Read Ebook: Greuze by Macklin Alys Eyre

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 76 lines and 11224 words, and 2 pages

He was now in the prime of life, and the village boy had evolved into a handsome man of middle height, with an impressive personality and air of distinction. One of the two portraits of himself hanging now in the Louvre must have been painted about this period. It shows a fine head, full of energy, both mental and physical, delicate yet strong, very sensitive, the brilliant eyes deeply set, the whole face informed with something akin to, without being genius. The curved mouth is eloquent, and we are told his conversation was sincere, elevated, and animated; but much nervous irritability is indicated, and a physiognomist would point significantly to the exaggerated slope backwards of the otherwise fine forehead, suggesting a lack of that reflectiveness which turns keen perceptions and observation to the best account.

The "Danae," now in the Louvre, and "L'Offrande ? l'Amour," in the Wallace Collection, are also mentioned in correspondence as having been shown by Greuze in his studio about this time. They are the best examples of his allegorical work--there was no branch of painting he did not attempt--but they are hardly more successful than his moral subjects, and quite lack the charm of his homely, familiar scenes.

Chief among the latter may be mentioned "La paix du M?nage," a young father and mother clasping each other tenderly as they watch their sleeping child; "La M?re Bien-aim?e," whose pretty head comes out of a crowd of the clambering children, who excited Madame Geoffrin's ill-received remark; "Le Gouter," a young mother feeding her two fat little boys with a spoon, while a cat sits on the table watching enviously; "Le Silence," in which the mother, nursing one child, tells an unhappy older one not to blow his trumpet in case he wakes the babe in the cradle. Greuze was never tired of painting mothers with their little children, and the picturesque interiors in which he places them are perhaps more charming than the figures, showing, as they do, the old-world utensils and objects he had round him in his own childhood. The oddly-shaped cradle which he reproduced so often was that in which he himself had been rocked.

Very celebrated at the time were the companion pictures, "L'Enfant envoy? en Nourrice" and "Le Retour de Nourrice." The first scene is laid in the quaint courtyard of a little thatched farm, with all the family clustering round the mule on which the foster-mother is to carry away the baby. The composition is charming, with the foster-father arranging the saddle, the grandmother giving a last word of advice to the young nurse, the two little children afraid of the strange dog, and the mother giving a last kiss to the baby she would give much not to have to part with. The return of the baby, now a sturdy child on his feet, is set in the interior, where the little hero of the occasion struggles away from his eager mother and the brother who strives to amuse him, to return to the foster-mother. These are the least affected of all the subject-pictures. With the exception of the foster-father, who stands in the second one with a cradle on his back and his eyes piously uplifted to the rafters, all the actors seem absorbed in what they are doing, and this sincerity accentuates the grace and sentiment which always informs Greuze's work.

Engravings of all these canvases, of all his work, were sent out in their thousands. He was well known in Germany and other countries, and his name was almost as familiar in the bourgeois homes of provincial France as in Paris.

Seeing him at this period of his career, the pet of princes, and earning vast sums of money, it is difficult to realise Greuze could ever have fallen on evil days, have come to actual want. Yet so it was to be.

RUIN AND DEATH

Even during these brilliant days, when Greuze was considered the most fortunate of mortals, there lurked beneath the glittering surface of his life a grim reality which made happiness impossible, the misery of a private life dominated by as bad a wife as ever cursed a man's existence.

At first he had no intention of marrying her, and they had known each other two or three years before she practically compelled him to do so by threatening to kill herself if he did not make her his wife. It was a disastrous marriage. Lazy, greedy, extravagant, devoid of all moral sense, she soon got over the satisfaction the position of her husband gave her, and began to regard his work merely as a means to supply her caprices. When she had been married a few years she sent her two little girls away to school, and going from bad to worse, ended by filling the house with vulgar men, who made Greuze ridiculous. Her business training fitted her to keep the monetary accounts of the family, and when at length her husband was obliged to look into them to try to account for the disappearance of vast sums of money, he found she had been squandering them on her dissolute friends. The extent of her audacity can be judged by her accounting for the disappearance of 100,000 livres by saying she had invested it in a ship which had gone down at sea, and she refused to give the name of the vessel or captain.

It was in vain that he wrote to the papers, calling attention, as of old, to the moral meaning of his work; in vain that he tried to fall in with new ideas and paint classical scenes like his "Ariadne at Naxos." Any notice he received was worse than none, and two years before he died he was cruelly summed up by a critic who wrote: "Greuze is an old man inspired by Boucher, whom he followed. His colour is not true, his drawing poor." We hear of his receiving 175 francs for a picture that would formerly have brought him thousands of livres; we hear of his wearing shabby frayed clothes he could not afford to replace. Finally, there are pitiful letters, one asking for an advance on a picture ordered out of charity, another saying, "I am seventy-five years old, and have not a single order for a picture. I have nothing left but my talent and my courage."

In these days of bitter neglect and dire poverty Greuze's pride stood him in good stead. He seems to have worried more at the prospect of leaving his daughters unprovided for than because of his own privations, and till the last he kept the indomitable spirit that characterised him. "Who is king to-day?" he would ask sarcastically, as he lay in bed waiting for the end.

"I am ready for the journey," he said to his friend Barth?lemy, just before he died. "Good-bye. I shall expect you at my funeral. You will be all alone there, like the poor man's dog."

Worn out as much by the heavy weight of a dead reputation as by the years his robust country constitution enabled him to carry so lightly, he died on March 21, 1805. The humble funeral, followed by two persons, would have been tragic in its friendlessness but for the message of hope written on a wreath of Immortelles placed on his coffin by a weeping woman closely veiled in black.

"These flowers, offered by the most grateful of his pupils, are the emblem of his glory."

THE ART OF GREUZE

When you think of the important place held by Greuze before the Revolution in the art of the eighteenth century, above all, when you reflect on how, being long dead, he still speaks in accents of such beauty, his pictures, valued at vast sums, finding honoured places in the art treasure-houses of the world, it comes almost as a shock to consider how far from being a really great artist he was.

Absence of sincerity is his chief fault. We read he used to talk much and very eloquently about studying Nature, and had at one time a habit of wandering about the streets in search of subjects, that he used even to make sketches and studies on the spot, but once home and at work on the composition of the picture, he evidently gave rein to the libertine imagination we know. In short, if he really Saw, he Interpreted his own way, and that way resulted in his eliminating all the Strength and most of the Truth. In the theatrical moral pictures, for example, it never seems to have occurred to him that each scene that would tell a story is composed of a whole series of emotions and gestures, and that to try to fix on one canvas a situation which of its nature must be mobile and composed of many changes, is to attempt the false as well as the impossible. Further, even taking him as Diderot's disciple, "a painter who studied with a literary man," he is grievously at fault, for the idea of life he conveys is that of a melodrama in which vice is invariably punished and virtue rewarded--and life is not thus.

Except when he touches flesh his colour is rarely good, the scheme too grey, with undecided reds, dull violets, dirty blues, and muddy foundations. The draperies are often badly painted, a fault which he explained by saying he purposely neglected them to give more value to the painting of the flesh.

Then there is his monotony. No painter ever copied himself with more constancy and indefatigability. He has but three or four types, and these he copies and recopies till you never want to see them again. The father is always the same venerable man, much too old to be the father of such young children; the mother does not vary; it is always the same child a size or two smaller or larger, as the case may be. Although he nominally gives to his girls and women a profession by labelling them washerwomen, knitters, philosophers, chesnut-sellers, kitchen wenches, and so forth, they all have the air of being members of one family, and striking likenesses at that. And one and all have the appearance of posing in light opera rather than of playing a part in life. The peasant mothers of large families have that charming coquettishness which is the hall-mark of every female he painted. The picturesque interiors are equally wanting in variety.

It has been urged by Greuze's admirers that if he had been properly trained, or had at least been spared those early years in Grandon's picture-manufactory, had been less inclined to listen to flatteries and the advice of Diderot, who praised him for "not making his peasants coarse," he might have overcome his faults and developed the qualities of a Chardin. The reply to this is that anything touching on genius cannot be held in check or turned from its own full expansion, that it is more than likely that Greuze expressed all he had to say, and himself summed up his own limitations when he said, "Be piquant, if you cannot be true."

To turn to the much pleasanter theme of his good qualities, Greuze was an innovator. He was the first to go to humble life for inspiration, and he brought into the painting of bourgeois subjects a distinct character till then seen only in historical scenes. He created in France the moral type of painting. On Sundays in the Louvre you still see those who do not understand the beauty of colour, line, and subtler poetry, and find utility the essential condition of all art, lingering admiringly before "La Mal?diction paternelle" and "Le Fils puni"; and engravings of similar works are still cherished objects in many a home.

Valuable, too, is his quality of being documentary. He admirably interpreted his age with its superficiality running into theatricalness, its affectations of a morality which worshipped languor and voluptuousness under the name of "Innocence."

Last and best of all, there are the heads by which we know him. Merely clever in all else, Greuze rises above himself when he approaches these. Nothing could be fresher or more lightly touched than the little blonde heads of his children, the fresh rose of their cheeks, the features suggested under the baby fat, the delicacy of the little unformed members set down with a tenderness that mocks at the limitations of pigments. The same rare quality of livingness animates the older heads. The eyes of the young girls have depth and flame, or their dewy sparkle is subdued in seductive languor. The face almost seems to tremble with emotion while a gleaming tear, a big wet drop, escapes from beneath the heavy lids. The nostrils quiver, the breath comes from between the half-opened mouth, the full lips seem to be making a movement forward. The white flesh is soft and warm, and rich life pulses delicately under the gauze-veiled bosom.

In short, mediocre in all other branches of painting, and affected and faulty at his best, in this exquisite series Greuze not only proves that he possessed a very personal and poetic vision of his own, but that he had a glint of that "divine spark" which sets technique at naught, and results in the instinctive work of the inspired artist.

The plates are printed by BEMROSE & SONS, LTD., Derby and London

The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet