History of Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture

by J. S. Memes

His predecessor thus standing alone, Sir Joshua Reynolds claims to be the founder of English historical painting in its recognised acceptation. Indeed, his principles already, or hereafter to be explained, have been followed by all succeeding artists, or have influenced practice in history no less than in portraiture. And what this influence accomplished in the latter, it certainly has also effected in the former department, with this difference indeed, that in the first it created, in the second improved, giving to each a large, bold, and energetic manner, which was at least a step greatly in advance, a most respectable approximation, in the path of excellence. But this, as a resting-place, was far less perfect in history than in any other branch of the art, since the style was adverse to attainment in many of those qualities justly deemed essential. Hence is Sir Joshua not only inferior to himself in history, but his example has, on the whole, retarded the advancement of the study amongst us. Successors have either too often rested in imitation of his manner, or they have carried his principles forward, in which case they are unfortunately calculated to lead farther from the genuine sources of pure taste and substantial composition.

The masterpieces of Sir Joshua are his representations of children; and in many historical, or rather fancy pieces of this character, as the Infant Hercules, the Strawberry Girl, Puck, Cupid and Psyche, Hope nursing Love, his labours are truly admirable. Such subjects were just fitted to his bland and flowing pencil, while they suffered nothing from undecided form and contours feebly expressed. The arch, yet simple expression, the lovely, yet almost grotesque individuality of character, in the heads of his children, the execution, and even coloring—all is equally natural and exquisite. They are among the most perfect gems of art. Only second to the similar productions of Coreggio, they are superior to everything done on the Continent since the days of Rubens and Fiammingo. It appears singular, then, on the first view of the matter, that Sir Joshua should have so frequently failed, and on the whole left so few good female portraits, while so nearly attaining perfection in subjects of allied grace and loveliness. But it is to be remarked, a style of handling broad and facile, yet peculiarly soft and fleshy, which in these instances produces effects so beautiful without much finish, is not equally adapted to express the equally soft, yet decided forms and delicate movements of the female countenance. Besides, Sir Joshua had peculiar notions of grace, which affected ease and nature, rather than actually represented the easy and the natural. He wished to avoid stiffness, and has often lapsed into the contrasted and theatrical. His picture of Mrs Siddons, as the Tragic Muse, however, is pronounced by Sir Thomas Lawrence to be 'a work of the highest epic character, and indisputably the finest female portrait in the world.' How far, however, either that, or the no less celebrated picture of Garrick, can rank with historical portraitures, at least considered with those of Raphael and Titian, may justly be questioned. Of the more elevated and serious historical compositions of Sir Joshua, the Death of Cardinal Beaufort is the grandest, the best drawn, and the most powerfully colored; the only defect is the expression, which is too material; Ugolino is a failure, if intended for the fierce inmate of Dante's 'tower of famine:' these want dignity and truth of character. The designs at Oxford are fine; the Nativity, in imitation of the famous Notte of Coreggio, is a splendid performance.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, then, owed more to taste and application than to genius; more to incessant practice than to science; he derived all from his predecessors which he has bequeathed to posterity; but if, in making the transmission, he added no new nor essential principle of imitation or invention, he established in high practical excellence the arts of his country.

Among those whose labours in historical painting connect the former with the present school, Barry stands foremost in time as in merit. The performances of this artist exhibit, in a very striking manner, the justice of some of the preceding remarks. They are destitute of the most essential and touching graces of imitative representation; they want, in short, all that portraiture, which their author affected to despise, could have given—life, nature, truth, and sweetness, without this absence being compensated by any extraordinary beauties of what is termed higher art. The drawing, though often good, is also not seldom defective; while the coloring is uniformly harsh, and the management without force. Imagination and invention run riot without due control of the judgment; not that the fervor of poetic enthusiasm snatches a too daring grace, but rather the unpruned fertility of conception frequently unites the most glaring incongruities. Yet Barry is far from being without power or science; his great deficiences were a chaste taste and mellowed practice. No man better understood, or has written more learnedly, on the abstract principles of composition; indeed, he has been accused of devoting too much attention to the mere theory and literature of his art, while he neglected Raphael's golden application of Cicero's maxim—'Nulla dies sine linea.' There existed, however, in the character of Barry, notwithstanding a rudeness of exterior, and ignorance or disregard of the proprieties of polished life, a moral grandeur of unshaken resolve, of enduring enthusiasm, of stern and uncompromising self-denial, in his professional career, which invest his memory with no common interest. The man who could undertake, alone, and with no certain prospect of remuneration, one of the greatest works which has been attempted within two centuries—and that, too, with only sixteen shillings in his pocket; who, during seven years of struggle, prosecuted that work to a completion, often thus labouring all day, while he sat up the greater part of the night finishing some sketch for the publishers, in order to make provision for the passing hour;—such a man presents claims to admiration of higher dignity than even those of genius. The great work undertaken and finished amid these difficulties, is the series of six pictures, of the size of life, representing the progress of civilization, in the Hall of the Society of Arts; and it reflects the highest honor on that useful institution, that its gratuitous reward enabled the artist to enjoy his only permanent, though small income, of about £60 yearly. That such a member should have been ejected from the Royal Academy of Great Britain, in which also he held the Chair of Painting, must be considered as a common calamity both to that body and to himself: to him it certainly was, for the degradation embittered the enjoyment, and very seriously impaired the means, of existence. Barry died in 1806, having been born at Cork in 1741; rising from a sailor boy, chalking his rude fancies on the deck of his father's coaster, self-taught, to be the painter now described—the learned writer on his art—the friend of Samuel Johnson and of Edmund Burke.

Many other names of minor reputation might be mentioned,—as Hayman, Mortimer, &c.,—who occasionally with portrait, painted history, but to no extent. This branch of the art, except for the labours of the late Sir Benjamin West, at the close of the last century, would almost have been without a representative amongst us. From that period, very great progress in all the departments has been realized. Still, to the ancient grandeur of the historic style this venerable artist has continued to make the nearest approaches. To the New World, succeeding ages will stand indebted for West; but for the painter, the arts are under obligation to England. It is singular, too, that the advice and services of a Scotsman were the immediate inducements which prevented this ornament of two worlds from returning to his native country, in which case his talents would most probably have been lost to both. The state of patronage and of taste could not have afforded to him the means nor the incitement of rising beyond portrait, in which we do not think West would ever have excelled. Two incidents in his lot reflect equal honor on his native and his adopted country,—like many other moral analogies, evincing the common possession of a congenial liberality and kindliness of spirit, which ought, and will, we trust, ever mingle its best affections in reciprocally advantageous and amicable intercourse. In the land of his birth, the opening genius of West was cheered with a truly tender solicitude; his future advance and his future fame seemed less the care of individual friends than of his countrymen. And, from 1763, on first setting foot in Britain, during the long course of his life, he received more encouragement from her sovereign and her people than has ever been accorded to any historical painter, native or foreign; this, too, in the midst of an unhappy, and, as then considered, rebellious contest.

When we consider the labours of Sir Benjamin, in reference either to English or Continental art, they have, in both points of view, a high, but not an equal rank. In the former, they are unrivalled in magnitude, in progressive improvement, and in the excellence of the principles upon which they are composed. In comparing them with foreign art, their merits are not so absolute; but here we shall use the words of the present accomplished president. 'At an era,' says Sir Thomas Lawrence, 'when historical painting was at the lowest ebb, (with the few exceptions which the claims of the beautiful and the eminent permitted to the pencil of Sir Joshua), Mr West, sustained by the munificent patronage of his late Majesty, produced a series of compositions, from sacred and profane history, profoundly studied, and executed with the most facile power, which not only were superior to any former productions of English art, but, far surpassing contemporary merit on the Continent, were unequalled at any period below the schools of the Caracci.'

In support of this high encomium, Sir Thomas instances 'the Return of Regulus to Carthage,' and 'the Shipwreck of St Paul,'—pictures which amply testify the superiority we have assumed to exist in the living arts of Britain. These, however, are by no means the only master-pieces of West, whose great glory it is to have proceeded on a system which admits of indefinite, and which tends to certain improvement. Even to his eightieth year he was employed in new exercises, not inferior to, or in some respects excelling, the enterprises of his vigorous strength. The cause of his late eminence bears strongly upon the whole tenor of our remarks in treating of Sculpture, and will best be explained in his own words. In 1811, writing to Lord Elgin, the artist thus expresses himself: 'in the last production of my pencil, which I now invite your lordship to see, it has been my ambition, though at a very advanced period of life, to introduce those refinements in art, which are so distinguished in your collection,'—(the Phidian Marbles of the Parthenon.) 'Had I been blest with seeing and studying these emanations of genius at an earlier period of life, the sentiment of their pre-eminence would have animated all my exertions; and more character, and expression, and life, would have pervaded my humble attempts at historical painting.'

It is the soundness and regularity of principle expressed in, or whose existence is clearly deducible from, the entertaining of such views, that constitutes the great merit of the pictures of West. It is these qualities, too, which impart to them their utility and high value as a school of art. As far as they go, they may safely and without reserve be recommended to the student. Here he will not be led astray by brilliant though false theory, nor degraded into mannerism by peculiar though striking modes, which can please only from their peculiarity, and when they exhibit the result of native invention. All here is placed upon the broad highway of universal art; all is equable, uniformly correct, firm, and respectable; no compensation of error by an occasional loftiness of flight: the stream of invention sweeps onward calmly and majestically; if not conducting to scenes of the most stupendous sublimity, flowing at least without cataract or whirlpool, through a magnificence which is grand from its very regularity and usefulness. In these works we discover this, perhaps singular character, that in them we detect many wants, but no defects. The composition, grouping and symmetry, are unexceptionable; the drawing is particularly fine, yet without the statue-like design of the French school. But to animate this beautiful framework of art—to inspire these moulds of form and emblems of intelligence with action and sentiment—the touch of that genius, to whose final aims external science furnishes the bare instrument, is wanting. The representation is chaste and beautiful, but it is too clearly a representation; there wants the almost o'er-informing mind, the freshness of natural feeling, which give to art its truest, only mastery over the human spirit.

The surpassing softness and variety of our island scenery seems to have inspired a corresponding beauty and vigorous diversity into our school of Landscape. Rural imagery may almost be said to mingle in every dream of English enjoyment. Hence this department of our arts has always been popular, and, as a necessary consequence of encouragement, has been cultivated with ardor and success. Only, indeed, when English artists have forsaken English nature, or have attempted to unite classical allegory with heroic landscape, as it is called, have they failed in this delightful branch. From an early period in the eighteenth century, the school may be said to commence, and thenceforward may justly be said to have remained unrivalled by contemporary merit in any other country. One department indeed of landscape, and that too a very charming one, namely water-color, has been, by British artists, not only invented, it may be said, but raised into a most beautiful and useful branch of dignified art. Nor let landscape be deemed, as too frequently, an inferior department: it certainly requires not the highest genius, yet so many qualities must unite in the same individual before he can attain excellence here, that Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say, 'there is more likely to be another Raphael than a second Claude.' Yet more than one native has approached the eminence of the latter.

Commencing with the last century, the following arrangement will include the most esteemed landscape painters of this country.