hood with
anecdotes, yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The only
talent which was supposed to lurk in the napkin was that for painting.
A little while before he left school, he was found to have been working
hard with water-colors. Various persons have recalled finished works of
the young Ibsen--a romantic landscape of the ironworks at Fossum, a view
from the windows at Venstoeb, a boy in peasant dress seated on a rock,
the latter described by a dignitary of the church as "awfully splendid,"
overmaade praegtigt. One sees what kind of painting this must have
been, founded on some impression of Fearnley and Tidemann, a
far-away following of the new "national" art of the praiseworthy
"patriot-painters" of the school of Dahl.

It is interesting to remember that Pope, who had considerable
intellectual relationship with Ibsen, also nourished in childhood the
ambition to be a painter, and drudged away at his easel for weeks and
months. As he to the insipid Jervases and Knellers whom he copied,
so Ibsen to the conscientious romantic artists of Norway's prime. In
neither case do we wish that an Ibsen or a Pope should be secured for
the National Gallery, but it is highly significant that such earnest
students of precise excellence in another art should first of all have
schooled their eyes to exactitude by grappling with form and color.

In 1843, being fifteen years of age, Ibsen was confirmed and taken away
from school. These events marked the beginning of adolescence with a
young middle-class Norwegian of those days, for whom the future proposed
no task in life demanding a more elaborate education than the local
schoolmaster could give. Ibsen announced his wish to be a professional
artist, but that was one which could not be indulged. Until a later date
than this, every artist in Norway was forced abroad for the necessary
technical training: as a rule, students went to Dresden, because J.
C. Dahl was there; but many settled in Duesseldorf, where the teaching
attracted them. In any case, the adoption of a plastic profession meant
a long and serious expenditure of money, together with a very doubtful
prospect of ultimate remuneration. Fearnley, who had seemed the very
genius of Norwegian art, had just (1842) died, having scarcely begun to
sell his pictures, at the age of forty. It is not surprising that Knud
Ibsen, whose to were in a worse condition than ever, refused even to
consider a course of life which would ent