The evolution of art

From Explosive Acts:
When Pons joined the Garde de Monsieur in 1814 he found that both his
patron the Duc d’Artois and his brother the King had surrounded themselves
with writers and artists, much as their ancestors had done. Before the
Revolution and during the years of exile, Artois had been the centre of
English influence at court. This had nothing to do with politics, England
remained the eternal enemy, but was more a question of style — of English
clothes, dogs, guns, of anything to do with hunting and riding. And this in
turn was- to have a key influence on artistic taste, for the English had devel-
oped a form of art closely linked to these outdoor pleasures, which crossed
the Channel in the form of the sporting prints that were to become highly
fashionable in French aristocratic circles. The century-old tradition of paint-
ing hunting scenes in France had tended to concentrate on the royal hunt as
a part of courtly ceremonial whereas in England a more popular tradition
had flourished, from humble scenes of coursing to the more elevated images
of horse-racing by major artists such as Stubbs. This was an art that
appealed directly to those like Artois who lived for the hunt and it was not
the great names of the official art world, men such as Ingres and the Baron
Gros, who were part of his entourage but the altogether more humble figure
of Carle Vernet, a painter of horses and hunting much influenced by the
English style.
Son of Joseph, the famous marine artist, father of Horace the history
painter,Carle was best known for prints of his ‘lively swan-necked’ horses
taken directly from studies of the living animal rather than from the antique
originals that were the usual objects of study. Before the Revolution, Carle
was a primary exponent in France of the English tradition of sporting and
animal art, much admired by Artois with whom he hunted, sketching him in
action and painting the scene later in a manner that still seems extraordi-
narily fresh and lively when compared to the static Classicism then coming
into fashion. For Vernet it was the dramatic, living moment that mattered —
his painting of a horse startled by lightning still shocks when set beside the
primly trottingchariot horses then in vogue.
This newly established Classicism was rigidly opposed to any art that was
not studio based. Nature was, by definition, not art and while it was just
possible to begin with sketches from the motif, antique originals were
preferable, and in either case the final result had to be worked up, indoors,
according to clearly defined principles. Subjects, too, were to be drawn from
antiquity or mythology, while anything contemporary, whether a landscape
or a recent event, was shunned. It was not unknown for a leading Classicist
to leave a gap in his canvas where a glimpse of landscape would be filled in
by a hack specialist hired to carry out so menial a task, and not surprisingly,
paintings of anything connected with real life — portraits, seascapes,
battles, animals — were considered mere genre, on a level far below the high
Classicism of the great masters. A landscape was just about acceptable if
some hint of antiquity was included — a temple on a hilltop, a satyr in the
glade. But the greatest suspicion was reserved for artists such as Carle Vernet
who persisted in painting horses in motion, fiery forces of untrammelled
nature, so worryingly popular with the ignorant public. And they were right
to be suspicious, for it would be the painters of animal and sporting scenes
who would lead the way out of the studio in what, as the nineteenth century
progressed, became a mass exodus to the countryside and the move to paint
directly from nature, unregulated, in the raw.
Vernet was followed by another friend Pons made during his service at
court, the artist Theodore Géricault, who had joined the King’s Guard,
whose members also hunted with Artois” troops. When Pons first met
Céricault, he was just finishing The Wounded Cuirassier Leaving the Field of
Battle, in which a defeated rider leads his nervous mount out of the fray, a
dark image of the collapse of Empire, that disturbed, even irritated, many of
the visitors to the first Salon of the Restauration. Géricault had been a pupil
of Vernet and was always keen to emphasise that he shared his teacher°s love
of the fleeting moment. He recounted how he was once out
riding to Saint~Cloud when he saw a dappled grey carthorse suddenly panic
and bolt into the sunshine — and just like Vernet and his horse startled by
lightning, so too this escaping beast was hastily sketched and used for
Géricaults first major work, The Charging Chasseur. By lifting Vernet’s
embryonic realism out of the obscure world of the sporting print and thrust-
ing it into the mainstream of high art, Géricault had taken a huge stride
down that road that would one day lead to an art of modern life, drawn
directly from nature. And one of his earliest followers, if only on a modest