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

of the son
already joined itself to that of the father, the figures being from the
pencil of Horace; and before the death of the father, which took place
in 1836, he had already seen the artistic reputation of the family
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 Vallière
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"