Chapter V: Part 5

Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin--a man of the _bourgeoisie_, as original as Hogarth--was born on the 2nd November 1699. It was in Paris, in the quarter of St. Sulpice, in the trading quarter where shopkeepers and skilled artisans wait on the wants of the neighbouring Faubourg St. Germain. He was of humble, decent parentage, as befitted the place; and he had for godmother, when he was christened, one Anne Bourgine, wife of Jacques Riche, who declared herself unable to sign her name in attestation of the event. Chardin’s father was a cabinet-maker; a dexterous craftsman, with a speciality which, along with such honour as it afforded, he passed on to one of his sons. He made, as Chardin’s best biographer has told us, ‘ces billards monumentaux dont une planche de Bonnart nous a gardé le dessin,’ and he made them for the King. But though he worked successfully and well, the burden of a family weighed on his fortunes, and his thought about his children was chiefly that they might find means of support. Chardin was given little education, and he was to have followed his father’s trade, but he showed, in his quite early youth, enough of promise as a painter for it to be held reasonable that he should enter M. Cazes’ painting-room. Cazes was not at this time an unknown artist, but Chardin learned almost nothing from him. The inventor of a _genre_, Chardin must needs be his own best teacher. Time and his own individuality alone could allow him his sturdy facility of touch. Only in working for himself could he acquire the schemes of colour, the tones, the delicate justice of expression, for which we admire him to-day. And if he was already independent of a master in the selection of his method, still more his own was his choice of the world which he observed to record.

That world, of which Chardin has given us so veracious yet so poetic a chronicle, was indeed the world of his daily life. His art concerned itself with the familiar pursuits of the lower middle class, homely because it was bound to be frugal, but refined because it was French. The grosser manners which reflected accurately--as manner is wont to do--the duller thoughts of our English lower middle class of a hundred years since, would never have afforded to an artist who desired inspiration from that class alone, such an opportunity as was offered to Chardin by the lower _bourgeoisie_ of France. The ruder civilisation of the London of that period provoked from English art no such exquisite transcript. And had it come, it could hardly have been welcomed, for in the two countries the taste of the day was different--the one was finer than the other. A similarity in coarseness, in imaginative Literature--the unquestioned grossness of Rétif de la Bretonne, placed by the side of the grossness of Smollett--may seem to deny it. But pictorial art makes the contrast evident. In France it was possible not only for Chardin to exist, but for him to be valued.

In a life that was eighty years long--a life mainly calm, and filled with peaceful work--Chardin was of course able to accomplish much, and to labour with variety; but whatever may have been his great successes in other departments of Art than that of _genre_ painting, it is by his mastery and originality in that that he may be expected most to interest us. It was to that that he chiefly devoted the middle years of his career. Other successes established his fame; other successes came happily to its support, long afterwards, when he was failing. We do not note, indeed, in Chardin, rapid transitions, sudden transformations--the one occupation was apt to overlap the other--but until we are to look into his course in great detail it may be accepted as roughly true that it was first still-life that engrossed him, then scenes of the domestic interior, and then, in the late days, portraiture. Of the two first, he was a painter in oil. For the third he employed pastel.

That, putting it briefly, was the course of his work. What was the course of his life apart from work?--the course, I mean, of that second life of the artist in painting or literature which is separate from his production, yet must affect it so much? How about the people who were nearest to him?--those whose society gave him his pleasure or withheld it? Chardin was twice married. While he was still engaged in the struggles of his youth, before his position was assured, he met a young girl, Marguerite Saintar, at some modest merrymaking, where his parents had planned that he should find her. Whether or not he knew of their aims, his own wishes seemed to have been at one with theirs. He liked Marguerite Saintar, who liked him in return. The attachment appears indeed to have been so mutual that in their loves there was no place for the proverb of the ‘one who kisses’ and ‘the other who holds out the cheek.’

In 1728, Chardin being twenty-nine, he was received into the Academy, and by 1731 he was permitted to marry the young woman to whom he was devoted. She was still but twenty-two, but in the few years that they had waited, their positions had a good deal changed. Chardin had won a reputation to which already a certain modest money value was attached, and the girl had lost her small fortune. The painter’s father was now opposed to the marriage, but his objections were overcome. The couple were wedded for but four years. Their only child, a son, remained to Chardin, when his wife died, after a time of union troubled as to outward matters, and which, in the wife’s declining health, it must have needed either satisfied love or a happy temperament to make even fairly bright. Chardin’s was a temperament of calm--the shrewd smiling face, painted by himself when he was seventy years old, shows him yet elastic and vivacious.

At forty-five--it was nine years after the close of the first domestic episode--Chardin married a second time. Still in the parish of St. Sulpice, to which from his youth he had been constant, he wedded a youngish widow, Françoise Marguerite Pouget. Later, he was to paint, in her agreeable features, a ‘rêve de femme et la philosophie de ses quarante ans.’ She bore him company during the rest of his life, from the days of his eminence to the days when fame forsook him. On the whole he was fortunate. He worked so slowly and deliberately that it would not have been easy for his painting to have made him rich, but he had no unsatisfied ambitions, and he enjoyed his art and his home and his assured friendships. No utterly disabling blow fell on him till he had entered upon his later years. Then his son died, who had been in a measure his pupil and follower. The remembrance of this, and his own gathering age, and the neglect of his art, affected him in the end, and he was a martyr to the disease which caused Bishop Butler, who himself suffered from it, to say that the keenest physical pleasure in life was the cessation of pain. In the last days dropsy followed upon stone. On the 6th of December 1779, Doyen wrote to a familiar friend of Chardin’s, M. Desfriches--‘Madame Chardin begs me to inform you of her situation, which is very pitiable.’ The last sacrament had been given to the aged painter. ‘M. Chardin a reçu le bon Dieu.’ ‘He is in a state of exhaustion which causes the greatest anxiety.’ Later in the day he died.

The placid and agreeable cheerfulness of Chardin’s temperament affords some key to the things which his art chose, and the things which it left aside. Contentment with the daily round, and with the common lot, alone could have allowed him to confine the subject of his work within the limits of a narrow experience. He painted what he saw, and he saw the _bourgeoisie_, nor was he anxious to extend the field of his vision. He is the artist of ‘Le Bénédicité,’ of ‘La Mère Laborieuse,’ of ‘L’Économe,’ of ‘La Bonne Éducation’--that is, he is the painter of decent middle-class life, in its struggle with narrow means, and in its happiness, which is that of the family and of tranquil and ordered labour. Even the pursuits of his youth, when he painted still-life, and the pursuits of his age, when he was drawing portraits, accorded with that chronicle of the Parisian _bourgeoisie_ which was the work of his mid-career; for the portraits were yet of everyday folk, and the still-life, the fruits, the china, the copper vessels, the silk-lined workboxes in whose familiar textures, colours, tones, his brushes revelled so adroitly, were the natural accessories and accompaniments of an existence led always within the limits of the home. Thus regarded--and this is the fair way of looking at his course--there is really no sudden change of route to be discovered in his artistic progress. His was the record of the things he saw; but in his youth he did not feel himself strong enough to portray, in what he saw, that which was one day to interest him most--Humanity.

He began very humbly. It was in 1728, when he was but twenty-nine, that his picture of ‘The Skate’ attracted some notice; and other objects of still-life were grouped with it at the Exposition de la Jeunesse, in the Place Dauphine, when M. Largillière--not a bad judge, one would have thought--inspected his things, and, not knowing that they were Chardin’s, protested that they must be the work of some very excellent Dutchman, and that Chardin would be wise if he copied them. Soon after that, as we have seen, he was accepted at the Academy, and from that time forward he exhibited at the Louvre. An exhibitor for forty years, he was for twenty years a hanger. That was a capacity in which he was sure to make enemies; but at least he was never blamed for bestowing unmerited prominence upon his own labours.

Chardin won, and he would have deserved to retain, a reputation by his still-life pictures alone, for the truth is, none of the older Dutchmen had conceived of common matter so nobly; and, sentiment apart, none had brought to its representation a touch quite so large, a palette quite so rich. To Chardin belongs at once a reality without meanness, and an arrangement without pretension or artifice. The very gathering of his groups of household things has a significance; it is characteristic; it reveals in him that sense of human interest with which his forerunners were scarcely occupied, and which we, in these later days, have missed equally in men as different as Blaise Desgoffe and William Hunt. Into Chardin’s pictures nothing is put thoughtlessly; and, possessed as he was of a perception uniquely keen to note the varied individuality of matter and its artistic interest, he yet had little of mere pride in his ability to paint so well the object and the substance of his choice. The simple materials gathered on his kitchen-slab have their place there of right, and tell the story of modest and frugal provision--from the little red jar of rough but highly glazed pottery, to the eggs and the saucepan. In one picture there will be exactly the material for the humblest meal, and the things that are required to prepare it--that and no more--a transcript from his own limited home in the early days, when he was an ill-rewarded painter and the husband of an ailing young woman whose fortune was gone. In another, and it is most likely of a later time, there are the fruits for the dessert of the well-to-do, and with them is the silver and the gold, and the sugar-bowl of now famous Dresden.

But though Chardin does justice to a luxury of colour, as in the ‘Goblet d’Argent,’ and in the picture--both are in the Salle Lacaze--of the brown wooden jewel-box whose pale-blue soft silk lining catches so discreet and delicate a light, the charm of the very simple never escapes him. A tumbler of water and three tiny onions, and there is a subject for Chardin. And in all the still-life of his earlier and of his middle years there is an unfailing vigour of draughtsmanship, a quiet truth of chiaroscuro, an effect of unforced picturesqueness; and with easy decisiveness he executes intricate schemes of colour. His hues, above all, are blended and fused; the influence of colour upon the colour that is near it he is found to have studied to perfection. He is a master of the elaborate interchange of reflections between the silver cup and the glazed copper-hued pottery, on which its light chances to play. And now the reflected light is cold and clear, and now it is vague and warm. To see these things as Chardin saw them, is really to see them for the first time. He opens to us, in a measure that is entirely his own, the charm of the world of matter.

No engraving--hardly even the soft lights and the opulent shadows of mezzotint--could render the character of this still-life of Chardin’s. No etching, short of Jacquemart’s, could do justice to work in itself so subtle, yet apparently so bold. But the manly and refined line-engraving of the French engravers of the middle of the Eighteenth Century was happily able to translate, with singular excellence, the work of Chardin’s middle age, a work in which the rendering of matter counted indeed for something, yet in which character, sentiment, story counted also for much.

It was in 1734, and still at the Place Dauphine, that Chardin showed that which seems to have been the first of his _genre_ pictures--a picture of a woman sealing a letter. From that time onwards, to about the beginning of his last decade, the painter’s work consisted chiefly of the record of the daily life of the civilised _bourgeoisie_, on whom Fortune never smiled too lavishly, but from whom she rarely turned with a quite empty hand. The value of the _bourgeois_ virtues, of reticent affection, of subdued love, of calm persistency in uneventful and continually recurring labour, Chardin himself must have felt. Unlike too many of his Dutch brethren, he saw life, and dealt with it, where life was not gross. His children have an unconscious innocence along with their reflectiveness; his boys are all ingenuous; his young women bring the delightfulness of grace to the diligent doing of household work in kitchen or parlour; and his seniors, in gaining experience, have not lost sweetness.

And with the interest of pleasantness you have in Chardin’s case the assurance of the interest of truth. Hogarth was as true, but he was less pleasant; Morland was as pleasant, but he was less true. Hogarth painted an individual; Morland generalised or idealised the individual, and was contented with a type. Chardin’s figures do not cease to be typical of the race, while they retain the delicate accuracy of personal studies, and betray an untiring reference not to a few models only, but to all the nature he lived amongst. Always without exaggeration, always with directness and a deep simplicity, the self-effacing art of Chardin accomplished its task, writing for us in picture after picture, or print after print, the history of the quietest of refined lives that the Eighteenth Century knew; arresting for us the delicate gesture, in itself so slight, yet so completely revealing; and tracing, on honest and sensitive faces, every expression that rises above broad comedy, or falls short of high passion.

Unaccustomed though it was to the sincere portrayal of homely things, Chardin’s own generation became quickly appreciative of the finest phase of his art, and from 1738 to 1757 (as M. Emmanuel Bocher has so laboriously and carefully recorded in a volume which is the inevitable supplement to the De Goncourts’ literary study) the best engravers of the time--Laurent Cars, Lépicié, Surugue, Le Bas, and others besides--were busy in the translation of Chardin’s work. Such accomplished draughtsmen with the burin could not fail, of course, to express his obvious subject, and to retain in the black and white of their copperplates the sentiment of the canvas. But they did more than this--their flexible skill allowed them to retain often Chardin’s manner and method; so that the very men who had rendered best, or as well as the best, the trembling light of Watteau and his immense and airy distance, with all its delicate gradations and infinite planes, are found to be the complete interpreters of Chardin’s peculiar breadth and simplicity, and of that deliberate firmness which is opposed the most to Watteau’s masterly indecision. The low prices at which the prints were issued made the prints saleable, and popularised Chardin’s art among the educated middle class. Often but a couple of francs were charged for an engraving worth, if it is in fine condition, three or four guineas to-day.

Contemporary criticism, and especially the criticism of Diderot, was favourable to Chardin, and may have assisted his fame. There were years in which ‘the father of modern criticism,’ occupied as much with intellectual charm and moral teaching as with technical perfection, fairly raved over the painter whose work was the eulogium of the _tiers état_. Lafont de St. Yonne, in 1746, places him very high in the ranks ‘des peintres compositeurs et originaux.’ In 1753, the Abbé le Blanc writes of him--‘Il prend la nature sur le fait.’ And a few years later it is Diderot who says: ‘It is always nature and truth. M. Chardin is a man of mind. He understands the theory of his art.’ Again, ‘M. Chardin is not a painter of history, but he is a great man.’ Then there dawns upon the critical mind some sense that the painter is repeating himself. From the old mint he reissues, with but slight modification, the old coins. Still-life apart, he can give us no new subjects; and the familiar ends by being undervalued, and the excellent is held cheaply. At last, from Diderot, in 1767, there comes the undisguised lamentation, ‘M. Chardin s’en va!’

Fortunately, however, though popularity passed from him, the old man was able to interest himself in a fresh department of work. He had painted a few portraits at an earlier time, but now his attention was attracted to portraiture in pastel--that was the medium in which an artist as masculine as himself, and as penetrating, had obtained an admitted triumph; and why should Chardin fail where Quentin Latour had brilliantly succeeded? Nor did he fail altogether. He was able to draw back upon himself, in the last years, a little of the old attention. And the pastel portraits, if they had the ‘_fragilité_’ had also the ‘_éclat_,’ which a well-known verse attributes to the then fashionable method. And in subjects which were portraits only, the flesh tints were no longer, by any possibility, effaced by the stronger reality which somehow Chardin had been wont to bestow upon the accessories in his pictures.

Pleasant to him and well merited as must have been that slight return of appreciation which came to Chardin in his eighth decade, it is not by the labour of that time that we are now likely to class him. With the galvanised revival of a classical ideal, his name, after his death, fell into dishonour. Some of his worthiest pictures tumbled, neglected, about the quays of Paris. Only within the last quarter of a century has there been evident the sign of an intention to do justice to his work; and for us his principal distinction is, as I have said already, that he is not only foremost, but was for years alone, in the perception of the dignity and beauty of humble matter, and of the charm which Art may discover in the daily incidents of the least eventful life.

(_The Art Journal_, 1885.)

MOREAU

One of the prettiest chapters of the volume in which French artists of the Eighteenth Century have recorded with grace and freedom the lighter manners of their age, is that certainly which was written by Moreau le Jeune. He employed, with extreme diligence, half a life in writing it. Born in March 1741, he died in November 1814. The son of a Parisian wigmaker, of the parish of St. Sulpice--which was also Chardin’s--he, with his brother, Moreau l’Aîné, a painter not greatly known, was drawn early into the circle of the producers of Art. He was a pupil of Louis de Lorrain, a now forgotten painter, whom he followed, at seventeen years old, to St. Petersburg. Coming back to Paris, he was in the workroom of Le Bas, the engraver, and there he learned the secret of the burin’s expression. He engraved with delicate skill. It was but slowly, however, that in his own designs he showed himself an accomplished draughtsman; for though his daughter, Madame Carle Vernet--who wrote an account of him--lets us understand that he was born drawing, there is much of his early work that is obviously laboured. Suddenly, the De Goncourts tell us--those critics who, with M. Maherault, the industrious collector, have studied him the best--suddenly his power of draughtsmanship declared itself--the individuality of his vision and method. It was in a drawing commissioned by Le Bas, who sought to engrave it, the ‘Plaine des Sablons’--a review by Louis XV. In it he was revealed as the successful draughtsman of festivals, the historian of lively ceremonies. And such success was rewarded. For, with commendable promptitude, in 1770--the year after the drawing was executed--he was appointed ‘Dessinateur des Menus-plaisirs,’ and five years later, when Cochin retired, ‘Dessinateur du Cabinet du Roi.’ Thus, while still a young man, Moreau’s position was assured, and he was left free to use much of his time in works on which it was possible to bestow a more exquisite grace than any which could be fitly employed upon labours in which official portraiture counted for much. Moreau was free to invent for himself, and free to illustrate the best literary inventions of a literary age. His career was before him, and the day not distant when he would produce ‘L’Histoire des Mœurs’ and the illustrations to the ‘Nouvelle Héloïse.’

I have indicated now, by a brief line or two, the direction in which Moreau le Jeune must chiefly be studied, and the places in which he may be seen if men would see him at his prime. Perhaps it may be a matter of taste, and a matter of taste only, whether one prefers him in his more spontaneous or in his more official work. The draughtsman is the same in either labour, though the inspiration is different. For me his greatest achievement is ‘L’Histoire des Mœurs,’ or, in another phrase, ‘Le Monument du Costume,’ which must be spoken of in detail later on. For many, and above all, for the lovers of curiosities, the seekers in byways of history, his celebrity hangs chiefly on his performance of the various ‘Sacres’; his records of the public functions, his ‘Fêtes at Versailles for the Marriage of the Dauphin and of Marie Antoinette’; his ‘Crowning of Voltaire’--at the Théâtre Français--in 1788; his ‘Fêtes at the Hôtel de Ville,’ on the birth of a new Dauphin to Louis XVI. Among these we may look perhaps principally at the ‘Crowning of Voltaire,’ for it has the virtues of them all. The drawing was engraved by Gaucher, who has preserved in the print the lively touch of the original. But what, one asks, was the occasion of the ceremony, what the cause of the ‘crowning’? At the Théâtre Français, Voltaire’s _Irène_ had been performed for sixteen nights. In those days of limited audiences that was a brilliant success. The bust of the poet is placed then in the middle of the stage, to be adorned and declaimed before. Madame Vestris--another, of course, than the Vestris known to Englishmen--reads aloud, and with emphasis, the lines of which the Marquis de Saint-Maur has hurriedly been delivered. Other performers, in more or less classic garb, cluster about her with garlands in their hands, ready to bestow them on the bust. In a box, high up on one side of the theatre, sits the demi-god, with two fair friends--one of whom is his niece, Madame Denis, and the other that Marquise de Villette to whom the print that represents the occasion is dedicated. The playhouse is full. The clapping of hands is lusty and enthusiastic. People rise in their boxes. Men stare upwards from the pit. Fine ladies crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the hero with the thin angular face, with its tell-tale lines of wit and mockery and observation.

Moreau must have seen the sight himself, and borne away the vivid recollection of it. Never was _l’actualité_--the thing that passes, the thing that may be insignificant to-day, but is to be History to-morrow--never was _l’actualité_ designed with a more fitting mixture of grace and precision. But in the more important work next to be spoken of, there was greater room for invention. Therein was Moreau, in the true sense, dramatist as well as draughtsman, for even if the outline of the subject was suggested to him by the speculator who undertook the publication, it was Moreau alone who gave veracity and character to the head and gesture of each person in the play.

The ‘Suite d’Estampes pour servir à l’histoire des Mœurs et du Costume dans le Dix-huitième Siècle’ began to be published in 1775 by Prault, of Paris, though it has been of late suggested that it was really conceived and undertaken by a German of the name of Eberts. The notion was to give a series of plates in which the most correct and fashionable manners, and the dress of the moment, and the furniture in vogue, should be together portrayed. The artist first pitched upon to recall them was, strangely enough, a foreigner. Freudeberg, a Bernese settled in Paris, a draughtsman of grace and charm undoubtedly, but of a closely bounded talent, had found favour with the public, and it was he who was chosen to make--and he did make--the first dozen drawings. The best engravers of the day were forthwith to engrave them. But by the time the first series was finished--and two odd pieces, I believe, not generally taken account of as belonging to the set--Freudeberg became home-sick and resolved to depart, and the business of continuing the work, which in the view of its promoter was to be a practical guide to fashion, was assigned to Moreau. Moreau did the second series, and then the third. The second dealt with the fortunes of a lady; the third with those of a _grand seigneur_, who was likewise something of a _petit-maître_. And for each there was a text, bald, it may be, but in a measure appropriate. It was anonymous, and chiefly descriptive. A little later, in a new issue, it was sought to associate the work with popular literature, and Restif de la Bretonne--a free-spoken ‘realist,’ whom, after long neglect, it is now, not altogether without cause, the fashion to enjoy--was invited to write his commentary, and his commentary took the form of quite a new interpretation. ‘Restif,’ says M. Anatole de Montaiglon, ‘au lieu de respecter le sentiment des trois suites, a isolé chaque motif et chaque planche.’ Restif, that is, has invented for each plate some fresh little story.

In life, the mind associates with a given and chosen landscape the more magnetic and memorable of the figures that people it. These alone bestow on it the reality of its human interest, and the others may be ignored. And so, among the masses of description and criticism of the arts of design, the writings which we really associate with the works they endeavour to vivify are those generally which have a charm of their own--the charm of the literary touch. Restif de la Bretonne’s stories, with all their faults, have just that charm. There is that in them which permits their author to take possession of the theme, so that the theme belongs no longer at all to whatever dullard chanced to be the first to treat it.

Two designs which I never see without wanting them are the most vivacious of Moreau’s series. They are the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra’ and ‘C’est un fils, Monsieur!’ Others, even among the most admirable, are more limited in their aim. The ‘Grande Toilette,’ for instance, as its name implies, is occupied more particularly with raiment. It is a very summary of fashion. It is the great lord, or the consummate _petit-maître_, displayed to us when dressing is completed. The edifice, it seems, has just been crowned. ‘Monseigneur,’ vividly writes Restif de la Bretonne, ‘Monseigneur is dressed; for some minutes already he has been standing; his cordon bleu is assumed; they have just given him his purse, and he has his bouquet.’ Yes, the edifice has been crowned: Monseigneur is ready; for--and the touch is untranslatable--they have _achevé de le chausser_. You see the neat shoes, the garter, the closely drawn stocking, the whole paraphernalia of the leg he was proud of. ‘_Achevé de le chausser_’--it is all in the phrase. And now he is free, no doubt, to enjoy the idleness of the morning, to do a service to a comedian, and, after an author has had audience of him, to accept the dedication of a book.

‘La Petite Loge’ is just as characteristic. What one sees is the inside of an opera-box, of which the tenants are a couple of bachelors of fashion. A dance is over, on the stage, and a girl who has taken part in it has been brought into the box, to be encouraged--to be touched under the chin. And here is an epitome of Restif’s story. A Prince, struck with the beauty of a ragged little child in the street, determined that she should be educated--pensioned her and her mother. Soon, however, busied with the greatest business of his class and day--‘occupied with intrigue,’ the story-teller tells us--he forgot his little protégée. She had her money regularly--all that she was promised--but he was too busy to think of her. Then, one night, at the Opera, smitten with the charm of a new dancer, he inquired who the dancer was, and ordered her to be brought to him. As soon as she was in the box, ‘Il lui passa sous le menton une main un peu libre’; but then it was disclosed to him that she was the child he had been struck with. Coulon, the famous dancing-master, had by this time taught her to some purpose. As for her future, her mother--an ancestress, I take it, of Halévy’s ‘Madame Cardinal’--had already a register of one hundred and twenty pages, filled with the propositions of the Court and the town. ‘Sa mère se reservait le droit de les comparer,’--for nothing, it seems, even by a Madame Cardinal, should be done in a hurry. Well, among the girl’s many lovers there was one who was unselfish. What did he want but to marry her! The Prince--not minded now to be outdone in chivalry--generously urged that he should be accepted, and Isabelle was glad to consent. But the King ordered the lover’s arrest, and the young people were separated. The girl lived prudently, in London and in Paris. She and her art were admired; but she died of a sudden illness. ‘Her young lover was in absolute despair, and the Prince, her protector, wept for her.’

In the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra’ we see the elegant and famous crowd that surged out of the theatre after a performance long looked forward to. ‘Gluck’s new Operas--it is essential to see them,’ said a writer who knew what it was that a fashionable woman could not afford to neglect. The ‘all Paris’ of the day was there; and at the end, when the crowd was in the lobbies, and the _aboyeur_ was calling the carriages, and the flower-girl was a messenger of intrigue--that was the moment that gave birth to plans for dainty suppers eaten away from home, the time when ‘abbés without a family learned the secret of how they might belong to all.’ What a bustle of flirtation! What a passing about of love-letters! The elegance of the scene must make amends, as best it can, for its light-hearted naughtiness.

‘C’est un fils, Monsieur!’ has no such forgiveness to ask of us. It is the blithest picture that we need to be shown of the home joys of the refined. A young husband, who is known already as ‘le Président,’ and who is a student and a fortunate collector of Art as well as a man of the world, rises from his study chair with outstretched hands and radiant face, as the newly born baby is carried in to him in triumph, followed by a procession of household retainers, and preceded by the lively Miss Rozette, the President’s foster-sister. Nothing is more expressive than the joyous pantomime of this privileged young woman, and the answering gestures of the newly made father; and delightful is the sentiment of the piece. In England, popular Art has sometimes made the joys of domesticity a little dull; but here the respectable is actually gay, and nothing but sunshine lies upon the path of duty.

Of the many writers whom Moreau avowedly illustrated, as distinguished from those who furnished a text for his designs, Rousseau was the one in whom he most believed, and for Rousseau much of his best work was executed. His designs for the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ were among the last of the important drawings wrought by him before he made that journey into Italy which his daughter speaks of as having ‘opened his eyes,’ but which, to whatever it may have ‘opened’ them, certainly closed them to the aspects of that France it was his truest mission to portray. The types of Julie and Saint-Preux are types which Moreau understood--he understood their impulse and their sentiment; and how many faults he would have forgiven them for their grace! To illustrate Rousseau was of course to have the opportunity--and in Moreau’s case it was also to profit by it--of representing both a deeper and a more immediate sensitiveness than most of that which claimed interpretation in the sometimes callous figures of the ‘Monument du Costume.’ Moreau was grateful for so fortunate an occasion, and he thoroughly responded to it. His Julie is ‘un type de Greuze honnête,’ with her ‘bouche entr’ouverte,’ her ‘regard profond,’ her ‘gorge couverte en fille modeste, et non pas en dévote,’ her ‘petite figure de blonde, mouvante et sensible.’ Moreau read Rousseau again and again: he genuinely cared for him, and when Rousseau died, the death-scene was not suffered to pass unrecorded, and of the grave in the Ile des Peupliers, by Geneva, he made a little etching.

Presently, however, Moreau was to be led away from the very sentiment of the scenes he had understood the best. His individuality was lessened, his flexibility arrested by the journey to Italy, undertaken with Dumont, the architect, in 1786. And his association with David--‘le peintre de Marat assassiné et le membre de la Convention’--operated to make more certain his style’s divorce from all the natural grace and flowing sentiment and homely unheroic dignity with which it had lived so fruitfully for more than twenty years. The illustrator of Rousseau was already less happy as the illustrator of Voltaire; and in 1791 Moreau was received into the Academy; the drawing which procured him the distinction being that of ‘Tullie faisant passer son char sur le corps de son père.’ Wille, the engraver, writes, in his published journal, how he went to the Academical Assembly when Moreau was received. ‘There was an Academician to receive: it was Monsieur Moreau, draughtsman and engraver. He had begged me to be his sponsor, and I presented him to the Assembly with a great deal of pleasure.’ But Moreau’s entrance into the Academy was the signal for his exit from the regions of his native art. The bibliophile may seek with avidity for the editions of Renouard, which years afterwards Moreau illustrated. But his verve had deserted him; his talent was gone; his originality had yielded up the ghost. And somehow, too, in his last years, and in his old age, poverty overtook him. In February 1814, he wrote to M. Renouard that he was penniless--‘Je n’ai pas le sou.’ Friends he had, though; and one of the first acts of Louis XVIII. was to reappoint him to the old office--‘draughtsman to the King.’ He held the place for but a short time; for on the 30th November, in the same year, Moreau died. With his later style both he and his daughter, and the group, too, by whom they were surrounded, were content--no one assailed it then or looked back regretfully to the earlier--but it is by the work of the first half of his career as an artist that Moreau finally takes rank as one of the most precise and flexible of draughtsmen, and as the closest possible observer of the gay, great world that he portrayed.

(_The Art Journal_, 1885.)

GAINSBOROUGH AT THE GROSVENOR GALLERY

‘If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire for us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the art, among the very first of that rising name.’ So wrote, in his Fourteenth Discourse, Sir Joshua Reynolds--a lover of pomp and ceremony even in the art of Literature--doing therein ‘untimely justice’ to the merits of his contemporary, whom he survived. Since then the English School, whose separate existence this accomplished admirer of the Roman and the Bolognese did but doubtfully and modestly look forward to, has become an accomplished fact, and all but a hundred years after his death, ‘the talents of the late Mr. Gainsborough’ are honoured at the Grosvenor Gallery. In the two large rooms and in the vestibule there are to-day exhibited about a couple of hundred pieces from his brush; the great Sir Joshua Exhibition of last winter is felt to be successfully rivalled; and an opportunity is given to the student to perceive the range, the flexibility, the spontaneity of Gainsborough’s art.

Gainsborough, like any other distinct individuality in Art or Letters, is best understood when he is taken simply on his merits, without reference to other personalities who happened to be of his time. To institute a perpetual comparison between him and Sir Joshua is to make the sterile blunder that is made when Dickens is pitted against Thackeray, the epic of _Copperfield_ against the satire of _Vanity Fair_. In each case it was only accident that brought the men into juxtaposition; and as regards Gainsborough, it is rather with Velasquez or Vandyke, or with some French Eighteenth Century Master of familiar grace, that we should compare him. These were his kindred, with these he had something in common, as the Romans, the Bolognese, and sometimes the Venetians, were the kindred of Sir Joshua. And yet, to a certain extent, comparison between Gainsborough and Sir Joshua is even now unavoidable. Living at the same period and in the same great town, painting the same people, and--save for the briefer apparition of Romney--dividing between them, though dividing unequally, the applause of polite Society, that choice which the men of their time had to make of one of them, has still to a certain extent to be made by us. Often, of course, we are liberated from the necessity of any such narrow alternative; but when we look at the portraits, by the two artists, of Johnson, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, the characteristics of each--what each lacked and what each brought to the accomplishment of his task--cannot but suggest themselves. And it will then be apparent that Reynolds painted with a more obvious learning, Gainsborough with a more spontaneous grace; Reynolds often with a more determined adherence to the particular character, Gainsborough with a keener enjoyment of the suggestions that character afforded for translating a sometimes uncouth nature into an exquisite art. Take, for instance, the two portraits of Mrs. Siddons: the learning and tradition of the Schools, the disposition towards a dignity that may be well-nigh pompous, are in Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic Muse’; the spontaneous grace, the disposition towards simplicity are in the Mrs. Siddons of Gainsborough. Further, again, to compare the portraits of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua with that one by Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery, is to see that here is an instance in which the fidelity--the unflattering fidelity--is on Reynolds’ side, and the idealisation on Gainsborough’s. Yet it is hardly needful to declare of so great a man as Gainsborough that he never idealised merely that he might flatter. He idealised because his vision of the world was bound to be poetic. He was a poet above all things. The ideal was his atmosphere. But Sir Joshua, with all his accomplishments, lived with the prose of the world, and, as a rule, was but in vain ambitious to reach to its poetry.

The poetic character of Gainsborough’s mind and work is, then, the first thing to be realised, if we are to understand his pictures. For otherwise we shall be offended at exaggerations and astonished at suppressions, both of which are the result of a method he adopted in obedience to his temperament, which combined, of course, a gentle and genuine love of Nature with a consuming thirst to see that Nature was never deprived of the assistance of Art. Gainsborough has been written of as the earliest Master of Naturalism--save, indeed, Hogarth--in the English School. Nor is the description untrue; in the sense that he sought his inspiration from Nature, instead of from academies, and that his landscape had more than a suggestion of Suffolk or of Somerset. Yet Morland carried Naturalism much further than Gainsborough, and Constable much further than Morland. Gainsborough was never a mere copyist of Nature. From the first he composed and arranged, but his artifices were seldom very apparent, and his control over actual form--his artistic modification of it--was gentle and tempered, and this is most of all made evident by the display of his Landscape. With the permanent exhibition at the National Gallery and the annually recurring winter shows at Burlington House, no one of course has any need to be ignorant of the fact that one of the most fascinating of the painters of portraits was also a landscape painter. But the display at the Grosvenor Gallery will bring home to people a truth some may have overlooked, because at the Grosvenor Gallery Gainsborough’s range in landscape work is seen to have been extensive. No single early painting there, indeed, can claim to be quite the equal of the ‘Great Cornard’ picture in Trafalgar Square, but the paintings are so many, and the subjects so varied, that the impression they produce must be great. In the East Room, the smaller room, are some of the most interesting of these landscapes. There--to begin with only a minor example--is the ‘Landscape with Figures against a Tree’: one of the very few dated pictures. It is of the year 1775, or just about the time that the painter left Bath for London. It is interesting as seeming to belong to an earlier period, as carrying on to a time when most of his work had changed character, the features of his more youthful work. It is a bit of every day English scenery, accepted for what it is, with a tolerance of the commonplace rare with him, indeed in any day, but, as one would have thought, quite impossible to his later life. Here, too, is one of his few failures to attain what was really beautiful, ‘A Landscape with Cows,’ lent by the trustees of the Duke of Newcastle--an artificial scene of blue distance and of hot and ‘unconvincing’ foreground. ‘A View in Shropshire’ is in character not less classical, not less suggestive of Claude, but it is far more successful. The foreground is of wooded country, brown and gold; behind it, a richly illuminated champaign ends abruptly in a conical hill, which is the Wrekin beheld in the light of a selected hour. The Catalogue of the Exhibition--full of industriously compiled detail and of quaint anecdote, carefully burrowed for in half-forgotten places--might, perhaps, have chronicled the fact that the great picture we are speaking of is repeated, feature by feature, in another. But this other happens to be hung so high that its merits we can hardly estimate. Its pedigree, however, is unimpeachable. The little ‘Landscape with Horses Ploughing’ recalls, in the disposition of its objects, Turner’s ‘Windmill and Lock,’ and Turner, who was never above taking suggestions--who took them from every one--may possibly have seen it. Lord Bateman’s ‘Boys and Fighting Dogs,’ though by no means among the most attractive things, is at least memorable. It shares with several other pictures the business of proving that as a draughtsman of animals--certainly as a draughtsman of dogs--Gainsborough had few rivals; and it is one of the rare instances of Gainsborough’s painting what is properly called a subject picture--a picture in which the portrayal of an incident has been the first care. Furthermore, the boys here--like that uncouth child, ‘Jack Hill, in a Cottage’--are, at all events, perfectly natural examples of everyday folk. Generally his cottage urchins, though they have rustic grace and rustic wildness, though they roll on the greensward and dabble in the brook, are not profound studies of a real peasantry; and, though Leslie indeed said of the ‘Girl with a Pitcher’ that nothing more beautiful had ever been painted, we may remember that this lavish appreciation by a brother artist who was invariably generous was bestowed at a time when the graver aspects of the peasant’s life had, as far as pictorial art is concerned, been mirrored only in the art of Turner. The student of to-day, the student of Millet, can hardly single out for truthfulness, though he can always single out for grace, the rustics of Gainsborough. Into the realities of peasant life, Gainsborough scarcely even essayed to have any deep entrance.

The large ‘View at the Mouth of the Thames’ is one of the most realistic, one of the least poetic, of Gainsborough’s pictures. It is an instance of how well this curiously flexible genius could at need perform that which somebody else could still perform much better. And if it had not to be remembered that Collins and Turner came after Gainsborough, instead of before him, we should say the same about the Duke of Westminster’s ‘Coast Scene.’ Here a sea that has only enough of movement to give it vivacity and sparkle, runs up to a narrow breadth of beach, behind which a cliff rises. Three figures are on the beach--a group of country or of fisher folk; a man kneeling by a basket hands up a fish, to be inspected by two girls, who bend towards him. The inspiration of an ancient master and some concession to ancient traditions are discernible in the umber and golden shores of another piece. It is in the ‘River Scene with Cattle’ that Gainsborough is more characteristic; it is there that he delights us in full measure with that which is his own. The scene is at a ferry somewhere in the Eastern Counties, where the stream is wide, the land large and flat, the sky ample, the horizon infinite. At the edge of a miniature cliff, stands a group of cattle. Below them are figures in shadow, and from the water, to the right, rise high into the sky the tall and narrow sails of two fishing-smacks drawn up together. Here the scene is an everyday place, but Gainsborough has known how to choose the hour; his selection of objects has been justified by a fortunate grouping; he has secured a rhythm of line second only to that which lies at the service of a subtle draughtsman of the figure or a great Ornamentist; and the hues of silvery blue and golden grey with which his picture is flooded, are those that gather only on the palette of a born colourist. When this picture has been adequately seen, and its calm radiance appreciated, the student has little need to go further to find what Gainsborough was as a poetical recorder of earth and sky, and what as a pure painter. But for variety’s sake, and for the sake of noting how much Gainsborough saw for himself, and how much he was influenced, too, by the ways in which predecessors as different from each other as Hobbema and Cuyp had seen the world and presented it, it is well to look carefully at some of the smaller landscapes in the other and larger room. There are, perhaps, especially the ‘Small Landscape,’ with luminous white clouds, remote in a lofty sky; the ‘Forest Scene,’ and the unfinished sketch, in which Gainsborough has given to a little group of gypsies and their beasts a greater dignity than a Fleming could have bestowed on a Flight into Egypt. There are, of course, larger works not claiming less attention; and one and all, by their deficiencies as well as by their merits, show that the greatness or the general attractiveness of Gainsborough as a landscape painter is due not much to his naturalism--which was naturalism only in his own day, and is seen to have been almost idealism in ours. His greatness as a landscape painter consists much more in his continual endowment of Nature with the grace and magic of Style.

* * * * *

In Portraiture, the only failing that can be laid to Gainsborough’s charge--and it may at times be a serious one--is that he was apt to be less impressed by individuality of character than by the occasion which his subject presented for the painter’s triumph in brush-work. Facile observer as he was, and wonderful draughtsman, it was not often that he braced himself to such an effort of stern realism as was made in the portrait of ‘Judge Skinner.’ This light of the law, sitting robed--with the keen, sagacious face perfectly dominant over all the splendour of attire--was painted (on the canvas of which we are now speaking) for Christ Church, Oxford, of which in 1742 he had been a student; but the Grosvenor Gallery contains another, though a less admirable, presentment of the same person. This, though inferior, comes likewise from an unimpeachable quarter--it is lent by the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn. Of portraits of William Pitt, there are several by Gainsborough; but his best representation of all, of the young man who governed England, is that which comes, like the second portrait of Skinner, from Lincoln’s Inn. The natural charm of the model here accorded with that which was the frequent preoccupation of Gainsborough’s art, and sincere must have been the painter’s pleasure in dealing with a face which--like the face of Dickens in his youth, two generations later--expressed sweetness with firmness, and placidity with boundlessness of resource. The portrait of ‘David Garrick’ is less satisfactory as an effort of craftsmanship. The shrewd little lady who succeeded the great and genial Peg Woffington in Garrick’s love, declared that it was the ‘best portrait ever painted of her Davy,’ so we will not attempt to dispute the excellence of the likeness; but the thought that inspired the composition was comparatively trivial and commonplace. In a park-like scene, the background somewhat suggestive of Garrick’s favourite retreat at Hampton, the actor whose attentions were wont to be divided between the Tragic and the Comic Muse--as Sir Joshua has expressed so suggestively in his happy allegory--stands by a pedestal on which is placed the bust of Shakespeare, and Garrick has his arm round the bust, and almost familiarly caresses it. More valuable would have been a picture in which the head of the actor had been more dominant than the _dégagé_ gesture. The head of Garrick, however, if the story goes truly, was always a puzzle to Gainsborough. Of Garrick and of Foote--mobile comedians, baffling beyond all men--he is said to have exclaimed, when he essayed to paint them, ‘Rot them for a couple of rogues, they have everybody’s faces but their own.’