There was no furniture in the rooms worth mentioning—Italians do not burden themselves with things—but on the wall I caught sight of a bright-colored unfinished sketch of the Bridge of Sighs. It was little more than an outline, and probably did not represent ten minutes' work, but the lines seemed so firm and sure that I at once asked who did it.

"An American did it, Signore, an American painter; he comes here every year; our son is his gondolier and shows him all the best places to paint, and takes him there when the light is good and keeps the people back so the artist can work—you understand? A shower came up just as his Excellency, the American, began on this, and it got wet and so he gave it to my son and he gave it to me."

"What is the painter's name?" I asked. Enrico could not remember, but Mona Lisa said his name was Signore Hopsmithiziano, or something like that.

There were several little plaster images on the walls, and through the open door that led to the adjoining room I saw a sort of an improvised shrine, with various little votive offerings grouped about an unframed canvas. The picture was a crude attempt at copying that grand figure in Titian's "Assumption."

"And who painted that?" I asked.

Enrico crossed himself in silence, and Mona Lisa's subdued voice answered: "Our other son did that. He was only nineteen. He was a mosaicist and was studying to be a painter; he was drowned at the Lido."

The old woman made the sign of the cross, her lips moved, and a single big tear stood on her leathery cheek. I changed the painful subject, and soon found excuse to slip away. That evening as the darkness gathered and twinkling lights began to appear like fireflies, up and down the Grand Canal, I sat in a little balcony of my hotel watching the scene. A serenading party, backing their boats out into the stream, had formed a small blockade, and in the group of gondolas that awaited the unraveling of the tangle I spied Enrico. He had a single passenger, a lady in the inevitable black mantilla, holding in her hands the inevitable fan. A second glance at the lady—and sure enough! it was Mona Lisa. I ran downstairs, stepped out across the moored line of gondolas, took up a hook, and reaching over gently pulled Enrico's gondola over so I could step aboard.

Mona Lisa was crooning a plaintive love-song and her gondolier was coming in occasionally with bars of melodious bass. I felt guilty for being about to break in upon such a sentimental little scene, and was going to retreat, but Enrico and Mona Lisa spied me and both gave a little cry of surprise and delight.

"Where have you been?" I asked—"you fine old lovers!"

And then they explained that it was a Holy Day and they had been over to the Church of San Giorgio, and were now on their way to Santa Maria de' Frari.

"It is a very special mass, by torchlight, and is for the repose of the soul of Titian, who is buried there. You may never have an opportunity to see such a sight again—come with us," and Enrico held out his strong brown hand.

I stepped aboard, the boats opened out to the left and to the right, and we passed with that peculiar rippling sound, across the water that reflected the lights as of a myriad stars.

* * * * *

Titian was born one hundred years before Rubens, and died just six months before Rubens' birth.

On the one hundred twenty-second anniversary of the birth of Titian, Rubens knelt at his grave, there in the church of Santa Maria de' Frari, and vowed he would follow in the footsteps of the illustrious master. And the next day he wrote to his mother describing the incident. Thousands of other sentimental and impulsive youth have stood before that little slab of black marble on which is carved the simple legend, "Tiziano Vecellio," and vowed as Rubens did, but out of the throng not one rendered such honor to the master as did the brilliant Fleming. The example of Titian was a lifelong inspiration to Rubens; and to all his pupils he held up Titian as the painter par excellence. In the Rubens studio Titian was the standard by which all art was gauged.

When Rubens returned to Flanders from Italy he carried with him twenty-one pictures done by the hand of the master.

Titian was born at the little village of Cadore, a few miles north of Venice. When ten years of age his father took him down to the city and apprenticed him to a worker in mosaic, the intent of the fond parent probably being to get the youngster out of the way, more than anything else.

The setting together of the little bits of colored glass, according to a pattern supplied, is a task so simple that children can do it about as well as grown folks. They do the work there today just exactly as they did four hundred years ago, when little Tiziano Vecellio came down from Cadore and worked, getting his ears pinched when he got sleepy, or carelessly put in the red glass when he should have used the blue.

An inscription on a tomb at Beni Hassan, dating from the reign of Osortasen the First, who lived three thousand years before Christ, represents Theban glassblowers at work. I told Enrico of this one day when we were on our way to a glass-factory.

"That's nothing," said Enrico; "it was the glassblowers of Venice who taught them how," and not a ghost of a smile came across his fine, burnt-umber face.

There is a story by Pliny about certain Phenician mariners landing on the shores of a small river in Palestine and making a fire to cook their food, and afterward discovering that the soda and sand under their pots had fused into glass. No one now seriously considers that the first discovery of glass, and for all I know Enrico may be right in his flat statement that the first glass was made at Venice, "for Venice always was."

The art of glassmaking surely goes back to the morning of the world. The glassblower is a classic, like the sower who goes forth to sow, the potter at his wheel, and the grinding of grain with mortar and pestle. Thus, too, the art of the mosaicist—who places bright bits of stone and glass in certain positions so as to form a picture—goes back to the dawn. The exquisite work in mosaic at Pompeii is the first thing that impresses the visitor to that silent city. Much of the work there was done long before the Christian era, and must have then been practised many centuries to bring it to such perfection.

Young Tiziano from Cadore did not like the mere following of a set pattern—he introduced variations of his own, and got his nose tweaked for trying to improve on a good thing. Altogether he seemed to have had a hard time of it there at Messer Zuccato's mosaic-shop.

The painter's art, then as now, preceded the art of the mosaicist, for the picture or design to be made in mosaic is first carefully drawn on paper, and then colored, and the worker in mosaic is supposed simply to follow copy. When you visit the glass-factories of Venice today, you see the painted picture tacked up on the wall before the workmen, who with deft fingers stick the bits of glass into their beds of putty. This scheme of painting a pattern is in order that cheap help can be employed; when it began we do not know, but we do know there was a time when the great artist in mosaic had his design in his head, and materialized it by rightly placing the bits of glass with his own hands, experimenting, selecting and rejecting until the thing was right. But this was before the time of Titian, for when Titian came down to Venice there were painters employed in the shop of Sebastian Zuccato who made the designs for the dunderheads to follow. That is not just the word the painters used to designate the boys and women who placed the bits of glass in position, but it meant the same thing.

The painters thought themselves great folks, and used to make the others wait on them and run errands, serving them as "fags."

But the Vecellio boy did not worship at the shrine of the painters who made the designs. He said he could make as good pictures himself, and still continued to make changes in the designs when he thought they should be made; and once in a dispute between the boy and the maker of a design, the master took sides with the boy. This inflated the lad with his own importance so, that shortly after he applied for the position of the quarrelsome designer.

The fine audacity of the youngster so pleased the master that he allowed him to try his hand with the painters a few hours each day. He was getting no wages anyway, only his board, and the kind of board did not cost much, so it did not make much difference.

In Venice at that time there were two painters by the name of Bellini—Gentile and Giovanni, sons of the painter Jacob Bellini, who had brought his boys up in the way they should go. Gian, as the Venetians called the younger brother, was the more noted of the two. Occasionally he made designs for the mosaicists, and this sometimes brought him to the shop where young Titian worked.

The boy got on speaking terms with the great painter, and ran errands back and forth from his studio. When twelve years of age we find him duly installed as a helper at Gian Bellini's studio, with an easel and box of paints all his own.

* * * * *

The brightest scholar in the studio of Gian Bellini was a young man by the name of Giorgio, but they called him Giorgione, which being interpreted means George the Great. He was about the age of Titian, and the two became firm friends.

Giorgione was nearly twenty when we first hear of him. He was a handsome fellow—tall, slender, with an olive complexion and dreamy brown eyes. There was a becoming flavor of melancholy in his manner, and more than one gracious dame sought to lure him back to earth, away from his sadness, out of the dream-world in which he lived.

Giorgione was a musician and a poet. He sang his own pieces, playing the accompaniment on a harp. Vasari says he sang his songs, playing his own accompaniment on a flute, but I think this is a mistake.

Into all his work Giorgione infused his own soul—and do you know what the power to do that is? It is genius. To be able to make a statue is little, but to breathe into its nostrils the breath of life—ah! that is something else! The last elusive, undefinable stroke of the brush, that something uniting the spirit of the beholder with the spirit of the artist, so that you feel as he felt when he wrought—that is art. Burne-Jones is the avatar of Giorgione. He subdues you into silence, and you wait, expecting that one of his tall, soulful dream-women will speak, if you are but worthy—holding your soul in tune.

Giorgione never wrought so well as Burne-Jones, because he lived in a different age—all art is an evolution. Painting is a form of expression, just as language is a form of expression. Every man who writes English is debtor to Shakespeare. Every man who paints and expresses something of that which his soul feels is debtor to Giorgione and Botticelli. But to judge of the greatness of an artist—mind this—you must compare him with his contemporaries, not with those who were before or those who came after. The old masters are valuable, not necessarily for beauty, but because they reveal the evolution of art.

Between Burne-Jones and Giorgione came Botticelli. Now, Botticelli builded on Giorgione, while Burne-Jones builded on Botticelli. Aubrey Beardsley, dead at the age at which Keats died, builded on both, but he perverted their art and put a leer where Burne-Jones placed faith and abiding trust. Aubrey Beardsley got the cue for his hothouse art from one figure in Botticelli's "Spring," I need not state which figure: a glance at the picture and you behold sulphur fumes about the face of one of the women.

Did Aubrey Beardsley infuse his own spirit into his work? Yes, I think he did. Mrs. Jameson says, "There are no successful imitations of Giorgione, neither can there be, for the spirit of the man is in every face he drew, and the people who try to draw like him always leave that out."

There are various pictures in the Louvre, the National Gallery, and the Pinacothek at Munich, signed with Giorgione's name, but Mrs. Jameson declares they are not his, "because they do not speak to your soul with that mild, beseeching look of pity," Possibly we should make allowance for Mrs. Jameson's warm praise—other women talked like that when Giorgione was alive.

Giorgione was one of those bright luminaries that dart across our plane of vision and then go out quickly in hopeless night, leaving only the memory of a blinding light. He died at thirty-three, which Disraeli declares is the age at which the world's saviors have usually died—and he names the Redeemer first in a list of twenty who passed out at the age of three-and-thirty. Disraeli does not say that all those in his list were saviors, for the second name he records is that of Alexander the Great, the list ending with Shelley.

Giorgione died of a broken heart.

The girl he loved eloped with his friend, Morta del Feltri, to whom he had proudly introduced her a short time before. It is an old story—it has been played again and again to its Da Rimini finish. The friend introduces the friend, and the lauded virtues of this friend inflames imagination, until love strikes a spark; then soon instead of three we find one—one groping blindly, alone, dazed, stunned, bereft.

The handsome Giorgione pined away, refusing to be comforted. And soon his proud, melancholy soul took its flight from an environment with which he was ever at war, and from a world which he never loved. And Titian was sent for to complete the pictures which he had begun.

Surely, disembodied spirits have no control over mortals, or the soul of Giorgione would have come back and smitten the hand of Titian with palsy.

For a full year before he died Giorgione had not spoken to Titian, although he had seen him daily.

Giorgione had surpassed all artists in Venice. He had a careless, easy, limpid style. But there was decision and surety in his swinging lines, and best of all, a depth of tenderness and pity in his faces that gave to the whole a rich, full and melting harmony.

Giorgione's head touched heaven, and his feet were not always on earth. Titian's feet were always on earth, and his head sometimes touched heaven. Titian was healthy and in love with this old, happy, cruel, sensuous world. He was willing to take his chances anywhere. He had no quarrel with his environment, for did he not stay here a hundred years (lacking half a year), and then die through accident? Of course he liked it. One woman, for him, could make a paradise in which a thousand nightingales sang. And if one particular woman liked some one else better, he just consoled himself with the thought that "there is just as good fish," etc. I will not quote Walt Whitman and say his feet were tenoned and mortised in granite, but they were well planted on the soil—and sometimes mired in clay.

Titian admired Giorgione; he admired him so much that he painted exactly like him—or as nearly as he could.

Titian was a good-looking young man, but he was not handsome like Giorgione. Yet Titian did his best; he patronized Giorgione's tailor, imitated his dreamy, far-away look, used a brush with his left hand, and painted with his thumb. His coloring was the same, and when he got a commission to fresco the ceiling of a church he did it as nearly like Giorgione frescoes as he could.

This kind of thing is not necessarily servile imitation—it is only admiration tipped to t' other side. It is found everywhere in aspiring youth and in every budding artist.

As in the animal kingdom, genius has its prototype. In the National Gallery at London you will see in the Turner Room a "Claude Lorraine" and a "Turner" hung side by side, as provided for in Turner's will. You would swear, were the pictures not labeled, that one hand did them both. When thirty, Turner admired Claude to a slavish degree; but we know there came a time when he bravely set sail on a chartless sea, and left the great Claude Lorraine far astern.

Titian loved Giorgione so well that he even imitated his faults. At first this high compliment was pleasing to Giorgione; then he became indifferent, and finally disgusted. The very sight of Titian gave him a pain.

He avoided his society. He ceased to speak to him when they met, and forbade his friends to mention the name "Titian" in his presence.

It was about this time that Giorgione's ladylove won fame by discarding him in that foolish, fishwife fashion. He called his attendants and instructed them thus: "Do not allow that painter from Cadore—never mind his name—to attend my funeral—you understand?"

Then he turned his face to the wall and died.

In his studio were various pictures partly completed, for it seems to have been his habit to get rest by turning from one piece of work to another. His executors looked at these unfinished canvases in despair. There was only one man in all Venice who could complete them, and that was Titian.

Titian was sent for.

He came, completed the pictures, signed them with the dead man's name, and gave them to the world.

"And," says the veracious Vasari, "they were done just as well, if not better than Giorgione himself could have done them, had he been alive!"

It was absurd of Giorgione to die of a broken heart and let Titian come in, making free with everything in his studio, and complete his work. It was very absurd.

Time is the great avenger—let us wait. Morta del Feltri, the perfidious friend, grew tired of his mistress: their love was so warm it shortly burned itself to ashes—ashes of roses.

Morta deserted the girl, fled from Venice, joined the army, and a javelin plunged through his liver at the battle of Zara ended his career.

The unhappy young woman, twice a widow, fought off hungry wolves by finding work in a glass-factory, making mosaics at fourteen cents a day. When she was seventy, Titian, aged seventy-five, painted her picture as a beggar-woman.

* * * * *

The quality of sentiment that clings about the life of Giorgione seems to forbid a cool, critical view of his work. Byron indited a fine poem to him; and poetic criticism seems for him the proper kind. The glamour of sentiment conceals the real man from our sight. And anyway, it is hardly good manners to approach a saint closely and examine his halo to see whether it be genuine or not. Halos are much more beautiful when seen through the soft, mellow light of distance.

Giorgione's work was mostly in fresco, so but little of it has survived. But of his canvases several surely have that tender, beseeching touch of spirit which stamps the work as great art.

Whether Mrs. Jameson is right in her assumption that all canvases bearing Giorgione's name are spurious which lack that look of pity, is a question. I think that Mrs. Jameson is more kind than critical, although my hope is that Renan is correct in his gratuitous statement, "At the Last Great Day men will be judged by women, and the Almighty will merely vise the verdict." If this be true, all who, like Giorgione, have died for the love of woman will come off lightly.

But the fact is, no man is great all the time. Genius is an exceptional mood even in a genius, and happy is the genius who, like Tennyson, builds a high wall about his house, so he is seen but seldom, and destroys most of his commonplace work.

Ruskin has printed more rubbish than literature—ten times over. I have his complete works, and am sorry to say that, instead of confining myself to "Sesame and Lilies," I have foolishly read all the dreary stuff, including statistics, letters to Hobbs and Nobbs, with hot arguments as to who fished the murex up, and long, scathing tirades against the old legal shark who did him out of a hundred pounds. Surely, to be swindled by a lawyer is not so unusual a thing that it is worth recording!

But Ruskin wrote about it, had it put in print, read the proof, and printed the stuff, so no one, no matter how charitably disposed, can arise and zealously declare that this only is genuine, and that spurious. It's all genuine—rubbish, bosh and all.

Titian painted some dreary, commonplace pictures, and he also painted others that must ever be reckoned as among the examples of sublime art that have made the world stronger in its day and generation and proud of what has been.

Titian was essentially a pagan. When he painted Christian subjects he introduced a goodly flavor of the old Greek love of life. Indeed, there is a strong doubt whether the real essence of Christianity was ever known at Venice, except in rare individual cases.

It was the spirit of the sea-kings, and not the gentle, loving Christ, that inspired her artists and men of learning.

The sensuous glamour of the Orient steeped the walls of San Marco in their rainbow tints, and gave that careless, happy habit to all the Venetian folk. In Titian's time, as today, gay gallants knelt in the churches, and dark, dreamy eyes peeked out from behind mantillas, and the fan spoke a language which all lovers knew. Outside was the strong smell of the sea, and never could a sash be flung open to the azure but there would come floating in on the breeze the gentle tinkle of a guitar.

But Titian, too, as well as Giorgione, infused into his work at times the very breath of life.

At the Belle d' Arte at Venice is that grand picture, "The Assumption," which for more than two hundred years was in the Church of Santa Maria de' Frari. When Napoleon appointed a commission to select the paintings in Venice that were considered best worth preserving and protecting, and take them to the Belle d' Arte, this picture was included in the list. It was then removed from its place, where it had so long hung, above the grave of the man who executed it.

I have several large photographs of this picture, showing different portions of it. One of these pictures reveals simply the form of the Virgin. She rises from the earth, caught up in the clouds, the drapery streaming in soft folds, and on the upturned face is a look of love and tenderness and trust, combined with womanly strength, that hushes us into tears.

Surely there is an upward law of gravitation as well as a gravitation that pulls things down. Titian has shown us this. And as he drew over and over again in his pictures the forms and faces of the men and women he knew, so I imagine that this woman was a woman he knew and loved. She is not a far-off, tenuous creature, born of dreams: she is a woman who has lived, suffered, felt, mayhap erred, and now turns to a Power, not herself, eternal in the heavens. Into this picture the artist infused his own exalted spirit, for the mood we behold manifest in others is usually but the reflection of our own spirit.

In some far-off eon, ere this earth-journey began, some woman looked at me that way once, just as Titian has this woman look, with the same melting eyes and half-parted lips, and it made an impression on my soul that subsequent incarnations have not effaced.

I bought the photograph in Venice, at Ongania's, and paid three dollars for it. Then I framed it in simple, unplaned, unstained cedar, and it hangs over my desk now as I write.

When I am tired and things go wrong, and the round blocks all seem to be getting into the square holes, and remembrances of the lawyer who cheated me out of a hundred pounds come stealing like a blight over my spirit, I look up at the face of this woman who is not only angelic but human. I behold the steady upward flight and the tender look of pity, and my soul reaches out, grasping the hem of the garment of Her who we are told was the Mother of God, and with Her I leave the old sordid earth far beneath and go on, and on, and up, and up, and up, until my soaring spirit mingles and communes with the great Infinite.



ANTHONY VAN DYCK

His pieces so with live objects strive, That both or pictures seem, or both alive. Nature herself, amaz'd, does doubting stand, Which is her own and which the painter's hand, And does attempt the like with less success, When her own work in twins she would express. His all-resembling pencil did outpass The magic imagery of looking-glass. Nor was his life less perfect than his art. Nor was his hand less erring than his heart. There was no false or fading color there, The figures sweet and well-proportioned were.

—Cowley's "Elegy on Sir Anthony Van Dyck"



The most common name in Holland is Van Dyck. Its simple inference is that the man lives on the dyke, or near it. In the good old days when villagers never wandered far from home, the appellation was sufficient, and even now, at this late day, it is not especially inconsistent.

In Holland you are quite safe in addressing any man you meet as Van Dyck.

The ancient Brotherhood of Saint Luke, of Antwerp, was always an exclusive affair, but during the years between Fifteen Hundred Ninety-seven and Sixteen Hundred Twenty-three there were twenty-seven artists by the name of Van Dyck upon its membership register. Out of these two dozen and three names, but one interests us.

Anthony Van Dyck was the son of a rich merchant. He was born in the year Fifteen Hundred Ninety-nine—just twenty-two years after the birth of Rubens. Before Anthony was ten years old the name and fame of Rubens illumined all Antwerp, and made it a place of pilgrimage for the faithful lovers of art of Northern Europe.

The success of Rubens fired the ambition of young Van Dyck. His parents fostered his desires, and after he had served an apprenticeship with the artist Van Balen, a place was secured for him in the Rubens studio. For a full year the ambitious Rubens took small notice of the Van Dyck lad, and possibly would not have selected him then as a favorite pupil but for an accident.

Rubens reduced his work to a system. While in his studio he was the incarnation of fire and energy. But at four o'clock each day he dismissed his pupils, locked the doors, and mounting his horse, rode off into the country, five miles and back.

One afternoon, when the master had gone for his usual ride, several of the pupils returned to the studio, wishing to examine a certain picture, and by hook or by crook gained admittance. On an easel was a partly finished canvas, the paint fresh from the hands of the master. The boys examined the work and then began to scuffle—boys of sixteen or seventeen always scuffle when left to themselves. They scuffled so successfully that the easel was upset, and young Van Dyck fell backwards upon the wet canvas, so that the design was transferred to his trousers.

The picture was ruined.

The young men looked upon their work aghast. It meant disgrace for them all.

In despair Van Dyck righted the easel, seized a brush, and began to replace the picture ere it could fade from his memory. His partners in crime looked on with special personal interest and encouraged him with words of lavish praise. He worked to within ten minutes of the time the master was due; and then all made their escape by the window through which they had entered.

The next day, when the class assembled, the pupils were ordered to stand up in line. Then they were catechized individually as to who had replaced the master's picture with one of his own.

All pleaded ignorance until the master reached the blond-haired Van Dyck. The boy made a clean breast of it all, save that he refused to reveal the names of his accomplices.

"Then you painted the picture alone?"

"Yes," came the firm answer that betokened the offender was resolved on standing the consequences.

The master relieved the strained tension by a laugh, and declared that he had only discovered the work was not his own by perceiving that it was a little better than he could do. Accidents are not always unlucky—this advanced young Van Dyck at once to the place of first assistant to Peter Paul Rubens.

* * * * *

Commissions were pouring in on Rubens. With him the tide was at flood. He had been down to Paris and had returned in high spirits with orders to complete that extensive set of pictures for Marie de Medici; he also had commissions from various churches; and would-be sitters for portraits waited in his parlors, quarreling about which should have first place.

Van Dyck, his trusted first lieutenant, lived in his house. The younger man had all the dash, energy and ambition of the older one. He caught the spirit of the master, and so great was his skill that he painted in a way that thoroughly deceived the patrons; they could not tell whether Rubens or Van Dyck had done the work.

This was very pleasing to Rubens. But when Van Dyck began sending out pictures on his own account, properly signed, and people said they were equal to those of Rubens, if not better, Rubens shrugged his shoulders.

There was as little jealousy in the composition of Peter Paul Rubens as in any artistic man we can name; but to declare that he was incapable of jealousy, as a few of his o'er-zealous defenders did, is to apply the whitewash. The artistic temperament is essentially feminine, and jealousy is one of its inherent attributes. Of course there are all degrees of jealousy, but the woman who can sit serenely by and behold her charms ignored for those of another, by one who yesterday sat at her feet making ballad to her eyebrow and sighing like a furnace, does not exist on the planet called Earth.

The artist, in any line, craves praise, and demands applause as his lawful right; and the pupil who in excellence approaches him, pays him a compliment that warms the cockles of his heart. But let a pupil once equal him and the pupil's name is anathema. I can not conceive of any man born of woman who would not detest another man who looked like him, acted like him, and did difficult things just as well. Such a one robs us of our personality, and personality is all there is of us.

The germ of jealousy in Rubens' nature had never been developed. He dallied with no "culture-beds," and the thought that any one could ever really equal him had never entered his mind. His conscious sense of power kept his head high above the miasma of fear.

But now a contract for certain portraits that were to come from the Rubens studio had been drawn up by the Jesuit Brothers, and in the contract was inserted a clause to the effect that Van Dyck should work on each one of the pictures.

"Pray you," said Rubens, "to which Van Dyck do you refer? There are many of the name in Antwerp."

The jealousy germ had begun to develop.

And about this time Van Dyck was busying himself as understudy, by making love to Rubens' wife. Rubens was a score of years older than his pupil, and Isabella was somewhere between the two—say ten years older than Van Dyck, but that is nothing! These first fierce flames that burn in the heart of youth are very apt to be for some fair dame much older than himself. No psychologist has ever yet just fathomed the problem, and I am sure it is too deep for me—I give it up. And yet the fact remains, for how about Doctor Samuel Johnson—and did not our own Robert Louis fall desperately in love with a woman sixteen years his senior? Aye, and married her, too, first asking her husband's consent, and furtherance also being supplied by the ex-husband giving the bride away at the altar. At least, we have been told so.

Were this sketch a catalog, a dozen notable instances could be given in which very young men have been struck hard by women old enough to have nursed them as babes.

Van Dyck loved Isabella Rubens ardently. He grew restless, feverish, lost appetite and sighed at her with lack-luster eye across the dinner-table. Rubens knew of it all, and smiled a grim, sickly smile.

"I, too, love every woman who sits to me for a portrait. He'll get over it," said the master. "It all began when I allowed him to paint her picture."

Busy men of forty, with ambitions, are not troubled by Anthony Hope's interrogation. They glibly answer, "No, no, love is not all—it's only a small part of life—simply incidental!"

But Van Dyck continued to sigh, and all of his spare time was taken up in painting pictures of the matronly Isabella. He managed to work even in spite of loss of appetite; and sitters sometimes called at the studio and asked for "Master Van Dyck," whereas before there was only one master in the whole domain.

Rubens grew aweary.

He was too generous to think of crushing Van Dyck, and too wise to attempt it. To cast him out and recognize him openly as a rival would be to acknowledge his power. A man with less sense would have kicked the lovesick swain into the street. Rubens was a true diplomat. He decided to get rid of Van Dyck and do it in a way that would cause no scandal, and at the same time be for the good of the young man.

He took Van Dyck into his private office and counseled with him calmly, explaining to him how hopeless must be his love for Isabella. He further succeeded in convincing the youth that a few years in Italy would add the capsheaf to his talent. Without Italy he could not hope to win all; with Italy all doors would open at his touch.

Then he led him to his stable and presented him with his best saddle-horse, and urged immediate departure for a wider field and pastures new.

A few days later the handsome Van Dyck—with a goodly purse of gold, passports complete, and saddlebags well filled with various letters of introduction to Rubens' Italian friends—followed by a cart filled with his belongings, started gaily away, bound for the land where art had its birth.

"With Italy—with Italy I can win all!" he kept repeating to himself as he turned his horse's head to the South.

* * * * *

The first day's ride took the artistic traveler to the little village of Saventhem, five miles from Brussels. Here he turned aside long enough to say good-by to a fair young lady, Anna Van Ophem by name, whom he had met a few months before at Antwerp.

He rode across the broad pasture, entered the long lane lined with poplars, and followed on to the spacious old stone mansion in the grove of trees.

Anna herself saw him coming and came out to meet him. They had not been so very well acquainted, but the warmth of a greeting all depends upon where it takes place. It was lonely for the beautiful girl there in the country: she welcomed the handsome young painter-man as though he were a long-lost brother, and proudly introduced him to her parents.

Instead of a mere call he was urged to put up his horse and remain overnight; and a servant was sent out to find the man who drove the cart with the painter's belongings, and make him comfortable.

The painter decided that he would remain overnight and make an early start on the morrow.

And it was so agreed.

There was music in the evening, and pleasant converse until a late hour, for the guest must sit up and see the moon rise across the meadow—it would make such a charming subject for a picture!

So they sat up to see the moon rise across the meadow.

At breakfast the next morning there was a little banter on the subject of painting. Could not the distinguished painter remain over one day and give his hosts a taste of his quality?

"I surely will if the fair Anna will sit for her portrait!" he courteously replied.

The fair Anna consented.

The servant who drove the cart had gotten on good terms with the servants of the household, and was being initiated into the mysteries of making Dutch cheese.

Meanwhile the master had improvised a studio and was painting the portrait of the charming Anna.

After working two whole days he destroyed the canvas because the picture was not keyed right, and started afresh. The picture was fairish good, but his desire now was to paint the beautiful Anna as the Madonna.

Van Dyck's affections having been ruthlessly uprooted but a few days before, the tendrils very naturally clung to the first object that presented itself—and this of course was the intelligent and patient sitter, aged nineteen last June.

If Rubens could not paint the picture of a lady without falling in love with her, what should be expected of his best pupil, Van Dyck?

Pygmalion loved into life the cold marble which his hand had shaped, and thus did Van Dyck love his pictures into being. All portrait-painters are sociable—they have to be in order to get acquainted with the subject. The best portrait-painter in America talks like a windmill as he works, and tries a whole set round of little jokes, and dry asides and trite aphorisms on the sitter, meanwhile cautiously noting the effect. For of course so long as a sitter is coldly self-conscious, and fully mindful that he is "being took," his countenance is as stiff, awkward, and constrained as that of a farmer at a dinner-party.

Hence the task devolves upon the portrait-artist to bring out, by the magic of his presence, the nature of the subject. "In order to paint a truly correct likeness, you must know your sitter thoroughly," said Van Dyck.

The gracious Rubens prided himself on his ability in this line. He would often spend half an hour busily mending a brush or mixing paints, talking the while, but only waiting for the icy mood of the sitter to thaw. Then he would arrange the raiment of his patron, sometimes redress the hair, especially of his lady patrons, and once we know he kissed the cheek of the Duchess of Mantua, "so as to dispel her distant look." I know a portrait-artist in Albany who is said to occasionally salute his lady customers by the same token, and if they protest he simply explains to them that it was all in the interest of art—in other words, artifice for art's sake.

After three days at the charming old country-seat at Saventhem, Van Dyck called his servant and told him to take the shoes off of the saddle-horse, and turn it and the cart-horse loose in the pasture. He had decided to remain and paint a picture for the village church.

And it was so done.

The pictures that Van Dyck then painted are there now in the same old ivy-grown, moss-covered church at Saventhem. The next time you are in Brussels it will pay you to walk out and see them.

One of the pictures is called "Saint Martin Dividing His Cloak With Two Beggars." The Saint is modestly represented by Van Dyck himself, seated astride the beautiful horse that Rubens gave him.

The other picture is "The Holy Family," in which the fair Anna posed for the Virgin, and her parents and kinsmen are grouped around her as the Magi and attendants.

Both pictures reveal the true Van Dyck touch, and are highly prized by the people of the village and the good priests of the church. Each night a priest carries in a cot and sleeps in the chancel to see that these priceless works of art are protected from harm. When you go there to see them, give the cowled attendant a franc and he will unfold the tale, not just as I have written it, but substantially. He will tell you that Van Dyck stopped here on his way to Italy and painted these pictures as a pious offering to God, and what boots it after all!

More than once have the village peasants collected, armed with scythes, hoes and pitchforks, to protect these sacred pictures from vandalism on the part of lustful collectors or marauding bands of soldiers.

In Eighteen Hundred Fourteen, a detachment of French soldiers killed a dozen of the villagers, and a priest fell fighting for these treasures on the sacred threshold, stabbed to his death. Then the vandals tramped over the dead bodies, entered the church, and cut from its frame Van Dyck's "Holy Family" and carried the picture off to Paris. But after Napoleon had gotten his Waterloo (only an hour's horseback ride from Saventhem), the picture was restored to the villagers on order of the Convention.

Rubens waited expectantly, thinking to have news from his brilliant pupil in Italy. He waited a month. Two months passed, and still no word. After three months a citizen reported that the day before he had seen Van Dyck, aided by a young woman, putting up a picture in the village church at Saventhem.

Rubens saddled his horse and rode down there. He found Van Dyck and his lady-love sitting hand in hand on a mossy bank, in a leafy grove, listening to the song of a titmouse. Rubens did not chide the young man; he merely took him one side and told him that he had stayed long enough, and "beyond the Alps lies Italy." He also suggested that Anthony Van Dyck could not afford to follow the example of his illustrious Roman namesake who went down into Egypt and found things there so softly luxurious that he forgot home, friends, country—all! To remain at Saventhem would be death to his art—he must have before him the example of the masters.

Van Dyck said he would think about it; and Rubens took a look at his old saddle-horse rolling in the pasture or wading knee-deep in clover, and rode back home.

In a few days he sent Chevalier Nanni down to the country-seat at Saventhem, to tell Van Dyck that he was on his way to Italy and that Van Dyck had better accompany him.

Van Dyck concluded to go. He made tearful promises to his beautiful Anna that he would return for her in a year.

And so the servant, who had become an expert in the making of Dutch cheese, caught the horses out of the pasture, and having rebroken them, the cavalcade started southward in good sooth.

* * * * *

It was four years before Van Dyck returned. He visited Milan, Florence, Verona, Mantua, Venice and Rome, and made himself familiar with the works of the masters. Everywhere he was showered with attention, and the fact that he was the friend and protege of Rubens won him admittance into the palaces of the nobles.

The four years in Italy widened his outlook and transformed him from a merely handsome youth into a man of dignity and poise.

Great was his relief when he returned to Antwerp to hear that the pretty Anna Van Ophem of Saventhem had been married three years before to a worthy wine merchant of Brussels, and was now the proud mother of two handsome boys.

Great was the welcome that Van Dyck received at Antwerp; and in it all the gracious Rubens joined. But there was one face the returned traveler missed: Isabella had died the year before.

The mere fact that a man has been away for several years studying his profession gives him a decided prestige when he returns. Van Dyck, fresh from Italy, exuberant with life and energy, became at once the vogue.

He opened a studio, following the same lines that Rubens had, and several churches gave him orders for extensive altarpieces.

Antwerp prided herself on being an artistic center. Buyers from England now and then appeared, and several of Rubens' pictures had been taken to London to decorate the houses and halls of royalty.

Portrait-painting is the first form of art that appeals to a rude and uncultivated people. To reproduce the image of a living man in stone, or to show a likeness of his face in paint, is calculated to give a thrill even to a savage. There is something mysterious in the art, and the desire to catch the shadow ere the substance fades is strong in the human heart. One reason that sacred art was so well encouraged in the Middle Ages was because the faces portrayed were reproductions of living men and women. This lent an intense personal interest in the work, and insured its fostering care. Callous indeed was the noble who would not pay good coin to have himself shown as Saint Paul, or his enemy as Judas. In fact, "Judas Receiving the Thirty Pieces of Silver" was a very common subject, and the "Judas" shown was usually some politician who had given offense.

In Sixteen Hundred Twenty-eight, England had not yet developed an art-school of her own. All her art was an importation, for although some fine pictures had been produced in England, they were all the work of foreigners—men who had been brought over from the Continent.

Henry the Eighth had offered Raphael a princely sum if he would come to London and work for a single year. Raphael, however, could not be spared from Italy to do work for "the barbarians," and so he sent his pupil, Luca Penni. Bluff old Hans Holbein also abode in England and drew a goodly pension from the State.

During the reign of Mary and her Spanish husband, Philip, several pictures by Titian arrived in London, via Madrid. Then, too, there were various copies of pictures by Paul Veronese, Murillo and Velasquez that long passed for original, because the copyist had faithfully placed the great artist's trademark in the proper place.

Queen Elizabeth held averages good by encouraging neither art nor matrimony—whereas her father had set her the example of being a liberal patron of both. If Elizabeth never discovered Shakespeare, how could she be expected to know Raphael?

About Sixteen Hundred Twenty, the year the "Mayflower" sailed, Paul Vensomer, Cornelis Jannsen and Daniel Mytens went over to England from the Netherlands and quickly made fortunes by painting portraits for the nobility. This was the first of that peculiar rage for having a hall filled with ancestors. The artists just named painted pictures of people long gone hence, simply from verbal descriptions, and warranted the likeness to give satisfaction.

Oh, the Dutch are a thrifty folk!

James the First had no special eye for beauty—no more than Elizabeth had—but a few of his nobles were intent on providing posterity with handsome ancestors, and so the portrait-painter flourished.

An important move in the cause of literature was made by King James when he placed Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower; for Raleigh's best contributions to letters were made during those thirteen years when he was alone, with the world locked out. And when his mind began to lose its flash, the King wisely put a quietus on all danger of an impaired output by cutting off the author's head.

Still, there was no general public interest in art until the generous Charles appeared upon the scene. Charles was an elegant scholar and prided himself on being able to turn a sonnet or paint a picture; and the only reason, he explained, why he did not devote all his time to literature and art was because the State must be preserved. He could hire men to paint, but where could one be found who could govern?

Charles had purchased several of Rubens' pieces, and these had attracted much attention in London. Receptions were given where crowds surged and clamored and fought, just to get a look at the marvelous painting of the wonderful Fleming. Such gorgeous skill in color had never before been seen in England.

Charles knighted Rubens and did his best to make him a permanent attache of his Court; but Rubens had too many interests of a financial and political nature at home to allow himself to be drawn away from his beloved Antwerp.

But now he had a rival—the only real rival he had ever known. Van Dyck was making head. The rival was younger, handsomer, and had such a blandishing tongue and silken manner that the crowd began to call his name and declare he was greater than Caesar.

Yet Rubens showed not a sign of displeasure on his fine face—he bowed and smiled and agreed with the garrulous critics when they smote the table and declared that all of Van Dyck's Madonnas really winked.

He bided his time.

And it soon came, for the agent of Lord Arundel, that great Maecenas of the polite arts, came over to Flanders to secure treasures, and of course called on Rubens.

And Rubens talked only of Van Dyck—the marvelous Van Dyck.

The agent secured several copies of Van Dyck's work, and went back to England, telling of all that Rubens had told him, with a little additional coloring washed in by his own warm imagination.

To discover a genius is next to being one yourself. Lord Arundel felt that all he had heard of Van Dyck must be true, and when he went to the King and told him of the prodigy he had found, the King's zeal was warm as that of the agent, for does not the "messianic instinct" always live?

This man must be secured at any cost. They had failed to secure Rubens, but the younger man had no family ties, no special property interests, neither was he pledged to his home government as was Rubens.

Straightway the King of England dispatched a messenger urging Anthony Van Dyck to come over to England. The promised rewards and honors were too great for the proud and ambitious painter to refuse. He started for England.

* * * * *

In stature Van Dyck was short, but of a very compact build. He carried the crown of his head high, his chin in, and his chest out. His name is another added to that list of big-little men who had personality plus, and whose presence filled a room. Caesar, Napoleon, Lord Macaulay, Aaron Burr and that other little man with whom Burr's name is inseparably linked, belong to the same type. These little men with such dynamic force that they can do the thinking for a race are those who have swerved the old world out of her ruts—whether for good or ill is not the question here.

When you find one of these big-little men, if he does not stalk through society a conquering Don Juan it is because we still live in an age of miracles.

Women fed on Van Dyck's smile, and pined when he did not deign to notice them. He was royal in all his tastes—his manner was regal, and so proud was his step that when he passed forbidden lines, sentinels and servants saluted and made way, never daring to ask him for card, passport or countersign.

He gloried in his power and worked it to its farthest limit.

Unlike Rembrandt, he never painted beggars; nor did he ever stoop as Titian did when he pictured his old mother as a peasant woman at market, in that gem of the Belle d' Arte at Venice; nor did he ever reveal on his canvas wrinkled, weather-worn old sailors, as did Velasquez.

He pictured only royalty, and managed, in all his portraits, to put a look of leisure and culture and quiet good-breeding into the face, whether it was in the original or not. In fact, he fused into every picture that he painted a goodly modicum of his own spirit. You can always tell a Van Dyck portrait; there is in the face a self-sufficiency, a something that speaks of "divine right"—not of arrogance, for arrogance and assumption reveal a truth which man is trying to hide, and that is that his position is a new acquirement. Van Dyck's people are all to the manner born.

He was thirty-three years old when he arrived in England.

King Charles furnished the painter a house at Blackfriars, fronting the Thames, to insure a good light, and gave him a summer residence in Kent. All his expenses were paid by the State, and as his tastes were regal the demands on the public exchequer were not small. His title was, "Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King and Queen of England."

Van Dyck had worked so long with Rubens that he knew how to use 'prentice talent. He studied by a system and turned off a prodigious number of canvases. The expert can at once tell a picture painted by Van Dyck during his career in England: it lacks the care and finish that was shown in his earlier years. Yet there is a subtle sweep and strength in it all that reveals the personality of the artist.

Twenty-two pictures he painted of King Charles that we can trace. These were usually sent away as presents. And it is believed that in the seven years Van Dyck lived in England he painted nearly one thousand portraits.

The courtly manner and chivalrous refinement of the Fleming made him a prime favorite of Charles. He was even more kingly than the King.

In less than three months after he arrived in England Charles publicly knighted him, and placed about his neck a chain of gold to which was attached a locket, set with diamonds, containing a picture of the King.

A record of Van Dyck's affairs of the heart would fill a book. His old habit of falling in love with every lady patron grew upon him. His reputation went abroad, and his custom of thawing the social ice by talking soft nonsense to the lady on the sitter's throne, while it repelled some allured others.

At last Charles grew nettled and said that to paint Lady Digby as "The Virgin" might be all right, and even to turn around and picture her as "Susanna at the Bath" was not necessarily out of place, but to show Margaret Lemon, Anne Carlisle and Catherine Wotton as "The Three Graces" was surely bad taste. And furthermore, when these same women were shown as "Psyche," "Diana" and the "Madonna"—just as it happened—it was really too much!

In fact, the painter must get married; and the King and Queen selected for him a wife in the person of a Scottish beauty, Maria Ruthven.

Had this proposition come a few years before, the proud painter would have flouted it. But things were changed. Twinges of gout and sharp touches of sciatica backed up the King's argument that to reform were the part of wisdom. Van Dyck's manly shape was tending to embonpoint: he had evolved a double chin, the hair on his head was rather seldom, and he could no longer run upstairs three steps at a time. Yes, he would get married, live the life of a staid, respectable citizen, and paint only religious subjects. Society was nothing to him—he would give it up entirely.

And so Sir Anthony Van Dyck was married to Maria Ruthven, at Saint Paul's Cathedral, and the King gave the bride away, ceremonially and in fact.

Sir Anthony's gout grew worse, and after some months the rheumatism took an inflammatory turn. Other complications entered, which we would now call Bright's Disease—that peculiar complaint of which poor men stand in little danger.

The King offered the Royal Physician a bonus of five hundred pounds if he would cure Van Dyck: but if he had threatened to kill the doctor if the patient died, just as did the Greek friends of Byron, when the poet was ill at Rome, it would have made no difference.

A year after his marriage, and on the day that Maria Ruthven gave birth to a child, Anthony Van Dyck died, aged forty years. Rubens had died but a few months before.

The fair Scottish wife did not care to retain her illustrious name at the expense of loneliness, and so shortly married again. Whom she married matters little, since it would require a search-warrant to unearth even the man's name, so dead is he. But inasmuch as the brilliant Helena Fourment, second wife of Rubens, whose picture was so often painted by her artist-husband, married again, why shouldn't Madame Van Dyck follow the example?

It is barely possible that Charles Lamb was right when he declared that no woman married to a genius ever believed her husband to be one. We know that the wife of Edmund Spenser became the Faerie Queene of another soon after his demise, and whenever Spenser was praised in her presence she put on a look that plainly said, "I could a tale unfold."

My own opinion is that a genius makes a very bad husband. And further, I have no faith in that specious plea, "A woman who marries a second time confers upon her first husband the highest compliment, for her action implies that she was so happy in her first love that she is more than willing to try it again."

I think the reverse is more apt to be the truth, and that the woman who has been sorely disappointed in her first marriage is anxious to try the great experiment over again, in order if possible to secure that bliss which every daughter of Eve feels is her rightful due.

Maria Ruthven lived to rear a goodly brood of children, and Samuel Pepys records that she used to send a sort o' creepy feeling down the backs of callers by innocently introducing her children thus: "This is my eldest daughter, whose father was Sir Anthony Van Dyck, of whom you have doubtless heard; and these others are my children by my present husband, Sergeant Nobody." Van Dyck's remains are buried in Saint Paul's Cathedral. A very fine monument, near the grave of Turner, marks the spot; but his best monument is in the examples of his work that are to be found in every great art-gallery of the world.



FORTUNY

I think I knew Fortuny as well as any one did. He was surcharged with energy, animation and good-cheer; and the sunshine he worked into every canvas he attempted, was only a reflection of the sparkling, gem-like radiance of his own nature. He absorbed from earth, air, sky, the waters and men, and transmuted all dross into gold. To him all things were good.

—Letter From Regnault



Now, once upon a day there was a swart, stubby boy by the name of Mariano Fortuny. He was ten years old, going on 'leven, and lived with his grandfather away up and up four flights of rickety stairs in an old house at the village of Reus, in Spain. Mariano's father had died some years before—died mysteriously in a drunken fight at a fair, where he ran a Punch and Judy show. Some said the Devil had come and carried him off, just as he nightly did Mr. Punch.

Frowsy, little, shock-headed Mariano didn't feel so awfully bad when his father died, because his father used to make him turn the hand-organ all day, and half the night, and take up the collections; and the fond parent used to cuff him when there were less than ten coppers in the tambourine. They traveled around from place to place, with a big yellow dog and a little blue wagon that contained the show. They hitched their wagon to a dog. At night they would sleep in some shed back of a tavern, or under a table at a market, and Mariano would pillow his head on the yellow dog and curl up in a ball trying to keep warm.

When the father died, a tall man, who carried a sword and wore spurs, and had two rows of brass buttons down the front of his coat, took the dog and the wagon and the Punch and Judy show and sold 'em all—so as to get money to pay the funeral expenses of the dead man.

The tall man with the sword might have sold little Mariano, too, or thrown him in with the lot for good measure, but nobody seemed to want the boy—they all had more boys than they really needed already.

A fat market-woman gave the lad a cake, and another one gave him two oranges, and still another market-woman, fatter than the rest, blew her nose violently on her check apron and said it was too bad a boy like that didn't have a mother.

Mariano never had a mother—at least none that he knew of, and it really seemed as if it didn't make much difference, but now he began to cry, and, since the fat woman had suggested it, really wished he had a mother, after all.

There was an old priest standing by in the group. Mariano had not noticed him. But when the priest said, "But God is both our father and our mother, so no harm can come to us!" Mariano looked up in his face and felt better.

The priest's name was Father Gonzales; Mariano knew, because this is what the market-woman called him. The fat market-woman talked with the priest, and the priest talked with the man with the dangling sword, and then Father Gonzales took the boy by the hand and led him away, and Mariano trotted along by his side, quite content, save for a stifled wish that the big yellow dog might go too. And it is a gross error to suppose that a yellow dog is necessarily nothing but a canine whose capillary covering is highly charged with ocherish pigment.

Where they were going made no difference. "God is our father and our mother"—Father Gonzales said so—and, faith! he ought to know.

And by and by they came to the tall old tenement-house, and climbed up the stairs to where Mariano's old "grandfather" lived. Perhaps he wasn't Mariano's sure-enough grandfather, but he was just as good as if he had been.

* * * * *

But now it was an awfully long time ago since little Mariano and Father Gonzales had first climbed the stairs to where Grandfather Fortuny lived. The old grandfather and Mariano worked very hard, but they were quite content and happy. They had enough to eat, and each had a straw bed and warm blankets to cover him at night, and when the weather was very cold they made a fire of charcoal in a brazier and sat before it with spread-out hands, very thankful that God had given them such a good home and so many comforts.

The grandfather made images out of white plaster, flowers sometimes, and curious emblems that people bought for votive offerings. Little Mariano's share in the work was to color the figures with blue and red paint, and give a lifelike tint to the fruit and bouquets that the grandfather cast from the white plaster.

Father Gonzales was their best customer, and used often to come up and watch Mariano paint an image of the Virgin, just as he ordered it. Mariano was very proud to receive Father Gonzales' approval; and when the image was complete he would sometimes get a copper extra for delivering the work to some stricken person that the priest wished especially to remember. For one of Father Gonzales' peculiarities was that although he bought lots of things he always gave them away.

Mariano used often to carry letters and packages for Father Gonzales.

One day the good priest came up the stairs quite out of breath. He carried a letter in his hand.

"Here, Mariano, my boy, you can run, while my poor old legs are full of rheumatism. Here, take this letter down to the Diligence Office and tell them to send it tonight, sure. It is for the Bishop at Barcelona and it must be in his hands before tomorrow. Run now, for the last post closes very soon."

Mariano took the letter, dived hatless out of the door and, sitting on the first stair, shot to the bottom like the slide to doom.

Grandfather Fortuny and the gentle old priest leaned out over the stone window-sill and laughed to see the boy scurry down the street.

Then the priest went his way.

Grandfather Fortuny waited, looking out of the window, for the boy to come back. The boy did not come.

He waited.

Lights began to flicker in the windows across the way.

A big red star came up in the West. The wind blew fresh and cool.

The old man shut down the sash, and looked at the untasted supper of brown bread and goat's milk and fresh fruit.

He took his hat from the peg and his cane from the corner and hobbled down the stairs. He went to the Diligence Office. No one there remembered seeing the boy—how can busy officials be expected to remember everything?

Grandfather Fortuny made his way to the house of Father Gonzales. The priest had been called away to attend a man sick unto death—he would not be back for an hour.

The old man waited—waited one hour—two.

Father Gonzales came, and listened calmly to the troubled tale of the old man. Then together they made their way over to the tall tenement and up the creaky stairway.

There was the flicker of a candle to be seen under the door.

They entered, and there at the table sat Mariano munching silently on his midnight supper.

"Where have you been?" was the surprised question of both old men, speaking as one person.

"Me? I've been to Barcelona to give the letter to the Bishop—the last diligence had gone," said the boy with his mouth full of bread.

"To Barcelona—ten miles, and back?"

"Me? Yes."

"Did you walk?"

"No, I ran."

Father Gonzales looked at Grandfather Fortuny, and Grandfather Fortuny looked at Father Gonzales; then they both burst out laughing. Mariano placed an extra plate on the table, and the three drew up chairs.

* * * * *

Business was looking up with Grandfather Fortuny and Mariano. All the images they made were quickly taken. People said they liked the way the cheeks and noses of the Apostles were colored; and when Father Gonzales brought in a sailor who had been shipwrecked, and the sailorman left ten pesetas for a plaster-of-Paris ship to be placed as a votive offering in the Chapel of Saint Dominic, their cup was full.

Mariano made the ship himself, and painted it, adding the yellow pennant of Spain to the mainmast.

This piece of work caused a quarrel between Grandfather Fortuny and Father Gonzales. The priest declared that a boy like that shouldn't waste his youth in the shabby, tumble-down village of Reus—he should go to Barcelona and receive instruction in art.

The grandfather cried and protested that the boy was all he had to love in the wide world; he himself was growing feeble, and without the lad's help at the business nothing could be done—starvation would be the end.

Besides, it would take much money to send Mariano to the Academy—it would take all their savings, and more! Do not inflate the child with foolish notions of making a fortune and winning fame! The world is cruel, men are unkind, and the strife of trying to win leads only to disappointment and vain regret at the last. Did not the artist Salvio commit suicide? Mariano had now a trade—who in Reus could make an image of the Virgin and color it in green, red and yellow so it would sell on sight for two pesetas?

Father Gonzales smiled and said something about images at two pesetas each as compared with the work of Murillo and Velasquez. He laughed at the old man's fears of starvation, and defied him to name a single case where any one had ever starved. And as for expenses, why, he had thought it all out: he would pay Mariano's expenses himself!

"Should we two old men, about ready to die, stand in the way of the success of that boy?" exclaimed the priest. "Why, he will be an artist yet, do you hear?—an artist!"

They compromised on the Grammar-School, with three lessons a week by a drawing-master.

Grandfather Fortuny did not starve. Mariano was a regular steam-engine for work. He made more images evenings, and better ones, than they had ever made before during the day.

Finally Father Gonzales' wishes prevailed and Mariano was sent to the Academy at Barcelona. Out of his own scanty income the old priest set aside a sum equal to eight dollars a month for Mariano; and when the grandfather's sight grew too feeble for him to work at his trade he moved over to the rectory.

For a year, Father Gonzales sent the eight dollars on the first of each month. And then there came to him a brusk notification from Claudio Lorenzale, the Director of the Academy, to the effect that certain sums had been provided by the City of Barcelona to pay the expenses of four of the most worthy pupils at the Academy, and Mariano Fortuny had been voted as one who should receive the benefit of the endowment.

Father Gonzales read the notice to Grandfather Fortuny, and then they sent out for a fowl, and a bottle and a loaf of bread two feet long; and together the two old men made merry.

The grandfather had now fully come to the belief that the lad would some day be a great artist.

We do not know much concerning the details of Mariano's life at Barcelona, save from scraps of information he now and then gave out to his friends Regnault and Lorenzo Valles, and which they in turn have given to us.

Yet we know he won the love of his teachers, and that Federico Madrazo picked out his work and especially recommended it.

Madrazo, I believe, is living now—at least he was a few years ago. He was born and bred an artist. His father, Joseph, had been a pupil under David, and was an artist of more than national renown. He served the Court at Madrid in various diplomatic relations, and won wealth and a noble name.

Federico Madrazo used to spend a portion of his time at the Academy of Barcelona as instructor and adviser to the Director. I do not know his official position, if he had one, but I know he afterward became the Director of the Museum of Art at Madrid.

Madrazo had two sons, who are now celebrated in the art world. One of them, Raimonde Madrazo, is well known in Paris, and, in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three, had several pictures on exhibition at the Chicago Exposition; while another son, Rivera, is a noted sculptor and a painter of no small repute.

And so it was that Mariano Fortuny at Barcelona attracted the attention of Federico Madrazo, the artist patrician.

I can not find that Mariano's work at this time had any very special merit. It merely showed the patient, painstaking, conscientious workman. But the bright, strong, eager young man was the sort that every teacher must love. He knew what he was at school for, and did his best.

Madrazo said, "He's a manly fellow, and if he does not succeed he is now doing more—he deserves success." So Mariano Fortuny and the great Madrazo, pupil and teacher, became firm friends.

And we know that, in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven, Mariano was voted the "Prize of Rome." Each year this prize was awarded to the scholar who on vote of the teachers and scholars was deemed most deserving. It meant two years of study at Rome with five hundred dollars a year for expenses. And the only obligation was that the pupil should each year send home two paintings: one an original and the other a copy of some old masterpiece.

The sum of two hundred fifty dollars was advanced to Mariano at once. He straightway sent one-half of the amount down to his grandfather, with particulars of the good news.

"What did I tell you?" said the grandfather. "It was I who first taught him to use a brush. I used to caution him about running his reds into his greens, and told him to do as I said and he would be a great artist yet."

Father Gonzales and Grandfather Fortuny went out and bought two fowls, three bottles, and a loaf of bread a yard long.

Mariano made all preparations to start for Rome. But the night before the journey was to begin, conscription officers came to his lodging and told him to consider himself under arrest—he must serve the State as a soldier.

It seems that the laws of Spain are such that any citizen can be called on to carry arms at any moment; and there are officials who do little but lie in wait for those who can pay, but have no time to fight. These officials are more intent on bleeding their countrymen than the enemy.

Mariano applied to his friend Madrazo for advice as to what to do, and Madrazo simply cut the Gordian knot by paying out of his own purse three hundred dollars to secure the release of the young artist.

And so Mariano started gaily away, carrying with him the heart's love of two old men, and the admiring affection of a whole school.

The grandfather died three months afterward—went babbling down into the Valley, making prophecies to the last to the effect that Mariano Fortuny would yet win deathless fame.

And Father Gonzales lived to see these prophecies fulfilled.

* * * * *

Then, at twenty-two, Fortuny was ordered by the city of Barcelona to accompany General Prim on his Algerian expedition, it was a milepost on his highway of success.

Nominally he was secretary to the General. Who it was secured his appointment he never knew; but we have reason to suppose it was Federico Madrazo.

Fortuny's two years in Rome had just expired; his Barcelona friends knew that the time had been well spent, and the opportunities improved, and a further transplantation they believed would result in an increased blossoming.

"Enter into life! Enter into life!" was the call of a prophet long ago. In barbaric Africa, Fortuny entered into life with the same fine, free, eager, receptive spirit that he had elsewhere shown. General Prim, soldier and scholar, saw that his secretary was capable of doing something more than keeping accounts, and so a substitute was hired and Fortuny was sent here and there as messenger, but in reality, so that he could see as many sides of old Moorish life as possible.

Staid old General Prim loved the young man just as Madrazo had. Fortuny was not much of a soldier, for war did not interest him, save from its picturesque side. "War is transient, but Beauty is eternal," he once said.

Even the fact that the Spanish Army was now on the soil of her ancient enemy, the Moor, did not stir his patriotism.

He sketched with feverish industry, fearing the war would end too soon, and he would have to go back with empty sketchbooks. The long stretches of white sands, the glaring sunshine, the paradox of riotous riches and ragged poverty, the veiled women, blinking camels, long rifles with butts inlaid with silver, swords whose hilts are set with precious stones, gray Arab horses with tails sweeping the ground, and everywhere the flutter of rags—these things bore in on his artist-nature and filled his heart.

He hastily painted in a few of his sketches and sent them as presents to his friends in Barcelona.

The very haste of the work, the meager outline and simple colors—glaring whites and limpid blues, with here and there a dash of red to indicate a scarf or sash—astonished his old teachers. Here were pictures painted in an hour that outmatched any of the carefully worked out, methodical attempts of the Academy! It was all life, life, life—palpitating life.

The sketches were shown, the men in power interviewed, and the city of Barcelona ordered Fortuny to paint one large picture to be eventually placed in the Parliament House to commemorate the victory of General Prim.

As an earnest of good faith a remittance of five hundred dollars accompanied the order.

The war was short. At the battle of Wad Ras the enemy was routed after a pitched fight where marked dash and spirit were shown on both sides.

And so this was to be the scene of Fortuny's great painting. Hundreds of sketches were made, including portraits of General Prim and various officers. Fortuny set about the work as a duty to his patrons who had so generously paved the way for all the good fortune that was his. The painting was to be a world-beater; and Fortuny, young, strong, ambitious—knowing no such word as fail—went at the task.

Fortuny had associated with many artists at Rome and he had heard of that wonderful performance of Horace Vernet's, the "Taking of the Smalah of Abd-el-Kader." This picture of Vernet's, up to that time, was the largest picture ever held in a single frame. It is seventy-one feet long and sixteen feet high. To describe that picture of Vernet's with its thousand figures, charging cavalry, flashing sabers, dust-clouds, fleeing cattle, stampeding buffalos, riderless horses, overturned tents, and fear-stricken, beautiful women would require a book.

In passing, it is well to say that this picture of Vernet's is the parent of all the panorama pictures that have added to the ready cash of certain enterprising citizens of Chicago, and that Vernet is the father of the modern "military school."

If you have seen Vernet's painting you can never forget it, and if there were nothing else to see at Versailles but this one picture you would be repaid, and amply repaid, for going out from Paris to view it.

Before beginning his great canvas Fortuny was advised to go to Versailles and see the Vernet masterpiece.

He went and spent three days studying it in detail.

He turned away discouraged. To know too much of what other men have said is death to a writer; for an artist to be too familiar with the best in art is to have inspiration ooze out at every pore.

Fortuny took a week to think it over. He was not discouraged—not he—but he decided to postpone work on the masterpiece and busy himself for a while with simpler themes. He remained at Paris and made his thumb-nail sketches: a Moor in spotless white robe with red cap, leaning against a wall; a camel-driver at rest; a solitary horseman with long spear, a trellis with climbing vines, and a veiled beauty looking out from behind, etc.

And in all these pictures is dazzling sunshine and living life. The joy of them, the ease, the grace, the beauty, are matchless.

Goupil and Company, the art-dealers, contracted to take all the work he could turn out. And Fortuny did not make the mistake of doing too much. He possessed the artistic conscience, and nothing left his studio that did not satisfy his heart and head.

Trips had been taken to Florence, Venice and the beloved Morocco, and the poise and grace and limpid beauty of Fortuny's pictures seemed to increase.

Three years had passed, and now came a letter from the authorities at Barcelona asking for their great battle picture, and a remittance was sent "to meet expenses."

Fortuny promised, and made an effort at the work.

Another year went by and another letter of importunity came. Barcelona did not comprehend how her gifted son was now being counted among the very ablest artists in Paris—that world center of art. Artists should struggle for recognition, be rebuffed, live on a crust in dingy garrets, cultivate a gaunt and haggard look, and wear suits shiny at the elbows!

How could the old professors down at Barcelona understand that this mere youth was pressed with commissions from rich Americans, and in receipt of a princely income?

Fortuny returned all the money that Barcelona had sent him, regarding it all as a mere loan, and promised to complete the battle picture whenever he could bring his mind to bear upon it so that the work would satisfy himself.

The next year he visited Spain and was received at Madrid and Barcelona as a prince. Decorations and ceremonials greeted him at Madrid; and at Barcelona there were arches of triumph built over the streets, and a hundred students drew his carriage from the steamboat-landing up to the old Academy where he used to draw angles and curves from a copy all day long.

And it was not so many moons after this little visit to Barcelona that wedding-bells were sent a-swing, and Mariano Fortuny was married to Cecilia, daughter of Federico Madrazo.

Their honeymoon of a year was spent at the Alhambra Palace amid the scenes made famous by our own Washington Irving. And it was from Granada that he sent a picture to America to be sold for the benefit of the sufferers in the Chicago fire.

But there were no idle days. The artist worked with diligence, dipping deep into the old Moorish life, and catching the queer angles of old ruins and more queer humanity upon his palette. His noble wife proved his mate in very deed, and much of his best work is traceable to her loving criticism and inspiration.

Paris, Granada and Rome were their home, each in turn. The prices Fortuny realized were even greater than Meissonier commanded. Some of his best pieces are owned in America, through the efforts of W. H. Stewart of Philadelphia. At the A. T. Stewart sale, in New York, the "Fortunys" brought higher prices than anything else in the collection, save, I believe, the "1807" of Meissonier. In fact, there are more "Fortunys" owned in New York than there are in either Barcelona or Madrid.

Indeed, there is a marked similarity between the style of Fortuny and that of Meissonier. When some busybody informed Meissonier that Fortuny was imitating him, Meissonier replied, "To have such a genius as Mariano Fortuny imitate me would be the greatest happiness of my whole career."

Fortuny's life is mirrored in his name: his whole career was one triumphant march to fortune, fame, love and honor.

He avoided society, as he was jealous of the fleeting hours, and his close friends were few; but those who knew him loved him to a point just this side of idolatry.

Fortuny died at Rome on November Twenty-second, Eighteen Hundred Seventy-two, of brain rupture—an instant and painless death. In his short life of thirty-six years he accomplished remarkable results, but all this splendid work he regarded as merely in the line of preparation for a greater work yet to come.

For some weeks before he died he had been troubled with a slight fever, contracted, he thought, from painting in a damp church; but the day of his death he took up his brush again and, as he worked, gaily talked with his wife of their plans for the future.

It is very pleasant to recall, however, that before death claimed him, Fortuny had completed the great picture of "The Battle of Wad Ras." The canvas is now hanging on the wall of the Parliament House at Barcelona, and the picture is justly the pride of the city that showed itself such a wise and loving mother to the motherless boy, Mariano Fortuny.

* * * * *

Italy and Spain are sisters, and not merely first cousins, as Mr. Whistler once remarked. Their history to a great degree is contemporaneous. They have seen dynasties arise, grow old, and die; and schools of art, once the pride of the people, sink into blank forgetfulness: for schools, like dynasties and men, live their day and go tottering to their rest.

Italy, as the elder sister, has set the fashion for the younger. The manners, habits and customs of the people have been the same.

To a great extent all art is controlled by fad and fashion; and all the fashions in the polite arts easily drifted from Italy into Spain. The works of Titian carried to Madrid produced a swarm of imitators, some of whom, like Velasquez, Zurbaran, Ribera and Murillo, having spun their cocoons, passed through the chrysalis stage, developed wings, and soared to high heaven. But the generations of imitators who followed these have usually done little better than gape.

And although Spain has been a kind mother to art for four hundred years, yet the modern school of Spanish art shows no "apostolic succession" from the past. It is a thing separate and alone: gorgeous, dazzling, strong, and rarely beautiful. Totally unlike the art of the old masters, it takes its scenes from Nature and actual living life—depending not on myth, legend or fable. It discards pure imagination, and by holding a mirror up to Nature has done the world the untold blessing of introducing it to itself.

The average man sees things in the mass, and therefore sees nothing; everything, to his vision, is run together in hopeless jumble: all is discord, confusion—inextricable confusion worse confounded.

But the artist who is also a scientist (whether he knows it or not) discovers that in the seeming confusion, order, method and law yet reign supreme. And to prove his point he lifts from the tangle of things one simple, single scene and shows this, and this alone, in all its full and rounded completeness—beautiful as a snow-crystal on the slide of a microscope.

All art consists in this: to show the harmony of a part. And having seen the harmony of a part we pass on to a point where we can guess the harmony of the whole. Whether you be painter, sculptor, musician or writer, all your endeavors are toward lifting from the mass of things a scene, a form, a harmony, a truth, and, relieving it from all that distracts, catch it in immortal amber.

The writer merely unearths truth: truth has always existed: he lifts it out of the mass, and holding it up where others can see it, the discerning cry, "Yes, yes—we recognize it!" The musician takes the sound he needs from the winds blowing through the forest branches, constructs a harp strung with Apollo's golden hair, and behold, we have a symphony! The wrongs of a race in bondage never touched the hearts of men until a woman lifted out a single, solitary black man and showed us the stripes upon the quivering back of Uncle Tom. One human being nailed to a cross reveals the concentrated woes of earth; and as we gaze upon the picture, into our hard hearts there comes creeping a desire to lessen the sorrows of the world by an increased love; and a gentleness and sympathy are ours such as we have never before known.

Fortuny is king of the modern school of Spanish painters. His genius made an epoch, and worked a revolution in the art of his country—and, some have said, in the art of the time.

As a nation it may be that Spain is crumbling into dust, but her rotting ruins will yet fertilize many a bank of violets. Certain it is that no modern art surpasses the art of Spain; and for once Italy must go to Spain for her pattern.



ARY SCHEFFER

The artistic tastes of the Princess, the lofty range of her understanding, her liberality, and the sterling benevolence of her mind all combined to engender a coldness and lack of sympathy between herself and the persons composing the Court.

In the heart of the Princess dwelt a deep religious faith, such as becomes a noble, womanly heart. Nevertheless, her ardent mind sought to penetrate every mystery, so she was often accused of being a doubter—when the reverse was really true.

—Ary Scheffer to His Brother Arnola



The artistic evolution of Ary Scheffer was brought about mainly through the influence of three women. In the love of these women he was bathed, nourished and refreshed; their approbation gave direction to his efforts; for them he lived and worked; while a fourth woman, by her inability to comprehend the necessities of such a genius, clipped his wings, so that he fell to earth and his feet mired in the clay.

The first factor in the evolution of Scheffer, in point of both time and importance, was his mother. She was the flint upon which he tried his steel: his teacher, adviser, critic, friend. She was a singularly strong and capable woman, seemingly slight and fragile, but with a deal of whipcord, sinewy strength in both her physical and mental fiber.

No one can study the lives of eminent artists without being impressed with the fact that the artist is essentially the child of his mother. The sympathy demanded to hold a clear, mental conception—the imagination that sees the whole, even when the first straight line is made—is the gift of mother to son. She gives him of her spirit, and he is heir to her love of color, her desire for harmony and her hunger for sympathy. These, plus his masculine strength, may allow him to accomplish that which was to her only a dream.

If a mother is satisfied with her surroundings, happy in her environment, and therefore without "a noble discontent," her children will probably be quite willing to have a good time on the "unearned increment" that is their material portion. Her virtue and passive excellence die with her, and she leaves a brood of mediocrities.

Were this miraculous scheme of adjustment lacking in the Eternal Plan, wealth, achievement and talent could be passed along in a direct line and the good things of earth be corraled by a single family.

But Nature knows no law of entail; she does, however, have her Law of Compensation, and this is the law which holds in order the balance of things. If a man accumulates a vast fortune, he probably also breeds spendthrifts who speedily distribute his riches; if he has great talent, the talent dies with him, for he only inspires those who are not of his blood; and if a woman is deprived of the environment for which her soul yearns, quite often her children adjust the average by working out an answer to her prayer.

When twenty-eight years of age we find Madame Scheffer a widow, with three sons: by name, Ariel, Henri and Arnold.

Madame Scheffer had a little money—not much, but enough to afford her a small, living income.

She might have married again, or she could have kept her little "dot" intact and added interest to principal by going and living with kinsmen who were quite willing to care for her and adopt her children.