French Art

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French Art

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Title: French Art Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture
Author: W. C. Brownell
Release Date: December 6, 2005 [EBook #17244]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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FRENCH ART
CLASSIC AND CONTEMPORARY PAINTING AND SCULPTURE BY
W.C. BROWNELL
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1892
Copyright, 1892, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

TO AUGUSTE RODIN

CONTENTS
PAGE
I. Classic Painting, 1 I. Character and origin. II. Claude and Poussin. III.
Lebrun and Lesueur. IV. Louis Quinze. V. Greuze and Chardin. VI.
David, Ingres, and Prudhon.
II. Romantic Painting, 47 I. Romanticism. II. Géricault and Delacroix.
III. The Fontainebleau Group. IV. The Academic Painters. V. Couture,
Puvis de Chavannes, and Regnault.
III. Realistic Painting, 89 I. Realism. II. Courbet and Bastien-Lepage.
III. The Landscape Painters; Fromentin and Guillaumet. IV. Historical
and Portrait Painters. V. Baudry, Delaunay, Bonvin, Vollon, Gervex,
Duez, Roll, L'Hermitte, Lerolle, Béraud, The Illustrators. VI. Manet
and Monet. VII. Impressionism; Degas. VIII. The Outlook.
IV. Classic Sculpture, 139 I. Claux Sluters. II. Jean Goujon. III. Style.
IV. Clodion, Pradier, and Etex. V. Houdon, David d'Angers, and Rude.
VI. Carpeaux and Barye.
V. Academic Sculpture, 165
I. Its Italianate Character. II. Chapu. III. Dubois. IV. Saint-Marceaux

and Mercié. V. Tyranny of Style. VI. Falguière, Barrias, Delaplanche,
and Le Feuvre. VII. Frémiet. VIII. The Institute School in General.
VI. The New Movement in Sculpture, 205 I. Rodin. II. Dalou.

I
CLASSIC PAINTING
I
More than that of any other modern people French art is a national
expression. It epitomizes very definitely the national æsthetic judgment
and feeling, and if its manifestations are even more varied than are
elsewhere to be met with, they share a certain character that is very
salient. Of almost any French picture or statue of any modern epoch
one's first thought is that it is French. The national quite overshadows
the personal quality. In the field of the fine arts, as in nearly every other
in which the French genius shows itself, the results are evident of an
intellectual co-operation which insures the development of a common
standard and tends to subordinate idiosyncrasy. The fine arts, as well as
every other department of mental activity, reveal the effect of that
social instinct which is so much more powerful in France than it is
anywhere else, or has ever been elsewhere, except possibly in the case
of the Athenian republic. Add to this influence that of the intellectual as
distinguished from the sensuous instinct, and one has, I think, the key
to this salient characteristic of French art which strikes one so sharply
and always as so plainly French. As one walks through the French
rooms at the Louvre, through the galleries of the Luxembourg, through
the unending rooms of the Salon he is impressed by the splendid
competence everywhere displayed, the high standard of culture
universally attested, by the overwhelming evidence that France stands
at the head of the modern world æsthetically--but not less, I think, does
one feel the absence of imagination, opportunity, of spirituality, of
poetry in a word. The French themselves feel something of this. At the
great Exposition of 1889 no pictures were so much admired by them as

the English, in which appeared, even to an excessive degree, just the
qualities in which French art is lacking, and which less than those of
any other school showed traces of the now all but universal influence of
French art. The most distinct and durable impression left by any
exhibition of French pictures is that the French æsthetic genius is at
once admirably artistic and extremely little poetic.
It is a corollary of the predominance of the intellectual over the
sensuous instinct that the true should be preferred to the beautiful, and
some French critics are so far from denying this preference of French
art that they express pride in it, and, indeed, defend it in a way that
makes one feel slightly amateurish and fanciful in thinking of beauty
apart from truth. A walk through the Louvre, however, suffices to
restore one's confidence in his own convictions. The French rooms, at
least until modern periods are reached, are a demonstration that in the
sphere of æsthetics science does not produce the greatest artists--that
something other than