Part 1 (1/2)

Fragonard.

by Haldane Macfall.

I

THE BEGINNINGS

High up, amongst the Sea-Alps that stretch along the southern edge of France, where romantic Provence bathes her sunburnt feet in the blue waters of the Mediterranean, high on the mountain's side hangs the steep little town of Gra.s.se, embowered midst grey-green olive-trees.

In as sombre a narrow street as there is in all her dark alleys, on the fifth day of April in the much bewigged and powdered year of 1732, there was born to a glovemaker of the town, worthy mercer Fragonard, a boy-child, whom the priest in the gloomy church christened Jean Honore Fragonard.

As the glovemaker looked out of his sombre house over the sunlit slopes of the grey-green olive-trees that stretched away to the deep blue waters of the sea, he vowed his child to commerce and a thrifty life in this far-away country place that was but little vexed with the high ambitions of distant, fickle, laughing Paris, or her splendid scandals; nay, scarce gave serious thought to her gadding fas.h.i.+ons or her feverish vogues--indeed, the attenuated ghosts of these once frantic things wriggled southwards through the provinces on but sluggish feet to the high promenades of Gra.s.se--as the worthy mercer was first in all the little town to know by his modest traffic in them; and that, too, only long after the things they shadowed were buried under new millineries and fopperies and fantastic riot in the gay capital. As a fact, the dark-eyed, long-nosed folk that trudged these steep and narrow thoroughfares were a sluggish people; and sunlit Gra.s.se snored away its day in drowsy fas.h.i.+on.

But if the room where the child first saw the light were gloomy enough within, the skies were wondrous blue without, and the violet-scented slopes were robed in a tender garment of silvery green, decked with the gold of orange-trees, and enriched with bright embroidery of many-coloured flowers that were gay as the gayest ribbons of distant Paris. And the glory of it bathed the lad's eyes and heart for sixteen years, so that his hands got them itching to create the splendour of it which sang within him; and the wizardry of the flower-garden of France never left him, casting its spell over all his thinking, and calling to him to utter it to the world. It stole into his colour-box, and on to his palette, and so across the canvas into his master-work, and was to lead him through the years to a blithe immortality.

The small boy with the big head was born in the year after Francois Boucher came back to Paris from his Italian wanderings on the eve of his thirties and won to academic honour. The child grew up in his Provencal home, whilst Boucher, turning his back upon academic art on gaining his seat at the Academy, was creating the Pastorals, Venus-pieces, and Cupid-pieces that changed the whole style of French art from the pompous and mock-heroic manner of Louis Quatorze's century of the sixteen hundreds to the gay and elegant pleasaunces that fitted so aptly the elegant pleasure-seeking days of Louis the Fifteenth's seventeen hundreds.

Gossip of high politics came trickling down to Gra.s.se as slowly as the fas.h.i.+ons, yet the eleven-year-old boy's ears heard of the death of the minister, old Cardinal Fleury, and of the effort of Louis to become king by act. Though Louis had small genius for the mighty business, and fell thenceforth into the habit of ruling France from behind petticoats, raising the youngest of the daughters of the historic and n.o.ble house of De Nesle to be his accepted consort under the rank and honours of d.u.c.h.ess of Chateauroux. All tongues tattled of the business, the very soldiery singing mocking songs; when--Louis strutting it as conqueror with the army, got the small-pox at Metz, and sent the Chateauroux packing at the threat of death. He recovered, to enter Paris soon after as the Well-Beloved, and to be reconciled with the frail Chateauroux before she died in the sudden agony in which she swore she had been poisoned.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--THE MUSIC LESSON

(In the Louvre)

Fragonard had a profound admiration for the Dutch painters. Whether he went to Holland shortly after his marriage is not known; but he seems suddenly to have employed his brush as if he had come across fine examples of the Dutch school. ”The Music Lesson” at the Louvre is one of these, and the Dutch influence is most marked both as to subject, treatment, and handling of the paint, if we allow for Fragonard's own strongly French personality.]

At thirteen the boy listened to the vague rumours of a new scandal that set folk's tongues wagging again throughout all France. The king raised Madame Lenormant d'Etioles, a daughter of the rich financier cla.s.s, to be Marquise de Pompadour, and yielded up to her the sceptre over his people.

The nations, weary of war, agreed to sign the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. In this, our artist's sixteenth year, the Pompadour had been the king's acknowledged mistress for three years. From this time, the peace being signed, Louis the Fifteenth laid aside all effort to fulfil the duties of the lord over a great people; gave himself up to shameless and riotous living, and allowed the Pompadour to usurp the splendour of his throne and to rule over the land.

For the next sixteen years she was the most powerful person at court, the greatest personality in the State--making and unmaking ministers like a sovereign, and disposing of high offices, honours, t.i.tles, and pensions. The king squandered upon her some seventy odd millions of the public money as money is now valued. Her energy and her industry must have been colossal. Her intelligence saved the king from the boredom of decision in difficult affairs. She made herself a necessity to his freedom from care. Every affair of State was discussed and settled under her guidance. Ministers, amba.s.sadors, generals, transacted their business in her handsome boudoirs. She dispensed the whole patronage of the sovereign with her pretty hands. The prizes of the army, of the church, of the magistracy, could only be secured through her good-will. As though these things were not load enough to bow the shoulders of any one human being she kept a rein upon every national activity. She created the porcelain factory of Sevres, thereby adding a lucrative industry to France. She founded the great military school of Saint Cyr. She mothered every industry. She was possessed of a rare combination of talents and accomplishments, and of astounding taste. But her deepest affection was for the arts.

The Pompadour had gathered about her, as the beautiful Madame d'Etioles, the supreme wits and artists and thinkers of her day; Voltaire and Boucher and Latour and the rest were her friends, and the new thought that was being born in France was nursed in her drawing-rooms. As the Pompadour she kept up her friends.h.i.+ps. She was prodigal in her encouragement of the arts, in the furnishment of her own and the king's palaces and castles. And it was in the exercise and indulgence of her better qualities that she brought out the genius and encouraged to fullest achievement the art of Boucher, and of the great painters of her time. So Boucher brought to its full blossom the art that Watteau had created--the picture of ”Fetes galentes”--and added to the artistic achievement of France the Pastorals wherein Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses dally in pleasant landscapes, and the Venus-pieces wherein Cupids flutter and romp--a world of elegance and charm presided over by the G.o.ddess of Love.

II

ROME

All this was but Paris-gossip amidst the olive-trees and steep streets of far-away Gra.s.se, where the large-headed, small-bodied lad was idling through his fifteen summers, living and breathing the beauty of the pleasant land of romance that bred him, when, like bolt from the blue, fell the news upon him that his father, tearing aside the fabric of the lad's dreams, had articled him as junior clerk to a notary.

But the French middle-cla.s.s ideal of respectability meant no heaven for this youth's goal, no ultimate aim for his ambition. He idled his master into despair; ”wasting his time” on paint-pots and pencil-scribblings until that honest man himself advised that the lad should be allowed to follow his bent.

So it came about--'twas in that year of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the year that saw the Pompadour come to supreme power (she had been for three years the king's acknowledged mistress)--the youth's mother, with all a French mother's shrewdness and common-sense, gathered together the sixteen-year-old lad's sketches, and bundled off with him in a diligence to Paris.

Arrived in Paris she sought out the greatest painter of the day, and burst with the shy youth into the studio of the dandified favourite artist of the king's majesty, Pompadour's Boucher--large-hearted, generous, much-sinning, world-famed Boucher, then at the very summit of his career--he was at that time living in the Rue Grenelle-Saint-Honore, which he was about to leave, and in which Fragonard in his old age was destined to end his days.

The lad glanced with wonder, we may be sure, at the great ”Rape of Europa” that stood upon the master's easel, whilst his mother poured out in the rough accent of Provence the tale of the genius of her son--stole, too, a stealthy scrutiny of the Venus-pieces and Pastorals that stood about the studio, and was filled with awed admiration. The mother besought the genius of France to make a genius of her son; and Boucher, with kindly smile upon his lips, glancing over the immature work of the prodigy, told the lad that he might come back to him in six months' time, pointing out to him, with all that large-hearted friendliness and sympathy that made him the loved idol of the art-students, that he lacked sufficient dexterity in the use of his tools to enter his studio or to benefit by apprentices.h.i.+p to him, and advising the anxious mother to take him to Chardin as the supreme master in France from whom to learn the mastery of his craft.