by Grant Allen
Now cross over to the L side.
*698. Rogier Van der Weyden. Excellent Deposition, with a touching St. John, and a very emaciated Dead Christ. These scenes of death are extremely common in Flemish and German art, and resulted in a great effort to express poignant emotion, as contrasted with the calmer ecstatic character of Italian art.
* *279. Quentin Matsys. Banker and his wife. An admirable and celebrated picture, with marvellous detail, of which there are variants elsewhere. Notice the crystal vase, mirror, leaves of book, and objects on shelves in background. The fur is exquisitely painted.
*288 and 289. Two beautiful little Memlings.
588. Most characteristic and finished Holy Family.
699. Memling. St. Sebastian, Resurrection, Ascension. Compare the first with Italian examples. Notice the extraordinarily minute work in the armour and accessories, contrasted with the blank and meaningless face of the Risen Saviour. Flemish art, perfect in execution, seldom attains high ideals.
277 and 278. Mabuse. Virgin and donor. Excellent.
* *596. Gerard David. Marriage at Cana. A splendid specimen of this great and insufficiently recognised painter. Background of buildings at Bruges. Every face and every portion of the decorative work, including the jars in the foreground, should be closely noticed. The kneeling donor is an admirable portrait. As a whole, what a contrast to the Paolo Veronese! The pretty, innocent face of the bride, with her air of mute wonder, is excellently rendered. I believe the donor in this work is a younger portrait of the Canon who appears in the glorious Gerard David in the National Gallery.
Skied above all these pictures on either side are several works by Van Veen, Jan Matsys, Snyders and others, mostly worthy of notice. Among them, 136, Van Dyck, good Madonna with the Magdalen and other saints.
We now come to the * *great series by Rubens narrating the History of Marie de Médicis, in the inflated allegorical style of the period. To understand them, the spectator should first read an account of her life in any good French history. These great decorative canvasses were painted hurriedly, with even more than Rubens’s usual dash and freedom, to Marie’s order, after her return from exile, for the decoration of her rooms at the Luxembourg (see Part V) which she had just erected. Though designed by Rubens, they were largely executed by the hands of pupils; and while possessing all the master’s exuberant artistic qualities in composition, they are not favourable specimens of his art, as regards execution and technique. It is to be regretted that most Englishmen and Frenchmen form their impressions of the painter from these vigorous but rapid pictures, rather than from his far nobler works at Antwerp, Munich, and Vienna. I give briefly the meaning of the series.
1. The Three Fates spin Marie’s destiny. A small panel for the side of a door.
2. Birth of Marie at Florence. Lucina, goddess of birth, with her torch, attends the mother. Genii scatter flowers; others hold her future crown. In the foreground, the River God of the Arno, with his stream issuing from an urn, and accompanied by the Florentine lion, as well as by boys holding the Florentine lily. This curious mixture of allegorical personages and realities is continued throughout the series.
3. Her Education, presided over by Minerva, with the aid of Mercury (to indicate her rapidity in learning), and Apollo, as teacher of the arts. Close by are the Graces, admirable nude figures. Among the accessories, bust of Socrates, painting materials, etc.
4. The Genius of France in attendance upon Henri IV, while Love shows him Marie’s portrait. The attitude of the king expresses delight and astonishment. In the clouds, Jupiter and Juno smile compliance. Below, little Loves steal the king’s shield and helmet.
5. Marriage of Marie by proxy. The Grand Duke Ferdinand represents the king. Hymen holds the torch.
6. Marie lands at Marseilles, and is received by France, while Tritons and Nereids give easy passage to her vessel. Above, her Fame. On the vessel, the balls or palli of the Medici family.
7. Consummation of the Marriage at Lyons. The town itself is seen in the background. In the foreground, the (personified) city, crowned with a mural coronet, and designated by her lions. Above, the King, as Jupiter, with his eagle, and the Queen, as Juno, with her peacocks.
8. Birth of her son, afterwards Louis XIII, at Fontainebleau. Health receives the infant. Fortune attends the Queen.
9. The King, setting out to his war against Germany, makes Marie Regent — allegorically represented by passing her the ball of empire — and confides to her their son.
Larger pictures: No. 10, the Coronation of the Queen, and No. 11, the Apotheosis of Henri, the painful scene of his death being avoided. He is represented as raised to the sky by Jupiter on one side, and Death with his sickle on the other. Beneath, the assassin, as a serpent, wounded with an arrow. Victory and Bellona mourning. Beyond, the allegorical figure of France presenting the regency to Marie, with the acclamation of the nobility and people.
12. The Queen’s government approved of by Jupiter, Juno, and the heavenly powers. In the foreground Apollo, Mars, and Minerva (the first copied from the antique statue known as the Belvedere), representing courage, art, and literature, dispel calumny and the powers of darkness.
Continue on the opposite side, crossing over directly.
13. Civil discord arises. Marie starts for Anjou, attended by Victory. Military preparations in the background.
14. The exchange of Princesses between allegorical figures of France and Austria — each intended to marry the heir of the other empire.
15. The Happiness of the Regency. The Queen bears the scales of justice. Plenty prevails. Literature, science, art, and beauty predominate over evil, slander, and baseness.
16. Louis XIII attains his Majority (at 14) and mans the ship of State in person, still attended by the counsels of his mother. The Virtues row it.
17. Calumny overcomes the Queen. By the advice of her counsellors, she takes refuge at Blois, escorted by Wisdom.
18. Mercury, as messenger, brings an olive branch to Marie, as a token of reconciliation from her son, through the intermediation of Richelieu and the Church party.
19. Marie enters the Temple of Peace, escorted by Mercury and Truth with her torch, while blind Rage and the evil powers stand baffled behind her.
20. Apotheosis of Marie and Louis: their reconciliation and happiness. Final overthrow of the demons of discord.
21. Time brings Truth to light. Louis recognises the good influence of his mother.
The history, as given in these pictures, is of course envisaged from the point of view of a courtier, who desires to flatter and please his patroness.
Beneath this great series of Rubens are a number of Dutch and Flemish Pictures, mostly admirable and well worthy of attention, but, so to speak, self-explanatory. They belong entirely to modern feeling. Dutch and Flemish art, in its later form, is the domestic development of that intense love of minute detail and accessories already conspicuous in Van Eyck, Memling, and Gerard David. Sacred subjects almost disappear; the wealthy burghers ask for portraits of themselves, their wives and families, or landscapes for their households. I would call special notice to the following among many which should be closely examined to show the progress of art: — 512, Teniers; 691, Rubens; 518, Teniers; 238 and 239, Van Huysum; *425, a charming Rubens, in his smaller and more delicate style; 147, admirable portrait by Van Dyck; 513, an excellent Teniers; *461, a good portrait by Rubens; 125, exquisite, luminous Gerard Dou; next it * *Van der Helst’s Four Judges of the Guild of Cross-bow-men deciding on the prizes, one of the most perfect specimens of this great portrait painter. Notice the wonderful life-like expressions. Then 123, another exquisite luminous Dou; 542, Van de Velde; 41, splendid portrait by Bol; 130, Gerard Dou by himself; * *404, Rembrandt, Raphael leaving the house of Tobias, a master-piece of the artist’s weird and murky luminosity — strangely contrasted with Italian examples; 205, a good Hobbema; 133, fine portrait by Duchâtel; 369, excellent family group by Van Ostade; next it, 126, a delicious little
Dou. But, indeed, every one of these Dutch paintings should be examined separately, in order to understand the characteristic Dutch virtues of delicate handling, exquisite detail, and domestic portraiture. They are the artistic outcome of a nation of housewives.
On the opposite side the series is continued with admirable flower-pieces, landscapes by Van der Veldt and Karel du Jardin, and several noteworthy portraits, among which notice the famous *Van Dyck (143) of the children of Charles I., most daintily treated. Beyond the Rubenses, again, on this side, 144, two noble portraits by Van Dyck, and several excellent examples of Philippe de Champaigne, a Flemish artist who deeply influenced painting in France, where he settled. * *151, Van Dyck’s Duke of Richmond, perhaps his most splendid achievement in portraiture, deserves careful study. I do not further enlarge upon these subjects because the names and dates of the painters, with the descriptions given on the frames, will sufficiently enable the judicious spectator to form his own conceptions. Devote at least a day to Dutch and Flemish art here, and then go back to the Salon Carré, to see how the Rembrandts, Dous, and Metsus, there unfortunately separated from their compeers, fall into the general scheme of Dutch development.
Good view out of either window as you pass the next archway. Look out for these views in all parts of the Louvre. They often give you glimpses of the minor courtyards, to which the general public are not admitted.
The next two compartments contain further Dutch and Flemish pictures of high merit — portraits, still-life, landscape, and other subjects. The scenes of village life are highly characteristic. Notice in this connection the growing taste for landscape, at first with a pretence of figures and animals, but gradually asserting its right to be heard on its own account. In Italy, under somewhat similar commercial conditions, we saw this taste arise in the Venetian School, with Cima, Giorgione, and Titian; in Holland, after the Reformation put sacred art at a discount, it became almost supreme. And note at the same time how the Reformation in commercial countries has wholly altered the type of northern art, focussing it on trivial domestic incidents.
Among the many beautiful pictures in these compartments the spectator should at least not miss, on the L, the very charming * *Portrait by Rubens (not quite finished) of his second wife and two children, scarcely inferior to the lovely specimen at Munich. Near it, an admirable Crucifixion with the Madonna, St. John, and Magdalen, more reminiscent than is usual with Rubens of earlier compositions. On the R side, notice a portrait of Elizabeth of France (459), by Rubens, in his other, stiffer, and more courtly manner. We may well put down this peculiarity to the wishes of the sitter. His *Kermesse, near it, is an essay in the style afterwards popularized by Teniers, in which the great artist permits his Flemish blood to overcome him, and produces a clever but most unpleasant picture. The numerous admirable fruit and flower pieces, works in still-life, etc., which these compartments contain, must be studied for himself by the attentive visitor. In Rubens’ great canvas of the Triumph of Religion, painted for a Spanish commission, observe his curious external imitation of Spanish tendencies.
After having completed his examination of the Long Gallery, the visitor may next proceed to the five small rooms — IX, X, XI, XII, and XIII on Baedeker’s map — devoted to
The German, English and Early French Schools.
Among the early German works in the 2nd of these rooms, the visitor may particularly notice (*22), Hans Holbein’s portrait of Southwell, full of character. Above it, a quaint Venus by Cranach, instinct with the northern conception of the crude nude. Next, two good portraits by Holbein. In the centre of this wall, *a Descent from the Cross, of the School of Cologne, which should be compared with similar pictures of the Italian and Flemish Schools. The somewhat exaggerated expression of grief on all the faces is strongly characteristic of German tendencies. The figure of the Magdalen, to the R, strikes the German keynote; so does Joseph of Arimathea receiving the Crown of Thorns. Study this well, for coincidences with and differences from Italian treatment. Beyond it, two fine Holbeins, of the astronomer Kratzer, and *Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, the latter a marvellous piece of painting. The opposite wall also contains good portraits and sacred pieces, among which an altar-piece by the “Master of the Death of the Virgin,” deserves careful study. (Most early German masters are unknown to us by name, and are thus identified by their most famous pictures.) The Last Supper in this work, below, is largely borrowed from Leonardo. Compare with the copy of Leonardo’s fresco at Milan in the Long Gallery, probably by Marco da Oggionno, which hangs near the Vierge aux Rochers. The Adoration of the Magi (597), should also be compared with the Italian examples; notice in particular the burgher character of the Three Kings, which is essentially German. The other works in this room can be sufficiently studied (for casual observers) by the aid of the labels.
The English Room contains a few examples of English masters of the last and present century, none of them first-rate. The most famous is the frequently reproduced Little Girl with Cherries by the pastellist John Russel. It is a pleasing work, but not good in colour.
The next room, with an admirable view from the window, begins the Modern French School (in the wide sense), and contains Le Sueur’s History of the Life of St. Bruno, painted for a Carthusian monastery near the Luxembourg — of which order the saint was the founder. They are characteristic examples of the French work of the early 17th century, and they exhibit the beginnings of the national tendencies in art. The legends are partially explained on the frames, and more fully in Mrs. Jameson’s “Monastic Orders.” On a cursory inspection, the observer will notice the marked French tendency in the 9th, 7th, 21st, and 22nd of the series. Cold and lifeless in design and colour, these feeble works have now little more than a historical interest.
Before proceeding to the succeeding rooms of the
French School,
you had better form some conception of the circumstances and conditions under which that school arose. The artists whom François Ier invited to Fontainebleau had little influence on French art, except in sculpture (where we shall see their spirit abundantly at work when we come to examine the Renaissance sculpture in this collection). Primaticcio and his followers, however, left behind them in France, as regards painting, scarcely more than the sense of a need for improvement. Succeeding French artists took up the Italian Renaissance in the stage represented by the later decadents and the eclectic Caracci. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) is the first Frenchman to attain distinction in this line; he throws something of French sentimentality into the affected mythological scenes of contemporary Italy. Claude of Lorraine, again, is almost an Italian by training and style; his artificial landscapes, not copied direct from nature, but built up by arbitrary and often impossible conjunctions, represent the prevailing tendencies of Italian art in the 17th century. On the other hand, the influence of Rubens, many of whose greatest works were painted for French kings, or came early to France, and still more of Philippe de Champaigne, a Brussels master who settled in Paris and painted much for Richelieu and Marie de Médicis, introduced into France a strain of Flemish influence. On these two schools — decadent Italian and later Flemish — then, modern French art at first based itself; the final outcome is a resultant of the two, transmuted and moulded in spirit and form by the innate, though at first unrealised, French tendencies.
Also, before you proceed to examine the subsequent specimens of the development of French art, you had better return to the Salon Carré to inspect the portraits by Philippe de Champaigne, as well as the Jouvenet, the Rigaud, and other French works there, which I purposely passed by on our previous visit, as out of harmony with the Italian masterpieces. On your way back, glance at the later Italian pictures in the First Compartment of the Long Gallery (particularly at Bronzino’s odiously vulgar Christ and Mary Magdalen, and Rossi’s Doubting Thomas, both skied, on your R) as conspicuous examples of the sort of thing admired at the time when the French School took its first flights and made its earliest experiences. Then
observe once more the works of the School of Fontainebleau; and, finally, inspect the pictures in Baedeker’s Room IX; after which, you will be in a position to start fair in Room XIII, with the French School in the 17th century.
This Small Room beyond the St. Brunos contains more favourable specimens of Le Sueur’s faculty (such as 559, 556, and 551), in which a distinctive French tendency still more markedly announces itself. The Ganymede, in 563, in particular, faintly foreshadows at a distance the classic painters of the Empire. We see in this room, in a very vague way, an early stage in the evolution of a David.
Passing through the Landing, at the head of the staircase (with interesting terra-cotta Etruscan sarcophagi) we arrive at the Great Gallery of French paintings of the 17th century. These may be examined somewhat in the mass, exhibiting, as they do, rather the courtly tendencies of the age of Louis XIV than any great individual artistic faculty. We must understand them in the spirit which built Versailles and conducted the wars on the north-eastern frontier. They are painted for the most part by the command of His Majesty. Only here and there does a faintly individual work, like Le Sueur’s Christ and the Magdalen, and Bearing of the Cross, or Lebrun’s Crucifixion, arrest for a moment one’s passing attention. The crudeness of the colour, and the insufficiency of the composition, will be the chief points, in a general survey, to strike the spectator. (On a screen in the centre, out of proper place among its contemporaries, hangs at present Paul Delaroche’s famous Christian Martyr.)
The student who has courage to attack this mass of uninteresting art in detail, should observe particularly the works of N. Poussin, as forming the point of departure for the School in general. His Bacchanal and other mythological works set the fashion of those dreary allegorical scenes which cover so many yards of ceilings in the Louvre. Observe the mixture of religious themes, like Lebrun’s Martyrdom of Stephen, and N. Poussin’s Holy Family, with classical pictures like the Rescue of Pyrrhus, and the Alexander and Porus, as well as the close similarity of treatment in both cases. Among the best of the lot are Jouvenet’s Raising of Lazarus, and Lesueur’s Paul Preaching at Ephesus (partly after Raphael). *Poussin’s “Et in Arcadia ego,” a rustic morality, is also famous, and is regarded as the greatest achievement of this artificial School. Claude’s landscapes, often with a small inserted mythological story by another painter, deserve attention. (Note that landscape has hardly yet vindicated its claim to independent existence.) On the whole, it may be said that this room represents the two prevailing influences in French art of the purely monarchical period of Louis XIV, — either the pictures are quasi-royal and official, or else they are religious, for church or monastery. The mythological scenes, indeed, have often a royal reference — are supposed parallels of contemporary events; and even the religious scenes, wholly destitute of spiritual feeling, are painted in a courtly, grandiose manner. They are saints as conceived by flunkeys. Not till the Revolution swept away the royal patron did the French spirit truly realise itself. This room reveals the Court, not the nation.