ART AND ARTISTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2454, 27 March 1901, Page 68

ART AND ARTISTS.

— The story of Mr Frederic Remington's farst painting is interesting. The now famous American artist arrived in New York with a portfolio full of Western sketches, but without money enough to buy a painting outfit. Jie confided his trouble to a medical friend, and he had such faith in the young artist's ability that he gave him a hundred dollars to- his first picture— before it was begun. The picture, which represented a trooper standing by his horse and gazing at the hills in the distance, brought the young artist many valuable commission*. — The highest price realised by any picture painted by a living Royal personage is one thousand pounds. The Empress Frederick of Germany, the mother of the present Emperor William 11, and the eldest daughter of our late Queen, is an admirable artist, and two of her pictures, which were recently sold at a charity bazaar, realised £1000 each. One room at Windsor Castle is entirely hung with watcrcolours from her brush. Her love of the artistic has always had much to do with her excursions, and, after visits to the leading pottery and china works, she went in for modelling, a work in which the Duchess of Argyll excels. — I was intimate with the Pre-Raphaelites when we were little more than boys together. They were all very simple, pure-minded, ignorant, and confident. Millais was looked upon as in some sort the leader, but this, I fancy, was partly because he always had more command of money than the others, who were vciy poor. They could not even have printed "The Germ" without assistance. I well remember Millais triumphantly flourishing befoie my eyes a cheque for £150 which he got for "The Return of the Dovo to the Ark." . . . Holman Hunt attracted me personally more than any of the other PreRaphaelite'. _ He was heroically simple and con-taut in his purpose of primarily serving religion by his art, and had a Quixotic notion that it was absolutely obligatory upon him to redress every wiong that came under his notice. Rosctti was in manner", mind, and appearance completely Italian. lie had ■very little knowledge of, or sympathy with, English literature ; and always gave mo the impre«sion. of tensity rather than intensity. — Coventry Patmore. AN EMINENT OLD MASTER. ''The Great Masters in Painting and Sculpture: Corrcggio," by Sclv.yn Brinton, M.A. — I The Renaissance, like the Reformation, may • V1?.V 1 ?. deicubecl in one of its aspects as the

liberation^ of the individual spirit from traditional bondage : and in nothing was that, great awakening in Italy more remarkable than in the distinctiveness of the genius of its chief representatives. No better illustration of this can be found than Antonio Allegri, of the little town of Correggio. in Emilia. Recent criticism has sufficiently established the fact that in his youth he was influenced by the work of some of the masters of Ferrara, and also by the more virile and masterly painting of Mantegna, at Mantua. But in all that was greatest in his art Correggio stands apart and alone ; he was the child of his time, but he was like no other memb°r of the family. He never visited any of the great centres, Florence or Venice, Milan o,r Rome ; and his artistic affinities with one or another of their great masters were the result, not of any personal relations between him and them, but pimply of that emotional and intellectual quickening which was over all the land, and which we know as the Renaissance. It was one movement ; but its results in Correggio's work were unique, as much so as in the work of Raphael, Michel Angelo, or Leonardo, of whom he was tho contemporary and the compeer. With him that new freedom and ardour of interest in human life and in the natural world which was the note of the period, that new claim of the natural man to live his life, found expression as sheer delight in physical grace, in innocent gaiety, in the subtle charms of colour in light and ehade. There is a fine simplicity in the story of Correggio's short and laborious life — a Hf e o f quiet domestic happiness; his 40 years, of which his work is almost the whole record, were spent between his native town and Parma, whose chief glory is now in his paintings. The regrets expressed by Vasari for the master's poverty and for his arti«tic isolation one now f eei6 to be very superfluous. In the first place, it was evident that he was not poor, while he was not wealthy ; and, in the second place, whatever he might conceivably have gained by a visit, say, to the Court of Pope Julius he must surely have lost something of that childlike naivette, that absolute simplicity of feeling, which is perhaps the most distinctive feature of all his work. The charming pranks of his childangels and little heathen loves and the winsomeness and vivacity of his representations of the Infant Jesus are in perfect harmony with one another, as they are with the radiant grace and happiness of his saints and Madonnas, and with the simple dignity and loveliness of his figures from myth and allegory ; because they all expre33 one temperament, and set forth one way of regarding things. His pathos, as in "The Agony in the Garden" and "Ecce Homo," is never that of deeply-conceived tragedy, which was doubtless quite out of his reach ; it is the beauty of suffering innocence and of heavenly consolation that he sets before us in these pictures, and even so it is in such subjects that we feel most the limitations of his art It is his supreme gift of sincere and innocent delight that absolutely saves Correggio, in a sense the most voluptuous of painters of the nude, from any approach to grossn«ss. As lis chief biographer says of his "Leda," "the forms . . . are distinguished by that indescribable spiritualisatiori of sensual emotion, in the rendering of which Correegio stands alone." Of the same work, Mr Biinton writes : — "Like the artist's other painting? cf Uiis period . . . this picturc-pocm scams sot to the same melody, the song which Lo^ c ia sii r'ng beneath the great trees hi the coolness anil beauty of that summer day, when betide the Euro tas, in old Lacedsemon, the gods yet walked on earth, and life seemed to yield moments of entire and unalloyed sweetness." _ Correggio was a realist, as every Rreat artist must be in some sense, and, indeed, Ins realism sometimes misled him into strange jmd violent experiment 5 ! ; but he taw real things "through a temperament/ and he used them to set forth 1113 dream of a faiicr and happier and more innocent world than this. No lesson in the qualities of Correggio'a genius can be had in smaller compass than in a study of two of the most piecioi.s treasuies of our National Gallery — his "Venus, Mercury, and Cupid," one of his loveliest paintings of the nude, and "The Holy Family" (with the basket), which Sir Frederick Burton calls "an epitome of Correggio's art." The latter is a rare example not only of the

j peculiar grace and vitality of Correggio'* I forms, but also and more specially of his astonitohing mastery of chiaroscuro and aerial perspective, the gradations of light and colour in shadow and distance.