Corpses and cannibals

5 April 2012

When the curators of exhibitions can think of no better title for what began as a well-conceived idea but ended as a random gathering of pictures, they fall back on such portmanteaus as Greco to Goya, Manet to Matisse, Poussin to Picasso - for something snappy must be conjured to catch the public eye. Tate Britain's new exhibition, however, Constable to Delacroix, is by no means random: it is, instead, the close scrutiny of a particular aspect of European painting, the two decades of Romanticism between 1820 and 1840, when France and Britain were not at war and French and British painters could, untrammelled, enjoy friendship and intellectual exchange. It is subtitled British Art and the French Romantics.

The handsome catalogue opens with a peerless essay that perfectly explains the state of painting, art theory and art criticism in Paris and London in the days of Gericault and Turner as well as Constable and Delacroix.

Cogent and succinct, entirely free of jabberwocky and jargon, it sets the scene, too, in literature, drama and opera: Shakespeare the presiding ghost; Walter Scott and Byron, both simultaneously published in French and English, the presiding presences; Weber, Berlioz and Meyerbeer triumphant in both capitals.

Effortlessly we gather from it the views of British painting expressed by such giants of criticism as Stendhal, Baudelaire, Gautier, Hugo, de Vigny and other writers pressed on us in the context of French literature at school. In return, with the exception of Hazlitt, it seems that British writers had little to say of the French and their theoretically and philosophically driven art.

In brief, it is enough to say that in the two decades covered by this exhibition, British painters contributed to the Paris Salon so often and in such quantity that 1824, 1827 and 1831 are often referred to as the years of the "British" Salons; that most French critics were so impressed that they abandoned the notion that British artists were "varnished barbarians"; that British painters briefly in Paris shared in amity the studios of French artists; that French paintings of subjects taken from the novels of Walter Scott were numbered in hundreds; that such French painters as Delacroix and Gericault-came to London and hobnobbed with Lawrence, Wilkie and Etty, and that when Gericault - spelled Jerricault in British newspapers - sent his masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa, to be exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for the second six months of 1820, 40,000 of us paid to see it. Only at this point must I introduce a note of dissent, for though I accept that everywhere and by everyone Gericault is perceived as a great Romantic painter - perhaps even the greatest - to me he seems, apart from his wonderful excursions into lunacy and death, a resolute classicist thoroughly imbued with the rules of composition, physical proportion, physical type and exemplary purpose that are the constants of both the freestanding figures and high reliefs of ancient Roman and Hellenistic sculpture.

Almost everything he drew and painted, be it male or female, clothed or nude, horse race or cattle slaughter, landscape or mythology, descends from the great compositions of Raphael in Rome and, indeed, it is not going too far to assert that Gericault was the Raphael of Romanticism - and, by four years, even more short-lived.

Consider his Raft of the Medusa. The vast original, some 16 feet by 22, a French national treasure, could not be brought from Paris, but Tate Britain has borrowed a life-size copy made in 1860, which gives a not unfair impression of the dark dramatic terms in which Géricault conceived his almost monochrome vision of shipwreck and murderous survival.

In a strictly formal sense it is a classical picture - change its title to St Paul Shipwrecked off Malta and it is at once converted from a contemporary event reported in the newspapers of Paris into a monument of Raphaelesque classicism revised by Caravaggio.

The circumstances on the raft were horrific, the problems of overcrowding, thirst, fever, hunger, hallucination and madness remedied by battle between the strong and weak and the simple but beastly expedient of cannibalism. Of the 150 French soldiers, sailors and passengers off-loaded on to the raft when Medusa struck a reef off the coast of Mauretania in July 1816, most died within a week and only 15 survived to be rescued on the 13th day.

On 24 February 1818, Gericault, then only 27 (the same age as Raphael when he painted The School of Athens), bought the canvas for his great picture of the raft's few survivors. Eighteen months later, to the day, the finished masterpiece was hanging in the Paris Salon.

These had been months of intimate study of suffering and death; he had contemplated the dying in hospitals and, in bringing cadavers to his studio, had turned it into a charnel house; to understand the suffering of the survivors he had endured the stinks of corruption as the corpses, like the horses whose anatomies were studied by George Stubbs, rotted and provided feasting for the local rats; and from his oil paintings of arms and legs elegantly arranged as still lives, we may assume that he practised crude dissection with a butcher's cleaver - all this in searching for the truth.

BUT it was not the truth that he eventually painted - had he chosen to illustrate that he might well have produced a picture of such immediate horror that it would indeed have been Romantic in the sense that Gustave Flaubert's novel Salammbo - a sado-masochistic tale of Hannibal's sister willingly raped and her violator mutilated while she stood by yearning to repeat her submission to him - was Romantic.

He chose instead to discard the horrors gathered in his studio, and if not discard, to elevate them into concepts of suffering, despair, hope and survival-cumredemption that Raphael, hotfoot from The Fire in the Borgo, would immediately have recognised as continuing the Antique tradition of portraying abstractions as well as events through the human figure.

With a classical composition based on two powerful diagonals, he constructed a pyramid of saved souls looking to the light (it is unlikely that he knew Beethoven's Fidelio, not produced in Paris until 1860), pictorially anchored in the foreground by the balanced divergent outlines of the raft and the naked dead in perfect counterpoise.

In Gericault's case, the failure to be Romantic in the ghastly sense is particularly acute, for so elevated and abstract is his treatment of the distressing and vile event, his tone so hortative, that our sympathy is not only untainted by revulsion, but sanitised against it. In this, The Raft of the Medusa fits perfectly the dictum uttered by Alfred de Vigny in 1825 that "we do not want facts, we want the philosophical spectacle.

With Delacroix, in The Death of Sardanapalus and Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, we have more great monuments of painting that combine the established traditions of historic western art with a fading residue of antique references.

They suggest that Gericault and, on his death in 1824, his successor Delacroix as uncrowned leader of the French Romantics, developed no such thing as a Romantic style, only a Romantic attitude; in Delacroix's case evident in his obvious sympathy with the cause of Greek independence and his exploitation of a contemporary political subject that demanded an empathic response from the spectator - it was not his intention to educate but to arouse emotions.

Even so, Romanticism in his hands inevitably exploited the same concepts of nobility, sacrifice, virtue and gravity as were the currency of classicism and inevitably demonstrated them with similar subjects.

French Romanticism is utterly distinct from Romanticism elsewhere. The British had foggy notions of an unchronicled ancient past, of windy weather and sublimity; the Germans, too, invented a mythology, both ancient and pagan, darkly Nordic, and medieval and serene; but French Romanticism had its roots in the Napoleonic heroism of very recent history and had to be reinvented with Bonaparte's failure and defeat. When he, who had been both Christ and Caesar to the French, was suddenly removed to the south Atlantic, he took with him the destiny of France, and it is the slow reinvention of French Romanticism without a Napoleonic raison d'etre that this exhibition chronicles.

Facts prove the close association of French and British artists, major and minor, in the years it covers. Delacroix was indeed the friend of Bonington and the friendship burgeoned into thousands of the most cursory and most incompetent watercolours the world has ever seen, needlessly resurrected in 1963 for dire centenary exhibitions of the great Frenchman's death (for Bonington's exquisite quality, no one should miss the exhibition at the Wallace Collection, until 27 April); Constable did exhibit in the Salon several of his most hard-worked machines; and The Raft of the Medusa was on view in Piccadilly to anyone with a willing shilling. But was there really a significant exchange of influence?

Was it not all French talk and criticism, the chatter of novelists and literary salons? True, we can point to a French appetite for the nonsense of Scott's historical novels, to the passionate fashion for Byron's bletherings, even, in the case of Ingres, to James McPherson's Ossianic forgeries (the very foundation of the Romantic movement in 1762-3), but is there the least sign of a visual influence?

Other than to occasional references in the work of Huet and Rousseau, can any of us point to a French landscape in the manner of Constable's White Horse,

or a French imitator of Turner before Felix Ziem? Can any of us discern in later Gericault the influence of Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch (which took far, far longer to paint than The Raft of the Medusa), in spite of his commenting at length that it would be useful for French painters to have Wilkie's command of touching and emotional expression?

Would it not be preposterous to discern in Ingres or Delacroix a kinship with Lawrence's little Lord Lambton posed as an infant Byron in a patch of moonlight above a calm Ionian Sea?

These are among the marvellous pictures in this exhibition, and in many lesser-known paintings, subtle, instructive and, indeed, invaluable insights are to be had, but I am far from certain that the relationships of French and British painters between 1820 and 1840 were in any visual way fruitful - how could they be if Delacroix, the best of the French, could describe Benjamin Robert Haydon, by far the worst of the British (thank the Lord for his suicide), as "a very great painter. In effect, the exhibition, in comparing and contrasting, proves the opposite of its underlying thesis - but it is none the worse for that. Anyone whose appetite for French Romanticism has been tickled, should read Anita Brookner's Romanticism and its Discontents(Viking, 2000) - pointed and exquisite perceptions gathered in brief essays, wry and finely wrought.

Constable to Delacroix, Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1. Daily 10am-6pm. Admission £8.50. Until 11 May. Bonington and his Contemporaries. Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, W1. Monday-Saturday 10am-5pm, Sunday 12- 5pm. Admission free. Until 27 April.

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