Carlo Dolce's representations of our Saviour are pretty, to be sure; but they are too smooth to please me. His Christs are always in sugar-candy.
* * * * *
That is a very odd and funny picture of the Connoisseurs at Rome[1] by Reynolds.
[Footnote 1:
"Portraits of distinguished Connoisseurs painted at Rome,"—belonging to
Lord Burlington.—ED.]
* * * * *
The more I see of modern pictures, the more I am convinced that the ancient art of painting is gone, and something substituted for it,—very pleasing, but different, and different in kind and not in degree only. Portraits by the old masters,—take for example the pock-fritten lady by Cuyp[1]—are pictures of men and women: they fill, not merely occupy, a space; they represent individuals, but individuals as types of a species.
Modern portraits—a few by Jackson and Owen, perhaps, excepted—give you not the man, not the inward humanity, but merely the external mark, that in which Tom is different from Bill. There is something affected and meretricious in the Snake in the Grass[2] and such pictures, by Reynolds.
[Footnote 1:
I almost forget, but have some recollection that the allusion is to Mr.
Heneage Finch's picture of a Lady with a Fan.—ED.]
[Footnote 2: Sir Robert Peel's.—ED.]
July 25. 1831.