Ombres Chinoises are performances by means of the shadows of figures projected upon a stretched sheet of thin calico or a gauze scene painted as a transparency. The cardboard flat figures are held behind this screen, illuminated from behind—the performer supporting each figure by a long wire held in one hand while wires from all the movable parts terminate in rings in which are inserted the fingers of his other hand.
See also C. Magnin, Histoire des marionettes (1852; 2nd ed., 1862); L. de Neuville, Histoire des marionettes (1892).
MARIOTTE, EDME (c. 1620-1684), French physicist, spent most of his life at Dijon, where he was prior of St Martin sous Beaune. He was one of the first members of the Academy of Sciences founded at Paris in 1666. He died at Paris on the 12th of May 1684. The first volume of the Histoire et mémoires de l’Académie (1733) contains many original papers by him upon a great variety of physical subjects, such as the motion of fluids, the nature of colour, the notes of the trumpet, the barometer, the fall of bodies, the recoil of guns, the freezing of water, &c.
His Essais de physique, four in number, of which the first three were published at Paris between 1676 and 1679, are his most important works, and form, together with a Traité de la percussion des corps, the first volume of the Œuvres de Mariotte (2 vols., Leiden, 1717). The second of these essays (De La nature de l’air) contains the statement of the law that the volume of a gas varies inversely as the pressure, which, though very generally called by the name of Mariotte, had been discovered in 1660 by Robert Boyle. The fourth essay is a systematic treatment of the nature of colour, with a description of many curious experiments and a discussion of the rainbow, halos, parhelia, diffraction, and the more purely physiological phenomena of colour. The discovery of the blind spot is noted in a short paper in the second volume of his collected works.
MARIPOSAN, or Yokuts, a linguistic stock of North American Indians, including some 40 small tribes. Its former territory was in southern California, around Tulare lake. The Mariposans were fishers and hunters. Their villages consisted of a single row of wedge-shaped huts, with an awning of brush along the front. In 1850 they numbered some 3000; in 1905 there were 154 on the Tule river reservation.
MARIS, JACOB (1837-1899), Dutch painter, first studied at the Antwerp Academy, and subsequently in Hébert’s studio during a stay in Paris from 1865 till 1871. He returned to Holland when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and died there in August 1899. Though he painted, especially in early life, domestic scenes and interiors invested with deeply sympathetic feeling, it is as a landscape painter that Maris will be famous. He was the painter of bridges and windmills, of old quays, massive towers, and level banks; even more was he the painter of water, and misty skies, and chasing clouds. In all his works, whether in water or oil colour, and in his etchings, the subject is always subordinate to the effect. His art is suggestive rather than decorative, and his force does not seem to depend on any preconceived method, such as a synthetical treatment of form or gradations of tone. And yet, though his means appear so simple, the artist’s mind seems to communicate with the spectator’s by directness of pictorial instinct, and we have only to observe the admirable balance of composition and truthful perspective to understand the sure knowledge of his business that underlies such purely impressionist handling. Maris has shown all that is gravest or brightest in the landscape of Holland, all that is heaviest or clearest in its atmosphere—for instance, in the “Grey Tower, Old Amsterdam,” in the “Landscape near Dordrecht,” in the “Sea-weed Carts, Scheveningen,” in “A Village Scene,” and in the numerous other pictures which have been exhibited in the Royal Academy, London, in Edinburgh (1885), Paris, Brussels and Holland, and in various private collections. “No painter,” says M. Philippe Zilcken, “has so well expressed the ethereal effects, bathed in air and light through floating silvery mist, in which painters delight, and the characteristic remote horizons blurred by haze; or again, the grey yet luminous weather of Holland, unlike the dead grey rain of England or the heavy sky of Paris.”
See Max Rooses, Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1899); R. A. M. Stevenson, “Jacob Maris,” Magazine of Art (1900); Ph. Zilcken, Peintres Hollandais modernes (Amsterdam, 1893); Jan Veth, “Een Studie over Jacob Maris,” Onze Kunst (Antwerp, 1902).