Page:EB1911 - Volume 03.djvu/720

 war that ever he had seen in Ireland.” His short but successful term of office was ended by his recall in 1549.

 BELLINGHAM, a city of Whatcom county, Washington, U.S.A., on the E. side of Bellingham Bay, 96 m. N. of Seattle. Pop. (1900) 11,062; (1905, state est.) 26,000; (1910, U.S. census) 24,298. Area about 23 sq. m. It is served by the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, the Canadian Pacific, and the Bellingham Bay & British Columbia railways—being a terminus of the last named, which operates only 62 m. of line and connects with the Mt. Baker goldfields and the Nooksack valley farm and orchard region. A suburban electric line was projected in 1907. About 2 m. south-east of the city is the main body of Lake Whatcom, 13 m. long, 1 m. wide, and 318 ft. higher than the city and the source of its water-supply, a gravity system which cost $1,000,000, being owned by the city. Bellingham has two Carnegie libraries. Among the principal buildings are the county court-house, the city hall, the Young Men’s Christian Association building, and Beck’s theatre, with a seating capacity of 2200. The largest of the state’s normal colleges is situated here; in 1907 it had a faculty of 25 and 350 students; there are two high schools, two business colleges, and one industrial school also in the city. The excellent harbour, and the fact that Bellingham is nearer to the great markets of Alaska than any other city in the states, make the port an important shipping centre. In the value of manufactured product the city was fourth in the state in 1905 (being passed only by Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane), with a value of $3,293,988; according to a census taken by the local chamber of commerce the value of the product in 1906 was $7,751,464. The principal industrial establishments are shingle (especially cedar) and saw-mills, salmon canneries and factories for the manufacture of tin cans, and machinery used in the canning of salmon. Motive and electric lighting power is brought 52 m. from the falls of the north fork of the Nooksack river, where there is a power plant which furnishes 3500 horsepower. There are deposits of clay and limestone in the surrounding country, and cement is manufactured in the vicinity of the city. The blue-grey Chuckanut sandstone is quarried on the shore of Chuckanut Bay, south of Bellingham; and a coarse, dark-brown sandstone is quarried on Sucia Island, west of the city. There are quarries also on Waldron Island. Bellingham was formed in 1903 by the consolidation of the cities of New Whatcom (pop. in 1900, 6834) and Fairhaven (pop. in 1900, 4228), and was chartered as a city of the first class in 1904; it is named from Bellingham Bay, which Vancouver is supposed to have named, in 1792, in honour of Sir Henry Bellingham.  BELLINI, the name of a family of craftsmen in Venice, three members of which fill a great place in the history of the Venetian school of painting in the 15th century and the first years of the 16th.

I. (c. 1400–1470–71) was the son of a tinsmith or pewterer, Nicoletto Bellini, by his wife Franceschina. When the accomplished Umbrian master Gentile da Fabriano came to practise at Venice, where art was backward, several young men of the city took service under him as pupils. Among these were Giovanni and Antonio of Murano and Jacopo Bellini. Gentile da Fabriano left Venice for Florence in 1422, and the two brothers of Murano stayed at home and presently founded a school of their own (see ). But Jacopo Bellini followed his teacher to Florence, where the vast progress lately made, alike in truth to natural fact and in sense of classic grace and style, by masters like Donatello and Ghiberti, Masaccio and Paolo Uccello, offered him better instruction than he could obtain even from his Umbrian teacher. But his position as assistant to Gentile brought him into trouble. As a stranger coming to practise in Florence, Gentile was jealously looked on. One day some young Florentines threw stones into his shop, and the Venetian pupil ran out and drove them off with his fists. Thinking this might be turned against him, he went and took service on board the galleys of the Florentine state; but returning after a year, found he had in his absence been condemned and fined for assault. He was arrested and imprisoned, but the matter was soon compromised, Jacopo submitting to a public act of penance and his adversary renouncing further proceedings. Whether Jacopo accompanied his master to Rome in 1426 we cannot tell; but by 1429 we find him settled at Venice and married to a wife from Pesaro named Anna (family name uncertain), who in that year made a will in favour of her first child then expected. She survived, however, and bore her husband two sons, Gentile and Giovanni (though some evidences have been thought to point rather to Giovanni having been his son by another mother), and a daughter Nicolosia. In 1436 Jacopo was at Verona, painting a Crucifixion in fresco for the chapel of S. Nicholas in the cathedral (destroyed by order of the archbishop in 1750, but the composition, a vast one of many figures, has been preserved in an old engraving). Documents ranging from 1437 to 1465 show him to have been a member of the Scuola or mutual aid society of St John the Evangelist at Venice, for which he painted at an uncertain date a series of eighteen subjects of the Life of the Virgin, fully described by Ridolfi but now destroyed or dispersed. In 1439 we find him buying a panel of tarsia work at the sale of the effects of the deceased painter Jacobello del Fiore, and in 1440 entering into a business partnership with another painter of the city called Donato. About this time he must have paid a visit to the court of Ferrara, where there prevailed a spirit of free culture and humanism most congenial to his tastes. Pisanello, the first great naturalist artist of north Italy, whose influence on Jacopo at the outset of his career had been only second to that of Gentile da Fabriano, had been some time engaged on a portrait of Leonello d’Este, the elder son of the reigning marquis Niccolo III. Jacopo (according to an almost contemporary sonneteer) competed with a rival portrait, which was declared by the father to be the better of the two. In the next year, the last of the marquis Niccolo’s life, we find him making the successful painter a present of two bushels of wheat. The relations thus begun with the house of Este seem to have been kept up, and among Jacopo’s extant drawings are several that seem to belong to the scheme of a monument erected to the memory of the marquis Niccolo ten years later. He was also esteemed and employed by Sigismondo Malatesta at the court of Rimini. In 1443 Jacopo took as an articled pupil a nephew whom he had brought up from charity; in 1452 he painted a banner for the Scuola of St Mary of Charity at Venice, and the next year received a grant from the confraternity for the marriage of his daughter Nicolosia with Andrea Mantegna, a marriage which had the effect of transferring the gifted young Paduan master definitively from the following of Squarcione to that of Bellini. In 1456 he painted a figure of Lorenzo Giustiniani, first patriarch of Venice, for his monument in San Pietro de Castello, and in 1457, with a son for salaried assistant, three figures of saints in the great hall of the patriarch. For some time about these years Jacopo and his family would seem to have resided at, or at least to have paid frequent visits to Padua, where he is reported to have carried out works now lost, including an altar-piece painted with the assistance of his sons in 1459–1460 for the Gattamelata chapel in the Santo, and several portraits which are described by 16th-century witnesses but have disappeared. At Venice he painted a Calvary for the Scuola of St Mark (1466). His activity can be traced in documents down to August 1470, but in November 1471 his wife Anna describes herself as his relict, so that he must have died some time in the interval.

The above are all the facts concerning the life of Jacopo Bellini which can be gathered from printed and documentary records. The materials which have reached posterity for a critical judgment on his work consist of four or five pictures only, together with two important and invaluable books of drawings. These prove him to have been a worthy third, following the Umbrian Gentile da Fabriano and the Veronese Pisanello, in that trio of remarkable artists who in the first half of the 15th century carried towards maturity the art of painting in Venice and the neighbouring cities. Of his pictures, an important signed example is a life-size Christ Crucified in the archbishop’s