[398]. After proportion or form add: ‘This distinction has not been sufficiently attended to. Mr. West, for example, has considerable knowledge of drawing, as it relates to proportion, to the anatomical measurements of the human body. He has not the least conception of elegance or grandeur of form. The one is matter of mechanical knowledge, the other of taste and feeling. Rubens was deficient in the anatomical measurements, as well as in the marking of the muscles: but he had as fine an eye as possible for what may be called the picturesque in form, both in the composition of his figures and in the particular parts. In all that relates to the expression of motion, that is, to ease, freedom, and elasticity of form, he was unrivalled. He was as superior to Mr. West in his power of drawing, as in his power of colouring.—Correggio’s proportions are said to have been often incorrect: but his feeling of beauty, and grace of outline, was of the most exquisite kind.’
[399]. After and some others add the following footnote: ‘Our references are generally made to pictures in the late exhibition of Sir Joshua’s works in the British Gallery.’
No mark or likelihood. 1 King Henry IV., Act III. Sc. 2.
After downright portraits and nothing more, add: ‘What if he had painted them on the theory of middle forms, or pounded their features together in the same metaphysical mortar? Mr. Westall might just as well have painted them. They would have been of no more value than his own pictures of Mr. Tomkins,[[70]] the penman, or Mrs. Robinson,[[71]] who is painted with a hat and feather, or Mrs. Billington,[[72]] who is painted as St. Cecilia, or than the Prince of Wales and Duke of York, or the portraits of Sir George and Lady Beaumont. Would the artist in this case have conferred the same benefit on the public, or have added as much to the stock of our ideas, as by giving us fac-similes of the most interesting characters of the time, with whom we seem, from his representations of them, to be almost as well acquainted as if we had known them, and to remember their persons as well as their writings? Yet we would rather have seen Johnson, or Goldsmith, or Burke, than their portraits. This shows that the effect of the pictures would not have been the worse, if they had been the more finished, and more detailed: for there is nothing so true, either to the details or to the general effect, as nature. The only celebrated person of this period whom we have seen is Mr. Sheridan, whose face, we have no hesitation in saying, contains a great deal more, and is better worth seeing, than Sir Joshua’s picture of him.’
After stiff and confined add: ‘But there is a medium between primness and hoydening.’
[400]. After ease and elegance add: ‘Sir Joshua seems more than once (both theoretically and practically) to have borrowed his idea of positive excellence from a negation of the opposite defect. His tastes led him to reject the faults, which he had observed in others; but he had not always power to realize his own idea of perfection, or to ascertain precisely in what it consisted. His colouring also wanted that purity, delicacy, and transparent smoothness, which gives such an exquisite charm to Vandyke’s women. Vandyke’s portraits (mostly of English women) in the Louvre, have a cool, refreshing air about them, a look of simplicity and modesty even in the very tone, which forms a fine contrast to the voluptuous glow and mellow golden lustre of Titian’s Italian women. There is a quality of flesh-colour in Vandyke, which is to be found in no other painter, neither in Titian, Rubens, nor Rembrandt; nor is it in Reynolds, for he had nothing which was not taken from those three. It exactly conveys the idea of the soft, smooth, sliding, continuous, delicately varied surface of the skin. Correggio approached nearer to it, though his principle of light and shade was totally different. The objects in Vandyke have the least possible difference of light and shade, and are presented to the eye without being reflected through any other medium. It is this extreme purity and clearness of tone, together with the elegance and precision of his particular forms,[[73]] that places Vandyke in the first rank of portrait-painters. As Reynolds had not his defects, he had not his excellences. We accidentally saw the late Lady Mount-Joy at the exhibition of Sir Joshua’s works in Pall-mall: nor could we help contrasting the dazzling clearness of complexion, the delicacy and distinctness of the form of the features, with the half made-up and faded beauties which hung on the walls, and which comparatively resembled paste figures, smeared over with paint. We doubt whether the same effect would have been produced in a fine collection of Vandyke’s. In the gallery of Blenheim, there is a family picture of the Duchess of Buckingham with her children, which is a pure mirrour of fashion. The picture produces the same sort of respect and silence as if the spectator had been introduced into a family circle of the highest rank, at a period when rank was a greater distinction than it is at present. The delicate attention and mild solicitude of the mother are admirable, but two of the children surpass description. The one is a young girl of nine or ten, who looks as if “the winds of heaven had not been permitted to visit her face too roughly”;[[74]] she stands before her mother in all the pride of childish self-importance, and studied display of artificial prettinesses, with a consciousness that the least departure from strict propriety or decorum will be instantly detected; the other is a little round-faced chubby boy, who stands quite at his ease behind his mother’s chair, with a fine rosy glow of health in his cheeks, through which the blood is seen circulating. It was like seeing the objects reflected in a glass. The picture of the late Duke and Duchess of Marlborough and their children, in the same room, painted by Sir Joshua, appear coarse and tawdry when compared with “the soft precision of the clear Vandyke.”’[[75]]
[400]. After borrowed from Correggio add: ‘Sir Joshua has only repeated the same idea ad infinitum, and has, besides, caricatured it. It has been said that his children were unrivalled. Titian’s, Raphael’s, and Correggio’s were much superior. Those of Rubens and Poussin were at least equal. If any one should hesitate as to the last painter in particular, we would refer them to the picture (at Lord Grosvenor’s) of the children paying adoration to the infant Christ, or to the children drinking in the picture of Moses striking the rock. Our making these comparisons or giving these preferences is not, we conceive, any disparagement to Sir Joshua. Did we not think highly of him, we might well blush to make them.’
Infant Samuel. The passage in The Champion is slightly different, and quotes a few lines from Mr. Sotheby’s poetical Epistle to Sir G. Beaumont describing the infant Jupiter and the infant Samuel. William Sotheby (1757–1833) was horse-soldier, friend of Sir Walter Scott, and poet.
After but the name add: ‘Sir Joshua himself (as it appears from his biographers) had no idea of a subject in painting them, till some ignorant and officious admirer undertook to supply the deficiency. What can be more trifling than giving the portrait of Kitty Fisher[[76]] the mock-heroic title of Cleopatra?’
[401]. Count Ugolino. The story will be found in The Inferno, Canto XXXIII.