W. C. Brownell - French Art

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FRENCH ART

_CLASSIC AND CONTEMPORARY PAINTING
AND SCULPTURE_

BY
W.C. BROWNELL

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1892

Copyright, 1892, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

TO AUGUSTE RODIN

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. Classic Painting, 1
I. Character and origin.
II. Claude and Poussin.
III. Lebrun and Lesueur.
IV. Louis Quinze.
V. Greuze and Chardin.
VI. David, Ingres, and Prudhon.

II. Romantic Painting, 47
I. Romanticism.
II. Gericault and Delacroix.
III. The Fontainebleau Group.
IV. The Academic Painters.
V. Couture, Puvis de Chavannes, and Regnault.

III. Realistic Painting, 89
I. Realism.
II. Courbet and Bastien-Lepage.
III. The Landscape Painters; Fromentin and Guillaumet.
IV. Historical and Portrait Painters.
V. Baudry, Delaunay, Bonvin, Vollon, Gervex,
Duez, Roll, L'Hermitte, Lerolle, Beraud,
The Illustrators.
VI. Manet and Monet.
VII. Impressionism; Degas.
VIII. The Outlook.

IV. Classic Sculpture, 139
I. Claux Sluters.
II. Jean Goujon.
III. Style.
IV. Clodion, Pradier, and Etex.
V. Houdon, David d'Angers, and Rude.
VI. Carpeaux and Barye.

V. Academic Sculpture, 165

I. Its Italianate Character.
II. Chapu.
III. Dubois.
IV. Saint-Marceaux and Mercie.
V. Tyranny of Style.
VI. Falguiere, Barrias, Delaplanche, and Le Feuvre.
VII. Fremiet.
VIII. The Institute School in General.

VI. The New Movement in Sculpture, 205
I. Rodin.
II. Dalou.

I

CLASSIC PAINTING

I

More than that of any other modern people French art is a national
expression. It epitomizes very definitely the national aesthetic judgment
and feeling, and if its manifestations are even more varied than are
elsewhere to be met with, they share a certain character that is very
salient. Of almost any French picture or statue of any modern epoch
one's first thought is that it is French. The national quite overshadows
the personal quality. In the field of the fine arts, as in nearly every
other in which the French genius shows itself, the results are evident
of an intellectual co-operation which insures the development of a
common standard and tends to subordinate idiosyncrasy. The fine arts, as
well as every other department of mental activity, reveal the effect of
that social instinct which is so much more powerful in France than it is
anywhere else, or has ever been elsewhere, except possibly in the case
of the Athenian republic. Add to this influence that of the intellectual
as distinguished from the sensuous instinct, and one has, I think, the
key to this salient characteristic of French art which strikes one so
sharply and always as so plainly French. As one walks through the French
rooms at the Louvre, through the galleries of the Luxembourg, through
the unending rooms of the _Salon_ he is impressed by the splendid
competence everywhere displayed, the high standard of culture
universally attested, by the overwhelming evidence that France stands at
the head of the modern world aesthetically--but not less, I think, does
one feel the absence of imagination, opportunity, of spirituality, of
poetry in a word. The French themselves feel something of this. At the
great Exposition of 1889 no pictures were so much admired by them as the
English, in which appeared, even to an excessive degree, just the
qualities in which French art is lacking, and which less than those of
any other school showed traces of the now all but universal influence of
French art. The most distinct and durable impression left by any
exhibition of French pictures is that the French aesthetic genius is at
once admirably artistic and extremely little poetic.

It is a corollary of the predominance of the intellectual over the
sensuous instinct that the true should be preferred to the beautiful,
and some French critics are so far from denying this preference of
French art that they express pride in it, and, indeed, defend it in a
way that makes one feel slightly amateurish and fanciful in thinking of
beauty apart from truth. A walk through the Louvre, however, suffices to
restore one's confidence in his own convictions. The French rooms, at
least until modern periods are reached, are a demonstration that in the
sphere of aesthetics science does not produce the greatest artists--that
something other than intelligent interest and technical accomplishment
are requisite to that end, and that system is fatal to spontaneity. M.
Eugene Veron is the mouthpiece of his countrymen in asserting absolute
beauty to be an abstraction, but the practice of the mass of French
painters is, by comparison with that of the great Italians and Dutchmen,
eloquent of the lack of poetry that results from a scepticism of
abstractions. The French classic painters--and the classic-spirit, in
spite of every force that the modern world brings to its destruction,
persists wonderfully in France--show little absorption, little delight
in their subject. Contrasted with the great names in painting they are
eclectic and traditional, too purely expert. They are too cultivated to
invent. Selection has taken the place of discovery in their inspiration.
They are addicted to the rational and the regulated. Their substance is
never sentimental and incommunicable. Their works have a distinctly
professional air. They distrust what cannot be expressed; what can only
be suggested does not seem to them worth the trouble of trying to
conceive. Beside the world of mystery and the wealth of emotion forming
an imaginative penumbra around such a design as Raphael's Vision of
Ezekiel, for instance, Poussin's treatment of essentially the same
subject is a diagram.

On the other hand, qualities intimately associated with these defects
are quite as noticeable in the old French rooms of the Louvre.
Clearness, compactness, measure, and balance are evident in nearly every
canvas. Everywhere is the air of reserve, of intellectual good-breeding,
of avoidance of extravagance. That French painting is at the head of
contemporary painting, as far and away incontestably it is, is due to
the fact that it alone has kept alive the traditions of art which,
elsewhere than in France, have given place to other and more material
ideals. From the first its practitioners have been artists rather than
poets, have possessed, that is to say, the constructive rather than the
creative, the organizing rather than the imaginative temperament, but
they have rarely been perfunctory and never common. French painting in
its preference of truth to beauty, of intelligence to the beatific
vision, of form to color, in a word, has nevertheless, and perhaps _a
fortiori_, always been the expression of ideas. These ideas almost
invariably have been expressed in rigorous form--form which at times
fringes the lifelessness of symbolism. But even less frequently, I
think, than other peoples have the French exhibited in their painting
that contentment with painting in itself that is the dry rot of art.
With all their addiction to truth and form they have followed this ideal
so systematically that they have never suffered it to become mechanical,
merely _formal_--as is so often the case elsewhere (in England and among
ourselves, everyone will have remarked) in instances where form has been
mainly considered and where sentiment happens to be lacking. Even when
care for form is so excessive as to imply an absence of character, the
form itself is apt to be so distinguished as itself to supply the
element of character, and character consequently particularly refined
and immaterial. And one quality is always present: elegance is always
evidently aimed at and measurably achieved. Native or foreign, real or
factitious as the inspiration of French classicism may be, the sense of
style and of that perfection of style which we know as elegance is
invariably noticeable in its productions. So that, we may say, from
Poussin to Puvis de Chavannes, from Clouet to Meissonier, _taste_--a
refined and cultivated sense of what is sound, estimable, competent,
reserved, satisfactory, up to the mark, and above all, elegant and
distinguished--has been at once the arbiter and the stimulus of
excellence in French painting. It is this which has made the France of
the past three centuries, and especially the France of to-day--as we get
farther and farther away from the great art epochs--both in amount and
general excellence of artistic activity, comparable only with the Italy
of the Renaissance and the Greece of antiquity.

Moreover, it is an error to assume, because form in French painting
appeals to us more strikingly than substance, that French painting is
lacking in substance. In its perfection form appeals to every
appreciation; it is in art, one may say, the one universal language. But
just in proportion as form in a work of art approaches perfection, or
universality, just in that proportion does the substance which it
clothes, which it expresses, seem unimportant to those to whom this
substance is foreign. Some critics have even fancied, for example, that
Greek architecture and sculpture--the only Greek art we know anything
about--were chiefly concerned with form, and that the ideas behind their
perfection of form were very simple and elementary ideas, not at all
comparable in complexity and elaborateness with those that confuse and
distinguish the modern world. When one comes to French art it is still
more difficult for us to realize that the ideas underlying its
expression are ideas of import, validity, and attachment. The truth is
largely that French ideas are not our ideas; not that the French
who--except possibly the ancient Greeks and the modern Germans--of all
peoples in the world are, as one may say, addicted to ideas, are lacking
in them. Technical excellence is simply the inseparable accompaniment,
the outward expression of the kind of aesthetic ideas the French are
enamoured of. Their substance is not our substance, but while it is
perfectly legitimate for us to criticise their substance it is idle to
maintain that they are lacking in substance. If we call a painting by
Poussin pure style, a composition of David merely the perfection of
convention, one of M. Rochegrosse's dramatic canvasses the rhetoric of
technic and that only, we miss something. We miss the idea, the
substance, behind these varying expressions. These are not the less real
for being foreign to us. They are less spiritual and more material, less
poetic and spontaneous, more schooled and traditional than we like to
see associated with such adequacy of expression, but they are not for
that reason more mechanical. They are ideas and substance that lend
themselves to technical expression a thousand times more readily than do
ours. They are, in fact, exquisitely adapted to technical expression.

The substance and ideas which we desire fully expressed in color, form,
or words are, indeed, very exactly in proportion to our esteem of them,
inexpressible. We like hints of the unutterable, suggestions of
significance that is mysterious and import that is incalculable. The
light that "never was on sea or land" is the illumination we seek. The
"Heaven," not the atmosphere that "lies about us" in our mature age as
"in our infancy," is what appeals most strongly to our subordination of
the intellect and the senses to the imagination and the soul. Nothing
with us very deeply impresses the mind if it does not arouse the
emotions. Naturally, thus, we are predisposed insensibly to infer from
French articulateness the absence of substance, to assume from the
triumphant facility and felicity of French expression a certain
insignificance of what is expressed. Inferences and assumptions based on
temperament, however, almost invariably have the vice of superficiality,
and it takes no very prolonged study of French art for candor and
intelligence to perceive that if its substance is weak on the
sentimental, the emotional, the poetic, the spiritual side, it is
exceptionally strong in rhetorical, artistic, cultivated, aesthetically
elevated ideas, as well as in that technical excellence which alone,
owing to our own inexpertness, first strikes and longest impresses us.

When we have no ideas to express, in a word, we rarely save our
emptiness by any appearance of clever expression. When a Frenchman
expresses ideas for which we do not care, with which we are
temperamentally out of sympathy, we assume that his expression is
equally empty. Matthew Arnold cites a passage from Mr. Palgrave, and
comments significantly on it, in this sense. "The style," exclaims Mr.
Palgrave, "which has filled London with the dead monotony of Gower or
Harley Streets, or the pale commonplace of Belgravia, Tyburnia, and
Kensington; which has pierced Paris and Madrid with the feeble
frivolities of the Rue Rivoli and the Strada de Toledo." Upon which
Arnold observes that "the architecture of the Rue Rivoli expresses show,
splendor, pleasure, unworthy things, perhaps, to express alone and for
their own sakes, but it expresses them; whereas, the architecture of
Gower Street and Belgravia merely expresses the impotence of the
architect to express anything."

And in characterizing the turn for poetry in French painting as
comparatively inferior, it will be understood at once, I hope, that I am
comparing it with the imaginativeness of the great Italians and
Dutchmen, and with Rubens and Holbein and Turner, and not asserting the
supremacy in elevated sentiment over Claude and Corot, Chardin, and
Cazin, of the Royal Academy, or the New York Society of American
Artists. And so far as an absolute rather than a comparative standard
may be applied in matters so much too vast for any hope of adequate
treatment according to either method, we ought never to forget that in
criticising French painting, as well as other things French, we are
measuring it by an ideal that now and then we may appreciate better than
Frenchmen, but rarely illustrate as well.

II

Furthermore, the qualities and defects of French painting--the
predominance in it of national over individual force and distinction,
its turn for style, the kind of ideas that inspire its substance, its
classic spirit in fine--are explained hardly less by its historic origin
than by the character of the French genius itself. French painting
really began in connoisseurship, one may say. It arose in appreciation,
that faculty in which the French have always been, and still are,
unrivalled. Its syntheses were based on elements already in combination.
It originated nothing. It was eclectic at the outset. Compared with the
slow and suave evolution of Italian art, in whose earliest dawn its
borrowed Byzantine painting served as a stimulus and suggestion to
original views of natural material rather than as a model for imitation
and modification, the painting that sprang into existence, Minerva-like,
in full armor, at Fontainebleau under Francis I, was of the essence of
artificiality. The court of France was far more splendid than, and
equally enlightened with, that of Florence. The monarch felt his title
to Maecenasship as justified as that of the Medici. He created,
accordingly, French painting out of hand--I mean, at all events, the
French painting that stands at the beginning of the line of the present
tradition. He summoned Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Rossi, Primaticcio,
and founded the famous Fontainebleau school. Of necessity it was
Italianate. It had no Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael behind it. Italian was
the best art going; French appreciation was educated and keen; its
choice between evolution and adoption was inevitable. It was very much
in the position in which American appreciation finds itself to-day. Like
our own painters, the French artists of the Renaissance found themselves
familiar with masterpieces wholly beyond their power to create, and
produced by a foreign people who had enjoyed the incomparable advantage
of arriving at their artistic apogee through natural stages of growth,
beginning with impulse and culminating in expertness.

The situation had its advantages as well as its drawbacks, certainly. It
saved French painting an immense amount of fumbling, of laborious
experimentation, of crudity, of failure. But it stamped it with an
essential artificiality from which it did not fully recover for over
two hundred years, until, insensibly, it had built up its own traditions
and gradually brought about its own inherent development. In a word,
French painting had an intellectual rather than an emotional origin. Its
first practitioners were men of culture rather than of feeling; they
were inspired by the artistic, the constructive, the fashioning, rather
than the poetic, spirit. And so evident is this inclination in even
contemporary French painting--and indeed in all French aesthetic
expression--that it cannot be ascribed wholly to the circumstances
mentioned. The circumstances themselves need an explanation, and find it
in the constitution itself of the French mind, which (owing, doubtless,
to other circumstances, but that is extraneous) is fundamentally less
imaginative and creative than co-ordinating and constructive.

Naturally thus, when the Italian influence wore itself out, and the
Fontainebleau school gave way to a more purely national art; when France
had definitely entered into her Italian heritage and had learned the
lessons that Holland and Flanders had to teach her as well; when, in
fine, the art of the modern world began, it was an art of grammar, of
rhetoric. Certainly up to the time of Gericault painting in general held
itself rather pedantically aloof from poetry. Claude, Chardin, what may
be called the illustrated _vers de societe_ of the Louis Quinze
painters--of Watteau and Fragonard--even Prudhon, did little to change
the prevailing color and tone. Claude's art is, in manner, thoroughly
classic. His _personal_ influence was perhaps first felt by Corot. He
stands by himself, at any rate, quite apart. He was the first thoroughly
original French painter, if indeed one may not say he was the first
thoroughly original modern painter. He has been assigned to both the
French and Italian schools--to the latter by Gallophobist critics,
however, through a partisanship which in aesthetic matters is ridiculous;
there was in his day no Italian school for him to belong to. The truth
is that he passed a large part of his life in Italy and that his
landscape is Italianate. But more conspicuously still, it is
ideal--ideal in the sense intended by Goethe in saying, "There are no
landscapes in nature like those of Claude." There are not, indeed.
Nature has been transmuted by Claude's alchemy with lovelier results
than any other painter--save always Corot, shall I say?--has ever
achieved. Witness the pastorals at Madrid, in the Doria Gallery at Rome,
the "Dido and AEneas" at Dresden, the sweet and serene superiority of the
National Gallery canvases over the struggling competition manifest in
the Turners juxtaposed to them through the unlucky ambition of the great
English painter. Mr. Ruskin says that Claude could paint a small wave
very well, and acknowledges that he effected a revolution in art, which
revolution "consisted mainly in setting the sun in heavens." "Mainly" is
delightful, but Claude's excellence consists in his ability to paint
visions of loveliness, pictures of pure beauty, not in his skill in
observing the drawing of wavelets or his happy thought of painting
sunlight. Mr. George Moore observes ironically of Mr. Ruskin that his
grotesque depreciation of Mr. Whistler--"the lot of critics" being "to
be remembered by what they have failed to understand"--"will survive his
finest prose passage." I am not sure about Mr. Whistler. Contemporaries
are too near for a perfect critical perspective. But assuredly Mr.
Ruskin's failure to perceive Claude's point of view--to perceive that
Claude's aim and Stanfield's, say, were quite different; that Claude, in
fact, was at the opposite pole from the botanist and the geologist whom
Mr. Ruskin's "reverence for nature" would make of every landscape
painter--is a failure in appreciation than to have shown which it would
be better for him as a critic never to have been born. It seems hardly
fanciful to say that the depreciation of Claude by Mr. Ruskin, who is a
landscape painter himself, using the medium of words instead of
pigments, is, so to speak, professionally unjust.

"Go out, in the springtime, among the meadows that slope from the
shores of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their lower mountains. There,
mingled with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the grass
grows deep and free; and as you follow the winding mountain paths,
beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom--paths that
forever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweeping down in
scented undulation, steep to the blue water, studded here and there with
new-mown heaps, filling the air with fainter sweetness--look up toward
the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll silently
into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines."

Claude's landscape is not Swiss, but if it were it would awaken in the
beholder a very similar sensation to that aroused in the reader of this
famous passage. Claude indeed painted landscape in precisely this way.
He was perhaps the first--though priority in such matters is trivial
beside pre-eminence--who painted _effects_ instead of _things_. Light
and air were his material, not ponds and rocks and clouds and trees and
stretches of plain and mountain outlines. He first generalized the
phenomena of inanimate nature, and in this he remains still unsurpassed.
But, superficially, his scheme wore the classic aspect, and neither his
contemporaries nor his successors, for over two hundred years,
discovered the immense value of his point of view, and the puissant
charm of his way of rendering nature.

Poussin, however, was the incarnation of the classic spirit, and perhaps
the reason why a disinterested foreigner finds it difficult to
appreciate the French estimate of him is that no foreigner, however
disinterested, can quite appreciate the French appreciation of the
classic spirit in and for itself. But when one listens to expressions of
admiration for the one French "old master," as one may call Poussin
without invidiousness, it is impossible not to scent chauvinism, as one
scents it in the German panegyrics of Goethe, for example. He was a very
great painter, beyond doubt. And as there were great men before
Agamemnon there have been great painters since Raphael and Titian, even
since Rembrandt and Velasquez. He had a strenuous personality, moreover.
You know a Poussin at once when you see it. But to find the suggestion
of the infinite, the Shakespearian touch in his work seems to demand the
imaginativeness of M. Victor Cherbuliez. When Mr. Matthew Arnold
ventured to remark to Sainte-Beuve that he could not consider Lamartine
as a very important poet, Sainte-Beuve replied: "He was important to
us." Many critics, among them one severer than Sainte-Beuve, the late
Edmond Scherer, have given excellent reasons for Lamartine's absolute as
well as relative importance, and perhaps it is a failure in
appreciation on our part that is really responsible for our feeling that
Poussin is not quite the great master the French deem him. Assuredly he
might justifiably apply to himself the "Et-Ego-in-Arcadia" inscription
in one of his most famous paintings. And the specific service he
performed for French painting and the relative rank he occupies in it
ought not to obscure his purely personal qualities, which, if not
transcendent, are incontestably elevated and fine.

His qualities, however, are very thoroughly French qualities--poise,
rationality, science, the artistic dominating the poetic faculty, and
style quite outshining significance and suggestion. He learned all he
knew of art, he said, from the Bacchus Torso at Naples. But he was
eclectic rather than imitative, and certainly used the material he found
in the works of his artistic ancestors as freely and personally as
Raphael the frescos of the Baths of Titus, or Donatello the fragments of
antique sculpture. From his time on, indeed, French painting dropped its
Italian leading-strings. He might often suggest Raphael--and any painter
who suggests Raphael inevitably suffers for it--but always with an
individual, a native, a French difference, and he is as far removed in
spirit and essence from the Fontainebleau school as the French genius
itself is from the Italian which presided there. In Poussin, indeed,
the French genius first asserts itself in painting. And it asserts
itself splendidly in him.

We who ask to be moved as well as impressed, who demand satisfaction of
the susceptibility as well as--shall we say rather than?--interest of
the intelligence, may feel that for the qualities in which Poussin is
lacking those in which he is rich afford no compensation whatever. But I
confess that in the presence of even that portion of Poussin's
magnificent accomplishment which is spread before one in the Louvre, to
wish one's self in the Stanze of the Vatican or in the Sistine Chapel,
seems to me an unintelligent sacrifice of one's opportunities.

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