‘At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiles!’
In the opposite corner of the room is a Portrait of a Female (by the same), in which every thing is as clear, and pointed, and brought out into the open day, as in the former it is withdrawn from close and minute inspection. The face glitters with smiles as the ear-rings sparkle with light. The whole is stiff, starched, and formal, has a pearly or metallic look, and you throughout mark the most elaborate and careful finishing. The two pictures make an antithesis, where they are placed; but this was not probably at all intended: it proceeds simply from the difference in the nature of the subject, and the truth and appropriate power of the treatment of it.—In the middle between these two pictures is a small history, by Rembrandt, of the Salutation of Elizabeth, in which the figures come out straggling, disjointed, quaint, ugly as in a dream, but partake of the mysterious significance of preternatural communication, and are seen through the visible gloom, or through the dimmer night of antiquity. Light and shade, not form or feeling, were the elements of which Rembrandt composed the finest poetry, and his imagination brooded only over the medium through which we discern objects, leaving the objects themselves uninspired, unhallowed, and untouched!
We must go through our account of these pictures as they start up in our memory, not according to the order of their arrangement, for want of a proper set of memorandums. Our friend, Mr. Gummow, of Cleveland-house, had a nice little neatly-bound duodecimo Catalogue, of great use as a Vade Mecum to occasional visitants or absent critics—but here we have no such advantage; and to take notes before company is a thing that we abhor. It has a look of pilfering something from the pictures. While we merely enjoy the sight of the objects of art before us, or sympathise with the approving gaze of the greater beauty around us, it is well; there is a feeling of luxury and refinement in the employment; but take out a pocket-book, and begin to scribble notes in it, the date of the picture, the name, the room, some paltry defect, some pitiful discovery (not worth remembering), the non-essentials, the mechanic common-places of the art, and the sentiment is gone—you shew that you have a further object in view, a job to execute, a feeling foreign to the place, and different from every one else—you become a butt and a mark for ridicule to the rest of the company—and you retire with your pockets full of wisdom from a saloon of art, with as little right as you have to carry off the dessert, (or what you have not been able to consume,) from an inn, or a banquet. Such, at least, is our feeling; and we had rather make a mistake now and then, as to a numero, or the name of a room in which a picture is placed, than spoil our whole pleasure in looking at a fine Collection, and consequently the pleasure of the reader in learning what we thought of it.
Among the pictures that haunt our eye in this way is the Adoration of the Angels, by N. Poussin. It is one of his finest works—elegant, graceful, full of feeling, happy, enlivening. It is treated rather as a classical than as a sacred subject. The Angels are more like Cupids than Angels. They are, however, beautifully grouped, with various and expressive attitudes, and remind one, by their half antic, half serious homage, of the line—
‘Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.’
They are laden with baskets of flowers—the tone of the picture is rosy, florid; it seems to have been painted at
‘The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,’
and the angels over-head sport and gambol in the air with butterfly-wings, like butterflies. It is one of those rare productions that satisfy the mind, and from which we turn away, not from weariness, but from a fulness of delight.—The Israelites returning Thanks in the Wilderness is a fine picture, but inferior to this. Near it is a group of Angels, said to be by Correggio. The expressions are grotesque and fine, but the colouring does not seem to us to be his. The texture of the flesh, as well as the hue, too much resembles the skin of ripe fruit. We meet with several fine landscapes of the two Poussins, (particularly one of a rocky eminence by Gaspar,) in the room before you come to the Rembrandts, in which the mixture of grey rock and green trees and shrubs is beautifully managed, with striking truth and clearness.
Among detached and smaller pictures, we would wish to point out to the attention of our readers, an exquisite head of a Child, by Andrea del Sarto, and a fine Salvator in the inner room of all: in the room leading to it, a pleasing, glassy Cuyp, an airy, earthy-looking Teniers, and a Mother and a Sleeping Child, by Guido: in the Saloon, a St. Catherine, one of Parmegiano’s most graceful pictures; a St. Agnes, by Domenichino, full of sweetness, thought, and feeling; and two pictures by Raphael, that have a look as if painted on paper: a Repose in Egypt, and St. Luke painting the Virgin, both admirable for drawing and expression, and a rich, purple, crayon tone of colouring. Wherever Raphael is, there is grace and dignity, and an informing soul. In the last-mentioned room, near the entrance, is also a Conversion of Saint Paul, by Rubens, of infinite spirit, brilliancy, and delicacy of execution.