The discovery in 1868, and subsequent years, of numerous specimens of the artistic ability of the cave-men of palæolithic Europe, revealed a singularly interesting phase of primitive history. Remains of the so-called “Reindeer period” are now familiar to us from many localities; for the range of this animal in palæolithic times appears to have extended from the Baltic to the Pyrenees. But a special interest was conferred on the first disclosures by the locality itself, where the Vézère, an affluent of the river Dordogne, winds its way through the cretaceous limestone, in which occur numerous caves and rock-shelters, rich in remains of primitive art. In this region of South-western France, where many historical and legendary associations carry the fancy back to elder centuries, the Dordogne unites with the Garonne at its estuary below Bordeaux. The upper waters of the Dordogne form the boundary between Limousin and Auvergne, and the Vézère is one of its highest tributaries in Limousin. There, nearly in the latitude of Montreal, but with the genial climate which, throughout the whole historic period, has characterised Southern France, lie the caves of Cro-Magnon, La Moustier, Gorge d’Enfer, Laugerie Haute and Basse, and La Madelaine: the long-sealed art galleries of prehistoric Gaul. The reindeer and the aurochs haunted its forests; the woolly rhinoceros and the mammoth still frequented its glades; and the long-extinct fossil horse was not only an object of the chase, but was possibly already subdued to the companionship and service of man. Such, at least, is the idea suggested by a scene graven on the portion of a baton or staff, found by M. Lartet and Mr. Christy in La Madelaine cave, which represents a man between two horses’ heads, apparently walking past, with a staff or spear over his shoulder. Nor were those man’s sole contemporaries.
The drawings of the ancient cave-men are of varying degrees of merit, showing the efforts of the unskilled tyro as well as of the practised artist. Some of the examples found at Laugerie Basse—as, for instance, the assumed representation of an ibex, with its legs folded as if sitting,—are the crude efforts of unpractised draughtsmen, and would compare unfavourably with many examples of graphic art, the work of modern Eskimo and Indian gravers and draughtsmen. But other specimens—such as the mammoth from La Madelaine cave, and the Alpine ibex and reindeers from Laugerie Basse, in Southern France, and, still more, the remarkably spirited drawing of the reindeer grazing, from the Kesserloch, near Thayingen, sketched on a piece of reindeer horn,—evince powers of observation, and a freedom of hand in sketching from nature, such as would be found exceptional among pupils of our best training schools of art. On this point my friend, Sir Noel Paton, writes me: “I entirely concur in your view as to the immense superiority as works of art of the engravings on horn and ivory found in the prehistoric caves, over any modern work of the same kind which I have seen, executed by the Eskimos or other savage, tribes of our own day. As compared with the latter, the prehistoric productions are like the swift and direct studies from nature of Landseer, compared with the laboured scrawlings from memory of a rather dull schoolboy.”