Cfortiell Httitteraitg SIthrarg Strata, aitm ^ntk BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 arVl802l'^""^" ""'"^raKy Library ^Jgf' minds in art. olin ,3„3 1924 031 262 185 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031262185 THE "LIVES WORTH LIVING" SERIES OF POPULAR BIOGRAPHIES. Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 3s. 6d. per vol. I. LEADERS OF MEN: A Book of Biographies specially written for Young Men. By H. A. Page, Author of " Golden Lives." Fourth Edition. " Mr. Page thoroughly hrlngs out the disinterestedness and devotion to high aims which characterise the men of whom he writes. He has done his work with care and good taste." — Spectator, 2. WISE WORDS AND LOVING DEEDS: A Book of Biographies for Girls. By' E. Conder Gray. Sixth Edition. , " A series of brightly-written sketches of lives of remarkable women. The subjects are well chosen and well treated." — Saturday Review. 3. MASTER MISSIONARIES: Studies in Heroic Pioneer Work. By Alex. H. Japp, LL.D., F.R.S.E. Third Edition. , " An extremely interesting book. The reader need not be afraid of falling into beaten tracks here." — The Guardian. "A really excellent and readable' book." — Literary Churchman. 4. LABOUR AND VICTORY. By A. H. Japp, LL.D. Memoirs of Those who Deserved Success and Won it. Third Edition. "We should be glad to see this volume in the hands of thousands of boys and young men" — Leeds Mercury. 5. HEROIC ADVENTURE : Chapters in Recent Explorations and Discovery. Illustrated. Third Edition. " Gives freshness to the old inexhaustible story of enterprise and dis- covery by selecting some of the very latest of heroes in this field." — Daily News. London : T. FISHER UNWIN, 26, Paternoster Sq.. E.C. THE STORY OF THE NATIONS. 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GREAT MINDS IN ART WITH AN INTRODUCTION ON "ART AND ARTISTS" WILLIAM TIREBUCK AUTHOR OF " ROSSETTI : HIS WORK AND INFLUENCE," &C. WITH PORTRAITS T. FISHER UNWIN 26 PATERNOSTER SQUARE MDCCCLXXXVIII CONTENTS. Introduction I. Gust AVE Dor6 . . • French. IMAGINATION. II. Albert Durer . • German. SYMBOLISM. Raphael III. GRACE OF FORM AND COLOUR. IV. Italian. Du/ch. Rembrandt . • • • LIGHT AND SHADOW. DRAMATIC EFFECT. 8 CONTENTS. V. Velazquez . . . , Spanish. REALISM AND ROMANCE. VI. Richard Wilson . . . Welsh. LANDSCAPE. THE REAL AND IDEAL. VII. Sir Edwin Landseer . . . English. THE LOVE OF ANIMALS. VIII. Sir David Wilkie THE LOVE OF MANKIND. Scotch. ILLUSTRATIONS, Group from "The Industrial Arts of Peace," BY Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A. Frontispiece GusTAVE Dor6 Albert Durer Raphael Rembrandt . "Velazquez Richard Wilson Sir Edwin Landseer Sir David Wilkie . PAGE 26 90 128 162 196 224 252 286 INTRODUCTION. jHE lives of the eight remarkable men included in this volume have two phases — the biographical and the artistic. Though the biography artist has an attraction of its own, though each man was independent of the other, though they belonged to different nationalities and exemplified different versions of art — they are all related by the underlying unity of art and life as a whole. A biography is not the life of merely one man ; it is part of the broader life of mankind, so that however the years and the countries separated these eight men. Time now unites them. 12 MASTER MINDS IN ART. . Richard Wilson painted landscape; Wilkie, men and women ; Landseer, animals ; Rem- brandt, light and shade ; while Albert Durer utilized all these as symbols ; Velazquez delineated peasants and princes; Raphael sought grace in form and colour ; and Dore, imagination. As personalities these men were eight in number, but as artists they were virtually one ; they were phases of the one human endeavour distributed over various countries and under varied conditions, to seize the physical beauty of nature, and to unite it with the moral beauty of mankind. Art has always been an infatuating cause of indefinite ecstasy. The charm of mystery has surrounded it, because its influence upon most people is one of feeling rather than of thought. If a picture pleases we are satis- fied ; we do not analyze, we do not specially think — whereas beneath the pleasure of the sensations there are the pleasures of thought, as beneath the perfume of a flower is the miraculous mechanism of its colour and form. A simple key is frequently wanted, and espe- cially in the case of art, to set thought going. Pictorial art, for example, may be likened to a INTRODUCTION. 13 language. It zj a language : the speech of one man intended to be read by another. It was so when hieroglyphics adorned the tombs of the Egyptian kings ; it was so when pictures were painted to teach the Scriptures and to record history ; and it is so now, when pictures are not only scriptural, historical, and narrative, but are painted to convey beauty for the sake of beauty, when by the combination of form and colour, one man can excite in another sensations of pleasure quite as delicate and as indefinite as the pleasure induced by music. The eight painters whose biographies appear in this volume may be regarded as the eight parts of speech in the one great language of pictorial art. Raphael's part was grace in form and colour ; Dord's, imagination ; Wilkie's, pathos ; Landseer's, sentiment ; Durer's was moral inference ; Rembrandt's, contrast, or light and shade ; Velazquez, realism or fidelity to what he saw ; and Richard Wilson's was idealization, or the power of adding to what he saw something finer which he imagined. A great picture by one of these masters will have his own predominant characteristic and fainter 14 MASTER MINDS IN ART. traces of the predominant feature of each of the other painters, for that beauty which attracts us in a work is the total result of combined qualities, and not of one quality unduly pro- nounced. Art would be monotonous if all painters were as dramatic as Rembrandt, or as placid as Raphael, or as strained as Dor^, or as literal as Wilkie ; and though each artist may have a leading feature, as each play has a leading character, or music a leading theme, it cannot be seen at its best alone, but is depen- dent upon the complementary support of sub- ordinate parts. No artist, in fact, is a whole one. He is partial, individual ; and necessarily so. One man cannot be supreme in all the phases of art any more than one man can master all the sections of literature, or all the possibilities of music. He must be content to give specially the single view he sees, and even then he has before him work that will remain unfinished, however much he may do. The young painter in his ignorance is auda- cious. He attempts the impossible, he will cover the whole range : what is animal paint- ing, or portrait painting, or still-life painting, or landscape or figure painting to him ! Why INTRODUCTION. 15 should he not have triumphs in all ? It is all painting ; it is all art. He makes his attempts, and they teach him humility. He was going to do a wood ; he can hardly do a tree : then the tree is more exacting than the wood. Why, the impossible seemed easier than the possible — the possible demands such work. But ignorance is not the only difficulty. Look at the teeming abundance of beauty. While a painter is spending his days over one effect, nature is unremitting with others. She can give in an instant what would con- found him for a year. Indeed the artist's consideration is, what to exclude. He must forego this and leave that — in fact, compose his picture, or focus the scene for the limited range of man's eye. Nor is this super- abundance of effect only in landscape. Raphael could not realize all the grace he beheld or conceived ; though Dor6 had a pencil of light- ning he could not fix all the ideas that flitted through his restless brain ; Landseer no doubt saw expression in every animal he met ; Wilkie, though he was as industrious as an ant, left pathetic scenes unrealized ; Albert Durer con- fessed, "No man lives on earth who possesses i6 MASTER MINDS IN ART. all that is beautiful ; he might always be much more beautiful " ; Rembrandt worked even harder towards the close of his life than at the beginning, as if to keep pace with the increas- ing suggestions without and within. Thus each branch of art appears infinite to its own artist, but it is finite compared with the infini- tude of nature — that untiring model which develops with our development and increases its revelations in proportion to our perceptions. In art, as in other work, therefore, there have to be many divisions of labour, and with the deepening subtlety of man's emotion, and the in- creasing nicety of his vision, the divisions surely must become more numerous still. With the spread of culture, aye, and with the spread of science which is acquainting us with new facts and teaching us new beauties, new side-paths no doubt will be cut on every main road of art : art as a whole will be more diversified, but art for the artist will become more and more sub- divided and confined. Because of this inevit- able division into departments, and because of inherent individualities, no artist, as no writer or no composer, can be all things to all men. Hence the difference of opinion, hence those INTRODUCTION. 17 conflicting criticisms on the right and on the left which surprise artists themselves, and puzzle the public in general. But what of the accepted standards ? Is not the artis,t to be judged by them ? Only with certain reserva- tions, which every judge must make for himself. An artist may have something to say in his new picture that will annul or modify the stan- dards, and form the basis of a new criticism. An artist with a new perception may paint for years for eyes that cannot see beauty, or har- mony, or pathos as he does. He is counted strange, he is ridiculed, laughed at ; but he still paints. Gradually the film of ignorance is removed by him, the eyes of the public begin to see as his see, the public acknowledge it, he becomes an accepted standard, and criticism, not only of his work, but of all con- temporaneous work, is modified accordingly. It is true this does not occur frequently among artists. With the exception of Richard Wilson all the men in this volume were speedily ac- cepted — because they displayed unique power within a comprehended range ; but poor Wil- son's works inculcated a new principle in land- scape painting before the public were able to 2 i8 MASTER MINDS IN ART. understand it. Such is the potentiality, the disguised potentiality of art. But quite apart from high criticism there are important reasons why a picture should be approached as much as possible in the painter's own mood, and seen from his own point of view, and even from that distance which his treatment of the subject decrees as necessary, for some pictures can be studied through a micro- scope, and others through the telescope of distance. Then there are simple influences at work of which most people take no account, and yet the influences affect their pleasure and, consequently, their judgment. If we pass from strong sunlight into a gallery we do not see brown, blue, and grey as the painter saw them — how, therefore, can there be agreement ? He worked according to the experience of his eyes, and we judge him according to the dif- ferent experience of ours. People pass from picture to picture in an exhibition, and pro- nounce one too red, another too blue, and another very faint, without knowing that they are influenced in their momentary judgment of colour by the picture they last saw ; neverthe- less the painter is judged and found wanting. INTRODUCTION. 19 We have spoken of allowing the artist his own mood : we must even allow him his characteristic, and run the risk of encouraging mannerism, for such is the limited individuality of one man that, deprived of the natural mannerism of his character, he would cultivate an artificial one much more objectionable and much more pro- nounced. Every man to his phase ; let every man be faithful to the revelation which his own nature makes. It would be unreasonable to demand Raphael's pronounced grace from Wilkie, or Dore's imagination from Velazquez, or Durer's symbolism from Rembrandt — not that Wilkie is devoid of grace, Velazquez of imagination, or Rembrandt of symbolism, but each is responsible for a special merit of his own. On the other hand, something may be gained at times by viewing one painter in rela- tion to another. Raphael, Durer, Rembrandt, • and Dor4 for example, painted religious sub- jects ; but with remarkably different results. Raphael stands for the maternal beauty and gentleness of Christianity ; Durer represents its moral severity ; Rembrandt its miraculous splendour of the individual, as of Saul becom- ing Paul; and Dor6 gives us Christianity in 20 MASTER MINDS IN ART. relation to the ardent passions of masses of men. Or another view through other mediums may be taken. Wilkie and Landseer touched the humorous and pathetic phases in man and beast ; but with what dehcate differences of mood. The one could not be the other, and yet both were united by the touch of feeling that makes the whole world kin. Note Velazquez and Wilson. Velazquez, the Spaniard, painted beggars, peasants, water-carriers, cour- tiers; and princes. Nothing was too low or too high in the social scale for him, and in each case he was faithful to what he saw. He was a realist; but the beggar in Seville whom we would have passed, he beheld as a picture. He had the power of detecting the inherent grace of even grossness. Though faithful to the life, he gave beggars the pictorial atmosphere of romance, while he gave princes — also true to the life — that superior princely bearing in which art can better nature by selecting the best of it. Wilson's process was yet another. He dealt with actual scenes in Wales, England, and Italy ; but he had within himself a landscape neither Welsh, English, nor Italian. He had ideality. Wherever he went he endeavoured INTRODUCTION. ii to lift landscape up to his ideal. His strong gruff spirit approached nature in a sort of discontent, as if, in his opinion, nature could not make the picturesque, but could only suggest it — albeit without the suggestion Wilson himself would never have been a painter. This fundamental dependence of Wilson on nature indeed touches the very- existence of art. It raises the question of the real and the ideal. Every picture is an ideal. It may, to some of us, be an ideal of a low range ; but it is one : it is something in addition to reality. On the other hand, however high the ideal of the most ideal of idealists may be, he cannot wholly quit reality. He cannot conceive anything wholly apart from nature. For his most exquisite scenes he must come to earth for his language ; for his most exquisite beings, even for his goddesses, angels, and spirits, he must adapt the forms of women and men. The lowest art, then, has something of the ideal, and the highest some- thing of the real, and between these two poles all the varieties of art have interchanging play. The great artist will justify himself in his work of whatever range it may be. He will make 22 MASTER MINDS IN ART. US understand his own view of things : not ours, but his — ours only when we have passed through what he has passed through. Then a new phase of life will be made clear. The scene we thought we knew so well, the human face with which we imagined we were so familiar, will have an additional significance — the significance of an artist's vision. Reality will become more than reality. We will see a landscape passed on to canvas through the idealizing touch of Richard Wilson's brush ; or an Italian peasant-mother transformed into a madonna by the canonizing touch of Raphael's hand ; or nude figures in a Paris plunge-bath passed through Dord's imagination and be- coming creatures in Dante's Inferno ; or por- traits by Velazquez and Rembrandt becoming portraits not only of individuals, but of man- kind ; or, finally, in the case of Durer, we will see knights, animals, and landscapes stand not only for what they are, but for ideas of great moral import in his day, and indeed in ours. And of what service is all this art, so like, so different ; so simple, and yet so complex ? It has precisely the same use as experience — to develop life. It is, in fact, the special expe- INTRODUCTION. 23 rience of special natures notified for our learn- ing. The painter, as the disseminator of beauty, feeling, and thought, serves a most utilitarian purpose in a social system. He transmits to people with indefinite perceptions, a definite perception of grace which grows into the next generation. Nor does it rest there. The following generation will probably embody the result in its fabrics, its clothing, so that the influence of pictures does not begin and end on walls ; it ultimately comes to be worn. The influence is still wider, still deeper. It is an absolute gain to a State to have the latent sus- ceptibilities of its people vivified. The more keenly the individual feels and thinks, the more vivid is the life of the nation, and the deeper and wider the spiritual and intellectual influence of the State. GUSTAVE DORA. GUSTAVE DORfi. GUSTAVE DORIi. |N Twelfth Night (January 6), 1832, Gustave Dore was born in a house opposite Strasburg Cathedral. His mother was the wife of a successful engineer : a dark, impulsive woman of an Ori- ental type. They had three sons, and Gustave was the second. He might have been the only son, so strongly did he, to the great delight of his mother, assert himself in the household, His'two brothers were also brilliant boys, but there was a force, a spirit, a power of brain and will in Gustave that made his mother, who over ordinary people exercised an 28 MASTER MINDS IN ART. impulsive wilfulness, surrender her will to his. It was the surrender, too, of a worshipping infatuation. Whatever Gustave did justified itself in her sight. When he was hardly six years of age she would watch his movements as if she had again fallen in love. If he were engaged upon some childish sketch which she saw was clever, too impatient to wait for its completion, she would go into ecstasies and declare her son a genius, " Don't fill his head with nonsense," her . husband once replied. " It is not nonsense. My son is a great genius," she said. "He will be one of the finest artists in the world. He must study painting." Gustave's father thought it neces- sary to resolutely check the idea. " Our son will be nothing of the sort, and do nothing of the sort. He shall go to school at Bourg, but he shall not study to be an artist. I don't want any son of mine to adopt so precarious a calling. He shall go to a polytechnic school with his brothers, then we shall see what he can do. But if he wish to please his father he will never become a painter." It sounded like a sentence of extinction. Never draw ? Never sketch ? Never realize GUST A VE DOR&. 29 those fanciful ideas flitting through his mind ? wondered Gustave under the pain of his father's decree, and in the background was his mother quietly urging him to hope. But Gustave's father could not long resist the new power which Providence had fixed in the little circle of his home. The boy could not, day after day, and week after week, reveal himself in his own special way, by drawing and by speech, without the father becoming aware of a force he would be obliged to surrender to in the end. That force was imagination. Gustave lived in the house opposite the beautiful cathedral of Strasburg, but he also lived in a house of fancy of his own building, so vividly did the things on the earth, and things under the earth, and things in the air live with him. His home was within easy reach of the Black Forest, a place verily alive with the creatures of old grandmothers' tales, and to Gustave these tales became realities in the process of narration — words became facts, and names became characters. He spoke of their personal appearance with the familiarity of one who had an established acquaintanceship with the people of the Black Forest and Fairy- 30 MASTER MINDS IN ART. dom, and it was a surprise, and sometimes an annoyance, if others could not see his friends as vividly as he did. In the younger Dor6, indeed, there were more of the manifestations of the poet than the painter, for though the desire and faculty for drawing people and things were unusually strong in him, the resource of his imagination, his passion for music and for dramatic representations, were more remarkable still, in one so young. Now that we know the sequence we can see how these traits were the signs of the dormant genius that was to express itself in illustrating for imaginations less keen than his own, Dante's Divine Comedy, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, and Cervantes' Don Quixote. Nor was Dore's an ordinary imagination of ordinary existences. Before he was six years old he represented himself, in an illustrated letter, in the character of a vain fly stalking on its hind legs, carrying away his first prize at school ; and in a second letter, still in the character of the fly, he showed his joy over the discomfiture of his comrades. The comrades, in the mythological forms of a dog, a parrot, and a frog, were represented as drowning in sight GUSTAVE DORJ& 31 of him — parading his coveted success on dry- land. These and other interesting drawings of this period were published for the first time in 1885 in the Life of Gustave Dord, by- Blanche Roosevelt, and they are valuable as showing the absolutely unique character of his mind, the precision of his eye, and the adroit- ness of his hand — Dore, be it reiterated, then being not quite six years old. The sketches are chiefly with pen and ink, and they are like the magic results of a pen that could not go wrong. The impression made by animals upon his boyish fancy was remarkable. He described in a series of sketches " the brilliant adventures of M. Fouilloux " — a dog of that formidable name, carrying him through a variety of vicissitudes from mis-stealing pepper for sugar at the grocer's and betrayed by his sneeze, to dining out and learning to polka. This occurred when Dor6 was about seven, and before he was eight years of age he dis- played that duplex command of sombreness and humour which afterwards showed itself in Dante's poem and Don Quixote. Among his early drawings is a peasant's head, which, in its conformation and severity, is an anticipation 32 MASTER MINDS IN ART. of the portrait of Dante ; while there are also sketches of Strasburg characters, chiefly women, closely related tp the drollery of Sancho Panza. But even in the face of this evidence of his unusual aptitude for character-sketching, it was believed up to this time that Dor6 would ulti- mately distinguish himself as an actor — such' was his power for mimicry, his boisterous humour, and his passion for private theatricals. When he was about nine, however, his friends discovered, or say re-discovered, the deeper bent of his nature, and the re-discovery was some- what of a public event in Strasbiirg ; as we now view it, indeed, a public event in Europe, for it was the beginning of that unexampled publicity he attained a few years later by means of his pencil. The great event happened on the f^te day of Dore.'s schoolmaster, Pro- fessor Vergnette, and Dore resolved that the fSte should be held in full form and order. He hired and decorated four chariots to be drawn by schoolboys to represent the trades of glass- staining, printing, coopering, and gardening ; and cars to represent other trades ; he painted banners for each profession, and allotted each boy his part in the mimic demonstration. He GUSTAVE DOR^. 33 headed the procession as the glass-stainer with an elaborately-painted banner on which was copied one of the windows of the cathedral ; and dressed in an elaborate costume, topped by a Rubens' hat, he was drawn by the boys (the other chariots following) to the master's house, and then around the cathedral square. Crowds looked from windows, crowds turned out, and crowds followed. At each stopping point the coopers mimicked their trade, the gardeners threw flowers to the people, the printers scat- tered papers, and Dore, as the glass-painter, made broad, rapid sketches of striking cha- racters in the crowd, and with a flourish, as of a great soul indifferent to such trifling offshoots of his inspiration, threw the caricatures in the air, thus spreading among the crowd some of the enthusiasm that had inspired him. That day the artist asserted himself over the actor. Dor6 was forthwith pronounced an inevitable painter, a creature who could not avoid the destiny of pictorial as against his- trionic art. Along with his two brothers and his two closest friends, Arthur and Ernest Kratz, Gustave Dord was removed from Professor 34 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Vergnette's school to Strasburg College. In a brief sketch of Dora's life, written by himself, he remarked that amidst the scenes of Strasburg and the little communes of St. Odile and Barr were born in him the first lively and lasting impressions which determined his tastes in art. " My early attempts in drawing," he continued, " were all of a similar character, and for a long time I had but one wish, viz., to reproduce those sights and scenes so familiar to my boyhood, and which I loved so well. More than this, a great many of my first efforts in painting were landscapes, always depicting the country round Strasburg." When Gustave was nine years old, his father was appointed chief engineer of the Department of the Ain — " a beautiful pro- vince of French Savoy, composed entirely of spurs of the Alps." To the visits to that moun- tainous district with his father, Dor6 attributed many of the deepest impressions nature made upon him. It was there that he first beheld the beautiful on a giant scale, there he first came face to face with the sublime. Contem- poraneous with these revelations was another experience : his first meeting with the sublime and great in literature, and these two expe- GUST A VE DOR&. 35 riences, acting on an imagination of such sus- ceptibility as his, influenced him throughout his life. The Bible, Greek mythology, and Dante were his delight, his keen delight. Like the spurs of the Alps, they were new realms for his imagination, and he allowed it play in half-serious drawings of Jupiter and the Goat, Jupiter and the Eagle, and scenes from Voyage cL L' Enfer. When Dore had been two years at Strasburg College his parents removed to Bourg, and the youth was sent to an academy there. This brought him in contact with the peasantry. As at Strasburg, so at Bourg. He was not satisfied with merely seeing — he sketched ; and sketched with a graphic facility remarkable even for a trained artist with years of experience, and yet the artist in this case was a youth delighted on his comings and goings between home and school. His vision and dexterity were well-nigh preternatural. What seeing and what perform- ing ! The eye and hand leapt tuition, and said forthwith what it desired to say ; he was a born orator in the language of form, and the more the facts and the results are studied the more mar- vellous does the endowment appear. It is no mere fanciful phrase to say that he could speak 36 MASTER MINDS IN ART. with his pencil. He verily did speak with it. He once even answered a question at school with it, and was sent to the top of the class. The subject was the murder of Clitus. Instead of writing a description of the murder, he drew one ; and, while many of his schoolfellows' descriptions were wrong in detail and feeble in effect, his drawing was correct and graphic. On a later occasion, when at school in Paris, the professor of history, in the course of a lesson on Nero, called out, " Dore, go to the blackboard and sketch a portrait of Nero, so that these young gentlemen may perfectly understand what I mean, and what he looked like." And Dore went forward and drew a portrait of Nero. The schoolmaster at Bourg, M. Grandmottet, favoured the natural bent of Gustave. He allowed the young draughtsman, in school or out of school, liberty with his pencil ; whatever the young draughtsman did he could show it to his master confident of appre- ciation, and all the more confident if the sketch had a touch of humour, for then the master made his hearty laughter his praise. " Study well," said the generous Grandmottet to young Dore — "study well, and your aspirations must GUSTA VE DONE. 37 be realized sooner or later." Dore did study- well, nature as well as his art, continually re- ciprocating them, returning from one to the ■other with the avidity of a nature thriving on both. It is somewhat strange that his father ■still objected to the idea of his son Gustave being a painter. It may have been that the father, as a practical man, wished to thoroughly test the depth of his son's inclinations by opposing them ; on the other hand, civil en- gineering was possibly in the father's mind, for he frequently took the youth with him on sur- veying expeditions, as if to initiate him into the fascinations of the land-level and chain. But these very expeditions only deepened Dora's inclination for art. Instead of appeasing and •discouraging, they excited and encouraged — in short, they renewed his inspirations, and, under their spell, he had to reveal himself in sketches. His mother was as ecstatic as ever. Her Gustave was a born genius ; he would yet become one of the foremost artists in the world, and she had the opinion of M. Grandmottet to support her. Nevertheless, in time, she yielded. In the course of two years she also thought that 38 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Gustave had better prepare himself for arn ordinary profession. She also dreaded the hazardous life of an artist for her son, and, as he was fifteen, it was time that his educationi should be directed accordingly. ; and accordingly the parents thought of sending him to the Poly- technic school. In September, 1847, Dord's parents were suddenly called from Bourg to Paris on busi- ness, and they took Gustave with them. Paris,. with its squares, boulevardes, monuments, and galleries ; Paris, with its people, its professions,, and its wonderful shop-windows, inflamed Gus- tave. One shop-window in particular attracted him — that of Messrs. Auber and Philipon, in the Place de la Bourse, the publishers of the Journal pour Rire. Some of the caricatures, displayed in the window so impressed Dord one morning that, on returning to his hotel, he dashed off in secret a few characters in the same style. His parents were to stay in Paris three weeks. Three years would have been too short for Gustave ; and, when the last of the three weeks was drawing to a close, he wondered how he could induce his parents tO' leave him in the city to study art. He knew GUSTA VE DORt. 39 their proposals about the Polytechnic, and he knew more ardently than ever his own longing to become an artist. He acted on the impulse. He ran with his caricatures to Messrs. Auber and Philipon. M. Philipon looked at the sketches, asked Dore a few questions, and sent him back to the hotel with a note — a note re- questing his parents to go and talk over the prospects which art as a profession held out for their son. The parents went, full of wonder, doubt, solicitude. Paris was such a place, art was so treacherous to its devotees, and Gustave was so very dear to them. They would prefer a respectable certainty to the thousand and one risks hovering above and around the youth who would attempt a new departure; but M. Philipon prevailed upon them to travel to Bourg without their son, to leave him behind, and to article him for three years to lithographic work both with pen and pencil. The arrangement was that M. Philipon was not to expect from his apprentice more than one cartoon per week, for in addition to drawing he was to attend college, the Lyc^e Charlemagne, for two years. The agreement was signed on April 17, 1848. Two other great events happened to Dor6 that 40 MASTER MINDS IN ART. year — one personal, the death of his father ; and one national, the revolution of '48, which, indeed, was personal also, for the dramatic scenes — the rising of the populace, the gather- ing of masses of the most desperate orders of French democracy — deeply affected him, and gave him many a momentary subject for his rapid pencil. At the end of 1848 Dor6's mother and two brothers removed to Paris, first to the Rue St. Paul, and then in a fine house once occupied by the famous Due de St. Simon, in the Rue St. Dominique. The idea of living in such a house, and with such asso- ciations, so delighted young Dore that on the first evening of occupation he leapt about the room, jumped on the dining-table, turned on his back, and kicked outwards and upwards so vigorously that he brought down a shower of cut-glass from a fine new chandelier. For ten years after the agreement with Philipon, most of Dore's published work was in the nature of caricature, because the only publisher who accepted his work had but one speciality of publication. " This speciality was caricature ; the publisher was Philipon," wrote Dor^. In the background, however, he GUSTA VE DORt. 41 filled his drawers and portfolios with more serious work. He submitted some of it to pub- lishers, but publishers would not take it. Where- ever he submitted it, they declined it with thanks — because, he imagined, he looked so young. He worked on, however, quietly filling his drawers with illustrations suggested by Rabelais, Balzac, and Eugene Sud's Wander- ing Jew, awaiting the time when he could free himself from "the actualities of comic work." At the Lycee Charlemagne he had Edmond About and H. Taine — both since eminent men in letters — for fellow collegians, and no doubt the contact with these two aspiring spirits would deepen his dislike of the actualities of comic work. He also found in Paris Paul Lacroix, the historian, a friend of his family, and no doubt he too would direct the mind of Dor6 from the trivialities of caricature to the more elevating class of bookwork. With a weekly page of drawings in the J ournal pour Rire, for a period of three years Dord could not avoid be- coming a distinguished character in Paris, and, having a marked personality, he soon became one of the familiar great ones of the city. He was known at the art galleries and libraries as 42 MASTER MINDS IN ART. the marvellous young caricaturist, and though he secretly had other aspirations, as a carica- turist he freely allowed himself to be known. The Louvre and the National Library were his chief haunts, and there he absorbed more than studied the influence of genius, on wall and in archive. It is remarkable that though he spent hours upon hours in communion with the great masters, he was never known to put pencil to paper to copy an effect. He did not re- quire it. He had resources of his own. All that he wanted was personal contact with a great- ness akin to his, and he stood in the Louvre or among the rare prints at the National Library just as he would have stood in the presence of nature in one of its most inspiring moods.' He carried this independent spirit, this reliance upon his own power, even further. He was never taught drawing at Strasburg or Bourg, and the idea of learning drawing at Paris was equally remote. Learn to draw ? He could draw. It was his drawing that made Paris talk of him every week. His friend, Paul Lacroix, an intense and methodical student from his youth, would frequently suggest study and models to Dor6, and Dore would GUSTA VE DORt. 43 glance with dignified ofifence, and pat his forehead, saying, " Models ? They are here." ..." Models, models," he exclaimed at an- other time, " always the same word, M. Lacroix. Now let me confide something to you. I know very well what you mean, and have often made studies in my mind ; but my real models I find in the swimming school, where I see about three hundred every day." Lacroix suggested that these would be all of the one sex. Dord hesitated, and then replied, " That is true ; but I have all sorts of men, women, and children in my head, and am exactly acquainted with every human being. I know it by instinct " — and delighted with his reply, like a proud boy, he immediately turned a somersault, and walked on his hands about the room. The nearest ap- proach to models that he had were a number of engravings from drawings from Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Rembrandt, which he had ob- tained after a conversation with Lacroix, to whom young Dor6 declared that he had learned every one of those engravings by heart, and had copied them from memory. Models or no models, Lacroix was anxious to secure Dord to illustrate a new edition of his own works. 44 MASTER MINDS IN ART. The idea seemed to be no sooner suggested than done. To the great surprise of Lacroix, Dor6 turned up one day with his pockets full of wood blocks drawn upon and ready for the engraver. The rest, making a total of three hundred, were in a basket at the door. The old author looked at some of the blocks, said nothing, but must have betrayed his delight, for Dore, in the middle of the examhiation, suddenly turned one of his most rapturous somersaults over Lacroix's best sofa, and pranced about the room until he was despatched with his basket of blocks to the publisher. The publisher was even more surprised. Instead of sending the choicest of the blocks .to the en- gravers, he sent them home to his wife to have them framed and covered with glass as master- pieces, and then requested Dor6 to draw another set of these for the engravers, which Dor6 did, under the impression that the first had not been approved of Dore disliked the idea of being only a draughtsman — the name roused his indignation, even though he announced at one time that his sole purpose in life was to improve the art pf wood-engraving. When that purpose had GUSTAVE DORt. 45 had its day, when he met with engravers who could do justice to his drawings, he became equally concerned for painting. He was not a draughtsman only : he was an artist — aye, a painter, and he would prove it to the sceptical Lacroix. He hired a large studio, in a fort- night executed twenty-five pictures, dragged the incredulous Lacroix to the studio, and exclaimed in the presence of his mother, who had also been invited : " Look, look at these ! Twenty-five pictures, mostly landscapes, and all — all, M. Lacroix, painted by me alone, in this very studio. Models, forsooth ! You old hobby ! My mind is my model for everything. Mother under- stands me, and she tells me that I am a great artist." And saying this, Dor6 moved towards his mother, kissed her, and, with his arm about her waist, they stood beholding his work. He was indeed a strange character, self-conscious, wilful, sensitive, impulsive, and even jealous — jealous that he should stand foremost in any class of work he undertook. His ambition would have been audacious were it not justified by per- formances that have not been approached by any other man of his own century. Even yet it is the fashion to lift the eyebrows and shrug 46 MASTER MINDS IN ART. the shoulders when Dor6 is mentioned as a painter. He may not have been a reticent delineator of figures ; he may not have been a refined colourist ; he may not have even mas- tered some of the superfine secrets in the use of paint : but he had ideas, he had imagination, he had something to say, and even with his weakness and ignorance he contrived to say it with more of that power which commands atten- tion than fell to his many contemporaries, with far more conventional schooling, on either side of the channel. The test is perfectly simple. Where are the works of any other man, painter or illustrator, who has such imaginative heights and depths allied with such a teeming humorous fancy ? What works of what man outside of literature have peopled the popular mind with such distinctly realized individualities ? Though they are individualities derived from second-hand sources, where are the illustrations to Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Coleridge that get nearer the original inspirations ? It is probable that as many people know the Spanish Knight and his Squire, the Ancient Mariner, Pantagruel, the Wandering Jew, and Dante, through Dor6's drawings, as through the texts. GUSTA VE DORJi. A7 Dora's versions are not translations into sepa- rate tongues ; he speaks in one language, the language of his cosmopolitan pencil — a language read at a glance by thousands to whom ordi- nary reading is tedious, and in many cases unintelligible. After Dor6 had displayed himself to Lacroix and his mother, as a landscape painter, he left Paris for the country, as if the fervour of paint- ing imaginary scenes had given him the desire to see real ones. He went to Strasburg, and then on a walking tour through a district of pine forests, where he dreamed away many a day. He declared to his friend Lacroix — whom he was delighted to surprise with the powers of his apparently model-less and study-less memory — that he had made no sketches, but roamed about from morning to night enjoying his idleness, though every mountain, river, tree, stick, and stone he saw was engraven indelibly on his heart. To substantiate at least a part of this boast he painted from memory "A pine forest in the Voges " — " one of his best pictures, . . . and really a work of art," said Lacroix. Lacroix confessed that he was very happy at this result, and he loved Gustave as 48 MASTER MINDS IN ART. if he had been his own child, and no one more than he could have wished Dore to obtain the desire of his heart ; for that desire, he well knew, was to rank as an oil painter, and not simply as a designer on wood. A few days after this event Lacroix visited Dord, and they were soon in the studio together. " Here you are, my friend," said Dor6. "What do you think of that ? " Lacroix thought very well of it, for he described it as " a superb landscape, charming in light and shade, delightful in con- ception, and excellent in colour." " But where did you study it ? " he asked. " Where did I study ? " replied Dor6. " Your old words, my friend. I have not studied since the last time we met, when, whilst talking about landscapes, you praised me and suddenly quoted some lovely words. They struck me then, while you were speaking ; I saw their true meaning in my imagination. This picture is intended to illustrate your lines of Virgil." He rushed affectionately towards Lacroix ; he saw admira- tion and wonder in the old scholar's face, in his exuberant and boyish fashion he danced round and round ; in his wild delight he vaulted table, chairs, and even pictures ; and when he GUST A VE DORi. 49 approached on his return journey of boisterous delight, the old scholar seized the young painter within his arms. " Gustave, I yield, you are a genius ! " he cried. Gustave Dor6, however, had still to display his genius through caricature and humour. The public did not appear to believe that he could do anything else, and if he did anything else the publishers as a rule stood aloof. They would not pay for anything but broad-grin. Much of his serious work had to be thrust upon them ; given to them ; and in that way his varied power became more generally known. He still worked for the Journal pour Rire, and in addition supplied the Journal Amusant with some of its laughter. A little book of his "The Unpleasantness of a Pleasure Trip" to Switzerland, extended his reputation beyond the range of the weekly journals. The desire to try his hand at more poetical work than his weekly drawings for the journals became too strong to resist. Moreover, he was touched with the Byron fever of the day, and began making drawings for an illustrated edition. That edition of Byron was published in Paris in a very cheap serial form, and was Dord's first 4 50 MASTER MINDS IN ART. published work of that class. The edition served a very transient purpose, and the only copy now supposed to exist is in the National Library in Paris. The drawings were unsigned : a notable instance of hesitancy in Dore, for he was extremely fond of his name. His next suggestion in the direction of freedom was made to Philipon to issue a cheap serial edition of Rabelais. He had already, in private, made the great satirist and humourist his own, and, in fact, had tried to realize some of the grotesque spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Philipon could not resist the idea, and although Dore was only twenty-one, the work was put in hand under the editorship of Paul Lacroix. The book appeared in 1854 with sixteen draw- ings without the text, and two hundred drawings with the text. It took Paris by storm. Those who knew Rabelais renewed the acquaintance ; those who did not were no longer ignorant. If they could not read him, they could see him ; he was put before them realized by the most vivid hand that had ever touched the subject. The success had the usual result. Instead of Dor6 waiting on the publishers and returning with his drawings rejected, the publishers waited GUSTAVE DORA. 51 upon him, ready to pay his own prices if he would illustrate other books in the same masterly spirit. He undertook to illustrate several romances, but soon declined to add to their number. He had no desire to be con- sidered a specialist in that school. During the Crimean War he issued a journal in French and English, recording and illustrating the principal engagements, and the journal had a wide cir- culation during the war, both in France and England. His illustrations to La Sainte Russie, five hundred in number, published in Paris, was another example of his prolific fancy. His too prolific fancy : the supply was so ready and abundant that the people, though still admir- ing them, ceased to regard them with the same enthusiastic astonishment which gratified Dor6 at the first. A sign of coldness such as this on the part of the public keenly wounded him. He affected to be indifferent, and occa- sionally could seem independent ; but the hankering after popularity soon softened his indifference. Considering his exceptional power, and his unquestioned supremacy, this this sensibility was a sad weakness. Though Gustave Dor6 was a genius, it was vain to 52 MASTER MINDS IN ART. expect everybody to repeat it with the ecstasy of his mother. Even Lacroix was some time before he yielded, and granted to Dord the utmost praise he could bestow. But for this sensibility to the very opinion he affected to disregard, Dore would have passed through life with less friction. He fretted himself too much about the attitude of the world towards him. If the attitude were not of adoration he fancied himself neglected, misunderstood, and feared he would be appreciated too late ; and then he was tempted into passionate declara- tions against the world and its workers. No doubt his phenomenal skill, the early success, the ardent and fulsome caresses of those who could not hide their admiration, and the sensi- tiveness of the artist-nature had much to do with this ; but another important cause was, his feverish dread that he would never fully realize his own possibilities. He felt all he might do ; the public only knew him by what he had opportunities to do. He was a draughtsman in wood ; he wanted to be a painter. He would forego sleep to paint, and would dash off im- mense pictures by lamp-light. It was in 1854 that he first sent two works to the salon. They GUSTA VE DORA. 53 were entitled " L' Enfant Rose et I'enfant Chetif," and " La Famille de Saltimbanques." They might never have appeared on the walls of the great French exhibition. They caused no talk, and the press took no notice of them. He fancied the public and the critics would not grant him an existence out of books ; but after a summer holiday in the same year, he painted a series of pictures called " Paris as it is." He depicted Paris with no sparing hand. He presented with all the realism he could command the abominations of the city, " all the old streets, all the wretches and outcasts and many other realistic things," as he described them, he had been meditating upon. Lacroix was invited to inspect the pictures at the studio, and of that visit he has said : " I grew more and more astounded, for there were twelve colossal canvases, some of them more than half the height of the room. ... His effects were not derived from colour, but from the grouping of the personages and the draw- ing, which were beyond all praise. Of the twelve pictures each one was more horrible than the other — all were positively sickening in their realism. I could not bring myself to 54 MASTER MINDS IN ART. believe that he had imagined such vivid scenes in so short a space of time. . . . The same evening Theophile Gautier came to see the pictures, and pronounced them masterpieces." "Where on earth, in what hall, in what gallery could one place such loathsome pro- ductions ? They are too indecent to be ex- hibited, but too real, too great to be left in oblivion," That was Gautier's opinion, and Dor4 instead of exhibiting them in Paris, decided to ship them to America. Two American speculators- offered one hundred and ten thousand francs for the twelve pic- tures, but Dora's mother persuaded Gustave not to part with them unless the speculators offered thirty thousand francs more. The speculators would not advance, Dore would not yield ; it was a drawn contest, and nothing more was ever heard of the subject. The fate of the pictures is not known. They were never exhibited ; Dore perhaps perceived that he had misapplied his energy, and very probably destroyed them. His pictures in the salon had failed to command attention and remained un- sold, and his twelve colossal canvases, crowded with representations of the worst phases of GUSTAVE DORt. 55 Parisian life, were also left on his hands until his hands destroyed them ; his friends were eloquent about his illustrations, but silent about his paintings, and yet there was the feeling in Dore that he had an equal capacity for both. He worked at illustrations for his livelihood, and worked at his pictures for fame. The illustrations alone were quite sufficient for any ordinary man's labour, and any man's ambi- tion ; but not so for Dord. He set his heart on the grander class of art. He would not be confined to two or three inches of block ; he would have pictorial escapades on yards of canvas. The demands for his illustrations increased ; authors and publishers waited upon him with old books and new books ; and, with a courage that alarmed his intimate friends, he endeavoured to meet the demands of all. He would work from ei^t in the morning until seven in the evening with a slight break in the middle of the day, and after another break in the evening for dinner he would return to his studio and finish drawing after drawing with amazing facility. Never, surely, was there a fleeter imagination or a more adroit pencil. The mind, eye, and hand seemed one, for S6 MASTER MINDS IN ART. there was usually no preliminary sketching or designing. The block used by the engraver was the first and the last medium, and it was said to be rare that the graver could equal his nicety of touch : no doubt the opinion of most artists who have designed for engraving. It was not simply the rapid realization of his own fancy, he had to read the fancies of others, catch the spirit of other men's creations and give them form. In 1855 he again sought the opinion of the public on some of his pictures. He submitted four for the Universal Exhibition held that year in Paris. Three were accepted, and ,one, " Rizzio " (now in the Dore Gallery, London), was rejected. The accepted works were, " La Bataille de I'Alma," " Le Soir," and " La Prairie," and Paris, through its first critics, Edmond About and Theophile Gautier, con- fessed its surprise. Gautier said, " M. Gustave Dor6 possesses one of the most marvellously artistic organizations we have encountered. His illustrations of Rabelais, ' Les Cortes Dr61atiques ' and ' Les L^gendes Ponflaires,' are masterpieces in which the most powerful realism unites itself to a still rarer fancifulness GUSTA VE D0R£. 57 of imagination. His studio is choked with immense canvases ; here and there shadowy, here and there gorgeous, with a chaos of colour, sparkling works of the very first order ; a head, a torso, or corselet, dashed off as they might have been sketched by Rubens, Tintoretto, or Velasquez. From this time forth, breaking through the clouds, shines a ray of genius. Yes, genius ; a word we are none too prodigal of. Let it be well understood that we speak alone of the future of the painter ; for the draughtsman has already won his proper rank." Edmond About wrote : " Your colour is frank, lively, startling, and, what is still less to be despised, entirely your own. You imitate neither the Venetians, Flemish, nor Spaniards ; but ere long the world will begin to imitate you." These were enthusiastic words; but they did not sell one of Dore's pictures. Indeed, the public were most obstinate. He was still Dord the draughtsman : Dore as painter was a contradiction, a distortion, a violation of the very evident intention of nature ; and as the public presumably knew the intention of nature better than Dore did, poor Dor6, as far as they were concerned, was still an artist whose 58 MASTER MINDS IN ART. natural work in the world was to lay the lines for the engraver. Though he had to accept this practical, stubborn, and ungracious verdict of the public, he studied by what means he could emancipate himself in the very class of art the people were resolved to accept from him. He mapped out a laborious project for illustrating the standard authors, epic, comic, and tragic, of the world. The editions in his project were to be of a uniform and superfine style. The publishers, however, did not think the time opportune for an expensive class of publication, and Dor6 issued Dante's Inferno at his own expense. Dora's Inferno was a translation of Dante into another kind of imaginative poetry. It was Dante's, and yet it was Dore's. Never had text been so re-expressed by the eloquence of another art, a silent art, an art that borrowed none of its enchantment from the charm of sweet sounds. Dor^ was a pictorial poet, who could follow Dante through his cantos of nether regions as most of us can do ; but he could come back and show us what he saw. What Dante could describe in words Dore could delineate in form — a rare faculty. GUST AVE DORt. 59 surely, in the most material of the arts with the exception of sculpture. Nor did he depend on vastness of canvas or on colour for his effects. He could be sublime, pathetic, terrible; he could realize the beauty and the horror of Dante's imagination in the space of a few inches and in simple black and white. This is a test of his greatness. He was weary of his box-wood blocks, and yet in that very range of art which he felt so narrow and even mean, and to which his vast canvases were a sort of protest, he pro- duced the effects of grandeur and magnitude. On the page of a book he gave us a region ; in a few square inches he gave us space ; in the face of one man, and that the won- derful face of Dante, he gave us the face of all mankind grievous for the fate of the lost. Was this the Dore who from week to week had kept Paris in a state of smile by his car- toons in the Journal pour Rire, his sketches " in the Journal Amusant, and who had made the broad-grins of Rabelais visible ? The same ; and Paris could hardly believe it. The Dore edition of the Inferno was a marvel, and the papers and people of Paris 6o MASTER MINDS IN ART, spoke of it as an event both in literature and art. Dord needed no telling that he had executed a wonderful work. He knew it — and with an agonizing self-consciousness. He read and heard of its success, but wept among his friends depressed and dejected — the reaction, it was thought, after the strain of such a labour. His mother also knew the greatness of the work, and openly expected some official recogni- tion, some governmental acknowledgment that he had done the State some service. Madame Dore, in fact, dreamt of the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and did not hesitate to say so, with the complaint that she thought Gustave had been neglected, misinterpreted, and half-understood too long. "He is not appreciated by his ungrateful country. Shame to Paris ! A crying shame to France ! " she exclaimed to Paul Dolloz, a literary friend whom she seized by the shoulders. " Do you not see that he suffers, that I suffer, and that the entire household is in despair ? " Dolloz took the hint and went to the Minister of Public Instruction. The Minister of Public Instruction muttered something about the idea having been thought of, but that Dord GUSTAVE DORjt. 6i was so young, and there were so many other candidates. Dolloz excused himself for a quarter of an hour. He returned with a pile of Dor6's books. The Minister, alarmed, asked what they were. " Some of the works of a young man of eight-and-twenty," Dolloz replied ; "and this is not a quarter of all that Gustave Dord has done." The Minister began to turn over the pages. First one book passed through his hands, and then another ; and the more he saw, the more he wondered. At last he came to the Inferno. The Minister of Public Instruction was conducted through the nether regions on the turned pages of Dora's illus- trations. He did not say a word ; he simply accompanied Dante. He completed the journey in silence, closed the volume, then reopened it, and with his hand on one of the illus- trations he said, " Not a word more ! Let this speak for him. His own talent says more than could a multitude of friends. For Gustave Dor6 not to belong to the Legion of Honour would be an insult to himself and an injustice to the country that gave him birth." Dolloz returned to Dbre's house. " Here, you great baby," he said to Gustave as they embraced. 62 MASTER MINDS IN ART. " Take your books ; laugh, sing, eat, drink, sleep, and lament no longer. You will have the Cross of the Legion of Honour, not through any influence of mine, but through your own real talent and labour." Dor6 pressed Dolloz affectionately to him, Madame Dora's brilliant eyes sparkled with intense delight, and they all passed one of the happiest of the many happy evenings they had enjoyed together. Dord had to publish the Inferno at his own expense, and when the result favoured the artist's view that the public were prepared for such editions of the best authors, the publishers arranged with Dor6 for other volumes to follow in a similar style — a labour which, according to Dore's estimate, with his own marvellous speed as a basis, would occupy him ten years. The British authors in the list first proposed by Dor6 were Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Spenser, Goldsmith {The Vicar of Wakefield)^ and Ossian. Though Dor6 was a constant worker, he was also an erratic one. Sometimes a subject would seize him in the midst of a conversation. Then he would rush off, pencil very rapidly on GUSTA VE DORE. 63 the handiest piece of paper, and return to take up the conversation again. On the other hand, a subject would seize him while he was making a casual call. Then he would sit at his friend's table, sketch for an hour or two while servants went about on tip-toe, partake of the next meal in a state of abstraction, return to his drawing, work several hours, and thank his friend for the splendid day he had enjoyed. He could work, too, in the midst of a dance in his studio. His friends could talk, and dance, and laugh, and make merry — he would continue at work ; but if some fine strain caught his ear, as if be- witched, he would seize his violin, play an entrancing polka until the friends took the floor again and danced themselves tired. Before he had completed his illustrations to Dante, Dore and his friend Dolloz visited Verona and Venice. On the way to Verona his spirits were most exuberant, and his pranks as numerous as his fancies. At his suggestion he and Dolloz spent the whole of an afternoon in diverting, by means of large stones, a moun- tain stream from , its customary "channel. The natives protested, a scuffle ensued, friendship was proclaimed, and that night Dord played 6+ MASTER MINDS IN ART. the peasants into the happiest of humours with a fiddle an old dame had found for him. He no sooner arrived at Verona than he drew his hat over his eyes, buttoned his jacket up to his chin, stepped off the pavement, and, to the surprise of Dolloz and a friend, began an acro- batic performance.- A great crowd gathered. He kept them diverted, now with his tricks and now with his drollery, for some time ; and finished in the usual way of making an appeal with his hat. On his whimsical earnings the three friends dined at the Caf6 Anglais in Verona. At Venice he lounged and dreamt the days away. Dolloz could go to the chapels, museums, and galleries — Dord was content with the streets, and in the streets, in some quiet, sunny quarter, he lounged for hours, apparently idle, but as busy as an ant, storing his memory, nay, his whole nature, with the sentiment of the place. Others might go and see the inside of Venice ; he wanted the outside. The works illustrated by Dord after the success of the Inferno would make a for- midable catalogue. English publishers began to think of him, and to make overtures for some of his work. Messrs. T. Warne and Co. GUSTAVE DORt. 6; invited Dore, who was then about thirty-two, to compile a book of drawings ; and in a re- markably short time they could announce "Two hundred humorous and grotesque sketches, with eighty-six plates and three hundred and two drawings, by G. Dor6." On the success of this book he ventured to look into his drawers and portfolios, crowded with sketches. Among the mass he found " Historical Pencillings ; or. From the First Century to the Nineteenth." These also found their way to a London pub- lisher, and were issued. It would have beera a marvel if they had not made Dor6 generally recognized in England as a man of exceptional and prolific invention. They proved that his brain teemed with ideas, and that his hand fortunately responded with a kindred alacrity. They proved, too, that he had been earnestly labouring in private, while he had been labouring for the comic journals in public. It was now evident that the merest sugges- tion filled his mind with thoughts that would not rest until he fixed them in black and white. Success engendered success. The works undertaken by him varied from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Don Quixote, 5 66 MASTER MINDS IN ART. to La Fontaine's Fables ; from Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, to, Milton's Paradise Lost and The Bible. He was as much in the spirit of Alexandre Dumas as of Coleridge, and could turn from a History of the Crusades to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and from the Tales of the Rhine, to the Idyls of the King of Tennyson, or a Royal visit to Boulogne for the Illustrated London News. His grasp was cosmopolitan. Poet, novelist, historian, humourist, Italian, French, Spanish, or English — all were as so many note-takers in the world for Dora's pencil. He could work with twenty blocks before him at a time, moving fleetly from block to block, the work on one being rest from another. He was known to have earned as much as ^400 in a single morning, and it has been calculated that between the years 1850 and 1870 he earned about .;^2 80,000. There became a saying that his blocks were worth, not their single weight, but a hundred times their weight in gold ; and yet he had used as much wood as would have sufficed for a temple. It is supposed that most of the ideas for Don Quixote were conceived at Baden-Baden in 1862, where Dore, in company with Viardot, GUSTA VE DORt. 67 who translated Cervantes into French, went for a hoHday. There he fell ill with an attack of bronchitis, which alarmed his friends like ai new pest, for Dore had had a constitution that, never seemed out of working order. In a few; days, however, he was at work again, familiar- izing himself with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, making them his friends, mentally dramatizing them, in fact, so that when he sat down to his blocks he could make them play their parts with the freedom of a dramatist. Dord had now fully asserted himself, and his unique mastery in his own sphere of art was acknowledged. Publishers had encouraged him, the press praised him, men of letters lauded him and were endeared to him, the salons of the most brilliant men and women in literature and art were open to him, and in 1864 Napoleon III. crowned the social honours by inviting Dore as a special guest. The artist stayed ten days with the emperor, and there met Alexandre Dumas and Offen- bach. But even the Emperor's brilliant enter- tainment was tame compared with the intel- lectual brilliance of Dora's own Sunday evening receptions in his great studio in the Rue St. 68 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Dominique. Then the studio became a salon where the most original men and women in France met to honour and to be honoured by possibly the most unique personality of the day. Liszt might keep the assembly enrapt by the tips of his fingers tripping over the keys, Gounod might enchant them with his melodies, Patti and Nilsson might thrill them with their song, Gautier, Dumas, Lacroix, Taine, and Edmond About might startle them with electric shocks of wit, but possibly none would have the erratic spontaneity of unanticipatable genius as pronounced as Dore himself; As at Stras- burg, Verona, and Venice, as in every new book he undertook, so at his receptions in the Rue St. Dominique studio no one could anti- cipate in what way he would reveal his humour, his playful fancy, and his serious imagination. His mother still worshipped him as one of the most wonderful of wonderful men, still loved him as one of the most [loving and lovable sons, and all of Dore's real friends, charmed by the same power, were bound to hirn by affectionate admiration. The man and the artist were inseparable. He was as distinctly Dor6 out of his books as in them, quite as original in GUSTA VE DOR±. 69 one form as in another, cementing his friend- ships while he asserted his genius. Victor Hugo's tale, The Toilers of the Sea, with three hundred illustrations by Dord, was published in 1866, and Hugo in one of his most generous impulses wrote Dore a brief but emphatic letter of congratulation. In the fol- lowing year The Toilers of the Sea was published in England by Messrs. Sampson Low & Co., and then followed, by simultaneous publication in London and Paris, the Dor6 Bible. In England that great work was pub- lished by Messrs. Cassell, and became an un- paralleled success. " D ore's Bible" became a household word and a household book. This marked success was practically a turning- point in Dore's career. It was the beginning of an intensified English appreciation of the French artist, and the French artist was too impressionable to ignore it. When a London publisher made his way to Paris, called on Dor4 dined with him, invited him to England, and suggested illustrations for The Idylls of the King, a book by the Laureate of England, the appreciation visited Dore in a definite form. The idea captivated him. He would 70 MASTER MINDS IN ART. and he would not. Between France and England he was in a maze of the most exquisite bewilderment. France was his home, but England was a new realm, a new and wider sphere for possibly a wider range of art. He dreaded leaving his home, yet de- sired to visit the new country ; and between the two he had a presentiment th^t the event would mean more than a run from one capital to another — that, in short, it would some- how change his life. This presentiment, no doubt, was nothing more than his own wish casting its shadow before it. He probably realized that he had touched the highest pos- sible point of honour in France. Whatever he did, professionally and nationally he could not stand higher. That to Dor6 was virtually standing still, and of all things in connection with his work standing still was the most dis- comforting and abhorrent. To work, to advance, and to consciously revel in the result, formed one of the severest laws of his nature — its life, in fact — and as in France he had attained his professional apex he dreamt of England as new ground for work and honour. Dor6 must have been in a mood of this kind when the Rev. GUSTAVE DOR±. jt Canon Harford, of -London, answering a strong impulse of admiration, ventured to call upon him in Paris. The artist received the Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral with the heartiest cor- diality. The warmest sympathy ran between the two natures, and before departing the new friend urged Dor6 to visit England, an idea Dore seemed disposed to entertain. Early in 1868 an exhibition of some of Dor6's paintings was arranged in the Egyptian Hall, London. The principal works were "Dante on the Ice-fields with Virgil," " Jephtha," and a large " Gambling Scene at Baden-Baden." This exhibition was very successful, and in the meantime Dore was working hard at his picture, "The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism," which he had been commissioned to do by Messrs. Fairlees and Beeforth of London for ;^8oo in December, 1867. In 1868, after the success of the Egyptian Hall venture, " The Triumph of Christianity " and other works by Dor6 were exhibited at 168, New Bond Street, and that was the beginning of the Dord Gallery, to which the painter from time to time con- tributed additional works. The success of the Dore Bible and of the Dore Exhibition deepened 72 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Dore's obligations. Gratitude made him feel that he ought to visit England, if only as a personal acknowledgment of such a generous reception accorded to two classes of his work, and in May, 1868, he left Paris for London. He stayed at the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria Station. His friend. Canon Harford, who was in the country, returned to town and introduced Dore to Dean and Lady Stanley. The cul- tured and the fashionable at the height of the London season opened their doors to him. He was found to be as unique a man as he was an artist ; fanciful and vivacious, dreamy and en- thusiastic, and extremely impressionable ; with, as Canon Harford aptly put it, "a talent for every hour of the day." The reception was not extravagantly fulsome with compliments and the bows of flunkeydom. Of course there were abundant outward and visible signs of welcome. He could see and hear the hearti- ness of the greeting ; but more than this, he felt it. It was not so much his vanity as his affec- tion that was touched. In France he had longed for official recognition, he had languished for the Cross of the Legion of Honour ; in England he obtained unsought the heart of the GUST AVE DORi. 73 legion of love. In France he was acknow- ledged only as an illustrator ; in England he was illustrator and painter as well, with the Dor6 Bible going into households, and households going to the Dor6 pictures. No wonder that this new, broader, and steadier enthusiasm of another type of people in a city which rivalled Paris itself, in a country in close relationship with the vaster England of the colonies and Ame- rica, deeply impressed a nature like Dore's. He remained in London a month, and spent a little ■ time in Gloucestershire at Canon Har- ford's home. It was while travelling in a train with Canon Harford that the idea for a picture, " Christ Leaving the Praetorium," occurred to Dord. They were talking of religion in general, and of scriptural subjects in relation to art. It was remarked that none of the old masters had painted a picture representing Christ just before He took up the cross. Dore was much im- pressed with the idea. That . meant he would have to do something with it, for when a theme once took hold of his imagination it seemed to live on the cells of his brain until he freed him- self of it through work. He returned to Paris in June thinking of great religious subjects for 74 MASTER MINDS IN ART. great canvases for an augmented Dore gallery in London. Before he left London, Messrs. Fairlees and Beeforth commissioned him to paint the great subject, " Christ Leaving the Praetorium ; " and, back in his studio, Dor6 set himself to the. task. In the meantime, that was, in 1869, the Dore pictures were removed to more extensive pre- mises at 35, New Bond Street. Ever since then, a period of eighteen years, the exhibition has been open every working day of the year — one of the most remarkable instances of the continued curiosity of the public in one man's labours. People of all nationalities flock there. They sit there as in a chapel and marvel at the man's colossal canvases as they would marvel at some giant freak of nature. Dor6 completed the commissioned work in 1870 in time for the salon. Before it left the studio, however. Canon Harford happened to visit Paris. To his -regret the subject was not treated in accordance with Dore's original idea. Instead of the sky being dark and lowering, it was blue and full of sunshine. Dore observed a reticence in his friend and frankly asked of him the cause. Canon GUSTA VE DORi. 75 Harford told him. Poor Dor6 appeared stunned — he thought of the salon — of his mother who was present, enraptured with the blue sky — and then he confessed that a diver- gence of his imagination had led him to do what he hoped would have been more effective. He there and then realized that it was not. He seized a brush, mounted his ladder, and amid the imploring appeals of his mother to spare the beautiful blue sky, he painted it com- pletely out. While he was engaged carrying out the necessary alterations of effect over the whole work, the Franco-German war broke out, and during the siege of Paris, to secure the picture from injury, it was rolled up and buried in a place of safety. In 1872 the picture, completed, was added to the Dore Gallery. For that work Dor6 received ^6,000. Perhaps London was never so stirred by a single picture. It was an event for general talk, in the streets, in homes, in the clubs, and even in pulpits. The Rev. E. Paxton Hood, taking the work as a text, preached a powerful dis- course, which was afterwards widely circulated ; and the Rev. George H. Giddins, in his Life of Paxton Hood, quotes the following touching response from Dore : 76 MASTER MINDS IN ART. "Friday, September s, 1873. " Dear Sir, — I have just received some printed copies of the sermon that you have done me the honour to deliver on the subject of my picture, ' Christ Leaving the Praetorium.' I hasten to tell you, sir, how grateful and flattered I am by such an act, and I regret not being in London at this moment the better to express to you, personally, my thanks for your kind and obliging words. Be good enough to believe, dear sir, that in looking back to the hours of success .which have been given me in the course of my career, I have never felt so honoured and proud as in learning that my name has been pronounced in a religious place and before a Christian assembly, and I have never found a ''satisfaction more tender and true, or an encouragement more high and powerful. Gu. Dore." Only a man imbued with the right spirit for labour could write in that strain ; as only a man with the true humility of genius, however self- conscious, could say, as Dore said to a friend when told he ought to be. proud of his varied talents ; " Not proud. Monsieur Beeforth, I am GUSTAVE DORt. 77 simply glad of them. I am not vain ; but only- grateful. God has been very good to me, and I thank Him every day of my life for my gifts. I would not change places with any man in the world. Understand me, not from vanity, but because, when I look around me and see how full the world is of hapless people and hopeless talents, I go down on my knees to thank Him for having given me so much to work with, and so rhuch to be grateful for." For the picture, " Christ Leaving the Pr^- torium," Dore, as already stated, received ;if 6,000, but the total amount paid to Dore for the pictures at the New Bond Street Gallery was over p^6o, 000 — evidence of at least a finan- cial success as a painter. He was even more signally successful as to finance with his illustra- tions. It has been computed that between the years 1850 and 1870, Dore must have received ;^ 2 80, 000. We have seen that when illustrating, Dore could fleetly pass from block to block, resting from one idea while he developed another. It was relatively the same with his painting. At this period his fine studio was crowded with great stretches of canvas, and he passed 78 MASTER MINDS IN ART. from one to another .with a masterly fami- liarity. " Never be modest in your undertakings, but always be modest in the day of success," was written by Dord under one of his own portraits, and this especially applies to his own under- takings in oil. A sum — ^400, for instance — which many an artist would be glad to receive for a finished work, he expen^ded on canvas and materials to begin one of his great pictures. Painting, and painting on a monster scale, became a passion. The success in England rekindled the fire. He would show Paris, he would show France, aye, show the world, that his own country had miscalculated his resources, that, after all, he was a painter worthy of his illustrations. It was a singular contest — for a contest it became — between the nation and the man. Dore painted ; but the French would not believq in him. They knew too much to be duped. The man had lost his way in the labyrinth of his own canvases and easels — paint, he could not ! After all, the verdict depends on one's view of paint. Though there is a general broad law on which a masterpiece might be accepted as a masterpiece the world over. GUST A VE DORt. 79 there are local conditions of nationality and education which may qualify the acceptance of a work of art.. This is so, not only as between one nationality and another, but between schools and styles in the one coun- try and even the one city. It happened that Dore was out of harmony with the taste prevailing in France. The charge laid against him by painters and critics was, that he had not been schooled : he was a free-lance, an adventurer in a domain of art no man could safely travel in by instinct. According to them, he tried impossibilities, and conse- quently, according to them, everything he did was an abortion and inadequate. He knew his blocks — no one, they admitted, knew them better — why did he not stick to them ? He knew nothing of painting — academic paint- ing — and never could know — why did he ever take up the brush ? Simply because art is a free domain, and every man is at liberty to put himself to the test. Dor6 put himself to the test with the result that, what he naturally ■evolved was crude and wanting in culture. And no wonder. He had to discover the properties and possibilities of paint as he 8o MASTER MINDS IN ART. went along. Nevertheless he had every right to paint, and that right Dore persistently exercised. It is not difficult to understand why work tabooed in France should be ap- plauded in England. It is a trite saying that circumstances alter cases ; but it is true. When Dord first exhibited his pictures in London, instead of a professional prejudice against them, he found a public curiosity in their favour. One of the very facts which were against him in France — his success as an illus- trator — was greatly in his favour in England. Just because he had illustrated Dante's Inferno, Rabelais, and the Bible, the public wanted to see his other work, and seeing it, they did not pause to consider whether he was or was not technically a painter, but at once applauded the results. This was an example of practical British com- mon sense, as against French analysis and culture. Between the two extremes — the jealous culture of the French and the blind acceptance by the English — it is possible to arrive at a reasonable verdict on Dore as a painter. The French were right because of their knowledge ; the English, because of their ignorance. The French demanded painting on academic lines ; GUST A VE DORE. 8i the English did not care what the Hnes were, they only wanted results — and, very likely, the bigger the better. The French, schooled in colour and technique, pronounced the Dores daubs ; the English, then only moderately schooled in the later subtleties of art, looked to the themes alone, and felt them dramatic and pathetic. On the question of technique the French were right, but too dogmatic and bitter ; on the score of motive and general results the English were right. It must be admitted, however, that the English, even in their ignorance, were much nearer that general standard of justice which, whether we be tech- niquists or impressionists, or a combination of both, we must accord to the man who even crudely could express himself as Dord did on the canvases now at the Bond Street Gallery. Almost twenty years have gone since then, and English views on art have changed. We have become more analytical, more subtle, more conscious of art as art, and in that respect have veered a little towards the French — and to France some of our students go — hence the growing tendency in England to smile at the crudeness of Dore. Grant that he is crude ; but 6 «2 MASTER MINDS IN ART. grant, too, that he was a power struggling with fortitude to do the best he could with his great ideas. He conveyed those ideas, not possibly in the best taste, or in a manner to command the one-eyed admiration of the microscopist ; but he conveyed them, and that surely was better than having no ideas to convey at all. Under ordinary circumstances, no doubt, Dor6 would have visited London in 1870 as he had done in 1868 and 1869 ; but that was the year of France's terrible humiliation, and Dord, with the Germans creeping closer to the ramparts of Paris, wrote to Canon Harford that he could not think of leaving his country even with the idea of soon returning, at such a time. While he was thus anxiously imprisoned in Paris, he received news that Queen Victoria had bought one of his pictures, "The Psalterion," for the gallery at Windsor Castle ; and that was a great solace. In 187 1 -he visited London, and, as on the previous occasions, he was warmly welcomed. He stayed at the Westminster Palace Hotel, and there the Prince of Wales frequently visited him, on one occasion taking with him the Princess Louise and several other ladies and gentlemen. He formed a studio at GUSTAVE DORi. 83 the hotel and worked there throughout the summer, chiefly at sketches of character for Blanchard Jerrold's London. Dor6, his friend Bourdelin, who assisted at the architectural por- tions of the work, and two private detectives who had been told off for the duty, went on evening peregrinations through the most notable haunts of London. Dord went his rounds dis- guised, now and then betraying himself, how- ever, by his pencil and note-book. He would begin a sketch alone, and end it in a crowd. He returned to France, lived with his mother at Marseilles during the reign of the Commune, and again visited London in July, 1873, sailed to Aberdeen, visited Dee-side, Balmoral, and Edinburgh, and returned to Paris in August, to paint and illustrate — now "The Dream of Pilate's Wife," and now " The Crusades." " There is always despair in my heart," he wrote to Canon Harford, about this time. "And yet I have forgotten nothing " — as though visited by one of those poignant feelings of failure which dwarf the greatest work of the greatest men in moments of self-judgment. He was then forty-one. He had done so much — and yet had so much more in his mind to do. 84 MASTER MINDS IN ART. He had illustrated, he had painted, and there had come the desire to etch, and the inspiration to model. It must have been but a momen- tary despair, for he worked on with the most remarkable versatility. He had executed his . statuette group, " Time Cutting the Thread of Life,'" a group for the Opera House, Monaca, and " La Parque et 1' Amour ; " he had designed vases, and his happy idea for a timepiece of twelve cherub-like boys tumbling around a globe ; he had painted several Scotch landscapes, etched " The Neophyte" and "The Death of Rossini" from a sketch taken by Dore at his friend's bedside, the head of Christ, and several land- scapes ; he had illustrated at his own expense (;^3,50o) Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, finished drawings for Orlando Furioso, and had visited Warwickshire to begin one of the dearest am- bitions of his life, the illustrations to Shake- speare : and above and beneath all this there was the desire to devote his days to painting religious subjects. Nothing impressed him more, he said ; he never felt such fevour over his other tasks. Time after time, haunted by the theme, he sketched and painted the head of Christ and gave the sketches as souvenirs to his friends. GUSTAVE DORA. 85 In 1878 he completed for the Paris Universal Exhibition of that year a monumental vase which he called" " The Poem of the Vine," the whole vase being studded with symbolism suggestive of the vine-lands, and for that work he was decorated with the rosette as Officer of the L'Cgion of Honour. For three years he laboured with his cus- mary ardour; but in March, 1881, his mother died. "I am alone. She is dead," he wrote in anguish to Canon Harford. To Dore the loss of his mother was a terrible experience. It robbed him of half of his own life. He had never married. Coming so early and so distinctly into prominence he had met with women who impressed him and were in turn impressed, but he was too much in love with his art, and ambition was too exacting for him to yield the absolute allegiance that a union would demand. When very young he had sought a hand that was refused because he had no position ; and later in life he became betrothed. But not for long. He did not want marriage, and freed himself from the tie to remain at home. His mother, he found, was his best interpreter. She always knew him aright. As 86 MASTER MINDS IN ART. his genius had grown, she had grown towards it, moulded herself to it, fostered it, flattered it, and, when needed, had defended it. She it was who was dead, and Dor6, even with his friends and a world-wide reputation, felt himself in the old home, alone. His bedroom was a little one leading out of the finer room where his mother had slept. She would await his passing through, however late ; he would kiss his " good-night " ; and with the door that divided the great from the little room open, they would talk from their resting-places of his dear ambitions. In the morn- ing she would visit him and caress him, and go to make ready for another day's work. All this had gone, and Dor6 would wander into the great room and stare at his mother's bed, as if expec- tant, and turn dejected to the studio that seemed cold, blank, and devoid of its customary inspira- tions. He was a changed man. The Sunday evening receptions were broken off, only his dearest friends were sought, and it was some time before he could take up his brush, his pencil, his graver, or his modelling tools with anything like the old verve. It is doubtful, in ■ fact, whether Dor6 ever completely survived the blow. He worked, but with more restraint. GUSTA VE DORE. 87 He had 'the Shakespearean illustrations to do, but they remained undone as though the in- spiration had become dormant. It is true that he designed and executed the memorial statue to Dumas, but he got the impulse for that from his admiration for his departed friend. He was offered payment for this work, but declined it : he did it, as he said, for love, as his contribution to the memory of his friend. On January 20, 1883, Dore was unwell. He was expected at a friend's house to dinner, but his place was vacant. Late that night, Kratz, Dord's old schoolfellow, was summoned to Dore's house. Dore had been very ill since early morning. He went into his studio, but could not work, and on returning to his bed- room fell as if dead on the floor. It had been a stroke, and Kratz found him in bed extremely ill, talking eagerly about his work — com- plaining that he had no time to be ill. Two days after that he died in the presence of his brother. Colonel Emile Dore, and an old man- servant. On the 25th of January a service was held in the Church of St, Clotilde, and Dor6 was buried in Pere la Chaise, amid the most 88 MASTER MINDS IN ART. touching manifestations of public regret, and on that day Alexandre Dumas the younger, and Paul Dolloz delivered orations and strewed flowers over the grave of one of the most ver- satile artists of his age. ALBERT DURER. ALBERT DURER. ALBERT DURER. Flanders, N the Uffizi Gallery at Florence there is the portrait of one Albert Durer. He was a goldsmith, and the son of a goldsmith of West and had travelled from town to town in Germany in search of employment. The goldsmith, whose portrait is at Florence, was an able man at his craft, serious in all his undertakings ; and he found enough employ- ment through a rich merchant named Pirkheimer at Nurnberg, to induce him to settle in that city. He found also a "pretty, straight young ihaiden named Barbara," the daughter of his •92 MASTER MINDS IN ART. master, Hieronymus Helper, whom he served for over twelve years. The daughter was only fifteen and Durer was forty — nevertheless, they married, and they had eighteen children. The third child they christened Albert, after his father, and he was the painter of the Uffizi Gallery portrait. He was born in Pirkheimer House, Nurnberg, on St. Prudentius' Day in Holy Week, 1471. "My father's life," recorded Albert Durer the younger, in his journal, " was passed in great struggles and in continuous hard work. With my dear mother bearing so many children he never could become rich, as he had nothing but what his hands brought him. He had thus many troubles, trials, and adverse circumstances. But yet from every one who knew him he received praise, because he led an honourable Christian life, and was patient, giving all men consideration, and thanking God. . . . For me, I think, he had a particular affection, and as he saw me diligent in learning, he sent me to school. When I had learned to write and read, he took me home again with the intention of teaching • me gold- smith's work. In this I began to do very well, but my love was towards painting much more ALBERT DURER. 93. than towards the goldsmith's craft. When at last I told my father of my inclination, he was not well pleased, thinking of the time I had been under him as lost if I turned painter. But he let me have my will, and in the year i486, on St. Andrew's Day, he settled me apprentice with Michael Wohlgemuth to serve him for three years." Michael Wohlgemuth was one of the most successful painters of the fifteenth century,, devoting himself in a business-like manner to painting altar-pieces, chests, to carving and colouring figures, and to designing wood blocks. He was a mechanical master, doing little religious work on the impulse, but a good deal to order,, and leaving plenty of it to be done by his ap- prentices. "In that time (the three years' apprenticeship) God gave me diligence to learn well," wrote Durer ; but very little of the results- of Durer's diligence in those years is known. He is supposed to have made drawings of three Swiss patriots, and another representing a Com- pany of Horsemen, the drawing bearing Durer's monogram and the date 1489. In the following year Durer's apprenticeship was completed, and, according to the custom of the time with crafts- •94 MASTER MINDS IN ART. men, his father allowed him liberty and a little money to roam for further experience and to try his fortune. Before starting, Durer pai nted his father's portrait — the portrait now at Florence — as a parting mark of affection, and then set out. Where he wandered is not known. It was a pilgrimage for work, a search for experience, a test for his ability. It has been suggested that he wandered as far as Venice ; but, after all, the pleasant surmises about his travels are only surmises. It is simply known that he was -away from home for four years, and that he was recalled in 1494 by his father — evidently to be ■ordered to get married. "And now," says Durer in his quaint way, " when my wanderjahre was over, Hans Frey treated with my father, and gave me his daughter, by name Agnes, with a dowry of 200 guldens. Our wedding was held on the Monday before St. Margaret's Day, in the year 1494." Hans Frey had property, culture, and influence, and the marriage was ■considered an advantageous one for the young artist. Durer, with his beautiful young wife, lived and worked in his father's house, and there, in the same year of the marriage, the old gold- smith's portrait was again affectionately painted. ALBERT DURER. 95 as if to display the progress Durertheyoungerhad made in the course of his four y&'axs' wanderjahre. Here is a picture for a masterly hand — the old goldsmith resting from work, his handsome son, tanned with travel, painting his portrait, and the quaint, beautiful young wife looking on with the wonder of one who cannot paint, who cannot do anything but love, and who has never been beyond the city gates. We have a description of young Durer at this period from his friend Joachim Camerarius, who became the head of the first Protestant college established at Nurn- berg. " Nature gave our Albert a form re- markable for proportion and height, and well suited to the beautiful spirit which it held within. ... He had a graceful hand, brilliant eyes, a nose well formed. As to his fingers you would have said that you never saw any- thing more graceful. Such, moreover, was the sweetness and charm of his language that listeners were always sorry when he had finished speaking. . . . Nature had especially designed him for painting, which study he embraced with all his might, and was never tired of considering the works and the methods of celebrated painters, and learning from them all that com- 96 MASTER MINDS IN ART. mended itself to him." And Philip Melancthon, another friend, could say that " Durer's art, great as it was, was his least merit," presumably- meaning that his greatest merit was his noble personality. With this nobility of character, and his simple life under the influence of religion as a reality and not as a mere form, kept well in view, the spirit of Durer's work can be the better understood. His was a noble, devotional nature, seeking and finding truth, and endea- vouring to express it in the best language avail- able at the time. Durer's earliest authenticated work — in addition to a drawing of himself (copied out of a looking-glass when he was thirteen), in the Albertina Gallery at Vienna, and two portraits of his father — consists of a number of engravings, the principal of which are : — " The Woman in the Grasp of the Wild Man," " The Holy Family," " St. Sebastian," " St. Christian" ; a portrait of Katherine Fiirleger, another portrait of the same lady as the Madonna, two por- traits of himself, one at Florence and one at Madrid, and a water-colour altar-piece. Soon after his marriage Durer was elected a member of the Nurnberg Guild of Painters, and his diploma ALBERT DURER. 97 picture was a pen-and-ink drawing, " Orpheus abused by the Bacchante." About the same time he also drew "A Bacchanal often figures," and " A Fight between Tritons " — evidence that during his four years' absence he had not quite escaped the influence of the classic spirit quietly extending from Italy into Germany. But there was no abiding satisfaction to Durer in this range of thought. Mythology was too abstract a faith for him. It was too remote. He wanted to work with a symbolism nearer the spirit of his own times, he wanted to interpret the Christian version of good and evil, for in everything he did there was the feeling of austere moral conviction. This moral conviction was the basis of his didactic symbolism. He put into form what the preacher puts into words — in fact, he was a preacher by prints. " After a time," records Durer (and we prefer to give his own simple words), " my father fell ill with a kind of dysentery no one could cure. Soon he clearly saw death before him, and with great patience waited to go, recommending my mother to me, and a godly life to us all. . . . The old nurse helped him to rise and put the close cap upon his head 7 ^8 MASTER MINDS IN ART. again, which had become wet by the heavy- sweat. He wanted something to drink, and we gave him Rhine wine, of which he tasted some, and then wished to lie down again. He thanked her for her aid, but no sooner lay back upon his pillows than his last agony began. Then the woman trimmed her lamp, and set herself to read aloud St. Bernard's dying song, but she only reached the third verse, and behold his soul had gone. God be good to him ! Amen. Then the little maid, when she saw that he was dying, ran quickly up to my chamber and waked me ; and I went down fast, but he was gone, and I grieved much that I had not been found worthy to be beside him at his end." After the death of his father, in 1502, Durer took a house of his own, and a brother Hans lived with him to learn painting. "Two years later," he adds to his journal, "my mother came to me, having nothing to live upon. With me she remained the rest of her life." Before the close of the year 1505 Durer seems to have viewed his prospects. He had his wife, his mother, and his brother Hans living with him, and he was the only one able ' ALBERT DURER. 99 to earn money. He had worked hard at his drawings for engravings, and had very probably exhausted the resources of Nurnberg as a market for his work. Some of his work, however, had travelled as far as Italy, where it was being pirated and imitated, and he decided to journey that far with the double object of protecting and furthering his interests. It was a long journey, and though he could defray some of the expenses by disposing of his drawings in the principal towns he would pass through, he was so ill provided for, after leaving his wife and mother something to live upon during his absence, that he had to seek the assistance of his wealthy friend, Pirkheimer, and borrow. Pirkheimer was the son of the merchant who first encouraged Durer's father, and was born a year earlier than the painter. They had played together in their childhood, and while Durer was becoming an artist, Pirk- heimer junior was becoming a great scholar. Having borrowed from his friend Pirkheimer, Durer set out on his journey on horseback, like a knight in search of something great to do for the ladies he had left at Nurnberg. At Stein, near Laibach, he fell ill, and was tended loo MASTER MINDS IN ART. by a generous painter, and in return Durer painted a picture on one of the walls of his room. At Venice he was very well received. His talent obtained him entry into higher circles than he was accustomed to at home, and this he records with pardonable relish to Pirk- heimer, who was supposed to belong to the higher grades of society. He sold several pictures, and though he was at first thought to be a good engraver, but a man who did not knov/ how to use colours, he soon asserted himself as a painter by an altar-piece for the chapel of the German residents in Venice. He was offered a pension of two hundred ducats by the Government if he would settle in Venice, but the responsibilities and ties at home were too great to allow him to entertain it. His friend, Pirkheimer, seems to have been afraid that the attractions of Venice would keep Durer there and even tempt him froni being honour- able to his obligations. " I will aid you with all diligence," Durer wrote to his friend, "and wish to God I could do you more service, which would be a great pleasure to me, know- ing how much you have already done for me. Meantime, I pray you, don't lose patience with ALBERT DURER. loi me ; for I daresay I think oftener than you do of the money I owe, and I will honourably return, with thankfulness, when God helps me home again. The picture I am to paint for the German community will be one hundred Rhenish guldens, and there will be only five guldens cost. I shall prepare my design and get it ready for painting in eight days ; and, God willing, it will stand on the altar a month after Easter." ..." I wish you were in Venice ! " he writes in another letter. " There are many fine fellows among the painters, who get more and more friendly with me. It holds one's heart up. Well brought-up folks. Good lute-players, skilled pipers, and many noble and excellent people are in the company, all wishing me very well and being very friendly. On the other hand, here are the falsest, most lying, thievish villains in the whole world, I believe, appearing to the unwary the pleasantest pos- sible fellows. . . . Gian Bellini, who has praised me much before many gentlemen, wishes to have something from my hand. He has come himself to me, and asked me to do him something, and he will pay well for it." Bellini, who was a very old painter, could I02 MASTER MINDS IN ART. not understand how the young German got his touch for indicating the detail of his work. The beard of a Pharisee in one of Durer's pictures was so finely hinted that old Bellini begged to see Durer's brushes, Durer at once showed them ; but they made the elder painter more sceptical, and to satisfy him Durer took up the handiest brush and at once painted a lock of hair. Then Bellini confessed that he could not have believed -it but for the incon- testable evidence of his own eyes. In a later letter Durer wrote : " The painters are be- coming very obnoxious to me. They have had me three times before the Lords, and com- pelled me to give four good florins to their guild. Now I see I might have made a good deal of gold if I had not taken in hand this picture for the Germans. It takes great work, and I cannot expect to have it done " before Whitsuntide. As I only receive eighty-five ducats, you may suppose my purse is soon empty. I have bought some things, and sent some money away, so that I am cleared out. But, you may believe me, I wish to be econo- mical until God grants me wherewith to repay you. I might easily have made one hundred ALBERT DURER. 103 florins (presumably by designs for engravings) but for this picture, for all the world wishes me well— except the painters. I am still unruined, but have still to reap the harvest. It is very hard that no one throws his money at me." . . . "My willing service to dear Master Pirkheimer. When you are well it gives me great joy ; I also am well, by the grace of God, and hard at work. I have sold all my pictures except one. I wish you could be here ; the time would pass quickly. Here are pleasant people to meet, true artists. 1 have sometimes such a crowd of strangers visiting me, I have to hide myself to get painting. All the noblemen wish me well, but few painters. I cannot leave this place in two months. I have nothing to send, as I have already told you ; therefore I beg you will give my mother ten florins if she wants them, till God helps me forward. Of course I will thankfully pay you all. I send the Venice glass. As to two carpets, Anthony Kolb will help me to choose the handsomest and cheapest. I shall see after the Crane's pens ; as yet I have seen none but Swan's, which they write with here, and these you might stick in your hat for a while. . . . Let 104 MASTER MINDS IN ART.. me pray you to remember me to our prior. Tell him to say some prayers for my preser- vation from disease (then very prevalent in Italy). Salute sweethearts and friends for me." . . . "You would give a ducat to see my picture, it is so good and rich in colour. I have great praise for it, but little profit. I might easily have made two hundred in the time, and have had to refuse good offers. I might, in fact, have returned by this time. I have silenced all the painters who say, ' He engraves well, but he knows little about colour.' Indeed every one praises the colour. The Doge and the Patriarch have both seen my picture." In his last letter he was a little more play- ful, though, withal,^ the moralist. " As I know you believe in my goodwill to be service- able to you, I need not write of that ; but I must tell you of the joy I have had hearing of your masculine wisdom and enlightened know- ledge of things. It is surprising such qualities should be found in so juvenile a body ; but they are God's gifts, no doubt, like some I receive myself! We are both so well off and think so much of ourselves — naturally, I with my pictures, you with your wisdom — when the ALBERT DURER. 105 crowd glorify us we keep our chins in the air, and perhaps some one is making sport of us behind our backs. Don't let us believe all the praises we get. . . . After hearing from you I shall soon come home, only I want to carry away with me enough for my needs. I have given out one hundred ducats for colour and other things. On leaving this I should like to go to Bologna for an artistic reason — to learn the mystery of perspective an artist there can teach. I shall return here in eight or ten days, and then homewards by the next courier. Alas! how shall I live in Nurnberg after the bright sun of Venice ? Here I am the lord, at home only the hanger-on." He had stayed longer than was agreeable to his wife, and after completing his purchases of carpets, feathers, and jewels for the learned and vain young Pirkheimer, he visited Bologna. He wanted to visit Mantua also, if only to pay his dutiful respects to the painter, Andrea Montegna, who was then very old, but Mon- tegna died before Durer started, and instead of going to Mantua, he at last turned towards home, and reached Nurnberg in 1507. On his return, Durer devoted himself closely io6 MASTER MINDS IN ART. to his blocks and plates. It was, after all, on these that he depended for his livelihood, and he began his illustrations of " The Apocalypse," " The Life of the Virgin," "The Great Passion," " A Pictorial History of Christ's Travail," and "The Little Passion," the latter being a series of engravings illustrative of Biblical subjects from the time of Adam- and Eve to the Last Judg- ment, He had his workshop, his apprentices, and engravers. He meditated, evolved his ideas and put them into form, and his en- gravers carried them out on block and plate. Sometimes he used the graver himself, but as a rule devoted himself to composition and design, for his mind was too active for the slow process of realization in wood or on copper ; nevertheless, his was the guiding spirit even in the most practical stages of the work. He was so successful with his undertakings that in two years after his return to_ Nurnberg he could discharge his debts and buy a house in Zissel Strasse. In honour of the artist that house has been bought by the city authorities as a memorial, and the name Zessel Strasse has been changed to Albert Durer Strasse. In that house Durer ALBERl DURER. 107 executed his principal works ; from there he sent to Raphael a portrait of himself, and to that house Raphael sent Durer a number of drawings, one of them a study of male figures, inscribed, " Raphael di Urbino, so highly esteemed by the Pope, has drawn this study from the nude, and has sent it to Albert Durer at Nurnberg, in order to show him his hand." To appreciate the historical value of Durer's work, to understand its spirit, to allow for its crudities, and have even a dim idea of his difficulties, it is necessary to picture him over three hundred and fifty years ago — contem- poraneous with Henry VIII. — in the walled city of Nurnberg. Nurnberg was one of the prin- cipal commercial centres of Germany, whose manufactures were prized in other countries. It had its goldsmiths, its watchmakers, organ- builders, and paper-makers, but it was a com- mercial city of the Middle Ages, dreamy, isolated, doing its business by waggoner and carrier. Durer was a new power ; expression through ar4r, in Germany, was in that stage when the inspirations transcend the power of giving them perfect form — that stage, indeed, when the artist does not fully realize, until io8 MASTER MINDS IN ART. attempt after attempt has been made, the limits of his craft and of his material. An illustration of this double struggle may be found in the result of any child's effort to draw. If the child could know how crudely its little drawing conveys to an older mind its angular idea of a so-called man or horse, it would surely never put its pencil to slate ; if its incapacity did not delude it, if its unpractised vision did not keep its unpractised hand company, it would shrink in despair from another effort. As it is, the eye is only sufficiently in advance of the hand to lure it from effort to effort until the mind and the eye become conscious, critical, and then the nearest approach to the ideal is exacted from the hand. View Durer in his early days as a great child-artist, contemporaneous with the infancy of art in his country, and you have one of the key-notes — for there are several — to the candid and childish complexity of his earlier drawings. Ideas crowded upon him, cramping his utterance, for he had not reached the maturer stage when art taught him to select and present his idea with as much unin- cumbered directness as possible. Another interpretative feature of his work is ALBERT DURER. 109 the ever-present religious sentiment of the time. The calendar was crowded with saints' days. Letters were dated, and events were calculated from fasting and festival days. The Roman Church was powerful in its demands upon priests and laity, superstition was abroad, fiends, devils, and demons swayed the imagi- nation ; it was the period of strong social dis- tinctions, of a domineering • aristocracy and adventurous knights ; it was a period, too, of physiological ignorance, when epidemics visited cities, and made life, hazardous and death horrible. It was within such a permeating environment of intellectual, social, political, and religious darkness that the patient and de- votional Durer had to work his way towards the greater light of a later day, by the aid of the twilight in his own heart ; and right man- fully he worked. When the light spread, when slow, meditative Germany began to feel the thraldom of Rome too binding on its conscience, Durer did not hesitate to join hands with Luther. Under this influence his art with his conscience gained freedom. It had a more definite object to work for, a crisis in the affairs of the world to participate in. Durer's in- no MASTER MINDS IN ART. fluence as a mere draughtsman for wood and copper engravings is hard to realize in this epoch of orations, books, newspapers, and rapid travelling ; but his influence on his period was most significant. His prints were not merely seen as pictures, but were read as books. They had the significance of caustic criticism. They were religious cartoons, moral truths adorned into a tale — a tale that we have not yet done telling, because the dangers to spiritual life which existed in Durer's time exist now, with their allurements increased a million-fold. Rightly seen, few drawings can be more sig- nificant in moral allegory than his " Knight, Death, and the Devil," or his " Three Horse- men," or more pathetic in its applicability to the problems of the present day, than his " Melan- cholia " — the figure of a musing woman sitting near the sea, confounded ; the finite tools for measuring infinity are about her, useless, while incalculable time still goes on and illimitable space is still around her. The Emperor Maximilian became aware of what Durer was doing for the art of his country, and was possibly anxious to keep the artist from wandering in search of favour into other ALBERT DURER. 1 1 1 lands, for in 15 12 the emperor addressed the following communication to the Council of the City of Nurnberg : " Honourable and Dear Lieges — The care which our liege, Albert Durer, has always shown towards us in the execution of works of art we have commanded of him ; the assurance we have of his continuing to serve us ; and the pleasure we have derived from such works, have determined us to aid and serve him in a special manner. We there- fore demand of you that you forthwith and with goodwill exempt him from communal im- posts, and all other contributions in money, in testimony of our friendship for him, and for the sake of the marvellous art of which it ■ is but just that he should freely benefit. We trust that you will not refuse the demand we now make and address to you, because it is proper, as far as possible, to encourage the arts he cultivates and so largely develops among you. You will thus acknowledge the singular good- will that we have always shown to you and your city." In 15 18 the emperor conferred other favours. That year Durer visited Augsberg, when the Imperial Parliament was sitting, to dispose of some of his prints, and 112 MASTER MINDS IN ART. . while there he painted a portrait of Maximilian. Durer was made painter to the emperor with an annual allowance of one hundred florins and a grant of arms, which was an important indi- cation of social rank. An inscription on the portrait runs : " This is the Emperor Maxi- milian, whom I, Albert Durer, drew at Augsberg in his little room high up in the Imperial resi- dence in the year 15 18, on the Monday after St. John the Baptist." The story is told, that one day Maximilian asked Durer to make upon a wall a sketch of an engine, and at the same time requested a lord of the court who was near to hold a ladder while Durer mounted the top step. The lord refused, and the emperor ex- claimed, "You may be noble by birth, but my painter has the true nobility of genius," and honoured Durer by there and then giving him a coat of arms. At another time Durdr made an apt reply that pleased Maximilian. The emperor took up one of Durer's pieces of charcoal and tried to draw with it. He could not ; and asked why in his hands the charcoal continually broke off. "Ah, your majesty," replied Durer, ."you are emperor in more difficult things ; but I am emperor in that." ALBERT DURER: iis Durer did not find painting profitable. His pictures were difficult to sell. Even the em- peror, it is supposed, conferred the material and ornamental favours upon Durer in partial dis- charge of debts he owed the painter for work done ; and as the Council of Nurnberg per- suaded Durer not to accept the privilege of exemption suggested by the emperor, the ma- terial benefit resolved itself into the one hun- dred florins a year already allowed by Maxi- milian — an allowance, however, which was not regularly paid. He had to appeal through an official to the emperor. " Point out to his majesty," Durer urged, " that I have served him for three years, that I have suffered loss myself from doing so, and that if I had not used my utmost diligence his ornamental work would never have been finished in such a manner, therefore I pray his majesty to reward me with the one hundred guldens." The ornamental work was an elaborate wood-cut representing a triumphal arch illustrative of the grea:t deeds of the great emperor. This wood-cut, made up of ninety- two separate blocks, was ten feet six inches high and nine feet wide, crowded with pictorial records of the 8 114 MASTER MINDS IN ART. emperor's achievements. The designs occupied Durer three years. For the emperor, also, Durer made elaborate and fanciful designs for the Imperial Prayer- Book. The text, with ample margin on each page, was given to Durer, and Durer filled the margins with con- ceits devotional, grotesque, and fanciful. If Durer's paintings were difficult to sell, his prints sold in their stead. They became very popular in the religious centres of Germany — so popular that other artists not only copied his style, but his drawings, and traded in them. As many as three hundred artists either worked after his manner, or copied his compositions ; and seventeen separate reproductions of one plate were known. His name was so popular in Italy that a young artist. Marc Antonio Raimondi, for some time devoted himself ex- clusively to the reproduction on copper of Durer's most popular engravings, and did not hesitate to put the well-known initials of the German in the corners of the fraudulent plates. Durer sought the protection of the emperor, and with the Imperial sanction issued a strong warning to the pirates of his work. This had only the effect of preventing the copyists using ALBERT DURER. 115 his initials. They reproduced with even more freedom, and put their own names on the plates, making the theft all the more annoying, since it robbed Durer of both his idea and his reputa- tion. One foreigner had the audacity to sell the spurious Durers in Nurnberg itself, but he was speedily warned by the authorities that if he continued the traffic his stock would be seized. On October i, 1532, the Council of Nurnberg called a meeting of all the booksellers of the city, warned them about the sale of fraudulent prints, and passed a resolution to write to the towns of Strasburg, Antwerp, Frankfort, Leipsic, and Augsberg, begging them to take similar steps. This unscrupulous appropriation of Durer's ideas and name floated for a time after his death more reputation than was his due. Paintings, engravings, and carvings which he had never seen were attributed to him, simply on the score of having his well-known initials prominent in the corner, and were sold for large sums ; but though there is doubt as to the authenticity of some of his labours, there is quite sufficient of the authenticated in every department of his craft to justify the position he holds as one of the master minds of European 1 16 MASTER MINDS IN ART. art. He did the work, not of one man, but of several — he painted on panels, helped at frescoes, painted miniatures on paper and parchment, designed series upon series of sub- jects for wood and copper engravings, superin- tended the printing in his own house, etched ornamental work on armour, designed for gold- smiths, in one case cut the Crucifixion on a gold tablet the size of a shilling ; he designed his own picture frames, sketched for medallions, planned architecture, and painted on glass. The only example of his painting on glass is at Vienna, the subject being " Holy Women weep- ing over the Body of Christ." The circular gold tablet cut with the Crucifixion was executed for a sword presented to the Emperor Maxi- milian. The sword is still in Venice, but a silver tablet was substituted, at some time, no doubt with the idea of keeping the gold one as a Durer relic though it has been so very well- kept that it cannot be found. Nor was Durer solely an artist. He issued a book on mensu- ration with geometrical illustrations, four illus- trated books on human proportion for artists, and a treatise on fortifications for cities and castles. ALBERT DURER. 117 " The dear Prince, Emperor Maximilian, de- parted this Hfe happily on the twelfth day of January, a.d. 1519, in the 59th year of his age." This was Durer's inscription beneath a wood- engraving portrait of the emperor, which he issued as a memorial ; and as soon as Durer knew that a grandson of the emperor was to ascend the throne he prepared to go and meet the emperor-elect in the Netherlands— a journey he took in July, 1520. The mission was a dip- lomatic one. He wanted to secure a continua- tion of court favour, and an assurance that the pension bestowed upon him by the late emperor would be continued. His principal goal was Antwerp as a market for work he hoped to sell to defray the expenses of his journey. His wife and her maid accompanied him. At Bam- berg he bought hospitality and a costly release from custom-tolls on the works he had with him, by presenting the bishop of the place with a painting of the Madonna, engravings from the Life of the Virgin and the Apocalypse series, and other prints; He travelled on to Frankfort, Mainz, Cologne, and Antwerp. Wherever he went his fame had preceded him. His wood-cuts and plates were known on every 1 1 8 MA STER MINDS IN ART. hand, and these prepared the way for very- hospitable receptions ; but for very Httle busi- ness. At Antwerp, Durer, his wife, and even her maid were entertained at a banquet by the painters of the city at their Academy of Art. "The banquet," he records, with justifiable pride, " was served on silver dishes, and all the painters were present with their wives. When I entered the hall with Agnes on my arm, they formed a wall on either side of me, while I passed down the passage they made for me just as if I had been some illustrious scion of royalty. Several personages of very high rank did homage to my talents, and displayed the greatest eagerness to make themselves use- ful and agreeable to me. When I had taken my place at table, a little dignitary of the name of Rathporth, presented me, in the name of the citizens of Antwerp, with four pints of wine as a pledge of their esteem and regard. I thanked them in a speech in which I endeavoured to express my sense of the honour they had con- ferred upon me. We sat at table till a late hour, and they then escorted me home by torch- light, and overwhelmed me with their protesta- tions of regard." Possibly the painters and ALBERT DURER. 119 citizens of Antwerp did not suspect that their distinguished guest was poor, anxious to sell his works to defray the expenses of his journey ; and Durer would be too sensitive to make them aware of it. While at Antwerp Durer called on the blacksmith-artist, Quinten Matsys ; he also met Erasmus, who gave him presents ; from others he received presents of wine and con- fections, and, according to his diary — a wonder- ful thing in those days — " sugar-cane just as it grows." In August, 1520, he journeyed to Brussels, where he had an audience of the Archduchess Margaret, the aunt of Charles V., the emperor-elect. From Brussels he went to Auchen, where the coronation took place on the 23rd. of October, and after following the em- peror on his coronation tour for a long time, he obtained, " with great trouble and labour," the ratification of his pension by the new monarch, and returned early in 1521 to Ant- werp. There he bought a native head-dress for his wife, and painted her portrait, inscribing it in his quaint, faithful way, " This was taken by Albert Durer in Netherlands costume, in 152 1, after they had been married twenty-seven years." I20 MASTER MINDS IN ART. The surprising news reached Antwerp that a whale had been cast ashore at Zealand, and Durer was anxious to see the monster. He took ship for the Island of Walcheren, and while touching at Armuyden a vessel bore down upon them. " When we were just going to land and had thrown out our rope," he wrote, " a large ship that was near came against us. We were just landing, and in the confusion I let every one get ashore before me, until there was no one but myself, Georg Kotzler, two old women, and the Master with a little lad remaining in the vessel ; and just as the other ship came upon us, and I with those named were on the ship and could not get away, the strong rope broke. Added to that there was a strong gust of wind which drove us hard astern. Then we all cried out for help, but no one dared to come. Then the wind carried us out to sea ; the. master tore his hair and wept, for all his men had landed. There Avas anxiety and distress, for the wind was high, and there were not more than six people on board. Then I spoke to the master, and told him to keep up his spirits, put his trust in God, and think what was best to be done. He said if he could hoist the small sail he would ALBER T D URER. 1 2 1 try if he could not get to land ; so then we all helped together, got it up, and again moved on. And when the men on shore, who had already- given us up, saw how we helped ourselves, they came to our assistance and we got to land." Durer, after all, did not see the whale. By the time he reached Zealand, the sea had washed it away, and he had to be content with a few seashore curiosities given to him by Lazarus Ravensburger, in return for a portrait Durer painted. This payment in kind did not always please Durer, who still wished to turn his work into much-needed money. I n fact, he was provoked to write with more bitterness than his gentle spirit usually betrayed : " At Antwerp I made many drawings, portraits, and other subjects, but for the greater portion of them I never received a penny." And actually in distress for money he wrote in his journal, " In all my transactions during my stay in the Low Countries — in all my money dealings, sales, and other bargains — in all my dealings with the great and the little — I have been robbed, but more especially by Margaret of Austria, who, in exchange for all my presents and all my labours, 123 MASTER MINDS IN ART. has given me nothing." This in the face of the public hospitality he received may seem ungracious, but public hospitality is an incon- venient honour when the pocket is empty. As Goldsmith remarked, when he was appointed Professor of History to, the Royal- Academy, the honour was like a ruffle when he was in want of a shirt. In the spi-ing of 152 1 Durer paid a visit to Bruges and Ghent, At Bruges the painters and goldsmiths banquetted him, presented him with wine, and did -him much honour ; and at Ghent the painters showed him the art-treasures of the place, and from his arrival to his departure did not leave him. In April he returned to Antwerp, visited Mechlin, where, once more, the painters and sculptors provided him with entertainment. As he was . preparing to depart for home. Christian II. of Denmark arrived at Antwerp and sought Durer. He was so pleased with the artist's engravings that he commissioned Durer to paint his por- trait, and then entertained him at a banquet, at which the Emperor Charles, Archduchess Mar- garet, and the Queen of Spain were present, " On the Friday before Whitsuntide," wrote Durer, " the tidings reached me in Antwerp that ALBERT DURER. 123 Martin Luther had been treacherously taken prisoner. For as the herald of the Emperor Charles had been added to the Imperial escort confidence was placed in him. But after the herald had brought him to an unfriendly place near Eisenach, he said he required him no longer, and rode away. Immediately ten horsemen appeared and treacherously carried off the man thus be- trayed, the pious, the Spirit-enlightened one, the follower of the true Christian faith. Does he still live, or have they murdered him ? This I know not. But he has suffered for the sake of Christian truth, and because he has punished the unchristian papacy, which opposes its great burden of human laws to the liberty of Christ. . . . And especially hard is it to me that God will perhaps leave us under' their false blind teaching, which men, whom they call Fathers, have invented and set up ; whereby the precious word of God is in many places falsely explained or not set forth at all. Ah ! God in heaven, have mercy upon us ! " With this prayer for Luther, and indeed for himself, he had serious thoughts of home, and started for Niirnberg on July 12, 1521, in his 124 MASTER MINDS IN ART. fiftieth year. His long and exciting journey had enfeebled him, and the voyage to Zealand to view the coast-driven whale was the begin- ning of a. pain in his side. He worked at home with his wonted patience, but he must have felt himself on the weaker side of life, for three years after his return he begged the Nurnberg Rath to accept an investment of one thousand guldens in their funds, and to pay him the annual interest of fifty guldens to ensure him and his wife (his mother had died in 15 14) the means of a liveli- hood in their closing years. Among the works he executed after his return were the portraits on copper of Melancthon and Erasmus ; but the most notable of all were two panels on which he painted St. John and St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Mark. A contemporary of Durer, Johnn Neudorffer, has recorded that the four characters were intended to portray four tem- peraments — St. John the Melancholy, St. Peter the Phlegmatic, St. Paul the Choleric, and St. Mark the Sanguine. In addition to quoting texts from each apostle, he placed beneath the panels the following inscription : — " All temporal rulers in these perilous times must take care not to accept human misleading for the divine ALBERT DURER. 125 word, for God will have nothing added to His word, or taken away. Then listen to the warn- ings from these four excellent men, Peter, John, Paul, and Mark." Durer was proud of these panels, and requested the Rath of Nurnberg to accept them as a tribute to . his native city. The Rath accepted them, and voted the painter one hundred guldens. Only copies of the originals, however, are now at Nurnberg ; the originals, after being in Durer's native city for one hundred years, were removed to Munich by desire of the emperor. The copies at Nurn- berg, on the other hand, have the original in- scriptions attached to them — the emperor having had them sawn off the original panels because of the allusion to the papacy. Durer's health gave way, and though he had been gradually failing, at the close death came suddenly on the 6th of April 1528, when Durer was fifty-seven. Pirkheimer, his friend from childhood, cried aloud, as it were, at the suddenness of the event : " Thou who for so many years wast so closely united to me, Albrecht, my soul's better part, with whom I enjoyed dear discourse, who didst treasure my words in a faithful bosom ! Why, 126 MASTER MINDS IN ART. unhappy one, didst thou hurry away with swift, never-returning step ? I was not allowed to touch the dear head, to clasp the hand, or say a last farewell to the departing one, for scarcely hadst thou entrusted thy weary limbs to thy bed, than death snatched thee away in haste." " It grieves me," said his friend Melancthon, " to see Germany deiprived of such an artist and such a man;" and Luther wrote: "You may count him happy that Christ so enlightened him and took him in good time from stormy scenes, destined to become still stormier, so that he who was worthy of seeing only the best should not be compelled to experience the" worst. So may he rest in peace with his fathers. Amen." Durer was buried in St. John's Cemetery just beyond the walls of his native city of Nurn- berg.. RAPHAEL. RAPHAEL. IISITORS have been known to pass through the corridors and rooms of the Vatican, where Raphael's principal frescoes are to be seen, and to inquire on the way out, " Where are the Raphaels ? " The fame of the artist had created a false Raphael, an imaginary Raphael. The travellers expected a Raphael who would instantly electrify them by an unmistakable power which they never paused to define; and under this deluding expectation they passed, on the right and on the left, yards, upon yards of work that the world of art still wonders at. ' I30 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Nor have only ordinary or unschooled visitors experienced this. A French artist saw the Raphael works at the Vatican with- out knowing they were Raphael's, failed to be impressed by them, and finally asked the custodian where the frescoes of frescoes, the Raphael frescoes, could be seen. Then we have Our own ■ Sir Joshua Reynolds confessing his disappointment. " I remember very well," he writes, " my own disappointment when I first visited the Vatican ; but on confessing my feel- ings to a brother student, of whose ingenuous- ness I had a high opinion, he acknowledged ' that the works of Raphael had the same effect on him ; or rather, that they did not produce the effect which he expected," Ignorance of the principles of Raphael's art, as Sir Joshua admits, may have something to do with the disappoint- ment ; but once acquire the principles, or without knowing the principles, once grow familiar with the results, and the greatness of the work be- comes more and more perceptible. Whatever may be the cause of disappoint- ment in individual cases, these confessions are only so many unconscious testimonies to the unobtrusive excellence of Raphael's art RAPHAEL. 131 — a gentle, unobtrusive excellence, characteristic also of Raphael the man. See Michael Angelo's work, and there can be no mistake, no passing by. It arrests and surprises. It is the vagary of a giant. See Raphael's, and there is such a quiet harmony of form and colour, the whole is such a sweet emanation of a poetic nature, that it may be passed except by those specially initiated, unrecognizable as the first most complete realiza- tion of Italian art. Prior to Raphael, artists were too self-conscious because of their strug- gling ignorance. Their crudities made art too apparent. After Raphael, artists became self- conscious because of their knowledge ; their power made them proud of display — hence the works .of both schools, of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Post-Raphaelites, arrest by their singu- larities, though of course they may also charm by their beauty. Raphael touched the happy medium between these two extremes. In him art had its easiest expression, and the language was not more apparent than the mes- sage. He was not too ideal to be mystic ; and not too realistic to be commonplace. He made the familiar beautiful, and the beautiful familiar. He transformed an Italian mother nursing 132 MASTER MINDS IN ART. her child into a Madonna that has satisfied the general idea of either Divine or human mother- hood ever since ; and his frescoes, cartoons, and drawings afford a gentler but a more abiding satisfaction than is afforded by the strength of other masters more striking at first. One could live with the works of Raphael ; but only be on visiting terms with those of Michael Angelo, Titian, and Rubens. Raphael was the son of an Umbrian painter, Giovanni Sanzio, and therefore inherited the artistic faculty from him ; but his good-nature, his poetic temperament, the qualities, indeed, which gave his faculty its character, and his beauty of feature, came, it may be presumed, from his mother, Magia Sanzio, a beautiful character who died when her son was only eight years of age. Raphael was born on April 6th (Good Friday), 1483, in the moun- tain village of Urbino, where his first home still stands the object of many a pilgrimage from all parts of the world. Naturally the boy Raphael would early become aware of art as a fact in the world through the labours of his father. He would hear of his father's pictures, and possibly see some of them, for at Cagli RAPHAEL. 133 there is a portrait of the boy Raphael in a fresco on the wall of the Tiranni Chapel. The paternal influence, however, was very limited, for when Raphael was eleven years old his father died. He then fell under the care of his step-mother (his father having soon married a second time), and an uncle, a priest ; but as the guardianship was not satisfactory, Simone di Ciarla, his mother's brother, perceiving the talent of the boy, sent him to Pietro Perugino, the painter, as an apprentice. This is supposed to have taken place soon after the death of Raphael's father. Perugino was one of the most versatile, craftsmen, and yet one of the itiost limited artists of the Umbrian school. He had for his apprentices, Pinturicchio, Ferrari, La Spagnuoletto, Alfini, and Raphael. By the aid of these, and others with more of the artizan about them, Perugino executed the most varied orders, from a triumphal arch to designs for filigree confection for sweetmeats. Pinturicchio and Raphael copied Madonnas and the like for chapels ; and the master, Perugino, when he was not designing for wood carvings or silver casts or armour, painted and re-painted, and yet again painted, and yet again and again 134 MASTER MINDS IN ART. repeated his monotonous . version of emaci- ated maidenhood — the symbol of the saints on earth longing for the unattainable : longing because unattainable, and yet unattainable because they simply longed in a dreary weary round of inactive spiritual desire. Thus Raphael, in the miscellaneous workshop- studio of Perugino, had conditions very similar to Durer's in the practical workshop of Wohlge- muth, in Nurnberg, about ten years earlier in the same century. Raphael's work during his apprenticeship was so merged in the general labours of the master and his other apprentices as to be beyond authentication. Had the master not so dominated the pliable ignorance of his learning youths, had the youths been able to resist so dogmatic a personality in a narrow and stereotyped style of form, colour, and expression, there might have been safe grounds for surmise ; but there can now only be the vague but pleasant fancy that to this wistful head on some Perugino altar-piece, or to that attenuated hand, or to that drapery too spare and limp to flow, the brush of young Raphael contributed his earliest endeavour. Even about his presumably first picture there RAPHAEL. 135 is the fascination of doubt. " The Infant Jesus and St. John," in the Church of San Pietro, Perugia, is only supposed to be his. Time, however, has given him the benefit of the doubt. As usual in such cases, the longer the time the less the doubt, and so "The In- fant Jesus and St. John " is on many sides unquestionably called a Raphael. One of his first undoubted drawings, however, is now in the Stadel Institute, Frankfort, and represents St. Martin on horseback. When Raphael, under the advice of his uncle, left Urbino for Perugia, there were disputes be- tween his step-mother and his father's brother, Don Bartolommeo Sanzi, as to some of the family property. The disputes during his absence were for a time settled ; but they recurred, and Raphael returned to Urbino. He settled the quarrel betw^een his step-mother and uncle, gave . from his own pocket a sum of money for the benefit of his step-sister Elisa- betta, and returned to his studies at Perugia. Soon after Raphael's return Perugino left for Florence ; and, in fact, settled there. Whether he invited Raphael to follow him is not known, but not very long after, the young painter was 136- MASTER MINDS IN ART. invited to depart at once to Citta di Castello by Vitelli. Raphael regarded himself as free from Perugino and accepted the call. He was commissioned to paint a double church-banner, the subjects being " The Holy Trinity" and "The Creation of Man;" and in addition he painted " The Crucifixion " (now the property of the Earl of Dudley), and an altar-piece for the Church of St. Agostino, the subject being " The Coronation of St. Nicholas." In the meantime, however, Perugino found his way back from Florence to Perugia, and Raphael, on the com- pletion of his commissions, also returned to Perugia, to help his master with the Sala del Cambio frescoes. Though still under the influence of his master, Raphael began to show that he likewise had an individuality. His hand began to dis- play its special cunning, and there were signs that the prophecy of Perugino when he first saw Raphael's drawings, " Let him be my pupil : he will soon become my master," would some day be fulfilled. Raphael was still under the artistic sway of Perugino. He still borrowed ideas from his senior, and emulated the style ; but there were prognostications of an in- RAPHAEL. 137 dependent source. It is especially interesting to note how at this period Raphael in Italy and Durer in Germany, with only the connecting link of art spreading northward, were dealing with similar spiritual and artistic problems. Durer's " Knight and Death " has a parallel in Raphael's " Vision of a Knight " — both exem- plify the imperative nature of duty in face of all sorts of danger (in the case of Durer) and allurements (in the case of Raphael) to the con- scientious being. Durer's " Adoration of the Magi" has a parallel in Raphael's "Coronation of the Virgin," in the Vatican ; and Durer's " Betrothal of the Virgin " has a still more striking parallel in Raphael's " Marriage of the Virgin." The similarity in the latter case is not merely in the subject. The basis of design is .the same in each case. They differ in detail and expression ; but Raphael's expression is the more beautiful of the two. Raphael's design was a copy of his master's treatment of the same subject in the cathedral of Perugia, and possibly Perugino's idea had influenced Durer, directly or indirectly, during his visit to Italy ; or, on the other hand, the same art wave which had influenced Perugino had 138 MASTER MINDS IN ART. travelled into Germany, and found Durer awaiting it at Nurnberg. Be that as it may, the contemporaneous treatment of kindred subjects by two friends who never met, but who exchanged pictorial compliments with each other, is extremely interesting ; and the study of the contrast shows that Raphael was the out- come of a nation and a personality a stage in advance of the condition of art in Germany and Durer at that period. When Raphael was twenty he went to Siena to help Pinturicchio, one of his fellow-appren- tices under Perugino, with some frescoes for the library of Siena Cathedral ; and in the following year he revisited Citta di Castello, to paint for the Franciscans' Church the picture alluded to in connection with Durer — the " Marriage of the Virgin." The work is now in the Palace of Science and Art, Milan. When that work was finished Raphael visited Urbino, where the Duke and Duchess of Urbino engaged him to copy some portraits in their library. For them he also painted " Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane." At the end of that year, 1504, Raphael decided to try his skill at Florence, and thither he RAPHAEL. 139 went with a letter of introduction from the sister of the Duke of Urbino to the Gon- falonier. Florence was then the centre of art. It was the goal of the most aspiring painters of Italy, and among those who were in Florence at the time of Raphael's visit was Leonardo da Vinci. The visit awakened the dormant possibilities in young Raphael. At the sight of the power of others he became the more conscious of his own. The superiority of the artists he found at Florence inspirited him. He measured himself by them, and while he became aware of his weakness, he also became aware of his possible strength. The quiet and dignified beauty of Leonardo da Vinci's works attracted him. He made Da Vinci and Masaccio his models. In Da Vinci's work he perceived a more masculine beauty, and in Masaccio a greater mastery of composition than he had found in Perugino. Under this new- influence he painted a Madonna, now in the Museum at Berlin ; and on a small panel the more celebrated Madonna del Granduca, in the Fitti Palace, Florence. No doubt the dignified and meditative beauty of Leonardo da Vinci prevails in the latter work. Its I40 MASTER MINDS IN ART. statue-like simplicity is exquisite, while the spiritual abstraction of the Madonna, and the purity, as of a little child, of the young Christ, are more like the influences of life than of a picture. The Grand Duke Ferdinand III., who owned this eloquent little panel, carried it about with him, took it with him into exile, for to him, as to thousands of others since, it was as a talisman of blessing. Raphael had not finished with Perugia, however. He re- turned there in 1505 to paint an altar-piece for the monks of St. Antony — a work, indeed, which he began during his apprenticeship. While at Perugia he also executed some frescoes for the Church of San Severo, and went back to Florence towards the close of 1505. In 1506 Raphael, still restless and seeking new experience, went to Bologna and made the acquaintance of the painter, Francesco Francia. Having painted " The Nativity " for Bentivoglio, Raphael left Bologna for Urbino. There he was welcomed to the ducal court, and painted for the Duke " St. George on the White Horse," for presentation to Henry VII. of England. That work is now honoured as a sacred relic at St. Petersburg, and a lamp RAPHAEL. 141 is constantly kept burning where it hangs. One of Raphael's most famiHar works, the one in fact by which he is, as it were, per- sonally known wherever engravings have travelled — his own portrait at the age of twenty-three — was painted during this sojourn at Urbino. That memorable and autobio- graphical portrait is now in the long gallery of artists' portraits in the great Pitti Palace, Florence. It stands out distinguished by- its youth, its feminine beauty, and its gentle, pathetic side-look ; as if gazing from the dreamy sixteenth century into the awakened nineteenth. The portrait is over three hundred and eighty years old — and it bears signs of its age — -but Raphael continues his perennial reign of youth- ful twenty-three. Before leaving Urbino he was asked to paint a number of portraits, and when these were finished he again set out for Florence. On his way he sojourned among the mountains at the Convent of Vallombrosa, and there also painted portraits — the Prin- cipal of the Order, and one of the Brethren, On his return to Florence, the magnetic in- fluence of Michael Angelo was added to the calmer sway of Leonardo da Vinci. Michael 142 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Angelo was Raphael's senior by nine years, Michael Angelo being thirty-two, and Raphael only twenty-three. The contact of these two strongly contrasted characters, with the still older Leonardo da Vinci in the back- ground, must have been very striking in the •Florence of the sixteenth century : Michael Angelo with a strong masculine nature, im- pulsive, proud, and dignified, aware of his Titanic strength and of his own value in the world ; and Raphael a tender, emotional nature with its poetic reserve, still undergoing change, . Under this new personal and eesthetic in- fluence ' Raphael prepared his design for his great picture, " The Entombment," as an altar- piece for the Franciscans' Church at Perugia. Up to this time it was Raphael's finest achievement, alike for its pathetic conception, its dramatic realization, and the variety of expression compared with his previous works. " The Entombment," like many of Raphael's pictures, did not remain at the place it was painted for. It was removed from the church at Perugia to the Bourghese Palace, Rome. Soon after the completion of " The Entomb- ment" Raphael found himself in Florence RAPHAEL. 143 without the society of Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. They had left for the execution of work elsewhere ; but Raphael found another congenial spirit in Fra Barto- lommeo, a painter who had taken to the cloister. Raphael, it must be borne in mind, was but twenty-four. He had been accus- tomed to work under orders from Perugino, and had not quite arrived at that stage of development when he could be wholly in- dependent of whatever influences were around him. Up to this time he was taking in as well as giving out ideas, and the character and quantity of the yield largely depended upon the influence of an older nature than his own. Thus the meeting with Fra Barto- lommeo resulted in several Madonnas, the most notable being the one in the Louvre, and known as "La Belle Jardinere." The contrast between it and the " Madonna della Granduca" in the Pitti Palace, and painted when Raphael was first under the personal influence of Leonardo da Vinci, is very notable. They might have been painted by two dis- tinct men — a Da Vinci-Raphael might have produced the one, and a Bartolommeo-Raphael 144 MASTER MINDS IN ART. the other* Raphael has not escaped criticism for this susceptibility to an outside influence, and his. originahty on that account has been impeached. Raphael was undoubtedly in- fluenced ; Raphael unquestionably borrowed — but he was influenced, and he borrowed with such justifying results. He dealt with a theme as if it were absolutely new, and to be dealt with once and for ever. In that respect he was so much more original in resource than his models that he transcended them either by developing the conception or by greatly enhancing the beauty. Julius II. was Pope at this period. St. Peter's, Rome, was in course of erection, after designs by Bramante, architect to Julius. The decorations of the Vatican, begun under the predecessors of Julius, were incomplete, and the Pope having heard, both at Rome and at Florence, of a young and promising painter of the name of Raphael, invited him to the Vatican in 1508. It was an all-important call, and one can picture the departure of Raphael, who was then twenty-five, from Florence for Rome. According to Quatremere de Quincy, " He was finely proportioned, his person pleasing and RAPHAEL. 145 elegant, his features regular, his hair brown, his eyes of the same hue, and of a sweet and modest expression. Captivating in manner, engaging in address, of distinguished presence,, his bearing was that of a finished courtly gentle- man." We can also picture his arrival in Rome, and his first courtly audience with the Pope. He was immediately commissioned to decorate with frescoes the walls and ceilings of several corridors and rooms. A complete list of the pictures left by Raphael and- his pupils on the walls of the Vatican would make a catalogue. They varied from allegories of theology, philosophy, poetry, and law, to the painting of Cupids ; from the painting of portraits of Popes, to the painting of sibyls ; from Biblical subjects to mythological subjects ; from themes suitable for an altar, to decorations for the bath room of a cardinal. The principal works were Theology, The School of Athens, fifty - two frescoes on the Creation of the World, the Transfiguration, the Annunciation, the Raphael tapestries fof the Sistine Chapel (seven of the ten original cartoons for which are at South Kensington), and three allegorical figures, Prudence, Force, and Moderation ; God ap- 10 146 MASTER MINDS IN ART. pearing to Noah, Moses before the Burning Bush, and subjects from the history of Con- stantine. The seven cartoons now at South Kensington have passed through strange hands since Raphael drew them for the Sistine Chapel tapestries illustrative of subjects from the lives of Peter, Paul, and Stephen. The tapestries were finished in 151 8, but the cartoons were left at the manufactory at Arras until 1630. Three had disappeared, and the remaining seven being seen by Rubens, that painter ad- vised Charles I. of England to purchase them for Whitehall Palace. After the death of Charles, Oliver Cromwell bought the cartoons for the nation for ^300. Charles II., however, negotiated with Louis XIV. with the object of selling them, but Lord Danby succeeded in keeping them in England, William III. placed the treasures in Hampton Court Palace, and they passed, on loan, to the South Kensington Museum, with the sanction of Queen Victoria. The Queen also possesses at Windsor the original sketch for the cartoon which represents the Charge (of the Church) to St. Peter, and it was among the old-master drawings exhibited at the Royal Academy in the winter of 1878, RAPHAEL. 147 This drawing is interesting, as showing Raphael's sketching direct from the models, the male figures being attired in their every- day clothes, while in the cartoon the same figures become classicised by the usual folds of drapery. The Pope was so impressed by the first fresco completed by Raphael, " The Dispute on the Holy Sacrament," that his Holiness ordered several works by earlier painters in other rooms of the Vatican to be demolished, so that Raphael could have even more space to work upon than had already been allotted ; but Raphael pro- tested, and when he had power, only allowed frescoes of quite an inferior order to be destroyed. On a later occasion, when the Pope made the same suggestion in regard to other frescoes by early painters, Raphael, when the demolition was inevitable, had the subjects copied, so that there would be at least a second-hand record of the past. While Raphael was engaged upon the rooms and corridors of the Vatican, decorating the home of the Pope, Michael Angelo was mounted on a great scaffold of his own inven- tion, decorating the chapel of the Pope. That two such men worked contemporaneously, in 148 MASTER MINDS IN ART. the same hour and practically under the same roof, was a wonderful instance of the fecundity of genius in Italy. The few years in which they lived became a standard epoch for future centuries ; and such an outpouring of genius of the highest and freshest order in different parts of Italy, but especially in the case of Michael Angelo and Raphael at Rome, has only a parallel in the free poetic utterance in our Elizabethan era. In Michael Angelo and Raphael two phases of beauty were touched. Between those two phases all the varieties may be said to move and have their being, influenced, in the measure of their approach, by the one or the other. Michael Angelo gave us a beauty born of strength ; and Raphael a gentleness born of beauty. The one was pre-eminently vigorous in pictorial form, all colour being the servant of form ; the other was pre-eminently sweet in artistic colour, the grace of his forms becoming an inseparable part of the harmony of the whole. The two phases in their extreme fulness were apart and yet related. An ab- solute combination of the two with the special genius of either was impossible. Each might borrow the spirit of the other, but to go beyond RAPHAEL. 149 that would be to transpose the principle on which each consciously or unconsciously worked. The vigorous training necessary for the develop- ment of a Premiere Danseuse is disastrous to the qualities which make a Prima Donna, For the strength of the one, you sacrifice the gentler harmony of the other. Raphael and Michael Angelo — and especially Michael Angelo — were conscious of each other's rare power. The senior painter, a man as impetuous and forcible as some of his own forms, was envious of the marked favour bestowed upon the junior who at Florence had divested himself of the narrow- ness of Perugia, and who at Rome showed a capacity for adding the style of Rome to that of Florence. The two men, in fact, were in every respect extremes. Michael Angelo was more masculine -than a man, and Raphael more feminine than a woman. The one was aggressive with the audacity of un- quenchable genius ; and the other, when under strong influence, was assimilative. Raphael could combine with his own the spirit of another. No wonder, therefore, that on see- ing some of Michael Angelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, he took a dislike to parts of his ISO MASTER MINDS IN ART. own early work in the Vatican. He felt the style dry and cold, and naturally erhulated the vigorous inspirations of the' elder master. He soon discovered the inevitable distinction be- tween the two, and though he returned to a reliance upon himself, the transient emulation invigorated his invention. Michael Angelo was jealous of Raphael, but the jealousy was not deep enough to blind him to the qualities of his rival. No doubt, like his rival, he learned the distinction of the two styles, and that there was room for both, not only in the world, but in the area of the Vatican. Once, indeed, Michael Angelo paid Raphael a compliment, and did him a very good turn. Among Raphael's commissions outside of the Vatican, was one from Agostino Chigi, a merchant, for four frescoes for the Church of Santa Maria della Pace. The subjects chosen by Raphael were angels, prophets, and sibyls, representative of four different nations receiving divine inspirations. The artist had been paid five hundred scudi in advance, and on completion of the work he advised the merchant's treasurer of the balance due. The treasurer ignored the claim. RAPHAEL. 151 He considered five hundred scudi quite enough for the work. Raphael suggested arbitration, the treasurer selected the jealous Michael Angelo, and treasurer and arbitrator went to the Church of Santa Maria, Seeing one of the sibyls, Michael Angelo at once said, "That head alone is worth a hundred scudi," and soon de- clared that the other heads were certainly not worth less. The merchant, alarmed, instructed his cashier to pay Raphael three hundred scudi more, told him to behave very politely to the painter, otherwise he might insist upon payment for drapery as well as heads, and ruin him. Among the other general works by Raphael when in Rome were a portrait of Julius IL now in the Pitti Palace, a second portrait of himself, portraits of Beatrice of Ferrara, and Bindo Altovito, and the Naples Holy Family. In 1 5 13 Julius II. died, and the son of Lorenzo de Medici was elected Pope as Leo X., who not only continued the engagement for the decoration of the Vatican, but on the death of Bramante, in the following year, appointed Raphael architect of St. Peter's. In the same year Raphael painted the fresco, " Galatea" in the Farnesina Palace, and in the next year 152 MASTER MINDS IN ART. again took up the frescoes. in the Vatican. In- deed trie Pope was so ready to find space for Raphael to fill, that it was utterly impossible for the one painter to cope with the labours, and, to keep himself abreast of his instructions, he engaged pupils to take up some of the work from his designs under his guidance.. Nor did Raphael always enjoy perfect liberty with his conceptions. Julius II., for instance, would have a papal-chair portrait of himself introduced into the fresco, " The Driving of Heliodorus out of the Temple of Jerusalem." Leo X., in the same way, in " The Discomfiture of the Hordes of Attila by the Apparition of St. Peter and St. Paul," insisted upon being introduced on a horse surrounded by attendants, as a memorial of the driving of the French out of Italy during his reign. There is, perhaps, a certain compensa- tion for this in the fact that the French now possess in the Louvre the original drawing for this fresco, and in place of the insipid presence of an anachronistic pope in the fresco, the draw- ing has an effective group of soldiers. Although Raphael was appointed 'architect for St. Peter's, very little progress under his superintendence was made, because by spending RAPHAEL. 153 money in other directions the Pope did not encourage the work. Raphael made a model in wood of his idea for the great building, and that really secured him. the appointment as architect^after -the death of Bramante ; but that design was never carried out. After Raphael's death. the project descended to Michael Angelo, whose plan was adopted. Raphael, however, finished the court of San Domaso in the Vati- can, begun by Bramante ; furnished designs to the merchant, Agostino Chigi, for the Chapel Santa Maria del Popoplo ; and built himself a house on Via di Borgo Nuova, not far from the Vatican. . While all, this work was proceeding, Raphael, both by his genius and his personality, attracted a great number of friends. It is recorded that he was so well regarded that when he walked through the streets of Rome he was usually followed by an admiring little company ■of pupils, ■ Nor were all his friends close at hand. Durer, far away in Germany, could send Raphael a portrait, and Raphael in return sent Durer some studies of figures, and a design for the -battle -of Ostia. He also corresponded with his uncle, Simone di Ciarla, who, it would 154 MASTER MINDS IN ART. appear, was at one time desirous of suiting Raphael with a partner for life. " As to taking a wife," Raphael wrote from Rome, " I will say in regard to her whom you destined for me, that I am very glad, and thank God for not having taken either her or another. In this I have been wiser than you who wished to give her to me, I am convinced that you see your- self that I should not have got on as I have^" Still, thankful though he was for not having taken his uncle's choice or another, Raphael was not without his love incident in Rome. On the opposite side of the Tiber, to be seen in her father's garden, and sometimes bathing her feet under a fountain, was a mere girl, Margarita by name. With Margarita Raphael fell in love. He never married, it is not known that he even wooed ; it is simply known that his love had such hold upon him that Margarita's name was found in his will, enshrined in gold — the gold of a little fortune on which to live and to remember him. In 15 16, when Raphael was thirty-three, Leo X. took him to Florence. The Church of San Lorenzo, erected by Brunelloschi, wanted finishing with a fa9ade, and the Pope invited RAPHAEL. IS5 Michael Angelo, Raphael, Giuliano da san Gallo, Baccio, D'Agnola, and Jacopo Sansovino, to send in designs. Michael Angelo resented the imputation. He was above competition. He would interest himself only on condition that he was appointed architect without a con- test. Leo X. complied, and Michael Angelo took the work in hand. Raphael's visit to Florence, however, resulted in his furnishing designs for the Uguccioni Palace and the Palace of Pandolfini. He returned to Rome in 1 516 to begin work on the walls of Cardinal Bibiena's bath-room, the subject being " Scenes from the Life of Venus." Had not " Scenes from the Life of Venus " been repeated in the Villa Palatina, a very vague idea of their beauty would have been left to us, for the frescoes in the Cardinal's bath-room, as if Venus had become ashamed of herself, have shrunk almost out of sight. In these frescoes Raphael was largely assisted by his pupils. The demands from outside for Raphael's work very much increased, and only for the labours of his pupils, who had become thoroughly imbued with his style, it would have been impossible to meet the calls of his patrons. The pupils, as a rule, painted-in 156 MASTER MINDS IN ART. the general features of the subject, and the master touched it with his vitaHzing hand. At this period Raphael painted his " Christ Bearing the Cross," now in the museum at Madrid. The first destination of the work was the Church of Santa Maria della Spasimo, at Palermo. It was despatched by sea, the vessel was wrecked, and all hands were lost *; but the picture drifted into Genoa. When discovered by the inhabitants of- that port, it caused a great sensation, and by order of the Pope was handed over to the monks of Monte Oliveto, Palermo. ' Philip IV. of Spain after- wards bought it for the Madrid Museum. Among Raphael's other works of this period were his perhaps most celebrated Madonna, the " Madonna della Sedia," in the Pitti Palace, and made familiar by every species of print ; " The Visitation," and " The Holy Family," both in Madrid Museum ; " St. Michael," painted by desire of Lorenzo de Medici for presentation to Francis I. of France ; and the largest " Holy Family " that Raphael ever painted, and now in the Louvre. Francis I. tried to induce Raphael to leave Rome for Paris. But the engagements at Rome were too binding to allow him to leave, RAPHAEL. 157 though he undertook some cartoons for tapes- tries. One cartoon only, " The Massacre of the Innocents," was finished by Raphael, and that had a remarkable adventure, or say a remark- able series of adventures. The cartoon became so valuable that on the death of the owner it had to be cut into a number of pieces for distri- bution among his heirs. One part was pledged with a London pawnbroker, and it ultimately found its way to the National Gallery, where it is at present ; another portion is in the posses- sion of Lord Spencer, and a third section is in the library at Christ Church, Oxford. The remaining sections have never been traced. The other tapestry cartoons were finished by Raphael's pupils after his death. This unfor- tunately had to be so in a number of cases. The master's hands were crowded with labours — portraits of Leo X., Lorenzo de Medici, Cardinal Borgia, Archdeacon Carondelet, and of Margarita (now in the Pitti Palace), who also appears in the Madonna di San Sisto; decorative frescoes for Agostino Chigi's Farensina Palace, and a fresh series of frescoes for the Vatican. Raphael could do only the designs for the Farensina Palace, leaving nearly all of the IS8 MASTER MINDS IN ART. actual frescoes to be done by Guilio Romano, Francesco Penni, and Giovanni da Udine. The result was not considered satisfactory, and a report soon circulated through Rome that the great master's power was on the decline, that Raphael was no longer Raphael, and that there would be a collapse to his brilliant and speedy success. The report had a tone of bitterness in it ; it penetrated the Vatican and reached Raphael himself. Stung by the ungracious fabrication, he determined to refute it by the production, unaided, of a masterpiece. The result was his large picture, " The Transfigura- tion," now at the Vatican. But even this, the outcome of his defiance, was destined not to be entirely finished by his hand. It was almost complete when a sudden illness seized the painter. He was busily intent upon a portion of the frescoes at the Farensina Palace one day when the Pope sent a messenger requesting his attendance. Raphael immediately left for the Vatican, hastening all the way so as to return to the palace with the least possible delay. He reached the Vatican wearied and heated, and while talking with Leo X, in one .of the corridors, on the plans for St. Peter's, RAPHAEL. IS9 Raphael received a severe chill. Instead of returning to the palace he went home, took to his bed, and almost immediately made prepara- tions for the close. His friends were shocked, but in every way hopeful. It was a chill— it would pass. But Raphael, with an assurance like one of his own inspirations, realized that the end was nigh. He settled his earthly affairs, provided for Margarita, and his relatives at Urbino, bequeathed his villa to Cardinal Bibiena, appointed his executors, and begged his pupils, Guilio Romano and Francesco Penni, to complete his unfinished works. Raphael lingered a fortnight ; then the last sacraments were administered, and he died on Good Friday, April 6, 1520, on the anniversary of his birth, aged thirty-seven. The body of Raphael lay in state for several days in his house near the Vatican, and not far from where the Tiber flowed beneath Villa, Cyprus, and Pine. The people of Rome — painters, pupils, church dignitaries, wealthy citizens, and no doubt Margarita — passed through the room to see Raphael for the last time, and for the first time to gaze on his unfinished work, " The Transfiguration." Very i6o MASTER MINDS IN ART. appropriately as his last work and as a symbol of the change that had overtaken him, " The Transfiguration " was placed near the body, and when, in a few days, the remains of the painter were publicly borne to the Pantheon, his last great work formed part of the long and impres- sive procession. He was buried in the wall under the altar — and now the Pantheon rising above and around like a great dome with its circular opening at the top through which sunshine and shower can freely enter, appears as a vast sar- cophagus to the honour of Raphael. There Raphael rested undisturbed until as recently as '^'^'i'ht when a singular and questionable homage was paid to his bones. The tomb was opened, and for five weeks the skeleton of the painter was publicly exhibited. Crowds flocked to see it as if it were a sacred relic of the church ; and after the curiosity was gratified a new marble tomb was fixed, and the remains were once more interred in the wall of the Pantheon — the shrine of many a pilgrim of Art to Rome. REMBRANDT. [ I REMBRANDT. REMBRANDT. |AUL REMBRANDT, the most original and imaginative of the Dutch painters, and one of the most assertive in the whole range of art, is an example of the inevitable assertion of native power He had comparatively little tuition, and in the direction in which his genius displayed itself he was entirely self-taught. He was resolutely independent. He made Amsterdam his home, and, once fixed there, he did not travel beyond its outskirts. No grand artistic tour to Italy was necessary to him ; indeed. i64 MASTER MINDS IN ART. instead of going to Italy, he made Italy, through its picture dealers, come to him. They travelled from far and wide for his work, and especially for his etchings when they became known. This remarkable character was born on the 15th of July, 1606, in the suburb of the busy Dutch town of Leyden. His parents, like his grandparents, were part-owners of a malt mill, on an arm of land on the banks of the winding Rhine. They were thoroughly Dutch — quiet, plodding, industrious, and thriving people in a busy period of their country's history, when Ley- den and Amsterdam were the centres of learning and of very active municipal life. Rembrandt van Ryn — meaning Rembrandt the son of Her- man of the Rhine — was their youngest son. Being prosperous they wished to give him an education that would fit him to take part, not in milling and baking, but in the municipal activity of Leyden. They were, in fact, vain enough to think of the law for their son, and with that in view they placed him at school in Leyden to learn Latin, preparatory to his enter- ing the University. It is the old, old story. Studies with a view to the law were not at all REMBRANDT. 165 Congenial. The boy had forms and figures in his brain. What did he want with Latin ? To him the illustrations in books were far more interesting than the text ; as the exe- cution of the elaborate caligraphy of that day, when the goose-quill was made to do wonderful scroll work, delighted him far more than ordinary penmanship. It was of no use studying for the law. His own power haunted him. Do what he would it asserted itself — pushing itself through the general run of his studies ; and at last he had to speak. No doubt there was evidence to support his asser- tion — some sketch or drawing, or perhaps the state of his school books, and particularly of his exercise books. The evidence was sufficient, however ; his parents yielded to his desire to devote himself to drawing, and Rembrandt, when about twelve years of age, was placed under a master named Swanenberg. After being three years with Swanenberg, who was more notable as a trusted friend of the parents than as a master, he was sent to the studio of Pieter Lastman at Amsterdam ; but only stayed six months with that painter. Rembrandt was transferred to another teacher, Jacob Pinas, i66 MASTER MINDS IN ART. of Haarlam. Nor did the latter arrangement last long, for soon after, in 1623, Rembrandt went home to Leyden. This is worthy of note in a youth of sixteen. He had done with masters, done for the present with the larger city of Amsterdam ; he re- turned like one conscious of his latent power, conscious of coming events, to the quiet outskirts of Leyden, where he could see a stretch of flat landscape intercepted by the arms of a windmill, a cottage, or a cow. His native spirit was evidently too strong, too conscious of itself for a long course of conventional teaching under masters. He wanted to see for himself, and wanted to learn to portray whatever he saw precisely as he saw it. Rembrandt, in fact, had a perception and an imagination of his own ; he did not require an outsider, who could only partially enter into his spirit, to direct them. He remained at home with his parents for the long term of seven years, and had himself and Nature for his masters. His studies were the familiar characters and scenes he had grown up with from childhood — the mill, the millers, the Leyden citizens, the peasants of the outskirts, and the flat reaches of hazy landscape. Some- REMBRANDT. 167 times his own good mother, with whose homely- features he has made the world familiar, sat for a study in portraiture, and one can picture the interest of the household — the father and mother and seven children — in the result. Imagine Rembrandt's faith in his own resource at this period of silent work — work of which the world knows little beyond the fact that he passed through it. In those seven years he no doubt laid the basis of his future greatness, struggling as he would have to do through the tentative efforts of his own ideas and skill, when he would try much and destroy much, and begin again. Though very little of the general work of this part of Rembrandt's life is known, his earliest traceable picture is dated 1627 — four years after his return home. It is called "St. Paul in Prison," and in its style bears evidence of the patient toil he passed through in the days of anxious struggle with the half familiar laws of his art. In the following year he seems to have felt the confidence of developed power, for he took a pupil, Gerard Douw, a man as old as himself, who afterwards became popular as a painter of Diitch life. Probably the success of the " Bust of an Old i68 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Man," in 1630, painted in the manner which afterwards became associated with Rembrandt, brought him invitations to paint portraits from the larger city of Amsterdam. In that year he took up his abode in Amsterdam, and from 1630 to 1634 he was prolific with ideas and adroit in executing them on canvas and on plate. His hand could rarely have been idle. He evidently felt his power growing, and delighted to exercise it. When he first settled in Amsterdam he was in the state of mind which produced " St. Paul in Prison." Biblical subjects continued to impress him, for among his works for that period was " The Household of Joseph and Mary." But in due course life in busier Amsterdam had its in- fluence. He painted a number of portraits, including attempts at his own ; and, never idle, he etched the heads of beggars, old men, and street characters. To further advance his studies of the human form, and to familiarize himself with the laws of its attitudes and movements, he regularly attended lectures on Anatomy by Professor Tulp, at the Surgeons' Guild. The professor and some of the sur- geons and Rembrandt became friends ; and REMBRANDT. 169 when it was decided that the portraits of the professor and some of his admirers should be painted, Rembrandt, then a young painter with a growing reputation for portraiture, was in- vited to take the work in hand. The result was the famous " Lesson in Anatomy." It was considered, and still is considered, a re- markable achievement. Success is always in proportion to difficulties overcome. The "diffi- culties in Rembrandt's way on this occasion were most formidable, and of a kind to test the daring of any artist who would attempt to overcome them. He did not want to paint a monotonous group of faces, all conscious of the operations of the painter : he would have them interested in a lesson in anatomy. But a lesson in anatomy a subject for art ? Seven doctors listening to Professor Tulp dilating on the muscles of the arm of a corpse, and the corpse in the very front of the picture ! Surely the veil need not have been lifted from the dissecting room, the painter might have spared us this — and yet such is Rembrandt's manipulation of the portraits, such the converging of the interest by means of the rapt expression (with but one exception) of every listener's I70 MASTER MINDS IN ART. eye upon the lecturer, that the dead body, the object of the inquiry, becomes of little account even though the full glare of lights, managed in Rembrandt's own brilliant style, falls upon it. This is a marvellous result of what may be called pictorial will. By sheer force of expression in six of the seven por- traits Rembrandt draws off attention from what would otherwise first demand it; and with the seventh portrait he indicates that, after all, the mere dead object of the lecture, though so essential, though so prominent, and though so ghastly and glaring, is only intended to have a seventh part of the attention. After this great achievement in portraiture and several single portraits, Rembrandt returned to sacred subjects, such as " Moses Saved from the Water," "Jesus being carried to the Tomb." "The Good Samaritan," "The Descent from the Cross," and the " Raising of Lazarus " — all marked by the pictorial feeling of a devotional man. Rembrandt no doubt slightly reversed the attitude of some of the earlier painters of Italy, who were painters because they were devout, and took to painting to express their devotion. Rembrandt was devout because he REMBRANDT. 171 was a painter. It was the desire for subjects for his art, the craving of his imagination for conceptions to dwell upon, that took him to the Bible ; and, going to the Bible with the earnestness inseparable from great work, he partook of its spirit. How otherwise could he have told us so much of Biblical subjects on canvas? In such as "The Raising of Lazarus," " The Return of the Prodigal Son," and " The Descent from the Cross," he seems to insist not only that we shall see, but that we shall also hear. The dramatic realization of the emotion of his characters is such that they do every- thing but exclaim ; and our own emotion, inspired by Rembrandt, tells us what his characters would exclaim were they endowed with life. Rembrandt was now twenty-seven years of age, with an increasing reputation, and, if he desired, the first people of Amsterdam for his friends. But he was not a man for society for society's sake. He avoided it because of its interference with his work. " The rest which I often require after labour," he said to a friend who reproached him for his habits, " I never find in the society of those 172 MASTER MINDS IN ART. whose splendour and refinement are a restraint upon me." Conditions had to facilitate his work, or he would have very little to do with them. While in this state of mind he came under a new experience, an experience quite common- place in the aggregate, but very special indeed in each individual case — the experience of love. It was a Burgomaster's daughter who struck Rembrandt's affection with a force he had never before experienced. She was twenty- two, and beautiful ; he was twenty-seven, and not so handsome as remarkable. Was he not a rising painter, beginning to be talked about beyond his own country ? Did not his power compensate for anything wanting in appear- ance ? If he were not beautiful he could make beauty, and that, perhaps, helped to charm the young lady of twenty-two. Rem- brandt and Saskia Ulenburgh, however, married, and the marriage enabled the painter to buy a large house in one of the best quarters of Amsterdam. The union was a most felicitous one. The painter set to work with new spirit ; he took in five pupils chiefly to study his system of etching ; he bought statuary and specimens of the old masters to make his REMBRANDT. 173 house both a painter's home and a painter's workshop. There is no doubt that Rembrandt and his wife became deeply attached ; and no wonder, for she impressed herself not only on his affection, but on his imagination ; she lived through the brightest epoch of his progress, and they both witnessed his power and popu- larity increase. Possibly before meeting with Saskia Ulen- burgh Rembrandt was somewhat inclined to look at objects for their effect, but after the meeting it may be assumed that he paid atten- tion to at least one object — Saskia — for its own sake, never failing, however, when he painted her portrait, as he frequently did, to render it with a touch of that wonderful picturesque effect of his. Saskia pervades the general sombreness of the vast body of his work like the light which in various degrees of intensity illumes them all. His heart and his hand seemed ever ready to vivify the reality of the possession of such a creature by expressing it on canvas, on etching plate or drawing paper, in one instance even showing her seated on his knee. This period is also notable for his first etching of a landscape, " The Cottage with the 174 MASTER MINDS IN ART. White Palings " — a quiet bit of nature ; puzzling as to whether it is beautiful because it is simple, or simple because it is beautiful. Were there no other evidence this would be sufficient to indicate the happy contentment of Rembrandt at this time. Prosperous with his work and his pupils he continued, with increased energy, the system already begun of collecting valuable objects of art. Like Sir Walter Scott, he loved to have relics of the past about him, and — who knows ? — next to her little family and her brilliant husband they perhaps formed Saskia's delight as well. This collecting of things of artistic and antiquarian interest became a hobby. If anything arrested his attention in the street — a strange sword in a window, a dagger on a stall, a piece of armour, or drapery, or a length of glowing sash in a broker's doorway — if it struck his sense of the picturesque, if it sug- gested an idea for one of his works, no price was too high for it. He would procure it and add it to his collection. After a happy union of only eight years Rem- brandt's wife died in 1642. Weakness had been creeping upon her, during that year gaining in its REMBRANDT. 175 hold upon her constitution, taking her away from him by slow but perceptible degrees, and in June of that year she was buried in the old kirkyard at Amsterdam. The event and its foreshadowing had a marked effect upon the mood of his work. In that year, with melancholy feelings no doubt, he painted Saskia's portrait direct for the last time, and in that same year executed the etch- ings, " The Resurrection of Lazarus," " The Descent from the Cross," and two studies of " St. Jerome in Meditation." It is also worthy of note that in the year preceding his mother's death, which occurred in 1640, a similar mood prevaiiled. That year he painted her portrait no less than three times, and drew the etchings, " The Death of the Virgin," " The Youth Sur- prised by Death," and " A Doctor Feeling the Pulse of a Sick Man." In the actual year of her death, among many other works, he did " The Virgin Mourning the Death of Jesus," and " The Sick Woman." The year in which Rembrandt's wife died, however, was also the year of one of his most famous pictures, long known — an enigma under that name — as " The Nightwatch," but now more logically called "Sortie of the Company of Frans Banning 176 MASTER MIND.S IN ART. Cock." It was also the year of a series of graphic portraits. For some time this picture was a mystery. Even when it was exhibited in Manchester, in 1857, a writer of that period gave it up as an insolvable enigma, having neither Hght of night nor day, nor the light of a torch. Subsequent investigation proves that Rembrandt was commissioned to paint a group of portraits, about twenty-four in number, and this was Rembrandt's rendering of the subject — an animated, almost turbulent, scene of excited figures issuing, sword, gun, and spear in hand, from the dark doorway of a building into dazzling sunlight. As a rendering of portraits the work was not regarded as a success in Rembrandt's day, because, as in the modern photograph, every sitter wanted his full share of sun, whether the effect of the whole were pictorial or not. Now, however, the work is regarded as a picture, and the facts about the intended portraiture have only a secondary historical interest. The captain of the com- pany was so much dissatisfied with the result that he had his portrait painted by another artist, and though this new portrait showed the unmistakable captain in unmistakable com- REMBRANDT. 177 mand of his unmistakable men, the work is unknown, while Rembrandt's " Sortie " is among the first pictures of the world. After the loss of his wife, it is supposed that Rembrandt quitted the city for the country. The only evidence we have is the character of his work, and it is notable that for some time after 1642 the studies of landscape became numerous. But even the studies of landscape do not localize his movements at this period. They do not tell us where he went ; they only reveal his mood, which was evidently sombre and pathetic under the pain of his grief. This is the time of his celebrated etch- ing, " The Three Trees," with its splendid scope of sky, its suggestion of atmosphere, its flat reaches of land and water with two anglers in the foreground, and the vague towers of a city (possibly Amsterdam) in the distance. Wherever Rembrandt was at this time he was exceptionally busy. Indeed the character and quality of his work suggest a return to his studio and his pupils. Paintings and etchings were turned out with remarkable facility, and the more remarkable because of their power. Sorrow surely had fixed him more grimly at 12 178 MASTER MINDS IN ART. work than ever, and losing his Saskia he again became wedded solely to his art. He still had a large house, and five pupils carrying out his system of etching. Under Rembrandt's practical and stern guidance each pupil was isolated in a little studio of his own. There was to be no imitation, no copying, no de- pendence upon another. If the pupil had any power at all he was to find it, aided now and then by the master, by his own thought and application. This was the character of the man. He knew that ardent, solitary applica- tion had developed his own natural power, and he resolved that each pupil should stand on his own legs, and as much as possible without crutches. He still had his passionate interest in the art of other masters. Side by side with some of his own works were pictures by Van Eyck, Palma Veccheo, a head by Raphael, or Giorgione, and a study by Michael Angelo, while his corners and passages were filled with quaint conceits — statues, statuettes, busts, bronzes, armour, swords, and drapery ; and his own studio, his work-room, was a medley of casts, figures, musical instruments, rare costumes, old books, and ■ one of the very REMBRANDT. 179 finest collections of prints by the greatest of engravers of the continent — everything, in short, that would further and perfect his work. And yet with all his luxurious surroundings Rem- brandt lived a plain practical life of labour, sometimes dining, at his easel, on a red herring and a piece of cheese ! For about eleven years after the death of Saskia, Rembrandt laboured with the most remarkable results, both as to the quantity and quality of his work, and in the early part of those years his fame so spread that print- sellers were sending from all quarters, even from the South of Italy, for impressions of his plates, which he sold at high prices. A sup- posed secret in the manipulation of his etch- ings enhanced their value. It is true that he and his pupils worked at them alone in their rooms, but the only secret was the touch of his genius, and untiring industry to make every tool and every bit of essential material do their very best. As the courageous do not know what fear is, so he did not seem to know the idler's meaning of trouble. Result was his keenest sensation ; and everything that would secure his desired end was only part of the i8o MASTER MINDS IN ART. progress towards it. Hence the numerous versions of his etchings. If an arm, or a head, or a tree did not please him, it was quite suf- ficient to set him and his pupils at work again. But the work must have been full of pleasant surprises. A man could not have his dexterity of touch, his certitude of handling, without some such joy as the chemist feels when he sees the successful demonstration of even an anticipated result. This enjoyment of manipu- lation would especially apply to the hazardous process of etching. Not that painting fails to afford it, but in etching the degree is increased and intensified because to some extent every stroke is made in faith, in trust that all will turn out well ; and because every stroke adds to or takes from the desired expression, every touch helps either to make or mar. " Learn to do well what you already know, and you will find in time the unknown things." This was Rembrandt's reply to Hoogstraten, a writer of his day who troubled the painter with some inquisitive in- quiries. It is excellent as a proverb and excellent as a graphic touch in the delineation of Rembrandt. The phrase fits the man as REMBRANDT. i8i we know him by one of his own portraits, where his flowing hair, his steady direct gaze, his curved lip, and the very poise of his head on his neck, and of his cap on his head, speak of independence, dignity, and impatience about trifling. "Learn to do weH what you already know " he seems to repeat, " and you will find in time the unknown things." He had learned to do well what he already knew ; but there were certain unknown things of life, certain vicissitudes of existence that he had yet to learn, and the experience was a bitter one. Through no fault of his own the course of Rembrandt's career did not run as smoothly as it began. He could control his brush, his pencil, his graver ; he could impel them to do as he willed ; but he could not at the age of fifty control the adverse circumstances which gathered around him like the gloom in some of his own pictures. Had he been able to foresee that Holland would become impoverished by war expenditures, that there would come a visitation of depression throughout the country, that the trade of Amsterdam would suffer so severely that hundreds of houses would become emptied, that property would depreciate in i82 MASTER MINDS IN ART. value, and that works of art would become a drag upon the market — no doubt Rembrandt would have paused before he spent so liberally for the adornment of his home and the advance- ment of his own work, and paused, very likely, even in the generous giving of some of his earnings to relatives and friends not so for- tunate as himself. But those days of spending were the days of Saskia, who brought him some wealth and the days of his increasing prosperity. Far different was it ten or eleven years after her death, when the depression like a blight came over the land, and when, for companion- ship, he married again. It was a hazardous marriage, for by the will of his first wife the whole of her property, in case of marriage, was to pass to their son Titus ; but it is not our place, in the absence of considerations perhaps more important to Rembrandt than wealth, to judge. The plain fact is that Rembrandt at the age of fifty did marry again, one Hend- ricke Stoffels, and at a time when his finances would not bear the inevitable result of having most of his property transferred to his son. After that there were very distressing law proceedings, extending over about three REMBRANDT. 183 years ; the decisions were against Rembrandt, and although in that year Rembrandt's second wife died, in the following year, 1657, the trustees for his son Titus demanded the amount stipulated in the bond, seized all of Rembrandt's goods — his pictures, statues, busts, books, dra- pery, armour — everything, even to some linen that was at the wash — and sold them under the hammer at a time of woful depreciation in the value of such things. His house was also sold, and the trustees and creditors were paid. The attitude of Titus under these distressing circum- stances is not known. Historically, he is a mere existence. Neither his words nor his actions are recorded, but as he went to stay at the inn with his father during and aftef the disposal of the property, it may be generously supposed that he was an unwilling witness of the proceedings taken by the trustees under his mother's will 6n his behalf His father, however, had to provide for himself, and with what fortitude and energy he began — yea, and continued to the close ! Prosperity had inspired him; it was now the turn of adversity. Its harsh and narrowing conditions gathered around him ; he had not his mansion with its luxurious i84 MASTER MINDS IN ART. and well-appointed passages, chambers, and studio; he had not a fashionable following, eager to pay almost any price he would demand — only a room at the inn, and the craft of his hand. His good old friend, Burgomaster Six, whose portrait he had painted, and one or two others, were willing to help, and did help ; still, all the help of all the friends in the world could not make Rembrandt young, or turn back the hand of time or of fate. " Rembrandt could only have been produced by Rembrandt," said Immerzeel, in his tribute to the great painter, with special allusion to his early industry and independent study. It was true also of his latter years. Rembrandt alone could reinstate Rembrandt, and it was to that task the unfortunate man resolutely fixed him- self He took a modest house in a quiet quarter of his loved Amsterdam, with modest surroundings, and among neighbours of modest means, and there he worked in a room with three windows, on the first floor. There he painted and etched with the enthusiasm of a young man, and the mastery of an old one. There he was with his freedom of handling, his facility of expression, his vigour and breadth, REMBRANDT. 185 and his fervid imagination — a combination of powers which we know, on the incontestable evidence of great results, did not exist anywhere else over the wide range of the continent ; and yet, owing to the generad depression, and owing to the number of his own works and of his imitators, he was not quite the force in the world that he had been. Still he worked on. The long years of not only devoted, but of devotional application to the mysteries of the craft, had by this repaid him with the blessing of power. The mysteries revealed themselves, and he availed himself as one who gratefully acknowledged the revelation, though the world for the time being was a little indifferent about him and his fate. Painting after painting, and etching after etching followed each other with marvellous rapidity and power. He seemed to work incessantly. Even if he had no commis- sions or matured subjects to proceed with, he fell back upon studies of himself, painting his portrait in various styles — one at this period showing us his rich auburn hair turned gray, his face wrinkled, but his bright expression undimmed. One can picture the artist, the man conscious of his power, past the heyday i86 MASTER MINDS IN ART. of life and of fortune, battling with the adverse conditions year bj' year as he advanced towards the inevitable close. It would require all his will, all his energy and fortitude, and much of the greatness he had put into his works. Re- gret and sympathy for such a man in such a plight there must be ; but in reflecting on his work, in looking back even through memory, on the expression of resignation, in " The Death of the Virgin," in the pathos of " The Return of the Prodigal," or the solemn tragedy of " The Crucifixion," we feel that the man who could so conceive and realize these emotions would be fortified in the hour of need with a perception of the currents of life which lie deeper than appearances, and keep the pure in heart com- pany through all vicissitudes. The career of Rembrandt after this point becomes vaigue. Nine years after the sale of his goods he is supposed to have married again ; but he retires into the background of the in- scrutable past, like one of his own dimly-lighted figures. Very little beyond the fact that he worked earnestly to the close is known, and the most definite piece of history at this time is the following bald entry in the registry of deaths at the Wester Kirk : REMBRANDT. 187 " Tuesday, 8th Oct., 1669. Rembrandt Van Ryn, painter, on the Roozegraft opposite the Doolhof. Leaves two children." He left something besides two children, some- thing, however, of which the register of deaths took no account. And rightly so, for his was a fame destined to live. Though Rembrandt Van Ryn, painter on the Roozegraft opposite the Doolhof, passed away on October 8, 1669, the results of his labour, of his pathos, imagination, and beauty, are by the power of his own hand with us to-day. No less than four men during Rembrandt's lifetime claimed the honour of forming or influencing his style. No doubt his early masters, Swanenberg, Pinas, and Lastman — especially the latter — had some bearing upon his studies, but it is equally without doubt that Rembrandt would have been Rembrandt with- out them. A young painter who had the strength and the will of retiring from their in- fluence to the neutral ground of his own ordinary home for seven years to develop his own powers, was not of the kind to depend upon masters for influence or inspiration. Though bearing some traces of the remem- 1 88 MASTER MINDS IN ART. brance of Lastman's style, Rembrandt came out of his seven years of application at his home with such marked individuality that he may be fairly credited with having been his own master. He had not even the advantage of the customary visits to Venice, Florence, and Rome ; and at that time he did not possess, as he afterwards did, specimens of the finest Italian masters. He felt that he did not require outside influence, either upon his imagination or his style ; all that he then wanted was time and strength to evolve himself. Fortunately he had these. Circumstances were favourable, and he made the most of them, with the result that he stamped his individuality upon the art of Europe. Very few people do not know a Rembrandt effect. It is very much more familiarly known than the effects of Titian or Raphael ; not because it is superior, but because it is more striking. It is only the student of art who can define the subtleties of Titian, or Raphael, or Guido, but the word Rembrandt is a synonym for light and shade. Photography has now got its Rembrandt effects, and Rem- brandt's effects are seen on every hand. If a shaft of light through a shutter-hole falls on a' REMBRANDT. 189 jar, if a lantern lights an apple-stall at night, or a candle gleams in the dark corner of a room, or a policeman sheds his bull's-eye upon a street urchin under an arch, it is all Rem- brandtesque — the public have the term all so pat. But that is only half, and hardly half, of the truth. The object was more to Rembrandt than the light and shade. Light and shade were only part of the setting, as light and shade are the unavoidable part of every great artist's work. The difference is, that Rembrandt carried that inherent feature in art a point further ; he made that mode of stage-setting for his subject dramatic ; sometimes, it must be admitted, theatrical. Before he dealt with it, that feature in art remained unrecognized by the public, though artists were fully aware of it as part of their laws. It has been said, with as much striking truth as simplicity, that until light falls on an object, light is not seen. That would appear to be the keynote to Rembrandt's motive in art — the representation of light, the painting of the object for the sake of the light. But it is a false keynote. The presentation of the subject was the prime motive, and light, to Rembrandt's mind, was the best accessory igo MASTER MINDS IN ART. by which to present it with some of the halo of poetry and art. Rembrandt's Hght and shade would not have come down to us, would not have been perpetuated in the public memory, it would not have got much further than the city of Amsterdam, if it had not been accom- panied on canvas by the pathos of " The Return of the Prodigal," in which we actually feel the return of the son, and the inexpressible welcome of the father ; or by the dramatic silence of " The Descent from the Cross," where speech- less agony prevails in the gloom ; or by the affectionate portraiture of his mother and wife ; or, in short, by the thousand and one vivid ideas that live in his light and shade. It is the abun- dance of his thought, and his marvellous power of telling it that arrests us. Be it in painting, in etching, or a simple drawing, his hand seemed ever ready, ever apt, with the language of form : a vocabulary of all resources of expression. I f he saw Saskia looking at him under the shade of her broad-brimmed hat, or a striking little group in a flat landscape and under an ample arch of sky, or one of his friends with a characteristic attitude and look, or if he saw in imagination the meditative figure of Jerome in a cave under the REMBRANDT. 191 dark outline of a gnarled tree, and with a lion keeping guard, he, apparently, had only to take his pencil, brush, or graver, and, as by the magic of a preternatural will, make the paper, canvas, or plate say so. But we must not be deceived by this supposed magic of genius. We must not forget the process — the labour, the love, the earnestness, the patience, leading up to the marvellous result. Rembrandt did not acquire his facility forthwith. He had special aptitude, it is true ; but idle aptitude, however special, is useless and abortive in anything, and especially in art. Rembrandt's first work was severe, hard, precise, simply because his hand had not fully served its apprenticeship. He served an apprenticeship of fully twenty years before he acquired that freedom of expression, that cer- tainty of touch, that command of form, we marvel at in picture and etching. He acquired that power by turning his special aptitude and all circumstances to account, and by accepting no compromise between the thing done and the thing wanted, if at all attainable by work. Those portraits that we see looking out of his canvas with so much ease, with so much of what to us appears characteristic grace and 192 MASTER MINDS IN ART. dignity, were not even started without great consideration — with far too much consideration it was thought by the uneasy sitters, so long, so deliberative was he in deciding upon a characteristic portrait, with a pictorial effect, before he began work. He was constantly testing his strength, constantly drawing. If he had no friend, no subject handy, he made his own head a model, and studied from that. One day, when at the house of his friend Burgo- master Six, dinner was announced, but rather prematurely — there was no mustard on the table, and none in the house. The Burgo- master at once despatched a servant to the village ; Rembrandt declared that he could etch a landscape before the man returned, a playful wager was offered and accepted, and Rembrandt (with his plate always prepared and always with him) began work, and before the mustard arrived he finished a view from the dining- room window and called it " The Bridge of Six." Broadly speaking, Rembrandt had two styles — his early, precise and hard ; and his later, free and graphic. This, in fact, is the usual order of progress. The free and graphic style REMBRANDT. 193 rarely comes except through a servitude under the stern laws of precision. In his later style Rembrandt painted with such breadth that, like Richard Wilson a sketch of whose life appears in this volume, he objected to too close a view of his picture. Rembrandt would playfully tell any one who peered too narrowly into his work that the smell of paint was unwholesome, and ought not to be inhaled. Towards the middle of his career he could use this broad treatment with great mastery, knowing as by an intuitive perception of perspective what the distant effect of a given form or a given mass of paint would be. In etching, by much the same law, he attained another power — that of graphic gene- ralizing. An effect which other engravers would try to express by many lines he would sum- marize by a few. He gave the main idea ' boldly, and went direct to the vital feature of the subject with the confidence of mastery. His contemporaries thought his process was very intricate ; but, always granting, of course, Rem- brandt's eye and hand as part of the process, it was very simple. One man, the Chevalier de Claussin, it is said, devoted thirty years to the study of Rembrandt's process of etching, 13 194 MASTER MINDS IN ART. and did not master it in the end ; first, because he had not the native power of Rembrandt, and next, because he attributed to the master a far more elaborate process than the master em- ployed. In justice to Rembrandt's pupils, Gerard Douw, Ferdinand Bol, Givert Flink, and Eckhout, it ought to be stated that the searches and comparative criticism of Francis Seymour Haden (whose monograph on Rem- brandt is an effective and convincing study) tend to prove that while, in regard to some of the etchings, credit must be given to Rembrandt for the main feature of certain works, credit must also be given to some of his pupils for the execution of minor features under his super- vision. Mr. Haden also points out, with evidence in support, that Rembrandt did not hesitate to adapt from Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Durer, or Titian, if, in his vast collec- tion of prints, he saw a suggestive idea which helped to express a general conception of his own. Nevertheless, Rembrandt was a great master. If he borrowed, he enhanced, and that power of enhancing must ever largely exonerate the borrower in art. VELAZQUEZ. VELAZQUEZ. VELAZQUEZ. PEGO RODRIQUEZ DE SILVA Y VELAZQUEZ, or Diego Velaz- quez de Silva, was born at Seville 1599, and baptized i6th June in the parish church of San Pedro. His father was descended from a noted Portuguese family, and his mother, Geronmia Velazquez (whose name the artist took), was born of a noble family of Seville. Velazquez's father was a lawyer, and both parents were watchful over the education of their son Diego, "feeding him," as one of his Spanish biographies term it, " on the milk of the fear of God." igS MASTER MINDS IN ART. He had the best scholastic education avail- able at Seville, and showed power in language and philosophy ; but, owing to his constant habit of drawing characters and episodes on the blank spaces of his school books, and especially his exercise books, he was allowed to follow the unquestionable bent of his mind. In due course he was apprenticed to Francisco Herrera the elder, the painter who first ventured to set him- self free from the conventional and strictly religious style of art which then prevailed in Spain — forming, in fact, the first step towards the boldness of the school of Seville. Instead of working with needle-point delicacy, Herrera even sketched with burnt sticks, and put on his colour with brushes of great length and fulness, so that the breadth and vigour of his style soon made him notable. Nor was he vigorous in his style only. He was severe with the new pupils who crowded upon him, frequently thrash- ing them into a comprehension of his precepts. Velazquez fully appreciated his style, but ob- jected to the severe physical process of the tuition, and, after absorbing as much of the style as he thought he would need, he removed to the studio of Francisco Pacheco. It was like VELAZQUEZ. 199 removing from a stock exchange babel to the quiet of a chapel, the contrast was so great ; but it was marked also in another respect. The difference in the style of the two masters was so great — the first, though blustering and harsh, being a painter with spirit, with some of the realism of actual things ; the other was a learned but fastidious artist in the old st)^le. Velazquez, between the apparently conflicting tendencies of the two, seems to have decided that nature was the most beneficial of all teachers, and he set himself the rigid rule of not sketching or colouring anything, unless he had the object there and then before him. He even set up as a small master on his own accounts engaging a peasant youth as a model, who was to laugh or cry or posturize according to the artistic whim of Velazquez. Velazquez made study after study of the peasant youth, now in colour, now in charcoal, now in chalk, until, as it is some- times said of actors, he made the part of the peasant his own, drawing him with unfailing certainty whenever he desired. This determined mastery of one subject, doing one thing, and doing it well, was the basis of much of his power, namely, the power of rendering studies 200 MASTER MINDS IN ART. of heads, for which he became notable.' It was, indeed, said reproachfully in his own time that he could paint nothing but heads ; to which Philip IV. of Spain used to reply that that reproach, surely, was a compliment, since he knew no artist who could paint a head tho- roughly well. Of what avail are excellent draperies, realistic swords, natural-looking limbs and hands, and dignified bodies, if the head, the central indication of the attributes of the whole, gives no adequate expression ? In the same way that Velazquez fixed him- self to study expression, he schooled himself to master colour. He relied neither upon masters nor himself. He repeated the hint of studying from nature, from things as they actually existed. For this study of colour he was content to go to very commonplace models. It did not matter to him whether it were an earthen pot or a metal pan, a plate of copper or a dish of gold, a bird or a fish ; he painted anything suggestive of depth or subtlety of tone, anything that would teach him to catch the portrait of colour in the same way he had learned to catch the portrait of the peasant youth. To this humble study of still-life subjects is due much of the ease VELAZQUEZ. 2or and tone he afterwards attained. But he had not yet finished studying. In fact he was only half-way across the threshold. The peasant youth and the earthen pot and the metal pan were preparatory to another course of sincere application in what may be termed the higher rudiments of his art — the study of his fellow- men as he saw them with infinite variety of expression, form, and colour in the picturesque streets and alleys of Andalusia. Nothing in this direction, as in the previous direction of his studies, was too commonplace for his attention, providing it suggested itself as paint- able, providing it justified itself on the canvas. It was about this period, 1620, that the noted work of Velazquez, " The Water - carrier of Seville," was painted. The picture was after- wards stolen by King Joseph Boneparte when he fled from the palace of Madrid ; but at the rout of Vittoria it was captured in his carriage, with a quantity of Bourbon plate and jewels, and afterwards became one of the Wellington trophies at Apsley House, having been presented to the Duke of Wellington by King Ferdinand VII. in gratitude for being placed on the throne of his forefathers. 202 MASTER MINDS IN ART. There was yet another process of absorption to take place with Velazquez — a refining pro- cess, the influence of another style of art. This came about through the introduction into Seville of works by foreign artists, and by Spanish artists who had already coipie under ■the same foreign influence. It was, in fact, a slight return to the feeling when subjects of religion pervaded the whole of the art of Spain, and under this feeling — new to Velazquez, but old to Spain — he painted the "Adoration of the Shepherds." It is now in the National Gallery, London, having been bought from King Louis Philippe's collection in 1853 for At this time Velazquez was also impressed by the colour of Luis Tristan, a Spanish painter, who practised at Toledo. Tristan blended with the sober and sometimes sombre tones of the Castille school the more glowing effects of Venice, and to this Tristan of Toledo, Velazquez acknowledged his indebtedness for the suggestion of a brighter array of tints for some of his work. Though Velazquez was pursuing these independent courses of study, he was still living under the roof of Francisco VELAZQUEZ. 203 Pacheco, the master of the school of precision in art — an independence of study and a mode of teaching that seem to have been made per- fectly reconcilable by the presence of Pacheco's ■daughter, Dona Juana. Love harmonized divergent principles, and at the end of five years Velazquez became Pacheco's son-in-law. The master himself records the fact. " At the «nd of five years of education and teaching," he says, " I married him to my daughter, moved thereto by his virtue, honour, and ex- cellent qualities, and the hopefulness of his great natural genius." According to this the master was not so biased in his own views of art as to be stubborn towards the original qualities of Velazquez — a fact that was fortunate in more respects than the important one of obtaining a wife. Pacheco was cultured, he had an excellent library, and it was in his library, and possibly under his direction, that Velazquez became acquainted with the subject of anatomy from Albert Durer and Vesalius, with physiognomy and perspective from Gio- -vanni Battista Porta and Daniel Barbaro, with architecture from Vitruvius and Vignolia, and with the art and artists of Italy through the 204 MASTER MINDS IN ART. works of Federigo and Albert! Romano. Primed by experience both of life and art,. Velazquez, who was only twenty-three at this time, desired to dip further into the depths of both. The school of Castille, with its warmth and brilliancy of effect, took hold of his imagi- nation. In addition he wished to see some of the original Italian works which had inspired that school with the feeling for a greater warmth and brilliancy of tone than native influences had suggested. He had a longing^ to go to the royal galleries of art at Madrid, where specimens of both schools could be studied ; and, in fact, to try his prospects in the capital as a painter. In April, 1622, therefore, accompanied by a servant, he made what was to be a disappoint- ing, but eventful journey to Madrid — the centre of life and art in Spain, "the noble theatre of the greatest talents in the world," says the patriotic Spaniard, Palomino. Full of hopes and dreams and prospects, and armed with introductions to some of his father-in-law's friends, Velazquez entered Madrid. Madrid, notwithstanding, failed to- turn out in proud and enthusiastic welcome VELAZQUEZ. 205 of the new arrival. Beyond the circle of Pacheco's friends, indeed, the city did not seem aware that a new power, or rather a new possibility, in art had arrived. The people of the capital of Spain pursued their usual courses, the favourite painters remained the favourites, the patrons remained unmoved, and Velazquez was practically stranded in Madrid, with no royal commissions, with no introduction at Court (though one was tried by the usher of the curtain to Philip IV.), and with only free and open admission to the royal galleries, — as if regarded not as a painter, but as a student. It was a student that he became. He turned the hard facts of the situation to account. Instead of bewailing the harshness of fate, and weeping over broken pride and shattered hopes, Velazquez set himself to study at the royal galleries the masters of the art he so much desired to excel in. He studied for several months, but made no professional head- way. The Court was still closed against him, the king would not sit to the stranger for his portrait; but failing to procure a king for a subject, Velazquez, at the request of Pacheco, painted the portrait of a poet, Gongora, the 2o6 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Pindar of Andalusia, as he has been called. With this portrait young Velazquez returned tO' Seville, deeply disappointed, and no doubt dis- appointing his young wife and aged master with the general result of the adventure. The visit to Madrid, however, was not without result in the very direction that the master and pupil had desired. Don Juan Fonseca, a Sevillian, but a well-known amateur and patron of art in Madrid, had not forgotten the student's visit to that capital, and within a few months' time after the return of Velazquez^ to Seville he was actually commanded to attend the Court. This was mainly through the in- fluence of Fonseca, who had impressed Olivares, art patron, diplomatist, and prime minister tO' Philip IV., with the power then latent irt Velazquez — an obligation towards Olivares which Velazquez never forgot, not even when the minister many years after was expelled in disgrace from the service of the king. The visit to Madrid now ceased to be an unsuccess- ful adventure, and became instead the precursor of a great future. Summoned to the Court in that way by a minister of the Crown, Velazquez: was jubilant ; and naturally enough the good VELAZQUEZ. 207 old master Pacheco resolved to accompany his proiegd, his loved pupil, and the husband of his daughter, to Madrid. Attended by a slave, Jaun Pareja, a Mulatto youth (who, through emulating his master, became a skilful painter), the two artists set out in March, 1623, Velaz- quez then being only twenty-four years of age. They were accommodated in their good friend Fonseca's house, where Velazquez painted Fon- seca's portrait both as a test and an introduction to the king. The very same evening that the portrait was finished it was conveyed to the royal palace by a son of the Count of Pena- randa, then chamberlain to the cardinal-infant. The work was almost immediately seen by Philip IV., his prince, Don Carlos, and many of the courtiers, and, as by magic, Velazquez ceased to be the student in the royal galleries, and became the painter in the inner circle of the Court, to the king himself. The mere admission into this inner circle was a mark of the highest distinction, for Philip IV. wrote and painted for his own en- tertainment, surrounded himself with works of art by renowned Italian and Spanish masters, and encouraged his courtiers in the purchase of 2o8 MASTER MINDS IN ART. pictures, while the courtiers often presented him with famous works as a means of securing his favour. The chapels and palaces of Madrid became crowded with objects of art-paintings by Raphael, Titian, and Coreggio, sculpture in marble and bronze, sketches by Michael Angelo, and gold and silver plate of the most luxurious type. Even Fonseca, the usher of the curtain to the king, was a skilled painter, as were also ■other courtiers, so that Velazquez was put to the severest possible trial. The trial resulted in immediate success, the young king took to the young painter, and the work of Velazquez so delighted him that a royal order was issued to the official who managed the artistic appoint- ments of the Court as follows : — " I have in- formed Diego Velazquez that you receive him into my service to occupy himself in his pro- fession as I shall hereafter cornmand ; and I have appointed him a moathly salary of twenty -ducats, payable at the office of works for the royal palaces, the Casa del Campo and the Pardo. You will prepare the necessary com- mission according to the form observed with other persons of his profession. Given at Madrid on the 6th of April, 1623." VELAZQUEZ. 209 Thus formally installed, Velazquez and his master, Pacheco, settled in Madrid. The first royal commission the painter received was to execute a portrait of the cardinal-infant, Don Fernando ; and the king, impatient for the new- artist to try his skill with the royal countenance, soon commanded Velazquez to set a canvas apart for that purpose. Velazquez thus had two portraits on hand, but was destined to be interrupted in the execution of both, for in the same month that the artist took up his abode in Madrid, young Prince Charles of Wales journeyed to the Court of Spain to woo if possible (which was not) the hand of the young daughter of Philip IV. Art was set aside. The Court was given over to festivities. Bull-fights, hunting, dramatic performances, balls, and religious ceremonies prevailed for several months. During the visit of Prince Charles of Wales to Madrid, however, Velazquez, it is stated by Pacheco began but never finished a portrait of the prince, with which the prince was so well pleased that the artist was presented with a hundred crowns. The portrait of Philip IV. was finished soon after the departure, without a bride, of Prince Charles. The king was der 14 210 MASTER MINDS IN ART. picted in armour — somewhat falsely, for he was no warrior — and seated on a spirited Andalusian charger — ^very aptly so, for he was said to be the best horseman in Spain — and the picture was an extraordinary success. Public honours were accorded the new painter. By royal command the picture was exhibited on a day of festival in front of the Church of San Felipe el Real in the principal thoroughfare of Madrid. Citizens were enthusiastic, and artists were envious. The king, usually very reserved and immovable, expressed himself as being charmed with the performance ; and his prime minister, Olivares, declared that the portrait of the king, though attempted by others, had never until then really been painted. Philip paid Velazquez 300 ducats for the work, and appointed him painter-in-ordinary to the king on the 31st of October, 1623. He was to be paid his salary as previously fixed, and, in addition, was to receive payment for his works. Moreover, Velazquez was requested to transfer his family from Seville to Madrid, and a further pension of 300 ducats was granted him. In the year 1 62 6 the painter, then twenty-seven, was allowed to have apartments in the Treasury VELAZQUEZ. 21 r at the expense of the State, and there Velazquez for some time was solely devoted to painting- the portraits of the royal family. A second, and perhaps the most notable, equestrian por- trait of the king was executed about this period, and is now one of the glories of the royal gallery of Madrid. This was followed by a work that must have been a very welcome change to the artist, a change from the luxu- rious strictness of the Court to the freedom of the imagination — a work representing, some- what satirically, it would appear, the orgies of Bacchus. " For force of character and strength of colouring this picture has never been excelled," writes Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell, to whom we are mainly indebted for the facts of this sketch, " and its humour entitles Velazquez to the name of the Hogarth of Andalusia." Very soon after this the royal painter was put to a severe test by the king. His majesty ordered that Velazquez should enter the lists with three artists, Vinceucio Carducho, Angelo Nardi, and Eugenio Caxes, who were older than himself, and of Italian extraction. The subject was the expulsion by Philip HI. of the heretical Moriscos from the Spanish provinces ; 212 MASTER MINDS IN ART. and the prize was to be the wand of usher of the royal chamber.. Velazquez carried away the prize, became usher of the royal chamber, and his picture, as a mark of further honour, was hung in the great hall of the Alcazar. The Alcazar was burned in 1735, and as no trace of the picture has since been found, it is supposed to have been entirely destroyed. Honours were thrust upon the painter. He was not only usher, but elevated to the rank of gentleman of the king's chamber ; and his father, a lawyer, had bestowed upon him three legal appoint- ments, under the government, at Seville. In 1628 Peter Paul Rubens, painter and envoy, visited Madrid on a diplomatic mission from Isabella, governess of the Low Countries. Velazquez and he became friends, and visited the principal churches, palaces, and galleries together. The conversation of Rubens revived in Velazquez the desire to see more of the work of the Italian masters — in fact the desire to visit Italy. The king, at first reluctant to part with him, finally consented, allowed him leave of absence for two years without the loss of his usual salary, and presented him with 600 ducats and letters of introduction to the first VELAZQUEZ. 213 people in the Italian cities. It was on August the loth, 1629, Velazquez then being thirty- years of age, that he sailed from Barcelona. Arriving first at Venice, he was received and entertained by the Spanish ambassador. It proved no mere idle visit. Velazquez began to copy some of the finest works of the Venetian school, and presented his master, Philip IV., with a copy of Tintoretto's " Last Supper." He proceeded to Ferrara, Bologna, and Rome, not as in the case of his first visit to Madrid, an adventurous stranger, but as a man of ad- mitted power, with every door and gate open to him, even the door of the Vatican, where he was offered a suite of apartments — a compliment of which he did not avail himself. He lived instead in the Villa Medici, until an attack of fever compelled him to seek quarters in the city. As at Venice, so at Rome, the sight of the grand achievements in painting set his own brush going in emulation. He studied and copied portions of Michael Angelo's work in the Sistine Chapel, and of Raphael's work in the Vatican galleries ; but while he did this his own peculiar strength — indeed, in the light of the Italian ideal, his own peculiar weakness — 214 MASTER MINDS IN ART. for fidelity to the real, remained his own. During his two years' sojourn in Rome he painted three original works — a portrait of him- self for Pacheco, " The Forge of Vulcan," and " Joseph's Coat." Though these form three of his most notable pictures, in the latter two, owing to his early predilection for realistic treatment without the poetic faculty of selecting the fine from the gross, he gained effect at the cost of refinement. Thus, in the presence of the Italian masters in Rome, and even in the presence of the refined work of Raphael, he retained his bias for prosaic realism. His con- ceptions were by this time expanded, but poetic treatment did not accompany throughout, a poetical idea. In 1630 Velazquez travelled as far south as Naples, and there painted the portrait of the Infanta Maria — the object, years before, of the visit of Prince Charles of Wales to Madrid, but who had now become the affianced of the King of Hungary. In 1631 the painter returned to Madrid. The king sought his advice for the design of an equestrian statue of himself for the Buenretio Gardens, and, for purposes both of design and portraiture, an VELAZQUEZ. 215 equestrian portrait of Philip by Velazquez was sent to Petrus Tacca, the Florentine sculptor, who was to undertake the work, and which eventually proved one of the finest statues of the period. The statue now stands in the square in the front of the palace of Philip V., and on the base two bas-reliefs represent Philip IV. presenting Velazquez with a medal, and an allegory of the king's patronage of art. For some time, too long it may be said, the brush of Velazquez was devoted to the pomps and vanities of King Philip and his Court — that is, to portraits of the king, queen, and cour- tiers ; but in 1639 the Court painter ventured a deeper and a higher subject, and the result was one of the noblest from his hand — " The Crucifixion." It was painted for the nunnery of San Placido, Madrid, but that place being attacked by the French, the picture was taken to Paris, offered for sale, and bought by the Duke of San Fernando, and presented to the royal gallery of Spain. Velazquez was soon brought to portraiture again. The admiral of the fleet had to be portrayed, and the painter did this with such realistic effect, with such fidelity to the life, that the king is said to have actually 2i6 MASTER MINDS IN ART. mistaken the portrait for the admiral himself. " Still here ! " said the king, as if speaking to the admiral, who had really set sail — "Still here ! Having received orders, why are you not gone ? " The king discovered his mistake, and, turning to Velazquez, he said, " I assure you I was taken in." Velazquez was of a generous and amiable dis- position. Jealousy never seemed to blot the fair course of his unusual fortune^, and when Murillo, poor and friendless, reached Madrid from Seville fevered with a desire to see Rome, Velazquez introduced him to Philip for favour. The king was so pleased that opportunities were given the young artist to study in the royal galleries, of which Murillo availed himself for about three years, returning to Seville instead of going forward to Rome. After moving about with Philip in expeditions to Aragon, in 1648 Velazquez, accompanied by his faithful servant Pareja, was sent by the king to Italy to collect works of art for the Spanish galleries, with no limit as to subject or price. Velazquez was to buy anything he thought worth buying. He visited Genoa, Milan, Padua, Venice, Bologna, Modena, Parma, VELAZQUEZ. 217 Florence, Rome, and Naples. At Rome he was elected in 1650 a member of the Aca- demy of St. Luke, and he painted a portrait of Innocent X., who presented the artist with a gold chain and medal. The portrait must have been a vivid one, for the hasty sight of it through an open door caused one of the chamberlains to caution some other attendants on the Pope to talk in whispers, as his holiness was in the next room. Velazquez repeated this portrait several times, and a fine copy of it is in Apsley House, London. In 1 651, with a great number of pictures and three hundred pieces of statuary, the king's commissioner in art left Rome for Spain, and once more his royal master conferred honours upon him, electing him quartermaster- general of the king's household, a post with a salary of 3,000 ducats. The vast collections of pictures and marbles which Velazquez had bought wanted arranging and fixing and cata- loguing. Naturally this task also fell to him, and owing to the continuous pressure of this new duty, and the duties of the royal household, Velazquez had very little time for painting. He, indeed, was such a favourite that the king would sit in conversation with him for hours. 2i8 MASTER MINDS IN ART. In 1656 the artist was again allowed to seriously take the brush in hand, to execute what is regarded by some as the painter's masterpiece, as much because of the difficulties encountered as for the general result. It is known as " The Maids of Honour," contain- ing a portrait of the young Infanta Maria Margarita, portraits of the dwarfed creatures the king and queen prided themselves in having about them, reflections of the king and queen in a mirror, the figures of courtiers passing out of the room or gazing at the group, an over-fed petted dog in the foreground, and a significant portrait of Velazquez himself. He is wearing the key of his exacting office, he is decorated with the red cross of Santiago, but he stands, palette and brush in hand, at a vast canvas visible at the side — stands there with a dignified and dis- dainful look at the singular group in the fore- ground. So singular and forced is the whole situation that the picture was surely intended as a great satire on his own baffled position as Court painter. Too much favoured with the royal presence in mirrors and out of them, accommodated with luxurious appointments, and paid liberal salaries, Velazquez found himself, at VELAZQUEZ. 219 fifty-seven years of age, still painting Court portraits — portraits of the king and queen, por- traits of their children, of the maids of honour, of dwarfs, and of dogs, instead of devoting himself to some great work which the large canvas to the left of this picture may be sup- posed to represent. The king, however, did not regard the picture as a satire. He stood before it ad- miringly, but said there was one thing yet wanting to complete it, and upon the painter inquiring what that might be, his majesty took a brush and painted on the breast of the figure of Velazquez in the picture the insignia of knighthood, and three years later, when the necessary documents had been prepared, Velaz- quez was formally invested with the order. The career of Velazquez had unfortunately become somewhat overshadowed and arrested in its free artistic progress by the excessive demands and patronage of the king. He was not only Court painter, Court companion, but Court upholsterer as well. On the occasion of the alliance between France and Spain, when the two Courts met in the summer of 1660 on the border of the two countries to celebrate the 220 MASTER MINDS IN ART. marriage of Louis XIV. of France, with the Infanta Maria Teresa of Spain, Velazquez had the whole of the Spanish decorations to see to. He had also to arrange for the king's accommo- , dation along the route, and to control much of the entertainment on the scene of festivity, the Isle of Pheasants, in the river Bidosoa. It is, therefore, to be regretted that a man of such brilliant parts permitted himself to be so utilized and so blocked in his opportunities for following with freedom his artistic impulses by a patron who abused his position. Here, it must be admitted, is cause for dissatisfaction in the close of the great painter's career. It began earnestly and well, it progressed well, as it deserved to do, but it became clogged and enervated by the undue demands of a vain and inconsiderate monarch. Soon after the return of Velazquez from the festivities on the Isle of Pheasants he fell ill with a fever. The king, the Court doctors, the patri- arch of the Indies as spiritual adviser, and the painter's wife attended his bedside ; but without avail,. Velazquez died on the 6th of August, 1660, at the age of sixty-one. He was buried in the parish church of San Juan— a church VELAZQUEZ. 221 destroyed by the French in 18 10. The wife of Velazquez died eight days after her husband, and Was interred by his side in the Church of San Juan. Though Velazquez, towards the close of his life, became the victim of Philip IV., and surrendered his possibilities to the whims of the Court, we must not forget or ignore the great service that his earnestness, his perseverance, his independence of conception and treatment performed, not only to the art of Spain, but to the art of Europe, at a time when the power of the Venetian school was on the wane. He instituted a broader selection of subjects, a more graphic mode of treatment, and a finer harmony of colour than then prevailed in Spain, and though Velazquez did not go far into the region of the ideal in art, though he kept close to the realities, he painted the realities as if a generous and noble spirit were singling them out of the general mass for the sympathy of the world. RICHARD WILSON. RICHARD WILSON. 1 1 nt^li^^^ P 1 1 K RICHARD WILSON. 3HE remains of Richard Wilson, Esquire, Member of the Royal Academy of Artists." Such is part of the inscription on a tomb in the graveyard at the old church, Mold, North Wales, The inscription is large and boldly cut ; the tomb is formidable, and in a conspicuous place near the north entrance to the church — the honours indeed lie so thickly upon "Richard Wilson, Esquire," in the grave, that one recalls with irony the poor and plain " Dick Wilson," as Garrick called him, who to live had to sell his drawings for a few shillings and his paint- ings for a few pounds. The inscription is 226 MASTER MINDS IN ART. perfectly correct — in the letter ; but it is hollow in spirit. Wilson was indeed a member of the Royal Academy of Artists ; nevertheless, he was allowed to starve. He was also an Esquire, but only for the last two years of a life of nearly seventy. The story of his life is the old story of the struggle of an individuality, of genius. Wilson paid the penalty every new man has to pay — the penalty of teaching the old, and teaching them against their will. He had something new to do for British art in the direction of landscape painting, and the story of how he did it will be found in the plain facts of his remarkable life. Wilson was Welsh, beginning his life in South Wales in 1713, and ending it in North Wales in 1782. He was born at .Pinegras, in Montgomeryshire, the third of six sons, • his father at the time being rector of the place. His mother was one of the Wynnes, of Lees- \vold. Soon after the birth of Richard, the rector removed to a living at Mold, Flintshire, and there the boy first showed the bent of his nature. When quite a child he drew figures on walls with pieces of burnt stick, and he after- wards displayed such a faculty for drawing that RICHARD WILSON. 227 Sir George Wynne, a relative on his mother's side, was induced to place young Wilson in the studio of Thomas Wright, a portrait painter then living in Covent Garden. It was a long apprenticeship ; no doubt chiefly served in pre- paring backgrounds and surfaces for Wright's portraits. Of Wilson's early studies in por- traiture proper — presuming he had any — there is no trace. The first authenticated effort occurred as late as in his thirty-sixth year, and then through the good offices of his only sister, who happened to be an attendant on Lady Sandown, a lady of the bed-chatnber of Queen Caroline. The sister spoke to Lady Sandown, Lady Sandown to. the Queen, and the Queen to the Prince of Wales and his brother, the Duke of York, whose portraits were duly painted by Wilson for Dr. Hayter, then Bishop of Norwich and tutor to the two princes. Wilson must have still considered himself in his apprenticeship, for in the following year, 1 749, after six years' stay with Wright, he drew a sum of money he had managed to save and went to Italy to study the old masters. It was genius going on a voyage of discovery — really in search of itself It was revealed to him at 228 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Venice. Not through the great masters, but through a studio window. He had called one day to see Zuccarelli, the popular Venetian landscape painter. Zuccarelli was out, and and Wilson, while waiting, sketched in oil a view from one of the windows. When Zuc- carelli returned he was so impressed with the sketch that he strongly advised Wilson to abandon portraiture and take to landscape. Wilson did. That was how and when Wilson's genius disclosed and discovered itself. Though he had spent six years with Wright, portrait painting, trying to find his true bent, it was there, in Venice, in one day, that he found the real beginning of a life's important work. The six years of portrait painting, or even the filling-in of backgrounds, had not been labour in vain — no labour in art can be labour in vain — but this simple intermediate effort in landscape was the budding of the power by which he was to enrich British art and be remembered. This was the beginning of work which made Joseph Vernet, the French painter, exclaim to some Englishmen at Rome, " Don't talk of my land- scapes when you have such a clever fellow in your countryman Wilson." RICHARD WILSON. 229 While in Italy it is supposed that Wilson painted a portrait of the then Marquess of Rockingham, which got into the possession of Lord Fitzwilliam ; but landscape became his special study, a study he followed under con- ditions so trying that only a man with that attribute of genius, infinite patience under suf- fering, could have endured what he endured, to do what he had set himself to do. To appreciate what he accomplished for British landscape painting it is necessary to bear in mind the state of that branch of art in his day. Landscape, as landscape only, was then without an interpreter. The people had not eyes to see — at least, to see as Wilson saw it. What they understood was something nearer themselves. Hogarth and his cartoons were the rage ; historical painters thrived, and fashionable portraiture led to popularity. Land- scape was only an accessory, and even then chiefly as an indication that the proprietor of the portrait was also the proprietor of a park. Here, amid these elements, was Wilson, who perceived landscape as landscape, who saw in it something special to portray, and he set his life to the task of interpreting nature according 230 MASTER MINDS IN ART. to his own pictorial ideal. He was practically alone in the work. He was ten years earlier than Sir Joshua, fourteen earlier than Gains- borough, and sixty-three earlier than Constable, He, in fact, set foot upon the narrow track leading to that great high road which Turner opened up and widened to such wonderful breadth. In 1755, after remaining in Italy six years, he returned to England imbued with his own perception of landscape and with an additional perception of colour acquired amid the warm tones of the South. Think of him, ardent with purpose and hope. Picture his arrival in London — the London of Dr. Johnson, Gold- smith, and Garrick — full of success already realized in a foreign land, and of his new aspira- tions in his own country. At Venice he had been warmly encouraged by Zuccarelli ; at Rome, the French landscape painter, Vernet, had taken him by the hand and proffered an exchange of works ; and Mengs painted his portrait in exchange for a landscape — in fact, such was Wilson's reputation during his stay in Italy that, in addition to these spontaneous compliments from masters in the art, he had the RICHARD WILSON. 231 compliment of having a number of pupils studying his style. But what of the Wilson in London ? On his arrival, and when the character of his work became known, a so-called Committee of Taste was formed ; a committee of artists and others, who, forsooth, assumed the responsibility of guiding public opinion. They sat like a judge and jury on Wilson's powers. They sat several times, in fact, and ultimately gave their verdict and pronounced sentence in the following reso- lution : — "That the manner of Mr. Wilson is not suited to English taste, and that if he hopes for patronage he must change it for the lighter style of Zuccarelli." One day, while Wilson was painting, this resolution was conveyed to him by one of the members of the committee of very questionable taste. The painter, ignoring the insult, continued his work for a few minutes, and then, more by manner than by words, indicated in what contempt he held the committee's decree. Warm with the warmth of the South, such was his cold reception in England. His manner was " not suited to English taste," and " if he hoped for patronage he must change it." This 232 MASTER MINDS IN ART. proved terribly true. English taste turned its back on him. He was neglected. by painters and patrons, he was ridiculed and lampooned — though, as a French critic admits, " in France Wilson would have been covered with honour and glory." He hopefully continued to paint in his own style ; but without encouragement. Hearty recognition of his power was withheld, and his pictures remained on his hands. He became dependent upon brokers and dealers ; and would hawk his latest work, willing to part with . it for whatever it would bring. The brokers and dealers became tired of him. Naturally. He was not popular or profitable ; hardly even marketable —why trouble about him ! "Look ye, Dick," said one dealer, show- ing him a pile of landscapes against an attic wall — " Look ye, Dick, you know I wish to oblige .you; but see, there's the stock I've paid you for these three years." The bulk of three years' work^ — and such superb work, as we have since learned to see it — leaning in piles along a dealer's attic wall ! With such success in Italy why did not Wilson return ? Why suffer the privations and indignity of failure at home ? Why persist RICHARD WILSON. 233 in a course incurring a condition very like beggafy ? Why, indeed ? Simply because he was Richard Wilson. He was not of a sur- rendering nature. The truth he had to reveal was at" stake. Conscious of the worth of his work, of its originality, he was determined to stand by it. He would be faithful to his impulses, give them their utmost chance to speak to others as they spoke to him, and bear for them what others have borne for their deepest convictions. It has been said that he did somewhat modify his style in the direction of popular taste. . That may be so, and if so, it would come about sincerely, and in keeping with his own feeling of development. Even if the modification were a bid for patronage, it was not successful. He could barely live. He had to sell his pictures, when he did sell, for the paltriest sums — six and seven guineas ; sometimes, to get bread, he parted with draw- ings for half-a-crown each ; and if he received a commission he had to have money advanced to him to buy canvas and colotars to begin. Repetition 'is a complaint usually associated with Wilson's work, and with some justification ; biit. we have to remember the chief cause. 234 MASTER MINDS IN ART. His precarious circumstances made him cautious. Though he was firm enough to stand to his own principles, necessity made him study his best chances in his own style. If he were fortunate enough to sell a work, rather than risk a new subject he repeated the old one, with some slight variation. If the replica sold, a further variation was produced. In this way as many as six renderings of the one theme have been painted, Wilson proudly calling a subject that sold well " a good breeder." When the dealers and brokers came to ignore him he induced a shoemaker in Long Acre to allow him to exhibit his latest work in a spare window, and thus the people of those days saw the latest "Wilson" — good enough for the National Gallery now — in one window, and boots and shoes in the other. Like Goldsmith in his distresses, Wilson moved from one quarter of London to another, now lodging in the Piazza, Covent Garden, then at Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, now at Great Queen Street, then at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and in different parts of Marylebone. He even lamented that he had ever been fixed to the pursuit of an art which fed the sensibility RICHARD WILSON. 235 of the mind and provided such poor fare for the body. To test him the more, his process of work was meditative and slow. He could not dash off a picture without satisfying his own high sense of quality. Though it were a repetition, it was done as if that, and that only, had to stand as his one special version of the subject. Whether he spoke or performed, it was with a vehement sincerity. Even a grand waterfall could make him shout, " Well done, water, by God ! " Under all the galling circumstances of his life in London that vehement sincerity of his hardened, and gave a gruffness to his manner. This gruffness coming from a person- ality rather in keeping with it, seemed harsher than it actually was. There was far more roughness on the surface than in the heart ; but that wanted finding out. Indeed, he was sin- gularly unfortunate. In the enumeration of his adverse circumstances Wilson himself must be included, for his own personality, his very features, alas, were against him. It is painful to remember what James Northcote, R.A., records of him, and yet, for a more than super- ficial insight into the trials of the man this has to be done. Northcote says : " Wilson's mind 236 MASTER MINDS IN ART. was as refined and intelligent as his person and manners were coarse and repulsive ; and dis- cernmerit and familiarity with him were neces- safy to discover the unpolished jewel beneath its ferruginous coat." This ferruginous coat, added to his alleged offences in art, aggravated the professional rebuffs. He and Sir Joshua Reynolds could not agree. It is not stated why, but Edwards, in his Anecdotes of Painters, says, " Sir Joshua and Wilson were often observed to treat each other if not with rudeness, at least with acri- mony ; " and an anecdote confirms the state- ment, and perhaps hints a little of the cause of the ill-feeling. When Gainsborough went up to London, Sir Joshua remarked to Wilson, with questionable good-will,' " The first land- scape painter in England has come to town ;" whereupon Wilson, with still more point, retorted, "You mean the h^st portrait painter. Sir Joshua" — an excellent rebuff of a need- less and ungenerous taunt. Nor did Sir Joshua forget to look down upon Wilson from the pedestal of the Presidency of the Royal Academy, criticising the introduction of gods and goddesses by Wilson into his landscapes. RICHARD WILSON. 237 " The first idea that presents itself," said the president in one of his discourses, "is that of wonder, in seeing a figure in so uncommon a situation as that in which the Apollo is placed ; for the clouds on which he kneels have not the appearance of being able to sup- port him." Sir Joshua was nothing if not practical. He would not hold up Apollo on his imagination : he wanted a substantial scaffold of paint. Probably most men of the world in Wilson's unfortunate position would have halted, con- formed to their surroundings, studied the pro- prieties, and trimmed their art to fit the public deniand,: Not so with Richard Wilson. With his doggedly faithful nature, no doubt he had little choice. What he was he had to be, and bear, the consequences. Friends, and patrons alike, if they accepted him at all, had to accept him as he stood. Though his fidelity to his impulse took him to the point of starvation, perhaps, this isolation was not so keen or galling, as the isolating character, amounting to self-irnprisonment, of his own personality. He was above the middle height, corpulent, with a head out of proportion to his body, 238 MASTER MINDS IN ART. and a nose so out of proportion to the whole, that the boys of the neighbourhood nicknamed him — the slang is too biographical to be omitted — nicknamed him " Nosey," arid he frequently walked the streets with his face partly covered in his handkerchief. With his work unappreciated, his person disliked and ridiculed, Wilson's inner spirit became vexed, and his outer gruffness increased until it absolutely contradicted the delicacy and sweet sombreness of his pictures. Dis- tinct success might have given a sparkle to his character, but repeated failure, and failure in the face of the fashionable successes of others now hardly known, added a robust bitterness to his demeanour. This reacted upon him, and then came provocation and despondency. The rightfulness of his work he never doubted ; he only moaned, in his most dejected moods, that the conditions of labour were so very harsh ; but behind this was always the conviction, confirming him in his course, that posterity would understand him. In hours of despondency, when the spirit could not work, he would quit his shabby little room, and donning his triangular cocked hat RICHARD WILSON. 239 over his wig, and a brown coat down to his knee breeches, would make for a music stall in Exeter 'Change, kept by one Willie Thomson, an organist. There these two cronied and sang, there they exchanged consolations, and with revived spirits, especially if Wilson had recently sold a work, they would adjourn to the " Black Horse," near Somerset House barracks, dine luxuriously on Scotch collops, and return for leisurely digestion to Thomson's stall. Sometimes David Garrick the actor would turn in, and, as Garrick put it, see " Thomson turning the painter into a moral concord." Garrick, in fact, occasionally sent forward a bottle of wine, and around a little table, in a shadowy corner of the bookstall, Garrick, actor ; Wilson, painter ; and Arne and Thomson, musicians, would cheerily sip. These were rare gleams in Wilson's dark- some life. At the thought of this little group one feels grateful to the sturdy David Garrick for his generous consideration ; and more grateful still when we learn of Wilson being invited to supper, together with Dr. Johnson, Laurence Sterne, and Goldsmith, at the actor's own house. Picture this singular group of 240 MASTER MINDS IN ART. diverse manifestations of genius — little mimick- ing Garrick ; big stentorious Johnson ; lean keen-eyed Yorick, smiling sentimentalisms and glancing questionable inference's ; heavy- headed Goldsmith, now boisterous, now sad ; and pungent, corpulent Wilson. On one occa- sion these gentlemen had kept the ladies waiting, and on their arrival Mrs. Garrick greeted them with, " We have been very lively at your expense, gentlemen. Shall I tell ? " said she, addressing her lady companions. " W^ell, then, the ladies likened you all to plants and fruits and flowers." " Pray let us hear," said Wilson : " doubtless I come in for a sprig of laurel ? " " No, sir," said the lady, " you are wrong." " For rue, perchance } " said he. " No, sir ; guess again." " Why, I'm dubbed bitter enough; perhaps a crab.''" said he, " for that man (pointing to Garrick) has dubbed me ' Sour Dick.' " " Guess again," said the lady, laughing. " Will you give it up ? " asked one. " Yea, madam." " Why then, sir, you are likened to olives. Now, sir, will you dare to inquire further ? " " Let me see," said Wilson, all eyes upon him. " Well, then, mv dear, out with it ; I dare ! " " Then know, RICHARD WILSON. 241 sir," said she, rising and curtseying, " Mister Wilson is rough to the taste at first, tolerable by a little longer acquaintance, and delightful at last ! " " Art thou content, friend Richard ? " asked Johnson. " That is very handsome, sir." Wilson, making the lady his pleasantest bow, replied, " Faith, I shall henceforth have a better opinion of myself! " " Rough to the taste at first, tolerable by a little longer acquaintance, and delightful at last " — an excellent epitome, surely, of the slow growth of poor Wilson's popularity. Rough in his own day ; Tolerable a little later ; and at last, to those who study him in these days. Delightful. But we are still with him in the rough usage of his own day, still with him struggling against poverty, against prejudice, and against himself. In 1760, five years after his return to London from Italy, he exhibited his picture, " Niobe " — now in the National Gallery. The work stamped Wilson beyond doubt as one of the foremost landscape painters, and it was bought by the Duke of Cumberland. With such an acknowledg- ment as this he would now surely go forward ? No ; his work did not touch the general senti- 16 242 MASTER MINDS IN ART. merit ; it seemed foreign, austere, alien, and he remained a financial failure. He still had the severest struggle to live, still had to sell for the paltriest sums, still had to part with drawings for half-a-crown each — unless Paul Sandby, also a painter, ashamed of taking them at such a price, paid a more liberal figure. And yet Wilson, conscious of his worth, could calmly say to Sir William Beechey, "You will live to see good prices given for my pictures." Five more years went by before he had a success equal to the sale of the " Niobe," and this occurred when, in 1 765 — Wilson then being fifty-two — he exhibited in the great room at Spring Gardens his " View of Rome from the Villa Madama," and sold the work to the Marquess of Tavistock. This success, surely, would do for him what the other failed to do ? No ; this also left him struggling. On the formation of the Royal Academy, three years later, he was included in the first list of mem- bers. This public acknowledgment of worth would accomplish what private acknowledgment had failed in — it would rescind the old resolu- tion of the Committee of Taste ; it would direct the patrons of art towards him ; it would at RICHARD WILSON. 243 last lift him to a profitable position — such, we may be sure, was Wilson's hope, and perhaps, indeed, his belief. But the result was not so. In 1770, with two years of Academy honours upon him, he was so neglected by the public that on the death of Hay man, the librarian to the Royal Academy, Wilson applied for the vacant post, and gratefully accepted the ^50 per annum it brought. He lived, in fact, under the provo- cation of having recognition, and recognition both private and public, high of its kind ; but not recognition enough. Sir Joshua Reynolds, to his honour, at last tried to change this state of affairs. Through his recommendation, Wilson was commissioned by a nobleman to paint two pictures, but beyond modifying the animosity that had existed between the two artists, and of course the immediate benefit, the introduction had very little ulterior result. Wilson's popularity re- mained like a dead-calm, which practically left him stranded. His was a singular case. Among his friends were the finest spirits of the age. Dr. Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Goldsmith, Garrick, and others, testifying the worth of the man ; and among his patrons were the king, 244 MASTER MINDS IN ART. dukes, and earls ; and yet he was a failure. The support he had was spasmodic and unreliable, and the prices he received were poor. Even the king indirectly bartered with him. over a view of Sion House, painted to order, and Wilson boldly suggested, through Lord Bute the agent in the matter, that if his majesty could not pay the whole sum down (sixty guineas), he might pay it in instalments — a suggestion that lost him the royal favour. He was hemmed in, beleagued. There were some in his own day who saw and lamented his position. Peter Pindar (Dr. J. Wolcot), in his Odes to the Aca- demicians, wrote : " Wilson's art Will hold its empire o'er my heart, By Britain left in poverty to pine^- But, honest Wilson, never mind, Immortal praises thou shalt find. And so for a dinner have no cause to fear — Thou start' St at my prophetic rhymes ! Don't be impatient for those times ; Wait till thou hast been dead one hundred year ! " Shee, also, in his Rhymes on Art, wrote : " Kind too late, Relenting Fortune weeps o'er Wilson's fate ; Remorseful, owns her bhndness, and to fame Consigns with sorrow his illustrious name." RICHARD WILSON. 245 But for a little property bequeathed him by a brother, who knows where and how this want of public comprehension would have left him ? As it was, the legacy found Wilson in his sixty- seventh year, nigh at his wits' end, becoming also incomprehensible even to himself, in a room almost without furniture, on the second floor in a house in Tottenham Street, off Tottenham Court Road. The property was in Wales, so gathering his brushes together, and selling some old things for a few shillings, poor Wilson, fagged and defeated, quitted his bare and blank second-floor room and set out for the rural luxury of North Wales. His retreat was Colomendy, the house of a relative, about three miles from Mold, on the road crossing the Moel Famman range, for Ruthin. There he spent his last two years ; but compared with the long years of precarious labour, these two were only as a glimpse at the pleasures of a contempla- tive ease. That, even, was a glimpse through failing powers, for at Colomendy, Wilson almost lost his memory his hand became tremulous, and he fell into a childish dotage — painting, however, in a dim groping, tremulous way, to the end. 246 MASTER MINDS IN ART. On one changeable day in May Richard Wilson, practically awaiting the close, com- plained of cold, and was put to bed ; and death, apparently awaiting him, came almost im- mediately. He was buried near the north door of the fine old church at Mold, where a tomb was erected to his memory by a friend, Mrs. Garnons, one of those women who in their own sympathy anticipate and express the sympathy of those who come after. Here was a life spent in hardy endurance for a conscientious conviction — for an intuitive sense of right. True, it was only a conviction that a certain phase of art was right ; neverthe^ less, it was as binding and as vital as those conscientious struggles we admire in the re- former, the preacher, the scientist, or the mechanic. Wilson bore ridicule, neglect and poverty for the sake of his art. He had faith in his artistic impulse, and time has proved him right. He once painted a view of Kew Gardens for George HI., but so infused the picture with his own phase of the beautiful that his majesty failed to recognize the landscape portrait, and returned the picture. This is a key to Wilson's RICHARD WILSON. li/j conflict. His time wanted something conven- tional, something in the order of the day ; but he was impelled to do something else. Instead of painting merely the strict portrait of nature, he wished to depict its spirit and his own ; and he was the first artist who seriously set himself to the task in England. Owing to continental influences, he is not so British as either Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, or Constable, and therefore further from British taste; but, on the other hand, they are not so cosmo- politan as he. Wilson's was a version rather than a transcript of what he saw ; and in a gallery of European art, while Sir Joshua and Gainsborough would seem powerful repre- sentatives of individuals and localities, Wilson would appear as an emissary from a region where pictorial Italy and rural England had mingled their beauties in an atmospheric halo of both. With an abstract beauty perceived by a strong but not an obtrusive individuality, with a meditative, almost moody charm for atmospheric tone in foliage, in river, in land or air or sky, and with a spirit of sweet sincerity alike to nature and himself — Wilson's works come down speaking revelations from the period 248 MASTER MINDS IN ART. when they were silenced by the counter-taste which then prevailed. They have come down, however, and they accompany the Gains- boroughs and the Constables. They come with no evil rivalry ; they call for no detri- mental comparisons ; but each and all — the Wilsons, Gainsboroughs, and Constables alike — come with individualities which comple- ment the virtues of each other. Undoubtedly tone and aerial effects constituted Wilson's individuality, and in these he considered him- self above every rival. Wright of Derby was an avowed imitator of these achievements, and when he proposed an exchange of works, Wilson replied, "With all my heart, Wright. I will give you air, and you'll give me fire ! " — an allusion to Wright's fiery effects of light. Wil- son, like every great nature, saw the possibilities of the commonplace. In the broken surface of a Stilton cheese he perceived his scheme of colour for his classical subject, " Ceyx and Alcyone " ! — and yet this perceiver of the great in the little, so painted a sky in a damaged work of Claude's, that when the owner took it home a friend thinking the whole was by Claude, exclaimed, " There ! there is a sky ! Where is the artist alive who can paint such a one ? " RICHARD WILSON. 249 Amid the "sublime and pastoral" character- istics of Wales, as Wilson called them, the man who painted that sky spent the closing days of his life. He had come from nature ; and thus he returned to her — spending his hours among his relatives at Colomendy, resting and painting ; strolling to his favourite fir-trees on the estate, and sometimes walking the main road. In a cozy nook of the road not far from the gates of Colomendy, was, and still is, " The .Loggerheads" Inn ; and there Wilson occa- sionalfy went to fit himself into a corner of the old settle, and chat with the landlord. The face of the inn still bears the sign of " The Loggerheads " he painted — and an adroit trans- formation of good humour out of bad, the work is. Two hail, fellows have met, not wisely but too well. They have disputed, and turned their backs upon each other, looking thunder over their shoulders. Wilson's inscription was, " We three loggerheads be " — thus including the spectator ; and hence the laugh. In the floor of the inn, opposite where Wilson would sit, is a flag in which a brown vein of stratifi- cation suggests a profile, and from this hint Wilson painted the jolliest-looking of the two 250 MASTER MINDS IN ART. heads on the sign, the portraiture being un- mistakable. At Colomendy Hall, itself, now in possession of Colonel H, Cooke, is a portrait of Wilson painted by himself. He is seated on a fallen old tree, looking at a canvas, on which is sketched the very scene that forms the background to the portrait, both views being very characteristic of the artist. If the recorded descriptions of Wilson are faithful, the portrait flatters him. He must have seen himself, as he saw landscape, through an idealizing imagination. Wilson had an arduous and hazardous struggle, but let us admit that his contem- poraries were not wholly answerable for this. They saw according to their light. Their ap- preciation could only be to the extent of their perception ; and though a Richard Wilson may believe in his intuitions, and stand firm to them, if the intuitions are new he must not look for a swift acceptance. His contempo- raries view him through the prevailing mode, through the established rules, through the prior intuitions which, by common acceptance, have become laws — but laws, of course, subject to the reform such as a Wilson by his genius enacts. SIR EDWIN LANDSEER. SIR EDWIN LANDSEER. SIR EDWIN LANDSEER. IDWIN HENRY LANDSEER was the third son of John Land- seer, the engraver, whose Lectures on the Art of Engraving, published in 1807, is one of the best guides to the art. Edwin and his brother Thomas were also en- gravers of note, though it is with Edwin as painter that we now have chiefly to do. Edwin Landseer's mother was formerly a Miss Potts, a lady who appropriately joined the painters of last century to the painters of this, for she sat to Sir Joshua Reynolds as the maiden with a sheaf of corn on her head in his picture, " The 254 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Gleaners," known also as " The Cottagers." It was, indeed, shortly after this interesting event in her life, that possibly the most interesting- event of all her life, happened^— she married John Landseer, and went to live at No. 83, Queen Anne Street, East. In course of time three sons and four daughters were born to them — Thomas in 1796 ; Charles in 1797 ; Edwin in 1802 ; and the three sons proved themselves eminent and worthy of their dis- tinguished father. John Landseer, the father, made himself the special advocate of the rights of engravers as artists, claiming for them recog- nition from the Royal Academy, and after many years devoted to advocating his cause he was successful. He well knew the labour, the devo- tion, and the special skill required for the pro- duction of those very plates of which painters themselves were usually so proud, and to break down the monopoly of honour bestowed by the Academy, John Landseer set resolutely to work. He gloried in his calling, and did not hesitate to define " engraving as a species of sculpture performed by incision." At first, of course, he was hardly listened to. He was a man with a grievance and a craze. Still, he insisted upon SIR EDWIN LANDSE.ER. 255 his definition, and as those at head-quarters would not pay much attention to his speech in private, he began to speak in public. He de- livered lectures on his favourite subject, and brought engraving as an art topic to the front ; and so convinced the Royal Academy authori- ties of the injustice they both inferred and inflicted upon able men, that in the very year of his lectures he was made an Associate En- graver of the Academy. But the work was not yet complete. He was elected an Associate Engraver of the Royal Academy as a special favour, the regulations of the body were not altered, and the honour had the appearance of a gag to keep him quiet. It was not until fifty years later, not until John Landseer had battled for the rights and the adequate recognition of engravers, and passed away, that it was pro- posed by a member of the Council of the Academy that Engravers should be entitled to the full honours of the Academy as Artists, without the qualifying distinction of the term Engravers, All the time that John Landseer was fighting the battle of the Engravers his sons were gaining very distinguished positions as engravers and painters. 256 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Edwin Henry Landseer, in whose career we are now specially interested, was, as a child, not very diligent at school. He was constantly leaving his teachers and devpting himself to drawing. His artistic education was begun by his father at a very early age, but not before natural ability had made itself evident in sketches and drawings. As soon as he could command the use of a pencil he was allowed to go his way in the fields to draw sheep, goats, and donkeys. In a valuable note furnished by Miss Meteyard to Mr. F. G. Stevens' Life of Landseer, we have the following interesting account of Edwin's first lessons in drawing : — " In 1 849-1 850 the Howitts resided in Avenue Road, St. John's Wood, and the father of Edwin Landseer no great way off. William Howitt and Mr, John Landseer being well acquainted, and often meeting in their walks, would go and return together, sometimes one way, sometimes another, but generally in the direction of Hampstead. One evening, in pass- ing along the Finchley Road towards Child's Hill, Mr. Landseer strayed by a stile of ancient look, and said to his friend, ' These two fields were Edwin's first studio. Many a time have SIR EDWIN LANDSEER. 257 I lifted him over this very stile. I then lived in Foley Street, and nearly all the way between Marylebone and Hampstead was open fields. It was a favourite walk, with my boys, and one day when I had accompanied them, Edwin stopped by this stile to admire some sheep and cows which were quietly grazing. At his re- quest I lifted him over, and finding a scrap of paper and a pencil in my pocket, I made him sketch a cow. He was very young indeed then — not more than six or seven years old. After this we came on several occasions, and as he grew older this was one of his favourite spots for sketching. He would start off alone, or with John, or Charles, and remain until I fetched him in the afternoon. I would then criticise his work, and make him correct defects before we left the spot. Sometimes he would sketch in one field, sometimes in the other ; but gene- rally in the one beyond the old oak we see there, as it was more pleasant and sunny.' This interesting fact was told me by Mr. Howitt whilst walking through these fields about twenty years ago." Landseer, we thus learn, not only had a natural aptitude, but was fortunate in having a 17 258 MASTER MINDS IN ART. father who watched only as an artist could the budding tendency, and who taught and en- couraged the young idea to shoot. Edwin, when only five years of age, could draw well. He had even that early begun to discern the typical character of animals, and — which is perhaps still more remarkable — the humorous interpretations they were capable of In the British Art Collection, South Ken- sington Museum, may be seen a series of nine early studies by Landseer, and belonging to his eighth year is a plate with such subjects as the Head of an Ass, or a Sheep, or a Boar ; on another plate is a Donkey, another Donkey and her Foal. He was constantly drawing from nature, and whereas in the majority of cases the early tendency is towards representative types, Landseer's endeavour was to express individual, characteristics. His drawing of the head of a sheep was not a generalization from sheep in general, but the portrait of one sheep in par- ticular, with its own peculiar expression, under a merely momentary influence. When he was nine years of age Landseer tried his hand at a lion and a tiger, and then at a young bull. In the following year he advanced another stage SIJi EDWIN LANDSEER. 259 venturing to do cattle in groups ; and in 181 5 — Landseer then being thirteen — he entered the sphere in which he was to do great things; he made a remarkably able study of a St. Bernard dog. It was in 181 5 also that he first exhibited in the Royal Academy. The subjects were " A Mule," and "A Pointer and Puppy." These early examples of the young exhibitor are as significant as they are interesting. They intro- duced a new perception into English art. Prior to this, art had been the instrument for exalting man and nature, and more especially man. The vain pet spaniel or the graceful hound seen in portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds and others of that school, or the shepherd- dog and sheep and horses in a Constable, have a secondary importance. They are either ac- cessories in a portrait or auxiliaries in a land- scape, or, as in the case of Wilkie, a bit of detail important in its way, but not primary. Young Landseer leaped the breach. He did what everybody now sees was possible to do, and now we readily wonder why it was never done in that simple yet profound way before. But the vision for seeing the animal world in that special way had not developed. 26o MASTER MINDS IN ART. In the earlier days a dog was simply a dog, and very little more ; but Landseer came and looked with the eye of the sympathetic inter- preter. He saw what has been established in quite another range of study — the physical affinity between the lower animals and the higher — and carrying this even a stage further, he inferred mental and emotional affinities as well. He perceived latent attributes in the canine race related to similar qualities developed in mankind. That is the secret of our interest, the basis of our sympathy, the incitement of our humour. Whether a French Poodle can lay the law down or not, we see the physical propriety of making him enact the part of a judge ; whether or no a fine Mastiff has a consciousness of its dignity (and it is hard to believe it has not), or a little Scotch Terrier a consciousness of its impudence (and, judging by human parallels, it is hard to believe that it has), the fact is Landseer singled out animals typical of human characteristics. To test how unerringly Landseer has done this we have only to try to reverse any of his selections. It would be in direct opposition to all our observation and experience, and to the law of SIR ED WIN LANDSEER. 261 relationship underlying each subject, to call the little Scotch Terrier, Dignity, and the Mastiff, Impudence ; or to change the titles in the case of "High Life" and "Low Life," and thus make the butcher's dog the aristocrat, and the stag- hound the plebeian ; or to make one of the thin fawning suppliants around the dog's meat-barrow the Jack-in-ofiEce in place of the selfish bully on guard. Landseer, indeed, was a portrayer of character. He painted not only dogs, not only typical dogs, but dog individualities. Given a number of mastiffs or a number of poodles, and from those he would select varieties of charac- ter, as Dickens or Thackeray could get varie- ties from a group of cockneys, or rustics. In the same way we can imagine Landseer selecting and portraying from dogs in general a Becky Sharp, a Pecksniff, or an Adam Bede, simply because he was more than a mere copyist — an interpretating delineator of canine character. The germ of the genius for this was in the early drawings we have referred to. He drew an ass or a sheep as a painter drew a portrait, striving after the spirit as well as the material ; the form, in fact, being only the inevi- table medium for the expression ; or, to push the 262 MASTER MINDS IN ART. illustration further, he drew a sheep with the keen perception for individual traits, of the shepherd. Novices observe no distinction ; but the shepherd can give every sheep a characteristic name, and this is possible with Landseer's studies. When Landseer was thirteen he came under a new influence, that of Haydon the painter. Hitherto he had had, under the occasional guidance of his father, the liberty of his own conceptions suggested direct from nature ; he was now to experience some of the more arti- ficial processes of art under Haydon. That painter, in his somewhat self-assertive auto- biography, writes: "In 1815, Mr. Landseer the engraver, had brought his boys to me and said, ' When do you let your beard grow and take pupils ? ' I said, ' If my instructions are useful and valuable, now.' 'Will you let my boys come ? ' I said, ' Certainly.' Charles and Thomas it was immediately arranged should come every Monday, when I was to give them work for the week. Edwin took my dissec- tions of the lion, and I advised him to dissect animals — the only mode of acquiring their con- struction — as I had dissected men, and as I SIR EDWIN LANDSEER. 263 should make his brothei:;^ do. I lent him my dissections from the lion, which he copied, and when he began to show real power I took a portfolio of his drawings to Sir George Beau- mont's one day, at a grand dinner, and showed them all round to the nobility. When he painted his " Dogs " I advised Sir George to buy it. In short, I was altogether the means of bringing him so early into notice. These things may be trifles, . . . but when I see a youth denying his obligations to me I may as well note them down. Edwin Landseer dis- sected animals under my eye, copied my anatomical drawings, and carried my prin- ciples of study into animal painting. His genius thus tutored has produced sound and satisfactory results." Landseer may have been sincere in denying his obligations to Haydon, as sincere as Haydon may have been in assert- ing .them. The truth may perhaps be found between the two. Though Landseer's genius, broadly speaking, required no Haydon, there may have been professional points of detail on which Haydon gave Landseer excellent hints ; but we cannot believe that the influence went much beyond this very practical phase. 264 MASTER MINDS IN ART. About this time Landseer sat as model to Leslie for his picture, " The Death of Rutland." According to Leslie he was then a "curly- headed youngster, dividing his time between Polito's wild beasts at Exeter 'Change and the Royal Academy schools." " The Death of Rut- land," after appearing at the Academy in 1816, was sent to America, and was purchased by the Academy of Philadelphia. It is interesting as containing a portrait of Landseer at this early period of his life, and the same interest sur- rounds a still earlier portrait of him in J. Hayter's picture, "The Cricketer," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 181 5. Up to the appearance of " Brutus" — the picture of a Mount St. Bernard dog — in 18 17, we must look upon Landseer as a patient, modest student feeling his way. After the exhibition of " Brutus" he took an unquestioned pre-eminent position as an animal painter. The picture was engraved by his brother, Thomas Landseer. In the following year he produced his " Fighting Dogs Getting Wind," which was bought by Sir George Beaumont, then considered a great dis- tinction. A criticism from The Examiner of that date runs : " Did we see only the dog's SIJi EDWIN LANDSEER. 265 collar we should know that it was produced by- no common hand, so good is it and palpably- true. But the gasping and cavernous and redly - stained mouths, the flaming eyes, the prostrate dog and his antagonist standing exult- ing over him, the inveterate rage that superior strength inflames but cannot subdue, with the broad and bright relief of the objects, give a wonder-producing vitality to the canvas." This picture is at Coleorton Hall, and in 1874 it was hung in the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition. Another picture of this year was bought by the Hon. H. Pierrepoint. It was called " A White Horse in a Stable," but when Landseer was about to send it home it could not be found, and its disappearance remained a mys- tery for over twenty-four years. At the end of that time it was discovered in a hay-loft, hidden there, it is supposed, by a dishonest servant. When discovered, twenty-four years after date of purchase, it was sent to Mr. Pierrepoint with a letter from Landseer, in which he said, " ' The White Horse ' was the first of that com- plexion I ever painted," and that he had not re-touched it, thinking " it better when my early style unmingled with that of my old age." 266 MASTER MINDS IN ART. " The Cat Disturbed " was a picture exhibited in the year 1819, contributed to the British Institution, and afterwards engraved and called "The Intruder" — the intruder being a cat, chased by a dog from his quarters in a stable. This work is now in the possession of Sir Philip de Malpas Egerton, of which Dr. Waagen writes : " This . picture exhibits a power of colouring and a solidity of execution recalling such masters as Snyders and Fyt." "The Intruder" was followed by "Alpine Mastiffs Re-animating a Distressed Traveller," exhibited in the Pall Mall Gallery in 1820, and engraved by John Landseer, and in the same year he exhibited two large pictures, " A Lion Enjoying his Repast," and "A Lion Disturbed at his Repast." In 1821 Landseer exhibited "The Seizure of a Bear," with life-size figures, while in the same year the Academy had from him "The Rat-Catchers" and "Pointers To-ho." , In 1822 he sent "The Larder Invaded" to the British Institution, and was awarded by the directors a premium of ;^i50. In a letter to Sir George Beaumont, Wilkie wrote : " I have been warning our friend Collins against a nig- gling touch in painting as very common of late SIR EDWIN LANDSEER. 267 in our pictures, arising from the desire for fulness of subject. I have been warning our friend Collins against this, and was also urging young Landseer to beware of it." In the year 1824 Landseer visited Scotland with Leslie, and exhibited " The Cat's Paw." It was bought from the artist for .;^ioo, and sold a few days afterwards for ;i^i20. Shortly after this picture was executed, Sir Walter Scott visited London, and on his return to Abbotsford Landseer accompanied him. Leslie had been with Sir Walter Scott painting his portrait, and the two artists went from Abbotsford to Glas- gow, Loch Lomond, and Loch Katrine, and crossed the mountains on foot to Loch Eurn to witness an annual Highland gathering. This visit left a deep impression upon Landseer ; he did not seem to think a year's experience com- plete unless it included a trip to the Highlands. The results of his first visit were " A Scene at Abbotsford," " The Hunting of Chevy Chase," " Taking a Buck," and " The Widowed Duck." The latter was a subject conceived and treated in Landseer's own peculiar vein. He applied that phase of sentiment which had served him so well in the case of dogs, to another species, 268 MASTER MINDS IN ART. to a duck and a drake, and most beautiful specimens of their kind. The drake has been shot dead by a sportsman, and the duck, bereft of its mate, rises to its utmost on its feet, flaps its wings in the wildest distress, and quacks its plaint to the air. The story is as instantaneous as the deadly shot. There need be no second look, though indeed a second look confirms the painter's intent, and makes keener the simple pathos. Only a master of the most subtle expression could touch a subject of this kind without making himself and the duck extremely ridiculous. The masterly delicacy of interpre- tation saves both. It makes the improbable possible ; and at last it seems as natural and as inevitable that the bird should wing and wail its widowhood, as that a human being should mourn for the dead. Landseer's professional position was now assured. He clearly saw his special province in art, and he was to a large extent master of • his craft. Up to this he had lived with his father, renting a studio in a street off Fitzroy Square, and leaving to his father all business transactions. It was his father who received the works from the studio, who priced, sold, S/R EDWIN LANDS EER. 269 and received the money for them ; it was simply Edwin Landseer's business to paint, and until his growing success caused others to hint the possibility of another arrangement, he was perfectly happy, and willing to go on as if he were a youth ever under the tutorship of his considerate father. What had been going on up to this time was perfectly natural, and in accordance with the guidance the father had always proffered the son, and the reliance the son had always shown in his father's judgment ; and what followed it was perfectly natural also — namely, the desire on the part of the son to have a house and a studio of his own, where he could exercise with the utmost freedom the power he felt. Young Landseer was by no means eager for this, but friends argued that it was professionally advisable to have an establishment of his own, and at last he took a house in the neighbourhood of Regent's Park. His sister, Mrs. Mackenzie, was his companion and housekeeper, and under these most favourable conditions for work he painted in the same house for well-nigh fifty years. In the year 1826 appeared "The Dog and the Shadow," which is now at South Kensing- 270 MASTER MINDS IN ART. ton ; and in the same year, when Landseer was twenty-four years old, he was elected an Asso- ciate of the Royal Academy. This was a distinction his work had entitled him to before, but according to the regulations of the Academy no artist could be elected an Associate until he was twenty-four, a limit which had kept Lawrence, and Millais, as well as Landseer, waiting awhile. In the year following his election he finished his great Highland picture, " The Chief's Return from Deer-Stalking." He also exhibited in the Academy that year " The Monkey who had seen the. World ; " and in the British Institution two other pictures, " Chevy Chase " and " A Scene at Abbotsford," containing a portrait of Sir Walter Scott's dog Maida. In 1829 he produced "The Illicit Whisky Still in the Highlands," and a " Fire- side Party " of dogs. The models for the dogs are said to be Pepper and Mustard described by Sir Walter Scott in Guy Mannering. In 1830 Landseer was elected a Royal Academician. His first pictures exhibited after his election were remarkable for their smallness, being only i8xi3J^ inches. They are known through engravings as " High Life " and " Low Sm EDWIN LANDSEER. 271 Life," and one of them induced Ruskin to write : " Cunning signifies especially a habit or gift of over-reaching, accompanied with enjoyment and a sense of superiority. Its essential connections with vulgarity may be at once exemplified by the expression of the butcher's dog in Landseer's ' Low Life.' It is the intensest rendering of vulgarity, absolute and utter, with which I am acquainted." "Poachers Deer-Stalking," "Too Hot," "A Lassie Herding Sheep," and " The Cavalier's Pets " were the most notable pictures that followed. "The Cavalier's Pets" were dogs of the King Charles breed, and the picture was painted in two days. The dogs were favourites of Mr. Vernon, and a sketch was made of them by Landseer in Mr. Vernon's house. The sketch, however, was laid aside for some time, and one day the painter was reminded of his Commission, and two days after the reminder the picture was sent home. It now hangs in the National Gallery. Another example of very rapid work was the Hon. W. Russell's picture, " Odin," painted within twelve hours, and exhibited in 1835. Of this rapid execution Mr. Rpdgrave writes: "That happy facility 272 MASTER MINDS IN ART. ... is fairly to be illustrated in the works of Sir Edwin Landseer. Examine carefully 'A Fireside Party,' No. 90 (Sheepshank's gift) ; here the hairy texture of the veritable race of Pepper and Mustard is given, as it were, hair for hair, yet it was achieved at once by a dexterous use of the painter's brush. Or turn from this work to ' The Tethered Rams,' No. 95 (Sheepshank's gift), where the woolly texture is obtained by simply, with a full brush, applying the more solid pigment into that which has already been laid on as a ground, with a large admixture of the painter's vehicle. Days might be spent in endeavouring to arrive at a result which the painter has achieved at once. The early works of this painter are a complete study for light-handed and beautiful execution ; they look intuitively perfect, yet many instances are known of his extreme rapidity of execution." Mr. F. G. Stevens, after Mr. Solomon Hart, R.A., relates the following remarkable incident of Landseer's dual adroitness : " A large party was assembled one evening at the house of a gentleman in the upper ranks of London society ; Landseer was there, and a large group gathered about the SIR ED WIN LANDSEER. 273 sofa where he was lounging ; the subject turned on dexterity and faciUty in feats of skill with the hand. A lady, sitting back on a settee, and rather tired of the subject, exclaimed, after many instances of manual dexterity had been cited, 'Well, there is one thing nobody has ever done, and that is, draw two things at once.' She thought she had annihilated the subject, when Landseer said, ' Oh, I can do that ; lend me two pencils, and I will show you.' Then with a pencil in each hand he drew simultaneously, and without hesitation, with the one hand the profile of a stag's head, and all its antlers complete, and with the other hand a perfect profile of a horse's head. Both drawings were full of energy and spirit, and were, together and individually, quite as good as the master was accustomed to produce with his right hand alone. And it was observed that the acts of draughtsmanship were strictly simultaneous and not alternate." " The Harvest in the Highlands," painted in 1833, was a combination picture, Callcott painting the landscape, and Landseer the figures ; but the most important work of that year was " Jack in Office," now at South 18 274 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Kensington. The work is one of those de- lineations of canine character with very human -^but not, in this case, humane — attributes, which distinguished Landseer. The "Jack in Ofifice" is a gluttonous, over-fed dog perched on guard on a dogs' meat-barrow. Beneath him are the suppliants for favour — thin, hungry, wearied, expectant ; but he sits self-satisfied, self- gratified, on his haunches, with a watchful eye on those who, though now humble suppliants, may become daring pickers and stealers. The moral is too obvious to need any pointing. Every spectator can apply it to his own ex- perience. In this, as in most of the works of Landseer, we see the well-defined dif- ference between him and all other painters of animals. Prior to him, as already briefly stated, animals in pictures by British artists were usually lay auxiliaries. In sturdy George Morland we get a little nearer the Landseer spirit of painting the animal for the animal's sake; but only a little. His old shaggy- hoofed, gipsy-looking horses, with pronounced shoulder-bones, excite a certain degree of sentiment ; but Morland's old horses, or say the deeper qualities of the animals, are not his S/H EDWIN LANDS EER. 275 sole theme. We somehow remember his pic- ture as a rustic whole rather than remember his animals with a special emotion. Gains- borough, in his " Fighting Dogs," made the dogs primary ; but this is merely a fight : chiefly jawbone and claw. Hogarth, in his " Cock- pit," and his " Stages of Cruelty," made crea- tures of a lower species the mediums for satirizing the barbarity of man, but with crude and forced art compared with the gentle force of Landseer. Hogarth presents you with an ironical tract on cruelty ; Landseer does more — he makes you feel the joy of kindness. Even the dog which has precedence in Hogarth's celebrated portrait of himself is too much after his usual audacity to allow the sympathies to play. We smile at the artist's daring much more than we feel for the dog. Bewick's woodcuts of birds and animals have been the themes for warm admiration ; but they do not get beyond the cold sphere of instructive diagrams. They are excellent data, but emotionless pictures. There is a dog in Rem- brandt's "Sortie, or the Night Watch"; but it simply barks and bounds at the sound of a drum. The Prince Charles poodles in Van- 276 MASTER MINDS IN ART. dyke's portrait-picture of the "Children of Charles I." suggest no more than that they are the pets of the children. " Paul Potter's Cattle " and " Cuyp's Cattle " are remarkable, but if they have any sentiment it is purely pastoral, and borrowed from the landscape and a soothing twilight or sunset effect. Frangois Sneyders, the Flemish painter, had wonderful technical skill and a command of expression; but his animals have too much animalism. His " Fight between Dogs and Bears," "A Boar Hunt," and " Dogs in a Larder," are brutal. He strained ferocity for effect : Landseer affec- tionately painted affection. Oudrey and Des- portes, the French painters of this class, get very little beyond the animalism of Sneyders, though Oudrey, in his illustration of La Fontaine's Fable of the monkey inducing the cat to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, touched the threshold of Landseer's domain. Landseer's subtlety of expression was not confined to animals. Few pictures are more provokingly fascinating than his " Naughty Boy " — the portrait of a bonny, sturdy, de- termined boy of not more than three years. He is in the sulks, and perversely stands in SIR EDWIN LAND SEER. 277 a corner while he is told to stand forward. In his temper he has kicked one of his socks down, and his boots loose, pulled the top of his frock until it displays his dimpled stubborn little neck ; his slate is broken, and his book is thrown down. He has been in a towering rage. You feel that you could not, and would not if you could, spare the rod in the face of such a mite of humanity with such a giant temper. You declare against coaxing such a vixen, he declares against being coaxed by you or anybody else, and yet if you gave him the rod, at the sight of his first tear you could not help but hug the little chap, curls, dimples, temper and all. Then, you are sure, he would come out of his sulks one of the sunniest and brightest and most winsome of boys. The " Naughty Boy" was painted in 1834. " Suspense," " A Highland Breakfast," and " Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time " (the property of the Duke of Devonshire) belong to the same period. "A Sleeping Blood- hound" was one of the works of 1835, and it came about in a strange way. A favourite hound belonging to Mr. Jacob Bell, Landseer's friend and business manager, happened to 278 MASTER MINDS IN ART. overbalance, and it fell to a depth of about twenty-five feet. She died during the night, and Mr. Bell had her removed next morning to Landseer's house, in the hope that the painter would make a memorial sketch. Landseer was very busy at the time, and the interruption displeased him ; but when he caught sight of the hound he instantly saw a subject, dismissed Mr. Bell, and told him to call in four days. When Mr. Bell, called he saw his hound Countess life-size, painted as if asleep. "The Highland Shepherd's Chief Mourner" appeared in 1837. Mr. Ruskin has described this work in language akin to Land- seer's own. He says : " Take one of the most perfect poems or pictures (I use the words sy- nonymous) which modern times have seen — 'The Highland Shepherd's Chief Mourner.' Here the exquisite execution of the crisp and glossy hair of the dog, the bright, sharp touch of the green bough beside it, the clear painting of the wood of the coffin, and the folds of the blanket, are language — language clear and ex- pressive in the highest degree. But the close pressure of the dog's breast against the wood, the convulsive clinging of the paw which has SIR EDWIN LANDSEER. 279 dragged the blanket oft" the trestle, the total helplessness of the head laid close and motion- less upon its folds, the fixed and tearful fall of the eye in its utter hopelessness, the rigidity of repose, which marks that there has been no motion nor change in the trance of agony since the last blow was struck on the coffin lid, the quietness and gloom of the chamber, the spectacles marking the place where the Bible was last closed indicating how lonely has been the life — how unwatched the departure of him who is now laid solitary in his sleep ; these are all thoughts — thoughts by which the picture is separated at once from hundreds of equal merit as far as mere painting goes, by which it ranks as a work of high art, and stamps its author not as a neat imitator of the texture of a skin, or the fold of a drapery, but as a man of mind." Ruskin, in Pre- Raphaelitism, also says : "I need not point out to any one acquainted with Edwin Landseer's earlier works, the labour or watchfulness of nature they involve, nor need I do more than allude to the peculiar faculties of his mind. It will at once be granted that the highest merits of his pictures are throughout to be found in 28o MASTER MINDS IN ART. those parts of them which are least Hke what had been before accomplished, and that it was not by the study of Raphael that he attained his eminent success, but by a healthy love of Scotch terriers." From 1837 to 1850 Landseer painted many remarkable pictures — such as, " The Life's in the Old Dog Yet," " A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society," " Dignity and Impu- dence," " Not Caught Yet," " The Sanctuary," " Coming Events Cast their Shadows Before Them," " Peace," " War," and " A Dialogue at Waterloo," and executed the well-known lions for Trafalgar Square ; " Peace " and " War " (since bequeathed to the nation) were painted for Mr. Vernon, who paid Landseer ;^3,5oo for the pair ; but for the privilege of engraving the two works the owner was paid three thou- sand guineas by a firm of art publishers. In 1850 the Queen conferred upon the painter the honour of knighthood ; in 1855 he won a gold medal at the Paris Universal Exhibition ; and on the death of Sir Charles Eastlake he was offered the presidency of the Royal Academy^ but respectfully declined the honour. Land- seer died on October i, 1873, and was buried SIR EDWIN LANDSEER. 281 with public honour in St. Paul's Cathedral. First through his paintings, and then through the more familiar engravings of his paintings, he touched the national sympathy, and at the close the nation in turn expressed its gratitude by giving him a resting-place of honour. The painter had well earned it. St. Paul's was a fitting place for one who had preached, without sermonizing, a gospel of sympathy with the animal world, and so with the world in general. He was not a missionary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and yet no man, by word or by deed, has done more than Landseer to excite that love which is the surest preventative of cruelty of whatever order. He managed to convey his moral with the least possible display. While he loved his art for its own sake, he seemed also to love it for what he could say with it ; and so subtle is the union between the two motives in Landseer's case, so excellent is the art and so eloquent the theme, that it is difficult to define whether he painted dogs for the sake of art, or art for the sake of the dogs. This, however, is solvable by a very simple analysis. Landseer would 282 MASTER MINDS IN ART. never have been satisfied to simply paint animals or birds for the sake of the graceful form or the fine bit of colour. Stuffed birds or animals would not have inspired him, unless something in that posthumous condition touched his fancy or pathos. He sought . expression, thought, emotion. He. wanted to give out- wardly the inner life of the creature, and in so giving it to lift the animal the nearer man. In the most wonderful way was Landseer able to do this. His subject became a medium for thought, so that to look at his work was to think new thoughts, and feel new emotions — and all by means of the expression of a lower animal, forsooth. It took generations upon generations to accomplish this. Perhaps it was not possible in an earlier stage of exist- ence, because man and the lower animals stood related to each other on the harsh conditions enforced by the struggle for existence. Take the case of the dog. It would be first re- garded by man for its hunting qualities ; as hunting declined the dog would be valued for his utility as a watchman ; gratitude for services would create affection, and from the courtyard he would in the course of years be Sm EDWIN LAND SEER. 283 invited into the dining or drawing-room, and thus would begin the reign of domesticity. The laps and palms of ladies would further develop his social qualities, and in the next generation ornament would be a more im- portant feature than utility. The dog would be liked for itself. Sentiment would be the outcome of deepened affection, and in the next period, the period of Landseer, the dog would even become the vehicle for poetry. SIR DA VID WILKIE. SIR DAVID WILKIE. SIR DAVID WILKIE. AM the third son of the Rev. David Wilkie and of Isabella Lister, his wife," says Wilkie in an autobiography he began, " My father came from the county of Mid-Lothian. ... He was a native of Ratho- Byres, a small property which had been in possession of our family for four hundred years, until, as he used to tell us, by the imprudence of his an- cestors it had passed to a younger branch of the same family and name, and was held by his father, John Wilkie, only as its tenant and cultivator." Wilkie was born on November 288 MASTER MINDS IN ART. 1 8, 1785, at his father's manse in the parish of Cults, on the banks of Eden-water, Fife- shire. His father had married three times within a period of nine years. His first wife, one of the most beautiful women in Fife, Miss Mary Campbell, died five months after mar- riage ; his second wife. Miss Peggie Wilkie, his cousin, died two years after marriage ; and it fell to the lot of Isabella Lister, a miller's daughter, to be the mother of Wilkie the artist. The living of Cults was not a rich one, the stipend, payable in kind and money, amounting to about one hundred and thirteen pounds a year, so that the Scotch minister and his wife had every need to exercise strict frugality, and to turn their bit of glebe land to good account. Their third son, David, very early showed a disposition to draw. The son himself de- clared, long after, when he had become a noted artist, that he could draw before he could read. His drawing-boards were the floors of the manse, smooth stones, and even the banks of sand left partly dry by streams. Lady Balgonie once visited the manse, and soon after little David was seen doing in SIR DA VID WILKIE. 289 chalk a very palpable attempt at a head on the floor. With unintentional irony the young artist was asked what he was doing ; and he replied, " Making Bonnie Lady Gonie!" He soon extended his range of observation and took to drawing horses, sheep, dogs, and soldiers on any available blank space, still having recourse to blank stones and walls when he became too old to innocently practise on the floors of the manse. When seven years old he was sent to the parish school at Pitlessie, under a master of the old type, who had time and inclination to be more than one thing, who could be schoolmaster, clerk to the session, and precentor in the kirk. One can see him. He is just the man Wilkie could depict. The j.uvenile artist's fame ran before him to Pitlessie, and " wee sunny-haired Davie," as one of his companions described him many years after, had barely settled in the school when he was called upon by both boys and girls to justify his great renown — in short, to draw something; and in time, to use Wilkie's own words, he drew " most of the heads in the school." He spent his time observing rather than acquiring. To 19 290 MASTER MINDS IN ART. the discomfiture of his schoolmaster and father, he could not grasp the intricacies of arithmetic, and he made very little progress in anything at the parish school but writing. Even in playtime he observed rather than participated, standing " wi' his hands in his pouches," watching groups of other boys at their games, unless he were seated in some quiet corner or stretched on the ground drawing characters on his slate. It is, of course, very apparent to us now what he was doing in those days. He had the reputation of being a slow schoolboy ; but he was quietly absorbing, consciously or unconsciously, the qualities that were to make him in other respects an exceptional man. When he was about twelve years of age Wilkie was removed to a schjodl at Kettle, about three miles' distance from the, manse. There the same character displayed itself The master could make very little of him ; though Wilkie on his slate and copybooks could make a great deal of the master. The benches and walls of the school always seemed blank to him, and he was on every opportunity filling them with grotesque versions of the scholars around him. His master declared that SIR DAVID WILKIE. 291 though young Wilkie was to all outward appearances quiet and demure, he had an eye and an ear for all the idle mischief that was in hand. But no doubt the idle mischief in the case of Wilkie had some method in it, and was governed by the impulses of a nature not then fully understood even by itself. He was an ex- pert little mechanic. With a knife and a chisel he made small water-mills and windmills, frames for winnowing corn and suction pumps, and interested himself in the crafts of local shoe- makers and weavers, whose peculiar movements he could cleverly mimic. At the manse a room was set apart for the amusement of the children, and that was David's portrait gallery. There he sketched with chalk, charcoal, pencil, or ink the portraits of visitors to the manse, striking characters in his father's congregation — de- lineated as a rule with a turn for a humorous version of the most striking features — and when the manse passed into the hands of Professor ■Gillespie of St. Andrews, in 181 3, he found, dimly peering through a new coat of whitewash on the walls of the children's room, those early examples of Wilkie's character sketches. There was something precocious in. his per-' 292 MASTER MINDS IN ART. ception, then. He surely must have had an impulse which almost amounted to a pre-vision of his future possibilities, so eagerly did he make note of the picturesque. And not only mental note, or note on walls and stones, but note in a sketch-book which he soon came to have as an inseparable part of himself Nothing in the way of remarkable character escaped him. If he saw a soldier, or a sailor, or a fiddler, or a bearded beggar, Wilkie was soon in position, sketch-book in hand, taking note ; and with all the more of an artist's relish if the soldier or sailor happened to have only one leg or arm, or if what legs or arms he had suggested more grotesque form than the con- ventional regularity of perfect limbs. Wilkie without doubt was an original youth,. If he paid a visit to friends he usually left a drawing on the walls — a sort of substitute for his card, surely — an intimation that he had been. His boyish taste was advanced in another respect, but perhaps remarkable only in the degree of its intensity. He not only delighted in reality, but in fancy and fiction based upon fact. Very few things he enjoyed more than to listen to the tales of Scottish SIR DAVID WILKIE. 293 history related by some visitor to his father's house. It was not a love of history for its own sake, but for the sake of the round of pictures the stories suggested to his mind. As the tale proceeded each point impressed him as a vivid tableau ; and, quite in the spirit of the painter, if he did not grasp some point clearly enough to see it in his mind's eye, young as he was he did not hesitate to beg the narrator to define more clearly the situation. As though carrying a stage farther this process of seeing he would group his companions into pictures representing some story he had heard, thus first ■exercising his faculty for grouping. A great commander, it is said, when very young, some- times worked out a campaign with pieces of matches on a table. Wilkie worked out pictures with the living lay figures of his companions. Wilkie remained at Kettle Grammar School for about eighteen months, and was then transferred to Cupar Academy, where he passed under the ordinary rigours of education for another year. But he was restless. His father desired him to study for an ordinary profession, and his grand- father wished him to study for the ministry. Art in the district of Cults was a suspected 294 MA S TER MINDS IN ART. because an untried profession. No one in the district knew anything about art, very few- people had pictures, and although the youth's talent for sketching characters was generally admitted, the idea of a man devoting his life to that, and that only, made some of the old Scotch folk dubiously shake their heads, heads grey with a knowledge of the very practical side of life. Nevertheless David Wilkie was not to be turned from what had now developed a definite ambition — the ambition of being a painter. Hitherto his purpose in drawing had been dim and undefined. It was more of a blind impulse working in faith, than a defined per- ception working with a purpose ; but some con- versations with David Martin, a portrait painter, gave point to young Wilkie's vague desires, and firmly fixed in him the ambition of becoming a painter. As is frequently the case the lad's mother had, a keener insight into his desires and possibilities than the father, minister though he was, and when Wilkie had turned fourteen years of age, his father was prevailed upon to allow the youth to go to the Academy of Edin- " burgh, with a view of having instruction in drawing. That was in November, 1799— the sin DA VW WILKIE. . 295 eve of the marvellous nineteenth century, the century in which literature, science, and art were destined to develope with unknown volume and power. He travelled to Edin- burgh with an introduction from the Earl of Leven to the Secretary of the Edinburgh Academy. The Secretary was seen, the intro- duction was read, and Wilkie's sketches were examined — but the Secretary declined to admit him. He did not see sufficient evidence of talent ! That was a terrible blow from head- quarters, and one likely to confirm the doubts of those who were sceptical from the fifst. The disappointment to Wilkie must have been intense. The flattery of comrades had declared that he could draw ; the Edinburgh Academy had practically said he could not, or that if h6 could, it was only moderately well. Which of the judges could be relied upon ? Was he to be a painter, or after all was he to glide into one of the ordinary occupations of the day ? It was his owii faithful intuition that gave the answer. Eyert the Secretary of the Edinburgh Academy was. not to declare for henceforth and' for ever that David Wilkie had not that power within him which would some day niake a painter. 296 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Lord Leven again took the matter up, and regarding the talent Wilkie had shown as quite exceptional, considering his surroundings, he brought the case again before the Secretary of the Academy, with the result that Wilkie was admitted as a student. It ought to be stated, in partial defence of the Secretary, that Wilkie's early sketches were really not remark- able because of their intrinsic merit as drawings, but, as Lord Leven declared, because of their ideas, because the boy who had executed them had not come under any outside influence of art, but, like Burns, had answered an inborn impulse tending always in the direction of art. It is only in regard to the latter circumstance that tire Secretary can be charged with a hasty judgment. His decision, though finally over- come, must have tested Wilkie's confidence in his own resources. However favourable Lord Leven's opinion was, and however successful it had been in overcoming the doubts concerning Wilkie, no amount of favourable opinion, no successful entry into the Edinburgh Academy, could conjure Wilkie into a painter if he were not one. The momentous result depended solely upon himself It yet remained for him to prove Sm DA VID WILKIE. 297 for himself, for his parents, for his patron, and the Edinburgh Academy, that if his drawings were not then remarkable for intrinsic merit as draw- ings, they soon would be ; and remarkable for -originality of idea as well. It was precisely a.d. 1800 when Wilkie began his studies in Edinburgh. He took lodgings in Nicholson Street, and with a crude easel, a palette of his own make, a few brushes and -colours, he started in his little room there a course which, once entered upon, he resolved firmly to pursue. He had with him a Bible, a copy of Allan Ramsey's " Gentle Shepherd," a -'few of his own sketches for the walls, his com- panionable fiddle, and of course his power and his studious perseverance. During the morning, from ten o'clock to twelve, he attended the class at the Academy. He was set to copy eyes and ■noses, hands and feet, and though he was ad- mittedly deficient as an academic draughtsman compared with other students, none of them could surpass him in force of expression. If he drew even an isolated eye, it was an eye looking at something ; if he drew a hand or a foot, it was a hand or foot doing something. Once, when he was given the cast of a foot to '298 MASTER MINDS IN ART. draw, he surprised the students by inquiring from the master what the statue to which the foot was related was supposed to be doing. They had no need to be surprised. The purpose of the question was perfectly clear. Wilkie first wanted to grasp the action, and with that clear in his mind he could more vividly give "the drawing •expression than if he placidly drew ah abstract foot that might be doing anything. Wilkie very soon justified the renewed appeal of Lord Leven and the reversal of the first decision of the Secre- tary. He quickly made headway among the students, and took rank with the first, his special talent being originality of idea. The habits of his boyhood followed him to Edinburgh. He went about the city in search of the unique and pic- turesque. When he had finished his work at the easel he would practically continue it in another way by roaming about the market- places, and" especially the Edinburgh Grass- market, where he renewed his acquaintance with rural characters; and by going to fairs and street gatherings, and taking note of remarkable subjects and characte'rs — thus accumulating the elements of his future greatness. But young Wilkie, successful though he was, still SIR DAVID WILKIE. 299 needed all his courage and determination to carry him forward. He entered the lists with some of the students for a premium granted by the academy for the best version in oil of a sub- ject to be selected by each student from the play of Macbeth. Wilkie selected the scene in Macduff's castle, Lady Macduff protecting her son from the murderers. But he failed to win the prize. He still had to go forward in faith, with a belief that in the end he could justify all. He did not confine himself to academic studies. Occasionally one of the old moods would come over him even in the class and among the students, and instead of drawing from the cast he would draw from the master's head as it was bent reading or in conversation. This habit led him into portraiture, and into still more intricate subjects, until one day the ballad of " Scotland's Skaith ; or, Will and Jean " impressed his fancy. He saw the tippling country politicians as de^ scribed there, and forthwith began to realize it on ia. piece of pasteboard, and that was the nucleus of the famous picture he afterwards painted, en- titled " The Village Politicians." In 1803, Wilkie then being eighteen, he entered into another "Competition at the Acad^ny ; this time for a pre- 30O MASTER MINDS IN ART. mium of ten guineas. The subject was " Calisto in the Bath of Diana," and he carried off the prize. This was his first remunerative success. He had been three years studying, and here was evidence of a favourable result. He no sooner had the ten guineas in his palm than he wanted to rush home with them. On the way he bought a silver watch, a present for his mother, whose encouragement in the hours of failure he grate- fully remembered in the moment of success. Returning to Edinburgh he again applied him- self to work. Hedevoted himself more than ever in his own room to studying street characters, whom he allured to his place either by the few pence he could afford to give them, or by a tune on his fiddle, with which it was his habit to play his models into a good humour, or into the mood the subject in hand required. Wilkie, in 1 804, the year after gaining the premium of ten guineas, left the academy, and, like Rembrandt, quitted the guidance of masters for the guidance of his own spirit at home. He was now niner teen, and dependent upon his parents. The income at the manse was not great, and naturally, after a training in Edinburgh, it was hoped that he would not be much of a burden. ■ He had SIR DA VID WILKIE. 301 all along practised the most rigid economy, and he now found he would have to continue it, and turn his work to account. Portrait paint- ing was the remunerative class of art just then, with Raeburn at its head in Edinburgh ; but while bearing this in mind Wilkie decided to try his hand with a subject which would allow his eye for character some play. He found a subject — the Country Fair — and wanted to sketch it on his canvas, but he had no easel. Necessity, once more, invented. A large chest of drawers stood in his room, and partly pulling out the central drawer, he placed his canvas on that and sketched-in the subject. He had an easel, the subject was sketched-in, but the difficulty of difficulties — he had no models. Models there were in plenty in the village, but they were never in repose, never in position for more than a few moments at a time, and what was one hazardous chance moment for a painter who wanted to fix a feature for all time ? He would have invited some of the local characters to sit ; but there was a distrusting feeling abroad about his habit of sketching. They objected to being put into pictures, they wanted to preserve their own individualities intact. Wilkie was in a ^02 MASTER MINDS IN ART. dilemma. One Sabbath morning a model, an, old man, presented himself in kirk, in repose ; asleep, in fact, under the influence of David Wilkie the elder's sermon. The opportunity- was a golden one, irresistible ; and wholly lost in his anxiety for his first picture, Wilkie sketched the head of the sleeping old man on the blank page of his Bible — a delinquency he explained away when charged with it by stating that portrait painting did not require any thought. He could draw and at the same time attend to the sermon. In this way, character by character, he filled in his composition, but before he had finished he must have dispelled some of the misgivings about his sketching — at least in the minds of the younger generations — for he wrote to one of his Edinburgh companions, " I have the advantage of our herd-boy and some children who live about the place as standers ; and I now see how superior painting from nature is to anything that our imagination, assisted by our memory, can conceive." In "The Country Fair'' there are about one hundred and forty characters, and among them he introduced his grandfather, his father, his sister, sister-in-law, and himself. His industry at this time was very great. He SIR DAVID WILKIE. 303 painted a hvjmber of portraits, some miniatures on ivory, some larger attempts on canvas, and some were family groups, one of the latter being his own father and mother. But related also to this time is another subject picture, "The Village Recruit," painted with the same faithful por- traiture of local character and points. Wilkie, however, did not remain in Cults much more than a year, very likely because it ceased to be a market for his work. He removed to St. Andrews and then to Aberdeen. But St. Andrews and Aberdeen were not encouraging centres. He thought of London. From the little village of Cults to the vast city of London was a great leap, and his parents, even his mother, pictured struggles with established repu- tations ; but Wilkie did not shrink from the venture, and a Leith packet bore him and some of his unsold work to London on the 20th of May, 1805, He engaged modest lodgings at S, Norton Street, off Portland. Road, and managed to get some of his work exhibited in a shop window near Charing Cross. He entered as a probationer at the Royal Academy classes when Haydon the painter was studying. How they became acquainted is neatly told by Haydon 304 MASTER MINDS IN ART. himself. " I went to the Academy ; Wilkie, the most punctual of mankind, was there before me. We sat and drew in silence for some time. At length Wilkie rose, came and looked over my shoulder, said nothing, and resumed his seat. I rose, went and looked over his shoulder, said nothing, and resumed my seat. We saw enough to satisfy us of each other's skill, and when the class broke up we went and dined together." Wilkie at this time was tall, pale, and thin, with unusually bright blue eyes, and a mouth expres- sive of sly, quiet humour. Soon after this meeting with Haydon, Wilkie invited him to breakfast. Haydon went to 8, Norton Street, knocked at the door of his room, and heard a voice call " Come in ! " He opened the door and found, instead of an expected breakfast, Wilkie sitting partly naked, and drawing from his left knee for a figure then on canvas. Haydon expressed surprise, but. Wilkie only replied, " It's capital practice, let me tell you." The young Scotchman saw clearly how matters stood at the Academy classes, and was evidently prepared to take his stand. " I have got acquainted with some of the students," he S/Ji DA VID WILKIE. 305 wrote in a letter at this time, " who seem to know a good deal of the cant of criticism, and are very seldom disposed to allow anything merit that is not two hundred years old. . . . I have seen a great many very fine pictures of the old school which have given me a taste very different from that which I had when I left Edinburgh, and I am convinced now that no picture can possess real merit unless it is a just representation of nature." He soon had some- thing more serious to think of than the cant of criticism. He had been several months in London living on his Scotch money as he called it, and this was week by week • getting so low that he decided to return home to his "old trade" of portrait painting if he failed to obtain portraits to paint in London ; and even to these he could not devote very much time, for the studies at the Royal Academy occupied him from eleven to two o'clock, and from five to seven o'clock. He had tried several letters of introduction : the people were very polite, very much interested, and verbally very encour- aging, and so forth, but not one of them con- cerned themselves practically in his work ; not one suggested a portrait. On the other hand, this 20 3o6 MASTER MINDS IN ART. very experience suggested to Wilkie the subject of his " Letter of Introduction," in which the delicate situation is delineated with gentle but penetrating irony. His first commission to paint a portrait was one of his own finding— that of Mr. Stodart the pianoforte dealer, to whom he happened to speak about a second- hand instrument for his sister Helen, at home. He was engaged upon this portrait when his parents up in the manse at Cults also became anxious about his prospects. " I have had in my mind for some time," wrote his father, "of applying to Lord Crawford for the loan of a few pounds — fifteen or twenty — which if he lends I would transmit to you in case you found that such assistance was necessary to continue in London for a certain time ; and the money might be paid after your return to Scotland." Wilkie replied that he had still eight pounds in hand, which would allow him time to think, and Mr. Stodart had procured him the promise that some friends of his would sit for their portraits. On the strength of the eight pounds and the prospects of work he asked his father not to become indebted to Lord Crawford. In December, 1805, Wilkie the Royal Aca- Sm DA VID WILKIE. 307 demy probatioiter became Wilkie the student ; but Tvhile this advance increased his prospects for study, it did not increase his income. In the following January he wrote telling his father that he had become quite inured to the difificul- ties of living in London, that he had been several times reduced to the last half-guinea, and had even been obliged to live on credit. Still, he had cleared himself, he had found a market for some of his work, there was the ever-looming prospect of new portraits to paint, and, in addition, an introduction to the Countess of Mansfield, who had seen a picture, and, in turn, wanted to see its painter. From January to April is a long time when it is a question of last half-guineas, and how he lived during those three months is not recorded. In April his position was still precarious, his health was weakened, he owed twenty pounds, London held out no immediate or remote hope, there were smarter painters of portraits than he was, carry- ing away all the best commissions. He had one portrait, that of Captain Ramage, on hand, he was retouching his " Country Fair," which had been sent from Fife to help his reputation, and he calculated that in six months he would 3o8 MASTER MINDS IN ART. have to return to Scotland. In the meantime he sent home for ten pounds to enable him to continue the studies at the Academy, and to complete the work promised. One day he was surprised by a visit from Lord Mansfield. His Lordship had seen " The Country Fair," and was interested; and observing the original sketch of " The Village Politicians " in the little studio, he asked Wilkie what price he would paint a picture of the same subject for. Wilkie replied, " Fifteen guineas." His Lordship made the indefinite reply, " You had better consult your friends " — presumably, about the price of the work. Instead of consulting any one, however, Wilkie proceeded with the picture on specula- tion, for possibly the approval of Lord Mansfield had revived the painter's love of the idea. The reputation of the work even while on the easel spread, and Wilkie soon had two other notable visitors — Sir George Beaumont, painter and patron, and Jackson the artist. They both commissioned Wilkie to paint a subject for them. Sir George Beaumont fixing his own price at fifty guineas. Wilkie was elated for the moment ; but he was troubled by the feeling that his process of work was so SIR DA VI D W ILK IE. 309 slow, the subjects promised would demand so much study, that, to use a familiar phrase, the horse would starve while the grass was grow ing. To increase his anxiety, his father, who had heard from another source of Wilkie's impaired health, wrote almost demanding his return to Scotland. " Should you continue where you are we are alarmed about your support ; you know that in the course of the last eleven months, besides the twenty pounds you mention, you have received fifty- five pounds from Scotland. Now as this resource must fail for the time to come, we suspect, if you come not home, that all that you can gain by drawing will be insufficient for vour maintenance. . . . Once for all, I warn you not to put your faith too much in Hope, which, rainbow-like, eludes our grasp, and glitters but to deceive our eye. If, upon a fair comparison betwixt your monthly labours and expense, you find the balance against you, hesitate no longer, but come home, ... for the sake of your health, lest by redoubling your diligence, as you propose, you shall hurt your constitution. ... I have been, and am still, distressed by a sounding in my head, and 3IO MASTER MINDS IN ART. a great defect in hearing ; your mother, too, is still ailing very much." While Wilkie and his parents were in this state of mutual anxiety, "The Village Politicians" was accepted at the Royal Academy. " On the hanging day," wrote Haydon in his Autobio- graphy, "the academicians were so delighted that they hung it on the chimney, the best place for a fine picture. On the private day there was a crowd about it, and at the dinner Anger- stein took the prince up to see it. On the Sunday (the next day) I read in The News : ' A young man by the name of Wilkie, a Scotchman, has a very extraordinary work.' I was in the clouds— hurried over my breakfast — rushed away — met Jackson, who joined me, and we both bolted into Wilkie's room. I roared out — ' Wilkie, my boy, your name's in the paper ! ' Is it rea-al-ly ? ' said David. I read the puff — we huzzaed — and, taking hands, all three danced around the table until we were tired." The picture was praised by painters and patrons, and the press in England and Scotland extended the praise from London to the country. Wilkie, however, did not venture much enthusiasm. He knew that his cupboard was haunted ; he felt Sm DA VI D W ILK IE. 3 1 1 that the sudden laudation might as suddenly cease, and leave him still struggling, still in debt, with a longing to return home for his parents' sake, and a desire to remain in London for his own. On May the 9th, 1806, Wilkie had a communication from Lord Mansfield. He had heard that Wilkie was offered thirty guineas for " The Village Politicians," and begged to remind Wilkie that the picture was expressly painted for him at the price of fifteen guineas. Two days after, Wilkie replied, " You remind me that I stated the price of the picture to be fifteen guineas ; but I beg leave only to observe that it was not acceded to by your Lordship, and, as you state in your letter, you desired me to consult some artists as to the charge I ought to make. This I have done : I have consulted artists of the first eminence with a view to be directed by their judgment, as your Lordship did not in any terms whatever agree to the price that I myself had put upon the picture. The artists with whom I have consulted consider thirty guineas as but a very moderate price for the picture. If your Lordship is not satisfied with their judgment, I am willing to refer it to the arbitration of any three Royal Academicians 312 MASTER MINDS IN ART. your Lordship shall please to name." While this correspondence was passing between them, Wilkie had two separate offers of one hundred pounds each for the work. In an interview soon after, Lord Mansfield declared on his honour that he considered the commission a settled matter at the price of fifteen guineas. "When I named that price," replied Wilkie, "your Lordship only said 'consult your friends.' I have consulted them, and they all say that I ought not to take less than thirty guineas ; but since your Lordship appeals to your honour, my memory must be in the wrong, the price there- fore is fifteen guineas." Lord Mansfield smiled, and wrote out a cheque for thirty. The parents became reconciled to his con- tinuance in London, and he concluded a long letter to his father as follows : — " I have sent a picture to Mr. Atkin, of Cupar, for which there will be an account of about ten pounds, which I have desired to be paid to you, and which I would wish to be applied in repaying Lord Crawford. I expect to be able to repay my brother very soon. I am now redoubling my application with the sure hope of success. My ambition is got beyond all bounds, and I have S/R DA VI D W ILK IE. 313 the vanity to hope that Scotland will one day be proud to boast of your affectionate son, David Wilkie." The two subjects decided upon for the pic- tures ordered by Sir George Beaumont and Jackson were " The Blind Fiddler " and " The Gamekeeper," and to these he ardently applied himself Jackson gave Sir George a hint that Wilkie would, he thought, be very glad of some cash on account. This was offered, but Wilkie did not require immediate help, and preferred to proceed on the usual terms. After his suc- cess at the Academy new friends gathered around Wilkie, and the old ones gathered still closer. Among the latter was the Earl of Mul- grave, who invited Wilkie to Mulgrave Castle, Yorkshire ; where, after finishing " The Blind Fiddler " and " The Gamekeeper," he went for several weeks, returning to London in October, 1806, with a commission from his Lordship to paint two pictures, the subjects to be Wilkie's own choice. He decided upon " Sunday Morn- ing " and the more widely known " Rent Day." " The Blind Fiddler " was exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1807, when, we must bear in mind, Wilkie was only twenty-two. This 314 MASTER MINDS IN ART. work confirmed his previous success. It was, however, very badly hung, jealously hung, it is said, next to a glaring picture which dimmed the quieter tone of Wilkie's work. Nevertheless it commanded attention. " The Blind Fiddler" played his tune on the walls of the Academy, and crowds pressed to see him. Wilkie may not have been academic in his subject or his style ; his delineations of low life, in the opinion of some, were beneath the dignity of the good old school of classicists — but, he touched the sympathy, and that won him many friends. If he had not always beauty of form or face, he had the beauty of emotion, and that availed him much. With this confirmed suc- cess, the position of Wilkie seemed assured, and still more friends and admirers circled about him. But Wilkie kept his own counsel, looked steadily at the success, as if estimating a power that was either for or against him both as a man and a painter. His .deliberate bearing at this juncture was notable. He had prior to this removed from Portland Street to lo, Sol's Row, Hampstead, to escape the tongue of a landlady, and on the success of "The Blind Fiddler" he removed again ; this time to Tottenham Court SIR DAVID WILKIE. 315 Road : mainly for his health, but also to avoid the number of idle and inquisitive callers, who now began to take a vivid interest in his affairs. One of the callers — in this case a welcome one — was Bannister the actor. The actor knocked at the door of the studio, and, obeying the call " Come in ! " he found, apparently, an old woman on a low seat, with brush and. palette in hand. "You see," said a man's voice, " I can't move, lest I spoil the folds of my petticoat. I am, for the present, an old woman, very much at your service." It was Wilkie acting as his own model. With the flush of success upon him Wilkie went home to see his father and mother. His visit to Cults became the talk of the district. Lord Leven, and Lord Crawford, and neigh- bours, hitherto sceptical, but now convinced, called to add their congratulations. Wilkie, however, fell ill with a fever soon after his arrival, due, it was thought, to a very rough passage from London to Leith acting on his overwrought condition. For some months he continued very feeble, and was unable to return to London until August, 1807. Those who are not behind the scenes of a new 3i6 MASTER MINDS IN ART. power struggling towards its own development cannot judge of the unremitting strife from one stage of progress to another. No wonder, then, that Wilkie's two successes, as successes, were overestimated in their bearing upon the practical question of his bread-and-butter. Not long after his return to London he wrote to his brother in India, who had imagined the painter endowed with the power of Midas at the end of every brush : — " What I have received since I commenced my career has barely been sufficient to support me. . . . Indeed, my present is the most singular position that can well be imagined. I have at least forty pictures be- spoke, and some by the highest people in the kingdom, and yet, after all, I have but sel- dom got anything for any picture I have yet painted " — meaning that the picture seldom cleared the current expenses during the time he was engaged upon the work, with the result that he had to borrow, and get into debt in other ways. But Wilkie's calm realization of his actual position, both in regard to the world and himself, never deserted him. The praise of the world was flattering and encouraging ; but in- stead of relieving his responsibilities it increased SIR DAVID WILKIE. 317 and deepened them. He saw clearly that in- cessant application to the subtleties of his art, to the discovery of its resources and his own, was inevitable if he wished to retain the posi- tion he had won. He made no false pretence to power, he did not allow assumption to form a cloak for his ignorance. As in the days of his boyhood, so in these days of his early man- hood, and even with the success of " The Country Politicians" and "The Blind Fiddler" shedding a halo about the threshold of a great career, he did not hesitate to stop the conversa- tion of his painter friends if there were some technical point he did not grasp, even though to appear ignorant compromised him for the mo- ment in the opinion of those who could not dare to be true to their ignorance. Wilkie, on the other hand, did not absorb all, and impart none. " There is a great liberality in Wilkie," wrote Haydon, " for he keeps nothing to himself, and, right or wrong, always communicates his thoughts to others. . . . ' What is this, and that, and that for ? ' brought out answers which I stored up. His knowledge in composi- tion was exquisite. The remarks he made to me relative to his own works I looked into 3i8 MASTER MINDS IN ART. Raphael for, and found them appHed there, and then it was evident to me that Wilkie's peasant pictures concealed deep principles of \}a& ponere totum which I did not know. It was through ignorance, and not superior knowledge, that at first I could not perceive his excellence." It was in the same sincere,, modest, and courageous spirit which had characterized him from the first, that Wilkie decided, on his return to Lon- don from Cults, to continue his attendance at the Royal Academy classes. There he studied from living models, there he attended the lec- tures delivered on painting by Tresham, and on sculpture by Flaxman. At his Sol's Row studio he began, on commission, for a gentleman who wanted a series of historical subjects by several artists, the subject of " King Alfred in the Neatherd's Cottage." He had been thinking of the subject for some time, and was so anxious about it that he sought the opinion of his ready friend. Sir George Beaumont, about the general spirit of the conception and proposed treatment. He read much on the subject, he studied the period, he told and re-told the story about the king and the cakes in his own mind, until it seemed to be an experience of his own ; SIR DAVID WILKIE. 319 he drew each figure separately, then drew all the figures grouped, and finally, to assure him- self of the natural effect of the light and shade of the composition, he modelled the whole in clay. Such was the patient way in which he sought out the power of his materials and the cunning of his hand. After painting a portrait of Lady Mary Fitzgerald for the Earl of Mul- grave, Wilkie finished his " Card Players " for the Duke of Gloucester, who pleasantly sur- prised the artist by paying him one hundred and fifty guineas for the picture — one hundred guineas more than agreed upon. Wilkie next proceeded with " A Sick Lady visited by her Physician." He decided to keep this work and himself completely uncommitted to any one. He wanted to feel the liberty of his own ideas once more. The life of Wilkie soon became crowded with the most entertaining events. The great called upon him, and he called upon the great. Lord Egremont, Lord and Lady Mulgrave, Lord and Lady Lansdowne look in at his studio ; and he, sometimes alone, and sometimes with Haydon, calls on Leigh Hunt and Mulready, the painter; goes to church to hear Sydney Smith preach ; 320 MASTER MINDS IN ART. attends the theatre to see Grimaldi, Charles Mathews, and Liston play ; goes to a musical party to hear Haydn's music, dines with Sir George Beaumont, meets with Mrs. Opie, Cole- ridge, and Constable ; he has Haydon to break- fast, works from ten till four, attends the Academy, has Haydon for supper, and even sits for two hours as a model for a hand in one of his friend's pictures. These facts are taken from a journal that he began to keep with business-like brevity. " Had a call from Mr. L., who disgusted me with his fulsome flattery. Painted from ten till three, in which I put the bird-cage in the corner of the picture of ' The Sick Lady,' with a cloth over it as if to prevent the bird disturbing her with its song." On the 1 8th of July, 1808, he wrote : " Finished my picture of ' The Sick Lady,' which has occupied me altogether about four months." " The Jew's Harp " was his next subject, and the following brief extracts from the journal show us the man at work. (July) " 20th. Began my sketch of my picture, ' The Jew's Harp,' which I almost finished by four o'clock. 22nd. Walk before breakfast. Painted a little in the fore part of the day : to the Admiralty, SIR DAVID WILKIE. 321 and saw Lord and Lady Mul grave, and showed them a small sketch of the picture I had begun, which they seemed to like. 23rd. Walked before breakfast ; then began the picture of 'The Jew's Harp.' 25th. Went over some part of the physician's head in ' The Sick Lady,' and drew a hand for my next picture. 26th. Put in the hand of the man playing the Jew's harp. Went to dine at M.'s, where I met ten people I knew nothing of, which made the entertainment very unpleasant for me. 27th. Went out to buy a Jew's harp. 28th. Painted from ten till three, did a good deal to the man playing. 30th. On my way back from Liston's I saw a dog, which, being suitable for my picture, I agreed with the man to whom it belonged to send it to me with a person to sit ; which he did, and I was lucky enough to pencil it in an hour ; this, with the sleeve of the boy, was all I got done to-day with ' The Jew's Harp.' 31st. Hoppner and Constable came to breakfast. I went to church and heard a very good sermon." Wilkie had not yet done with " The Sick Lady," however. The entries in his journal show that from time to time he brought maturer 21 322 . MASTER MINDS IN ART. judgment to bear onit — now altering a costume, now improving the expression, now re-touching a head ; and he worked alternately on " The Sick Lady," "The Jew's Harp," "The Cut Finger," and a family group of portraits. He had evidently made his style felt. Others could now perceive his individual view of a subject, and one day, when in the company of Liston and Bannister, the actors, Bannister suggested the opening of a will as a subject for his brush. Wilkie thought the idea an excellent one, and we know from his fine work with that title, that he remembered it. Work was telling upon Wilkie. The strain of success, and the necessity of continuing suc- cess, weighed heavily on a constitution not robust to begin with, and in June, 1809, Wilkie and his friend Haydon set out for Devonshire for rest and recuperation. Plympton, the~ birth- place of Sir Joshua Reynolds, was the centre they made for, and having stayed on the Devonshire coast, riding and bathing, for about a month, they visited Wells Cathedral, Glas- tonbury Abbey, travelled to Bath, and returned to London. In August, Wilkie, seeking another change, availed himself of Sir George Beau- SIX DAVID WILKIE. 323 mont's hospitality at Coleorton Hall, Ashby-de- la-Zouch. There, however, he was so impressed by the picturesque rusticity, that he did some sketching — got into the graces of an old cottager, and sketched her kitchen and her beautiful young daughter-in-law and child. One of his sketches he compared with a work by Rubens in Coleorton Hall, saw the superior effect obtained by the Flemish master, and modified his own accordingly. He was very much impressed by life in an English Hall, and noted in his diary that in the evening Sir George desired all the servants to come in, when Lady Beaumont read part of the Church Service, and Sir George read a sermon. " I was highly gratified," he adds, " with this devo- tional duty, which I had never before witnessed in any part of England." By September, 1809, Wilkie had taken such a stand, his originality and his distinct popu- larity among the general visitors to the Royal Academy Exhibitions were so marked, that his friends, some of whom were in high quarters, advised him to enter his name as a candidate as an associate of the Academy. A year later, having worked well in the meantime, he was 324 MASTER MINDS IN ART. elected, Wilkie then being only twenty-five. At this time he was engaged upon " The Village Festival." He made several attempts with the subject. He wanted it for the approaching Exhibition, but it had to be set aside. It was too exacting a subject to deal with except in his best mood and with his customary patience. With the object of being represented by some- thing in the Academy that year, he painted "The Man with the Girl's Cap," or "The Wardrobe Ransacked," a less exacting work, and one he could finish in time. But Wilkie fell between two stools. Several influential members of the Academy looked at " The Man with the Girl's Cap" very dubiously. Surely the painter of " The Blind Fiddler," " The Sick Lady," " The Rent Day," and " The Village Politicians," would not hurt his reputation on the year of his election as an associate with such a work as this ! That was the general, or apparently general solicitude, and Wilkie at the last moment was advised to withdraw the picture. Thinking the indignity of with- drawing would only confirm and increase adverse opinion when the news got abroad, he was disposed to risk the exhibition ; but SIR DA VID VVILKIE. 325 his friends prevailed upon him to act on the judgment of the hanging committee — a course he partly regretted, for there was afterwards a suspicion of duplicity in the transaction. Wilkie of course outlived this piece of questionable business. On the death of Sir Francis Bourgeoise, R.A., in 181 1, Wilkie, somewhat to his surprise, was elected a member of the Royal Academy. The honour was a surprise because Wilkie had doubted the attitude of the Academy as a body towards him. There may have been individual members with a strong admiration for his work, but he felt that the Academy as a constitution looked with suspicion upon the style of one who, according to Fuseli, had " made a perilous step into the vulgar," and who belonged to " the school of beggary" in art. He was also sur- prised because of his age, Wilkie then being only twenty-six. His pictures in the Academy that year were "A Humorous Scene " (the germ of " The Penny Wedding") and " The Game- keeper." " The Village Festival " was not ad- vanced enough, or Wilkie would have exhibited that also. In August of that year Wilkie, himself only partially restored to vigour, went 326 MASTER MINDS IN ART. home to his father, who was very ill. When he returned to London, in October, he took rooms at 29, Philimore Place, Kensington, and began work on the oil sketch of " Blindman's Buff," for the Prince Regent, He had for some time contemplated an exhibition of his works, and in 181 2 the desire returned so strongly that in March of that year he took a very handsome room in Pall Mall. " The Exhibition requires me to lay out a great deal of money," he wrote to his sister, " and I have to go to town on my pony almost every day. . . . It is giving great offence to some of my brethren of the Academy, which I am doing all I can to pacify, although I cannot entirely remove their dissatisfaction." The Exhibition was opened in May. The financial result is very doubtful. The venture cost Wilkie ^414 for rent and advertising, and whenever asked if the Exhibition had been successful, he simply shook his head in silence. In 181 2, however, he sold his "Village Festival " for eight hundred guineas. In December of that year Wilkie's father died. It was thought that his mother and sister would have to remove from Cults, and live quietly in some neighbouring town. That was S/J? DA VID WILKIE. 327 almost decided when Wilkie, under a strong impulse, wrote to his sister in January, 1813 : " Instead of going to Cupar, St. Andrews, or Edinburgh, as we were thinking of at first, my mother and yourself must make up your minds to come to London. This is a plan which, I must say, never occurred as a practical scheme till within these few days." In August the mother, daughter, and son were living together in Lon- don, at24 (instead of 29), Lower Philimore Place, a house Wilkie had taken to provide for the change. The change of conditions almost im- mediately acted upon him like a new force. The proximity of his mother and sister sug- gested a love theme, " Duncan Gray," also called " The Refusal," and with his mother and sister as models, he began work. Mul- ready, the artist, sat for the dejected lover, and Wilkie sold the picture for three hundred and thirty guineas. Wilkie exhibited " Duncan Gray" and "The Letter of Introduction" in the next Academy Exhibition ; and that settled, yielding to the curiosity to see the French col- lections of art, he in 18 14, in company with Haydon, visited Paris, Next year Wilkie was strongly advised to 328 MASTER MINDS IN ART. rest, and for a complete change he, along with Raimbach, the engraver, went to the Nether- lands, drawn there by the reputation of the Dutch colourists. In 1816 he visited Fife to refresh his memory for further work. While in Scotland he painted his " Sir Walter Scott and Family," and soon after his departure for Lon- don the authorities of Cupar, hearing of his recent visit to the district, voted him the Free- dom of Cupar. The Duke of Wellington desired Wilkie to paint a picture commemorative of his military success, and Wilkie undertook " The Chelsea Pensioners." The King of Bavaria also desired one of his works, and Wilkie took up the subject suggested by Ban- nister, the actor, " The Reading of the Will " — a subject he worked at most diligently during the autumn of 18 19 and the following year. When " The Reading of the Will " was ex- hibited, George IV. wanted to induce Wilkie to send the King of Bavaria a duplicate, and to let him have the original ; but Wilkie felt in honour bound to carry out his contract with the Bavarian monarch, and after some courtly cor- respondence between the ambassadors of the two kings, the picture was despatched to Munich. S/Ji DA VI D WILKIE. 329 To George IV., Wilkie suggested the subject of " Knox Preaching at St. Andrews " ; but his majesty wanted something more humorous. The mind of the painter, however, was not in a humorous mood. " The Reading of the Waterloo Despatch to the Chelsea Pensioners " was the most pressing idea just then. He realized its national importance. He knew that artists and the public would have great expectations ; and, as usual, he wanted to fully realize them. He submitted sketches to the Duke of Wellington, studied and re-studied the subject, its com- position, its effect, its story ; sketched and re-sketched the part of Old Chelsea he intended to introduce, and watched, day by day the movements of the maimed old pensioners of the district. He resolutely grappled with the idea; but the effort was not to continue. His health once more threatened to give way, and he was induced to form one of a party to visit France. On his return with renewed vigour, he zealously applied himself to the haunting task for the Iron Duke. In 1822 it was finished and exhibited. It proved to be, as he antici- pated, a truly national picture. The success was electrical. From morning until dusk there 330 MASTER MINDS IN ART. was a continiaally changing crowd before the work, and at times so demonstrative that to protect the work from injury by the continual pressure of people around it, the committee had a semicircular rail erected. For this work the artist received twelve hundred guineas. About this time Wilkie and his mother were invited to spend a little time at Woodbridge, and from Woodbridge Wilkie soon had to travel north to witness the entry of George IV. into Edinburgh, an event which, by the king's command, was to suggest a picture for the royal pleasure. On the death of Sir Henry Raeburn,. Wilkie was appointed, in July, 1823, limner to the king in Scotland. The name of David Wilkie had been spread- ing far and wide, and by means of engravings his work was beginning to spread also. Impres- sions of "The Rent Day," " The Village Politicians," " The Blind Fiddler," " The Letter of Introduction," and " The Rabbit on the Wall " were extremely popular. So that the people as well as his patrons became acquainted with the spirit of the man. Wilkie himself etched several subjects, and presented a series of them to the king. In the year 1824 Wilkie SIR DAVID WILKIE. 331 received further honours. While in Scotland seeking details for his picture for George IV., and a sitting from Sir Walter Scott, he was entertained to dinner by brother artists at Edinburgh, and had what he described to his sister as " a royal feast." He then travelled in Fifeshire a little, and returned to London, to a new and larger house. No. 7, The Terrace, Kensington, where his mother and sister had by arrangement moved in his absence. He hastened home because of his mother's serious illness. But he was too late. She died the day before his arrival. Calamities followed fast. His brother James returned from ordnance work abroad, shattered in health, and with a wife and family to support ; and soon suc- cumbed. Then a terrible experience of his sister added grief to grief with deeper intensity. Her betrothed died at her side on the night before the morning fixed for their marriage ; and very shortly after came the news of the death of Wilkie's eldest brother in India. With these calamities falling upon Wilkie, no wonder that ill-health again seized him, and he and his sister went for change and rest to Chelten- ham. This only temporarily relieved him. A 332 MASTER MINDS IN ART. greater change was deemed absolutely neces- sary. He went to Paris with an American artist named Newton, where they met a cousin of Wilkie's, David Lister. This was the begin- ning of a still longer journey. He travelled through Switzerland into Italy, where he stayed eight months, without any marked improve- ment in health. The only relief was the excitement of seeing so much, but as the princi- pal ailment was in his head, that relief also had its limits, and at times complete rest was necessary. " I am," he wrote from Rome, " with every faculty alive, stout and active in frame, yet as unable as ever to make even the slightest study or sketch of what is to be seen around me. This state of nervous debility has now lasted for nearly ten months. In this uncertainty may not one ask, Is the disease really understood ? ... In health, in strength, and even in good spirits and in soundness of mind, I feel as well as ever ; yet still that want of energy for continued thought remains, which, though it does not much diminish the enjoy- ments of life, must while it lasts unfit me for all its active purposes." There was yet another disaster awaiting him at home. " The bills on Sm DA VID IVILKIE. 333 Hurst, Robinson, and Co., will be falling due shortly," he wrote from Rome to his -brother Thomas. " These will be a help, as my whole dependence is upon them, and the sums very large ; the panics in London, which have created anxiety here, have given me also uneasiness." After several months' suspense, the crash came. Messrs. Hurst and Robinson, who owed him about ;^i,7oo, failed with debts stated at ^500,000 ; his brother Thomas failed ; and Wilkie had to forfeit ^1,000 on a bond of security that he had given for his brother James, who had returned from India. Though the loss was great, doubly great to one who required rest rather than additional work, he still had sufficient for himself and sister ; nevertheless the effect upon his health was serious. He passed from Italy to Germany, still for rest and entertain- ment. He tried the baths at Toplitz, but found that he was weaker. Continued travel was advised, and Wilkie once more made for Italy. A public dinner was given in his honour by the Scotch artists in Rome. The pleasure of this, however, was counterbalanced by the news of the death of his great friend. Sir George Beaumont. In April, 1827, Wilkie thought it a favourable 334 MASTER MINDS IN ART. sign when he could write from Rome, telHng his brother that within the past five months he had been able to finish two small pictures, and carry a larger one nearly to completion by little and by little, half an hour at a time, and three half-hours a day. He returned through Switzer- land to France and then into Spain, where he did a number of pictures suggested by his travels. He reached Paris once more, in June, 1828, in much better spirits, and, after an absence of three years, returned to England. His Spanish pictures were a surprise to those who had fixed their impressions of him by his earlier work, and the king purchased four for his own gallery—" A Council of War," " A Guerilla's Departure," " The Defence of Saragossa," and " A Guerilla's Return." In 1830 the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Thomas Lawrence, died, and Wilkie became a candidate for the president's chair. The king at once made Wilkie his painter in ordinary, with a view, no doubt, to secure his return. Wilkie, however, received only one solitary vote — that of his friend Collins. He shortly went to Brighton to paint the king's portrait, then visited Scotland and Ireland, making sketches in the SIR DA VI D WILKIE. 335 latter country from which he painted " The Still at Work " and " The Peep o' Day Boy." On the 15th of June, 1836, Wilkie became Sir David Wilkie. George IV. knighted him, and in the following year, on the accession of Queen Victoria, the new knight was commanded to paint her majesty's first council. " Her majesty has been most gracious," he wrote from Brighton to his sister, "appearing tore- cognize me as an early friend. I proceed with the picture — have painted-in her figure on the canvas you sent. Her face I have painted, nearly a profile — it is thought like her. She sat to-day in the dress — a white satin covered with gauze embroidered — I think it looks well. All here think the subject good, and she likes it herself. She appoints a sitting once in two days, and never puts me off." In another letter he wrote : " Having been accustomed to see the Queen from childhood, my reception had a little the air of an early acquaintance. She is eminently beautiful, her features nicely formed, her skin smooth, her hair worn close to her face in a most simple way, glossy and clean- looking. Her manner, though trained to act the sovereign, is yet simple and natural : she 335 MASTER MINDS IN ART. has all the decision, thought, and self-possession of a Queen of older years ; has all the buoy- ancy of youth, and, from the smile to the un- restrained laugh, is a perfect child." For three years Wilkie worked at portraits, and his pictures of Irish life ; but somewhat suddenly in 1840 he left England in company with a gentleman named Woodburn for the East. They first went to Holland, then followed the Danube route to Constantinople, sketched and painted with some of his old avidity, sailed to Smyrna, and reached Jerusa- lem in February, 1841, where he remained five weeks. This complete change of society and scene acted very favourably upon him. He had access to the most notable personages, saw sights few strangers are permitted to see, and painted portraits, and sketched studies with some of the old spirit, and yet with new, for the Oriental associations came upon him with the surprise of new form and colour. Leaving Constantinople, he and his companion Wood- burn made for Alexandria via Jaffa, Damietta, and Lazaretto. At Lazaretto, while waiting for favourable weather for the vessel to re-start, Wilkie experienced an acute pain in the S/Ji DA VID WILKIE. 337 abdomen. He fancied it left him weaker, but a stay of two days at an hotel in Alexandria revived him, the comforts of which " after three months' roughing were exquisite." Something, however, was wrong, for he consulted a doctor, who advised him to desist taking physic, as though Wilkie had been hankering after a cure for his unknown ailment. Leaving Alexandria about the middle of May, 1841, and reaching Malta by the 26th, he began to think earnestly of home. In a letter written on that date to his sister — one who in his presence and in his absence had done so much for him — he ventured to hint that she should have the house got into condition for his arrival. We may be sure it would be so, that his sister Helen, his brother Thomas, and his brother's wife, and a baby born during his travels, would be there awaiting him. Patiently and devotedly had they seen to his affairs during his tour in search of health, and as he referred so little in his cheetful letters to his ailments, the more confident were they that they would welcome him restored to some of his early vigour. On the other hand, the surgeon of the steamer Oriental recorded in his log that Wilkie was 22 338 MASTER MINDS IN ART. "apparently greatly impaired in constitution" when he went on board at Alexandria ; and at eight o'clock in the morning, before the steamer left Malta homeward bound, on the ist of June, Wilkie was taken suddenly ill. The steamer sailed at half-past ten in the morning, and shortly after eleven Wilkie died. The vessel put back, but the authorities at Malta would not allow the body to be landed. The Oriental, with its sacred charge, steamed off again towards England ; but that night — a night in June, in Gibraltar Bay — the steamer's engines were stopped, the vessel was brought to a stand, the passengers and crew were assembled on deck, like grieving representatives of. the British nation, and the body of Sir David Wilkie, R.A., was committed to the deep. The news fell upon the country with a shock. Painters, patrons, and the public alike were grieved, and yet were incredulous in their grief. The members of the Royal Academy were assembled, and a resolution of condolence was orderejd to be sent to Wilkie's sister and brother, and at a subsequent public meeting it was re- solved to erect a statue of Wilkie in the inner hg^H of the National Gallery. SIR DA VID WILKIE. 339 And so passed away — passed away from life into the deepened affection of the nation — one of the most original of its children. He was one of the many brilliant sons of hardy Scot- land — meditative, cautious until sure, but once sure, full of calm daring ; industrious in trifles, doing little by little, and doing that little well with a definite purpose. Without having as much depth as Burns, or as much breadth as Sir Walter Scott, Wilkie concentrated on canvas a mingling of what they diffused through literature. His was story, humour, pathos, told through the expression of form, with colour as an accessory ; but only as an accessory, for witness with what directness his story can be told by a good engraving. There is no questioning his themes ; in the majority of cases there is no need for a title. The picture and its sentiment are one, and before there is time for the inquiry, " What is it called ? " the spectator is at home in one of Wilkie's cottages, enjoying — not examining — his humour and pathos. Except by painters, his art, as art, is rarely noted. The mind is not permitted that lapse in which it usually does note. It is constantly kept active by the expressed thoughts on canvas. They 340 MASTER MINDS IN ART. may not be profound thoughts, but they are thoughts. They may even be thoughts which coincide with your own observation ; if so, the keener the pleasure : a bellows, a toasting-fork, a pony's bridle and reins, a key on a wall, a hand-loom, a man casting the shadow of a rabbit on the wall, his wife nursing a child delighted with the phantom, and a group of children in the secret watching, are all very simple ideas, mere reflexes of commonplace fact ; but collectively they become the language of sentiment, and separately they fill the mind with memories. His children are always childish, and charming even when not beautiful ; his dogs are not as superbly done as Landseer's, but they usually have something to say in the general story of his picture, as witness a pup scratching its ear with its hind paw, while it appears con- cerned in a girl having her ear pierced. He has been compared with Hogarth, but Wilkie was not so much a moralist as a sentimentalist, and more of a sympathetic Dickens than a satirical Thackeray, though he had some of the elements of both. His was an instance of talent becoming genius itself by the force of deliberate and persistent labour. Wilkie him- S//? DAVID WILKIE. 341 self would not grant genius the credit of what he knew was the result of a patient husband- ing of countless efforts to do something he could not always do. Ultimately he was successful. He had his brilliant triumphs ; to- wards the close he had his trials, too, but these he bore with the same fortitude with which he had borne his early struggles while pressing towards the goal he ever held in view. Some painters have taught us to admire nature ; some have increased our affection for animals ; Wilkie has deepened our love of mankind. UNWIN BROtHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON. Mr. Unwin has pleasure in sending herewith his Catalogue of SeleB Books. Book Buyers are requested to order any Books they may require from thetr local Bookseller. Catalogue of Select Books in Belles Lettres^ History, Biography, Theology ^ Travel, General Literature, and Books for Children. (^^ffe0 Uiixtti, EUnKoriOn ■ Studies of the Antique and the Mediasval r 'in the Renaissance. By Vernon Lee,. Cheap Edition in one volume. Demy 8vo., cloth, 7$. 6d. 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The Bible and the Age; ^:^S:^:^^[ Consistent and Verifiable Interpretation of Scripture. By CuTHBERT CoLLiNGWooD,M.A.,andB.M. Oxon. Demy 8vo., cloth, I OS. 6d. ' ' We heartily congratulate the church on so valuable an addition to its litera- ture. " — Tke New Church Magazine. The Ethic of Free Thought: \ff^:i Lectures. By Karl Pearson, M.A. Demy 8vo., cloth, 12s. Contents— ¥^v.Y. Thought :— The Ethic of Free Thought— The Prostitution of Science— Matter and Soul— The Ethic of Renunciation— The Enthusiasm of the Market-place and of the Study— History :— Maimonides and Spmoza— Meister Eckehart the Mystic— Note on Jacob Wimfeling— The Influence of Martin Luther on the Social and Intellectual Welfare of Germany— 1 he Kingdom of God in Munster.— Sociology :— The Moral Basis of Sociahsm— Socialism in Theory and Practice— The Woman's Question— Sketch of the Relations of Sex in Germany— Socialism and Sex. 1 6 Cfteologp anD Pijilosopbg. Descartes and His School. 2.^ ^r°, J"^M'' Translated from the Third and Revised German Edition by J. P. Gordy, Ph.D. Edited by Noah Porter, D.D., LJli.D. Demy 8vo., cloth, 1 6s. "A valuable addition to the literature of Philosophy." — Scotsman. " No greater service could be done to English and American students than to give them a trustworthy rendering of Kuno Fischer's brilliant expositions."— AfjKrf. Socrates ' ■^ Translation of the Apology, Crito, and Parts of the Phaedo of Plato, izmo., cloth, 3s. 6d. " The translation is clear and AegaxiX."— Morning Post. A Day in Athens with Socrates : Translations J I rom th e Protagoras and the Republic of Plato. i2mo., cloth, 3s. 6d. " We can commend these volumes to the English reader, as giving him what he wants — the Socratic . . . philosophy at first hand, with a sufficiency of explana- tory and illustrative comment." — Pall Mall Gazette. Talks with Socrates about Life : Translations from the Gorgias and the Republic of Plato, izmo., cloth, 3s. 6d. ' ' A real service is rendered to the general reader who has no Greek, and to whom the two ancient philosophers are only names, by the publication of these' three inviting httle volumes. . . . Every young man who is forming a library ought to add them to his collection." — Christian Leader. tv 23 The Bird's Nest ^'^'^ other sermons for children of all ' Ages. ByThe Rev. Samuel Cox, D.D., Author of "Expositions," &c. Imp. i6mo., cloth, 6s. "These beautiful discourses were addressed to children of all ages, and must have found an echo in the hearts of many youthful listeners."— a James's Gazette. " Dr. Samuel Cox has opened up a comparatively new vein." Nineteenth Century, ArminiuS Vambery : ^is Life and Adventures. / Written by Himself. With Introductory Chapter dedicated to the Boys of England. Portrait and Seventeen Illustrations. Crown 8vo., 5s. " We welcome it as one of the best books of travel that our boys could have possibly placed in their hands." — Schoolmaster. Boys' Own Stories. ^^ f='=°'^T. ^ Hope Author of J " btories of Young Adventurers, " Stories out of School Time," &c. Eight Illustrations. Crown 8vo., cloth, 5s. " This is a really admirable selection of genuine narrative and history, treated with discretion and skill by the author. Mr. Hope has not gathered his stores from the highway, but has explored far afield in less-beaten tracks, as may be seen in his 'Adventures of a Ship-boy' and 'A Smith among Savages.' " — Saturday Review. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Newly Edited after the Original Editions. Nineteen lUus- , trations. Large crown 8vo., cloth extra, 5s. The chief papers of interest in The Century for 1887-1888 -will be those dealing with Travel and Adventure. Mr. Kennan will describe his Adventures, Exile Life, and the People he met with in a journey of fifteen thousand miles through Russia and Siberia. Mr. Roosevelt will treat of the Wild Industries and scarcely Wilder Sports of the great lonely plains of the Far West ; while Mr. De Kay will contribute a series of studies on the Ethnology, Landscape, Literature, and Arts of Ireland. Price is. \d. Monthly. Post free, ipj-. a year. NIGHOIAS CONDUCTED BY ,ARYAAPES- DODGE- For 188 7- 1888, will contain a large number of Tales by many well-known Authors, among whom are Miss Alcott, Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Frank R. Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, Amelia B. Barr, H. H. BoyeSen, Miss F. C, Baylor and Palmer Cox. Price \s. Monthly. Post free, \\s. a year. XoiiOon: IX. jFiebet "Clnwln, 26, ipaternostec Square. gr ■5««5«3W!g^BWSg«