Monday, March 24.
In the evening I went (as I generally do) to Adelaide Sartoris', where I found Bickerton Lyons, French, and Leighton. This latter is a singularly gifted youth. Besides his talent for painting and drawing, which is already at twenty-five very remarkable, and likely, if he lives, to place him in the highest rank of modern artists, he appears endowed with an extraordinary facility for anything he attempts to do. He speaks many foreign languages with remarkable fluency, and almost without accent; he is possessed of much musical intelligence, and on matters connected with the art which he has made his particular study and profession his information is very extensive—and, I am told by others, better able to judge than myself, that this is the case. With all these qualities, natural and acquired, I never saw a more amiable or single-hearted youth.
Wednesday, March 26.
Went with the Sartoris's, Montfort, and Leighton to the Palais Bourbon to see Morny's pictures—a charming collection. The Emperor had just sent him two beautiful pieces of Beauvais tapestry—marvellous specimens of that manufacture; in return, I suppose, for his speech of the other day, with which his Majesty was highly pleased.
Wednesday, April 2, 1856.
In the morning, with Adelaide Sartoris, Browning the poet, Cartwright, and Leighton, to the Pourtalès Gallery—a charming collection. The pictures that most pleased me were a Paul Veronese, a Rembrandt, and a Greuze. There is also a fine collection of Raphael ware—glass and bronzes. Pourtalès has ordered by will that this collection should remain intact for ten years, and then to be sold to the highest bidder.
Wednesday, April 9, 1856.
Last night, after a dinner given by a Lady Monson to Adelaide Sartoris, Leighton, and myself, at Philippe's, we adjourned to the first representation of the Italian translation of Legouvé's play of "Medea"—that in which Rachel refused, after attending rehearsals, to act the principal part, and about which there was a trial. Great curiosity was shown about this performance, and there was a great scramble for places; and, although inserts for nearly three weeks, we were fobbed off with very bad seats in the orchestra. The play had great success, and that of Ristori was prodigious, but not greater than she deserved. The part is most arduous, full of transitions, and almost always on the full stretch. Her costume was most picturesque, having been designed by Schæffer, and she looked like a figure on an Etruscan vase; and in no play that I have yet seen her in does she produce more effect than in certain passages of "Medea." The audience was wound up to a pitch of frantic enthusiasm. I am always astonished at the effect she produces on the mass of the audience, when I know how few there are who really can follow the play. But, whether by means of her countenance, voice, or gestures, she contrives to make all the nuances of her acting felt by the public. I expect when she comes to London she will find a vast difference between this excitable and sympathetic audience and that stupid, flat collection of would-be fashionables who will promener leurs ennuis at her performances.
Before his family had arrived in Paris the subject of the Orpheus entitled "The Triumph of Music," to which Leighton was devoting himself, was criticised by his father, which criticism Leighton answered in the following letter:—
I do not think honestly that the choice of a mythological subject like Orpheus shows the least poverty of invention, a quality, I take it, much more manifested in the manner of treatment than in the choice of a moment.