_Ary Scheffer_ (French-Dutch: 1795-1858).
An artist who once enjoyed a great vogue (a version of this
picture was bought in 1845 by the ex-Queen of the French for
£1000), and whose pictures are historically interesting for
their extraordinary absence of the colour-sense. Ary Scheffer's
pictures, says Ruskin (_Academy Notes_, 1858, p. 40), are
designed "on the assumption that the noblest ideal of colour is
to be found in dust," and what he said in 1846 of the German
School is equally true of Ary Scheffer:[229] "Brightness of
colour is altogether inadmissible without purity and harmony;
and the sacred painters must not be followed in their frankness
of unshadowed colour, unless we can also follow them in its
clearness. As far as I am acquainted with the modern schools
of Germany, they seem to be entirely ignorant of the value of
colour as an assistant of feeling, and to think that hardness,
dryness, and opacity are its virtues as employed in religious
art; whereas I hesitate not to affirm that in such art, more
than in any other, clearness, luminousness, and intensity of
hue are essential to right impression" (_Modern Painters_, vol.
ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 15). Ary Scheffer, whose father
was court painter at Amsterdam, was born at Dordrecht. On the
death of his father in 1809 his mother removed to Paris, and
he became a pupil of Pierre Guérin. In 1826 he became drawing
master in the Orleans family, and for the rest of his life
he was attached to them. In 1830, in company with Thiers, he
brought Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, to Paris; in 1848 he
helped the king to fly, and went with him to Brussels. The
events of the next few years shocked him so much that for a
time he "could neither paint, eat, nor sleep," and he ceased
altogether to exhibit. His best known works are "Paolo and
Francesca" (1822), and "Dante and Beatrice" (1839). The former
of these sold in 1842 for over £2000; but at the posthumous
exhibition of his works, held shortly after his death, his
reputation suffered greatly, and at subsequent sales the
prices paid for his pictures went down with a rush. Their
sentimentality made them popular for a while, but it could not
save them from the condemnation due to their commonness of
thought and poverty of colour.
A portrait of the lady--an English resident in Paris, and a friend of
Ary Scheffer--who sat to him for St. Monica. The two pictures were
bequeathed to the Gallery by her husband.