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Show Mr. Vaoderbllt'S Picture. There seems a certain confusion as to the Venetian picture by Turner which Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt has purchased. That he has bought it and paid the splendid splen-did price of a hundred thousand dollars for it there is no doubt, but we may receive re-ceive with a very largo grain of salt the rumor that the millionaire was ambitious of acquiring Meissonier's "Eixe," which is one of the ornaments of Windsor, and that he actually offered the queen half a million dollars for it. The fact that the rumor came around by way of Paris is sufficient reason for fighting shy of it The art of "faking" originated in Paris, where it had already attained colossal grandeur before the first American journal jour-nal had been printed at Boston. Whichever of the Grand canal pictures by Turner Mr. vanderbilt lias bought he has got a good one. Turner understood Venetian color, and had a peculiar process pro-cess of his own, taken from the early Flemish, school, and made his own by the extraordinary manner in which he applied it for rendering the exquisitely luminous atmospheres of the "Queen of the Adriatic." And he was true as true as any mortal can be in the ever varying, vary-ing, evanescent glories of sea and sky. Ruskin hit it when he said of Turner, after accusing him of "exaggerating all he saw," that the foundation of all he did was truth. The vivid and warm colorings of nature he painted with the deepest reds and yellows; the grays he attempted to imitate with blues of too strong a tint; yet the whole was true in principle, both in general and in particular. particu-lar. Cor. Boston Journal. |