Art

MR. GARDNER'S second book on housebuilding,¹ which should have had an earlier notice, is lively and entertaining, like its predecessor, Homes and How to Make Them, and like it full of practical good sense. It contains a baker’s dozen of plans and descriptions of houses of different kinds and sizes, which assume to have been built for proprietors whose characters and professional interviews with the architect are amusingly sketched. In the course of the reported discussions, most of the practical questions concerning convenience and comfort that are likely to arise in planning houses of the class Mr. Gardner describes — country houses ranging in cost from five hundred to twelve thousand dollars—are touched upon in one way or another. Questions of form or decoration are ignored or only incidentally alluded to.

The plans are on the whole well and often ingeniously arranged for their assumed purpose, without any chance of special skill or invention; just such houses in fact as an architect would be likely to have to build in practice, and such as lead one to believe that the author is serious in calling them real homes. One or two bear evidence of being taken from preliminary sketches rather than from plans worked out for execution. The exteriors, without any marked excellence of design or display of professional resource, are often comely and picturesque. Some would evidently be more attractive in execution than in the drawings, which are not always happy.

The slight sketches of character are clever and the dialogue lively to friskiness. Practicing architects will probably recognize some of their own clients in Mr. Gardner s people, who have mostly an air of being taken from living models, though their speech has a strong family likeness throughout. His Wandering Jew has at one time or other visited most architect’s offices. Persons who wish to build houses, on the other hand, will find most of the practical exigencies they have to consider suggested to them. They will probably be willing to be reminded by Mr. Gardner that “ there may be model lodging-rooms and model tenements, model barns, perhaps, but every man must be a law unto his own house ; ’ and when it comes to building they will be glad to find an architect who will enter into his client’s personal tastes and fancies as heartily as he of this book.

— The etchings of Old New York ² are not etchings at all in the current sense of the word, but manifestly only pen-drawings reproduced by some photographic process. They are published from time to time for subscribers, in numbers of half a dozen plates each, with accompanying letter-press, and it was announced that the series of fifty plates would probably be issued during the present year. The effort to preserve a record of the interesting old buildings of New York is most praiseworthy ; we wish it could be made with the same earnestness for other parts of the country. With the enthusiasm for rebuilding which now prevails, it will not take long to strip our country of almost every building that wears the fashion of its early days. There have been till very recently a great many buildings of the last century, and not a few of the seventeenth, scattered over the older parts of the States; but they are going fast, — many of them to make way for inferior work,—and we may be thankful for every careful attempt to record them. This one comes with considerable pretensions, with thick paper and wide margins, and a promise of extra issues on India paper and of special copies in large papers for collectors. We wish its artistic and literary success were in proportion to the liberality of the publishers and the evidently sincere effort of the author. The illustrations show a feeling for picturesqueness and an effort for artistic effect; but there is not much precision or force in the drawing, and the effects are amateurish. In truth they have hardly exactness enough of detail to make them valuable as a record, and are not artistically skillful enough to be very interesting as pictures.

The letter-press contains more or less entertaining gossip, padded out with abundance of what it has been a habit to call " moralizing.” It will probably have a good deal of interest for those who know the scenes which it describes, but we should think it unsafe to pin much faith to, if we may judge by a curious collection of blunders which we noticed in the first paper that caught our eye in the first number. It is said that “ in 1772 the Duke of Clarence, then a young midshipman, was a frequent guest, . . . and became so infatuated . . . that his guardian and superior, Admiral Digby, found the immediate departure of his ship would be necessary to prevent his young charge from laying his royal rank and ‘ great expectations ’ at the feet of this fair queen of New-World beauty, for the law of England forbade to a crowned head marriage with a subject.” In 1772 the prince was seven years old; he entered the navy in 1779, the time of his visit to New York, and was not made Duke of Clarence, it appears, till ten years later. It goes without saying that he was not a “ crowned head,” and he had no apparent chance of ever becoming one, being then, and for forty years after, the third living son of George III. The notion that the marriage of a member of the royal family with a subject was forbidden had been exploded, we thought, by the discussions over the marriage of the Princess Louise, but it seems to linger.

— Very few of the mass of readers with whom Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes are names that stand close to that which is highest and happiest in their lives know how much the writings of these three men have drawn from the unobtrusive neighborhood of Old Cambridge; and Mr. Stillman, in editing a charming little volume of extracts from their poems, with heliotype views of the scenes touched upon,³ has conferred a signal benefaction upon a vast number of people. One sees in this book a connection between the authors and the place which has about it a moving and tender interest; for with Mr. Lowell and Dr. Holmes the tie has been one of birth as well as long association, and nearly all the fruitful years of Mr. Longfellow’s career have been passed in Cambridge At this season of the falling leaves, one reads with a new sense this line from Lowell’s Indian-Summer Reverie of long ago : —

Much that is presented in these pictures will be familiar to Cambridge readers: the Washington elm, the old Holmes house, the church-yard, and the chestnut-tree that shaded the vanished smithy preserved in Longfellow’s poems. Mr. Stillman’s judgment and skill (the views, we believe, were taken by himself) give us these few scattered rays from the past concentrated in so happy a light that one may easily fall into a pleasant dreaming while under its spell. One or two of the heliotypes disappoint the Cambridge-cultured eye : Mr. Longfellow’s peculiarly beautiful elms, for example, by no means have justice done them, and the Charles River marshes have a certain blurriness which, unfortunately, cannot be laid wholly to the Indian summer haze of the verses opposite the page which shows them to us. But the views of the Holmes house, the Waverloy oaks, the college elms, and the sturdy chief of Mr. Lowell’s “ willow Pleiades ” are admirable. All the heliotypes, we do not hesitate to say, are quite good enough for any extra-Cambridgean ; and we call to mind no American book published for the present holiday season which should be more sought and more cherished than this one. Dearer, perchance, than the poets’ works themselves, because containing something from each, and a subtle charm besides which other agency can alone supply, this slender volume will call up by many a Christmas fireside fair memory-pictures of the scenes where different readers first knew the poems quoted from ; and with those pictures a new pleasure will be blended by these glimpses of the actual birthplace of the verse.

— We are tempted to go somewhat out of our course, this month, in order to take what seems merited notice of a marked success in lithographic portraiture ; we mean the portrait of Mr. Longfellow, which the publishers of The Atlantic have just issued, and which was drawn on stone by Mr. J. E. Baker. It is an extremely sturdy and at the same time most refined piece of graphic art. Amongst the various and ingenious processes for pictorial reduplication which have come into vogue of late years, it is somewhat curious and not a little startling to find the simple method of drawing on stone suddenly coming to the front again with so graceful and thorough an achievement as this. The picture gives about a third of the figure’s length, and the pose is very simple, one arm being raised from the elbow, with the hand supporting the cheek and partially concealed in the poet’s thick, white beard. A slight turning of the face, resulting from this supported posture of the head, throws the left cheek and temple into soft shadow ; a disposition to which must be attributed something of the deeply thoughtful aspect of the head. This aspect gives to the portrait its great charm, which we think will prove a lasting one ; and the whole appearance is most agreeably characteristic ; we receive from the sight of this portraiture the same sort of impression which comes from reading Mr. Longfellow’s poetry. The peculiar soft tones of lithography, so different from the metallic tinet of photographs, so much more delicate in its modelings (on a large scale) than even fine steel engraving, impart a strong yet yielding surface to the features, that is extremely pleasing. Here is by no means an average piece of lithography ; a real sentiment has been contributed to the work by its draughtsman, and a picture has been produced which at a little distance has all the charm of a crayon-drawing. It is, in short, probably the best portrait of Mr. Longfellow which has yet been placed within the reach of the public.