A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools: Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin
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A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools: Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin
National Gallery (Great Britain); Painting -- England -- London -- Catalogs
209. THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS.
_Both_ and _Poelenburgh_ (Dutch). _See under_ 71 and 955.
The landscape by Both, the figures by Poelenburgh. For the subject of
the judgment of Paris, see under 194.
210. VENICE: THE PIAZZA DI SAN MARCO.
_Francesco Guardi_ (Venetian: 1712-1793).
Francesco Guardi was a scholar and imitator of Canaletto. "Less
prized during the heyday of his master's fame, he has been
steadily acquiring reputation on account of certain qualities
peculiar to himself. His draughtsmanship displays an agreeable
stateliness; his colouring a graceful gemmy brightness and
a glow of sunny gold. But what has mainly served to win for
Guardi popularity, is the attention he paid to contemporary
costume and manners. Canaletto filled large canvases with
mathematical perspectives of city and water. At the same time
he omitted life and incident. There is little to remind us that
the Venice he so laboriously depicted was the Venice of perukes
and bagwigs, of masks and hoops and carnival disguises. Guardi
had an eye for local colour and for fashionable humours" (J. A.
Symonds, "Pietro Longhi," in the _Century Guild Hobby Horse_,
April 1889).
Notice the effect of light on the Church of St. Mark at the end of the
square: "Beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out
of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in
a kind of awe, that we may see it far away;--a multitude of pillars
and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured light"
(_Stones of Venice_, vol. ii. ch. iv. § 14).
211. A BATTLE-PIECE.
_Johan van Huchtenburgh_ (Dutch: 1646-1733).
Huchtenburgh was in great request as a battle-painter, and in
1708 was commissioned by Prince Eugene to paint the victories
won by that prince and the Duke of Marlborough over the French.
212. A MERCHANT AND HIS CLERK.
_Thomas de Keyser_ (Dutch: 1596-1667).
This painter--the son of an eminent sculptor and architect--was
born at Amsterdam, and was one of the chief forerunners of
Rembrandt in the art of portrait painting. "If," says Burton,
"in some of his work remains of the formality and stiffness
of the sixteenth century may be traced, the greater number
show a freedom and a sense of life unusual among those of his
predecessors."
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