Identifier: artartistsofourt04cook (find matches)
Title: Art and artists of our time
Year: 1888 (1880s)
Authors: Cook, Clarence, 1828-1900
Subjects: Painting Painters
Publisher: New York, S. Hess
Contributing Library: Brandeis University Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

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in rapid succession, all of them dealing with subjects of national interest,and insuring the popular favor, but belonging to an order of work essentially melodramaticand superficial, akin to the mass of historical painting for which his countrymen havesuch a rooted affection—shared alike by the cultivated and tlie uncultivated—but which out-side of Germany is by no means so indiscriminately admired. Later on, Wagner visitedSpain, and the fruit of his travels was a large number of pictures with subjects illustratingthe more striking and picturesque episodes in the life of that half-medijeval, half-barbaricland, most of which subjects were reproduced for a show-book on Spain, published in Berlinin 1880. The Mail-Coach in Toledo, which we place before our readers, was one of the ART AND ARTISTS OF OUR TIME. I pictures engraved for tliis book; and to those who are familiar with the artists earlierpicture, the Roman Chariot-Race —and who is not?—it will be evident that the composi-
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AT THE LAKE. FROM THE PICTURE BY WILHELM AMBERG tion and the essential spirit of the scene are to all intents and purjioses the same in the twoworks. Wagner painted the Roman Chariot-Race twice; the iirst was a small picture, ART AND ARTISTS OF OUR TIME. • 231 now owned in England; the second, a mxich. larger work, is the one painted for the Philadel-phia Exposition of 1876, where it was much admired, although it is considered far inferior tothe original painting. The subject was, however, well-suited to the larger canvas, and therecan be no doubt that as a purely spectacular and sensational performance it deserved all theapplause it received. It was a very vivid, and no doubt in the main true, object-lesson inRoman manners, and it will certainly long hold its place in popular favor by virtue of itsspirited and energetic expression of rapid movement animating the whole scene as in reallife, and by no means confined to the main actors. In the Mail-Coach, the same merit is tobe acknow

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