Viewing page 54 of 64

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Wilkie as "gruff-looking Scotchman of plain, blunt manners, truly Scotch in face and accent." Durand had not the luck to surprise Wilkie, as Hayden did, stripped to the waist and painting from himself before a mirror and exclaiming : "Capital practice, Hayden!"

During this visit he saw Turner also, and visited the house where his paintings were kept. Few were admitted to this den, which was a wilderness of accumulated studies and works in every stage of progress. Some time after this Turner, on being shown Smillie's engraving of an illustration Durand made for Halleck's poems, called "Our Own Green Forest-Land," said that it was the finest thing he had seen of American art.

From London he took steamer to Antwerp enjoying as well as he could the midnight horrors of that sickening channel. While at Antwerp the festival in honor of Rubens, and the inauguration of the statue of that great artist, took place. Elated by the splendid spectacle, he writes: "It is here that masters in the fine arts are fully honored. It makes one feel proud to be one of the fraternity. Not only the name of Rubens, but the names of all the distinguished Flemish and Dutch masters are posted about the streets."

This is in the spirit of Corregio, who, on seeing a

picture of Titan, exclaimed: "Anch' Io son Pittore." (I am also a painter.) In Paris he made a short stay, drinking inspiration at the Louvre, but soon journeyed to Switzerland, making some sketches there which he afterwards painted. In October the party reached Florence. Here the beautiful "Marine," by Claude, must have strongly interested him, as the influence of its softly diffused light glancing over the gently disturbed sea was in harmony with some of his later productions. He copied a portrait of Rembrandt in the Uffizzi palace. (Exhibited at the sale in 1887.)

The winter of '40-'41 was mostly spent in Rome, where he was joined by his friends F. W. Edmonds. There he painted some heads of the picturesque old models and various studies of figures, pipers, and Contadini, including that of a donkey, which, thanks to the superior facilities for studio practice in Rome, was hauled up a flight of stone stairs by ropes, where, it is needless to say, the donkey posed with becoming gravity.

He also made an admirable copy of a grand head of a monk, by Titan, and a figure from the same painter's famous composition in the Borghese Palace, called "Venus Blindfolding Cupid," of which there is a masterly engraving by Strange.

This European episode for a time distracted his attention.