1861 Chesneau – Géricault (3)
Géricault Life
1870 (circa) L’Odalisque allongée (Detail) Jean-Joseph-Benjamin-Constant, Musée d’Orsay.
Ernest Chesneau published his initial study of Théodore Géricault: “Le Mouvement moderne en peinture: Géricault” in the Revue Européene XVII, 1 October, 1861, pp. 483-511). Enjoy the third and final part of Chesneau’s important essay.
Géricault (3)
“…They reveal to us an order of qualities in French painting; they confirm also certain others that we must study attentively to learn how Géricault understood and rendered the horse.
IV
Of all beings created and gifted with breath, the most noble, the most aesthetically beautiful, after man – is the horse. It is also the horse which is most often depicted alongside man in the artistic productions of all epochs. The horse is a creation so perfectly formed that Greek antiquity made the animal an attribute of one of their great gods, and awarded the animal the place of honor beneath the guardian hand of their most venerated goddess. It was Neptune who, with a gesture, fashioned the horse from the waves, which raged against its brothers, and escaped to bound onto the shore. It was Pallas Athena who tamed the horse with her elegant power, and delivers him with her power embodied to the citizens of Attica, to the inhabitants of the young city which today still carries her name. In recognition, the Athenians raised a temple to their protectress, and upon the walls of this temple they inscribed the immortal representation of the festivals of Minerva, the great frieze of the Pan-Athena; they multiplied to infinity the animated figure of her generous care, passionate and quivering, and so beautiful and so wise, in the middle of this unfolding cavalcade, in marble carved by the divine Phidias. As a result of the postures, the nobility of the attitudes, the intelligent accord of mount and rider, all the elements assemble to celebrate in the admirable frieze of the Parthenon, not the horse of Neptune in his furious liberty, not the work horse, or the horse of war, but the horse tamed by Minerva, the wheeling horse, instructed to hold firm, well-trained, and quite simply, the horse of dressage.
Before the Greeks, the Assyrians, who voluntarily tortured all the animal forms, and did not respect event those of man, Assyrian sculptors had traced upon the granite of palaces and temples in a style true and particularly delicate the proud contours of the horse. These images, a little meager in terms of line, illustrate well the idea of oriental race to which, according to the prophet, God had said at the creation: ‘As good for the attack as for the retreat: you will fly without wings.” (1.- Les Chevaux du Sahara et les mœurs du désert, General E. Daumas. Paris, Michel Levy.)
Antiquity seems to have held the privilege of representing the horse poetically and exactly. The primitive Italian renaissance, locked in the interpretation of the New Testament, where the donkey alone serves as the mount of Christ, left no equestrian figure. Raphaël, one of the first, if not the first, introduced again the noble race in the picturesque composition. Unfortunately, this purist in form neglected to study the living model; he limited himself to copying the monstrous animal where Roman sculpture found all the dignity which it reserved for the gravity of imperial majesty. The master gave to the monster a human regard; but we can be sure that none of our peasants wanted to employ the horse of Trajan, that Raphaël passed from his Roman pedestal into his paintings, from which it then played by turn a role for all painters – Italian, Spanish, Flemish, and French, including Vander Meulen and Lebrun. Leonardo de Vinci, in truth, made an anatomical study of the horse: but Mr. L. Moll and Mr. Eug. Gayot, the authors of la Connaissance générale du Cheval (General Knowledge of the Horse Paris, Ambroise Firmin Didot,) smile today at the teachings of the Florentine master in this particular branch of art. He searches for the round forms, the massive limbs, like a cannon, in a word le courtaud (a powerful horse) of the 17th century. Parrocel, in France, Albert Cuyp and some others of the Northern schools, returned first to the study of nature; but in reality, the horse only appears for the first time in the great battles of Gros.
The horses of Gros are heroic, full of fire; the painter of Aboukir returned them to greatness, this beautiful fever which is their health; but he hardly produced any but the Arabian, and unfortunately dressed them each in coats of satin, they are like silk which sticks to the dripping chest, which whitens with foam beneath leather straps and the trappings of gold. It is not so fine and supple, perfectly snug, that the slightest touch of a finger makes the mount shudder. Gros painted the war horse, Géricault was the first and the only to paint the horse.
The studies at the Louvre; those which are in private galleries; the lithographs published in London; and those of which Gihaut, in Paris, was the editor, offer everywhere and always the representation of the same animal, hardly ever accompanied by a hostler, a groom, a blacksmith. It seems that a quick study sufficed to liberate eyes bored by the continual reproduction of a single type. Let us not be deceived; this is not the case. We regard these drawings with an ever-increasing curiosity: the eye rejoices at the inexhaustible variety: one wonders: “What will we discover now?” And each page which we examine reveals to us a new masterpiece, which seems easy, a last difficulty overcome.
In a public lecture delivered at the college of France upon this interesting subject: De l’imitation idéale des animaux par la sculpture (On the Ideal Imitation of Animals in Scripture), professeur Mr Ch. Leveque spoke recently of a very great contemporary statue, roughly in the following terms: “M. Barye imitated nature, nobody has imitated it better. But how? By a profound and serious study, not by the superficial consideration of surfaces. He has done dissections, he studied separately the osteology of each animal and each of its members, in particular. He compared the skeleton with those of other animals and with that of man. He knew the mathematical proportions of each of them. But this was not that of an animal in death. He wanted to know the habits of the life of each. He went into the woods, into the markets, into the living places, everywhere he could encounter each species in their most divers and most sincere behaviors. This is what we know from his critics and his biography. But all of this was confirmed by his works.” These same words could be applied exactly to the mode of work adopted by Géricault. These few words; that there are not two paths to follow in the study of the living model in order arrive at the essential point, which is above all a faithful imitation of physical form. The genius of the artist is then to invigorate this imitation, to give to it a personal character, to recover in the choice of forms, of attitudes, such that he comes finally to compose the object of his imitation. Obviously, all this is necessary – but demands the artist must, beforehand, possess an exact understanding of nature. This is his point of departure; this is the unshakable base upon which he will always rely, and which he will always find beneath him so long as he would extend himself in the expression of his particular ideal, and without which he would quickly tumble into manners and convention.
This principle, that we should not need to repeat so often, is confirmed by the example of all the masters in whatever genre they worked, and if it had never been posited, it could be deduced through an attentive examination of the work of Géricault. Look at his studies of horses, multiplied to infinity, and never boring. From where comes this variety without parallel, if it is not that the artist possesses the very foundation for his model? The breed could change, but the type was passing within his mind with the most intimate details, and nothing could have removed them. The studious painter arrived at a point where he no longer saw difficulty, and rendered horses from the front, from the rear, in all their allure without worry and with equal surety of hand.
How did Géricault view the horse? As he viewed everything, with his own energy. The horse, chez Géricault, is strong, vigilant, always ready for battle. The war horse, exhausted or on parade, the Arabian, Spanish, Norman, Mecklembourgeois, or English horse, he goes directly and valiantly to that action which for each is correct. Consider that in the works of many other painters, one senses that the horse hastens to return to the stable. In the works of Géricault, the horse in the stable strains to leave – Géricault’s horse demands an obstacle, hedges to leap, the heavy cart to pull, to join the squadrons assembling. I would certainly not say that Géricault’s horses possess the divine, supernatural souls of the horses of Phidias, horses which could have been handled as easily by an untrained child as by the hand of their riders – they would gallop the same way, they would be as docile; – Nor would I say that his had the same touching faculty of emotion as the horses of Homer, or of Virgil, weeping Patroclus and Mezentius, of which Mr. Horace Vernet produced a serious parody in the Trumpeter’s Horse. I doubt that the horses of Géricault cry for each other, like the steer of the Georgics blinking back tears upon the death of his companion:
Sadly, the ploughman unyokes the steer which weeps for his brother’s death
But if we search for parallels to the horse of Géricault in classical art, the Greek anthologies do furnish us with numerous epigrams from antiquity, inspired by the celebrated cow of Myron of Eleutherae. We cite two of the prettiest: ‘Shepard, lead your beasts far away to graze for you could believe that the cow of Myron was alive and push her into your flock.’ (Anacreon, the Greek Anthology by Jacobs, Epigram 715.) And here is the second: “Our good Myron, the artist, has brought brass to life, or perhaps, having taken from the flock a live heifer, he cast it in bronze.” (Julian, idem, Epigram 795.) This power of life that the writings of Anacreon, of the emperor Julian, of Martial and of others still accord to the cow of Myron, we are compelled to accord to the horses of Géricault. That by some miracle they descend from their setting and then detach themselves upon the lithographer’s stone, and we see them continue the movement commenced, achieve it, and upon the nervous elasticity of their hocks, follow their course uninterrupted.
I have witnessed the hesitation which grips the soul of the spectator, at times, contemplating the work of Géricault; one is unsure of the purpose which the artist intended to achieve; one wonders: “Does he wish to surprise, or does he wish to simply explain?” It is such caution that we would happily help end. Able to experience all violent emotion to any measure, the artist was equally apt at rendering it. He sought and found precisely the violence of his emotions with a facility which seems today to have been lost. The figures which animate his paintings are not there so that one can regard their suffering: these figures have no concern for the public, they are unaware the public exists; they are not there other than to suffer, because they suffer. Few masters, I assert, among the greatest, knew how to avoid the appearance of staging a scene. In Géricault, from the deranged of the Medusa to the least picturesque study of horses, the action does not occur only at the moment of our attention, it was underway before we arrived, and it will continue forward. Even while we stop there, it endures. I do not wish to add the obvious: that once we we have looked upon the action well, and after several studies, it is impossible not discern the effect of the preceding action, and to divine that which will certainly follow.
That which continues to surprise about the painter is his ability to express nature with exactitude and truth, and to give to his interpretations, as well, something that is perhaps deeper than nature. There is nothing which must astonish us now that we have penetrated the psychological faculties of Géricault, and perused the extent of his works. His profound science permitted him to abandon himself within his native exaltation in order to translate exterior objects, or his own thoughts, by intuition, and obey nothing greater than his imagination. It is thus that we find the same charm of expression in his compositions after Lara by Byron and in his drawing of a Paris street, the breadth of its morning bustle and the detail of the street-cleaner’s cart. The rank Parisian humidity was never evoked with such energy; there is as much spleen in the cold haze of this November morning, rendered with one end of the lithographic pencil, as there is profane revolt in his Lara.
We do not have the courage to regret the time he employed in these designs, since the artist achieved here such effects, but one can wonder why, in this haste to produce, he did not attend much sooner to the execution of one of the two great projects which have been attributed to him la Traite des Nègres and l’Ouverture des portes de l’Inquisition (the Slave Trade and the Opening of the Doors of the Inquisition). All which seemed like a task inspired in him, it is true, a lively repugnance. But there is another thing which we must admit that nobody dares to say: namely, that this artist, so passionately taken with his own art, in the heights of his dreams did at times disdain this art itself. He had truly, and in the good sense of the word, a Byronic soul; he was of another world. If the puerile affectation of the epoch has not bestowed a perfume of shabby vanity to the term which best expresses my thoughts, I would say that Géricault was an eccentric: a complex nature – difficult to grasp in his diverse and often contradictory nuances, a nature perpetually in combat, rocked by powerful currents which tugged at him from within. Three elements of force almost equally contested for control: the soul which climbed towards the ideal; the spirit attached to reality; and finally the positive instincts of his race. We explain to ourselves that sometimes the momentum is restrained and frustrated in Géricault, that the fear of being vanquished pushed him to avoid the attacks. The school of David would not fail to launch unfettered attacks against a second work of the importance of the Medusa, after largely ignoring le Maréchal ferrant (the Blacksmith); Diligence de Sèvres (the Sevres Stagecoach); and Four à plâtre (the Plaster Kiln). With the Medusa the painter assured the duration of his name; full of promises, the gestures, the despair of the shipwrecked in the Raft of the Medusa, and certainly he could have gone much farther still. Yet, acutely vulnerable to the power of the waves of somber energy roiling within him, who knows today whether the artist understood well enough the path which separates the sublime from the ridiculous? Who would affirm that he did not hesitate? – This is the inviolable secret of a life crushed at its first fruit.
All the same, he lived his life fully, this physically strong and powerful man. In his short existence, he was envious of but one artist; not of his talent, which he admired, but of his ability to paint, his spiritual execution. One day, accompanied by a friend he entered the studio of Mr. Horace Vernet, for it is of him that we speak. Both Géricault and Vernet had recently begun paintings of horses. In the studio, Géricault saw there the work of Vernet, who was absent, finished and mounted on a wall. He stopped, stupefied; “It is good, this here,” he said speaking to himself, “I am still not half-finished my own piece!” An accomplished horseman, Géricault also wanted to pursue both study and pleasure; that which was the nourishment for the verve of Mr. Horace Vernet; was no less a form of meditation without which he could do nothing. He told himself often that he needed to change, but pursued his violent and frivolous existence with unrelenting vigor until this lifestyle finally killed him. Without going so far as to assert that Géricault had found a detour around his promise to Charlet, it appears clear to me that the painter did not, at times, display any great haste to produce because he sensed that his time was to be short. He had two very violent falls from horseback in succession and, after a period of long suffering, died in Paris on the 18th of January 1824 (1. The city of Rouen, where Géricault was born, does not possess enough works by the artist to give even a weak idea of his immense talent: just few sketches of horses. This is unfortunate. As is the monument by Mr. Étex at the base of the stairs of the Museum, and the fact that one of the tiniest streets of Rouen (the former rue de l’Aumône) was chosen to carry the painter’s illustrious name. One hopes the city will commission a good copy of the Raft of the Medusa for a place of honor in the its museum, it is the least the city can do.)
V
The talent of Géricault had been itself, a work of continual progress; a rare enough phenomenon, it did not stop for even an instant; it was not constrainted and was always growing and expanding. That the artist had hesitated to put this talent to work; this, we accept. But his drawings now at the Louvre display not only a consummate ability and a science finished by nature, but also a constant effort to arrive at the ideal expression of a dramatic movement. The admirers of antique art do not hesitate to compare the great design of the Arenas with the most beautiful pieces of Greek sculpture, and the fighting centaurs, always battling, and the admirable centaur from the time of Hadrian, also placed at the Louvre and attributed to the sculptors Aristius et Papias. It is by no accident that I compare these drawings of Géricault to works of sculpture; they awaken, in fact, the idea of statuary, which we find by examining them, and from the size of the model suggested by the general plans. If doubt remains, his Cheval écorché, or ‘flayed horse,’ the figure of which molded in plaster is present in most studios, suffices to justify to us the belief that Géricault would have been a great sculptor. Just as his work suggests that he would have been, in all probability, the greatest among contemporary painters. I employ the term probability here in place of a making clear assertion, and ask myself whether Géricault would have always wanted to fully respond to his potential – to the hopes with which he had been born. On this point doubt takes me. If I am to be sincere, I must state that I believe that on the day when Géricault sensed his vision to be greater than his means of execution, he would have abandoned his efforts. I am even more certain that he would have also stopped on that day when he encountered too violent a resistance to his own doctrines. In this regard I fear to imagine the response of this agitated nature in revolt, who shared certain traits with Gros, if forced to put himself in shackles in order to hold on to life. The premature but natural death of Géricault was, therefore, perhaps not injurious to his glory.
Must we regard his death as a blow against the progress of French art? Yes, without doubt, but less damaging than one might suppose. The young master would probably have elected not to establish a school; but if we consider the contrary hypothesis, with his determination, convinced in his principles, through his works and by his natural charm upon intelligent individuals who do not easily suffer direction, among the artists of a lesser rank, he would have made a great number of disciples. But in inspiring them to take on challenges beyond their abilities, he would have crippled their development, troubling them needlessly; and in this respect he would have become the founder of a new school of convention, producing artists unable to see and to feel as he did. He would have been the David of romanticism.
I would be doing a very poor job, however, of rendering my feelings about this great painter if I left the impression that his time as an artist did not produce excellent results. He probably played some role in the daring of Sigalon; it is perhaps from Géricault that the timid Léopold Robert, student of David, may have hoped to find success in the representation of contemporary subjects. Géricault shocked, freed, and sustained a body of spirited artists who were until then sleeping in the shackles of their schools, he showed them the limitations of the classical tradition; he thus rendered to French art an important service, and to ignore this would be a flagrant injustice.
Loving art with passion, Géricault had to produce, and did produce, works of a rare merit and of an elevated order. Taken with the reality which he found to be in harmony with his soul and which brought light to the fires of his somber interior, and realistic like most grand masters, like Rembrandt, like Leonardo de Vinci, he would have wished that his followers would follow his steps. The furrows he broke are still rich, these form part of an eternally fecund field, where modern art has only to bend down to raise a beautiful harvest. But we have to want this, and understand that we do not march towards the future while staring at the past, in dead works, or the present while wearing the glasses of a scholar.
The two strongest personalities of our time now have no relationship with Géricault. Their talent has great parts which we must admire. But without pretending to assess their worth in two words, one can say that this talent, incontestable as it is, is entirely individual, neither is sustaining, or fertile. Yet, we must admit that these two individuals alone maintain the honor of the French school. However, when time rips this flag from their hands, as it must, who then will take up the banner? Will we have nothing to boast of in our future but the names of Mr. Ingres and Mr. Delacroix! Is our time and our legacy so spent and bankrupt that we will not see any man raise himself up and cry in his turn, like Correggio, a testament of a powerful calling as an artist? Our morals, our costumes, the great doings of our epoch are they really so unworthy of great artistic interpretation? Our politics, industry, our social and religious life – are they devoid of picturesque sense, are they hollow, gutted, or dead? Let us not believe it, nor cease to oppose a parallel assertion which is produced too frequently and appears to be accepted in the world of the arts. We must not fear rejection by the public. Society is more intelligent than we often suppose, society does not repulse so freely those willing to make a strong case with a firm conviction in their own value. Only, as she is often deceieved by innovators who describe themselves as necessary, and which she soon recognizes as worthless, society pushes back a bit at that which is entirely audacious, new, or arrives by chance, demanding greater and greater proofs of strength and sincerity before surrendering.
But to triumph, one must dare. What prevents Mr. Courbet, who has succumbed so often to whim, from completing this great scene of the fire of Paris, a project we are told he has been contemplating these several years? The agitated crowd, the flames reflected upon the high houses, the severe silhouette of firemen, this would certainly serve to make a painting full of picturesque qualities. This fire is a subject which Géricault – the painter of human drama, would not disdain.
We desire talents true, sincere, confident – we have need of them, and the place is beautiful in this century for he who dares take it. David held fast to his errors, and moreover had the frigid genius of pure reason without any invigorating power. Gros, with the nature of a woman, nervous, capricious, capable in a moment of ascending the highest heights and falling back in an instant to the lowest, Gros succumbed halfway towards his goal. As for Géricault, the master we have just examined, he gave us no more than a glimpse of what he would have accomplished. He was the first to lay the foundations of modern art. He was not a baroque painter, as it is said – but rather a sombre eccentric who struggled against the various powers which he opposed, as we have shown, and surrendered to the forces which raised him highest. It is for this reason, perhaps, that he was given an early death: to announce a new era. Géricault was not the Messiah, but merely the precursor of the one we still await.”