The Life of Thomas Hardy
Throughout the Wessex novels one can find a lavish—perhaps too lavish—use of the information and terminology of the art-connoisseur. In Desperate Remedies, Mrs. Leat stretches out "a narrow bony hand that would have been an unparalleled delight to the pencil of Carlo Crivelli," and Manston's face is tinged with "the greenish shades of Corregio’s nudes." In Under the Greenwood Tree the members of the Mellstock choir “advanced against the sky in flat outline which suggested some processional design on Greek or Etruscan pottery," and in A Pair of Blue Eyes "gaslights glared from butchers' stalls, illuminating the lumps of flesh to splotches of orange and vermilion, like the wild coloring of Turner's later pictures." One can continue through all the novels, collecting references of this kind. Thus, in A Pair of Blue Eyes, we find mentioned Nollekens, Holbein, Kneller, Lely, Greuze, Guido; in Far from the Madding Crowd, Terburg, Douw, Danby, Poussin, Ruysdael, Hobbema, and the following splendid example of art in description: "The strange, luminous semi-opacities of fine autumn afternoons and eves intensified into Rembrandt effects the few yellow sunbeams which came through the holes and divisions in the canvas, and spirited like gems of gold dust across the dusky blue atmosphere of haze pervading the tent, until they alighted in inner surfaces of cloth opposite and shone like little lamps suspended there." In The Return of the Native we find Dürer, Raffaello, Somerset, Perugino, Sallaert and Van Alsloot; in Jude, Del Sarto, Reni and Sebastiano.
Whether or not the man of letters availed himself of a
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