Meanwhile a Scotchman honorable in art comes upon the scene—Sir Robert Strange, born in the distant Orkneys in 1721, who abandoned the law for engraving.Strange. As a youthful Jacobite he joined the Pretender in 1745, sharing the disaster of Culloden, and owing his safety from pursuers to a young lady dressed in the ample costume of the period, whom he afterwards married in gratitude, and they were both happy. He has a style of his own, rich, soft, and especially charming in the tints of flesh, making him a natural translator of Titian. His most celebrated engravings are doubtless the Venus and the Danaë after the great Venetian colorist, but the Cleopatra, though less famous, is not inferior in merit. His acknowledged masterpiece is the Madonna of St. Jerome called The Day, after the picture by Correggio, in the gallery of Parma, but his portraits after Vandyck are not less fine, while they are more interesting—as Charles First, with a large hat, by the side of his horse, which the Marquis of Hamilton is holding, and that of the same Monarch standing in his ermine robes; also the Three Royal Children with two King Charles spaniels at their feet, also Henrietta Maria, the Queen of Charles. That with the ermine robes is supposed to have been studied by Raffaelle Morghen, called sometimes an imitator of Strange.[9] To these I would add the rare autograph Portrait of the Engraver, being a small head after Greuze, which is simple and beautiful.
JOHN HUNTER
(Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Engraved by William Sharp.)
One other name will close this catalogue. It is that of William Sharp, who was born at London in 1746, and died there in 1824. Though last in order, this engraverSharp. may claim kindred with the best. His first essays were the embellishment of pewter pots, from which he ascended to the heights of art, showing a power rarely equalled. Without any instance of peculiar beauty, his works are constant in character and expression, with every possible excellence of execution; face, form, drapery—all are as in nature. His splendid qualities appear in the Doctors of the Church, which has taken its place as the first of English engravings. It is after the picture of Guido, once belonging to the Houghton gallery, which in an evil hour for English taste was allowed to enrich the collection of the Hermitage at St. Petersburgh; and I remember well that this engraving by Sharp was one of the few ornaments in the drawing-room of Macaulay when I last saw him, shortly before his lamented death. Next to the Doctors of the Church is his Lear in the Storm, after the picture by West, now in the Boston Athenæum, and his Sortie from Gibraltar, after the picture by Trumbull, also in the Boston Athenæum. Thus, through at least two of his masterpieces whose originals are among us, is our country associated with this great artist.
It is of portraits especially that I write, and here Sharp is truly eminent. All that he did was well done; but two were models; that of Mr. Boulton, a strong, well-developed country gentleman, admirably executed, and of John Hunter, the eminent surgeon, after the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in the London College of Surgeons, unquestionably the foremost portrait in English art, and the coequal companion of the great portraits in the past; but here the engraver united his rare gifts with those of the painter.
In closing these sketches I would have it observed that this is no attempt to treat of engraving generally, or of prints in their mass or types. The present subject isMandel. simply of portraits, and I stop now just as we arrive at contemporary examples, abroad and at home, with the gentle genius of Mandel beginning to ascend the sky, and our own engravers appearing on the horizon. There is also a new and kindred art, infinite in value, where the sun himself becomes artist, with works which mark an epoch.
CHARLES SUMNER.
Washington, 11th Dec., 1871.
