A complaint has been made of the short-lived duration of works of art, and particularly of pictures; and poets more especially are apt to lament and to indulge in an elegiac strain over the fragile beauties of the sister-art. The complaint is inconsiderate, if not invidious. They will last our time. Nay, they have lasted centuries before us, and will last centuries after us; and even when they are no more, will leave a shadow and a cloud of glory behind them, through all time. Lord Bacon exclaims triumphantly, ‘Have not the poems of Homer lasted five-and-twenty hundred years, and not a syllable of them is lost?’ But it might be asked in return, ‘Have not many of the Greek statues now lasted almost as long, without losing a particle of their splendour or their meaning, while the Iliad (except to a very few) has become almost a dead letter?’ Has not the Venus of Medicis had almost as many partisans and admirers as the Helen of the old blind bard? Besides, what has Phidias gained in reputation even by the discovery of the Elgin Marbles? Or is not Michael Angelo’s the greatest name in modern art, whose works we only know from description and by report? Surely, there is something in a name, in wide-spread reputation, in endless renown, to satisfy the ambition of the mind of man. Who in his works would vie immortality with nature? An epitaph, an everlasting monument in the dim remembrance of ages, is enough below the skies. Moreover, the sense of final inevitable decay humanises, and gives an affecting character to the triumphs of exalted art. Imperishable works executed by perishable hands are a sort of insult to our nature, and almost a contradiction in terms. They are ungrateful children, and mock the makers. Neither is the noble idea of antiquity legibly made out without the marks of the progress and lapse of time. That which is as good now as ever it was, seems a thing of yesterday. Nothing is old to the imagination that does not appear to grow old. Ruins are grander and more venerable than any modern structure can be, or than the oldest could be if kept in the most entire preservation. They convey the perspective of time. So the Elgin Marbles are more impressive from their mouldering, imperfect state. They transport us to the Parthenon, and old Greece. The Theseus is of the age of Theseus: while the Apollo Belvidere is a modern fine gentleman; and we think of this last figure only as an ornament to the room where it happens to be placed.—We conceive that those are persons of narrow minds who cannot relish an author’s style that smacks of time, that has a crust of antiquity over it, like that which gathers upon old wine. These sprinklings of archaisms and obsolete turns of expression (so abhorrent to the fashionable reader) are intellectual links that connect the generations together, and enlarge our knowledge of language and of nature. Of the two, we prefer black-letter to hot-pressed paper. Does not every language change and wear out? Do not the most popular writers become quaint and old-fashioned every fifty or every hundred years? Is there not a constant conflict of taste and opinion between those who adhere to the established and triter modes of expression, and those who affect glossy innovations, in advance of the age? It is pride enough for the best authors to have been read. This applies to their own country; and to all others, they are ‘a book sealed.’ But Rubens is as good in Holland as he is in Flanders, where he was born, in Italy or in Spain, in England, or in Scotland—no, there alone he is not understood. The Scotch understand nothing but what is Scotch. What has the dry, husky, economic eye of Scotland to do with the florid hues and luxuriant extravagance of Rubens? Nothing. They like Wilkie’s pauper style better. It may be said that translations remedy the want of universality of language: but prints give (at least) as good an idea of pictures as translations do of poems, or of any productions of the press that employ the colouring of style and imagination. Gil Blas is translateable; Racine and Rousseau are not. The mere English student knows more of the character and spirit of Raphael’s pictures in the Vatican, than he does of Ariosto or Tasso from Hoole’s Version. There is, however, one exception to the catholic language of painting, which is in French pictures. They are national fixtures, and ought never to be removed from the soil in which they grow. They will not answer any where else, nor are they worth Custom-House Duties. Flemish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, are all good and intelligible in their several ways—we know what they mean—they require no interpreter: but the French painters see nature with organs and with minds peculiarly their own. One must be born in France to understand their painting, or their poetry. Their productions in art are either literal, or extravagant—dry, frigid fac-similes, in which they seem to take up nature by pin-points, or else vapid distorted caricatures, out of all rule and compass. They are, in fact, at home only in the light and elegant; and whenever they attempt to add force or solidity (as they must do in the severer productions of the pencil) they are compelled to substitute an excess of minute industry for a comprehension of the whole, or make a desperate mechanical effort at extreme expression, instead of giving the true, natural, and powerful workings of passion. Their representations of nature are meagre skeletons, that bear the same relation to the originals that botanical specimens, enclosed in a portfolio, flat, dry, hard, and pithless, do to flourishing plants and shrubs. Their historical figures are painful outlines, or graduated elevations of the common statues, spiritless, colourless, motionless, which have the form, but none of the power of the antique. What an abortive attempt is the Coronation of Napoleon, by the celebrated David, lately exhibited in this country! It looks like a finished sign-post painting—a sea of frozen outlines.—Could the artist make nothing of ‘the foremost man in all this world,’ but a stiff, upright figure? The figure and attitude of the Empress are, however, pretty and graceful; and we recollect one face in profile, of an ecclesiastic, to the right, with a sanguine look of health in the complexion, and a large benevolence of soul. It is not Monsieur Talleyrand, whom the late Lord Castlereagh characterised as a worthy man and his friend. His Lordship was not a physiognomist! The whole of the shadowed part of the picture seems to be enveloped in a shower of blue powder.—But to make amends for all that there is or that there is not in the work, David has introduced his wife and his two daughters; and in the Catalogue has given us the places of abode, and the names of the husbands of the latter. This is a little out of place: yet these are the people who laugh at our blunders. We do not mean to extend the above sweeping censure to Claude, or Poussin: of course they are excepted: but even in them the national character lurked amidst unrivalled excellence. If Claude has a fault, it is that he is finical; and Poussin’s figures might be said by a satirist to be antique puppets. To proceed to our task.—
The first picture that struck us on entering the Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery (a little bewildered as we were with old recollections, and present objects) was the Meeting of Christ and St. John, one of Raphael’s master-pieces. The eager ‘child-worship’ of the young St. John, the modest retirement and dignified sweetness of the Christ, and the graceful, matron-like air of the Virgin bending over them, full and noble, yet feminine and elegant, cannot be surpassed. No words can describe them to those who have not seen the picture:—the attempt is still vainer to those who have. There is, however, a very fine engraving of this picture, which may be had for a trifling sum.—No glory is around the head of the Mother, nor is it needed: but the soul of the painter sheds its influence over it like a dove, and the spirit of love, sanctity, beauty, breathes from the divine group. There are four Raphaels (Holy Families) in this collection, two others by the side of this in his early more precise and affected manner, somewhat faded, and a small one of the Virgin, Sleeping Jesus, and St. John, in his finest manner. There is, or there was, a duplicate of this picture (of which the engraving is also common) in the Louvre, which was certainly superior to the one at the Marquis of Stafford’s. The colouring of the drapery in that too was cold, and the face of the Virgin thin and poor; but never was infancy laid asleep more calmly, more sweetly, more soundly, than in the figure of Our Saviour—the little pouting mouth seemed to drink balmy, innocent sleep—and the rude expression of wonder and delight in the more robust, sun-burnt, fur-clad figure of St. John was as spirited in itself as it was striking, when contrasted with the meeker beauties of the figure opposed to it.—From these we turn to the Four Ages, by Titian, or Giorgione, as some say. Strange that there should have lived two men in the same age, on the same spot of earth, with respect to whom it should bear a question—which of them painted such a picture! Barry, we remember, and Collins, the miniature-painter, thought it a Giorgione, and they were considered two of the best judges going, at the time this picture was exhibited, among others, in the Orleans Gallery. We cannot pretend to decide on such nice matters ex cathedra; but no painter need be ashamed to own it. The gradations of human life are marked with characteristic felicity, and the landscape, which is thrown in, adds a pastoral charm and naïveté to the whole. To live or to die in such a chosen, still retreat must be happy!—Certainly, this composition suggests a beautiful moral lesson; and as to the painting of the group of children in the corner, we suppose, for careless freedom of pencil, and a certain milky softness of the flesh, it can scarcely be paralleled. Over the three Raphaels is a Danae, by Annibal Caracci, which we used to adore where it was hung on high in the Orleans Gallery. The face is fine, upturned, expectant; and the figure no less fine, desirable, ample, worthy of a God.—The golden shower is just seen descending; the landscape at a distance has (so fancy might interpret) a cold, shuddering aspect. There is another very fine picture of the same hand close by, St. Gregory with Angels. It is difficult to know which to admire most, the resigned and yet earnest expression of the Saint, or the elegant forms, the graceful attitudes, and bland, cordial, benignant faces of the attendant angels. The artist in these last has evidently had an eye to Correggio, both in the waving outline, and in the charm of the expression; and he has succeeded admirably, but not entirely. Something of the extreme unction of Correggio is wanting. The drawing of Annibal’s Angels is, perhaps, too firm, too sinewy, too masculine. In Correggio, the Angel’s spirit seemed to be united to a human body, to imbue, mould, penetrate every part with its sweetness and softness: in Caracci, you would say that a heavenly spirit inhabited, looked out of, moved a goodly human frame,
‘And o’er-informed the tenement of clay.’
The composition of this picture is rather forced (it was one of those made to order for the monks) and the colour is somewhat metallic; but it has, notwithstanding, on the whole, a striking and tolerably harmonious effect.—There is still another picture by Caracci (also an old favourite with us, for it was in the Orleans set) Diana and Nymphs bathing, with the story of Calisto. It is one of his very best, with something of the drawing of the antique, and the landscape-colouring of Titian. The figures are all heroic, handsome, such as might belong to huntresses, or Goddesses: and the coolness and seclusion of the scene, under grey over-hanging cliffs, and brown overshadowing trees, with all the richness and truth of nature, have the effect of an enchanting reality.—The story and figures are more classical and better managed than those of the Diana and Calisto by Titian; but there is a charm in that picture and the fellow to it, the Diana and Actæon, (there is no other fellow to it in the world!) which no words can convey. It is the charm thrown over each by the greatest genius for colouring that the world ever saw. It is difficult, nay, impossible to say which is the finest in this respect: but either one or the other (whichever we turn to, and we can never be satisfied with looking at either—so rich a scene do they unfold, so serene a harmony do they infuse into the soul) is like a divine piece of music, or rises ‘like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumes.’ In the figures, in the landscape, in the water, in the sky, there are tones, colours, scattered with a profuse and unerring hand, gorgeous, but most true, dazzling with their force, but blended, softened, woven together into a woof like that of Iris—tints of flesh colour, as if you saw the blood circling beneath the pearly skin; clouds empurpled with setting suns; hills steeped in azure skies; trees turning to a mellow brown; the cold grey rocks, and the water so translucent, that you see the shadows and the snowy feet of the naked nymphs in it. With all this prodigality of genius, there is the greatest severity and discipline of art. The figures seem grouped for the effect of colour—the most striking contrasts are struck out, and then a third object, a piece of drapery, an uplifted arm, a bow and arrows, a straggling weed, is introduced to make an intermediate tint, or carry on the harmony. Every colour is melted, impasted into every other, with fine keeping and bold diversity. Look at that indignant, queen-like figure of Diana (more perhaps like an offended mortal princess, than an immortal Goddess, though the immortals could frown and give themselves strange airs), and see the snowy, ermine-like skin; the pale clear shadows of the delicately formed back; then the brown colour of the slender trees behind to set off the shaded flesh; and last, the dark figure of the Ethiopian girl behind, completing the gradation. Then the bright scarf suspended in the air connects itself with the glowing clouds, and deepens the solemn azure of the sky: Actæon’s bow and arrows fallen on the ground are also red; and there is a little flower on the brink of the Bath which catches and pleases the eye, saturated with this colour. The yellowish grey of the earth purifies the low tone of the figures where they are in half-shadow; and this again is enlivened by the leaden-coloured fountain of the Bath, which is set off (or kept down in its proper place) by the blue vestments strown near it. The figure of Actæon is spirited and natural; it is that of a bold rough hunter in the early ages, struck with surprise, abashed with beauty. The forms of some of the female figures are elegant enough, particularly that of Diana in the story of Calisto; and there is a very pretty-faced girl mischievously dragging the culprit forward; but it is the texture of the flesh that is throughout delicious, unrivalled, surpassingly fair. The landscape canopies the living scene with a sort of proud, disdainful consciousness. The trees nod to it, and the hills roll at a distance in a sea of colour. Every where tone, not form, predominates—there is not a distinct line in the picture—but a gusto, a rich taste of colour is left upon the eye as if it were the palate, and the diapason of picturesque harmony is full to overflowing. ‘Oh Titian and Nature! which of you copied the other?’
We are ashamed of this description, now that we have made it, and heartily wish somebody would make a better. There is another Titian here (which was also in the Orleans Gallery),[[3]] Venus rising from the sea. The figure and face are gracefully designed and sweetly expressed:—whether it is the picture of the Goddess of Love, may admit of a question; that it is the picture of a lovely woman in a lovely attitude, admits of none. The half-shadow in which most of it is painted, is a kind of veil through which the delicate skin shows more transparent and aerial. There is nothing in the picture but this single exquisitely turned figure, and if it were continued downward to a whole-length, it would seem like a copy of a statue of the Goddess carved in ivory or marble; but being only a half-length, it has not this effect at all, but looks like an enchanting study, or a part of a larger composition, selected a l’envie. The hair, and the arm holding it up, are nearly the same as in the well-known picture of Titian’s Mistress, and as delicious. The back-ground is beautifully painted. We said before, that there was no object in the picture detached from the principal figure. Nay, there is the sea, and a sea-shell, but these might be given in sculpture.—Under the Venus, is a portrait by Vandyke, of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, a most gentleman-like performance, mild, clear, intelligent, unassuming; and on the right of the spectator, a Madonna, by Guido, with the icy glow of sanctity upon it; and to the left, the Fable of Salmacis, by Albano (saving the ambiguity of the subject), exquisitely painted. Four finer specimens of the art can scarcely be found again in so small a compass. There is in another room a portrait, said to be by Moroni, and called Titian’s School-master, from a vague tradition, that he was in the habit of frequently visiting, in order to study and learn from it. If so, he must have profited by his assiduity; for it looks as if he had painted it. Not knowing any thing of Moroni, if we had been asked who had done it, we should have replied, ‘Either Titian or the Devil.’[[4]] It is considerably more laboured and minute than Titian; but the only objection at all staggering is, that it has less fiery animation than is ordinarily to be found in his pictures. Look at the portrait above it, for instance—Clement VII. by the great Venetian; and you find the eye looking at you again, as if it had been observing you all the time: but the eye in Titian’s School-master is an eye to look at, not to look with,[[5]] or if it looks at you, it does not look through you, which may be almost made a test of Titian’s heads. There is not the spirit, the intelligence within, moulding the expression, and giving it intensity of purpose and decision of character. In every other respect but this (and perhaps a certain want of breadth) it is as good as Titian. There is (we understand) a half-length of Clement VII. by Julio Romano, in the Papal Palace at Rome, in which he is represented as seated above the spectator, with the head elevated and the eye looking down like a camel’s, with an amazing dignity of aspect. The picture (Mr. Northcote says) is hard and ill-coloured, but, in strength of character and conception, superior to the Titian at the Marquis of Stafford’s. Titian, undoubtedly, put a good deal of his own character into his portraits. He was not himself filled with the ‘milk of human kindness.’ He got his brother, who promised to rival him in his own art, and of whom he was jealous, sent on a foreign embassy; and he so frightened Pordenone while he was painting an altar-piece for a church, that he worked with his palette and brushes in his hand, and a sword by his side.
We meet with one or two admirable portraits, particularly No. 112, by Tintoretto, which is of a fine fleshy tone, and A Doge of Venice, by Palma Vecchio, stamped with an expressive look of official and assumed dignity. There is a Bassan, No. 95, The Circumcision, the colours of which are somewhat dingy with age, and sunk into the canvas; but as the sun shone upon it while we were looking at it, it glittered all green and gold. Bassan’s execution is as fine as possible, and his colouring has a most striking harmonious effect.—We must not forget the Muleteers, supposed to be by Correggio, in which the figure of the Mule seems actually passing across the picture (you hear his bells); nor the little copy of his Marriage of St. Catherine, by L. Caracci, which is all over grace, delicacy, and sweetness. Any one may judge of his progress in a taste for the refinements of art, by his liking for this picture. Indeed, Correggio is the very essence of refinement. Among other pictures in the Italian division of the gallery, we would point out the Claudes (particularly Nos. 43 and 50,) which, though inferior to Mr. Angerstein’s as compositions, preserve more of the delicacy of execution, (or what Barry used to call ‘the fine oleaginous touches of Claude‘)—two small Gaspar Poussins, in which the landscape seems to have been just washed by a shower, and the storm blown over—the Death of Adonis, by Luca Cambiasi, an Orleans picture, lovely in sorrow, and in speechless agony, and faded like the life that is just expiring in it—a Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, by Alessandro Veronese, a very clever, and sensible, but rigidly painted picture[[6]]—an Albert Durer, the Death of the Virgin—a Female head, by Leonardo da Vinci—and the Woman taken in Adultery, by Pordenone, which last the reader may admire or not, as he pleases. We cannot close this list without referring to the Christ bearing his cross, by Domenichino, a picture full of interest and skill; and the little touching allegory of the Infant Christ sleeping on a cross, by Guido.
The Dutch School contains a number of excellent specimens of the best masters. There are two Tenierses, a Fair, and Boors merry-making, unrivalled for a look of the open air, for lively awkward gesture, and variety and grotesqueness of grouping and rustic character. There is a little picture, by Le Nain, called the Village Minstrel, with a set of youthful auditors, the most incorrigible little mischievous urchins we ever saw, but with admirable execution and expression. The Metzus are curious and fine—the Ostades admirable. Gerard Douw’s own portrait is certainly a gem. We noticed a Ruysdael in one corner of the room (No. 221), a dark, flat, wooded country, but delectable in tone and pencilling. Vandevelde’s Sea-pieces are capital—the water is smooth as glass, and the boats and vessels have the buoyancy of butterflies on it. The Seaport, by A. Cuyp, is miraculous for truth, brilliancy, and clearness, almost beyond actual water. These cannot be passed over; but there is a little picture which we beg to commend to the gentle reader, the Vangoyen, at the end of the room, No. 156, which has that yellow-tawny colour in the meads, and that grey chill look in the old convent, that give one the precise feeling of a mild day towards the end of winter, in a humid, marshy country. We many years ago copied a Vangoyen, a view of a Canal ‘with yellow tufted banks and gliding sail,’ modestly pencilled, truly felt—and have had an affection for him ever since. There is a small inner room with some most respectable modern pictures. Wilkie’s Breakfast-table is among them.
The Sacraments, by N. Poussin, occupy a separate room by themselves, and have a grand and solemn effect; but we could hardly see them where they are; and in general, we prefer his treatment of light and classical subjects to those of sacred history. He wanted weight for the last; or, if that word is objected to, we will change it, and say force.
On the whole, the Stafford Gallery is probably the most magnificent Collection this country can boast. The specimens of the different schools are as numerous as they are select; and they are equally calculated to delight the student by the degree, or to inform the uninitiated by the variety of excellence. Yet even this Collection is not complete. It is deficient in Rembrandts, Vandykes, and Rubenses; except one splendid allegory and fruit-piece by the last.