The Paris Sketch Book of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh; and the Irish Sketch Book. William Makepeace Thackeray
as they now are by what is called the Christian art (of which anon); and it is curious to look at the pictorial traditions as here handed down. The consequence of them is, that scarce one of the classical pictures exhibited is worth much more than two-and-sixpence. Borrowed from statuary, in the first place, the colour of the paintings seems, as much as possible, to participate in it: they are mostly of a misty, stony-green, dismal hue, as if they had been painted in a world where no colour was. In every picture there are, of course, white mantles, white urns, white columns, white statues—those obligés accomplishments of the sublime. There are the endless straight noses, long eyes, round chins, short upper lips, just as they are ruled down for you in the drawing-books, as if the latter were the revelations of beauty, issued by supreme authority, from which there was no appeal. Why is the classical reign to endure? Why is yonder simpering Venus de’ Medici to be our standard of beauty, or the Greek tragedies to bound our notions of the sublime? There was no reason why Agamemnon should set the fashions, and remain ἁναξ ἁνδρὡν to eternity: and there is a classical quotation, which you may have occasionally heard, beginning Vixere fortes, etc., which, as it avers that there were a great number of stout fellows before Agamemnon, may not unreasonably induce us to conclude that similar heroes were to succeed him. Shakespeare made a better man when his imagination moulded the mighty figure of Macbeth. And if you will measure Satan by Prometheus, the blind old Puritan’s work by that of the fiery Grecian poet, does not Milton’s angel surpass Æschylus’s—surpass him by ‘many a rood’?
In this same school of the Beaux Arts, where are to be found such a number of pale imitations of the antique, Monsieur Thiers (and he ought to be thanked for it) has caused to be placed a full-sized copy of ‘The Last Judgment’ of Michael Angelo, and a number of casts from statues by the same splendid hand. There is the sublime, if you please—a new sublime—an original sublime—quite as sublime as the Greek sublime. See yonder, in the midst of his angels, the Judge of the world descending in glory; and near him, beautiful and gentle, and yet indescribably august and pure, the Virgin by his side. There is the ‘Moses,’ the grandest figure that ever was carved in stone. It has about it something frightfully majestic, if one may so speak. In examining this, and the astonishing picture of ‘The Judgment,’ or even a single figure of it, the spectator’s sense amounts almost to pain. I would not like to be left in a room alone with the ‘Moses.’ How did the artist live amongst them, and create them? How did he suffer the painful labour of invention? One fancies that he would have been scorched up, like Semele, by sights too tremendous for his vision to bear. One cannot imagine him, with our small physical endowments and weaknesses, a man like ourselves.
As for the École Royale des Beaux Arts, then, and all the good its students have done, as students, it is stark naught. When the men did anything, it was after they had left the academy, and began thinking for themselves. There is only one picture among the many hundreds that has, to my idea, much merit (a charming composition of Homer singing, signed Jourdy); and the only good that the academy has done by its pupils was to send them to Rome, where they might learn better things. At home, the intolerable, stupid classicalities, taught by men who, belonging to the least erudite country in Europe, were themselves, from their profession, the least learned among their countrymen, only weighed the pupils down, and cramped their hands, their eyes, and their imaginations; drove them away from natural beauty, which, thank God, is fresh and attainable by us all, to-day, and yesterday, and to-morrow; and sent them rambling after artificial grace without the proper means of judging or attaining it.
A word for the building of the Palais des Beaux Arts. It is beautiful, and as well finished and convenient as beautiful. With its light and elegant fabric, its pretty fountain, its archway of the Renaissance, and fragments of sculpture, you can hardly see, on a fine day, a place more riant and pleasing.
Passing from thence up the picturesque Rue de Seine, let us walk to the Luxembourg, where bonnes, students, grisettes, and old gentlemen with pigtails, love to wander in the melancholy, quaint old gardens; where the peers have a new and comfortable court of justice, to judge all the émeutes which are to take place; and where, as everybody knows, is the picture-gallery of modern French artists whom Government thinks worthy of patronage.
A very great proportion of these, as we see by the catalogue, are by the students whose works we have just been to visit at the Beaux Arts, and who, having performed their pilgrimage to Rome, have taken rank among the professors of the art. I don’t know a more pleasing exhibition; for there are not a dozen really bad pictures in the collection, some very good, and the rest showing great skill and smartness of execution.
In the same way, however, that it has been supposed that no man could be a great poet unless he wrote a very big poem, the tradition is kept up among the painters, and we have here a vast number of large canvases, with figures of the proper heroical length and nakedness. The anticlassicists did not arise in France until about 1827; and, in consequence, up to that period, we have here the old classical faith in full vigour. There is Brutus, having chopped his son’s head off, with all the agony of a father; and then, calling for number two, there is Æneas carrying off old Anchises; there are Paris and Venus, as naked as two Hottentots, and many more such choice subjects from Lemprière.
But the chief specimens of the sublime are in the way of murders, with which the catalogue swarms. Here are a few extracts from it:—
| 7. Beaume, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. ‘The Grand Dauphiness Dying.’ |
| 18. Blondel, Chevalier de la, etc. ‘Zenobia found Dead.’ |
| 36. Debay, Chevalier. ‘The Death of Lucretia.’ |
| 38. Dejuinne. ‘The Death of Hector.’ |
| 34. Court, Chevalier de la, etc. ‘The Death of Cæsar.’ |
| 39, 40, 41. Delacroix, Chevalier. ‘Dante and Virgil in the Infernal Lake,’ ‘The Massacre of Scio,’ and ‘Medea going to murder her Children.’ |
| 43. Delaroche, Chevalier. ‘Joas taken from among the Dead.’ |
| 44. ‘The Death of Queen Elizabeth.’ |
| 45. ‘Edward V. and his Brother’ (preparing for death). |
| 50. ‘Hecuba going to be Sacrificed.’ Drolling, Chevalier. |
| 51. Dubois. ‘Young Clovis found Dead.’ |
| 56. Henry, Chevalier. ‘The Massacre of St. Bartholomew.’ |
| 75. Guérin, Chevalier. ‘Cain, after the Death of Abel.’ |
| 83. Jacquand. ‘Death of Adelaide de Comminges.’ |
| 88. ‘The Death of Eudamidas.’ |
| 93. ‘The Death of Hymetto.’ |
| 103. ‘The Death of Philip of Austria.’ |
And so on.
You see what woeful subjects they take, and how profusely they are decorated with knighthood. They are like the Black Brunswickers, these painters, and ought to be called Chevaliers de la Mort. I don’t know why the merriest people in the world should please themselves with such grim representations and varieties of murder, or why murder itself should be considered so eminently sublime and poetical. It is good at the end of a tragedy; but, then, it is good because it is the end, and because, by the events foregone, the mind is prepared for it. But these men will have nothing but fifth acts; and seem to skip, as unworthy, all the circumstances leading to them. This, however, is part of the scheme—the bloated, unnatural, stilted, spouting, sham sublime, that our teachers have believed and tried to pass off as real, and which your humble servant and other anti-humbuggists