It only remains to speak of Pietro Longhi's sketch-book. This collection
of original drawings, numbering 140 pieces, and containing a very large
variety of studies (several pages being filled on front and back with
upwards of ten separate figures) was formed by Alessandro Longhi. It
came into the possession of the patrician Teodoro Correr, who bequeathed
it, together with the rest of his immense museum, to the town of Venice.
As a supplement to Longhi's paintings, this sketch-book is invaluable.
It brings us close to the artist's methods, aims, and personal
predilections in the choice of motives. Most of the drawings are done in
hard black pencil or chalk, heightened and corrected with white; a few
in soft red chalk. Unfortunately, they have suffered to a large extent
from rubbing; and this injury is likely to increase with time, owing to
the clumsy binding of the volume which contains them.
Studies from the nude are conspicuous by their extreme rarity and want
of force. Great attention has been paid to the details of costume and
furniture. The _zendado_, the _bautta_, the hoop, the bag-wig, the fop's
coat and waistcoat, the patrician's civil mantle, the knee-breeches and
stockings of a well-dressed gentleman, are copied and re-copied with
loving care. Painters at the easel, ballet-girls with castanets,
maid-servants holding trays, grooms and lacqueys, men on horseback,
serenaders with lute or mandoline, ballad-singers, music and
dancing-masters, women working at lace-pillows, gentlemen in bed,
sportsmen discharging their fowling-pieces, gondoliers rowing, little
girls in go-carts or fenced chairs, sellers of tarts upon the street,
country boys in taverns, chests of drawers, pots, pans, jugs, gourds,
wine-flasks, parrots in cages, ladies at the clavichord, queues, fans,
books, snuff-boxes, tables, petticoats, desks, the draperies of doors
and windows, wigs, footmen placing chairs for guests, beaux bowing in
the doorway or whispering tender nothings at a beauty's ear, old men
reclining in arm-chairs, embroiderers at work, muffs, copper
water-buckets, nurses with babies in their arms, silver plate of all
descriptions:--such is the farrago of this multiform and graceful, but
limited, series of transcripts from the world of visible objects. It is
clear that Longhi thought "the proper study of mankind is man;" and man
as a clothed, sociable, well-behaved animal.
His sketches are remarkable for their strenuous sincerity--their search
after the right attitude, their serious effort to hit the precise line
wanted, their suggested movement and seizure of life in the superficies.
They have a sustained air of good-breeding, refined intelligence, and
genial sympathy with the prose of human nature. Landscape might never
have existed so far as Longhi was concerned. I do not think that a tree,
a cloud, or even a flower will be found among the miscellaneous objects
he so carefully studied and drew so deftly. The world he moved in was
the world of men and women meeting on the surface-paths of daily
intercourse. Even here, we do not detect the slightest interest in
passionate or painful aspects of experience. All Longhi's people are
well-to-do and placid in their different degrees. The peasants in the
taverns do not brawl, nor the fine gentlemen fight duels, nor the lovers
in the drawing-rooms quarrel. He seems to have overlooked beggary,
disease, and every form of vice or suffering. He does not care for
animals. With the exception of a parrot, a caged canary, and a stiffly
drawn riding-horse, the brute creation is not represented in these
sketches. No sarcasm, no grossness, no violence of any kind, disturbs
the calm artistic seriousness, the sweet painstaking curiosity of his
mental mood. The execution throughout is less robust than sensitively
delicate. We feel a something French, a suggestion of Watteau's elysium
of fashion, in his touch on things. In fine, the sketch-book
corroborates the impression made on us by Longhi's finished pictures.