French Landscape
By M. H. MMULLTON Cc AINTING," wrote a Frenchman, " is nothing but an image of disembodied values, for it represents only the arrange- ments. proportions and forms of things, and is more intent on the idea of beauty than on any other." But another Frenchman wished he had been born blind and had suddenly gained his sight " so that he could have begun to paint without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him." (More succinctly he put it that " pictures aren't made out of doctrines.") Somewhere between these two, the intellect and the eye, the passionate need to impose order and permanence upon nature—which was Cizanne's and Seurat's, as it was Poussin's—and the desire to distil enchantment from immanent wonders—which was Claude's and Corot's, as much as Monet's—lies the great landscape of French painting itself.
The exhibition at Burlington House—first fruits of the new Anglo- French cultural convention—is unbalanced. But since one of the aims of the organisers has been to assemble lesser-known works from provincial and private collections, here and in France, few will emerge into Piccadilly with precisely the same set of valuations as they held on arrival. Bounded at one end by a set of hunting tapestries from the early fifteenth century—never previously shown —and at the other by the post-impressionists, it is an exhibition to uplift the spirit.
The backcloths of Fontainebleau, Caron Deruet and Niccolo dell'Abate serve to set the scene and show landscape seeking to emerge from a subsidiary language of symbols to the independence of the seventeenth century. Here are the twenty-six Claudes and sixteen Poussins (many never previously seen in public) which domi- nate the exhibition—probably the most impressive collection of the two masters ever assembled.
Because of the century in which he lived, Claude was, in a sense and as a painter, almost a routinier, conforming to a set composi- tional scheme (one of the new pictures, " Christ Preaching on the Mount," is an exception). Were other proof needed, however, the drawings in the south rooms in all their variousness would show the immense amount of hard observation underlying his painting, subordinated though it was with complete single-mindedness to an elegiac twilight of the spirit. The ever " Enchanted Castle " and the paintings from H.M. the King's collection (of which the half- cleaned view of Tivoli may be noted as a curiosity) are sheer wonder with their delicate gravity and Virgilian echoes, but in the drawings his triumph is complete.
No less impressive are the cerebral fugues of Poussin. In his splendid copy of Bellini's " Feast of the Gods "—long recognised as a corner-stone in the formation of his style—he pays homage to the Venetian tradition of landscape which he inherited. In the great composition of " The Body of Phocion Carried out of Athens." " The Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion " and the Louvre's " Orpheus and Eurydice," Poussin's Cartesian grandeur reaches an almost super-human level. Gaspar Poussin, an unjustly over- shadowed painter, and Francisque Millet are also well represented.
So into the eighteenth century—to Lancret, Fragonard, Pater and Watteau. Germany's " l'Embarquement pour Cythere "—of which the first version was Watteau's Academy morceau de reception, so tardily presented that it delayed his election by five years—I found faintly disappointing in colour by reason of the olive varnish. Of Watteau's " forest clearings, trodden by the measures of a minuet and illuminated by a sunbeam " the de Goncourts wrote: " In the recesses of his art, beneath the laughter of its utterance, there murmurs an indefinable harmony, slow and ambiguous ; throughout his fetes galantes there penetrates an indefinable sadness ; and like the enchantment of Venice, there is an indefinable poetry, veiled and sighing, whose soft converse captivates our spirits."
The finally, the flowering of pure landscape and the bridge to modern painting—Corot, with some masterful early -sketches and a delightful late " Mantes Cathedral " ; the Barbizon School with Theodore Rousseau, father of nineteenth-century academic realism Daubigny, first of the impressionists ; longkind and Boudin ; the honest Millet ; poor Courbet, to whom scant justice is done. And at the end, an intermittently brilliant display of impressionist and post-impressionist fireworks, including a Monet from the Queen's collection (leading straight to Soutine) and some late Venetian can- vases sumptuously and sweetly rich in blue-pink sentiment ; very excellent Sisleys and a supreme Pissarro (Lower Norwood); some Renoirs, Seurats, sixteen azannes (most of them familiar but always very fine) and Gauguins from the recent centenary exhibition in Paris. Space forbids the ditcussion of the drawings—they are an exhibition in themselves—but mention must be made of the work of selection and cataloguing by Professor Anthony Blunt and M. Bernard Dorival, who also contributes a notable catalogue introduction to the exhibition.
Previous page
