XXVIII

PLATE--ARTIST'S PORTRAIT [Footnote: Many artists have left us portraits of themselves, painted, no doubt, with the aid of a mirror, in a group or alone. This one of Masaccio in the Naples Museum, shows him to have been a picturesque model.]

Some of his known pictures are the frescoes in the church of St. Clemente in Rome; the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of the Carmine, "St. Peter Baptising" and the "Madonna and Child, with St. Anne," which is in the Accademia at Florence.

(Pronounced May-sohn-yay)French School1815-1891Pupil of Léon Cogniet

This artist was born at Lyons. His father was a salesman and an art-training seemed impossible for the young man because the Meissoniers were poor people. Nevertheless, he was so persevering that while still a young man he got to Paris and began to paint in the Louvre. He was but nineteen at that time, and his fate seemed so hard and bitter that later in life he refused to talk of those days.

He sat for many days in the Louvre, by Daubigny's side, painting pictures for which we are told he received a dollar a yard. We can think of nothing more discouraging to a genius than having to paint by the yard. It is said that his poverty permitted him to sleep only every other night, because he must work unceasingly, and someone declares that he lived at one time on ten cents a week. This is a frightful picture of poverty and distress.

Meissonier's first paying enterprise was the painting of bon-bon boxes and the decoratingof fans, and he tried to sell illustrations for children's stories, but for these he found no market. A brilliant compiler of Meissonier's life has written that "his first illustrations in some unknown journal were scenes from the life of 'The Old Bachelor.' In the first picture he is represented making his toilet before the mirror, his wig spread out on the table; in the second, dining with two friends; in the third, on his death-bed, surrounded by greedy relations and in the fifth, the servants ransacking the death chamber for the property." This was very likely a vision of his own possible fate, for Meissonier must have been at that time a lonely and unhappy man.

There are many stories of his first exhibited work, which Caffin declares was the "Visit to the Burgomaster," but Mrs. Bolton, who is almost always correct in her statements, tells us that it was called "The Visitor," and that it sold for twenty dollars. At the end of a six years struggle in Paris, his pictures were selling for no more.

Until this artist's time people had been used only to great canvases, and had grown to look for fine work, only in much space, but here was an artist who could paint exquisitely a whole interior on a space said to be no "larger than his thumb nail." His work was called "microscopic," which meant that he gave great attention to details, painting very slowly.

During the Italian war of 1859, and in theGerman war of 1870, this wonderful artist was on the staff of Napoleon III. During the siege of Paris he held the rank of colonel, and he lost no chance to learn details of battles which he might use later, in making great pictures. Thus he gained the knowledge and inspiration to paint his picture "Friedland," which was bought by A. T. Stewart and is now in the Metropolitan Museum. He, himself, wrote of that picture: "I did not intend to paint a battle--I wanted to paint Napoleon at the zenith of his glory; I wanted to paint the love, the adoration of the soldiers for the great captain in whom they had faith, and for whom they were ready to die.... It seemed to me I did not have colours sufficiently dazzling. No shade should be on the imperial face.... The battle already commenced, was necessary to add to the enthusiasm of the soldiers, and make the subject stand forth, but not to diminish it by saddening details. All such shadows I have avoided, and presented nothing but a dismounted cannon, and some growing wheat which should never ripen.

"This was enough.

"The men and the Emperor are in the presence of each other. The soldiers cry to him that they are his, and the impressive chief, whose imperial will directs the masses that move around, salutes his devoted army. He and they plainly comprehend each other and absolute confidence is expressed in every face."

This great work was sold at auction for $66,000 and given to the Metropolitan Museum.

It is said that when he painted the "Retreat from Russia," Meissonier obtained the coat which Napoleon had worn at the time, and had it copied, "crease for crease and button for button." He painted the picture mostly out of doors in midwinter when the ground was covered with snow, and he writes: "Sometimes I sat at my easel for five or six hours together, endeavouring to seize the exact aspect of the winter atmosphere. My servant placed a hot foot-stove under my feet, which he renewed from time to time, but I used to get half-frozen and terribly tired."

So attentive was he to truthfulness in detail that he had a wooden horse made in imitation of the white charger of the Emperor; and seating himself on this, he studied his own figure in a mirror.

At last this conscientious man was made an officer of the Legion of Honour, having already become President of the Academy. Edmund About writes that "to cover M. Meissonier's pictures with gold pieces simply would be to buy them for nothing; and the practice has now been established of covering them with bank-notes."

Meissonier seldom painted the figure of a woman in his pictures, but all of his subjects were wholesome and fine.

One time an admirer said to him "I envyyou; you can afford to own as many Meissonier pictures as you please!"

"Oh no, I can't," the distinguished artist replied. "That would ruin me. They are a good deal too dear for me."

In his maturity he became very rich, and his homes were dreams of beauty, filled with rare possessions such as bridles of black leather once owned by Murat, rare silver designed by the artist himself, great pictures, and flowers of the rarest description besides valuable dogs and horses. Yet it was said that "this man who lives in a palace is as moderate as a soldier on the march. This artist, whose canvases are valued by the half-million, is as generous as a nabob. He will give to a charity sale a picture worth the price of a house. Praised as he is by all he has less conceit in his nature than a wholesale painter."

On the 31st of January in his country house at Poissy, this great man, whose life reads like a romance, died, after a short illness. His funeral services were held in the Madeleine, and he was buried at Poissy, near Versailles, a great military procession following him to the grave.

PLATE--RETREAT FROM MOSCOW

In the painting of this picture we have already told how every detail was mastered by actual experience of most of them. Meissoniermade dozens of studies for it--"a horse's head, an uplifted leg, cuirasses, helmets, models of horses in red wax, etc. He also prepared a miniature landscape, strewn with white powder resembling snow, with models of heavy wheels running through it, that he might study the furrow made in that terrible march home from burning Moscow. All this work--hard, patient, exacting work."

Some of his other pictures are "The Emperor at Solferino," "Moreau and His Staff before Hohenlinden," "A Reading at Diderot's" and the "Chess Players."

Fontainebleau-Barbizon School1814-1875Pupil of Delaroche

Two great artists painted peasants and little else. One was the artist of whom we shall speak, and the other was Jules Breton. One was realistic, the other idealistic. Both did wonderful work, but Millet painted the peasant, worn, patient steadfast, overwhelmed with toil; Breton, a peasant full of energy, grace, vitality, and joy.

Millet painted peasants as he knew them, and hardly any one could have known them better, for he was himself peasant-born. His youth was hard, and the scenes of his childhood were such as in after life he became famous by painting. Millet lived in the department of Manche, in the village of Gruchy, near Cherbourg. Manche juts into the sea, at the English Channel, and whichever way Millet looked he must have seen the sea. His old grandmother looked after the household affairs, while his father and mother worked in the fields and Millet must have seen them hundreds of times, standing at evening, with bowed heads, listening to the Angelus bell. Hetoiled, too, as did other lads in his position. His grandmother was a religious old woman, and nearly all the pictures he ever saw in his boyhood were those in the Bible, which he copied again and again, drawing them upon the stone walls in white chalk.

The old grandmother watched him, never doubting that her boy would become an artist. It was she who had named him--François, after her favourite saint, Francis, and it was she, who, beside the evening fire, would tell him legends of St. Francis. It was she alone who had time and strength left, after the day's work, to teach him the little he learned as a boy and to fix in his mind pictures of home. His father and mother were worn, like pack-horses, after their day in the fields. The mother very likely had to hitch herself up with the donkey, or the big dog, after the fashion of these people, as she helped draw loads about the field. Who can look for Breton's ideal stage peasants from Millet who knew the truth as he saw it every day?

Many years after his life in the Gruchy home, Millet painted the portrait of the grandmother whom he had loved so much that he cried out: "I wish to paint her soul!" No one could desire a better reward than such a tribute.

Millet had an uncle who was a priest and he did what he could to give the boy a start in learning. He taught him to read Virgil andthe Latin Testament; and all his life those two books were Millet's favourites. Besides drawing pictures on the walls of his home, he drew them on his sabots. Pity some one did not preserve those old wooden shoes! He did his share of the farm work, doing his drawing on rainy days.

When he was about eighteen years old, coming from mass one day, he was impressed with the figure of an old man going along the road, and taking some charcoal from his pocket he drew the picture of him on a stone wall. The villagers passing, at once knew the likeness; they were pleased and told Millet so. Old Millet, the father, also was delighted for he, too, had wished to be an artist, but fate had been against him. Seeing the wonderful things his son could do, he decided that he should become what he himself had wished to be, and that he should go to Cherbourg to study.

François set off with his father, carrying a lot of sketches to show, and upon telling the master in Cherbourg what he wanted and showing the sketches, he was encouraged to stay and begin study in earnest. So back the old father went, with the news to the mother and grandmother and the priest uncle, that François had begun his career. He stayed in Cherbourg studying till his father died, when he thought it right to go home and do the work his father had always done. He returned, but the women-folk would not agree to himstaying. "You go back at once," said the grandmother, "and stick to your art. We shall manage the farm." She sewed up in his belt all the money she had saved, and started him off again, for he had then been studying only two months. Now he remained till he was twenty-three, a fine, strapping, broad-shouldered country fellow. He had long fair hair and piercing dark blue eyes. All the time he was with Delaroche he was dissatisfied with his work--and with his master's, which seemed to Millet artificial, untrue. He knew nothing of the classical figures the master painted and wished him to paint, for his heart and mind were back in Gruchy among the scenes that bore a meaning for him. He wished to study elsewhere, and by this time he had done so well that one of the artists with whom he had studied went to the mayor of Millet's home town, and begged him to furnish through the town-council money enough to send Millet to Paris. This was done, and Millet began to hope.

He was very shy and afraid of seeming awkward and out of place. The night he got to Paris was snowy, full of confusion and strange things to him, and an awful loneliness overwhelmed him. The next morning he set out to find the Louvre, but would not ask his way for fear of seeming absurd to some one, so that he rambled about alone, looking for the great gallery till he found it unaided. Hespent most of the days that followed gazing in ecstasy at the pictures.

He liked Angelo, Titian, and Rubens best. He had come to Paris to enter a studio, but he put off his entrance from day to day, for his shyness was painful and he feared above all things to be laughed at by city students. At last one day, he got up enough courage to apply to Delaroche, whose studio he had decided to enter if he could, as he liked his work best. The students in that studio were full of curiosity about the new chap, with his peasant air, his bushy hair and great frame, so sturdy and awkward. They at once nicknamed him "the man of the woods," and they nagged at him and laughed at the idea that he could learn to paint, till one day, exasperated nearly to death, he shook his fist at them. From that moment he heard no more from them, for they were certain that if he could not paint he could use his fists a good deal better than any of them. Delaroche liked the peasant but did not understand him very well, and Millet was not too fond of his painting, so after two years he and a friend withdrew from that studio and set up one for themselves. Thus eight years passed, the friends living from hand to mouth, doing all sorts of things: sign-painting, advertisements, and the like; and Millet, in the midst of his poverty, got married.

He went home, returning to Paris with his wife, and after starving regularly, he becamedesperate enough to paint a single picture as he wished. It seemed at the time the maddest kind of thing to do. Who would see ugly, toil-worn peasants upon hissalonwalls? Paris wanted dainty, aesthetic art, and an Academy artist would have scoffed at the idea; but the Millets were starving anyway, so why not starve doing at least what one chose. So Millet painted his first wonderful peasant picture "The Winnower," and just as the family were starving he sold it--for $100. He had done at last the right thing, in doing as he pleased. This was a sign to him that there was after all a place for truth and emotion in art. But the Millets must change their place of living, and go to some place where the money made would not at once be eaten up. Jacque--the friend with whom Millet had set up shop, and who also became famous, later--advised them to go to a little place he knew about, which had a name ending in "zon." It was near the forest of Fontainebleau, he said and they could live there very cheaply, and it was quiet and decent. The Millets got into a rumbling old cart and started in search of the place which ended in "zon" near the forest of Fontainebleau. Jacque had also decided to take his family there and they all went together. When they got to Fontainebleau they got down from the car and went a-foot through the forest.

They arrived tired and hungry towardevening, and went to Ganne's Inn, where there were Rousseau, Diaz, and other artists who like themselves had come in search of a nice, clean, picturesque place in which to starve, if they had to. Those who were just sitting down to supper welcomed the newcomers, for they had been there long enough to form a colony and fraternity ways. One of these was to take a certain great pipe from the wall, and ask the newcomer to smoke; and according to the way he blew his "rings" he was pronounced a "colourist" or "classicist." The two friends blew the smoke, and at once the other artists were able to place Jacque. He was a colourist; but what were they to say about Millet who blew rings after his own fashion.

"Oh, well!" he cried. "Don't trouble about it. Just put me down in a class of my own!"

"A good answer!" Diaz answered. "And he looks strong and big enough to hold his own in it!" Thus the newcomers took their places in the life of Barbizon--the place whose name ended in "zon," and Millet's real work began. His first wife lived only two years, but he married again. All this time he was following his conscience in the matter of his work, and selling almost nothing. In a letter to a friend he tells how dreadfully poor they are, although his new wife was the most devoted helpful woman imaginable, known far and near as "Mère Millet." The artist wrote to Sensier, his friend, who aided him: "I havereceived the hundred francs. They came just at the right time. Neither my wife nor I had tasted food in twenty-four hours. It is a blessing that the little ones, at any rate, have not been in want."

The revolution of 1848 had come before Millet went to Barbizon, and he like other men had to go to war. Then the cholera appeared, and these things interrupted his work; and after such troubles people did not begin buying pictures at once. Rousseau was famous now, but Millet lived by the hardest toil until one day he sold the "Woodcutter" to Rousseau himself, for four hundred francs. Rousseau had been very poor, and it grieved him to see the trials and want of his friend, so he pretended that he was buying the picture for an American. That picture was later sold at the Hartmann sale for 133,000 francs. Millet was now forty years old, and had not yet been recognised as a wonderful man by any but his brother artists. He was truly "in a class of his own." He had learned to love Barbizon, and cried: "Better a thatched cottage here than a palace in Paris!" and we have the picture in our minds of Millet followed patiently and lovingly by "Mère Millet" in the peasant dress which she always wore, that she might be ready at a moment's notice to pose for his figures. Then there were his little children and his sunny, simple, fraternal surroundings, which make his life the most picturesque of all artists.

His paintings had the simplest stories with seldom more than two or three figures in them. It was said that he needed only a field and a peasant to make a great picture. When he painted the "Man with the Hoe," he did it so truthfully, in a way to make the story so well understood by all who looked upon it, that he was called a socialist. No one was so much surprised as Millet by that name. "I never dreamed of being a leader in any cause," he said. "I am a peasant--only a peasant."

Of his picture "The Reaper" a critic wrote, "He might have reaped the whole earth." All his pictures were sermons, he called them "epics of the fields." He pretended to nothing except to present things just as they were, as he writes in a letter to a friend about "The Water Carrier:"

In the woman coming from drawing water I have endeavoured that she shall be neither a water-carrier nor a servant, but the woman who has just drawn water for the house, the water for her husband's and her children's soup; that she shall seem to be carrying neither more nor less than the weight of the full buckets; that beneath the sort of grimace which is natural on account of the strain on her arms, and the blinking of her eyes caused by the light, one may see a look of rustic kindliness on her face. I have always shunned with a kind of horror everything approaching the sentimental. I have desired on the other hand, that this woman should perform simply and good-naturedly, without regarding it as irksome, an act which, like her other household duties, is one she is accustomed to perform every day of her life. Also I wanted to makepeople imagine the freshness of the fountain, and that its antiquated appearance should make it clear that many before her had come to draw water from it.

At forty he was in about the same condition as he had been on that evening ten or twelve years before, when he had entered Barbizon carrying his two little daughters upon his shoulders, his wife following with the servant and a basket of food, to settle themselves down to hardship made sweet by kind comradeship and hope. Now a change came. Millet painted "The Angelus." He was dreadfully poor at that time and sold the picture cheaply, but it laid the foundation of his fame and fortune. He had worked upon the canvas till he said he could hear the sound of the bell. Although its first purchaser paid very little for it, it has since been sold for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

At last, having struggled through his worst days, without recognition, and with nine little children to feed and clothe, he was given the white cross of the Legion of Honour; and as if to make up for the days of his starvation, he was nearly feasted to death in Paris. He was placed upon the hanging committee of theSalon, and took a dignified place among artists. He and Mère Millet travelled a little, but always he returned to Barbizon, till the war came and he had to move to Normandy to work. Afterward he returned to Barbizon, to the scenes and the old friends he loved sowell, and there he died. He had come back ill and tired with the long struggle, and he instructed his friends to give him a simple funeral. This was done. They carried his coffin, while his wife and children walked beside him to the cemetery, and he was buried near the little church of Chailly, whose spire is seen in "The Angelas," and where Rousseau, whom he loved, had already been laid.

There in Barbizon, to-day, may be seen Rousseau's cottage and Millet's studio. "The peasants sow and reap and glean as in the days of Millet; Troyon's oxen and sheep are still standing in the meadow; Jacque's poultry are feeding in the barnyard. The leaves on Rousseau's grand old trees are trembling in the forest; Corot's misty morning is as fresh and soft as ever; while Diaz's ruddy sunsets still penetrate the branches; and the peasant pauses daily as the Angelus from the Chailly church calls him to silent prayer."

PLATE--THE ANGELUS

In "The Angelus" you may see far-off the spire of the church at Chailly, from which the bell sounds. The day's work is drawing to a close. The peasant man and woman have been digging potatoes--the man uncovering them, while his wife has been putting them in the basket. As the Angelus floats across the fields, the two pause and bow their heads in prayer. Theman has dropped his fork and uncovered his head, and his wife has clasped her hands devoutly before her.

All the air seems still and full of tender sound and colour, and we, like Millet, seem "to hear the bell." This is the only picture he painted which is full of the sentimentality he so much disliked. It is a great picture, but we need to know the title in order to interpret it.

Besides this one, Millet painted "The Gleaners," "The Woodcutters," "The Sower," "The Man with the Hoe;" "The Water Carrier," "The Reaper," and many other stories of the peasant poor.

(Pronounced Claude Mo-nay)Impressionist School of France1840--

Another--Manet--was the founder of this school among modern painters, but Monet is always considered his most conspicuous follower.

Monet's remarkable method of putting his colours upon canvas does not mean impressionism. He is an impressionist but alsoMonet--an artist with a method entirely different from that of any other. He belongs to what in France is called thepointillistes. The word means nothing more nor less than an effort to accomplish the impossible. If you stand a little way from a very hot stove you may be able to see a kind of movement in the air, a quivering of particles or molecular motion, and this is what thepointillistestry to show in their paintings--Monet most of all.

The theory is that by putting little dabs of primitive colours, close together upon canvas, without mixing them, just separate dabs of red, yellow, blue, etc., the effect of movement is produced. Needless to say, none of them ever have produced such an effect, but theyhave made such grotesque, ugly pictures that they have attracted attention even as a humpbacked person does.

The first who painted thus was a Frenchman named Seurat, who tried it after closely studying experiments made in light and colour by Professor Rood, of Columbia University. After him came Pissarro, and then Monet. America also has such a painter, Childe Hassam, but nobody is so grotesque as Monet.

He was born in Paris but spent most of his youth in Havre, where he met a painter of harbours and shipping scenes called Boudin. Through his influence Monet studied out-of-door effects, and was beginning to do fairly good work, when he was drawn as a conscript and sent to Algeria. It is written that Monet discovered that "green, seen under strong sunshine is not green, but yellow; that the shadows cast by sunlight upon snow or upon brightly lighted surfaces are not black, but blue; and that a white dress, seen under the shade of trees on a bright day, has violet or lilac tones." This only means that these things have been scientifically determined, not that the naked eye ever perceives them, and it is for the natural, unscientific eye that art exists. None of us see the separate colours of the spectrum, as we look about in every-day fashion upon every-day objects.

Professor Rood managed to produce an intelligent effect by putting separate colourson discs and whirling these round so that the colours mingled. Monet tried to do the same by dotting his original colours close together, and leaving the picture to its own destruction. It ought to revolve, if the scientific idea is to be carried out.

Nothing desirable can be made out of his pictures even when viewed from far off, while at close range they are simply grotesque, and photographs of them give the impression that the entire landscape is wabbling to the ground.

I wonder if anyone, small or grown up, can understand this: "It was indeed a higher kind of impressionism that Monet originated, one that reveals a vivid rendering, not of the natural and concrete facts, but of their influence upon the spirit when they are wrapped in the infinite diversities of that impalpable, immaterial, universal medium which we call light, when the concrete loses itself in the abstract, and what is of time and matter impinges on the eternal and the universal." Monet's pictures look just as that explanation of them sounds!

The same writer says that Monet was greater than Corot because he was more sensitive to colour; but if Monet had been as sensitive to colour as Corot, he could not have lived and looked at his own pictures.

PLATE--HAYSTACK IN SUNSHINE

The main feature of this picture is such a hay stack as never existed anywhere, ofindescribable lurid colour, against a background of blue such as never was seen. All about there are violet and rose-coloured trees, and it is a picture that every child should know, because he is likely never to have another such opportunity.

Monet has made two interesting pictures of churches, one at Vernon, the other at Varangeville.

(Pronounced Moo-reel'oh Bar-tol-o-may' A-stay'bahn)Andalusian School1617-1682Pupil of Juan del Castillo

The story of Murillo has been delightfully told by Mrs. Sarah Bolton.

Like Velasquez, he was born in Seville, a city called "the glory of the Spanish realms," and was baptised on New Year's day, 1618, in the Church of the Magdalen.

Murillo's father paid his rent in work, instead of in money. He made a bargain with the convent who owned his house that he would keep it in repair if he might have it free of rent, so there Gaspar Estéban and his wife, Maria Perez, settled. "Perez" was the family name of Murillo's mother, who had very good connections; one of her brothers, Juan del Castillo, being a man who encouraged all art and had an art school of his own. Little Murillo therefore had encouragement from the start, an unusual circumstance at a time when parents rarely wished to think of their sons as painters. As a matter of fact, his mother would have preferred that he should become a priest, but she was kind and sensible, and putno difficulties in the way of the little Murillo doing as he wished.

The story goes that the Perez family had been very rich, but, however it may have been, that was not the case when the artist was born. One day after his mother had gone to church, Murillo being left at home alone, retouched a picture that hung upon the wall. It was a picture of sacred subject--"Jesus and the Lamb." He thought he could make some improvements in it, so he painted his own hat upon the head of Jesus and changed the lamb into a little dog. His mother was a good deal shocked at what seemed to her an irreligious act, though it showed the family genius. After that the boy was found to be painting upon the walls of his schoolroom, and making sketches upon the margins of his books, though he did little else at school.

He had one sister, Therese, and they were left without father or mother before the artist was eleven years old.

It was at that time that he received the name of "Murillo" by which he is known.

It came about thus: After the death of his parents he went to live with his mother's sister, the Doña Anna Murillo, who had married a surgeon called Juan Agustin Lagares, and since the little artist was to live with his aunt, he soon became known by her family name. There, in her home, he and his sister Therese, were brought up, but he was not tobecome a surgeon like his uncle-in-law, but an artist like his uncle Juan, the teacher in Seville. That uncle took him in hand, taught the boy to draw, to mix colours, to stretch his canvas, and soon Murillo's genius won the love of master and pupils.

In peace and reasonable comfort he served a nine years apprenticeship, and painted his first important, if not especially great, pictures. These were two Madonnas, one of them "The Story of the Rosary." St. Dominic had instituted the rosary; using fifteen large and one hundred and fifty small beads upon which to keep record of the number of prayers he had said; the large beads representing thePaternosters and Gloriasand the small ones, theAves. This practical way of indicating duties helped the heedless to concentrate their attention, and did much to increase the number of prayers offered. Indeed, it is said that "by this single expedient Dominic did more to excite the devotion of the lower orders, especially of the women, and made more converts, than by all his orthodoxy, learning, arguments, and eloquence." It was this incident in the history of the Catholic Church that Murillo commemorated.

When the artist was twenty-two years old, his uncle, Juan del Castillo, broke up his home and went elsewhere to live, leaving the artist without home or means, and with his little sister to take care of. Without vanity orambition, but with only the wish to care for his sister and to get food, the marvellous painter took himself to the market place, and there, wedged in between stalls, old clothes, vegetables, all sorts of wares, like a wanderer and a gypsy, he began his career.

At the weekly market--theFeriaor fair, opposite the Church of All Saints--his brotherly, kindly feeling for the vagabonds he daily met is shown in the treatment he gives them in his wonderful pictures. During the two years that he worked in that open-air studio he had flower-girls, muleteers, hucksters all about him, and he painted dozens of rough pictures which found quick sale among the patrons of the market. What Velasquez was doing in the court of Madrid, Murillo was doing in the streets of Seville; the one painting cardinals, kings, and courtiers; the other painting beggars,gamins, and waifs. Between the two, the world has been shown the social history of Spain as it then existed.

Through a peculiar happening, the American Indian saw the beauties of Murillo's work before Europe was even conscious there was such a man. In his old home, his uncle's studio, Murillo had had a dear comrade, Moya. They had not met for two years or more, and when they did come together again Moya told Murillo he had been travelling, that he had been to Flanders with the Spanish army, and thence to London, in both places seeinggorgeous paintings and other inspiring things. He opened the eyes of Murillo to the splendours the world contained, and the artist became wild with desire to go and see them for himself, but he had no money. He was painting pictures in the market place of Seville and getting so little for his hasty work that he could barely support himself and little Therese. What must he do in order to get to London and see the world?

What he did do was to buy a piece of linen, cut it into six pieces and hide himself long enough to paint upon them "saints, flowers, fruit and landscapes," and then he went forth to sell them.

He actually sold those pictures to a ship-owner who was sending his ship to the West Indies. Eventually they were hung upon the walls of a mission in wild, far off America. It is said that after this Murillo made no little money by painting such pictures, destined to give the American savage an idea of the Christian religion. One cannot but wonder if there may not be, all unknown to us, Murillo pictures, made in the market-place of Seville nearly three hundred years ago, hidden away in the remains of those old Spanish missions, even to-day. Such a picture would be more rare than the greatest that he ever painted.

After selling his six pictures Murillo started a-foot, not to London but on a terrible journey across the Sierra Mountains, to Madrid--thehome of Velasquez. Murillo knew that this native of Seville had become a famous artist. He was powerful and rich and at the court of Philip II., while Murillo had no place to lay his head, and besides he had left Therese behind in Seville in the care of friends. He had no claim upon the kindness of Velasquez but he determined to see him; to introduce himself and possibly to gain a friend. It was under these forlorn circumstances he made himself known to the great Spanish court painter.

The story of their meeting is a fine one. For Murillo Velasquez had a warm embrace, a kind and hospitable word. The stranger told Velasquez how he had crossed the mountains on foot, was penniless, but could use his brush. Instead of jealousy and suspicion, the young man met with nothing but the most cheerful encouragement, found the Velasquez home open to him, took up his lodging there and established his workshop with nothing around him but friendship and the sympathy his nature craved.

From the market-place to the home of Velasquez and the Palace of Philip II.! It was a beautiful dream to Murillo.

With what splendour of colour and mastery of design he illuminated the annals of the poor! Coming forth from some dim chancel or palace-hall in which he had been working on a majestic Madonna picture, he would sketch in, with the brush still loaded with the colours ofcelestial glory, the lineaments of the beggar crouching by the wall, or the gypsy calmly reposing in the black shadow of an archway. Such versatility had never before been seen west of the Mediterranean, and it commanded the admiration of his countrymen.

All his beggarly little children, neglected and houseless, appeared only to be full of cheer and merriment, with soft eyes and contented faces. It was a happy, care-free, gay, and kindly beggardom that he painted, with nothing in it to sadden the heart.

Thus he lived for three years; working in the galleries of the king, making friends at court, painting beautiful women, gallant cavaliers and fascinating little beggars.

In the course of time, however, he grew restless, and Velasquez wished to give him letters of introduction to Roman artists and people of quality, advising him to go to Rome to study the greatest art in the world. This was an alluring plan to Murillo, but after all he longed for his own home and chose to return there rather than go to Rome. Besides, his sister Therese was still in Seville.

Once more in his home, at one stroke of his magic brush Murillo raised himself and a monastic order from obscurity to greatness. In his native city was the order of San Francisco. The monks had long wished to have their convent decorated in a worthy manner by some artist of repute; but they were poor and hadnever been able to engage such a painter. When Murillo got back home, he was as badly in need of work as the Franciscans were in want of an artist. The monks held a council and finally agreed upon a price which they could pay and which Murillo could live upon. Then he began a wonderful set of eleven large paintings. Among them were many saints, dark and rich in colouring, and no sooner was it known that the paintings were being made than all the rich and powerful people of Seville flocked to the convent to see the work. They gathered about the young artist, overwhelmed him with honours and praise, and the monastery was crowded from morning till night with those who wished to study his work. From that moment Murillo's fame, if not his fortune, was made.

He married a rich and noble lady with the tremendous name of Doña Beatriz de Cabrera y Sotomayer. He had fallen in love with her while painting her as an angel.

About that time he formed a strange partnership with a landscape painter, who agreed to supply the backgrounds that his pictures needed, if Murillo would paint figures into his landscapes. This plan did very well for a little time, but it did not last long.

Murillo painted in three distinct styles, and these have come to be known as the "warm," the "cold," and the "vaporous." He painted pictures in the great cathedral of the Escorialand the "Guardian Angel" was one of them. Also, he painted "St. Anthony of Padua," and of this picture there is one of those absurd stories meant to illustrate the perfection of art. It is said that the lilies in it are so natural that the birds flew down the cathedral aisles to pluck at them. Many artists have painted this saint, but Murillo's is the best picture of all.

When the nephew of his first master, Murillo's cousin, saw that work he said: "It is all over with Castillo! Is it possible that Murillo, that servile imitator of my uncle, can be the author of all this grace and beauty of colouring?"

The Duke of Wellington offered for this picture as many gold pieces "as would cover its surface of fifteen square feet." This would have been about two hundred and forty thousand dollars; but we need not imagine that Murillo received any such sum for the work. This picture has a further interesting history. The canvas was cut from the frame by thieves in 1874, and later it was sold to Mr. Schaus, the connoisseur and picture dealer of New York. He paid $250 for it, and at once put it into the hands of the Spanish consul, who restored it to the cathedral.

The story of the saint whom Murillo painted is as interesting as Murillo's own. Among the many wonderful things said to have happened to him was that a congregation of fishes hearinghis voice as he preached beside the sea, came to the top and lifted up their heads to listen.

While Murillo was doing his work, he was living a happy, domestic life. He had three children, and doubtless he used them as models for his lively cherubs, as he used his wife's face for madonnas and angels.

He founded an academy of painting in Seville, for the entrance to which a student could not qualify unless he made the following declaration: "Praised be the most Holy Sacrament and the pure conception of Our Lady."

The most delightful stories are told of Murillo's kindness and sweetness of disposition. He had a slave who loved him and who, one day while Murillo was gone from the studio, painted in the head of the Virgin which the master had left incomplete. When Murillo returned and saw the excellent work he cried: "I am fortunate, Sebastian"--the slave's name--"For I have not created only pictures but an artist!" This slave was set free by Murillo and in the course of time he painted many splendid pictures which are to-day highly prized in Seville.

This is a description of Murillo's house which is still to be seen near the Church of Santa Cruz: "The courtyard contains a marble fountain, amidst flowering shrubs, and is surrounded on three sides by an arcade upheld by marble pillars. At the rear is a prettygarden, shaded by cypress and citron trees, and terminated by a wall whereon are the remains of ancient frescoes which have been attributed to the master himself. The studio is on the upper floor, and overlooks the Moorish battlements, commanding a beautiful view to the eastward, over orange groves and rich corn-lands, out to the gray highlands about Alcala."

Murillo's fame brought fortune to his little sister, Therese. She married a nobleman of Burgos, a knight of Santiago and judge of the royal colonial court. He became the chief secretary of state for Madrid.

Murillo made money, but gave almost all that he made to the poor, though he did not make money in the service of the Church, as Velasquez made it in the service of the king.

His work of more than twenty pictures in the Capuchin Church of Seville occupied him for three years, and in that time he did not leave the convent for a single day.

Of all the charming stories told of this glorious artist, one which is connected with his work in that church is the most picturesque. It seems that every one within the walls loved him, and among others a lay brother who was cook. This man begged for some little personal token from Murillo and since there was no canvas at hand, the artist bade the cook leave the napkin which he had brought to cover his food, and during the day he painted upon it a Madonna and child, so natural that one ofhis biographers declares the child seems about to spring from Mary's arms. This souvenir made for the cook of the Capuchin, convent has been reproduced again and again, as one of the artist's greatest performances.

Toward the close of his happy life, he became more and more devout, spending many hours before an altar-piece in the Church of Santa Cruz where was a picture of "The Descent from the Cross," by Pedro Campana. "Why do you always tarry before 'The Descent from the Cross?'" the sacristan once asked of him.

"I am waiting till those men have brought the body of our blessed Lord down the ladder." Murillo answered. His wife had died, his daughter had become a nun, and all that was left to him was his dear son Gaspar, when in his sixty-third year he began his last work, "The Marriage of St. Catherine." He had not finished this when he fell from the scaffolding upon which he was working, and fatally hurt himself. He died, with his son beside him. He was a much loved man, and when he was buried, his bier was carried by "two marquises and four knights and followed by a great concourse of people." He chose to be buried beneath the picture he loved so much--"The Descent from the Cross," and upon his grave was laid a stone carved with his name, a skeleton and an inscription in Latin which means "Live as one who is about to die."

The church has since been destroyed, andon its site is the Plaza Santa Cruz, but Murillo's grave is marked by a tablet.

Each country seems to have had at least one man of beautiful heart and mind, to represent its art. Raphael in Italy, Murillo in Spain, were types of gentle and greatly beloved men. Leonardo in Italy and Dürer in Nuremberg, were types of forceful, intellectual men, highly respected and of great benefit to the world.

Of all the painters who ever lived, Murillo was the one who painted little children with the most loving and fascinating touch.

PLATE--THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

Besides the little angels in this picture, we have a bewildering choice among many other beauties.

Many pictures of this subject have been painted, and many were painted by Murillo, but the one presented here is the greatest of all. It hangs in the Louvre, Salle VI. Mary seems to be suspended in the heavens, not standing upon clouds. Under the hem of her garments is the circle of the moon, while there is the effect of hundreds of little cherub children massed about her feet, in a little swarm at the right, where the shadow falls heaviest, and still others, half lost in the vapoury background at the left, where the heavenly light streams upon them, and brilliantly lights up the Virgin'sgown. In this picture are all Murillo's beloved child figures, some carrying little streamers, their tiny wings a-flutter and all crowding lovingly about Mary. Far below this gorgeous group we can imagine the dark and weary earth lost in shadow.

Among Murillo's most famous paintings are: "The Birth of the Virgin," "Two Beggar Boys," "The Madonna of the Rosary," "The Annunciation," "Adoration of the Shepherds," "Holy Family," "Education of Mary," "The Dice Players," and "The Vision of St. Anthony."

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