“Dès cet époque, il commenca à jouer avec l’argile, le marbre, le ciseau, liè par un attachement devenu une parenté d’esprit, avec une des plus belles et des plus splendides femmes de son époque, il fit son buste pendant qu’elle vivait; il le fit idéal et plus touchant après sa mort. Il moula en formes après, rudes, sauvages, de grandeur fruste, les traits paysanesque d’O’Connell. Ces bustes furent à l’instant vulgarisés en millièrs d’exemplaires en Angleterre et à Paris. C’étaient des créations neuves.…
“Ces premiers succès furent des plus complets. Il cherchait un visage. Il en trouva un. Lord Byron, dont il fut l’ami et avec lequel il voyagea pendant deux ans[21] en Italie, n’était plus qu’un souvenir aimé dans son cœur.… Il fit le buste de Lamartine,…” and then there is something approaching very closely to a rhapsody on this work of art, and then a set of verses by Lamartine himself!
Debt drove D’Orsay to seek in art a means of adding to his income; in the case of Mr. Mitchell of Bond Street, who published a series of portrait drawings, it is even possible that he used his art to cancel his debt for Opera boxes, etc.! These portraits were 14 inches high and 10½ inches wide and were sold at 5s. each. The set must have been almost a pictorial “Who’s Who,” and among those honoured with inclusion may be named Byron, Disraeli, Theodore Hook, Carlyle, Liszt, D’Orsay himself, the Duke of Wellington, Greville, Louis Napoleon, Bulwer Lytton, Trelawney, Landor, Dickens, Lady Blessington, Henry Bulwer, Captain Marryat and Sir Edwin Landseer.
Richard James Lane, the engraver and lithographer, saw much of D’Orsay, and judging by the following letter held him in esteem:—
“As a patron, his kind consideration for my interest, and prompt fulfilment of every engagement, never failed me for the more than twenty years of my association with him; and the friendship that arose out of our intercourse (and which I attest with gratitude) proceeded at a steady pace, without the smallest check, during the same period; and remained unbroken, when on his final departure from England, he continued to give me such evidence of the constancy of his regard, as will be found conveyed in his letters.
“In the sketches of the celebrities of Lady Blessington’s salons, which he brought to me (amounting to some hundred and fifty, or more), there was generally an appropriate expression and character, that I found difficult to retain in the process of elaboration; and although I may have improved upon them in the qualities for which I was trained, I often found that the final touches of his own hand alone made the work satisfactory.
“Of the amount and character of the assistance of which the Count availed himself, in the production of his pictures and models, I have a clear notion.…
“When a gentleman would rush into the practice of that which, in its mechanism, demands experience and instruction, he avails himself of the help of a craftsman, whose services are sought for painting-in the subordinate parts, and working out his rude beginnings. In the first rank of art, at this day, are others who, like the Count d’Orsay, have been unprepared, excepting by the possession of taste and genius, for the practice of art, and whose merits are in no way obscured by the assistance which they also freely seek in the manipulation of their works; and it is no less easy to detect, in the pictures of the Count, the precise amount of mechanical aid which he has received from another hand, than the graces of character and feeling that are superadded by his own. I have seen a rough model, executed entirely by himself, of such extraordinary power and simplicity of design, that I begged him to have it moulded, and not to proceed to the details of the work, until he could first place this model side by side with the cast in clay, to be worked up. He took my advice, and his equestrian statue of the first Napoleon may fairly justify my opinion.
“In art, he had a heartfelt sympathy, a searching eye, and a critical taste, fostered by habitual intercourse with some of our first artists.”
This letter from D’Orsay to Lane shows the Count in an amiable light:—