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CrKllBLR i BAHR.LE- [E= Pi o ■fJ ■a \ ■r P '-CieV !>" -M^^^"^ ^ "C^^^ ^ '4 X i?**^ TffilE FI^-BIMG OF MOS] U . 3 , liitematioiijil Exliiljitioii laV 6 , FIE]ElD)iIN(& TMIE gACRIEB JIIBIS m THE ULiS OFKAIitJJAC. j.KBBIE &HAKK1E ~^ ^iL-^' .J JDLtJtjINt,£NG ]L A Fltii:yi] M 1 ]l:!^ K ]1^] IP © S E U.S. International Exhibihon 1876. " /■i-t fJt I 1 ipr /"* rf^ll THE AMERICAN SOLLUEE. J , C. . j'jjte'uiali DTial E.)iliuu lloiL 18 7 (i E5 ea ■0 < ^ n TME KEABIlEf© GIIMvIL, V. 3 JntBTimtioiial ExlialJitioiL 187 ij l;F, lll'.l r: " l-IAKlilE 5^ Q 5 H ?P < 01 III ,1 ' IE &EMIIUS OIF §T!EAR1« , in1j:iiiiiiion.al ExhibltLo:! 1876 CJEB15IE aJriW^RIi: pil- Q r N "i;-.* & °«1s s M g ;9 % m !J S, IxLtsiuation-al Exjtji in iioii..l876. THE GENIUS OF ELECTRICITY. FROM THE STATUE BT ANTONIO ■ ROSETTI , ROME. OTllBBI B ci B.AF-j.: < h o w ■(3 o B CD S S S A 'llllHii i\ n V. n 1^ g o tc Fine Art OF THE International Exhibition EDWARD STRAHAN. Vol. 1, Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year iSjSi ^y GEBBIE &■ BARRIE, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. %!# The International Exhibition, 1876. |HE people of the nineteenth century find themselves inherit&rs of the great classical revival of the beginning of that century. An American, West ; a Frenchman, David ; and a German, Mengs, led the aesthetic taste of the civilized world in 1800. Every art-school, as has been well observed, starts from a pagan revival or renaissance. There is, as it were, a fund of the vital principle in Greek sculpture and Roman mural painting and Attic vase-painting which immediately goes to work and fortifies a fresh school of plastic, just so soon as any accident brings the work of the ancients promi- nently before people's attention. At different times the resuscitation of Greek specimens creates the career of Nicolo in Pisa, of Leonardo in Milan, of Michael Angelo in the Medici gardens, of Raphael when he enfranchises him- self from Perugia, of Poussin on leaving France, of Albert Diirer on reaching Venice, of Velasquez in Spain, of Rubens in Antwerp, as well as of our triad of painters, Mengs, West and David. David, then, in France, and West, in England, were restoring classical art with all their force at the beginning of this country's career. . But what is art? A convenient definition, one which Taine the critic is fond of using, we owe to one who never meddled with paints or marble, who was not, correctly speaking, either a painter or a sculptor, yet who helped on the cause of art in his day with an energy of practice and a blaze of enthu- siasm which has rarely been equaled before or since. This was Benvenuto Cellini, the immortal jeweler of the sixteenth century; and he says in effect that FINE ART. the aim of art is "to produce a representation of a beautiful human figure, with correctness of design and in a graceful attitude." If we can approve this definition, and keep it in mind, it will greatly simplify our estimate of the men and works we shall have to examine during our excursion in the paths of modern art. It is a definition that would have been approved, without much modification, by both the able artists who started our century for us. David found the French captivated by the shepherdess-pictures of Boucher and Fra- gonard. He found them insisting that art was clouds, art was gauze, art was roses, art was hearts and darts, art was Cupids and nymphs disporting in the sky, art was idiots in white satin who pretended they were herdsmen, art was amorous ladies and sexless creatures in silken breeches vacantly giggling in flowery gardens, art was the beauties of the Pare anx Cerfs, the ephemeral etchings of Madame de Pompadour, the sweet, liquid Elysium of Watteau. David met this warm, steamy, enervated tide of feeling, and said coldly, ''Art is the representation of beautiful human figures, with correctness of design and in noble attitudes;" and by uttering this theory with perseverance and distinct- ness he completely stifled a whole national school of painting and sculpture, set in motion an influence that is perfectly distinct in his country to this day, and spliced again a cord that was being frittered and fretted away by the French of his time — the cord, I would say, that united the art of France with the great classical line of art; for the fine arts, if we take this direction of them and consider it the central direction, stretch back in one unbroken thread through Italy and antiquity. There is not the slightest break — from David to his master, Vien, who expressed some recognition of classical correctness at a time when the shepherdesses were all in favor, and antique art was a bore, who spent much of his time in Rome, and who was beggared by the. Revolution — from Vien to Poussin, who tried his best to make an Italian of himself, and was glad to clean the brushes of Domenichino — from him to the grand masters, Raphael, Leonardo, Angelo, who indeed married Clerical Art (the art of the churches) with their left hands, but gave their right hands and their whole hearts to the pagan renaissance of their day, and whose schoolmasters were the Greek statues which the spade then turned out hour by hour in the teeming soil of Italy — from Italy to Italy's political captive and intellectual conqueror, Greece, and from Greece to her mysterious old oracle, Egypt. There is not the slightest THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. logical hiatus from Egypt four thousand years ago to David in 1800, and from David to Ingres and Gerome, if we take this clear definition of classical art, that it is " ike representation of beautiful human figures with correctness of design and in noble atti- tudes!' If we take any other definition we shall find the thread very short. If we say it is Christian asceticism, we shall indeed see it most profoundly express- ed by Diirer and Fra Angelico, but it is doomed to come to a sudden end when the hot vital flame of the pagan renaissance touches the thread. If we call it mere compo- sition and light-and- shade — picturesque- ness, in fact — it shows what won- ders it can do un- der Rembrandt, but is unable to assert itself in any long Aurora : jf, A. Bailly, Sc. coherence or his- tory; if we call it landscape sentiment, we find it goes back but a little way, and under Hobbema and Ruisdall soon drowns itself in a Dutch canal ; if we call it still-life, it reaches its highest development among the Dutch flower- painters, and buries itself, as Edmond About says, in a Rot- terdam tulip. These specialties make very large claims now-a-days, and have influential schools — flower- painting and "still- life," among the vase - painters and panel-decorators ! — " picturesqueness, " among the etchers and workers on the illustrated press! — Christian acerbity, among the pre-Raphaelites !— and landscape, among the hosts of practitioners. To talk to any of these specialists, alone by himself, you would fancy there was no other kind of art. But the art of tradition and history is the art which FINE ART. Cellini loved with all his passion and all his turbulence ; and this is the art of "representing a beautiful human figure with correctness of design and in a graceful attitude!' Under this tradition, beautified from old Greece and ennobled from Egypt, Art has completely filled the south of Europe with a bland, lambent, civilizing wave of feeling. Classical art, coming from Egypt and Etruria, invaded Italy with a hundred thousand marble statues ; dived under the soil, and reappeared in Raphael ; spread eastward to Venice, to revel in the luxury there ; took a northward turn, and inspired Correggio in Parma and Rubens in Flanders ; and so, modified according to race and clime, visited the grave hidalgos, and overshadowed the easels of Murillo and Velasquez ; came finally to France, and found a witty nation industriously worshipping artificial flowers. Here, in the person of David, it struck down frivolity as with an arm of marble, and pre- pared the foundations of the greatest school of art at present existing. Thus is art homogeneous and continuous in the south of Europe. All the while there was, lying in the cold water, and separated from the European continent by an apparatus of chopping, perpendicular waves which the best sailors have not often been able to regard without nausea — an island, which it is impossible for us to regard with indifference, because it is our parent. This island was called Albion, Angle-land or England. It had always given the Continent a great deal of trouble. Caesar went over and made it partly an Italian island ; Saint Austin went over and made it partly a Christian island ; William of Normandy went over and made it partly a French island ; none of which reforms are to our purpose until Benjamin West in 1763 put on his broadbrim and went over and helped to make it an island of painters. The history of England, in relation to European civilization, has been most singular. Although insulated by the sea, England has never been willing to remain detached from the great mental movements of Christendom. Full of originality and the instinct to express herself, she mingled forcibly with all the politics of the Continent ; she visited and colonized savage shores in every part of the globe, until to-day, bursting out of Britain to stretch herself over India, she is, as Disraeli says, an oriental rather than a European power. The moment printing was invented she took her place at the head of modern letters ; but in Art her development was extremely fitful and peculiar. THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. Let us not for an instant surmise that the Saxon or Gothic mind is inca- pable of art; the cathedrals of Germany and England show a race artistically equal — at the time when cathedrals were the expression of art — with the Latin race. But England, at the great revival of oil-painting, was found in a very strange attitude. Conscious of noble deeds and personal worth, fond of visiting but remote from visitors, she needed above all things the portrait-painter. For y. IV. CItmnpney, Pinx. / 'an !ngen &■ Sttyder, EHg. ' Your Good Health!" a long time, instead of forming her own celebrators, advertisers, commemora- tors— whatever we choose to call them— she summoned them from the ends of the earth. Zucchero was sent for from Italy to paint Queen Elizabeth, as Holbein had been sent for from Augsburg to paint Henry VIII ; Vandyck was tempted from Antwerp to paint Charles I, as Lely was, from the virtues and the sugar-cured hams of Westphalia, to paint Nelly Gwyn. At the close of the last century, however, one great native uavie in portraiture had risen into FINE ART. full renown : Reynolds had represented with superb talent the heroes of the Augustan age, and he was an Englishman. Unsurpassable in portrait, Reynolds was a tyro in all else ; if he tried an ideal scene, it would be good in so far as it depended upon the attributes of portraiture, and entirely wanting in force 10 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. for its other attributes. Beside him and his rival in portraiture, Gainsborough, and the splendid satirist, Hogarth, the artists of the country were hardly noticed; there was nobody fit to assert seriously and effectively the principles of classical art, and there never had been — nobody able to paint the grand English battles, nobody capable of placing a Christian lesson in fresco, with any beauty, in the domes of the churches. Dazzled by the splendor of Reynolds's genius, and drilled by the influence of all the English tradition, which had been pouring imported portraitists into the land for full three hundred years — ''Portraiture I' said the people, "is Art, and Art is Portraiture." "Not quite so,'' said West, in effect, as he stepped quietly upon the scene : ''Art is the representation of human beauty, ideally perfect in design, graceful and noble in attitude." That was what West had to say; that was the eternal burden of his -preaching. He was a man of influence and success in his day, and England would have done well if she could have carried out her academic education on his line. Not a great man, nor a perfectly successful follower of Beauty, he was eminently sane and sensible. He invented the camera obscura; he had the pleasure of making Reynolds wince, by venturing to paint "The Death of Wolfe" with the innovation of modern uniforms, instead of Roman garments. His whole course of work was a standing rebuke to the undisciplined fancies of FusELi. As for portraiture, he cheapened that by painting very poor like- nesses himself It is safe to say that he gave the nation more ideas in the way of balanced composition, elegance, sound training, and conception of the great thoughts of the renaissance, than she had had up to his time. Under his presidency the Academy was a safe school for the study of human beauty, of accomplished design and of grace in attitude. Unfortunately, however, what he could teach and what he knew was not quite represented in what he wrought. His works are left; his teaching is forgotten. His influence was a strong one for half a century; but the English nation could not long rest in the spirit of his teachings, and the ~ school of West, after correcting Fuseli, extinguishing Barry, and giving a fair start to Allston and Trumbull, fell into utter despair, and blew out its brains in Haydon. English art took up the anecdotic vein of Hogarth, which was followed with ability by Wilkie and Mulready. Its land- scape school, invented by Wilson, became accomplished in Constable, incom- mensurable in Turner. On the death lately of Maclise — a rather weak, FINE ART. II distorted reflection of Paul Delaroche — the last classic tradition seemed to die out. The prominent men of the moment, like Hunt and Millais, are experi- menters, chercheurs. Except Leighton, there is scarce any one capable oi putting up a correct frescoed figure in an archway of the Kensington Museum. The development of the nation, taking another of its strange caprices, has gone over to industrial art. There is not an Englishman now living whose endeavor could be said to be, in Cellini's sense, to represent a beautiful human figure, with correctness of design and in a graceful attitude. That was the way in which our century of art was started for us in the two foremost countries of the world. West and David, in their day, met on equal terms, and West received an ovation in the Louvre. Both are bywords of a slight contempt in the mouths of unthinking persons now, but not in those of considerate men. They found it their business to take their two nations by the shoulders, break off old habits suddenly, and set them in the eternal way of art, the one way that has produced great works in time gone by — the study of beautiful human form, correct design, graceful composition. They wished to knit the career of their countries to the great fabric of art which has come unbroken from antiquity. The corresponding influence was exerted at the same time on Germany by Raphael Mengs, who walked with all the accuracy at his command in the footsteps of Raphael Sanzio. He painted with the search for classic beauty, and he founded the Dresden Gallery of anrique statuary. That was the spirit of 1800 — a revival of classicism. West's light went out completely in England and this country; but in France, the torch brandished by David was never quite suffered to drop to the ground. His principles are assiduously practised at this moment ; and France, let us confess, is the first art-producing country to-day. It has taken some little time thus to set up these two worthies firmly on their legs. But it seemed worth while to do so, because a period has now supervened when painters trade on very limited specialties, making reputations out of some small attainment that would only be a fraction of the discipline of a thorough-going classic ardst. But, as we have just said, the traditions of David still form an equipment for various painters of reputation in the country he adorned. It must not be supposed, however, that David was quite alone. There is a whole group of artists belonging to the epoch of the French Revo- 12 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. lution, whose works compare together with a certain harmony. There was Gerard, whose " Cupid and Psyche" is a painting that suggests some pure, cold group of ancient sculpture ; there was Prudhon, whose faces caught the subtle, penetrating smile so often represented in the works of Correggio. Of Prud- hon's women, a critic has said, they are grisettes, of the Restoration period, but designed by a painter of Athens ; and there was Girodet, a ripe and classic draftsman, but afflicted in his coloring with a tinge of green ; of whose famous Bible scene delineating the Flood, Thackeray remarks that it is a venerable man in a green Deluge, clinging to a green tree in a green old age. FINE ART. 13 The way in which David's time connects with our own time may be quite simply explained. Only lately, in 1867, died the most faithful of his pupils, the great painter Ingres. We know of no specimen of Ingres in this country 14 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. except lithographic studies of his figures ; but who that has seen it can forget his dignified "Apotheosis of Homer," painted for a ceiHng in the Louvre, but replaced by a copy on account of its singular value. In this great compo- sition, amidst Homer and his fellow-bards, sit two woman-forms, supposed to represent the Iliad and the Odyssey. The sacred anger of the warlike Iliad, the deep fatigue of the travel-tossed Odyssey, are something memorable ; they look like grand primitive nymphs, conceived in the same spirit that designed the vast Fates of the Parthenon. These two female forms, in their austerity and uncontaminated beauty, remind us strongly of Delaroche's woman-spirits, depicted in the central part of his principal work, "The Hemicycle." The figures by Delaroche we refer to are those intended for Greece, Rome and Fame. In Delaroche we have nearly the same largeness of style as in Ingres — Titan women, each filled and inspired with a single idea. We look at the women of Ingres — such as we have named and such as his exquisite Fountain (or La Source) — at the women of Delaroche, finding in them a something that is not of our time, a something learned from the plain, grand Past, and we say. For this thank master David. Observe, there is a certain advance in these figures beyond the loftiest thoughts ever reached by David; but the direction is the same ; it is not that a disciple is never to get beyond his teacher. David, in all he did, kept much of the rigidity, the uncomfortable determination never to be caught napping, which always marks the schoolmaster. But shall not the pupil, crowned with honor and sympathy, keep up a veneration for the wise and cautious old pedagogue ? We will just mention some others in whom we believe the school of David to be kept up or produced. Delaroche — his works, his Death of Elizabeth, his Execution of Jane Gray, his Princes in the Tower, his Hcinicyclc, are quite familiar from engravings — kept the accent of David quite as plainly as he did that of his master, Gros. The clean drawing of David has cast an influence on the Hebe, the Beatrice and the Marguerite of Ary Scheffer; it has not been for nothing in the elegant work of Gleyre — you remember his pictures, the Separation of the Apostles, the Pompeian girls washing an infant, and resem- bling ivory statuettes, in the gallery of Mr. Johnston, of New York ; and above all, his masterpiece, one of the loveliest dreams ever fastened upon canvas, the scene where an old poet sits alone on the shore, while past him floats a boat FINE ART. IS in which all the muses are singing. It lingers in the highly-finished work of Leopold Robert, whose fame rests chiefly on his Fishermen of the Adriatic and the other pendants of that fine group of three pictures, where the life of modern Italy is treated with the balanced harmony of antique bas-reliefs. It is shown most clearly in the classic work of Gerome and all his school — he and they the most legitimate descendants of David; yes, in the noble and sculp- tural composition of the Death of Ccesar; in the Gladiators hailing Vitellius in the Amphitheatre, in the Alcibiades, the King Candaules, and all that line of paintings of the most eminent living classicist, a clear ray of illumination from the age of the renaissance is visible. Another painter, who has not forgotten this academic influence, though he takes vast liberties in making use of it, is Couture. His masterpiece, the Decadence of the Roman Empire, is a vast colora- tion of Veronese-gray, spotted here and there with rich blots of brilliancy, like ribbons on a plain dress. The figures are Hfe-size, and subjected, without slavish fidelity, to the rules of classic design. Another classicist, of singular chaste elegance, is Flandrin. His frescoes in the old church of Saint Germain- des-Pres are masterpieces of thoughtful simplicity, while he is most analytical in portraiture, and his likeness of Napoleon III makes the emperor look like the very serpent of wisdom. Cabanel is a classicist in about the same degree as Couture, though in a diff"erent way. His feeling ot grace is very exquisite, to an almost effeminate degree ; his conception of Venus is tender as a rose- leaf, soft as marrow, without any notion of the dignity of a Queen of Love. His Florentine Poet, Nymph and Faun, and Aglaia are exquisitely beautiful. Baudry is a painter almost the equal of Cabanel ; his Fortune and the Infant, at the Luxembourg, is a luscious piece of flesh-modeling; and his interior deco- rations of the new opera-house are exceedingly choice. Bouguereau and Merle are pseudo-classic in taste, exhibiting to the full that preponderating search for elegant form which shows that the classic graft has taken firmly, and altered the nature of the sap in the whole tree. Their style, shows, too, that waxy smoothness adopted by the prize scholars who have been sent to Rome, in imitation of Raphael and of Angelo. When such scholars return to Paris they are called Italians, and wear their nickname often for ever. Their pictures, if they go on showing the recollection ot the antique rather than a feeling for modern life, are called academic studies, or academies, whatever they may rep- i6 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. resent. Hebert, with his lovely, consumptive Italian girls, devoured by the malaria; and Bonnat, with his healthy, rich transcripts of peasant life in Italy, are a pair of admirable painters, whose works, however, can seldom be found in this country. And so the influence of the antique dies gradually away, over a line of artists of great personal force and originality, like the great Decamps, or like Jules Breton, who paints the poetry of pastoral life so tenderly, or like Millet, who paints its grime, its cark and care. In these painters there is but a faint reflection of the Greek, or of the dictum of Benvenuto. The reader may have been surprised at our tracing a resemblance to David in Ary Scheffer, in Cabanel ; but these resemblances seem like identity itself Blanche Nevin, Sc. Cinderella. when we think of the contrasts off'ered by the rebels to his school. Think of Delacroix, with his turbulent riot of color and form. It is the property of an academy, we may say, to succeed not only by its successes but by the reac- tions against it. Victor Hugo would not have been so great a dramatist but for the protest he felt against the classic stage. So Delacroix was forced by classicism into his full power and glory of counteraction. The classical painters indeed seem to stand together in a mass, when we compare them with Dela- croix, or with Courbet, who paints with massive, vulgar strength the life of the senses; or with Manet, who was told in despair by his master, Gleyre, ''You will be the Michael Angelo of bad art!'' or with the landscape specialists, like Rousseau, Dupre, Pasini, and Belly ; or with the incident-painters, the reporters FINE ART. 17 i8 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. or journalists of the brush, who have painted on every battle-field, from Vernet in Africa to Yvon in the Crimea. ViBERT and Zamacois are anecdotic or incident painters of another sort, the latter now deceased, all too early. His dwarfs and courtiers and monks, his matchless Education of a Prince, show how his thoughts and genius survive him, still lively and alert. The last great promise to go out in death was Regnault, who seemed to have the world of art at his feet. As Zamacois came from Spain to fight the Prussians, so did Regnault participate in the glory and sadness of the war. In the last sortie from Paris, when the order was given to fall back, his undaunted spirit caused him reluctantly to obey, and linger for "one shot more," which cost him his life, and us the young and talented artist. Tennyson lately, in dedicating to the Queen his completed collection of "Idylls," took occasion to speak of "art with poisoned honey stolen from France," an allusion which it would be hard for him to justify, because very litde of the French art-method, whether it be poisonous or not, has ever got into England in any way. But the laureate has an old grudge against the French nation, which he cannot allude to without the least little delicate aqui- line curl of a sensitive nose ; and perhaps, after all, he was not speaking of the fine arts, to which he seems never to have paid any attention, but of dramas or romances. We are about to leave art in France, at any rate, whether dangerous or not, and say a few words about a new art-development which is attracting attention under the name of the Roman school. It must be called the Roman school because the practitioners are Spaniards. The geographical name is a poor one at any rate, and we had better allude to the school as the members themselves designate it, as the school of the spot — the spot or blot, or, in the French language, the tache. It is to be observed that one great and unexpected benefit of the French Academy has accrued in the education it has given to other nations. Paris has been of late years filled with strangers of every race, who have brouo-ht into the atelier some of their national artistic habits, and have looked at the model in a different way from the way of the French. Thus does a great academy receive the benefit of new suggestions in return for the .routine benefit she confers. FINE ART. 19 Among these foreign students were Hollanders, recollecting the secret of the old Holland school, which sees nature in a succession of taches, which reckons the tree standing against the sky, the herd moving in the lush pasture, the distant windmill printed against the vapors of a watery cHmate, not as so many rotundities, but as blots against the groundwork ; that, in fact, is the true impression made upon the optical sense, rather than the impression of relief or modeling, which is the result of experience and calculation. The Holland painters, in their masterly simplicity, often had the courage to paint nature precisely as they found it printed on the eye, as a composition of color-patches. Something of this kind had been going on in the history of Spanish art. Cer- tain masters of Spain, by the exclusive study of "values," had arrived at a method of translating all the flash of open-air color upon the canvas. Values, you know, are the degrees and reliefs which one tint makes against another or against a deeper or lighter shade of itself The Spaniard Zurbaran's painting is "melted," as the critics express it, "in a certain interior flame;" and Goya's shadows are broad blotted suffusions. Now, a classical painter, like Poussin, lookino- at a group or at any kind of scene, pays special attention to the sweep and meaning of the boundary-lines dividing the objects. To dwell upon this and refine upon it, as the classicists do, is almost inevitably to forget the pursuit of values, the relief of shad^ upon shade. The new school trains the eye differently. Look, now, upon the scene as a simple mosaic of spots ; get the exact tone, the precise degree of light or dark, the actual way in which one color relieves against or reflects from another ; make yourself thoroughly impartial ; a lady's face is before you : think of it as if it were a figure in a kaleidoscope, but study the shapes made by the high-lights against the planes of the features, and the precise boundary and tone of the shadow. A child is playing in a garden ; study him as if he were a bouquet of roses, but place him in his exact relations of tone with the shrubbery and the sky. By watching in this spirit, you surprise nature at her secret tricks ; you find how she gives emphasis to a tint by an extremely subtile contrast, by saving herself up for the point of greatest brilliancy and purest delivery of the color; you notice how objects placed together reflect mutually a thousand audacious hues. Now paint these things as a study of tints, and as a study of light and shade, getting each hue into place in its proper situation, size and outline, hardly knowing 20 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. whether you are painting a lady or a camel. You must not set down the tints you see in the open air, neither; they will not produce the effect of nature so. Painting is not materializing colors : it is translation ; chiaroscuro is not matching values: it is translating them. To succeed in all this, you will have your hands pretty full ; and you will have been a pretty good draftsman if, while attending almost entirely to your patches, you have produced a figure Emily Sartain, Pinx. t-an litgen Gr Snyder, Jiti£^, The Reproof. that will pass muster in drawing. If you succeed, you have turned out a study a la tache. Now, Rembrandt could make a figure look bright by manipulating his shadows into that tremendous depth he uses. Boldini will make a figure look bright when relieved against a brilliant light-blue sky, and without putting a speck of black in his picture. Boldini, by-the-by, is driven to strange expe- dients in translating (that is the word, not rendering) the reliefs of nature. In FINE ART. 21 an example of Mr. Cutting's, the lady's satin dresses are set upon a local back- ground as opaque and inky as the inkiest shadows sometimes employed by the Hungarian painter Munkacsy. Painting "by the spots" need not be done in splendid colors either. The photograph is one of the best proficients of the 22 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. whole school, and the photograph works in monochrome. Nothing can exceed the calmness with which the photographs will blend and lose outline in the abandoned pursuit of values. Set photography to copying a number of persons scattered over a hill, getting berries or nuts. You probably cannot tell whether the objects in the picture are people or rocks, or incidents of the ground; but the values are relatively right; trust the camera for that. Photography has in this way been a foster-father to the school, and given it many a hint. Some of the practitioners are by no means colorists. Madrazo paints under a veil, sometimes, of light blue or purple ; perhaps he has been fond of watching the broadened, "unified" values in moonlight. Now when to pro- ficiency in^ translating the spots, you intend to add proficiency in expression and character, a sense of beauty, and the plastic feeling for elegant form, you had better prepare yourself by being a great man beforehand. You must draw so easily and well that you scarcely think of it as you carelessly sketch with your felicitously-chosen colors ; you must color so naturally and easily and happily that you know just what two colors to blend for your tint, and what the proportion, by a second nature. Of course, if you are working to get the richness and directness of nature's colors, you never mix more than two paints together; and you cannot go over and mend and pare your outline, for mixing the wet tints kills the color. The truth is, in practice, a good picture in this style must be made over and over again. It is thus that Fortuny is said to have worked ; he made a study in light and shade, or repeated studies in color, ruthlessly sacrificing all but the ultimate picture, when the patchwork of blots is struck on in just the right way, so as to be perfect in color, perfect in values, perfect in relief, and at the same time masterly in expression and drawing. The utterly careless-looking sketch of Fortuny's you are looking at may have been tried for again and again, like throwing a handfiil of darts through a quantity of rings — only when all the rings are filled and all the darts are gone home is the task perfect. It was such results as this that Regnault had been studying in Fortuny's Roman studio, when he wrote, as we find it in his cor- respondence from Rome, "Oh, Fortuny, you keep me from sleeping!" "Ah, Fortuny, ta m'empeches de dormir !" We will quote the words of a late French critic, in balancing the good and evil of the method in question : "These youthful inventors work in imitation of certain Spanish masters. They sacrifice to color FINE ART. 23 their drawing, their relief and their perspective, in hopes of preserving with greater freshness the tint, the blot, to use the conventional expression. It would be too foolish to argue about this determined exclusion of modeling and paint- ing; we will not reckon up all the qualities which make of this art something quite differently undertaken, and which fill it with a new order of difficulties. It is a mania, and time will judge it, alas ! quickly enough. Speaking for our- selves alone, we feel that we are the contemporaries, the accomplices of these improvisations played upon the pencil ; they bring out with a few touches certain accents of modern, contemporary life, and we cannot help finding more or less attraction in them." The Spanish-Roman mode of painting is an example of the kind of spurts which take place in the career of art, whose progress advances not so much by a uniform flowing movement as by a series of ebullitions. A young painter has been struck by some unnoticed aspect of nature, or by an old master's picture in a gallery ; he talks about it in his club, paints a few novel-looking studies, excites the emulation of his friends, and behold the formation of a fresh sect! Thus the young Mariano Fortuny, having observed an effect of light in a Peter De Hooge, and a dash of color in a Herrera, was equipped for the revelation of the "splashy" school. Similarly, in England, thirty years since, it occurred very suddenly to Gabriel Rossetti and Millais that the masters who wrought before the time of Raphael were sincerer copyists of nature than the great Renaissance painters, and safer examples for a tyro to follow. They began to work according to their convictions, and formed the school of the "pre-Raphaelites." The term pre-Raphaelite is a misnomer (besides its awkwardness of form), for the practitioners in question do not pretend to follow the technical methods of the artists who preceded Raphael. They simply emulate the faithfulness and literal fidelity of those pioneers, while they freely deal in subjects con- nected with our own more complicated civilization. They apply the keen literal eyesight of Perugino and Masaccio to topics which would have made Perugino and Masaccio stare. Their peculiarity is their minute copy-work after nature as they see it. This addiction has given some of them a curious leaning towards the minutiae of natural objects. If Millais paints the drowning of Ophelia, we shall find Ophelia not so much the heroine of the scene as the 24 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. foliage of Ophelia's willow. The copy-work of nature is true beauty — nature not selected, nor cured of her irregularities and defects. Millais had rather copy an English girl's face for an Eastern scene than imagine an Oriental one ; and this, artistically, is right enough. In his drawing of the " Pearl of Great Price," the good man who sells his all for the jewel is an Orien- tal, but his daughter standing by his side is a London house- maid. Other pre- Raphaelites, how- ever, are more scru- pulous than this ; they must not only have a model to copy literally, but they will go to the ends of the earth to obtain the proper one. We have had described to us with minute and inti- mate good-fellow- ship the handsome young Jewish car- penter of Bethle- hem, from whom iJllill'W.'iBiiiailllWIhliill I y. i. Hartley. Sc. The Little Samaritan. Holman Hunt paints his concep- tion of the Saviour. This is well ; but Mr. Hunt goes much further : for his picture of "The Awakened Con- science" he painted his background in a maison damnee ; and we grieve to think of the incon- venience to which he would put him- self if anybody should give him an order to paint the casting out of Mary Magdalen's seven devils or the shear- ing of Samson's locks. There are certain respects in which the British pre-Raphaelites follow their exemplars to a degree of pernicious fidelity; the masters before Raphael never thought of imitating atmospheric effect ; it was the Venetians, with their love of landscape backgrounds, and Rubens, with his Flemish traditions, and Velasquez, who developed to a high degree the soft breathable sense of air in a picture, and the film of atmospheric distance FINE ART. 25 26 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. which we feel to stretch between ourselves and any scene we contemplate in nature. When a lover of pictures learns to appreciate this quality in a work of art he is always on the lookout for it, and always miserable if he misses it. But most of the pre-Raphaelites paint away in perfect serenity without it, as their models, Perugino and Lippi and Giotto, did in their time. We in America have had a very imperfect opportunity to contemplate the works of the English school. Some few years back, an importation was made of important English oil-paintings, and many of our readers will remember how they used to admire them arranged at the old Academy of Fine Arts on Chestnut Street — the knightly grace of "Prince Hal," assuming the Crown, from the scene in Shakespeare, the minute carefulness of Holman Hunt's scene from the "Eve of Saint Agnes," and the pathos of "Romeo and Juliet in the Tomb," by Leighton. The attempt to open a commerce in English pictures, in quantity, has not been attempted since. Mr. Henry Blackburn, it is true, lately brought over a quantity of good examples of the British water- color school ; but difficulties with the custom-house have prevented a repetition of the experiment. The English are high appreciators and devoted buyers of the worthier works of their own countrymen, and purchase them at rates which exclude competition from abroad, so that British pictures are confined to Britain with a strictness known to no other national school of art. In noticing these successive upheavals in the geology of painting, it is impossible to omit allusion to the Munich school. Munich is to-day the most formidable rival of Paris as a centre of art, so far as its power to draw off the young students of America is concerned. About half a century ago Ludwig of Bavaria built the Glyptothek, or sculpture-museum, in the capital of his state, and this edifice was followed by an Odeon, a Pinathokek or picture-museum, and the Walhalla at Ratisbon. Cornelius, as Director, raised the Academy of Arts to a pitch of great eminence, and his successor, Kaul- bach, continued to give the city prominence as an art-source, by his very imaginative and inventive but ill-colored works. It only remained for Piloty, in somewhat later times, to assert his claims as a colorist, for the school to unite every kind of importance as an educational nucleus. We shall revert immediately to Munich art in considering the talent of its pupil Maekart. It remains to notice, as the completion of the list of schools tliat have obtained FINE ART. 27 special attention here of late years, the Dusseldorf school, which burst upon America all in a mass a few years before the civil war, in the large collection of large pictures exhibited in Broadway, New York, and is already sunk in oblivion, — and the Belgian school, which has turned out, at its headquarters in Brussels, works by Leys, Alfred Stevens, Gallait and Knaus, worthy to rank with any productions of the time. To revert to the Munich school : its most classical living practitioner is Karl Piloty, and its most adventurous offshoot is probably John or Hans Maekart. It is easy to recall specimens now-a-days to the recollection of almost any wide-awake person who "lives in the world," because the subjects at least of all good works are, by means of prints and photographs, so widely dissemi- nated. Many readers will accordingly remember Piloty by such compositions as his "Assassination of Caesar" and his "Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn." His pupil, Maekart, has taken wider flights. He attacks nature on its decorative side, and paints works whose destination, like the works of the Venetian artists, is primarily that of making fine rooms look finer. We are here, be it noted, at the very antipodes of the pre-Raphaelite Englishman, the motive of whose work is to make the spectator think, to persuade him to be indifferent to apparent ugliness, and to chain his attention to some problem of character or intellect. The first works of Maekart's seen in this country were a large pair called "Abundantia," representing the riches of the sea and land respectively, brought over last winter, and exhibited for a season in New York. For splendor of ornamental effect it is safe to say that nothing to equal them has ever been imported to our shores. With a dazzled pleasure that excluded minute attention, the eye grasped a cluster of soft colossal female forms, playing with shells or fruits, displaying the richest lustres of blonde flesh and gorgeous tissues, and revealing here and there, by a happy ingenuity, the flash of the gold ground on which the figures were painted. These were works of his youth, executed for the dining-hall of a particular house, and not intended to be judged by the strictest rules of plastic accuracy. On examination the eye could detect many a lapse of drawing, which seemed, however, not so much a want of ability as a condition of voluptuous carelessness, and a desire to fasten the color and the impression in all its freshness immediately upon the canvas. To the painter's youth 28 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. likewise belongs his composition of "The Seven Sins." Another of his works is "The Cleopatra," another "The Triumph of Ariadne." His "Catherine Cornaro," of which we give, from the original in the 1876 International Exhibition, the only cut that the public has seen, and a very good one — is perhaps his masterpiece. It seems to be inspired by the happiest influence from Paul Veronese, and plays the same part as one of that master's crowded compositions in elevating the mind to a state of proud and noble happiness by the contemplation of an ideal festival-world bathed in heaven's own silver F. D. MiiUt, Pinx. . In the Bay of Naples. light. The subject is that fair Venetian who endowed Venice with the realm of Cyprus. Catherine Cornaro, a noblewoman of Venice about the middle of tlie fifteenth century, became the wife and widow of the Cyprian king, James de Lusignan. After ruling the island as queen for a quarter of a century, she at length conferred the island on her native country by abdication — certainly the queenliest gift that Venice ever received. The painter in dealing with the subject has pleased his fancy with the various sumptuous images evoked by this passage of history — the singular idea of a lonely lady governing the island consecrated to Venus from the earliest dawn of fable, and then by a feminine caprice of abnegation giving up her state and becoming once more a FINE ART. 29 Venetian republican. He accordingly represents her seated on a wharf, whence steps descend into the sea, and whither the argosies of Venice direct their sails. Maidens kneel at her feet to offer her flowers and treasure; a statesman like a Venetian doge stands at the right hand of her throne ; her courtiers G. IV. Mayrutrd, Pinx. J776. y. Roe. Eng. are women; torms of beauty surround her on every side; musicians peal out her praises through their instruments of gold. It is the pomp and wealth of the Renaissance in Venice. The appearance of this picture definitely secured for Maekart the esteem of his fellow artists, and made friends of some of his previous enemies, the critics. Among the latter, Bruno Meyer, who had 36 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. spoken very severely about some of the artist's earlier work, declared that Paul Veronese's paintings must have looked like this when they were fresh from the easel. Another great pupil of Munich and Piloty is here represented by Wagner's "Chariot Race," a picture already somewhat familiar to the American public by means of Moran's admirable etching of this masterpiece of modern genius. The admirers of the spirited etching have now the pleasure of beholding the original painting in all its beauty of color, and while dazzled with its action and splendor, will not forget the success of the American interpreter in his dashing engraving. When Romulus induced the Sabine women to come to Rome, it was to see the chariot-racing that those ladies trusted themselves in the city of the "Sanctuary," and this, according to the legend, was the first circus, or exhibition for horse-racing, ever held. Another legend' informs us that L. Tarquinius, about 600 B. c, commemorated his success in arms by an exhibition of races and athletic sports in the Murcian Valley, in which temporary platforms were erected by individuals for personal, family or friends' use. These platforms surrounding the course gave place, before the death of Tarquinius, to a per- manent building with regular tiers of seats in the manner of a theatre ; to this the name of "Circus Maximus" was subsequently given, but it was more generally known as the Circus, because it surpassed in extent and splendor all other similar buildings. A few masses of rubble-work in a circular form are now shown the visitor in Rome, as all that remains of the ever-famous Circus Maximus ; and although there were a considerable number of buildings of a like nature in Rome, they are all destroyed now, with the exception of a small one on the Via Appia, called the Circus of Caracalla, which is in a good state of preservation. In the chariot race, each chariot was drawn by four horses ; four, six and sometimes eight chariots started at one time ; the charioteer, standing in the car, had the reins passed around his back: this enabled him to throw all his weight against the horses by leaning backward ; but this rendered his situation dangerous in case of an upset, occasionally resulting in serious accidents or death; to avoid this peril, if possible, each driver carried a knife at his waist for the purpose of cutting the reins. F INE ART. 31 The foremost driver in Wagner's picture has an air of mad hilarity and gratification in his face, and even in his whole bearing; and as he seems to wish to cast his eyes to see how much ahead he is of the driver on his left, who is imbued with carefulness and fixity of purpose, he little recks that one of his horses has reared in excitement, and may at any moment cause the loss of the race and imperil the lives of all concerned. The enthusiasm of the Romans for the races exceeded all bounds. Lists of the horses with their names and colors, and those of the drivers, were cir- culated, and heavy bets made. The winning drivers were liberally rewarded with considerable sums of money, so that many of these charioteers, according to Juvenal, were very wealthy. In Wagner's delineation of "The Chariot Race," he has embraced as many of the prominent features of an ancient circus as could artistically be brought within the canvas. To the left of us are the Emperor and his household; opposite to this imperial group, on the low wall, may be the president, or judge, and a number of spectators ; near the ground of this low wall there is a grating: this undoubtedly is designed by the artist to indicate the proximity of the officiating priests' chambers. A portion of the pillar, on which were placed the conical balls, is behind this group, and a little further back is shown the cylindrical goal. The immense space between this and the Triumphal Gateway, and the great height of the building with its myriads of people, are not exaggerations, for according to very early writers 'this circus was several times enlarged until, at the time of Julius Caesar, it was over eighteen hundred feet long (the length of the Main Building of the Centennial Exhibition), six hundred feet wide, and capable of containing three hundred and eighty-five thousand spectators. A further idea of the size of the Circus Maximus is formed by comparing it with the capacity of the Coliseum at Rome, which was capable of holding only about eighty-seven thousand people. The mention of Piloty as a great master of great pupils, represented in this Exhibition, suggests another master represented by a pupil famous in the contributions already made to art, and worthily here represented in "The Vintage Festival," of which a very fine wood engraving furnishes a good interpretation on page 17 — Alma Tadema, a Dutchman by birth, and a pupil of the late Baron Leys. His works are most agreeable and varied, and cer- 32 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. I'll > \„J^J A". Caroftt, Sc. The Telegram of Love. tainly more suggestive and instructive than pictures usually seen in public galleries, and they throw a light, evidendy the reflection of a careful student, FINE ART. 33 Lr. BecJier, Pinx. Van Ingtn &• Snyder, En£. Rizpah Protecting the Bodies of her Sons. 34 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. on the manners and customs whose eccentricity raised the cry of "O temporal O mores!" from Cicero. The painter of "The Vintage Festival," whose full name is Lourens Alma Tadema, was born in Dronryp, in Friesland, and for many years resided in Paris, receiving medals in that city and in Brussels for the uncommon merit of his works. Since the Franco-Prussian war he has lived in London ; the artists and art-lovers there have offered him that warm reception which their nation has ever accorded to foreign talent naturalizing itself among them, and which is at this moment enjoyed as well by Tadema's imitator, Tissot, as by the Americans, Boughton, Hennessey, Miss Lea, and Arthur Lumley, while its sincerity and cordiality remind us of the honorable treatment in England of Lely, Kneller, Vandyck, Rubens, and Holbein. Mr. Tadema is one of the most eminent living archaeological painters; his works restore the antique life of Greece, Rome and Egypt with that fulness arid accuracy of detail which his teacher, Baron Leys, conferred on mediaeval subjects. He exhibits now at every annual display of the Royal Academy, and has contributed no less than six of his most important works to the English section of the International Exhi- bition. They are "The Vintage Festival," which we, engrave, "The Mummy," "Convalescence," in oil-color; and "The Picture," "The Three Friends," and "History of an Honest Wife," in water-color — the last subject in fact being three pictures framed together on account of the connected theme. The "Vintage" (page 17) is of all these the most important. It represents the solemn dedi- cation to Bacchus of the first fruits of the wine-press, selecting only the more elevated and dignified features of the ceremony — those deeply symbolic features, connected with the branches and fruits of the vine, the progress of the deity as a conqueror of the East, and his descent into hell, which touched the hearts of the early Christians, so that the Bacchic mystery was admitted as a type of the Christian, and the daughter of the first Christian emperor was buried in a casket enwreathed with Bacchic grapes and symbols, carved in enduring por- phyry. In Mr. Tadema's exquisite picture we see the sacred procession winding into a Roman temple to offer homage to the planter of the vine. A beautiful priestess, crowned with grapes and holding a torch, advances toward the statue of the god at the left; turning her lovely face to the procession that follows her, she awaits the arrival of the offerings, while near the shrine some ardent FINE ART. 35 priests, with panther-slcins tied around their throats, wave the cups of libation in ecstatic expectancy. Three flute-girls, with the double pipe bound to the mouth of each, a pair of dancers with tambourines, and a procession solemnly bearing wine-jars and grapes, advance along the platform, whose steps, are seen covered with ascending worshippers and joyous Romans as far as the eye can reach through the colonnades of the temple. The perfect execution of a pythos or earthen wine-tub, enwreathed with the Bacchic ivy, and planted near the tripod in the centre of the scene, attracts attention. The grace and elegance of the chief priestess are positively enchanting. She forms as she stands a white statue of perfect loveliness, quite outdazzling the Bearded Indian Bacchus whose marble purity sheds a light around the shrine. The most unexpected success of the artist, however, is that sense of religious calm and solemn grati- tude which he has managed to diffuse over a ceremony dedicated to such a power as the spirit of the grape. Everything shows that the symbol as accepted by the early Church was most prominent in his mind, and that he wished to represent the parallelism between the True Vine and its imperfect tj'pe. The worshippers, elated by a really religious rapture, proceed to the offering with all the decorum of the Christian agape or love-feast, and the ornaments of the temple — pictures and votive images — hang upon the columns precisely like the "stations" and ex-voto offerings of a modern Roman church. The technical qualities of the painting are admirable ; the action and character of the figures are completely Roman ; the texture of the different marbles is felicitously given, and the silvery flood of light and air deluging the temple successful in the extreme. We would like to dwell with greater fulness on the works of this artist, both because he reveals and teaches so much, and because a certain austerity and simplicity in his style keep him a little above the comprehension of the vulgar. The limits of this work, however, have been strained to admit even so imperfect a glimpse of his merits, and we must pass to other subjects. We cannot quite omit mention, however, of "The Mummy," conspicuous by its strangeness and antique truth, in which the interior of an Alexandrian palace, filled with funereal preparations, is treated in oil with all the luminous limpidity of water-color; nor of "The Picture," in which a Roman painter's shop is realized for us; nor of "The History of an Honest Wife," a quaint and moving 36 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. story connected with the early Christianization of France. It is the peculiar distinction of Mr. Tadema to turn out in every picture a composition utterly unlike anything that has ever been painted before. The intense devotion of his mind to archaeological research is rewarded by the unearthing of quantities Tftos. Hart, Piiix. I'lin fftx't-n &• Stiyiier, i t Keeiie Valley, Adirondacks, of truths so old that they have the air of novelty; the texture and pattern of ancient garments, the ornaments of buildings in mixed transitional periods, the habits of a vanished civilization, are made to flash on the eye like a revelation. Not a shoe, not a finger-ring, but is of the epoch represented ; the monstrous FINE ART. 17 Jno. Coiistadle, Pinx. The Lock. frizzled wigs of the latter empresses, the thick plaited ones of Egyptian kings, the tasteless cumber of Pompeian or Roman colonial architecture, are set down 38 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. remorselessly, with a love of the bizarre that sometimes verges upon carica- ture. With all this book-learning, his style is generally direct, limpid and transparent to a high degree ; the simple sweetness of his coloring, and the soft tide of air that is felt to play easily through his interiors, are as perfect as in the work of the most ignorant painter of natural appearances, who ever confined his copy-work to his "impressions." We have in Mr. Tadema the artist of the grand Teutonic blood conferring his talent upon the English race of his adoption. It is singular, ever since the "Tedeschi" poured into Italy and revoludonized its architecture, how constantly they have enriched the blood of other nations with their intellect and art. The Teuton is not very flexible, but whatever he learns to do becomes a fixed fact in the world. Not a country of Europe but has gained in stable progress from the intermixture of the Gothic strain, and in America he has come to stay, and plants himself at every foot of our advance like a sheet-anchor. German talent — in the person of Mr. Schwarzmann — has adorned the Centennial Park with buildings, arbors and bridges; German talent, in the same personification, has furnished to the group of Exhibidon buildings its two finest examples — the utterly diverse Memorial Hall, with its classic arcades, and Hordcultural Hall, with its ornate Arabian splendor. A German artist, Mr. Pilz, was the author of the two statues of Pegasus, in bronze, which restively perch, with clipped wings, in front of the Art Building, where are enshrined the treasures we have to consider. A German ardst, Mr. Mueller, prepared for the dome of the same hall the colossal figure of "Columbia," in persistent metal, to welcome the nadons to the feast of Industry and Commerce, — the international peacemakers. This statue, by-the-bye, although it has been sharply cridcised, holds forth a salutary meaning in the easily-read symbols of its posture : the hand, presentmg no sword, but the peaceful bays; the bowed head of salutation and welcome; th6 crown of savage feathers, adorning the forehead of a Cybele of the wil- derness, whose diadem has not yet crystalized into towers. As we pause, before entering, in the shadow of the shielding wing of the monumental Pegasus, we behold the fostering fordtude of Teutonic art realizing, strengthening, solidifying, and construcdng the shelter of industry for all the world. The Memorial Hall, before us, spreading its vistas of circular arches to right and left, is just such a padent restoradon of Roman architecture as Von Klenze might have drawn FINE ART. 39 upon cardboard to show to Ms patron, Ludwig of Munich.; and, crowning every pedestal and pinnacle with art of the same national parentage, we see the shadows of the Industries, of America, and of the gigantic mountain eagle, throwing themselves from the parapets above to the sward beneath. The silhouette or outline of the crest of Exhibition Palaces is a very rich and varied one, whether seen from a nearer or a more comprehensive view. An American artist, Mr. E. D. Lewis, has been struck with the effect they make, in crowning Lansdowne Terrace, from the opposite side of the Schuyl- kill, and has painted a beautiful, sunshiny, autumn-tinted picture of the same, which forms one of the ornaments of the American art department. Mr. Lewis has often been praised by Hamilton, the great landscapist, for his ability in making a painting "look luminous." This he does by a simple system of contrasts, without any heavy Rembrandt shadows or Carravaggio blackness. Whatever scene his pencil touches seems to be caressed by a ray of light. Some time since he went to Cuba, and painted "The Queen of the Antilles" in a large brilliant composition, and the magic sunshine of the tropics seems to have clung around his pencil ever since. Mr. Lewis, born to uncommon privileges among the best part of the Philadelphia social melange, might have excusably sacrificed some portion of his art-industry to the prosecution of drawing-room successes ; tut though a genial and agreeable society-man, ready for any parlor knight-errantry, he toils at his profession in a steady, prolific way that no poor brush-wielder laboring for his pay can possibly surpass. The mention of this brilliant landscapist reminds us that the United States have long claimed to have one of the foremost among the existing schools of landscape art — enthusiastic patriots used to say, the very foremost. Our natural scenery is certainly the widest in range, and among the most picturesque in detail, possessed by any country of the globe, and should be the inspiration of a noble style of delineation. The proud eminence awarded by native judges to our school of scenery-painting began with Thomas Cole, whose poetical and imaginative way of introducing allegory into landscape was much to the taste of "fifty years syne." His pupil, Church, and the eminent Albert Bierstadt, came next into prominence, with what began to be called the "panoramic" school of landscape, and the public saw with amazement vast scenes on enor- mous canvases, that seemed to compete in dimensions with the original 40 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. mountains and forests whose portraits were represented. This is not the place to speak of the wonderful works of Church — canvases so large and so minutely finished that each may be called an accumulation of miniatures. Mr. Bierstadt, having established his reputation by a fine study of a church-portal, in the Diisseldorf style, called "Sunshine and Shadow," found himself famous, and began to turn his attention to the Titanic scenery of our E. Caroni, Pmx. Van Ingen Gr Snyder, Ettg\ L' Africaine. far West, producing several very comprehensive and very striking pictures of the Rocky Mountains. To this class of subjects, which still forms the theme of his warmest predilection, belongs the scene of "Western Kansas," of which we present a careful steel engraving. It is one of the natural "parks" with which nature has bestrewn the American Occident — scenes which, when man first bursts upon them, amaze him by their appearance of preparation and deliberate culture. Here is the tiny lake, with its trim island, such as kings construct K. DUliU, Pttx. I and My Pipe. 42 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. with dainty care for the grounds of their palaces. On the island, which is a natural bank of flowers, spreads an umbrageous and symmetrical tree — no spindling stem from the forest, but a well-rounded, broad, shadowy "park" tree ; it is such a tree as Wordsworth describes in one of his prose prefaces, which being recommended to the owner as a profitable subject to fell for timber, the peasant replied, "Fell it! I had rather fall on my knees and. worship it." And, indeed, worship is the natural impulse in the presence of one of these gigantic overshadowers of the earth; trees, as Bryant reminds us, were the first temples. Mr. Bierstadt's magnificent specimen makes a felicitous fore- ground incident for him ; and others, only diminished by distance, spread far towards the horizon. The scene would be an English nobleman's game-preserve; but, advancing ponderously from the left, intrude the mammoth brutes that no game-preserve on earth contains, except the Indian's, and stamp it as the natural hunting-ground of the Native American. We see there the drinking-place of the bison, and the garden of the primitive red Adam. It is a fortunate thing that Mr. Bierstadt was able to spare so characteristic a specimen from his easel — though easel-pictures are hardly what this artist's gigantic works gene- rally would be called — and that the world of strangers collected here on the Adantic seaboard should be able to travel thus, on the magical broomstick of one of his colossal brushes, into the heart of the Great West. What the Centennial visitor from the outre-mer is first apt to see, however, is New York harbor, not the grassy ocean of the prairie. An attractive painting by Mr. Edward Moran, of New York, copied in the large wood-cut on page 21, shows that superb and starry spectacle of the land-lights of America, which first causes the immigrant's eye to dance with hope and his heart to swell with ambition as he comes to conquer his opportunity among the free. Here is the city spread between the mouths of the Hudson and East rivers, here is the dull and ponderous fortification on Governor's Island, all pierced and pricked with twinkling lights like a fairy scene in the theatre. How many sturdy men have looked upon the inspiration of these lights with irrepressible tears! For how many has the pause at Sandy Hook, the debarcation at Castle Garden, meant success, opportunity, renown even, in contrast with the certain continuance of degradation in that darker and older world! The able and successful men .we can reckon around us, the public men who have risen to command, have in a FINE ART. 43 surprising number of Instances been taken from the ranks of those strong, muscular, serious, plain men whom we see idling around the walks of Castle Garden in the first day of their unaccustomed liberty, waiting to " take occasion by the hand." Such are the seed of the new earth. To-day they are of the million — to-morrow of the millionaires. To-day they are nobodies, rocked over the flashing waves of the Bay into the embrace of that twinkling crescent of lights : soon they are individuals, entities, sovereigns, with every chance to conquer the esteem of their kind by power, wealth, or intellect. This is the sort of legend that seems to be whispering forth out of the rippled waves and rolling moon of Mr. Moran's picture, a fine augury to greet the subjects of European monarchs as they face it. The painter, a man of self-made progress in art, belongs to a family of brothers who are all curious instances of inborn talent and perseverance conquering a success among the American people, so hospitable to ideas. Mr. Edward Moran and his brother Thomas have enjoyed the advantages of an Americo-British art-education : they have profited almost as much by the English artist Turner as by the American artist Hamilton. Thomas Moran, — about equally known by his fine "Yellowstone" scene in the Capitol at Washington, as by the remarkable book-illustrations which he scatters from his home at Newark to the best magazines and art-publications of the land — can be judged in the Exhibition by five landscapes in widely-separated styles. The "Dream of the Orient" plainly shows his extraordinary admiration for Turner, of whose works he has made so many copies of the rarest fidelity; while "The Mountain of the Holy Cross" is more In the style of his monu- mental works at the Capitol. Another brother, Peter Moran, is an accomplished practitioner in the more difficult line of cattle and figure painting; while a younger one, John, is one of the first topographical photographers in the country. By Peter Moran, the catrie-painter aforesaid, we present on page 9 the spirited subject, "The Return of the Herd." In a pleasant rolling country near the Brandywine or the Wissa- hickon the herdsman and his dog are driving home the cows after the soft afternoon storm which makes the herbage so tempting for a lingering bite. Mr. P. Moran's cattle are always obviously studied from nature. In the present picture, the black head of the central animal, relieved against the brightest sky where the storm breaks away, makes fine pictorial effect for the artist; and the 44 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. pretty play of the near cow and calf is true to life. The four brothers we have named live in different cities, but their starting-point was Philadelphia, of whose academic art-training they are creditable alumni. The steel-plate engraving from the picture called " Brig hove-to for a Pilot" can hardly be a representation of an American scene, from the presence of the windmill on the shore— though, for that matter, there are windmills on the FINE ART. 45 Long Island coast, and upon other exposed parts of the American seaboard. Something in the crisp freshness of the air and light — light and air not used by so many centuries of sea faring practice as the European — makes us connect this picture with E. Moran's "New York Harbor," just above-men- tioned, and assign the scene to our own shores. At any rate, it is a spirited and telling composition — the small pilot-boat dancing on the waves to get 46 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. alongside the statelier brig, whose half-lowered sails wrinkle and flutter in the wind, awaiting the trustworthy sailor who is to board the vessel as guide. The swift, racing wash of the water past the group of boats, without any very violent freshness or stormy motion, is given in a true seamanlike manner by Mr. M. F. H. De Haas, the artist. Mr. Maurice De Haas, as well as Mr. William F. De Haas, is a Holland painter, whose merit having attracted the attention of Mr. Belmont, the Rothschild of America, procured an invitation to visit these shores, and the promise of a career and a fortune. The Messrs. De Haas are doing well, and are not likely ever to forsake the country which has given them so pleasant a reception, and which they have beautified with so many meritorious works of art. Marine artists like Mr. E. Moran or Mr. M. De Haas characteristically find their pleasure in beating about -New York Harbor. Day after day, in the fine summer weather, they may be seen standing, Columbus-like, on the prow of some vessel (which is more likely to be a grimy steam-tug than anything hand- somer), engaged in their own peculiar kind of exploration. Their game is worth the chase, and the booty they collect justifies their taste. Other artists, like Mr. Brown in the picture we engrave on page 13, choose the freezing winter-time, and the frost-locked mimic sea of Central Park. He has given us a careful and variously-discriminated crowd, mainly engaged in the noble old Scotch sport of "Curling." The compatriots of Burns, among the hardest players and hardest workers of the age, have transported the game to this country, where it attracts every winter the delighted wonder of the ignorant and the incapable. As the plaid-wrapped athletes send the heavy balls of Aberdeen granite vigorously across the ice, or carefully sweep the crystal floor to a state of frictionless purity for the next effort, or measure the distance between a couple of stones with noisy and angerless vociferation, they are sure to have an admiring crowd around them. The curious Yankee, not "native and indued unto that element," pauses to watch the missiles, with a modest convic- tion that he could improve them; the litde school-girl, sledding with her brother, glides slower past the fascinating sports of the good-natured, manly contestants. It is a crisp, eager, jolly game, imparting to the tame picture of the city lake a spicy flavor of wild loch-sports in North Britain. This animated scene, crowded with small faces and figures very difificult to engrave, is one of FINE ART. 47 the most elaborate attempts of Mr. Brown, whose pencil, though loving rustic subjects, more generally seeks the softness and refinement of fair child-faces, and the delights of lovers, whose very whispers it essays to paint. A sport better understood here is angling — a pleasure as cosmopolitan as its synonym, coquetry. Mr. W. M. Brackett, in a series one of whose subjects we represent on page 12, has delineated "The Rise," "The Leap," "The Last Struggle," and "Landed." Here is the suggestion of country streams, hissing into foam over the shingly rock, and curling up into peaceful sleep among the boulders of the shore. The noble captive, his silver mail availing him nothing in this unequal warfare, writhes and twists his flexible body into a semicircle, exposing to the air his elegant tail and his panting gills, already half-drowned in the long race. It is the last effort for liberty; shortly will come the usual reward of unsuccessful heroes in a lost cause — the martyr's fire, the approval meted too late to benefit the recipient, and the apotheosis — of the supper-table. The painter of the last-named picture, Mr. Brackett, hails from Boston, a metropolis whose art-development has always been the pet puzzle of the painting- world in America elsewhere. Nobody could tell who took the likenesses of Bostonians, who painted the landscapes of their surrounding country, who com- posed their battle-pieces, fruit-pieces, picayune-pieces, and masterpieces. A rumor got about that the Bostonians, in the moments of leisure they secured from the study of Emerson, dashed into the picture-shops and bought up all the Corots and Paul Webers they could find. These names represent two landscape-painters as opposite in style as anything that can be imagined. It would seem impossible that one city should be generous enough to contain them both. Corot, the Frenchman, paints vapory, dreamy, invisible landscapes, that nobody -perhaps can fully understand : by summoning up all your resolution, coming up to a Corot very fresh, keeping the catalogue-title very distinct in your mind, and if possible turning the picture upside-down, you think you distinguish a tree, a fog, a boat, a pond, a bog, and a fisherman. Weber, of Philadelphia, on the contrary, is the distinctest of painters: everything with him is frank, fair, obvious painting, honest trees, white clouds and green weeds, in the style of Lessing. How should the Bostonians love the one and the other? Yet it has been generally asserted that each Bostonian had a Corot and a Weber on the two sides of the looking-glass in his "keeping-room." The 48 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. Corot was to put him into a state of trance, and the Weber to wake him to realities of life, after an evening of Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. Then it was known that one of Couture's pupils, William M. Hunt, was established P, Guarnerio, Sc. The Forced Prayer. in Boston as a portrait-painter, and that the Athenians there, in their ardent way of elevating every novelty into a fresh superstition, had convinced them- selves that there was no painter in the solar system equal to Hunt. True, he sent to the Exposition Universelle of 1867 a portrait of Lincoln, so vigorously MiiMil ,iiiii!!Ji llillil lillviilllliP: llllllliiililiiiMillil'liiii |i frijijii iiiiiTiiv:iiiT>njiiiia;'!i:;;,,:s^^^^^^^ ( so THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. and invidiously thrown into shadow that every Frenchman beholding it came away convinced that the martyr President was a man of color. True, too, that though not without eccentricity, Mr. Hunt is an artist of ability. But the Bos- tonians, epical and self-contained, rarely divulged themselves in art to the outer world. Mr. Hunt could send his Lincoln to Paris, but he sent nothing to the Philadelphia exhibitions, and very seldom displayed his work in New York. Boston landscape, Boston marine, Boston figure-painting, were an Isis-mystery, probably intensely enjoyed by the civic mind, but veiled from all the world outside. Of late, a little corner of this Isis-curtain has been lifted. It is known that every Bostonian lately bought, and hung up in his sanctum sanctorum, a specimen from the auction-sale of young Mr. Longfellow's landscapes — the poet's son. It is known that Boston has a Millet. Of course. France has a Millet — or had — the painter of peasant-groups, so original, so racy of the soil, so grimy, so similar to a chapter of Thoreau. England, too, has a Millais, pro- nounced just like the French, and equally the favorite of a certain inmost circle of the elect. These postulates being given, it was obvious that Boston must in the course of time, and that as soon as possible, have a Millet too. She has got one now, and nothing remains to complete her ambition. Young Millet is a growing sapling, as yet in the developing stage, but, without joking, a young man of very decided promise. He sent to the National Academy Exhibition of 1876, a portrait of a lad, very frank, boyish, direct, and painted with engaging simplicity and robustness. We very decidedly like his gondel- lied in colors, entided "In the Bay of Naples," and copied by us on page 28 from the original in the Centennial show. Who that has ever taken that primi- tive, antique sail from Naples to Capri in the old market-boat, would not warm to the picture of it, especially when executed with such freshness and wit? It is like a revived missing chapter from Pliny the Naturalist; behind our backs are the phenomena of that great volcano which cost the erudite Roman his life ; before us the two-peaked oudine of Capri lifting from the blue, and around us the peasant-life which has scarcely changed since the days of the ancients. Four of the mariners in this picture wear the Phrygian cap that Ulysses wore. They roll their arms and legs into the softest convolutions of the dolce far niente. They play with the handsome Anacapri girl on the seat that eternal gam 3 of dalliance and love which is never old. The bare-backed boys, openino- FINE ART. SI and shutting their fingers Hke flashes of tawny lighting, play the immortal game of Morra which. the Hebrew slaves played beneath the pyramids. So drifting and floating, and letting the wind take care of the dirty old sail, they sit with their feet in a bed of fish, and execute that delicious Capri-transit — the most luxurious bit of vagabondage, set in the loveliest scenery, that even Italian life affords. And now that enchanter word "Italian" — most alluring and spell-containing adjective in the language — has got so fast hold of us that we must fain leave the Boston corner of American art-development, which we had set about to elucidate, and sail across forthwith to San Giorgio, at Venice. One word in parenthesis, however, before we have utterly lost our train of thought, for another Boston artist, the younger Champney. Two Bostonians, both Champ- neys, enlivened the American colony in France eight years or so ago — Benjamin, the elder, an old-fashioned landscape-painter, with a soul and heart eternally young, and a slim youth, J. W. Champney, who in those days lived in a very small and very lofty room in the Rue du Dauphin, and carried up his own milk in the morning for a home-made breakfast. Those days of student-liberty and independent fortune-fighting are over now, and as "Champ," the young art-adventurer is famous. His illustrations to Mr. King's work on "The Great South," and his charming Centennial American sketches in a French journal, have won him admirers in America, England and France, and procured him compliments in more than one language. He contributes to the Exhibition, among other things, "Your Good Health!", engraved on page 8. It is one of the small, single-figure subjects which Meissonier brought into vogue. A cordial old bachelor, who has seen life, and who wears the full-bottom wig and gaiters of the last century, is just lifting the glass filled from the tall champagne-botde before him; a smile breaks on his mouth as the bead breaks on the rim. "Champ" has caught the freshness, the urbanity, the hospitality of his type' "and that," as Nym says, "is the humor of it." With which short digression from the Mediterranean, made in the interest of the modern Athens, we revert to the enchanted lands, and find ourselves basking on the sunset gold of the Adriaric, and gazing at Gifford's "San Giorgio." This church, we may recollect, built when Venice was attempting to reconstruct the Athenian orders of archi- tecture with more good-will than knowledge, has been contemptuously ridiculed 52 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. by Riiskin, because the architect, in his intellectual vacancy, put a hole in the pediment where Phidias would have put a grand statue. The building, in faith, would never attract notice from its classical perfection, if left to honest com- petition with other edifices; but in Venice its situation, with the broad mouth FINE ART. 53 of the Giudecca to isolate it, makes it one of the most conspicuous buildings ^ you can see. You paddle across in a gondola to where it lies, separated from the bulk of Venice by a breadth of rippled water, which has been reflecting 54 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. the triangular pediment of San Giorgio before your eyes ever since you dis- embarked at the Hotel Danieli; and as you unload at the flat steps of the basilica, and proceed inside to see the famous Tintoretto, you feel that this formal church, peaked out of the water like Teneriffe, is one of the character- features of Venice, as ill to be spared as the nose on the face. Mr. Gifford has chosen the sunset-view, when the water around the lonely temple shines like chiseled gold. Has he hit the true color of sunset? We are not sure. We recollect, when the picture was first exhibited in New York, walking past it with a young French artist, fresh from the atelier of Gerome. He asked the author's name of "that 'omelette' yonder," and remai:ked that sunsets were not bad things in art when they were not "false in tone as the dickens." "Dickens," as every reader may not know, is diable in French. We defended the picture, but the disrespect of the careless young intruder has clung to the work in our mind ever since. If the stricture did happen to possess one grain of justice, then our engraving, which is one of Mr. Hinshelwood's most lumi- nous, liquid successes, is a better art-work than its original — a fact which it would be gratifying enough to believe. The mention of Sanford Gifford's Venetian subject introduces to our thoughts the graceful group of Venetian "Water-carriers," painted by a foreign artist, Wulffaert, whose Belgian birth is suggested by his name, and engraved for our readers on page 49. The supply of fresh water in the sea-city is none too abundant, and the custom is for householders to buy the indispensable crystal, like a gem of price, at the hands of water-carriers, who bear it in large ketdes through the town. These water-porters are young girls, and form a race apart. Robust, brown, graceful, and dressed in a traditional costume, they are among the most picturesque inhabitants of Venice, and, when they happen to be fair in face, recall the women of Veronese, with their full persons and liquid, serious, animal eyes. Herr Wulffaert gives us a cluster, as seen any morning at one of the large wells in the public squares of Venice, In the background rises the vast brick bell-tower of St. Mark's, and around the cistern are collected the handsome girls whose ready hands assuage a city's thirst. One lowers her bucket by its cord into the well-shaft ; another empties the flashing fluid, like a fountain of gems, from one vessel into another; the youngest, a pretty litde creature, watches the doves, which are publicly fed every FINE ART. 55 day at noon in front of St. Mark's, and which sometimes fly to other public squares for variety of diet or for a sip of that fresh water which is rather hard of attainment for them, and for which they are often indebted to the indulgence of these good-natured water-bearing girls. The picture, besides being true to nature and without any flattering idealization, is peculiarly graceful in its grouping and the character of its personages. At the Academy of Venice, and under the eye of resident Venetian sculp- tors. Miss Blanche Nevin, the authoress of "Cinderella" (page i6), received her best technical education. This artist is a sister of the Rev. Dr. Nevin, whose exertions in building a handsome church for American Protestants in the very heart of Rome were so creditable, and so quickly successful upon the triumph of the present government over the temporal power of the Pope. The lady is still quite young, but several of her figures in marble have been successful, as witness her "Maud Muller," and a subject owned by Mrs. Ste- phens, the society queen. "Cinderella" sits with an air of discouragement among the ashes, in pose as if the Dying Gladiator had shrunk back into infancy and femininity. Dreams of the splendors and delights into which her luckier sisters have been admitted occupy her litde head, while her own future seems as dry and cheerless as the faded embers. Cheer up, small Marchioness ! In a moment the fairy godmother will appear, and you will escape from your marble and be a belle, and your tiny Parian foot shall be shod in glass, and the pumpkin shall roll with you and the rats shall gallop with you, and the Prince shall kiss your litde mouth into warmth and color. The creator of this engaging figure, who some two years back de-Latinized herself and exchanged the shores of Latium for the streets of Philadelphia, is one of the most prom- ising of the rising school of lady sculptors. Miss Nevin finished her "Maud Muller" in the atelier of another Phila- delphia artist, the well-known and highly-successful Joseph A. Bailly, whose "Aurora" we copy on page 6. Mr. Bailly exhibits, besides this ideal figure, which rises so white and mist-like in the middle ot the great American gallery of paindngs in Memorial Hall, a portrait work of ponderous importance, the likeness of President Blanco, of Venezuela, recently set up in bronze at Caracas. Mr. Bailly, as a young Paris revolutionist exiled by the events of 1848, went over to Eno-land, where he wrought for awhile in the studio of his namesake, 56 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. Edward Hodgjes Bailly, author of "Eve at the Fountain." Coming to this country, he attracted immediate attention by the skill with which he could carve R. Rogers, Sc, ^. Hea, £iiff. Ruth. and "undercut" the most intricate designs, and gradually rose to success as a sculptor of portrait and classical subjects. From the corner of Sixth and Chest- FINE ART. 57 »^''*Si( ; ^ ^ if. ". *>. f. Feyen-Perrin, Pittx. MeloMcholy. nut streets, in this city, three of Mr. Bailly's works may be seen at once — the Washington in front of Independence Hall, the Franklin on the corner of the S8 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. Ledger building, and the fine horses supporting the escutcheon on the Sixth street facade of the same edifice. The technical ability of this prolific artist is especially shown in all that relates to the mechanical portion of his art. His modeling in the clay of ponderous and elaborate subjects, with assured touch and upon a well-calculated skeleton or frame, is so quick and imperative as to seem like magic to less skilled practitioners. His labors for the republic of Venezuela consisted in the colossal equestrian figure now exhibited, and a standing statue of still larger scale. The standing figure was modeled, and the equestrian one twice repeated, in the space of four months, to be in readiness for a special anniversar}^ It is not likely that any other artist in the country would have accepted and fulfilled the commission for such a piece of time- work. The "Aurora," likewise, is a piece of magic ; the equilibrium of the figure, whose feet are folded far above the ground, and who rises just over the trailing folds of a vail which merely sweeps the earth, is a powerful stimu- lant of our wonder. To have made such a device in bronze would be easy; but to carve it out of marble, when a false blow of the hammer would lay the beautiful image low at once, seems more than human skill could accomplish. Then the transporting of the critically-balanced figure in safety was a remark- able event, only to be brought about by a mechanical genius as conspicuous as the artistic. But Mr. Bailly has passed through the apprenticeship of every art that mechanics includes ; and his marble vails and flowers and figure, light and perfect as a blossom on the stem, have successfully removed — half standing, half overhanging — from the studio to the destined position in the far-away Park edifice. The image is like a crystallized mist from daybreak: "Aurora," only half disengaged from the Night, whose vail sweeps lingeringly from her fore- head to the ground, holds and scatters upon the earth those blossoms whose petals are opened by the winds of morning, and whose blushes are copied from the blushes of the dawn. Such an evanescent idea ought to be sculptured in mist; but Mr. Bailly is able to give a mist-like tenuity to marble. An instructive comparison of the overcoming the technical difficulties of sculpture may be made by looking first at Mr. Bailly's lightly-poised figure, and then at some of the sculptures which Italy has sent over with a lavish hand to the Centennial Exhibition. However these statues may disappoint the lovers of classicality and repose, there is no question that in overcoming the stub- FINE ART. 59 bornness of material, they teach many a valuable lesson to our chiselers. We would indicate, as special examples of the triumph over this kind of difficulty, the hair in Caroni's "Africaine" (page 40), and the dressing-robe in the same artist's "Telegram of Love" (page 32). These works, though completely dis- severed from the Greek theory of sculpture, have a rich, pictorial, and as it were, colored quality of their own which justifies the theory on which they are carved. If the success in representing texture were attained by an uncommon and worthless degree of mere finish, it would not be commendable ; but exami- nation will convince us that it is not the difficulty or the patience, but the live flash and expressiveness of the touch that gives the effect. The flowered silk of the dressing-gown in "The Telegram" gives no evidence of excessive diffi- culty overcome: it is its felicitous invention which strikes us. The heavy crisped tresses of the "Africaine" are no more closely finished than the smoothest locks and bands of hair sculptured by Chantrey or Westmacott; but the sculptor, putting a brain into his chisel, has set it to thinking, and invented for his woolly convolutions a glancing, sketchy touch as expressive as the brushing of Reynolds on canvas. The Italian cleverness, as a mechanical and inventive development of resources, is well worth studying. Signor Caroni has chosen subjects well adapted to show off his rich and glittering style. In the "Africaine" we have the heroine of Meyerbeer's opera, the black Afric queen whose dusky soul was illumined with the light of tenderness at the visit of Vasco de Gama. For these primitive intelligences love is the apple of know- ledge; when it is once bitten, the nature is changed, the Eden is spoiled, the contentment is lost, and the whole soul is thrown into the passion of desire, for bliss or for despair. In Signor Caroni's picturesque work we have the uncultured queen tortured by the pangs of a boodess passion, her supple body thrown broodingly beside the couch where her hero dreams of another, and watching with jealous eyes the lips that murmur of her rival. In his "Telegram of Love" we are amused with a lighter and more hopeful subject: this radiant maiden, who confides to the neck of her dove the fluttering message which will lead to a rendezvous or an answer, is tortured by no doubt, crushed by no despondency. We can imagine the haste and tumult of her telegraphy, a tumult indicated by her alert, moving figure ; we can see the hurry with which she has sprung from her morning dreams, the hair hastily knotted, the peignoir 6o THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. I \ quickly thrown on, and the bird briskly dismissed from the cottage steps, with a last loving, brooding bend of the head over its faithful wings. For so large FINE ART. 6i a statue this figure has an astonishing lightness and bewitchment. The stooping posture is a bold, daring contradiction of the rules arranged by the martinets of art. It is all grace, spontaneity, sweetness, and pastoral charm. Its technical y. C. Forbes, Pinx^ Beware ! y. Rea, Ens. merits disappear under the gracious elegance of the conception. From "The Telegram" to Selika, the "Africaine," there is a gulf of transition, but the maid of "The Telegram," lovely as she is, is eclipsed by the strange tropical inten- 62 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. sity of the "Selika." Equal in the technical part of the carver's art, there is no comparison in the lofty scope of the subject. A replica, reduced in size, represents in this gallery the celebrated " Reading Girl" of Pietro Magni, of Milan. This work, which was one of the charms of the London Exhibition of 1862 (see page xlv of our "Historical Introduction"), loses little by being accommodated to a more portable scale. It is seen in the Annex, close to the exquisite figure of a girl nursing a sick kitten, by Vela, the famous sculptor of "Napoleon Dying." Not unfit to stand beside these delicate renderings of child-sentiment is "The Little Samaritan" (page 24), a marble poem by one of our American sculptors, J. S. Hartley. We have here a pretty maid of ten years, who, carrying the drink of the harvesters through the sunny field, has tempted a bird to taste it, as she stands silent and curi- ously watchful, with the cup in her extended hand. Is it water pure? Is it something stronger, such as harvesters love to taste behind the hedge? We do not know. The bird, shaking its wise, saucy little head with an air of doubt on the rim of the cup, shall decide for us. But of all the skillful repre- sentations of child-feeling in marble, in which the present Exhibition is so remarkably rich, it is probable that "The Forced Prayer" (page 48), by Pietro Guarnerio of Milan, bears off the votes of the greatest number of spectators. It is an epigram in sculpture, and ' it is epigrammatic sculpture carried to the limits of the permissible. This telling little figure has received a medal. It is easier to understand the subject from our spirited engraving than to construct it in the mind from a description. The handsome little rebel is standing in his shirt, sleepy and ready for bed, but denied the blessings of repose until the customary paternoster is gone through with. Conscious that there will be no rest for him until the ordeal is over, he begins to mumble the holy words with frankest hatred, throwing himself into the prescribed attitude of supplica- tion like a trick-dog into his positions, with a skill derived from long practice rather than from feeling, while the implied devotion of the routine is belied by every line of his face, and from his piously lowered eye escapes the tear of temper and not of contrition. • Of half-a-score varied works by Signor Guar- nerio, this one probably has the most friends. These exquisite trifles seem, however, but bijoux, and their manufacture but bijouterie or jewelers' work, in comparison with the ponderous "Antietam FINE ART. 63 Soldier," in granite, of which we give a steel engraving. Like the nation he defends, this colossus is in the bloom of youth, and like it he is hard and firm though alert. What art has succeeded in making this monster out of granite? He is twenty-one feet six inches in height. What sempster, working with needles of thrice-hardened steel, has draped him in those folds of adamant, that hang ten feet or farther from his inflexible loins ? The sculptors of ancient Egypt, who had their colossi in granite also, worked for years with their bronze points and their corundum-dust to achieve their enormous figures, while the makers of this titanic image, availing themselves of the appliances of American skill, have needed but a few months to change the shapeless mass of stone into an idea. Something rocky, rude and large-grained is obvious still in this stalwart American; his head, with its masculine chin and moustache of barbaric proportions, is rather like the Vatican "Dacian" than like the Vatican "Genius." But, whatever may be thought of the artistic delicacy of the model, Mr. Conrads' "Soldier" presents the image of a sentinel not to be trifled with, as he leans with both hands clasped around his g^n-barrel, the cape of his overcoat thrown back to free his arm, and the sharp bayonet thrust into its sheath at his belt. Rabelais' hero, Pantagruel, whose opponents were giants in armor of granite, would have recoiled before our colossus of Antietam, because his heart is of granite too. The American heroes who have really succeeded in conquering the stub- bornness of this mossy stone, and making it bend before them into the desired shape by the power of ingenious machinery, are the New England Granite Company, of Hartford. Before their wonderful ingenuity the rock seems to lose its obstinacy; and, furnish them but an artistic model, they will translate its delicacy into the most imperishable stone. What Mr. Conrads gives us in granite, Mr. George W. Maynard gives us page 29, "1776" — on canvas. It is the same inflexibility, the same courage, the same mature will in stripling body; only in Maynard's revolutionary hero these qualities are aggressive, while in Conrads' defender of the Union they are conservative. The figure in Mr. Maynard's "1776" is one of the "embattled farmers," a homespun patriot, bearing the standard that represented our Union before we had a flag — the pine-tree banner of Massachusetts, used as a device in the first battles of the Revolution, before the stars and stripes 64 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. were invented. In his other hand he grasps the ancient musket^perhaps the very "Old queen's arm, that Gran'lher Young Fetched back from Concord — busted." On the wall behind him is seen a placard, with fragments of the date, '']6, and of the words "Union" and "In- dependence." This manly figure, in the pictu resqu e " Con- tinental" uniform, so rich in angles, gables, lappels, and revers, who crosses his gun-barrel over the standard he will only yield with his life, looks as sacred as a cru- sader. In his face of grief and valor we see the rankling wrong, the press- ure of fate, that were the birth- throes of our na- tion. It is a face fit for a philoso- pher, transformed streets of our cities. by events into that of a warrior. And this obser- vation leads us to interject the ques- tion whether any country ever yet begot a national type of face appa- rently able to do so much thinking and philosophizing as the American when at its best. The problem is whether the world yields an amount of thinking suf- cient to equip the deep, brain-worn visages we see in all our national pic- tures, or in real life in the business There is nothing else like them in the world. Com- y. Gibsott, Sc. Venus. pared with the American soldier's face, as defined from the testimony of all our artists and the very photographs of our officers, the faces of soldiers over the rest of the world are those of undeveloped intelligences ; the Greek con- testants of the Parthenon frieze are but large babies; the English soldiers of 66 ' THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. Hogarth's "March to Finchley" are good-natured, immature, beef-eating lads; the French soldiers of Vernet are dried out of all individuality — a tinder-box and a spark — a lean cheek and a glowing eye — food for powder, and then nothingness. But our ordinary American phiz has a look of capability, of knowingness, and when handsome of intellectual majesty, that it would take a vast deal of actual achievement to justify us in wearing. It is walking about under false colors to adopt such faces unless we are really the philosophers, tacticians and diplomats of the age ! Turn we to George Becker, of Paris, whose "Rizpah" is probably the most impressive picture in the Exhibition. One fancies this work to emerge from some gloomy studio, whose tenant is aged, tall, morose, and ^poetical. On the contrary, little George Becker is one of the least terrific and most likable of dwarfish youths, a mild butt for the raillery of his taller chums among the pupils of Gerome. Amid the paint-shops and costume-markets of the Latin Quarter is to be seen often a small fresh-faced figure, with a good aquiline profile overshadowed by an immensely tall and glossy hat; in the hand an artist's box of colors, which is of a size almost to drag upon the ground, and which conceals a large proportion of the person of the walker, as he spreads his short compasses to their utmost distention in getting briskly over the ground. It is Becker. "Come back with your color-box or in it," says the studio friend from whom he parts, alluding to the Spartan and his shield. He takes all jests with a quiet, good-natured smile, and goes home to paint tragedy. We recollect walking with him to the funeral of the painter Ingres, and the diffi- culty of keeping "down" with him, as he stepped with mincing tread among the mourners. It was snowing, and he asked a group who paused on the pavement near the church, "Shall we not seek a porte-cochere?" — while the attendants, opining that the flakes would have uncommon difficulty in finding him out, laughed at his anxiety even among the solemnities of the occasion. Such is the pleasant little lad, always mild, neat and conciliating, who goes into his studio, seizes his enormous brushes, and turns out for us the almost Michael-Angelesque composition of "Rizpah." Ah! in the presence of so impressive a work we scarcely think of the physical means by which it was created. We think of the idea alone, the terrible ordeal of constancy and maternity. Our engraving on page 33 gives a vivid conception of Mr. Becker's FINE ART. by subject, though the imagination has to expand the cut to the size of nature, on which scale the original is painted, to get the full vigor of the tragedy. The seven sons of Saul, whom David delivered to the Gibeonites to be hanged to avert the famine, are seen suspended from a lofty gibbet, in the evening of a stormy day. It is the commencement of their exposure, "the beginning of the harvest," and Rizpah has just initiated her gloomy watch against the eagles, which come sailing toward the corpses from afar. Over her head hang the fair young bodies of her sons, Armoni and Mephibosheth, and the rest. She is a strong Jewish heroine, a worthy mate for the giant Saul, and her posture while she fights the mighty bird with her club is statuesque and grand. As she throws up one massive arm as a fence between the aggressor and her dead, and looks into the eagle's eye with a glance in which grief is temporarily merged in horror and repulsion, we seem to hear the hoarse, desolate cry which escapes from her parched mouth to scare the fam- ished creature from his prey. The attitudes of the dead youths are supine, with a languid and oriental grace even in death, and the curled Assyrian beards of the older ones contrast with the pitiful boyishness of the rest, while the whole row of princes, tender, elegant and helpless, forms the strongest contra- diction to the direct, rigid, and as it were virile force of the woman. Another painter might have chosen the misery, the desolation of Rizpah's vigil for his theme. But this artist sees, in the whole long tragedy, the peculiar feature that it was effective. Rizpah succeeded in defending the relics of her family ; the incessant watch, by night as well as by day, from the beginning of barley harvest until the rainy season, was grand because it was unrelaxed and vigilant. Mr. Becker therefore, by sinking the mother's grief in her fierceness and energy, has developed the real sentimental force of the situation ; any quiet treatment would have lost it. He has delineated for us the first grand example in history of maternal devotion, the Mater Dolorosa ot the Old Testament, in lines and colors that leave an unfading impression. A painting that commemorated a most touching incident, while it formed on its production an epoch in historical painting, is West's "Death ot Wolfe." Many spectators may have neglected this picture for more showy rivals. Dark- ened, overshadowed and of no great size, it makes small effect among the fresh and garish productions of the British School, where it is hung. Benjamin West, 68 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. when he painted it, was at the height of his friendly rivalry with Reynolds. Reynolds was inaccessible in portrait, but in history West was able to read a lesson to Reynolds. Dunlap, in his "History of the Arts of Design," tells the G. A. Storey, Pinx Mistress Dorothy. incident which made this picture a milestone in art-development. Up to this period, the exceedingly feeble efforts of England in "high art" had leaned entirely to the classical: the statues of her warriors had been draped as Romans or FINE ART. 69 Greeks, and the few battle-pictures that had been produced were treated in a half-symbolic or representative manner, with a pseudo-classical endeavor to Alma Tadetna Pinx. The Convalescent. make their heroes look like the heroes of Plutarch and Xenophon. A modern musket, a modern cap, the uniform of the day, was considered '*low art," and 70 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. left to caricaturists like Hogarth. In the height of this false classicality of the "Augustan age," West ventured to represent one of England's best-loved heroes, a young and intellectual enthusiast excessively dear to the nation's heart, falling exacdy as he fell on the heights near Quebec, with the surround- ings and equipments treated as nearly as possible in literal fidelity. It was an innovation, rneant for what we now call realism. Reynolds was alarmed; Fuseli was alarmed; the amiable and genial President of the Royal Academy, who would have been delighted with the vigor of West's sketch if only he had clothed his hero in a helmet and cuirass, dissuaded him for a whole hour from introducing the novelty. When he went away he exclaimed that West, if the thing "took," was revolutionizing the art of England. The good sense of the nation went over to the side of the sensible painter, and this picture, to us so dark and dim, was the radiant success and sensation of the day. But for West's intelligence, it is hard to tell how much longer the absurd and hollow classicality of the period would have lasted; we might have had for an indefinitely longer term red-faced Englishmen draped as Grecian heroes in hundreds of pictures, and English verses attempting the false antique in dramas like Johnson's "Irene." In France, as we know, the Roman taste endured in art to a considerably later date. When David wished to represent the wives and mothers of France correcting the discords between the Girondists and the Jacobins, he painted Romulus and Tatius reconciled by the women of the Sabines; and Guerin, desiring to show the Emigrants of the Revolution return- ing to their bereaved homes, invented a "Marcus Sextus" to tell the story. But English art, set in the right path by West, was forever content, after the production of this picture, to leave the eloquence of facts to produce their natural effect; and accordingly, when our own great wars came to be recorded, a pupil of West— Trumbull — was empowered by a wise education to represent them as they happened, and in the strictest historic sense. West's "Death of Wolfe," of which we present a copy on page 53, is a touching and solemn composition. On the ground, near the crest of Abra- ham's Heights, the young hero is dying in the arms of his friends, at the moment of victory. The defences of Quebec are taken, Montcalm's forces are in full retreat, and the chain of French strongholds will not much longer bar the advance of Anglo-Saxon civilization across the American wilderness. But FINE ART. 71 this consciousness is only just dawning on the expiring hero. It is the tliick of the battle. As young Wolfe sinks down with his death-wound, with the issue still uncertain around him, an officer cries, "They fly! I protest they fly!" "Who fly?" asks Wolfe with ' terrible anxiety, through the death-rattle. ''The French" is the reply, and the young chieftain, raising his eyes to heaven as West has drawn him, gasps out, "Then I die happy!" and expires. Around him kneel the English captains bare-headed ; the brave young colonists, our forefathers, who supplied the flower of the British forces, in fringed leggings and moccasins are looking wistfully on ; one of them has just run up with the news of the French retreat; and, pointing to the captured flag, with its Bourbon lilies, this American rustic gives Wolfe the news of his success — a form of apprisal that we somehow like better than if it had come from lips stranger to the soil. More completely indigenous, a red-skin brave, one of the few whom British diplomacy was able to win from the wily blandishments of the French, sadly crouches on the ground to count the last breaths of the expiring martyr. Wolfe's figure is young, slender and aristocratic; the pale, upturned face is such an one as might well belong to the literary hero who beguiled the journey of the night attack a few hours before by reciting Gray's "Elegy," with the remark that he would rather have written that perfect requiem than take Quebec. This charming saying, so full of college-boy enthusiasm, gives reality to the character of Wolfe in our minds; the measures of the stately Elegy close around him for his own proper epitaph and consecration, and throb, as a dead march, among the bowed military figures whom West groups in his picture. The epoch (as defined by costume) of the bewitching "Mistress Dorothy" (page 68) is that of the "Death of Wolfe." We are again at the period, so big with changes for the face of the world, when England covered herself with victory, and made herself the dictator of Europe, to be brought up with a sudden check as soon as she tried to extend her conquests to the Western hemisphere. Yes, here is the costume that Gainsborough and Northcote and Romney immortalized ; but from the scene of the dying Wolfe and scattering French, what a transition ! It is like changing our reading from Marlborough's Dispatches to the beautiful make-believe antique English of Thackeray's "Esmond." The epoch, the period, is there, but we shift from grim work to 72 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. play. "Mistress Dorothy" is a lovely, simple English girl, of the time when Anglo-Saxon simplicity was real simplicity, uncontaminated with superficial science and French novels. This round-faced maid, who sits waiting for her palfrey to be brought mean- while drawingf on a pair of gloves that Jugla and Al- exandre would declare to be of frightfully bad cut, pos- sesses a mind healthfully va- cant of "Con- suelo" and "The Prin- cess." She knows the af- fairs of the buttery, doubt- less, and every day counts the eggs of her father the Squire's poul- try-yard. The crystal pellu- cidity of her .-/. Tanlardini, Sculp. The Bather. eyes has never been crossed by ugly shad- ows of skep- ticism and speculation. Doubtless she has sins of her own to ac- count for, and to ask expia- tion from, as she humbly kneels at her dimity pillow by night ; but the sins of the bluff Hano- verian period have a certain innocence about them ; one can see that the hero- ines of Miss Burney's nov- els have never let their teeth quite meet in the apple of knowledge. Now-a-days we should have to dive very deep into the country wilderness to meet such a gem of simplicity. Ah ! we travel a thousand miles for a wife, and think nothing of it; if we could defeat time as easily as space, and plunge into distant epochs FINE ART. 7i Ji. Lehtnan, Pin. La Rota — the Foujidling Hospital at Rome. 74 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. for our mates, what a hurry-scurry there would be to get the first choice ! Swinburne the poet would make for Cleopatra ; Faust the printer would call for Helen of Troy ; Longfellow would pursue his Evangeline, and Tennyson a protracted " Dream" of fair women, while we for our part should be con- tented with the dewy rustic buxomness of " Mistress Dorothy." For this sane and beautiful creation we have to thank Mr. George A. Storey, a talented London artist who has not received the honor of an election to the Academy, but who in this picture and in another entitled "Only a Rabbit" displays quali- ties that make the highest honors seem not inappropriate. A really exalted sentiment of rural tranquillity is poured over Mr. Bellows's scene entitled "Sunday in Devonshire" (page 44). It is the vibration of the church-going bell expressed in landscape-painting. We seem to see and breathe a different atmosphere from the work-a-day air as we mingle with these smock-frocked peasants on their way from church, appearing to have just received the blessing of Sir Roger de Coverley. Mr. Bellows is a young American painter who has passed much time in England, and whose works, both in oil and water-color, take an inspiration from English art rather than from that of the Continent. The spirit of English landscape, too, whose nutty honest flavor he seizes so perfecdy, is a boon he has secured from a residence in the tight little island. It is not for him to soar into Colorado scenery or wrestle with the Yo Semite. The stage he loves is set with snug and crisp trees and happy cottages; sometimes he is familiar, and gives a kitchen-garden comedy for the benefit of Gaffer and Gammer; but when he is at his best, as in the present example, the limpid, translucent touches of his pencil transfer the very sentiment of "an English home," with the security, the hereditary calm, the " Dewy landscape, dewy trees, Softer than sleep; all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace." We have already described and illustrated the wondrous archaeology of Mr. Alma Tadema ; but we are sure our readers will readily forgive us for recurring to a painter of such marked originality. On page 69 we present an engraving of his gem-like picture entided "The Convalescent." The original is not large, and reminds us strangely of some mosaic just dug up from FINE ART. 75 Pompeii — as highly finished as the celebrated "Pliny's Doves," and as dramatic as the "Choragus instructing his Actors." We are transported, by the magic art of this wizard painter, into the times of the later emperors, when rococo had completely usurped the simplicity and ponderousness of early Roman taste, when the arts of conquered Greece had rendered the Italians finical without rendering them elegant, and when even the false Egyptian and false Hellenic of Adrian had been forgotten, and the grandiose had sunk into the trivial throughout all the mansions of Rome. The museums of Europe, the lavas of Herculaneum, and the fragmentary busts of the statue-galleries, have to be ransacked, for costumes, hints, habits and back-grounds, before such a group as "The Convalescent" can be constructed, so true to life in the first century. Amid the worst innovations of Pompeian taste — the bewigged toilets, the pillars painted part way up and merging into pilasters, the garments chequered with a confusion of colors, the household divinities made absurd with barber's-block frivolity — he places his group of the invalid dame and her attendants. He knows well that the imagination is more easily caught with the every-day litter and vulgar ugliness of a period of decline than with the frigid perfection of the more elegant epochs. The graceful figures of an Attic vase would touch us but slightly, and nothing would come of an effort to interest the mind with the Grecian couches and reclining nymphs of the classical period as the French restored them in the day of the Revolution. Our artist's persons are direct, real, ungraceful, and convincing. The noble dame lounges on her carved seat. Her hair is bunched up into a hideous mop, which gives her infinite satisfac- tion. Her accomplished slave has dipped her hand into the round box of parchments, and has extracted some of the light literature of the day — not that story in Virgil which made an empress faint, but the love-poems of Ovid or the graceful fancies of Catullus. A younger slave-woman kneels in the fore- ground over a tempting luncheon. It is homely and stately at once. It is parlor-life in the days when they talked Latin without making it a school- exercise, and perhaps, in some cool corner around the pillar, Pliny is writing one of his pleasant letters. Christian resignation, which soothes the bed of sickness, and finds an answer even for the yawning challenge of the grave, is most poetically illus- trated by the British artist F. Holl, in his two subjects contributed to the 76 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. Exhibition. One is entitled "The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; Vl ■^ blessed be the name of the Lord;" the other, "The Village Funeral: 'I am the Resurrection and the Life.'" The former, lent by its owner, F. C. Pawle, FINE ART. 77 Esq., forms the theme of our engraving on this page : it seems to attain the very acme of rehgious pathos. We share in the first meal which unites an humble family after some awful bereavement. The watchers who have taken their turns at the sick couch are released now — their faithful task is over; the 78 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. household whose regular ways have been overturned by the malady has come back to its wonted course again, and the pious nurses have no cares to prevent them from meeting at the board as of old. Is there anything more dreadful than that first meal after a funeral? The mockery of leisure and ease — the sorrowful, decorous regularity of the repast — the security from those hindrances and interruptions that so long have marred the order of the attendance — these improvements are here indeed, for what they are worth; but where is the tender hand that was wont to break the bread for the household? — where are the lips that used to breathe forth the humble grace before meat? It is the very emptiness of a once cheerful form — the bitterness of meat eaten with tears. The frugal board is neat and pleasant — " But oh for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still !" In Mr. Holl's picture we see this ghastly, unnatural decorum of the table spread with funeral bakemeats : the wan woman beside it, whose hollow eyes and tear-worn cheeks tell of faithful watching for many a weary night, is neat with the miserable neatness of the funeral evening ; the young brother in the back-ground is brushed and combed more than his wont, and his attitude has an unnatural restraint ; the old woman behind is tender and sympathetic, beyond the customary usage and practice of that kind of old women. Death has come among them all like a leveling wind, reducing everything to the regularity of desolation. Out of this weary scene of frustration and lassitude arise the words of the sincere-looking, earnest young curate: "The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away;" he stands by the robbed fireside; he joins the family-circle whose most precious link is gone, and he confidently cries, "Blessed be the name of the Lord!" It is the very triumph of faith out of the jaws of death! Mr. HoU has uttered that sure word of promise which is the best reliance of our religion. In the assurance of the immortality which is to join the family at last in a more-enduring mansion, is the highest boon of Christianity. The expressions here are so earnest, pure, devout, and full of tenderness, that the painting is as elegant as a canto of In Memoriam. It is deservedly a great favorite, and forms a precious example of the intellectual and moral profundity which is the redeeming feature of English art. FINE ART. 79 A work of considerable dignity and elegance, and one deserving respectful criticism apart from the mere stupefied admiration accorded to its gigantic size, is the colossal group of sculpture entitled "America," set up in the great Central Hall of the Memorial Building. Besides being an interesting reminder of a superb monument, it is noteworthy as probably the largest ceramic work ever made, except those Chinese towers confessedly put together out of small fragments. However many may be the segments in which the "America" group is cast, they must severally be enormously large, and in their grouping they produce an effect of perfect unity, so adroidy are their joints concealed. The memorial recendy erected to Prince Albert, in Hyde Park, London, has occupied the leading sculptors of England for many years. The podium or central mass, covered by Mr. Armstead with friezes of the principal poets, ardsts, and musicians, is approached by flights of steps on its four sides, the whole forming a vast platform, at whose corners are pedestals, quite remote from the central edifice, and respectively crowned with groups of sculpture. "Asia" is one of these groups, executed by J. H. Foley; the late P. Macdowell designed the group of "Europe;" the veteran John Bell, whose works, says Mr. S. C. Hall, "have long given him a leading posidon in his profession," is the inventor of the elaborate allegory dedicated to our own country, a fine engraving of which we introduced in an earlier part of the present work. The quarters of the globe are backed by other groups of sculpture representing human achievement: as, "Agriculture," by W. C. Marshall; "Engineering," by J. Lawlor; "Commerce," by J. Thornycroft, and "Manufactures," by H. Weekes. The collection of figures representing "America," which are worthy the attention needed to unravel their symbolism, may be thus described. America herself, the central and all-embracing type of the continent, rides the bison in the centre of the cortege. Her right hand holds the spear, her left the shield, decorated with the beaver, the eagle and other Indian signs ; her tiara of eagle feathers sweeps backward from her forehead and trails over her shoulders ; she is the aboriginal earth-goddess, depending upon kindlier forces to illumine her path and guide her steps. This office is assumed by the figure representing the United States; the serene virgin, self-confident and austere, wearing the lineaments of the Spirit of Liberty, belted with stars, and leading the earth- goddess with a sceptre on whose tip shines that planet of empire which 8o THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. "westward takes its way," is the effigy of our own happy country. At her feet lies the Indian's quiver, with but one or two arrows left within it. Behind the figure of the Republic is that of Canada, a pure and fresh-faced damsel, wearing furs, and pressing the rose of England to her bosom. The figure seated on a rock, in front, is Mexico, rep- resented by an Az- tec in his radiating crown of feathers, with the flint axe, curiously carved, in his hand ; a corres- ponding sitting per- sonage on the other side, and not within the scope of the engraving, is South America, a Spanish- faced cavalier in the broad-brimmed som- brero and grace- fully folded poncho. These are the prin- cipal features of the lofty and elaborate group which casts its shadow over the floor of Memorial Hall. The artist has Sculpture by Signer Corti. Lucifer. worked in such evi- dent sympathy with and admiration for the Spirit of Ameri- can institutions that he deserves the most gracious recognition of this country; the original of this mighty group, be- held by all who pass under the marble arch and stroll to- wards the Serpent- ine, is a perpetual appeal for Constitu- tional Liberty, as we understand it; and the lesson taught by those sister statues, who though crown- less subdue the rugged forces of the West, is not lost upon the thronging citizens who gaze upon them. The effect of the group as we have it, in the pleasant earth-color of Messrs. Doulton's terra-cotta, is quite unique — something more exquisite and piquant than that of white marble, with which the eye becomes satiated after a long course of civic monuments. English rustic life is well-depicted in Constable's paindng of "The Lock" FINE ART. (page 2j']'), which is a piece of good fortune for us to keep for awhile in America. The importance of John Constable's influence and example cannot possibly be over-estimated in the progress of landscape art throughout England %) fe" Sculpture by E^iidio Pazz\ The Youth of Michael Angela. and the Continent. His effect on art is in fact, considerably greater than that of Turner, because, while Turner's individuality cannot be imitated to any Bri. \ng in the Corn. 84 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. advantage, the discoveries of Constable are not altogetlier uncopiable. He was born at East Bergholt, in Suffolk, in 1776, and died at his home in Charlotte Street, London, on the first of April, 1837, with Southey's "Cowper," which he had been reading an hour before his death, lying at the bed-head on a table. Constable found landscape composition enthralled in the noble formality of Gainsborough and Wilson; by paying attention to nature, and not to any school, he invented a manner of his own, expressed certain phases as they had never been expressed before, and left behind him a body of works which were the code of a new faith in art. The mannered landscapes of his predecessor, Wilson, in England, have just the same relation to real scenery that the man- nered descriptions of Pope and Shenstone have to actual effects ; it is landscape gardening, not landscape; you are among groves that "frown," and "horrid" rocks, and "nodding" mountains, and all those other curiosities that are never found in nature by those who really love her, but are invariably lent to her by artists of the drop-curtain sort ; at the same time, on the Continent, the grand but baleful influence of Poussin had set all the world to formalizing nature, and that of Claude had established his precedent of artful symmetry among those who could never reach his golden air. It was for Constable to charm away the whole world from the shrines of these divinities, and they are empty to this very day. His fresh and flashing style, so true to a single aspect of European climate, set every painter to looking, not upon antique bas-reliefs and Italian ruins, but right into the open, windy, showery, capricious sky, and 'kmong the dewy grasses underfoot. He made the lush and humid leaves twinkle with sense of growth and stirring life and mounting sap. He sent the scudding clouds flashing and darkening across the changeable sky; he swept this sky with rocking branches and tufted ripples of foliage. Although not altogether unappreciated during his lifetime, his fame has immensely increased since his death ; along with " Old Crome" and Bonington, he enjoys a sort of posthumous elevation to the peerage ; his slightest works are sought out like gold, and even the gallery of the Louvre, so very chary of credit to English art, has recently received with pride two or three of his pictures — one of them a very noble study of a sea-beach swept with shadows from a storm — and hung them in positions of honor. He is the true progenitor of such eminent land- scapists as Troyon, Rousseau, Frangais, Dupre, and even Daubigny — some of FINE ART 8s whom find their fortune in appropriating a mere corner of his mantle. "Among all landscape-painters, ancient or modern," says the celebrated C. R. Leslie, "no one carries me so entirely to nature ; and I can truly say that since I have known his works I have never looked at a tree or the sky without being reminded of him." In his personal character Constable was winning, and con- quered the most unpromising material to his allegiance ; he would say to a London cabby, "Now, my good fellow, drive me a shilling fare towards so and so, and don't cheat yourself." Constable's picture at the Exposition, generously lent by the Royal Academy, is an important example. One of his flashing skies, summing up the whole quarrel between storm and sunshine, occupies the upper half; against this lean a couple of vigorous, riotous-looking trees, half- drunk with potations of superabundant English moisture. Both these features are modelled: the sky shows as much light and shade as a study of sculpture, and the trees are moulded into their natural dome-like forms, with play of light and shade on the mass ; in such a scene, an inferior painter is tempted either to keep his sky very thin, in order to get it well back from the invading trees, or else, if the sky has much variegation, to turn his trees into a mere dark screen, perfectly flat, so as easily to insure the desired contrast and difference of values. Constable boldly moulds his clouds, and vigorously lights the sun- ward edges of his trees, trusting to his close copywork of nature to get his firmament fifty miles away. A man in a boat is guiding the prow by means of a rope passing around a post through the brimming reservoir of the lock, which the care-taker is raising with a lever applied to the gate. Beyond stretches a level view of a flat country, of which a considerable stretch is commanded from the elevation of the race-bank. In spirit and idea it is all English — homely, familiar, dew-bathed, and tender. It reminds us, in temper, feehng and gratitude, of the lines in Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis": "Runs it not here, the track by ChikUworth Farm, Up past the wood, to where the elm-tree crowns The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames? The signal-elm that looks on Isley Downs, The vale, the three lone wears, the youthful Thames?" In the crowded vegetation with which he fills the foreground of this picture, Constable is all himself. Without pedantic analysis of forms and genera, with- 86 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. out that close attention to vegetable minutiae which invariably turns landscape art into botany, and destroys the higher truths of atmosphere, the painter gives with great success the vital principle of weed-growth — the confusion, the struggle for light and air, the soft brushing of leaf against leaf surcharged with moisture. This ardent study of a great inventor's, "The Lock," is twice noteworthy: first as it hangs, as a hit at nature taken on the fly, and second as a document, showing the invasion of realism into academic art early in this century. It is in some of its qualities a resume of the advice which West gave Constable in his youth, and which it was not his own cue to act upon. "Always remember, sir, that light and shadow never stand still." Hamerton quoting this proverb, says, "It thus became one of Constable's main purposes to rhake people feel the motions of cloud-shadows and gleams of light stealing upon objects and brightening before we are quite aware of it." It is hardly unfair or extravagant to say that Emile Breton's picture of "The Canal at Courrieres" results from Constable's "Lock." This sincere and simply-viewed landscape effect could be traced, through a connected series of studies and exemplars, logically and materially back to England and the studio of Constable. It is part of the same movement, the championship of pure nature, of pure impression as the phrase goes, and the hewing in pieces of Claude and Poussin. The simple life of the brothers Breton, one of the most charming imaginable examples of gentle existence in rustic France, is an idyl in itself, and is in perfect harmony with Constable's rustic way of living in the heart of nature. Among the dandies of Paris who throng before the pictures at the spring exhibitions, there is seen most years a singular and charming figure — a short, solid-looking countryman, tanned and rough, with hat carried respectfully in hand, hair blowing about in the utter absence of pomade, a preposterous old watch-chain, and a waistcoat of white Marseilles stuft*, pro- fusely adorned with flowers of all colors : such a make-up would be the fortune of a comic actor in the part of a "brave paysan;" but the country farmer elbows his way with modest confidence to the most exquisite examples of art m the exhibition, and some of the dandies make way for him with unfeigned respect, for he is know« to be Jules Breton, painter of some of the finest of them all. Jules, renowned for his figure-subjects, has a younger brother, Emile, a landscapist, in character not unlike himself, and the author of the picture we THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. represent on page 76. From the agreeable pen of Rene Menard we have a lifelike sketch of all the brothers. Courrleres, where they live, is a little village in French Flanders, Departement du Nord. Of the children who played about in the mayor's garden, and watched with delight the house-painter touching up the eyes and lips of the four wooden garden statues every spring, the youngest was Emile, the subject of this paragraph. When he was nine months old, however, and before such intelligent watching was possible to him, he lost his father, the good mayor, the year being 1827. Nothing can exceed the charm and the goodness, the mixture of patriarchal despotism and sub- stantial kindness, of a French country mayor in an out-of-the-way province. Looking like a market-huckster, he is armed with the majesty of Rhadamanthus and graced with the goodness of Sir Roger de Coverley. Another brother now inherits the good, simple office of mayor vacated by the father, and conducts the village brewery. Jules, the great painter of "The Benediction of Harvest," is some three years older than Emile, which vast advantage in point of time has made him treat the junior like a patron and guardian all his life. During the ruinous overturnings of 1848, the career of the family was clouded by poverty, owing to which circumstance, says M. Menard, "the younger brother, Emile Breton, enlisted in the army, but after a time he resumed his studies in pajnting, and is now among our most distinguished landscape-painters. Pictures like those of Emile Breton charm by a mixture of poetry and reality; his moonlight effects and winter scenes assign to him an eminent position among our best painters. When the invasion came he separated himself from his family to defend his country, and his conduct was such that his general embraced him on the field of battle. After the war he returned to art, and in the last exhi- bitions his pictures had so much success that public opinion now places him by the side of his brother. The talent of the two brothers, though applied to different objects, presents nevertheless great affinities, since we find in the figures of the one, as in the landscapes of the other, the search after truthful- ness combined with an extreme refinement in their way of understanding nature." Both the landscapes contributed by Emile Breton belong to the class called "impressions;" they are not meant to be examined from the distance of a foot and with the aid of a magnifying-glass, but to be viewed for the whole effect and from a somewhat remote position. Under these conditions they are FINE ART. 89 found to deliver the aspect of nature with a close verity not often reached by painting. The "Village in Winter" records the exact appearance of soft, heavy, clogging, and lumpish snow; you can positively see it melt. The "Canal at Courrieres" makes capital of the straightness, starkness and uncompromising Tlie Youthful Hannibal, BroHze by the Ca-valitr Efinay. ricridity of the water-course beside which the artist has played from childhood. The two banks, as if laid out with a ruler, recede in perspective towards the point of sight as you look up the canal; on each side rise small perpendicular trees, trimmed every year in French fashion: it is like looking up a tunnel — the straio-ht level bars of cloud closing over the top and completing the effect of imprisoning the sight between the bars of a sort of cage. The low and Move. 92 THE INTERNATIONAL EX HIB IT 1 N, 1 8 7 6. rather melancholy light strays as best it can through this all-enclosing prison. It will be observed that the water of the canal seems perfectly level, though its wedge-shaped boundaries would give it the look of a hill-side in the hands of an unskillful artist. Mr. Breton gives us a direct, unadorned, literal page from the book of nature: it is the unfeigoed report of an impression derived from a particular place and hour; this candid scene is worthy to figure as the back- ground of one of his brother's peasant groups. The pathetic subject of which we give a representation on page 73, "La Rota," is by Mr. Rudolph Lehmann, of London. The picture represents an incident only too common in Rome, where the scene is laid. A wretched mother has brought her babe in the evening to the foundling hospital, and is about to place the tiny creature in the "wheel," or turning box at the window, to become henceforth a waif and unclassified citizen. In a little while she will have departed, and the good nun within will search the receptacle for the litde nesding, never more to know mother or kindred. The culpable and weak- hearted girl, of course, is not too hardened to part from her offspring without a pang ; there is genuine grief in her last despairing ^kiss, and, perhaps, genuine pious feeling in the care with which the rosary has been brought along with the cradle. It is the resolute endurance of obloquy for the future advantage of the infant, of which the impulsive, impressionable Southern character is incapable; to find this heroism of the depths, we have to seek a sterner and more exalted race, among the duty-laden peoples of the North — ex. gr., Hester Prynne, and "The Scarlet Letter." Mr. Lehmann has thrown his figure into a very graceful pose, without doing violence to that directness of action and uncalculating simplicity which the subject demands, and which these moments of soul-outpouring provide. The cradle deserves a note, too — cradle and basket at once, with hoop handle for convenient transport, such as the Italian poor make use of. How often has this cradle-pannier made its innocent journeys from door-step to hearth, and from floor to grass-plot, perhaps for generations, without consciousness that it should one night make its stealthy trip, along the narrowest, filthiest and loneliest alleys of Rome, to the "Rota" in the hospital of infamy! Mr. K. Dielitz, of Berlin, shows a piece of hearty, sympathedc genre paindng, in the subject we illustrate on page 41, entided "I and my Pipe." FINE ART. 93 Ihis fine young Bavarian peasant, from his festal dress, seems to have returned from some holiday occasion — perhaps a shooting-match, perhaps a sermon. The luxury with which he stretches his stalwart and clean-shaped legs, and concen- trates all his attention on the filling and lighting of his pipe, is quite contagious in its hearty humor. The pipe, like the magnificent porcelain stove against which his broad back is set, is monumental in its dimensions. A witty writer says the German peasant's face is composed of the following features : the eyes, the nose, and the — pipe. We may gratify our national vanity by taking a specimen of American industry as a contrast to Bavarian otium cum dignitatis. Mr. E. T. Billings, of Boston, sends to the Exhibition a highly characteristic interior representing a wheelwright shop, with the capable-looking master bending his philosopher's forehead over a felloe for the wheel that is in process of construction at his side. The extraordinary scrupulosity with which every detail of the shop is individualized and dwelt upon renders this picture a little wonder. The artist does not spare us a chisel, a saw, a gauge, or a glue-pot. It is Dutch patience celebrating American skill. There is capital training for the painter in the elaboration of one of these laborious toys of art ; there are provoking little problems of drawing, perspective and grouping to be worked out, and the (i-eneral difficulty of giving each item its prominence without losing breadth; and one would say that every artist, no matter how large a style, how volup- tuous a color, how easy a grace, how masterly a generalization he is ultimately to attain to, might profitably spend a year of his youth in putting together one of these intricate puzzles. It is said that Sir John Gilbert occupied his boyhood in drawing the details of ornamental carriages; so the not altogether different business of a wheelwright shop may be the training destined to conduct Mr. Billings to fame and excellence. For the entirely graceful and feminine figure of "The Bather" — engraved on pao-e 72 — we are indebted to Professor Antonio Tantardini, of Milan. The posture of this shrinking woman — who seems to fear surprisal — is at first sight somewhat like that of Mr. Howard Roberts' statue of "The First Pose." In both, the foot is timidly drawn up into the mass of drapery on which the fio-ure sits, and the face is shielded in the right elbow ; this is, of course, an accidental resemblance, and only proves the fact which has become proverbial 94 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. among sculptors, that there are very few poses in nature for the artist to select from. Immense have been the number of "Bathers" contributed to art by sculptors and painters in want of a theme, the plain reason being that the situation of bathing is one of the very few in which a modern female subject can be treated without any violation of modesty of character. The artist, impelled to make a study of nude flesh — after all, the worthiest exercise afforded by nature to the craft — can hardly find another situation in modern life which affords him the needed revelation, without the slightest sacrifice of womanly character. The variations, too, which may be played on this delicate theme are infinite. Let the careless reader, who is disposed to pass by Tantardini's fine work with the hasty remark, "Only another bathing girl!" turn again to the glowing and delicate episode of Musidora, in Thomson's "Seasons," as he reads for one more time this gende pastoral, which the Italian sculptor seems to have been familiar with, he will comprehend the resources which art can find in the topic of modesty taken at a disadvantage. Another sculptor of Milan, Signor Egidio Pozzi, contributes to the Exhibi- tion a sitting male figure, supposed to represent Michael Angelo in his youth. We present an engraving of this work on page 81. The Milanese artist repre- sents his immortal fellow-sculptor at that period of his boyhood when he studied all day long in the garden of Lorenzo de Medici, "the Magnificent," in Florence, among the treasures of antique statuary which the growing taste for such collections had then amassed in that retreat. It is related that the first original work of the young genius was a face of an antique satyr, or faun —one of those grotesques which the architecture of the period demanded in abundance for the decoration of keystones and lintels. The greater the extrava- gance of expression, the richer the sadsfaction of the architect, and the artists of the time exhausted their fancy in giving the look of leering, fantastic intelli- gence to these stone faces which peered over arches and portals, and conferred an air of conscious slyness and counsel-keeping on the various apertures of an edifice. Michael Angelo's first effort was as great a hit as the mature efforts of finished sculptors in this line, and the row of mascaro7ts, or grotesque faces made by Jean Goujon for the Pont Neuf in Paris, contained no example more expressive than this first specimen, which had been made by the elfish stripling in Florence. " However, your faun is wrong," said Lorenzo, laughing indulgently FINE ART. 95 over the boy's shoulder. " He is old and has cracked many a hard nut with those grinning teeth; he ought to have lost some of them by this time." When the Magnifico passed next into the garden, young Michael had knocked out a tooth, and the patron, pleased with his own cleverness and the lad's, was 96 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. unreserved in his praise .of a work which now recorded a thought of his own within one of Michael Angelo's. The figure sent to us by Signer Pozzi is one of intellectual delicacy ; it is hardly that of the fiery young goblin who drew his own face, with pointed ears as a satyr, before he was twenty-one, and who, in this same garden of Florence, so taunted Torregiano that the latter marked him for life with a broken nose. It is a representation of the etherial, creative part of Michael Angelo's character. The lad before us seems likely to grow up into a sort of seraphic being, more like a Raphael than like the gusty and morose recluse who carved the Moses. Yet, it is undeniable that this lonely man had his side of ineffable tenderness, and there is artistic justification for the artist who chooses to represent that phase of his nature on which his con- temporaries were continually harping, when they played upon his' name and said that his works were exected by an "Angelo." One of the most creditable representatives of our country abroad is Mr. Frederick A. Bridgman, whose picture of " Bringing in the Corn " is engraved on pages 82 and 83. Mr. Bridgman, when a young lad, became tired of executing line-engravings for the Bank Note Company in New York, and determined to open for himself a career as an oil painter. He looked like a mere boy when he took his seat, in 1867, among the students of one of the large ateliers of Paris; but the professor soon noticed that he had uncommon application and advanced rapidly out of the hard liney style which his apprenticeship to the burin had cramped him into. Young Bridgman passed his summers in Brittan)-, and afterwards went to Algiers and Egypt. If ever artist fulfilled Apelles' motto of "Nulla dies sine linea" it was this indefatigable worker. Now, his reputa- tion is both European and American, and the Liverpool Academy has bought one of his pictures as a model to its students and an adornment of its galleries. He is a constant contributor to American exhibitions, but he has seldom sent to his native country a better scene than the Brittan)' subject which we intro- duce to our readers. The drawing of the patient oxen, with their liquid eyes and hides of plush, is worthy of Rosa Bonheur, or any animalistwho ever painted. The rustic scenery represents to the life one of those narrow earthy roads of Brittany, which have stretched between the old town for thousands of years, in many cases, and whose bed is often worn to a hollow beneath the level of the fields from the mere carrying off of its dust, through centuries of travel. The FINE ART 97 picture basks in a delicious breadth of soft summer sunshine — which in Finis- tere is never dry and never too intense — and the type of an honest farmer's ff. Moulin, Se. A Secret. boy, who balances the goad in his toughened rustic hands and goes along the road singing and contented, is a fresh and pretty thing to see. Mr. Bridg- The Wci, . Hall. 100 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. man's versatility is shown in the fact that he paints all subjects about equally well, whether landscapes, or circus scenes, or life-size Oriental heads, or country eclogues, like the example we are considering. A French figure-painter, who is no tyro, and is by no means young, yet who has made within a few years a quite novel and separate effect for himself by a fresh and original style of portraits, is the artist who calls himself " Carolus Duran." His old friends remember him as plain Charles Durand. He excites attention because in each of his portraits there is a new study of character, surroundings, relief and light and shade. To the "Salon" of 1876 he sent a portrait of the editor Girardin, in the stuffy seclusion of his study, backed up and almost wrapped up with a voluminous red curtain. To a previous one he conveyed the portrait of Mile. Croizette, of which we show a representation on page 87, in the full liberty of air and space, sitting on horseback, with the long beach in front of her and the illimitable sea behind. Mile. Croizette is the actress who made her grand sensation by turning green and dying of poison every night as the suicide in " The Sphinx." When those of our readers who have not seen the original are told that this lovely horsewoman of Monsieur Duran's is a woman the size of nature, on a bay hackney the size of nature, standing out dark and distinct from an Infinite that is the size of nature too, they may conceive that this work — though only a portrait — attracts about as much attention as any painting in the French Department. Many visitors, too, have seen her great part played in our own theatres and have heard of Mile. Croizette as the creator of it, and therefore have a personal interest in this gifted and fascinating woman, who is the sister-in-law of the painter. The picture, indeed, is one you cannot escape from ; whenever you are in the large room where it hangs, the ripe, imperial beauty, turning to you her questioning, rallying face reins you up as she does her steed. She impresses each spec- tator as if she had something very particular to say to him. This individual appeal is the charm of a French society-woman, and it is the charm, too, of a certain class of the best portraits of the old masters. For our own part we habitually think about this picture — which we have been irresistibly drawn to a great many times — that the attractiveness of it resides especially in the face, around which all the rest of the composition plays as a mere Arabesque. The eyes of the figure strike so directly into the eyes of your own head, and FINE ART. loi the smiling, appealing, sidelong visage talks to you so intimately, that you have but a divided attention left for the neat hackney — with its uncommonly short ears — that stands off from the sky like a bronze, or for the iron drapery and cast-steel hat, which form the insignificant continuations of the beauty's commanding head and softly-turning neck. It must be acknowledged that the portraitist requires a great deal of space to relate his impression. Is there no way of expressing a fine woman's thoughts about the sea, and that sense of dominating something which she so much enjoys as the mistress of a fine animal, without importing the sea and the fine animal both bodily into the canvas ? Taken as it stands, however, the picture is a triumph of perfectly clear analysis in, and careful relief of, objects against a distant sky. To deter- mine merely the right tint of that bright face against that bright sky, so that the flesh should look like flesh and the firmanent like light, was a whole volume of problems in art. The clearness with which the character, and a special mood of a character, is defined is above all a singularity of the picture ; you see just how far the painter is impressed by his model, and are reminded of some of Alfred de Mussett's analyses. The French are always logical and retain their logical expression even when submitting to a charm. The gentle negro slave-girl, whom one of our prettiest steel-plates shows in the act of feeding a flock of storks, is the work of an eminent English artist, Edward J. Poynter, A. R. A. It is called "The Ibis Girl," or, more explana- torily, " Feeding the Sacred Ibis in the Hall of Karnac." It is a singular and lovely picture, and there is a sly, quaint humor in the contrast between the ibis-headed god on the elevation of his pillar, with incense rising up to his sacred beak, and the real ibises, who display such frank carnivorous appetite at his feet. The ibis, it is known, was sacred to Thoth, the Egyptian Mercury. Those ancient Africans, with their extraordinary talent for finding hidden meanings in things, discovered that the inundation of the Nile was caused by the annual coming of the ibis, instead of being the mere pretext of a visit when the feathered pilgrims wanted food. Impressed with this idea, they fer- vently worshipped the symbol presented by the migrating ibis, and, that the sign of their land's fertility might be never wanting, reared the birds in their temples with the greatest care. When a chick came out of the &^^ black, he was welcomed as a specially fortunate guest, honored during his life and spiced I02 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. and embalmed after his death. Mr. Poynter's subject is an inferior ministrant of the temple feeding these birds with fish. Her posture is simple, natural and beautiful, and in its soft rounded form offers a contrast to the varied attitudes of ungainliness among the birds around her. Wrapped in transparent linen tissue, and covered with heavy symbolic jewelry, she feeds the storks with a shower of small fish which she scoops in a patera out of the large basin held against her hip. The monstrous pillars of Karnac, painted and covered with bas-reliefs, close in the background. The birds, who are bolting their food in a gormandizing and irreligious manner, are capitally studied, laying their long beaks sideways on the ground to gobble better, or elevating their heads and shaking the food into their throats as into a hopper. The innocent interest of the simple-minded black novice is very well felt by the artist. It is the precise shade of feeling demanded — the reverent care of a sacred thing, modified by familiarity, but not obscured — the humility of the Levite who sustains the temple service. A well-known French picture, illustrating a well-known French proverb, shows two augurs amongst the sacred chickens laughing heartily at the joke of the thing, and turning their backs upon the mystical hen-coops. Mr. Poynters' genrie priestess will never laugh at her feathered gods. Our nearest neighbor, the Dominion of Canada, is represented at the Centennial Exhibition by one hundred and fifty-six paintings, among which are several of a high order of merit. One of the most versatile exhibitors, whose works represent the three styles of portrait, marine and imaginative art, is Mr. J, C. Forbes. Of this gentleman's portraits, that delineating his Excellency Lord Dufferin, is of a particularly close resemblance, as many of those who have been glad to meet the distinguished original on his "Centennial" tour, have hastened to testify. His marine painting is an interesting representation of the foundering of the ship "Hibernia" in mid-ocean; in his third or "\m^.g^- m.tw&" genre, the artist presents himself as the illustrator of an American poet! Longfellow's song of "Beware!" from the romance of Hyperion, has been accepted for thirty years as the best and standard expression of feminine coquetry; and this is the poem which our neighborly contributor chooses to embody in a graceful picture, engraved by us on page 61. A lady, whose beauty and elegance are not concealed by a somewhat worldly-mannered carriage, is touching the feathers of a fan with her pearly teeth, while the Count vvn Harach, Pittx. Luther Intercepted. 104 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. fingers of one hand are trifling with the long chain she wears, as if she was ready to throw it over her victim. The narrow, languid eyes gaze into the beholder's with the refinement of tender flirtation. It is the figure we meet in the parlor, in the park, in the piazza of the watering-place; one would say she was all heart; but "Take care ! She knows how much 'tis best to showl Beware ! Beware ! Trust her not, She is fooHng thee! " Another illustration of English poetry — this time of a loftier and more serious nature — is the statue of "Lucifer," in pure white marble, by Signor Corti, of Milan. Our cut, on page 80, gives an excellent idea of the original, if it be borne in mind that the statue is of the full size of an ordinary human form. It is one of the most seriously treated and practically conceived figures which the prolific Italian sculptors have shown to us. The conception is that of Milton's "Paradise Lost," representing the lost angel, not as a base and intellectually degraded being, but as the fallen rebel, nothing less than arch- angel ruined. The moment chosen is that after the immersion in the lake of fire, when the vanquished chieftain first recovers his ethereal strength. "Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool His mighty statue. On each hand the flames ■Driven backward, slope their pointing spires, and rolled In billows, leave i' the 'midst a horrid vale." The figure of Lucifer is that of an athlete in the pride of youthful strength, yet rather nervous and ethereal in its power than ponderous or solid. Upon the haughtily squared shoulders rides a head of most proud and noble carriage, surmounting a long boyish neck. The vast wings, covered with disheveled feathers, are drooping and half closed behind the shoulders, and the long agitated locks, from which heaven's ambrozia has been scorched all away, flow wildly back and meet the torn plumage of the pinions. The expression of the head, turned proudly to the right with a look of angry investigation, needs no description of ours, having been so superbly anticipated by Milton. FINE ART. I OS Giuiio Branca, Sc, The \oung Grape Gatherer. Another sort of "Lucifer," or light-bearer, is seen in the pretty bronze statue, by Antonio Rosetti, of the "Telegraph," or "Genius of Electricity." This G. F. Fi'/iiijjs/'y, I'm. Lady Jane Grcv s\ triumph over Bishop Gardiner, io8 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. figure is one of a pair, of which the other represents with equal felicity the idea which Rumsey and John Fitch elaborated so painfully on our shores — the idea of the railway-engine. Of the "Electricity" we present a steel engraving. Signor Rosetti hails from Rome, — the last city on the face of the globe, one would think, into which these modern innovations would penetrate; to anni- hilate time, annihilate space, — what interest has Rome in these, or what would she be if the time of her enduring or the extension of her ancient sway were lost to thought! Yet these disturbances and destructions, doing away with distances and periods, have swept at last, by the throne of the Popes and the sepulchre of the Caesars, and Rome is modern and pretty, like the rest of the world. Signor Rosetti has aimed at representing not so much the power, as the agility, delicacy and grace of the electric spark. Just born to illuminate the world, the child of light balances in one hand the torch of intelligence, while with the other he wraps the wire cables around the glass insulators which stud like mushrooms the stems of the trees; the forest of electric masts will cover the globe, and time will be shrivelled to nothingness, as the corpulent old planet throbs within the girdle of Puck. The most celebrated sculptor, whose labors contribute to the embellishment of our exhibition, is certainly John Gibson, whose death lately caused such deep, wide and unfeigned regret in the art-world. Kindly Wrapped in his art, wonderfully absent-minded — the ideal of an idealist — Gibson was for many years the British lion in the circles of Rome, where he abode. His "Venus," executed for St. George's Hall, that classical Parthenon of Liverpool, is represented at the Centennial by a replica, which occupies the post of honor in the largest gallery appropriated to British use, and is represented by our engraving on page 64. The original excited a storm of doubt and objection by being stained or colored in imitation of life. Gibson's previous works, the details of his "Queen Victoria" and "Aurora" were faintly tinted, but the "Venus" showed the experiment carried out to its utmost limit. The first "Venus" was exhibited in 1854, in a chamber arranged for the special purpose, and the wondering crowd saw the marble entirely disguised under a flesh tint, which obscured the translucency though it did not affect the form of the marble, while the eyes, hair and drapery were stained to imitate the appearance of actual life. In the present duplicate, kindly committed by its owner, Richard C. Naylor, Esq., to PINB. art. 160 the risks and perils of exhibition, we have the purity of a beautiful fragment of Italian marble. The artist represents with dignity, with sweetness, and even with somewhat of the lymphatic and sedentary plumpness of the ordinary British matron, the charms of Venus Victrix. In her left hand she exhibits the apple, detur pulchriori, which Discord had contributed to the marriage-feast of Peleus. The robe she has relinquished hangs over her arm and trails over the carapace of that mystical tortoise, which was the attribute of the divinity at Elis. Yes, she grasps at length the easily-won apple. Paris will steal Greek Helen, and the Grecian ships will dart to the Cape of Sagaeum, and Troy will blaze, — but what cares Beauty, — supreme in her conquest of smiles and graces, alone on her pedestal of white supremacy? Few English artists are thought of more admiringly in France than W. Q. Orchardson. "Of M. Orchardson," says VArt, "it may be said that he is essentially a painter. Whatever subject he may select, even incompletely represented, you see that he has been attracted by some quality sincerely picturesque, or by an effect which it belongs to painting to render ably * * * The painter is a colorist by race." He contributes two specimens of his skill to the Centennial display, one a humorous picture of Falstafif, Poins and the Prince, the other a wonderful expression of sentiment in landscape, " Moonlight on the Lagoons, Venice." The expression of fleet racing motion communicated to the sky full of hurrying clouds, as well as to the darting boat and the sweeping water, is worthy of a poet. All the picture hurries together, from left to right, yet with a power as soft as love, while inexorable as fate. There is no light on the horizon — the last lamps of Murano or the Lido has been left behind, and the glittering shore of Venice is outside the picture; there is nothing but the diffused lustre of the moon, whose orb is not visible, but whose brightness flashes and waves behind a certain station among the clouds; immediately beneath this brightest spot is drawn the black iron beak of the gondola; as the beak rises towards it and defines the place of the moon, so the stretching oar of the gondolier tends directly to it, the bench on which he stands is laid toward it, and the two female figures assist, by the brightened folds of their drapery, to point to an illuminator which we cannot see. The supreme lone- liness of the sea and sky, emphasized rather than contradicted by the black darting boat, gives a curious hush to this impressive painting. no THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. The long, intense, memorable monotone which Orchardson introduces into his marine is deeply poetic in its way, and is characteristic of certain modern studies and states of feeling. The fine old windy sense of the open sea, — the feeling characteristic of the day when Dibdin sang its songs and Stanfield painted its tides, — is indicated by an American artist, Mr. Briscoe, with peculiar success, in the subject of our steel-plate, "A Breezy Day off Dieppe." This excellent picture was long in the principal American room. Gallery C, and numbered 158. The picturesque gables and square tower of the town, whose chimneys send curling sooty clouds into the dirty weather of the zenith, occupy the left : the most sharply serrated roof stands dark against the brightest opening in the firmament: the fishing boats are racing in, lowering their sails hastily as they make the pier ; the waves are dancing in light and gloom, the gulls are blown like foam along their crests, and a row-boat filled with fishy ballast is making towards the slippery staircase quay. It is a capital picture of amphibious life, and our engraver has been peculiarly felicitous in making his contrasts of light and shade do duty for combinations of color. As for the painter, his manipulation of forms and values, so that every object is in its necessarily right place, and would unhinge the composition if removed, shows a mastery of scenic effect. The Dusseldorf school of painting, formerly a great favorite for its clever scenes of familiar life, is represented by a small constituency in the Fair ; is this indicative of a waning popularity ? The pleasant feeling of old days, when the Dusseldorf gallery was the vogue of the metropolis, and innocent maidens at balls wondered how long it took "Mr. Dusseldorf" to paint so many pictures, comes blowing back, a breeze of youth, as we gaze at Ewers's " Duet in the Smithy" of which our elaborate engraving is seen on page 65. It is Hogarthism translated into German : each canvas is a page, with an anecdote, an epigram, or a witticism, clearly set down — like an acknowledged wit's after- dinner story. Of this table-talk of art, the " Smithy " is an amusing specimen. The apprentice, who has music in his soul, and whose master is absent, is letting the fire go out, the irons cool, the bellows collapse, and the baby explode, as he plays his flute from a music-book reared up against the water- ing-pot. The capital misfortune is that the tail-board of baby's cart has fallen, and the infant, with his plump feet much higher than his head, is howling his FINE ART. Ill Pietro AficAis, Pinx, During the Sermon. 112 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. obligato part in the " duet." A man who will be a Hogarth exposes himself to perils through his very ingenuity ; determined to introduce as many graphic objects as the space will hold, he forgets their mutual relations ; thus Herr Ewers, glad to show his ability in poultry, leads a meditative, corn-hooking hen a great deal nearer the roaring baby than the most distrait hen would get in nature. But the picture is expressively designed and well painted. As is proper to one of these dolce far niente themes, our sympathies are led out altogether with the young Beethoven, impelled by the inner god of song to set aside present duty, instead of with the utilitarian aspects of the case ; even the inverted baby gets but small share of our concern in comparison with the possessed, dreaming rhapsodist, who tames the strength of his burly black- smith's arm to the niceties of his playing. His pleasant, whole-souled, round- headed figure is interesting and individual, though the face is concealed, and there is real ability in which the beautiful velvety, sooty richness ot an old forge is represented in the background. Although the conception of Mr. Gibson is rather correct than original, his goddess is smooth and delicate, but hardly divine. It is curious what difficulty even the most devoted lovers of the ancients have in producing a work which would even at the first glance be taken for an antique. Mr. Gibson observes the Greek rules of simplicity; directness; absence of profound expression; but these negatives do not result in that position, a deceptive counterfeit of Greek plastic art. One of his few pupils in latter times has been Miss Harriet Hosmer. John Gibson, born in Wales late in the last century, practised wood-carving in Liverpool, studied in Italy under Canova and Thorwaldsen, and sent to the Royal Academy at home, in 1827, his "Psyche borne by Zephyrs," of which Sir George Beaumont, the artist's best friend then, became the owner. This portrait-statue, such as the numerous ones of the Queen, those of Peel, of George Stephenson, of Huskisson, are more satisfactory than his ideal figures. His great claim to notice is, after all, the idea he conceived of tinting his figures, which he defended stoutly by reference to those traces of color on Greek and Greco-Roman work which an artist residing in Italy must so often see, and by which he must so inevitably be set to speculatino-. Gibson never solved the problem; he never stifled by any supreme success the voice of hostile criticism; but if the triumphs of later men in polychromatic 114 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. sculpture should ever cause the taste to prevail, and our statue-galleries of the future should shine with colors as in the time of the best Greek art, then Gibson will occupy an honorable place as pioneer. Among the specimens of that flexible, winning, seductive treatment of marble which made the Italian sculpture at the Centennial a revelation, a favorite specimen was "The Finding of Moses," by Francesco Barzaghi of Milan. This group occupied a conspicuous central position in the Fourth Room of the Art-Annex, and from its subject secured a general sympathy. It was by no means the only contribution of the distinguished Milanese ; his "Phryne," after having unveiled her charms at more than one world's fair, occupied a prominent neighboring position, and his "Silvia" and "First Ride" were ornaments of the Nineteenth Room of the same edifice. "The Child Moses," however, was undoubtedly the elect of popular suffrage out of the whole contribution of the sculptor. The beautiful child, a model of cherubic infancy, is represented by Signor Barzaghi in the arms of his sister Miriam, a budding maiden in the formal Egyptian cap. The gentle slave girl is holding up the little foundling, with a tearful smile that would disarm cruelty itself, to see if she can win the favor of the dread Egyptian princess, whose presence must be supplied by Imagination. There are some wild legends, quite outside the scriptural history, which excite the imagination in considering that strange interview between the Pharaoh's daughter — whose name is said to have been Thermutis — and the helpless young brother and sister. According to these rabbinical tales, Thermutis was a lepress, and had six sisters also in the same unpleasant plight. The baby touch of the future Hebrew statesman healed them all, and for that reason he was allowed to be reared in the gyneceum of the palace. Other singular and rather unbiblical stories cling around the group of the slave-lawgiver, his mother Jochabed, and his prophetess-sister Miriam. More than one of the Italian sculptors represented at the Exposition has rep- resented the Incident of Moses trampling on the crown. It is narrated that the infant was one day playing boldly with the king, when Rameses placed his crown on the little Hebrew's head; Moses, inspired with a holy hatred of the idols with which the diadem was sculptured, tore it off and dashed it to the ground. Such Is the fable which Messieurs Cambi and Martegani have illus- trated in their spirited statues contributed to the Exposition. The sequel of FINE ART. IK the crown incident, according to the legend, is that when the courtiers would have punished the inspired infant for his revolutionary action, a wise counsellor, more merciful than the rest, said, "Show him a ruby and a live coal; if he snatches at the coal, he does not know right from wrong, and may be quit for the scorching he will get." An opportune angel guided Moses' baby-fingers, not to the gem, but to the coal, which he put into his mouth, and gave himself that contraction of the tongue which was the life-mark of his career and the symbol of his wisdom. These single figures of Moses and the crown are prob- ably the work of revolutionary Italians, anxious to express symbolically their opposition to royalty; but the group is more classical, and is a work of pure and gracious idyllic art. Signor Barzaghi has made a tender, plaintive, appealing work, which takes possession of the heart-strings at once. It is gratifying to be able to state that this pure and elevating piece of sculpture does not leave the city with the close of the festival it was sent to grace. It has become the property of the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. While the Bible-leaf is still open, as it were, with the beautiful poem of Moses in the arms of Miriam, we may turn back through the pages of the present work and consult Huntington's large and impressive subject of Bible- reading, entitled "Sowing the Word." This picture, which occupied a com- manding position on the south wall of Gallery C, was seen necessarily by all who even hastily examined the American department, and will be instantly recognized in our elaborate copy on page 25. A venerable man is expounding the Scriptures. His auditors are two maidens of the most contrasted types, recalling Leonardo's "Modesty and Vanity" in the Sciarra collection. One is dark, studious, attentive, and drinks in the Word like thirsty soil ; the other, blonde, gay, distraite, and worldly, plays with a flower and looks away from the lesson. Immediately above her head, in the tapestry on the wall, the Maid- mother nurses her divine infant. The three heads, set so close together, express with that instantaneous emphasis which only the sight of a work of art can give, the three temperaments with which religion has to do — the didactic, which enforces and perpetuates it; the frivolous, which repels it; and the receptive, which absorbs and illustrates it. The important temperament of the three, so far as the vitality of religion on the earth is concerned, is the middle one, — the trifling and obstinate. It is the perpetual resistance which tests the tool ; and ii6 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. again, our race is more improved by converting one mind from an obstacle into an aid, than by letting a good many naturally sober ones go on in their mod- eration without conflict. Mr. Huntington has always shown a strong moral '.^y . i\t„.i„'0Sj Sc. The Erring Wife. comes the sad down-hill of his career. There is a rich huskiness in his voice, and a twinkle in his bleary eyes, which speak forcibly of tap-room eloquence and pot-house celebrity.