CHAPTER XVI

THE DRAUGHTSMEN Inasmuch as modern art, in the beginning of its career, held commerce almost exclusively with the spirits of dead men of bygone ages, it had set itself in opposition to all the great epochs that had gone before. All works known to the history of art, from the cathedral pictures of Stephan Lochner down to the works of the followers of Watteau, stand in the closest relationship with the people and times amid which they have originated. Whoever studies the works of Dürer knows his home and his family, the Nuremberg of the sixteenth century, with its narrow lanes and gabled houses; the whole age is reflected in the engravings of this one artist with a truth and distinctness which put to shame those of the most laborious historian. Dürer and his contemporaries in Italy stood in so intimate a relation to reality that in their religious pictures they even set themselves above historical probability, and treated the miraculous stories of sacred tradition as if they had been commonplace incidents of the fifteenth century. Or, to take another instance, with what a striking realism, in the works of Ostade, Brouwer, and Steen, has the entire epoch from which these great artists drew strength and nourishment remained vivid in spirit, sentiment, manners, and costume. Every man whose name has come down to posterity stood firm and unshaken on the ground of his own time, resting like a tree with all its roots buried in its own peculiar soil; a tree whose branches rustled in the breeze of its native land, while the sun which fell on its blossoms and ripened its fruits was that of Italy or Germany, of Spain or the Netherlands, of that time; never the weak reflection of a planet that formerly had shone in other zones. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that this connection with the life of the present and the soil at home was lost to the art of painting. It cannot be supposed that later generations will be able to form a conception of life in the nineteenth century from pictures produced in this period, or that these pictures will become approximately such documents as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries possess in the works of Dürer, Bellini, Rubens, or Rembrandt. The old masters were the children of their age to the very tips of their fingers. They were saturated with the significance, the ideals, and the aims of their time, and they saturated them with their own aims, ideals, and significance. On the other hand, if any one enters a modern picture gallery and picks out the paintings produced up to 1850, he will often receive the impression that they belong to earlier centuries. They are without feeling for the world around, and seem even to know nothing of it. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BOILLY. THE TOILETTE.] Even David, the first of the moderns, has left no work, with the exception of his "Marat," which has been baptized with the blood of the French Revolution. To express the sentiment of Liberty militant he made use of the figures of Roman heroes. The political freedom of the people, so recently won, so fresh in men's minds, he illustrated by examples from Roman history. At a later time, when the allied forces entered Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, he made use of the story of Leonidas at Thermopylæ. Only in portrait painting was any kind of justice done to modern life by the painters in "the grand style." True it is that there lived, at the time, a few "little masters" who furtively turned out for the market modest little pictures of the life around them, paintings of buildings and kitchen interiors. The poor Alsatian painter _Martin Drolling_, contemptuously designated a "dish painter" by the critics, showed in his kitchen pictures that, in spite of David, something of the spirit of Chardin and the great Dutchmen was still alive in French art. But he has given his figures and his pots and pans and vegetables the pose and hard outline of Classicism. A few of his portraits are better and more delicate, particularly that of the actor Baptiste, with his fine head, like that of a diplomatist. At the exhibition of 1889, this picture, with its positive and firmly delineated characterisation, made the appeal of a Holbein of 1802. Another "little master," _Granet_, painted picturesque ruins, low halls, and the vaults of churches; he studied attentively the problem of light in inner chambers, and thereby drew upon himself the reproach of David, that "his drawing savoured of colour." In _Leopold Boilly_ Parisian life--still like that of a country town--and the arrival of the mail, the market, and the busy life of the streets, found an interpreter,--_bourgeois_ no doubt, but true to his age. In the time of the Revolution he painted a "Triumph of Marat," the tribune of the people, who is being carried on the shoulders of his audience from the _palais de justice_ in Paris, after delivering an inflammatory oration. In 1807, when the exhibition of David's Coronation picture had thrown all Paris into excitement, Boilly conceived the notion of perpetuating in a rapid sketch the scene of the exhibition, with the picture and the crowd pressing round it. His speciality, however, was little portrait groups of honest _bourgeois_ in their stiff Sunday finery. Boilly knew with accuracy the toilettes of his age, the gowns of the actresses, and the way they dressed their heads; he cared nothing whatever about æsthetic dignity of style, but represented each subject as faithfully as he could, and as honestly and sincerely as possible. For that reason he is of great historical value, but he is not painter enough to lay claim to great artistic interest. The execution of his pictures is petty and diffidently careful, and his neat, Philistine painting has a suggestion of china and enamel, without a trace of the ease and spirit with which the eighteenth century carolled over such work. The heads of his women are the heads of dolls, and his silk looks like steel. His forerunners are not the Dutchmen of the good periods, Terborg and Metsu, but the contemporaries of Van der Werff. He and Drolling and Granet were rather the last issue of the fine old Dutch schools, rather descendants of Chardin than pioneers, and amongst the younger men there was at first no one who ventured to sow afresh the region which had been devastated by Classicism. Géricault certainly was incited to his "Raft of the Medusa" not by Livy or Plutarch, but by an occurrence of the time which was reported in the newspapers; and he ventured to set an ordinary shipwreck in the place of the Deluge or a naval battle, and a crew of unknown mortals in the place of Greek heroes. But then his picture stands alone amongst the works of the Romanticists, and is too decidedly transposed into a classical key to count as a representation of modern life. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BOILLY. THE NEWSVENDOR.] [Illustration: _Baschet._ BOILLY. THE MARIONETTES.] In its striving after movement and colour, Romanticism put forward the picturesque and passionate Middle Ages in opposition to the stiff and frigid neo-Greek or neo-Roman ideal; but it joined with Classicism in despising the life of the present. Even the political excitement at the close of the Restoration and the Revolution of July had but little influence on the leading spirits of the time. Accustomed to look for the elements of pictorial invention in religious myths, in the fictions of poets, or in the events of older history, they paid no attention to the mighty social drama enacted so near to them. The fiery spirit of Delacroix certainly led him to paint his picture of the barricades, but he drew his inspiration from a poet, from an ode of Auguste Barbier, and he gave the whole an air of romance and allegory by introducing the figure of Liberty. He lived in a world of glowing passions, amid which all the struggles of his age seemed to have for him only a petty material interest. For that reason he has neither directly nor indirectly drawn on what he saw around him. He painted the soul, but not the life of his epoch. He was attracted by Teutonic poets and by the Middle Ages. He set art free from Greek subject-matter and Italian form, to borrow his ideas from Englishmen and Germans and his colour from the Flemish school. He is inscrutably silent about French society in the nineteenth century. [Illustration: Queen Charlotte. George III. GILLRAY. AFFABILITY. "Well, Friend, where a' you going, hay?--what's your name, hay?--where d'ye live, hay?--hay?"] And this alienation from the living world is even more noticeable in Ingres. His "Mass of Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel" is the only one of his many works which deals with a subject of contemporary life, and it was blamed by the critics because it deviated so far from the great style. As an historical painter, and when better employed as a painter of portraits, Ingres has crystallised all the life and marrow of the past in his icy works, and he appears in the midst of the century like a marvellous and sterile sphinx. Nothing can be learnt from him concerning the needs and passions and interests of living men. His own century might writhe and suffer and struggle and bring forth new thoughts, but he knew nothing about them, or if he did he never allowed it to be seen. [Illustration: CRUICKSHANK. MONSTROSITIES OF 1822.] Delaroche approached somewhat nearer to the present, for he advanced from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century; and the historical picture, invented by him, virtually dominated French art under Napoleon III, in union with the dying Classicism. Even then there was no painter who yet ventured to portray the manners and types of his age with the fresh insight and merciless observation of Balzac. All those scenes from the life of great cities, their fashion and their misery, which then began to form the substance of drama and romance, had as yet no counterpart in painting. [Illustration: ROWLANDSON. HARMONY.] [Illustration: BUNBURY. RICHMOND HILL.] The Belgians preserved the same silence. During the whole maturity of Classicism, from 1800 to 1830, François, Paelinck, van Hanselaere, Odevaere, de Roi, Duvivier, etc., with their coloured Greek statues, ruled the realm of figure painting as unmitigated dictators; and amongst the historical painters who followed them, Wappers, in his "Episode," was the only one who drew on modern life for a subject. There was a desire to revive Rubens. Decaisne, Wappers, de Keyzer, Bièfve, and Gallait lit their candle at his sun, and were hailed as the holy band who were to lead Belgian art to a glorious victory. But their original national tendency deviated from real life instead of leading towards it. For the sake of painting cuirasses and helmets they dragged the most obscure national heroes to the light of day, just as the Classicists had done with Greeks and Romans. German painting wandered through the past with even less method, taking its material, not from native, but from French, English, and Flemish history. From Carstens down to Makart, German painters of influence carefully shut their eyes to reality, and drew down the blinds so as to see nothing of the life that surged below them in the street, with its filth and splendour, its laughter and misery, its baseness and noble humanity. And from an historical point of view this alienation from the world is susceptible of an easy explanation. [Illustration: LEECH. THE CHILDREN OF MR. AND MRS. BLENKINSOP.] [Illustration: LEECH. LITTLE SPICEY AND TATER SAM.] In France, as in all other countries, the end of the _ancien régime_, the tempest of the Revolution, and the consequent modification of the whole of life--of sentiments, habits, and ideas, of dress and social conditions--at first implied such a sudden change in the horizon that artists were necessarily thrown into confusion. When the monarchy entered laughingly upon its struggle of life and death, the survivors from the time of Louis XVI, charming "little masters" who had been great masters in that careless and graceful epoch, were suddenly made witnesses of a revolution more abrupt than the world had yet seen. Savage mobs forced their way into gardens, palaces, and reception-rooms, pike in hand, and with the red cap upon their heads. The walls echoed with their rude speech, and plebeian orators played the part of oracles of freedom and brotherhood like old Roman tribunes of the people. What was there yesterday was no longer to be seen; a thick powder-smoke hung between the past and the present. And the present itself had not yet assumed determinate shape; it hovered, as yet unready, between the old and the new forms of civilization. The storms of the Revolution put an end to the comfortable security of private life. Thus it was that the ready-made and more easily intelligible shapes and figures of a world long buried out of sight, with which men believed themselves to have an elective affinity, at first seemed to the artists to have an infinitely greater value than the new forms which were in the throes of birth. Painters became Classicists because they had not yet the courage to venture on the ground where the century itself was going through a process of fermentation. [Illustration: LEECH. FROM "CHILDREN OF THE MOBILITY."] [Illustration: _Magazine of Art._ SIR JOHN MILLAIS PINXT. GEORGE DU MAURIER.] The Romanticists despised it, for they thought the fermenting must had yielded flat lemonade instead of fiery wine. The artist must live in art before he can produce art. And the more the life of nations has been beautiful, rich, and splendid, the more nourishment and material has art been able to derive from it. But when they came the Romanticists found--in France as in Germany--everything, except a piece of reality which they could deem worthy of being painted. The whole of existence seemed to this generation so poor and bald, the costume so inartistic and so like a caricature, the situation so hopeless and petty, that they were unable to tolerate the portrayal of themselves either in poetry or art. It was the time of that wistfully sought phantom which, as they believed, was to be found only in the past. The powerful passions of the Middle Ages were set in opposition to a flaccid period that was barren of action. [Illustration: _L'Art._ DU MAURIER. THE DANCING LESSON.] And then came the overwhelming pressure of the old masters. After the forlorn condition of colouring brought about by David and Carstens, it was so vitally necessary to restore the artistic tradition and technique of the old masters, that it was at first thought necessary to adopt the old subject-matter also--especially the splendid robes of the city of the lagoons--in order to test the newly acquired secrets of the palette. Faltering unsteadily under influences derived from the old artists, modern painting did not yet feel itself able to create finished works of art out of the novel elements which the century placed at its disposal. It still needed to be carried in the arms of a Venetian or Flemish nurse. And æsthetic criticism bestowed its blessing on these attempts. The Romanticists had been forced to the treatment of history and the deification of the past by disgust with the grey and colourless present; the younger generation were long afterwards held captive in this province by æsthetic views of the dignity of history. To paint one's own age was reckoned a crime. One had to paint the age of other people. For this purpose the _prix de Rome_ was instituted. The spirit which produced the pictures of Cabanel and Bouguereau was the same that induced David to write to Gros, that the battles of the empire might afford the material for occasional pictures done under the inspiration of chance, but not for great and earnest works of art worthy of an historical painter. That æsthetic criticism which taught that, whatever the subject be, and whatever personages may be represented, if they belong to the present time the picture is merely a _genre_ picture, still held the field. Whilst the world was laughing and crying, the painter, with the colossal power of doing everything, amused himself by trying not to appear the child of his own time. No one perceived the refinement and grace, the corruption and wantonness, of modern life as it is in great cities. No one laid hold on the mighty social problems which the growing century threw out with a seething creative force. Whoever wishes to know how the men of the time lived and moved, what hopes and sorrows they bore in their breasts, whoever seeks for works in which the heart-beat of the century is alive and throbbing, must have his attention directed to the works of the draughtsmen, to the illustrations of certain periodicals. It was in the nineteenth century as in the Middle Ages. As then, when painting was still an ecclesiastical art, the slowly awakening feeling for nature, the joy of life was first expressed in miniatures, woodcuts, and engravings, so also the great draughtsmen of the nineteenth century were the first who set themselves with their whole strength to bring modern life and all that it contained earnestly and sincerely within the range of art, the first who held up the glass to their own time and gave the abridged chronicle of their age. Their calling as caricaturists led them to direct observation of the world, and lent them the aptitude of rendering their impressions with ease; and that at a time when the academical methods of depicting physiognomy obtained elsewhere in every direction. It necessitated their representing subjects to which, in accordance with the æsthetic views of the period, they would not otherwise have addressed themselves; it led them to discover beauties in spheres of life by which they would otherwise have been repelled. London, the capital of a free people ruling in all quarters of the globe, the home of millions, where intricate old corners and back streets left more space than in other cities for old-fashioned "characters," for odd, eccentric creatures and better-class charlatans of every description, afforded a ground peculiarly favourable for caricature. In this province, therefore, England holds the first place beyond dispute. [Illustration: _L'Art._ DU MAURIER. A RECOLLECTION OF DIEPPE.] [Illustration: _L'Art._ DU MAURIER. DOWN TO DINNER.] Direct from Hogarth come the group of political caricaturists, in whom the sour, bilious temper of John Bull lives on in a new and improved edition. Men like _James Gillray_ were a power in the political warfare of their time; bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom with a divine rage and slashing irony, while at the same time they were masterly draughtsmen in a vehement and forceful style. The worst of it is, that the interest excited by political caricature is always of a very ephemeral nature. The antagonism of Pitt and Fox, Shelburne and Burke, the avarice and stupidity of George III, the Union, the conjugal troubles of the Prince of Wales, and the war with France, seem very uninteresting matters in these days. On the other hand, _Rowlandson_, who was not purely a politician, appeals to us in an intelligible language even after a hundred years have gone by. Like Hogarth, he was the antithesis of a humorist. Something bitter and gloomily pessimistic runs through all he touches. He is brutal, with an inborn power and an indecorous coarseness. His laughter is loud and his cursing barbarous. Ear-piercing notes escape from the widely opened lips of his singers, and the tears come thickly from the eyes of his sentimental old ladies who are hanging on the declamation of a tragic actress. His comedy is produced by the simplest means. As a rule any sort of contrast is enough: fat and thin, big and little, young wife and old husband, young husband and old wife, shying horse and helpless rider on a Sunday out. Or else he brings the physical and moral qualities of his figures into an absurd contrast with their age, calling, or behaviour: musicians are deaf, dancing masters bandy-legged, servants wear the dresscoats and orders of lords, hideous old maids demean themselves like coquettes, parsons get drunk, and grave dignitaries of state dance the cancan. And so, when the servant gets a thrashing, and the coquette a refusal, and the diplomatist loses his orders by getting a fall, it is their punishment for having forgotten their proper place. They are all of them "careers on slippery ground," with the same punishments as Hogarth delighted to depict. But Rowlandson became another man when he set himself to represent the life of the people. [Illustration: _L'Art._ DU MAURIER. A WINTRY WALK.] [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ KEENE. FROM "OUR PEOPLE." THE PERILS OF THE DEEP.] Born in July 1756, in a narrow alley of old London, he grew up amidst the people. As a young man he saw Paris, Germany, and the Low Countries. He went regularly to all clubs where there was high play. As man, painter, and draughtsman alike, he stood in the midst of life. Street scenes in Paris and London engage his pencil, especially scenes from Vauxhall Gardens, the meeting-place of fashionable London, and there is often a touch of Menzel in the palpitating life of these pictures--in these lords and ladies, fops and ballad-singers, who pass through the grounds of the gardens in a billowy stream. His illustrations include everything: soldiers, navvies, life at home and in the tavern, in town and in village, on the stage and behind the scenes, at masquerades and in Parliament. When he died at seventy, on 22nd April 1827, the obituaries were able to say of him with truth that he had drawn all England in the years between 1774 and 1809. And all these leaves torn from the life of sailors and peasants, these fairs and markets, beggars, huntsmen, smiths, artizans, and day labourers, were not caricatures, but sketches keenly observed and sharply executed from life. His countrymen have at times a magnificent Michelangelesque stir of life which almost suggests Millet. He was fond of staying at fashionable watering-places, and came back with charming scenes from high life. But his peculiar field of observation was the poor quarter of London. Here are the artizans, the living machines. Endurance, persistence, and resignation may be read in their long, dismal, angular faces. Here are the women of the people, wasted and hectic. Their eyes are set deep in their sockets, their noses sharp and their skin blotched with red spots. They have suffered much and had many children; they have a sodden, depressed, stoically callous appearance; they have borne much, and can bear still more. And then the devastations of gin! that long train of wretched women who of an evening prostitute themselves in the Strand to pay for their lodging! those terrible streets of London, where pallid children beg, and tattered spectres, either sullen or drunken, rove from public-house to public-house, with torn linen and rags hanging about them in shreds! The cry of misery rising from the pavement of great cities was first heard by Rowlandson, and the pages on which he drew the poor of London are a living dance of death of the most ghastly veracity. But, curiously enough, this same man, who as an observer could be so uncompromisingly sombre, and so rough and brutal as a caricaturist, had also a wonderfully delicate feeling for feminine charm. In the pages he has devoted to the German waltz there lives again the chivalrous elegance of the period of Werther, and that peculiarly English grace which is so fascinating in Gainsborough. His young girls are graceful and wholesome in their round straw hats with broad ribbons; his pretty little wives in their white aprons and coquettish caps recall Chardin. One feels that he has seen Paris and appreciated the fine fragrance of Watteau's pictures. [Illustration: _Mag. of Art._ SIR GEO. REID. PORTRAIT OF CHARLES KEENE.] Mention should also be made of _Henry William Bunbury_, who excelled in the drawing of horses and ponies. "A long Story" is an excellent example of his powers as a caricaturist pure and simple. The variations rung on the theme of boredom and the self-centred and animated stupidity of the narrator have been vividly observed, and are earnestly rendered. Rowlandson has the savage indignation of Swift; Bunbury is not savage, but he has the same English seriousness and something of the same brutality. The faces here are crapulous and distorted, and the subject is treated without lightness or good-nature. Perhaps the English do not take their pleasures so very seriously, but undoubtedly they jest in earnest. Yet Bunbury's incisiveness and his thorough command of what it is his design to express assure him a distinct position as an artist. His "Richmond Hill" shows the pleasanter side of English character. The breeze billowing in the trees, the little lady riding by on her cob, the buxom dames in the shay, and the man spinning past on his curricle, give the scene a spirit of life and movement, besides rendering it an historical document of the period of social history that lies between _The Virginians_ and _Vanity Fair_. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ KEENE. FROM "OUR PEOPLE."] As a political caricaturist _George Cruikshank_ has the same significance for England as Henri Monnier has for France, and the drawings of the latter often go straight back to the great English artist. But his first works in 1815 were children's books, and such simple delineations from the world of childhood and the life of society have done more to preserve his name than political caricatures. Their touch of satire is only very slight. Cruikshank's ladies panting under heavy chignons, his serious and exceedingly prosy dames pouring out tea for serious and not less ceremonious gentlemen, whilst the girls are galloping round Hyde Park on their thoroughbreds, accompanied by a brilliant escort of fashionable young men--they are all of them not so much caricatures as pictures freshly caught from life. He had a great sense for toilettes, balls, and parties. And he could draw with artistic observation and tender feeling the babbling lips and shining eyes of children, the shy confidence of the little ones, their timid curiosity and their bashful advances. And thus he opened up the way along which his disciples advanced with so much success. [Illustration: KLEIN. A TRAVELLING LANDSCAPE PAINTER.] The style of illustration has adapted itself to the altered character of English life. What at first constituted the originality of English caricaturists was their mordant satire. Everything was painted in exceedingly vivid colours. Whatever was calculated to bring out an idea in comic or brutal relief--great heads and little bodies, an absurd similarity between persons and animals, the afflorescence of costume--was seized upon eagerly. These artists fought for the weary and heavy-laden, and mercilessly lashed the cut-throats and charlatans. They delighted in spontaneous obscenity, exuberant vigour, and undisguised coarseness. Men were shaken by a broad Aristophanic laughter till they seemed like epileptics. At the time when the Empire style came into England, Gillray could dare to represent by speaking likenesses some of the best-known London beauties, in a toilette which the well developed Madame Tallien could not have worn with more assurance. Such things were no longer possible when England grew out of her awkward age. After the time of Gillray a complete change came over the spirit of English caricature. Everything brutal or bitterly personal was abandoned. The clown put on his dress-clothes, and John Bull became a gentleman. Even by Cruikshank's time caricature had become serious and well-bred. And his disciples were indeed not caricaturists at all, but addressed themselves solely to a delicately poetic representation of subjects. They know neither Rowlandson's innate force and bitter laughter, nor the gallows humour and savagery of Hogarth; they are amiable and tenderly grave observers, and their drawings are not caricatures, but charming pictures of manners. _Punch_, which was founded in 1841, has perhaps caught the social and political physiognomy of England in the middle of the nineteenth century with the greatest delicacy. It is a household paper, a periodical read by the youngest girls. All the piquant things with which the Parisian papers are filled are therefore absolutely excluded. It scrupulously ignores the style of thing to which the _Journal Amusant_ owes three-fourths of its matter. Every number contains one big political caricature, but otherwise it moves almost entirely in the region of domestic life. Students flirting with pretty barmaids, neat little dressmakers carrying heavy bonnet-boxes and pursued by old gentlemen--even these are scenes which go a little too far for the refined tone of the paper which has been adapted to the drawing-room. [Illustration: JOHANN CHRISTOPH ERHARD.] Next to Cruikshank, the Nestor of caricature, must be mentioned _John Leech_, who between 1841 and 1864 was the leading artist on _Punch_. In his drawings there is already to be found the high-bred and fragrant delicacy of the English painting of the present time. They stand in relation to the whimsical and vigorous works of Rowlandson as the fine _esprit_ of a rococo abbé to the coarse and healthy wit of Rabelais. The mildness of his own temperament is reflected in his sketches. Others have been the cause of more laughter, but he loved beauty and purity. Men are not often drawn by him, or if he draws them they are always "pretty fellows," born gentlemen. His young women are not coquettish and _chic_, but simple, natural, and comely. The old English brutality and coarseness have become amiable, subtle, refined, mild, and seductive in John Leech. He is a fine and delicate spirit, who seems very ethereal beside Hogarth and Rowlandson, those giants fed on roast-beef; he prefers to occupy himself with sport and boating, the season and its fashions, and is at home in public gardens, at balls, and at the theatre. Here a pretty baby is being taken for an airing in Hyde Park by a tidy little nurse-maid, and there on mamma's arm goes a charming schoolgirl, who is being enthusiastically greeted by good-looking boys; here again a young wife is sitting by the fireside with a novel in her hand and her feet out of her slippers, while she looks dreamily at the glimmering flame. Or a girl is standing on the shore in a large straw hat, with her hand shading her eyes and the wind fluttering her dress. Even his "Children of the Mobility" are little angels of grace and purity, in spite of their rags. The background, be it room, street, or landscape, is merely given with a few strokes, but it is of more than common charm. Every plate of Leech has a certain fragrance and lightness of touch and a delicacy of line which has since been attained only by Frederick Walker. His simplicity of stroke recalls the old Venetian woodcuts. There is not an unnecessary touch. Everything is in keeping, everything has a significance. [Illustration: ERHARD. A PEASANT SCENE.] Leech's successor, _George du Maurier_, is less delicate--that is to say, not so entirely and loftily æsthetic. He is less exclusively poetic, but lives more in actual life, and suffers less from the raw breath of reality. At the same time, his drawing is pithier and more incisive; one discerns his French training. In 1857 du Maurier was a pupil of Gleyre, and returned straight to England when Leech's place on _Punch_ became vacant by his death. Since that time du Maurier has been the head of the English school of drawing--of the diarists of that society which is displayed in Hyde Park during the season, and found in London theatres and dining-rooms, and in well-kept English pleasure grounds, at garden parties and tennis meetings, the leaders of clubs and drawing-rooms. His snobs rival those of Thackeray, but he has also a special preference for the fair sex--for charming women and girls who race about the lawn at tennis in large hats and bright dresses, or sit by the fire in fashionable apartments, or hover through a ball-room waltzing in their airy skirts of tulle. The coquettishness of his little ones is entirely charming, and so too is the superior and comical exclusiveness of his æsthetically brought-up children, who will associate with no children not æsthetic. [Illustration: ERHARD. A PEASANT FAMILY.] But the works of _Charles Keene_ are the most English of all. Here the English reveal that complete singularity which distinguishes them from all other mortals. Both as a draughtsman and as a humorist Keene stands with the greatest of the century, on the same level as Daumier and Hokusai. An old bachelor, an original, a provincial living in the vast city, nothing pleased him better than to mix with the humbler class, to mount on the omnibus seat beside the driver, to visit a costermonger, or sit in a dingy suburban tavern. He led a Bohemian life, and was, nevertheless, a highly respectable, economical, and careful man. Trips into the country and little suppers with his friends constituted his greatest pleasures. He was a member of several glee clubs, and when he sat at home played the Scotch bagpipes, to the horror of all his neighbours. During his last years his only company was an old dog, to which he, like poor Tassaert, clung with a touching tenderness. All the less did he care about "the world." Grace and beauty are not to be sought in his drawings. For him "Society" did not exist. As du Maurier is the chronicler of drawing-rooms, Keene was the fine and unsurpassed observer of the people and of humble London life, and he extended towards them a friendly optimism and a brotherly sympathy. An endless succession of the most various, the truest, and the most animated types is contained in his work: mighty guardsmen swagger, cane in hand, burly and solemn; cabmen and omnibus drivers, respectable middle-class citizens, servants, hairdressers, the City police, waiters, muscular Highlanders, corpulent self-made City men, the seething discontent of Whitechapel; and here and there amidst them all incomparable old tradesmen's wives, and big, raw-boned village landladies in the Highlands. Keene has something so natural and self-evident in his whole manner of expression, that no one is conscious of the art implied by such drawing. Amongst those living in his time only Menzel could touch him as a draughtsman, and it was not through chance that each, in spite of their differences of temperament, greatly admired the other. Keene bought every drawing of Menzel's that he could get, and Menzel at his death possessed a large collection of Keene's sketches. [Illustration: LUDWIG RICHTER.] In the beginning of the century Germany had no draughtsmen comparable for realistic impressiveness with Rowlandson. At a time when the great art lay so completely bound in the shackles of the Classic school, drawing, too, appeared only in traditional forms. The artist ventured to draw as he liked just as little as he ventured to paint anything at all as he saw it; for both there were rules and strait-waistcoats. Almost everything that was produced in those years looks weak and flat to-day, forced in composition and amateurish in drawing. Where Rowlandson with his brusque powerful strokes recalls Michael Angelo or Rembrandt, the Germans have something laboured, diffident, and washed out. Yet even here a couple of unpretentious etchers rise as welcome and surprising figures out of the tedious waste of academic production, though they were little honoured by their contemporaries. In their homely sketches, however, they have remained more classic than those who put on the classical garment as if for eternity. What the painter refused to paint, and the patrons of art who sought after ideas would not allow to count as a picture, because the subject seemed to them too poor, and the form too commonplace and undignified--military scenes at home and abroad, typical and soldierly figures from the great time of the war of Liberation, the life of the people, the events of the day--was what the Nuremberg friends, _Johann Adam Klein_ and _Johann Christoph Erhard_, diligently engraved upon copper with sympathetic care, and so left posterity a picture of German life in the beginning of the century that seems the more sincere and earnest because it has paid toll neither to style in composition nor to idealism. This invaluable Klein was a healthy and sincere realist, from whom the æsthetic theories of the time recoiled without effect, and he had no other motive than to render faithfully whatever he saw. Even in Vienna, whither he came as a young man in 1811, it was not the picture galleries which roused him to his first studies, but the picturesque national costumes of the Wallachians, Poles, and Hungarians, and their horses and peculiar vehicles. A sojourn among the country manors of Styria gave him opportunity for making a number of pretty sketches of rural life. In the warlike years 1813 and 1814, with their marching and their bivouacs, he went about all day long drawing amongst the soldiers. Even in Rome it was not the statues that fascinated him, but the bright street scenes, the ecclesiastical solemnities, and the picturesque caravans of country people. And when he settled down in Nuremburg, and afterwards in Munich, he did not cease to be sensitive to all impressions that forced themselves on him in varying fulness. The basis of his art was faithful and loving observation of life as it was around him, the pure joy the genuine artist has in making a picture of everything he sees. [Illustration: L. RICHTER. HOME.] Poor Erhard, who at twenty-six ended his life by suicide, was a yet more delicate and sensitive nature. The marching of Russian troops through his native town roused him to his first works, and even in these early military and canteen scenes he shows himself an exceptionally sharp and positive observer. The costumes, the uniforms, the teams and waggons, are drawn with decision and accuracy. From Vienna he made walking tours to the picturesque regions of the Schneeberg, wandered through Salzburg and Pinzgau, and gazed with wonder at the idyllic loveliness of nature as she is in these regions, on the cosy rooms of the peasants with their great tiled stoves and the sun-burnt figures of the country people. He had a heart for nature, an intimate, poetic, and profound love for what is humble and familiar--for homely meadows, trees, and streams, for groves and hedgerows, for quiet gardens and sequestered spots. He approached everything with observation as direct as a child's. Both Klein and he endeavoured to grasp a fragment of nature distinctly, and without any kind of transformation or generalisation; and this fresh, unvarnished, thoroughly German feeling for nature gives them, rather than Mengs and Carstens, the right to be counted as ancestors of the newer German art. [Illustration: L. RICHTER. THE END OF THE DAY.] Klein and Erhard having set out in advance, others, such as Haller von Hallerstein, L. C. Wagner, F. Rechberger, F. Moessmer, K. Wagner, E. A. Lebschée, and August Geist, each after his own fashion, made little voyages of discovery into the world of nature belonging to their own country. But Erhard, who died in 1822, has found his greatest disciple in a young Dresden master, whose name makes the familiar appeal of an old lullaby which suddenly strikes the ear amid the bustle of the world--in _Ludwig Richter_, familiar to all Germans. Richter himself has designated Chodowiecki, Gessner, and Erhard as those whose contemplative love of nature guided him to his own path. What Leech, that charming draughtsman of the child-world, was to the English, Ludwig Richter became for the Germans. Not that he could be compared with Leech in artistic qualities. Beside those of the British artist his works are like the exercises of a gifted amateur: they have a petty correctness and a _bourgeois_ neatness of line. But Germans are quite willing to forget the artistic point of view in relation to their Ludwig Richter. Sunny and childlike as he is, they love him too much to care to see his artistic failings. Here is really that renowned German "_Gemüth_" of which others make so great an abuse. [Illustration: L. RICHTER. SPRING.] "I am certainly living here in a rather circumscribed fashion, but in a very cheerful situation outside the town, and I am writing you this letter (it is Sunday afternoon) in a shady arbour, with a long row of rose-bushes in bloom before me. Now and then they are ruffled by a pleasant breeze--which is also the cause of a big blot being on this sheet, as it blew the page over." This one passage reveals the whole man. Can one think of Ludwig Richter living in any town except Dresden, or imagine him except in this dressing-gown, seated on a Sunday afternoon in his shady arbour with the rose-bushes, and surrounded by laughing children? That profound domestic sentiment which runs through his works with a biblical fidelity of heart is reflected in the homeliness of the artist, who has remained all his life a big, unsophisticated child; and his autobiography, in its patriarchal simplicity, is like a refreshing draught from a pure mountain spring. Richter survived into the present as an original type from a time long vanished. What old-world figures did he not see around him as a boy, when he went about, eager for novelty, with his grandfather, the copperplate printer, who in his leisure hours studied alchemy and the art of producing gold, and was surrounded by an innumerable quantity of clocks, ticking, striking, and making cuckoo notes in his dark workroom; or as he listened to his blind, garrulous grandmother, around whom the children and old wives of the neighbourhood used to gather to hear her tales. That was in 1810, and two generations later, as an old man surrounded by his grandsons, he found once more the old, merry child life of his own home. And it was once more a fragment of the good old times, when on Christmas Eve the little band came shouting round the house of gingerbread from _Hansel and Gretel_ which grandfather had built out of real gingerbread after his own drawing. [Illustration: L. RICHTER. AFTER WORK IT'S GOOD TO REST.] "If my art never entered amongst the lilies and roses on the summit of Parnassus, it bloomed by the roads and banks, on the hedges and in the meadows, and travellers resting by the wayside were glad of it, and little children made wreaths and crowns of it, and the solitary lover of nature rejoiced in its colour and fragrance, which mounted like a prayer to Heaven." Richter had the right to inscribe these words in his diary on his eightieth birthday. Through his works there echoes a humming and chiming like the joyous cry of children and the twitter of birds. Even his landscapes are filled with that blissful and solemn feeling that Sunday and the spring produce together in a lonely walk over field and meadow. The "_Gemüthlichkeit_," the cordiality, of German family-life, with a trait of contemplative romance, could find such a charming interpreter in none but him, the old man who went about in his long loose coat and had the face of an ordinary village schoolmaster. Only he who retained to his old age that childlike heart--to which the kingdom of heaven is given even in art--could really know the heart of the child's world, which even at a later date in Germany was not drawn more simply or more graciously. His illustrations present an almost exhaustive picture of the life of the German people at home and in the world, at work and in their pleasure, in suffering and in joy. He follows it through all grades and all seasons of the year. Everything is true and genuine, everything seized from life in its fulness: the child splashing in a tub; the lad shouting as he catches the first snowflake in his hat; the lovers seated whispering in their cosy little chamber, or wandering arm in arm on their "homeward way through the corn" amid the evening landscape touched with gold; the girl at her spinning-wheel and the hunter in the forest, the travelling journeyman, the beggar, the well-to-do Philistine. The scene is the sitting-room or the nursery, the porch twined with vine, the street with old-fashioned overhanging storeys and turrets, the forest and the field with splendid glimpses into the hazy distance. Children are playing round a great tree, labourers are coming back from the field, or the family is taking its rest in some hour of relaxation. A peaceful quietude and chaste purity spread over everything. Certainly Richter's drawing has something pedantic and unemphatic, that weak, generalising roundness which, beside the sharp, powerful stroke of the old artists, has the spirit of a drawing-master. But what he has to give is always influenced by delicate and loving observation, and never stands in contradiction to truth. He does not give the whole of nature, but neither does he give what is unnatural. He is one of the first of Germans whose art did not spring from a negation of reality, produced by treating it on an arbitrary system, but rested instead upon tender reverie, transfigured into poetry. When in the fifties he stayed a summer in pleasant Loschwitz, he wrote in his diary: "O God, how magnificent is the wide country round, from my little place upon the hill! So divinely beautiful, and so sensuously beautiful! The deep blue heaven, the wide green world, the bright and fair May landscape alive with a thousand voices." [Illustration: WILHELM BUSCH.] In all that generation, to whom existence seemed so sad, Ludwig Richter is one of the few who really felt content with the earth, and held the life around them to be the best and healthiest material for the artist. And that is the substance of the plate to which he gave the title "Rules of Art." A wide landscape stretches away with mighty oaks slanting down, and a purling spring from which a young girl is drawing water, whilst a high-road, enlivened by travellers young and old, runs over hill and dale into the sunny distance. In the midst of this free rejoicing world the artist is seated with his pencil. And above stands the motto written by Richter's hand-- "Und die Sonne Homer's, siehe sie lächelt auch uns." By the success of Richter certain disciples were inspired to tread the same ground, although none of them equalled him in his charming human qualities. And least of all _Oskar Pletsch_, whose self-sufficient smile is soon recognised in all its emptiness. Everything which in Richter was genuine and original is in him flat, laboured, and prearranged. His landscapes, which in part are very pretty, are derived from R. Schuster; what seems good in the children is Richter's property, and what Pletsch contributed is the conventionality. _Albert Hendschel_ also stood on Richter's shoulders, but his popularity is more justifiable. Even in these days one takes pleasure in his sketch-books, in which he immortalised the joy and sorrow of youth in such a delicious way. [Illustration: _Braun, Munich._ OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME. RETHEL.] _Eugen Neureuther_ worked in Munich, and as an etcher revelled in the charming play of arabesques and ornamental borders, and told of pleasant little scenes from the life of the Bavarian people in his pretty peasant quatrains. [Illustration: _Braun, Munich._ OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME. GABRIEL MAX.] The rise of caricature in Germany dates from the year 1848. Though there are extant from the first third of the century no more than a few topical papers of no artistic importance, periodical publications, which soon brought a large number of vigorous caricaturists into notice, began to appear from that time, owing to the political agitations of the period. _Kladderadatsch_ was brought out in Berlin, and _Fliegende Blätter_ was founded in Munich, and side by side with it _Münchener Bilderbogen_. But later generations will be referred _par excellence_ to _Fliegende Blätter_ for a picture of German life in the nineteenth century. What the painters of those years forgot to transmit is here stored up: a history of German manners which could not imaginably be more exact or more exhaustive. From the very first day it united on its staff of collaborators almost all the most important names in their own peculiar branch. Schwind, Spitzweg, that genial humorist, and many others whom the German people will not forget, won their spurs here, and were inexhaustible in pretty theatre scenes, satires on German and Italian singing, memorial sketches of Fanny Elsler, of the inventor of the dress coat, etc., which enlivened the whole civilized world at that time. This elder generation of draughtsmen on _Fliegende Blätter_ were, indeed, not free from the guilt of producing stereotyped figures. The travelling Englishman, the Polish Jew, the counter-jumper, the young painter, the rich boor, the stepmother, the housemaid, and the nervous countess are everywhere the same in the first volumes. In caricature, just as in "great art," they still worked a little in accordance with rules and conventions. To observe life with an objective unprejudiced glance, and to hold it fast in all its palpitating movement, was reserved for men of later date. [Illustration: _Braun, Munich._ OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME. HANS MAKART.] [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ ADOLF OBERLÄNDER.] Two of the greatest humorists of the world in illustrative art, _Wilhelm Busch_ and _Adolf Oberländer_, stand at the head of those who ushered in the flourishing period of German caricature. They are masters, and take in with their glance the entire social world of our time, and in their brilliant prints they have made a history of civilisation for the epoch which will be more vivid and instructive for posterity than the most voluminous works of the greatest historians. Their heads are known by Lenbach's pictures. One has an exceptionally clever, expressive countenance--a thorough painter's head. The humorist may be recognised by the curious narrowing of one eye, the well-known eye of the humorist that sees everything, proves everything, and holds fast every absurdity in the gestures, every eccentricity in the bearing of his neighbour. That is Wilhelm Busch. [Illustration: _Braun, Munich._ OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME. GENELLI.] [Illustration: _Braun, Munich._ OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME. ALMA TADEMA.] In the large orbs of the other--orbs which seem to grow strangely wide by long gazing as at some fixed object--there is no smile of deliberate mischief, and it is not easy to associate the name of Oberländer with this Saturnian round face, with its curiously timid glance. One is reminded of the definition of humour as "smiling amid tears." Even in those days when he came every year to Munich and painted in Lenbach's studio, Busch was a shy and moody man, who thawed only in the narrowest circle of his friends: now he has buried himself in a market-town in the province of Hanover, in Wiedensahl, which, according to Ritter's _Gazetteer_, numbers eight hundred and twenty-eight inhabitants. He lives in the house of his brother-in-law, the clergyman of the parish, and gives himself up to the culture of bees. His laughter has fallen silent, and it is only a journal on bees that now receives contributions from his hand. But what works this hermit of Wiedensahl produced in the days when he migrated from Düsseldorf and Antwerp to Munich, and began in 1859 his series of sketches for _Fliegende Blätter_! The first were stiff and clumsy, the text in prose and not particularly witty. But the earliest work with a versified text, _Der Bauer und der Windmüller_, contains in the germ all the qualities which later found such brilliant expression in _Max und Moritz_, in _Der Heilige Antonius_, _Die Fromme Helene_, and _Die Erlebnisse Knopps,_ _des Junggesellen_, and made Busch's works an inexhaustible fountain of mirth and enjoyment. Busch unites an uncommonly sharp eye with a marvellously flexible hand. Wild as his subjects generally are, he solves the greatest difficulties as easily as though they were child's play. His heroes appear in situations of the most urgent kind, which place their bodily parts in violent and exceedingly uncomfortable positions: they thrash others or get thrashed themselves, they stumble or fall. And in what a masterly way are all these anomalies seized, the boldest foreshortenings and the most flying movements! Untrained eyes see only a scrawl, but for those who know how to look, a drawing by Busch is life itself, freed from all unnecessary detail, and marked down in its great characteristic lines. And amid all this simplification, what knowledge there is under the guise of carelessness, and what fine calculation! Busch is at once simpler and more inventive than the English. With a maze of flourishes run half-mad, and a few points and blotches, he forms a sparkling picture. With the fewest possible means he hits the essential point, and for that reason he is justly called by Grand Cartaret the classic of caricaturists, _le roi de la charge et la bouffonnerie_. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ DEBUCOURT. IN THE KITCHEN.] _Oberländer_, without whom it would be impossible to imagine _Fliegende Blätter_, has not fallen silent. He works on, "fresh and splendid as on the first day." A gifted nature like Busch, he possesses, at the same time, that fertility of which Dürer said: "A good painter is inwardly complete and opulent, and were it possible for him to live eternally, then by virtue of those inward ideas of which Plato writes he would be always able to pour something new into his works." It is now thirty years ago that he began his labours for _Fliegende Blätter_, and since that time some drawing of his, which has filled every one with delight, has appeared almost every week. Kant said that Providence has given men three things to console them amid the miseries of life--hope, sleep, and laughter. If he is right, Oberländer is amongst the greatest benefactors of mankind. Every one of his new sketches maintains the old precious qualities. It might be said that, by the side of the comedian Busch, Oberländer seems a serious psychologist. Wilhelm Busch lays his whole emphasis on the comical effects of simplicity; he knows how to reduce an object in a masterly fashion to its elemental lines, which are comic in themselves by their epigrammatic pregnancy. He calls forth peals of laughter by the farcical spirit of his inventions and the boldness with which he renders his characters absurd. He is also the author of his own letterpress. His drawings are unimaginable without the verse, without the finely calculated and dramatic succession of situations growing to a catastrophe. Oberländer gets his effect purely by means of the pictorial elements in his representation, and attains a comical result, neither by the distorted exaggeration of what is on the face of the matter ridiculous, nor by an elementary simplification, but by a refined sharpening of character. It seems uncanny that a man should have such eyes in his head; there is something almost visionary in the way he picks out of everything the determining feature of its being. And whilst he faintly exaggerates what is characteristic and renders it distinct, his picture is given a force and power of conviction to which no previous caricaturist has attained, with so much discretion at the same time. No one has attained the drollness of Oberländer's people, animals, and plants. He draws _à la_ Max, _à la_ Makart, Rethel, Genelli, or Piloty, hunts in the desert or theatrical representations, Renaissance architecture run mad or the most modern European mashers. He is as much at home in the Cameroons as in Munich, and in transferring the droll scenes of human life to the animal world he is a classic. He sports with hens, herrings, dogs, ducks, ravens, bears, and elephants as Hokusai does with his frogs. Beside such animals all the Reinecke series of Wilhelm Kaulbach look like "drawings from the copybook of little Moritz." And landscapes which in their tender intimacy of feeling seem like anticipations of Cazin sometimes form the background of these creatures. One can scarcely err in supposing that posterity will place certain plates from the work of this quiet, amiable man beside the best which the history of drawing has anywhere to show. [Illustration: DEBUCOURT. THE PROMENADE.] The _Charivari_ takes its place with _Punch_ and _Fliegende Blätter_. In the land of Rabelais also caricature has flourished since the opening of the century, in spite of official masters who reproached her with desecrating the sacred temple of art, and in spite of the gendarmes who put her in gaol. Here, too, it was the draughtsmen who first broke with æsthetic prejudices, and saw the laughing and the weeping dramas of life with an unprejudiced glance. Debucourt and Carle Vernet, the pair who made their appearance immediately after the storms of the Revolution, are alike able and charming artists, who depict the pleasures of the salon in a graceful style; and they rival the great satirists on the other side of the Channel in the incisiveness of their drawing, and frequently even surpass them by the added charm of colour. [Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._ MONNIER. A CHALK DRAWING.] _Carle Vernet_, originally an historical painter, remembered that he had married the daughter of the younger Moreau, and set himself to portray the doings of the _jeunesse dorée_ of the end of the eighteenth century in his _incroyables_ and his _merveilleuses_. Crazy, eccentric, and superstitious, he divided his time afterwards between women and his club-fellows, horses and dogs. He survives in the history of art as the chronicler of sport, hunting, racing, and drawing-room and café scenes. _Louis Philibert Debucourt_ was a pupil of Vien, and had painted _genre_ pictures in the spirit of Greuze before he turned in 1785 to colour engraving. In this year appeared the pretty "Menuet de la Mariée," with the peasant couples dancing, and the dainty châtelaine who laughingly opens the ball with the young husband. After that he had found his specialty, and in the last decade of the eighteenth century he produced the finest of his colour engravings. In 1792 there is the wonderful promenade in the gallery of the Palais Royal, with its swarming crowd of young officers, priests, students, shop-girls, and _cocottes_; in 1797 "Grandmother's Birthday," "Friday Forenoon at the Parisian Bourse," and many others. The effects of technique which he achieved by means of colour engraving are surprising. A freshness like that of water colour lies on these yellow straw hats, lightly rouged cheeks, and rosy shoulders. To white silk cloaks trimmed with fur he gives the iridescence of a robe by Netscher. If there survived nothing except Debucourt from the whole art of the eighteenth century, he would alone suffice to give an idea of the entire spirit of the time. Only one note would be wanting, the familiar simplicity of Chardin. The smiling grace of Greuze, the elegance of Watteau, and the sensuousness of Boucher--he has them all, although they are weakened in him, and precisely by his affectation is he the true child of his epoch. The crowd which is promenading beneath the trees of the Palais Royal in 1792 is no longer the same which fills the drawing-rooms of Versailles and Petit Trianon in the pages of Cochin. The faces are coarser and more plebeian. Red waistcoats with _breloques_ as large as fists, and stout canes with great gold tops, make the costume of the men loud and ostentatious, while eccentric hats, broad sashes, and high coiffures bedizen the ladies more than is consistent with elegance. At the same time, Debucourt gives this democracy an aristocratic bearing. His prostitutes look like duchesses. His art is an attenuated echo of the _rococo_ period. In him the _décadence_ is embodied, and all the grace and elegance of the century is once more united, although it has become more _bourgeois_. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ MONNIER. JOSEPH PROUDHOMME.] The Empire again was less favourable to caricature. Not that there was any want of material, but the censorship kept a strict watch over the welfare of France. Besides, the artists who made their appearance after David lived on Olympus, and would have nothing to do with the common things of life. Neither draughtsmen nor engravers could effect anything so long as they saw themselves overlooked by a Greek or Roman phantom as they bent over their paper or their plate of copper, and felt it their duty to suggest the stiff lines of antique statues beneath the folds of modern costume. [Illustration: _L'Art._ HONORÉ DAUMIER.] _Bosio_ was the genuine product of this style. Every one of his pictures has become tedious, because of a spurious classicism to which he adhered with inflexible consistency. He cannot draw a grisette without seeing her with David's eyes. It deprives his figures of truth and interest. Something of the correctness of a schoolmistress is peculiar to them. His grace is too classic, his merriment too well-bred, and everything in them too carefully arranged to give the idea of scenes rapidly depicted from life. Beauty of line is offered in place of spontaneity of observation, and even the character of the drawing is lost in a pedantic elegance which envelopes everything with the uniformly graceful veil of an insipidly fluent outline. As soon as Romanticism had broken with the classic system, certain great draughtsmen, who laid a bold hand on modern life without being shackled by æsthetic formulæ, came to the front in France. _Henri Monnier_, the eldest of them, was born a year after the proclamation of the Empire. Cloaks, plumes, and sabretasches were the first impressions of his youth; he saw the return of triumphant armies and heard the fanfare of victorious trumpets. The Old Guard remained his ideal, the inglorious kingship of the Restoration his abhorrence. He was a supernumerary clerk in the Department of Justice when in 1828 his first brochure, _Moeurs administratives dessinées d'aprés nature par Henri Monnier_, disclosed to his superiors that the eyes of this poor young man in the service of the Ministry had seen more than they should have done. Dismissed from his post, he was obliged to support himself by his pencil, and became the chronicler of the epoch. In Monnier's prints breathes the happy Paris of the good old times, a Paris which in these days scarcely exists even in the provinces. His "Joseph Proudhomme," from his shoe-buckles to his stand-up collar, from his white cravat to his blue spectacles, is as immortal as _Eisele und Beisele_, _Schulze und Müller_, or Molière's _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_. Monnier himself is his own Proudhomme. He is the Philistine in Paris, enjoying little Parisian idylls with a _bourgeois_ complacency. With him there is no distinction between beautiful and ugly; he finds that everything in nature can be turned to account. How admirably the different worlds of Parisian society are discriminated in his _Quartiers de Paris_! How finely he has portrayed the grisette of the period, with her following of young tradesmen and poor students! As yet she has not blossomed into the fine lady, the luxurious _blasée_ woman of the next generation. She is still the bashful _modiste_ or dressmaker's apprentice whose outings in the country are described by Paul de Kock, a pretty child in a short skirt who lives in an attic and dresses up only when she goes to the theatre or into the country on a Sunday. Monnier gives her an air of good-nature, something delightfully childlike. In the society of her adorers she is content with the cheapest pleasures, drinks cider and eats cakes, rides on a donkey or breakfasts amid the trees, and hardly coquets at all when a fat old gentleman follows her on the boulevards. These innocent flirtations remind one as little of the more recent _lorettes_ of Gavarni as these in their turn anticipate the drunken street-walkers of Rops. [Illustration: _L'Art._ DAUMIER. THE CONNOISSEURS.] Under Louis Philippe began the true modern period of French caricature, the flourishing time when really great artists devoted themselves to it. It never raised its head more proudly than under the _bourgeois_ king, whose onion head always served the relentless Philippon as a target for his wit. It was never armed in more formidable fashion; it never dealt more terrible blows. Charles Philippon's famous journal _La Caricature_ was the most powerful lever that the republicans used against the "July government"; it was equally feared by the Ministry, the _bourgeoisie_, and the throne. When the _Charivari_ followed _La Caricature_ in 1832, political cartoons began to give way to the simple portraiture of manners in French life. The powder made for heavy guns exploded in a facile play of fireworks improvised for the occasion. French society in the nineteenth century has to thank principally _Daumier_ and _Gavarni_ for being brought gradually within the sphere of artistic representation. These men are usually called caricaturists, yet they were in reality the great historians of their age. Through long years they laboured every week and almost every day at their great history, which embraced thousands of chapters--at a true zoology of the human species; and their work, drawn upon stone in black and white, proves them not merely genuine historians, but really eminent artists who merit a place beside the greatest. [Illustration: _L'Art._ DAUMIER. THE MOUNTEBANKS. (_By permission of M. Eugène Montrosier, the owner of the picture._)] When in his young days Daubigny trod the pavement of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, he is said to have exclaimed in astonishment, "That looks as if it had been done by Daumier!" and from that time Daumier was aptly called the Michael Angelo of caricature. Even when he is laughing there is a Florentine inspiration of the terrible in his style, a grotesque magnificence, a might suggestive of Buonarotti. In the period before 1848 he dealt the constitutional monarchy crushing blows by his drawings. "Le Ventre legislatif" marks the furthest point to which political caricature ever ventured in France. But when he put politics on one side and set himself free from Philippon, this same man made the most wonderful drawings from life. His "Robert Macaire" giving instructions to his clerk as a tradesman, sending his patients exorbitant bills as doctor to the poor, lording it over the bourse as banker, taking bribes as juryman, and fleecing a peasant as land-agent, is the incarnation of the _bourgeois_ monarchy, a splendid criticism on the money-grubbing century. Politicians, officials, artists, actors, honest citizens, old-clothes-mongers, newspaper-boys, impecunious painters, the most various and the basest creatures are treated by his pencil, and appear on pages which are often terrible in their depth and truthfulness of observation. The period of Louis Philippe is accurately portrayed in these prints, every one of which belongs to the great volume of the human tragicomedy. In his "Émotions parisiennes" and "Bohémiens de Paris" he deals with misfortune, hunger, the impudence of vice, and the horror of misery. His "Histoire ancienne" ridiculed the absurdity of Classicism _à la_ David at a time when it was still regarded as high treason to touch this sacred fane. These modern figures with the classical pose, which to some extent parodied David's pictures, were probably what first brought his contemporaries to a sense of the stiffness and falsity of the whole movement; and at a later period Offenbach also contributed his best ideas with much the same result. Moreover, Daumier was a landscape-painter of the first order. No one has more successfully rendered the appearance of bridges and houses, of quays and streets under a downpour, of nature enfeebled as it is in the precincts of Paris. He was an instantaneous photographer without a rival, a physiognomist such as Breughel was in the sixteenth century, Jan Steen and Brouwer in the seventeenth, and Chodowiecki in the eighteenth, with the difference that his drawing was as broad and powerful as Chodowiecki's was delicate and refined. This inborn force of line, suggestive of Jordaens, places his sketches as high, considered as works of art, as they are invaluable as historical documents. The treatment is so summary, the outline so simplified, the pantomime, gesticulation, and pose always so expressive; and Daumier's influence on several artists is beyond doubt. Millet, the great painter of peasants, owes much to the draughtsman of the _bourgeois_. Precisely what constitutes his "style," the great line, the simplification, the intelligent abstention from anecdotic trifles, are things which he learnt from Daumier. During the years when he drew for the _Charivari_, _Gavarni_ was the exact opposite of Daumier. In the one was a forceful strength, in the other a refined grace; in the one brusque and savage observation and almost menacing sarcasm, in the other the wayward mood of the butterfly flitting lightly from flower to flower. Daumier might be compared with Rabelais; Gavarni, the _spirituel_ journalist of the _grand monde_ and the _demi-monde_, the draughtsman of elegance and of _roués_ and _lorettes_, might be compared with Molière. Born of poor parentage in Paris in 1801, and in his youth a mechanician, he supported himself from the year 1835 by fashion prints and costume drawings. He undertook the conduct of a fashion journal, _Les Gens du Monde_, and began it with a series of drawings from the life of the _jeunesse dorée_: _les Lorettes_, _les Actrices_, _les Fashionables_, _les Artistes_, _les Étudiants de Paris_, _les Bals masqués_, _les Souvenirs du Carnaval_, _la Vie des Jeunes Hommes_. A new world was here revealed with bold traits. The women of Daumier are good, fat mothers, always busy, quick-witted, and of an enviable constitution; women who are careful in the management of their household, and who go to market and take their husband's place at his office when necessary. In Gavarni the women are piquant and given to pouting, draped in silk and enveloped in soft velvet mantles. They are fond of dining in the _cabinet particulier_, and of scratching the name of their lover, for the time being, upon crystal mirrors. [Illustration: _L'Art._ DAUMIER. IN THE ASSIZE COURT.] [Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._ DAUMIER. "LA VOILÀ ... MA MAISON DE CAMPAGNE."] Gavarni was the first who seized the worldly side of modern life; he portrayed elegant figures full of _chic_, and gave them a garb which fitted them exactly. In his own dress he had a taste for what was dandified, and he plunged gaily into the enjoyment of the Parisian life which eddied around in a whirl of pleasure. The present generation feels that the air in such old journals of fashion is heavy. In every work of art there is, in addition to what endures, a fine perfume that evaporates after a certain number of years, and is no longer perceptible to those who come afterwards. What is fresh and modern to-day looks to-morrow like the dried flowers which the botanist keeps in a herbarium. And those who draw the fashions of their age are specially liable to this swift decay. Thus many of Gavarni's lithographs have the effect of pallid pictures of a vanished world. But the generation of 1830 honoured in him the same _charmeur_, the same master of enamoured grace, which that of 1730 had done in Watteau. He was sought after as an inventor of fashions, whom the tailor Humann, the Worth of the "July Monarchy," regarded as his rival. He was the discoverer of all the fairy costumes which formed the chief attraction at masquerades and theatres, the delicate _gourmet_ of the eternal feminine; and having dangled much after women, he knew how to render the wave of a petticoat, the seductive charm of a well-proportioned leg, and the coquettishness of a new _coiffure_ with the most familiar connoisseurship. He has been called the Balzac of draughtsmen. And the sentences at the bottom of his sketches, for which he is also responsible, are as audacious as the pictures themselves. Thus, when the young exquisite in the series "La Vie des Jeunes Hommes" stands with his companion before a skeleton in the anthropological museum, the little woman opines with a shudder, "When one thinks that this is a man, and that women love _that_"! [Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._ DAUMIER. MENELAUS THE VICTOR.] But that is only one side of the sphinx. He is only half known when one thinks only of the draughtsman of ladies' fashions who celebrated the free and easy graces of the _demi-monde_ and the wild licence of the carnival. At bottom Gavarni was not a frivolous butterfly, but an artist of a strangely sombre imagination, a profound and melancholy philosopher who had a prescience of all the mysteries of life. All the mighty problems which the century produced danced before his spirit like spectral notes of interrogation. The transition was made when, as an older man, he depicted the cold, sober wakening that follows the wild night. _Constantin Guys_ had already worked on these lines. He was an unfortunate and ailing man, who passed his existence, like Verlaine, in hospital, and died in an almshouse. Guys has not left much behind him, but in that little he shows himself the true forerunner of the moderns, and it is not a mere chance that Baudelaire, the ancestor of the _décadence_, established Guys' memory. These women who wander aimlessly about the streets with weary movements and heavy eyes deadened with absinthe, and who flit through the ball-room like bats, have nothing of the innocent charm of Monnier's grisettes. They are the uncanny harbingers of death, the demoniacal brides of Satan. Guys exercised on Gavarni an influence which brought into being his _Invalides du sentiment_, his _Lorettes vieilles_, and his _Fourberies de femmes_. "The pleasure of all creatures is mingled with bitterness." The frivolous worldling became a misanthrope from whom no secret of the foul city was hidden; a pessimist who had begun to recognise the human brute, the swamp-flower of over-civilisation, the "bitter fruit which is inwardly full of ashes," in the queen of the drawing-room as in the prostitute of the gutter. Henceforth he only recognises a love whose pleasures are to be reckoned amongst the horrors of death. His works could be shown to no lady, and yet they are in no sense frivolous: they are terrible and puritanic. If Daumier by preference showed mastery in his men, Gavarni showed it in his women as no other has done. He is not the powerful draughtsman that Daumier is; he has not the feeling for large movement, but with what terrible directness he analyses faces! He has followed woman through all seasons of life and in every grade, from youth to decay, and from brilliant wealth to filthy misery, and he has written the story of the _lorette_ in monumental strophes: café chantant, villa in the Champs Elysées, equipage, grooms, Bois de Boulogne, procuress, garret, and radish-woman, that final incarnation which Victor Hugo called the sentence of judgment. [Illustration: GAVARNI.] And Gavarni went further on this road. His glance became sharper and sharper, and the seriousness of meditation subdued his merriment; he came to the study of his age with the relentless knife of a vivisectionist. Fate had taught him the meaning of the struggle for existence. A journal he had founded in the thirties overwhelmed him with debts. In 1835 he sat in the prison of Clichy, and from that time he meditated on the miserable, tattered creatures whom he saw around him, with other eyes. He studied the toiling masses, and roamed about in slums and wine-caves amongst pickpockets and bullies. And what Paris had not yet revealed to him, he learnt in 1849 in London. Even there he was not the first-comer. Géricault, who as early as 1821 dived into the misery of the vast city, and brought out a series of lithographs, showed him the way. Beggars cowering half dead with exhaustion at a baker's door, ragged pipers slouching round deserted quarters of the town, poor crippled women wheeled in barrows by hollow-eyed men past splendid mansions and surrounded by the throng of brilliant equipages--these are some of the scenes which he brought home with him from London. But Gavarni excels him in trenchant incisiveness. "What is to be seen in London gratis," runs the heading of a series of sketches in which he conjures up on paper, in such a terrible manner, the new horrors of this new period: the starvation, the want, and the measureless suffering that hides itself with chattering teeth in the dens of the great city. He went through Whitechapel from end to end, and studied its drunkenness and its vice. How much more forcible are his beggars than those of Callot! The grand series of "Thomas Vireloque" is a dance of death in life; and in it are stated all the problems which have since disturbed our epoch. By this work Gavarni has come down to us as a contemporary, and by it he has become a pioneer. The enigmatical figure of "Thomas Vireloque" starts up in these times, following step by step in the path of his prototype: he is the philosopher of the back streets, the ragged scoundrel with dynamite in his pocket, the incarnation of the _bête humaine_, of human misery and human vice. Here Gavarni stands far above Hogarth and far above Callot. The ideas on social politics of the first half of the century are concentrated in "Thomas Vireloque." [Illustration: _Baschet._ GAVARNI. THOMAS VIRELOQUE.] Of course the assumption of government by Napoleon III marked a new phase in French caricature. It became more mundane and more highly civilised. All the piquancy and brilliance, waywardness and corruption, looseness and amenity, mirth and affectation of this refined city life, which in those days threw its dazzling splendour over all Europe, found intelligent and subtle interpreters in the young generation of draughtsmen. The _Journal pour rire_ comes under consideration as the leading paper. It was founded in 1848, and in 1856 assumed the title of _Journal amusant_, under which it is known at the present day. [Illustration: _Hetzel, Paris._ GAVARNI. FOURBERIES DE FEMMES. _Au premier Mosieu._--"Attendez-moi ce soir, de quatre à cinq heures, quai de l'Horloge du Palais.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE." _Au deuxième Mosieu._--"Ce soir, quai des Lunettes, entre quatre et cinq heures.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE." _Au troisième Mosieu._--"Quai des Morfondus, ce soir, de quatre heures à cinq.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE." _À un quatrième Mosieu._--"Je t'attends ce soir, à quatre heures.--_Ton_ AUGUSTINE."] _Gustave Doré_, to the lessening of his importance, moved on this ground only in his earliest period. He was barely sixteen and still at school in his native town Burg, in Alsace, when he made an agreement with Philippon, who engaged him for three years on the _Journal pour rire_. His first drawings date from 1844: "Les animaux socialistes," which were very suggestive of Grandville, and "Désagréments d'un voyage d'agrément"--something like the German _Herr und Frau Buchholz in der Schweiz_--which made a considerable sensation by their grotesque wit. In his series "Les différents publics de Paris" and "La Ménagerie Parisienne" he represented with an incisive pencil the opera, the _Théâtre des Italiens_, the circus, the _Odéon_ and the _Jardin des Plantes_. But since that time the laurels of historical painting have given him no rest. He turned away from his own age as well as from caricature, and made excursions into all zones and all periods. He visited the Inferno with Dante, lingered in Palestine with the patriarchs of the Old Testament, and ran through the world of wonders with Perrault. The facility of his invention was astonishing, and so too was the aptness with which he seized for illustration on the most vivid scenes from all authors. But he has too much Classicism to be captivating for very long. His compositions dazzle by an appearance of the grand style, but attain only an outward and scenical effect. His figures are academic variations of types originally established by the Greeks and the Cinquescentisti. He forced his talent when he soared into regions where he could not stand without the support of his predecessors. Even in his "Don Quixote" the figures lose in character the larger they become. Everything in Doré is calligraphic, judicious, without individuality, without movement and life, composed in accordance with known rules. There is a touch of Wiertz in him, both in his imagination and in his design, and his youthful works, such as the "Swiss Journey," in which he merely drew from observation without pretensions to style, will probably last the longest. In broad lithographs and charming woodcuts, _Cham_ has been the most exhaustive in writing up the diary of modern Parisian life during the period 1848-78. The celebrated caricaturist--he has been called the most brilliant man in France under Napoleon III--had worked in the studio of Delaroche at the same time as Jean François Millet. After 1842 he came forward as Cham (his proper name was Count Amadée de Noë) with drawings which soon made him the artist most in demand on the staff of the _Charivari_. Neither so profound nor so serious as Gavarni, he has a constant sparkle of vivacity, and is a draughtsman of wonderful _verve_. In his reviews of the month and of the year, everything which interested Paris in the provinces of invention and fashion, art and literature, science and the theatre, passes before us in turn: the omnibuses with their high imperials, table-turning and spirit-rapping, the opening of the _Grands Magasins du Louvre_, Madame Ristori, the completion of the Suez Canal, the first newspaper kiosks, New Year's Day in Paris, the invention of ironclads, the tunnelling of Mont Cenis, Gounod's _Faust_, Patti and Nilsson, the strike of the tailors and hat-makers, jockeys and racing. Everything that excited public attention had a close observer in Cham. His caricatures of the works of art in the Salon were full of spirit, and the International Exhibition of 1867 found in him its classic chronicler. Here all the mysterious Paris of the third Napoleon lives once more. Emperors and kings file past, the band of Strauss plays, gipsies are dancing, equipages roll by, and every one lives, loves, flirts, squanders money, and whirls round in a maëlstrom. But the end of the exhibition betokened the end of all that splendour. In Cham's plates which came next one feels that there is thunder in the air. Neither fashions nor theatres, neither women nor pleasure, could prevent politics from predominating more and more: the fall of Napoleon was drawing near. [Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._ GAVARNI. PHÈDRE AT THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS.] [Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._ GAVARNI. "CE QUI ME MANQUE À MOI? UNE 'TITE MÈRE COMME ÇA, QU'AURAIT SOIN DE MON LINGE."] There was a greater division of labour amongst those who followed Cham, since one chose "little women" as a speciality, another the theatre, and another high-life. Assisted by photography, _Nadar_ turned again to portraiture, which had been neglected since Daumier, and enjoyed a great success with his series "Les Contemporains de Nadar." _Marcellin_ is the first who spread over his sketches from the world of fashions and the theatre all the _chic_ and fashionable glitter which lives in the novels of those years. He is the chronicler of the great world, of balls and _soirées_; he shows the opera and the _Théâtre des Italiens_, tells of hunting and racing, attends the drives in the Corso, and at the call of fashion promptly deserts the stones of Paris to look about him in châteaux and country-houses, seaside haunts in France, and the little watering-places of Germany, where the gaming-tables formed at that time the rendezvous of well-bred Paris. Baden-Baden, where all the lions of the day, the politicians and the artists and all the beauties of the Paris salons, met together in July, offered the draughtsman a specially wide field for studies of fashion and _chic_. Here began the series "Histoires des variations de la mode depuis le XVI siècle jusqu'à nos jours." In a place where all classes of society, the great world and the _demi-monde_, came into contact, Marcellin could not avoid the latter, but even when he verged on this province he always knew how to maintain a correct and distinguished bearing. He was peculiarly the draughtsman of "society," of that brilliant, pleasure-loving, tainted, and yet refined society of the Second Empire which turned Paris into a great ball-room. [Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._ GUYS. STUDY OF A WOMAN.] _Randon_ is as plebeian as Marcellin is aristocratic. His speciality is the stupid recruit who is marched through the streets with his "squad," or the retired tradesman of small means, as Daudet has hit him off in M. Chèbe, the old gentleman seated on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne: "Let the little ones come to me with their nurses." His province includes everything that has nothing to do with _chic_. The whole life of the Parisian people, the horse-fairs, the races at Poissy, and all the more important occurrences by which the appearance of the city has been transformed, may be followed in his drawings. When he travelled he did not go to watering-places, but to the provinces, to Cherbourg and Toulon, or to the manufacturing towns of Belgium and England, where he observed life at the railway stations and the custom-house, at markets and in barracks, at seaports and upon the street. Goods that are being piled together, sacks that are being hoisted, ships being brought to anchor, storehouses, wharfs, and docks--everywhere there is as much life in his sketches as in a busy beehive. Nature is a great manufactory, and man a living machine. The world is like an ant-hill, the dwelling of curious insects furnished with teeth, feelers, indefatigable feet, and marvellous organs proper for digging, sawing, building, and all things possible, but furnished also with an incessant hunger. Soon afterwards there came _Hadol_, who made his début in 1855, with pictures of the fashions; _Stop_, who specially represented the provinces and Italy; _Draner_, who occupied himself with the Parisian ballet and designed charming military uniforms for little dancing girls. _Léonce Petit_ drew peasants and sketched the charms of the country in a simple, familiar fashion--the mortal tedium of little towns, poor villages, and primitive inns, the gossip of village beldames before the house-door, the pompous dignity of village magistrates or of the head of the fire brigade. He is specially noteworthy as a landscape artist. The trees on the straight, monotonous road rise softly and delicately into the air, and the sleepy sameness of tortuous village streets is pregnantly rendered by a few strokes of the pencil. The land is like a great kitchen garden. The fields and the arable ground with their dusty, meagre soil chant a mighty song of hard labour, of the earnest, toilsome existence of the peasant folk. [Illustration: _Journal Amusant._ GRÉVIN. NOS PARISIENNES. "Tiens! ne me parle pas de lui, je ne peux pas le souffrir, même en peinture!" "Cependant, s'il t'offrait de t'epouser?" "Ça, c'est autre chose."] _Andrieux_ and _Morland_ discovered the _femme entretenue_, though afterwards her best known delineator was _Grévin_, an able, original, facile, and piquant draughtsman, whom some--exaggerating beyond a doubt--called the direct successor of Gavarni. Grévin's women are a little monotonous, with their ringleted chignons, their expressionless eyes which try to look big, their perverse little noses, their defiant, pouting lips, and the cheap toilettes which they wear with so much _chic_. But they too have gone to their rest with the grisettes of Monnier and Gavarni, and have left the field to the women of Mars and Forain. In these days Grévin's work seems old-fashioned, since it is no longer modern and not yet historical; nevertheless it marks an epoch, like that of Gavarni. The _bals publics_, the _bals de l'Opéra_, those of the _Jardin Mabille_, the _Closerie des Lilas_, the races, the promenades in the _Bois de Vincennes_, the seaside resorts, all places where the _demi-monde_ pitched its tent in the time of Napoleon III, were also the home of the artist. "How they love in Paris" and "Winter in Paris" were his earliest series. His finest and greatest drawings, the scenes from the Parisian hotels and "The English in Paris," appeared in 1867, the year of the Exhibition. His later series, published as albums--"Les filles d'Ève," "Le monde amusant," "Fantaisies parisiennes," "Paris vicieux," "La Chaîne des Dames"--are a song of songs upon the refinements of life. It does not lie within the plan of this book to follow the history of drawing any further. Our intention was merely to show that painting had to follow the path trodden by Rowlandson and Cruikshank, Erhard and Richter, Daumier and Gavarni, if it was to be art of the nineteenth century, and not to remain for ever dependent on the old masters. Absolute beauty is not good food for art; to be strong it must be nourished on the ideas of the century. When the world had ceased to draw inspiration from the masterpieces of the past merely with the object of depicting by their aid scenes out of long-buried epochs, there was for the first time a prospect that mere discipleship would be overcome, and that a new and original painting would be developed through the fresh and independent study of nature. The passionate craving of the age had to be this: to feel at home on the earth, in this long-neglected world of reality, which hides the unsuspected treasure of vivid works of art. The rising sun is just as beautiful now as on the first day, the streams flow, the meadows grow green, the vibrating passions are at war now as in other times, the immortal heart of nature still beats beneath its rough covering, and its pulsation finds an echo in the heart of man. It was necessary to descend from ideals to existing fact, and the world had to be once more discovered by painters as in the days of the first Renaissance. The question was how by the aid of all the devices of colour to represent the multifarious forms of human activity: the phases and conditions of life, fashion as well as misery, work and pleasure, the drawing-room and the street, the teeming activity of towns and the quiet labour of peasants. The essential thing was to write the entire natural history of the age. And this way, the way from museums to nature, and from the past to the world of living men, was shown by the English to the French and German painters. [Illustration: _Mansell Photo._ ROMNEY. SERENA.]