Elegant Art Jokes: HORACE VERNET.

Among all the artists of our day, is one standing almost alone, and singularly characterized in many respects. He is entirely wanting in that lofty religious character which fills with pureness and beauty the works of the early masters; he has not the great and impressive historical qualities of the school of Raffaelle, nor the daring sublimity of Michael Angelo; he has not the rich luxury of color that renders the works of the great Venetians so gorgeous, nor even that sort of striking reality which makes the subjects rendered by the Flemish masters incomparably life-like. Yet he is rich in qualities deeply attractive and interesting to the people, especially the French people, of our own day. He displays an astonishing capacity and rapidity of execution, an almost unparalleled accuracy of memory, a rare life and motion on the canvass, a vigorous comprehension of the military tactics of the time, a wonderful aptitude at rendering the camp and field potent subjects for the pencil, not withstanding the regularity of movement, and the unpicturesque uniformity of costume
demanded by the military science of our day. Before a battle-piece, of Horace Vernet (and only his battle-pieces are his masterpieces), the crowd stands breathless and horrified at the terrible and bloody aspect of war; while the military connoisseur admires the ability and skill of the feats of arms, so faithfully rendered that he forgets he is not looking at real soldiers in action. In the landscapes and objects of the foreground or background, there are not that charm of color and aërial depth and transparency in which the eye revels, yet there is a hard vigorous actuality which adds to the force and energy of the actors, and strengthens the idea of presence at the battle, without attracting or charming away the mind from the terrible inhumanities principally represented. No poetry, no romance, no graceful and gentle beauty; but the stern dark reality as it might be written in an official bulletin, or related in a vigorous, but cold and accurate, page of history. Such is the distinguishing talent of Horace Vernet—talent sufficient, however, to make his pictures the attractive centres of crowds at the Louvre Exhibitions, and to make himself the favorite of courts and one of the illustrissimi of Europe.

The Vernets have been a family of painters during four generations. The great-grandfather of Horace was a well-known artist at Avignon, a hundred and fifty years ago. His son and pupil, Claude Joseph Vernet, was the first marine painter of his time; and
occupies, with his works alone, an entire apartment of the French Gallery at the Louvre, besides great numbers of sea-pieces and landscapes belonging to private galleries. He died in 1789, but his son and pupil, Antoine Charles Horace Vernet, who had already during two years sat by his side in the Royal Academy, continued the reputation of the family during the Consulate and Empire. He was particularly distinguished for cavalry-battles, hunting scenes, and other incidents in which the horse figured largely as actor. In some of these pictures the hand of the son already joined itself to that of the father, the figures being from the pencil of Horace; and before the death of the father, which took place in 1836, he had already seen the artistic reputation of the family increased and heightened by the fame of his son.

Horace Vernet was born at the Louvre on the 30th June, 1789, the year of the death of his grandfather, who, as painter to the king, had occupied rooms at the Louvre, where his father also resided; so that Horace not only inherited his art from a race of artist-ancestors, but was born amid the chef d’ œuvres of the entire race of painters. Of course, his whole childhood and youth were surrounded with objects of Art; and it was scarcely possible for him not to be impressed in the most lively manner by the unbroken artist-life in which he was necessarily brought up. It would appear that from his childhood he employed himself in daubing on walls,
and drawing on scraps of paper all sorts of little soldiers.

Like his father and grandfather, his principal lessons as a student were drawn from the paternal experience, and certainly no professor could more willingly and faithfully save him all the loss of time and patience occasioned by the long and often fruitless groping of the almost solitary Art-student. He was also thus saved from falling into the errors of the school of David. Certainly no great penchant towards the antique is discoverable in his father’s works; nor in his own do we find painted casts of Greek statues dressed in the uniforms of the nineteenth century. At twenty, it is true, he tried, but without success, the classic subject offered to competition at the Academy for the prize of visiting Rome. The study of the antique did not much delight him. On the contrary, he rather joined with the innovators, whose example was then undermining the over-classic influence of David’s school, the most formidable and influential of whom, a youth about his own age, and a fellow-student in his father’s atelier, was then painting a great picture, sadly decried at the time, but now considered one of the masterpieces of the French school in the Louvre—the “Raft of the Medusa.” Gericault was his companion in the studio and in the field, at the easel and on horseback; and we might trace here one of the many instances of the influence which this powerful and original genius exercised on the young artists of his time, and which, had it not been arrested by his
premature death in January, 1824, would have made Gericault more strikingly distinguished as one of the master-spirits in French Art, and the head of a school entirely the opposite to that of David.

Horace’s youth, however, did not pass entirely under the smiles of fortune. He had to struggle with those difficulties of narrow means with which a very large number of young artists are tolerably intimate. He had to weather the gales of poverty by stooping to all sorts of illustrative work, whose execution we fancy must have been often a severe trial to him. Any youth aiming at “high art,” and feeling, though poor, too proud to bend in order to feed the taste, (grotesque and unrefined enough, it must be allowed,) of the good public, which artists somewhat naturally estimate rather contemptuously, might get a lesson of patience by looking over an endless series of the most variedly hideous costumes or caricatures of costume which Horace was glad to draw, for almost any pecuniary consideration. A series of amusingly naive colored prints, illustrating the adventures of poor La Vallière with Louis XIV., would strengthen the lesson. These were succeeded by lithographs of an endless variety of subjects—the soldier’s life in all its phases, the “horse and its rider” in all their costumes, snatches of romances, fables, caricatures, humorous pieces, men, beasts, and things. In short, young Horace tried his hand at any thing and every thing in the drawing line, at once earning a somewhat toughly-woven
livelihood, and perfecting his talent with the pencil. In later years, the force and freedom of this talent were witnessed to by illustrations of a more important character in a magnificent edition of Voltaire’s Henriade, published in 1825, and of the well known Life of Napoleon by Laurent.

Failing, as we have said, and perhaps fortunately for him, in the achievement of the great Prize of Rome, he turned to the line of Art for which he felt himself naturally endowed, the incidents of the camp and field. The “Taking of a Redoubt;” the “Dog of the Regiment;” the “Horse of the Trumpeter;” “Halt of French Soldiers;” the “Battle of Tolosa;” the “Barrier of Clichy, or Defense of Paris in 1814” (both of which last, exhibited in 1817, now hang in the gallery of the Luxembourg), the “Soldier-Laborer;” the “Soldier of Waterloo;” the “Last Cartridge;” the “Death of Poniatowski;” the “Defense of Saragossa,” and many more, quickly followed each other, and kept up continually and increasingly the public admiration. The critics of the painted bas-relief school found much to say against, and little in favor of, the new talent that seemed to look them inimically in the face, or rather did not seem to regard them at all. But people in general, of simple enough taste in matter of folds of drapery or classic laws of composition or antique lines of beauty, saw before them with all the varied[Pg 22] sentiments of admiration, terror, or dismay, the soldier mounting the breach at the cannon’s mouth, or the general,
covered with orders, cut short in the midst of his fame. Little of the romantic, little of poetical idealization, little of far-fetched style was there on these canvasses, but the crowd recognized the soldier as they saw him daily, in the midst of the scenes which the bulletin of the army or the page of the historian had just narrated to them. They were content, they were full of admiration, they admired the pictures, they admired the artist; and, the spleen of critics notwithstanding, Horace Vernet was known as one of the favorite painters of the time.

In 1819 appeared the “Massacre of the Mamelukes at Cairo,” now in the Luxembourg. We do not know how the public accepted this production. We have no doubt, however, that they were charmed at the gaudy éclat of the bloodthirsty tyrant, with his hookah and lion in the foreground, and dismayed at the base assassinations multiplied in the background. Nor do we doubt that the critics gave unfavorable judgments thereupon, and that most of those who loved Art seriously, said little about the picture. We would at all events express our own regret that the authorities do not find some better works than this and the “Battle of Tolosa,” to represent in a public gallery the talent of the most famous battle-painter of France. The Battles of Jemmapes, Valmy, Hanau, and Montmirail, executed at
this time, and hung till lately in the gallery of the Palais Royal (now, we fear, much, if not entirely, destroyed by the mob on the 24th February), were much more worthy of such a place. Whether it was by a considerate discernment that the mob attacked these, as the property of the ex-king, or by a mere goth-and-vandalism of revolution, we do not know; but certainly we would rather have delivered up to their wrath these others, the “property of the nation.” The same hand would hardly seem to have executed both sets of paintings. It is not only the difference in size of the figures on the canvass, those of the Luxembourg being life-sized, and those of the Palais Royal only a few inches in length, but the whole style of the works is different. The first seem painted as if they had been designed merely to be reproduced in gay silks and worsteds at the Gobelins, where we have seen a copy of the “Massacre of the Mamelukes,” in tapestry, which we would, for itself, have preferred to the original. But the latter four battles, notwithstanding the disadvantage of costume and arrangement necessarily imposed by the difference of time and country, produce far more satisfactory works of Art, and come much nearer to historical painting. They are painted without pretension, without exaggeration. The details are faithfully and carefully, though evidently rapidly, executed. The generals and personages in the front are speaking portraits; and the whole scene is full of that sort of life and action which impresses one at once as the very sort of action that must have taken place.
Now it is a battery of artillery backed against a wood,—now it is a plain over which dense ranks of infantry march in succession to the front of the fire. Here it is a scene where in the full sunlight shows the whole details of the action; there it is night—and a night of cloud and storm, draws her sombre veil over the dead and wounded covering the field. A historian might find on these canvasses, far better than in stores of manuscript, wherewith to fill many a page of history with accurate and vivid details of these bloody days; or rather, many a page of history would not present so accurate and vivid a conception of what is a field of battle.

In 1822, entry to the exhibition at the Louvre being refused to his works, Horace Vernet made an exhibition-room of his atelier, had a catalogue made out (for what with battles, hunts, landscapes, portraits, he had a numerous collection), and the public were admitted. In 1826 he was admitted a Member of the Institute, and in 1830 was appointed Director of the Academy at Rome, so that the young man who could not so far decline his antiques as to treat the classic subject of the Royal Academy, and thus gain the Academy at Rome, now went there as chief of the school, and as one of the most distinguished artists of his time. This residence for five years among the best works of the great masters of Italy naturally inspired him with ideas and de sires which it had not been hitherto in his
circumstances to gratify. And once installed in the Villa Medici, which he made to resound with the voices of joy and revelry, splendid fêtes and balls, he set himself to study the Italian school.

A series of pictures somewhat new in subject and manner of treatment was the result of this change of circumstances and ideas. To the Paris Exhibition of 1831 he sent a “Judith and Holofernes,” which is one of the least successful of his pictures in the Luxembourg, where it hangs still, with another sent two years after, “Raffaelle and Michael Angelo in the Vatican.” This is perhaps the best of his works at the Luxembourg, all being inferior; but it has a certain dry gaudiness of color, and a want of seriousness of design, which render it unfit to be considered a master-work. One unquestionably preferable, the “Arresting of the Princes at the Palais Royal by order of Anne of Austria,” found its way to the Palais Royal, so that in this, as in the other we have remarked, the king seemed to know how to choose better than the Art-authorities of the “Gallery of Living Painters.” A number of other pictures testified to the activity of the artist’s pencil at Rome:—”Combat of Brigands against the Pope’s Riflemen,” “Confession of the Dying Brigand,” also at the Palais Royal, but also we fear destroyed by the popular vandalism of the 24th February; a “Chase in the Pontine Marshes,” “Pope Leo XII. carried into St. Peter’s.” The favor of the public, however, still turned to the usual subject of Horace Vernet—the French
soldier’s life; finding which, on his return from Rome, he recurred to his original study. In 1836 he exhibited four new battle-pieces, “Friedland,” “Wagram,” “Jena,” and “Fontenoy,” in which were apparent all his usual excellencies.

The occupation of the Algerine territory by the French troops afforded the artist an opportunity of exhibiting his powers in that department most suited to them. A whole gallery at Versailles was set apart for the battle-painter, called the Constantine Gallery, after the most important feat of arms yet performed by the French troops in Africa, the Taking of the town of Constantine. Some of the solitary and extraordinary, we might say accidental, military exploits in Europe of Louis Philippe’s reign, are also commemorated there. The “Occupation of Ancona,” the “Entry of the Army into Belgium,” the “Attack of the Citadel of Antwerp,” the “Fleet forcing the Tagus,” show that nothing is forgotten of the Continental doings. The African feats are almost too many to enumerate. In a “Sortie of the Arab Garrison of Constantine,” the Duke de Nemours is made to figure in person. Then we have the Troops of Assault receiving the Signal to leave the Trenches, and “The Scaling of the Breach.” There are the “Occupation of the Defile of Teniah,” “Combat of the Habrah, of the Sickak, of Samah, of Afzoum.” In fine, there is the largest canvass in existence, it is said, the “Taking of
the Smalah,” that renowned occasion when the army was so very near taking Abd-el-Kader; and the “Battle of Isly,” which gained that splendid trophy, the parasol of command. Besides these great subjects there are decorations of military trophies and allegorical figures, which seem to have been painted by some pupil of Vernet. These battles were first of all exhibited to the admiration of Paris in the various salons after their execution, and were then sent off to decorate Versailles. There are also, in the Gallery of French History, at Versailles, several others of his, such as the “Battle of Bouvines;” “Charles X. reviewing the National Guard;” the “Marshal St. Cyr,” and some others among those we have already named. In them the qualities of the artist are manifested more fully, we think, than in any others of his works. They are full of that energy, vivacity, and daguerreotypic verity which he so eminently displays. There is none of that pretension after “high Art” which has injured the effect of some of his pictures. The rapidity of their execution too in general was such, that the public had hardly finished reading the last news of the combats, when the artist, returned in many cases from witnessing the scenes, had placed them on the canvass, and offered them to popular gaze. Yet the canvasses are in many cases of great extent, and often, the figures of life-size. But the artist rarely employs the model, painting mostly from memory, a[Pg 28] faculty most
astonishingly developed in him. He generally also saves himself the trouble of preparing a smaller sketch to paint after, working out his subject at once in the definitive size. Of course with more serious and elevated subjects, worked out in a more serious and elevated spirit, such a system would not do. But for the style of subject and execution required by Horace Vernet’s artistic organization, these careful preparations would not answer. They would only tend to diminish the sweeping passion of the fiery melée, and freeze the swift impulsive rush of the attack or flight.

Vernet has several times attempted Biblical subjects, but they have never succeeded so well as to add anything to his fame as a battle-painter. “Judah and Tamar,” “Agar dismissed by Abraham,” “Rebecca at the Fountain,” “Judith with the head of Holofernes,” “The Good Samaritan,” have rather served to illustrate Arab costume and manners, (which he makes out to be the same as, or very similar to, those of old Biblical times,) than to illustrate his own power in the higher range of Art.

In the midst of painting all these, Horace Vernet has found time, which for him is the smallest requisite in painting, to produce an innumerable mass of pictures for private galleries, or at the command of various crowned heads; which, with many of those already mentioned, are well known all over Europe by engravings. “The Post of the Desert,” “The Prayer in the Desert,” “The Lion Hunt in the
Desert,” “Council of Arabs,” “Episode of the Pest of Barcelona,” “The Breach of Constantine,” “Mazeppa,” and a host of others, together with landscapes, portraits, &c., have served both to multiply his works in the galleries of every country in Europe, and to make him one of the most popular of living artists.