Many Of The Pictures Are Hard
As A Tavern Sign, And As Ill Drawn; But They Mark The Era Of Dawning
Effort.
Then a long corridor of Dutch paintings, in which Rubens figures
conspicuously, displaying, as usual, all manner of scarlet
abominations, mixed with most triumphant successes.
He has a boar hunt
here, which is absolutely terrific. Rubens has a power peculiar to
himself of throwing into the eyes of animals the phosphorescent
magnetic gleam of life and passion. Here also was a sketch of his for
a large picture at Munich of the Last Judgment, in which the idea of
physical torture is enlarged upon with a most revolting vigor of
imagery.
Then a small room devoted to the Spanish and Italian schools,
containing pictures by Murillo and Velasquez. Then the French hall,
where were two magnificent Claudes, the finest I had yet seen. They
were covered with glass, (a bad arrangement,) which rendered one of
them almost entirely _unseeable_. I studied these long, with much
interest. The combinations were poetical, the foregrounds minutely
finished, even to the painting of flowers, and the fine invisible veil
of ether that covers the natural landscape given as I have never
before seen it. The peculiarity of these pieces is, that they are
painted in _green_ - a most common arrangement in God's landscapes,
but very uncommon in those of great masters. Painters give us trees
and grounds, brown, yellow, red, chocolate, any color, in short, but
green. The reason of this is, that green is an exceedingly difficult color
to manage. I have seen, sometimes, in spring, set against a deep-blue
sky, an array of greens, from lightest yellow to deepest blue of the
pines, tipped and glittering with the afternoon's sun, yet so swathed in
some invisible, harmonizing medium, that the strong contrasts of color
jarred upon no sense. All seemed to be bound by the invisible cestus
of some celestial Venus. Yet what painter would dare attempt the same?
Herein lies the particular triumph of Claude. It is said that he took his
brush and canvas into the fields, and there studied, hour after hour, into
the mysteries of that airy medium which lies between the eye and the
landscape, as also between the foreground and the background. Hence
he, more than others, succeeds in giving the green landscape and the
blue sky the same effect that God gives them. If, then, other artists
would attain a like result, let them not copy Claude, but Claude's Master.
Would that our American artists would remember that God's pictures are
nearer than Italy. To them it might be said, (as to the Christian,) "The
word is nigh thee." When we shall see a New England artist, with his
easel, in the fields, seeking, hour after hour, to reproduce on the canvas
the magnificent glories of an elm, with its firmament of boughs and
branches, - when he has learned that there is in it what is worth a
thousand Claudes - then the morning star of art will have risen on our
hills. God send us an artist with a heart to reverence his own native
mountains and fields, and to veil his face in awe when the great
Master walks before his cottage door. When shall arise the artist
whose inspiration shall be in prayer and in communion with God? - whose
eye, unsealed to behold his beauty in the natural world, shall offer
up, on canvas, landscapes which shall be hymns and ascriptions?
By a strange perversity, people seem to think that the Author of
nature cannot or will not inspire art; but "He that formed the eye,
shall he not see? he that planted the ear, shall he not hear?" Are not
God's works the great models, and is not sympathy of spirit with the
Master necessary to the understanding of the models?
But to continue our walk. We entered another Dutch apartment,
embellished with works by Dietrich, prettily colored, and laboriously
minute; then into a corridor devoted chiefly to the works of Rembrandt
and scholars. In this also were a number of those minute culinary
paintings, in which cabbages, brass kettles, onions, potatoes, &c.,
are reproduced with praiseworthy industry. Many people are enraptured
with these; but for my part I have but a very little more pleasure in
a turnip, onion, or potato in a picture than out, and always wish that
the industry and richness of color had been bestowed upon things in
themselves beautiful. The great Master, it is true, gives these
models, but he gives them not to be looked at, but eaten. If painters
could only contrive to paint vegetables (cheaply) so that they could
be eaten, I would be willing.
Two small saloons are next devoted to the modern Dutch and German
school. In these is Denner's head of an old woman, which Cowper
celebrates in a pretty poem - a marvel of faithful reproduction. One
would think the old lady must have sat at least a year, till he had
daguerreotyped every wrinkle and twinkle. How much better all this
labor spent on the head of a good old woman than on the head of a
cabbage!
And now come a set of Italian rooms, in which we have some curious
specimens of the Romish development in religion; as, for instance, the
fathers Gregory, Augustine, and Jerome, meditating on the immaculate
conception of the Virgin. Think of a painter employing all his powers
in representing such a fog bank!
Next comes a room dedicated to the works of Titian, in which two nude
Venuses, of a very different character from the de Milon, are too
conspicuous. Titian is sensuous; a Greek, but not of the highest
class.
The next room is devoted to Paul Veronese. This Paul has quite a
character of his own - a grand old Venetian, with his head full of
stateliness, and court ceremony, and gorgeous conventionality, half
Oriental in his passion for gold, and gems, and incense. As a specimen
of the subjects in which his soul delights, take the following, which
he has wrought up into a mammoth picture:
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