Lectures On Painting Delivered To The Students Of The Royal Academy — Lecture 4 'David' And His School

LECTURE IV.

“DAVID” AND HIS SCHOOL.

In my last lecture I traced the progress or rather the retrogression of the French school of painting during the eighteenth century.

I explained how, beginning fairly well with such painters as Lebrun, Sebastian, Bourdon, and Rigaud, the school gradually degenerated, and lost all traces of the pure and noble style of Poussin and Lesueur.

Boucher and the numerous tribe of the Vanloos deluged the country with a species of art which, however suitable for decorative purposes in Louis XV galleries and boudoirs, could not be called historical painting, and the false sentiment, conventional color, and meretricious style peculiar to the school (if pardonable in the original founders) became unendurable in their followers and imitators.

It is not surprising, therefore, that almost simultaneously with the great national Revolution, an art revolution should also have occurred.

At the time of _our_ great Revolution, when we set the example of beheading royalty, Cromwell and his Roundheads were antagonistic to all art (at least to all painting), and no revival was possible.

A gloomy Puritanism would tolerate nothing but dull portraiture.

In France, however, the case was different.

Atheism and the worship of the goddess of Reason, though, of course, antagonistic to religious art, were not opposed to pagan or classic painting, and in the interval immediately preceding the establishment of the Empire, art suffered no discouragement.

On the contrary, every thing was done to enlist the services of the best painters toward the glorification of the new régime; and as David, the most able artist of his day, happened to be an enthusiastic student of the antique, it is not surprising that he acquired unlimited influence over the school.

Artists (particularly when they are such men as David) do not spring up, like mushrooms, in a day, and it may surprise some to hear that he was born as early as 1748, and had therefore reached the mature age of forty-four when the Revolution broke out.

He received his artistic education in the atelier of Vien.

That painter, though not free altogether from the mannerism of the period, adhered more closely to nature than did the painters of the Vanloo school.

Vien rose to great eminence under Louis XVI, and held for many years the directorship of the French Academy at Rome.

His pupil, David, having after three unsuccessful attempts at last obtained the prix de Rome, accompanied his master, and it was not till his residence in Rome that he finally and completely emancipated himself from the Vanloo school.

His study from the antique was unremittent.

He drew more than he painted, but the few pictures he executed at this period were the best he ever did.

I know of nothing in the whole range of art more exquisite in arrangement and drawing than the drapery of the woman in his “Belisarius.

” This and several other excellent pictures were bought by Louis XVI, and the Count d’Artois, afterward Charles X, so that David in his best time was any thing but a ferocious revolutionist.

When the terrible time at last came, David appears to have given up his art, and to have joined the party of Robespierre.

His biographer says, “Il se laissa entrainer,” but there is no doubt that he was a willing convert, and his name is associated with some of the most atrocious acts of the Jacobins.

It is possible that, having once connected himself with that sanguinary set, he found he could not draw back, and _must_ be as cruel and ferocious as his colleagues.

It is difficult to believe that a man who had such an exquisite and refined taste for form (and especially the human form) should have taken a pleasure in ordering wholesale executions.

After narrowly escaping the fate of his friend Robespierre, he wisely returned to art and humanity; nor did he ever afterward take any share in the political convulsions of his country.

He was much patronized by the first Napoleon, as the huge official pictures at Versailles amply testify.

Official pictures, particularly during the hideous fashions which marked the Empire, must have been very awkward things to undertake, and David, with all his good qualities, had not the gift of color, which alone could enliven and give interest to such subjects as the crowning of Napoleon and the distribution of the eagles to the troops.

He had, however, _one_ quality in the highest perfection, and that was drawing.

His monochrome cartoon for the great coronation picture is really a wonderful production.

All the figures are completely nude, and it is a pity that his pontiffs, princes, and ambassadors could not be left in the state in which he first drew them from Academy models.

When he came to draw figures in violent action, as in his “Romans and Sabines” and the “Leonidas,” his drawing becomes rather stiff and constrained.

This, coupled with his disagreeable color, makes these pictures odious in the sight of most artists, and to none more odious than to Frenchmen.

But even in these works, if individual portions, heads, arms, and legs, are examined critically, it will be found how thoroughly masterly the drawing is.

There is in his figures no display of anatomy (which display, by the way, generally indicates _ignorance_ rather than knowledge of anatomy), no ugly realism perpetuating the bunions and other deformities of his models; and, on the other hand, none of that fictitious decorative style of drawing which is so characteristic of Louis XV painters.

David was a very great draughtsman, not exactly in the sense in which M. Angelo is considered a great draughtsman.

He was singularly deficient in imagination, in power of grouping, and in poetic feeling; but probably no man ever lived who could paint so good an Academy figure.

It may also be said of him, that he was not only a great master of drawing, but a great drawing-master.

Such a man was sadly wanted after the demoralization of eighteenth century art; and, notwithstanding the jeers of the modern realists, I maintain that the pre-eminence of the French historical painters over those of other nations during the better part of this century is entirely due to old David and his teaching.

Amongst his actual pupils may be mentioned Girodet, Drouais, Gros, Gérard, and Ingres; but his influence extended far beyond the walls of his atélier, and it is no exaggeration to say that the correct and refined though manly style of drawing inaugurated by David permeated the whole French school.

Of the above-mentioned pupils Drouais was undoubtedly the most promising.

His picture of the “Canaanitish Woman,” which is now at the Louvre, was his “prix de Rome” work, corresponding to our gold-medal pictures, and it certainly is a most remarkable work for a young man.

It has very little of the stiff academic manner about it.

Moreover, there is a feeling for color in it which is very rare in the David school.

Unfortunately Drouais died in his twenty-fifth year, and France lost a man who fairly promised to be one of the greatest painters she ever had.

Gérard followed pretty closely in the footsteps of his master.

His touch, however, was softer, and his color less unpleasant.

Moreover, he abandoned Greek and Roman warriors, and painted a great variety of more pleasing subjects, from “Cupid and Psyche” down to the “Entry of Henry IV into Paris.

” Pierre Guérin was another artist of this group, who, although not a pupil of David, adopted his style completely.

Guérin was an excellent draughtsman, but his taste in composition was theatrical, and in almost all his pictures his figures have a stagey look, as if they were on the boards of the Théatre Français, declaiming Racine.

His picture of “Phèdre and Hyppolite” is a good example of this histrionic tendency.

Both Gérard and Guérin were content to emulate not only the fine drawing of the master, but his false, unpleasant color, and their figures have, like David’s, rather the appearance of painted statues.

Moreover, there is a degree of effeminacy about such pictures as the “Cupid and Psyche” of Gérard, and the “Dido and Æneas” of Guérin which we never find in old David’s work.

Neither of these painters appears to me to have in any way improved on the style of their master, whereas Girodet, Gros, and Ingres grafted on to the correct drawing of David qualities of their own.

Girodet emancipated himself completely from the stiff academic attitudes which David gave to his figures when he wanted to depict action.

The scene from the “Deluge” (which every one who has been to the Louvre must have seen) is outrageously artificial; nevertheless, supposing it possible that a family of antediluvians should have performed the acrobatic feat here depicted, the action in all the figures is perfectly true.

Moreover, there is a freedom and spirit about the attitudes which we do not find in David’s work.

This picture competed with David’s “Romans and Sabines” for the grand decennial prize given in 1810, and the judges very justly gave the prize to Girodet.

In the “Endymion” and the “Burial of Atala,” both at the Louvre, Girodet deserted the David system of coloring and adopted a color suitable to the subjects, which to my thinking is very impressive and poetic.

The dead Atala is a most lovely creation, perfect in every way.

Indeed, I consider it to be the _chef-d’œuvre_ of the whole school.

Girodet’s talent for composition was very great.

He illustrated Virgil, Anacreon, Racine, and other poets with exquisite taste and skill.

I have seen some of these illustrations.

They are more picturesque than Flaxman’s, and much more refined in drawing.

Girodet was himself a poet of no mean order, and his translations from the Greek classics proves him to have been an accomplished scholar.

I should have much liked to have illustrated what I have been saying about these really great artists with a few engravings from their works.

When I was a student in Paris one might have picked up any number of them from the portfolios on the quays, but now they are extremely scarce.

The school has long since gone out of fashion in France, and in England it never was in fashion.

Before proceeding to speak of Gros, Ingres, and Granet, who, although pupils of David, departed gradually from their master’s style, I should like to notice two painters, Prudhon and Géricault, whose art was altogether antagonistic to the stiff classicism of the period.

The former went to Rome in 1782, and, unlike his countrymen, devoted his time to the study of the old masters instead of adhering to nature and the antique.

There is a pretty and true anecdote connected with this journey to Rome, which I should like to tell you.

Whilst competing for the prix de Rome, one of his fellow-competitors was taken ill and was obliged to give up.

Prudhon, out of compassion for the poor fellow, who had overworked himself, left his own picture and finished his rival’s in such a style that he gained him the prize.

The successful candidate was, however, not to be outdone in generosity, so he told the whole story to the judges, assuring them that had it not been for Prudhon’s assistance, his picture would by no means have been the best.

Upon hearing this, the judges revised their decision, and declared Prudhon to be the victor.

I am not aware whether so much generosity on the one hand, and modesty on the other, is common amongst prize candidates and gold medallists.

I

fancy it is the exception rather than the rule, and this must be my excuse for relating the story.

Prudhon’s pictures are very inferior to his small drawings.

He never was a thorough draughtsman like his contemporaries, and when he attempted life-size figures, the form becomes incorrect and very vague.

His favorite masters appear to have been Correggio and Andrea del Sarto, but he exaggerated their softness until his figures lost all texture and appeared to be made of cotton wool.

In aiming at breadth, he again overshot the mark.

Simplicity is a very desirable quality, and one which is rarely found in our Academy schools, but at the same time, when carried to such extremes as in Prudhon’s “Crucifixion” it degenerates into mannerism.

Of his small drawings I cannot speak too highly.

They are greatly admired in France, but little known in England.

The other eccentric nonconformist to the David tradition, namely, Géricault, is much better known in England than Prudhon.

His famous picture of the “Medusa Raft” was not liked when first exhibited in Paris.

It was brought over to London, where it was much more appreciated.

On its return to Paris, M. de Forbin, the director of the national collection, in vain urged the government to purchase it.

It was disliked by Louis XVIII’s ministers, and it took M. de Forbin three years to persuade them to grant £200 for its purchase.

After this it suddenly rose to great popularity, which went on increasing until my student days, when it was universally acknowledged to be the _chef-d’œuvre_ of the modern French school.

It is no doubt a fine, vigorous work, full of action and energy, but my enthusiasm was always rather cold compared to that of my fellow-students.

Its realism appears to me to lie more in the execution than in the conception.

It is too melodramatic to be true.

We admire the technical qualities of the painting, the vigorous drawing, and the appropriate, if somewhat sombre, color, but somehow we feel that the _mise en scène_ lacks truth, that the painter has thought more about displaying his own power than realizing the dreadful scene he had to depict.

Compared with the artificial, classical works of David, this picture is nature itself; but measured by the modern standard of pictorial truth, it must be confessed that it is not quite satisfactory.

The sea ought surely in such a subject to play an important part.

We miss altogether the long swell which always follows a storm, and the helpless condition of a rude raft as it plunges and rises on the big waves.

Géricault’s single wave, which threatens to break over the raft, is a pasteboard, theatrical one, which need cause no alarm.

To criticise the setting of the sail from a nautical point of view would be too matter-of-fact; but I cannot help thinking that if the canvas had been listlessly flapping, and consequently useless as a sail, the picture would have been truer, and therefore more touching.

Géricault’s other works in the Louvre are rather gigantic sketches than pictures.

They all evince great power and facility, but the action is generally unnecessarily violent, and the relative proportion between man and horse not properly observed.

In spite of his faults, Géricault was, however, a very great artist, and may justly be considered as the founder of the _école romantique_, which subsequently developed itself so greatly in France.

We now come to Gros, who, although originally a pupil of David, abandoned in after-life the style of his master.

Gros spent a good deal of his youth in Italy, and having pleased Buonaparte by a picture representing the battle of the Bridge of Arcola, the young general attached him to his staff, and thus fixed the painter’s career.

Every one who has been to Paris knows the gigantic pictures commemorative of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, the “Pestiferés de Jaffa,” the “Battaille des Pyramides,” and last, though not least, the “Battaille d’Aboukir.

” This picture may be accepted as the _chef-d’œuvre_ of that noble style of battle-painting which is intermediate between the academic manner of David and the thoroughly naturalistic style of modern battle-painters.

The composition of this picture has always struck me as being most masterly, and I strongly recommend all students to study the subtle manner in which the lines of the groups and the masses of light and shade are made to express the action, quite independent of the individual attitudes.

Murat, who is charging at the head of the French cavalry, looks like the forerunner of a great wave which is about to break over the unfortunate Turks, and the whole composition, viewed as a composition, is a masterpiece.

The relative proportions of the figures are not properly observed, but the spirit and skill displayed are so great that this fault passes almost unnoticed.

I do not wish to underrate the battle-pieces of H. Vernet, Bellanger, and Raffet, and I admire exceedingly those of De Neuville, but I must say that the art which could produce on canvas such an epic poem as this “Battaille d’Aboukir” is of a higher quality; and when we recollect that the figures are considerably larger than life, our respect and admiration for old Gros must be proportionately increased.

When considerably past fifty, Gros went to Brussels to visit his old master, David, who was living there in exile, and for whom he had always entertained the greatest affection.

Unfortunately for Gros, he allowed himself to be persuaded by the old man to give up painting modern battles, and to go back to the Greeks and Romans.

A few attempts in this direction, made by Gros on his return to Paris, were so severely criticised, and greeted with such roars of laughter, that poor Gros drowned himself from sheer vexation.

A

coroner’s jury would have justly returned a verdict of temporary insanity, for previous to his suicide Gros had shown many symptoms of mental aberration independent of his egregiously bad pictures.

His rival Ingres survived him for thirty years.

This painter (also a pupil of David) departed from the master’s style, but in quite a different direction to that taken by Gros.

Slow, laborious, and fastidious, he was a long time before gaining the front rank of French painters, which, however, when once gained he kept for forty years.

He largely modified the David interpretation of the antique by studying the works of Raffaelle, and importing into his own much of the simplicity, dignity, and grace which characterize the best works of the great Roman painter.

He deserves, however, more honor as the founder of a school than as a great painter.

He may be said to have supplemented the schooling in draughtsmanship which the French artists got under David.

I can name but one _very_ great artist amongst his pupils, namely, Flandrin, but there is no doubt that his severe and dignified style influenced, perhaps unconsciously, most of his younger contemporaries.

My own master, P. Delaroche, was eclectic in his art; that is, he endeavored to unite the spirit and life of Gros with the severe drawing of Ingres.

He was not always very successful in the attempt, but fortunately he had qualities of his own which will rescue his fame from the fate which attends that of most eclectic artists.

These qualities were great dramatic power and exquisite taste in the arrangement of his figures.

I can bear witness to the care he bestowed on composition, never grudging time or labor if he could in any way improve the action of his figures or the outline of his groups.

I have known him to efface no less than seventeen finished figures during the progress of his great mural painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts; thus destroying at least two months’ work, simply because he was dissatisfied with the grouping.

His atelier was about equally divided between the Ingrests and the partisans of the _école romantique_, but although a few men of extreme views would often quarrel over the respective merits of Ingres and Delacroix, the great majority were much better employed in endeavoring to draw and paint the model they had before them.

Some of Ingres’ portraits are fine works of art, but they want life.

Old David’s portrait of “Pius VII” is far better than Ingres’ best.

I

consider the _chef-d’œvre_ of Ingres to be the painting which he executed for one of the ceilings of the Louvre, representing the “Apotheosis of Homer.

” This work has been removed to where it can be seen more comfortably, but when _in situ_ it looked very noble and dignified, especially when contrasted with the trashy commonplace _plafonds_ of the neighboring rooms.

Many a young student has gazed with admiration at this work until he got a pain in his neck, and it is the powerful influence for good which the “Apotheosis of Homer” had on the then rising generation which constitutes Ingres’ best claim to the celebrity he enjoyed during a long life.

Surprise has been recently expressed at Ingres’ prejudice against anatomy.

It is perfectly true that he disliked the look of a skeleton, and small blame to him, but I don’t think he was opposed to any of the students consulting the anatomical figure.

He had never learned any thing about either bones or muscles himself, and therefore could not see any benefit to be derived from the study.

His contempt for anatomy as an adjunct to art was shared by a good many other French masters, nor can I much wonder at it when I recollect the courses of anatomy we used to attend.

A professor from the Ecole de Médecine would give a dozen dry lectures on the bones and muscles, just as if he were addressing a lot of medical students who would be called upon in after years to perform difficult surgical operations.

What would interest us, and be of use to us as artists, was never mentioned.

I don’t know whether a more artistic kind of anatomy is now taught in Paris; if not, I sympathize greatly with the students who attend the lectures.

Another pupil of David’s who for a few years made a great sensation was Leopold Robert, the painter of “The Pêcheurs de l’Adriatique,” “The Moissonneurs,” and similar scenes of Italian peasant life.

Two of these pictures are now hung in the Louvre, and it is marvellous to me how they could ever have been much admired by artists.

I am not surprised at their popularity with the general public, for they made a very nice pair of engravings, and there is a beauty about the women which is captivating at first sight; but the figures are all posing, as if for a photographic group, and these once celebrated pictures _now_ appear to me rather contemptible.

L.

Robert (like Gros) committed suicide, and it was perhaps on this account that the two men used often to be compared together, sometimes (I am ashamed to say) to the disadvantage of Gros.

Granet is the last artist I shall mention who actually studied in David’s atelier.

He never attempted the heroic style like Girodet, Guérin, and many others, nor did he endeavor, like Leopold Robert, to idealize Italian fishermen and peasants.

He began with architectural interiors, and during a long life never changed his style.

His figures, generally of medium or small size, are remarkably well drawn.

Their action is perfectly natural, and they are always in their right places.

Few artists ever lived whose work was more thorough and faultless than old Granet’s. An excellent colorist, a sound draughtsman, and by no means deficient in poetic feeling, he had but one blemish, and that was the habit of using bad materials.

I remember his large picture of the Mass at Assisi soon after it was painted.

The dim but glowing light of the church was admirably rendered, but now, alas!

the picture has become so black that it is difficult to make out the figures.

I believe he was in the habit of using dark-red grounds for his pictures, and this no doubt accounts for their so rapidly losing their brilliancy.

Granet was a native of Aix, near Marseilles, and in his old age returned to his native town, but used to contribute regularly to the annual exhibition in Paris; and his pictures were always admired, not only by the public, but by all the young artists, with whom he was a great favorite.

I trust I have shown you that David, whatever we may think of his pictures, was at any rate a successful schoolmaster, or what the French call a _chef d’école_, and his influence continued to be felt very perceptibly in the second generation.

Abel de Pujol, Leon Coignet, Delaroche, Couture, Flandrin, Alaux, etc. , were all pupils either of Guérin, Ingres, or Gros, and they all preserved the David traditions of sound and careful drawing.

Indeed, Flandrin carried the noble draughtsmanship of his master Ingres to such perfection that it seems to me impossible to advance any farther in this direction.

The two great pictorial heretics of this period were Delacroix and Decamps.

The former learned his art under Guérin, and the latter under A.

de Pujol, but in their case the maxim about “training up a child in the way he should go” certainly did not hold good, for both these great artists threw the time-honored atelier traditions overboard, and proceeded on diametrically opposed principles.

Being both great colorists, and both unusually gifted with true artistic feeling, they succeeded at last in rivalling, if not eclipsing, the fame of their more orthodox contemporaries.

With Delacroix, especially, the battle was a long one, and I well remember his “Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople” (perhaps the finest picture he ever painted) being rejected at the Salon, and in the following year being hung at the top of the gallery.

Decamps was much more careful about his drawing than Delacroix, and his pictures being always small, he did not give so much offence to “Ces Messieurs de l’Institût. ” If I were addressing a French audience I should certainly not think of mentioning Ary Schäffer; but as in England he enjoys a kind of reputation, a few words about him may not be out of place.

In the early part of his career he followed in the track of Delacroix, and the pictures he painted at this time show a great feeling for color.

All at once (after achieving considerable success in this style) he went about on the other tack, gave up color, and took to imitating Ingres.

He was always a poor draughtsman.

His “Paolo and Francesco,” and many of his best-known religious pictures, are wretchedly drawn, but there is a pretension to purity of style about them which takes people in.

It is not many years ago since Schäffer, on the strength of these sentimental works of art, was considered in England to be the first of French painters.

If we proceed to my own time, which I may call the third generation from David, we find decidedly less of that precision of drawing for which the French school was famous.

There are, of course, exceptions, and one or two very notable ones, but the number of weak draughtsmen amongst painters of mature years has certainly increased.

It is, however, when we come to consider the pictures of the younger generation that we find how very much the impulse given by David to correctness and refinement of drawing has exhausted itself.

French literature (speaking of course generally) is either mawkishly sentimental or brutally realistic, and these unpleasant characteristics seem to be reflected in the painting of many of their popular artists.

Eccentricity appears now to be the surest road to fame.

Formerly it required a great deal of talent to leave successfully the beaten track, but now the eccentric painter finds himself famous, not in spite of his grotesque peculiarities, but on account of them.

I consider the modern French school to be in a very critical state.

They have acquired color, but at too great a sacrifice.

Beauty and dignity of form, noble composition, and all the higher qualities of art, become rarer every year, and will, if the present downward tendency continue, soon be extinct.

Of course I am speaking of historical painting, either sacred or profane; of the art, in short, of Girodet, Géricault, Gros, Ingres, and Flandrin; and I think it will be generally allowed that no school can hold its place in the art-world which allows the noblest branch of the profession to wither and decay.

I will now proceed to consider the influence of David on other European schools.

This influence was very marked in Italy, where an uneasy feeling that their once famous school had sunk very low had prevailed for some time.

Raphael Mengs was too feeble, and Pompeo Battoni too meretricious, a painter to regenerate Italian art, but when David appeared, an effort was made.

The antique was again studied, the pernicious practice of imitating the old masters was abandoned, and Nature, the fountainhead of all art, was more conscientiously imitated.

David’s example thus produced, amongst others, Benvenuto and Camuccini, both of whom were infinitely greater painters than had appeared in Italy for a century.

Unfortunately, the revival so successfully begun was suffered to die out.

The race of copyists became again in the ascendant, and no doubt reaped a rich harvest when, after the great Napoleonic wars, the Continent was overrun by wealthy dilettanti anxious to obtain (if not a genuine Caracci or Guido) at least a good imitation of one.

The mania for collecting grimy old masters at last died out, and considering the shameless way in which the purchasers were imposed upon, it is a wonder that it lasted so long.

When, however, this happy event took place, and a healthier taste became fashionable, Italian artists could not supply the demand.

Small landscapes and pretty little costume pictures were painted in abundance, but for Biblical or historical art the public had to turn to the foreigner, to Overbeck or Cornelius.

Things are not quite so bad in Italy at the present day, but the school is very insignificant as compared with those of France, Belgium, England, and Germany.

In Germany the great art-revival began between 1810 and 1820. Cornelius and Overbeck, the two founders of the modern German school of historical painting, can neither of them be included among the followers of David, and yet it is not improbable that had the French school remained as it was under Boucher and Vanloo, Germany would also have been content to go on in the vicious routine of the eighteenth century.

David, therefore, though not the progenitor, may have been the indirect cause of the modern German school.

Winkleman’s laborious researches, and the flood of light he threw on classical art and antiquities, had fully prepared the way for a revival; and in Cornelius, Germany found a man after her own heart.

In 1825, when he was still young, he was made Director of the Academy at Munich, and commenced the gigantic series of mural paintings with which his name will always be associated.

He had a great number of scholars, and his manner is more or less perceptible in all their works.

It is a manner I never _did_ like, and probably never shall.

The effort made by the artist is too evident, and all the personages seem to be acting a part.

This is particularly noticeable in Kaulbach’s and Piloty’s large compositions.

These works were greatly admired in Germany, and are so still, but I believe their popularity is on the wane.

As for Overbeck, he never could have become the founder of a durable school.

Ascetic, exclusive, and narrow in his art views, the only charm of his pictures is indissolubly connected with the personal character of the painter.

His admiration for Perugino and the Umbrian school was genuine and unbounded.

He abhorred Titian and loathed Correggio.

With such ideas on art he may justly be called an anachronism, and it will be easily understood that however leniently and even favorably we may judge the work of an enthusiast like Overbeck, we should not be disposed to extend the same leniency to his imitators.

We will now examine what influence the great classical revival, inaugurated by David, had on British art.

I think it must be allowed that this influence (if it ever existed at all) was very slight.

Our artists were content to tread in the path pointed out to them by Sir J. Reynolds, and to study with more or less intelligence the old masters.

Their knowledge of the human form was very imperfect, and there were at that time no large ateliers where they could acquire such knowledge.

The Continent was closed to them, and they were therefore debarred from seeing the works of David, Girodet, Guérin, and Gérard.

It is probable, too, that even had they been able to visit the Paris galleries occasionally, they would have been greatly disgusted; for it must be confessed that the later works of David are singularly repellent to an eye educated on Titian and Rubens.

In England, particularly during the reign of George III, there was no demand for large figure subjects.

The government did nothing for historical art.

The churches were ugly square boxes with whitewashed walls, sometimes be-plastered with black or white marble commemoration tablets, but in which paintings were tabooed.

Private individuals could not, of course, find room in their houses for large pictures; so, as a natural consequence, the English school was forced into another direction, and we find accordingly the best and ablest artists of this period amongst the portrait and landscape painters.

A little of old David’s precision of drawing would not have hurt some of them, but landscape art depends more on color and effect than on fine perceptions of form, and careful study of the antique is obviously unnecessary to a man whose mission it is to paint mountains and trees, storm and sunshine.

Of the few artists who executed large figure pictures at this time I shall say very little, for the simple reason that there is very little to say.

We all know Benjamin West’s pictures, and are fully aware of their tameness and insipidity.

I think that West is a striking example of a man who succeeded in impressing his character on his work.

Highly respectable, prosaic, unimaginative, and rather goody, we find all these characteristics reproduced in his pictures, and yet many of these pictures, particularly “Death on the Pale Horse,” created a perfect furore at the time, and the prices the artist got for his works would be considered high even at the present day.

Hilton was undoubtedly the best of the very few artists who endeavored to revive large historical painting in England.

He was at any rate a good draughtsman and an accomplished painter, but his too palpable imitation of the old masters will always prevent his taking rank with such men as Girodet, Géricault, or Gros.

Fuseli, with all his bombast and affectation of anatomical knowledge, showed occasionally that he possessed real genius.

I know nothing finer in the whole English school than his ghost scene of “Hamlet.

” The ghost is not one of those artificial bogies, so common in the works of Blake and Flaxman, but a right royal ghost, who stalks with gigantic strides across the stage.

Fuseli was a very uneven painter.

His pictures are generally ludicrous, but sometimes show real talent.

He wanted ballast, and if West could have spared him a few tons of lead, both painters would have been greatly benefited.

My present lecture is on David and his school, and therefore I might have omitted altogether the contemporary English painters.

However, as I have mentioned some, I should be sorry to omit from my very short list the name of Stothard.

Of all the English figure-painters of this period, Stothard had the greatest feeling for composition.

With a little more power and correctness in his drawing, he would have been an English Prudhon.

Even with all his feebleness of draughtsmanship he is to me always attractive.

There is so much _bonhomie_ about his work, such an absence of pretence and humbug, and so evident a desire always to do his best, that although we cannot close our eyes to his shortcomings, we may well condone them for the sake of the good honest feeling which pervades almost all his compositions.

I prefer to pass unnoticed one or two aspirants to high art, who in the first half of the present century were thought a good deal of.

Some people still believe in them, but as I never did, I would, rather say nothing about them, particularly as their work is foreign to the subject of my lecture.

It is pleasant to turn from a kind of art with which I have no sympathy, to more recent efforts, and to be able to speak more favorably of English historical painting before closing my lecture.

We have had in Etty a colorist both brilliant and original; a painter who proved that it was quite possible to excel in color without imitating either the Venetians or Rubens; and in Dyce a draughtsman of the most severe and refined kind, a master of composition, and a most thorough artist.

I have often heard it remarked that Dyce’s mural paintings are very Germanic in style, but to my thinking there is but the slightest likeness to any work of the Munich or Dusseldorf masters.

His figures never have the labored self-conscious action which is so characteristic of the school of Cornelius.

Of course, frescoes representing King Arthur and his knights must have a sort of family resemblance to illustrations of the Niebelungen legends, but the resemblance is merely superficial.

A

closer comparison will prove how much more true, and therefore more dramatic, is the action in Dyce’s figures.

There is an old adage which tells us that “knowledge is power,” but in art this hardly holds good.

You may have plenty of knowledge and yet not have power; though, on the other hand, you can hardly have true power without knowledge.

Dyce had both in an eminent degree, whereas Schadow, Kaulbach, Piloty, and most of the great German artists, though decidedly learned painters, had not the power of turning their learning to good account.

It is obvious that I cannot continue my remarks down to the present time, but I may be allowed to express an opinion that (in this Academy at least) feeble mysticism or blatant quackery is no longer associated with high art.

We have, of course, our faults, but history-painters do not, as formerly, lag hopelessly behind their colleagues in genre, portrait, and landscape art.

This happy result is entirely due to a return to old David’s system of teaching; namely, to a diligent study of the antique, supplemented by a long course of drawing from nature.

Such an excellent competition as we recently had for the gold medal would have been simply impossible fifty years ago.

I don’t want to flatter the rising generation, nor to tell them that they have twice as much talent as their fathers, and ten times as much as their grandfathers; but what I wish to point out is, that by patient study and diligent work a much higher result can be obtained than by spasmodic effort or crazy enthusiasm.