At a sale at Christie’s in 1903 I saw a painting that attracted me, and I bought it, and hung it in the Tallet here. It was catalogued only as a portrait, 30 × 25, English School, and “the property of a gentleman”; but it appears to be a portrait of James Barry (1741-1806) painted by himself, when he was young. There are other portraits of him painted by himself at other times of life: one at the National Portrait Gallery, another at the South Kensington Museum, another at the Society of Arts, and probably others elsewhere. He also painted himself as Timanthes in the Victors at Olympia, one of his big pictures at the Society of Arts; and it seems clear to me (though Boswell did not see it) that Dr Johnson was thinking of Pliny’s criticism of Timanthes, when he made his celebrated criticism on Barry’s pictures there, 26 May 1783—“Whatever the hand may have done, the mind has done its part. There is a grasp of mind there which you will find nowhere else.” Pliny had said, “cum sit ars summa, ingenium tamen ultra artem est.”
In those six huge pictures he depicts the progress of the human race from the time of Orpheus onward till it comes to Navigation and Commerce and the Society of Arts, and thus into Elysium, with a glimpse of Tartarus beyond. This last bit was invidious, and he was asked for explanations “respecting the emaciated leg which belongs to the garter and star precipitating into Tartarus, which was said to be a portrait made out of resentment to a great nobleman.” Up in Elysium, Marcus Brutus is leaning on the shoulder of Sir Thomas More; Lycurgus is examining the laws of William Penn, who is supported by King Alfred; Annibale Carracci is talking to Pheidias, with Giles Hussey just behind him; and so on throughout a picture forty-two feet long. And all these people in Elysium wear the clothes they wore on earth. Barry had made progress since the Death of Wolfe. West painted that exactly as it happened, with everyone in uniform. Most artists thought it should have been idealized; and, as a protest, Barry painted it with all the figures in the nude.
Barry was in Rome from 1766 to 1770, and Winckelmann was there till 1768; and Winckelmann irritated Barry. Amongst other things, “Abbé Wincleman, who has also passed a magisterial censure upon all the English poets, was, to my own knowledge of him, so little acquainted with the language they wrote in, that he was scarcely able to understand even an ordinary article of intelligence in one of our gazettes.” That comes in his Inquiry into the real and imaginary obstructions to the acquisition of the Arts in England, published in 1775. Speaking of this in 1798, he says—“My idea of writing on that subject arose from the ill-founded, scurrilous aspersions on the climate and on the genius and capacity of the people of our islands, which made part of the history of the art, written by the Abbé Wincleman, and (whilst I was at Rome) much read and talked of, to the great annoyance of our little colony at the English coffee-house.” The coffee-house was in the Piazza di Spagna, and the colony then numbered about thirty artists, English, Scotch and Irish.
He says in his Inquiry, “They ascribe the grand style of design of the Greeks and Italians to the frequent opportunities that occur in such warm climates of seeing the people naked.... In our countries the practice of boxing alone furnishes more frequent exhibitions of the naked, and of the best kind, than any that are now to be met with in Italy.” I fancy he was wrong about the quantity of nudity, but right about its quality. Better models could be found in England than anywhere abroad, if artists took the trouble to secure them.
Looking at their landscapes, I sometimes think that English artists care less for getting the finest point of view than getting the most comfortable place to pitch their easel and camp-stool. And usually they take professional models for the figure, as these are easiest to get. They have not the enterprise of Giovanni di Bologna in asking an entire stranger to be sculptured in the nude. The Rape of the Sabines shows how wise he was in asking Ginori.
Winckelmann said that he saw people in real life, who were more beautiful than Guido’s Archangel or Raphael’s Galatea. And if our artists took the trouble, they might see people here in England, who are more beautiful than anything in modern art. One afternoon I saw a bather walking up the sands; and he caught sight of something in the distance, and stopped abruptly, putting up his hand to shade his eyes. If I could have fixed him there in gilded bronze, he might have faced the Apoxyomenos or any other figure by Lysippos.
When artists find their models fall short of their ideals, they usually begin idealizing them. And when the models are Italians, this answers very well, as the Italians are not unlike the ancient Greeks in build, and the ancient Greeks have given most artists their ideals. But when the models are English, it does not do at all, the English being generally built another way. For one thing, the ilio-femoral ligament is not so short, and an Englishman can therefore straighten out his back to an extent that few Italians can, and no Greeks ever could. Think of the Doryphoros and the Diadumenos being measured for frock-coats, and the amount of padding that the tailor would have to put in the small of the back to make their coats look right.
The professional models in England used mostly to be Italians; but now there are many Jews among them, and a few of other races. A model once explained to me, “Here I am of the Latin race: there I am Slav,” first pointing towards the buttocks and then towards the chest. We must have thoroughbred English models, if we want real English art; but the right people are seldom willing to endure the strain of staying motionless for fifty minutes at a time, though some of the professional models can do that five or six times in a day. The only chance would be with snap-shots or time-studies, taking only a few minutes each.
In looking at the students’ work at the National Competitions of Art Schools, I always feel that some schools treat their students rather badly in giving them such wretched models. It must be discouraging to have to draw these people who are not worth drawing, though not so great a waste of time as drawing plaster casts and other easy things. You set beginners to shoot snipe, reckoning that this will teach them to shoot anything; and you should likewise start beginners at the life-class.
There is a prize for studies from life, given by the Society of Arts out of the income of a fund that was subscribed as a memorial to Mulready; and the studies are exhibited at these National Competitions. But the prize cannot now be given every year, as the income is too small. A patron of the Arts might well augment that fund.