THE PICTURE AND THE MEN.

I.

F. B. CARPENTER.

FRANCIS BICKNELL CARPENTER, painter of the picture of "The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln to his Cabinet," is an artist of high reputation, having already painted portraits of Ex-President Tyler, President Pierce, President Fillmore, Chief-Justice Chase, Secretary Marcy, Secretary Seward, Senators Cass and Houston, Attorney-General Cushing, and many other eminent persons besides. Like Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Fillmore, and many more of the distinguished Americans who have sat to him, Mr. Carpenter was born in humble circumstances, and has earned his own prosperity and reputation by good conduct and hard work—a truly American career.

Mr. Carpenter was born in Homer, Cortland County, New York, Aug. 6, 1830. His father was a respectable farmer, of almost as practical a' character as King George the Second, whose whole doctrine about the fine arts was expressed by his saying, in his German brogue, "I hate bainting, and boetry too." Young

Carpenter was intended by his good father for a farmer, or perhaps a country merchant, and like other country. boys he was sent to the "deestrick school," or American university.

As soon as the boy was old enough to have any preferences, he showed a strong love for Art. This was when he was at school, and eight years old, and its first occasion was his seeing and admiring a clever pencil-drawing made on a panel of the school-room door, one day at recess, by a schoolmate named Otis, subsequently a distinguished physician in New York. This door-panel picture stirred up in young Carpenter the desire and resolve which made him an artist. For the next five or six years the little fellow worked away with untiring industry, drawing pictures of all sorts of things, on whatever would hold a picture. He had neither instruction, books, nor models. Farmers' sons seldom have much money, and the resolute boy often traveled three miles to the village to invest his total capital, usually not over two cents, in a sheet of unruled foolscap and a pencil. Blank leaves out of old account books, all manner of blank and waste papers, blank walls, both inside of the house and out, smooth pieces. of board-every available surface—were industriously used instead of canvas, and some of these monuments of youthful effort still decorate the walls of the old homestead. As in many other cases, this youthful period was one of ambition as great as its experience was small; the boy soared promptly into the ideal realm of historical painting, and among other scenes chalked on the side of the old barn the capture of André, and William Tell Shooting the Apple from his Son's Head.

All this vigorous industry met with little response, except snubs and sneers. Mr. Carpenter promptly rebuked every hint from his son about becoming a painter. And Deacon I- one of the more eminent dignitaries of the neighborhood, when somebody asked him some question about all this drawing, answered, with great scorn, "Humph! you can't turn over a chip on his father's farm without findin' a pictur' of a chicken or sunthin' on t'other side on't!" And this, by the way, is all that is known of the eminent and influential deacon.

When young Carpenter was thirteen, his father sought to put him in the way of earning a respectable living, and secured for him, to this end, employment in a grocery store in Ithaca. But drawing molasses was not the kind of drawing which the young gentleman preferred, and the worthy man of codfish soon became sure that the youth was "a poor creature." For six months he tried faithfully to make the boy do something useful, but all in vain; and quite discouraged, he sent him home to his father with a letter saying that he showed nothing of the intelligence necesfor mercantile business, and that his mind turned entirely to drawing and reading. Therefore, advised the good grocer, the best thing to be done with him is to keep him at work on the farm! This sage advice was followed, and doubtless Mr. Carpenter, senior, and the other elders, concluded, as Sir Isaac Newton's teacher did about him, that the boy was a hopeless dunce.

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Just at this time Mr. George L. Clough, a young artist from Auburn, N. Y., came to Homer to paint