W.G.C.

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FINE ARTS.

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MR. HAYDON’S PICTURE OF NAPOLEON MUSING AT ST. HELENA.

This picture has, we understand, been painted for Sir Robert Peel, whose taste and munificence in patronizing the fine arts cannot be too highly praised.  It is throughout a masterly performance, and one of which the English school of art has just cause to be proud.  We intend to let Mr. Haydon describe it in his own vivid style:—­

“Napoleon was peculiarly alive to poetical association as produced by scenery or sound; village bells with their echoing ding, dong, dang, now bursting full on the ear, now dying in the wind, affected him as they affect every body alive to natural impressions, and in the eve of all his great battles, you find him stealing away in the dead of the night, between the two hosts, and indulging in every species of poetical reverie.

“It was impossible to think of such a genius in captivity, without mysterious associations of the sky, the sea, the rock, and the solitude with which he was enveloped, I never imagined him but as if musing at dawn, or melancholy at sun-set, listening at midnight to the beating and roaring of the Atlantic, or meditating as the stars gazed and the moon shone on him:  in short Napoleon never appeared to me but at those moments of silence and twilight, when nature seems to sympathize with the fallen and when if there be moments fit, in this turbulent earth, for celestial intercourse, one must imagine these would be the moments immortal spirits might select to descend within the sphere of mortality, to soothe and comfort, to inspire and support the afflicted.

“Under such impressions the present picture was produced,—­I imagined him standing on the brow of an impending cliff and musing on his past fortunes,—­imagined sea birds screaming at his feet,—­the sun just down,—­the sails of his guard ship glittering on the horizon, and the Atlantic, calm, silent, awfully deep, and endlessly extensive.

“I tried it in a small sketch, and it was instantly purchased,—­I published a print and the demand is now and has been incessant; a commission for a picture the full size of life, from one well known as the friend of artists and patron of art followed, and thus I have ventured to think a conception so unexpectedly popular might, on this enlarged scale, not be uninteresting to the public.

“No trouble has been spared to render the picture a resemblance, its height is Napoleon’s exact height, according to Constant, his valet, viz. five feet two inches and three quarters, French, or five feet five inches and a half, English; the uniform is that of one of the regiments of Chasseurs, every detail has been dictated by an old officer of the regiment; and his celebrated hat has been faithfully copied from one of Napoleon’s own hats now in England.