When I last heard of his progress he was hard on the heels
of Hippocrates, but had no immediate prospect of tripping up his
successor, Is this the sort of occupation (I ask myself) in which
a modern young lady is likely to feel the slightest interest?
Once again, clearly not.
Owen's favorite employment is, in its way, quite as
characteristic as Morgan's, and it has the great additional
advantage of appealing to a much larger variety of tastes. My
eldest brother--great at drawing and painting when he was a lad,
always interested in artists and their works in after life--has
resumed, in his declining years, the holiday occupation of his
schoolboy days. As an amateur landscape-painter, he works with
more satisfaction to himself, uses more color, wears out more
brushes, and makes a greater smell of paint in his studio than
any artist by profession, native or foreign, whom I ever met
with. In look, in manner, and in disposition, the gentlest of
mankind, Owen, by some singular anomaly in his character, which
he seems to have caught from Morgan, glories placidly in the
wildest and most frightful range of subjects which his art is
capable of representing. Immeasurable ruins, in howling
wildernesses, with blood-red sunsets gleaming over them;
thunder-clouds rent with lightning, hovering over splitting trees
on the verges of awful precipices; hurricanes, shipwrecks, waves,
and whirlpools follow each other on his canvas, without an
intervening glimpse of quiet everyday nature to relieve the
succession of pictorial horrors.
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