NORTHWEST GALLERY.
From Mr. Dodge’s Pavilion, one goes into the Northwest Gallery, which leads directly into the Main Entrance Hall once more. In dimensions, arrangement, and general architectural scheme it corresponds to the Southwest Gallery, with which the visitor began his tour through the Rectangle. The prevailing color, however, is red, and not blue, both in the walls and in the coffers of the vaulted ceiling.
Mr. Melchers’s Paintings.—At either end, occupying the same position as Mr. Cox’s decorations, and of the same size and shape, is a painting by Mr. Gari Melchers, illustrating, at the north, War, and at the south, Peace. The same subjects, it is interesting to note, and as many readers will remember, were chosen by Mr. Melchers for his decorations at the World’s Fair in Chicago. The present paintings may be taken, therefore, as representing the development and completion of a favorite idea of the artist.
In the panel of War, the scene represented is that of a chieftain of some primitive tribe returning home with his clansmen across a desolate tract of open country from a successful battle. He is crowned with a wreath of laurel, and sits proudly astride a magnificent white horse. A second horseman rides beside him, and another a little behind. Three men carry a roughly constructed bier on which they are bringing home the dead body of a warrior for burial in his native soil. In the right-hand corner a woman kneels to care for a wounded man who has just sunk exhausted to the ground. Behind, a trumpeter sounds his horn, exulting in this dearly bought victory. To the left two foot-soldiers carry shields emblazoned with devices of primitive heraldry. One of them holds in a leash two straining bloodhounds, eager for their kennels, and leading the way toward home.
Mr. Melchers’s other painting, Peace, represents an early religious procession. The inhabitants of some little village, perhaps in prehistoric Greece, have come to the border of a grove bearing the image of their tutelar goddess, a small seated figure set on a little platform covered with an embroidered cloth. The procession has halted, and the priest is reading from a paper which he holds in his hand, containing, very likely, a blessing in the name of the goddess upon the fields and orchards of the villagers. Various objects, one of them the model of a ship, are carried in the procession to be offered up as memorials in the temple of the goddess, and in the rear a boy leads to the sacrifice a bull wreathed with garlands.
The following names—forming a list of the world’s most famous generals and admirals—are inscribed in tablets above the doors and windows of the gallery: Cyrus, Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Charles Martel, William the Conqueror, Frederick the Great, Charlemagne, Eugene, Marlborough, Napoleon, Wellington, Nelson, Washington, Jackson, Scott, Grant, Farragut, Sherman, and Sheridan.
WAR.—BY GARI MELCHERS.