would have been at least to have facilitated refer-
ence and to have assisted observation.
Nothing, perhaps, is earlier, among the canvases
of Velasquez now shown, than the large, somewhat
straggling picture with perfect composition yet to
learn of a ' Peasant Boy Feeding Fowls.' It comes
from Ireland, and is lent by Lady Gregory. It does
not, in every particular, want breadth of treatment :
it is broader in treatment, indeed, than some things
which may presumably have been painted not very
VELASQUEZ 159
long after it. The vigour of perception, the realistic
outlook upon life, the point of view, in fact, is hardly
less characteristic than in work avowedly mature ;
yet, to pass on from it to painting of the first Madrid,
rather than of the Seville, period,'is to move into the
presence of a much greater accomplishment. Before
taking another step, however, it may be well to
glance at one picture like it in subject, and, it is
scarcely too much to say, even richer in handling
a picture not Velasquez's at all, yet a link in the
chain of his history, for it is the work of his first
master, whose harsh temper drove the youth from
his painting-room Herrera el Viejo : it is a broad
and finely treated representation of a bird upon the
wing ' A Partridge.' This is one among the many
interesting loans of Sir Clare Ford, whose oppor-
tunities of study have been exceptional, and whose
devotion to Velasquez himself is indeed hereditary.
The Duke of Wellington is the owner of what
seems to be the first picture by Velasquez of whose
history there is authentic record. We saw it at the
Royal Academy, one winter, in bygone years. It
is called the ' Water-Carrier,' or ' El Corno, Aquador
de Sevilla,' and it represents, with a force and
luminousness already extraordinary, a man in tat-
tered brown doublet, bearing in one hand the large
160 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
earthen jar, and, with the other, tendering a glass
of water to a boy standing beside a table. It is
recorded in the inventory of Buen Retire, all but
two hundred years ago. Since then its fortunes have
been various. The picture figured amongst the im-
pedimenta of Joseph Bonaparte in his flight from
Madrid, but at the rout of Vittoria it was captured
from his carriage, and Ferdinand vu. afterwards gave
it to the Great Duke. Sir Charles Robinson contri-
butes an illustration of the story of Jael and Sisera,
painted, possibly, about 1623 a composition in
which, it is said, there is to be discerned a por-
trait of the Conde Duque Olivarez (who at that
period summoned Velasquez to Madrid), and a
posthumous portrait of the Duke of Alva ; and it
is suggested that there may be in this canvas an
allegorical reference to the assassination of William
the Silent. Two figures are in armour. At Madrid,
we believe, there are three suits of armour of
the Duke of Alva's there are ten of Charles the
Fifth's. A typical group of the earlier work of the
master may be said almost to end with the present-
ment of the veteran ' Spanish Beggar,' belonging to
Sir Francis Cook, and, as it would seem, somewhat
unnecessarily questioned by such an industrious
authority as Justi, who considers that it is the work
VELASQUEZ 161
of a Fleming. Not even the most audacious of
assailants has ventured to throw doubt upon the
portrait of ' Quevedo ' a head and shoulders, black
and deep brown-grey the poet wearing conspicu-
ously those thick and dark-rimmed glasses which,
by reason of too assiduous study, he is reported
never for a moment after middle life to have been
able to dispense with.
With Mr. Ruth's portrait of Philip the Fourth, a
full-length, life-size figure, and with the portrait of
Don Balthasar, the eldest son of a monarch who
would appear to have spent an appreciable portion
of his lifetime in the painting-room of Velasquez,
the artist reaches the hill-top a summit, fortun-
ately, from which, even to the end of his days, he
was not destined to descend. The ' Don Balthasar '
is the possession of the Duke of Westminster. It
shows the child in a costume enriched with gold
and silver, mounted upon a prancing pony, in the
courtyard of the palace ; and finely painted as the
face is, the picture, as a whole, illustrates the justice
of Mr. R. M. Stevenson's contention that in the
outdoor full-length portraits, in which ensemble, and
atmosphere, realised background even, a sense of the
presence of the actual world, must needs count for
so much, there is not to be looked for that searching
L
162 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
and intimate treatment of the visage which Velas-
quez reserved in the main for works which were
studies of the head alone.
And if the Duke of Westminster's 'Don Bal-
thasar' (not to speak of the Queen's well-known
and splendid representation of the boy) illustrates
this a subordination of the personal portrayal
to the general effect so the very perfection of the
study of individuality is evidenced in one or two
of the portraits of Philip's second wife, Mariana of
Austria, and in that unsurpassable achievement, the
Duke of Wellington's half-length, or head and
shoulders, of Innocent the Tenth. It is probable
that in more than one of the portraits of Mariana
those in which she is depicted at full-length much
of the painting of her raiment is due to the hand
of some pupil of the master's. But by Velasquez
wholly, as we should surmise, is Sir Francis Cook's
bust of the little lady, and this is the earliest of her
portraits here, and is succeeded by Mr. Cuthbert
Quilter's three-quarters length, and by Sir Clare
Ford's extraordinarily fresh and vigorous and
thorough rendering of the girl in much the same
manner. Greatest of all, perhaps, for colour, char-
acter, and there is no other word for it ' modern-
ness,' or actuality, is the ' Innocent the Tenth.'
VELASQUEZ 163
It belongs to the Duke of Wellington. Seven years
ago we paid it, at the Old Masters, our tribute
of homage. It is one of several treatments of the
same dignitary, wrought by Velasquez after that
voyage to Italy in which the artist had Spinola for
companion. But it is one of the most genuine and
one of the most intact ; and perhaps it is but by an
error of phrase that it is described as a ' repetition '
of the picture at the Hermitage. In it, at all events,
the finest qualities of masculine portraiture are com-
bined and displayed. It is said that the key to
human expression is most of all at the corners of
the mouth. Charged with the love of life, the love
of its good things, and the love of domination, is
this mouth of Innocent's. But is his eye less reveal-
ing ? wary, here, and shrewd ; watchful, yet full of
fire. What a study of character, and what a triumph
of brush-work ! A noble ' Philip the Fourth/ har-
monious in silver and rose-red, from the Dulwich
Gallery, sets forth, certainly not better than this
does, the greatness of Velasquez' mission, nor has
it quite as fully as this the pre-eminent decisiveness
which is so much of his charm.
(Standard, 3Oth December 1895.)
FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
PAINTING
THERE is plenty of variety in the Exhibition
which the Academy proffers to the Londoner this
winter ; and that was desirable we may almost
say, necessary for the Old Masters proper such
of them as are shown have not nearly the attrac-
tiveness and importance that have been customary.
This, under the circumstances, is scarcely to be
wondered at, for while of the Venetian painting
there is but the most doubtful or the scantiest trace,
the great Dutch and Flemish Masters of the Seven-
teenth Century are altogether unrepresented. Rem-
brandt and Rubens, Hobbema and Snyders, De
Hooch and Nicholas Maas, are as if they were not.
The Second Room, in which they are wont to be
gathered together, makes not a sign of them ; and
the Third or Great Gallery contains a not quite
happy or well-balanced representation of the masters
of the larger canvas, although we note already one
164
FRENCH PAINTING 165
exceptional Claude, one faultless Vandyke, and one
superb Velasquez. Even the First Room, which is
exclusively English, is not so attractive as it has
sometimes been ; though here and there a late
Turner or an early Cotman, a Hogarth 'conversa-
tion piece,' vivacious and sterling, or a William
Dobson portrait, honest at least and capable, asserts
unmistakably the hand of a master. Much of the
interest is concentrated upon the newer occupants
of the Second Room. Most of them are clever, but
many hopelessly incompatible.
This Second Room is given over to the French of
two periods. But what have the French of the
Eighteenth Century in common with the French of
the Nineteenth ? They have not even a tradition
they have only a name. In England, as you pass
from Richard Wilson to Turner, from Hogarth to
the elder Leslie, from Reynolds and Romney, even
to Etty and James Ward, the break of continuity is
never complete ; the elders were in a certain sense
the ancestors of the younger men. But in France
the incomparable grace of Watteau found no reflec-
tion of itself in the powerful brutality of Delacroix.
Imagine Corot as the successor of Boucher or
Millet's vision of the peasantry succeeding to the
suave dream of Prud'hon. Yet it is with these
166 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
juxtapositions' of the essentially incompatible with
this momentary joining together of those whom
Heaven (or, indeed, the peculiarity of their different
genius) has put asunder that we are face to face at
Burlington House. Yet, even as it is, there may be
a certain interest in the comparison ; and if it is
made fairly, the result will be an enhanced appre-
ciation of those great masters of the Eighteenth
Century, who were French in spirit as well as in
name. Briefly and slightly we will speak of these,
and these almost alone.
As the authorities of the National Gallery have
never yet been so fortunate as to possess a Watteau,
it is well for the nation that we have, at Dulwich,
one beautiful and unexceptionable example of his
art, and it is well too that that picture is now at
Burlington House. This is the canvas known as a
' Ball under a Colonnade ' the scene an arcade
overlooking a garden ; a lady and gentleman danc-
ing a minuet in the foreground, and, to right and
to left of them, groups of gay, happy people, dis-
posed with Watteau's naturalness and Watteau's
consummate skill. The condition of the picture is
faultless, but this with the great master of Valen-
ciennes is scarcely rare. Watteau's method was not
a method of experiment ; his technique was as
FRENCH PAINTING 167
sound as his spirit was vivacious. What is more
remarkable what would be remarkable anywhere
is the perfection of accomplished workmanship,
the carrying out to the end, with all the vividness
of a sketch, of a conception definite and elaborate
from the beginning. The colouring comes as an
inheritance from the Venetian as Watteau's adapta-
tion of the palette of the supreme decorators. There
are many canvases by the master spirit of the
French Eighteenth Century larger of touch than
this one ; there are few more happily intricate or
truer to the graceful side of life, in a world finely
imagined as well as finely seen.
Next to this admirable picture, which only the
Louvre, or Edinburgh, or, it may be, Potsdam, can
surpass, hangs a beautiful and interesting work,
avowedly by the pupil with whom Watteau was once
angered, but with whom in his declining days he was
generously reconciled, calling him to him, and im-
parting to him, as a final gift, what he could of the
secrets of his art. To Mr. Alfred de Rothschild
belongs ' The Pleasure Barge,' a work in which
the foreground figures are on a larger scale than
in the Watteau, and in which the handling is neat
and obviously careful, even while it is broad. If
Pater himself had been the inventor of the genre,
168 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
or even, perhaps, if he had practised it in any fashion
recognisably his own, this piece of delicate and
painter-like work which, as it is, no one with any
true appreciation of the graceful can possibly dis-
praise would have had a higher rank. As it is,
we recognise the dexterous handiwork, the pupil's
strangely complete reception of his master's spirit ;
but feel, at the same moment, that Pater is an echo
rather than a voice that his talent glowed only at
the fire that Watteau lit.
Lord Rosebery is the possessor of a portrait of
Robespierre, by Jean Baptiste Greuze. It is a direct,
good portrait ; very sound, and only perhaps a little
flattering ; the ' sea-greenness ' of the revolutionary,
having, it may be, been apparent but to the imagina-
tion of Carlyle. A second Greuze, highly and
daintily finished, and so appropriately small in
scale, is the 'A Vous' of Mr. Clementi Smith, an
interior, with three friendly figures, and the glass
genially passing. Thus, though in both cases Greuze is
represented creditably, in neither is he represented by
the kind of picture which in our own day is associated
with his name in neither is there the too seductive
or too adroitly planned presentation of womanhood
with its lines refined to the slenderness of the child,
or the child with, too early upon her, and too con-
FRENCH PAINTING 169
sciously and evidently, the contours of the woman.
Fragonard's 'Letter,' belonging to Lady Wallace,
is an engraved picture, small and of undoubted
quality the 'Lettre d'Amour,' it should be called,
properly that is indeed its name in the print
for the impulsiveness of the scribe, the earnestness
of her glance, the fire of her action, are due to
no urgency of everyday business, but to the ecstasy
of love. Small as the thing is, in its touch and
spirit we recognise the southern temperament of
sunshine and storm, and remember that Provence
was the land of Fragonard's birth, and that of its
half-Italian landscape he has been till now one of
the most sympathetic of depictors. From the same
gallery from Lady Wallace's we might conceiv-
ably have had the loan of a more important Frago-
nard, ' L'Escarpolette.' To Baron Ferdinand de
Rothschild belongs the life-size portrait of Madame
de Pompadour, seen somewhat from below, loung-
ing upon a sofa, and dressed in the colours whose
particular combination Boucher so much affected
sky blue and rose. The picture has little restfulness,
and not too much of character the mistress rather
than the dilettante, was it, perhaps, at the moment, the
courtier's business to paint. It is in a high key, yet not
precisely garish ; a clever tour deforce, agreeable, gay.
i;o ON BOOKS AND ARTS
Two interesting, since somewhat unusual, ex-
amples of Prud'hon come from Hertford House ;
one of them, a little nude boy inadequately de-
scribed as 'Le Zephyr/ a work in which a master
of tender sentiment, and graceful, even if somewhat
monotonous, design, betrays some debt to Correggio;
the other the singular allegory of ' The Triumph of
Bonaparte ' Napoleon surrounded by female figures
and by Cupids in a triumphal car a picture in which
Prud'hon shows something, indeed, of himself, and
much of his obligation to the Greeks. It is a work
more characteristic than the first, and less ambitious
than the second ; but it is in his simple designs most
of all that we can discern best the real Prud'hon,
with just a touch of a Classicism never austere, and
a world of tenderness never actually effeminate.
In the ' Odalisque/ a sketch of an Oriental nudity,
we see for once that which is rather surprising in
work of Ingres's a picture, that is, in which, at the
stage now reached, the colour is better than the
design, if it is not better than the draughtsmanship.
The curved line of the right arm repeats, surely,
only awkwardly the curve of the wide-hipped figure ;
and in the left arm, and in the modelling of some
portions of the trunk, there is little indication of the
' correctness of form ' which, to borrow Gautier's
FRENCH PAINTING 171
phrase, was, at least with Ingres, ' virtue.' We are
glad, of course, to see any canvas of Ingres's at
Burlington House, because it is a sight vouchsafed
but seldom, and again, because Ingres is a master in
whose labours there is, alike in France and England,
some right revival of interest. But it would have
been well had it been possible to represent him,
not semi- romantic and luxurious, limp in line,
impoverished of colour, but rather, as in 'The
Apotheosis of Homer,' august of conception, or,
as in ' The Source,' refined and exquisite of form.
(Standard, 4th January 1896.)
CHARDIN
JEAN BAPTISTE SIMEON CHARDIN a man of the
bourgeoisie, as original as Hogarth was born on the
2nd November 1699. It was in Paris, in the quarter
of St. Sulpice, in the trading quarter where shop-
keepers and skilled artisans wait on the wants of
the neighbouring Faubourg St. Germain. He was
of humble, decent parentage, as befitted the place ;
and he had for godmother, when he was christened,
one Anne Bourgine, wife of Jacques Riche, who
declared herself unable to sign her name in attesta-
tion of the event. Chardin's father was a cabinet-
maker; a dexterous craftsman, with a speciality
which, along with such honour as it afforded, he
passed on to one of his sons. He made, as Chardin's
best biographer has told us, ' ces billards monu-
mentaux dont une planche de Bonnart nous a garde"
le dessin,' and he made them for the King. But
though he worked successfully and well, the burden
of a family weighed on his fortunes, and his thought
about his children was chiefly that they might find
w
CHARDIN 173
means of support. Chardin was given little educa-
tion, and he was to have followed his father's trade,
but he showed, in his quite early youth, enough of
promise as a painter for it to be held reasonable
that he should enter M. Gazes' painting-room. Cazes
was not at this time an unknown artist, but Chardin
learned almost nothing from him. The inventor of
a genre, Chardin must needs be his own best
teacher. Time and his own individuality alone
could allow him his sturdy facility of touch. Only
in working for himself could he acquire the schemes
of colour, the tones, the delicate justice of expression,
for which we admire him to-day. And if he was
already independent of a master in the selection of
his method, still more his own was his choice of the
world which he observed to record.
That world, of which Chardin has given us so
veracious yet so poetic a chronicle, was indeed the
world of his daily life. His art concerned itself with
the familiar pursuits of the lower middle class,
homely because it was bound to be frugal, but
refined because it was French. The grosser manners
which reflected accurately as manner is wont to
do the duller thoughts of our English lower middle
class of a hundred years since, would never have
afforded to an artist who desired inspiration from
174 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
that class alone, such an opportunity as was offered
to Chardin by the lower bourgeoisie of France. The
ruder civilisation of the London of that period
provoked from English art no such exquisite tran-
script. And had it come, it could hardly have been
welcomed, for in the two countries the taste of the
day was different the one was finer than the other.
A similarity in coarseness, in imaginative Literature
the unquestioned grossness of Retif de la Bretonne,
placed by the side of the grossness of Smollett
may seem to deny it. But pictorial art makes the
contrast evident. In France it was possible not only
for Chardin to exist, but for him to be valued.
In a life that was eighty years long a life mainly
calm, and filled with peaceful work Chardin was
of course able to accomplish much, and to labour
with variety ; but whatever may have been his
great successes in other departments of Art than
that of genre painting, it is by his mastery and
originality in that that he may be expected most
to interest us. It was to that that he chiefly devoted
the middle years of his career. Other successes
established his fame ; other successes came happily
to its support, long afterwards, when he was failing.
We do not note, indeed, in Chardin, rapid transi-
tions, sudden transformations the one occupa-
CHARDIN 175
tion was apt to overlap the other but until we
are to look into his course in great detail it may be
accepted as roughly true that it was first still-life
that engrossed him, then scenes of the domestic
interior, and then, in the late days, portraiture. Of
the two first, he was a painter in oil. For the third
he employed pastel.
That, putting it briefly, was the course of his
work. What was the course of his life apart from
work? the course, I mean, of that second life of
the artist in painting or literature which is separate
from his production, yet must affect it so much ?
How about the people who were nearest to him ?
those whose society gave him his pleasure or with-
held it ? Chardin was twice married. While he
was still engaged in the struggles of his youth,
before his position was assured, he met a young
girl, Marguerite Saintar, at some modest merry-
making, where his parents had planned that he
should find her. Whether or not he knew of their
aims, his own wishes seemed to have been at one
with theirs. He liked Marguerite Saintar, who
liked him in return. The attachment appears
indeed to have been so mutual that in their loves
there was no place for the proverb of the ' one who
kisses ' and ' the other who holds out the cheek.'
176 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
In 1728, Chardin being twenty-nine, he was
received into the Academy, and by 1731 he was
permitted to marry the young woman to whom he
was devoted. She was still but twenty-two, but
in the few years that they had waited, their posi-
tions had a good deal changed. Chardin had
won a reputation to which already a certain modest
money value was attached, and the girl had lost
her small fortune. The painter's father was now
opposed to the marriage, but his objections were
overcome. The couple were wedded for but four
years. Their only child, a son, remained to Chardin,
when his wife died, after a time of union troubled
as to outward matters, and which, in the wife's
declining health, it must have needed either satisfied
love or a happy temperament to make even fairly
bright. Chardin's was a temperament of calm
the shrewd smiling face, painted by himself when
he was seventy years old, shows him yet elastic and
vivacious.
At forty-five it was nine years after the close
of the first domestic episode Chardin married a
second time. Still in the parish of St. Sulpice, to
which from his youth he had been constant, he
wedded a youngish widow, Franchise Marguerite
Pouget. Later, he was to paint, in her agreeable
CHARDIN 177
features, a ' reve de femme et la philosophic de ses
quarante ans.' She bore him company during the
rest of his life, from the days of his eminence to the
days when fame forsook him. On the whole he
was fortunate. He worked so slowly and deliberately
that it would not have been easy for his paint-
ing to have made him rich, but he had no un-
satisfied ambitions, and he enjoyed his art and
his home and his assured friendships. No utterly
disabling blow fell on him till he had entered
upon his later years. Then his son died, who had
been in a measure his pupil and follower. The
remembrance of this, and his own gathering age, and
the neglect of his art, affected him in the end, and
he was a martyr to the disease which caused Bishop
Butler, who himself suffered from it, to say that the
keenest physical pleasure in life was the cessation
of pain. In the last days dropsy followed upon
stone. On the 6th of December 1779, Doyen wrote
to a familiar friend of Chardin's, M. Desfriches
'Madame Chardin begs me to inform you of her
situation, which is very pitiable.' The last sacrament
had been given to the aged painter. ' M. Chardin
a regu le bon Dieu.' ' He is in a state of exhaustion
which causes the greatest anxiety.' Later in the
day he died.
M
i;8 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
The placid and agreeable cheerfulness of Chardin's
temperament affords some key to the things which
his art chose, and the things which it left aside.
Contentment with the daily round, and with the
common lot, alone could have allowed him to con-
fine the subject of his work within the limits of a
narrow experience. He painted what he saw, and
he saw the bourgeoisie, nor was he anxious to extend
the field of his vision. He is the artist of 'Le
B6ne'diciteY of ' La Mere Laborieuse,' of c L'liconome,'
of ' La Bonne Education ' that is, he is the painter