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Pierre Grassou by Honoré de Balzac
page 14 of 34 (41%)
quite passable work. He did as well as any artist of the second class.
Elie bought and sold all the paintings of the poor Breton, who earned
laboriously about two thousand francs a year while he spent but twelve
hundred.

At the Exhibition of 1829, Leon de Lora, Schinner, and Bridau, who all
three occupied a great position and were, in fact, at the head of the
art movement, were filled with pity for the perseverance and the
poverty of their old friend; and they caused to be admitted into the
grand salon of the Exhibition, a picture by Fougeres. This picture,
powerful in interest but derived from Vigneron as to sentiment and
from Dubufe's first manner as to execution, represented a young man in
prison, whose hair was being cut around the nape of the neck. On one
side was a priest, on the other two women, one old, one young, in
tears. A sheriff's clerk was reading aloud a document. On a wretched
table was a meal, untouched. The light came in through the bars of a
window near the ceiling. It was a picture fit to make the bourgeois
shudder, and the bourgeois shuddered. Fougeres had simply been
inspired by the masterpiece of Gerard Douw; he had turned the group of
the "Dropsical Woman" toward the window, instead of presenting it full
front. The condemned man was substituted for the dying woman--same
pallor, same glance, same appeal to God. Instead of the Dutch doctor,
he had painted the cold, official figure of the sheriff's clerk
attired in black; but he had added an old woman to the young one of
Gerard Douw. The cruelly simple and good-humored face of the
executioner completed and dominated the group. This plagiarism, very
cleverly disguised, was not discovered. The catalogue contained the
following:--

510. Grassou de Fougeres (Pierre), rue de Navarin, 2.
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