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Hamburg My Second Fatherland Ernest Hello Le Docteur Noir Taine Renan Marcelin Gleyre Taine's Friendship Renan at Home Philarete Chasles' Reminiscences Le Theatre Francais Coquelin Bernhardt Beginnings of Main Currents The Tuileries John Stuart Mill London Philosophical Studies London and Paris Compared Antonio Gallenga and His Wife Don Juan Prim Napoleon III London Theatres Gladstone and Disraeli in Debate Paris on the Eve of War First Reverses Flight from Paris Geneva, Switzerland Italy Pasquale Villari Vinnie Ream's Friendship Roman Fever Henrik Ibsen's Influence Scandinavians in Rome.
It had been my good fortune to commence my studies in Paris; it was there, in the atelier Gleyre, I had cultivated, I think I may say, very successfully, the essentially French art of chaffing, known by the name of "La blague parisienne," and I now was able to give my less lively Flemish friends and fellow-students the full benefit of my experience.
Many pleasant recollections bound me to Paris; so, when I heard one day that a "Nouveau" had arrived, straight from my old atelier Gleyre, I was not a little impatient to make his acquaintance. The new-comer was du Maurier.
He it was who opened Taine's eyes to the wealth of contributions to history locked up in collections of engravings, more especially perhaps as regarded people's external appearance, and what the exterior revealed. Another friend who came to Taine at all sorts of times was Gleyre, the old painter, who had been born in French Switzerland, but was otherwise a Parisian.
Auguste did so well, displayed such energy and taste, that he soon fell to decorating blinds, and saved, in the course of four years, enough money to enable him to enter the atelier of Gleyre. There he met Sisley, Bazille afterward shot in the Franco-Prussian war and Claude Monet. They became friends and later allies in the conflict with the Parisian picture public.
His studio was to be taken during his absence, by Gleyre, and he advised those of his pupils in whom he took a personal interest, to continue their studies under his successor. Gérôme was one of those to whom he gave this advice, but Gérôme was too much attached to his master to leave him for another, and bluntly announced his purpose of following him to Rome.
In 1856, at the age of twenty-two, he returned to Paris with his mother, to live in the Rue Paradis-Poissonière, very poor, very dull, and very miserable, as he himself has said; but almost at the entrance of what he describes as the best time of his life that period in which, deciding to follow art as a profession, he entered the studio of Gleyre. Those were the joyous Quartier Latin days.
"It does seem hard! But you've only to bide your time, Sir Gorgius. No man of your stamp need ever despair of a Peerage!" The studio of Gleyre was inherited from Delaroche, and afterwards handed down to Gerome. Whistler, Poynter, du Maurier, Lamont, and Thomas Armstrong were the group of Trilby, Lamont was "the Laird," Aleco Ionides "the Greek," and Rowley is supposed to have been "Taffy."
The teaching was of a sound, practical nature, strongly imbued with the tendencies of the colourist school. Antwerp ever sought to uphold the traditions of a great Past; in the atelier Gleyre you might have studied form and learnt to fill it with colour, but here you would be taught to manipulate colour, and to limit it by form.
It might be, for instance, some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre, in which she is cut out sharply against the sky, in the form of a silver sickle, some work as unsophisticated and as incomplete as were, at that date, my own impressions, and which it enraged my grandmother's sisters to see me admire.