m & g*? $r CATALOGUE THE FRENCH AND DUTCH ROMANTICISTS THE DOWDESWELL GALLERIES 1889 FRENCH and DUTCH ROMANTICISTS UNDER THE DIRECTION OF MESSRS. DOWDESWELL & DOWDESWELLS AND MESSRS. BUCK AND REID Edinburgh : T. Sr> A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty. CATALOGUE OF A LOAN COLLECTION OF PICTURES BY THE GREAT FRENCH and DUTCH ROMANTICISTS OF THIS CENTURY WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES OF THE ARTISTS BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY APRIL AND MAY 1889 THE DOWDESWELL GALLERIES 160 NEW, BOND STREET, LONDON Under Revision • -« From the Library of ^6> INTRODUCTION XIII of nature, and of art nought but the dry bones. Then, of a sudden, all was changed. Gericault had known England and Turner face to face ; Bonington was himself an Englishman ; the first journey of Delacroix was to the London of Lawrence and Wilkie ; and it is like enough that had this not been the case — had English influence been un- available — romanticism in historical and anecdotic painting would have been a dif- ferent thing from what it was. This, at any rate, is true of landscape. At the Salon of 1824 there were exhibited side by side with the mannered and theatrical prestance of Lawrence and the half-hearted originality of Copley Fielding, some specimens of the robust and resolute individuality of John Constable (1776-1837), and from that time forward landscape had a future. Delacroix had, as I have hinted, to depend in point of genius on himself and Bonington alone. Constable had but to be seen to be accepted by the flower of the young men of his time : by Cabat and Roqueplan and Camille Flers ; by Paul Huet and Gabriel Isabey xiv INTRODUCTION and Jules Dupre ; by Diaz and Rousseau, and Daubigny and Troyon ; and, finally, by Millet and Corot. He had taken up the Dutch convention where Hobbima and Ruysdael had left it, and had carried it as far forward as he could. And Marilhat, and Delacroix, and Decamps discovered and formulated the painter’s East. And Troyon invented a view of landscape in relation to cattle. And Diaz and Daubigny showed, each after his kind, that there were capaci- ties in nature not dreamed of till themselves. And Rousseau, the great experimentalist, took up the Englishman’s mantle, and ex- perimented upon a vaster scale and with materials far more varied and suggestive. And Millet saw and demonstrated that, viewed in connection with the requirements and concessions of nature, Man, however pitiful and unbeautiful in fact, may be heroic in sentiment and effect. And Corot, work- ing slowly toward an end none other had conceived of, and realising that Constable was great, but Claude was greater, contrived an intermarriage of the essentials of classi- INTRODUCTION xv cism with the suggestions of the new de- parture, and so achieved a consummation in landscape the like of which has not before, nor since, been seen of man. III. It is in landscape, too, that romanticism is still most potent and most satisfying. M. Gerome is found eclecticising between Ingres and Couture, while M. Meissonier has new- minted the rough but admirable coinage of Delacroix in (as it were) a form approved of by the Bank of France, and M. Roybet scatters in silver the change of M. Meis- sonier’s napoleons and ten-franc pieces. In landscape it is far otherwise. The Dutch have failed to develop an Oxford Graduate ; but, even as ourselves, they have had to read their Constable in a French transla- tion. The result is the achievements of Heeren Israels and Jacobus and Matthys Maris : — as some think, the best that is just nqw to be got in paint. W. E. H. Messrs. Buck & Reid, and Messrs. Dowdes- well & Dowdeswells, beg to return their best thanks to the following gentlemen who have so liberally contributed from their collections : — R. T. HAMILTON BRUCE, Esq. The Hon. Mr. JUSTICE DAY. JAMES DONALD, Esq. ELLIS ELIAS, Esq. J. S. FORBES, Esq. ANTONY GIBBS, Esq. R. K. HODGSON, Esq. CONSTANTINE A. IONIDES, Esq. ALEXANDER MUIR, Esq. HUMPHRY WARD, Esq. JOHN FORBES WHITE, Esq. ALEXANDER YOUNG, Esq. ETC. CONTENTS Introduction, Contributors, Bosboom, Breton, . Corot, . Courbet, Daubigny, . Delacroix, . Diaz, Dupre, . Gisrome, . Hervier, Ingres, . Israels, . Jacque, . Maris, Jacobus, . PAGE 45 Maris, Matthys, 5i Maris, Willem, . 44 Mauve, . 42 Meissonier, . 61 Mesdag, . 50 Michel, . 29 Millet, . 18 Monticell . 31 Roelofs, 41 Rousseau, 15 Roybet, . 28 Troyon, . 13 Van Marcke, 57 Vollon, 55 PAGE vii xvi 48 53 6 33 10 25 3 22 64 24 59 38 36 INTRODUCTION. N my Memorial Catalogue of the French and Dutch Loan Collec- tion , Edinburgh International Exhibition , 1886 (Edinburgh : Douglas), I have treated at length of the causes and effects of Romanticism — the movement in art, that is to say, of which 1830 is accepted as the golden year; and I take this present opportunity to repair an error of omission by remarking that Romanticism had nothing special to do with romance. It was simply the recurrence in a certain direction of the phenomenon which in David’s time was called Classicism, which was last week known as Realism, which was Naturalism’ yesterday, and is full of meaning as Impressionism to-day. In other words, it was a revolt from the dictates of a hide- INTRODUCTION viii bound, superannuated convention, and in that way an effort to realise new ideals, experiment with new methods, and discover and collect a set of new materials. I. One of the original romantiques was Napoleon, whose campaigns have much the same relation to those of Frederick as the verse of Hugo has to the verse of Voltaire ; and it was in the France of the Empire that romanticism, alike in music and literature and painting, began to be. In this place we are only concerned with the last of the three, and it will be enough to say that for the last years of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth centuries French painting was Louis David (1748-1825) — was ‘classic,’ that is, to a degree in these days hard to understand. The chief painters were David’s own pupils, or were those of his imitators and admirers; and in land- scape and history and portraiture the one convention that obtained was the convention INTRODUCTION IX — hard in form, cold in colour, Plutarchian in sentiment, frigid in ambition and effect — for which he was responsible. The first to sound another than the popular note was Gros (1771-1835), who ventured in the Pestiferes de Jaffa of 1804 to paint a lazar- house with some concern for reality, and in the Aboukir of 1806 and the Eylau of 1809 was bold enough to give some notion of the living looks of war. He was afterwards to deny his work and desert to the enemy — all at David’s solicitation ; but the effect of these experiments was irreparable. Ten years after the Eylau , Gericault (1791-1824) exhibited the Radeau de la Meduse ; and four years after that came the first Salon of Delacroix (1799-1864) — the Salon of the Dante et Virgile — and what had seemed a revolt was seen to be a revolution. It was, however, a revolution not so much in subject as in treatment. The so-called classics were as romantic in the incidents they dealt with, and the situations they selected, as the so-called romantiques : in that respect there is little to choose between INTRODUCTION the CEdipe of Ingres and the Croises a Constantinople of his rival, and the balance is not in favour of Delacroix. The change that was operated was in another direction. It was recognised that Rubens and Rembrandt were as exemplary in their way as Raphael in his; it was seen that colour was an even stricter necessary in painting than line ; it was felt that to represent the form and energy of the human figure in such terms as to suggest the presence of so much statuary in the flat was not inevitably the purpose of a picture, but that paint is the antithesis of sculpture, and sculpture the natural enemy of paint ; it was discovered that the por- traiture of passion is legitimate, that drapery is as pictorial as the heroic nude, that it is lawful to see with one’s own eyes and think with one’s own brain, and that the world at large is a far richer, vaster, likelier magazine of facts and suggestions than the History of Rome , or the lyrics of Anacreon, or the plays of Sophocles ; and under the breath of this novel inspiration the art was INTRODUCTION xi re-created so that it flourished anew. Dela- croix, who holds in painting the place which is held by Berlioz in music and Hugo and Dumas in poetry and drama, was only one of many. He was backed from the first by Bonington (1801-1828), who was probably a man of genius, and by Delaroche (1783- 1856), Decamps (1803-1860), Boulanger (1806-1869), Eugene Deveria (1805-1865), and Ary Scheffer (1795-1858), to name but these, who assuredly were men of talent ; and by some of them he was surpassed in popularity. The old order long remained official ; but the convention by whose virtue it had been a ruling influence was as completely dissipated as the convention of Boucher and Watteau which had vanished before itself. II. It was not, however, in history and genre , but in another province of pictorial art, that the great battle of romanticism was to be fought, and the most convincing triumphs INTRODUCTION xii to be won. In landscape the influence of Valenciennes (1750-1819) was even more blighting than that of David elsewhere. The etiquette (as it were) of the Roman School — the school of Claude and the Poussins : one of the great schools of the world — had been improved upon, developed, codified, until nature had ceased to count, and dramatic incident, presented according to the require- ments of an austere and pedantic formula — was accepted as the be-all and end-all of art. Rubens and Rembrandt — the painters, that is, of The Chateau Stem and The Mill — were ruled out of court ; the example of Claude himself existed but to be misrepre- sented and misapplied ; the scenic element in Watteau — so pre-eminently artistic in form and suggestiveness and quality of paint — had gone the way of Pierrot and Columbine ; such sporadic essays in pro- testation as those of Lantara (1729-1778) and Georges Michel (1763-1844) were ignored; there was room for nothing but the pictorial geometries of Valenciennes and his following, in which there was no touch BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND CATALOGUE NARCISSE-VIRGILIO DIAZ DE LA PENA. Born 1808. Died 1876. IAZ was a Spaniard born at Bordeaux. Orphaned at ten, and maimed of a leg at fifteen, he took to china-painting for a living, but studied in Souchon’s studio, and imitated Delacroix the while in oils, until he was, in 1831, admitted to the Salon. For many years he remained a copyist and a drudge, painting whatever would take the public — portraits, flowers, landscapes, battle-pieces, naked girls — and selling his work for whatever it would bring. But in 1836 he began to work with Rousseau in Fontainebleau Forest, and from that time his advance was steady enough. He won Third, Second, and First Class Medals in 1844, 1846, and 1851 ; and in 1859 he ex- hibited for the last time. Next year he lost 4 DIAZ his son, like himself a landscape-painter and a pupil of Rousseau ; and from this time forward it is told of him that he became the slave of his only daughter. There are a great many bad examples of Diaz in the market, and there are a great many forgeries as well ; and it is to the painter’s desire to gratify this lady’s whims that a goodly number of both are ascribed. In this cause (it is said) he was content not only to paint for money without much reference to art, but also to acknowledge as his own a vast deal of stuff in which there is nothing of him but his signature. Fancy, colour, charm — these are his master- qualities. At his highest, his colour is magi- cally rich and full, and his handling at once vigorous and delicate ; ‘ personne,’ says M. Jules Dupre, ‘n’a compris mieux que lui la magie, et pour ainsi dire la folie, du soleil dans les feuilles et les sous-bois ’ ; and, many and varied as were the influences he underwent, it may fairly be said of him that his best is no- body’s but his own, and that he created such a world of lovely fact and delightful fiction as exists nowhere save in his art alone. DIAZ 5 1. The Fortune-Teller. 2. Fontainebleau — Pool in Foreground. 3. Women Weeding. 4. Venus and Cupids. 5. The Bather. 6. Flower-piece. 7. Cupid and Adonis. 8. Fontainebleau. 9. Eastern Garden and Figures. 10. Dogs. 11. Mother and Child, with Dog. 12. Landscape — Early Spring. 13. Dogs and Hawk. 14. Eastern Castle and Figures. 15. Bathers. 16. Landscape. 1 7. Figures and Dog. 18. Wood-gatherer with Dog. 19. Landscape with Stormy Sky. 20. Children on the Banks of a Lake. 21. Les Abandonnees. 22. Sunset — The Fisherman. JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT. Born 1796. Died 1875. OROT, who was born at Paris, was the son of a draper, and followed his father’s calling till he was twenty-six years old. But the painting impulse was not thus to be appeased, and at last he got leave to go and do as he would. He worked a little in the studios of Michallon and Victor Bertin, and a great deal in the open air, in Italy with Caruelle d’Aligny called ‘l’Ingres des arbres,’ and by himself in France — at Ville d’Avray, and along the Seine, and in the Forest of Fontainebleau ; and for many years, although from 1827 on- wards his appearance at the Salon was in- evitable, he made so little way, and won so little reputation, that he was a man of forty when he sold his first picture. All the while, however, he was perfecting a method, evolving COROT 7 an ideal, and developing a style ; and at last the revelation came, and it was seen that his work was the nearest perfection of anything achieved in landscape since the golden age of Claude. It was his, indeed, to apply to the new facts observed and recorded by Constable and his following, the essential principles — of elegance in line, dignity of mass, rhythmic balance of parts, simplicity and selectness in effect, and distinction of style — of Roman landscape, and in this way to operate the fusion of the lasting and important elements of the two great schools. He is the most classic of realists and the most realistic among classics, and his art is therefore a culmination. And withal he re- mains himself. He is always Corot, and Corot, as I have said elsewhere, is a personality as rare, exquisite, and charming as ever found expression in art. He painted, says Jules Dupre, ‘ pour ainsi dire avec des ailes dans le dos ’ ; and the fact is that his loosest work is touched with not only the magic of supreme accomplishment, but a sense of the unseen as well. A good Corot is the practice of Virgil and the naturel of Mozart — the perfect mar- riage of spirit and style. 8 COROT In his latter years his mastery was so habitual that he was able to paint and finish direct from nature, composing and selecting as he went along. His official successes were few ; he was never an Academician, and he was twice refused the M^daille du Salon, once to the pro- fit of Cabanel, and again to that of M. Gerome. But his individual quality was proof against success and against failure. He remained the king of good fellows as well as the prince of painters ; and he died, in the same year with Millet and Barye, in a blaze of friendship and authority and fame. 23. The Lake. 24. Landscape, with Figures and Boat (an early work). 25. The Woodcutters. 26. The Ferry-boat. 27. At the Well. 28. Man in a Punt ; Woman and Cow under Trees. 29. Cows in a Stream. 30. Upright Landscape ; Castle in Distance. COROT 9 31. The Fisherman. 32. Lake, with Cows. 33. The Village. 34. Canal and Buildings. 35. An Evening in Arcadia. 36. Coucher de Soleil. 37. Woman and Child on the Banks of a Lake. 38. The Lake. 39. Le Coup de Vent. 40. Solitude. 41. Houses by a River. 42. The Port. 43. Landscape and Figures ; Bridge in Distance. 44. Birches. 45. Joinville-sur-Marne. CHARLES-FRANfOIS DAUBIGNY. Born 1817. Died 1878. HE son of one landscape-painter and the father of another, Fran- gois Daubigny, who was Paris- born, began by decorating box- lids and clock-cases. He was yet in his teens, however, when he went to Italy, and there, for something like a year, he prepared himself for his true vocation by painting the country round Naples and Florence and Rome. On his return, he worked with Granet and Delaroche, and in 1838 appeared for the first time at the Salon ; he did a good deal in etching, original and reproductive both ; he was medalled (Second Class) at the Salon of 1848, and again (First Class) at that of 1853; and, having thus won recognition as a master, he grew in reputation till the end. Mr. Hamerton has distinguished the ‘intimate DAUBIGNY ii affection’ and the ‘simple devotion’ he be- stowed upon his favourite river, and has noted the completeness of his reward. It is a fact that in his better work these qualities are de- lightfully apparent : that what I have elsewhere described 1 as ‘ the sanity and contentment of his regard for nature ’ — that ‘ innocent and grateful confidence as of a happy and not too masterful husband ’ — is peculiar to his art. It is a fact, too, that he was a colourist ; that he had elegance, refinement, grace ; that not only had his brushwork the characteristic of distinction, but that, as revealed in some of his bigger sketches, he was capable of effects in craftsmanship of singular breadth, vigour, and impressiveness. All the same, it is in- dubitable that a bad Daubigny is not a good picture, and that of bad Daubignys in the world there are enough and to spare. 46. On the Thames. 47. Women Washing in the River. 48. Les Grenouilles. 1 Memorial Catalogue , Edinburgh. / 12 DAUBIGNY 49. Sunset. 50. River and Ducks. 51. Stormy Sunset. 52. Sunset at Sea. 53. The Seaweed Harvest. 54. View of a Town and Bridge. 55. Buildings and Figures. 56. On the Seine. 57. Moonrise. 58. The Village Spire. 59. Banks of the Oise. 60. The Storks’ Retreat. 61. Banks of the Oise. 62. The Fisherman. 63. Moonlight. 64. Figures Washing in a Stream. 65. Sunset. CONSTANT TROYON. Born 1810. Died 1863. ROYON, like all artists who have \ been successful as well as great, has left a vast amount of work unworthy of his reputation and himself. At his highest, how- ever, he is a painter whose brush work suggests Velasquez, a magnificent colourist, a master in landscape, and in the portraiture of cattle in relation to their environment of air and light perhaps the greatest artist the world has yet seen. He was born at Sevres, and his beginnings — as was the case of Cabat, Raffet, Diaz, Dupre — were those of the painter on china. His first master was a certain Poupart, a pupil of the respectable Bertin ; his second was the land- scape-painter Camille Roqueplan, a romantique a tons crins (as they said in those days). Partly by precept, and partly by the example 14 TROYON of such men as Diaz and Huet and Dupre, Roqueplan converted his scholar to his own way of looking at nature and thinking in art ; and Troyon, who began in landscape pure and simple, was soon conspicuous for his violence in colour, the truculence of his method, his excesses in paint. But in 1846, or thereabouts, he went to Holland, and onwards from 1848 he was the Troyon — the great animalier — we know. He was five times medalled — thrice in the First Class ; he produced, and sold, and lived, at a tremendous rate ; he died, at fifty- three, having exhausted art and life. He is the anti-sentimentalist in paint. His effects are largely generalised ; his scenery is neither here nor there ; his cows and sheep are neither so much butcher-meat in posse, nor so much character on four legs in esse. His genius was nothing if not pictorial ; and while his worst work is still painting, his best is admirable art. 66. Sheep on Downs. 67. La Bergere. 68. The Lane. 69. Ducks in Water. 70. At the Well. THEODORE ROUSSEAU. Born 1812. Died 1867. HE son of a Paris tailor, Rousseau was a pupil, first of his mother’s cousin, the landscape-painter Pau de Saint-Martin, next of the classic Remond, and between whiles of Guillon-Lethi&re. With Remond, however, he was soon at open strife, and before he was twenty he started as a painter on his own account, by going off to sketch in Auvergne. He was imperfectly educated, and his results were worth little ; but the year of his return to Paris was 1831, romanticism seemed triumphant all along the line, he was received as a rebel from Remond and all his gods deserved, and for a time all went well enough. He exhibited at four successive Salons, and at the third of them (1834) he appears to have been medalled. Then came the famous i6 ROUSSEAU exhibition of 1836, from which the classics, being resolved upon a last stand, extruded their antagonists by the dozen. Rousseau * suffered with Delacroix and Barye and the rest, and for thirteen years the Salon knew him no more. He was melancholy, suspicious, very self- conscious, resentful, and vain ; and though the best in France were his friends and supporters, there can be no doubt that he suffered keenly. But he painted steadily on, now in this province, now in that ; and at last his time came. He was medalled (First Class) in 1849 >' * n 1852 he received the riband of the Legion ; in 1855 he was making money enough to be able to buy a Millet for 4000 francs ; in 1866 he could afford to treat himself to 30,000 francs’ worth of old prints and Japanese drawings ; in 1867 he was President of the Jury in the Painting Section of the Exposition Universelle, and was awarded one of the four Medals of Honour. What he wanted, however, and what he looked to have received, was his officer’s cross ; and, failing to get it, he seems to have literally fretted himself to death. The tendency of his art was largely experi- mental. He was insatiable of novelty, and he ROUSSEAU 1 7 painted every sort of scenery and every kind of effect ; but his grasp was incomplete and his method tentative, and it was only now and then that his success was absolute, while his failure was often conspicuous. Still, he was always a painter, and when he fulfilled himself, he was large in method, superb in colour, potent in expression, majestic in style, and in imagination original, affecting, and sincere. 71. The Road across the Heath. 72. The Plain of Barbizon. 73. The Rift in the Cloud. 74. Sunset. 75. The Bridge. 76. The Old Oak. 77. A View in Italy. 78. Figures and Cows in a Landscape. 79. Sunset. B JEAN-FRANqOIS MILLET. Born 1814. Died 1875. HE painter of le Semeur was reared and schooled at Gruchy, the Norman hamlet where he was born. He was the son of many generations of peasants, and he worked on his father’s holding till, at twenty, he was sent to Cherbourg, where he drew and painted with a certain Langlois, and whence he presently departed — with a pension from the Municipality — for Paris and the studio of Delaroche. This was in 1833, and for the next seven years he starved as best he could, till in 1840 he returned to Cherbourg and there got married. Next year he was back in Paris, painting for a living idylls, half pagan Greek and half modern Norman — as it were the motives and effects of Theocritus in the dialect of Burns — and enduring a penury that, if too MILLET 19 much has been made of it, was yet exception- ally discouraging and severe ; and in 1845, his first wife having died, he went to Havre, where he married again, and lived for a time by painting portraits. Then came his last sojourn in Paris, whence he removed in 1849 to Bar- bizon, the village in the Forest of Fontainebleau with which his name and fame are inseparably associated. By this time he was already ‘ Millet le rustique,’ and his work had come to be remarkable and debatable ; but for a long while he was not much the better — he was none the less above the necessity of borrowing a five-pound note — for that. He was medalled in 1853 and 1861, and in 1867 he gained a First Class distinction at the Exposition Universelle, and therewith the red riband. After this his circumstances mended, and his work found buyers ; but he continued to be a poverty- stricken kind of person, and after his death the State believed it to be incumbent upon it to pension his widow. By this time, however, Millet was something more than a name ; and the contents of his studio were sold by auction for something like ,£12,000. In his early work — produced under such varying pictorial influences as Correggio and 20 MILLET Rembrandt and Rubens and Diaz — Millet was a painter pure and simple, rich in colour, robust in handling, and frankly sensuous in aim. But from 1848, the year of la Vanne , his method and ambition changed, and he became so intent upon the expression of poetry in paint, that he sometimes preferred his ideas to his material — that he sometimes ^materialised his ideas — and suggested mys- tery instead of realising beauty. In other words, he was haunted by the ghost of Michel- angelo, and grew careless of paint in pro- portion as he grew curious in poetry. He knew nothing of Wordsworth, or he might fairly be described as Wordsworth’s greatest work, for his theme — which is Man in Nature — was Words- worth’s own, and he treats it now and then as Wordsworth did, with an almost parsonical regard for its spiritual potentialities, and an in- difference to its technical requirements that is not far short of being inartistic. The conse- quence is that, for all his magnificent endow- ment, the completest artist of the century is still Corot, but that his remains the greatest intellectual and emotional force that has sought, and partly found, expression in paint since the death of Rembrandt. MILLET 21 80. Greville. 81. Allant Travailler. 82. Cows and Figures under Trees. 83. The Shepherdess. 84. La Bergere. 85. The Wood -Sawyers. 1 86. La Bergere (Reverie). 87. L’Amour Vainqueur. 1 An Etching of this Picture, by William Hole, R.S.A., is in progress for Messrs. Dowdeswell. JULES DUPRE. Born, i8ii, at Nantes. HE son of a Nantais potter, M. Dupre began by painting china. He next became a pupil of the younger Diebold, and in due course appeared at the Salon. He was decore in 1849, and was the recipient of Second Class Medals at the Salon of 1833 and the Exposition Universelle of 1867. But he has his own ideas about publicity ; and these many years past he has painted — and talked — as though there were no such things as ex- hibitions in the world. He was probably the least of the great school of whom he and MM. Jacque and Ziem are the only living representatives ; but he is stronger than most of their successors, and he is all the stronger for the complete intelligence and conviction with which, in a time of experiment, DUPRE 23 he has maintained the distinction between art and nature. He has colour, drawing, handling, treatment ; he has seen and studied a great variety of facts ; and his results are synthesised in true pictorial terms. He was always the friend and champion of Rousseau, but his achievement, even when it is experimental, is always art. 88. The Farm-House. 89. Cows on the Heath. 90. The Homestead. 91. The Fisherman. 92. Stormy Sunset. 93. Cows in Water. 94. Marine — Sunset. 95. Cows in Water. 96. Cows in Water under Trees. ADOLPHE-LOUIS HERVIER. Born 1827. Died 1879. OTHING is known of Hervier except that he was born in Paris ; was a pupil of Eugene Isabey; first exhibited in 1849; produced with equal facility in oils and water-colours and etching ; was twenty- three times refused by the Salon Jury; and died after a life of hardship and ‘ strong travailling,’ not more than ten years ago. His work is entirely unknown to me ; but Gautier, writing in 1856, describes him as a landscape-painter ‘d’un talent original, persd- verant et serieux,’ and confesses that to him Hervier seemed not much, if at all, inferior to Theodore Rousseau, while M. Ph. Burty has written of him with genuine admiration. Also? there is now a good demand for his work, as there is for that of Georges Michel, whose fate had much in common with his own. 97. Interior of a Church. 98. Chickens. FERDINAND-VICTOR-EUGENE DELACROIX. Bohn 1799. Died 1864. O many Frenchmen the greatest painter of the century is not Corot, but Delacroix. The opinion is scarce like to be lasting ; but, be that as it may, there can be no question that the latter master has wielded an influence, and provided an ex- ample, that place him with the foremost of the makers of modern France. He was the son of a dignitary of the Re- public and the First Empire, and, like Corot and Rousseau and Daubigny, was a child of Paris. He drew from his earliest years, and, after working for a while under his uncle Riesener, the miniature-painter, and in the studio of the classic Guerin, he painted that Dante et Virgile which was the picture of 1823. Other influences were Gericault, Bonington, Paul Huet, Barye, Constable (under which last 26 DELACROIX he is said to have completely repainted his Massacre de Scio ), and Rubens ; while in 1825 he visited England, with Bonington and Isabey, and there knew Lawrence and Wilkie, made the acquaintance of Weber pure of Castil-Blaze, and saw Kean in Othello . In 1830, having meanwhile produced the Marino Faliero , the Christ au Jar din, and the inspired le Vingt-huit Juillet , he journeyed to Morocco, and in 1838 he went the round of Flanders. From the first he was saluted as one of the hopes of roman- ticism, and as early as 1833 he was pro- claimed the foremost painter of his time. But he had the classics against him always ; he was more than once refused admission to the Salon ; he sold with a certain difficulty, and for insignificant prices ; had it not been that Thiers admired his art, and gave him work for the State, he must have fared but poorly. It was not until the Exposition Universelle of 1855 that his genius was fully recognised, and it was only in 1859 that, after several repulses, he was admitted to the Institute. His last Salon was that of i860; and there were plenty to abuse and to deny him even then. He has always been a favourite with literary men, and it is not to be gainsaid that he found DELACROIX 27 in literature a fruitful source of inspiration. But he was one to whom it was impossible to think in other than pictorial terms, and to whom, while the aim of art is the expression of passion, the medium of art is inevitably paint. Rich, personal, robust, his colour is always vital to his ideas ; his drawing, incorrect though it be, is pregnant with energy and life ; he was a prodigy of inventiveness and the capacity of treatment. I have said 1 that what he did ‘ was to express the spirit, the tendencies, the ideals, the passions, the weaknesses of a new age in terms so novel and forcible as to be absolutely appropriate/ and that, as I believe, ‘ the violence, the brutality, the insincerity and bad taste ’ which some have found in his work are ‘ not specially his,’ but 1 were inherent in the movement ’ of which he was at once a master and a slave ; and to this I shall add nothing here and now. 99. The Good Samaritan. 100. The Barque of Don Juan. 1 Memorial Catalogue , Edinburgh. FERDINAND ROYBET. Born, 1849, at Uzfes. ROYBET began in etching, which art he learned of Vibert at Lyons, in which he was medalled at the Salon of 1866, and which he now professes, in Vibert’s place. At the time of his award, how- ever, he had taken to painting, and it is alto- gether as a painter that he is now known and admired. He is a very clever craftsman : ‘a sort of Meissonier on a large scale.’ His compositions are spirited, his colour is vigorous if a little garish ; ‘his inspiration is mainly literary and anecdotic, but his treatment is often pictorial.’ 1 He is perhaps less popular in France than in the United States. 101. Boy and Parrot. 1 Memorial Catalogue , Edinburgh. * GEORGES MICHEL. Born 1763. Died 1848. LL that need here be said of Michel’s life is that he was the son of a market-porter ; was born in Paris ; was ap- prenticed to the painter Leduc ; was twice married ; and died, at a green old age, unrecognised and in fairly easy circum- stances. His place in French art is peculiar. At a time when the classic convention was at its most triumphant, he was painting from nature in the plain of Montmartre, intent upon realising a conception of art adapted from, and largely inspired by, the work of Ruysdael and Hob- bima. He was, indeed, a ro7nantique before romanticism ; yet when romanticism came, and was seen, and conquered, it passed him by as though he had not been. 3 ° MICHEL His handling is seldom strong, his modelling is often primitive and naive ; but his colour — whose scheme is one of low blues and browns — is sometimes almost personal, and is nearly always decorative, and his simple portraitures of nature are touched with an imaginative quality that, conjoined with the sound con- vention of which he was a master, enables them to hold their own upon a wall against the good work of far greater men. 102. Figures on a Hill. 103. A River Scene. 104. Far and Near. 105. The Storm. ADOLPHE MONTICELLI. Born 1824. Died 1886. ONTICELLI was the son of a Marseilles gauger, and was grounded in art by the local master, who was a pupil of Ingres. In Paris, however, he succumbed to the influence, first of Delacroix, and then of Diaz (of whose work he is said to have been a skilled and determined forger) and was converted from a belief in line to the fanaticism of colour. Returning to Provence, he seems to have filled the Rhone Valley with legends about himself and with pictures the work of his hand ; but he was presently obliged to go again to Paris, where he sank so low that he had to hawk his works at street corners. He was driven south again by the advance of the German armies, and after crossing France on foot, he settled in his native city, and lived there by paint (at the rate of a twenty-franc picture a day) until he died there of drink. 32 MONTICELLI He remains responsible for a greater amount of worthless work than was ever before pro- duced by a man of equal genius ; but there were times when he was a distinguished craftsman as well as an unique and unrivalled colourist. It is true enough that he was so contemptuous of drawing, character, observation, nature, the constructive parts of art, that his achievement (‘painted music’ he called it) can scarce be said to be in touch with reality at all. But his colour sense was of extraordinary potency and range. They who have stamped them- selves colourists (a qualification as often and as recklessly misused as ‘ man of genius ’ itself), by their use of colour in its quieter and less positive form, are fewer than might be sup- posed ; but there is more than one of them, and Monticelli stands alone. He worked in the highest key with a certainty of inspiration and a brilliance of effect which are scarce to be paralleled in art ; and his magic meadows and enchanted gardens have but to be good to be unique. 106. The Ravine. 107. The Halt of the Hunting-party. 108. The Environs. 109. Fete Champetre. GUSTAVE COURBET. Born 1819. Died 1877. OURBET, who was the son of a peasant in the Doubs, was educated for a lawyer in the Seminary at Besangon, where he learned some drawing from a pupil of David, and whence he passed to Paris, and the studios of Steuben and Hesse. He painted much from nature, and was a devout student between whiles of the Flemings in the Louvre ; and it was not long before he began to be himself. The tide was setting strong for what was then called realism — the examination and assimilation, that is, of material omitted from romanticism ; and Courbet, who began at the Salon of 1 842, at that of 1850 contrived to identify himself with the movement by exhibiting, with several portraits and a Retour du Foire , the famous Casseurs de Pierres and the tremendous C 34 COURBET Enterrement d’Ornans. These demonstrations were followed by others in similar terms and to a similar purpose — the Baigneuses (1853), the Atelier du peintre (1855), the Combat des cerfs (1861), and so on to the Remise des chevreuils,iht notorious Sieste , and the Vague (1870) ; and as the painter was the most arrogant and sonorous of men, and each successive work was put for- ward as a challenge, alike to past and present, he was soon excluded from the exhibitions and proclaimed an outlaw. The position suited him perfectly ; and he maintained it with all the bluster of which he was capable (which is saying much) in politics and society and art. In 1871, having figured prominently in the Communistic revolt, he was heavily fined and got six months in jail. Broken in health and fortune and fame, he retired to Switzerland, and it was not until he had been some years in his grave that opinion changed, and there was any recognition of his immense merits. F rom the first he was a braggart, a pedant, and a vulgarian, and in the end he came to be something of a sot ; to a certain point he was a man of extreme intelligence, and beyond that a blundering and stupid egoist ; but he was, in the good sense of the word, a painter. COURBET 35 The temperament was magnificent, the eye and hand were worthy of it ; and had the brain been equal, Courbet would have been not merely a master craftsman, but a rare artist. As it was, he painted not with his hands alone. He believed himself to be wholly devoid of imagination, and he was dullard enough to be proud of the want ; but he had it in a measure all the same, and in combination with some other qualities of whose possession he was assured — as strength, insight, mastery of medium, breadth of vision and effect — it makes his good work almost great. no. The Rivulet. hi. LTmmensite. 112. Autumn. CHARLES JACQUE. Born 1813, at Paris. T was not until M. Jacque had figured as a lawyer’s clerk, as a map-maker’s assistant, and as a soldier in the line, that he began to live by the practice of art. He seems to have picked up the elements for himself, and to have fared ill enough for some years. In 1836 he was in London, drawing on the block and illustrating books, and two years after he was back in Paris and doing the same thing there. About this time he appears to have taken to etching, in which medium he has produced some four hundred plates, and been found worthy of three Third Class Medals. He was over thirty when he began to paint, and (being the friend and associate of Millet and Rousseau in their exile at Barbizon) it was a long time before he was officially recognised. JACQUE 37 He was, however, medalled (Third Class) in 1 86 1, 1863, and 1864, and he was decor 6 in 1867 ; so that, as he has been the most incon- stant of exhibitors, he is probably as successful as he has cared to be. It is like enough that M. Jacque has painted his last picture and etched his last plate, for he is very old, and of late has suffered cruelly in his eyes. This is the more to be regretted, as he has done quite excellent work. He has not the vision of Millet, nor the magic of Diaz, nor the magnificent energy and accomplish- ment of Troyon. But his landscape is that of a great school, while not only are his sheep and shepherds painted in an environment of air and light that is nothing if not modern, but also they bear their part ip effects of mystery and suggestions of romance peculiar to their author. 1 1 3. The Coming Storm. 1 14. Sheep under Trees. 1 1 5. The Shepherd. 1 16. Entering the Fold. The note upon JOSEF ISRAELS is under revision and will appear in future editions. 117. Waiting. 1 18. The Sailing Match. 1 19. The Family Meal. 120. The Day before the Departure. 12 1. Pickaback. 122. The Anxious Mother. 123. The Fisherman’s Wife. 124. The Drowned Fisherman. 125. The Fisherman’s Wife. 126. A Gleam of Sunshine. 127. The Sheepfold — Moonlight. M. ROELOFS. ROELOFS is, I believe, a Belgian ; but of the place and year of his birth I am not informed. He is a good painter himself, and has taught the technique of his art to many. His landscape is individual and interesting work, and may be studied with profit always, and sometimes with pleasure. 128. The Watering Place. 129. Landscape with Cowshed. 130. Landscape. 1 3 1. Landscape. 1 32. Landscape and Sheep. ANTON MAUVE. Born 1838. Died 1887. AUVE, who was born at Zaan- dam, was a pupil of Pieter Van Os ; was medalled at Paris, Antwerp, Philadelphia, Amster- dam, and Vienna ; was a Knight of the Order of Leopold, and a member of several Societies, native and foreign ; and was represented ere he died, in the Ryksmuseum, and at Rotterdam and the Hague. More- over, his pictures were so much liked that he had not always time to make them good ; so that he was obviously successful. To say that he was one of the heirs of the succession of Troyon, is to say that he was primarily a painter, and that his line was land- scape- with-cattle. He was a sound and ex- pressive draughtsman, a pleasing colourist. MAUVE 43 and a capital painter ; while his landscape was often remarkable, and his treatment of cattle is touched to dramatic issues of singular delicacy in taste and real subtlety in effect. 133. The Wood-Cart. 134. The Shepherdess. 135. Ploughing. 136. The Shepherdess. 137. On the Pleath. 138. Milking-time. 139. The Sheepfold. 140. Ploughing. 1 41. The Young Bull. 142. Returning to the Fold. 143: Girl leading Cows. 144. Marsh-lands. 145. The Shepherd. WILLEM MARIS. Born, 1844, AT THE Hague. HE youngest, and, so far, the least distinguished, of the brothers Maris, was trained in art in the city of his birth, where he has always lived, and whence (it seems) he is not likely to remove. He is called ‘the Silvery,’ and the epithet is good description. Like his brother James, he only paints his native Holland ; but, unlike him, he paints it commonly as a place of sunlight and haze. It is in the summer meadows near at hand that he finds the material of his choice ; and if his range be limited, his achievement — which is often touched with a certain distinction — is fraught with as it were a placid gaiety of inspiration and effect which has its charm. 146. Ducks. 147. The Shepherd. 148. Cows Drinking. 149. Cattle Drinking. 150. Milking-time. JACOBUS MARIS. Born, 1837, at the Hague. HE elder Maris, who was a painter by trade, came of a Magyar family long settled in Holland, but was Dutch by birth and training, and Dutch in his mar- riage and his whole career. His son Jacobus, the eldest of the three Maris brothers, began to draw while yet a school-boy, and was grounded in art at the Antwerp Academy. Proceeding in 1865 to Paris (where he stayed four years), he studied under Edmond Hebert, and at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1867, and was for some time a regular contributor ; but he was never medalled, and in France is more or less unknown. In London, though he has not, I believe, been seen at Burlington House, his reputation is already considerable. 46 JACOBUS MARIS He is by no means incapable of bad work ; but at its best his technical practice, both in water-colours and in oils, is masterly, and, as displayed in (for example) the modelling of his skies, is touched with a mingled subtlety and strength which is not to be paralleled in con- temporary art. His colour, while low in key and limited in range, is harmonious and really rich in quality ; his compositions, while rather original than elegant, are always pictorial. His art is naturalistic in the sense of resulting from a faculty of observation which is content with none save the closest intimacy with fact ; but it is essentially broad in treatment, digni- fied in style, and decorative in effect. It is small wonder, therefore, that the class of con- noisseurs to whom he is the greatest living artist in landscape is increasing year by year. 1 5 1. A Dutch Interior (an early picture). 152. Fishing-Boat at Anchor. 153. The Windmill. 154. Amsterdam. 155. Amsterdam, Bridge, etc. JACOBUS MARIS 47 1 56. Moonlight. 157. Dordrecht. 158. On the Beach. 159. On the Y, Amsterdam. 160. The Drawbridge, Amsterdam. 161. The Fisherman’s Home. 162. Amsterdam. 163. The Storm. 164. Amsterdam. 165. Church and Town. 166. At the Well. 167. Ploughing. 168. Towing-Path. 169. The Towing-Path. JOHANNES BOSBOOM. Born, 1817, at the Hague. OSBOOM learned the elements of his art from P. J. Van Bree, a pupil of Girodet ; has been twice medalled — at Paris in 1855, and at Philadelphia in 1876; is a Knight of several Orders, native and foreign ; and has produced a vast deal of work in water-colours and oils, of which a large proportion gives no notion at all of his peculiar talent and accomplishment. At first he was only careful and exact in ambition, and ‘tight,’ hard, and literal in fact. But his practice changed as his hand grew disciplined, and he learned to express himself in terms of exquisite sobriety, and with a singu- lar effect of distinction. Of human interest his art is utterly devoid : he is the painter of daylight, and especially of daylight in its BOSBOOM 49 relations to interior architecture — daylight roofed in and walled off from its original self. To him it is all-sufficient ; he finds romance in it, and mystery, and charm ; and his better work is only the portraiture of its varying aspects. His colour is personal and distinguished, his drawing expressive, his brushwork — above all in water-colours — of uncommon significance and skill ; and the drawings in which he has revealed himself are unique in art. 170. Interior of the Bakkenesse Kerk (Haarlem). 17 1. A Dutch Town. 172. Interior of a Cathedral. D HENDRIK WILLEM MESDAG. Born, 1831, at Groningen. ENDRIK MESDAG was born rich, and painted for amuse- ment only till he was thirty- five. Then he worked under M. Roelofs at Brussels, and with Mr. Alma Tadema here in London ; and since 1870 he has gained four medals (among them a First Glass at the Salon of 1887), and been made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. He has a real temperament, and his work is characterised by indubitable merits of senti- timent and observation and technique. He is perhaps as completely equipped a painter of seascapes as is now living ; and his results, which are always artistically got, are always pleasant to consider, if only for the breadth of treatment and simplicity of effect of which, nine times in ten, they are examples. 173. On the Beach. 174. The Return of the Fishing-Boats. MATTHYS MARIS. Born, 1839, at the Hague. ATTHYS MARIS was, like his greater brother, a student at Antwerp, and in Paris at the 9 Ecole des Beaux-Arts and under Hebert. It is understood that in old days he painted a good deal with Mr. Alma Tadema ; but the connection has left no mark upon his art, which, for all its rare accomplishment, is the personal expression of a strange and moving personality. In the beginning he was only a craftsman. But he presently began to be concerned with the spiritual shapes of things, and to view the body of life as no more than the suggestion and the shadow of the soul ; and since then his art has been imaginative in the good meaning of the word. His turn of mind is warped and melancholy, his sympathies are eccentric and 52 MATTHYS MARIS remote, his romance is little of this world ; but he has a magic of his own, and its potency — as of Heine in paint — is irresistibly affecting. Heer Israels has described his work as ‘the fine gold of Dutch painting’; but, with all his exquisite gift of colour, and his infallible sense of tone, it is too vexed as it were with individ- uality, and with what seems, and may very well be, mere whim, to appeal to more than the few. It is the materialisation of a spirit distorted with intensity, refined almost beyond humanity, peculiar enough to appear abnormal ; and, as he himself regards it as experimental, and is for ever busy with the invention of new devices and the quest of new possibilities, it is pretty certain that to the many the meaning of Heer Israels will remain inscrutable. 175. Washing-Day. 176. A Team of Oxen. 177. Feeding Chickens. 178. The Windmills. 179. He is coming ! 1 180. Starting for School. 1 An Etching of this Picture, by Mr. William Hole, R.S.A., is in progress for Messrs. Dowdeswell. JULES-ADOLPHE-AIME-LOUIS BRETON. Born, 1827, at CouRRifeREs. HE painter of la Glorieuse and j VAlouette is known to have j been long the pupil of both Drolling and Devigne, but he was so much more deeply in- debted to Millet than to either of these that he may fairly be described as one of Millet’s works. A constant exhibitor since 1855, he was medalled (Salon and Exposition Univer- selle) in 1855, 1857, 1859, 1861, and 1867 ; he gained the Medal of Honour in 1872 ; he received the riband of the Legion in 1861, and the cross in 1867 ; he published a volume of verse ( les Chatnps et la Mer) in 1872 ; he has been as frequently engraved, and has sold for sums as large, as any painter of his time. Like Millet he paints the figure in its relation 54 BRETON to landscape, and he paints it with a view to the pictorial expression of its innate signifi- cance and peculiar sentiment. But he has neither the strength nor the subtlety of his great exemplar : he is lacking alike in Millet’s dignity of style and in Millet’s consummate mastery of material and of fact. He is the poet in paint of the Breton feinme des champs , and his record of her aspects and her qualities is always a trifle emphatic in terms and a thought too sentimental in feeling and effect. It should be added that his intention is often grandiose, and that — while his colour is rather impersonal than not, and his handling not more than well educated and correct — his results are sometimes marked by real solemnity of emotion and propriety of utterance. 181. The Young Mother. 182. The Gleaner. 83. In Church. ANTOINE VOL LON. Born, 1833, at Lyons. VOLLON was first of all an engraver, and learned his art in the Academy at Lyons. But he soon took to painting, and, after a single reverse (at the Salon of 1864), he went on from triumph to triumph. He was medalled in 1865, and 1866, and 1869, and yet again (First Class) in 1878 ; in 1870 he gained the red riband with his famous Poissons de mer , and the cross in 1878 with his Casque de Henri Deux. Other notable achievements are the Chaudron of 1874, the Armures of 1875, the Cochon ecorche of 1876, the Courges of 1880, the Poteries of 1886, and the Port de la Joliette of last year. He is one of the very first among living craftsmen. His colour is living colour, the gusto of his brushwork is that of some good Old 5 6 VOLLON Master, his use of the material for the material’s sake is at once a lesson and a refreshment to the eye. He has painted man and he has painted landscape, both with signal success ; but it is in dealing with still life that he is most magnificently himself. His ambition is not imitation but expression. He takes his models less for themselves than for their envelopment ; and, in the presentation of fruits and flowers and armour, the results he achieves have somewhere been described as ‘des paysages d’interieur.’ He is as much (in other words) the painter of air and light, and an artist in the development of planes and the differentiation of values, as Corot or Jacobus Maris. 184. The Farm. 185. Still Life. EMILE VAN MARCKE. Born, 1829, at Sevres. AN MARCKE is a Fleming born in France, and reared in Flanders. It was from his father — who appears to have been employed at what is now the Manufacture Nationale — that he learned his rudiments, and it was at the Brussels Academy that he scored his first successes. Returning to S&vres, he married the daughter of a china-painter, and was himself attached to the Manufacture Imperiale from 1858 to 1864. In the end he became a pupil of Troyon, something of whose manner and style he caught, and whose subjects he has since affected. His first Salon was that of 1857 ; he was medalled at those of 1867, 1869, 1870, and again (First Class) at the Exposition Uni- verselle of 1878 ; of his kind and in his degree 58 MARCKE he is probably as successful — that is, as easily sold — a painter as the generation has seen. It is sometimes possible to mistake a third- rate Troyon for a good Van Marcke ; it is almost impossible to mistake a good Van Marcke for a good Troyon. It is a case of ‘ all can grow the flower, for all have got the seed.’ M. van Marcke is accomplished, inventive, observant ; also he is a painter, and the basis of his pictures is always an idea that can only be expressed in paint. But he is not even Troyon’s best work. 1 86. Cattle Resting. 187. Cows Drinking. 188. The White Cow. 189. La Falaise. 190. The Mill. 1 91. The Brown Cows. INGRES. Born 1787. Died 1867. NGRES was the son of a versa- tile and accomplished artist- of-all work, and was born at Montauban. He was a pupil, first of Roques, a friend and fellow-student of David, and next of David himself ; and it was his function to carry that ‘ studied mimicry of the antique ’ which David imposed upon the art of France to greater perfection than his master. In 1801 he gained the Prix de Rome, and, proceeding to the Villa Medicis in 1806, he remained there fourteen years, copying Ra- phael, studying the pictorial art recovered from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and producing largely on his own account. In 1824 he exhibited the Vceu de Louis XIII., and was received with acclamation as an exemplar of the classic principle and a captain of the classic host. For the rest of his life he was 6o INGRES the heroic anti-romantique ; he painted such masterpieces of their kind as the Bertin , the Cherubini , and the Apotheose d'Homere ; he had many pupils, and exercised unbounded authority. From 1834 to 1841 he was Director of the Ecole de Rome, but thereafter he made his home in Paris, where till the end he drew and painted and taught with unabated energy. ‘ David,’ said he, ‘ a dte le seul maitre de notre si£cle’; and the truth is, that without David and the Raphael of the Stanze the art of Ingres would not have been the art we know. In pencil, it is true, his draughtsman- ship is distinguished as well as consummate ; but in paint — a medium he appears to have considered as proper to reproduce the qualities and effects of sculpture — his achievement, for all its completeness upon certain lines, is not more than respectable. Feeling for material he has none ; his colour is cold and thin, and his brushwork only careful and exact. But he is still a living influence for good, for it is mainly to him that the French tradition of fine drawing and careful training is due. 192. L’Odalisque. 193. Henri iv. et son enfant. JEAN-LOUIS-ERNEST MEISSONIER. Born, 1815, at Lyons. EISSONIER is the type of the fortunate painter. A country drawing-master gave him his first lessons ; he worked for some months with Cogniet ; he sojourned a while in Rome ; he exhibited at nineteen, and at twenty or so he had painted the Joueurs dVchecs, and begun to be famous. He was awarded a Third-Class Medal in 1840, a Second-Class in 1841, a First-Class in 1846 and again in 1848, and the ‘Grande Medaille d’Honneur’ at the Exhibitions of 1855, 1867, and 1878 ; and he gained the riband in 1846, the cross in 1856, and in 1867 the star, of the Legion of Honour. In the Italian campaign he was attached to the Emperor’s staff, and he started with that potentate on the march that ended at Sedan. His pictures (which are 62 MEISSONIER innumerable) have all amazed the multitude, and some of them have commanded prices as in the dream of an opium-eating artist in finance. Nay, even spite itself has served him : for when Mrs. Mackay destroyed, with several circum- stances of indignity, the portrait M. Meissonier had painted of her, the profession made haste to repair the insult with a banquet of honour. Indeed, the felicity of his half-century (and more) of self-production may be fairly described as imperturbable. His merits are obvious : so obvious that no millionaire can go wrong with him. It has been said that he paints great pictures on tiny canvasses ; but to accept the proposition is surely to have an original conception of great- ness? Again, it is claimed for him that he is the heir of artists so various and so com- plete as Terburg and Mieris and Gerard Dow ; and again it has to be noted that these men painted the life they lived and knew, while M. Meissonier’s world is purely factitious — is indeed a last expression of that passion for strange suits which was a characteristic of romanticism. The truth is, M. Meissonier is French of the French : — French in his care for microscopic detail, French in his patient ME1SS0NIER 63 ingenuity and his conscientious disdain for what seems to him bad work, French in the neatness of his ambitions, French in the dry and somewhat impersonal quality of his colour, the deftness of his handiwork, the logical effect of his line, and the trim assur- ance of his effects. 1 II a mieux que personne le pittoresque de tout le monde 5 ; and that is why, in France and out of it, he seems the culmination we know. 194. Le Voyageur. JEAN-LEON g£r6mE. Born, 1824, at VEsoul. G£ROME, who is the son of a goldsmith, was for many years the favourite pupil of Paul Delaroche, with whom he painted in Italy in 1844-45. His first Salon was that of 1847 ; he won a Second Class Medal in 1847 ; in 1855 he went painting in Turkey; in 1855 he won another Second Class Medal ; in 1856 he journeyed through Egypt ; he was made Professor of Paint- ing at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts in 1863; he succeeded Heim at the Institute in 1865 ; in 1865 he received the Order of the Red Eagle; he was awarded First Class Medals (with the red riband) in 1867 (Exposition Universelle) and 1874 (Salon). There is no painter of these times, indeed, whose work is better known, or has been more liberally rewarded. GEROME 65 In colour, draughtsmanship, the technique of art, M. Gerome is the type of the Complete Academician. To such as take their cue from Velasquez and Rembrandt he is only (as some one said of some one else) ‘a man of letters who has deviated into paint * ; but even they are fain to acknowledge his wonderful clever- ness, to accept his advice in archaeology and his inventions in character and incident, and to admit that, if what ought to be expressed in words is, ipso facto , appropriate to expression in pigment, then is M. Gdrome beyond dispute a painter. 195. Rex tibicen. EDINBURGH T. & A. CONSTABLE Printers to Her Majesty l 1 -// fa C GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE 3 3125 01378 2137 •• V