was a rule with Sir Joshua that from the moment the latter entered, he was at home-the room belonged to him—but what secret whisperings would there be among these, what confidential, inaudible communications! It must be a refreshing moment, when the cake and wine had been handed round, and the artist began again. He, as it were by this act of hospitality assumed a new character, and acquired a double claim to confidence and respect. In the mean time, the sitter would perhaps glance his eye round the room, and see a Titian or a Vandyke hanging in one corner, with a transient feeling of scepticism whether he should make such a picture. How the ladies of quality and fashion must bless themselves from being made to look like Dr. Johnson or Goldsmith! How proud the first of these would be, how happy the last, to fill the same arm-chair where the Bunburys and the Hornecks had sat! How superior the painter would feel to them all! By "happy alchemy of mind," he brought out all their good qualities and reconciled their defects, gave an air of studious ease to his learned friends, or lighted up the face of folly and fashion with intelligence and graceful smiles. Those portraits, however, that were most admired at the time, do not retain their preeminence now: the thought remains upon the brow, while the colour has faded from the cheek, or the dress grown obsolete; and after all, Sir Joshua's best pictures are those of his worst sitters-his Children. They suited best with his unfinished style; and are like the infancy of the art itself, happy, bold, and careless. Sir Joshua formed the circle of his private friends from the élite of his sitters; and Vandyke was, it appears, on the same footing with his. When any of those noble or distinguished persons whom he has immortalised with his pencil, were sitting to him, he used to ask them to dinner, and afterwards it was their custom to return to the picture again, so that it is said that many of his finest portraits were done in this manner, ere the colours were yet dry, in the course of a single day. Oh! ephemeral works to last for ever! Vandyke married a daughter of Earl Cowper, of whom there is a very beautiful picture. She was the Enone, and he his own Paris. A painter of the name of Astley married a Lady -, who sat to him for her picture. He was a wretched hand, but a fine person of a man, and a great coxcomb; and on his strutting up and down before the portrait when it was done with a prodigious air of satisfaction, she observed, "If he was so pleased with the copy, he might have the original." This Astley was a person of magnificent habits and a sumptuous taste in living; and is the same of whom the anecdote is recorded, that when some English students walking out near Rome were compelled by the heat to strip off their coats, Astley displayed a waistcoat with a huge waterfall streaming down the back of it, which was a piece of one of his own canvasses that he had converted to this purpose. Sir Joshua fell in love with one of his fair sitters, a young and beautiful girl, who ran out one day in a great panic and confusion, hid her face in her companion's lap who was reading in an outer room, and said, "Sir Joshua had made her an offer!" This circumstance, perhaps, deserves mentioning the more, because there is a general idea that Sir Joshua Reynolds was a confirmed old bachelor. Goldsmith conceived a fruitless attachment to the same person, and addressed some passionate letters to her. Alas! it is the fate of genuis to admire and to cele brate beauty, not to enjoy it! It is a fate, perhaps not without its compensations "Had Petrarch gain'd his Laura for a wife, Would he have written Sonnets all his life ?" This distinguished beauty is still living, and handsomer than Sir Joshua's picture of her when a girl; and inveighs against the freedom of Lord Byron's pen with all the charming prudery of the last age.* The relation between the portrait-painter and his amiable sitters is one of established custom but it is also one of metaphysical nicety, and is a running double entendre. The fixing an inquisitive gaze on beauty, the heightening a momentary grace, the dwelling on the heaven of an eye, the losing one's-self in the dimple of a chin, is a dangerous employment. The painter may chance to slide into the lover-the lover can hardly turn painter. The eye indeed grows critical, the hand is busy but are the senses unmoved? We are employed to transfer living charms to an inanimate surface; but they may sink into the heart by the way, and the nerveless hand be unable to carry its luscious burthen any further. St. Preux wonders at the rash mortal who had dared to trace the features of his Julia; and accuses him of insensibility without reason. Perhaps he too had an enthusiasm and pleasures of his own! Mr. Burke, in his Sub2 and Beautiful, has left a description of what he terms the most beautiful object in nature, the neck of a lovely and innocent female, which is written very much as if he had himself formerly painted this object, and sacrificed at this formidable shrine. There is no doubt that the perception of beauty becomes more exquisite("till the sense aches at it") by being studied and refined upon as an object of art-it is at the same time fortunately neutralized by this means, or the painter would run mad. It is converted into an abstraction, an ideal thing, into something intermediate between nature and art, hovering between a living substance and a senseless shadow. The health and spirit that but now breathed from a speaking face, the next moment breathe with almost equal effect from a dull piece of canvass, and thus distract attention: the eye sparkles, the lips are moist there too; and if we can fancy the picture alive, the face in its turn fades into a picture, a mere object of sight. We take rapturous possession with one sense, the eye; but the artist's pencil acts as a nonconductor to the grosser desires. Besides, the sense of duty, of propriety interferes. It is not the question at issue: we have other work on our hands, and enough to do. Love is the product of ease and idleness but the painter has an anxious, feverish, never-ending task, to rival the beauty, to which he dare not aspire even in thought, or in a dream of bliss. Paints and brushes are not "amorous toys of lightwinged Cupid ;" a rising sigh evaporates in the aroma of some fine oilcolour or varnish, a kindling blush is transfixed in a bed of vermilion on the palette. A blue vein meandering in a white wrist invites the hand to touch it but it is better to proceed, and not spoil the picture. Sir Joshua may be thought to have studied the composition of his female protraits very coolly. There is a picture of his remaining of a Mrs. Symmonds, who appears to have been a delicate beauty, pale, with a very little colour in her cheeks: but then to set off this want of complexion, she is painted in a snow-white satin dress, there is a white marble pillar near her, a white cloud over head, and by her side stands one white lily. The ambiguity becomes more striking in painting from the naked figure. If the wonder occasioned by the object is greater, so is the despair of rivalling what we see. The sense of responsibility increases with the hope of creating an artificial splendour to match the real one. The display of unexpected charms foils our vanity, and mortifies passion. The painting A Diana and Nymphs is like plunging into a cold bath of desire to make a statue of a Venus transforms the sculptor himself to stone. The snow on the lap of beauty freezes the soul. The heedless, unsuspecting license of foreign manners gives the artist abroad an advantage over ours at home. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted only the head of Iphigene from a beautiful woman of quality: Canova had innocent girls to sit to him for his Graces. I have but one other word to add on this part of the subject: if having to paint a delicate and modest female is a temptation to gallantry, on the other hand the sitting to a lady for one's picture is a still more trying situation, and amounts (almost of itself) to a declaration of love! Landscape-painting is free from these tormenting dilemmas and embarrasments. It is as full of the feeling of pastoral simplicity and ease, as portrait-painting is of personal vanity and egotism. Away then with those incumbrances to the true liberty of thought-the sitter's chair, the bag-wig and sword, the drapery, the lay figure-and let us to some retired spot in the country, take out our portfolio, plant our easel, and begin. We are all at once shrouded from observation“The world forgetting, by the world forgot!" We enjoy the cool shade, with solitude and silence; or hear the dashing waterfall, "Or stock-dove plain amid the forest deep, That drowsy rustles to the sighing gale It seems almost a shame to do any thing, we are so well content without it; but the eye is restless, and we must have something to show when we get home. We set to work, and failure, or success, prompts us to go on. We take up the pencil, or lay it down again, as we please. We muse or paint, as objects strike our senses or our reflection. The perfect leisure we feel turns labour to a luxury. We try to imitate the grey colour of a rock or of the bark of a tree: the breeze wafted from its broad foliage gives us fresh spirits to proceed, we dip our pencil in the sky, or ask the white clouds sailing over its bosom to sit for their pictures. We are in no hurry, and have the day before us. Or else, escaping from the close-embowered scene, we catch fading distances on airy downs, and seize on golden sunsets with the fleecy flocks glit tering in the evening ray, after a shower of rain has fallen. Or from Norwood's ridgy heights, survey the snake-like Thames, or its smokecrowned capital; "Think of its crimes, its cares, its pain, Then shield us in the woods again." No one thinks of disturbing a landscape-painter at his task: he seems a kind of magician, the privileged genius of the place. Wherever a Claude, a Wilson has introduced his own portrait in the foreground of a picture, we look at it with interest (however ill it may be done), feeling that it is the portrait of one who was quite happy at the time, and how glad we should be to change places with him. Mr. Burke has brought in a fine episode in one of his later works in allusion to Sir Joshua's portrait of Lord Keppel, and of some other friends, painted in their better days. The portrait is indeed a fine one, worthy of the artist and the critic, and perhaps recalls Lord Keppel's memory oftener than any other circumstance at present does. Portraitpainting is, in truth, a sort of cement of friendship, and a clue to history. Mr. C****r, of the Admiralty, the other day blundered upon some observations of mine relating to this subject, and made the House stare by asserting that portrait-painting was history or history portrait, as it happened, but went on to add, "That those gentlemen who had seen the ancient portraits lately exhibited in Pall-mall, must have been satisfied that they were strictly historical;" which showed that he knew nothing at all of the matter, and merely talked by rote. There was nothing historical in the generality of those portraits, except that they were portraits of people mentioned in history-there was no more of the spirit of history in them, which is passive or active, than in their dresses. I was going to observe, that I think the reviving the recollection of our family and friends in our absence may be a frequent and strong inducement to sitting for our pictures, but that I believe the love of posthumous fame, or of continuing our memories after we are dead, has very little to do with it. And one reason I should give for that. opinion is this, that we are not naturally very prone to dwell with pleasure on any thing that may happen in relation to us after we are dead, because we are not fond of thinking of death at all. We shrink equally from the contemplation of that fatal event or from any speculation on its consequences. The surviving ourselves in our pictures is but a poor consolation—it is rather adding mockery to calamity. The perpetuating our names in the wide page of history or to a remote posterity is a vague calculation, that takes out the immediate sting of mortality-whereas, we ourselves may hope to last (by a fortunate extension of the term of human life) almost as long as an ordinary portrait ; and the wounds of lacerated friendship it heals must be still green, and our ashes scarcely cold. I think therefore that the looking forward to this mode of keeping alive the memory of what we were by lifeless hues and discoloured features, is not among the most approved consolations of human life, or favourite dalliances of the imagination. Yet I own I should like some part of me, as the hair or even nails, to be preserved entire, or I should have no objection to lie like Whitfield in a state of petrifaction. This smacks of the bodily reality at least-acts like a deception to the spectator, and breaks the fall from this "warm kneaded motion to a clod"-from that to nothing-to the person himself. I suspect that the idea of posthumous fame, which has so unwelcome a condition annexed to it, loses its general relish as we advance in life, and that it is only when we are young, that we pamper our imaginations with this bait, with a sort of impunity. The reversion of immortality is then so distinct, that we may talk of it without much fear of entering upon possession: death is itself a fable-a sound that dies upon our lips; and the only certainty seems the only impossibility. Fame, at that romantic period, is the first thing in our mouths, and death the last in our thoughts. STANZAS To the memory of the Spanish Patriots latest killed, in resisting the Regency and the Duke of Angoulême. BRAVE men who at the Trocadero fell Beside your cannons conquer'd not, though slain, For Freedom, and ye have not died in vain, Cursing the Bigot's and the Bourbon's chain, And looking on your graves, though trophied not, As holier, hallow'd ground, than priests could make the spot! What though your cause be baffled-freemen cast In dungeons-dragg'd to death, or forc'd to flee; Hope is not wither'd in affliction's blast ;— The patriot's blood 's the seed of Freedom's tree: Earth shudders at your victory,—for ye Are worse than common fiends from Heaven that fell, Go to your bloody rites again ;—bring back No eye may search-no tongue may challenge or reveal. Yet laugh not in your carnival of crime From Persecution-shew her mask off-torn, And tramp her bloated head beneath the foot of Scorn. Glory to them that die in this great cause! Your hangmen-fingers cannot touch his fame. |