Sulphate of copper, when dissolved in water, will give a beautiful blue color. The common red cabbage gives three colors. Slice the cabbage and pour boiling water on it; when cold, add a small quantity of alum, and you have purple. Potash dissolved in the water will give a brilliant green. A few drops of muriatic acid will turn the cabbage-water into a crimson.
Then, again, if a ghostly look be required, mix common salt with spirits of wine in a metal cup and set it upon a wire frame over a spirit-lamp. When the cup becomes heated, and the spirits of wine ignite, the other lights in the room should be extinguished, and that of the spirit-lamp shaded in some way. The result will be that the whole group will become like the witches in Macbeth,
“That look not like the inhabitants of the earth,
But yet are of it.”
This burning of common salt produces a very weird effect. It seems that salt has some other properties than the conservative, preserving, hospitable kind of quality which legend and the daily needs of mankind have ascribed to it.
A very fine and artistic set of tableaux can be gotten up by reference to such a great work as “Boydell’s Shakespeare,” if it happens to be at hand. Also a study of fine engravings, such as one finds in the “National Academy.” If these books are not attainable, almost any pictorial magazine will furnish subjects. Or, if imagination is consulted, construct a series out of Waverley, or from the but too well known scenes of the French Revolution, or from George Eliot’s delightful “Romola”—a book full of remarkable pictures, with the additional charm of the old Florentine dress. Sometimes a very impressive poem is given in tableaux, like Tennyson’s “Princess,” or, the “Dream of Fair Women.” Then there are many artistic but rather horrible surprises, as “The Head of John the Baptist,” which can be “cut off” admirably by an intervening table, and so on; but nothing is so good as a study of the fine groups of the best painters.
Venetian scenes, from Titian’s and Tintoretto’s pictures, can be admirably represented in tableaux. The Italian wealth of color is always impressive; and as engravings of these pictures are attainable, it is well to represent them. Roman scenes are very effective, and especially as Alma Tadema arranges them for us, with his fine feeling for the antique.
The humor of Hogarth, aided as it is by the picturesque dress of his day, can be represented in a tableau. But without some such aids humor is generally lost in a tableau. There is not time for it. Some of Darley’s groups, as, for instance, the illustrations of “Rip Van Winkle,” are admirable, and would seem to contradict this statement, for they are full of fun; but then—they are wonderfully well dressed. That early Revolutionary dress, borrowed in part from the days of Queen Anne, is very picturesque.
If there is some one in the group whose fine sense of the proprieties of art can be trusted, the allegorical can be attempted. But the danger is that the allegorical in art is generally ridiculous. Faith, Hope, and Charity, Mercy and Peace, are better anywhere than in pictures.
The grotesque is always lost in a tableau, where there seems to be a sort of æsthetic demand for the heroic, the refined, and the delicate. A double action may be presented with very good effect; as in some of those fancies of Retzsch and Ary Scheffer, where an angel bends over a sleeping child, or a group, unknown to the actors in front, is representing another picture behind. But the best effects are the simplest. One should not attempt too much. The old example, called “The Dull Lecture,” painted by Gilbert Stuart Newton, where a prosy old philosopher is reading aloud to a pretty girl who is fast asleep, is a case in point. That has been a favorite tableau for forty years, nor are its charms yet done away with. Tableaux from Dickens have only a moderate success, excepting, perhaps, the rather overdone “Christmas Carol.” The dress is wanting in color and character.