Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/189

Rh V E R V E R 169 of sedan chairs could not satisfy his ambition and he started for Rome. The sight of the sea at Marseilles and his voyage thence to Civita Vecchia made a deep im pression on him, and immediately after his arrival he entered the studio of a marine painter, Bernardino Fergioni. Slowly but surely Claude Joseph made his way and attracted notice. With a certain conventionality in de sign, proper to his day, he allied the results of constant and honest observation of natural effects of atmosphere, which he rendered with unusual pictorial art. Perhaps no painter of landscapes or sea-pieces has ever made the human figure so completely a part of the scene depicted or so important a factor in his design. &quot; Others may know better,&quot; he said, with just pride, &quot;how to paint the sky, the earth, the ocean ; no one knows better than I how to paint a picture.&quot; For twenty years Vernet lived on in Rome, producing views of seaports, storms, calms, moon lights, &c., when he was recalled (1753) to Paris, and executed, by royal command, the remarkable series of the .seaports of France (Louvre) by which he is best known. On his return he became a member of the academy, but he had previously contributed to the exhibitions of 1746 and following years, and he continued to exhibit, with rare ex ceptions, down to the date of his death, which took place in his lodgings in the Louvre on 3d December 1 789. Amongst the very numerous engravers of his works may be specially cited Le Bas, Cochin, Basan, Duret, Flipart, and Le Veau in France, and in England Vivares. II. ANTOINE CHARLES HORACE VERNET (1758-1835), commonly called CARLE, the youngest child of the above- named, was born at Bordeaux in 1758, where his father was painting the view from the chateau of La Trompette (Louvre). He showed, at the age of five, an extraordinary passion for drawing horses, but went through the regular academical course as a pupil of Lepicie. Strangely enough, on arriving in Italy after carrying off the great prize (1782) he lost all ambition and interest in his profession, so that his father had to recall him to France to prevent his entering a monastery. In Paris Carle Vernet became himself again and distinguished himself at the exhibition of 1791 by his Triumph of Paulus ^Emilius, a work in which he broke with reigning traditions in classical subjects and drew the horse with the forms he had learnt from nature in stables and riding-schools. But the Revolution drew on and Carle Vernet s career for awhile seemed to end in the anguish of his sister s death on the scaffold. When he again began to produce, it was as the man of another era : his drawings of the Italian campaign brought him fresh laurels ; his vast canvas, the Battle of Marengo, obtained great success ; and for his Morning of Austerlitz Napoleon bestowed on him the Legion of Honour. His hunting-pieces, races, land scapes, and work as a lithographer (chiefly under the restoration) had also a great vogue. From Louis XVIII. he received the order of St Michael. In 1827 he accom panied his son Horace (see below) to Rome, and died in Paris on his return, 17th November 1835, having pro duced but little during the last years of his life. III. EMILE JEAN HORACE VERNET (1789-1863), born in Paris, 30th June 1789, was one of the most characteristic, if not one of the ablest, of the military painters of France. He was just twenty when he exhibited the Taking of an Entrenched Camp a work which showed no depth of observation, but was distinguished by a good deal of char acter. His picture of his own studio (the rendezvous of the Liberals under the restoration), in which he represented him self painting tranquilly, whilst boxing, fencing, drum and horn playing, &c., were going on, in the midst of a medley of visitors, horses, dogs, and models, is one of his best works, and, together with his Defence of the Barrier at Clichy (Louvre), won for him an immense popularity. Enjoying equal favour with the court and with the opposi tion, he was most improperly appointed director of the school of France at Rome, from 1828 to 1835, and thither he carried the atmosphere of racket in which he habitually lived. 1 After his return the whole of the Constantine room at Versailles was decorated by him in the short space of three years. This vast work shows Vernet at his best and at his worst : as a picture it begins and ends nowhere and the composition is all to pieces ; but it has good qualities of faithful and exact representation. He died at Paris on 17th January 1863. The twenty works which were exhibited after his death confirmed his reputation for extraordinary facility ; he had tried every sort of subject, showing affinity for all that was anecdotic rather than dramatic, failing most wherever most was demanded of him, and never reaching either beauty of colour or dignity of line. Vernet was in short a brilliant off-hand sketcher of all he saw, as he said himself, &quot;from his window,&quot; and even in this work there was a good deal of affectation of the impromptu. See Lagrange, Joseph Veriiet ct la Peinture an XVIII. Sie.dc ; C. Blanc, Hist, de VEcole Franqaisc ; and T. Sylvestre, Peintrcs Contemporains. VERNIER, PIERRE (c. 1580-1637), inventor of the instrument which bears his name, was born at Ornans (near Besangon) in Burgundy about 1580. He was for a con siderable time commandant of the castle in his native town. In 1631 he published at Brussels a treatise entitled Con struction, usage, etproprietes du quadrant nouveau de mathe- matiques, in which the instrument associated with his name is described (see NAVIGATION, vol. xvii. p. 256, and SURVEY ING, vol. xxii. p. 718). He died at Ornans in 1637. The instrument invented by Vernier is frequently called a nonius ; but this is incorrect, as the contrivance described by Pedro Nunez in his work De crepusculis (1542) is a different one. Nunez drew on the plane of a quadrant 44 concentric arcs divided respectively into 89,88,. . . 46 equal parts ; and, if the alidade did not coincide with one of the divisions on the principal arc, it would fall more or less accurately on a division line of one of the auxiliary arcs, from which the value of the measured angle could be made out. This instrument was, however, very difficult to make, and was but little used. Vernier proposed to attach to a quadrant divided into half degrees a movable sector of a length equal to 31 half degrees, but divided into 30 equal parts, whereby single minutes could be read off by seeing which division line of the &quot;sector&quot; coincided with a division line of the quadrant. This movable arc was in rtj i i other words divided into parts, and the divisions were jrradu- n ated in the direction opposite to that of the graduation of the prin- ?i l cipal arc. It is now usual to divide it into parts, the two n L graduations going in the same direction. The idea had been mentioned by Christopher Clavius (1537-1612) in his Opera mathc- matica, 1612 (vol. ii. p. 5 and iii. p. 10), but he did not propose to attacli permanently an arc divided in this way to the alidade ; this happy application of the principle at all events belongs to Vernier. VERNON, EDWARD (1684-1757), English admiral, was born in Westminster, on 12th November 1684, and is said to have been descended from the ancient family of Vernon, long resident at Hanbury in Staffordshire. His father, James Vernon, secretary of state from 1697 to 1700, is best remembered by three volumes of his letters to the duke of Shrewsbury, which were published in 1841 ; and his mother was Mary, daughter of Sir John Buck of Lincolnshire. Edward, their second son, was sent to Westminster school, but his heart longed for the roving life of the sea, and his stay in that &quot; seed-plot of learning &quot; was but brief. Outside its walls he studied, with a view to his future profession, such branches of knowledge as geometry, geography, and the construction of military weapons. He entered the navy in 1701 and from that time until 1707 took part in many expeditions in the Mediterranean and the West Indies. He served with Sir George Rooke at the taking of Gibraltar in July 1704; See a letter of Mendelssohn s cited by C. Blanc. XXIV. 2: