REPORT OF MR. MILLETT.
175
who has assimilated much of his master’s admiration for the quality of tone, exposed three pictures, all very strong in this respect. The Bookworm , a library interior, with two figures, is a marvellous example of perspective of tone, and very strong in color and treatment. The Sorceress is less successful as a picture, for the witch is but a common-place model, posed before a fire, and very meagrely drawn and painted, and the two visitors who enter with a baby are expressionless and cold, but the interior is beautifully rendered. To another and degenerate class of followers of this master, Mho imitate their teacher with more affinity for his faults than for his better qualities, belong Frans Vinck, of Antwerp, and the two De Vriendts, of Brussels. Vinck’s idea °t a picture is a row of poses plastiques , before a fiat and obtrusive background of Antwerp architecture. He calls it Sortie (Tune Eglise , Ventrée joyeuse d’un Roi du Tir — you may call it what you will, and be sure of a fit. "When he sings of love, it is a Belgian soldier with a nursery-maid, and the sly priest, to play his part in the farce, all posed before a stiff hedge-row of trees. Julian and Albert De "VTiendt,— ami they might be one for all the difference that can be discovered in their works—both exposed large historical pictures, subjects chosen under pressure, painted with no spontaneity, and adding to a certain strength of color little expression, much gothic rigidity, and no human interest. Generally painting M T ith a great deal of feeling, Louis G allait was scarcely suggested by two dramatic pictures called Peace and War. The latter is a very unpleasant episode, illustrated with a horrid realism. A dead mother and infant, a child wild with grief, and a grimy, pallid hand, showing the fate °t the father, the situation of the scene marked by a few Sophies, it formed a group to be reverently covered with a sheet. Two portraits of Belgian gentlemen, and one of Pope Pius IX.—a reproduction of the one in the Vatican—were painted with a skill rarely found outside Belgium.
The morbid taste for a spice of horror so evident in the picture just spoken of, recalls to my mind that one of Wiertz’s largest canvases, The Fall of the Angels , hung in the Salon d Honneur, opposite the weak and monotonous expanse of Gabanel’s Triumph of Flora. A confessed imitator of Bu-