1169. MRS. ROBERT HOLLOND.
Ary Scheffer (French-Dutch: 1795-1858).
An artist who once enjoyed a great vogue (a version of this picture was bought in 1845 by the ex-Queen of the French for £1000), and whose pictures are historically interesting for their extraordinary absence of the colour-sense. Ary Scheffer's pictures, says Ruskin (Academy Notes, 1858, p. 40), are designed "on the assumption that the noblest ideal of colour is to be found in dust," and what he said in 1846 of the German School is equally true of Ary Scheffer:[229] "Brightness of colour is altogether inadmissible without purity and harmony; and the sacred painters must not be followed in their frankness of unshadowed colour, unless we can also follow them in its clearness. As far as I am acquainted with the modern schools of Germany, they seem to be entirely ignorant of the value of colour as an assistant of feeling, and to think that hardness, dryness, and opacity are its virtues as employed in religious art; whereas I hesitate not to affirm that in such art, more than in any other, clearness, luminousness, and intensity of hue are essential to right impression" (Modern Painters, vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 15). Ary Scheffer, whose father was court painter at Amsterdam, was born at Dordrecht. On the death of his father in 1809 his mother removed to Paris, and he became a pupil of Pierre Guérin. In 1826 he became drawing master in the Orleans family, and for the rest of his life he was attached to them. In 1830, in company with Thiers, he brought Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, to Paris; in 1848 he helped the king to fly, and went with him to Brussels. The events of the next few years shocked him so much that for a time he "could neither paint, eat, nor sleep," and he ceased altogether to exhibit. His best known works are "Paolo and Francesca" (1822), and "Dante and Beatrice" (1839). The former of these sold in 1842 for over £2000; but at the posthumous exhibition of his works, held shortly after his death, his reputation suffered greatly, and at subsequent sales the prices paid for his pictures went down with a rush. Their sentimentality made them popular for a while, but it could not save them from the condemnation due to their commonness of thought and poverty of colour.
A portrait of the lady—an English resident in Paris, and a friend of Ary Scheffer—who sat to him for St. Monica. The two pictures were bequeathed to the Gallery by her husband.