Art. XI.-FRENCH PAINTING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 1. Les Primitifs Français au Palais du Louvre et à la Bibliothèque Nationale. Catalogue rédigé par H. Bouchot, L. Delisle, J.-J. Guiffrey, Frantz-Marcou, H. Martin, P. Vitry. Paris: 1904. 2. Exposition des Primitifs Français. Compte rendu par Paul Vitry. Special number of 'Les Arts.' Paris : Manzi, Joyant, 1904. 3. De quelques travaux récents relatifs à la Peinture Française du XVe siècle. Par Paul Vitry. Paris: Rapilly, 1903. 4. L'Exposition des Primitifs Français au point de vue de l'influence des frères Van Eyck sur la Peinture Française et Provençale. Par Georges H. de Loo (G. Hulin). Paris Floury, 1904. 5. Les Euvres des Maîtres de l'École Flamand Primitifs. Par Mgr Dehaisne. Paris, 1891. 6. Gazette des Beaux Arts. Articles by le Comte de Durrieu, R. Maulde de la Clavière, B. Prost, Salomon Reinach, A. Champeaux, Benoit, Léopold Delisle. 7. La Revue de l'Art. Articles by le Comte de Durrieu and l'Abbé Réquin. THE exhibition of French Primitives held recently in the Pavillon de Marsan of the Louvre was to some extent a result of the great success which attended the exhibition of the Primitives of the Netherlands held at Bruges in 1902. M. Georges Hulin, whose admirable critical catalogue of that exhibition gave him at once a foremost position among the critics of mediæval painting, pointed to a number of works in that collection which were of French origin, and remarked on the singular indifference shown by so artistic a nation as the French to the study of their own early schools of painting. M. Bouchot took up the challenge; and no one will deny that he and his colleagues have done all in their power to make up for past neglect. In their writings the importance and interest of early French painting have been fully proclaimed. Some will even think that their repentance has been excessive, and that the measure of praise accorded to the French Primitives has been filled to overflowing. It may be admitted indeed that, after having in the past carelessly allowed the works of their own masters to be attributed to van Eyck and Wohlgemuth, and even to be called'œuvres grecques,' the French are now inclined to claim as part of their national inheritance a considerable share of the works of Flemish artists. No harm, but rather much good, has come of this enthusiasm. Without some such feeling, it is doubtful whether even M. Bouchot could have overcome all the difficulties which lay in his way. Moreover, while the French origin of disputed works and the independence of the French tradition has been asserted in very positive language, neither M. Bouchot nor any of those who, like M. Paul Vitry, so ably assisted him, have shown any inclination to force the verdict of foreign critics. On the contrary, every facility was given to students; inquiry and discussion were courteously welcomed; and, if the hope was entertained that the exhibition would prove to the world the existence of a mediæval French school of painting, even this cherished aim was felt to be subordinate to the search for historical truth. In the main, then, the thesis which the exhibition was intended to illustrate, and if possible prove, was that, alongside of the great fifteenth-century traditions of the Netherlands and Germany, there was another tradition as great, as original, and as national-that of France; and, further, that the tradition of the Netherlands was itself in the nature of an offshoot from the more complete and continuous tradition of still earlier French art. As yet, no final consensus of opinion has been arrived at on these points; but the weight of authority seems to incline to a negative verdict. This statement requires some modification and explanation, which it will be the object of this essay to supply; but we may say at once that, even if we accept the negative verdict, and deny to the French school of painting in the fifteenth century the homogeneity and completeness that we find in that of the Netherlands, we must nevertheless admit that the pictures shown in Paris this year, even if we confine ourselves to those which may properly be called French, were more varied in interest and occasionally rose to a higher range of imaginative feeling than those seen two years ago at Bruges. The very want of homogeneity in the French tradition actually contributed to this result. We may compare the styles which thus arose on French soil with our own language, which owes its richness of poetical content to the fusion of the German and Latin tongues. Like that, the French painting of the fifteenth century was, it may be, a hybrid compounded of Latin traditions vivified by a Teutonic directness of vision; but it was a magnificent hybrid, used by French painters to express essentially French conceptions and to illustrate French manners, and coloured by the French temperament. Still it would be difficult to find any common characteristics which bind together such diverse works as those of, say, Charenton and Fouquet and Froment. In fact the very words France and French, as we employ them, are misnomers for the fifteenth century. At that period a native of Burgundy was more united by political ties with Brussels than with Paris, while a Provençal was even less of a Frenchman than he is to-day. The organisers of the exhibition have indeed recognised this fact by distributing the pictures among the various provinces of France, creating with lavish ease schools of Lorraine, of Artois, of Picardy, of Auvergne, of Champagne, besides the better-recognised schools of Paris, Touraine, Bourges, Moulins, and Provence. That these schools were created on insufficient grounds may be seen from the fact that an interesting work (No. 94) of the so-called school of Lorraine, one which might have been expected to exemplify the essential characteristics of an important group, contained inscriptions which were unmistakably in Dutch. No less remarkable was the bold but unsuccessful annexation to French art of the Maître de Flémalle, under the convenient title of École d'Artois. The difficulty of discussing this question of a French school is largely due to the exceedingly small number of works which have survived. When we look at the Annunciation from Aix, at the Pietà from the same town, and at the few works attributable to Fouquet, all of them masterpieces of the most diverse kinds, and certainly on a level with any works produced at the same time in the Netherlands, we can hardly doubt that what we see are but isolated peaks of a once continuous mountain range, since submerged by the oblivious waters of political disturbance. Such great masterpieces could not have been sporadic and isolated efforts of genius; nor can we be sure that a fortunate chance has even preserved for us the finest products of the school. At all events, each surviving genius implies the unrecorded efforts of many men of talent; and such works as we possess indicate the continuance of a good tradition and the emulation of a school. The labours of archivists, which in France have preceded and outrun the work of critics, have given us, for every name of an artist to whom we can safely attribute even a single work, the names of numerous artists, famous in their day, of whom no certain performance remains. Thus, of the three leading artists in Paris who in 1391 formed a society of arts regulated and approved by the Garde de la Prévôté-Colard de Laon, Jean d'Orléans, Étienne Lannelier-we know nothing. Of Jean de Hasselt, who was court-painter first to Louis de Mâle and then to the first Valois Duke of Burgundy, and who was succeeded by Broederlam, we have no indisputable work, though he clearly must have been a distinguished artist. Of Conrad de Vulcop, painter-in-ordinary to Charles VII, of Jean le Sage, 'peintre très exquis du Roy de France Loys,' of Colin d'Amiens, celebrated for his portraits, and of Jean Poyet, who was praised as highly as Fouquet, we have no knowledge. The Abbé Réquin, to whose industry and learning we owe so much, has unearthed the names of more than a hundred painters working at Avignon during the fifteenth century, of whom only two have certainly survived in their works-Enguerrand Charenton and Nicholas Froment. Again, if we take fresco and wall decoration, of which we now have scarcely any vestiges for our period, we know that the walls of the Hôtel St Pol, the old Louvre, the Hôtel de Savoisi in Paris, and the châteaux of Bicêtre and Vaudreuil, were covered with paintings, and that the Countess of Artois employed painters in all her castles -at Bapaume, at Rihoult, at Lens, at Hesdin; while at Conflans she caused to be depicted the exploits of her late husband. If we could but see these, and still more the castle at Valenciennes, where the Counts of Hainault had painted a 'Jeu d'échecs' and a 'Pas de Saladin' and a 'Marché aux singes,' we might gain a totally new conception of how the realistic movement of the fifteenth century was prepared in the latter part of the fourteenth, and of the relative parts played in that development by the French and the Netherlandish peoples. When, therefore, we are inclined to emphasise the want of coherence and continuity in the French as opposed to the Flemish and Dutch schools, we may possibly be misled by the mere accident of this deplorable scarcity of surviving works. Suppose for a moment that we possessed only one or two of Jan van Eyck's portraits, one Pietà by Rogier van der Weyden, two or three Madonnas by Memling, one grotesque martyrdom by Dirck Bouts, and a landscape by Gerard of Haarlem, and that to the majority of these paintings we could attach no established names, we should lose almost entirely our sense of the common characteristics of the school of the Netherlands; we should miss the cumulative effect upon the imagination of a number of different subjects treated in a similar manner and from a common point of view. We might recognise, as we do now with the French, the greatness of single works of art, but we should lose the conviction and clearness of appreciation which come from varied comparison and contrast. In these circumstances, where a quantity even of second-rate works was so much to be desired in order to throw light on the few masterpieces accessible, it is to be regretted that the organisers of the exhibition in Paris did not devote more time and energy to collecting reproductions of every remaining scrap of fresco-painting and of every ruined altarpiece hidden away in the sacristies of village churches. Had a separate committee been formed for making such a photographic census of the remains of mediæval painting in France, many unforeseen connexions might have become plain, many illuminating hints of the development and spread of traditions might have been gathered. That this was not done is, perhaps, the most serious criticism that can be urged against an otherwise admirable example of organisation. If, for the sake of clearness, we may dramatise the succession of artistic ideas which the exhibition illustrated, we might entitle our play the 'Birth of Modern Painting,' while a subordinate plot would be that of the conflict between Latin and Teutonic Culture.' Like most true historical dramas, it is somewhat inconclusive and awkward in construction, for the climax is reached at an |