Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/640

Rh 610 M A S M A S MASOLINO DA PANICALE (1383-c. 1440). The life and art-work of this Florentine painter were related by Vasari in a form which is partly demonstrated and partly inferred to be highly incorrect. We shall follow the account supplied, and in many respects carefully vouched, by Messrs Crowe and Cavalcaselle. Masolino (a name which corresponds to &quot; Tommy &quot;) was said to have been born at Panicale di Valdelsa, near Florence. It is more probable, however, that he was born in Florence itself, his father, Cristoforo Fini, who was an imbiancatore &quot; or whitewasher, having been domiciled in the Florentine quarter of S. Croce. There is reason to believe that Tommaso, nicknamed Masolino, was a pupil of the painter Stamina, and was principally influenced in style by Antonio Veneziano ; he may probably enough have become in the sequel the master of Masaccio. His birth took place in 1383; his death later than 1429, perhaps as late as 1440. The only works which can with certainty be assigned to him are a series of wall paintings executed towards 1428, commissioned by Cardinal Branda Castiglione, in the church of Castiglione d Olona, not far from Milan, and another series in the adjoining baptistery. The first set is signed as painted by &quot; Masolinus de Florentia.&quot; It was recovered in 1843 from a coating of whitewash, and is not a little damaged ; its subject-matter is taken from the lives of the Virgin and of Sts Lawrence and Stephen. The series in the baptistery relates to the life and death of John the Baptist. The reputation of Masolino had hitherto rested almost entirely upon the considerable share which he was supposed to have had in the celebrated frescos of the Brancacci chapel, in the church of the Carmine in Florence : he was regarded as the precursor of Masaccio, and by many years the predecessor of Filippino Lippi, in the execution of a large proportion of these works. Now, however, from a comparison of the Castiglione with the Brancacci frescos, and from other data, it is greatly doubted whether Masolino had any hand at all in the latter series. Possibly he painted in the Brancacci chapel certain specified subjects which are now either destroyed or worked over. Of other and still existing subjects, hitherto assigned to Masolino on the authority of Vasari and later writers, the authorship is now moro reasonably ascribed to Masaccio, except only that one compartment, that which represents in one half Peter reviving Tabitha (or curing Petronilla), and in the other half Peter and John healing a cripple, remains in suspense between Masaccio and Masolino. In the Castiglione frescos there is some tenderness of expression, and tho nude figures are studied with an amount of care superior to their epoch ; generally the parts are well made out, but without unity of composition, or mastery of perspective, or of contrast and chiaroscuro. The merit of these works is not to be compared with that of the Brancacci frescos, unless in the single instance above excepted. The now ascertained facts of Masolino s life are that towards 1423 he entered the service of Filippo Scolari, the Florentine-born obergespan of Temeswar in Hungary, that he stayed in consequence some time in that country, and that, returning towards 1427 to Italy, he painted the works in Castiglione. Thus he resettled in Lombardy, not in Florence ; nor is there anything to show that ho returned to his Tuscan home at a later date. MASON, FRANCIS (1799-1874), an American missionary, son of a shoemaker in York, England, was born April 2, 1799. After emigrating to the United States in 1818, he practised there the trade he had learned from his father ; but, having studied languages with his minister at Canton, Massachusetts, he in 1827 entered the Newton theological institution. In 1830 he was sent by the American Missionary Union to labour among the Karens in Burmah, where he translated the Bible into two dialects of their language, and also conducted a training college for native preachers and teachers. In 1852 he published a book of great value on the fauna and flora of British Burmah, of which an improved edition appeared in 1860 under the title Burmah, its People and Natural Products. He was also the author of a grammar and vocabulary of the Pali language, besides various translations from it and other Indian dialects. He died at Rangoon, March 3, 1874. See his autobiography, The Story of a Working 3fan s Life, ivith Sketches of Travel, 1870. MASON, GEORGE HEMMING (1818-1872), A.R.A., was born at Whitley, in 1818, the eldest son of a Stafford shire county gentleman. Intended for the medical profes sion, he studied for five years under Dr Watt of Birming ham ; but he had no taste for science ; all his thoughts were given to art. In 1844 he abandoned medicine and travelled for a time on the Continent, visiting France, Germany, and Switzerland, and finally settling in Rome. His pencil was busy with the picturesque scenery that surrounded him, and with hardly any instruction, except that received from nature and from the Italian pictures that met his eye, he gradually acquired the painter s skill. At least two important works are referable to this period, Ploughing in the Campagna, shown in the Royal Academy of 1857, and In the Salt Marshes, Campagna, exhibited in the following year. After Mason s return from the Conti nent, in 1858, when he settled at Wetley Abbey, he con tinued to paint Italian subjects from studies made during his foreign tour, and then his art began to touch, in a wonderfully tender and poetic way, the peasant life of his native England, and especially of his native Staffordshire, and the homely landscape in the midst of which that life was set. The first picture of this class was Wind on the Wolds, and it was followed along with much else by the painter s three greatest works the Evening Hymn, 1868, a band of Staffordshire rnill-girls, seen, their figures dark against the sunset, returning from their work, singing as they walk; Girls Dancing by the Sea, 1869 ; and the Harvest Moon, 1872. Mason had long suffered from heart disease, which carried him off on the 22d of October 1872. In his work he laboured under the double disadvantage of feeble and uncertain health, and a want of thorough art- training, and consequently his pictures were never pro duced easily, or without strenuous and long-continued effort. His art is great in virtue of the solemn pathos which pervades it, of the dignity and beauty which it reveals in rustic life, of its keen perception of noble form and graceful motion and of rich effects of colour and sub dued light. In motif and treatment it has most in com mon with the art of Millet and Jules Breton, and of Frederick Walker among Englishmen. An interesting collection of Mason s pictures was brought together by the Burlington Club shortly after his death. MASON, WILLIAM (1725-1797), was about the begin ning of the last quarter of the 18th century one of the most eminent of living poets, but his eminence was owing to the lowness of the poetic level at the time. He is now held in remembrance, not by his poetry, but by his having been the friend, the literary executor, and the biographer of Gray. Born in 1725, the son of a Yorkshire clergyman, entered of St John s College, Cambridge, in 1742, he took his bachelor s degree in 1745, and seems to have at once decided steadily on a literary career, reading little or nothing, Gray says, but writing abundance. Pope died in 1744, and the aspiring young poet lamented him as &quot; Musseus &quot; in a careful imitation of Milton s Lycidax, showing an ear for the music of verse and considerable skill in weaving words together, but not a spark of original force. By his Musxus (1747) Mason attracted the