A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools. National Gallery (Great Britain)

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СКАЧАТЬ the girls, and, above all things, drink, like the live Flemings they are." Yet as compared with some other masters of genre, Teniers seems to treat his rustics somewhat from the outside. Their expressions are often exaggerated, and their gestures pass into grimace. "Brouwer knew more of taverns; Ostade was more thoroughly at home in cottages… Teniers seems anxious to have it known that, far from indulging in the coarse amusements of the boors he is fond of painting, he himself lives in good style and looks like a gentleman. He never seems tired of showing the turrets of his château of Perck, and in the midst of rustic merry-makings we often see his family and himself received cap in hand by the joyous peasants" (e. g. in 817). So too, though many of his interiors are very good, Teniers is on the whole at his best in open-air scenes. In his skies he has given (says Ruskin) "some very wonderful passages" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. i. § 20; H. Hymans in Encyclopædia Britannica; Wauters's Flemish School, p. 294). Good examples of Teniers continue to be greatly appreciated. The Belgian Government, for instance, gave £5000 in 1867 for the "Village Pastoral," now in Brussels Museum. The taste of Teniers may justly be condemned; his technique will always be admired. "Take," says Ruskin, "a picture by Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice; it is an entirely clever picture – so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an 'unmannered' or 'immoral' quality" (Crown of Wild Olive, § 56). His bright palette, his freshness of handling, his straightforwardness in means and intent, give to the best works of Teniers a permanent interest. He "touched with a workmanly hand, such as we cannot see rivalled now"; and he seems "never to have painted indolently, but gave the purchaser his thorough money's worth of mechanism." Hence it is that Sir Joshua Reynolds, though condemning Teniers's vulgarity of subject, yet held up his pictures as models to students who wished to excel in execution. It should, however, be noted that his works vary very much in this respect. Many of his later pictures are painted so thinly that the ground is in places barely covered. They have been called "afternoons," not from their subject, but from the time the painter took in producing them.

      This and the companion picture, 158, are characteristic specimens of the painter. The human specimens are ugly and vulgar; the pottery is pretty, and beautifully painted.

      155. THE MONEY CHANGERS

Teniers (Flemish: 1610-1694). See under last picture.

      A man and his wife – usurers, we may suppose – counting their money. There is all the miser's misery in the withered careworn faces, all the miser's greed in the thin, tremulous hands. The man alone seems not quite to like some transaction which they are discussing; the woman – Portia's prerogative of mercy being reversed – seems to be thinking, "Come, man, don't be a fool: a bond is a bond."

      156. A STUDY OF HORSES

Van Dyck (Flemish: 1599-1641). See 49.

      An interesting sketch as illustrating Van Dyck's affection for the horse. "In painting, I find that no real interest is taken in the horse until Van Dyck's time, he and Rubens doing more for it than all previous painters put together. Rubens was a good rider, and rode nearly every day, as, I doubt not, Van Dyck also. The horse has never, I think, been painted worthily again, since he died" (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vi. § 22).

      The particular choice of subject in this sketch shows further in its literary connection a lover of the horse. The subject, as we know from the words equi Achillis on a scroll in the left corner of the picture, is the horses of Achilles, said for their swiftness to be the sons of the wind Zephyrus: in the upper part of the picture is a sketch of a zephyr's head. "The gentleness of chivalry, properly so called, depends on the recognition of the order and awe of lower and loftier animal-life, … taught most perfectly by Homer in the fable of the horses of Achilles. There is, perhaps, in all the Iliad nothing more deep in significance – there is nothing in all literature more perfect in human tenderness, and honour for the mystery of inferior life, than the verses that describe the sorrow of the divine horses at the death of Patroclus, and the comfort given them by the greatest of the gods"98 (Fors Clavigera, 1871, ix. 13).

      157. A LANDSCAPE: SUNSET

Rubens (Flemish: 1577-1640). See 38.

      For Rubens's landscapes see under 66. "It is to be noted, however, that the licenses taken by Rubens in particular instances are as bold as his general statements are sincere… In the Sunset of our own Gallery many of the shadows fall at right angles to the light" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 15).

      158. BOORS REGALING

Teniers (Flemish: 1610-1694). See 154.

      159. THE DUTCH HOUSEWIFE

Nicolas Maes (Dutch: 1632-1693). See 153.

      "There are few pictures in the National Gallery," says C. R. Leslie (Handbook for Young Painters, p. 243), "before which I find myself more often standing than at this." Its great attraction, he adds, is "the delight of seeing a trait of childhood we have often observed and been amused with in nature, for the first time so felicitously given by art." The Dutch housewife sits intently engaged in scraping a parsnip, whilst the child stands by her side "watching the process, as children will stand and watch the most ordinary operations, with an intensity of interest, as if the very existence of the whole world depended on the exact manner in which that parsnip was scraped." Note the Flemish kruik, or beer-jug, so often introduced into the pictures of Maes. Signed and dated 1655.

      160. A "RIPOSO."

Mola (Eclectic-Bologna: 1612-1668). See 69.

      The Italians gave this title to the subject of the Holy Family resting on the way in their flight to Egypt, – "the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt."

      161. AN ITALIAN LANDSCAPE

Gaspard Poussin (French: 1613-1675). See 31.

      Gaspard travelled largely in Italy in search of the picturesque, and this striking landscape may be a recollection of the mountain scenery in the North – possibly near Bergamo. The spray of foliage prominent on the left is characteristic of Gaspard's method: —

      "One of the most remarkable characters of natural leafage is the constancy with which, while the leaves are arranged on the spray with exquisite regularity, that regularity is modified in their actual effect. For as in every group of leaves some are seen sideways, forming merely long lines, some foreshortened, some crossing each other, every one differently turned and placed from all the others, the forms of the leaves, though in themselves similar, give rise to a thousand strange and differing forms in the group… Now go to Gaspard Poussin and take one of his sprays, where they come against the sky; you may count it all round: one, two, three, four, one bunch; five, six, seven, eight, two bunches; nine, ten, eleven, twelve, three bunches; with four leaves each; and such leaves! every one precisely the same as its neighbour, blunt and round at the end (where every forest leaf is sharp, except that of the fig-tree), tied together by the stalks, and so fastened on to the demoniacal claws above described (see under 68), one bunch to each claw" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. i. §§ 16, 17).

      163. VENICE: A VIEW ON THE GRAND CANAL

Canaletto (Venetian: 1697-1768). See 127.

      The Church, that of S. Simeone Piccolo, was built in Canaletto's СКАЧАТЬ