The History of Modern Painting, Volume 2 (of 4) / Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century

THE HISTORY OF
MODERN PAINTING

Mansell Photo
LESLIE	MY UNCLE TOBY AND THE WIDOW WADMAN

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

BOOK III

THE TRIUMPH OF THE MODERNS

CHAPTER XVI

THE DRAUGHTSMEN

Inasmuch as modern art, in the beginning of its career, held commerce almost exclusively with the spirits of dead men of bygone ages, it had set itself in opposition to all the great epochs that had gone before. All works known to the history of art, from the cathedral pictures of Stephan Lochner down to the works of the followers of Watteau, stand in the closest relationship with the people and times amid which they have originated. Whoever studies the works of Dürer knows his home and his family, the Nuremberg of the sixteenth century, with its narrow lanes and gabled houses; the whole age is reflected in the engravings of this one artist with a truth and distinctness which put to shame those of the most laborious historian. Dürer and his contemporaries in Italy stood in so intimate a relation to reality that in their religious pictures they even set themselves above historical probability, and treated the miraculous stories of sacred tradition as if they had been commonplace incidents of the fifteenth century. Or, to take another instance, with what a striking realism, in the works of Ostade, Brouwer, and Steen, has the entire epoch from which these great artists drew strength and nourishment remained vivid in spirit, sentiment, manners, and costume. Every man whose name has come down to posterity stood firm and unshaken on the ground of his own time, resting like a tree with all its roots buried in its own peculiar soil; a tree whose branches rustled in the breeze of its native land, while the sun which fell on its blossoms and ripened its fruits was that of Italy or Germany, of Spain or the Netherlands, of that time; never the weak reflection of a planet that formerly had shone in other zones.

It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that this connection with the life of the present and the soil at home was lost to the art of painting. It cannot be supposed that later generations will be able to form a conception of life in the nineteenth century from pictures produced in this period, or that these pictures will become approximately such documents as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries possess in the works of Dürer, Bellini, Rubens, or Rembrandt. The old masters were the children of their age to the very tips of their fingers. They were saturated with the significance, the ideals, and the aims of their time, and they saturated them with their own aims, ideals, and significance. On the other hand, if any one enters a modern picture gallery and picks out the paintings produced up to 1850, he will often receive the impression that they belong to earlier centuries. They are without feeling for the world around, and seem even to know nothing of it.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.		Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
BOILLY.	THE TOILETTE.	BOILLY.	THE NEWSVENDOR.

Even David, the first of the moderns, has left no work, with the exception of his “Marat,” which has been baptized with the blood of the French Revolution. To express the sentiment of Liberty militant he made use of the figures of Roman heroes. The political freedom of the people, so recently won, so fresh in men’s minds, he illustrated by examples from Roman history. At a later time, when the allied forces entered Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, he made use of the story of Leonidas at Thermopylæ. Only in portrait painting was any kind of justice done to modern life by the painters in “the grand style.” True it is that there lived, at the time, a few “little masters” who furtively turned out for the market modest little pictures of the life around them, paintings of buildings and kitchen interiors. The poor Alsatian painter Martin Drolling, contemptuously designated a “dish painter” by the critics, showed in his kitchen pictures that, in spite of David, something of the spirit of Chardin and the great Dutchmen was still alive in French art. But he has given his figures and his pots and pans and vegetables the pose and hard outline of Classicism. A few of his portraits are better and more delicate, particularly that of the actor Baptiste, with his fine head, like that of a diplomatist. At the exhibition of 1889, this picture, with its positive and firmly delineated characterisation, made the appeal of a Holbein of 1802. Another “little master,” Granet, painted picturesque ruins, low halls, and the vaults of churches; he studied attentively the problem of light in inner chambers, and thereby drew upon himself the reproach of David, that “his drawing savoured of colour.” In Leopold Boilly Parisian life—still like that of a country town—and the arrival of the mail, the market, and the busy life of the streets, found an interpreter,—bourgeois no doubt, but true to his age. In the time of the Revolution he painted a “Triumph of Marat,” the tribune of the people, who is being carried on the shoulders of his audience from the palais de justice in Paris, after delivering an inflammatory oration. In 1807, when the exhibition of David’s Coronation picture had thrown all Paris into excitement, Boilly conceived the notion of perpetuating in a rapid sketch the scene of the exhibition, with the picture and the crowd pressing round it. His speciality, however, was little portrait groups of honest bourgeois in their stiff Sunday finery. Boilly knew with accuracy the toilettes of his age, the gowns of the actresses, and the way they dressed their heads; he cared nothing whatever about æsthetic dignity of style, but represented each subject as faithfully as he could, and as honestly and sincerely as possible. For that reason he is of great historical value, but he is not painter enough to lay claim to great artistic interest. The execution of his pictures is petty and diffidently careful, and his neat, Philistine painting has a suggestion of china and enamel, without a trace of the ease and spirit with which the eighteenth century carolled over such work. The heads of his women are the heads of dolls, and his silk looks like steel. His forerunners are not the Dutchmen of the good periods, Terborg and Metsu, but the contemporaries of Van der Werff. He and Drolling and Granet were rather the last issue of the fine old Dutch schools, rather descendants of Chardin than pioneers, and amongst the younger men there was at first no one who ventured to sow afresh the region which had been devastated by Classicism. Géricault certainly was incited to his “Raft of the Medusa” not by Livy or Plutarch, but by an occurrence of the time which was reported in the newspapers; and he ventured to set an ordinary shipwreck in the place of the Deluge or a naval battle, and a crew of unknown mortals in the place of Greek heroes. But then his picture stands alone amongst the works of the Romanticists, and is too decidedly transposed into a classical key to count as a representation of modern life.

Baschet.
BOILLY.	THE MARIONETTES.

In its striving after movement and colour, Romanticism put forward the picturesque and passionate Middle Ages in opposition to the stiff and frigid neo-Greek or neo-Roman ideal; but it joined with Classicism in despising the life of the present. Even the political excitement at the close of the Restoration and the Revolution of July had but little influence on the leading spirits of the time. Accustomed to look for the elements of pictorial invention in religious myths, in the fictions of poets, or in the events of older history, they paid no attention to the mighty social drama enacted so near to them. The fiery spirit of Delacroix certainly led him to paint his picture of the barricades, but he drew his inspiration from a poet, from an ode of Auguste Barbier, and he gave the whole an air of romance and allegory by introducing the figure of Liberty. He lived in a world of glowing passions, amid which all the struggles of his age seemed to have for him only a petty material interest. For that reason he has neither directly nor indirectly drawn on what he saw around him. He painted the soul, but not the life of his epoch. He was attracted by Teutonic poets and by the Middle Ages. He set art free from Greek subject-matter and Italian form, to borrow his ideas from Englishmen and Germans and his colour from the Flemish school. He is inscrutably silent about French society in the nineteenth century.

Queen Charlotte.	George III.
GILLRAY.	AFFABILITY.
“Well, Friend, where a’ you going, hay?—what’s your name, hay?—whered’ye live, hay?—hay?”

And this alienation from the living world is even more noticeable in Ingres. His “Mass of Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel” is the only one of his many works which deals with a subject of contemporary life, and it was blamed by the critics because it deviated so far from the great style. As an historical painter, and when better employed as a painter of portraits, Ingres has crystallised all the life and marrow of the past in his icy works, and he appears in the midst of the century like a marvellous and sterile sphinx. Nothing can be learnt from him concerning the needs and passions and interests of living men. His own century might writhe and suffer and struggle and bring forth new thoughts, but he knew nothing about them, or if he did he never allowed it to be seen.

CRUICKSHANK.	MONSTROSITIES OF 1822.

Delaroche approached somewhat nearer to the present, for he advanced from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century; and the historical picture, invented by him, virtually dominated French art under Napoleon III, in union with the dying Classicism. Even then there was no painter who yet ventured to portray the manners and types of his age with the fresh insight and merciless observation of Balzac. All those scenes from the life of great cities, their fashion and their misery, which then began to form the substance of drama and romance, had as yet no counterpart in painting.

ROWLANDSON.	HARMONY.

BUNBURY.	RICHMOND HILL.

The Belgians preserved the same silence. During the whole maturity of Classicism, from 1800 to 1830, François, Paelinck, van Hanselaere, Odevaere, de Roi, Duvivier, etc., with their coloured Greek statues, ruled the realm of figure painting as unmitigated dictators; and amongst the historical painters who followed them, Wappers, in his “Episode,” was the only one who drew on modern life for a subject. There was a desire to revive Rubens. Decaisne, Wappers, de Keyzer, Bièfve, and Gallait lit their candle at his sun, and were hailed as the holy band who were to lead Belgian art to a glorious victory. But their original national tendency deviated from real life instead of leading towards it. For the sake of painting cuirasses and helmets they dragged the most obscure national heroes to the light of day, just as the Classicists had done with Greeks and Romans. German painting wandered through the past with even less method, taking its material, not from native, but from French, English, and Flemish history. From Carstens down to Makart, German painters of influence carefully shut their eyes to reality, and drew down the blinds so as to see nothing of the life that surged below them in the street, with its filth and splendour, its laughter and misery, its baseness and noble humanity. And from an historical point of view this alienation from the world is susceptible of an easy explanation.

LEECH.	THE CHILDREN OF MR. AND MRS. BLENKINSOP.	LEECH.	LITTLE SPICEY AND TATER SAM.

In France, as in all other countries, the end of the ancien régime, the tempest of the Revolution, and the consequent modification of the whole of life—of sentiments, habits, and ideas, of dress and social conditions—at first implied such a sudden change in the horizon that artists were necessarily thrown into confusion. When the monarchy entered laughingly upon its struggle of life and death, the survivors from the time of Louis XVI, charming “little masters” who had been great masters in that careless and graceful epoch, were suddenly made witnesses of a revolution more abrupt than the world had yet seen. Savage mobs forced their way into gardens, palaces, and reception-rooms, pike in hand, and with the red cap upon their heads. The walls echoed with their rude speech, and plebeian orators played the part of oracles of freedom and brotherhood like old Roman tribunes of the people. What was there yesterday was no longer to be seen; a thick powder-smoke hung between the past and the present. And the present itself had not yet assumed determinate shape; it hovered, as yet unready, between the old and the new forms of civilization. The storms of the Revolution put an end to the comfortable security of private life. Thus it was that the ready-made and more easily intelligible shapes and figures of a world long buried out of sight, with which men believed themselves to have an elective affinity, at first seemed to the artists to have an infinitely greater value than the new forms which were in the throes of birth. Painters became Classicists because they had not yet the courage to venture on the ground where the century itself was going through a process of fermentation.

LEECH.	FROM “CHILDREN OF THE MOBILITY.”	SIR JOHN MILLAIS PINXT.	Magazine of Art.
		GEORGE DU MAURIER.

The Romanticists despised it, for they thought the fermenting must had yielded flat lemonade instead of fiery wine. The artist must live in art before he can produce art. And the more the life of nations has been beautiful, rich, and splendid, the more nourishment and material has art been able to derive from it. But when they came the Romanticists found—in France as in Germany—everything, except a piece of reality which they could deem worthy of being painted. The whole of existence seemed to this generation so poor and bald, the costume so inartistic and so like a caricature, the situation so hopeless and petty, that they were unable to tolerate the portrayal of themselves either in poetry or art. It was the time of that wistfully sought phantom which, as they believed, was to be found only in the past. The powerful passions of the Middle Ages were set in opposition to a flaccid period that was barren of action.

L’Art.
DU MAURIER.	THE DANCING LESSON.

And then came the overwhelming pressure of the old masters. After the forlorn condition of colouring brought about by David and Carstens, it was so vitally necessary to restore the artistic tradition and technique of the old masters, that it was at first thought necessary to adopt the old subject-matter also—especially the splendid robes of the city of the lagoons—in order to test the newly acquired secrets of the palette. Faltering unsteadily under influences derived from the old artists, modern painting did not yet feel itself able to create finished works of art out of the novel elements which the century placed at its disposal. It still needed to be carried in the arms of a Venetian or Flemish nurse.

And æsthetic criticism bestowed its blessing on these attempts. The Romanticists had been forced to the treatment of history and the deification of the past by disgust with the grey and colourless present; the younger generation were long afterwards held captive in this province by æsthetic views of the dignity of history. To paint one’s own age was reckoned a crime. One had to paint the age of other people. For this purpose the prix de Rome was instituted. The spirit which produced the pictures of Cabanel and Bouguereau was the same that induced David to write to Gros, that the battles of the empire might afford the material for occasional pictures done under the inspiration of chance, but not for great and earnest works of art worthy of an historical painter. That æsthetic criticism which taught that, whatever the subject be, and whatever personages may be represented, if they belong to the present time the picture is merely a genre picture, still held the field. Whilst the world was laughing and crying, the painter, with the colossal power of doing everything, amused himself by trying not to appear the child of his own time. No one perceived the refinement and grace, the corruption and wantonness, of modern life as it is in great cities. No one laid hold on the mighty social problems which the growing century threw out with a seething creative force. Whoever wishes to know how the men of the time lived and moved, what hopes and sorrows they bore in their breasts, whoever seeks for works in which the heart-beat of the century is alive and throbbing, must have his attention directed to the works of the draughtsmen, to the illustrations of certain periodicals. It was in the nineteenth century as in the Middle Ages. As then, when painting was still an ecclesiastical art, the slowly awakening feeling for nature, the joy of life was first expressed in miniatures, woodcuts, and engravings, so also the great draughtsmen of the nineteenth century were the first who set themselves with their whole strength to bring modern life and all that it contained earnestly and sincerely within the range of art, the first who held up the glass to their own time and gave the abridged chronicle of their age. Their calling as caricaturists led them to direct observation of the world, and lent them the aptitude of rendering their impressions with ease; and that at a time when the academical methods of depicting physiognomy obtained elsewhere in every direction. It necessitated their representing subjects to which, in accordance with the æsthetic views of the period, they would not otherwise have addressed themselves; it led them to discover beauties in spheres of life by which they would otherwise have been repelled. London, the capital of a free people ruling in all quarters of the globe, the home of millions, where intricate old corners and back streets left more space than in other cities for old-fashioned “characters,” for odd, eccentric creatures and better-class charlatans of every description, afforded a ground peculiarly favourable for caricature. In this province, therefore, England holds the first place beyond dispute.

L’Art.
DU MAURIER.	A RECOLLECTION OF DIEPPE.

L’Art.
DU MAURIER.	DOWN TO DINNER.

Direct from Hogarth come the group of political caricaturists, in whom the sour, bilious temper of John Bull lives on in a new and improved edition. Men like James Gillray were a power in the political warfare of their time; bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom with a divine rage and slashing irony, while at the same time they were masterly draughtsmen in a vehement and forceful style. The worst of it is, that the interest excited by political caricature is always of a very ephemeral nature. The antagonism of Pitt and Fox, Shelburne and Burke, the avarice and stupidity of George III, the Union, the conjugal troubles of the Prince of Wales, and the war with France, seem very uninteresting matters in these days. On the other hand, Rowlandson, who was not purely a politician, appeals to us in an intelligible language even after a hundred years have gone by.

Like Hogarth, he was the antithesis of a humorist. Something bitter and gloomily pessimistic runs through all he touches. He is brutal, with an inborn power and an indecorous coarseness. His laughter is loud and his cursing barbarous. Ear-piercing notes escape from the widely opened lips of his singers, and the tears come thickly from the eyes of his sentimental old ladies who are hanging on the declamation of a tragic actress. His comedy is produced by the simplest means. As a rule any sort of contrast is enough: fat and thin, big and little, young wife and old husband, young husband and old wife, shying horse and helpless rider on a Sunday out. Or else he brings the physical and moral qualities of his figures into an absurd contrast with their age, calling, or behaviour: musicians are deaf, dancing masters bandy-legged, servants wear the dresscoats and orders of lords, hideous old maids demean themselves like coquettes, parsons get drunk, and grave dignitaries of state dance the cancan. And so, when the servant gets a thrashing, and the coquette a refusal, and the diplomatist loses his orders by getting a fall, it is their punishment for having forgotten their proper place. They are all of them “careers on slippery ground,” with the same punishments as Hogarth delighted to depict. But Rowlandson became another man when he set himself to represent the life of the people.

L’Art.
DU MAURIER.	A WINTRY WALK.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
KEENE.	FROM “OUR PEOPLE.”    THE PERILS OF THE DEEP.

Born in July 1756, in a narrow alley of old London, he grew up amidst the people. As a young man he saw Paris, Germany, and the Low Countries. He went regularly to all clubs where there was high play. As man, painter, and draughtsman alike, he stood in the midst of life. Street scenes in Paris and London engage his pencil, especially scenes from Vauxhall Gardens, the meeting-place of fashionable London, and there is often a touch of Menzel in the palpitating life of these pictures—in these lords and ladies, fops and ballad-singers, who pass through the grounds of the gardens in a billowy stream. His illustrations include everything: soldiers, navvies, life at home and in the tavern, in town and in village, on the stage and behind the scenes, at masquerades and in Parliament. When he died at seventy, on 22nd April 1827, the obituaries were able to say of him with truth that he had drawn all England in the years between 1774 and 1809. And all these leaves torn from the life of sailors and peasants, these fairs and markets, beggars, huntsmen, smiths, artizans, and day labourers, were not caricatures, but sketches keenly observed and sharply executed from life. His countrymen have at times a magnificent Michelangelesque stir of life which almost suggests Millet. He was fond of staying at fashionable watering-places, and came back with charming scenes from high life. But his peculiar field of observation was the poor quarter of London. Here are the artizans, the living machines. Endurance, persistence, and resignation may be read in their long, dismal, angular faces. Here are the women of the people, wasted and hectic. Their eyes are set deep in their sockets, their noses sharp and their skin blotched with red spots. They have suffered much and had many children; they have a sodden, depressed, stoically callous appearance; they have borne much, and can bear still more. And then the devastations of gin! that long train of wretched women who of an evening prostitute themselves in the Strand to pay for their lodging! those terrible streets of London, where pallid children beg, and tattered spectres, either sullen or drunken, rove from public-house to public-house, with torn linen and rags hanging about them in shreds! The cry of misery rising from the pavement of great cities was first heard by Rowlandson, and the pages on which he drew the poor of London are a living dance of death of the most ghastly veracity.

But, curiously enough, this same man, who as an observer could be so uncompromisingly sombre, and so rough and brutal as a caricaturist, had also a wonderfully delicate feeling for feminine charm. In the pages he has devoted to the German waltz there lives again the chivalrous elegance of the period of Werther, and that peculiarly English grace which is so fascinating in Gainsborough. His young girls are graceful and wholesome in their round straw hats with broad ribbons; his pretty little wives in their white aprons and coquettish caps recall Chardin. One feels that he has seen Paris and appreciated the fine fragrance of Watteau’s pictures.

Mention should also be made of Henry William Bunbury, who excelled in the drawing of horses and ponies. “A long Story” is an excellent example of his powers as a caricaturist pure and simple. The variations rung on the theme of boredom and the self-centred and animated stupidity of the narrator have been vividly observed, and are earnestly rendered. Rowlandson has the savage indignation of Swift; Bunbury is not savage, but he has the same English seriousness and something of the same brutality. The faces here are crapulous and distorted, and the subject is treated without lightness or good-nature. Perhaps the English do not take their pleasures so very seriously, but undoubtedly they jest in earnest. Yet Bunbury’s incisiveness and his thorough command of what it is his design to express assure him a distinct position as an artist. His “Richmond Hill” shows the pleasanter side of English character. The breeze billowing in the trees, the little lady riding by on her cob, the buxom dames in the shay, and the man spinning past on his curricle, give the scene a spirit of life and movement, besides rendering it an historical document of the period of social history that lies between The Virginians and Vanity Fair.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
KEENE.	FROM “OUR PEOPLE.”

As a political caricaturist George Cruikshank has the same significance for England as Henri Monnier has for France, and the drawings of the latter often go straight back to the great English artist. But his first works in 1815 were children’s books, and such simple delineations from the world of childhood and the life of society have done more to preserve his name than political caricatures. Their touch of satire is only very slight. Cruikshank’s ladies panting under heavy chignons, his serious and exceedingly prosy dames pouring out tea for serious and not less ceremonious gentlemen, whilst the girls are galloping round Hyde Park on their thoroughbreds, accompanied by a brilliant escort of fashionable young men—they are all of them not so much caricatures as pictures freshly caught from life. He had a great sense for toilettes, balls, and parties. And he could draw with artistic observation and tender feeling the babbling lips and shining eyes of children, the shy confidence of the little ones, their timid curiosity and their bashful advances. And thus he opened up the way along which his disciples advanced with so much success.

KLEIN.	A TRAVELLING LANDSCAPE PAINTER.

The style of illustration has adapted itself to the altered character of English life. What at first constituted the originality of English caricaturists was their mordant satire. Everything was painted in exceedingly vivid colours. Whatever was calculated to bring out an idea in comic or brutal relief—great heads and little bodies, an absurd similarity between persons and animals, the afflorescence of costume—was seized upon eagerly. These artists fought for the weary and heavy-laden, and mercilessly lashed the cut-throats and charlatans. They delighted in spontaneous obscenity, exuberant vigour, and undisguised coarseness. Men were shaken by a broad Aristophanic laughter till they seemed like epileptics. At the time when the Empire style came into England, Gillray could dare to represent by speaking likenesses some of the best-known London beauties, in a toilette which the well developed Madame Tallien could not have worn with more assurance. Such things were no longer possible when England grew out of her awkward age. After the time of Gillray a complete change came over the spirit of English caricature. Everything brutal or bitterly personal was abandoned. The clown put on his dress-clothes, and John Bull became a gentleman. Even by Cruikshank’s time caricature had become serious and well-bred. And his disciples were indeed not caricaturists at all, but addressed themselves solely to a delicately poetic representation of subjects. They know neither Rowlandson’s innate force and bitter laughter, nor the gallows humour and savagery of Hogarth; they are amiable and tenderly grave observers, and their drawings are not caricatures, but charming pictures of manners.

Punch, which was founded in 1841, has perhaps caught the social and political physiognomy of England in the middle of the nineteenth century with the greatest delicacy. It is a household paper, a periodical read by the youngest girls. All the piquant things with which the Parisian papers are filled are therefore absolutely excluded. It scrupulously ignores the style of thing to which the Journal Amusant owes three-fourths of its matter. Every number contains one big political caricature, but otherwise it moves almost entirely in the region of domestic life. Students flirting with pretty barmaids, neat little dressmakers carrying heavy bonnet-boxes and pursued by old gentlemen—even these are scenes which go a little too far for the refined tone of the paper which has been adapted to the drawing-room.

Next to Cruikshank, the Nestor of caricature, must be mentioned John Leech, who between 1841 and 1864 was the leading artist on Punch. In his drawings there is already to be found the high-bred and fragrant delicacy of the English painting of the present time. They stand in relation to the whimsical and vigorous works of Rowlandson as the fine esprit of a rococo abbé to the coarse and healthy wit of Rabelais. The mildness of his own temperament is reflected in his sketches. Others have been the cause of more laughter, but he loved beauty and purity. Men are not often drawn by him, or if he draws them they are always “pretty fellows,” born gentlemen. His young women are not coquettish and chic, but simple, natural, and comely. The old English brutality and coarseness have become amiable, subtle, refined, mild, and seductive in John Leech. He is a fine and delicate spirit, who seems very ethereal beside Hogarth and Rowlandson, those giants fed on roast-beef; he prefers to occupy himself with sport and boating, the season and its fashions, and is at home in public gardens, at balls, and at the theatre. Here a pretty baby is being taken for an airing in Hyde Park by a tidy little nurse-maid, and there on mamma’s arm goes a charming schoolgirl, who is being enthusiastically greeted by good-looking boys; here again a young wife is sitting by the fireside with a novel in her hand and her feet out of her slippers, while she looks dreamily at the glimmering flame. Or a girl is standing on the shore in a large straw hat, with her hand shading her eyes and the wind fluttering her dress. Even his “Children of the Mobility” are little angels of grace and purity, in spite of their rags. The background, be it room, street, or landscape, is merely given with a few strokes, but it is of more than common charm. Every plate of Leech has a certain fragrance and lightness of touch and a delicacy of line which has since been attained only by Frederick Walker. His simplicity of stroke recalls the old Venetian woodcuts. There is not an unnecessary touch. Everything is in keeping, everything has a significance.

ERHARD.	A PEASANT SCENE.

Leech’s successor, George du Maurier, is less delicate—that is to say, not so entirely and loftily æsthetic. He is less exclusively poetic, but lives more in actual life, and suffers less from the raw breath of reality. At the same time, his drawing is pithier and more incisive; one discerns his French training. In 1857 du Maurier was a pupil of Gleyre, and returned straight to England when Leech’s place on Punch became vacant by his death. Since that time du Maurier has been the head of the English school of drawing—of the diarists of that society which is displayed in Hyde Park during the season, and found in London theatres and dining-rooms, and in well-kept English pleasure grounds, at garden parties and tennis meetings, the leaders of clubs and drawing-rooms. His snobs rival those of Thackeray, but he has also a special preference for the fair sex—for charming women and girls who race about the lawn at tennis in large hats and bright dresses, or sit by the fire in fashionable apartments, or hover through a ball-room waltzing in their airy skirts of tulle. The coquettishness of his little ones is entirely charming, and so too is the superior and comical exclusiveness of his æsthetically brought-up children, who will associate with no children not æsthetic.

ERHARD.	A PEASANT FAMILY.

But the works of Charles Keene are the most English of all. Here the English reveal that complete singularity which distinguishes them from all other mortals. Both as a draughtsman and as a humorist Keene stands with the greatest of the century, on the same level as Daumier and Hokusai. An old bachelor, an original, a provincial living in the vast city, nothing pleased him better than to mix with the humbler class, to mount on the omnibus seat beside the driver, to visit a costermonger, or sit in a dingy suburban tavern. He led a Bohemian life, and was, nevertheless, a highly respectable, economical, and careful man. Trips into the country and little suppers with his friends constituted his greatest pleasures. He was a member of several glee clubs, and when he sat at home played the Scotch bagpipes, to the horror of all his neighbours. During his last years his only company was an old dog, to which he, like poor Tassaert, clung with a touching tenderness. All the less did he care about “the world.” Grace and beauty are not to be sought in his drawings. For him “Society” did not exist. As du Maurier is the chronicler of drawing-rooms, Keene was the fine and unsurpassed observer of the people and of humble London life, and he extended towards them a friendly optimism and a brotherly sympathy. An endless succession of the most various, the truest, and the most animated types is contained in his work: mighty guardsmen swagger, cane in hand, burly and solemn; cabmen and omnibus drivers, respectable middle-class citizens, servants, hairdressers, the City police, waiters, muscular Highlanders, corpulent self-made City men, the seething discontent of Whitechapel; and here and there amidst them all incomparable old tradesmen’s wives, and big, raw-boned village landladies in the Highlands. Keene has something so natural and self-evident in his whole manner of expression, that no one is conscious of the art implied by such drawing. Amongst those living in his time only Menzel could touch him as a draughtsman, and it was not through chance that each, in spite of their differences of temperament, greatly admired the other. Keene bought every drawing of Menzel’s that he could get, and Menzel at his death possessed a large collection of Keene’s sketches.

In the beginning of the century Germany had no draughtsmen comparable for realistic impressiveness with Rowlandson. At a time when the great art lay so completely bound in the shackles of the Classic school, drawing, too, appeared only in traditional forms. The artist ventured to draw as he liked just as little as he ventured to paint anything at all as he saw it; for both there were rules and strait-waistcoats. Almost everything that was produced in those years looks weak and flat to-day, forced in composition and amateurish in drawing. Where Rowlandson with his brusque powerful strokes recalls Michael Angelo or Rembrandt, the Germans have something laboured, diffident, and washed out. Yet even here a couple of unpretentious etchers rise as welcome and surprising figures out of the tedious waste of academic production, though they were little honoured by their contemporaries. In their homely sketches, however, they have remained more classic than those who put on the classical garment as if for eternity. What the painter refused to paint, and the patrons of art who sought after ideas would not allow to count as a picture, because the subject seemed to them too poor, and the form too commonplace and undignified—military scenes at home and abroad, typical and soldierly figures from the great time of the war of Liberation, the life of the people, the events of the day—was what the Nuremberg friends, Johann Adam Klein and Johann Christoph Erhard, diligently engraved upon copper with sympathetic care, and so left posterity a picture of German life in the beginning of the century that seems the more sincere and earnest because it has paid toll neither to style in composition nor to idealism. This invaluable Klein was a healthy and sincere realist, from whom the æsthetic theories of the time recoiled without effect, and he had no other motive than to render faithfully whatever he saw. Even in Vienna, whither he came as a young man in 1811, it was not the picture galleries which roused him to his first studies, but the picturesque national costumes of the Wallachians, Poles, and Hungarians, and their horses and peculiar vehicles. A sojourn among the country manors of Styria gave him opportunity for making a number of pretty sketches of rural life. In the warlike years 1813 and 1814, with their marching and their bivouacs, he went about all day long drawing amongst the soldiers. Even in Rome it was not the statues that fascinated him, but the bright street scenes, the ecclesiastical solemnities, and the picturesque caravans of country people. And when he settled down in Nuremburg, and afterwards in Munich, he did not cease to be sensitive to all impressions that forced themselves on him in varying fulness. The basis of his art was faithful and loving observation of life as it was around him, the pure joy the genuine artist has in making a picture of everything he sees.

L. RICHTER.	HOME.

Poor Erhard, who at twenty-six ended his life by suicide, was a yet more delicate and sensitive nature. The marching of Russian troops through his native town roused him to his first works, and even in these early military and canteen scenes he shows himself an exceptionally sharp and positive observer. The costumes, the uniforms, the teams and waggons, are drawn with decision and accuracy. From Vienna he made walking tours to the picturesque regions of the Schneeberg, wandered through Salzburg and Pinzgau, and gazed with wonder at the idyllic loveliness of nature as she is in these regions, on the cosy rooms of the peasants with their great tiled stoves and the sun-burnt figures of the country people. He had a heart for nature, an intimate, poetic, and profound love for what is humble and familiar—for homely meadows, trees, and streams, for groves and hedgerows, for quiet gardens and sequestered spots. He approached everything with observation as direct as a child’s. Both Klein and he endeavoured to grasp a fragment of nature distinctly, and without any kind of transformation or generalisation; and this fresh, unvarnished, thoroughly German feeling for nature gives them, rather than Mengs and Carstens, the right to be counted as ancestors of the newer German art.

Klein and Erhard having set out in advance, others, such as Haller von Hallerstein, L. C. Wagner, F. Rechberger, F. Moessmer, K. Wagner, E. A. Lebschée, and August Geist, each after his own fashion, made little voyages of discovery into the world of nature belonging to their own country. But Erhard, who died in 1822, has found his greatest disciple in a young Dresden master, whose name makes the familiar appeal of an old lullaby which suddenly strikes the ear amid the bustle of the world—in Ludwig Richter, familiar to all Germans. Richter himself has designated Chodowiecki, Gessner, and Erhard as those whose contemplative love of nature guided him to his own path. What Leech, that charming draughtsman of the child-world, was to the English, Ludwig Richter became for the Germans. Not that he could be compared with Leech in artistic qualities. Beside those of the British artist his works are like the exercises of a gifted amateur: they have a petty correctness and a bourgeois neatness of line. But Germans are quite willing to forget the artistic point of view in relation to their Ludwig Richter. Sunny and childlike as he is, they love him too much to care to see his artistic failings. Here is really that renowned German “Gemüth” of which others make so great an abuse.

L. RICHTER.	SPRING.

“I am certainly living here in a rather circumscribed fashion, but in a very cheerful situation outside the town, and I am writing you this letter (it is Sunday afternoon) in a shady arbour, with a long row of rose-bushes in bloom before me. Now and then they are ruffled by a pleasant breeze—which is also the cause of a big blot being on this sheet, as it blew the page over.” This one passage reveals the whole man. Can one think of Ludwig Richter living in any town except Dresden, or imagine him except in this dressing-gown, seated on a Sunday afternoon in his shady arbour with the rose-bushes, and surrounded by laughing children? That profound domestic sentiment which runs through his works with a biblical fidelity of heart is reflected in the homeliness of the artist, who has remained all his life a big, unsophisticated child; and his autobiography, in its patriarchal simplicity, is like a refreshing draught from a pure mountain spring. Richter survived into the present as an original type from a time long vanished. What old-world figures did he not see around him as a boy, when he went about, eager for novelty, with his grandfather, the copperplate printer, who in his leisure hours studied alchemy and the art of producing gold, and was surrounded by an innumerable quantity of clocks, ticking, striking, and making cuckoo notes in his dark workroom; or as he listened to his blind, garrulous grandmother, around whom the children and old wives of the neighbourhood used to gather to hear her tales. That was in 1810, and two generations later, as an old man surrounded by his grandsons, he found once more the old, merry child life of his own home. And it was once more a fragment of the good old times, when on Christmas Eve the little band came shouting round the house of gingerbread from Hansel and Gretel which grandfather had built out of real gingerbread after his own drawing.

L. RICHTER.	AFTER WORK IT’S GOOD TO REST.	WILHELM BUSCH.

“If my art never entered amongst the lilies and roses on the summit of Parnassus, it bloomed by the roads and banks, on the hedges and in the meadows, and travellers resting by the wayside were glad of it, and little children made wreaths and crowns of it, and the solitary lover of nature rejoiced in its colour and fragrance, which mounted like a prayer to Heaven.” Richter had the right to inscribe these words in his diary on his eightieth birthday.

Through his works there echoes a humming and chiming like the joyous cry of children and the twitter of birds. Even his landscapes are filled with that blissful and solemn feeling that Sunday and the spring produce together in a lonely walk over field and meadow. The “Gemüthlichkeit,” the cordiality, of German family-life, with a trait of contemplative romance, could find such a charming interpreter in none but him, the old man who went about in his long loose coat and had the face of an ordinary village schoolmaster. Only he who retained to his old age that childlike heart—to which the kingdom of heaven is given even in art—could really know the heart of the child’s world, which even at a later date in Germany was not drawn more simply or more graciously.

His illustrations present an almost exhaustive picture of the life of the German people at home and in the world, at work and in their pleasure, in suffering and in joy. He follows it through all grades and all seasons of the year. Everything is true and genuine, everything seized from life in its fulness: the child splashing in a tub; the lad shouting as he catches the first snowflake in his hat; the lovers seated whispering in their cosy little chamber, or wandering arm in arm on their “homeward way through the corn” amid the evening landscape touched with gold; the girl at her spinning-wheel and the hunter in the forest, the travelling journeyman, the beggar, the well-to-do Philistine. The scene is the sitting-room or the nursery, the porch twined with vine, the street with old-fashioned overhanging storeys and turrets, the forest and the field with splendid glimpses into the hazy distance. Children are playing round a great tree, labourers are coming back from the field, or the family is taking its rest in some hour of relaxation. A peaceful quietude and chaste purity spread over everything. Certainly Richter’s drawing has something pedantic and unemphatic, that weak, generalising roundness which, beside the sharp, powerful stroke of the old artists, has the spirit of a drawing-master. But what he has to give is always influenced by delicate and loving observation, and never stands in contradiction to truth. He does not give the whole of nature, but neither does he give what is unnatural. He is one of the first of Germans whose art did not spring from a negation of reality, produced by treating it on an arbitrary system, but rested instead upon tender reverie, transfigured into poetry. When in the fifties he stayed a summer in pleasant Loschwitz, he wrote in his diary: “O God, how magnificent is the wide country round, from my little place upon the hill! So divinely beautiful, and so sensuously beautiful! The deep blue heaven, the wide green world, the bright and fair May landscape alive with a thousand voices.”

In all that generation, to whom existence seemed so sad, Ludwig Richter is one of the few who really felt content with the earth, and held the life around them to be the best and healthiest material for the artist. And that is the substance of the plate to which he gave the title “Rules of Art.” A wide landscape stretches away with mighty oaks slanting down, and a purling spring from which a young girl is drawing water, whilst a high-road, enlivened by travellers young and old, runs over hill and dale into the sunny distance. In the midst of this free rejoicing world the artist is seated with his pencil. And above stands the motto written by Richter’s hand—

“Und die Sonne Homer’s, siehe sie lächelt auch uns.”

By the success of Richter certain disciples were inspired to tread the same ground, although none of them equalled him in his charming human qualities. And least of all Oskar Pletsch, whose self-sufficient smile is soon recognised in all its emptiness. Everything which in Richter was genuine and original is in him flat, laboured, and prearranged. His landscapes, which in part are very pretty, are derived from R. Schuster; what seems good in the children is Richter’s property, and what Pletsch contributed is the conventionality. Albert Hendschel also stood on Richter’s shoulders, but his popularity is more justifiable. Even in these days one takes pleasure in his sketch-books, in which he immortalised the joy and sorrow of youth in such a delicious way.

Braun, Munich.		Braun, Munich.
VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.		VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.
OBERLÄNDER.	RETHEL.	OBERLÄNDER.	GABRIEL MAX.

Eugen Neureuther worked in Munich, and as an etcher revelled in the charming play of arabesques and ornamental borders, and told of pleasant little scenes from the life of the Bavarian people in his pretty peasant quatrains.

The rise of caricature in Germany dates from the year 1848. Though there are extant from the first third of the century no more than a few topical papers of no artistic importance, periodical publications, which soon brought a large number of vigorous caricaturists into notice, began to appear from that time, owing to the political agitations of the period. Kladderadatsch was brought out in Berlin, and Fliegende Blätter was founded in Munich, and side by side with it Münchener Bilderbogen. But later generations will be referred par excellence to Fliegende Blätter for a picture of German life in the nineteenth century. What the painters of those years forgot to transmit is here stored up: a history of German manners which could not imaginably be more exact or more exhaustive. From the very first day it united on its staff of collaborators almost all the most important names in their own peculiar branch. Schwind, Spitzweg, that genial humorist, and many others whom the German people will not forget, won their spurs here, and were inexhaustible in pretty theatre scenes, satires on German and Italian singing, memorial sketches of Fanny Elsler, of the inventor of the dress coat, etc., which enlivened the whole civilized world at that time. This elder generation of draughtsmen on Fliegende Blätter were, indeed, not free from the guilt of producing stereotyped figures. The travelling Englishman, the Polish Jew, the counter-jumper, the young painter, the rich boor, the stepmother, the housemaid, and the nervous countess are everywhere the same in the first volumes. In caricature, just as in “great art,” they still worked a little in accordance with rules and conventions. To observe life with an objective unprejudiced glance, and to hold it fast in all its palpitating movement, was reserved for men of later date.

Braun, Munich.
OBERLÄNDER.	VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME. HANS MAKART.

Hanfstaengl.		Braun, Munich.
		VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.
ADOLF OBERLÄNDER.		OBERLÄNDER.	GENELLI.

Two of the greatest humorists of the world in illustrative art, Wilhelm Busch and Adolf Oberländer, stand at the head of those who ushered in the flourishing period of German caricature. They are masters, and take in with their glance the entire social world of our time, and in their brilliant prints they have made a history of civilisation for the epoch which will be more vivid and instructive for posterity than the most voluminous works of the greatest historians. Their heads are known by Lenbach’s pictures. One has an exceptionally clever, expressive countenance—a thorough painter’s head. The humorist may be recognised by the curious narrowing of one eye, the well-known eye of the humorist that sees everything, proves everything, and holds fast every absurdity in the gestures, every eccentricity in the bearing of his neighbour. That is Wilhelm Busch.

In the large orbs of the other—orbs which seem to grow strangely wide by long gazing as at some fixed object—there is no smile of deliberate mischief, and it is not easy to associate the name of Oberländer with this Saturnian round face, with its curiously timid glance. One is reminded of the definition of humour as “smiling amid tears.”

Even in those days when he came every year to Munich and painted in Lenbach’s studio, Busch was a shy and moody man, who thawed only in the narrowest circle of his friends: now he has buried himself in a market-town in the province of Hanover, in Wiedensahl, which, according to Ritter’s Gazetteer, numbers eight hundred and twenty-eight inhabitants. He lives in the house of his brother-in-law, the clergyman of the parish, and gives himself up to the culture of bees. His laughter has fallen silent, and it is only a journal on bees that now receives contributions from his hand. But what works this hermit of Wiedensahl produced in the days when he migrated from Düsseldorf and Antwerp to Munich, and began in 1859 his series of sketches for Fliegende Blätter! The first were stiff and clumsy, the text in prose and not particularly witty. But the earliest work with a versified text, Der Bauer und der Windmüller, contains in the germ all the qualities which later found such brilliant expression in Max und Moritz, in Der Heilige Antonius, Die Fromme Helene, and Die Erlebnisse Knopps, des Junggesellen, and made Busch’s works an inexhaustible fountain of mirth and enjoyment.

Busch unites an uncommonly sharp eye with a marvellously flexible hand. Wild as his subjects generally are, he solves the greatest difficulties as easily as though they were child’s play. His heroes appear in situations of the most urgent kind, which place their bodily parts in violent and exceedingly uncomfortable positions: they thrash others or get thrashed themselves, they stumble or fall. And in what a masterly way are all these anomalies seized, the boldest foreshortenings and the most flying movements! Untrained eyes see only a scrawl, but for those who know how to look, a drawing by Busch is life itself, freed from all unnecessary detail, and marked down in its great characteristic lines. And amid all this simplification, what knowledge there is under the guise of carelessness, and what fine calculation! Busch is at once simpler and more inventive than the English. With a maze of flourishes run half-mad, and a few points and blotches, he forms a sparkling picture. With the fewest possible means he hits the essential point, and for that reason he is justly called by Grand Cartaret the classic of caricaturists, le roi de la charge et la bouffonnerie.

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

DEBUCOURT.	THE PROMENADE.

The Charivari takes its place with Punch and Fliegende Blätter.

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

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

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

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

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.		L’Art.
MONNIER.	JOSEPH PROUDHOMME.	HONORÉ DAUMIER.

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

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

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

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

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

L’Art.		L’Art.
DAUMIER.	THE MOUNTEBANKS.	DAUMIER.	IN THE ASSIZE COURT.
(By permission of M. Eugène Montrosier, the ownerof the picture.)

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

During the years when he drew for the Charivari, Gavarni was the exact opposite of Daumier. In the one was a forceful strength, in the other a refined grace; in the one brusque and savage observation and almost menacing sarcasm, in the other the wayward mood of the butterfly flitting lightly from flower to flower. Daumier might be compared with Rabelais; Gavarni, the spirituel journalist of the grand monde and the demi-monde, the draughtsman of elegance and of roués and lorettes, might be compared with Molière. Born of poor parentage in Paris in 1801, and in his youth a mechanician, he supported himself from the year 1835 by fashion prints and costume drawings. He undertook the conduct of a fashion journal, Les Gens du Monde, and began it with a series of drawings from the life of the jeunesse dorée: les Lorettes, les Actrices, les Fashionables, les Artistes, les Étudiants de Paris, les Bals masqués, les Souvenirs du Carnaval, la Vie des Jeunes Hommes. A new world was here revealed with bold traits. The women of Daumier are good, fat mothers, always busy, quick-witted, and of an enviable constitution; women who are careful in the management of their household, and who go to market and take their husband’s place at his office when necessary. In Gavarni the women are piquant and given to pouting, draped in silk and enveloped in soft velvet mantles. They are fond of dining in the cabinet particulier, and of scratching the name of their lover, for the time being, upon crystal mirrors.

Quantin, Paris.
DAUMIER.	“LA VOILÀ ... MA MAISON DE CAMPAGNE.”

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

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

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

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

		Baschet.
GAVARNI.		GAVARNI.	THOMAS VIRELOQUE.

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

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

Hetzel, Paris.
GAVARNI.	FOURBERIES DE FEMMES.

Au premier Mosieu.—“Attendez-moi ce soir, de quatre à cinq heures, quai de l’Horloge du Palais.—Votre Augustine.”

Au deuxième Mosieu.—“Ce soir, quai des Lunettes, entre quatre et cinq heures.—Votre Augustine.”

Au troisième Mosieu.—“Quai des Morfondus, ce soir, de quatre heures à cinq.—Votre Augustine.”

À un quatrième Mosieu.—“Je t’attends ce soir, à quatre heures.—Ton Augustine.”

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

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

Quantin, Paris.
GAVARNI.	PHÈDRE AT THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS.

Quantin, Paris.
GAVARNI.	“CE QUI ME MANQUE À MOI? UNE ’TITE MÈRE COMME ÇA, QU’AURAIT SOIN DE MON LINGE.”

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

Quantin, Paris.		Journal Amusant.
GUYS.	STUDY OF A WOMAN.	GRÉVIN.	NOS PARISIENNES.
		“Tiens! ne me parle pas de lui, je ne peux pas le souffrir,  même en peinture!” “Cependant, s’il t’offrait de t’epouser?” “Ça, c’est autre chose.”

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

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

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

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

Mansell Photo
ROMNEY.	SERENA.

CHAPTER XVII

ENGLISH PAINTING TO 1850

“The English school has an advantage over others in being young: its tradition is barely a century old, and, unlike the Continental schools, it is not hampered by antiquated Greek and Latin theories. What fortunate conditions it has for breaking away into really modern work! whereas in other nations the weight of tradition presses hard on the boldest innovators. The English do not look back; on the contrary, they look into life around them.” So wrote Burger-Thoré in one of his Salons in 1867.

Yet England was not unaffected by the retrospective tendency on the Continent. Perhaps it might even be demonstrated that this movement had its earliest origin on British soil. England had its “Empire style” in architecture fifty years before there was any empire in France; it had its Classical painting when David worked at Cupids with Boucher, and it gave the world a Romanticist at the very time when the literature of the Continent became “Classical.” The Lady of the Lake, Marmion, The Lord of the Isles, The Fair Maid of Perth, Old Mortality, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, who is there that does not know these names by heart? We have learnt history from Walter Scott, and that programme of the artistic crafts which Lorenz Gedon drew up in 1876, when he arranged the department Works of our Fathers in the Munich Exhibition, had been carried out by Scott as early as 1816. For Scott laid out much of the money he received for his romances in building himself a castle in the style of the baronial strongholds of the Middle Ages: “Towers and turrets all imitated from a royal building in Scotland, windows and gables painted with the arms of the clans, with lions couchant,” rooms “filled with high sideboards and carved chests, targes, plaids, Highland broadswords, halberts, and suits of armour, and adorned with antlers hung up as trophies.” Here was a Makartesque studio very many years before Makart.

Amongst the painters there were Classicists and Romanticists; but they were neither numerous nor of importance. What England produced in the way of “great art” in the beginning of last century could be erased from the complete chart of British painting without any essential gap being made in the course of its development. Reynolds had had to pay dear for approaching the Italians in his “Ugolino,” his “Macbeth,” and his “Young Hercules.” And a yet more arid mannerism befell all the others who followed him on the way to Italy, among them James Barry, who, after studying for years in Italy, settled down in London in 1771, with the avowed intention of providing England with a classical form of art. He believed that he had surpassed his own models, the Italian classic painters, by six pompous representations of the “Culture and Progress of Human Knowledge,” which he completed in 1783, in the theatre of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. The many-sided James Northcote, equally mediocre in everything, survives rather by his biographies of Reynolds and Titian than by the great canvases which he painted for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. That which became best known was “The Murder of the Children in the Tower.” Henry Fuseli, who was also much occupied with authorship and as preceptor Britanniæ, always mentioned with great respect by his numerous pupils, produced a series of exceedingly thoughtful and imaginative works, to which he was incited by Klopstock and Lavater. By preference he illustrated Milton and Shakespeare, and amongst this series of pictures his painting of “Titania with the Ass,” from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the London National Gallery, is probably the best. His pupil William Etty was saturated with the traditions of the Venetian school; he is the British Makart, and followed rather heavily and laboriously in the track of Titian, exploring the realms of nude beauty, and toiling to discover that secret of blooming colour which gleams from the female forms of the Venetians. The assiduous Benjamin Robert Haydon, a spirit ever seeking, striving, and reflecting, became, like Gros in France, a victim of the grand style. He would naturally have preferred to paint otherwise, and more simply. The National Gallery possesses a charming picture by him of a London street (for some years past on loan at Leicester), which represents a crowd watching a Punch and Judy show. But, like Gros, he held it a sin against the grand style to occupy himself with such matters. He thought it only permissible to paint sacred subjects or subjects from ancient history upon large spaces of canvas; and he sank ever deeper into his theories, reaching the profoundest abyss of abstract science when he made diligent anatomical studies of the muscles of a lion, in order to fashion the heroic frames of warriors on the same plan. His end, on 26th June 1846, was like that of the Frenchman. There was found beside his body a paper on which he had written: “God forgive me. Amen. Finis,” with the quotation from Shakespeare’s Lear: “Stretch me no longer on the rack of this rough world.” All these masters are more interesting for their human qualities than for their works, which, with their extravagant colour, forced gestures, and follies of every description, contain no new thing worthy of further development. Even when they sought to make direct copies from Continental performances, they did not attain the graceful sweep of their models. The refinements which they imitated became clumsy and awkward in their hands, and they remained half bourgeois and half barbaric.

The liberating influence of English art was not found in the province of the great painting, and it is probably not without significance that the few who tried to import it came to grief in the experiment. There can be no doubt that such art goes more against the grain of the English nature than of any other. Even in the days of scholastic philosophy the English asserted the doctrine that there are only individuals in nature. In the beginning of modern times a new era, grounded on the observation of nature, was promulgated from England. Bacon had little to say about beauty: he writes against the proportions and the principle of selection in art, and therefore against the ideal. Handsome men, he says, have seldom possessed great qualities. And in the same way the English stage had just as little bent for the august and rhythmical grandeur of classical literature. When he stabbed Polonius, Garrick never dreamed of moving according to the taste of Boileau, and was probably as different from the Greek leader of a chorus as Hogarth from David. The peculiar merits of English literature and science have been rooted from the time of their first existence in their capacity for observation. This explains the contempt for regularity in Shakespeare, the feeling for concrete fact in Bacon. English philosophy is positive, exact, utilitarian, and highly moral. Hobbes and Locke, John Stuart Mill and Buckle, in England take the place of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant upon the Continent. Amongst English historians Carlyle is the only poet: all the rest are learned prose-writers who collect observations, combine experiences, arrange dates, weigh possibilities, reconcile facts, discover laws, and hoard and increase positive knowledge. The eighteenth century had seen the rise of the novel as the picture of contemporary life; in Hogarth this national spirit was first turned to account in painting. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, again, the good qualities of English art consisted not in bold ideality, but in sharpness of observation, sobriety, and flexibility of spirit.

		Mag. of Art.
GEORGE ROMNEY.		ROMNEY.	LADY HAMILTON AS EUPHROSYNE.

Their proper domain was still to be found in portraiture, and if none of the new portrait painters can be compared with the great ancestors of English art, they are none the less superior to all their contemporaries on the Continent. George Romney, who belongs rather to the eighteenth century, holds the mean course between the refined classic art of Sir Joshua and the imaginative poetic art of Thomas Gainsborough. Less personal and less profound in characterisation, he was, on the other hand, the most dexterous painter of drapery in his age: a man who knew all the secrets of the trade, and possessed, at the same time, that art which is so much valued in portrait painters—the art of beautifying his models without making his picture unlike the original. Professional beauties beheld themselves presented in their counterfeit precisely as they wished to appear, and accorded him, therefore, a fervent adoration. And after his return from Italy in 1775 his fame was so widespread that it outstripped Gainsborough’s and equalled that of Reynolds. Court beauties and celebrated actresses left no stone unturned to have their portraits introduced into one of his “compositions”; for Romney eagerly followed the fashion of allegorical portraiture which had been set by Reynolds, representing persons with the emblem of a god or of one of the muses. Romney has painted the famous Lady Hamilton, to say nothing of others, as Magdalen, Joan of Arc, a Bacchante, and an Odalisque.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
LAWRENCE.	MRS. SIDDONS.	LAWRENCE.	PRINCESS AMELIA.

Great as his reputation had been at the close of the eighteenth century, it was outshone twenty years later by that of Sir Thomas Lawrence. Born in Bristol in 1769, Lawrence had scarcely given up the calling of an actor before he saw all England in raptures over his genius as a painter. The catalogue of his portraits is a complete list of all who were at the time pre-eminent for talent or beauty. He received fabulous sums, which he spent with the grace of a man of the world. In 1815 he was commissioned to paint for the Windsor Gallery the portraits of all the “Victors of Waterloo,” from the Duke of Wellington to the Emperor Alexander. The Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle gave him an opportunity for getting the portraits of representatives of the various Courts. All the capitals of Europe, which he visited for this purpose, received him with princely honours. He was member of all the Academies under the sun, and President of that in London; but, as a natural reaction, this over-estimation of earlier years has been followed by an equally undeserved undervaluation of his works in these days. Beneath the fashionable exterior of his ceremonial pictures naturalness and simplicity are often wanting, and so too are the deeper powers of characterisation, firm drawing, and real vitality. A feminine coquetry has taken the place of character. His drawing has a banal effect, and his colouring is monotonous in comparison with that realism which Reynolds shares with the old masters. It is easy to confound the majority of his pictures of ceremonies with those of Winterhalter, and his smaller portraits with pretty fashion plates; yet one cannot but admire his ease of execution and nobility of composition. Several of his pictures of women, in particular, are touched by an easy grace and a fine charm of poetic sensuousness in which he approaches Gainsborough. Not many at that time could have painted such pretty children’s heads, or given young women such an attractive and familiar air of life. With what a girlish glance of innocence and melancholy does Mrs. Siddons look out upon the world from the canvas of Lawrence: how piquant is her white Greek garment, with its black girdle and the white turban. And what subtle delicacy there is in the portrait of Miss Farren as she flits with muff and fur-trimmed cloak through a bright green summer landscape. The reputation of Lawrence will rise once more when his empty formal pieces have found their way into lumber-rooms, and a greater number of his pictures of women—pictures so full of indescribable fascination, so redolent of mysterious charm—are accessible to the public.

As minor stars, the soft and tender John Hoppner, the attractively superficial William Beechey, the celebrated pastellist John Russell, and the vigorously energetic John Jackson had their share with him in public favour, whilst Henry Raeburn shone in Scotland as a star of the first magnitude.

He was a born painter. Wilkie says in one of his letters from Madrid, that the pictures of Velasquez put him in mind of Raeburn; and certain works of the Scot, such as the portrait of Lord Newton, the famous bon vivant and doughty drinker, are indeed performances of such power that comparison with this mighty name is no profanation. At a time when there was a danger that portrait painting would sink in the hands of Lawrence into an insipid painting of prettiness, Raeburn stood alone by the simplicity and naturalistic impressiveness of his portraiture. The three hundred and twenty-five portraits by him which were exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy in 1876, gave as exhaustive a picture of the life of Edinburgh at the close of the century as those of Sir Joshua gave of the life of London. All the celebrated Scotchmen of his time—Robertson, Hume, Ferguson, and Scott—were painted by him. Altogether he painted over six hundred portraits; and, small though the number may seem compared with the two thousand of Reynolds, Raeburn’s artistic qualities are almost the greater. The secret of his success lies in his vigorous healthiness, in the indescribable furia of his brush, in the harmony and truth of his colour-values. His figures are informed by a startling intensity of life. His old pensioners, and his sailors in particular, have something kingly in the grand air of their calm and noble countenances. Armstrong has given him a place between Frans Hals and Velasquez, and occasionally his conception of colour even recalls the modern Frenchmen, as it were Manet in his Hals period. He paints his models, just as they come into contact with him in life, in the frank light of day and without any attempt at the dusk of the old masters; of raiment he gives only as much as the comprehension of the picture demands, and depicts character in large and simple traits.

The importance of West and Copley, two Americans who were active in England, is that they were the first to apply the qualities acquired in English portrait painting to pictures on a large scale.

Benjamin West has undoubtedly been over-praised by his contemporaries, and by a critic of the present day he has, not unfairly, been designated “the king of mediocrity.” At his appearance he was interesting to Europeans merely as an anthropological curiosity,—as the first son of barbaric America who had used a paint brush. A thoroughly American puff preceded his entry into the Eternal City in 1760. It was reported that as the son of a quaker farmer he had grown up amongst his father’s slaves in the immediate neighbourhood of the Indians, and had painted good portraits in Philadelphia and New York without having ever seen a work of art. People were delighted when, on being brought into the Vatican, he clapped his hands and compared the Apollo Belvidere to an Indian chief. In the art of making himself interesting “the young savage” was ahead of all his patrons; and as he followed the ruling classical tendency with great aptitude, within the course of a year he was made an honorary member of the Academies of Parma, Bologna, and Florence, and praised by the critics of Rome as ranking with Mengs as the first painter of his day. In 1763, at a time when Hogarth and Reynolds, Wilson and Gainsborough, were in the fulness of their powers, he went to London; and as people are always inclined to value most highly what they do not possess, he soon won an important position for himself, even beside these masters. Hogarth produced nothing but “genre pictures,” Wilson only landscapes, and Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits: West brought to the English what they did not as yet possess—a “great art.”

His first picture—in the London National Gallery—“Pylades and Orestes brought as Hostages before Iphigenia,” is a tiresome product of that Classicism which upon the Continent found its principal representatives in Mengs and David: it is stiff in drawing, its composition is suggestive of a bas-relief, and its cold grey colouring is classically academic. His other pictures from antique and sacred history stand much on the same level as those of Wilhelm Kaulbach, with whose works they share their stilted dignity, their systematically antiquarian structure, and their mechanical combination of forms borrowed in a spiritless fashion from the Cinquecentisti.

Fortunately West has left behind him something different from these ambitious attempts; for on the occasions when he turned away from the great style he created works of lasting importance. This is specially true of some fine historical pictures dealing with his own age, which will preserve his name for ever. “The Death of General Wolfe” at the storming of Quebec on 13th September 1759—exhibited at the opening of the Royal Academy in 1768—is by its very sobriety a sincere, honest, and sane piece of work, which will maintain its value as an historical document. It was just at this time that so great a part was played by the question of costume, and West encountered the same difficulties which Gottfried Schadow was obliged to face when he represented Ziethen and the Old Dessauer in the costume of their age. The connoisseurs held that such a sublime theme would only admit of antique dress. If West in their despite represented the general and his soldiers in their regulation uniform, it seems at the present time no more than the result of healthy common sense, but at that time it was an artistic event of great importance, and one which was only accomplished in France after the work of several decades. In that country Gérard and Girodet still clung to the belief that they could only raise the military picture to the level of the great style by giving the soldiers of the Empire the appearance of Greek and Roman statues. Gros is honoured as the man who first ceased from giving modern soldiers an air of the antique. But the American Englishman had anticipated him by forty years. As in Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” it was only the pyramidal composition in West’s picture that betrayed the painter’s alliance with the Classical school; in other respects it forecast the realistic programme for decades to come, and indicated the course of development which leads through Gros onwards. If in Gros men are treated purely as accessories to throw a hero into relief, in West they stand out in action. They behave in the picture spontaneously as they do in life. That is to say, there is in West’s work of 1768 the element through which Horace Vernet’s pictures of 1830 are to be distinguished from those of Gros.

This realistic programme was carried out with yet greater consistency by West’s younger compatriot John Singleton Copley, who after a short sojourn in Italy migrated to England in 1775. His chief works in the London National Gallery depict in the same way events from contemporary history—“The Death of the Earl of Chatham, 7th April 1778” and “The Death of Major Pierson, 6th January 1781,”—and it is by no means impossible that when David, in the midst of the classicising tendencies of his age, ventured to paint “The Death of Marat” and “The Death of Lepelletier,” he was led to do so by engravings after Copley. In the representation of such things other painters of the epoch had draped their figures in antique costume, called genii and river-gods into action, and given a Roman character to the whole. Copley, like West, offers a plain, matter-of-fact representation of the event, without any rhetorical pathos. And what raises him above West is his liquid, massive colour, suggestive of the old masters. In none of his works could West set himself free from the dead grey colour of the Classical school, whereas Copley’s “Death of William Pitt” is the result of intimate studies of Titian and the Dutch. The way the light falls on the perukes of the men and the brown, wainscoted walls puts one in mind of Rembrandt’s “Anatomical Lecture”; only, instead of a pathetic scene from the theatre, we have a collection of good portraits in the manner of the Dutch studies of shooting matches.

Mansell Photo
LAWRENCE.	CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, QUEEN OF GEORGE IV.

LAWRENCE.	THE COUNTESS GOWER.

That this unhackneyed conception of daily life has its special home in England is further demonstrated by the work of Daniel Maclise, who depicted “The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher,” “The Death of Nelson,” and other patriotic themes upon walls and canvases several yards square, with appalling energy, promptitude, and expenditure of muscle. By these he certainly did better service to national pride than to art. Nevertheless, with their forcible, healthy realism they contrast favourably with the mythological subjects so universally produced on the Continent at that time.

Beside the portrait painters of men stand the portrait painters of animals. Since the days of Elias Riedinger animal painting had fallen into general disesteem on the Continent. Thorwaldsen, the first of the Classicists who allowed animals to appear in his works (as he did in his Alexander frieze), dispensed with any independent studies of nature, and contented himself with imitating the formal models on the frieze of the Parthenon; or, in lack of a Grecian exemplar, simply drew out of the depths of his inner consciousness. Especially remarkable is the sovran contempt with which he treated the most familiar domestic creatures. German historical painting knew still less what to make of the brute creation, because it only recognised beauty in the profundity of ideas, and ideas have nothing to do with beasts. Its four-footed creatures have a philosophic depth of contemplation, and are bad studies after nature. Kaulbach’s “Reinecke” and the inclination to transplant human sentiments into the world of brutes delayed until the sixties any devoted study of the animal soul. France, too, before the days of Troyon, had nothing to show worth mentioning. But in England, the land of sport, animal painting was evolved directly from the old painting of the chase, without being seduced from its proper course. Fox-hunting has been popular in England since the time of Charles I. Racing came into fashion not long after, and with racing came that knowledge of horseflesh which has been developed in England further than elsewhere. Since the seventeenth century red deer have been preserved in the English parks. It is therefore comprehensible that English art was early occupied with these animals, and since it was sportsmen who cared most about them, the painter was at first their servant. He had not so much to paint pictures as reminiscences of sport and the chase. His first consideration in painting a horse was to paint a fine horse; as to its being a fine picture, that was quite a secondary matter. John Wootton and George Stubbs were in this sense portrayers of racehorses. The latter, however, took occasion to emancipate himself from his patrons by representing the noble animal, not standing at rest by his manger, or with a groom on his back and delighting in the consciousness of his own beauty, but as he was in action and amongst pictorial surroundings.

WEST.	THE DEATH OF NELSON.

Mansell Photo
MACLISE.	THE WATERFALL, CORNWALL.

COPLEY.	THE DEATH OF THE EARL OF CHATHAM.

MACLISE.	NOAH’S SACRIFICE.

Soon afterwards George Morland made his appearance. He made a specialty of old nags, and was perhaps the most important master of the brush that the English school produced at all. His pictures have the same magic as the landscapes of Gainsborough. He painted life on the high-road and in front of village inns—scenes like those which Isaac Ostade had represented a century before: old horses being led to water amid the sunny landscape of the downs, market carts rumbling heavily through the rough and sunken lanes, packhorses coming back to their stalls of an evening tired out with the day’s exertions, riders pulling up at the village inn or chatting with the pretty landlady. And he has done these things with the delicacy of an old Dutch painter. It is impossible to say whether Morland had ever seen the pictures of Adriaen Brouwer; but this greatest master of technique amongst the Flemings can alone be compared with Morland in verve and artistic many-sidedness; and Morland resembled him also in his adventurous life and his early death. To the spirit and dash of Brouwer he joins the refinement of Gainsborough in his landscapes, and Rowlandson’s delicate feeling for feminine beauty in his figures. He does not paint fine ladies, but women in their everyday clothes, and yet they are surrounded by a grace recalling Chardin: young mothers going to see their children who are with the nurse, smart little tavern hostesses in their white aprons and coquettish caps busily serving riders with drink, and charming city madams in gay summer garb sitting of a Sunday afternoon with their children at a tea-garden. Over the works of Morland there lies all the chivalrous grace of the time of Werther, and that fine Anglo-Saxon aroma exhaled by the works of English painters of the present day. Genuine as is the fame which he enjoys as an animal painter, it is these little social scenes which show his finest side; and only coloured engraving, which was brought to such a high pitch in the England of those days, is able to give an idea of the delicacy of hue in the originals.

MACLISE.	MALVOLIO AND THE COUNTESS.

Mansell & Co.
MORLAND.	HORSES IN A STABLE.

Morland’s brother-in-law, the painter and engraver James Ward, born in 1769 and dying in 1859, united this old English school with the modern. The portrait which accompanies the obituary notice in the Art Journal is that of a very aged gentleman, with a grey beard and thick, white, bristly hair. The pictures which he painted when he had this appearance—and they are the most familiar—were exceedingly weak and insipid works. In comparison with Morland’s broad, liquid, and harmonious painting, that of Ward seems burnished, sparkling, flaunting, anecdotic, and petty. But James Ward was not always old James Ward. In his early days he was one of the greatest and manliest artists of the English school, with whom only Briton Rivière can be compared amongst the moderns. When his “Lioness” appeared in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1816 he was justly hailed as the best animal painter after Snyders, and from that time one masterpiece followed another for ten long years. What grace and power there are in his horses and dogs! In pictures of this sort Stubbs was graceful and delicate; Ward painted the same horse in as sporting a manner and with the same knowledge, but with an artistic power such as no one had before him. His field of work was wide-reaching. He painted little girls with the thoroughly English feeling of Morland, and had the whole animal world for his domain. Lions, snakes, cats, pigs, oxen, cows, sheep, swans, fowls, frogs are the characters in his pictures. And characters they were, for he never humanised the looks of his four-footed models, as others did later. The home of his animals is not the drawing-room, but the woods and meadows, the air and the gardens. His broad, weighty manner was transformed first into extravagant virtuosity and then into pettiness of style during the last thirty years of his life, when he became senile. His reputation paled more than he deserved before the star of the world-famous Landseer.

MORLAND.	THE CORN BIN.

The most popular animal painter, not merely of England but of the whole century, was Edwin Landseer. For fifty years his works formed the chief features of attraction in the Royal Academy. Engravings from him had such a circulation in the country that in the sixties there was scarcely a house in which there did not hang one of his horses or dogs or stags. Even the Continent was flooded with engravings of his pictures, and Landseer suffered greatly from this popularity. He is much better than the reproductions with their fatal gloss allow any one to suppose, and his pictures can be judged by them just as little as can Raphael’s “School of Athens” from Jacobi’s engraving.

Edwin Landseer came of a family of artists. His father, who was an engraver, sent him out into the free world of nature as a boy, and made him sketch donkeys and goats and sheep. When he was fourteen he went to Haydon, the prophet on matters of art; and, on the advice of this singular being, studied the sculptures of the Parthenon. He “anatomised animals under my eyes,” writes Haydon, “copied my anatomical drawings, and applied my principles of instruction to animal painting. His genius, directed in this fashion, has, as a matter of fact, arrived at satisfactory results.” Landseer was the spoilt child of fortune. There is no other English painter who can boast of having been made a member of the Royal Academy at twenty-four. In high favour at Court, honoured by the fashionable world, and tenderly treated by criticism, he went on his way triumphant. The region over which he held sway was narrow, but he stood out in it as in life, powerful and commanding. The exhibition of his pictures which took place after his death in 1873 contained three hundred and fourteen oil paintings and one hundred and forty-six sketches. The property which he left amounted to £160,000; and a further sum of £55,000 was realised by the sale of his unsold pictures. Even Meissonier, the best paid painter of the century, did not leave behind him five and a half million francs.

One reason of Landseer’s artistic success is perhaps due to that in him which was inartistic—to his effort to make animals more beautiful than they really are, and to make them the medium for expressing human sentiment. All the dogs and horses and stags which he painted after 1855, and through which he was made specially familiar to the great public, are arrayed in their Sunday clothes, their glossiest hide and their most magnificent horns. And in addition to this he “Darwinises” them: that is to say, he tries to make his animals more than animals; he lends a human sentimental trait to animal character; and that is what distinguishes him to his disadvantage from really great animal painters like Potter, Snyders, Troyon, Jadin, and Rosa Bonheur. He paints the human temperament beneath the animal mask. His stags have expressive countenances, and his dogs appear to be gifted with reason and even speech. At one moment there is a philosophic dignity in their behaviour, and at another a frivolity in their pleasures. Landseer discovered the sentimentality of dogs, and treated them as capable of culture. His celebrated picture “Jack in Office” is almost insulting in its characterisation: there they are, Jack the sentry, an old female dog like a poor gentlewoman, another dog like a professional beggar, and so on. And this habit of bringing animals on the stage, as if they were the actors of tragical, melodramatic, or farcical scenes, made him a peculiar favourite with the great mass of people. Nor were his picture-stories merely easy to read and understand; the characteristic titles he invented for each of them—“Alexander and Diogenes,” “A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society,” and the like—excited curiosity as much as the most carefully selected name of a novel. But this search after points and sentimental anecdotes only came into prominence in his last period, when his technique had degenerated and given way to a shiny polish and a forced elegance which obliged him to provide extraneous attractions. His popularity would not be so great, but his artistic importance would be quite the same, if these last pictures did not exist at all.

MORLAND.	THE RETURN FROM MARKET.

But the middle period of Landseer, ranging from 1840 to 1850, contains masterpieces which set him by the side of the best animal painters of all times and nations. The well-known portrait of a Newfoundland dog of 1838; that of the Prince Consort’s favourite greyhound of 1841; “The Otter Speared” of 1844, with its panting and yelping pack brought to a standstill beneath a high wall of rock; the dead doe which a fawn is unsuspectingly approaching, in “A Random Shot,” 1848; “The Lost Sheep” of 1850, that wanders frightened and bleating through a wide and lonely landscape covered with snow,—these and many other pictures, in their animation and simple naturalness, are precious examples of the fresh and delicate observation peculiar to him at that time. Landseer’s portrait reveals to us a robust and serious man, with a weather-beaten face, a short white beard, and a snub bulldog nose. Standing six feet high, and having the great heavy figure of a Teuton stepping out of his aboriginal forest, he was indeed much more like a country gentleman than a London artist. He was a sportsman who wandered about all day long in the air with a gun on his arm, and he painted his animal pictures with all the love and joy of a child of nature. That accounts for their strength, their convincing power, and their vivid force. It is as if he had become possessed of a magic cap with which he could draw close to animals without being observed, and surprise their nature and their inmost life.

Landseer’s subject-matter and conception of life are indicated by the pictures which have been named. Old masters like Snyders and Rubens had represented the contrast between man and beast in their boar and lion hunts. It was not wild nature that Landseer depicted, but nature tamed. Rubens, Snyders, and Delacroix displayed their horses, dogs, lions, and tigers in bold action, or in the flame of passion. But Landseer generally introduced his animals in quiet situations—harmless and without fear—in the course of their ordinary life.

Mag. of Art.
LANDSEER.	THE LAST MOURNER AT THE SHEPHERD’S GRAVE.

Horses, which Leonardo, Rubens, Velasquez, Wouwerman, and the earlier English artists delighted to render, he painted but seldom, and when he painted them it was with a less penetrating comprehension. But lions, which had been represented in savage passion or in quiet dignity by artists from Rubens to Decamps, were for him also a subject of long and exhaustive studies, which had their results in the four colossal lions round the base of the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square. Here the Englishman makes a great advance on Thorwaldsen, who designed the model for the monument in Lucerne without ever having seen a lion. Landseer’s brutes, both as they are painted and as they are cast in bronze, are genuine lions, cruel and catlike, although in savageness and bold passion they are not to be compared with those of Delacroix, nor with those of his elder compatriot, James Ward. On the other hand, stags and roes were really first introduced into painting by Landseer. Those of Robert Hills, who had previously been reckoned the best painter of stags, are timid, suspicious creatures, while Landseer’s are the true kings of the forest, the shooting of which ought to be punished as an act of assassination. His principal field of study was the Highlands. Here he painted these proud creatures fighting on the mountain slopes, swimming the lake, or as they stand at a gaze in their quiet beauty. With what a bold spirit they raise their heads to snuff the mountain air, whilst their antlers show their delight in battle and the joy of victory. And how gentle and timid is the noble, defenceless roe in Landseer’s pictures.

LANDSEER.	HIGH LIFE.	LANDSEER.	LOW LIFE.

He had also a delight in painting sheep lost in a snow-storm. But dogs were his peculiar specialty. Landseer discovered the dog. That of Snyders was a treacherous, snarling cur; that of Bewick a robber and a thief. Landseer has made the dog the companion of man, an adjunct of human society, the generous friend and true comrade who is the last mourner at the shepherd’s grave. Landseer first studied his noble countenance and his thoughtful eyes, and in doing so he opened a new province to art, in which Briton Rivière went further at a later period.

But yet another and still wider province was opened to continental nations by the art of England. In an epoch of archæological resuscitations and romantic regrets for the past, it brought French and German painters to a consciousness that the man of the nineteenth century in his daily life might be a perfectly legitimate subject for art. Engravings after the best pictures of Wilkie hang round the walls of Louis Knaus’s reception-room in Berlin. And that in itself betrays to us a fragment of the history of art. The painters who saw the English people with the eyes of Walter Scott, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Dickens were a generation in advance of those who depicted the German people in the spirit of Immermann, Auerbach, Gustav Freytag, and Fritz Reuter. The English advanced quietly on the road trodden by Hogarth in the eighteenth century, whilst upon the Continent the nineteenth century had almost completed half its course before art left anything which will allow future generations to see the men of the period as they really were. Since the days of Fielding and Goldsmith the novel of manners had been continually growing. Burns, the poet of the plough, and Wordsworth, the singer of rustic folk, had given a vogue to that poetry of peasant life and those village tales which have since gone the round of all Europe. England began at that time to become the richest country in the world, and great fortunes were made. Painters were thus obliged to provide for the needs of a new and wealthy middle class. This fact gives us the explanation both of the merits and the faults which are characteristic of English genre painting.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century David Wilkie, the English Knaus, was the chief genre painter of the world. Born in 1785 in the small Scotch village of Cults, where his father was the clergyman, he passed a happy childhood, and possibly had to thank his youthful impressions for the consistent cheerfulness, the good-humour and kindliness that smile out of his pictures, and make such a contrast with Hogarth’s biting acerbity. At fourteen he entered the Edinburgh School of Art, where he worked for four years under the historical painter John Graham. Having returned to Cults, he painted his landscapes. A fair which he saw in the neighbouring village gave the impulse for his earliest picture of country life, “Pitlessie Fair.” He sold it for five and twenty pounds, and determined in 1805 to try his luck with this sum in London. In the very next year his “Village Politicians” excited attention in the exhibition. From that time he was a popular artist. Every one of his numerous pictures—“The Blind Fiddler,” “The Card Players,” “The Rent Day,” “The Cut Finger,” “The Village Festival”—called forth a storm of applause. After a short residence in Paris, where the Louvre gave him a more intimate knowledge of the Dutch, came his masterpieces, “Blind-Man’s Buff,” “Distraining for Rent,” “Reading the Will,” “The Rabbit on the Wall,” “The Penny Wedding,” “The Chelsea Pensioners,” and so forth. Even later, after he had become an Academician, he kept to plain and simple themes, in spite of the reproaches of his colleagues, who thought that art was vulgarised by the treatment of subjects that contained so little dignity. It was only at the end of his life that he became untrue to himself. His reverence for Teniers and Ostade was not sufficient to outweigh the impression made on him during a tour taken in 1825 through Italy, Spain, Holland, and Germany, by the artistic treasures of the Continent, and especially Murillo and Velasquez. He said he had long lived in darkness, but from that time forth could say with the great Correggio: “Anch’ io sono pittore.” He renounced all that he had painted before which had made him famous, and showed himself to be one of the many great artists of those years who had no individuality, or ventured to have none. He would have been the Burns of painting had he remained as he was. And thus he offered further evidence that the museums and the Muses are contradictory conceptions; since the modern painter always runs the risk of falling helplessly from one influence into another, where he is bent on combining the historical student of art with the artist. Of the pictures that he exhibited after his return in 1829, two dealt with Italian and three with Spanish subjects. The critics were loud in praise; he had added a fresh branch of laurel to his crown. Yet, historically considered, he would stand on a higher pedestal if he had never seen more than a dozen good pictures of Teniers, Ostade, Metsu, Jan Steen, and Brouwer. Now he began to copy his travelling sketches in a spiritless fashion; he only represented pifferari, smugglers, and monks, who, devoid of all originality, might have been painted by one of the Düsseldorfers. Even “John Knox Preaching,” which is probably the best picture of his last period, is no exception.

“He seemed to me,” writes Delacroix, who saw him in Paris after his return from Spain,—“he seemed to me to have been carried utterly out of his depth by the pictures he had seen. How is it that a man of his age can be so influenced by works which are radically opposed to his own? However, he died soon after, and, as I have been told, in a very melancholy state of mind.” Death overtook him in 1841, on board the steamer Oriental, just as he was returning from a tour in Turkey. At half-past eight in the evening the vessel was brought to, and as the lights of the beacon mingled with those of the stars the waters passed over the corpse of David Wilkie.

Mansell Photo
LANDSEER.	JACK IN OFFICE.

WILKIE.	BLIND-MAN’S BUFF.

In judging his position in the history of art, only those works come into consideration which he executed before that journey of 1825. Then he drew as a labour of love the familiar scenes of the household hearth, the little dramas, the comic or touching episodes that take place in the village, the festivals, the dancing, and the sports of the country-folk, and their meeting in the ale-house. At this time, when as a young painter he merely expressed himself and was ignorant of the efforts of continental painting, he was an artist of individuality. In the village he became a great man, and here his fame was decided; he painted rustics. Even when he first saw the old masters in the National Gallery their immediate effect on him was merely to influence his technique. And by their aid Wilkie gradually became an admirable master of technical detail. His first picture, “Pitlessie Fair,” in its hardness of colour recalled a Dutch painter of the type of Jan Molenaer; but from that time his course was one of constant progress. In “The Village Politicians” the influence of Teniers first made itself felt, and it prevailed until 1816. In this year, when he painted the pretty sketch for “Blind-Man’s Buff,” a warm gold hue took the place of the cool silver tone; and instead of Teniers, Ostade became his model. The works in his Ostade manner are rich in colour and deep and clear in tone. Finally, it was Rembrandt’s turn to become his guiding-star, and “The Parish Beadle,” in the National Gallery—a scene of arrest of the year 1822—clearly shows with what brilliant success he tried his luck with Rembrandt’s dewy chiaroscuro. It was only in his last period that he lost all these technical qualities. His “Knox” of 1832 is hard and cold and inharmonious in colour.

Hanfstaengl.
WILKIE.	A GUERILLA COUNCIL OF WAR IN A SPANISH POSADA.

So long as he kept from historical painting, art meant for him the same thing as the portrayal of domestic life. Painting, he said, had no other aim than to reproduce nature and to seek truth. Undoubtedly this must be applied to Wilkie himself with considerable limitation. Wilkie painted simple fragments of nature just as little as Hogarth; he invented scenes. Nor was he even gifted with much power of invention. But he had a fund of innocent humour, although there were times when it was in danger of becoming much too childlike. “Blind-Man’s Buff,” “The Village Politicians,” and “The Village Festival,” pictures which have become so popular through the medium of engraving, contain all the characteristics of his power of playful observation. He had no ambition to be a moralist, like Hogarth, but just as little did he paint the rustic as he is. He dealt only with the absurdities and minor accidents of life. His was one of those happy dispositions which neither sorrow nor dream nor excite themselves, but see everything from the humorous side: he enjoyed his own jests, and looked at life as at a pure comedy; the serious part of it escaped him altogether. His peasantry know nothing of social problems; free from want and drudgery, they merely spend their time over trifles and amuse themselves—themselves and the frequenters of the exhibition, for whom they are taking part in a comedy on canvas. If Hogarth had a biting, sarcastic, scourging, and disintegrating genius, Wilkie is one of those people who cause one no lasting excitement, but are always satisfied to be humorous, and laugh with a contented appreciation over their own jokes.

Seemann, Leipzig.
WILKIE.	THE BLIND FIDDLER.

And in general such is the keynote of this English genre. All that was done in it during the years immediately following is more or less comprised in the works of the Scotch “little master”; otherwise it courts the assistance of English literature, which is always rich in humorists and excellent writers of anecdote and story. In painting, as in literature, the English delight in detail, which by its dramatic, anecdotic, or humorous point is intended to have the interest of a short story. Or perhaps one should rather say that, since the English came to painting as novices, they began tentatively on that first step on which art had stood in earlier centuries as long as it was still “the people’s spelling-book.” It is a typical form of development, and repeats itself constantly. All painting begins in narrative. First it is the subject which has a fascination for the artist, and by the aid of it he casts a spell over his public. The simplification of motives, the capacity for taking a thing in at a single glance, and finding a simple joy in its essentially pictorial integrity, is of later growth. Even with the Dutch, who were so eminently gifted with a sense for what is pictorial, the picture of manners was at first epical. Church festivals, skating parties, and events which could be represented in an ample and detailed fashion were the original materials of the genre picture, which only later contented itself with a purely artistic study of one out of countless groups. This period of apprenticeship, which may be called the period of interesting subject-matter, was what England was now going through; and England had to go through it, since she had the civilisation by which it is invariably produced.

WILKIE.	THE PENNY WEDDING.

Just as the first genre pictures of the Flemish school announced the appearance of a bourgeoisie, so in the England of the beginning of the century a new plebeian, middle-class society had taken the place of the patrons of earlier days, and this middle class set its seal upon manners and communicated its spirit to painting. Prosperity, culture, travel, reading, and leisure, everything which had been the privilege of individuals, now became the common property of the great mass of men. They prized art, but they demanded from it substantial nourishment. That two colours in connection with straight and curved lines are enough for the production of infinite harmonies was still a profound secret. “You are free to be painters if you like,” artists were told, “but only on the understanding that you are amusing and instructive; if you have no story to tell we shall yawn.” When they comply with these demands, artists are inclined to grow fond of sermonising and develop into censors of the public morals, almost into lay preachers.

Or, if the aim of painting lies in its narrative power, there is a natural tendency to represent the pleasant rather than the unpleasant facts of life, which is the cause of this one-sided character of genre painting. Everything that is not striking and out of the way—in other words, the whole poetry of ordinary life—is left untouched. Wilkie only paints the rustic on some peculiar occasion, at merry-making and ceremonial events; and he depicts him as a being of a different species from the townsman, because he seeks to gain his effects principally by humorous episodes, and aims at situations which are proper to a novel.

WILKIE.	THE FIRST EARRING.	NEWTON.	YORICK AND THE GRISETTE.

Baptisms and dances, funerals and weddings, carousals and bridal visits are his favourite subjects; to which may be added the various contrasts offered by peasant life where it is brought into contact with the civilisation of cities—the country cousin come to town, the rustic closeted with a lawyer, and the like. A continual roguishness enlivens his pictures and makes comical figures out of most of these good people. He amuses himself at their expense, exposes their little lies, their thrift, their folly, their pretensions, and the absurdities with which their narrow circle of life has provided them. He pokes fun, and is sly and farcical. But the hard and sour labour of ordinary peasant life is left on one side, since it offers no material for humour and anecdote.

Through this limitation painting renounced the best part of its strength. To a man of pictorial vision nature is a gallery of magnificent pictures, and one which is as wide and far-reaching as the world. But whoever seeks salvation in narrative painting soon reaches the end of his material. In the life of any man there are only three or four events that are worth the trouble of telling; Wilkie told more, and he became tiresome in consequence. We are willing to accept these anecdotes as true, but they are threadbare. Things of this sort may be found in the gaily-bound little books which are given as Christmas presents to children. It is not exhilarating to learn that worldly marriages have their inconveniences, that there is a pleasure in talking scandal about one’s friends behind their backs, that a son causes pain to his mother by his excesses, and that egoism is an unpleasant failing. All that is true, but it is too true. We are irritated by the intrusiveness of this course of instruction. Wilkie paints insipid subjects, and by one foolery after another he has made painting into a toy for good children. And good children play the principal parts in these pictures.

As a painter, one of George Morland’s pupils, William Collins, threw the world into ecstasies by his pictures of children. Out of one hundred and twenty-one which he exhibited in the Academy in the course of forty years the principal are: the picture of “The Little Flute-Player,” “The Sale of the Pet Lamb,” “Boys with a Bird’s Nest,” “The Fisher’s Departure,” “Scene in a Kentish Hop-Garden,” and the picture of the swallows. The most popular were “Happy as a King”—a small boy whom his elder playmates have set upon a garden railing, from which he looks down laughing proudly—and “Rustic Civility”—children who have drawn up like soldiers, by a fence, so as to salute some one who is approaching. But it is clear from the titles of such pictures that in this province English genre painting did not free itself from the reproach of being episodic. Collins was richer in ideas than Meyer of Bremen. His children receive earrings, sit on their mother’s knee, play with her in the garden, watch her sewing, read aloud to her from their spelling-book, learn their lessons, and are frightened of the geese and hens which advance in a terrifying fashion towards them in the poultry-yard. He is an admirable painter of children at the family table, of the pleasant chatter of the little ones, of the father watching his sleeping child of an evening by the light of the lamp, with his heart full of pride and joy because he has the consciousness of working for those who are near to him. Being naturally very fond of children, he has painted the life of little people with evident enjoyment of all its variations, and yet not in a thoroughly credible fashion. Chardin painted the poetry of the child-world. His little ones have no suspicion of the painter being near them. They are harmlessly occupied with themselves, and in their ordinary clothes. Those of Collins look as if they were repeating a copybook maxim at a school examination. They know that the eyes of all the sightseers in the exhibition are fixed upon them, and they are doing their utmost to be on their best behaviour. They have a lack of unconsciousness. One would like to say to them: “My dear children, always be good.” But no one is grateful to the painter for taking from children their childishness, and for bringing into vogue that codling which had its way for so long afterwards in the pictures of children.

Gilbert Stuart Newton, an American by birth, who lived in England from 1820 to 1835, devoted himself to the illustration of English authors. Like Wilkie, he has a certain historical importance, because he devoted himself with great zeal to a study of the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century and to the French painters of the eighteenth, at a time when these masters were entirely out of fashion on the Continent and sneered at as representatives of “the deepest corruption.” Dow and Terborg were his peculiar ideals; and although the colour of his pictures is certainly heavy and common compared with that of his models, it is artistic, and shows study when one thinks of contemporary productions on the Continent. His works (“Lear attended by Cordelia,” “The Vicar of Wakefield restoring his Daughter to her Mother,” “The Prince of Spain’s Visit to Catalina” from Gil Blas, and “Yorick and the Grisette” from Sterne), like the pictures of the Düsseldorfers, would most certainly have lost in actuality but for the interest provided by the literary passages; yet they are favourably distinguished from the literary illustrations of the Düsseldorfers by the want of any sort of idealism. While the painters of the Continent in such pictures almost invariably fell into a rounded, generalising ideal of beauty, Newton had the scene played by actors and painted them realistically. The result was a theatrical realism, but the way in which the theatrical effects are studied and the palpableness of the histrionic gestures are so convincingly true to nature that his pictures seem like records of stage art in London about the year 1830.

WEBSTER.	THE RUBBER.

C. R. LESLIE.	SANCHO AND THE DUCHESS.

Charles Robert Leslie, known as an author by his pleasant book on Constable and a highly conservative Handbook for Young Painters, had a similar repértoire, and rendered in oils Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Molière, with more or less ability. The National Gallery has an exceedingly prosaic and colourless picture of his, “Sancho Panza in the Apartment of the Duchess.” Some that are in the South Kensington Museum are better; for example, “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Dinner at Mr. Page’s House” from The Merry Wives of Windsor, and “Sir Roger de Coverley.” His finest and best-known work is “My Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman,” which charmingly illustrates the pretty scene in Tristram Shandy: “’I protest, madam,’ said my Uncle Toby, ‘I can see nothing whatever in your eye.’ ‘It is not in the white!’ said Mrs. Wadman. My Uncle Toby looked with might and main into the pupil.” As in Newton’s works, so in Leslie’s too, there is such a strong dose of realism that his pictures will always keep their value as historical documents—not for the year 1630 but for 1830. As a colourist he was—in his later works at any rate—a delicate imitator of the Dutch chiaroscuro; and in the history of art he occupies a position similar to that of Diez in Germany, and was esteemed in the same way, even in later years, when the young Pre-Raphaelite school began its embittered war against “brown sauce”—the same war which a generation afterwards was waged in Germany by Liebermann and his followers against the school of Diez.

Mulready, thirty-two of whose pictures are preserved in the South Kensington Museum, is in his technique almost more delicate than Leslie, and he has learnt a great deal from Metsu. By preference he took his subjects out of Goldsmith. “Choosing the Wedding Gown” and “The Whistonian Controversy” would make pretty illustrations for an édition de luxe of The Vicar of Wakefield. Otherwise he too had a taste for immortalising children, by turns lazy and industrious, at their tea or playing by the water’s edge.

From Thomas Webster, the fourth of these kindly, childlike masters, yet more inspiriting facts are to be obtained. He has informed the world that at a not very remote period of English history all the agricultural labourers were quite content with their lot. No one ever quarrelled with his landlord, or sat in a public-house and let his family starve. The highest bliss of these excellent people was to stay at home and play with their children by the light of a wax-candle. Webster’s rustics, children, and schoolmasters are the citizens of an ideal planet, but the little country is a pleasant world. His pictures are so harmless in intention, so neat and accurate in drawing, and so clear and luminous in colour that they may be seen with pleasure even at the present day.

Cassell & Co.
FRITH.	POVERTY AND WEALTH.

The last of the group, William Powell Frith, was the most copious in giving posterity information about the manners and costumes of his contemporaries, and would be still more authentic if life had not seemed to him so genial and roseate. His pictures represent scenes of the nineteenth century, but they seem like events of the good old times. At that period people were undoubtedly good and innocent and happy. They had no income-tax and no vices and worries, and all went to heaven and felt in good spirits. And so they do in Frith’s pictures, only not so naturally as in Ostade and Beham. For example, he goes on the beach at a fashionable English watering-place during the season, in July or August. The geniality which predominates here is quite extraordinary. Children are splashing in the sea, young ladies flirting, niggers playing the barrel-organ and women singing ballads to its strains; every one is doing his utmost to look well, and the pair of beggars who are there for the sake of contrast have long become resigned to their fate. In his racecourse pictures everything is brought together which on such occasions is representative of London life: all types, from the baronet to the ragman; all beauties, from the lady to the street-walker. A rustic has to lose his money, or a famished acrobat to turn his pockets inside out to assure himself that there is really nothing in them. His picture of the gaming-table in Homburg is almost richer in such examples of dry observation and humorous and spirited episode.

This may serve to exemplify the failures of these painters of genre. Not light and colour, but anecdote, comedy, and genial tale-telling are the basis of their labours. And yet, notwithstanding this attempt to express literary ideas through the mediums of a totally different art, their work is significant. While continental artists avoided nothing so much as that which might seem to approach nature, the English, revolting from the thraldom of theory, gathered subjects for their pictures from actual life. These men, indeed, pointed out the way to painters from every country; and they, once on the right road, were bound ultimately to arrive at the point from which they no longer looked on life through the glasses of the anecdotist, but saw it with the eye of the true artist.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MILITARY PICTURE

While English painting from the days of Hogarth and Wilkie embraced rustic and middle-class life, the victory of modernity on the Continent could only be accomplished slowly and by degrees. The question of costume played an important part in it. “Artists love antiquated costume because, as they say, it gives them greater sweep and freedom. But I should like to suggest that in historical representations of their own age an eye should be kept on propriety of delineation rather than on freedom and sweep. Otherwise one might just as well allow an historian to talk to us about phalanxes, battlements, triarii, and argyraspids in place of battalions, squadrons, grenadiers, and cuirassiers. The painters of the great events of the day ought, especially, to be more true to fact. In battle-pieces, for example, they ought not to have cavalry shooting and sabreing about them in leather collars, in round and plumed hats, and the vast jack-boots which exist no longer. The old masters drew, engraved, and painted in this way because people really dressed in such a manner at the time. It is said that our costume is not picturesque, and therefore why should we choose it? But posterity will be curious to know how we clothed ourselves, and will wish to have no gap from the eighteenth century to its own time.”

VERNET.	THE WOUNDED ZOUAVE.

These words, which the well-known Vienna librarian Denis wrote in 1797 in his Lesefrüchte, show how early came the problem which was at high-water mark for a generation afterwards. The painting of the nineteenth century could only become modern when it succeeded in recognising and expressing the characteristic side of modern costume. But to do that it took more than half a century. It was, after all, natural that to people who had seen the graceful forms and delicate colours of the rococo time, the garb of the first half of the century should seem the most unfortunate and the least enviable in the whole history of costume. “What person of artistic education is not of the opinion,” runs a passage in Putmann’s book on the Düsseldorf school in 1835,—“what person of artistic education is not of the opinion that the dress of the present day is tasteless, hideous, and ape-like? Moreover, can a true style be brought into harmony with hoop-petticoats and swallow-tail coats and such vagaries? In our time, therefore, art is right in seeking out those beautiful fashions of the past, about which tailors concern themselves so little. How much longer must we go about, unpicturesque beings, like ugly black bats, in swallow-tail coats and wide trousers? The peasant’s blouse, indeed, can be accepted as one of the few picturesque dresses which have yet been preserved in Germany from the inauspicious influence of the times.” The same plaint is sung by Hotho in his history of German and Netherlandish painting; the costume of his age he declares to be thoroughly prosaic and tiresome. It is revolting to painters and an offence to the educated eye. Art must necessarily seek salvation in the past, unless it is to wait, and give brush and palette a holiday, until that happy time when the costume of nations comes to its pictorial regeneration. Only one zone, the realm of blouse and military uniform, was beyond the domain of tail-coat and trousers, and still furnished art with rich material.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
CHARLET.	UN HOMME QUI BOÎT SEUL N’EST PAS DIGNE DE VIVRE.	AUGUSTE MARIE RAFFET.

Since it was by working on uniform that plastic artists first learnt how to treat contemporary costume, so it was the military picture that first entered the circle of modern painting. By exalting the soldier into a warrior, and the warrior into a hero, it was here possible, even in the times of David and Carstens, to effect a certain compromise with the ruling classical ideas. Gérard, Girodet—to some extent even Gros—made abundant use of the mask of the Greek or Roman warrior, with the object of admitting the battle-piece into painting in the grand style. The real heroes of the Napoleonic epoch had not this plastic appearance nor these epic attitudes. Classicism altered their physiognomies and gave them, most illogically, the air of old marble statues. It was Horace Vernet who freed battle painting from this anathema. This, but little else, stands to his credit.

Together with his son-in-law Paul Delaroche, Horace Vernet is the most genuine product of the Juste-milieu period. The king with the umbrella founded the Museum of Versailles, that monstrous depôt of daubed canvas, which is a horrifying memory to any one who has ever wandered through it. However, it is devoted à toutes les gloires de la France. In a few years a suite of galleries, which it takes almost two hours merely to pass through from end to end, was filled with pictures of all sizes, bringing home the history of the country, from Charlemagne to the African expedition of Louis Philippe, under all circumstances which are in any way flattering to French pride. For miles numberless manufacturers of painting bluster from the walls. As pictor celerrimus Horace Vernet had the command-in-chief, and became so famous by his chronicle of the conquest of Algiers that for a long time he was held by trooper, Philistine, and all the kings and emperors of Europe as the greatest painter in France. He was the last scion of a celebrated dynasty of artists, and had taken a brush in his hand from the moment he threw away his child’s rattle. A good deal of talent had been given him in his cradle: sureness of eye, lightness of hand, and an enviable memory. His vision was correct, if not profound; he painted his pictures without hesitation, and is favourably distinguished from many of his contemporaries by his independence: he owes no one anything, and reveals his own qualities without arraying himself in those of other people. Only these qualities are not of an order which gives his pictures artistic interest. The spark of Géricault’s genius, which seems to have been transmitted to him in the beginning, was completely quenched in his later years. Having swiftly attained popularity by the aid of lithography which circulated his “Mazeppa” through the whole world, he became afterwards a bad and vulgar painter, without poetry, light, or colour; a reporter who expressed himself in banal prose and wounded all the finer spirits of his age. “I loathe this man,” said Baudelaire, as early as 1846.

Devoid of any sense of the tragedy of war, which Gros possessed in such a high degree, Vernet treated battles like performances at the circus. His pictures have movement without passion, and magnitude without greatness. If it had been required of him, he would have daubed all the boulevards; his picture of Smala is certainly not so long, but there would have been no serious difficulty in lengthening it by half a mile. This incredible stenographical talent won for him his popularity. He was decorated with all the orders in the world. The bourgeois felt happy when he looked at Vernet’s pictures, and the paterfamilias promised to buy a horse for his little boy. The soldiers called him “mon colonel,” and would not have been surprised if he had been made a Marshal of France. A lover of art passes the pictures of Vernet with the sentiment which the old colonel owned to entertaining towards music. “Are you fond of music, colonel?” asked a lady. “Madame, I am not afraid of it.”

RAFFET.	THE PARADE.

The trivial realism of his workmanship is as tedious as the unreal heroism of his soldiers. In the manner in which he conceived the trooper, Vernet stands between the Classicists and the moderns. He did not paint ancient warriors, but French soldiers: he knew them as a corporal knows his men, and by this respect for prescribed regulation he was prevented from turning them into Romans. But though he disregarded Classicism, in outward appearance, he did not drop the heroic tone. He always saw the soldier as the bold defender of his country, the warrior performing daring deeds, as in the “Battle of Alexander”; and in this way he gave his pictures their unpleasant air of bluster. For neither modern tactics nor modern cannon admit of the prominence of the individual as it is to be seen in Vernet’s pictures. The soldier of the nineteenth century is no longer a warrior, but the unit in a multitude; he does what he is ordered, and for that he has no need of the spirit of an ancient hero; he kills or is killed, without seeing his enemy or being seen himself. The course of a battle advances, move by move, according to mathematical calculation. It is therefore false to represent soldiers in heroic attitudes, or even to suggest deeds of heroism on the part of those in command. In giving his orders and directing a battle a general has to behave pretty much as he does at home at his writing-table. And he is never in the battle, as he is represented by Horace Vernet; on the contrary, he remains at a considerable distance off. Therefore, even with the dimensions of which Vernet availed himself, the exact portrait of a modern battle is exclusively an affair for panorama, but never for the flat surface of a picture. A picture must confine itself, either to the field-marshal directing the battle from a distance upon a hill in the midst of his staff, or else to little pictorial episodes in the individual life of the soldier. The gradual development from unreal battle-pieces to simple episodic paintings can be followed step by step in the following works.

RAFFET.	1807.

What was painted for the Versailles Museum in connection with deeds of arms in the Crimean War and the Italian campaign kept more or less to the blustering official style of Horace Vernet. In the galleries of Versailles the battles of Wagram, Loano, and Altenkirche (1837-39), and an episode from the retreat from Russia (1851), represent the work of Hippolyte Bellangé. These are huge lithochromes which have been very carefully executed. Adolphe Yvon, who is responsible for “The Taking of Malakoff,” “The Battle of Magenta,” and “The Battle of Solferino,” is a more tedious painter, and remained during his whole life a pupil of Delaroche; he laid chief stress on finished and rounded composition, and gave his soldiers no more appearance of life than could be forced into the accepted academic convention. The fame of Isidor Pils, who immortalised the disembarkation of the French troops in the Crimea, the battle of Alma, and the reception of Arab chiefs by Napoleon III, has paled with equal rapidity. He could paint soldiers, but not battles, and, like Yvon, he was too precise in the composition of his works. In consequence they have as laboured an effect in arrangement as they have in colour. He was completely wanting in sureness and spontaneity. It is only his water-colours that hold one’s attention; and this they do at any rate by their unaffected actuality, and in spite of their dull and heavy colour. Alexandre Protais verged more on the sentimental. He loved soldiers, and therefore had the less toleration for war, which swept the handsome young fellows away. Two pendants, “The Morning before the Attack” and “The Evening after the Battle,” founded his reputation in 1863. The first showed a group of riflemen waiting in excitement for the first bullets of the enemy; the second represented the same men in the evening delighted with their victory, but at the same time—and here you have the note of Protais—mournful over the loss of their comrades. “The Prisoners” and “The Parting” of 1872 owed their success to the same lachrymose and melodramatic sensibility.

Cassell & Co.
RAFFET.	POLISH INFANTRY.

RAFFET.	THE MIDNIGHT REVIEW.

A couple of mere lithographists, soldiers’ sons, in whom a repining for the Napoleonic legend still found its echo, were the first great military painters of modern France. “Charlet and Raffet,” wrote Bürger-Thoré in his Salon of 1845, “are the two artists who best understand the representation of that almost vanished type, the trooper of the Empire; and after Gros they will assuredly endure as the principal historians of that warlike era.”

Charlet, the painter of the old bear Napoleon I, might almost be called the Béranger of painting. The “little Corporal,” the “great Emperor” appears and reappears in his pictures and drawings without intermission; his work is an epic in pencil of the grey coat and the little hat. From his youth he employed himself with military studies, which were furthered in Gros’ studio, which he entered in 1817. The Græco-Roman ideal did not exist for him, and he was indifferent to beauty of form. His was one of those natures which have a natural turn for actual fact; he had a power for characterisation, and in his many water-colours and lithographs he was merely concerned with the proper expression of his ideas. How it came that Delacroix had so great a respect for him was nevertheless explained when his “Episode in the Retreat from Russia,” in the World Exhibition of 1889, emerged from the obscurity of the Lyons Museum; it is perhaps his best and most important picture. When it appeared in the Salon of 1836, Alfred de Musset wrote that it was “not an episode but a complete poem”; he went on to say that the artist had painted “the despair in the wilderness,” and that, with its gloomy heaven and disconsolate horizon, the picture gave the impression of infinite disaster. After fifty years it had lost none of its value. Since the reappearance of this picture it has been recognised that Charlet was not merely the specialist of old grey heads with their noses reddened with brandy, the Molière of barracks and canteens, but that he understood all the tragical sublimity of war, from which Horace Vernet merely produced trivial anecdotes.

Beside him stands his pupil Raffet, the special painter of the grande armée. He mastered the brilliant figure of Napoleon; he followed it from Ajaccio to St. Helena, and never left it until he had said everything that was to be said about it. He showed the “little Corsican” as the general of the Italian campaign, ghastly pale and consumed with ambition; the Bonaparte of the Pyramids and of Cairo; the Emperor Napoleon on the parade-ground reviewing his Grenadiers; the triumphal hero of 1807 with the Cuirassiers dashing past, brandishing their sabres with a hurrah; the Titan of Beresina riding slowly over the waste of snow, and, in the very midst of disaster, spying a new star of fortune; the war-god of 1813, the great hypnotiser greeted even by the dying with a cry of “Long life to the Emperor”; the adventurer of 1814, riding at the head of shattered troops over a barren wilderness; the vanquished hero of 1815, who, in the midst of his last square, in the thick of his beloved battalions, calls fickle fate once more into the lists; and the captive lion who, from the bridge of the ship, casts a last look on the coast of France as it fades in the mist. He has called the Emperor from the grave, as a ghostly power, to hold a midnight review of the grande armée. And with love and passion and enthusiasm he has followed the instrument of these victories, the French soldiers, the swordsmen of seven years’ service, through bivouac and battle, on the march and on parade, as patrols and outposts. The ragged and shoeless troops of the Empire are portrayed in his plates, with a touch of real sublimity, in defeat and in victory. The empty inflated expression of martial enthusiasm has been avoided by him; everything is true and earnest.

In a masterly fashion he could make soldiers deploy in masses. No one has known in the same way how to render the impression of the multitude of an army, the notion of men standing shoulder to shoulder, the welding of thousands of individuals into one complete entity. In Raffet a regiment is a thousand-headed living being that has but one soul, one moral nature, one spirit, one sentiment of willing sacrifice and heroic courage. His death was as adventurous as his life; he passed away in a hotel in Genoa, and was brought back to French soil as part of the cargo of a merchant ship. For a long time his fame was thrown into the shade, at first by the triumphs of Horace Vernet, and then by those of Meissonier, until at length a fitting record was devoted to him by the piety of his son Auguste.

Never had Ernest Meissonier to complain of want of recognition. After his rococo pictures had been deemed worth their weight in gold he climbed to the summit of his fame, his universal celebrity and his popularity in France, when he devoted himself in the sixties to the representation of French military history. The year 1859 took him to Italy in the train of Napoleon III. Meissonier was chosen to spread the martial glory of the Emperor, and, as the nephew was fond of drawing parallels between himself and his mighty uncle, Meissonier was obliged to depict suitable occasions from the life of the first Napoleon. His admirers were very curious to know how the great “little painter” would acquit himself in such a monumental task. First came the “Battle of Solferino,” that picture of the Musée Luxembourg which represents Napoleon III overlooking the battle from a height in the midst of his staff. After lengthy preparations it appeared in the Salon of 1864, and showed that the painter had not been untrue to himself: he had simply adapted the minute technique of his rococo pictures to the painting of war, and he remained the Dutch “little master” in all the battle-pieces which followed.

Napoleon III had no further deeds of arms to record, so the intended parallel series was never accomplished. It is true, indeed, that he took the painter with the army in 1870; but after the first battle was lost, Meissonier went home: he did not wish to immortalise the struggles of a retreat. Henceforward his brush was consecrated to the first Napoleon. “1805” depicts the triumphant advance to the height of fame; “1807” shows Napoleon when the summit has been reached and the soldiers are cheering their idol in exultation; “1814” represents the fall: the star of fortune has vanished; victory, so long faithful to the man of might, has deserted his banners. There is still a look of indomitable energy on the pale face of the Emperor, as, in utter despair, he aims his last shot against the traitor destiny; but his eyes seem weary, his mouth is contorted, and his features are wasted with fever.

(By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright.)
MEISSONIER.	1814.

Meissonier has treated all these works with the carefulness which he expended on his little rococo pictures. To give an historically accurate representation of Napoleon’s boots he did not content himself with borrowing them from the museum. Walking and riding—for he was a passionate horseman—he wore for months together boots of the same make and form as those of the “little Corporal.” To get the colour of the horses of the Emperor and his marshals, in their full-grown winter coat, and to paint them just as they must have appeared after the hardships and negligence of a campaign, he bought animals of the same race and colour as those ridden by the Emperor and his generals, according to tradition, and picketed them for weeks in the snow and rain. His models were forced to wear out the uniforms in sun and storm before he painted them; he bought weapons and harness at fancy prices when he could not borrow them from museums. And there is no need to say that he copied all the portraits of Napoleon, Ney, Soult, and the other generals that were to be had, and read through whole libraries before beginning his Napoleon series. To paint the picture “1814,” which is generally reckoned his greatest performance—Napoleon at the head of his staff riding through a snow-clad landscape—he first prepared the scenery on a spot in the plain of Champagne, corresponding to the original locality, just as he did in earlier years with his interiors of the rococo period; he even had the road laid out on which he wished to paint the Emperor advancing. Then he waited for the first fall of snow, and had artillery, cavalry, and infantry to march for him upon this snowy path, and actually contrived that overturned transport waggons, discarded arms, and baggage should be decoratively strewn about the landscape.

From these laborious preparations it may be understood that he spent almost as many millions of francs upon his pictures as he received. In his article, What an Old Work of Art is Worth, Julius Lessing has admirably dealt with the hidden ways of taste and commerce applied to art. Amongst all painters of modern times Meissonier is the only one whose pictures, during his own lifetime, fetched prices such as are only reached by the works of famous old masters of the greatest epochs. And yet he sold them straight from his easel, and never to dealers. Meissonier avenged himself magnificently for the privations of his youth. In 1832, when he gave up his apprenticeship with Menier, the great chocolate manufacturer, to become a painter, he had fifteen francs a month to spend. He had great difficulty in disposing of his drawings and illustrations for five or ten francs, and was often obliged to console himself with a roll for the want of a dinner. Only ten years later he was able to purchase a small place in Poissy, near St. Germain, where he went for good in 1850, to give himself up to work without interruption. Gradually this little property became a pleasant country seat, and in due course of time the stately house in Paris, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, was added to it. His “Napoleon, 1814,” for which the painter himself received three hundred thousand francs, was bought at an auction by one of the owners of the “Grands Magasins du Louvre” for eight hundred and fifty thousand francs; “Napoleon III at Solferino” brought him two hundred thousand, and “The Charge of the Cuirassiers” three hundred thousand. And in general, after 1850, he only painted for such sums. It was calculated that he received about five thousand francs for every centimetre of painted canvas, and left behind him pictures which, according to present rate, were worth more than twenty million francs, without having really become a rich man; for, as a rule, every picture that he painted cost him several thousand.

And Meissonier never sacrificed himself to money-making and the trade. He never put a stroke on paper without the conviction that he could not make it better, and for this artistic earnestness he was universally honoured, even by his colleagues, to his very death. As master beyond dispute he let the Classicists, Romanticists, Impressionists, and Symbolists pass by the window of his lonely studio, and always remained the same. A little man with a firm step, an energetic figure, eyes that shone like coals, thick, closely cropped hair, and the beard of a river-god, that always seemed to grow longer, at eighty years of age he was as hale and active as at thirty. By a systematic routine of life he kept his physique elastic, and was able to maintain that unintermittent activity under which another man would have broken down. During long years Meissonier went to rest at eight every evening, slept till midnight, and then worked at his drawings by lamplight into the morning. In the course of the day he made his studies from nature and painted. Diffident in society and hard of access, he did not permit himself to be disturbed in his indefatigable diligence by any social demands. A sharp ride, a swim or a row was his only relaxation. In 1848, as captain of the National Guard, he had taken part in the street and barricade fighting; and again in 1871, when he was sixty-six, he clattered through the streets of the capital, with the dangling sword he had so often painted and a gold-laced cap stuck jauntily on one side, as a smart staff-officer. Even the works of his old age showed no exhaustion of power, and there is something great in attaining ripe years without outliving one’s reputation. As late as the spring of 1890, only a short time before his death, he was the leader of youth, when it transmigrated from the Palais des Champs Elysées to the Champ de Mars; and he exhibited in this new Salon his “October 1806,” with which he closed his Napoleonic epic and his general activity as a painter. Halting on a hill, the Emperor in his historical grey coat, mounted on a powerful grey, is thoughtfully watching the course of the battle, without troubling himself about the Cuirassiers who salute him exultantly as they storm by, or about the brilliant staff which has taken up position behind him. Not a feature moves in the sallow, cameo-like face of the Corsican. The sky is lowering and full of clouds. In the foreground lie a couple of dead soldiers, in whose uniform every button has been painted with the same conscientious care that was bestowed on the buttons of the rococo coats of fifty years before.

Beyond this inexhaustible correctness I can really see nothing that can be said for Meissonier’s fame as an artist. He, whose name is honoured in both hemispheres, was most peculiarly the son of his own work. The genius for the infinitesimal has never been carried further. He knew everything that a man can learn. The movements in his pictures are correct, the physiognomies interesting, the delicacy of execution indescribable, and his horses have been so exactly studied that they stand the test of instantaneous photography. But painter, in the proper sense, he never was. Precisely through their marvellous minuteness of execution—a minuteness which is merely attractive as a trial of patience and as an example of what the brush can do—his pictures are wanting in unity of conception, and they leave one cold by the hardness of their contours, the aridness of their colour, and the absence of all vibrating, nervous feeling. In a cavalry charge, with the whirling dust and the snorting horses, who thinks of costume? And who thinks of anything else when Meissonier paints a charge? Here are life and movement, and there a museum of military uniforms. When Manet saw Meissonier’s “Cuirassiers” he said, “Everything is iron here except the cuirasses.”

His rococo pictures are probably his best performances; they even express a certain amount of temperament. His military pictures make one chilly. Reproduced in woodcuts they are good illustrations for historical works, but as pictures they repel the eye, because they lack air and light and spirit. They rouse nothing except astonishment at the patience and incredible industry that went to the making of them. One sees everything in them—everything that the painter can have seen—to the slightest detail; only one does not rightly come into contact with the artist himself. His battle-pieces stand high above the scenic pictures of Horace Vernet and Hippolyte Bellangé, but they have nothing of the warmth of Raffet or the vibrating life of Neuville. There is nothing in them that is contagious and carries one away, or that appeals to the heart. Patience is a virtue: genius is a gift. Precious without originality, intelligent without imagination, dexterous without verve, elegant without charm, refined and subtile without delicacy, Meissonier has all the qualities that interest, and none of those which lay hold of one. He was a painter of a distinctness which causes astonishment, but not admiration; an artist for epicures, but for those of the second order, who pay the more highly for works of art in proportion as they value their artifice. His pictures recall the unseasonable compliment which Charles Blanc made to Ingres: “Cher maître, vous avez deviné la photographie trente ans avant qu’il y eut des photographes.” Or else one thinks of that malicious story of which Jules Dupré is well known as the author. “Suppose,” said he, “that you are a great personage who has just bought a Meissonier. Your valet enters the salon where it is hanging. ‘Ah! Monsieur,’ he cries, ‘what a beautiful picture you have bought! That is a masterpiece!’ Another time you buy a Rembrandt, and show it to your valet, in the expectation that he will at any rate be overcome by the same raptures. Mais non! This time the man looks embarrassed. ‘Ah! Monsieur,’ he says, ‘il faut s’y connaître,’ and away he goes.”

Guillaume Regamey, who is far less known, supplies what is wanting in Meissonier. Sketchy and of a highly strung nervous temperament, he could not adapt himself to the picture-market; but the history of art honours him as the most spirited draughtsman of the French soldier, after Géricault and Raffet. He did not paint him turned out for parade, ironed and smartened up, but in the worst trim. Syria, the Crimea, Italy, and the East are mingled with the difference of their types and the brightness of their exotic costumes. He had a great love for the catlike, quick-glancing chivalry of Turcos and Sapphis; but especially he loved the cavalry. His “Chasseurs d’Afrique” are part and parcel of their horses, like centaurs, and many of his cavalry groups recall the frieze of the Parthenon. Unfortunately he died at thirty-eight, shortly before the war of 1870, the historians of which were the younger painters, who had grown up in the shadow of Meissonier.

DE NEUVILLE.	LE BOURGET.
(By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of the copyright.)

DÉTAILLE.	SALUT AUX BLESSÉS.
(By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of the copyright.)

The most important of the group, Alphonse de Neuville, had looked at war very closely as an officer during the siege of Paris, and in this way he made himself a fine illustrator, who in his anecdotic pictures specially understood the secret of painting powder-smoke and the vehemence of a fusillade. The “Bivouac before Le Bourget” brought him his first success. “The Last Cartridges,” “Le Bourget,” and “The Graveyard of Saint-Privat” made him a popular master. Neuville is peculiarly the French painter of fighting. He did not know, as Charlet did, the soldier in time of peace, the peasant lad of yesterday who only cares about his stomach and has little taste for martial adventure. His soldier is an elegant and enthusiastic youthful hero. He even neglected the troops of the line; his preference was for the Chasseur, whose cap is stuck jauntily on his head and whose trousers fall better. He loved the plumes, the high boots of the officers, the sword-knots, canes, and eye-glasses. Everything received grace from his dexterous hand; he even saw in the trooper a gallant and ornamental bibelot, which he painted with chivalrous verve.

The pictures of Aimé Morot, the painter of “The Charge of the Cuirassiers,” possibly smell most of powder. Neuville’s frequently over-praised rival, Meissonier’s favourite pupil, Edouard Détaille, after he had started with pretty little costume pictures from the Directoire period, went further on the way of his teacher with less laboriousness and more lightness, with less calculation and more sincerity. The best of his works was “Salut aux Blessés”—the representation of a troop of wounded Prussian officers and soldiers on a country road, passing a French general and his staff, who with graceful chivalry lift their caps and salute the wounded men. Détaille’s great pictures, such as “The Presentation of the Colours,” and his panoramas were as accurate as they were tedious and arid, although they are far superior to most of the efforts which the Germans made to depict scenes from the war of 1870.

In Germany the great period of the wars of liberation first inspired a group of painters with the courage to enter the province of battle-painting, which had been so much despised by their classical colleagues. Germany had been turned into a great camp. Prussian, French, Austrian, Russian, and Bavarian troops passed in succession through the towns and villages: long trains of cannon and transport waggons came in their wake, and friends and foes were billeted amongst the inhabitants; the Napoleonic epoch was enacted. Such scenes followed each other like the gay slides in a magic lantern, and once more gave to some among the younger generation eyes for the outer world. There was awakened in them the capacity for receiving impressions of reality and transferring them swiftly to paper. Two hundred years before, the emancipation of Dutch art from the Italian house of bondage had been accomplished in precisely the same fashion. The Dutch struggle for freedom and the Thirty Years’ War had filled Holland with numbers of soldiery. The doings of these mercenaries, daily enacted before them in rich costume and with manifold brightness, riveted the pictorial feeling of artists. Echoes of war, fighting scenes, skirmishes and tumult, the incidents of camp life, arming, billeting, and marauding episodes are the first independent products of the Dutch school. Then the more peaceable doings of soldiers are represented. At Haarlem, in the neighbourhood of Frans Hals, were assembled the painters of social pieces, as they are called; pieces in which soldiers, bold and rollicking officers, make merry with gay maidens at wine and play and love. From thence the artist came to the portrayal of a peasantry passing their time in the same rough, free and easy life, and thence onward to the representation of society in towns.

ADAM.	A STABLE IN TOWN.

German painting in the nineteenth century took the same road. Eighty years ago foreign troops, and the extravagantly “picturesque and often ragged uniforms of the Republican army, the characteristic and often wild physiognomies of the French soldiers,” gave artists their first fresh and variously hued impressions. Painters of military subjects make their studies, not in the antiquity class of the academy, but upon the parade-ground and in the camp. Later, when the warlike times were over, they passed from the portrayal of soldiers to that of rustics; and so they laid the foundation on which future artists built.

Hanfstaengl.
HESS.	THE RECEPTION OF KING OTTO IN NAUPLIA.

In Berlin Franz Krüger and in Munich Albrecht Adam and Peter Hess were figures of individual character, belonging to the spiritual family of Chodowiecki and Gottfried Schadow; and, entirely undisturbed by classical theories or romantic reverie, they penetrated the life around them with a clear and sharp glance. They lacked, indeed, the temperament to comprehend either the high poetic tendencies of the old Munich school or the sentimental enthusiasm of the old Düsseldorf.

On the other hand, they were unhackneyed artists, facing facts in a completely unprejudiced spirit: entirely self-reliant, they refused to form themselves upon any model derived from the old masters; they had never had a teacher and never enjoyed academic instruction. This naïve straightforwardness makes their painting a half-barbaric product; something which has been allowed to run wild. But in a period of archæological resuscitations, pedantic brooding over the past and slavish imitation of the ancients, it seems, for this very reason, the first independent product of the nineteenth century. As vigorous, matter-of-fact realists they know nothing of more delicate charms, but represented fact for all it was worth and as honestly and conscientiously as was humanly possible. They are lacking in the distinctively pictorial character, but they are absolutely untouched by the Classicism of the epoch. They never dream of putting the uniforms of their warriors upon antique statues. It is this downright honesty that renders their pictures not merely irreplaceable as documents for the history of civilisation, and in spite of their unexampled frigidity, hardness, and gaudiness, lends them, even from the standpoint of art, a certain innovating quality. In a pleasantly written autobiography Albrecht Adam has himself described the drift of historical events which made him a painter of battles.

He was a confectioner’s apprentice in Nördlingen when, in the year 1800, the marches of the French army began in the neighbourhood. In an inn he began to sketch sergeants and Grenadiers, and went proudly home with the pence that he earned in this way. “Adam, when there’s war, I’ll take you into the field with me,” said an old major-general, who was the purchaser of his first works. That came to pass in 1809, when the Bavarians went with Napoleon against Austria. After a few weeks he was in the thick of raging battle. He saw Napoleon, the Crown-Prince Ludwig, and General Wrede, was present at the battles of Abensberg, Eckmühl, and Wagram, and came to Vienna with his portfolios full of sketches. There his portraits and pictures of the war found favour with the officers, and Eugène Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, took him to Upper Italy and afterwards to Russia. He was an eye-witness of the battles at Borodino and on the Moskwa, and saved himself from the conflagration of Moscow by his courage and determination. A true soldier, he mounted a horse when he was sixty-two years of age to be present on the Italian expedition of the Austrian army under Radetzky in 1848. His battle-pieces are therefore the result of personal experience. When campaigning he led the same life as the soldiers whom he portrayed, and as he proceeded in this portrayal with the objective quietness and fidelity of an historian, his artistic productions are invaluable as documents. Even where he could not draw as an eye-witness he invariably made studies afterwards, endeavouring to collect the most reliable material upon the spot, and preparing it with the utmost conscientiousness. The ground occupied by bodies of troops, the marshalling of them, and the conflict of masses, together with the smallest episodes, are represented with simplicity and reality. In the portrayal of the soldier’s life in time of peace he was inexhaustible. Just as vividly could he render horses undergoing the strain of the march and in the tumult of battle as in the stall, the farm-horse of the transport waggon no less than the noble creature ridden for parade. That his colour was sharp and hard, and his pictures therefore devoid of harmony, is to be explained by the helplessness of the age in regard to colouring. Only his last pictures, such as “The Battle on the Moskwa,” have a certain harmony of hue; and there is no doubt that this is to be set to the account of his son Franz.

After Adam, the father of German battle-painters, Peter Hess made an epoch by the earnestness and actuality of his pictures. He too accompanied General Wrede on the 1813-15 campaigns, and has left behind him exceedingly healthy, sane, and objectively viewed Cossack scenes, bivouacs, and the like, belonging to this period; though in his great pictures he aimed at totality of effect just as little as Adam. Confused by the complexity of his material, he only ventured to single out individual incidents, and then put them together on the canvas after the fashion of a mosaic; and, to make the nature of the action as clear as possible, he assumed as his standpoint the perspective view of a bird. Of course, pictures produced in this way make an effect which is artistically childish, but as the primitive endeavours of modern German art they will keep their place. The best known of his pictures are those inspired by the choice of Prince Otto of Bavaria as King of Greece, especially “The Reception of King Otto in Nauplia,” which is to be found in the new Pinakothek in Munich. In spite of its hard, motley, and quite impossible colouring, and its petty pedantry of execution, this is a picture which will not lose its value as an historical source.

Vigorous Franz Krüger had been long known in Berlin, by his famous pictures of horses, before the Emperor of Russia in 1829 commissioned him to paint, on a huge canvas, the great parade on the Opernplatz in Berlin, where he had reviewed his regiment of Cuirassiers before the King of Prussia. From that time such parade pictures became Krüger’s specialty; especially famous is the great parade of 1839, with the likenesses of those who at the time played a political or literary part in Berlin. In these works he has left a true reflection of old Berlin, and bridged over the chasm between Chodowiecki and Menzel: this is specially the case with his curiously objective water-colour portrait heads. Mention should be made of Karl Steffeck as a pupil of Krüger, and Theodor Horschelt—in addition to Franz Adam—as a pupil of Adam. By Steffeck, a healthy, vigorous realist, there are some well-painted portraits of horses, and by Th. Horschelt, who in 1858 took part in the fights of the Russians against the Circassians in the Caucasus, there survive some of the spirited and masterly pen-and-ink sketches which he published collectively in his Memories from the Caucasus. Franz Adam, who first published a collection of lithographs on the Italian campaign of 1848 in connection with Raffet, and in the Italian war of 1859 painted his first masterpiece, a scene from the battle of Solferino, owes his finest successes—although he had taken no part in it—to the war of 1870. In respect of harmony of colouring he is perhaps the finest painter of battle-pieces Germany has produced. As I shall later have no opportunity of doing so, I must mention here the works of Josef Brandt, the best of Franz Adam’s pupils. They are painted with verve and chivalrous feeling. There is a flame and a sparkle, both in the forms of his warriors and of his horses, in his pictures of old Polish cavalry battles. Everything is aristocratic: the distinction of the grey colouring no less than the ductile drawing with its chivalrous sentiment. In everything there breathes life, vigour, fire, and freshness: the East of Eugène Fromentin translated into Polish. Heinrich Lang, a spirited draughtsman, who had the art of seizing the most difficult positions and motions of a horse, embodied the wild tumult of cavalry charges (“The Charge of the Bredow Brigade,” “The Charge at Floing,” etc.) in rapid pictures of incisive power, though otherwise the heroic deeds of the Germans in 1870 resulted in but few heroic deeds in art.

CHAPTER XIX

ITALY AND THE EAST

In the beginning of the century the man who did not wear a uniform was not a proper subject for art unless he lived in Italy as a peasant or a robber. That is to say, painters were either archæologists or tourists; when they did not dive into the past they sought their romantic ideal in the distance. Italy, where monumental painting had first seen the light, was the earliest goal for travellers, and satisfied the desire of artists, since, for the rest of the world, it was still enveloped in poetic mystery. Only in Rome, in Naples, and in Tuscany was it thought possible to meet with human beings who had not become vulgar and hideous under the influence of civilisation. There they still preserved something of the beauty of Grecian statues. There artists were less afraid of being diverted from absolute beauty by the study of nature, and thus an important principle was carried. Instead of copying directly from antique statues, as David and Mengs had done before them, painters began to study the descendants of those who had been the models of the old Roman sculptors; and so it was that, almost against their will, they turned from museums to look rather more closely into nature, and from the past to cast a glance into the present.

To Leopold Robert belongs the credit of having opened out this new province to an art which was enclosed in the narrow bounds of Classicism. He owes his success with the public of the twenties and his place in the history of art entirely to the fact that in spite of his strict classical training he was one of the first to interest himself, however little, in contemporary life. Hundreds of artists had wandered into Italy and seen nothing but the antique until this young man set out from Neufchâtel in 1818 and became the painter of the Italian people. What struck him at the first glance was the character of the people, together with their curious habits and usages, and their rude and picturesque garb. “He wished to render this with all fidelity,” and especially “to do honour to the absolute nobility of that people which still bore a trace of the heroic greatness of their forefathers.” Above all, he fancied that he could find this phenomenon of atavism amongst the bandits; and as Sonnino, an old brigand nest, had been taken and the inhabitants removed to Engelsburg shortly after his arrival, a convenient opportunity was offered to him for making his studies in this place. The pictures of brigand life which he painted in the beginning of the twenties soon found a most profitable market. “Dear M. Robert,” said the fashionable guests who visited his studio by the dozen, “could you paint a little brigand, if it is not asking too much?” Robbers with sentimental qualms were particularly prized: for instance, at the moment when they were fondling their wives, or praying remorsefully to God, or watching over the bed of a sick child.

From brigands he made a transition to the girls of Sorrento, Frascati, Capri, and Procida, and to shepherd lads, fishers, pilgrims, hermits, and pifferari. Early in the twenties, when he made an exhibition of a number of these little pictures in Rome, it effectually prepared the way for his fame; and when he sent a succession of larger pictures to the Paris Salon in 1824-31 he was held as one of the most brilliant masters of the French school, to whom Romanticists and Classicists paid the same honour. In the first of these pictures, painted in 1824, he had represented a number of peasants listening to a Neapolitan fisherman improvising to the accompaniment of a harmonica. “The Return from a Pilgrimage to the Madonna dell’ Arco” of 1827 is the painting of a triumphal waggon yoked with oxen. Upon it are seated lads and maidens adorned with foliage, and in their gay Sunday best. An old lazzarone is playing the mandolin, and girls are dancing with tambourines, whilst a young man springs round clattering his castanets, and a couple of boys, to complete the seasons of life, head the procession. His third picture, “The Coming of the Reapers to the Pontine Marshes,” was the chief work in the Salon of 1831 after the “Freedom” of Delacroix. Heine accorded him a classical passage of description, and the orthodox academical critics were liberal with most unmerited praise, treating the painter as a dangerous revolutionary who was seducing art into the undignified naturalism of Ribera and Caravaggio. Robert, the honest, lamblike man, who strikes us now as being a conscientious follower of the school of David!

How little did the artistic principles which he laid down in his letters accord with his own paintings! “I try,” he wrote to a friend in 1819, “to follow Nature in everything. Nature is the only teacher who should be heard. She alone inspires and moves me, she alone appeals to me: it is Nature that I seek to fathom, and in her I ever hope to find the special impulse for work.” She is a miracle to him, and one that is greater than any other, a book in which “the simple may read as well as the great.” He could not understand “how painters could take the old masters as their model instead of Nature, who is the only great exemplar!” What is to be seen in his pictures is merely an awkward transference of David’s manner of conception and representation to the painting of Italian peasants—a scrupulously careful adaptation of classical rules to romantic subjects. He looked at modern Italians solely through the medium of antique statuary, and conducts us to an Italy which can only be called Leopold Robert’s Italy, since it never existed anywhere except in Robert’s map. All his figures have the movement of some familiar work of antique sculpture, and that expression of cherished melancholy which went out of fashion after the time of Ary Scheffer. Never does one see in his pictures a casual and unhackneyed gesture in harmony with the situation. It seems as if he had dressed up antique statues or David’s Horatii and his Sabine women in the costume of the Italian peasantry, and grouped them for a tableau vivant in front of stage scenery, and in accordance with Parisian rules of composition. His peasants and fishers make beautiful, noble, and often magnificent groups. But one can always give the exact academic rules for any particular figure standing here and not there, or in one position and not in another. His pictures are much too official, and obtrusively affect the favourite pyramid form of composition.

L. ROBERT.	FISHERS OF THE ADRIATIC.

But as they are supposed to be pictures of Italian manners, the contrast between nature and the artificial construction is almost more irritating than it is in David’s mythological representations. It is as if Robert had really never seen any Italian peasants, though he maintains all the while that he is depicting their life. The hard outlines and the sharp bronze tone of his works are a ghastly evidence of the extent to which the sense of colour had become extinct in the school of David. It was merely form that attracted him; the sun of Italy left him indifferent. The absence of atmosphere gives his figures an appearance of having been cut out of picture sheets. O great artists of Holland, masters of atmospheric effect and of contour bathed in light, what would you have said to such heartless silhouettes! In his youth Robert had been a line engraver, and he adapted the prosaic technique of line engraving to painting. However, he was a transitional painter, and as such he has an historical interest. He was a modern Tasso, too, and on the strength of the adventurous relationship to Princess Charlotte Napoleon, which ultimately drove him to suicide, he could be used with effect as the hero of a novel. Through the downfall of the school of David his star has paled—one more proof that only Nature is eternal, and that conventional painting falls into oblivion with the age that saw it rise. “I wished to find a genre which was not yet known, and this genre has had the fortune to please. It is always an advantage to be the first.” With these words he has himself indicated, in a way which is as modest as it is accurate, the ground of his reputation amongst contemporaries, and why it is that the history of art cannot quite afford to forget him.

L. ROBERT.	THE COMING OF THE REAPERS TO THE PONTINE MARSHES.

Amongst the multitude of those who, incited by Robert’s brilliant successes, made the Spanish staircase in Rome the basis of their art, Victor Schnetz, by his “Vow to the Madonna” of 1831, specially succeeded in winning public favour. At a later time his favourite themes were the funerals of children, inundations, and the like; but his arid method of painting contrasts with the sentimental melancholy of these subjects in a fashion which is not particularly agreeable.

It was Ernest Hébert who first saw Italy with the eyes of a painter. He might be called the Perugino of this group. He was the most romantic of the pupils of Delaroche, and owed his conception of colour to that painter. His spiritual father was Ary Scheffer. The latter has discovered the poetry of sentimentality; Hébert the poetry of disease. His pictures are invariably of great technical delicacy. His style has something femininely gracious, almost languishing: his colouring is delicately fragrant and tenderly melting. He is, indeed, a refined artist who occupies a place by himself, however mannered the melancholy and sickliness of his figures may be. In “The Malaria” of 1850 they were influenced by the subject itself. The barge gliding over the waters of the Pontine Marshes, with its freight of men, women, and children, seems like a gloomy symbol of the voyage of life; the sorrow of the passengers is that of resignation: dying they droop their heads like withering flowers. But later the fever became chronic in Hébert. The interesting disease returned even where it was out of place, as it does still in the pictures of his followers. The same fate befell the painters of Italy which befalls tourists. What Robert had seen in the country as the first comer whole generations saw after him, neither more nor less than that. The pictures were always variations on the old theme, until in the sixties Bonnat came with his individual and realistic vision.

Portfolio.
HÉBERT.	THE MALARIA.

In Germany, where “the yearning for Italy” had been ventilated in an immoderate quantity of lyrical poems ever since the time of Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen, August Riedel represented this phase of modern painting; and as Leopold Robert is still celebrated, Riedel ought not to be forgotten. Riedel lived too long (1800-1883), and, as he painted nothing but bad pictures during the last thirty years of his life, what he had done in his youth was forgotten. At that time he was the first apostle of Leopold Robert in Germany, and as such he has his importance as an innovator. When he began his career in the Munich Academy in 1819 Peter Langer, a Classicist of the order of Mengs, was still director there. Riedel also painted classical subjects and church pictures—“Christ on the Mount of Olives,” “The Resurrection of Lazarus,” and “Peter and Paul healing the Lame.” But when he returned from Italy in 1823 he reversed the route which others had taken: the classic land set him free from Classicism, and opened his eyes to the beauty of life. Instead of working on saints in the style of Langer, he painted beautiful women in the costume of modern Italy. His “Neapolitan Fisherman’s Family” was for Germany a revelation similar to that which Robert’s “Neapolitan Improvisator” had been for France. The fisherman, rather theatrically draped, is sitting on the shore, while his wife and his little daughter listen to him playing the zither. The blue sea, dotted with white sails, and distant Ischia and Cape Missene, form the background; and a blue heaven, dappled with white clouds, arches above. Everything was of an exceedingly conventional beauty, but denoted progress in comparison with Robert. It already announced that search for brilliant effects of light which henceforward became a characteristic of Riedel, and gave him a peculiar position in his own day. “Even hardened connoisseurs,” wrote Emil Braun from Rome about this time, “stand helpless before this magic of colouring. It is often long before they are able to persuade themselves that such glory of colour can be produced by the familiar medium of oil painting, and with materials that any one can buy at a shop where pigments are sold.” Riedel touched a problem—diffidently, no doubt—which was only taken up much later in its full extent. And if Cornelius said to him, “You have fully attained what I have avoided with the greatest effort during the course of my whole life,” it is none the less true that Riedel’s Italian girls in the full glow of sunlight have remained, in spite of their stereotyped smile, so reminiscent of Sichel, better able to stand the test of galleries than the pictures of the Michael-Angelo of Munich. Before his “Neapolitan Fisherman’s Family,” which went the world over like a melody from Auber’s Masaniello, before his “Judith” carrying the head of Holofernes in the brightest light of morning, before his “Girls Bathing” in the dimness of the forest, and before his “Sakuntala,” painted “with refined effects of light,” the cartoon painters mumbled and grumbled, and raised hue and cry over the desecration of German art; but Riedel’s friends were just as loud in proclaiming the witchery of his colour, and “the Southern sunlight which he had conjured on to his palette,” to be splendid beyond the powers of comprehension. It is difficult at the present day to understand the fame that he once had as “a pyrotechnist in pigments.” But the results which he achieved by himself in colouring, long before the influence of the Belgians in Germany, will always give him a sure place in the history of German art. And these qualities were unconsciously inherited by his successors, who troubled their heads no further about the pioneer and founder.

RIEDEL.	THE NEAPOLITAN FISHERMAN’S FAMILY.