most famous colorist of Venice, Tiziano, and his painting 'Adonis and Astarte,' the two of them amid the groves and in the arms of spring, flowers spilling over them while Cupid, the god of love and youth, smiles upon them.
Then came the Flemish school, whose artists set down with their brushes marvelous things on spring and its blossoms, with a fineness that confounds the mind; the museums of Europe bear witness to it.
Nor was the English school any less attentive to it, especially as we know something of English nature and its green fields, and of the good that the man of letters Ruskin did the English by instilling in them a spirit that adores nature, and by his championing of her, so that they might behold in her beauties beyond number. Hence we see the care their artists took over spring and its representation in their canvases, among them the artist Constable and many others, of whom we now mention only a few by way of example.
As for the French school, it took part to a very great extent in painting brilliant canvases of 'Spring.' We mention at their head the artist Watteau, who sang to us in his splendid canvases the beauty of nature and the freshness of spring in its full flowering, giving us of his art what may rightly be counted masterpieces — especially since the circumstances of life and the traditions of the age were then such that people would go out to the orchards and groves to pass sweet, contented hours in the lap of nature amid music and drink and the company of fair women, all of which prepared the way for the artist to paint nature and spring in their loveliest raiment and brightest images. Like him in this was Fragonard, who portrayed the scenes of spring amid the gardens of Versailles and the groves of Fontainebleau, adding to nature's brilliance and her laughter — that merry, laughing artist who was enamored of painting nature and fair women alike. And are not spring and fair women one and the same thing, the very image of beauty and youth?
But the artist Corot devoted nearly his whole life to painting nature, and spring above all. In his
Hills? Or caravans of pearls, advancing deep into the festival of spring? Or temples of emerald, their slopes veiled at dusk with curtains of violet?
Are the goddesses at an eternal wedding? Is it that whenever their feet touch the earth, there rises from the earth a clamor of trilling colors, and the clusters of blossoms burst into light upon light... What are these mirrors on the throat of the bay?—It is the kiss of sun and water! The water wrought it into necklaces of pearls and wreaths of rainbows, and ranged them—for a whole age—that it might stud with them the breast of the bride-goddess.
My grief for the bay, when the mountain's shadow falls into the bay: the beads come unstrung, and the arches are scattered abroad.
And in the glow of the swaying surface the boats reeled—white doves trailing purple. From the farthest horizons they came, to pour out the jewels of the earth, to spill their censers at the foot of Sannine, and to attend the banquet of spring. They glide on, and beneath them the worlds of the sea lie still, gazing up at the sky to gather the stars!
And the sails have settled in the folds of the bay, awaiting the evening, till the stars come tumbling down upon them—from sky to sea—and they gather them up, and scatter them into the lap of the goddesses.
painting 'Spring in the Morning,' in its laughing glades, the girls go here and there, dancing, singing, and delighting in its pleasures and its surpassing marvels beneath the shade of towering trees, the rays of the sun playing upon their boughs and glistening leaves and adding to their charms under the magic of the brush of this genius, who stood alone in bringing out the charms of nature and her spring. He is a poet in the language of his lines, his colors, and his feeling, and he has granted us the sweetest of melodies in color, movement, and harmony.
In his canvases we feel the light and the breeze, we breathe in the fragrance, and we sense the
deepest meaning and enchantment there is in life, and all the magic and beauty that God has placed within it.
And such is the case with the Lebanese artists, who have not forgotten 'Spring,' living as they do in Lebanon, with its artistic nature teeming with every kind of loveliness, arrayed in the most splendid robes of beauty and enchantment — God's paradise on His earth, whether on the snowy summits of its mountains, on its slopes and in its valleys, or on its laughing shores. Spring there is nature's wedding feast, one of the festivals of beauty, and a gracious invitation extended by nature to the lovers of beauty.