Page:Scottishartrevie01unse.djvu/398

344 Palmer of that city has offered two prizes of 500 dollars each for the best landscape or marine and the best figure picture. There is no limitation as to age, but competitors must be citizens of the United States, and pictures must have been painted within three years. The Charcoal Club of Baltimore will open an Exhibition of Water-Colours on the Sih of April. Most of the prominent men will be represented. Frank Millet will send a large oil-painting to the Royal Academy this year. The subject is ' Antony Van Corlear, the Trumpeter,' and is from Washington Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York. Old Antony, fat, jolly, and good-natured, is seated at a table, surrounded by seven pretty girls. The picture is full of detail, carefully painted, and has already been sold, it is said, for 5000 dollars. In connection with the coming Centennial Celebration of Washington's Inaugural at New York, there will be held an Exhibition of Portraits of the Old Colonial Families that have been loaned from all quarters. There are many Gilbert Stewarts in the collection, and by other men of his day there will be found much that is interesting. With this collection, old laces, brocades, and relics of the last century will be shown. Mr. Coflin, the able art editor of the Evening Post, has entire charge of the affair, and a good arrangement may be looked for. An interesting collection of purely American pictures is now on view at the new residence of Vice-President Morton in Washington. The show is for the benefit of a Washington Charity, and the Vice-President generously offered his house prior to his moving therein. There are some two hundred canvases, and a considerable amount of money has been raised by admissions. The American exhibit at the Paris International Exhibition will be a fairly representative one. The pictures from this side have already gone over, while the Paris colony will contribute largely, notable among the latter will be Alexander Harrison, Gari Melchers, T. A. Bridgeman, Eugene Vail, Sprague Pearce, Ridgway Knight, and Walter Gay. The auction sales this year in New York have been greater than ever, and many well-know-n pictures have gone under the hammer. But few American pictures have been offered. The Fonlainebleau school have been so' numerous as to raise serious questions as tu the ability of such men as Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, and Rousseau to turn out all the work credited to them. Undoubtedly many were imitations, — some, too, very bad ; but the craze is on, the market must be supplied, and unscrupulous dealers are always to be found who are willing to lend a hand to such practices. In many cases the newspapers have denounced the fraud, but the public seem eager, and will not be deterred. In the Stebbins sale there was offered recently an original drawing by Rosa Bonheur. After the sale, on examination, it was found to be a photograph touched up. The auctioneers made instant reparation, having sold it in good faith for 750 dollars, but when experienced men are so taken in, how is the public to be sure ?

The Art Congress. — The preliminary arrangements for the Art Congress to be held in Edinburgh in the autumn of this year are now being made. A scheme has been set afoot to promote an exhibition of pictures, to be held in Edinburgh during the sitting of the Congress. This Exhibition is intended to be similar in character to that of Les Jeunes Artistes which is held in Antwerp, and will consist of works by the chief among the younger English and Scottish artists. The proposal has been received with the greatest warmth by many of the most prominent of these, and there is every prospect that the exhibition will be representative of modern art in a specially significant manner. The Concert of the Kyrle Choir at Glasgow, under the leader- ship of Mr. C. Hall Woolnoth, was a conspicuous success. Mr. Woolnoth's very remarkable composition, ' The Skeleton in Armour,' which formed the second part of the concert, is so important an addition to Scottish music that we shall publish an extended notice of it in an early issue. 'Burns in Edinburgh, 1787.' Mr. C. Martin Hardie's histori- cal picture is presently being exhibited in Mr. Davidson's Gallery, Glasgow. The Society of Lady Artists of Glasgow held an interesting and attractive exhibition of their works in their rooms there in the first week of April.

MONG the pictures which attracted the larger share of popular attention in the Galleries of the Louvre, the 'Cruclie Cassee,' by Jean Baptiste Greuze, occupies a foremost place. There, also, may be seen his ' Accordee de Village " and the 'Maltidiction Paternelle'; and these three pictures may be taken as types of his work. As a painter of budding womanhood, his dainty delicacy, grace, and gentle naivete could scarcely be excelled. While it was as a painter of most alluring heads of young females that he attained his highest reputation, his melodramatic representations of bourgeois life were also exceedingly popular, and the greater proportion of his earlier works were translated to the )3ublic by engraving. Greuze, however, lived in troublous times, and he himself was of an intractable, combative disposition. He was born in 1725, went at an early age to Paris, and he lived through the terrible Revolution period to see the Napoleonic Empire to appearance firmly founded, dying in 1805. During his time the classical revival headed by David took its rise, and the art which was native and natural to Greuze, as well as to many others, came to be despised and neglected. He attempted to work in the classical manner, like others, but in that field he found his strength gone from him. The head of a boy here reproduced from the M'Lellan Collection in the Glasgow Galleries is a fairly good and typical example of the master's work. .