I also visited an exhibition of pictures which had been proffered to Congress at the sum of forty thousand dollars, in order that this collection might form the foundation of a great national gallery; a worthy object, and of which these pictures would have formed a right-becoming commencement.
Here were specimens, and worthy ones, of many masters; amongst others a Murillo, indisputably genuine, and, although a little faded in colour, still worth a wilderness of most other productions. The subject was a painful one too, being the agony of Christ on the Mount of Olives.
Never, surely, was the utter prostration of flesh and soul so speakingly made out; bitter indeed must the cup have been so painfully contemplated by one so meek, so patient of suffering; Omniscience only, being so entreated, could yet have held it to the sufferer's pallid lips, or contemplated with a fixed purpose the sorrowing eyes imploringly cast upwards.
Before the kneeling Christ,—the worn and wasted man,—there floated an angel worthy of the dying Psalmist's imagining, so unearthly, so ethereal! What a full heart must the inspired painter have had as in his mind's eye he purely shadowed forth this most perfect conception of one of those who hold companionship with God! It was made up of all the rarest traits of beauty, yet its loveliness was not of the world: the veriest dullard looking on it would have paused in admiration; the most brutal have gazed into those pure eyes, untainted by one earthly feeling, one sinful thought, or impure desire. On my mind the effect was thrilling: I have pictured to myself angels as poets have described them, and have often before looked upon them such as they have been conceived by Angelo, Correggio, and other master-spirits amongst men, and have seen faces of theirs on which I could have looked unsatiated again and again, and forms I could have loved with all my heart; but never beheld an emanation of the Spirit of God, a thing only to be gazed on holily and worshipped humbly, until I met with this angel of Murillo's.
Were I Pope, the painter should be canonized as one visibly inspired from heaven, and on whose visions angels must have waited, since earth never could have supplied from its fairest a model for such expression as he has here given to the comforter of that heart-broken Christ. It is worth living virtuously, to die in the hope of such companionship hereafter, and for all eternity. After having been for two years deprived of the pleasure an enthusiast derives from the painter's art, the mere contemplation of such a picture elevates and refines one's spirit; the world and worldly feelings are forgot, and for a moment the soul breathes freely within its earthly prison.
Here were three pictures of Sir Joshua Reynolds; one a group of the Clive family, including the native Ayah holding a little girl on a chair. This Indian nurse is painted to the life, graceful, animated, and devoted; only for the difference of complexion, one might imagine the delicate girl she looks on with such tender pride her own, and not the offspring of the cold white woman whose eyes are fixed on you as she stands vis-à-vis to her stiff lord, who is dressed in a rappee-coloured habit richly overlaid with gold.
This picture might very well be described as a fancy subject, and designated Nature and Art. Opposite this fine picture of our English master hung another group, by Rembrandt; making up in force and colour what it lacked in delicacy and refinement. The subject was the De Witt family; and each portrait wore that genuine stamp of truth that left no question of their resemblance to the Dutch originals.
There were some sea-pieces by Backhuysen, and one by Vanderveldt; several excellent landscapes; a couple of gallery pictures worthy a place in the Pitti, together with Danby's Opening of the Sixth Seal. All together, in fact, this was a collection of no mean pretensions, which would have been an exceedingly creditable foundation on which to have raised a national gallery. The sum which it was required Congress should appropriate to the purchase was forty thousand dollars; and considering how that assembly is constituted, how little most of its members know or care about pictures, or of their intrinsic value, and how utterly unimbued they are with any conception of the moral worth of art to a young nation, I conceive it very creditable to the body that the motion was negatived by only two votes.
How could a member from Illinois or Mississippi have justified such an item in the budget to his constituents? I can fancy a group of good Jackson men, after reading of an appropriation of forty thousand dollars for the purchase of twenty pictures, raising their admiring eyes to a portrait of the General swinging from the signpost, for the painting of which, with a horse's head into the bargain, the tavern-keeper, Major Jones, had paid no cent more than fifteen dollars; and then coming back on the corrupt motives which could induce a vote of a couple of thousand a-piece for pictures "that could not by any natural means be liker nature, or more handsomely done, nohow, by any foreigner that ever fisted a paint-brush."