Indeed, I think that had Sir James lived at any other period he would have become a really great artist.
He was a very fair draughtsman, and understood the art of grouping with taste and dignity; but he had not the genius necessary to break away altogether from the ignoble style of his day.
It would be a profitless task to enumerate the crowd of insipid foreign painters who found a market for their work in England during the first half of the eighteenth century. I prefer passing on at once to Hogarth, who stands up like a giant amongst his dwarfish contemporaries. He at any rate possessed original genius, and his manual skill, though inferior to that of the best Dutchmen, was by no means contemptible. His portraits are amongst the best and most characteristic of the century, and I can find nothing in his attempts at a higher kind of art, as illustrated by his “Sigismunda” (in the National Gallery), to justify either the savage onslaught of Walpole or the contemptuous pity of Reynolds. On the contrary, it appears to me that this much-abused picture is a very respectable performance, and I fail to see any presumption in a skilful and accomplished artist like Hogarth seeking to escape from the loathsome task of always painting scenes of vice, misery, or folly.
Sir Joshua ought to have recollected his own “Death of Dido,” and other attempts in what he calls “the great historical style,” before taxing Hogarth with imprudence and presumption.
As in these lectures I have often ventured to criticise, and, as some may think, to speak disrespectfully of our first President and his discourses, I should like to state that though I do not admire his pictures as universally as some do, I consider him to have been a thorough artist; by which I mean that he was saturated with love for his profession. To him, painting, instead of being a task, was the greatest pleasure in life, and in pursuit of this pleasure he was indefatigable. We owe him a deep debt of gratitude as the great regenerator of art in this country.
The great French art-reformer, David, went back to the antique, and to nature (who is older still); and this seems to me the more logical method. But there is no doubt that, practically (considering Sir Joshua’s own idiosyncrasies and the state in which he found English portraiture), an intelligent study of the old masters was the best rope for hauling British art off the mudbank on which she had so long been stranded.
The name of Reynolds as a portrait-painter is almost as much respected abroad as it is here. Most of his work is faded and otherwise much deteriorated, but fortunately the excellent engravings of his portraits will to all ages preserve his fame as a man of great power, taste, and refinement.
I confess myself quite unable to appreciate Gainsborough’s pictures as they are at present appreciated. I don’t mean to say that I undervalue all his work. I have seen heads by him which I admired exceedingly, but I must protest against the blind fetishism which would compel us to accept as good work any weak, trashy picture which bears his name. I have read laudatory notices both of him and Romney which would tempt one to say with Borachio, “See what a deformed thief this Fashion is!”
I would recommend young artists to bear in mind a pithy old saying, to the effect that “One man may steal a horse while another may not look over the hedge”; and to beware of treating landscape, or portraiture either, in the Gainsborough style. Should they be misled into any thing of the kind, they will find to their cost that the loose, flimsy manner which is greatly admired in the fashionable painter of the last century, will not be tolerated for one instant in a modern picture.
Amongst the early members of this Academy, Cotes, Dance, and Ramsay were all portrait-painters, who have, in my opinion, fully as good a right to celebrity as Gainsborough; but their merits are ignored, whilst inferior works attributed to Gainsborough fetch thousands of pounds.