The early work of Raphael . h Napoleons pictureof himself, especially with that part of it in which we see him anxiousabout the verdict of posterity. You may say, too, that my reading ofthe painters intention in the Bellerophon picture is contradicted by theNapoleon he himself painted twelve years later. This second picture isthe St. Helena—1816, which was at the Academy in 1893. Here thecaptive is by no means an heroic figure ; but he has been a captive for ayear. For a year he has been controlled by his inferiors. For a yearhis vivid, all embracing, essentially constructive imagination has h
The early work of Raphael . h Napoleons pictureof himself, especially with that part of it in which we see him anxiousabout the verdict of posterity. You may say, too, that my reading ofthe painters intention in the Bellerophon picture is contradicted by theNapoleon he himself painted twelve years later. This second picture isthe St. Helena—1816, which was at the Academy in 1893. Here thecaptive is by no means an heroic figure ; but he has been a captive for ayear. For a year he has been controlled by his inferiors. For a yearhis vivid, all embracing, essentially constructive imagination has hurtledagainst those of men to whom life is routine. For a year he has been acaged eagle, conscious of his wings and of his ability to face the sun, andyet chained down by wingless, blinking mortals, to whom even his ownglory had been a thing too dazzling to look at and comprehend. Apainter might well choose such a change to give point to his drama, andvet I must confess that, to me, Orchardson seems to have slightly over-. Study for the figure of Napoleon at St. permission of W. O. Qrchardson, Esq., 48 THE ART OF WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHARDSON done the contrast. In his second Napoleon we may trace a combinationof impatience with solicitude, of irritability with a desire to put his bestfoot foremost, which do not grow inevitably out of the checked butirresistible personality of twelve months before. To me he even seemsto have painted his idol concocting a lie, and the secretary knowing heis doing it. On this I do not animadvert from a moral but from anartistic point of view. It seems an error in proportion. The painter,of course, justifies himself, or rather, to be more exact, the presumptuouscritic finds an excuse for what the painter has done, in the plea ofphysical decay, in the consideration that General Bonaparte had, in1816, already begun to understand that his time was short, and that, if hewould leave such a portrait of himself as he would like the world toa
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