The Story of French Painting
by Charles H. Caffin
1915
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
i THE BACKGEOUND
it PEE-RENAISSANCE AET .......... 15
m THE EAELY RENAISSANCE ......... 87
iv ABSOLUTISM AND THE SUN EJNG ....... 51
v POUSSIN AND CLAUDE LOEEAIN ....... 63
vi THE Rococo ............. 68
vn REVOLUTION . . ........... 91
vin LES VAILLANTS DE DIX-HUIT-CENT-TEENTE . . . 105 rx LE JUSTE-MILIEU ........... 120
X THE POETEY OF THE PAYSAGE INTIME ..... 130
xi MILLET AND SOME, OTHEES ......... 149
xn REALISM G. COUEBET .......... 160
xni MANET AND IMPEESSIONISM ........ . 166
xiv RENOIE ............... 180
xv NEO-!MPEESSIONISM ........... 183
xvi PENTTMBEA . . ............ 188
xvn Puvis DE CHAVANNES ...... * . . , 195
xvni LA FIN DE SEECLE ............ 202
xix HENEI MATISSE ............ 211
xx PAUL CEZANNE ............ 217
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS I . . , Jean Clouet . Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
THE DEPOSITION ..... Unknown Master of the
XV Century ... 20
PIETA School of Avignon . . 29
PORTRAIT OP CHARLES VII . . Jean Foucquet ... 34
DIANA School of Fontainebleau 47
PORTRAIT or BossuET .... Hyaclnfhe Eigaud . . 58
"Ex EGO IN ARCADIA" . . . Nicolas Poussin ... 65
LANDING OF CLEOPATRA AT
TARSUS Claude Lorrain . . . 6B
GIIXES ... Jean Antoine Wattea/u, 79
LA MAITRESSE D'ECOLE . . . Jean Honore Fragonard 80
PBINCESSE IE CONDE AS DIANA Jean Marc Nattier . . 87
MOTHER AND SON . . . . . Jean Baptiste CTia/rdin . 90
By courtesy of Franz Hanfstaengl.
PORTRAIT OF MADAME RECAMIER Jacques Lou%$ David . 97> PORTRAIT OF MADAME RECAMIER Franpois Pascal Gerard 100
PORTRAIT OF MADAME RIVIERE . Jean August e Dominique
Ingres 109
ix
FACING PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MASSACRE OF CHIOS .... Eugene Delacroix .
LES AVOCATS ...... Honore Daumier . .117
NIGHT PATROL, AT SMYRNA . . Alexandre Decamps
DANCE OF THE NYMPHS . . . Corot
From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie.
THE EDGE OF THE FOREST
SUNSET ....... Rousseau ..... 141
From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie.
THE SOWER ...... Jean Franyois Millet . 151
THE PROCESSION ..... Lucien Simon . . . 154
GOING TO CHURCH ..... Charles Cottet . . . 158
LE REVEIL ....... Gustave Courbet . . 161
THE GUITARIST ...... Edouard Manet . . . 164
THE DANCING LESSON . . . Degas ...... 173
POPLARS ........ Claude Monet . . . 176
LA LOGE ........ Pierre Auguste Renoir . 180
BATHING ........ George Seurat . . . 183
LANDSCAPE ....... Paul Signac .... 186
THE BATHERS ...... l5mile Rene Menard . .189
PORTRAIT OF EDOUARD MANET . Henri Fantvn-Latour . 193
MATERNITE . ...... Eugene Carriere . . . 194
INTER ARTES ET NATURAM . . Puvis de Chavannes . . 197
From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
DECORATION ....... Maurice Denis . . .
THE APPARITION ..... Gustave Moreau . . . 207
PORTRAIT or MI/LE. REJANE . Besnard ..... 208
TAHITI ........ Paul Gauguin . . . . 210
STUDY OF A WOMAN .... Henri Matisse . . . 213
LANDSCAPE ....... Paul Cezanne . . . 220
For permission to reproduce certain of the pictures the Author extends his thanks to
The Metropolitan Museum, New York.
The Art Institute, Chicago.
Durand-Ruel et fils.
FOREWORD
WHILE this book discusses a number of individual painters, it makes no pretension to encyclopedic completeness. It is primarily concerned with principles. It aims to trace the evolution of French paintiiig as it has been affected by outside influences and has been shaped by the genius of the French race. Nor does it view the subject as an isolated phenomenon of French culture. It aims to correlate the growth of French painting with the changes in the social and political life of the nation and with the manifestations of the esprit gaulois in other departments of intellectual and artistic activity, particularly in that of literature.
For as a leader in intellectual and artistic culture France has maintained her ascendancy since the beginning of the sixteenth century. ? Paris during the late century has been to the modern world the clearinghouse of artistic methods and ideals.
The Story of French Painting is, therefore, in a large measure the recapitulation of the varying motives and methods of painting in the modern world. It has a
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FOREWORD
special interest for us in America, since our painters are handing on to others the principles which they derived from their studentship in Paris. It is true that there is an attempt to substitute for the influence of Paris that of Rome, where an American School of Fine Arts has been established. But this is, I venture to believe, a reactionary move; a grasping of the dead hand of the Italian Renaissance instead of a living companionship with what is alive in modern progress.
The latter involves, it is to be admitted, much that is intellectually and artistically confused and tentative. But the student is himself a part of the progress and must face the issue and assist in clearing its confusion and establishing it on a basis of stability and permanence. He cannot, if he is alive to the modern spirit, afford to play the ostrich.
It goes without saying, however, that the part of the story most difficult to write and to estimate deals with the manifestations of the near present, which as yet we are compelled to view without the advantage cjf a lengthened perspective. How far these manifestations represent elements of vital growth and embody something durable and sound amid the flux of change must, in the nature of the case, be largely a matter of conjecture.
There is no finality in human development ; therefore a story such as this must necessarily conclude with a ragged edge. It can but bring up to date the unfinished
xiv
FOREWORD
recital of French development ; the latest chapter in the life of a nation that is still very much alive and is moving with the times ; that has its roots in a long past of its own and is a-quiver with the modern spirit.
For the French have been the only race since the Italians of the Renaissance and the Greeks of antiquity to whom art in its various forms is a natural and inevitable expression of what is for the time being their attitude toward life.
CHAKLES H. CAFFIN. New York,
September, 1911.
THE STORY OF FRENCH PAINTING
THE STORY OF FRENCH PAINTING
CHAPTER I
THE BACKGROUND
fTTlHE accession of Francis I in 1515 presents a I convenient starting point for the study of JL French painting provided one looks back as well as forward. For it was at this period of coming into touch with the Italian Renaissance that modern France emerged from medievalism. On the other hand, it must not he overlooked that there was a vigorous growth of French painting before the arrival of Italian influence and that the latter, while it stimulated, never submerged the French genius. France indeed, through all the vicissitudes of her development, has preserved her Northern rather than her Mediterranean traits.
For the French nation has been too exclusively identified with the Latin race. It is true that the French language has its roots in the Latin; that the Roman occupation left an indelible mark upon the race and its institutions, particularly in the South, and that after the fall of the Roman Empire the Roman Catholic Church preserved the tradition of Latin civilization. But the
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forms of the language, its idioms, and essential spirit are non-Latin, while very far from being undiluted Latin, is the race itself*
The race, originally Celtic and Ligurian, had been infused with Gallic, and nearly six centuries before the appearance of Caesar, Marseilles and other Greek colonies had been planted along the shores of the Mediterranean. It was with this already mixed strain that during the first four hundred years of the Christian era the Latin blood was mingled. Then followed successive invasions of German tribes, Franks, Allemans, Goths, and Burgundians.
In 485 Clovis the Frank established dominion over a large number of these rival tribes and founded the French monarchy. This so-called Merovingian dynasty persisted for two hundred and sixty-seven years. Then, the last of its enfeebled kings yielding to the increased authority of the Mayors of the Palace, Pepin founded the Carlovingian dynasty, which reached its zenith under his son Charlemagne. The latter's ambitions were imperial and resulted in an empire which extended east and west of the Rhine. It did not, however, long survive his death. Under the rule of his son and successor, Louis the Pious, the process of disintegration began. Rollo the Dane and his Northmen established the Dukedom of Normandy. Meanwhile, the stronger German element began to gravitate across the Rhine to the east, consolidating a German empire and leaving a residuum that in language, customs and government grew to be distinguishably French. Finally, in 987, Hugh Capet, Duke
THE BACKGROUND
of Paris, established a supremacy over the other dukedoms into which France had become divided and founded the Capetian, or third French dynasty. This was some five hundred years later than the original invasion of the Germanic tribes.
Racially, therefore, as the French historian M. R. de Maulde la Claviere observes, "France is a singular country. We are slightly Greek, half Latin or Ligurian, very Gallic or very German, and in the West, the country of an intellectual gulf -stream, we are dreamers Celts."
Hugh Capet, as Duke of the Royal Domain, which extended northward from Paris as far as Amiens and southward to Orleans, was a peer among his equals, who at the time numbered one hundred and fifty dukes, counts and barons. Their fiefs, which had become hereditary, were independent, yet mutually bound together by the complicated network of suzerainty and vassalage of the Feudal System. The most important included, along the shore of the Channel, Brittany, Normandy and Flanders, the last extending to the Rhine; on the East, Burgundy; on the West, Anjou, Poitou and Aquitaine; and in the South, Auvergne, Gascony, Toulouse and Provence. Geographically divided into two sections by the course of the Loire, the Southern part, superior at this time in civilization, was distinguished by their use of the Langue df Oc> while the Langue df Oil obtained in the North. The distinction was derived from corruptions of the Latin words, hoc and hoc-illud, which were respectively employed as
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terms of affirmation. The Langue d* Oc, while it admitted many varieties of dialect, remained closer to its Latin origin in vowel sounds, inflections and vocabulary and generally was softer, more harmonious and cunningly cadenced than the Northern French. The latter, on the other hand, excelled in vigor, variety and freshness (Saintsbury) : qualities that fitted it to grow with the development rank her among the poets of the time, second only to Clement Marot, whom she befriended when he was being pursued by the Church for the freedom of his expressions; while she not only caused the Decameron to be translated into French, but herself composed a heptameron, which comprised fifteen
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novelettes on the model of Boccaccio's. She was, indeed, a very vital influence in stimulating and directing
the beginnings of the French Renaissance.
*
It must be remembered, however, that while contact with Italian culture brought about a renaissance in France, the latter country was no stranger to learning or to arts and letters. The eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the period also distinguished by the extent and perfection of cathedral and church building had produced the epic poems, Chansons de Gestes. The most famous is the Chanson de Roland* based on the exploits of Charlemagne, though dignifying Roland even more than the emperor. Again, toward the end of the twelfth century appeared the French version of the Arthurian legend, originally written in nervous, picturesque prose, but later versified by Chrestien de Troyes, some of whose poems, as Saintsbury says, "are deeply imbued with religious mysticism, passionate gallantry and refined courtesy of manners." So far, however, a spirit distinguishably French is not represented. The Chansons de Gestes are Teutonic, probably in origin and certainly in genius; the Arthurian legends are tinged with the Celtic and Byzantine, while the Proven9al poetry is rather akin to the temperament and character of Spanish and Italian literature. Moreover, all these forms have a quality of artificiality and are the expressions of courtly and knightly society and not of the nation at large. The latter was for the first time represented in the Fabliaux which were produced from the latter
THE BACKGROUND
half of the twelfth to the latter part of the fourteenth centuries. They have been defined as "a recital, for the most part comic, of an adventure real or possible, which occurs in the ordinary conditions of human life." In fact the esprit gaulois makes its first appearance in the mocking raillery of these ludicrous presentations of life and humanity. The chief target for their scoffing is the weakness of the female sex and the frailty of the clergy; though all classes, knights, burghers, peasants, come in for their share of ridicule. Their popularity passed over into Italy and England, where Boccaccio and Chaucer imitated them. From Italy they return to France in a Renaissance guise; while the most famous of these, the Roman du Renart, wherein the characters are animals and birds, received a brilliant transformation in the Contes of La Fontaine, and quite recently in the Chantecler of M. Rostand.
Akin to the mocking tone of the Fabliaux are the satirical lyrics of Adam de la Halle and Ruteboeuf. On the other hand verse was the medium for serious historical themes, as in the Roman de Rou (Rollo) by Wace, and for a moral story in allegorical guise, as in the very famous Roman de la Rose. This poem of twenty thousand lines relates the poet's dream. He walks abroad on a fair May morning until he reaches a garden. Upon the walls are painted the figures of Hatred, Covetousness, Avarice, Envy, Sadness, Old Age and Poverty. Dame Leisure admits him through a barred wicket and introduces him to Courtesy, who invites him to join the company of singers and dancers
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in the train of Delight. Wandering* toward the Fountain of Narcissus he espies a Rosebud and covets it. But thorns and thistles bar his approach and the God of Love pierces him with an arrow. Finally after many rebuffs he is permitted by Venus to kiss the Rosebud; whereupon Shame and Jealousy conspire against him and he is driven from the Garden. So far the poem was written by one William de Loiris, It was continued by Jean de Meung, who introduced a coarser vein of satirical observation, descanting upon the ways of women and the subject of morality, and citing innumerable examples from sacred and secular writings.
The taste for allegory and didactic moralizing engendered by the popularity of this poem, found speedy expression in the Morality plays; for the step from narrative form to one in which the characters speak in propria persona was easy and natural. Far earlier than these, however, had been the Mystery and Miracle plays ; the former dealing with the Life and Passion of the Saviour and with events and personages of the Old Testament, the latter with the lives of the Virgin and Saints. Originally presented in the church or cathedral by the clergy, they outgrew the limitations of the sacred edifice and passed into the hands of the laity; becoming occasions of local importance, presided over by the several guilds of trades. Finally regular societies of actors were formed for their representation, among which the earliest and most famous was the Confraternity of the Passion, licensed in Paris in 1402.
Meanwhile, even before the arrival of the Moralities a secular drama made its appearance. To Adam de
THE BACKGROUND
la Halle is credited the earliest known comedy in the vulgar tongue, and the earliest specimen of comic opera* In Li Jus de la Feuille, the author relates his own troubles with his wife and satirizes other citizens of his native town. Arras, while the plot of Robin and Manon represents a dramatized form of the popular romantic love poems, known as Pastourelles. Also related to the Fabliaux? are the Farces which become so characteristic a feature of the French drama. The most famous is that of Paihelin, which survived the Renaissance, was included in 1706 in the repertoire of the Theatre Fran9ais and was acted in Paris so recently as 1872. For the performance of farces the clerks of the law courts had organized themselves into a company, licensed by the Crown, known as La Bazoche du Palais; while various Fool-Companies, among which Les Enfants Sans Soud were conspicuous, devoted themselves to that peculiar form of farce known as the Sottie. It dealt in political satire and was performed by typical Fool characters, such as Prince des Sots (the leader of the company) , Mere Sotte and the like. The most famous Mere Sotte, both as author and actor was Pierre Gringoire, who also composed a mystery and a morality for the trades guilds to perform and was Master of the Revels on the occasion of official pageants. Flourishing under Louis XII, Ms popularity continued into the reign of Francis I, notwithstanding the latter's dislike of the freedom of the Sottie, and only succumbed to the change of taste brought about by the arrival at the French Court of the Italian Comedians.
THE STORY OF FRENCH PAINTING
The fact which stands out preeminently in the foregoing brief summary of the literary life of France prior to the sixteenth century is its native vigor and racial originality. The national genius, though as yet undeveloped and furnished with a vehicle of language still rude in form and lacking in quantity and subtlety of vocabulary, set its imprint upon everything it handled. In the Epic of Arthur, the satire of Renard and the allegorical romance of the Rose it produced the three most popular works of the Middle Ages. Moreover, "it is now established beyond the possibility of doubt that to France almost every great literary style, as distinguished from great individual works, is at this period due." France, in fact, had demonstrated literary greatness of a high order and undeniably racial character during three centuries before her contact with Italian culture initiated her own Renaissance. The same is true of her painting.
CHAPTER II
PBE-BENAISSANCE AET
THE beginnings of painting in France, as in all the Northern countries, are involved in obscurity. But land is no less real, because it has been uncharted. One detects its vague outlines against the obscurity of the past, while nearer in point of time are conspicuous elevations, arresting and engrossing, notwithstanding that they are nameless. They are not connected with the remoter past as in Italy by a continuous if slender tradition, shading back through early Christianity to Roman days. They emerge slowly out of the background of Northern barbarism. Italy's first, and for a time, sole influence upon the North was that she handed on to it the Christian Faith. From this sprang the germs of civilization which the French shaped and developed according to their own temperament and needs.
Christianity had lingered on among the remains of Gallo-Roman civilization, but had become swamped by the German occupation. The Visigoths and Burgundians were the first to embrace the Faith. The decisive point was reached, however, when Clovis, engaged in consolidating a Frankish monarchy, yielded to the love and adroitness of his Burgundian Queen, Clotilda, and was baptized at Rheims in 496. This involved at
[153
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least the nominal acceptance of the Faith by the whole mass of the Franks, and henceforth France is to be regarded as a Christian country. It is noteworthy that at this period the Church had as yet no magnificence in her places of worship. Such as they were they followed the tradition of the basilica or hall of justice; a rectangular interior, with an apse projecting at the eastern end. So far as the ecclesiastical ritual was sumptuously furnished, it was rather in the way of vestments and sacred vessels and adornments, objects, in fact, of artistic craftsmanship. In the latter, as applied to secular purposes, the German tribes had already possessed some skill, which was developed and led into higher planes of imaginative invention by their growth in Christian zeaL
A further development of taste and skill was reached when the imperial rule of Charlemagne brought the West in contact with the East. He regarded himself and was regarded by Ms contemporaries as the successor of the Eastern emperors and it was to Byzantium and the East that he turned for the glorification of his power. When he established his palace at Aachen (Aixla-Chapelle) he obtained permission from Pope Adrian to remove thither the decorations of Theodoric's palace at Ravenna. Its pillars* mosaic pavements and panels of marble, were incorporated into the new Basilica at Aachen, which itself was modeled upon the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna. Moreover the emperor had entered into friendly relations with and received presents from the Saracen Caliph, Haroun-al-Raschid, whose power was steadily encroaching upon Byzantium.
PRE-RENAISSANCE ART
Thus It was by the older Byzantine art and by the immediate influence of the East and not by the example of Roman Italy that the German artistic imagination was in the first instance fertilized. The result was a gradual Northern growth in which a strain of Byzantine influence is perceptible, while on the other hand it takes independent forms, reflecting the racial distinctions of German proper, Burgundian, Flemish and Frank. All, however, have a common trait of naturalistic vigor, characteristically Northern, and in time share the Northern delight in craftsmanship.
So far as painting is concerned the development proceeds from illumination to frescoed adornments of the walls of churches and thence to the separate panel picture and finally to the painting upon canvas. Throughout, the decorative instinct prevails, as well as the realization of appearances and the expression of sentiment, the human figure being used in combination with beautiful accessories of textiles, architectural glass and metal work, mosaic and furniture, until the picture becomes an epitome of all the art-crafts of the period. Nor, while it is distinguished by elaborateness of detail, is it lacking in vigor and breadth of ensemble.
This fact is due to the conditions under which the early art of the North was produced. These were not individualistic, but socialistic, in the sense that there was cooperation and combination among all the workers in the various united arts. This great efflorescence of energy began after A. D. 1000, when Italy was still asleep. It had been popularly expected that the completion of the thousand years of Christianity would bring about the
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end of the world and usher in the terrors of the Judgment. When men found that the order of the cosmos was still pursuing its routine, the immense relief found its expression in a renewed joy of life and a more ardent piety. Thus commenced the great era of cathedral and church building which extended through the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, during which the Northern genius was liberated and worked in the enthusiasm of its native imagination. And, to repeat, it was a collective effort of all skilled artists, under the impulse of a great Faith and of a great belief in life. An architecture was evolved that in its aspiration toward the infinite and in its adventurous logic of construction, has never been rivaled, much less surpassed; until even Italy was kindled by its example and condescended to learn of the Northern barbarian.
In the vast cathedrals of France and Germany, the imagination not only soared heavenward but spread itself in endless vistas, which lose themselves in the mystery of distance and intricacy, for they enshrine the mysticism as well as the vigor and aspiration of the race. Throughout is a luxuriance of decorative detail, intrinsically the opposite of the formal logic of Roman and Greek art, being indeed akin to the freer logic of nature's growth, as she clothes the structure of the tree with an outburst from within of leafage, fruit and flower. Nor is the ornament so purely esthetic as the Greek and Roman. It is also intellectual and, in a sense, if you will, literary. It embraces forms of ugliness as well as beauty; embodies in animal and human shape, now natural, now grotesque, the racial lust of
PRE-RENAISSANCE AUT
life and the inherited myths of the conflict between physical powers of good and evil, of darkness and light. It is a hieratic script, of human significance and meaning, outcropping from the edifice and, like the latter, an embodiment of abstract energy and exaltation in terms of human experience and feeling.
To-day these cathedrals, by comparison with their origin, are impressive sepulchers of memory. A thousand other outside interests compete with them; they are frequented by alien sightseers, or at best by worshipers . whose faith, because it is no longer shared in common by all the world about them, can reverence these monuments of high physical and spiritual exaltation but is powerless to rival them. So it is only by a difficult straining of the imagination that one can picture the ancient days when the cathedral was inevitably the shrine of a whole community's yearning after the higher life, both in its relation to this world and the next; when the faith of a whole people served as a mighty impulse to the wealth of the powerful and the inventive genius of the artists; when the efforts of the latter diffused taste and appreciation throughout the whole community, until it reverenced and enjoyed, as a possession of its own, this miracle of the divine working in the human.
Picture, if it be possible, this shrine of popular devotion and pride, not completed, for successive ages will add to its embellishment; but already as perfect as the genius of the past has been able to make it; an edifice, rooted in strength and springing upward with agile grace and freedom; blossoming with sculptured ornament; its walls opening to the outside light in innumer-
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able traceried windows that glow with the splendor of colored glass ; its pavements laid with marbles ; its furniture of marvelously carved woodwork and wrought metal; precious metals and jewels flashing in the sacred vessels, and glory of textiles and embroideries making sumptuous the furnishings of the altar and of those who serve before it. As the solemn ritual proceeds in the presence of the kneeling multitude and the fragrance of the incense bears aloft the breath of united faith and adoration, the music of the organ and the voices, another of the great distinguishing features of the Northern cathedral, rolls forth a flood that fills the vast spaces and merges the thousandfold forms of beauty and the collective emotions of the worshipers in a wondrous ensemble of spiritual harmony.
The human appeal of these cathedrals was increased during the middle of the thirteenth century by the profuse use of statues. Sculpture had attained to a greater suppleness and freedom of action. The human forms as well as the draperies appear to have been studied from models. Moreover, canons of form seem to have been established, based on geometric principles and so elaborated as to cover every usual attitude and gesture of the human body. By following these formulas, laid down by the master designers, the ordinary workers were able to secure a high degree of grace and poise of figure. The draperies are particularly masterly, vying with those of the Greeks. Indeed a curious strain of affinity with the Greek feeling is apparent in this early sculpture and will appear in later forms of both sculpture and painting. Can it be a product of the
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tn
o w
*z! H
PRE-RENAISSANCE ART
transfusion of the Byzantine influence with the fresheyed interest in nature of the Germanic race, influenced in turn by the tender refinement of the Celtic strain and the vivacity of the Gallo-Roman? Whatever the source of this trait, it is a phenomenon of great account in French art, a phase of the esprit gaulois, which was anterior to the influence of the Italian Renaissance, and was to modify and survive it.
***
The practice of painting, in France, would appear to have developed under similar conditions of a few master-artists establishing canons of form and composition to be followed by their numerous assistants; an atelier system such as characterized also the flourishing periods of Japanese art. The earliest French painters were the miniaturists and illuminators, examples of whose work can be studied in the Bibliotheque Nationale. They were produced for the service of the ritual and as treasures for royalty and the nobility. The panel picture, on the other hand, was intended for popular edification, even as the early mystery and miracle plays to which they are closely akin both in motive and style. Their appeal is couched in the vernacular, reaching the intelligence and emotion of the people by directly natural means. As to the quality of their naturalism M. Viollet-le-Duc contends that "in the drawing of the form, in correct observation of movemeiits, in composition and in expression the French artists both in sculpture and painting cast off* the trammels of conventionalism long before the Italians did. The paintings and vignettes which the thirteenth een-
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tury has bequeathed to us are a proof of the fact ; and fifty years previous to Giotto we had among us painters who had already realized the progress ascribed to the pupil of Cimabue. From the twelfth century to the fifteenth drawing becomes modified. Fettered at first by the traditions of Byzantine art, it begins by shaking off those rules of a particular school. Without abandoning style it looks for principles derived from the observation of nature. The study of gesture soon attains to a rare delicacy and then comes a search after expression. As early as the second half of the thirteenth century we recognize striking efforts of composition; the dramatic idea finds place and some of the scenes exhibit powerful energy. 55
It is to be noted that Viollet-le-Duc, whose writings on architecture, archeology and criticism appeared between the years 1850 and 1875, was a confessed opponent of the theory that French art owed its greatest obligation to the Italian and Roman tradition. His followers went so far as to sweep the latter entirely out of consideration. He, however, was saner in his views; recognizing the debt to the Renaissance and thence to the Romans, but maintaining that what was intrinsically valuable in the art of his country, in every period, was traceable to enduring traits inherent in the racial amalgam of the French people, and that, even when they borrowed, the French artists fixed on the result the impress of the French character.
. . . ...
The Louvre in two of its galleries, and in examples, scattered elsewhere, presents fairly sufficient evidence
PRE-RENAISSANCE ART
of the painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and also of the period during which the Italian artists were working at Fountainebleau.
* *#*
Among the paintings of the fourteenth century is (995) The Last Communion and Martyrdom of St. Denis; the patron Saint of Old Paris, the first preacher of Christianity in that city, who suffered for the Faith in the year 270. Legend relates that after his decapitation on the Hill of Montmartre, he walked, bearing his head in his hand, to a spot two miles away where a pious lady buried him. Later the body was removed to the Abbey of St. Denis, which became the last resting-place of the kings of France. The composition involves a series of incidents, represented against a gold background. In the center Christ hangs upon the Cross, while the Holy Father stretches out his hands above Him. At the left, Christ, attended by a kneeling angel, administers the Wafer and Chalice to the saint, whose head shows through the bars of a window at the foot of a red brick tower. On the right, the saint, in a blue cope embroidered with gold, kneels at the block, while the executioner raises his ax. The body and head of another ecclesiastic lie at the foot of the cross, while a third awaits his turn of death. In the middle distance stands a group of spectators. The neck of the Saint is already half severed and blood flows profusely from the breast and the feet of Christ. While these details are sufficiently horrible, the limbs of the executioner are lithe and graceful, and the carnations of the flesh-tints throughout very tenderly painted. In fact, the picture
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shows the evidence of being an enlarged miniature. It is attributed to Jean Malouel and Henri Bellechose.
Also projected on a gold background are (996) Christ Dead and (997) The Entombment. The former shows the nude body of the Christ, crowned with thorns and bleeding, upheld in the arms of The Father.. He is robed in blue, as also is the Virgin while St. John, who stands beside her, wears a red mantle. At the left are five child-angels. The panel is circular and again suggests an enlarged miniature. The scale is unfortunate in view of the shape, for the composition appears unduly contracted, the result being a lack of bigness in the general effect. On the other hand, in The Entombment there is a marked increase of power in the treatment of the spaces and planes. The foreground is occupied by three old men, bearing the sacred body, while in the middle distance appears the Virgin, accompanied by Mary Magdalene and Mary Salome, behind whom stands St. John. At the left the scene is being witnessed by an abbot.
That the use of the plain gold background a survival of the miniature, derived from Byzantine tradition continued into the early part of the fifteenth century may be learned from a rendering of the popular theme of St. George. It is a multiple picture, containing various incidents. Here, the saint is in the act of slaying the dragon ; there, is being dragged to execution at the heels of a mule; elsewhere lies the dead body, its severed head being crowned with glory, while soldiers, whose lances form a hedge as in Velasquez' Surrender of Breda, and the executioners prostrate themselves or
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lift up their hands in awe at the apparition of the saint, kneeling in the sky.
In a fourth example, (941) The Scourging of Christ, the flat gold background yields to an architectural setting. It represents Gothic arcades in the pointed style, under which St. Peter and St. Paul stand, at the left and right of a central canopy. Here, bound to a pillar, is the Christ, His body splashed with blood from the wounds inflicted by birches and thongs, wielded by two executioners. The action and expression are more vigorous than in the preceding examples and the modeling of the figures more angular. The painting has more affinity with the sculpture of the period than with miniatures.
There is an interesting analogy between the multiple pictures and the stage settings and performances of the mystery and miracle plays of the period. It was customary to surround the back of the stage with enclosures variously styled estate, mansions, lieux. These represented the different localities, or as we should say, scenes, involved in the action of the drama, and were occupied by the groups of actors connected with each incident. There exists a title page of a lost "Mystery of St. Apollonia." The artist, no other than the famous Jehan Foucquet, has represented on the stage the torturing of the saint under circumstances of gross violence, corresponding to the horror of detail that characterizes the pictures of the period. Meanwhile, raised in the rear is a series of canopied stalls ; the right hand one occupied by the Prince of Evil, standing above the open dragon's mouth of Hell; the left representing Heaven, where
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the Virgin sits surrounded by Saints. In another box is a vacant chair from which the Emperor Decius has descended to superintend the torture. He will probably make his exit through the dragon's mouth, while the holy maid will be escorted up the flight of steps that leads to the mansion of the Virgin. Thus the locality became for the time being the seat of the incident. The practice grew until the mansions were differentiated by architectural fixtures and other details, suggestive of the particular locality. So by degrees came into use that peculiar feature of the early French Renaissance stage, known as le Decor Simultane, which presented a grouped arrangement of all the places to which the author's fancy transported the action of the play. Thus it would appear that in this particular the drama and painting
influenced each other reciprocally.
*** *
The pictures, so far considered, while they represent the incident dramatically, with fairly natural action and often striking expression, are in composition confused and agitated. They lack the dignity and force of static quality. It is in this respect that the work of the end of the fifteenth century shows a great advance. Compare, for example, (998) The Deposition (p. 20). How well ordered is the composition! Its geometric basis is a little obvious, but the rigidity and formality are assuaged by the suppleness and naturalness of the forms. So evident a love of truth has inspired the artist's observation. Nor less interesting in its naive sincerity, is the way in which the truth is brought home to the actual life of the Parisians of the day. The Cross
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Is set up outside their own city. In the distance extends a view, lovely in its detail* of the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Pres (then truly of the meadows) with the Seine beyond, washing the base of the Louvre of Philippe Augustus, over the towers of which shows the summit of Montmartre. These open spaces and that of the sky happily balance the foreground group, the ordering of which is accompanied by studied moderation in the gestures and expression of the figures. There are no ghastly evidences of blood ; the tibia and skull simply remind us that the place Is Golgotha; all the pathos of the scene Is conveyed by the pitifully helpless body of Christ and the silent anguish that characterizes each Individual of the group. We may be conscious of a certain formal affectation In the weeping woman who kneels between the Virgin and the abbot Guillaume, prior of St. Germain; but the respective expressions of these two are admirable; so, too, are the agony and adoration of the young St. John, the grave solicitude of the venerable Joseph of Arimathea; the Magdalen's humble desolation, and the woeful amazement of the seated woman at the left. She Is robed in slaty blue, the Virgin in blue of a brighter tone, the woman beside the latter being in black with a green veil, while the abbot's cope is of rose-colored brocade. St. John's cloak is old rose over a crimson tunic. Joseph's Oriental costume consists of a brown turban and richly embroidered garberdine above a green robe, while the Magdalen wears a white head-cloth and robe, the latter partly covered with a pale rose mantle. The colors, exceedingly beautiful, are illumined with a pure, out-of-doors light.
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The gem, however, of these primitive religious pictures in the Louvre is 1001 Us a Pietd of the School of Avignon (p. 29). It will be recalled that through the Intrigues of Philip the Fair this Provencal city became in 1309 the domicile of the Popes ; this "second Babylonish Captivity," as it has been called, lasting until 1376. The palace remained in papal possession until 1791, when it was annexed by France. Until quite recent years the castellated building was used as a barracks and coats of whitewash covered the mural decorations which have been lately revealed. Some of them, which are religious in subject, are attributed to Italian followers of Giotto, notably to Simone Memmi. But the latest restoration reveals another interior, decorated with secular subjects of hunting and fishing. In these a few figures are sprinkled against a background of grassy lawns and dense foliage, which is executed with delicate precision, forming an exquisite arabesque of leafage. All these paintings must have cultivated the taste and stimulated the rivalry of local artists ; but are not in themselves sufficient to explain the grand simplicity and severe exaltation which dignify this Pietd. Its inspiration is rather to be found in the higher intellectuality which characterized the cities of Provence. To this day they abound in magnificent monuments of the Roman occupation, which in the fifteenth century were no doubt in better preservation. It is not difficult to realize the effect which the vast sweep of amphitheaters and the silhouette of gateways, walls and aqueducts must have wrought on the imagination of
O
O
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the local artists; teaching them to see things more architectonically, simply and grandly.
Comparing this picture with The Deposition, one notes the greater abstraction of the former. The background is gold, surrounded by a text and border, fashioned in diaper; nor is there so natural an individualization of the figures, if we except the wonderfully direct characterization of the priest. But for what the Pietd loses in naturalness and detailed observation it more than atones in the intensity of its abstract appeal ; moreover, in the majestic simplicity of its coordination, so calculated as to give the exactly appropriate degree of emphasis to each of the parts. The eye is spellbound by the gesture of the Saviour's body; at first, it may be, painfully. But soon the grace and dignity of its arc of direction, so tenderly white against the black, gold-bordered mantle of the Virgin, wins one's sympathy. The obtrusion of the form yields to a pathetic insistence; its curve has the supple limpness of a wilting flower-stem, until it reaches the strain of the flesh over the ribs and the emphatic angle of the arm, which concentrate attention on the face with its eyes closed and lips apart in an expression of noble suffering. Toward it is inclined the head of the Virgin, thereby concentrating the prominence given to her raised and isolated position. The face is not that of a Mother; it is the Mother's, in its pure and noble abstraction. Scarcely less noble in its abstract, reverential tenderness is the expression of St. John, as he removes the crown of thorns from the illumined head. His robe is also
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black., "bordered with gold and partly concealed by a brown cloak, while the Magdalen, as she holds a yellow handkerchief to her eyes, Is draped in old dull crimson. And not less admirable than the monumental reserve of the color-scheme are the amplitude of the masses of the drapery and the large simplicity with which the planes are treated. There is nothing finer in Zurbaran's rendering of the white habits of the Carthusian monks than the effective handling here of the priest's surplice.
This Pietd fitly summarizes in pictorial form the noblest aspect of the medieval civilization that was even then in process of being superseded by the modern. So far as technique is concerned its unknown painter had attained in his art the mastery of architectonics that the sculptors and more particularly the architects had achieved in theirs. Emotional fervor is here tempered to a logical restraint and intellectualized. Intensity of conviction and of personal sensation are elevated to impersonal, abstract expression ; nature has been noted and rendered, but sublimated with a universal suggestion. Consequently, this primitive work, purged from the formalism of the Byzantine and the affectation and undue naturalism of the Gothic and not yet tainted with the sophistical superior knowledge and mundane quality of the Italian invasion, appeals to the higher consciousness and purest imagination of the modern mind. For the latter, wearied with much learning and with a prolonged pursuit of naturalistic verisimilitudes, is seeking to recover more abstract principles and an attitude of approach to nature which views it in relation to the universal.
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Somewhat corresponding to the development of religious painting before the French Renaissance is that of portraiture. It is distinguished by a resolute regard for nature. The painters represented the kings and nobles in whose employ they served without any attempt to idealize,, registering conscientiously the impressions of the eye and paying careful attention to details of the costume. Accordingly, even the most indifferent ones have a documentary value, and one can study to-day with an assurance of their veritableness the countenances, often forbidding, of some of the chief characters in the tangled drama of the times. These portraits, in fact, are more illuminative of history than much readIng of books.
The earliest portraits in the Louvre belong to the fifteenth century. Note, for example, a pair representing, respectively, Pierre II, Duke of Bourbon, Sire of Beaujeu and his wife Anne, daughter of Louis XL In each case the figure is kneeling, three quarters profile; the husband in front of St. Peter who carries the keys ; the lady facing St. John, who bears his emblem, a pyx from which a dragon springs. The figures are disposed in a corridor, through an opening of which appears a landscape. These portraits are assigned to the Burgundian school and exhibit a Flemish feeling in the treatment of the charming landscapes and the rich fabrics of the costumes, though inferior in the flesh parts, which are flabby and rather expressionless. Also belonging to the Burgundian school is a portrait of Philippe Le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece which he had instituted in
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1430. Formerly attributed to one of the Bellini, but now recognized as the work of some French painter of the early fifteenth century is a group-portrait of Jean Juvenal des Ursins, president of the Parliament, and his wife and eleven children. In this picture, too, the figures are kneeling, the father in advance and the wife and children strung out behind him, while underneath each is an inscription giving the name and title. The background represents a chapel divided into three parts, across the front of which is stretched to half the height, a cloth of gold dossal drapery. Except in a documentary sense, as a record of costumes and inscriptions and as an example of workshop methods, following the canons but uninspired by the artist, this picture has no interest. One cannot even accept it as evidence of portraiture, for the same physiognomy is repeated in all the heads.
On the contrary it is a human document that confronts us in the diptych portrait of Rene d'Anjou and his second wife, Jeanne de Laval. Rene, Duke of Anjou, Count of Provence and titular King ("le bon roi Rene") of Naples, until dispossessed by Alfonso of Aragon in 1442, was himself a painter as well as a patron of art and literature. The heads and busts are shown in profile; the king's having an expression of noble resignation, while his Queen's is a trifle sentimental in its sad sweetness. The execution is studiously elaborated and delicately truthful in detail. These portraits are attributed to Nicolas Froment of Avignon, who was also a painter of still-life and landscape.
The finest example, however, of the portraiture of the
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period is shown in the almost profile bust, Portrait of a Woman., painted by an unknown artist at the end of the fifteenth century. The subject is a lady of circumstance. She wears a red damask robe, fur-trimmed and cut square at the neck, revealing a blue silk guimpe. Over the latter lies a dainty, jeweled necklace, while suspended by a chain over her bosom is a handsome jewel, in the center of which appears the figure of St. John the Baptist. The hair is drawn back off the high forehead and confined in a quilled cap, over which shows the edge of a red skull cap, beneath a black hood, edged with pearls. The head is placed against a background sown with pansies and forget-me-nots, which add meaning to the inscription upon a scroll held between the lady's thumb and forefinger: ff De quoilque non vede yo my recorded "I remember those whom I do not see." Any suspicion of sentimentalism is banished by the expression of the face, which has a large strong nose and firmly set mouth. It is a face full of character, calm and purposeful, yet tender and constant; that of a chatelaine who could ably administer her husband's affairs in his absence.
. . ****
The dominant figure of this transition period is Jean Foucquet who was born in Tours about 1415 and died about 1485. He was painter in ordinary both to Charles VII and Louis XI. Some part of his life was spent in Italy, where he seems to have been chiefly affected by the work of the primitive Tuscans. Yet not in imitation but in emulation; their example stimulating Ms own habit of conscientious observation and directly simple
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rendering. He made his mark alike in panel pictures and in miniatures. Forty of the latter, illustrating a Book of Hours for Etienne Chevalier are preserved at Chantilly. He is represented in the Louvre by two portraits respectively of Charles VII and of the Juvenal des Ursins whose portrait with his family hy an unknown painter has been already noticed. Here, however, Juvenal is shown as a man of forceful character, such as is to be expected of one who was Chancellor of France under both Charles and Louis. Half life-size, he is represented standing in profile, in an oratory, clasping his hands before a priedieu, where a book lies open upon a cushion. His costume consists of a dull red robe,, trimmed with fur, fashioned with large, stuffed sleeves, and confined at the waist with a belt from which a purse depends. Green panels are fitted into the gilt pilasters of the background, the capitals of which comprise the coat of arms of the TJrsin family, supported by two muzzled bears rampant. The portrait, as Gustave Geffroy remarks, affirms the subject's character, as at once a bourgeois, a jurist and a man of the sword.
Compared with the ampleness of the Chancellor, the Portrait of Charles VII (p. 34) presents a sad-featured, meager face that ill accords with the inscription at the top and bottom of the panel: ff Le tres glorieuoo roy de France, Charles Septiesme de ce nom" Impressed, however, on the face are the traces both of his character and of his experience. When his father, Charles VI, died he was a young man of nineteen, confronted with a divided country over the greater part of which the English held control. He is described
PORTRAIT OF CHARLES YII JEAN FOUCQUET
LOUVRE
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as being of a delicate constitution, a good scholar, timid, reserved, but addicted to indulgence. It was not until some years later, after the triumphs of Joan of Arc, that he was crowned at Rheims. When his authority was finally established he set himself to reorganize the finances of the country, at the same time reducing the power of the feudal aristocracy by employing as ministers and captains of war members of the bourgeois and lesser nobility. His end was miserable, Louis, his son, having openly rebelled, Charles, in terror of being poisoned, refused food and ended his exhausted life by starvation. The good and the bad, the promise and the failure of the royal personality are marvelously suggested in this great human document, surely one of the most arresting portraits in the world.
Another superb example is that of Etienne Chevalier with St. Stephen in the Berlin Museum. The Secretary of Charles VII stands with hands folded as in prayer beside the Saint, who holds a book with a stone upon it in his left hand, while his right rests on the shoulder of his namesake. The youthful face of the protomartyr, calm and strong, is one of singular purity, while in that of the older man is embedded the suggestion of resolute directness, probity and kindly devotion. The figures are shown about half length in a corridor of Renaissance architecture, and again the artist betrays his favorite palette of red, green and gold-embroidered blue.
It appears in the strangely alluring Virgin and Child of the Antwerp Museum. Red and blue nude childangels form a clustering background to the tasseled,
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jeweled throne on which Madonna sits. An ermine cloak depends from her shoulders and is held across her lap with one hand for the nude Babe to sit on. The tight fitting bodice of her green robe is unlaced, releasing the left breast. It is a sphere of ivory, wax-white like the neck and the globe of the head. For the eyelids are lowered and the hair brushed off the high forehead, so that the head beneath the large jeweled crown seems as if bald. Immobile as marble and as cold are the form and its expression; yet instinct with latent coquetry, that exhales its allurement as naturally and as purely as a flower its fragrance. And with a similar detachment from passion one yields to the seduction. For the suggestion and the charm are those of femininity in the abstract. Agnes Sorel, the king's mistress, is known to have been the model; but the representation is cleansed of personality.
Foucquet's masterpiece, indeed, offers a strangely interesting commentary on the mental attitude of its time toward religion and the sex-relations. Moreover, it is the first indication in painting of the idea of "the eternal feminine," as interpreted by the finest qualities of the esprit gaulois. For the latter's choicest expression of the eternal feminine involves nothing 1 of coarseness or seductiveness but represents, as embodied in the idea of woman, the essence of the allure and beauty of life. It has in it not a little of Attic naivete and simplicity. It is a clue and the chief one, to some of the most characteristic phases of French art.
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CHAPTER III
THE EAELY SENAISSANCE
IT was the good fortune of France to receive the wine of Italian culture when she was ready to assimilate its heady strength; when, in fact, she was already a strong and growing nation with a vigorous culture all her own. Other nations were less lucky, at least as far as painting is concerned. England at this period was growing lustily, but her background of culture was only meager. Consequently, when the Renaissance reached her, mainly filtered through the French, it found a Shakespeare to fertilize but no painting. Nearly two hundred years had to elapse before there were English painters ready for the Italian influence, by which time the adoption of the latter was largely an affectation* The same is true of Germany, after a still longer period of waiting. The great tradition of Diixer and Holbein was checked by the Reformation; and, when the Renaissance reached her, it found no native culture to ferment. In lieu of it was a tradition of independence and profound religious feeling and these it fertilized. Germany enriched the world with ideas of civil and religious liberty, but at the expense of art. Only little Holland effected for a time the union of the three. As for Italy sooner or later she fructified the world; but her own harvest of culture
[373
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was raised upon a soil, already Impoverished and continually growing poorer. The dawn of the fifteenth century broke upon the beginning of her highest splendor ; the close of the century saw it set. TwiEght passed into a night, that until the nineteenth century remained unbroken. Meanwhile France, even before the collapse of Italian culture, began to be the arbiter and dispenser of art to the modern world and has maintained the role to the present day.
To what must the phenomenon be attributed? Firstly, to the fact already mentioned that at the time-of her contact with Italian culture France already had a glorious past in architecture and sculpture and was growing in nationality, with a living literature and art of painting that were racy of the French character. To herlEtie Renaissance did not come as a new birth, but as a reinforcement and refinement of a vigorous life. Secondly, she demonstrated again and not for the last time, her racial capacity of assimilation. Even as she had borrowed from Celtic or German lore and fashioned what she took into literature distingtdshably French, and had cast in a like national mold her borrowings from Flemish and German painting, and earlier from Byzantine art; so now, while she reveled in the Renaissance banquet, she digested what she took and made it a part of herself. But a third reason is to be found in that element of poise in the esprit gaulois; an attitude of philosophic gaiety, that while it can be serious, escapes the barrenness of too exclusive seriousness. Accordingly, in France at this period there was no unbridgable gap between religion and art. Catholics
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and Reformers alike could be humanists, devoted to liberal culture, which did not, as in Italy, tend to paganism. Calvin himself was a prime absorber of humanism, deriving from it a lucidity, precision, grace and pregnancy of style that reacted most invigoratingly on the thought and literature of the period. Poise was displayed in the critical and practical spirit that characterized the acceptance of the new culture. Generally speaking, it was one of unqualified joy in the discovery, of restraint and discretion in the use of it. This affected to some extent the choice of subject matter; but still more the method of handling it. On the one hand, the inflated style of the "Rhetoriqueurs," which had crept into French writing toward the end of the fifteenth century, was abandoned for simple and direct expression; on the other, the vocabulary and structure of the language became enriched, more flexible and more subtle by contact with Italian and Classic literature. This was ultimately the effect that the Italian Renaissance exerted upon French painting.
The first printing press was set up in Paris in 1470, nine years before the birth of the great printer and editor, Jean Grolier. By the end of the century, presses had been established in eighteen other cities, scattered over the country from Caen in the North to the Southern town of Perpignan. The appetite for the new learning and the preparedness for it were, in fact, nation-wide. Hence it resulted that, when France obtained a hold on humanistic culture, she leapt at once into the position of being the European leader of scholarship. The University of Paris became the center of the movement,
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chiefly through the transcending ability of Gillaume Bude, better known by his Latinized name, Budaeus* As librarian to Francis I, he formed a notable collection of Greek manuscripts and was the first to interpret the Greek texts on scientific and scholarly lines. He wrote as ably in the French tongue as in Greek and Latin; and was hailed by Calvin as "the foremost glory and support of literature, by whose service our France claims for herself to-day the palm of erudition." Closely associated with his influence was that of the Hollander, Erasmus, who developed in Paris his scholarly genius, and then through his sojourn in Germany and England became one of the chief pioneers in spreading enlightenment throughout Europe. Other great names among the French scholars of the period were the Scaligers and the Etiennes.
It was characteristic of French scholarship that much of it was expended in spreading the knowledge of the Classics through translations in the vulgar tongue; the latter becoming matured, extended and subtilized in the process. The greatest of the contributors to this diffusion of knowledge was Jacques Amyot (1518-1593), whose chief work was the translation of "Plutarch's Lives." This book, as much through the quality of Amyot's style as through its own intrinsic merits, immediately acquired a popularity in France, which spread to other countries; the French form, rather than the original Greek, becoming the basis of the various translations into other tongues. How it inspired Shakespeare is a matter of common knowledge, while its influence some two hundred years later on the growth of French
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thought which led to the Revolution is equally indisputable. The secret of its style is explained in the author's own advice "Take heed and find the words that are fittest to signify the thing of which we mean to speak. Choose words which seem to be the pleasantest, which sound best in our ears, which are customary in the mouths of good talkers, which are honest natives and no foreigners/' It is not difficult to see how the same principle can be applied to the technique of painting; as indeed it was by the original, as contrasted with the imitative, artists of the French Renaissance.
It is interesting to recall that during this century of literary activity, the French began to imitate the colonial activities of the Spaniards. Jacque Cartier, a native of St. Malo, born within a year of Columbus's discovery of America made three voyages to Canada, respectively in 1534, 1535 and 1541 ; while simultaneously with the
last year De Soto was exploring Louisiana.
It was scarcely to be expected that the development of painting at this period could keep pace with that of literature; for the former had no such agent in its service as the printing-press. Scholars and writers were in the employ or under the patronage of royalty or nobility; but through the press they spoke to the public at large and thereby were encouraged to speak as Frenchmen. With the painter or sculptor it was necessarily different. He worked to please his patron, and the latter's taste for the most part followed the Italianate fashion, set by Francis I, whose disasters
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In Italy did not impair his admiration for Italian art. He invited to Fontainebleau Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, II Rosso, Primaticcio and Niccolo delF Abbate and the sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini. Of these, Primaticcio exerted the greatest influence, since his sojourn in France extended over thirty years. His most noteworthy followers were Toussaint du Breuil (1561-1602) and Jean Cousin (1500 -1589), the latter a man of versatile gifts, practising also as an architect, sculptor, miniaturist, decorator and glassworker. He is represented in the Louvre by The Last Judgment. The scene is medieval in its conception and composed in close resemblance to the elaborate mystery plays of the sixteenth century; to that, for example, given at Valenciennes in 1547, of which a drawing still exists and is reproduced in Karl Mantzius' "History of Theatrical Art." The foreground in Cousin's picture is occupied by newly risen souls, some of whom are entering a cave, while others are being dragged off to Hell, which, as usual, is situated at the right of the scene. The clouds open overhead, revealing Christ, standing upon the globe of the earth, attended by the Virgin and St. John and a retinue of saints. Meanwhile the composition shows a marked advance in freedom and boldness of design, in knowledge of anatomy and foreshortening and in geometrical perspective. The picture, in its union of old feeling and new technical accomplishment stands in the same category as The Last Judgment of Van Orley in the Antwerp Museum.
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Meanwhile, notwithstanding the Italian invasion, a group of portrait painters, consisting of the Clouets and their pupils, preserved the characteristics, if not of strictly French, at least of Northern painting. For Jean Clouet, the father, otherwise called Jehannet, Jhannet or Janet, was a native of Flanders; while Francois Clouet, the most distinguished of the three sons, exhibits a style which suggests that he may have been a pupil of Holbein. The date of the father's birth is unknown, but about the year 1475 he moved to France and settled in Tours, where Francois was born in 1500.
To Jean Clouet the Louvre catalogue attributes the fine Portrait of F rands I (frontispiece). It represents the king about thirty years old, in a pearly satin doublet, striped with black velvet and embroidered in gold, resting his left hand on a balustrade covered with green velvet, while an arras damasked in two tones of dull claret red appears in the background. The very dark brown hair is dressed in a flat roll over the ears while the chin and cheeks are covered with the soft curly growth of a beard that has never known a razor. The expression of the face is sly and sensuous. If one compares the portrait with a later one (1007) of the same king, executed probably by a pupil of the Clouets, the change is significant. The face is puffier and coarsened, the complexion reddened, the expression that of the confirmed sensualist. The two pictures, as M. Geoffroy well says, exhibit respectively the youth and the maturity of the satyr. Clouet's portrait may also be compared, this time for technical interest, with Titian's Louvre portrait (1588), Frauds I. The
483
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latter, of which many repetitions exist, was probably not made from life; but possibly from a medal. Pictorially, of course, the Titian is finer than the Clouet; exhibiting a masterful treatment of planes and surfaces, as well as a controlling knowledge and skill that has swept all into an ensemble as apparently spontaneous as it is magnificent. Alongside of it the Clouet is, no doubt, caligraphic rather than painterlike; in which respect it is interesting to compare it with the beautiful portrait by Ingres of Madame Riviere (p. 109) . Yet in its very innocence of any brushwork bravura, in its close and prolonged analysis of values and the unremitting integrity with which the results of observation have been rendered, there is not only an assurance of fidelity of portraiture but a stirring suggestion of virility. If one's temperament inclines to prefer the less learned portrait, I don't think he need feel ashamed*
The same penetrating truth of characterization distinguishes the portraits by Fran$ois (also called Jehannet) Clouet; while the precision is associated with increased fluency of brushwork and a more subtle harmonizing of the flesh-tints, costumes "and background. The Louvre possesses his full length Portrait of Charles IX, of which a life-sized repetition exists in the Museum of Vienna; the latter bearing the inscription "Charles VIIII, tres chretien roy de France, en Tage de XX ans, peint au vif per Jannet, 1563." It is supposed that both of these pictures were sent to Vienna in 1570, at the time of the young king's marriage to Elizabeth, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian. This
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portrait reveals a weak and vicious face, with the wary, cruel expression of a ferret. It "bespeaks the character that two years later (1572) could countenance the treachery and political folly of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Admiral Coligny, the most illustrious victim of the devilish plot and his enemy, the Duke of Guise, and many other men and women who enacted willing and unwilling roles in the drama of the period are among the subjects represented in the Louvre's collection of historic portraits.
They suggest a momentary glance at the background of events following the death of Francis I in 1547. He was succeeded by his son, Henry II, who had married Catherine de' Medici. This able and unscrupulous woman, trained in the principles of Machiavelli, had ample scope for her prowess during the minority of her two sons, Francis II and Charles IX. The former succeeded his father in 1559 at the age of sixteen and died the following year, the Crown passing to his brother, at the time, a boy of ten. The latter reigned for fourteen years and was succeeded by Catherine de* Medici's third son, Henry III. The period of these three ignoble reigns is occupied with the struggle between Catholic and Huguenot parties. For the day of philosophic tolerance was past and war was carried on a Youtrance between the rival religionists. The reason for the change of feeling is to be found in the attitude of Francis I toward the aristocracy. Whereas it had been the policy of the preceding kings to subordinate the power of the latter to the authority of the Crown, Francis had courted popularity by lifting the
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aristocracy up to social equality with himself. It was Ms delight to pose as "the first gentleman of France." The ultimate effect of this was to precipitate that complete cleavage between a privileged nobility and the rest of the nation, which after working untold suffering and wrong was to culminate in the Revolution. Meanwhile, during the minority of the young kings, the more powerful nobles asserted their rights to a share in the powers of the Regency. In the rivalry which ensued Catherine allied herself with the Catholic family of Guise and thus the struggle became one of politics as well as religion. The power of the Guise continued until their infamy in instigating the horrors of St. Bartholomew's Eve had been avenged by the murder of themselves. This was contrived by Henry III, who himself paid the penalty the following year (1589) , when he was assassinated by Jacques Clement, a Dominican friar.
The reign of this last of the rulers of the House of Valois was the most contemptible in the annals of the French monarchy. The profligacy of the Court, which under Francis I preserved some grace of gallantry, had been fomented by Catherine de' Medici for political purposes, until respect for decent women disappeared and even the charm of the licentious palled. Henry chose his favorites among young men and even had the audacity to bestow places of authority upon these mignons. Protestants and Catholics alike were disgusted. The leader of the former was now the son of Antoine de Bourbon, Henry of Navarre, who had been drawn by the Queen dowager into a marriage with
DIANA
SCHOOL OF FONTAINEBLEAXJ
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Margaret, the dissolute sister of the king. To oppose his pretensions to the succession the Catholics founded The League to support the rival claims of the young Duke of Guise. On his deathbed the king named his brother-in-law as successor but warned him that none but a Catholic could reign over France. The forecast was realized. Although Henry defeated The League at the battle of Ivry, he found himself barred from Paris. Accordingly, after an indecisive struggle of several years he accepted Catholicism and was crowned as Henvy IV, first King of the House of Bourbon. The discontent of the Protestants was allayed by his issue of the Edict of Nantes. Having established his power, he obtained a divorce from Margaret and married Marie de ? Medici, whom Rubens later commemorated in the series of historic decorations that are now in the Louvre. Henry met his death at the hands of the assassin, Ravaillac.
******
By those who wish to study the painting of the socalled School of Fontainebleau a visit must be made to the Chateau, which owes its most characteristic splendor to the successive efforts of Francis I, Henry II and Henry IV. "The King's Staircase" which leads to the apartments of Francis 3 mistress, the Duchesse d* IStampes, is adorned with frescoes, variously ascribed to Primaticcio, II Rosso and Niccolo Dell* Abbate. In them Francis is depicted as Alexander the Great In a series of scenes from the life of the Macedonian conqueror. Francis also erected the gallery which bears Ms name and the magnificent Salle des Fetes. He
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lived to complete the decoration of the former with mythological subjects executed by II Rosso; but the embellishment of the latter was undertaken by Henry II, in honor of Diane de Poitiers. His initial, linked with that of his mistress, appears in all directions amid bows, arrows, and crescents, the emblems of Diana, while the panels are filled with eight large compositions and fifty smaller ones, embodying scenes from mythology.
So thoroughly identified is Fontainebleau with the memory of Diane de Poitiers that it is something of a shock to the sense of romance to recall that the lady was twenty years the senior of her royal lover; old enough, in fact, to be his mother. But Henry was quite a passionless person and only followed his father's example in adopting a mistress because the custom seemed to be de rigueur. And Diane herself played rather the part of a prudent directoress, whose influence on the king was edifying. Regarded, indeed, from the point of view of her contemporaries, the position of Diane was magnificent and divine, for her relations with the king represented to them the perfect type of Platonism, at once practical and sacred. Du Bellay voiced this in a poem in her honor "God had made you appear among us like a miracle, that you may possess the soul of this great King, whose faith is inviolable, and that his affection through your perfection may burn with a holy flame/' And he adds, "You have won the heart of all France."
This Platonistic tendency, borrowed from the Italians, strange as it may seem from the modern point of view,
Z&% THE EARLY RENAISSANCE
was in a measure the expedient of women of refinement to hold at bay the coarseness of the men. Nevertheless, it was a symptom of decadence and held in it the disease of profligacy which followed. Meanwhile its vogue explains the spirit which prompted and saw nothing incongruous in the sculptor Goujon's representation of the king's mistress as a nude Diana, reclining upon a stag, surrounded by her hounds; a group which originally adorned the front of Diane's palatial Chateau d'Anet. It is now in the Louvre, where its beauty can be enjoyed for its intrinsic charm. Goujon was the typical sculptor of the French Renaissance; the one who most happily enriched his Northern temperament with the grace and fluency of the Italian, Yet how completely he escaped a servitude to the Italian influence may be seen by comparing this group with the Nymph of Fontainebleau by Benvenuto Cellini, which to some extent must have been Goujon's model. The Cellini, in the exuberance of the bosom and turbulent pose of the abdomen, betrays the decadence of style that the misunderstood example of Michelangelo was promoting, while the long slender legs are more than a little meaningless and the expression of the face is trivial and formal. Goujon's Diana, on the contrary, is instinct with nature; monumental, it is true, and sublimated, but still woman, a synthesis of the purity and vigor of splendid womanhood. She is exquisitely personal; nevertheless aloof. Indeed it is this quality of humanness, touched with abstraction, that seems to be the secret of its fascination to the modern mind.
A corresponding quality distinguishes the painting
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(1013) Diana (p. 47) which is one of the few examples of the School of Fontainebleau comprised in the Louvre. The hair is blond, the flesh pale rosy cream; the drapery of golden huff silk; the hanger of the quiver a delicate blue, with dainty jewels; the color of the greyhound cream; the background, dull olive green foliage and a gray blue, characteristically Parisian sky. The drawing and modeling of the young figure betrays no learned assurance, the pose no artifice. The artist has rendered, with simple fidelity, his model. No sophistication intervenes. The maiden bears the charm of unconscious nakedness rather than conscious nudity; veiled with the naivete of her artless purity. The painter doubtless owed much to Italian influence, but Ms spirit was distinguishably French.
CHAPTER IV
ABSOLUTISM AND THE SUN KING
WHEN Louis XIII, a child of nine years old, was raised to the throne In 1610, the country was still torn asunder by Leaguers and Huguenots. The leaders of both factions encroached upon the royal power; there was as yet no middle class strong enough to assert its rights and the masses of the people were practically serfs. Authority existed nowhere. Under the circumstances, if it were to exist at all, it must be in the person of the sovereign. Louis XI had realized this and intrigued successfully to achieve it. Under his successors, however, what he had won was dissipated, and at no time was the crown more impotent than in the early years of the seventeenth century. The queen regent, Marie de* Medici, was of weak character and sought refuge from the insolence of the nobility in Italian favorites. When she married her son at the age of fourteen to Anne of Austria, it was to introduce another feminine influence no less weak and unprincipled. There were two queens at court but no king, for Louis from the start, while not without ability, lacked all capacity of concentration and persistence. He was as completely a roi faineant as any of the later kings of the Carlovingian dynasty, and the
[513
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equivalent of a mayor of the palace appeared in Cardinal Richelieu.
From his appearance at court in 1619 until his death in 1642 Richelieu worked with one end steadily in view the revival of the policy of Louis XI. His own ambition found its scope and satisfaction in converting the monarchy into an absolutism, which he wielded on behalf of the royal puppet. The latter survived his great minister only one year, having in the meantime followed Richelieu's dying admonition to give his confidence to Cardinal Mazarin. Again, as so often in French history, the new king was a minor and during the life of his minister Louis XIV showed little sign of independence. He subserved the intrigues of Anne, the queen mother, and Mazarin by marrying Maria Luisa, the daughter of Philip IV of Spain; the ceremony being conducted on the Isle of Pheasants, in the little frontier river of QBidassoa. Velasquez had charge of the preparations and festivities and was so exhausted by the ordeal that he died a few months later. By the terms of the marriage contract both Louis and his bride forswore for themselves and their heirs all pretentions to succeed to the Spanish crown. This agreement, by the way, in 1700 on the death of Charles II, the last of the Hapsburg line of Spanish Kings, Louis XIV, then in the plenitude of his power, found it convenient to ignore, thus precipitating the War of the Spanish Succession.
Before he submitted to the political exigencies of this marriage with the Infanta, the young king had been enamored of the nieces of his cardinal minister. He
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was now allowed to solace himself with the charms of Madame de la Valliere. But an end of mere dalliance was at hand. Mazarin died during the year which succeeded the Spanish marriage; regretting chiefly that he must be separated by death from the magnificent pictures and works of art, which he had set the fashion of collecting. When the council met and the secretary inquired of Louis to whom he should present his reports in the future the king's curt reply was Moi. There and then, at the age of twenty-three, he adopted the principle, that he upheld for fifty-five years, Yetat c'est moL His first act was to appoint Colbert Minister of Finance, whose long and faithful service put the treasury on a basis of certainty and affluence, which enabled Louis to satisfy his ambition to triumph in war and to shine as le Boi Soleil among obsequious courtiers. Without going into particulars it is enough to recall that Louis XIV justified his title of le Grand Monarque by raising France to a position of influence in the politics of Europe which made her everywhere respected. It was not until in the decline of his personal vigor, when he had married Madame de Maintenon, the widow of the writer Scarron, who had been tutor to his ilegitimate children, and under her influence turned devote and came under the control of the Jesuits, that the splendor of The Sun Bang began to decline. The War of the Spanish Succession proved disastrous to the French armies, which were successfully opposed by Marlborough; the resources of the kingdom, no longer husbanded by Colbert, became absorbed in deficits, and a series of deaths in the royal household, which the suspicion of the times
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attributed to poisoning, instigated by the king's dissolute nephew, the Duke of Orleans, darkened the old king's end.
Meanwhile, le grand Siecle, le Siecle de Louis Quatorze^ was prolific both in art and letters. The king himself affected to be the autocrat of both. The temper of the time was official. As the chaos of society yielded to the formative and consolidating influence of the royal authority, the aftermath of the French Renaissance grew to be systematization. The Roman element in the French genius asserted itself and set its definite and enduring impress upon French art and letters.
For the genius of Rome had been displayed less in originality than in judicious adaptation of a variety of examples to its own needs and circumstances. And this involved a systematizing of means to ends which, while it did little to encourage individual artists, trained up a host of competent craftsmen; a system of standardized style and widely comprehensive practical efficiency.
Richelieu had established about 1629 the Academie Fran9aise, for the purpose of controlling the French language and regulating literary taste. The trend, thus set, was furthered in Louis XIV's reign by the recognized critical influence of Malherbe ana Boileau. Its immediate result was to replace the imaginative and singing qualities of the earlier French poetry with a system of metrical versification, sometimes rising to heights of grandeur and beauty, but more usually characterized by its fitness for narrative description, as in La Fontaine's Fables and, for heroic dialogue as in the dramas of Corneille and Racine. With both these
ABSOLUTISM AND THE SUN KING
dramatists individual characterization is replaced by types of character; quick interchange of dialogue yields to lengthy speeches and action on the stage is supplanted hy descriptions of what has occurred off stage and by elaborate reflections and dissertations on the part of the actors. In all these respects Corneille differs radically from his older contemporary, Shakespeare, and Racine, coming later, fixed these traits on the so-called classic drama of France.
It has been remarked, no doubt with justice, by a French writer that only a Frenchman, and by no means all Frenchmen, can appreciate at its proper estimate the value of Racine, The latter is, in fact, the product of a quality in the French genius that is enduring in the race, to-wit, its heritage of the Roman tradition* This must unquestionably be taken into account by every conscientious student of French art, who would try to reach its inwardness through putting Mmself as far as may be, in the mental attitude of the French themselves.
Among the organized influences of the period that of the coterie or salon played an important role. The most famous of them, the Hotel de Rambouillet, had been established some fourteen years before the institution of the Academy as a protest against the puerility and license of society and as an encouragement of literary taste and style. The ladies of the group called themselves Les Predeuses, the men, JSsprit Doux. This coterie, comprising among others, Richelieu, Descartes, the reformer of Philosophy in France, Corneille, Bossuet, La Rochefoucauld, the famous author
THE STORY OF FRENCH PAINTING
of the Maodms,, and Madame de Sevigny, one of the most brilliant of letter-writers, exercised at first a salutary influence. But in time the effort to devulgarize the French tongue lead to the invention of literary conceits, such as strew the pages of Mademoiselle de Scudery and other writers of heroic romances; and justified the satire of Moliere, whose "Precieuses Midicules" gave the cult its deathblow.
In summing up the literary aspects of the period George Saintsbury says : "In the special characteristics of the genius of the French, which may be said to be clearness, polish of form and expression, and a certain quality which perhaps cannot be so well expressed by any other word as by alertness, the best work of the seventeenth century has no rivals. The charm of precision, of elegance, of expressing what is expressed in the best possible manner belongs to it in a supreme degree."
The same words are applicable to describe at least the trend of the development of French painting during this period; for its actual attainment of the above qualities belongs rather to the eighteenth century, when the French spirit was able to express itself more freely. Under Louis XIV French art had not only a patron, but an arbiter, who imposed his own will and taste upon obsequious courtier-painters. Art was officialized, firstly by the autocratic personality of the monarch, whose standard, if not so expressed was virtually Vart c'est moi; and secondly by the royal establishment of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture.
What Fontainebleau had been as an expression of the Italianized spirit of the French Renaissance, Versailles
ABSOLUTISM AND THE SUN KING
became to the Roman tendency of the seventeenth century. The former grew up at the call of three kings; the spirit of woman stiE haunts it; it lies embosomed in the natural beauties of the Forest. Versailles, on the contrary, is the climax of artifice; summoned into being by one man and loaded with his personality* For one needs to be reminded that Louis XIII commenced the Palace and Louis Philippe added wings to it. To the imagination Versailles means Louis XIV. Nature had supplied a waste of sandy tract; he bid Le Notre convert it into terraces, esplanades and fountains, bordered by a mimic forest, with artificial lakes, waterfalls, rocks and glens. With a Roman's largeness of plan and repetition of design, he summoned the f aades of the palace into rigid uniformity of line fronting the parade ground of extended terraces. Everything is grandiose and oppressively monotonous and artificial. It entombs the autocracy of Louis Quartorze and the formalism of "Le Grand Siecle" as unmistakably as the Escorial does the body of Philip II and the soul of Spanish Catholicism.
Yet inside and outside the Palace the French genius proclaims itself in an exuberance of invention, facility and skill. Le Notre is still unrivaled as a landscape architect, while Le Brun and his regiment of painters displayed as inexhaustible a resourcefulness in the interior decorations. That they were courtier-flatterers, obsequiously producing pictorial rhodomontade to extol the one-man needs no enforcement; or that their output affects one with impatient fatigue. Yet it would be heedless to overlook the exuberance and the
573
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facility that these men displayed,, symptomatic at least of the fecundity of the French spirit after it had been fertilized by Italian influence. What they would have made of themselves if they had been free of the regime of the Court, as were Poussin and Claude Lorrain, can be only conjectured. Perhaps, however, they had in themselves that Roman element which leaned toward and found its best capabilities in the regimental system.
This also may be true of the Court portrait-painters headed by Hyacinthe Rigaud (16591743) and Nicolas Largilliere (1656-1746), although on the whole, these two exhibit more individual character than the decorators. Rigaud, particularly, is a strong man whose virile personality comes to the surface of the prodigious amount of display that the circumstances of the time compelled Mm to adopt. Observe, for example, his (981) Portrait of Louis XIV in the Louvre. Painted in 1701, it represents the king at the age of sixty-three, when his days of gallantry were passed. The puffy face is not imposing under its brown perruque. Stiffness and pomposity characterize the pose of the figure, planted on its white silk-encased legs; the exaggerated superbness of the blue velvet mantle, heavy with silver fleur-de-lys, massed upon the floor and turned back to reveal the sumptuousness of the ermine lining; and the paraphernalia of the throne, crimson canopy, column and the Crown and Hood of Justice, lying on a stool. Yet it is a shallow study that does not discover beneath all this panoply of ostentation the essential force of physical and mental manhood which made it possible
583
PORTRAIT OP BOSSUET
HYACINTHS EIGAUD
LOUVRE
ABSOLUTISM AND THE SUN KING
for the Grand Monarch to impose Ms will so absolutely. That it does assert itself to a degree which explains and almost justifies the obsequiousness of its acceptance by his subjects is the measure of Bigaud's bigness. None but a painter who himself was endowed with mental and physical force could have interpreted the subject so plausibly; nay more, with such convincingness.
And for corroboration and heightened admiration of Bigaud's greatness turn to his (783) Portrait of Bossuetj which worthily holds a place among the masterpieces of the Salon Carre. The "Eagle of Meaux," as his contemporaries called the great preacher because of the survey and grasp that his sermons involved, was distinguished in his finest utterances by an extraordinary majesty of rhetoric and imposing grandeur of manner. Although he almost always aimed at the sublime, he scarcely ever overstepped it or fell into the bombastic and ridiculous. This characterization of George Saintsbury's might be applied to KIgaud's portrait. It is in a worthy sense a heroic canvas; but the heroic is modified, the sumptuousness mellowed, the ostentation assuaged. It is nobly assertive, yet with a refined control. And then, how genial the face with its straight and fearless glance and simple candor of expression!
Like the portrait of the king, it was engraved by the younger Drevet, one of that band of French engravers who added so much luster to the art of the period. In the logic of their line and the purity and vigor of expression they have never been surpassed. Indeed, it may be contended with much reasonableness that the
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French engravers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries represent in pictorial form the finest intellectuality of the period.
While Rigaud reflects the influence of his sojourn in Rome, Largilliere was trained in Antwerp and later studied under Sir Peter Lely in London. His measure as a painter may be best discovered in (491) Portraits of Largilliere, his Wife and Daughter. The picture betrays the affectations, as well as the excellent disposition of draperies and treatment of textures that the artist had learned from Lely. It also has a curious psychological interest in the way in which Largilliere, while preserving the courtly style, has tempered it to his family group ; has, as it were, domesticated it. The figures are seated, shown to a little below the waist. The artist, in a gray, long wig and drab suit, holds a gun and fondles a spaniel, a dead partridge lying beside him. His daughter, dressed in a dove-gray gown, trimmed with gold, holds a sheet of music, while the mother, in a crimson robe with her hair powdered, carries herself with easy and gracious alertness. The whole group is painted with breadth and spirit. After one has accepted the airs and graces of the picture as characteristic of the age, one's first suspicion of its sentimentality disappears in a recognition of the sincerity of technique and intention.
As the seventeenth century progressed French painters became the leaders in that invasion of Italy, which ultimately resulted in the general Italianizing of European art. The effects on the whole were disastrous. For, while the earlier influence of a still living Italian cul-
ABSOLUTISM AND THE SUN KING
ture had fertilized the native spirit of the countries that it touched, this later contact with the dead-hand chilled original impulse into soulless imitation. Even in France, where the consequences were less severe, there ensued a period of Italianate conventions, represented, for example, in Simon Vouet, a mild version of the great somersault-artist, Le Brun; in the suave amiability of Le Sueur's Raphaelesque compositions ; and in the more dramatic and interesting subjects of Bon de Boulongne (1649-1717)? which suggest the influence of Caravaggio; in the flower pieces of Jean Baptist Monnoyer (1634-1699) and the game and hunting subjects of Francois Desportes (1661-1742).
Meanwhile, a more honestly personal note appears in Sebastien Bourdon (1616-1671). The last named varied his compilation of religious compositions with a few genuinely observed and simply rendered genre subjects and with at least one fine portrait. This is the bust (78) Portrait of the Philosopher, Descartes; lowtoned, grayish flesh; large lucid eyes; a bearing and expression full of character, devoid of any display; a human record, arresting and authoritative.
Further, there are the three brothers, Antoine, Louis and Mathieu Le Nain, whose lives cover the period from 1588-1677* Natives of Laon, they preserved the independence that characterizes the French provincial, and, although they came to Paris to perfect themselves in their art, resisted alike the influence of Italy and the domination of Le Brun. Little is known of them beyond the meager facts that Antoine painted miniatures, Louis some bust portraits and that Mathieu was
THE STOEY OF FRENCH PAINTING
appointed painter of the town of Laon; while all three were elected to membership in the Academy at its foundation in 1648. This denotes broad and liberal policy in the king's appointments, for nothing could be farther from other officially encouraged art of the day than the work of these three brothers. The examples in the Louvre are grouped in the catalogue under their combined names, since no data exists which can identify the individual pictures with any one of them. They are genre pictures, mostly of rural subjects (540) The Forge, (541) Rustic Meal, (542) Return of the Haymakers, and so forth; executed in a tonality of gray and brown, very quiet and simple in expression, and exhibiting a direct and careful study of nature. One of them (544), Procession in a Church, is distinguished by the richness of the costumes. All are akin to the contemporary genre subjects of Holland and Flanders and anticipate the peasant genre of the nineteenth century.
C623
CHAPTER V poussnsr AND CLAUDE L
THAT the Italianate convention was less disastrous to France than to other countries is due to two causes. One has already been alluded to : that France had a vigorous native growth in art and literature, ready for fertilization, strong enough to resist absorption. The second cause is to be found in the personality and influence of Nicolas Poussin and, in a less degree, of Claude Lorrain. The artistic career of these two is identified with Italy and particularly Rome; yet they never ceased to be Frenchmen and shaped the Italian ideal to the needs of the racial genius.
Poussin was the father of the French Classical School, inasmuch as it was his example that blazed the track for the newly formed Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which has led on to the present day. Born In Les Andelys in Normandy, 1594, of good family, lie showed an early fondness for art. Among his teachers was Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674), a portrait painter of rare seriousness, whose portraits stand out with dignified simplicity and forthright humanness amid the showier productions of the time. But, although his best years were spent in France, he was of Flemish origin, and is regarded by the French as a member of that school. Flanders had long been
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the traditionary source of much French inspiration and Champaigne's influence may well have been one by which the grave, stalwart young Norman, Poussin, was impressed. He had learned to draw by copying prints of pictures by Raphael, and the latter's pupil, Giulio de Romano. In time he found his way to Rome, where he tempered his admiration of Raphael with study of Roman bas-relief sculpture. Meanwhile, as befitted a son of the North, Poussin gradually discovered another direct inspiration in landscape. Out of these three elements he constructed for himself a motive and method, distinguished by a union of nature and of architectonic repose and stability, in which a balance is maintained between the figures and the landscape. His well-known example of the Louvre, Et Ego in Arcadia, with its Raphaelesque balance and loveliness of expression, its extended composition of the figures in three flat planes and the simple beauty of the landscape, represents most characteristically his triune motive. In the very many other examples, which the same museum is fortunate enough to possess, the basis of the motive is less easily detected, for the artist was designing with greater freedom of personal expression.
The titles of Poussin's pictures betray the French leaning toward a literary subject. For example, Time shelters Truth from the Attacks of Envy and Discord* has a discouraging note, suggestive of the worst features of the Italianate convention. But it is not for the subject that one learns to look at a Poussin. Interest becomes absorbed in the extraordinary beauty of the landscape and in the suave nobility of the composition.
H
POUSSIF AND CLAUDE LORRAIN
Poussin, one discovers not only to have been the first of the great school of French landscape, but also to have remained unsurpassed in his ability to infuse the naturalness of the scene with architectonic dignity. And in this his treatment of the figure plays a determining part. The truth is that his classicism goes back of Italian and Roman, He exhibits that affinity with the Hellenic spirit which appears, as we have noted, at intervals in French art. How redolent of what one dreams of Hellas and yet how finely French in character are (738) Autumn, in which the Israelite spies are returning from the Promised Land, laden with grapes ; (737) Summer, with Ruth and Boaz in the harvest field, and (738) Spring, the Earthly Paradise! These are landscapes of an ideal loveliness, inspired by a sincere love of nature. Except for a visit to France during 1640-1642, Poussin remained in Italy, dying at Rome in 1665.
Claude Gellee, better known as Claude Lorrain, was born at Chateau de Chamagne near Toul, Lorrain, in 1600. One account says that he was apprenticed to a pastry-cook, another that, having lost both his parents, he crossed the Rhine to Freiburg and received instruction from a wood-carver and engraver. It is agreed that he made his way to Naples and studied architecture, and perspective and color under a German painter, Gottfried Waels. Then he moved to Rome and entered the service of the painter, Agostino Tassi, in the capacity of an attendant Later he set out on a tour of travel which brought him back to his native village.
THE STORY OF FRENCH PAINTING
But his stay was short; he seems to have felt the call of Italy and returned thither never to leave It. He died in 1682.
A student of nature, constantly drawing in the open air, he gradually acquired the style which won the appreciation of his contemporaries and secured him a popularity that lasted on into the nineteenth century. It represents a shrewd assembling of features of naturestudy, drawn from diverse places, and is particularly distinguished by its introduction of architectural details. By these means he built up a composition, as stable as it is ingratiating, its heroic character pleasantly animated with groups of lively figures. In his fondness for warm sunshine he is akin to the Hollander, Cuyp; but instead of the latter's pastoral wholesomeness the feeling of Claude's pictures is rather that of sweet and gracious suavity. His world is one from which all hint of irregularity and conflict is removed; wrapped in inviolable repose. It is a mannered world, tempered and attuned to gentle sentiments by artifice; a vindication of good taste rather than an idealization of nature. It is in this respect that he may be judged to fall short of Poussin, who, on the other hand, when he relies upon architecture instead of nature, is inferior to Claude. The latter, in fact, for all his nature study, appears to have had none of the profound love of nature which elevated Poussin. Claude is much less a, landscape painter than a contriver of beautiful scenic eff ects ; not Classic in spirit as was Poussin but a clever and alluring manipulator of the ingredients of the classical formula. That his work held the fancy of the sentimen-
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POUSSIN AND CLAUBE LORRAIN
tally classicized taste of the eighteenth century and that Poussin had to wait until our own day for a revival of appreciation are equally intelligible.
These two contemporaries, while representative of the trend of their time toward the Italian and the Roman vogue, maintained their identity as Frenchmen and shaped the foreign influence to their native genius, producing a new mode of pictorial subject. Each set a motive for the new Academy, the impress of which has endured to the present day. The Claude tradition has persisted in the Academic habit of improving upon nature and of repeating the obvious externals of the Classic style; while that of Poussin is discernible in many artists who lived outside the pale of the Academy and yet were truly Classic in spirit; Corot, for example, Millet, and Harpignies, to mention only three.
CHAPTER VI
THE KOCOCO
IN" 1717 Parisians enjoyed two new sensations. Watteau's diploma picture, Embarking for the Island of Cyfhera, marked his admission to the Academy of Painting and Sculpture and Mile, Adrieime Lecouvreur made her debut at the Comedie Fran9aise. Both events were the heralds of a new era. The Grand Monarque, dead two years, had been succeeded by his great grandson, Louis XV, a child of five, with the pleasure-loving Duke of Orleans as [Regent. The gloom of the Court had been dissipated in sunshine. Relieved of official incubus, the Gallic spirit floated lightly on the freer air. Immediately it found its apotheosis in Watteau's masterpiece, which pitched the key for the melodies of the Rococo period. At the same time it found expression in the Lecouvreur's natural, as opposed to the artificial, art of acting. The one was a sublimating of actual conditions by the magic of art, and the other an enfranchisement of art by wedding it with nature. These were the elements which fermented the eighteenth century; the gaysome pursuit of beauty and the serious study of nature. It is the former only that usually occupies the historian of art of this period.
THE ROCOCO
It is customary, in fact, to regard the eighteenth century in France as solely identified with the Rococo style of art and since this, as every other style always and everywhere, declined, to consider the period one of unrelieved decadence and to dismiss it with more or less lack of sympathy and interest. A period of decadence, certainly it was, for there were elements in the social conditions that were moribund; but also other elements which, however blindly, were making for vitality. The century, indeed, should rather be regarded as one of transition in which old forms were being replaced by new, as the experiment of autocracy was to be succeeded by the later one, still not yet solved, of popular rule. For the point overlooked is, that society at this period was not entirely composed of courtiers and bent on frivolity. This is the mistake which comes of confining historical study to the political intrigues that center round the throne; and taking no account at the same time of a people's development, as it is expressed in its trend of thought and through its arts, sciences and social conditions.
Society at the opening of the eighteenth century already included intellectual and literary elements. The Grand Monarch had patronized both, while the Academy and coteries increased their prestige. So far, the thinkers and men of letters had been to a considerable extent compelled to obsequiousness by these various forms of beaureaucratic control. Now they were to share in the freer air that pervaded the period. It is significant to recall that at the date with which this chapter opened, Voltaire was twenty-three years old;
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Montesquieu, twenty-eight; while Diderot and Jean Jacques Rousseau were children, respectively of four and five years. These were shortly to become leaders in a mental revolution which prepared the way for the political and social Revolution. This, it should be recalled, in anticipation, was to suffer from the manner of its bringing on. It had no stability at first, because it was founded, not on the demands and convictions of the masses of the people, but upon theories derived from the thinkers and writers. The latter, as usual, were the leaders, but, unfortunately for France, without a phalanx of thought to back them. They were not giving expression to the masses, but spinning their theories in the atmosphere exhaled by themselves.
The eighteenth century involved a breaking up of recognized conventions and a casting about for panaceas and new standards. Chief of these was what to-day with humorous seriousness we call "a return to nature." While philosophers argued for it, society practised it. It was fashionable to emulate the simplicity of the country folk; for had not Rousseau declared that if there is any virtue left it must be looked for among the lower classes?
The changed mood of society is closely represented in the painting of the time. The painters of the FSte Galantes continue to contribute to the gay dance of fashion, though gradually the Gardens of the Luxembourg are replaced by country scenes and the lovers disport themselves with sentimental tenderness in the garb of dainty peasants. Meanwhile Chardin contributes to the change of taste his exquisite bourgeois
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genre and Greuze commemorates the imagined virtues of the proletariate. These two artists, in fact, are a natural part of their time and not the exceptions to its general trend, as is suggested by those students of art who insist upon viewing the eighteenth century solely as the period of the Rococo.
From the early days of the Regency the soil was ready for the seed of simpler tastes. After the stifling pomp and ponderous gloom of the last years of the Grand Monarch, court society was eager for a freer and fresher elegance* The Luxembourg rather than Versailles became the nucleus of fashion. Moreover, society began to seek relief from the eternal routine of court life in private entertaining, and the hotels of the Faubourg St. Germain rivaled one another in elegance. The smaller apartment and salon were in vogue, and the skill and inventiveness of French designers were expended in converting the heavier and more elaborate furnishings and decorations of Louis Quatorze into the exquisite refinements of the style of Louis Quinze. It is a style that in its elegant exuberance, its airy invention and charm and tact of taste is a direct expression of the Gallic spirit. And it was the setting, it must not be forgotten, of the paintings of the period. Either occupying a panel in the wall or ceiling or added as cabinet pictures, they are in scale and spirit an integral part of the exquisiteness of the ensemble. To-day, unfortunately, we see them divorced from it; blossoms plucked from the flower-bed and set in strange and incongruous surroundings. The fact has done much to estrange the sympathy of students from the art of this
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period, which to Frenchmen seems the purest product of
the distinctively French spirit.
. * . **
Of this beautiful garden of painting 1 Antoine Watteau was the master hand. Born in Valenciennes in 1684, he made his way to Paris and in time entered the studio of Claude Gillot, a painter, designer and draftsman of sprightly and original fancy, who directed his pupil's attention to the scenes of the Italian Cbmedy and to decoration. Watteau found a home with
Claude Audran, one of the first decorative artists of the day and custodian of the Luxembourg. Here he was able to study the Marie de ? Medici decorations by Rubens and feast his imagination on the vistas of landscape in the palace gardens. In 1712 he took up his abode with Crozat, the collector of old masters in whose gallery he became acquainted with Venetian painting. In these particulars we have the summary of Watteau's external influences: experience in decoration, the impulse of Rubens's prolific invention and mastery of form and movement, the richness and dignity of Venetian coloring. The rest was Watteau and the Gallic spirit which was incarnated in him. It put the cachet of fine art on his decoration; refined and subtilized the Rubens inspiration and translated the mannered splendor of the Venetians into familiar elegance. Finally the result was impressed with the seriousness of Watteau's own temperament; that of a consumptive, passionately in love with beauty, haunted with the specter of early death and cherishing hungrily every moment in which he could yet work. Hence the qualities of impersonality and aloof-
C72]
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ness in Ms art The world of sight, transmuted by his poet's imagination, became purged of its mundane elements, spiritually recreated into a vision of abstract, universal beauty.
The Embarkation, for example (the original picture is 982 of the Louvre; there is an elaborated version of it in the Royal Palace in Berlin) , is a poet's vision of the eternal springtime of youth and love, of happy, carefree yielding to the soft promptings of nature and the loveliness of life. Nature looks her loveliest; the air is aquiver with the fluttering of infant loves; the lovers, gaily hued, and as fancy-free as flowers, dally on the mossy bank, gather to the pleasure-craft or strain their eyes toward the golden horizon of their desires, absorbed in the eternity of the present and the stingless dream of pleasure. Watteau himself at this time was a prey to mental and physical distress. He died four years later.
The Gilles (p. 79), No. 983 in the Lacaze collection of the Louvre, has the distinction of being a life-sized figure. His French name does not hide the fact that he is one of the Italian comedians, whose Commedia dell'arte, so called because it was a performance by professionals, had been popular during the French Renaissance and had done much to extend the scope and subtilize the methods of the French stage. Banished during the latter years of the Grand Monarch, they had returned with the bright days of the Regency. Gilles wears his clown's costume of creamy white, shadowed to olive in the hollows; rose ribbons garnish his shoes, and his drab hat shows against the delicate blue of the
T731
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sky. Below the slope of the mound on which he stands appear the black-garbed II Dottore on a donkey, II Capitano in a rose-colored vest and cap. Columbine and another. The statue of a satyr lurks in the shadow of the orange, tawny trees. The actors of the Italian Comedy, despite the extravagance of their humor and comic business, were serious artists, lifting the spirit of comedy to a high level of finished impersonation. It is this aspect of the actor that Watteau has represented. Hence a suggestion, perhaps for a moment, of incongruity between the grotesquely costumed, foolish-looking figure and the artless seriousness of the mobile face. But to Watteau it was another enigma of life, of the iridescent illusion upon the surface of dire reality: this comedy that hides under light laughter the pain of things. Such was the mission of the artist: to veil the bitterness of life with the mirage of art's creation. It is as a brother artist that Watteau conceived Gilles.
Poignant seriousness is, then, the measure of Watteau's superiority to his age and to Ms successors in the school of Fetes Galantes. They were imitators of his motives and methods, with none of his aloofness; enamored of the life they depicted and dabbling in its shallowness.
For profligacy reigned at Court. Louis, when he arrived at manhood, having an easy and diffident nature, drifted with the current that surrounded him. His political advisers married him to Maria Leczinski, the daughter of Stanislaus, ex-king of Poland, and provided him with mistresses. The flattery of courtiers styled
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him the " first gentleman of France," and he was satisfied with the dignity. The most famous of his mistresses, Madame de Pompadour, was the actual ruler of France for nearly twenty years, from 1745 until her death in 1764. From her apartments in the Grand Trianon, or the State Rooms of Versailles, she conducted wars, issued decrees and transacted the affairs of government, while Louis frittered away his time in his infamous seraglio of the Parc-au-Cerfs. Relieved of La Pompadour, he sank to the degradation of the Du Barry. It was into the circle tainted with her presence that the young, lovely and virtuous Marie Antoinette was received, as the bride of the Dauphin. The end of the royal shame arrived on May 10, 1774, when Louis, forsaken by all except his three daughters, Mesdames Adelaide, Henriette and Sophie, died of what was said to be smallpox.
During this shameless reign the world-power of France, built up by the Grand Monarch had sunk to national impotence. Her possessions abroad, won by her captains of war "and enterprise in the East Indies and Canada, were wrested from her by the English and, as a last humiliation, she stood by helpless or too indifferent to protest while Russia effected the partition of Poland. Within her own borders the national spirit seemed to be extinct. Royalty was debauched, while the Church, and Aristocracy were grasping for power and repudiating their responsibilities; institutions of privilege battening on the vitals of the country. The commercial classes were sucked by the leeches of taxation and the
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horde of usurers, bred from the exhaustion of society, while the agricultural population, the natural backbone of every country and of France in particular, was brutalized and beggared.
It was on this national rottenness that Rococo art, the most sprightly flowering of the Gallic spirit, flourished. The fact seems food for cynicism; an illustration of the esthete's trite contention that art has nothing to do with morals and of the philistine's scornful retort that the fairest periods of art are associated with the foulest conditions of national life. Incidentally the esthete and the philistine alike are partial in their choice of examples and superficial in their reasoning. Both point to such periods as the fifteenth century in Florence, the sixteenth in Venice and the eighteenth in France. They ignore the seventeenth in Holland, when a new art was fostered side by side with the growth of a new nationalism, and the fiber of both was moral. Not in the sense of didactic morality, but in that vigor and stanchness of pride and purpose which represent the highest coefficient of moral character.
But at the time the Dutch were freeing themselves from political and religious absolutism, the Grand Monarch had been forging the clamps of autocracy upon an exhausted feudalism. His grip removed, autocracy and feudalism declined rapidly to decay and dissolution. The Rococo was the afterglow of The Sun King, and of such color and life as still lingered in the privileged aristocracy. That the latter was not entirely corrupt is proved by the frequent heroism of individuals of the old noblesse during the Days of Terror that were to f ol-
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low. It was Aristocracy as an institution that had become moribund; cankered with licentiousness. But in its individual members it still retained something of beauty and worth, though enfeebled by the general atrophy. Its art was the dying, transient gleam that passed and ceased; whereas the dawning light of Holland, though interrupted in the eighteenth century, persisted to re-illumine the following century. While the intimate artistocratic art of the Rococo died with the death of privilege, the democratic art of Holland, the intimate product of burgher home life, has survived to extend its roots into modern art in every country. One was an art of life, the other of dissolution. But for that reason let us not overlook the beauty that the latter possessed, nor what it had of worth. It is instinct with that gaiety and grace of spirit that was to irradiate the chaos of the Revolution ; and to enable France to burst forth again into a new life which once more should make her the intellectual and artistic leader of the nations.
But justice is not done to the art of the Rococo even by these reflections unless one accepts at its own estimate the qualities of the Gallic spirit. The genius of the Teutonic is seriousness ; of the Celtic, for all its humor, sadness. One can fathom both; but not the Gallic genius. That, to be realized, must be surprised in its flight in mid air. It does not engender on the ground; but, like the Queen-bee, seeks its nuptials in the whirl of ascent into the empyrean. Its environment is light and liberty of airy movement ; its essence, love and life. The spirit most akin to it is the American, which has the
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aerial, sprightly qualities of a manhood that is still youth. But, as a nation, we are only old enough to be very serious about business and success therein ; too young to be philosophers; too puritanic still to dare to be frank about life and love. Yet one of the oldest and most highly respected editors in America told me once that the whole secret of the art of novel- writing was to recognize that all human life has its origin and its meaning in the love of a man and a woman. For business purposes of successful writing we accept the principle of life being love and love being life, but wrap our acceptance of it in cloaks of pharisaical discretion. Accordingly, we sniff pruriently like a Tartuffe at what we term the frivolity and libidinage of the Fetes Galantes. Watteau we tolerate. Rightly we appreciate that his peculiar genius distilled the finest poetry from the Gallic spirit; but with his followers/Pater, Lancret, Lemoine, Boucher and Fragonard the case is different. The Gallic spirit has grown increasingly salacious. So prates our Puritanism. Meanwhile, let the American Podsnap scan the covers and pages of our own magazines, examine ,the book illustrations or lift his eyes to the catch-penny appeals of our posters and advertisements. Everywhere he will find the changes rung upon the theme of sex-attraction. But, this being * 'God's Country," Podsnap regards it as part of the providential scheme, whereas in France it is salacious. Or, possibly, Podsnap is in process of moral reformation; he sees no harm at home because none is meant. In time he may extend the same tolerance to the Gallic point of view as expressed in the Rococo.
783
GILLES
JEAN ANTOINE WATTEAU
LOUVRE
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Watteau's chief pupils were Ms fellow townsmen, Jean Baptiste Joseph Pater (1695-1736) and Nicolas Lanc
