charm of color and aerial depth and
transparency in which the eye revels, yet there is a hard vigorous
actuality which adds to the force and energy of the actors, and
strengthens the idea of presence at the battle, without attracting or
charming away the mind from the terrible inhumanities principally
represented. No poetry, no romance, no graceful and gentle beauty; but
the stern dark reality as it might be written in an official bulletin,
or related in a vigorous, but cold and accurate, page of history. Such
is the distinguishing talent of Horace Vernet--talent sufficient,
however, to make his pictures the attractive centres of crowds at the
Louvre Exhibitions, and to make himself the favorite of courts and one
of the _illustrissimi_ of Europe.

The Vernets have been a family of painters during four generations. The
great-grandfather of Horace was a well-known artist at Avignon, a
hundred and fifty years ago. His son and pupil, Claude Joseph Vernet,
was the first marine painter of his time; and occupies, with his works
alone, an entire apartment of the French Gallery at the Louvre, besides
great numbers of sea-pieces and landscapes belonging to private
galleries. He died in 1789, but his son and pupil, Antoine Charles
Horace Vernet, who had already during two years sat by his side in the
Royal Academy, continued the reputation of the family during the
Consulate and Empire. He was particularly distinguished for
cavalry-battles, hunting scenes, and other incidents in which the horse
figured largely as actor. In some of these pictures the hand of the son
already joined itself to that of the father, the figures being from the
pencil of Horace; and before the death of the father, which took place
in 1836, he had already seen the artistic reputation of the family
increased and heightened by the fame of his son.

Horace Vernet was born at the Louvre on the 30th June, 1789, the year of
the death of his grandfather, who, as painter to the king, had occupied
rooms at the Louvre, where his father also resided; so that Horace not
only inherited his art from a race of artist-ancestors, but was born
amid the _chef d' oeuvres_ of the entire race of painters. Of course,
his whole childhood and youth were surrounded with objects of Art; and
it was scarcely possible for him not to be impressed in the most lively
manner by the unbroken artist-life in which he was necessarily brought
up. It would appear that from his childhood he emplo