Lippincotts Magazine, March 1876 | Page 6

side-wheel reigned supreme among British war-steamers, although some of the altered liners which cut such an imposing figure till the Sebastopol forts in '55 checked, and iron-clads in '62 finished, their career, were under way. A model of one of them, The Queen, was exhibited as the highest exemplification of "the progress of art as applied to shipbuilding during the last eighteen centuries"--a progress entirely eclipsed by that of the subsequent eighteen years.
We sent no steam fire-engines, no locomotives, and no cars. Our great printing-presses, since largely borrowed from and imported by Europe, were scarcely noticed. Not so with "a most beautiful little machine" for making card wire-cloth, copied from America. Recognition of the supreme merits of the pianos of Chickering, Steinway and the rest was still wanting, Erard's Parisian instruments bearing the bell. Borden's meat-biscuit--to revert to the practical--caused quite a sensation, the Admiralty being overloaded with spoiled and condemned preserved meat. The American daguerreotypes on exhibition were pronounced decidedly superior to those of France, and still more to those of England. Whipple displayed the first photograph taken of the moon, thus securing to this country the credit of having broken ground for the application of the new art to astronomy. No photograph of a star or of the sun had been obtained. The distance between the United States and Europe in the application and improvement of photography cannot be said, notwithstanding our advantage in climate, to have been since widened. A field of competition still lies open before them in the fixing of color by the camera and the sensitive surface. The sun still insists on doing his work with India ink and keeping his spectral palette strictly to himself. For cheap and popular renderings of color man was then, as now, fain to have recourse to the press. The English exhibited some chromatic printing, far inferior to the chromo-lithographs of today.
And this brings us to art. One out of thirty in the programme, it was, as it always will be on these occasions, nearer thirty to one in the estimation of assembled sight-seers. The dry goods and machinery, even the bald, shadeless and ugly (however comfortable) model cottages of the inevitable Prince Albert, failed to draw like the things which flattered the lust of the eye; as the pigs and pumpkins of an "agricultural horse-trot" attract but a wayside glance from the procession to the grand stand. We are all dwellers in a vast picture-gallery, with frescoed dome above and polychromed sculpture and mosaic pavement on the floor below. Its merits we perceive, enjoy and interpret according to our individual gifts and education. But it makes amateurs in some sort of every mother's son or daughter, of us; and we hasten to plunge, confident each in his particular grammar of the beautiful, into the study of what imitative gallery may be offered us. Though the financial idea may have been uppermost in the minds of the devotees of the Mountain of Light, and their pleasure in the march past that of a stroll through the vaults of the Bank of England, they also expected to see in it the combined brilliance of all diamonds. Not finding that, we dare say few of them paid it a second visit, but, led by a like craving for dazzle, sought more legitimate intoxication in marble, canvas, porcelain and chased and cast metals.
There they saw the diamond put into harness by the Hindus and used for drilling gems as it is now for drilling railway tunnels. In the carpets and shawls of the same region was to be traced an exact and unfaltering instinct for color, the tints falling into their proper places like those of the rainbow--the result not a picture, any more than the rainbow is a picture, but a blotted study rubbed up with the palette-knife, or what in music would be a fantasia.
[Illustration: MUNICH EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1854.]
From the Asiatic display, more complete by far than any before known, the eye passed to the works of the more disciplined hand and fancy and the more scholastic color-notions of Europe. There was young Munich with M��ller's lions and the anti-realistic figures of Schwanthaler; Austria with Monti's veiled heads, henceforth to be credited to Lombardy; Prussia with Rauch; and Denmark with Thorwaldsen--all pure form, copied without color from Nature, from convention and from the antique. Then came design and color united in ceramics--in the marvelously delicate flowers of Dresden, purified in the porcelain-furnace as by fire; in the stately vases of S��vres, just but varied in proportion, unfathomable in the rich depths of their ground-shadows, and exact and brilliant in the superimposed details; the more raw but promising efforts of Berlin, marked, like the jewelry from the same city, by faithful study of Nature; and, blending the decorative with the