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 was beaten by the servants of the Chevalier de Rohan-Cabot, and how the duc de Sully failed to avenge his guest. The painter was attracted by the opportunity it gave for effective opposition of character, line, colour and movement. The “Voltaire” was at the Academy of 1883; it was followed, in 1884, by the “Mariage de convenance,” perhaps the most popular of all Orchardson’s pictures; in 1885, by “The Salon of Madame Recamier”; in 1886, by “After,” the sequel to the “Mariage de convenance,” and “A Tender Chord,” one of his most exquisite productions; in 1887, by “The First Cloud”; in 1888, by “Her Mother’s Voice”; and in 1889, by “The Young Duke,” a canvas on which he returned to much the same pictorial scheme as that of the “Voltaire.” Subsequently he exhibited a series of pictures in which fine pictorial use was made of the furniture and costumes of the early years of the 19th century, the subjects, as a rule, being only just enough to suggest a title: “An Enigma,” “A Social Eddy,” “Reflections,” “If music be the food of love, play on!” “Music, when sweet voices die, vibrates on the memory,” “Her First Dance,”—in these, opportunities are made to introduce old harpsichords, spinets, early pianofortes, Empire chairs, sofas and tables, Aubusson carpets, short-waisted gowns, delicate in material and primitive in ornament. Between such things and Orchardson’s methods as a painter the sympathy is close, so that the best among them, “A Tender Chord,” for instance, or “Music, when sweet voices die,” have a rare distinction.

As a portrait-painter Orchardson must be placed in the first class. His portraits are not numerous, but among them are a few which rise to the highest level reached by modern art. “Master Baby,” a picture, connecting subject-painting with portraiture, is a masterpiece of design, colour and broad execution. “Mrs Joseph,” “Mrs Ralli,” “Sir Andrew Walker, Bart.,” “Charles Moxon, Esq.,” “Mrs Orchardson,” “Conditional Neutrality” (a portrait of Orchardson’s eldest son as a boy of six), “Lord Rookwood,” “The Provost of Aberdeen,” and, above all, “Sir Walter Gilbey, Bart.,” would all deserve a place in any list of the best portraits of the 19th century. In this branch of art the “Sir Walter Gilbey” may fairly be called the painter’s masterpiece, although the sumptuous full-length of the Scottish provost, in his robes, runs it closely. The scheme of colour is reticent; had the picture been exhibited at the time of the Boer War of 1900 the colour would have been called khaki; the design is simple, uniting nature to art with a rare felicity; and the likeness has been found satisfactory by the sitter’s friends. The most important commission ever received by Orchardson as a portrait-painter was that for a group of Queen Victoria, with her son (afterwards King Edward VII.), grandson, and great-grandson, to be painted on one canvas for the Royal Agricultural Society. The painter hit upon a happy notion for the bringing of the four figures together, and as time goes on and the picture slowly turns into history, its merit is likely to be better appreciated. He continued painting to the end of his life, and had three portraits ready for the Royal Academy in 1910.

Orchardson’s method was that of one who worked under a creative, decorative and subjective impulse, rather than under one derived from a wish to observe and record. His affiliation is with Watteau and Gainsborough, rather than with those who would base all pictorial art on a keen eye for actuality and “value.” Among French painters his pictures have excited particular admiration.

ORCHESTRA (Fr. Orchestre; Ger. Kapelle, Orchester; Ital. Orchestra), in its modern acceptation (1) the place in a theatre or concert hall set apart for the musicians; (2) a carefully-balanced group of performers on stringed, wind and percussion instruments adapted for playing in concert and directed by a conductor. In ancient Greece the was the space between the auditorium and the proscenium or stage, in which were stationed the chorus and the instrumentalists. The second sense is that which is dealt with here.

A modern orchestra is composed of (1) a basis of strings—first and second violins, violas, violoncellos and double basses;

(2) flutes, sometimes including a piccolo; (3) the reed contingent, consisting of two complete families, the oboes with their tenors and basses (the cor Anglais, the fagotto or bassoon and the contrafagotto or double bassoon), the clarinets with their tenor and basses (the basset horn and the bass and pedal clarinets) with the addition sometimes of saxophones; (4) the brass wind, consisting of the horns, a group sometimes completed by the tenor and tenor-bass Wagner tubas, the trumpet or cornet, the trombones (tenor, bass and contrabass), the tubas (tenor, bass and contrabass); (5) the percussion instruments, including the kettledrums, bells, Glockenspiel, cymbals, triangle, &c. Harps are added when required for special effects.

Although most of the instruments from the older civilizations of Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, Phoenicia and of the Semitic races were known to the ancient Greeks, their conception of music led them to discourage all imitation of their neighbours' love of orchestral effects, obtained by combining harps, lyres, guitars, tanburs, double pipes and long flutes, trumpets, bagpipes, cymbals, drums, &c., playing in unison or in octaves. The Greeks only cultivated to any extent the various kinds of citharas, lyres and auloi, seldom used in concert. To the predilection of the Romans for wind instruments of all kinds, we owe nearly all the wind instruments of the modern orchestra, each of which had its prototype among the instruments of the Roman Empire: the flute, oboe and clarinet, in the tibia; the trombone and trumpet in the buccina; the tubas in the tuba; and the French horn in cornu and buccina. The 4th century witnessed the downfall of the Roman drama and the debasement of instrumental music, which was placed under a ban by the Church. During the convulsions which the migrations of Goths, Vandals and Huns caused in Europe after the fall of Rome, instrumental music was preserved from absolute extinction by wandering actors and musicians turned adrift after the closing of the theatres by command of the Church. Later, as demand arose, reinforcements of instruments, instrumentalists and instrument makers filtered through the Byzantine Empire and the Christian East generally on the one side and from the Moors on the West. It is towards the dawn of the 11th century that we find the first definite indications of the status of instrumental music in Western and Central Europe. Everywhere are the evidences, so conspicuously absent from the catacombs and from Romano-Christian monuments, of the growing favour in which instrumental music was held, to instance only such sculptures as those of the Abbey of Boscherville in Normandy, of the portico of the Cathedral of Santiago da Compostella (12th century) with its orchestra of 24 musicians, and the full-page illuminations of Psalters representing David and his musicians and of the 24 elders in the Apocalypses.

The earliest instrumental compositions extant are certain 15th-century dances and pieces in contrapuntal style preserved in the libraries of Berlin and Munich. The late development of notation, which long remained exclusively in the hands of monks and troubadours, personally more concerned with vocal than with instrumental music, ensured the preservation of the former, while the latter was left unrecorded. Instrumental music was for centuries dependent on outcasts and outlaws, tolerated by Church and State but beyond the pale. Little was known of the construction and technique of the instruments, and their possibilities were undreamed. Nevertheless, the innate love and yearning of the people for tone-colour asserted itself with sufficient strength to overcome all obstacles. It is true that the development of the early forms of harmony, the organum, diaphony, the discant and the richer forms of polyphony grew up round the voice, but indications are not wanting of an independent energy and vitality which must surely have existed in unrecorded medieval instrumental music, since they can be so clearly traced in the instruments themselves. It is, for example, significant of the attitude of 10th-century instrumentalists towards musical progress that they at once assimilated Hucbald’s innovation of the organum, a parallel succession of fourths and fifths, accompanied sometimes by the octave, for two or three voices respectively, and they produced in the