PICTURES
EVERY CHILD SHOULD KNOW

A SELECTION OF THE WORLD’S ART
MASTERPIECES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

BY
DOLORES BACON

Illustrated from
Great Paintings

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Besides making acknowledgments to the
many authoritative writers upon artists and
pictures, here quoted, thanks are due to
such excellent compilers of books on art
subjects as Sadakichi Hartmann, Muther,
C. H. Caffin, Ida Prentice Whitcomb,
Russell Sturgis and others.

INTRODUCTION

Man’s inclination to decorate his belongings
has always been one of the earliest signs of
civilisation. Art had its beginning in the lines
indented in clay, perhaps, or hollowed in the
wood of family utensils; after that came crude
colouring and drawing.

Among the first serious efforts to draw were
the Egyptian square and pointed things, animals
and men. The most that artists of that
day succeeded in doing was to preserve the
fashions of the time. Their drawings tell us
that men wore their beards in bags. They
show us, also, many peculiar head-dresses and
strange agricultural implements. Artists of
that day put down what they saw, and they
saw with an untrained eye and made the record
with an untrained hand; but they did not put
in false details for the sake of glorifying the
subject. One can distinguish a man from a
mountain in their work, but the arms and legs
embroidered upon Mathilde’s tapestry, or the
figures representing family history on an Oriental
rug, are quite as correct in drawing and as
little of a puzzle. As men became more intelligent,
hence spiritualised, they began to
express themselves in ideal ways; to glorify
the commonplace; and thus they passed from

Egyptian geometry to gracious lines and beautiful
colouring.

Indian pottery was the first development
of art in America and it led to the working
of metals, followed by drawing and portraiture.
Among the Americans, as soon as that term
ceased to mean Indians, art took a most distracting
turn. Europe was old in pictures,
great and beautiful, when America was worshipping
at the shrine of the chromo; but the
chromo served a good turn, bad as it was. It
was a link between the black and white of
the admirable wood-cut and the true colour
picture.

Some of the Colonists brought over here the
portraits of their ancestors, but those paintings
could not be considered “American” art, nor
were those early settlers Americans; but the
generation that followed gave to the world
Benjamin West. He left his Mother Country
for England, where he found a knighthood and
honours of every kind awaiting him.

The earliest artists of America had to go
away to do their work, because there was no
place here for any men but those engaged in
clearing land, planting corn, and fighting
Indians. Sir Benjamin West was President of
the Royal Academy while America was still
revelling in chromos. The artists who remained
chose such objects as Davy Crockett
in the trackless forest, or made pictures of the
Continental Congress.

After the chromo in America came the picture
known as the “buckeye,” painted by relays
of artists. Great canvases were stretched
and blocked off into lengths. The scene was
drawn in by one man, who was followed by
“artists,” each in turn painting sky, water,
foliage, figures, according to his specialty.
Thus whole yards of canvas could be painted
in a day, with more artists to the square inch
than are now employed to paint advertisements
on a barn.

The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 came as
a glorious flashlight. For the first time real
art was seen by a large part of our nation.
Every farmer took home with him a new idea
of the possibilities of drawing and colour.
The change that instantly followed could
have occurred in no other country than the
United States, because no other people would
have travelled from the four points of the
compass to see such an exhibition. Thus it
was the American’s penchant for travel which
first opened to him the art world, for he
was conscious even then of the educational
advantages to be found somewhere, although
there seemed to be few of them in the
United States.

After the Centennial arose a taste for the
painting of “plaques,” upon which were the
heads of ladies with strange-coloured hair;
of leather-covered flatirons bearing flowers
of unnatural colour, or of shovels decorated

with “snow scenes.” The whole nation began
to revel in “art.” It was a low variety, yet
it started toward a goal which left the chromo
at the rear end of the course, and it was a better
effort than the mottoes worked in worsted,
which had till then been the chief decoration
in most homes. If the “buckeye” was hand-painting,
this was “single-hand” painting,
and it did not take a generation to bring the
change about, only a season. After the Philadelphia
exhibition the daughter of the household
“painted a little” just as she played the
piano “a little.” To-day, much less than a
man’s lifetime since then, there is in America
a universal love for refined art and a fair technical
appreciation of pictures, while already
the nation has worthily contributed to the
world of artists. Sir Benjamin West, Sully,
and Sargent are ours: Inness, Inman, and
Trumbull.

The curator of the Metropolitan Museum in
New York has declared that portrait-painting
must be the means which shall save the modern
artists from their sins. To quote him: “An
artist may paint a bright green cow, if he is so
minded: the cow has no redress, the cow must
suffer and be silent; but human beings who
sit for portraits seem to lean toward portraits
in which they can recognise their own features
when they have commissioned an artist to
paint them. A man will insist upon even the
most brilliant artist painting him in trousers,

for instance, instead of in petticoats, however
the artist-whim may direct otherwise; and a
woman is likely to insist that the artist who
paints her portrait shall maintain some recognised
shade of brown or blue or gray when he
paints her eye, instead of indulging in a burnt
orange or maybe pink! These personal preferences
certainly put a limit to an artist’s
genius and keep him from writing himself down
a madman. Thus, in portrait-painting, with
the exactions of truth upon it, lies the hope
of art-lovers!”

It is the same authority who calls attention
to the danger that lies in extremes; either in
finding no value in art outside the “old masters,”
or in admiring pictures so impressionistic
that the objects in them need to be labelled
before they can be recognised.

The true art-lover has a catholic taste, is
interested in all forms of art; but he finds
beauty where it truly exists and does not allow
the nightmare of imagination to mislead him.
That which is not beautiful from one point of
view or another is not art, but decadence.
That which is technical to the exclusion of
other elements remains technique pure and
simple, workmanship–the bare bones of art.
A thing is not art simply because it is fantastic.
It may be interesting as showing to what degree
some imaginations can become diseased, but
it is not pleasing nor is it art. There are fully
a thousand pictures that every child should

know, since he can hardly know too much
of a good thing; but there is room in this
volume only to acquaint him with forty-eight
and possibly inspire him with the wish to
look up the neglected nine hundred and
fifty-two.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. Andrea del Sarto, Florentine School, 1486-1531

II. Michael Angelo (Buonarroti), Florentine School, 1475-1564

III. Arnold Böcklin, Modern German School, 1827-1901

IV. Marie-Rosa Bonheur, French School, 1822-1899

V. Alessandro Botticelli, Florentine School, 1447-1510

VI. William Adolphe Bouguereau, French (Genre) School 1825-1905

VII. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, English (Pre-Raphaelite) School, 1833-1898

VIII. John Constable, English School, 1776-1837

IX. John Singleton Copley, English School, 1737-1815

X. Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Fontainebleau-Barbizon
School, 1796-1875

XI. Correggio (Antonio Allegri), School of Parma, 1494(?)–1534

XII. Paul Gustave Doré, French
School, 1833-1883

XIII. Albrecht Dürer, Nuremberg
School, 1471-1528

XIV. Mariano Fortuny, Spanish
School, 1838-1874

XV. Thomas Gainsborough, English
School, 1727-1788

XVI. Jean Léon Gérôme, French
Semi-classical School, 1824-1904

XVII. Ghirlandajo, Florentine
School, 1449-1494

XVIII. Giotto (di Bordone), Florentine
School, 1276-1337

XIX. Franz Hals, Dutch School,
1580-84-1666

XX. Meyndert Hobbema, Dutch
School, 1637-1709

XXI. William Hogarth, School of
Hogarth (English), 1697-1764

XXII. Hans Holbein, the Younger,
German School, 1497-1543

XXIII. William Holman Hunt,
English (Pre-Raphaelite)
School, 1827-

XXIV. George Inness, American,
1825-1897

XXV. Sir Edwin Henry Landseer,
English School, 1802-1873

XXVI. Claude Lorrain (Gellée), Classical
French School, 1600-1682

XXVII. Masaccio (Tommaso Guidi), Florentine School, 1401-1428

XXVIII. Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier, French School, 1815-1891

XXIX. Jean François Millet, Fontainebleau-Barbizon School, 1814-1875

XXX. Claude Monet, Impressionist School of France, 1840-

XXXI. Murillo (Bartolomé Estéban), Andalusian School, 1617-1682

XXXII. Raphael (Sanzio), Umbrian, Florentine, and Roman
Schools, 1483-1520

XXXIII. Rembrandt (Van Rijn), Dutch School, 1606-1669

XXXIV. Sir Joshua Reynolds, English School, 1723-1792

XXXV. Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish School, 1577-1640

XXXVI. John Singer Sargent, American and Foreign Schools,
1856-

XXXVII. Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), Venetian School, 1518-1594

XXXVIII. Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), Venetian School, 1489-1576

XXXIX. Joseph Mallord William Turner, English, 1775-1831

XL. Sir Anthony Van Dyck,
Flemish School, 1599-1641

XLI. Velasquez (Diego Rodriguez
de Silva), Castilian School,
1599-1660

XLII. Paul Veronese (Paolo Cagliari),
Venetian School,
1528-1588.

XLIII. Leonardo da Vinci, Florentine
School, 1452-1519.

XLIV. Jean Antoine Watteau,
French (Genre) School,
1684-1721

XLV. Sir Benjamin West, American,
1738-1820

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FRONTISPIECE

The Avenue, Middleharnis, Holland–Hobbema

Madonna of the Sack–Andrea del Sarto

Daniel–Michael Angelo (Buonarroti)

The Isle of the Dead–Arnold Böcklin

The Horse Fair–Rosa Bonheur

Spring–Alessandro Botticelli

The Hay Wain–John Constable

A Family Picture–John Singleton Copley

The Holy Night–Correggio (Antonio Allegri)

Dance of the Nymphs–Jean Baptiste Camille Corot

The Virgin as Consoler–Wm. Adolphe Bouguereau

The Love Song–Sir Edward Burne-Jones

The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine–Correggio

Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law–Paul Gustave Doré

The Nativity–Albrecht Dürer

The Spanish Marriage–Mariana Fortuny

Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan–Thomas Gainsborough

The Sword Dance–Jean Léon Gérôme

Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizi–Ghirlandajo (Domenico Bigordi)

The Nurse and the Child–Franz Hals

The Meeting of St. John and St. Anna at Jerusalem–Giotto (Di
Bordone)

The Avenue–Meyndert Hobbema

The Marriage Contract–Wm. Hogarth

The Light of the World–William Holman Hunt

Robert Cheseman with his Falcon–Hans Holbein, the
Younger

The Berkshire Hills–George Inness

The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner–Sir Edwin Henry
Landseer

The Artist’s Portrait–Tommaso Masaccio

Acis and Galatea–Claude Lorrain

Retreat from Moscow–Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier

The Angelus–Jean François Millet

The Immaculate Conception–Murillo (Bartolomé Estéban)

Haystack in Sunshine–Claude Monet

The Sistine Madonna–Raphael (Sanzio)

The Night Watch–Rembrandt (Van Rijn)

The Duchess of Devonshire and Her Daughter–Sir Joshua
Reynolds

The Infant Jesus and St. John–Peter Paul Rubens

Carmencita–John Singer Sargent

The Miracle of St. Mark–Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti)

The Artist’s Daughter, Lavinia–Titian (Tiziano
Vecelli)

The Fighting Téméraire–Joseph Mallord William Turner

The Children of Charles the First–Sir Anthony Van Dyck

Equestrian Portrait of Don Balthasar Carlos–Velasquez (Diego
Rodriguez de Silva)

The Marriage at Cana–Paul Veronese

The Death of Wolfe–Sir Benjamin West

The Artist’s Two Sons–Peter Paul Rubens

The Last Supper–Leonardo da Vinci

Fête Champêtre–Jean Antoine Watteau

I

ANDREA DEL SARTO

Italian painters received their names in
peculiar ways. This man’s father was a
tailor; and the artist was named after his
father’s profession. He was in fact “the
Tailor’s Andrea,” and his father’s name was
Angelo.

One story of this brilliant painter which
reads from first to last like a romance has been
told by the poet, Browning, who dresses up
fact so as to smother it a little, but there is
truth at the bottom.

Andrea married a wife whom he loved
tenderly. She had a beautiful face that
seemed full of spirituality and feeling, and
Andrea painted it over and over again. The
artist loved his work and dreamed always of
the great things that he should do; but he was
so much in love with his wife that he was
dependent on her smile for all that he did
which was well done, and her frown plunged
him into despair.

Andrea’s wife cared nothing for his genius,

painting did not interest her, and she had no
worthy ambition for her husband, but she
loved fine clothes and good living, and so
encouraged him enough to keep him earning
these things for her. As soon as some money
was made she would persuade him to work no
more till it was spent; and even when he had
made agreements to paint certain pictures
for which he was paid in advance she would
torment him till he gave all of his time to her
whims, neglected his duty and spent the
money for which he had rendered no service.
Thus in time he became actually dishonest, as
we shall see. It is a sad sort of story to tell
of so brilliant a young man.

Andrea was born in the Gualfonda quarter
of Florence, and there is some record of his
ancestors for a hundred years before that,
although their lives were quite unimportant.
Andrea was one of four children, and as usual
with Italians of artistic temperament, he was
set to work under the eye of a goldsmith. This
craftsmanship of a fine order was as near to
art as a man could get with any certainty of
making his living. It was a time when the
Italian world bedecked itself with rare golden
trinkets, wreaths for women’s hair, girdles,
brooches, and the like, and the finest skill was
needed to satisfy the taste. Thus it required
talent of no mean order for a man to become a
successful goldsmith.

Andrea did not like the work, and instead

of fashioning ornaments from his master’s
models he made original drawings which did
not do at all in a shop where an apprentice was
expected to earn his salt. Certain fashions
had to be followed and people did not welcome
fantastic or new designs. Because of this,
Andrea was early put out of his master’s shop
and set to learn the only business that he could
be got to learn, painting. This meant for him
a very different teacher from the goldsmith.

The artist may be said to have been his own
master, because, even when he was apprenticed
to a painter he was taught less than he already
knew.

That first teacher was Barile, a coarse and
unpleasing man, as well as an incapable one;
but he was fair minded, after a fashion, and
put Andrea into the way of finding better
help. After a few years under the direction
of Piero di Cosimo, Andrea and a friend,
Francia Bigio, decided to set up shop for
themselves.

The two devoted friends pitched their tent
in the Piazza del Grano, and made a meagre
beginning out of which great things were to
grow. They began a series of pictures which
was to lead at least one of them to fame. It
was in the little Piazza, del Grano studio that
the “Baptism of Christ” was painted, a partnership
work that had been planned in the Campagnia
dello Scalzo.

“The Baptism” was not much of a picture

as great pictures go, but it was a beginning and
it was looked at and talked about, which was
something at a time when Titian and Leonardo
had set the standard of great work. In the
Piazza del Grano, Andrea and his friend lived
in the stables of the Tuscan Grand Dukes,
with a host of other fine artists, and they had
gay times together.

Andrea was a shy youth, a little timid, and
by no means vain of his own work, but he
painted with surprising swiftness and sureness,
and had a very brilliant imagination. Its
was his main trouble that he had more imagination
than true manhood; he sacrificed everything
good to his imagination.

After the partnership with his friend, he
undertook to paint some frescoes independently,
and that work earned for him the name of
“Andrea senza Errori”–Andrea the Unerring.
Then, as now, each artist had his own way of
working, and Andrea’s was perhaps the most
difficult of all, yet the most genius-like. There
were those, Michael Angelo for example, who
laid in backgrounds for their paintings; but
Andrea painted his subject upon the wet
plaster, precisely as he meant it to be when
finished.

He was unlike the moody Michael Angelo;
unlike the gentle Raphael; unlike the fastidious
Van Dyck who came long afterward; he was
hail-fellow-well-met among his associates,
though often given over to dreaminess. He

belonged to a jolly club named the “Kettle
Club,” literally, the Company of the Kettle;
and to another called “The Trowel,” both
suggesting an all around good time and much
good fellowship The members of these clubs
were expected to contribute to their wonderful
suppers, and Andrea on one occasion made a
great temple, in imitation of the Baptistry,
of jelly with columns of sausages, white birds
and pigeons represented the choir and priests.
Besides being “Andrew the Unerring,” and a
“Merry Andrew,” he was also the “Tailor’s
Andrew,” a man in short upon whom a nickname
sat comfortably. He helped to make
the history of the “Company of the Kettle,”
for he recited and probably composed a
touching ballad called “The Battle of the Mice
and the Frogs,” which doubtless had its
origin in a poem of Homer’s. But all at once,
in the midst of his gay careless life came his
tragedy; he fell in love with a hatter’s wife.
This was quite bad enough, but worse was to
come, for the hatter shortly died, and the
widow was free to marry Andrea.

After his marriage Andrea began painting
a series of Madonnas, seemingly for no better
purpose than to exhibit his wife’s beauty over
and over again. He lost his ambition and
forgot everything but his love for this unworthy
woman. She was entirely commonplace,
incapable of inspiring true genius or
honesty of purpose.

A great art critic, Vasari, who was Andrea’s
pupil during this time, has written that the
wife, Lucretia, was abominable in every way.
A vixen, she tormented Andrea from morning
till night with her bitter tongue. She did not
love him in the least, but only what his money
could buy for her, for she was extravagant,
and drove the sensitive artist to his grave
while she outlived him forty years.

About the time of the artist’s marriage he
painted one fresco, “The Procession of the
Magi,” in which he placed a very splendid
substitute for his wife, namely himself. Afterward
he painted the Dead Christ which found
its way to France and it laid the foundation
for Andrea’s wrongdoing. This picture was
greatly admired by the King of France who
above all else was a lover of art. Francis I.
asked Andrea to go to his court, as he had
commissions for him. He made Andrea a
money offer and to court he went.

He took a pupil with him, but he left his
wife at home. At the court of Francis I.
he was received with great honours, and amid
those new and gracious surroundings, away
from the tantalising charms of his wife and her
shrewish tongue, he began to have an honest
ambition to do great things. His work for
France was undertaken with enthusiasm, but
no sooner was he settled and at peace, than the
irrepressible wife began to torment him with
letters to return. Each letter distracted him

more and more, till he told the King in his
despair, that he must return home, but that
he would come back to France and continue
his work, almost at once. Francis I., little
suspecting the cause of Andrea’s uneasiness,
gave him permission to go, and also a large
sum of money to spend upon certain fine
works of art which he was to bring back to
France.

We can well believe that Andrea started
back to his home with every good intention;
that he meant to appease his wife and also
his own longing to see her; to buy the King
his pictures with the money entrusted to him,
and to return to France and finish his work;
but, alas, he no sooner got back to his wife
than his virtuous purpose fled. She wanted
this; she wanted that–and especially she
wanted a fine house which could just about be
built for the sum of money which the King of
France had entrusted to Andrea.

Andrea is a pitiable figure, but he was also
a vagabond, if we are to believe Vasari. He
took the King’s money, built his wretched
wife a mansion, and never again dared return
to France, where his dishonesty made him
forever despised.

Afterward he was overwhelmed with despair
for what he had done, and he tried to make
his peace with Francis; but while that monarch
did not punish him directly for his knavery;
he would have no more to do with him, and

this was the worst punishment the artist
could have had. However, his genius was so
great that other than French people forgot
his dishonesty and he began life anew in his
native place.

Almost all his pictures were on sacred
subjects; and finally, when driven from
Florence to Luco by the plague, taking with
him his wife and stepdaughter, he began a
picture called the “Madonna del Sacco” (the
Madonna of the Sack).

This fresco was to adorn the convent of the
Servi, and the sketches for it were probably
made in Luco. When the plague passed and
the artist was able to return to Florence, he
began to paint it upon the cloister walls.

Andrea, like Leonardo, painted a famous
“Last Supper,” although the two pictures
cannot be compared. In Andrea’s picture it
is said that all the faces are portraits.

Just before the plague sent him and his
family from Florence a most remarkable
incident took place. Raphael had painted a
celebrated portrait of Pope Leo X. in a group,
and the picture belonged to Ottaviano de
Medici. Duke Frederick II., of Mantua, longed
to own this picture, and at last requested the
Medici to give it to him. The Duke could
not well be refused, but Ottaviano wanted to
keep so great a work for himself. What was
to be done? He was in great trouble over the
affair. The situation seemed hopeless. It

seemed certain that he must part with his
beloved picture to the Duke of Mantua; but
one day Andrea del Sarto declared that he
could make a copy of it that even Raphael
himself could not tell from his original. Ottaviano
could scarcely believe this, but he begged
Andrea to set about it, hoping that it might be
true.

Going at the work in good earnest, Andrea
painted a copy so exact that the pupil of
Raphael, who had more or less to do with the
original picture, could not tell which was which
when he was asked to choose. This pupil,
Giulio Romano, was so familiar with every
stroke of Raphael’s that if he were deceived
surely any one might be; so the replica was
given to the Duke of Mantua, who never
found out the difference.

Years afterward Giulio Romano showed the
picture to Vasari, believing it to be the original
Raphael, neither Andrea nor the Medici
having told Romano the truth. But Vasari,
who knew the whole story, declared to Romano
that what he showed him was but a copy.
Romano would not believe it, but Vasari told
him that he would find upon the canvas a
certain mark, known to be Andrea’s. Romano
looked, and behold, the original Raphael
became a del Sarto! The original picture
hangs in the Pitti Palace, while the copy
made by Andrea is in the Naples Gallery.

The introduction of Andrea to Vasari was

one of the few gracious things, that Michael
Angelo ever did. About Andrea he said to
Raphael at the time: “There is a little
fellow in Florence who will bring sweat to
your brows if ever he is engaged in great
works.” Raphael, would certainly have agreed,
with him had he known what was to happen
in regard to the Leo X. picture.

Notwithstanding Andrea’s unfortunate temperament,
which caused him to be guided
mostly by circumstances instead of guiding
them, he was said to be improving all the
time in his art. He had a great many pupils,
but none of them could tolerate his wife for
long, so they were always changing.

Throughout his life the artist longed for
tenderness and encouragement from his wife,
and finally, without ever receiving it, he died
in a desolate way, untended even by her.
After the siege of Florence there came a
pestilence, and Andrea was overtaken by it.
His wife, afraid that she too would become ill,
would have nothing to do with him. She kept
away and he died quite alone, few caring that
he was dead and no one taking the trouble to
follow him to his grave. Thus one of the
greatest of Florentine painters lived and died.
Years after his death, the artist Jacopo da
Empoli, was copying Andrea’s “Birth of the
Virgin” when an old woman of about eighty
years on her way to mass stopped to speak with
him. She pointed to the beautiful Virgin’s

face in the picture and said: “I am that
woman.” And so she was–the widow of
the great Andrea. Though she had treated
him so cruelly, she was glad to have it known
that she was the widow of the dead genius.

PLATE–THE MADONNA DEL SACCO
(Madonna of the Sack)

This picture is a fresco in the cloister of the
Annunziata at Florence, and it is called “of
the sack” because Joseph is posed leaning
against a sack, a book open upon his knees.

Doubtless the model for this Madonna is
Andrea del Sarto’s abominable wife, but she
looks very sweet and simple in the picture.
The folds of Mary’s garments are beautifully
painted, so is the poise of her head, and all
the details of the picture except the figure of
the child. There is a line of stiffness there
and it lacks the softness of many other pictures
of the Infant Jesus.

In this picture in the Pitti Palace, Florence,
Andrea del Sarto represents all the characters
in a serious mood. There are St. John and
Elizabeth, Mary and the Infant Jesus, and
there is no touch of playfulness such as may
be found in similar groups by other artists
of the time. Attention is concentrated upon

Jesus who seems to be learning from his
young cousin. The left hand, resting upon
Mary’s arm is badly drawn and in character
does not seem to belong to the figure of the
child. A full, overhanging upper lip is a
dominant feature in each face.

Other works of Andrea del Sarto are
“Charity,” which is in the Louvre; “Madonna
dell’ Arpie,” “A Head of Christ,” “The Dead
Christ,” “Four Saints,” “Joseph in Egypt,”
his own portrait, and “Joseph’s Dream.”

II

MICHAEL ANGELO (BUONARROTI)

This wonderful man did more kinds of
things, at a time when almost all artists
were versatile, than any other but one. Probably
Leonardo da Vinci was gifted in as many
different ways as Michael Angelo, and in his
own lines was as powerful. This Florentine’s
life was as tragic as it was restless.

There is a tablet in a room of a castle which
stands high upon a rocky mount, near the
village of Caprese, which tells that Michael
Angelo was born in that place. The great
castle is now in ruins, and more than four
hundred years of fame have passed since the
little child was born therein.

The unhappy existence of the artist seems
to have been foreshadowed by an accident
which happened to his mother before he
was born. She was on horseback, riding
with her husband to his official post at
Chiusi, for he was governor of Chiusi and
Caprese. Her horse stumbled, fell, and badly
hurt her. This was two months before

Michael Angelo was born, and misfortune ever
pursued him.

The father of Angelo was descended from an
aristocratic house–the Counts of Canossa
were his ancestors–and in that day the
profession of an artist was not thought to be
dignified. Hence the father had quite different
plans for the boy; but the son persisted and
at last had his way. When he was still a little
child his father finished his work as an official
at Caprese and returned to Florence; but he
left the little Angelo behind with his nurse.
That nurse was the wife of a stonemason, and
almost as soon as the boy could toddle he used
to wander about the quarries where the stonecutters
worked, and doubtless the baby joy
of Angelo was to play at chiseling as it is the
pleasure of modern babies to play at peg-top.
After a time he was sent for to go to Florence
to begin his education.

In Florence he fell in with a young chap
who, like himself, loved art, but who was
fortunate enough already to be apprenticed
to the great painter of his time–Ghirlandajo.
One happy day this young Granacci volunteered
to take Michael Angelo to his master’s studio,
and there Angelo made such an impression
on Ghirlandajo that he was urged by the
artist to become his pupil.

All the world began to seem rose coloured to
the ambitious boy, and he started his life-work
with enthusiasm. At that time he was thirteen

years old, full of hope and of love for his kind;
but his good fortune did not last long.
He had hardly settled to work in Ghirlandajo’s
studio than his genius, which should have made
him beloved, made him hated by his master.
Angelo drew superior designs, created new art-ideas,
was more clever in all his undertakings
than any other pupil–even ahead of his
master; and almost at once Ghirlandajo became
furiously jealous. This enmity between pupil
and master was the beginning of Angelo’s
many misfortunes.

One day he got into a dispute with a
fellow student, Torregiano, who broke his nose.
This deformity alone was a tragedy to one
like Michael Angelo who loved everything
beautiful, yet must go through life knowing
himself to be ill-favoured.

In height he was a little man, topped by
an abnormally large head which was part of the
penalty he had to pay for his talents. He
had a great, broad forehead, and an eye that
did not gleam nor express the beauty of his
creative mind, but was dull, and lustreless,
matching his broken, flattened nose. Indeed
he was a tragedy to himself. In the “History
of Painting” Muther describes his unhappy
disposition:

“In his youthful years he never learned what
love meant. ‘If thou wishest to conquer me,’
in old age he addresses love, ‘give me back
my features, from which nature has removed

all beauty.’ Whenever in his sonnets he
speaks of passion, it is always of pain and tears,
of sadness and unrequited longing, never of the
fulfilment of his wishes.”

Then, too, Michael Angelo had a quarrelsome
disposition, and he was harsh in his criticism
of others. He hated Leonardo da Vinci more
for his great physical beauty than for his
genius. He quarreled with most of his
contemporaries, never joined the assemblies
of his brother artists, but dwelt altogether
apart. His was a gloomy and melancholy
disposition and he never found relief outside
his work.

He was all kinds of an artist–poet, sculptor,
architect, painter–and although he worked
with the irregularity of true genius, he worked
indefatigably when once he began. It is said
that when he was making his “David” he
never removed his clothing the whole time he
was employed upon the work, but dropped
down when too exhausted to work more, and
slept wherever he fell.

His first flight from the workshop of Ghirlandajo
was to the gardens of the great
Florentine prince, Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had
sent to Ghirlandajo for two of his best pupils.
He wished them to come to his gardens and
study the beautiful Greek statues which
ornamented them. The choice fell to Angelo
and Granacci. Probably those statues in
Lorenzo’s garden were the first glimpses of

really great art that Michael Angelo ever had.
Certain it is that he was overwhelmed with
happiness when he was given permission to
copy what he would, and at once he fell to work
with his chisel. His first work in that garden
was upon the head of an old faun; and Lorenzo,
walking by, curious to know to what use the
lad was putting his opportunity, made a
criticism:

“You have made your faun old,” he said,
“yet you have left all the teeth; at such an age,
generally the teeth are wanting.”

Angelo had nothing to say and the prince
walked on, but when next he came that way,
he found that Angelo had broken off two of the
faun’s teeth; and this recognition of his
criticism pleased Lorenzo so much that he
invited Angelo to live with him. At first his
father objected. He felt himself to be an
aristocrat, and sculpture and painting were
indeed low occupations for his son, who he
had resolved should be nothing less than a
silk merchant. Nevertheless, the prince’s
command, united with the son’s pleading,
compelled the father to give up his cherished
dream of making a merchant of him, and
Angelo went to live in the palace.

Then indeed what seemed a beautiful life
opened out. He was dressed in fine clothing,
dined with princes, and possibly he was grateful
to his patron. Some historians say so, and add
that when Lorenzo died Angelo wept, and

returned sadly to his father’s house to mourn,
but this tale seems at odds with what else we
know of Angelo’s unangelic, envious and
bitter disposition. It is quite certain, however,
that with the death of Lorenzo, Angelo’s,
fortunes became greatly changed. Another
prince followed in line–Pietro de’ Medici–but
he was a poor thing, who brought little
good to anybody. He had small use for
Michael Angelo’s genius, but it is said that
he did give him one commission. After a
great storm one day, he asked him to make a
snow-man for him, and Angelo obligingly
complied. It was doubtless a very beautiful
snow-man, but although it was Angelo’s
it melted in the night, even as if it had been
Johnny’s or Tommy’s snow-man, and left no
trace behind.

In Rome there was a high and haughty pope
on the throne–Julius II.–who had probably
not his match for obstinacy and
haughtiness, excepting in the great painter
and sculptor. When Angelo went to Rome,
he was bound to come in conflict with Julius
for it was popes and princes who gave art any
reason for being in those days, and the Church
prescribed what kind of art should be cultivated.
Michael was to come directly under the
command of the pope and such a combination
promised trouble. Kings themselves had to
remove their crowns and hats to Julius, and
why not Michael Angelo? Yet there he stood,

covered, before the pope, opposing his greatness
to that of the pope. Soderini says that
Angelo treated the pope as the king of France
never would have dared treat him; but Angelo
may have known that kings of France might
be born and die, times without number, while
there would never be born another Michael
Angelo. There could be nothing but antagonism
between Angelo and Julius, and soon after
the artist returned to Florence; but the
necessity for following his profession enabled
Julius to tame him after all, and it is said that
the pope led him back to Rome, later, “with
a halter about his neck.” This must have
been agony to Angelo.

Back in Rome, he was commissioned to make
a tomb for the pope. He had no sooner set
about the preliminaries–the getting of suitable
marble for his work–than he began to quarrel
with the men who were to hew it. When that
difficulty was settled, and the marble was got
out, he had a set-to with the shipowners
who were to transport the stone, and that row
became so serious that the sculptor was
besieged in his own house.

At another and later time, when he was
engaged upon the frescoes of the Sistine
Chapel, he was made to work by force. He
accused the man who had built the scaffolding
upon which he must stand, or lie, to paint, of
planning his destruction. He suspected the
very assistants whom he, himself, had chosen

to go from Florence, of having designs upon his
life. He locked the chapel against them, and
they had to turn away when they went to
begin work. Because of his insane suspicion
he did alone the enormous work of the frescoes.
Doubtless he was half mad, just as he was
wholly a genius.

By the time he had finished those frescoes
he was so exhausted and overworked that
he wrote piteously to his people at home,
“I have not a friend in Rome, neither do I
wish nor have use for any.” This of course
was not true; or he would not have made the
statement. “I hardly find time to take
nourishment. Not an ounce more can I bear
than already rests upon my shoulders.” Even
when the work was done he felt no happiness
because of it, but complained about everything
and everybody.

If Angelo thought this an unhappy day,
worse was in store for him. Julius II. died
and in his place there came to reign upon the
papal throne, Leo X. If Michael Angelo had
been restricted in his work before, he was
almost jailed under Leo X. Julius had been a
virile, forceful man, and Michael Angelo was
the same. Since he must be restrained and
dictated to, it was possible for the artist to
listen to a man who was in certain respects
strong like himself, but to be under the thumb
of a weak, effeminate person like Leo, was the
tragedy of tragedies to Angelo. That was a

marvellous time in Rome. All its citizens had
become so pleasure-loving that the world, stood
still to wonder. When the pope banqueted,
he had the golden plates from which fair women
had eaten hurled into the Tiber, that they
might never be profaned by a less noble use
than they had known. From all this riot and
madness of pleasure, Michael Angelo stood
aside with frowning brow and scornful mien.
He approved of nothing and of nobody–despising
even Raphael, the gentle and loving
man whom the pleasure-crazed people of Rome
paused to smile upon and love. The pope
said that Angelo was “terrible,” and that he
filled everybody with fear.

Finally, Rome so resented his frowning looks
and his surly ways that work was provided
for him at a distance. He was sent to Florence
again to build a facade. While there, the city
was conquered, and Angelo was one who fought
for its freedom, but even so, he fled just at the
crisis. Thus he ever did the wrong thing–excepting
when he worked. In Florence he
had planned to do mighty things, but he never
accomplished any one of them. He planned
to make a wonderful colossal statue on a cliff
near Carrara, and also he resolved to make
the tomb of Julius the nucleus of a “forest of
statues.”

Michael Angelo never married, but he was
burdened with a family and all its cares.
He supported his brothers and even his

nephews, and took care of his father. All of
those people came to him with their difficulties
and with their demands for money. He
chided, quarreled, repelled, yet met every
obligation. He would sit beside the sick-bed
of a servant the night through, but growl at the
demands of his near relatives–and it is not
unlikely that he had good reason.

At last he withdrew himself from all human
society but that of little children, whom he
cared to speak with and to please. He would
have naught to do with men of genius like himself;
and when he fell from a scaffolding and injured
himself, the physician had to force his way
through a barred window, in order to get into
the sick man’s presence to serve him.

An illustration of his determined solitude
is given in the “Young People’s Story of Art:”

“There had long been lying idle in Florence
an immense block of marble. One hundred
years before a sculptor had tried to carve
something from it, but had failed. This was
now given to Michael Angelo. He was to be
paid twelve dollars a month, and to be allowed
two years in which to carve a statue. He
made his design in wax; and then built a
tower around the block, so that he might
work inside without being seen.”

Everything Angelo undertook bore the marks
of gigantic enterprise. Although he never
succeeded in making the tomb of Julius II.
the central piece in his forest of statues, the

undertaking was marvellous enough. His
original plan was to make the tomb three
stories high and to ornament it with forty
statues, and if St. Peter’s Church was large
enough to hold it, the work was to be placed
therein; but if not, a church was to be built
specially to hold the tomb. When at last,
in spite of his difficulties with workmen and
shipowners, the marbles were deposited in the
great square before St. Peter’s, they filled the
whole place; and the pope, wishing to watch
the progress of the work and not himself to be
observed, had a covered way built from the
Vatican to the workshop of Angelo in the
square, by which he might come and go as he
chose, while an order was issued that the
sculptor was to be admitted at all times to
the Vatican. No sooner was this arrangement
completed than Angelo’s enemies frightened
the pope by telling him there was danger in
making his tomb before his death; and with
these superstitions haunting him Julius II.
stopped the work, leaving Angelo without the
means to pay for his marbles. With the doors
of the Vatican closed to him, Angelo withdrew,
post haste to Florence–and who can blame
him? Nevertheless, the work was resumed
after infinite trouble on the pope’s part. He
had to send again and again for Angelo and
after forty years, the work was finished.
There the sequel of the sculptor’s forty-years
war with self and the world stands to-day in

“Moses,” the wonderful, commanding central
figure which seems to reflect all the fierce
power which Angelo had to keep in check
during a life-time.

The command of Julius that he should paint
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel aroused all his
fierce resistance. He did it under protest,
all the while accusing those about him of
having designs upon his life.

“I am not a painter, but a sculptor,” he said.

“Such a man as thou is everything that he
wishes to be,” the pope replied.

“But this is an affair of Raphael. Give
him this room to paint and let me carve a
mountain!” But no, he must paint the
ceiling; but to render it easier for him the pope
told him he might fill in the spaces with saints,
and charge a certain amount for each. This
Angelo, who was first of all an artist, refused
to do. He would do the work rightly or not at
all. So he made his own plans and cut himself
a cardboard helmet, into the front of which
he thrust a candle, as if it were a Davy lamp,
and he lay upon his back to work day and
night at the hated task. During those months
he was compelled to look up so continually,
that never afterward was he able to look down
without difficulty. When he had finished the
work Julius had some criticisms to make.

“Those dresses on your saints are such poor
things,” he said. “Not rich enough–such
very poor things!”

“Well, they were poor things,” was Angelo’s
answer. “The saints did not wear golden
ornaments, nor gold on their garments.”

After Julius II. and Leo X. came Pope
Paul III., and he, like the other two, determined
to have Angelo for his workman. Indeed all
his life, Michael Angelo’s gifts were commanded
by the Church of Rome. It was for Paul III.
he painted the “Last Judgment.” His former
work upon the Sistine Chapel had been the
story of the creation. All his work was of a
mighty and allegorical nature; tremendous
shoulders, mighty limbs, herculean muscles
that seemed fit to support the universe. These
allegories are made of hundreds of figures.
To-day they are still there, though dimmed
by the smoke of centuries of incense, and
dismembered by the cracking of plaster and
disintegration of materials.

Angelo’s methods of work, as well as their
results, were oppressive. In his youth, while
trying to perfect himself in his study of the
human form, he drew or modelled, from
nude corpses. He had these conveyed by
stealth from the hospital into the convent of
Santo Spirito, where he had a cell and there
he worked, alone.

He was concentrated, mentally and emotionally,
upon himself. The only remark he made
after the blow from Torregiano was, “You will
be remembered only as the man who broke
my nose!” This proved nearly true, since

Torregiano was banished, and murdered by
the Spanish Inquisition.

All sorts of anecdotes have floated through
the centuries concerning this man and his work.
For example, he made a statue of a sleeping
cupid, which was buried in the ground for a
time that it might assume the appearance of
age, and pass for an antique. Afterward it
was sold to the Cardinal San Giorgio for two
hundred ducats, though Michael Angelo
received only thirty. Nevertheless, he died a
rich man, after having cared for a numerous
family, while he himself lived like a man
without means. All the tranquillity he ever
knew he enjoyed in his old age.

It was characteristic of his perversity that
he left his name upon nothing that he made,
with one exception. Vasari relates the story
of that exception:

“The love and care which Michael Angelo
had given to this group, ‘In Paradise,’ were
such that he there left his name–a thing he
never did again for any work–on the cincture
which girdles the robe of Our Lady; for it
happened one day that Michael Angelo, entering
the place where it was erected, found a large
assemblage of strangers from Lombardy there,
who were praising it highly; one of them
asking who had done it, was told, ‘our Hunchback
of Milan’; hearing which Michael Angelo
remained silent, although surprised that his
work should be attributed to another. But

one night he repaired to St. Peter’s with a light
and his chisels, to engrave his name on the
figure, which seems to breathe a spirit as perfect
as her form and countenance.”

If his youth had been given to sculpture,
his maturity to the painting of wondrous
frescoes, so his old age was devoted to architecture,
and as architect he rebuilt the
decaying St. Peter’s. In this work he felt
that he partly realised his ideal. Sculpture
meant more to him, “did more for the glory
of God,” than any other form of art. When
he had finished his work on St. Peter’s, he is said
to have looked upon it and exclaimed: “I
have hung the Pantheon in the air!”

This colossal genius died in Rome, and was
carried by the light of torches from that city
back to his better loved Florence, where he
was buried. His tomb was made in the Santa
Croce, and upon it are three female figures
representing Michael Angelo’s three wonderful
arts: Architecture, sculpture and painting.
No artist was greater than he.

His will committed “his soul to God, his
body to the earth, and his property to his
nearest relatives.”

This wonderful painting is a part of the
decoration of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
The picture of the prophet tells so much in

itself, that a description seems absurd. It is
enough to call attention to the powerful
muscles in the arm, the fall of the hand, and
then to speak of the main characteristics of the
artist’s pictures.

It is extraordinary that there is no blade of
grass to be found in any painting by Michael
Angelo. He loved to paint but one thing,
and that was the naked man, the powerful
muscles, or the twisted limbs of those in great
agony. He loved only to work upon vast
spaces of ceiling or wall. Look at this picture
of Daniel and see how like sculpture the
pose and modelling appear to be. First of all,
Michael Angelo was a sculptor, and most of
the painting which fate forced him to do has
the characteristics of sculpture.

One critic has remarked that he loves to
think of this strange man sitting before the
marble quarry of Pietra Santa and thinking
upon all the beings hidden in the cliff–beings
which he should fashion from the marble.

It was said that in Michael Angelo’s hands
the Holy Family became a race of Titans, and
where others would have put plants or foliage,
Angelo placed men and naked limbs to fill the
space. When his subject made some sort of
herbage necessary, he invented a kind of
mediæval fern in place of grass and familiar
leaves. Everything appears brazen and hard
and mighty, suggestive of Angelo’s own
throbbing spirit and maddened soul. Most

of his work, when illustrated, must be shown
not as a whole but in sections, but one can
best mention them as entire picture themes.
On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are nine
frescoes describing “The Creation of The
World,” “The Fall of Man” and “The Deluge.”
“The Last Judgment” occupies the entire
altar wall in the same chapel of the Vatican.
“The Holy Family” is in the Uffizi Gallery,
Florence.

III

ARNOLD BÖCKLIN

This splendid artist is so lately dead that
it does not seem proper yet to discuss
his personal history, but we can speak understandingly
of his art, for we already know it
to be great art, which will stand the test of
time. His imagination turned toward subjects
of solemn grandeur and his work is very
impressive and beautiful.

He was born in Basel, “one of the most
prosaic towns in Europe.” His father was a
Swiss merchant, and not poor; thus the son
had ordinarily good chances to make an artist
of himself. He was born at a time when to be
an artist had long ceased to be a reproach,
and men no longer discouraged their sons
who felt themselves inspired to paint great
pictures.

When Böcklin was nineteen years old he
took himself to Düsseldorf, with his merchant
father’s permission, and settled down to learn
his art, but in that city he found mostly
“sentimental and anecdotal” pictures being
painted, which did not suit him at all. Then

he took himself off to Brussels, where again
he was not satisfied, and so went to Paris.
But while in Brussels he had copied many old
masters, and had advanced himself very
much, so that he did not present himself in
Paris raw and untried in art.

At first he studied in the Louvre, then went
to Rome, seeking ever the best, and being
hard to satisfy. He found rest and tranquillity
in Zürich, a city in his native country, but it
was Italy that had most influenced his work.

He loved the Campagna of Rome with its
ruins and the sad grandeur of the crumbling
tombs lining its way, and therefore a certain
mysterious, grand, and solemn character made
his pictures unlike those of any other artist.
He loved to paint in vertical (up-and-down)
fines, rather than with the conventional horizontal
outlines that we find in most paintings.
This method gives his pictures a different
quality from any others in the world.

He loved best of all to paint landscape,
and it is said of him that “as the Greeks
peopled their streams and woods and waves
with creatures of their imagination, so Böcklin
makes the waterfall take shape as a nymph, or
the mists which rise above the water source
wreathe into forms of merry children; or in
some wild spot hurls centaurs together in
fierce combat, or makes the slippery, moving
wave give birth to Nereids and Tritons.”

Muther, art-critic and biographer, calls our

attention to the similarity between Wagner’s
music and Böcklin’s painting. While Wagner
was “luring the colours of sound from music,”
Böcklin’s “symphonies of colour streamed
forth like a crashing orchestra,” and he calls
him the greatest colour-poet of the time.

In appearance Böcklin was fine of form,
healthy and wholesome in all his thoughts and
way of living. In 1848 he took part in
revolutionary politics and later this did him
great harm. Only the influence of his friends
kept him from ruin. After the Franco-Prussian
war he was made Minister of Fine Arts. In
this office he rendered great service; but
because he had to witness the wrecking of the
Column Vendôme in order to save the Louvre
and the Luxembourg from the mob, he was
censured; indeed so heavy a fine was imposed
that it took his whole fortune to pay it; and
he was banished into the bargain. From
1892 to 1901 he lived in or near Florence,
and he died at Fiesole, January 16th, 1901.

This picture is perhaps the greatest of the
many great Arnold Böcklin paintings, and it is
both fascinating and awe-inspiring.

It best shows his liking for vertical lines in
art. The Isle of the Dead is of a rocky, shaft-like
formation in which we may see hewn-out
tombs; and there, tall cypress trees are growing.

The traces of man’s work in the midst of this
sombre, ideal, and mystic scene add to the
impressiveness of the picture. The isle stands
high and lonely in the midst of a sea.

The water seems silently to lap the base
of the rocks and the trees are in black shadow,
massed in the centre. It looks very mysterious
and still. There is a stone gateway touched
with the light of a dying day. It is sunset
and the dead is being brought to its resting
place in a tiny boat, all the smaller for its
relation to the gloomy grandeur of the isle
which it is approaching. One figure is standing
in the boat, facing the island, and the sunlight
falls full upon his back and touches the boat,
making that spot stand out brilliantly from all
the rest of the picture.

Among Böcklin’s paintings are “Naiads at
Play,” which hangs in the Museum at Basel,
“A Villa by the Sea,” “The Sport of the
Waves,” “Regions of Joy,” “Flora,” and
“Venus Dispatching Cupid.”

IV

MARIE-ROSA BONHEUR

Rosa Bonheur, Landseer, and Murillo
maybe called “Children’s Painters” in this
book because they painted things that children,
as well as grown-ups, certainly can enjoy.
To be sure, Murillo was a very different sort
of artist from Rosa Bonheur or Landseer,
but if the two latter painted the most beautiful,
animals–dogs, sheep, and horses–Murillo
painted the loveliest little children.

Rosa was the best pupil of her father;
Raymond B. Bonheur. In Bordeaux they
lived together the peaceful life of artists,
the father being already a well known painter
when his daughter was born. She became,
as Mr. Hamerton, who knew her, said, “the
most accomplished female painter who ever
lived … a pure, generous woman as
well and can hardly be too much admired …
as a woman or an artist. She is simple in her
tastes and habits of life and many stories are
told of her generosity to others.”

After a time the Bonheurs moved to Paris

where young Rosa could have better opportunities;
and there she put on man’s clothing,
which she wore all her life thereafter. She
wore a workingman’s blouse and trousers,
and tramped about looking more like a man
than a woman with her short hair. This,
made everybody stare at her and think her
very queer, but people no longer believe that
she dressed herself thus in order to advertise
herself and attract attention; but because it
was the most convenient costume for her to
get about in. She went to all sorts of places;
the stockyards, slaughter houses, all about the
streets of Paris, to learn of things and people,
especially of animals, which she wished most
to paint. She could hardly have gone about
thus if she had worn women’s clothing.

Rosa Bonheur exhibited her first painting
at the Salon in 1841, and this was twelve years
before her beloved father died; thus he had the
happiness of knowing that the daughter whom
he had taught so lovingly was on the road
to success and fortune. He knew that when
fortune should come to her she would use it
well. The year that she exhibited her work
in the Salon she painted only two little pictures–one
of rabbits, the other of sheep and
goats–but they were so splendidly done
that all the critics knew a great woman artist
had arrived.

It was then that her enemies, those who
were becoming jealous of her work, said that

she was wearing men’s clothing in order to
attract attention to herself.

Soon her work began to be bought by the
French Government, which was a sure sign of
her power. She was already much beloved
by the people. In the meantime we in America
and others in England had heard of Mademoiselle
Bonheur, but we heard far less about her
painting than we did about her masculine
garb. We thought of her mostly as an eccentric
woman; but one day came “The Horse
Fair,” and all the world heard of that, so the
artist was to be no longer judged by the
clothes she wore but by her art. Finally, she
received the cross of the Legion of Honour,
and also was made a member of the Institute
of Antwerp.

She lived near Fontainebleau; her studio
a peaceful retired home, till the Franco-Prussian
war came about. Then she and others began
to fear that her studio and pictures would be
destroyed, so the artist was forced to stop her
work and prepared to go elsewhere. But
the Crown Prince of Prussia himself ordered
that Mademoiselle Bonheur should not even
be disturbed. Her work had made her belong
to all the world and all the world was to
protect her if need be.

Rosa Bonheur had a brother who, some
critics said, was the better artist, but if that
were true it is likely that his popularity would
in some degree have approached that of his

sister. Rosa Bonheur did not paint many
large canvases, but mostly small ones, or
only moderately large; but when she painted
sheep it seems that one might shear the wool,
it stands so fleecy and full; while her horses
rampage and curvet, showing themselves off
as if they were alive.

This picture was exhibited all over the world
very nearly. It was carried to England and
to America, and won admiration wherever it
was seen. Finally it was sold in America.
It was first exhibited in 1853, the year in
which the artist’s father died. Mr. Ernest
Gambart was the first who bought the picture,
and he wrote of it to his friend, Mr. S.P.
Avery: “I will give you the real history of
‘The Horse Fair,’ now in New York. It
was painted in 1852, by Rosa Bonheur, then
in her thirtieth year, and exhibited in the next
Salon. Though much admired it did not find
a purchaser. It was soon after exhibited in
Ghent, meeting again with much appreciation,
but was not sold, as art did not flourish at the
time. In 1855 the picture was sent by Rosa
Bonheur to her native town of Bordeaux and
exhibited there. She offered to sell it to
the town at the very low price 12,000
francs ($2,400). While there, I asked her if
she would sell it to me, and allow me to take

it to England and have it engraved. She said:
‘I wish to have my picture remain in France.
I will once more impress on my countrymen,
my wish to sell it to them for 12,000 francs.
If they refuse, you can have it, but if you take
it abroad, you must pay me 40,000 francs.’
The town failing to make the purchase, I at
once accepted these terms, and Rosa Bonheur
then placed the picture at my disposal. I
tendered her the 40,000 francs and she said:
‘I am much gratified at your giving me such
a noble price, but I do not like to feel that I
have taken advantage of your liberality; let
us see how we can combine in the matter. You
will not be able to have an engraving made
from so large a canvas. Suppose I paint you
a small one from the same subject, of which I
will make you a present.’ Of course I accepted
the gift, and thus it happened that the large
work went travelling over the kingdom on
exhibition, while Thomas Landseer was making
an engraving from the quarter-size replica.

“After some time (in 1857 I think), I sold
the original picture to Mr. William P. Wright,
New York (whose picture gallery and residence
were at Weehawken, N.J.), for the sum
of 30,000 francs, but later I understood
that Mr. Stewart paid a much larger price
for it on the breaking up of Mr. Wright’s
gallery. The quarter size replica, from which
the engraving was made, I finally sold to Mr.
Jacob Bell, who gave it in 1859 to the nation,

and it is now in the National Gallery, London.
A second, still smaller replica, was painted a
few years later, and was resold some time ago
in London for £4,000 ($20,000). There
is also a smaller water-colour drawing which
was sold to Mr. Bolckow for 2,500 guineas
($12,000), and is now an heirloom belonging
to the town of Middlesbrough. That is the
whole history of this grand work. The Stewart
canvas is the real and true original, and only
large size ‘Horse-Fair.’

“Once in Mr. Stewart’s collection, it never
left his gallery until the auction sale of his
collection, March 25th, 1887, when it was purchased
by Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt for the
sum of $55,000, and presented to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.”

And thus we have the whole story of the
“Horse-Fair.” The picture is 93-1/2 inches high,
and 197 inches wide, and it contains a great
number of horses, some of which are ridden,
while others are led, and all are crowding with
wild gaiety toward the fair where it is quite
plain they know they are about to be admired
and their beauty shown to the best advantage.
Other well-known Rosa Bonheurs are “Ploughing,”
“Shepherd Guarding Sheep,” “Highland
Sheep,” “Scotch Deer,” “American Mustangs,”
and “The Study of a Lioness.”

V

ALESSANDRO BOTTICELLI

Botticelli took his name from his first
master, as was the fashion in those days.
The relation of master and apprentice was very
close, not at all like the relation of pupil and
teacher to-day.

Botticelli’s father was a Florentine citizen,
Mariano Filipepi, and he wished his son to
become a goldsmith; hence the lad was soon
apprenticed to Botticelli, the goldsmith. As a
scholar, the little goldsmith had not distinguished
himself. Indeed it is said that as a
boy he would not “take to any sort of schooling
in reading, writing, or arithmetic.” It cannot
be said that this failure distinguished him as a
genius, or the world would be full of genius-boys;
but the result was that he early began
to learn his trade.

Fortunately for him and us, Botticelli, the
smith, was a man of some wisdom and when he
saw that the lad originated beautiful designs
and had creative genius he did not treat the
matter with scorn, as the master of Andrea del

Sarto had done, but sent him instead to Fra
Filippo (Lippo Lippi) to be taught the art
of painting. So kind a deed might well
establish a feeling of devotion on little Alessandro’s
part and make him wish to take his
master’s name.

Fra Filippo was a Carmelite monk, merry
and kindly; simple, good, and gifted, but his
temperament did not seem to influence his
young pupil. Of all unhappy, morbid men,
Botticelli seems to have been the most so, unless
we are to except Michael Angelo.

After studying with the monk, Botticelli
was summoned by Pope Sixtus IV. to Rome
to decorate a new chapel in the Vatican.
Before that time his whole life had been greatly
influenced by the teachings of Savonarola
who had preached both passionately and
learnedly in Florence, advocating liberty.
From the time he fell under Savonarola’s
wonderful power, the artist grew more and
more mystic and morbid. In Rome it was the
custom to have the portraits of conspirators,
or persons of high degree who were revolutionary
or otherwise objectionable to the state,
hung outside the Public Palace, and in Botticelli’s
time there was a famous disturbance
among the aristocrats of the state. In 1478
the powerful Pazzi family conspired against
the Medici family, which then actually had
control. It was Botticelli who was engaged
to paint the portraits of the Pazzi family,

which to their shame and humiliation were
to be displayed upon the palace walls.

One peculiarity of this artist’s pictures was
that he used actual goldleaf to make the high
lights upon hair, leaves, and draperies. The
effect of the use of this gold was very beautiful,
if unusual, and it may have been that his
apprenticeship as a goldsmith suggested to
him such a device.

Also it was he who created certain characteristics
of painting that have since been thought
original with Burne-Jones. This was the use
of long stiff lily-stalks or other upright details
in his compositions. Examples of this idea,
which produced so weird an effect, will be found
in his allegory of “Spring,” where stiff tree-trunks
form a part of the background. In
the “Madonna of the Palms” upright lily-stalks
are held in pale and trembling hands.
Like Michael Angelo, who came years afterward,
Botticelli was a guest of the great Lorenzo
the “Magnificent,” in Florence. It was by
Botticelli’s hand that the greater painter sent
a letter to Lorenzo from a duchess friend
who was also his patron. This was in Angelo’s
youth; in Botticelli’s old age.

All his life was a drama of morbid seeking
after the unattainable, and finally he became
so poor and helpless that in his old age he
would have starved had Lorenzo de’ Medici
not taken care of him. Lorenzo and other
friends who in spite of his gloominess admired

his real piety, gathered about him and kept
him from starvation.

On his “Nativity,” Botticelli wrote: “This
picture I, Alessandro, painted at the end of
the year 1500 in the troubles of Italy, in the
halftime after the time, during the fulfilment
of the eleventh of John, in the second woe
of the Apocalypse, in the loosing the devil
for three and a half years. Afterward he
shall be chained according to the twelfth of
John, and see him trodden down as in this
picture.” All of this is interesting because
Botticelli himself wrote it, but it is not
very easily understood by any child, nor by
many grown people.

Botticelli did some very extraordinary things,
but whether they are beautiful or not one
must decide for himself. They are paintings
so characteristic that one must think them
very beautiful or else not at all so.

In this picture we have the forerunner of a
modern painter, because we see in it certain,
qualities that we find in Böcklin. Look at
the effect of vertical lines; the tree trunks,
and the poses of the slender women. Over
all hovers a cupid who is sending love-shafts
into the hearts of all in springtime.

Notice the lacy effect of the flowers that

bestar the wind-blown gown of “La Primavera,”
the fern-like leaves that fleck the background;
the draperies that do not conceal the forms
of the nymphs of the lovely springtime.

The very spirit of spring is seen in all the
half-floating, half-dancing, gliding, diaphanous
figures of the forest. The flowers of “La
Primavera’s” crown are blue and white cornflowers
and primroses. She scatters over the
earth tulips, anemones, and narcissus. The
painting is allegorical and unique. Never were
such fluttering odds and ends of draperies
painted before, nor such fascinating effects had
from canvas, paint, or brush. The picture
hangs in Florence in the Uffizi Gallery. A
German critic tells us that the “Realm of
Venus,” is a better title for this picture, and
that it was painted after a poem of that name.

Other pictures by this artist are: “The
Birth of Venus,” “Pallas,” “Judith,” “Holofernes,”
“St. Augustine,” “Adoration of the
Magi,” and “St. Sebastian.”

VI

WILLIAM ADOLPHE BOUGUEREAU

Bouguereau’s business-like father meant
his son also to be business-like, but
he made the mistake of permitting him to
go to a drawing school in Bordeaux and there,
to his father’s chagrin, the youngster took the
annual prize. After that there seemed nothing
for the father to do but grin and bear it,
because the son decided to be an artist and had
fairly won his right to be one.

Young Bouguereau had no money, and
therefore he went to live with an uncle at
Saintonge, a priest, who had much sympathy
with the boy’s wish to paint, and he left him
free to do the best he could for himself in art.
He got a chance to paint some portraits, and
when he and his uncle talked the matter over
It was decided that he should take the money
got for them, and go to Paris. It was there
that he sought Picot, his first truly helpful
teacher; and there, for the first time he learned
more than he already knew about art.

All Bouguereau’s opportunities in life were
made by himself, by his own genius. No one

gave him anything; he earned all. He longed
to go to Italy, and in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
he won the Prix de Rome, which made possible
a journey to the land of great artists. The
French Government began to buy his work,
and he began to receive commissions to decorate
walls in great buildings; thus, gradually, he
made for himself fame and fortune.

When this artist undertook to paint sacred
subjects, of great dignity, he was not at his
best; but when he chose children and mothers
and everyday folk engaged about their everyday
business, he painted beautifully. Americans
have bought many of his pictures and he
has had more popularity in this country than
anywhere outside of France.

Some authorities give the birthplace of Bouguereau
as La Rochelle; at any rate he died there
at midnight, on the nineteenth of August, 1905.

The main distinction about this artist’s
pictured faces is the peculiarly earnest expression
he has given to the eyes. In this picture
of the Virgin there is great genius in the pose
and death-look of the little child whose
mother has flung herself across the lap of Mary,
abandoned to her agony. This painting is
hung in the Luxembourg. Others by the same
master are called “Psyche and Cupid” “Birth of
Venus,” “Innocence,” and “At the Well.”

VII

SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES

This artist has been called the most original
of all contemporaneous artists. He has
also been called the “lyric painter”; meaning
that he is to painting what the lyric poet is
to literature. His work once known can almost
always be recognised wherever seen afterward.
He did not slavishly follow the Pre-Raphaelite
school, yet he drew most of his
ideas from its methods. He was, in the use of
stiff lines, a follower of Botticelli, and not
original in that detail, as some have seemed to
think.

This is a picture in the true Burne-Jones
style: a beautiful woman in billowy draperies,
playing upon a harp forms the central
figure of the group of three–a listener on
either side of her. There is the attractiveness
of the Burne-Jones method about this picture,
but after all there seems to be no very good

reason for its having been painted. The
subject thus treated has only a negative value,
and little suggestion of thought or dramatic
idea.

Another picture of this artist, in which his
use of stiff draperies is specially shown, is
that of the women at the tomb of Christ,
when they find the stone rolled away and,
looking around, see the Saviour’s figure before
them. The scene is low and cavern-like, with
a brilliant light surrounding the tomb. This
artist also painted “The Vestal Virgin,”
“King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” “Pan
and Psyche,” “The Golden Stairs,” and
“Love Among the Ruins.”

VIII

JOHN CONSTABLE

John Constable was the son of a “yeoman
farmer” who meant to make him also
a yeoman farmer. Mostly we find that the
fathers of our artists had no higher expectations
for their sons than to have them take up their
own business; to begin as they had, and to end
as they expected to. But in John Constable’s
case, as with all the others, the father’s methods
of living did not at all please the son, and
having most of all a liking for picture-making;
young John set himself to planning his own
affairs.

Nevertheless, the foundation of John’s art
was laid right there in the Suffolk farmer’s
home and conditions. He was born in East
Bergholt, and the father seems to have believed
in windmills, for early in life the signs of
wind and weather became a part of the son’s
education. He learned a deal more of atmospheric
conditions there on his father’s windmill
planted farm than he could possibly have
learned shut up in a studio, French fashion.
As a little boy he came to know all the signs of

the heavens; the clouds gathering for storm or
shine; the bending of the trees in the blast;
all of these he loved, and later on made the
principal subjects of his art. He learned to
observe these things as a matter of business
and at his father’s command; thus we may say
that he studied his life-work from his very
infancy. All about him were beautiful hedgerows,
picturesque cottages with high pitched
roofs covered with thatch, and it was these
beauties which bred one other great landscape
painter besides Constable, of whom we shall
presently speak, Gainsborough.

At last, graduating from windmills, John
went to London. He had a vacation from
the work set him by his father, and for two
years he painted “cottages, studied anatomy,”
and did the drudgery of his art; but there was
little money in it for him, and soon he had to go
into his father’s counting house, for windmills
seemed to have paid the elder Constable,
considerably better than painting promised
to pay young John.

John doubtless liked counting-house work
even less than he had done the study of windmills
and weather in his father’s fields. He
was a most persistent fellow, however, and
finally he returned to London, to study again
the art he loved, this time in the Royal Academy,
which meant that he had made some
progress.

His father gave him very little aid to do

the things he longed to do, but after his father’s
death he found that a little money was coming
to him from the estate–£4,000. He
had already triumphed over his difficulties by
painting his first fine pictures; he now knew
that he was to become a successful artist,
and be able to take care of himself and a wife.
Though in love, he had hitherto been too poor
to marry. His first splendid work was
“Dedham Vale.”

Though things were going very well with him,
it was not until Paris discovered him that he
achieved great success. In 1824 he painted
two large pictures which he took to Paris,
and there he found fame. The best landscape
painting in France dates from the time when
Constable’s works were hung in the Louvre,
to become the delight of all art-lovers.

He received a gold medal from Charles X.,
and became more honoured abroad than he had
ever been at home.

Constable had many enemies, and made
many more after he became an Academician.
Some artists, who would have liked that
honour and who could not gain it for themselves,
declared that Constable painted “with a
palette knife,” though it certainly would not
have mattered if he had, since he made great
pictures.

He painted things exactly as he saw them,
and was not a popular artist. Most of all, he
loved to paint the scenes that he had known so

well in his youth, and he did them over and
over again, as if the subject was one in which
he wished to reach perfection.

When he died he left a picture, “Arundel
Castle and Mill,” standing with its paint wet
upon his easel for he passed away very suddenly,
on April 1st, leaving behind him many unsold
paintings.

He was a sensitive chap, and throughout his
youth was greatly distressed by the differences
of opinion between himself and his father. He
was torn asunder between a sense of duty and
his own wish to be an artist; and his greatest
consolation in this situation was in the friendship
he had formed for a plumber, who, like
himself, dearly loved art. The plumber’s
name was John Dunthorne, and the two men
wandered about the country, when not
employed at their regular work, and together,
by streams and in fields, painted the same
scenes. At one time they hired a little room
in the neighbouring village which they made
into a studio. Constable was a handsome
fellow in his youth and was known to all as the
“handsome miller.” His father, the yeoman
farmer with the windmills, was also a miller.

In London he became acquainted with one
John Smith, known as “Antiquity Smith,”
who taught him something of etching. After
he was recalled to his father’s business, his
mother wrote to “Antiquity Smith,” that she
hoped John “would now attend to business,

by which he will please me and his father,
and ensure his own respectability and comfort”–a
complete expression of the middle-class
British mind. Her satisfaction was short-lived,
for her son soon returned to London.

When his first pictures were rejected by the
Royal Academy he showed one of them to Sir
Benjamin West, who said hopefully: “Don’t
be disheartened, young man, we shall hear of
you again; you must have loved nature very
much before you could have painted this.”

About that time he tried to paint many
kinds of pictures, such as portraits and sacred
subjects, but he did not seem to succeed in
anything except the scenes of his boyhood,
which he truly loved. Hence he gave up
attempting that which he could do only
passably, and kept to what he could do
supremely well.

When his friends wished him to continue
portrait painting, the only thing that was well
paid at that time, Constable wrote: “You
know I have always succeeded best with my
native scenes. They have always charmed
me, and I hope they always will. I have now
a path marked out very distinctly for myself,
and I am desirous of pursuing it uninterruptedly.”

About the time he fell in love and before his
father’s death, his health began to fail, and the
young woman’s mother would have none of
him. Her father was in favour of Constable,

but he could not hold out against the chance
of his daughter losing her grandfather’s fortune
by marrying the wrong man.

The lady was not so distractingly in love as
young Constable was, and she did not entirely
like the idea of poverty, even with John, so
she held off, and with so much anxiety Constable
became downright ill. For five years
the pair lived apart, and then the artist and
the young woman, whose name was Maria
Bicknell, lost their mothers about the same time,
This drew them very closely together; and to
help the matter on, John’s attendance upon
his father in his last illness brought him to the
same town as Miss Bicknell. After his father’s
death, he urged the young lady so strongly
to be his wife that she consented They were
married and her father soon forgave her,
but not so her grandfather, who declared that
he never would forgive her, but he really must
have done so from the first, for when he died
it was found that he had left her a little fortune
of £4,000. This was about the same amount
the artist had received from his father, so that
they were able to get on very well.

After Constable’s marriage he went on a visit
to Sir George Beaumont, and there an amusing
incident occurred which is known to-day as
the story of Sir George’s “brown tree.” It
seems that Constable’s ideas of colour for his
landscapes were so true to nature that a good
many people did not approve of them, and one

day while painting, Sir George declared that
the colour of an old Cremona fiddle was the
best model of colour tone that a landscape
could have. Constable’s only answer was to
place the fiddle on the green lawn in front of
the house. At another time his host asked
the artist, “Do you not find it very difficult
to determine where to place your brown tree?”
“Not at all,” was Constable’s reply, “for I
never put such a thing into a picture in my
life.”

In painting one picture many times he
declared, “Its light cannot be put out because
it is the light of nature.” A Frenchman called
attention to one of his pictures thus: “Look
at these landscapes by an Englishman. The
ground appears to be covered with dew.”

Notwithstanding the little fortune of his
wife and himself, Constable was not quite carefree,
because he had to raise a good sized
family of six children so that when his wife’s
father died and left his daughter £20,000
he said to a friend: “Now I shall stand before
a six-foot canvas with a mind at ease, thank
God!” In the very midst of this happiness,
his beloved wife became ill with consumption,
and was certain to die. He no longer cared
very much for life and wrote very sadly:

“I have been ill, but am endeavouring to
get work again, and could I get afloat upon a
canvas of six feet, I might have a chance of
being carried from myself.” When he became

a member of the Royal Academy, he said:
“It has been delayed until I am solitary and
cannot impart it,” meaning that without his
dear wife to share his good fortune, it seemed
an empty honour to him.

Strange things are told which show how little
his work was valued by his countrymen.
After he had become a member of the Academy
one of his small pictures was entered but
rejected; nobody knowing anything about it.
It was put on one side among the “outsiders.”
Finally, one of his fellow members glancing at
it was attracted.

“Stop a bit! I rather like that. Why not
say ‘doubtful’?” Later Constable acknowledged
the picture as his, and then they wished
to hang it, but he refused to let them. Another
Academy story is about his picture “Hadleigh
Castle.” On Varnishing Day, Chartney, a brilliant
critic, told Constable that the foreground
of the picture was “too cold,” and so he
undertook to “warm it,” by giving it a strong
glaze with asphaltum with Constable’s brush
which he snatched from the artist’s hand.
Constable gazed at him in horror. “Oh!
there goes all my dew,” he cried, and when
Chartney’s back was turned he hurriedly wiped
the “warmth” all away and got back his “dew.”

Even the amusing things that happened to
him, seem to have a little sadness about them.
He wrote to a friend: “Beechey was here
yesterday, and said: ‘Why d–n it Constable,

what a d–n fine picture you are making;
but you look d–n ill, and you’ve got a d–n
bad cold!’ so,” added Constable, “you have
evidence on oath of my being about a fine
picture and that I am looking ill.”

An illustration of his painstaking and truthfulness
to nature is that he once took home
with him from a visit bottles of coloured sand
and fragments of stone which he meant to
introduce into a picture; and on passing some
slimy posts near a mill, he said to his host,
“I wish you could cut those off and send
their tops to me.”

Constable was a loyal friend, the most
persistent of men, and several anecdotes are
told of his characteristics. His friend Fisher
said to him:

“Where real business is to be done, you are
the most energetic and punctual of men. In
smaller matters, such as putting on your
breeches, you are apt to lose time in deciding
which leg shall go in first.”

This picture was first called “Landscape,”
and it was painted in 1821. In his letters
about it, however, Constable also called it
“Noon,” and others wrote of it as “Midsummer
Noon.” This tells us what a wealth
of hot sunlight is suggested by the painting.

It shows a little farmhouse upon the bank of

a stream, a spot well known as “Willy Lott’s
Cottage.” The owner had been born there
and he died there eighty-eight years later,
without ever having left his cottage for four
whole days in all those years. Upon the
tombstone of Lott, which is in the Bergholt
burial ground, his epitaph calls the house
“Gibeon Farm.” It was a favourite scene
with Constable, and he painted it many times
from every side. It is the same house we see
in the “Mill Stream,” another Constable painting,
and again in “Valley Farm.” In this
last picture he painted the side opposite to the
one shown in the “Hay Wain.”

The stream near which the house stands
spreads out into a ford, and in the picture the
hay cart, with two men upon it, is passing
through the ford. The horses are decked out
with red tassels. On the right of the stream
there is a broad meadow, golden green in the
sunlight, “with groups of trees casting cool
shadows on the grass, and backed by a distant
belt of woodland of rich blues and greens.” On
the right is a fisherman, half hidden by a bush,
standing near his punt.

Constable wrote to his friend, Fisher, “My
picture goes to the Academy on the tenth.”
This was written on April 1st, 1821. “It is not
so grand as Tinney’s.” This shows us, that
Constable had not vanity enough to interfere
with his self-criticism. Again in a letter
written to him by a friend: “How does the

‘Hay Wain’ look now it has got into your
own room again?” adding that he wished to
see it there, away from the Academy which
to him was always “like a great pot of boiling
varnish.”

Later Fisher wrote: “I have a great
desire to possess your ‘Wain,’ but I cannot
now reach what it is worth;” and he begged
Constable not to sell it without giving him a
chance to try once more to raise the money
to buy it. He wrote that the picture would
become of greater value to his children if the
artist left it hanging upon the walls of the
Academy, “till you join the society of Ruysdael,
Wilson, and Claude. As praise and money
will then be of no value to you, the world will
liberally bestow both.”

Later a Frenchman wished to buy it for
exhibition purposes, and when Constable wrote
to Fisher of this, his friend replied that he had
better sell it to the Frenchman “for the sake
of the éclat it may give you. The stupid
English public, which has no judgment of its
own, will begin to think there is something
in it if the French make your works national
property. You have long lain under a mistake;
men do not purchase pictures because they
admire them, but because others covet them.”

Finally, the “Hay Wain” was sold to the
French dealer for £250, and Constable threw
in a picture of Yarmouth for good measure.
Later a friend declared that he had created a

good deal of argument about landscape painting,
and that there had come to be two divisions,
for he had practically founded a new school.
He received a gold medal for the “Hay Wain,”
and the French nation tried to buy it. In
the Louvre are “The Cottage,” “Weymouth
Bay,” and “The Glebe Farm.” Elsewhere are
“Hampstead Heath,” “Salisbury Cathedral,”
“The Lock on the Stour,” “Dedham Mill,”
“The Valley Farm,” “Gillingham Mill,” “The
Cornfield,” “Boat-Building,” “Flatford Mill
on the River Stour,” besides many others.

IX

JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY

A little boy with a squirrel was the
first picture that pointed this artist
toward fame and that was painted in England
and exhibited at the Society of Arts.

This American-born Irishman had no family
or ancestry of account, but he himself was
to become the father of Lord Chancellor
Lyndhurst, and he did some truly fine things
in art.

About the same time America had another
painter, Benjamin West, marked out for fame,
but he got his start in Europe while Copley
had already become a successful artist before
he left Boston, his native place.

He liked best to paint “interiors”–rooms
with fine furniture and curtains, women in
fine clothing and men in embroidered waistcoats
and bejewelled buckles.

In 1777 he got into the Royal Academy,
and on the whole had considerable influence on
European art. If we study the portraits
that he painted while in Boston, we can
get a very complete idea of the surroundings

of the “Royalists” at the time of our
colonial history.

In this picture there are seven figures with
an open landscape forming the background.
The baby of the family plays, with uplifted
arms, upon grandfather’s knee. The mother
on the couch, surrounded by her three other
children, is kissing one while another clings
to her. Before her stands a prim little
maid, gowned in the fashion of grown-folks
of her day. A little lock of hair falling upon
her forehead suggests that when she was
good she was very, very good, and when she
was bad she was horrid! She wears a little
cap. At the back is the artist himself in a wig
and other fashions of the time. A great column
rises behind him, forming a part of the
architecture or the landscape, one hardly
knows which in so artificially constructed a
picture.

Copley painted also John Hancock, Judge
Graham, Jeremiah Lee, and General Joseph
Warren.

X

JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT

About three hundred years before Corot’s
time there was a Fontainebleau school
of artists, made up of the pathetic Andrea del
Sarto, the wonderful Leonardo da Vinci, and
Cellini. These painters had been summoned
from their Italian homes by Francis I., to
decorate the Palace of Fontainebleau. The
second great group of painters who had studios
in the forest and beside the stream were
Rousseau, Dupré, Diaz, and Daubigny; Troyon,
Van Marcke, Jacque; then Millet, the painter
of peasants.

Corot was born in Paris and received what
education the ordinary school at Rouen could
give him. He was intended by his parents
for something besides art, as it would seem
that every artist in the world was intended.
Corot was to grow up and become a respectable
draper; at any rate a draper.

The young chap did as his father wished,
until he was twenty-six years old, and dreary
years those must have been to him. He did

not get on well with his master, nor did the
world treat him very well. He found neither
riches nor the fame that was his due till he was
an old man of seventy. At that age he had
become as rich a man as he might have been
had he remained a sensible draper.

Best of all, Corot loved to paint clouds and
dewy nights, pale moons and early day, and of
all amusements in the world, he preferred the
theatre. There he would sit; gay or sad as the
play might make him, weeping or laughing
and as interested as a little child.

After he had anything to give away, Corot
was the most madly generous of men. It was
he who gave a pension to the widow of his
brother artist, Millet, on which she lived all
the rest of her days. He gave money to his
brother painters and to all who went to him
for aid; and he always gave gaily, freely, as if
giving were the greatest joy, outside of the
theatre, a man could have. Everyone who
knew him loved him, and there was no note
of sadness in his daily life, though there seems
to be one in his poetical pictures. Because of
his generous ways he was known as “Pere
Corot.” He sang as he worked, and loved his
fellowmen all the time; but most of all, he
loved his sister.

“Rousseau is an eagle,” he used to say in
speaking of his fellow artist. “As for me, I
am only a lark, putting forth some little songs
in my gray clouds.”

It has been noted that most great landscape
painters have been city-bred, a remarkable fact.
Constable and Gainsborough were born and
bred in the country, but they are exceptions
to the rule. Corot’s parents were Parisians
of the purest dye, having been court-dressmakers
to Napoleon I.; and when Corot finally determined
to leave the draper’s shop and become a painter,
his father said: “You shall have a yearly
allowance of 1,200 francs, and if you can live on
that, you can do as you please.” When his son was
made a member of the Legion of Honour, after
twenty-three years of earnest work, his father
thought the matter over, and presently doubled
the allowance, “for Camille seems to have some
talent after all,” he remarked as an excuse for
his generosity.

It is told that when he first went to study
in Italy, Corot longed to transfer the moving
scenes before him to canvas; but people moved
too quickly for him, so he methodically set
about learning how to do with a few strokes
what he would otherwise have laboured over.
So he reduced his sketching to such a science
that he became able to sketch a ballet in full
movement; and it is remarked that this practice
trained him for presenting the tremulousness
of leaves of trees, which he did so exquisitely.

One learns something of this painter of early
dawn and soft evening from a letter he wrote
to his friend Dupré:

One gets up at three in the morning, before the sun;
one goes and sits at the foot of a tree; one watches and
waits. One sees nothing much at first. Nature resembles
a whitish canvas on which are sketched scarcely the
profiles of some masses; everything is perfumed, and
shines in the fresh breath of dawn. Bing! the sun grows
bright but has not yet torn aside the veil behind which lie
concealed the meadows, the dale, and hills of the horizon.
The vapours of night still creep, like silvery flakes over
the numbed-green vegetation. Bing! bing!–a first ray
of sunlight–a second ray of sunlight–the little flowers
seem to wake up joyously. They all have their drop of
dew which trembles–the chilly leaves are stirred with the
breath of morning–in the foliage the birds sing unseen–all
the flowers seem to be saying their prayers. Loves
on butterfly wings frolic over the meadows and make the
tall plants wave–one sees nothing–yet everything is
there–the landscape is entirely behind the veil of mist,
which mounts, mounts, sucked up by the sun; and
as it rises, reveals the river, plated with silver, the
meadow, the trees, cottages, the receding distance–one
distinguishes at last everything that one had
divined at first.

In all the world there can hardly be a more
exquisite story of daybreak than this; and so
beautiful was the mood into which Corot
fell at eventime, as he himself describes it,
that it would be a mistake to leave it out.
This is his story of the night:

Nature drowses–the fresh air, however, sighs among
the leaves–the dew decks the velvety grass with pearls.
The nymphs fly–hide themselves–and desire to be seen.
Bing! a star in the sky which pricks its image on the pool.
Charming star–whose brilliance is increased by the quivering
of the water, thou watchest me–thou smilest to me
with half-closed eye! Bing!–a second star appears in the

water, a second eye opens. Be the harbingers of welcome,
fresh and charming stars. Bing! Bing! Bing!–three,
six, twenty stars. All the stars in the sky are keeping
tryst in this happy pool. Everything darkens, the pool
alone sparkles. There is a swarm of stars–all yields to
illusion. The sun being gone to bed, the inner sun of
the soul, the sun of art awakens. Bon! there is my
picture done!

In writing those letters, Corot made literature
as well as pictures. That little word “bing!”
appears also in his paintings, as little leaves
or bits of tree-trunk, some small detail which,
high-lightened, accents the whole.

There could hardly be a more charming
painting than this which hangs in the Louvre.
It is of a half-shut-in landscape of tall trees,
their branches mingling; and all the atmospheric
effects that belong to Corot’s work can
here be seen.

On the open greensward is a group of nymphs
dancing gaily, while over all the scene is the
veil of fairy-land or of something quite mysterious.
At the back and side, satyrs can be seen
watching the nymphs. There is here less of
the blur of leaves than that seen in later
pictures, but the same soft effect is found,
and the little “bings” are the accents of light
placed upon a leaf, a nymph’s shoulder, or a
tree-trunk.

This picture was painted in 1851, when

Corot had not yet developed that style which
was to mark all his later work.

Besides this picture he painted “Paysage,”
“The Bathers” “Ville d’Arvay,” “Willows near
Arras,” “The Bent Tree,” “A Gust of Wind,”
and others.

XI

CORREGGIO (ANTONIO ALLEGRI)

When Correggio was a little boy, he
lived in the odour of spices, which
were kept upon his father’s shop-shelves. He
was a highly-spiced little boy and man, although
the most timid and shrinking. His imagination
was the liveliest possible.

The spice merchant lived in the town of
Correggio, and thus the artist got his name.
Correggio knew what should be inside the
lovely flesh of his painted figures before he
began to paint them, because he studied
anatomy in a truly scientific manner before he
studied painting. Probably no other artist
up to that time, had ever begun with the bare
bones of his models, but Correggio may be said
to have worked from the inside out. He learned
about the structure of the human frame from
Dr. Giovanni Battista Lombardi, and showed his
gratitude to his teacher by painting a picture
“Il Medico del Correggio” (Correggio’s Physician),
and presenting it to Doctor Lombardi.

Now Correggio’s childhood, or at least his

early manhood, could not have been spent in
poverty, because it is known that he used
the most expensive colours to paint with,
painted upon the finest of canvas, while greater
artists had often to be content with boards.
He also painted upon copper plates, and it is
said that he hired Begarelli, a sculptor of much
fame, to make models in relief for him to copy
for the pictures he painted on the cupolas of
the churches in Parma. That sculptor’s services
must have been expensive.

On the lovely island of Capri, in the Franciscan
convent, will be found one of his first
pictures, painted when Correggio was about
nineteen years old.

He was highly original in many ways.
Although he had never seen the work of any
great artist, he painted the most extraordinary
fore-shortened pictures; and fore-shortening
was a technicality in art then uncommon.
He also was the first to paint church cupolas.
Fore-shortening produces some peculiar as well
as great results, and being a feature of art
with which people were not then familiar,
Correggio’s work did not go uncriticised.
Indeed one artist, gazing up into one of the
cupolas where Correggio’s fore-shortened
figures were placed, remarked that to him it
appeared a “hash of frogs.”

But when Titian saw that cupola, he said:
“Reverse the cupola, fill it with gold, and even
then that will not be its money’s worth.”

Correggio did not receive very large sums for
his work, and since he was married and took
good care of his family, he must have had
some source of income besides his brush.
He received some interesting rewards for his
paintings. For example, for “St. Jerome,”
called “Il Giorno,” he was given “400 gold
imperials, some cartloads of faggots and
measures of wheat, and a fat pig.” That
picture is in the Parma Gallery, and all the
cupolas which he painted are in Parma churches.

Some of his pictures are signed; “Leito,”
a synonym for his name, “Allegri.” This
indicates his style of art.

There is an interesting story told of how
Correggio stood entranced before a picture of
Raphael’s, and after long study of it he exclaimed:
“I too, am a painter!” showing at
once his appreciation of Raphael’s greatness
and satisfaction at his own genius.

Doubtless a good share of Correggio’s comfortable
living came from the lady he married,
since she was considered a rich woman for
those times and in that locality. Her name
was Girolama Merlini, and she lived in Mantua,
the place where the Montagues and Capulets
lived of whom Shakespeare wrote the most
wonderful love story ever imagined. This
young woman was only sixteen years old when
Correggio met and loved her, and very beautiful
and later on he painted a picture, “Zingarella,”
for which his wife is said to have been the

model. It seems to have been a stroke of
economy and enterprise for painters to marry,
since we read of so many who made fame and
fortune through the beauty of their wives.

They were very happy together, Correggio
and his wife, and they had four children.
Their happiness was not for long, because
Correggio seems to have been but thirty-four
years old when she died, nor did he live to be
old. There is a most curious tale of his death
which is probably not true, but it is worth
telling since many have believed it. He is
supposed to have died in Correggio, of pleurisy,
but the story is that he had made a picture
for one who had some grudge against him, and
who in order to irritate him paid him in copper,
fifty scudi. This was a considerable burden,
and in order to save expense and time, it is
said that Correggio undertook to carry it home
alone. It was a very hot day, and he became
so overheated and exhausted with his heavy
load that he took ill and died, and he may be
said literally to have been killed by “too much
money,” if this were true. Vasari, a biographer
to be generally believed, says it is a fact.

Correggio said that he always had his
“thoughts at the end of his pencil,” and there
are those who impudently declare that is the
only place he did have them, but that is a
carping criticism, because he was a very great
artist, his greatest power being the presentation
of soft blendings of light and shade. There

seem to have been few unusual events in
Correggio’s life; very little that helps us to
judge the man, but there is a general opinion
that he was a kind and devoted father and
husband, as well as a good citizen. With
little demand upon his moral character, he did
his work, did it well, and his work alone gave
him place and fame.

He became the head of a school of painting
and had many imitators, but we hear little of
his pupils, except that one of them was his own
son, Pompino, who lived to be very old, and
in his turn was successful as an artist.

Correggio was buried with honours in the
Arrivabene Chapel, in the Franciscan church
at Correggio.

This painting is not characteristic of Correggio’s
work, but nevertheless it is very
beautiful. The brilliant warm light which
comes from the Infant Jesus in His mother’s
arms is reflected upon the faces of those
gathered about, and even illuminates the
angelic group hovering above him. The slight
landscape forming the background is also
suggestive, and the conditions of the birth
are indicated by the ass which may be seen
in the middle distance. The faces of all are
joyous yet full of wonderment, the whole scene
intimate and human.

The picture is also called the “Adoration of
the Shepherds,” and that title best tells the
story. See the shepherdess shading her face
with one hand and offering two turtle-doves
with the other. The ass in the distance is the
one on which Mary rode to Bethlehem, and
Joseph is caring for it. Even the cold light
of the dawning day is softened by the beauty
of the group below. This picture is in the
Royal Gallery in Dresden.

The Infant Jesus sits upon His mother’s
lap, and places the ring upon St. Catherine’s
finger, while Mary’s hand helps to guide that
of her Child. This action brings the three
hands close together and adds to the beauty
of the composition. All of the faces are full of
pleasure and kindliness, while that of St.
Sebastian fairly glows with happy emotion.
The light is concentrated upon the body of the
Child and is reflected upon the faces of the
women. This painting hangs in the Louvre.

Other great Correggio pictures are the
“School of Cupid,” which is more characteristic
of his work; “Antiope,” “Leda,” “Danae,”
and “Ecce Homo.”

XII

PAUL GUSTAVE DORÉ

This artist died in Paris twenty-five years
ago, but there is little as yet to be told
of his life history. He was educated in Paris
at the Lycée Charlemagne, having gone there
from Strasburg, where he was born.

He was a painter of fantastic and grotesque
subjects, and as far as we know, he began his
career when a boy. He made sketches before
his eighth year which attracted much attention,
and he earned considerable money while still
at school. He was at that time engaged to
illustrate for journals, at a good round sum,
and before he left the Lycée he had made
hundreds of drawings, somewhat after the
satirical fashion of Hogarth.

His work is very characteristic and once seen
is likely to be always recognised.

He first worked for the Journal Pour Rire,
but then he undertook to illustrate the work
of Rabelais, the great satirist, whose text just
suited Doré’s pencil. After Rabelais he illustrated
Balzac, also the “Wandering Jew,” “Don
Quixote,” and Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

He undertook to do things which he could

not do well, simply for the money there was in
the commissions. He had but a poor idea of
colour and his work was coarse, but it had
such marked peculiarities that it became
famous. He did a little sculpture as well,
and even that showed his eccentricities of
thought.

This is one of the illustrations of the Doré
Bible, published in 1865-66. The story is well
known of how Moses went up into the Mount
of the Lord to receive the laws for the Israelites,
which were written upon tables of stone.
Upon his descent from the Mount he found
that his followers had set up a golden calf,
which they were worshipping; and in his wrath
Moses broke the tablets on which the Law
was inscribed. The power shown in his attitude,
the affrighted faces of the cowering Jews,
the thunder and lightning as an expression of
the wrath of the Almighty are all painted in
Doré’s best manner.

XIII

ALBRECHT DÜRER

Albrecht Dürer by nationality was a
Hungarian, but he was born in the city
of Nuremberg. His father had come from
the little Hungarian town of Eytas to Nuremberg
that he might practise the craft of
a goldsmith. Notwithstanding his Hungarian
origin, the name is German and the family
“bearing,” or sign, is the open door. This
device suggests that the name was first formed
from “Thurer,” which means “carpenter,”
maker of doors.

The father became the goldworker for a
master goldsmith of Nuremberg named Hieronymus
Holper, and very soon the new
employee had fallen in love with his master’s
daughter. The daughter was very young and
very beautiful; her name was Barbara, and as
Herr Dürer was quite forty years of age, while
she was but fifteen, the match seemed most
unlikely, but they married and had eighteen
children! The great painter was one of them.

Albrecht loved his parents most tenderly,

and from first to last we hear no word of
disagreement among any members of that
immense household. Young Albrecht was
especially the companion of his father, being
brilliant, generous, and hard-working in a
family where everyone needed to do his best
to help along. This love and companionship
never ceased until death, and after his parents
died Albrecht wrote in a touching manner of
their death, describing his love for them,
and their many virtues. He was an author
and a poet as well as a painter, and only
Leonardo da Vinci matched him for greatness
and versatility. We may know what
Dürer’s father looked like, since the son made
two portraits of him; one is to be seen in the
Uffizi Gallery at Florence and the other belongs
to the Duke of Northumberland’s collection.
The latter portrait has been reproduced in an
engraving, so that it is familiar to most people.

In the days when the great artist was growing
up, Nuremberg was the centre of all intellectuality
and art in the North. The city of Augsburg
also followed art fashions, but it was far
less important than Nuremberg, because in the
latter city every sort of art-craft was followed
in sincerity and with great originality.

In those days, the craft of the goldsmith
was closely allied with the profession of the
painter, because the smith had to create his
own designs, and that called for much talent.
Thus it was but a step from designing in

precious metals to the use of colour, and to
engraving. In making wood engravings, however,
the drudgery of it was left almost entirely
to workmen, not artists. Nuremberg was also
the seat of musical learning. Wagner makes
this fact pathetic, comical, and altogether
charming in his “Mastersingers of Nuremberg.”

Till Dürer’s time, however, there had been
little painting that could be regarded as art,
and when he came to study it there was but
little opportunity in his own land, but Dürer
was destined to bring art to Nuremberg. If
he went elsewhere to study, it was only for a
little time, because he was above all things
patriotic and dearly loved his home.

With seventeen brothers and sisters, young
Dürer’s problem was a serious one. His
father not only meant him to become a goldsmith
like himself–a craft in which there
was much money to be made at a time when
people dressed with great ornamentation and
used gold to decorate with–it was highly
necessary with so large a family that he should
learn to do that which could make him helpful
to his father. Hence the young boy entered
his father’s shop. If he had not been handicapped
with so many to help to maintain,
he would have laid up a considerable fortune,
because from the very beginning he was master
of all that he undertook; doing the least thing
better than any other did it, putting conscience
and painstaking into all.

“My father took special delight in me,”
the son said, “seeing that I was industrious
in working and learning, he put me to school;
and when I had learned to read and write, he
took me home from my school and taught
me the goldsmith’s trade.”

The family were good and kind; excellent
neighbours, deeply religious, and little Albrecht
certainly was comely. He was beautiful as a
little child, and as a man was very handsome,
with long light hair sweeping his shoulders,
and gentle eyes. He was very tall, stately,
and full of dignity.

In his father’s shop he made little clay figures
which were afterward moulded in metal; also
he learned to carve wood and ivory, and he
added the touch of originality to all that he
did. He was the Leonardo da Vinci of Germany,
an intellectual man, a poet, painter, sculptor,
engraver, and engineer. He approached everything
that he did from an intellectual point
of view, looking for the reasons of things.

After a while in his father’s shop, he found
mere craftsmanship irksome, and he begged
to be allowed to enter a studio. This was a
great disappointment to the father, even a
distress, because he could see no very quick
nor large returns in money for an artist, and
he sorely needed the help of his son; but being
kind and reasonable, he consented Albrecht
was apprenticed to the only artist of any
repute then in Nuremberg, Wolgemuth.

To his studio Albrecht went, at the age of
fifteen, and if he did not learn much more of
painting, under that artist’s direction, than
his own genius had already taught him, he
learned the drudgery of his work; how to grind
colours and to mix them, and he studied wood
engraving also.

In Wolgemuth’s studio he remained for
the three years of his apprenticeship, and then
he fled to better things. For a time he followed
the methods of another German artist, Schongauer,
but finally he went forth to try his luck
alone. He wandered from place to place,
practising all his trades, goldsmithing, engraving,
whatever would support him, yet
always and everywhere painting.

It is thought that he may have gone as far
as Italy, but it is not certain whether he went
there in his first wanderings or later on.
However, he was soon recalled home, for his
father had found a suitable wife for him. She
was the daughter of a rich citizen and her
name was Agnes Frey. She was pretty as well
as rich, but had she been neither Albrecht would
have returned at his father’s bidding. There was
never any resistance to the fine and proper things
of life on Albrecht Dürer’s part. He was the
well balanced, reasonable man from youth up.

There have been extraordinary tales told of
the artist’s wife. She has been called hateful
and spiteful as Xantippe, the wife of Socrates,
but we think this is calumny. The stories

came about in this way: Dürer had a life-long
friend, Wilibald Pirkheimer, who in his old
age became the most malicious and quarrelsome
of old fellows. He lived longer than
Dürer did, and Dürer’s wife also outlived her
husband. Pirkheimer wanted a set of antlers
which had belonged to Dürer and which he
thought the wife should give him after Dürer
was dead, but Agnes thought otherwise and
would not give them up. Then, full of rage,
the old man wrote the most outrageous letters
about poor Agnes, saying that she was a shrew
and had compelled Dürer to work himself to
death; that she was a miser and had led the
artist an awful dance through life. This is the
only evidence against her, and that so sane and
sensible a man as the artist lived with her all
his life and cherished her, is evidence enough
that Pirkheimer didn’t tell the truth. When
Dürer died he was in good circumstances and
instead of being overworked, he for many
years had done no “pot-boiling,” but had
followed investigations along lines that pleased
him. After his death, the widow treated his
brothers and sisters generously, giving them
properties of Dürer’s and being of much help
to them. During the artist’s life he and she
had travelled everywhere together and had
appeared to love each other tenderly; hence
we may conclude that the old Pirkheimer
was simply a disgruntled, gouty old man
without a good word for anybody.

If Dürer’s father and mother had eighteen
children, Albrecht and Agnes struck a balance,
for they had none. Whether or not Dürer
went to Italy before his marriage in 1494,
certain it is that he was in Venice, the home of
Titian, in 1506. Titian was six years younger
than Dürer, who was then about thirty-five
years old. It is said that he started for Italy
in 1505 and that he went the whole of the way,
over the Alps, through forests and streams,
on horseback. Who knows but it was during
that very journey, while travelling alone,
often finding himself in lonely ways, and full
of the speculative thoughts that were characteristic
of him, that he did not think first of
his subject, “Knight, Death, and the Devil,”
which helped make his fame. In that picture
we have a knight, helmeted, carrying his lance,
mounted upon his horse, riding in a lonely
forest, with death upon a “pale horse” by
his side, holding an hour glass to remind the
knight of the fleeting of time. Behind comes
the devil, with trident and horn, represented
as a frightful and disgusting beast, which
follows hot-foot after the lonely knight, who
looks neither to right nor left, but persistently
goes his way.

Titian’s teacher, Bellini, was still living,
and he was one of Dürer’s greatest admirers.
Especially did he believe that he could paint
the finest hair of any artist in the world. One
day, while studying Dürer’s work, and being

especially fascinated by the hair of one of
his figures, the old man took Dürer’s brush
and tried to reproduce as beautiful a
tress. Presently he put down the brush
in despair, but the younger artist took it up,
still wet with the same colours, and in a
few brilliant strokes produced a lovely lock
of woman’s hair.

While luxuriating in Venetian heat, Dürer
wrote home to his friend Pirkheimer: “Oh,
how I shall freeze after this sunshine!” He
was a lover of warm, beautiful colour, gay
and tender life. Most of all he loved the
fatherland, and all the honours paid him and
all the invitations pressed upon him could
not keep him long from Nuremberg. The
journey homeward was not uneventful because
he was taken ill, and had to stop at a house
on his way, where he was cared for till he was
strong enough to proceed. Before he went
his way he painted upon the wall of that house
a fine picture, to show his gratitude for the
kind treatment he had received. Imagine a
people so settled in their homes that it
would be worth while for an artist who
came along to leave a picture upon the walls
to-day–we should have moved to a new
house or a new flat almost before Dürer
could have washed his brushes and turned
the corner.

Back in Nuremberg, he settled down into
the life of a responsible citizen, lived in a fine

new house, in time became a member of the
council, and his studio was a veritable workshop.
Studios were quite different from those
of to-day. Then the pupils turned to and
ground colours, did much of their own manufacturing,
engaged at first in such commonplace
occupations, which were nevertheless teaching
them the foundation of their art, while they
watched the work of the master. Such a
studio as Dürer’s must have been full of young
men coming and going, not all working at the
art of painting, but engraving, preparing
materials for such work, designing, and executing
many other details of art work.

After this time Dürer made his smallest
picture, which is hardly more than an inch in
diameter. On that tiny surface he painted
the whole story of the crucifixion, and it is now
in the Dresden Gallery. To those of us who
see little mentality in the faces of the Italian
subjects, the German art of Dürer, often ugly
in the choice of models, and so exact as to
bring out unpleasing details, is nevertheless
the greater; because in all cases, the faces have
sincere expressions. They exhibit human purposes
and emotions which we can understand, and despise
or love as the case may be.

They say that his Madonna is generally a
“much-dressed round-faced German mother,
holding a merry little German boy.” That
may be true; but at any rate, she is every inch

a mother and he a well-beloved little boy,
which is considerably more than can be said of
some Italian performances.

Dürer made a painting of “Praying Hands,”
a queer subject for a picture, but those hands
are nothing but praying hands. The story of
them is touching. It is said that for several
years Dürer had won a prize for which a friend
of his had also competed, and upon losing the
prize the last time he tried for it, the friend
raised his hands and prayed for the power to
accept his failure with resignation and humility.
Dürer, looking at him, was impressed with the
eloquence of the gesture; thus the “Praying
Hands” was conceived.

Dürer was also called the Father of Picture
Books, because he designed so many woodcuts
that he first made possible the illustration of
stories.

He printed his own illustrations in his own
house, and was well paid for it. The Emperor
Maximillian visited Nuremberg, and wishing
to honour Dürer, commanded him to make a
triumphal arch.

“It was not to be fashioned in stone like
the arches given to the victorious Roman
Emperors; but instead it was to be composed
of engravings. Dürer made for this purpose
ninety-two separate blocks of woodcuts. On
these were represented Maximillian’s genealogical
tree and the principal events of his life.
All these were arranged in the form of an

arch, 9 feet wide and 10-1/2 feet high. It took
Dürer three years to do this work, and he was
never well paid,” so says one who has compiled
many incidents of his life.

“While the artist worked, the Emperor
often visited his studio; and as Dürer’s pet
cats often visited it at the same time,
the expression arose, ‘a cat may look at a
King!'”

On the occasion of one of these kingly visits,
Maximillian tried to do a little art-work on his
own account. Taking a piece of charcoal he
tried to sketch, but the charcoal kept breaking
and he asked Dürer why it did so.

“That is my sceptre; your Majesty has other
and greater work to do,” was the tactful reply.
It is a question with us to-day whether the
King ever did a greater work than Albrecht
Dürer, king of painters, was doing.

After this, Maximillian gave Dürer a pension,
but when the Emperor died the artist found it
necessary to apply to the monarch who came
after him, in order to have the gift confirmed.
This was the occasion for his journey to the
Low Countries, and he took his wife Agnes with
him. In the Netherlands he was received
with much honour and was invited to become
court painter; and what was more, his pension
was fixed upon him for life. The great work
of his life was his illustration of the Apocalypse.
For this he made sixteen extraordinary woodcuts,
of great size.

On his journey to see Charles V., Maximillian’s
successor, Dürer kept a diary in which he
noted the minutest details of all that happened
to him. He told of the coronation of Charles;
of hearing about a whale that had been cast
upon the shore; of his disappointment that it
had been removed before he had reached the
place. He wrote with great indignation about
the supposed kidnapping of Martin Luther,
while he was on his way home from the Diet
of Worms.

While Dürer was in the Low Countries, a
fever came upon him, and when he returned
home, it still followed him. Indeed, although
he lived for seven years after his return, he was
never well again. Among his effects there was
a sketch made to indicate to his physician the
seat of his illness.

Dürer did not paint great frescoes upon walls
as did Raphael, Michael Angelo, and all great
Italian artists; but instead he painted on wood,
canvas, and in oils.

In all the civilised world Dürer was honoured
equally with the great Italian painters of his
time. He was a man of much conscientiousness,
dignity, and tenderness. He was devoted
to his home and country, and regarded the
problems of life intellectually. When he came
to die, his end was so unexpected that those
dearest to him could not reach his bedside.
He was buried in St. John’s cemetery in
Nuremberg. After his death, Martin Luther

wrote as follows to their mutual friend, Eoban
Hesse:

“As for Dürer; assuredly affection bids us mourn for
one who was the best of men, yet you may well hold him
happy that he has made so good an end, and that Christ
has taken him from the midst of this time of troubles, and
from yet greater troubles in store, lest he, that deserved
to behold nothing but the best, should be compelled to
behold the worst. Therefore may he rest in peace with
his fathers, Amen.”

Our description of this painting calls attention
to the fact that the columns and arches of
the picturesque ruin belong to a much later
period in history than the birth of Christ.
Dürer was not acquainted with any earlier
style of architecture than the Romanesque and
therefore he used it here. “The ruin serves as
a stable. A roof of board is built out in front
of the side-room which shelters the ox and ass,
and under this lean-to lies the new born babe
surrounded by angels who express their
childish joy. Mary kneels and contemplates
her child with glad emotion. Joseph, also
deeply moved, kneels down on the other side of
the child, outside the shelter of the roof. Some
shepherds to whom the angel, who is still seen
hovering in the air, has announced the tidings,
are already entering from without the walls.”
(Knackfuss). The picture is the central panel
of an altar-piece now in the Old Pinakothek at

Munich. Dürer’s oil painting of the four
apostles–John, Peter, Mark, and Paul–is in
the same gallery. Other Dürer pictures are:
“The Knight, Death and the Devil,” “The
Adoration of the Magi,” “Melancholy,” and
portraits of himself.

XIV

MARIANO FORTUNY

Fortuny won his own opportunities.
He took a prize, while still very young,
which made it possible for him to go to Rome
where he wished to study art. He did not
spend his time studying and copying the old
masters as did most artists who went there, but,
instead, he studied the life of the Roman streets.

He had already been at the Academy of
Barcelona, but he did not follow his first
master; instead, he struck out a line of art for
himself. After a year in Rome the artist
went to war; but he did not go to fight men,
he was still fighting fate, and his weapon
was his sketch book. He went with General
Prim, and he filled his book with warlike
scenes and the brilliant skies of Morocco.
From that time his work was inspired by
his Moorish experiences.

After going to war without becoming a
soldier, Fortuny returned to Paris and there
he became fast friends with Meissonier, so that
a good deal of his work was influenced by
that artist’s genius. After a time Fortuny’s

paintings came into great vogue and far-off
Americans began buying them, as well as
Europeans. There was a certain rich dry-goods
merchant in the United States who had
made a large fortune for those days, and while
he knew nothing about art, he wanted to spend
his money for fine things. So he employed
people who did understand the matter to buy
for him many pictures whose excellence he,
himself, could not understand, but which were
to become a fine possession for succeeding
generations. This was about 1860, and this
man, A.T. Stewart, bought two of Fortuny’s
pictures at high prices. “The Serpent Charmer,”
and “A Fantasy of Morocco.”

When Fortuny was thirty years old he
married the daughter of a Spaniard called
Madrazo, director of the Royal Museum.
His wife’s family had several well known
artists in it, and the marriage was a very
happy one. Because of this, Fortuny was
inspired to paint one of the greatest of his
pictures, “The Spanish Marriage.” In it are
to be seen the portraits of his wife and his
friend Regnault. After a time he went to
live in Granada; but he could never forget the
beautiful, barbaric scenes in Morocco, and so
he returned there. Afterward he went with
his wife to live in Rome, and there they had a
fine home and everything exquisite about them,
while fortune and favour showered upon them;
but he fell ill with Roman fever, because of

working in the open air, and he died while he
was comparatively a young man.

Fortuny is said to “split the light into a
thousand particles, till his pictures sparkle
like jewels and are as brilliant as a kaleidoscope….
He set the fashion for a class
of pictures, filled with silks and satins, bric-à-brac
and elegant trifling.”

Look at the brilliant scene in this picture!
The priest rising from his chair and leaning
over the table is watching the bridegroom
sign his name. This chap is an old fop, bedecked
in lilac satin, while the bride is a dainty
young woman, without much interest in her
husband, for she is fingering her beautiful
fan and gossiping with one of her girl friends.
She wears orange-blossoms in her black hair
and is in full bridal array. One couple, two
men, sit on an elegantly carved seat and are
looking at the goings-on with amusement,
while an old gentleman sits quite apart,
disgusted with the whole unimpressive scene.
Everybody is trifling, and no one is serious for
the occasion. The furnishings of the room are
beautiful, delicate, almost frivolous. People
are strewn about like flowers, and the whole
effect is airy and inconsequent. Fortuny painted
also “The Praying Arab,” “A Fantasy of Morocco,”
“Snake Charmers,” “Camels at Rest,” etc.

XV

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH

There seems to have been no artist, with
the extraordinary exceptions of Dürer and
Leonardo, who learned his lessons while at
school. Little painters have uniformly begun
as bad spellers.

Gainsborough’s father was in the business
of woolen-crape making, while his mother
painted flowers, very nicely, and it was she
who taught the small Thomas. There were
nine little Gainsboroughs and, shocking to
relate, the artist of the family was so ready
with his pencil that when he was ten years
old he forged his father’s name to a note which
he took to the schoolmaster, and thereby
gained himself a holiday. There is no account
of any other wicked use to which he put his
talent. It is said that he could copy any
writing that he saw, and his ready pencil
covered all his copy-books with sketches of
his schoolmasters. It was thought better
for him finally to follow his own ideas of
education, namely, to roam the woodlands
and make beautiful pictures.

His father’s heart was not softened till one
day little Gainsborough brought home a sketch
of the orchard into which the head of a man
had thrust itself, painted with great ability.
This man was a poacher, and father Gainsborough
recognised him by the portrait. There
seemed to be utility in art of this kind, and
before long the boy found himself apprenticed
to a silversmith.

Through the silversmith the artist got
admission to an art school and began his
studies; but his master was a dissolute fellow,
and before long the pupil left him.

Gainsborough was born in the town of
Sudbury on the River Stour, the same which
inspired another great painter half a century
later. Gainsborough is best known by his
portraits, in particular as the inventor of “the
Gainsborough hat,” but he was first of all a
truly great landscape painter, and learned
his art as Constable did after him, along the
beautiful shores of the river that flowed past
his native town.

The old Black Horse Inn is still to be seen,
and it was in the orchard behind it that he
studied nature, the same in which he made
the first of his famous portraits, that of the
poacher. It is known to this day as the
portrait of “Tom Pear-tree.” That picture
was copied on a piece of wood cut into the
shape of a man, and it is in the possession of
Mr. Jackson, who lent it for the exhibition of

Gainsborough’s work held at the Grosvenor
Gallery, in 1885.

While Thomas was with his first master,
by no means a good companion for a lad of
fifteen, he lived a busy, self-respecting life,
since he was devoted to his home and to his
parents. Only three years after he set out
to learn his art he married a young lady of
Sudbury. The pair were by no means rich,
Gainsborough having only eighteen years of
experience in this world, besides his brush,
and a maker of woolen-crape shrouds for a
father–who was not over pleased to have
an artist for a son. The lady had two hundred
pounds but this did not promise a very luxurious
living, so they took a house for six pounds a
year, at Ipswich. Thus the two young lovers
began their life together. There was a good
deal of romance in the story of his wife, whose
name was supposed to be Margaret Burr.
The two hundred pounds that helped to pay
the Ipswich rent did not come from the man
accepted as her father, but from her real
father, who was either the Duke of Bedford, or
an exiled prince. This would seem to be just
the sort of story that should surround a great
painter and his affairs.

While he lived at Ipswich Gainsborough
used to say of himself that he was “chiefly
in the face-way” meaning that for the most
part he made portraits. He loved best to
paint the scenes of his boyhood, as Constable

afterward did, but he soon found there was
more money in portraits, and so he decided
to go to live in Bath, the fashionable resort of
English people in that day, where he was
likely to find rich folk who wanted to see
themselves on canvas. He settled down there
with his wife, whom he loved dearly, and his
two daughters and at once began to make
money. It is said he painted five hours a day
and all the rest of the time studied music. As
the theatre was Corot’s greatest happiness, so
did music most delight Gainsborough, and he
could play well on nearly every known instrument;
he became so excellent a musician that
he even gave concerts. He had the most
delightful people about him, people who loved
art and who appreciated him, and then there
were the other people who paid for having
themselves painted. Altogether it was an
ideal situation.

His studio was in the place known as the
“Circus” at Bath, and people came and went
all day, for it became the fashionable resort
for all the fine folks.

From five guineas for half length portraits,
he soon raised his price to forty; he had charged
eight for full length portraits, but now they
went for one hundred. He painted some
famous men of the time. The very thought
is inspiring of such a company of geniuses
with Gainsborough in the centre of the group.
He painted Laurence Sterne, who wrote “The

Sentimental Journey,” and a few other delightful
things; also Garrick, the renowned actor.

Even the encyclopædia reads thrillingly upon
this subject and one can afford to quote it, with
the feeling that the quotation will be read:
“His house harboured Italian, German, French
and English musicians. He haunted the green
room of Palmer’s Theatre, and painted gratuitously
the portraits of many of the actors. He
gave away his sketches and landscapes to any
one who had taste or assurance enough to ask
for them.” This sounds royal and exciting.

After that Gainsborough went up to London
with plenty of money and plenty of confidence
and instead of six pounds a year for his house,
he paid three hundred pounds, which suggests
much more comfort.

There were two other great painters of the time
in London, Sir Benjamin West–an American,
by the way–and Sir Joshua Reynolds. West
was court favourite, but Gainsborough too was
called upon to paint royalty, and share West’s
honours. Reynolds was the favourite of the
town, but he too had to divide honours with
Gainsborough when the latter painted Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke and Sir
William Blackstone.

Notwithstanding, his landscapes, for which
he should have been most famous, did not sell.
Everybody approved of them, but it is said they
were returned to him till they “stood ranged in
long lines from his hall to his painting room”

Gainsborough was a member of the Royal
Academy and also a true Bohemian. He cared
little for elegant society, but made his friends
among men of genius of all sorts. He was very
handsome and impulsive, tall and fair, and
generous in his ways; but he had much sorrow
on account of one of his daughters, Mary, who
married Fischer, a hautboy player, against her
father’s wishes. The girl became demented–at
least she had spells of madness.

When Mary Gainsborough married, her father
wrote the following letter to his sister, which
shows that he was a man of tender feeling for
those whom he truly loved:

” … I had not the least suspicion of
the attachment being so long and deeply seated;
and as it was too late for me to alter anything
without being the cause of total unhappiness on
both sides, my consent … I needs must
give … and accordingly they were married
last Monday and settled for the present in a
ready-furnished little house in Curzon Street,
Mayfair … I can’t say I have any reason to
doubt the man’s honesty or goodness of heart, as
I never heard anyone speak anything amiss of
him, and as to his oddities and temper, she must
learn to like them as she likes his person …
Peggy has been very unhappy about it, but I endeavour
to comfort her.” Peggy was his wife.

The abominable Fischer died twenty-years
before Mary did–she lived to be an old, old
woman.

Among those whom Gainsborough loved best
was the man called Wiltshire who carried his
pictures to and from London. He was a public
“carrier” but would never take any money
for his services to the artist, because he loved his
work. All he asked was “a little picture”–and
he got so many of these, given in purest
affection, that he might have gone out of business
as a carrier, had he chosen to sell them. Four
of those little pictures are now very great ones
worth thousands of pounds and known everywhere
to fame. They are “The Parish Clerk,” “Portrait
of Quin,” “A Landscape with Cattle,” and
“The Harvest Waggon.”

We have a good many stories of Gainsborough’s
bad manners. The artists of his day tried to
treat him with every consideration, but in return
he treated them very badly, especially Sir Joshua
Reynolds. Reynolds, who was then President of
the Academy greatly admired Gainsborough but
the latter would not return Sir Joshua’s call, and
when Reynolds asked him to paint his portrait
for him, Gainsborough undertook it thanklessly.
Sir Joshua left town for Bath for a time, and
when he returned he tried to learn how soon the
portrait would be finished, but Gainsborough
would not even reply to his inquiry. There
seems to have been no reason for this behaviour
unless it was jealousy, but it made a most uncomfortable
situation between fellow artists.

Gainsborough has told some not very pleasing
stories about himself, but one of them

shows us what a knack he had for seeing the
comic side of things, and perhaps for seeing
comedy where it never existed. Upon one
occasion he was invited to a friend’s house
where the family were in the habit of assembling
for prayers, and he had no sooner got
inside, than he began to fear he should laugh,
when prayer time came, at the chaplain. In a
rush of shyness he fled, leaving his host to look
for him, till he stumbled over a servant who
said that Mr. Gainsborough had charged him
to say he had gone to breakfast at Salisbury.
Even respect for the customs of others could
not make him control himself.

It was through his intimacy with King
George’s family that his quarrel with the
Royal Academy came about. He had painted
the three princesses–the Princess Royal,
Princesses Augusta and Elizabeth, and these
were to be hung at a certain height in Carlton
House, but when he sent the first to the
Academy he asked it to be specially hung and
his request was refused. Then he sent a note
as follows:

“He begs pardon for giving them so much trouble, but
he has painted the picture of the princesses in so tender a
light that, notwithstanding he approves very much of
the established line for strong effects, he cannot possibly
consent to have it placed higher than eight feet and a half,
because the likeness and the work of the picture will not
be seen any higher, therefore at a word he will not trouble
the gentlemen against their inclination, but will beg the
best of his pictures back again.”

Immediately, the Academy returned his
pictures, although it would seem that they
might better have accommodated Gainsborough
than have lost such a fine exhibition. He
never again would send anything to them.

He was inclined to be irritated by inartistic
points in his sitters, and is said to have muttered
when he was painting the portrait of Mrs.
Siddons, the great actress: “Damn your nose
madam; there is no end to it.” The nose
in question must have been an “eyesore”
to more than Gainsborough, for a famous
critic is said to have declared that “Mrs.
Siddons, with all her beauty was a kind of
female Johnson … her nose was not
too long for nothing.”

Notwithstanding that his landscapes were
not popular, he used to go off into the country
to indulge his taste for painting them, and
once he wrote to a friend that he meant to
mount “all the Lakes at the next Exhibition
in the great style, and you know, if people
don’t like them, it’s only jumping into one
of the deepest of them from off a wooded island
and my reputation will be fixed forever.”
An old lady, whose guest he was, down in the
country, told how he was “gay, very gay, and
good looking, creating a great sensation, in a rich
suit of drab with laced ruffles and cocked hat.”

One of the boys he saw in the country he
delighted to paint, and he also grew so much
attached to him that he took him to London

and kept him with him as his own son. That
boy’s name was Jack Hill and he did not care
for city life, nor maybe for Gainsborough’s
eccentricities, so he ran away. He was found
again and again, till one day he got away for
good, and never came back.

All his later life Gainsborough was happy.
His daughter, who had married Fischer, the
hautboy-player, came back home to live, and
her disorder was not bad enough to prevent
her being a cause of great happiness to her
father. The other daughter never married.
Gainsborough says that he spent a thousand
pounds a year, but he also gave to everybody
who asked of him, and to many who asked
nothing, so that he must have made a great
deal of money during his lifetime, by his art.
It is said that the “Boy at the Stile” was
bestowed on Colonel Hamilton for his fine
playing of a solo on the violin. A lady who
had done the artist some trifling service
received twenty drawings as a reward, which
she pasted on the walls of her rooms without
the slightest idea of their value.

Gainsborough got up early in the morning,
but did not work more than five hours. He
liked his friends, his music, and his wife, and
spent much time with them. He was witty,
and while he sketched pictures in the evening,
with his wife and daughters at his side, he kept
them laughing with his droll sayings.

The last days of Gainsborough showed him

to be a hero. He died of cancer, and some
time before he knew what his disease was he
must have suffered a great deal. There is a
story that is very pathetic of a dinner with his
friends, Beaumont and Sheridan. Usually,
he was the gayest of the gay, but of late all his
friends had noticed that gaiety came to him
with effort. Upon the night of this dinner,
Sheridan had been his wittiest, and had tried
his hardest to make Gainsborough cheer up,
till finally, the artist, finding it impossible to
get out of his sad mood, asked Sheridan if
he would leave the table and speak with him
alone. The two friends went out together.
“Now don’t laugh, but listen,” Gainsborough
said; “I shall soon die. I know it; I feel it.
I have less time to live than my looks infer,
but I do not fear death. What oppresses my
mind is this: I have many acquaintances,
few friends; and as I wish to have one worthy
man to accompany me to the grave, I am
desirous of bespeaking you. Will you come?
Aye or no!” At that Sheridan, who was greatly
shocked, tried to cheer him, but Gainsborough
would not return to the table, till he got the
promise, which of course Sheridan made.

It was not very long after this that a famous
trial took place–that of Warren Hastings. It
was in Westminster Hall, and Gainsborough
went to listen several times. On the last
occasion, he became so interested in what was
happening that he did not notice a window

open at his back. After a little he said to a
friend that he “felt something inexpressibly
cold” touch his neck. On his return home he
told of the strange feeling to his wife. Then
he sent for a doctor, and there was found a
little swelling. The doctor said it was not
serious and that when the weather grew
warmer it would disappear; but all the while
Gainsborough felt certain that it would mean
his death. A short time after that he told his
sister that he knew himself to have a cancer,
and that was true.

When he felt that he must die, he fell to
thinking of many things in the past, and
wished to right certain mistakes of his behaviour
as far as possible.

He sent to Sir Joshua Reynolds and asked
him to come and see him, since he could not
go to see Sir Joshua. Reynolds went and then
Gainsborough told him of his regret that he
had shown so much ill-will and jealousy toward
so great and worthy a rival. Reynolds was
very generous and tried to make Gainsborough
understand that all was forgiven and forgotten.
He left his brother artist much relieved and
happier, and he afterward said: “The impression
on my mind was that his regret at
losing life was principally the regret of leaving
his art.” As Reynolds left the dying man’s
room, Gainsborough called after him: “We
are all going to heaven–and Van Dyck is of
the company.”

He was buried in Kew Churchyard and the
ceremonies were followed by Reynolds and
five of the Royal Academicians, who forgot
all Gainsborough’s eccentricities of conduct
toward them in their honest grief over his
death. He was one of the first three dozen
original members of the Royal Academy.

This picture is now in the collection of Lord
Rothschild, London. Mrs. Sheridan was the
loveliest lady of her time. She was the daughter
of Thomas Linley, and a singer.

She came from a home which was called “a
nest of nightingales,” because all in it were
musicians. The father had a large family and
made up his mind to become the best musician
of his time in his locality in order to support them.
He was successful, and in turn most of his children
became musicians. His lovely daughter,
Eliza (Mrs. Sheridan), he bound to himself as an
apprentice and taught her till she was twenty-one,
insisting that she “serve out her time” to him,
that she might become a perfect singer. The
story of this beautiful lady seems to belong to
the story of Gainsborough’s portrait and shall
be told here.

When she was a very little girl, no more than
eight years old, she was so beautiful that as she
stood at the door of the pump room in Bath to sell

tickets for her father’s concerts, everyone bought
them from her. When she was a very young
woman her father engaged her to marry a Mr.
Long, sixty years old. She did not seem to mind
what arrangements her father made for her,
but continued to sing and attend to her business,
till after the wedding gowns were all made and
everything ready for the marriage, when she
happened to meet the brilliant Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, whose plays were so fashionable, and
she fell deeply in love with him. She told Mr.
Long she would not marry him, and without
much objection he gave her up, but her father
was very angry and he threatened to sue Mr. Long
for letting his daughter go. Then the beautiful
lady ran away to Calais and married Mr. Sheridan
without her father’s permission; but she came
home again and said nothing of what she had
done, kept on singing and helping her father
earn money for his family. One day, Mr.
Sheridan was wounded in a duel which he had
fought with one of his wife’s admirers, and when
she heard the news she screamed, “my husband,
my husband,” so that everybody knew she was
married to the fascinating playwright. Sheridan
for some reason did not at once come and get her,
nor arrange for them to have a home together.
For a good while she continued to sing; and once
hearing her in oratorio, Sheridan fell in love
with his wife all over again. He took her from
her home and would never let her sing again in
public. They remarried publicly and went to

live in London. He was not at all a rich and
famous man at that time–only a poor law-student–but
he would not let his wife make
the fortune she might easily have made, by
singing.

This must have made his beautiful wife very
sad, but she made no complaint at giving up
her music and letting him silence her lovely
voice, but turned all her attention to advancing
his fortunes. She worked for him even harder
than she had for her father, and that was saying
a great deal. When he became a great writer
of plays his wife took charge of all the accounts
of his Drury Lane Theatre, and when he was in
the House of Commons she acted as his secretary.
Sheridan died in great poverty and wretchedness,
and it is believed had his self-sacrificing wife
not died before him she would have looked after
his affairs so well that he would not have lost his
fortune. Gainsborough painted the portraits of
Sheridan’s father-in-law, and of Samuel Linley;
and it was said that this last portrait was painted
in forty-eight minutes. Among his other portraits
are: eight of George III., Sir John
Skynner, Admiral Hood, Colonel St. Leger,
and “The Blue Boy”; but he was first and last
a landscape painter of highest genius.

XVI

JEAN LEON GEROME

One cannot write much more than the date
of birth and death of a man who lived until
three or four years of the time of writing, so we may
only say that Gérôme was one of the most brilliant
of modern French painters. He was born at
Vesoul and his father was a goldsmith. Thus
he probably had no very great difficulty in getting
a start in his work. The prejudice against having
an artist in the family was dying out, and as a
prosperous goldsmith we may believe that his
father had means enough to give his son good
opportunities.

Gérôme, like Millet, studied under Delaroche,
but became no such characteristic painter as he.
While studying with Delaroche he also was taking
the course in l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

His first exhibited picture was “The Cock
Fight,” and he won a third class medal by it.

Almost always this painter has chosen his
subjects from ancient or classic life, and his
pictures are not always decent, but he painted
with much care, the details of his work are

very finely done and their vivid colour is
fascinating.

This painting may be seen in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City. The scene
is full of action and interest, but perhaps the
details of dress, mosaic decoration upon the walls,
patterns of the rugs, the coloured and jewelled
lamps and windows are the most splendidly
painted of all.

The central figure is a dancing girl, only partly
draped, balancing a sword on her head, while
a brilliant green veil flies from head and face.
Other Oriental women squat upon the floor
watching her with a half indolent expression,
while their Oriental masters and their friends
sit in pomp at one side, absorbed in the dance
and in the girl. The expressions upon all the
faces are excellent and, the jewelled light that
falls upon the group, the rich clothing, the grace
of the dancer–all make a fascinating picture
of a genre type. Other Gérômes are “Daphnis
and Chloe,” “Leda,” and “The Duel after
the Masked Ball.”

XVII

GHIRLANDAJO

It is a good deal of a name–Domenico
di Tommaso di Currado Bigordi–and
it would appear that the child who bore it
was under obligation to become a good deal
of a something before he died.

Italian and Spanish painters generally had
large names to live up to, and the one known as
Ghirlandajo did nobly.

His father was a goldsmith and a popular part
of his work was the making of golden garlands
for the hair of rich Italian ladies. His work
was so beautiful that it gained for him the name
of Ghirlandajo, meaning the garland-twiner, a
name that lived after him, in the great art of his
son. Domenico began as a worker in mosaic,
a maker of pictures or designs with many coloured
pieces of glass or stone.

Ghirlandajo’s art was no improvement on that
of his teacher, but he in turn became the teacher
of Michael Angelo.

The Florentine school of painting, to which
Ghirlandajo belonged, was not so famous for

colour as the Venetian school, but it had many
other elements to commend it. One cannot
expect Ghirlandajo to rank with Titian, Rubens,
or other “colourists” of his own and later periods,
but he did the very best work of his day and school.
He attained to fame through his choice of types
of faces for his models, and by his excellent
grouping of figures.

Until his day, the faces introduced into paintings
were likely to be unattractive, but he chose
pleasing ones, and he painted the folds of garments
beautifully. He was not entirely original
in his ideas, but he carried out those which others
had thus far failed to make interesting.

Often, in his wish to paint exactly what he
saw, he softened nothing and therefore his
figures were repulsive, but Fra Bartolommeo’s
pupil gave promise of what Michael Angelo was
to fulfill.

Ghirlandajo and Michael Angelo were a good
deal alike in their emotional natures. Both
sought great spaces in which to paint, and both
chose to paint great frescoes. Indeed Ghirlandajo
had the extraordinary ambition to put
frescoes on all the fortification walls about
Florence. It certainly would have made the
city a great picture gallery to have had its walls
forever hung with the pictures of one master.
Had he painted them, inside and out, when such
an enemy as Napoleon came along, with his love
of art, and his fashion of taking all that he saw
to Paris, he would likely enough have camped

outside the walls while he decided what part of
the gallery he would transfer to the Louvre.

One of the reasons that Ghirlandajo is famous
is that he often chose well known personages
for his models, and as he painted just what
he saw, did not idealise his subject, he gave
to the world amazing portraits, as well as fine
paintings. The same thing was done by
painters of a far different school, at another
period. The Dutch and Flemish painters
were in the habit of using their neighbours
as models.

Ghirlandajo is classed among religious
painters, but let us compare some of his
“religious” paintings with those of Raphael
or Murillo, and see the result.

He painted seven frescos on the walls of the
Santa Maria Novella in Florence, all scenes
of Biblical history, as Ghirlandajo imagined
them. They show him to have been a fine
artist, but to have had not much idea of history,
and to have had little sense of fitness.

Ghirlandajo’s seven subjects are taken from
legends of the Virgin, and the greatest represents
Mary’s visit to Elizabeth; it is called
“The Visitation,” and it is a fresco about
eighteen feet long painted on the choir wall.

Let us imagine the possible scene. The
Virgin Mary came from Cana, a little town in
Galilee placed in the hills about nine miles
from Nazareth, the home of the lowliest and
the poorest, of a kindly pastoral people living

in the open air, needing and wanting very
little, simple in their habits. Elizabeth, Mary’s
old cousin, lived in Judea, and St. Luke writes
thus: “Mary arose in those days and went
into the hill country with haste, into a city
of Judea; and entered into the house of Zacharias”
(Elizabeth’s husband) “and saluted
Elizabeth.”

This record had been made at least eleven
hundred years before Ghirlandajo painted in the
Santa Maria Novella, and from it one cannot
imagine that Mary made any preparation for
her journey, nor does it suggest that Elizabeth
had any chance to arrange a reception for her.
Even had she done so, it must have been of
the simplest description, at that time among
those people. One can imagine a lowly home;
an aged woman coming out to meet her young
relative either at her door or in the high road.

There may have been surroundings of fruit
and flowers, a stretch of highroad or a hospitable
doorway; but the wildest imagination
could not picture what Ghirlandajo did.

He paints Elizabeth flanked with handmaidens,
as if she were some royal personage,
instead of a priest’s wife in fairly comfortable
circumstances where comfort was easily
obtained. Mary appears to be escorted by
ladies-in-waiting, hardly a likely circumstance
since she was affianced to no richer or more
important person than a carpenter of Galilee.
Possibly the three ladies that stand behind

Mary in, the picture are merely lookers-on,
but in that case the visit of Mary would seem
to have been of public importance, especially
as there are youths near by who are also much
interested in one woman’s hasty visit to another.
The rich brocades worn by Elizabeth’s waiting
ladies are splendid indeed and the landscape
is fine–a rich Italian landscape with architecture
of the most up-to-date sort–showing,
in short, that the artist lacked historical
imagination. He found some models, made a
purely decorative painting with an Italian
setting and called it “The Visitation.” The
doorway on the right is distinctly renaissance.

Such a painting as this is not “religious,”
nor is it historic, nor does it suggest a subject;
it is merely a fine picture better coloured than
most of those of the Florentine school. There
is another painting of this same subject by
Ghirlandajo in the Louvre, but it is no nearer
truth than the one in the Santa Maria.

Ghirlandajo painted other than religious
subjects, and one of them, at least, is quite
repulsive. It is the picture of an old man,
with a beautiful little child embracing him.
The old man may have tenderness and love in
his face, but his heavy features, his warty
nose, do not make one think of pleasant
things and one does not care to imagine the
dear little child kissing the grotesque old fellow.

It was before Ghirlandajo’s time that another
painter had discovered the use of oil in mixing

paints. Previously colours had been mixed
in water with some gelatinous substance, such
as the white and yolk of an egg, to give the
paint a proper texture or consistency. This
preparation was called “distemper,” and frescoes
were made by using this upon plaster
while it was still wet. Plaster and colours dried
together, and the painting became a part of
the wall, not to be removed except by taking
the plaster with it.

The different gluey substances used had
often the effect of making the colours lose their
tone and they presented a glazed surface when
used upon wood, a favourite material with
artists.

There are numberless anecdotes written of this
artist and his brother, and one of these shows
he had a temper. The brothers were engaged in
a monastery at Passignano painting a picture
of the “Last Supper.” While at work upon it,
they lived in the house. The coarse fare did
not suit Ghirlandajo, and one night he could
endure it no longer. Springing from his seat in
the refectory he flung the soup all over the monk
who had served it, and taking a great loaf of
bread he beat him with it so hard that the poor
monk was carried to his cell, nearly dead. The
abbot had gone to bed, but hearing the rumpus
he thought it was nothing less than the roof
falling in, and he hurried to the room where he
found the brothers still raging over their dinner.
David shouted out to him, when the abbot tried

to reprove the artist, that his brother was worth
more than any “pig of an abbot who ever
lived!”

It is recorded in the documents found in the
Confraternity of St. Paul that:

Domenico de Ghurrado Bighordi, painter, called del
Grillandaio, died on Saturday morning, on the 11th day
of January, 1493 (o.s.), of a pestilential fever, and the
overseers allowed no one to see the dead man, and would
not have him buried by day. So he was buried, in Santa
Maria Novella, on Saturday night after sunset, and may
God forgive him! This was a very great loss for he was
highly esteemed for his many qualities, and is universally
lamented.

The artist left nine children behind him.

Ghirlandajo’s pictures may be found in the
Louvre, the Berlin Museum, the Dresden,
Munich, and London galleries. Most children
will find it hard to see their beauty.

Great men are likely to come in groups, and
with Ghirlandajo there are associated Botticelli
and Fra Filippo Lippi.

This lovely lady was the wife of one of the
painter’s patrons, Giovanni Tornabuoni, through
whom he received the commission for a series of
frescoes in the choir of the Santa Maria Novella,
Florence. The subjects chosen were sacred, but
since Ghirlandajo, no more than his neighbours,
knew what the Virgin or her contemporaries
looked like, he saw no reason why he should not

compliment some of the great ones of his own
city and his own time by painting them in to
represent the different characters of Holy Writ.
So, as one of the ladies attendant upon Elizabeth
when Mary comes to visit her, we have this
signora of the fifteenth century. The artist made
another picture of her, the one here shown, but
in the same dress and posed the same as she had
been for the church fresco. This accounts for
its dignity and simplicity. It would seem like
a bas-relief cut out of marble were it not for
its wonderful colouring. It is in the Rudolf
Kann Collection, Paris. This artist’s other
pictures are “Adoration of the Shepherds,”
“Adoration of the Magi,” “Madonna and
Child with Saints,” “Three Saints and God
the Father,” “Coronation of the Virgin,” and
“Portrait of Old Man and Boy.”

XVIII

GIOTTO (DI BORDONE)

Giotto painted upon wood, and in “distemper”–the
mixture of colour with
egg or some other jelly-like substance. We know
nothing of his childhood except that he was a
shepherd, as we learn from a story told of him and
his teacher, Cimabue.

The story runs that one day while Giotto was
watching his sheep, high up on a mountain,
Cimabue was walking abroad to study nature,
and he ran across a shepherd boy who was
drawing the figure of a sheep, with a piece of
slate upon a stone. In those days we can imagine
how rare it was to find one who could draw anything,
ever so rudely. Immediately Cimabue
saw a chance to make an artist and he asked the
little shepherd if he would like to be taught art
in his studio. Giotto was overjoyed at the
opportunity, and at once he left the mountains
for the town, the shepherd’s crook for the brush.

In those days the studio of one like Cimabue
was really a workshop. Artists had to grind
their own colours, prepare their own panels upon

which to paint, and do a hundred other things
of a workman rather than an artist kind in
connection with their painting. Such a studio
was crowded with apprentices–boys who did
these jobs while learning from the master.
Their teaching consisted in watching the artist
and now and then receiving advice from him.

It was into such a shop as this, in Florence,
that Giotto went, and soon he was to become
greater than his master. Even so, we cannot
think him great, excepting for his time, because
his pictures, compared with later art, are crude,
stiff, and strange.

No pupil was permitted to use a brush till he
had learned all the craft of colour grinding and the
like, and this was supposed to take about six
years. These workshops were likely to be dull,
gloomy places, and only a strong desire to do
such things as they saw their master doing, would
induce a boy to persevere through the first
drudgery of the work. Giotto persevered, and
not only became an original painter, at a time
when even Cimabue hardly made figures appear
human in outline, but he designed the great
Campanile in Florence, and he saw it partly
finished before he died. The Campanile is a
wonder of architecture, but Giotto’s Madonnas
had to be improved upon, as certainly as he had
improved upon those of Cimabue.

There are many amusing stories of Giotto,
mainly telling of his good nature, and his ugly
appearance, which everyone forgot in appreciation

of his truly kind heart. Once a visit was made
to his studio by the King of Naples, after the
artist had become famous. Giotto was painting
busily, though the day was very hot. The King
entered, and bade Giotto not to be disturbed but
to continue his work, adding: “Still, if I were you,
I should not paint in such hot weather.” Giotto
looked up with a laugh in his eye: “Neither would
I–if I were you, Sire!” he answered.

There is a famous saying: “As round as
Giotto’s “O,” and this is how it came about.
The pope wanted the best of the Florentine
artists to do some work in Rome for him and he
sent out to them for examples of their work.
When the pope’s messenger came to Giotto the
artist was very busy. When asked for some of
his work to show the pope, he paused, snatched
a piece of paper and with the brush he had been
using, which was full of red paint, he hurriedly
drew a circle and gave it to the messenger who
stared at him.

“But–is this all?” he asked.

“All–yes–and too much. Put it with
the others.” This perfect circle and the
account the messenger gave of his visit so delighted
the pope that Giotto was chosen from all the
Florentine artists to decorate the Roman
buildings.

Thus Giotto worked till he was fifty-seven or
eight years old when he put aside his brush
and turned to sculpture and architecture.
Meantime he had far outstripped his master in

art. The arrangement of the groups is about the
same, but the figures look human and the
draperies are more natural, while he gives the
appearance of length, breadth, and thickness
to his thrones and enclosures. We shall not
choose a Madonna for illustration, but another
of Giotto’s masterpieces, remembering that good
as he was in his time, he seems amazingly bad
compared with those who came after him.

In 1303 a certain Enrico Scrovegno had a
private chapel built in the Arena at Padua and
he sent for Giotto to come there and adorn the
whole of its walls and ceiling with frescoes.
These remain, though the chapel is now emptied
of all else, and they suffice to bring scores of art-lovers
to Padua. The picture here reproduced
represents the meeting and reconciliation between
the father and mother of the Virgin before her
birth. The peculiarly shaped eyes and eyebrows
that Giotto gives to all his characters are specially
noteworthy here as in every one of the thirty-eight
frescoes. There are three rows of pictures,
one above the other and in them are portrayed
the principal scenes in the lives of Christ and the
Virgin. The painter here reached his high-water
mark, showed the very best he could produce
in sincere, restrained art.

XIX

FRANZ HALS

Franz Hals belonged to a family which
for two hundred years had been highly
respected in Haarlem in the Netherlands. The
father of the painter left that town for political
reasons in 1579, and it was at Antwerp that
Franz was born sometime between that date
and 1585. His parents took him back to Haarlem
as an infant, and that is the town with which
his name and fame are most closely associated.

Little is known of his early life except that he
began his studies with Karel Van Mander and
Cornelis Cornelissen. What we know of his
family life is not to his credit. In the parish
register of 1611 is recorded the birth of a son to
Franz Hals and five years later he is on the public
records for abusing his wife, who died shortly
afterward. He married again within a year
and the second wife bore him many children and
survived him ten years. Five of his seven sons
became painters.

Franz Hals drank too much and mixed too
freely with the kind of disreputable people he

loved to paint, but he never became so degraded
that his hand lost its cunning, or his eye its keen
vision for that which he wished to portray. In
1644, he was made a director of the Guild of St.
Lucas, an institution for the protection of arts
and crafts in Haarlem, but from that time
onward he sank in popular esteem, deservedly.
He fell into debt, then into pauperism, and when
he died, about the age of eighty-six, he was buried
at public expense in the choir of St. Bavon
Church in Haarlem.

It was in the year 1616 that Hals first became
known as a master of his art by the painting of
the St. Jovis Shooting Company, one of the
clubs composed of volunteers banded together
for the defence of the town should occasion arise.
Such guilds were common throughout Holland,
and they became a favourite subject with Hals,
as with other painters of the time, who vied with
one another in portraiture of the different
members. These groups were hung upon the walls
of the chambers where meetings were held for
social purposes in times of peace. The men
of highest rank are always given the most
conspicuous places in the pictures. The flag
is generally the one bit of gorgeous colour in the
scene; but Franz Hals seized the opportunity to
show his wonderful skill in detail while painting
the cuffs and ruffs worn by these grandees. In
all his work there is an impression of strength
rather than of beauty; it is the charm of
expressiveness he is aiming at, rather than the charm

of grace and colour to which the Italian school
was devoted. He differed from that school, also,
in his choice of subjects, for he was distinctly
and almost entirely a portrait painter, and within
his own limited range he is unsurpassed. A
wonderful collection of his works is to be seen in
the Haarlem Town Hall.

Considering the woeful life that Franz Hals led,
it is amazing to think that he of all artists is the
best painter of good humour. He puts a smile
on the face of nearly every one of his “leading
characters,” whether it be a modest young girl,
a hideous old woman, a strolling musician, or a
riotous soldier, and in every case the laugh suits
the subject. It may have been his own easygoing
shiftlessness, his way of casting care aside
with a jest that enabled him to live so long and
to accomplish so much in spite of his poverty
and other misfortunes.

The roguish look upon the face of this baby
of the house of Ilpenstein makes it appear older
than the pleasant faced nurse. The dress of the
child is such as Hals delighted to spend his
talents upon. The picture is in the Berlin
Gallery.

Among his best known paintings are “The
Laughing Cavalier,” “The Fool,” “The Man
with the Sword,” and “Hille Bobbe. the Witch
of Haarlem.”

XX

MEYNDERT HOBBEMA

When a man becomes famous many
people claim his acquaintance, and
often many places his birthplace. In Hobbema’s
case it has never been decided whether
he was born in the little town of Koeverdam,
or in the city of Haarlem or in Amsterdam. Nor
is it quite certain when he was born; but what
he did afterward, we are all acquainted with.

No one knows much about the life of this
artist, but his master was doubtless his uncle,
van Ruisdael. Hobbema was dead a hundred
years before the world acknowledged his genius,
thus he reaped no reward for hard work and
ambition. He, like Rembrandt, died in great
poverty, and with nearly the same surroundings.
Rembrandt died forsaken in Roosegraft Street,
Amsterdam, and Hobbema died in the same
locality. We must speak chiefly about his
work, since we know little of his personality
or affairs.

If Böcklin’s pictures seem to be composed
of vertical lines, Hobbema’s are as startling
in their positive vertical and horizontal lines

combined. We are not likely to find elevations
or gentle, gradual depressions in his
landscapes, but straight horizons, long trunked,
straight limbed trees; and the landscape seems
to be punctured here and there by an upright
house or a spire. It is startlingly beautiful,
and so characteristic that after seeing one or
two of Hobbema’s pictures we are likely to
know his work again wherever we may find it.

Hobbema got at the soul of a landscape. It
was as if one painted a face that was dear to
one, and not only made it a good likeness but
also painted the person as one felt him to be–all
the tenderness, or maybe all the sternness.

It may be that Hobbema’s failure to get
money and honours, or at the very least, kind
recognition as a great artist, while he lived,
influenced his painting, and made him see
mostly the sad side of beauty, nor it is certain
that his landscapes give one a strange feeling
of sadness and desolation, even when he paints
a scene of plenty and fulness.

The French have made a phrase for his kind
of work, paysage intime–meaning the
beloved country–the one best known. It
is a fine phrase, and it was first used to describe
Rousseau’s and Corot’s work; but it especially
applies to Hobbema’s.

While this artist was not yet recognised,
his uncle van Ruisdael was known as a great
artist. The family must have been rich in
spirit that gave so much genius to the world.

Hobbema certainly loved his art above all
things, for he had no return during his lifetime,
save what was given by the joy of work. There
are those who complain that Hobbema was a
poor colourist. True, he used little besides grays
and a peculiar green, which seemed especially
to please him; but since that colouring belonged
to the subjects he chose, one cannot complain
on the ground that what he did was unsatisfying.
For lack of knowledge about him we
can think of him as a man of moods, sad,
desolate ones at that; because his work is too
extreme and uniform in its character for us
to believe his method was affected.

This perhaps is one of the most characteristic
of Hobbema’s pictures. Note a strange hopelessness
in the scene, as well as beauty. The
tall and solemn trees, the high light upon the
road, suggesting to us all sorts of joys struggling
through the cheerlessness of life. What other
artist would have chosen such a corner of
nature for a subject to paint? To quote a
fine description:

“He loved the country-side, studied it as a
lover, and has depicted it with such intimacy of
truth that the road to Middelharnis seems
as real to-day as it did over a hundred years
ago to the artist. We see the poplars, with

their lopped stems, lifting their bushy tops
against that wide, high sky which floats over
a flat country, full of billowy clouds as the sky
near the North Sea is apt to be. Deep ditches
skirt the road, which drain and collect the
water for purposes of irrigation, and later on
will join some deeper, wider canal, for purposes
of navigation. We get a glimpse on the right,
of patient perfection of gardening, where a
man is pruning his grafted fruit trees; farther
on a group of substantial farm buildings. On
the opposite side of the road stretches a long,
flat meadow, or “polder,” up to the little
village which nestles so snugly around its tall
church tower; the latter fulfilling also the
purpose of a beacon, lit by night, to guide the
wayfarer on sea and land; scene of tireless
industry, comfortable prosperity, and smiling
peace. … Pride and love of country
breathe through the whole scene. To many
of us the picture smiles less than it thrills
with sadness. Perhaps it speaks thus only
to those who find a kind of hurt in the revival
of the spring, which promises so much and
may fulfill so little.”

Hobbema’s “Watermill” is very well-known
and so are his “Wooded Landscape,” and
“Haarlem’s Little Forest.”

XXI

WILLIAM HOGARTH

William Hogarth, like Watteau, originated
his own school; in short there never
was anybody like him. He was an editorial
writer in charcoal and paint, or in other words
he had a story to tell every time he made a picture,
and there was an argument in it, a right and a
wrong, and he presented his point of view by
making pictures.

English artists in literature and in painting
have done some great reformatory work. Charles
Dickens overthrew some dreadful abuses by
writing certain novels. The one which has most
interest for children is the awful story of Dotheboys’
Hall, which exposed the ill treatment of
pupils in a certain class of English schools. What
Dickens and Charles Reade did in literature,
Hogarth undertook to do in painting. He
described social shams; painted things as they
were, thus making many people ashamed and
possibly better.

Italians had always painted saints and
Madonnas, but Hogarth pretended to despise
that sort of work, and painted only human
beings. He did not really despise Raphael,

Titian, and their brother artists, but he was so
disgusted with the use that had been made of
them and their schools of art, to the entire
exclusion of more familiar subjects, that he
turned satirist and ridiculed everything.

First of all, Hogarth was an engraver. He was
born in London on the 10th December, 1697, and
eighteen days later was baptised in the church
of St. Bartholemew the Great. His father was
a school teacher and a “literary hack,” which
means that in literature he did whatever he could
find to do, reporting, editing, and so on.

Hogarth must early have known something
of vagabond life, for his father’s life during his
own youth must have brought him into association
with all sorts of people. He knew how
madhouses were run, how kings dined, how
beggars slept in goods boxes, and many other
useful items.

Hogarth said of himself: “Shows of all sorts
gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant,
and mimicry, common to all children, was
remarkable in me…. My exercises, when
at school, were more remarkable for the ornaments
which adorned them, than for the exercises
themselves.” He became an engraver or silver-plater,
being apprenticed to Mr. Ellis Gamble,
at the sign of the “Golden Angel,” Cranbourne
Alley, Leicester Fields.

Engraving on silver plate was all well enough,
but Hogarth aspired to become an engraver on
copper, and he has said that this was about the

highest ambition he had while he was in Cranbourne
Alley.

The shop-card which he engraved for Mr.
Ellis Gamble may have been the first significant
piece of work he undertook. The card is still
among the Hogarth relics. He set up as an
engraver on his own account, though he did study
a little in Sir James Thornhill’s art school;
but whatever he learned he turned to characteristic
account.

He continued to make shop-cards, shop-bills,
and book-plates. Finally, in 1727, a maker of
tapestry engaged Hogarth to sketch him a design
end he set to work ambitiously He worked
throughout that year upon the design, but when
he took it to the man it was refused. The truth
was that the man who had commissioned the
work had heard that Hogarth was “an engraver
and no painter,” and he had so little intelligence
that he did not intend to accept his design,
however much it might have pleased him.
Hogarth sued the man for his refusal and he won
the suit. He next began to make what he called
“conversation pieces,” little paintings about a
foot high of groups of people, the figures being
all portraits. These were very fashionable for
a time and made some money for the artist.
Both he and Watteau were fond of the stage,
and both painted scenes from operas and plays.

In time he moved into lodgings at the “Golden
Head,” in Leicester Fields, and there he made his
home. He had already begun the great paintings

which were to make him famous among artists.
These were a series of pictures, telling stories
of fashionable and other life. His own story of
how he came to think of the picture series was
that he had always wished to present dramatic
stories–present them in scenes as he saw them
on the stage.

He had married the daughter of Sir James
Thornhill, and had never been thought of kindly
by his father-in-law till he made so much stir
with his first series. Then Sir James approved
of him, and Hogarth found life more pleasing.

There are very few anecdotes to tell of the
artist’s life, and the story of his pictures is much
more amusing. One of his first satires was made
into a pantomime by Theophilus Gibber, and
another person made it into an opera. Many
pamphlets and poems were written about it,
and finally china was painted with its scenes and
figures. There was as much to cry as to laugh
over in Hogarth’s pieces and that is what made
them so truly great. One of his great picture
series was called the “Rake’s Progress” and it was
a warning to all young men against leading too
gay a life. It showed the “Rake” at the beginning
of his misfortunes, gambling, and in the last
reaping the reward of his follies in a debtor’s
prison and the madhouse. There are eight
pictures in that set.

In this series, especially in the fifth picture,
there are extraordinary proofs of Hogarth’s
completeness of ideas. Upon the wall in the

room wherein the “Rake” marries an old woman
for her money, the Ten Commandments are
hung, all cracked, and the Creed also is cracked
and nearly smudged out; while the poor-box
is covered with cobwebs. The eight pictures
brought to Hogarth only seventy guineas.

One of his pictures was suggested to him
by an incident which greatly angered him.
He had started for France on some errand of
his own, and was in the very act of sketching
the old gate at Calais, when he was arrested
as a spy. Now Hogarth was a hard-headed
Englishman, and when he was hustled back
to England without being given time for
argument, he was so enraged that he made his
picture as grotesque as possible, to the lasting
chagrin of France. He painted the French
soldiers as the most absurd, thin little fellows
imaginable, and that picture has largely influenced
people’s idea of the French soldier
all over the English-speaking world.

As Hogarth grew old he grew also a little
bitter and revengeful toward his enemies,
often taking his revenge in the ordinary way
of belittling the people he disliked, in his
paintings.

Hogarth came before Reynolds or Gainsborough;
in short, was the first great English
artist, and his chief power lay in being able
instantly to catch a fleeting expression, and to
interpret it. An incident of Hogarth’s youth
illustrates this. He had got into a row in a

pot-house with one of the hangers-on, and
when someone struck the brawler over the
head with a pewter pot, there, in the midst of
excitement and rioting, Hogarth whipped out
his pencil and hastily sketched the expression
of the chap who had been hit.

Hogarth was friends with most of the
theatre managers, and one of his souvenirs
was a gold pass given him by Tyers, the
director of Vauxhall Gardens, which entitled
Hogarth and his family to entrance during
their lives. This was in return for some
“passes,” which Hogarth had engraved for
Tyer.

Upon one occasion Hogarth set off with
some companions for a trip to the Isle of
Sheppey. Incidentally Forest wrote a sketch
of their journey and Hogarth illustrated it.
That work is to be found, carefully preserved,
in the British Museum. The repeated copying
and reproduction for sale of his pictures brought
about the first effort to protect his
works of art by copyright. But it was not
till he had done the “Rake’s Progress” that
he was able to protect himself at all, and even
then not completely.

Just before his death he was staying at
Chiswick, but the day before he died he was
removed to his house in Leicester Fields.
He was buried in the Chiswick churchyard;
and in that suburb of London may still be seen
his old house and a mulberry tree where he

often sat amusing children for whom he cared
very much. Garrick wrote the following
epitaph for his tomb:

Farewell, great Painter of Mankind!
Who reached the noblest point of art,
Whose pictured Morals charm the Mind
And through the Eye correct the Heart.

If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay;
If Nature touch thee, drop a tear;
If neither move thee, turn away,
For Hogarth’s honour’d dust lies here.

The picture used in illustration here is part
of probably the very greatest art-sermon ever
painted, called “Marriage à la Mode.” The
story of it is worth telling:

“The first act is laid in the drawing-room
of the Viscount Squanderfield”–is not that
a fine name for the character? “On the left,
his lordship is seated, pointing with complacent
pride to his family tree, which has its roots
in William the Conqueror. But his rent roll
had been squandered, the gouty foot suggesting
whither some of it has gone; and to restore his
fortunes he is about to marry his heir to the
daughter of a rich alderman. The latter is
seated awkwardly at the table, holding the
marriage contract duly sealed, signed and
delivered; the price paid for it, being shown
by the pile of money on the table and the bunch

of cancelled mortgages which the lawyer is
presenting to the nobleman, who refuses
to soil his elegant fingers with them. Over
on the left is his weakling son, helping himself
at this critical turn of his affairs, to a pinch
of snuff while he gazes admiringly at his own
figure in the mirror. The lady is equally
indifferent; she has strung the ring on to her
finger and is toying with it, while she listens
to the compliments being paid to her by
Counsellor Silver-tongue. Through an open
window another lawyer is comparing his lordship’s
new house, that is in the course of building,
with the plan in his hand. A marriage so
begun could only end in misery.” This is the
first act, and the pictures that follow show all
the steps of unhappiness which the couple
take. There are five more acts to that painted
drama, which is in the National Gallery,
London.

XXII

HANS HOLBEIN, THE YOUNGER

There were three generations of painters in
the Holbein family, and the Hans of whom
we speak was of the third. His grandfather
was called “old Holbein,” and when more painters
of the same name and family came along it became
necessary to distinguish them from each other
thus: “old Holbein,” the “elder Holbein,” and
“young Holbein.” The first one was not much
of an artist; still, in a locality where at best there
was not much art he was good enough to be
remembered.

“Young Holbein” was born in Augsburg,
which is in Swabia, in southern Germany; “elder
Holbein” and his father, Michael, “old Holbein,”
had moved there from Schonenfeld, a neighbouring
village, about forty three years before little
Hans was born, the old Michael bringing his
family to the larger town where it was easier to
make a living.

The “elder Holbein” was a really good artist
and well thought of in Augsburg, and when little
Hans’s turn came he had no teacher but his

father, unless indeed we were to call him also a
pupil of his elder brother, Ambrosius. His
uncle Sigismund, too, taught him something of
art, for the whole Holbein family seem to have
been artists. Young Holbein was never regularly
apprenticed to any outsider.

Art was not then taught as it is now. The
work of a beginner was often to paint for his
master certain details which it was thought that
he might handle properly, while the master
occupied himself with what he thought to be
some more important part of the picture. It is
said that Hans often painted the draperies of his
father’s figures when his father was engaged upon
the altar pieces so fashionable at the time.
The Holbeins one and all must have been bad
managers or improvident; at any rate, Hans did
not turn out well as a man and we read that his
father was always in debt and difficulty although
he received much money for his work and was
not handicapped, like Dürer’s father, by a family
of eighteen children.

The story of the Holbeins is quite unlike that
of the Dürers, and not nearly so attractive.

Some time before Hans was twenty years of age,
the entire family had packed up and gone to live
in Lucerne, while Hans and his brother, Ambrosius,
went travelling together, as most young
Germans went at that time before they settled
down to the serious work of life. The last we
hear of Ambrosius he had joined the painters’
guild in Basel, and probably he died not long

afterward, or at any rate while he was still young.
There was in Basel a certain Hans Bar, for whose
wedding occasion Hans Holbein designed a table,
on which he pictured an allegory of “St. Nobody.”
This was very likely such work as our cartoonists
do to-day, but being the work of Holbein,
it had great artistic value. Besides that, he
painted a schoolmaster’s sign to be hung outside
the door.

As an illustrator, Holbein made the acquaintance
of several authors about that time and
started on the high road to fame. He was a man
of very little conscience or fine feeling, and there
could hardly be a greater contrast than that
between the clean sweet life of Dürer and the
brawling, unfeeling one that Hans Holbein led.

Dürer married, had no children, but tenderly
loved and cared for his wife, taking her with him
upon his journeys and making her happy.

Holbein married and beat his wife; had
several children and took care of none of them.
His wife grew to look old and worn while he
remained a gay looking sport, quite tired of one
whom he had had on his hands for ten years.
He wandered everywhere and left his family
to shift for itself. One writer in speaking of the
two men says:

“Dürer would never have deserted his wife
whom he took with him even on his journey
to the Netherlands; and he was bound by the
same tenderness to his native town. However
much he rejoiced to receive a visit from Bellini

at Venice, or when at Antwerp, the artists instituted,
a torch-light procession in his honour,
nothing could have moved him to leave Nuremberg.”
Dürer loved his home; Holbein hated his.

Holbein had a cold, light-blue eye; Dürer a
soft and tender glance. While Dürer lived he
was the mainstay of his family–father and
brothers. Holbein’s father died in misery and
his brother’s life was disastrous, Hans doing
nothing to serve them and looking on at their
sufferings indifferently.

There is a court document in existence which
tells the particulars of Hans Holbein’s arrest
for getting into a brawl with a lot of goldsmiths’
apprentices during a night of carousal. The
court warned him that he would be more severely
punished if he did not cease his lawless life and
he was made to promise not to “jostle, pinch, nor
beat his lawful spouse.” When he died he
made no provision in his will for his family.
There is a picture of his wife, Elizabeth Schmidt,
to be seen in his “Madonna” at Solothurn
Holbein used her for the model. She then was
young and blooming and the model for the child
was his own baby; at that time he found them
useful.

His life of folly can hardly be excused by
impulsiveness or emotion, for his pictures show
little of either. He was best at portrait painting.
At that time guilds and town councils
wanted the portraits of their members preserved
in some way, and it was the habit of

painters like Holbein to form picturesque groups
and give to such dramatic groupings the
features of townsmen. Rembrandt did this
much later than Holbein, when he painted
the “Night Watch,” or as it is more properly
called, “The Sortie.”

Probably Holbein’s first important work
was to make title pages for the second edition
of Martin Luther’s translation of the New
Testament. This MS. was made about the
time that Holbein’s work began to be of
interest to the public, and so the commission
was given to him.

After a time this artist went to England
with letters of introduction to Sir Thomas
More, Chancellor to King Henry VIII. Sir
Thomas treated him very kindly and set him
to work making portraits of his own family.
During the time he was living at More’s home
in Chelsea, the King himself, used frequently
to visit there, and on one occasion he saw the
brilliant portraits of the More family and
inquired about the artist. Sir Thomas offered
the King any of the pictures he liked, but
Henry VIII. asked to see the artist. When
brought before him, Holbein’s fortune seemed
to be made for the King asked him to go to
court and paint for him, remarking that “now
he had the artist he did not care about the
pictures.”

Holbein seems to have been a favourite
with Henry and many anecdotes are told of his

life at Whitehall, where he went to live. Once
while Holbein was engaged upon a portrait, a
nobleman insisted upon entering his studio,
after the artist had told him that he was painting
the portrait of a lady, by order of the King.
The nobleman insisted upon seeing it, but
Holbein seized him and threw him down the
Stairs; then he rushed to the King and told
what had happened. He had no sooner
finished than the nobleman appeared and told
his story. The King blamed the nobleman for
his rudeness.

“You have not to do with Holbein,” he said,
“but with me. I tell you, of seven peasants
I can make seven lords, but of seven lords I
cannot make one Holbein. Begone! and remember
that if you ever attempt to avenge
yourself, I shall look upon any injury offered
to the painter as done to myself.”

It was Holbein who, visiting a brother
artist and finding a picture on the easel,
painted a fly upon it. When the artist
returned he tried to brush the fly off, then
set about looking for the one who had
deceived him.

His portrait painting was so superb that he
received many commissions.

Meantime, Sir Thomas More had fallen into
disfavour with the King and was to lose his
head, but it is written that the artist’s portraits
“betray nothing of this tragedy.” He was
as ready to climb to fame by the favour of

his generous patron’s enemies as he had been
to accept the offices of Sir Thomas More. He
painted the portraits of several of the wives
of Henry VIII., and it may be said that there
was a good deal of that monarch’s temperament
to be found in Holbein himself. Take
him all in all, Hans was as detestable as a man
as he was excellent as a painter.

In his adopted home in Lucerne, Holbein
had painted frescoes, both on the inside and
the outside of a citizen’s house, and this house
stood until 1824, when it was torn down to
make way for street improvements, but several
artists hastily copied the frescoes so that they
are not entirely lost.

Before he left Germany for England, Holbein
had been commissioned to decorate the town
hall in Basel, and a certain amount of money
was voted for the work, but after he had
finished three walls, he decided that the money
was only enough to pay him for what he had
already done. The councillors agreed with
him, but as money was a little “close” in
Basel at that time, they felt unable to give
him more, and so voted to “let the back wall
alone, till further notice.”

He painted one Madonna whom he surrounded
with the entire family of Burgomaster Meyer,
including even the burgomaster’s first wife,
who was dead. This work is called the
“Meyer Madonna.”

It is said that after Holbein’s return to

Basel he, with others, was persecuted for his
“religious principles,” but if this were true,
his persecutors went to considerable pains
for nothing, because Holbein was never known
to have any sort of principles, religious or
otherwise. He was neither a Protestant, nor
a Catholic but a painter, a man without convictions
and without thought. He did not care
for family, country, friends, politics, religion,
nor for anything else, so far as any one knows.

When he was asked why he had not partaken
of the Sacrament, he answered that he wanted
to understand the matter better before he did
so. Thus he escaped punishment, and when
matters were explained to him, he did whatever
seemed safest and most convenient under
the circumstances.

On his return to England, he settled among
the colony of German and Netherland merchants,
who were in the habit of meeting at a place
called “The Steelyard,” as their home and
warehouses were grouped in that locality,
with a guild hall and a wineshop they alone
patronised.

While associated with his compatriots Holbein
made portraits of many of them, and these
are magnificent works of art. He painted them
separately or in groups; in their offices and in
their guild hall, as the case might be. The
men whom he thus painted were: Gorg Gisze,
Hans of Antwerp, Derich Berck, Geryck Tybis,
Ambrose Fallen, and many others. He designed

the arch which the guild erected upon the occasion
of Anne Boleyn’s coronation, and he painted
Henry’s next Queen, Jane Seymour.

Holbein painted many portraits of Henry VIII.
and probably all those dated after 1537 were
either copies or founded upon the portrait which
Holbein made and which was destroyed with
Whitehall.

While he painted for Henry, Holbein received
a sort of retainer’s fee of thirty pounds a year,
but he may have received sums for outside
commissions which he undertook. On one
occasion, when he took a journey to Upper
Burgundy to paint a portrait of the Duchess
whom Henry contemplated making his next wife,
the King gave him ten pounds out of his own
purse. We have no record of vast sums such as
Raphael received.

Henry did not succeed in making the Duchess
his wife, so Holbein was sent to paint another–Anne
of Cleves–that Henry might see what
he thought of her before he undertook to make
her his queen. Holbein did a disastrous deed,
for he made Anne a very acceptable looking
woman, (the portrait hangs in the Louvre)
and Henry negotiated for her on the strength of
that portrait. Later, when he saw her, he was
utterly disgusted and disappointed.

Holbein, notwithstanding this trick, was employed
to paint the next wife of Henry, and
doubtless he also made the miniature of Catherine
Howard which is in Windsor Castle.

Holbein finally died of the plague and no one
knows where he was buried. His wife died later,
and it was left for his son, Philip, who was said to
be “a good well-behaved lad,” to bring honours
to the family. He was apprenticed in Paris, and,
settling later in Augsburg, he founded a branch
of the Holbein family on which the Emperor
Matthias conferred a patent of nobility, making
them the Holbeins of Holbeinsberg.

This is one of the best of the many splendid
portraits Holbein painted. It hangs in The
Hague gallery. The gentleman was forty-eight
years old and in the portrait he wears a purplish-red
doublet of silk and a black overcoat,
which was the fashion of the day, all trimmed
with fur. He has curly hair, just turning gray.
His left hand is gloved and on it he holds his
falcon, while with the other hand he strokes its
feathers.

Of all sports at that time, falconry was the
most fashionable and every fine gentleman had
his sporting birds. Robert Cheseman lived in
Essex. He was rich and a leader in English
politics. His father was “keeper of the wardrobe
to Henry VIII.” and he himself served in many
public offices. He was one of the gentleman
chosen to welcome Anne of Cleves when she landed
on English soil to marry Henry VIII. These
details were first published by Mr. Arthur

Chamberlain and are taken from his sketch of
Holbein and his works.

Among Holbein’s other famous pictures are:
“The Ambassadors,” “Hans of Antwerp,”
“Christina of Denmark,” “Jane Seymour,”
“Anne of Cleves,” and “St. George and the
Dragon.”

XXIII

WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT

The story of the Pre-Raphaelites is all by
itself a story of art. Holman Hunt was
one of three who formed this “brotherhood”;
and he, with one other, are the only ones whom
some of us think worthy of giving a place in art.
This is to be the story of the brotherhood
rather than a story of one man.

The last great artist England had had before
this extraordinary group, was J. M. W. Turner,
truly a wonderful man, but after him England’s
painters became more and more commonplace,
drawing further and further away from truth,
There was one, J. F. Lewis, who went away to
Syria and lived a lonely and studious life, trying
to paint with fidelity sacred scenes, but he was
not great enough to do what his conscience and
desires demanded of him; and, finally, Constable
declared that the end of art in England had come.
But it had not, for up in London, in the very
heart of the city, in Cheapside (Wood Street)
there was born, in April, 1827, a child destined to
be a brilliant and wonderful man, who was
actually to rescue English art from death. Many

do not think thus, but enough of us do to warrant
the statement.

The new artist was Holman Hunt. He was
the son of a London warehouseman, with no inclination
whatever for learning, so that it
seemed simply a waste of time to send him to
school. This continually repeated history of
artists who seem to know nothing outside their
brushes and colours, is astonishing, but it is true
that artists for the most part must be regarded
as artists, pure and simple, and not as men of even
reasonably good intellectual attainments, and
more or less this accounts for their low estate
centuries ago. One does not associate “learning”
and the artist. When we have such splendid
examples as Dürer and two or three others we
discuss their intellectuality because they are so
unusual.

Holman Hunt was like most of his brother
artists in all but his art. He hated school and at
twelve years of age was taken from it. His father
wanted him to become a warehouse merchant
like himself, and he began life as clerk or apprentice
to an auctioneer. He next went into the
employment of some calico-printers of Manchester.
The designing of calicoes can hardly be called art,
even if the department of design had fallen to
Holman Hunt’s lot and we have no evidence that
it did, but he started to be an artist nevertheless,
there in the print-shop. He found in his new
place another clerk who cared for art; and this
sympathy encouraged him to fix his mind upon

painting more than ever. He used to draw such
natural flies upon the window panes that his
employer tried one day to “shoo away a whole
colony of flies that seemed miraculously to have
settled.” This gave the clerks much amusement,
and also attracted attention to Holman Hunt’s
genius.

His very small salary was spent, not on his
support, but in lessons from a portrait painter
of the city. His parents did not like this, but
they could not help themselves, and thus this
greatest of the Pre-Raphaelites began his work.

The Pre-Raphaelites were a little group of men
who believed that artists were drawing too much
on their imaginations, not painting things as
they saw them, and that the painter had
become incapable of close observation. He
worked in his studio, did not get near enough to
nature, and instead of trying to follow along this
line, this group of men, with their new and partly
correct ideas, meant to go back further than the
great masters themselves and present an elemental
art. This was a part of their scheme and partly
it was justified, but of all the men who undertook
to make a new school, Holman Hunt was the only
one who remained, and will remain forever, a representative.
He alone stuck to the original purpose
of the group and developed it into a truly great
school; so that it is he alone we need to know.

After he began to take lessons of the portrait
painter in London, he developed so quickly that
he found by painting portraits three days a week,

he could pay his own expenses, and the rest of the
time he devoted to study. He tried to be
admitted to the Academy schools twice and was
twice refused before they would receive him.

It was there in the Academy the three original
Pre-Raphaelites met for the first time; they were
Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and
Millais. After entering the school Hunt painted
and sold four excellent pictures, but they all
seem to have been lost; nobody can trace them.
He was not yet a “Pre-Raphaelite.”

All this time Hunt was half ill because he knew
that he was grieving his father of whom he was
devotedly fond, and the strain of trying to work
while he was unhappy nearly destroyed him.
The pictures that he exhibited at the Royal
Academy were so poor that the commission
declared they should not only be removed but
that Hunt ought really to be forbidden to exhibit
any more. This must have been a great blow
to the young and struggling artist, and to add to
this trouble, his father was being jeered at for
having such a good-for-nothing son. Hunt’s
pictures in the Academy were so much despised
that his father was told his son was a disgrace to
him, and we may be sure that did not help the
young fellow, who meantime was earning a living,
not by painting pictures, but by cleaning up those
of another man. Dyce, who had painted on the
walls of Trinity House, engaged him to clean and
restore those paintings, and Hunt was doing this
for his bread and butter.

At that time he became so downhearted
and discouraged that he almost decided to
leave England altogether and go to live in
Canada away from his friends who jeered, and
his family who reproached him; but just then
Millais, one of the successful painters whom
he had met in the Academy school, who could
afford to be generous, came to Hunt’s aid and
gave him the means of living while he painted
“The Hireling Shepherd.” This was destined
to be the turning point in Hunt’s luck, for
that painting was properly hung at the exhibition,
and it received recognition. After that
he painted a picture which he sold on the
installment plan–being paid by the purchaser
so much a month.

Meantime he owed his landlady a large sum,
and he says himself that he “suffered almost
unbearable pain at passing her and her husband
week after week without being able to
even talk of annulling his debts.” In time he
not only settled that bill which distressed him,
but paid back his friend Millais the money
loaned by him.

Hunt rarely took a commission, because to
do so meant that he must paint a picture
after the manner his employer wished, and
Hunt had certain ideas of art in which he
believed and therefore would not bind himself
to depart from them; but after a little success,
which enabled him to pay his bills, he did
undertake a commission from Sir Thomas

Fairbairn, and it was called “The Awakened
Conscience.” He finished this picture on a
January day late in the afternoon, and that
very night he left England, setting out upon a
longed-for journey to the Holy Land, where
he meant to study the country and people
till he believed himself able to paint a truthful
picture of sacred scenes. He refused to
paint pictures of Eastern Jews who should
look like Parisians, with Venetian backgrounds.
He meant to paint Oriental scenes
as nearly as he could, as they might have
taken place.

He came back to his English home just two
years and one month from the time he had
left it, and he brought back a picture of the
goat upon which the Jews loaded their sins and
then turned loose in waste-places to wander
and die. “The Scapegoat” was a great picture,
but before he left England he had painted a
greater–the one we see here–“The Light
of the World.”

He had depended upon the sale of the
“Scapegoat” to pay his way for a time after
his return home, and alas, it did not sell.
More than that, his beloved father died and
this added to his sense of desolation, for he had
not been sufficiently successful before his
death to justify himself in his father’s eyes.
These things so overwhelmed his sensitive
mind with trouble, that his condition became
very serious, and if certain good friends had

not stood by him loyally, he would probably
never have painted again.

He began at last another ambitious picture–“Finding
of Christ in the Temple”–but while
he was engaged upon this, he had to paint
mere pot-boilers also in order to get on at
all, and he says that half the time the great
picture “stood with its face to the wall” while
he was trying merely to earn bread and butter.
The wonderful Louis Blanc tried once to plan
a way by which all deserving people should
have in this world equal opportunity to try.
This has never been “worked out.” It never
will be, but Holman Hunt reminds us how
much the world loses by not providing that
“equal opportunity.” No one deserves more
than his chance; but such struggles of genius
tell us that all is not fair.

Hunt persevered with this Christ in the
Temple and when finished he sold it for 5,500
guineas–a larger sum than he had ever
before been given for a painting.

He no sooner received his money for this
great picture than off he went once more to
the Holy Land. He was conscientious in
everything he did, and never before had an
artist painted scenes of Christ that carried
such a sense of truth with them. The set
haloes seen about the heads of the saints and of
holy people even in Raphael’s pictures and
in those of the very greatest artists of his
time, disappeared with Holman Hunt’s

coming. In the “Light of the World,” the
halo is an accident–the great white moon,
happening to rise behind the Christ’s head–and
there we have the halo, simple, natural,
only suggestive, not artificial. Then, too, in
the “Shadow of Death,” there is a menacing
shadow of the cross–made upon the wall by
Christ’s body, as he naturally stretches out
his arms, after his work in the carpenter shop.

There is not one false note that shocks us,
or makes us feel that after all the story itself
is affected and artificial. Everything that
is symbolical is brought about naturally.
They are sincere, truthful pictures that speak
to the mind as well as to the eye.

Hunt’s colouring and many other technical
matters are often far from perfect, but there
is something besides technicality to be considered
in judging a picture.

For a time, while the three men, Hunt,
Rossetti, and Millais, kept together, their pictures
were signed P. R. B., as a sign of their league;
but this did not last very long, and afterward
Hunt signed his pictures independently.

After the “Brotherhood” had worked against
the greatest discouragements for a long time,
and felt nearly hopeless of success, John Ruskin,
one of the greatest of critics and most fearless
of men, who was so much respected that his
words had great influence, suddenly published
a defence of these Pre-Raphaelites. He declared
that they were the greatest artists of the time,

and while scorning their critics he applauded
those three young men, till he turned the tide,
and everybody began to know what truly
brilliant work they were doing. Ruskin’s words
came, Hunt said, “as thunder out of a clear
sky.”

When the “Brotherhood” was formed the
three young men thought they should have a
paper–a periodical of some sort, in which they
might tell of their purposes and express their
ideas; and so Rossetti, who wrote as well as
painted, proposed that they print such a periodical
once a month, and call it the Germ; and the
P. R. B’s. were to be joint proprietors. Rossetti
had first thought of a different title, Thoughts
Toward Nature, and his brother, W. M. Rossetti,
who was going to take charge of the monthly,
thought that expressed the Pre-Raphaelites’
idea; but it was finally agreed to call it the
Germ. Only two numbers could be published
by the Pre-Raphaelites, because nobody bought
it and the young men’s money gave out, but
the printers came to the rescue, and put up the
money to issue two or three more Germs.

Although that journal failed utterly, its four
numbers were worth publishing, and are to-day
worth reading. They were truly valuable, for
they contained a story and poem by Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, besides work of the other
P. R. B’s.

Above all things Hunt was conscientious in
his work, trying with all his might to represent

things as be believed them to be. When he
made his “Scapegoat,” he went to the shores of
the Dead Sea to paint, accompanied only by Arab
guides, and there he found the desolate, hard
landscape for his picture. The hardships he
experienced were very many. The wretched
goat he took with him died in the desert of that
dreary place after it had been no more than
sketched in, but back in Jerusalem Hunt finished
the goat. Ruskin’s description of the picture
helps one to feel all the desolation of the
subject: “The salt sand of the wilderness of
Ziph, where the weary goat is dying. The
neighbourhood is stagnant and pestiferous,
polluted by the decaying vegetables brought
down by the Jordan in its floods, and the bones
of the beasts of burden that have died by the way
of the sea, lie like wrecks upon its edge, bared
by the vultures and bleached by the salt ooze.”

Even the superstitious Arabs would not go
near the spot which Hunt chose as the scene
of his picture, but Hunt endured all things,
believing it due to his art.

When he painted “Christ in the Temple,” he
needed Jewish models, and it was almost impossible
for him to get them. He could not let
them know what they were to represent, or
they would not have sat for him at all but he
succeeded in painting the “first Semitic presentment
of the Semitic Scriptures.” In Jerusalem
the Jews heard that he had come “to traffic with
the souls of the faithful,” and they forbade him

to have any Jews come into his studio; so that
he could not finish the picture there. Back
in London he had to find his models in the
Jewish school. He left the figures of Christ
and the Virgin till the last and then painted
them “from a lady of the ancient race, distinguished
alike for her amiability and beauty,
and a lad in one of the Jewish schools, to which
the husband of the lady furnished a friendly
introduction.”

Thus, step by step, through the greatest
difficulties, Holman Hunt established a new
school of painting–allegory with a modern
treatment which all could understand.

This is the most popular picture of a sacred
subject, ever painted; and John Ruskin’s
description of it, here quoted, is the best ever
written or that can be written. “On the left
of the picture is seen the door of the human
soul. It is fast barred, its bars and nails are
rusty; it is knitted and bound to its stanchions
by creeping tendrils of ivy, showing that it
has never been opened. A bat hovers over
it; its threshold is overgrown with brambles,
nettles and fruitless corn…. Christ approaches
in the night time, … he wears
the white robe, representing the power of the
Spirit upon Him; the jewelled robe and breastplate,
representing the sacredotal investitude;

the rayed crown of gold, interwoven with the
crown of thorns; not dead thorns, but now
bearing soft leaves, for the healing of the
nations…. The lantern carried in Christ’s
left hand is the light of conscience….
Its fire is red and fierce; it falls only on the
closed door, on the weeds that encumber
it, and on an apple shaken from one of the
trees of the orchard, thus marking that the
entire awakening of the conscience is not to
one’s own guilt alone, but to the guilt of the
world, or, ‘hereditary guilt.’…

“This light is suspended by a chain, wrapt
around the wrist of the figure, showing that
the light which reveals sin to the sinner appears
also to chain the hand of Christ. The light
which proceeds from the head of the figure–is
that of the hope of salvation; it springs
from the crown of thorns, and, though itself
sad, subdued and full of softness, is yet so
powerful, that it entirely melts into the glow
of it the forms of the leaves and boughs which
it crosses, showing that every earthly object
must be hidden by this light, where its sphere
extends.”

If you will study every detail of this reproduction,
finding all the objects–the apple, the
rusty bolts–noting how the full risen moon
has formed a natural nimbus for the sacred
head, and then re-read what Ruskin has
said, you will discover the rarest truths in
Holman Hunt’s picture.

The several pictures which he painted, but
which cannot now be found are: “Hark!”
which was first exhibited in the Royal Academy;
“Scene from Woodstock,” “The Eve of St.
Agnes,” “Jerusalem by Moonlight,” “The
King of Hearts,” “Moonlight at Salerno,”
“Interior of the Mosque of Omar,” “The
Pathless Water,” “Winter,” “Afternoon,”
“Sussex Downs,” “Penzance,” “The Archipelago,”
“Will-o’-the-Wisp,” “Ivybridge,”
“The Foal of an Ass,” “Road over the Downs,”
“The Haunt of the Gazelle,” “‘Oh, Pearl,’
Quoth I,” “Miss Flamborough,” “The School-girl’s
Hymn.” Portraits: Mr. Martineau;
Mr. J. B. Brice. Small sketch of the “Scapegoat,”
“Sunset on the Sea,” “Morning Prayer,”
“Bianca,” “Past and Present,” and “Dead
Mallard.”

Should you ever find one of these pictures
bearing the initials P. R. B. or those of Holman
Hunt, you will have made an interesting
discovery and should make it known to others.

XXIV

GEORGE INNESS

George Inness was destined to keep a
grocery store as his father had kept
one before him, and had grown rich in it.
When George was a young man he was
given a grocery store in Newark, New Jersey,
a very small store indeed, and it is not surprising
that the young man preferred art to
butter and eggs. The Inness family had
just moved from Newburg, probably the elder
Innes seeking in Newark a good location for
his son’s beginning.

The first art-work Inness did was engraving;
as he had been apprenticed to that business,
but afterward he studied with Gignoux, a
pupil of Delaroche.

At that time there was what is known as
the Hudson River School. Its ideas were
set and formal, and not very inspiring, aside
from the subjects treated. Church was then
a young man like Inness, and he was studying
in the Hudson River School, but the young
grocer struck out a line for himself.

He was forty years old before he got to Paris,

but once there, he turned to the men at Barbizon–Rousseau,
Millet, Corot, and the rest–for
inspiration, and began to do beautiful things
indeed. Rousseau became his friend, and the
art of Inness grew large and rich through such
influences.

Inness had inherited much religious feeling
from his Scotch ancestors, and all his work
was conscientious, very carefully done.

When Inness returned from Paris he was
not yet well known. He went to Montclair,
New Jersey, to live and it was there that he
did his best work. Finally, after he was fifty
years old, he became known as a truly splendid
painter. He loved best to paint quiet scenes
of morning, evening sunset, and the like. His
pictures began to gain value, and one that he
had sold for three hundred dollars jumped in
price to ten thousand and more. His work
is not equally good, because his moods greatly
influenced him.

This picture in the George A. Hearn collection
is full of the sense of restfulness that the
works of this artist always convey. The trees
are as motionless as the distant hills, and if
the oxen are moving at all it is but slowly.

Some other Inness paintings are the “Georgia
Pines,” “Sunset on the Passaic,” “The Wood
Gatherers” and “After a Summer Shower.”

XXV

SIR EDWIN HENRY LANDSEER

It is pleasant to speak of one artist whose
good work began in the companionship
of his father; the case of Edwin Landseer is
most unusual.

His father was a skilful engraver who loved
art, and encouraged the cultivation of it in his
son, as other fathers of painters encouraged
them to become priests or haberdashers or
bakers, as the case might be. Little Landseer’s
beginning has been described by his
father as he and a friend stood looking upon
one of the scenes of his childhood:

“These two fields were Edwin’s first studio.
Many a time have I lifted him over this very
stile. I then lived in Foley Street, and nearly
all the way between Marylebone and Hampstead
was open fields. It was a favourite walk
with my boys; and one day when I had
accompanied them, Edwin stopped by this
stile to admire some sheep and cows which
were quietly grazing. At his request I lifted
him over, and finding a scrap of paper and a
pencil in my pocket, I made him sketch the

cow. He was very young indeed, then–not
more than six or seven years old.

“After this we came on several occasions,
and as he grew older this was one of his favourite
spots for sketching. He would start off alone,
or with John (Thomas?) or Charles, and remain
till I fetched him in the afternoon. I would
then criticise his work, and make him correct
defects before we left the spot. Sometimes
he would sketch in one field, sometimes in the
other, but generally in the one beyond the old
oak we see there, as it was more pleasant and
sunny.”

All the Landseer men were gifted, and the
mother was the beautiful woman whom Reynolds
painted as a gleaner, carrying a bundle
of wheat upon her head.

There were seven little Landseers, the oldest
of them being Thomas, the famous engraver,
whose reproduction of his brother’s works
will preserve them to us always, even after
the originals are gone. The first of Edwin’s
drawings which seemed to his family worthy
of publishing was a great St. Bernard dog,
such a wonderful performance for a little
fellow of thirteen that Thomas engraved it and
distributed it all over England. Little Edwin
had seen this beautiful dog one day in the
streets of London in a servant’s charge, and he
was so delighted with its beauty, that he
followed the two home and asked the dog’s
owner if he might sketch him. The St.

Bernard was six feet four inches long “and
at the middle of his back, stood two feet seven
inches in height.” A great critic said that
this drawing was one of the very finest that
any master of art had ever made, though it was
done by a little child of thirteen years and it is
also said that Landseer himself never did
anything better than that little-boy work.
A live dog who was let into the room with it–as
critic, maybe–proved to be the most
flattering of such, because he bristled instantly
for a fight.

While the boy was still thirteen–which
seems to have been a magic and not a tragic
number to him–he exhibited pictures in the
Royal Academy. These were a mule, and a
dog with a puppy. In the stories of “Famous
Artists” we are told that he was a fine, manly
little chap with light curly hair and very well
behaved. When he became a student of the
Academy the keeper, Fuseli, used to look about
among the students and cry: “Where is my
little dog boy?” if Landseer was not in his
place. The little chap’s favourite dog was his
own Brutus, which he painted lying at full
length; and though the picture was small, it
sold for seventy guineas. This means an
earning capacity indeed, for a small boy.

When he was but seven years old he had
made pictures of lions and tigers, each with
a different expression from the other and each
with a character of its own. Critics spoke

specially of the tiger’s whiskers as “admirable
in the rendering of foreshortened curves.”
Tigers’ whiskers were thought to be most
difficult things to make, but in Landseer’s
pictures, they were as “natural as life.” The
great success of the artist’s animal pictures
was that he made them seem to have human
intelligence, and it was also said that if one
only saw the dog’s collar, as Landseer painted
it, he would know it to be the work of a great
artist, that a great dog-picture must be attached
to it.

At least one of his pictures had a remarkable
history. He had been commissioned by the
Hon. H. Pierrpont to paint a “white horse in
a stable.” After the painting was ready for
delivery it disappeared, and for twenty-four
years it could not be found. At last it was
discovered in a hay-loft! It had been stolen
by a servant and hidden there. In spite of
the long years that had passed, Landseer sent
it at once to the man for whom it had been
made, with the message that he had not
retouched it nor changed it in the least,
“because,” said he, “I thought it better not
to mingle the style of my youth with that of
my old age.”

One of Landseer’s early advisers had told
him he must dissect animals to get the proper
effects in painting them, as it was necessary
for him to understand their construction.
So, one time, when a famous old lion died in the

Exeter Exchange menagerie Landseer got its
body and dissected it, and immediately afterward
he painted three great lion pictures:
“The Lion Disturbed at His Repast,” “A Lion
Enjoying His Repast,” and “A Prowling Lion.”

Sir Walter Scott became so enchanted with
Landseer’s pictures that the great novelist
came to London to take the young artist to his
home at Abbotsford. “His dogs are the most
magnificent things I ever saw,” said Scott,
“leaping and bounding and grinning all over
the canvas.”

Landseer lived in the centre of London
till he was more than thirty years old, and then,
looking for more quiet and space he bought a
very small house and garden at No. 1, St. John’s
Wood. There was not much room in the house
but it had a stable attached which made a fine
studio, and there Landseer lived with a sister
of his, for nearly fifty years. When he first
wished to rent the house, the landlord asked
him a hundred pounds premium which Landseer
felt that he could not pay and he was
about to give it up, when a friend declared
that if the matter of money was all that
prevented him, he was to rent it immediately,
and he could repay him as he chose. Landseer
then took the house, his friend paying down the
premium, and Landseer returned the money
twenty-pounds at a time, till all the debt was
paid.

Landseer made this a famous and hospitable

house, and it is said that more great people
gathered under his roof than had ever gathered
about any other artist with the exception of
Sir Joshua Reynolds. That was the house in
which Landseer’s loving old father spent his
last days and finally died. A story is told of
the witty D’Orsay, who would call out at the
door, when he went to visit the artist: “Landseer,
keep de dogs off me, I want to come in
and some of dem will bite me–and dat fellow
in de corner is growling furiously.”

On one of his several visits to Abbotsford,
where he went many times after his first invitation,
to enjoy Scott’s delightful hospitality,
he painted a famous dog of Sir Walter’s called
Maida, which died six weeks afterward.

There are several such stories about dogs
who died rather tragically and were also
painted by Landseer. The two King Charles
spaniels which he painted both died soon
after sitting to the great painter. They had
been pets of Mr. Vernon, who commissioned
the painting, and the white Blenheim spaniel
fell from a table and was killed, while the King
Charles fell through the railings of a staircase
and was picked up dead. The great bloodhound,
Countess, belonging to Mr. Bell who
gave her picture to the Academy, was watching
for her master’s return one dark night and when
she heard the wheels of his carriage, then his
voice, she leaped from the balcony, but missed
her footing and fell nearly dead at Mr. Bell’s

feet. That gentleman loved the dog so much
that he was distracted, and taking her into his
gig, knowing that she must die, he raced in to
London again that same night, and rousing
Sir Edwin, begged him to paint the dog before
it was too late. Then and there was the sketch
of the dying animal made.

Sir Edwin Landseer was the most versatile
and entertaining of artists. He was a wit, and
could also perform all sorts of sleight of hand
tricks, besides being so quick with his pencil
that his doings seemed miraculous. One
evening, during a conversation with many
friends, someone declared that in point of
time Sir Edwin could do a record-sketch.
One young woman spoke up and said: “There
is one thing that even he cannot do–he cannot
make two different pictures at the same time.”

“Think not?” cried Sir Edwin. “Let us
see!” Gaily taking two pencils, he rapidly
drew a stag’s head with one hand and a horse’s
head with the other.

Landseer became the guest of royalty, a
favourite of Queen Victoria, whose dog Dash
was one of the many famous dogs painted by
him. Dash was the favourite spaniel of the
Duchess of Kent, Victoria’s mother; and the
Queen’s biographer says that she too loved
him very much. On Coronation Day she had
been away from him longer than usual, and
when the great state coach rolled up to the
palace steps she could hear Dash barking for

her in the hall. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “there’s
Dash,” and throwing aside the ball and sceptre
which she carried, she hurried to change her
fine robes, in order to wash the dog. This is
a very homelike and picturesque story, but
it is possibly not true. Doubtless the little
Queen heard the dog bark–and was glad to
see him.

At Windsor Landseer painted another royal
dog, Islay, the pet terrier of Victoria; also
Dandie Dinmont, belonging to the Princess
Alice; then Eos, who was Prince Albert’s–King
Edward’s–dog. All the last years
of Sir Edwin Landseer’ life, the royal family
were his devoted and comforting friends. The
painter suffered much and during his visits
to Balmoral he wrote to his sister how the
Queen used to go several times a day to his
room, to look after his comfort and to inquire
about his condition. He wrote:

“The Queen kindly commands me to get
well here. She has to-day been twice to my
room to show additions recently added to her
already rich collection of photographs. Why,
I know not, but since I have been in the High
lands I have for the first time felt wretchedly
weak, without appetite. The easterly winds,
and now again the unceasing cold rain, may
possibly account for my condition, but I can’t
get out. Drawing tires me; however, I have
done a little better to-day. The doctor residing
in the castle has taken me in hand, and gives

me leave to dine to-day with the Queen and
the rest of the royal family…. Flogging
would be mild compared with my sufferings.
No sleep, fearful cramp at night, accompanied
by a feeling of faintness and distressful
feebleness.”

When he was well, he was gay and cheerful;
and Dickens, Thackeray, and many other noted
men were his friends. We are told that above
all things. Sir Edwin was a great mimic and
that one night at dinner he threw everybody
into fits of laughter by imitating his friend the
sculptor Sir Francis Chantry. It was at the
sculptor’s table, where a large party was
assembled. Chantry called Sir Edwin’s attention,
when the cloth was removed, to the
reflection of light in the highly polished table.

“Come here and sit in my place,” said
Chantry, “and see the perspective you can
get.” Then he went and stood by the fire,
while Landseer sat in his place. Seated then
in Chantry’s chair, Landseer called out in
perfect imitation of his host: “Come, young
man, you think yourself ornamental; now
make yourself useful, and ring the bell.”
Chantry did so, and when the butler came in
he was confused and amazed to hear his
master’s voice from where Landseer sat in
Chantry’s place at the table. The voice of
his master from the head of the table ordered
claret, while his master really stood before
the fire with his hands under his coat-tails.

We are told that Landseer stood his pictures
on their heads, or upon one corner or looked
at them from between his legs, any way, every
way, to get a complete view of them from all
quarters. He went to bed very late and got
up very late, but in the mornings, while lying
in bed he mostly thought out the subjects of
his pictures.

He was not much of a sportsman, preferring
to paint animals rather than to kill them,
and one day when hunting, he saw a fine stag
before him. Instead of firing at it, he thrust
his gun into a gillie’s hands, crying: “Hold
that! hold that!” and whipping out his pencil
and pad he began to sketch the stag. Whereupon
the gillies were disgusted that he should
miss so fine a shot, and they said something
to each other in Gaelic, which Sir Edwin must
have understood, for he became very angry.

“It was a pity,” wrote one who knew all
his qualities, “that Landseer, who might have
done so much for the good of the animal kind,
never wrote on the subject of their treatment.
He had a strong feeling against the way some
dogs are tied up, only allowed their freedom
now and then. He used to say a man would
fare better tied up than a dog, because the
former can take his coat off, but a dog lives
in his forever. He declared a tied-up dog,
without daily exercise, goes mad, or dies,
in three years.”

He had a wonderful power over dogs, and

he told one lady it was because he had “peeped
into their hearts.” A great mastiff rushed
delightedly upon him one day and someone
remarked how the dog loved him. “I never
saw the dog before in my life,” the artist said.

While teaching some horses tricks for Astley’s,
he showed his friends some sugar in his hand
and said: “Here is my whip.” His studio
was full of pets, and one dog used as a model
used to bring the master’s hat and lay it at his
feet when he got tired of posing.

This charming man suffered a great deal
before his death, and had dreadful fits of
depression. During one of these he wrote:
“I have got trouble enough; ten or twelve
pictures about which I am tortured, and a
large national monument to complete.” That
monument was the one in Trafalgar Square,
for which he designed the lions at the base.
“If I am bothered about anything and everything,
no matter what, I know my head will
not stand it much longer.” Later he wrote:
“My health (or rather condition), is a mystery
beyond human intelligence. I sleep seven
hours, and awake tired and jaded, and do not
rally till after luncheon. J. L. came down
yesterday and did her best to cheer me…
I return to my own home in spite of kind
invitations from Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone to
meet Princess Louise at breakfast.” Of the
many anecdotes told of this great man, his
introduction to the King of Portugal furnishes

the most amusing. “I am delighted to make
your acquaintance,” the King said, “I am
so fond of beasts.”

Before he died he had made a large fortune
from his work, and during his illness he was
tended most lovingly by his friends and sister.
One day, walking in his garden, much depressed,
he said sadly: “I shall never see the green
leaves again,” but he did live through other
seasons. He wished to die in his studio, and
at one time when he was much distracted the
Queen wrote him not to fear, but to trust those
who were doing all they could for him, that her
confidence in his physicians and nurses was
complete. At last with brother, sister, friends
and fortune about him the great animal
painter died, and on October 11, 1873, and
was buried with great honours in St. Paul’s
Cathedral.

Of all the dogs Landseer loved to paint, the
sheep collie has the most character; and here
he shows us one expressing in every line of
his face and form the most profound grief.
The Glengarry bonnet on the floor beside the
shepherd’s staff, the spectacles lying on the
Bible, the ram’s horn, the vacant chair, the
black and white shawl known as a “Shepherd’s
plaid”–all these things have failed to comfort
this humble follower. We can imagine him,

not bounding ahead with a joyous bark, but
walking staidly behind the coffin when it is
borne away and laying himself down upon his
master’s grave, perhaps to die of starvation,
as some of his kind have been known to do.
The painting is one of the Sheepshanks Collection
in the South Kensington Museum.

Among Landseer’s other famous dog pictures
are “Low Life and High Life,” “Dignity
and Impudence” and “The Sleeping Bloodhound,”
all in the National Gallery.

XXVI

CLAUDE LORRAIN (GELLEE)

Of all the contrasts between the early
and later lives of great artists, Claude
Lorrain gives us the most complete.

He was born to make pastry. His family
may have been all pastry cooks, because people
of Lorrain were famous for that work; anyway
as a little chap he was apprenticed to one. His
parents were poor, lived in the Duchy of
Lorrain and from that political division the
Artist was named.

The town in which he was born was
Chamagne, and his real name was Gellée. As
a pastry cook’s apprentice he served his time,
and then, without any thought of becoming
anything else in the world, he set off with
several other pastry cooks to go to Rome,
where their talents were to be well rewarded.

But how strangely things fall out! In
Rome he was engaged to make tarts for
Agostine Tassi, a landscape painter. His work
was not simply to furnish his master with
desserts, but to do general housekeeping, and
it fell to his lot to clean Tassi’s paint brushes.

So far as we know, this was the first introduction
of Claude Lorrain to art other than culinary.

From cleaning brushes it was but a step
to trying to use them upon canvas, and Tassi
being a good-natured man, began to give
Lorrain instruction, till the pastry cook became
his master’s assistant in the studio. This led
to a larger and larger life for the young Frenchman,
and he copied great masters, did original
things, and finally in his twenty-fifth year
returned to France a full-fledged artist. He
remained there two years, and then went back
to Italy, where he lived till he died. The
visit to France turned out fortunately because
on his way back he fell in with one of the original
twelve members of the French Academy,
Charles Errard, who became the first director
of the Academy in Rome. A warm friendship
sprang up between the men, and Errard was
very helpful to the young artist.

Nevertheless, Lorrain did not gain much
fame till about his fortieth year, when he was
noticed by Cardinal Bentivoglio, and was given
certain commissions by him. He grew in
Bentivoglio’s favour so much that the Cardinal
introduced him to the pope. The Catholic
Church set the fashions in art, politics, and
history of all sorts at that time, so that Lorrain
could not have had better luck than to become
its favourite. The pope was Urban VIII.,
whose main business was to hold the power of
the Church and make it stronger if he could,

so that he was continually building fortresses
and other fortifications, and he had use for
artists and decorators. Lorrain’s fame outlasted
the life of Urban VIII., and he
became a favourite in turn with each of the
three succeeding popes. All this time he
was doing fine work in Italy and for Italy,
besides receiving orders for pictures from
France, Holland, Germany, Spain, and England,
for his fame had reached throughout the world.

Besides leaving many paintings behind him
when he died, he left half a hundred etchings;
also a more precise record of his work than most
artists have left. He executed two hundred
sketches in pen or pencil, washed in with brown
or India ink, the high lights being brought
out with touches of white. On the backs of
them the artist noted the date on which the
sketch was developed into a picture, and for
whom the latter was intended. The story is
that his popularity produced many imitators,
and that he adopted this means to establish
the identity of his own work and distinguish
it from the many copies made.

These sketches were collected in a volume
by Lorrain and called “Liber Veritatis,” and
for more than a hundred years the Dukes of
Westminster have owned this.

This picture in the Dresden Gallery is a scene
from the mythical story of a goddess who

fell in love with the youthful son of a faun and
a naiad. Thus she excited the jealous fury
of the cyclops, Polythemus, who is seen in the
picture herding his flock of sheep upon the
high cliff at the right. Soon he will rise and
hurl a rock upon Acis, crushing the life out of
him, so that there will be nothing left for
Galatea to do but to turn him into the River
Acis, but meanwhile the lovers are unconscious
and happy. Venus is reposing near them on the
waves and Cupid is closer still, while the sea
in the background seems to be stirred with a
fresh morning breeze.

Some of the famous Lorrains in the Louvre
are: “Seaport at Sunset,” “Cleopatra Landing
at Tarsus,” and “The Village Festival.”

XXVII

MASACCIO (TOMMASO GUIDI)

This artist, who lived and died within the
century that witnessed the discovery
of America, was famous for more than his
painting. He was the original inventor who
first learned and taught the mixing of colours
with oils, thus making the peculiar “distemper”
unnecessary.

The story of Italian artists includes a history
of their names, for the Italians seem to have had
most remarkable reasons for naming children.
For example, this artist, Masaccio, was born
on St. Thomas’s day, hence, his name of
Tommaso. Presently, for short, or for love,
he was called Maso, and to cap all, being a
careless lad, his friends added the derogatory
“accio,” and there we have the artist completely
named. He owed nothing of this to his father,
who was plain, or ornamentally, Ser Giovanni
di Simone Guidi, of Castello San Giovanni,
in the Valdamo.

As a very little boy, it was plain to be seen
that slovenly Thomas was going to be a great

artist, and no time was lost in putting him to
work with the best of masters.

He was a veritable inventive genius. Until
his time difficulties in drawing had been overcome
mostly by ignoring them. Since no artist
had been able to draw a foreshortened foot,
it had been the fashion in art to paint people
standing upon their tiptoes, to make it possible
for an artist to paint the foot. The enterprising
Thomas came along and he decided
that feet must be painted both flat and crossed,
on tiptoe or otherwise; in short he did not
mean to lose by a foot.

He worked at this problem day and night,
till at last the naturally poised foot came
into existence for the artist. Never after
Masaccio’s time did an artist paint the foot
stretched upon the toes. Moreover, until
his time flesh had never been painted of a
remotely natural colour, so Masaccio set about
combining colours till he made one that had
the tint of real flesh. Thus he was the first to
overcome the difficulties of drawing and the
first to discover a mixture that would not leave
a glazed, hard, unnatural appearance and be
likely to crack and destroy the finest effort of
an artist.

He worked during his youth in Pisa, where
the “leaning tower” stands; then he worked
in Florence, finally in Rome, but those early
pictures are long since gone. It was a century
of adventure and discovery as well as of art,

and with so much change, so many wars and
rumours of wars, many great art works were lost.
Besides, the horrible plague swept Italy east,
west, north, and south. Who was to concern
himself with saving works of art, when human
life was going out wholesale all over the land?

Masaccio was certainly very poor most of his
life. He lived with his mother and his
brother Giovanni, an artist like himself, but not
nearly so brilliant. Masaccio could not spend
his life in painting but had to eke out the family
fortunes by keeping a little shop near the old
Badia, and being pestered day and night by
his creditors he was forced again and again to go
to the pawn shop.

Somewhere about 1422, careless Thomas
painted his greatest picture which was doomed
to destruction too early for us to know much
about it; but it was named “San Paolo” and
it was painted in the bell-room of the Church
of the Carmine in Florence. The figure for
his model was an illustrious personage, Bartoli
d’Angiolini, who had held many honourable
offices in Florence for many years. A critic
and friend of artists tells us that the portrait
was so great it lacked only the power of speech.

In this picture Masaccio made his first great
triumph in the foreshortening of feet.

He undertook to celebrate the consecration
Of the Church of the Carmine, and for this he
made many frescoes, among which was a correct
painting of the procession as it entered from

the cloisters of the church. “Among the
citizens who followed in its wake, portraits
are introduced of Brunellesco, Donatello,
Masolino, Felice Brancacci (the founder of the
chapel) Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, and others,
including the porter of the convent with the
key of the door in his hand.”

This work was thought to be very wonderful
because the figures grew smaller in the distance,
thereby giving “perspective” for the first time.
Imagine how crude a thing was painting in the
day of careless Thomas.

That fresco is long since gone, but drawings
of it still exist which tell us something of the
people of Christopher Columbus’s day–previous
to their appearance, and their conditions.

After Masaccio had finished the procession
he went back to his painting of the chapel and
in the end covered three of its four walls with
his works. Many of those paintings are scenes
from the life of St. Peter, and several were
worked at by other artists than Masaccio.

Masaccio was greater than Raphael, greater
than Michael Angelo in so far as he pointed the
way that they were to go, having solved for them
all the problems that had kept artists from
being great before him. Sir Joshua Reynolds
says that “he appeared to be the first who
discovered the path that leads to every
excellence to which the art afterward arrived;
and may therefore be justly considered one of
the great fathers of modern art.”

The artist lived but a little time, and was
most likely poisoned. Nobody knows, but it is
said that other painters were so wildly jealous of
his original genius that they wished him out of
the way, and his death was at least mysterious.
He drew very rapidly and let the details go,
caring only to represent motion and action.
Because he painted so many portraits into his
pictures there was great life and animation
in them, and people said of him that he painted
not only the body but the soul.

Some of his known pictures are the frescoes
in the church of St. Clemente in Rome; the
frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in the Church
of the Carmine, “St. Peter Baptising” and the
“Madonna and Child, with St. Anne,” which is
in the Accademia at Florence.

XXVIII

JEAN LOUIS ERNEST MEISSONIER

This artist was born at Lyons. His
father was a salesman and an art-training
seemed impossible for the young man
because the Meissoniers were poor people.
Nevertheless, he was so persevering that while
still a young man he got to Paris and began
to paint in the Louvre. He was but nineteen
at that time, and his fate seemed so hard and
bitter that later in life he refused to talk of
those days.

He sat for many days in the Louvre, by
Daubigny’s side, painting pictures for which
we are told he received a dollar a yard. We
can think of nothing more discouraging to a
genius than having to paint by the yard. It
is said that his poverty permitted him to
sleep only every other night, because he must
work unceasingly, and someone declares that he
lived at one time on ten cents a week. This
is a frightful picture of poverty and distress.

Meissonier’s first paying enterprise was the
painting of bon-bon boxes and the decorating

of fans, and he tried to sell illustrations for
children’s stories, but for these he found no
market. A brilliant compiler of Meissonier’s
life has written that “his first illustrations in
some unknown journal were scenes from the
life of ‘The Old Bachelor.’ In the first
picture he is represented making his toilet
before the mirror, his wig spread out on the
table; in the second, dining with two friends;
in the third, on his death-bed, surrounded by
greedy relations and in the fifth, the servants
ransacking the death chamber for the property.”
This was very likely a vision of his own possible
fate, for Meissonier must have been at that
time a lonely and unhappy man.

There are many stories of his first exhibited
work, which Caffin declares was the “Visit to
the Burgomaster,” but Mrs. Bolton, who is
almost always correct in her statements, tells
us that it was called “The Visitor,” and that it
sold for twenty dollars. At the end of a six
years struggle in Paris, his pictures were
selling for no more.

Until this artist’s time people had been
used only to great canvases, and had grown
to look for fine work, only in much space, but
here was an artist who could paint exquisitely
a whole interior on a space said to be no “larger
than his thumb nail.” His work was called
“microscopic,” which meant that he gave
great attention to details, painting very slowly.

During the Italian war of 1859, and in the

German war of 1870, this wonderful artist was
on the staff of Napoleon III. During the siege
of Paris he held the rank of colonel, and he
lost no chance to learn details of battles which
he might use later, in making great pictures.
Thus he gained the knowledge and inspiration
to paint his picture “Friedland,” which
was bought by A. T. Stewart and is now in the
Metropolitan Museum. He, himself, wrote of
that picture: “I did not intend to paint a
battle–I wanted to paint Napoleon at the
zenith of his glory; I wanted to paint the love,
the adoration of the soldiers for the great
captain in whom they had faith, and for whom
they were ready to die…. It seemed
to me I did not have colours sufficiently dazzling.
No shade should be on the imperial
face…. The battle already commenced,
was necessary to add to the enthusiasm of the
soldiers, and make the subject stand forth, but
not to diminish it by saddening details. All
such shadows I have avoided, and presented
nothing but a dismounted cannon, and some
growing wheat which should never ripen.

“This was enough.

“The men and the Emperor are in the presence
of each other. The soldiers cry to him that
they are his, and the impressive chief, whose
imperial will directs the masses that move
around, salutes his devoted army. He and
they plainly comprehend each other and
absolute confidence is expressed in every face.”

This great work was sold at auction for
$66,000 and given to the Metropolitan Museum.

It is said that when he painted the “Retreat
from Russia,” Meissonier obtained the coat
which Napoleon had worn at the time, and had
it copied, “crease for crease and button for
button.” He painted the picture mostly out
of doors in midwinter when the ground was
covered with snow, and he writes: “Sometimes
I sat at my easel for five or six hours together,
endeavouring to seize the exact aspect of the
winter atmosphere. My servant placed a
hot foot-stove under my feet, which he renewed
from time to time, but I used to get half-frozen
and terribly tired.”

So attentive was he to truthfulness in detail
that he had a wooden horse made in imitation
of the white charger of the Emperor; and
seating himself on this, he studied his own
figure in a mirror.

At last this conscientious man was made an
officer of the Legion of Honour, having already
become President of the Academy. Edmund
About writes that “to cover M. Meissonier’s
pictures with gold pieces simply would be to
buy them for nothing; and the practice has
now been established of covering them with
bank-notes.”

Meissonier seldom painted the figure of a
woman in his pictures, but all of his subjects
were wholesome and fine.

One time an admirer said to him “I envy

you; you can afford to own as many Meissonier
pictures as you please!”

“Oh no, I can’t,” the distinguished artist
replied. “That would ruin me. They are a
good deal too dear for me.”

In his maturity he became very rich, and
his homes were dreams of beauty, filled with
rare possessions such as bridles of black leather
once owned by Murat, rare silver designed by
the artist himself, great pictures, and flowers
of the rarest description besides valuable dogs
and horses. Yet it was said that “this man
who lives in a palace is as moderate as a
soldier on the march. This artist, whose
canvases are valued by the half-million, is as
generous as a nabob. He will give to a charity
sale a picture worth the price of a house.
Praised as he is by all he has less conceit in his
nature than a wholesale painter.”

On the 31st of January in his country house
at Poissy, this great man, whose life reads
like a romance, died, after a short illness. His
funeral services were held in the Madeleine,
and he was buried at Poissy, near Versailles,
a great military procession following him to
the grave.

In the painting of this picture we have
already told how every detail was mastered
by actual experience of most of them. Meissonier

made dozens of studies for it–“a horse’s
head, an uplifted leg, cuirasses, helmets,
models of horses in red wax, etc. He also
prepared a miniature landscape, strewn with
white powder resembling snow, with models
of heavy wheels running through it, that he
might study the furrow made in that terrible
march home from burning Moscow. All this
work–hard, patient, exacting work.”

Some of his other pictures are “The Emperor
at Solferino,” “Moreau and His Staff before
Hohenlinden,” “A Reading at Diderot’s” and
the “Chess Players.”

XXIX

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET

Two great artists painted peasants and
little else. One was the artist of whom
we shall speak, and the other was Jules Breton.
One was realistic, the other idealistic. Both
did wonderful work, but Millet painted the
peasant, worn, patient steadfast, overwhelmed
with toil; Breton, a peasant full of energy,
grace, vitality, and joy.

Millet painted peasants as he knew them,
and hardly any one could have known them
better, for he was himself peasant-born. His
youth was hard, and the scenes of his childhood
were such as in after life he became famous by
painting. Millet lived in the department of
Manche, in the village of Gruchy, near Cherbourg.
Manche juts into the sea, at the
English Channel, and whichever way Millet
looked he must have seen the sea. His old
grandmother looked after the household affairs,
while his father and mother worked in the
fields and Millet must have seen them hundreds
of times, standing at evening, with bowed
heads, listening to the Angelus bell. He

toiled, too, as did other lads in his position.
His grandmother was a religious old woman,
and nearly all the pictures he ever saw in his
boyhood were those in the Bible, which he
copied again and again, drawing them upon the
stone walls in white chalk.

The old grandmother watched him, never
doubting that her boy would become an artist.
It was she who had named him–François,
after her favourite saint, Francis, and it was
she, who, beside the evening fire, would tell him
legends of St. Francis. It was she alone who
had time and strength left, after the day’s
work, to teach him the little he learned as a boy
and to fix in his mind pictures of home. His
father and mother were worn, like pack-horses,
after their day in the fields. The mother very
likely had to hitch herself up with the donkey,
or the big dog, after the fashion of these people,
as she helped draw loads about the field.
Who can look for Breton’s ideal stage peasants
from Millet who knew the truth as he saw it
every day?

Many years after his life in the Gruchy
home, Millet painted the portrait of the grandmother
whom he had loved so much that he
cried out: “I wish to paint her soul!” No one
could desire a better reward than such a
tribute.

Millet had an uncle who was a priest and he
did what he could to give the boy a start in
learning. He taught him to read Virgil and

the Latin Testament; and all his life those
two books were Millet’s favourites. Besides
drawing pictures on the walls of his home,
he drew them on his sabots. Pity some one
did not preserve those old wooden shoes!
He did his share of the farm work, doing his
drawing on rainy days.

When he was about eighteen years old,
coming from mass one day, he was impressed
with the figure of an old man going along the
road, and taking some charcoal from his
pocket he drew the picture of him on a stone
wall. The villagers passing, at once knew the
likeness; they were pleased and told Millet so.
Old Millet, the father, also was delighted for he,
too, had wished to be an artist, but fate had
been against him. Seeing the wonderful things
his son could do, he decided that he should
become what he himself had wished to be,
and that he should go to Cherbourg to study.

François set off with his father, carrying a
lot of sketches to show, and upon telling the
master in Cherbourg what he wanted and
showing the sketches, he was encouraged to
stay and begin study in earnest. So back the
old father went, with the news to the mother
and grandmother and the priest uncle, that
François had begun his career. He stayed in
Cherbourg studying till his father died,
when he thought it right to go home and do the
work his father had always done. He returned,
but the women-folk would not agree to him

staying. “You go back at once,” said the
grandmother, “and stick to your art. We
shall manage the farm.” She sewed up in his
belt all the money she had saved, and started
him off again, for he had then been studying
only two months. Now he remained till he
was twenty-three, a fine, strapping, broad-shouldered
country fellow. He had long fair
hair and piercing dark blue eyes. All the time
he was with Delaroche he was dissatisfied with
his work–and with his master’s, which
seemed to Millet artificial, untrue. He knew
nothing of the classical figures the master
painted and wished him to paint, for his heart
and mind were back in Gruchy among the
scenes that bore a meaning for him. He wished
to study elsewhere, and by this time he had
done so well that one of the artists with whom
he had studied went to the mayor of Millet’s
home town, and begged him to furnish through
the town-council money enough to send Millet
to Paris. This was done, and Millet began to
hope.

He was very shy and afraid of seeming
awkward and out of place. The night he got
to Paris was snowy, full of confusion and
strange things to him, and an awful loneliness
overwhelmed him. The next morning he set
out to find the Louvre, but would not ask his
way for fear of seeming absurd to some one,
so that he rambled about alone, looking for the
great gallery till he found it unaided. He

spent most of the days that followed gazing
in ecstasy at the pictures.

He liked Angelo, Titian, and Rubens best.
He had come to Paris to enter a studio, but
he put off his entrance from day to day, for
his shyness was painful and he feared above all
things to be laughed at by city students. At
last one day, he got up enough courage to apply
to Delaroche, whose studio he had decided
to enter if he could, as he liked his work best.
The students in that studio were full of
curiosity about the new chap, with his peasant
air, his bushy hair and great frame, so sturdy
and awkward. They at once nicknamed him
“the man of the woods,” and they nagged
at him and laughed at the idea that he could
learn to paint, till one day, exasperated nearly
to death, he shook his fist at them. From that
moment he heard no more from them, for
they were certain that if he could not paint he
could use his fists a good deal better than any
of them. Delaroche liked the peasant but
did not understand him very well, and Millet
was not too fond of his painting, so after two
years he and a friend withdrew from that
studio and set up one for themselves. Thus
eight years passed, the friends living from
hand to mouth, doing all sorts of things: sign-painting,
advertisements, and the like; and
Millet, in the midst of his poverty, got married.

He went home, returning to Paris with his
wife, and after starving regularly, he became

desperate enough to paint a single picture as
he wished. It seemed at the time the maddest
kind of thing to do. Who would see ugly,
toil-worn peasants upon his salon walls? Paris
wanted dainty, aesthetic art, and an Academy
artist would have scoffed at the idea; but the
Millets were starving anyway, so why not
starve doing at least what one chose. So
Millet painted his first wonderful peasant
picture “The Winnower,” and just as the
family were starving he sold it–for $100.
He had done at last the right thing, in doing
as he pleased. This was a sign to him that
there was after all a place for truth and emotion
in art. But the Millets must change their
place of living, and go to some place where
the money made would not at once be eaten
up. Jacque–the friend with whom Millet
had set up shop, and who also became famous,
later–advised them to go to a little place
he knew about, which had a name ending in
“zon.” It was near the forest of Fontainebleau,
he said and they could live there very
cheaply, and it was quiet and decent. The
Millets got into a rumbling old cart and started
in search of the place which ended in “zon”
near the forest of Fontainebleau. Jacque
had also decided to take his family there and
they all went together. When they got to
Fontainebleau they got down from the car
and went a-foot through the forest.

They arrived tired and hungry toward

evening, and went to Ganne’s Inn, where
there were Rousseau, Diaz, and other artists
who like themselves had come in search of a
nice, clean, picturesque place in which to starve,
if they had to. Those who were just sitting
down to supper welcomed the newcomers, for
they had been there long enough to form a
colony and fraternity ways. One of these
was to take a certain great pipe from the wall,
and ask the newcomer to smoke; and according
to the way he blew his “rings” he was pronounced
a “colourist” or “classicist.” The
two friends blew the smoke, and at once the
other artists were able to place Jacque. He
was a colourist; but what were they to say about
Millet who blew rings after his own fashion.

“Oh, well!” he cried. “Don’t trouble about
it. Just put me down in a class of my own!”

“A good answer!” Diaz answered. “And
he looks strong and big enough to hold his
own in it!” Thus the newcomers took their
places in the life of Barbizon–the place whose
name ended in “zon,” and Millet’s real work
began. His first wife lived only two years,
but he married again. All this time he was
following his conscience in the matter of his
work, and selling almost nothing. In a letter
to a friend he tells how dreadfully poor they
are, although his new wife was the most devoted
helpful woman imaginable, known far and
near as “Mère Millet.” The artist wrote to
Sensier, his friend, who aided him: “I have

received the hundred francs. They came just
at the right time. Neither my wife nor I had
tasted food in twenty-four hours. It is a
blessing that the little ones, at any rate, have
not been in want.”

The revolution of 1848 had come before
Millet went to Barbizon, and he like other men
had to go to war. Then the cholera appeared,
and these things interrupted his work; and
after such troubles people did not begin buying
pictures at once. Rousseau was famous now,
but Millet lived by the hardest toil until one
day he sold the “Woodcutter” to Rousseau
himself, for four hundred francs. Rousseau
had been very poor, and it grieved him to see
the trials and want of his friend, so he pretended
that he was buying the picture for an American.
That picture was later sold at the Hartmann
sale for 133,000 francs. Millet was now forty
years old, and had not yet been recognised as
a wonderful man by any but his brother
artists. He was truly “in a class of his own.”
He had learned to love Barbizon, and cried:
“Better a thatched cottage here than a palace
in Paris!” and we have the picture in our
minds of Millet followed patiently and lovingly
by “Mère Millet” in the peasant dress which
she always wore, that she might be ready at
a moment’s notice to pose for his figures. Then
there were his little children and his sunny,
simple, fraternal surroundings, which make his
life the most picturesque of all artists.

His paintings had the simplest stories with
seldom more than two or three figures in them.
It was said that he needed only a field and a
peasant to make a great picture. When he
painted the “Man with the Hoe,” he did it so
truthfully, in a way to make the story so
well understood by all who looked upon it,
that he was called a socialist. No one was
so much surprised as Millet by that name.
“I never dreamed of being a leader in any
cause,” he said. “I am a peasant–only a
peasant.”

Of his picture “The Reaper” a critic wrote,
“He might have reaped the whole earth.”
All his pictures were sermons, he called them
“epics of the fields.” He pretended to nothing
except to present things just as they were, as
he writes in a letter to a friend about “The
Water Carrier:”

In the woman coming from drawing water I have
endeavoured that she shall be neither a water-carrier nor
a servant, but the woman who has just drawn water for
the house, the water for her husband’s and her children’s
soup; that she shall seem to be carrying neither more nor
less than the weight of the full buckets; that beneath the
sort of grimace which is natural on account of the strain
on her arms, and the blinking of her eyes caused by the
light, one may see a look of rustic kindliness on her face.
I have always shunned with a kind of horror everything
approaching the sentimental. I have desired on the other
hand, that this woman should perform simply and good-naturedly,
without regarding it as irksome, an act which,
like her other household duties, is one she is accustomed
to perform every day of her life. Also I wanted to make

people imagine the freshness of the fountain, and that
its antiquated appearance should make it clear that many
before her had come to draw water from it.

At forty he was in about the same condition
as he had been on that evening ten or twelve
years before, when he had entered Barbizon
carrying his two little daughters upon his
shoulders, his wife following with the servant
and a basket of food, to settle themselves down
to hardship made sweet by kind comradeship
and hope. Now a change came. Millet
painted “The Angelus.” He was dreadfully
poor at that time and sold the picture cheaply,
but it laid the foundation of his fame and
fortune. He had worked upon the canvas
till he said he could hear the sound of the bell.
Although its first purchaser paid very little
for it, it has since been sold for one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars.

At last, having struggled through his worst
days, without recognition, and with nine little
children to feed and clothe, he was given the
white cross of the Legion of Honour; and as
if to make up for the days of his starvation, he
was nearly feasted to death in Paris. He was
placed upon the hanging committee of the
Salon, and took a dignified place among
artists. He and Mère Millet travelled a little,
but always he returned to Barbizon, till the
war came and he had to move to Normandy
to work. Afterward he returned to Barbizon,
to the scenes and the old friends he loved so

well, and there he died. He had come back
ill and tired with the long struggle, and he
instructed his friends to give him a simple
funeral. This was done. They carried his
coffin, while his wife and children walked
beside him to the cemetery, and he was buried
near the little church of Chailly, whose spire
is seen in “The Angelas,” and where Rousseau,
whom he loved, had already been laid.

There in Barbizon, to-day, may be seen
Rousseau’s cottage and Millet’s studio. “The
peasants sow and reap and glean as in the days
of Millet; Troyon’s oxen and sheep are still
standing in the meadow; Jacque’s poultry are
feeding in the barnyard. The leaves on
Rousseau’s grand old trees are trembling in the
forest; Corot’s misty morning is as fresh and
soft as ever; while Diaz’s ruddy sunsets still
penetrate the branches; and the peasant pauses
daily as the Angelus from the Chailly church
calls him to silent prayer.”

In “The Angelus” you may see far-off the spire
of the church at Chailly, from which the bell
sounds. The day’s work is drawing to a close.
The peasant man and woman have been digging
potatoes–the man uncovering them, while
his wife has been putting them in the basket.
As the Angelus floats across the fields, the two
pause and bow their heads in prayer. The

man has dropped his fork and uncovered his
head, and his wife has clasped her hands
devoutly before her.

All the air seems still and full of tender
sound and colour, and we, like Millet, seem
“to hear the bell.” This is the only picture
he painted which is full of the sentimentality
he so much disliked. It is a great picture,
but we need to know the title in order to
interpret it.

Besides this one, Millet painted “The
Gleaners,” “The Woodcutters,” “The Sower,”
“The Man with the Hoe;” “The Water Carrier,”
“The Reaper,” and many other stories of the
peasant poor.

XXX

CLAUDE MONET

Another–Manet–was the founder
of this school among modern painters,
but Monet is always considered his most
conspicuous follower.

Monet’s remarkable method of putting his
colours upon canvas does not mean impressionism.
He is an impressionist but also
Monet–an artist with a method entirely
different from that of any other. He belongs
to what in France is called the pointillistes.
The word means nothing more nor less than
an effort to accomplish the impossible. If you
stand a little way from a very hot stove you
may be able to see a kind of movement in the
air, a quivering of particles or molecular motion,
and this is what the pointillistes try to show in
their paintings–Monet most of all.

The theory is that by putting little dabs of
primitive colours, close together upon canvas,
without mixing them, just separate dabs of
red, yellow, blue, etc., the effect of movement
is produced. Needless to say, none of them
ever have produced such an effect, but they

have made such grotesque, ugly pictures that
they have attracted attention even as a humpbacked
person does.

The first who painted thus was a Frenchman
named Seurat, who tried it after closely studying
experiments made in light and colour by
Professor Rood, of Columbia University.
After him came Pissarro, and then Monet.
America also has such a painter, Childe Hassam,
but nobody is so grotesque as Monet.

He was born in Paris but spent most of his
youth in Havre, where he met a painter of
harbours and shipping scenes called Boudin.
Through his influence Monet studied out-of-door
effects, and was beginning to do fairly
good work, when he was drawn as a conscript
and sent to Algeria. It is written that Monet
discovered that “green, seen under strong
sunshine is not green, but yellow; that the
shadows cast by sunlight upon snow or upon
brightly lighted surfaces are not black, but
blue; and that a white dress, seen under the
shade of trees on a bright day, has violet or
lilac tones.” This only means that these
things have been scientifically determined,
not that the naked eye ever perceives them,
and it is for the natural, unscientific eye that
art exists. None of us see the separate colours
of the spectrum, as we look about in every-day
fashion upon every-day objects.

Professor Rood managed to produce an
intelligent effect by putting separate colours

on discs and whirling these round so that the
colours mingled. Monet tried to do the same
by dotting his original colours close together,
and leaving the picture to its own destruction.
It ought to revolve, if the scientific idea is to
be carried out.

Nothing desirable can be made out of his
pictures even when viewed from far off, while
at close range they are simply grotesque, and
photographs of them give the impression that
the entire landscape is wabbling to the ground.

I wonder if anyone, small or grown up, can
understand this: “It was indeed a higher
kind of impressionism that Monet originated,
one that reveals a vivid rendering, not of the
natural and concrete facts, but of their
influence upon the spirit when they are wrapped
in the infinite diversities of that impalpable, immaterial,
universal medium which we call light,
when the concrete loses itself in the abstract,
and what is of time and matter impinges on the
eternal and the universal.” Monet’s pictures
look just as that explanation of them sounds!

The same writer says that Monet was greater
than Corot because he was more sensitive to
colour; but if Monet had been as sensitive to
colour as Corot, he could not have lived and
looked at his own pictures.

The main feature of this picture is such a
hay stack as never existed anywhere, of

indescribable lurid colour, against a background
of blue such as never was seen. All
about there are violet and rose-coloured
trees, and it is a picture that every child should
know, because he is likely never to have
another such opportunity.

Monet has made two interesting pictures of
churches, one at Vernon, the other at Varangeville.

XXXI

MURILLO (BARTOLOME ESTEBAN)

The story of Murillo has been delightfully
told by Mrs. Sarah Bolton.

Like Velasquez, he was born in Seville, a
city called “the glory of the Spanish realms,”
and was baptised on New Year’s day, 1618,
in the Church of the Magdalen.

Murillo’s father paid his rent in work,
instead of in money. He made a bargain with
the convent who owned his house that he
would keep it in repair if he might have it
free of rent, so there Gaspar Estéban and his
wife, Maria Perez, settled. “Perez” was the
family name of Murillo’s mother, who had
very good connections; one of her brothers,
Juan del Castillo, being a man who encouraged
all art and had an art school of his own. Little
Murillo therefore had encouragement from the
start, an unusual circumstance at a time when
parents rarely wished to think of their sons
as painters. As a matter of fact, his mother
would have preferred that he should become a
priest, but she was kind and sensible, and put

no difficulties in the way of the little Murillo
doing as he wished.

The story goes that the Perez family had
been very rich, but, however it may have been,
that was not the case when the artist was born.
One day after his mother had gone to church,
Murillo being left at home alone, retouched
a picture that hung upon the wall. It was a
picture of sacred subject–“Jesus and the
Lamb.” He thought he could make some
improvements in it, so he painted his own hat
upon the head of Jesus and changed the lamb
into a little dog. His mother was a good deal
shocked at what seemed to her an irreligious
act, though it showed the family genius. After
that the boy was found to be painting upon the
walls of his schoolroom, and making sketches
upon the margins of his books, though he
did little else at school.

He had one sister, Therese, and they were
left without father or mother before the artist
was eleven years old.

It was at that time that he received the name
of “Murillo” by which he is known.

It came about thus: After the death of his
parents he went to live with his mother’s
sister, the Doña Anna Murillo, who had
married a surgeon called Juan Agustin Lagares,
and since the little artist was to live with his
aunt, he soon became known by her family
name. There, in her home, he and his sister
Therese, were brought up, but he was not to

become a surgeon like his uncle-in-law, but an
artist like his uncle Juan, the teacher in Seville.
That uncle took him in hand, taught the boy to
draw, to mix colours, to stretch his canvas,
and soon Murillo’s genius won the love of
master and pupils.

In peace and reasonable comfort he served
a nine years apprenticeship, and painted his
first important, if not especially great, pictures.
These were two Madonnas, one of them “The
Story of the Rosary.” St. Dominic had
instituted the rosary; using fifteen large and
one hundred and fifty small beads upon which
to keep record of the number of prayers he
had said; the large beads representing the
Paternosters and Glorias and the small ones, the
Aves. This practical way of indicating duties
helped the heedless to concentrate their attention,
and did much to increase the number of
prayers offered. Indeed, it is said that “by
this single expedient Dominic did more to
excite the devotion of the lower orders, especially
of the women, and made more converts,
than by all his orthodoxy, learning, arguments,
and eloquence.” It was this incident in the
history of the Catholic Church that Murillo
commemorated.

When the artist was twenty-two years old,
his uncle, Juan del Castillo, broke up his home
and went elsewhere to live, leaving the artist
without home or means, and with his little
sister to take care of. Without vanity or

ambition, but with only the wish to care for
his sister and to get food, the marvellous painter
took himself to the market place, and there,
wedged in between stalls, old clothes, vegetables,
all sorts of wares, like a wanderer and a gypsy,
he began his career.

At the weekly market–the Feria or fair,
opposite the Church of All Saints–his brotherly,
kindly feeling for the vagabonds he daily met
is shown in the treatment he gives them in
his wonderful pictures. During the two years
that he worked in that open-air studio he had
flower-girls, muleteers, hucksters all about him,
and he painted dozens of rough pictures which
found quick sale among the patrons of the
market. What Velasquez was doing in the
court of Madrid, Murillo was doing in the
streets of Seville; the one painting cardinals,
kings, and courtiers; the other painting beggars,
gamins, and waifs. Between the two, the
world has been shown the social history of
Spain as it then existed.

Through a peculiar happening, the American
Indian saw the beauties of Murillo’s work
before Europe was even conscious there was
such a man. In his old home, his uncle’s
studio, Murillo had had a dear comrade, Moya.
They had not met for two years or more, and
when they did come together again Moya
told Murillo he had been travelling, that he
had been to Flanders with the Spanish army,
and thence to London, in both places seeing

gorgeous paintings and other inspiring things.
He opened the eyes of Murillo to the splendours
the world contained, and the artist became
wild with desire to go and see them for himself,
but he had no money. He was painting pictures
in the market place of Seville and getting so
little for his hasty work that he could barely
support himself and little Therese. What must
he do in order to get to London and see the
world?

What he did do was to buy a piece of linen,
cut it into six pieces and hide himself long
enough to paint upon them “saints, flowers,
fruit and landscapes,” and then he went forth
to sell them.

He actually sold those pictures to a ship-owner
who was sending his ship to the West
Indies. Eventually they were hung upon the
walls of a mission in wild, far off America.
It is said that after this Murillo made no little
money by painting such pictures, destined to
give the American savage an idea of the
Christian religion. One cannot but wonder
if there may not be, all unknown to us, Murillo
pictures, made in the market-place of Seville
nearly three hundred years ago, hidden away
in the remains of those old Spanish missions,
even to-day. Such a picture would be more
rare than the greatest that he ever painted.

After selling his six pictures Murillo started
a-foot, not to London but on a terrible journey
across the Sierra Mountains, to Madrid–the

home of Velasquez. Murillo knew that this
native of Seville had become a famous artist.
He was powerful and rich and at the court of
Philip II., while Murillo had no place to lay
his head, and besides he had left Therese behind
in Seville in the care of friends. He had no
claim upon the kindness of Velasquez but he
determined to see him; to introduce himself
and possibly to gain a friend. It was under
these forlorn circumstances he made himself
known to the great Spanish court painter.

The story of their meeting is a fine one. For
Murillo Velasquez had a warm embrace, a kind
and hospitable word. The stranger told Velasquez
how he had crossed the mountains on
foot, was penniless, but could use his brush.
Instead of jealousy and suspicion, the young
man met with nothing but the most cheerful
encouragement, found the Velasquez home
open to him, took up his lodging there and
established his workshop with nothing around
him but friendship and the sympathy his nature
craved.

From the market-place to the home of
Velasquez and the Palace of Philip II.! It was
a beautiful dream to Murillo.

With what splendour of colour and mastery
of design he illuminated the annals of the poor!
Coming forth from some dim chancel or palace-hall
in which he had been working on a majestic
Madonna picture, he would sketch in, with
the brush still loaded with the colours of

celestial glory, the lineaments of the beggar
crouching by the wall, or the gypsy calmly
reposing in the black shadow of an archway.
Such versatility had never before been seen
west of the Mediterranean, and it commanded
the admiration of his countrymen.

All his beggarly little children, neglected and
houseless, appeared only to be full of cheer
and merriment, with soft eyes and contented
faces. It was a happy, care-free, gay, and
kindly beggardom that he painted, with nothing
in it to sadden the heart.

Thus he lived for three years; working in
the galleries of the king, making friends at
court, painting beautiful women, gallant
cavaliers and fascinating little beggars.

In the course of time, however, he grew
restless, and Velasquez wished to give him
letters of introduction to Roman artists and
people of quality, advising him to go to Rome
to study the greatest art in the world. This
was an alluring plan to Murillo, but after all
he longed for his own home and chose to return
there rather than go to Rome. Besides, his
sister Therese was still in Seville.

Once more in his home, at one stroke of his
magic brush Murillo raised himself and a
monastic order from obscurity to greatness.
In his native city was the order of San Francisco.
The monks had long wished to have their
convent decorated in a worthy manner by some
artist of repute; but they were poor and had

never been able to engage such a painter.
When Murillo got back home, he was as badly
in need of work as the Franciscans were in
want of an artist. The monks held a council
and finally agreed upon a price which they
could pay and which Murillo could live upon.
Then he began a wonderful set of eleven large
paintings. Among them were many saints,
dark and rich in colouring, and no sooner was
it known that the paintings were being made
than all the rich and powerful people of Seville
flocked to the convent to see the work. They
gathered about the young artist, overwhelmed
him with honours and praise, and the monastery
was crowded from morning till night with
those who wished to study his work. From
that moment Murillo’s fame, if not his fortune,
was made.

He married a rich and noble lady with the
tremendous name of Doña Beatriz de Cabrera y
Sotomayer. He had fallen in love with her
while painting her as an angel.

About that time he formed a strange partnership
with a landscape painter, who agreed to
supply the backgrounds that his pictures
needed, if Murillo would paint figures into his
landscapes. This plan did very well for a
little time, but it did not last long.

Murillo painted in three distinct styles, and
these have come to be known as the “warm,”
the “cold,” and the “vaporous.” He painted
pictures in the great cathedral of the Escorial

and the “Guardian Angel” was one of them.
Also, he painted “St. Anthony of Padua,”
and of this picture there is one of those absurd
stories meant to illustrate the perfection of
art. It is said that the lilies in it are so
natural that the birds flew down the cathedral
aisles to pluck at them. Many artists have
painted this saint, but Murillo’s is the best
picture of all.

When the nephew of his first master, Murillo’s
cousin, saw that work he said: “It is all over
with Castillo! Is it possible that Murillo,
that servile imitator of my uncle, can be the
author of all this grace and beauty of
colouring?”

The Duke of Wellington offered for this
picture as many gold pieces “as would cover
its surface of fifteen square feet.” This would
have been about two hundred and forty thousand
dollars; but we need not imagine that
Murillo received any such sum for the work.
This picture has a further interesting history.
The canvas was cut from the frame by thieves
in 1874, and later it was sold to Mr. Schaus,
the connoisseur and picture dealer of New York.
He paid $250 for it, and at once put it into
the hands of the Spanish consul, who restored
it to the cathedral.

The story of the saint whom Murillo painted
is as interesting as Murillo’s own. Among the
many wonderful things said to have happened
to him was that a congregation of fishes hearing

his voice as he preached beside the sea, came
to the top and lifted up their heads to listen.

While Murillo was doing his work, he was
living a happy, domestic life. He had three
children, and doubtless he used them as
models for his lively cherubs, as he used his
wife’s face for madonnas and angels.

He founded an academy of painting in
Seville, for the entrance to which a student
could not qualify unless he made the following
declaration: “Praised be the most Holy
Sacrament and the pure conception of Our
Lady.”

The most delightful stories are told of
Murillo’s kindness and sweetness of disposition.
He had a slave who loved him and who, one
day while Murillo was gone from the studio,
painted in the head of the Virgin which the
master had left incomplete. When Murillo
returned and saw the excellent work he cried:
“I am fortunate, Sebastian”–the slave’s
name–“For I have not created only pictures
but an artist!” This slave was set free by
Murillo and in the course of time he painted
many splendid pictures which are to-day
highly prized in Seville.

This is a description of Murillo’s house which
is still to be seen near the Church of Santa
Cruz: “The courtyard contains a marble
fountain, amidst flowering shrubs, and is
surrounded on three sides by an arcade upheld
by marble pillars. At the rear is a pretty

garden, shaded by cypress and citron trees, and
terminated by a wall whereon are the remains
of ancient frescoes which have been attributed
to the master himself. The studio is on the
upper floor, and overlooks the Moorish battlements,
commanding a beautiful view to the
eastward, over orange groves and rich corn-lands,
out to the gray highlands about Alcala.”

Murillo’s fame brought fortune to his little
sister, Therese. She married a nobleman of
Burgos, a knight of Santiago and judge of the
royal colonial court. He became the chief
secretary of state for Madrid.

Murillo made money, but gave almost all
that he made to the poor, though he did not
make money in the service of the Church, as
Velasquez made it in the service of the king.

His work of more than twenty pictures in
the Capuchin Church of Seville occupied him
for three years, and in that time he did not
leave the convent for a single day.

Of all the charming stories told of this
glorious artist, one which is connected with his
work in that church is the most picturesque.
It seems that every one within the walls loved
him, and among others a lay brother who was
cook. This man begged for some little personal
token from Murillo and since there was no
canvas at hand, the artist bade the cook leave
the napkin which he had brought to cover
his food, and during the day he painted upon
it a Madonna and child, so natural that one of

his biographers declares the child seems about
to spring from Mary’s arms. This souvenir
made for the cook of the Capuchin, convent
has been reproduced again and again, as one
of the artist’s greatest performances.

Toward the close of his happy life, he became
more and more devout, spending many hours
before an altar-piece in the Church of Santa
Cruz where was a picture of “The Descent
from the Cross,” by Pedro Campana. “Why
do you always tarry before ‘The Descent from
the Cross?'” the sacristan once asked of him.

“I am waiting till those men have brought
the body of our blessed Lord down the ladder.”
Murillo answered. His wife had died, his
daughter had become a nun, and all that was
left to him was his dear son Gaspar, when in his
sixty-third year he began his last work, “The
Marriage of St. Catherine.” He had not finished
this when he fell from the scaffolding upon
which he was working, and fatally hurt himself.
He died, with his son beside him. He was a
much loved man, and when he was buried, his
bier was carried by “two marquises and four
knights and followed by a great concourse of
people.” He chose to be buried beneath
the picture he loved so much–“The Descent
from the Cross,” and upon his grave was laid
a stone carved with his name, a skeleton and
an inscription in Latin which means “Live as
one who is about to die.”

The church has since been destroyed, and

on its site is the Plaza Santa Cruz, but Murillo’s
grave is marked by a tablet.

Each country seems to have had at least one
man of beautiful heart and mind, to represent
its art. Raphael in Italy, Murillo in Spain,
were types of gentle and greatly beloved men.
Leonardo in Italy and Dürer in Nuremberg,
were types of forceful, intellectual men,
highly respected and of great benefit to the
world.

Of all the painters who ever lived, Murillo
was the one who painted little children with
the most loving and fascinating touch.

Besides the little angels in this picture, we
have a bewildering choice among many other
beauties.

Many pictures of this subject have been
painted, and many were painted by Murillo,
but the one presented here is the greatest of all.
It hangs in the Louvre, Salle VI. Mary seems
to be suspended in the heavens, not standing
upon clouds. Under the hem of her garments
is the circle of the moon, while there is the effect
of hundreds of little cherub children massed
about her feet, in a little swarm at the right,
where the shadow falls heaviest, and still
others, half lost in the vapoury background
at the left, where the heavenly light streams
upon them, and brilliantly lights up the Virgin’s

gown. In this picture are all Murillo’s beloved
child figures, some carrying little streamers,
their tiny wings a-flutter and all crowding
lovingly about Mary. Far below this gorgeous
group we can imagine the dark and weary
earth lost in shadow.

Among Murillo’s most famous paintings are:
“The Birth of the Virgin,” “Two Beggar Boys,”
“The Madonna of the Rosary,” “The
Annunciation,” “Adoration of the Shepherds,”
“Holy Family,” “Education of Mary,” “The
Dice Players,” and “The Vision of St. Anthony.”

XXXII

RAPHAEL (SANZIO)

It was said of Raphael that “every evil
humour vanished when his comrades saw
him, every low thought fled from their minds”;
and this was because they felt themselves
vanquished by his pleasant ways and sweet
nature.

Imagine his beautiful face, with its sunny
eyes, reflecting no shadow of sadness or pain.
Such a one was sure to be beloved by all.

The father of Raphael was Giovanni Santi,
himself an able artist. Both he and Raphael
studied in many schools and took the best from
each. The son was brought up in an Italian
court, that of Guidobaldo of Urbino, where the
father was a favourite poet and painter, so that
he had at least one generation of art-lovers
behind him, at a time when learning and art
were much prized. Nothing ever entered
into his life that was sad or sorrowful; his
whole existence was a triumph of beautiful
achievements. There were three great artists
of that time, the other two being Michael

Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci, both of whom
were absolutely unlike Raphael in their art
and in their characters.

Raphael was born on April 6th at Contrada
del Monte in the ducal city of Urbino.
His mother’s name was Magia Ciarla, and
she was the daughter of an Urbino merchant.
She had three children besides the great painter,
all of whom died young, and when Raphael
was but eight years old his mother died also.
It is said that it was from her Raphael inherited
his beauty, goodness, mildness, and genius.
His father’s patron, the Duke of Urbino, was
a fine soldier, but he also cherished scholarship
and art, and kept at his court not less than
twenty or thirty persons at work copying
Greek and Latin manuscript which he wished
to add to his library.

Raphael had a stepmother, Bernardina,
the daughter of a goldsmith, a good and forceful
woman, but not gentle like the first wife; and
when Raphael was eleven years of age his
father, too, died. By his father’s will Raphael
became the charge of his uncle Bartolommeo,
a priest, but the property was left to the stepmother
so long as she remained unmarried.
Almost at once the priest and the stepmother
fell to quarreling over the spoils, and thus
Raphael was left pretty much to his own
devices, but just when life began to look dark
and sad for him, his mother’s brother took a
hand in the situation. He settled the dispute

between the priest and the second wife, and
arranged that Raphael should be placed in the
studio of some great painter, for the loving
lad had already worked in his father’s studio,
and had given promise of his wonderful gifts.
So he became the pupil of Perugino, a painter
noted for his fine colouring and sympathetic
handling of his subjects. At that time, Italian
schools were less wonderful in colouring than
in other matters of technique.

“Let him become my pupil,” said Perugino,
when Raphael was brought to him and some of
his work was exhibited; “soon he will be my
master.” A very different attitude from that
of Ghirlandajo toward Michael Angelo.

Raphael and his master became friends and
worked together for nine years.

His first work was not conceived until
Raphael was seventeen. It was to be a
surprise to his master who had gone to Florence.
A banner was wanted for the Church of S.
Trinita at Citta di Castello, and Raphael undertook
it, painting the “Trinity,” on one canvas
and the “Creation of Man” on another. Then
he painted the “Crucifixion,” which was bought
by Cardinal Fesch, who lived in Rome. That
painting is now in a collection of the Earl of
Dudley. It was sold away from Rome in 1845,
for twelve thousand dollars–or a little more.
No one will deny that this is an unusual sum
for an artist’s first work, but about the same
time he did a much more wonderful thing.

He painted a little picture, six and three-quarter
inches square. It was of the Virgin walking
in the springtime, before the leaves had appeared
upon the trees, and with snow-capped
mountains behind her. She holds the infant
Jesus in her arms while she reads from a small
book, and the little child looks upon the page
with her. This six inches of beauty sold to
the Emperor of Russia, in 1871, for sixty
thousand dollars.

Before Raphael was twenty-one, he had left
his master’s studio and had gone into the
splendid world of Rome, where Angelo was
straining at his bonds. But how differently
each accepted his life! The gentle Raphael,
who took the best of the ideas of all great
painters, and gave to them his own exquisite
characteristics, was beloved of all, shed light
upon art and friends alike. To such a one all
life was joyous. Michael Angelo, trying ever
to do the impossible, betraying his hatred of
limitations in all that he did, doing always
that which aroused horror, distress, longing,
elemental feelings, in those who studied his
wonderful work, and giving hope and satisfaction
and peace to none–to such as he life
must ever have been hateful and painful.
These men lived at the same time, among the
same people.

One of Raphael’s greatest pictures came
into the possession of a poor widow, who being
hard pressed by poverty, sold it to a bookseller

for twelve scudi. In time it was bought from
the bookseller by Grand Duke Ferdinand III.
of Tuscany, who prayed before it night and
morning, taking it with him on his travels.
That picture is now in the Pitti Palace at
Florence and it is called the “Madonna del
Granduca.” The Berlin Museum purchased
a Raphael Madonna for $34,000 which was
painted about the same time as these
others, but after a little the artist left
Florence where he had been studying the
methods of Leonardo and Angelo and returned
to Urbino, the home he loved, where his conduct
was such that all the world seems to have
become his lover. It is written that he was
“the only very distinguished man of whom we
read, who lived and died without an enemy
or detractor!” No better can ever be said of
any one.

While he dwelt in Perugia and Urbino he
had painted the “Ansidei Madonna,” so called
because that was the name of the family for
which it was painted. That Madonna was
sold in 1884 to the National Gallery, by the
Duke of Marlborough for $350,000. A Madonna
on a round plaque-like canvas, 42-3/4 inches in
diameter, was bought by the Duke of Bridgewater
for $60,000. It is the “Holy Family
under a Palm Tree,” painted originally for a
friend, Taddeo Taddei, who was a Florentine
scholar. Many of the pictures which after many
vicissitudes have landed far from home and been

bought for fabulous sums were painted for love
of some friend, or were paid for by modest sums
at the time the artist received the commissions.
Lord Ellesmere in London now owns the
“Holy Family under a Palm Tree.”

It is said of Raphael that whenever another
painter, known to him or not, requested any
design or assistance of any kind at his hands,
he would invariably leave his work to perform
the service. He continually kept a large
number of artists employed, all of whom he
assisted and instructed with an affection which
was rather that of a father to his children than
merely of an artist to artists. From this it
followed that he was never seen to go to court,
except surrounded and accompanied, as he
left his house, by some fifty painters, all men
of ability and distinction, who attended him,
thus to give evidence of the honour in which
they held him. He did not, in short, live the
life of a painter, but that of a prince.

There is something wonderfully inspiring
about such a life. We read of emperors and
the homage paid to them; of the esteem in
which men who accomplish deeds of universal
value are held, but nowhere do we behold
the power of a beautiful and exquisite personality
and character, allied with a single art,
so impressively exhibited.

He urged nothing, yet won all things by the
force of his loving and sympathetic mind.
“How is it, dear Cesare that we live in such

good friendship, but that in the art of painting
we show no deference to each other?” he
asked of Cesare da Sesto, who was Da Vinci’s
greatest pupil.

In discussing the great ones of the earth,
Herman Grimm, son of the collector of fairy
tales, says: “Can we mention a violent act of
Raphael’s, Goethe’s or Shakespeare’s? No, it
is restful only to recall these wonderful men.”

One of Raphael’s most beautiful Virgins was
modeled from a beautiful flower-girl whom he
loved, “La Belle Jardinière.”

Raphael as well as Michael Angelo was
summoned by Pope Julius II., but how
different were the two occasions! Michael
Angelo had stood with dogged, gloomy self-assertiveness
before the pope, head covered,
knee unbent. Uncompromising, while yet no
injury had been done him, resentful before he
had received a single cause for resentment,
the attitude was typical of his art and his
unhappy life.

When Raphael appeared, his bent knee, his
“chestnut locks falling upon his shoulders,
the pope exclaimed: ‘ He is an innocent
angel. I will give him Cardinal Bembo for a
teacher, and he shall fill my walls with historical
pictures.'” The artist’s behaviour was no
sign of servility, but the simple recognition of
forms and customs which the people themselves
had made and by which they had decided they
should graciously be bound. The attitude of

Angelo was not heroic but vulgar; that of
Raphael not servile, but in good taste, showing
a reasonable mind.

Pope Julius had summoned Raphael for a
special reason. Alexander VI., his predecessor
in the Vatican, had been a depraved man.
The fair and virile Julius had a healthy
sentiment against occupying rooms which must
continually remind him of the notorious
Alexander’s mode of life. Some one suggested
that he have all the portraits of the former pope
removed, but Julius declared: “Even if the
portraits were destroyed, the walls themselves
would remind me of that Simoniac, that Jew!”
The word ‘Jew’ was then execrated by all
Christians, for the world was not yet Christian
enough to know better.

Raphael was summoned to decorate the
Vatican, that Julius might have a place which
reminded him not at all of Alexander. It is
said that when Raphael had completed one of
his masterpieces the pope threw himself upon
the ground and cried, “I thank Thee, God, that
Thou hast sent me so great a painter!”

While at work upon his first fresco at the
Vatican–“La Disputa,” the dispute over
the Holy Sacrament–Raphael met a woman
with whom he fell deeply in love. Her father
was a soda manufacturer and her name was
Margherita. Missirini relates this incident in
Raphael’s career.

“She lived on the other side of the Tiber.

A small house, No. 20, in the street of Santa
Dorothea, the windows of which are decorated
with a pretty frame work of earthenware,
is pointed out as the house where she was born.

“The beautiful girl was very frequently in
a little garden adjoining the house, where,
the wall not being very high, it was easy to see
her from the outside. So the young men,
especially artists–always passionate admirers
of beauty–did not fail to come and look at
her, by climbing up above the wall.

“Raphael is said to have seen her for the
first time as she was bathing her pretty feet
in a little fountain in the garden. Struck by
her perfect beauty, he fell deeply in love with
her, and after having made acquaintance with
her, and discovered that her mind was as
beautiful as her body, he became so much
attached as to be unable to live without her.”

She is spoken of to-day as the “Fornarina,”
because at first she was supposed to have
been the daughter of a baker (fornajo).

Raphael made many rough studies for his
picture “La Disputa,” and upon them he left
three sonnets, written to the woman so dear to
him. These sonnets have been translated by
the librarian of l’Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts,
as follows: “Love, thou hast bound me
with the light of two eyes which torment me,
with a face like snow and roses, with sweet
words and tender manners. So great is my
ardour that no river or sea could extinguish

my fire. But I do not complain, for my
ardour makes me happy…. How sweet
was the chain, how light the yoke of her
white arms about my neck. When these bonds
were loosed, I felt a mortal grief. I will say
no more; a great joy kills, and, though my
thoughts turn to thee, I will keep silence.”

Although he had been a man of many loves,
Raphael must have found in the manufacturer’s
daughter his best love, because he remained
faithful and devoted to her for the twelve
years of life that were left to him. It was said
some years later, while he was engaged upon a
commission for a rich banker, that “Raphael
was so much occupied with the love that he
bore to the lady of his choice that he could not
give sufficient attention to his work. Agostino
(the banker) therefore, falling at length into
despair of seeing it finished, made so many
efforts by means of friends and by his own care
that after much difficulty he at length prevailed
on the lady to take up her abode in his house,
where she was accordingly installed, in apartments
near those which Raphael was painting;
In this manner the work was ultimately brought
to a conclusion.”

Raphael painted this beautiful lady-love
many times, and in a picture in which she
wears a bracelet he has placed his name upon
the ornament.

After this time he painted the “Madonna
della Casa d’Alba,” which the Duchess d’Alba

gave to her physician for curing her of a grave
disorder. She died soon afterward, and the
physician was arrested on the charge of having
poisoned her. In course of time the picture
was purchased for $70,000 by the Russian
Emperor, and it is now in “The Hermitage,”
St. Petersburg.