1843 Blanc – Carle Vernet
Géricault Life
1650 Le Manège en plein air (Outdoor Equitation), Philips Wouwerman Louvre.
Carle Vernet
Charles Blanc published his biography of Carle Vernet in the Revue Indépendante on December 10th, 1843. Read the first part of this critical study.
“Quite by chance, the first painting I encountered upon leaving college was executed by Carle Vernet. I recall looking upon a magnificent team of horses and elegant carriage waiting by the gate of a country house someplace on the outskirts of Paris, perhaps Auteuil, Verrieres, or Meudon. The house was set amidst a stand of broad trees, the branches and folliage of which recalled the color of the shutters. Drawn in by this beautiful carriage, the horses high-mounted and steaming from some arduous journey, the porter’s door partially open, the blossoms of the trees half-concealed by the wall, the scene seemed filled with mystery – enough to construct a long novel full of charming adventures. Who were the happy masters who would be transported in this car through the woods; what awaited the solitary driver; what intrigue would complicate their departure? In such a way, a simple painting engaged and captivated the imagination of a young scholar setting out in the world, armed with pretensions towards poetry! Such is the admirable privilege of painting – to enchant both those who know life well, and those who still know little. Painting offers to some the pleasures of reliving the impressions of youth; to others it opens new and inviting spaces.
It was the destiny of Carle Vernet to paint the amusements, diversions and good life of the rich, and the occupations of the idle. Son of an illustrious painter, the name of his father carried him more than half the distance and freed him of the need to overcome the challenges which caused so many others to succumb unknown. Glory, wealth, the welcome of the world, the hospitality of the great, he found all these well-prepared for him; he stepped into a life of joy and ease, and did not have to traverse the harsh paths which can darken and mar talent.
Born in 1758, he was the youngest of the three children of Joseph Vernet and Virginia Parker, the daughter of an English family based in Rome. His father had been commissioned by Louis XV to paint all the ports of France; Carle was born during the family residence in Bordeaux.
At the age of five Carle already drew with a surprising facility. While attending a choice gathering of families in the home of Mr. d’Angivilliers, Joseph Vernet became concerned about the whereabouts of his son and set out to search for him. Voilà, the poor child was on the floor of the salon, a piece of paper before him and a pencil in hand. Following his instinct, he was hard at work on a horse. A crowd gathered as he worked, murmurs rose around him: “Good! very good! but he began too far down, he will not have space for the legs.” The child continued unconcerned. Completing the body, he began work on the limbs of the horse, and then in four strokes of his pencil sketched a pond at the base of his composition in which the horse was bathing, leaving the spectators stunned by the child’s presence of mind.
Even before finishing his studies, Carle Vernet was known to all the celebrated men of his time; he could join their conversations and received encouragment and praise. During a trip through Switzerland, he was presented to Voltaire, who professed a passionate admiration for the marine paintings of Joseph. The philosopher received the father and son with great grandeur at his estate of Ferney, and said to young Carle: “Here you are in the home of a colleague of your father: anch’io son pittor! (I, too, am a painter!)” At the end of this trip, in which he visited in succession Rousseau, Gessner, Lavater and Tissor, Carle Vernet returned to Paris and there completed his studies before entering the studio of Lepicie, the bizarre and austere painter who habitully wore the garb of a monk. It was from him, without doubt, that the young Carle was imbued with the propensity towards extremism which affected him throughout his life. This Lepicie was, however, a talented man; he instructed his pupil so well that he won the grand prize for painting in 1782. He had won the second prize at seventeen, the same year when David was crowned.
The new recipient of the prize of Rome was already a very fashionable young man and a brilliant rider. He had an agreeable figure, one of those sharp well-defined forms which seen once is never forgotten: a slightly arched nose, a thin mouth, and a penetrating gaze filled with kindness. Elegant and well built, his energetic presence, name, manners, and taste for riding made him a sought after member of society, a society into which he had been thrown at such an early age. He was admired above all for his witty repartee, and marvelous skill with language. This was the epoch of de Bievre [Georges-François Mareschal de Bièvre]. Joseph Vernet had not given more than half his life to painting, preserving the rest for the great and the wise, usually among the beautiful spirits of his time, and marked as one of the best of the best. As he had not lost, despite his age, his love of attention, he borrowed from his son a supplement of spirit, and purchased witty remarks from him at the price of six francs each. But the young man, despite his fecundity of wit, often found himself short of cash and bon mots. And so, counting on the slightly failing memory of his father, he sometimes provided him with a quip already paid for and used; and this was another way of having fun; when Joseph employed the same bon mot a second time, it did not produce the same effect, and he returned furious with the result.
Arriving in Rome, Carle Vernet set about, like everyone, to contemplate the frescoes of Raphaël, the paintings of Jules Romain or of Salvator; but this was principally to see how these masters had painted horses. He who had made a special study of them, who loved them as a painter and who knew them as an equestrian, he could not be seduced by these epic forms shaped by accepted convention, which had stripped them of all the appearences of heroism that nature had given them. Rather than be entrained, however, as Gericault later had been in an instant, by the authority of example, Vernet was brought up to react, and he resolved at the risk of displeasing the masters of the Academy, to place his figures, whether they were Greeks or Romans, upon horses as we see them in nature. But it pained him to derive much benefit from his observations, for a private circumstance had truly changed his humor, such that when he stood before the canvas, the brush slipped from his fingers. His spirit, normally so present and so gay, was transformed into a shroud of sadness, and while he wandered this great city filled with memories in some places and deserted in others, his thoughts were entirely in Paris, where, in a salon, he had said his farewells to a young girl, mademoiselle de Montbars. In vain the Roman nobility opened their doors to him, he lived taciturn and alone, pleasing himself only among ruins where the chants in the churchs added to the sentimentality of his love. Bit by bit, the religious ideas penetrated this impressionable soul. Melancholy became piety; the priests transformed him into a devotee; he no longer dreamed of becoming a painter and wished only one fine day to become a monk. His father, alerted to this change, hastened to call him back and have him take up his brushes once more. But the young convert heard nothing of these calls to renounce monastic life and spoke of nothing but joining the Feuillants [a reformed Cistercian order]. Fortunately, he chose a clear-sighted confessor who lost no time discerning the malady of this knight full of grace, and who, as a man of sense, counselled him to marry quickly; return to his true vocation: painting; and resume riding, his favorite form of exercise.
What would the neophyte do after returning to his palette? Imitate Vincent? Follow the path of the ignoramous Suvee (so named by David), or that of Brenet? Carle Vernet had too much originality in his soul for this. Whatever the case, a painting was for him, above all, a setting for horses. Thus, he approached the challenge of history painting as an opportunity to depict the long procession of equestrian scenes which he had envisioned in his imagination, while at his easel. He completed his preparations with the Triumph of Paul-Emile; for he had to make some demonstration of respect for antiquity. Scenes of loves in baskets, the shepards, no longer excited imaginations. Vien had already timidly made some attempts at reform and there was, among the companions of Carle Vernet, one who contemplated the Oath of the Horatii, which would cause a revolution in painting. The Triumph of Paul-Emile captured this time of transition. If this work embraced these new ideas by the choice of subject, one found there nonetheless the style of the preceding epoch in the mandatory form of dress and figure type, and the particular French character easily recognizable in the depiction of the heroes represented. The artist maintained a distance from that which was inflated and he always envisioned things from the point of view of the real, of the kind which imagined a composition simple, natural, and noble – without waiting for the influence and the examples of David. Until this time one drew the horse badly; rather than observe nature, one studied Vander Meulen, in whom this weakness of tradition continued. Vander Meulen, this talented master, who had before his eyes the equestrian exercises performed under his eyes at the carrousels of Versailles, was obligated to paint the parade horse, the kind which reared imperiously beneath the majestic wig of Louis the XIVth. Since then we had not been able to free ourselves from these forms which exclusively suited the procession of a great king, so well that painting produced even better the heavy equestrian statues of our public places, these brewers’ horses who raised a front leg in a form of parenthesis, and dragged behind them their enormous rumps. Rather than revive the fringed courser of Wouwermans, or plant the monarch on the work horse of Paul Potter, Carle Vernet was the first who made the effort to visit the stud farm and the riding school; he returned to the horse its vibrant allue, its attentive expression, its grace, its coqueterie, its gaze, and breathing enflamed nostrils.
During the time when he worked upon this vast painting, his future admission title to the Academy, Carle kept his door carefully closed, not daring to show his study to anyone, even his father. But as he had begun before he had finished his plan, and because the subject continued to grow and expand, he was obliged to order a second canvas in order to improve upon the first, then a third canvas, which was of a size to great to fit inside his studio, he was forced to enlarge the door in order to make passage for this new extension. Curious to see a composition so fashioned in three volumes, Joseph Verent went to visit his son, accompanied by his friend Moreau le jeune, engraver to the king, the creator of so many of the adorable vignettes so sought after then, and pillaged today. Carle awaited their judgement in a state of the livliest anxiety, until from the lips of his father came the words: “You are a painter!” This judgement, which the young man dared not hope would come from his father, was promptly confirmed by Moreau, and at this moment the marriage of Carle Vernet to the daughter of the engraver was arranged, a marriage which was celebrated in 1787.
The ex-novice of the Feuillants had already once more become a man of pleasures and cavalcades. The Duke d’Orléans included him in all his hunting parties. Carle there took lessons for painting, for points of view, for subjects; returning to his studio, he replaced the riding crop with the brush. One day, the duke d’Orleans commanded him to prepare a painting of the hunt he had made with the duc de Chartres, today Louis-Philippe. Carle did his best, says Mr. Paul Huguet, from whom I record this anecdote, which involves the two princes and the payment for this painting. Two months passed; Carle saw the duke everyday; he never uttered a single word about his work. The young artist started to find this infinite silence excessively long, when one day he was commanded to visit the Palais-Royal. The painter ran there, believing he was attending some pleasure party. He found himself taken into a room filled with luxurious snuff boxes and walking canes of the greatest value. The future Muscadin said to himself, I don’t value these snuff boxes much, but I would greatly prize one of these canes. The duke, after showing him everthing, handed him four thousand francs, saying: “You possess too much discretion regarding a man with such a poor memory.” This was a prince who understood the world well.
The Triumph of Paul-Emile, completed in 1788, won the creator his entry into the Academy of painting. According to the ceremonial in place in this Academy, the recipient was introdued by a hussar who presented him to each of the members, to whom he had to salute. When Vernet arrived before his father, the two forgot the laws of etiquette entirely and embraced to the applause and acclamations of those assembled, which, for the first time since its foundation by Louis XIV, saw a father and his son esconced at the same time within its bosom. The two Vernets did not long enjoy together this hereditary privilage earned for their family. Joseph died in 1789, at the age of seventy-six, but never lost the vitality of youth, such that la Harpe [Jean François de la Harpe] observed : “Those seeking a miracle, it is Vernet, who at the age of seventy-three, has not declined, but appears entirely fresh; one can say that nature has immersed in him its secrets.”
When the revolution arrived, Carle Verent was never busy with politics. He was a royalist without really understanding why, perhaps because he had among his circle of friends some who would perish in the tempest. In 1792, was a captain in the Paris national guard. On August 10th, at the moment of the attack on the Tuilleries by the people, Carle was in his apartments in the Louvre with his family, when he heard gunfire and saw his windows shatter. He picked up his son aged three and placed him on his shoulder, mounted his horse and traversed the place du Carrousel, accompanied by his wife with their daughter, just four, at her side. As he had removed his uniform coat and wore nothing but his white vest with a red collar, the republicans took him for a Swiss Guard and fired upon him. Carle, struck in the hand, continued and said nothing of his wound until he was sure of the safety of his family and of this little boy of three years called Horace Vernet. But an ordeal more terrible still awaited. His sister Emilie Vernet, a beautiful and gracious woman it is said, married to the architect Chalgrin, was condemned to death by the revolutionary tribunal (court) for corresponding with the émigré princes. Carle was a friend and colleague of David; he ran to his home and begged, weeping, for him to intercede with Robespierre. David, unmoved, replied coldly: “I painted Brutus, I cannot solicit Robespierre…The tribunal is fair.” Madam Chalgrin was executed.
One understands easily that Vernet’s paintings dating from fractiouse period, such as the Funeral of Patroclus, did not carry the imprint of his customary verve, of the vivacity which was the center of his talent. But this talent, this verve, returned to him under the Directory. He threw himself once more into this life of glittering pleasures, which had all the power of a reaction, to resurface on this elegant scene and give free rein to his spirit for bon mots and witticisms, which better suited the world of Barras than Robespierre. This was a unique epoch where one lived in resurrected regency under a republican veneer, and which produced a parody of antique morals; the corruption placed a bonnet on Minerva and covered Ipheginia with a veil; Cato himself was made into kind of peacock, and Brutus transformed into an affected dandy. Carle found himself drawn deeply towards to this joyful life of the “gilded” youth, (as they were called), so much so that he lacked the free time to paint and did nothing but draw. The Death of Hippolytus and the Chariot Race, magnificent works which quickly appeared as engravings, enhanced his growing reputation. As soon as he had finished depicting the chariot of Hippolytus, rendering the overturned hero, the fear of the horses, the pouncing monster, and the gates of Troezan, he raced to the field of Mars, churning up the dust of the olympic games. There he presented himself among all the “incredible characters” of Paris, Tourton, Bacuée, Lagrange, who would compete for the prize for the foot race. What am I saying? He arrived to win this prize, for he indeed won it, and the director la Reveillere-Lepaux, in crowning the speedy victor, said to him graciously: “Your name is associated with all the triumphs.”
In the midst of all these celebrations, the lively wit and intelligence of Carle Vernet remained at no time inactive…”