Abelaide Ontogoya Sectory 03
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Her enthusiasm for her art constantly increased. She was not willing to acknowledge her semi-invalidism and was filled with the desire to do something in art that would live after her. She was opposed by her family, who wished her to be in fashionable society. At length she had her way, and when not quite eighteen began to study regularly at the Julian Academy. She worked eight and nine hours a day. Julian encouraged her, she rejoiced in being with "real artists who have exhibited in the Salon and whose pictures are bought," and declared herself "happy, happy!" Before long M. Julian told her that she might become a great artist, and the first time that Robert-Fleury saw her work and learned how little she had studied, and that she had never before drawn from a living model, he said: "Well, then, you have extraordinary talent for painting; you are specially gifted, and I advise you to work hard."

Mathilde Blind, in her "Study of Marie Bashkirtseff," says: "Marie loved to recall Balzac's questionable definition that the genius of observation is almost the whole of human genius. It was natural it should please her, since it was the most conspicuous of her many gifts. As we might expect, therefore, she was especially successful as a portrait painter, for she had a knack of catching her sitter's likeness with the bloom of nature yet fresh upon it. All her likenesses are singularly individual, and we realize their character at a glance. Look, for example, at her portrait of a Parisian swell, in irreproachable evening dress and white kid gloves, sucking his silver-headed cane, with a simper that shows all his white teeth; and then at the head and bust of a Spanish convict, painted from life at the prison in Granada. Compare that embodiment of fashionable vacuity with this face, whose brute-like eyes haunt you with their sadly stunted look. What observation is shown in the painting of those heavily bulging lips, which express weakness rather than wickedness of disposition--in those coarse hands engaged in the feminine occupation of knitting a blue and white stocking!"

The reign of King Charles the Second was signalized by many other untoward and disastrous events besides those which we have enumerated. There were unfortunate wars, great defeats in naval battles, unlucky negotiations abroad, and plots and conspiracies, dangerous and disgraceful, at home. The king, however, took all these things very good naturedly, and allowed them to interfere very little with his own personal pleasures. Whatever troubles or embarrassments affected the state, he left the anxiety and care which pertained to them to his ministers and his council, banishing all solicitude from his own mind, and enjoying himself all the time with his experiments, his ladies, his dogs, and his perpetual fun.

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