184
EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
and you 'will find they are unconscious of the presence of the illustrious visitors, and are all posed and grouped to perfect the composition, but not to illustrate a shadow of the main idea. In treatment, the flesh is hard and inflexible, the light is harsh, and falsities of tone prevail. The shadows are, for the most part, of a chocolate opacity. In two portraits, hung either side of the large picture, Kichter was seen to much better advantage. The artist’s wife, with her infant on her arm, very gracefully posed, and the face full of motherly tenderness, is painted with great skill, and excellent in color and drawing. This portrait had no rival, but its companion, which is of the artist himself, and an older child, who holds a glass of champagne to the light, its chubby arm supported by the strong hand of the father. These portraits possess all the interest of pictures, and are beautifully arranged and charmingly rendered.
Of the immense allegories and numerous religious pictures exposed, there was little more remarkable than their general conventionality and parallel merits. One of the characteristics of the genres , and even of the pictures above described, is their adaptability to almost perfect representation by a photograph, gaining rather than losing by this means of reproduction. Any one who is acquainted with Paul Meyerheim, through the photographs of his pictures, cannot fail to be greatly disappointed at the sight of the originals. Without exception, as they were seen in Vienna, they are hard and dry in contour and color. The Menagerie , in which the burly keeper performs with the boa-constrictor, to the amazement of a gaping crowd of country people, and the wise-looking pelican, the awkward flamingo, and the garrulous parrot, adding to the interest of the occasion, is one of the better examples of this artist. 8hearing Sheep, and one or two others, are noticeable only for the lack of the good qualities which belong to the one first mentioned, and in none of these is there any story told worth recording. Knaus is evidently resting 011 his oars, having put off the student’s cap, and occupying himself with the elaboration of what he has already acquired— judging from his half dozen pictures exposed. There is not a suggestion of direct inspiration from nature in any of them, and they all could have been, and probably were, painted by