The History of Modern Painting Volume 2

The History of Modern Painting Volume 2 by Richard Muther The History Of Modern Painting BOOK III THE TRIUMPH OF THE MODERNS CHAPTER XVI THE DRAUGHTSMEN INASMUCH as modern art, in the beginning of its career, held commerce almost exclusively with the spirits of dead men of bygone ages, it had set itself in opposition to all the great epochs that had gone before. All works known to the history of art, from the cathedral pictures of Stephan Lochner down to the works of the followers of Watteau, stand in the closest relationship with the people and times amid which they have originated. Whoever studies the works of Dürer knows his home and his family, the Nuremberg of the sixteenth century, with its narrow lanes and gabled houses; the whole age is reflected in the engravings of this one artist with a truth and distinctness which put to shame those of the most laborious historian. Dürer and his contemporaries in Italy stood in so intimate a relation to reality that in their religious pictures they even set themselves above historical probability, and treated the miraculous stories of sacred tradition as if they had been commonplace incidents of the fifteenth century. Or, to take another instance, with what a striking realism, in the works of Ostade, Brouwer, and Steen, has the entire epoch from which these great artists drew strength and nourishment remained vivid in spirit, sentiment, manners, and costume. Every man whose name has come down to posterity stood firm and unshaken on the ground of his own time, resting like a tree with all its roots buried in its own peculiar soil; a tree whose branches rustled in the breeze of its native land, while the sun which fell on its blossoms and ripened its fruits was that of Italy or Germany, of Spain or the Netherlands, of that time; never the weak reflection of a planet that formerly had shone in other zones. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that this connection with the life of the present and the soil at home was lost to the art of painting. It cannot be supposed that later generations will be able to form a conception of life in the nineteenth century from pictures produced in this period, or that these pictures will become approximately such documents as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries possess in the works of Dürer, Bellini, Rubens, or Rembrandt. The old masters were the children of their age to the very tips of their fingers. They were saturated with the significance, the ideals, and the aims of their time, and they saturated them with their own aims, ideals, and significance. On the other hand, if any one enters a modern picture gallery and picks out the paintings produced up to 1850, he will often receive the impression that they belong to earlier centuries. They are without feeling for the world around, and seem even to know nothing of it. Even David, the first of the moderns, has left no work, with the exception of his “Marat,” which has been baptized with the blood of the French Revolution. To express the sentiment of Liberty militant he made use of the figures of Roman heroes. The political freedom of the people, so recently won, so fresh in men’s minds, he illustrated by examples from Roman history. At a later time, when the allied forces entered Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, he made use of the story of Leonidas at Thermopylæ. Only in portrait painting was any kind of justice done to modern life by the painters in “the grand style.” True it is that there lived, at the time, a few “little masters” who furtively turned out for the market modest little pictures of the life around them, paintings of buildings and kitchen interiors. The poor Alsatian painterMartin Drolling, contemptuously designated a “dish painter” by the critics, showed in his kitchen pictures that, in spite of David, something of the spirit of Chardin and the great Dutchmen was still alive in French art. But he has given his figures and his pots and pans and vegetables the pose and hard outline of Classicism. A few of his portraits are better and more delicate, particularly that of the actor Baptiste, with his fine head, like that of a diplomatist. At the exhibition of 1889, this picture, with its positive and firmly delineated characterisation, made the appeal of a Holbein of 1802. Another “little master,” Granet, painted picturesque ruins, low halls, and the vaults of churches; he studied attentively the problem of light in inner chambers, and thereby drew upon himself the reproach of David, that “his drawing savoured of colour.” InLeopold Boilly Parisian life— still like that of a country town—and the arrival of the mail, the market, and the busy life of the streets, found an interpreter,—bourgeois no doubt, but true to his age. In the time of the Revolution he painted a “Triumph of Marat,” the tribune of the people, who is being carried on the shoulders of his audience from the palais de justice in Paris, after delivering an inflammatory oration. In 1807, when the exhibition of David’s Coronation picture had thrown all Paris into excitement, Boilly conceived the notion of perpetuating in a rapid sketch the scene of the exhibition, with the picture and the crowd pressing round it. His speciality, however, was little portrait groups of honest bourgeois in their stiff Sunday finery. Boilly knew with accuracy the toilettes of his age, the gowns of the actresses, and the way they dressed their heads; he cared nothing whatever about æsthetic dignity of style, but represented each subject as faithfully as he could, and as honestly and sincerely as possible. For that reason he is of great historical value, but he is not painter enough to lay claim to great artistic interest. The execution of his pictures is petty and diffidently careful, and his neat, Philistine painting has a suggestion of china and enamel, without a trace of the ease and spirit with which the eighteenth century carolled over such work. The heads of his women are the heads of dolls, and his silk looks like steel. His forerunners are not the Dutchmen of the good periods, Terborg and Metsu, but the contemporaries of Van der Werff. He and Drolling and Granet were rather the last issue of the fine old Dutch schools, rather descendants of Chardin than pioneers, and amongst the younger men there was at first no one who ventured to sow afresh the region which had been devastated by Classicism. Géricault certainly was incited to his “Raft of the Medusa” not by Livy or Plutarch, but by an occurrence of the time which was reported in the newspapers; and he ventured to set an ordinary shipwreck in the place of the Deluge or a naval battle, and a crew of unknown mortals in the place of Greek heroes. But then his picture stands alone amongst the works of the Romanticists, and is too decidedly transposed into a classical key to count as a representation of modern life. In its striving after movement and colour, Romanticism put forward the picturesque and passionate Middle Ages in opposition to the stiff and frigid neo-Greek or neo-Roman ideal; but it joined with Classicism in despising the life of the present. Even the political excitement at the close of the Restoration and the Revolution of July had but little influence on the leading spirits of the time. Accustomed to look for the elements of pictorial invention in religious myths, in the fictions of poets, or in the events of older history, they paid no attention to the mighty social drama enacted so near to them. The fiery spirit of Delacroix certainly led him to paint his picture of the barricades, but he drew his inspiration from a poet, from an ode of Auguste Barbier, and he gave the whole an air of romance and allegory by introducing the figure of Liberty. He lived in a world of glowing passions, amid which all the struggles of his age seemed to have for him only a petty material interest. For that reason he has neither directly nor indirectly drawn on what he saw around him. He painted the soul, but not the life of his epoch. He was attracted by Teutonic poets and by the Middle Ages. He set art free from Greek subject-matter and Italian form, to borrow his ideas from Englishmen and Germans and his colour from the Flemish school. He is inscrutably silent about French society in the nineteenth century. And this alienation from the living world is even more noticeable in Ingres. His “Mass of Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel” is the only one of his many works which deals with a subject of contemporary life, and it was blamed by the critics because it deviated so far from the great style. As an historical painter, and when better employed as a painter of portraits, Ingres has crystallised all the life and marrow of the past in his icy works, and he appears in the midst of the century like a marvellous and sterile sphinx. Nothing can be learnt from him concerning the needs and passions and interests of living men. His own century might writhe and suffer and struggle and bring forth new thoughts, but he knew nothing about them, or if he did he never allowed it to be seen. Delaroche approached somewhat nearer to the present, for he advanced from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century; and the historical picture, invented by him, virtually dominated French art under Napoleon III, in union with the dying Classicism.

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