The Portland daily press., 1877-04-28
Art and Artists.

Mr. Dante Rossetti, the founder Of the Pre-
raphaelite fraternity, believes that the habit of
painting for exhibition walls is not good one,
and leads an artist to paint merely to please
vague and unlearned popular taste.
Miss Ransom, the artist who painted Gen.
Thomas's portrait, has an order to paint all the
Presidents and their wives for FloridiaD, who
at his death will leave them to some State
institution. The portraits will be copied from
the best originals, and the artist will receive
$4,000 for the whole.
Millas gets more money for his pictures
than any other artist in England. He was
born a poor boy in the Island of Jersey, and
began his artistic work with an employer who
gave him bis board and 81 25 week. Now he
receives $40, 900 or more for painting one por-
trait. He is little over so years old. He has
q superb new house with marble stairway and
fountains and carved doorways.
The number of American students at the
Munich school of painting has been reduced
from about 60 to between 80 and 40 during the
past year. Messrs. Duveneck, Chase, Barnum,
and Vinton contemplate tour in Italy and
Egypt. and may not return again to Munich.
Mr.. Vinton will afterward go to Paris, and Mr..
Rosenthal will shortly take his departure thth-
er. The latter's health was very poor last win
ter He now has on his easel picture called
much Ado about Nothing; or, A Man in the
House,
The greatest sale the Rue Drouot has ever
perhaps witnessed closed on Friday of last
week. The collection of the Duke of Alba,
brother.in.law of the Empress Eugene, has
been brought to the hammer. 1t embraces
heirlooms dating from the reign of Charles v.
Among the tapestries are seventy-fve in gold,
s;l oil nd -
nament the front of their palace when the
Spanish kings were going to prove their Chris
tianity at autos-da-fe, or queenly brides coming
home. These were manufactured at Ferrara
and Florence. OF the works of Pannmaker,
the celebrated Flemish weaver of hangings in
the Arras style, there are eleven subjects de-
signed by Raphael, and taken from the Acts of
the Apostles, the victories of the Duke of Alba
and scenes from the Old Testament. Not pfe-
rior in execution are the tapestries taken from
the cartoons of Rubens, Martin Vos and Charles
Lebrun. The engravngs-of which there are
as many as 4000-would in themselves form
one of the most remarkable galleries in the
world Only four pictures remain of all the ar
tistic wealth of the Lir'a Palace. They are by
MurilO and Velasquez.
The whole of the great Temple of Zeus at
Olympia is now cleared from soil and impor-
tant additions are being made every week to
correspondent of The Academy describes these
Oiympian sculptures as possessing neither the
grace nor the careful finish of the Parthenon
statues SIT is easy to point out faults in them,
and in many respects they give shock to the
notions of art which we have formed from the
works of the sculptOrS who represent the or
thodox line of descent. But the originality and
boldness of execution produce first surprise and
next delight, and finally feeling that Greek
art is a wider thing than we had supposed"
The fragments of the Eastern and Western
pediments are described in detail. All these
sculptures, the works of the contemporaries of
Phidias, were elaborately sketched by Pausa-
MAS. He made one mistake. In describing
the sculptured group on the eastern pediment
he puts helmet on the head of Gnomads, one
OF the principle figures in the chariot race. The
German diggers have discovered that 1t was
Pelops who had the helmet, and that Gno-
mails wore band around his head. Pausanias
seems to have been, on the whole, a tolerably
accurate reporter as we'll as an intelligent trav-
eller, and this little slip was probably an in
stance of heterophemy.