United States or Timor-Leste ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Whereupon, allowing the conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on those untranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozart manuscript and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chilly day at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter and colder, which returned to my memory.
Raphael's drawings were done with a different intention from Ingres'; Raphael's drawings were no more than rough memoranda, and in no instance did he attempt to carry a drawing to the extreme limit that Ingres did. Ingres' drawing is one thing, Raphael's is another; still I would ask if any one thinks that Raphael could have carried a drawing as far as Ingres?
Mark you, I deny that I am urging any fault or flaw; I am merely contending that Whistler's art is not modern art, but classic art yes, and severely classical, far more classical than Titian's or Velasquez; from an opposite pole as classical as Ingres. No Greek dramatist ever sought the synthesis of things more uncompromisingly than Whistler. And he is right. Art is not nature.
His alter ego was Delaroche, to whom he gave his daughter in marriage. Of the other painters, Boulanger, Delacroix, Ingres, Decamps, Jules Dupre were his favourites true artists, he deemed them. At the Salon he saw hardly anything to please him besides a canvas by Meissonier and Cogniet's Tintoretto painting his Dead Daughter.
"When a writer is praised above his merits in his own times," wrote Savage Landor, "he is certain of being estimated below them in the times succeeding." In the case of Ingres, opposition and contumely were followed by perhaps excessive laudation whilst he lived, after his death ensuing a long period of reaction. Time has now set the seal upon his fame.
They made much of music in that household and we often heard there Delsarte, the singer without a voice, whom Ingres admired very much. Delsarte and Henri Reber were, in fact, his musical mentors, and, in spite of his pretence of being a great connoisseur, he was in reality their echo. He affected, for example, the most profound contempt for all modern music, and would not even listen to it.
But each of those pictures was a gem; such Watteaus, such Greuzes, such landscapes by Patel, and, above all, such masterpieces by Ingres, Horace Vernet, and Delaroche were worth all the doubtful originals of Flemish and Italian art which make the ordinary boast of private collectors. These pictures occupied two rooms of moderate size, built for their reception, and lighted from above.
As I already played, and rather nicely for my years, some of Mozart's sonatas, Ingres, in return for my dedication, presented me with a small medallion with the portrait of the author of Don Juan on one side, and this inscription on the other: "To M. Saint-Saëns, the charming interpreter of the divine artist."
Did that backsliding in early life disturb the great painter's stormy but dazzling career? Who can say? We learn that Ingres was twice, and, according to accredited reports, happily, married. His first wife, a humbly-born maiden from his native province, died in 1849, leaving the septuagenarian so desolate, helpless and stricken that kindly interveners set to work and re-married him.
The suggestion that Ingres spoilt the legs of "La Source" by repainting them when the model was not before him could come from nowhere but the Beaux Arts. That Ingres was not so great an artist as Raphael I am aware. That Ingres' drawings show none of the dramatic inventiveness of Raphael's drawings is so obvious that I must apologise for such a commonplace.
Word Of The Day