Part 15 (1/2)

_Rossetti_]

Clothed in soft white garh a coold to fullest length; her head leans back half sleepily, superb and satiate with its own beauty; the eyes are languid, without love in them or hate; the sweet luxurious mouth has the patience of pleasure fulfilled and coht Outside, as seen in the gli leaves have drunk in the whole strength of the sun The sleepy splendour of the picture is a fit raiment for the idea incarnate of faultless fleshly beauty and peril of pleasure unavoidable For this serene and sublime sorceress there is no life but of the body; with spirit (if spirit there be) she can dispense

Were it worth her while for any word to divide those terrible tender lips, she too ht say with the hero of the most perfect and exquisite book of modern times--_Mademoiselle de Maupin--”Je trouve la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la vertu”_ Of evil desire or evil iood She is indifferent, equable, netic; she charms and dran the souls of nant; outside herself she cannot live, she cannot even see: and because of this she attracts and subdues all men at once in body and in spirit Beyond the mirror she cares not to look, and could not

_”Ma lio, e siede tutto 'l giorno”_

So, rapt in no spiritual contemplation, she will sit to all ti day flooding and filling the old of her hair By the reflection in a deep e froer colour is touched in this picture; next in brilliance and force of relief is the heap of curling and tu hair on which the sunshi+ne strikes; the face and head of the siren are withdrawn froht

_Essays and Studies_ (London, 1875)

ADORATION OF THE MAGI

(_DuRER_)

MORIZ THAUSING

Italy, that beautiful enchantress, whose irresistible charet their native land, and array themselves beneath her colours, did not fail to exercise over Durer, in the course of the year and more that he spent beyond the Alps, that subtle influence which elevates the understanding and expands the ht, as did Goethe after him, with a sort of shudder, of his return to cloudy skies, and of the less easy nature of the life which awaited hih he enjoyed hily intaste there, the essential nature of his art ren influences, and he returned to Nureinal principles The faed him to continue in the path he had already chosen Perhaps the exuberance of life displayed in Venetian painting inspired him, even under the altered circumstances of his hoies to large easel pictures To the _Adoration of the Magi_ in 1504, and the _Feast of the Rosary_ in 1506, succeeded the _Adam and Eve_ in 1507, the _Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Saints_ in 1508, the _assuin_ in 1509, and the All Saints picture or _Adoration of the Trinity_ of 1511 Durer was at the height of his pohen he created these masterpieces, small, indeed, in number, but remarkable for their conception, composition, and entire execution by his own hand To coe picture to his satisfaction, Durer required the saedy, viz, a whole year

It was in the year 1504 that Durer finished the first great picture, which, from its excellent state of preservation, reatest care by his own hand, even to the i_, now in the Tribune of the Uffizi at Florence Mary sits on the left, looking like the happiest of Gerly nave Infant on her knees; the three Wise Men froold, approach, deeply moved, and with various emotions depicted on their countenances, while the whole creation around see, even to the flowers and herbs, and to the great stag-beetle and thite butterflies, which are introduced after the reen on copse and roup better than the conventional niin, draped entirely in blue with a white veil, recalls vividly the saartner altarpiece Aerial and linear perspective are still iures is as finished as in Durer's best pictures of the later period

The outlines are sharp, the colours very liquid, laid on without doubt in tely fresh, clear, and brilliant If it was Barbari's fine hich incited Durer to this delicate and careful method of execution, he has certainly far surpassed the Venetian, not only in form and ideas, but also in the solidity of his technique This technique is undoubtedly of Northern origin, as is also the harmony of colour, which Durer here realizes, and does not soon again abandon It otten, however, that the difference between this technique and that practised by Giovanni Bellini is one of degree and not of principle; judging at least by the unfinished painting of Giovanni's in the Uffizi, in which the design is sketched either with the pencil or brush, and the colours then laid on in telazes Durer appears to have owed the opportunity of producing this his firstto a commission from the Elector Frederick of Saxony Christian II presented it to the Emperor Rudolph II in 1603, and in the last century it was sent froe for the _Presentation in the Temple_, by Fra Bartoloest the renowned pictures in the Tribune of the Uffizi

[Illustration: ADORATION OF THE MAGI

_Durer_]

_The Life and Works of Albert Durer_, translated from the German and edited by Fred A Eaton (London, 1882)

MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE

(_HOGARTH_)

AUSTIN DOBSON

Nevertheless, if the main circumstances of the painter's career should still remain unaltered, there must always be a side of his hich will continue to need interpretation In addition to painting the faults and follies of his time, he was pre-eminently the pictorial chronicler of its fashi+ons and its furniture The follies endure; but the fashi+ons pass away In our day--a day which has witnessed the demolition of Northumberland House, the disappearance of Temple Bar, and the removal of we know not what other tiarth's plates must seem as obscure as the cartouches on Cleopatra's Needle Much uidance the student will scarcely venture into that dark and doubtful rookery of tortuous streets and unnuhteenth Century

[Illustration: MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE

_Hogarth_]

Were it not beyond the reasonable compass of a methodical memoir, it would be a pleasant task to loiter for a while in that vanished London of Hogarth, of Fielding, of Garrick;--that London of Rocque's faazebos” at Islington and Hackney, and fine gentlemen their villas at _Marybone_ and _Chelsey_; when duels were fought in the ”fields” behind the British Museum, and there was a windmill at the botto with noisy watermen, and the streets with thick-calved Irish chairhted feebly with the oil that dribbled on the Rake when he went to Court; and the great creaking sign-boards that obscured the sky, and occasionally toppled on the heads of his Majesty's lieges beneath We should note the sluggish kennels and the ill-paved streets; and rejoice in the additional facilities afforded for foot-passengers at the ”new Buildings near _Hanover_ Square” Wein his Chapel Royal of St James's, or follow Queen Caroline of Anspach in her walk on Constitution Hill Or we s with a _Beau-Monde_ of cinnaes_ But the tour of Covent Garden (with its column and dial in the centre) would take at least a chapter, and the pilgrie of Leicester Fields another We should certainly assist at the Lord Mayor's Show; and we ulfed in that ard-faring crohich, after due warning from the belfry of St Sepulchre's, swept down the old Tyburn Road on ”Execution Day” to see the last of Laurence shi+rley, Earl Ferrers, or the highwayman James M'Lean It is well, perhaps, that our limits are definitely restricted

Moreover, arth has done iraver Essentially metropolitan in his tastes, there is little notable in the London of his day of which he has not left us some pictorial idea He has painted the Green Park, the Mall, and Rosamond's Pond He has shown us Covent Garden and St Ja Cross; Tottenha-Lane, St Giles He has shown us Bridewell, Bedlah ain one print we see the houses on old London Bridge; in another it is Tehastly relics of Jacobite traitors He takes us to a cock-fight in Bird Cage Walk, to a dissection in Surgeons' Hall He gives us reception-roo-houses in St Mary Axe, sky-parlours in Porridge Island, and night-cellars in Blood-Bowl Alley He reproduces the decorations of the Rose Tavern or of the Turk's Head Bagnio as scrupulously as the monsters at Dr Misaubin's museum in St Martin's Lane, or the cobweb over the poor-box in Mary-le-bone Old Church The pictures on the walls, the Chinese nondescripts on the shelves, the tables and chairs, the pipes and punch-bowls, nay, the very tobacco and snuff, have all their distinctive physiognoives us, unromanced and unidealized, ”the form and pressure,” the absolute details and accessories, the actual _mise-en-scene_, of the time in which he lived[23]

But he has done much more than this He has peopled his canvas with its _draly-marked actors in that cynical and sensual, brave and boastful, corrupt and patriotic age Not, be it understood, with its Wolfes and Johnsons,--he was a huame for his pencil,--rather with its Lovats and Chartres, its Sarah Malcolms and its Shebbeares He was a hteenth-century , not tender-hearted at ti, unco, uncohly literal and business-like way, neither sparing nor extenuating its details, wholly insensible to its seductions, incapable of flattering it even for aits precise contortion of pleasure or of pain In all his delineations, as in that faeance following hard upon the criiven in the _Battle of the Pictures_, where the second scene, still inoffensively reposing upon the easel, is wantonly assaulted by a copy of the _Aldobrandini Marriage_

In April following the set of engravings was issued, the subscription ticket being the etching of heads known as _Characters and Caricaturas_