PLATE CV.
The principal object in our present plate might well, both from its artistic merits and technical excellence,be ranged with many of those bucklers which the immortal Cellini and his compeers have left us as memorialsof their own powers, and of the high standard of art at that period.
We have already had occasion, when calling attention to another work of M. Vechte’s (Plate XXVII.),to speak in terms of high commendation of that artist’s labours, and we shall be fully justified in extendingthat praise to the object here represented. The subject of the composition is the “ Massacre of the Innocents,”with an appropriate centre of Furies and loathsome monsters ; the whole is enclosed by an arabesque borderin low relief.
According to our promise in a former article, we shall proceed to lay before our readers some account ofthe life and strivings of M. Vechte, the materials for which have been most kindly furnished us by that artist.
M. Vechte (born 1801 ) is native of Vir in Burgundy, but he was taken at an early age to Paris , wherehis first occupation was cotton-spinning; he afterwards worked at the several trades of toy-maker, paper-hanger, button-maker, and carpenter, and continued in a very humble station in life, not always free from actualdeprivation.
After losing both his parents our artist obtained some employment with a man named Daussin, by tradea chaser, and thus, as it were, made the first step on that path, which he has since trodden so perseveringly,and at last successfully. While with Daussin he accidentally met with Plutarch’s Lives of great men, theperusal of which so stimulated his ambition that he thenceforward aspired to the profession of an artist,though he had no master to assist his studies, pursued amid the toil of the workshop. M. Vechte’s peculiartalents appear to have exhibited themselves in a manner so original as to have drawn down upon him thederision of his companions, who considered him visionary and self-conceited; but he would not allow himselfto be discouraged, bearing steadily one object in view, namely, ultimate success. A number of years of anxiouslabour passed, however, without any verj great result; or, as our artist himself says, he was still nothing morethan a good workman, and laboured for others. He was next induced by the care of a rising family towork on his own account, but an unfortunate partnership in a short time again reduced him to his foimeicondition of a working chaser. He began, however, to be known in his trade, and appears also to have beenemployed by some curiosity-dealers, to restore and retouch suits of antient armour. In executing these littlecommissions he exhibited so much proficiency that he was engaged to make some entire pieces of aimour mimitation of the antique. In this, also, he was so successful, that his commissions for such works multipliedto such an extent as to afford him constant employment; for the dealers found that the pioductions of thisobscure workman could be passed off to antiquarian connoisseurs as veritable specimens of antient ai t, andM. Vechte has, doubtless, supplied many an object of cinque-cento art to the private cabinets 01 even thepublic museums of Europe .