Meantime, where is the agricultural fair and cattle-show? You must know that we do these things differently in Bavaria. On the fair-ground, there is very little to be seen of the fair. There is an inclosure where steam-engines are smoking and puffing, and threshing-machines are making a clamor; where some big church-bells hang, and where there are a few stalls for horses and cattle. But the competing horses and cattle are led before the judges elsewhere; the horses, for instance, by the royal stables in the city. I saw no such general exhibition of do mestic animals as you have at your fairs. The horses that took the prizes were of native stock, a very serviceable breed, excellent for carriage-horses, and admirable in the cavalry service. The bulls and cows seemed also native and to the manor born, and were worthy of little remark. The mechanical, vegetable, and fruit exhibition was in the great glass palace, in the city, and was very creditable in the fruit department, in the show of grapes and pears especially. The products of the dairy were less, though I saw one that I do not recollect ever to have seen in America, a landscape in butter. Inclosed in a case, it looked very much like a wood-carving. There was a Swiss cottage, a milkmaid, with cows in the foreground; there were trees, and in the rear rose rocky precipices, with chamois in the act of skipping thereon. I should think something might be done in our country in this line of the fine arts; certainly, some of the butter that is always being sold so cheap at St. Albans, when it is high everywhere else, must be strong enough to warrant the attempt. As to the other departments of the fine arts in the glass palace, I cannot give you a better idea of them than by saying that they were as well filled as the like ones in the American county fairs. There were machines for threshing, for straw-cutting, for apple-paring, and generally such a display of implements as would give one a favorable idea of Bavarian agriculture. There was an interesting exhibition of live fish, great and small, of nearly every sort, I should think, in Bavarian waters. The show in the fire-department was so antiquated, that I was convinced that the people of Munich never intend to have any fires.
Art Journal
Saunterings — Part 73
2026-11-14 18:19:49 · Cedar Herald Index
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