Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
History
Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
Biography
The day before Thorwaldsen's death the interior of his tomb was
finished, for it was his wish that his remains might rest in the
centre of the court-yard of the museum; it was then walled round, and
he begged that there might be a marble edge around it, and a few
rose-trees and flowers planted on it as his monument. The whole
building, with the rich treasures which he presented to his
fatherland, will be his monument; his works are to be placed in the
rooms of the square building that surrounds the open court-yard, and
which, both internally and externally, are painted in the Pompeian
style. His arrival in the roads of Copenhagen and landing at the
custom-house form the subjects depicted in the compartments under the
windows of one side of the museum. Through centuries to come will
nations wander to Denmark; not allured by our charming green islands,
with their fresh beech-woods alone--no, but to see these works and
this tomb.
There is, however, one place more that the stranger will visit, the
little spot at Nysöe where his _atelier_ stands, and where the tree
bends its branches over the canal to the solitary swan which he fed.
The name of Thorwaldsen will be remembered in England by his statues
of Jason and Byron; in Switzerland, by his "recumbent lion;" in
Roeskilde, by his figure of Christian the Fourth. It will live in
every breast in which a love of art is enkindled.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET[6]
[Footnote 6: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
By CLARENCE COOK
(1814-1875)
[Illustration: Jean-François Millet.]
We read that on one occasion, when a picture by some Dutch artist,
representing peasants at their sports, was shown to Louis XIV., he
angrily exclaimed, "Take away those vermin!" Such subjects had never
been chosen by French artists, nor indeed had they been seen anywhere
in Europe before the Dutch artists began to paint them in the
seventeenth century. The Italian painters of the early and the later
Renaissance, working almost exclusively for the churches, or for the
palaces of pleasure-loving princes, did not consider the peasant or
the laboring man, by himself, a proper subject for his art. If he were
introduced at any time into picture or bas-relief, it was only as a
necessary actor in some religious story, such as "The Adoration of the
Shepherds," or in the representations of the months or the seasons, as
in the Fountain of the Public Square at Perugia, where we see the
peasant engaged in the labors of the farm or vineyard: cutting the
wheat, gathering in the grapes, and treading out the wine, and, in
the later season, dressing the hog he has been killing; for in those
less sophisticated times, Art, no more than Poetry, despised the ruder
side of rustic life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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