UNFORTUNATE ACCURACY.
Liotard, a Swiss artist, who came to this country in the reign of George II., and stayed two years, is best known by his works in crayons. His likenesses were as exact as possible, and too like to please those who sat to him: thus he had great business the first year, and very little the second. Devoid of imagination, and one would think of memory also, he could render nothing but what he saw before his eyes. Freckles, marks of the smallpock, everything, found its place; not so much from fidelity, as because he could not conceive the absence of anything that appeared to him. Truth prevailed in all his works; grace in very few or none. Nor was there any ease in his outline; but the stiffness of a bust in all his portraits. Liotard’s lack of employment may, therefore, easily be accounted for.
IMMORTALITY OF PAINTING.
It is painful to think how soon the paintings of Raphael, and Titian, and Correggio, and other illustrious men, will perish and pass away. “How long,” said Napoleon to David, “will a picture last?” “About four or five hundred years—a fine immortality!” The poet multiplies his works by means of a cheap material; and Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, and Tasso, and Moliere, and Milton, and Shakspeare, may bid oblivion defiance; the sculptor impresses his conceptions on metal or on marble, and expects to survive the wreck of nations, or the wrongs of time; but the painter commits to perishable cloth or wood, the visions of his fancy, and dies in the certain assurance that the life of his works will be but short in the land they adorn.
SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS’S “PUCK.”
This merry imp is the portrait of a child, which was painted without any particular aim as to character. When Alderman Boydell saw it, he said: “Sir Joshua, if you will make this pretty thing into a Puck, for my Shakspeare Gallery, I will give you a hundred guineas for it.” The President smiled and said little, as was his custom: a few hours’ happy labour made the picture what we see it.