The painter not only takes a delight in nature, he has a new
and exquisite source of pleasure opened to him in the study and
contemplation of works of art--
Whate'er Lorraine light touch'd with soft'ning hue,
Or savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew.
He turns aside to view a country gentleman's seat with eager looks,
thinking it may contain some of the rich products of art. There is
an air round Lord Radnor's park, for there hang the two Claudes, the
Morning and Evening of the Roman Empire--round Wilton House, for there
is Vandyke's picture of the Pembroke family--round Blenheim, for there
is his picture of the Duke of Buckingham's children, and the most
magnificent collection of Rubenses in the world--at Knowsley, for there
is Rembrandt's Handwriting on the Wall--and at Burleigh, for there are
some of Guido's angelic heads. The young artist makes a pilgrimage to
each of these places, eyes them wistfully at a distance, 'bosomed high
in tufted trees,' and feels an interest in them of which the owner is
scarce conscious: he enters the well-swept walks and echoing archways,
passes the threshold, is led through wainscoted rooms, is shown the
furniture, the rich hangings, the tapestry, the massy services of
plate--and, at last, is ushered into the room where his treasure is, the
idol of his vows--some speaking face or bright landscape! It is stamped
on his brain, and lives there thenceforward, a tally for nature, and a
test of art. He furnishes out the chambers of the mind from the spoils
of time, picks and chooses which shall have the best places--nearest his
heart. He goes away richer than he came, richer than the possessor;
and thinks that he may one day return, when he perhaps shall have done
something like them, or even from failure shall have learned to admire
truth and genius more.
My first initiation in the mysteries of the art was at the Orleans
Gallery: it was there I formed my taste, such as it is; so that I am
irreclaimably of the old school in painting. I was staggered when I saw
the works there collected, and looked at them with wondering and with
longing eyes. A mist passed away from my sight: the scales fell off. A
new sense came upon me, a new heaven and a new earth stood before me.
I saw the soul speaking in the face--'hands that the rod of empire had
swayed' in mighty ages past--'a forked mountain or blue promontory,'
--with trees upon't
That nod unto the world, and mock our eyes with air.
Old Time had unlocked his treasures, and Fame stood portress at
the door. We had all heard of the names of Titian, Raphael, Guido,
Domenichino, the Caracci--but to see them face to face, to be in the
same room with their deathless productions, was like breaking some
mighty spell--was almost an effect of necromancy! From that time I lived
in a world of pictures. Battles, sieges, speeches in parliament seemed
mere idle noise and fury, 'signifying nothing,' compared with those
mighty works and dreaded names that spoke to me in the eternal silence
of thought. This was the more remarkable, as it was but a short time
before that I was not only totally ignorant of, but insensible to the
beauties of art. As an instance, I remember that one afternoon I was
reading _The Provoked Husband_ with the highest relish, with a green
woody landscape of Ruysdael or Hobbima just before me, at which I looked
off the book now and then, and wondered what there could be in that sort
of work to satisfy or delight the mind--at the same time asking myself,
as a speculative question, whether I should ever feel an interest in it
like what I took in reading Vanbrugh and Cibber?
I had made some progress in painting when I went to the Louvre to study,
and I never did anything afterwards. I never shall forget conning
over the Catalogue which a friend lent me just before I set out. The
pictures, the names of the painters, seemed to relish in the mouth.
There was one of Titian's Mistress at her toilette. Even the colours
with which the painter had adorned her hair were not more golden, more
amiable to sight, than those which played round and tantalised my fancy
ere I saw the picture. There were two portraits by the same hand--'A
young Nobleman with a glove'--Another, 'a companion to it.' I read
the description over and over with fond expectancy, and filled up the
imaginary outline with whatever I could conceive of grace, and dignity,
and an antique gusto--all but equal to the original. There was the
Transfiguration too. With what awe I saw it in my mind's eye, and
was overshadowed with the spirit of the artist! Not to have been
disappointed with these works afterwards, was the highest compliment I
can pay to their transcendent merits. Indeed, it was from seeing other
works of the same great masters that I had formed a vague, but no
disparaging idea of these. The first day I got there, I was kept for
some time in the French Exhibition Room, and thought I should not be
able to get a sight of the old masters. I just caught a peep at them
through the door (vile hindrance!) like looking out of purgatory into
paradise--from Poussin's noble, mellow-looking landscapes to where
Rubens hung out his gaudy banner, and down the glimmering vista to
the rich jewels of Titian and the Italian school. At last, by much
importunity, I was admitted, and lost not an instant in making use of my
new privilege. It was _un beau jour_ to me. I marched delighted through
a quarter of a mile of the proudest efforts of the mind of man, a whole
creation of genius, a universe of art! I ran the gauntlet of all the
schools from the bottom to the top; and in the end got admitted into the
inner room, where they had been repairing some of their greatest works.
Here the Transfiguration, the St. Peter Martyr, and the St. Jerome of
Domenichino stood on the floor, as if they had bent their knees, like
camels stooping, to unlade their riches to the spectator. On one side,
on an easel, stood Hippolito de Medici (a portrait by Titian), with a
boar-spear in his hand, looking through those he saw, till you turned
away from the keen glance; and thrown together in heaps were landscapes
of the same hand, green pastoral hills and vales, and shepherds piping
to their mild mistresses underneath the flowering shade. Reader, 'if
thou hast not seen the Louvre thou art damned!'--for thou hast not seen
the choicest remains of the works of art; or thou hast not seen all
these together with their mutually reflected glories. I say nothing of
the statues; for I know but little of sculpture, and never liked any
till I saw the Elgin Marbles.... Here, for four months together, I
strolled and studied, and daily heard the warning sound--'Quatres heures
passees, il faut fermer, Citoyens'--(Ah! why did they ever change their
style?) muttered in coarse provincial French; and brought away with
me some loose draughts and fragments, which I have been forced to
part with, like drops of life-blood, for 'hard money.' How often, thou
tenantless mansion of godlike magnificence--how often has my heart since
gone a pilgrimage to thee!
It has been made a question, whether the artist, or the mere man
of taste and natural sensibility, receives most pleasure from the
contemplation of works of art; and I think this question might be
answered by another as a sort of _experimentum crucis_, namely, whether
any one out of that 'number numberless' of mere gentlemen and amateurs,
who visited Paris at the period here spoken of, felt as much interest,
as much pride or pleasure in this display of the most striking monuments
of art as the humblest student would? The first entrance into the Louvre
would be only one of the events of his journey, not an event in his
life, remembered ever after with thankfulness and regret. He would
explore it with the same unmeaning curiosity and idle wonder as he would
the Regalia in the Tower, or the Botanic Garden in the Tuileries, but
not with the fond enthusiasm of an artist. How should he? His is
'casual fruition, joyless, unendeared.' But the painter is wedded to his
art--the mistress, queen, and idol of his soul. He has embarked his
all in it, fame, time, fortune, peace of mind--his hopes in youth, his
consolation in age: and shall he not feel a more intense interest
in whatever relates to it than the mere indolent trifler? Natural
sensibility alone, without the entire application of the mind to that
one object, will not enable the possessor to sympathise with all
the degrees of beauty and power in the conceptions of a Titian or a
Correggio; but it is he only who does this, who follows them into all
their force and matchless race, that does or can feel their full value.
Knowledge is pleasure as well as power. No one but the artist who has
studied nature and contended with the difficulties of art, can be aware
of the beauties, or intoxicated with a passion for painting. No one who
has not devoted his life and soul to the pursuit of art can feel the
same exultation in its brightest ornaments and loftiest triumphs which
an artist does. Where the treasure is, there the heart is also. It is
now seventeen years since I was studying in the Louvre (and I have on
since given up all thoughts of the art as a profession), but long after
I returned, and even still, I sometimes dream of being there again--of
asking for the old pictures--and not finding them, or finding them
changed or faded from what they were, I cry myself awake! What
gentleman-amateur ever does this at such a distance of time,--that is,
ever received pleasure or took interest enough in them to produce so
lasting an impression?
But it is said that if a person had the same natural taste, and the
same acquired knowledge as an artist, without the petty interests and
technical notions, he would derive a purer pleasure from seeing a fine
portrait, a fine landscape, and so on. This, however, is not so much
begging the question as asking an impossibility: he cannot have the same
insight into the end without having studied the means; nor the same
love of art without the same habitual and exclusive attachment to it.
Painters are, no doubt, often actuated by jealousy to that only which
they find useful to themselves in painting. Wilson has been seen poring
over the texture of a Dutch cabinet-picture, so that he could not see
the picture itself. But this is the perversion and pedantry of the
profession, not its true or genuine spirit. If Wilson had never looked
at anything but megilps and handling, he never would have put the soul
of life and manners into his pictures, as he has done. Another objection
is, that the instrumental parts of the art, the means, the first
rudiments, paints, oils, and brushes, are painful and disgusting;
and that the consciousness of the difficulty and anxiety with which
perfection has been attained must take away from the pleasure of the
finest performance. This, however, is only an additional proof of the
greater pleasure derived by the artist from his profession; for these
things which are said to interfere with and destroy the common interest
in works of art do not disturb him; he never once thinks of them, he
is absorbed in the pursuit of a higher object; he is intent, not on the
means, but the end; he is taken up, not with the difficulties, but with
the triumph over them. As in the case of the anatomist, who overlooks
many things in the eagerness of his search after abstract truth; or the
alchemist who, while he is raking into his soot and furnaces, lives in
a golden dream; a lesser gives way to a greater object. But it is
pretended that the painter may be supposed to submit to the unpleasant
part of the process only for the sake of the fame or profit in view. So
far is this from being a true state of the case, that I will venture to
say, in the instance of a friend of mine who has lately succeeded in an
important undertaking in his art, that not all the fame he has acquired,
not all the money he has received from thousands of admiring spectators,
not all the newspaper puffs,--nor even the praise of the _Edinburgh
Review_,--not all these put together ever gave him at any time the same
genuine, undoubted satisfaction as any one half-hour employed in the
ardent and propitious pursuit of his art--in finishing to his heart's
content a foot, a hand, or even a piece of drapery. What is the state
of mind of an artist while he is at work? He is then in the act of
realising the highest idea he can form of beauty or grandeur: he
conceives, he embodies that which he understands and loves best: that
is, he is in full and perfect possession of that which is to him the
source of the highest happiness and intellectual excitement which he can
enjoy.
In short, as a conclusion to this argument, I will mention a
circumstance which fell under my knowledge the other day. A friend had
bought a print of Titian's Mistress, the same to which I have alluded
above. He was anxious to show it me on this account. I told him it was
a spirited engraving, but it had not the look of the original. I believe
he thought this fastidious, till I offered to show him a rough sketch
of it, which I had by me. Having seen this, he said he perceived exactly
what I meant, and could not bear to look at the print afterwards. He had
good sense enough to see the difference in the individual instance;
but a person better acquainted with Titian's manner and with art in
general--that is, of a more cultivated and refined taste--would know
that it was a bad print, without having any immediate model to compare
it with. He would perceive with a glance of the eye, with a sort
of instinctive feeling, that it was hard, and without that bland,
expansive, and nameless expression which always distinguished Titian's
most famous works. Any one who is accustomed to a head in a picture can
never reconcile himself to a print from it; but to the ignorant they are
both the same. To a vulgar eye there is no difference between a Guido
and a daub--between a penny print, or the vilest scrawl, and the most
finished performance. In other words, all that excellence which lies
between these two extremes,--all, at least, that marks the excess above
mediocrity,--all that constitutes true beauty, harmony, refinement,
grandeur, is lost upon the common observer. But it is from this point
that the delight, the glowing raptures of the true adept commence. An
uninformed spectator may like an ordinary drawing better than the
ablest connoisseur; but for that very reason he cannot like the highest
specimens of art so well. The refinements not only of execution but of
truth and nature are inaccessible to unpractised eyes. The exquisite
gradations in a sky of Claude's are not perceived by such persons, and
consequently the harmony cannot be felt. Where there is no conscious
apprehension, there can be no conscious pleasure. Wonder at the first
sights of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but
real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste
and knowledge. 'I would not wish to have your eyes,' said a good-natured
man to a critic who was finding fault with a picture in which the other
saw no blemish. Why so? The idea which prevented him from admiring this
inferior production was a higher idea of truth and beauty which was
ever present with him, and a continual source of pleasing and lofty
contemplations. It may be different in a taste for outward luxuries and
the privations of mere sense; but the idea of perfection, which acts
as an intellectual foil, is always an addition, a support, and a proud
consolation!
Richardson, in his _Essays_, which ought to be better known, has left
some striking examples of the felicity and infelicity of artists, both
as it relates to their external fortune and to the practice of their
art. In speaking of _the knowledge of hands_, he exclaims: 'When one is
considering a picture or a drawing, one at the same time thinks this was
done by him(1) who had many extraordinary endowments of body and mind,
but was withal very capricious; who was honoured in life and death,
expiring in the arms of one of the greatest princes of that age, Francis
I., King of France, who loved him as a friend. Another is of him(2) who
lived a long and happy life, beloved of Charles V. emperor; and many
others of the first princes of Europe. When one has another in hand, we
think this was done by one(3) who so excelled in three arts as that any
of them in that degree had rendered him worthy of immortality; and one
moreover that durst contend with his sovereign (one of the haughtiest
popes that ever was) upon a slight offered to him, and extricated
himself with honour. Another is the work of him(4) who, without any one
exterior advantage but mere strength of genius, had the most sublime
imaginations, and executed them accordingly, yet lived and died
obscurely. Another we shall consider as the work of him(5) who restored
Painting when it had almost sunk; of him whom art made honourable, but
who, neglecting and despising greatness with a sort of cynical pride,
was treated suitably to the figure he gave himself, not his intrinsic
worth; which, (he) not having philosophy enough to bear it, broke
his heart. Another is done by one(6) who (on the contrary) was a fine
gentleman and lived in great magnificence, and was much honoured by his
own and foreign princes; who was a courtier, a statesman, and a painter;
and so much all these, that when he acted in either character, _that_
seemed to be his business, and the others his diversion. I say when
one thus reflects, besides the pleasure arising from the beauties and
excellences of the work, the fine ideas it gives us of natural things,
the noble way of thinking it suggest to us, an additional pleasure
results from the above considerations. But, oh! the pleasure, when a
connoisseur and lover of art has before him a picture or drawing of
which he can say this is the hand, these are the thoughts of him(7)
who was one of the politest, best-natured gentlemen that ever was; and
beloved and assisted by the greatest wits and the greatest men then in
Rome: of him who lived in great fame, honour, and magnificence, and
died extremely lamented; and missed a Cardinal's hat only by dying a
few months too soon; but was particularly esteemed and favoured by two
Popes, the only ones who filled the chair of St. Peter in his time, and
as great men as ever sat there since that apostle, if at least he ever
did: one, in short, who could have been a Leonardo, a Michael Angelo,
a Titian, a Correggio, a Parmegiano, an Annibal, a Rubens, or any other
whom he pleased, but none of them could ever have been a Raffaelle.'
The same writer speaks feelingly of the change in the style of different
artists from their change of fortune, and as the circumstances are
little known I will quote the passage relating to two of them:--
'Guido Reni, from a prince-like affluence of fortune (the just reward of
his angelic works), fell to a condition like that of a hired servant
to one who supplied him with money for what he did at a fixed rate; and
that by his being bewitched by a passion for gaming, whereby he lost
vast sums of money; and even what he got in his state of servitude
by day, he commonly lost at night: nor could he ever be cured of this
cursed madness. Those of his works, therefore, which he did in this
unhappy part of his life may easily be conceived to be in a different
style to what he did before, which in some things, that is, in the airs
of his heads (in the gracious kind) had a delicacy in them peculiar to
himself, and almost more than human. But I must not multiply instances.
Parmegiano is one that alone takes in all the several kinds of
variation, and all the degrees of goodness, from the lowest of the
indifferent up to the sublime. I can produce evident proofs of this in
so easy a gradation, that one cannot deny but that he that did this
might do that, and very probably did so; and thus one may ascend and
descend, like the angels on Jacob's ladder, whose foot was upon the
earth, but its top reached to Heaven.
'And this great man had his unlucky circumstance. He became mad after
the philosopher's stone, and did but very little in painting or drawing
afterwards. Judge what that was, and whether there was not an alteration
of style from what he had done before this devil possessed him. His
creditors endeavoured to exorcise him, and did him some good, for he
set himself to work again in his own way; but if a drawing I have of a
Lucretia be that he made for his last picture, as it probably is (Vasari
says that was the subject of it), it is an evident proof of his decay;
it is good indeed, but it wants much of the delicacy which is commonly
seen in his works; and so I always thought before I knew or imagined it
to be done in this his ebb of genius.'
We have had two artists of our own country whose fate has been as
singular as it was hard: Gandy was a portrait-painter in the beginning
of the last century, whose heads were said to have come near to
Rembrandt's, and he was the undoubted prototype of Sir Joshua Reynolds's
style. Yet his name has scarcely been heard of; and his reputation, like
his works, never extended beyond his own country. What did he think of
himself and of a fame so bounded? Did he ever dream he was indeed an
artist? Or how did this feeling in him differ from the vulgar conceit
of the lowest pretender? The best known of his works is a portrait of an
alderman of Exeter, in some public building in that city.
Poor Dan. Stringer! Forty years ago he had the finest hand and the
clearest eye of any artist of his time, and produced heads and drawings
that would not have disgraced a brighter period in the art. But he fell
a martyr (like Burns) to the society of country gentlemen, and then of
those whom they would consider as more his equals. I saw him many
years ago when he treated the masterly sketches he had by him (one
in particular of the group of citizens in Shakespeare 'swallowing the
tailor's news') as 'bastards of his genius, not his children,' and
seemed to have given up all thoughts of his art. Whether he is since
dead, I cannot say; the world do not so much as know that he ever lived!