"A un prix d'extrême bon marché, 4 francs environ, en petits volumes joliment cartonnés, et ornés de quinze à vingt planches, la maison Sampson Low, Marston et Cie., à Londres, a entrepris de publier une série de biographies des grands artistes, résumées d'après les travaux les plus récents et les plus estimés. Une bibliographie, une liste des gravures exécutées par ou d'après l'artiste, une liste de ses œuvres ou de leurs prix; enfin, un index accompagnant ces résumés confiés à des écrivains distingués versés dans l'histoire de l'art. Ont paru ou sont en préparation dans cette série de notices: Titien, Rembrandt, Raphaël, Van Dyck et Hals, Holbein, Tintoret, Turner, Rubens, Michel-Ange, Léonard, Giotto, Gainsborough, Velazquez, Pérugin, Reynolds, Landseer, Delaroche et Vernet, les Petit Maîtres, les Peintres de figure en Hollande.
"Peut-être la maison Sampson Low, Marston et Cie, devrait-elle tenter une édition française de ces jolis et intéressants petits volumes sérieusement étudiés, dont la brièveté substantielle et le bon marché deviennent une bénédiction par ce temps d'énormes publications à prix non moins énormes."—Duranty.
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON,
CROWN BUILDINGS, 188. FLEET STREET.
FOOTNOTES
[1] This essay was originally written for, and will ultimately appear in, the series of "Illustrated Biographies of the Great Artists," published by Messrs. Sampson Low, and Co.
[2] See Pre-Raphaelitism, by John Ruskin. 1862.
[3] In this connection the following quotation from Mr. Ruskin's description of the origin of English pre-Raphaelitism may be found interesting. He is here speaking of Messrs. Millais, Hunt, and Rossetti: "Pupils in the same schools receiving precisely the same instruction, which for so long a time has paralysed every one of our painters; these boys agree in disliking to copy the antique statues set before them. They copy them as they are bid, and they copy them better than anybody else; they carry off prize after prize, and yet they hate their work. At last they are admitted to study from the life, they find the life very different from the antique, and they say so. Their teachers tell them the antique is the best, and they must not copy the life. They agree among themselves that they like the life and that copy it they will. They do copy it faithfully, and their masters forthwith declare them to be lost men. Their fellow-students hiss them whenever they enter the room. They cannot help it, they join hands and tacitly resist both the hissing and the instruction. Accidentally a few prints of the works of Giotto, a few casts from that of Ghiberti, fall into their hands, and they see in them something which they never saw before; something eternally and everlastingly true."
[4] "From Giotto's old age to the youth of Raphael the advance consists principally in two great steps: the first, that distant objects were more or less invested with a blue colour; the second, that trees were no longer painted with a black ground but with a rich dark brown, or dark green one."—John Ruskin.
[5] See Kugler's Handbook of Painting, edited by Lady Eastlake, 1874, pp. 17 and 18, for a description of the origin of mosaic art.