ART AND ARTISTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1900, 3 July 1890, Page 39

ART AND ARTISTS.

In Paris a fabricator of military pictures named Hartman has been discovered with a studio full of imitations and copies of Detaille's pictures. A fire in the mansion of Baron de Kothschild at Ailsbury, England, burned a painting by Gainsborough, valued at £10,000, and a large quantity off valuable tapestry. Two great pictures by Rubens, now in the Collegiate Church at Antwerp, which are rapidly going to pieces, are to be transferred to the new museum in that old city. As they added about £800 to the revenue of the church each year, it is said this loss will be made good. Sir Frederick Leighton has three pictures for this year's Boyal Academy Exhibition : (1) "The Bath of Venus"; (2) "Solitude," a maiden seated in a rocky cleft beside a stream in Scotland ; (3) " The Tragic Muse," a seated figure, not unlike "The Sibyl" of last year. The portraits of Romney have risen so much in price in England that his painting of Lady Hamilton as "Sensibility" was sold to Mr Henson for about £5000. It was bequeathed by George Romnoy to Nathaniel Engleheart, and has never been exhibited, though R. Earlowe engraved it long ago. Mr Herbert, R.A., presented during the last few years of his life a pathological study. For 10 years at least, whilst his vital powers remained unimpaired, not only his power of painting, but his sense of colour altogether forsook him. But of this he was apparently entirely ignorant. Mr J. B. Whittaker, of Brooklyn, has painted a historical picture representing the beginnings of Methodism in New York. Philip Emhury, the first local preacher and class loader, stands at a table in his house on Park place, then (1760) called Barrack street. He is preaching to Barbara Heck, her husband and brother, their coloured maid, Betty, and the hired man. The picture is called " The First Sermon in the Methodist Church." A GREAT PIECE OV STATUARY. Mr G. F. Watts, R.A., has been at work for five years upon a piece of sculpture which he intends to represent " Vital Knergy." It is the gigantic figure of a man mounted upon a horse, and the model is being made in plaster in th: garden of Mr Watts' house, being so arranged beneath a shed that it can bo run out upon rails in fair weather to be worked upon, and when it rains can be run back out of the wet. The statue is so large that the top of the sculptor's head does rot reach half way up the horse's leg when he stands in front of it. — Herd in a train — the inmates of a cattl truck. A slight cold often proves the forerunner of a complaint whlpli may be fa' al. Avoid this result by taking Ajer's Gherr^ Pectoral, the bpst remedy for colds, coughs, and all throat and lung disease*. ■