And this development proceeded without its being established that any one country had direct influence on any other. The ideas hung in the atmosphere; they were the ideas of the century. It is as though the departing age would hold a mirror before us—a magic mirror—which foretells the future; as though it would point out that nineteenth century art, advancing further along this road, should be domestic-human, and that it should find in landscape its most appropriate expression.

It was not given to painting to proceed straight forward in this course, for through favour, partly of the changed current of literature, partly of the revolution, the flame of reactionary classicism shot up brightly once more before it expired.

CHAPTER III

THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN GERMANY

A hundred years ago there lived a man of the name of Asmus Carstens; and he was the pioneer and founder of the new German art. That has become since Fernow a standing maxim in manuals of the history of art. Dilettantism, however, is not an element, but an end. It is on this account, therefore, that later times will see in Carstens, not a pioneer, but only one of the close followers of that tendency of which the founders were the brothers Caracci, and the offshoots Lebrun, Lairesse, and Van der Werff. It is, at all events, historically clear that Hogarth and Gainsborough, Watteau, Greuze, Chardin, and Goya were the men to whom the future belonged. Their art survived the overthrow of the Classicalism represented by Mengs and Carstens, which, through external circumstances, once more got the upper hand for a short time, and it became the foundation on which, after the disappearance of this tendency inherited from the past, the moderns built further. The former represented progress, because they moved forwards; Carstens and David, reaction, because they looked backwards—backwards to an age which had long ago been buried.

There is always danger to a living art in the contact with any great art of the past. Only those who are themselves highly gifted may hope to emulate the great ones of the earlier centuries; lesser geniuses perish in the attempt. Painters like Leonardo and Raphael, like Titian and Poussin, taking the Greeks as their masters, produced immortal works, and Goethe and Schiller proved to us that the Hellenic spirit is still alive and active in our midst. But would anyone dare to mention Mengs and Carstens in the same breath with these giants?

The close of the eighteenth century was a period of antiquarian revival. The ruins of Pæstum had been brought to light, Greek vases and Roman monuments had become known to the public by the works of Hamilton and Piranesi. In 1762 Stuart and Revett published their splendid work on the Antiquities of Athens. To a German, however, was to fall the honour of becoming the hero of the archæological period. The History of Ancient Art, by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, appeared in 1764, and this writer devoted his literary energies to the hymning of the glories of the re-discovered treasures of antiquity. In the realm of pictorial art he may also be looked upon as the chosen of fate. Already, nine years before the appearance of his History of Art, he had given, at the age of thirty-eight, his first writing to the world, Thoughts upon the Imitation of Greek Works, in which the reformation motive is epitomised in this sentence: “The sole means for us to become—ay, if possible, inimitably great—is the imitation of the ancients.”

From Winckelmann the stone kept on rolling. “In Greek sculpture the painter can attain to the most sublime conception of beauty, and learn what he must lend to nature in order to give dignity and propriety to his imitation,” writes Solomon Gessner in 1759. In 1762 Hagedorn of Dresden deplored, in his Treatise on Painting, that “Terburg and Metsu never showed us fair Andromache amongst her industrious women, instead of Dutch sempstresses.” In 1766 Lessing wrote his Laocoön, and, like Winckelmann, saw in the sculpture of the Greeks the ideal to be imitated. From this point forward he despised landscape and genre painting, and especially everything which illustrates intimate emotions and actions, and would confine the composition of pictures to an arrangement of two or three “ideal figures which please by physical beauty.” Soon afterwards, with almost astonishing partiality, Goethe intervened in a notable manner on behalf of Classicism with the most flagrant contradiction of the ideas of his youth. “Nature alone,” he had said in Werther, “makes the great artist”; and in his essay upon German Method and Art he aimed this sentence at Winckelmann and his followers: “You yourselves, admirable beings, to whom it was given to enjoy the highest beauty, you are hurtful to genius; it will be raised up and borne along on no strange wings, were they even the wings of the dawn.” In the same essay occurs the beautiful passage: “If art is produced out of an inward, single, independent conception, untroubled by, unconscious indeed, of, all that is extraneous, then whether she be born of rough wildness or of cultivated sensibility, she is complete and living.” Soon afterwards he wrote again these great words: “Rembrandt appears to me in his biblical subjects as a true saint who saw God present everywhere, at every step, in the chamber and in the fields, and did not need the surrounding pomp of temples and sacrifices to feel drawn towards Him,”—an observation made at a time when the academic and erudite writer on art was still for years to perceive in the biblical pictures of the great Dutchman only a crude conception of form. In another passage, upon the frescoes of Mantegna, in the Church of the Anchorite, at Padua, there occur the following sentences, showing the deepest historical perception: “How sharp and sure a modernity stands out in these pictures! From this modernity, which is quite real, and not merely seeming, with factitious effects, speaking only to the imaginative faculty, but solid, detailed, and conscientiously circumscribed, and which at the same time has something austere and industrious and painstaking—from this issued subsequent painters such as Titian; and now the liveliness of their genius, the energy of their nature, enlightened by the spirit of their predecessors, built up through their strength, was able to soar ever higher and higher, to rise from earth and create divine but real figures.” But, alas! later on he did not draw the conclusion which followed quite logically from these observations for the judgment of contemporary German art. He came back from Italy as a disciple and follower of Winckelmann’s writings on art. “Art has once for all, like the works of Homer, been written in Greek, and he deceives himself who believes that it is German.”

Something pagan entered into his soul, a breath from the calm of Olympus. He derided his earlier Gothic inclinations, contemptuous of all that was opposed to Greek notions of form, mild and indulgent to all that bore at least the outward semblance of the antique. He preferred a cold ideal manner to what was natural, and held Greek art the absolutely valid model. From it should be derived a fixed canon, a table of accepted laws, to be the standard for the artist of our own days, and of every age. The Prize Essays, which he published with Heinrich Meyer in the Propyläen, and later in the Jena Literary Journal, required the treatment of subjects exclusively from the Hellenic legendary cycles, “whereby the artist should become accustomed to come out from his own age and surroundings”; the composition of pictures was to correspond strictly with the style of the antique frieze.

Amongst his contemporaries voices were not wanting to point out how fatal this programme was. Notably, Wilhelm Heinse, in 1776, wrote this golden sentence: “Art can only direct itself to the people with whom it lives. Every one works for the people amongst whom fate has thrown him, and seeks to plumb its heart. Every country has its own distinctive art, just as it has its own climate, its scenery, its own taste, and its own drink.”

Similarly, Klopstock opposed Winckelmann’s theories in these lines—

Again, in the German Republic of Letters, in the chapter “On High Treason”: “It is high treason for any one to maintain that the Greeks cannot be surpassed.” In a letter to Goethe, in the year 1800, Schiller wrote: “The antique was a manifestation of its age which can never return, and to force the individual production of an individual age after the pattern of one quite heterogeneous, is to kill that art which can only have a dynamic origin and effect.” Madame de Staël, in her book on Germany, says: “If nowadays the fine arts should be confined to the simplicity of the ancients, we should not then be able to attain to the original strength which distinguished them, while we should lose that intimate, composite feeling for life which is especially found in us. Simplicity in art would easily turn with the moderns into coldness and affectation, whereas with the ancients it was full of life.” In 1797 Counsellor Hirth published in Schiller’s Horæ his well-known treatise on Beauty in Art, which, in opposition to the inanimate type of beauty of Winckelmann, upheld the characteristic as the first principle in art. Most remarkable, however, is the breadth of historical outlook which was peculiar to Herder, and the stern actuality with which in his Plastik, and in the Vierten Kritischen Wäldchen, he turned against “those pitiful critics, those wretched and narrow rules of art, that bitter-sweet prattle of universal beauty, through which the younger generation is being ruined, which is nauseating to the master, and which, nevertheless, the rabble of connoisseurs takes in its mouth as words of wisdom.... Shadows and sunrise, lightning and thunder, the brook and the flame the sculptor cannot model; but is that therefore to be a reason why it should not be done by the painter? What other law has painting, what other power and function, than to depict the great scheme of nature with all her manifestations, in their great and beautiful aspect? And with what magic it does this! They are not clever who despise landscape painting, the fragments of nature of the great harmony of creation, who depreciate it or entirely forbid it to the sincere artist. Is a painter not to be a painter? Is he to turn statues with his brush, and fiddle with his colours, just as it may please their antique taste? To represent the scheme of creation seems vulgar to them; just as though heaven and earth were not better than an old statue.... Doubtless Greek sculpture stands in the sea of time like a lighthouse, but it should be only a friend and not a commander. Painting is a scheme of magic, as vast as the world and as history, and certainly not every figure in it can or ought to be a statue. In a picture no single figure is everything; and if they are all equally beautiful, no one then is beautiful any longer. They become a dull monotony of long-limbed Greek figures with straight noses, who all stand there and parade and take as little part in the action as possible. Now, when this misrepresentation of beauty cries scorn at the same time upon the whole conception, upon history, upon character, upon action, and this openly attacks that as a lie, there comes a discord, something insupportable, into painting, which certainly the antique pedant is unaware of, but which is felt all the more by the true friend of the antique. And finally, our own actual age, the most fruitful subjects of history, the liveliest characters, all feeling of a simple truth and precision, will be antiquarianised away. Posterity will stand and gape at such fantasies in practice and theory, and will not know what we were, in what age we lived, nor what brought us to this wretched folly, to the wish to live in another age, in another nation and climate, and thereby to abandon, or vitiate deplorably, the whole order of nature and history.”

These sentences, however, stood in isolation, or else they came too late. Immediately after it had been heralded by the literary movement, after the archæologists had verbally announced its aim, formulated its principles and laws, German art turned into the new paths. “It happened for the first time in the history of art,” wrote Goethe, “that important talents took pleasure in disciplining themselves by the past, and so founding a new epoch in art.”

was sung in the academies. And this violent grasping after the ideal of a foreign race brought a bitter revenge, since not one of the artists who now appeared had the genius to create anything new out of the old.

The disciples of Winckelmann had not been, like Goethe and Schiller, vigorous naturalists until the spirit of ancient times had looked upon them, and they were consequently still less able to resist her glance. They entered upon the new road not with that generative impulse of the creative mind, whose superabundance did not know what course it should take, what stream it should find. They adopted the forms, as they had been provided by the greater ages, without any doubt as to their absolute excellence, or the least attempt at any happy innovation. And if they “have better understood” the Greeks than their predecessors in Italy and France were able to do, then one is never less like an original nature than when one imitates them faithfully. Winckelmann’s road to inimitability led not only to a more hollow and lifeless Classicism than there ever had been, to a more cheerless and unpleasant art than any which the school of Bologna had produced. It tended, above all, since the thinking people had thought out the classic idea—which the other nations had not—to the sacrifice of all pictorial technique, of the whole knowledge which the age had up till then possessed. There is a legend in the history of the Church, that at the time of the donation of Constantine a voice was heard from Heaven: “This day has poison entered into the body of the Church.” To the German art of our century this poison was the writings of Winckelmann.

First of all it was Anton Rafael Mengs, whose originally strong and great talent was distorted by the counsels of the learned. As in the works of the Caracci, those only are to-day of any interest which reveal themselves least as eclectics and most as children of the seventeenth century, so with Mengs—he is only enjoyable now where he did not try to be antique, but sympathised without too much reflection on the traditions of his age. He is particularly so in his fine pastel portraits in the Dresden Gallery, which are wholly influenced by the taste for rococo, and are its last expiring manifestation. They are a testimony that it was not without some justice that the Apelles of Dresden was called by his contemporaries the most remarkable German painter of the eighteenth century. Rosalba Carriera and Liotard seem weak and insipid beside him; Reynolds only at his best had that characteristic clearness, that plastic energy of modelling, and that life-like colouring. There is nothing insipid or affected, nothing of that simpering affability that his successors brought into vogue. And when we remember that they proceeded from a youth of sixteen, the strength and simplicity of intuition seem incredible. In his later portraits, too, painted in oil, the better ones are directly classic; very noble in their clear, subtile, grey tone, strikingly alive, and, withal, of an extraordinary independence which shows no leaning upon any other master whatever. Mengs belongs to those portrait painters who look into the souls of their sitters, and he ranks, in works like his portrait of himself, in the Munich Gallery, amongst the best portrait painters of the eighteenth century.

MENGS.	MOUNT PARNASSUS.

In his huge ecclesiastical paintings he is the son of that period which had just commenced to be touched by the pallor of thought, and groped eclectically now in this direction and now in that. “First of all must the weeds be rooted up,” wrote Zanotti in his Directions to a Young Man upon Painting. “And then we must go back again to Cimabue and Giotto, and again, a few years later, to Buonarotti and Sanzio, and their noble successors whose footsteps are no longer sought or followed by any one. But when such a happy resurrection will take place, God knows!” The old Ismael Mengs believed that that was his concern; he chose Antonio da Allegri and Rafael Sanzio as sponsors for his son. Anton Rafael should become the eclectic reformer of art, and as he was probably the first painter who, by the express permission of the Elector of Saxony, was allowed to visit the hitherto inaccessible Dresden Gallery, this wish was easy of accomplishment.

He was quick in freeing himself from the immediate tradition of the age, and in harmony with the teaching of the Caracci, in returning to the so-called “higher” models of painting. When one runs across such of his pictures in some gallery—notably his altar pieces—they strike one as the works of some good master of the seventeenth century whose name one cannot, for the moment, recollect. His famous “Holy Night,” in which he wished to enter into rivalry with Correggio, has something of a Maratti about it, only the heads are more vacant and insipid.

It is that unfortunate “Parnassus” in the Villa Albani which first marks the collapse of this great talent. When, upon the advice of his friend Winckelmann, he turned from the study of Raphael and Correggio to that of the antique, Mengs forfeited not only the remnant of all that was essentially natural, but even all the picturesque qualities which had hitherto distinguished him. After painting had so long taken sculpture in tow, now sculpture seemed anxious to be revenged on it, and there was a manifestation of those prettily painted figures in plaster which for some score years afterwards paraded in every German picture.

For Winckelmann’s mistake, as Herder had already pointed out with great justice, consisted not only in this, that he set up for imitation a departed ideal for the consciousness of his contemporaries, but notably in that he obtruded principles upon modern painting which might be valid in ancient sculpture. Since the antique ideal was solely a plastic one, and neither the Greek Prussian nor, later, Meister Ephraim was clear as to the difference between sculpture and painting, they practically recommended the painter to work after plastic models.

The fact that Lessing, in discussing the limits of painting in his Laocoön, took a work of sculpture as his starting-point, proves that to him the laws and conditions of both arts were valued as the same. They denounced the confusion of the art of painting with poetry, and instead advocated the confounding of painting with sculpture, which was no less hazardous.

ANGELICA KAUFFMANN.	PORTRAIT OF A LADY AS A VESTAL.

In this manner there came an alien element into Mengs’ hitherto quite pictorial apprehension; a vain and exclusively reproductive ideality deprived his figures of the last remnant of truth to nature which he had formerly understood how to give them. It is difficult to believe that Winckelmann’s paroxysm of friendship should have burst out, upon the completion of the “Parnassus,” into this pæan: “During the whole of the new age a more beautiful work has not appeared in painting; even Raphael would have bowed his head.” The whole is nothing more than a mélange of plagiarism and banal reminiscences, without soul or perception, without freshness or individuality; a mere plastic warehouse, and not even a painted antique group, but a daubed compilation of solitary statues, colder and more lifeless than any Baltoni ever painted. There was an audacious, strong aim, genial strength and an overwhelming flow of fantasy in the contemporary works of the great décorateur Tiepolo; here there is a mere work of intellect which with philological aid builds up the composition entirely of borrowed materials. The only thing which even still points in this work to the good old times is a more solid study of form and colour than all that which originated in Germany during the next fifty years. The figures are painted with a strength and bloom which are still quite worthy of the rococo.

The “good Angelica” is the second representative of this phase of transition. She, too, at the persuasion of her friend Winckelmann, clothed herself as an ancient Vestal, but her true woman’s nature left in her classical raiment still a neat fashion of rococo. Through her intercourse with Winckelmann she became somewhat of a “blue-stocking,” and studied the historians of antiquity in order to find there subjects like Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, Agrippina with the urn of Germanicus, Phryne, and the like. Still more there were the tender legends of the ancients, out of whose store she satisfied her patrons: Adonis at the chase, Psyche, Ariadne abandoned by Theseus or found by Bacchus, the death of Alcestis, Hero and Leander. In these she is soft to the point of sentimentality, and pleasant to the point of nausea. Goethe says of her with justice: “The forms and traits of the figures have little variety, the expression of the passions no force, the heroes look like gentle boys, or girls in disguise.” But he also says of her: “The lightness, grace in form, colour, conception, and treatment is the one ruling quality of the numerous works of our fair artist. No living painter has surpassed her either in grace of representation or in the taste and capacity with which she handles her brush.” And this decision, too, can still be endorsed. Angelica knew how to impart to those clear lines and forms demanded by Winckelmann a grace now coquettish, now sentimental, but always extremely lovable. She has struck soft and—notably in her portraits of women—very tender colour chords.

She and Mengs were the last who still possessed considerable technical knowledge. Almost everything which has survived of the tradition of craftsmanship in Germany in the nineteenth century is traceable to Mengs’ influence, and that fact so offended his successors that they no longer counted him as one of them, but put him contemptuously aside as a “mannerist painter by recipe.” “Such technical knowledge,” wrote Goethe, “hinders that complete abstraction and elevation over the real, which is asked of identical representations in sculpture, which merely furnish forms in their highest purity and beauty.” “Colouring, light and shadows, do not give such value to a painting as noble contour alone,” wrote Winckelmann, and these sentences became the starting-point of the next generation. Winckelmann’s error when he recommended the imitation of Greek sculpture to the modern painter consisted still further in this, that he confused “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” with lack of colour and coldness. Herder had written well: “In distinction to the compact harmony of form in sculpture, painting has her harmonious unity in colour and light. I do not know why many theorists should have spoken so contemptuously of what is called chiaroscuro, the grouping of light and shade; it is the instrument of genius with every scholar and master, the eye with which he sees, the flashing, spiritual sea with which he sprinkles everything, and on which, indeed, every outline also depends. This divine, spiritual sea of light, this fairyland of adjusted light and shade, is the business of painting: why should we fight against nature, and not allow every art to do what it alone can do and do best?”

His words died away. The philosophic tendency of the century, which sought to penetrate into the “soul” of things, and to recreate things from the throne of the universe of the abstract, tried its hand also upon painting. By abstracting from the manifestation of colour, and touching upon form and line, it came to believe that in these plastic elements it had discovered the Essential of which it was in search.

Once on the road to execute statues in paint, the question ensued, Ought we to paint our statues? And as that age, following in Winckelmann’s track, understood no word of the significance which the specific, picturesque principles had for the Greeks, it was only logical that they should endeavour to reconcile the idea of immaculate whiteness with that of classical beauty, to see pure beauty in absence of colour, and in consequence to accentuate the question, Ought we to paint our pictures? To painters the most suspicious element in a painting became the paint! There is nothing more urgent for them to do than to deprive themselves ascetically of all coloristic means of expression. Painting is shown to be an essential form of corruption—“The brush is become the ruin of our art,” wrote Cornelius—and there commences the era of a cartoon style hitherto unprecedented, which is to be carried on by the most highly endowed in the most earnest fashion. While during the rococo the sense of colour had reached, through a piquant arrangement of the most tender and variegated tones, its highest point of refinement, there followed now as a reaction an absolute lack of colour. The ideal is seen in an abstract beauty of line, colour as a secondary matter and a vain show. It was of as much value as a vari-coloured dress, which nature could put on or off, without being less nature thereby. Amongst painters there was talk of nothing but outlines. This line style, whose world is not the wall or the canvas, but white paper, can do with a proportionately meagre study of nature. Why, therefore, when the ideal was so easy of attainment, drudge in the academy, where, moreover, since the introduction of Mengs’ Classicism, universal desolation of the spirit and doctrinaire pedantry reigned? As Mengs had broken with the taste of the rococo, so the younger generation broke with its technique, whilst they left the academy in open dissatisfaction, and threw off in contempt the whole paraphernalia of technical traditions.

Carstens plays the momentous rôle in German art as the first who trod this path. He has more individuality than Mengs; antiquarianising with him is not exclusively an external derivation and a cold imitation: he lives in the antique; the world of the Greek poets is his spiritual home, and their profound thoughts find in him a subtle interpreter. But he has, at the same time, the melancholy fame of being the first of the frivolous to renounce the national inheritance, the knowledge bequeathed by the rococo age, and so definitely to cut the chain which should otherwise have connected German art of the nineteenth century with that of the eighteenth.

Through the Investigations of Beauty in Painting, by Daniel Webb, which was founded on Winckelmann’s Thoughts on Imitation, the seed of Hellenism was already sown in the youth’s soul. He heard talk of the dwarf intelligences of the age; how the studios of inferior artists were full of gaping visitors, whilst the halls of the Vatican stood deserted. “Learn the taste for beauty in the antique,” the cooper’s apprentice learns from Webb’s works. “Let us meditate upon the style of the painter’s art in the ‘Laocoön,’ with regard to the fighter. Notice the sublimity in the divine character of Apollo. Let us stand hushed before the exquisite beauty of the Venus di Medici. These are the extreme incentives of the art of drawing.... The Belvedere Apollo and the daughter of Niobe offer us an ideal of nobility and beauty. Raphael’s drawing never reached to such a height of perfection as we find in the statues of the Greeks.... Whither do you carry me, gods and demigods and heroes who live in marble? I follow your call, and, Imagination! thy eternal laws. I go into the Villa Medici and breathe there the purest air. I stretch myself on a flowery plot, the shadow of the orange trees covers me;—there, unmolested, I gaze at a group full of the highest feminine beauty. Niobe, my beloved, beautiful mother of beautiful children, thou fairest among women, how I love thee!” So dreamed Asmus Jacob in the wine-cellar at Eckernförde, or in his solitary chamber by the dim light of his lamp, as he had been seized with giddiness before all the great and marvellous revelations of art which this book had afforded him. In his enraptured fantasy he painted the hour nearer and nearer when he should attain to a sight of the works which were described. Could he have looked into the future, what a picture would have come before his eyes! Would he have recognised himself in the broken-down man, with the pale countenance, the grief-marked expression, and the decrepit figure, who in Rome gazed spellbound at the Colossus of Monte Cavallo?

CARSTENS.	SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS.

Our Holsteiner was two-and-twenty years old when he discarded the cooper’s apron and entered the Copenhagen Academy, being then too old for any regular training. His head was so full of “inventions” that “it could not enter his mind to begin from the beginning.” “Drawing from the life did not satisfy me; the fellow, too, who sat as my model, although he was for the rest well built, seemed to me, in contrast with the antique from which I had attained a higher ideal of beauty, so petty and imperfect that I thought I could easily learn to draw a better figure if I only confined myself to that. I resolved not to visit the academy, in spite of the other artists impressing upon me the importance and utility of academic study.” He stayed daily, instead, for hours together before the casts in the antique room, and “a holy feeling of adoration, almost compelling me to tears, pervaded me. There I never drew at all after an antique. When I attempted it, it was as though all my emotion was chilled by it. I thought that I should learn more if I gazed at them with great studiousness.”

CARSTENS.	ARGO LEAVING THE TRITON’S MERE.

Thus he reached, as Fernow says, the method whereby he “did not tread the ordinary way of imitation, gradually progressing to a special invention, but began at once with invention.” There he was the true child of his age. At a period whose creative power found its highest expression in philosophy and poetry, the painter strove for the reputation only of being the poet of his pictures. And Carstens encountered the old tragedians and philosophic writers with a fine, poetic understanding. “The Greek Heroes with Cheiron,” “Helen at the Skæan Gate,” “Ajax,” “Phœnix and Odysseus in the Tent of Achilles,” “Priam and Achilles,” “The Fates,” “Night with her Children,” “Sleep and Death,” “The passage of Megapenthes,” “Homer before the People,” “The Golden Age”—all these prints have really something of the noble simplicity and quiet harmony of Greek art.

CARSTENS.	CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT.

It can be understood, then, that such subjects should be in the highest degree interesting to an archæologist. When Carstens, in April 1795, was organising the famous exhibition of his collected works in Rome, Fernow published in Wieland’s Deutscher Merkur a discourse in which he celebrated him as the creator of a new epoch. From the very first, however, an equally resolute opposition was excited in artistic circles. The painter Müller, nicknamed “The Devil’s Miller,” who at that time wandered about Rome as a cicerone, proves that Winckelmann’s principles, even at the threshold of the century, by no means met with universal acceptance. The Writing of Herr Müller, Painter in Rome, upon the Exhibition of Herr Professor Carstens, with the motto Amicus Plato, Amicus Socrates, magis amica veritas, was published in 1797 in Schiller’s Horæ. Carstens imitated; he worked rather by reminiscence and understanding than by fantasy. Isolated figures do not bring their individuality to an expression. Then he pointed out the models, discussed the lack of colour, and proved numerous sins of the draughtsman against nature in detail. The artist must ever seek to find characteristic expression; composition comes in the second degree. Technique, even if the previous age has been an epoch of fabrication, must always stand in the foreground; it is not only from the artist, but from the connoisseur, that knowledge is demanded, and in consequence of this exhibition Carstens is recommended to forbear from his fantastical geniality, observe nature, and achieve a picture exactly, since it is only from nature that the ideal springs, and consequently nothing can be great and beautiful in the representation which is not right and true. In almost similar words, later on, Koch, in his Thoughts on Painting, and with him the majority of artists, has censured Carstens. And posterity cannot but allow them to be in the right as against the archæologists.

CARSTENS.	PRIAM AND ACHILLES.

Admirable in Carstens is the zeal with which he defended his ideal, the sacred fire which burned within him and sustained him, even during those years when his sickly frame was weakened by consumption. Art was, as he wrote, his element, his religion, his beatitude, his existence. And it is already something great to wear oneself out alone for the sake of an ideal. Carstens was a sublime dreamer. It will not be forgotten of him that, in an age when abundant mediocrity and manufacture were all-prevailing, he once more pointed, unfaltering in his noble and pure intention, to the sublimity of artistic creation. The history of art, however, has not to deal with hearts, but to judge logically by results; and it would not be doing justice to the old masters, nor to those earnest rococo painters who sat at their easels with less noble intentions, but with so much greater knowledge of their craft, if one were to proclaim Carstens, in consideration of the self-sacrifice and renunciation which he showed in the fight for his ideal, as a martyr and a genius, a pioneer of German art. He was not a genius, as he thought himself, and announced so proudly to Heinitz, the Minister; for that he possessed too little originality. It is not imagination, but reminiscence, which created his works. The outlines of his plates are done with fine sentiment, but sentiment taken from the Greeks, and he required no genius to recognise in his recollection and his hand a transcript of Greek forms. What pleases us in Carstens is in substance not Carstens, but an echo of what we like in the Greek statues and vases, in Michael Angelo and other old masters.

GENELLI.	THE EMBASSY TO ACHILLES.

He was not a martyr, because in his struggles he met with assistance and encouragement such as were granted to no old master, and if, in spite of that, he never rose above the cares of life, that is only a proof of the limitations and partiality of his art. He had lost all decorative facility; still more was the inheritance of oil painting first naturally mislaid by him, and by draughtsmanship alone not even Dürer nor Rembrandt could have lived.

This deficiency in technique must even debar him from claiming any higher signification than that of a clever dilettante. He is not an artist who does not in the midst of his exaltation think to put himself in possession of the means which can turn the lispings of genius into a fully intelligible language. Carstens’ plates seduce by a certain wavy treatment of the lines, but no one of them can sustain critical appreciation. It is inconsistent to work in the beautiful and not to become free of ugliness, to move in the great, in the sublime, and at the same time to fall from one defect of form to another, from coarse uncouthness into the most elementary sins against drawing and proportion. Carstens was a draughtsman who could not draw, and, with this limitation of his genius, by no manner of means a founder of German art. One cannot call him a mannerist, because with him art and individuality corresponded; but, nevertheless, like Mengs and Lairesse, he gave art at second-hand, and only differs from them in that with him commences that complete abandonment of the idea of colour which after him disfigured German art. For the future it was quite indifferent that Thorwaldsen took suggestions from Carstens, and Genelli trod in his footprints as a draughtsman.

GENELLI.	THETIS LAMENTING THE FATE OF HECTOR.

Bonaventura Genelli, if one takes for once the standpoint of the painters of his time, who desired to be the “poets” of their works, is certainly a not unremarkable poet. In him, who was born in the year of Carstens’ death, the spirit of the little Holsteiner was raised to life, and the figure which he assumed in this new incarnation actually made an impression like a picture out of beauty-illuminated days of Hellas. The muscular, thick-set figure of a youthful Hercules, with a broad chest and sturdy neck, a head of short brown curly hair, full lips fringed by the compact beard of a Sophocles, the short Greek nose, grave eyes glancing out from beneath the strong brows—such was Genelli, a Hellene left stranded in Germany, the last Centaur, as Heyse has depicted him in his novel—“an antediluvian, mythological enigma on four sound legs sprung upon our godless world.” Thus he sat, as he himself writes, in Rome, “in his dirty chamber, bare except for a chair or two, rickety or quite broken down, and on the wall a pair of hawks nailed up, whose pinions served as models for his winged figures.” Thus he sat later in his little house in the Sendlingergasse at Munich, and lived in his world of imagination. Perhaps, had he been the child of a more fortunate period in art, he might have become a strong and memorable painter; as a successor of Carstens he has left behind him a legacy of two suites of copper prints—the two tragedies of the “Profligate” and the “Witch.” He existed, moreover, only in contour; he never rose above harmoniously outlined silhouette. It was only to this point that his talent would sustain him. The more he wished to produce shadow, water-colour, or even oil, the more tedious and pale and vague did he become. And even in his drawing he shares with Carstens the desolate generalisation of form, the eternal euphony which so soon becomes wearisome and monotonous. To beauty of line everything is offered up. The blank characterlessness of the faces is even more noticeable with him than with Carstens, who had, after all, in his youth drawn excellent portraits in crayons, and on this account was able to give even to his Greeks more individual traits and a certain variety of expression. With Genelli the heads are treated as no more than parts of the body, and as they gave no opportunity for flowing lines, they have not even the same graciousness as the limbs. His women fared worst, for whilst he could be his own model for his men, he created the ewig Weibliche out of his inner consciousness. In men and women the eyes, in particular, are merely animal.

GENELLI.	ODYSSEUS AND THE SIRENS.

Carstens’ influence on German art has been then entirely a negative one. It was not on such a foundation that a German art could arise. He prepared no ground for his successors on which they could build further; but through his abandonment of the whole capital which, since Stephen Lochner, had been handed down at compound interest from one generation of painters to another, he rather cut away the ground from under their feet. “For very easily can art go astray, but it is a difficult and lengthy process for her to recover herself.”

The art which was born in that humble studio in Rome to the sickly, neurotic man, the “famous draughtsman,” needed later, in order to become technically healthy again, an impulse replete with life from abroad.

CHAPTER IV

THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN FRANCE

In France also modern art began with a stream of antiquarianism which flowed from the same archæological source. De Brosses published a history of the Roman Republic, and wrote on Herculaneum. Leroy produced his Ruines des plus anciens monuments de la Grèce in 1758. Shortly afterwards the Recueils d’Antiquité of Caylus and Hamilton were published. The former undertook his great journeys, and presented the Academy of Inscriptions with a succession of archæological treatises. He is perhaps the first since Batteux and Coypel who again makes of the modern painter a positive demand for a quiet beauty of lines after the “manière simple et noble du bel antique.” The architects begin to take counsel of Vitruvius, and to work after some model borrowed from the antique. Soufflot rebuilt the Pantheon, and produced the Temple of Pæstum.

Even in 1763 Grimm could write: “For some years past we have been making keen inquiry for antique ornaments and forms. The predilection for them has become so universal that now everything is to be done à la Grecque. The interior and exterior decorations of houses, furniture, dress material, and goldsmiths’ work all bear alike the stamp of the Greeks. The fashion passes from architecture to millinery: our ladies have their hair dressed à la Grecque, our fine gentlemen would think themselves dishonoured if they did not hold in their hands une boîte à la Grecque.” Even Diderot’s preference for the ethical and emotional, as Greuze had painted it—and as Diderot himself had dramatised it—veered round at the commencement of the sixties into an enthusiasm for the antique. After 1761 he carried on in the salons a war of extermination against poor old Boucher, and lectured him in a menacing voice upon the “great and severe taste of antiquity.” He twitted him with possessing neither reality nor taste, and produced in proof the fact that, in the whole catalogue of Boucher’s figures, not four could be found which could be employed in relief, or even as statues. The new taste demanded pure and simple lines, the beauty of sculpture; it went back to the antique. When a French translation of Winckelmann appeared in 1765 he spoke out, on the occasion of a review of the book, clearly and plainly: “Il me semble qu’il faudrait étudier l’antique pour apprendre à voir la nature.” In the same vein Watelet pronounced on Boucher: “Jamais artiste n’a plus ouvertement témoigné son mépris pour la vraie beauté telle qu’elle a été sentie et exprimée par les statuaires de l’ancienne Grèce.” Thus the change in the artistic outlook was heralded long before the curtain went up upon the events of 1789.

Madame Vigée-Lebrun, the French Angelica Kauffmann, possessed of a tender, soft, sympathetic talent, is perhaps the truest representative of this gracious, entirely French transition style, over which like a breath, but only like a breath, hovers the antique. She has in her portraits, in an especially refined manner, fixed that age when noble ladies desired to forget the Marquise and Duchess, to exhibit only the wife and mother, and believed that by unconstraint of attitude in their simple white robe, the scarf thrown modestly over the shoulders, they had effected a return to antique simplicity. Boucher, moved to the depths of his consciousness by Diderot, resolved to paint a picture taken from ancient history. Greuze painted “Severus and Caracalla,” Fragonard “Chœreas and Callirhöe.” Hubert Robert grew more and more archæological, and played in his landscapes with ancient remains and classical ruins. Vien became enthusiastic over antique gems, and thought he must draw the conclusion, from the noble calm of these figures, that the amiable coquetry and capricious garments of rococo were without nobility. His plan was “to study the antique—Raphael, the Caracci, Domenichino, Michael Angelo, and, in one word, all those masters whose works convey the character of truth and grandeur.”

But what gave far other significance to the French classicism of the ensuing period was that great event in the world’s history, of which France became the theatre at the close of the eighteenth century. In the secluded gardens of Versailles, where the goat-footed Pan embraced the tall, white nymphs by an artificial water-fall, the noble lords and ladies, clad as Pierrots and Columbines, overheard in the midst of their whispered flirtations the menacing earthquake which was announced in thunder from Paris. Soon they beheld the earth crack and burst asunder, as that time came when the air was filled with the smoke of powder, when the first notes of the Marseillaise rang out, and in the Place de la Concorde, where to-day the loveliest fountains in the world are playing, blood ran from a dozen guillotines. That “après nous le deluge” of the Marquise de Pompadour had become a dire, prophetic truth, and in that flood of blood and horrors the artistic ideal of the eighteenth century was also washed away. The Revolution gave the death-blow to rococo. At one stroke it overthrew the most pleasant of all French periods, the truest presentiment of French grace and esprit, the noble and amiable art of Louis XV, which the melancholy, life-emitting Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard cause to hover before us as in the clouds of a dream. Classicism, however, attained through it a new and stronger basis, a certain connection with modern life, since it was transposed by it from the Museum of Antiquity into the middle of the Place de la Concorde beneath the guillotine.

What the age of the Revolution demanded of art was at all events not a “noble style,” as Vien had required of it, but rather in the first place a Spartan virtue. Various philosophical writers had drawn a parallel between the organisation of the old and the modern state; they had exerted themselves to show that the old Republics were models of an almost absolute perfection, which the modern should, in so far as it was possible, imitate. They had contrasted the moral conditions of Sparta and the Roman Republic with the moral constitution of contemporary, monarchical France. They had quoted on every opportunity the acts of virtue, renunciation, courage, and patriotic sacrifice of the great men of antiquity; they had used these deeds as a means of proving their thesis, and their ideas aroused deep echoes in men’s hearts.

ELISABETH VIGÉE-LEBRUN.	PORTRAIT OF THE PAINTER WITH HER DAUGHTER.

The sentiment of Rome had entered into the people as a thing of flesh and blood even before the catastrophe had ensued. “We were more prepared,” wrote Nodier, “for the particular tone of the language of the Revolution than people would have believed, and it cost us little pains to pass from the studies of our gymnases to the strife of the forum. In the schools we had prize compositions set of this kind: Who stands higher, the elder Brutus who judged his children, or the younger Brutus who judged his father? And so Livy and Tacitus have done more to overthrow the monarchical system than Voltaire and Rousseau.” It was evident then that France, so soon as she had freed herself from her kings, so soon as she had spoken the word “Republic,” must take the Roman Republic as her pattern. People lived in an atmosphere of antiquity; the great citizens of Rome and Athens were ranged with the French National Convention; Scævola, Scipio, Cato, Cincinnatus, were the idols of the populace. The speakers in the council cited the ancients in preference; Madame Vigée-Lebrun gave soupers à la Grecque. “Everything was ordered according to the Voyage d’Anacharsis—garments, viands, amusements, and the table, all were Athenian. Madame Lebrun herself was Aspasia; M. l’Abbé Barthélémy, in a Greek dress with a laurel wreath on his head, recited a poem; M. de Cabierès played the golden lyre as Memnon, and young boys waited at table as slaves. The table itself was set entirely with Greek utensils, and all the viands were actually those of ancient Greece.” Children were given Greek and Roman names. People called themselves “Romans.” “Mais, je l’aimais, Romains!” cried Coulon at the death of Mirabeau. Paris is Rome. In the theatre the bust of Brutus is set opposite that of Voltaire, and the actor says: “O buste réveré de Brutus, d’un grand homme, transporté dans Paris tu n’as point quitté Rome.” And as with the bust of Brutus in the theatre, that of Mucius Scævola appears in the cafés, which Parisian journalists, still full of remembrances of ancient history studied in the gymnasium, liken to the Lyceum and the Porch. In every case ancient Rome is set up as the exemplar. The Parisian collection of engravings on copper possesses a reproduction of the guillotine, with the inscription: A similar machine was used for the execution of the Roman, Titus Manlius. A valet committed suicide, and quoted the illustrious example of Seneca. Had it been possible, people would have gladly thrown themselves back eighteen hundred years into the past, with all its grandeur, its simplicity, and its ruthlessness. Political and social forms did not suffice; even the implements and costume of the ancients were again brought into honour. Furniture put on antiquarian shapes; the walls were decorated à la Grecque. The lively frivolity of rococo, with its freaks and fancies, was no longer adapted to the boudoir of the age of revolution, now transformed into the political council-room. Twists and curves were no longer permitted: everything had to be straightforward, logical, ungenerous, inexorable. Men went clad wretchedly, with red Phrygian caps and no breeches. Women and girls cast aside their ordinary attire and put on straight, falling drapery, discarded their heeled shoes and bound sandals round their feet, shook the powder from their locks and tied their hair in a Greek knot. “Dressed in white raiment without adornment, but decked in the virtue of simplicity,” they appeared in the cabinet of the president, in order to surrender their jewels for the salvation of their country, like those Roman matrons in the time of Camillus.

And, in co-operation with the building up of this new world, painting also advanced. It was only when it assisted to arouse civic virtue, it was said at a sitting of the jury at the Salon of 1793, that painting could possess a right to exist in the new state, and as the handmaid of this patriotism might fulfil an even higher mission than it had done in ancient Greece and Rome. “The Greeks and Romans were indeed only slaves, but we French are by nature free, philosophers in character, virtuous in our every perception, and artists through our taste.” In proportion as the French Republic transcended the old free states, so too must French art take the lead of the antique. “All that stimulated art in Greece, the gymnastic exercises, the public games, the national festivals, is also accessible to the French, who possess above all that which the Greeks lacked, the feeling for true liberty. To depict the history of a free people is indeed quite another mission for the true genius than to embody scenes out of mythology.”

Through this fresh nuance, which classicism thus acquired, the ground was cut from under the feet of those who devoted themselves to the study of the antique as conceived by Diderot. The new moral age would have no traffic with those artists in whom the last smile of the eighteenth century was personified. Their pictures, full of grace and caprice, fell into the same disrepute into which everything of yesterday had come, and it was only with a bitter smile that they followed the course of events. The younger Moreau, that animated master of rococo, became academically cold and tedious when he designed his book on the French costume of the Revolution. The good Fragonard, who was only fifty-nine in 1789, and lived till 1806, saw himself hooted in spite of his “Chœreas.” He, the true representative of frivolous tenderness, of fair and roseate hues, had lost every right to exist in the new world, and ended his life by a sad death when, after the Reign of Terror, there was no longer a place for fêtes galantes. A delightful portrait of himself, which he painted in the first period of the Revolution, shows us an old man, clothed entirely in black, softly melancholy, standing in a formal, dusky-brown salon. On the table on which his arm rests lies a guitar, at his feet a portfolio of engravings; but he neither plays the guitar nor looks at the prints. In the shadows of the falling evening he reminds himself forlornly of past days, and his bald forehead, where so many rose-coloured dreams have passed, is overcast with gloomy shadows.

Greuze, too, outlived himself. It was no use for him to pretend more and more to the utmost virtue, and to paint an “Ariadne at Naxos.” He died in misery and oblivion in 1805. The demands which this new classicism made were able to be satisfied by no one any longer, not even by Vien. However loudly he might proclaim himself a student of the Greeks, he, nevertheless, remained a very timid and lukewarm revolutionary. An old man, cold and peaceful and stolid, moderate in everything, he had neither the energy nor the audacity of the reformer. He had been the Court painter of Louis XVI, a most monarchically disposed and loyal man, and was a suspect on this ground alone to those who were in power in 1789. His pictures, too, describe no more than the end of a world. Greuze, Fragonard, and Vien, in spite of their assumed seriousness, survived only as gallant phantoms in the new age, by the side of those men of more rugged countenance who inaugurated the nineteenth century.

Jacques Louis David first satisfied the new requirements, and in so doing lent to French classicism, if only for a few years, a certain touch of far greater vivacity. He it was who carried through, in all its consequence, that reformation in taste which Vien had sought in externals, in costume, furniture and decoration; who inspired the gems painted by Vien with republican pathos, and became in this way the great herald of that age which read Plutarch and made Paris into a modern Sparta. David, Prix de Rome after three successive failures, still came from that “corrupt epoch” against which Republican prudery was so excited. At the age of twenty-six he had already painted Soffits, in the manner of his kinsman “Boucher, to say it with respect.” But the journey to Rome converted Saul into Paul. In 1775 Vien, on his appointment as director of the Roman Academy, had taken him to Italy as his best pupil, and hardly dreamt at that time that this young man would strike out on such an entirely new path from his Roman studies. He did not wait for the Revolution to be converted; when the hour struck he was ready. Thus his first pictures were in a manner the prelude to the Revolution. In them he had already quite consciously entered upon the road along which he was to go later. His “Oath of the Horatii” and his “Brutus,” both painted in Rome in 1784, proclaimed his programme. The little, rosy loves, the doves of Venus, and all the charming frivolity and gallantry of rococo, received their final dismissal, and rough men walked in their stead. He broke his staff over all that he had previously venerated, and declared loudly that he had sinned when in his youth he had believed in the flowery palette of rococo, and completed in tender tones those ceiling frescoes which Fragonard had commenced in the house of Mdlle. Guimard. Capricious frivolities had to make way for a manlier art, matter “that was worthy to rivet the gaze of a free nation upon itself.” Already, long before the taking of the Bastille, the painting of young David was valued by the rising generation as the artistic embodiment of their political ideas, imbibed while they were still at school. When the “Horatii” was completed it was not only old Pompeo Battoni who exclaimed, when he saw the picture in David’s Roman studio, “Tu ed io soli siamo pittori, pel rimanente si puo gettarlo nel fiume.” In Paris his success was universal; all the critics were unanimous in praise; David was the man after the heart of the age, for his picture was the first which spoke clearly and perceptibly of the pathos of the revolution which stood at the threshold. People saw in it an “example of patriotism which knew no obstacles,” since not even love for their sister, who was betrothed to the enemy, prevailed upon the Horatii to refrain from combat with the Curiati. His next picture, “Brutus” as he received the lictors, when they bring him the bodies of his sons who have been implicated in a monarchical conspiracy, was greeted as allegorical of the incorruptible justice of republicanism. The populace saw in it the “glorification of the chastisement of all traitors to liberty,” and acclaimed David because he “had founded the sinewy style which should characterise the heroic deeds of the revolutionaries, children of liberty, equality, and fraternity.” And one understands—when one also adds the influence of Napoleon—this reaction of military simplicity against the effeminacy of rococo.

DAVID.	MADAME RÉCAMIER.

David, at the outbreak of the Revolution, no longer a young man, but forty years old, was the terrible painter of the age, its despotic dictator. As a deputy in the Convention he not only ruled over painting, but also imposed his taste upon sculpture, ivory work, goldsmiths’ work, and decoration. He designed the new costumes for the deputies and ministers. As organiser of public fêtes, he brought to life again the whole of republican Rome. He was one of those rare artists who are the men of their hour. To a new plebeian race, to whose feverishly excited patriotism the soft, luxurious, aristocratically reprehensible art of rococo must seem as a mockery of all the rights of men, he showed, for the first time, the man, the hero who died for an idea or for his country; and he gave this man huge and elastic muscles, like those of a gladiator who struggles in the arena. He was a second Hercules, cleansing the Augæan stables; with his own strong shoulders he thrust back the petulant band of painters who had tarried too long in the island of Cythera. He applied art to the heroism of the day, gave it the martial attitude of patriotism, inspired it with the spirit of Robespierre, St. Just, and Danton. The more obtrusively his heroes paraded their patriotism, the more people saw in them a picture of the French nation, as true as a transposition could hope to be. This strained rhetorical pathos dwelt in the mind of the age. Talma moved the people to enthusiasm when he played the “Horatii” of Corneille in the classic cothurnus. When David painted, the state declamations of the orators still rang in his ears. Robespierre is said to have spoken from the tribune slowly, rhythmically, artistically: a Bossuet in his rostrum, a Boileau in his chair, while the volcano quivered beneath his very feet: his philippics were carefully divided into three sections, like academic discourses: his patriotism resolved itself into tirades with correctly composed periods. In David’s pictures we have an exact correspondence with all this: the rigid classicality of his composition, figures grouped as though on parade; his cold pathos, the counterpart to that of the orators’ fine sentiments set forth in fine phrases.

The great distinction between the beginning of modern art in Germany and in France is that in France the new style was not only called forth by the influence of a scientific programme from outside, but stood in conjunction with a great transformation in culture, and that it was compelled at first to concern itself not only with imitation and philological retrospect, but with the free expression of the characteristically modern spirit. German art had no new pronouncement to make through the medium of the antique; it followed, on the other hand, the programme of an artistically barren scholar who forgot that archæology is not art, recommended imitation as the path to perfection, and perpetually reminded the artists who followed him how widely they deviated from the correct lines of the model. “Afterwards they rebuke it, and say it is not antique and consequently not good art,” as Albrecht Dürer had complained of such people. In the earnest sentiment, the exalted Roman spirit, the declaiming over rugged, masculine virtues, freedom and patriotism, that found expression in David’s first pictures, there lived something of the Catonian spirit of the Terror; and that still gives them historical value. His enthusiasm was not, first and foremost, for antique art, but for the ideas of country, duty, freedom, progress. The words antiquity and democracy were of like meaning to him.

DAVID.	THE OATH OF THE HORATII.

And how thoroughly this man was permeated with the spirit of his age is shown still more when he discarded the cothurnus, boldly attacked the present, and gave himself up entirely to the delineation of what came under his direct observation in his own life and experience. There he became not only a rhetorician, a revolutionary agitator, but a really great painter. Lepelletier on his death-bed, the assassinated Marat, and the dead Barre, are works of a mighty naturalist. Lepelletier, one of the many deputies who had voted for the death of Louis XVI, was treacherously assassinated in Paris, on 20th January 1793, by a valet of the king’s. The body was publicly exhibited; David painted it, and on 29th March presented the picture to the Convention. As the portrait of the “first Martyr of Liberty,” it was hung in the Convention chamber. On 13th July 1793 Marat, the man-of-terror, fell a victim to the knife of Charlotte Corday. David was presiding at the Jacobin Club when the news was brought him, and he embraced the citizen who had arrested the girl. Deputations of the people appeared in the Convention to express their grief for the heavy loss. Suddenly a voice was heard to cry: “Où es tu, David? Tu as transmis à la posterité l’image de Lepelletier mourant pour la patrie, il te reste encore un tableau à faire.” Silence succeeded in the Assembly. Then David started up: “Je le ferai.” On 11th October he informed the Convention that his “Marat” was finished. “The people asked for their murdered man back again, longed to look once more on the features of their truest friend. They cried to me: ‘David, take up your brush, avenge Marat, so that the enemy may blanch when they perceive the distorted countenance of the man who became the victim of his love for freedom.’ I heard the voice of the people, and obeyed.” Thus David spoke in the Assembly when he presented the Republic with the picture of the murdered man—one of the most thrilling representations of that awful age. The body is lying in the bath. Only the naked upper part of the body, and the head, with a dirty cloth tied round it, and fallen back upon the right shoulder, are visible; one hand, resting back on the side of the bath, still holds a paper in a convulsive grip; the other hangs down limp and dead to the ground. Over this head, with the half-closed eyelids, and the mouth distorted from the death-throes, Caravaggio would have rejoiced, there is such keen naturalism in every stroke of the brush. Like Géricault, in later times, David was then a regular visitor at the Morgue, attended at executions, and took an interest in the convulsive muscular movements of the guillotined. And the colour, too, like the drawing, is of a naturalistic strength to which he never again attained. The light falls slantingly on the corpse from above and throws the head, shoulder, and one arm into strong relief, while all the rest is left in obscurity. In this awful still-life of uncompromising reality and tragical grandeur he has created a work in the midst of an age of storm which will survive all storms and all changes of taste.

	Seemann, Leipzig.
DAVID.	THE RAPE OF THE SABINES.

DAVID.	HELEN AND PARIS.

His portraits have no less strikingly survived the fiery ordeal of time. In them, too, he is neither rhetorical nor cold, but full of fire and the freshness of youth. Face to face with his model, he forgot the Greeks and Romans, saw life alone, was rejuvenated in the youth-giving fount of nature, and painted—almost alone of the painters of his generation—the truth. Here his effect, when otherwise he was lacking in all naïveté, is actually naïve and intimate. The best painters have never treated flesh better. He had an aversion to palette tones, and sought after nature with unexampled attention. The fine pearl-grey of his colouring is as delicate as it is distinguished; in his portraits, especially, the relief-tones of blue and light rose seem almost to anticipate the delicate, toned-down tints of modern Impressionism. Himself an ardent Revolutionist, he was, as it were, created to be the portrayer of those men of an austerity like Cato’s, and those women with their free, masculine, proud gaze; that valiant generation that felt within itself a desire to begin civilisation again and found religion anew. The portrait of Lavoisier and his wife reminds one in its refinement of Madame Vigée-Lebrun. The chemist is sitting by a table covered with instruments; his wife, in an elegant light gown, bends attentively over him. The picture dates from 1788, and it still looks like some good work of the age of Louis XVI. Again, how intimate is the effect of the marvellous portrait of Michael Gérard and his family. The good man, in his shirt-sleeves, seems to feel really at home; a small boy is leaning against his knee, a girl is playing on the clavicorde. There is not the slightest suggestion of pose or a conventional type of beauty in this stout old gentleman sitting so comfortably in his bourgeois négligé, and with honest eyes gazing out so inquisitively round him. In a few other pictures the spiritual life of women is portrayed with remarkable tenderness. One of the earliest is the exceptionally fine portrait of his mother-in-law, Madame Pécoult, in 1783; then, in 1790, the portrait of the Marquise d’Orvilliers, with that expression of dreamy languor which plays round the eyes of the beautiful woman. The Louvre possesses, in the portrait of Madame Récamier, perhaps the most charming and attractive woman’s portrait that David ever painted. The beautiful Juliette lies stretched on a divan of antique pattern. She wears a white dress, her soft rosy feet are bare. The arrangement of the room coquettes primly with that simplicity which was paraded at the time. Apart from the divan, there is only a huge bronze candelabra to be seen. Then there is Barere’s portrait. He stands on the tribune, and delivers the speech which is to cost Louis XVI his life. The face is small and insignificant, the gaze cold and harsh, and on the mouth there is a shadow of bitter hate and narrow fanaticism. But the triumph of these portraits of men is that of Bonaparte. David was one of the first of the men of the Revolution to come beneath the spell of the Little Corporal. One day, while he was working in his studio at the Louvre, a pupil rushed in breathlessly: “General Bonaparte is outside the door!” Napoleon entered in a dark-blue coat “that made his lean yellow face look leaner and yellower than ever.” David dismissed his pupils, and drew, in a sitting of barely two hours, the stern head of the Corsican. Thus he passed into the service of Napoleon.

This man, who viewed himself only as the coping-stone of the Republic—after the example of Augustus when he transformed the Roman Republic into the Empire—was unwilling to show any opposition to the republican tastes. The first painter of the Republic was appointed to be the Imperial Court painter. What he had been under Robespierre he was under Napoleon: the dictator of his age, who maintained a supremacy over the whole of art similar to that which Lebrun held beneath Louis XIV. The “Marat” was the great work of his revolutionary, the “Coronation” of his monarchical period,—that colossal picture which, completed between 1806 and 1807, has handed down to posterity a true representation of the ceremonial pageants that took place in Notre Dame on 2nd December 1804. The moment selected is when Napoleon places the crown, which is carried on a velvet cushion by the Duc de Berg, upon the head of the Empress, who kneels before him in a white robe and a crimson mantle. The picture contains portraits of all the personages present at the ceremony, amongst them being David himself, as he stands on a platform and sketches at a small table. The whole composition of this picture and the grouping of the figures is full of stately gravity. Real energy and patience must have been required to paint this immense picture, though it shows not the least sign of fatigue. With the exception of Menzel’s “Coronation of William I,” I know of no historical picture of the century of as high an artistic value, with the like noble sublimity of colour, with so tender, quivering a light. There are certain portions of the “Coronation” in which the white robes, the deep-red velvet of the mantles, and gold embroideries affect us like a symphony in colours. When the picture was completed Napoleon visited David’s studio, accompanied by the Empress, his ministers, and his staff. The Court drew up, and the Emperor moved up and down in front of the picture, hat in hand, for more than half an hour, examining it in all its details. Finally, with one of those dramatic effects of which he was so fond, he lightly raised his hat: “C’est bien, très bien; David, je vous salue.”

DAVID.	BELISARIUS ASKING ALMS.

David had now still better opportunities than at an earlier period of proving his great capacity as a portrait painter. His portraits of the Emperor, of the Pope, of Cardinal Caprara, and of Murat symbolise the brutal greatness of an age which worshipped strength. Even at the close of his life, when the Restoration had exiled him from France, there resulted in Brussels graceful and tenderly observed portraits, such as that of the daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, which will perpetuate his name. One, in the Praet Collection at Brussels—three women of indescribable ugliness—marks the pinnacle of his pictorial strength and keen naturalism. They are the “Three Fates” of 1810, and he has painted them with the true artist’s delight, and with a massiveness like that of Frans Hals.

When these works were brought together at the Paris Exhibition of 1889, universal astonishment prevailed when it was discovered what a great painter this Louis David was. He appeared in these pictures as an artist who stood completely within his age, who shared its passions and was permeated by its greatness; he even appeared as a charmeur who handled the phenomena of colour and light as few others have done. It is true, David showed himself in this favourable light at the exhibition only because the entirely archæological side of his talent was not represented. For at the bottom of his heart he too was an archæologist. Many of his works, such as “The Death of Socrates,” “Brutus,” “The Oath in the Tennis Court,” and “The Rape of the Sabines,” are specimens of a barren theory.

Against all the caprice of the eighteenth century, with its charming, alluring grace, he opposed a strict, inexorable system, as he believed he saw it in the antique. Simplicity, however, beneath his hands became dryness, nobility formal. He saw in painting a sort of abstract geometry for which there existed hard-and-fast forms. There was something mathematical in his effort after dry correctness and erudite accuracy. The infinite variety of life with its eternal changes was hidden from his sight. The beautiful, he taught with Winckelmann, does not exist in a single individual; it is only possible to create a type of it by comparison and through composition. The human being of art ought always to be a copy of that perfect being, primitive man, whom the Roman sculptors had still before their eyes, but who had deteriorated in the course of ages. Thus in France, too, the sensuous art of painting was converted into an abstract science of æsthetics. The classic ideal weighed upon French art and prescribed for all alike the same “heroic style,” the same elevation, the same marble coldness and monotony of colour. Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and François André Vincent, whose studios were most frequented after David’s, worshipped the same gods. After David’s departure, Guérin, in particular, endeavoured to bequeath to the students those genuinely academic rules which his pupil, Delacroix, has summed up in these words: “In order to make an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinous, and then say, ‘We have done our utmost; if he is, nevertheless, not beautiful, we must altogether abstain from this freak of nature, with his squat nose and thick lips, so unendurable to the eyes.’” When he had to paint his “Insurrection in Cairo,” therefore, Egyptians as well as Arabs must first be supplied with heads of Antinous and transformed from modern soldiers into ancient warriors, Romans of the time of Romulus, before they could enter into the kingdom of art. Everything was sacrificed to line,—an inflexible, inexorable, correct, and icy line, the conventional, ideal line,—not the true line which follows from observation of the infinite variety of nature.

Nevertheless, even in works constructed as these were by rule and line, we cannot fail to be impressed by the technical ability displayed by the artist.

France, who in her outward relations has generally had a feverish longing for change, has been in literary and artistic respects, as a rule, exceedingly conservative, has upheld authority, supported an academy, and prized limitations and proportion above everything. They had upset the monarchy, murdered the hated aristocrats, built up the republic, done away with Christianity before they ever thought of touching the three unities of the drama. Voltaire, who had a reverence for nothing in heaven or earth, respected the received treatment of the Alexandrine verse. And David, the great painter of the Revolution, who cast the pictures of Boucher out of the Louvre, and whose pupils used to shoot bread-crumbs at Watteau’s masterpiece, the “Voyage à Cythère,” yet conveyed with him into the new age, as an inheritance from rococo, its prodigious knowledge. The good old traditions of the technique of French painting were little shaken by him and his school. The Academy described by Quatremère as the “eternal nursery garden of incurable prejudices,” was indeed overthrown, but David became immediately the head of a new one. This age of absorption in politics developed an art to correspond, more disciplined than ever, girt round by an iron cuirass; and this art, notwithstanding multifarious phases, at no time lost its touch, technically, with the acquisitions of former epochs, but evolved itself in its various directions from one centre, distracted from its path by nothing brought into it from outside. Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet, widely as they differ from one another, are links in one chain of evolution. Art comes from knowledge. This maxim, which David held in honour, has remained to the present day a dominant force in French art, and by virtue of this knowledge, which David received from the old masters and guarded as a sacred trust, France became in the nineteenth century the chief school of technique for all other nations. From the French the other nations learned their grammar and syntax; through them they acquired a wider horizon and a deeper insight into the great mystery of nature.