ART AND ARTISTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2674, 14 June 1905, Page 76

ART AND ARTISTS.

SIR L. AIAIA. TADEMA.

Miss Hulda Friederiehs, gives an interesting account in the Young Woman of Si 1 * Alma's first entry into the world of painting and painters: — "When Laurens Alma Tadema was a boy of 16, the worthy medicos of the small Dutch village of Dronrijp, where he was born, advised his mother to let the sickly lad have his -own way with his undesirable artistic cravings. After all, they said, he will only live a few years more at best. Therefore, he may as well be happy in his pwn way. This waa a. blow to the widow of the lawyer, whose great ambition it was that her son should some future day tread in his dead father's footsteps. To the boy it was like the sudden lifting of a dense black cloud. For ever einoe he could hold a pencil he had preferred that to any other toy, and had expressed his 'joy of form' in making drawings of whatever came to hand. Both his mother and his guardian watched this tendency with misgivings. However, he would get over it, they said, and the good Dutch mother, depriving herself of many tilings, xxiacle it possible to send tii-e pa.l-6 child to a good school, where a classical education in which Roman and other law bulked large should prepare him for the honoured and honourable profession of notary. The child read ancient law and history, learned the tongues of ancient Rome and Greece, and prepared, all unwittingly, a fine foundation whereon was to be built his great and unique artistic career. He and his elders thought he was progressing towards the musty, dusty, drab-coloured ohamibers of the man of law ; and meanwhile the ancients, whose odes and epiea he translated, were whispering to him of countries of Oriental splendour, of wineooloured seas, of marbles gloaming as velvet, of flowers bright as jewels and fresh and fragrant as a morning in June, of prooessions of undreamt-of splendour, and, in> deed, of all the wealth of colour, all the grace and beauty of form that distinguish the work of the master artist."

T"WO FAMOUS PAINTERS.

— Rubens. —

Rubens, in spite of the splendour of his success, in spite of the high position he took as ambassador and man of affairs, in spite of his splendid artistic achievement, does in some strange way remain curiously uninteresting as a personality. He has not the romantic appeal. Be wore elaborate clothes, he was a pretty man, he trod the stag© of life with all the limelight upon him ; but he never for a moment catches our affection. His influence in art wag enormous; but there is throughout his great artistio achievement this curious impression of unintcrestingness. What an eye the man had for arrangement; for the grand manner ! Yet in it all there is somo lack of essential greatness. The large pictures in the I.ouvre leave one with a sensg of vulgar display. It is in his simpler works, as in his superb portrait of himself and his first wife, Isa'bclla Brant, at! Munich, that he reaches the heights.

— Boucher. —

The cant about Boucher "not being serious" is surely near dead. Boucher tho man stands out as one of the most generous, lovable beings the world has known; and we forgive him for his weaknesses, as we cannot forgive the harsh and cruel virtues of many a smug hypocrite. And above all things, he could paint a picture. For th« drawing room and the walls of one's

I living-rooms, who so gay and blithe a comm janion as Boucher? And. forsooth, beX cause he" was no great master of altar-pieces Pi or of sentimentality we are to condemn him as a mere voluptuary ! But Boucher needs no apology — he has come to stay. He is>, in the French pastoral, absolutely supreme ; and in decorative eighteenth century art he ranks with Wattean and Fragonard, than wkom it would be difficult to find, in their ;pe»lm, greater masters. — Academy.