French Eighteenth Century Painting

There is plenty of variety in the Exhibition which the Academy proffers to the Londoner this winter; and that was desirable -- we may almost say, necessary -- for the Old Masters proper -- such of them as are shown -- have not nearly the attractiveness and importance that have been customary. This, under the circumstances, is scarcely to be wondered at, for while of the Venetian painting there is but the most doubtful or the scantiest trace, the great Dutch and Flemish Masters of the Seventeenth Century are altogether unrepresented. Rembrandt and Rubens, Hobbema and Snyders, De Hooch and Nicholas Maas, are as if they were not. The Second Room, in which they are wont to be gathered together, makes not a sign of them; and the Third or Great Gallery contains a not quite happy or well-balanced representation of the masters of the larger canvas, although we note already one exceptional Claude, one faultless Vandyke, and one superb Velasquez. Even the First Room, which is exclusively English, is not so attractive as it has sometimes been; though here and there a late Turner or an early Cotman, a Hogarth ‘conversation piece,' vivacious and sterling, or a William Dobson portrait, honest at least and capable, asserts unmistakably the hand of a master. Much of the interest is concentrated upon the newer occupants of the Second Room. Most of them are clever, but many hopelessly incompatible.

This Second Room is given over to the French of two periods. But what have the French of the Eighteenth Century in common with the French of the Nineteenth? They have not even a tradition -- they have only a name. In England, as you pass from Richard Wilson to Turner, from Hogarth to the elder Leslie, from Reynolds and Romney, even to Etty and James Ward, the break of continuity is never complete; the elders were in a certain sense the ancestors of the younger men. But in France the incomparable grace of Watteau found no reflection of itself in the powerful brutality of Delacroix. Imagine Corot as the successor of Boucher -- or Millet's vision of the peasantry succeeding to the suave dream of Prud'hon. Yet it is with these juxtapositions of the essentially incompatible -- with this momentary joining together of those whom Heaven (or, indeed, the peculiarity of their different genius) has put asunder -- that we are face to face at Burlington House. Yet, even as it is, there may be a certain interest in the comparison; and if it is made fairly, the result will be an enhanced appreciation of those great masters of the Eighteenth Century, who were French in spirit as well as in name. Briefly and slightly we will speak of these, and these almost alone.