Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

een, like the rest of the Marquis’s books and papers, carried off ‘in mere spite by the ruffians
who pillaged the castle’ during the Terror. 119
By 1830, the year of the July Revolution, a third of all the novels published in France
were by Scott. 120 His influence was vast and diffuse and it has been much discussed. 121 Here
there is scope only to consider it in relation, briefly, to painting and at slightly more length, its
connection with the Duchessee de Berry’s costume ball of 1829 and as an inspiration for Victor
Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris. Scott had described himself as imitating the technique of the
painter and it was not long before artists were returning the compliment and illustrating scenes
from Scott’s novels. Between 1827 and 1833 an average of twenty-five pictures a year on themes
from Scott were shown in the French salons. 122 Not all the influence flowed one way, however.
It was in France that the ‘Troubadour painters’, who had emerged from the studio of David,
developed a style of historical genre painting which was ideally suited to the depiction of literary
episodes and was quickly adopted in Britain. The admiration was mutual. There were British
salons at the Louvre in 1824 and 1827, years which saw crises in the confrontation between
classicists and romantics, in which the influence of British art was a considerable factor. The
French also exhibited their work at the Royal Academy. Delacroix’s Massacre de l’évêque de
Liège, a scene from Quentin Durward, was a particular success in 1830.
The rise of romantic history painting and Scott’s part in it on both sides of the Channel
have been thoroughly examined, notably by Roy Strong in And when did you last see your
father? by Beth Segal Wright in ‘Scott’s Historical Novels and French Historical Painting’ and
by Patrick Noon in Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics. It is worth
emphasising, however, in this context the consciously antiquarian aspect of the French artists’
work. While it may be true, as Segal Wright suggests, that the most successful painters, notably
Delacroix, moved beyond an exact adherence either to the plot of a particular novel or to the
historical details of furniture, architecture and costume, there is evidence that they took such
119
Scott, Ivanhoe, p.20.
120
Wright, ‘Scott’s Historical Novels and French Historical Painting’, p.270.
121
The notes in Wright ‘Scott’s Historical Novels and French Historical Painting’ give a fair overview of the
literature up to 1981. See also Noon, Constable to Delacroix.
122
Wright, ‘Scott’s Historical Novels and French Historical Painting’.
138