by Will Durant
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was the Rousseau and Diderot of the brush, who rosied his colors with sentiment, and made himself the Apelles of the bourgeoisie. Sentiment is happier than sophistication, and not as shallow; we must forgive Greuze for seeing and painting the pleasant sides of life, for loving the gay gambol of children, the fragile innocence of pretty girls, and the modest contentment of middle-class homes. Without Greuze and Chardin we might have supposed that all France was decadent and corrupt, that Du Barry was its model, that Venus and Mars were its only gods. But it was the nobles who were decadent, it was Louis XV who was corrupt; and it was the aristocracy and the monarchy that fell in the Revolution. The masses of the people—excepting the rural and city mobs—retained the virtues that save a nation, and Greuze portrayed them. Diderot hailed Chardin and Greuze, not Boucher and Fragonard, as the voice and health of France.
We have the usual stories about the artist’s youth: he wanted to draw; his father forbade it as a cover for idleness; the boy crept from his bed at night to draw pictures; the father, coming upon one, relented, and sent him to study with an artist in Lyons. Jean-Baptiste was not long satisfied with what he could learn there; he made his way to Paris. He worked for some time in the poverty that tests young talent. He had good reason later to show the better side of men, for, like most of us, he found much kindness mingled with the busy inattentiveness of the world. About 1754 an art collector, La Live de Jully, bought Greuze’s Père de Famille (Diderot used the same title for his second play, 1758), and encouraged him to persevere. The art instructor of the royal family, seeing a picture by Greuze, recommended him as a candidate for the Academy. But every candidate was expected to present, within six months, a painting of some scene in history. Such “histories” were not in Greuze’s line; he let his candidacy drop, and accepted the offer of Abbé Gougenot to finance his trip to Rome (1755).
He was now thirty, and must long since have felt the magnetism of woman; is not half of art a by-product of that irresistible force? He experienced it in Rome to the point of agony. He was engaged to teach drawing to Laetitia, daughter of a duke; she was in the full bloom of youth; what could he do but fall in love? And he was handsome, with curly hair and cheerful, ruddy face; Fragonard, his fellow student, called him an “amorous cherub”; see in the Louvre his self-portrait in old age, and imagine him at thirty; inevitably Laetitia, with blood that could not count ducats, played Héloïse to his Abélard, surgery omitted. He took no advantage of her. She proposed marriage; he longed for her, but realized that the marriage of a poor artist with the heiress of a duke would soon be a tragedy for the girl; and, uncertain of his self-control, he resolved not to see her again. She fell ill; he visited and comforted her, but returned to his resolution. We are assured that for three months he lay in bed with fever and frequent delirium.56 In 1756 he returned to Paris, quite untouched by classic art or the neoclassical revival.
“A few days after my arrival in Paris,” he tells us, “I happened to be passing, I know not by what fatality, down the Rue Saint-Jacques, when I noticed Mlle. Babuti at her counter.”57 Gabrielle Babuti worked in a bookshop; Diderot had bought her books and “loved her well” (his words) some years before. Now (1756-57) she was “over thirty years old” (Greuze’s account), and feared spinsterhood; she found Jean-Baptiste not affluent but delectable; after he had paid her a few visits she asked him, “Monsieur Greuze, would you marry me if I were willing?” Like any decent Frenchman he replied, “Mademoiselle, would not any man be too happy to spend his life with such a charming woman as you are?” He thought no more of it, but she let the neighborhood understand that he was her betrothed. He had not the heart to contradict her; he married her, and for seven years they were reasonably happy. She had a luscious beauty, and willingly served as his model in many poses that revealed nothing but suggested all. She gave him in those years three children; two survived and inspired his art.
The world knows him for his pictures of children. We must not expect here the supreme excellence of Velázquez’ Don Balthasar Carlos58 or Vandyck’s James II as a Boy;59 and we are sometimes repelled, in Greuze’s girls, by an exaggerated and weepy sentiment, as in the Berlin Portrait of a Maiden; but why should we reject the curls and rosy cheeks and wistful-trustful eyes of Innocence, 60 or the unrouged simplicity of A Young Peasant Girl?61 There is no pose in the Boy with a Lesson Book;62 it is any lad weary of a task seemingly irrelevant to life. Of 133 extant pictures by Greuze, thirty-six are of girls. Johann Georg Wille, a German engraver living in Paris, bought as many as he could of these childhood idealizations, and “held them more precious than the finest paintings of the period.”63 Greuze repaid the compliment by portraying the unprepossessing Saxon as an exemplar of virility. As these girls grow up in Greuze’s art they become more artificial; La Laitière (The Milkmaid)64 is all dressed up as if for a ball, and the lass of La Cruche Cassée (The Broken Pitcher)65 has no excuse (except beauty) for exposing a nipple on her way from the well. But in a portrait of Sophie Arnould66 the feathered hat, saucy pose, and carmine lips seem all in character.
Greuze was a minor Chardin touched with Boucher; a man honestly admiring virtue and middle-class life, but dressing it up, now and then, with a sensuous lure that Chardin would have shunned. When Greuze forgot the flesh of his women he could achieve an idyl of bourgeois domesticity, as in The Village Bride (L’Accordée de Village) 67 Exhibited in the final week of the 1761 Salon, it won the highest honors, and became the talk of Paris. Diderot extolled it for its émotion douce; and the Théâtre des Italians paid it the unprecedented compliment of representing it in a “living picture” on the stage. Connoisseurs found flaws in it—ill-managed light, discordant colors, imperfect drawing and execution; aristocrats laughed at its sentiment; but the Paris public, which had swilled adultery to the dregs, and was in this very year weeping over Rousseau’s Julie, was in a mood to respect the moral admonitions that were almost audibly coming from the father of the bride to the promised spouse. Every middle-class matron knew the feelings of the mother as she surrendered her daughter to the trials and hazards of marriage; and any peasant would have felt at home in that cottage where a hen and her chicks pecked for corn on the floor, or drank in safety from the bowl at the father’s feet. The Marquis de Marigny bought the picture at once, and the King later paid 16,650 livres for it to prevent its being sold abroad. It is now in one of the less-frequented rooms of the Louvre, spoiled by the deterioration of its too superficial colors, and passed by in the reaction of realism and cynicism against optimistic sentiment.
Nearly all the artists of Paris felt that Greuze had lowered art by making it preach through romances instead of revealing truth and character with penetration and impartiality. Diderot defended him as “the first of our artists who gave morals to art, and arranged his pictures to tell a story.”68 He mounted to exclamation points over the tender tragedies that Greuze depicted; “Délicieux! Délicieux! ” he cried over The Young Girl Weeping for Her Dead Bird. He himself was campaigning for middle-class subjects and feelings in drama; he saw in Greuze a precious ally, and praised him even above Chardin. Greuze took him too seriously; he stereotyped himself as the apostle of virtue and sentiment; he sent to Paris journals long expositions of the moral lessons in the pictures that he was producing. Finally he wore out his welcome with the art public, even while sentiment was the rising mood of the age.
During all the twelve years since the acceptance of his candidacy for the Academy, he had neglected to submit to it the historical picture required for full membership. In the judgment of the Academy a genre picture, describing domestic or everyday life, called for a less mature talent than the imaginative reconstruction and competent representation of some historical scene; hence it accepted genre painters only as agréés (literally, agreeable), but not yet eligible to academic honors or professorships. In 1767 the Academy announced that Greuze’s pictures would no longer be exhibited in the biennial Salon until he had submitted an historical picture.
Diderot suggested that the inadequacy of the painting was due to the disturbance of the artist’s mind by the collapse of his marriage. He charged that Gabrielle Babuti had degenerated into an arrogant vixen, exhausting her husband’s funds by her extravagance, wearing him down with vexations, and destroying his pride by her repeated infidelities.71 Greuze himself submitted to the commissioner of police (December 11, 1785) a deposition charging his wife with persistently receiving her lovers into his home and over his protests. In a later letter he accused her of stealing large sums from him, and of attempting to “batter in my head with a chamber pot.”72 He secured a legal separation, took their two daughters with him, and left her half his fortune and an annuity of 1,350 livres.
His character deteriorated under these blows. He became resentful of any criticism, and lost all modesty in the exaltation of his pictures. The public, however, agreed with his self-estimate; it flocked to his studio, and made him rich with purchases of his paintings, and of the prints derived from them. He invested his earnings in government bonds—assignats; the Revolution left these bonds worthless, and Greuze found himself a poor man, while the absorption of France in class violence, political ecstasy, and the neoclassical reaction destroyed the market for his pictures of domestic felicity and peace. The new government rescued him moderately (1792) with a pension of 1,537 livres, but he soon outran this, and appealed for an advance. A woman of the streets, named Antigone, came to live with him and care for his failing health. When he died (1805) nearly all the world had forgotten him, and only two artists attended his corpse to the grave.
4. Fragonard
Jean-Honoré Fragonard survived better than Greuze the trials of success, for he surpassed Greuze in both sensuality and technique. His elegant art is the final exaltation of the woman of eighteenth-century France.
Born at Grasse in Provence (1732), he carried the perfumes and flowers of his birthplace into his art, along with the romantic love of the troubadours; to which he added Parisian gaiety and philosophic doubt. Brought to Paris at fifteen, he asked Boucher to take him as a pupil; Boucher told him, as kindly as possible, that he took only advanced students. Fragonard went to work for Chardin. In his off hours he copied masterpieces wherever he could find them. Some of these copies he showed to Boucher, who, much impressed, now accepted him as a pupil, and enlisted his youthful imagination in making designs for tapestry. The lad improved so rapidly that Boucher urged him to compete for the Prix de Rome, Fragonard submitted an historical painting—Jeroboam Sacrificing to the Idols.73 It was a remarkable product for a boy of twenty—magnificent Roman columns, flowing robes, old heads bearded, turbaned, or bald; Fragonard had learned so soon that there is more character in an old face than in one that has not yet been carved by sensation and response. The Academy awarded him the prize; he studied three years in the studio of Carle Vanloo, and then (1765) went off in ecstasy to Rome.
At first he was discouraged by the masterpieces abounding there.
The energy of Michelangelo terrified me—I experienced an emotion which I could not express; and on seeing the beauties of Raphael I was moved to tears, and the pencil fell from my hands. In the end I remained in a state of indolence which I lacked the strength to overcome. Then I concentrated upon the study of such painters as permitted me to hope that I might some day rival them. It was thus that Baroccio, Pietro da Cortona, Solimena, and Tiepolo attracted and held my attention.74
Instead of copying Old Masters he drew plans or sketches of palaces, arches, churches, landscapes, vineyards, anything; for already he had acquired that skill with the pencil which was to make him one of the most facile and finished draftsmen of an age rich in that basic art.* Few drawings catch more of nature’s life than the green trees of the Villa d’Este as seen by Fragonard at Tivoli.75
On his return to Paris he set himself to satisfy the Academy with a “history” as the indispensable morceau de réception. Like Greuze he found historical subjects uncongenial; present Paris with its entrancing women drew him more powerfully than the past; the influence of Boucher was still warm in his mood. After much delay he submitted Le Grand Prêtre Corésus Se Sacrifie pour Sauver Callirhoé; let us not stop to inquire who this priest and maiden were; the Academy found them vivid and well drawn, and granted Fragonard associate membership. Diderot raved—“I do not believe that any other artist in Europe could have conceived t as painting”;76 Louis XV bought it as a design for tapestry. But Fragonard was finished with historical subjects; indeed, after 1767 he refused to exhibit in the Salon; he worked almost wholly on private commissions, where he could indulge his own taste, freed from academic restraints. Long before the French romantics he rebelled against the “brown sauce” of the Renaissance, and moved out gaily into less charted seas.
Not quite uncharted. Watteau had opened the way with his radiantly robed women starting out with easy conscience for Venus’ isle; Boucher had followed with romping senses; Greuze had mated sensuality and innocence. Fragonard combined them all: delicate raiment blowing in the breeze; dainty tarts offering unimpeded sweets; stately ladies hypnotizing men with the rustle of a dress or the fragility of a blouse, or with some rhythmic grace or melting smile; and children plump and rosy and tousle-haired, who had never yet discovered death. In his drawings and miniatures he pictured almost every aspect of child life—babes caressing their mothers, girls fondling their dolls, boys mounting a donkey or playing with a dog . . .
Fragonard’s Gallic amorousness responded congenially to the requests of aging courtiers and tired mistresses for pictures celebrating and stirring the flesh. He ranged through the pagan mythology for goddesses whose rosy bodies were immune to time; now it was Venus, not the Virgin, who was raised in triumphant assumption to the skies. He stole half the ritual of religion for the ceremonies of love: The Kiss77 is a prayer, The Vow of Love is a sacred pledge, The Sacrifice of the Rose is the ultimate offering. Among four pictures painted by Fragonard for Mme. du Barry’s château at Louve-ciennes one had a title that might have covered half the artist’s work: L’Amour Qui Embrasse l’Univers (Love That Sets the World on Fire). He fingered the Gerusalemme liberata to find the scene where nymphs flaunted their charms before the chaste Rinaldo. He became the Boucher of the bed, revealing women in half or all their nudity, as in La Dormeuse (The Sleeping Beauty), La Chemise Enlevée (The Blouse Removed), or La Bacchante Endormie.78 Then, realizing that nudity can be disillusioning, he returned from revelation to suggestion, and painted his most famous picture, Les Hasards de l’Escarpolette (The Hazards of the Swing);79 the lover gazes in delight at the mysteries of lingerie revealed as his lady swings higher and higher, kicking one slipper with laughing abandon into the air.—Finally, Fragonard could be Greuze, and even Chardin: he pictured modest women, as in L’Étude, La Lecture,80 and Les Baisers Maternels; and in Mademoiselle Colombe he discovered that women have souls.
In 1769, aged thirty-seven, he submitted to marriage. When Mlle. Gérard came up from Grasse to study art in Paris, she had only to name her birthplace to win admission to Fragonard’s studio. She was not beautiful, but she was a woman in full bloom; and “Frago” (as he called himself) decided, like Mme. Bovary, that there could not be much more boredom in monogamy than in adultery. He found a new
pleasure in working together with her on such pictures as The Child’s First Steps, and joining his signature with hers. When she bore their first child she asked might she bring her fourteen-year-old sister up from Grasse to help her with the infant and the house; he agreed, and for years this ménage lived in precarious peace.
Now he rivaled Greuze in portraying domestic life, and Boucher in conveying the tranquillity of rural scenes. He painted some religious pictures, and made portraits of his friends. He was more constant as a friend than as a lover, remaining always fond of Greuze and Robert and David despite their success. When the Revolution came he dedicated a patriotic picture, La Bonne Mère, to the nation. His savings were mostly annulled by inflation and governmental defaults, but David, favorite artist of the new era, secured his appointment to some minor sinecure. It was about this time that he painted the remarkable self-portrait that hangs in the Louvre: strong and burly head, white hair cropped close, eyes still calm with confidence. The Terror frightened and disgusted him, and he fled to his native Grasse, where he received shelter in the home of his friend Maubert. He decorated the walls with panels collectively known as Roman d’Amour et de la Jeunesse (A Story of Love and Youth). These he had intended for Mme. du Barry, but she, no longer affluent, had refused them; now they are among the treasures of the Frick Gallery in New York.
One summer day, returning hot and perspiring from a walk in Paris, he stopped at a café and ate an ice. He was seized almost immediately by a cerebral congestion, and died with blessed suddenness (August 22, 1806). Grasse raised a pretty monument to him, with a naked urchin at his feet and, behind him, a young woman swirling her skirts in a joyous dance.
An artist must pay a price for symbolizing an age; his fame fades with its passions, and can return only when the pathos of distance ennobles him, or some turn in the tide brings a past mode into present taste. Fragonard prospered because his art, desnuda or vestida, pleased his time, soothing and gracing decay; but the stern code of a Revolution fighting for its life against all the rest of Europe needed other gods than Venus to inspire it, and found them in the stoic heroes of republican Rome. The reign of woman ended, the rule of the warrior returned. Greco-Roman models, redeified by Winc-kelmann, served a new generation of artists, and the neoclassical style swept away baroque and rococo in a tidal wave of ancient forms.
