Stories from Everybody's Magazine by Various
page 134 of 492 (27%)
page 134 of 492 (27%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
suggest more obviously a wave," he says, "and you have a trick
picture. After a while, you wouldn't see anything in it but the trick." The wave motion is repeated on a comber out at sea, and, to the left, against a rock on the shore. Diana stands behind the horses, against the great, golden moon--a radiant halo. She has just unloosed an arrow from her bow. Her draperies are of indefinite color, the rose and lilac and amber of sunset. Her face, it will be noted, though she stands against the moon, is lighted from in front. In that fact lies the secret of the illumination. For this picture was supposedly painted at that one Byronic hour of the year when The sun was setting opposite the moon. Turner, in a small water color, has worked out a similar problem, with the cool copper of the harvest moonlight bathing one side of an old stone tower, the warm rose of sunset the other. In Mr. Elliott's great canvas the mutual lights kill all shadows, and out toward the great yellow disk of the moon the invisible sun floods its lilac and pink, kindling the waves, the draperies of the goddess, the wet flanks of the horses, and suffusing the whole painting with its delicate, bright warmth, which is yet kept too cool for gaudiness by the twilight of the moon. While this canvas was being unpacked in Washington last winter, Mr. Elliott was exhibiting in Boston his portrait of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. It was begun and nearly finished at Newport four or five years ago; but Mr. Elliott has not cared to complete it, for during the interval the "Grand Old |
|