File:Jaroslav Čermák - A Herzegovinian Girl.jpg

Identifier: artartistsofourt04cook (find matches)
Title: Art and artists of our time
Year: 1888 (1880s)
Authors: Cook, Clarence, 1828-1900
Subjects: Painting Painters
Publisher: New York, S. Hess
Contributing Library: Brandeis University Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
Our picture is his most pleasing performance, and deserves itswide popularity. Whether it be intended to be accepted literally or not, we do not know,but it certainly looks like a piece of pure romance; an incident in a novel by George Sand orby Prosper Merimee. This lovely dark-eyed girl standing by the horse, as beautiful as her-self, caressing his silken mane with her hand as she looks dreamily out over the fields, canhardly, one would think, be a type of the people of her country. Rather, we see in her theembodiment of heV countrys past, when the land was subject to the rule of the Byzantine; by ART AND ARTISTS OF OUR TIME. 305 her dress, her attitude, her expression, she seems a vision of the antique muse brooding insoft melancholy over the decay of glorious empire. Her dress recalls what we said a littlebefore on the permanence of old types, when describing Otto von Thorens picture. Here wehave, surviving, down to our own day, all the elements of the Greek and Roman dress—the
Text Appearing After Image:
A HERZEGOVINIAN GIRL. FROM THE PICTURE BY JAROSLAV CERMAK. cJiiton, with its double girdle, and the himation or mantle, while the jewelled circlets pen-dent from the necklace, the girdle made of gold or silver plates, the earrings, and the head-dress fringed with glittering ornaments, recall the days of Byzantine decadence. The horses—one a cream-white stallion with flowing undipped tail and long profuse silken mane shad-ing his eyes, and with some of its strands confined in braids, the darker a more common-VoL. II.—20 * * 3o6 ART AND ARTISTS OF OUR TIME. place animal—are drinking from a ruined fountain-basin, once belonging to a Byzantinepalace, its base half liid in burdock and nettle. This picture has always seemed to us aremarkable one; among a cloud of works to which by its title it seems to belong—ethno-graphic notes inspired for the most part by mere curiosity and idleness of travel—this has allthe qualities of a genuine poetic impression; we feel that it is real, but

Note About Images