A PAINTER’S RETORT COURTEOUS.

Jean Ranc, an eminent French portrait painter, was sometimes annoyed by impertinent and vexatious criticism.  Having exhausted all his talent upon a particular portrait, the friends of the sitter refused to be pleased, although the sitter himself appears to have been well satisfied.  In concert with the latter, Ranc concerted a plan for a practical retort.  After privately painting a copy of the picture, he cut the head out of the canvas, and placed it in such a position that the original could supply the opening with his own veritable face, undetected.  After all was ready, the cavilers were invited to view the performance, but they were no better pleased.  Falling completely into the snare, the would-be critics were going on to condemn the likeness, when the relaxing features and hearty laughter of the supposed portrait, speedily and sufficiently avenged the painter of their fastidiousness.

ARDEMANS AND BOCANEGRA—­A TRIAL OF SKILL.

These Spanish painters contended in 1689 for the office of Master of the Works in the Cathedral of Granada.  Bocanegra was excessively vain and overbearing, and boasted his superiority to all the artists of his time; but Ardemans, though a stranger in Granada, was not to be daunted, and a trial of skill, “a duel with pencils,” was accordingly arranged between them, which was, that each should paint the other’s portrait.  Ardemans, who was then hardly twenty-five years of age, first entered the lists, and without drawing any outline on the canvas, produced an excellent likeness of his adversary in less than an hour.  Bocanegra, quite daunted by this feat, and discouraged by the applause accorded to his rival by the numerous spectators, put off his own exhibition till another day, and in the end utterly failed in his attempt to transfer the features of his rival to canvas.  His defeat, and the jeers of his former admirers, so overwhelmed him with mortification, that he died shortly after.

A PAINTER’S ARTIFICE TO “KEEP UP APPEARANCES.”

The Spanish painter Antonio Pereda married Dona Maria de Bustamente, a woman of some rank, and greater pretension, who would associate only with people of high fashion, and insisted on having a duenna in constant waiting in her antechamber, like a lady of quality.  Pereda was not rich enough to maintain such an attendant; he therefore compromised matters by painting on a screen an old lady sitting at her needle, with spectacles on her nose, and so truthfully executed that visitors were wont to salute her as they passed, taking her for a real duenna, too deaf or too discreet to notice their entrance!

A GOOD-NATURED CRITICISM.

Bartolomeo Carducci, who was employed in the service of the Spanish court for many years, was expressing one day his admiration of a newly finished picture by a brother artist, when one of his own scholars drew his attention to a badly executed foot.  “I did not observe it,” replied he, “it is so concealed by the difficult excellence of this bosom and these hands”—­a piece of kindly criticism that deserves to be recorded.