PART II

By a strange coincidence those paintings in the ‘Cappella Maggiore’ of Santa Trinita to which the entries in Alesso’s ‘Ricordi, Libro B,’ refer, have alone been preserved of all the frescoes once in the chapel, with the exception of some fragments of the lunettes on the lateral walls. The last but one of these entries records the purchase of cinnabar for the wings of the seraphim on the soffit of the arch opening into the ‘Crociera.’[51] The first entry in ‘Libro B’ is dated March 9, 1470-1; but according to an abstract of an entry in ‘Libro A,’ Alesso ‘received the commission to paint the “Cappella Maggiore” of Santa Trinita from Bongianni Gianfigliazzi, for 200 gold ducats, on July 1, 1471, and undertook to finish the work within the period of five to seven years.’[52] The latter date, no doubt, was that of the execution of the ‘writing,’ subscribed by the hand of Misser Bongianni, which Alesso held, and to which he refers in the ‘ricordo’ on the first page of ‘Libro B.’ In the interval between these two dates the painter began the cartoons for the figures of the prophets and the other ornaments of the vault. On April 28, 1471, he bought ‘16 quires of coarse paper (_carta da straccia_) in royal folio, at 5 soldi the quire, for making the “spolverizzi” of the prophets and the other “spolverizzi” that occur in the said vault.’ The ‘spolverizzi’ properly were the outlines pounced upon the plaster, by means of the pricked cartoon; but here, by a figure of speech, Alesso clearly intends the cartoons themselves. The more usual method of transferring a cartoon was to trace the outlines, by means of a metal style, on to the fresh plaster, as Vasari recommends.[53] Pricked cartoons seem to have been more commonly employed in the case of embroideries and ‘drappi.’[54] ¶ Having in the meantime purchased certain colours for the work, Alesso, at length, on August 29, 1471, paid various sums for moving the boxes containing his colours, etc., into chapel, and for the purchase of brushes and pipkins in preparation for the actual painting of the vault. There are two entries of that date: the first records that he bought ‘from Bernardino di Ventura, the pencil-maker, 58 pencils of minever, between coarse and fine, one with another, great and small,’ costing, lire 1 soldi 12; the second, that he spent, ‘between new pipkins and small pots, and hogs’-hair and pack thread for making pencils of hogs’-hair, and for the carriage of chests and trestles for the work of painting the said chapel, lire 3 soldi 5.’ Alesso, however, does not appear to have proceeded very far with the actual painting of the vault until the following spring; for on April 12, 1472, he records that he bought ‘five pounds of azzurro della Magnia (namely, biadetto) for making the bed under the fine blue, and this I bought from Lorenzo di Piero, the painter, in Borgo Sant’Apostoli, at the price of 5 soldi the ounce.’[55] This ‘biadetto’ was probably identical with the ‘sbiadato’ mentioned by Cennini, in a passage in which he says, that ‘a blue like sbiadato, and very similar to azzurro della Magnia,’ may be made with indigo and white, ‘biacca’ or ‘bianco sangiovanni.’[56] Alesso would seem to have painted _a fresco_ the blue backgrounds behind the figures of the prophets on the vault with this ‘biadetto,’ using it as a ‘bed’ for the fine azzurro della Magnia, which he afterward applied _a secco_.[57] It cost one-fifth, or even less, of the genuine azzurro della Magnia, and, no doubt, resembled it in colour. The genuine azzurro della Magnia seems to have been not easily obtainable in Florence; and Alesso is generally careful to record how he came by his purchases. On March 7, 1470-1, according to the first entry in ‘Libro B,’ he bought ‘2 pounds 9 ounces of azzurro di Magnia from Cardinale del Bulletta, at the price of 26 soldi the ounce’; and on the 12th of the same month, 4 pounds 2½ ounces, at 33 soldi the ounce. On April 31, 1471, he bought 1 pound 7 ounces, ‘from a German, in a bladder,’ at 31 soldi the ounce. ‘On 25 day of September, 1472,’ records Alesso, ‘I bought 2 pounds of azzurro di Magnia from Giovanni d’Andrea, glazier, at the price of 25 soldi the ounce; he said it belonged to a gossip of his, a courier, who brought it from Venice: the said Giovanni wanted 4 soldi to go drinking with.’ This Giovanni d’Andrea was the glazier who, in partnership with Il Lastra, had executed the window of the ‘Cappella Maggiore’ of Santa Trinita, from Alesso’s design. Finally, on January 13, 1472-3, Alesso bought 2 pounds 10 ounces, ‘from a Pole,’ at 20 soldi the ounce; ‘a clear, beautiful, finely-ground blue,’ he adds with satisfaction. At that time the painter was about to begin the lunettes on the lateral walls of the chapel. ¶ Cennini calls azzurro della Magnia ‘a natural colour that is found in and around silver lodes.’ ‘Much,’ he adds, ‘is obtained in Germany [La Magnia, whence its name], and also in the country about Siena.’[58] Milanesi, in the notes to his edition of Cennini, says that this blue was an oxide of cobalt; but Mrs. Herringham, with more probability, identifies the colour with blue carbonate of copper, commonly called blue verditer: in the same way, she identifies ‘verde azzurro,’ which Cennini says was made artificially from ‘azzurro della Magnia,’ with green verditer, which is also a carbonate of copper.[59] Alesso records in ‘Libro B,’ that, on March 20, 1470-1, he bought 6 pounds of ‘verde azzurro,’ at 14 soldi the ounce. ¶ It is worthy of remark that in a work of the importance of these frescoes, executed for so wealthy a patron as Messer Bongianni Gianfigliazzi, Alesso should not have used ultramarine, but a blue which cost but a twentieth part of that ‘noble, beautiful, and most perfect beyond all colours.’[60] According to the entries cited above, Alesso bought his azzurro della Magnia at prices varying from 20 soldi to 33 soldi the ounce.

Few other colours are specified by name in these ‘Ricordi.’ On May 24, 1471, Alesso purchased 4 pounds 5 ounces of yellow, namely, ‘arzicha,’ at 13 soldi the ounce. Cennini calls ‘arzica’ a colour chemically produced and little used, but more at Florence than elsewhere. He adds that it perishes on exposure to the air, and is not good for walls, but mixed with a little azzurro della Magnia and giallorino it makes a beautiful green.[61] Mrs. Herringham suggests that ‘arzica’ may be massicot, called azarcon in Spain.[62] ¶ On September 1, 1471, Alesso bought 5 ounces of fine lake at 14 soldi the ounce. The colour was probably used for the purple robe of the David. Lastly, on September 14, 1472, he bought ‘8 ounces of fine cinnabar to make the cherubim of the arch before the said chapel,’ at 2 soldi 8 danari the ounce. This was the vermilion for the wings of the seraphim, which still remain on the soffit on the arch. ¶ By June 1472 the painting of the vault had so far advanced that Alesso began to buy the gold for the ornaments. On June 13 he bought from Domenico, the gold-beater, 1,700 pieces of fine gold ‘laid upon tin-foil,’ for lire 61; on June 15, from Giovanni, the gold-beater, called Il Rosso, 500 pieces, also on foil, for lire 18; on June 23, 4,000 pieces of fine gold, at 3 lire 4 soldi the hundred, from a Genoese; and on June 28, 86 sheets of yellow foil, on which to lay the gold, for lire 8. Lastly, on July 9, 1472, he bought ‘8 pounds of liquid varnish, to apply them upon the vault, namely, the ornaments of fine gold.’ In all this Alesso appears to have followed the method set forth by Cennini, in cap. 99 of his ‘Trattato.’[63] ¶ But one other entry in these ‘Ricordi’ calls for any remark: on July 24, 1471, Alesso ‘bought four pounds of linseed oil at the price of 4 soldi the pound.’ What purpose was this oil intended to serve? Was it for some oil ‘tempera’? Vasari, speaking of these paintings of Santa Trinita, says that ‘Alesso laid them in _a fresco_, and afterwards finished them _a secco_, tempering the colours with yolk of egg, mixed with liquid varnish made over the fire’; he adds that Alesso ‘thought that this tempera would protect the paintings against damp; but it was of so strong a nature that where it has been applied freely the work has in many places flaked away, and so, whereas he thought to have found a rare and most beautiful secret, he remained deceived by his opinion.’[64] Without attempting to discuss the nature of the ‘tempera’ which is here described, I may recall the fact that Domenico Veneziano, who was undoubtedly Alesso’s master, is celebrated by Vasari on account of ‘the new method which he employed of colouring in oil’; and the books of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova record payments for very considerable quantities of linseed oil which that master used for the lost paintings in the ‘Cappella Maggiore’ of Sant’ Egidio.[65] Domenico, no doubt, possessed the secret of some improvement upon the old method of painting in oil on walls, which Cennino Cennini, who describes it at length in the ‘Libro dell’ Arte,’ cap. lxxxix.–cap. xciv., says ‘was much in use among the Germans.’ ¶ Alesso, as I have said, originally undertook, on July 1, 1471, to paint the ‘Cappella Maggiore’ of Santa Trinita for 200 gold florins, and to finish the work within a period of five to seven years. It was not, however, until January 19, 1496-97, after an interval of more than twenty-five years, that the total amount to be paid him for finished work was estimated by Cosimo Rosselli, Benozzo Gozzoli, Pietro Perugino and Filippino Lippi at 1,000 gold florins.[66] In other words, Alesso had spent upon the work five times the minimum period originally stipulated for its completion, and he was awarded five times the original sum for which he had undertaken to complete the chapel. Two causes appear to have contributed to this delay. The one was that Alesso’s method of laying-in his paintings _a fresco_, and finishing them _a secco_, admitted of endless elaboration, and a consequent expenditure of time, which pure fresco painting did not admit of. The other was, that shortly after receiving the commission for the chapel Alesso appears to have turned his attention to reviving the art of mosaic, which had almost died out in Florence. We first hear of Alesso working in mosaic in 1481, in which year he restored the figures on the façade of San Miniato a Monte.[67] In 1483 he was appointed by the consuls of the Arte de’ Mercanti to restore the mosaics in the tribune of the baptistery of San Giovanni, ‘there being no one, in all the dominion and jurisdiction of Florence, but he, who then understood that art’: in consideration of which the consuls resolved to convey to him, ‘for the term of his natural life, such real property as would yield 30 florins yearly, upon the condition that he bound himself, so long as he lived, to repair and restore the mosaics of San Giovanni.’[68] In accordance with this resolution two houses in the Piazza di San Giovanni, belonging to the Arte de’ Mercanti, were assigned to Alesso on February 26, 1483-4,[69] and by two instruments of the same date, engrossed by the notary, Ser Giovanni di Jacopo de’ Migliorelli, Alesso re-leased the two houses to the persons who were already in possession of them at the date of the assignment. These instruments are printed, for the first time, in the appendix to this article.[70] ¶ The decoration of the ‘Cappella Maggiore’ of Santa Trinita, and the restoration of the mosaics in the baptistery of San Giovanni and San Miniato a Monte, appear to have almost entirely engrossed the last thirty years of Alesso’s life. During that time we hear of no work of importance undertaken by him, with the exception of the lost altar-piece of Sant’ Ambrogio, which he began in 1470. Messer Bongianni Gianfigliazzi died on November 7, 1484, and was buried in his chapel at Santa Trinita, long before Alesso had brought its frescoes to a conclusion.[71] The work, however, was continued at the instance of his son, Jacopo Gianfigliazzi; and Stefano Rosselli records in his ‘Sepoltuario Fiorentino,’ that at the time he was writing, c. 1657, the basement of Alesso’s altar-piece in the ‘Cappella Maggiore’ of Santa Trinita bore the inscription: ‘Jacobus Gianfigliazzius Bongiannis Equitis Fil_ius_, sua erga De_um_ Pietate.’[72] ¶ Of the paintings that once decorated the walls of this chapel we possess but some partial and imperfect accounts. Vasari, to whom we chiefly owe the meagre notices which are extant, says that they consisted of ‘stories from the Old Testament.’ Alesso, he says, ‘drew many portraits from the life; and in the story of the aforesaid chapel [of Santa Trinita], in which he represented the Queen of Sheba going to hear the wisdom of Solomon, he drew Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Magnificent, who was father of Pope Leo X, and Lorenzo dalla Volpaia, a most excellent master of dials, and a great astrologer.’ ‘In another story which is opposite to this, Alesso drew Luigi Guicciardini the elder, Luca Pitti, Diotisalvi Neroni, Giuliano de’ Medici, father of Pope Clement VII; and next to the stone pilaster [of the arch opening into the church] Gherardo Gianfigliazzi the elder, and Messer Bongianni, knight, wearing a blue habit and a collar round his neck, together with Jacopo and Giovanni of the same family. Near to these last are Filippo Strozzi and Messer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, astrologer.’[73] What the subject of this latter story may have been, we do not now know. According to Giovanni Cinelli, in his edition of the ‘Bellezze di Firenze,’ published in 1677, the other story of the Queen of Sheba was on the left wall of the chapel, ‘dal Corno del Vangelo.’ Cinelli, after quoting this passage from Vasari, adds that ‘in the angle of the choir, on the left side, there is painted a Cain in the act of striking his brother Abel, a figure which is very admirable in its attitude, and which expresses in its countenance the malice and hatred which Cain bore in his heart towards his brother: and it is greatly esteemed by the connoisseurs; so much so, that when the cardinal of the serene house of Este came to Florence and visited this church, he desired to see and consider with attention so fine a painting.’[74]

[Illustration: _Photograph by Alinari_

THE PAINTINGS OF ABRAHAM, NOAH, MOSES, AND DAVID BY ALESSO BALDOVINETTI ON THE VAULT OF THE CAPPELLA MAGGIORE OF SANTA TRINITA AT FLORENCE]

Already, when Vasari wrote in 1568, the frescoes in the ‘Cappella Maggiore’ of Santa Trinita ‘had begun to flake away in many places.’[75] The last writer to allude to their indifferent condition is Giuseppe Richa, who speaks of them as ‘not a little consumed and spoiled by time.’[76] That was in 1755; five years later, in 1760, Alesso’s ‘stories’ were ruthlessly destroyed or covered with whitewash, and the walls of the chapel decorated with ‘stucchi’ in the taste of the time.[77] During the recent restoration of the church, in 1890-7, the paintings of the four patriarchs on the vault of the chapel, the seraphim on the soffit of the vault, and the fragments of the lunettes on the lateral walls of the chapel, were found under the whitewash, and restored by Signor Dario Chini. [Plate III.] ¶ The vault itself is divided into four triangular compartments by the intersecting ribs of the vault, which spring from the four corbels at the angles of the chapel. In the compartment above the window of the chapel is a seated figure of Noah, in an ample cloak of dark green, worn over an under-dress of a reddish colour. He holds some object which is now undecipherable in his right hand; and beside him, on the left, is placed the ark. ¶ In the compartment above the left wall of the chapel is a seated figure of Abraham clad in a yellow robe lined with green, over an under-dress of vermilion. In his right hand he holds the sacrificial knife, and at his feet kneels his son Isaac, bound and clad in white. In the compartment above the right wall is a seated figure of Moses, holding the two tables of the Law in his hands. The robe, which falls over the knees of the figure, is vermilion in colour, and the underdress appears to have been a dark leaf-green. In the compartment above the arch is a seated figure of David playing upon a psaltery with three sound-holes. He is attired in a purple mantle lined with green, which almost entirely envelops his figure. The purple of this robe is now much perished. All these four figures are relieved against blue backgrounds, broken by rays of gold which appear to proceed from the figures; and all the four compartments are surrounded by borders of fruit and flowers upon a vermilion ground. The ribs of the vault are painted with green foliage intertwined with a running ribbon, and the keystone of the vault is blazoned with the arms of the Gianfigliazzi: or, a lion rampant azure. On the soffit of the arch opening into the chapel is painted, on a blue ground, the series of seraphim with vermilion wings, to which allusion has already been made. ¶ In the lunette on the left wall, immediately below the figure of Abraham, in the vault, are the remains of a ‘story’ of the ‘sacrifice of Isaac.’ In the upper part of the picture, on some rising and rocky ground, Abraham is seen turned towards the right, and kneeling before an altar. This figure is in large part almost obliterated, and the figure of the angel who appears to him in the sky, and that of Isaac upon the altar, can now scarcely be made out. On the right of the painting, however, there may still be seen a tree boldly designed against the sky, recalling certain passages in Alesso’s painting of the Nativity in the atrium of the Annunziata at Florence. The lower part of this lunette has entirely perished. ¶ In the lunette on the opposite wall, below the figure of the patriarch, in the vault, is a ‘story’ of ‘Moses receiving the tables of the Law on Mount Sinai.’ The upper portion of this painting alone remains in a ruined condition. On the top of the mount Moses kneels, turned to the left. The figure is much damaged; and that of God the Father, who appears to him out of the heavens, has almost entirely disappeared. The bare mountain-top is broken by patches of herbage, and around it may still be seen some cypresses, with other foliage. ¶ Below each of these lunettes, on the lateral walls of the chapel, appear to have been two other stories; but the subject of only one of them has been recorded (as I have said) by Vasari, namely, the visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, which appears to have been on the left wall of the chapel. The story of Cain killing his brother Abel, recorded by Cinelli, was probably on the altar-wall beside the window, in the left-hand corner. ¶ In the figures on the vault, Alesso attains to a nobility of design, and a largeness of manner, which he does not again reach in any extant work of his. That extreme research for form, which so largely spoils our enjoyment of the altar-piece which he painted for this chapel, does not detract, at all in the same degree, from the severe beauty of these figures; for they possess a charm both of conception and design which is little distinctive of Alesso’s later manner, though akin to a certain grace and sweetness in some of his earliest works. The attitudes of these ‘prophets old’ are very grandly imagined, especially that of the David, who looks up as he touches his psaltery with a gesture that expresses a spiritual ecstasy, with an admirable fineness and reticence. Indeed, these figures are represented with a truth of character, and a refinement of feeling, for which we vainly look in similar works by his more famous, and more obviously gifted, pupil, Domenico Ghirlandaio; such as the vaults of the ‘Cappella Maggiore’ of Santa Maria Novella, and of the Sassetti chapel in Santa Trinita. To judge from these figures of the four patriarchs, the destruction of the ‘stories’ which were below them cannot sufficiently be deplored; the reputation of few Florentine masters depended so largely on a single work as Alesso’s did upon this chapel of the Gianfigliazzi. ¶ One other fragment of the ‘stories’ which once decorated the walls of this chapel has come down to us. Giuseppe Richa, in his ‘Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine,’ after mentioning the various portraits to be found in these paintings, adds: ‘all these figures are named by the writers of the life of Alesso; but they do not allude to [the portrait of] a young man in the angle of the choir, on the epistle side, who is represented in a red habit, with a green cap on his head, and a white handkerchief in his hands; and this is Alesso Baldovinetti, who portrayed himself as he was, when a young man; and he, also, drew there the portrait of Guido Baldovinetti, who was the man most gifted and renowned at that time in his illustrious family.’[78] ¶ Domenico Maria Manni, in the notes to his edition of ‘Baldinucci,’ published a few years after Richa’s work had appeared, cites a certain ‘Memoriale’ of Francesco di Giovanni di Guido Baldovinetti, written in the year 1513. According to this ‘Memoriale’ (from which, no doubt, Richa derived his notice of the portrait in question) Alesso portrayed on the walls of the ‘Cappella Maggiore’ of Santa Trinita, among many other noble citizens, ‘Guido Baldovinetti, and, last of all, himself, wearing a _cioppone_ of faded rose, and a handkerchief in his hand.’[79] Among the pictures which Morelli bequeathed to the Accademia Carrara, at Bergamo, is a fragment of a fresco, No. 23, containing the head of a man. It has been cut to a round measuring 0.23 centm. in diameter. According to an inscription on the back of the painting it is a portrait of Alesso Baldovinetti, painted by himself and taken from an angle of the choir of Santa Trinita in Florence.[80] There can be little doubt that this is the head to which Francesco Baldovinetti referred in his ‘Memoriale,’ and that it was cut from the walls of Santa Trinita when Alesso’s paintings were destroyed in 1760; but whether it is a portrait of the painter is a question which I must not here attempt to discuss.

[Illustration: A GROUP OF THREE, BY JAN MIENSE MOLENAER; IN THE COLLECTION OF MR. EDGAR SPEYER (_See_ ~The Burlington Magazine~ for June 1903, page 52)]

THE DUTCH EXHIBITION AT THE GUILDHALL

❧ ARTICLE II.--THE MODERN PAINTERS ❧

The collection of works of modern Dutch painters at the Guildhall is much more representative than that of the old masters, and is likely to be a revelation to those visitors who know only the few, and in many cases inadequate, examples of modern Dutch works which have been seen from time to time in London. In only one previous instance, that of the Glasgow exhibition, has such a representative collection of modern Dutch painters been brought together in this country. ¶ The chief interest of the collection is to be found in the works of the three brothers Maris and of Israels, for these painters are the leaders of the school, and the rest, though not without individualities of their own in technique and treatment, are followers. ¶ Joseph Israels is represented at the Guildhall chiefly by works of his later period, which are far better known in England than are the pictures in his earlier manner, which can be studied best at Amsterdam; these latter are distinguished by precision and detail rather than by the subtler and more sympathetic treatment of his mature work. ¶ The largest canvas of Israels shown is The Shipwrecked Fisherman (11), which, though impressive and well balanced, has a certain stagey effect. There are several tricks of technique, such as the parallel clouds and sky, which, however, add not a little strength to the general effect. Far superior to this picture is The Cottage Madonna (14), a vigorous painting of a woman with a child in a characteristically Dutch cottage interior. This fine work can hardly be considered a typical example of Israels, not indeed because it falls short of his other achievements, but rather for the opposite reason. It is a wonderful piece of sympathetic painting, full of feeling and pathos, and without those eccentricities which are apparent in such of his pictures as A Jewish Wedding (95), interesting as being the last picture which he has painted, and therefore reproduced here for this reason, but lacking in the opinion of the present writer the surpassing merits which many claim for it. It has become so much the mode to praise equally all the work of a particular painter or a particular school, that the sense of proportion and the power of discrimination have almost become extinct and criticism has been undermined. No painter of the modern Dutch school is more unequal than Israels, except perhaps Mauve; and one feels that if he has almost risen to the level of a great master in The Cottage Madonna, and perhaps in A Ray of Sunshine (7) and The New Flower (82), there is a particular group of works at the Guildhall which are sustained in estimation by the repute of greater achievements. ¶ The case of Jacob Maris is quite otherwise. The whole of his work is upon essentially legitimate lines, and inspires a feeling that he never produced a picture from a less than worthy motive. His pictures are full of the softness and delicacy of the Dutch atmosphere, and most people would consider it incredible that none of them were painted out-of-doors. Yet the present writer has been assured by one of Maris’s intimate friends that this was the case; when a particular view or picture struck him he was accustomed to stand with his hands in his pockets, and the picture was painted entirely from memory in his studio. Yet his works miss no essential truth. This stage was not reached without much experimentalizing and profound study. Jacob Maris began with a scrupulous striving after finish, which would do credit to any of the little masters of Holland of the seventeenth century. Take for example The Weary Watchers (90), painted in 1869, in which the child is painted with the finish of a Metzu, and the cat approaching the cradle with the minuteness of a Mieris. It is a long jump from this picture to A Windmill, Moonlight (125), the last work which he finished; but under the surface of the latter, in spite of the apparent dash, we perceive not one whit less regard for essential truth. ¶ There are three or four canvases at the Guildhall which display Maris in his very finest mood. Many will, perhaps, consider that the finest of all, at least as regards brush work, is Gathering Seaweed (44). The sky with its immense grey white clouds, through breaks in which glimpses of blue beyond are discernible, is the chief factor in the picture. This is in every respect one of Maris’s finest works, and he has never exceeded the delicious silveriness of sea and sky and the sense of moisture in the breeze which he here gives us; his rendering of the wet flat sand on which stand the horse and cart of the seaweed gatherers has been equalled only by Bonington. ¶ Of somewhat similar character is the beautiful little Storm Cloud (80), into which he has infused much the same feeling; but another phase of Maris is shown in the wonderful Bridge (92), which deservedly occupies a place of honour on the walls of the Guildhall gallery. Across a typical Dutch canal is thrown a wooden bridge, under which, away along the placid canal, can be seen a distant quay abutted with houses; little red-tiled houses fill the extreme left and right of the picture. It is a simple motive which in strict accordance with the principles of the painters of Holland demonstrates the innate beauty of the commonplace. Quite equal to this, both for intensity of feeling and realization, is the River and Windmill (101) on the side wall; the sense of stillness and calm which pervades this work is typical of the tranquillity of a mind whose sole delight was in nature and its portrayal. The artist is equally successful in a very different way in the bold and powerful Dutch Town (43), which seems to be a freely adapted view of Amsterdam. This is one of his latest works, and was painted in 1898. There is a delicate shimmer on the water with its lazy craft, and the ill-defined buildings are developed in an atmosphere shrouded by haze and darkened by smoke. These two works should be compared with The Ferry Boat (81), painted in 1870, which owes something to Van Goyen and Soloman Ruysdael; to his appreciation of the qualities of his predecessors, and his study of their art, Maris’s own achievements must in great measure be attributed. It is always unsafe to prophesy, but it is almost safe to say that Jacob Maris’s reputation will last. ¶ The representation at the Guildhall of Willem Maris is much less worthy, and a better series of his works could surely have been obtained; but in one small panel, Springtime (37), we have the best qualities of his art, and it may be doubted whether in the representation of the delicate and poetical charm of spring Willem Maris is surpassed even by Daubigny, except in a very few pictures. The trees awaken from their winter slumber and put forth in velvety green the leaves which hardly more than tinge the brownness of trunk and branch. The stream swollen with the recent rain affords refreshing drink to the cattle which have just emerged from the copse on the right. The meadow, with its carpet of tender green bordered by a row of pollard willows, recedes until it meets the sky line. Light clouds float over the blue sky and betoken weather fair but fickle. ¶ When one turns from these two kindred spirits to their brother Matthew Maris one is struck by the contrast. For Matthew lifts us at once from things earthly into a spiritual atmosphere; everything that he touches he envelops in mysticism and poetry. Yet perhaps his work is more difficult of appreciation; he appeals to a more exclusive circle. Yet what magic contour of line, what exquisite rhythm, what consummate balance of composition, we find in it. The Outskirts of a Town (39), for instance, enveloped in a bewitching gloom, commends itself to the artist and student, though not to the lover of pyrotechnics. That fine canvas entitled Montmartre (40) is another example of the same idealistic treatment. Among examples of his work which particularly puzzle the public are such efforts as A Study (58) and A Lady and Goats (59), the latter an idyl inadequately described by its prosy title. But perhaps the essence of his art is to be found in The Butterflies (62) and L’Enfant Couchée (70), which for typical presentment and delicacy of colour are among his finest achievements.

[Illustration: THE ARCHIVES AT VEERE, BY JAN BOSBOOM; IN THE COLLECTION OF MR. J. C. J. DRUCKER]

[Illustration: A JEWISH WEDDING, BY JOSEPH ISRAELS; IN THE COLLECTION OF MR. J. C. J. DRUCKER]

[Illustration: A FANTASY, BY MATTHEW MARIS; IN THE COLLECTION OF MADAME VAN WISSELINGH]

[Illustration: THE NEW FLOWER, BY JOSEPH ISRAELS; IN THE COLLECTION OF MR. J. STAATS FORBES]

[Illustration: WATERING HORSES, BY ANTON MAUVE; IN THE COLLECTION OF MR. J. C. J. DRUCKER]

[Illustration: THE CANAL BRIDGE, BY JACOB MARIS; IN THE POSSESSION OF MESSRS. THOMAS AGNEW AND SONS]

[Illustration: A WINDMILL, MOONLIGHT, BY JACOB MARIS; IN THE COLLECTION OF MR. J. C. J. DRUCKER]

[Illustration: THE BUTTERFLIES, BY MATTHEW MARIS; IN THE COLLECTION OF MR. WILLIAM BURRELL]

We are back once more upon the earth when we come to Anton Mauve, of whose works there are no less than twenty-one examples in the Guildhall exhibition. With the exception of Joseph Israels, he is the most unequal painter of modern Holland; there are occasions when he comes near to equalling Jacob Maris at least in atmospherical effect, and yet at other times he sinks into a mere technical repetition of his better self. Of his best phase we could not have better illustrations than The Hay Cart (2) and Driving in the Dunes (4). In both there is the same feeling for truth, the same adaptation of technique to the necessities of the occasion. Watering Horses (97) is another fine work, resplendent with harmonies of green and grey, and showing the same feeling for natural phenomena. ¶ After such work as that of the brothers Maris, and Mauve, and occasionally Israels, one is inevitably disappointed with Mesdag. Mesdag misses the mark not because of any deficiencies in technique, but because his works lack that essential quality of landscape painting--atmosphere. The consequence is that we never lose sight of the paint; it is paint everywhere. This is all the more to be regretted since he is a good draughtsman, and his scheme of colour is often satisfactory and truthful; moreover he has a profound knowledge of composition. Yet with all these qualities he generally fails. We do not want a sunset sky full of prismatic glow, nor a sea shimmering with opalescent tints, if we cannot feel that it is a real sky and a real sea, and that something other than paint fills up the intervening space. Mesdag’s deficiency is emphasized in the two pictures shown in the present exhibition, A Stormy Sunset (28) and A Threatening Sky (54), which give us nothing but the mere physical features of the scene, and leave us with an undefinable yearning for something for which we look in vain. ¶ The other men whose work is represented for the most part owe what is best in their art to the greater lights of their school. Of such is the work of Théophile de Bock, of which Evening (17) is an example of a plagiarism on the school of 1830, intermingled with a Dutch sentiment which renders it difficult to say with certainty whether it should be classified as French or Dutch in sentiment. That Bock has originality when it is brought into play is amply demonstrated in An Avenue in Holland (94). The sunlit road with its strongly painted trees conveys an admirable idea of summer heat and foliage, in which the artist boldly achieves his aim without any aid but his own sheer force. Such a work shows powers which are never brought into full play when he attempts to see with other eyes. Apart from landscape there is but little of interest in the exhibition. An exception, however, must be made in favour of the fine canvas by Christopher Bisschop, Prayer Disturbed (29), which is a strong and powerful piece of painting, and also intensely sympathetic in realization. Two other canvases are worthy of mention, that by Albert Neuhuys, Near the Cradle (96), a fine representation of a cottage interior painted with incisive truth and directness, and Bosboom’s Archives at Veere (128), an excellent example of the interiors to which he devoted himself; it has the spaciousness and grace characteristic of the work of a painter than whom no modern artist has shown a keener appreciation of the artistic possibilities of ancient buildings.

THE SEALS OF THE BRUSSELS GILDS[81]

❧ WRITTEN BY R. PETRUCCI ❧

MONSIEUR G. DES MAREZ, professor at the university and keeper of the records of the city of Brussels, has drawn attention lately to three seals which appeared to him to be worthy of special study. These consist, first, of the matrix of the seal of the Gild of Barbers in the fifteenth century, which forms part of the sigillographical collection of the Musées Royaux du Cinquantenaire; secondly, of the silver matrix of the seal of the Gild of Butchers in the sixteenth century, preserved in the archives of the city of Brussels; thirdly and lastly, of the matrix of the seal of the Gild of Bakers, in the private collection of M. Charles Lefébure: this last belongs, like the first, to the fifteenth century. Now the Brussels gilds were never called upon to seal deeds, a fact of which M. Des Marez was the better aware as he had just obtained a gold medal from the Royal Academy of Belgium for an important study, which is at this moment in the press, on the organization of labour in Brussels during the fifteenth century. Were the three existing matrices therefore false? And, if they did in reality date from the period to which everything contributed to ascribe them, how was their presence to be explained? Those were the questions which M. Des Marez set himself to adjudge and upon which he has succeeded in throwing a brilliant light. ¶ Thanks to M. Des Marez’ kindness, I have been able to take cognizance of his work and of the seals upon which it bears. M. Des Marez’ study will not be published until the end of August or September next, when it will appear in the annals of the Archaeological Society. My readers will therefore be the first to find here set forth the solution of an important historical and archaeological question. ¶ The juridical incompetence of the Brussels trading corporations is indisputable. In the second half of the thirteenth century, the artisans began to lay down the outlines of a corporate movement. This led to a privilege obtained from Duke John by the patricians invested with power, by which the craftsmen were subjected to their authority. The gilds were dependent upon the town council for all that concerned the making of their rules and regulations; at most, they enjoyed the right of presenting drafts for the approval and sanction of the aldermen; they were not able to sell, pledge or mortgage; and, although their wardens were invested with certain police functions, their jurisdiction was nevertheless extremely limited. Difficult cases were submitted to the judgement of the aldermen, and in no case could the wardens of their own initiative proceed to a forced execution upon the persons or goods of delinquents. ¶ The gild was unable to issue any act directly, and therefore the use of a seal, the attributive mark of jurisdiction, is inexplicable. Even the Drapers’ Gild was without it, although this gild constituted a powerful administrative and jurisdictive machinery by the side of the aldermen, of whom, at the time of its splendour, it was even independent. It issued acts, which the trading corporations were not able to do, and made regulations, far and near, for all those having to do with the woollen manufactures or cloth-making. The absence of a collective seal is to be explained, in this case, by the use made by the deacons of their personal seals, a use proved by documents in which it is explicitly mentioned. It was not until 1698 that the Drapers’ Gild ordered a collective seal to be made. The matrix of this seal is lost, but there remains an impression of it affixed to one side of the very sheet containing the text of the resolution relating to it, which document is preserved in the archives of the kingdom, where I have been able to consult it. ¶ The engraving of this seal is very poor. In a circular field is St. Michael, clad in a Roman breast-plate, his legs cased in buskins. His forehead is surmounted by a cross, and his wings are unfolded. He brandishes a sword in his right hand. Lucifer lies felled at his feet. St. Michael is seizing one of the demon’s horns with his hand. Lucifer raises his right hand with a defending gesture; his left arm is brought back against his body. He wears short wings, one of which covers a part of the saint’s arm. His lower limbs end in claws; a long tail is twined between his legs. The impression is made on a paper pulp which was previously moistened. Above this was laid a cut-out leaf of thin paper, on which the matrix of the seal was pressed with force. The paper shows stains of mould; the reliefs are weak and difficult to distinguish; to reproduce them by photography is almost impossible. These circumstances, added to the fact that this piece has absolutely no artistic value, account for the absence of a reproduction in these pages. Between the two circular fillets that run around the above figures is this inscription: SIGIL · DECANOR · ET OCTOJUDICUM · GILDÆ · BRUXELLENSIS. (_Sigillum decanorum et octojudicium gildæ bruxellensis._) The text of the resolution says that the seal shall be inscribed with the words: _Sigillum collegii decanorum_, etc. The engraver could not find room for the word _collegii_, and was obliged to omit it. This is why a note added to the text of the resolution of December 4, ordering the execution of the seal, declares that a true impression of the seal is affixed on the other side and corrects the text by suppressing the word _collegii_. I may also mention that, whereas the seal shows the spelling GILDÆ, the text preserves the old mediaeval spelling GILDE. ¶ We find, therefore, that one alone of the corporations, the Drapers’ Gild, which was the most powerful, did unquestionably possess a seal, but at a late date, at the end of the seventeenth century. This innovation is due, on the one hand, to modifications introduced into the expedition of the acts, involving the abolition of the single or double parchment label separate from the sheet itself and bearing the seal; on the other, to the fact that the deacons abandoned the use of their personal seals, which served as a signature in the middle ages, for the customary employment of a manuscript signature. The personal seals of the deacons having been abandoned, it became necessary to have recourse to a collective seal. ¶ It is certain, therefore, that the juridical conditions under which the trading corporations were constituted give rise to very grave doubts as to the authenticity of the seals of the gilds. If we add the fact that the records contain no sealed document proceeding from any of the Brussels gilds, we shall feel greatly tempted to lend to these doubts the force of certainty. However, an examination of the three matrices of seals which are here for the first time reproduced scarcely permits us to believe in their falseness. Let me briefly analyse each of these three pieces.

[Illustration: SEAL OF THE GILD OF BARBERS]

The matrix of the seal of the Barbers’ Gild is in the sigillographical collection of the Musées Royaux du Cinquantenaire. Two figures are standing on a circular ground; they represent St. Cosmas and St. Damian, the patrons of barber-surgeons. They are dressed in the costume of the fifteenth century. The right figure, clad in a tunic that comes down to mid-leg, carries in its left hand a mortar exactly similar to the mortars that were still in use in Flanders in the last century. In its right hand, it holds an instrument that might be either a pestle or a lancet; it is a long, thin instrument, spreading slightly at one end. Its right arm is bent, and from the wrist hangs a sort of case shaped like a purse, with an open clasp. This figure symbolizes the barber. By its side is a shield bearing a pair of open scissors, with an instrument in pale that appears identical with that which the figure holds in its right hand. The figure on the left is clad in a long robe adorned with a wide collar, which seems to point to a profession superior to that of the mere barber: this is a surgeon. In his right hand, he holds a round phial with a long, bell-mouthed neck. His left hand is folded over his breast; the extended fore-finger points to the phial. From his wrist hangs a bag or purse-shaped case, with open clasp. By his side is the escutcheon of the city of Brussels, which, in the fifteenth century, was a plain red shield. The two figures are standing on a grassy mound. In the upper half of the circumference of the seal we see a device that reads: _S. barbitonsorū in brūx_. This seal is the only one of the three that bears a Latin device, a fact quite in keeping with the learned profession of the surgeons and barbers.

[Illustration: SEAL OF THE GILD OF BAKERS]

The matrix of the seal of the Bakers’ Gild is now in the private collection of M. Charles Lefébure. On the ground of the seal we see St. Aubert, Bishop of Cambrai, the patron of the Brussels bakers, clad in his pontifical vestments, with the mitre on his head. With his right hand he is giving the benediction; in his left he holds a peel, the shovel used for thrusting bread into the oven. The figure rises at half-length from behind a wide shield on which are represented, saltierwise, a peel, with two round loaves laid upon the blade, and a bar for raking the cinders. The circular inscription is in Flemish, it reads: _S. d’s ambachts · der · beckers · in brussel ·_ (‘Seal of the Gild of the Bakers in Brussels’). The seal displays all the characteristics of the fifteenth century.

[Illustration: SEAL OF THE GILD OF BUTCHERS.]

The matrix of the seal of the Butchers’ Gild is in silver. It is kept in the archives of the city of Brussels. Its date must be carried back to the early sixteenth century; it is very beautifully engraved. St. Michael fells the dragon, represented as a shaggy monster with a bull’s head, which seizes the saint’s left leg in one of its claws; in the other, it clutches the escutcheon, which it bites in the lower corner. The saint is clad in armour. In his right hand, he brandishes his sword; with his left, he holds the escutcheon, which he uses as a buckler. On the shield figure the heads of three animals: an ox, a calf and a sheep. The exergue bears the device in Flemish: ~S. TSVLEESHOUWERS · A͡BACHT · IN BRUESSEL ·~ (‘Seal of the Butchers’ Gild in Brussels’). ¶ M. Des Marez connects the making of these seals with the great impulse towards emancipation that stirred the trading corporations in the fifteenth century. In the second half of that century, the protests of the magistrates are constantly multiplying, and the trades seem to be progressing towards complete independence. On the accession of Mary of Burgundy, a violent popular agitation wrested from the young princess the privilege of June 4, 1477, which hallowed the triumph of democracy. But this victory lasted only a little while; and, in 1480, Maximilian of Austria restored the old constitution of 1421. The execution of the seals must, therefore, be ascribed to this emancipatory movement and, doubtless, to that short period of three years during which the gilds, as sovereign masters, were called upon to seal their acts. It is to be presumed that, if any acts were sealed, these were very rare and were probably destroyed; and it is also very possible that, after the matrices had been engraved, the reaction set in almost immediately and that they were never used. ¶ This concerns the seals of the Barbers’ and Bakers’ Gilds. That of the butchers must be attributed to the beginning of the sixteenth century. The gild had, since 1450, claimed a privileged situation consecrating the hereditary principle: none could be a butcher who was not sprung from butchers. This privilege, granted by Philip the Good, kindled a quarrel between the butchers and the town which sometimes led to bloodshed and which lasted for seventy years. In or about 1516, Charles V put an end to this state of things by perpetuating the privilege. The date of the execution of the seal corresponds with this victory for the gild. But the butchers were stopped in their too independent courses and were made to continue to recognize the authority of the town council in all that concerned the making of their rules and regulations and the management of their interests. ¶ I have shown how constitutional history and sigillography have together enabled M. Des Marez to solve a question debated to this day by proving the genuineness of the seals of the Brussels gilds. The question involved a two-fold problem, historical and archaeological. The interest attaching to it will be understood when I add that seals of gilds are exceedingly rare in Belgium. Hardly any are known to exist except for Bruges, Saint-Trond, Hasselt, Maastricht, Liége and Ardenbourg. Almost all the tradesmen were subject to the authority of the town magistrates. The seals of the Brussels gilds survive as eloquent witnesses of a temporary triumph in their struggle for independence.

NEW ACQUISITIONS AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS

~British Engraving at the Victoria and Albert Museum~

The exhibition of British engraving which has been arranged at the Victoria and Albert Museum is of considerable interest and importance. Moreover, it is timely; for the trend of fashion in engravings has of late been in a direction so limited, that the need was very apparent of a corrective to a popular point of view by no means entirely warranted by the facts. The cult of the colour-print and mezzotint has been pursued beyond all reasonable bounds. In the hands of able merchants and indiscriminating patrons it has reached a mere absurdity--expressed in market values. The whole matter has got out of scale; and the most serious criticism that could be launched against the present exhibition--that it tried to cover a field too wide--is fully met by the absolute desirability of reminding the British public that there were line engravings of some importance; that aquatint had been used with results of no little value; that etching was not a lost art, and that mezzotints of subjects other than those devoted to portraits of pretty women were by no means ignoble. ¶ The art of line engraving was but tardily settled in this country, for some doubtful reason, not until well-nigh a century after it had reached a pitch of high perfection on the continent. Its tangible beginnings are represented at South Kensington by the superb title-page of the ‘Anatomy’ of Thomas Gemini (1545). But the work of William Rogers is the first of importance by a native-born artist. By him, we have the superb portrait of Queen Elizabeth, lent by his Majesty the King from the collection at Windsor; and three plates from Segar’s ‘Honor Military and Ciuill,’ Sir Thomas Docwra, Godfreydus Adelmar, and Alphonsus Rex Castiliensis. These very fairly represent the strongly individual talent of Rogers, who used a most expressive line with care and economy; and in his employment of the dot for the modelling of faces, foreshadowed the invention of stipple by more than a hundred years. ¶ The method of Thomas Coxon is not represented in the exhibition; but that of Elstracke, a Flemish contemporary has full justice done to it by the fine Prince Charles, as well as other prints from the King’s collection. His Majesty has also contributed most of the best examples of the severe and dry manner of the De Passe family, who had an influence so great on British line engraving; but whose technique, however able, seems to lack something, and to have destroyed the decorative qualities which were already apparent in the earlier group. An interesting comparison may be made between the Queen Elizabeth of Crispin de Passe and that of Rogers mentioned before. Of the engravers of the later part of the seventeenth century, mention need only be made of the fact that Faithorne the elder, David Loggan, Sherwin, and White, all receive ample justice in the exhibition; and this means that under their names will be found some of the finest prints exhibited in any branch of engraving. The line engraving of the eighteenth century developed for the best in subjects other than portraiture. Thus we have the strong work of that turbulent spirit, Sir Robert Strange, devoted mainly to the translation of paintings by the great masters; and that of William Woollett and his school to landscape, especially after Claude. Woollett is well represented by four plates attributed entirely to him, and by two in which Ellis and Vivares avowedly collaborated. But of the first it must be said that a note in Dance’s ‘Portraits’ expressly states that Thomas Hearne, the water-colour artist, who was apprenticed to Woollett, ‘etched’ the Roman Edifices in Ruins. The working proof exhibited at Kensington (No. 146) is, if this is true, in great part the work of Hearne. We have little space on this occasion for more than the merest summary of the contents of the gallery; an adequate notice of which would indeed require at least a whole number of this magazine. It is only possible therefore, in passing from the subject of line engraving, to draw special attention to Mr. Rawlinson’s splendid loan of specimens of the fine school fostered especially by J. M. W. Turner; to the numerous proofs of the delicate work produced by the book illustrators of about the same period; and to the interesting and unique examples of working and finished proofs of the Landseer school--portions of a collection which came to the National Art Library by the generosity of Mr. Sheepshanks--in its way, probably unrivalled.

[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH; LINE ENGRAVING BY WILLIAM ROGERS; IN THE COLLECTION OF HIS MAJESTY THE KING]

[Illustration: ROMAN EDIFICES IN RUINS; LINE ENGRAVING BY THOMAS HEARNE AND WILLIAM WOOLLETT, AFTER CLAUDE; WORKING PROOF; IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM]

There is little to say, in this place, on the subject of the mezzotints. His Majesty has lent a magnificent impression of The Great Executioner, by Prince Rupert, after Spagnoletto; a print which strikes one as perhaps in its vigour and splendid painter-like qualities the finest in the gallery. The rest of the mezzotints are generally well known, though to the credit of the exhibition it must be said that the preponderance of the fashionable, if insipid class, is not overwhelming. The Wards are hardly as good as they might be; especially in view of the large amount of space given to Charles Turner. But The Water Mill by the latter, after Sir A. W. Callcott, makes one very charitable towards him. It is certainly one of the finest examples of the value of mezzotint as a method of rendering landscape. Mr. Rawlinson, again, lends some valuable examples of the ‘Liber Studiorum’ which are carefully and instructively catalogued. Among the modern work, that of Mr. Frank Short holds, of course, the first place, for he is one of the very few living mezzotinters who can be said to take rank with the best of the old men in technique. The pretty art of stipple receives due attention; and so do the colour-prints, of which the best are, it is good to find, the property of the museum. The art of etching is well shown from Hollar, the group of imitators of Rembrandt in the eighteenth century, the Norwich school, and Wilkie and Geddes in the nineteenth, down to the etching clubs and our own times. Most of this work is well known, for etching has been better served in the matter of literature than any of its sister arts: and it is the only one which has real life at the present day. A most important complement to the exhibited prints is furnished by a series of technical cases, containing complete sets of all tools and materials used in each of the various methods of engraving and etching; as well as examples of all the intermediate stages of working them. These were arranged by Mr. Frank Short and Miss C. M. Pott, and their descriptive notes in the catalogue make it a really useful little manual of technique for the amateur. It only remains to add that the illustration of Rogers’s Queen Elizabeth is reproduced by the gracious permission of his Majesty the King, who has also allowed a photogravure to be made of The Great Executioner, by Prince Rupert, which will appear as a supplement to the next number of ~The Burlington Magazine~. The other illustrations are from the collection of prints in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

~Edward F. Strange.~

~British Museum~

~Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities~

Among the additions to the department of British and mediaeval antiquities during the past half year are several objects of exceptional interest. In the ceramic section, a large two-handled vase of Florentine maiolica of the fifteenth century, with heraldic lions upon the sides, forms a worthy pendant to the magnificent vase of the same fabric acquired last year; while the series of oriental wares has been enriched by a writing-stand, or stand for flowers, of the twelfth or thirteenth century, ornamented with animals of archaic style in relief, and attributed to a factory in the neighbourhood of Aleppo. The acquisitions to the collection of glass exhibited in the same room include an enamelled German drinking-glass of the late sixteenth century, a very good example of its kind. ¶ In the mediaeval room the most notable additions will be found in the series of ivory carvings. Here the place of honour belongs to the beautiful head of a tau cross in morse ivory, dating from the eleventh century, recently discovered in the vicarage garden of Alcester, Warwickshire, which will be fully described next month in these pages. Secondly, there is a small but important group of ivories formerly in the possession of the Rev. Walter Sneyd, of Keele Hall, and exhibited in the art treasures exhibition at Manchester in 1857, and at South Kensington in 1862. Although few of the pieces composing this group are of high artistic merit, they are valuable as illustrations of the development of ivory carving during the early middle ages, a period which needed fuller representation in the museum collections. The most remarkable is an oval pyx of the form favoured between the fourth and seventh centuries, especially in Egypt and Syria. Its interest lies in the fact that it appears to be a Carlovingian imitation of a Syrian original dating from perhaps two centuries earlier. It differs essentially in style from the other examples which have been preserved, and the heavy, large-headed figures, with their long, retorted fingers, find their nearest parallels in the miniatures of Carlovingian MSS. Then there is a Byzantine panel, apparently by the same hand as a plaque acquired by the museum at the Ashburnham sale in 1901. This plaque was let into the cover of a thirteenth-century MS. of the romance of ‘Parceval le Galois,’ but originally belonged to a casket ornamented with scenes from the history of Joseph, two large panels from which have been for many years in the Berlin museum. It is satisfactory now to record the acquisition from the Sneyd collection of yet another example marked by the same individuality of style, and perhaps once forming a part of the same composition. Another small piece of Byzantine work not without charm is a panel from the lid of a casket of the ninth century, with figures probably from one of the classical scenes so popular during the iconoclastic period. Finally there are two long panels with seated apostles, Rhenish work of the twelfth century, and a smaller panel with the Flagellation, of similar attribution and date. An interesting accession in the sphere of prehistoric industrial art is a remarkably large bronze spear-head, inlaid at the base of the blade with gold studs, a fine example of the skill and taste of the metal-workers of Britain towards the close of the bronze age.

O. M. D.

[Illustration: THE WATER MILL, MEZZOTINT BY C. TURNER AFTER SIR A. W. E. CALCOTT, R.A.; IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM]

[Illustration: THE HÔTEL DE VILLE AT LOUVAIN; COLOURED AQUATINT BY J. C. STADLER, AFTER S. PROUT; IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM]

~The Print Room of the British Museum~

The Department has acquired by purchase an extremely interesting and important addition to the collection of Chinese paintings. This is a long roll, containing scenes of court life and amusements in the first century ~A.D.~ Pan Chao, a female historian of that era, is among the figures represented. It is painted in colours on brown silk; green, purple, and a tawny yellow have been used, but have more or less sunk, so that the general impression is that of a painting in vermilion and black, the two pigments which have stood best. The actual workmanship, especially the modulation of the brush-line, is of extraordinary beauty and power, and can only be that of a great master. There seems no reason to doubt that we have in this roll an authentic work by Ku K‘ai-chih (‘Ko-gai-shi’ in Japanese pronunciation), a very famous artist of the fourth and fifth centuries ~A.D.~, to whom it has always been attributed, though the signature and inscriptions are probably of later date. Annexed to the roll is a eulogy of the painter in the handwriting of Ch‘ien Lung, the emperor who received Lord Macartney’s embassy in 1793; and following this is an admirable and delicate ink-landscape by an eighteenth-century painter. The importance of a picture by Ku K‘ai-chih will be realized when we consider that of the art of the T‘ang dynasty (600 to 900 ~A.D.~) hardly a vestige remains, while relics of the later Sung period are extremely rare. Nothing so ancient exists in Japan, the country where for a thousand years the early paintings of China have been collected with ardour and preserved with veneration. ¶ A full account of this and some other important examples of Chinese painting will shortly be given in this magazine.

L. B.

NOTE ON THE LIFE OF BERNARD VAN ORLEY

Bernard van Orley is generally said to have been the second son--third child--of Valentine van Orley by his first wife, Margaret van Pynbroeck, whom he married May 13, 1490. He is further stated to have left Brussels in 1509 for Rome, and to have studied in the school of Raphael, becoming a great favourite with his master. ¶ It seems impossible to reconcile these statements with certain facts which are established beyond doubt by authentic documents. In 1514 Bernard was settled as a master-painter at Brussels, and had already gained a certain reputation, for the confraternity of the Holy Cross at Furnes in 1515 sent a delegate to Brussels to ask him to furnish a design for the altar-piece of their chapel. Bernard must therefore have at that time attained the age of 30,[82] which would put back the date of his birth to 1484-5. And unless there is some error in the date--May 4, 1504--of the procuration published by A. Wauters (‘Bernard van Orley,’ Bruxelles, 1881, p. 70), his birth must have taken place before May 1479, as no minor could give a procuration or power of attorney to another to dispose of property. Children at that time only attained their majority at the age of 25. ¶ If born in 1479 Bernard may well have become a free master or gone to Rome in 1509. I suspect that he was not the son of Valentine and Margaret van Pynbroeck, but of some other Valentine, perhaps the uncle. I know of no document giving the name of his mother.

~W. H. James Weale.~

THE COLLECTION OF PICTURES OF THE EARL OF NORMANTON, AT SOMERLEY, HAMPSHIRE

❧ WRITTEN BY MAX ROLDIT ❧

ARTICLE I.--PICTURES BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

In almost every corner of these islands there is to be found hidden away amongst the trees or proudly standing on the summit of a hill one of those imposing ancestral homesteads which the British aristocracy have erected at various times ever since the Norman conquest. From the feudal castle of gothic architecture to the modern mansion replete with every comfort and household invention of the nineteenth century every style is represented. These buildings are geographical landmarks in the country, and nearly all are also landmarks in the artistic topography of Great Britain. Succeeding generations of owners have accumulated treasures which, severely guarded by family settlements, can only be dislodged under special conditions. In not a few instances the ancient furniture thus preserved, the objects of art and especially the pictures, the latter usually grouped round a nucleus of family portraits of successive periods, would rival many a public collection for the perfection of the examples, their artistic and monetary worth, and even their actual number. The more therefore is it to be regretted that they are so rarely accessible to the artist, the student, the public at large. A small percentage is, it is true, to be seen at the admirable loan exhibitions organized yearly at Burlington House and the Guildhall, and also from time to time in galleries governed by private enterprise; but these artistic feasts are all too rare, and even were the owners of fine works of art always willing to lend their property, which is not invariably the case, it would be impossible for all the objects worthy of being shown to pass in this way before the gaze of a single generation. Many are the masterpieces in this country which have not moved from their resting place for scores of years and which are, except to a privileged few, as completely unknown and invisible as the immensely distant stars which astronomers contemplate through their most powerful lens. ¶The collection of pictures at Somerley, the Earl of Normanton’s beautiful seat near Ringwood in Hampshire, is one of those of whose very existence only a small minority is aware. The mansion, of late Georgian style, stands on the banks of the Avon in the midst of a park and estate extending over 9,000 acres, and is visited by only a small number of persons annually besides Lord Normanton’s immediate entourage. ¶ With a very few exceptions, the entire collection was formed between the years 1820 and 1868 by Welbore Ellis, second Earl of Normanton, and grandfather of the present peer. Born in 1778, he succeeded to the title in 1809, married Diana, eldest daughter of the eleventh Earl of Pembroke, in 1816, and died in his ninetieth year in 1868, leaving as a record of his taste and artistic knowledge the wonderful gallery of paintings which is the subject of this study. ¶ The collection is composed chiefly of pictures of the eighteenth-century English school, including works by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Hoppner, Romney, Lawrence, Morland, Bonington, Nasmyth and Crome; it contains also pictures by some Flemish and Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, Rubens, Van Dyck and Teniers, Paul Potter, Van de Capelle, Aart van der Neer, Wouwerman and Willem van de Velde; Guardi and Canaletto represent the Italian; Murillo represents the Spanish school; whilst Greuze is the only French artist who has found a place at Somerley. The most striking feature of the collection is to be found in the predominance of works by Sir Joshua Reynolds, evidently the favourite painter of the second Lord Normanton, who acquired no fewer than twenty-six examples from his brush. ¶ For the sake of clearness and convenience, a description of the Normanton collection may be divided into three sections, namely:--

I. The works by Sir Joshua Reynolds. II. The works by British painters other than Sir Joshua Reynolds. III. The works by painters of the foreign schools.

[Illustration: MISS MURRAY, OF KIRKCUDBRIGHT, BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS;

IN THE COLLECTION OF THE EARL OF NORMANTON.]

[Illustration: CHARITY FAITH HOPE

THE THREE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES; FROM THE PAINTINGS BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS FOR THE WINDOW AT NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD; IN THE COLLECTION OF THE EARL OF NORMANTON]

¶ The group of paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds is unparalleled in any other collection public or private all the world over; both by the number and the excellence of the examples, it is absolutely unique, and it would be well-nigh impossible at the present day for even a multi-millionaire to bring together a rival gathering of this one painter’s productions. ¶ All through his career as a collector, Lord Normanton continued to acquire examples of Sir Joshua’s work, but his most important single purchase was made as early as 1821 at the sale of the pictures of the Marchioness of Thomond, held at Christie’s on May 18 and 19 of that year. The Marchioness of Thomond was no other than Mary Palmer, daughter of Sir Joshua’s elder sister, and sister to pretty ‘Offy’ Palmer, afterwards Mrs. Gwatkin, whom her uncle so often used as a model for his fancy pictures, notably for the Strawberry Girl. When Sir Joshua died in 1792, he left the bulk of his property to his niece, Mary Palmer; she inherited nearly £100,000 besides a number of pictures and other works of art; the same year she married the fifth Earl of Inchiquin, subsequently created Marquess of Thomond. After her death in 1821, her pictures were sold at Christie’s, and that occasion may be said to mark the foundation of the Normanton collection. Lady Thomond’s sale included, besides many works by old masters, a large number of pictures and sketches by her illustrious uncle; and here Lord Normanton secured for less than £3,000 the wonderful series of seven decorative panels which have ever remained the chief ornament of his collection, and for which in recent years fabulous sums have been offered and refused. They represent the three theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity, and the four cardinal virtues, Temperance, Prudence, Justice, and Fortitude. They are the original designs executed by Sir Joshua Reynolds for the window at New College, Oxford, and afterwards copied on glass by Jarvis. Ever since his school days at Westminster, Lord Normanton had known and admired these pictures at Lady Thomond’s. On the day of the sale, in answer to a suggestion of the auctioneer that the entire set should be sold together, the company present, which included the Dukes of Devonshire and Northumberland, Lords Egremont, Grosvenor, Bridgewater, Fitzwilliam, Dudley and Ward, and Harewood, Sir Charles Long on behalf of the king, and many other well-known picture buyers, decided that the Virtues should be offered separately. The Charity was put up first, and its purchase at 1,100 guineas by Lord Normanton, then a young man, created no small sensation. Lord Dudley and Ward eagerly competed for the Fortitude, for which his mother had sat to Sir Joshua, but that as well as the other six succumbed to Lord Normanton’s bidding. Seven years later an offer of twice the purchase price was made for them on behalf of the king, and again some few years afterwards the National Gallery tried in vain to tempt Lord Normanton with three times the original sum. ¶ As to the designs themselves, it had been the painter’s original intention to make them drawings or cartoons; but he soon found it would be easier for him to paint them in oils, so long had he been used to the brush and the palette. ‘Jarvis, the painter on glass,’ he said, ‘will have a better original to copy, and I suppose persons hereafter may be found to purchase my paintings.’ In this he was, however, disappointed, since the Virtues were still in his possession at his death. ¶In a letter written about 1778, Sir Joshua details the general plan for the Oxford window. ‘Supposing this scheme to take place, my idea is to paint, in the great space in the centre, Christ in the Manger, on the principle that Correggio has done it, in the famous picture called the Notte; making all the light proceed from Christ. These tricks of the art, as they may be called, seem to be more properly adapted to glass-painting than any other kind. This middle space will be filled with the Virgin, Christ, Joseph and angels; the two smaller spaces on each side I shall fill with the shepherds coming to worship; and the seven divisions below with the figures of Faith, Hope, Charity and the four cardinal virtues; which will make a proper rustic base or _foundation_ for the support of the Christian Religion....’ ¶ The large central picture of the Nativity, measuring ten feet by eighteen, was sold by the artist to the Duke of Rutland for the then unprecedented price of 1,200 guineas. It was unfortunately destroyed in the fire at Belvoir in 1816. A powerful sketch of this subject on a small scale is, however, to be found at Somerley. ¶ The seven Virtues, which now hang side by side in the magnificent gallery built by the second Earl of Normanton, each measure 6 ft. 11 in. in height by 2 ft. 9 in. in width, except the central panel, Faith, which is taller and narrower than the others, namely, 8 ft. by 2 ft. 5 in. Charity is represented by a group of a woman clasping three children in her protecting arms, whilst all the rest contain but a single allegorical figure, with the special attributes consecrated by tradition. The most noteworthy feature of the entire series, and that which first strikes the onlooker, is its thoroughly and unmistakably English character. No straining after classicism, no copying or imitation of the Italians are to be found in this the most successful work of decoration ever painted by a British artist. In the Nativity, Reynolds was accused of a too servile imitation of Correggio, but certainly no such reproach can apply to the seven Virtues. In the conception or the execution, in the drawing or the colour, in the types of his models or the arrangement of the draperies, nowhere is a trace discernible of any foreign element. Reynolds represented the Virtues under the features of the lovely and refined English ladies whom he was accustomed to paint; the draperies in which they are clothed are dresses of the eighteenth century, simplified no doubt, and chastened, but sometimes scarcely altered, as in the case of Temperance and Prudence. He thus avoided the cold conventionality usually so apparent in allegorical paintings, whilst losing nothing in dignity or impressiveness; if one misses the spiritual elevation of the Italians, there is a corresponding gain in humanity, and that indefinable quality, charm.

[Illustration: TEMPERANCE PRUDENCE

TWO OF THE CARDINAL VIRTUES FROM SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS’S PAINTINGS FOR THE WINDOW AT NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD, IN THE COLLECTION OF THE EARL OF NORMANTON]

[Illustration: FORTITUDE JUSTICE

TWO OF THE CARDINAL VIRTUES; FROM THE PAINTINGS BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS FOR THE WINDOW AT NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD; IN THE COLLECTION OF THE EARL OF NORMANTON]

Faith is represented by the figure of a girl with a face of exquisite innocence and sweetness, expressive also of deep suffering and infinite resignation. Her plain white pilgrim’s robe is partly covered by a loose brown drapery falling around her in simple heavy folds; with her left hand she holds a tall wooden cross, the upper part of which is strongly outlined against the divine illumination which brightens the clouds above her; her right hand is uplifted towards heaven in an attitude of invocation. Hope is the least successful panel of the series. Clad in dull green draperies with a brown scarf flowing from her shoulders, she stands in a somewhat awkward position, her hands uplifted and her face averted towards the light which pours upon her through the clouds. Charity can, on the contrary, rank with the finest of Sir Joshua’s pictures; his model in this instance was Mrs. Sheridan, the lovely wife of the author of ‘School for Scandal,’ who had also sat to him for the figure of the Virgin in the Nativity. On her breast nestles a half-naked infant whom she lovingly supports with her left hand, whilst with the other she clasps in a close embrace two more children, a young girl and a curly-headed boy, who have run to her for protection; with an expression of rare tenderness and pity she gazes down upon her little charges. This picture is painted with exceptional power; the contrasts of light and shade are rendered with a perfection almost reminiscent of Rembrandt, whilst the composition is both strong and graceful. The two beautiful young women in whom Reynolds has impersonated Temperance and Prudence are clothed in white dresses of eighteenth-century design, bordered in the case of the second with a narrow gold braid. Mrs. Elizabeth Palmer, wife of the artist’s nephew, the Dean of Cashel, was the model for Prudence; she gazes thoughtfully into a mirror which she holds in her right hand; in the left she has an arrow round which an adder is entwined. Temperance is pouring water from a golden jug into a golden cup. In the two last panels, the figures stand full face to the spectator; the features of Justice are shaded by the balance which she raises to the level of her head; her loose robe, held by a girdle at the waist, is rose-coloured, and her right hand rests on the hilt of a naked sword. Fortitude (Lady Dudley and Ward) is the traditional figure of Britannia, a plumed helmet upon her noble head, a small golden breast-plate decorating her white robe, around which a dark red mantle is draped; the head of the watchful lion crouching at her feet is shown in the right-hand corner. ¶ Several other works by Sir Joshua were acquired by Lord Normanton besides the seven Virtues at Lady Thomond’s sale, including the expressive half-length portrait of himself, painted in 1769, in his robes of president of the Royal Academy, his right hand resting on a book. The delightful portrait of Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Joshua’s friend Topham Beauclerk and his beautiful wife Lady Diana, represented as Spenser’s Una with the lion crouching at her side, came from the same source and cost only thirty-seven guineas. Elizabeth Beauclerk married in 1787 the Earl of Pembroke and was the mother of Diana, Lady Normanton, wife of the collector. Sir Joshua painted her about the year 1778 and showed her in a perfectly simple white frock, childishly sitting on her heels upon the ground. Her hair falls loosely over her shoulders and her expression is one of thoughtful innocence. The foliage and landscape behind her are treated with great breadth and power; the more delicate parts of the picture, such as the face and hands, are on the contrary very smoothly painted; the marked difference in texture is explained by the fact that at this period Sir Joshua used a mixture of wax and Venice turpentine as a vehicle for the heads, and wax alone for other portions of his pictures where he wished to produce thicker impastos. The picture described in Lady Thomond’s catalogue as A Girl seated on her heels embracing a favourite Kitten, for which Lord Normanton gave 295 guineas, is one of several of the same delightful subject done by Sir Joshua and usually known as Felina. It was painted in 1787, and although Offy Palmer was by that time a grown-up young woman, it is her features when a child which her uncle has once more used. Witty and graceful, this picture bears witness to Sir Joshua’s supremacy as a limner of children. No one more than he succeeded in reproducing their quaint and charmingly awkward attitudes, and it would be difficult to find even in his works anything more delicious than this little dark-eyed damsel fondling her unhappy pet almost to the point of suffocation. The face is painted with great delicacy and a clearness of complexion unusual in Sir Joshua’s pictures; the background of foliage is unfortunately severely cracked, owing to an excessive use of treacherous bitumen. Miss Falconer (afterwards the Hon. Mrs. Stanhope) as Contemplation was also included in the Marchioness of Thomond’s collection, but was not bought at her sale by Lord Normanton. It was knocked down on that occasion for 100 guineas to a dealer, from whom it passed into the possession of Mr. John Allnutt, of Clapham Common, and it was only many years later that it was transferred into the Somerley collection of which it now forms part. The beautiful lady whom the painter has here represented, in a moonlit landscape, seated on a bank in a pensive attitude, was a well-known figure in the society of her day, where her high spirits and light-hearted gaiety made her a general favourite; the appearance of this portrait, so contrary to her character, excited no little comment at the time. In charm of expression and unaffected grace of pose this portrait is a truly delightful production. An interesting fact concerning it is that it is one of the few portraits by Reynolds painted on a panel; the artist, who, as is well known, was for ever making new experiments in the mediums he employed, selected on this occasion an old Japanese panel, and the reverse of the picture is to this day decorated with a still-life in bold relief, brilliant in colouring and of no mean artistic merit. ¶ In three life-size full-length portraits of young girls which hang in Lord Normanton’s gallery, it is instructive to compare the artist’s method of treatment of a similar subject at different periods of his career. These pictures are those of Lady Betty Hamilton, painted in 1758, of Miss Murray of Kirkcudbright, 1765, and that, some twenty years later in date, known for lack of a better title as The Little Gardener. In the first there is a richness of colour and a wealth of detail not to be found in either of the two others; the influence of Reynolds’s master, Hudson, is still clearly discernible, and the warmth and brilliance of the colouring must be traced to the immediate effects of the artist’s recent travels in Italy, where the gorgeous tones of the Venetians had filled him with a boundless admiration. In the two earlier portraits there is a simple artlessness of pose in striking contrast with the affected and self-conscious attitude of The Little Gardener, whilst the latter is far broader and more spontaneous in technique. ¶ The portrait of Lady Betty Hamilton, afterwards Countess of Derby, is unsurpassed by any work of Sir Joshua at this early period, and it may also be counted among the best of his child portraits. In a low-cut dress of plum-coloured embroidered silk, her wide skirt reaching to the ground, she sits on a bank in a garden; she has a white muslin pinafore bordered with lace, and her hands rest on her lap holding a bunch of vari-coloured flowers. The flesh-tints are somewhat faded, but the dreamy blue eyes and rosebud mouth expressive of happy childhood’s ignorance of evil and suffering, are a delight to look upon. She was a daughter of the Duke of Hamilton, and became the first wife of the twelfth Earl of Derby, who, after divorcing her, married Miss Farren the celebrated actress. In 1777 Reynolds painted another portrait of her as Countess of Derby, a whole-length which was engraved by William Dickinson; this picture has, however, disappeared, probably destroyed by her husband after his divorce. ¶ Little Miss Murray of Kirkcudbright in a plain white dress with a black silk scarf thrown over her head and shoulders and funny blue shoes, stands in a landscape, her hands loosely crossed in front of her. By her side sits a curious woolly white dog with black spots on its face, which has no appearance of life, and shows how inferior in this respect Sir Joshua was to Gainsborough, who stands with Velasquez among the greatest dog painters of the world. The landscape in this picture is of quite unusual excellence, and with the fine breezy sky forms an effective and pleasing background to the figure of the blue-eyed little Scotch girl. ¶ Who was the sitter for the portrait called The Little Gardener, it seems at the present time impossible to discover; it shows a pretty young girl sitting dreamily on a bank at the edge of a wood; she wears a white dress with a crimson sash, and with her right hand she loosely holds a straw bonnet decorated with pink ribbons.

[Illustration: THE LITTLE GARDENER, BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS; IN THE COLLECTION OF THE EARL OF NORMANTON]

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF GEORGE, THIRD DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH, BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS; IN THE COLLECTION OF THE EARL OF NORMANTON]

There is at Somerley only one male portrait of great importance by Sir Joshua Reynolds. This represents George, third Duke of Marlborough, and is a magnificent three-quarter length portrait. The duke wears a rich coat of brown embroidered silk and a mantle of crimson velvet bordered with white fur thrown over his right shoulder; his left arm rests upon a column, and the upper portion of the body is outlined against a beautiful sky background. The pose is evidently inspired by Van Dyck, and the portrait lacks none of the dignity and elegance of the older master. An almost exactly similar painting is in the possession of the Earl of Pembroke, in which however the duke’s dark dress is replaced by one of white embroidered satin. ¶ Some dozen portraits of the usual half-length format (about 30 in. by 25 in.) are contained in the Normanton collection, and not a few of them are of superlative quality. Among the most pleasing is that of the Misses Horneck, as original as it is graceful in composition; many failures have resulted from the attempt thus to group two life-size heads in so small a space, but Sir Joshua has here admirably succeeded in avoiding stiffness and crowding while preserving perfect pictorial unity. Painted in a light key about the year 1775, this picture is in a wonderful state of preservation, having retained all its freshness of tone and delicacy of modelling. An unfinished sketch of the same subject, slightly larger in size, belongs to Sir Henry Bunbury, a descendant of the elder sister’s husband, the caricaturist, Henry William Bunbury. Mrs. Bunbury (Catharine Horneck), who is seen on the right of the group, was Goldsmith’s ‘Little Comedy,’ whilst her sister Mary, afterwards Mrs. Gwyn, is celebrated by him as ‘The Jessamy Bride.’ The excellent though slightly faded portrait of Miss Anne Liddell was bought by the second Lord Normanton at Christie’s in May, 1867, at the sale of Mr. H. A. J. Munro, of Novar, for 225 guineas. Miss Liddell, who is represented in a black low-cut dress and black cloak trimmed with white fur, holding some flowers in her right hand, was a daughter of Lord Ravensworth; she became Duchess of Grafton, and after divorcing in 1769 married the Earl of Upper Ossory. The pair of heads of the Earl and Countess of Pembroke, painted within the last years of the artist’s life, cost Lord Normanton only 30 guineas in 1827. Lord and Lady Pembroke were the parents of Diana, Lady Normanton, and the countess is the same lady whom Sir Joshua represented some years previously as Una with the lion; she wears her peeress’s robes of crimson and ermine over a white low-necked dress, and the earl is in uniform of red and gold. It is interesting to find side by side with these examples of the end of the painter’s career the picture of A Boy Reading, which is inscribed ‘1747, J^a Reynolds pinxit Nov.’ and which is one of the earliest known works of the artist, when he was only twenty-three years of age. It is said to be a portrait of himself, but this is by no means certain, although the boy’s features bear a certain resemblance to those of Sir Joshua. With hair falling over his shoulders, and arms leaning on a table, he reads from a large book which he holds open with both hands; four more books lie on the table beside him. It is related that on seeing this picture after an interval of many years Sir Joshua remarked that he had made but little progress since he painted it. Although this observation must not be taken too literally, there is no doubt that even at this early period he exhibited uncommon mastery of his art. To an early period also, probably between 1755 and 1760, the portrait of Lady Charlotte Johnstone, daughter of the first Earl of Halifax, and that of Mrs. Russell, daughter of Mr. Flountia Vassall, are shown to belong by the marked attention paid to detail, by a certain tightness of drawing, and also by the faded flesh-tints due to Reynolds’s excessive use at this time of brilliant but unstable carmine. Both are painted in profile, wearing rich dresses of similar pattern, with pearls in their ears and round their throat. Probably a little later in date is the very decorative and somewhat French-looking portrait of Miss Meux (engraved as Miss Muse); she wears a Louis XV costume, the bodice all tucks and frills, and a flat gipsy straw hat trimmed with pink ribbons; she has two rows of pearls round her throat, and the muslin gimp which covers her breast is spotted with little pink rosettes. This is no doubt the picture which Lord Normanton bought for 135 gns. at the Novar sale in 1867, and which was then said to be a portrait of Fanny Reynolds (Sir Joshua’s sister). Another beautiful half-length picture is that of the actress Mrs. Quarrington, as St. Agnes, in a brown dress over which hangs a dark green mantle. She holds a lamb in her arms and a palm branch in her left hand; the pathetic face, surrounded by her loose locks of hair, is upturned in an attitude of prayer. Nor must mention be omitted of a pretty and powerful octagonal study of a little girl’s head with pearls in her hair, the shoulders covered with a light white drapery. ¶ The oval portrait of Mrs. Inchbald is catalogued in more than one volume of recent date as a work by Sir Joshua; it is, however, hard and unconvincing, and the flesh and black dress are too weakly painted not to leave a doubt in one’s mind whether it is not rather the production of one of Reynolds’s pupils, most probably Northcote. It is difficult also to admit the portrait of Admiral Barrington to be entirely from the master’s hand; there is a similar portrait by him in Greenwich Hospital, and it is known that six replicas were made at the time in Sir Joshua’s studio; this is one of them, and, although painted under his supervision, it is probable that his own brush took but little part in the work. Possibly a replica of the famous picture in the Chamberlayne collection, but also more probably the work of a contemporary copyist, is the Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante, a subject rendered familiar by numerous engravings, notably Bartolozzi’s beautiful colour-print. No doubt whatever is possible in the case of The Little Archer, the figure of a boy lying full length in a landscape; here the methods of Sir Joshua are palpably imitated, but the poor drawing and the ugly obtrusiveness of the boy’s white stockings preclude any possibility of the master having in any way contributed to its painting. ¶ A number of acknowledged copies of pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds are also to be found at Somerley, and some are not devoid of merit. Among the best may be mentioned Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, painted by the Duchess of Buckingham, from the original now at Grosvenor House, of which a genuine replica hangs at Dulwich; also Mrs. Gwyn in Persian costume, a good contemporary reproduction of the picture which belongs to Mr. W. W. Astor. ¶ It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this group of pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds; the genius of the Royal Academy’s first president is displayed at Somerley in its every phase, and each period of his career is represented by one or more works of the highest artistic value; there, he can be studied as it is impossible to study him elsewhere, at the same time that a comparison can be made with masterpieces of other great English painters which hang in Lord Normanton’s magnificent gallery.

[Illustration: STUDY OF A LITTLE GIRL, BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS; IN THE COLLECTION OF THE EARL OF NORMANTON]

[Illustration: THE MISSES HORNECK, BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS; IN THE COLLECTION OF THE EARL OF NORMANTON]

[Illustration: HIGH WARP TAPESTRY, LOUIS XIV VISITING THE ROYAL FURNITURE MANUFACTORY AT THE GOBELINS, AFTER CHARLES LE BRUN. LOUVRE]

FRENCH FURNITURE OF THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES[83]

❧ WRITTEN BY ÉMILE MOLINIER ❧

ARTICLE II.--THE LOUIS XIV STYLE--(_continued_)

THE GOBELINS

It would certainly be unfair to consider Louis XIV and espeacially Colbert, from the point of view of the part played of the royal manufactory of crown furniture at the Gobelins, as being merely unconscious instruments. There is no doubt that a formal act of will on their part entered into this creation. But, once having done this justice, especially to Colbert, we are bound to remark, if we would wish to take a sane view of events, that an institution of this kind was, at the moment when it was established in France, the result of a series of previous efforts, all turned in the same direction; was the result also of a general movement of centralization which was to be one of the sources of weakness, of the system of government adopted in France. ¶ The founding of the academy of painting and sculpture had completed the organization of art in the great sense; the founding of the manufactory of the Gobelins was destined to bring about the centralization of the minor arts and to strike a blow at the old edifice of the rules of the corporations. We must make no mistake: from the artistic point of view, the monarchy largely began the salutary work of emancipation which the French Revolution was to complete, and we may well be surprised that right-minded persons should discover a source of weakness and decadence in the modifications introduced into the life of the workshops. To be logical we should have to blame the monarchy itself, which, nearly 150 years before the Revolution, began, by a devious course it is true, to take away all force from restrictive laws, from rules and regulations which already seemed out of date at the end of the middle ages. It will be seen that, though the complete abolition of the rules of the corporations did, in certain cases, become a cause of confusion, we should do wrong to look upon it as the sole cause of the degeneration in artistic feeling in the minor arts at the commencement of the nineteenth century. The suppression of the corporations under the Revolution was as inevitable an event as was under Louis XIV the establishment of official artistic workshops. The whole lay in the manner of setting to work to decree those two measures. ¶ To second his views, Colbert was fortunate enough to have at hand an exceptional man, one who was at the same time an organizer and an artist, two qualities rarely united in one and the same brain; and he also had the good sense to select him in spite of appearances. He did more, for after selecting him he left him the most complete liberty. And yet Charles Le Brun might have passed as suspect in the minds of both the king and Colbert. ¶ Born in Paris on February 24, 1619, Charles Le Brun was the son of Nicholas Le Brun, a sculptor. His first masters were Perrier, a Burgundian painter, and Simon Vouet; and it was doubtless through Vouet’s intermediary that he became acquainted with the Chancellor Séguier, in whom he was later to find a firm friend and a constant protector. Some works executed for the Cardinal de Richelieu earned for him the title of painter to the king in 1638. In 1642, he accompanied Nicolas Poussin to Rome and was admitted as a master-painter into the corporation. He returned to Paris in 1646, received the title of _valet de chambre_ to the king, and married Suzanne Butay, a painter’s daughter. ¶ A law-suit between the wardens of the Gild of Painters and the king’s painters, the so-called ‘patent painters,’ suddenly made Le Brun conspicuous, and, after the favourable decision pronounced by the parliament, with the support of Séguier he contributed not a little towards the definite foundation of the academy of painting (1648). But, while fighting strenuously for the principles of his art, Le Brun neglected no opportunity of practising it, and executed for a number of Paris mansions a series of large decorative compositions, for which he had acquired the taste in Italy. The houses of Bertrand de la Bazinière, treasurer of the _Épargne_; of Marshal d’Aumont; of the Chevalier de Jars; of Inselin, treasurer of the _Chambre aux Deniers_; of Lambert de Thorigny, president of the _Chambre des Comptes_, were decorated by him in turns. In the last of these mansions he painted the Galerie d’Hercule, which still exists, and the sight of which eventually determined the Superintendent Fouquet to send for Le Brun to Vaux (1657). Here, in the sumptuous residence of Vaux, of which Fouquet was to have the enjoyment for so short a while, Le Brun displayed his full powers. He not only painted or designed such compositions as the Apothéose d’Hercule, the Triomphe de la Fidélité, L’Aurore, Le Sommeil, the Palais du Soleil, but he also directed the sculptors, ornament workers and silversmiths, the tapestry workers and embroiderers, and managed the manufactory of high-warp tapestry established by Fouquet at Maincy. He supplied so large a number of models and cartoons for tapestry, that many of his compositions could be executed only much later at the manufactory of the Gobelins; the Chasses de Méléagre, Mars et Venus, Jupiter allaité par la chèvre Amalthée, five pieces representing the history of Constantine, the Muses, all bear witness to the prodigious fertility of an artist who, like the great Italians of the Renaissance, was lavish in production while developing his admirable administrative qualities. ¶ If these gigantic works at the Château de Vaux had not succeeded in earning for him the esteem of Mazarin and of the queen-mother, Anne of Austria, and also in drawing the attention of the king (for Le Brun was the organizer of the great _fêtes_ given by the Superintendent in 1659), it might have happened that our artist would have incurred the same disgrace as his patron. Very fortunately this was not so; for once talent was able to silence envy, and Le Brun was admirably served by circumstances. In 1660, the king ordered a large picture of him, Alexandre pénétrant dans la tente de Darius, and the city of Paris instructed him to erect a triumphal arch on the Place Dauphine for the entry into Paris of Louis XIV and his queen, Maria Theresa. In 1661 he entered into relations with Colbert; in 1662 he received the much-coveted title of ‘first painter to the king.’ We see, therefore, that his connexion with Fouquet--and it does not seem that Le Brun was ever placed in the painful situation of having to deny the man who had enabled him to make his mark--so far from harming him, had, on the contrary, done him good service. Perhaps the king, at the same time that Colbert began to suspect his exceptional powers as an organizer and administrator, recognized in Le Brun one of those men who were to be so useful to his thirst for stately glory and royal pomp.

[Illustration: GOBELIN TAPESTRY, PSYCHE’S BATH, BY LE LORRAIN; END OF LOUIS XIV; IN THE LOUVRE]

[Illustration: SECTION OF THE BORDER OF THE SAME TAPESTRY]

[Illustration: A MARQUETRY BUREAU BY ANDRÉ CHARLES BOULE IN THE PALACE OF FONTAINEBLEAU]

[Illustration: A BOOK CASE BY ANDRÉ CHARLES BOULE]

One last circumstance enabled Le Brun to make himself absolutely indispensable to the king’s glory. On February 6, 1661, the first floor of the small gallery of the Louvre was almost totally destroyed by fire. Our artist was commissioned to renew its decoration; he made of this a monument to the glory of Apollo, the god of the sun, a delicate attention which enabled him to indulge in more or less delicate allusions with his brush to the king himself. All the works--which, for that matter, were never finished under Louis XIV: the works at the other royal residences, and particularly at Versailles, thrust the Galerie d’Apollon into the background--were directed solely by Le Brun: he got together a little army of sculptors and decorators, among whom we recall the names of Gaspard and Balthazar de Marsy, François Girardon, Thomas Regnauldin, Monnoyer, the brothers Lemoyne and Ballin, whose fortunes were thenceforth closely linked with those of the first painter to the king. ¶ The letters patent of Louis XIV instituting the ‘royal manufactory of crown furniture’ are dated November 1667, but they sanction a state of things that existed as far back as 1663. I shall analyse briefly this deed of foundation, most of whose dispositions it is very important for us to know, showing as they do how the machinery of administration was capable of being simplified in the seventeenth century. Let me here remind my readers that the name of ‘Gobelins,’ which to-day serves to designate the tapestries issuing from the famous manufactory, dates back to the fifteenth century. At that time a dyer called Jean Gobelin, a native of Rheims, settled on the banks of the little river Bièvre. His trade prospered so well that his name was given to his house and workshop, near to which came to live Marc de Comano and François de la Planche, the Flemish upholsterers installed in Paris by Henry IV. In 1662 Colbert joined the old house of the Gobelins to the workshops of the descendants of Comano and La Planche; and on these premises was installed the new manufactory which was destined to perpetuate the memory of the name of the humble dyer of the fifteenth century.

(_To be continued._)

THE EXHIBITION OF GREEK ART AT THE BURLINGTON FINE ARTS CLUB

❧ WRITTEN BY CECIL SMITH ❧

‘Every man of taste will congratulate himself that England is the seat and the refuge of the arts; and that so many genuine remains of ancient sculpture are present in our cabinets.’ So wrote James Dallaway at the beginning of last century, and, although some may think that the arts have now somewhat altered their habits, there is no doubt that this country still remains pre-eminent in the wealth of its private collections of Greek antiquities. If proof were needed, this admirable little collection would afford it. When the scheme was first mooted of a Greek exhibition at the Burlington Club, a moderate scepticism was not altogether unnatural. The former attempt in 1888 had not been exactly an enthusiastic success, and somehow the club itself appeared to be a somewhat stern soil for so tender a plant. A society of dilettanti, with grave and reverend opinions upon every conceivable form of bigotry and virtue, might be expected either to adopt an attitude of cold aloofness or to overlay its offspring with excessive and even (may one whisper it?) injudicious appreciation. But we never know where a blessing may light, and, if one may judge from the assiduous attention the exhibition has received, not only from the sternest critics of the club, but from the smart ladies of at least two capitals, a new era has dawned for Greek art; if it only lasts long enough, intrepid explorers will be found invading Bloomsbury, and the British Museum will cease to offer cool solitudes for the peaceful reflection of the philosopher and student. ¶ For the general public who have little time or inclination for long museum galleries, this sort of exhibition has much to recommend it; the intelligent public likes to have its culture prescribed for it in tabloid form--a small dose, unmistakably potent, which can be easily digested between meals. To this form of requirement the Burlington Club is admirably adapted: a single room, with just enough space for arranging a few good things. Mrs. Strong and her committee are so much to be congratulated that it seems ungracious to grumble; but personally I should have preferred to turn out about half of the less fine objects. It was difficult, no doubt; the susceptibilities of lenders are not lightly to be trifled with; but Greek art, more than most things, needs plenty of breathing space, and the exhibition would have gained by a judicious depletion. ¶ I think it was M. Piot who used to carry always in his waistcoat pocket a few of the choicest Greek coins (those being the most portable forms of the best art), as he said, ‘to correct his eye’; that was undoubtedly a true instinct. When all is said and done, Greek art will always serve as an admirable corrective--within its limits of course, for painting is obviously excluded--and that is at least some comfort in these impressionist days, when new creeds lie about like leaves in Vallombrosa. ¶ I overheard one day a visitor to this exhibition angrily resenting the suggestion that Greek art at its best could be compared for a moment with the master works of the middle ages. It is a large question, which there is no space here to argue, only I do not think it is so easily dismissed as the hasty critic supposed. I should even be prepared to stand by some of the objects here exhibited. After all, it is in many cases the same plant growing up under differing conditions of time and circumstance. Some day perhaps the club may be persuaded to try the experiment of showing side by side some of the finest parallel achievements of antiquity and the three centuries of mediaeval Europe.

[Illustration: PLATE I

FRAGMENT OF THE FRIEZE OF THE PARTHENON, BELONGING TO MR T. D. BOTTERELL]

[Illustration: PLATE II

BUST OF APHRODITE, PROBABLY BY PRAXITELES; IN THE COLLECTION OF THE LORD LECONFIELD]

[Illustration: PLATE III

HEAD OF A MOURNING WOMAN, BELONGING TO MR. CLAUDE PONSONBY

HEAD OF A YOUTH, BELONGING TO SIR EDGAR VINCENT, K.C.M.G., M.P.]

And I am not sure that the plan might not be adopted with advantage in museums, of having a small room, like the _tribuna_ at Florence for instance, with a florilegium of the best things of all dates; it would be both physically and mentally a boon to many a weary wayfarer. ¶ The most obvious point of comparison with the classical is the work of the classicists of north-east Italy, who, already at the end of the trecento, were beginning a formal but intelligent study of the antique. It would be instructive to see works of Donatello and John of Bologna side by side with their Greek counterparts; a Syracusan decadrachm of Kimon or Euainetos beside a medal of Pisanello or Sperandio. ¶ One bronze in the Burlington Club especially seems to challenge this comparison--the big mounted warrior (No. 53), which at first sight suggests a kind of glorified gothic aquamanile. A reviewer in the _Athenaeum_ points out the ‘research for elegance which already characterizes this figure,’ and which he considers to mark the essential difference between the Greeks and their successors. ‘Whereas the Greek,’ he says, ‘feels most keenly the planes, to the northern and Italian artists it is the ridges that count.’ This seems to me to be a plausible generalization from imperfectly perceived facts. The world-old contrast of the ideal and the real naturally went on in Greek art as it has gone on in every other art; but less among the Greeks, because for most of their history they steadily withstood realism; they believed and acted upon Shakespeare’s ‘Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean.’ At a late period realism became too strong for them, and the Pergamene school was the beginning of the end. Surely the broad contrasting of planes is not the characteristic of a race, but of a stage of development. Obviously the sculptor in marble or wood is bound to set out by blocking out his figure in broad planes: relative development shows itself in the amount of skill which the artist exhibits in graduating and refining these planes into each other. Early Greek art shows this particularly, because it derived largely from Egyptian traditions, and was long in breaking loose from set canons. But it is none the less true of all sculpture in which an historical development can be traced. The history of Italian sculpture down to Michael Angelo is so much under classical influence that its evolution may almost be said to be an index of its information regarding Greek art. Michael Angelo unfortunately corresponds to the Pergamene stage. Already, before his day, the great Italian medallists had shown in their medal work what is probably, outside of classical times, the nearest approach to the best Greek relief, and they worked largely on Greek lines. It is not by coincidence alone that the helmeted knight on the well-known medal of Ludovico Gonzaga naturally suggests an analogy to the bronze now exhibited. In both cases the simple effect is attained by a judicious elimination, by contrasted planes, and by a skilful co-ordination into an harmonious whole. ¶ This bronze is said to have been found at Grumentum, in Lucania, a city which, as its name and its geographical position show, was never a Greek colony, though latterly a town of some importance. Probably it found its way there in the course of Corinthian traffic: the long-bodied horse, the unusual subject of a helmeted horseman, the treatment of mane and tail, are all characteristic rather of the Corinthian art of the sixth century ~B.C.~; and we know how active the Corinthian colonists were at that period in south Italy. ¶ The same characteristic treatment is seen in the splendid bronze head from Chatsworth (No. 8). It is an Apollo rather over life size, belonging to that interesting transitional stage which immediately precedes the Parthenon. In this case, however, the archaism is partly conscious; the artist realizes the maxim _peu de moyens, beaucoup d’effet_, and uses it to advantage. The type chosen is that of a strong virile athlete, with hair still long, but just budding into manhood, the Βούπαις (‘bully boy’), as Furtwängler points out, of an epigram on a contemporary statue of him by Onatas. What a contrast this to the soft and dreamy Sauroktonos of the succeeding century: with its almost architectural symmetry, its vigorous subordination of all search for detail to general effect, and its mathematical balance of large lines and large planes, it seems to stand as a visible protest against weakness and effeminacy. As Emerson puts it, this one head might be the indemnification for populations of pygmies or weaklings. The step from this to the Parthenon is short in point of years, but is artistically an interval which is strongly defined, for within its limit Greek sculpture has entered into its birthright. This stage is nobly represented in the exhibition by the fragment from a slab of the north frieze of the Parthenon, reproduced in Plate I. Broken away probably at the time of the Venetian bombardment, it seems to have been acquired in Athens by Stuart, who sent it to Smyrna; a few years ago it was dug up beside a rockery in a garden in Essex; what its movements were between Smyrna and Essex is matter for conjecture. A former owner of the Essex property was a Mr. Astle, who was a trustee of the British Museum, and may be supposed to have had an interest in antiquities: _habent sua fata_, these flotsam relics of antiquity: this is not the only marble in the exhibition which has been excavated on English soil. The head (No. 24), which early in the seventeenth century belonged to the famous Arundel collection, was recently dug up by a navvy in London close to the Temple, on the site that was once part of the Arundel house garden. ¶ The surface of the Parthenon fragment has suffered, of course, but not so grievously as might be expected. It gives the head of one of the mounted knights of the north frieze, and the horse’s head of the figure immediately following him. The youth is from northern Greece, probably from one of the Thracian colonies of Athens, as his Thracian headdress of foxskin (the _alopeke_) shows. That his horse is in movement even the fragment makes clear by the light tresses of hair blown backward beneath his cap, of which the heavy tail is itself curved outward by the motion; but his eyes are intently set on his forward path, and the firm and straight yet supple poise of neck and torso bespeak his ‘magic horsemanship.’ The figure behind him (preserved in the British Museum), a squadron commander or marshal, turns partly round in his seat, checking his horse, apparently to give an order to his section; with the suddenness of the action the horse’s mouth is wrenched open and his head thrown back, the plaited forelock swings upward, and every muscle is tense; the motive is a subtle variation on the theme represented by the splendid horse’s head of Selene or Night in the eastern pediment, but with this principal difference, that while this horse is answering to its rider’s curb, the Selene horse is probably starting back of its own accord, in alarm at taking the downward plunge. Now that this beautiful fragment has found its way to London, is it too much to hope that it may make one more journey--and that its last--to Bloomsbury, and rejoin the slab to which it fits?

[Illustration: PLATE IV--BRONZES

SMALL BRONZES: HANDLE OF AMPHORA BELONGING TO MR. WYNDHAM COOK; MASK OF SEA DEITY BELONGING TO MR. GEORGE SALTING; PLAQUE BELONGING TO MR. H WALLIS

APHRODITE WITH TORCH, BELONGING TO MR. J. E. TAYLOR

SICK MAN, BELONGING TO MR. WYNDHAM COOK

SEILENOS CROUCHING, BELONGING TO MR. J. E. TAYLOR

NUDE APHRODITE, BELONGING TO MR. CHARLES LOESER]

[Illustration: PLATE V

REPOUSSÉ MIRROR-COVER; IN THE COLLECTION OF MR. J. E. TAYLOR]

From Pheidias it is natural to turn to that other sculptor who shared with him the glory of the latter part of the fifth century. Polykleitos, the leader of the Argive school, did for the physical ideal what Pheidias had done for the religious. His earliest recorded work, the statue of a boy-boxer crowning himself with a wreath, set up at Olympia about 440 ~B.C.~, has been identified in four different replicas, of which one is the head belonging to Sir Edgar Vincent (No. 45), shown on Plate III. The statue-base itself was found at Olympia in 1877, still bearing its dedicatory inscription, and with marks showing that the figure was of bronze. From a marble copy to a bronze original, and that of an artist whose bronze technique was by many considered pre-eminent in antiquity, is a far cry, but even in this head we may see some faint reflection of the genius of Polykleitos. The curved surfaces definitely meet and intersect instead of merging almost insensibly into one another, as happens in marble work. In this respect an admirable contrast is offered by the famous head of Aphrodite, belonging to Lord Leconfield, on Plate II. This head, which is in the catalogue (No. 22) boldly described as ‘an original by Praxiteles,’ in acceptation of a suggestion originally due to Payne Knight, and later adopted by Furtwängler, is undoubtedly the most beautiful Aphrodite head in this artist’s style which has come down to us. A comparison of it with that of the Olympian Hermes and with the copies of the Knidian Aphrodite makes this identification at least highly probable. The hair is apparently roughly finished and almost sketchy, but offers an admirable contrast to the highly polished surface of the flesh, and even without the colour which certainly once covered it is magically successful in its rendering of texture. The high triangular forehead-space, which gives distinction to the type and value to the setting of the eyes, is almost identical with the forehead of the Knidian Aphrodite, and also that of the Knidian Demeter, a statue certainly under strong Praxitelean influence: the slight projection over the brows, the so-called ‘bar of Michael Angelo,’ which is so marked a feature in the Hermes, is introduced here with extraordinary delicacy of effect. It is no wonder that Lucian singled out for praise in the Aphrodite of Praxiteles ‘the beautiful line of her forehead and brow, and her melting eye, full of joy and of pleasure.’ The eyes indeed are especially characteristic; their narrow opening in proportion to the length (_yeux bridés_), the slight projection of the lower lid, which gives an indescribable softness to the shadow beneath it, the almost imperceptible transition at the outer corner both of eye and mouth, are all traits which belong to Praxiteles alone. The oval contour is skilfully redeemed from formality by the dimple in the chin, just as the columnar neck is softened by the soft fold midway. For beneath all the refinement, which might easily become voluptuous, there is withal a physical dignity of form which bespeaks the goddess, ‘che muove il sole e l’ altre stelle.’ The artist ‘keeps the two vases, one of aether and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both.’ ¶ In the presence of this masterpiece it is difficult to share the admiration which the catalogue bestows on the Head of a Girl from Chios (No. 44). The intention of the sculptor was obviously to reproduce a Praxitelean type; but whatever this head may once have been, the entire surface has been so rubbed down that it now looks like a model in partly melted loaf sugar. Under these circumstances any close study of the details is fruitless, but the characteristic features, especially the mouth, are so weakly conceived that it probably looks as pretty now, half hidden under a ‘baldacchino,’ as ever it did; its prettiness indeed seems to be its highest claim to notice.[84] ¶ The head belonging to Mr. Claude Ponsonby on Plate III has lately been claimed as Lysippean by M. Salomon Reinach. Unfortunately we know very little of the characteristic treatment of the features by Lysippos; we know that he was essentially a worker in bronze, that he introduced a more natural treatment of the hair and an animation of facial expression, and that this last qualification naturally led him into portraiture. The general outline of the eye cavities, and the form and modelling of the forehead, closely resemble those of the Alexander portrait in the British Museum; and the rendering of the hair has a certain naturalism which is also found in the Alexander: moreover there is a tragic intensity in the almost haggard eyes and parted lips which, together with the loosened tresses and the drapery covering the back of the head, certainly mark the head as the portrait of a mourning woman. Further than this perhaps we cannot go; but it is worth noting that Tatian mentions the portrait of a woman (the Praxilla) by Lysippos, which we may presume to have been something like this. Michaelis suggests that it may have belonged to ‘the statue of a mourning woman which may have served as the decoration of some sepulchral monument.’ This is probably not far from the truth; at any rate the head seems to stand midway between the conventionalized portraits of the Athenian stelae and the more realistic portraiture of the Hellenistic age, well represented in the exhibition by the busts of Menander (No. 26) and the presumed Hipponax (No. 27). ¶ The _genre_ side of Hellenistic art is well represented in the exhibition by the large bronze statuette of Eros, a dexterous figure of a winged laughing boy rushing forward through space with outspread wings and right foot just touching the ground; Mrs. Strong justly points to the motive as an ultimate evolution from that of the Nike of Samothrace, wherein the weight of the body seems partly supported by the foot and partly by the spread wings, which serve as a counterpoise to the structure. It is quite in consonance with Hellenistic sentiment that the love-god should be shown as the victor in the sacred torch race, the Lampadephoria --Eros the unconquerable, the ἀνίκατος μάχαν, invades the palaestra and beats the athlete at his own game. ¶ When I first saw this charming figure (it was in a room at the Charing Cross Hotel, on his first arrival here) the then owner told me the circumstances of his discovery. Not far south of Vesuvius the river Sirmio finds its way to the sea; at a spot on the Pompeii side which probably in antiquity marked a ferry or ford, this statuette with other things was excavated. The presumption is that the hapless owner, fleeing from the eruption with his treasure under his arm, was overtaken here, possibly while waiting for the ferry-boat. It is a tragic little history, all the more touching somehow on account of the subject which the figure represents. ¶ In its collection of smaller bronzes the exhibition is particularly rich. A small selection is here given in Plate IV. The archaic period is represented by the little crouching or, more probably, dancing Seilenos (No. 34), the wild animalistic sprite of the woods, half bearded man and half horse, as Ionic art depicted him; by the amphora handle (No. 92) in the form of a youth bent backwards below two panthers which rested on the lip of the vase; and by the charming little Aphrodite (No. 20) whose formal drapery and pose, combined with a refinement of delicate modelling, are together characteristic of the springtime of Greek art. With her may be contrasted the tiny nude Aphrodite (No. 11) to which an ancient admirer has presented a necklace, bracelet, and anklet in gold, probably, as Mrs. Strong suggest, an adaptation of a famous statue by Praxiteles. ¶ On Plate V is a fine example of the repoussé mirror-covers which seem to have belonged exclusively to the fourth and third centuries ~B.C.~ The nearly full-grown Eros with long wings is characteristic rather of the earlier stage; otherwise the subject, in which he assists a lady or his mother at her toilet, is a favourite one for this class of representation. An unusual form of mirror support is Mr. Wallis’s plaque (No. 62), which has the design cut out _à jour_, as beautiful in its pale blue patina as it is in the dexterous adaptation of the composition to the space which it has to fill. The owner suggests that the reclining winged boy is Hypnos rather than Eros; if so, it is an unusual rendering of the god of sleep.

[Illustration: PLATE VI

(_a_) (_b_) (_c_) (_d_) (_e_)

(_a_) CARYATID FIGURE; (_b_) WOMAN LEANING ON PEDESTAL, BELONGING TO MR. J. E. TAYLOR; (_c_) DOLL, BELONGING TO MRS. MITCHELL; (_d_) WOMAN WITH A FAN, BELONGING TO MR. JAMES KNOWLES; (_e_) THE YOUNG DIONYSOS, BELONGING TO MR. J. E. TAYLOR

TERRACOTTAS]

[Illustration: PLATE VII

KRATER BELONGING TO HARROW SCHOOL

(_a_) (_b_)

(_a_) KYLIX SIGNED BY TLESON, AND (_b_) PLATE SIGNED BY EPIKTETOS; IN THE COLLECTION OF THE MARQUESS OF NORTHAMPTON]

The Alexandrine period is represented on Plate IV by Mr. Salting’s fine mask of a sea deity (No. 113) with inlaid eyes and marine emblems skilfully worked in, suggestive of the grotesque masks of Pompeian and cinquecento Italian art; and by Mr. Wyndham Cook’s puzzling seated statuette of an emaciated man (No. 50). This figure has usually been described as a pathological study, a votive offering to Asklepios from a sick person. The careful workmanship, however, and the fact that it is inscribed with the name of the personage represented seem to militate against this view; moreover the figure does not seem to represent actual suffering so much as austerity. The excessive emaciation, the pose, and the fixed abstracted expression appear to me to indicate rather ecstasy, the ἔκστασις of the mystic, the Pythagorean anchorite who, like the Brahmin, has learnt by mortification of the flesh to project his soul into the unseen. We know the interest that Alexander took in the Indian _yogins_, and that he had intended to bring one of them, Kalanos, back with him to Greece. It is not improbable that other Greeks may have taken up the idea: and it is significant that this bronze was found at Alexander’s own city of Pella and bears a Macedonian name. If this be so, it adds an extraordinary and unique interest to the little bronze. ¶ The group of terracotta statuettes on Plate VI are chosen as characteristic types of different forms of this charming art. The little doll (No. 24) made, perhaps, in imitation of a Persephone figure, but intended to have movable limbs, and the Caryatid figure (No. 26) belong to the fifth century; the latter is remarkable for its strongly Pheidian character of type and drapery, and is certainly of Attic work nearly contemporary with the Parthenon. The young Dionysos (No. 7) and the two girls (Nos. 3 and 10) are good instances of the peculiarly modern sentiment which pervaded the art as well as the literature of the Hellenistic age. These figures are the bric-à-brac of antiquity; the far-away ancestors of Dresden, and Saxe, and Watteau, with some of their coquetry and none of their artificiality. ¶ Before leaving the terracottas it is necessary to mention the large head of Zeus (No. 46) which has been added since the exhibition opened; Professor Furtwängler and Mrs. Strong consider this head to be ‘a Greek work of the great period of Pheidias.’ It is particularly unpleasant to me to find myself differing entirely from their view; after close and repeated examination I am bound to say that it seems to me to belong to a well-known class of terracottas which are now generally agreed to be of modern origin. ¶ Of the collection of vases there is only space here to include three typical specimens (Plate VII); these are the kylix signed by the artist Tleson (No. 16), with a charming drawing of two goats rearing up and butting one another above a floral ornament; a good example of the skill with which the Greek artist pressed into his service as pure decoration a common scene of daily life; the plate (No. 79), signed by Epiktetos, with its humorous ride-a-cock-horse subject, the precursor of the Parthenon horseman riding on his own fighting-cock; and the krater from Harrow School (No. 44), with its masterly composition of the hero Kaineus overwhelmed by the Centaurs. In its strong firm line, and spirited composition, which is yet kept in subordination to the decorative effect of the vase as a whole, this work stands out instinct with the combination of strength and self-control which are the leading characteristics of the best works of Hellenic art. ¶ I have already occupied so much space that the very important series of engraved gems and coins must remain almost unnoticed, and this is a pity because outside the great museums we are not likely ever to see such a series again assembled. The beautiful drawings of Greece by Cockerell, the wandering artist-scholar, one of the great builders of English artistic repute in the Levant, these too must be left with a bare mention. But this fact in itself speaks for the high standard attained by the exhibition, on which Mrs. Strong and the club are much to be congratulated.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

~Pintoricchio: His Life, Work, and Time.~ By Corrado Ricci. Translated by Florence Simmons. William Heinemann, 1902.

The publication by Mr. Heinemann of a large, costly, and elaborately illustrated book upon Pintoricchio is evidence that this long-neglected Umbrian painter is growing in popularity. Effaced for more than two and a half centuries by the dazzling radiance of his younger contemporary’s fame, Pintoricchio’s individuality, first appreciated by Rumohr, began clearly to stand out again only when Morelli demonstrated that he was the author of two frescoes in the Sixtine chapel. Even then he borrowed his lustre from working where Michelangelo left his masterpieces, and from having, as Morelli pointed out, influenced Raphael. It remained for the anarchical taste of recent years to exalt him into an important ‘Master’ on his own account. ¶ The occasion was offered by the reopening in 1897 of the Borgia apartments, which he decorated; for although the popes may have lost their power to immortalize themselves by feats of statesmanship, the ambition to signalize their pontificates by the patronage of art appears not wholly to have died out. Leo XIII in restoring and opening to the public the magnificent suite of rooms where, in the service of Alexander VI, Pintoricchio toiled to make a monument to his patron, was no less the maker of an artistic reputation than his Renaissance predecessors--with the significant difference, however, that he conferred a posthumous fame, a _succès d’archéologie_, instead of the renown that came from the commission to rebuild and decorate that city of cities which has now passed from under the papal sway. ¶ But, unless the lay world had been independently attuned to Pintoricchio’s art, papal patronage would not have carried his renown far. But modern art is just at a point where Pintoricchio is really more sympathetic than the masters of the great style, for in the break-up of artistic tradition and the decline of classical taste the decorator of to-day is thrown back upon parading the mere materials of his art, upon bright colour and relief, upon sumptuousness, and the startling and attractive. He has, in fact, dedicated himself to ornamentation--for we must not debase the word decoration! And of ornamentation, of the sumptuous, the attractive, the gay and the ingenious, Pintoricchio was a master. The gorgeousness of the Borgia apartments delude even critics who ought to distinguish more subtly, into praising them as art. It is so difficult to be stern with the attractive! ¶ And so Pintoricchio, becoming popular, needed a handsome book to reveal him further to his English admirers; and for them, being English, a volume of mere illustrations, like the French tome of M. Boyer d’Agen, did not suffice. There must be the flavour of pedantry, of Morellianism, of research into origins, without omitting the necessary historical setting. And so the publisher commissioned the valiant Dr. Ricci, head of the great gallery of the Brera, to prepare such a work, knowing well that he could not entrust it to more skilful and conscientious hands. But, contrary to the Biblical story, instead of blessing Israel the emissary of Balak was unable to keep his tongue from curses! Dr. Ricci’s taste was too cultivated, his experience of great art too profound, to permit him to raise the chosen painter to the altar prepared for him, and the publisher was thus constrained to write a short ‘Note’ explaining that, in spite of what the author says, Pintoricchio really _is_ a great artist, standing only just below ‘the three or four supreme masters’--close, that is to say, to Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Giorgione! Turning, however, to Dr. Ricci’s estimate, we find it absolutely sane and just:--‘Pintoricchio ... was more attracted by the external splendours of art than by its sentiment ... is wholly destitute of passion ... and shows but little research in the matter of expression.’ And instead of joining in the unreserved praise accorded to him in the publisher’s ‘Note’ as a ‘master of decoration,’ he, on the contrary, criticizes his artist’s gaudiness and his lack of composition, and utters a protest, particularly welcome at the present moment, against the use of raised ornament in decorative painting. Indeed, while Morelli’s account of Pintoricchio leaves the reader with a general sense that he was to be preferred to his master Perugino, Dr. Ricci nowhere loses his sense of proportion, nowhere unduly exalts the subject of his work, and the resulting impression of his long book is to place Pintoricchio in a just relation to the artists of his time: attractive, sweet, agreeable, ‘exuberant and instinctively elegant,’ but almost never entering into rivalry with any master who possessed, in however small a degree, any of the specifically artistic qualities. His treatment, indeed, of Pintoricchio’s greatest work, the frescoes of the cathedral library of Siena, scarcely does justice to the real artistic merits of the decorative scheme. As these works so far surpass the frescoes of the Borgia apartments, the impression they give of ‘gaiety and well-being,’ which Dr. Ricci barely touches on, might well have been amplified. But one is grateful to him for pronouncing himself so clearly against the current notion that the young Raphael assisted Pintoricchio in these frescoes, instead of mystifying us with the usual non-committal generalities on this subject; and also for ranging himself so openly with Morelli and against Signor Venturi in refusing the absurd ascription of Gentile Bellini’s drawings to Pintoricchio. He calls attention to a phrase in Gentile’s will which speaks of drawings of his in Rome, thus amply accounting for the introduction of figures similar to those in Gentile’s sketches into the Roman frescoes of the Umbrian painter so notoriously given to pilfering. ¶ Singularly full and complete is Dr. Ricci’s list of Pintoricchio’s works; indeed, the fault lies just in this! While we thank him for sparing no pains to look up every possible work of his painter, we must reproach him with being too liberal in questions of authenticity. It is particularly among what Dr. Ricci considers the early works that we find him too generous. It is in my opinion quite impossible that Pintoricchio should have executed the Presentation at Torre d’ Andrea, which shows so many of the characteristics of that (deservedly) little known painter, Antonio da Viterbo[85], while the copy at Siena of the central figures in the great ancona of 1498 at Perugia cannot of course be, as he supposes, an _early_ work, and seems to me too crude and flaccid to be by him at any period of his career. The early Madonna in the Bufalini collection at Città di Castello I cannot clearly remember, but the ruined Madonna with the infant John in the _duomo_ of that town could certainly never have been touched by Pintoricchio’s own hand, and Lord Crawford’s Madonna and Angels at Wigan is too cold and hard for him, and indeed seems to be the work of some Romagnol imitator of Pintoricchio, whose youthful hand was trained under the benumbing influence of Palmezzano. ¶ I regret that I cannot quite follow our author in his chronology of Pintoricchio’s works, for the clear arrangement of which at the end of his book he nevertheless earns our gratitude. The assumption that the Ara Coeli frescoes were painted after those in the Sixtine chapel seems to me to confuse Dr. Ricci’s view of the chronology from the start. To my eyes they are clearly earlier works, although I know that Morelli here for once agreed with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and dated them as late as 1496. But the whole question is by no means clear, and I confess to being unable to discover in Dr. Ricci’s book the exact criteria he uses to determine the date of a particular work. The Sienese _tondo_ which he calls early seems to me definitely to belong to the period after 1500, and the two Madonnas at Spello do not convince me that they are early, or even that they are of the same date. Dr. Ricci professes himself not quite convinced of the adequacy of internal evidence; nevertheless, like all unbelievers, he constantly takes refuge in it, but not consistently, and it is this uncertainty of method which, perhaps more than anything else, prevents our following his conclusions with intelligent sympathy. And this one regrets the more, because with the broad lines of his book, and, above all, with his estimate of Pintoricchio, one has such hearty sympathy. ¶ A word of protest must be added about the strange translation and about certain carelessness apparent in the book-making. ‘Coetanean’ is an odd word to meet on the first page, and surely Dr. Ricci never spoke of the ‘coast of Subasio’! ‘S. Bernardine,’ or, worse still, ‘San Bernardine,’ is not a happy way of anglicizing the name of the Sienese saint, nor is ‘Cybo’ an improvement upon the usual form. ‘Enea’ recurs in an irritating manner, where every cultivated English person expects Aeneas; for, since Bishop Creighton’s sympathetic account, ‘Aeneas Silvius,’ whether as humanist or pope, has become a familiar name. Just here, by the way, I may express my surprise that among Dr. Ricci’s historical references for Pope Alexander VI (p. 87) he did not place Creighton’s account, the best in English, or perhaps in any language. ¶ The subject of the first coloured plate is misnamed ‘S. Bernardino,’ although in the text correctly described as St. Louis of Toulouse. And this leads me to protest against cheap colour reproductions of this kind. The feeblest, young-lady water-colour sketch after Pintoricchio could not resemble him less than these coarse, smeared, falsely-tinted reproductions. They are worse than useless; they are hideously misleading. The other illustrations of the book, however, are copious and accurate, and we cannot be too grateful for the reproduction of so many of the pictures in private collections, photographs of which it is often almost impossible for the student to procure.

M. L.

~Ancient Coffers and Cupboards.~ By Fred Roe. Methuen & Co.

Mr. Fred Roe’s book of ancient coffers and cupboards must surely be the first of many such monographs. To-day the process block has made it possible to illustrate with ease the most elaborate details of the work of the ancient craftsmen, and within the covers of a book we may bear home our museum to be pored over at leisure. And here we have the chosen pieces of many museums, many churches, and many collectors’ hoards, in a form which makes them as useful to the new craftsmen as to the antiquary. It is true that Mr. Roe has not given us process work alone. Although such illustrations as those of the famous chest of the twelve knights at the Cluny and the St. George chest at South Kensington leave nothing to be desired, Mr. Roe does not allow it to be forgotten that he can use a pencil with effect. His drawings, although they have nothing of the tight and \T\-squared manner familiar in architects’ drawings of old pieces, yet give a pleasant impression of truth and trustworthiness, and err not on the side of that dangerous cleverness which so often persuaded that great man M. Viollet le Duc to translate ornament and detail from every scratch and stain of his model. With a volume of the _Mobilier Français_ at hand Mr. Roe may be at issue with the Frenchman on a definite point. Here we have the great _armoire_ of Noyon as presented spick and span in the coloured drawing of M. Viollet le Duc, and here we have it also from the pencil of Mr. Roe. To our mind Mr. Roe seems the more trustworthy interpreter, but one or other is at fault. On the first of the eight doors of the _armoire_ Mr. Roe gives us a figure of the Virgin in a sweeping robe, holding the Child in her arms. M. Viollet le Duc, with abundant detail, gives us the same door with a bare-legged St. John Baptist in his camel’s hair, supporting in his arms a lamb. ¶ It is no disparagement to Mr. Roe’s written commentary to say that the early history of the chest is told clearly enough by his well-arranged series of drawings and photographs. We owe him thanks that he has avoided the temptation which would persuade the writer upon any side of English archaeology to gallop through his subject from Stonehenge to the great exhibition within the covers of a single book. Here we have the history of the mediaeval chest, from the thirteenth-century examples with which we must perforce begin, to the end of the Gothic work in the fifteen hundreds. There Mr. Roe stays, and for the story of the Elizabeth and seventeenth-century chests, which are still in such plenty amongst us, we may wait in good content for Mr. Roe’s future work. ¶ To those who are familiar with inventories, and wills, and such-like documents of the intimate life of our ancestors, the picture of the ancient English home rises up furnished with a bed, a brass pot, and a chest; for these good things came ever foremost amongst the few household goods of folk of the middling sort. It would be difficult to say where the collector might lay his hand nowadays upon the woodwork of a mediaeval bed; the brass pots have for the most part served their day and gone back to the foundry furnace; but the oaken chest remains here and there in the countryside for a most curious and venerable relic. ¶ We can hardly doubt that the familiar chest was from the beginning cunningly decorated; but accurate knowledge begins with the thirteenth century, with vast fronts of one or more broad beams set longways between two broad uprights. For ornament we have suggestions of arch-work simply indicated with chiselled lines and roundels of tracery. The ends are solidly framed with massive timbers. Of painted chests a notable example remains at Newport in Essex, and this Mr. Roe shows us in its colours. The inside of the lid when upreared shows like a painted reredos with a rood, the Virgin and St. John, and St. Peter and St. Paul, each within a painted archway of reds and greens. Twelve shields appear upon the chest, but on these remains no trace of the painted bearings which would have told us the story of the piece. Below the twelve shields, fessewise across the front of the chest runs a most singular ornament, a broad band of open tracery cast in pewter. ¶ The thirteenth century closes with the richly ornamented chest-fronts which endure for the rest of the medieval period. The long chest in Saltwood church is assigned by Mr. Roe to the century-end. The front is covered with tracery work with deep mullions, the broad uprights at the ends being filled with winged dragons in square panels. To this century-end belongs also that most famous and glorious chest which is the pride of the Musée Cluny, along whose mullioned front stand twelve knights with shields and ailettes of their arms; and here again we feel that, although the lighting of Mr. Roe’s photograph was unfortunate, our modern illustrations must take the place of Viollet le Duc’s too highly wrought drawings. ¶ Throughout the fourteenth century we find in England the traditional window tracery along the chest front, and the dragons or beasts in squared compartments of the broad uprights. From Hultoft, in Lincolnshire, we have in a late fourteenth-century chest an early example of a panelled and buttressed piece, in which pierced and cut-out tracery has been applied to a flush front. A lid painted inside with shields of arms belongs to a chest formerly in the Chancery court of Durham, and, apart from its beauty, claims our interest by the fact that the first shield is that of the Aungerviles, of whom came Richard of Bury, bishop of Durham, and author of the ‘Philobiblon,’ one of those few mediaeval books which yet find readers. Concerning this shield, we may remark that Mr. Roe’s ‘Gules, a cinquefoil _or_ (or argent) ermine pierced (of the field?)’ is not a very lucid piece of blazonry. Between the shields a dragon meets with a centaur-like figure in yellow hood and red kilt ‘running a tilt,’ as Mr. Roe somewhat loosely phrases it, but really playing with the sword and buckler. Forty-five years ago this chest was still in the Chancery court; if we ask why it is now in the hands of an ‘eminent antiquary,’ we should have for answer a familiar story of the ignorance and wanton folly of our half-civilized English official classes. A sad side of Mr. Roe’s narrative is the recurrent exclamation at the fact that a church chest, perfect in the days of Parker, Cotman, or Shaw, is now staved in, or clumsily restored. This in such cases where the chest has been suffered to remain. The Wittersham chest does not seem to have stayed at Wittersham long after its beauties had been published to the world in a ‘Dictionary of Architecture,’ and the fact that the nameless connoisseur who removed it took with him the ancient parish stocks as well leaves Wittersham without the means of dealing with the offence of those who should have been its custodians. Parker engraves a famous chest at Guestling, of which but one panel remained when the present rector came to Guestling, and even this poor relic has gone the way of the rest. It would be well if the thief were the one enemy of such treasures--in that case the nation might come to its own some day; but the church stove, even in our own time, has crackled with fuel for the loss of which our descendants will curse their pig-hearted ancestry. ¶ Of the most interesting type, which Mr. Roe, who shuns the English word chest, is pleased to call a ‘tilting coffer,’ we are afforded a valuable set of pictures. It is good to see that perhaps the finest panel of St. George and his dragon and Dame Cleodolinde is in our own national collection at South Kensington. The barbarously fine chest at Ypres will stand to all who know it for a familiar example. Mr. Roe, being possessed with the idea that these figured chests are English in design and working, is persuaded that the Ypres chest may have been abandoned by the English army which sieged Ypres in 1383; but we may confess that we find no notably English feeling in this chest or its fellows. ¶ To follow the story of the gothic chest to its running to seed in the sixteenth century were to encroach upon the office of Mr. Roe’s excellent monograph. Mr. Roe’s work is clear and to the point. We feel that he has not only drawn and photographed, but handled and rummaged the chests of which he tells us. He is cunning in hinges and locks, and forgeries of respectable standing and the mis-datings of long tradition do not entangle him. It may perhaps be said of his terminology that he attaches too definite and settled a meaning to the words which he chooses to apply to various forms of the objects of his study. The definition of a coffer as ‘a box of great strength for the keeping and transport of weighty articles, having its front formed by a single panel,’ as distinct from a hutch, ‘a household coffer of a rough description,’ strikes us as too assured and exact. A more serious blemish arises from Mr. Roe’s apparent belief that from the character of the work upon a chest one may easily guess whether its first home were in church or hall. The familiar window tracery of many chest-fronts spells for him plainly church or monastery. By the same token Mr. Roe would have us set down for a churchman every fourteenth-century man who wore ‘Poules windowes’ cut in his shoe leather, and the knights and dragons of many miserere-seats would show him that the first place of their setting-up was in the castle hall. Another odd fancy of Mr. Roe’s persuades him that the ‘civil wars,’ apparently those of the king and commonwealth, account for the loss of many pieces of English gothic furniture. Such a fancy does not argue an intimate knowledge of the history of the seventeenth-century struggles, than which no wars have been waged with less sacking and burning; and Mr. Roe, as his last words show, knows full well that the fellest enemies of our mediaeval relics flourished in the nineteenth century in the close and the rectory, sat at high tables of old foundations, and even came to good credit as scholars and antiquaries. There are honoured names amongst us to-day whose bearers have done deeds of destruction to which Merciful Strickalthrow or Corporal Humgudgeon would not have set their hands.

O. B.

~A Guide to Siena: History and Art.~ By William Heywood and Lucy Olcott. Enrico Torrini, Siena, 1903.

Certainly it never rains but it pours. Siena, so long without any adequate guide to her intensely interesting history and art, has suddenly broken out into quite a literature to herself. Scarcely has the controversy over the respective merits, or the reverse, of Professor Langton Douglas’s ‘History’ and Mr. Gardner’s ‘Story’ ceased to rouse our interest before a third guide appears in the field, which to our mind is infinitely the best of the three. Less pretentious and less costly, it contains in its smaller compass a mass of information in a readable form that is within the comprehension of the dullest, and yet worthy of the careful perusal of the most critical. Both Mr. Heywood and Miss Olcott live in and love Siena, so that their several parts are not only written _con amore_, but on carefully studied data. The history is written with a swing that carries one along, and yet leaves one at the end with a clear idea of what Siena was at her best. Mr. Heywood’s charm of style--as might be expected from his former work--is very great. It is easier, more lucid, and, without being any the less expressive or forcible, is wholly free from the few blemishes that might be objected to in his previous essays. No one understands better than he the complications and kaleidoscopic changes that occurred with so much abruptness in the government of the republic. Therefore we have the more occasion to be grateful to him for having set the main facts of her story before us, unhampered by superfluous digressions and comments. Once only he pauses to give eloquent expression to his admiration for that much-misunderstood and much-abused body, the _Nove_, whose rule (1292-1355) was the longest and most prosperous of all the various combinations that held sway in Siena. They are usually represented as ruthless tyrants, and generally detested and hateful; whereas there can be no question that their firm, autocratic rule, if severe and sometimes cruel, held in check alike arrogant noble and turbulent demagogue, and that under their guidance Siena reached the highest point of her prosperity, internal and external. At home flourished the arts of peace as they never did again, and abroad her fame was European, her merchants were respected, and her produce in demand throughout the civilized world. With the fall of the _Nove_ fell Siena. Their hold over the reins of government lasted sixty-three years;--no other body again held them so long until she finally sank into the position of a subject city. Mr. Heywood’s notices as to the saints and writers of Siena are all too brief, and we would like to hear more from him about them, but space clearly forbids: and, as he points out, readers may turn to his other works for much that is perforce left unrelated here. We can only regret one note (on p. 68), which we feel must have been inadvertent on his part, and certain expressions in the bibliographical notice, to which we refer presently. ¶ Miss Olcott’s section, being, we believe, her first literary work, deserves an unusually high meed of praise. One may not always agree with her attributions, and her judgement on painters that she does not like is severe and not always quite just;--for example, her attitude towards Sodoma and Beccafumi, respectively, will not be endorsed by all her readers;--still, she has so evidently studied her subject with thoroughness and care, working under the best direction, and weighing her facts with so much patience and real insight, that one can scarcely praise this first essay of hers too highly. Her attitude towards the native Sienese artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is so truly devotional that, even if it blinds her to the beauties and merits of later workers, it disarms severe criticism. She points out very truly--and in this respect she follows the same line as Mr. Heywood in his history--that the art of Siena never rose again after the middle of the fourteenth century (_i.e._, contemporarily with the fall of the _Nove_) to the point that it then attained. The various foreign influences that eventually came into the state wrought fine achievements, but native talent was never again what it had been in the days of Duccio, Simone Martini, and their immediate successors. It is, however, true that in the following century very great artists did arise, in whose praise the authoress is specially eloquent. That she has great reason, the lovely works of such men as Matteo di Giovanni, Neroccio di Landi, Lorenzo di Pietro (Vecchietta), and Giovanni di Stefano (Sassetta) amply testify to those who have eyes to see. To Neroccio and Vecchietta, moreover, she draws further notice, since, like so many artists of their day, they were both sculptors and painters, and obtained more than ordinary success in either of the greater arts. Thus panel, bronze, and marble, when touched by them, produce effects of exquisite charm in gracious line and lovely expression that are unsurpassed and unsurpassable. We feel no doubt that to walk through the city in Miss Olcott’s company will be a pleasure, which student and traveller cannot fail to appreciate. That small mistakes as to fact have occasionally crept in was of course unavoidable; but for practical purposes they are unimportant. She has managed to avoid the dullness of a mere record of facts, though her notes are full of practically useful side-information; while, on the other hand, she has not fallen into that temptation to dogmatize, so difficult to escape from when dealing with a specialized school of painting like that of Siena. ¶ Student and traveller alike have much reason to be grateful for the work; mainly on account of its directness and simplicity; though also for the valuable footnotes supplied by both authors. The bibliographical lists are of great interest, but we cannot refrain from remarking that the notice as to books to be avoided is, to say the least of it, in doubtful taste. We understand the irritation caused by such books as those specified to writers who have studied the subject carefully, and we recognize fully the incalculable mischief done by the inaccuracies of the modern catchpenny magazine contributor; but we cannot but think so long and virulent an attack, however justly deserved, quite unsuitable within the pages of a guide book. We suggest that in a future edition these pages might be omitted, as being the only serious blemish to a book on which authors and publisher may be very heartily congratulated.

R. H. H. C.

~Yacoub Artin Pasha: Contribution à l’Étude du Blason en Orient.~ Londres (B. Quaritch), 1902.

The prospectus issued by the publisher of this work contained the extraordinary statement that ‘E. T. Rogers Bey, in his contributions to the subject, established beyond doubt that coats of arms and armorial bearings were introduced into Europe by the crusaders in imitation of the practice of the eastern princes whom they had encountered in the field of battle.’ It would surprise no one acquainted with the vexed question of heraldic ‘origins’ to know that he did nothing of the kind. What he did advance was that ‘... les avis sont partagés sur la question de savoir si les Croisés ont pulsé en Orient les notions de cet art [blazon] ou s’il est exclusivement d’origine européenne. Les arguments en faveur de son origine orientale me paraissent les mieux fondés, car ils sont soutenus par des données historiques. Un esprit militaire et même chevaleresque existait parmi les Musulmans de l’Arabie, de la Syrie et de l’Égypte, longtemps avant la formation de nos ordres de templiers et de chevaliers; et il est fort probable que cet esprit guerrier s’est communiqué par l’entremise des Venitiens et des Génois et repandu peu à peu en Europe même avant la première croisade.’ We do not hesitate to say that beyond this string of theory there is nothing in the forty-nine pages of Rogers Bey’s ‘Le Blason chez les Princes Musulmans de l’Égypte et de la Syrie’ (Bulletin de l’Institut Égyptien, 1880) offering proof of the derivation of European armory from the east. All this we quote _in extenso_ because Artin Pasha’s work is, he states, to be regarded as the sequel to Rogers Bey’s memoir, and because, where he touches the origin of western heraldry, his remarks are likewise mere unfounded assertion. Neither does his knowledge of European arms appear to be of the most accurate order; he states that Louis IX of France was the first to adopt the fleur de lys, when in fact the seal of that monarch’s father, Louis VIII, bears a shield semé de lys, bearing