GIACOMO DE PONT, or LE BASSAN, a celebrated Venetian painter, was born in 1510. His subjects were generally peasants and villagers, busy at their different rural occupations, according to the various seasons of the year, together with cattle, landscapes, and historical designs; and in all these the figures are well designed, while the animals and landscapes have an agreeable air of simple nature. His compositions cannot boast of much elegance or grandeur of taste, not even those which are historical; but they have abundance of force and truth. His local colours are well observed, his carnations fresh and brilliant, and his chiaroscuro and perspective unexceptionable. His touch is free and spirited; and the distances in his landscapes are always true, if not sometimes too dark in the nearer parts. As he lived to be very old, he finished a great number of pictures; but notwithstanding his age and application, the real pictures of Giacomo are not commonly met with; many of those which are called originals by purchasers as well as dealers being at best no more than copies by the sons of Bassan, who were far inferior to him, or perhaps by some painter of still meaner abilities. The true pictures of Giacomo, however, always bear a considerable price if they happen to be undamaged. He died in 1592, aged eighty-two. Francis and Leander, his sons, made some progress in the same art; but inheriting a species of lunacy from their mother, both came to an untimely end.