Chapter XVI: The Draughtsmen (2)

_Oberländer_, without whom it would be impossible to imagine _Fliegende Blätter_, has not fallen silent. He works on, "fresh and splendid as on the first day." A gifted nature like Busch, he possesses, at the same time, that fertility of which Dürer said: "A good painter is inwardly complete and opulent, and were it possible for him to live eternally, then by virtue of those inward ideas of which Plato writes he would be always able to pour something new into his works." It is now thirty years ago that he began his labours for _Fliegende Blätter_, and since that time some drawing of his, which has filled every one with delight, has appeared almost every week. Kant said that Providence has given men three things to console them amid the miseries of life--hope, sleep, and laughter. If he is right, Oberländer is amongst the greatest benefactors of mankind. Every one of his new sketches maintains the old precious qualities. It might be said that, by the side of the comedian Busch, Oberländer seems a serious psychologist. Wilhelm Busch lays his whole emphasis on the comical effects of simplicity; he knows how to reduce an object in a masterly fashion to its elemental lines, which are comic in themselves by their epigrammatic pregnancy. He calls forth peals of laughter by the farcical spirit of his inventions and the boldness with which he renders his characters absurd. He is also the author of his own letterpress. His drawings are unimaginable without the verse, without the finely calculated and dramatic succession of situations growing to a catastrophe. Oberländer gets his effect purely by means of the pictorial elements in his representation, and attains a comical result, neither by the distorted exaggeration of what is on the face of the matter ridiculous, nor by an elementary simplification, but by a refined sharpening of character. It seems uncanny that a man should have such eyes in his head; there is something almost visionary in the way he picks out of everything the determining feature of its being. And whilst he faintly exaggerates what is characteristic and renders it distinct, his picture is given a force and power of conviction to which no previous caricaturist has attained, with so much discretion at the same time. No one has attained the drollness of Oberländer's people, animals, and plants. He draws _à la_ Max, _à la_ Makart, Rethel, Genelli, or Piloty, hunts in the desert or theatrical representations, Renaissance architecture run mad or the most modern European mashers. He is as much at home in the Cameroons as in Munich, and in transferring the droll scenes of human life to the animal world he is a classic. He sports with hens, herrings, dogs, ducks, ravens, bears, and elephants as Hokusai does with his frogs. Beside such animals all the Reinecke series of Wilhelm Kaulbach look like "drawings from the copybook of little Moritz." And landscapes which in their tender intimacy of feeling seem like anticipations of Cazin sometimes form the background of these creatures. One can scarcely err in supposing that posterity will place certain plates from the work of this quiet, amiable man beside the best which the history of drawing has anywhere to show.

The _Charivari_ takes its place with _Punch_ and _Fliegende Blätter_.

In the land of Rabelais also caricature has flourished since the opening of the century, in spite of official masters who reproached her with desecrating the sacred temple of art, and in spite of the gendarmes who put her in gaol. Here, too, it was the draughtsmen who first broke with æsthetic prejudices, and saw the laughing and the weeping dramas of life with an unprejudiced glance.

Debucourt and Carle Vernet, the pair who made their appearance immediately after the storms of the Revolution, are alike able and charming artists, who depict the pleasures of the salon in a graceful style; and they rival the great satirists on the other side of the Channel in the incisiveness of their drawing, and frequently even surpass them by the added charm of colour.

MONNIER. A CHALK DRAWING.]

_Carle Vernet_, originally an historical painter, remembered that he had married the daughter of the younger Moreau, and set himself to portray the doings of the _jeunesse dorée_ of the end of the eighteenth century in his _incroyables_ and his _merveilleuses_. Crazy, eccentric, and superstitious, he divided his time afterwards between women and his club-fellows, horses and dogs. He survives in the history of art as the chronicler of sport, hunting, racing, and drawing-room and café scenes.

_Louis Philibert Debucourt_ was a pupil of Vien, and had painted _genre_ pictures in the spirit of Greuze before he turned in 1785 to colour engraving. In this year appeared the pretty "Menuet de la Mariée," with the peasant couples dancing, and the dainty châtelaine who laughingly opens the ball with the young husband. After that he had found his specialty, and in the last decade of the eighteenth century he produced the finest of his colour engravings. In 1792 there is the wonderful promenade in the gallery of the Palais Royal, with its swarming crowd of young officers, priests, students, shop-girls, and _cocottes_; in 1797 "Grandmother's Birthday," "Friday Forenoon at the Parisian Bourse," and many others. The effects of technique which he achieved by means of colour engraving are surprising. A freshness like that of water colour lies on these yellow straw hats, lightly rouged cheeks, and rosy shoulders. To white silk cloaks trimmed with fur he gives the iridescence of a robe by Netscher. If there survived nothing except Debucourt from the whole art of the eighteenth century, he would alone suffice to give an idea of the entire spirit of the time. Only one note would be wanting, the familiar simplicity of Chardin. The smiling grace of Greuze, the elegance of Watteau, and the sensuousness of Boucher--he has them all, although they are weakened in him, and precisely by his affectation is he the true child of his epoch. The crowd which is promenading beneath the trees of the Palais Royal in 1792 is no longer the same which fills the drawing-rooms of Versailles and Petit Trianon in the pages of Cochin. The faces are coarser and more plebeian. Red waistcoats with _breloques_ as large as fists, and stout canes with great gold tops, make the costume of the men loud and ostentatious, while eccentric hats, broad sashes, and high coiffures bedizen the ladies more than is consistent with elegance. At the same time, Debucourt gives this democracy an aristocratic bearing. His prostitutes look like duchesses. His art is an attenuated echo of the _rococo_ period. In him the _décadence_ is embodied, and all the grace and elegance of the century is once more united, although it has become more _bourgeois_.

MONNIER. JOSEPH PROUDHOMME.]

The Empire again was less favourable to caricature. Not that there was any want of material, but the censorship kept a strict watch over the welfare of France. Besides, the artists who made their appearance after David lived on Olympus, and would have nothing to do with the common things of life. Neither draughtsmen nor engravers could effect anything so long as they saw themselves overlooked by a Greek or Roman phantom as they bent over their paper or their plate of copper, and felt it their duty to suggest the stiff lines of antique statues beneath the folds of modern costume.

_Bosio_ was the genuine product of this style. Every one of his pictures has become tedious, because of a spurious classicism to which he adhered with inflexible consistency. He cannot draw a grisette without seeing her with David's eyes. It deprives his figures of truth and interest. Something of the correctness of a schoolmistress is peculiar to them. His grace is too classic, his merriment too well-bred, and everything in them too carefully arranged to give the idea of scenes rapidly depicted from life. Beauty of line is offered in place of spontaneity of observation, and even the character of the drawing is lost in a pedantic elegance which envelopes everything with the uniformly graceful veil of an insipidly fluent outline.

As soon as Romanticism had broken with the classic system, certain great draughtsmen, who laid a bold hand on modern life without being shackled by æsthetic formulæ, came to the front in France. _Henri Monnier_, the eldest of them, was born a year after the proclamation of the Empire. Cloaks, plumes, and sabretasches were the first impressions of his youth; he saw the return of triumphant armies and heard the fanfare of victorious trumpets. The Old Guard remained his ideal, the inglorious kingship of the Restoration his abhorrence. He was a supernumerary clerk in the Department of Justice when in 1828 his first brochure, _Moeurs administratives dessinées d'aprés nature par Henri Monnier_, disclosed to his superiors that the eyes of this poor young man in the service of the Ministry had seen more than they should have done. Dismissed from his post, he was obliged to support himself by his pencil, and became the chronicler of the epoch. In Monnier's prints breathes the happy Paris of the good old times, a Paris which in these days scarcely exists even in the provinces. His "Joseph Proudhomme," from his shoe-buckles to his stand-up collar, from his white cravat to his blue spectacles, is as immortal as _Eisele und Beisele_, _Schulze und Müller_, or Molière's _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_. Monnier himself is his own Proudhomme. He is the Philistine in Paris, enjoying little Parisian idylls with a _bourgeois_ complacency. With him there is no distinction between beautiful and ugly; he finds that everything in nature can be turned to account. How admirably the different worlds of Parisian society are discriminated in his _Quartiers de Paris_! How finely he has portrayed the grisette of the period, with her following of young tradesmen and poor students! As yet she has not blossomed into the fine lady, the luxurious _blasée_ woman of the next generation. She is still the bashful _modiste_ or dressmaker's apprentice whose outings in the country are described by Paul de Kock, a pretty child in a short skirt who lives in an attic and dresses up only when she goes to the theatre or into the country on a Sunday. Monnier gives her an air of good-nature, something delightfully childlike. In the society of her adorers she is content with the cheapest pleasures, drinks cider and eats cakes, rides on a donkey or breakfasts amid the trees, and hardly coquets at all when a fat old gentleman follows her on the boulevards. These innocent flirtations remind one as little of the more recent _lorettes_ of Gavarni as these in their turn anticipate the drunken street-walkers of Rops.

DAUMIER. THE CONNOISSEURS.]

Under Louis Philippe began the true modern period of French caricature, the flourishing time when really great artists devoted themselves to it. It never raised its head more proudly than under the _bourgeois_ king, whose onion head always served the relentless Philippon as a target for his wit. It was never armed in more formidable fashion; it never dealt more terrible blows. Charles Philippon's famous journal _La Caricature_ was the most powerful lever that the republicans used against the "July government"; it was equally feared by the Ministry, the _bourgeoisie_, and the throne. When the _Charivari_ followed _La Caricature_ in 1832, political cartoons began to give way to the simple portraiture of manners in French life. The powder made for heavy guns exploded in a facile play of fireworks improvised for the occasion.

French society in the nineteenth century has to thank principally _Daumier_ and _Gavarni_ for being brought gradually within the sphere of artistic representation. These men are usually called caricaturists, yet they were in reality the great historians of their age. Through long years they laboured every week and almost every day at their great history, which embraced thousands of chapters--at a true zoology of the human species; and their work, drawn upon stone in black and white, proves them not merely genuine historians, but really eminent artists who merit a place beside the greatest.

DAUMIER. THE MOUNTEBANKS.

(_By permission of M. Eugène Montrosier, the owner of the picture._)]

When in his young days Daubigny trod the pavement of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, he is said to have exclaimed in astonishment, "That looks as if it had been done by Daumier!" and from that time Daumier was aptly called the Michael Angelo of caricature. Even when he is laughing there is a Florentine inspiration of the terrible in his style, a grotesque magnificence, a might suggestive of Buonarotti. In the period before 1848 he dealt the constitutional monarchy crushing blows by his drawings. "Le Ventre legislatif" marks the furthest point to which political caricature ever ventured in France. But when he put politics on one side and set himself free from Philippon, this same man made the most wonderful drawings from life. His "Robert Macaire" giving instructions to his clerk as a tradesman, sending his patients exorbitant bills as doctor to the poor, lording it over the bourse as banker, taking bribes as juryman, and fleecing a peasant as land-agent, is the incarnation of the _bourgeois_ monarchy, a splendid criticism on the money-grubbing century. Politicians, officials, artists, actors, honest citizens, old-clothes-mongers, newspaper-boys, impecunious painters, the most various and the basest creatures are treated by his pencil, and appear on pages which are often terrible in their depth and truthfulness of observation. The period of Louis Philippe is accurately portrayed in these prints, every one of which belongs to the great volume of the human tragicomedy. In his "Émotions parisiennes" and "Bohémiens de Paris" he deals with misfortune, hunger, the impudence of vice, and the horror of misery. His "Histoire ancienne" ridiculed the absurdity of Classicism _à la_ David at a time when it was still regarded as high treason to touch this sacred fane. These modern figures with the classical pose, which to some extent parodied David's pictures, were probably what first brought his contemporaries to a sense of the stiffness and falsity of the whole movement; and at a later period Offenbach also contributed his best ideas with much the same result. Moreover, Daumier was a landscape-painter of the first order. No one has more successfully rendered the appearance of bridges and houses, of quays and streets under a downpour, of nature enfeebled as it is in the precincts of Paris. He was an instantaneous photographer without a rival, a physiognomist such as Breughel was in the sixteenth century, Jan Steen and Brouwer in the seventeenth, and Chodowiecki in the eighteenth, with the difference that his drawing was as broad and powerful as Chodowiecki's was delicate and refined. This inborn force of line, suggestive of Jordaens, places his sketches as high, considered as works of art, as they are invaluable as historical documents. The treatment is so summary, the outline so simplified, the pantomime, gesticulation, and pose always so expressive; and Daumier's influence on several artists is beyond doubt. Millet, the great painter of peasants, owes much to the draughtsman of the _bourgeois_. Precisely what constitutes his "style," the great line, the simplification, the intelligent abstention from anecdotic trifles, are things which he learnt from Daumier.

During the years when he drew for the _Charivari_, _Gavarni_ was the exact opposite of Daumier. In the one was a forceful strength, in the other a refined grace; in the one brusque and savage observation and almost menacing sarcasm, in the other the wayward mood of the butterfly flitting lightly from flower to flower. Daumier might be compared with Rabelais; Gavarni, the _spirituel_ journalist of the _grand monde_ and the _demi-monde_, the draughtsman of elegance and of _roués_ and _lorettes_, might be compared with Molière. Born of poor parentage in Paris in 1801, and in his youth a mechanician, he supported himself from the year 1835 by fashion prints and costume drawings. He undertook the conduct of a fashion journal, _Les Gens du Monde_, and began it with a series of drawings from the life of the _jeunesse dorée_: _les Lorettes_, _les Actrices_, _les Fashionables_, _les Artistes_, _les Étudiants de Paris_, _les Bals masqués_, _les Souvenirs du Carnaval_, _la Vie des Jeunes Hommes_. A new world was here revealed with bold traits. The women of Daumier are good, fat mothers, always busy, quick-witted, and of an enviable constitution; women who are careful in the management of their household, and who go to market and take their husband's place at his office when necessary. In Gavarni the women are piquant and given to pouting, draped in silk and enveloped in soft velvet mantles. They are fond of dining in the _cabinet particulier_, and of scratching the name of their lover, for the time being, upon crystal mirrors.

DAUMIER. IN THE ASSIZE COURT.]

DAUMIER. "LA VOILÀ ... MA MAISON DE CAMPAGNE."]

Gavarni was the first who seized the worldly side of modern life; he portrayed elegant figures full of _chic_, and gave them a garb which fitted them exactly. In his own dress he had a taste for what was dandified, and he plunged gaily into the enjoyment of the Parisian life which eddied around in a whirl of pleasure. The present generation feels that the air in such old journals of fashion is heavy. In every work of art there is, in addition to what endures, a fine perfume that evaporates after a certain number of years, and is no longer perceptible to those who come afterwards. What is fresh and modern to-day looks to-morrow like the dried flowers which the botanist keeps in a herbarium. And those who draw the fashions of their age are specially liable to this swift decay. Thus many of Gavarni's lithographs have the effect of pallid pictures of a vanished world. But the generation of 1830 honoured in him the same _charmeur_, the same master of enamoured grace, which that of 1730 had done in Watteau. He was sought after as an inventor of fashions, whom the tailor Humann, the Worth of the "July Monarchy," regarded as his rival. He was the discoverer of all the fairy costumes which formed the chief attraction at masquerades and theatres, the delicate _gourmet_ of the eternal feminine; and having dangled much after women, he knew how to render the wave of a petticoat, the seductive charm of a well-proportioned leg, and the coquettishness of a new _coiffure_ with the most familiar connoisseurship. He has been called the Balzac of draughtsmen. And the sentences at the bottom of his sketches, for which he is also responsible, are as audacious as the pictures themselves. Thus, when the young exquisite in the series "La Vie des Jeunes Hommes" stands with his companion before a skeleton in the anthropological museum, the little woman opines with a shudder, "When one thinks that this is a man, and that women love _that_"!

DAUMIER. MENELAUS THE VICTOR.]

But that is only one side of the sphinx. He is only half known when one thinks only of the draughtsman of ladies' fashions who celebrated the free and easy graces of the _demi-monde_ and the wild licence of the carnival. At bottom Gavarni was not a frivolous butterfly, but an artist of a strangely sombre imagination, a profound and melancholy philosopher who had a prescience of all the mysteries of life. All the mighty problems which the century produced danced before his spirit like spectral notes of interrogation.

The transition was made when, as an older man, he depicted the cold, sober wakening that follows the wild night. _Constantin Guys_ had already worked on these lines. He was an unfortunate and ailing man, who passed his existence, like Verlaine, in hospital, and died in an almshouse. Guys has not left much behind him, but in that little he shows himself the true forerunner of the moderns, and it is not a mere chance that Baudelaire, the ancestor of the _décadence_, established Guys' memory. These women who wander aimlessly about the streets with weary movements and heavy eyes deadened with absinthe, and who flit through the ball-room like bats, have nothing of the innocent charm of Monnier's grisettes. They are the uncanny harbingers of death, the demoniacal brides of Satan. Guys exercised on Gavarni an influence which brought into being his _Invalides du sentiment_, his _Lorettes vieilles_, and his _Fourberies de femmes_. "The pleasure of all creatures is mingled with bitterness." The frivolous worldling became a misanthrope from whom no secret of the foul city was hidden; a pessimist who had begun to recognise the human brute, the swamp-flower of over-civilisation, the "bitter fruit which is inwardly full of ashes," in the queen of the drawing-room as in the prostitute of the gutter. Henceforth he only recognises a love whose pleasures are to be reckoned amongst the horrors of death. His works could be shown to no lady, and yet they are in no sense frivolous: they are terrible and puritanic.

If Daumier by preference showed mastery in his men, Gavarni showed it in his women as no other has done. He is not the powerful draughtsman that Daumier is; he has not the feeling for large movement, but with what terrible directness he analyses faces! He has followed woman through all seasons of life and in every grade, from youth to decay, and from brilliant wealth to filthy misery, and he has written the story of the _lorette_ in monumental strophes: café chantant, villa in the Champs Elysées, equipage, grooms, Bois de Boulogne, procuress, garret, and radish-woman, that final incarnation which Victor Hugo called the sentence of judgment.

And Gavarni went further on this road. His glance became sharper and sharper, and the seriousness of meditation subdued his merriment; he came to the study of his age with the relentless knife of a vivisectionist. Fate had taught him the meaning of the struggle for existence. A journal he had founded in the thirties overwhelmed him with debts. In 1835 he sat in the prison of Clichy, and from that time he meditated on the miserable, tattered creatures whom he saw around him, with other eyes. He studied the toiling masses, and roamed about in slums and wine-caves amongst pickpockets and bullies. And what Paris had not yet revealed to him, he learnt in 1849 in London. Even there he was not the first-comer. Géricault, who as early as 1821 dived into the misery of the vast city, and brought out a series of lithographs, showed him the way. Beggars cowering half dead with exhaustion at a baker's door, ragged pipers slouching round deserted quarters of the town, poor crippled women wheeled in barrows by hollow-eyed men past splendid mansions and surrounded by the throng of brilliant equipages--these are some of the scenes which he brought home with him from London. But Gavarni excels him in trenchant incisiveness. "What is to be seen in London gratis," runs the heading of a series of sketches in which he conjures up on paper, in such a terrible manner, the new horrors of this new period: the starvation, the want, and the measureless suffering that hides itself with chattering teeth in the dens of the great city. He went through Whitechapel from end to end, and studied its drunkenness and its vice. How much more forcible are his beggars than those of Callot! The grand series of "Thomas Vireloque" is a dance of death in life; and in it are stated all the problems which have since disturbed our epoch. By this work Gavarni has come down to us as a contemporary, and by it he has become a pioneer. The enigmatical figure of "Thomas Vireloque" starts up in these times, following step by step in the path of his prototype: he is the philosopher of the back streets, the ragged scoundrel with dynamite in his pocket, the incarnation of the _bête humaine_, of human misery and human vice. Here Gavarni stands far above Hogarth and far above Callot. The ideas on social politics of the first half of the century are concentrated in "Thomas Vireloque."

GAVARNI. THOMAS VIRELOQUE.]

Of course the assumption of government by Napoleon III marked a new phase in French caricature. It became more mundane and more highly civilised. All the piquancy and brilliance, waywardness and corruption, looseness and amenity, mirth and affectation of this refined city life, which in those days threw its dazzling splendour over all Europe, found intelligent and subtle interpreters in the young generation of draughtsmen. The _Journal pour rire_ comes under consideration as the leading paper. It was founded in 1848, and in 1856 assumed the title of _Journal amusant_, under which it is known at the present day.

GAVARNI. FOURBERIES DE FEMMES.

_Au premier Mosieu._--"Attendez-moi ce soir, de quatre à cinq heures,
quai de l'Horloge du Palais.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE."

_Au deuxième Mosieu._--"Ce soir, quai des Lunettes, entre quatre et
cinq heures.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE."

_Au troisième Mosieu._--"Quai des Morfondus, ce soir, de quatre heures
à cinq.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE."

_À un quatrième Mosieu._--"Je t'attends ce soir, à quatre
heures.--_Ton_ AUGUSTINE."]

_Gustave Doré_, to the lessening of his importance, moved on this ground only in his earliest period. He was barely sixteen and still at school in his native town Burg, in Alsace, when he made an agreement with Philippon, who engaged him for three years on the _Journal pour rire_. His first drawings date from 1844: "Les animaux socialistes," which were very suggestive of Grandville, and "Désagréments d'un voyage d'agrément"--something like the German _Herr und Frau Buchholz in der Schweiz_--which made a considerable sensation by their grotesque wit. In his series "Les différents publics de Paris" and "La Ménagerie Parisienne" he represented with an incisive pencil the opera, the _Théâtre des Italiens_, the circus, the _Odéon_ and the _Jardin des Plantes_. But since that time the laurels of historical painting have given him no rest. He turned away from his own age as well as from caricature, and made excursions into all zones and all periods. He visited the Inferno with Dante, lingered in Palestine with the patriarchs of the Old Testament, and ran through the world of wonders with Perrault. The facility of his invention was astonishing, and so too was the aptness with which he seized for illustration on the most vivid scenes from all authors. But he has too much Classicism to be captivating for very long. His compositions dazzle by an appearance of the grand style, but attain only an outward and scenical effect. His figures are academic variations of types originally established by the Greeks and the Cinquescentisti. He forced his talent when he soared into regions where he could not stand without the support of his predecessors. Even in his "Don Quixote" the figures lose in character the larger they become. Everything in Doré is calligraphic, judicious, without individuality, without movement and life, composed in accordance with known rules. There is a touch of Wiertz in him, both in his imagination and in his design, and his youthful works, such as the "Swiss Journey," in which he merely drew from observation without pretensions to style, will probably last the longest.

In broad lithographs and charming woodcuts, _Cham_ has been the most exhaustive in writing up the diary of modern Parisian life during the period 1848-78. The celebrated caricaturist--he has been called the most brilliant man in France under Napoleon III--had worked in the studio of Delaroche at the same time as Jean François Millet. After 1842 he came forward as Cham (his proper name was Count Amadée de Noë) with drawings which soon made him the artist most in demand on the staff of the _Charivari_. Neither so profound nor so serious as Gavarni, he has a constant sparkle of vivacity, and is a draughtsman of wonderful _verve_. In his reviews of the month and of the year, everything which interested Paris in the provinces of invention and fashion, art and literature, science and the theatre, passes before us in turn: the omnibuses with their high imperials, table-turning and spirit-rapping, the opening of the _Grands Magasins du Louvre_, Madame Ristori, the completion of the Suez Canal, the first newspaper kiosks, New Year's Day in Paris, the invention of ironclads, the tunnelling of Mont Cenis, Gounod's _Faust_, Patti and Nilsson, the strike of the tailors and hat-makers, jockeys and racing. Everything that excited public attention had a close observer in Cham. His caricatures of the works of art in the Salon were full of spirit, and the International Exhibition of 1867 found in him its classic chronicler. Here all the mysterious Paris of the third Napoleon lives once more. Emperors and kings file past, the band of Strauss plays, gipsies are dancing, equipages roll by, and every one lives, loves, flirts, squanders money, and whirls round in a maëlstrom. But the end of the exhibition betokened the end of all that splendour. In Cham's plates which came next one feels that there is thunder in the air. Neither fashions nor theatres, neither women nor pleasure, could prevent politics from predominating more and more: the fall of Napoleon was drawing near.

GAVARNI. PHÈDRE AT THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS.]

GAVARNI. "CE QUI ME MANQUE À MOI? UNE 'TITE MÈRE COMME ÇA, QU'AURAIT
SOIN DE MON LINGE."]

There was a greater division of labour amongst those who followed Cham, since one chose "little women" as a speciality, another the theatre, and another high-life. Assisted by photography, _Nadar_ turned again to portraiture, which had been neglected since Daumier, and enjoyed a great success with his series "Les Contemporains de Nadar." _Marcellin_ is the first who spread over his sketches from the world of fashions and the theatre all the _chic_ and fashionable glitter which lives in the novels of those years. He is the chronicler of the great world, of balls and _soirées_; he shows the opera and the _Théâtre des Italiens_, tells of hunting and racing, attends the drives in the Corso, and at the call of fashion promptly deserts the stones of Paris to look about him in châteaux and country-houses, seaside haunts in France, and the little watering-places of Germany, where the gaming-tables formed at that time the rendezvous of well-bred Paris. Baden-Baden, where all the lions of the day, the politicians and the artists and all the beauties of the Paris salons, met together in July, offered the draughtsman a specially wide field for studies of fashion and _chic_. Here began the series "Histoires des variations de la mode depuis le XVI siècle jusqu'à nos jours." In a place where all classes of society, the great world and the _demi-monde_, came into contact, Marcellin could not avoid the latter, but even when he verged on this province he always knew how to maintain a correct and distinguished bearing. He was peculiarly the draughtsman of "society," of that brilliant, pleasure-loving, tainted, and yet refined society of the Second Empire which turned Paris into a great ball-room.

GUYS. STUDY OF A WOMAN.]

_Randon_ is as plebeian as Marcellin is aristocratic. His speciality is the stupid recruit who is marched through the streets with his "squad," or the retired tradesman of small means, as Daudet has hit him off in M. Chèbe, the old gentleman seated on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne: "Let the little ones come to me with their nurses." His province includes everything that has nothing to do with _chic_. The whole life of the Parisian people, the horse-fairs, the races at Poissy, and all the more important occurrences by which the appearance of the city has been transformed, may be followed in his drawings. When he travelled he did not go to watering-places, but to the provinces, to Cherbourg and Toulon, or to the manufacturing towns of Belgium and England, where he observed life at the railway stations and the custom-house, at markets and in barracks, at seaports and upon the street. Goods that are being piled together, sacks that are being hoisted, ships being brought to anchor, storehouses, wharfs, and docks--everywhere there is as much life in his sketches as in a busy beehive. Nature is a great manufactory, and man a living machine. The world is like an ant-hill, the dwelling of curious insects furnished with teeth, feelers, indefatigable feet, and marvellous organs proper for digging, sawing, building, and all things possible, but furnished also with an incessant hunger.

Soon afterwards there came _Hadol_, who made his début in 1855, with pictures of the fashions; _Stop_, who specially represented the provinces and Italy; _Draner_, who occupied himself with the Parisian ballet and designed charming military uniforms for little dancing girls. _Léonce Petit_ drew peasants and sketched the charms of the country in a simple, familiar fashion--the mortal tedium of little towns, poor villages, and primitive inns, the gossip of village beldames before the house-door, the pompous dignity of village magistrates or of the head of the fire brigade. He is specially noteworthy as a landscape artist. The trees on the straight, monotonous road rise softly and delicately into the air, and the sleepy sameness of tortuous village streets is pregnantly rendered by a few strokes of the pencil. The land is like a great kitchen garden. The fields and the arable ground with their dusty, meagre soil chant a mighty song of hard labour, of the earnest, toilsome existence of the peasant folk.

GRÉVIN. NOS PARISIENNES.

"Tiens! ne me parle pas de lui, je ne peux pas le souffrir, même en
peinture!"

"Cependant, s'il t'offrait de t'epouser?"

"Ça, c'est autre chose."]

_Andrieux_ and _Morland_ discovered the _femme entretenue_, though afterwards her best known delineator was _Grévin_, an able, original, facile, and piquant draughtsman, whom some--exaggerating beyond a doubt--called the direct successor of Gavarni. Grévin's women are a little monotonous, with their ringleted chignons, their expressionless eyes which try to look big, their perverse little noses, their defiant, pouting lips, and the cheap toilettes which they wear with so much _chic_. But they too have gone to their rest with the grisettes of Monnier and Gavarni, and have left the field to the women of Mars and Forain. In these days Grévin's work seems old-fashioned, since it is no longer modern and not yet historical; nevertheless it marks an epoch, like that of Gavarni. The _bals publics_, the _bals de l'Opéra_, those of the _Jardin Mabille_, the _Closerie des Lilas_, the races, the promenades in the _Bois de Vincennes_, the seaside resorts, all places where the _demi-monde_ pitched its tent in the time of Napoleon III, were also the home of the artist. "How they love in Paris" and "Winter in Paris" were his earliest series. His finest and greatest drawings, the scenes from the Parisian hotels and "The English in Paris," appeared in 1867, the year of the Exhibition. His later series, published as albums--"Les filles d'Ève," "Le monde amusant," "Fantaisies parisiennes," "Paris vicieux," "La Chaîne des Dames"--are a song of songs upon the refinements of life.

It does not lie within the plan of this book to follow the history of drawing any further. Our intention was merely to show that painting had to follow the path trodden by Rowlandson and Cruikshank, Erhard and Richter, Daumier and Gavarni, if it was to be art of the nineteenth century, and not to remain for ever dependent on the old masters. Absolute beauty is not good food for art; to be strong it must be nourished on the ideas of the century. When the world had ceased to draw inspiration from the masterpieces of the past merely with the object of depicting by their aid scenes out of long-buried epochs, there was for the first time a prospect that mere discipleship would be overcome, and that a new and original painting would be developed through the fresh and independent study of nature. The passionate craving of the age had to be this: to feel at home on the earth, in this long-neglected world of reality, which hides the unsuspected treasure of vivid works of art. The rising sun is just as beautiful now as on the first day, the streams flow, the meadows grow green, the vibrating passions are at war now as in other times, the immortal heart of nature still beats beneath its rough covering, and its pulsation finds an echo in the heart of man. It was necessary to descend from ideals to existing fact, and the world had to be once more discovered by painters as in the days of the first Renaissance. The question was how by the aid of all the devices of colour to represent the multifarious forms of human activity: the phases and conditions of life, fashion as well as misery, work and pleasure, the drawing-room and the street, the teeming activity of towns and the quiet labour of peasants. The essential thing was to write the entire natural history of the age. And this way, the way from museums to nature, and from the past to the world of living men, was shown by the English to the French and German painters.

ROMNEY. SERENA.]