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the coarse and dictatorial ill-breeding of the possessor, the effect of conscious talent and of a vulgar origin, and his merit would have been sooner known had it been more amiably accompanied. We yield to none in the veneration paid to that great name, but we claim for the gentlemen of England the merit of appreciating virtue and talents when they really are proved, and we warn them against presuming their existence before the proof is clear. The danger lies the other way. We hear enough of genius

Each mother claims it for her booby son;
Each widow claims it for the best of men,

For him she mourns, for him she weds again.'

Painting geniuses, reading such a passage as we have quoted, may suppose themselves injured after the fashion of Johnson, by not being admitted to Almack's, or invited to dine with the Duke of Sutherland. These volumes contain more than one example of such discontents. Again, we say let geniuses learn wisdom from Sir Joshua, and the consequence of wanting it from Barry. Good breeding, good nature, and kindly feeling will create friends in every class, while coarseness, rudeness, and envy will counteract even genius and wit, where they exist, and are simply odious and contemptible without them.

If it be true, as Mr. Cunningham alleges, that disappointment and neglect had for ever roughened Johnson,' we should like to hear at what period he was smooth? Alas! the sad gifts of Nature were the causes of Johnson's infirmity of temper. We know not only what he did, but what he resisted, and how much he overcame; and the nobleness of his nature shone brightly through the cloud of melancholy, and the disadvantage of early habits. But we cannot class among his merits, the very foibles which were disadvantageous even to Johnson-nor allow respectful pity to pass into the weakness of undistinguishing admiration.

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The friendship of Johnson for Reynolds was given to the man, and not to the artist. Johnson certainly undervalued an art which he talks of, in his letter to Baretti, as what we call in to our assistance to rid us of our time.' This has been imputed to envy by one ingenious biographer; and to Johnson's disgust at the personal worthlessness of too many artists, by Mr. Cunningham. Did neither of them recollect that Johnson was as nearly blind as possible, which is, at least, a more obvious reason for his not being an admirer or judge of painting?

Mr. Cunningham (vol. i. p. 250) seems to think it not only remarkable, but astonishing, that Sir Joshua through life preferred to the company of men employed in the same walk with himself, the general society of whatever was eminent in London, and lived with men of literature and business, rather than with painters, and

men

men whose talk was of pictures. Nothing more surely marks the elevation and scope of his understanding. No man could be more zealous for the progress of the art he loved, none more assiduous in its cultivation. When we reflect that, notwithstanding the constant demand upon his time for portraits, he painted upwards of one hundred and thirty pictures on historical or fancy subjects, many of them of the greatest excellence, and compare these with the lofty dreams of others, which at best ended in miserable abortions, though half their leisure was spent in meditating on them, and the other half in writing and talking of them, we cannot accuse him of neglecting opportunities. Let it be remembered, too, that these were the works of a man whose society was as acceptable to the good, the learned, and the wise, as his pictures were to the lovers of art. But, in truth, no man of high and great attainments ever confines his admiration of genius to the sphere in which he himself excels. It is only the Cockney Phoebus, or the College pedant, who never ranges beyond the limits of his own puny Parnassus, and wastes life in twaddling and jangling with its inmates, or dirty efforts to raise himself by their assistance. The real man of talent leaves his art in his study, and finds its materials in the world. He loves to contemplate excellence, in pursuits most alien to his own, but which it is his province to illustrate and portray. Shakspeare and Homer must have found pleasure in associating with mankind of all classes. Milton was a stern statesman and an active politician. Scott despised the cant of literature, and Byron hated it. Did Sir Thomas Lawrence live much among painters ?-or does Mr. Westmacott, or does Allan Cunningham's own friend, Mr. Chantrey, live habitually among the sculptors? Reynolds knew all that could be said, or at least was likely to be said, about painting, and sought and found in Burke and Johnson what the academicians had not to bestow.

The incidents of his life are few and well-known; the excellence of his pencil is now universally acknowledged. His knowledge of the principles by which colours are blended into harmony, and the fine eye with which he preserved the scale and arrangement of these, must have struck every lover of the art who has witnessed the splendid and brilliant effect which his pictures produce when collected (as many of them were a few months ago) within the walls of the British Institution. Some beauties have indeed been lost, from the perishable colours which he occasionally used, but enough remains never to be forgotten. We cannot agree with Mr. Cunningham's sentence, that Sir Joshua's historic pictures have little of the heroic dignity which an inspired mind breathes into compositions of that class.' They have at least more dignity than any painter of the English school has hitherto breathed into such subjects, and, what is better, the dignity is never theatric

dignity,

dignity, nor contaminated by affectation. It is indeed less ideal than that of the great Italian schools, and more obviously selected from living nature; but he found it there, and not in the Opera House, the usual standard of grace and elegance with those who know no better. There is nothing that is false or melodramatic in his representation.

It would not be difficult to defend Reynolds from some minute criticism which has found its way into these pages. Of the Ugolino, it is said, that he looks like a famished mendicant; deficient in commanding qualities of intellect, and regardless of his dying children.' Sir Joshua painted the same head in his picture of the Banished Lord, which has been often admired for the lofty resignation that it expresses. He repeated it in several sketches, and, as his model was a well-known beggar, the criticism was obvious— but Reynolds was not mistaken in his choice. The head is not devoid of intellectual dignity; and who expects the Count not to appear famished, when dying of hunger in the Torre del Famé, or his looks to be directed to his children, when he recollects the horrible description

Io non piangeva, si dentro impietrai.'

We never beheld the face without feeling the full force of that immortal line. Again-in a group of Charity, some critic had commended the affectionate expression of the Mother to the children around her. Mr. Cunningham asks,' where is the charity of a mother taking care of her own children?' He might, however, have commended the affection with which she fondles the children, which this critic, but not the painter, mistook for her own. will not pursue these trifling oversights: the pictures speak for themselves; and in the words of Fielding, we assure the reader, that if he has seen all these without knowing what beauty is, he has no eyes; if without feeling its power, he has no heart.'

We

As Sir Joshua, in his historical and fancy pictures, often studied his heads from real life, so in taking portraits he not unfrequently tried to give them a more permanent value, by connecting them with poetical or imaginary subjects. Mr. Cunningham is unnecessarily discomposed at this mixed practice. The best historical painters of the highest schools of Italy converted pretty women, generally their favourite mistresses, into Madonnas and saints; and we have seen it gravely urged by the Rev. VicarApostolic Dr. Milner, in his History of Winchester, that Protestantism must be the grave of sensibility,' since those old Italians' conceptions of divine female purity and piety are infinitely more animated than the rival personifications of Mr. West, or even of Sir Joshua. Andrea del Sarto seems not to have been so judicious. His model was his wife, as may be seen by her portrait,

now

men.

now in the Pitti Palace at Florence. She is not very attractive, and yet, by means known only to the initiated, had great sway over her husband. He is said to have been henpecked into this choice of a model; but we observe with sorrow, that his Madonnas, though inspired by the same glowing religion, have by no means the fervour of Raphael's, who was a gay bachelor. The devotion of Italy must have been most effectually cooled, if we may judge by the test of Mengs's Holy Families, and the inspiration of the recent school. Mr. Cunningham, however, objects that a modern lord would make an indifferent Jupiter, and we are not aware that any of their lordships ever sat to Reynolds in that character; though we have seen, by a more adventurous artist, the late Duke of York, attended by an enormous eagle, on the ceiling of one of our noblest mansions, in the capacity of that commander-in-chief of gods and We hope the fashion is not likely to become very general. Pretty women, however, in spite of all Mr. Cunningham can say, have a prescriptive right to be treated as goddesses, and even as angels, if the scrupulous conscience of the deputy lord-chamberlain had not taken alarm at the profaneness of the designation. The exquisite and brilliant portrait of Mrs. Hale, in the character of Euphrosyne, now in the gallery of Lord Harewood, is an inimitable example of Sir Joshua's success, in producing a splendid and most interesting work of art, thus ingeniously grafted on a likeness. But in many of his most admired and popular compositions, he has, in fact, pursued the same plan. The Snake in the Grass, a painting that rivals Titian himself, is one in which the Nymph was copied from actual life. Hope nursing Love -now in the possession of Mr. Morritt of Rokeby-is another, -not taken merely, as Mr. Cunningham seems to suppose, as the portrait of Miss Morris the actress, but because Miss Morris's face, and it is a very pretty one, furnished the expression he wanted for his imagined allegory. The deep heartfelt content of the girl in her employment, trying to repress the restless mischief of the little winged urchin at her bosom, is beautifully expressed by the sweet smile of her lips; and here we would observe, that nobody, except perhaps Correggio, ever painted smiles like Sir Joshua. They are frequent in his pictures, and are always characteristic, always expressive of the emotion of the mind, which it was his object to represent, and in harmony with the action. They are smiles of affection, of simplicity, of playful cunning, or intelligence, or sensibility, and never the unmeaning simper of affectation, or the mere outbreak of animal spirits and hilarity. With all his brilliancy, Lawrence did not rival him in this great perfection.

Sir Joshua, it seems, incurred in some degree the malevolence of Gainsborough, but if he regretted, he does not appear to have returned

returned it, and how he deserved it we are not told :—but we are told, ' that when Gainsborough asked sixty guineas for his "Girl and Pigs," Sir Joshua gave him a hundred,' and then reminded, that he could afford to aid him both in fame and purse.' This is one of Mr. Cunningham's hints which we cannot approve of-he has evidently allowed himself to imbibe from certain very obscure sources, what we must call a narrow prejudice against Sir Joshua. In truth, the same kind spirit appears to have actuated the man through life; he never lost a friend when in poverty, or forgot one when in prosperity. When Madame Le Brun became a candidate for fame, and, on the strength of two bad French portraits, the lioness of the day, Reynolds held the following characteristic dialogue with Northcote:

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Pray what do you think of them, Sir Joshua?" Reynolds"That they are very fine." Northcote-" How fine ?" Reynolds"As fine as those of any painter." Northcote-"As fine as those of any painter! Do you mean living or dead?" Reynolds, sharply"Either living or dead." Northcote-" Good God! what, as fine as Vandyke?" Reynolds-" Yes, and finer."-vol. i. p. 296. His quiet contempt of competition and exaggeration cannot be more strongly marked; and yet because Barry, in his splenetic craziness, hated Reynolds, for being loved by Burke, and admired by the world, it is elsewhere asserted, and it is insinuated here, that Reynolds was not free from jealousy of Barry! We cannot read their lives, much less compare their works, and believe in these dreams of disappointed artists, or the gossip of partizans in an academy; the thing is impossible. The beautiful eulogy from the pen of Burke, with which Mr. Cunningham concludes his life of Sir Joshua, will be remembered long after these petty squabbles are forgotten; and let it not be unobserved, that it was written by the wisest, kindest, and most judicious friend that poor Barry ever possessed, or ever quarrelled with.

Every mistaken rule which Reynolds had ever laid down was indeed carried into its full effect by Barry himself, and every wise advice which Burke gave, or Sir Joshua practised, as certainly neglected. He disdained colouring, as inconsistent with the dignity of the art, of which it is, after all, the distinguishing criterion. As even Raphael and Michael Angelo were inferior to the ancient statuaries in ideal beauty, he raved about his love of antiquity, and despised Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, and all that Sir Joshua adored in private. He dwelt with statues, drawings and casts from the antique; painted the death of General Wolfe, and represented the French and English armies in primitive nudity, after the manner of the ancients. With Barry, a difference of opinion was an affront, a controversy was a quarrel, advice an insult, and competition a deadly and ir

remissible

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