Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/430

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

Desavary has reproduced the idealism of Corot on stone, and Anastasi has executed landscapes after Dupré and after Troyon; Émile Vernier (1831-1884), Loutrel, Laurens, and Français have faithfully caught the reflected glory of Corot and the Barbizon school and monumentally recorded it on stone.

Fantin-Latour, with his wonderful series of musical subjects inspired by Wagner, by Berlioz, by Schumann and Brahms, has produced considerably over a hundred lithographs. Among some of the finest are Scène première du Rheingold (1876), Solitude (1882), Harold dans les Montagnes (1884), Évocation d'Erda (1885), Götterdämmerung, Siegfried et les Filles du Rhin (1884).

Adolphe Willette enchants us with his Chansons d'Amour and Girl and Pierrot, Sterner charms with his Girl with Mandoline and many others,—and there is Steinlen. In his incomparable ballads in stone of grisettes, of sordid night-hawks, of laughing roysterers, all the modern street life of Paris is revealed. The helpless cry of the social outcast, hanging over the river on the quay-side, rings in our ears, and the low, musical purr of the cat nestling by the side of the tired sempstress touches a tender note. The thousand and one kaleidoscopic phases of Parisian life he has arrested at the psychological moment and transferred to the stone. We peep at them through the filmy dream-halo he has, artist that he is, thrown around his characters. In such a gallery it is difficult to choose where all are so striking. But in the series Chansons de Femmes the graceful figure of a workgirl, bonnet-box on arm,