et ee ee : ROITION DE LUXE Ant od EBACE a wad ae) i CO Oa URE Bras OUR ANUS ae a hianinteiinie tina einnbbet sede) Mr E.F Minuken’s COLLECTION OF VALUABLE PalntINGs ACC. f " a a ee | THE | MILLIKEN COLLECTION. q | Ftne Pictures by American and French Colorists to be Sold Friday. | | That Mr, B..Re Milliken is a very dis- | eriminating pérsor in his choice of pictures | one can sée at a glance on éntéring the. _ upper gallery of the American Art Asso- | \ elation.”, From nearly every frame among | |the twenty-six comes a flash of interest, |apd from some the Clear signs of genius. | beckon. Heélécti¢ inswio narrow sense, Mr. | Milliken has, however, no examples of the | aneedote picture, .nor any of the religious, | but he likes ol@ masters and yet enjoys + the extréemé) painters of the pléinair move- }ment; he. aflmires the romantic landscap- er in France, (1830-75,) and buys pietures of ballet dancers by Degas, in which such ' pitiful little suggestions of beauty in, form | and movement as exist among those sur- | | ¥ivals of bad taste in the opera are ruth- Tessly put to flight.. He can pass from the @rubby realism of Degas to the calm sym- holism of Puvis de Chavannes and appre- ‘elate the exquisite art of Albert Ryder and | r er Martin in marine and landscape, | without being rebuffed by the bold if some- | what erudé realism of Edouard Manet. Small, choice collections like this are use- | ful to educate the public to the fact that | Atherica producés work which not merely | | @€Guals but surpasses that of modern Eu- ropeans who are rightly placed, among the | great. On one wall hangs a very beautiful | | study of sky and clouds and low hill-top | horizon by J. F. Millet; luminous and lim-| pid, it is the true descendant of the land- | scapes of old Dutchmen who gave their | life to painting nature. And on the opposite wall hangs a moonlight marine by Albert) | Ryder which soars high above the beautiful | -Millet. Such a delightful mystery as we | | fina in the boat with tattered sail wallow- ke Ling in the trough of the sea, suggesting a Mote survivor of a shipwreck, or a man | marooned by his heartless comrades, or | some ene of the old legends of heroes or) “heroines 6f romance sent adrift for the) "gods to pity and succor! And the strange ‘boat and its occupant are bathed in a moon- light which is splendid and yet consoling, | ' the rays vibrating through the heavens and | |on the surface of the sea with a radiance ‘that seers the, summing up of a hundred | moonlights, ratHer than the record of some’ oné hight in midocéan over which memory likes to linger. This is Ryder’s great feat, | ‘that his pictures so oftén concentrate many | | Studies of nature in one and fuse many / actualities into one hymn, one dramatic! poem, one delightful piece of music. This| Picture, from the W. T. Evans collection, | [Was painted on thé other side of the panel, “Containing his ‘‘ Temple of the Mind,” and/| by a skillful section of the panel the for-| (mer Owner of the “‘ Temple” obtained two | pictures Instead of one. } The ‘ Westchester Hills,” by Homer D.)| Martin, one of the finest in the Evahs sale, |; has. been to Paris since it came into Mr. | Milliken’s possession, where it found rev- | vérent admirers at the Exposition of 1900, and where efforts were made to secure it for the collections of the French Govern- ment. With that of Daubigny'’s *‘ Cliff of Viller- | ville’’ to see the superiority of the Ameri- €an master; and if this painting by Dau- “bigny, good as it is, may be thought an un- fair example to use for comparison, then | one has merely to compare it with more | important Daubignys. The simple grandeur | of “‘ Westchester Hills’’ goes hand in hand with a loveliness in the coloring that be-| + eame Martin's secret as soon as he reached | the point of making of his landscapes | Something more than a bare transcript of | hature, Certainly it is a wonderful picture| even for Martin, wonderful forthe impres- sive effects he obtained by the simplest means. One thinks of Constable, but it is) ‘not Constable: one thinks of Rousseau, but) One has only to compate its sky | ‘are sometimes right, _table-shaped rocks and a tender, q is” “HOt Rousséiu; something far more ar, pensive, sah ia Wbcatee aes ithe, bare “hill and weéed-grown pastures, smiles from “the exquisite sky. “of William Gedney Bunce discredit the con-| /noisseurship of this collector. Nor does the specimen It is a Ven-) ice lagoon which renders mést impressively the effect of the vast concave of sky as it) appears from the gondola when the marvel-_ \jous city of the Adriatic is low down on) the horizon and the héavens are decorated with fleecy clouds, while the sun ainien| . strange patterns with rays and cloud shad- ows all about the vault. This, picture also. went to the Paris Exposition in 1900 and | | Was deéreed a medal. The Titian is supposed to be a porttalt of Giorgio Cornaro, brother of Caterina | Cornaro, one time Queen of Cyprus. He is a powerful man, With hunting dog by his side, who is inspecting with the ¢ritical eye of a fowler the trained hawk that sits on his gloved left hand. The hood which. hunting hawks wore to keep them quiet, has been removed and the gentleman seems | to be considering the condition of his pet. bird. The name Titianus, painted on the grayish background, is no guarantee of the | genuineness of the attribution; ‘nor does. the fact that it bélonged to the collection of the Warls of Howard at Castle Howard weigh much in that consideration. The. name may have been placed there centur-_ ies ago, and not by Titian, The attribu- tion may or may not have been right, as. attributions in the most famous collections | sometimes ‘wrong. | The fact that it is a splendid portrait in JVitian’s manner is the only sure guide. “ Hope,” by Puvis de Chavannes has a! great portion of that decorative largenéss in composition which placed him at the head of modérn mural painters, The ar- tist’s mind was on the composition rather | than the humanly central point, namely, | the face of the symbolical maiden. She ts a gracious figure seated on a shattered wall near, and on Which various Wild flow+ ers grow, and in the distance one séeg Sweet | Instead of a flower she holds | evening sky. ‘at arm’s length a twig of green oak leaves, | typifying strength and hope; for the daté is 1872, and France was still deep in des: | pair over the wreck made by ambitious | rulers on both sides of the Rhine. The face alone fails to reach the proper level; it is insignificant. Doubtless the pictura was part of some larger schenie for wall | decoration which Puvis had in mind, repre- | senting the dangers and vicissitudes of France; but it is carried out with all the! eare of a finished e€asel picture. . The Corot is a fine landscape with beech | trees, and on the horizon a group of horse- | men just about toe disappear, While the) foreground is occupied by a trio of two. women and a man, the latter wounded put | sti]l alive. Overhead against the foliage of the tall trees are boyangels carrying crown | and palm branch, descending to greet the | sufferer as a saint. It is a variant on Corot’s picture of Saint Sebastian. The Delacroix is a somewhat confused compo. | sition in a brilliant state as to preserva. | tion, with several very charming and sey. | eral very indifferent figures—a study by | Delacroix of a cartoon by Rubens, The | identity of the different gods tn this sym. bolical design is not always cleat. We can tell Venus by her ample undraped charms, Apollo by his bow, Mars by his helmet and the place he occupies by Venus. What is meant by the man and woman pursued | and wounded by the gods is not Very evi- | dent. The two examples of Mantt, a view | of the British Channel, and black-sailed fishing boats, when the ocean looks, as hard as a turquois floor, and a broadly brushed half-length of a man smoking a clay pipe, his thick beard streaked with gray, are good examples of mi ats Girl in Green,” made a hit nes ap- peared ih the show of — -Durand-Rue} galleries, It is. a half-length fand boa, green gown her face is reflected full. It is a powerful }and very satisfactory picce of work. - ‘The }in white gown and pale yellow. silk. shave | portrait of a boy by the late via / and a decorative féte Gtr 4 | celli, a winterscape by Sisley, ‘ond. shores | Scape by Renoir are, further pi |The sale takes place: on Friday | Mendelssohn Hall on. ash Ae Street. with steamship | ‘Prices, stance. In the a es Belle Isle,” the smooth water, with tions of the cliffy is beautiful, but bigs themselves less attractive, powerfully ee in which the are solid and the breakers rolling in tow: the curving beach to thé left are perh too firm. The stinlight on the rocks strong and true. ‘‘ Reflections,” by Julian ‘Alden Weir, otherwise known as “The Ten at the of a comely young woman in black hat who stands in profile by a mirror so that. ‘portrait of his wife, by William M) is excellent. Rather di Morris Hunt; more int of a head in the manner ‘of tear Sx .C. D, Currier, an American, ay sb in Munich. A little Michel, asi aight at Sa ale PAINTINGS ve AUCTION The Miliken estientidi Disposed Of for aie $42,000 Paid for a Titian ad’ $20,000 for a Corot, After Very Spirited — = Bidding. | | P. + 5 ° : . ‘ . Mr. E. ¥. Milliken's collection of twenty- six paintings were sold at public auction | last night at Mendelssohn Hall. The By Seats Seas | ‘receipts from the sale were $128,325. The highest price paid for a single picture was $42,000, which was bid by Durand-Ruel &| Sons for Titian’s portrait of Giorgio Cor-) naro, This is one of the largest sums ever) paid for a painting sold in this country. | The next highest price paid on $20,000. for Corot’s St. Sebastian, © | The bidding on the Titian started oa $20,000, and was very spirited ‘until the The bids first raised in ne: al when a thirty-thousand-dollar ‘bid was, reached jumped to $35,000. After that the | rising bids ranged from $100 ‘to $500, and before the painting was bid in the auc: tioneer had considered fifty-dollar raises, The bidding for the Corot was also spirit- ed, starting in at $10,000 and jumping in one-thousand-dollar raises to $15,000. Brom then on the bidding varied from one-tnou- sand-dollar to fifty-dollar jumps until finally the picture went under the hammer | to Cottier & Co, The prices paid for the re- maining pictures ranged from $225 for a Currier to $8,250 for a Millet landscape, Following is a list of the collection, the and the purchasers: ‘by J. Haren Rhodes cree, $225. - 4 c Sake chel;, 2 ; 500 Wils aD ad ee a eat i as . by “William hell rt h Cottier phage 525. " . Caen. 425 | & ddd pit nbs! - William Merritt Chase; tis by Julian Alden’ Weir; pur- 2 S ae ae ee . 1,125 . Gedney Bunce; purchased Ak thats spt eeeessenecers PROS: 1,950 ‘Coast ral, y Theodore Rous- eee d by L, Laflin Kellogg... 2,450 bens nseuses,’’ by Hilaire Ger- iy Degas; purchased by Cot- bi bY by wiisine Gerdain ba + , Durand-Ruel.. 6,100 a ,000 “ie 1,450 Ah eg ; mers... L, ¥ ord Renoir; pur- ee mois, Belle Isle, 1886,’’ . t; purchased by Durand- a “Rov “four d*Aibane, Bariy . ude Manet; purchased jae! , 000 7,050 -Ru Magee Ueki kates 100 ” by A @ Monti; dee 3 tbat 2,050 de la THE GALLERIES. Collection of Pictures at the ely ca dp® see a private collection nt aity worth seeing. There care. vent¥-six pictures, but the quality high and in many cases pre- y ITS. icity of taste has been very choice discernment, and the almost evet'y instance suggests Hivated instinct for ; fine and worthy, but to possess it for the pleasure : of its companionship. So with | yus and heartfelt eclecticism the | ranged from Titian to our) , dipping, by the way, into | ; of the Barbizon men, and the lster harvest of im- , always with no mere pride on, but with the serious desire igent and appreciative possession. its way a model of what asmall col- ‘should be. s example by Georgio Cornaro (so valled) from , collection of the Earl of Carlisle at fo ahaa The person represented, ae ch a man and a gentleman in the of life, holds a falcon on Titian is the noble por- his left wrist, while he strokes its plumage with. the other hand. His figure, erect and of , is clad in a black. commanding velvet doublet; and the high-bred features, | browned with the health of open air, and the curly black hair and beard show in profile against a dark background, Crowe and Cavaleaselle in their “Life and Times of Titian” write of this picture with am enthusiasm that few will hesitate to in- dorse. For it is a portrait of the er. +. Yr “ a | | | “| choice example of Renoir’s grandezza, so appreciable yet ult to define, a certain conscious and yet per-— fectly natural and acceptable air of supe- riority; moreover, with a sort of courtly | per SS. its impressiveness of color and in the mingled breadth and completeness of the execution, it is a gal- inty Ee of the first rank. : vis the Barbizon pictures is that beautifu example of Daubigny, “The Cliff at Villerville,” from the collection of 'Mr. William H. Fuller. It will be remem- ‘pered as showing an undulating stretch of grassy ground, dotted with cows and crowned on the left with scrub trees shel- tering a farm, while below lies the broad | est of the Seine. Its smooth waters flecked with two sails, extends to a distant horizon of low cliffs, over which mounts a gray sky quivering with rose that parts at one point into a glint of blue. It is an ' exquisitely balanced composition, with 'a harmony of quiet reserve, tender lumi- nousness and infinite delicacy of tone and feeling; being in Daubigny’a sweetest manner, blended with a more than usual dignity. The “St. Sebastian” by Corét ‘ig the one that the artist in writing to a friend said he hoped “to make a ovely picture.” That he succeeded who will ‘deny? The dying saint, tended by holy. women; the two little angel children that float above them holding the crown and ‘palm of mattyrdom and the soldiers dis-. appearing over the brow of the hill may seem to but accessories to the picture. | One may be disposed to feel that even to the artist himself the setting of the scene |was of more’ import than the dramatis. | persone. For the dignity and pathos of ‘the subject seem to come to it through the landscape; a grove of birch trees, with supple hewn ess of stem and limitless subt- \lety of ight and shade on their polished | bark, and overhead a canopy of rich olive | foliage, trembling in the stir of atmosphere ‘and melting on its edges into a delicate | lace of luminous leaves, silhouetted against }a sky that throbs with pale light. Lovely, ‘indeed, the picture is with a beatitude that is full of spiritual fervor! The “Landscape” poy Millet’ is an unusual example, goribts picture. Glorious, | the grandeur and immensity of the sky, | vividly blue with large sails and trailing eee of sunlit ¢ up toward it, for the strip of land is a | mountain crest, a ledge from which one 'is brought into close ellowship with the | purity and spaciousness of the upper air, | and tastes of its exaltation. | ‘he impressiveness of this picture is 'in its suggestion of nature's elemental _fore?, and we. shall find the same in the “Westchester Hills” by one of our own | masters, the late Homer D, Martin. But | ‘with what difference of spiritual mood! In Millet’s picture the note is exuberant, | inviting the spirit to range freely, in this of Martin’s the prompting is to compressed | intensity of emotion. The twilight is gath- ‘ering and the strong earth is folding ‘itself to slumber; there is a contrast of its ‘solid stability with the sky’s trembling ‘incertitude of light. The miracle of re- _eurring rest in its relation to matter and ‘to the experience of humanity is wrought ‘out. here in large Homeric fashion, which 'makes one every time one sees the picture ‘more deeply impressed with its serious | ‘elevation. Of the other American pict- lures let us particularly notice Albert gee ‘Ryder’s “Moonlight,” one of the most peautiful examples of that strangely in- teresting artist, a poem in color, pene- ‘trated with emotion and having passages of gem-like tone, full and limpid. There |are also two particularly charming ex- | i i of W. Gedney Bunce and J. Alden air, | Surely thisexhibition should win some new | adherents to the cause of Impressionism, 'so called. At the end of the long gallery | Bates one of Monet’s Cathedral’ series, _fianked at ample distance on the one side | by his picture of the rocks and blue sea at Belle-Isle and on the other by Renoir’s '“Bordighiera.” Sunlight in all. three! in the Cathedral picture veiled by the pure |mists of early morning; in_ the Belle-Isle, lusty and expansive; in Renoir’s. softly seductive, shedding a bloom over the water | and the landscape as ripe and warm as | eolee upon a girl’s silky flesh. This | “Bordighiera” seems to be a pareeey. andseapes, but a) because of: ud. One is lifted. Bd | racehorses at the starti fe | other ballet girls in the ried hg The latter especially is firm tone, reaching | from deep, sonorous color through a dainty -arpeggio up to high and vivid notes, and both are brilliant examples of gesture and “movement, without any trace of that in- difference to ugliness which repels not a few people in some of this artist’s work |By Manet are “Le Fumeur” and “Sortie | der Port de Boulogne;” the one a broad /and masculine presentment of an old man | ina rich scheme of brown and drab tones; _ the other a very effective, if somewhat forced, impression of boats upon a smooth | sliding sea. By Sisley is a winter scene, | very ifferent from his usual tranquil sunny Pre ugaege bee og that delicate in- of feeling so isti | gente art g characteristic of his stly there is “L’ Esperance,” i de Chavannes; painted when Pranierene recovering from the grip of the invader; a symbolic picture of tender melancholy istirred by the first breath of awakening ‘hope. A naiveté, as of a new spirit still ‘distrustful of itself, pervades the whole, composition; and a tenseness of saddened’ 'feeling—the grave monotony of the color! scheme, which, however, buds forth in little bright accents of color in the fore- | ground. _It is a picture which, the more peer ceaten er yields 7 Raber? of ar- ik completeness and be ess of pear e isi autiful serious- out a doubt this is the most enjoy- able exhibition presented so far this conned and no one interested in pictures of varied ‘$49,000 FOR TITIAN PORTRAIT. |\MILLIKEN COLLECTION _ BRINGS | $128,325 AT AUCTION. The Sale Last NightWas One of the Most Interesting “Eyer’ Held in New York —The Twenty-six Paintings Put Up Seid at an Average of Nearly $5,000 Each. | By far the most interesting collection of |paintings offered at auction in New York | this season, that belonging to E. F. Milliken | was sold by Thomas E. Kirby as auctioneer |for the American Art Association in Men- \delssohn Hall last evening, and the sale \was as interesting as the collection itself. |The twenty-six pictures sold fetched a | total of $128,325, or an average price of very ‘nearly $5,000 each, which has rarely if ever been equalled at the public sale of so small |a collection in this city. | The top figure of the, lot, $42,000, paid ‘for Titian’s portrait ‘ofGiorgio Cornaro, 'has been exceeded-only by half a dozen ‘paintings disposed, of here at public sale, ‘if indeed this Titian is not within the half dozen highest-priced paintings knocked down in the New York auction mart. | It was very much of a Degas night at | Mendelssohn . Hall; it was certainly an |impressionists’ night, notwithstanding. the \top figure brought by the Old Master. | Degas’s picture of the side scenes of a 'theatre, “Les Coulisses,” or “Behind the Scenes” for those who prefer their titles |in English, was sought by people in all | parts of the house, and from $1,000 the | price of it was sent up to $6,100. _ It called forth the liveliest bidding of the ‘evening, and a part of the time Mr. Kirby could scarcely call the bids rapidly enough’ ‘for the eager bidders. Interests who have | been generally looked to as ready to protect ‘productions of the impressionists ceased i! idding at half the final price of the paint- ing. ‘sition went for $1,000 less. Monet’s facade of the Rouen Cathedral in early morning, which was sold for $3,100 'at. the American Art Association’s sale The same artist’s racetrack compo- | if LS ‘Daubigny’s lovely “Cliff a | mped from the first bid of $2,500 to. $4,000, i 1g at $5,500; and ad of Homer in’s “Westchester - Hillis,” which has: m so widely commended, while be- aning the reluctance of American pict- buyers to offer liberally for works of | first American painters, took satis-) on in the fact that this well-known vas went up to within $200 of the ad-. able Daubigny, although Millet’s poetic. m (No. 22 of the catalogue) was sent. to $8,250. y work of Puvis de Chavannes of at public sale here brought’ may very likely be found in a. hern city. When next it is publicly | Corot’s “St. Sebastian” went to the | ected figure of $20,000, and che miscatalogued “Green ' Bodice,” | h was made to appear as “Reflections” name borne by another of Mr. Weir’ Pe s—was obtained ‘for $1,125, although | been expected to go higher: ecord of the sale in detail is as | [SERRE Saco Ga ea RUT ha $225 | Butmarte,” Michel; J. T. Wilson.. 500. ee of a Boy,” W. M. Hunt; Cottier ios | Beat Re Ie ee Sion cassie ob Ms Sinise SEEN 25 | he Schick Doctor,” Van der Heuval: | "ELD Supt ilies oad 01 0A ae 425 | oonlight,” A. P. Ryder; Cottier & Co. 1,500 | ortrait,’’ W. M. Chase; S. Peters.... 325 | een Bodice,” Alden Welr; Knoedler Rial aie DpeREE MPEG shew" &IC's Bh oe ieataly WOE idee 1,125 4 i ice, Mg Gedney’ ‘Bunce: 8 Peters. 1,950 j “Coast of Portugal,” Rousseau; 1. Lafiin 1 MIEN EE ea ewiis ne) alace te ao e'e eas we stdin ba ele wae SIE NN) 2's fe 2,450 Ore des” Danseuses," Degas; Cottier Berea hice: cepa Sa amas he dae be 500 | RRR Ne ie. Bats aiken Misia Vinh ailace’ wot at dk 6,100 | 1 egas; Cottier & Co...... 5,100 | Ww at, Moret, ie Sisley: Glaenger & Co. 1,450 | ge Renoir; Durand-Ruel.. R00 | -Isle,” ent Durand-Ruel...... 1,300 | Monet; Knoedler | oR ee ee 4,000 | 4 LA RAS Fs A SMR eh ea 7,050 | - Smoker, Manet: Durand-Ruel . 2,100 Pali of Fire,” * Monticelli; S. P. Avery, Sr. 2,050 | eek ernment of the Queen,” Delacroix; [cesta ERS 2) | MERE ee aa 2,706 Daubigny: N. E | OS USS SSB SS AS Pe ee 5,500 ’ Millet: Wililam Macbeth.. 8,250 | Sn Eas SUSE EEG VEE I GS es Gale SM 5,300 “St. Sebastian,” Cordt; Cottier & Co.. 25 “Hope,” Chavannes; top r ys eo scccuicls Ue 4,100 | Giorgio Cornaro,” Titlan; Durand-Ruel. ‘ 000 | ue Ee eee $128.25 Collection. y meet ate gs were sold tn. Men- delssohn Ff hem. the rait of Giorgio Cornaro.” “by Titia Ng etizine $42,000: sixth highest price ever paid in America for a picture at a public sale The Durand- “Ruel firm of dealers was ineGurepasr . Next to this came the * bestian,’” by Corot, the opening bid for Thich was $10,- | 000, the offers go’ng * $20.000. was reache 5 which price. the ; work was mgs coe) wn to Cottier & Co The paintings.comprised the collection of : EL F. Milliken of by the American Art Association: “the interest in the prices brought by the ere painte*s, curiosity was shown as "artist. in the eo'lection—in this case the | “Westchester Hils”’ by Homer D. Mar- )tin--would bring a higher price than was } paid for it at the Fivans sale in 1909, when ‘it broueht $4.750 This. patriotic interest was gratified. for the picture went to “genheim for $5, 300. Titian Frings £12,00 at, Sale at sateen | ¢ night for $128,325. one of | This was the. 090 jumps until ; is city. and were sold | Next to) te whether the best examp’e by a hative| BD. Gug- | | Bs beat C) MILLIKEN COLLECTION | cae UN oe les Ganies by Corot est Price, $20,000, at Ameri- can Galleries Sale. Petey et ee eee ee ee er ee one ee HIGHEST PRICES PAID FOR PICTURES BY AMERICANS. Meissomier’s ‘1807,’’ $66,000. (Purchased by A. T. Stewart, and by his will presenited to the Metro- politan Museum.) Rosa Bonheur’s “The Horse Fair,” and presented to the Metropolitan Museum.) Van Dyke’s Marchese di Spinola, $50,000. (Purchased by M. Kmoedler and resold abroad.) Fortuny’s ‘Choosing a Model,” $42,000. (Purchased by Senator W. A. Clark.) Titian’s Giorgio Camaro, $42,000. (Purchased last night by Durand- Ruel, acting, it is said, for J. Pier-_ 4 pont Morgan.) | Qe oe Mer Ore Ber Gar Gre O10 Gor Oe or Oso Ber ee Ser Gee Dov Hes Doo Ber GoGo or Bre $53,000. (Purchased by W. H. Vanderbilt 4 Acting, it fs said, for J. Pierpont Mor- gan, Durand-Ruel, an art dealer, aftera lively struggle for its possession, pur- @hased one of Titian’s mastempiecee last} night, when the magnificent collection | of E. F. Milliken was auctioned off. Mr, Milliken’s gallery had depended | rather on its quality than its qnantity. The total realized at the sale, which was conducted at Mendelssohn Hall by the American Art Galleries, was $128,325, al-) though there were only twenty-six can-| vases in the collection. Best Picture Held to End. Interest, of course, centred end. ennui, for each sale provoked lively ‘bidding, particularly in the case of | Morot’s “St. Sebastian,” which brought | $20,000, and was the only one beside the | Titlan which sold for a five-figure sum. After the applause caused by the un-| veiling of the masterpiece had subsided, | Mr. Kirby, the auctioneer, to be sold in this country. Then he) asked for bids. “Twenty . thousand. dollars,’ came a voice, and then the fight was on. Twen-)} ty-five thousand dollars was the next ibid, and this was raised another $5,000.) by a third. Another addition af an equal | amount proved enough for the new-| comer, and then the first two had the; field to themselves. the following Severs broue hes prices: Rousseau’ s “Coast of Portugal’’.. rings Next High- _Degas’s “Les Conlisses’’....... o hip'Wielaisiou ope mul Durand-Ruel. ase Degas’s ‘‘Les Courses’’......... ce eeueesesecs ie: * ‘Cottier & Co. ALN Monet's ‘‘Rouen Cathedral’’........+49 ey ‘ 'M. Knoedler & ‘Co. 4 |Manet’s ‘Port du Boulogne’ .......4¢sse0. M. Knoedler & Co. “Manet’s “Le Fumeut’’, ‘Daubigny’ s “Villerville’”’.. 2 Pn8OMO- OO“ OOH OME HD OME BOMBA ON OHOMOROHIMPNONENO BOHOL HO OnOnS Os in: the | Titian—the portrait of Giorgi Camaro; | and this being held to the very last had} the effect of keeping. each one of the) fashionable crowd in his seat until the There was, however, no reason for explained | that it was the only Titian ever likely | ; : hire,’ ‘0 the financier is credited paid $150,000. year bought a Van ‘Dyck for which h paid $120,000. - i “William C. Whit In addition ‘to. those already mentio renesenn 3 L. L, Kellogg. Durand- Ruel. ; Paes | N. Ee: Montross. | $128,325. The highest price paid wa: bid by Durand-Ruel & Sons for. portrait of Giorgio Cornaro.~ Sebastian brought $20, 000. - Following is a partial ist of tures and their Aurchasens: a a A Waa by mhewlere 6 a: purchased by L, flin Kellogg. ii Beat; ‘Les Coulisses, ” by Hilaire Germain dgard Degas; purchased b Durand-Ruel.. i... Les Courses,’’ by Hilaire Germain Edgard Es Sa purchased by Cottier & Co.. Hlfet de Neige a Moret,’’ by Alfred Sis- i ley; purchased bY Bugene W. Glaenzer... 1, een eared: ‘ ee 3 d’ Albane, arly ae te sti aude Manet Knoedler a Coli Mh NPE ae “Sortie du Port de, Boulogne,’’ b a ag ead Bad ae Knoedler & Co... ie umeur,’’ by ouard Ma chas = ed by Purana Bae ae bat S918 00 9 aie" ae Chahele tetarene tetas e gnased ee de la Reine, PO yi EG sea i Se veep purchased by Henry Hg sf ya ee sce eee ates 2, a erville, ot b ; Francois Daubigny; purchased Be a hee es axe ng .mped yaar ele skis ches Ce eneaen eae Cee weed oe wwe Dy © ao ge 08 6 ee a eblevele t wis thee Esiahere Rat - ane it ee EL Kirby, of the American é Aswicintion, ‘on d $128,325, was realized aa only twenty-six works. sale diag not begin until nearly 9 Biolock, | about an hour, So spirited was i _ Lively applause was excited by ‘S “Rouen Cathedral: Tour d’Albane, 4 serinhde “Sortie du Port de Boulogne,” . Fae ‘Which was $2,000, ang which gold “No painting, -however, was more cor- E. ae collection of | dially applauded than, “Homer D. Martin's aM Mendelssohn ‘Hall last “Westchester Hills,” whiéh, starting at $2,500, an: ment Nanny to $5,800, at ania figure tt went a m, orgi occa eee the evening, $42,000. at | 8s. Durand-R ; reached $20,000. The painting, which ett! € highest figure of the » Was Titian’s ; auctioneer, put up | | Portrait of Giorgio Cornaro.” The first bid was wasa fashionable gath- $5000 t and was quickly followed by $2, 000 Bad ® in addition to the regu- ».000 bids until $42,000 was reached, never miss a sale of this | The prices and es of buyers follow: Brominent private collec Pp Bee y /C..D. Currier, “Study of a _Heaa, J. Hargen HShat an important Titian | res ies ae PSAP EM Tye Beta Wee} (wees ichel, “‘Montmartre tH Pw Wilson...... if hen Moms Hunt, See ot a Boy,’ Cot- 525 casion. If. the Prk col he Van ‘Det Hetivei” “The. Quark’ Poptart eT present bought they didso [4p lee P. Ryder, ““Moonlight ‘Gotten & Co. .i1 11,500. lers, j (Altera M. Chase, “Portrait” Pet 825 teres 2. enaee : Weir, * P iettveat & Cops s 21984 hest price of the eo W, Geine Bunce, Venta ” S. Pet ee | een ses seau, “Coast of Portugal,” L. Laflin ye . Deeks, rs | des” Dabisouses, "4" tees . Hi FO eee rcices on MI ALE eo IK 9 ° oi - GE. De Les Coulisses,’’ urar tuel.... 6,100 - B- @ Degas,” « Courses Cottier & came Tt) ) Algea Sisley. “Bet de Neige a Moret,” E. Glaen- | WE Aah Rae SOR A i ed (phi ° Lae 1, it sola | Aseuste Renoir, oar Durand- : ei thet buyer uel. ...., Claude a oe de Port-—-Domoi le oil. 1886,’" Dura a's oe edna rtssesesees Ly de Boulogne” Claude se ie It was bought other, ainting S sold as fol- ce,’ ® Pavi de Cha- cee oun” 3 to nivernen “Rouen Salhnati: Tour Albane, H arly Morning,’ Knoedler & Co path rmat a sree yay a Edouard Manet, “Sortie an Port de Boulogne, Knoedler & CO. -s. 40.5 Dis id sah ais aR Bh uard Manet, “he umeur,’? Durand “Riel eign’ = 00 . “Adolphe Monticelli, “The Ball of Fire i ery, . 26 ware bie a iel ela el eld Seiene | Bugene * Delacroix, “Le Gouvernement’ de la Reine 2,700, en bad Oey sicie'e sia bts ews aictiae SERA e im 4 Mite Vitlerviite, baieaes (2 ae aubleny, ‘The Clift at SP Ae NY's tine wes eee eaee e* eee eeee 5, ; 1 F, aft ri tn ner wisn 8.250, 3 “Mftet eee "Ceri enact 50, to eral Bugene ea é ae Courses, ” 35.100, Bs e “high art at. lelss ing. aie picture, Titiar ) ‘Giorgi. Camaro,” — bs b Durand-Re 1, a se fo ce was Corot’s “St. sold for $20,000 to cot- ae me for a wealthy. me “Me- | ; 5,100; “Daubleny's ne Bela to “themseieee se se ee ; a Fe) —ea=———a——x————SSSS—<“‘~;~*t”w”w”””””OO™;™;~™ rao a sags $42,000, which was bid en i ihe bidding vi: oe. Pets, ‘Moonilighi,”* by Atber Pas » ante by W.. Gedney: fei: purehi ieee price ae + uy : Sons for Titian’ s portrait of Maro. anes is one of Soin jar =4 “Corot’s ‘St. ibe cae ; ie The bidding on the Titian started $20,000, and was very sae na The” Ryde. doe raise i ‘sand-dollar to fifty finally the picture went under to Cottier & Co. ‘The prices pa maining pictures ranged from — Currier to $8,250 for a Millet 1 Following is a list of the ca prices, and the purchasers: sf ie “ Stud, a Heed, Doe amc BA Currier: ) 2.) Seenaned i by de Garcon Ei veka 3225. ‘*Montmarte,’’ by Georges: Michel; “pur= PH chased by J. T. Wilson....sessseeesevce 500. “ Portrait ofa. Boy,’ by Willan, ‘Morris oe urchased by Cottier & Co.. a Dae + seen Doctor,”? by Antoine van) “Bauvel: purchased iy Everes. bake tee ased by Cot ttl ae ea wee aw eeeee Ne “Pongal bead ier kicriaagd Nrerride ‘ Gha : chased by s. Peters 4 ane eae - B25. Reflections,” by Julian Aiden’ 3 Weir} 3 pure ; ased by ag age Sr OG oh = Bue shdoies 5 Roam 19 MCD en sa! Pi of . Po: a. DY, seau; purchas palin ae “Loge des ehied fe apa ee: Degas; purchased by Cot owt ‘Les. patieace.s by ‘“Filaie Ge gard ey purchased te pee sf “Les, Benet ow aged by. a de. Duran Roel she ue ot ange Manet; pee ura cs tere es we and Boosh ‘Cathedral; “Tour a. eon ing," by te Manet noedler & [9] penne nee es eee a a” one eee ee Ne ee Pere ART COLLECTION OF MR. E. PF. MILLIKEN No. 26 of Catalogue Portrait of Giorgio Cornaro TIZIANO_VECELLI CATALOGUE OF Mise, F. MILLIKEN’S PRIVATE COLLECTION OF VALUABLE PAINTINGS TO BE SOLD AT ABSOLUTE PUBLIC SALE AT MENDELSSOHN HALL ForTIETH STREET, EAST oF BROADWAY ON FRIDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 14TH BEGINNING AT 8.30 O’CLOCK ON VIEW DAY AND EVENING AT THE AMERICAN ART GALLERIES MADISON SQUARE SOUTH FROM FEBRUARY 7TH UNTIL THE MORNING OF SALE INCLUSIVE THOMAS E. KIRBY, OF THE AMERICAN ART ASSOCIATION, WILL CONDUCT THE SALE THE AMERICAN ART ASSOCIATION, Manacgrs NEW YORK 1902 ————<$—$—— - s ry 2 is wy a fe 5 m . “ nt 2 : ‘ * Ys i 4 ° — ‘ is 3 Se ‘ 4 « A Lik Press of J. J. Little & Co. Astor Place, New York ce pce ee SHAAN oo. = : ins. ee ; | REPRI CATALOGUE NO. 24 Study of a Head I é , CHARLES FRANCOIS + Zh The Cliff at Villerville 21 me ¥ ar , is ae eee ss ‘ ho a 7 oe ds < x @ a DEGAS, HILAIRE GERMAIN EDGARD CATALOGUE NO. Loge des Danseuses : 10.) an Les Coulisses II Les Courses . a e DELACROIX, FERDINAND VICTOR EUGENE . Le Gouvernement de la Reine 20 HUNT, WILLIAM MORRIS . . “Vora Portrait of a Boy g°7 MANET, EDOUARD | or Soe Sortie du Port de Boulogne 2 Le Fumeur 18 MARTIN, HOMER D. Westchester Hills 23 MICHEL, GEORGES ys cd Montmartre 2 MILLET, JEAN FRANCOIS “Ae Landscape ‘ 22 Grotte de Port-Domois—Belle- : Isle, 1886 15 16 19 25 14 ~ Coast of Portugal 9 =R, ALBERT P. Moonlight . EY, ALFRED oH . ie Effet de Neige 4 Morét 13 VAN DER HEUVEL, ANTOINE The Quack Doctor WEIR, JULIAN ALDEN ee Reflections ‘THE PAINTERS REPRESENTED IN Mr. rE Re Milliken’s Collection and Appreciations mip a 4 = = » -_ ‘ ri #4" a att ~ T .° " , oh? : ar ee 4 = - 7 iv ’ a, ‘, 7 i S % % 4 W. GEDNEY BUNCE The art of W. Gedney Bunce is identified with the city of his choice. He has long made his home in Venice, and pictures her with the quiet reserve of intimacy; having a special fondness for the delicate moods of atmosphere, veiling the brilliant coloring in mystery. In this prefer- ence may linger something of the influence of his early training under Paul Jean Clays, in Antwerp, whither he proceeded after some preliminary study with William Hart. Clays was the first painter of the sea to break with the old traditions of storm and furor, and to paint the normal aspects of the water, varying under different moods of light and atmosphere: the magical charm of morning, the golden brilliancy of evening twilight, and the infinite variety of tones which light produces upon waves. These ideals and the quiet sincerity of spirit which prompts them belong equally to Mr. Bunce. WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE Eagerly assimilative and with a temperament sensitively alert, William M. Chase has few rivals among American painters in resourcefulness of technique and artistic feel- eS aa Ls ing in many mediums; working in oil, water color, pastels, and etching with equal ease and certainty. To this must be added a perennial freshness of study, which has kept him continually familiar with the galleries of Europe, and the influence which he has exerted at home over a wide circle of students. He was born in Franklin, Indiana, in 1849, and when still young became a pupil of B. F. Hayes in Indianapolis, afterwards practising in the West as a painter of portraits and still life. Then he came to New York and entered the schools of the National Academy of Design, studying also with J. O. Eaton until 1872, when he migrated to the Royal Academy at Munich. There he was the pupil of Alexander Wagner and Karl Piloty, and under this influ- ence produced such good genre pictures of the German style as “The Court Fool.” About 1883 appeared his portraits of the painters Frank Duveneck and F. S. Church, and a number of landscapes of Venice and the American coast. These proved that he had passed out of the influence of Piloty into a search for light colors and brilliant sunshine. Then followed the influence of Whis- tler and of the study of Velasquez and the appreciation of the subtleties of tone. Thus he has run the gamut of the chief artistic movements and revivals of the past quarter of a century, and has acquired an eclecticism very indi- vidual to himself and distinguishably modern in spirit. His landscapes, especially those painted near his sum- mer home on the Shinnecock Hills, are brilliant examples of actuality, seen and rendered in true painter fashion and with an evident joyousness. Deeper quality of feeling appears in his portraits; those of women and young girls, especially, revealing a charming tenderness, and in still life he often shows a fulness of zesthetic purpose most im- pressive. Then again he will fling upon his canvas some scrap of studio or domestic genre, fascinating in its light- someness of motive. Whether skimming the surface or stirring deeper water, his craft is always graceful and cun- ningly handled. PIERRE PUVIS DE CHAVANNES 1824-1898 In the art of Puvis de Chavannes, so tranquil and aloof from the manners of his time, enclosed within the walls of his own sturdy self-contained personality, there is some analogy with a mountain lake that is fed by innumerable rivulets. Busy and bubbling, they lose themselves in the infinite calm of the still, transparent water. For, while Puvis yielded to no direct influence, he absorbed the movements of his time and the influence of several mas- ters, merging them into his own distinct personality. Thus his work, classic in conception and spirit, shows a reliance upon form, though not after the manner of the academicians: it is so far realistic that it is based upon an intimate study of facts both in the human figure and in landscape; and it is poetical, but with a moral or philo- sophical significance. Above all, it is abstract. This was the personal element that tinged each influence and re- ceived them all into one single unity. With him the idea was the significant thing. His poetry “attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact.” All his study of the fact was to reach the idea which it embodied, and it was but natural that his conception and the spirit of his work should be classic. The study of his whole art life was to force himself from the material and to express the abstract; to subtilize his color and to sim- plify his design; to extract from the human figure and from landscape their essential characteristics; to express even in a gesture the spiritual impulse that prompts the play of muscle. In this way he attains the simplicity of the primitive Italian painters, but by a reverse process; for they were simple from lack of knowledge, while he attained simplicity by the shredding off of what he could do and by a recognition of the largeness that is to be reached by being simple. Nor was this the bias of a nature emasculated and visionary. Puvis was a man of sturdy physique, practised in athletic exercises, a bon vivant, who, after a day of unremitting labor with doors closed to everybody, could enjoy the concrete delights of a good dinner. “ Understand, I am not a saint,” he said to a friend; “in art there cannot and ought not to be saints. One does beautiful things only by loving woman and voluptuousness and all that is good.” This is the philosophy of Wein, Weib, und Gesang, but with a dif- ference from the ordinary acceptation that his work is not drowned in natural impulses, but done in the calm that follows after, with the recollection only of the passion. He was by birth a Burgundian, a Lyonnais by education, a poet in temperament, by training analytical and exact. His family, an aristocratic one, had been settled for three centuries in Burgundy, and his father was Engineer of Bridges and Roads at Lyons. The young Puvis had the ye ae iy OR uu 5 : id i a7 4 a e eh . rary | aie pay = an < U > a a classic and eienifie education, nt ay oa eu ee tyter the Ecole Polytechnique. After a Italy he joined the atelier of Henri Scheffer. Then : eon visit to Italy, followed by ee eo al - studios of Delacroix and Couture: For Scheffer he re- ; ng hos all his life a feeling of regard: the influence of a Delacroix. and that of Couture was received from their — Pe: | ‘S ie work ‘rather than. their teaching, and both have left traces eieis his method of painting, just as the impressions © ed « of the Italians, Piero della Francisca, Fra An- i aie Signorelli, and Ghirlandajo, more or less abided ith him throughout his life. As John La Farge says, - : ed so sensitive as his absorbed a great deal of what he. saw.” How these various influences consciously ap affected him may be gathered from his own words: “ Be on your guard—distrust tradition. Tradition is only a guide; there is a tradition of error as well as a tradition ae truth, and man knows to his sorrow which of the two is more active. Go not to the most brilliant, the most skilful, the most surprising enchanters, but to the sincerest, the simplest—to those who have not thought of astonish- ing you, but of charming you. Love them and under- stand them, and far from taking you away from nature, they will continually bring you back to her.” The logic of his mind was perpetually in the direction of repose and calm; the logic of his technique perpetually towards greater simplification, the voluntary abandonment of what is of trivial or only secondary interest. In both cases the logic which began in himself may have been purstied more relentlessly from an instinctive distrust of the turmoil of art around him, its exaggerated appeals and magnification of the little. Unappreciated as he was at first, he more and more found a refuge within the calm | and simplicity of his own character, and made these the foremost qualities of his technical expression. That the simplification was carried so far as to result at times in a barrenness of effect can hardly be denied: color becom- ing attenuated until it is almost colorless; form and fea- tures reduced to a mere indication; draperies ascetic even to niggardliness. In fact, the eye will often have to purge itself of accustomed predilections before it can fit itself to see the subject as Puvis saw it. But, granted that there are limitations, defects if you will, the greatness of Puvis is largely due to the strength he has gathered from his weakness; to his acceptance of limitations as inevitable, but to his control of the same until he compels from them some value. He followed Napoleon’s advice: “Il faut savoir se borner.”” Writing to a young friend in Italy, he says: “ The sight of such lovely countries must give you riches of many kinds. As for me, my dear child, my part in the battle is well determined and well limited, and I bring my supplies from nowhere else but France. I, too, have seen a great yellow river, but it was made of all the mud of the province of La Bresse; and yet some flowering bushes and perfumed groves were ravishing. All this is nothing but chamber music compared to the powerful harmonies that must have struck you; but it also has its own grandeur, and its calm grace is very penetrating.” Grandeur, calm, and penetrating grace— surely these qualities, despite limitations of technique, per- haps even because of them, saturate his pictures, espe- cially his mural paintings. In these his beautiful equi- librium of lines and spaces; the faint and diffused color which seems rather to have grown out of the material of the building than to have been applied to it; the abstract character of the conception, suggesting instead of insist- ing upon an interpretation, combine to produce a decora- tion essentially architectural, because it involves the same elements as the architecture itself should involve. The building and architecture are wedded as man and woman. The years between 1890 and 1808 brought him long- deferred triumph. But it was too late; he had so long walked alone with himself and his ideas, self-wrapt and self-reliant, that the world’s approval affected him as little as its scorn or indifference. Two years before his death he was nursed through a serious illness by the Princess Cantacuzéne, the intimate friend of thirty years, and on his recovery they were mar- ried. Her death some eighteen months later left him but one desire—to finish his great picture of Saint Gene- viéve, begun the year before, and to follow her. But his labor at her sick bed and the shock of her loss had finally undermined his strength, and the picture was never fin- ished. When after several weeks of suffering he felt the end at hand, he thanked his friends for their services and asked them to retire, that he might die alone. His art was not a part of him, it was himself; and he, to those who knew him, was a brave and loyal gentleman, of high purpose and serene will—sincere, urbane, and modest. JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT 1796-1875 Was there ever a happier man than Pére Corot, or one better loved by his friends? Happiness and lovableness breathe from his pictures. He had inherited the whole- some hardiness of the middle-class French character; its orderliness and balance, and its shrewd, genial, sprightly cheerfulness. His father, a hair-dresser in the Rue du Bac, number 37, married a milliner’s assistant, who worked at number 1, near the Pont Royal. Two years after the birth of Camille, Madame Corot took over the millinery business, and with such success that under Na- poleon I. Cor6t became court milliner. He sent his son to the high school at Rouen, and afterwards apprenticed him to a linen-draper’s establishment. When Camille was twenty-three his father yielded to his desire to be an artist, and promised him a yearly allowance of twelve hundred francs, which he doubled twenty-three years later, when his son received the cross of the Legion of Honor; for, as he said, ‘‘ Camille seems to have talent after all.” Corét entered the studio of Victor Bertin, and for five years pursued the orthodox course of classic training, afterwards visiting Rome and Naples in the company of his master. There he remained two and a half years, returning in 1827 to exhibit at the Salon. Other visits to Italy were made in 1835 and 1845; and it was only after this third visit that his eyes were opened to the charm of French landscape. He was nearly forty years old when he set himself to become the new Corot whom the world 1 a to beanie the harvest. had | discovered the secret of rendering air and light. Christ ea the Mount of i al painted in 184, a, | seems. Tike 2 a convert’s Pepsi: of faith. One Be aialite: of his friend Rousseau. Rousseau was dis- _ passionately objective in his point of view, a master of wee form and construction, rich in color, while Corot, weaker 2 ide in drawing, saw objects i in masses, narrowed the range of his palette, delighting particularly in dark olive greens _ and pure grays, and viewed nature as a medium for the 4 i expression of his own poet-dreams; the one magnificently ‘- powerful, the other infinitely tender. “ Rousseau is an eagle,” Corét himself said, “ while I am a lark that pulses Pe: forth little songs in my gray clouds.” . His father had given him, in 1817, a little house at Ville d’Avray, and here or at Barbizon he spent his time when he was not at Paris. How he felt toward nature (for feel- ria . ing was eminently the method of his approach) may be gathered from a letter to Jules Dupré, in which he de- scribes the day of a landscape painter : “One gets up early, at three in the morning, before the sun; one goes and sits at the foot of a tree; one watches and waits. One sees nothing much at first. Nature resembles a whitish canvas on which are sketched scarcely the profiles of some masses; everything is perfumed, and shines in the fresh breath of dawn. Bing! The sun grows bright, but has not yet torn asunder the veil behind which lie con- cealed the meadows, the dale, and hills of the horizon. The vapors of night still creep, like silvery flakes, over the numbed-green vegetation. Bing! Bing!—a first ray of sunlight—a second ray of sunlight—the little flowers seem to wake up joyously. They all have their drop of dew which trembles—the chilly leaves are stirred with the breath of morning—in the foliage the birds sing unseen— all the flowers seem to be saying their prayers. Loves on butterfly wings frolic over the meadow and make the tall plants wave—one sees nothing—everything is there— the landscape is entirely behind the veil of mist, which mounts, mounts, sucked up by the sun; and, as it rises, reveals the river, plated with silver, the meadows, trees, cottages, the receding distance—one distinguishes at last everything that one divined at first.” How spontaneous a commentary upon his pictures of early morning—nature in masses, fresh and fragrant, the “numbed green” of the vegetation, the shiver of leaves and the twinkling of flowers, the river plated with silver, and the sky suffused with misty light! : In the same letter he describes the evening: “ Nature drowses—the fresh air, however, sighs among the leaves —the dew decks the velvety grass with pearls. The nymphs fly—hide themselves—and desire to be seen. Bing!—a star in the sky which pricks its image on the ) h halt ora eye. ie !—a second star appears h oe ry i second eye opens. Be the harbingers of ome, fresh and charming stars. Bing! bing! bing! _ —three, six, twenty stars. All the stars in the sky are keeping tryst in this happy pool. Everything darkens, ~ the pool alone sparkles. There is a swarm of stars—all yields to illusion. The sun being gone to bed—the inner : > soul, the sun of art, awakes. Bon! there is my bike € dv ee. literally his pictures were done in this way ae ae the last part of his life. Forty years of practice = with the brush had rendered the actual record of the scene ae “comparatively easy, and this he made in Paris, between 4 y vhich and nature he divided his affection. But the picture " ie self had been made during his periods of contemplation is Ville d’Avray or Barbizon. Suggestive, also, is his allu- . sion in this letter to the nymphs, that hide themselves de- fai bi siring to be seen. Cordt, though foremost among the men who gave the final quietus to classical landscape, was really more classic than the classicists. More ordinary minds, like Poussin’s, had been captivated by the forms of Italian } landscape and the elegant pageantry of classic archi- _ tecture; while the poetic spirit of Corot had found affinity with the indwelling genius of the scene. He could realize the Oreads, Dryads, and Nereids sporting among the hills, groves, and water-courses. They were the necessary ac- companiment of the childlike glimpse of nature, the an- thropomorphic view which is the child-man’s. Solitude is terrible; so also the intrusion of the actual; like the ancients he peopled nature with beings of his own crea- tion ; sweetly impersonal, responsive only to his own mood. — In the picture of ‘‘ St. Sebastian ” in this collection, he has seen with the physical eye as well as with the eye of the imagination; representing the fact of the martyred saint, as well as the vision of the glory that awaits him. It is the double viewpoint that characterizes the religious pic- tures cf the earlier Renaissance, but its realization here in the exquisite landscape, directly inspired by nature— in which, too, the exquisiteness of nature is the largest and most abiding impression—accentuates the separateness of fact and fancy. To Corét life was one unbroken harmony. « “ Rien ne trouble sa fin, c’est le soir d’un beau jour.” His sister, with whom the old bachelor lived, died in the October of 1874. On February 23d of the following year, when he had just completed his seventy-ninth year, he was heard to say as he lay in bed, drawing in the air with his fingers: “ Mon Dieu, how beautiful that is; the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen!’’ On his deathbed his friends brought him the medal struck to commemorate his jubilee, and he said: “ It makes me happy to know that one is so loved; I have had good parents and dear friends. I am thank- ful to God.” With these words he passed away—the sweetest poet-painter and the “ tenderest soul of the nine- teenth century.” Cc. D. CURRIER C. D. Currier was born and brought up in Boston; but his art life, although he has paid some visits to his home, has been associated with Munich. There for many years i eae he has been one of the most distinguished members of the colony of artists; a painter of extraordinary versatility, who will one day execute a portrait in the manner of Rem- brandt and on another in that of Franz Hals, meanwhile doing work which is stamped with his own powerful imagination. He is a genius of whom too little is known in this country, and whose pictures are scarce because he painted with little thought of making sales; working upon the impulse of the moment and then throwing the canvas aside, as if, his passion appeased, he had no further interest in the picture. The few that are owned in this country have for the most part been rescued from the dust and confusion of his studio by some of the American students in Munich who recognized their merit and insisted on finding a purchaser for them. His gift of music, though uncultivated, is as remarkable as his genius for painting. He is, indeed, in every fibre of his being an artist. CHARLES FRANCOIS DAUBIGNY 1817-1878 4 While so many of the painters represented in this col- lection were daring innovators, Daubigny was the in- heritor of the fruits of others’ labors. He was the youngest member of the Fontainebleau-Barbizon group, and won early recognition which he increased with time. Yet he had his special métier. While Rousseau, Corot, Dupré, and Diaz, in their several ways, are painters of nature, he was a painter of the country. In him, as in the English Constable, the lovableness of the paysage intime, the familiar countryside, to which men are at- tracted by ties of sentiment and daily life, had its faithful exponent. His ripest harvest was gathered along the rivers of France—the Seine and Oise and Marne—which he travelled in a houseboat, fitted up with creature com- forts as well as with facilities for painting. The combina- tion is suggestive, for Daubigny by choice took life as he found it, satisfied with its desirableness. He was not an exacting analyst, like Rousseau; or elevated in mood as Dupré; not consciously a poet as Corét, or a sharer of Diaz’s fantastic or exalted conceptions; only, quite simply and normally, a lover of the country. Such a love of nature is a survival of, or a return to, the simple associations of childhood, and Daubigny in this respect was perpetually a boy. His pictures have the freshness and spontaneity of boyhood, expressed with the virility of a man. He was born in Paris, but his childhood was spent near L’Isle Adam on the Seine, opposite which he had his home in later years, and the influence of which abode with him all through his life. Belonging to a family of painters, he entered the studio of Delaroche, and in time became a candidate for the Prix de Rome. But by some mistake he failed to present himself at the proper time, and was disqualified. Nothing daunted, he set out for Italy on foot with a friend, and visited Florence, Rome, and Naples, stopping for a while in Subiaco. When their money was becoming exhausted they travelled home on foot, and later Daubigny visited Holland. But neither Italy nor Holland left its mark upon him; he was still ao a ch ild 0 0! { France, grown a little older. He first appeared sae are es The } Harvest ”’ in we Dia iecd to the : egion of Honor in 1859, he was made an Officer in 7 ree years later he died, a victim to the damp indie sp a8 of the river ; and as he died, the name of - of the fa 10 sp rit anc ‘deliberately poetic vein than with his sweet, ef _perenni ial youthfulness of character. He was by nature ai He | had 1d more affinity. with Corét than with any other td ; brotherhood—less with Corot’s classical lovable, with a heart that kept its sweetness fresh and un- -_sullied to the end. The lovableness is reflected in his _ HILAIRE GERMAIN EDGARD DEGAS eye vous autres il faut la vie naturelle, a mot la vie - factice.” Degas is six years older than Monet. In their early days they were companions at the symposia in the Avenue de Clichy. Monet, muscular, large, and wholesome, sought the country and the pure enjoyment of natural life; Degas, a little man with round shoulders and shuffling walk, sparing and sarcastic in conversation, remained in the city to become the realist of artificial life. With a contempt for what was banal and an appetite that craved for piquancy, he helped himself, with the nice selection of an epicure, to this and that in other men that could contribute to style. Ingres first attracted him; then the suggestive intimacy and quiet harmonies of Chardin; later Delacroix’s fine distinction of gesture and movement, and Manet’s large simplicity and fluency of modelling; lastly the example of the Japanese. From the last he took the principle of dispersed composition ; the choice of stand- point, allowing the artist to look up from beneath or down from above; decorative feeling; the suggestive method of emphasizing this and suppressing that; the sur- prise of detail, introduced here and there in a perfectly arbitrary fashion; and, finally, the preference for type rather than for the individual. Out of these various ele- ments he has formed a style marvellously expressive and entirely personal. ; In his range of subjects he started with the grace and charming movements of women: trim Parisian laundresses and little shop-girls in their boutiques, the toilet and négligé of the women of the world, boudoir scenes, scenes at court and in the boxes of the theatre. And these sub- jects of women were interspersed with studies of that other product of man’s love of pleasure—the race-horse. These lead to the human animal trained and managed for the sport of men—the hallet-girls of the opera house. Ruthlessly he has depicted also the Nanas of society, with vanished charm and unsatiated animalism. By this time he has ceased to care for the charm of women. It fas- cinates him to strip the modern woman of her finery and show her defects of figure, the product of fashion; to spy upon her in some moment of ungainly gesture; to eigen 3 ” a. ae hery in acrobatic contortions, as the Japanese do = Page angie he seeks At its pleasantest | is Women or race- eines it is all one! The i supple movement, clean, muscular limbs, and vibrating ) energy—these alone fascinate him, and offer material for rad i: pici ctorial expression. Again, those subjects which repel, ee en while one admires the consummate art displayed in = 3! th .eir treatment, are, if anything, moral in their tendency, ee ” terrible. commentary upon the vanitas vanitatum of Bes, and the more terrible because they are not ~, prompted by pity but by satiety: a satiety not necessarily & £ of indulgence, but of interest. And it is the extreme evi- | dence of satiety, of contempt no longer calm, but rabid, . that makes his later horrors additionally terrible; not for pe effect upon ourselves, but for their testimony to his own condition of mind. Such a remark as the above puts the writer outside the - jimited number of eee who profess to find in these ie drawings or paintings a “joy in the sublime beauty of — Such extol the marvellous expressiveness with which a gesture is characterized, and profess themselves indifferent to the ugliness of the gesture; feeling, indeed, an extra satisfaction in the sorcery by which abstract beauty can be extracted from material so unpromising. It is very much a matter of temperament. In such a picture, however, as “ Les Coulisses ” in this collection, there is no hindrance to one’s pleasure. The a ye re 4 i f ' ‘>? grave distinction of color harmony, the captivating sur- prise of the unexpected composition, the exquisite light- ing, and spontaneous vitality of the figures are alike enjoy- able. So, too, in the case of “ Les Courses.” What a feeling of space, animation of color and composition, and extraordinary vivacity of movement in the horses! To any one familiar with the characteristic action of the race- horse, the springy, twinkling, dapper, nervous movement of the legs as they form a mass of shifting shapes and colors at the post, in the few minutes of suspense before the start, there is no one who can recall the scene as Degas does. But to him appreciation is a matter of entire indiffer- ence. He is said never to have exhibited, and keeps aloof also from Parisian society—an isolated, self-reliant man, who paints to please himself. FERDINAND VICTOR EUGENE DELACROIX 1799-1863 In the upheaval of the Revolution, French imagination, needing some basis for its ideals, turned back to the Roman republic. But when the French republic had been swal- lowed up in Imperialism, and the latter had yielded to the bourgeois mediocrity of Louis Philippe’s reign, the soul — was dead in classicism, and it survived only as a dogma of scl sale _ Meanwhile new forces had been let loose. 1e had sounded the romantic note in Germany, and eon Fictor ae was in literature, Géricault and Dateos were i in painting. For the abstract type they substituted the individual; for ideal beauty the interest of character; a for suavity and plastic calm the glow and fury of passion. & loka Passion—love and hatred, remorse and despair—became mh ‘the life and ‘breath of the movement. Géricault’s “ The Raft of Medusa ” had been its bugle note of rallying and “defiance: and when he died at the early age of thirty-two, Be 7 now twenty-three, stepped into his place. In ; 1822 appeared his “ Dante’s Bark,” at sight of which a David exclaimed: “ D’ot vient-il? Je ne connais pas cette aa ~ touche-la. pee Indeed, “‘ there were thoughts in it which had a “not ‘been conceived and expressed in the same manner ‘since the time of Rubens.” For besides “the dramatic expression and composition marked by action” which ye i - Delecluze, in characterizing Delacroix’s next picture, barre _ “ Massacre of Chios,” declared was a reef on which the good style of painting must inevitably be wrecked, it in- volved a force and meaningness of color such as the great Venetians and Rubens employed. Color was no longer _ merely tinting, sparingly and arbitrarily applied—it was the language in which the idea was conveyed, a torrent of emotional expression. How complete was the gulf be- tween this kind of painting and the academical dogma that form is everything, may be understood by the re- mark of Ingres, as he was one day taking his pupils through the Louvre. Entering the Rubens Gallery, he said: “ Saluez, messieurs, mais ne regardez pass And this was the same gallery that had been to Dela- croix the mine from which he drew a wealth of inspira- tion. Throughout his life the influence of Rubens clave to him. Every morning before his work began he drew an arm, a hand, or piece of drapery, after the manner of Rubens. “He had formed the habit of taking Rubens © when other people were drinking their coffee.’ These sketches, great works in little frames, such as the one in this collection, have, for the most part, it is said, found their way to this country. Yet there is a pathetic differ- ence between the master and his disciple; Rubens was a being of joyous strength, happy and healthy; Delacroix a prey to disease, insulted on all sides, and consumed with an internal fire. In Rubens’ work there is a magnificent repose; in that of Delacroix a feverish stress of battle. It was only by force of will and by careful dieting that his frail body sufficed for the enormous work he accomplished —two thousand pictures. Delicate from childhood, he suffered in later life a complication of diseases, and, like Goethe, could work only in a high temperature. He was short in stature, but had a leonine head with a mane of hair, flashing eyes, and a prickly mustache—‘ the fas- cinating ugliness of genius.” In 1832 he visited Morocco, in company with an em- bassy sent by Louis Philippe to the Sultan Muley Abdur- rahman; the first of French artists to fall under the spell of the Orient. There he saw and lived amidst the splendor of color that hitherto had existed for him only on canvas or in his imagination. He had found a new world in which his dreams were realized. His coloring became more lucid and the dark backgrounds in which he had de- lighted were replaced by a bright serenity and golden 1¢ r the direct ee of line Orient he F Ge tives: as the “Entry of the Crusaders cae | which > es been described as re- a a ful, 1 : Of tlie men of the Orient he writes to a friend: Sess ae save a blanket i in which Py walk, ee ae “There j is cere more beauti- e antique.” And then he turned his attention to ic subjects, giving them, as in the ‘‘ Medea,” a modern real y of emotion. Biblical subjects, also, so far as they - are _ imbued with dramatic and passionate movement, he a treated. | In fact, his range was immense; as Silvestre says, ‘a “3 In the course of forty years he sounded the entire gamut of human emotion, his grandiose and awe-inspiring brush passing from saints to warriors, from warriors to lovers, _ from lovers to tigers, from tigers to flowers.” His critics | called him “ the tattooed savage who paints with a drunken ”? broom.” As for himself, he writes: “Every work is merely a temporary narcotic, a distraction; and every dis- ce traction, as Pascal has said in other words, is only a method which man has invented to conceal from himself the abyss of his sufferings and misery. In sleepless nights, in illness, and in certain moments of solitude, when the end of all things discloses itself in utter nakedness, a man endowed with imagination must possess a certain amount of courage not to meet the phantom half way, not to rush to embrace the skeleton.” In 1835, at the instance of his friend Thiers, he was commissioned to decorate the in- terior of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon, and thus commenced a series of mural paintings, the bold- est and the most monumental of modern times. They include the ‘‘ Triumph of Apollo,” on one of the ceilings in the Louvre; a theme from the “ Divina Commedia,” in the Library of the Luxembourg; and wall paintings, | amongst them ‘The Expulsion of Heliodorus,” in the Church of Saint Sulpice. Shortly after the conception of these last he died; and, being dead, began straightway to live in the popular imagination. While during his life- time he seldom got more than four hundred dollars for his largest paintings, the sale of the pictures he had left be- hind him netted the sum of one million eight hundred thousand dollars. For the principles of art to which he clung, let himself speak. “This famous thing, the Beautiful,’ he once wrote, “ must be—every one says so—the final aim of art. But if it be the only aim, what then are we to make of men like Rubens, Rembrandt, and, in general, all the artistic natures of the North, who preferred other quali- ties belonging to their art? In any case, there is no recipe by means of which one can attain to what is called the ideally beautiful. Style depends absolutely and solely upon the free and original expression of each master’s peculiar qualities. Wherever a painter sets himself to follow a conventional mode of expression, he will become affected and will lose his own peculiar impress; but where, on the contrary, he frankly abandons himself to the im- pulse of his own originality, he will ever, whether his name be Raphael, Michael Angelo, Rubens, or Rembrandt, be securely master of his soul and of his art.” 2 'The ‘qualities of William M. Hunt as a painter, and the personal charm of his character, as well as the fact that he ‘ was one of the earliest to réturn from study abroad, contributed | to. the influence " ‘that he exerted on his Po -contemp oraries. cal : =) “He was born at Brattleborough, Vermont, in 1824; his ~ fathe er being a noted judge, and his mother a lady of rare mental gifts. At sixteen he went to Harvard, but through e il health \ was obliged to leave without graduating. With Nos the intention of becoming a sculptor, he entered the Art oe: “Academy. of Diisseldorf, but after nine months was at- aan tracted to Paris by the fame of the sculptor Pradier. The . a latter, however, was absent in Italy, so Hunt entered the studio of Couture. Later he studied with Millet at Bar- oe, bizon, and became his enthusiastic admirer; buying as many of his pictures as he could afford, notably “ The Sower” for three hundred francs, and inducing other Americans to buy them. Indeed, it is one of the honors of Hunt that he introduced the Barbizon pictures to this country, and advocated their merit persistently. By this ~ time his faith in Couture had lessened, and he spent twenty years of his life trying to free himself from the influence that he had assimilated while in that master’s studio. For Hunt had undoubtedly a faculty for assimilation, the imitative faculty being stronger in him than the crea- tive; and it is one of the criticisms made on his work that it reflects so much of the work of others. Granting the truth of this, it must be admitted that his high feeling and good taste lead him instinctively to appreciate the best; yet still it remains a fact that Millet was a painter more likely to stir noble impulse than to instruct a student in matters of painting, and the help that he might have given in that of drawing—his supreme accomplishment—Hunt’s predilection tempted him to neglect. He was by tempera- ment a colorist, attracted by the mysteries of light and shade; and during his later life these problems occupied his increasing attention. No doubt the study was encour- aged by his close acquaintanceship with John La Farge, who had a studio in Newport, where Hunt also settled on his return from Europe in 1855. Later he was called to Boston to execute a portrait of Chief Justice Shaw, one of his strongest works; and it was so enthusiastically re- ceived that he transferred his studio to Boston. There he became the centre of the artistic set, and gathered round him a body of pupils with inevitable detriment to his personal work. In 1878 he received a commission to paint two mural decorations in the Capitol at Albany, and executed “ The Flight of Night ” and “ The Discoverer.” | But the time allowed for their execution was only fifty- five days; much of the work was done at night, and the strain upon him was overwhelming. Those who knew him intimately perceived a change in him; yet his sudden death the following year at the Isle of Shoals was a shock to the large circle of his admirers. Few, indeed, have been so personally loved as he was. Pe 4 Manet completed what Courbet had eae Both were " reactionists against the pseudo-idealism of the Academy; 7 both advocates of the first-eyed study of nature, restored sep the men of 1830, though without the poetry of that from matter. Courbet sought what he assumed to be a - the vérité vraie viewing nature through the animal eye \ Z = of a robust physique; Manet, on the other hand, was con- wae scious that what he saw was only the impression of the is oe . object upon his particular temperament, and viewed na- ture with a pictorial intention. Courbet thought he was representing the actual thing, Manet was bent on giving oy pictorial expression to the impression he felt he had re- ceived of it. He first appeared in 1861. Four years later two of his pictures were hung in the Salon des Refusés; and one = ortiem, ‘The Scourging of Christ,” had to be protected from the sticks and umbrellas of a public that felt out- _ raged by what they termed its ugliness and sacrilege. In 1870 he exhibited from twenty to thirty pictures in his studio, and people began to say, “ Manet is bold,” with with. In the following year an exhibition was held at Nadar’s of work by him and others who had been attracted a vere ‘j to his point of view, and the critic, Claretie, summed up : -_— , te ce + HF, his remarks by styling it the “ Salon des Impressionistes.”’ They differed from one another much as mind an inkling that he was after all a painter to be reckoned © The name stuck, and Manet was regarded.as le maitre impressioniste. He was born in 1833, in the Rue Bonaparte, exactly opposite the Ecole des Beaux Arts. At sixteen he en- tered the navy and made a trip to Rio de Janeiro. Upon his return he determined to devote himself to art, and entered the studio of Couture, remaining with the master of ‘The Decadent Romans” nearly six years. Then he travelled extensively, and began to form his painting upon the work of the old masters. His first picture, “ The Child with the Cherries,” painted in 1859, reveals the in- fluence of Brouwer, while the double portrait of his parents, which received an honorable mention at the Salon in 1860, was painted in the old Bolognese style, while “ The Nymphs Surprised,” exhibited the following year, was a “medley of reminiscences from Jordaens, Tintoretto, and Delacroix.” Then he discovered Velas- quez, and began to find himself. At the beginning of the sixties France came under the influence of the great Spaniard’s serious feeling for color, and Manet was his first enthusiastic pupil. Burger praised Velasquez as the “ peintre le plus peintre qui fit jamais,” and it has been remarked that, as far as concerns the nine- teenth century, the same may be said of Manet, whose influence, directly and indirectly, has penetrated modern painting. Henceforth his point of view became more and more individual and more and more essentially and ex- clusively pictorial. He cares nothing for subject, except in so far as it may be made contributory to the pictorial idea he has in mind. He painted, for example, a nude woman sitting on the grass in company with two gentlemen in every-day costume, and shocked a public who forgot that st Again, he nts “ The aan at the Tomb of Christ,’ ” largely as a tee f pallid limbs and white drapery ; for he has im- he coloring of Velasquez, the delicate grays, the whites and blacks and cool rose-colors, and imparts to o: each an intrinsic beauty of tone and combines them with itively discriminated tone-values. The secret of this ‘elasquez’ s also—the rendering of the pervasive atmos- phere that in nature brings all the colors into harmony. on enyelops. the objects and figures in ambient atmos- wes "phere that fills in the spaces of his picture and unites its : planes, and no longer models with shadows but with light, the actual light of out of doors. o “paint in the style of Boucher and Fragonard, which drew from. Diaz the criticism: “ Your women bathing re come from the cowhouse.” He turned out copies at twenty francs, and portraits at five, and painted signs for - ta erns and booths. He had married and, his wife dying | after three years, remarried. Then, in 1848, he exhibited « ‘The Winnower,” a characteristically peasant picture. It sold for five hundred francs. This was the turning-point of Millet’s career. His ee friend Jacque proposed that they both should migrate to be Barbizon. With their wives and five children they reached i ~ Ganne’ s Inn, just as the dinner hour had assembled twenty a PF persons at the table—artists with their families. Diaz did the honors and invited them to smoke the pipe of peace which hung above the door in readiness for newcomers. As usual, a jury was appointed, to judge from the ascend- ing rings of smoke whether the new painters were to be 2 : _ reckoned among the Classicists or Colorists. Jacque was - declared to be a Colorist. Difference of opinion being held concerning Millet, he exclaimed: “ Eh bien, si vous étes embarrassés, placez-moi dans la mienne.” “It is a good retort,” cried Diaz. “The fellow looks powerful enough to found a school that will bury us all.” Millet was thirty-five when he settled in Barbizon and picked up again the broken thread of his youth, resum- a ing once more his contact with the soil and with the laborers in the fields. Henceforth he gave himself up unreservedly to painting what he knew, regardless of criticism or contempt. At first he boarded with a peasant, — and lived with his family in a tiny room where wheat was stored. Later he rented a little house at a hundred and sixty francs a year. In winter he sat in a work-room without a fire, in thick straw shoes, and with an old horse-- cloth about his shoulders. Under such conditions was “The Sower”’ painted. Meanwhile he was often in dire” straits. Rousseau and Diaz helped him with small sums. “T have received the hundred francs,” he writes to Sensier, “and they came just at the right time; neither my wife nor I had tasted food for four and twenty hours. It is a blessing that the little ones, at any rate, have not been in want.” It was only from the middle of the fifties that he began to sell, at the rate of from two hundred and fifty to three hundred francs a picture. Even in 1859 his “ Death and the Woodcutter ” was rejected at the Salon. Rousseau was the first to offer him a large sum, buying his “‘ Woodcutter ” for four thousand francs, under the pretence that an American was the purchaser. Dupré helped him to dispose of “ The Gleaners”’ for two thou- sand francs. At length, in 1863, he was commissioned to paint four decorative panels of the “ Seasons” for the dining-room of the architect Feydau. They are his weak- est work, but established his reputation. He was able to buy a little house in Barbizon, and henceforth had no financial cares. At the Exposition of 1867 he received the Grand Prix, and in the Salon of 1869 was a member of the Hanging Committee. He lived to see his ““ Woman with the Lamp,” for which he had received a hundred and went a about Eeween like a peasant, in an old red wooden shoes, and a soe esaren straw hat. eh ea Ai iality is particularly apparent in his etchings, pastels, and lithographs. They are aah studies, but pictures in ores = = 3 s - fullest oo of the salient truth. And the decisive lines which characterize a movement are so rhythmic and : c harmonious that he attains to an altitude of style. Even as a child he had received a good education from an uncle who was an ecclesiastic, and had learned enough Latin to read the Georgics of Virgil in the original text. He knew them almost by heart, and cited them continu- ously in his letters. Shakespeare filled him with admira- tion, and Theocritus and Burns were his favorite poets. _ He was a constant reader, and more cultivated than most painters ; a philosopher and a scholar. In January, 1875, he was stricken with fever, and ined at the age of sixty. His grave is near Rousseau’s at Chailly, and the sculptor Chapu has wrought their two heads side by side in bronze on the stone at Barbizon. a 7 ea a eee ae Nee CLAUDE MONET All his life intolerant of restraint, Monet in his art has been rigidly self-disciplined. As a boy he skipped school on fine days, and as a young man found Gleyre’s studio impossible for him; was acquainted with the pictures of the Louvre, but never tried to draw them, and in every way sought to emancipate himself from the traditions of the old masters and the influence of contemporaries. On the other hand, from the day that Boudin directed his atten- tion to nature he never deviated from the study of it. And his study of it has been most exacting; for in the pursuit of nature’s fugitive qualities of light, air, and movement, he has imposed upon himself a minute examination of these qualities as they present themselves during some brief portion of the day. He never yields to the pleasant- ness of generalizing or to the enthusiasm which might tempt him to linger over a canvas beyond the limit of the hour it represents. As soon as the slightest change in the conditions arises, he betakes himself to another can- vas, having sometimes as many as ten in process of execu- tion at the same time. His work being based entirely on analysis, without any help from temperament, and on anal- ysis of the most searching kind, only a man of his great physical strength could possibly support the strain. Nor are his pictures accomplished quickly, as some suppose. At the first sitting he covers his canvas with a complete sketch, summarizing the effects that he is studying; but on subsequent days he works deliberately; thinking out the value of each stroke, juxtaposing and superimposing (seldom mixing) the virgin pigments; building up a solid 840. But five years later his family moved to Havre, Eas where “his boyhood was spent. His earliest efforts in Ba drawing were caricature portraits, for which, by the time ~ - that he was fifteen, he began to find purchasers at prices ranging La ten to twenty francs. He was already ier famous,” and, as he himself says, “nearly choked with vanity and self-satisfaction. Still there was a shadow in al Il this glory. Often in the same show-window I beheld, hung over my own productions, marines that I, like most i my fellow-citizens, thought disgusting. And at heart m3 was much vexed to endure this contact, and never ceased hte abuse the idiot who, thinking he was an artist, had the self-confidence to sign them—this idiot was Boudin.” é : The dealer urged Monet to meet Boudin, but he resisted, . _ until a chance meeting in the store brought him face to face with the man who was to change the whole tenor of his life. Boudin praised the caricatures, but hoped that the young man would not rest satisfied with such work, and urged him to study nature. It is curious, in the light of Monet’s future, that what repelled him then in Boudin’s pictures was their fidelity to nature; they had nothing artistic, he thought, and their fidelity struck him as more than suspicious. So while he was drawn to Boudin per- sonally, he rejected over and over again his invitation to accompany him sketching, until the older man’s per- sistent kindness at last prevailed. “I gave in finally,” he says, “and Boudin, with untiring kindness, undertook my education. My eyes at last were opened, and I really understood nature and learned at the same time to love it. I analyzed it in its forms with a pencil and studied it > in its colorations.” He was now resolved to become a painter ; and, having saved two thousand francs, started for Paris with a letter of introduction to Troyon. The latter recommended him to enter the studio of Couture, which he declined to do, and at this juncture met Pissarro, who was then tranquilly working in Corot’s style. Monet fol- lowed his example; but during his stay in Paris, which lasted four years, he made frequent visits to Havre, and was really governed by the advice of Boudin, “ although inclined,” as he says, “ to see nature more broadly.” He had now reached his twentieth year, the period for conscription, which his parents hoped might be utilized to get him back to commercial life. He refused, however, all compromise; and, drawing an unlucky number, man- aged to get drafted to Algeria, where for two years he thoroughly enjoyed himself, collecting those impressions of light and color that were to be the germ of his future researches. Then he was invalided home; and his father, yielding at last to his persistence, bought him out of the army, on condition that he put himself under the discipline of some well-known master. Upon the advice of Toul- mouche, who had married one of his cousins, he entered the studio of Father Gleyre. After he had been there a © week the master came round to criticise, and found fault with the realism of his study from the living model: “I want you to realize, young man, that when one executes a figure one should always think of the antique. Nature, my friend, is all right as an element of study, but it offers no interest. Style, you see, style is everything.” Monet waited for a week or two, so as not to exasperate his family, and then quitted the studio; inducing his fellow- 4453 | ie Bere — 4 students, Renoir and Sisley, to accompany him. Some 4 before, he had met Jongkind in the country, and now _ shim equ in inal and this Sree completed the ulating the latter, much to his chagrin. This was ets ane = pee at the Salon. oe 1867 his — of es fies: In 1869 he met Manet, and became one of the group of younger men who gathered round a yea: in a café at Batignolles. There he associated also ~ “e with Mibeons Fantin-Latour, Sisley, Renoir, Cezanne, Tate Whistler, Zola, and others, who formed what the mem- sl bers called “I’Ecole des Batignolles.” When war was ae declared with Germany, he had just married, and took his haat ©! wife to London, where he found Bonvin and Pissarro. He was in much distress until Daubigny, who was then -- painting scenes on the Thames, introduced him to Du- rand-Ruel. The latter began to take his pictures, and for . fifteen years was almost the only purchaser of his work, ee. and that of Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley. The public, however, was still shy of buying their pictures, and Du- rand-Ruel was compelled to restrict his orders. Then Petit and Boussod took their work, and the public, seeing it in the hands of other dealers, grew more confident and began to buy. “ To-day,” as Monet says, ‘‘ every one ap- preciates us in some degree.” | | It is very true. Some painters Ketuie cous directly in- a i . a & he K ep fluenced by them; and there are very few who have not — been affected indirectly; while the public, though it may © still jibe at out-and-out impressionism, has learned more and more to look in other men’s work for the qualities — to which the Impressionists have given currency. More- over, the number is increasing of those who find this new gospel of landscape painting admirably satisfying. In- stead of introducing them to a vision of nature filtered through some painter’s more or less poetical tempera- ment, it brings them face to face with nature herself in her subtlest manifestations of light and air and move- ment, and leaves them as in the presence of nature to ex- tract for themselves the poetry and personal feeling. The very objectivity of this so-called impressionism is its most winning feature. It opens a window through which we get the consciousness, not of a picture, but of nature herself. ADOLPHE MONTICELLI 1824-1886 In his early period Monticelli showed a very strict ob- servation of nature; later he stands forth as a magician © of color, with a brain that transferred everything into a brilliant fantasy of colors—colors that have the wild melody and heedless luxuriousness of gipsy music. He was born October 24, 1824, at Marseilles, whither his family had migrated from Italy. After passing through the art schools of that city, he betook himself to Paris in the middle of the forties, and, through his friend- ship with Diaz, was brought into connection with picture dealers and purchasers. Having means, he built himself a handsome studio, and affected the manners of an old Venetian, dressing in velvet costumes and wearing a large gray Rubens hat. Napoleon III. bought pictures of him, and towards the end of the second empire he was on the road to fame. Then came the crash of 1870. He re- turned to Marseilles, and there remained until his death in 1886, resisting all attempts of his friends to lure him back to Paris, and troubled with no ambition or desire of fame. “ Of an evening he could be seen walking with a dignified gait through the streets of the city, carrying in each hand a little wooden panel covered with colors, which he disposed of to a dealer for a small sum. He lived in the simplest manner, in a single room, with a bed, an easel, and two chairs, the only thing he valued being a red silk curtain over the window, which bathed the room in a purple light.” His conversation was studded with phrases that he invented for his own personal enjoyment, the unintelligibility of which confirmed his neighbors in the belief that he was mad; a theory supported by his own belief that he had had a previous existence at Venice in the time of Titian. In appearance he is said to have been a handsome old man, walking with a large, impressive stride, and having a grave, majestic countenance, thick white hair, and a long beard which fell deep upon his chest. “Tn all his work,” says Muther, “ Monticelli appears as an ‘artist incomplet.’ The majority of the figures which give animation to his scenes are clumsily drawn; they are not planted well upon their feet, and move auto- matically, like awkward marionettes. But the suggestive power of his painting is very great. Everywhere there are swelling chords of color, which move the spirit before the theme of the picture has been recognized.” For in his extravagantly fantastic way he was aiming at the purely abstract pictorial quality for which Whistler strove, only with a juxtaposition of primary colors instead of the sub- ‘tler harmonies of their complementaries. But, as with Whistler’s impressionistic work, his pictures have aban- doned form for the purely pictorial quality of tone. His figures lose themselves in a chaotic composition, and re- appear as notes in a bewitching harmony of color. “AUGUSTE RENOIR Renoir early determined to become a painter, and, as his parents were not rich, he worked in a porcelain factory in his native town of Limoges, painted pictures in the cafés, and sold little subjects to the stores, until he had gained sufficient to enable him to study in Paris. Arriving there in 1860, at the age of nineteen, he entered the studio of Gleyre, having Sisley and Bazille as fellow-pupils, and re- maining for four years, until, at Monet’s prompting, they all abandoned it. During this time he was seen at the Salon in a portrait of Sisley’s father, which procured him several other commissions. He was working then in an ultra-romantic vein, scoring his first success at the Salon with a picture entitled “‘ Esmeralda.” The woman is danc- ing at night in the Place de Gréve; there is a fire in the as This was ii last of his genre pictures. He spat th impatience the closing of the Salon to scrape “xaeiage pet sais set salsa to make landscapes aden Then _misery read ee ihctiires or sketches, brown with ould sell, but not his serious studies. Happily, Si pecans briny; thanks to friends. sai ae ay Gleyre a 1864, lie had been the intimate of Monet, and the “two friends, under each other’s inspiration, made rapid at progress. In 1868 he exhibited at the Salon “The ~ Woman i in White,” which showed a tendency towards his ala Ry ew style of painting; timid enough, yet at the period pe “sufficient to arouse hostility and to secure his exclusion - from the Salon until 1880, when his “ Portrait of Madame Charpentier ” was accepted. But long before this he had ceased to concern himself with official honors. One of the little group that circled round Manet at the Café Guer- bois, on the Avenue de Clichy, he joined in the exhibition at Nadar’s in 1871, which stamped on “ Ecole des Bati- gnolles,” as they called themselves, the outside title of Im- pressionists. In 1874 Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, and himself held the first of the separate exhibitions, and their work received the support of M. Durand-Ruel. The latter had been introduced in London to Monet and Pissarro four years earlier by Daubigny, and now staked his reputa- tion and money upon the new men. . As Durand-Ruel had bought the Barbizon pictures, he now bought those of the Impressionists, and published an album of three hundred etchings, in which, side by side with the celebrated works of Rousseau, Cordt Dupre, Troyon, etc., figured reproductions of pictures by Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Puvis de Chavannes, and Sisley. Yet, at the very start of this new period of recog- nition, Renoir had to share with Monet and Sisley a severe blow at the sale of their pictures at the Hotel Drouot, in — 1875. However, it had its compensations, for the violent attacks of the press, the public, and the painters stimu- lated the appearance of defenders, whose numbers have since been continually increasing. Among the pictures of the Impressionists, Renoir’s are conspicuous for their elegant luxuriousness. Whether painting a landscape or a figure, he floods it with sun- shine, and paints its soft, sensuous caress on foliage, water, or the human flesh; and always with such lightness of feel- ing. Though he coaxes from his subject its ripest tints, ’ the colors have the quality of bloom upon fruit—silky or velvety, glowing with manifestation of healthy life. The animation of his sunlight is always tender as well as joyous. It is the smile upon the warm, mobile face of nature that he has painted in the “ Bordighiera” of this collection; and it is the exquisitely engaging tenderness of mirth that he gives to his pictures of young girls and children. In these he renders with fascinating skill the differing soft- ness of flesh and hair, the fragrant radiance of flesh, and the quiver of delicate expression. | 1812-1867 “Like a voice crying in the wilderness—the parched, iss d pai prsteriess of ‘aimee landscape—the influ- i. = f ape. ; | The times were ripe for cae and his na- _ ‘ture study, with its search for air, light, color, and move- “mer nt, gave the impetus and direction. France bestowed % ‘on him a gold medal, but in his own England he was ig- = ~ nored and died in poverty, bequeathing a similar legacy ; of neglect to the brave, humble souls in France who dared te follow him. | | . eri Of these, Rousseau grew to be the sticnoWhedeed leaded i. The son of a tailor, who lived in the Rue Neuve-Saint Nae - Eustache, No. 14 au quatriéme, he is said as a boy to have shown a special aptitude for mathematics. But his heart must have been elsewhere, for Biirger-Thoré, writing a _ dedicatory letter to his exhibition of 1844, says: “ Do you our attics in the Rue de Taitbout and let our feet dangle at the edge of the roof, contemplating the chaos of houses and chimneys which you, with a twinkle in your eye, com- pared to mountains, trees, and outlines of the earth? You were not able to go to the Alps, into the cheerful country, and so you created landscapes for yourself out of these horrible skeletons of walls. Do you still recall the tree in Rothschild’s garden which we caught sight of between two roofs? It was the one green thing that we could see; still recall the years when we sat on the window ledge of _ ee a = |. See é re rs every fresh shoot of the little poplar wakened our interest in spring, and in autumn we counted the fallen leaves.” About this time Rousseau must have been in the studio of the classicist Lethiére; later he competed for the Prix de Rome, but his “ historical landscape” was fortunately _ found wanting. Then he took his paint boxes and wan- dered over to Montmartre, the scene of Michel’s striving after nature. His first little picture, “The Telegraph Tower,” was painted in 1826. In the Salon of 1831 he appeared, in company with the others who were shortly to foregather at Barbizon. His first excursion to Fon- tainebleau was in 1833, and the following year he painted his first masterpiece, ‘Cotes de Grandville.’ It was awarded a medal of the third class; but this concession to genius was followed by many years of rejection from the Salon. For Rousseau, as the master of the new brother- hood, the most dangerous because the least to be contro- verted, fared worse than the others at the hands of official- dom, and, by consequence, in popular estimation. It is the old story—that of mediocrity getting even with a genius, that cannot be ignored, by rewarding its followers instead. So Troyon, Dupré, and Diaz were admitted to the Legion of Honor before Rousseau. It is true they were older men, but, in the estimation of the sturdy Diaz at least, that should not have counted, for when, at the banquet given in his honor, he rose upon his wooden leg to respond to the courtesies, his sentiment was: “ Here’s to our master who has been forgotten!” Officialdom had to admit him the following year, but never conferred the higher rank of Officer of the Legion, though his posi- tion as chief of a section of the jury at the Universal Ex- position of 1867 warranted it—almost, in fact, demanded Sap i. ee ae = ‘How ae ae omission hurt him, may be inferred | 138 om a paper discovered after his ies on which he had e time ee Gisty his life had been saddened © pain . and illness. He had married a poor, unfortunate creature, a wild child of the forest, the only female being he had found time to love in his life of toil, and after a few years ¢ ie went mad. He was urged to put her in confinement, fs. but saw his duty otherwise, keeping her and tending her a until his own brain became affected: As he lay dying his’ mad wife danced and sang and the parrot screamed. ‘He was laid to rest in the village churchyard at Chailly, ch “near Barbizon, in a spot that looked out upon the forest; and Millet set over his grave a simple cross upon an un- ae i hewn bidek of sandstone, and a tablet with the AEERG, “ Théodore Rousseau, Peintre.” pe One of two attitudes of mind distinguishes a landscape ms painter’s view of nature—he either sees in her, as Corot did, a response to his own emotions, and selects such sub- ject and mood as will correspond with his own mood; or he studied, and portrayed. The latter was Rousseau’s way. In his art he was a naturalist; in his mental attitude he became a pantheist. Nature was to him an actual, sen- dependent of the moods of man, and only related to man as all the parts of the universe are related to one another in various degrees of subordination. Dispassionately analytical, his purpose was to possess himself of truth— the truth of the tree, its sap and structure, its firm grip within the strong-ribbed earth, the play of its leaves in looks at her objectively, as worthy of herself to be loved, tient creature, with anatomy, expression, and breath, in- it S.A (Sie 7 ‘ a ia light and air; and so with every natural form. He would discover not only the fact of its growth and character, but the fact also of its relation to its surroundings. Except Rembrandt, no one has ever had such a profound knowl- edge of nature’s forms. For a time, in his middle period, this passion for form, which amounted to a kind of nature- religion, led him to feel that all natural features, even the most insignificant, were important, and for a while his pic- tures were crowded with detail and lost the balanced dig- nity of his best works. In these, nature is interpreted with a grandeur of con- ception. Her fundamental, basic, inevitable qualities are dwelt upon; her power and permanence, bulk and volume; her ceaseless compliance with the laws of the universe; her passionless moods and separate existence outside of man. As Turgenief wrote: ‘‘ The last of thy brothers might vanish off the face of the earth and not a needle of the pine trees would tremble.” Completely objective as the conception is, it attains to poetry, reaching by its searching logic to the big, insoluble mystery above, be- yond, and within this elaboration of cause and effect. Its truth is beauty; and while there is no infusion of man’s sentiment, either great or small, there becomes revealed the underlying harmony of matter and matter’s laws. ALBERT P, RYDER Through the teaching of his first master, William E. Marshall, who had been a pupil of Couture, Albert P. Ryder is supposed to have been influenced by the latter. a aati little “ Moonlight ” in this collection. “Hej iS best where incident or detail scarcely or only vaguely en nters into his conception, as in the “ Moonlight ” already In this the theme is immensity, solitude, the _, isi Ne) ; ery ¢ of f moonlight anda at of weirdness, at the same ALFRED SISLEY : 1840-1899 Though of English origin, Alfred Sisley was born in Paris, and the greater part of his life was spent in France, the last twenty years at Morét. The story of his art life is interwoven with that of the other Impressionists. He is with Renoir in the studio of Gleyre until Monet induces them to leave it; he mixes with the other kindred spirits at the Café Guerbois in Batignolles; is with Monet in Lon- don during 1870, and is then introduced by Daubigny to M. Durand-Ruel. In 1874 he is one of the group organiz- ing their first separate exhibition, receiving his share of the abuse so lavishly bestowed upon this band of new painters. In the latter part of his career he was estranged from Monet, having an ungrounded suspicion that the latter had prejudiced his reputation and had thus unfairly eclipsed him in people’s estimation, and his pictures of this period suffer from his mental worriment. After leaving Gleyre’s studio he worked at Marlotte, and later at Hampton Court, on the Thames, and in London; but the region of his warmest regard was on the outskirts of Fontainebleau, along the banks of the Seine and its tributary, the Loing, in the little towns of Morét and Saint Mammés. At the Salon he exhibited only twice, but was an associate of the Champ de Mars. The picture in this collection, though an early one, is characteristic. It is one of many snow scenes in which he has expressed the silence and immobility of winter with extraordinary realism. It exhibits, also, the quiet, un- exaggerated way in which nature appealed to him. The picture is one of indefinable sadness, rather than of deep intensity of feeling. The same gentle view appears in his spring pictures, fledged with tenderest green, melting in quiet atmosphere. Even in the scenes of summer, the light is never riotous or even glowing, but soft and lam- bent. His autumns have the gentle melancholy of ap- proaching winter. Nor are these qualities the result of a merely dreamy, meditative spirit. He was a keen an- alyst, very sensitive by nature, and delighting most in the study of the underlying subtleties of normal nature. Tiziano > Vecelli was born about 1477, at Pieve di Ca- si re, a district of the Southern Tyrol, then belonging to ys tl e Republic of Venice. He was the son of Gregorio dei : Conti Vecellio | by his wife Lucia, the father being de- - scended from an ancient and honorable family of the name $f ~ of Guecello (or Vecelli) established in the valley of Cadore. “ed the age of nine, according to Dolce * in the “ Dia- eo o della Pittura,” or of ten, according to Tizianello’s { x : Anonimo,” Titian was taken to Venice to study paint- ing. Dolce says that Zuccato, the mosaic worker, was on first master; that he next passed into the studio of eenite Bellini, and thence into that of Giovanni Bellini (which Morelli questions), and finally became the pupil and partner of Giorgione. Although the last named was __ the same age as Titian, his genius had ripened earlier, and his influence was dominant in shaping the art of Venice. Beginning with the example of Giovanni Bellini, he infused into art the mystery and complexity of life, and through | the force of color expressed its fulness of sensuous yearn- a ‘ing, mingled with spiritual aspiration. Titian carried the style to its highest pitch of material splendor, the vigor of his mountain nature counteracting the marked -__ sensuousness of his art, except in his later interpretations * Ludovico Dolce, a friend of Titian’s. { Tizianello, Titian’s cousin, thrice removed, dedicated in 1622 to the Countess of Arundel an anonymous life of the master known as Tizianello’s ‘‘ Anonimo.” a. 7 if ita f p " dh - ¥ = ahs yin OSS aes 4 = Ys PY: 4.9: , ct i. " ts ae rae Sige? oy rp Z - Y | r x b° es Sisk y (ALFRED) Effet de Neige a Morét A study in browns, drabs, white, and slaty gray. An irregularly built stone cottage abuts on a walled-in alley- way, along which an old man with a stick is walking towards another man in pale-blue blouse, who stands be- fore a door at the end of the passage. In front of the picture, against the cottage, is a shed formed of a broken wall and roof supported by posts, with a rough-barred gate across the side which faces us. Over the top of the wall at the right appear the naked branches of a tree, while poplars are faintly massed against the sky above the end of the passage. , Signed at the right, and dated ’74. Height, 25 inches; width, 203/ inches. $0/.- 2 Ves. i nan ae , ia woe -“ ~ -" wre 7a ei Xi : - ro a ; a (AUGUSTE) On i - 254 a Bordighiera ae - From an elevation covered with dark-green foliage in the lower left of the picture, one looks down at the sheet of water streaked with rose, pink, purple, and green. eae yond rises the cliff bathed in sunshine, its top bare, with — rosy yellow rocks and lower slopes covered with trees, an among which straggle white houses, the main part of the town Se | in terraces above the water, “ae = i Signed at the left. ee me an ) ». PR lO cet MONET (CLAUDE) = f = ff i aud 2g rs eC AIUU. N?: 5 Grotte de Port-Domoits—Belle- Isle, 1886 A bold reach of rock juts from the right, the gray stone, rosy in the clear sunlight, honeycombed with shadows and deeply hollowed near the water. The latter is a cool green in the sheltered part, growing gradually bluer towards the horizon very high up in the picture. Above it the sky is simmering in tones of pink and gray. Signed at the left, and dated ’86. Height, 25% inches; length, 31% inches. 050 & WG 0.9 Famer Gal, WY, fo Fh ata eu bn Vanrtsckor P-® Sha /eo# AS Rep in Cob effect of early morning on some day when there is no rosy violet on the other. A part of one of the houses in MONET (CLAUDE) N°? 16 i, A “aD This example of the famous Cathedral series shows the mist, but the light is still soft and caressing. The lower part of the edifice is veiled in blue shadow, the recess of the west entrance slightly tinged with orange luminous- ness, and the enrichment of the architecture showing as a mottle of deeper and fainter shadow. The tower, re- flecting the mild radiance of a dove-gray sky that melts towards the horizon into pale pink and primrose, blooms _ with rose and creamy yellow on its lighter side and with _ ey ¢ the square is shown upon the left of the picture. Signed at the left, and dated ’94. Height, 42 inches; width, 28 inches. Sieg ae oa. MANET (EDOUARD) Yawedll, x Gj Seal] Drop Sortie du Port de Boulogne Ww yy SV f e . e ° The smooth sea, colored in various tones of lapis lazuli, is dotted with the black hulls and dark sails of fishing smacks, among which gleam an occasional white sail and the white smokestacks of a packet boat. From the paddle-wheel of the latter extends a wake of pale blue, and the fluster of brown smoke that wreathes above it makes a light-brown reflection on the water. A sailing vessel and two smaller craft appear on the horizon, above which is a sky drab on the left and growing blue towards the right. Signed at the right. Initials ‘‘E. M.” on the sail. Height, 28 inches; length, 354 inches. Exhibited at the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900. (EDOUARD) Ne 5 lau Si~ ie Le Fumeur A powerfully built man, eae light-brown a flecked with gray, sits facing us, his left elbow resti ng neo ae a Ae the hand Bes a clay pipe in his pe oe ue oo his knee. He wears a soft dark-brown is with 1 b1 oe. = turned up all round, and an olive-brown coat buttoned x ’ ) under the velvet collar and sagging open as far as the 4 aa waist. The figure, seen to the knees, is placed against og j drab background, lighter on the left side of the picture, ot Signed at the right. Reproduced in E. Bazire’s Life of Manet. = cS Lo-19-05 HW 10 (iAped Sos MONTICELLI (ADOLPHE) 0. my Caer J, N® 19 4090, - The Ball of Fire A swarm of gayly dressed people pass through the three doorways of a brilliantly lighted ballroom, cluster on the flight of steps, and throng the garden below. In front of the assemblage are a lady and gentleman, the latter in plum-colored doublet and crimson hose, to the left of whom is a lady with a mandolin. At the back of the pic- ture on the right is suggestion of a lake, and a fountain, partly reflecting the shower of rosy flakes that appear amidst a glow of illumination in the sky. Signed at the right. Height, 2334 inches; length, 25% inches. ads a ie any wre by 0 yt : ? ei.bs ‘ fas 9 a7 : =a ee ef in eo i es ee aan = 5 Sa ten ee F. hd L4 “@. We rent ’ ye + a on™ a. d -k is S49 - DELACRO am = “ I 7 ¢ ‘ae v-) Mas Ps ty oe E . \ Wa +) eae see $* (EUGENE) a Neeee 4 Le Gouvernement de la Reine The key of the composition is a figure of Venus in pink floating drapery. By her side Mars, clad in helmet and cuirass, is stabbing a nude man, who, with arms upraised, is trying to escape. Crouching below the latter is a woman with blue drapery over her knee and snakes curling around her, On the left appears the figure of Apollo, an aureole around his head, a bow extended in his hand, while behind Venus sits Ceres, with green amber drapery around her waist and a garland of wheat on her head, her left hand held by a man bearing a wreath and staff. } Height, 19 inches ; width, 12% inches. . A free and very personal study of ‘‘ Le Gouvernement de la Reine,” one of the cartoons designed by Rubens for the decoration of the Luxembourg. The original is described at length in the official cata- logue of the Louvre.—Edinburgh Memorial Catalogue, French and Dutch Loan Collection, Edinburgh International Exhibition, 1886. From the collection of the late Daniel Cottier, Esq., London. We. «ab > a DAUBIGNY 7 (CHARLES FRANCOIS) ie 4, Vi) pee. ‘ Mn Me 2x The Chiff at Villerville od ‘The high ground, overlooking the water, rises towards i: the right. to a bunch of scrub trees and roofs of cottages, xy then dips again. In the hollow are cows, and three more a on the upper level. Beyond the green-blue water, on which are two sailboats, is seen the distant blue of the _ other shore, stretching horizontally a little below the mid- dle of the picture. The sky is gray, with glints of pigs and a few tufts of white cloud. Signed at the left, and dated '74. ae ee Er Height, 19% inches ; length, 3134 inches. From the sale of the collection of William H. Fuller, February, 1898. $4 f.— MILLET. (JEAN FRANGOIS) — N? A 2 2 Landscape The picture lifts us on to a mountain plane and proje our vision into space. Above and all around is an im bs mense blue sky, ee clear of earth ee. with 1 3 i rocks and torn scrags of tree stems, and over the bro WC ae ma. it is seen a beast peering down into the space below. x Height, 311% inches ; length, 383/ inches. W From the Albert Spencer Collection. Bang ¢ . i* ” vyh ivy My. ~_ = MARTIN (HOMER D.) N°: 2 3 } Westchester Hills ss fo A very Eeeeictanistic peample is the “ Wesichester Hills,” because wee ait is at once so powerful and so free from any of the small and perfectly Beau - legitimate devices to attract attention; a picture that in its massive sobriety of brown and white (for such, very broadly speaking, is its. color scheme) makes no bid for popularity; in a gallery it might escape the notice of a careless visitor, and grows upon one’s compre- hension only gradually. In the gathering gloom of twilight we are confronted with a country road crossed by a thread of water and _ bounded on the right by a rough stone wall. The road winds away 4 from us, skirting the ridge of hill, which slumbers like some vast recumbent beast against the expanse of fading sky. The dim fore- ground and shadowed mass are grandly modelled: strength, solidity, and bulk contrasted with the tremulous throbbing of the light. This contrast of rude, tawny ground with the vibration of a white sky recalls a favorite theme of the French painter Pointelin; but one feels that a comparison of his pictures with the “ Westchester Hills” is all in favor of the latter. Both painters have felt the solemn loneliness of nature folding her strength in sleep, the mystery of darkening and of the lingering spirituality above, but Martin is the grander draughts- man of the two, suggesting with far more convincingness the solid structure of the earth. So we are made to realize that the phenomenon is not merely one that he has noted or that we might note, but one that through countless ages has manifested itself as part of the order of the universe. Its significance is elemental. We may attribute this to the better drawing, or, with far more justice, to the superiority of intellect that could embrace this larger conception and find the means to express it. And in studying the means, let us not overlook the essential gran- deur of the color—not of the brave or passionate kind, but sober with a concentration of subtle meaning that discovers infinite expression in the minutest variations of the homely browns and yellows, which in the shadow yield nothing but their strength and quietude. And then what a wonder of suggestion in the sky! It is not only lighted, but quivering with light: an elastic fluid that extends as far as one’s ———- ay Ts oe] = imagination can travel in height and breadth and depth. These limit- less skies are a characteristic of Martin’s pictures. He does not seem aes to have been attracted so much by cloud forms, or to have been given, © ee as it were, to building castles in the air; but his imagination loved to free itself in the far stretches of ether, the circumambient medium through which the waves of light travel. His skies are brushed in | 3 with firm assurance; it is a pleasure to peer into the canvas and study 7 the sweep and exultation of the strokes, and then to step back until — distance blends them into a unity of ranging grandeur. And just as_ ca . Corot said of himself that he was “like a lark pulsing forth its songs amid the gray clouds,” and his skies have the vibrative quality of violin a music, so there is music in these skies of Martin’s, only it is that of se the organ and the diapason stop.—Charles H. Caffin, “ Brief Apyres a ciations of some American Painters,” N. Y. Sun. ~, el) eae ie WF ‘ 7 ¢ Signed at the right. ; oe My Height, 32 inches ; length, 60 inches. From the sale of the collection of William T. Evans, January, 1900. (JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE) ; , N° 24 ade Be ites Of. Scbasiian es yy ‘¢ 4 . : ae " The scene is an undulating tract of country, rising on the right of the picture. In the foreground is a small _ grove of beech trees, their foliage meeting in a kind of arch through which appears a twilight sky, dragged with 4 blue, white, and pink. Horse soldiers are visible above the brow of the hill, beginning the descent. Extended upon a white cloth is the limp form of St. Sebastian, supported by a woman in a blue mantle, who draws an arrow from the saint’s body. His head droops forward over the right shoulder and one arm hangs loosely, the back of the hand resting on the ground with the fingers curled inwards. To the right kneels another woman with a white drapery over her head and shoulders, who is rinsing a sponge in a bowl. Overhead float two infant angels, one holding a crown, the other a palm branch, and a warmer glow ir- radiating from them touches the upper foliage, the rest of the picture being saturated with cool evening light. Signed at the right. Height, 50% inches; length, 33 inches. NoTE.—Corét painted more than one of this subject. The largest went to the Salon of 1853, afterwards in the Exposition Universelle of 1867. In 1851 Corét wrote to Constant Dutilleux: ‘I am at this moment *~ ] edi err 6< a » gil nip a) ee ee working upon an historical landscape embellished with a Saint Sebas- tian succored by some holy women, and with care and work I sere under the guidance of Heaven to make a lovely picture.” p29: The Salon picture was returned unsold to the painter, and he did a good deal more work on it. It went again to the Exposition of ’67, — but again came back, and Corét once more set to work on it as he fel there was a lack of aerial perspective in the subject. He opened up the trees and enlivened the picture throughout, and in several er proved it. In 1871 he presented the Salon picture, now also in this country, to the promoters of the Lottery held to aid the opiaas ict, by ed victims of the late war. ee Exposition du Centenaire de Corét, 1895. Pe ae Collection Defossés, Paris, 1899. 2 eae 2 ” ie, ee 5 Ae ae - PUVIS DE CHAVANNES yy Su Te * _ (PIERRE) Waa oe N°: 25 | Rete LL spéerance ‘ The date of this picture (1872) is significant—France, sO recently under the heel of the invaders, even now gathering herself together for the work of peaceful res- toration. The crisis affected her artists in different ways, plunging Raffaelli, for example, into pessimism, eliciting the optimism of Puvis de Chavannes. He pictures the vision of hope as a maiden clad in white, fair-haired like the daughters of Northern France, - with blue eyes fixed upon the future, holding a spray of “ oak, symbol of civic triumphs. The sun has sunk; a low ridge of deep blue hills and browned tree tops showing against the rosy horizon, over which are layers of dove- gray cloud—a twilight sky that tells of past tumult and bespeaks a fairer morrow. The light is tender behind the girl’s head, more sullen above the top of the sloping hill- land, a drab waste of uncultivated ground whose only crop is ruined farmsteads and two grave-mounds crowned with rude crosses. The maiden sits upon a heap of fallen masonry, her slender form, supported on the right hand, in profile, her head and bust turned towards us. Bright little flowers are already growing in the crannies of the stones and around her feet, where the earth is fledged " Sik = ; ’ a. a / > ™ 5, Fee : ‘ a Ve eb with tender RP ‘The e foregrou ou e vi t ¥ os ? the present, as it were—is s quickening into Rae ; desolate. Signed at the left, and dated. ; a. oe “Height, 39 inches ; . i 3 wee . ; bial ~ ag eo TITIAN ates _— (iziano YECELED No 6 ness Pre rtishes this portrait of a gentleman in the prime - of life and health. The figure, set against a dark back- | ground and clad in a black velvet doublet, is rather more 34 helt length, and facing to the right. The strong head has. carried high and crowned with black curly hair, the ___ face having the fresh color that comes of an open-air life. - The eye is full, penetrating, and yet gracious, the nose long and clean- cut, the mouth supply curved, a fringe of Se: ‘black upon the upper lip, and the chin and cheeks bearded ae with curly hair. His left arm is extended in front, and ; 7 perched upon the gloved wrist is a falcon with gray | spreckled breast and black plumage on the wings and head, which he caresses with his right hand, that also holds the bird’s hood. The head of a hound with black a7 2 forehead and white muzzle appears in the left corner of - the picture. This well- known picture, from the collection of the Earl of Carlisle at Castle Howard, has been known as a por- trait of Giorgio Cornaro, on the strength of an inscrip- tion at the back of the canvas: “ Georgius Cornelius; Frater Catterinz Cipri et Hierusalem Regine.” The per- + eae a 14 345.— of Sal fancied likeness to the picture of Alfonso I. and Laura — Dianti at the Louvre, had been assumed to be also ae Velasquez, proved it could not be so. But he thi may be a portrait of his son, Ercole II., in which would seem necessary to apply the same title to this. called “ Cornaro.” Titian never produced a finer picture than that which now the gallery of Castle Howard. Cornaro stands as large as life a window, and his frame is seen to the hips. His head, three-qu to the right, is raised in a quick and natural way, and his fine, features are enframed in short chestnut hair and a well-trimmed bea es of the same color. On his gloved left hand a falcon without a hood me is resting, of which he is grasping the breast. He looks at the bi ie which is still chained to his finger, as if preparing to rs ta sword ee shows his head above the partaee There is no sign of a touch in this beautiful work, which is aoa with all the richness of tone and smoothness of surface which | tinguish polished flesh. The attitude is natural, the complexion warm and embrowned by sun, and every part is blended with utmost finish, without producing want of flexibility. ie A copy of this picture was formerly owned by Signor Valentino % be é Benfatto, of Venice. See the Addenda of Zannotos Guida of 1863. The original at Castle Howard was engraved, 1811, by Skelsnn ea os ms : From “ The Life and Times of Titian” of Crowe & Conia 1881, ; Vol. 2, page 18. Signed at the left, TICIANVS F. Height, 424 inches ; length, 3734 inches. AMERICAN ART ASSOCIATION MANAGERS, THOMAS E. KIRBY, Auctioneers. FAMOUS TITIAN eae TO NEW YORK: “THE MAN WITH ey Se ” Titian’s prithats’ of Cir Sethe Once Owned by Seth Milliken of New York, and Now Acquired by ~ the Duveen Brothers for $300,000 From Dr. Edward Simon, Privy Councillor and Art Collector (e ) of Berlin. (From Times Wide World Rh aten dV ‘9 Naples and Re- * Classical Lore. Tre Saas. - AW game- pe * ~ ae ty * a 5 oe, is Sao a 5 ‘ey dy : e" ‘ n ah By aa ) —a —-— ae er ae . nie Petatan on US hare naten bran asf NST ng IL Ent career a) ae =p h ey Te oe riage ties Bilas Le 6 As ties j g Liao Lied g Lips Zi Late ps i A, 5g VE G ese es Beene Se Yi rss