Aur 2rto.
FINE ARTS SECTION OP THE PARIS EXHIBITION—NO. II.
In our first general view of the Paris fine arts collection we endea- voured to characterize the several European schools. We now return to it for the purpose of picking out some salient examples, commencing with the richly-filled French department; in which we may find it convenient to maintain our former distinction between the historic and picturesque schools.
, Among all living painters, the most complete type of the historic school is Paul Delaroehe ; not only on account of his personal eminence, but also because of the definiteness with which he embodies the tendencies of the school, and the leadership he exercises over others. Next to him in the strictly historic ranks, Ary Scheffer is probably the best known on this aide of the Channel. • Neither of these however, exhibits. In their stead, we have lavish contributions from Ingres, Vernet, and Delacroix ; the latter of whom, as being the leader of the romanticists, we shall speak of among the picturesque artists,.hiatorical as many of his subjects are. In the course of a tolerably long life, M. Ingres has been a devoted but by no means a prolific painter ; and the visitor to Paris who has before him forty-one of the master's pictures in a room where nothing else intrudes sees probably all his masterpieces, and more than half of his finished works. There is much of puzzling and contradictory about Ingres ; much also so individual as to take him at once out of the rank of
artists whom it is posaiblo to classify, and place him on an undisputed standing-point of his own. Starting from the studio of David, Int has never entirely cast off the coldness and conventionality of the pseado- classic ; and the beholder may turn with enthusiasm from ono of the greatest works of the period to find that its author is chargeable with one of the most ordinary. His latest pictures, the Virgin of the Host and Joan of Arc, are unfortunately of this sort. Another is a perfectly com- monplace allegory of "The Apotheosis of the Emperor Napoleon I.: He is conducted on a chariot to the temple of Glory and Immortality ; Fame crowns him, and Victory directs the horses; France regrets him ; .Nemo- sis, the goddess of vengeance, overthrows Anarchy." But these and sei.these we gladly leave for works of a very different stamp. Ab- sfstit purity of form is one great quality in Ingress film pictures; and in fact their chief and most abiding charm may be said to consist in the ab- stract feeling: which one perceives to imbue the entire performance. The painter, it is evident, has some standard which he aims at at- taining : you analyze and admire, and feel that, after all done and said, there is something more than , you can define. The two small works of Pope Pius the Seventh "tenant chapelle" fill the mind and eye surprisingly—so profoundly are they characterized by the sentiment of church authority and ceremonial. Sometimes a subject unimpressive in itself appears to be chosen as representative of a period of history' and we know nothing in art that seems to come more truly out of the mad- ded middle age than King Charles the Fifth returning to Paris, and re- ceiving the Provost and Sheriffs ; nothing more encrusted with the spirit of court honour and aristocratic exclusiveness than Philip the Fifth, King of Spain, bestowing the order of the Golden Fleece on Marshal de Ber- wick after the battle of Almanza. At the same time all in these is simple and matter-of-fact. So also the Ruggero rescuing An- gelica from the sea monster is something far more than an illustration of Ariosto : it contains the essence of chivalric romance, although under a form so studiously simple and elemental that one hesitates to say where. In the "Birth of Venus Anadyomene," the "Odalisque," and the "Recumbent Odalisque," the exquisitely tender delicacy of the flesh and contours, the placid regularity of the features, with an expression as it were of inward delight in their own beauty, are equally abstract, and avail to give high rimirto works which in other hands would be earthy and even gross. The portraits are wonderful embodiments of permanent character, not of momentary expression ; and among these the full-length of Napoleon when First Consul is certainly the most interesting and noble record of the man we are acquainted with. r; Ingres is reported to despise colour in his devotion to,form • but there appears to be some misapprehension or great exaggeration in this rumour. His colour, like his form, has.an.abstraot quality, and it sometimes lapses in,fo coldness and even crudenes;s ; but it is markedly pure and clear. In sems pictures, such as,the Venus, the effect depends as much on the absolute sweetness and serenity of the co-
lour as on anything else. We regard it as not the least sign of Ingres's
genius that he is a fascinalbig as well as an unequal painter. While some remain deaf to his charming, others feel his ,influence more acutely than they can give a reason for and are content to yield themselves to it, per- suaded that he not a man the secret of whose works can be gained by picking them to pieces. They are not altogether the stuff for a critical Hobbs to operate upon.
If there is something intangible and recondite about Ingres, we find quite the reverssprinciple when we step into Horace Vernet's room ; where the enormous " Smala " from Versailles, the "Judith and Ilolofemee,"
and several other renowned examples, are collected. Of all painters, none is more unalterably positivist than Vernet ; everything which he
does is rendered and finished exactly as far as is needful for giving with rapidity and vigour a look of the reality, and nothing in the least beyond this. Perhaps there never was an artist of equal power and eminence who, without giving into negligence or coarseness, cared so little for the means of art, who manifested so little value for abstract properties of
form or colour, or felt less inclined to go one hair's breadth out of his way to satisfy what it is the fashion to call the Esthetic feelings, after once ob- taining the essential requisites for presenting his subject clearly and ef- fectively. We do not feel it an exaggeration to say, that, spite of extraordi- nary skill at realization in every stroke of the brush—spite of life, move- ment, endless power of combination and knowledge of expression—there is not one passage of beautiful execution in the large number of huge pictures which Vernet has here assembled. Everything is done with an immediately practical aim, by a brain and a hand which act with the force and cer- tainty of a steam-engine : the painter seems to be a machine for seeing and painting battle-pieces, hunting-pieces, and Arabized Scrip- ture-pieces. The works are destitute of the feeling for art itself, as exemplified in beauty of colour and general treatment, richly as Vernet is endowed with the genius and means requisite for strict realization; and the effect, though great and certain upon all men, is not of a lofty kind. It can scarcely be too often enforced that fine art must not be used as a vehicle of mere representation, such as the language of a newspaper-report ; but must indicate, on the part of the artist, a love and reverence for Nature, in the form, colour, and expression wherewith she clothes every visible fact, as well as the ability to convey his own mean- ing distinctly. Failing in this, the work may present a clear narrative, and often a striking one, but it lacks the one quality which entitles a man to embody that narrative in form and colour, instead of words. He is at best qualified to sketch ; and the same impassable distance yawns between his work and the complete art of picture or of statue as between prose and poetry in words. Vernet's admirable gifts, far as they go to atone for deficiencies, must not make us forget these considerations. Neither does he stand alone, although the foremost man of his class ; there are other French historical painters, and of high distinction, who, differing altogether from him in other respects, share his deficiency. The name of Leon Cogniet is chiefly known by the two pictures now in the Palais des Beaux Arts—"The Massacre of the Innocents," and "Tintoret painting from his dead Daughter." The first is decidedly one of the most condensed and complete expressions which the subject has received from art : a young mother, huddled in the angle of a wall, tries to stifle her child's crying, and save him from the notice of the slaughterers, who are advancing towards where she crouches. But the work stops short at telling its story well; that is its whole and sole title to ad- mtion as a work of art. Robert Fleury again, like Cogniet, with all his fine technical knowledge and mastery, is rather a clear and able ex- positor than a born painter. His colour is hot and dirty, and of course disagreeable in consequence. He has a fine power of expression, how- ever,—though still of what we have termed the positivist order. This is seen in his best picture here, "The Colloquy of Poissy in 1661 " ; where the disputing Huguenot and Catholic are contrasted so much to the latter's disadvantage as might make one surmise the painter a Protestant; especially after seeing, hard by, his "Inquisition Scene" of torture. M. Fleury's picture of the present year is the "Pillage of a House in the Venetian Giudecca in the Middle Ages." A pupil of this eminent artist of whom high things may confidently be predicted, and who tends more to combine with his master's the merits of the picturesque school, is M. Comte ; who realizes to the life, in its ghastly hypocrisy and vivid cou- leur locale, the "Meeting of Henry the Third and the Duke of Guise," prior to receiving the communion together on the 2d December 1588, the day preceding that on which Guise was assassinated by the King's order. A remarkable series, strongly marked by the generic character of French historic art, is that of eighteen cartoons by M. Chenavard, for works destined to adorn the Pantheon. They begin with a "Philo- sophy of History," and with Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, treated chiefly from suggestions in Dante, and pass on to subjects of the Roman period, ending with Augustus, and of the Christian period, ending with Louis the Fourteenth ; an historic parallel not without its element of grim satire, intentional or otherwise. They are distinguished by the fine broad study and hard-won knowledge of the French school, and by a grail e clearness in the telling of the story. In beauty and in spon- taneity they are somewhat deficient ; but, on the whole, they furnish a standard example of the French historic system,—showing its distinctive qualities, and how advantageously these can be applied by a man of ability and thought without imagination. Another series of cartoons, in a grand style of model-drawing, and daring in the vigour of their design, is Rage, Lust, Avarice, Gluttony, and Pride, after Dante, by M. Yvon ; to which he has added Envy and Idleness, to complete the deadly seven. The same artist's enormous oil-picture of "Marshal Ney heading the Rear-guard of the Grand Army in the Retreat from Russia" is one of those nightmare displays of physical energy and horror which the French painters affect, and in which the Englishman scarcely knows whether moat to wonder at the display of force, or reprobate the unalloyed and valueless monstrosity. Ary Scheffer, as we have said, does not exhibit ; but a picture from Henry. Scheffer (his brother, we believe) represents the school, and the special section of it to which the absentee belongs, with as much dig- nity as almost any of his own productions. This work is the "Vision of Charles the Ninth" ; who, haunted by the ghosts of his victims of St. Bartholomew's Day, is represented alone in his chamber, groping on his knees in the agony of horror, and clutching with one hand at the hangings of the wall, while the other holds out an unavailing crucifix. His face is averted, with starting eyes and bristling hair; but still the vision is before him—a vision of old men and young, women and chil- dren, with faces serene but pale and rigid in death, who, passionlessly accusing, with no gesture or mien of menace, but silent messengers of retributive doom, point to their bloody wounds. There is an awful quiet in this part of the picture. At the first moment it scarcely sug- gests itself to the eye that the figures are other than living flesh and blood. This is a daring but a justifiable and even admirable idea ; for the ultimate impression on the beholder is not the more material, while the artist more fully enforces the terrible reality of the vision to the eyes of the appalled King. Judging from this work, although the others from the same hand do not present any corresponding height of excellence, we should say that the reputation of Henry Scheffer does not bear any fair proportion to that of his brother.
Here our limits warn us off from the French historic school. When we return to the Palais des Beaux Arts, it will be for a ramble in the far wider, more varied, and more wildly growing field of the picturesque.
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