and the most faultless work that an observance of academic precepts could produce, he probably thought no better than the crests and ciphers, the chevrons and lozenges, which he executed in the service of Ellis Gamble. Lines and colours he esteemed but as lines and colours, whether they chanced to signify saints and goddesses, or only Gules and Azure. Born and bred in a great city, he had little opportunity of imbuing his mind with the grander forms of nature. London never had much architectural beauty to boast; and whatever works of art are there possessed, were for the most part religiously kept aloof from the eye of youth and poverty. To this day, it may be said, that the majority of the English population have never seen a fine picture, while the galleries and churches of Italy are open to all, and the very forms and faces of the Florentine and Roman women are insensibly modelled to the grandeur of Michael Angelo, the grace of Raphael, the luxury of Titian, and the sweetness of Correggio.

An Englishman of the present time may see fine figures and beautiful countenances in every street; but in Hogarth's pupilage, and long after, not only was grace, ease, and natural motion precluded by the absurdity of costume, but the preposterous style of head-dress, and the abomination of paint and patches, disguised the original contour of the features, and showed the whole town in a mask. Add to this, that Hogarth's Indentures must have excluded him from those circles where refinement of manner gives a certain charm to the artificial, and reconciles the eye,

if not the heart, to the absence of nature, and we shall not wonder that his genius, inclining him strongly to represent the world he saw, took the turn of graphic and dramatic satire, even had he possessed the ability to portray that fairer attitude of things which imagination sees through Love, and, by loving, makes real.

A MODEST DEFENCE OF PORTRAIT

PAINTING.

HOGARTH, in his Frontispiece to the Artists' Catalogue, 1761, has committed a very whimsical bit of allegorical testiness. From a lion's head, surmounted by a bust of King George the Third, there issues a stream of water (meant to indicate the royal bounty) which flows into a watering-pot-nothing more nor less; from which watering-pot a pretty, plump, neatlooking grisette (such as we may see similarly employed in the suburban garden-plots, that indicate the inextinguishable love of nature of the Cockneys,) is watering three intertwining shrubs; one leafy and flourishing-the others bare, stunted, and moribund. Now the pretty damsel, whose robes succinct are tucked up in a way that shows she is used to dirty streets, we are to call Britannia; and the three plants, on which she is pouring the fluid favours of Majesty, are inscribed, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture: the last is in good condition, but Painting looks as miserable as Wordsworth's thorn-all except one single branch, which has withdrawn the sap and sustenance from its parent stem, and starved its

brother branches, each of which is higher than itself. This monopolising bough is Portrait Painting.

error

Hogarth was an awkward flatterer, and seldom succeeded in allegory; but his satire is not often misapplied, and hardly ever feeble. In this instance, however, his shaft may be fairly described as imbelle sine ictu. He seems to have fallen into a common that the patronage of portrait starves the higher and more inventive branches of art; a notion sufficiently confuted by the fact, that Titian was a portrait painter. In truth, it was the desire to preserve the lineaments of eminent individuals that first brought painting to Britain. The value we set on our friends' faces and our own, enables artists to live, while they are acquiring the skill to execute their poetic conceptions; and to suppose that the taste for individual likenesses produced an insensibility to general beauty, is as absurd as to ascribe to the annuals and other periodical publications, the lack of profound erudition in our modern literature.

Yet many are there at this day, malcontents in art, and sons of Zoïlus in criticism, who decry portraiture as a wen, a fungus, a parasitical sucker, a pampered menial, a slave, that has usurped dominion over its master; as a poor, base, sordid, mechanical, bowing, cringing, interest-making, money-getting handicraft! Ay, money-getting!-there's the rub!

Let us hear the testimony of Johnson, who, in matters that come home to the business and bosoms of men, was seldom wrong; and only erred when comprehensive imagination and subtile philosophy

were required. Hence he was one of the best critics of manners, and worst of poetry, that ever existed. "Genius is chiefly exerted in historical pictures; and the art of the painter of portraits is often lost in the obscurity of the subject. But it is in painting, as it is in life-what is greatest is not always best. I should grieve to see Reynolds transfer to heroes and goddesses, to empty splendour and to airy fiction, that art which is now employed in diffusing friendship, in renewing tenderness, in quickening the affections of the absent, and continuing the presence of the dead. Every man is always present to himself, and has therefore little need of his own resemblance; nor can desire it, but for the sake of those he loves, and by whom he hopes to be remembered. This use of the art is a rational and reasonable consequence of affection; and though, like all other human actions, it is often complicated with pride, yet even such pride is more laudable than that by which palaces are covered with pictures that, however excellent, neither imply the owner's virtue, nor excite it."

But is it true that the portrait is a work of mere mechanic dexterity, in which the hand and the eye alone are employed; and all that constitutes the man in man is out of office? A portrait may be produced mechanically, as an air may be composed by rule, and rote, and memory; but it may safely be assumed that a good portrait cannot be painted, without some of the best talents of the poet and of the philosopher. It does not indeed demand the fancy, the invention,

VOL. I.

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