CHAPTER XVIII

THE MILITARY PICTURE While English painting from the days of Hogarth and Wilkie embraced rustic and middle-class life, the victory of modernity on the Continent could only be accomplished slowly and by degrees. The question of costume played an important part in it. "Artists love antiquated costume because, as they say, it gives them greater sweep and freedom. But I should like to suggest that in historical representations of their own age an eye should be kept on propriety of delineation rather than on freedom and sweep. Otherwise one might just as well allow an historian to talk to us about phalanxes, battlements, triarii, and argyraspids in place of battalions, squadrons, grenadiers, and cuirassiers. The painters of the great events of the day ought, especially, to be more true to fact. In battle-pieces, for example, they ought not to have cavalry shooting and sabreing about them in leather collars, in round and plumed hats, and the vast jack-boots which exist no longer. The old masters drew, engraved, and painted in this way because people really dressed in such a manner at the time. It is said that our costume is not picturesque, and therefore why should we choose it? But posterity will be curious to know how we clothed ourselves, and will wish to have no gap from the eighteenth century to its own time." [Illustration: VERNET. THE WOUNDED ZOUAVE.] [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ CHARLET. UN HOMME QUI BOÎT SEUL N'EST PAS DIGNE DE VIVRE.] These words, which the well-known Vienna librarian Denis wrote in 1797 in his _Lesefrüchte_, show how early came the problem which was at high-water mark for a generation afterwards. The painting of the nineteenth century could only become modern when it succeeded in recognising and expressing the characteristic side of modern costume. But to do that it took more than half a century. It was, after all, natural that to people who had seen the graceful forms and delicate colours of the _rococo_ time, the garb of the first half of the century should seem the most unfortunate and the least enviable in the whole history of costume. "What person of artistic education is not of the opinion," runs a passage in Putmann's book on the Düsseldorf school in 1835,--"what person of artistic education is not of the opinion that the dress of the present day is tasteless, hideous, and ape-like? Moreover, can a true style be brought into harmony with hoop-petticoats and swallow-tail coats and such vagaries? In our time, therefore, art is right in seeking out those beautiful fashions of the past, about which tailors concern themselves so little. How much longer must we go about, unpicturesque beings, like ugly black bats, in swallow-tail coats and wide trousers? The peasant's blouse, indeed, can be accepted as one of the few picturesque dresses which have yet been preserved in Germany from the inauspicious influence of the times." The same plaint is sung by Hotho in his history of German and Netherlandish painting; the costume of his age he declares to be thoroughly prosaic and tiresome. It is revolting to painters and an offence to the educated eye. Art must necessarily seek salvation in the past, unless it is to wait, and give brush and palette a holiday, until that happy time when the costume of nations comes to its pictorial regeneration. Only one zone, the realm of blouse and military uniform, was beyond the domain of tail-coat and trousers, and still furnished art with rich material. Since it was by working on uniform that plastic artists first learnt how to treat contemporary costume, so it was the military picture that first entered the circle of modern painting. By exalting the soldier into a warrior, and the warrior into a hero, it was here possible, even in the times of David and Carstens, to effect a certain compromise with the ruling classical ideas. Gérard, Girodet--to some extent even Gros--made abundant use of the mask of the Greek or Roman warrior, with the object of admitting the battle-piece into painting in the grand style. The real heroes of the Napoleonic epoch had not this plastic appearance nor these epic attitudes. Classicism altered their physiognomies and gave them, most illogically, the air of old marble statues. It was Horace Vernet who freed battle painting from this anathema. This, but little else, stands to his credit. Together with his son-in-law Paul Delaroche, _Horace Vernet_ is the most genuine product of the _Juste-milieu_ period. The king with the umbrella founded the Museum of Versailles, that monstrous depôt of daubed canvas, which is a horrifying memory to any one who has ever wandered through it. However, it is devoted _à toutes les gloires de la France_. In a few years a suite of galleries, which it takes almost two hours merely to pass through from end to end, was filled with pictures of all sizes, bringing home the history of the country, from Charlemagne to the African expedition of Louis Philippe, under all circumstances which are in any way flattering to French pride. For miles numberless manufacturers of painting bluster from the walls. As _pictor celerrimus_ Horace Vernet had the command-in-chief, and became so famous by his chronicle of the conquest of Algiers that for a long time he was held by trooper, Philistine, and all the kings and emperors of Europe as the greatest painter in France. He was the last scion of a celebrated dynasty of artists, and had taken a brush in his hand from the moment he threw away his child's rattle. A good deal of talent had been given him in his cradle: sureness of eye, lightness of hand, and an enviable memory. His vision was correct, if not profound; he painted his pictures without hesitation, and is favourably distinguished from many of his contemporaries by his independence: he owes no one anything, and reveals his own qualities without arraying himself in those of other people. Only these qualities are not of an order which gives his pictures artistic interest. The spark of Géricault's genius, which seems to have been transmitted to him in the beginning, was completely quenched in his later years. Having swiftly attained popularity by the aid of lithography which circulated his "Mazeppa" through the whole world, he became afterwards a bad and vulgar painter, without poetry, light, or colour; a reporter who expressed himself in banal prose and wounded all the finer spirits of his age. "I loathe this man," said Baudelaire, as early as 1846. [Illustration: AUGUSTE MARIE RAFFET.] Devoid of any sense of the tragedy of war, which Gros possessed in such a high degree, Vernet treated battles like performances at the circus. His pictures have movement without passion, and magnitude without greatness. If it had been required of him, he would have daubed all the boulevards; his picture of Smala is certainly not so long, but there would have been no serious difficulty in lengthening it by half a mile. This incredible stenographical talent won for him his popularity. He was decorated with all the orders in the world. The _bourgeois_ felt happy when he looked at Vernet's pictures, and the paterfamilias promised to buy a horse for his little boy. The soldiers called him "_mon colonel_," and would not have been surprised if he had been made a Marshal of France. A lover of art passes the pictures of Vernet with the sentiment which the old colonel owned to entertaining towards music. "Are you fond of music, colonel?" asked a lady. "Madame, I am not afraid of it." [Illustration: RAFFET. THE PARADE.] The trivial realism of his workmanship is as tedious as the unreal heroism of his soldiers. In the manner in which he conceived the trooper, Vernet stands between the Classicists and the moderns. He did not paint ancient warriors, but French soldiers: he knew them as a corporal knows his men, and by this respect for prescribed regulation he was prevented from turning them into Romans. But though he disregarded Classicism, in outward appearance, he did not drop the heroic tone. He always saw the soldier as the bold defender of his country, the warrior performing daring deeds, as in the "Battle of Alexander"; and in this way he gave his pictures their unpleasant air of bluster. For neither modern tactics nor modern cannon admit of the prominence of the individual as it is to be seen in Vernet's pictures. The soldier of the nineteenth century is no longer a warrior, but the unit in a multitude; he does what he is ordered, and for that he has no need of the spirit of an ancient hero; he kills or is killed, without seeing his enemy or being seen himself. The course of a battle advances, move by move, according to mathematical calculation. It is therefore false to represent soldiers in heroic attitudes, or even to suggest deeds of heroism on the part of those in command. In giving his orders and directing a battle a general has to behave pretty much as he does at home at his writing-table. And he is never in the battle, as he is represented by Horace Vernet; on the contrary, he remains at a considerable distance off. Therefore, even with the dimensions of which Vernet availed himself, the exact portrait of a modern battle is exclusively an affair for panorama, but never for the flat surface of a picture. A picture must confine itself, either to the field-marshal directing the battle from a distance upon a hill in the midst of his staff, or else to little pictorial episodes in the individual life of the soldier. The gradual development from unreal battle-pieces to simple episodic paintings can be followed step by step in the following works. [Illustration: RAFFET. 1807.] What was painted for the Versailles Museum in connection with deeds of arms in the Crimean War and the Italian campaign kept more or less to the blustering official style of Horace Vernet. In the galleries of Versailles the battles of Wagram, Loano, and Altenkirche (1837-39), and an episode from the retreat from Russia (1851), represent the work of _Hippolyte Bellangé_. These are huge lithochromes which have been very carefully executed. _Adolphe Yvon_, who is responsible for "The Taking of Malakoff," "The Battle of Magenta," and "The Battle of Solferino," is a more tedious painter, and remained during his whole life a pupil of Delaroche; he laid chief stress on finished and rounded composition, and gave his soldiers no more appearance of life than could be forced into the accepted academic convention. The fame of _Isidor Pils_, who immortalised the disembarkation of the French troops in the Crimea, the battle of Alma, and the reception of Arab chiefs by Napoleon III, has paled with equal rapidity. He could paint soldiers, but not battles, and, like Yvon, he was too precise in the composition of his works. In consequence they have as laboured an effect in arrangement as they have in colour. He was completely wanting in sureness and spontaneity. It is only his water-colours that hold one's attention; and this they do at any rate by their unaffected actuality, and in spite of their dull and heavy colour. _Alexandre Protais_ verged more on the sentimental. He loved soldiers, and therefore had the less toleration for war, which swept the handsome young fellows away. Two pendants, "The Morning before the Attack" and "The Evening after the Battle," founded his reputation in 1863. The first showed a group of riflemen waiting in excitement for the first bullets of the enemy; the second represented the same men in the evening delighted with their victory, but at the same time--and here you have the note of Protais--mournful over the loss of their comrades. "The Prisoners" and "The Parting" of 1872 owed their success to the same lachrymose and melodramatic sensibility. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ RAFFET. POLISH INFANTRY.] [Illustration: RAFFET. THE MIDNIGHT REVIEW. C'est la grande revue Qu'aux Champs-Elysées A l'heure de minuit Tient César décédé.] A couple of mere lithographists, soldiers' sons, in whom a repining for the Napoleonic legend still found its echo, were the first great military painters of modern France. "Charlet and Raffet," wrote Bürger-Thoré in his _Salon_ of 1845, "are the two artists who best understand the representation of that almost vanished type, the trooper of the Empire; and after Gros they will assuredly endure as the principal historians of that warlike era." _Charlet_, the painter of the old bear Napoleon I, might almost be called the Béranger of painting. The "little Corporal," the "great Emperor" appears and reappears in his pictures and drawings without intermission; his work is an epic in pencil of the grey coat and the little hat. From his youth he employed himself with military studies, which were furthered in Gros' studio, which he entered in 1817. The Græco-Roman ideal did not exist for him, and he was indifferent to beauty of form. His was one of those natures which have a natural turn for actual fact; he had a power for characterisation, and in his many water-colours and lithographs he was merely concerned with the proper expression of his ideas. How it came that Delacroix had so great a respect for him was nevertheless explained when his "Episode in the Retreat from Russia," in the World Exhibition of 1889, emerged from the obscurity of the Lyons Museum; it is perhaps his best and most important picture. When it appeared in the Salon of 1836, Alfred de Musset wrote that it was "not an episode but a complete poem"; he went on to say that the artist had painted "the despair in the wilderness," and that, with its gloomy heaven and disconsolate horizon, the picture gave the impression of infinite disaster. After fifty years it had lost none of its value. Since the reappearance of this picture it has been recognised that Charlet was not merely the specialist of old grey heads with their noses reddened with brandy, the Molière of barracks and canteens, but that he understood all the tragical sublimity of war, from which Horace Vernet merely produced trivial anecdotes. [Illustration: _Mag. of Art._ ERNEST MEISSONIER.] Beside him stands his pupil _Raffet_, the special painter of the _grande armée_. He mastered the brilliant figure of Napoleon; he followed it from Ajaccio to St. Helena, and never left it until he had said everything that was to be said about it. He showed the "little Corsican" as the general of the Italian campaign, ghastly pale and consumed with ambition; the Bonaparte of the Pyramids and of Cairo; the Emperor Napoleon on the parade-ground reviewing his Grenadiers; the triumphal hero of 1807 with the Cuirassiers dashing past, brandishing their sabres with a hurrah; the Titan of Beresina riding slowly over the waste of snow, and, in the very midst of disaster, spying a new star of fortune; the war-god of 1813, the great hypnotiser greeted even by the dying with a cry of "Long life to the Emperor"; the adventurer of 1814, riding at the head of shattered troops over a barren wilderness; the vanquished hero of 1815, who, in the midst of his last square, in the thick of his beloved battalions, calls fickle fate once more into the lists; and the captive lion who, from the bridge of the ship, casts a last look on the coast of France as it fades in the mist. He has called the Emperor from the grave, as a ghostly power, to hold a midnight review of the _grande armée_. And with love and passion and enthusiasm he has followed the instrument of these victories, the French soldiers, the swordsmen of seven years' service, through bivouac and battle, on the march and on parade, as patrols and outposts. The ragged and shoeless troops of the Empire are portrayed in his plates, with a touch of real sublimity, in defeat and in victory. The empty inflated expression of martial enthusiasm has been avoided by him; everything is true and earnest. In a masterly fashion he could make soldiers deploy in masses. No one has known in the same way how to render the impression of the multitude of an army, the notion of men standing shoulder to shoulder, the welding of thousands of individuals into one complete entity. In Raffet a regiment is a thousand-headed living being that has but one soul, one moral nature, one spirit, one sentiment of willing sacrifice and heroic courage. His death was as adventurous as his life; he passed away in a hotel in Genoa, and was brought back to French soil as part of the cargo of a merchant ship. For a long time his fame was thrown into the shade, at first by the triumphs of Horace Vernet, and then by those of Meissonier, until at length a fitting record was devoted to him by the piety of his son Auguste. Never had _Ernest Meissonier_ to complain of want of recognition. After his _rococo_ pictures had been deemed worth their weight in gold he climbed to the summit of his fame, his universal celebrity and his popularity in France, when he devoted himself in the sixties to the representation of French military history. The year 1859 took him to Italy in the train of Napoleon III. Meissonier was chosen to spread the martial glory of the Emperor, and, as the nephew was fond of drawing parallels between himself and his mighty uncle, Meissonier was obliged to depict suitable occasions from the life of the first Napoleon. His admirers were very curious to know how the great "little painter" would acquit himself in such a monumental task. First came the "Battle of Solferino," that picture of the Musée Luxembourg which represents Napoleon III overlooking the battle from a height in the midst of his staff. After lengthy preparations it appeared in the Salon of 1864, and showed that the painter had not been untrue to himself: he had simply adapted the minute technique of his _rococo_ pictures to the painting of war, and he remained the Dutch "little master" in all the battle-pieces which followed. Napoleon III had no further deeds of arms to record, so the intended parallel series was never accomplished. It is true, indeed, that he took the painter with the army in 1870; but after the first battle was lost, Meissonier went home: he did not wish to immortalise the struggles of a retreat. Henceforward his brush was consecrated to the first Napoleon. "1805" depicts the triumphant advance to the height of fame; "1807" shows Napoleon when the summit has been reached and the soldiers are cheering their idol in exultation; "1814" represents the fall: the star of fortune has vanished; victory, so long faithful to the man of might, has deserted his banners. There is still a look of indomitable energy on the pale face of the Emperor, as, in utter despair, he aims his last shot against the traitor destiny; but his eyes seem weary, his mouth is contorted, and his features are wasted with fever. [Illustration: MEISSONIER. 1814. (_By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright._)] [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ MEISSONIER. THE OUTPOST. (_By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright._)] Meissonier has treated all these works with the carefulness which he expended on his little _rococo_ pictures. To give an historically accurate representation of Napoleon's boots he did not content himself with borrowing them from the museum. Walking and riding--for he was a passionate horseman--he wore for months together boots of the same make and form as those of the "little Corporal." To get the colour of the horses of the Emperor and his marshals, in their full-grown winter coat, and to paint them just as they must have appeared after the hardships and negligence of a campaign, he bought animals of the same race and colour as those ridden by the Emperor and his generals, according to tradition, and picketed them for weeks in the snow and rain. His models were forced to wear out the uniforms in sun and storm before he painted them; he bought weapons and harness at fancy prices when he could not borrow them from museums. And there is no need to say that he copied all the portraits of Napoleon, Ney, Soult, and the other generals that were to be had, and read through whole libraries before beginning his Napoleon series. To paint the picture "1814," which is generally reckoned his greatest performance--Napoleon at the head of his staff riding through a snow-clad landscape--he first prepared the scenery on a spot in the plain of Champagne, corresponding to the original locality, just as he did in earlier years with his interiors of the _rococo_ period; he even had the road laid out on which he wished to paint the Emperor advancing. Then he waited for the first fall of snow, and had artillery, cavalry, and infantry to march for him upon this snowy path, and actually contrived that overturned transport waggons, discarded arms, and baggage should be decoratively strewn about the landscape. From these laborious preparations it may be understood that he spent almost as many millions of francs upon his pictures as he received. In his article, _What an Old Work of Art is Worth_, Julius Lessing has admirably dealt with the hidden ways of taste and commerce applied to art. Amongst all painters of modern times Meissonier is the only one whose pictures, during his own lifetime, fetched prices such as are only reached by the works of famous old masters of the greatest epochs. And yet he sold them straight from his easel, and never to dealers. Meissonier avenged himself magnificently for the privations of his youth. In 1832, when he gave up his apprenticeship with Menier, the great chocolate manufacturer, to become a painter, he had fifteen francs a month to spend. He had great difficulty in disposing of his drawings and illustrations for five or ten francs, and was often obliged to console himself with a roll for the want of a dinner. Only ten years later he was able to purchase a small place in Poissy, near St. Germain, where he went for good in 1850, to give himself up to work without interruption. Gradually this little property became a pleasant country seat, and in due course of time the stately house in Paris, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, was added to it. His "Napoleon, 1814," for which the painter himself received three hundred thousand francs, was bought at an auction by one of the owners of the "Grands Magasins du Louvre" for eight hundred and fifty thousand francs; "Napoleon III at Solferino" brought him two hundred thousand, and "The Charge of the Cuirassiers" three hundred thousand. And in general, after 1850, he only painted for such sums. It was calculated that he received about five thousand francs for every centimetre of painted canvas, and left behind him pictures which, according to present rate, were worth more than twenty million francs, without having really become a rich man; for, as a rule, every picture that he painted cost him several thousand. And Meissonier never sacrificed himself to money-making and the trade. He never put a stroke on paper without the conviction that he could not make it better, and for this artistic earnestness he was universally honoured, even by his colleagues, to his very death. As master beyond dispute he let the Classicists, Romanticists, Impressionists, and Symbolists pass by the window of his lonely studio, and always remained the same. A little man with a firm step, an energetic figure, eyes that shone like coals, thick, closely cropped hair, and the beard of a river-god, that always seemed to grow longer, at eighty years of age he was as hale and active as at thirty. By a systematic routine of life he kept his physique elastic, and was able to maintain that unintermittent activity under which another man would have broken down. During long years Meissonier went to rest at eight every evening, slept till midnight, and then worked at his drawings by lamplight into the morning. In the course of the day he made his studies from nature and painted. Diffident in society and hard of access, he did not permit himself to be disturbed in his indefatigable diligence by any social demands. A sharp ride, a swim or a row was his only relaxation. In 1848, as captain of the National Guard, he had taken part in the street and barricade fighting; and again in 1871, when he was sixty-six, he clattered through the streets of the capital, with the dangling sword he had so often painted and a gold-laced cap stuck jauntily on one side, as a smart staff-officer. Even the works of his old age showed no exhaustion of power, and there is something great in attaining ripe years without outliving one's reputation. As late as the spring of 1890, only a short time before his death, he was the leader of youth, when it transmigrated from the Palais des Champs Elysées to the Champ de Mars; and he exhibited in this new Salon his "October 1806," with which he closed his Napoleonic epic and his general activity as a painter. Halting on a hill, the Emperor in his historical grey coat, mounted on a powerful grey, is thoughtfully watching the course of the battle, without troubling himself about the Cuirassiers who salute him exultantly as they storm by, or about the brilliant staff which has taken up position behind him. Not a feature moves in the sallow, cameo-like face of the Corsican. The sky is lowering and full of clouds. In the foreground lie a couple of dead soldiers, in whose uniform every button has been painted with the same conscientious care that was bestowed on the buttons of the _rococo_ coats of fifty years before. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ ALPHONSE DE NEUVILLE.] Beyond this inexhaustible correctness I can really see nothing that can be said for Meissonier's fame as an artist. He, whose name is honoured in both hemispheres, was most peculiarly the son of his own work. The genius for the infinitesimal has never been carried further. He knew everything that a man can learn. The movements in his pictures are correct, the physiognomies interesting, the delicacy of execution indescribable, and his horses have been so exactly studied that they stand the test of instantaneous photography. But painter, in the proper sense, he never was. Precisely through their marvellous minuteness of execution--a minuteness which is merely attractive as a trial of patience and as an example of what the brush can do--his pictures are wanting in unity of conception, and they leave one cold by the hardness of their contours, the aridness of their colour, and the absence of all vibrating, nervous feeling. In a cavalry charge, with the whirling dust and the snorting horses, who thinks of costume? And who thinks of anything else when Meissonier paints a charge? Here are life and movement, and there a museum of military uniforms. When Manet saw Meissonier's "Cuirassiers" he said, "Everything is iron here except the cuirasses." His _rococo_ pictures are probably his best performances; they even express a certain amount of temperament. His military pictures make one chilly. Reproduced in woodcuts they are good illustrations for historical works, but as pictures they repel the eye, because they lack air and light and spirit. They rouse nothing except astonishment at the patience and incredible industry that went to the making of them. One sees everything in them--everything that the painter can have seen--to the slightest detail; only one does not rightly come into contact with the artist himself. His battle-pieces stand high above the scenic pictures of Horace Vernet and Hippolyte Bellangé, but they have nothing of the warmth of Raffet or the vibrating life of Neuville. There is nothing in them that is contagious and carries one away, or that appeals to the heart. Patience is a virtue: genius is a gift. Precious without originality, intelligent without imagination, dexterous without verve, elegant without charm, refined and subtile without delicacy, Meissonier has all the qualities that interest, and none of those which lay hold of one. He was a painter of a distinctness which causes astonishment, but not admiration; an artist for epicures, but for those of the second order, who pay the more highly for works of art in proportion as they value their artifice. His pictures recall the unseasonable compliment which Charles Blanc made to Ingres: "_Cher maître, vous avez deviné la photographie trente ans avant qu'il y eut des photographes._" Or else one thinks of that malicious story of which Jules Dupré is well known as the author. "Suppose," said he, "that you are a great personage who has just bought a Meissonier. Your valet enters the salon where it is hanging. 'Ah! Monsieur,' he cries, 'what a beautiful picture you have bought! That is a masterpiece!' Another time you buy a Rembrandt, and show it to your valet, in the expectation that he will at any rate be overcome by the same raptures. _Mais non!_ This time the man looks embarrassed. 'Ah! Monsieur,' he says, '_il faut s'y connaître_,' and away he goes." _Guillaume Regamey_, who is far less known, supplies what is wanting in Meissonier. Sketchy and of a highly strung nervous temperament, he could not adapt himself to the picture-market; but the history of art honours him as the most spirited draughtsman of the French soldier, after Géricault and Raffet. He did not paint him turned out for parade, ironed and smartened up, but in the worst trim. Syria, the Crimea, Italy, and the East are mingled with the difference of their types and the brightness of their exotic costumes. He had a great love for the catlike, quick-glancing chivalry of Turcos and Sapphis; but especially he loved the cavalry. His "Chasseurs d'Afrique" are part and parcel of their horses, like centaurs, and many of his cavalry groups recall the frieze of the Parthenon. Unfortunately he died at thirty-eight, shortly before the war of 1870, the historians of which were the younger painters, who had grown up in the shadow of Meissonier. [Illustration: DE NEUVILLE. LE BOURGET. (_By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of the copyright._)] [Illustration: DÉTAILLE. SALUT AUX BLESSÉS. (_By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of the copyright._)] The most important of the group, _Alphonse de Neuville_, had looked at war very closely as an officer during the siege of Paris, and in this way he made himself a fine illustrator, who in his anecdotic pictures specially understood the secret of painting powder-smoke and the vehemence of a fusillade. The "Bivouac before Le Bourget" brought him his first success. "The Last Cartridges," "Le Bourget," and "The Graveyard of Saint-Privat" made him a popular master. Neuville is peculiarly the French painter of fighting. He did not know, as Charlet did, the soldier in time of peace, the peasant lad of yesterday who only cares about his stomach and has little taste for martial adventure. His soldier is an elegant and enthusiastic youthful hero. He even neglected the troops of the line; his preference was for the Chasseur, whose cap is stuck jauntily on his head and whose trousers fall better. He loved the plumes, the high boots of the officers, the sword-knots, canes, and eye-glasses. Everything received grace from his dexterous hand; he even saw in the trooper a gallant and ornamental _bibelot_, which he painted with chivalrous verve. The pictures of Aimé Morot, the painter of "The Charge of the Cuirassiers," possibly smell most of powder. Neuville's frequently over-praised rival, Meissonier's favourite pupil, _Edouard Détaille_, after he had started with pretty little costume pictures from the _Directoire_ period, went further on the way of his teacher with less laboriousness and more lightness, with less calculation and more sincerity. The best of his works was "Salut aux Blessés"--the representation of a troop of wounded Prussian officers and soldiers on a country road, passing a French general and his staff, who with graceful chivalry lift their caps and salute the wounded men. Détaille's great pictures, such as "The Presentation of the Colours," and his panoramas were as accurate as they were tedious and arid, although they are far superior to most of the efforts which the Germans made to depict scenes from the war of 1870. [Illustration: _Soldan, Nürnberg._ ALBRECHT ADAM AND HIS SONS.] In Germany the great period of the wars of liberation first inspired a group of painters with the courage to enter the province of battle-painting, which had been so much despised by their classical colleagues. Germany had been turned into a great camp. Prussian, French, Austrian, Russian, and Bavarian troops passed in succession through the towns and villages: long trains of cannon and transport waggons came in their wake, and friends and foes were billeted amongst the inhabitants; the Napoleonic epoch was enacted. Such scenes followed each other like the gay slides in a magic lantern, and once more gave to some among the younger generation eyes for the outer world. There was awakened in them the capacity for receiving impressions of reality and transferring them swiftly to paper. Two hundred years before, the emancipation of Dutch art from the Italian house of bondage had been accomplished in precisely the same fashion. The Dutch struggle for freedom and the Thirty Years' War had filled Holland with numbers of soldiery. The doings of these mercenaries, daily enacted before them in rich costume and with manifold brightness, riveted the pictorial feeling of artists. Echoes of war, fighting scenes, skirmishes and tumult, the incidents of camp life, arming, billeting, and marauding episodes are the first independent products of the Dutch school. Then the more peaceable doings of soldiers are represented. At Haarlem, in the neighbourhood of Frans Hals, were assembled the painters of social pieces, as they are called; pieces in which soldiers, bold and rollicking officers, make merry with gay maidens at wine and play and love. From thence the artist came to the portrayal of a peasantry passing their time in the same rough, free and easy life, and thence onward to the representation of society in towns. [Illustration: ADAM. A STABLE IN TOWN.] German painting in the nineteenth century took the same road. Eighty years ago foreign troops, and the extravagantly "picturesque and often ragged uniforms of the Republican army, the characteristic and often wild physiognomies of the French soldiers," gave artists their first fresh and variously hued impressions. Painters of military subjects make their studies, not in the antiquity class of the academy, but upon the parade-ground and in the camp. Later, when the warlike times were over, they passed from the portrayal of soldiers to that of rustics; and so they laid the foundation on which future artists built. [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ HESS. THE RECEPTION OF KING OTTO IN NAUPLIA.] In Berlin Franz Krüger and in Munich Albrecht Adam and Peter Hess were figures of individual character, belonging to the spiritual family of Chodowiecki and Gottfried Schadow; and, entirely undisturbed by classical theories or romantic reverie, they penetrated the life around them with a clear and sharp glance. They lacked, indeed, the temperament to comprehend either the high poetic tendencies of the old Munich school or the sentimental enthusiasm of the old Düsseldorf. On the other hand, they were unhackneyed artists, facing facts in a completely unprejudiced spirit: entirely self-reliant, they refused to form themselves upon any model derived from the old masters; they had never had a teacher and never enjoyed academic instruction. This naïve straightforwardness makes their painting a half-barbaric product; something which has been allowed to run wild. But in a period of archæological resuscitations, pedantic brooding over the past and slavish imitation of the ancients, it seems, for this very reason, the first independent product of the nineteenth century. As vigorous, matter-of-fact realists they know nothing of more delicate charms, but represented fact for all it was worth and as honestly and conscientiously as was humanly possible. They are lacking in the distinctively pictorial character, but they are absolutely untouched by the Classicism of the epoch. They never dream of putting the uniforms of their warriors upon antique statues. It is this downright honesty that renders their pictures not merely irreplaceable as documents for the history of civilisation, and in spite of their unexampled frigidity, hardness, and gaudiness, lends them, even from the standpoint of art, a certain innovating quality. In a pleasantly written autobiography _Albrecht Adam_ has himself described the drift of historical events which made him a painter of battles. He was a confectioner's apprentice in Nördlingen when, in the year 1800, the marches of the French army began in the neighbourhood. In an inn he began to sketch sergeants and Grenadiers, and went proudly home with the pence that he earned in this way. "Adam, when there's war, I'll take you into the field with me," said an old major-general, who was the purchaser of his first works. That came to pass in 1809, when the Bavarians went with Napoleon against Austria. After a few weeks he was in the thick of raging battle. He saw Napoleon, the Crown-Prince Ludwig, and General Wrede, was present at the battles of Abensberg, Eckmühl, and Wagram, and came to Vienna with his portfolios full of sketches. There his portraits and pictures of the war found favour with the officers, and Eugène Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, took him to Upper Italy and afterwards to Russia. He was an eye-witness of the battles at Borodino and on the Moskwa, and saved himself from the conflagration of Moscow by his courage and determination. A true soldier, he mounted a horse when he was sixty-two years of age to be present on the Italian expedition of the Austrian army under Radetzky in 1848. His battle-pieces are therefore the result of personal experience. When campaigning he led the same life as the soldiers whom he portrayed, and as he proceeded in this portrayal with the objective quietness and fidelity of an historian, his artistic productions are invaluable as documents. Even where he could not draw as an eye-witness he invariably made studies afterwards, endeavouring to collect the most reliable material upon the spot, and preparing it with the utmost conscientiousness. The ground occupied by bodies of troops, the marshalling of them, and the conflict of masses, together with the smallest episodes, are represented with simplicity and reality. In the portrayal of the soldier's life in time of peace he was inexhaustible. Just as vividly could he render horses undergoing the strain of the march and in the tumult of battle as in the stall, the farm-horse of the transport waggon no less than the noble creature ridden for parade. That his colour was sharp and hard, and his pictures therefore devoid of harmony, is to be explained by the helplessness of the age in regard to colouring. Only his last pictures, such as "The Battle on the Moskwa," have a certain harmony of hue; and there is no doubt that this is to be set to the account of his son Franz. After Adam, the father of German battle-painters, _Peter Hess_ made an epoch by the earnestness and actuality of his pictures. He too accompanied General Wrede on the 1813-15 campaigns, and has left behind him exceedingly healthy, sane, and objectively viewed Cossack scenes, bivouacs, and the like, belonging to this period; though in his great pictures he aimed at totality of effect just as little as Adam. Confused by the complexity of his material, he only ventured to single out individual incidents, and then put them together on the canvas after the fashion of a mosaic; and, to make the nature of the action as clear as possible, he assumed as his standpoint the perspective view of a bird. Of course, pictures produced in this way make an effect which is artistically childish, but as the primitive endeavours of modern German art they will keep their place. The best known of his pictures are those inspired by the choice of Prince Otto of Bavaria as King of Greece, especially "The Reception of King Otto in Nauplia," which is to be found in the new Pinakothek in Munich. In spite of its hard, motley, and quite impossible colouring, and its petty pedantry of execution, this is a picture which will not lose its value as an historical source. Vigorous _Franz Krüger_ had been long known in Berlin, by his famous pictures of horses, before the Emperor of Russia in 1829 commissioned him to paint, on a huge canvas, the great parade on the _Opernplatz_ in Berlin, where he had reviewed his regiment of Cuirassiers before the King of Prussia. From that time such parade pictures became Krüger's specialty; especially famous is the great parade of 1839, with the likenesses of those who at the time played a political or literary part in Berlin. In these works he has left a true reflection of old Berlin, and bridged over the chasm between Chodowiecki and Menzel: this is specially the case with his curiously objective water-colour portrait heads. Mention should be made of Karl Steffeck as a pupil of Krüger, and Theodor Horschelt--in addition to Franz Adam--as a pupil of Adam. By _Steffeck_, a healthy, vigorous realist, there are some well-painted portraits of horses, and by _Th. Horschelt_, who in 1858 took part in the fights of the Russians against the Circassians in the Caucasus, there survive some of the spirited and masterly pen-and-ink sketches which he published collectively in his _Memories from the Caucasus_. _Franz Adam_, who first published a collection of lithographs on the Italian campaign of 1848 in connection with Raffet, and in the Italian war of 1859 painted his first masterpiece, a scene from the battle of Solferino, owes his finest successes--although he had taken no part in it--to the war of 1870. In respect of harmony of colouring he is perhaps the finest painter of battle-pieces Germany has produced. As I shall later have no opportunity of doing so, I must mention here the works of _Josef Brandt_, the best of Franz Adam's pupils. They are painted with verve and chivalrous feeling. There is a flame and a sparkle, both in the forms of his warriors and of his horses, in his pictures of old Polish cavalry battles. Everything is aristocratic: the distinction of the grey colouring no less than the ductile drawing with its chivalrous sentiment. In everything there breathes life, vigour, fire, and freshness: the East of Eugène Fromentin translated into Polish. _Heinrich Lang_, a spirited draughtsman, who had the art of seizing the most difficult positions and motions of a horse, embodied the wild tumult of cavalry charges ("The Charge of the Bredow Brigade," "The Charge at Floing," etc.) in rapid pictures of incisive power, though otherwise the heroic deeds of the Germans in 1870 resulted in but few heroic deeds in art. [Illustration]