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Pontiac Directory 03
Page 05
Next day the adjourned Assembly met on the Capitol in the open space in front of the Temple of Jupiter. The Senate also assembled in the Temple of Faith close by. Scipio Nasica, the leader of the more violent party in the Senate, called upon the Consul Mucius Scaevola to stop the re-election, but the Consul declined to interfere. Fulvius Flaccus, a Senator, and a friend of Tiberius, hastened to inform him of the speech of Nasica, and told him that his death was resolved upon. Thereupon the friends of Tiberius prepared to resist force by force; and as those at a distance could not hear him, on account of the tumult and confusion, the Tribune pointed with his hand to his head, to intimate that his life was in danger. His enemies exclaimed that he was asking for the crown.
Reynolds was well-grounded in Venetian color, Bolognese composition, Parmese light-and-shade, and paid them the homage of assimilation; but if Gainsborough (1727-1788) had such school knowledge he positively disregarded it. He disliked all conventionalities and formulas. With a natural taste for form and color, and with a large decorative sense, he went directly to nature, and took from her the materials which he fashioned into art after his own peculiar manner. His celebrated Blue Boy was his protest against the conventional rule of Reynolds that a composition should be warm in color and light. All through his work we meet with departures from academic ways. By dint of native force and grace he made rules unto himself. Some of them were not entirely successful, and in drawing he might have profited by school training; but he was of a peculiar poetic temperament, with a dash of melancholy about him, and preferred to work in his own way. In portraiture his color was rather cold; in landscape much warmer. His brush-work was as odd as himself, but usually effective, and his accessories in figure-painting were little more than decorative after-thoughts. Both in portraiture and landscape he was one of the most original and most English of all the English painters--a man not yet entirely appreciated, though from the first ranked among the foremost in English art.
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