ART AND ARTISTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1851, 17 August 1893, Page 49

ART AND ARTISTS.

One of the finest piotures by Murillo, owned by the Duke of Devonshire, is that of a beggar boy eating a snail pie.

A colossal figure of John Knox has just been completed by Mr John Hutchison, R S A. The plaster cast is much admired, and a project is on foot to have it reproduced in bronze and erected on a public site in Edinburgh.

The first "sun picture " or photograph* of the human countenance ever taken has been lent by Sir William Herschell for the Chicago Exhibition. The portrait was taken in 1840, and the subject, a lady, still lives. She is 87 years old. Her recent portrait will be exhibited side by side with the first sun picture.

At Christie's a Louis XVI library table of tulip wood, with three drawers, inlaid all round with a border of 2d square plaques of old Sevres porcelain, painted with bouquets of flowers in medallions, in gilt borders on

apple-green ground, 45in by 23in, was sold for £2495.

A statue of Hiawatha, bearing Minnehaba in hie arms "across wild and rushing rivers," is shown in the Minnesota State building at the World's Fair. The sculptor is Fjeldje, a Norwegian artist. The women of Minnesota raised the money for the work. It is shown in plaster at the Exposition. Later it will be cast in bronze and placed in the State Park at Minnehaha Falls, Minn.

The Onicago Tribune urges the Illinois Legislature to pass the bill providing for the purchase of the art gallery at the World's Fair by the South Park Commissioners of Chicago. "It is conceded universally," it sayp, "to be the most beautiful structure in Jackson Park. Its exquisite lines and beauty of construction have been admired by every one and praised by all American and foreign critics."

While modelling her colossal statue of Father Mathew, Miss Mary Eedmond, the Irish sculptor, bad an experience that in some respects recalls that of the unfortunate hero of "The Light that Failed." She had taken for a model, at the recommendation of a philanthropist friend, a youth of 20 from a reformatory. After the completion of the clay figure, the mode), in a fit of spite, entered the studio and destroyed her work. Nothing daunted, Miss Redmond procured a year's extension of time from the committee in charge of the work, and remodelled the figure to the satisfaction of the committee." The completed statue has recently been unveiled in Dublin.

One of the most interesting figures at the varnishing day of the French Salon was Rosa Bonheur, whom one instinctively thinks of with a young, boyish face, dressed in the man's loose jacket and trousers that she usually wears in her studio and her portraits. At the vernissage, however, she appeared like a respectable old body of about 70, dressed quietly in an ordinary woman's costume of black, her short hair concealed under the grey perruque that she adopts in public to avoid attracting attention, and nothing noticeable about her except the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour that she wore in her buttonhole. She sends two pictures to the Chicago Exposition, "The King of the Forest " and " A Skirmish," both the property of M. Garabard, the Spanish Consul at Nice. It is interesting to know that it was he who was Rosa Bonheur's first patron. M. Gambard was at that- time a picture dealer, and recognising the talent of the young painter, then poor and unknown, he had a pen built for her in one corner of his grounds in which she could study the lions and other " kings of the forest," who, as a rule, are not too easily persuaded to have their portraits painted. M. Gambard made a fortune and collected a rare picture gallery from his dealings with unknown painters, and the lion's head at Chicago is one of the finest Rosa Bonheurs in existence.