These Minor Monurnen ts FROM the point of view of
pure enjoyment, there is much to be said for only looking at the best paintings, or, at any rate, at those which we believe at any particular moment to be the best: But as soon as we get involved in studying the history of art it becomes evident that often works of art which aesthetically are not of a high order have the greatest importance as documents, and that we cannot explain the major art of painting unless we have also studied minor arts, such as popular engraving. Therefore by the study of the remote and the dingy we can not only satisfy a lust for obscure wisps of knowledge, but also increase our under- standing of more serious matters.
Two current exhibitions illustrate this point : Wilden- stein's have a small exhibition of minor paintings, and Colnaghi's a major exhibition of what is commonly called a minor art, namely engraving.
The paintings at Wildenstein's belong to the French eight- eenth-century school. The earliest in date is very nearly a major work of art, namely .a lovely family group by Lancret. This is typical of the earlier and more sober phase of the Rococo. It is pretty and fanciful with a certain playfulness in the children, but with great seriousness and close observa- tion in drawing and painting. One line of its ancestry leads straight back to 17th-century genre subjects—a tradition brought to life at the end of the 17th century in France by Dutch influence, but existing before that underground in the minor painters outside the Academy, and, as we shall see later, also in engraving. The later court phase of the Rococo is represented by a painting by Lajoue showing the performance of a ballet, The Triumph of Columbine, appa- rently at Versailles. Here realism has very nearly vanished and playfulness has triumphed. The figures hardly have a real existence of their own, but float in a pretty haze of light on the stage. But as an elegant rendering of a society function the painting could not be bettered, and it represents a nuance not to be found exactly in the major Rococo artists of the day;, for Boucher is more voluptuous, Nattier is sweeter and Pater is more pastoral. Next comes a small landscape by a rare painter, Norblin de la Gourdaine, who, in this painting at least, seems to be following Fragonard and to represent that last phase of aristocratic Rococo in which lightness of touch and richness of pigment are the qualities sought after. The Ford, by Schall, is a good example of how far French painters of pre-Revolutionary days could go in tnierrerie, to what point of unreality they could push their convention of treating sex in terms of playful titillation. The Bohemian romantic element in painting of the same period is represented in The Smuggler Asleep, by Casanova, a brother of the adventurer. Casanova's soldiers and smug- glers mark the nearest that the French ever approached in figure painting to the English ideal of the Picturesque—paralleled in other fields by Fragonard's Bull and Vernet's landscapes. Les Soldats Musiciens, by Watteau de Lille, a nephew of the great Watteau, is a much more straightforward rendering of an
everyday scene ; and the two little paintings, The Happy and the Unhappy Mother, by Prud'hon, reflect the moralising sentimentality of Paul et Virginie—a step beyond Greuze down the path of virtuous emotionalism.
Colnaghi's exhibition is very different, because in its particular field, namely engraving, it contains many master- pieces. Ten Diirers, including the Melancholia, a couple of Mantegna's, and some Marc Antonios, are perhaps the most distinguished items, but there are other works of less absolute importance which are well worth looking at. Nanteuil, who has several portraits here, is typical of that school which kept alive the realistic portrait in France in engravings, till the later seventeenth century, when the less pretentious bourgeoisie was able to indulge in oil paintings and the influence of Dutch artists began to be felt in that field also. Bosse, who is represented by some of his most typical genre scenes, is even more important. His Schoolmaster and Schoolmistress show the serious, his County Wedding the amusing, side of ordinary middle-class life in a style as wholeheartedly realistic as anything the Dutch ever achieved, avoiding equally the aristocratic elegance or his master, Callot, and _the heroic classicism of his major contemporary, Poussin.
AN-ruoNY 13Lincr.
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