In one of the last rooms the servitor unlocked two handsome cases, and showed me, with a great deal of circumstance, two heads by Denner. They were an old man and his wife—two hale, temperate, good old country gossips—but so curiously finished! Every pore was painted. You counted the stiff stumps of the good man’s beard as you might those of a living person, till you were tired. Every wrinkle looked as if a month had been spent in elaborating it. The man said they were extremely valuable, and I certainly never saw anything more curiously and perhaps uselessly wrought.
Near them was a capital picture of a drunken fellow, sitting by himself, and laughing heartily at his own performance on the pipe. It was irresistible, and I joined in the laugh till the long suite of halls rung again.
Landscapes by Van Delen—such as I have seen engravings of in America, and sighed over as unreal—the skies, the temples, the water, the soft mountains, the distant ruins, seemed so like the beauty of a dream. Here, they recall to me even lovelier scenes in Italy—atmospheres richer than the painter’s pallet can imitate, and ruins and temples whose ivy-grown and melancholy grandeur are but feebly copied at the best.
Come Karl! I am bewildered with these pictures. You have twenty such galleries in Vienna, you say! I have seen enough for to-day, however, and we will save the Belvidere till to-morrow. Here! pay the servitor, and the footman, and the porter, and let us get into the open air. How common look your Viennese after the celestial images we have left behind! And, truly, this is the curse of refinement. The faces we should have loved else, look dull! The forms that were graceful before, move somehow heavily. I have entered a gallery ere now, thinking well of a face that accompanied me, and I have learned indifference to it, by sheer comparison, before coming away.
We return through the Kohlmarket, one of the most fashionable streets of Vienna. It is like a fancy ball. Hungarians, Poles, Croats, Wallachians, Jews, Moldavians, Greeks, Turks, all dressed in their national and striking costumes, promenade up and down, smoking all, and none exciting the slightest observation. Every third window is a pipe shop, and they show, by their splendour and variety, the expensiveness of the passion. Some of them are marked “two hundred dollars.” The streets reek with tobacco smoke. You never catch a breath of untainted air within the Glacis. Your hotel, your café, your coach, your friend, are all redolent of the same disgusting odour.
| [2] | By Franceschini. He passed his life with the Prince Liechstenstein, and his pictures are found only in this collection. He is a delicious painter, full of poetry, with the one fault of too voluptuous a style. |
| [3] | One of the loveliest pictures that divine painter ever drew. |