ART AND ARTISTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2080, 4 January 1894, Page 41

ART AND ARTISTS.

The sack of Rome by Constable de Bourbon in 1527 dispersed the school of Raphael all over Europe, and his style became generally fashionable.

Lysippus of Sicyon was the first to make portrait statues. He was court sculptor tc Alexander the Great, and had the monopoly of making the statues of that monarch.

Raphael is described by the art critics as "the first of painters, for moral force in allegory and history unrivalled ; for fidelity in portraiture unsurpassed ; who has never been approached in propriety of invention, composition, or expression ; who is almost without a rival in design, and in sublimity and grandeur inferior to Angelo alone."

Mr Linley Sambourne, the • caricaturist, has a splendid collection of photographs. It contains upwards of 10,000, and includes the photographs of all living celebrities in politics, literature, art, and science. They are so arranged in alphabetical cabinets that at a moment's notice he can place on his table the counterfeit of any celebrity whose features he may wiah to introduce into his work. Mr Sambourne is himself a clever photographer, and a large number of these portraits have been taken with his own camera.

It was as a scene painter at the Hastings Theatre tbat Mr T. S'dney Ccoper, the veteran R.A , began bis artistic career. Giving up this position, he nude a sketching

tour from Calais to Brussels, obtaining food and lodging at the inns on the way by painting the likenesses of host and hostess. Arrived at Brussels, he studied for several years in the Flemish schools, and returned to England in consequence of the Revolution, of 1830, to become in the course of time one~ of the most distinguished and popular painters of English landscape. The extraordinary popularity erjjoyed by the late Edwin Long, R A., which attended him throughout his life— although, curiou3ly enough, he did not till near the end admit it— is not to be judged by those who only remember his wooden, ill-coloured figures of the last few years, whun his powers seemed so suddenly to leave him. It was his literary ability, his dramatic power, which first held the public— such pictures as "The Babylonian Marriage Market," which gave people plenty to talk about : not its art, but its subject, as when Ruskin declared that it ought to be bought by the Anthropological Society. Then his religious compositions suited so well the middle-class, non-artistic ideas of the day; and people liked his subjects, quite forgetful that, as a rule, the pictures were only coloured illustrations on a large scale. — Magazine of Art.