Footnote 9: ([return])
War-horse.
Footnote 10: ([return])
Could Sir Joshua now be permitted to visit his own Academy, and our exhibitions in general, he would be startled at the excess of ornament, in defiance of his rule of repose, succeeding the slovenliness of his own day. Whatever be the subject, history, landscape, or familiar life, it superabounds both in objects and colour. In established academies, the faults of genius are more readily adopted than their excellences; they are more vulgarly perceptible, and more easy of imitation. We have, therefore, less hesitation in referring the more ambitious of our artists to this prohibition in Sir Joshua's Discourse. The greater the authority the more injurious the delinquency. We therefore adduce as examples, works of our most inventive and able artist, his "Macbeth" and his "Hamlet"—they are greatly overloaded with the faults of superabundance of ornament, and want unity; yet are they works of great power, and such as none but a painter of high genius could conceive or execute. In a more fanciful subject, and where ornament was more admissible, he has been more fortunate, and even in the multiplicity of his figures and ornaments, by their grouping and management, he has preserved a seeming moderation, and has so ordered his composition that the wholeness, the simplicity, of his subject is not destroyed. The story is told, and admirably—as Sir Joshua says, "at one blow." We speak of his "Sleeping Beauty." We see at once that the prince and princess are the principal, and they are united by that light and fainter fairy chain intimating, yet not too prominently, the magic under whose working and whose light the whole scene is; nothing can be better conceived than the prince—there is a largeness in the manner, a breadth in the execution of the figure that considerably dignifies the story, and makes him, the principal, a proper index of it. The many groups are all episodes, beautiful in themselves, and in no way injure the simplicity. There is novelty, variety, and contrast in not undue proportion, because that simplicity is preserved. Even the colouring, (though there is too much white,) and chiaro-scuro, with its gorgeousness, is in the stillness of repose, and a sunny repose, too, befitting the "Sleeping Beauty." Mr Maclise has succeeded best where his difficulty and danger were greatest, and so it ever is with genius. It is not in such subjects alone that our artists transgress Sir Joshua's rule; we too often see portraits where the dress and accessaries obtrude—there is too much lace and too little expression—and our painters of views follow the fashion most unaccountably—ornament is every where; we have not a town where the houses are not "turned out of windows," and all the furniture of every kind piled up in the streets; and as if to show a pretty general bankruptcy, together with the artist's own poverty, you would imagine an auction going on in every other house, by the Turkey carpets and odds and ends hanging from the windows. We have even seen a "Rag Fair" in a turnpike road.
Footnote 11: ([return])
The reader will remember the supposed epitaph,
"Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee."
Footnote 12: ([return])
A fresh-water spring rushing into the sea called Chewton Bunny.
Footnote 13: ([return])