Chapter IV: Letter XIV

The Louvre.--Patronage of the Fine Arts.--The Luxembourg.--The
Palais des Beaux Arts.--The Sêvres Porcelain.--The
Gobelins.--Manners of the common People in Paris.--A fair
Cicerone.--Her remarks on Painting.--The French, Flemish, and
Italian Schools.--English Patronage of Art.--The New National
Gallery.--Sir Christopher Wren.--A tender Adieu.

PARIS, Nov. 14th, 1835.

I have passed the morning in the _Louvre_, and have nothing in my head but galleries and pictures; and you must expect nothing else through the whole of this letter. You may dread a long letter too, for you know, the less one is conversant with a subject the more one is likely to reason upon it. In the Louvre, the pictures occupy both walls of a room, thirty feet wide by a quarter of a mile long, and consist of about twelve hundred pieces of native and foreign artists. In the same building also is the _Musée des Antiques_ containing 736 statues, with bronzes and precious vases; also the _Musée des Desseins_, with 25,000 engravings; the _Musée de la Marine_, with models of vessels; and the _Musée Egyptien_, with collections of Egyptian, Roman and Grecian antiquities. An exhibition too is held here, from the first of March till May every year, of the works of living artists, painters, sculptors, engravers, architects, and lithographers.

Paris, in patronising the fine arts, has taken the lead of all the cities of Europe. The government spends annually large sums, and extensive purchases are made by the royal family, and wealthy individuals. They do not hoard their pictures in private houses, as in England, but place them, as in ancient Greece, in the public collections. They improve, therefore, the public taste and embellish their city. It is one of the means by which they entice amongst them rich foreigners, who always pay back with usurious interest the money spent for their entertainment.

There is, besides, a public gallery in the palace of the Luxembourg, which contains collections of paintings and sculpture of living French artists since 1825. The other museums are those of Natural History at the Garden of Plants, and the _Musée d’Artillerie_, containing all kinds of military weapons, used by the French from the remotest periods of their history; also the “Conservatory of Arts and Trades,” where models of every French invention, from a doll-baby to an orrery and steam-engine, have been preserved--the greatest museum of gimcracks, they say, in the world. This gives two courses of gratuitous lectures under distinguished professors, and has a free school in which young men are taught the arts.

To these you may add the “_Palais des Beaux Arts_,” begun in 1820, and now near its completion, which is destined to be one of the splendid miracles of Paris. The “Gallery of Architecture,” which is already rich, is to be increased with copies of the choice sculpture, statuary, and architecture of all the world, so that students will have no longer to run after the originals into foreign countries.

There are two manufacturing establishments here with galleries of their produce, which have dignity enough to be mentioned even with the Louvre; the Sêvres Porcelain, and the weaving of the Gobelins. In the gallery of the porcelain, some of the specimens are inconceivable. There was scarcely less difference between mother Eve and the clay that made her than there is between the original materials, and one of these exquisite vases. Gold blushes to see itself outdone by the rude earth at the tables of the Rothschilds and other lords. Plate of the precious metals is mean in comparison. Porcelain has fragility in its favour. The best mine, which sleeps between the Broad and Sharp Mountains would scarce buy you a dinner-set. I priced you breakfast plates at 2,000 francs each, and a table to set them on at 30,000; and a vase with American scenery, as if Iris herself had painted it, 35,000. But why, after all, put this exquisite art upon matter so destructible, and upon objects destined to mean services? Why bake Vandykes upon your cream jugs, and Raffaelles and Angelos on your wash-basin, and the Lord knows what else? There are things which admit of ornament only to a certain extent.

At the Gobelins the most intricate groups of paintings are interwoven in the carpets and tapestry, of churches and palaces. The great Peter superintending the battle at Pultawa, the Duke d’Epernon carrying off the queen, and St. Stephen pouring out his soul towards Heaven are all under the shuttle or starting into life, from the woof and chain of a weaver’s web. And here is Marie de Medicis, and two other ladies, just out of the loom. The most effeminate tints, the nicest features, have a glow and delicacy equalled but by the best paintings upon canvass. Only think! the charms of the divinest female; her arched eye-brows, her lips, like the opening flower, gently parted, as if going to speak; her graceful smile, which steals away the senses, and all the heaven of her features, may be expressed in wool.

Here are carpets to be trodden on only by queens, and to be purchased only with queens’ revenues. One of the cheapest is 8,000 dollars. Two hundred years have been employed upon a single piece. All that you have read about the “weaving of the Dardan Dames,” of the webs of Penelope and other ladies, is nothing but mythology. Here is a Bonaparte in the plague of Egypt, so natural and so animate, of such questionable shapes and features, one is almost ready to exclaim with Hamlet, “Be thou a spirit”--(the temptation to a pun is not quite so bad as the offence.) You are tempted almost to speak to him, so full is he of expression and vitality. The workmen of the Gobelins require six years’ apprenticeship, and twenty years to become proficients. Under the ancient government they were locked up for life, like old Dædalus, within the walls, and no one is now permitted to buy or sell without an order of the king. A dyeing establishment is kept up under an able chemist, expressly to supply this factory with colours.

The doors of all the French galleries are opened on certain days of the week to every body, and a special favour of every day is extended to strangers. Minerva, like the others of her sex in Paris, cares not to be rumpled a little by the crowd, or stared at by the vulgar. The rich are refined always sufficiently for their own will and resources; but in the condition of the poor man--his poverty, the contempt which follows poverty, every thing tends to debasement. It is surely then wise in a government to devise such institutions, and encourage such modes and fashions as may ennoble the motives, refine the tastes, and employ innocently the idle hours of the poor; and since one member of a community cannot be badly affected without injury to the rest, it is the proper business of the rich to second such measures of policy. It is certain that no city in the world contains so many violent principles of corruption as Paris, and it is equally certain that the common people have an air of neatness and decency, not equalled by the same class in any other country. As for grace, it is here (and it is no where else) a mere bourgeois and plebeian quality. The distinction too is as remarkable in conversation as in manners. There is not a milliner or shop-girl at fifteen sous a-day, whose head is not a little museum of pictures; she will converse with you too of the Malibrans, and Taglionis, and Scribes, with nearly the same sense and the same phraseology as the _Journal des Spectacles_. But the Frenchman seeks his recreation in the dance, the theatre, in the pure air of his gardens, and in these galleries of statues and paintings, whilst the Englishman skulks into his gin-shop. No one can walk into these galleries on the public days, and not see, that there is in man a natural attraction for the arts which exalt and refine his nature. We follow our mother country in many things, and we follow her especially in her whims and her vices. She shuts out the public from her pictures, and then complains that there is no public taste. And she imports her Lelys and Godfrey Knellers from abroad. We have a gallery in Philadelphia, and though there is but one picture in it, the admission to this one picture is a shilling sterling. It is the “Last Supper;” and we have puffed in all the newspapers the religious impressions which it inspires (for a shilling.) I ask pardon of the “Academy of Fine Arts;” it also has pictures, which are visited by fashionable people once a-year, admission twenty-five cents.

The ancients set more value upon this silent kind of instruction than we moderns. A Spartan mother rocked her baby in a shield, and she dressed the household gods in armour, that her little Leonidas might have the image of war before his eyes, even in his prayers. She even commenced this course of education before the child’s birth. For she took care to have bucklers and helmets, and portraits of Castor and Pollux, and other heroes, hung around her chamber, and to have some martial air played over her couch of a morning, that she might not, by pusillanimous dreams, spoil her child. The “city councils” too of that country, employed certain grave old men, good for nothing else, to inspect the public morals, and especially to take care that the recreations of the youth should be public. In a word, they thought it better, by such impressions and such vigilance, to anticipate the dispositions of men to be bad, than to build “Houses of Refuge,” and “Penitentiaries” to correct them.

We prefer to connive at the opportunity of sin, till men have become rogues, and then hang them. But, to take the example of a people nearer our own manners, there can be no doubt that the excellent specimens of the Fine Arts, exhibited daily to the Athenians in the embellishment of their city, with the pomp of their games and festivals, gave them that exquisite taste, that grace of movement, language, dress and manner, in which they had an acknowledged superiority over all other people in the world.

To enter the Louvre this morning, I used the stranger’s privilege; and unfolding my passport, a lady, with so much the air of a lady, as to be sure of meeting no repulse, taking my arm, said, “Sir, I will ask the favour of going in with you. I will be your wife two minutes,” and we went in together. A Frenchwoman says and does things sometimes at which our American honour grows very indignant, yet does she say and do no harm. In conversing with this woman, I did not doubt “two minutes” of her being of the best breeding and education. She had resided at Florence, and a long time at Rome, and had exactly that kind of information which the necessities of my condition required. I entreated her of course not to be divorced at the end of the “minutes.” She has wit and learning, and is eloquent to the very ends of her fingers. Her personal beauty, too, is of no common order, but just threatening to fade; the period at which woman, to my taste, is much more interesting than with the full blown charms of seventeen summers in her face. She has then the interest of a possession which soon may escape; she has maturity of intelligence, of feeling and expression, to which the brilliancy of youthful beauty is as the tinsel to the pure gold.

The Louvre has nine divisions, bounded each by an arch resting on four Corinthian columns, and pilasters of beautiful marble, having bases and capitals of bronze-gilt; and between them are mirrors, and splendid ancient and modern vases and busts. Three of these parts are assigned to the French, three to the German, Flemish, and Dutch, and as many to the Italian and Spanish masters. I walked with my amiable _virtuosa_ up and down this enchanting gallery for an hour; gathering wisdom, not being allowed to gather any thing else, from her lips.

And we conversed, not of politics, or the town scandal, but of what it imported me more to know, of Florence, and of the treasures of that city of the arts--of Florence, the birth-place of Dante, of Galileo, of Machiavelli, of Michael Angelo; and we conversed of those two great patrons of Florentine learning, Cosmo and Lorenzo de Medici,--how the arts revived under their care, and flourished under their munificent protection, and how much more one man often does towards the glory and honour of a country, than ten thousand of his neighbours. And so we walked, and then stood still, and looked up, to the great fatigue of our legs, a contingency which the French foreseeing, had provided against by placing sofas along each side the room, and in front of the finest paintings; so down we sat opposite the “French School.”

Here I put the lady back to her rudiments, and I am going to give you a tincture of her remarks. Before coming to this country I had seen neither statues nor pictures. I had seen only Miss “Liberty,” on the bow of an East Indiaman, and a General Washington or two, hospitably inviting one to put up for the night. In a word I had studied only in that great National Gallery of ours, the sign-posts. So the less I say of my own wit upon this subject, the better.

“To improve your taste, sir, in painting, it is not the best way to dissipate your attention upon all this variety. Select a few pieces of the best and study these alone, for an hour a day, until by comparison you can distinguish their beauties, with the style and character of each master. You will then be able to read with satisfaction through the rest of the great volume; you will know what to receive, what to reject, and how to economise your time and attention. Here are the French masters. It was under Louis XIV., and with Poussin, this school began. The great number of pictures at this time brought to Paris and exhibited publicly gave a general taste for the art; and we have attained since a very eminent distinction, without, however, reaching the great masters of the Flemish and Italian schools. We have all the dry particulars of excellence, such as the labour of copying the fine classical models may produce. All schools, under the authority of a master, lead off from nature, to imitation--to a mean practice of mere copying, which fetters and debases genius.

“How much better to have open galleries, as the ancient Greeks, untrammelled; where the mind may follow its own impulses, and recommend itself at once to the great tribunal, before which all human excellence must come at last for its recompense and fame. Hogarth, Reynolds, Wilson, and West, were all eminent before the birth of the Royal Academy, and who does not know that Reynolds would have been more eminent still, if he had not been thrust into its Presidency? Raphael never read a treatise or heard a lecture on his art. All the great painters under Leo X. were of no school; they were fostered by individuals and the public, and all the efforts of the academy of St. Luke have not been able to continue the race. When painting shows her face in your country, be wise, and do not cramp her natural movements by the trammels of an academy.

“In this French school you must admire the life, the movement, the variety of _Lebrun_; the serene and noble expression, the correct, yet grand and heroic style of the classical _Poussin_; and him, whose landscapes, and tableaux contend for superiority, _Claude Lorraine_; especially the trees, suns, moons, and lightning of his beautiful landscapes; the fine sea pieces too, and landscapes of _Vernet_; and _Lemoine_, immortal for his Hercules. This last died of melancholy from the neglect of his patron and the envy of his rivals. The next time we meet, I shall hear you all day praise the grace and sentiment of _Le Sueur_, and the more animated grace of _Mignard_; you will have adored his cupola of Val-de-Grace, and his virgins, too, and above all his St. Cecilia, celebrated so magnificently by Molière.

“See what a different world!--The phlegmatic and laborious Hollander. This is nature, as it is in Amsterdam, fat, Dutch nature; wrought out to a neat and prudish perfection, to be accomplished only by Dutch patience, admirable in animals, fruits, flowers, insects, night-scenes, vessels, machines, and all the objects of commerce and arts; admirable, too, in perspective; its clara obscura is magic, it paints the very light of heaven; the shades in nature’s self are not better blended. Don’t you love this shop; this peasant’s kitchen; and the grotesque dresses, and comic expression of these figures? All, as you see, in this school have the same face; the artist has no idea of a connection between faces and minds. Scipio is a Dutch burgomaster.

“Here are Alexander and Diogenes; either in the tub will do for the philosopher; both are Dutchmen. But what harmony of colours; what living carnations; what relief; what truth and character!--these are _Rembrandt’s_, and even these want spirit and dignity. Let us sit down here and take a long look at _Rubens_, the Titian, the Raphael of the Low Countries--of the singular beauty of his heads, his light and easy pencil; the life, harmony and truth of all his compositions. The whole world goes to Anvers, alone, to see the works of this extraordinary genius; to see his “Crucifixion,” you would go any where; you can hear his thief scream upon the cross. And here is _Jordaens_, almost his equal, and the portraits, never to be surpassed, of _Vandyke_. Here, too, the inimitable village fêtes, and grotesque peasantry, and soldiers of _Teniers_; the landscapes and farms, and cattle of Potter; and _Van-der-meer’s_ sheep, as natural as those which feed upon the down.--These last, of nearly the same character, are the Germans, _Durer_, _Holbein_, and _Kneller_.

“And now the divine Italy. The noble Florentines; _Michael Angelo_ and _Vinci_ at their head;--the fruitful, the lively, the imaginative, the graceful, the majestic, and every other excellence combined. If you love the arts you will live always in Florence. There is nothing here of Angelo, but this is the _Joconde_ of Vinci, the most finished portrait in the world.

“Next is Lombardy, and her fine forms and expression; her masterly composition, and colours, so sweetly blended; all the best qualities of “excelling nature” are in this school formed by _Correggio_, who received, they say, his pencil from the Graces. His drapery seems agitated by the winds. And who are these others, who divide equally with him the admiration of the world? you cannot remove your eyes from their charming figures--it is _Permessan_ and the _Caraccis_, severe and correct; and he who excels them all three in some of the principal features of the art, he who paints nature in her defects, and with irresistible force and truth, _Caravaggio_; and next _Guido_, who paints her majesty and graces; and _Albano_, in her winning, and poetic enchantments; and _Domenichino_, whose obstinate genius dragged him to the very heights of Parnassus, in spite of the predictions of his masters.

“In the Roman School, founded upon the antique models, you will have an inexhaustible source of enjoyment. Who does not love _Raphael_; his works are as well known as Virgil’s. Who can admire enough the natural expression and attitude of his figures, and his composition, simple and sublime. Here are _Titian’s_ lively portraits, and landscapes, never to be surpassed in force and boldness of colouring. And here is the fruitful, and lively, and dignified _Paul Veronese_, with his brilliant, various and magnificent draperies. His “Marriage of Cana,” is one of the chef-d’œuvres of Italy. And here are tableaux and landscapes by the wild fancy of _Salvator Rosa_, excelling in savage nature; who paints the arid plain and carnage of the battle as no one else. In America, he would have painted your Mississippi, where its mighty flood rolls through the silent wilderness, or your War Dance; or the Hut of the Woodman, where the panther looks through his window, and the rattlesnake coils upon his pillow, or the savage upon his lonely cliff; while surveying the firmament, he reads God’s Holy Scriptures in the skies.

“---- Of this the composition is perfect; the passions are violent, but natural, and without disagreeable distortion, and the drapery even beyond ideal perfection.--The figures have less majesty than Michael Angelo’s, and are more within our common nature.--His women, as you see, are too plump, and his children too grave, whose is it?

“---- And this exquisite woman? with no sins of her ancestors in her face, and none of their diseases and deformities in her limbs; with all the sweet sensibilities, as the colours of the rainbow, in her expression--Who is she?--Who gathered these fugitive charms into her features, and who this divine grace about her limbs, to play upon her tapering arms, and neck and bosom, as the soft moonlight upon the stream?---- Who made her? * *

“---- All these eminent beauties, and this dove-like innocence to be thrown away, as the fragrance of the wild rose upon a desert; no taste to value; no * *

“* * To be sure, her unforbidden husband! * * * This other figure of the same canvass you will no doubt easily recognise. * *

“---- It is no wonder; it is a bad likeness. It should have less of the terrific attributes. Cloven feet and horns are the stupid imaginations of the monks. Without the temptations to sin what exercise or opportunity is there in virtue? What becomes of human greatness--of honesty, piety, charity, continence and all that props up the dignity of our race?--To be well painted he should have nothing of a supernatural being; he should have human passions to enlist human sympathies. He should be a gentleman; a gentleman too in his most seducing and fascinating form. With such a nature only he can sustain the functions assigned to him by Providence, especially amongst women; and to corrupt the world you must begin by them.

“There is here, as you see, no _Ecole Britannique_. The English have given us nothing in return for our Claudes and Poussins. Yet England does not yield to any nation of Europe, in the munificence of her patronage. One of her dukes pays for a picture of West’s 3,000 guineas; another buys “Murillo’s” at half a million in a year. Walpole’s collection at Houghton was valued at 200,000 pounds sterling. And she has not only invited the arts from foreign countries, by sumptuous presents, but has pensioned them, given them degrees in the universities, knighted them, and married them with her proudest nobility. Some pretend that she wants the lively and quick sensibilities necessary to success in this art; that she raises paintings, as the fruit of the Indies, not natural to her climate. But the climate of Rubens, Vandyke and Rembrandt is quite as Bœotian as that of Great Britain. Who ever heard of the sensibilities of the Hollander? The atmosphere, which nourished a Milton, would not have smothered a Raphael, or a Michael Angelo; nor would Salvator Rosa have withered, where Shakspeare ‘warbled his native wood-notes wild.’

“One of the great stimulants to excellence has been wanting in England altogether, and is now weakened throughout Europe--the wealth, the influence, the enthusiasm of the Catholic Religion. This spirit which, like the mythology of the Greeks, put a God in every niche of the Temple; which produced the Angelos and Rubens, and breathed inspiration into the artist and spectator, is quenched. Your Presbyterian prejudices of the impressions produced by paintings, as well as by architecture and music, are now obsolete. Idolatry is to be feared only among a savage or very ignorant people. We have got beyond these limits; and a picture of the Saviour or the Virgin can have no worse effect now in a church, than the picture of a father or mother in the habitation of their children.

“England will have a school of paintings, when she will have public galleries and a public taste, when the artist shall hold the reins of his imagination in his own hands, and shall paint, not for private recompense, but public fame, and not for the Duke of Sutherland, but the nation. In portraits, where vanity supplies a public taste, England excels; and the engraver, who ministers to the common pride, and supplies the furniture of the parlour, and the lady’s Annual, succeeds as no where else. Vandyke, who painted the “Descent from the Cross,” in his own country, painted in England only portraits; as affording him a better remuneration than his exertions on historical subjects.

“These seven pieces every one admires for their mellow colouring, and for their bold and vigorous expression--they are of the Spaniard _Murillo_. With these, I beg leave to close my lecture, and to thank you for your amiable and patient attention.”

Now this is the end of the Louvre--Are you not glad?--To designate by single epithets persons, who have a hundred qualities, is too absurd; but to seem to know something about paintings, is so very genteel!

As you cross the _Pont des Arts_, you will see, placed in its centre, a bench to accommodate wearied travellers. You may now fancy me seated--long enough, at least, to fill the rest of this page--upon this bench. The breezes here fan you with their little wings, and the landscape is covered with delightful images. The Seine flows under your feet so smooth, you can count the stars on its surface. It is arched by seventeen sumptuous bridges, many of them in sight; and the dwellings of luxurious men, and the temples of the Divinity, vie with each other in magnificence, upon its banks, and the steeples stand tip-toe upon the neighbouring hills.

“The correspondence of the architecture is not accidental. You must look at Paris as a picture, and examine the composition, as well as the execution of the parts. Its monuments are not only beautiful in themselves, but are made, as you see, to harmonise with each other. The Louvre, the Institute, the Arch of Neuilly, the Tuileries and its gardens, the Madelaine, the Palais Bourbon, the Seine and all its turretted castles--all are but parts of the same tableau. In this respect Paris, so inferior to London in wealth, and to Rome in situation, is yet more beautiful than either. St. Paul’s harmonises with nothing--Westminster Abbey, also, is lost in its individuality. The “New Gallery” occupies one of the best situations in Europe, only cumbering the ground, which the taste of a better age might have employed to the ornament of the city. London monuments are built as at Thebes, _au son du Tambour_; they are built for the job, and ours for the honour of Paris and posterity. The Madelaine, yet under the architect, was begun sixty years ago; St. Paul’s was built by the same architect, and the same mason. Sir Christopher Wren was employed upon it, at two hundred a-year, and had a suit at law for a few half-pence, which stood unpaid upon his bill.

“This ‘_Palais des Beaux Arts_’ is now the Palace of the Institute. As it stands at the head of our fine arts, as well as letters, I may as well tell you the little I know of its organization. It is the old _Academie Française_, expanded from forty to several hundred members. They are separated into four divisions; having only the hall and library in common; and their common funds are managed by a joint committee from each; and they have a united meeting yearly, on the 1st of May. The vacancies are filled by ballot of the members, with the approbation of the king. Each member receives an annual salary of 1500 francs, except honorary members, who are contented with the honours.

“The ‘_Academie des Beaux Arts_’ distributes prizes in painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving, and musical composition; and the successful candidates pursue their studies at Rome at the expense of the state. The ‘_Academie des Belles Lettres_’ gives also a prize of 1500 francs, and medals for the best memoir on French antiquities. The ‘_Academie des Sciences_’ awards a prize of 3000 francs, on a subject given, and smaller prizes upon specific branches of science; and finally, the ‘_Academie Française_’, upon a proposed subject, pays a prize of 1500 francs, and some of smaller amount. One is called the ‘Montyon Prize,’ for some act of virtue in the common class of society.”

Here my fair cicerone slipped through my fingers--not indeed without an effort on my part to hold her fast. I threatened her not to survive.

“Yes, do; and you can put in for the Montyon prize of this year. We are just under the tower of Philip Augustus, so the end like the beginning of our acquaintance will have something of romance.---- Oh, no, my name would spoil all the interest of the plot; what is a plot without a mystery?”

“A romance beginning with a marriage, has usually a tragical end.”

“And so end the best romances--where could you find for the catastrophe a more desirable place?--Here stood the _Tour de Nesle_ of tragical memory, and you have in view the Pont Neuf, and there is the Morgue.”

“It is a pity,” said I in a pique, “that nature had not taken some of the pains she has lavished upon your brains and your beauty, to give to your heart. You see a stranger, never before a traveller, wandering in your country----”

“A stranger never before a traveller is not to my taste. Such a traveller’s views of human nature are very narrow. He judges of merit always by some mode or fashion of his own, and sets up his whims as the standard of propriety for others. One who has travelled does not think a fellow-creature bad because she may deviate from the little etiquette of his native village. He does not think any thing wrong that is not so essentially. If he should meet for example, a lady, an entire stranger, who would ask his arm, to see these fine pictures of the Louvre; in the alternative of remaining out of doors, and should choose, in return for his politeness, to be entertained an hour with his company, he would not infer that she wanted either sense or good breeding; he would not presume, on such appearances, to treat her with less respect--much less----”

I dropped the hand I had taken without her leave. She then returned it, and bade me adieu, crossing the bridge and traversing the _Quai de La Monnaie_, where she disappeared among the narrow lanes of St. Germain--and there was an end of her.

I intended in setting out to give you the cream of her conversation, but it turns out to be the skim-milk only, and I have no time for revision. There is nothing so insipid and creamless as the fine things people say to one’s self, and especially the fine things one says in reply.

This, with a little package of music, will be handed you by Mr. D----, who is going to accompany it all the way himself. The obliging man! Please to give him your thanks; and to his prettiest little wife in the world, a thousand compliments from your very devoted humble servant.