The vicissitudes which sometimes attend a picture or statue furnish no inadequate materials for narrative interest.  Amateur collectors can unfold a tale in reference to their best acquisitions which outvies fiction.  Beckford’s table-talk abounded in such reminiscences.  An American artist, who had resided long in Italy and made a study of old pictures, caught sight at a shop-window in New Orleans of an “Ecce Homo” so pathetic in expression as to arrest his steps and engross his attention.  Upon inquiry, he learned that it had been purchased of a soldier fresh from Mexico, after the late war between that country and the United States; he bought it for a trifle, carried it to Europe, and soon authenticated it as an original Guercino, painted for the royal chapel in Madrid, and sent thence by the government to a church in Mexico, whence, after centuries, it had found its way, through the accidents of war, to a pawnbroker’s shop in Louisiana.  A lady in one of our eastern cities, wishing to possess, as a memorial, some article which had belonged to a deceased neighbor, and not having the means, at the public sale of her effects, to bid for an expensive piece of furniture, contented herself with buying for a few shillings a familiar chimney-screen.  One day she discovered a glistening surface under the flowered paper which covered it, and when this was torn away, there stood revealed a picture of Jacob and Rebecca at the Well, by Paul Veronese; doubtless thus concealed with a view to its secret removal during the first French Revolution.  The missing Charles First of Velasquez was lately exhibited in this country, and the account its possessor gives of the mode of its discovery and the obstacles which attended the establishment of its legal ownership in England is a remarkable illustration both of the tact of the connoisseur and the mysteries of jurisprudence.

There is scarcely, indeed, an artist or a patron of art, of any eminence, who has not his own “story of a picture.”  Like all things of beauty and of fame, the very desire of possession which a painting excites, and the interest it awakens, give rise to some costly sacrifice, or incidental circumstance, which associates the prize with human fortune and sentiment.  I remember an anecdote of this kind told me by a friend in Western New York.

“Waiting,” said he, “in the little front-parlor of a house in the town of C——­, to transact some business with its occupant, I was attracted by a clean sketch in oil that hung above the fireplace.  It might have escaped notice elsewhere, but traces of real skill in Art were too uncommon in this region to be disregarded by any lover of her fruits.  The readiness to seize upon any casual source of interest, common with those who “stand and wait” in a place where they are strangers, doubtless had something to do with the careful attention I bestowed upon this production.  It was a very modest attempt,—­a bit of landscape, with two horses grazing and a man at work in the foreground.  Quiet in tone, and half-concealed by the shaded casement, it was only by degrees, and to ward off the ennui of a listless half-hour, that I gradually became absorbed in its examination.  There were some masterly lines, clever arrangement, a true feeling, and a peculiar delicacy of treatment, that implied the hand of a trained artist.