Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 December 1882 — The Lion in Art. [ARTICLE]

The Lion in Art.

No animal has been treated so variously as the lion. Seeing that he is a beast showing little difference of type —not having been given over to the dilettantism of the breeder who has done so much for the race-horse, nor to the experiments of the servant who has played such pranks with the pigeon- - it is wonderful how different he lookin art at different times and under dis- | ferent hands. He has been more con- < ventionalized than any object in nature, . and no “allegory on the banks of the. ' Nile” can ever have lieen quite so al- j legorical as the allusive fancy of man I has made him. He has done decorative ■ duty, preserving only hints of his own ! form, and lie has passed with art and ' literature through the phases of the heroic, romantic and realistic conception and treatment. It must be added that the royal brute has been fortunate in his laureates. Rubens—the true Lion of Flanders!—preferred him over all other beasts, and painted him with the whole might of his vast and enter- ' prising genius. His imagination had I continual food in his contemplation; > his imperial hand found continual • pastime in his portraiture. The savage ! majesty, the brute romance,‘the bestial i royalty of the creature were depicted by him as by no other painter in all time. It is to be noted that the passion for painting lions that distinguishes the master distinguishes his followers and scholars likewise. Thus his friend and collaborator, Franz Snyders, was inspired by the great man’s encouragement and example to add the living lion to his models, and to paint lion I hunts and lions in fight where once he ! had only painted fruits and flowers anr! I the fur and feathers of dead game. ' Again, the man among moderns who has best succeeded with the lion is unquestionably Eugene Delacroix, who was perhaps the liest and strongest pupil the Antwerp master ever had, and who has drawn and painted lions and lionesses w-ith an intensity of imagination, a vigor of line and color, a mastery of gesture, an energy of conception and execution, that Rubens himself would certainly have been proud to own. After the lions of these two great men, the lions of Landseer and Rosa Bonheur, good as in some ways they are, are apt to seem a little tame, and, as it were, to fall a little flat. It must lie owned that the lions of Mr. Briton Riviere are in much the same case. That lion of his. for instance, who is guarding the gentle Una through the perils of the present exhibition at Burlington House, is not a bit romantic or impressive; he is a kind of carpet lion—a lion to do duty in the pages of Mme. d’Auluoy, and behave with politeness and grace to such heroes as Prince Azor and Prince Charming, and such heroines as Princess Fair Star and the Damsel with the Golden Locks.— From CagKtirn Art Magazine. A Vermont man who has been there fourteen times, says the meanest thing aliout a misfortune with a polecat is the difficulty of keeping it secret.