Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, [French Painters of the Eighteenth Century]

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
Pittori francesi del secolo XVIII
[French Painters of the Eighteenth Century]
Translation by Orsola Nemi. Original Title: L’art du dix-huitième siècle
Milan, Longanesi, 1956

Review by Luciano Mazzaferro

Fig. 1) Antoine Watteau, The Embarkation for Cithera (first version), 1717, Paris, Louvre Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[Note by Giovanni and Francesco Mazzaferro: this text is the translated transcript of a manuscript of our father, Luciano Mazzaferro, containing a review of the work. The manuscript dates back to 1995. Our editorial update only consists of the bibliographical note; we also set the titles of the chapters in bold].

Fig. 2) Antoine Watteau, The Embarkation for Cythera, 1718, Berlino, Charlottenburg Palace
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The revaluation of the French eighteenth century

Lovers of fine arts, the brothers Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules (1830-1870) de Goncourt worked on both contemporary painting and the one produced in the previous century, that is, during the eighteenth century. In his History of Art Criticism, Lionello Venturi clearly distinguished between the two sets of studies. As far as the study of, and the assessment on, the artists of the same era in which two brothers lived are concerned, his judgment is negative: "They preferred Gavarni ... to Daumier, despite the latter’s creative power. They favoured Decamps to Delacroix, Gustave Moreau to Manet. They did not understand Courbet" and Edmond, who in fact lived much longer than Jules and died more than twenty years after the first exhibition of the Impressionists, failed to grasp the fundamental importance of the new movement. However, when Venturi went on to consider the works of the eighteenth century painting, his valuation changed and became very positive: thanks to the work of the two scholars, French art of the eighteenth century "has taken the place it deserves in the history of art. The Goncourts repaired therefore a historic mistake of romanticism, and after them, no one questioned the absolute artistic value of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard anymore" [1].

Fig. 3) Antoine Watteau, Gersaint's Signboard, 1720, Berlin, Charlottenburg Palace
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 4) Antoine Watteau, Gersaint's Signboard (detail)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

French editions and Italian translation

The writings on the French art of the eighteenth century were released, in twelve instalments, starting from 1859; the last of them (Notules, additions, errata, i.e. Notes, additions, and corrigenda) was released after the death of Jules (1870). The second edition, carried out at the Rapilly printing house, was organised in two volumes, the first of which was released in 1873, while the other was published in the following year. A third revised edition, enlarged and enriched by illustrations, was printed with an outstanding lay-out by the publisher A. Quantin in Paris. The reference to some passages which were included for the first time here suggests that the third edition (or, possible, any later one) may have served for the translation done by Orsola Nemi, the first - so far as I know - in Italian. Ms Nemi was born in 1903 and died in Lepanto in 1985; she worked in publishing houses, collaborated with newspapers and other periodicals, and made use of various literary genres (from poetry to novels and fairy tales); moreover, she translated French works, as indeed these pages of the Goncourts, but also English texts in Italian. It is obvious that she had good drafting skills, even if she was not particularly experienced in the study of art history.

The translation is not complete: Ms Nemi failed to take account of the essays on Saint Aubin, Gravelot, Cochin, Eisen, Jean Michel Moreau and Debucourt. In fact, she examined the sections on seven artists, namely Watteau, Chardin, Boucher, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Greuze, Fragonard and Prud'hon. It should also be noted that, of the seven painters now listed, she also did not provide all the material included in the third French edition; the translator ensured the translation of the seven surveys and of the notes (Notules), while she ruled out other pages that provide news and listings on exposures, etchings and, as far as La Tour is concerned, the work in pastel. The inclusion of the Notules (that Nemi translated with the Italian term Note, i.e. Notes) made sure we can know the content of many letters, various documents and those writings that, for their importance, will be listed in the second part of this note; the exclusion of the remaining material does not allow to get an idea of that work of reorganization (mainly performed, after the death of Jules, by Edmond) that Bazin considered a significant ("remarquable") fact [2] for one can recognize there the signs and some typical elements of an activity, i.e. the cataloguing of art works, later on widely practiced by modern critics.

Fig. 5) Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Soap Bubbles, after 1739, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Passages are by large and faithfully translated. I made a comparison between the Italian text and that of the third French edition (a copy is available in the Archiginnasio library in Bologna) and I found out for the sections under consideration - that is, for the seven monographs and their Notules - only two omissions of some relief. The first concerns the entire page 336 and the top of p. 337 of the first volume, of course of the French edition: what has been overlooked should have been included in the Italian text, in the book printed by Longanesi publisher, before the asterisks of page 264. The other shortcoming, less extensive than the first one, resulted in the shortening of the note that in the translated text appears with the number 15 on pp. 438-439.

Ms Nemi also changed the original title, and, to say the truth, made it more in line with the text; the title no longer speaks broadly of "art", but of "painters" and specifies immediately that artists considered in the publication belong exclusively to French art production. There is no need to make any noise on the title change and not even on the omission of some monographs, individual chapters and somewhere minor passages, but it is really upsetting that Ms Nemi did not feel the need to insert even a brief notice to inform us of the criteria she followed and the reasons that may have recommended or even imposed those criteria. The only few lines inserted by the translator concern a few notes, marked, as it is customary, with the initials N.d.T. [Nota del traduttore/Note of the translator] and compiled not to clarify fundamental questions or to explain the reasons for certain choices, but to spend some time on rather marginal things or providing certainly useful, but not always necessary biographical information.

Fig. 6) Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Young Girl with Shuttlecock, 1741, Florence, Uffizi Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Watteau

The historical vacuum that had been created around the eighteenth century painting surprised the Goncourt brothers; it was a source of frustration for them and made them angry. "When you start talking about the art of the eighteenth century" – I read on p. 67 of the Italian translation, which I will refer to from now on, unless otherwise stated - "and approach the memory of its artists, you may be won by a feeling of great sadness, a kind of melancholic anger, already at the outset of this study. Against such a prodigious example of oblivion, against the excess of ingratitude and the insolence of contempt that the immediate posterity showed for the art of Louis XV’s great century, we begins to doubt about the opinions of France. One wonders if all our taste is simply fashion, if our national pride itself and the consciousness of our judgments depend perhaps, from mode. [...] France, for a whole half-century, has refused to recognize artists really born from here, French masters, true children of its spirit and of its genius!" But, after all - the two authors wondered -"what does fashion matter? In less than one century, Watteau will be universally recognized as a first-rate master" and one will no longer "need to have courage, to say what we say now, that Chardin was a great painter"(p. 69). These prophecies found confirmation much earlier than the Goncourts had imagined.

The admiration for Watteau is sincere and heartfelt. His sanguines are wonderful, his "three-pencil drawings" are enchanting. Among the paintings the favourite work is The Embarkation for Cythera (fig. 1 and 2). "What harmony in those sunny distances, in those mountains of rosy snow, in those waters mirroring the green; and those rays of sunlight flowing on pink robes, yellow robes, amaranth skirts, blue coats, the jackets coloured like pigeon's throat, and white dogs with spots of the colours of flame."(p. 62). The choice of the painting is motivated, besides its stylistic qualities, also by a definite polemical intent to get revenge against a blunt criticism and a corrupted taste. "Do you know where is buried, hidden, The Embarkation for Cythera, the masterpiece of Watteau’s masterpieces, and this enchanted canvas where the spirit runs between the characters like a flame among the flowers, a poem of light that can always, at any museum, compete against any picture? In a study hall of the Academy, where it serves as a target to mocking and bread balls of the pages of David"(p. 68). Yet, Watteau was the master who has greatly influenced the painting of his century: "All the paintings of Chardin, all those paintings of that century which are not consecrated to the Greeks and Romans, mimic the poses, the attitudes of the head, the taste of hairstyle, the colour, the design, the brush stroke" of this great artist (p. 63).

Fragonard and Chardin

Fig. 7) Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Stolen Kiss, St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Goncourts discover in Fragonard "a nature happy to live, a gaiety that flies over the seriousness of life, a gentle obstinacy in following their own path" and also a love for "an easy existence, without efforts..." (p . 273). And here is Chardin, "the great painter of still life" (p. 73). This genre, considered secondary, was raised by him "to the highest and most wonderful art conditions" (p. 74). "Flowers, fruits, tools, who paints them like him? Who displayed the life of inanimate things as Chardin made it? Who gave the eyes a similar feeling of real presence of the object?". And a little later: "Nothing humiliates his brushes. There is no piece of nature that he despises" (p. 75). The authors are also affected by the ability to paint the usual things of the bourgeois world and the "characters that are at his hand" (p. 85). They comment: "One can feel that Chardin loves, and even more, respects what he paints. So, that aura of purity that surrounds his characters, that perfume of honesty that reigns in his interiors, and that seems to come from all corners of his paintings, from the position of furniture, from the simplicity of their form, the hardiness of the chairs, the bareness of the walls, from the tranquillity of the lines around the tranquillity of the people" (p. 88).

The others

Fig.8) François Boucher, The Toilette of Venus, 1751, New York, Metropiltan Museum of Art
Source: Wikimedia Commons

No doubt, the other artists lie on a lower level; however, they are not denied what belongs to them. Boucher is a "original and brilliant painter", which however lacks the superior quality and the typical trait of the great artists. "He has a manner; he does not have a style. Therefore he is much inferior to Watteau, even though high-society people often name and associate them, as if there were a tie between Boucher and the master who has elevated the spirit of the style. Elegant vulgarity, this is the sign of Boucher" (pp. 145-146). With a prodigious memory for faces, Maurice Quentin de La Tour "paints and reveals the woman of his time [...] While leaving her with face powder, moles and fashions, he enhances her above the amiable conventions of which the portraitists of the time make abuse. He takes away that air of listless doll, which, in the current painting, integrates the vacuum, vacuous and vulgar type in her; the type which is imagined to be that of a 'gossip girl' " (pp. 195-196). His limits are to be found in various places, but, more than elsewhere, in a tormented search of principles and rules that gradually undermined the "spontaneity of talent" (p. 198).

Fig. 9) Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Portrait of Madame Pompadour, about 1750, Paris, Louvre Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Greuze is defined as "the painter of childhood" and "excels in representing the female beauty that, still uncertain, awakens in the child's features" (p. 224). But in the large paintings are visible all his weaknesses and colour miseries: "A slavering white, an at once dull and grey range of colours, a faded feature of violet and pigeon throat tones, an indecision of the red, a messy blue, a weakness and barbotage of the backgrounds, the thickness of the shadows "(ibid).

Fig. 10) Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Head of a Smiling Girl, about 1765, Vienna, Albertina
Source: Wikimedia Commons

And, finally, here is Prud'hon, whose figure is outlined not only to highlight his salient features, but also to scale down - with the presence of this painter - what is perceived as noisy and unacceptable in the role of David. David, the academic painter and interpreter of orthodox neo-classicism, is precisely contrasted against the Prud'hon who did not "tear to shreds the beauties of Greek art", found and revived them in his soul: "intuition was his science" (p. 320).

The sources of the Goncourts

The de Goncourt brothers utilized various sources, documents and letters. I am quoting the most interesting material described in the pages devoted to Watteau, where one can find a particular assortment of items:

CAYLUS, CLAUDE A. de; The life of Antoine Watteau painter of figures and landscapes, courteous and modern subjects (La vie d’Antoine Watteau peintre de figures et des paysages, sujets galants et modernes).

The Life, included in pp. 18-38, was read on February 3, 1748 at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Pierre Rosenberg [3] recalls the three versions of the text: a temporary copy, hand-drafted by Caylus himself, now preserved at the library of the Sorbonne, a transcript made by Caylus’s Secretary (who introduced slight changes), also at the Sorbonne and, finally, the text presented by the brothers de Goncourt. On p. 17, they provide some information on the totally random way how they discovered that material. More news and some considerations on p. 41.

COYPEL, CHARLES-ANTOINE; Response to Mr. Comte de Caylus (Réponse faite á Monsieur le comte de Caylus…).

Words spoken after the reading of the previous writing, on February 3, 1748. Here in pp. 39-40. For the location of the document, please refer to Rosenberg [4].

MARIETTE, PIERRE JEAN; Handwritten note on the Abecedario (Note manuscrite de l’Abecedario de Mariette).

It is kept at the National Library, Cabinet of Drawings. It contains reservations on Watteau’s aesthetic activity. It extends from line 37 of page 393 to line 30 of the next page.

Gersaint, EDME-FRANÇOIS; Summary of the life of Antoine Watteau (Abrégé de la vie d’Antoine Watteau) placed in the Catalogue raisonné des diverses curiosités du Cabinet de feu M. Quentin de Lorangère - auctioned on March 2, 1744, pp. 172-188).

Very close to Watteau, the art dealer Gersaint composed catalogues of the auctions. The text of Gersaint is used in various parts of the study of the Goncourts. Gersaint’s writing was fully reproduced in the collection of Rosenberg [5].

WATTEAU, ANTOINE; Letters

In note 21, which extends from p. 390 to p. 392, are transcribed four letters of Watteau: three addressed to Jean de Jullienne and the fourth one to Gersaint. The first contains the day and month (but not the year) in which it was written; the others do not include any indication of date.

CROZAT, PIERRE; Letter to Rosalba Carriera

It is reproduced part of the letter of 11 August 1721, in which Pierre Crozat announces the death of Watteau. The full text of the letter appears in French in the epistolary of the Venetian artist [6].

Vleughels, NICOLAS; Letter to Rosalba Carriera

In note 23, is reproduced a part of the letter of September 20, 1719 which can be read in its entirety in the correspondence of Ms Carriera [7].

NOTES

[Bibliographic Update] With respect to the period in which this review was written, no new Italian editions of the work were published. The interest for the Goncourt brothers, however, has never ceased. This materialised in the complete Italian edition of the Journals of the two brothers, published by Nino Aragno Publishers between 2007 and 2009 and the Casa d'artista (House of an artist) by Edmond de Goncourt, released by Sellerio in 2005. We are moreover aware of the publication of a new French critical edition in two volumes of the work, curated by Jean-Louis Cabanès and published in two volumes by the publisher Du Lérot in 2007.

[1] See Lionello Venturi, Storia della critica d’arte (History of Art Criticism), Florence, U Editions, 1945, p. 395 and Lionello Venturi, Storia della critica d’arte (History of Art Criticism), 4th edition, Turin, Einaudi, 1964, p. 267.

[2] See Germain Bazin, Histoire de l'histoire de l'art, Paris, Albin Michel, 1986 p. 481 and Germain Bazin, Storia della storia dell’arte (History of Art History), Naples, Guida Publishers, 1993, p. 587.

[3] See Pierre Rosenberg, Watteau. Le Vite antiche. (Watteau. The Ancient Lives). Bologna, Nuova Alfa Publishers, 1991, p. 73.

[4] Pierre Rosenberg, Watteau ... quoted., p. 117.

[5] Pierre Rosenberg, Watteau ... quoted.

[6] Rosalba Carriera, Lettere, diari, frammenti (Letters, Diaries, Fragments), edited by Bernardina Sani, Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 1985, pp. 400-402.

[7] Rosalba Carriera, Lettere ... cit., P. 359.