| Pierre Girieud, inspired and learned painter, has just completed in Paris a series of compositions which are to decorate the great hall of the University of Poitiers. Before sending them to this city, where they will be mounted on the walls for which he designed them, the artist wanted to show them to the Parisian public. But where to find the vast rooms necessary for such an exhibition, if not in the pavilion of the Orangerie? Pierre Girieud asked the administration of the national museums to lend them to him. By alleging difficulties that are not invincible, the latter, it is said, would oppose him.
With Gabriel Boissy in Comoedia, we must support the instances that the painter renews to obtain this advantage. Last year, it was well suited to decorative compositions painted for a palace in Venezuela by O.D.V. Guillaunnet. In addition, it is important to support by honoring the rare painters who, despite the little profit they derive from it and at the cost of efforts that are all the harder as the tradition is diminished, not to say disappeared, maintain some thing of mural painting, superior in itself to any other use of the brush, does not displease the artists limited in still life or drunk-still life. The State, which at this time should discourage, not the fine arts, but two thirds of those who devote themselves to it, has the duty to encourage the pimps of the great epic and decorative painting, without question the one of the highest glories of the French school |