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Susanna of 1839, now in the Louvre, he proved himself by no means an orthodox pupil.
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He has not the least understanding for the ideas or the changes which have entered into art in our time, and knows absolutely nothing of the poets of recent days. He will live on as a reminiscence and a reproduction of certain ages in the art of the past, without having created anything to hand down to the future. My wishes and my ideas do not in the least correspond with his. In these words Chassériau has himself pointed out what it was that distinguished him from Ingres. Unfortunately he produced but little. Personally a very elegant, _blasé_ gentleman, he plunged on his return from Italy into the whirlpool of Parisian life. He was remarkably ugly; but his black, piercing eyes made him the idol of the ladies, and he hurried through life with such haste that he broke down altogether at the age of thirty-six. Beyond various decorative paintings for the church of Saint Méry and for the Salle des Comptes in the Palais d'Orsay, only a few Eastern pictures, and, best and most characteristic, a couple of lithographs, remain to represent his work. In these delicate mythological compositions a chord is struck which found no echo until, a generation later, it was heard again in the work of the French New Idealists and the English Pre-Raphaelites: there speaks in them a Romantic Hellenism, a something dreamily mystic, which makes him a remarkable link between Delacroix and the most refined spirit in the modern school, Gustave Moreau. It was purely an act of gratitude in Moreau when he affixed the dedication
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To Théodore Chassériau to his fine picture of
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The Young Man and Death.
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Death of St. Francis, in the Louvre, a good piece of work in the manner of the Quattrocento. _Léon Cogniet_ deserves to be mentioned because in the fifties he brought together in his studio so many foreign pupils, especially Germans. He enjoyed above all others the reputation of being able to initiate beginners both quickly and with certainty into the peculiar mysteries of craftsmanship. All that a master can teach, and that can be learned from his example, was to be obtained from this kind and fatherly instructor. Even after he had long given up painting, his grateful pupils used to meet together yearly at a banquet given in the patriarch's honour. As an artist he belongs to the list of the great men who have paid for overpraise in their lifetime by oblivion after their death. His
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Massacre of the Innocents of 1824--a woman who, mad with terror, thinks to hide herself and her child from the assassins of Bethlehem under an open stairway--could give pleasure only in a time which hailed with enthusiasm Ary Scheffer's heads resembling plaster busts full of expression. Occasionally, too, he painted landscapes--the chimerical, vague creations of a man who had lived but little in the open air. His finest picture,
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Tintoretto Painting his Dead Daughter by Lamplight,