The Rise Of French Painting

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Side by side with these aristocratic painters whose art reflected the temper of the French Court, we find now and then an artist of genius who expresses the life and feelings of the people. The greatest of these was Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin (1699-1779), who was also born in Paris. Though he worked for a time under the Court painter Van Loo at Fontaineblueau, and was elected a member of the Academy in 1728, Chardin was never a favorite with the nobles of France, nor did he make any effort to pander to their taste. His pictures, like those of his predecessors the brothers Le Nain, were ‘tainted with democracy,’ and the intense humanity of Chardin links him to his great contemporary on the other side of the Channel, William Hogarth.

Though Chardin, as Lady Dilke once said, ‘treated subjects of the humblest and most unpretentious class, he brought to their rendering, not only deep feeling and a penetration which divines the innermost truths of the simplest forms of life, but a perfection of workmanship by which everything he handled was clothed with beauty.’

Like the Persian poet, Chardin could compose a song about a loaf of bread and a glass of red wine—as his beautiful still-life in the National Gallery, London, proved—while ‘The Pancake Maker’ shows what beauty and tenderness he could find in the kitchen.

Amid all the artificiality of the gaudy Court of Versailles, Chardin stands out as the supreme interpreter of the sweetness and sane beauty of domesticity. He was a poet with the unspoilt heart of a child who could reveal to us the loveliness in the common things of life.

How strong a character Chardin must have been to resist the current of the time and adhere unswervingly to his simple democratic ideals we realize when we contemplate the talent and career of Jean Honoré Fragnonard (1732-1806), who was for a time his pupil. We have only to look at Fragonard’s charming domestic scene, ‘The Happy Mother,’ in the National Gallery, London, to see that this artist also might have been a painter of the people. He shows us here the home of a blacksmith, whose forge is seen in the background, while in the center the young mother with her three children sits at a table, and beyond another woman rocks a cradle.

For good or ill Fragonard chose another path, and after he had gained from Chardin a knowledge of sound craftsmanship which he never afterwards lost, he chose a more fashionable master and became the pupil of Boucher. In 1752, at the age of twenty, he won the Prix de Rome, and in 1756 he went for four years to Italy, where he made a particular study of the decorative paintings of ‘The Last of the Venetian,’ namely, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1769). He returned to Paris in 1761 and almost immediately became a favorite with the French nobility.

In Fragonard, wrote Lady Dilke, ‘Boucher found his true heir. The style of Court fashions and customs, highly artificial even in the affectation of nature and simplicity, the temper of society, purely sensual in spite of pretensions to sentiment, gave birth to innumerable fictions which took their place in the commerce of ordinary life. Eternal youth, perpetual pleasure, and all the wanton graces, their insincere airs masked by a voluptuous charm, came into seeming—a bright deceitful vision which cheated and allured all eyes....The hours float by in waves of laughter, and the scent of flowers which breathe of endless summer fills the air. Existence in the gardens of Fragonard is pleasure; its penalties and pains are ignored, just as sickness and sorrow were then ignored in actual life.’

Highly typical of the period and of the manner in which Fragonard catered for the taste of his patrons is his picture ‘The Swing’, painted to order and exhibiting all the characteristics which Lady Dilke has so brilliantly analyzed in the passage quoted. The workmanship is beautiful, the drawing and color are alike charming, but these displays of so-called ‘gallantry’ are detestable to many people, and through it all we are conscious of the insincerity of a clever and highly gifted painter.

Pictures which Fragonard painted purely to please himself, like ‘The Happy Mother’ and the ‘The Lady Carving her Name,’ a tiny canvas which cost Lord Hertford £1400 in 1865, are less typical of Fragonard, but often pleasanter to gaze upon than his commissions and elaborate decorations. But even in these subjects Fragonard is always frolicsome and playful where Chardin was serious and earnest, and it is impossible to escape the conclusion that Fragonard’s was essentially a shallow nature. For all his cleverness he paid the penalty of his insincerity; he outlived his popularity and ultimately died in dire poverty. In 1806 the times had changed; Napoleon and the French Revolution had swept away the frivolities of Versailles.

The Rise Of French Painting (continued)