Charles Blanc – Carle Vernet (3)
Géricault Life
1804 Portrait of Carle Vernet (detail) Robert Lefevre, Louvre.
Théodore Gericault’s first major biographers, Louis Batissier and Charles Blanc, tread carefully around the matter of Théodore Géricault’s mental and emotional health.
However, in the final section of Charles Blanc’s 1843 biography of Carle Vernet, Géricault’s teacher, Blanc uses the expression “this madness of Géricault” to describe an obesessive behavior in Carle Vernet. Blanc is, thus, the first critic to explicitly connect “madness” and “Géricault” together in print.
Carle Vernet
“…’These compositions,[of Carle Vernet]’ said Mr. Guizot, (l’État des Beaux-Arts en France et du Salon de 1810) ‘offer very beautiful parts; the ensemble is well conceived, with finesse and lightness in the touch; but the head of the Spaniard, who regards with dread a watch held by Monsieur the Duke de Frioul, with which the emperor indicates the hour at which the city must be surrendered, wears the most exaggerated expression; the features seem collapsed by shock and fear. In general, one senses, in my opinion standing before this painting, that Mr. Vernet lacks the force of grandeur necessary for historic subjects. When one is not sure of the energy and of the richness of his methods, one searches beyond the limits of art; and, while Mr. Gros, by an excess of verve sometimes exaggerates true expressions, Mr. Vernet forces himself to supply through exaggeration, the verve which he lacks. That which tends to prove this point is that among the other heads, where he had no need to render so strong an expression, several are very beautiful and full of truth.’
If the word verve is employed by Mr. Guizot to mean industry and passion, then we have nothing further to add. However, if by verve we are required to use the term for the suddenness of intuition, that faculty which among painters consists of seizing in a glimpse the most presentable elements a scene offers, and then executing easily that which he conceives, it would be most unjust to deny these qualities in Carle Vernet, qualitites which precisely characterize the man. Incapable of delving deeply into a subject, he understood how to cover the subject with grace at least. His talent, for the rest, was as his spirit. Too superficial to explore the simplest of questions, or too lazy to make the effort, he would insert a joke into the middle of serious discussions, pay his way with a word, reply with a pleasantry, or evade with a pun. In the same way, brush in hand, he captured well the appearance of things, the bark of the tree. The habits, the gestures, the masks which we wear, those parts of ourselves we display most prominently, these are what he captured so marvellously, but quickly in passing, with a smile racing by, without finding in these human actions a sense of intimacy, a philosophy of some kind. In this respect, he shared a certain similarity with Callot, who, though more serious, more poetic, and graver did not, however, possess within his mind the morality which his editor Israël employed in alexandrine verses to illustrate the artist’s eaux-fortes.
Carle Vernet was an amusing storyteller. There was no tale twenty-times repeated which he could not re-arrange, rework, exaggerate, or modify to render fresh and interesting, and even more so by the lively and picturesque nature of his pantomime; for he spoke using his arms and legs, and performed like the Méridionaux, he jumped up and down on small conventions, excusing all excess with the force of his spirit…We can mention one or two here: after the first performance of Maison à vendre (House for Sale, a comedy), Carle found himself with Alexandre Duval in the lodge of Chenard where all congratulated the creator: Vernet alone said nothing: ‘Are you not then content?’ asked Chenard – ‘No,’ replied Carle, ‘Mr. Duval has fooled the public; he announced a house for sale, and I do not find anything but a room to rent.’ On the day when he learned, in Paris, of the death of Marshal Lannes, who had his thigh torn away (in battle in Austria), Desaugiers encountered Carle Vernet, and said to him: ‘Now, a quip upon Lannes, and I offer this example: If he had not died from his wound, he would have had to wear only one sock.’ – ‘Monsieur,’ replied Carle, ‘I have often played upon the words of the French language, never upon the miseries of France.’
The Morning of the Battle of Austerlitz won Vernet the Cross of Honor. Napoleon awarded it to him in the gallery of the Louvre with his own hand, on the same day he decorated Prudhon, Gros, and Girodet… It was the emperor himself who granted Carle the commissions for l’Entrée des français dans Milan (The French enter Milan), and the Battles of Wagram and of Tolosa, in which Carle found so many opportunities to paint his heroes on horseback – both in battle and marching in triumph. What is my point? These same heroes which he painted engaged in the most violent military actions – sabering here the Prussians, there the Spanish, he had rendered these previously riding on parade beneath the eye of the young Bonaparte in the courtyard of the Tuileries. Who does not know the beautiful Revue of the First Consul by Carle and Isabey – his friend, camarade d’atelier, and riding companion? Where do we find a composition which has more character than this revue? Nowhere, I believe, is the first consul more interesting to see. He is again slight, pale, and thin; dressed in a cheap and ordinary uniform, he leans slightly over the pommel of his saddle. With an assured regard, he gazes upon the brilliant escort which surrounds him, and this immense parade of dazzling young men and of warriors of all arms. His great Arabian horse, with a braided mane, is static and rigid, ready to depart at the least touch of the spur. Around him ride generals resplendent with gold, plumes, and egrets, faces framed by their curling hair, and mounted upon horses intoxicated by the fanfare, coats gleaming with froth.
Napoleon figured prominently in the paintings of Carle Vernet until the artist shifted his focus to hunting scenes. The empire had furnished to this painter every means to shine, and from the time he was named to the Institute, he – the former member of the Academy suppressed by the Convention, it seemed the painter could let his pencils run free in the full range of his imagination. But Carle Vernet, like too many artists, lacked the kind of dignity which produces convictions. Because the old foundation of royalism remained strongly within him, perhaps from 1793, he placed his brush in the service of the restored Bourbon monarchs, and thus was rewarded for the portraits of the king and princes of the blood which he presented at the Salon of 1814. Carle painted the duc de Berry on horseback in the magnificent uniform of a colonel-general of dragoons. This was an approach still used at that time as a political portrait. As for the Parisian public, so quick to laugh at appearances, and so easily seduced through their eyes, it was no different with the long-forgotten princes, who displayed their effigies in the Louvre, where the elite of France gathered, and through these salute the spectators with the grace which the painter could lend them. In fact, in this case public opinion would seem to be correct; one greatly admires the portrait of the duc de Berry depicted upon a prancing white horse. This horse is rendered with a rare perfection and painted with a light touch. The prince salutes with his épée as he looks behind him. In the background, we can see a hillside on which platoons are maneuvering and some orderly officers near the Duke. A sky charged with clouds advances upon the subject, but the harmony of the background is marred by the tone of the hillside, the greenery of which is too crude. The green leg of his uniform is confused badly with the saddle-blanket of the same color.
Once more, I repeat: Carle was not a colorist. He was made during a time when painting, enamoured with antique statuary, existed only to correct the line, to embellish it, to choose the shape of forms as well as the characters. The open disdain for colors expressed today by Mr. Ingres was avowed frankly long before by David, who pursued above all the justice of the modelled; and was of a sort that Vernet, in submitting to this general influence, would lose all sense of color, as if nature itself had infected him with some germ. “The style of the composition,” said Mr. Jal, “the spiritual deduction of an ingenious thought, the drawing, the propriety in all the parts of the subject, the choice of the accessories which he knew very well to adapt to the principal scene, voilà – this is what constantly occupied Carle Vernet.” Carle, himself, sensed his true talents so well that on several occasions he abandoned painting to devote himself exclusively to pencil work. He was one of the first to put into use the practices of lithography, which seemed to have been invented expressly for a talent as alive as his. Upon his stone, there was not one of his qualities which he could not display, and not one of his weaknesses he could not conceal. The physiognomy of objects, the movements or the countenances of individuals, all that during the time of the Directory had been noted and discussed in his caricatures of the Incredibles, reappeared in his innumerable drawings, the series of which recommenced during this epoch of 1814, a time when he painted courtesanesque portraits of princes of the blood. The invasion had to leave its traces in the lithographs of Carle Vernet: one can find there all the ignoble types making the horde of the “Holy Alliance”: the hard and ugly Cossack, the swaggering Englishman, and the stupid Kalmucks, these Hottentots of the North courting our daughters, who are far too gentille for them, so the song of Beranger goes.
From the time he took a pencil in his hand, Carle drew all that he saw in the street once he returned to his studio; and what wit we find in these hasty compositions! Here, it is the marquise de Pretintailles surprised by a downpour, and who, this time, displays to the tempests a compromised leg, while the Auvergnat (the sly, stereotypical bumpkin from Auvergne) invites her to pass over the stream on a plank, and not to forget the engineer of this improvised bridge; there it is the blindman who plays his clarinet before the door of delayed coaches, or else the Savoyard who dances with his strumpet in the costume of a duke or a peer. No, nothing is more true, more of nature than this strangely-plumed bird which we see in a dozen piled-up, shaken, jostled, squeezed and deformed Parisians going out on Sunday to eat melon on the grass. If Vernet amused himself staring at the foreign charlatan balancing a vase on the end of his nose, it is so that later he can carve it onto a stone so that a thousand others can view the same scene after him, just as he was on the lookout for the mountebank swallowing swords, or snakes, and who bends his vertebrae in two for a penny. Long before Charlet saw the infantryman declare himself to the nursemaid, the women selling fish to annoy the coalmen of the port, the old man who repairs chairs – whose body is as broken as his irreparable furniture, and who walks in such a grotesque manner that the dogs bark freely at the strangeness of his gait; before Gavarni, before Daumier, Carle surprised the theater heroes undressing in the wings; the lion of the Circus, for example, opening his jaws to demand a pinch of Spanish tobacco. In the end, without waiting for Decamps, he adorned his animals – dogs, especially, and monkeys, with a thousand spiritual accoutrements, using their backs to lightly flog the ridiculous acts of men.
During the Restoration, Carle Vernet passed the largest part of his time as a lithographer, working profusely and with ease, much the same way as Callot did as an engraver. He was pleased to represent one by one all the aspects of the life of the soldier, but always the soldier on horseback, from the trumpet call to arms to the ambulance. One finds engagements of all kinds in his work, mamelukes exchanging pistol fire, or Cossacks fighting our cavaliers. He loved above all the hussars riding pell-mell; and his pencil joined in the brilliant charge, where the horse was as fiery and as animated as the rider. We cannot count how many times he rendered justly and with spirit all these movements of the man on horseback – whether in the pose of command; whether to advance and to deliver a sabre blow, or to retreat to parry – or as he finally leads his horse by the bridle, smoking his pipe, contemplating his country and the woman he loves. Never have there been better depictions of all the details of the harnesses of horses, nor better adapted to their bodies – the saddle, saddle-bag, saddle-blanket, and cavalry stirrup.
His talents in this genre naturally made Carle Vernet the ideal painter for the commissions of the civil list of the Bourbons. When the crown wished to illustrate the war of Spain and the military exploits of the Dauphin, the official painter of the committee of the war received for his subject the siege of Pamplona. We have seen this painting which depicts this siege at the museum of Versailles, made memorable by the witticisms made of it at the time. I do not know why the horses here look like cardboard; or why the canvas resembles a large piece of paper. Everything has been done in haste; the undercoats are scarcely covered, and Carle’s painting is scarcely more serious, in truth, than the campaign of Monsieur. It was said that the artist, finding himself successful in the eyes of public opinion, executed this painting more for pleasure than as an exercise of his craft. In any event, the Restoration was for Carle a happy epoch. Louis XVIII approved the collection of the Fables de la Fontaine, which Madame Vernet, daughter of Moreau, presented to him; Carle was named a knight of the order of Saint-Michel; he saw his son Horace become a member of the Institute, and sat at his side, just as he himself had entered the academy and sat at the side of his father Joseph. The birth place of this great marine painter, the city of Avignon, invited the Vernet family to a festival celebrating the opening of its museum, and gave them all a sincere ovation. What more can I add? We asked of the brush of Carle all that he knew how to produce: the horse races, rambling carriage rides, hunts for doe and stag, the flushing of the quarry and its final moments. What is my point? His brush made him the first painter of Saint-Hubert. He could not have made a better choice. Carle understood that the subject offered varied and agreeable scenes across the canvas, beaters, huntsmen sounding their horns, panting dogs – tracking or returning, and men and horses touched with spirit as if they had been grouped for art.
In 1827, Horace Vernet was named director of the Academy of Rome, Carle wanted to follow his son there, for he loved his son like no other, and could not be separated from him. In Rome, Carle walked the streets in a mortal trance; yet, when he saw his son he raced furiously towards him with “this madness of Géricault” (…quand il le voyait galoper ventre à terre avec ce fou de Géricault….) He visited him or wrote to him twice a day, and pursued him with a ceaseless and jealous love, to which Horace responded always with devotion, compliance, and respect. When they arrived in Rome, Carle unrolled an immense canvas which he had transported there, and upon which one found a study for a Louis XVIII going to render homage to the grace of God in Notre-Dame. It was said by those who saw it that this painting would have been his finest work, but it was destined to never be completed; the finished parts, which are the portraits of the King and the Duchess of Angouleme, and the eight horses harnessed to the royal coach, are much extolled. The July Revolution came to aid the laziness of the painter who, for ten years, anchored his ship at the dock, and who was glad to find a political pretext for his indifference to the work of this painting. As well, memories of his time in Rome daily distracted his thoughts, awakening in him thoughts of his first trip, and the sentiments of excessive devotion which never, in fact, completely abandoned him, even in the bosom of the pleasures of a joyous and riotous life. He was acquainted with a number of small manias, the peculiarities of which he sensed in himself, and of which he confessed ingenuously, as soon as he had perceived them. For example, when he passed, in Rome, before the madonnas which one encounters there on all the street-corners, he always invented some reason for removing his hat, without actually openly saluting the madonna, except on those occasions when he was on the arm of someone – thus tempering his own fervour with an abundance of respect for others. One entered the Academy via two great staircases; Carle never chose to use the one on his left, and he would have been troubled if he had not reached the last step with his right foot. He feared salt, the number thirteen, and placed a truly stunning degree of faith in all vulgar superstitions. When evening approached, he took himself alone to the summit of Mont Pincio, where the Academy was situated, and from there gazed upon the dome of Michelangelo, not to silently contemplating the genius of the work, but solely to salute the cross of Saint-Peter, and to look once more at its black silhouette projected upon the last lights of the sky.
On his return to Paris, Carle Vernet lived there without infirmity, and retained to the age of sixty-nine a limber and agile form. A few days before his death, he went riding in the bois de Boulogne, in a manner so vigorous that he exhausted the four or five young men following him. On the 19th of November, 1835, he spent his final evening at a gathering at the Palais-Royal, in the café de Foy, of which he was the oldest and most faithful client. There he made witty banter as usual. It had rained a lot all that day, and as he had not wanted to change his clothes, he was struck by an inflammation of the chest which eight days later carried him away.
Carle Vernet, assuredly, is not a great painter, but he is an original spiritual painter, who lived not only to carry his name, as the empress Josephine observed, but because he excelled in a genre which justifies his celebrity. Weak as a colorist, he possessed precision and finesse in drawing; he was justly admired for the fecundity of his verve, for the movement and animation of his figures, and for this readiness to find the obvious defects of man, a quality which made him one of the creators of modern caricature. Carle marvelously reflected the world in the midst of which he lived – the world of the happy and the rich, of those who love their mistresses a bit less than their horses, and who, fatigued with commanding others, make themselves the slaves of their dogs. The gentleman rider is the true hero of Carle Vernet. The races, the hunts, the betting, all the aspects of equitation, all the episodes of this perilous life experienced by the riders who do not break their necks, these are the favorite subjects of Carle: within this genre Carle made a unique place for himself. Let us not forget one of his secondary characters – the groom, it was he who drew with all complacency that mysterious being who has his part in all the intrigues, who knows something of all the secrets. Impassive witness to all the dramas of the gallant life, this model beloved of the painter was agreeable to everyone, as if he belonged to a race different from our own. As no master wishes to hold tightly the whip and the traces, he lets himself be gently conducted to the tilbury (coach), seemingly occupied with the gravest thoughts, and reverently holding his black cockard and riding boots. Carle Verne gave to his groom a flat nose and prominent cheekbones; perhaps considering this the product of the invasion, or perhaps he saw him as the descendant of the famous dwarves painted by the somber Caravaggio.
Carle died a man who had known how to live, without moaning, without complaining, never ceasing to inspire and speak of happiness. He expired so softly that nobody actually marked the exact moment. Two hours before he formed his final breath, which was as light as his spirit, he described himself in a way we judge to be much superior to our own observations. Full of admiration for his son Horace and for his father Joseph, and believing himself to far inferior between these two figures equally loved: ‘Is it not odd,’ said he, ‘that I resemble the grand dauphin, son of the king, father of the king, and never the king.’ He fell asleep, and spoke no more.”
Charles Blanc
La Revue Indépendante, Tome XI, Décembre 10, 1843.