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The Louvre possesses sixteen Claudes, among which we may emphasise on the L. wall, 310, View of a Port; 311, a poetic and glowing representation of the Roman Forum, before the old Campo Vaccino, with its romantic and picturesque aspect, had been excavated by modern archæologists. 314 and 316, Landing of Cleopatra at Tarsis, and Ulysses restoring Chryseis to her father, are typical imaginary classic compositions and variations on the artist's favourite theme the effects of sunlight on an atmosphere of varying luminosity and on the limpid, rippling waves of the sea.
One great fault is, that the dramatis personae are too much employed in pointing out the Claudes and Salvator Rosas, with which they are surrounded. They seem to want nothing but long poles in their hands to make them very good conductors over a gallery of pictures. When Earl Orgar, on seeing the habitation of his daughter, begins
Having sold one of his Claudes for four thousand dollars, the trick being detected, he was threatened with a public prosecution, the fear of which brought on his death. The favorite field of the early masters was fresco-painting.
In the intense heat, when through the drawn blinds fruit-sellers could be heard in the street, crying their mirabelles and Queen Claudes, the workgirls slept heavily, their heads on the table. Or perhaps Malvina would go and ask Mademoiselle Le Mire for a copy of the 'Journal pour Tous, and read aloud to the others. But little Chebe did not care for the novels.
But we pass from meek Madonnas and seraphic saints, from gleaming Claudes and Guidos soft as Eve, from Rubens's satyrs and Albano's boys, and even from those gay and natural medleys, paintings that cheer the heart, where fruit and flower, with their brilliant bloom, call to a feast the butterfly and bee; we pass from these to square-headed ancestors by Holbein, all black velvet and gold chains; cavaliers, by Vandyke, all lace and spurs, with pointed beards, that did more execution even than their pointed swords; patriots and generals, by Kneller, in Blenheim wigs and Steen-kirk cravats, all robes and armour; scarlet judges that supported ship-money, and purple bishops, who had not been sent to the Tower.
When we shall see a New England artist, with his easel, in the fields, seeking, hour after hour, to reproduce on the canvas the magnificent glories of an elm, with its firmament of boughs and branches, when he has learned that there is in it what is worth a thousand Claudes then the morning star of art will have risen on our hills.
The Benedictine convent, which clings to certain more or less vertiginous ledges and slopes of a vast precipitous gorge, constitutes, with the whole perfection of its setting, the very ideal of the tradition of that <i>extraordinary in the romantic</i> handed down to us, as the most attaching and inviting spell of Italy, by all the old academic literature of travel and art of the Salvator Rosas and Claudes.
Then a small room devoted to the Spanish and Italian schools, containing pictures by Murillo and Velasquez. Then the French hall, where were two magnificent Claudes, the finest I had yet seen. I studied these long, with much interest.
There is an air round Lord Radnor's park, for there hang the two Claudes, the Morning and Evening of the Roman Empire round Wilton House, for there is Vandyke's picture of the Pembroke family round Blenheim, for there is his picture of the Duke of Buckingham's children, and the most magnificent collection of Rubenses in the world at Knowsley, for there is Rembrandt's Handwriting on the Wall and at Burleigh, for there are some of Guido's angelic heads.
We have been called by a countryman to admire his gallery of Claudes, Poussins, Rembrandts, Murillos, and Titians, for which he had expended a princely sum, but which there was no difficulty in recognizing as the shop roba got up expressly to entrap the unwary.
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