The Project Gutenberg eBook of Greuze, by Harold Armitage

Although Paris, during the eighteenth century, became the home of artists of more subtle genius than Greuze, yet the pictures of no other painter of that alluring period have become so familiar to the people of our own country. Engravings, etchings, photographs, and reproductions in colour of the works of Greuze abound on every hand; but many have admired the art who have not known so much as the name of the artist, and more have known his name, and have still been far from any knowledge of the story of his life.

Indeed, though brief narrations of what Greuze did and suffered in this world have appeared in volumes that have contained also the biographies of other artists, no book, in this country, has been devoted solely to an account of his romantic career. Moreover, the addition of twenty-one of the works of Greuze to the possessions of the British nation by the bequest of the Wallace Collection, and the exhibition of nine more at the Art Gallery of the Corporation of London in 1902, must have awakened curiosity concerning a painter whose peculiar place in the evolution of art in France, { vi} whose character, and whose eventful life, make his history interesting alike to those who delight in pictures and to those who read biography for its own sake.

The author hopes that this volume will make more available than it has hitherto been an account of the principal happenings in the story of an artist with whose charming pictures the world has been for many years so intimately acquainted.

EARLY YEARS

The way of life in which Jean Baptiste Greuze spent his childhood and his youth was not different from that of most other artists. His parents were obscure people, who had no riches; and his father opposed his desire to be a painter.

For many years, even his own countrymen who wrote of Greuze, gave the date of his birth any time between 1725 and 1732; but it is known now that the accurate date is August 21, 1725, the one which has since been inscribed on the modest house in Tournus, near Mâcon, where his father and mother were living when the artist was born.

By the time that Greuze was eight years of age he had manifested a strong inclination towards the use of the pencil. Drawing became his chief amusement; and he employed, indifferently, stray pieces of paper, or whitewashed walls, for the display of his draughtsmanship. His father, as the way of fathers is, had planned for his son a position more exalted than his own in an occupation with which he himself was connected. The elder Greuze was { 2} a kind of provincial builder, contractor, and slater; and he wished the younger Greuze to become an architect.

Although it is not apparent why an architect, who to-day undergoes severe discipline in drawing, should be the worse because he had a propensity for sketching, it has yet been stated by some of the biographers of Greuze that the father used persuasions and threats to prevent the son from making drawings, and that the boy was thereby driven to the device of exercising his skill surreptitiously in his bedroom.

But a day came when the father saw the folly of his continued resistance. Mistaking for an engraving a head of St. James which his son had copied with a pen, that he might give it to his father as a birthday present, the elder Greuze was so much impressed by the skill of the lad that he thought it better after all to allow him to have his own way in the choice of a profession; and Greuze therefore became the pupil of Grandon, of Lyons, a portrait painter.

In Grandon's constitution the artist was subservient to the man of affairs; and De Goncourt has written that his studio was a veritable picture factory. Greuze, however, had more elevated notions of the vocation of an artist than to remain content in marking time for the rest of his life as a sort of inglorious piece-worker, and his ambition and self-confidence urged him to Paris, where he believed his powers would win for him both fame and fortune.

In Paris Greuze worked unobtrusively, often in solitude, and earned a precarious livelihood, possibly not without invoking the aid of some of the methods of the master whom he had left in Lyons. He was not immediately successful, and his chance of triumphing over the obstacles which beset a raw youth from the provinces, seeking fame in Paris, seemed to be but a remote one. Yet Pigalle, the king's sculptor, believing that Greuze had the qualities which win success ultimately, encouraged the painter to persevere.

Greuze had, or fancied he had, to contend against the hostility and the jealousy of the other artists. At the Academy, where he went to draw, he received less consideration than his ability merited, and he complained eventually to the artist Silvestre, to whom also he showed some specimens of his work. Silvestre, admiring his skill, wished to have his portrait painted by Greuze, and as Silvestre was a man of some influence, this commission was the means of making Greuze's name more widely known. About this time, too, Greuze attracted attention by one of his representations of scenes from the life of humbler folk than were usually seen in pictures during that period. This painting was L'Aveugle Trompé , and Greuze was made agréé of the Academy on June 28, 1755, either by the good offices of Silvestre or of Pigalle, and thus acquired the right to exhibit his pictures at the annual exhibitions.

FAME IN PARIS

Popular as was this picture of L'Aveugle Trompé , its success was eclipsed by the fame of Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants , a work which advanced Greuze to the front rank of the leading painters of that time. Even when one remembers that this is a better picture than many which he painted afterwards, it is yet not easy to-day to understand the enthusiasm that it caused when it was first exhibited. One reason for our difficulty is that we do not feel the force of its novelty as the people of Paris felt it when they had become satiated with the painted pastorals, allegories, and coquetries of that voluptuous era.

The picture, pleasing as a whole, contains indications of the tendency towards artificiality which afterwards became so marked in many of Greuze's melodramatic paintings. But for the rest the scene is nature in a mirror compared with other canvases of the same century. The painter has represented the interior of a farm kitchen, and a devout and venerable farmer reads, from a large Bible, some chapters of the New Testament to the other members of the household. All these, from the grandmother to the child of three years, are picturesque and pleasing, and they are happily placed in the picture. This work was bought by Monsieur de la Live de Jully, a rich connoisseur, who invited artists and others interested in painting to go to his house, to see { 5} the new kind of picture which Greuze had introduced into Paris.

Even from artists and critics the picture won a generous meed of praise; but, containing as it does all the elements which still appeal to "the man in the street," it was not until 1755, when it was exhibited at the Salon, that it achieved its greatest triumph. As long as the exhibition was open the people crowded round this pious presentment of humble life which had strayed so unaccountably amongst the pictures of the Court painters—pictures which for many years, as we shall see, had been free from the suspicion of any odour of sanctity.

"Whence comes he? Whose pupil is he?" asked the bewildered Academicians, who, in the manner of Academicians, could not believe it possible for an artist outside their circle to attain either excellence or fame. The answer came, "He is a pupil of Diderot."

Although this answer did not contain the whole truth, it was yet significant of a change that was taking place in the aspirations of many French people. Diderot, a clever and copious man of letters, had commenced to write about pictures, and he was now advocating that art should be devoted to the cause of morality. Greuze's picture happening to coincide with his own idea, he at once wrote an enthusiastic, one may almost say a gushing, eulogy of this and other similar works of the artist; and in that way he helped to swell the renown which Greuze had now achieved.

Meanwhile, the artist, with that perversity which one has noted in the early life of other famous men, must now leave his own path to go to study art in Italy. Hundreds of years have been needed to convince painters that the Italian artists wrought great pictures because they expressed their own ideas of beauty, just as away from Italy Rembrandt "saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks." "I do not study the ancients," wrote Chantrey, heedless of syntax, "but I study where the ancients studied—nature."

The ambition of Greuze at this time was to belong to that singularly dreary and barren class of painters known as historical painters; and he wasted some years in the pursuit of a project which, in the end, brought him one of the most crushing humiliations of his whole life. "Woe to the artist," Goethe has written, "who leaves his hut to squander himself in academic halls of state!" and this woe fell upon Greuze in exceeding bitterness when his first historical picture was exhibited. But that incident belongs to the year 1769, and it was at the end of the year 1755, when he was thirty years of age, that he went to Italy.

Almost the only effect of his stay of two years in Italy was that for some time the figures in his pictures were arrayed in the "resplendent small clothes" of the people of that country, and had also Italian names. The { 7} painter who did really influence Greuze was Rubens, who was not an Italian, and whose pictures, no further away than the Luxembourg in Paris, it was in later years one of the great delights of his life to study.

In the list of Greuze's works for the year 1757 we notice amongst some pictures of the genre type—the representation, that is, of the life of the humble—a number of paintings which have Italian names; and then there are portraits, and the first of that long series of heads of girls and boys whose fame has outlasted the fame of all his more pretentious works.

Greuze's industry was now very great, and in 1761 there was exhibited one more of his greater triumphs, Un Mariage à l'instant où le Père de l'accordée delivre la dot à son gendre , a picture which created another sensation in Paris. It was unfinished when the Salon of that year was opened, and was hung only during the last few days of the exhibition. But all through these days people gathered round it with the same avidity with which they had elbowed one another for a peep at Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants .

During the next two years Greuze painted portraits and heads of children, and the year 1769 is notable because of his unhappy attempt to become a member of the Academy as an historical painter. He had, as we have seen, been made agréé , but he had not yet complied with the rule that required each member to provide the Academy with one of his pictures. { 8} The picture he now submitted bore the sufficiently comprehensive title of Septime-Sévère reprochant à son fils Caracalla d'avoir attenté à sa vie dans les défilés d'Ecosse et lui disant:—Si tu désires ma mort, ordonne à Papinien de me la donner . The members of the Academy assembled, and the picture was placed upon an easel that they might examine it, while Greuze awaited their verdict in another room. In an hour the artist was admitted.

"Monsieur Greuze," said the director, "the Academy receives you; come forward and take the oath." When this ceremony had been completed the director continued, "You have been received; but it is as a painter of genre . The Academy has considered your former productions, which are excellent, but it has closed its eyes upon this picture, which is worthy neither of the Academy nor of you."

Greuze was astounded and disappointed; and he commenced to stammer out a confused defence of the picture, the worst probably that he ever painted. Then Lagrenée, taking a pencil from one of his pockets, pointed out some of the mistakes in drawing on the canvas. Greuze, cut to the heart, went away, and continued a defence of his picture in the newspapers.

One of the letters which Greuze sent to the public journals is an interesting revelation of how little of what is understood now as art went to the making of an historical painting. Greuze wrote:

"In the continuation of your comments upon the pictures exhibited at the Salon in the last number of your journal you have been unjust towards me upon two points; and as an honourable man you would no doubt wish to remove these injustices in your next issue. In the first place, instead of treating me as you have treated the other artists, my confrères, to whom you have offered, in a few lines, the tribute of commendation which they have merited, you have gone out of your way to discuss, with the public, how, according to your opinion, Poussin would have painted the same subject. I do not doubt, sir, that Poussin, of the same subject, would have made a sublime work; but to a certainty he would have painted a very different picture from the one which you have imagined. I must ask you to believe that I have studied, as carefully as you have been able to study, the works of that great man, and I have, above all, sought to acquire the art of endowing my characters with dramatic expression. You have carried your views a long way, it is true, inasmuch as you have remarked that Poussin would have put the clasps of the cloaks upon the right side, while I have put that of the robe of Caracalla upon the left—surely a very grave error! But I do not surrender so easily concerning the character which you pretend that Poussin would have given to the Emperor. All the world knows that Severus was the most passionate, the most violent of men, and you would wish { 10} that when he says to his son, 'If thou desirest my death, order Papinian to kill me with that sword,' he should, in my picture, have an air as calm and as tranquil as Solomon had in similar circumstances. I ask all sensible men to judge whether that was or was not the expression which should have been put on the face of that redoubtable Emperor.

"Another injustice, much greater still, is that, after you had endeavoured to discover how Poussin would have treated this subject, you have assumed that I had the idea to paint Geta, the brother of Caracalla, in the personage that I have placed behind Papinian. First of all, Geta was not present at that scene; it was Castor the chamberlain, one of the most faithful servants of Severus. In the second place, in supposing gratuitously, as you have done, that I had the design to represent Geta, you would have been right to have reproached me if I had painted him too old, because he was the younger brother of Caracalla. Thirdly, I should still have been wrong if I had not painted him in his armour. You see, sir, what absurdities you have attributed to me in order that you might indulge your love of criticism. I believe you to be a man too honest to refuse me the satisfaction of making this letter public in your journal. It is due to me to be allowed to explain my own picture and to correct the interpretation which you have given to it without consulting me and without consulting history.

"Do you wish to discourage an artist who sacrifices all to merit the favours with which the public has so far honoured him? Why, upon my first essay, attack me so openly? This is to me a new kind of painting, but it is one in which I flatter myself that I shall become perfect as time goes on. Why compare me alone, amongst all my confrères, to the most learned painter of the French school? If you have done this to indulge me, you have not done it happily, for I can find nothing in all that article but a marked design to annoy me. Nor shall I be able to recognise any other than that design—a most unworthy one in a writer who ought to be impartial—until I have seen your willingness to print my letter in your journal."

It will be noticed that in this letter there is not a single word written about art. All the discussion turns upon archæological details. Poussin is not mentioned as an artist, but merely as a "learned painter," and we shall see, when we discuss the position held by Greuze amongst French artists, that scholars, excellent in their own place, came at length to push the painters "from their stools," with very disastrous results for the art of France.

Even Diderot turned upon this picture and condemned it; for he and his followers now saw that after all Greuze was not the painter of morality for whom they had been seeking. Greuze, it appeared, was ready "to pay homage to traditional conventions," and to become a { 12} backslider from the ideals which they had cherished. After this scene Greuze refused to exhibit any of his pictures at the annual exhibitions of the Academy until the Revolution swept away restrictions, and opened the doors of the Salon to all artists. He also shook the dust of Paris from his feet, and lived for a time in Anjou, where he painted a number of pictures, including that portrait of Madame de Porcin which is to-day one of the treasures of the museum of Angers.

When Greuze returned to Paris his repute was greater than it had ever been before. It was now the fashion to visit his studio, and royal princes, the nobility, the Emperor Joseph the Second and other foreign notabilities came to see La Cruche Cassée , La Malédiction Paternelle , La Dame de Charité , Le Fils Puni , and other paintings which happened at that time to be still in his possession. He amassed money notwithstanding the great losses caused by his wife's lawless extravagance. High prices were paid for his paintings, and the engravers Massard, Gaillard, Levasseur and Flipart were kept busy making plates, the impressions from which were in the houses of Paris, of the provinces, and of foreign countries. Moreover, curious dilettanti, people of the kind whose chief regard is for technical and accidental states of the plates, began to collect these engravings, and to compete with one another to possess them. One engraver, Jean Georges Wille, had always been the staunch friend of { 13} Greuze; and his son, Pierre Alexandre, became a pupil in Greuze's studio. At a time when the artist had been less known, it was Wille who disseminated a knowledge of his works, not only in France, but also in Germany.

POVERTY AND DEATH

Suddenly, amidst all the splendour of his great reputation, the Revolution smote Paris, and Greuze was bereaved of all his glory. The pension he had received from the King ceased with the authority of the King. The attention of the people was withdrawn from him, and such regard as was paid to pictures during this distracted epoch went to the paintings of David, who was both painter and politician. Greuze's ironical inquiry each morning, "Who is King to-day, then?" is significant of the instability of the time. No more the elite of Paris crowded round his easel; but one of his two daughters still remained with him; and a number of his scholars, especially his girl pupils, were faithful to the end.

"You have a family and you have talent, young man," he once said to Prudhon; "that is enough in these days to bring about one's death by starvation. Look at my cuffs," continued the old man bitterly; and then Greuze would show him his torn shirt-sleeves, "for even he could no longer find means of getting on in the new order of things."

How poor he was may be inferred from his letter to the Minister of the Interior: "The picture which I am painting for the government is but half finished. The situation in which I find myself has forced me to ask you to pay me part of the money in advance, so that I may be enabled to finish the work. I have been honoured by your sympathy in all my misfortunes; I have lost everything but my talent and my courage. I am seventy-five years of age, and have not a single order for a picture; indeed, this is the most painful moment of my life. You have a kind heart, and I flatter myself that you will relieve me in accordance with the urgency of my need."

"Well, Greuze," said his friend Barthélemy one day to him, when sitting at his bedside.

"Well, my friend," replied the artist, "I am dying.... I am commencing to know no longer what I am saying; but patience! yet a little while and I shall say nothing more."

"Ah! my God, since the Sans-culottides I have taken no heed of the seasons. Are we in Ventóse or in Germinal ? Is to-day Saint Pissenlit or Saint Asperge ?"

"I am quite at ease for my journey. Adieu, Barthelemy. I await you at my burial. You will be all alone like the poor man's dog."

So in poverty and neglect the artist died. There is a tradition that when Napoleon heard of it, he exclaimed, "Dead! poor and neglected! Why did he not speak? I would have given him a pitcher made of Sèvres china, filled to the brim with gold, for every copy of his Broken Pitcher ."

At the funeral, when the coffin rested in the church, a lady, whose emotion could not be hidden, even by the thick veil which she wore, advanced to the coffin, and placed upon it a bouquet of immortelles . She then withdrew again to an obscure part of the church. Tied to the bouquet was discovered a piece of paper which bore this inscription: "These flowers, offered by the most grateful of his pupils, are the emblem of his glory."

A newspaper of the time gave the name of the young lady as Mademoiselle Mayer, the artist who, before she committed suicide, did so much to cheer the desolate life of Prudhon, and who now occupies the same tomb as Prudhon in the cemetery of Père la Chaise in Paris. Madame de Valory, however, the god-daughter of Greuze, has stated that the woman was Madame Jubot, another of the pupils of Greuze.

Tournus neglected him in his life, but to-day is proud of its illustrious son. A monument of the artist has been erected in the town, some of his pictures hang in the church and in the museum, and a tablet marks the house in which he was born.

ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY

It was peculiarly fitting that a lady should deposit upon the coffin of Greuze a bouquet of immortelles , for his romantic and chivalrous regard for women, from a very early period in his career, had a great influence upon his life and work. Even as a pupil of Grandon, Greuze fell in love with his master's wife, a woman of very great beauty and charm. He never told his love; but one day Grandon's daughter surprised Greuze on his knees in the studio. She asked him what he was doing there, and he replied that he was looking for something he had lost. But she had seen that he had one of her mother's shoes, and that he was covering it with ardent kisses.

Exceptionally romantic, too, was his love for the beautiful Lætitia during the two years that he spent in Italy. Greuze had carried with him to that country letters of introduction to the Duc del Or...., by whom he had been received with great cordiality. The Duke's wife had died, but he had a charming daughter, Lætitia, to whom it was arranged that Greuze should give lessons in painting. Greuze was a man to whom women and girls were instinctively attracted, and Lætitia fell in love with him, with all the violence and passion of the Italian temperament. Her beauty and her charming manners had also fascinated Greuze; but he was very much disconcerted when he found that she loved him, because he was conscious { 17} of the gulf which birth and fortune had placed between them. He, therefore, rigorously repressed his desire to see her, and forced himself to stay away from the palace.

Meanwhile, his doleful demeanour, innocent face, and light curls obtained for him, from Fragonard and other French students, who were in Italy at the time, the name of the love-sick cherub.

Greuze at length heard that Lætitia was ill, and that no one could discover the cause or nature of her malady. He loitered near her home to try to obtain tidings of her, and one day he encountered the Duke, who took him to the palace to show him two pictures by Titian, which he had recently purchased.

"My daughter," he said, "has promised herself the pleasure of copying them when her health has been restored. I hope that you will come to superintend her work. That is what she wishes."

The Duke further asked Greuze to make a copy of one of the pictures as soon as he could, because he wished to send the copy away as a present. Greuze could not refuse; and thus he was soon installed in the palace again, working there day by day. Each morning he was informed, by an old retainer of the family, who had been Lætitia's nurse, how the young lady fared. The old nurse knew the two were in love with each other. Indeed, a little later, she arranged a secret interview between them, { 18} and Greuze found his idol pale and thin, but not less beautiful than before.

At first neither of them could speak; but, encouraged by the nurse, Lætitia blurted out:

Greuze was too happy to speak, and Lætitia, mistaking the cause of his silence, hid her face in her hands, and burst into tears.

This melted Greuze to the uttermost. He threw himself at her feet, and then, in the intervals between his impetuous kisses, he poured out impassioned declarations of his love.

"I can now be happy," cried Lætitia, clapping her hands, and behaving like a gladdened child. She ran and embraced her nurse, and again and again gave expression to her ecstasy. "Listen to me, you two; here is my scheme. I love Greuze, and I will marry him."

"My nurse, you wish to say that my father will not consent. Well I know that. He wishes me to marry his eternal Casa—the oldest and the ugliest of men; or the young Count Palleri, whom I do not know, nor ever wish to know. I am rich through my mother, and I give my fortune to Greuze, whom I marry. He takes me to France, and you will follow us there."

And intoxicated with the future which she had arranged, she detailed, with a delicious { 19} volubility, the life that they would lead together in Paris. Greuze would continue to paint. He would become another Titian, and in the end her father would be proud to have such a son-in-law.

When Greuze next saw Lætitia he had had time to review all the circumstances, and he appeared with a woeful face. Lætitia derided him, and then tried to coax him tenderly out of his gloomy mood. At last, becoming angry, she called him perfidious, and reproached him that he had pretended to love her that he might the more easily break her heart. She cried and tore her hair, and Greuze fell at her feet, and promised to obey her blindly.

But as soon as he had left the palace he saw the folly of it all. He saw the despair of her father, heard his maledictions, and felt his vengeance, and all the misfortune which would come upon their love. He then decided that he would not relent again, nor see Lætitia any more. As an excuse for not visiting her he pretended that he was ill, and this simulated illness became real. For three months he was ailing, and part of the time he was consumed by fever and delirium.

At the end of his illness Lætitia was still eager to marry him; but with extraordinary firmness of will he resisted the temptation and fled from Italy, carrying with him secretly a copy of the portrait of Lætitia, which he had painted for her father.

Many years later, when Greuze was once { 20} more a poor man, he wrote in reply to the Grand Duchess of Russia, who had offered ten thousand livres for the portrait of Lætitia, "If you were to give me all the riches of the Empire of Russia they would not pay for that picture," and probably in his old age he read yet again the letter he had received from Lætitia, eight years after he quitted Rome. "Yes, my dear Greuze, your old pupil is now a good mother; I have five charming children, whom I adore. My eldest daughter is worthy to be offered as a subject for your happy talent; she is beautiful as an angel. Ask the Prince d'Este. My husband almost convinces me that I continue to be young and pretty, so much does he still love me. As I have told you, this happiness is due to you, and I love you for having prevented me from loving you."

Greuze had scarcely returned from Italy when he was attracted by Mademoiselle Anne-Gabrielle Babuty, who was in charge of a bookshop in Paris. Diderot, who had himself been very much in love with her, has described her as a smart dashing young woman, of upright carriage, and with a complexion of lilies and roses. De Goncourt also speaks of her numerous charms. She had a pretty face, which Greuze seemed to be never tired of painting. It was the smooth face of a child, and had an attractive roundness, and a soft, tender, peach-like delicate complexion. The expression was simple and unaffected, and there was enough of piquancy to animate a face { 21} which, for all its manifold good qualities, would else have had a tendency towards insipidity. Her eyebrows were very much arched, and this circumstance lent to her face its expression of naïveté. Her eyelashes were long, and when her eyes were downcast they gave a charming look to her face, resting like a caress upon her cheeks. Her little nose, the nose of a child, was exquisitely formed, and seemed to indicate an alert and lively character, and her rosy lips were also finely shaped, and particularly alluring.

Her portrait appears often in the paintings of Greuze in La Philosophie Endormie , La Mère Bien Aimée , La Voluptueuse , and in many others.

The story of their first encounter, and of their subsequent relations, is best told by a few extracts from a document which Greuze had cause to execute some years afterwards. He wrote:

"A few days after having arrived from Rome—I know not by what fatality—I passed along the Rue Saint Jacques , and saw in her shop Mademoiselle Babuty, who was the daughter of a bookseller.

"I was struck with admiration, for she had a very beautiful figure; and that I might have a better chance of seeing her I bought a number of books. Her face was without character, and was indeed rather sheep-like. I paid her as many compliments as she could wish, and she knew who I was, for my reputation had already commenced, and I had been recognised by the Academy.

"She was then thirty and some odd years of age, and therefore in danger of remaining single all her life. She employed all the cajoleries that were possible to attach me to her, and to cause me to come again, and I continued to pay her visits for about a month. One afternoon I found her more animated than usual. She took one of my hands, and, regarding me with a very passionate look, she said, 'Monsieur Greuze, would you marry me if I were to consent?'

"I avow I was confounded by such a question. I said to her, 'Mademoiselle, would not one be too happy to pass his life with a woman so lovable as you are?'

"Of course, this was but lightly said, yet that did not prevent her from taking action at once; for, upon the very next morning, she went with her mother to the Quai des Orfèvres, and there bought, at the shop of Monsieur Strass, earrings of false diamonds, and next day she did not hesitate to wear these in her ears.

"As she lived in a shop, the neighbours were not slow in paying her compliments, and in asking her who had presented these jewels to her.

"With downcast eyes she answered softly, 'It is Monsieur Greuze who has given them to me.'

"'Ah, no;' but this was said in a way that implied that secretly she had married me. My friends began at once to congratulate me, but I assured them there was nothing more false than { 23} the news they had heard, and that I had not money enough to enable me to marry.

"Outraged at such effrontery, I did not return to Mademoiselle Babuty any more. I lived at that time in le faubourg Saint Germain , rue du Petit Lion , in an hotel of furnished rooms called l'Hôtel des Vignes . Three days passed, during which I heard no more of the matter, and I was already thinking of other affairs, when one fine day she came knocking at my door accompanied by her little servant girl. I took no notice of the knocks, but she knew I was there, and she attacked my door with her hands and feet like a veritable fury. Then, to prevent a public scandal, I opened my door, and she threw herself into my room all in tears. She said to me:

"'I have done wrong, Monsieur Greuze, but it is love which has misled me. It is the attachment I have for you which has made me resort to such a stratagem. My life is in your hands.' Then she flung herself at my knees, and said she would not rise again until I had promised that I would marry her. She took my two hands in hers, and they were wet with tears. I pitied her, and I promised all she wished.

"We were not married until two years afterwards, in the parish of Saint Medard—which was not her parish—for fear of the pleasantries that would have been made, seeing that she had said that we were already married. I commenced housekeeping with twenty-six livres the day after our wedding."

During the first seven years of their married life they had three children. One of the children died, leaving the artist and his wife with two daughters.

Concerning these seven years no complaint is made about the conduct of Madame Greuze; but from that time it would be difficult to find a more unhappy household than that of Greuze. His wife was a continual torment, hindering him in his work, putting his life on a lower level, and making his home intolerable. Diderot even blamed her for the infelicity of his Academy picture, and Greuze himself suspected her of having poisoned the minds of the members of the Academy against him.

Her faithlessness, gross as it was, received further aggravation from the insolent openness in which it manifested itself. She received men of the most disreputable character at her house, caring naught whether her husband knew or not; and she polluted the morals of his boy pupils. Her children she neglected and put into a convent, one for eleven years, and the other for twelve. "It is a year and seven days since mamma saw us," said one of the girls sadly one day, when their father had gone to visit them.

Many a time Greuze went in bodily fear of her violence. When she asked for the help of a servant, and Greuze suggested that she should wait a little longer, until he could pay the wages of one, she dealt him, with all her might, a blow upon his face. She squandered in all { 25} manner of foolish extravagance the large fortune which Greuze received from the sale of the engravings from his works; and then she destroyed his account books, that the extent of her defalcations might never be known. Her household duties were abandoned, and Greuze nearly died when one day he warmed for himself some food in a saucepan in which verdigris had been suffered to accumulate.

At last her violence, her rank immorality, her extravagance and her neglect could be borne no longer, and in despair Greuze obtained from the magistrates the legal right to live apart from his wife.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

The sadness of the story of Greuze's married life is all the more touching because he had the qualities of a true and tender husband. It is indeed not less than a tragedy that, constituted as he was, he should have been denied the companionship of a woman worthy of the great affection of which his nature was capable. Often querulous and brusque with men, his manner with women was gracious and respectful, his politeness the true politeness of the kind heart that desires the well-being of others. As we have seen, his relations with Lætitia were governed by a most chivalrous ideal of conduct, an ideal which seems quite quixotic when we think of the period in which he lived. As Lætitia had been attracted towards him, so { 26} also were most of the women who moved in his social sphere; and, eager as he was for praise from men, it came with added sweetness from the lips of women. It is not surprising that he painted women with such perfect charm, because his heart was in the work.

Greuze, though only of middle height, had yet an impressive personality; and people of any discernment saw at a glance that he was a man of distinction. His head was well formed, his forehead high, his eyes large and bright, and of a good shape, and his features indicated genius, candour, and an energetic will.

His conversation was sincere and elevated, and often piquant and animated. He sometimes showed signs of nervousness and irritability, and became quite fiery when his work was criticised, or when he thought he was not receiving the treatment which his vanity prompted him to think he ought to receive.

This self-esteem, always abnormal, had been increased by his early success with Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants . "Our painter is a little vain," wrote Diderot in 1765, "but his vanity is that of a child;" and it was generally recognised that there was very much of naïveté in his conceit, and that his good qualities compensated for any displays of childish self-sufficiency.

At times his talk became inflated and bombastic. "Oh, sir!" he would say, concerning his own picture, "here is a work which { 27} astonishes even me who painted it. I cannot understand how a man can, with a few pounded earths, animate a canvas in this way," and no ridicule could cure him of this flamboyant manner.

"That is beautiful," said Monsieur de Marigny, standing before Greuze's painting of La Pleureuse .

"Sir, I know it; moreover, people praise me, and yet I am in need of more commissions."

"It is because you have a host of enemies," said Vernet, who was present at the time, "and amongst those enemies is one who appears to love you to the verge of folly, but he will nevertheless ruin you."

Greuze's irritability sometimes revealed itself in downright rudeness. Natoire, the professor at the Academy, looking through a portfolio of drawings of some other artist, questioned the accuracy of one of the figures, whereupon Greuze turned upon him and said:

The Dauphin, when Greuze had painted his portrait, wishing to show how pleased he was with Greuze's work, paid him the high compliment of suggesting that he should now paint the portrait of the Dauphine, who was present. Greuze looked at her face, and alluding to the thick covering of rouge which appeared upon { 28} her cheeks, asked to be excused, for he could not paint such a face as that. No wonder that Mariette should say that Greuze had the manners of a cobbler.

There are also hints that Greuze was sometimes jealous. In Un Homme d'Autrefois , by the Marquis Costa de Beauregard, it has been narrated that Henry Costa, one of the author's ancestors, wishing to be an artist, went at the age of fourteen years to Paris. He was received with great kindness by Greuze, and the enthusiastic boy said " il parle comme un ange ," but in an article contributed by Augustus Mansion to Temple Bay we have read, "Another chagrin followed. Greuze became jealous of his prodigy, tried to shake him off, ignored letters, and declined to permit himself to be seen at work. It was an unkindness keenly felt by the boy, who was learning every day a little more of the world: ' Quelle froideur et quelle mystère! ' he says. 'Greuze told me he could not communicate certain processes he was employing, that what was useful for him might not be the same for me. I cannot understand how a fine genius can be capable of such meanness.'"

Yet one cannot estimate the whole character of Greuze by these isolated incidents. Like other people, he said and did different things when he was in different moods, and we know that when the artists of Paris held aloof from Prudhon, whose poverty had compelled him to "draw vignettes on letter sheets for the { 29} government offices, business cards for tradesmen, and even little pictures for bon-bonnières... Greuze alone treated him amicably."

Greuze's industry was abnormal. As a worker he seemed indefatigable. He was absorbed in his art, putting all his soul and brains into his pictures, and seeming to live for his work, and for no other thing.

CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS WORK

There is so little variety in the works of Greuze that if one divides them into two main classes, nearly all his pictures, with the exception of the portraits, may be placed in one or other of these two divisions. In one class there are his genre pictures, containing as a rule many figures; and then, better known than these, and of greater merit, are his single heads of girls and boys, which constitute the other principal category.

His first great success was achieved with his picture of the genre class, Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants , and this book contains an illustration from another popular work of this sort called L'Accordée de Village . A section of this volume explains the relative position of Greuze in the history of art, and reasons are given which account for the great acclamation with which this and similar works were received in Paris when first they were exhibited. Meanwhile we will consider the intrinsic merits of these pictures without reference to the novelty of their appearance—an appearance in which a number of adventitious circumstances are involved.

In painting pictures of scenes in the life of humble people, Greuze had an aim other than the representation of some beauty of nature by which his own emotions had been profoundly stirred. He wished to play the schoolmaster, and the history of painting has demonstrated that, whatever may be the immediate effect of pictures that have been wrought in this mood, they have never been the pictures that have endured for all time the test of a comparison with the severest standards of excellence in art, and they have invariably sunk into their own place—amongst pictures not in the first class.

Again and again it has been shown that a man cannot be a preacher or a story-writer on canvas and at the same time an artist of the first rank. The reason for this is that it is not the function of pictorial art to tell tales, nor to preach sermons, though artists can do both, and yet be very popular.

"Sir," said Dr. Johnson, "a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs: it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." And one may apply the same remark to the pulpiteering of the painter with much less risk of evoking a protest.

During recent years this truth has begun to receive recognition. Théophile Gautier has written strenuously against story-telling pictures, and Whistler has argued that Art "is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only—having no desire to teach—seeking { 32} and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all times."

While these opinions of modern critics upon anecdotal art are in our minds, it will be appropriate to mention Greuze's own views as revealed in what he called " une note historique " upon his painting of La Belle-Mère . "For a long time I had wished," he says, "to paint that character, but in each sketch the expression of the stepmother always appeared to me to be feeble and unsatisfactory. One day, however, when I was crossing the Pont-Neuf, I saw two women, who spoke to one another with much vehemence. One of them began to shed tears, and she exclaimed, 'Such a stepmother too! Yes, she gave me bread, but in giving it to me she broke my teeth.' That was a coup de lumière for me; I returned to the house, and I made the sketch for my picture, which contains five figures: the step-mother, the daughter of the dead mother, the grandmother of the orphan, the daughter of the stepmother, and a child of three years. I have supposed in my picture that it is the dinner-hour, and that the poor little girl goes to take a seat at the table with the other children. Then the stepmother takes a piece of bread from the table, and, holding the orphan back by her apron, thrusts the bread roughly into her mouth. I have set myself the task of showing in that action the deliberate hate of the woman. The child seeks to evade her stepmother's violence, and seems as one { 33} who would say, 'Why would you ill-use me? I have done you no harm.' The child's expression is a mixture of shyness and of fear. Her grandmother is at the other end of the table. Harrowed by grief, she lifts her eyes to heaven, and, with hands trembling, seems to say, 'Ah! my daughter, where are you? What misfortunes! what bitterness!' The daughter of the stepmother, not at all sympathetic concerning the lot of her sister, laughs to witness the despair of the poor old woman, and, in ridicule, draws her mother's attention to her gestures. The infant of the family, whose heart has not yet been corrupted, gratefully stretches out her arms towards the sister who has bestowed so much kindness upon her. I have wished to paint a woman who maltreats a child that does not belong to her, and who, by a double crime, has also corrupted the heart of her own daughter."

Here, then, we see an anecdotal painting in the making. Although this rehearsal is very touching, as a revelation of the kind heart of the man, it yet seems to-day a particularly naïve exposition of the motive for a work of art. Nothing could show with greater clearness the wide gulf that, in the art world, lies between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of a century which closed with discussions of the theories of impressionists, vibrists, symbolists and pointillists, and with the theories of those who, denying that art is primarily moral, or even intellectual, have contended that it is { 34} simply a means by which we are made to respond to an artist's emotion.

If Whistler, to mention an artist representative of some newer movements than those of the eighteenth century, had been on the Pont-Neuf, from what a different source would have come any coup de lumière which might have flashed into his brain! Not during high noon, nor in the gossip of the people, would he have found the motive for his paintings. His coup de lumière would have come "when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; and the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her."

Whistler's eyes would have been directed towards the beauties of colour and of tone that he might find on the river or on its banks; and the Isle de France, as it is seen by the tired journalist as he makes his way to the Latin Quarter at dawn of day, with its tender grays, and its evasive charms of exquisite light and colour, would be of more account to him than { 35} all the conversations in the world, however vehement they might be. The idea of preaching or moralizing on canvas would never have entered his head for a moment.

When Greuze, in harmony with the raw notions of Diderot upon art, did preach, his homilies were singularly unimpressive. The pictures which he painted when in this sermonizing vein have all the elements that go to the making of what is now called melodrama. The scenes are not the result of a discriminating observation of real life; are not, to use Zola's phrase, "Nature seen through a temperament." They are founded upon conventions, upon the artificial and sentimental ideas of life that have by some curious freak of the human mind established themselves in books and plays and pictures.

The figures in Greuze's genre pictures pose before the spectators; they gesticulate and overdo their parts like barn-stormers. Pity becomes maudlin, morality degenerates into sanctimoniousness, and humility is degraded into utter abasement. The sentimentality in Un Paralytique Soigné par sa Famille , ou le Fruit de la Bonne Education , and in La Mère Paralytique is particularly nauseating, and in La Mère bien Aimée the exaggeration of what is in actual life a very tender sentiment makes of that picture a very significant example of Greuze's stilted manner. The six children—all of them about the same age—who have flung themselves upon their mother, seem so numerous, { 36} and are so involved in a confused heap of humanity that Madame Geoffrin spoke of the picture as a "fricassee of children," and incurred thereby the fulminations of the artist. In his genre pictures, too, as is usual in melodrama elsewhere, the humble cottage is the headquarters of all the virtues.

Greuze, it is true, made sketches for his pictures in the streets and in the market-places; but there is none of the freshness of the sketch when the figure appears on the canvas, and De Goncourt has complained that little tatterdemalions with their split breeches have become on their way to Greuze's canvases the Cupids of Boucher dressed as Savoyards; and further, he has put in a mild demurrer that the artist's washerwomen do not wash!

In strong contrast to Greuze's melodramatic, affected, domestic scenes are those by Chardin, another French artist of the eighteenth century. No ethical teaching is obtruded in his pictures; there is no pose, and the spectator can enjoy the real poetry of life, the sweetness and simplicity of well-ordered homes, undisturbed by the poseurs who clamour for our regard in many of the pictures by Greuze.

Another fault of Greuze's genre pictures is their poverty and feebleness of colour. There is a general deadness, and in parts an abuse of purple and violet. Some of the tints have a dirty muddled look, and the shadows are heavy and brown. Still the chief fault is that art in { 37} these pictures is relegated to a second place; the pictures are a means, and not an end.

To see many of his genre pictures together is to receive an impression of monotony. It is clear that the range of the artist is narrow, that he is making a few ideas cover a great area of canvas, and that he ceased to grow intellectually at an early stage of his career.

Greuze and Hogarth have often been compared, but there are many essential differences between the two men. There was dissimilarity in their temperaments, and while Greuze has adopted the attitude of a mild-mannered Sabbath-school superintendent, towards those whose immorality he would correct, Hogarth, as Professor Muther has written, has "swung over this human animal the stout cudgel of morality in the manner of a sturdy policeman and Puritan bourgeois ." Charles Normand explains the difference with some disregard for international amenity. Greuze, he says, "did not paint for the English, at once drunkards and theologians, maundering on through life, with a pot of gin in one hand and a Bible in the other."

And yet Greuze is no Puritan, even when he preaches most. There is often an air of coquetry and voluptuousness in his most serious pictures. Charles Blanc has written that Greuze is a moralist who is passionately fond of beautiful shoulders, a preacher who loves to see and to reveal to us the bosoms of young girls; and Lady Dilke has pointed out that "even in Un { 38} Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants ... the instinct which bade him associate with his lessons of grace and morality the stimulus of voluptuous charm has tempted him to give prominence to the girl whose thoughts are far away, and whose kerchief is torn just where it should hide the budding breast."

But when criticism has said all it can say in dispraise of Greuze's pictures, even of his genre pictures, it may be seen that Greuze was by temperament an artist. The melodramatic moralist was only part of the man and not the whole. Even Robert Louis Stevenson had "something of the Shorter-Catechist" in his constitution, and yet remains the most romantic and interesting figure of the latter-day world of letters.

It need not be forgotten that in the most theatrical works of Greuze there are many beauties. There is often a figure in these otherwise imperfect pictures which indicates his love for the beautiful, and in some of his paintings, for instance in Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants , the melodramatic element, though present, is not obtrusive, and is more than compensated by the other qualities of tenderness and graceful composition.

We may now consider the other class of Greuze's paintings, the heads of children, and it is in these that Greuze is seen at his best; it is in these that he redeems himself, and reveals more of the artist. To-day, though his other works are scarcely ever mentioned, his heads { 39} of girls and boys are treasured in the most costly collections, and are known far and wide by means of photographs and other reproductions.

In many an art gallery the beautiful eyes of these pretty, rosy-cheeked children meet our own, and we stay yet again to admire their fresh lips and their brown hair, in which the piece of blue ribbon nestles with such harmony of colouring. Often a light gauze has been thrown round their necks or upon their shoulders, and often, too, a posy of flowers tucked into the tops of their bodices emulates the carnation and white of their complexions. There are few pictures that are more sweet and alluring than these heads of children.

In London it is an easy matter to study Greuze's child portraits, because there are a few examples at the National Gallery, and more at Hertford House. Standing before these canvases the general effect is one of sweetness and delicacy, one colour melting into another in almost imperceptible gradations, and giving an impression very unlike the one we receive from the hard edges of a painting by Maclise for example. The colours are not positive, but have been softened and harmonized. For instance, if a piece of white paper is held against what may seem to be a piece of white drapery, it will be found that the white has been modified into a beautiful delicate pearly gray. The same test may be applied to the other colours. Hold a piece of positive blue { 40} near to one of Greuze's seemingly blue ribbons, and it will be noticed that a similar modification has been effected.

The forms, too, have been rounded, and have been freed from all angularities. Indeed, Greuze has carried this process as far as it is possible. Too much of this smoothing and the picture would lose in character, and would become but a vapid piece of work.

In the long series of heads of girls and boys that Greuze painted, some of the pictures are conspicuously better than the rest. Of these may be mentioned the Head of a Young Girl Veiled in Black , which belongs to M. Leopold Goldschmidt, and two more which are in the Museum at Besançon, Paul Strogonoff , Infant , and the Head of a Young Girl . Also characteristic of Greuze at his best, and more available to the people of this country, is A Girl with Doves . In the year 1800 he exhibited at the Salon L'Innocence tenant Deux Pigeons . It has not been definitely ascertained, but it is possible that this is the beautiful picture that hangs now in the Wallace Gallery. Few paintings by Greuze are more pleasing than this one. The picture is well painted, and it is quite free from Greuze's besetting sins. Where in other pictures one finds posturing and affectation, one finds here the simplicity and sweetness of nature. The painting was a commission from a Mr. Wilkinson, and Greuze received 4,500 francs for it. When Mr. Wilkinson's pictures were sold in 1828, Mr. Nieuwenhuys became { 41} the purchaser, and he paid 245 guineas for the painting. Later the work became the property of Mr. W. Wells, of Redleaf, and when, in 1848, his pictures were dispersed, the Marquis of Hertford gave £787 10s. for this one, and thus it has become part of the splendid collection at Hertford House, now belonging to the nation. During the Manchester Exhibition of 1857 the public had a chance to see it there, and it was exhibited again at Bethnal Green in 1874. Another picture in which Greuze's style may be studied is A Girl's Head, draped with a Scarf . In England this is one of the best-known of the artist's works. Thirty and more years ago it was reproduced in popular publications, and it has been reproduced many times since by various processes. By the bequest of Mr. R. Simmons, the original picture has become the property of the nation, and it is now the most characteristic example of Greuze amongst those that hang in the National Gallery. Upon this canvas one may see many of the qualities to which we have already referred. There is more than a suspicion of mannerism in the way that the hands are held, and one feels, concerning the shoulder, that, beautiful as it is, it has been obtruded upon the notice of the spectator with a somewhat free anatomical license. The half-open mouth also gives an impression of affectation; and yet, when criticism has pronounced its last word, the picture still remains graceful and seductive.

Some of the faults of Greuze's manner which { 42} have been noted in his genre pictures appear also in his heads of children. The girls in a number of the pictures are too self-conscious and affected, imperfections that one may see prominently illustrated in Fidelity and in Ariadne , in the Wallace Collection.

A few, indeed, of Greuze's heads can scarcely be called paintings of children at all, so many of the elements of womanhood has he mingled with what is otherwise typical of childhood. As representations of the charm and the insouciance of childhood, a painting by Greuze would ill bear comparison, for example, with a work by Chardin amongst his own compatriots, with works by Reynolds and Gainsborough; or, to come to our time, with some of the children of Millais, with Watts' Agathoniké Hélène Ionides , Whistler's Miss Alexander , Mouat Loudan's Isa , John Lavery's A Girl in White , or with Edward Arthur Walton's The Girl in Brown .

Most of the French critics who have written of Greuze have drawn attention to this imperfection in the artist's paintings of children. De Goncourt in some passages of searching criticism has written regarding a number of these heads that they represent "the innocence of Paris and of the eighteenth century, an easy innocence which is near its fall." And De Goncourt, Diderot, and other writers have pointed out that in many the head is the head of a girl on the body of a woman; that Greuze has, in fact, put "young heads on old shoulders." { 43} Charles Blanc has written of Une Jeune Fille qui pleure la Mort de son Oiseau , that the head is the head of a child, but the grief is the grief of a woman; and he has added to this criticism that it is rare to find in Greuze's pictures of this class the head in harmony with the body.

Despite all these shortcomings, however, the pictures are charming, but the appeal of Greuze will be specially to the young, who mark the beauty only, and are unconscious of any pose or any incongruity.

In addition to the kinds of paintings we have mentioned, Greuze showed that he was not quite free from the conventions of the period by painting a few mythological, religious, and allegorical works, but these are pictures which are not of any importance.

"Keep yourself free from formulas," he said to Count Henry Costa, but therein he did not follow his own bidding. A writer in the Nouvelle Biographie Générale has recorded that during this era it was accepted and taught that a sphere should be represented as though it had many sides. Greuze at one time accepted this absurd dogma, and in some of his pictures the chubby cheeks of children have been painted as though they had facets. His most finished works, however, are free from this blemish. Greuze's desire to be an historical painter is more evidence that he was not without the conventional ideas which have strangled art with such persistency.

Although Greuze sometimes sketched rapidly, yet his works are usually the result of slow and laborious effort renewed again and again. His plan was to return to his picture when he was at his best, and to paint and repaint, no matter how often, until he felt that the work was as free from faults as he could make it.

HIS POSITION IN FRENCH ART

During the seventeenth century France had not an art of her own. The native painters derived their pictures from Roman or Grecian traditions. They shut their eyes upon the beauties of Nature, painted tedious repetitions of other people's notions, and could not so much as paint their own King, Louis XIV., except as Cyrus or as Alexander!

This period of dulness, pomposity, and general boredom was succeeded by one of light and gaiety, when the joy and the colour of life received recognition. To this consummation the supreme genius of Watteau contributed some of the most exquisite and poetical pictures of all time, and delivered France "from the oppressive yoke of the Italian tradition." Watteau had many imitators, and his style dominated art for many years, but eventually freedom degenerated into license, and even into sheer obscenity. Count Henry Costa, visiting Paris during this period, wrote in a letter to his parents in Savoy: "Greuze, I think, is not partial to Boucher; and rightly loathes the filthiness in fashion now, which desecrates art and ruins morality." Boucher he described as { 46} "an old worldling, more dissipated and done up than you can imagine."

It is in the writings of Diderot that one can see, as well as in any other place, an indication that towards the end of the eighteenth century influential people in France were growing more and more studious and serious. The ideas of Rousseau were taking possession of the minds of other people. The nation must study Nature, and discover her laws. Prejudices, authority, tradition, must all be examined in the light of this new idea. Vice must be subdued, artificiality, insincerity, luxury, false refinements, must be swept away, and the people must return to a life of greater simplicity. Man, by nature moral, had been corrupted by civilization, and it was therefore the least civilized who were the least corrupt.

Ideas like these, set forth with the power and the burning zeal of Rousseau, and with the deftness of Diderot, had prepared the minds of the Parisians to receive the genre pictures of Greuze, for to some extent he is an advocate of these ideas in his pictures, seeing that virtues are attributed in a generous measure to the poor and downtrodden of the people.

It is thus that, breaking away from the style of the painters who did little more than pander to the French Court, the pictures of Greuze mark with perfect clearness the beginning of a new tendency which was making itself felt in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of adding to the great store of fêtes { 47} galantes , and the triumphs of love of the time, Greuze looked for his subjects upon the quays, and boulevards, and market-places, and in the cottages of humble people.

"Courage, my good Greuze," said Diderot of one of Greuze's pictures of domestic drama; "introduce morality into painting. What! has not the palette been long enough, and too long, consecrated to debauchery and vice? Ought we not to be delighted at seeing it at last, united with dramatic poetry, in instructing, correcting us, and inviting us to virtue?"

Living amidst such ideas as these, Greuze founded in France, in the words of De Goncourt, "the deplorable school of the literary painter, and the moralizing artist," or of "that barbaric, story-telling art," as Muther, writing in a similar strain, has described it.

It was this manner of painting that brought out what similarity there is between Hogarth and Greuze, who has been called "a sentimental Hogarth." Like the painter of The Rake's Progress , Greuze told moral tales in a series of pictures in which virtue is exalted and vice abashed, a kind of painting quite different from the pictures which had hitherto been exhibited in Paris. Truly, as Charles Normand has written, "the hour of the reaction against the pastorals and the mythological insipidities of Boucher had sounded. It was Greuze who was the pioneer in the new departure, and he reaped the reward. His fault is that he replaced one convention by another." Hitherto { 48} the Court had been all in all, but now had arrived, in the phrase of Charles Blanc, "l'usurpation bourgeoise."

Yet though Greuze thus parted from his predecessors, and, at his best, went along the line of progress towards a study of Nature at first hand, he brought about no violent change such as was seen in England when Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites broke in upon the complacent mediocrities who represented art in England during early Victorian times.

Though he preached against the ardent sensuality of his era, his own pictures were not wholly free from it, and in the collection at Hertford House his L'Offrande a l'Amour , and particularly La Bacchante , strike no new note amongst the other paintings of the same period. There is not the great difference that would be noticed if an early Millais were to be hung amidst a collection of the works of Maclise, Landseer, Collins, Newton, Leslie, Mulready, and Webster. Greuze did not free France in the same way that the Pre-Raphaelites loosed the bonds of convention and tradition in our own country.

Greuze founded no school, and indeed outlived his own movement; for he and Fragonard were left in hopeless isolation when the Revolution overwhelmed France. There are few more pathetic passages in the lives of painters than those which relate how, for the sake of their daily bread, these poor old men made { 49} ineffectual attempts, Fragonard with his Le Grand Prêtre Corésus se sacrifie pour sauver Callirrhoé , and Greuze with his Ariadne at Naxos , to adapt themselves to the new situation.

The Revolution, so far from freeing art in France, brought about, under David—excellent as he was as a painter of portraits—a reaction to a "barren, wearisome classicism," represented by pictures which are now absolutely without attraction. Instead of studying Nature, the painters studied the statues and the friezes of the ancients. They became antiquaries and geometricians, and left the open air to weary themselves in musty libraries, in the pursuit of archæological accuracy. Formulas and conventions, traditions and self-constituted authority were once more exalted upon pedestals, and the century which opened with the "pipes and timbrels" of Watteau closed with the prosing of the most tedious bores.

So successfully did David put back the clock, that it was not until the nineteenth century was nearly thirty years of age that the artists of France, inspired, as we love to think, by our own John Constable, issued from the house of bondage to study Nature in the forest of Fontainebleau.

OUR ILLUSTRATIONS

The Kiss ( Le Baiser Jeté ).—Although this work has not been reproduced so many times as La Cruche Cassée , it yet ranks with that painting as one of the most fascinating of the works of Greuze. A young woman looks from the window of her room. She has received a letter from the hands of her lover, to whom she throws a kiss as he departs. In his treatment of this subject Greuze has shown that it was not a lack of capacity that caused him sometimes to lapse into melodrama. His acute feeling for what is beautiful has been expressed on this canvas with remarkable skill. Writing of the painting in 1765, Diderot called it "a charming picture," and Charles Normand, in giving a description of the work, has written: "The eighteenth century, amorous and unrestrained, has been made to live again in that woman, who, her eyes full of longing, her mouth partly opened, her throat scarcely veiled by a light gauze, throws from her window a kiss to her lover. The seductive shapeliness of her neck, the expression of love, the hand carried tenderly to her lips, the whole effect of her beautiful figure, which palpitates at the sight of her lover, justifies the title of La { 51} Voluptueuse which the painter has also given to the picture." A copy of this painting, by C. Turner, was sold in London in 1902 for £136.

The Village Bride ( L'Accordée de Village ).—This is the short title of the work "Un Mariage à l'instant où le père de l'accordée délivre la dot à son gendre." The first title was Un Père qui vient de payer la dot de sa Fille . The scene is a great country kitchen, which has a freedom from furniture that is refreshing in these days of senseless overcrowding. Stone steps lead from the kitchen to an upper chamber. A shelf, a gun, a lantern, a great cupboard, and a few chairs and a table, would almost complete an inventory of the movables. Twelve people, arranged as though they were on the stage of a theatre, or for a tableau vivant , take part in the scene. The parish official, sitting at a small table, has registered the marriage, and one of the children toys with the document. The father of the bride, a venerable old man with white hair, has just handed to his son-in-law a small leather bag, containing his daughter's marriage portion, and he is now holding forth in true melodramatic style, his face to the gallery, and, as one may fancy, the limelight streaming on his head. The bridegroom, a tall, handsome fellow, listens in a respectful attitude; and the pretty bride, whose eyes are downcast, has her arm linked in his, and the fingers of one hand are laid lovingly upon one of his hands. Her other arm is held by her mother, { 52} a comely matron, dressed in simple and picturesque attire. The bride's sisters and brother watch with intense interest, except one little girl of five or six years, who feeds a hen and chickens on the kitchen floor. Another sister has her head upon the bride's shoulder, and a third is weeping. In the incident of one of the chickens, balanced on the edge of the dish of water, trying its wings, some writers have seen an allegorical reference to the marriage. It is said that the head of the bride is a portrait of Mademoiselle Ducreux when she was fifteen years of age. In this painting Greuze's tendency to cause his figures to assume self-conscious poses is apparent; but there is not so much of theatricality here as to spoil the picture, and thus one may still derive some pleasure from a contemplation of the scene. It is interesting to remember that this is the picture which caused such a sensation during the last few days of the Salon of 1761. It was bought by Monsieur de Marigny for 3,000 livres, and at the sale of his pictures, twenty years later, the price paid for it was 16,650 livres. The picture is now in the Louvre in Paris. It has often been reproduced. During the life of the artist it was engraved by Flipart, and then was reproduced in colours by Alix. Greuze also painted a replica of the picture.

Portrait of Maximilien Marie Isidore Robespierre .—In John Morley's "Critical Miscellanies" { 53} we are told that "In the Salon of 1791 an artist exhibited Robespierre's portrait, simply inscribing it The Incorruptible . Throngs passed before it every day, and ratified the honourable designation by eager murmurs of approval. The democratic journals were loud in panegyric on the unsleeping sentinel of liberty. They loved to speak of him as the modern Fabricius, and delighted to recall the words of Pyrrhus, that it is easier to turn the sun from its course than to turn Fabricius from the path of honour." Mr. A. G. Temple, F.S.A., has written recently that efforts have been made to identify the Salon portrait with this one, but unsuccessfully. Robespierre's ancestors were Irish people, but he was born at Arras. After a successful career as a lawyer he became a member of the States-General, and Mirabeau prophesied, "That young man believes what he says; he will go far." Carlyle has described him as "That anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles; his eyes (were the glasses off) troubled, careful; with upturned face, snuffing dimly the uncertain future times; complexion of a multiplex, atrabiliar colour, the final shade of which may be pale sea-green." He was small and weakly, fond of solitude, and sober in most things except in speech. Fluent and rhetorical, he soon won fame with the populace; but an analysis of his speeches reveals them "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The latest criticism has dubbed him "a phrase-making { 54} charlatan." On July 28, 1794, still clad in the inevitable blue coat, white waistcoat, short yellow breeches, white stockings, and shoes with silver buckles, he himself perished on the guillotine that had removed so many of his enemies.

The Listening Girl .—Another of Greuze's exceedingly pretty heads. This picture, like the Girl's Head draped with a Scarf in the National Gallery, is an excellent representative of that numerous class of the artist's work that consists of the heads of girls. The face is exceedingly dainty, and the workmanship excellent. The picture forms one of the Wallace Collection, and is, therefore, easily accessible to the public. Although it is now called The Listening Girl , it is not certain that this title expresses the intention of the artist.

The Broken Pitcher ( La Cruche Cassée ).—No picture by Greuze is more widely known than this one. In one of Madame Roland's letters we are able to gain an idea of what was thought of the work at the time that it was painted. She has written: "It is a girl, naïve, rosy, charming, who has broken her pitcher. She holds it on her arm, near to the fountain where the accident has happened. Her eyes are not too wide open; her mouth is still partly open. She wonders what account to give of the misfortune, and does not know whether she is to blame or not. It would { 55} not be possible to find anything more piquant or more pretty, and the only matter upon which one would be right to reproach Monsieur Greuze is that he has not made the little girl so sorry but what she would be ready to go to the fountain again." The derangement of the draperies, the incongruity of the lapful of flowers, the impossible way in which the pitcher is being carried, are not less characteristic of Greuze than the sweet face and the general charm and beauty of the painting. It is, indeed, one of Greuze's most winsome works, and its fascination will continue to captivate all but the most hypercritical. The original is in the Louvre, but Greuze painted the subject again with modifications, and there are a number of sketches and studies in existence. For instance, in the National Gallery of Scotland there is the preliminary sketch in oils for this work, and many prefer this sketch to some of Greuze's more finished pictures.

The Milkmaid ( La Laitière ).—Pretty as is this picture, it embodies a city man's sentimentality concerning the work of a farm. The hard labour of an actual milkmaid, and the peculiar conditions of her employment, are especially fatal to dainty hands, for instance. Thus, as the presentment of a milkmaid, the picture is far from any truth to Nature; but as an engaging girl-picture it is one of Greuze's most graceful and successful works. In 1821 it was sold for 7,210 francs, but in 1899, when { 56} it was bequeathed to the Louvre by Baroness de Rothschild, its value was estimated at 600,000 francs.

Innocence .—Many of the excellent qualities of Greuze's work appear in this attractive picture. It is true that the lamb is unfortunate, and, as Greuze's lambs usually are, is more reminiscent of the Lowther Arcade than of the meadow. Here also we see the head of a girl on the body of a woman; but the general effect of the picture is one of sweetness and tenderness, and the girl's expression is free from the affectations which have marred so many of the artist's paintings. This picture is one of the Wallace Collection.

The Pretty Laundress ( La Belle Blanchisseuse ).—De Goncourt, in a criticism of Greuze's pictures, has written that the work that goes on in his paintings is but a simulation of work—that his washerwomen do not wash. It may be that this is the picture which inspired the criticism. A charming girl, elegantly dressed, sits in an impossible position, as far as any effective washing is concerned, before a ridiculously little bowl. The whole picture is most attractive, but it is not washing day; and, perhaps, after all, washing day is not precisely the best subject that an artist could have selected for sublimation. The picture is now in the collection of Count Axel Wachtmeister, at Wanas, in Germany.

THE CHIEF WORKS OF GREUZE

The largest collection of Greuze's pictures is not in his own country, but is here in England, at Hertford House. The paintings forming that collection were included in the Wallace bequest, and thus they have become the property of the nation. Most other European countries have secured examples of Greuze's work, and several of his paintings may also be seen in America.

In this collection alone there are twenty-one examples of the work of Greuze. Some of these are of the best, and a few illustrate the artist's imperfections. For instance, before Fidelity and Ariadne one has the same unpleasant sensation as when a girl spoils the effect of her beauty by stagey poses and by sentimental attitudinizing. A Bacchante is gross and voluptuous. The most important pictures in the collection are:

A Girl with Doves. (See p. 40. )
The Listening Girl. (See p. 54. )
Portrait of Mdlle. Sophie Arnould.
The Votive Offering To Cupid.
The Broken Mirror.
Innocence. (See p. 56. )
Espièglerie,
Girl With A Gauze Scarf.

Girl's Head Draped with a Scarf (See p. 41. )
The Head of a Girl.
Girl with an Apple.
Girl with a Lamb.

The mother indicates, by a look, that she does not wish the oldest boy to disturb the youngest by playing his flute.

There are also pictures by Greuze in many of the galleries of private collectors. For instance, examples may be seen in the collections of the Duke of Wellington, the Earl of Rosebery, the Earl of Dudley, the Earl of Northbrook, Lord Yarborough, the Marquis of Lansdowne, Sir Frederic Cook, Bart., Mr. Alfred de Rothschild, Mr. Reginald Vaile, Mr. H. L. Bischoffsheim, Mr. Pierpont Morgan, Mr. Lesser Lesser, Mr. George Donaldson, Mr. Martin Colnaghi, Mr. Charles Morrison, Mr. Beit, and others.

This is a sketch in oils of the idea which Greuze afterwards painted as The Broken Pitcher , the famous picture that now hangs in the Louvre.

Other examples of the works of Greuze in Scotland are those in the collection of Lord Murray.

During the period of unrest that accompanied and followed the Revolution, many notable pictures were sold from France, and thus the largest collection of pictures by Greuze is not to be found in Greuze's own country. In the Louvre, however, all Greuze's characteristics may be studied in one or other of the works that hang there.

L'accordée de Village. (See p. 51. )
La Laitière. (See p. 55. )
La Cruche Cassée. (See p. 54. )
La Malédiction Paternelle.
Le Fils Puni.
Le Portrait de l'Artiste.
Le Portrait du Peintre Jeaurat.
Several Heads Of Girls.

La Prière du Matin.
Le Gâteau des Rois.
Le Petit Mathématicien.
Jeune Fille, les Mains Jointes.
La Jeune Fille au Panier.
Tête de Jeune Fille.
Etude d'un Enfant de Quatre à Cinque Ans.

Versailles has examples, and the traveller to any of the following, and to a few other towns, will find works by Greuze: Aix, Angers, Cherbourg, Dijon, Compiègne, Douai, Lille, Lyons, Marseille, Nantes, Nîmes, Rouen, Tournus, Troyes; and the members of the Rothschild family have many examples at their various places of residence.

In Germany Greuze is represented by La Belle Blanchisseuse , in the collection of Count Axel Wachtmeister, at Wanas, and by pictures in the Art Galleries of Berlin, Leipzig, Karlsruhe, Munich, and Metz.

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