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We now come to one of the most artistic of all Home Amusements—the Tableau vivant.

Lady Hamilton amused the people of her age, all over Europe, by playing in a parlor very striking living pictures. All she asked was a corner of the room, a heavy curtain behind her, and a few shawls and turbans. Being a beautiful and graceful woman, with the dramatic instinct, she gave imitations of celebrated statues and pictures, and was no doubt aided by some very ingenious painting, which she knew how to apply to her own fair face. The art she discovered is certainly worth trying in the present age as an amusement.

The preparations for good tableaux should be somewhat elaborate. A vista should be built and lined with dark-colored cloth; lights should fall from the top, sides, and front, so as to avoid shadows. The groups should be striking, the colors clear, and the attitudes simple. Sometimes there are such wonderful and unpremeditated effects from these living pictures that artists hold up their hands in despair; more often they are ruined by shadows; the lights are not well arranged, and the whole effect lacks elevation and meaning. It is difficult to arrange a crowded tableau, but it can be done.

The principle of a picture—a pyramidal form—should be observed closely in tableau. To secure this desirable object the persons in the background must stand on elevations. Boxes covered with dark cloth, so as to be unnoticeable, are the best of all devices, and the effect of any object held up in the hand, as a scepter, a bird, a distaff, or a wreath, must be carefully noted, as it may throw a shadow on the picture in the background. There never was, or could be, a tableau which did not have some weak spot, and these shadows are the faults which most easily beguile; but they can be avoided.

A group of Puritans make into many very striking pictures. The costume is beautiful and becoming; red cloth can be laid on the table or floor to set off the grays; and the many picturesque incidents in our early history form very pleasing subjects. It is a beautiful dress for women and a dignified one for men—that gray dress and high ruff, that broad hat, and plain, long gown. A group of young people might take a winter’s amusement out of reading up the Puritan annals, and giving at the Academy or in their own homes a series of Puritan tableaux.

A tableau can be given in parlors separated by folding-doors; but they are not by any means as good as those for which a stage, vista and footlights, flies and side-lights, are arranged. If there is a large unused room, where these properties can stand, the result is very much better. There should be a gauze curtain or one of black tarlatan, which should have no seams in it, and this curtain should hang in front of the stage all the time. The drop-curtain must be outside of this. The gauze curtain serves as a sort of varnish to the picture, and adds to the illusion.

Although the pure white light of candles, gas, kerosene, or lime-light is the best for tableaux, very pretty effects are produced by the introduction of colored lights, such as can be produced by the use of nitrate of strontia, chlorate of potash, sulphuret of antimony, sulphur, oxymuriate of potassa, metallic arsenic, and pulverized charcoal. Muriate of copper makes a bluish-green fire, and many other colors can be obtained by a little study of chemistry. Here are some simple recipes:

To make a red fire.—Five ounces nitrate of strontia, dry, one and a half ounces finely-powdered sulphur. Take five drachms chlorate of potash and four drachms sulphuret of antimony and powder them separately in a mortar; then mix them on paper, and, having mixed the other ingredients, previously powdered, add these last, and rub the whole together on paper. In use, mix a little spirits of wine with the powder, and burn in a flat iron plate or pan.

A green fire may be made by powdering finely and mixing well thirteen parts flour of sulphur, five parts oxymuriate of potassa, two parts metallic arsenic, three parts pulverized charcoal, seventy-seven parts nitrate of baryta; dry it carefully, powder, and mix the whole thoroughly. A polished reflector fitted on one side of the pan in which this is burned will concentrate the light and cast a brilliant green luster on the figures. A bluish-green fire may be produced by burning muriate of copper finely powdered and mixed with spirits of wine. These fires smell unpleasantly in the drawing-room; and equally good effects may almost always be produced by colored globes, if the light is not needed too quickly.

Sulphate of copper, when dissolved in water, will give a beautiful blue color. The common red cabbage gives three colors. Slice the cabbage and pour boiling water on it; when cold, add a small quantity of alum, and you have purple. Potash dissolved in the water will give a brilliant green. A few drops of muriatic acid will turn the cabbage-water into a crimson.

Then, again, if a ghostly look be required, mix common salt with spirits of wine in a metal cup and set it upon a wire frame over a spirit-lamp. When the cup becomes heated, and the spirits of wine ignite, the other lights in the room should be extinguished, and that of the spirit-lamp shaded in some way. The result will be that the whole group will become like the witches in Macbeth,

“That look not like the inhabitants of the earth,

But yet are of it.”

This burning of common salt produces a very weird effect. It seems that salt has some other properties than the conservative, preserving, hospitable kind of quality which legend and the daily needs of mankind have ascribed to it.

A very fine and artistic set of tableaux can be gotten up by reference to such a great work as “Boydell’s Shakespeare,” if it happens to be at hand. Also a study of fine engravings, such as one finds in the “National Academy.” If these books are not attainable, almost any pictorial magazine will furnish subjects. Or, if imagination is consulted, construct a series out of Waverley, or from the but too well known scenes of the French Revolution, or from George Eliot’s delightful “Romola”—a book full of remarkable pictures, with the additional charm of the old Florentine dress. Sometimes a very impressive poem is given in tableaux, like Tennyson’s “Princess,” or, the “Dream of Fair Women.” Then there are many artistic but rather horrible surprises, as “The Head of John the Baptist,” which can be “cut off” admirably by an intervening table, and so on; but nothing is so good as a study of the fine groups of the best painters.

Venetian scenes, from Titian’s and Tintoretto’s pictures, can be admirably represented in tableaux. The Italian wealth of color is always impressive; and as engravings of these pictures are attainable, it is well to represent them. Roman scenes are very effective, and especially as Alma Tadema arranges them for us, with his fine feeling for the antique.

The humor of Hogarth, aided as it is by the picturesque dress of his day, can be represented in a tableau. But without some such aids humor is generally lost in a tableau. There is not time for it. Some of Darley’s groups, as, for instance, the illustrations of “Rip Van Winkle,” are admirable, and would seem to contradict this statement, for they are full of fun; but then—they are wonderfully well dressed. That early Revolutionary dress, borrowed in part from the days of Queen Anne, is very picturesque.

If there is some one in the group whose fine sense of the proprieties of art can be trusted, the allegorical can be attempted. But the danger is that the allegorical in art is generally ridiculous. Faith, Hope, and Charity, Mercy and Peace, are better anywhere than in pictures.

The grotesque is always lost in a tableau, where there seems to be a sort of æsthetic demand for the heroic, the refined, and the delicate. A double action may be presented with very good effect; as in some of those fancies of Retzsch and Ary Scheffer, where an angel bends over a sleeping child, or a group, unknown to the actors in front, is representing another picture behind. But the best effects are the simplest. One should not attempt too much. The old example, called “The Dull Lecture,” painted by Gilbert Stuart Newton, where a prosy old philosopher is reading aloud to a pretty girl who is fast asleep, is a case in point. That has been a favorite tableau for forty years, nor are its charms yet done away with. Tableaux from Dickens have only a moderate success, excepting, perhaps, the rather overdone “Christmas Carol.” The dress is wanting in color and character.

Tableaux in which animals are introduced are sometimes very effective, if stuffed bears and lions and tigers can be hired from a museum. A fine tableau was once composed, from a French print, of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon; but the camel on which that lofty lady arrived was a piece of scene-painting done by a very clever artist, and it would be difficult to improvise one.