LORD GROSVENOR’S COLLECTION OF PICTURES
We seldom quit a mansion like that of which we have here to give some account, and return homewards, but we think of Warton’s Sonnet, written after seeing Wilton-house.
‘From Pembroke’s princely dome, where mimic art
Decks with a magic hand the dazzling bowers,
Its living hues where the warm pencil pours,
And breathing forms from the rude marble start,
How to life’s humbler scenes can I depart?
My breast all glowing from those gorgeous tow’rs,
In my low cell how cheat the sullen hours?
Vain the complaint! For Fancy can impart
(To Fate superior, and to Fortune’s doom)
Whate’er adorns the stately-storied hall:
She, mid the dungeon’s solitary gloom,
Can dress the Graces in their Attic pall:
Bid the green landscape’s vernal beauty bloom;
And in bright trophies clothe the twilight wall.’
Having repeated these lines to ourselves, we sit quietly down in our chairs to con over our task, abstract the idea of exclusive property, and think only of those images of beauty and of grandeur, which we can carry away with us in our minds, and have every where before us. Let us take some of these, and describe them how we can.
There is one—we see it now—the Man with a Hawk, by Rembrandt. ‘In our mind’s eye, Horatio!’ What is the difference between this idea which we have brought away with us, and the picture on the wall? Has it lost any of its tone, its ease, its depth? The head turns round in the same graceful moving attitude, the eye carelessly meets ours, the tufted beard grows to the chin, the hawk flutters and balances himself on his favourite perch, his master’s hand; and a shadow seems passing over the picture, just leaving a light in one corner of it behind, to give a livelier effect to the whole. There is no mark of the pencil, no jagged points or solid masses; it is all air, and twilight might be supposed to have drawn his veil across it. It is as much an idea on the canvas, as it is in the mind. There are no means employed, as far as you can discover—you see nothing but a simple, grand, and natural effect. It is impalpable as a thought, intangible as a sound—nay, the shadows have a breathing harmony, and fling round an undulating echo of themselves,
‘At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiles!’
In the opposite corner of the room is a Portrait of a Female (by the same), in which every thing is as clear, and pointed, and brought out into the open day, as in the former it is withdrawn from close and minute inspection. The face glitters with smiles as the ear-rings sparkle with light. The whole is stiff, starched, and formal, has a pearly or metallic look, and you throughout mark the most elaborate and careful finishing. The two pictures make an antithesis, where they are placed; but this was not probably at all intended: it proceeds simply from the difference in the nature of the subject, and the truth and appropriate power of the treatment of it.—In the middle between these two pictures is a small history, by Rembrandt, of the Salutation of Elizabeth, in which the figures come out straggling, disjointed, quaint, ugly as in a dream, but partake of the mysterious significance of preternatural communication, and are seen through the visible gloom, or through the dimmer night of antiquity. Light and shade, not form or feeling, were the elements of which Rembrandt composed the finest poetry, and his imagination brooded only over the medium through which we discern objects, leaving the objects themselves uninspired, unhallowed, and untouched!
We must go through our account of these pictures as they start up in our memory, not according to the order of their arrangement, for want of a proper set of memorandums. Our friend, Mr. Gummow, of Cleveland-house, had a nice little neatly-bound duodecimo Catalogue, of great use as a Vade Mecum to occasional visitants or absent critics—but here we have no such advantage; and to take notes before company is a thing that we abhor. It has a look of pilfering something from the pictures. While we merely enjoy the sight of the objects of art before us, or sympathise with the approving gaze of the greater beauty around us, it is well; there is a feeling of luxury and refinement in the employment; but take out a pocket-book, and begin to scribble notes in it, the date of the picture, the name, the room, some paltry defect, some pitiful discovery (not worth remembering), the non-essentials, the mechanic common-places of the art, and the sentiment is gone—you shew that you have a further object in view, a job to execute, a feeling foreign to the place, and different from every one else—you become a butt and a mark for ridicule to the rest of the company—and you retire with your pockets full of wisdom from a saloon of art, with as little right as you have to carry off the dessert, (or what you have not been able to consume,) from an inn, or a banquet. Such, at least, is our feeling; and we had rather make a mistake now and then, as to a numero, or the name of a room in which a picture is placed, than spoil our whole pleasure in looking at a fine Collection, and consequently the pleasure of the reader in learning what we thought of it.
Among the pictures that haunt our eye in this way is the Adoration of the Angels, by N. Poussin. It is one of his finest works—elegant, graceful, full of feeling, happy, enlivening. It is treated rather as a classical than as a sacred subject. The Angels are more like Cupids than Angels. They are, however, beautifully grouped, with various and expressive attitudes, and remind one, by their half antic, half serious homage, of the line—
‘Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.’
They are laden with baskets of flowers—the tone of the picture is rosy, florid; it seems to have been painted at
‘The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,’
and the angels over-head sport and gambol in the air with butterfly-wings, like butterflies. It is one of those rare productions that satisfy the mind, and from which we turn away, not from weariness, but from a fulness of delight.—The Israelites returning Thanks in the Wilderness is a fine picture, but inferior to this. Near it is a group of Angels, said to be by Correggio. The expressions are grotesque and fine, but the colouring does not seem to us to be his. The texture of the flesh, as well as the hue, too much resembles the skin of ripe fruit. We meet with several fine landscapes of the two Poussins, (particularly one of a rocky eminence by Gaspar,) in the room before you come to the Rembrandts, in which the mixture of grey rock and green trees and shrubs is beautifully managed, with striking truth and clearness.
Among detached and smaller pictures, we would wish to point out to the attention of our readers, an exquisite head of a Child, by Andrea del Sarto, and a fine Salvator in the inner room of all: in the room leading to it, a pleasing, glassy Cuyp, an airy, earthy-looking Teniers, and a Mother and a Sleeping Child, by Guido: in the Saloon, a St. Catherine, one of Parmegiano’s most graceful pictures; a St. Agnes, by Domenichino, full of sweetness, thought, and feeling; and two pictures by Raphael, that have a look as if painted on paper: a Repose in Egypt, and St. Luke painting the Virgin, both admirable for drawing and expression, and a rich, purple, crayon tone of colouring. Wherever Raphael is, there is grace and dignity, and an informing soul. In the last-mentioned room, near the entrance, is also a Conversion of Saint Paul, by Rubens, of infinite spirit, brilliancy, and delicacy of execution.
But it is in the large room to the right, that the splendour and power of Rubens reign triumphant and unrivalled, and yet he has here to contend with highest works and names. The four large pictures of ecclesiastical subjects, the Meeting of Abram and Melchisedec, the Gathering of Manna, the Evangelists, and the Fathers of the Church, have no match in this country for scenic pomp, and dazzling airy effect. The figures are colossal; and it might be said, without much extravagance, that the drawing and colouring are so too.[[8]] He seems to have painted with a huge sweeping gigantic pencil, and with broad masses of unalloyed colour. The spectator is (as it were) thrown back by the pictures, and surveys them, as if placed at a stupendous height, as well as distance from him. This, indeed, is their history: they were painted to be placed in some Jesuit’s church abroad, at an elevation of forty or fifty feet, and Rubens would have started to see them in a drawing-room or on the ground. Had he foreseen such a result, he would perhaps have added something to the correctness of the features, and taken something from the gorgeous crudeness of the colour. But there is grandeur of composition, involution of form, motion, character in its vast, rude outline, the imposing contrast of sky and flesh, fine grotesque heads of old age, florid youth, and fawn-like beauty! You see nothing but patriarchs, primeval men and women, walking among temples, or treading the sky—or the earth, with an ‘air and gesture proudly eminent,’ as if they trod the sky—when man first rose from nothing to his native sublimity. We cannot describe these pictures in their details; they are one staggering blow after another of the mighty hand that traced them. All is cast in the same mould, all is filled with the same spirit, all is clad in the same gaudy robe of light. Rubens was at home here; his forte was the processional, the showy, and the imposing; he grew almost drunk and wanton with the sense of his power over such subjects; and he, in fact, left these pictures unfinished in some particulars, that, for the place and object for which they were intended, they might be perfect. They were done (it is said) for tapestries from small designs, and carried nearly to their present state of finishing by his scholars. There is a smaller picture in the same room, Ixion embracing the false Juno, which points out and defines their style of art and adaptation for remote effect. There is a delicacy in this last picture (which is, however of the size of life) that makes it look like a miniature in comparison. The flesh of the women is like lilies, or like milk strewed upon ivory. It is soft and pearly; but, in the larger pictures, it is heightened beyond nature, the veil of air between the spectator and the figures, when placed in the proper position, being supposed to give the last finishing. Near the Ixion is an historical female figure, by Guido, which will not bear any comparison for transparency and delicacy of tint with the two Junos.—Rubens was undoubtedly the greatest scene-painter in the world, if we except Paul Veronese, and the Fleming was to him flat and insipid. ‘It is place which lessens and sets off.’ We once saw two pictures of Rubens’ hung by the side of the Marriage of Cana in the Louvre; and they looked nothing. The Paul Veronese nearly occupied the side of a large room (the modern French exhibition-room) and it was like looking through the side of a wall, or at a splendid banquet and gallery, full of people, and full of interest. The texture of the two Rubenses was woolly, or flowery, or satiny: it was all alike; but in the Venetian’s great work the pillars were of stone, the floor was marble, the tables were wood, the dresses were various stuffs, the sky was air, the flesh was flesh; the groups were living men and women. Turks, emperours, ladies, painters, musicians—all was real, dazzling, profuse, astonishing. It seemed as if the very dogs under the table might get up and bark, or that at the sound of a trumpet the whole assembly might rise and disperse in different directions, in an instant. This picture, however, was considered as the triumph of Paul Veronese, and the two by the Flemish artist that hung beside it were very inferior to some of his, and assuredly to those now exhibited in the Gallery at Lord Grosvenor’s. Neither do we wish by this allusion to disparage Rubens; for we think him on the whole a greater genius, and a greater painter, than the rival we have here opposed to him, as we may attempt to shew when we come to speak of the Collection at Blenheim.
There are some divine Claudes in the same room; and they too are like looking through a window at a select and conscious landscape. There are five or six, all capital for the composition, and highly preserved. There is a strange and somewhat anomalous one of Christ in the Mount, as if the artist had tried to contradict himself, and yet it is Claude all over. Nobody but he could paint one single atom of it. The Mount is stuck up in the very centre of the picture, against all rule, like a huge dirt-pye: but then what an air breathes round it, what a sea encircles it, what verdure clothes it, what flocks and herds feed round it, immortal and unchanged! Close by it is the Arch of Constantine; but this is to us a bitter disappointment. A print of it hung in a little room in the country, where we used to contemplate it by the hour together, and day after day, and ‘sigh our souls’ into the picture. It was the most graceful, the most perfect of all Claude’s compositions. The Temple seemed to come forward into the middle of the picture, as in a dance, to show its unrivalled beauty, the Vashti of the scene! Young trees bent their branches over it with playful tenderness; and, on the opposite side of a stream, at which cattle stooped to drink, there grew a stately grove, erect, with answering looks of beauty: the distance between retired into air and gleaming shores. Never was there scene so fair, ‘so absolute, that in itself summ’d all delight.’ How did we wish to compare it with the picture! The trees, we thought, must be of vernal green—the sky recalled the mild dawn, or softened evening. No, the branches of the trees are red, the sky burned up, the whole hard and uncomfortable. This is not the picture, the print of which we used to gaze at enamoured—there is another somewhere that we still shall see! There are finer specimens of the Morning and Evening of the Roman Empire, at Lord Radnor’s, in Wiltshire. Those here have a more polished, cleaned look, but we cannot prefer them on that account. In one corner of the room is a St. Bruno, by Andrea Sacchi—a fine study, with pale face and garments, a saint dying (as it should seem)—but as he dies, conscious of an undying spirit. The old Catholic painters put the soul of religion into their pictures—for they felt it within themselves.
There are two Titians—the Woman taken in Adultery, and a large mountainous landscape with the story of Jupiter and Antiope. The last is rich and striking, but not equal to his best; and the former, we think, one of his most exceptionable pictures, both in character, and (we add) colouring. In the last particular, it is tricky, and discovers, instead of concealing its art. The flesh is not transparent, but a transparency! Let us not forget a fine Synders, a Boar-hunt, which is highly spirited and natural, as far as the animals are concerned; but is patchy, and wants the tone and general effect that Rubens would have thrown over it. In the middle of the right-hand side of the room, is the Meeting of Jacob and Laban, by Murillo. It is a lively, out-of-door scene, full of bustle and expression; but it rather brings us to the tents and faces of two bands of gypsies meeting on a common heath, than carries us back to the remote times, places, and events, treated of. Murillo was the painter of nature, not of the imagination. There is a Sleeping Child by him, over the door of the saloon (an admirable cabinet-picture), and another of a boy, a little spirited rustic, brown, glowing, ‘of the earth, earthy,’ the flesh thoroughly baked, as if he had come out of an oven; and who regards you with a look as if he was afraid you might bind him apprentice to some trade or handicraft, or send him to a Sunday-school; and so put an end to his short, happy, careless life—to his lessons from that great teacher, the Sun—to his physic, the air—to his bed, the earth—and to the soul of his very being, Liberty!
The first room you enter is filled with some very good and some very bad English pictures. There is Hogarth’s Distressed Poet—the Death of Wolfe, by West, which is not so good as the print would lead us to expect—an excellent whole-length portrait of a youth, by Gainsborough—A Man with a Hawk, by Northcote, and Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, by Sir Joshua. This portrait Lord Grosvenor bought the other day for £1760. It has risen in price every time it has been sold. Sir Joshua sold it for two or three hundred pounds to a Mr. Calonne. It was then purchased by Mr. Desenfans who parted with it to Mr. William Smith for a larger sum (we believe £500); and at the sale of that gentleman’s pictures, it was bought by Mr. Watson Taylor, the last proprietor, for a thousand guineas. While it was in the possession of Mr. Desenfans, a copy of it was taken by a pupil of Sir Joshua’s, of the name of Score, which is now in the Dulwich Gallery, and which we always took for an original. The size of the original is larger than the copy. There was a dead child painted at the bottom of it, which Sir Joshua Reynolds afterwards disliked, and he had the canvas doubled upon the frame to hide it. It has been let out again, but we did not observe whether the child was there. We think it had better not be seen.
We do not wish to draw invidious comparisons; yet we may say, in reference to the pictures in Lord Grosvenor’s Collection, and those at Cleveland-house, that the former are distinguished most by elegance, brilliancy, and high preservation; while those belonging to the Marquis of Stafford look more like old pictures, and have a corresponding tone of richness and magnificence. We have endeavoured to do justice to both, but we confess we have fallen very short even of our own hopes and expectations.
PICTURES AT WILTON, STOURHEAD, &c.
Salisbury Plain, barren as it is, is rich in collections and monuments of art. There are, within the distance of a few miles, Wilton, Longford-Castle, Fonthill-Abbey, Stourhead, and last though not least worthy to be mentioned, Stonehenge, that ‘huge, dumb heap,’ that stands on the blasted heath, and looks like a group of giants, bewildered, not knowing what to do, encumbering the earth, and turned to stone, while in the act of warring on Heaven. An attempt has lately been made to give to it an antediluvian origin. Its mystic round is in all probability fated to remain inscrutable, a mighty maze without a plan: but still the imagination, when once curiosity and wonder have taken possession of it, heaves with its restless load, launches conjecture farther and farther back beyond the landmarks of time, and strives to bear down all impediments in its course, as the ocean strives to overleap some vast promontory!
Fonthill-Abbey, which was formerly hermetically sealed against all intrusion,[[9]] is at present open to the whole world; and Wilton-House, and Longford-Castle, which were formerly open to every one, are at present shut, except to petitioners, and a favoured few. Why is this greater degree of strictness in the latter instances resorted to? In proportion as the taste for works of art becomes more general, do these Noble Persons wish to set bounds to and disappoint public curiosity? Do they think that the admiration bestowed on fine pictures or rare sculpture lessens their value, or divides the property, as well as the pleasure with the possessor? Or do they think that setting aside the formality of these new regulations, three persons in the course of a whole year would intrude out of an impertinent curiosity to see their houses and furniture, without having a just value for them as objects of art? Or is the expence of keeping servants to shew the apartments made the plea of this churlish, narrow system? The public are ready enough to pay servants for their attendance, and those persons are quite as forward to do this who make a pilgrimage to such places on foot as those who approach them in a post-chaise or on horseback with a livery servant, which, it seems, is the prescribed and fashionable etiquette! Whatever is the cause, we are sorry for it; more particularly as it compels us to speak of these two admired Collections from memory only. It is several years since we saw them; but there are some impressions of this sort that are proof against time.
Lord Radnor has the two famous Claudes, the Morning and Evening of the Roman Empire. Though as landscapes they are neither so brilliant, nor finished, nor varied, as some of this Artist’s, there is a weight and concentration of historic feeling about them which many of his allegorical productions want. In the first, half-finished buildings and massy columns rise amidst the dawning effulgence that is streaked with rims of inextinguishable light; and a noble tree in the foreground, ample, luxuriant, hangs and broods over the growing design. There is a dim mistiness spread over the scene, as in the beginning of things. The Evening, the companion to it, is even finer. It has all the gorgeous pomp that attends the meeting of Night and Day, and a flood of glory still prevails over the coming shadows. In the cool of the evening, some cattle are feeding on the brink of a glassy stream, that reflects a mouldering ruin on one side of the picture; and so precise is the touch, so true, so firm is the pencilling, so classical the outline, that they give one the idea of sculptured cattle, biting the short, green turf, and seem an enchanted herd! They appear stamped on the canvas to remain there for ever, or as if nothing could root them from the spot. Truth with beauty suggests the feeling of immortality. No Dutch picture ever suggested this feeling. The objects are real, it is true; but not being beautiful or impressive, the mind feels no wish to mould them into a permanent reality, to bind them fondly on the heart, or lock them in the imagination as in a sacred recess, safe from the envious canker of time. No one ever felt a longing, a sickness of the heart, to see a Dutch landscape twice; but those of Claude, after an absence of years, have this effect, and produce a kind of calenture. The reason of the difference is, that in mere literal copies from nature, where the objects are not interesting in themselves, the only attraction is to see the felicity of the execution; and having once witnessed this, we are satisfied. But there is nothing to stir the fancy, to keep alive the yearnings of passion. We remember one other picture (and but one) in Lord Radnor’s Collection, that was of this ideal character. It was a Magdalen by Guido, with streaming hair, and streaming eyes looking upwards-full of sentiment and beauty.
There is but one fine picture at Wilton-house, the Family Vandyke; with a noble Gallery of antique marbles, which we may pronounce to be invaluable to the lover of art or to the student of history or human nature. Roman Emperors or Proconsuls, the poets, orators, and almost all the great men of antiquity, are here ‘ranged in a row,’ and palpably embodied either in genuine or traditional busts. Some of these indicate an almost preternatural capacity and inspired awfulness of look, particularly some of the earlier sages and fabulists of Greece, which we apprehend to be ideal representations; while other more modern and better authenticated ones of celebrated Romans are distinguished by the strength and simplicity of common English heads of the best class.—The large picture of the Pembroke Family, by Vandyke, is unrivalled in its kind. It is a history of the time. It throws us nearly two centuries back to men and manners that no longer exist. The members of a Noble House (‘tis a hundred and sixty years since) are brought together in propriâ persona, and appear in all the varieties of age, character, and costume. There are the old Lord and Lady Pembroke, who ‘keep their state’ raised somewhat above the other groups;—the one a lively old gentleman, who seems as if he could once have whispered a flattering tale in a fair lady’s ear; his help-mate looking a little fat and sulky by his side, probably calculating the expence of the picture, and not well understanding the event of it—there are the daughters, pretty, well-dressed, elegant girls, but somewhat insipid, sentimental, and vacant—then there are the two eldest sons, that might be said to have walked out of Mr. Burke’s description of the age of chivalry; the one a perfect courtier, a carpet-knight, smooth-faced, handsome, almost effeminate, that seems to have moved all his life to ‘the mood of lutes and soft recorders,’ decked in silks and embroidery like the tender flower issuing from its glossy folds; the other the gallant soldier, shrewd, bold, hardy, with spurred heel and tawny buskins, ready to ‘mount on barbed steeds, and witch the world with noble horsemanship’—down to the untutored, carroty-headed boy, the Goose-Gibbie of the piece, who appears to have been just dragged from the farm-yard to sit for his picture, and stares about him in as great a heat and fright as if he had dropped from the clouds:—all in this admirable, living composition is in its place, in keeping, and bears the stamp of the age and of the master’s hand. Even the oak-pannels have an elaborate, antiquated look, and the furniture has an aspect of cumbrous, conscious dignity. It should not be omitted that it was here (in the house or the adjoining magnificent grounds) that Sir Philip Sidney wrote his Arcadia; and the story of Musidorus and Philoclea, of Mopsa and Dorcas, is quaintly traced on oval pannels in the principal drawing-room.
It is on this account that we are compelled to find fault with the Collection at Fonthill Abbey, because it exhibits no picture of remarkable eminence that can be ranked as an heir-loom of the imagination—which cannot be spoken of but our thoughts take wing and stretch themselves towards it—the very name of which is music to the instructed ear. We would not give a rush to see any Collection that does not contain some single picture at least, that haunts us with an uneasy sense of joy for twenty miles of road, that may cheer us at intervals for twenty years of life to come. Without some such thoughts as these riveted in the brain, the lover and disciple of art would truly be ‘of all men the most miserable:’ but with them hovering round him, and ever and anon shining with their glad lustre into his sleepless soul, he has nothing to fear from fate, or fortune. We look, and lo! here is one at our side, facing us, though far-distant. It is the Young Man’s Head, in the Louvre, by Titian, that is not unlike Jeronymo della Porretta in Sir Charles Grandison. What a look is there of calm, unalterable self-possession—
‘Above all pain, all passion, and all pride;’
that draws the evil out of human life, that while we look at it transfers the same sentiment to our own breasts, and makes us feel as if nothing mean or little could ever disturb us again! This is high art; the rest is mechanical. But there is nothing like this at Fonthill (oh! no), but every thing which is the very reverse. As this, however, is an extreme opinion of ours, and may be a prejudice, we shall endeavour to support it by facts. There is not then a single Titian in all this boasted and expensive Collection—there is not a Raphael—there is not a Rubens (except one small sketch)—there is not a Guido, nor a Vandyke—there is not a Rembrandt, there is not a Nicolo Poussin, nor a fine Claude. The two Altieri Claudes, which might have redeemed Fonthill, Mr. Beckford sold. What shall we say to a Collection, which uniformly and deliberately rejects every great work, and every great name in art, to make room for idle rarities and curiosities of mechanical skill? It was hardly necessary to build a cathedral to set up a toy-shop! Who would paint a miniature-picture to hang it at the top of the Monument? This huge pile (capable of better things) is cut up into a parcel of little rooms, and those little rooms are stuck full of little pictures, and bijouterie. Mr. Beckford may talk of his Diamond Berchem, and so on: this is but the language of a petit-maitre in art; but the author of Vathek (with his leave) is not a petit-maitre. His genius, as a writer, ‘hath a devil:’ his taste in pictures is the quintessence and rectified spirit of still-life. He seems not to be susceptible of the poetry of painting, or else to set his face against it. It is obviously a first principle with him to exclude whatever has feeling or imagination—to polish the surface, and suppress the soul of art—to proscribe, by a sweeping clause or at one fell swoop, every thing approaching to grace, or beauty, or grandeur—to crush the sense of pleasure or of power in embryo—and to reduce all nature and art, as far as possible, to the texture and level of a China dish—smooth, glittering, cold, and unfeeling! We do not object so much to the predilection for Teniers, Wouvermans, or Ostade—we like to see natural objects naturally painted—but we unequivocally hate the affectedly mean, the elaborately little, the ostentatiously perverse and distorted, Polemberg’s walls of amber, Mieris’s groups of steel, Vanderwerf’s ivory flesh;—yet these are the chief delights of the late proprietor of Fonthill-abbey! Is it that his mind is ‘a volcano burnt out,’ and that he likes his senses to repose and be gratified with Persian carpets and enamelled pictures? Or are there not traces of the same infirmity of feeling even in the high-souled Vathek, who compliments the complexion of the two pages of Fakreddin as being equal to ‘the porcelain of Franguestan?’ Alas! Who would have thought that the Caliph Vathek would have dwindled down into an Emperor of China and King of Japan? But so it is.—
Stourhead, the seat of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, did not answer our expectations. But Stourton, the village where it stands, made up for our disappointment. After passing the park-gate, which is a beautiful and venerable relic, you descend into Stourton by a sharp-winding declivity, almost like going underground, between high hedges of laurel trees, and with an expanse of woods and water spread beneath. It is a sort of rural Herculaneum, a subterranean retreat. The inn is like a modernized guard-house; the village-church stands on a lawn without any inclosure; a row of cottages facing it, with their white-washed walls and flaunting honey-suckles, are neatness itself. Every thing has an air of elegance, and yet tells a tale of other times. It is a place that might be held sacred to stillness and solitary musing!—The adjoining mansion of Stourhead commands an extensive view of Salisbury Plain, whose undulating swells shew the earth in its primeval simplicity, bare, with naked breasts, and varied in its appearance only by the shadows of the clouds that pass across it. The view without is pleasing and singular: there is little within-doors to beguile attention. There is one master-piece of colouring by Paul Veronese, a naked child with a dog. The tone of the flesh is perfection itself. On praising this picture (which we always do when we like a thing) we were told it had been criticized by a great judge, Mr. Beckford of Fonthill, who had found fault with the execution as too coarse and muscular. We do not wonder—it is not like his own turnery-ware! We should also mention an exquisite Holbein, the Head of a Child, and a very pleasing little landscape by Wilson. Besides these, there are some capital pen-and-ink drawings (views in Venice), by Canaletti, and three large copies after Guido of the Venus attired by the Graces, the Andromeda, and Herodias’s Daughter. They breathe the soul of softness and grace, and remind one of those fair, sylph-like forms that sometimes descend upon the earth with fatal, fascinating looks, and that ‘tempt but to betray.’ After the cabinet-pictures at Fonthill, even a good copy of a Guido is a luxury and a relief to the mind: it is something to inhale the divine airs that play around his figures, and we are satisfied if we can but ‘trace his footsteps, and his skirts far-off behold.’ The rest of this Collection is, for the most part, trash: either Italian pictures painted in the beginning of the last century, or English ones in the beginning of this. It gave us pain to see some of the latter; and we willingly draw a veil over the humiliation of the art, in the age and country that we live in. We ought, however, to mention a portrait of a youth (the present proprietor of Stourhead) by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which is elegant, brilliant, ‘though in ruins;’ and a spirited portrait by Northcote, of a lady talking on her fingers, may, perhaps, challenge an exception for itself to the above general censure.
We wish our readers to go to Petworth, the seat of Lord Egremont, where they will find the coolest grottos and the finest Vandykes in the world. There are eight or ten of the latter that are not to be surpassed by the art of man, and that we have no power either to admire or praise as they deserve. For simplicity, for richness, for truth of nature, for airiness of execution, nothing ever was or can be finer. We will only mention those of the Earl and Countess of Northumberland, Lord Newport, and Lord Goring, Lord Strafford, and Lady Carr, and the Duchess of Devonshire. He who possesses these portraits is rich indeed, if he has an eye to see, and a heart to feel them. The one of Lord Northumberland in the Tower is not so good, though it is thought better by the multitude. That is, there is a subject—something to talk about; but in fact, the expression is not that of grief, or thought, or of dignified resignation, but of a man in ill health. Vandyke was a mere portrait-painter, but he was a perfect one. His forte was not the romantic or pathetic; he was ‘of the court, courtly.’ He had a patent from the hand of nature to paint lords and ladies in prosperity and quite at their ease. There are some portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds in this Collection; and there are people who persist in naming him and Vandyke in the same day. The rest of the Collection consists (for the most part) of staircase and family pictures. But there are some admirable statues to be seen here, that it would ask a morning’s leisure to study properly.
PICTURES AT BURLEIGH HOUSE[[10]]
Burleigh! thy groves are leafless, thy walls are naked—
‘And dull, cold winter does inhabit here.’
The yellow evening rays gleam through thy fretted Gothic windows; but I only feel the rustling of withered branches strike chill to my breast; it was not so twenty years ago. Thy groves were leafless then as now: it was the middle of winter twice that I visited thee before; but the lark mounted in the sky, and the sun smote my youthful blood with its slant ray, and the ploughman whistled as he drove his team afield; Hope spread out its glad vistas through thy fair domains, oh, Burleigh! Fancy decked thy walls with works of sovereign art, and it was spring, not winter, in my breast. All is still the same, like a petrification of the mind—the same things in the same places; but their effect is not the same upon me. I am twenty years the worse for wear and tear. What is become of the never-ending studious thoughts that brought their own reward or promised good to mankind? of the tears that started welcome and unbidden? of the sighs that whispered future peace? of the smiles that shone, not in my face indeed, but that cheered my heart, and made a sunshine there when all was gloom around? That fairy vision—that invisible glory, by which I was once attended—ushered into life, has left my side, and ‘faded to the light of common day,’ and I now see what is, or has been—not what may lie hid in Time’s bright circle and golden chaplet! Perhaps this is the characteristic difference between youth and a later period of life—that we, by degrees, learn to take things more as we find them, call them more by their right names; that we feel the warmth of summer, but the winter’s cold as well; that we see beauties, but can spy defects in the fairest face; and no longer look at every thing through the genial atmosphere of our own existence. We grow more literal and less credulous every day, lose much enjoyment, and gain some useful, and more useless knowledge. The second time I passed along the road that skirts Burleigh Park, the morning was dank and ‘ways were mire.’ I saw and felt it not: my mind was otherwise engaged. Ah! thought I, there is that fine old head by Rembrandt; there within those cold grey walls, the painter of old age is enshrined, immortalized in some of his inimitable works! The name of Rembrandt lives in the fame of him who stamped it with renown, while the name of Burleigh is kept up by the present owner. An artist survives in the issue of his brain to all posterity—a lord is nothing without the issue of his body lawfully begotten, and is lost in a long line of illustrious ancestors. So much higher is genius than rank—such is the difference between fame and title! A great name in art lasts for centuries—it requires twenty generations of a noble house to keep alive the memory of the first founder for the same length of time. So I reasoned, and was not a little proud of my discovery.
In this dreaming mood, dreaming of deathless works and deathless names, I went on to Peterborough, passing, as it were, under an arch-way of Fame,
——‘and still walking under,
Found some new matter to look up and wonder.’
I had business there: I will not say what. I could at this time do nothing. I could not write a line—I could not draw a stroke. ‘I was brutish;’ though not ‘like warlike as the wolf, nor subtle as the fox for prey.’ In words, in looks, in deeds, I was no better than a changeling. Why then do I set so much value on my existence formerly? Oh God! that I could but be for one day, one hour, nay but for an instant, (to feel it in all the plentitude of unconscious bliss, and take one long, last, lingering draught of that full brimming cup of thoughtless freedom,) what then I was—that I might, as in a trance, a waking dream, hear the hoarse murmur of the bargemen, as the Minster tower appeared in the dim twilight, come up from the willowy stream, sounding low and underground like the voice of the bittern—that I might paint that field opposite the window where I lived, and feel that there was a green, dewy moisture in the tone, beyond my pencil’s reach, but thus gaining almost a new sense, and watching the birth of new objects without me—that I might stroll down Peterborough bank, (a winter’s day,) and see the fresh marshes stretching out in endless level perspective, (as if Paul Potter had painted them,) with the cattle, the windmills, and the red-tiled cottages, gleaming in the sun to the very verge of the horizon, and watch the fieldfares in innumerable flocks, gamboling in the air, and sporting in the sun, and racing before the clouds, making summersaults, and dazzling the eye by throwing themselves into a thousand figures and movements—that I might go, as then, a pilgrimage to the town where my mother was born, and visit the poor farm-house where she was brought up, and lean upon the gate where she told me she used to stand when a child of ten years old and look at the setting sun!—I could do all this still; but with different feelings. As our hopes leave us, we lose even our interest and regrets for the past. I had at this time, simple as I seemed, many resources. I could in some sort ‘play at bowls with the sun and moon;’ or, at any rate, there was no question in metaphysics that I could not bandy to and fro, as one might play at cup-and-ball, for twenty, thirty, forty miles of the great North Road, and at it again, the next day, as fresh as ever. I soon get tired of this now, and wonder how I managed formerly. I knew Tom Jones by heart, and was deep in Peregrine Pickle. I was intimately acquainted with all the heroes and heroines of Richardson’s romances, and could turn from one to the other as I pleased. I could con over that single passage in Pamela about ‘her lumpish heart,’ and never have done admiring the skill of the author and the truth of nature. I had my sports and recreations too, some such as these following:—
‘To see the sun to bed, and to arise,
Like some hot amourist, with glowing eyes
Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him,
With all his fires and travelling glories round him.
Sometimes the moon on soft night clouds to rest,
Like beauty nestling in a young man’s breast,
And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep
Admiring silence while those lovers sleep.
Sometimes outstretcht, in very idleness,
Nought doing, saying little, thinking less,
To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,
Go eddying round and small birds how they fare,
When Mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn,
Filch’d from the careless Amalthea’s horn:
And how the woods berries and worms provide
Without their pains, when earth has nought beside
To answer their small wants.
To view the graceful deer come tripping by,
Then stop and gaze, then turn, they know not why,
Like bashful younkers in society.
To mark the structure of a plant or tree,
And all fair things of earth, how fair they be.’
I have wandered far enough from Burleigh House; but I had some associations about it which I could not well get rid of, without troubling the reader with them.
The Rembrandts disappointed me quite. I could hardly find a trace of the impression which had been inlaid in my imagination. I might as well
‘Hunt half a day for a forgotten dream.’
Instead of broken wrinkles and indented flesh, I saw hard lines and stained canvas. I had seen better Rembrandts since, and had learned to see nature better. Was it a disadvantage, then, that for twenty years I had carried this fine idea in my brain, enriching it from time to time from my observations of nature or art, and raising it as they were raised; or did it much signify that it was disturbed at last? Neither. The picture was nothing to me: it was the idea it had suggested. The one hung on the wall at Burleigh; the other was an heir-loom in my mind. Was it destroyed, because the picture, after long absence, did not answer to it? No. There were other pictures in the world that did, and objects in nature still more perfect. This is the melancholy privilege of art; it exists chiefly in idea, and is not liable to serious reverses. If we are disappointed in the character of one we love, it breaks the illusion altogether; for we drew certain consequences from a face. If an old friendship is broken up, we cannot tell how to replace it, without the aid of habit and a length of time. But a picture is nothing but a face; it interests us only in idea. Hence we need never be afraid of raising our standard of taste too high; for the mind rises with it, exalted and refined, and can never be much injured by finding out its casual mistakes. Like the possessor of a splendid collection, who is indifferent to or turns away from common pictures, we have a selector gallery in our own minds. In this sense, the knowledge of art is its own exceeding great reward. But is there not danger that we may become too fastidious, and have nothing left to admire? None: for the conceptions of the human soul cannot rise superior to the power of art; or if they do, then we have surely every reason to be satisfied with them. The mind, in what depends upon itself alone, ‘soon rises from defeat unhurt,’ though its pride may be for a moment ‘humbled by such rebuke,’
‘And in its liquid texture mortal wound
Receives no more than can the fluid air.’
As an illustration of the same thing, there are two Claudes at Burleigh, which certainly do not come up to the celebrity of the artist’s name. They did not please me formerly: the sky, the water, the trees seemed all too blue, too much of the colour of indigo. But I believed, and wondered. I could no longer admire these specimens of the artist at present, but assuredly my admiration of the artist himself was not less than before; for since then, I had seen other works by the same hand,
——‘inimitable on earth
By model or by shading pencil drawn,’—
surpassing every idea that the mind could form of art, except by having seen them. I remember one in particular that Walsh Porter had (a bow-shot beyond all others)—a vernal landscape, an ‘Hesperian fable true,’ with a blue unclouded sky, and green trees and grey turrets and an unruffled sea beyond. But never was there sky so soft or trees so clad with spring, such air-drawn towers or such halcyon seas: Zephyr seemed to fan the air, and Nature looked on and smiled. The name of Claude has alone something in it that softens and harmonises the mind. It touches a magic chord. Oh! matchless scenes, oh! orient skies, bright with purple and gold; ye opening glades and distant sunny vales, glittering with fleecy flocks, pour all your enchantment into my soul, let it reflect your chastened image, and forget all meaner things! Perhaps the most affecting tribute to the memory of this great artist is the character drawn of him by an eminent master, in his Dream of a Painter.
‘On a sudden I was surrounded by a thick cloud or mist, and my guide wafted me through the air, till we alighted on a most delicious rural spot. I perceived it was the early hour of the morn, when the sun had not risen above the horizon. We were alone, except that at a little distance a young shepherd played on his flageolet as he walked before his herd, conducting them from the fold to the pasture. The elevated pastoral air he played charmed me by its simplicity, and seemed to animate his obedient flock. The atmosphere was clear and perfectly calm: and now the rising sun gradually illumined the fine landscape, and began to discover to our view the distant country of immense extent. I stood awhile in expectation of what might next present itself of dazzling splendour, when the only object which appeared to fill this natural, grand, and simple scene, was a rustic who entered, not far from the place where we stood, who by his habiliments seemed nothing better than a peasant; he led a poor little ass, which was loaded with all the implements required by a painter in his work. After advancing a few paces he stood still, and with an air of rapture seemed to contemplate the rising sun: he next fell on his knees, directed his eyes towards heaven, crossed himself, and then went on with eager looks, as if to make choice of the most advantageous spot from which to make his studies as a painter. “This,” said my conductor, “is that Claude Gelée of Lorraine, who, nobly disdaining the low employment to which he was originally bred, left it with all its advantages of competence and ease to embrace his present state of poverty, in order to adorn the world with works of most accomplished excellence.”’
There is a little Paul Brill at Burleigh, in the same room with the Rembrandts, that dazzled me many years ago, and delighted me the other day. It looked as sparkling as if the sky came through the frame. I found, or fancied I found, those pictures the best that I remembered before, though they might in the interval have faded a little to my eyes, or lost some of their original brightness. I did not see the small head of Queen Mary by Holbein, which formerly struck me so forcibly; but I have little doubt respecting it, for Holbein was a sure hand; he only wanted effect, and this picture looked through you. One of my old favourites was the Head of an Angel, by Guido, nearly a profile, looking up, and with wings behind the back. It was hung lower than it used to be, and had, I thought, a look less aërial, less heavenly; but there was still a pulpy softness in it, a tender grace, an expression unutterable—which only the pencil, his pencil, could convey! And are we not then beholden to the art for these glimpses of Paradise? Surely, there is a sweetness in Guido’s heads, as there is also a music in his name. If Raphael did more, it was not with the same ease. His heads have more meaning; but Guido’s have a look of youthful innocence, which his are without. As to the boasted picture of Christ by Carlo Dolce, if a well-painted table-cloth and silver-cup are worth three thousand guineas, the picture is so, but not else. Yet one touch of Paul Veronese is worth all this enamelling twice over. The head has a wretched mawkish expression, utterly unbecoming the character it professes to represent. But I will say no more about it. The Bath of Seneca is one of Luca Jordano’s best performances, and has considerable interest and effect. Among other historical designs, there is one of Jacob’s Dream, with the angels ascending and descending on a kind of stairs. The conception is very answerable to the subject; but the execution is not in any high degree spirited or graceful. The mind goes away no gainer from the picture. Rembrandt alone perhaps could add any thing to this subject. Of him it might be said, that ‘his light shone in darkness!’—The wreaths of flowers and foliage carved in wood on the wainscots and ceiling of many of the rooms, by the celebrated Grinling Gibbons in Charles the Second’s time, shew a wonderful lightness and facility of hand, and give pleasure to the eye. The other ornaments and curiosities I need not mention, as they are carefully pointed out by the housekeeper to the admiring visitor. There are two heads, however, (one of them happens to have a screen placed before it) which I would by no means wish any one to pass over, who is an artist, or feels the slightest interest in the art. They are, I should suppose unquestionably, the original studies by Raphael of the heads of the Virgin and Joseph in his famous picture of the Madonna of the Crown. The Virgin is particularly beautiful, and in the finest preservation, as indeed are all his genuine pictures. The canvas is not quite covered in some places; the colours are as fresh as if newly laid on, and the execution is as firm and vigorous as if his hand had just left it. It shews us how this artist wrought. The head is, no doubt, a highly-finished study from nature, done for a particular purpose, and worked up according to the painter’s conception, but still retaining all the force and truth of individuality. He got all he could from Nature, and gave all he could to her in return. If Raphael had merely sketched this divine face on the canvas from the idea in his own mind, why not stamp it on the larger composition at once? He could work it up and refine upon it there just as well, and it would almost necessarily undergo some alteration in being transferred thither afterwards. But if it was done as a careful copy from Nature in the first instance, the present was the only way in which he could proceed, or indeed by which he could arrive at such consummate excellence. The head of the Joseph (leaning on the hand and looking down) is fine, but neither so fine as the companion to it, nor is it by any means so elaborately worked up in the sketch before us.
I am no teller of stories; but there is one belonging to Burleigh-House, of which I happen to know some of the particulars. The late Earl of Exeter had been divorced from his first wife, a woman of fashion, and of somewhat more gaiety of manners than ‘lords who love their ladies like.’ He determined to seek out a second wife in an humbler sphere of life, and that it should be one who, having no knowledge of his rank, should love him for himself alone. For this purpose, he went and settled incognito (under the name of Mr. Jones) at Hodnet, an obscure village in Shropshire. He made overtures to one or two damsels in the neighbourhood, but they were too knowing to be taken in by him. His manners were not boorish, his mode of life was retired, it was odd how he got his livelihood, and at last, he began to be taken for a highwayman. In this dilemma he turned to Miss Hoggins, the eldest daughter of a small farmer, at whose house he lodged. Miss Hoggins, it might seem, had not been used to romp with the clowns: there was something in the manners of their quiet, but eccentric guest that she liked. As he found that he had inspired her with that kind of regard which he wished for, he made honourable proposals to her, and at the end of some months, they were married, without his letting her know who he was. They set off in a post-chaise from her father’s house, and travelled homewards across the country. In this manner they arrived at Stamford, and passed through the town without stopping, till they came to the entrance of Burleigh-Park, which is on the outside of it. The gates flew open, the chaise entered, and drove down the long avenue of trees that leads up to the front of this fine old mansion. As they drew nearer to it, and she seemed a little surprised where they were going, he said, ‘Well, my dear, this is Burleigh-House; it is the home I have promised to bring you to, and you are the Countess of Exeter!’ It is said, the shock of this discovery was too much for this young creature, and that she never recovered it. It was a sensation worth dying for. The world we live in was worth making, had it been only for this. Ye Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Night’s Entertainment! hide your diminished heads! I never wish to have been a lord, but when I think of this story.