But What I Found Most
Remarkable In The City Was Its Public Walks.
The old walls by which
Utrecht was once inclosed having been thrown down, the rubbish has formed
hillocks and slopes which almost surround the entire city and border one
of its principal canals.
On these hillocks and slopes, trees and shrubs
have been planted, and walks laid out through the green turf, until it
has become one of the most varied and charming pleasure-grounds I ever
saw - swelling into little eminences, sinking into little valleys,
descending in some places smoothly to the water, and in others impending
over it. We fell in with a music-master, of whom we asked a question or
two. He happened to know a little German, by the help of which he pieced
out his Dutch so as to make it tolerably intelligible to me. He insisted
upon showing us every thing remarkable in Utrecht, and finally walked us
tired.
The same evening the diligence brought us to Arnheim, a neat-looking town
with about eighteen hundred inhabitants, in the province of Guelderland,
where the region retains not a trace of the peculiarities of Holland. The
country west of the town rises into commanding eminences, overlooking the
noble Rhine, and I feel already that I am in Germany, though I have yet to
cross the frontier.
Letter XXIX.
American Artists Abroad.
Rome, _October_, 1845.
You would perhaps like to hear what the American artists on the continent
are doing. I met with Leutze at Duesseldorf. After a sojourn of some days
in Holland, in which I was obliged to talk to the Dutchmen in German and
get my answers in Dutch, with but a dim apprehension of each other's
meaning, as you may suppose, on both sides; after being smoked through and
through like a herring, with the fumes of bad tobacco in the railway
wagons, and in the diligence which took us over the long and monotonous
road on the plains of the Rhine between Arnheim and Duesseldorf - after
dodging as well as we were able, the English travellers, generally the
most disagreeable of the travelling tribe, who swarm along the Rhine in
the summer season, it was a refreshment to stop a day at Duesseldorf and
take breath, and meet an American face or two. We found Leutze engaged
upon a picture, the subject of which is John Knox reproving Queen Mary. It
promises to be a capital work. The stern gravity of Knox, the
embarrassment of the Queen, and the scorn with which the French damsels
of her court regard the saucy Reformer, are extremely well expressed, and
tell the story impressively.
At Duesseldorf, which is the residence of so many eminent painters, we
expected to find some collection, or at least some of the best specimens,
of the works of the modern German school. It was not so, however - fine
pictures are painted at Duesseldorf, but they are immediately carried
elsewhere. We visited the studio of Schroeter - a man with humor in every
line of his face, who had nothing to show us but a sketch, just prepared
for the easel, of the scene in Goethe's Faust, where Mephistophiles, in
Auerbach's cellar, bores the edge of the table with a gimlet, and a stream
of champagne gushes out.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 107 of 206
Words from 55015 to 55565
of 107287
