Who was Verrio? Who was Laguerre?
ANTONIO VERRIO was born in Lecce, a town in the Neapolitan province of Terra di Otranto, in the year 1639. Early in life he visited Venice to study the colouring of the Venetian masters. He returned a successful, not a meritorious painter. In 1660 he was at Naples, where he executed a large fresco work, 'Christ healing the Sick,' for the Jesuit College. This painting, we are told, was conspicuous for its brilliant colour and forcible effect.
Subsequently the artist was in France, painting the high altar of the Carmelites at Toulouse. Dominici says that 'Verrio had such a love for travelling that he could not remain in his own country.'
Charles II., desiring to revive the manufacture of tapestry at Mortlake, which had been stopped by the civil war, invited Verrio to England; but when he arrived the king changed his plans, and intrusted the painter with the decoration in fresco of Windsor Castle. Charles was induced to this by seeing a work of Verrio's at Lord Arlington's house at the end of St. James's Park, the site of Buckingham House. 'In possession of the Cartoons of Raphael,' Fuseli lectured, angrily, on the subject, years afterwards, 'and with the magnificence of Whitehall before his eyes, he suffered Verrio to contaminate the walls of his palaces.' But there was raging then a sort of epidemical belief in native deficiency and in the absolute necessity of importing art talent. In his first picture Verrio represented the king in a glorification of naval triumph. He decorated most of the ceilings of the palace, one whole side of St. George's Hall and the Chapel; but few of his works are now extant. Hans Jordaens' lively fancy and ready pencil induced his critics to affirm of him, 'that his figures seemed to flow from his hand upon the canvas as from a pot-ladle.' Certainly, from Verrio's fertility in apologue and allegory, and the rapidity of his execution, it might have been said that he spattered out his works with a mop. Nothing daunted him. He would have covered an acre of ceiling with an acre of apotheosis. As Walpole writes, 'His exuberant pencil was ready at pouring out gods, goddesses, kings, emperors, and triumphs over those public surfaces on which the eye never rests long enough to criticise, and where one should be sorry to place the works of a better master. I mean ceilings and staircases. The New Testament or the Roman History cost him nothing but ultramarine; that and marble columns and marble steps he never spared.'
He shrunk from no absurdity or incongruity. His taste was even worse than his workmanship. He delighted to avenge any wrong he had received, or fancied he had received, by introducing his enemy, real or imaginary, in his pictures. Thus, on the ceiling of St. George's Hall, he painted Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, in the character of Faction dispersing libels; in another place, having a private quarrel with Mrs. Marriott, the housekeeper, he borrowed her face for one of his Furies. Painting for Lord Exeter, at Burleigh, in a representation of Bacchus bestriding a hogshead, he copied the head of a dean with whom he was at variance. It is more excusable, perhaps, that, when compelled by his patron to insert a Pope in a procession little flattering to his religion, he added the portrait of the Archbishop of Canterbury then living. In a picture of the 'Healing of the Sick,' he was guilty of the folly and impropriety of introducing among the spectators of the scene, portraits of himself, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and Mr. May, surveyor of the works, all adorned with the profuse periwigs of the period. But he could not transfer to his pictures a decorum and a common sense that had no place in his mind. Hence he loved to depict a garish and heterogeneous whirl of saints and sinners, pan-pipes, periwigs, cherubim, silk stockings, angels, small-swords, the naked and the clothed, goddesses, violoncellos, stars, and garters. A Latin inscription in honour of the painter and his paintings appeared over the tribune at the end of St. George's Hall:—'Antonius Verrio Neapolitanus non ignobili stirpe natus, ad honorem Dei, Augustissimi Regis Caroli Secundi et Sancti Georgii, molem hanc felicissimâ manu decoravit.'
The king lavished kindness upon this pretentious and absurd Italian. He was appointed to the place of master-gardener, and lodgings in a house in St. James's Park, to be afterwards known as Carlton House, were set apart for his use. Here he was visited by Evelyn, who records that 'the famous Italian painter' was 'settled in His Majesty's garden at St. James's, which he had made a very delicious paradise.' The artist also dined with the author, and was regaled with 'China oranges off my own trees, as good, I think, as ever were eaten.' For works executed in Windsor Castle between the years 1676 and 1681, he received the sum of £6845, 8s. 4d. Vertue copied the account 'from a half-sheet of paper fairly writ in a hand of the time.' It particularizes the rooms decorated, and the cost. For the king's guard chamber, £300; for the king's presence chamber, £200; for the queen's drawing-room, £250; for the queen's bed-chamber, £100; and so on, until the enormous total is reached. Of his paintings in St. George's Hall Evelyn writes, 'Verrio's invention is admirable, his ordnance full and flowing, antique and heroical; his figures move; and if the walls hold (which is the only doubt, by reason of the salts, which in time and in this moist climate prejudice), his work will preserve his name to ages.' He employed many workmen under him, was of extravagant habits, and kept a great table. He considered himself as an art-monarch entitled to considerable state and magnificence. He was constant in his applications to the Crown for money to carry on his works. With the ordinary pertinacity of the dun, he joined a freedom which would have been remarkable, if the king's indulgence and good humour had not done so much to foster it. Once, at Hampton Court, having lately received an advance of a thousand pounds, he found the king so encircled by courtiers that he could not approach. He called out loudly and boldly—
'Sire! I desire the favour of speaking to your Majesty.'
'Well, Verrio,' the king inquired, 'what is your request?'
'Money, sire! I am so short in cash that I am not able to pay my workmen, and your Majesty and I have learned by experience that pedlars and painters cannot give credit long.'
The king laughed at this impudent speech, and reminded the painter that he had but lately received a thousand pounds.