1014. THE MARTYRDOM OF ST. LAWRENCE.
Adam Elsheimer (German: 1578-1620).
Elsheimer was the son of a tailor at Frankfort-on-Maine. He himself settled in Rome. "He inherited with his northern blood an intense love of nature and her varied aspects. Upon this he engrafted a careful study of the human form, and in Italy he profited by the example of the great masters of preceding generations. Thus, aided by a certain homely imagination, he formed a style of his own, combining landscape and figure in such a manner that each was the necessary complement of the other, and that subject and situation were in perfect harmony. The lonely, and at that time, wooded, depressions of the Roman Campagna, and the hills of Albano and Tivoli, were his favourite haunts, and in their scenery his imagination placed events in biblical or mythological story. He loved especially to paint the strange effects produced by diverse sources of illumination. The novelty of his aims, the beauty of his execution, and the geniality of his disposition, gained him admirers and friends" (Official Catalogue). His contemporaries Sandrart and Cornelius de Bie describe him as an extraordinary artist who had "a peculiar manner of his own. He was, indeed, the first who invented a style of small sceneries, landscapes, and other curiosities." He possessed, we are told, so extraordinary a memory, that it was sufficient for him to have looked at an object or scene once to draw it with the utmost precision. The extreme patience and labour with which he finished his pictures were such that the prices he received never sufficiently repaid him. Had he been paid but a fourth part of what his works have since produced, he might have lived in affluence instead of indigence and distress. Elsheimer usually painted on copper (as is the case with this picture). His etchings and drawings are well known; in the Städel Institute of his native town there is a large collection of them. There are also some in the British Museum. Elsheimer's works had a considerable influence on many succeeding Dutch painters. "Elsheimer," says Mr. Colvin in his Guide to the British Museum Drawings, "fills a very important part in art as the forerunner on the one hand of Claude and his group, by his delight in the composition and massing of the forms of hill, plain, and grove in the country round Rome, and on the other hand of Rembrandt and his group, by his predilection for strong artificial contrasts of light, and for the dramatic and speaking action of his figures."
St. Lawrence (for whose legend see 747) is being prepared for martyrdom. Beside him there is an image of Cæsar, unto whom will be rendered Cæsar's due—the saint's life; but over his head is an angel from heaven, for unto God will go the saint's soul. The emperor is crowned on earth; the angel brings the saint a palm branch, an earnest of the martyr's crown in heaven.
1015. FRUIT, FLOWERS, AND DEAD BIRDS.
Jan van Os (Dutch: 1744-1808).
Born at Middelharnis, a most distinguished flower-painter in the manner of Van Huysum. He also painted marine pieces and wrote poetry. His wife drew portraits in chalk, and his two sons were painters.
Prominent amongst the flowers is the red cockscomb. A picture by the most distinguished flower-painter of his time, and characteristic, in an interesting particular, of Dutch pictures of this kind generally. "If the reader has any familiarity with the galleries of painting in the great cities of Europe, he cannot but retain a clear, though somewhat monotonously calm, impression of the character of those polished flower-pieces, or still-life pieces, which occupy subordinate corners, and invite to moments of repose, or frivolity, the attention and imagination which have been wearied in admiring the attitudes of heroism, and sympathising with the sentiments of piety. Recalling to his memory the brightest examples of these ... he will find that all the older ones agree—if flower-pieces—in a certain courtliness and formality of arrangement, implying that the highest honours which flowers can attain are in being wreathed into grace of garlands, or assembled in variegation of bouquets, for the decoration of beauty, or flattery of noblesse. If fruit or still-life pieces, they agree no less distinctly in directness of reference to the supreme hour when the destiny of dignified fruit is to be accomplished in a royal dessert; and the furred and feathered life of hill and forest may bear witness to the Wisdom of Providence by its extinction for the kitchen dresser. Irrespectively of these ornamental virtues, and culinary utilities, the painter never seems to perceive any conditions of beauty in the things themselves, which would make them worth regard for their own sake: nor, even in these appointed functions, are they ever supposed to be worth painting, unless the pleasures they procure be distinguished as those of the most exalted society" (Notes on Prout and Hunt, pp. 10, 11, where Ruskin goes on to contrast with this Dutch ideal the simple pleasure in the flowers and fruits for their own sake which marks W. Hunt's still-life drawings).
Observe, as further characteristic of Dutch fruit-pieces, the butterfly, the fly, and the earwig: "There was a further tour de force demanded of the Dutch workman, without which all his happiest preceding achievements would have been unacknowledged. Not only a dew-drop, but, in some depth of bell or cranny of leaf, a bee, or a fly, was necessary for the complete satisfaction of the connoisseur. In the articulation of the fly's legs, or neurology of the bee's wings, the genius of painting was supposed to signify her accepted disciples; and their work went forth to the European world, thenceforward, without question, as worthy of its age and country. But, without recognising in myself, or desiring to encourage in my scholars, any unreasonable dislike or dread of the lower orders of living creatures, I trust that the reader will feel with me that none of Mr. Hunt's peaches or plums would be made daintier by the detection on them of even the most cunningly latent wasp, or cautiously rampant caterpillar; and will accept, without so much opposition as it met with forty years ago, my then first promulgated, but steadily since repeated assertion, that the 'modern painter' had in these matters less vanity than the ancient one, and better taste" (ib. pp. 14, 15).