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The picture of M. Ménageot, a member of the ancient academy of painters, and formerly president of the French school at Rome, was exhibited about twenty years since, and met with the most general approbation. It is one of those compositions which manifest the return of good taste in the French school; it combines with much dignity of expression, correctness of design, and vigour of colouring, a flowing and easy pencil, and the most rigid attention to costume. This picture, the figures of which are of the natural size, has been for some time placed in the Gobelins. It has been there wrought in tapestry, with unexampled skill.

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THE EXPOSITION OF MOSES.

N. POUSSIN.

UPON the death of Joseph, and all his generation, the people of Israel multiplied in Egypt in the most extraordinary manner. At this period the king ordered his subjects to oppress the Hebrews, with a view of decreasing their numbers. He appointed officers, who condemned them to painful labour, and pushed his hatred against that nation to such an extent, as to enjoin the midwives to put the children of the Israelites to death, who were born males. This resource not being sufficient to appease his fury, he resolved to persecute the Jews, not in secret, as before, but openly and avowedly, and promulgated an edict by which he condemned all the male children of the Hebrews to be thrown into the Nile.

A little time after this cruel proclamation, a man of the tribe of Levi had a son, of uncommon beauty. The mother of the infant concealed his birth for three months; but finding that she could no longer secrete him, she took a panier of rushes, which she hardened with slime and bitumen, and placing her son in it, exposed him on the borders of the river, among the flags. The daughter of king Pharaoh, walking with her companions on the banks of the Nile, perceived the young Israelite, took him from the waters, and adopted him. This child, thus happily preserved from death, received the name of

Moses, and proved in the end the liberator of the Hebrews.

Poussin was in his sixtieth year when he painted this picture, in which are evident the vast conceptions of a superior genius. The manner in which the artist has expressed the grief and dejection of the parents of Moses, and the conscious security depicted in the countenance of the child, who is insensible of his danger, cannot be sufficiently extolled. The landscape is one of the finest of Poussin's: the high towers, the palace, and buildings, represent the capital of a great state, and form the richest and most variegated back ground that can be conceived.

To indicate, with greater precision, the place of the scene, the artist has introduced into his composition a river and a sphinx. Poussin perhaps ought to have depicted the river by a statue, instead of an animated figure, and not to have introduced a mythological idea, in a subject taken from the Bible. In the picture of the Passage of the Jordan," Raphael has painted the river god supporting his waters, to leave no obstruction to the march of the priests, who carry the ark, and the people of Israel: but the sublimity of the thought palliates the inconsistency. In the composition before us, Poussin has not the same motive to alledge.

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This picture was considered one of the most valuable of the Orleans collection.

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