568 



THE CENTURY BOOK OF EACTS. 



to the world in the work of Guerin's celebrated 

 pupil, Gericault, whose "Wreck of the Me-" 

 dusa * ' appalled by its truth to nature and power 

 in art. Leopold Robert followed in the same 

 track, and produced some remarkable and life- 

 like scenes. Paul Delaroche, took up his won- 

 drous pencil, to delineate history with the 

 power of a genius and the truthfulness of a 

 historian, and nature again appeared on the 

 walls of the French exhibition rooms. No 

 painters excel the modern French school in 

 history ; but in landscape they are inferior to 

 those of England and Belgium. 



The English School is the youngest of 

 the cycle of Arts ; but its youthful vigor has 

 given it a wondrous position in a compara- 

 tively short time. The first great native gen- 

 ius, who neither copied in a school nor followed 

 its rules, who struck out his own path, in 

 which he has hitherto been alone, and whose 

 thoughts, subjects, and sympathies were all 

 essentially English, was William Hogarth. 

 " Hogarth," says Walpole, " had no model to 

 follow and improve upon. He created his art, 

 and used colors instead of language. His 

 place is between the Italians, whom we con- 

 sider as epic poets and tragedians, and the 

 Flemish painters, who are as writers of farce 

 and editors of burlesque nature." Hogarth's 

 was the period of the revival of painting in 

 England in every department of the art ; the 

 hitherto brightest names in the annals of 

 English painting were his contemporaries 

 Sir Joshua Reynolds, -Gainsborough, Wilson, 

 West. Romney, Cotes, Cosway, Barry, and 

 Mortimer ; to whom may be added the for- 

 eigners De Loutherbourg, Zoffany, Cipri- 

 ani, Moser, and Fuseli, all domiciliated in 

 England. Toward the end of the century, the 

 most conspicuous masters in the department of 

 history were Opie, Northcote, Westall, Cop- 

 ley, Harlow, Hilton, and others ; in portrait 

 Sir T. Lawrence, Hoppner, Jackson, and Rae- 

 burn ; in genre Wilkie, Bird, Smirke, and 

 Newton; and in landscape Constable, Call- 

 cott, and Collins. 



The American School has been more or 

 less influenced by the French, and has not yet 

 attained to the distinction of independent char- 

 acteristics. The most noted names are : 

 Malbone (1777-1807), Copley (1738-1815), C. 

 W. Peale (1741-1827), Gilbert C. Stuart 

 (1756-1828), J. Trumbull (1756-1843), W. 

 Allston (17794843), Thomas Cole (1801-48), 

 Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), W. M. Hunt 

 (1824-79)r W. Page (1811-85), D. Hunting- 

 don (1816), S. R. Gifford (1823-80), Eastman 

 Johnson (1824), Elihu Vedder (1836), Bier- 

 stadt (1830). 



Russian art, dormant since the Byzantine 



period, has during the last forty years produced 

 Swedomsky Verestchagin (1842)-, and Kram- 

 skoe. 



Scandinavian art has been represented in 

 modern times by Uhde, and Edelfeldt. 



Pyramids. The great pyramid of Gizeh 

 is the largest structure of any kind ever 

 erected by the hand of man. Its original di- 

 mensions at the base were 764 feet square, 

 and its perpendicular height in the highest 

 point is 488 feet ; it covers four acres, one 

 rood and twenty-two perches of ground, and 

 has been estimated by an eminent English 

 architect to have cost not less than 30,000,000, 

 which in United States currency would be 

 about $145,200,000. Internal evidences prove 

 that the great pyramid was begun about the 

 year 2170 B. C., about the time of the birth 

 of Abraham. It is estimated that about 

 5,000,000 tons of hewn stones were used in its 

 construction. 



Sphinx. The word sphinx is from the 

 Greek and means the strangler, and was ap- 

 plied to a fabled creature of the Egyptians, 

 which had the body of a lion, the head of a 

 man or an animal, and two wings attached to its 

 sides. In the Egyptian hieroglyphs the sphinx 

 symbolized wisdom and power united. It has 

 been supposed that the fact that the overflow 

 of the Nile occurred when the sun was in the 

 constellations Leo and Virgo gave the idea of 

 the combinations of form in the sphinx, but 

 this idea seems quite unfounded. In Egypt 

 the reigning monarch was usually represented 

 in the form of a sphinx. The most remarkable 

 sphinx is that near the pyramids at Gizeh. It 

 is sculptured from the rock, masonry having 

 been added in several places to complete the 

 form. It is 172 feet long by 53 feet high, 

 but only the head of this remarkable sculpture 

 can now be seen, the rest of the form having 

 been concealed by the heaped up sands of the 

 desert. 



Obelisks. The oldest of all the obelisks 

 is the beautiful one of rosy granite which 

 stands alone among the green fields upon the 

 banks of the Nile, not far from Cairo. It is 

 the gravestone of a great ancient city which 

 has vanished and left only this relic behind. 

 The city was the Bethshemesh of the Scrip- 

 tures, the famous On, which is memorable to all 

 Bible readers as the residence of the priest of 

 Potipherah, whose daughter, Asenath, Joseph 

 married. The Greeks called it Heliopolis. 



Cleopatra's Needle. .The two obelisks 

 known as Cleopatra's Needles were set up at 

 the entrance of the Temple of the Sun, in 

 Heliopolis, Egypt, by Thothmes III., about 

 1831 B. C. We have no means of knowing 

 when they were built, or by whom, except 



