DEFENCE OF PORTRAIT-PAINTING. A SYSTEM OF MORAL COSMETICS RECOMMENDED
TO THE LADIES. GWILLIM. SIR T. LAWRENCE. GEORGE WITHER. APPLICATION TO
THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK.
_Pingitur in tabulis formæ peritura venustas,
Vivat ut in tabulis, quod perit in facie._
OWEN.
The reader will mistake me greatly if he supposes that in showing why
it was impossible there should be a good portrait of Dr. Daniel Dove,
I meant to depreciate the art of portrait painting. I have a very high
respect for that art, and no person can be more sincerely persuaded of
its moral uses. The great number of portraits in the annual
exhibitions of our Royal Academy is so far from displeasing me that I
have always regarded it as a symptom of wholesome feeling in the
nation,—an unequivocal proof that the domestic and social affections
are still existing among us in their proper strength, and cherished as
they ought to be. And when I have heard at any time observations of
the would-be-witty kind upon the vanity of those who allow their
portraits thus to be hung up for public view, I have generally
perceived that the remark implied a much greater degree of conceit in
the speaker. As for allowing the portrait to be exhibited, that is no
more than an act of justice to the artist, who has no other means of
making his abilities known so well, and of forwarding himself in his
profession. If we look round the rooms at Somerset House, and observe
how large a proportion of the portraits represent children, the old,
and persons in middle life, we shall see that very few indeed are
those which can have been painted, or exhibited for the gratification
of personal vanity.
Sir Thomas Lawrence ministers largely to self-admiration: and yet a
few years ripen even the most flattering of his portraits into moral
pictures;
_Perchè, donne mie care, la beltà
Ha l' ali al capo, a le spalle ed a' piè:
E vola si, che non si scorge più
Vestigio alcun ne' visi, dove fù._[1]
[Footnote 1: RICCIARDETTO.]
Helen in her old age, looking at herself in a mirror, is a subject
which old sonneteers were fond of borrowing from the Greek Anthology.
Young Ladies! you who have sate to Sir Thomas, or any artist of his
school, I will tell you how your portraits may be rendered more useful
monitors to you in your progress through life than the mirror was to
Helen, and how you may derive more satisfaction from them when you are
grown old. Without supposing that you actually “called up a look,” for
the painter's use, I may be certain that none of you during the times
of sitting permitted any feeling of ill humour to cast a shade over
your countenance; and that if you were not conscious of endeavouring
to put on your best looks for the occasion, the painter was desirous
of catching them, and would catch the best he could. The most
thoughtless of you need not be told that you cannot retain the charms
of youthful beauty; but you may retain the charm of an amiable
expression through life: Never allow yourselves to be seen with a
worse than you wore for the painter! Whenever you feel ill-tempered,
remember that you look ugly; and be assured that every emotion of
fretfulness, of ill-humour, of anger, of irritability, of impatience,
of pride, haughtiness, envy, or malice, any unkind, any uncharitable,
any ungenerous feeling, lessens the likeness to your picture, and not
only deforms you while it lasts, but leaves its trace behind; for the
effect of the passions upon the face is more rapid and more certain
than that of time.
“His counsel,” says Gwillim the Pursuivant, “was very behoveful, who
advised all gentlewomen often to look on glasses, that so, if they saw
themselves beautiful, they might be stirred up to make their minds as
fair by virtue as their faces were by nature; but if deformed, they
might make amends for their outward deformity, with their intern
pulchritude and gracious qualities. And those that are proud of their
beauty should consider that their own hue is as brittle as the glass
wherein they see it; and that they carry on their shoulders nothing
but a skull wrapt in skin which one day will be loathsome to be looked
on.”
The conclusion of this passage accorded not with the Doctor's
feelings. He thought that whatever tended to connect frightful and
loathsome associations with the solemn and wholesome contemplation of
mortality, ought to be avoided as injudicious and injurious. So too
with regard to age: if it is dark and unlovely “the fault,” he used to
say, “is generally our own; Nature may indeed make it an object of
compassion, but not of dislike, unless we ourselves render it so. It
is not of necessity that we grow ugly as well as old.” Donne says
No spring, nor summer's beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face;
he was probably speaking of his wife, for Donne was happy in his
marriage, as he deserved to be. There is a beauty which, as the
Duchess of Newcastle said of her mother's, is “beyond the reach of
time;” that beauty depends upon the mind, upon the temper,—Young
Ladies, upon yourselves!
George Wither wrote under the best of his portraits,
What I WAS, is passed by;
What I AM, away doth fly;
What I SHALL BE, none do see;
Yet in THAT my beauties be.
He commenced also a Meditation upon that portrait in these impressive
lines;
When I behold my Picture and perceive
How vain it is our Portraitures to leave
In lines and shadows (which make shews to-day
Of that which will to-morrow fade away)
And think what mean resemblances at best
Are by mechanic instruments exprest,
I thought it better much to leave behind me,
Some draught, in which my living friends might find me,
The same I am, in that which will remain
Till all is ruined and repaired again.
In the same poem he says,
A Picture, though with most exactness made,
Is nothing but the shadow of a shade.
For even our living bodies (though they seem
To others more, or more in our esteem)
Are but the shadow of that Real Being,
Which doth extend beyond the fleshly seeing,
And cannot be discerned, until we rise
Immortal objects for immortal eyes.
Like most men, George Wither, as he grew more selfish, was tolerably
successful in deceiving himself as to his own motives and state of
mind. If ever there was an honest enthusiast, he had been one;
afterwards he feathered his nest with the spoils of the Loyalists and
of the Bishops; and during this prosperous part of his turbulent life
there must have been times when the remembrance of his former self
brought with it more melancholy and more awful thoughts than the sight
of his own youthful portrait, in its fantastic garb, or of that more
sober resemblance upon which his meditation was composed.
Such a portraiture of the inner or real being as Wither in his better
mind wished to leave in his works, for those who knew and loved him,
such a portraiture am I endeavouring to compose of Dr. Dove, wherein
the world may see what he was, and so become acquainted with his
intellectual lineaments, and with those peculiarities, which forming
as it were the idiosyncrasy of his moral constitution, contributed in
no small degree to those ever-varying lights and shades of character,
and feeling in his living countenance which, I believe, would have
baffled the best painter's art.
_Poi voi sapete quanto egli è dabbene,
Com' ha giudizio, ingegno, e discrezione,
Come conosce il vero, il bello, e 'l bene._[2]
[Footnote 2: BERNI.]