OTHER PORTRAIT PAINTERS
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.
INDEXES