An admirable portrait. The Jesuit father, here depicted with so much quiet truth and skill, is a good representative of the great order which had at that time saved the Papacy. He is a student, but the crucifix is ever on his books. "The Jesuits appear," says Macaulay, "to have discovered the precise point to which intellectual culture can be carried without risk of intellectual emancipation." But he turns round from his book and looks with a smile of tender sadness on the spectator—he is ready to read your heart and to give you sympathy in return for confidences.
1169. MRS. ROBERT HOLLOND.
Ary Scheffer (French-Dutch: 1795-1858).
An artist who once enjoyed a great vogue (a version of this picture was bought in 1845 by the ex-Queen of the French for £1000), and whose pictures are historically interesting for their extraordinary absence of the colour-sense. Ary Scheffer's pictures, says Ruskin (Academy Notes, 1858, p. 40), are designed "on the assumption that the noblest ideal of colour is to be found in dust," and what he said in 1846 of the German School is equally true of Ary Scheffer:[229] "Brightness of colour is altogether inadmissible without purity and harmony; and the sacred painters must not be followed in their frankness of unshadowed colour, unless we can also follow them in its clearness. As far as I am acquainted with the modern schools of Germany, they seem to be entirely ignorant of the value of colour as an assistant of feeling, and to think that hardness, dryness, and opacity are its virtues as employed in religious art; whereas I hesitate not to affirm that in such art, more than in any other, clearness, luminousness, and intensity of hue are essential to right impression" (Modern Painters, vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 15). Ary Scheffer, whose father was court painter at Amsterdam, was born at Dordrecht. On the death of his father in 1809 his mother removed to Paris, and he became a pupil of Pierre Guérin. In 1826 he became drawing master in the Orleans family, and for the rest of his life he was attached to them. In 1830, in company with Thiers, he brought Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, to Paris; in 1848 he helped the king to fly, and went with him to Brussels. The events of the next few years shocked him so much that for a time he "could neither paint, eat, nor sleep," and he ceased altogether to exhibit. His best known works are "Paolo and Francesca" (1822), and "Dante and Beatrice" (1839). The former of these sold in 1842 for over £2000; but at the posthumous exhibition of his works, held shortly after his death, his reputation suffered greatly, and at subsequent sales the prices paid for his pictures went down with a rush. Their sentimentality made them popular for a while, but it could not save them from the condemnation due to their commonness of thought and poverty of colour.
A portrait of the lady—an English resident in Paris, and a friend of Ary Scheffer—who sat to him for St. Monica. The two pictures were bequeathed to the Gallery by her husband.
1170. ST. AUGUSTINE AND ST. MONICA.
Ary Scheffer (French-Dutch: 1795-1858).
To illustrate the popularity which Ary Scheffer enjoyed forty years ago, it may be interesting to cite what Mrs. Jameson said of this picture: "I saw in the atelier of the painter, Ary Scheffer, in 1845, an admirable picture of St. Augustine and his mother Monica. The two figures, not quite full-length, are seated; she holds his hand in both hers, looking up to heaven with an expression of enthusiastic undoubting faith;—'the son of so many tears cannot be cast away!' He also is looking up with an ardent, eager, but anxious, doubtful expression, which seems to say, 'Help thou my unbelief.' For profound and truthful feeling and significance, I know few things in the compass of modern art that can be compared to this picture" (Sacred and Legendary Art, 1850, p. 186).