ART.

THE PRODIGAL SON, BY EDOUARD DUBUFE.

The sublime lesson of forgiveness, inculcated by the story of the Prodigal Son, is among the earliest and most familiar in the memories of a nation of Bible readers like our own.  Every one of us, perhaps unconsciously, carries in mind a simple, straight-forward conception of this subject, formed in early childhood—­a time when the imagination rarely goes beyond an attempt to realize the unlooked for forgiveness of the once deserted parent, or the captivating visions of adventure suggested by the changing fortunes of the wanderer during his absence in a “far country.”

With the painter the picture is his vision, and the panels are the realities.  As a man of a different order of thought would have chosen another incident of the story for illustration, so also would a painter of a less independent school have permitted himself to be bound down by the historical facts of the architectural and costume fashions of the time of narration.  Dubufe has so far discarded the unities of time and place, if any can really be said to exist—­as no date was fixed in the relation of the parable by Christ—­that he has adopted the mingled costumes of Europe and the East, which obtained in the fifteenth century, and has placed his figures in a Corinthian porch under the light of Italian skies.  Apart from the conception and the “telling of the story,” about which there will be various opinions, this picture may be justly regarded as a magnificent work of art.

The great David, a pupil of whose pupil Edouard Dubufe was, and Horace Vernet, appear to have been the guides selected by him, rather than the greatest of his masters—­Paul Delaroche.  The influence of both is to be traced in this work, although it may be said to take rank above any production of either of them.  In drawing, color, and composition, rendering of textures, and the exhibition of the resources of the palette, now better known to French painters than ever before, the picture leaves nothing to be desired.  The faces of the principal figures are full of that “expression to the life” in which the English are justly considered to excel, while the admirable focus of the groups, the color, and interest, are as un-English as excellent.  Fault-finding in more than one or two unimportant details would be hypercriticism where so much is perfect, and it becomes our happy privilege, in this notice, to commend and to point out, to “lay” readers about Art, the manifold beauties of its technical execution.  A critical examination will show that the composition is on the pyramidal principle, and the arrangement of groups principally in threes.  In the central portion of the canvas, where the marble pillars of the porch fall off in perspective, the Profligate stands holding up a golden cup in his right hand, as in the act of proposing a toast.  His red costume and commanding figure attract the eye, and the attention falls at