The Revival of the Le Nains

Abstract

Asharply defined change is valuable as a critical case for the study of taste.1 A number of painters who had been completely forgotten after their deaths suddenly, in the middle of the nineteenth century, became great masters. Artists whose names or paintings even the best historians would have found it difficult to place, were turned into eternal geniuses in the space of a decade. Vermeer, Chardin, El Greco, Brueghel, Grünewald, and the Le Nains, to name only a few of the most familiar, underwent this process. The study of changes in taste is a corrective for the delusion that great art has eternal values. No one hesitates to show the dependence of a work of art on its milieu, yet it is too often forgotten that our critical evaluations of that art are just as dependent on circumstance. Each picture, embodying as it does thousands of choices between a “good” and a “bad” crystallized into visible form, is a concretion of the implicit morality of a time. The history of each painting is composed of revaluations of the choices of earlier generations by later ones. The history of a painting, the history of taste, is as important an instrument for the investigation of culture as the study of the act of creation, and is in some ways more precise. So specific are the choices in a revival that it is as if a new artist were created. This new artist corresponds to an esthetic of the period in which he is rediscovered. The study of these reincarnations—the Phidias of Winkelmann, the Leonardo of the Romanticists, or the Le Nains of the Realists—should be important to historians. Since the resuscitated Leonardo was a greater artist than the original, he deserves at least some study.2 But the disappearances as well as the rediscoveries should be examined, for the loss of a painter should be as important to an art historian as the loss of a battle is to the political historian.

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