e opened bright before us; the sky was blue!"
Gerome's pictures of Eastern life make a gallery by themselves. A few
of them are historic, such as his "Cleopatra visiting Caesar," but the
most of them are simply scenes and incidents drawn from the daily life
of the modern inhabitants of Cairo and the desert, illustrating their
manners and customs. The mere titles would fill up a large part of our
space. Many of the best of them are owned in this country, and all
have been reproduced by engraving or by photography.
In another field Gerome won great distinction, painting scenes from
the history of France in the reign of Louis XIV.; subjects drawn from
what may be called the high comedy of court-life, and treated by
Gerome with remarkable refinement and distinction. Among these
pictures the best known are: "Moliere Breakfasting with Louis XIV.,"
illustrating the story of the king's rebuke to his courtiers who
affected to despise the man of genius; "Pere Joseph," the priest who
under the guise of humility and self-abnegation reduces the greatest
nobles to the state of lackeys; "Louis XIV. Receiving the Great
Conde," and "Collaboration," two poets of Louis XIV.'s time working
together over a play. Among his accomplishments as an artist we must
not forget the talent that Gerome has shown as a sculptor. He has
modelled several figures from his own pictures, with such admirable
skill as to prove that he might easily have made sculpture a
profession had he not chosen to devote himself to painting.
[Signature of the author.]
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI[10]
[Footnote 10: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
By EDMUND GOSSE
(1828-1882)
[Illustration: Dante Gabriel Rossetti.]
Those whose privilege it was to meet the late Mr. Gabriel Rossetti, at
once in the plenitude of his powers and in the freshness of their own
impressions, will not expect to be moved again through life by so
magnetic a presence. In his dealings with those much younger than
himself, his tact and influence were unequalled; he received a shy but
ardent youth with such a noble courtesy, with so much sympathy yet
with no condescension, with so grand an air and yet so warm a welcome,
that his new acquaintance was enslaved at the first sentence. This
seems to me to have been in a certain sense the key-note of the man.
He was essentially a point of fire; not a peripatetic in any sense,
not a person of wide circumference, but a nucleus of pure
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