In a number of the "Illustrated News," not long since, there was what
professed to be a view of Manchester. It represented a thousand tall
factory-chimneys rising out of a gray mist, and surmounted by a heavy,
drifting cloud of smoke. And in truth a view not very different from this
was presented to any one who, standing at the entrance of the Palace of the
Exhibition of Art Treasures, turned and looked back before going within.
Two miles off lies the body of the great workshop-city, already stretching
its begrimed arms in the direction of the Exhibition. The vast flat expanse
of brick walls, diversified by countless chimney and occasional steeples,
now and then interrupted by the insertion of a low shed or an enormous
warehouse, offers no single object upon which the eye or the imagination
can rest with pleasure. Such a view was never to be seen in the world
before this century; a city built merely by trade, built for the home of
labor, of machines, and of engines, and for the dwelling-place (one cannot
call it the home) of crowds of human beings, whose value is, for the
most part, estimated according to the development of their machine-like
qualities. Beauty is not consulted here. In those places in or near the
city, where Nature, reluctant to be driven utterly away, still tries to
keep a foothold, she is parched and scorched by the feverish breath of
forges and furnaces. Standing here, one may see the cloud of smoke, which
waves in the wind like a pall over the city, slowly moving and settling
down upon the land. One may almost hear the roar of the continual fires,
the throb of the engines, the heavy beat of the trip-hammers, and the
rattle of the spindles, by which the work of the world is done; and their
noises, blended by the distance into one monotonous sound, seem like the
voice of the restless, hard-working, unsettled spirit of gain. Manchester
is built and is worked for profit, not for pleasure; beauty is driven away
from her as a thing at variance with practical life; and even the sky above
her and the fields around her yield only at rare moments and for short
seasons those precious and gracious shows of beauty which are the free and
blessed gift of love to all the world. Smoke, steam, coal-dust, blackened
walls, and bare fields lie outside the Exhibition; and now let us go
within.
The world could show no sharper and more affecting contrast. Outside, all
suggests the competitions and struggles of trade, the crowded street, the
bustle of the exchange, the cold and dry elements of purely unimaginative
life. Inside, all suggests the quietness and composure of solitary and
delightful labor, the silence of the studio, the resort to nature, and the
frequenting of the springs of poetry. From the present, one is suddenly
transferred to the past; from the near, to the remote. In place of the
blank, black factory wall, there is the low wall of some Italian Campo
Santo, its painted sides more precious than marbles or gold could have made
them; in place of the dull and heavy stone of the Exchange, the glowing
mosaics of some southern cathedral; in place of the factory bell and
the rush into the steaming and dirty workroom, the bell of a convent on
Fiesole, and the slow walk through its cool cloisters; in place of the dead
files of uniform ugly houses, Venetian palaces, with the water at their
base, reflecting the colors which Giorgione and Titian, housepainters at
Venice, left upon their stones; in place of the racket of the street, the
quiet greenness of an English lane, or the inaccessible ice and glory of
a far-off mountain summit; in place of the burnt waste of fields covered
with ashes and coal-dust, the burning stretch of the desert with the Sphinx
looking out over it century after century; in place of the shower coming
down through the dirty air to wash the dirty roofs, a storm breaking over
the sea-shore rocks, or beating down on the broken wreck; instead of the
drabbled calico of the factory girl and her face old before its time,
the satins of Vandyck's beauties, and the fair looks of Sir Peter Lely's
heroines; instead of Manchester mayors and masters of factories, Tintoret's
noble Venetian counsellors and doges, and Titian's Shakspearian men. It was
a bold thought thus to bring pictures and statues into one great collection
at Old Trafford, and to set off the art of the world against the
manufactures of Manchester.
The Exhibition building was admirably designed for its purpose. Its plan
is simple, and not unpleasing, although the proportions, which its object
required, were such as to prevent any attempt at grand architectural
effect. The general arrangement of the interior is easily understood, even
without the aid of a ground-plan. The chief entrance leads into a nave,
which has on each side an aisle of less height, separated from it by a
wall. The wall is broken by two openings, through which is the passage from
nave to aisle, or aisle to nave. The nave and aisles end in a transept,
and behind the transept are two small saloons, and a large hall or aisle
crossing the building transversely and forming its western end. A gallery
runs round the transept, and another crosses the nave at its eastern end.
This is the general arrangement. The walls of the nave or central hall are
occupied by the gallery of British portraits, and between the iron columns
that support the roof are set pieces of sculpture, and the cases containing
the precious collection of Ornamental Art, (works of the minor arts, as
they might be called,) which has been brought together from private and
public sources, and is quite unrivalled in its completeness. The southern
aisle contains the main collection of pictures by ancient, foreign masters;
while the opposite aisle is filled with the works of the British school.
The transept, being chiefly given up to arrangements for an orchestra,
contains below little but a collection of busts, but its galleries are
occupied with the collection of miniatures, a most admirable and extensive
historical series of engravings, a large number of photographs, and a very
precious collection of original drawings by the old masters. The saloon
at the north end of the transept is filled with East Indian and Chinese
tapestries, furniture, and works of ornamental design; while the opposite
saloon continues the collection of paintings of ancient masters, being
chiefly occupied with works from the gallery of the Marquis of Hertford,
which he sent to the Exhibition on condition that they should be kept
together. The hall that crosses the building at the western end is filled
with a collection of water-color drawings.--Such, in brief, is an outline
of the distribution of the treasures contained in this great palace of Art.
The first impression, on entering the nave, is that of the vast space
filled with light and rich with color. The attention is not attracted to
particular details. Separate objects are dwarfed in the long vista. The eye
rests on nothing that is not precious, and is at first contented to wander
rapidly from one object to another, without attempting to delay on any
thing. Passing down the middle between the ordered files of statues, (all
modern works, and few of them worthy of remark,) we enter from the transept
the south nave, where the works of the foreign schools of painting are
arranged for the most part in chronological order. This nave, like the
opposite, is divided into three saloons and two vestibules. We are now in
the first saloon. On the one side are the works of the earlier Italian
masters, and on the other those of the masters of the earlier German and
Flemish schools. And it is here that one observes the chief deficiency of
the collection. The pictures which are here have been brought from the
private galleries in which England is so rich. Many a famous country-house,
full of historic and poetic associations, gains additional interest from
its gallery of pictures or of marbles. Blenheim, Wilton House, Warwick
Castle, have their old walls hung with pictures by Titian, Vandyck, and
Holbein. Who does not remember, as one of his most delightful recollections
of England,--delightful as all his recollections of that dear old
Mother-land are, if he has really seen her,--who does not thus remember the
drive from the little country town to the old family place, up the long
avenue under its ancestral trees, the ferny brook crossed by the stone
bridge with its carved balustrade, the deer feeding on the green slope
of the open park or lying under some secular oak, the heavy white clouds
casting their slow shadows on the broad lawn, the dark spreading cedars
of Lebanon standing on the edge of the bright flower-garden,--the old
house itself, with its quaint gables and oriels, the broad flight of
steps leading to the wide door,--the cheerful reception from the prim,
but good-natured housekeeper,--her pride in the great hall, and in the
pleasant, home-like rooms, in Vandyck's portrait of the beautiful countess,
and in Holbein's of the fifth earl,--the satisfaction with which she would
point to the pictures and the marbles brought two centuries ago from
Italy, now stopping before this to tell you that "it is considered a very
improportionable Virgin by Parmigianino," and calling you to observe this
old statue "of a couching Silenius wrapped in the skin of a Pantheon,"--and
then, when the Rubens, and the Claude, and all the other pictures have been
seen, her letting you pass, as a great favor, through the library with its
well-filled oaken shelves, the gilding worn off the backs of many of its
books by the love of successive generations;--who does not remember such
scenes as these, and recall the glorious pictures from Florence, or from
Venice, or from Antwerp, that enrich many an English country home?
It was, indeed, from such homes that the Manchester collection was, in
great measure, brought together; and this being the case, it is not to be
wondered at that it was difficult to form an historic sequence of pictures
by which the course and progress of Art should be properly illustrated,
or that many of the old pictures that hang on the walls of the Exhibition
bear the names of greater masters than they deserve to be honored with. Nor
is it strange that the earlier schools of Art should be but very scantily
represented. The earlier painters did not do much work that would answer
for the decoration of homes; their work was of a public, and, for the most
part, a consecrated nature. The pictures of later centuries are more easily
appreciated by those who have not made a thoughtful study of Art, and they
have consequently been more loudly praised and more generally sought for.
The later works have attractive qualities in which the earlier are often
deficient, and it is not until very recently that the real beauty and
value of these first pictures of the revival have been felt with any due
appreciation. The masters of the fourteenth, and of the greater part of
the fifteenth century, did not, as we have said, paint pictures simply as
objects of beauty or for mere purposes of adornment, nor were those methods
of painting then in use which have brought pictures into private homes and
within private means. And so it happens that the schools of this period are
not represented at Manchester in any fair proportion to the schools of the
sixteenth century.
The two most important centuries of Art are not to be studied here. Of
the six pictures, for instance, that profess to be by Giotto, the great
head and master of Italian Art, there are but two from which even a faint
impression of his style can be gained. There is nothing here which would
enable one who had not seen his works in Italy to conceive a true idea
of their character and merits. Giotto stands at the threshold of the
fourteenth century, breaking open the door, so long barred up, that was to
let men into the glories of the unseen world. The friend of Dante, he, as
painter, stands side by side with the poet. In the midst of the tumults,
the confusion, and violence of those bloody times, his soul rose above
the discord of the world, his hand snapped the fetters of authority and
tradition, and revealed by line and color the exalted visions of his
imagination. Painting, with him, took its inspiration from religious faith,
and spent itself in religious service. Whether at Padua, in the little
withdrawn Arena chapel, or on the bare mountains at Assisi, in the great
church of St. Francis, or at Naples, in the king's chapel, his frescos,
though dimmed by the dust of five hundred years, blackened by the smoke
of incense, abused by restorers, still show a power of imagination, a
spirituality and tenderness of feeling, a simplicity and directness of
treatment, which give them place among the most sacred and precious works
that Art has yet produced. That quiet, solitary chapel of the Arena at
Padua is one of the places most worthy of reverence in Italy; for in the
pictures from the lives of the Virgin and the Saviour, that are painted
upon its walls, there is the expression of such religious fervor, such
faith and love, as Art has rarely or never reached in later times.
Nor is there at Manchester any picture by Duccio da Siena, the great, and,
one may almost say, the worthy contemporary of Giotto, from which his power
and feeling are to be well estimated. Like Giotto he struggled to free
himself from the swathing-clothes in which the traditions of Byzantine Art
had bound up the limbs and the imaginations of artists, and he succeeded
in at last breaking loose. But the long restraint had impaired the power
of all who were subjected to it; and as in the works of Giotto, so in the
rarer works of Duccio, one often finds an effort after truth of expression,
which is almost pathetic in its character, from its revealing the
inefficiency of the hand to carry out the thought, and the resolute will
striving half in vain to overcome the impediments of bad teaching and
imperfect knowledge of the materials and limits of painting. It is this
groping effort after truth which results often in the _naïve_ rendering
of details, and the quaintness of composition, which are so common in
the works of these early masters; but the deep feeling of the artists
penetrates through all, and thus even their awkward and imperfect drawing
frequently produces a stronger effect, and seems a better rendering of
nature, than the cold, unfeeling, academic accuracy of Bologna, or all the
finished science of the eclectic schools.
In passing down through the century one finds lamentable omissions at
Manchester. Fifty pictures, of which half at least have been restored,
(that is to say, in part or wholly spoiled,) and half originally the work
of inferior masters, do not represent the art of a century which was full
of the glow of reawakening life, and which, as the spring covers the
earth with flowers, covered Italy with cathedrals, campaniles, churches,
baptisteries, and camposantos, and decorated their walls with sculpture and
painting. Art was gaining gradually a knowledge of her own powers. Orgagna,
the Michel Angelo of his time, (one of his pictures is at Manchester,) was
opening a wider field for her progress; and ten years after his death Fra
Angelico was born. He was a boy of fifteen years old when in 1402 Masaccio
was born at Florence, and the brightness of the fifteenth century had
begun.
There is one, among the four pictures ascribed to Fra Angelico in this
collection, from which something of the heavenly purity, the sweetness,
and the tenderness of this great and gentle master may be learned. It is a
picture of the Last Judgment. Unfortunately, it has been much injured by
time and by neglect; its brilliant colors have sunk and become dim,--those
pure, clear colors which give to Fra Angelico's panel pictures the
brilliancy of a missal illumination, and which reflect the purity and the
clearness of his tranquil life and his reverential soul. It is no fanciful
theory which connects the uses of color with moral qualities, and which
from the coloring of a picture will deduce something of the moral character
of its painter. Thus it is not only from the exquisite delicacy of form,
the spirituality of expression, and the sweet, reverent fancy in attitude,
of the angels from which Fra Angelico derived his name, but also from the
brightness of their golden wings, from the deep glow of their crimson, or
scarlet, or azure robes, and from the clear shining of the stars on their
foreheads, that one learns that he deserved that name as characteristic of
his temper and his life. Something of the influence of the cloister shows
itself in most of his larger works; but if his vision was narrowed within
convent walls, it did but pierce the more clearly into the regions of
tranquillity and loveliness that lay above them.
With the end of the fifteenth century religion almost disappears from Art.
John Bellini, dying ninety years old in 1516, was the last and one of the
greatest of the long line of artists who had loved Art as the means granted
them of serving God upon earth. The manly vigor of his conceptions, the
tender and holy purity of his imagination, the delicate strength of his
fancy, are not to be discovered in the few pictures that bear his name at
Manchester. His pictures are to be fairly seen only at Venice, where, in
out-of-the-way churches, over tawdry altars, his colors gleam undimmed
by time, and the faces of his Virgins look down with a still celestial
sweetness. But there is one picture here, by a Venetian contemporary
of John Bellini, before which we shall do well to pause. It is a St.
Catharine, by Cima da Conegliano. It is the picture of a noble woman, full
of fortitude, serenity, and faith. The richness of the color of her dress,
her calm dignity, the composure of her attitude, recall to mind and make
her the worthy companion of the beautiful St. Barbara of the church of
Santa Maria Formosa. It is well to look at her, for we are coming to those
days when such saints as these were no longer painted; but in their places
whole tribes of figures with faces twisted into every trick of sentimental
devotion, imbecile piety, and pretended fervor.
But before this time, somewhere about the middle of the fifteenth century,
the fashion of painting pictures upon panel for private purposes, though as
yet religious subjects were principally chosen for treatment, had already
begun; and we find the masters of the early part of the sixteenth century
represented with tolerable fulness at Manchester. English collectors have
long had a passion for Raphael, and England is almost as rich in his works
in oils as Italy herself. Italy, however, keeps his frescos; and may she
long keep them! There are more than thirty works ascribed to Raphael
hanging on the walls of the Exhibition. Many of them are of doubtful
genuineness; many of them have been restored.
It is impossible to trace in these pictures the progress of Raphael's
manner, and to mark the development of his style; but even in these one may
see something of the change from the simplicity and feeling of his early
works, produced under the influence of religious sentiment, and the still
clinging stiffness of traditional restraints, to the freedom and coldness
of his later works, painted under the influence of success at a dissolute
court, of flattery, of jealousy, and of indifference to the motives of
religion.
The Venetian masters of the sixteenth century fill a large portion of the
sides of one of the great saloons of this aisle, covering it with a glow of
deepest color. The opposite side is hung with many pictures by Rubens; and
the contrast between the works of the mighty colorists of Venice and the
famous colorist of Antwerp is not without curious interest and instruction.
The Venice wall has the color of Venetian sunsets, the gold and crimson
of its clouds, the solemn blue of the Cadore hills, the deep green of the
lagoons, the brown and purple of the seaweeds, and the shadows of the city
of decaying palaces. Here are such harmonies as Nature strikes in her great
symphony of color. But on the other wall are the colors of the courts in
which Rubens passed so many of his days,--the dyes of tapestry, the sheen
of jewels and velvet, the glaring crimson and yellow of royal displays;
while the harmonies that he strikes out with his rapid and powerful hand
are like those of the music of some great military band.
There are noble pictures here by Giorgione, and Titian, and Tintoret, and
Paul Veronese, and Bonifazio. Look at this Musical Party by Giorgione, this
landscape by Titian, this portrait of the vile Duke of Alva by the same
great master, the greatest master of all in portraiture. It is the Duke
himself, not merely in his outward presence, but such as the insight of
one as profoundly versed in human as in external nature beheld him. The
portrait is a biography of the man, and one may read in the narrow, hard,
and wily face the history of his cruel life. The same qualities of inward
vision are displayed by Tintoret in his more hasty portraits, and one
learns as much of Venetian men and of their lives from the pencil of Titian
and of Tintoret as from the pens of contemporary chroniclers. The picture
by Bonifazio of a Virgin and Child surrounded by saints is a splendid
example of this almost unsurpassed colorist; while several of the pictures
by Paul Veronese are among the most precious things in all the Exhibition,
as clear and uninjured specimens of admirable Venetian work.
The Bolognese school is represented at Manchester out of all proportion to
its worth, in comparison with the earlier and greater schools of Italy. It
is essentially the school of decline, and, after the time of Francia, very
few pictures proceeded from it dignified by noble thought, or exhibiting
either purity or power of imagination. Its very method condemned it
to inferiority. But debased as it is, it has been during the last two
centuries the object of perhaps more real and affected admiration than any
other of the schools of Italian art. Fortunately, we have entered upon a
better period of criticism, and a change is fast coming over the public
taste. But it is a curious fact, that the most popular picture in the whole
gallery of ancient masters, the picture before which larger crowds assemble
and linger than before any other, is one from this school,--the three
Maries weeping over the body of the Saviour, by Annibale Caracci. A portion
of the interest which it excites undoubtedly arises from the report that
Louis Napoleon has offered the sum of £20,000 for it to its possessor, the
Earl of Carlisle; but its intrinsic qualities are such as to explain much
of its attraction for uneducated eyes. The attitudes of the figures are
violent and theatrical, the colors are strong, the surface is smooth, the
subject is easily recognized and of general interest. But whatever value
be set upon these points, it is an example of many of the worst defects of
the school. The expressions of the figures are exaggerated and unnatural,
the color, though strong, is cold and inharmonious, the drawing feeble and
incorrect, the sentiment inconceivably material. It is a true exponent of
the low ebb of artistic power and of religious feeling at the period at
which it was painted.
But we are delaying too long in these halls of the old painters. We have
scarcely looked at a tithe of the eleven hundred pictures that hang around,
and we must pass by with only a glance the long lines of German, Flemish,
and Dutch works, and the rows of pictures by the great Spanish masters. We
can but see how much there is for pleasure and for study, and wish in vain
to pause before Rembrandt, and Cuyp, and Ruysdael, and Vandyck, before
Murillo and Velasquez.
We come out into the nave, and, forgetting for a time pictures as works of
art, let us look at them as representations of men, as we pass along before
the portraits of British worthies, with which the two sides of this great
hall are hung. It is a gallery of which every one of British blood may be
proud; for no other country could show such a long line of the portraits
of her famous men, and feel at the same time that so many of her greatest
were not to be found in the collection. The gallery begins with a portrait
of King Henry IV.; it ends with that of Mr. Prescott. After nearly four
hundred English worthies, at last one American,--and only one; for in the
whole collection there is but one other portrait of an American,--West, the
painter,--and he was English by adoption, though not by birth. We could
spare his fame without great loss, but it would not do for us to give
up that of our popular historian. In the next great assemblage of the
portraits of the worthies of the English race and speech, perhaps those
born on this side of the Atlantic may appear in larger numbers and in even
rank of honor.
The first portrait on the catalogue is that of King Henry IV.; but he has
displaced here, as in life, his predecessor on the throne. Henry VI. and
Richard III. follow in near succession; but it is not till Henry VIII.'s
time that we really enter upon the field of English portraiture. We begin
with the king himself. Here is Holbein's famous picture of him; a picture
that represents a man so gross, so sensual, so disgusting in appearance,
that one recognizes its truth, and wonders that the court-painter did not
lose his head for such a libellous sincerity.
Wolsey is near his master; his face is that of a man "exceeding wise,
fair-spoken, and persuading"; he has a large, full brow, narrow and shrewd
eyes, a delicate nose, and somewhat heavy and sensual cheeks. A little
later the portraits become more numerous. Of Queen Elizabeth there are
seven here, and in them may be traced the great changes of her face,--from
that of the plain, awkward, not altogether unpleasing, red-haired girl, to
that of the hard, bitter, disappointed old woman. Some of her courtiers
surround her;--Leicester, with a treacherous uncertainty of expression;
and Burleigh, riding on a mule, and holding flowers in his hand,--an
odd representation of the great Lord Treasurer. And here, too, is Henry
Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, finding a deserved place among the
chief men of his time,--for he was Shakspeare's friend, and to him the
"Rape of Lucrece" was dedicated, with the words, "What I have done is
yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have devoted yours."
Here is Holbein's portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, with the face of a true
knight. Sidney is not here, but "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," has
an honored place,--and though her portrait is not of so "fair" a woman as
one might desire to have seen her, it has the look of a woman "wise and
good." And here are Shakspeare and Ben Jonson themselves;--the Chandos
portrait of Shakspeare, with which all the world is familiar, more
interesting from its own fame than from its being either an authentic or a
satisfactory likeness of the poet; and Ben Jonson close by, with his strong
features and manly face. And Fletcher, and Shirley, and Dick Burbadge, who
first acted Hamlet, and whose picture explains why the queen should say,
"He's fat and scant of breath,"--and others of the same great band of
contemporaries. Their heads belong for the most part to one broad type;
their common characteristics are strongly marked. There were never finer
heads than these;--the broad, uplifted, solidly based skulls; the strong
and vigorous marking of the features, giving evidence, both in shape and in
expression, of the union of pure intellect and pure imagination. Compare
with them the heads of the wits and statesmen of Charles II.'s time. See
the difference;--the high, wide arch of the skull is lowered or narrowed;
the broad brow cramped; the features finer cut, but losing in force what
they gain in fineness. Look, for instance, at this Vandyck of Sir John
Suckling,--only the next generation after the great men; but his portrait
is that of an idler, his head that of a man without great thoughts or great
interests. The age of imagination had passed; the age of fancy was setting
in. Here and there in the later days one finds a man who might belong to
the earlier time;--for instance, this likeness of Sir Henry Wotton, also by
Vandyck, gives us a broad and noble head; but one sees the time to which
he belonged in his somewhat affected meditative attitude, and in the word
_Philosophemur_, which is inscribed upon the canvas. The finest type of
head which England has had since the time of Elizabeth was that developed
among the Roundheads. _Round_ heads they were, and noble heads too. They
are well represented here. Look at this portrait of Cromwell;--it has
the same character and expression with that still nobler likeness of
him which he sent to the Duke of Tuscany, and which hangs now in one
of the back halls of the Pitti Gallery, a stern, silent monitor to the
dull Florentines. Frederick Tennyson said of it, that it was the best
battle-piece he ever saw;--"In its red ruggedness it looks as if it had
been sketched in by the gleam of Dunbar's cannon flashes." Hampden,
Eliot, and Pym, with wide individual differences, all belong to the same
class;--the lines of their faces, which in Hampden and in Eliot have
settled into a cast of resolute melancholy, and in Pym betray the sternness
of his nature, tell in all of the hard discipline of their lives, and the
upright patriotism of their hearts. Compare the faces of these patriots
with those of the leaders of the French Revolutions. The Cavaliers, with
a type of head less fine, were for the most part handsomer men than the
Roundheads. Here is Lovelace, the poet, for instance; Aubrey says of him,
"He was an extraordinary handsome man," and this likeness bears out the
assertion. His face has a look of enthusiasm and of gallantry, appropriate
to the man who could write, "Stone walls do not a prison make." With the
portraits of Brooke, and Fairfax, and Falkland, and Astley, and others of
the time, the comparison between Roundhead and Cavalier might be carried
still farther,--but we must pass on.
The portrait of Hobbes of Malmesbury, as an old man, hangs near that of Sir
Thomas Browne. It is a curious contrast between the imaginative and the
unimaginative philosopher,--between the student of innumerable books, and
the cynic who declared that "he should know as little as other men, if he
had read as many books."
There is a whole bevy here of the famous beauties of Charles II.'s
court,--full of the affected airs and languishing graces which Sir Peter
Lely knew well how to paint, and rarely showing any thing in their
portraits of the sprightliness which some of them at least possessed in
life. The only one of Sir Peter's full-length beauties, who calls up any
associations but such as belong to Grammont's Memoirs, is Margaret Lucas,
the Duchess of Newcastle. Who does not know her through Charles Lamb, and
love her for Charles Lamb's sake? She looks out of place here, between
Charles II. and the Duchess of Cleveland; and it was not in a fancy dress
of most fantastic style that she wrote her memoir of her husband,--in which
she tells of what My Lord would eat at dinner, as well as collects the wise
things which dropped from My Lord's lips.
The worthy Secretary Pepys appears here, in "an excellent conceited
picture," of which he himself has told the story in his Diary:--
"1666, March 17. To Hales's, and paid him £14 for the picture, and £1 5s.
for the frame. This day I began to sit, and he will make me, I think, a
very fine picture. He promises it shall be as good as my wife's; and I sit
to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my
shoulder, to make the posture for him to work by."
"March 30. To Hales's, and there sat till almost quite dark upon working my
gowne, which I hired to be drawn in; an Indian gowne."
"April 11. To Hales's, where there was nothing found to be done more to my
picture, but the musique, which now pleases me mightily, it being painted
true." [Footnote: Mr. Peter Cunningham has quoted these passages in his
excellent catalogue of the gallery.]
And here is Kneller's familiar portrait of John Evelyn, the other diarist
of the times. And Lely's portrait of Rochester, the _roué_, represented in
the characteristic act of crowning his monkey with laurel,--laurel to
which he sometimes aspired himself. And Kneller's portrait of Lord William
Russell, with a face that answers better to the character of the man, as it
appeared before he was brought face to face with death, and forced to exert
and to display the manlier qualities of his nature.
The men of letters of the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th
century appear here in great force. With the faces of most of them the
world is familiar. Here are six of the Kit-Kat Club portraits that
were painted for Jacob Tonson. First in order Tonson himself, the very
personification of the nourishing publisher and patron of authors, with
the pleasant air of the happy discoverer of genius, and the maker of its
fortune as well as of his own. He holds a folio copy of "Paradise Lost"; it
is Tonson patting Milton on the back. Dryden, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Steele,
Addison, and Lord Chancellor Somers are the other five of these celebrated
portraits. What a congress of wits! But we have besides, Atterbury, and
Pope, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Prior, and Tickell, and Swift.
Pope's face, as given in Kneller's portrait, (which recalls the poet's
stolen complimentary verse to the painter,) has a sad and weary look, and
is marked by that pallor, and that peculiar hollowness of eye and cheek,
which often accompany bodily deformity. Swift's face betrays but little
of the bitterness of his soul; but it was painted in his best days,
before the cloud of darkness had begun to settle down upon him. It is the
portrait of him as he was in London, among his set,--not as he was in the
half-banishment of his Irish life.
The end of the century brings us to other familiar portraits, and at length
to portraits painted by great native artists. Gainsborough and Reynolds
appear in full rivalry. Here are Gainsborough's Johnson, the well-known
profile portrait, and Sir Joshua's Boswell; Gainsborough's Garrick, a most
delightful portrait of Garrick's pleasantest expression, and Sir Joshua's
Gibbon, which looks as ugly and as conceited as the little man himself.
One of Reynolds's most pleasing portraits is his likeness of himself in
spectacles. It has suffered from the fading of colors and the cracking of
the paint, as so many of Sir Joshua's best pictures have done; but it still
presents him amiable, cultivated, and unpretending, the accomplished artist
and the kindly friend, and affords the best possible illustration of the
character which Goldsmith drew of him in his "Retaliation."
We pass rapidly before the portraits of the present century. Every one
knows by heart the faces of Scott and Byron, Southey and Coleridge. But
there is one little portrait, hung at the end of the gallery, in front of
which we pause. It has no remarkable merit as a work of art, but it is the
portrait of Keats, painted in Rome by his friend Severn. The young poet is
resting his head on his hand, as if it were heavy and tired. His face has a
look of illness; his eyes are large, and the spaces around them are hollow.
His wide and well-formed brow, and all the features, betray a temperament
delicate, passionate, and sensitive to excess. This portrait was painted,
according to tradition, in the little summer-house studio, at the corner
of the Via Strozzi. The windows look out over the garden with its cypress
walks, its old pine trees, its rows of cabbages and artichokes, its
weather-stained statues and bits of ancient marbles. Beyond are the walls
of Rome, and beyond these the Campagna stretches away in level lines of
beauty to the blue billow of the Alban hills. On this view the eyes of the
dying poet rested, while his heart gave no prophecy to him of coming fame.
Would it have cheered him, during those last disheartened days, to have
foreseen that so soon England would rank him among her honored children,
and place his portrait in the gallery of the most worthy of her dead; while
a line of his writing, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," should be
emblazoned in glowing letters at the end of the great hall of her first
great Palace of Art?
We come now to the northern aisle, the aisle which contains the works of
the British school of painters. It is the most complete of the sections of
this great collection of pictures, and the lessons which are to be learned
from it of the present condition and prospects of Art are of the highest
interest. Here are six hundred pictures, the English record of about a
hundred years of painting. Never before has there been such a collection
of the works of English painters, and never before has there been an
opportunity of studying so fully and satisfactorily the course and progress
of the English school.
The beginning of this school hardly dates before the first quarter of the
last century. Public taste was then at its lowest level. The fall of Art
in Italy, in the preceding century, had carried down with it both the
appreciation and the feeling for what was truly good. A factitious taste
had taken the place of honest and simple likings. The worst things were
often preferred, the worst pictures bought. Artists, as a class, had given
up the study of Nature as the foundation of Art; and in the place of
Nature, they had put other men's pictures. They had substituted a system
of conventional rules and traditional methods, for the infinite variety
and the unceasing study of truth. They preferred falsehood, they liked
imitation, and their patrons soon came to consider the feeble results of
falsehood and imitation as better than honest work and strong originality.
Of course, here and there was a man whose native love of truth or spirit
of opposition would give him strength to break loose from the fetters of
artistic convention and prevailing taste, and to exhibit the truth in his
pictures. Such a man was the first great artist of the English school,
Hogarth; the greatest humorist of a century rich in humorists, with a
knowledge of human nature that reminds one sometimes of Fielding's in its
clearness and variety, sometimes of Goldsmith's in its tender pleasantry.
But Hogarth had to struggle all his life against the taste of his time,
which was unable to appreciate his merit. He was too natural for an
artificial age. Among the pictures exhibited here is one from his famous
series of the Harlot's Progress. It is too well known by the engravings to
need description; but when the eight masterly pictures which compose this
series were sold at auction during Hogarth's life, they brought the sum of
fourteen guineas each! The March of the Guards to Finchley, so admirable in
composition, so full of incident and character, so rich in humor, could not
be sold by the artist, and he disposed of it in a lottery, in which many
tickets were left on his hands. And while this was the fate of works which
still stand unsurpassed in their peculiar field, the amateurs were paying
enormous prices for worthless pictures of second-rate Italian masters, and
talking about their "Correggios and Raphaels and stuff."
From Hogarth to Sir Joshua Reynolds is a wide step. Sir Joshua is well
represented here by some thirty pictures; and Gainsborough is at his side
with perhaps half as many. If Sir Joshua had not been a man of genius,
he would have been ruined by his academic principles. He laid down rules
which he constantly violated. He praised the Bolognese masters, and advised
all students of Art in Italy to study at Bologna; but he did not confine
himself to the study of other men's works, but sometimes gave himself, with
honest sincerity and affection, to the study of Nature; and thus it is that
it becomes hard to draw the line of praise between some of his pictures and
some of those by Gainsborough, and to say which are the best. Gainsborough
was no academician; he did not believe in conventionalities. When Sir
Joshua laid down as a rule that blue was bad as a prevailing color in
pictures, Gainsborough painted his famous Blue Boy, and made one of the
most charming portraits and pleasantest pictures that had ever been painted
in England. Look at Sir Joshua's delightful, winning Nelly O'Brien,--what
a happy picture of a girl!--and then look at Gainsborough's Mrs. Graham,
with her exquisite, perhaps even too exquisite, beauty; and see, not which
of the artists was the best, for that it is hard to see, but how great
both were as students and renderers of human nature. One of the best of
Reynolds's portraits is that of Foote, the actor. He is leaning over a
chair, and his laughing face is looking out from the canvas, as if he
were watching the effect of one of his own most brilliant and easy jokes.
But Sir Joshua does not compare with Gainsborough in landscape; there the
lover of Nature had the advantage over the lover of Poussin and Claude.
The famous picture of Puck, which Lord Fitzwilliam lately bought at Mr.
Rogers's sale for the extravagant sum of nine hundred and eighty guineas,
is here for all eyes to see how far the imagination of the President of the
Royal Academy differed from that of Shakspeare.
But the principles which Sir Joshua laid down, though they did not ruin
his own works, did much to ruin those of the next generation of painters.
There was still the struggle between the painters by rule and according to
convention, and the painters of truth as found in Nature. But the painters
of Nature were in a minority so small as to be powerless against the
prevailing current. English Art seemed to be running down; cold formalisms,
classicalities, extravagances, affectations, imitations, "high art,"
occupied the field almost to the exclusion of better things. West, Fuseli,
Northcote, Barry, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Haydon, Maclise, and Sir Charles
Eastlake form a famous line of painters who have been admired, but whose
works have little value except as warnings, and as showing into what errors
a false method and want of recognition of the foundation and the end of Art
may lead men not destitute of ability.
But while these men had their day, the school of the lovers of Nature as
seen in the external world was making irregular progress. The overwhelming
pressure of conventional traditions is shown most forcibly, however, by
the fact that the great leader of this school of the students of landscape
nature, the man to whom was given the power to see and to represent Nature
in all the changing glories and beauties of her ceaselessly varying
moods, the man who knew the value of truth and set his desires upon it
accordingly,--that this man should have been for years of his life kept
down to the imitation of and competition with the works of painters of
previous centuries who were supposed to have painted landscapes. But it was
Pegasus running a race with cart-horses. He had reached the goal which they
had never aspired after. There are nineteen pictures of Turner's here at
Manchester; some of them among his noblest works. Here is his Cologne at
Sunset; look at it, for the picture will fade before your eyes, and you
will stand looking at the golden glow of evening over the church towers,
and the gleaming river of the ancient city.
With the growth of Turner's power, and the commencement of a better period
of public taste and feeling, as marked not only in Art, but in letters, the
study of Nature became more manifest in the English school. In different
directions, and with different degrees of success, many artists, but
generally with more or less faltering, broke away from the old system.
Wilkie, Etty, Constable, Collins, and others, often painted simple and
sincere pictures, pictures that showed careful study and real love of
Nature. All these artists may be seen to advantage here. But in looking
at the mass of the collection, one sees that the true principles of Art
have not even as yet been generally recognized by the majority of English
artists. The last hall of the gallery, which is devoted to the works of
living artists, gives especial proof of this fact. But at the same time,
it gives proof of the rise of a spirit among a small body of the younger
painters, whose influence promises to be of strong and beneficial effect.
The artists among whom this spirit exists are the Pre-Raphaelites.
Great misconception exists with regard to the works and to the principles
of Art of this school. The name by which it is known has in part occasioned
this misconception. It was not happily chosen; for these Pre-Raphaelites,
instead of being three centuries behind their times, are fully up with the
day in which they live. Pre-Raphaelitism was not intended to mean, as it
might seem to imply, the going back to worn-out and obsolete methods of
painting, the resort to past modes of representation; it does not mean the
adoption of the artistic forms, traditions, or rules of the old painters;
it does not mean the seeking of inspiration from the works of any other
men; but, in theory at least, it means the pursuit of Art in that spirit
which the painters before Raphael possessed, the spirit which united Art
with Religion; it means the pursuit of Art with the humility of learners,
with the faith of apostles. It does not mean the reproduction of the
quaintnesses, and awkwardnesses, and limitations of the early artists, more
than it means the adoption of the errors of their creed as exhibited in
their paintings; but it means that as those artists broke loose from the
bondage of Byzantine captivity, and found in Nature the source of all true
inspiration, the exhaustless fountain from which their imaginations might
draw perpetual refreshment,--so these artists who took this name would free
themselves from whatever they could discern to be false in the teaching
and practice of Art in our times, and give themselves to the study of that
beauty and that truth which are to be found in God's world to-day, whether
in external nature or in human hearts, actions, and lives. Truth was to be
their device; Nature was to be their mistress. And in the ardor of youth,
they set forth for the conquest of new and untravelled lands.
It is greatly to be regretted that there should be but an inconsiderable
number of pictures in this last hall of the English gallery by
Pre-Raphaelite artists. A little private exhibition of seventy-two pictures
and drawings, by some twenty artists of this school, which was held in a
small house in London, during the month of June, gave a far better view of
what had been already accomplished by them, of the practical working out of
their principles of Art, and of their present tendencies. Three men stand
as the prominent leaders of the movement,--Rosetti, Hunt, and Millais.
There is not a single picture by Rosetti at Manchester; but two (if we
remember rightly) by Millais; and although there are several by Hunt, there
are none of his latest works, nor the most powerful and beautiful of his
comparatively early ones, the well-known Light of the World. Rosetti has
never, we believe, exhibited in public. But whether he paint Dante led in a
vision by Love to see Beatrice lying dead,--or the Angel leading King and
Shepherd to adore the new-born Saviour, while the angelic choir in white
robes stand around the manger in the night, singing their song of Peace and
Good-will,--or Queen Guinever and Sir Lancelot meeting in the autumn day
at King Arthur's tomb,--or Mary of Magdala flying from the house of revels,
and clasping the alabaster box of ointment to her bosom,--or Ophelia
redelivering to Hamlet his gifts of remembrance, while he strips the leaves
from a rosetree as he breaks her heart,--or the young farmer, who, having
driven his cart to London, and crossed one of the bridges over the black
river, finds in the cold, wet morning his old love, long lost, now fallen
at the side of the street, fainting against the dead brick wall of a
graveyard; whether he paint these or other scenes, in all are to be found
such sense of the higher truths of Nature and such faithful rendering of
them, such force of expression, and such beauty of conception, as place
them as works of imagination among the first that this age has produced.
With equal fidelity to Nature, with a more definite moral purpose, perhaps
with a more consistent steadiness of work, but with less delicate sense
of beauty, and with imagination of a very different order, Hunt stands
with Rosetti in the front ranks of Pre-Raphaelitism. The earnestness and
directness of moral expression in most of his pictures is such as has for
a long time been rare in Art. Art is with him a means of enforcing the
recognition of truths often avoided or carefully concealed. Their powerful
dramatic character compels the attention of the careless to his pictures.
He paints Claudio and Isabella in the prison scene, and it is not merely
a vivid rendering of the scene in its external features, but also a true
rendering of the character of Claudio and Isabella, of the weakness of the
coward, of the strength that dwells with the pure. His Awakened Conscience
is a scene from the interior of London life; a denunciation of the vice
of which the world is so careless; a sad, stern picture of the bitterness
of sin. Millais is less in earnest, and his pictures, with many great
technical merits, with portions of very exquisite painting, have rarely
possessed any great worth as works of imagination. One of the tenderest
of them all is the Huguenots, the girl and her lover parting, which is
now becoming generally known through the engraving that has recently been
published. The Autumn Leaves, which is exhibited at Manchester, is one of
his least satisfactory pictures.
But all these men are young, and what they have already accomplished is
but as the promise of greater things to come. It is impossible, however,
to look forward for these greater things, without a feeling of doubt and
uncertainty as to their being produced. The times in which we are living
are not fitted to develope and confirm the qualities on which the best
results of Art depend. Ours is neither an age of composure nor of faith. It
urges speedy results; it desires effective, rather than simple, truthful
work. But the Pre-Raphaelites are exposed to especial dangers; just now to
the dangers that come from success. And these are of two kinds; first, the
undermining of that humility which is the secret of mastery; and secondly,
the tendency to the development of peculiarities and mannerisms, to the
exaggeration of special features that have attracted attention in their
work, and which have a factitious value set upon them by the public, as
they are taken to be the signs and passwords of initiation into the new
school. But, lying deeper than these, there is a danger to Pre-Raphaelitism
from the tendency to insist on too literal an application of its own
principles. The best principles will not include all cases. The workings
and ways of Nature are infinite, and the principles of Art are finite
deductions from these infinite examples. As yet these deductions have been
but imperfectly made. The most exact and truthful representation of Nature
may be the rule of the artist, but it is not an easy thing to attain to an
understanding of the truth of Nature. The actual is not always the real.
Literal truth is not always exact truth; and the seeming truth, which is
what Art must often represent, is very different from the absolute truth.
And here there has been much stumbling in Pre-Raphaelitism, and there is
likelihood of fall; likelihood of the actual being mistaken for the real,
the show for the essence. It is, indeed, apparently, a tendency toward this
error which has deprived most of the best pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites
of the quality of _breadth_, a quality which Nature usually preserves in
herself, which in painting takes the place of harmony in music, and which
only the greatest painters have acquired.
But if Pre-Raphaelitism be true, not to the letter, but to the spirit
of its principles,--if its artists remain unspoiled by flattery and
success,--if they avoid mannerisms, conceits, and the affectations of
originality,--if they can keep religious faith undimmed by the "world's
slow stain"; then we may expect from the school such works of painting as
have not been seen in past times,--works which shall be the forerunners of
a new period of Art, and shall show what undreamed conquests yet lie open
before it,--works which shall take us into regions of yet undiscovered
beauty, and reveal to us more and more of the exhaustless love of God.