21
LANDSCAPES AND SIGN-BOARDS

FIRE-ESCAPES are part of the scenery in a city.Landscapes are the scenery in the country. Fire-escapes have nothing to do with painting. Landscapes have a great deal to do with painting. But once upon a time landscapes had as little connection with painting as fire-escapes have now.

It seems strange that from the time the cave men made their animal pictures, thousands of years ago, all the way up to the middle of the seventeenth century, almost no one in Europe painted a real landscape. Italy had great painters during the Renaissance. Italy had beautiful landscapes. But strange to say the great painters never thought of painting the beautiful landscapes. If there was any country scenery at all in the Italian pictures, it was always as a mere background for the figures in the foreground.

The Van Eycks in Flanders had come near to real landscapes in their famous altar-piece. But the things happening in their picture were more important than the scenery.

Some landscapes had been painted in Germany about 1500, but they didn't attract much notice.

It seems strange that the first two painters of Italian landscapes were not Italians but Frenchmen. One was named Nicolas Poussin (Poo-sanh). He was interested in the stories of the ancient Greeks and in the old Roman ruins.His pictures generally have Greeks in the foreground, but the backgrounds are true landscapes. The next picture will show you the Greeks. It is called “Shepherds of Arcadia.”

Do you know where Arcadia is? Arcadia used to be a country of ancient Greece noted for its kind, happy, simple country people and shepherds. These shepherds that Poussin painted seem to be talking about the marble tomb in the picture. One is pointing to some words on the tomb. The words can't be read here, but in the real picture they mean, “I too have been in Arcadia.”

The other French artist who painted landscapes in Italy is known as Claude Lorrain. His real name was Claude Something Else, but as he came from Lorraine, in France, he is always called Claude Lotrain. The story goes that he was once a pastry cook and later the servant of a painter in Italy. One of his duties was to clean the paint brushes of his master. This interested him in painting. His master gave him some lessons and soon Claude Lorrain was a painter himself.

NO.21-1 SHEPHERDS OF ARCADIA POUSSIN

Claude Lorrain had people in his pictures, but generally they were small and unimportant. The landscape was the important thing, even more important than it had been with Poussin. So Claude Lorrain is sometimes called the father of landscape painting. He liked to paint pictures of the sea even more than landscapes, so we might call him a seascape painter too.

The next important French painter lived about a hundred years later than Poussin and Claude Lorrain. His name was Watteau. One of his paintings was on wood and was painted as a sign-board for a hat shop. Poor Watteau led a miserable life. In the beginning he was very poor. When he came to Paris to paint he worked hard, but he was paid so little he almost starved. At last, when he had become well-known as a painter and was making enough money to live comfortably, he was always so ill that he could not enjoy himself much, and finally he died of the disease that had made him ill.

Now, I'm telling you about the sad things of Watteau's life for this reason: The pictures he painted are just the opposite from sad. The people in them are just the opposite of the kind of person Watteau was.

Instead of painting poor people, he painted young men and women clothed in silks and satins.

Instead of painting hard-working people like himself, he painted only people having a good time — dancing, picnicking, playing at garden parties, making love.

Instead of painting ugly, crude people like himself, he painted people who are almost too graceful and pretty and polite. No one could be quite so free from worries and cares as Watteau's people are.

Chardin was another French painter who was born only a little later than Watteau. He too painted a sign-board. Perhaps he got the idea from Watteau, but Chardin's sign was for a surgeon's office instead of for a hat shop. It showed a crowd of people in a street looking on while a surgeon binds up the wound of a man hurt in a sword fight.

Chardin liked to paint still life. Still life means a picture of any thing without life such as fruits, dead fish, basins, cut flowers, dead rabbits or pheasants and other game, pots, pans, and so on. He was also a portrait painter. But the third kind of painting that Chardin liked to do is the kind he is best known for — scenes of people inside their houses, doing the everyday things that people do. Usually there are children in these pictures. One painting shows a mother teaching her little girls to say grace before meals, another shows a little boy spinning a top on a table, another shows a mother telling her son to be careful of his new hat when he goes out.

NO.21-2 BOY WITH A TOP CHARDIN

Though the people in Chardin's time dressed differently from us, still we can say when we see his paintings, “Those look like real everyday people.” We feel he didn't try to show us something astonishing or exciting, but just ordinary scenes in ordinary French families.