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.
The visit of the Emperor Joseph II. referred to by Madame Roland, and followed by a command for a picture, a present of 4000 ducats, and the conferring of the t.i.tle of baron on the painter, was the high-water mark in his career. And the tide of success was not only to turn, but to recede with tragic rapidity.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VII.--LA CRUCHE Ca.s.seE
"La Cruche Ca.s.see," or "The Broken Pitcher," is too well known in every form of reproduction to need description. It hangs in the Louvre, and is always surrounded by eager copyists, who strive, very frequently in vain, to reproduce the delicate tints of the flesh and the vague, wondering expression in the eyes of the charming heroine.]
CHAPTER VII
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.
She was a Mademoiselle Babuty, daughter of a bookseller on the Quai des Augustins, and entering the little shop to buy some books, Greuze became infatuated with her beauty. "White and slender as a lily, red as a rose," is how Diderot describes her, and though she was past thirty when Greuze made her acquaintance, she must have been a remarkably pretty woman, with a round, smooth forehead, eyes full of _navete_ beneath long shadowing lashes, small nose, moist lips, delicate complexion. A sentimental, coquettish air redeemed what would otherwise have been an inane expression. In the portraits under her own name, and several pictures for which she posed, such as "La Mere Bien-aimee" and "La Philosophie endormie," you see that if she was not the actual model, she was certainly the ideal that inspired most of Greuze"s best work.
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.
Of all that freedom of mind and internal peace so important to all successful work, but supremely so to the artist whose creations are to be strong, Greuze knew nothing. Petty discussions, foolish quarrels, then grievous wrongs and personal violences, made up the background of his life, and it is astonishing that the trials of man and husband did not sap the strength of the artist. You would wonder why he supported it all so long did you not know that the artistic temperament finds the most important part of its life in its work, and falls an easy prey to imposition in most things outside it. Besides, at first he loved her very sincerely, and she was the mother of his two daughters. At length, when cartoons were printed ridiculing her lightness, and her husband for supporting it, and her behaviour was instrumental in his having to resign his _logement_ in the Louvre, even Greuze"s patience gave way, and in 1785 a deed of separation enabled him to get rid of her.
Considering the large sums commanded by his pictures--and it was said he painted one a day--and the vast sale of the engravings, it is unlikely, even with a vicious wife"s extravagance, Greuze could ever have known want in the ordinary course of events. But the terrible days of the Revolution were at hand. Bank after bank failed, and slowly but surely all his savings had vanished. With the fall of the monarchy, the annual pension of 1500 livres granted by the King for thirty-seven years of work in "an art he had exercised with success"
went, and finally he was reduced to what he was producing as a means of living. But, alas, when from chaos anything like order arose, and Greuze, now grown old, sent to the Salon of the year VIII. seventeen works of the kind that had earned for him so much glory in the past, the new order of things knew him not. The risen David was the G.o.d of the moment, and at each new picture of his a little more scorn fell on those who had preceded him.
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 cla.s.sical 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 Barthelemy, 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 const.i.tution 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."
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VIII.--LA LAITIeRE
"La Laitiere," or "The Milkmaid," may perhaps be given as quite the most representative of Greuze"s works. The affected pose and simpering smile, the unsuitability and over-arrangement of the dress, are as characteristic of the painter as the perfect grace of the _ensemble_, the delicious coquetry of the att.i.tude, the dimpled roundness of the form, and, above all, the sparkle in the clear eyes and the exquisite bloom of the flesh. The picture is in the Louvre.]
CHAPTER VIII
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.
He took liberties with Nature, too, when he supposedly copied his homely, familiar scenes direct from life. His peasant women take on att.i.tudes and smirk as they feed the carefully placed children; no sweeping or labour of any sort seems to soil the hands of the busiest housewife; clinging children never succeed in disarranging the garments or hair of the mothers and nurses. By no stretch of the imagination could you see his milkmaids delivering milk; his servants look like ladies "making believe." The att.i.tudes of all his dramatis personae are always affected, the _navete_ of his girls and children mannered, their pathos conventional. Tears never redden their eyes; no emotion disarranges the kerchief carefully arranged to show more than is necessary of the throat and breast. And the head of a child of twelve is often placed on the throat and bosom of a girl of seventeen.
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 coa.r.s.e," 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 Malediction 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 doc.u.mentary. 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.