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THE
MIRR0R OF ART
Critical Studies By BAUDELAIRE
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\ DOUBLEDAY
ANCHOR BOOK
Ullje (gift Df
Eugene E, Grissom
J^INc ARTS
THE MIRROR OF ART
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The Mirror of Art
CRITICAL STUDIES BY
Charles Baudelaire
Translated and Edited
With Notes and Illustrations
By Jonathan Mayne
DOUBLEDAY ANCHOR BOOKS
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK, 1956
Charles Baudelaire was bom in Paris in 1821. Upon re- ceiving his degree in 1839 from the College Louis-le-Grand in Paris, he began his sensational literary career. After a life characterized by poverty, excesses, and controversy, he died in 1867.
Baudelaire first attracted public attention with two of his earliest writings on ait— The Salon of 1845 and The Salon of 1846. He wrote only one book of poetry, the famous Fleurs du mal (1857), whose successive revisions occupied him throughout his Hfe. He was also the translator of such works of Edgar AUan Poe as Histoires extraor- dinaires (1857) and Histoires grotesques et serieuses (1865).
Though The Mirror of Art is a title invented by Bau- delaire himself, the book, first published in 1955, is com- posed of excerpts from two collections of Baudelaire's art criticism which were not compiled imtil after his death. These are Curiosites esthetiques (1868) and VArt ro- mantique (1869).
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CONTENTS
Editor's Note and Acknowledgements vii
Editor's Introduction ix
Bibliographical Note xxiii
THE SALON OF 1845 1
A few words of introduction— History-paintings— Portraits— Genre-paintings— Landscapes— Drawings, Engravings— Sculpture
# THE SALON OF 1846 38
f To the bourgeois— What is the good of criticism?— t What is Romanticism?— On colour— Eugene Dela- j croix— On erotic subjects in art, and on M. Tassaert—
On some colourists— On the ideal and the model— '^ Some draughtsmen— On portraiture— The *chic' and > the poncif'— M. Horace Vemet— On eclecticism P and doubt— On M. Ary Scheffer and the apes of ' sentiment— On some doubters— On landscape— Why
sculpture is tiresome— On schools and journeymen S —On the heroism of modem life
ON THE ESSENCE OF LAUGHTER 131
SOME FRENCH CARICATURISTS 154
SOME FOREIGN CARICATURISTS 179
THE EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE, 1855 192
Critical method— Ingres— Eugene Delacroix
TEDS SALON OF 1859 220
The modern artist— The modern public and photog- raphy—The queen of the faculties— The govern- ance of the imagination— Religion, history, fantasy —Portraiture-Landscape— Sculpture— Envoi
VI CONTENTS
THE LIFE AND WORK OF EUGENE DELACROIX 306
Appendix: Translations of verse in the text 339
Notes on the Illustrations 343
Index 363
EDITOR'S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The present translation has been made from the Conrad editions of Curiosites esthetiques (1923) and L'Art romati- tique (1925), both edited by the late Jacques Cr^pet Reference has also been made to the Pleiade edition of the Oeuvres completes (1951), edited by M. Y.-G. le Dantec, and to the late Andr6 Ferran's fully-annotated edition of the Salon de 1845 (Toulouse 1933). To these editions I am indebted for much of the material contained in those footnotes which are preceded by a numerical reference. All footnotes, or parts of footnotes, included between an asterisk and the initials 'C.B/ are Baudelaire's own. To some of these I have added a further note after the initials. Of the works of art mentioned in the text, I have identi- fied as many as I have been able— though by no means as many as I should have Hked— either by giving their present whereabouts, or by indicating where reproductions of them can be seen. In certain cases, where neither reproduction nor whereabouts were knov^ni to me, I have referred to standard catalogues raisonnes of the works of the artists concerned. In the matter of translating, or not translating, the titles of pictures, I have found absolute consistency impossible to secure. Where pictures, such as Dante et Virgile or La Mort de Sardanapale, are well known under their English titles, it is the EngHsh form that I have given. In the case of titles of obscure or unidentified pictures, of which so many are mentioned in the course of Baudelaire's Salons, 1 have generally left them in French, except in a few instances where the point of a criticism depends upon the literal understanding of a title. My guiding motive has been the avoidance of possible misidentification.
My greatest personal debts are owed to Miss Margaret Oilman, of Bryn Mawr College, whose Baudelaire the Critic has been an invaluable aid and whose kindness a constant encouragement; and to Mr Felix Leakey, of Glasgow Uni- versity, who has been most patient and helpful with advice. Among those others who have assisted me in a variety of
Vm EDITOR S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ways, and whom I should like to take this opportunity of thanking once again, are: M. Jean Adhemar, of the Bib- liotheque Nationale; Mr John Beckwith, of the Victoria and Albert Museum; M. de Broglie, of the Musee Conde, Chantilly; Mr Gordon Crocker; Miss Helen Darbishire; Miss Bemice Davidson, of the Frick Collection; M. Claude Ferment; Mr H. G. Fletcher, of the Cheltenham Art Gal- lery; M. Armand Godoy; Mrs Marie-Louise Hemphill; Mr Asa Lingard; Mrs Dora Lykiardopulo; Mrs F. J. Mather, Jr.; Mr Peter Mayne; Mr O'Hana; M. Claude Pichois; Mr Peter Quennell; Mr Graham Reynolds, of the Victoria and Albert Museum; M. Philippe Roberts- Jones; Mr Bryan Robertson; Mr Denys Sutton; and M. A. Veinstein, of the BibHotheque de I'Arsenal, Paris. My thanks are also due to the authorities of the following Museums and Galleries who have kindly granted permission for works of art in their care to be reproduced here: the Victoria and Albert Mu- seum, the Tate Gallery and the Wallace Collection, Lon- don; the Musee du Louvre, Paris; the MetropoHtan Mu- seum, and the Frick Collection, New York; the Fodor Museum, Amsterdam; the Musee d'Art Modeme, Brussels; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Musee Fabre, Montpellier; the Musee Ingres, Montauban; the Musee Conde, ChantiUy; the Museums at Autun, Bordeaux, Bourg-en-Bresse, Lille, Lyon, Metz, Nantes, Nimes, Rouen, Saint-L6, Toulouse and Versailles.
I wish to dedicate this edition to the memory of my friend Hallam Fordham.
J.M.
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
It is probably true to say that tbe name Baudelaire has more suggestive power for the average EngHsh reader than that of any other French poet. Ever since Swinburne 'dis- covered' him to us in the 1860s, and the egregious Robert Buchanan anathematized him some ten years later as the accursed begetter of the 'Fleshly School of Poetry', he has had his more or less violent partisans and enemies. But in England and America at least it is only during the last generation or so that he has achieved his unquestioned status as one of the great archetypal figures— if not the great- est—in the moral and Kterary history of the nineteenth cen- tury. A considerable literature has grown up around him in English, ranging from biographical and interpretative studies to a whole shelf of translation of his poems and a volume or two of extracts from his prose-writings. It is therefore only the more remarkable that his works of criti- cism—and particularly his art-criticism, which is generally held to be his finest achievement in that field— should have remained largely unavailable to EngHsh readers. With the exception of Miss Margaret Gilmans excellent Baudelaire the Critic, no book in English, so far as I know, has been exclusively devoted to this subject; and I think that it would be fair to add that few professional art-writers, even, have given much evidence of having studied and profited by the works of one who has been called 'the father of modem art-criticism' and *le premier estheticien de son age'.
The present selection, therefore, should need no apology. It includes all three of Baudelaire's Salons, the articles on the Exposition Universelle of 1855, the essay on Laughter, with its accompanying articles on French and Foreign Cari- caturists, and finally the great obituary panegyric on Dela- croix. The well-known essay on Constantin Guys— Le Peintre de la vie moderne— has been regretfully omitted for reasons of space, and on the grounds that it alone of Baudelaire's art-critical studies has been translated, not
X EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
once only, but twice during the last twenty-five years. ^ It is certainly relevant, and therefore I hope not overpresump- tuous, to add that this is the first edition of these writings to be published in any language, including French, with a substantial appendix of reproductions of paintings and prints discussed in the text. These include a number that have never before been reproduced, and one at least— Haussoullier's Fontaine de jouvence— which has long been believed to be lost
*Glorifier le culte des images {una grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion)', wrote Baudelaire in a famous passage of his autobiographical commonplace-book, Mon coeur mis a nu. And perhaps not the least rewarding approach to his art-critcism is to regard it as a kind of lifelong glorification of this chosen cult. Early in his Salon of 1846 Baudelaire inserted a brief manifesto of what he meant by criticism; in this he was quick to reject a cold, mathematical, heartless type of criticism, and to require in its place a criticism which should be partial, passionate and political'— and, he added, 'amusing and poetic'. 'Thus,' he went on to say, *the best account of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy —a type of 'criticism' of which we find several exam- ples among the Fleurs du mal.
But this, of course, is not all. To find the simplest and most revealing exposition of Baudelaire's critical attitude, it is best to turn to a long article which he wrote some fifteen years later in defence of Wagner. 'All great poets naturally and fatally become critics', he wrote there. 'I pity those poets who are guided by instinct alone: I regard them as incomplete. But in the spiritual life of the former [i.e. the great poets] a crisis inevitably occurs when they feel the need to reason about their art, to discover the obscure laws in virtue of which they have created, and to extract from this study a set of precepts whose divine aim is infal- libility in poetic creation. It would be unthinkable for a
^By P. G. Konody, in The Painter of Victorian Life (London 1930), and by Norman Cameron, in My Heart Laid Bare, and other essays by Charles Baudelaire (London 1950).
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION XI
critic to become a poet; and it is impossible for a poet not to contain within him a critic. Therefore the reader will not be surprised at my regarding the poet as the best of all critics/ The poet— that is, the creative artist, whatever his medium— is thus a double man who both feels and analyses his feelings; and the movement of his critical thought will be powered by the same central force which is also behind his creation. For Baudelaire, the distinction between criti- cism and creation in this way breaks down; they turn out to be merely different aspects of the same process.
Earlier in the same article he had written, ']e resolus de rninformer du paurquoi, et de transformer ma volupte en connaissance', and this, as several writers have already observed, is at the very core of Baudelaire's critical method. The starting-point is nearly always volupte— the shock of pleasure experienced in front of a work of art; the poet- critic then proceeds to examine and analyse the pourquoi— the why and the wherefore— until finally he is able to trans- form the initial shock of pleasure into knowledge— the volupte into connaissance. Knowledge gained in this way, however, is far from being the same thing as the cold, text- book knowledge which he had long ago rejected as a criti- cal instrument; it is a knowledge charged and quickened by the pleasure which has logically preceded it, and, as we have seen, it is far more likely to take the form of a sonnet than an algebraic equation— a witty and suggestive interpretation than a piece of scientific, or pseudo-scientific, analysis.
Baudelaire made his literary d^but with a work of art- criticism— the Salon of 1845, with which this volume opens. In later years he became dissatisfied with this early and admittedly imperfect work, although we have the authority of Theodore de Banville that it made a striking effect on publication. Nevertheless it would certainly be worth pre- serving if only because it provides a kind of preliminary sketch— an ebauche, so to speak— for many of the critical attitudes that he was later to adopt and develop. Further- more it contains his earliest tribute to the genius of Dela- croix, whose art and ideas were to inform and interpenetrate
XU EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
SO much of what he was to write in the future on the subject of art.
The Salon of 1845 is set out in a conventional way, and when it touches on general topics, it does so en passant. Pictures are arranged neatly within their genres, and each artist is dealt with in his place, with a paragraph or a series of paragraphs to himself. The Salon of 1846, however, is composed with great originality and brilliance. It begins with a series of chapters on fundamental aesthetic ques- tions, and by the time that we are presented with the first artist (again Delacroix), a whole critical background has been adumbrated. It is in this general introduction, and in the further 'generaF chapters and observations with which this Salon is interspersed, that we find the first of the great Baudelairean key-words, themselves defining key-positions in his critical strategy. Individualism, Romanticism, naivete, the Ideal— all of them are paraded before the reader and redefined in a new, exact and highly personal fashion. No- where, indeed, could we have a better example of Baude- laire's extraordinary gift for taking already-existing concepts and reanimating them so that they are still recognizable, but, in an essential sense, fresh and surprising. Take Ro- manticism, for example. 'Few people today will want to give a real and positive meaning to this word', we are told. And then, after showing us the various ways in which the idea of Romanticism has been misunderstood and per- verted, Baudelaire proceeds, in a few short sentences, to give his own definition. 'Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth. . . To say the word Romanticism is to say modem art— that is, inti- macy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts'. Or naivete: 'By the naivete of the genius', he writes, 'you must imder- stand a complete knowledge of technique combined with the Know thyself! of the Greeks, but with knowledge mod- estly surrendering the leading role to temperament.' Even the old-fashioned, classic shibboleth of 'the Ideal' is given an honoured and important place in this renovated vocabu- lary of art. 'I am not claiming that there are as many funda- mental ideals as there are individuals, for a mould gives
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION XUl
several impressions: but in the painter's soul there are just as many ideals as individuals, because a portrait is a model complicated hy an artist'
From this necessarily brief r^sum^ of a few of the leading ideas to be encountered in the Salon of 1846, it will be apparent that Baudelaire was by no means setting out to make a sudden and shocking breach with the past. What he was doing was to take a series of dead or dying concepts and to breathe a new life into them; and if, in the process, he foimd it necessary (as he did) to denounce certain fashionable heresies by which, in his opinion, the integrity of art was endangered, this was not because his views were the views of a self-conscious enfant terrible. He was Hving at a time when artistic anarchy and its natural counterpart, artistic pinitanism, were both rampant; when the *great tradition' had got lost, and the new tradition had not yet been discovered; when *wit' and 'anecdote' and 'erudition' were already beginning to flourish on the soil left vacant by *history'— and his deeply serious aim was to attempt to call back the visual arts to what he held to be their proper functions. Hence his lifelong devotion to Delacroix who, by his indomitable adherence to classical values of order and artistic purity amid the turbulence of his Romantic imagi- nation, was, in Baudelaire's view, the true painter of the age.
It has often been observed of Baudelaire's poetry that it reveals an extraordinary fusion of a lapidary, Classical permanence and an intimate. Romantic contingency— and this is only one of the striking parallek between Baudelaire and Delacroix as creative and critical artists. Both believed that every nation and every age possessed, and must pos- sess, its own Beauty. Baudelaire analysed these various and varying manifestations of Beauty into two separate ele- ments—the eternal, which was common to all, and the transitory, which resulted from the changing modes of feel- ing characteristic of different ages. In this, it may be argued, he showed no great originality; the idea was al- ready impHcit in Stendhal, and doubtless in other theorists too (for the successful tracing back of individual aspects of Baudelaire's thought to former authors has of recent
XIV EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
years become a minor industry of literary scholarship). But in going a step further and asserting that without the co- existence of both elements there could be no Beauty at all, he was asserting something both new and significant. This was but another way of saying that the 'ideal' had now become a relative concept. And if we remember that, in a mechanically progressive age, Baudelaire had the deepest possible contempt for material 'progress', it will only make his undertanding of the central aesthetic problem by so much the more prophetic of our own.
It is in the articles on the Exposition Universelle, of some nine years later, that we first encounter the concept which may be said to epitomize and develop to their logical con- clusion all those that we have already considered This is the concept of the 'imagination', which makes a brief but telling debut in the course of an analysis of the funda- mental defects of Ingres. But it is not until the Salon of 1859 that Baudelaire's idea of the imagination finds its full statement. It is to some extent linked to his doctrine of 'cor- respondences' (which is also first mentioned by name in the Exposition Universelle articles), but it is not necessary to accept that esoteric doctrine in all its implications in order to appreciate the real value of the idea. As with all of Baudelaire's key-words, the word 'imagination' has a very special meaning attached to it. It is an all-informing faculty, which must be allowed to dominate and to order aU the others. Furthermore, it is essentially creative— and here, as Miss Gilman has pointed out, Baudelaire comes very close to the doctrine of the creative imagination as developed by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria, though it is in a high degree doubtful that he was aware of this relationship. (If a Hterary parentage for Baudelaire's Imagination is re- quired, we need look no further than Poe— although it is now fashionable to deplore his influence— and Poe, as is readily admitted even by his friends, owed much to the ideas of Coleridge. )
But Imagination is also the 'most scientific of the facul- ties'. By this seemingly paradoxical statement Baudelaire meant that the Imagination alone is, by its nature, capable of penetrating beneath the surface of appearances and of
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION XV
detecting hidden analogies between different material man- ifestations, different modes of perception, and different levels of existence. The Imagination, in fact, is that capital faculty of the creative artist whereby he is enabled to see all in one synoptic glance, and thus to order his work in such a way that the topical shall co-exist with the eternal, the natural with the supernatural and the moral with the metaphysical. It is through the Imagination, in short, that the universal correspondences are discerned and the 'ideal' brought to Hght. Baudelaire is nevertheless careful to insist that the Imagination must have at its service a refined sensibihty and a practised technical equipment. He is, in- deed, scornful of technical ineptitude (though, as in the case of Corot, he does not always agree that criticism on this score has been correctly appHed); but he is, if any- thing, even more contemptuous of a purely manual dex- terity, undirected by Imagination or the 'SouF— witness his criticism of Troyon, for example.
There is one idea of fundamental importance, however, which we have not yet touched on, although it runs through all of Baudelaire's art-criticism, from the very first Salon to the essay on Guys of almost twenty years later, and may be said to emerge naturally from his doctrine of the Imagi- nation and of Beauty. This is the idea of the 'Heroism of Modem Life'. Starting with his definition of Romanticism as intimacy, spirituality and the rest, and feeHng (as we know so well from his poetry that he felt) that modem life was presenting a challenge and an obhgation to the creative artist which few of his contemporaries seemed willing to meet, Baudelaire concluded his Salon of 1845 with an im- passioned appeal, which he took up again and developed in the following year. This was an appeal for a painter who could interpret tiie age to itself, with a complete imagina- tive grasp of its occasional and paradoxical acts of a protest- ing heroism amid a setting of moral and spiritual desolation. Delacroix, for all that he was in other essentials the 'painter of the age', had scarcely touched modem fife, and even though Baudelaire claimed to find a contemporary, sickly type of beauty in his women (somewhat to tiie constema- tion of Delacroix himself, it must be admitted), this was
XVI EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
hardly enough to qualify him as the almost Messianic genius whom Baudelaire was crying in the wilderness. Coiurbet might perhaps suggest himself to us as a possible candidate; but this would be to forget that Baudelaire, after a brief flirtation with socialist ideas (and thus with the possibility of a popular, realist art), and in spite of a personal friendship with Courbet himself which lasted longer than is often supposed— Baudelaire, the sworn anti- materiahst, had early declared his enmity for the realist ideal. ReaHsm (associated by him with Positivism) was for Baudelaire a flat negation of the Imagination— it was httle less than a blasphemy; hence his somewhat curious coupling of the names of Ingres and Courbet, both of whom he regarded as having sacrificed the imaginative faculty on the altars of other gods— the great tradition' and 'external nature', respectively.
Another possibility might have been Damnier, for whom Baudelaire expressed a wholehearted admiration in his article on the French caricaturists; or the young Manet, whom he admired in private (if with certain reservations), but never, in fact, praised publicly, save on one occasion- in an article, not included here, in which he joined the name of Manet with that of Alphonse Legros (to the shocked surprise of posterity). When, however, the time came, it was none of these, but the modest, morbidly self- conscious Constantin Guys in whom Baudelaire discovered his painter of modem Hfe'; it was around this deHghtfully gifted but essentially minor artist that he built his fully- developed theory of the relationship of art to modern Hfe.
Whether or not we agree that Baudelaire was justified in glorifying Guys to this extent, it is generally conceded that the Peintre de la vie modeme is one of his prose mas- terpieces. For our present purpose, however, we may per- haps confine ourselves to a single one of the ideas of which it is composed— a crucial idea, nevertheless, not only in its context, but in the whole fabric of Baudelaire's aesthetic and metaphysical opinion. To reduce it to its fundamental statement, ibis was a passionately-held belief in the Fall of Man, and Original Sin. The essay. On the Essence of Laughter, had already made it clear that Baudelaire based
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION XVU
his whole theory of the Comic on this idea; and I think that it would be possible to maintain that in the final analysis his whole aesthetic was similarly foimded. Good— whether in art or morahty— can only be achieved by conscious (and, one might add, imaginative) effort; by striving after an ideal virtue or beauty, and constantly battling against the powerful, but senseless and undirected impulses of Nature. Hence the moving aphorisms of personal morality in Mon cceur mis a nu; and hence, as extreme statements, the glori- fication of the Dandy and the 'eloge du maquillage' in the Peintre de la vie moderne. Transferred to the criticism of the arts in the mid-nineteenth century, the doctrine has a corollary of the greatest importance. For it is precisely this contempt (and also perhaps this fear) of Nature that ex- plains Baudelaire's impatience with all current naturahstic trends— for the landscapes of the Barbizon painters no less than the reahsm of Courbet. The idea of copying nature, which was at that time more than usually in the air, was to Baudelaire an even greater artistic heresy than was the idea of adding something extraneous ('style', for example) to nature. He remained consistent from first to last in his belief that the immanent, individual ideal— whether ex- pressed by the detachment of the Dandy, the make-up of the courtesan, or the imagination of the poet— was the only thing with which man should concern himself. In the sphere of art the realization of this ideal would always be the result of a collaboration— a sort of fusion, rather— of two separate entities. 'What is purt art, according to the modern conception?', asks Baudelaire in an unfinished article, L'Art philosophique. It is to create a suggestive magic containing at one and the same time the object and the subject, the external world and the artist himself.'
In the course of the preceding sketch of Baudelaire's general attitude towards the problems of art, several ex- amples of his practical sympathies and antipathies have already been touched on. As has often been pointed out, Delacroix was from first to last his touchstone of greatness— the Turner to his Ruskin. It is very nearly true to say that Baudelaire's published criticism begins and ends with the name of Delacroix; and it is certain that the idea of Dela-
XVUl EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
croix can almost always be felt hovering in the background through the intervening pages. Some modem critics have indeed come to reproach Baudelaire for this special and all-absorbing devotion, on the grounds that it blinded him to those progressive trends in contemporary painting which were already leading in the direction of Impressionism and thus of Modem Art as we now know it. They are shocked at his severe criticisms of Ingres and Courbet; they note his fundamentally imperfect sympathy for Rousseau, and his damaging dislike of MiUet; and finally he is rebuked for omitting to 'discover' Manet at a time when he was in a position to do so, and instead for lavishing praise on a host of minor painters who are now almost entirely forgot- ten—and in most cases deservedly so.
Such is the case against him, as stated by M. Philippe Rebeyrol,2 for example. But it is necessary first of all to view this kind of criticism in its historical context— to see it as a reaction from a modem devotion to Baudelaire no less fervent than was his own devotion to Delacroix. It has for some time indeed been conventional to hold that Baude- laire was the only art-critic of the nineteenth century who never made mistakes; and if by the phrase 'never made mis- takes' we mean that he exactly anticipated the verdicts of posterity in all his judgements, it must at once be owned by anyone who has taken the trouble to read what he wrote that this conventional behef is not founded strictly on fact. Other critics of his time— the serious and business-like Thor^, for example, or even a gifted progressive like Champ- fleury— may be instanced as more accurate prophets of the dawn. Other critical attitudes than his behef in a purified and re-stated Romanticism may now seem to have been more in the mainstream of the theory of art as it has since developed.
But though such practical criticisms must indeed be ad- mitted to have some force, it is legitimate to ask whether it is not perhaps a Httle cmde to attempt to place a critic such as Baudelaire— or any critic, for that matter, who is
^ See liis article, 'Baudelaire et Manet' in Les Temps modernes, Oct. 1949.
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION XIX
also a creative artist— in accordance with a simple score- card of Tiits' and 'misses', and particularly when those hits and misses are themselves not so much verifiable facts as elements in a constantly changing complex of opinion. It is necessary at once to state that we do not read Baudelaire in order to dazzle ourselves with the shafts of his prophetic gaze; we may even perhaps allow ourselves to hazard the guess that, if he did look forward to a future art, it may well have been to that of Gustave Moreau rather than of Renoir or Cezanne, to that of Beardsley rather than of Toulouse-Lautrec. But against the enormous positive im- portance of his work, any such possible shortcomings are fundamentally insignificant. When we call Baudelaire the 'father of modem art-criticism' or the 'first aesthetician of his age' we are referring not to his anticipation of any one of our particular judgements and fashionable cults; we are thinking of his whole approach to the art of art-criticism. For Baudelaire was perhaps the first to detect the danger- ous fallacy of a 'party-Hne' in art, to perceive the 'admirable, eternal and inevitable relationship between form and func- tion' and to apprehend the delicate distinction between anarchy and autonomy in an artist of genius. Even his strictures on artists with whom he was naturally out of sympathy are more often than not conceived in such a way as to throw hght on virtues no less than on vices; and in spite of M. Rebeyrol's carefuUy-arranged texts, he seldom failed to discern greatness, or even 'importance', where it existed, even though he may then have proceeded to en- quire why it was not greater or more important still.
But it is above all to Baudelaire's passionately-held be- lief in the purity of art that we find ourselves returning. Just as his Romanticism transcends the historical reality of that movement (T. S. EHot once called him a 'counter- Romantic'; in this context, perhaps 'post-Romantic' might be even more appropriate), so his behef in the purity or in- tegrity of art transcends the concept of 'Art for Art's sake'. Painting (or poetry, or music) exists in its own right; it has nothing to do with politics (or philosophy, or archae- ology), even though in certain conditions it may appeal, in a greater or a lesser degree, to a spectator who is con-
XX EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
cemed with these things. 'Painting is an evocation, a magi- cal operation' which makes its effect by means of a fusion of colour and line, and which has its own principles of life, to be found nowhere else but in the 'soul' of the artist. If it were for nothing more than the constant re-affirmation of this point of view, Baudelaire's criticism would remain a landmark in the development of our understanding of the arts. Add to it all those other qualities— the poetic insight, the wit, the brilliance of description and the underlying humanity— and the result is a critic with whom we may on occasions disagree, but one whom we cannot forget once we have read him.
A final note on the title and composition of this book.
Although Baudelaire had for long intended to assemble and re-print his art-critical writings in one or more volumes, this aim was not in fact accomplished until after his death (in 1867). The following year there appeared, under the editorship of Charles Asselineau and Theodore de Banville, the volume entitled Curiosites esthetiques, containing all three Salons, the articles on the Exposition Universelle, the Laughter and Caricature articles, and a shorter piece en- titled Le Musee classique du Bazar Bonne-nouvelle (not included here) . This was followed in 1869 by L'Art roman^ tique (a title, it seems, of the editors' own choosing) which contained the articles on Delacroix and Guys, and two other shorter art-critical studies; the remainder of the volume was devoted to articles of literary and other criticism. The pres- ent book is therefore neither one nor the other, being com- posed for the greater part of elements from Curiosites esthetiques, but with one important extract from VArt romantique. The title. The Mirror of Art, has been chosen because it was invented (but not used) by Baudelaire him- self when he was meditating the publication of the book that was finally issued as Curiosites esthetiques. Other titles, such as Bric-d-hrac esthetique and Le Cabinet esthetique were also discussed, but of the various available possibili- ties, Le Miroir de VArt has seemed by far the most appropri-
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION XXI
ate— not least because it alone can be happily transformed into English, yahne les titres mysterieux et les titres petards', wrote Baudelaire to his publisher Poulet-Malassis; and in default of anything more mysterious or explosive, The Mirror of Art, suggesting as it does Baudelaire's con- viction that art-criticism should be the reflection of a work of art in the mind of a critic, seems to sum up his attitude and express his intentions with the maximimi of authen- ticity.
Jonathan Mayne
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE FOOTNOTES
Delteil Loys Delteil. Honor e Daumier (in the series
'Le peintre-graveur illustre'). 10 volumes. Paris, 1925-30
Escholier Raymond Escholier. Delacroix. 3 volmnes. Paris, 1926-9
Gilman Margaret Oilman. Baudelaire the Critic. New
York, 1943
lllustr. L'lllustration. Journal universel
Journal The Journal of Eugdne Delacroix. London,
1951
Robaut Alfred Robaut. L'Oeuvre complet d'Eugdne
Delacroix. Paris, 1885
Wildenstein Georges Wildenstein. The Paintings of J.A.D. Ingres. London, 1954
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Margaret Gilman's Baudelaire the Critic (New York 1943) contains a list of works on Baudelaire's criticism. To this may be added Nino Barbantini's important article *Bau- delaire Critico d'Arte' in his Scritti d'Arte (Venice 1953). Martin TumeU's Baudelaire (London 1953) contains a good general bibliography. For a detailed examination of the art-criticism of the period 1848-70, see Joseph C. Sloane's French Painting between the Past and the Present (Princeton 1951).
The most convenient source of information concern- ing the Salon-exhibits of 19th century French artists is Bellier de la Chavignerie's Dictionnaire general des artistes de I'ecole frangaise (2 vols., Paris 1882-5).
THE SALON OF 18451
A FEW WORDS OF INTRODUCTION
We can claim with at least as much accuracy as a well- known writer claims of his little books, that no newspaper would dare print what we have to say. Are we going to be very cruel and abusive, then? By no means; on the contrary, we are going to be impartial. We have no friends— that is a great thing— and no enemies. Ever since the days of M. Gustave Planche,^ a rough diamond whose learned and commanding eloquence is now silent to the great regret of all right-thinking minds, the Hes and the shameless fa- vouritisms of newspaper criticism, which is sometimes silly, sometimes violent, but never independent, have inspired the bourgeois with a disgust for those useful handbooks which go by the name of Salon-reviews.*
And at the very outset, with reference to that impertinent designation, 'the bourgeois', we beg to state that we in no way share the prejudices of our great confreres in the world of art, who for some years now have been striving their utmost to cast anathema upon that inoffensive being whom nothing would please better than to love good painting, if only those gentlemen knew how to make it understandable
^The exhibition opened on 15th March at the Musee Royal (Louvre). Baudelaire's review appeared in the form of a book- let. Although it was oflBcially recorded as published on 24th May, Baudelaire himself wrote to his mother that it was appear- ing on his birthday, 9th April. The present translation of this Sdon is somewhat abridged. Omissions are indicated where they occur.
* Gustave Blanche (1808-57), who had written regularly for the Revue des Deux-Mondes, had been absent in Italy for the last few years.
*Let us record a fine and honourable exception in M. Dele- cluze, whose opinions we do not always share, but who has always managed to preserve his integrity, and, without roaring or ranting, has often been responsible for bringing new and unknown talents to light, (c.b.)
2, THE SALON OF 1845
to him and if the artists themselves showed it him more often.
That word, which smells of studio-cant from a mile off, should be expunged from the dictionary of criticism.
The iDOurgeois' ceased to exist the moment he himself adopted the word as a term of abuse— which only goes to prove his sincere desire to become artistic, in relation to the art-critics.
In the second place, the bourgeois— since he does, in fact, exist— is a very respectable personage; for one must please those at whose expense one means to live.
And finally, the ranks of the artists themselves contain so many bourgeois that it is better, on the whole, to suppress a word which does not define any particular vice of caste, seeing that it is equally applicable to those who ask no more than that they should cease to incur it, as to those who have never suspected that they deserved it.
It is vdth the same contempt for all systematic nagging and opposition— opposition and nagging which have be- come banal and commonplace;* it is with the same orderli- ness, the same love of good sense, that we are banishing far from this little booklet all discussion both of juries^ in general and of the paintings-jury in particular; of the re- form of the jury, which we are told has become necessary, and of the manner and frequency of exhibitions, etc. . . . First of all, a jury is necessary— so much is clear; and as for the annual recurrence of the exhibition,^ which we owe to the enlightened and Hberally paternal mind of a king to whom both public and artists owe also the enjoyment of six museums,** a fair-minded man will always see that the
*The complaints are perhaps justified, but they count as nag- ging, because they have become systematic, (c.b.) ^ i.e. selection-committees, about which there was much current dissatisfaction. Under the Empire and the Restoration, the works of new exhibitors only were subject to the jury; in 1831 new rules were formed according to which aU were so subject. * It was not until 1833 that the Salon became an annual event. In recent years there had never been less than two years be- tween each, and often more (viz. 1817, 1819, 1822, 1824, 1827, 1831). ** The Galerie des Dessim, the extension to the Galerie Fran-
HISTORY-PAINTINGS 3
great artist cannot fail to gain by it, considering his natural productiveness, and that the mediocre artist will only find his deserved punishment therein.
We shall speak about everything that attracts the eye of the crowd and of the artists; our professional conscience obliges us to do so. Everything that pleases has a reason for pleasing, and to scorn the throngs of those that have gone astray is no way to bring them back to where they ought to be.
Our method of address will consist simply in dividing our work into categories— History-paintings and Portraits— Genre-paintings and Landscape— Sculpture— Engravings and Drawings; and in arranging the artists in accordance with the rank and order which the estimation of the public has assigned to them.
8th May 1845
HISTORY-PAINTINGS
Delacroix— M. Delacroix is decidedly the most original painter of ancient or of modem times. That is how things are, and what is the good of protesting? But none of M. Delacroix's friends, not even the most enthusiastic of them, has dared to state this simply, bluntly and impudently, as we do. Thanks to the tardy justice of the years, which blunt the edge of spite and shock and ill-will, and slowly sweep away each obstacle to the grave, we are no longer living at a time when the name of Delacroix was a signal for the reactionaries to cross themselves, and a rallying- symbol for every kind of opposition, whether intelligent or not. Those fair days are past. M. Delacroix will always le-
gaise, the MusSe Espagnol, the MusSe Standish, the Musie de Versailles, and the MttsSe de Marine (c.b.). The first two and the last two of these exist today. The Musie Espagnol comprised Spanish pictures belonging to the Orleans family. The MusSe Standish consisted of worics bequeathed by Lord Standish to King Louis-Philippe.
4 THE SALON OF 1845
main a somewhat disputed figme— just enough to add a little lustre to his glory. And a very good thing tool He has a right to eternal youth, for he has not betrayed us, he has not lied to us like certain thankless idols whom we have borne into our pantheons. M. Delacroix is not yet a member of the Academy, but morally he belongs to it.^ A long time ago he said everything that was required to make him the first among us— that is agreed. Nothing remains for him but to advance along the right road— a road that he has always trodden. Such is the tremendous feat of strength demanded of a genius who is ceaselessly in search of the new. This year M. Delacroix has sent four pictures i^
1. La Madeleine dans le desert.^ A head of a woman, up- turned, in a very narrow frame. High up to the right, a little scrap of sky or rock— a touch of blue. The Magdalen's eyes are closed, her mouth soft and languid, her hair dishevelled. Short of seeing it, no one could imagine the amount of intimate, mysterious and romantic poetry that the artist has put into this simple head. It is painted almost entirely in visible brush-strokes, like many of M. Delacroix's pictures. Far from being dazzling or intense, it is very gentle and restrained in tone; its general effect is almost grey, but of a perfect harmony. This picture demonstrates a truth which we have long suspected, and which is made clearer still in another work of which we shall shortly speak; it is that M. Delacroix is stronger than ever, and on a path of progress which ceaselessly renews itself— that is to say that he is more than ever of a harmonist.
2. Dernidres paroles de Marc-Aurele^ Marcus Aurelius commits his son to the Stoics. A half-draped figure, on his death-bed, he is presenting the young Commodus— a yoimg, pink, soft voluptuary, seemingly a little bored— to his aus- tere friends grouped around him in attitudes of dejection.
A splendid, magnificent, sublime and misunderstood pic-
^ In fact Delacroix had already sought election to the Institut in
1837, but he was not finally elected until 1857.
^ A fifth, his Education de la Vierge, was rejected by the jury.
« Robaut 921.
* Now in the Lyons Museum; see pi. 68.
HISTORY-PAINTINGS 5
ture. A well-known critic has sung the painter's praises for having placed Commodus— that is to say, the future— in the light; and the Stoics— that is to say, the past— in the shade. What a briUiant thoughtl But in fact, except for two figures in the half-shadow, all the characters have their share of illumination. This reminds us of the admiration of a re- publican man of letters who could seriously congratulate the great Rubens for having painted Henri IV with a slovently boot and hose, in one of his official pictures in the Medicis gallery.^ To him it was a stroke of independent satire, a liberal thrust at the royal excesses. Rubens the revolutionary! Oh criticism! Oh you critics! . . .
With this picture we are in mid-Delacroix— that is to say, we have before us one of the most perfect specimens of what genius can achieve in painting.
Its colour is incomparably scientific; it does not contain a single fault. And yet what is it but a series of triumphs of skill— triumphs which are invisible to the inattentive eye, for the harmony is muffled and deep? And far from losing its cruel originahty in this new and completer science, the colour remains sanguinary and terrible. This equihbrium of green and red delights our heart. M. Delacroix has even introduced into this picture some tones which he had not habitually employed before— at least, so it seems to us. They set one another off to great advantage. The back- ground is as serious as such a subject requires.
Finally— let us say it, since no one else does— this picture is faultless both in draughtsmanship and in modelling. Has the public any idea of how difficult it is to model in colour? It is a double difficulty. In modelling with a single tone- that is with a stump— the difficulty is simple; modelling with colour, however, means first discovering a logic of light and shade, and then truth and harmony of tone, aU in one sudden, spontaneous and complex working. Put in another way, if the light is red and the shadow green, it means discovering at the first attempt a harmony of red and green, one luminous, the other dark, which together pro- duce the effect of a monochrome object in relief.
^ The paintings executed by Rubens for the Palais du Liixem- bourg are now in the Louvre.
6 THE SALON OF 1845
'This picture is faultless in drawing.' With reference to this vast paradox, this impudent piece of blasphemy, must I repeat, must I re-explain what M. Gautier gave himself the trouble of explaining in one of his articles^ last year, on the subject of M. Couture— for when a work is well suited to his literary temperament and education, M. Gautier expounds well what he feels finely? I mean, that there are two kinds of draughtsmanship— the draughtsman- ship of the colourists, and that of the draughtsmen. Their procedures are contrary; but it is perfectly possible to draw with untrammelled colour, just as it is possible for an artist to achieve harmonious colour-masses while remaining an exclusive draughtsman.
Therefore when we say that this picture is well drawn, we do not wish it to be imderstood that it is drawn like a Raphael. We mean that it is drawn in an extempore and graphic manner; we mean that this kind of drawing, which has something analogous with that of all the great col- ourists, Rubens, for example, perfectly renders the move- ment, the physiognomy, the hardly perceptible tremblings of nature, which Raphael's drawing never captures. We only know of two men in Paris who draw as well as M. Delacroix— one in an analogous and the other in a contrary manner. The first is M. Daumier, the caricaturist; the second M. Ingres, the great painter, the artful adorer of Raphael. This is certainly something calculated to astound both friends and enemies, both partisans and antagonists of each one of them; but anyone who examines the matter slowly and carefully will see that these three kinds of draw- ing have this in common, that they perfectly and completely render the aspect of nature that they mean to render, and that they say just what they mean to say. Daumier draws better, perhaps, than Delacroix, if you would prefer healthy, robust qualities to the weird and amazing powers of a great genius sick with genius; M. Ingres, who is so much in love with detail, draws better, perhaps, than either of them, if you prefer laborious niceties to a total harmony, and the nature of the fragment to the nature of the com- position, but ... let us love them all three. •In La Presse, 28th March, 1844.
HISTORY-PAINTINGS 7
3. Une Sibylle qui montre le rameau d'orJ Once more the colour is fine and original. The head reminds one a Httle of the charming hesitancy of the Hamlet designs. As a piece of modelling and texture it is incomparable: the bare shoulder is as good as a Correggio.
4. Le Sultan de Maroc entoure de sa garde et de ses affi- ciers.^ This is the picture to which we were referring a moment ago when we declared that M. Delacroix had ad- vanced in the science of harmony. In fact, has anyone ever shown a greater musical seductiveness, at any time? Was ever Veronese more enchanting? Were melodies more fanciful ever set to sing upon a canvas? or a concord more wondrous of new, unknown, deHcate and charming tones? We appeal to the honesty of anyone who knows his Louvre to mention a picture by a great colourist in which the colour is as suggestive as in M. Delacroix's picture. We know that we shall only be understood by a small number, but that is enough. In spite of the splendour of its hues, this picture is so harmonious that it is grey— as grey as nature, as grey as the summer atmosphere when the sun spreads over each object a sort of twihght film of trembling dust. Therefore you do not notice it at first; its neighbours kill it. The com- position is excellent; it has an element of the unexpected, because it is true and natural . . .
P.S. It is said that praises can be compromising, and that it is better a wise enemy, etc. . . . We, however, do not believe that it is possible to compromise genius by explain- ing it.
HoBACE Vernet. This African painting^ is colder than a fine winter's day. Everything in it is of a heart-breaking whiteness and brightness. Unity, none; rather, a crowd of interesting httle anecdotes— a vast tavern mural. These
' See pi. 69.
® Now in the Toulouse Museum; see pi. 67.
® The Prise de la Smalah d'Abd-el-Kader, now in the Versailles
Museum. The colossal size of this painting ( over sixty feet long )
ensured it overwhelming critical and popular attention. The
military operation which it illustrated took place in 1843;
see pi. 15.
8 THE SALON OF 1845
kinds of decoration are generally divided up as though into compartments or acts, by a tree, a great mountain, a cavern, etc. M. Horace Vemet has followed the same method— that of a serialist— thanks to which the spectator's memory duly finds its landmarks; namely a huge camel, some deer, a tent, etc. ... It is truly painful to see an intelligent man floundering about in such a mess of horror. Good Heavens, has M. Horace Vernet never seen the works of Rubens, Veronese, Tintoretto, Jouvenet?
William Haussoullier. M. Haussoullier must not be sur- prised, first of all, at the violence of the praises which we are about to heap upon his picture, for we have only de- cided to do so after having conscientiously and minutely analysed it; nor, in the second place, at the brutal and un- mannerly reception which a French public is according it —at the passing bursts of laughter which it occasions. We have seen more than one important newspaper-critic toss- ing it his little meed of mockery, over his shoulder. Let the artist take no notice. It is a fine thing to have a success like St. Symphorian.^^
There are two ways of becoming famous— by the accu- mulation of annual successes, or by a bolt from the blue. The second way is certainly the more original. Let M. HaussouUier remember the outcries which greeted Dante and Virgil,^^ and then persevere along his own path. A lot of miserable catcalls are yet in store for this work, but it v^ abide in the memory of anyone with eyes and feelings. May its success continue ever widening— for success it ought to have.
After M. Delacroix's wonderful pictures, this is truly the capital work of the exhibition. Let us rather say, it is, in a certain sense at least, the tmique picture of this year's Salon. For M. Delacroix has for long been an illustrious genius, a granted and accepted glory; and this year he has given us four pictures. Whereas M. William HaussouUier was un- known yesterday; and he has only sent one. " Ingres' Martyre de saint Symphorian, painted for the Cathe- dral of Autun and exhibited at the 1834 Salon, was the centre of violent controversy. ^ By Delacroix; exhibited at the 1822 Salon.
HISTORY-PAINTINGS 9
To begin with, we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of describing it— such a joyful and delicious task does it seem. The subject is the Foimtain of Youth.^^ In the foregroimd are three groups. At the left a young, or rather a reju- venated couple, gazing into one another's eyes and talking close together— they appear to be practising Platonic love. In the middle, a half-nude woman, with skin white as snow, and brown crimped hair— she too is smiling and chatting with her partner; there is a greater air of sensuality about her, and she stiU holds a mirror in which she has just been looking at herself. Finally, in the right-hand comer, a robust and elegant man— a ravishing head, this, with fore- head a trifle low and Hps a shade forceful; he smiles as he puts down his glass on the turf, while his companion is pouring some wondrous elixir into the glass of a long, thin yoimg man standing in front of her.
Behind them, on the second plane, is another group, lying at full length on the greensward, in one another's arms. In the middle stands a nude woman; she is wringing from her hair the last drops of the health-giving and fer- tilizing stream. A second woman, also nude, and half re- cumbent, seems Hke a chrysalis still clothed in the last shift of its metamorphosis. DeHcate of form, these two women are vapourously, outrageously white; they are just beginning to re-emerge, so to speak, into life. The standing figure is in the strong position of dividing the picture symmetrically in two. This almost-living statue is admirably effective, and, by contrasting with them, stresses the vio- lent hues of the foreground, which thereby acquire an added vigour. The fountain itself, which wiU doubtless strike some critics as a little too 'Seraphin'^^ in style— this
"This painting, long believed lost, was acquired in London shortly before the war by Mr. Graham Reynolds; see pi. 12. A preliminary drawing for it was published by J. Cr^pet in the Figaro, 15th Nov. 1924. The painting itself had been exhibited at the Royal Academy in London a year before being shown in Paris. As well as Baudelaire, Theodore de Banville was much struck by it and described it in a poem of the same title ( dated May 1844), which was later published in Les Stalactites (1846).
"The 'Theatre du sieur Seraphin', a marionette-theatre for children, was well known for its sensational production-effects.
lO THE SALON OF 1845
fairy-tale fountain is much to our liking; it divides into two sheets of water, and is tapered, or cleft, into wavering fringes, thin as air. Along a vmiding pathway, which leads the eye right into the background of the picture, come happy sixty-year-olds, bent and bearded. The background to the right consists of a grove in which a kind of joyful ballet is taking place.
The sentiment of this picture is exquisite; it shows us people making love and drinking— a sight that thrills the senses— but they are drinking and making love in a deeply serious, almost a melancholy manner. Far from the storms and ferments of youth, this is a second youth which knows the value of life and can enjoy it in tranquillity.
In our opinion this picture has one very important quality, especially in a Museum— it is very showy. There is no chance of not seeing it. Its colour is of a terrible, an unrelenting rawness, which might even be accounted rash, if the artist were a weaker man; but ... it is distinguished —a merit so sought after by the gentlemen of the school of Ingres. Moreover it contains some happy tonal combina- tions; it is possible that the artist will one day become a genuine colourist. This painting possesses another pro- digious quality, and one which makes men— true men; it has faith— faith in its own beauty; this is absolute, self- convinced painting, which cries aloud 1 will, I will be beautiful, and beautiful according to my own lights; and I know that I shall not lack an audience to please 1'
The drawing, too, suggests great determination and finesse; the facial expressions are pretty. All the attitudes are feHcitous. Elegance and distinction are the particular mark of this picture throughout.
Will it have a swift success? We cannot tell. It is true that every public possesses a conscience and a fund of good vidll which urge it towards the true; but a pubHc has to be put on a slope and given an impetus, and our pen is even more unknown than M. HaussouUier's talent.
If it were possible to re-exhibit the same work at different times, and on different occasions, we could guarantee the justice of the pubHc towards this artist.
Nevertheless his painting is quite bold enough to sup-
HISTORY-PAINTINGS 11
port attack, and it suggests a man who can assume re- sponsibility for his works; so he has only to go off and paint a new picture.
Now that we have so openly displayed our sympathies, dare we . . . ?— but our wretched duty compels us to think of everything!— dare we, I say, admit that after our sweet contemplation the names of Giovanni Bellini and of one or two other early Venetian painters crossed our mind? Is M. HaussouUier perhaps one of those who know too much about their art? That is a truly dangerous scourge, and one that represses the spontaneity of many an excellent impulse. Let him beware of his erudition, let him beware even of his taste— but that is a glorious failing— and this picture still contains enough originality to promise a happy future.
Decamps. Let us hurry on quickly— for Decamps kindles the curiosity in advance— you can always promise yourself a surprise— you count on something new. This year M. Decamps has contrived for us a surprise which surpasses aU those on which he worked for so long and with so much love in the past— I mean the Crochets and the Cimhres.^^ This year M. Decamps has given us a bit of Raphael and Poussin. Yes, by Heaven, he hasl
Let us hasten to correct any exaggeration in that sentence by saying that never was imitation better concealed, nor more skilful; it is perfectly permissible, it is praiseworthy, even, to imitate thus.
But frankly— in spite of all the pleasure it gives us to peruse an artist's works for the various transformations of his art and the successive preoccupations of his mind- frankly, we miss the old Decamps a Httle.
With the sense of choice which particularly distinguishes him, he has hit upon that one among aU biblical subjects which best suits with the nature of his talent; it is the strange, epic, fantastic, baroque, mythological story of Samson, the man of impossible labours, who could overturn houses with a push of his shoulder— Samson, that antique cousin of Hercules and the Baron von Miinchausen.
" The Supplice des crochets (Wallace Collection) was exhibited in 1839, and the Defaite des Cimbres (Louvre) in 1834.
12 THE SALON OF 1845
The first of these designs^^— the sudden appearance of the angel in the midst of a wide landscape— makes the mistake of recalling things that we know too well; that raw sky, those rocky boulders, those horizons of granite have for long been famiHar to the whole of the younger school, and although it is true to say that it was M. Decamps who first taught them, nevertheless it pains us to be reminded of M. Guignet when we are in front of a Decamps.
Several of tiiese drawings have, as we have already said, a very Italian cast to them; and this mingUng of the spirit of the great masters with that of M. Decamps himself— a very Flemish intelligence, in certain respects— has produced a most curious result. For example, you will find figures comporting themselves happily enough in the grand man- ner, side by side with an effect of an open window and the sun streaming through it to light up the floor, such as would rejoice the heart of the most industrious Fleming. In the drawing, however, which represents the overturning of the temple— a drawing composed like a great and magnificent picture, with gestures and attitudes of historical grandeur— you will find the purest essence of this artist's genius in a flying silhouette of a figure who is taking several steps in his stride and remains eternally suspended in mid-air. How many others would have dreamt of this detail? or if they had, would not have realized it in a different way? But M. Decamps loves to capture nature in the very act, in her simultaneous moments of fantasy and reality— in her most sudden and most unexpected aspects.
The finest of all is undeniably the last, in which the broad-shouldered and invincible Samson is condemned to turn a miU-stone— his head of hair, or rather his mane, is no
"Decamps* Histoire de Samson in nine drawings was unani- mously praised by the critics. The drawings were dispersed at the Delessert sale in May 1911, but a set of lithographic repro- ductions by Eugene le Roux exists. Decamps liimself made a set of reduced replicas, of which one is now in the Lyons Museum. Pierre du Colombier {Decamps, 1928) reproduces three of tlie set, including that which shows Samson at the mill; the same three are reproduced in the Delessert sale cata- logue. The statement in Benezit's dictionary that such a set is in the Musee des Arts D^coratifs, Paris, is incorrect
HISTORY-PAINTINGS I3
more— his eyes are blinded— the hero is bending to his toil like a draft-animal— trickery and treachery have mastered that terrible strength which was capable of overturning the very laws of nature. Here, then, at last is a true bit of Decamps, and of the best vintage; here at last we find that sense of irony, of fantasy, I was just about to say that sense of the comic, which we missed so much in the earlier drawings. Samson is turning the wheel like a draft-horse; he walks ponderously, stooping with a rude naivet^the naivety of a dispossessed lion, the resigned sadness, the almost brute abasement of the king of the forests made to drag a cartload of manure or of offal for cats.
In the shadowed foreground an overseer— a jailor, no doubt— is silhouetted against the wall, in an attentive atti- tude, and is watching him work. What could be more complete than these two figures and the mill-stone? And what more interesting? There was no need even to intro- duce those inquisitive onlookers behind a grill in the wall —the thing was already fine, and fine enough.
And so we may say that M. Decamps has produced a magnificent illustration, a set of heroic vignettes, to the strange and poetic story of Samson. And although one might perhaps find fault with the over-Hteral treatment of a wall here and an object there, or with the meticulous and artful mixture of painting and pencil, nevertheless, just be- cause of the new aims which it reveals, this series of de- signs constitutes one of the finest surprises which this prodi- gious artist has yet produced. But no doubt he is already getting some new ones ready for us.^^
AcHiLLE Deveria. And now for a fair name; now for a true and noble artist, to our way of thinking.
The word has gone round among critics and journalists to start intoning a charitable De Profundis over the defunct talent of his brother, M. Eugene Dev^ria;!''^ and each time
" Paragraphs on Robert-Fleury and Granet are omitted here. "This probably refers to the article by Gautier in La Presse (28th March 1844), in which Eugene Deveria's Naissance de Henri TV (1827; now in the Louvre) was praised at the ex- pense of his most recent work.
14 THE SALON OF 1845
the fancy takes that glorious old veteran of romanticism to show his face, they devoutly enshroud him in the Birth of Henri IV, and burn a few candles in honour of his ruined genius. So far so good; it proves that those gentlemen have a conscientious love of beauty, and it does honour to their feelings. But how comes it that no one thinks of tossing a few sincere blossoms, of plaiting a few loyal tributes to the name of M. Achille Deveria? For long years, and all for our pleasure, this artist poured forth from the inexhaustible well of his invention a stream of ravisliing vignettes, of charm- ing little interior-pieces, of graceful scenes of fashionable life, such as no Keepsake— in spite of the pretensions of the new names— has since published. He was skilled at colouring the lithographic stone; all his drawings were distinguished, full of feminine charms, and distilled a strangely pleasing kind of reverie. All those fascinating and sweetly sensual women of his were idealizations of women that one had seen and desired in the evening at the cafe-concerts, at the Bouffes, at the Opera, or in the great Salons. Those Htho- graphs, which the dealers buy for three sous and sell for a franc, are the faithful representatives of that elegant, per- fumed society of the Restoration, over which there hovers, like a guardian angel, the blond, romantic ghost of the duchesse de Berry.^^
But what ingratitude! People speak of them no longer, and today all our routine-minded and anti-poetic asses have turned their loving eyes towards the virtuous asininities and ineptitudes of M. Jules David,i^ or the pedantic paradoxes of M. Vidal.20
We are not going to say that M. Achille Deveria has painted an excellent picture in his Sainte Anne instruisant la Vierge, but he has painted a picture whose great value con- sists in qualities of elegance and clever composition. It is more a patchwork of colour than a painting, it is true, and
^^The duchesse de Berry (1798-1870), daughter-in-law of
Charles X, and motlier of the comte de Chambord.
"In 1837 Jules David had published a set of moralistic litlio-
graphs entitled Vice et Vertu. He exhibited tliree water-colours
at the 1845 Salon.
^ See p. 34.
HISTORY-PAINTINGS I5
in these days of pictorial criticism, of Catholic art and of bold handling, a work like this must of necessity seem some- what naive and out of its element. But if the works of a famous man who was once your joy seem today to be naive and out of their element, then at least you might bury him to the accompaniment of a chord or two on the orchestra, you mob of egotists I
Boulanger's Sainte famille^^ is detestable.
His Bergers de VfrgiZe— mediocre.
His Baigneuses—a. little better than Duval Lecamuses or Maurins;22 but his Portrait d'homme is a good piece of painting.
Here we have the last ruins of the old romanticism— this is what it means to come at a time when it is the accepted belief that inspiration is enough and takes the place of everything else; this is the abyss to which the unbridled course of Mazeppa has led.^^ It is M. Victor Hugo that has destroyed M. Boulanger— after having destroyed so many others; it is the poet that has tumbled the painter into the ditch. And yet M. Boulanger can paint decently enough- look at his portraits. But where on earth did he win his diploma as history-painter and inspired artist? Can it have been in the prefaces and odes of his illustrious friend?
BoisSARD. It is to be regretted that M. Boissard,^* who pos- sesses the qualities of a good painter, has not been able to show us this year an allegorical picture of his represent- ing Music, Painting and Poetry. The jury, who doubtless found its irksome task too fatiguing that day, did not deem it proper to admit it. M. Boissard has always contrived to
^ Now in the church of Saint-Medard, Paris.
^ The Duval Lecamuses ( father and son ) were pupils of David
and Delaroche respectively; Antoine Maurin was a pupil of
Ary ScheflFer.
^Boulanger achieved his first great success in 1827 with Le
Supplice de Mazeppa (Rouen Museum).
^Boissard de Boisdenier, painter, musician, writer and dandy,
was a friend of Baudelaire's in the days of the Club des
Haschischins.
l6 THE SALON OF 1845
keep his head above the troubled waters of that bad period of which M. Boulanger prompted us to speak, and thanks to the serious and what one might call the naive quahties of his painting, he has preserved himself from danger. His Christ en croix is solidly painted and its coloin: is good.
ScHNETZ. Alasl what is to be done with these vast Itahan pictures? We are in 1845— but we are very afraid that Schnetz will still be giving us the same kind of thing ten years from now.
Chasseriau. Le Kalife de Constantine suivi de son escorte.^^ The immediate attraction of this picture Hes in its composition. This procession of horses and noble riders has something that suggests the spontaneous boldness of the great masters. But to anyone who has carefully followed M. Chasseriau's studies, it must be obvious that many a revolution is still going on in this youthful mind, and that the struggle is not yet over.
The position which he wants to create for himself be- tween Ingres, whose pupil he is, and Delacroix, w^hom he is seeking to plunder, has an element of ambiguit)' for every- body—and of embarrassment for himself. That M. Chas- seriau should find his quarry in DelacroLx is simple enough; but that, in spite of all his talent and of all the precocious experience that he has acquired, he should make the fact so obvious— that is where the evil hes. And so this picture con- tains contradictions. Here and there it already achieves colour; elsewhere it is still only a patchwork of colouring. Nevertheless its general effect is pleasing, and its compo- sition, we are glad to repeat, is excellent.
As early as the Othello illustrations^^ ever)'one had noticed how concerned he was with imitating DelacroLx. But given tastes as distinguished and a mind as active as those of M. Chasseriau, there is every ground for hoping that he will become a painter, and an eminent one.^^
^ Now in tlie Versailles Museum; see pi. 17.
^^ A series of fifteen etchings which appeared in 1844.
^ A paragraph on Debon is omitted here.
HISTORY-PAINTINGS I7
Victor Robert. Here is a picture which has been very un- lucky. We think, however, that it has been quite sufficiently roasted by the pundits of the press, and that the time has now come to right its wrongs. And yet what a curious idea it was to show these gentlemen Europe being enlightened by Religion, Philosophy, the Sciences and the Arts,^^ and to represent each European people by a figure occupying its geographical position in the picture! How could one hope to make something bold acceptable to those scribblers, or to make them understand that allegory is one of the noblest branches of art?
The colour of this enormous composition is good— in bits, at least; it even reveals a search after fresh tones. The atti- tudes of some of the beautiful women who symbolize the various nations are elegant and original.
It is unfortunate that the eccentric idea of assigning its geographical position to each people should have damaged tile ensemble of the composition and the charm of the groups, and that the figures should thus have been spilt all over the canvas, as in a picture by Claude whose little manikins are allowed to tumble about as they Uke.
Is M. Victor Robert a consummate artist, or a crack- brained genius? There are things to be said for either view —expert intentions side by side with the blunders of youth. But on the whole this is one of the most interesting pictures in the Salon, and one of the most worthy of attention.^^
Planet is one of those rare pupils of Delacroix who bril- liantly reflect certain of their master's quahties.^^
There is no joy so sweet, in the miserable business of writ- ing a Salon-review, than to come upon a genuinely good and original picture whose name has already been made— by hoots and catcalls.
^ The catalogue contained a lengthy explanation of this picture. Gautier described it as *cet immense tableau humanitaire et palingenesique'.
^ Paragraphs on Brune, Glaize, LepauUe, Mouchy, Appert and Bigand are omitted here.
^Planet's Souvenirs (published long after his death, in 1929) contain much useful information concerning Delacroix's methods, as weU as information about the present picture.
l8 THE SALON OF 1845
And in fact this picture really has been jeered at. We can perfectly well understand the hatred of architects, masons, sculptors and modellers towards anything that looks hke painting; but how comes it that artists can be blind to such things in this picture as its originahty of composition, and even its simpHcity of colour?
We were charmed at the very start by some hint which it contains of an almost Spanish voluptuousness. M. Planet has done what all first-rate colomists do— that is, he has achieved colour with a small quantity of tones— with red, white, and brown; and the result is deUcate and caressing to the eye. St. Teresa,^^ as the painter has represented her here— St. Teresa, sinking, falling, thrilling at the point of the dart with which Divine Love is about to pierce her, is among the happiest inventions in modern painting. The hands are charming. The attitude, for all its naturalness, is as poetic as could be. This picture distills an atmosphere of extreme sensuous rapture and marks its author as a man who is capable of thoroughly understanding a subject— for we are told that St. Teresa was 'afire with so great a love of God that its violence caused her to cry out aloud . . . And her pain was not bodily but spiritual, although her body had its share in it, even a large one'.^^
Are we going to speak about the mystical httle cupid, hanging in mid-air and about to transfix her with his jave- lin? No. What is the point? M. Planet is obviously talented enough to paint a complete picture another time.^^
Gleyre. He it was that captured the heart of the senti- mental public with his picture, Le Soir.^'^ And that was all very well, so long as it was only a question of painting women warbHng romantic ballads in a boat— in the same way as a poor opera can triumph over its music with the
^ La Vision de sainte Therese, now in a private collection, is re- produced on pi, 18.
'^ Quoted, in the catalogue, from St. Teresa's Life ( ch. XXIX, §17).
'"A paragraph on Dugasseau is omitted here. " Now in the Louvre; otherwise known as Les Illusions perdues. See pi. 42.
HISTORY-PAINTINGS IQ
delightful aid of undraped bosoms— or rather behinds. But this year M. Gleyre has taken it into his head to paint apostles^^— apostles, M. Gleyrel and alas! he has not proved capable of triumphing over his own painting.^^
Joseph Fay. M. Joseph Fay has sent only drawings, like M. Decamps— which is our reason for including him among the history-painters. We are not concerned here with the technique, but with the manner in which an artist works.
M. Joseph Fay^^ has sent six drawings representing the life of the ancient Germans— they are the cartoons for a frieze executed in fresco in the town hall at Elberfeld in Prussia.
And as a matter of fact these things did strike us as more than a little Germanic, and while we were scrutinizing them with the pleasure that any honest work will always afford, we found ourselves thinking of all those modern celebrities from the other side of the Rhine, who are published by the dealers on the Boulevard des Italiens.
These drawings, of which some represent the great struggle between Arminius and the invading Romans, and others the serious and ever-martial games of Peace, bear a noble family likeness to the excellent compositions of Peter ComeHus. Their draughtsmanship is adroit and skilful, and tends towards the neo-Michelangelesque. Every movement is happily conceived and denotes a mind which sincerely loves form, if it be not actually in love with it. We were attracted to these drawings because of their beauty; and it is for that that we like them. But on the whole, despite the beauty of this array of intellectual power, we still yearn and cry aloud for originality: we should like to see this same talent arrayed in support of ideas more modern— or rather, in support of a new way of seeing and of understanding the arts. By this we do not mean to refer to choice of subject— for in that respect artists are not always free— but rather to
^ This painting is now in the church at Montargis; it is repro- duced, after an engraving, in Clement, Gleyre, 1878, pi. IV. ** Paragraphs on Pilliard and Auguste Hesse are omitted here. ^'A German artist, Joseph Fay was in Paris in 1845-6. He studied for a time with Delaroche.
20 THE SALON OF 1845
the manner in which subjects are comprehended and de- picted.
In a word, what is the point of all this erudition when a man has talent?^®
Janmot. We were only able to find a single figure-subject by M, Janmot— it is of a woman, seated, with flowers on her knee.^^ This simple figure, which is both serious and melan- choly, and whose fine draughtsmanship and sHghtly raw colour remind one of the old German masters— this graceful Dilrer made us excessively curious to find the others; but we were not successful. Here, however, we certainly have a fine painting; and quite apart from the fact that the model is very beautiful, well chosen and well attired, there is in the colour itself, and in this slightly distressing combination of green, pink and red tones, a certain mystical quality which is in keeping with the rest; there is a natural har- mony here between colour and drawing.
To complete the idea that one should form of M. Jan- mot's talent, it will be enough to read the subject of another of his pictures in the catalogue:— 'T/ie Assumption of the Virgin; in the upper part, the Blessed Virgin surrounded by angels, of which the two chief ones represent Chastity and Harmony; in the lower part. The Rehabilitation of Woman —an angel breaking her chains.'
Etex. Oh sculptor! you who have been known to give us good statues— are you unaware, then, that there is a great difference between designing upon a canvas and modelling with clay, and that colour is a melodious science whose secrets are not revealed by merely knowing how to cope with marble? It would be possible to understand a musician wanting to ape Delacroix— but a sculptor, never! Oh great hewer of stone, why do you want to play the fiddle?^^
^ Paragraphs on Jollivet, Laviron and Matout are omitted here. "^ Janmot's Fleurs des cJiamps is now in the Lyons Museum; see pi. 16. Besides his Assumption (mentioned below), he also ex- hibited two portraits.
*" Etex's painting was entitled La Delivrance. On liis sculpture see pp. 36-7 below.
PORTRAITS Zl
in
PORTRAITS
Leon Cogniet has a very fine portrait of a woman, in the Salon cane.
This artist occupies a very high position in the middle reaches of taste and invention. If he does not aspire to the level of genius, his is one of those talents which defy criti- cism by their very completeness within their own modera- tion. M. Cogniet is as unacquainted with the reckless flights of fantasy as with the rigid systems of the absolutists. To fuse, to mix and to combine, while exercising choice, have always been his role and his aim; and he has perfectly ful- filled them. Everything in this excellent portrait— the flesh- tones, the millinery, the background— is handled with an equal feHcity.
DuBUFE. For several years now M. Dubufe has been the victim of every art-journalist. If it is a far cry from M. Dubufe to Sir Thomas Lawrence, at any rate it is not with- out a certain justice that he has inherited some of that artist's urbane popularity. In our opinion the bourgeois is quite right to idolize the man who provides him with such pretty women— and almost always such elegantly attired ones.
M. Dubufe has a son who has declined to walk in the steps of his father, and has blundered into serious painting.
Mlle. Eugenie Gautier. Fine colour— firm and elegant drawing. This woman knows her old masters— there is a touch of Van Dyck about her— she paints like a man. Every connoisseur of painting will remember the modelling of two bare arms in a portrait which she showed at the last Salon. Mlle. Eugenie Gautier's painting has nothing to do with woman s 'painting, which usually makes us think of the do- mestic precepts of the excellent Chrysale.^
^The protesting husband, and father, of Moliere's Femmes Savantes.
22 THE SALON OF 1845
Belloc. M. Belloc has sent several portraits. That of M. Michelet struck us with the excellence of its colour. M. Belloc, who is not well enough known, is among the most skilful of present-day artists. He has turned out some remarkable pupils— Mile. Eugenie Gautier is one of them, we beHeve. Last year at the Bonne-Nouvelle galleries we saw a child's head of liis which reminded us of the very best of Lawrence.2
Haffner. Another new name, for us at least. Very badly hung in the Httle gallery, he has a strikingly effective por- trait of a woman. It is diflBcult to find, which is a real pity. This portrait betokens a colourist of the first order. There is nothing dazzling, sumptuous or vulgar about its colour; it is excessively distinguished and remarkably harmonious. The whole thing is carried out within a very grey tonal scale. Its effect is very skilfully contrived, so that it is at once both soft and striking. The head, which is romantically conceived and of a delicate pallor, stands out against a grey background, which is paler still at this stage, and which, by growing darker towards the edges, gives the impression of forming a halo around it. As well as this, M. Haffner has painted a landscape which is very daring in colour— it shows a waggon with a man and some horses, almost silhouetted against the uncertain brilliance of a twihght sky. Another conscientious seeker . . . how rare they are I
Perignon^ has sent nine portraits, of which six are of women. M. Perignon's heads are as hard and polished as in- animate objects. A real waxwork show.
Horace Vernet. M. Horace Vemet, the portrait-painter, is inferior to M. Horace Vernet, the heroic painter. His colour surpasses that of M. Court in rawness.
Hippolyte Flandrin. Did not M. Flandrin once give us a graceful portrait of a woman leaning against the front of
^ Paragraphs on Tissier, Riesener and Dupont are omitted here. ' According to the critic of V Illustration, P^rignon was 'le por- traitiste a la mode'.
PORTRAITS 23
a theatre-box, with a bxinch of violets at her bosom?* But alas! he has come to grief in his portrait of M. Chaix-d'Est- Ange.^ This is but the semblance of serious painting; he has quite failed to catch the well-known expression of that fine- drawn, sardonic and ironical face. It is heavy and dull.
Nevertheless it has just given us the keenest pleasure to find a female portrait by M. Flandrin— a simple head— which reminded us once more of his best works. Its general effect may be a little too gentle, and perhaps it makes the mistake of not rivetting the eye, Kke M. Lehmann's portrait of the Princess Belgiojoso.^ Nevertheless, as this picture is a small one, M. Flandrin has been able to carry it through to perfection. The modelling is beautiful, and the whole thing has the merit, which is rare among these gentlemen, of seeming to have been done all in one breath and at the first attempt.'^
Henri Scheffer. To give this artist his proper due, we dare not suppose that this portrait of His Majesty was done from the fife. There are but few faces in contemporary history which are so strongly marked as that of Louis-Philippe. Toil and fatigue have printed some goodly wrinkles upon it— but of these the artist shows no knowledge. It pains us that France should not possess a single portrait of her King. One man alone is worthy of that task— it is M. Ingres.
All of M. Henri Scheffer's portraits are painted with the same bHnd and meticulous honesty, the same monotonous and patient conscientiousness.*
* Presumably the portrait of Mme. Oudine, exhibited at the 1840 Salon; repro. facing p. 166 in Louis Flandrin's Hippolyte Flandrin, Sa Vie et son Oeuvre (Paris 1902). ^ Jurist, statesman and barrister ( 1800-76), the father of Baude- laire's counsel in the lawsuit over Les Fleurs du Mai (Aug. 1857).
' Henri Lehmann's portrait of the Princess Belgiojoso was one of the great successes of the 1844 Salon. Reproduced in R. Bar- biera's La Principessa Belgioioso (edition of 1914), as the prop- erty of the Marchese Franco Dal Pozzo. ' Paragraphs on Richardot and Verdier are omitted here. ® A paragraph on Leiendecker is omitted here.
24 THE SALON OF 1845
Diaz. M. Diaz usually paints little pictures whose magical colour surpasses even the fantastic visions of the kaleido- scope. This year he has sent some small full-length portraits. But it is not only colour, but lines and modelhng, that go to make a portrait. No doubt our genre-painter will get his own back for this year's aberration.
IV
GENRE-PAINTINGS
Baron has taken his Oies du pdre Thilippe^ from one of La Fontaine's tales.
He has made it an excuse for introducing pretty women, shady trees, and variegated colours, for all that.
Its general efiFect is most engaging, but it must be ac- counted the rococo of Romanticism. It contains elements of Couture, a Httle of Celestin Nanteuil's technique, and a lot of tints borrowed from Roqueplan and Clement Boulanger. Stand in front of this picture and reflect how cold an ex- cessively expert and brilliantly-coloured painting can still remain when it lacks an individual temperament.
IsABEY. TJn Interieur dalchimiste.^ These scenes always contain crocodiles, stufiEed birds, vast morocco-bound tomes, fiery braziers, and an old man in a dressing-gown— that is to say, a great diversity of tints. This explains the partiahty of certain colourists for so commonplace a subject.
M. Isabey is a true colourist— always brilliant, frequently subtle. He has been one of the most justly fortunate of the men of the new movement.
Lecurieux. Salomon de Cans, d Bicetre.^ We are in a popular playhouse that has gone in for real literature for a
^Repro. Moniteur des Arts (I, 96). 'Repro. lllustr., vol. 5 (1845), p. 57.
"Repro. Illustr., vol. 5 (1845), p. 41. Salomon de Caus was an engineer who in his writings foreshadowed the theory of steam- power. The story of his confinement in the as)'lum at Bicetre is
GENRE-PAINTINGS 25
change. The curtain has just risen, and all the actors are facing the public.
A great lord, with Marion Delorme leaning sinuously upon his arm, is turning a deaf ear to the complaints of Salomon, who is gesticulating like a maniac in the back- ground.
The production is well-staged; all the lunatics are charm- ing, picturesque, and know their parts perfectly.
Indeed, we cannot understand Marion Delorme's dismay at the sight of such charming lunatics.
The uniform e£Fect created by this picture is one of cafe au lait. It is as russet in colour as a wretched, dust-ridden day.
The drawing— that of a vignette, an illustration. What is the point of attempting what is called serious painting when one is neither a colourist nor a draughtsman?*
Tassaert. a httle devotional picture, done almost like a love-scene. The Virgin is suckling the infant Jesus, beneath a coronet of flowers and httle cupids. We had aheady taken note of M. Tassaert last year. He combines good, mod- erately bright colour with a great deal of taste.^
GuiLLEMiN. Though his execution certainly has merit, M. Guillemin wastes too much talent supporting a bad cause— the cause of wit in painting. By this I mean providing the catalogue-printer with captions aimed at the Sunday pubHc.
MuLLER. Can it be the Saturday public, on the other hand, that M. MuUer thinks to please when he chooses his sub- jects from Shakespeare and Victor Hugo?^ Enormous 'Em- pire' cupids in the guise of sylphs. So it is not enough to be a colourist in order to have taste. His Fanny, however, is better.*^
related in a letter from Marion Delorme, the famous 17th cen- tury courtesan, which is quoted in the catalogue. *A paragraph on Mme. Celeste Pensotti is omitted here. ^ Paragraphs on Leleux freres and Lepoitevin are omitted here. " MuUer's Sylphe endormi was supported with a quotation from Victor Hugo, and his Lutin Puck with one from Shakespeare. ''Paragraphs on Duval Lecamus (pere) and Duval Lecamus (Jules) are omitted here.
26 THE SALON OF 1845
GiGOux. M. Gigoux has given us the pleasant task of re- reading the account of the death of Manon Lescaut^ in the catalogue. But his picture is bad; it has no style, and its composition and colour are bad. It lacks all character, it lacks all feeling for its subject. Whatever is this Desgrieux? I would not recognize him.
No more can I recognize M. Gigoux himself in this pic- ture—the M. Gigoux who several years ago was acclaimed by the public as the equal of the most serious innovators in art. . . . Can it be that he is embarrassed today by his reputation as a painter?
RuDOLPHE Lehmann.^ His Italian women this year make us regret those of last year.^^^
Papety showed great promise, they say. On his return from Italy (which was heralded by some injudicious applause), he exhibited an enormous canvas^^ in which, although the recent usages of the Academy of Painting were too clearly discernible, he had nevertheless hit upon some felicitous poses and several compositional motifs; and in spite of its fan-Hke colour, there was every ground for predicting the artist a serious future. Since then he has remained in the secondary class of the men who paint weU and have port- folios fuU of scraps of ideas aU ready to be used. His two pictures this year {Memphis and Un Assaut)^^ are com- monplace in colour. Nevertheless their general appearance
® Repro. I' Artiste, 4th series, vol. IV, and Ferran's edition of tlie
Salon de 1845, facing p. 178.
^ Rudolphe Lehmann is not to be confused with his brother
Henri Lehmann, to whose portrait of the Princess Belgiojoso
there is reference above. Of the former's paintings of Italian
peasant women, one is reproduced Illustr., vol. 5 ( 1845), p. 137,
and another Moniteur des Arts (II, p. 41).
^° Paragraphs on De la Foulhouse, Perese, De Dreux and Mme.
Calamatta are omitted here.
" Presumably his RSve de bonheur, exhibited in 1843.
^Memphis, repro. Illustr., vol. 5 (1845), p. 137. Un Assaut
(correct title, Guillaume de Clermont ddfendant PtoUmais) is
in die Versailles Museum.
GENRE-PAINTINGS 2/
diflFers considerably, which leads us to imagine that M. Papety has not yet discovered his manner.
Admen Guignet. There is no doubt that M. Adrien Gui- gnet has talent; he knows how to compose and arrange. But why, then, this perpetual doubt? One moment it is De- camps, and the next, Salvator. This year you would think that he had taken some motives from Egyptian sculpture or antique mosaics, and then had coloured them, on papyrus (Les Pharaons) .^^ And yet if Salvator or Decamps were painting Psammenit or Pharaoh, even so they would do them in the manner of Salvator or Decamps. Why then does M. Guignet . . . ?
Meissonier. Three pictures: Soldats jouant aux des—Jeune homme feuilletant un carton?-^— Deux buveurs jouant aux cartes.
Times change— and with them, manners; fashions change —and with them, schools. In spite of ourselves, M. Meis- sonier makes us think of M. Martin Drolhng. All reputa- tions, even the most deserved ones, contain a mass of Httle secrets. Thus, when the celebrated Monsieur X. was asked what he had seen at the Salon, he repHed that the only thing he had seen was a Meissonier— in order to avoid speaking about the equally famous Monsieur Y., who, for his part, said exactly the same thing! See what a good thing it is to act as a club for two rivals to beat one another withl
On the whole M. Meissonier executes his little figures admirably. He is a Fleming, minus the fantasy, the charm, the colour, the naivete— and the pipe!^^
Hornung. 'Le plus tetu des trois nest pas celui quon pense.'^^
" Joseph expliquant les songes du Pharaon is now in the Rouen
Museum. See pi. 14.
"Repro. {Jeune homme regardant des dessins), Illustr., vol. 5
(1845), p. 184.
" Paragraphs on Jacquand, Roehn, Remond and Henri Scheffer
are omitted here.
" 'The most stubborn of the tliree is not the one you think', was
ZS THE SALON OF 1845
Bard. See above. Geffroy. See above.
LANDSCAPES
CoROT. At the head of the modern school of landscape stands M. Corot. If M. Theodore Rousseau^ were to ex- hibit, his supremacy would be in some doubt, for to a naivete, an originaHty which are at least equal, M. Rosseau adds a greater charm and a greater sureness of execution. It is naivete and originaHty, in fact, which constitute M. Corot's worth. Obviously this artist loves Nature sincerely, and knows how to look at her with as much knowledge as love. The quahties by which he excels are so strong— be- cause they are quahties of heart and soul— that M. Corot's influence is visible today in almost all the works of the young landscape-painters— in those, above all, who already had the good -sense to imitate him and to profit by his man- ner before he was famous and at a time when his reputa- tion still did not extend beyond the world of the studios. From the depths of his modesty, M. Corot has acted upon a whole host of artists. Some have devoted themselves to combing nature for the themes, the views and the colours for which he has a fondness— to fostering the same subjects; others have even tried to paraphrase his awkwardness. Now, on the subject of this pretended awkwardness of M. Corot's, it seems to us that there is a sHght misconception to clear up. After having conscientiously admired and faithfully praised a picture by Corot, our fledghng con- noisseurs always end by declaring that it comes to grief in its execution; they agree in this, that decidedly M. Corot
the title of Hornung's painting; it showed a boy and a girl sit- ting on a donkey, and served Baudelaire witli a con\'enient riddle with which to dismiss his last three genre-painters. See La Fontaine, Le Meunier, son fih, et I'dne, 1. 37. ' See n., p. 117.
LANDSCAPES ZQ
does not know how to paint. Splendid fellows 1 who first of all are unaware that a work of genius (or if you prefer, a work of the soul), in which every element is well seen, well observed, well understood and well imagined, will always be very well executed when it is sufficiently so. Next, that there is a great di£Eerence between a work that is complete and a work that is finished; that in general what is complete is not finished, and that a thing that is highly finished need not be complete at all; and that the value of a telling, ex- pressive and well-placed touch is enormous, etc., etc.,— from all of which it follows that M. Corot paints like the great masters. We need look no further for an example than to his picture of last year,^ which was imbued with an even greater tenderness and melancholy than usual. That verdant landscape, in which a woman was sitting playing the violin— that pool of sunlight in the middle distance, which lit up and coloured the grass in a different manner from the foreground, was certainly a most successful stroke of aesthetic daring. M. Corot is quite as strong this year as in the past— but the eye of the pubHc has become so ac- customed to neat, gHstening and industriously poHshed morsels that the same criticism is always levelled at him.
Another proof of M. Corot's powers, be it only in the sphere of technique, is that he knows how to be a colourist within a scarcely varied tonal range— and that he is always a harmonist even when he uses fairly raw and vivid tones. His composition is always impeccable. Thus in his Homere et les bergers^ there is nothing unnecessary, nothing to be pruned— not even the two Httle figures walking away in conversation down the path. The three Httle shepherds with their dog are enchanting, like those excellent Httle scraps of bas-reHef which are sometimes to be found on the pedestals of antique statues. But is not Homer himseH a Httle too much like BeHsarius, perhaps?
Daphnis et Chloe"^ is another picture full of charms; its
^ Exhibited in 1844 as Pay sage avec figures, this picture was ex- tensively repainted by the artist and exhibited again thirteen years later; it is now in the Chantilly Museum {Le Concert). ^ Now in the Saint-L6 Museum. See pi. 20. *Repro. Moniteur des Arts (I, 152).
30 THE SALON OF 1845
composition, like all good compositions— as we have often observed— has the merit of the unexpected.
Francais is another landscape-painter of the highest merit —a merit somewhat hke that of Corot, and one that we should be incHned to characterize as 'love of nature'; but it is already less naive, more artful— it smacks much more of its painter— and it is also easier to understand. His painting, Le Soir,^ is beautiful in colour.
Paul, Huet. Un vieux chateau sur des rochers. Can it be that M. Paul Huet is seeking to modify his manner? But it was aheady excellent as it was.
Haffner. Prodigious originaHty— above all in colour. This is the first time that we have seen works by M. HafiFner, so we do not know if he is by rights a landscape-painter or a portrait-painter— all the more so because he excels in both genres.
Troyon 'always paints beautiful, luxuriant landscapes, and he paints them in the role of colourist and even that of observer— hut he always wearies the eye by the unshakeable self-confidence of his manner and the restless flicker of his brush-strokes. It is not pleasant to see a man so sure of himself.
CxmzoN has painted a highly original view called Les Houblons. It is quite simply a horizon, framed in the leaves and branches of the foreground. As well as this, M. Curzon has produced a very fine drawing of which we shall shortly have occasion to speak. ^
Calame and Did ay J For a long time people were under the impression that this was one and the same artist, suffer- ing from a chronic dualism; but later it was observed that
^ Repro. Moniteur des Arts (I, 64).
" Paragraphs on Flers and Wickemberg are omitted here. 'Calame was tlie pupil of Diday. This year Calame exhibited Un Orage and Diday La Suite d'un orage dans les Alpes.
LANDSCAPES 3I
he had a preference for the name Calame on the days when he was painting well.^
BoRGET. Eternal views of India and China.^ Doubtless it is all very well done, but they are too much Hke travel-essays or accounts of manners and customs. There are people, however, who sigh for what they have never seen— such as the boulevard du Temple, or the galeries de Boisl^^ M. Borget's pictures make us sigh for that China where the very breeze, according to M. Heine,^^ takes on a comic sound as it slips past the Httle hanging bells, and where nature and man cannot look at one another without laugh- ing.
Paul Flandrin. It is understandable that a man should damp down the reflected Kghts on a head in order to make the modelling more visible— and above all so when his name is Ingres. But who on earth was the weird eccentric who first took it into his head to mgrize' the country side?^^
Brascassat. Without doubt too much fuss is being made of M. Brascassat, who, man of sense and talent as he is, must really know that the Flemish gallery contains a lot of pictures of the same kind as his^^- quite as fully realized, more broadly paiated- and of a better colour.— Similarly too much fuss is made of
^Paragraphs on Dauzats, Frere, Chacaton, Loubon, Gamerey
and Joyant are omitted here.
® His Pont Chinois was repro. Illustr., vol. 5 ( 1845), p. 136. He
had been exhibiting Chinese and Indian views since 1836.
"A favourite rendezvous in the Palais-Royal: it had already
been demolished when Baudelaire wrote, and the site is now
occupied by the Galerie d' Orleans.
" The allusion is to a passage in Heine's Die romantische Schule
(Bk. Ill, ch. 1, §1).
^ Paragraphs on Blanchard, Lapierre and Lavieille are omitted
here.
" Of five landscapes exhibited, one, Vache attaquSe par des hups, was repro. Illustr., vol. 5 (1845), p. 39, and another, Paysage, repro. Moniteur des Arts (I, 112).
32 THE SALON OF 1845
Saint-Jean, who is of the school of Lyons, the penitentiary of painting, the comer of the known world in which the infinitely minute is wrought the best. We prefer the flowers and fruits of Rubens; they seem to us more natural. More- over the general effect of M. Saint- Jean's picture^"* is most wretched— it is monotonously yellow. On the whole, how- ever well executed they may be, M. Saint-Jean's pictures are dining-room pictures— not cabinet or gallery-pictures, but real dining-room pictures.^^
Arondel.^^ a great heap of game of every kind. This ill- composed picture— more a hotch-potch than a composition, as though it was aiming above all at quantity— has neverthe- less what is a very rare quality these days; it is painted \\dth a great naivete, without any dogmatism of school or ped- antry of studio. And from this it follows that parts of it are really well painted. Unhappily some others are of a muddy brown colour, which gives the picture a certain effect of dinginess— but all the clear or rich tones are thoroughly effective. What therefore struck us in this picture was its mixture of clumsiness and skill— blunders suggesting a man who had not painted for years, and assurance suggesting a man who had painted a great deal.
Chazal has painted the Yucca gloriosa which flowered last year in the park at Neuilly. It would be a good thing if all those people who cling so desperately to microscopic truth, and believe themselves to be painters, could see this httle picture; and if the following Httle observations could be pumped into their ears through an ear-trumpet:— 'This pic- ture is a success not because everything is there and you can count each leaf, but because at the same time it cap- " Fruits et Fleurs, a copy of which is now in the Dijon Museum. ^Paragraphs on Kiorboe, Philippe Rousseau and Beranger are omitted here.
" This obscure artist was twice mentioned by Baudelaire in his salon-reviews (see p. 119 below). He is generally identified with the dealer Arondel who sold Baudelaire false Bassanos and in whose debt Baudelaire long remained. His address is given in the catalogue as the Hotel Pimodan, quai d'Anjou, where Bau- delaire also had lived.
DRAWINGS— ENGRAVINGS 33
tures the general character of nature; because it conveys well the raw greenness of a park beside the Seine and the effect of our cold sun; in short, because it is done with a profound naivete, whereas all of you spend far too much of your time being . . . artists!' (Sic).
VI
DRAWINGS — ENGRAVINGS
Brillouin has sent five pencil-drawings which are a little like those of M. de Lemud; these, however, have more firmness and perhaps more character. Their composition on the whole is good. 'Tintoretto giving a drawing-lesson to his daughter' is certainly an excellent thing. What chiefly distinguishes these drawings is their nobility of structure, their seriousness and the characterization of the heads.
CuRZON. Une serenade dans un bateau is one of the most distinguished things in the Salon. The arrangement of all those figures is most happy, and the old man lying amid his garlands at the end of the boat is a most dehghtful idea. There is some affinity between M. Curzon's composition and those of M. Brillouin; they have this above all in com- mon—they are well drawn, and drawn with a vivid touch. ^
Marechal. Without doubt La Grappe^ is a fine pastel, and good in colour. But we must criticize all those gentle- men of the school of Metz^ for only as a rule achieving a conventional seriousness, an imitation of real mastery. We would say this without wishing in the very least to detract from the honour of their efforts . . .^ ^ A paragraph on De Rudder is omitted here, " Repro. Illustr., vol. 5 ( 1845), p. 185.
^ The SocietS des Amis des Arts at Metz was founded in 1834, and it was from this that the Ecole de Metz sprang. Marechal was one of its leaders. See Ferran's edition of the Scdon de 1845 (pp. 272-3) for further details. See also p. 90 below. * Paragraphs on Toumeux, PoUet, Chabal, Alphonse Masson and Antonin Moine are omitted here.
34 THE SALON OF 1845
ViDAL. It was last year, to the best of our belief, that the parrot-cry about Vidal's drawings began to be raised.^ It would be a good thing to be finished with it once and for aU. Every effort is now being made to present M. Vidal to us as a serious draughtsman. His are very -finished drawings —but they are incomplete; nevertheless it must be admitted that they have more elegance than those of Maurin and Jules David. We beg forgiveness for insisting so strongly on this point— but we know a critic who took it into his head to speak about Watteau in connection with M. Vidal.^
Jacque. Here we have a new name which will continue, let us hope, to grow greater. M. Jacque's'' etching is very bold and he has grasped his subject admirably. There is a directness and a freedom about everything that M. Jacque does upon his copper which reminds one of the old masters. He is known, besides, to have executed some remarkable reproductions of Rembrandt's etchings.
vn
SCULPTURES
Babtolini.^ We in Paris have a right to be suspicious of foreign reputations. Our neighbours have so often beguiled
^ Baudelaire seems to be confusing two artists of tliis name. Vic- tor Vidal, who exhibited five drawings this year (one of tliem, V Amour de soi-meme, repro. Illustr., vol. 5 [1845], p. 152), had not exhibited since 1841, whereas Vincent Vidal, who showed nothing in 1845, had exhibited five pastels in the previ- ous year. It seems, therefore, tliat tlie 'prejuge Vidal', to which Baudelaire again referred in 1846 (see pp. 91-2 below), origi- nated with Vincent, and not Victor, Vidal.
" Gautier had invoked the name of Watteau ( and of Chardin ) in La Presse, 16th April; and Thore added Boucher and Fragonard. Paragraphs on Mme. de Mirbel and Henriquel-Dupont are omitted here.
'' This was Jacque's first Salon.
^Lorenzo Bartolini (1777-1850) was one of the most admired Italian sculptors of his day. His portrait had been painted by Ingres in 1806, and again in 1820.
SCULPTURES 35
our credulous admiration with masterpieces which tiiey never showed— or which, if at last they consented to reveal them, were an object of embarrassment for them, as for us —that we always remain on our guard against new traps. Thus it was only with an excessive feeling of suspicion that we approached the Nymphe au scorpion. But this time we have found it quite impossible to withhold our admiration from a foreign artist. Certainly our sculptors have more skill— an excessive preoccupation with technique engrosses them just as it does our painters; but it is precisely because of the qualities which our artists have to some extent for- gotten—namely taste, nobiHty, grace— that we regard M. BartoHni's exhibit as the capital work of the Salon of sculpture. We know that more than one of the sculpturizers of whom we are about to speak are very well fitted to pick out the several faults of execution which this statue con- tains—a little too much softness here, a lack of firmness there; in short, certain flabby passages, and a touch of meagreness about the arms— but not one of them has man- aged to hit upon such a pretty motif; not one of them has this fine taste, this purity of aim, this chastity of line which by no means excludes originahty. The legs are charming, the head graceful and coquettish; it is probable that it is quite simply a well-chosen model.* The less a workman obtrudes himself in his work and the purer and clearer its aims, the more charmed we are.
David. This is far from the case v^dth M. David, for ex- ample, whose works always make us think of Ribera. And yet our comparison is not entirely just, for Ribera is only a man of technique into the bargain, so to speak— in addi- tion to that, he is full of fire, originality, rage and irony.
Certainly it would be diflScult to model or to trace a contour better than M. David. His child hanging on to a bunch of grapes,^ which was already familiar to us from
* What makes us only the prouder of our opinion is that we know it to be shared by one of the greatest painters of the mod- em school. ( C.B. )
® L'Enfant d la grappe, now in the Louvre. Sainte-Beuve's poem, 'Sur ime statue d'enfant, a David, statuaire', is included in his Pensees d'Aout.
36 THE SALON OF 1845
a few charming lines by Sainte-Beuve, is an intriguing thing; admittedly it is real flesh and blood, but it is as sense- less as nature— and surely it is an uncontested truth that it is no part of the aim of sculpture to go into rivalry with plaster-casts. Having made this point, let us stand back and admire its beauty of workmanship.^
Pradier. You would think that M. Pradier had wanted to get away from himself and to mount up, in one leap, towards the supernal regions. We do not know how to praise his statue;* it is incomparably skilful; it is pretty from every angle, though doubtless one could trace some of its detail to the Museum of antique sculpture, for it is a prodigious mixture of hidden borrowings. Beneath this new skin the old Pradier still Hves, to give an exquisite charm to this figure. Certainly it is a noble tour de force; but M. Bartolini's Nymph, with all its imperfections, seems to us to be more original.
Feuchere. More cleverness— but Good Heavens! shall we never get any further?
This young artist has already had his good years at the Salon; his statue is evidently destined for a success. Quite apart from the fact that its subject is a happy one (for virgin purity can generally count on a public, like every- thing that touches the popular affections), this Joan of Arc, which we had already seen in plaster,^ gains much by being enlarged. The fall of the drapery is good— not at all like that of the generality of sculptors; the arms and the feet are very finely v^TOught; the head is perhaps a Httle commonplace.^
Etex. M. Etex has never been able to produce anything complete. His conceptions are often happy— he possesses a certain pregnancy of thought v^^hich reveals itself quickly enough and which we find pleasing; but his work is always
* A paragraph on Bosio is omitted here.
* Phryn^, repro. lUustr., vol. 5 ( 1845), p. 173. » At the 1835 Salon.
" A paragraph on Daumas is omitted here.
SCULPTURES 37
spoiled by quite considerable passages. Thus, when seen from behind, his group 'Hero and Leander' seems heavy, and the lines do not unfold harmoniously. Hero's shoulders and back are unworthy of her hips and legs."^
Dantan has done several good busts^— noble, and ob- viously lifelike— as has
Clesinger, who has put a great deal of distinction and elegance into his portraits of the due de Nemours and Mme. Marie de M . . .
Camagni has done a romantic bust of Cordelia, original enough in type to be a portrait . . .
We do not think that we have been guilty of any serious omissions. This Salon, on the whole, is like all previous Salons, except for the sudden, unexpected and dazzling appearance of M. WilHam HaussouUier, and several very fine things, by Delacroix and Decamps. For the rest, let us record tliat everyone is painting better and better— which seems to us a lamentable thing; but of invention, ideas or temperament there is no more than before. No one is cocking his ear to to-morrow's wind; and yet the heroism of modern life surrounds us and presses upon us. We are quite suEBciently choked by our true feelings for us to be able to know them. There is no lack of subjects, nor of colours, to make epics. The painter, the true painter for whom we are looking, will be he who can snatch its epic quahty from the life of today and can make us see and understand, with brush or vvdth pencil, how great and poetic we are in our cravats and our patent-leather boots. Next year let us hope that the true seekers may grant us the extraordinary delight of celebrating the advent of the neioP
^Paragraphs on Garraud, Debay, Cumberworth, Simart, Force- ville-Duvette and Millet are omitted here. ® One of them, of Soufflot, is at Versailles. The reference is to Dantan the younger; Dantan aine did not exhibit this year. ® This conclusion is taken up and developed in the closing sec- tion of the Salon of 1846.
THE SALON OF 1846i
TO THE BOURGEOIS
You ARE the majority— in number and intelligence; there- fore you are the force— which is justice.
Some are scholars, others are owners; a glorious day will come when the scholars shall be owners and the owners scholars. Then your power will be complete, and no man will protest against it.
Until that supreme harmony is achieved, it is just that those who are but owners should aspire to become scholars; for knowledge is no less of an enjoyment than ownership.
The government of the city is in your hands, and that is just, for you are the force. But you must also be capable of feeling beauty; for as not one of you today can do with- out power, so not one of you has the right to do without poetry.
You can live three days without bread— without poetry, never! and those of you who say the contrary are mistaken; they are out of their minds.
The aristocrats of thought, the distributors of praise and blame, the monopolists of the things of the mind, have told you that you have no right to feel and to enjoy— they are Pharisees.
For you have in your hands the government of a city whose pubHc is the public of the universe, and it is neces- sary that you should be worthy of that task.
Enjoyment is a science, and the exercise of the five senses calls for a particular initiation which only comes about through good will and need.
Very well, you need art.
Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refresh- ing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equihbrium of the ideal.
You understand its function, you gentlemen of the bour-
*The exhibition opened on 16th March at the Mus^e Royal. Baudelaire's review appeared as a booklet on 13th May. See pi. 2.
TO THE BOURGEOIS 39
geoisie— whether lawgivers or business-men— when the seventh or the eighth hour strikes and you bend your tired head towards the embers of your hearth or the cushions of your arm-chair.
That is the time when a keener desire and a more active reverie would refresh you after your daily labours.
But the monopolists have decided to keep the forbidden fruit of knowledge from you, because knowledge is their counter and their shop, and they are infinitely jealous of it If they had merely denied you the power to create works of art or to understand the processes by which they are created, they would have asserted a truth at which you could not take offence, because public business and trade take up three quarters of your day. And as for your leisure hours, they should be used for enjoyment and pleasure.
But the monopolists have forbidden you even to enjoy, because you do not understand the technique of the arts, as you do those of the law and of business.
And yet it is just that if two thirds of your time are devoted to knowledge, then the remaining third should be occupied by feeling— and it is by feeHng alone that art is to be understood; and it is in this way that the equilibrium of your soul's forces will be estabhshed.
Truth, for all its multiplicity, is not two-faced; and just as in your politics you have increased both rights and benefits, so in the arts you have set up a greater and more abundant communion.
You, the bourgeois— be you king, lawgiver or business- man—have founded collections, musemns and galleries. Some of those which sixteen years ago were only open to the monopolists have thrown wide their doors to the multi- tude.
You have combined together, you have formed com- panies and raised loans in order to realize the idea of the future in all its varied forms— pohtical, industrial and artistic. In no noble enterprise have you ever left the initiative to the protesting and suffering minority ,2 which anyway is the natural enemy of art.
For to allow oneself to be outstripped in art and in ' i.e. the Republicans.
40 THE SALON OF 1846
politics is to commit suicide; and for a majority to commit suicide is impossible.
And what you have done for France, you have done for other countries too. The Spanish Museum^ is there to in- crease the volume of general ideas that you ought to possess about art; for you know perfectly well that just as a national museum is a kind of communion by whose gentle influence men's hearts are softened and their wills unbent, so a foreign museum is an international communion where two peoples, observing and studying one another more at their ease, can penetrate one another's mind and fraternize without discussion.
You are the natural friends of the arts, because you are some of you rich men and the others scholars.
When you have given to society your knowledge, your industry, your labour and your money, you claim back your payment in enjoyments of the body, the reason and the imagination. If you recover the amount of enjoyments which is needed to establish the equiHbrium of all parts of your being, then you are happy, satisfied and well-disposed, as society will be satisfied, happy and well-disposed when it has found its own general and absolute equilibrium.
And so it is to you, the bourgeois, that this book is naturally dedicated; for any book which is not addressed to the majority— in number and intelligence— is a stupid book.
1st May 1846
WHAT IS THE GOOD OF CRITICISM?
What is the good?— A vast and terrible question-mark which seizes the critic by the throat from his very first step in the first chapter that he sits down to uTite.
At once the artist reproaches the critic with being unable to teach anything to the bourgeois, who wants neither to paint nor to write verses— nor even to art itself, since it is from the womb of art that criticism was born. " See pp. 2-3.
WHAT IS THE GOOD OF CRITICISM? 41
And yet how many artists today owe to the critics alone their sad Kttle fame! It is there perhaps that the real re- proach lies.
You will have seen a Gavarni which shows a painter bending over his canvas; behind him stands a grave, lean, stiflF gentleman, in a white cravat, holding his latest article in his hand. If art is noble, criticism is holy. —'Who says that?'— 'The critics '.'^ If the artist plays the leading role so easily, it is doubtless because his critic is of a type which we know so well.
Regarding technical means and processes taken from the works themselves,* the pubHc and the artist will find nothing to learn here. Things like that are learnt in the studio, and the pubhc is only concerned about the result.
I sincerely believe that the best criticism is that which is both amusing and poetic: not a cold, mathematical criticism which, on the pretext of explaining everything, has neither love nor hate, and voluntarily strips itself of every shred of temperament. But, seeing that a fine picture is nature reflected by an artist, the criticism which I approve will be that picture reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. Thus the best account of a picture may weU be a sonnet or an elegy.
But this kind of criticism is destined for anthologies and readers of poetry. As for criticism properly so-called, I hope that the philosophers will understand what I am going to say. To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criti- cism should be partial, passionate and pohtical, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.
To extol line to the detriment of colour, or colour at the expense of line, is doubtless a point of view, but it is neither very broad nor very just, and it indicts its holder of a great ignorance of individual destinies.
* No. 4 of Gavami's series of lithographs entitled Legons et Conseils, published in Le Charivari, 27 Nov. 1839. See pi. 3. *I know quite weU that criticism today has other pretensions; that is why it will always recommend drawing to colourists, and colour to draughtsmen. Its taste is in the highest degree rational and sublime! ( c.b. )
42 THE SALON OF 1846
You cannot know in what measure Nature has mingled the taste for hne and the taste for colour in each mind, nor by what mysterious processes she manipulates that fusion whose result is a picture.
Thus a broader point of view will be an orderly in- dividualism—that is, to require of the artist the quaHty of naivete and the sincere expression of his temperament, aided by every means which his technique provides.* An artist without temperament is not worthy of painting pic- tures, and— as we are wearied of imitators and, above all, of eclectics— he would do better to enter the service of a painter of temperament, as a humble workman. I shall demonstrate this in one of my later chapters.^
The critic should arm himself from the start with a sure criterion, a criterion drawn from nature, and should then carry out his duty with passion; for a critic does not cease to be a man, and passion draws similar temperaments to- gether and exalts the reason to fresh heights.
Stendhal has said somewhere 'Painting is nothing but a construction in ethics 1'^ If you will understand the word 'ethics' in a more or less hberal sense, you can say as much of all the arts. And as the essence of the arts is always the expression of the beautiful through the feeUng, the pas- sion and the dreams of each man— that is to say a variety within a unity, or the various aspects of the absolute— so there is never a moment when criticism is not in contact with metaphysics.
As every age and every people has enjoyed the expres- sion of its own beauty and ethos— and if, by romanticism^ you are prepared to understand the most recent, the most modem expression of beauty— then, for the reasonable and
* With reference to the proper ordering of individualism, see the article on William HaussoulHer, in the Salon of 1845 (pp. 8— 11 ). In spite of all the rebukes that I have suffered on this sub- ject, I persist in my opinion; but it is necessary to understand the article, (c.b.) » See p. 123.
' Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, ch. 156 (edition of 1859, p. 338, n. 2). Stendhal's phrase is 'de la morale construite', and he explains that he is using tlie past participle in the geometric
WHAT IS ROMANTICISM? 43
passionate critic, the great artist will be he who will combine with the condition required above— that is, the quality of naivete— the greatest possible amount of ro- manticism.
WHAT IS ROMANTICISM?
Few people today will want to give a real and positive meaning to this word; and yet will they dare assert that a whole generation would agree to join a battle lasting several years for the sake of a flag which was not also a symbol?
If you think back to the disturbances of those recent times, you will see that if few romantics have survived, it is because few of them discovered romanticism, though all of them sought it sincerely and honestly.
Some applied themselves only to the choice of subjects; but they had not the temperament for their subjects. Others, still believing in a Catholic society, sought to reflect Catholicism in their works. But to call oneself a romantic and to look systematically at the past is to contradict one- self. Some blasphemed the Greeks and the Romans in the name of romanticism: but you can only make Romans and Greeks into romantics if you are one yourself. Many others have been misled by the idea of truth in art, and local colour. Realism had already existed for a long time when that great battle took place, and besides, to compose a tragedy or a picture to the requirements of M. Raoul Rochette is to expose yourself to a flat contradiction from the first comer if he is more learned than M. Raoul Rochette.1
Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling.
They looked for it outside themselves, but it was only to be found within.
^A well-known archaeologist (1789-1854), who held several important positions, and published many books on his subject
44 THE SALON OF 1846
For me, Romanticism is tlie most recent, the latest ex- pression of the beautiful.
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.*
This is clearly explained by the philosophy of progress; thus, as there have been as many ideals as there have been ways in which the peoples of the earth have understood ethics, love, religion, etc., so romanticism will not consist in a perfect execution, but in a conception analogous to the ethical disposition of the age.
It is because some have located it in a perfection of technique that we have had the rococo of romanticism, without question the most intolerable of all forms.
Thus it is necessary, first and foremost, to get to know those aspects of nature and those human situations which the artists of the past have disdained or have not known.
To say the word Romanticism is to say modem art— that is, intimacy, spirituaHty, colour, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
Thence it follows that there is an obvious contradiction between romanticism and the works of its principal ad- herents.
Does it surprise you that colour should play such a very important part in modern art? Romanticism is a child of the North, and the North is all for colour; dreams and fairy- tales are bom of the mist. England— that home of fanatical colourists, Flanders and half of France are all plunged in fog; Venice herself lies steeped in her lagoons. As for the painters of Spain, they are painters of contrast rather than colourists.
The South, in return, is all for nature; for there nature is so beautiful and bright that nothing is left for man to desire, and he can find nothing more beautiful to invent than what he sees. There art belongs to the open air; but several hundred leagues to the north you will find the deep
* Stendhal. ( c.b. ) Baudelaire seems to have in mind a footnote in ch. 110 of the Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, where Sten- dhal wrote 'La beaute est Texpression d'line certaine maniere habituelle de chercher le bonheur . . .'
ON COLOUR 45
dreams of the studio and the gaze of the fancy lost in hori- zons of grey.
The South is as brutal and positive as a sculptor even in his most delicate compositions; the North, suffering and restless, seeks comfort with the imagination, and if it turns to sculpture, it will more often be picturesque than classical.
Raphael, for all his purity, is but an earthly spirit cease- lessly investigating the solid; but that scoundrel Rembrandt is a sturdy idealist who makes us dream and guess at what lies beyond. The first composes creatures in a pristine and virginal state— Adam and Eve; but the second shakes his rags before our eyes and tells us of human sufferings.
And yet Rembrandt is not a pure colourist, but a har- monizer. How novel then would be the effect, and how matchless his romanticism, if a powerful colourist could realize our dearest dreams and feelings for us in a colour appropriate to their subjects!
But before passing on to an examination of the man who up to the present is the most worthy representative of ro- manticism, I should Hke to give you a series of reflections on colour, which will not be without use for the complete understanding of this little book.
in
ON COLOUR
Let us suppose a beautiful expanse of nature, where there is full Hcence for everything to be as green, red, dusty or iridescent as it wishes; where all things, variously coloured in accordance with their molecular structure, suffer con- tinual alteration through the transposition of shadow and light; where the workings of latent heat allow no rest, but everything is in a state of perpetual vibration which causes lines to tremble and fulfils the law of eternal and universal movement. An immensity which is sometimes blue, and often green, extends to the confines of the sky; it is the sea. The trees are green, the grass and the moss are green; the tree-trunks are snaked with green, and the unripe stalks
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are green; green is nature's ground-bass, because green marries easily with all the other colours.* What strikes me first of all is that everywhere— whether it be poppies in the grass, pimpernels, parrots, etc.— red sings the glory of green; black (where it exists— a soHtary and insignificant cipher) intercedes on behalf of blue or red. The blue— that is, the sky— is cut across with airy flecks of white or with grey masses, which pleasantly temper its bleak crudeness; and as the vaporous atmosphere of the season— winter or sum- mer—bathes, softens or enguHs the contours, nature seems like a spinning-top which revolves so rapidly that it appears grey, although it embraces within itself the whole gamut of colours.
The sap rises, and as the principles mix, there is a flower- ing of mixed tones; trees, rocks and granite boulders gaze at themselves in the water and cast their reflections upon them; each transparent object picks up light and colour as it passes from nearby or afar. According as the daystar alters its position, tones change their values, but, always respect- ing their natural sympathies and antipathies, they continue to Hve in harmony by making reciprocal concessions. Shadows slowly shift, and colours are put to flight before them, or extinguished altogether, according as the Hght, itself shifting, may wish to bring fresh ones to life. Some colours cast back their reflections upon one another, and by modifying their own qualities with a glaze of trans- parent, borrowed qualities, they combine and recombine in an infinite series of melodious marriages which are thus made more easy for them. When the great brazier of the sun dips beneath the waters, fanfares of red surge forth on all sides; a harmony of blood flares up at the horizon, and green turns richly crimson. Soon vast blue shadows are rhythmically sweeping before them the host of orange and rose-pink tones which are like a faint and distant echo of the light. This great symphony of today, which is an
* Except for yellow and blue, its progenitors: but I am only speaking here of pure colours. For this rule cannot be applied to transcendent colourists who are tlioroughly acquainted with the science of coimterpoint. (c.b.)
ON COLOUR 47
eternal variation of the symphony of yesterday, this suc- cession of melodies whose variety ever issues from the infinite, this complex hymn is called colour.
In coloiu: are to be found harmony, melody and counter- point.
If you will examine the detail within the detail in an object of medium dimensions— for example, a woman's hand, rosy, slender, with skin of the finest— you will see that there is perfect harmony between the green of the strong veins with which it is ridged and the ruby tints which mark the knuckles; pink nails stand out against the topmost- joints, which are characterized by several grey and brown tones. As for the palm of the hand, the life-lines, which are pinker and more wine-coloured, are separated one from another by the system of green or blue veins which run across them. A study of the same object, carried out with a lens, will afford, within however small an area, a perfect harmony of grey, blue, brown, green, orange and white tones, warmed by a touch of yellow— a harmony which, when combined with shadows, produces the coloiuist's type of modelling, which is essentially different from that of the draughtsman, whose difficulties more or less boil down to the copying of a plaster-cast.
Colour is thus the accord of two tones. Warmth and coldness of tone, in whose opposition all theory resides, can- not be defined in an absolute manner; they only exist in a relative sense.
The lens is the colourist's eye.
I do not wish to conclude from all this that a coloinist should proceed by a minute study of the tones commingled in a very limited space. For if you admit that every mole- cule is endowed with its ov\ai particular tone, it would follow that matter should be infinitely divisible; and be- sides, as art is nothing but an abstraction and a sacrifice of detail to the whole, it is important to concern oneself above all with masses. I merely wished to prove that ff the case were possible, any number of tones, so long as they were logically juxtaposed, would fuse naturally in accordance with the law which governs them.
48 THE SALON OF 1846
Chemical affinities are the grounds whereby Nature can- not make mistakes in the arrangement of her tones; for with Nature, form and colour are one.
No more can the true colourist make mistakes; everything is allowed him, because from birth he knows the whole scale of tones, the force of tone, the results of mixtures and the whole science of counterpoint, and thus he can produce a harmony of twenty different reds.
This is so true that if an anti-colourist landowner took it into his head to repaint his property in some ridiculous maimer and in a system of cacophonous colours, the thick and transparent varnish of the atmosphere and the learned eye of Veronese between them would put the whole thing right and would produce a satisfying ensemble on canvas- conventional, no doubt, but logical.
This explains how a colourist can be paradoxical in his way of expressing colour, and how the study of nature often leads to a result quite different from nature.
The air plays such an important part in the theory of colour that if a landscape-painter were to paint the leaves of a tree just as he sees them, he would secure a false tone, considering that there is a much smaller expanse of air be- tween the spectator and the picture than between the spectator and nature.
Falsifications are continually necessary, even in order to achieve a trompe-Voeil.
Harmony is the basis of the theory of colour.
Melody is unity within colour, or over-all colour.
Melody calls for a cadence; it is a whole, in which every effect contributes to a general effect.
Thus melody leaves a deep and lasting impression in the mind.
Most of our young colourists lack melody.
The right way to know if a picture is melodious is to look at it from far enough away to make it impossible to under- stand its subject or to distinguish its lines. If it is melodious, it already has a meaning and has already taken its place in your store of memories.
Style and feeling in colour come from choice, and choice comes from temperament.
ON COLOUR 49
Colours can be gay and playful, playful and sad, rich and gay, rich and sad, commonplace and original.
Thus Veronese's colour is tranquil and gay. Delacroix's colour is often plaintive, and that of M. Catlin^ is often terrible.
For a long time I lived opposite a drinking-shop which was crudely striped in red and green; it afiforded my eyes a delicious pain.
I do not know if any analogist has ever estabhshed a complete scale of colours and feeHngs, but I remember a passage in Hoffmann which expresses my idea perfectly and which will appeal to all those who sincerely love nature: It is not only in dreams, or in that mild delirium which pre- cedes sleep, but it is even awakened when I hear music— that perception of an analogy and an intimate connexion between colours, sounds and perfumes. It seems to me that all these things were created by one and the same ray of light, and that their combination must result in a wonderful concert of harmony. The smell of red and brown marigolds above all produces a magical effect on my being. It makes me fall into a deep reverie, in which I seem to hear the solemn, deep tones of the oboe in the distance.'*
It is often asked if the same man can be at once a great colourist and a great draughtsman.
Yes and no; for there are different kinds of drawing.
The quaHty of pure draughtsmanship consists above all in precision, and this precision excludes touch; but there are such things as happy touches, and the colourist who undertakes to express nature through colour would often lose more by suppressing his happy touches than by study- ing a greater austerity of drawing.
Certainly colour does not exclude great draughtsmanship —that of Veronese, for example, which proceeds above all by ensemble and by mass; but it does exclude the meticu- lous drawing of detail, the contour of the tiny fragment, where touch will always eat away hne.
* On Catlin, see pp. 72-3.
* Kreisleriana. (c.b.) It is the third of the detached observa- tions entitled Hochst zerstreute Gedanken.
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The love of air and the choice of subjects in movement call for the employment of flowing and fused lines.
Exclusive draughtsmen act in accordance with an inverse procedure which is yet analogous. With their eyes fixed upon tracking and surprising their line in its most secret convolutions, they have no time to see air and Hght— that is to say, the effects of these things— and they even compel themselves not to see them, in order to avoid offending the dogma of their school.
It is thus possible to be at once a colourist and a draughts- man, but only in a certain sense. Just as a draughtsman can be a colourist in his broad masses, so a coloiirist can be a draughtsman by means of a total logic in his linear en- semble; but one of these quahties always engulfs the detail of the other.
The draughtsmanship of colourists is like that of nature; their figures are naturally bounded by a harmonious colli- sion of coloured masses.
Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians.
Colourists are epic poets.
IV
EUGENE DELACROIX
Romanticism and colour lead me straight to Eugene Dela- croix. I do not know ff he is proud of his title of 'romantic', but his place is here, because a long time ago— from his very first work, in fact— the majority of the public placed him at the head of the modern school.
As I enter upon this part of my work, my heart is full of a serene joy, and I am purposely selecting my newest pens, so great is my desire to be clear and limpid, so happy do I feel to be addressing my dearest and most sympathetic subject. But in order to make the conclusions of this chapter properly intelligible, I must first go back some Httle distance in the history of this period, and place before the eyes of the public certain documents of the case which have aheady been cited by earHer critics and historians, but which are
EUGENE DELACROIX 5I
necessary to complete my demonstration. Nevertheless, I do not think that true admirers of Eugene Delacroix will feel anything but a keen pleasure in re-reading an extract from the Constitutionnel of 1822, taken from the Salon of M. Thiers,! joumaMst.
*In my opinion no picture is a clearer revelation of future greatness than M. Delacroix's Dante et Virgile aux Enfers.^ Here above all you can recognize that spurt of talent, that burst of dawning mastery which revives our hopes, already a trifle dashed by the too moderate worth of all the rest.
'Dante and Virgil are being ferried across the infernal stream by Charon; they cleave their way with difficulty through the mob which swarms round the barque in order to clamber aboard. Dante, pictured alive, bears the dreadful taint of the place : Virgil, crowned with gloomy laurel, wears the colours of death. The hapless throng, doomed eternally to crave the opposite bank, are cling- ing to the boat: one is clutching at it in vain, and, thrown backwards by his precipitate effort, plunges once more into the waters; another has hold, and is kicking back those who, hke himself, are struggling to get on board; two others are gripping at the elusive timber with their teeth. There you have all the egoism of misery, the despair of Hell. In a subject which borders so closely on exaggeration, you will yet find a severity of taste, a propriety of setting, so to say, which enhances the de- sign, though stern judges— in this case, ill-advised— might perhaps criticize it for a lack of nobiHty. It is painted with a broad, firm brush, and its colour is simple and vigorous, if a trifle raw.
'Apart from that poetic imagination which is common both to painter and writer, the author of this picture has another, artistic imagination, which one might almost call 'the graphic imagination',^ and which is quite dif-
^Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), later famous as statesman and historian, was at that time at the very outset of his career.
* In the Louvre; see pi. 63.
* Vimagination du dessin.
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ferent from the first. He throws his figures on to the can- vas, he groups and bends them at will, with the boldness of Michelangelo and the abundance of Rubens. Some strange recollection of the great masters seized hold of me at the sight of this picture; once more I found that power— wild, ardent, but natural— which yields without effort to its own impulse . . .
1 do not believe that I am mistaken when I say that M. Delacroix has been given genius. Let him for^vard this assurance, let him devote himself to immense tasks, an indispensable condition of talent; and let him take still further confidence when I say that the opinion which I am expressing here is shared by one of the great masters of the school.'^
A. T . . . rs
These enthusiastic paragraphs are truly staggering, as much for their precocity as for their boldness. If, as is to be pre- sumed, the editor of the joiunal had pretensions himself as a connoisseiUL of painting, the young Thiers must have struck him as a trifle mad.
To obtain a proper idea of the profound confusion into which the picture of Dante and Virgil must have thrown contemporary minds— of the amazement, the dimibf ounded- ness, the rage, the shouts of praise and of abuse, the enthusiasm and the peals of offensive laughter which beset this fine picture (a true signal of revolution)— you must remember that in the studio of M. Gu6rin (a man of great worth, but a despot and absolutist, like his master David) there was only a small group of pariahs who devoted them- selves in secret to the old masters and who dared shyly to conspire beneath the wing of Raphael and Michelangelo. There was as yet no question of Rubens.
M. Guerin, who was harsh and severe towards his young pupil, only looked at the picture because of the clamour that raged around it.
G^ricault, who was back from Italy (where he was said to have renounced several of his almost original quahties before the great frescoes of Rome and Florence) com- * According to Silvestre (Histoire des artistes vivants, 1856, p. 62), this was Gerard.
EUGENE DELACROIX 53
plimented the new and still bashful painter so warmly that he was almost overcome.^
It was in front of this painting, or, some time afterwards, in front of the Pestiferes de Scio* that Gerard himself, who, as it seems, was more a wit than a painter, cried 'A painter has just been revealed to us, but he is a man who runs along the roof-tops!'— To run along the roof-tops you need a firm step and an eye illumined by an interior light.
Let glory and justice be accorded to MM. Thiers and Gerard!
It is doubtless a lengthy interval that separates the Dante and Virgil from the paintings in the Palais Bourbon;^ but the biography of Eugene Delacroix is poor in incident. For a man Hke this, endowed with such courage and such pas- sion, the most interesting struggles are those which he has to maintain against himself; horizons need not be vast for battles to be important, and the most curious events and revolutions take place beneath the firmament of the skull, in the close and mysterious laboratory of the brain.
Now that the man had been duly revealed and was con- tinuing to reveal himself more and more (in the allegorical picture La Grece,'^ Sardanapalus,^ La Liberie,^ etc.), and now that the contagion of the new gospel was spreading from day to day, even academic disdain found itself forced to take this new genius into account. One fine day M. Sosthenes de la Rochefoucauld, then Directeur des Beaux- Arts, sent for Eugene Delacroix, and, after lavishing com- pliments upon him, told him that it was vexing that a man of so rich an imagination and so fine a talent, a man, more-
^ Gericault is elsewhere recorded as saying that it was a picture that he would have been glad to have signed himself.
* I write pestiferes instead of massacre in order to explain to the critics those flesh-tones to which they have so often and so stupidly objected, (c.b.) The picture is now in the Louvre. It was painted in 1824.
" On which Delacroix was still engaged in 1846.
"^ Painted in 1827: first exhibited the following year, and now in
the Bordeaux Museum,
* Painted in 1827, and now in the Louvre; repro. Journal, pi. 8.
® Painted in 1830, and now in the Louvre; repro. Journal, pi. 13.
54 THE SALON OF 1846
over, to whom the government was favourably disposed, should not be prepared to add a little water to his wine; he asked him once and for all if it would not be possible for him to modify his manner. Eugene Delacroix, vastly surprised at this quaint condition and these ministerial counsels, repHed with almost a parody of rage that evi- dently if he painted thus, it was because he had to and because he could not paint otherwise. He fell into complete disgrace and was cut off from any kind of official work for seven years. He had to wait for 1830. Meanwhile M. Thiers had written a new and very lofty article in Le Glohe?-^
A journey to Morocco^^ seems to have left a deep impres- sion on his mind; there he could study at leisure both man and woman in their independence and native originaHty of movement, and could comprehend antique beauty in the sight of a race pure of all base-breeding and adorned with health and the free development of its muscles. The com- position of The Women of Mgiers^^ and a mass of sketches probably date from this period.
Up to the present, Eugene Delacroix has met wdth in- justice. Criticism, for him, has been bitter and ignorant; with one or two noble exceptions, even the praises of his admirers must often have seemed offensive to him. Gen- erally speaking, and for most people, to mention Eugene Delacroix is to throw into their minds goodness knows what vague ideas of ill-directed fire, of turbulence, of hazardous inspiration, of confusion, even; and for those gentlemen who form the majority of the public, pure chance, that loyal and obliging servant of genius, plays an important part in his happiest compositions. In that unhappy period of revolution of which I was speaking a moment ago and whose numerous errors I have recorded, people used often to compare Eugene Delacroix to Victor Hugo. They had their romantic poet; they needed their painter. This neces- sity of going to any length to find counterparts and ana- logues in the different arts often results in strange blunders; and this one proves once again how Httle people knew what ^° On the Salon of 1824. "In 1832. " Painted in 1834, and now in the Louvre; see pi. 64.
EUGENE DELACROIX 55
they were about. Without any doubt the comparison must have seemed a painful one to Eugene Delacroix, if not to both of them; for if my definition of romanticism (intimacy, spirituality and the rest) places Delacroix at its head, it naturally excludes M. Victor Hugo. The parallel has en- dured in the banal realm of accepted ideas, and these two preconceptions still encumber many feeble brains. Let us be done with these rhetorical ineptitudes once and for all. I beg all those who have felt the need to create some kind of aesthetic for their own use and to deduce causes from their results, to make a careful comparison between the productions of these two artists.
M. Victor Hugo, whose nobility and majesty I certainly have no wish to belittle, is a workman far more adroit than inventive, a labourer much more correct than creative. Delacroix is sometimes clumsy, but he is essentially creative. In all his pictures, both lyric and dramatic, M. Victor Hugo lets one see a system of uniform alignment and contrasts. With him even eccentricity takes symmetrical forms. He is in complete possession of, and coldly employs, all the modulations of rhyme, all the resources of antithesis and all the tricks of apposition. He is a composer of the de- cadence or transition, who handles his tools with a truly admirable and curious dexterity. M. Hugo was by nature an academician even before he was bom, and if we were still Hving in the time of fabulous marvels, I would be pre- pared to beheve that often, as he passed before their wrath- ful sanctuary, the green lions of the Institut would murmur to him in prophetic tones, 'Thou shalt enter these portals'.
For Delacroix justice is more sluggish. His works, on the contrary, are poems— and great poems, naively* conceived and executed with the usual insolence of genius. In the works of the former there is nothing left to guess at, for he takes so much pleasure in exhibiting his skiU that he omits not one blade of grass nor even the reflection of a street- lamp. The latter in his works throws open immense vistas
* By the naivete of the genius you must understand a complete knowledge of technique combined with the yvudi ceavrov of the Greeks, but with knowledge modestly surrendering the leading role to temperament, (c.b. ) The word naivete, used in this special sense, is one of the keywords of this Salon.
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to the most adventurous imaginations. The first enjoys a certain cahnness, let us rather say a certain detached egoism, which causes an unusual coldness and moderation to hover above his poetry— qualities which the dogged and melancholy passion of the second, at grips with the ob- stinacies of his craft, does not always permit him to retain. One starts with detail, the other with an intimate under- standing of his subject; from which it follows that one only captures the skin, while the other tears out the en- trails. Too earth-bound, too attentive to the superficies of nature, M. Victor Hugo has become a painter in poetry; Delacroix, always respectful of his ideal, is often, without knowing it, a poet in painting.
As for the second preconception, the preconception of pure chance, it has no more substance than the first. Nothing is sillier or more impertinent than to talk to a great artist, and one as learned and as thoughtful as Delacroix, about the obligations which he may owe to the god of chance. It quite simply makes one shrug one's shoulders in pity. There is no pure chance in art, any more than in mechanics. A happy invention is the simple consequence of a sound train of reasoning whose intermediate deductions one may perhaps have skipped, just as a fault is the con- sequence of a faulty principle. A picture is a machine, all of whose systems of construction are intelligible to the practised eye; in which everything justifies its existence, if the picture is a good one; where one tone is always plaimed to make the most of another; and where an occa- sional fault in dravdng is sometimes necessary, so as to avoid sacrificing something more important.
This intervention of chance in the business of Delacroix's painting is all the more improbable since he is one of those rare beings who remain original after ha\dng drunk deep , of all the true wells, and whose indomitable individuality ,t has borne and shaken off the yokes of all the great masters in turn. Not a few of you would be quite astonished to see one of his studies after Raphael— patient and laborious masterpieces of imitation; and few people today remem- ber his Hthographs after medals and engraved gems.^^ "Delacroix made six such Hthographs in 1825.
EUGENE DELACROIX 57
Here are a few lines from Heinrich Heine which explain Delacroix's method rather well— a method which, Hke that of all robustly-framed beings, is the result of his tempera- ment:
'In artistic matters, I am a supematuralist. I believe that the artist cannot find all his forms in nature, but that the most remarkable are revealed to him in his soul, like the innate symbology of innate ideas, and at the same instant. A modem professor of aesthetics, the author of Recherches sur I'ltalie,^^ has tried to restore to honour the old prin- ciple of the imitation of nature, and to maintain that the plastic artist should find all his forms in nature. The pro- fessor, in thus setting forth his ultimate principle of the plastic arts, had only forgotten one of those arts, but one of the most fundamental— I mean architecture. A belated attempt has now been made to trace back the forms of architecture to the leafy branches of the forest and the rocks of the grotto; and yet these forms were nowhere to be found in external nature, but rather in the soul of man.'^^
Now this is the principle from which Delacroix sets out— that a picture should first and foremost reproduce the in- timate thought of the artist, who dominates the model as the creator dominates his creation; and from this principle there emerges a second which seems at first sight to con- tradict it— namely that the artist must be meticulously care- ful concerning his material means of execution. He professes a fanatical regard for the cleanliness of his tools and the preparation of the elements of his work. In fact, since painting is an art of deep ratiocination, and one that de- mands an immediate contention between a host of different quahties, it is important that the hand should encounter the least possible number of obstacles when it gets down to business, and that it should accompHsh the divine orders of the brain with a slavish alacrity; otherwise the ideal will escape.
"The reference is to Carl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785-1843); his book, Italienische Forschungen, was published in three vol- umes between 1827 and 1831.
^ From Heine's Salon of 1831, which was published in a French translation in his De la France, 1833.
58 THE SALON OF 1846
The process of conception of this great artist is no less slow, serious and conscientious than his execution is nimble. This moreover is a quaUty which he shares with the painter whom public opinion has set at the opposite pole from him— I mean M. Ingres. But travail is by no means the same thing as childbirth, and these great princes of paint- ing, though endowed with a seeming indolence, exhibit a marvellous agility in covering a canvas. St. Symphoriari^^ was entirely re-painted several times, and at the outset it contained far fewer figures.
Nature, for Eugene Delacroix, is a vast dictionary whose leaves he turns and consults with a sure and searching eye; and his painting which issues above all from the memory, speaks above all to the memory. The effect produced upon the spectator's soul is analogous to the artist's means. A picture by Delacroix— Dante and Virgil, for example— always leaves a deep impression whose intensity increases v^dth distance. Ceaselessly sacrificing detail to whole, and hesitat- ing to impair the vitality of his thought by the drudgery of a neater and more calligraphic execution, he rejoices in the full use of an inalienable originaHty, which is his searching intimacy with the subject.
The employment of a dominant note can only rightfully take place at the expense of the rest. An excessive taste makes sacrifices necessary, and masterpieces are never any- thing but varied extracts from nature. That is the reason why it is necessary to submit to the consequences of a grand passion (whatever it may be), to accept the destiny of a talent, and not to try and bargain with genius. This is a thing never dreamt of by those people who have jeered so much at Delacroix's draughtsmanship— particularly the sculptors, men more partial and purblind than they have a right to be, whose judgement is worth no more than half that of an architect, at the most. Sculpture, to which colour is impossible and movement difiBcult, has nothing to discuss with an artist whose chief preoccupations are movement, colour and atmosphere. These three elements necessarily demand a somewhat undecided contour, light and floating
" Ingres' St. Symphorian was commissioned for Autun cathedral in 1824: it was not completed until ten years later.
EUGENE DELACROIX 59
ines, and boldness of touch. Delacroix is the only artist oday whose originality has not been invaded by the tyran- lical system of straight lines; his figures are always restless nd his draperies fluttering. From Delacroix's point of view he line does not exist; for, however tenuous it may be, a easing geometrician may always suppose it thick enough 0 contain a thousand others; and for colourists, who seek 0 imitate the eternal throbbings of nature, lines are never nything else but the intimate fusion of two colours, as in he rainbow.
Moreover there are several kinds of drawing, as there are f colour:— the exact or silly, the physiognomic and the naginative.
The first is negative, incorrect by sheer force of reality, atural but absurd; the second is a naturalistic, but ideal- zed draughtsmanship— the draughtsmanship of a genius /ho knows how to choose, arrange, correct, rebuke, and tiess at nature; lastly the third, which is the noblest and trangest, and can afford to neglect nature— it realizes nother nature, analogous to the mind and the tempera- lent of the artist.
Physiognomic drawing is generally the domain of the matical, like M. Ingres; creative drawing is the privilege f genius.*
The great quaHty of the drawing of supreme artists is :uth of movement; and Delacroix never violates this atural law.
But let us pass on to an examination of still more general uaHties. Now one of the principal characteristics of the reat painter is his universaHty. Take an epic poet, Homer r Dante, for example: he can write an idyll, a narrative,
speech, a description, an ode, etc., all equally well.
In the same way, if Rubens paints fruit, he will paint ner fruit than any speciaHst that you care to name.
Eugene Delacroix is universal. He has painted genre- ictures full of intimacy, and historical pictures full of randeur. He alone, perhaps, in our unbelieving age has onceived religious paintings which were neither empty
This is what M. Thiers called Timagination du dessin'. ( c.b. ) ee p. 51.
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and cold, like competition works, nor pedantic, mystical or neo-Christian, like the works of all those philosophers of art who make religion into an archaistic science, and who beheve that not until they have made themselves masters of the traditions and symbology of the early church, can they strike and sound the chords of reHgion.
This is easy to understand if you are prepared to consider that DelacroLX, like all the great masters, is an admirable mixture of science— that is to say, he is a complete painter; and of nawete— that is to say, a complete man. Go to St. Louis au Marais^"^ and look at his Pietd, in which the ma- jestic Queen of Sorrows is holding the body of her dead Son on her knees, with her two arms extended horizontally in an access of despair, a mother's paroxysm of grief. One of the two figures, who is supporting and soothing her anguish, is sobbing like the most pitiful characters in his Hamlet— a work with which, moreover, this painting has no Httle aflfinity. Of the two holy women, the first, still decked with jewels and tokens of luxury, is crouching convulsively on the ground; the other, fair and golden-haired, sinks more feebly beneath the enormous weight of her despair.
The group is spread out and disposed entirely against a background of a dark, uniform green which suggests a tempest-ridden sea no less than massed boulders. This back- ground is fantastic in its simphcity, for, like Michelangelo, Eugene Delacroix seems to have suppressed the accessories in order not to damage the clarity of his idea. This master- piece leaves a deep furrow of melancholy upon the mind. But this was not the first time that he had tackled rehgious subjects. His Agony in the Garden^^ and his St. Sebastian^^ had already testified to the seriousness and deep sincerity with which he can stamp them.
But to explain what I declared a moment ago— that only Delacroix knows how to paint religious subjects— I would
"Baudelaire is mistaken here. Delacroix's Pietd was painted (in 1844) for the church of Saint-Denis-du-Saint-Sacrement, Paris, where it is now to be seen.
^® Exhibited in 1827, and now in the church of Saint-Paul-Saint- Denis. "Painted in 1836 and bought for the church of Nantua.
EUGENE DELACROIX 6l
have the spectator note that if his most interesting pictures are nearly always those whose subjects he chooses himself —namely, subjects of fantasy— nevertheless the grave sad- ness of his talent is perfectly suited to our religion which is itself profoundly sad— a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very cathoHcity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language— so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
I remember a friend of mine— a lad of some merit, too, and an aheady fashionable colourist; one of those pre- cocious young men who give promise aU their Hves, and who is far more academic than he himself believes— I re- member him calling this 'cannibal's painting'.
It is perfectly true that our yoimg friend will look in vain among the niceties of a loaded palette or in the dic- tionary of rules for a blood-soaked and savage desolation such as this, which is only just offset by the sombre green of hope.
This terrible hymn to anguish affected his classical imagination in just the same way as the formidable wines of Anjou, Auvergne or the Rhine affect a stomach which is used to the pale violets of Medoc.
So much for universaHty of feeling— and now for uni- versaHty of knowledgel
It is a long time since our painters unlearnt, so to speak, the genre called 'decoration'. The Hemicycle^^ at the Beaux- Arts is a puerile, clumsy work whose intentions con- tradict one another; it is hardly more than a collection of historical portraits. The Plafond d'Homdre^^ is a fine pic- ture which makes a bad ceiling. Most of the chapels exe- cuted in recent times and distributed among the pupils of Ingres were done according to the methods of the Italian
^ Painted by Paul Delaroche, 1838-41. It represents the most celebrated artists of all nations, up to the end of the 17th cen- tury.
^Painted by Ingres in 1827 for the ceiling in one of the gal- leries of the Louvre. It was removed in 1855 in order to be shown at the Exposition Universelle, and some years later was replaced by a copy. The original now hangs as a picture in the Louvre. See pi. 61.
6a THE SALON OF 1846
primitives— that is, they aim at achieving unity by the sup- pression of effects of Hght and by a vast system of softened colourings. This method, which is doubtless more reason- able, nevertheless evades the diflBculties. Under Louis XIV, XV and XVI, painters produced decorations of dazzling brilliance, but they lacked unity in colour and composition.
Eugene Delacroix had decorations to paint, and he solved the great problem. He discovered pictorial unity without doing hurt to his trade as a colourist.
We have the Palais Bourbon^^ to bear witness to this extraordinaiy tour de force. There the Hght is dispensed economically, and it spreads evenly across all the figures, without tyrannically catching the eye.
The circular ceiling in the Hbrary of the Luxembourg^^ is a still more astonishing work, in which the painter has arrived not only at an even blander and more unified effect, while suppressing nothing of the quahties of colour and Hght which are the characteristic feature of all his pictures —but he has gone further and revealed himself in an alto- gether new guise: Delacroix the landscape-painter!
Instead of painting Apollo and the Muses, the invariable decoration for a Hbrary, Eugene Delacroix has yielded to his irresistible taste for Dante, whom Shakespeare alone, per- haps, can challenge in his mind, and he has chosen the passage where Dante and Virgil meet with the principal poets of antiquity in a mysterious place:
We ceased not to go, though he was speaking; but passed the wood meanwhile, the wood, I say, of crowded spirits. Our way was not yet far since my slumber, when I saw a fire which conquered a hemisphere of the darkness. We were still a Httle distant from it; yet not so distant that I did not in part discern what honourable people occupied that place.
'O thou that honourest every science and art; who are these, who have such honour that it separates them from the manner of the rest?'
'"^ Delacroix made twenty allegorical paintings for the library of the Chambre des Ddputes between 1838 and 1847. "* Delacroix was nearing tlie end of his work at die Luxembourg at the time tliat this was written.
EUGENE DELACROIX 63
And he to me: 'The honoured name, which glorifies them in that life of thine, gains favour in Heaven which thus advances them*.
Meanwhile a voice was heard by me: 'Honoxn: the great Poet! His shade returns that was departed/
After the voice had paused and was silent, I saw four great shadows come to us; they had an aspect neither sad nor joyful.
The good Master began to speak: 'Mark him with that sword in hand, who comes before the three as their lord: that is Homer, the sovereign poet; the next who comes is Horace the satirist; Ovid is the third, and the last is Lucan. Because each agrees with me in the name which the one voice sounded, they do me honour; and therein they do well.'
Thus I saw assembled the goodly school of that lord of highest song, who like an eagle soars above the rest. After they had talked a space together, they turned to me with a sign of salutation; and my Master smiled thereat. And greatly more besides they honoured me; for they made me of their number, so that I was a sixth amid such intelligences.^*
I shall not pay Eugene Delacroix the insult of an exag- gerated panegyric for having so successfully mastered the concavity of his canvas, or for having placed his figures upright upon it. His talent is above these things. I am con- centrating above all upon the spirit of this painting. It is impossible to express in prose all the blessed cahn which it breathes, and the deep harmony which imbues its atmos- phere. It makes you think of the most luxuriant pages of Telemaque, and brings to life aU the memories which the mind has ever gathered from tales of Elysium. From the point of view at which I took up my position a short while ago, the landscape, which is nevertheless no more than an accessory— such is the universality of the great masters I— is a thing of the greatest importance. This circular landscape, which embraces an enormous area, is painted with the as- surance of a history-painter, and the delicacy and love of
^ Dante, Inferno, canto iv. 11. 64 sqq.
64 THE SALON OF 1846
a painter of landscape. Clumps of laurel and considerable patches of shade dissect it harmoniously; pools of gentle, uniform sunlight slumber on the greensward; mountains, blue or forest-girt, form a perfect horizon for the eyes* pleasure?^ The sky is blue and white— an amazing thing with Delacroix; the clouds, which are spun and drawn out in different directions, like a piece of gauze being rent, are of a wonderful airiness; and the deep and luminous vault of the sky recedes to a prodigious height. Even Bonington's water-colours are less transparent.
This masterpiece, which, in my opinion, is superior to the finest of Veronese, needs a great tranquiUity of mind and a very gentle Hght to be properly comprehended. Unfor- tunately the brilliant daylight which will burst through the great window of the fagade, as soon as it is cleared of its tarpaulins and scaffolding, will make this task more difficult.
Delacroix's pictures this year are The Abduction of Re- becca, taken from Ivanhoe, the Farewell of Romeo and Juliet, Marguerite in Church, and A Lion, in water-colour.
The admirable thing about The Abduction of Rebecca^^ is the perfect ordering of its colours, which are intense, close-packed, serried and logical; the result of this is a thrilling effect. With almost all painters who are not colour- ists, you will always be noticing vacuums, that is to say great holes produced by tones which are below the level of the rest, so to speak. Delacroix's painting is like nature; it has a horror of a vacuum.
Romeo and Juliet^" are shown on the balcony, in the morning's cold radiance, holding one another devoutly clasped by the waist. In the violence of this farewell em- brace, JuHet, with her hands laid on the shoulders of her lover, is throwing back her head as though to draw breath, or in a movement of pride and joyful passion. This un- wonted attitude— for almost all painters glue their lovers'
^ The phrase italicized (by Baudelaire) is an exact verbal echo
from Fenelon's description of Cal)'pso's island ( Teleinaque,
Bk. 1).
"In the Metropolitan Museum, New York; repro. Journal, pi.
39.
*^ See pi. 66,
EUGENE DELACROIX 65
lips together— is nevertheless perfectly natural; this vigorous movement of the neck is typical of dogs and cats in the thrill of a caress. This scene, with the romantic landscape which completes it, is enveloped in the purpHsh mists of the dawn.
The general success which this picture has achieved, and the interest which it inspires, only go to show what I have already said elsewhere— that Delacroix is popular, whatever the painters may say; and that it will be enough not to keep the public away from his works for him to be as much so as inferior painters are.
Marguerite in Church^^ belongs to that already numerous class of charming genre-pictures, by which Delacroix seems to be wanting to explain his Hthographs,^^ which have been so bitterly criticized.
The water-colour Livn has a special merit for me, quite apart from its beauty of drawing and attitude; this is be- cause it is painted with a great simpHcity. Water-colour is restricted here to its own modest role; it has no desire to rival oil-paint in stature.
To complete this analysis, it only remains for me to note one last quaHty in Delacroix— but the most remarkable quahty of all, and that which makes him the true painter of the nineteenth century; it is the unique and persistent melancholy with which all his works are imbued, and which is revealed in his choice of subject, in the expression of his faces, in gesture and in style of colour. Delacroix has a fondness for Dante and Shakespeare, two other great painters of human anguish: he knows them through and through, and is able to translate them freely. As you look through the succession of his pictures, you might think that you were assisting at the celebration of some dolorous mystery; Dante and Virgil, The Massacre of Scio, Sar-
^ Repro. Escholier, vol. II, facing p. 308.
^Delacroix's Faust lithographs were first published in book form in 1828. Goethe had seen some of them two years before, and spoke of them with great admiration to Eckermann (see Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, Everyman ed., pp. 135-6). Between 1834 and 1843 Delacroix made sixteen litho- graphs of scenes from Hamlet.
66 THE SALON OF 1846
danapalus, Christ in the Garden of Olives, St. Sebastian, Medea,^^ The Shipwreck of Von }uan,^^ and the Hamlet,^^ which was so much mocked at and so misunderstood. In several of them, by some strange and recurring accident, you will find one figure which is more stricken, more crushed than the others; a figure in which all the surround- ing anguish is epitomized— for example, the kneeling woman, with her hair cast down, in the foreground of the Crusaders at Constantinople,^^ or the old woman, so wrinkled and forlorn, in The Massacre of Scio. This aura of melancholy surrounds even The Women of Algiers,^^ that most engaging and showy of his pictures. That little poem of an interior, all silence and repose, and crammed with rich stuffs and knick-knacks of the toilet, seems some- how to exhale the heady scent of a house of ill-fame, which quickly enough guides our thoughts towards the fathomless limbo of sadness. Generally speaking he does not paint pretty women— not at any rate from the point of view of the fashionable world. Almost all of them are sick, and gleam- ing with a sort of interior beauty. He expresses physical force not by bulk of muscle, but by nervous tension. He is unrivalled at expressing not merely su£Fering, but above all moral suffering— and here lies the prodigious mystery of his painting I This lofty and serious melancholy of his shines with a gloomy brilliance, even in his colour, which is broad, simple and abundant in harmonious masses, like that of all the great colourists; and yet it is as plaintive and deep- toned as a melody by Weber.^^
Each one of the old masters has his kingdom, his pre- rogative, which he is often constrained to share with illus- trious rivals. Thus Raphael has form, Rubens and Veronese
^ Painted in 1838, and now in the Lille Museum. ^ Painted in 1840, and now in the Louvre; repro. Journal, pi. 30. ^ Delacroix painted several versions of Hamlet and the Grave- digger: that of 1839 is in the Louvre; see pi. 65. ^ Painted in 1841, and now in the Louvre; repro. Journal, pi. 25. ^ Painted in 1834, and now in the Louvre; see pi. 64. ^ The simile recurs in the stanza devoted to Delacroix in Baude- laire's poem Les Phares. See p. 217, where Baudelaire analyses this stanza.
EUGENE DELACROIX 6/
colour, Rubens and Michelangelo the 'graphic imagination'. There remained one province of the empire in which Rembrandt alone had carried out a few raids; I mean drama, natural and living drama, the drama of terror and melancholy, expressed often through colour, but always through gesture.
In the matter of sublime gestures, Delacroix's only rivals are outside his art. I know of scarcely any others but Frederick Lemaitre^^ and Macready.^'''
It is because of this entirely modem and novel quality that Delacroix is the latest expression of progress in art. Heir to the great tradition— that is, to breadth, nobiHty and magnificence in composition— and a worthy successor of the old masters, he has even surpassed them in his command of anguish, passion and gesturel It is reaUy this fact that establishes the importance of his greatness. Sup- pose, indeed, that the baggage of one of the illustrious departed were to go astray; he will almost always have his counterpart, who vidll be able to explain him and disclose his secret to the historian's scrutiny. But take away Dela- croix, and the great chain of history is broken and slips to the ground.
In an article which must seem more like a prophecy than a critique, what is the object of isolating faults of de- tail and microscopic blemishes? The whole is so fine that I have not the heart. Besides it is such an easy thing to do, and so many others have done it! Is it not a pleasant change to view people from their good side? M. Delacroix's defects are at times so obvious that they strike the least trained eye. You have only to open at random the first paper that comes your way, and you wiU find that they have long followed the opposite method from mine, in persistently not seeing the glorious qualities which con-
** Frederick Lemaitre ( 1800-1876 ) was one of the great French actors of the Romantic generation. He made his first great suc- cess as Robert Macaire in VAuherge des Adrets (1823), and later created the title-role in Victor Hugo's Buy Bias. ^William Charles Macready (1793-1873), the notable English tragedian of the same generation as Edmund Kean. His grand, impassioned style greatly impressed the French when he acted in Paris in 1828 (twice) and again in 1844.
68 THE SALON OF 1846
stitute his originality. Need I remind you that great geniuses never make mistakes by halves, and that they have the privilege of enormity in every direction?
Among Delacroix's pupils there are some who have happily appropriated whatever elements of his talent could be cap- tured—that is, certain parts of his method— and who have already earned themselves something of a reputation. Nevertheless their colour has, generally speaking, this flaw —that it scarcely aims above picturesqueness and 'effect'; the ideal is in no sense their domain, although they readily dispense with nature, without having earned the right to do so by dint of their master's intrepid studies.
This year we must regret the absence of M. Planet, whose Sainte Therdse^^ attracted the eyes of the con- noisseurs at the last Salon— and of M. Riesener, who has often given us broadly-coloured pictures, and by whom you can see some good ceilings at the Chambre des Pairs— and see them with pleasure, too, in spite of the terrible proximity of Delacroix.
M. Leger-Cherelle has sent Le Martyr e de Sainte Irdne.^^ The composition consists of a single figure and a pike, which makes a somewhat unpleasant effect. Nevertheless the colom and the modelling of the torso are generally good. But I rather think that M. Leger-Cherelle had aheady shown the public this picture before, with some minor variations.
A somewhat surprising feature of La Mort de Cleopdtre,^^ by M. Lassale-Bordes, is that the artist does not seem to be uniquely preoccupied v^dth colour; and this is perhaps a merit. Its tints are, so to speak, equivocal, and this sour- ness of taste is not without its charms.
Cleopatra is dying, on her throne, while Octavius's envoy stoops forward to gaze at her. One of her handmaidens has
^ See pp. 18-19.
^ The note in the Salon catalogue runs as follows: 'Cette vierge,
ayant cache les livres saints, contre les ordres de I'empereur
Diocletien, fut mise en prison et percee d'une fleche' (Vies des
Saints ) .
*" Now in the Autun Museum; see pi. 19.
ON EROTIC SUBJECTS IN ART, AND ON M. TASSAERT 69
just expired at her feet. The composition does not lack majesty, and the painting has been executed with quite a daring simplicity; Cleopatra's head is beautiful, and the negress's green and pink attire contrasts happily with the colour of her skin. This huge picture has been successfully carried through with no regard for imitation, and it cer- tainly contains something to please and attract the un- attached flaneur.
ON EROTIC SUBJECTS IN ART, AND ON M. TASSAERT
Has it ever been your experience, as it has mine, that after spending long hours turning over a collection of bawdy prints, you fall into a great spell of melancholy? And have you ever asked yourself the reason for the charm sometimes to be found in rummaging among these annals of lewdness, which are buried in libraries or lost in dealers' portfoKos— and sometimes also for the ill-humour which they cause you? It is a mixture of pleasure and pain, a vinegar for which the Hps are always athirstl The pleasure lies in your seeing represented in all its forms that most important of natural feelings— and the anger in often finding it so badly copied or so stupidly slandered. Whether it has been by the fireside during the endless winter evenings, or in a corner of a glazier's shop, in the dog-days when the hours hang heavy, the sight of such drawings has often put my mind into enormous drifts of reverie, in much the same way as an obscene book sweeps us towards the mystical oceans of the deep. Many times, when faced with these countless samples of the universal feeling, I have found myself wish- ing that the poet, the connoisseur and the philosopher could grant themselves the enjoyment of a Museum of Love, where there would be a place for everything, from St. Teresa's undirected aflFections down to the serious debauch- eries of the ages of ennui. No doubt an immense distance separates Le Depart pour Tile de CytMre^ from the miser- ^ By Watteau.
70 THE SALON OF 1846
able daubs which hang above a cracked pot and a rickety side-table in a harlot's room; but with a subject of such importance, nothing should be neglected. Besides, all things are sanctified by genius, and if these subjects were treated with the necessary care and reflection, they would in no wise be soiled by that revolting obscenity, which is bravado rather than truth.
Let not the moralist be too alarmedl I shall know how to keep the proper bounds, and besides, my dream is Hmited to a wish for this immense poem of love as sketched by only the purest hands— by Ingres, Watteau, Rubens, Delacroix! The playful and elegant princesses of Watteau beside the grave and composed Venuses of M. Ingres, the resplendent pearls of Rubens and Jordaens and the sad beauties of Delacroix, just as one can imagine them— great pale women, drowned in satin!*
And so, to give complete reassurance to the reader's startled virtue, let me say that I should class among erotic subjects not only all pictures which are specially concerned with love, but also any picture which suggests love, be it only a portrait.**
In this immense museum I envisage the beauty and the love of all climes, expressed by the leading artists— from the mad, scatter-brained merveilleuses which Watteau fils^ has bequeathed us in his fashion engravings, down to Rembrandt's Venuses who are having their nails done and their hair combed with great boxwood combs, just like simple mortals.
Subjects of this nature are so important a thing that there is no artist, small or great, who has not devoted himself to
* I have been told that many years ago Delacroix made a whole mass of marvellous studies of women in the most voluptuous attitudes, for his Sardanapalus. (c.b.)
** M. Ingres' Grande and Petite Odalisque are two pictures of our times which are essentially concerned with love, and are ad- mirable, moreover, (c.b.) The Grande Odalisque is in the Louvre (see pi. 62): the Petite Odalisque is presumably the Odalisque with Slave, in tlie Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.
' Frangois Watteau (de Lille) (1758-1823), son of Louis Wat- teau and nephew of Antoine Watteau.
ON EROTIC SUBJECTS IN ART, AND ON M. TASSAERT 7I
them, secretly or in public, from Giulio Romano to Deveria and Gavami.
In general their great defect is a lack of sincerity and naivete. I remember, however, a lithograph^ which ex- presses one of the great truths of wanton love— though im- happily without too much refinement. A young man, dis- guised as a woman, and his mistress, dressed as a man, are seated side by side on a sofa— the sofa which you know so well, the sofa of the furnished lodgings and the private apartment. The young woman is trying to lift her lover's skirt.* In the ideal museum of which I was speaking, this lewd sheet would be counterbalanced by many others in which love would only appear in its most refined form.
These reflections have occurred to me in connection with two pictures by M. Tassaert— Engon^ and Le Marchand d'esclaves.
M. Tassaert, of whom I made the grave mistake of not saying enough last year, is a painter of the greatest merit, and one whose talent would be most happily applied to erotic subjects.
Erigone is half recumbent upon a mound overshadowed with vines— in a provocative pose, with one leg almost bent back, the other stretched out, and the body thrust forward; the drawing is fine, and the lines sinuous and expertly organized. Nevertheless I would criticize M. Tassaert, who is a colourist, for having painted this torso in too uniform a tone.
The other picture represents a market of women awaiting buyers. These are true women, civilized women, whose feet have felt the rubbing of shoes; they are a little common, a little too pink perhaps, but a silly, sensual Turk is going to
^ One of the series *Les Amants et les Epoux' by Tassaert. The lady's words are 'Ne fais done pas la cruellel' See pi. 4. * 'Sedebant in fomicibus pueri puellaeve sub titulis et lychnis, illi faeminio compti mundo sub stola, hae parum comptae sub puerorum veste, ore ad puerilem formam composite. Alter veniebat sexus sub altero sexu. Corruperat omnis caro viam suam.' Meursius. (c.b.) This passage is quoted from Nicolas Chorier's Aloysiae Sygeae satira sotadica de arcanis Amoris et Veneris (1658), wtdch purported to be a Latin version (by Meursius) of a Spanish original.
72 THE SALON OF 1846
buy them as superfine beauties. The one who is seen from behind, and whose buttocks are enveloped in a transparent gauze, still wears upon her head a milliner's hat, a hat bought in the Rue Vivienne or at the Temple. The poor girl has doubtless been carried off by pirates!
The colour of this picture is remarkable in the extreme for its delicacy and transparency of tone. One would imagine that M. Tassaert has been studying Delacroix's manner; nevertheless he has managed to retain an original colour.
He is an outstanding artist, whom only the fldneurs ap- preciate and whom the public does not know well enough; his talent has never ceased growing, and when you think of whence he started, and where he has arrived, there is reason to look forward to ravishing things from him in the future.
VI
ON SOME COLOURISTS
There ake two curiosities of a certain importance at the Salon. These are the portraits of Petit Loup and of Graisse du dos de buffle, by M. Cathn, the impresario of the red- skins.^ When M. Catlin came to Paris, with his Museum and his loways, the word went round that he was a good
^George Catlin (1796-1872), the American artist, spent eight years with Indian tribes residing in United States, British and Mexican territories, between 1829 and 1837. During this period he painted some five hundred portraits and other pictures of Red Indians. During 1838 and 1839 he toured his collection in the United States, and then brought it to London, where he established himself at 6, Waterloo Place. In 1845 he visited Paris, bringing with him not only his paintings but several live Indians as well. One of these was Shon-ta-yi-ga, or Little Wolf, whose portrait Baudelaire mentions here. See Alfred Delvau's Lions du Jour (1867), and also Catlin's own Descriptive Cata- logue, published by himself in London in 1848; it contains ap- preciations from the American, English and French press.
CatKn's collection is now in tlie care of the Smitlisonian In- stitution, Washington; a small selection was brought to Europe and exhibited in 1954. See pis. 52-3.
ON SOME COLOURISTS 73
fellow who could neither paint nor draw, and that if he had produced some tolerable studies, it was thanks only to his courage and his patience. Was this an innocent trick of M. Catlin's, or a blunder on the part of the journalists? For today it is established that M. Catlin can paint and draw very well indeed. These two portraits would be enough to prove it to me, if I could not call to mind many other specimens equally fine. I had been particularly struck by the transparency and Hghtness of his skies.
M. Catlin has captured the proud, free character and the noble expression of these splendid fellows in a masterly way; the structure of their heads is wonderfully well understood. With their fine attitudes and their ease of movement, these savages make antique sculpture compre- hensible. Turning to his colour, I find in it an element of mystery which delights me more than I can say. Red, the colour of blood, the colour of life, flowed so abundantly in his gloomy Museum that it was like an intoxication; and the landscapes— wooded mountains, vast savannahs, de- serted rivers— were monotonously, eternally green. Once again I find Red (so inscrutable and dense a colour, and harder to penetrate than a serpent's eye)— and Green (the colour of Nature, calm, gay and smiling)— singing their melodic antiphon in the very faces of these two heroes.— There is no doubt that all their tattooings and pigmenta- tions had been done in accordance with the harmonious modes of nature.
I beheve that what has led the public and the journalists into error with regard to M. Catlin is the fact that his painting has nothing to do with that brash style, to which all our young men have so accustomed us that it has become the classic style of our time.
Last year I already entered my protest against the unani- mous De profundis— against the conspiracy of ingratitude- concerning the brothers Deveria. This year has proved me right. Many a precocious name which has been substituted for theirs is not yet worth as much. M. Achille Deveria has attracted special attention at this year s Salon by a picture, Le Repos de la Sainte Famille,^ which not only retains all ^ Repro. Illustr., vol. 7 ( 1846), p. 56.
74 THE SALON OF 1846
of that grace peculiar to these charming brother-geniuses, but which also recalls the soHd qualities of the older schools of painting— minor schools, perhaps, which do not precisely sweep the board either by their drawing or their colour, but which, nevertheless, by their sense of order and of sound tradition are placed well above the extravagances proper to transitional ages. In the great battle of Ro- manticism, the Deveria brothers were members of the sacred band of the colourists; and thus their place was marked out here. The composition of M. Achille Deveria's picture is excellent, and, over and above this, the eye is struck by its soft and harmonious appearance.
M. Boissard, whose beginnings were also brilliant and full of promise, is one of those excellent artists who have taken their nourishment from the old masters; his Made- leine au desert is good and sound in colour— except for the flesh-tones which are a trifle dingy. The pose is a happy one.
In this interminable Salon, where differences have been more than ever wiped out, and where everyone can draw and paint a Httle, but not enough to deserve even to be classed, it is a great joy to meet a frank and true painter Hke M. Debon. Perhaps his Concert dans V atelier^ is a Httle too artistic a picture— Valentin, Jordaens and several others have their part in it; but at least it is fine, healthy painting, which marks its author as a man who is perfectly sure of himself.
M. Duveau has sent Le Lendemain d'une tempete. 1 do not know if he has it in him to become a frank colourist, but some parts of his picture give hopes of it. At first sight you search your memory for some historical scene which it can represent; for in fact the Enghsh are almost alone in daring to paint genre-pictures of such vast proportions. Nevertheless it is well organized and in general seems well designed. The tonahty, which is a Httle too uniform and offends the eye at first, is doubtless based on an effect of nature, aU of whose features appear singularly crude in colour after being washed by the rains.
M. Laemlein's Char it e"^ is a charming woman with a « Repro. Illustr., vol. 7 ( 1846), p. 121. * Laemlein made a lithograph also of this subject.
ON SOME COLOURISTS 75
whole bunch of little brats of all countries— white, yellow, black, and so on— held by the hand or carried at the breast. Certainly M. Laemlein has a feeling for good colour. If his picture contains one great fault, it is that the little China- man is so pretty, and his garment so deHghtful to the eye, that he practically monopolizes the spectator's attention. This Httle mandarin never stops trotting through the mem- ory, and he will cause many people to forget all the rest.
M. Decamps is one of those who, for many years now, have tyrannically possessed the public's interest; and nothing could be more legitimate.
This artist, who is gifted with a marvellous capacity for analysis, used often to achieve powerfully effective results by means of a happy conflict of little tricks. If he shirked linear detail too much, often contenting himself with move- ment and general contour, and if his drawing used occa- sionally to verge upon the chic, nevertheless his meticulous taste for Nature, studied above aU in her effects of Hght, always kept him safe and sustained him on a superior plane.
If M. Decamps was not precisely a draughtsman in the generally accepted sense of the word, nevertheless, in his own way and in a particular fashion, he was one. No one has seen large figures from his pencil; but certainly the drawing— that is to say, the build— oi his Httle manikins was brought out and realized with remarkable boldness and feHcity. Their bodily nature and habits were always clearly revealed; for M. Decamps can make a figure intelligible in a few lines. His sketches were diverting and profoundly comical. It was the draughtsmanship of a wit, almost of a caricaturist; for he possessed an extraordinary geniality, or mocking fancy, which was a perfect match for the ironies of nature; and so his figures were always posed, draped or dressed in accordance with the truth and with the eternal proprieties and habits of their persons. If there was a certain immobiHty in his drawing, this was by no means unpleasing, and actually put tie seal upon his orientaHsm. Normally he took his models in repose; and when they were shown running, they often reminded you of frozen shadows or of silhouettes suddenly halted in their course; they ran as though they were part of a bas-relief.
76 THE SALON OF 1846
But it was colour that was his strong suit, his great and unique afifair. Now M. Delacroix is without doubt a great colourist; but he is not a fanatical one. He has many other concerns, and the scale of his canvases demands it. But for M. Decamps colour was the great thing; it was, so to speak, his favourite mode of thought. His splendid and radiant colour had, what is more, a style very much of its own. It was, to use words borrowed from the moral order, both sanguinary and mordant. The most appetizing dishes, the most thoughtfully prepared kickshaws, the most piquantly seasoned products of the kitchen, had less relish and tang, and exhaled less fierce ecstasy upon the nose and the palate of the epicure than M. Decamps' pictures possessed for the lover of painting. Their strangeness of aspect halted you, held you captive and inspired you with an irresistible curiosit)^ Perhaps this had something to do with the unusual and meticulous methods which the artist often employs— for he lucubrates his painting, they say, with the tireless will of an alchemist. So sudden and so novel was the im- pression that it produced upon the mind of the spectator at that time, that it was difficult to conceive its ancestry, or to decide who had fathered this singular artist, and from what studio this solitary and original talent had emerged. Certainly a hundred years from now historians will have trouble in identifying M. Decamps' master. Some- times he seemed to stem from the boldest colourists of the old Flemish school, but he had more style than they, and he grouped his figures more harmoniously; sometimes the splendour and the triviality of Rembrandt were his keen preoccupation; at other times his skies would suggest a loving memory of the skies of Claude. For M. Decamps was a landscape-painter too, and, what is more, a landscape- painter of the greatest merit. But his landscapes and his figures formed a single whole and helped one another mutually; one had no more importance than the other, for with him nothing was an accessor)'— so curiously \\TOught was every part of his canvas, and to such an extent was each detail planned to contribute to the total effectl Nothing was unnecessary— not even the rat swimming across a tank in one or other of his Turkish pictures— a picture all
ON SOME COLOURISTS 7/
lethargy and fatalism; nor even the birds of prey which hover in the background of that masterpiece entitled Le Supplice des Crochets.
At that time the sun and light played a great part in M. Decamps' painting. No one studied atmospheric effects v^th so much care. The weirdest and most improbable tricks of shadow and light pleased him more than anything. In a picture by M. Decamps the sun seemed really to scorch the white walls and the chalky sands; every coloured object had a keen and lively transparency. The waters were of untold depth; the great shadows which used to cut across the flanks of his houses or to sleep stretched out upon the ground or the water had the languor and sweet drowsi- ness of shadows beyond description. And in the midst of this fascinating decor, you would find little figures bestir- ring themselves or dreaming— a complete little world in all its native and comic truth.
Yes, M. Decamps' pictures were full of poetry, and often of reverie; but what others, like Delacroix, would achieve by great draughtsmanship, by an original choice of model or by broad and flowing colour, M. Decamps achieved by intimacy of detail. The only criticism, in fact, which you could make, was that he was too concerned with the material execution of objects; his houses were made of true plaster and true wood, his walls were made of true lime- mortar; and in front of these masterpieces, the heart was often saddened by a painful idea of the time and the trouble which had been devoted to their making. How much finer they would have been if executed less artfully!
Last year, when M. Decamps took up a pencil and thought fit to challenge Raphael and Poussin, the en- thusiastic flaneurs of both parties— men whose hearts em- brace the whole world, but who are quite content wi\h things as the Almighty has designed them, and who all of them adored M. Decamps as one of the rarest products of creation— these men said amongst themselves: If Raphael prevents Decamps from sleeping, then it's no more De- campses for us! who vdll do them now—? Alas! it wHl be MM. Guignet^ and Chacaton/ ^ See pp. 27-8.
78 THE SALON OF 1846
All the same, M. Decamps has reappeared this year with some Turkish things, some landscapes, some genre-pictures, and an Effet de Pluie.^ But you have to look for them; they no longer strike the eye at once.
M. Decamps, who is so good at doing the sun, has failed, however, wdth the rain; besides, he has given his ducks a slab of stone to svmn on, etc., etc. His Ecole turque, never- theless, is more like his best pictures; there they all are, those lovely children whom we know so well, and that luminous, dust-charged atmosphere of a room which the sun is trying to enter bodily.
It seems to me so easy to console ourselves with the magnificent Decampses which already adorn our galleries, that I do not want to analyse the faults of these. It would be a puerile task, and besides everyone wiYi do it very well for himself wdthout any help from me.
Amongst the paintings by M. Penguilly-rHaridon,"^ which are all good pieces of workmanship— httle pictures, broadly yet finely painted— there is one that especially stands out and attracts the eye; Pierrot present e a TassembUe ses compagnons Arlequin et Polichinelle.^
Pierrot, with one eye open and the other closed, and that crafty air which is traditional, is presenting Harlequin to the public; Harlequin advances with sweeping and ob- sequious gestures, and vdth one leg gallantly pointed in front of him. Punchinello follows him, wdth swimming head, fatuous glance, and his poor Httle legs in great big sabots. A ridiculous face, with a huge nose, huge spectacles and a huge curled moustache, appears between two cur- tains. The colour of the whole thing is pleasing— both simple and fine— and the three characters stand out perfectly
'Of Decamps' four exhibits this year, one, the Souvenir de la Turquie d'Asie (catalogued as Enfants turcs auprds d'une jontaine, and incorrectly assigned to 1839) is in the Musee Conde, ChantiUy; the remaining three are in the Fodor Museum, Amsterdam. See pis. 24-5.
'At one time Baudelaire considered liim as a possible illus- trator for the Fleurs du Mai.
® This painting was Lot 59 at the Moreau-Nelaton sale, Paris, 11 May 1900; its present whereabouts is unknown.
ON SOME COLOURISTS 79
against a grey background. But the thrilling effect of this picture is less the result of its general appearance than of its composition, which is excessively simple. The figure of Punchinello, which is essentially comic, reminds us of the EngHsh Punch, who is usually shown touching the end of his nose with his index finger, to express his pride in it, or his vexation. I would, however, criticize M. Penguilly for not having taken his type from Deburau,^ who is the true Pierrot of today— the Pierrot of modem history— and should therefore have his place in any painted harlequinade.
Now here is another fantasy, which is very much less adroit and less learned, and whose beauty is all the greater in that it is perhaps involuntary; I refer to M. Manzoni's La Rixe des mendiants. I have never seen anything so poetically brutal, even in the most Flemish of orgies. Here, under six heads, are the different reactions of the visitor who passes in front of this picture— 1. Lively curiosity. 2. *How shockingl' 3. It's badly painted, but the composition is unusual and does not lack charm.* 4. It's not so badly painted as we thought at first.* 5. 'Let's have another look at this picture.' And 6. A lasting memory.
It has a ferocity and a brutality of manner which suit the subject rather weU and put us in mind of Goya's violent sketches. These, in fact, are the most ruffianly countenances that you could wish to see: it is a weird conglomeration of battered hats, wooden legs, broken glasses, befuddled topers; lust, ferocity and drunkenness are shaking their rags.
The ruddy beauty who is kindling the desires of these gentlemen is a fine stroke of the brush, and well formed to please the connoisseurs. I have rarely seen anything so comic as that poor wretch up against a waU, whom his neighbour has victoriously nailed with a pitch-fork.
The second picture, VAssassinat nocturne, has a less strange look. Its colour is dim and commonplace, and the fantastic ingredient is confined to the manner in which the scene is represented. A beggar is brandishing a knife in the face of a miserable fellow whose pockets are being ran- sacked and who is half dead from fear. Those white domi-
° Jean Gaspard Deburau, the famous French pantomimist, died this year. See pp. 147-8.
80 THE SALON OF 1846
noes, in the form of gigantic noses, are very droll and give the most singular stamp to this scene of terror.
M. Villa-Amil has painted the throne-room in Madrid. At first sight, you might say that it was very simply executed; but if you look at it with more care, you will recognize a lot of cleverness in the organization and in the general colour- ing of this decorative picture. It is less fine in tone, perhaps, but it is firmer in colour than the pictures of the same type for which M. Roberts^^ has a liking. If it has a fault, it is that the ceiHng looks less like a ceiling than a veritable sky.
MM. Wattier and Perese generally treat almost similar subjects— fair ladies wearing old-fashioned costumes, in parks, beneath ancient shades. What distinguishes M. Perese is that he paints with much more simplicity, and his name does not compel him to ape Watteau. But in spite of the studied delicacy of M. Wattier's figures, M. Perese is his superior in invention. You might say that there is the same difference between their works as between the minc- ing gallantry of the time of Louis XV and the honest gal- lantry of the age of Louis XIII.
The school of Couture— since we must call it by its name —has given us much too much this year.
M. Diaz de la Peiia,^^ who is, in Httle, the extreme repre- sentative of this little school, sets out from the principle that a palette is a picture. As for over-all harmony, M. Diaz thinks that you will invariably find it. Of draughtsmanship —the draughtsmanship of movement, the draughtsmanship of the colourists— there is no question; the hmbs of all his little figures behave for all the world Hke bundles of rags, or like arms and legs scattered in a railway accident. I would far rather have a kaleidoscope; at least it does not presume to give us Les Delaissees or he Jardin des amours —it provides designs for shawls and carpets, and its role is a modest one. It is true that M. Diaz is a colourist; but enlarge his frame by a foot, and his strength will fail him,
"Presumably David Roberts, R.A., who is cliiefly remembered for his Spanish scenes.
^ Diaz had eight paintings at the Salon this year, of which Bau- delaire mentions the names of two. Another, entitled Orientale, is reproduced Illustr., vol. 7 (1846), p. 136.
ON SOME COLOURISTS 8l
because he does not recognize the necessity for general colour. That is why his pictures leave no memory behind them.
But each man has his allotted part, you say. Great paint- ing is not made for everyone, by any means. A fine dinner contains both hors-d'oeuvres and main courses. Would you dare to sneer at the Aries sausages, the pimentoes, the anchovies, the aioli, and the rest?— Appetizing hors- d'oeuvres?, I reply. Not a bit of it. These things are bon- bons and nauseating sweetmeats. Who would want to feed on dessert? You hardly do more than just touch it when you are pleased with your dinner.
M. Celestin Nanteuil knows how to place a brush-stroke, but he does not know how to fix the proportions and the harmony of a picture.
M. Verdier paints well enough, but fundamentally I be- lieve him to be an enemy of thought.
M. Muller, the man of the Sylphes, the great connoisseur of poetic subjects— of subjects streaming with poetry— has painted a picture which he calls Primavera. People who do not know Italian will think that this word means De- cameron.
M. Faustin Besson's colour loses much by being no longer dappled and befogged by the windows of Deforge's shop.i2
M. Fontaine is obviously a serious-minded man; he has given us M. de Beranger surrounded by youngsters of both sexes, whom he is initiating into the mysteries of Couture's manner.
And what great mysteries they are! A pink or peach- coloured light, and a green shadow— that's all there is to iti The terrible thing about this painting is that it forces itself upon the eye; you notice it from a great distance.
Without a doubt the most unfortunate of all these gentle- men is M. Couture himself, who throughout plays the in- teresting role of victim. An imitator is a babbler who gives away surprises.
In the various speciahties of Bas-Breton, Catalan, Swiss, Norman subjects and the rest, MM. Armand and Adolphe ^ In the Boulevard Montmarte.
8a THE SALON OF 1846
Leleux are outstripped by M. Guillemin, who is inferior to M. Hedouin, who himself yields the palm to M. HafiFner.
Several times I have heard this peculiar criticism directed at the MM. Leleux— that whether they were supposed to be Swiss, Spanish or Breton, all their characters seemed to come from Brittany.
M. Hedouin is certainly a commendable painter, who possesses a firm touch and understands colour; no doubt he will succeed in establishing his own particular originality.
As for M. Haffner, I owe him a grudge for once having painted a portrait in a superably romantic style, and for not having painted any more like it.^^ I beHeved that he was a great artist, rich in poetry and, above all, in invention, a portraitist of the front rank, who came out vdth an occa- sional daub in his spare time; but it seems that he is no more than just a painter.
vn
ON THE IDEAL AND THE MODEL
Since colour is the most natural and the most visible thing, the party of the colourists is the most numerous and the most important. But analysis, which facilitates the artist's means of execution, has divided nature into colour and line; and before I proceed to an examination of the men who form the second party, I think that it would be well if I explained some of the principles by which they are guided —sometimes even wdthout their knowing it.
The title of this chapter is a contradiction, or rather an agreement of contraries; for the drawing of a great draughtsman ought to epitomize both things— the ideal and the model.
Colour is composed of coloured masses which are made up of an infinite number of tones, which, through harmony, become a unity; in the same way, Line, which also has its
" The portrait was at the Salon of the previous year: see p. 22. This year HaJEner exhibited three landscapes only, of which one is reproduced Illustr., vol. 7 (1846), p. 185.
ON THE IDEAL AND THE MODEL 83
masses and its generalizations, can be subdivided into a profusion of particular lines, of which each one is a feature of the model.
The circumference of a circle— the ideal of the curved line— may be compared with an analogous figure, composed of an infinite nxmaber of straight lines which have to fuse with it, the inside angles becoming more and more obtuse.
But since there is no such thing as a perfect circum- ference, the absolute ideal is a piece of nonsense. By his exclusive taste for simplicity, the feeble-minded artist is led to a perpetual imitation of the same type. But poets, artists, and the whole hinnan race would be miserable indeed if the ideal— that absurdity, that impossibility— were ever dis- covered. If that happened, what would everyone do with his poor ego— with his crooked line?
I have already observed that memory is the great cri- terion of art; art is a kind of mnemotechny of the beautiful. Now exact imitation spoils a memory. There are some wretched painters for whom the least wart is a stroke of luck; not only is there no