Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art | Page 8

increased and heightened by the fame of his son.
Horace Vernet was born at the Louvre on the 30th June, 1789, the year of the death of his grandfather, who, as painter to the king, had occupied rooms at the Louvre, where his father also resided; so that Horace not only inherited his art from a race of artist-ancestors, but was born amid the chef d' oeuvres of the entire race of painters. Of course, his whole childhood and youth were surrounded with objects of Art; and it was scarcely possible for him not to be impressed in the most lively manner by the unbroken artist-life in which he was necessarily brought up. It would appear that from his childhood he employed himself in daubing on walls, and drawing on scraps of paper all sorts of little soldiers.
Like his father and grandfather, his principal lessons as a student were drawn from the paternal experience, and certainly no professor could more willingly and faithfully save him all the loss of time and patience occasioned by the long and often fruitless groping of the almost solitary Art-student. He was also thus saved from falling into the errors of the school of David. Certainly no great penchant towards the antique is discoverable in his father's works; nor in his own do we find painted casts of Greek statues dressed in the uniforms of the nineteenth century. At twenty, it is true, he tried, but without success, the classic subject offered to competition at the Academy for the prize of visiting Rome. The study of the antique did not much delight him. On the contrary, he rather joined with the innovators, whose example was then undermining the over-classic influence of David's school, the most formidable and influential of whom, a youth about his own age, and a fellow-student in his father's atelier, was then painting a great picture, sadly decried at the time, but now considered one of the masterpieces of the French school in the Louvre--the "Raft of the Medusa." Gericault was his companion in the studio and in the field, at the easel and on horseback; and we might trace here one of the many instances of the influence which this powerful and original genius exercised on the young artists of his time, and which, had it not been arrested by his premature death in January, 1824, would have made Gericault more strikingly distinguished as one of the master-spirits in French Art, and the head of a school entirely the opposite to that of David.
Horace's youth, however, did not pass entirely under the smiles of fortune. He had to struggle with those difficulties of narrow means with which a very large number of young artists are tolerably intimate. He had to weather the gales of poverty by stooping to all sorts of illustrative work, whose execution we fancy must have been often a severe trial to him. Any youth aiming at "high art," and feeling, though poor, too proud to bend in order to feed the taste, (grotesque and unrefined enough, it must be allowed,) of the good public, which artists somewhat naturally estimate rather contemptuously, might get a lesson of patience by looking over an endless series of the most variedly hideous costumes or caricatures of costume which Horace was glad to draw, for almost any pecuniary consideration. A series of amusingly naive colored prints, illustrating the adventures of poor La Valli��re with Louis XIV., would strengthen the lesson. These were succeeded by lithographs of an endless variety of subjects--the soldier's life in all its phases, the "horse and its rider" in all their costumes, snatches of romances, fables, caricatures, humorous pieces, men, beasts, and things. In short, young Horace tried his hand at any thing and every thing in the drawing line, at once earning a somewhat toughly-woven livelihood, and perfecting his talent with the pencil. In later years, the force and freedom of this talent were witnessed to by illustrations of a more important character in a magnificent edition of Voltaire's Henriade, published in 1825, and of the well known Life of Napoleon by Laurent.
Failing, as we have said, and perhaps fortunately for him, in the achievement of the great Prize of Rome, he turned to the line of Art for which he felt himself naturally endowed, the incidents of the camp and field. The "Taking of a Redoubt;" the "Dog of the Regiment;" the "Horse of the Trumpeter;" "Halt of French Soldiers;" the "Battle of Tolosa;" the "Barrier of Clichy, or Defense of Paris in 1814" (both of which last, exhibited in 1817, now hang in the gallery of the Luxembourg), the "Soldier-Laborer;" the "Soldier of Waterloo;" the "Last Cartridge;" the "Death of Poniatowski;" the "Defense of Saragossa," and many more, quickly followed each other, and kept up continually