Greuze had the deepest love and affection for children, and was never so happy as when painting them. For this reason we find that his pictures are not stiff little photographs of sedate and unnaturally wise young people, but that they have the frank unconsciousness and joyous serenity of youth. They are real children, and truth is as essential to greatness in the world of art as it is to greatness in the human character.
In his mode of life Greuze was eccentric and unhappy. He had the great fault of thriftlessness, and carelessness of his personal affairs, and when he died in 1805, in his eightieth year, he was reduced to a condition of miserable poverty. It is sad to contemplate so wretched an end to the life of one whose artistic creations will be admired and respected as long as art endures.
[THE SCULLION WHO BECAME A SCULPTOR.]
BY GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON.
In the little Italian village of Possagno there lived a jolly stone-cutter named Pisano. He was poor, of course, or he would not have been a stone-cutter, but he was full of good-humor, and everybody liked him.
There was one little boy especially who loved old Pisano, and whom old Pisano loved more than anybody else in the world. This was Antonio Canova, Pisano's grandson, who had come to live with him, because his father was dead, and his mother had married a harsh man, who treated the little Antonio roughly.
Antonio was a frail little fellow, and his grandfather liked to have him near him during his working hours.
While Pisano worked at stone-cutting, little Canova played at it, and at other things, such as modelling in clay, drawing, etc. The old grandfather, plain, uneducated man as he was, soon discovered that the pale-faced little fellow at his side had something more than an ordinary child's dexterity at such things.
The boy knew nothing of art or of its laws, but he fashioned his lumps of clay into forms of real beauty. His wise grandfather, seeing what this indicated, hired a teacher to give him some simple lessons in drawing, so that he might improve himself if he really had the artistic ability which the old man suspected. Pisano was much too poor, as he knew, ever to give the boy an art-education and make an artist of him, but he thought that Antonio might at least learn to be a better stone-cutter than common.