But In
The Large Towns He Is Usually Excellent Company, Though
As Discursive As Sterne, And Strangely Indifferent, For A
Man Of Imagination, To Those Superficial Aspects Of
Things Which The Poor Pages Now Before The Reader Are
Mainly An Attempt To Render.
It is his conviction that
Alfieri, at Florence, bored the Countess of Albany ter-
ribly; and he adds that the famous Gallophobe died
of jealousy of the little painter from Montpellier.
The
Countess of Albany left her property to Fabre; and I
suppose some of the pieces in the museum of his
native town used to hang in the sunny saloons of that
fine old palace on the Arno which is still pointed out
to the stranger in Florence as the residence of Alfieri.
The institution has had other benefactors, notably
a certain M. Bruyas, who has enriched it with an extra-
ordinary number of portraits of himself. As these,
however, are by different hands, some of them dis-
tinguished, we may suppose that it was less the model
than the artists to whom M. Bruyas wished to give
publicity. Easily first are two large specimens of
David Teniers, which are incomparable for brilliancy
and a glowing perfection of execution. I have a weak-
ness for this singular genius, who combined the delicate
with the grovelling, and I have rarely seen richer
examples. Scarcely less valuable is a Gerard Dow
which hangs near them, though it must rank lower as
having kept less of its freshness. This Gerard Dow
did me good; for a master is a master, whatever he
may paint. It represents a woman paring carrots,
while a boy before her exhibits a mouse-trap in which
he has caught a frightened victim. The good-wife has
spread a cloth on the top of a big barrel which serves
her as a table, and on this brown, greasy napkin, of
which the texture is wonderfully rendered, lie the raw
vegetables she is preparing for domestic consumption.
Beside the barrel is a large caldron lined with copper,
with a rim of brass. The way these things are painted
brings tears to the eyes; but they give the measure of
the Musee Fabre, where two specimens of Teniers and
a Gerard Dow are the jewels. The Italian pictures are
of small value; but there is a work by Sir Joshua Rey-
nolds, said to be the only one in France, - an infant
Samuel in prayer, apparently a repetition of the pic-
ture in England which inspired the little plaster im-
age, disseminated in Protestant lands, that we used to
admire in our childhood. Sir Joshua, somehow, was
an eminently Protestant painter; no one can forget
that, who in the National Gallery in London has looked
at the picture in which he represents several young
ladies as nymphs, voluminously draped, hanging gar-
lands over a statue, - a picture suffused indefinably
with the Anglican spirit, and exasperating to a mem-
ber of one of the Latin races. It is an odd chance,
therefore, that has led him into that part of France
where Protestants have been least _bien vus_. This is the
country of the dragonnades of Louis XIV.
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