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Updated: June 25, 2025
The only surviving brother, Henri, is also a painter, of considerable reputation. He is a thorough and accomplished draughtsman, and a superior teacher. His atelier is one of the few in Paris which are open to women, and several American ladies have enjoyed its advantages. We have spoken of Scheffer's love for his native country.
The last picture, painted just before Scheffer's death, and soon to be engraved, represents "Margaret at the Fountain." "It is full of expression, and paints the joy and pain of love still struggling in the young girl's heart, while conscience begins to make its chiding voice heard." The "Mignons" are the best known of all Scheffer's works of this period.
How much the fatherless home of Scheffer's childhood, how much his own desolated life, when his beloved companion was so early taken from his side, may have had to do with this melancholy cast of thought, or how far it belonged to his delicate physical constitution, we are not prepared to say.
He had no schooling, in the École des Beaux Arts sense. A brief period in Henri Scheffer's studio, three months under Couture, after he had begun life in an altogether different field of effort, yielded him all the explicit instruction he ever had. His real study was done in Italy, in the presence of the old masters of Florence.
It was more like a dream than a reality, and for the first twenty minutes I was almost afraid to stir for fear I might wake up and find the vision gone. But when I began to look at him as a being of real flesh and blood, I found that Ary Scheffer's portrait had not deceived me.
Scheffer's life was devoted to providing for and educating these young women. He himself gave them lessons in the languages, in music, painting and sculpture. The daughter was a handsome girl; and in point of intellect kept her artist-father very busy to keep one lesson in advance.
If the picture be not overcolored by the critic's eye, we must believe this to be the culmination of the morbidly spiritualistic tendency which we meet in Scheffer's works. Yet it never exists unrelieved by redeeming qualities. Many will remember the original picture of the "Dead Christ," which was exhibited here by an Art Union about ten years ago.
An uncongenial caller would instantly unhorse Carlyle, and Tennyson had a hatred of all lion-hunters not merely because they were lion-hunters, but because they broke in upon his paradise and snapped the thread of inspiration. Mrs. Grote tells us that Scheffer's wife was intelligent and devoted in fact, she was too devoted. She would bring her sewing and watch the artist at his work.
There is a picture of Ary Scheffer's of an old knight, whose son had fled from the battle, cutting the tablecloth in two between himself and the unhappy youth. Like that stern baron's countenance was that with which my mother sat at the head of the dinner-table, and we conversed by jerks about whatever we least cared for, as if we could hide our wretchedness from Peter.
It becomes less prominent in his later compositions, "as faith became stronger and sight clearer"; and perhaps in those pictures yet unknown to us we may find still brighter omens of the new life of rest and joy into which he has entered. If we turn from Scheffer's works to his life, our task is no less grateful and pleasing.
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