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Abdication of Charles V --one fails to understand how it was possible that so much able disquisition was suggested by this picture. How slight a smattering of the erudition of a stage manager is necessary for the representation of such a scene: the throne on one side; before it the lords and gentlemen in a semicircle, to the left front the ladies to make a fine effect for the eye, and in the background balconies with curious spectators, to widen out the spectacle. It is all pure theatre; an icy ceremony with prettily got up supernumeraries. All the heads have the discreditable appearance of family portraits painted after death, and then washed over with a faint conventional tinge of red. The whole thing is like a huge piece of still-life, which an adroit painter has put together out of a mixture of heads, gold, jewels, mantles, and perukes. Delaroche seems to have contributed the composition, Devéria the sumptuous costumery; and as for the colouring, Isabey, with his sunbeams shimmering in gold and silver, may not improbably have had something to do with that. What was spontaneous in Wappers is replaced in Gallait by cold calculation. Once and once only did this correct and frigid painter give evidence of a certain dramatic vein; it was when in 1851 he painted
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The Brussels Guild of Marksmen paying the Last Honours to Egmont and Horn. With a brutal audacity the decapitated heads are set to their bodies. Bloodless and livid, with clotted and tangled beards, they both really look as if they had been studied direct from nature. But the rest of the picture, the surrounding of theatrical attractions, parade costumes, and false pathos, is all the less in keeping with this study of death. How Zurbaran or Caravaggio would have treated the theme! They would have veiled the unessential figures in darkness, and irradiated the heads only with a trenchant light. What Gallait has made of it is the final tableau of an opera of costume. The two sergeants of Alva who are on guard, and the men who are showing their reverence, tread the stage like bad actors, scrupulously arrayed and making pathetic gestures. Their action has been studied from drawing-school copies; no genuine cry of passion ever breaks through. Heads, hands, and outlines have all a sickly idealism; a studious and sedulously polished manner of painting has ruined the intrinsic spirit of the work as a whole. Théophile Gautier was right when he wrote of Gallait:
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Gallait's
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Last Obsequies, hung in that same Salon of 1850 which contained Courbet's
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Stone-breakers, and the words of recognition accorded to it, were the last obsequies given to the parting genius of historical painting. A few years went by, and Gallait's fame died away. After 1851 he painted fourteen other great historical pictures (
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Egmont's Last Moments,
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Johanna the Mad by the Corpse of her Husband,
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Alva at the Window during the Execution of the two Counts, etc.), and, occasionally, sentimental _genre_ pictures, such as
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The Oblivion of Sorrow in the Berlin National Gallery; in this a small boy is playing the fiddle for the consolation of his sister, who had sunk upon the high-road exhausted by hunger. He also painted many portraits. But nothing gave him a niche in the memory of his contemporaries.
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The Pest at Tournai,