Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SNARED An artist’s nature, its necessities ? How Greuze became the painter of the day?How and why he never attained the summit of Parnassus?Rubens the father of French art? Wille, the engraver?The bookseller’s shop?The spider and the fly?Mademoiselle Barbuty?A woman’s persistency ?Marriage at St. Medard?Small means?Greuze’s admiration of, and devotion to, his wife?Deception and disillusion ?Domestic discord?Daily scenes?Greuze devotes himself to his art, but his wife interferes even with his pupils? Wretched life?His children are sent to the convent because Madame neglects them?Legal separation?Greuze returns to his art and solitude. THERE is nothing so necessary to the full development of an artist’s nature as congenial surroundings, which leave the mind and heart free from care; fitted to conceive things beautiful, to soar into regions of thought and imagination, to create a new world for himself and others. The artists?by which term we mean all who, with the brush or with the pen, create for themselves two lives, two distinct personalities which act upon each other, making or marring one or the other; for seldom, alas! is there per- Ill1i LOVING THOUGHT feet unity in these dual lives. Too often the daily needs of the family, grinding poverty, and the material necessities of existence, oblige rapid production, the sending forth into the world immature or imperfect work: this is one of the greatest trials, the greatest evil, to which artists are subjected. But there is a strong counter-influence, a motive power, which redeems the position and exalts what appears mean and sordid into something sublime, giving colour to the artist’s picture and divine eloquence to the writer’s imagination. And this thing is what we call
love
and self- sacrifi…