Pierre Grassou by Honoré de Balzac
page 14 of 34 (41%)
page 14 of 34 (41%)
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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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