DEATH OF GAINSBOROUGH.
When assured that the progress of his fatal malady (cancer) precluded all hopes of life, Gainsborough desired to be buried in Kew churchyard, and that his name only should be cut on his gravestone. He sent for Sir Joshua Reynolds, and was reconciled to him: then exclaiming, “We are all going to heaven, and Vandyke is of the company,” he immediately expired, in the sixty-first year of his age. Sheridan and Sir Joshua followed him to his grave.
FANATICISM THE DESTROYER OF ART.
It is curious to reflect, that mistaken views of religion have in all times been the prime cause of the ruin of art. It was not Alaric or Theodoric, but an edict from Honorius, that ordered the early Christians to destroy such images, if any remained.
Flaxman says: “The commands for destroying sacred paintings and sculpture prevented the artist from suffering his mind to rise to the contemplation or execution of any sublime effort, as he dreaded a prison or a stake, and reduced him to the lowest drudgery in his profession. This extraordinary check to our national art occurred at a time which offered the most essential and extraordinary assistance to its progress.” Flaxman proceeds to remark, that “the civil wars completed what fanaticism had begun; and English art was so completely extinguished that foreign artists were always employed for public or private undertakings.”
In the reign of Elizabeth it became a fashionable taste to sally forth and knock pictures to pieces; and in the “State Trials” is a curious trial of Henry Sherfield, Esq., Recorder of Salisbury, who concealed himself in the church, and with a long pike knocked a window to pieces: as he was doing this, he was watched through the door, and seen to slip down, headlong, where he lay groaning for a long time, and a horse was sent for to carry him home: he was fined 500l., and imprisoned in the Fleet; and the Attorney-general for the Crown, 1632, said there were people, he verily believed, who would have knocked off the cherubim from the ark. By the witnesses examined, it was evidently a matter of religious conscience in Sherfield, who complained that his pew was opposite the window, and that the representation of God by a human figure disturbed him at prayer.
Queen Elizabeth was the bitterest persecutor: she ordered all walls to be whitewashed, and all candlesticks and pictures to be utterly destroyed, so that no memorial remain of the same.
In Charles the First’s time, on the Journals of the House is found, 1645, July 23: “Ordered, that all pictures having the second person in the Trinity shall be burnt.” Walpole relates, that one Blessie was hired at half-a-crown a day to break the painted glass window at Croydon Church. There is extant the journal of a parliamentary visitor, appropriately enough named Dowsing, appointed for demolishing superstitious pictures and ornaments of churches, &c.; and by calculation, he and his agents are found to have destroyed about 4660 pictures, from June 9, 1643, to October 4, 1644, evidently not all glass, because when they were glass he specifies them.