The early work of Raphael . script is to the novel what the call before the curtainis to the tragedy consummated before it fell. In painting his secondNapoleon Orchardson yielded perhaps to a similar temptation ; the wayin which he conducted himself therein shows that he knew well enoughthat the great French Emperor came to his end on the deck of anEnglish man-of-war. So far I have said nothing of the pictorial constitution of this OnBoard the Bellerophon. It is, in fact, unmistakable. The aestheticand the intellectual elements alike find their focus in the Emperorsfigure. All the rest is comp
The early work of Raphael . script is to the novel what the call before the curtainis to the tragedy consummated before it fell. In painting his secondNapoleon Orchardson yielded perhaps to a similar temptation ; the wayin which he conducted himself therein shows that he knew well enoughthat the great French Emperor came to his end on the deck of anEnglish man-of-war. So far I have said nothing of the pictorial constitution of this OnBoard the Bellerophon. It is, in fact, unmistakable. The aestheticand the intellectual elements alike find their focus in the Emperorsfigure. All the rest is complement, complement rightly placed and justin proportion, balancing the masses, picking up and resolving the lines,completing the chords of colour. Orchardson is often blamed for hisempty spaces. The truth is that his spaces—and, I confess, they are THE ART OF WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHARDSON 49 often ample enough—are seldom empty. They are filled with subtlecolour modulations, with the infinite echoes of a harmony which never. Study for the figure of Madame Recamier. dies completely into silence. Almost the only exception I can callto mind occurs in the picture we are now discussing. The mainsail D 50 THE ART OF WILLIAM QUILLER 0RCHARDS0N of the Bellerophon seems blinder, more monotonous and opaque, thanit need have been. But that seems a pettifogging fault to find. Orchardson followed up his success of 1881 by building on a lesssatisfactory theme a still more perfect work of art. The incident whichtook his fancy is one of those too numerous events in the life of Voltairewhich prevent him, as a personality, from looming over the life of hisday at the height his intellect would justify. In the book already quoted, Chesneau complains that Englishpictures too often compel a reference to the catalogue before they can beunderstood. He goes on, with some simplicity, to find a partial excusefor this in the idea that the English public is much more literary in itstastes than the French,
Size: 1157px × 2160px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookde, booksubjectraphael14831520, bookyear1895
