Pingitur in tabulis formæ peritura venustas,
Vivat ut in tabulis, quod perit in facie.
OWEN.
The reader will mistake me greatly if he supposes that in showing why it was impossible there should be a good portrait of Dr. Daniel Dove, I meant to depreciate the art of portrait painting. I have a very high respect for that art, and no person can be more sincerely persuaded of its moral uses. The great number of portraits in the annual exhibitions of our Royal Academy is so far from displeasing me that I have always regarded it as a symptom of wholesome feeling in the nation,—an unequivocal proof that the domestic and social affections are still existing among us in their proper strength, and cherished as they ought to be. And when I have heard at any time observations of the would-be-witty kind upon the vanity of those who allow their portraits thus to be hung up for public view, I have generally perceived that the remark implied a much greater degree of conceit in the speaker. As for allowing the portrait to be exhibited, that is no more than an act of justice to the artist, who has no other means of making his abilities known so well, and of forwarding himself in his profession. If we look round the rooms at Somerset House, and observe how large a proportion of the portraits represent children, the old, and persons in middle life, we shall see that very few indeed are those which can have been painted, or exhibited for the gratification of personal vanity.
Sir Thomas Lawrence ministers largely to self-admiration: and yet a few years ripen even the most flattering of his portraits into moral pictures;
Perchè, donne mie care, la beltà
Ha l' ali al capo, a le spalle ed a' piè:
E vola si, che non si scorge più
Vestigio alcun ne' visi, dove fù.1
1 RICCIARDETTO.
Helen in her old age, looking at herself in a mirror, is a subject which old sonneteers were fond of borrowing from the Greek Anthology. Young Ladies! you who have sate to Sir Thomas, or any artist of his school, I will tell you how your portraits may be rendered more useful monitors to you in your progress through life than the mirror was to Helen, and how you may derive more satisfaction from them when you are grown old. Without supposing that you actually “called up a look,” for the painter's use, I may be certain that none of you during the times of sitting permitted any feeling of ill humour to cast a shade over your countenance; and that if you were not conscious of endeavouring to put on your best looks for the occasion, the painter was desirous of catching them, and would catch the best he could. The most thoughtless of you need not be told that you cannot retain the charms of youthful beauty; but you may retain the charm of an amiable expression through life: Never allow yourselves to be seen with a worse than you wore for the painter! Whenever you feel ill-tempered, remember that you look ugly; and be assured that every emotion of fretfulness, of ill-humour, of anger, of irritability, of impatience, of pride, haughtiness, envy, or malice, any unkind, any uncharitable, any ungenerous feeling, lessens the likeness to your picture, and not only deforms you while it lasts, but leaves its trace behind; for the effect of the passions upon the face is more rapid and more certain than that of time.
“His counsel,” says Gwillim the Pursuivant, “was very behoveful, who advised all gentlewomen often to look on glasses, that so, if they saw themselves beautiful, they might be stirred up to make their minds as fair by virtue as their faces were by nature; but if deformed, they might make amends for their outward deformity, with their intern pulchritude and gracious qualities. And those that are proud of their beauty should consider that their own hue is as brittle as the glass wherein they see it; and that they carry on their shoulders nothing but a skull wrapt in skin which one day will be loathsome to be looked on.”
The conclusion of this passage accorded not with the Doctor's feelings. He thought that whatever tended to connect frightful and loathsome associations with the solemn and wholesome contemplation of mortality, ought to be avoided as injudicious and injurious. So too with regard to age: if it is dark and unlovely “the fault,” he used to say, “is generally our own; Nature may indeed make it an object of compassion, but not of dislike, unless we ourselves render it so. It is not of necessity that we grow ugly as well as old.” Donne says