We have already mentioned the portrait group (No. 1812B), a picture in
deplorable condition, to which the name of John Hoppner (1758?-1810)
has been attached without sufficient reason. No less doubtful is the
authenticity of the _Portrait of the Countess of Oxford_ (No. 1812A), a
meretricious picture which serves to show the mannerisms and striving
after prettiness of Lawrence’s rival, rather than the more estimable
qualities by which his better achievements are distinguished.
George Romney (1734-1802), on the other hand, is seen in his
most serious mood in the _Portrait of Sir John Stanley_ (No.
1818C)— a thoroughly honest “likeness,” well drawn, and painted
straight-forwardly, without tricky accents and mechanical recipes. On a
screen in Gallery XV. has been temporarily placed a recently acquired
_Portrait of the Artist_, by Romney. He is seated, palette in hand, in
a landscape background. The features are well modelled, and the light
and shade managed with considerable skill.
Strangely enough the most remarkable English picture at the Louvre
is by a little known painter, who is not represented in any of the
leading British galleries. Charles Howard Hodges (1764-1837), who was
born in London, but went at the age of twenty-four to Holland, where
he spent the rest of his life, was really a mezzotint engraver, in
which craft he had been trained by John Raphael Smith. He produced many
plates after pictures by the Dutch masters, and also painted a few
portraits, among them the masterly _Portrait of a Woman_ (No. 1812),
at the Louvre. At a time which was too much given to conventionality
and to the desire to please by concessions to a popular craving for
prettiness, this picture strikes a note of almost brutal realism. It
is painted with surprising vigour and with an appreciation of correct
tone-values, in a low key, which heralds the art of the Glasgow school
in the later decades of the nineteenth century.
With _The Bathing Woman_ (No. 1810B), by William Etty (1787-1849), and
_The Watering Place_ (No. 1815), by William Mulready (1786-1863), we
reach the full decadence of the British school in early Victorian days
before the great revival initiated by the pre-Raphaelites.