"Joseph Interpreting the Dreams of Pharaoh," for which the Grand Prize of Rome was awarded to him. It will be seen by these examples that the young artist had begun his career as a historical painter with lofty themes; and his choice of impressive subjects for his paintings distinguished the work of the next two years in Rome, where he painted his picture of the "Imprisonment of Don Carlos by Philip II. of Spain," and "Mary Stuart taking leave of Melville." From Rome, Sichel went to Paris for a while and afterwards painted portraits in several towns in Germany. The attractions of the gay French capital drew him back there presently, however, and for several years he continued to devote himself largely to portraiture, in which difficult field of fine art he achieved a considerable fame. At this time, too, being much engrossed with problems of rendering flesh, for the solution of which he seemed to have an especial gift, he painted many fancy heads and decorative figures and panels, some examples of which are herewith reproduced. Sichel's most famous, and as it is generally agreed by his critics, his greatest picture, is his "Francesca da Rimini," painted in Paris in 1876. Somewhat later he exhibited his "Cardinal de Guise in Rome." The considerable success which rewarded the work of Sichel in Paris caught the shrewd commercial eye of Goupil & Cie., the picture dealers and publishers of high class art works, and it was upon commissions from that firm that many of the fancy heads and characters of romantic story were painted. Their beauty of color and grace of figure made them readily salable, and they have been reproduced in photograph and photogravure and widely circulated. It is by such publications that some of Sichel's minor pictures have become perfectly familiar in the shops of the picture dealers in this country, while his name has at the same time escaped anything like familiarity away from Paris and Berlin. Tambourine Girl. as a German painter by this means, and it is an interesting circumstance in his career that he was the first German painter to exhibit again in Paris after the memorable war that has left the relations of the two neighboring people unpleasantly strained even to the present day. In 1881 Sichel returned to Berlin, the city of his earliest triumph, where he has since remained, devoting his talents largely to portrait painting and to the painting of these richly draped female figures of which such excellent examples are here given. In fact, in the past ten years, Sichel seems not to have done anything to fulfil his early promise Sichel became almost as much a French as a painter of historical subjects, no doubt Vestal Virgin. finding a readier and more profitable demand for the decorative odalisques and other eastern types in which there is such fine opportunity for the display of skill in the painting of flesh and textile fabrics. Of the works of this artist in the ideal representation of characters of history and romance, a very good idea may be had from the reproductions of photographs of his paintings here presented; but the charm and richness and brilliant combinations of color with which his canvases are illuminated, especially in his oriental characters and eastern types, cannot be indicated except in so far as one may evolve them in fancy from the velvety blacks of the printed picture. As an illustration, his "Egyptian Slave" is an example of splendid color harmonies, to be found in the oriental hanging which forms a background, against which the olive flesh of the face and arms, the silken drapery, and the spangling jewels that adorn the hair and neck, stand forth with brilliant effect. A creature of a curious social state, in which her slavery is no irksome bondage but merely a matter-of-course devotion to a fondling master, she is the picture of voluptuous contentment. The subject in its treatment is strikingly like that of Richter's well-known "Reverie." In the "Fellah Woman and Child" is shown a voluptuousness in the young mother's figure quite in keeping with the character of the subject; and the flesh of the face, neck, and arms, and of the infant cherub that sits up aloft, is beautifully fleshy in its rendering. The "Tambourine Girl" is less interesting, perhaps, as an example merely of a certain decorative prettiness, lacking in character and individuality and of a sort that is likely to be more popular than impressive. In all of these subjects, however, as in the others yet to be considered, the black and white reproductions give a very good idea of the splendid contrasts and of the graceful poses and arrangement, especially in the disposition of the arms and hands. Sichel's clever management of strong lights and shadows is particularly striking, as is, also, his manner of preserving the beautiful, if sometimes characterless, faces quite free from obscuring shadows. As in the paintings of "Francesca da Rimini" and "Mary Stuart," so in these decorative figures, Sichel seems to delight to represent the heroines of disappointed love. His "Sappho" which shows evidence of the influences of the French master, Lefebvre, can hardly be regarded as successful however. There is a palpable absence of truth in picturing this sweet-faced, demure, ladylike and self-possessed young person as the realization of that fervid and passionate Sappho who sang somewhat wildly of love as a "bitter-sweet, impracticable violence." This may be Sappho in Sichel's painting, as he fancied her, but it is something tamer and paler than the image that will come to most minds at the mention of the first "poetess of passion." Our artist's "Medea" is more like. Here, indeed, is "Medea, the imperious Colchian enchantress, beloved and at the last deserted by the adventurous Jason, terrible in her love and her vengeance." Of all his heroines of unrequited or unenduring passion, she alone shows something of the fire of tragedy in her dark eyes and darkling brow and in the drawn corners and set lines of her fair lips. Of the other pictures here printed, that of "Hero" claims attention by its loveliness, Hero, the fair, Whom young Apollos courted for her hair." She is a statuesque beauty according to Sichel's conception of her, but showing nothing in her gentle face of that "tragedy divine Musæus sang." She looks, indeed, like a heroine out of Wagner, as she stands, well posed and graceful, and holding, as a priestess of Venus, the significant dove. It is easy to find in the sweet face some justification for the ardent young Leander's foolish and reckless and finally fatal exposure to the strong current of the Hellespont, in order that he might be with his idol. Just why Sichel should have painted Pandora with butterfly wings is not clear to me, but certainly the artist has emulated the graces who attired this beautiful creature, this "fascinating mischief," whom Jupiter let loose into the world, the heathen prototype of Eve in the orchard, as the cause of all the hopeless evils of mankind. She is lovely as Venus meant she should be, as she holds her urnful of fatefulness, and one "Sweet Pandora! dear Pandora! Why did mighty Jove create thee Coy as Thetis, fair as Flora, Beautiful as young Aurora, If to win thee is to hate thee?" If the first ten of the thirty years of service to which the Vestal Virgins were bound was passed in earning their duties, then surely this fair maid whom Sichel has painted with her constant lamp must have been a sweet girl graduate from this preparatory course. In her demure face is pictured a young-womanly sense of the honorable obligations, responsibilities, and dignities which Rome put upon her and her sisters. Here in his treatment of this graceful figure, the artist has shown his mastery of the details of drapery, his skill in composition and arrangement, and his happy faculty in the realization of ideal maidenly beauty. The "Ophelia" of Sichel is a portrait of a beautiful young woman strewing flowers. As a representation of the distracted maiden, "of ladies most deject and wretched," the picture is without character. A pensiveness and wide-open fixedness of the eyes is hardly sufficient to indicate the madness which possessed the poor girl as she scattered rue and rosemary and went presently to her death in the lake. Sichel's tragedy queens and heroines, it will be seen by these examples, are all merely sadeyed beauties. The fury of a woman scorned is barely indicated in Medea's face, but there is no passion in his Sappho and no hint of the deceitfulness of Pandora. Medea. Beauty and beauty alone seems to have been the aim of the painter, and the appropriate costume and face, exquisitely painted, have but served as an excuse in each case for giving a title to the picture, and a means of displaying the manifold technical abilities of the possession of which our artist seems to have been fully conscious. |