AN INCIDENT IN THE LIFE OF A PAINTER.

EVERYBODY has heard of the famous painter Albrecht Durer, but every one is not aware that he possessed a "better half" so Xantipical in temper as to be the torment not only of his own life, but of that of his pupils and domestics also. Some of the former were cunning enough to purchase peace for themselves by conciliating the common tyrant-but woe to those unwilling or unable to offer aught in propitiation. Even the wiser ones were spared only by having their offences visited upon a scape-goat. This unfortunate individual was Samuel Duhobret, a disciple whom Durer had admitted into his school out of charity. He was employed in painting signs, and the coarse tapestry then used in Germany. He was about forty years of age, little, ugly, and humpbacked; was the butt of every ill joke among his fellow-disciples, and was picked out as a special object of dislike by Madame Durer.

Poor Samuel had not a spice of envy or malice in his heart. He would at any time have toiled half the night to assist or serve those who were wont, oftenest, to laugh at him, or abuse him loudest for his stupidity. True-he had not the qualities of social humour or wit; but he was an example of indefatigable industry. He came to his studies every morning at daybreak; and remained at work until sunset. Then he retired into his lonely chamber, and wrought for his own

amusement.

One morning Duhobret was missing at the scene of his daily labours. His absence created much remark, and many were the jokes passed upon the occasion. One surmised this, and another that, as the cause of the phenomenon; and it was finally agreed that the poor fellow must have worked himself into an absolute skeleton, and taken his final stand in the glass frame of some apothecary; or had been blown away by a puff of wind, while his door happened to stand open. No one thought of going to his lodgings to look after him.

Meanwhile the object of their mirth was tossing on a bed of sickness. Disease, which had been slowly sapping the foundations of his strength, burned in every vein; poor Duhobret had his dreams, as all artists, rich or poor, will sometimes have. He had thought the fruit of many years' labour, disposed of to advantage, might procure him enough to live, in an economical way, for the rest of his life. Now, alas! even that hope had deserted him. He believed himself dying, and thought it hard to die without one to look kindly upon him; without the words of comfort that might soothe his passage to another world. He fancied his bed surrounded by devilish faces, grinning at his sufferings, and taunting him with his inability to summon a priest to exorcise them. At length the apparitions faded away, and the patient sank into an exhausted slumber. He awoke unrefreshed; it was the fifth day he had lain there neglected. His mouth was parched; he turned over, and feebly stretched out his hand towards the earthen pitcher, from which, since the first day of his illness, he had quenched his thirst. Alas! it was empty! Samuel lay a few moments thinking what he should do. He knew he must die of want if he remained there alone; but to whom could he apply for aid in procuring sustenance? An idea seemed at last to strike him. He arose slowly, and with difficulty, from the bed, went to the other side of the room, and took up the picture he had painted last. He resolved to carry it to the shop of a salesman, and hoped to obtain for it sufficient to furnish him with the necessaries of life for a week longer. On his way he passed a house about which there was a crowd. He drew nigh-asked what was going on; and received for an answer, that there was to be a sale of many specimens of art collected by an amateur in the course of thirty years.

Something whispered the weary Duhobret that here would be the market for his picture. He worked his way through the crowd, and, after many inquiries, found the auctioneer. That personage was a busy, important, little man, with a handful of papers; and he was inclined to notice somewhat roughly the interruption of the lean, sallow hunchback, imploring as were his gestures and language.

"What do you call your picture?" at length said he,

"It is a view of the Abbey of Newbourg-with its villageand the surrounding landscape," replied the trembling artist The auctioneer again scanned it contemptuously, and asked what it was worth.

"Oh, that is what you please—whatever it will bring." "Hem! it is too odd to please, I should think-I can promise you no more than three thalers."

Poor Samuel sighed deeply. He had spent on that piece the nights of many months. But he was starving now; and the pitiful sum offered would give him bread for a few days. He nodded his head to the auctioneer, and, retiring, took his seat in a corner.

The sale began. After some paintings and engravings had been disposed of, Samuel's was exhibited.

"Who bids at three thalers? Who bids?" was the cry. Duhobret listened eagerly, but none answered. "Will it find a purchaser?" said he, despondingly, to himself. Still there was a dead silence. He dared not look up, for it seemed to him that all the people were laughing at the folly of the artist who could be insane enough to offer so worthless a piece at a public sale. "What will become of me?" was his mental inquiry. "That work is certainly my best ;" and he ventured to steal another glance. "Does it not seem that the wind actually stirs those boughs and moves those leaves? How transparent is the water! what life breathes in the animals that quench their thirst at that spring! How that steeple shines! How beautiful are those clustering trees!" This was the last expiring throb of an artist's vanity. The ominous silence continued, and Samuel, sick at heart, buried his face in his hands.

"Twenty-one thalers!" murmured a faint voice, just as the auctioneer was about to knock down the picture. The stupified painter gave a start of joy. He raised his head and looked to see from whose lips those blessed words had come. It was the picture-dealer to whom he had first thought of applying. Fifty thalers," cried a sonorous voice. This time a tal man in black was the speaker.

There was a silence of hushed expectation. "One hundred thalers," cried the picture-dealer. "Three hundred."

"Five hundred." "One thousand."

Another profound silence; and the crowd pressed around the two opponents, who stood opposite each other with eager and angry looks.

"Two thousand thalers!" cried the picture-dealer, and glanced around him triumphantly, when he saw his adversary hesitate.

"Ten thousand!" vociferated the tall man, his face crimson with rage, and his hands clenched convulsively.

The dealer grew paler; his frame shook with agitation he made two or three efforts, and at last cried out-" Twenty thousand !"

His tall opponent was not to be vanquished. He bid forty thousand. The dealer stopped; the other laughed a low laugh of insolent triumph, and a murmur of admiration was heard in the crowd. It was too much for the dealer; he felt his peace at stake. 'Fifty thousand!" exclaimed he, in desperation.

It was the tall man's turn to hesitate. Again the whole crowd were breathless. At length, tossing his arms in defiance, he shouted, "One hundred thousand!"

The crest-fallen picture-dealer withdrew; the tall man victoriously bore away the prize.

The possessor was proceeding homeward when a decrepit, lame, and humpbacked invalid, tottering along by the aid of a stick, presented himself before him. He threw him a piece of money, and waved his hand as dispensing with his thanks.

"May it please your honour," said the supposed beggar, “I am the painter of that picture !" and he rubbed his eyes. The tall man was Count Dunkelsback, one of the riches noblemen in Germany. He stopped, took out his pocketbook, tore out a leaf, and wrote on it a few lines. "Take it, friend,” said he; "it is a check for your money. Adieu."

THE Exposition of French Arts and Industry in 1849 was inaugurated in the Royal Palace of the Tuileries, at Paris; and a writer of the day, alluding to the former occupancy of that celebrated pile, observed, that "kings might perish and dynasties might be overthrown, but art must be eternal!" Now, however applicable or otherwise this expression was to the occasion, it contained a great truth. Art, if not exactly French art, is lasting and universal. Whether we stand in the shadow of the past, or bask in the sunshine of the present, our sympathies with art are enlisted, and our grosser natures purified; and, in this sense, the painter and the sculptor become great teachers, great poets, great orators!

We have heard of the "golden age," when little gold was discovered or brought into use; the "iron age," which indeed existed before railroads or steam-engines; the " age of innocence," which, by all accounts, was an age of very loose morals indeed; and various other " ages" distinguished by various other positive terms; but few have dared to designate the present time by any similitude to actual materialities. With the news of Australian and Californian discoveries brought daily to our fire-sides, we might, indeed, term this the " golden age;" while, if we look merely to the mechanical results of modern research and invention, we might, with equal truth, esteem ours the "age of bronze," or the "age of iron." Artistically and figuratively speaking, ours has been termed-whether truly or otherwise we shall not pretend to determine, the "Age of Tinsel!" Glitter and superficiality, says a modern writer, are the characteristics of both the times and the tinsel. Everything appears to be overdone; everything seems to be brought out in the gayest possible forms, at the cheapest possible rates, and with the least possible real utility or purpose. Burke declared, that with the French Revolution the age of chivalry had passed away; and later writers have not hesitated to affirm that the romantic period has altogether vanished from the world's history. In some senses--that is to say, in the senses in which these phrases were, and are, generally understood,-both assertions are probably correct; but in that higher view of chivalry and romance, which regards the most noble and daring action to be the removal of those old superstitions and restrictions which confined the minds of our forefathers, as iron bands and prison walls and rusty chains confined their bodies, the spirit of honour and the love of adventure are more than ever the property of the present. True, we have designated this the age of tinsel, but is it not a period of advancement too? If, in our literature, we place too much reliance on showy and tawdry exteriors, striking illustrations, beautiful printing, glossy paper, and gossamer writing, have we not also some enduring books which will take their stand beside the works of the masters of the past? If, in our mechanical arts, we waste, occasionally, the energies of both mind and capital in the production of trifling and shallow nothingnesses,—hundred bladed penknives, patent leather boots with a polish like court sticking-plaster, and ladies' silk dresses with half a dozen tints and shades, according to the light you view them n,—have we not also our tubular bridges, and Thames tunnels, and spinning jennies, and caloric engines? And so also in art. Though artists no longer produce "Holy Families," and Galateas," and "Schools of Athens," and " Annunciations," like those of Titian, and Raphael, and Guido, and Claude, and Murillo, but content themselves with "Pet Kittens," and "Oyster Dredgers," and "Views on the Thames," and "Mousetraps," and such like nonentities, the world has something to boast in the grandeurs of Turner, and Danby, and Martin, and the naturalnesses of Landseer, and Webster, and Wilkie, and Prith. It is true that, instead of the severely classic styles of the painters patronised by Lorenzo the Magnificent, in the glorious times of Italy, when a church thought it no waste to spend a couple of years' income for one grand altar-piece,-we have numerous examples of what may be called domestic pieces,-portraits and fancy pictures, and illustrations for annuals and drawing-books,-yet must we hold the times we

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live in, and not the artists who live in the times, to account for this seeming, nay, real-degeneration of art. In the place of noble and wealthy patrons, who, like Leo and Lorenzo, directed the artists to higher aims and more ambitious purposes, and disdained not to expend fortunes in the production of splendid art-examples, we have now a middle class public whose patronage can only be secured by the manufacture of paintings small enough to hang over library fire-places, and fill wall-spaces over parlour cupboards. It is the public who control the artists and not the artists who govern the taste of the public. We had a melancholy instance in the unfortunate Haydon, of the failure of an attempt to educate the public mind by great historical and grand gallery pieces. He painted pictures which were too large for modern houses, and the consequence was, that they remained unsold on his hands, and failed to attract discriminating audiences to the Egyptian-hall, in London, when put in competition with the superior claims of General Tom Thumb!

And the reason for all this is, not that the artists of our day want patronage --for the thousand new works which cover the walls of the public picture exhibitions, with the annual budding of the roses, attest to the contrary—but that the patronage is not quite of the right sort. What was it that produced such multitudes of low-art paintings among the Dutch masters? Why, simply because their patrons were shopkeepers and dairymen, who preferred the portraits of themselves and their little houses to anything which the genius of the artist might dare to attempt in a higher walk; because such productions paid, and because there was no demand among the wealthy and educated classes for the nobler and more enduring evidences of the painter's skill and labour.

Till within a very recent period indeed, the same remark would have applied to modern patrons and modern artists; but statesmen have shown their appreciation for the higher creations of art, and their love of the true, and beautiful, and noble, by those commissions which produced the statues and frescoes which decorate the walls of the New Palace at Westminster, and by that determination, so lately made public, to provide a better building than that in Trafalgar-square for the reception and preservation of the noble works which have been purchased by, or bequeathed to, the English nation. When a Vernon and a Turner-a well-informed patron and a successful artist-give their pictures to a nation, it behoves that nation to provide them a fitting house.

Much, too, has been done for modern art by the establishment of such institutions as Art-Unions, and Fine-art Distributions, Public Galleries, and Free Exhibitions; and much has been done towards the improvement of the public taste by the patronage of the rich and powerful among us. But not enough. It was, we think, a mistake of the Royal Commission, in excluding paintings from the Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations--an example which, we trust, will not be followed in the Great Industrial Fair in New York. Art requires extensive patronage, and that patronage must be judicious as well as extensive. The half-penny balladschool of illustration must give place to the higher claims of works, such as we insert in this magazine. Art must not be allowed to sink, either in style, conception, or execution, by the low taste of the purchasing patrons, or in the nonappreciation of governmental boards. We have had examples enough of Falls of Niagara painted upon tea-boards, and shipcovered Atlantic Oceans depicted upon canvasses twenty inches by twelve. Even the sellers of pictures now-a-days begin to exclaim against the rubbish they are compelled to sell, and the public demand for better subjects and higher art is beginning to make itself known among artists. Glaring colour and petty artistic efforts are, we trust, about to give way to a nobler and more living style of painting.

As in pictures, so in statuary. The Baileys, and Wyatts, and Steeds, and Bells, are slowly beginning to perceive that the public taste-and therefore the profitable art-trade -- is

study. Many of our readers will remember the works of Pradier, Collas, and Debay, which graced the French Sculpture Court in the Exhibition of 1851; and they will coirclude that something more of thought and inspiration were bestowed on, and evolved by their production than the beautiful pictures of Valentin would lead us to suppose. The age of Tinsel is the age of youth; and it is generally succeeded, in art as in nature, by the ages of Gold and of Iron.

SILK AND SILK-WEAVERS.

THE silk-trade of England, employing upwards of half a million of people, is the exclusive occupation of only two localities in that country of any great importance Spitalfields and Macclesfield. In the latter place, where it employs about 25,000 persons, it is entirely the growth of the last sixty years; in Spitalfields it boasts of a much higher antiquity, dating its origin as far back as 1685. Silk-weaving was not entirely unknown in England prior to that time, it having been carried on at Canterbury, Norwich, and other places, by large numbers of refugees from religious persecution on the continent. A new impulse was given to the trade in 1685, caused by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when upwards of 50,000 French refugees, chiefly weavers, found an asylum in this country, and were treated with the utmost consideration, both by the parliament and people. A grant of £15,000 per annum was voted by government for their immediate necessities, and they were permitted to settle on what was then an open space belonging to the Hospital of St. Augustine, and known as "Hospital-fields;" hence, by a very obvious abbreviation, the modern name, Spitalfields. The hospitality thus afforded, appears to have been in no way abused, for the liberality of the legislature soon became unnecessary, the weavers attaining a flourishing and important position; so much so, that in less than thirty years afterwards, their trade in its various branches maintained upwards of 300,000 persons in England, about half the number at present engaged in it. While the cotton-trade has originated and grown to its present colossal dimensions almost within the memory of the present generation, 140 years has scarcely sufficed to double the number of those dependent on the silk-trade.

The early

growth of the silk-trade was, however, of a far more extraordinary character than that of the cotton-trade, the first forty or fifty years having witnessed its development to an extent, which, when taken in connexion with the total population of the country, is entirely without a parallel.

For many years the population of Spitalfields was almost exclusively French, and although in a foreign country, they retained almost to within the memory of persons now livin the use of their native language, remnants of which may still be traced in names of articles used by the weavers. For instance, the instrument used to turn the work on to the beam after it is woven is called a tanto; in Norwich, where the Flemings are supposed to have given most of the names to weavers' tools, the same thing is called a starking-pin. The batteau, the battens, the mounture of the Spitalfields weaver, are substitutes for the rol, the boards, and the harness, of the Norwich weaver; the former words being pure French, and the latter evidently of Saxon or low German origin. Lancashire has synonymes for these words in rathe, lathe, and mountain, the latter clearly a corruption or mispronunciation of the French name. The evidence of French antecedents is not, in Spitalfields, confined to the names of tools; numbers of proper names of undoubted French parentage are to be found scattered over the whole district, many of them owned by shopkeepers and small tradesmen. The foreign aspect of the neighbourhood is, however, with the exception of a few names, almost entirely amongst the things that were. The French songs, which we are told were formerly sung about the streets, the French coffee-houses, the French manners, the dash of French in the style of the houses, the porticoes, the seats at the doors, with the weavers on summer evenings enjoying their pipes, all these are gone, leaving scarcely a remnant behind. Spitalfields is changed; and, it is painful to add, not for the better.

There is one pleasant remnant of old times that has survived all the adverse vicissitudes from which Spitalfields has suffered the little gardens with their neat summer-houses. Of these there are several hundreds, and from the immense numbers of tulips and dahlias which appear to be the peculiar care of Spitalfields cultivators, the whole neighbourhood pregents during the latter part of the summer a gay and sprightly appearance. The ancient chronicler of Norwich describes that early seat of the weaving trade as a "city in a garden;" it has certainly, even to this day, some pretensions to that agreeable description; but it must yield the palm in that respect to Spitalfields, whose superiority renders that horticultural vanity, of which a few instances might be given, somewhat excusable. Although their gardens in autumn present all the deep tints and variegated obtrusiveness of the showiest of flowers, the cultivators are not all unmindful of the utilities. We remember, about five years ago, a gentleman, well known for his exertions in the cause of popular improvement, invited a number of the principal weavers of Spitalfields to several meetings at his house, for the purpose of talking over their depressed condition, and the possibility of something being. done for them. At the second meeting, an old man between 60 and 70 presented a small basket to the host, saying, it contained some of the produce of Spitalfields. The contents were put upon the table in the shape of several fine parsnips. The old man was first speaker that night; and, with the produce of his garden before him, he waxed absolutely eloquent on the sin and shame and disgrace of letting a man who could produce such parsnips work from "morn to eve, from eve to dewy morn," and earn no more than enabled him to spend in food for his family just three farthings per head per day! He was perfectly right as to the sin and shame and disgrace existing somewhere; but one would have expected the "reason why" and the pride to have lain in another direction.

The decadence of Spitalfields may be dated from shortly after the commencement of the present century. Up to that period the wages of weavers were higher than those of any other class of workmen. Even in 1814, some years after the stream of adversity had begun to gather strength, a list of prices for labour was published, in which the price of the lowest article in the trade, which was and is made chiefly by women and young persons, was 7d. per yard; the price paid for a similar article, but with a far greater amount of labour in it, in Lancashire and Cheshire, is 2d. per yard. This com parison of prices is a tolerably correct indication of the amount of reduction in wages generally.

From the earliest times, the Spitalfields weavers have sought, by combination, to fix the prices of their labour. For a time they succeeded. The state of the trade would have enabled them to command almost any prices they chose to name; but they endeavoured to maintain their monopoly too long. An enemy was in the field that they refused to recognise; the power-loom was taking the work from the cottonweavers of Manchester, Macclesfield, and other places, and cotton-weavers needed but little instruction to make them good silk-weavers. Silk manufacturers discovered this, and as Spitalfields has declined, other places have taken its trade. The silk-trade, which, at its commencement, was almost confined to one locality, is now scattered over twenty counties. In the small towns of Essex, in Kent, in Somersetshire, in Norfolk, in Lancashire and Cheshire, in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, in Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and Warwickshire, and even in Yorkshire, the sound of the silk-loom may be heard. In many of these places the trade is extendng, but Spitalfields declines. Although the original cause of this decline was the high wages demanded, the reaction has been so great that prices are now lower in Spitalfields than in some of those places to which the trade has fled. Forty years ago, the best hands earned as much as £7 or £8 per week; and they would any of them have been ashamed of themselves not to have kept St. Monday as a holiday. There was no waiting then one week's wages was the average wages of the year, and the masters were so anxious to obtain the goods, that some of them have been known to take work in from