The Early French Painters—Richard Parkes Bonington—Chardin—Historical Paintings—Bonington again—The Moreau Collection—The Thomy-Thierret Collection—The Chauchard Collection.

French pictures early and late now await us. On our way down the Grande Galerie we passed on the right two entrances to other rooms. Taking that one which is nearer the British School, we find ourselves in Salle IX., leading to Salle X. and so on to Galerie XVI., which completes the series. In Salle X. the beginnings of French art may be studied, and in particular the curious Japanese effects of the Ecole d'Avignon. Here also is very interesting work by Le MaÎtre de Moulins and a remarkable series of drawings in the case in the middle, representing the Siege of Troy. Salle XI. is notable for its portraits by Clouet and others; in Salle XII. we find Le Sueur, and in Salle XIII. the curious brothers Le Nain, of whom there are very interesting examples at the Ionides collection at South Kensington, but nothing better than the haymaking scene here, No. 542.

French painting of the seventeenth century bursts upon us in the great Salle XIV. or Galerie Mollien, of which Nicolas Poussin and Ausonian Claude are the giants, thus completing Landor's pleasant list with which we entered the Grande Galerie in the last chapter. There are wonderful things here, but so crowded are they that I always feel lost and confused. There is, however, compensation and relief, for the room also contains one minute masterpiece which perhaps not more than five out of every thousand visitors have seen, and yet which can be studied with perfect quietness and leisure. This is a tiny water-colour in the revolving screen in the middle. There is much delicate work in this screen, dainty aquatint effects by the Dutchmen Ostade and Van der Heyden, Weenix and Borssom, and so forth; but finest of all (as so often happens) is a little richly-coloured drawing of Nottingham by Bonington, who, as we shall see, has a way of cropping up unsuspectedly and graciously in this great collection—and very rightly, since he owed so much to that Gallery. He was one of the youngest students ever admitted, being allowed to copy there at the age of fifteen, while at the Beaux Arts. That was in the year after Waterloo. There may in the history of the Gallery have been copyists equally young, but there can never have been one more distinguished or who had deeper influence on French art. Paris not only made Bonington's career but ended it, for it was while sketching in its streets ten years or more later that he met with the sunstroke which brought about his death when he was only twenty-seven, and stilled the marvellous hand for ever.

Salle XV. is given up to portraits, among them—and shall I say chief of them, certainly chief of them in point of popularity—the adorable portrait of Madame Elizabeth Louise VigÉe Le Brun and her daughter, painted by herself, which is perhaps the best-known French picture, and of which I give a reproduction opposite page 246. On a screen in this room are placed the latest acquisitions. When last I was there the more noticeable pictures were a portrait by Romney of himself, rich and melancholy, recalling to the mind Tennyson's monologue, and a sweet and ancient religieuse by Memling. There were also some Corot drawings, not perhaps so good as those in the Moreau collection, but very beautiful, and a charming old-world lady by Fragonard. These probably are by this time distributed over the galleries, and other new arrivals have taken their place. I hope so.

Galerie XVI., which leads out of the Salle des Portraits, brings us to French art of the eighteenth century—to Greuze and David, to Fragonard and Watteau, to Lancret and Boucher, and, to my mind, most charming, most pleasure-giving of all, to Jean Baptiste SimÉon Chardin, who is to be seen in perfection here and in the distant room which contains the Collection La Caze. It is probable that no painter ever had quite so much charm as this kindly Frenchman, whose loving task it was to sweeten and refine homely Dutch art. Chardin is the most winsome of all painters: his brush laid a bloom on domestic life. The Louvre has twenty-eight of his canvases, mostly still-life, distributed between the Salle La Caze and Salle No. XVI., where we now are. The most charming of all, which is to be seen in the Salle La Caze, is reproduced opposite page 234.

Having walked down the left wall of the Salle, it is well to slip out at the door at the end for a moment and refresh oneself with another view of Botticelli's fresco, which is just outside, before returning by the other wall, as we have to go back through the Salle des Portraits in order to examine Salle VIII., a vast room wholly filled with French paintings of the first half of the nineteenth century, bringing the nation's art to the period more or less at which the Luxembourg takes it up, though there is a certain amount of overlapping. No room in the Louvre so wants weeding and re-hanging as this, for it is a sad jumble. Search, however, for the magnificent examples by the great plein-airistes. They are lost in this wilderness; but there they are for those that seek—the two vast Troyons; Corot's magic "Souvenir de Castel-Gondolfon"; a great Daubigny, "Les Vendances de Bourgogne," very hard and fine, and the same gigantic painter's large and lovely harvest scene, "Le Moisson"; Rousseau's "Sortie de ForÊt," not unlike the Rousseau in the Wallace Collection in London, with its natural archway of branches and rich tenderness of colour; the sublime "La Vague," by Courbet; lastly Millet's "Les Glaneuses," the three stooping women in the cornfield who come to the inward eye almost as readily as the figures in the "Angelus". The red, blue and yellow of their head-kerchiefs alone would make this picture worth a millionaire's ransom.

We leave the room by the door opposite that through which we came and find ourselves again in the Grande Galerie. The way now is to the left, through the Italian Schools, through the Salon CarrÉ (why not stay there and let French art go hang?) through the Galerie d'Apollon (of which more anon), through the Rotunda and the Salle des Bijoux (whither we shall return), to another crowded late eighteenth and early nineteenth century French room chiefly notable for David's Madame RÉcamier on her joyless little sofa. (Why didn't we stay in the Salon CarrÉ?) In this room also are two large Napoleonic pictures—one by Gros representing General Bonaparte visiting the plague victims at Jaffa in 1799; the other, by David, of the consecration service in Notre Dame, described in an earlier chapter. To see this kind of picture, at which the French have for many years been extremely apt, one must of course go to Versailles, where the history of France is spread lavishly over many square miles of canvas.

From this room—La Salle des Sept CheminÉes—we pass through a little vestibule, with Courbet's great village funeral in it, to the very pleasant Salle La Caze, containing the greater part of the collection of the late Dr. La Caze, and notable chiefly for the Chardins of which I have already spoken, and also, by the further door, for a haunting "Buste de femme" attributed to the Milanese School. But there are other admirable pictures here, including a Velasquez, and it repays study.

Leaving by the further door and walking for some distance, we come to the His de la Salle collection of drawings, from which we gain the Collection Thiers, which should perhaps be referred to here, although there is not the slightest necessity to see it at all. The Thiers collection, which occupies two rooms, is remarkable chiefly for its water-colour copies of great paintings. The first President of the Republic employed patient artists to make copies suitable for hanging upon his walls of such inaccessible works as the "Last Judgment" of Michael Angelo and Raphael's Dresden Madonna. The results are certainly extraordinary, even if they are not precisely la guerre. The Arundel Society perhaps found its inspiration in this collection. Among the originals there is a fine Terburg.

On leaving the Thiers collection, one comes to a narrow passage with a little huddle of water-colours, very badly treated as to light and space, and well worth more consideration. These pictures should not be missed, for among them are two Boningtons, a windmill in a sombre landscape, which I reproduce opposite page 274, and next to it a masterly drawing of the statue of BartolommÉ Colleoni at Venice, which Ruskin called the finest equestrian group in the world. Bonington, who had the special gift of painting great pictures in small compass (just as there are men who can use a whole wall to paint a little picture on), has made a drawing in which the original sculptor would have rejoiced. It would do the Louvre authorities good if these Boningtons, which they treat so carelessly, were stolen. Nothing could be easier; I worked out the felony as I stood there. All that one would need would be a few friends equally concerned to teach the Louvre a lesson, behind whose broad backs one could ply the diamond and the knife. Were I a company promoter this is how I should spend my leisure hours. Such theft is very nigh virtue.

Among other pictures in these bad little rooms—Nos. XVII. and XVIII.—are some Millets and Decamps.

Three more collections—and these really more interesting than anything we saw in Galeries XIV. or XVI., or the Salle des Sept CheminÉes—await us; but two of them need considerable powers of perambulation. Chronology having got us under his thumb we must make the longer journey first—to the Collection Moreau. The Collection Moreau is to be found at the top of the MusÉe des Arts DÉcoratifs, the entrance to which is in the Rue de Rivoli. In the lower part of this building are held periodical exhibitions; but the upper parts are likely at any rate for a long time to remain unchanged, and here are wonderful collections of furniture, and here hang the few but select canvases brought together by Adolphe Moreau and his son, and presented to the nation by M. Etienne Moreau-Nelaton.

In the Thomy-Thierret collection in another top storey of the same inexhaustible palace (to which our fainting feet are bound) are Corots of the late period; M. Moreau bought the earlier. Here, among nearly forty others, you may see that portrait of Corot painted in 1825, just before he left for Rome, which his parents exacted from him in return for their consent to his new career and the abandonment of their rosy dreams of his success as a draper. Here you may see "Un Moine," one of the first pictures he was able to sell—for five hundred francs (twenty pounds). Here is the charming marine "La Rochelle" painted in 1851 and given by Corot to Desbarolles and by Desbarolles to the younger Dumas. Here is the very beautiful Pont de Mantes, reproduced opposite page 252, belonging to his later manner, and here also is an exceptionally merry little sketch, "Bateau de pÊche À marÉe basse". I mention these only, since selection is necessary; but everything that Corot painted becomes in time satisfying to the student and indispensable to its owner. Among the pencil drawings we find this exquisite lover of nature once more, with fifteen studies of his Mistress.

One of the most interesting of the Moreau pictures is Fantin-Latour's "Hommage À Delacroix," with its figures of certain of the great and more daring writers and painters of the day, 1864, the year after Delacroix's death. They are grouped about his framed portrait—Manet, red haired and red bearded, a little like Mr. Meredith in feature; Whistler, with his white feather black and vigorous, and his hand on the historical cane; Legros (the only member of the group who is still living, and long may he live!) and Baudelaire, for all the world like an innocent professor. Manet himself is represented here by his famous "DÉjeuner sur l'herbe," which the scandalised Salon of 1863 refused to hang, and three smaller canvases. Among the remaining pictures which gave me most pleasure are Couture's portrait of Adolphe Moreau the younger; Daumier's "La RÉpublique"; CarriÈre's "L'enfant À la soupiÈre" (notice the white bowl); Decamps' "La Battue," curiously like a Koninck; and Troyon's "Le Passage du GuÉ," so rich and sweet.

From the Collection Moreau, with its early Barbizon pictures, one ought to pass to the Chauchard with its middle period, and then to the Collection Thomy-Thierret; but let us go to the Thomy-Thierret now. It needs courage and endurance, for the room which contains these exquisite pictures is only to be reached on foot after climbing many stairs and walking for what seem to be many miles among models of ships and other neglected curiosities on the Louvre's topmost floor. But once the room is reached one is perfectly happy, for every picture is a gem and there is no one there. M. Thomy-Thierret, who died quite recently, was a collector who liked pictures to be small, to be rich in colour, and to be painted by the Barbizon and Romantic Schools. Here you may see twelve Corots, all of a much later period than those bequeathed by M. Moreau, among them such masterpieces as "Le Vallon" (No. 2801), reproduced opposite the next page, "Le Chemin de SÈvres" (No. 2803), "EntrÉe de Village" (No. 2808), "Les ChaumiÈres" (No. 2809), and "La Route d'Arras" (No. 2810). Here are thirteen Daubignys, including "Les Graves de Villerville" (No. 28,177), and one sombre and haunting English scene—"La Tamise À Erith" (No. 2821). Here are ten Diazes, most beautiful of which to my eyes is "L'ÉplorÉe" (No. 2863). Here are ten Rousseaus, among them "Le Printemps" (No. 2903), with its rapturous freshness, which I reproduce opposite page 120, and "Les ChÊnes" (No. 2900), such a group of trees as Rousseau alone could paint. Here are six Millets, my favourite being the "PrÉcaution Maternelle" (No. 2894), with its lovely blues, which again reappear in "Le Vanneur" (No. 2893). Here are eleven Troyons, of which "La Provende des poules" (No. 2907), with its bustle of turkeys and chickens around the gay peasant girl beneath a burning sky, reproduced opposite page 266, is one of the first pictures to which my feet carry me on my visits to Paris. Here are twelve DuprÉs, most memorable of which is "Les Landes" (No. 2871). And here also are Delacroix', Isabeys and Meissoniers.

The Chauchard pictures—140 in number—which are now hanging in five rooms leading from the Salle Rubens, were bequeathed to the nation by M. Alfred Chauchard, proprietor of the Magasins du Louvre (which some visitors to Paris have considered the only Louvre). Among the pictures are twenty-six by Corot, twenty-six by Meissonier, eight by Millet (including "L'Angelus") and eight by Daubigny.

I may say at once that the Chauchard Collection does not compare with the Thomy-Thierret in courage. M. Thomy-Thierret liked his pictures to be small and exquisite and happy. Within the limits imposed the Barbizon painters never did anything more delightful or indeed better. The whole collection—and it is beyond price—is homogeneous: it embodies the taste of one man. M. Moreau and his son had a robuster taste, a bolder eye. They wanted strength as well as sweetness, or strength alone. Their collection has not quite the homogeneity of the Thomy-Thierret, but one feels here also that personality has honestly been at work bringing together things of beauty and power that pleased it, and nothing else. But M. Chauchard....

It is perfectly evident in a moment that M. Chauchard had neither knowledge nor taste. He merely had acumen. At a certain moment in his successful life, one feels, M. Chauchard extended himself before the fire-place, stroked his spreading favoris (so like those of our own Whiteley), and announced "I must have some pictures". Other prosperous men saying the same thing have forthwith taken their courage in their hands and bought pictures; but M. Chauchard as I see him (both in his dazzling marble bust and in the portrait by Benjamin Constant), was not like that. "I must have some pictures," he announced, and then quickly reverted to type and cast about as to the best means of discovering whose pictures were most worth buying. That is how the Chauchard Collection came about, if I am not mistaken: it was the venture of an essentially commercial man—an investor-in-grain—who also desired a reputation of virtuosity but did not want to lose money over it.

As it happens M. Chauchard was well advised. But wonderful as they are, beautiful as they are, valuable as they are, there is not a picture here which suggests to the visitor that it ever brought a real gladness to the eyes of its owner in his own home.

But I can convince you only too easily that M. Chauchard had no taste. Do you remember when driving out to Longchamp, through the Bois, either to the Races or to Suresnes, just after you pass the Cascade, you come on the left to a windmill overlooking the course, and on the right to a white villa, all alone and unreal? A club house, one naturally thinks it, for the French Jockey Club, or something of that kind. You may have forgotten the villa, but you will recall it when I say that on the very trim vivid lawn in front of it, scattered about, supposed to be counterfeiting life, are various animals in stone—a stag, a doe, some dogs, all white and motionless, in the best mortuary manner, and all, to you and me, outrageous. Well, that was one of M. Chauchard's homes. M. Chauchard was the owner of that lawn and its occupants. The man who looking out of his window could feast his eye on these triumphs of the monumental mason was the same man who bought for his walls sheep by Jacque and Millet, and cattle and dogs by Troyon....

No matter. M. Chauchard acquired pictures and left them to the French Nation, and they are now on view for ever (always excepting the fatal Continental Mondays) for all to rejoice in. The first really compellingly beautiful work as one enters—the first picture to touch the emotions—is Rousseau's "La Charrette". It was painted in 1862, five years before the painter's death, which left the villagers of Barbizon the richer by a studio-chapel. It is a mere trifle and it is as wonderful as a summer day: a forest glade, in the midst of which a tiny wagon and white horse with blue trappings are seen beneath a burning sky, such a picture as ought to have a wall if not a room to itself: such a picture as I should like to see placed above an altar. It is the same subject—a forest wagon—that provided what in some ways is the best or most attractive Corot here. His "La Charrette" is a large easy landscape lit by the gracious light of which he alone had the secret. In the foreground is a deep sandy road with the charrette labouring through it. But before we came to this we had stood before one of the finest of the seven Daubignys, "La Seine À Bezons," a river scene of almost terrible calm, with Mont Valerien in the distance and geese and boats on the near shore, and implicit in it the sincerity, strength and humility of this great man.

At the end of the room hang two large and busy Troyons, one on each side of M. Chauchard himself, the donor of the feast, whose bust in the whitest Carrara, with the whiskers in full fig and the croix de grand officier du Legion d'honneur meticulously carved upon it, stands here, as stipulated in the will. These two Troyons, of which there are eighteen in all, are I think the largest. One represents cows sauntering lazily down to drink; the other the return from the market of a mixed herd of cattle and sheep, with a donkey in panniers, being driven by a man on a white horse. As was his wont, Troyon chose a road on the edge of a cliff with a very green border of turf and an exquisite glimpse of sea to the left. None of the new Troyons perhaps is as fine as those in Salle VIII. of the Louvre proper, but this is a superb thing. The "Boeufs se rendant au labour" and the "Le Retour À la ferme" in Salle VIII. should be visited after the Chauchards.

And so we leave the first and largest room, in the midst of which are two cases of Barye's bronzes—lions and tigers, bears and deer, snakes and birds—and enter the first room on the left as we came in; and here we begin to see for the first time pictures with special knots of people before them. For the Meissoniers begin here. And of Meissonier what am I to say? For Meissonier leaves me cold. He is marvellous; but he leaves me cold. He painted with a fidelity and spirit that border on the magical; but those qualities that I want in a picture, those callings of deep to deep, one seeks in vain. Hence I say nothing of Meissonier, except that he was a master, that there are twenty-six of his masterpieces here, and that the crowd opposite his "1814" extends to the opposite side. How can one spend time over "Le cheval de l'ordonnance" and the "Petit Poste de Grand'-Garde" when Daubigny's "Les Laveuses (effet de soleil couchant)" hangs so near—this great placid green picture, so profoundly true as to be almost an act of God? Corot's "Etang de Ville d'Avray" is here too, liquid and tender.

The little room that leads out of this is usually almost unenterable by reason of the press before Meissonier's "1814". This undoubtedly is one of the little great pictures of the world, and I can understand the enthusiasm of the French sightseer, whose blood is still stirrable by the enduring personality of the saturnine man on the white horse. Neighbouring pictures are a rich cattle piece by Diaz, immediately over "1814"; Rousseau's "La Mare," which is not a little like the Koninck in the Ionides Collection at South Kensington, and the same painter's "La Mare au pied du coteau" with its lovely middle distance. Here too is one of Corot's many pÊcheurs, who little knew as they fished on so quietly in the still gentle light that they were being rendered immortal by the quaint little bourgeois with the long pipe, sketching on the bank. One of the finest of the DuprÉs is also here—"La Vanne," a deep green scene of water.

In the last room we come at last to that painter whose work, next perhaps to Meissonier's, is the magnet which draws such a steady stream of worshippers to this new shrine of art—to Jean FranÇois Millet. M. Chauchard had eight Millets, including the "Angelus," but though it is the "Angelus" which is considered of many to be the very core of this collection, I find more pleasure in "La BergÈre gardant ses moutons" (reproduced opposite page 308), which I would call, I think, the best picture of all. It has been remarked that no picture containing sheep can ever be a bad picture; but when Millet paints them, and when they are grazing beneath such a sky, and when one of those grave sweet peasant women—a monument of patient acceptance and the humility that comes from the soil—is their shepherdess, why then it is almost too much; and the brave ardent Jacque, whose "Moutons au PÂturage" hangs close by, is half suspected of theatricalism. Millet is so great, so full of large elemental simplicity and truth that one regrets that his eight pictures have not a room to themselves. That they should be elbowed by the neat dancing-master chefs d'oeuvre of Meissonier is something of a catastrophe.

Thinking over the collection, I have very strongly the feeling already expressed that it was wrongly assembled. The investor rather than the enthusiast is too apparent. M. Chauchard, it is true, refrained from making money by his acquisitions, since he gave them to the nation, and this is eternally to his credit. None the less I find it difficult to esteem him as perhaps one should even in the light of a generous testator. One so wants pictures to be loved. And of all pictures that are lovable and that long to pass into their owner's being—to engentle his eyes and enrich his experience and deepen his nature—none equal those that were painted by the little group of friends who in the middle of the last century made the white-walled village of Barbizon their head-quarters and the Forest of Fontainebleau their happy hunting-ground and a Wordsworthian passion for nature their creed.

Such pictures deserve the most faithful owners and the most thoughtful hospitality....

But if we cannot get all as we wish it, at least we must be grateful for the next best thing, and to M. Chauchard and the Louvre authorities we must all be supremely grateful.

The Louvre is to-day the most wonderful museum in the world; but what would one not give to be able to visit it as it was in 1814, when it was in some respects more wonderful still. For then it was filled with the spoils of Napoleon's armies, who had instructions always to bring back from the conquered cities what they could see that was likely to beautify and enrich France. It is a reason for war in itself. I would support any war with Austria, for example, that would bring to London Count Czernin's Vermeer and the Parmigianino in the Vienna National Gallery; any war with Germany that would put the Berlin National Gallery at our disposal. Napoleon had other things to fight for, but that comprehensive brain forgot nothing, and as he deposed a king he remembered a blank space in the Louvre that lacked a Raphael, an empty niche waiting for its Phidias. The Revolution decreed the Museum, but it was Napoleon who made it priceless and glorious. After the fall of this man a trumpery era of restitution set in. Many of his noble patriotic thefts were cancelled out. The world readjusted itself and shrank into its old pettiness. Priceless pictures and statues were carried again to Italy and Austria, Napoleon to St. Helena.