United States or Eswatini ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Over the chimney-piece, which is splendidly carved in woodwork, is a looking-glass in the Renaissance style, with a bronze and silver frame, representing grinning fawns and dishevelled nymphs. Benches are placed round the hearth, which is large enough to hold six people. Above the divans, on the walls, are large oil-paintings by old masters.
It was all as she promised; three little bedrooms, and a little salon opening on a little balcony; queer old oil-paintings and framed embroideries and tiles hanging on the walls; spotless curtains, and board floors so white that it would have been a shame to eat off them without spreading a cloth to keep them from being soiled.
They passed on, through a great hall lined with oil-paintings of famous soldiers, and trophies of big game from all over the world; for this was a Service club, bearing a proud record of soldier and sailor members for a hundred years. Presently they were in the dining-room, already crowded. The waiter found them a little table in a quiet corner.
The walls were covered with a loan collection of oil-paintings, water-colour drawings, and etchings English and French, but chiefly English. A very large proportion of the pictures were portraits of women done by a select group of very expensive painters in the highest vogue.
But where were there purchases for those streaky, dirty oil-paintings? Who needed those Flemish boors, those red and blue landscapes, which put forth some claims to a higher stage of art, but which really expressed the depths of its degradation? They did not appear the works of a self-taught child.
Large oil-paintings of Queen Victoria, the Czar of Russia, and other sovereigns, surround the walls, including two portraits of her Majesty the Ex-Empress Eugenie.
The others could hear him loudly reiterate again and again that though the loss of his oil-paintings, sketches, and etchings, which he had intended to sell in America, was irreparable and beyond compensation, yet the steamship company was unquestionably liable, and as soon as he reached New York, he would take to haunting the company's office, until they paid him full damages.
She is a wee bit out of favour the last few days, but I haven't a chance beside her. She has the Farrell eyebrows, you see, and the Farrell frown, and poise of the head. When she is sitting in the dining-room, you could tell at once that she was a descendant of the oil-paintings. I often see Uncle Bernard looking from her to them, and he is far more amiable to her than to any of us, as a rule.
Nevertheless, there were frescos by Domenichino, and oil-paintings by Guido and others. I found it peculiarly touching to read the records, in Latin or French, of persons who had died in this foreign laud, though they were not my own country-people, and though I was even less akin to them than they to Italy. Still, there was a sort of relationship in the fact that neither they nor I belonged here.
The young lady was of an artistic bent, and the stiff ornaments in the shut-up parlor and the wonderful oil-paintings jarred upon her. Strange to say, even the wax-dipped wreath that hung in its circular black frame over the whatnot did not appeal to her.
Word Of The Day