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remissible injury. And what was there to balance all these social absurdities and annoyances? He could talk of beauty and grace, but he could represent neither; and his boasted visions, when transferred to canvass, ended in an extravagant jumble of classical common-places, applied as preposterously to stupid modern allegories, as the naked forms of the palæstra had been to the soldiers who fought on the Heights of Abram. The absurdities of his pencil were, with equal absurdity, defended by his pen, as if we could be persuaded or scolded into admiration of works which must, after all, be liked or disliked for their own impression. The true apology for Barry is in the state of mind, which Mr. Southey's narrative furnished to these volumes places so graphically before us. The coexistence of partial insanity with strong and powerful, but ill-directed talents, is unfortunately too common to excite surprise, and too melancholy not to claim forbearance. As a warning, indeed, Barry's life (very amusingly detailed in the second of these volumes) may be of use, otherwise we should have felt inclined to quarrel with the low price of admission allowed by Mr. Cunningham, as door-keeper to this Temple of Fame. We assign the title of eminent artists to those only whose works, whether applauded or neglected during their lives, have been sought after and valued since their decease. Short as the period is that has elapsed, it has been enough to destroy that reputation, the child of party spirit and envy, which once attached to Barry-and it is rapidly reducing to their true dimensions the flighty mediocrity of Romney, and the scientific but powerless labour of West.

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The best of Romney's works were only portraits of Lady Hamilton in various characters; and Lady Hamilton was undoubtedly a beautiful woman and an admirable actress. West was a good and amiable man; his vanity was so mixed with good-nature as to be simply amusing; and his glorious self-consequence in fancying that, when he walked with Mr. Fox in the Louvre, the crowds that followed were attracted by the reputation of English art,' is indeed quite delightful. Of him may justly be said what Mr. Cunningham somewhere says of Mr. Payne Knight, that he mistook the knowledge of art which he possessed for natural taste and genius. He understood rules, and had studied composition both in form and colouring; he loved his art, and drew well. His small finished sketches, and his death of Wolfe and Battle of La Hogue, had many beauties, and few faults; but the beauties were not of a high or striking order, and the faults were those of deficiency, least likely to be remedied. He was the Sir Richard Blackmore of painting, and, with all the outward forms and ceremonies of the painters most admired, receives now much the same degree of attention as is bestowed on the congenial

poetry

poetry of the medical knight, whose aims were as lofty and whose execution was as prosaic as his own.

With such sentiments on these heroes of the academy we cannot pursue Mr. Cunningham through his charitable labours, in detecting the latent excellencies of artists whose claims rest on still lower achievements, or even on one or two lucky pictures, much less on what has ever abounded-the glory of unfinished sketches —and drawings, which might have become good pictures if their authors had but possessed the means or patience to complete them. Lord Aldborough and Lord Buchan delighted in Barry,Cumberland, Hayley, and Miss Seward worshipped Romney,George the Third himself was an admirer of West,-but we prefer the criterion of the auction-room, and the lists of Mr. Phillips and Mr. Christie.

Gainsborough daily rises in price and estimation: he was the first of our painters who taught his countrymen the charm of English landscape. Wilson had imported to our shores his own poetic style, formed certainly with taste and skill, and varied with considerable power of imagination, but yet ideal, and, though not servilely copied from the great masters of Italy, still formed on their example, and compounded of their materials. 'His landscapes,' says Mr. Cunningham, are fanned by the pure air, warmed with the glowing sun, filled with the ruined temples, and sparkling with the wooded streams and tranquil lakes of that classic region,' They are so; and here was probably one of the causes why the English public were unjustly slow in appreciating his real merit. A few of his works were well sold, in consequence of the reputation he had acquired in Italy, but the demand was soon supplied; and the insensibility of the public to exotic beauties left him very undeservedly in indigence. His own personal character, however, seems to have been partly the source of this neglect. It is admitted, indeed, that he was coarse and repulsive in his manner, or, as Mr. Cunningham prefers to express it,

that he was a lover of pleasant company,' (a phrase admitting of very various construction,) a drinker of ale and porter-one who loved boisterous mirth and rough humour, and' (as he adds with much naïveté) such things are not always found in society which calls itself select. What then,' he says, 'could the artist do?'

Certainly, with such tastes, he could do nothing but what he did ; yet it was quite as natural, in those whose habits and tastes were different, to prefer more delicate and moderate potations, more polished mirth, and company which they considered as pleasant: and even Reynolds might be excused for disliking the man who must equally have disliked what such a man would call the dulness

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of Reynolds' best society. Mr. Cunningham may be assured that genius, far superior to any which Wilson ever possessed, will not make a gentleman (and Reynolds was in all respects one) associate with companions of low, coarse and repulsive habits. As mere lions, they may for a while be indulged and stared at, but the novelty once over, the disgust returns, and after being tolerated for a while through compassion, in itself humiliating, they are at last left to more congenial allies. We blame the world for not buying good pictures, but we cannot condemn them for avoiding bad company. That Reynolds's dislike went further has not at least been shown; and that he was not an undiscriminating admirer of Wilson's paintings is unfairly ascribed, we think, to cautious malignity,' and a wish to damn with faint praise.' The lecture on which this charge is founded was, as Mr. Cunningham himself admits, not delivered till Wilson was dead, and it could not hurt him, and yet its language proves, as he supposes, an old and rooted spleen. That Reynolds was actuated by such motives we do not believe. Sir Joshua's criticism on the Niobe appears to us much more just than Mr. Cunningham's; but at any rate, before it can be quoted as an instance of malevolence, it must be proved not only false, but insincere. is singular enough that in this part of Cunningham's narrative Reynolds should be charged with extolling Gainsborough out of envy to Wilson; and that he should be charged just as broadly with envying Gainsborough himself, in a subsequent page. Well might Reynolds prefer the society he lived in to that of his brothers in art. Even his wise and sensible reserve was a wound to their self-complacency, and every criticism a presumed mark of his envy or an invidious eulogy on some hated rival. His patience and forbearance were more admirable than his paintings.

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With all his merit there is a heaviness and opacity in much of the colouring of Wilson which Gainsborough avoided; but, on the other hand, there is a truth of representation in Gainsborough which even Wilson had not attained. The peasantry, the woods, and cottages of England were his materials, and he had studied them from childhood. Luckily, too, no systems of ideal beauty in this department of the art had limited its range to the precincts in which Claude, Poussin, or Salvator had excelled. Ruysdael, Cuyp, and Hobbima, Ostade and Rembrandt had already proved the extent of its domain, and Gainsborough ranged, like them, through its wild and sequestered scenery. He saw nature also with a poet's eye, and retaining all the appearance of homely truth, reflected it with increased beauty and more forcible expression. There is a fine selection of real life about his peasantry, and of real scenery in his landscape, more impressive,

because

because apparently more unstudied and fresher, than the elaborate though poetic compositions of Wilson. If there is less elevation in his conceptions, there is more of facility, exuberance, and vigour in the expression of them. These are all merits of the highest order, and not the less so for being more easily and more extensively recognized by untutored minds. They are also united to others more immediately technical,-a clearness and transparency both of lights and shadows, and that magical luce di dentro in some of his pictures, which marks the great masters of colour, and gives to his sunshine and shadow the effect of reality. What Gray's Elegy did for our peasantry, was achieved with perhaps hardly less success by the pencil of Gainsborough.

We owe much to the last hero of Cunningham's third volume -Fuseli: he exemplified most of the problems which artists and sometimes authors find it difficult to solve. His hand was ready and his sketches clever, his diction fluent, and his love of art undoubted,-but he was the dupe of a false system, and mistook himself for a man of genius, soaring beyond human ken into the deep serene of the empyrean, when he was only skimming about the dark and narrow circle of his own cloudy metaphysics. Who does not perceive in his designs the abortive efforts of an inadequate imagination to embody ideas confusedly conceived, and after all incapable of being represented? To fail in great attempts may be the fate of a gigantic mind, but it is only a weak understanding that is in danger of straining at impossibilities. When Mr. Cunningham tells us that his colouring is like his design,' we perfectly agree with him, and also that it is original, for it is entirely unnatural. We do not, assuredly, know the shape or complexion of Milton's Satan or Hamlet's Ghost, but our respect for their characters prevents us from accepting Mr. Fuseli's report of their appearance. The Royal Academy of Egypt had anticipated his great discovery in the representation of supernatural personages, and we recommend their practice, as even more compendious and intelligible than his. In Belzoni's tomb, and in many others still extant, all the gods and goddesses are represented as pea-green,—a still more supernatural colour than that which distinguishes them in Fuseli's works. But his mortals are almost of the same hue with his archangels, and the painters of Pharaoh had more variety. The genius of Fuseli has been praised—and his is not a solitary case

by men who confound the delirium of a common, with the inspiration of a lofty mind; but we are astonished at the limited range, no less than at the flighty absurdity, of his extravagance. He is the Macpherson of his art; and, indeed, his writing is somewhat akin to his painting. We fear Mr. Cunningham himself

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quotes the following passage because he thinks it fine. There is, indeed, a power in his diction,' for it has blinded his admirer to his want of meaning; or, if it has a meaning, we shall be most thankful for a translation of it into any comprehensible dialect of English or of Greek :

Form, in its widest meaning, the visible universe that envelopes our senses, and its counterpart, the invisible one, that agitates our mind with visions bred on sense by fancy, are the element and realm of invention: it discovers, selects, combines the possible, the probable, the known, in a mode that strikes with an air of truth and novelty. Possible, strictly, means an effect derived from a cause, a body composed of materials, a coalition of forms whose union or co-agency imply in themselves no absurdity, no contradiction: applied to our art, it takes a wider latitude; it means the representation of effects derived from causes, or forms compounded from materials heterogeneous and incompatible among themselves, but rendered so plausible to our senses, that the transition of one part to another seems to be accounted for by an air of organization, and the eye glides imperceptibly, or with satisfaction, from one to the other, or over the whole: that this was the condition on which, and the limits within which, the ancients permitted invention to represent what was strictly speaking impossible, we may with plausibility surmise from the picture of Zeuxis, described by Lucian in the memoir to which he has prefixed. that painter's name, who was probably one of the first adventurers in this species of imagery. Zeuxis had painted a family of Centaurs: the dam, a beautiful female to the middle, with the lower parts gradually sliding into the most exquisite forms of a young Thessalian mare, half reclined in playful repose, and gently pawing the velvet ground, offered her human nipple to one infant centaur, whilst another greedily sucked the feline udder below, but both with their eyes turned up to a lion whelp held over them by the male centaur, their father, rising above the hillock on which the female reclined,—a grim feature, but whose ferocity was somewhat tempered by a smile.'vol. iii. pp. 312, 313.

We particularly recommend the picture of Zeuxis, as described by Fuseli, to the students of our poetic school of art. It will have all the relish of the celebrated Roman dinner in Peregrine Pickle, even though some ignoble brother of the brush may be tempted in contemplating it to exclaim with poor Pallet, 'Bless me! what beastly fellows these ancients were!' Again we say that we thank Fuseli. He cured us of supernatural aspirations-he cured us of the systematic sublime and beautiful,-he showed us the superiority even of common nature to the selfexcited enthusiasm of prosaic minds. He died at eighty-four, an age nearly equal to that attained by Titian and Michael Angelo, and left above eight hundred sketches, and pictures numerous enough, but of which we believe not one, if exhibited without his

name,

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