Greuze. The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon by Anita BrooknerReview by: F. J. B. WATSONJournal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 121, No. 5202 (MAY 1973), pp. 407-408Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41371082 .

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MAY I973 NOTES ON BOOKS

Coast and Isles, and Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland. A grandson of the eighth Duke, he succeeded his cousin as eleventh holder of that title in 1949. He was educated at Milton, Massachusetts, and at Christ Church, Oxford. During the Second World War he served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He had been a Fellow of the Society since 1953.

The Duke of Hamilton The Duke of Hamilton and Brandon, KT, PC, Gcvo, AFC, who died on 30th March, aged 70, held the greatest position of any subject in the Kingdom of Scotland. He was premier peer, Hereditary Bearer of the Crown of Scotland and Hereditary Keeper of the Palace of Holyrood- house. From 1940 to 1964 he was Lord Steward of the Royal Household in Scotland.

Douglas Douglas-Hamilton succeeded his father as fourteenth Duke of Hamilton and eleventh Duke of Brandon in 1940. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, and as a young man won acclaim for his prowess as an amateur boxer and for his sense of adventure. This was most strikingly put to the test in the air. One of the first owners of a private aeroplane in this country, he was also the first man to fly over Mount Everest, as Chief Pilot of the expedition mounted for the purpose in 1933. He took a close interest in the develop- ment of civil aviation, particularly in Scotland,

and himself served in the Auxiliary Air Force, and (from 1939-45) i*1 the Royal Air Force, in which he attained the rank of Group-Captain and became Controller with the 11 Fighter Group. In 1 94 1 he was the central figure in the bizarre episode of Rudolf Hess's sudden flight to Scotland. Under the delusion that, by virtue of his rank and birth, Hamilton wielded great political power, Hess had cast him for the rôle of go-between in a crazy attempt to negotiate peace between Britain and Germany. Later in the war Hamilton commanded the Air Training Corps in Scotland. He was prominently associated with the Air Cadet Council and the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators, and was President of the Air League and of the British Air Line Pilots Association. For a number of years he was Treasurer, and subsequently President, of the Boys' Brigade in Scotland.

In other spheres of public and official life Hamilton was much to the fore. As Marquess of Clydesdale he had been for ten years Member of Parliament for East Renfrew. On four occasions in the 1950s he was Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Since 1948 he had been Chancellor of the University of St. Andrews. He was created GCVO in 1946 and a Knight of the Thistle in 1 95 1. In 1964 he was awarded the Royal Victorian Chain.

Hamilton became a Fellow of the Society in 1952.

NOTES ON BOOKS Greuze. The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon By Anita Brookner London , Paul Elek , 1972. £7.00 Posterity, or at any rate late posterity, has been exceedingly unjust to Greuze. Many painters before and since his time have enjoyed immense popular success during their lifetime and then quickly vanished leaving hardly a trace. But this was not what happened to Greuze. For a long time after the French Revolution which caused such a strong revulsion against almost all the most distinguished painters of the previous age, he continued to enjoy a certain esteem and his works went on fetching quite respectable prices in the auction room. Half a century later when Watteaus, Bouchers and Fragonards could still be bought for extremely modest sums, Greuze' s works remained rich men's paintings. But within a few years of the Goncourts' publication of the first serious study of the painter in 1864 a decline set in which has become increasingly precipitate. Yet their essay on Greuze is far from unfavourable and all the other artists about whom the Goncourts wrote have risen steadily in reputation and price, ever since L'Art du Dix-huitième Siècle was published.

Even to-day a glance at the so-called Portrait

of Talleyrand* y recently shown at the Royal Academy, or at certain illustrations in Miss Brookner's excellent book, will at once make it evident that Greuze was at least a masterly portrait painter, and his drawings show him to have been a first-rate draughtsman. The chief obstacle to the appreciation of his art to-day is that for most people he is merely the painter of innumerable studies of heads of young girls, sentimental and often verging on the porno- graphic, which are the most familiar of his works. The majority of these are mere pot- boilers produced late in his life when his reputa- tion was waning, to pay the debts incurred through his unfortunate marriage. Many indeed are not by him at all but by studio assistants or even imitators.

Greuze' s great reputation with his contem- poraries was built on his scenes of domestic manners with a bourgeois setting and a pro- testant, even calvinistic, moral tone. This was a type of painting he invented almost single- handed and certainly hoped to elevate to the same level as the history painting to which the Académie assigned the highest place in the hierarchical categories of painting. The hope was dashed when his reception piece Sevère et

♦Reproduced in the November 1972 Journal, p. 932. - Ed

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS MAY I973

Caracalla caused him to be accepted into the Académie only in the low category of a genre painter rather than as a history painter. Such an affront to his proud and hypersensitive nature was a blow which overshadowed the rest of his life.

But if Greuze failed to earn the appreciation of his fellow Academicians he won it from non- academic sources, from the general art-loving public and, above all, from Diderot. From 1761 to 1769 (after which Greuze virtually ceased to exhibit at the Académie ) Diderot included in his Salons a series of lyrical paeans in praise of such of Greuze's exhibits as UAcordée du Village , La Bénédiction Paternelle , La Consolation de la Vieillesse , L'Avare et Ses Enfants , and La Mort ďun Père Dénaturé Abandonné par Ses Enfants. The moral and literary character of his themes is revealed by their titles.

It is not difficult to see why such works appealed to Diderot. He was a literary man with little knowledge of painting (for years Chardin provided him with technical hints for his Salons). In the 1750S he had published a series of plays with bourgeois subjects like Le Fils Naturel^ Le Père de Famille , Entretiens de Dorial et Moi. Their themes might well have (but actually did not) provided subjects for Greuze's painting. These drames bourgeois or comédies larmoyants , as the more mawkish ones came to be known in the hands of writers like Nivelle de la Chausée, introduced a new form of feeling, known as sensibilité , into the French literature of the mid- eighteenth century. Even as early as 17 19 the Abbé du Bos had noticed in his Réflections Critiques sur la Poésie et la Peinture , an im- mensely popular book on aesthetics, that 'generally speaking people prefer to cry rather than laugh when they go to the theatre'. Greuze adopted this new mode of feeling, this sensibilité , from literature and combined it with the altogether tougher and more democratic realism he found in the works of Dutch seventeenth- century masters of genre painting which were so avidly collected in eighteenth-century Paris, to create his new type of essentially literary painting. Miss Brookner thinks that sensibilité is 'a kind of feeling that has now become extinct' and that is the reason why we can no longer appreciate Greuze's best work. This is not perhaps quite so self-evident as the author believes. Anyone who has explored the lower depths of modern literature, particularly in fiction, will be aware of this. The moral and emotional tone of such works has been debased through the cinema, the press, the pulp novel, and perhaps even the radio, so that no one with any sophistication at all can respond to such exhausted stimuli. But that Greuze's moral dramas awoke a genuine and valuable chord in the hearts of intelligent and emotionally mature contemporaries cannot be doubted.

Miss Brookner's study makes a very important contribution to our knowledge of the inter-

relations between literature and painting in eighteenth-century France. As such it is of far greater interest than the average art-historical study of an individual artist, though even on that level it is a very valuable achievement. She reprodu ces (and reproduces well) over a hundred of Greuze's paintings and drawings, about ten times as many as any earlier writer has illus- trated, and since so many of Greuze's best works are hard to see that is very valuable too.

F. J. B. WATSON

Rowlandson Watercolours and Drawings By John Hayes London , Phaidon , 1972. £7 Rowlandson: A New Interpretation By Ronald Paulson London , Studio Vista , 1972 £5 In spite of the steady level of public admiration for Rowlandson in this century, little has been written on him since Oppé's monograph of 1923, a work so stringent in its criticisms that it is surprising Rowlandson's reputation has survived at all. Yet it has ; so much so that John Hayes presents his selection of Rowlandson Watercolours and Drawings on the assumption that 'Rowlandson was one of the very greatest of English draughtsmen, arguably the greatest of all as a master of pen line'.

In the case of so prolific and variable an artist, substantiating this claim is largely a matter of careful selection; and Dr. Hayes's 144 plates (of which however only sixteen are in colour) succeed, on the whole, in showing Rowlandson as a fine draughtsman in nearly all the many aspects of his output. Yet, curiously enough, the descriptive notes which accompany these illustrations constantly allude to in- accurate, mechanical or perfunctory drawing. Again and again, Rowlandson's ebullience and verve allow him to get away with slapdash execution which would damn any less vital and convincing artist at once. Perhaps this is what Dr. Hayes means by 'greatness'. One is certainly very willing to be carried away on the surge of Rowlandson's endlessly flexible line, and the examples of it in this book, despite Dr. Hayes's readiness to point out flaws, are well calculated to maintain one's enthusiasm. But it is a little difficult to understand why, for instance, High Spirits (plate 62 ; coll. H.M. the Queen) should be singled out as 'brilliant and totally assured' - it seems to me to embody some of Rowlandson's worst characteristics, and, though an amusing sketch, is weak in drawing throughout, not the work of a 'highly accomplished draughtsman' as Dr. Hayes describes it.

One or two small corrections to the notes might be made: the famous Exhibition Stare- Case (plate 10 1) is not destroyed, as Dr. Hayes imagines, but alive and well at University

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