[Illustration]
To be understood, however, it is certainly best to place design and
explanation side by side.
Mrs. Hogarth also had a dog, which eventually was buried at the end of
a filbert walk in her yard at Chiswick. A stone marked the grave, and
Hogarth himself cut the epitaph:
“Life to the last enjoyed, here Pompey lies.”
I tried not long ago, though without success, to find some trace
of this grave. In the oldest, quaintest part of Chiswick stands
Hogarth’s house, still bearing his name, and probably, as to stone
and mortar, much the same as when he lived there. But the once
beautiful garden is now in part a vegetable plot, and in part an
untidy barnyard. A venerable mulberry-tree and some gnarled old yews
are still standing--“sole relics of a finer past”; but of the filbert
walk there remains only a row of little stumps with here and there a
straggling branch. No trace of Pompey anywhere, unless in tradition;
“she had heard,” said the mistress of the house, “that a dog had been
buried somewhere there.” And--final touch--two pigs looked out from
the doorway, squealing shrilly as we passed! It seemed a pity that
Hogarth should not see them; no one would have sooner appreciated the
humor of the scene. But--life to the last enjoyed--he lies in Chiswick
churchyard.
Famous among Middle Age painters was Paolo Uccello--Paul of the
Birds--who won this sobriquet by his extreme delight in birds. They
were his ruling passion, and appeared in his pictures both in and out
of season.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF ALBRECHT DURER AT THIRTEEN.
(_Drawn by himself._)]
More famous was the eccentric Bazzi, who, according to the pleasant old
gossip, Vasari, “was fond of keeping in his house all sorts of strange
animals--badgers, squirrels, cat-a-mountains, dwarf monkeys, horses,
racers, little Elba ponies, jackdaws, bantams, doves of India, and
other creatures of this kind, so many as he could lay his hands on.”
Over and above, he had a raven which had learned to talk and to imitate
its master’s voice, especially in answering a knock at the door. “His
house was like nothing more than a Noah’s ark,” adds Vasari.
Of Vittore Carpaccio’s likes and dislikes little is known, but Ruskin
praises as one of the finest paintings in the world, a Venetian
interior by him, representing two fair dames surrounded by animals.
Two dogs--one small, one large--a peacock, doves, a turtle and a
lizard--such were the pets these ladies kept to amuse their leisure
hours.
Albrecht Dürer found special pleasure in studying hares. One hardly
knows which is quainter, the thirteen-year-old artist as drawn by
himself, or the hare which his childish fingers sketched. A later study
is the charming Bunny, apparently pausing after a pleasant nibble to
look at his artist _vis-à-vis_. In some of his pictures, Dürer painted
angel children playing with little hares--surely a gentle companionship!
[Illustration: HARE DRAWN BY THE BOY ALBRECHT DURER.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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