That which drew him to the idealistic painters was, at
bottom, the same quality as drew him to Beethoven and Chopin.
Gleyre's best-known picture is the painting in the Louvre, somewhat weak
in colouring, but showing much feeling, a Nile subject representing a
man sitting on the banks of the river and watching the dreams of his
youth, represented as beautiful women, fleeing from him on a decorated
dahabeah, which is disappearing. The title is _Lost Illusions_.
There is more strength in the painting, much reproduced in engraving, of
a Roman army, conquered by Divico the Helvetian, passing under the yoke
--a picture which, as an expression of the national pride of the Swiss,
has been placed in the Museum at Lausanne.
Still, it was the man himself, rather than his pictures, that Taine
thought so much of. Intellectually, Taine was in his inmost heart an
admirer of the Italian and the English Renaissance, when most pagan and
most unrestrained; his intellectual home was the Venice of the sixteenth
century; he would have been in his right place at one of the festivals
painted by Veronese, and should have worn the rich and tasteful costume
of that period. But socially, and as a citizen, he was quite different,
was affectionate and subdued and calm, excessively conventional;
temperate in all his judgments, as in his life.
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