The son of one of these pioneers, more rich than cultivated,
noticed the other day, while visiting a friend of mine, an
exquisite eighteenth-century bust of Madame de Pompadour, the pride
of his hostess's drawing-room. "Ah!" said Midas, "are busts the
fashion again? I have one of my father, done in Rome in 1850. I
will bring it down and put it in my parlor."
The travellers consulted the residents in their purchases of copies
of the old masters, for there were fashions in these luxuries as in
everything else. There was a run at that time on the "Madonna in
the Chair;" and "Beatrice Cenci" was long prime favorite.
Thousands of the latter leering and winking over her everlasting
shoulder, were solemnly sent home each year. No one ever dreamed
of buying an original painting! The tourists also developed a
taste for large marble statues, "Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii"
(people read Bulwer, Byron and the Bible then) being in such demand
that I knew one block in lower Fifth Avenue that possessed seven
blind Nydias, all life-size, in white marble, - a form of
decoration about as well adapted to those scanty front parlors as a
steam engine or a carriage and pair would have been. I fear
Bulwer's heroine is at a discount now, and often wonder as I see
those old residences turning into shops, what has become of the
seven white elephants and all their brothers and sisters that our
innocent parents brought so proudly back from Italy! I have
succeeded in locating two statues evidently imported at that time.
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