But what need to enumerate the motives that move the professional “portrait-painter,”—they are written on his every canvas.
Sculpture still clings to its ideals, and the “bust-maker” is a term of reproach. No sculptor with any ambition whatsoever, with any love for his art, would willingly look forward to a career of portrait bust-making. Dire necessity may compel him, and year after year he may make the marble and bronze effigies of local celebrities; but the yoke galls, the task wearies, and he looks forward to the time when, emancipated from his thraldom, he may do something of his own.
Not so the “portrait-painter.” He glories in his degradation; paints a score of huge, staring canvases, blatant likenesses of blatant people, and, before the paint is dry, parades them in exhibition as his latest galaxy of masterpieces,—not that his art may be magnified, but that his trade may be advertised.
The sculptor is only too glad if his bronze effigies are hidden in leafy thickets, in parks, and out-of-the-way places. He has not learned the commercial value of exhibitions. He does not every few months place on view a lot of marbles and bronzes, the work of as many weeks. He has not caught from the shop-keeper the trick of displaying his wares in a window. But the “portrait-painter”——!
“Portrait-painting” pays,—that is the worst of it all. It is the one branch of the art of painting that can be followed as methodically as the making of clothes. It is, for that matter, closely allied to and quite dependent upon the tailor and the dressmaker. Worth has made more portraits than any one painter in Paris.
The “portrait-painter” must dress his manikin in clothes that will “paint,” for the manikin is worse than nothing for the picture. There must be a gown of brilliant stuffs, and either a hat or the hair-dresser,—who also has made and unmade portraits,—or there must be a uniform, hunting-breeches, judge’s gown and wig, accordingly as the manikin is woman or man; and it is the theatrical trappings that are painted, and, incidentally thereto,—manikin.
Reynolds painted something like two thousand canvases. In 1758 one hundred and fifty persons sat to him,—an average of three portraits a week. He was as methodical as an automatic machine. Rose early, breakfasted at nine, was in the studio at ten, worked by himself until eleven, when his first sitter of the day would appear, to be succeeded by another precisely one hour later, and so on, a sitter an hour, until four o’clock, when the popular painter made himself ready for a plunge in the social swirl.
Portraits produced under such conditions cannot be made more than technically brilliant,—superficial likenesses of the great majority of the sitters,—and are unworthy the painter’s art.
After a brief study of their careers, and without seeing a portrait by either, one would be warranted in looking for a masterpiece among Gainsborough’s two hundred and twenty portraits rather than among the two thousand canvases of Reynolds.
Great facility of execution is not necessarily a condemnatory feature of a man’s art, but it is a dangerous feature, and with most men it is a fatal feature.