University of Virginia Library

1. I.

IT may be very bad taste in me, but I must confess
to a strong love for many of those old French
painters who flourished during the last century, and at
whom it is now quite the fashion to sneer. I do not allude
to the Poussins, of whom the best was more Roman
than Frenchman, and whose most striking pictures
seem to me to wear no nationality of sentiment; there
is nothing lively and mercurial in them; hardly anything
that is cheerful. But what a gayety there is in
the Vanloos—all of them! What a lively prettiness in
the little girl-faces of Greuze! What a charming coquetry
in the sheep and shepherdesses of Watteau!

To be sure the critics tell us that his country swains
and nymphs are far more arch and charming than any

swains ever were in nature; and that his goats even,
browse, and listen and look on, more coquettishly than
live goats ever did; but what do I care for that?

Are they not well drawn? Are they not sweetly
colored? Do not the trees seem to murmur summer
strains? Does not the gorgeousness of the very atmosphere
invite the charming languor you see in his
groups? Is it not like spending a day of summer
stretched on the grass at St. Cloud—gazing idly on
Paris and the plain—to look on one of the painted pastorals
of Watteau?

Are not his pictures French from corner to corner—
beguilingly French—French to the very rosette that sets
off the slipper of his shepherdess? If there are no
such shepherdesses in nature, pray tell me, do you not
wish there were—throngs of them, lying on the hillsides
all about you—just as charming and as mischievous?

Watteau's brooks show no mud: why should the
feet of his fountain nymphs be made for anything but
dancing? Watteau's sheep are the best-behaved sheep
in the world; then why should his country swains look
red in the face, or weary with their watches? Why
should they do anything but sound a flageolet, or coquet
with pretty shepherdesses who wear blue sashes, and
rosettes in their shoes? In short, there is a marvellous
keeping about Watteau's pictures,—whatever the critics

may say of their untruth: if fictions, they are charming
fictions, which, like all good fictions, woo you into a
wish “it were true.”

But I did not set out to write critiques upon paintings;
nobody reads them through when they are written.
I have a story to tell. Poor Emile!—but I must begin
at the beginning.

Liking Watteau as I do, and loving to look for ten
minutes together into the sweet girl-face of Greuze's
“Broken Jug,” I used to loiter when I was in Paris for
hours together in those rooms of the Louvre where the
more recent French paintings are distributed, and where
the sunlight streams in warmly through the south windows,
even in winter. Going there upon passeport days,
I came to know, after a while, the faces of all the artists
who busy themselves with copying those rollicking French
masters of whom I have spoken. Nor could I fail to
remark that the artists who chose those sunny rooms for
their easels, and those sunny masters for their subjects,
were far more cheerful and gay in aspect than the
pinched and sour-looking people in the Long Gallery,
who grubbed away at their Da Vincis, and their Sasso
Ferratos.

Among those who wore the joyous faces, and who
courted the sunny atmosphere which hangs about Boucher
and Watteau, I had frequent occasion to remark a
tall, athletic young fellow, scarce four-and-twenty, who

seemed to take a special delight in drawing the pretty
shepherdesses and the well-behaved goats about which
I was just now speaking.

I do not think he was a great artist; I feel quite
sure that he never imagined it himself; but he came to
his work, and prepared his easel—rubbing his hands
together the while—with a glee that made me sure he
had fallen altogether into the spirit of that sunny nymph-world
which Watteau has created.

I have said that I thought him no great artist; nor
was he; yet there was something quite remarkable in
his copies. He did not finish well; his coloring bore
no approach to the noontide mellowness of the originals;
his figures were frequently out of drawing; but he never
failed to catch the expression of the faces, and to intensify
(if I may use the term) the joviality that belonged
to them. He turned the courtly levity of Watteau into
a kind of mad mirth. You could have sworn to the
identity of the characters; but on the canvas of the
copyist they had grown riotous.

What drew my attention the more was—what seemed
to me the artist's thorough and joyful participation
in the riot he made. After a rapid half-dozen of touches
with his brush, he would withdraw a step or two from
his easel, and gaze at his work with a hearty satisfaction
that was most cheering, even to a looker-on. His
glance seemed to say—“There I have you, little

nymphs; I have taken you out of the genteel society
of Watteau, and put you on my own ground, where you
may frisk as much as you please.” And he would beat
the measure of a light polka on his pallet.

I ought to say that this artist was a fine-looking
fellow withal, and his handsome face, aglow with enthusiasm,
drew away the attention of not a few lady
visitors from the pretty Vanloos scattered around. I do
not think he was ever disturbed by this; I do not think
that he tweaked his mustache, or gave himself airs in
consequence. Yet he saw it all; he saw everything
and everybody; his face wore the same open, easy,
companionable look which belongs to the frolicking
swains of Watteau. His freedom of manner invited
conversation; and on some of my frequent visits to the
French gallery I was in the habit of passing a word or
two with him myself.

“You seem,” said I to him one day, “to admire
Watteau very much?”

“Oui, Monsieur, vous avez raison: j'aime les choses
riantes, moi.”

“We have the same liking,” said I.

“Ah, vous aussi: je vous en félicite, Monsieur.
Tenez,”—drawing me forward with the most naive
manner in the world to look at a group he had just
completed—“Regardez! n'est ce pas, que ces petites
dames là rient aux anges?”

I chanced to have in that time an artist friend in
Paris—De Courcy, a Provincial by birth, but one who
had spent half his life in the capital, and who knew by
name nearly every copyist who made his appearance at
either of the great galleries. He was himself busy just
then at the Luxembourg; but I took him one day with
me through the Luvre, and begged him to tell me who
was the artist so enraptured with Watteau?

As I had conjectured, he knew, or professed to
know, all about him. He sneered at his painting—as a
matter of course: his manner was very sketchy; his
trees stiff; no action in his figures; but, after all, tolerably
well—passablement bien—for an amateur.

He was a native of the South of France; his name
—Emile Roque; he was possessed of an easy fortune,
and was about to marry, rumor said, the daughter of a
government officer of some distinction in the Department
of Finance.

Was there any reason why my pleasant friend of the
sunny pictures should not be happy? Rumor gave to
his promised bride a handsome dot. Watteau was always
open to his pencil and his humor. Bad as his
copies might be, he enjoyed them excessively. He had
youth and health on his side; and might, for aught
that appeared, extend his series of laughing nymphs
and coquettish shepherdesses to the end of his life.

The thought of him, or of the cheery years which

lay before him, came to my mind very often, as I went
journeying shortly after, through the passes of the Alps.
It comes to me now, as I sit by my crackling fireside in
New England, with the wind howling through the pine-tree
at the corner, and the snow lying high upon the
ground.