Sir Joshua Reynolds has done more than any one else to vindicate the art
of portrait-painting as indigenous to our country--he has started it
afresh from its lethargy and recovered it from its errors--placed
himself at once above all his countrymen who had preceded him, and has
remained above all who have followed. Like Holbein and Vandyke, Sir
Joshua put his stamp upon the times; or rather, like a true artist and
philosopher, he took that aggregate impression which the times gave.
Each has doubtless given his sitters a character of his own; but this is
not our argument. Each has also made his sitters what the costume of the
time contributed to make them. If Vandyke’s women are dignified and
lofty, it is his doing, for he was dignified and lofty in all his
compositions; if they are also childish and trivial, it is the accident
of the costume; for he was never either in his other pictures. If
Reynolds’s sitters are all simple, earnest, and sober, it is because he
was the artist, for he was so in all he touched; if they are also
stately, refined, and intellectual, it was the effect of the costume,
for he was not so in his other conceptions. For instance, Lady St.
Asaph, with her infant, lolling on a couch, in a loose tumbled dress,
with her feet doubled under her, is sober and respectable looking--in
spite of dress and position. Mrs. Hope, in an enormous cabbage of a cap,
with her hair over her eyes, is blowsy and vulgar in spite of Reynolds.
To our view, the average costume of Sir Joshua was excessively
beautiful. We go through a gallery of his portraits with feelings of
intense satisfaction, that there should have been a race of women who
could dress so decorously, so intellectually, and withal so becomingly.
Not a bit of the costume appeals to any of the baser instincts. There is
nothing to catch the vulgar, or fix the vicious. All is pure, noble,
serene, benevolent. They seem as if they would care for nothing we could
offer them, if our deepest reverence were not with it. We stand before
them like Satan before Eve, “stupidly good,” ready to abjure all the
fallacies of the Fathers, all the maxims of the moderns--ready to eat
our own words if they disapproved them--careless what may have been the
name or fame, family or fortune, of such lofty and lovely
creatures--yea, careless of their very beauty, for the _soul_ that
shines through it. And then to think that they are all dead!--_Quarterly
Review._