accepted and well received, she continued to send her work every year;
but, up to 1849, her pictures were small, and had little more interest
than belongs to simple studies from nature; 1849 was a memorable year
to her, as it was to France. In this year her father died of cholera,
just as he had been appointed director of the School of Design for
Young Girls. Rosa was appointed to succeed him with the title of
Honorary Directress, and her sister Juliette was made a teacher in the
school. In the same year she exhibited the picture that may be said to
have made her reputation with the artists and amateurs, as well as
with the general public. This was her "Oxen of Cantal," a picture that
combined with no little feeling for landscape the most admirable
painting of cattle in repose. Its high qualities were immediately
recognized. Horace Vernet, in the name of the Provisional Government,
presented her with a handsome vase of Sevres porcelain, and the gold
medal for painting. In 1851, the jury selected for exhibition at the
World's Fair in London another picture by Rosa, "Ploughing in the
Nivernais," which made the artist's name known to England, where the
national love of animals secured for her no end of praise and of
substantial reward. In 1856 Rosa painted her most popular picture,
"The Horse Fair," now in the Metropolitan Museum. This painting went
from Paris to London, where it was bought for rising L1,500, and
created such an interest in the artist's personality as would have
turned the head of any ordinary woman; but Rosa Bonheur's whole life
proves her no ordinary woman.
For many years Mlle. Bonheur lived in Paris in a house surrounded by a
large garden where she kept a number of animals, partly for the
pleasure of their companionship, partly for the opportunity it gave
her of studying their habits, and using them as models. She now
resides in the Chateau By, near Fontainebleau, where she leads the
same industrious life in her advancing years that she did in the
beginning of her career. She rises early, and works at her painting
all day, and often spends the evening in drawing: for she takes but
little interest in what is called society, and cares only for the
companionship of her intimate friends, which she can enjoy without
disarranging her life, or neglecting the studies she loves. She
dresses with great simplicity at all times, and even when she accepts
invitations, makes no concessions to the caprices of fashion. In her
student-days, when visiting the abattoirs, markets, and fairs, she
accustomed herself to wear such a modification of man's dress as would
permit her to move about among rough men without compromising her sex.
But, beside that her dignity was always safe in her own keeping, she
bears testimony to the good manners and the good dispositions of the
men she came in contact with. Rosa Bonheur has always been an honor to
art and an honor to her sex. At seventy-two she finds herself in the
enjoyment of many things that go to make a happy life. She has a
well-earned fame as an artist; an abundant fortune gained by her own
industry and used as honorably as it has been gained; and she has
troops of friends drawn to her by her solid worth of character.
Of the great number of pictures Rosa Bonheur has painted, by far the
most are of subjects found in France, but a few of the best were
painted in Scotland. She has received many public honors in medals and
decorations. In 1856, after painting the "Horse Fair," the Empress
Eugenie visited her at her studio and bestowed upon her the Cross of
the Legion of Honor, fastening the decoration to the artist's dress
with her own hands. When the invading army of Prussia reached Paris,
the Crown Prince gave orders that the studio of Rosa Bonheur should be
respected. But though she, no doubt, holds all these honors at their
worth, yet she holds still more dear the art to which she owes, not
only these, but all that has made her life a treasury of happy
remembrances.
[Signature of the author.]
GEROME[9]
[Footnote 9: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
By CLARENCE COOK
(BORN 1824)
[Illustration: Gerome.]
In the Paris Salon of 1847, a small picture appeared, representing a
Greek boy and girl stirring up two game-cocks to fight. Although it
was the work of an unknown painter, and had to contend with an
unusually brilliant display of pictures, many of them by men already
famous, yet it strongly attracted the general public, partly by the
novelty of the subject, and partly by the careful and finished manner
of the painting. It delighted the critics as well, and one of the most
distinguished of them, Theophile Gautier, wrote: "A new Greek is born
to us, and his name is Gerome!"
This picture, which was to prove the first leaf in a laurel-crown to
be awarded the painter in his lifetime, and not, as is so often the
case, by the tardy hand of Death, was the work of Jean-Leon Gerome, a
young man of twenty-three. He had been for six years under the
teaching of Paul Delaroche, part of the time in Italy, but most of it
in Paris. He was born at Vesoul, a small, dull town in the Department
of Haute-Saone, in 1824. His father was a goldsmith, who, like most
French fathers in his rank of life, had hoped to bring up his son to
succeed him in his business. The boy did for a time, we believe, work
in his father's shop, but he had a stronger natural bent for painting;
something perhaps in the occupation fostered, or even created, this
taste--for not a few distinguished painters have been apprenticed to
the goldsmith's trade--and his father, like a wise man, instead of
opposing his son's wishes, did what he could to further them. He
bought him painting-materials; and instead of sending him to a "school
of design," or putting him under the tutelage of some third-rate
drawing-master, such as is commonly found in country towns, he bought
him a picture by Decamps, an artist since become famous, but then just
in the dawn of his fame, and put it before his son as a model. Young
Gerome made a copy of this picture, and an artist from Paris, who
happened to be passing through Vesoul, saw it, and discerning the
boy's talent, gave him a letter to Paul Delaroche, encouraging him to
go to Paris and there to take up the study of art as a profession. At
seventeen years of age, with his father's consent and $250 in his
pocket, Gerome went up to Paris, and presenting his letter to
Delaroche, was well received by him, and entered the School of Fine
Arts (Ecole des Beaux-Arts) as his pupil.
He had been with Delaroche three years and had proved himself one of
the most loyal and diligent of his pupils, when an event occurred,
insignificant in itself, but which was to have an important influence
upon his life and give a new direction to his talent.
French studios are not as a rule very orderly places. The young men
who frequent them are left pretty much to themselves, with no one to
govern them or to oversee them. The artist they are studying under
makes, at the most, a brief daily visit, going the round of the
easels, saying a word or two to each pupil, although it often happens
that he says nothing, and then departs for his proper work, leaving
his pupils to their own devices. The students are for the most part
like young men everywhere, a turbulent set, full of animal spirits,
which sometimes carry them beyond reasonable bounds. It was a
boisterous outbreak of this sort, but far wilder than common, that
occurred in the studio of Delaroche, and which brought about the
crisis in Gerome's life to which we have alluded. Fortunately for him,
the incident took place while Gerome was on a visit to his parents at
Vesoul, so that he was in no way implicated in the affair. He came
back to find the studio closed; Delaroche, deeply disturbed, had
dismissed all his pupils and announced his intention to visit Italy.
His studio was to be taken during his absence, by Gleyre, and he
advised those of his pupils in whom he took a personal interest, to
continue their studies under his successor. Gerome was one of those to
whom he gave this advice, but Gerome was too much attached to his
master to leave him for another, and bluntly announced his purpose of
following him to Rome. A few of the other pupils of Delaroche were of
the same mind, and they all set out for Italy together. Arrived in
Rome, Gerome, always a hard worker, threw himself energetically into
his studies; drawing the ancient buildings, the Capitol, the
Colosseum; sketching in the Forum and on the Campagna; copying the
pictures and the statues, saturating his mind in the spirit of antique
art, and schooling his hand in its forms, until he had laid up a rich
store of material for use in future pictures. On his return to Paris
he worked for a while in Gleyre's studio, but when Delaroche came back
from Italy, Gerome again joined him and renewed his old relation as
pupil and assistant--working, among other tasks, on the painting of
"Charlemagne Crossing the Alps," a commission given to Delaroche by
the Government, for the _Grande Galerie des Batailles_ at Versailles:
a vast apartment lined with pictures of all the victories of the
French from Soissons to Solferino.
Such work as this, however, had little interest for Gerome. His mind
at this time was full of the Greeks and Romans; his enthusiasm for
Napoleon, which later was to give birth to so many pictures, had not
yet awakened; nor did he care for the subjects from the histories of
France and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that
had provided his master, Delaroche, with so many tragic themes for his
pencil: "The Death of the Duke of Guise," "The Children of Edward,"
the "Death of Queen Elizabeth," "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey,"
"Cromwell at the Coffin of Charles I.," and others of the same strain.
Gerome's visit to Italy had awakened in him a strong interest in the
life of the antique world, and this would naturally be strengthened by
all that he would hear and see of the growing interest of the public
in the same subject: an interest kindled by the discoveries of
archaeologists in classic soil: in Greece and Italy, in Assyria and
Egypt. These discoveries had filled the museums and the cabinets of
private collectors with beautiful and interesting fragments
illustrating the external life of the past, and illuminating its
poetry; and it is no wonder that some of the younger artists rejoiced
in the new world of anecdote and story that opened so richly before
them.
However it came about--whether his own interest in the antique life
communicated itself to his fellows, or whether they, all together,
simply shared in the interest taken in the subject by the world about
them--Gerome and some of his companions in Delaroche's studio showed
such a predilection for classic themes, that they were nicknamed by
the critics "The New Greeks." Among Gerome's fellow-pupils were two
young men, Hamon and Aubert, who later gained no small applause by
their playful and familiar way of treating classic themes. They are
well known to us by engravings from their pictures, which are in all
our shops. Hamon's "My Sister is not at home," and Aubert's various
pretty fancies of nymphs and cupids, while they are not great works of
art, are reasonably sure of a long life, due to their innocent
freshness and simplicity.
Delaroche's pupils were working all together in friendly competition
for the grand Roman prize which was to give the fortunate one the
right to four years' study in Rome at the expense of the state.
Gerome's studio was shared by his friends Picou and Hamon. Hamon,
writing in later years about his youthful days, says: "Companions and
rivals at the same time, we were all working together for the Grand
Prix de Rome. Gerome inspired us all with the love of hard work, and
of hard work to the accompaniment of singing and laughing."
But in the intervals of his hard work for the prize, Gerome was also
working on a picture which he hoped to have accepted for the Salon.
This was the picture we spoke of in the beginning of this notice: "Two
Young Greeks stirring-up Game-cocks to fight." When it was finished
Gerome showed it to his master with many misgivings; but Delaroche
encouraged him to send it to the Salon. It was accepted, and as we
have seen, won for Gerome a great success with the public. The next
year, 1848, he again exhibited, but the impression he made was less
marked than on the first occasion. His former picture had a subject
such as it was, of his own devising. The "Cock-fight" was not an
illustration of any passage in Greek poetry, and in spite of its
antique setting, it had a modern air, and to this, no doubt, its
popularity was largely due. But in 1848 he essayed an illustration of
the Greek poet, Anacreon, translating into picture the poem that tells
how, one winter evening, sitting by his fire, the old poet was
surprised by a sound of weeping outside his door, and opening it,
found Cupid wet and shivering and begging for a shelter from the cold.
The man takes the pretty, dimpled mischief to his bosom, warms his
feet and hands at the fire, dries his bow and arrows, and lets him sip
wine from his cup. Then, when Cupid is refreshed and warmed, he tries
his arrows, now here, now there, and at last aims one straight at his
benefactor's heart, and laughing at the jest, flies out at the open
door. Gerome's picture was in three panels. The first showed the poet
opening the door to the sobbing Cupid, with his bedraggled wings and
dripping curls; in the next, the rosy ingrate wounds his benefactor;
in the third, the poet sits disconsolate by his hearth, musing over
the days when Love was his guest, if but for an hour. As the story was
an old one, so many an artist before Gerome had played with it as a
subject for a picture. Jean-Francois Millet himself, another pupil of
Delaroche, though earlier than Gerome, had tried his hand at
illustrating Anacreon's fable before he found his proper field of work
in portraying the occupations of the men and women about him, the
peasants among whom he was born and bred.
Gerome's picture did nothing to advance his fortunes with the public.
1848 was a stormy time in France and in all Europe, and people were
not in the mood to be amused with such trifles as Anacreon and his
Cupid. The pictures in that year's Salon that drew the public in
crowds about them were Couture's "The Romans of the Decline of the
Empire," in which all Paris saw, or thought it saw, the
handwriting-on-the-wall for the government of Louis-Philippe; and the
"Shipwrecked Sailors in a Bark," of Delacroix, a wild and stormy scene
of terror that seemed to echo the prophecies of evil days at hand for
France with which the time was rife.
Gerome's next picture, however, was to bring him once more before the
public, and to carry his name beyond his native France even as far as
America. Leaving for the nonce his chosen field of antiquity, where
yet he was to distinguish himself, he looked for a subject in the
Paris of his own day. "The Duel after the Masquerade" opens for us a
corner of the Bois de Boulogne--the fashionable park on the outskirts
of Paris--where in the still dawn of a winter's day, a group of men
are met to witness a duel between two of their companions who have
quarrelled at a masked ball. The ground is covered with a light fall
of snow; the bare branches of the trees weave their network across the
gray sky, and in the distance we see the carriages that have brought
the disputants to the field. The duel is over. One of the men, dressed
in the costume of Pierrot, the loose white trousers and slippers, the
baggy white shirt, and white skull-cap, falls, mortally wounded, into
the arms of his second: the pallor of coming death masked by the
white-painted face. The other combatant, a Mohawk Indian (once a
staple character at every masked-ball in Paris: curious survival of
the popularity of Cooper's novels), is led wounded off the field by a
friend dressed as Harlequin. Gerome in this striking picture showed
for the first time that talent as a story-teller to which he is so
largely indebted for his reputation. Whatever his subject may be, it
is always set forth in the clearest manner, so that everyone may
understand the story without the need of an interpreter.
Leaving out of view the few pictures he painted illustrating passages
in Napoleon's career, it may be said that Gerome's taste led him away
from scenes of modern life; for even his many oriental subjects so
relate to forms of life belonging in reality to the past, that they
make no exception to the statement. He did not therefore follow up
"The Duel" with other comments on the follies of modern society--for
in the temper of that time this picture, like Couture's "Roman Orgie"
and Millet's "Man with the Hoe," was looked upon as a satire and a
warning, and owed its popularity as much to this conviction on the
part of the public as to its pictorial merits--but returned to antique
times, and showed in his treatment of themes from that source an
equal, if not a greater power to interest the public.
Gerome's two pictures, the "Ave Caesar! Morituri te Salutant," "Hail,
Caesar! Those about to die, salute Thee," and "The Gladiators," are so
universally known as to need no description. Whatever criticism may be
made upon them, they will always remain interesting to the world at
large; from their subject, from the way in which the discoveries of
archaeology are made familiar, and, not least, from the impression they
make of the artist's own strong interest in what he had to say. In
both pictures he succeeded in showing the Colosseum as no longer a
ruin, but as, so to speak, a living place peopled by the swarm of the
Roman populace, with the emperor and his court, and the College of the
Vestal Virgins, and, for chief actors, the hapless wretches who are
"butchered to make a Roman holiday." Another picture that greatly
increased Gerome's reputation, was his "Death of Julius Caesar," though
it must be confessed there was a touch of the stage in the arrangement
of the scene, and in the action of the body of senators and
conspirators leaving the hall with brandished swords and as if singing
in chorus, that was absent from the pictures of the amphitheatre.
There was also less material for the curiosity of the lovers of
archaeology; no such striking point, for instance, as the reproduction
of the gladiators' helmets and armor recently discovered in
Herculaneum; but the body of the dead Caesar lying "even at the base of
Pompey's statue" with his face muffled in his toga, was a masterly
performance; some critic, moved by the grandeur of the lines, said it
was not a mere piece of foreshortening, it was "a perspective." Gerome
made a life-size painting of the Caesar in this picture. It is in the
Corcoran Gallery at Washington.
Gerome painted several other pictures from classic subjects, but none
of them had the interest for the general public of those we have
described. In 1854 he exhibited a huge canvas, called "The Age of
Augustus," a picture suggested, perhaps, by the "Hemicycle" of his
master Delaroche, on which he himself had painted. It represented
heroes, poets, sages, of the Augustan age, grouped about the cradle of
the infant Christ; it procured for Gerome the red ribbon of the Legion
of Honor, and is now, as the artist himself jestingly says, "the
'greatest' picture in the Museum of Amiens." In the same year Gerome
went to Egypt for the first time; since then he has more than once
visited it, but it is doubtful if he could renew the pleasure of his
youthful experience. "I set out," he says, "with my friends, I the
fifth, all of us lightly furnished with money, but full of youthful
enthusiasm. Life was then easy in Egypt; we lived at a very moderate
rate; we hired a boat and lived four months upon the Nile, hunting,
painting, fishing by turns, from Damietta to Philae. We returned to
Cairo and remained there four months longer in a house in the older
part of the town, belonging to Soleman Pasha. As Frenchmen, he treated
us with cordial hospitality. Happy period of youth, of freedom from
care! Hope and the future opened bright before us; the sky was blue!"
Gerome's pictures of Eastern life make a gallery by themselves. A few
of them are historic, such as his "Cleopatra visiting Caesar," but the
most of them are simply scenes and incidents drawn from the daily life
of the modern inhabitants of Cairo and the desert, illustrating their
manners and customs. The mere titles would fill up a large part of our
space. Many of the best of them are owned in this country, and all
have been reproduced by engraving or by photography.
In another field Gerome won great distinction, painting scenes from
the history of France in the reign of Louis XIV.; subjects drawn from
what may be called the high comedy of court-life, and treated by
Gerome with remarkable refinement and distinction. Among these
pictures the best known are: "Moliere Breakfasting with Louis XIV.,"
illustrating the story of the king's rebuke to his courtiers who
affected to despise the man of genius; "Pere Joseph," the priest who
under the guise of humility and self-abnegation reduces the greatest
nobles to the state of lackeys; "Louis XIV. Receiving the Great
Conde," and "Collaboration," two poets of Louis XIV.'s time working
together over a play. Among his accomplishments as an artist we must
not forget the talent that Gerome has shown as a sculptor. He has
modelled several figures from his own pictures, with such admirable
skill as to prove that he might easily have made sculpture a
profession had he not chosen to devote himself to painting.
[Signature of the author.]
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI[10]
[Footnote 10: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
By EDMUND GOSSE
(1828-1882)
[Illustration: Dante Gabriel Rossetti.]
Those whose privilege it was to meet the late Mr. Gabriel Rossetti, at
once in the plenitude of his powers and in the freshness of their own
impressions, will not expect to be moved again through life by so
magnetic a presence. In his dealings with those much younger than
himself, his tact and influence were unequalled; he received a shy but
ardent youth with such a noble courtesy, with so much sympathy yet
with no condescension, with so grand an air and yet so warm a welcome,
that his new acquaintance was enslaved at the first sentence. This
seems to me to have been in a certain sense the key-note of the man.
He was essentially a point of fire; not a peripatetic in any sense,
not a person of wide circumference, but a nucleus of pure imagination
that never stirred or shifted, but scintillated in all directions. The
function of Gabriel Rossetti, or at least his most obvious function,
was to sit in isolation, and to have vaguely glimmering spirits
presented to him for complete illumination. He was the most prompt in
suggestion, the most regal in giving, the most sympathetic in
response, of the men I have known or seen; and this without a single
touch of the prophetic manner, the air of such professional seers as
Coleridge or Carlyle. What he had to give was not mystical or
abstract; it was purely concrete. His mind was full of practical
artistic schemes, only a few of which were suited to his own practice
in painting or poetry; the rest were at the service of whoever would
come in a friendly spirit and take them. I find among his letters to
me, which I have just been reading once again, a paper of delightful
suggestions about the cover of a book of verse; the next youth who
waited upon him would perhaps be a painter, and would find that the
great genius and master did not disdain the discussion of
picture-frames. This was but the undercurrent of his influence; as we
shall see more and more every year as the central decades of this
century become history, its main stream directed the two great arts of
painting and poetry into new channels, and set a score of diverse
talents in motion.