Observe the remarkable difference between Claude and Teniers in their power
of painting vacant space. Claude makes his whole landscape a _plenum:_ the
air is quite as substantial as any other part of the scene. Hence there are
no true distances, and every thing presses at once and equally upon the
eye. There is something close and almost suffocating in the atmosphere of
some of Claude's sunsets. Never did any one paint air, the thin air, the
absolutely apparent vacancy between object and object, so admirably as
Teniers. That picture of the Archers[2] exemplifies this excellence. See
the distances between those ugly louts! how perfectly true to the fact!
But oh! what a wonderful picture is that Triumph of Silenus![3] It is the
very revelry of hell. Every evil passion is there that could in any way be
forced into juxtaposition with joyance. Mark the lust, and, hard by, the
hate. Every part is pregnant with libidinous nature without one spark of
the grace of Heaven. The animal is triumphing--not over, but--in the
absence, in the non-existence, of the spiritual part of man. I could fancy
that Rubens had seen in a vision--
All the souls that damned be
Leap up at once in anarchy,
Clap their hands, and dance for glee!
That landscape[4] on the other side is only less magnificent than dear Sir
George Beaumont's, now in the National Gallery. It has the same charm.
Rubens does not take for his subjects grand or novel conformations of
objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles,--
nothing that a poet would take at all times, and a painter take in these
times. No; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that
ruinous château, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble
images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite
no surprise; but he--and he Peter Paul Rubens alone--handles these every-
day ingredients of all common landscapes as they are handled in nature; he
throws them into a vast and magnificent whole, consisting of heaven and
earth and all things therein. He extracts the latent poetry out of these
common objects,--that poetry and harmony which every man of genius
perceives in the face of nature, and which many men of no genius are taught
to perceive and feel after examining such a picture as this. In other
landscape painters the scene is confined and as it were imprisoned;--in
Rubens the landscape dies a natural death; it fades away into the apparent
infinity of space.
So long as Rubens confines himself to space and outward figure--to the mere
animal man with animal passions--he is, I may say, a god amongst painters.
His satyrs, Silenuses, lions, tigers, and dogs, are almost godlike; but the
moment he attempts any thing involving or presuming the spiritual, his gods
and goddesses, his nymphs and heroes, become beasts, absolute, unmitigated
beasts.
[Footnote 1:
All the following remarks in this section were made at the exhibition of
ancient masters at the British Gallery in Pall Mall. The recollection of
those two hours has made the rooms of that Institution a melancholy place
for me. Mr. Coleridge was in high spirits, and seemed to kindle in his mind
at the contemplation of the splendid pictures before him. He did not
examine them all by the catalogue, but anchored himself before some three
or four great works, telling me that he saw the rest of the Gallery
_potentially_. I can yet distinctly recall him, half leaning on his old
simple stick, and his hat off in one hand, whilst with the fingers of the
other he went on, as was his constant wont, figuring in the air a
commentary of small diagrams, wherewith, as he fancied, he could translate
to the eye those relations of form and space which his words might fail to
convey with clearness to the ear. His admiration for Rubens showed itself
in a sort of joy and brotherly fondness; he looked as if he would shake
hands with his pictures. What the company, which by degrees formed itself
round this silver-haired, bright-eyed, music-breathing, old man, took him
for, I cannot guess; there was probably not one there who knew him to be
that Ancient Mariner, who held people with his glittering eye, and
constrained them, like three years' children, to hear his tale. In the
midst of his speech, he turned to the right hand, where stood a very lovely
young woman, whose attention he had involuntarily arrested;--to her,
without apparently any consciousness of her being a stranger to him, he
addressed many remarks, although I must acknowledge they were couched in a
somewhat softer tone, as if he were soliciting her sympathy. He was,
verily, a gentle-hearted man at all times; but I never was in company with
him in my life, when the entry of a woman, it mattered not who, did not
provoke a dim gush of emotion, which passed like an infant's breath over
the mirror of his intellect.--ED.]
[Footnote 2:
"Figures shooting at a Target," belonging, I believe, to Lord Bandon.--ED.]
[Footnote 3: This belongs to Sir Robert Peel.--ED.]
[Footnote 4:
"Landscape with setting Sun,"--Lord Farnborough's picture.--ED.]
* * * * *
The Italian masters differ from the Dutch in this--that in their pictures
ages are perfectly ideal. The infant that Raffael's Madonna holds in her
arms cannot be guessed of any particular age; it is Humanity in infancy.
The babe in the manger in a Dutch painting is a fac-simile of some real
new-born bantling; it is just like the little rabbits we fathers have all
seen with some dismay at first burst.
* * * * *
Carlo Dolce's representations of our Saviour are pretty, to be sure; but
they are too smooth to please me. His Christs are always in sugar-candy.
* * * * *
That is a very odd and funny picture of the Connoisseurs
at Rome[1] by Reynolds.
[Footnote 1:
"Portraits of distinguished Connoisseurs painted at Rome,"--belonging to
Lord Burlington.--ED.]
* * * * *
The more I see of modern pictures, the more I am convinced that the ancient
art of painting is gone, and something substituted for it,--very pleasing,
but different, and different in kind and not in degree only. Portraits by
the old masters,--take for example the pock-fritten lady by Cuyp[1]--are
pictures of men and women: they fill, not merely occupy, a space; they
represent individuals, but individuals as types of a species.
Modern portraits--a few by Jackson and Owen, perhaps, excepted--give you
not the man, not the inward humanity, but merely the external mark, that in
which Tom is different from Bill. There is something affected and
meretricious in the Snake in the Grass[2] and such pictures, by Reynolds.
[Footnote 1:
I almost forget, but have some recollection that the allusion is to Mr.
Heneage Finch's picture of a Lady with a Fan.--ED.]
[Footnote 2: Sir Robert Peel's.--ED.]
July 25. 1831.