Chapter I: Part 1

[Frontispiece: INNOCENCE.]

Bell's Miniature Series of Painters

GREUZE

BY

HAROLD ARMITAGE

LONDON
GEORGE BELL & SONS
1902

{v}

PREFACE

Although Paris, during the eighteenth century, became the home of artists of more subtle genius than Greuze, yet the pictures of no other painter of that alluring period have become so familiar to the people of our own country. Engravings, etchings, photographs, and reproductions in colour of the works of Greuze abound on every hand; but many have admired the art who have not known so much as the name of the artist, and more have known his name, and have still been far from any knowledge of the story of his life.

Indeed, though brief narrations of what Greuze did and suffered in this world have appeared in volumes that have contained also the biographies of other artists, no book, in this country, has been devoted solely to an account of his romantic career. Moreover, the addition of twenty-one of the works of Greuze to the possessions of the British nation by the bequest of the Wallace Collection, and the exhibition of nine more at the Art Gallery of the Corporation of London in 1902, must have awakened curiosity concerning a painter whose peculiar place in the evolution of art in France, {vi} whose character, and whose eventful life, make his history interesting alike to those who delight in pictures and to those who read biography for its own sake.

The author hopes that this volume will make more available than it has hitherto been an account of the principal happenings in the story of an artist with whose charming pictures the world has been for many years so intimately acquainted.

{vii}

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Early Years

Fame in Paris

Poverty and Death

Romance and Tragedy

Personal Characteristics

Characteristics of his Work

Position in French Art

Our Illustrations

The Chief Works of Greuze

{viii}

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Innocence ... Frontispiece

The Village Bride (L'Accordée de Village)

The Pretty Laundress (La Belle Blanchisseuse)

The Listening Girl

The Kiss (Le Baiser Jeté)

Portrait of Robespierre

The Broken Pitcher (La Cruche Cassée)

The Milkmaid (La Laitière)

{1}

LIFE OF GREUZE

EARLY YEARS

The way of life in which Jean Baptiste Greuze spent his childhood and his youth was not different from that of most other artists. His parents were obscure people, who had no riches; and his father opposed his desire to be a painter.

For many years, even his own countrymen who wrote of Greuze, gave the date of his birth any time between 1725 and 1732; but it is known now that the accurate date is August 21, 1725, the one which has since been inscribed on the modest house in Tournus, near Mâcon, where his father and mother were living when the artist was born.

By the time that Greuze was eight years of age he had manifested a strong inclination towards the use of the pencil. Drawing became his chief amusement; and he employed, indifferently, stray pieces of paper, or whitewashed walls, for the display of his draughtsmanship. His father, as the way of fathers is, had planned for his son a position more exalted than his own in an occupation with which he himself was connected. The elder Greuze was {2} a kind of provincial builder, contractor, and slater; and he wished the younger Greuze to become an architect.

Although it is not apparent why an architect, who to-day undergoes severe discipline in drawing, should be the worse because he had a propensity for sketching, it has yet been stated by some of the biographers of Greuze that the father used persuasions and threats to prevent the son from making drawings, and that the boy was thereby driven to the device of exercising his skill surreptitiously in his bedroom.

But a day came when the father saw the folly of his continued resistance. Mistaking for an engraving a head of St. James which his son had copied with a pen, that he might give it to his father as a birthday present, the elder Greuze was so much impressed by the skill of the lad that he thought it better after all to allow him to have his own way in the choice of a profession; and Greuze therefore became the pupil of Grandon, of Lyons, a portrait painter.

In Grandon's constitution the artist was subservient to the man of affairs; and De Goncourt has written that his studio was a veritable picture factory. Greuze, however, had more elevated notions of the vocation of an artist than to remain content in marking time for the rest of his life as a sort of inglorious piece-worker, and his ambition and self-confidence urged him to Paris, where he believed his powers would win for him both fame and fortune.

{3}

In Paris Greuze worked unobtrusively, often in solitude, and earned a precarious livelihood, possibly not without invoking the aid of some of the methods of the master whom he had left in Lyons. He was not immediately successful, and his chance of triumphing over the obstacles which beset a raw youth from the provinces, seeking fame in Paris, seemed to be but a remote one. Yet Pigalle, the king's sculptor, believing that Greuze had the qualities which win success ultimately, encouraged the painter to persevere.

Greuze had, or fancied he had, to contend against the hostility and the jealousy of the other artists. At the Academy, where he went to draw, he received less consideration than his ability merited, and he complained eventually to the artist Silvestre, to whom also he showed some specimens of his work. Silvestre, admiring his skill, wished to have his portrait painted by Greuze, and as Silvestre was a man of some influence, this commission was the means of making Greuze's name more widely known. About this time, too, Greuze attracted attention by one of his representations of scenes from the life of humbler folk than were usually seen in pictures during that period. This painting was _L'Aveugle Trompé_, and Greuze was made _agréé_ of the Academy on June 28, 1755, either by the good offices of Silvestre or of Pigalle, and thus acquired the right to exhibit his pictures at the annual exhibitions.

{4}

FAME IN PARIS

Popular as was this picture of _L'Aveugle Trompé_, its success was eclipsed by the fame of _Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants_, a work which advanced Greuze to the front rank of the leading painters of that time. Even when one remembers that this is a better picture than many which he painted afterwards, it is yet not easy to-day to understand the enthusiasm that it caused when it was first exhibited. One reason for our difficulty is that we do not feel the force of its novelty as the people of Paris felt it when they had become satiated with the painted pastorals, allegories, and coquetries of that voluptuous era.

The picture, pleasing as a whole, contains indications of the tendency towards artificiality which afterwards became so marked in many of Greuze's melodramatic paintings. But for the rest the scene is nature in a mirror compared with other canvases of the same century. The painter has represented the interior of a farm kitchen, and a devout and venerable farmer reads, from a large Bible, some chapters of the New Testament to the other members of the household. All these, from the grandmother to the child of three years, are picturesque and pleasing, and they are happily placed in the picture. This work was bought by Monsieur de la Live de Jully, a rich connoisseur, who invited artists and others interested in painting to go to his house, to see {5} the new kind of picture which Greuze had introduced into Paris.

Even from artists and critics the picture won a generous meed of praise; but, containing as it does all the elements which still appeal to "the man in the street," it was not until 1755, when it was exhibited at the Salon, that it achieved its greatest triumph. As long as the exhibition was open the people crowded round this pious presentment of humble life which had strayed so unaccountably amongst the pictures of the Court painters--pictures which for many years, as we shall see, had been free from the suspicion of any odour of sanctity.

"Whence comes he? Whose pupil is he?" asked the bewildered Academicians, who, in the manner of Academicians, could not believe it possible for an artist outside their circle to attain either excellence or fame. The answer came, "He is a pupil of Diderot."

Although this answer did not contain the whole truth, it was yet significant of a change that was taking place in the aspirations of many French people. Diderot, a clever and copious man of letters, had commenced to write about pictures, and he was now advocating that art should be devoted to the cause of morality. Greuze's picture happening to coincide with his own idea, he at once wrote an enthusiastic, one may almost say a gushing, eulogy of this and other similar works of the artist; and in that way he helped to swell the renown which Greuze had now achieved.

{6}

Meanwhile, the artist, with that perversity which one has noted in the early life of other famous men, must now leave his own path to go to study art in Italy. Hundreds of years have been needed to convince painters that the Italian artists wrought great pictures because they expressed their own ideas of beauty, just as away from Italy Rembrandt "saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks." "I do not study the ancients," wrote Chantrey, heedless of syntax, "but I study where the ancients studied--nature."

The ambition of Greuze at this time was to belong to that singularly dreary and barren class of painters known as historical painters; and he wasted some years in the pursuit of a project which, in the end, brought him one of the most crushing humiliations of his whole life. "Woe to the artist," Goethe has written, "who leaves his hut to squander himself in academic halls of state!" and this woe fell upon Greuze in exceeding bitterness when his first historical picture was exhibited. But that incident belongs to the year 1769, and it was at the end of the year 1755, when he was thirty years of age, that he went to Italy.

Almost the only effect of his stay of two years in Italy was that for some time the figures in his pictures were arrayed in the "resplendent small clothes" of the people of that country, and had also Italian names. The {7} painter who did really influence Greuze was Rubens, who was not an Italian, and whose pictures, no further away than the Luxembourg in Paris, it was in later years one of the great delights of his life to study.

In the list of Greuze's works for the year 1757 we notice amongst some pictures of the _genre_ type--the representation, that is, of the life of the humble--a number of paintings which have Italian names; and then there are portraits, and the first of that long series of heads of girls and boys whose fame has outlasted the fame of all his more pretentious works.

Greuze's industry was now very great, and in 1761 there was exhibited one more of his greater triumphs, _Un Mariage à l'instant où le Père de l'accordée delivre la dot à son gendre_, a picture which created another sensation in Paris. It was unfinished when the Salon of that year was opened, and was hung only during the last few days of the exhibition. But all through these days people gathered round it with the same avidity with which they had elbowed one another for a peep at _Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants_.

During the next two years Greuze painted portraits and heads of children, and the year 1769 is notable because of his unhappy attempt to become a member of the Academy as an historical painter. He had, as we have seen, been made _agréé_, but he had not yet complied with the rule that required each member to provide the Academy with one of his pictures. {8} The picture he now submitted bore the sufficiently comprehensive title of _Septime-Sévère reprochant à son fils Caracalla d'avoir attenté à sa vie dans les défilés d'Ecosse et lui disant:--Si tu désires ma mort, ordonne à Papinien de me la donner_. The members of the Academy assembled, and the picture was placed upon an easel that they might examine it, while Greuze awaited their verdict in another room. In an hour the artist was admitted.

"Monsieur Greuze," said the director, "the Academy receives you; come forward and take the oath." When this ceremony had been completed the director continued, "You have been received; but it is as a painter of _genre_. The Academy has considered your former productions, which are excellent, but it has closed its eyes upon this picture, which is worthy neither of the Academy nor of you."

Greuze was astounded and disappointed; and he commenced to stammer out a confused defence of the picture, the worst probably that he ever painted. Then Lagrenée, taking a pencil from one of his pockets, pointed out some of the mistakes in drawing on the canvas. Greuze, cut to the heart, went away, and continued a defence of his picture in the newspapers.

One of the letters which Greuze sent to the public journals is an interesting revelation of how little of what is understood now as art went to the making of an historical painting. Greuze wrote:

{9}

"In the continuation of your comments upon the pictures exhibited at the Salon in the last number of your journal you have been unjust towards me upon two points; and as an honourable man you would no doubt wish to remove these injustices in your next issue. In the first place, instead of treating me as you have treated the other artists, my confrères, to whom you have offered, in a few lines, the tribute of commendation which they have merited, you have gone out of your way to discuss, with the public, how, according to your opinion, Poussin would have painted the same subject. I do not doubt, sir, that Poussin, of the same subject, would have made a sublime work; but to a certainty he would have painted a very different picture from the one which you have imagined. I must ask you to believe that I have studied, as carefully as you have been able to study, the works of that great man, and I have, above all, sought to acquire the art of endowing my characters with dramatic expression. You have carried your views a long way, it is true, inasmuch as you have remarked that Poussin would have put the clasps of the cloaks upon the right side, while I have put that of the robe of Caracalla upon the left--surely a very grave error! But I do not surrender so easily concerning the character which you pretend that Poussin would have given to the Emperor. All the world knows that Severus was the most passionate, the most violent of men, and you would wish {10} that when he says to his son, 'If thou desirest my death, order Papinian to kill me with that sword,' he should, in my picture, have an air as calm and as tranquil as Solomon had in similar circumstances. I ask all sensible men to judge whether that was or was not the expression which should have been put on the face of that redoubtable Emperor.

"Another injustice, much greater still, is that, after you had endeavoured to discover how Poussin would have treated this subject, you have assumed that I had the idea to paint Geta, the brother of Caracalla, in the personage that I have placed behind Papinian. First of all, Geta was not present at that scene; it was Castor the chamberlain, one of the most faithful servants of Severus. In the second place, in supposing gratuitously, as you have done, that I had the design to represent Geta, you would have been right to have reproached me if I had painted him too old, because he was the younger brother of Caracalla. Thirdly, I should still have been wrong if I had not painted him in his armour. You see, sir, what absurdities you have attributed to me in order that you might indulge your love of criticism. I believe you to be a man too honest to refuse me the satisfaction of making this letter public in your journal. It is due to me to be allowed to explain my own picture and to correct the interpretation which you have given to it without consulting me and without consulting history.

{11}

"Do you wish to discourage an artist who sacrifices all to merit the favours with which the public has so far honoured him? Why, upon my first essay, attack me so openly? This is to me a new kind of painting, but it is one in which I flatter myself that I shall become perfect as time goes on. Why compare me alone, amongst all my confrères, to the most learned painter of the French school? If you have done this to indulge me, you have not done it happily, for I can find nothing in all that article but a marked design to annoy me. Nor shall I be able to recognise any other than that design--a most unworthy one in a writer who ought to be impartial--until I have seen your willingness to print my letter in your journal."

It will be noticed that in this letter there is not a single word written about art. All the discussion turns upon archæological details. Poussin is not mentioned as an artist, but merely as a "learned painter," and we shall see, when we discuss the position held by Greuze amongst French artists, that scholars, excellent in their own place, came at length to push the painters "from their stools," with very disastrous results for the art of France.

Even Diderot turned upon this picture and condemned it; for he and his followers now saw that after all Greuze was not the painter of morality for whom they had been seeking. Greuze, it appeared, was ready "to pay homage to traditional conventions," and to become a {12} backslider from the ideals which they had cherished. After this scene Greuze refused to exhibit any of his pictures at the annual exhibitions of the Academy until the Revolution swept away restrictions, and opened the doors of the Salon to all artists. He also shook the dust of Paris from his feet, and lived for a time in Anjou, where he painted a number of pictures, including that portrait of Madame de Porcin which is to-day one of the treasures of the museum of Angers.

When Greuze returned to Paris his repute was greater than it had ever been before. It was now the fashion to visit his studio, and royal princes, the nobility, the Emperor Joseph the Second and other foreign notabilities came to see _La Cruche Cassée_, _La Malédiction Paternelle_, _La Dame de Charité_, _Le Fils Puni_, and other paintings which happened at that time to be still in his possession. He amassed money notwithstanding the great losses caused by his wife's lawless extravagance. High prices were paid for his paintings, and the engravers Massard, Gaillard, Levasseur and Flipart were kept busy making plates, the impressions from which were in the houses of Paris, of the provinces, and of foreign countries. Moreover, curious dilettanti, people of the kind whose chief regard is for technical and accidental states of the plates, began to collect these engravings, and to compete with one another to possess them. One engraver, Jean Georges Wille, had always been the staunch friend of {13} Greuze; and his son, Pierre Alexandre, became a pupil in Greuze's studio. At a time when the artist had been less known, it was Wille who disseminated a knowledge of his works, not only in France, but also in Germany.

POVERTY AND DEATH

Suddenly, amidst all the splendour of his great reputation, the Revolution smote Paris, and Greuze was bereaved of all his glory. The pension he had received from the King ceased with the authority of the King. The attention of the people was withdrawn from him, and such regard as was paid to pictures during this distracted epoch went to the paintings of David, who was both painter and politician. Greuze's ironical inquiry each morning, "Who is King to-day, then?" is significant of the instability of the time. No more the elite of Paris crowded round his easel; but one of his two daughters still remained with him; and a number of his scholars, especially his girl pupils, were faithful to the end.

"You have a family and you have talent, young man," he once said to Prudhon; "that is enough in these days to bring about one's death by starvation. Look at my cuffs," continued the old man bitterly; and then Greuze would show him his torn shirt-sleeves, "for even he could no longer find means of getting on in the new order of things."

{14}

How poor he was may be inferred from his letter to the Minister of the Interior: "The picture which I am painting for the government is but half finished. The situation in which I find myself has forced me to ask you to pay me part of the money in advance, so that I may be enabled to finish the work. I have been honoured by your sympathy in all my misfortunes; I have lost everything but my talent and my courage. I am seventy-five years of age, and have not a single order for a picture; indeed, this is the most painful moment of my life. You have a kind heart, and I flatter myself that you will relieve me in accordance with the urgency of my need."

"Well, Greuze," said his friend Barthélemy one day to him, when sitting at his bedside.

"Well, my friend," replied the artist, "I am dying.... I am commencing to know no longer what I am saying; but patience! yet a little while and I shall say nothing more."

"_Allons, mon ami_--courage, one doesn't die on the first day of spring."

"Ah! my God, since the Sans-culottides I have taken no heed of the seasons. Are we in _Ventóse_ or in _Germinal_? Is to-day Saint _Pissenlit_ or _Saint Asperge_?"

"What matters! See how beautifully the sun shines."

"I am quite at ease for my journey. Adieu, Barthelemy. I await you at my burial. You will be all alone like the poor man's dog."

{15}

So in poverty and neglect the artist died. There is a tradition that when Napoleon heard of it, he exclaimed, "Dead! poor and neglected! Why did he not speak? I would have given him a pitcher made of Sèvres china, filled to the brim with gold, for every copy of his _Broken Pitcher_."

At the funeral, when the coffin rested in the church, a lady, whose emotion could not be hidden, even by the thick veil which she wore, advanced to the coffin, and placed upon it a bouquet of _immortelles_. She then withdrew again to an obscure part of the church. Tied to the bouquet was discovered a piece of paper which bore this inscription: "These flowers, offered by the most grateful of his pupils, are the emblem of his glory."

A newspaper of the time gave the name of the young lady as Mademoiselle Mayer, the artist who, before she committed suicide, did so much to cheer the desolate life of Prudhon, and who now occupies the same tomb as Prudhon in the cemetery of Père la Chaise in Paris. Madame de Valory, however, the god-daughter of Greuze, has stated that the woman was Madame Jubot, another of the pupils of Greuze.

Tournus neglected him in his life, but to-day is proud of its illustrious son. A monument of the artist has been erected in the town, some of his pictures hang in the church and in the museum, and a tablet marks the house in which he was born.

{16}

ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY

It was peculiarly fitting that a lady should deposit upon the coffin of Greuze a bouquet of _immortelles_, for his romantic and chivalrous regard for women, from a very early period in his career, had a great influence upon his life and work. Even as a pupil of Grandon, Greuze fell in love with his master's wife, a woman of very great beauty and charm. He never told his love; but one day Grandon's daughter surprised Greuze on his knees in the studio. She asked him what he was doing there, and he replied that he was looking for something he had lost. But she had seen that he had one of her mother's shoes, and that he was covering it with ardent kisses.

Exceptionally romantic, too, was his love for the beautiful Lætitia during the two years that he spent in Italy. Greuze had carried with him to that country letters of introduction to the Duc del Or...., by whom he had been received with great cordiality. The Duke's wife had died, but he had a charming daughter, Lætitia, to whom it was arranged that Greuze should give lessons in painting. Greuze was a man to whom women and girls were instinctively attracted, and Lætitia fell in love with him, with all the violence and passion of the Italian temperament. Her beauty and her charming manners had also fascinated Greuze; but he was very much disconcerted when he found that she loved him, because he was conscious {17} of the gulf which birth and fortune had placed between them. He, therefore, rigorously repressed his desire to see her, and forced himself to stay away from the palace.

Meanwhile, his doleful demeanour, innocent face, and light curls obtained for him, from Fragonard and other French students, who were in Italy at the time, the name of the love-sick cherub.

Greuze at length heard that Lætitia was ill, and that no one could discover the cause or nature of her malady. He loitered near her home to try to obtain tidings of her, and one day he encountered the Duke, who took him to the palace to show him two pictures by Titian, which he had recently purchased.

"My daughter," he said, "has promised herself the pleasure of copying them when her health has been restored. I hope that you will come to superintend her work. That is what she wishes."

The Duke further asked Greuze to make a copy of one of the pictures as soon as he could, because he wished to send the copy away as a present. Greuze could not refuse; and thus he was soon installed in the palace again, working there day by day. Each morning he was informed, by an old retainer of the family, who had been Lætitia's nurse, how the young lady fared. The old nurse knew the two were in love with each other. Indeed, a little later, she arranged a secret interview between them, {18} and Greuze found his idol pale and thin, but not less beautiful than before.

At first neither of them could speak; but, encouraged by the nurse, Lætitia blurted out:

"Monsieur Greuze, I love you. Tell me frankly, do you love me?"

Greuze was too happy to speak, and Lætitia, mistaking the cause of his silence, hid her face in her hands, and burst into tears.

This melted Greuze to the uttermost. He threw himself at her feet, and then, in the intervals between his impetuous kisses, he poured out impassioned declarations of his love.

"I can now be happy," cried Lætitia, clapping her hands, and behaving like a gladdened child. She ran and embraced her nurse, and again and again gave expression to her ecstasy. "Listen to me, you two; here is my scheme. I love Greuze, and I will marry him."

"My dear child, you dream," replied the nurse. "What about your father?"

"My nurse, you wish to say that my father will not consent. Well I know that. He wishes me to marry his eternal Casa--the oldest and the ugliest of men; or the young Count Palleri, whom I do not know, nor ever wish to know. I am rich through my mother, and I give my fortune to Greuze, whom I marry. He takes me to France, and you will follow us there."

And intoxicated with the future which she had arranged, she detailed, with a delicious {19} volubility, the life that they would lead together in Paris. Greuze would continue to paint. He would become another Titian, and in the end her father would be proud to have such a son-in-law.

When Greuze next saw Lætitia he had had time to review all the circumstances, and he appeared with a woeful face. Lætitia derided him, and then tried to coax him tenderly out of his gloomy mood. At last, becoming angry, she called him perfidious, and reproached him that he had pretended to love her that he might the more easily break her heart. She cried and tore her hair, and Greuze fell at her feet, and promised to obey her blindly.

But as soon as he had left the palace he saw the folly of it all. He saw the despair of her father, heard his maledictions, and felt his vengeance, and all the misfortune which would come upon their love. He then decided that he would not relent again, nor see Lætitia any more. As an excuse for not visiting her he pretended that he was ill, and this simulated illness became real. For three months he was ailing, and part of the time he was consumed by fever and delirium.

At the end of his illness Lætitia was still eager to marry him; but with extraordinary firmness of will he resisted the temptation and fled from Italy, carrying with him secretly a copy of the portrait of Lætitia, which he had painted for her father.

Many years later, when Greuze was once {20} more a poor man, he wrote in reply to the Grand Duchess of Russia, who had offered ten thousand livres for the portrait of Lætitia, "If you were to give me all the riches of the Empire of Russia they would not pay for that picture," and probably in his old age he read yet again the letter he had received from Lætitia, eight years after he quitted Rome. "Yes, my dear Greuze, your old pupil is now a good mother; I have five charming children, whom I adore. My eldest daughter is worthy to be offered as a subject for your happy talent; she is beautiful as an angel. Ask the Prince d'Este. My husband almost convinces me that I continue to be young and pretty, so much does he still love me. As I have told you, this happiness is due to you, and I love you for having prevented me from loving you."

Greuze had scarcely returned from Italy when he was attracted by Mademoiselle Anne-Gabrielle Babuty, who was in charge of a bookshop in Paris. Diderot, who had himself been very much in love with her, has described her as a smart dashing young woman, of upright carriage, and with a complexion of lilies and roses. De Goncourt also speaks of her numerous charms. She had a pretty face, which Greuze seemed to be never tired of painting. It was the smooth face of a child, and had an attractive roundness, and a soft, tender, peach-like delicate complexion. The expression was simple and unaffected, and there was enough of piquancy to animate a face {21} which, for all its manifold good qualities, would else have had a tendency towards insipidity. Her eyebrows were very much arched, and this circumstance lent to her face its expression of naïveté. Her eyelashes were long, and when her eyes were downcast they gave a charming look to her face, resting like a caress upon her cheeks. Her little nose, the nose of a child, was exquisitely formed, and seemed to indicate an alert and lively character, and her rosy lips were also finely shaped, and particularly alluring.

Her portrait appears often in the paintings of Greuze in _La Philosophie Endormie_, _La Mère Bien Aimée_, _La Voluptueuse_, and in many others.

The story of their first encounter, and of their subsequent relations, is best told by a few extracts from a document which Greuze had cause to execute some years afterwards. He wrote:

"A few days after having arrived from Rome--I know not by what fatality--I passed along the _Rue Saint Jacques_, and saw in her shop Mademoiselle Babuty, who was the daughter of a bookseller.

"I was struck with admiration, for she had a very beautiful figure; and that I might have a better chance of seeing her I bought a number of books. Her face was without character, and was indeed rather sheep-like. I paid her as many compliments as she could wish, and she knew who I was, for my reputation had already commenced, and I had been recognised by the Academy.

{22}

"She was then thirty and some odd years of age, and therefore in danger of remaining single all her life. She employed all the cajoleries that were possible to attach me to her, and to cause me to come again, and I continued to pay her visits for about a month. One afternoon I found her more animated than usual. She took one of my hands, and, regarding me with a very passionate look, she said, 'Monsieur Greuze, would you marry me if I were to consent?'

"I avow I was confounded by such a question. I said to her, 'Mademoiselle, would not one be too happy to pass his life with a woman so lovable as you are?'

"Of course, this was but lightly said, yet that did not prevent her from taking action at once; for, upon the very next morning, she went with her mother to the Quai des Orfèvres, and there bought, at the shop of Monsieur Strass, earrings of false diamonds, and next day she did not hesitate to wear these in her ears.

"As she lived in a shop, the neighbours were not slow in paying her compliments, and in asking her who had presented these jewels to her.

"With downcast eyes she answered softly, 'It is Monsieur Greuze who has given them to me.'

"'You are married, then?'

"'Ah, no;' but this was said in a way that implied that secretly she had married me. My friends began at once to congratulate me, but I assured them there was nothing more false than {23} the news they had heard, and that I had not money enough to enable me to marry.

"Outraged at such effrontery, I did not return to Mademoiselle Babuty any more. I lived at that time in _le faubourg Saint Germain_, _rue du Petit Lion_, in an hotel of furnished rooms called _l'Hôtel des Vignes_. Three days passed, during which I heard no more of the matter, and I was already thinking of other affairs, when one fine day she came knocking at my door accompanied by her little servant girl. I took no notice of the knocks, but she knew I was there, and she attacked my door with her hands and feet like a veritable fury. Then, to prevent a public scandal, I opened my door, and she threw herself into my room all in tears. She said to me:

"'I have done wrong, Monsieur Greuze, but it is love which has misled me. It is the attachment I have for you which has made me resort to such a stratagem. My life is in your hands.' Then she flung herself at my knees, and said she would not rise again until I had promised that I would marry her. She took my two hands in hers, and they were wet with tears. I pitied her, and I promised all she wished.

"We were not married until two years afterwards, in the parish of Saint Medard--which was not her parish--for fear of the pleasantries that would have been made, seeing that she had said that we were already married. I commenced housekeeping with twenty-six livres the day after our wedding."

{24}

During the first seven years of their married life they had three children. One of the children died, leaving the artist and his wife with two daughters.

Concerning these seven years no complaint is made about the conduct of Madame Greuze; but from that time it would be difficult to find a more unhappy household than that of Greuze. His wife was a continual torment, hindering him in his work, putting his life on a lower level, and making his home intolerable. Diderot even blamed her for the infelicity of his Academy picture, and Greuze himself suspected her of having poisoned the minds of the members of the Academy against him.

Her faithlessness, gross as it was, received further aggravation from the insolent openness in which it manifested itself. She received men of the most disreputable character at her house, caring naught whether her husband knew or not; and she polluted the morals of his boy pupils. Her children she neglected and put into a convent, one for eleven years, and the other for twelve. "It is a year and seven days since mamma saw us," said one of the girls sadly one day, when their father had gone to visit them.

Many a time Greuze went in bodily fear of her violence. When she asked for the help of a servant, and Greuze suggested that she should wait a little longer, until he could pay the wages of one, she dealt him, with all her might, a blow upon his face. She squandered in all {25} manner of foolish extravagance the large fortune which Greuze received from the sale of the engravings from his works; and then she destroyed his account books, that the extent of her defalcations might never be known. Her household duties were abandoned, and Greuze nearly died when one day he warmed for himself some food in a saucepan in which verdigris had been suffered to accumulate.

At last her violence, her rank immorality, her extravagance and her neglect could be borne no longer, and in despair Greuze obtained from the magistrates the legal right to live apart from his wife.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

The sadness of the story of Greuze's married life is all the more touching because he had the qualities of a true and tender husband. It is indeed not less than a tragedy that, constituted as he was, he should have been denied the companionship of a woman worthy of the great affection of which his nature was capable. Often querulous and brusque with men, his manner with women was gracious and respectful, his politeness the true politeness of the kind heart that desires the well-being of others. As we have seen, his relations with Lætitia were governed by a most chivalrous ideal of conduct, an ideal which seems quite quixotic when we think of the period in which he lived. As Lætitia had been attracted towards him, so {26} also were most of the women who moved in his social sphere; and, eager as he was for praise from men, it came with added sweetness from the lips of women. It is not surprising that he painted women with such perfect charm, because his heart was in the work.

Greuze, though only of middle height, had yet an impressive personality; and people of any discernment saw at a glance that he was a man of distinction. His head was well formed, his forehead high, his eyes large and bright, and of a good shape, and his features indicated genius, candour, and an energetic will.

His conversation was sincere and elevated, and often piquant and animated. He sometimes showed signs of nervousness and irritability, and became quite fiery when his work was criticised, or when he thought he was not receiving the treatment which his vanity prompted him to think he ought to receive.

This self-esteem, always abnormal, had been increased by his early success with _Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants_. "Our painter is a little vain," wrote Diderot in 1765, "but his vanity is that of a child;" and it was generally recognised that there was very much of naïveté in his conceit, and that his good qualities compensated for any displays of childish self-sufficiency.

At times his talk became inflated and bombastic. "Oh, sir!" he would say, concerning his own picture, "here is a work which {27} astonishes even me who painted it. I cannot understand how a man can, with a few pounded earths, animate a canvas in this way," and no ridicule could cure him of this flamboyant manner.

"That is beautiful," said Monsieur de Marigny, standing before Greuze's painting of _La Pleureuse_.

"Sir, I know it; moreover, people praise me, and yet I am in need of more commissions."

"It is because you have a host of enemies," said Vernet, who was present at the time, "and amongst those enemies is one who appears to love you to the verge of folly, but he will nevertheless ruin you."

"And who is that?"

"It is yourself."

Greuze's irritability sometimes revealed itself in downright rudeness. Natoire, the professor at the Academy, looking through a portfolio of drawings of some other artist, questioned the accuracy of one of the figures, whereupon Greuze turned upon him and said:

"Sir, you would be happy if you could draw one as well."

The Dauphin, when Greuze had painted his portrait, wishing to show how pleased he was with Greuze's work, paid him the high compliment of suggesting that he should now paint the portrait of the Dauphine, who was present. Greuze looked at her face, and alluding to the thick covering of rouge which appeared upon {28} her cheeks, asked to be excused, for he could not paint such a face as that. No wonder that Mariette should say that Greuze had the manners of a cobbler.

There are also hints that Greuze was sometimes jealous. In _Un Homme d'Autrefois_, by the Marquis Costa de Beauregard, it has been narrated that Henry Costa, one of the author's ancestors, wishing to be an artist, went at the age of fourteen years to Paris. He was received with great kindness by Greuze, and the enthusiastic boy said "_il parle comme un ange_," but in an article contributed by Augustus Mansion to _Temple Bay_ we have read, "Another chagrin followed. Greuze became jealous of his prodigy, tried to shake him off, ignored letters, and declined to permit himself to be seen at work. It was an unkindness keenly felt by the boy, who was learning every day a little more of the world: '_Quelle froideur et quelle mystère!_' he says. 'Greuze told me he could not communicate certain processes he was employing, that what was useful for him might not be the same for me. I cannot understand how a fine genius can be capable of such meanness.'"

Yet one cannot estimate the whole character of Greuze by these isolated incidents. Like other people, he said and did different things when he was in different moods, and we know that when the artists of Paris held aloof from Prudhon, whose poverty had compelled him to "draw vignettes on letter sheets for the {29} government offices, business cards for tradesmen, and even little pictures for bon-bonnières... Greuze alone treated him amicably."

Greuze's industry was abnormal. As a worker he seemed indefatigable. He was absorbed in his art, putting all his soul and brains into his pictures, and seeming to live for his work, and for no other thing.

{30}

CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS WORK

There is so little variety in the works of Greuze that if one divides them into two main classes, nearly all his pictures, with the exception of the portraits, may be placed in one or other of these two divisions. In one class there are his _genre_ pictures, containing as a rule many figures; and then, better known than these, and of greater merit, are his single heads of girls and boys, which constitute the other principal category.

His first great success was achieved with his picture of the _genre_ class, _Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants_, and this book contains an illustration from another popular work of this sort called _L'Accordée de Village_. A section of this volume explains the relative position of Greuze in the history of art, and reasons are given which account for the great acclamation with which this and similar works were received in Paris when first they were exhibited. Meanwhile we will consider the intrinsic merits of these pictures without reference to the novelty of their appearance--an appearance in which a number of adventitious circumstances are involved.

{31}

In painting pictures of scenes in the life of humble people, Greuze had an aim other than the representation of some beauty of nature by which his own emotions had been profoundly stirred. He wished to play the schoolmaster, and the history of painting has demonstrated that, whatever may be the immediate effect of pictures that have been wrought in this mood, they have never been the pictures that have endured for all time the test of a comparison with the severest standards of excellence in art, and they have invariably sunk into their own place--amongst pictures not in the first class.

Again and again it has been shown that a man cannot be a preacher or a story-writer on canvas and at the same time an artist of the first rank. The reason for this is that it is not the function of pictorial art to tell tales, nor to preach sermons, though artists can do both, and yet be very popular.

"Sir," said Dr. Johnson, "a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs: it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." And one may apply the same remark to the pulpiteering of the painter with much less risk of evoking a protest.

During recent years this truth has begun to receive recognition. Théophile Gautier has written strenuously against story-telling pictures, and Whistler has argued that Art "is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only--having no desire to teach--seeking {32} and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all times."

While these opinions of modern critics upon anecdotal art are in our minds, it will be appropriate to mention Greuze's own views as revealed in what he called "_une note historique_" upon his painting of _La Belle-Mère_. "For a long time I had wished," he says, "to paint that character, but in each sketch the expression of the stepmother always appeared to me to be feeble and unsatisfactory. One day, however, when I was crossing the Pont-Neuf, I saw two women, who spoke to one another with much vehemence. One of them began to shed tears, and she exclaimed, 'Such a stepmother too! Yes, she gave me bread, but in giving it to me she broke my teeth.' That was a _coup de lumière_ for me; I returned to the house, and I made the sketch for my picture, which contains five figures: the step-mother, the daughter of the dead mother, the grandmother of the orphan, the daughter of the stepmother, and a child of three years. I have supposed in my picture that it is the dinner-hour, and that the poor little girl goes to take a seat at the table with the other children. Then the stepmother takes a piece of bread from the table, and, holding the orphan back by her apron, thrusts the bread roughly into her mouth. I have set myself the task of showing in that action the deliberate hate of the woman. The child seeks to evade her stepmother's violence, and seems as one {33} who would say, 'Why would you ill-use me? I have done you no harm.' The child's expression is a mixture of shyness and of fear. Her grandmother is at the other end of the table. Harrowed by grief, she lifts her eyes to heaven, and, with hands trembling, seems to say, 'Ah! my daughter, where are you? What misfortunes! what bitterness!' The daughter of the stepmother, not at all sympathetic concerning the lot of her sister, laughs to witness the despair of the poor old woman, and, in ridicule, draws her mother's attention to her gestures. The infant of the family, whose heart has not yet been corrupted, gratefully stretches out her arms towards the sister who has bestowed so much kindness upon her. I have wished to paint a woman who maltreats a child that does not belong to her, and who, by a double crime, has also corrupted the heart of her own daughter."

Here, then, we see an anecdotal painting in the making. Although this rehearsal is very touching, as a revelation of the kind heart of the man, it yet seems to-day a particularly naïve exposition of the motive for a work of art. Nothing could show with greater clearness the wide gulf that, in the art world, lies between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of a century which closed with discussions of the theories of impressionists, vibrists, symbolists and pointillists, and with the theories of those who, denying that art is primarily moral, or even intellectual, have contended that it is {34} simply a means by which we are made to respond to an artist's emotion.

If Whistler, to mention an artist representative of some newer movements than those of the eighteenth century, had been on the Pont-Neuf, from what a different source would have come any _coup de lumière_ which might have flashed into his brain! Not during high noon, nor in the gossip of the people, would he have found the motive for his paintings. His _coup de lumière_ would have come "when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us--then the wayfarer hastens home; and the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master--her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her."

Whistler's eyes would have been directed towards the beauties of colour and of tone that he might find on the river or on its banks; and the Isle de France, as it is seen by the tired journalist as he makes his way to the Latin Quarter at dawn of day, with its tender grays, and its evasive charms of exquisite light and colour, would be of more account to him than {35} all the conversations in the world, however vehement they might be. The idea of preaching or moralizing on canvas would never have entered his head for a moment.

When Greuze, in harmony with the raw notions of Diderot upon art, did preach, his homilies were singularly unimpressive. The pictures which he painted when in this sermonizing vein have all the elements that go to the making of what is now called melodrama. The scenes are not the result of a discriminating observation of real life; are not, to use Zola's phrase, "Nature seen through a temperament." They are founded upon conventions, upon the artificial and sentimental ideas of life that have by some curious freak of the human mind established themselves in books and plays and pictures.

The figures in Greuze's _genre_ pictures pose before the spectators; they gesticulate and overdo their parts like barn-stormers. Pity becomes maudlin, morality degenerates into sanctimoniousness, and humility is degraded into utter abasement. The sentimentality in _Un Paralytique Soigné par sa Famille_, _ou le Fruit de la Bonne Education_, and in _La Mère Paralytique_ is particularly nauseating, and in _La Mère bien Aimée_ the exaggeration of what is in actual life a very tender sentiment makes of that picture a very significant example of Greuze's stilted manner. The six children--all of them about the same age--who have flung themselves upon their mother, seem so numerous, {36} and are so involved in a confused heap of humanity that Madame Geoffrin spoke of the picture as a "fricassee of children," and incurred thereby the fulminations of the artist. In his _genre_ pictures, too, as is usual in melodrama elsewhere, the humble cottage is the headquarters of all the virtues.

Greuze, it is true, made sketches for his pictures in the streets and in the market-places; but there is none of the freshness of the sketch when the figure appears on the canvas, and De Goncourt has complained that little tatterdemalions with their split breeches have become on their way to Greuze's canvases the Cupids of Boucher dressed as Savoyards; and further, he has put in a mild demurrer that the artist's washerwomen do not wash!