I got a Director’s ticket for Sir Joshua Reynolds’ on Friday evening. They were in great request, being no more in number than the three rooms would conveniently hold, and were bespoke for weeks before. The evening exhibitions, which were only once a week, closed that evening, and only the Directors had tickets. It is the order of the day to call these meetings ‘the best assembly in town.’ They began at nine, and ended nominally at eleven, but the Duchess of York did not come in till past eleven. What a ridiculous freak of fashion to be anxious to see pictures by candlelight, merely because money will not admit one, when people can admire them so much better by daylight on any morning they please to go; or was it set on foot by the superannuated beauties, who do themselves justice, and know they are not fit to be seen by daylight?
Ugolino is the most pathetic picture I ever saw (N.B. I went in the morning also)—unutterable, hopeless anguish, moral and physical, suffered in one’s own person, and in the persons of the dearest objects of one’s love—a suffering to which all human beings are exposed, and which none can ridicule as romantic, or despise as ignoble. If it was as old as the Laocoon, it would be as much, perhaps more, admired. It is delightful to see at once, transferred into so many works, the whole soul and genius of an artist so elevated as Sir Joshua.
Tell me about the babes; I long for their sweet musical clamour, and to see them circling me like the spheres, all in harmonious, beautiful, and perpetual motion.
TO MRS. LEADBEATER.
London, July 31, 1813.
The great object of curiosity now in London, is Mad. de Staël. The envy she excites in her own sex is painfully disclosed by their continual remarks on her total want of grace and beauty, in short, on her being a large, coarse, and homely woman. One is tempted to say—‘Who ever inquires what is the plumage of the nightingale?’ Mrs. Jones, a lively friend of mine, put an end to a discussion of the kind in three words, ‘In short, she is most consolingly ugly,’ thus by one happy phrase criticizing the critics with a light yet sharp touch. These critics would inveigh with more justice against the tiresome uses she often makes of her powers. One hates to see a drawing-room turned into a fencing school. I always wish somebody would say with Richard III.,
‘but, gentle lady,
To leave this keen encounter of our wits.’
She has been received with all the honours due to her genius, sought for in every society; and the Prince Regent, with more appearance of taste than he now often displays, went to Lady Heathcote’s one evening purposely that she might be presented to him previously to her appearance at his fête, where she could not have gone without being introduced before it.