Noël Hallé (Salon of 1767)

[p.88]

HALLÉ

There's a sect of point-makers here, of which M^rthe Chevalier de Chastelux¹ is one of the first apostles. They're so bad that it's almost one of the characters of a good spirit not to hear them. One day Wilks² said to the knight : " Chevalier, o quantum est in rebus inane³. " The rebus is a very empty thing⁴. Vernet's son is one of the sharpests⁵. He enters the Salon. He sees two paintings. He asks whose they are. He is told de Hallé ; and he adds, go away. Go away. This is as well judged as it is badly said. I repeat it to you without point ; M^r Hallé, if you don't know any better, go away.

Minerve Driving Peace to City Hall⁶.

Table 14 feet wide, by 10 feet high.

Enormous composition, enormous silliness. Imagine in the middle of a large [p.89] room, a square table. On this table, a small writing desk⁷ from cabinet, and a small academy portfolio. All around, the provost of the merchants, or a monstrous fat woman in disguise, the entire aldermen's council, the entire city government, a multitude of long flaps, frightening wigs, voluminous red and black robes, all these people standing, because they are honest; and all their eyes turned towards the upper right-hand corner of the stage from where Minerva descends accompanied by a small Peace, which the immensity of the place and of the other characters completes to dwarf. This dwarfed little Peace drops from a cornucopia, flowers, on a few geniuses of the sciences and arts, and on their attributes.

To overcome the flatness of all these characters would have required the most astonishing ideal, the most marvelous doing, and M^r Hallé has neither. So his composition is as sullen as it could be. It's a real charge⁸. It's another sadly colored sketch. It's a half-painted canvas over which a glaze has been passed⁹. All these vaporous, vague, blown-out figures resemble those sketched by chance or our imagination in the clouds. Not even the hall and its grayish, nebulous architecture can be mistaken for a castle in the air. These aldermen are nothing but bags of wool ; or ridiculous colossi of whipped cream ; or if you like it better, it's as if the artist had left his canvas exposed in his yard one winter night and it had snowed all over this composition. It will melt with the first ray of sunlight ; it will blur with the first gust of wind. It will dissipate in pieces like the commissioner in Soirée des boulevards¹⁰. [p.90]

It looks like M^r the provost marketeer is inviting Minerva and Peace for chocolate. All heads of the same touch, and cast in the same hollow. The red dresses symmetrically distributed between the black dresses. Minerva raw in tone. Yellowish-green genies. Flowers of the same color. They are heavily touched and without finesse. Monotony so general, so unbearable that you can't stand it for long without yawning. Around the Minerva, it's not a cloud, it's a little linen-gray smoke or vapor; and the figures it supports are turned, contorted, petty, mannered, without nobility. These florets thrown before these big, heavy bellies of figures are reminiscent despite having the proverb, margaritas ante porcos¹¹. And these marmots with a common physiognomy, badly grouped, badly drawn, you call them geniuses ; ah monsieur Hallé ! you've never seen one. The attributes scattered on the carpet¹² are without intelligence and taste.

In this bad painting, however, there is perspective, and the figures flee well to the side of the back door. There's another merit that few artists would have had and far fewer viewers would have felt ; it is in a multitude of figures, all standing, all dressed the same, all lined up around a square table, all with their eyes fixed on the same point of the canvas, natural positions, movements of arms, legs, heads, bodies so varied, so simple, so imperceptible, that everything contrasts, but of this contrast inspired by the particular organization of each individual, by its place, by its whole ; of this unstudied contrast, [p.91] unacademic, of this contrast in nature¹³. These ugly figures have a flowing, flowing quality from head to toe which, by its truth, makes the ridiculous out of big heads, big wigs and big bellies. It's the real action of being bundled up like that. One more line of exaggeration, and you'd have had an assembly of figures in Calot¹⁴ that would have had you holding the sides laughing. Nothing would be easier, with a little verve, than to make an excellent thing of it. Everything lends itself to it.

The Strength of Union ; or the arrow broken by Scilurus's youngest child ; and the bundle of arrows resisting the effort of the elders united¹⁵.

Beautiful lesson from the expiring king of the Scythians ! Never was a more beautiful lesson taught ; never was a worse painting made. I'm sorry for the King of Poland. The best of the three paintings he asked our artists to do is mediocre. Let's come to Hallé's.

But, tell me, please, who is this skinny, ignoble, expressionless, characterless man lying under this tent ? "This is king [p.92] Scilurus." That, he's a king ! he's a Scythian king ! owhere is the pride, the sense, the judgment, the unruly reason of the wild man ? He's a beggar. And those three sullen, hideous, flat figures swaddled in their draperies up to their noses, could you teach me if they are real characters in the scene, or bad illuminated prints¹⁶, such as we see on our docks¹⁷, with which this poor devil has decorated the inside of his tent. And you'll call this the wife, the daughters of Scilurus ? And those three other naked figures sitting off to the right, opposite the reclining man, are they three galley slaves, three roués¹⁸, three brigands escaped from the Conciergerie¹⁹ ? They're awful. They look awful. What body contortions ! What facial grimaces ! They're rowing²⁰. Let's cover the beam with arrows, and I defy anyone to judge otherwise. Tableau détestable de tout point, de dessin, de couleur, d'effet, de composition, pauvre, sale, mou de touche²¹, papier barbouillé sous la presse de Gautier²². It's all yellow and gray. No difference between the bed cover and the children's flesh. The legs of the oarsmen spindly enough to scare. To be erased with the tongue. In our countryside, best ravaged by the stewardship and the farm; in the most wretched of our provinces, lousy Champagne; where taxation and corvée have exerted all their rage; where the shepherd reduced to the congruent portion has not a liard to give to his poor; at the door of the church or the presbytery; under the thatched cottage where the unfortunate lacks bread to live and straw to lie down, the artist would have found better models. [p.93]

And you think we'll have the nerve to send this to a king. I swear to you that if I were, I tell you not the minister ; I tell you not the director of the Academy ; but pure and simple accredited, I would protest for the honor of my corps, and my nation ; and I would protest so strongly that M^r Hallé would keep this painting to frighten his grandchildren, if he has any, and that he would execute another that responded a little better to the good taste, the intentions, of His Polish Majesty.

His bad painting of Peace is excusable by the ingratitude of the subject, but what can be said to excuse the Scilurus that lends to art and is infinitely worse. My friend, poor Hallé is getting away while he can²³.

If this painting lent itself to art and all its parts, it can also be said that never was the subject better chosen to decorate the palace of a Polish king. What a lesson for a nation that thought to base its freedom on unanimous suffrage²⁴ ! Jean Sobieski dying²⁵ couldn't have given his nation gathered in diet a more sublime lesson than the one King Scilurus gives his numerous family. But you know what lessons are for, and we see every day how easy it is²⁶ for wisdom to enlighten a nation about its true interests, and unite it for the party of justice and reason.