French Art | Page 4

of the French genius itself. French painting really began in
connoisseurship, one may say. It arose in appreciation, that faculty in
which the French have always been, and still are, unrivalled. Its
syntheses were based on elements already in combination. It originated
nothing. It was eclectic at the outset. Compared with the slow and
suave evolution of Italian art, in whose earliest dawn its borrowed
Byzantine painting served as a stimulus and suggestion to original
views of natural material rather than as a model for imitation and
modification, the painting that sprang into existence, Minerva-like, in
full armor, at Fontainebleau under Francis I, was of the essence of
artificiality. The court of France was far more splendid than, and
equally enlightened with, that of Florence. The monarch felt his title to
Mæcenasship as justified as that of the Medici. He created, accordingly,
French painting out of hand--I mean, at all events, the French painting
that stands at the beginning of the line of the present tradition. He
summoned Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Rossi, Primaticcio, and

founded the famous Fontainebleau school. Of necessity it was Italianate.
It had no Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael behind it. Italian was the best art
going; French appreciation was educated and keen; its choice between
evolution and adoption was inevitable. It was very much in the position
in which American appreciation finds itself to-day. Like our own
painters, the French artists of the Renaissance found themselves
familiar with masterpieces wholly beyond their power to create, and
produced by a foreign people who had enjoyed the incomparable
advantage of arriving at their artistic apogee through natural stages of
growth, beginning with impulse and culminating in expertness.
The situation had its advantages as well as its drawbacks, certainly. It
saved French painting an immense amount of fumbling, of laborious
experimentation, of crudity, of failure. But it stamped it with an
essential artificiality from which it did not fully recover for over two
hundred years, until, insensibly, it had built up its own traditions and
gradually brought about its own inherent development. In a word,
French painting had an intellectual rather than an emotional origin. Its
first practitioners were men of culture rather than of feeling; they were
inspired by the artistic, the constructive, the fashioning, rather than the
poetic, spirit. And so evident is this inclination in even contemporary
French painting--and indeed in all French æsthetic expression--that it
cannot be ascribed wholly to the circumstances mentioned. The
circumstances themselves need an explanation, and find it in the
constitution itself of the French mind, which (owing, doubtless, to other
circumstances, but that is extraneous) is fundamentally less imaginative
and creative than co-ordinating and constructive.
Naturally thus, when the Italian influence wore itself out, and the
Fontainebleau school gave way to a more purely national art; when
France had definitely entered into her Italian heritage and had learned
the lessons that Holland and Flanders had to teach her as well; when, in
fine, the art of the modern world began, it was an art of grammar, of
rhetoric. Certainly up to the time of Géricault painting in general held
itself rather pedantically aloof from poetry. Claude, Chardin, what may
be called the illustrated _vers de société_ of the Louis Quinze
painters--of Watteau and Fragonard--even Prudhon, did little to change

the prevailing color and tone. Claude's art is, in manner, thoroughly
classic. His personal influence was perhaps first felt by Corot. He
stands by himself, at any rate, quite apart. He was the first thoroughly
original French painter, if indeed one may not say he was the first
thoroughly original modern painter. He has been assigned to both the
French and Italian schools--to the latter by Gallophobist critics,
however, through a partisanship which in æsthetic matters is ridiculous;
there was in his day no Italian school for him to belong to. The truth is
that he passed a large part of his life in Italy and that his landscape is
Italianate. But more conspicuously still, it is ideal--ideal in the sense
intended by Goethe in saying, "There are no landscapes in nature like
those of Claude." There are not, indeed. Nature has been transmuted by
Claude's alchemy with lovelier results than any other painter--save
always Corot, shall I say?--has ever achieved. Witness the pastorals at
Madrid, in the Doria Gallery at Rome, the "Dido and Æneas" at
Dresden, the sweet and serene superiority of the National Gallery
canvases over the struggling competition manifest in the Turners
juxtaposed to them through the unlucky ambition of the great English
painter. Mr. Ruskin says that Claude could paint a small wave very
well, and acknowledges that he effected a revolution in art, which
revolution "consisted mainly in setting the sun in heavens." "Mainly" is
delightful, but Claude's excellence consists in his ability to paint
visions of loveliness,