Three seriously
studied pictures would have been worth more.
At heart this great overgrown jovial boy was melancholy and sensitive.
He died young from heart disease, which was aggravated by grief over the
death of his mother from whom he had never been separated.
I dedicated a slight piece written for the violin to Dore. This was not
lost as the one to Ingres was, but it would be entirely unknown had not
Johannes Wolf, the violinist of queens and empresses, done me the favor
of placing it in his repertoire and bringing his fine talent to its aid.
Hebert was the most serious of the painter-violinists. Down to the end
of his life he delighted in playing the sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven,
and, from all accounts, he played them remarkably. I can say this only
from hearsay, for I never heard him. The few times that I ever saw him
at home in my youth, I found him with his brush in hand. I saw him after
that only at the Academie, where we sat near each other, and he always
greeted me cordially. We talked music from time to time, and he
conversed like a connoisseur.
Henri Regnault was the most musical of all the painters whom I have
known. He did not need a violin--he was his own. Nature had endowed him
with an exquisite tenor voice.
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