GEMS OF FRENCH AR'I A SERIES OF CARBON-PHOTOGRAPHS THE PICTURES OF EMINENT MODERN ARTISTS. WITH REMARKS ON THE WORKS SELECTED. AND AN ESSAY ON THE FRENCH SCHOOL. WILLIAM B. SCOTT, IB OF "THE life of albert durer,' "hai bonbon : THE BROADWAY 71. (c3F7(f LONDON : R. CLAV, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS., BREAD STREET HILL. 36 (To the III cm on; of DANIEL MACLISE PAINTER OF THE THE MEETING OF WELLINGTON AND BLUCHER, THE DEATH OF NELSON, PALACE OF PARLIAMENT AT WESTMIN THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED, VV III! HV HI'. \v. b. sco r i. r UFI7 LYV\ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. To/,. Edouard Frere The Little Model . . . Front. Vernet First Campaign in Algeria 39 Robert Fete de la Madonna 43 INGRES Henry IV. playing with his Children ... 47 SCHEFFER Ruth and Naomi DELAROCHE Trial of Marie Antoinette 57 Gleyre Post Illusions JALABERT Christ tea/king on the Sea 65 1 6ME Louis XIV. and Mi Here 1 ' ('max tg of the Nightingale .... 71 DUBUFE The Wid Boi LANGER Mozart at the Court of i .... Meissonier The Bibliophile \ Bonheur / Heath on the I Hamon "My Sister is not at I! ... Bei i .... The Friends. ( -55 .... PREFACE. Tins is a Picture-Book ; a Gallery of Pictures done in small ; an attempt to illustrate the present condition of the French school of historical and genre art by a selection of sixteen prints, representing sixteen artists. If one looks round any exhibition room, more especially the great annual display in Paris, it will be easily ui stood that the task of selection must have been sufficiently difficult. There are thirty living men equally des sentation in such a collection ; and as it was essential i few of the still greater men lately deceased — because the Fren although, it may be, attaining a higher level of excellence, as it is the nature of modern culture to spread itself out, is certain ent falling off in the list of the truly great — the numb prints was diminished by five, those devoted to Vernet, Robert, Ingres, SchefFer, am! < he. 'llir difficulties, moreover, were not me p. according to the importance of the work in representing tl Tlu: element of popularity had b and tlu- possibilil PREFACE. a form as to give our photographers a fair chance of supporting their high character, as we think they have done. It is a Picture-Book. And so the literary portion, I fear, may be in a measure thrown away. We don't expect the habitues of the drawing-room to be even studious enough to read about Painting. Mr. Hamerton, in his two admirable books somewhat resembling the present volume, gave the public his excellent Essays as the principal, and the prints as illustrations. The present publication proceeded differently, the selection being first, and the writing second. It is the less necessary for the writer to say anything about him- self, so as further to extend these few words of preface. W. B. S. Bellevie, Battersea Bridge, Chelsea. FRENCH SCHOOL OF PAINTING. I. Ix the long list of three hundred or more pupils of the school of David, given by M. Delecluxe, in his excellent 1 " Louis David, son Ecole et son Temps," we find an infinite variety of men : representatives of the great world in those early years of the Empire — three marquises and a count, military aspirants, architects, engineers, Mourette the fai chess-player, and Lubin, whose head dropt into the basket of the guillotine on the ioth Thermidor; besides sail] I and engravers. Many of these became illustrious Ba Gros, Baron Gerard, Girodet, Leopold Robert, fort) being decorated with the Cross of the Legion ^i II many also, growing up from the gamin into the In or from the affectations of the Roman revival in costume into the penniless misanthrope, startling a changed world by their apparition on great days, such as that oi' the distribul of honours at the close of the Salon. 9 n GEMS OF FRENCH ART. This variety of character spreading out from a single studio may be taken as the visible expression of that variety in subject, treatment, and motive, which the French critics arrogate to themselves as belonging peculiarly to the national art. English art, they say, is always the same ; the clever handling, the bright colours, the indispensable pretty girl's face, and the little dog, must be in every picture, whether of genre or history, whether tragic, comic, or conversational ! The little dog I cannot always find, but the pretty girl's face and the bright colours, I fear, we must admit as almost universal on the walls of our exhibition rooms, and in the works of the painters who get most success with us. But on the other side of the water it is certainly not so. There are in Paris indeed many painters whose lives are devoted to the production of pretty faces, but they are not less distinct than other classes of artists, perhaps a good deal more so : they have their circle, which is not the best. The charm of mere execution also standing in the place of insight and quiet mastery is not wanting, is indeed carried to monstrous excess on the canvas of such men as Courbet, the landscape painter, but these are at once distinguishable, while with us every landscape must be painted with a certain freedom of brush and no more, while the green and the grey pictures, so fresh and true to these latitudes, and so distinctive of French taste in landscapes, are nowhere to be seen. The bright colours we must have and the clever execution, and a spring landscape must keep its place, as they say, beside the figure picture, its neighbour, in which a red shawl and a yellow gown are the leading features. In size of canvas, too, the French have a width of range corresponding to the manner of their treatment. Works GEMS OF FRENCH ART. whose area would make the Vicar of Wakefield's group of family portraits look like a miniature, arc not uncommon ; while many of the noblest productions of Delaroche, the most accomplished by Meissonier, or the most tragic by ( m'p are minute in size to an astonishing degree, considering how large they are in treatment. There are besides so many painters who now either imitate Meissonier, or paint refined genre % or tableaux de societe, with original feeling, on miniature smallness of canvas, that minuteness is becoming a charac- teristic of the school. Perhaps this peculiarity of smallr however, is to be considered a modern innovation. The old altar-piece has gone nearly out of existence— it is dropping among the "old clothes." the roba of the past; and the battle- piece of the later military period, now covering the acres Versailles and elsewhere, is also following to the same bourn of things forgotten, and a reaction in externals is nearly sure to take effect. But it is in the subjects treated, by French artists the variety claimed is most apparent, and any enu- meration of the names of the leading painters will recall to the reader the independence of field occupied by them. The stock-in-trade of the school will perhaps always remain immediately traceable to the nude model at the atelier, and the picturesque trumpery of the Calabrian and the Oriental is next in importance, as tin- Wanderjahre follows the Lehr- jalirc. But the realism of our day, if it has born. fruit with us worth)' to be mentioned in the hearing of Eur such as Holman Hunt's "Christ in the Temple," has in France produced a thousand-fold. This literal Orientalism applied t<> Bible history I have always considered as originated by Horace Vernet, and perly belonging to him as a leaf in hi, laurels, h< GEMS OF FRENCH ART. painted " Rebecca at the Well," " Thamar and Juda," and other subjects, on his return from the East, as Arabs of our own day. But realism of this kind is of very limited value ; it is in fact translating the rhythmical into prose, since the imagination and the senses reign over separate kingdoms. It is bringing revelation to the test of facts in a way impossible in any age but that of Strauss, and seems to me out of the province of the true artist, rather in that of the analytical critic, valuable and, in the last degree in Vernet's case, original : but the treatment which causes the costume to become so important, is destructive of the spirit ; and where the scenic accessories become so definitive and re- stricted, the poetic impression suffers. How different from this Orientalism are the pictures of Delaroche, portraying emotionally, and as in a drama, the various stages of the Passion of Christ, as suffered by His Mother and the Apostles ! Perhaps the reader may remem- ber these (not, I believe, the original pictures, but copies by the masters hand) in our 1862 International Exhibition. They were numbered in, 112, 109, in the French Department. In the first, we are within the darkened chamber of the home of S. John, and see the unspeakable prostration of the Mother and of the Magdalene, who lies prone upon the ground. All the figures are turned towards an opening, though none of them dare to look from it, because the cry and hustle of Roman soldiers and Jewish rabble is at that terrible moment passing ; the top of the cross almost grazing the wall as it is borne along the narrow street, indicating to those within the immortal agony of the beloved Son. In the second, we find the Mother returning with all the others that were collected in the first, and we know that they have followed, CFMS OF FRENCH ART. have suffered with Him, and that "It is finished ;" John, with his heart broken within him, sustains the weak body of the Virgin. And in the last of the three, it is far in the night, nigh to the break of day ; John is asleep, and the other Apostles, and the Magdalene, and the sister of Lazarus, all are asleep; only the Mother waits standing on her feet, still as a figure of stone, and beside her a lamp burns dimly, and beside the lamp lies a crown of thorns These are the pictures that dignify a school, and show us a new condition of religious art, at once faithful to Christianity, and to our human feelings ; adequate also as art, ; ing that necessary unity between the spirit and form, the sentiment and the colour. This last indicated unity, the unity of the sentiment and the colour, it appears to me, is the crowning quality of French painters, and the only one in which English art must acknowledge itself as yet inferior. I say as yet, because the latest of the new men appearing among us ar n further from it than ever; and the terrible, the tragic, or the pathetic seem all impossible in presence of the trumpery seductions of bright colours, or of "charming bits" >lour by way of relieving the sadness or the monotony. I S] here of the many clever palette-masters from Edinbi who have made so successful a descent lately on tin ! Exhibitions; and perhaps 1 ought to except Mr. E. I whose pictures in the last Water Colour Exhibition h noli] tic unity of colour, although, I ventun ink. pictorially considered, they were otherwise imp. pictures are that affect to be poems. In our Burlinj 1 l day, it may be, the earthquake will come, and the blood of the coup cVctat be wiped away, Victor Hugo return to Paris, and (ui'i'mic paint pictures filled with tenderness and emotion! Let us not, however, hope for such an event; for after that the delue III, 1 1 is not necessary in these introductory pages I very far back into an account of the French School ; bl there were space at our command to do so, the sul would be found Lingly interesting. In the j Italian painting, that of Ha Vinci, Michael .V Titian, ami the others whoso productions remain now, and are likely to continue, as the highest development lern, as Greek sculpture is of ancient Art, — \\ inch ahead of England. The Italians who tried, under : ill., to form a school for our neighbours a , died oi GEMS OF FRENCH ART. with little result, and it is not till a century after that a Frenchman appears before the world as a leader in matters of art. This was Poussin, and we may accept him as the representative man in painting for a period of time. As in the drama, Corneille (whose " Horace " was produced in 1639) and Racine (whose " Andromaque " appeared twenty- five years later) confirmed the revival of the unities, and the use of heroic verse, not only on the stage, but throughout the poetry of Europe, so Poussin carried the same Academic influence into painting. In costume, the Roman armour, and, as far as then known, by means of statues, the civil dress of the ancients, became the only style either painter or sculptor would allow their heroes and heroines to adopt ; in subjects, the mythology of paganism carried everything before it : modern history was not to be thought of. Still, however, there was little inducement for the artist to live in Paris; want of knowledge and feeling on the part of the Court — for his public was as yet only the Court — made Poussin more an Italian than a Frenchman. And after his long residence and death in Rome, Le Brun carried on the tradition, and we already find a number of men, all working in one taste, and properly designated a school : Le Brun himself, Le Sueur (who would perhaps have been a much higher artist had he not died young), Mignard, Dufresnoy, and others. The " Academic " still prevailed : on the great staircase at Versailles the gods and goddesses in brown, with red draperies against blue skies, covered wall and ceiling; and in the chapel " the Father eternal sitting on the wings of angels," appeared exactly in the same manner and style, only with a greater amount of yellow glory. GEMS OF FRENCH ART. But as Louis XIV. approached the end of his long and important reign, a great change became visible ; and just as the eighteenth century begins, the second representative man we should like to describe appears upon the scene. This is Watteau, the greatest possible contrast to the teaching and tendency of the previous age. The Court and the Church had now ceased to be exclusive patrons in matters of taste : the middle classes now appear, and in every department of literature we find a larger audience. The Opera began in Paris, and Watteau reached the capital in the service apparently of a decorator or scene painter from Flanders. Thus he escaped the school, the influence of the Antique, the conventionalities of all the old bigwigs, and there appeared a phenomenon truly charming, an altogether new kind of art ! Rather, I ought to say, a new kind of painting, because Callot and Delia Bella had led the way in that species of design called by the Italian name Capriccio. But to this he was to add the sentiment and the beauty. He was to be the Boccaccio of a new Decameron, peopled by the amorous and the happy, free of libertinism, a region equally above tlie weaknesses of bad taste and bad faith. He was one the few to whom it is given to strip off the grosser 1 ties and accidental conditions from the times, and to expi its amenities and graces without any moral question ; carrying his own age into an ideal paradise (a fool's paradise the cynic may say), under the eternal autumn of imaginary b where golden-tinted statues of Venus or the nymphs receive the mid-day shadows on their smooth limbs. In his own day, in the midst of an unenjoying sensuality without curb, he was alone the representative ^\ the delicacie gallantry, GEMS OF FRENCH ART. the innocent romance of love. And now, in the presence of our positive life and philosophy, his brush is for us a magic wand, a ravishing delusion ! From its peculiar and limited nature the manner of Watteau could not spread out and become national. His education was that of the stage, and his province was that inhabited by the train of Harlequin. His only effective continuators were his pupils Lancret and Pater : after these, says M. Blanc, his happiest imitators are an English painter Andrews, and an Augsburger, Nilson by name. But the effect of Watteau was not confined to his pupils and imi- tators ; it is true his art was not for the people in distinc- tion from the Court ; it did not celebrate the people, nor was there any teaching in it ; but it was the most decisive step from the foreign and blind authority of early masters, heathen gods, and church mythology, to independence, poetry, and national taste. He did not make the change, but it followed in the next generation, and in some con- siderable degree from the hand of Greuze. When that painter had exhibited his picture of the " Father of the Family explaining the Bible," Diderot said on receiving him in his salon, " Behold the first among us who has made painting moral ! " Greuze's picture was of humble life ; it celebrated the father of the family, the paternal teaching, the happy home, without priest or patron. It was one of the most notable successes ever made, and indeed that choice of subject by a Frenchman either then or now seems to require some explanation. Fifteen or twenty years later a similar success in poetry was made by the very same subject in Scotland when Robert Burns published his "Cotter's Saturday Night." But Scotland was 24 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. a Bible-loving and Bible-reading country ; whereas France, like any other Roman Catholic land, knew comparatively little of the book so powerful in the education of Reformed com- munities. Yet Greuze's picture might be almost engraved as an illustration to Burns ! Diderot's praise of Greuze for moral teaching was moreover premature. This " Father explaining the Bible " is, in the list of the painter's works, as unique as the " Cotter's Saturday Night " is in the catalogue of Burns' lyrics, and the picture accounted his masterpiece. "The Broken Pitcher" has the doubtfulest of morals." 5 ' Watteau one cannot accuse of immorality in the tendency of his fanciful design. Still it loosened the tie that united art with religion and with severe history, but his sue plunged into the slough of licentiousness, which, directly expressed through the obvious and imitative art of painting, crushes out the poetry and arrests the pleasure. It was the age when Pompadour was succeeded by Du Barry, when La Tour's pastel portraits were the fashion, and Boucher was thought to be gaily voluptuous. The works of Vein were indeed staid enough, but they were too like what had been done before ; there was not enough force and individuality in the artist to make a r< • "The 'Broken Eggs' of Greuze brought ^5,000 at the Demid the 'Cruche Cassee' may therefore be worth ^8, 000 in the market ! It is a strange and curious fact that a picture by Titian, a Tintoret, and a all admitted to be authentic, did not at this sale realize in the much more than a single chalk study by Decamps I The pi things is spoken of. ' mania ' or ' gambling,' but it i much iling as pugnai ity in expenditure. A picture sale rich men go to fight with each other." — . 70. GEMS OF FRENCH ART. lution, and nothing short of a revolution was required. The man who was to effect the change was born in the middle of the century (1748) in Paris, and, curiously enough, was the grand-nephew of Boucher, the greatest sinner of the day. This man was Louis David, by far the most important figure in art at the end of the last century and beginning of this, coming on the stage of life at the very moment when it was lighting the foot-lamps and arranging the coulisse for the greatest drama of all history, the First French Revolution. Mr. Hamerton begins his excellent book on Contemporary French Painters with a very amusing account of two pupils of the Classic school who used to walk about Paris in the time of the Revolution and the Consulate, one in a large blue mantle with a white tunic under it, the other in a complete Phrygian costume copied from the statue of Paris in the Louvre. Paris he was consequently called, and his friend Agamemnon. The rage of the day was to re-create the Roman aspect of things, the virtues of antique life and the stoicisms of Cato and Scipio. Dress, furniture, forms of speech and thought, were all transformed, and the art of painting, above all in the atelier of David, occupied itself with the Horatii, Belisarius, and the death of Socrates. Taking him as the representative of the period and its move- ment, he appears to open the century for us and begin the present, even after the tide has turned, and the ebb has left him high and dry. I hope my readers are not too impatient of the length of this introduction, to allow me to give a little history of Louis David, which will bring us down to the men whose works we illustrate. 26 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. IV. The father of Louis David had been killed in a duel, and his maternal uncle wished to make him an architect. The boy felt this was but half-way to what he wanted, but he did not rebel against the desires of his guardian. till one day his mother sent him with a letter to his great- uncle, Boucher. He found Madame du Barry's painter occupied on a nymph in the prevailing taste ; and as the boy waited while the letter was read, he made the deter- mination in his mind that he would be a painter and nothing else. Such a nice little anecdote as this appears to be always providentially at hand for the biographers of painters. Boucher had the penetration to see that a different kind of master from himself would be desirable for the young David, so he sent him to Vein. As we might expect from his later works, at first David did not succeed, although he worked hard enough, and at twenty-five or so he began to be sadly discouraged, when his good angel appeared in the form of an opera-dancer! The celebrated Mademoiselle Guimard, whom Paris adored, and who was followed by all the friends of her former and now ruined lover, the Prince Soubise, had built in the Chaussee d'Antin, under the name of the Temple of Terpsichore, a "delicious retreat" where the petit soupcr was regarded as one of the chief ends 27 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. existence. To embellish this hotel the danseuse had pre- vailed upon Fragonard, a very clever fellow, the painter, par excellence and without prejudices, of gracious nymphs. But a quarrel quickly sprung up between them and Frago- nard, who had represented Guimard as Terpsichore, paid the supper-room a furtive last visit, and made Terpsichore into a raging fury. The danseuse " arrived as usual with all her friends, and, in the tremendous anger she gave way to when she saw the disfigured Terpsichore, she resembled the fury so completely, that her maledictions were received with a burst of laughter. David was applied to, and while he was finishing the work, one day she saw him very sad, and heard him sighing very grievously, and asked the reason. The reason was simple enough, — he was at his last sou, — on hearing which she ran off and immediately returned with a handful of money ; he was welcome to it, he charged so little ! With this money he began an important picture, and sent it again to the competition, his great ambition being to get to Rome. A third time he failed. In despair, and again penniless, he locked his door — at this time he lived in the Louvre, in the apartments of Sedaine, a poet, who loved him like a son— and determined to starve himself to death. However, Sedaine, missing him after a time, and finding the door locked, forced his way in and saved him. From this time his stream runs smooth. He did get the grand prix, and that very year, Natoire, the previous director, dying, and Vein being appointed, master and pupil went to Rome together. Just then Canova was beginning what was called a reform in sculpture ; Raphael Mengs was lecturing the young painters about returning to the love of Raphael ; 28 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. and Winckelmann was publishing his History, preaching the worship of the Greeks. All David's natural predilections disposed him to the movement, and he threw himself into it with all his soul. Five years of Rome at this time made him the slave of an idea, and he returned to Paris in 1 7 So, to exhibit " Belisarius," to be made Painter to the King by poor Louis XVI., to get a great studio in the Louvre, to marry Mademoiselle Pecoul, the heiress, and, by and by, to become as mad a Republican as he was now a classicist, and to vote in the Convention for the death of Louis ! Before that dreadful time came there was a good ten years of work for David, during which he painted his leading pictures of Greek and Roman subjects, which gradually consolidated his influence and made him the most important of European artists. These are not very many — the "Date obolum Bclisario," " The Grief of Andromacha," " The Oath of the Horatii," "The Death of Socrates," "Junius Brutus return- ing from condemning his Sons," " The Loves of Paris and Helen," " Romulus." If we look at the design of these pictures, that of " Belisarius," for example, we are struck by the extraordinary resemblance to Poussin. I say the design, as shown in an engraving, the pictures are different in colour to such a degree that the similarity in design is hidden : Poussin having no enjoyment in colour, and painting on a dark red ground, which ground infallibly influences the surface at last; David painting on a white ground, with a hard, scientific sense of splendour. Everything like texture in CUtioh, all imitation of the differences o\ surface resulting from materials, except, indeed, those materials that v. considered heroic, as steel and brass, were ignored by David, as they are by the great painters of the Italian meridian da GEMS OF FRENCH ART. The " great style " demands the abnegation of minor charms in execution. In England this principle has never been followed ; no painter since West (who painted very weakly) would dare to act upon it, because he would be misunderstood. The misfortune in Paris is, that the surface adopted and uniformly carried over the picture in the highest class of works, is not an expressive transparent surface, but one of opaque porcelain unity, so that the " style " results in a negation. The " Oath of the Horatii" was a royal commission. The painter went to Rome to paint it; and when it appeared in Paris, the admiration it excited was immense. Here was a realization of the terrible drama of the heroic times of Rome, painted with deadly earnestness and creative power. The slight and sybaritical offerings to luxury and sans-souciance that the pastel and decorative men of a past generation still produced, were shrivelled up before it. The intendant of the Maison du Rot and many others saw in it an omen of evil, and, finding it measure thirteen feet instead of ten, objected to receive it. " Take the knife to it, then," savagely said David. Objections from the learned also there were. Seroux d'Agincourt accused him of an historical heresy in the back- ground of the Horatii ; but David knew Plutarch and Levy by heart. He is, in fact, as far as he goes, irreproachable in furniture, costume, and so on, but since his time increased taste for classic accessories has made them a hundred times more important in later French painting. David rejected antique luxuries as he rejected modern ; he preached Cato and stoicism. Such a development of classicism as Alma Tadema presents would have appeared trivial and even sacri- legious to him. His pictures were Corneille on canvas. 3° GEAfS OF FRENCH ART. Hitherto the actor had walked the stage in modern dress : Brutus had been applauded in red-heeled shoes and culottes jarretees ; when Talma, following in David's wake, and advising with him, appeared in the toga and sandals befi >re an enthusiastic audience. At this moment in our artist's life we find an anecdote of his painting a Christ. Madame de Noailles insisted upon his doing a picture for her of the author of Christianity, and it was only after all excuses had been refused that David produced his work, when the Saviour was found to be more like a very handsome soldier of the Guards. "I told you so ! " he answered the expostulation of the lady. '' I knew how it would be. Raphael found inspiration in Christianity : I do not ! " Nearly every recorded passage in the life of David shows him to have been by nature a pagan. In the history of the world, " virtue " means heroism in the ancient, moral excel- lence in the modern ages. The first dominated David ; to the latter he was utterly callous. He made a sort of god of Socrates, a sort of religion of love of country, would have liked to offer real incense to Liberty. His heroes were those who had no infusion of chivalry, no humility, no dependence on superhuman aid. Joan of Arc, Bayard, William Tell, were poisoned to him by their faith, their superstition as he would have called it. He certainly had the brand also of that brutality — that blindness to the emotion <,)( others — that belonged to the most refined ages of paganism, even to the age of Augustus. The "Death of Socrates" followed the Horatii. The philosopher sits on his bed, and continues to the last minute to discourse on the immortality of the soul to his ci:> GEMS OF FRENCH ART. disciples. He is self-possessed, but scarcely any of them can listen for grief and frightful suspense, except Crito, who has given us the discourse. And here is the executioner who hides his face while he offers the cup. The painter had made Socrates actually taking the cup from the hand of the weeping slave, although still speaking and pointing upwards with the other hand. " No, no," said Andre Chenier, "Socrates would not take hold of it till he had finished speaking ; " and now the right hand of the philosopher just approaches the cup as if the sentence he then spoke was his last. At the foot of the bed sits Plato, his back to his master, to whom he does not look ; wrapped in his mantle, a noble and worthy figure. The face, however, seems to me too old ; the St. Paul to the Socratic evangel was by many years younger than the master. The drama here presented to us is nobly conceived, and yet the hard- ness of the painting and the garishness of the colour destroy the impression. He was too thorough a pagan to make us feel his subject. Had he lived in the time of Socrates, he would perhaps have signed the death-warrant of the philosopher as he did that of Louis XVI. When the painter who deals with the highest poetic or historic motives works all the surfaces into bright colour and highly-finished smoothness, and yet denies himself the enrichment of many accessory objects and the pleasure of imitation of texture, he contradicts himself. It is as if every^ thing was made out of stone, and the figures painted statues. But this was in some measure just what he wanted ; he was a pedant, and painted sculpture approached his ideal ; he thought, thus would the ancients have painted ! In " Brutus," and in the " Rape "of the Sabines," the pic- 32 GEMS OF FRE.XCH ART. turc we all know so well in the Louvre, the objection here stated is patent to everyone. And yet if we free our minds from all the conventionalities of European art from the Christian era downwards, especially eliminating Rubens, Rembrandt, and Reynolds, we may see with the eyes of David, and acknowledge painted sculpture to be the true art-form of History. The picture of " Brutus after having condemned his Sons," was, like the " Oath of the I loratii," commi in the name of the King ! It was finished in '89, and the exhibition of this picture, among other influences, increa the public excitement. It was his glory to be in the front of the movement, and his art was a power, in his belief, strong enough to aid it. He now began the large picture of the "Oath of the Tennis Court," that moment of <• powering exaltation, that expressed and fixed the tendency of years. A vast canvas was planned, filled with the up- stretched arms of men like the bouehs of a forest in a storm, and with wild faces white with determination. On the m< of Larere the Constituent Assembly decreed the painting the picture thus began by David, but ho never finished the work. Time went too quick then, he could not keep up with it. The "virtuous Bailly " whose figure is the central point in the composition, had a few years later to lay his neck under the knife. Other scenes of the Revolution then acting: were com- pleted by him : " The Last Moments of Lepelletier ;" " Marat expiring." David entered the Convention in '02, and quickly d tinguished himself. 1 le it was who made the famou beginning " II sera clcve an peuple une st.it in -ale." and he also, at the end of Robespierre's address on the GEMS OF FRENCH ART. immortality of the soul, developed the idea of the Fete of the Supreme Being - . Like an Athenian Panathenaic procession, the choirs of girls and children passed, with plentiful music, and all Paris — all France, we may say — looking on with delight. The members of the Convention were there, every one with an immense bouquet of flowers. A stupendous and beautiful festival, whatever Carlyle or any other analytical critic may say, and not the less so that the prime actors were so shortly dispersed to the four winds. David was arrested and lay five months in the Luxembourg, getting off at last with his head on his shoulders, however, to become the worshipper of Napoleon ! The pictures he did under the Empire are historically important and extremely interesting. The two most important, the " Distribution of the Eagles " and the " Coronation," he did for the Emperor, at the price of 180,000 francs. The Empire, however, was not to be more permanent than the Republic, and David had ten years of exile before he died. When we are following the role of one illustrious actor upon the stage of life, it is instructive to observe how another with whom we associate or contrast him was employed. Boucher was dead before the Revolution began, but Greuze was living all through the convulsive period somewhat obscurely in Paris, and died at last poor and unable to paint, at the age of eighty, in the year 1805, when David was at the height of his renown. When his coffin was about to be lifted from the church where it had been placed, a veiled but visibly weeping lady approached and left upon it a bouquet of immortelles, then glided back to her seat and 34 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. renewed her prayers. The bouquet had attached to it a paper on which was written, " These flowers, offered by the most grateful of pupils, are an emblem of his glory." This lady was Mademoiselle Mayer, the painter of the " Dream of Happiness," and other poetic pictures, now little known. The summer of Greuze was then past apparently, to be resuscitated, however, in our own day, as far as the battle between rich men in the auction mart goes ; ( his pupils, Mdlle. Mayer among them in her "Dream of Happiness," went over to the classic, while those of David spread over all the field. In the year [854 I saw one of these, one of the last of the leading men of the school, in his own studio. I was asked to take with me to Paris and place in the hand of David d' Angers the pen of Mrs. Opie, but shortly before deceased, and 1 found the old sculptor working in a large studio surrounded with his works. lie was, like his master, a political agitator, and had narrowly escaped exile like him. lie was a portrait sculptor, and had kept a cast of all his busts. They in rows, all the European celebrities for fifty years, includ- ing Mrs. Opie, who had left him by will this relic in remembrance. It was but a little gift, a quill ornamented with beads, a show pen to lie on an lioned la inkstand. "This is my church," he said; "here I have the communion of saints; man)' are gone, and you bring me news of another. But some remain a the greatest; there," — pointing to a < ; bust, with file of three feet in height, of Victor Hugo, done in the early days of Noire Dame de Paris, — "there is the prince ot our living men: 1 hope to shake hands with him i 35 THE I. HORACE VERNET. FIRST CAM I' A K.N I N A.LG ERIA. Fur-; name of Horace Vernet properly enough continues the story of French Art related in our Introductory Essay. For three grenerations the ancestors of Horace w< painters, and lived each of them to nearly a hundred y< the grandfather dying the year Horace was horn, [789, after producing acres of dismal sea-pieces and lands* dismal, grey, and colourless than Backheysen, or any else, even in the hands of the dealers. Since Louis XIII. the kings of France had lodged favourite artists in the Louvre, and there Horace, the national painter and popular favourite, was born; his father, Carle Vernet, being al national and popular painter. So we find the vocation of I lorace was inherited. Carle was not so vain of his own powers as of t' his son, and before the: child had any artistic ability at his father was vain of him, showing the infant t<» his friends as tlie finest creature in the world, exhibiting the naked child as a work of art! And Horace grew up manly, well- shapen, and clear-sighted; without, however, th ques- tioning and God- questioning, the sadness and difficult)- that the true poet or greatest kind of artist must suffer. o\ and express. He grew up under tin- double flag of liberty GEMS OF FRENCH ART. military glory, and he painted with enthusiasm and veracity the epoch in which he lived, as Beranger sang it in his songs, but his record is of externals only. Twice Horace was drawn in the conscription, but both times, and the last was in 1815, his [father insisted on providing a substitute, so that the often-repeated stories of his early military achievements are baseless. The actual bayonet and sabre were avoided by him as they were by Beranger, but both of them did their country better service with their arts. On the contrary, Horace was to be found at the grand bah de V opera disguised as a woman, his smooth chin and foot of Chinese smallness enabling him to become an irreproachable demoiselle. Before the fall of Napoleon he was a favourite with Marie-Louise and King Jerome, for whom many of his pictures were painted, and at this time the numerous designs for engraving, which show his powers so favourably, were sketched on the wood. At the restoration of the Bourbons he was treated as a Bonapartist, and the choice of subject he indulged in confirmed this impression — " Le Soldat Laboureur," " La Bataille de Tolosa," "Le Chien du Regi- ment," " Le Cheval de Trompette." " The Massacre of the Mamelukes " also belongs to this time, and twenty other pictures (for already and all his life he painted with astonishing velocity), but they remained in his studio, marked by the disapprobation of the Government. He and his father left Paris for Italy. It was not long, however, before he returned, and went on with the production of his military pictures, large in size and immense in number. To enumerate these, or indicate even the principal, would be useless. They represented the great deeds of arms of all the wars of the Empire, and on 40 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. their ample fields figured the French soldier in all costumes and positions, in garrison, on the held, at review, bivouac, attack, and in the struggle of the fight Infantry, cavalry (no man ever managed the charger in action like Ven artillery, defiled or charged, under the unerrin parte, in the tricolour scarf and long hair as First Consul, or in the grey capot or green habit of the chasseurs. The d of the Louvre continued to be closed against them, but the Constitutionnel and other papers made his canst; a public one, and the world of Paris began to know them in his own studio. This studio was in the Rue de la Tour des 1 ).i and has been described, painted, and published in engravings ; and to an English artist, or to any man who may ha dated the idea of study with the interior of a stua certainly was a strange pla< The painter and his s< pupils and assistants working on great cam .ere the least noticeable inhabitants : visitors of rank, fidtieurs^ and amateurs thronged the wide area, models and old gen mixed together, and a liberty of action prevailed thai ief. One amused himself beating riveille on the drum, another blew the trumpet, and two tall fellows held the centre of the floor, while, in shirt sleeves and cigar in mouth, they nail sword. Settled in Rome as Director ^f the Academy, he painted a new class of works | ing to us a quite higher hit than battles. Of these, tin- one now in the Luxembourg, *' Michael Angelo and Raphael in the Vatican," particularized. In the school of Fri tor ever held in the high mplished and complete of human pi This is claiming a high place tor it, but yet it is n GEMS OF FRENCH ART. its qualities are mainly external, it is the outcome of a sound mind in a sound body, the work of a sure hand, well trained ; but more than this is found in Gericault's " Shipwreck of the Medusa." Other subjects he painted also, and very notably two Brigand pictures. While Eastlake, then in Rome, and other timid souls, were spending years trying to realize the attractions of the aprons of the brigands' wives, Vernet produced at once the " Fight between Brigands and Gens d'armes," and the " Brigand's Confession," works of Sfreat dramatic force and interest. The Duke of Orleans, when Louis Philippe, found Vernet plenty of employment. The " Gallery of Constantine " at Versailles, the immense canvases of the " Battle of I sly," and the " Taking of Smala," and much else, were executed at his command. His last picture was the " Battle of the Alma," which scene he had actually witnessed. His first visit to Sebastopol was with the Emperor of Russia, his second was with the allied army ! The picture represented in our photograph is not one of his great works, although characteristic. It belongs to the " Gallery of Constantine," and shows the cool, steady, and deadly advance of the French line. It has that about it recognizable as the work of a man who has smelt gunpowder and seen what he painted. *mm 1 —4 1 ^jjVj [i j i T-Fl Brl » * 4J ^^5^^^* ^H •--'--.. vcS . i m 3M \ ^ ft i v > 1 Wj/*- i ^ v J^ "^ ■ p /-: wv™ tHWBI - - 1*^ "^j^iH HB^ir k" j». m . ^? - \ r fjc : < ^^^w l_* *jJBra' *»j -**HH v i GEMS OF FRENCH ART. of Horace Vernet, who married Delacroix, a beautiful, amiable, and intellectual girl, whose death, it is said, shook the sand down in the hour-glass of her father's life, and clouded the character of her husband ever after. Robert's love was an unhappy one : he had been weak enough also to take to the Roman Catholic communion ; moreover the world began to look to him for inventions of the highest kind, which it is supposed made him shrink from his future. "The Fishermen of the Adriatic" was painted in the island of Chioggia, the old residence of the Doges of Venice It was exhibited with great eclat in Venice, but by some accident was detained at the douane at Lyons, and arrived too late for the Salon of 1835 in Paris. He had at this time left Rome in low spirits, and for a time found in hard work, and absorption in his subject so well carried out, the relief required. But this little contretemps came in the way. He had an atelier in the Pisani Palace on the Grand Canal. He had just heard that his picture was not in the Salon — and we must remember that there is but one exhibition in Paris, so that the only chance of notice is through the Salon (we in England have many chances and means of coming before the buyers and the critics) — when the anniversary of his brother's death arrived. A dear friend, too, had left him for Florence. But after all these circumstances are recounted, who would have thought that this man, with such power of hand and perceptions of beauty in the world about him, was secretly trying the key that would open the grave ? The evening before the 20th March, the anniversary of his brother's death, Aurele writes : " We met in the chamber of the Padroni di casa with two friends, Fortigue and Joyant. Leopold was still more sad than ordinary, and took no part 44 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. in the general conversation. I affected to be gay, but for moments my self-possession abandoned me. Hi always fixed on mine, and he repeatedly asked me if I was happy. We rose at last, and he asked me to sleep in his chamber that night, instead of going to my own. I did so, and he brought me a glass of orange water to make me sle * '- * Leopold was to leave Venice, and his journey was spoken of between the brothers in the morning. At list he went out to speak to M. Fortigue in another chamber, and to go to the studio. 1 lis brother's heart misgave him, and he followed. "On the way I found I had the key of the studio in my pocket; where could he go then ? And at that moment an unhappy dog at a corner of the street ran against me and hindered me; instantly somehow a black presentiment I ion of me. I ran, I reached the Pisani Palac aided of our old servant if my brother was there. ' '■ he is gone up stairs.' I rushed up and found the door fixed. I prayed to God for help, and I burst open the first door. I tried to open the second. I struck, I called — no repl) threw myself with all my force against it. I forced it ti, and, () great God ! I saw my poor Leopold lying on his fi * * '■'' When the news reached Paris, every one had an expla- nation, but the explanation has yet to Ik- found. j cm nics desirerent qifil se jut tue par amour? Mrs. Trollope thought she had found th on in religious mortification and disappointment after his weak-minded change of creed. It seems to me that we must put all the circumstances 1 have mentioned abo\ an understanding of th ^\ mind. Th< in tin- lives of all "men us," to us< rtem GEMS OF FRENCH ART. phrase, when the past seems to have come to a close ; all they have done and suffered and known seems to culminate : they estimate and find themselves so far below their ideal that despair seizes on them, the eyes of the heart are opened, and they see themselves as their enemies see them. The strong overcome the dark hour and begin a new life. Many miss the way from then, and do no more good. The " Fete of the Madonna dell' Arco" is one of the pictures he painted in Rome. Like the better known " Reapers in the Pontine Marshes," it has the gorgeous heathenish character and wild gaiety of the south of Italy. The enjoyment of the strong brown-limbed peasants is superb, and the girl seated on the car is beautiful enough to be Flora herself. III. INGRi III \k\ [V. AND HIS CHILDR] If one is to believe in our general experiences of fac< indicating character, we would come to the conclusion that Jean-Dominique-Augustin Ingres was not naturally or pecu- liarly an artist. Force of intellect he may be allowed, judging from his portrait, and certainly force of will ; but we should at once say, 1 I ere is a piece of coarse material, a strong and ambitious, unsympathetic and not subtle nature, with most probably no perceptions of beauty. And in effect his art seems to me a kind of art to be r< Lit, not enjoyed, to be respected but yet repudiated by a poet, and not loved by an\ ak of his early art, and indeed of his pictures up to an advanced period of life; but at last we find him overcoming his is it id painting the picture we all saw at our Inl national Exhibition in 1S62, called "La .^ " at the eighty ! iy he did not like to own himself old. He irl on this point, perhaps because he knew something had to 1 by him before he died to ju the 1 .If his d, as it was GEMS OF FRENCH ART. times, a younger generation beginning to conceive a fabulous idea of his years, he would answer, " Mon Dieu ! je V ignore. y'ai si pen dc memoire." He would have liked to have resembled the dowager who owned to fifty, but discovered next year she was but forty-nine. However, it was found at last, when he died in 1867, that he was eighty-six, having been born in September 1781, at Montauban. His father was an artist, a very poor one ; so very poor an artist, that he lived partly by music, teaching both arts, and he placed in his son's hands at the same time the fiddlestick and the pencil. At first he took to the music, and would not practise the teacher's well-thumbed examples of eyes and ears. At fourteen or so, it is reported, his attempts with the crayon were abominable, but his playing on the violin excellent. At that period little Theatres de Societe came in vogue, and Ingres was ambitious of being an actor. He studied the parts of Caesar, Mahomet, Britannicus, and Orosman. In this last character his passion was cut short, first by roars of laughter — which his hard hide did not heed much, but projectiles followed, anything that came to hand being pitched at him till he vanished behind the scenes. When he reappeared it was in quite another position : at Toulouse, copying a copy of Raphael, which had been presented to the museum. The professor there received him as a scholar, and after six months his family sent him to Paris. Here he entered the atelier of David, and soon began to distinguish himself among the tumultuous crowd of rapius by his southern vivacity, and mannerless brusqueries. GEMS OF FRENCH ART. Not only in that way, however, did he continue to be a leader. He began very soon to be tired of hearing Alcibiades always called " the Just," and was, in fact, the first rebel against the sovereign tyranny of David, whom not only France, but Europe, in some measure held as lawgh And just then (in 1S00) he had made such good use of his time that he would have been sent to Rome, only the French Academy there had been closed since 1793. He had to remain in Paris, and was commissioned by the Corps Li latif for a picture of " Bonaparte passing the Bridge of Kehl," which the critics of the day would not admire. It was a protest against realism, not cl ism indei but the picture is described as a repudiation of uniforms shakos, and gunpowder smoke, a sort of Ossianic generali- zation. I confess I have not seen this " Pas f the Bridge of Kehl ; " it must be very interesting if all accounts are correct, as an attempt, not to return to modern facts from the classic theories, but to substitute somethi more remote. And yet I think it is certain Ingres had real poetry. He had a musical education as we ha . and at this time Ossian retained its European celebrity and was the devoted admiration of the French ; and I sh< dare to say simply, he made nun', tried i'or a new school, and pretended to an elevation he did not reach. In 1806 he did go to Rome, and remained in Italy fourl years, sending home many pictures others that of "Henry IV. playing with his Childr which we give. From year to year his pictures a; n the walls, or carefully put away in d had the obstinacy as well as th< of the rhinoi GEMS OF FRENCH ART. Gerard, and Girodet were the masters of the situation, but he went straight on, and friends gathered round him ; his pictures found admirers. At forty-four years of age he returned to Paris, and became all at once the head of a school, and that school was called (why, seems to me next to impossible to understand) the school of Idealism. What French poetry is or where it is to be found, an Englishman finds difficult to discover, but in what consists the Idealism of the school of Ingres is truly a vague problem ! In one way his day of success had come : he had a multitude of pupils, and among them already cropping up were the brothers Flandrin, Lehmann, Ziegler, and others. His atelier became one of the noisiest in Paris, a place where neither Idealism nor anything else worth studying could by any means be brought to book. In this den the two hundred rapins declared war on the pupils of Baron Gros, whose atelier was not far off; and the whole lot of them having practised making a caricature of an episode in Gros' " Battle of Eylau," that of a French surgeon dressing a wounded Prussian, they spread out one fine morning and covered all the blank walls in the neighbourhood with this burlesque of Gros ! Another time Gros, passing by the atelier, was hailed as he thought by a cry from within of " Muscles ct Biceps!" He rushed into the painting-room of Ingres and complained, but the boy who had made the exclamation exculpated himself by saying that he and a comrade were both washing their hands by the window, when the herculean proportions of his fellow-pupil's arms caught his eye, and he cried out, as it happened, just as the Baron was passing, " Quels muscles ! quel biceps I" Ingres, however, made the youth apologize. 50 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. I le did not always repress the mischief of his adherents, however. An anecdote is told of a stranger, an Englishman, described as a blond individual with a candid face, in " Les Contemporains," who had the folly to think twenty minutes a week too little time for the master to bestow, when the hundred and thirty pupils then present cast their clothes and danced a naked saraband round him, with savage yells, when Ingres looked in, and smiling, only said, " All right, my children ; you amuse yourselves, I see ! " Ingres' career continued doubtful till nearly the last decade of his life. And now it is difficult to place him. Had Ik; not displayed some very remarkable power- colour in his later years, and had he not painted a few very line pictures, exceptional for him, such as " Ri and Angelico," " La Source," and others, he would have pas into the second rank of French painters ; as it is, he has his worshippers who hold him to be beyond any other. The " Henry IV. playing with his Children " was painted in Italy about the period of his marriage. Henry, the Protestant king of Navarre, is one of their heroes of romance and history, and figures frequently in the art r<{ our n< bours. When his pred ;or Henry III. distributed the forty-live daggers in the Castle of Blois, and the G fell beneath them, he became more hated by the Catholics than if he had been a Huguenot; and when he died under the; knife of the fanatic monk Clement, Henry IV. su ultimately changing his religion, and consolidating the centra. 1 authority and the national forces. The Immediate of the picture is related by the Spanish Ami r. In dly ushered into the presence of th< I family, found tlie little boy, the future Louis Kill., mounted on GEMS OF FRENCH ART. his father's back, who imitated the horse he was supposed to ride. The queen sits smiling at the gambols of her husband, the " Most Christian and august sovereign," and her happy boy ; and the little Duke of Orleans with the Dauphiness complete the charming group. Queen Mary de Medici nursing her child is a lovely figure. C2 IV. SCHEFFER. RUTH AND NAOMI. The personality of Scheffer is quite as interesting as his works. In many French artists that love of notoriety common to men who have become famous for a speciality, may be fairly said to be visible in their history; but in Scheffer this certainly cannot be traced, at the same time that his role in life was more important than that of any other, except perhaps Horace Vernet. Scheffer, mixing much with the great of the day, and also with literary celebrities, has had many notices of his career published from time to time, beginning with Lady Morgan and ending as far as I know with Mrs. Grote. In this last lady's Life of our artist, Guerin comes ^\\ with scanty justice. He is not only stigmatized as a slavish disciple of David (which of course is true, only his slavery was also obedience to his own genius), but he is said to have n unfit to educate such great natures as Schefl that his atelier was a scene of confusion, as if all the ateliers in Paris where pupils draw the model at a monthly fee, and ive only an hour's visit from the master weekly, were not GEMS OF FRENCH ART. Madame Scheffer, the noble mother of Ary and his brothers, sold her jewels to educate her sons, and lived without a servant ; and Ary, who felt this as a noble son should, painted for ready sale small pictures of popular character and portraits, and began the successful practice that placed his family and every one immediately connected with him " above the world." He became, says M. Viardot, " not only the father of his own family, but during the whole of his life he was regarded as the holder of < ' stock purse,' into which all might dip their hands when money was wanted. Friends, brother-artists, all who were in need, had recourse to Scheffer's kind aid, for to no application could he turn a deaf ear." And now came the great change for France : the com- pression of the first Napoleon's reign was at an end, and with it the classical school, which gave way on all points like a pack of cards. Gericault and Delacroix were at once the heroes, and by and by Ingres was added to the number. We see by the anecdote I relate in the notice of the last-named, how the old Baron Gros, remaining as a leader of the classical party, was insulted by the rapins of the new ateliers. Scheffer among the rest went over to Ingres, and after the period of that master's return from Italy, it is said that a marked change is visible in Scheffer's style. However this may be, and it is very likely the stronger nature impressed the weaker, the interest attaching to Ary Scheffer's career, from the time he and his two brothers became " Carbonari " and assisted in the rising in Alsace in 1822, is political rather than artistic. By family he was democratic, perhaps republican, but a republic was little practicable, and in the year 1826 he was intro- 54 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. duced into the family of the Duke and Duchess of Orleans, by the Baron Gerard, and to this line of the royal family he became attached for life. The disposition of the head of the house to liberal ideas was hopeful, and he continued to hope to the end. His enemies indeed found out that he was but " le complaisant serviteur d'uiic jamillc royale bourgeoises but all the world knew better, and that the chivalrous painter could never stand in such a relation to any family, royale or roturicre. At the Revolution of the Three Days, he and Thiers rode out to Neuilly with the mdndat from the Committee sitting- at the Motel de Ville, addressed to Louis Philippe ; and, on the abdication the "Citizen-King," Scheffer happened to hand him into the remise that carried him away. His works, after the return of Ingres from Italy, begin with his series from Goethe's " Faust," which have 1 astonishingly popular. To me they have a very German air, not realizing Ingres at all, but rather as if the new- school of Munich had already asserted its influence. After these came the " Francesca di Rimini," certainly on. his finest conceptions, and one in which his weak colour is not felt; and still later the "Christ the Consoler," which has been in this country the means of making him popular as any of our own painters. The truth is, the English public know him by excellent engravings, a tunate circumstance when the quality ^( colour and style of execution is so poor as in the pictures ol Scheffer. In design he is as refined as in feeling, but the weak light and shade and diluted colour coincide to deprive his pic: of all vigour of impression. On the other hand, they ha\ broad and simple character, which may 1 inted n GEMS OF FRENCH ART. All those from the great drama of Goethe are, as well as " Christus Consolator," well-known favourites. The one now given is a beautiful rendering of the beautiful story of Ruth, and ought to be so too. Naomi deprived of her sons by- death is left by Orpah, but Ruth will not leave but abide with her and comfort her. " And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee : for whither thou goest, I will go ; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge : thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God : where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried." 56 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. them, and how continuously the succession was maintained, and always with the same distinctness and (right or wrong) historical emphasis, I think we do not require to find in him a greater sympathy with his age than others his contempo- raries possessed. Indeed, I should say that Horace Vernet, for example, was very much more expressive of his age than Delaroche, not only in painting the passing events (only military ones certainly, and the military period of the world's history is most probably nearly over), but in his treatment of Bible history. The Hemicycle in the Ecole de Beaux Arts itself is a work that holds a relationship with to-day no more than with the past and the future. Hippolyte Delaroche, called Paul by familiar abbreviation, born in Paris in 1 799, at the age of twenty entered with Gros, and there associated, among others, with Bonington, an English painter we in England see nothing of, but who has had a very considerable influence in France. Five years later his first picture was seen, and, much as the public thought of it, the painters thought still more highly. " Jehosabeth saving Joash " was much spoken of, and one day he had the curiosity to listen to what was said in presence of his own work, when Gericault stopped before it with a friend, and praised the picture so loudly that the young painter could not but hear. Next day Delaroche presented himself to Gericault, and this led to much ; the painter of " The Shipwreck of the Medusa " not affecting the tone of the professor but of the friend. By the side of Gericault at that time was Delacroix, who carried away the critics, and was for a time the cause of much opposition and strife between men of different ways of thinking. Delaroche's success was different; all the world 58 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. was agreed that in him there was a moderation and balance of thought beyond dispute, a true and just reading of the page of history. And yet, if we examine those we under- stand best, those historical works he did from English history, we shall find this far from being the case. Was Cromwell likely to go furtively to the room where the body of Charles was lying in his coffin and examine the decapitated king ? Was Charles left in the guard-room to be insulted, and was the insult so base as that of puffing tobacco smoke in his face ? It may be that in these cases he took care to be within the range of royalist tradition ; but as an incorrect reading of history, what can exceed the " Execution of Lady Jane Grey," which he represents as taking place in a dun- geon ? She was, of course, executed on Tower Hill in the open air, and he ought to have known that an execution was always public in England His large picture of the "Death of Queen Elizabeth," in the Luxembourg, does not look like history to me ; it is the representation of a personal and even noble peculiarity, the extreme reluctance to believe herself dying made to look like the terrible end of a she-dragon. The " I )eath of Lady Jane Grey" is nevertheles Imir- able in management, and so pathetic in interest, we forgive him at once. But when we come to the "Death of the Duke; ot Guise," there is nothing to forgive, it is absolutely per; How vivid and dramatic is the portion of the bed with the murdered man lying by it on the dragged carpet ! Then the wide empty space of the room between the body and the knot ol truculent noblesse crowded towards the at which the wretched Louis peeps in to make sure the dvrd is d is admirably dramatic 59 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. "Cinq-Mars and De Thou conducted to Execution" again is nearly as fine. First goes the splendid boat with the Cardinal sitting under his baldaquin, his head lifted a little forward, from the pillow that he may hear more perfectly (if anything is to be heard), and his eyes turn as if he would like to see behind him, where the second boat, that of the condemned, follows, with the two men seated between halberdiers. Of the three pictures seen in our International Exhibi- tion, 1862, the "Virgin and the Disciples in the time of the Passion," I have already spoken. These are perhaps his finest works ; they were done late in life, and after he lost his wife, Louise Vernet, who died in 1845. The perfect execution and thorough painting of Delaroche's pictures in some measure accounts for his uniform success with all parties, without looking for any deeper reason in motive or meaning. His surface is more perfect than that of Vernet, Scheffer, or Robert, or even Ingres. The " Marie Antoinette," by which Delaroche is repre- sented here, was painted at the same time as the " Lady Jane Grey " and " Strafford led to Execution." The condemned and widowed queen walks proudly out from her judges ; the head is admirable. At the side the little group of women, including the ferocious dame de la halle and the pitiful grisette, is admirably introduced. 60 VI. GLEYRE. LOST ILLl A GREAT many years ago now, twice too many to count the fingers, the writer saw this picture on his first visit to Paris, and is now very pleased to reproduce it to the English public by photography. It was then placed in the Luxem- bourg, I suppose not very long before. And at that early day I quite well recollect how much the sentiment in the design touched me. In youth we feel often by anticipation more than the realities of life affect us otherwii wrote his "Pleasures of Memory" when he was alm< boy, and fifty years later wondered what could have led him to do it ! Tlie old poet sits alone and sees the ! and the Grao . ly putting off from shore and leaving him. lind as the blue skies after sunset, blind! And 1 am tired of looking on thin « )ne might as \v< •' never mi As Li i it with . ; I would this night WO 1 am tired. GEMS OF FRENCH ART. And all hath happened I have wished, and more : Our pleasures all pass from us, one by one ; With that relief which sighing gives the heart, When each sigh leaves it lower, lower still." It is the shore of an imaginary land, and the sun has gone down. It is time to leave the quay, but he must remain. He has drained the cup, and the wine has become poison ; he has no more power of enjoyment or pleasure, but sits still on the cold stone while the darkness overtakes him. And there they steer along, following the sun, with the breeze in their sail and in their hair, near to the shore but with an infinitely deep wave between, in the fair ship painted and garlanded, love and beauty, the curled hair and the smooth limb, with the sound of music and song. " O bitterness of things too sweet ! O broken singing of the dove ! Love's wings are over fleet, And, like the panther's feet, The feet of Love." The painter of this imaginative picture is not much more known in Paris than in England. He is a Swiss by birth, although a pupil of the Ingres section of Parisian art. He is one of those who object to exhibiting ; and although he came first into notice by doing so something more than thirty years ago, he has only exhibited four altogether. Indeed, this picture now before us, and a few engravings, particularly that of the " Dispersion of the Apostles," are all that the public know of him. His name is entirely strange to many who know the living painters by residing among them, and yet he is one of the men whose motif in painting is the highest, and whose manner is the purest. Charles 62 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. Clement has a very good paper on Gleyre in his " Etudes sur les Beaux Arts," almost entirely occupied with his picture of " Hercules and Omphale," produced in '63, but I know of no other mention of him. Yet his pictures are not very few, and all of them fine. Poetic fable he has painted much — "The Nymph Echo," " Diana the Huntress," " Nausicaa," " Venus Pan- demos," " Daphnis and Cloe," "The Bacchant' Sacred subjects, too, he has illustrated — "Pentecost," "John in the Island of Patmos," " The Virgin with the Two Children," " Ruth and Boaz," and others. But he does not multiply pictures for the market, and so the dealers can't blow any brass trumpets over him. lie does not exhibit Is he right not to do so? Every man who does not need to try about for stray purcha- or who has not the small vanity impelling him to see his name in print in newspaper criticisms, or on the privileged list of an Academy, will, as a matter of taste, prefer not to exhibit. But the notoriety of the exhibition room is so important, a man's friends so exacting, that scarcely any artist can now exist without subjecting himself to the ordeal. Thirty or forty years ago such a thing was not even thought of, and now there is but one painter of mark in England who has :hibited. Doing so requires the young painter to wait for his audience collecting, which few can do. Charles Gleyre, for one, did not: he made a public success and then retired from the profane vulgar, but the life of the great artist in Paris is so exposed and so loud, that it must be much more delightful there than here to be unknown, but lor the motives tor notoriety mentioned before. In Swinburne's " Poems and Ballads," thi I ailed GEMS OF FRENCH ART. " A Ballad of Burdens " — does the reader remember it ? How full of the same emotional colour the poem and picture are ! Here are some of the verses : — " The burden of long living. Thou shalt fear Waking, and sleeping mourn upon your bed ; And say at night, ' Would God the day were here,' And say at dawn, ' Would God the day were dead.' With weary days thou shalt be clothed and fed, And wear remorse of heart for thine attire, Pain for thy girdle and sorrow for thy head : This is the end of every man's desire. " The burden of dead faces. Out of sight And out of love, beyond the reach of hands, Changed in the changing of the dark and light, They walk and weep about the barren lands Where no seed is nor any garner stands, Where in short breaths the doubtful days respire, And Time's turned glass lets through the sighing sands : This is the end of every man's desire. " The burden of much gladness. Life and lust Forsake thee, and the face of thy delight ; And underfoot the heavy hour strews dust, And overhead strange weathers burn and bite ; And where the red was, lo ! the bloodless white, And where truth was, the likeness of a liar, And where day was, the likeness of the night : This is the end of every man's desire. L'Envoi. " Princes, and ye whom pleasure quickeneth, Heed well this rhyme before your pleasure tire For life is sweet, but after life is death : This is the end of every man's desire.' 64 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. " But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves, for the wind was contrary. And in the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit : and they cried out for fear." To this account, given by Matthew, the second Evangelist adds a remarkable particular : " About the fourth watch of the night he cometh unto them walking on the sea, and would have passed by them ; but when they saw him walking upon the sea they supposed it had been a spirit, and cried out : for they all saw him, and were troubled." Here it would seem he was walking on the sea as he would on the land, as if unconscious of the difference ! Charles Jalabert is a pupil of Delaroche. It is the custom to say who was his master after the exhibitor's name in the catalogue of French exhibitions. Where an artist has been entered in several ateliers, all of them are occasionally given, as for example in the case of Janet-Lange, we find him described as " eleve de H. Vernet, de Ingres, et de M. A. Colin." Jalabert is now a fashionable portrait painter, whose pictures have some splendid qualities. In the Salon just closed (1870), he had two large portraits that attracted much attention. One was a Russian Grand-Duchesse, the other a portrait of " Madame E , souvenir d'tin bal costume." 66 VIII. GEROME. LOUIS XIV. AND MOLIERE. In speaking of the illustrious dead it is natural to review the history of the men and their works together. But with the living it is different. Let them play out their parts and then we shall see the completed whole, and understand the beginning by the end. Some artists, like some fashion- able physicians, take the high places at the feast by qualities quite apart from their abilities. These, such as many in our Royal Academy, if they live too long, have an unpleasant experience of neglect and even derision in their old a Others grow in honour the longer they live, and of these is certainly Gerome, the first living painter in all the world for power in reproducing a dramatic moment on canvas. It is not yet a great many years since Gerome b the series of pictures already so considerable, and every one distinguished by invention of a memorable kind. "The Duel after the Ball " was, I think, the earlit siderable work, anil that was slightly touched with the melodramatic; at least it dealt with the Parisian demi-monde life of the day, in a way that gave it a tragic importance really not GEMS OF FRENCH ART. belonging to it. This first work too had a saturnine cha- racter, cold as iron in winter, that startles the hand that touches it. And in one shape or other this continues to prevail in nearly every design by Gerome, except where the tragic wholly supersedes it, as in the " Death of Caesar." But even here it may be said to be present in the one sluggish senator who keeps his seat in the wide circle of deserted benches, while the crowd pass out in a body, sheathing their swords, and the hero who has wrapped his mantle round his head to die with propriety lies at the foot of Pompey's pedestal. " The Duel after the Ball " made its way all over the world as a coloured lithograph, and Gerome about the same time assisted in publishing a " Course of Drawing " with a Mons. Bargue, and then went to the East. An irresistible fascination resides in the East, somehow or other, for the French nation ; the harem and odalesque rubbish passes with the artist, novelist, and even poet, as a charming and advanced condition of social life. In Gerome's case, besides, the Mussulman is having his turn as a respectable pietist, now that the Church at home is left to the hewers of wood and drawers of water in the provinces. In the impressive " Muezzim's Call," " The Prayer at Evening," " Solomon's Wall, Jerusalem," and other small pictures, we find an ex- pression of earnestness and faith, rendered with simplicity. They are admirably worth doing, but Gerome went on to paint a host of illustrations of Egyptian life, whose value seems mainly in their un-European and un-Christian de- velopment of modern life, — a Dealer in Small Arms — in Old Clothes — a Recruiting Sergeant — a Horse Dealer — a Donkey Driver. Of another and more serious kind are 68 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. " The Slave Sale," " The Mosque of El Assaneyn," " The Prisoner," the latter two of which have been spoken of before. Greater than these, which are indeed pictures of the picturesque only (a picturesque without a touch of sentiment), are his pictures of historical subjects or ancient Roman life. " The Two Augurs " gives him the highest place as a satirist as well as painter. Admirable as art are these two worthies smiling that esoteric smile. The people are without, the remains of the victim are being swept up, they are quite alone. So would Antonelli smile, could he only see that the infallibility schema could ever turn to good ! " The Comedians" is another of like interest, though inferior, and " The Cock-fight." Greater than these are his " Phryne before the Areopagus," " King Caudaules," "The Gladiators hailing Caesar," " Alcibiades at the House of Aspasia," " The Darkness coming on Calvary." In all these pictures, and in all the other works of Gdr6me, women play but a feeble part. He is Oriental enough in that respect ; in his art, as in Eastern life, the feminine is kept in its place ! But he has no cynical pleasure in his views of history, and no touch of sentiment. Certainly in England no painter could find it possible to exclude the feminine half of humanity from his canvas. The "Merchant Princes" we hear so much about would not tolerate him; history, tragedy, satire, without the " pretty girl's fa make them pass into the family circle, will never tie them. We have many painters who never paint a male figure at all, even some of our best and must poetical an' The erotic is the only poetry to them, and the total abs< of it is doubtless Ge*rdme's weakness, or rather I ought to GEMS OF FRENCH ART. say, draws a line of limitation round his art. Where he does introduce women, it is invariably in such actions as accord with the Oriental sect that affirms the daughters of Eve to be only bodies without souls. The picture here chosen to represent Gerome is no ex- ception to the rule. It is entirely a picture of men. The Court etiquette of the time of Louis XIV. and down to the Revolution was of an astounding rigour. The royal lacqueys were noblesse, and they stood about, the bearers of plate, cup, or napkin ; they were proud of it, and they in their turn had their observances. Moliere was of a different kind ; Louis had been godfather to his child, but his sitting down and eating with the King was not to be borne. True, the comedian was a great writer and a great philosopher, but what did they care for these things ? Louis saw the commo- tion among his attendants. " Me voila done ! '" he is reported to have said. " Well ! you see, I have to occupy myself in making Moliere eat, because my officers do not find him a sufficiently good companion ! " The difficulty expressed in the helpless group behind the King is admirable. The indignant prelate on the left is most probably De Harlay de Chanvalon, the Archbishop of Paris so notorious for his intrigues galantes, who afterwards refused burial to the body of the poet. 70 - mm 4 > > ^** ^^^H •mm #- maum ^ mmm m^^^ , ^Mf PBl " c THE NIGHTINGALES SONG. IX. COMPTE-CALIX. THE SONG OF THE NIGHT1 NGA Francois Claudius Compte-Calix is a native of Lyons, from whence he came to Paris some thirty years ago, and from his entree to the present time he lias been successful as a public favourite, without being looked upon as a 1< ing artist. His public honours have been numerous, but not of the highest class. In one popular department of art he has distinguished himself, — that is, by the publication of sets of attractive prints that have their admirers over the greater part of the world, as French publications of that class go " from Indus to the pole," and from Petersburg to New York. " The Four Queens," — Argine, Pallas, Rachel, and Judith, respectively the queens of Clubs, Spades, Diamonds, and Hearts have been engraved with success; also a series of six from "(iil Bias," and a similar series called "The Foster Sist< besides "Ave! pious sister," "The Viper's Ni The Passing Shower," "The Country Postman," and a hosl others, in enumerating which we feel as if we had come home to one of our London Exhibition C ami were safe from tin- chance n{ being troubled by either 7' GEMS OF FRENCH ART. sacred or profane history, not to speak of the tragic and the classic. " Art thou a bird, or but a wandering voice ? " A little troop of people have been drawn out on the garden terrace and down towards the lake, on a warm evening late in the spring, by the song of the unseen bird. One lady leans upon the pier of the balustrade, and looks up into the thick foliage glittering with the light of the full moon, and seems to ask, " Art thou a bird, or but a wandering voice ? " Two others, sisterly beauties, sit upon the steps with an expression of listening, singularly well given, conveying to us the sentiment inspired by the song. " Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home. She stood in tears amidst the alien corn : The same that ofttimes hath Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn. " Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self ! Adieu, the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. " Adieu, adieu ! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side, and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley glades : Was it a vision, or a waking dream ? Fled is that music — do I wake or sleep ? ' : 72 THE WIDOWS SMITE. X. DUBUFE. THE WIDOW'S MITE. A FEW years ago a lady presented to the National Gallery a picture by an artist of the Flemish school, Joseph Dyck- maiis, the subject being a " Blind Beggar at a Church I )• The feeling- of the donatrix was that there was no such picture in the gallery, indeed that it was unequalled in the world. No sooner was it exhibited to the public, than her opinion was apparently endorsed and confirmed. For a very long time easel behind easel stood in front of it, and the engraving published was an undoubted su< The ion for this was the extreme finish of the work, and its obvious sentiment. The elaboration of the old beggar's hair, and beard was the admiration of all those whose • fixed idea is, that minute imitation is perfection. I confess our "Widow's Mite" oi~ Dubufe reminds me of the picture I have described, and its success with the public has been similar. A widowed matron enters the porch. Her son and daughter, the handsome little boy on his good behaviour, and the taller girl more self-] ed, go before; in her arms is the youngest one, a little boy sleeping on the shoulder of his mother, who, h.. . GEMS OF FRENCH ART. " known affliction," has a compassionate heart for those who are still more severely tried than herself, and drops her copper coin into the alms-chest. Edward Dubufe is the son of a painter, and possesses something of that propriety of design distinguishing the works of his master, Delaroche. He wants, however, all the force of the great painter, every one of whose works strike so directly, that we may never again lose sight of them in the memory. The blow is no doubt nearly always a coup de theatre, but that is precisely the dearest thing in the world to the heart of a Parisian. The subjects natural to Dubufe are of a mild character besides. " Maternal Affection," " Filial Affection," " Prayer," " The Virgin of the Cross," are names that indicate the same motive under different treatments. For the most part of the year Dubufe is a portrait painter, and appears in the Salon by a number of portraits of a sound but commonplace character. One of these we in England became very well acquainted with : that of Rosa Bonheur, in which he did the greatest of female painters justice, at least in one point of view, not indifferent to ladies, although the weight and force of expression was not given. He has produced one picture with a kind of claim to historical importance, the " Congress of Paris," March 30, 1856. 74 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. is a juvenile portrait of Mozart, painted in a suit of handsome clothes, said to have been given him by Maria Theresa, similar to the style in which other children at Court were dressed. The young performer sits with perfect self-possession at the great piano painted with Cupids on the end and in the interior. To him it is only enjoyment, his busy hands pro- ducing the flood of emotional sound that rises and falls as by an instinct. Maria Theresa leans forward, quite filled with the beauty, and feeling that the performer scarcely yet himself comprehends. The men listen, as Germans do, with thoughtful consideration, a tinge of sadness somehow pre- vailing. In this we English show our relationship by descent from the same original stock, for we certainly take our music gravely, and most affect those things that sadden us, as Lorenzo expresses it in the " Merchant of Venice :" " We're never merry when we hear sweet music." This is an early work of Gustave Boulanger. After his stay in Rome, in consequence of his taking the Prix de Rome in 1849, he painted subjects of antique classic life, of a semi- poetic kind, and now he appears to have taken to the Eastern subjects which occupy so many Parisian artists. 76 ' THE XII. MEISSONIER. T II i: B [BLIOPHIl MEISSONIER has attained nearly all the honours awarded to the artist in France, and there is scarcely a dissentient \ as to his right in appropriating them. This uniform it \ regard is caused by the admirable art with which he accomplishes a limited task; all that he sets himself to being, as a rule, single figures employed in common actions as "Picture Amateurs," "The Reader," "The Halberdi In our International Exhibition we became acquainted with a number of his works, one of which was more than usually elaborate for him. This was called " The Bravos." Two truculent villains are placed in a corridor, to watch for the coming of their victim. One stoops to the keyhole, and tries to see through, his hand being raised to caution his com- panion, for he dares not speak. The other stands prepared, with his hand on his weapon. The expression of both was absolutely perfect; the clearness of the meaning in their attitudes, suspense with determination, could not be better; and the thorough elaboration of the costumes completed the impression. Painting with miniature small ness, Meissonier has the all important power of representil GEMS OF FRENCH ART. life on a panel one foot square is a surprising triumph. " The Breakfast," numbered 188 in the catalogue, was another exhibited by him at that time, and a third was " The Student." The first was a young man breakfasting by an open window, and reading the while ; the second a stout, middle-aged litterateur writing, — both inimitably completed. The time of Louis XV. is Meissonier's golden age, when men wore full-curled wigs, or powdered hair drawn back, giving every one a disguised air, and appearance of being made up and middle-aged. The silk and velvet of their coats and hose, the lace and linen, the whole fittings and furnishings, are equally well understood and painted. The picture by which he is here represented is a young man of this time. He turns his head to see his book, while the day is fading and the grey of the evening is seen in the outside sky, the shutter being partially closed. He stands with his feet so well expressed, crossing each other, and his hands are so perfectly well drawn, holding the book, that a picture without any incident becomes interesting and delightful. Meissonier, like Gerome, is a painter of men. 7* XIII. ROSA BONHEUR. A HEATH ON THE PYREN] 'I'm Bois de Boulogne in 1831 did not much resemble the place now made, so beautiful by the genius of luxury and the spirit of improvement. It was nothing but a thick plantation, sufficiently ill attended to, succeeding by degrees the old forests of oak. beech, and birch, cut down and destroyed in 1N15 by the Cossacks. The avenues, large and dusty, cut at right angles the sterile; waste, little frequented except for the duel and by the suicide. But in spite of its poor shade, its wretchedi of aspect, the Bois de Boulogne had one fervent admirer. That was a young girl scarcely ten years of a. She knew nothing more magnificent in the world than that promenade, and went thither to pass all the fine days of sunshine the good God gave her. With her free step, her fearless aspect, her shorn hair and round fare, you might have taken her for a wild boy ^i the hush, did not her short robe, and the brown pantaloon reach- ing to mid-leg below it, indicate her sex. And h might be seen bounding like a deer along the avenues, while GEMS OF FRENCH ART. the good Catherine believed her all the while at the school of the Sisters of Chaillot. She gathered great bouquets of daisies and buttercups, passing hours in listening to the singing of the fauvettes, or lying on the grass looking at the great white clouds ; or, at another time, she smoothed the dust, and with a branch drew upon it everything she saw — people, and cattle, and vast horizons filled with mills and villages. Nor did she heed the people that might be attracted and gather about her, wondering at the precision of the pictures traced upon the dust ! The young artist of the Bois was Rosa Bonheur. In her very infancy she showed prodigious powers of design ! Her father, Raymond Bonheur, had some talent, but he belonged to a poor family, whose necessities effaced with brutal hands the dreams he may have had of seizing the palms and the laurels, first of the schools of Paris and afterwards of Rome. He contented himself with giving lessons in drawing, and overcome by the charms of a jeune pcrsonne, his pupil, as poor as himself, and with valetudinary parents who continued having children, he married her, and Rosa was born on the 23rd of March, 1822. God succours the numerous family. Raymond redoubled his industry, and his ardour in this fight with misery was truly supernatural. Day and night he worked without glory, but with a facile execution, refreshing himself by gazing on his wife and children. And Madame ? She was an excellent musician, and she gave lessons on the piano, going about from one end of the town to the other. Things seemed to become not so bad : Raymond began two great pictures for the Salon of Paris, when a terrible stroke broke his spirit. His dear wife died. 80 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. Left with four children, his habits of economy all him hope for distinction, lie removed from Bordeaux to Paris. Rosa, now seven years of age, confided to the care of a brave and worthy woman they called Mother Catherine, who lived in the Champs Elysees, enjoyed a free and can life, till the time came she must be placed in the shop milliner. The inferiority of this position was painfull}' lelt by the child. She had been but eight days in the workri when her wan and sad aspect- showed the profound ennui that had taken ; Ion of her. Alas! the birds were still singfingf in the Bois de Boulogne. Her father took her away. He thought what he should do, and he knocked at the i for young ladies. \\c\\- she was taken in on condition that he gave them three m ;ons a week as remuneration. Mademoiselle X., who directed the pension, was satisfi with the drawing-master, but not with his daughter ; she would attend to nothing, and rather assisted in setting the whole place upside -down. She found the child a little female devil, occupied without r in plaguing her companions and her mistress. She had quicksilver in her veins- a hobgoblin! And ev< v she increased in pen:!,. madness, and audacity. At last she drew caricatures of the Professor of English, tl . and the bi. lts. And that was but half her misdemeanour. by bits of thread and pe bread i them attache* the ceiling, and there they stuck, visibl of the tumult and the shouts of laughter! No one hesil ay at oner wh culprit Immediately Rosa is condemned, without d. But every how admirable GEMS OF FRENCH ART. sketches, how ridiculous and striking are the resemblances. Mademoiselle X. declares her a criminal, but takes care to confiscate the sketches, and to enrich in secret her album with a collection so original and amusing. Rosa is of a scandalous feebleness in grammar, her ortho- graphy is dreadful, and she knows not a sentence in his- tory or geography. A single study absorbs her, the study of design ! She would now have been perfectly happy if these other pupils and comrades had not wounded her amour propre. They belonged all to rich families. The dear little women were already ornamented with the characteristics of their sex ; that is to say, with a rich intemperance of tongue, much vanity, little good sense, and a proud disdain for all who had neither titles nor carriage-horses ! The daughter of the Professor was in their eyes a sort of mendicant, admitted by charity to the inestimable advantage of their illustrious company. Twenty times a day did they humiliate her, these precocious young people, sometimes comparing her robe cfindicnuc to their robe dc soic, at other times staring at her plain cover and tin mug. How then ! Was she not just to do as she could, because they ate and drank from silver ? Her character became sombre. She ceased to play with them in her hours of recreation. To-day she cried, and to-morrow she was out of sorts, and Mademoiselle X. became discontented, because she could not see faults in the young aristocrats of her establishment. M. Bonheur took his daughter away. Returned to her paternal home, Rosa lived entirely in the vocation of the artist. She never quitted the atelier, drew and painted from morning to night, and when the lamp was 82 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. lit she lifted again the brush or the crayon. And now a strong inclination drew her to modelling. She moulded in wax or in clay for on into the night. For a long time she abandoned herself serious])' to this new love, but at last the genius of colour carried her away from the fascination of the plastic. She painted for four successive years in the Louvre : she had too much modesty and good sense to forestall her destiny. M. Mousselin, the keeper of the museum, said, " I never before knew what application and ardour w< Crowds gathered about her, but she took no notice ; the English visitors might be heard saying, " Very well, very well indeed!" but her ear was closed. They inhabited the sixth story in the Rue Rumfort, and there she resembled Semiramis, Queen of Babylon, for she had a hangi on the roof! At last, behold her, the time has ; she makes her debut, in the Salon of [841, with two piet entitled "Goats and Sheep" and " Two Rabbits." Perhaps the reader has perceived in this narrative a flamboyant and scintillating style of writing, which a plain English editor does not pretend to. The reader is right; we have been quoting from Monsieur Eugene de Mirecourt The termination of all this fine writing in a picture of " Two Rabbits" is rather a falling off, but still we cannot help being interested in Rosa llonheur's early career. Nay, every point in her history, from childhood upwards, has historic importance, for she of all the women who have lived for the last two thousand years is the sin-' who has excelled all the men of her own school and country in painting animals. The rarest of all gifts of natun the female hand is that force oi characterization and power GEMS OF FRENCH ART. of touch we find in Rosa Bonheur's cattle and horses. She sympathises with the hot life of the strong creature, and reveals it to us in his nostril and eye. We enjoy this little narrative besides, because Rosa Bonheur, it is said, has neither the vanity nor the " fear of cows" of other women, and she is frank and generous, giving assistance in money or other help wherever it is deserved. Her difficulties, and with hers those of her family, were now over. She attached herself to a speciality little practised in France, and she succeeded from the first. She sent to the Salon in eight years thirty-one pictures, and painted many others that were carried directly from her studio by- dealers and collectors from various countries, and especially from England. The Jury of the Salon awarded her picture of " Bceufs du Cantal " a medal of the first class, and Horace Vernet, who was that year President of the Commission, proclaimed before an illustrious crowd his admiration for the young lady's genius. In the Salon of 1849 appeared her " Labourage Nivernais," commanded by the Government, and it was received with a burst of enthusiasm by the public and her brethren in the art. It is now in the gallery of the Luxembourg. The picture of " The Horse Fair," however, it was, that made her fame with us. This picture was desired by the French Government, but it was already sold ; a picture dealer having paid for it forty thousand francs. After that work left her easel she went to Spain, and in the Pyrenees found some of the best subjects possible for her peculiar powers. One of them is the subject we give : " A Heath on the Pyrenees," a wild undulating hollow, with sheep and goats cropping the scanty herbage. IS ■a ,, o o 2 GEMS OF FRENCH ART. human form ; but the unpoetical motives, the style of painting, and the reasons for it, have all gone to the limbo of things forgotten. A new form of classicism, however, has taken an important place in French painting. The poetry and the fable of the ancient world are as fresh as ever, and a certain re-creation of antique life as a vehicle of poetry has produced beautiful things at the hand of Hamon and others following him, Coomans particularly, and G. R. Boulanger. The latest form of all is that we see in the pictures of Alma-Tadema, who treats the ancient Romans and their ways as if they were no more heroic than our- selves, only more curiously elegant in their appliances. Subjects of the kind illustrated by our engraving Hamon has made his own, and has given his entire life to them. " The Muses at Pompeii," " The Image Shop," " The Pro- menade," " Aurora," " The Comedy of Life," " The Evening Twilight," are a few of the names, themselves so suggestive of delicate fancies. After the death of Delaroche, whose pupil Hamon was, he went into the atelier of Gleyre, and in his case the spirit of the master seems to have greatly influenced the pupil. or \ nvB ffan 1 XV. BELLANGE. THE TWO FRIEND i [S-Hippolyte Bellange was one of the an who went out to the Crimea. This picture of " The I Friends," among others, is a result of that expedition, and is reported to have been a real incident that was seen on the field next day after one of the fights south of SebastopoL That the military school of art is still in great force in France is proved by the number of pictures of every great battle in the late wars ; the war in Italy as well as that of the Allies in the Crimea. Magenta and Solferino have been pail by volunteers as well as by the men commissioned by the Government of France. And the "Battle 'ma" was painted over and over again. M. 1'ils with v< ability did a large picture of the subject with artillery ci ing the stream; and some of my readers may rememb [862, when Horace Vernet's "Alma" was also in London. Bellang^ painted the Alma also. But he has had the 1: of illustrating the art of war in a way somewh to the world at large certainly more inter. than the display of troops of men in active rvice, schemes of manoeuvre not easily unci' GEMS OF FRENCH ART. painted incidents after the battle, such as give us a vivid sense of the sad realities of war and the life of the soldier. Of these the companion subjects, " The Last Salute " and " The Two Friends," are notable examples. In the first of these, the bearers of the dead carry the body of a comrade to his grave, covered with his cloak, and the fatigue party, as he is carried past, desist from their labours and lift their right hands to their hats. The other is the one here selected. The two friends have died together ; they were missed and here they lie, the one last fallen holding his comrade's hand. The surgeon and officer of the detachment who are groine the round with their staff of attendants and a working party to prepare the returns of the dead and wounded, pause by the touching group. The officer is perusing the papers found on the dead, identifying them. There is a manly pathos in the conception of the scene, and it is entirely without affectation. ss XVI. EDOUARD FRERE. THE LITTLE MODEL. Tins charming picture of Edouard Frfcre I havi le tin: frontispiece to our hook, and I think it < many words to elucidate it and enable the reader I the incident. The stout little fellow is the ma f the situation, as models so often arc. If he would only remain so, leaning himself back on his chubby hands in a bashful but really fearless manner, making his great t<» with each other! But in a minute or two he will turn round and peep from under his elbow, or perhaps present on! back view to the discomfited student. Dogs and child try the patience of the artist in a manner too frightfu describe. It is of no use to speak, for they cannot im stand, and to twist them into the wished for action fi the dbg and makes the infant howl. I low wry ; the reader thinks, when he or she looks at this print, when he or she visits an exhibition and sees the compl work ; how very pleasant to have the little model ; studio, and see him just as lie is in the picture, ami d him, and then paint him, and play with him after, and [ him apples, and send Aim home and the picture I GEMS OF FRENCH ART. place in the exhibition. But, dearest of readers, if you only tried it! If you only had this fine little fellow in, hour after hour, day after day, and never got any stroke of good work done till he was fairly out of the house again, perhaps roaring as if you had been guilty of cruelty, and ought properly to be indicted by the secretary of the Society for the Protection of Infants ! All models are nearly as intractable, and these are after all but a trifling part of the difficult materials to be brought into shape by the painter, and made to contribute to the result. It is well for the girl in Frere's picture that she is apparently only an amateur. Dearest of readers, it is very nice to be only a reader, only a spectator, although it must be admitted it is not nearly so clever as to be the creator of even the least of the works of the least of the artists we have been reviewing. But I have reached the last page, and have only to say, I hope the more intimate acquaintance we have made with the leaders of the present school of France has increased our respect for their powers and our enjoyment in their productions. THE END. London: r. clay, sons, and tavlok, printers. X n . b loan ton ED n,s b «* is doe oTa I *P*» "S&iS^ip Berkeley ° rn,a