The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 09 (of 12)

by William Hazlitt

THE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE BRITISH INSTITUTION

We will lay odds that this is a fellow ‘damned in a fair face;’ with white eyes and eye-brows; of the colour of a Shrewsbury cake; a smooth tallow-skinned rascal, a white German sausage, a well-fed chitterling, from whose face Madame de —— would have turned away in disgust,—a transcendental stuffed man! We have no patience that the Arts should be catechised by a piece of whitleather, a whey-face, who thinks that pictures, like the moon, should be made of green-cheese! Shall a roll of double tripe rise up in judgment on grace; shall a piece of dough talk of feeling? ‘Tis too much. ‘Sdeath, for Rembrandt to be demanded of a cheese-curd, what replication should he make? What might Vandyke answer to a jack-pudding, whose fingers are of a thickness at both ends? What should Rubens say, who ‘lived in the rainbow, and played i’ th’ plighted clouds,’ to a swaddling-clout, a piece of stockinet, of fleecy hosiery, to a squab man, without a bend in his body? What might Raphael answer to a joint-stool? Or Nicholas Poussin, charged in the presence of his Cephalus and Aurora with being a mere pedant, without grace or feeling, to this round-about machine of formal impertinence, this lumbering go-cart of dulness and spite? We could have wished that as the fellow stood before the portrait of Rembrandt, chattering like an ape, making mocks and mows at it, the picture had lifted up its great grimy fist, and knocked him down.

The Catalogue Raisonné of the British Institution is only worth notice, as it is pretty well understood to be a declaration of the views of the Royal Academy. It is a very dull, gross, impudent attack by one of its toad-eaters on human genius, on permanent reputation, and on liberal art. What does it say? Why, in so many words, that the knowledge of Art in this country is inconsistent with the existence of the Academy, and that their success as a body of men instituted for promoting and encouraging the Fine Arts, requires the destruction or concealment of all works of Art of great and acknowledged excellence. In this they may be right; but we did not think they would have come forward to say so themselves. Or that they would get a fellow, a low buffoon, a wretched Merry Andrew, a practical St. Giles’s joker, a dirty Grub-Street critic, to vent his abominations on the chef-d’œuvres produced by the greatest painters that have gone before them, to paw them over with his bleared-eyes, to smear the filth and ordure of his tongue upon them, to spit at them, to point at them, to nickname them, to hoot at them, to make mouths at them, to shrug up his shoulders and run away from them in the presence of these divine guests, like a blackguard who affects to make a bugbear of every one he meets in the street; to play over again the nauseous tricks of one of Swift’s Yahoos—and for what? Avowedly for the purpose of diverting the public mind from the contemplation of all that genius and art can boast in the lapse of ages, and to persuade the world that there is nothing in Art that has been or ever will be produced worth looking at but the gilt frames and red curtains at the Exhibition of the Royal Academy! We knew before that they had no great genius for the Arts; but we thought they might have some love of them in their hearts. They here avow their rankling jealousy, hatred and scorn, of all Art and of all the great names in Art, and as a bold put indeed, require the keeping down of the public taste as the only means of keeping up the bubble of their reputation. They insist that their only hope of continued encouragement and support with a discerning public is in hood-winking that public, in confining their highest notions of Art to their own gross and superficial style of daubing, and in vilifying all works of standard genius.—This is right English. The English are a shop-keeping nation, and the Royal Academy are a society of hucksters in the Fine Arts, who are more tenacious of their profits as chapmen and dealers, than of the honour of the Art. The day after the Catalogue Raisonné was published, the Prince Regent, in the name and on behalf of his Father, should have directed it to be burned by the hands of the hangman of their Committee, or, upon refusal, have shut up their shop. A society for the encouragement and promotion of Art has no right to exist at all, from the moment that it professes to exist only in wrong of Art, by the suppression of the knowledge of Art, in contempt of genius in Art, in defiance of all manly and liberal sentiment in Art. But this is what the Royal Academy professes to do in the Catalogue Raisonné.

The Academy, from its commencement and up to the present hour, is in fact, a mercantile body, like any other mercantile body, consisting chiefly of manufacturers of portraits, who have got a regular monopoly of this branch of trade, with a certain rank, style, and title of their own, that is, with the King’s privilege to be thought Artists and men of genius,—and who, with the jealousy natural to such bodies, supported by authority from without, and by cabal within, think themselves bound to crush all generous views and liberal principles of Art, lest they should interfere with their monopoly and their privilege to be thought Artists and men of genius. The Academy is the Royal road to Art. The whole style of English Art, as issuing from this Academy, is founded on a principle of appeal to the personal vanity and ignorance of their sitters, and of accommodation to the lucrative pursuits of the Painter, in a sweeping attention to effect in painting, by which means he can cover so many more whole or half lengths in each season. The Artists have not time to finish their pictures, or if they had, the effect would be lost in the superficial glare of that hot room, where nothing but rouged cheeks, naked shoulders, and Ackermann’s dresses for May, can catch the eye in the crowd and bustle and rapid succession of meretricious attractions, as they do in another hot room of the same equivocal description. Yet they complain in one part of the Catalogue, that ‘they (the Academicians) are forced to come into a hasty competition every year with works that have stood the test of ages.’ It is for that very reason, among others, that it was proper to exhibit the works at the British Institution, to show to the public, and by that means to make the Academicians feel, that the securing the applause of posterity and a real rank in the Art, which that alone can give, depended on the number of pictures they finished, and not on the number they began. It is this which excites the apprehensions of the cabal; for if the eye of the public should be once spoiled by the Old Masters, the necessity of doing something like them might considerably baulk the regularity of their returns. Why should they complain of being forced into this premature competition? Who forces them to bring forward so many pictures yearly before they are fit to be seen? Would they have taken more pains, more time to finish them, to work them up to that fastidious standard of perfection, on which they have set their minds, if they had not been hurried into this unfair competition with the British Institution, ‘sent to their account with all their imperfections on their heads, unhouseled, unanointed, unanealed?’ Would they have done a single stroke more to any one picture, if the Institution had never been opened? No such thing. It is not then true, that this new and alarming competition prevents them from finishing their works, but it prevents them from imposing them on the public as finished. Pingo in eternitatem, is not their motto. There are three things which constitute the art of painting, which make it interesting to the public, which give it permanence and rank among the efforts of human genius. They are, first, gusto or expression: i.e. the conveying to the eye the impressions of the soul, or the other senses connected with the sense of sight, such as the different passions visible in the countenance, the romantic interest connected with scenes of nature, the character and feelings associated with different objects. In this, the highest and first part of art, the Italian painters, particularly Raphael, Correggio, &c., excel. The second is the picturesque; that is, the seizing on those objects, or situations and accidents of objects, as light and shade, &c. which make them most striking to the mind as objects of sight only. This is the forte of the Flemish and Venetian painters, Titian, Paul Veronese, Rubens, Vandyke, Rembrandt, and they have carried this part of the art as high as it can go, some of them with more, some of them with less of the former excellence. The third is the exact and laborious imitation of natural objects, such as they exist in their component parts, with every variety and nicety of detail, the pencil performing the part of a microscope, and there being no necessity for expression or the picturesque in the object represented, or anything but truth in the representation. In this least interesting but still curious and ingenious part of the Art, the Dutch School have been allowed to excel, though with little of the former qualities, which indeed are not very much wanted for this purpose. Now in all these three the English School are notoriously deficient and they are so for these following reasons:—

They cannot paint gusto, or high expression, for it is not in the national character. At least, it must be sought in Nature; but our Painters do not go out of their way in search of character and expression—their sitters come to them in crowds; and they come to them not to be painted in all the truth of character and expression, but to be flattered out of all meaning; or they would no longer come in crowds. To please generally, the Painter must exaggerate what is generally pleasing, obvious to all capacities, and void of offence before God and man, the shewy, the superficial, and the insipid, that which strikes the greatest number of persons with the least effort of thought; and he must suppress all the rest; all that might be ‘to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Gentiles foolishness.’ The Exhibition is a successful experiment on the ignorance and credulity of the town. They collect ‘a quantity of barren spectators’ to judge of Art, in their corporate and public capacity, and then each makes the best market he can of them in his own. A Royal Academician must not ‘hold the mirror up to Nature,’ but make his canvass ‘the glass of fashion, and the mould of form.’ The ‘numbers without number’ who pay thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred guineas for their pictures in large, expect their faces to come out of the Painter’s hands smooth, rosy, round, smiling; just as they expect their hair to come out of the barber’s curled and powdered. It would be a breach of contract to proceed in any other way. A fashionable Artist and a fashionable hair-dresser have the same common principles of theory and practice; the one fits his customers to appear with éclat in a ball room, the other in the Great Room of the Royal Academy. A certain dexterity, and a knowledge of the prevailing fashion, are all that is necessary to either. An Exhibition-portrait is, therefore, an essence, not of character, but of commonplace. It displays not high thought and fine feeling, but physical well-being, with an outside label of health, ease, and competence. Yet the Catalogue-writer talks of the dignity of modern portrait! To enter into a general obligation to paint the passions or characters of men, must, where there are none, be difficult to the artist; where they are bad, be disagreeable to his employers. When Sir Thomas Lawrence painted Lord Castlereagh some time ago, he did not try to exhibit his character, out of complaisance to his Lordship, nor his understanding, out of regard to himself; but he painted him in a fashionable coat, with his hair dressed in the fashion, in a genteel posture like one of his footmen, and with the prim, smirking aspect of a haberdasher. There was nothing of the noble disinvoltura of his Lordship’s manner, the grand contour of his features, the profundity of design hid under an appearance of indifference, the traces of the Irish patriot or the English statesman. It would have puzzled Lavater or Spurzheim to have discovered there the author of the Letter to Mon Prince. Tacitus had drawn him before in a different style, and perhaps Sir Thomas despaired of rivalling this great master in his own way. Yet the picture pleased, and Mr. Perry of the Chronicle swore to the likeness, though he had been warned to the contrary. Now, if this picture had erred on the side of the characteristic expression as much as it did on that of mannered insignificance, how it must have shocked all parties in the State! An insipid misrepresentation was safer than a disagreeable reality. In the glosses of modern art, as in the modern refinement of law, it is the truth that makes the libel.—Again, the picturesque is necessarily banished from the painting rooms of the Academicians, and from the Great Room of the Academy. People of fashion go to be painted because other people do, and they wish to look like other people. We never remember to have seen a memorable head in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. Any thing that had any thing singular or striking in it would look quite monstrous there, and would be stared out of countenance. Any thing extraordinary or original in nature is inadmissible in modern art; any thing that would strike the eye, or that you would ever think of again, would be a violation of decorum, an infringement of professional etiquette, and would disturb the uniform and well-arranged monotony of the walls of the Exhibition ‘with most admired disorder.’ A man of any originality of mind, if he has also the least common sense, soon finds his error, and reforms. At Rome one must do as the people at Rome do. The Academy is not the place for the eccentricities of genius. The persons of rank and opulence, who wish to have their pictures exhibited, do not wish to be exhibited as objects of natural history, as extraordinary phenomena in art or nature, in the moral or intellectual world; and in this they are right. Neither do they wish to volunteer their own persons, which they hold in due reverence, though there is nothing at all in them, as subjects for the painter to exercise his skill upon, as studies of light and shade, as merely objects of sight, as something curious and worth seeing from the outward accidents of nature. They do not like to share their triumph with nature; to sink their persons in ‘her glorious light.’ They owe no allegiance to the elements. They wish to be painted as Mr. and Mrs. Such-a-one, not as studies of light and shade; they wish to be represented as complete abstractions of persons and property, to have one side of the face seen as much as the other; to have their coat, waistcoat and breeches, their muslin dresses, silks, sophas, and settees, their dogs and horses, their house furniture, painted, to have themselves and all that belongs to them, and nothing else painted. The picture is made for them, and not they for the picture. Hence there can be nothing but the vapid, trite, and mechanical, in professional Art. Professional Art is a contradiction in terms. Art is genius, and genius cannot belong to a profession. Our Painters’ galleries are not studies, but lounging shew-rooms. Would a booby with a star wish to be painted (think you) with a view to its effect in the picture, or would he not have it seen at all events and as much as possible? The Catalogue Writer wishes the gentlemen-sitters of the Royal Academy to go and look at Rembrandt’s portraits, and to ask themselves, their wives, and daughters, whether they would like to be painted in the same way? No, truly. This, we confess, is hard upon our Artists, to have to look upon splendour and on obscurity still more splendid, which they dare not even attempt to imitate; to see themselves condemned, by the refinements of taste and progress of civilization, to smear rouge and white paste on the faces and necks of their portraits, for ever; and still ‘to let I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage.’ But why then complain of the injury they would sustain by the restoration of Art (if it were possible) into the original wardship of nature and genius, when ‘service sweat for duty, not for meed.’ Sir Joshua made a shift to combine some of Rembrandt’s art with his portraits, only by getting the start of public affectation, and by having the lead in his profession, so that like the early painters he could assert the independence of his own taste and judgment. The modern makers of catalogues would have driven him and his chiaro scuro into the shade presently. The critic professes to admire Sir Joshua, though all his excellencies are Gothic, palpably borrowed from the Old Masters. But he is wrong or inconsistent in everything.—The imitation of the details of nature is not compatible with the professional avarice of the painter, as the two former essentials of the art are inconsistent with the vanity and ignorance of his employers. ‘This, this is the unkindest blow of all.’ It is that in which the understanding of the multitude is most likely to conspire with the painter’s ‘own gained knowledge’ to make him dissatisfied with his disproportioned profits or under the loss of them. The Dutch masters are instructive enough in this way, and shew the value of detail by shewing the value of Art where there is nothing else but this. But this is not all. It might be pretended by our wholesale manufacturers of chef-d’œuvres in the Fine Arts, that so much nicety of execution is useless or improper in works of high gusto and grand effect. It happens unfortunately, however, that the works of the greatest gusto and most picturesque effect have this fidelity of imitation often in the highest degree (as in Raphael, Titian, and Rembrandt), generally in a very high degree (as in Rubens and Paul Veronese), so that the moderns gain nothing by this pretext. This is a serious loss of time or reputation to them. To paint a hand like Vandyke would cost them as much time as a dozen half-lengths; and they could not do it after all. To paint an eye like Titian would cost them their whole year’s labour, and they would lose their time and their labour into the bargain. Or to take Claude’s landscapes as an example in this respect, as they are in almost all others. If Turner, whom, with the Catalogue-writer, we allow, most heartily allow, to be the greatest landscape-painter of the age, were to finish his trees or his plants in the foreground, or his distances, or his middle distances, or his sky, or his water, or his buildings, or any thing in his pictures, in like manner, he could only paint and sell one landscape where he now paints and sells twenty. This is a clear loss to the artist of pounds, shillings, and pence, and ‘that’s a feeling disputation.’ He would have to put twenty times as much of every thing into a picture as he now has, and that is what (if he is like other persons who have got into bad habits) he would be neither able nor willing to do. It was a common cant a short time ago to pretend of him as it formerly was of Wilson, that he had other things which Claude had not, and that what Claude had besides, only impaired the grandeur of his pictures. The public have seen to the contrary. They see the quackery of painting trees blue and yellow, to produce the effect of green at a distance. They see the affectation of despising the mechanism of the Art, and never thinking about any thing but the mechanism. They see that it is not true in Art, that a part is greater than the whole, or that the means are destructive of the end. They see that a daub, however masterly, cannot vie with the perfect landscapes of the all-accomplished Claude. ‘To some men their graces serve them but as enemies’; and it was so till the other day with Claude. If it had been only for opening the eyes of the public on this subject, the Institution would have deserved well of the art and their country.

WEST’S PICTURE OF DEATH ON THE PALE HORSE

Mr. West’s name stands deservedly high in the annals of art in this country—too high for him to condescend to be his own puffer, even at second-hand. He comes forward, in the present instance, as the painter and the showman of the piece; as the candidate for public applause, and the judge who awards himself the prize; as the idol on the altar, and the priest who offers up the grateful incense of praise. He places himself, as it were, before his own performance, with a Catalogue Raisonné in his hand, and, before the spectator can form a judgment on the work itself, dazzles him with an account of the prodigies of art which are there conceived and executed. This is not quite fair. It is a proceeding which, though ‘it sets on a quantity of barren spectators to admire, cannot but make the judicious grieve.’ Mr. West, by thus taking to himself unlimited credit for the ‘high endeavour and the glad success,’ by proclaiming aloud that he has aimed at the highest sublimities of his art, and as loudly, with a singular mixture of pomposity and phlegm, that he has fully accomplished all that his most ardent hopes had anticipated,—must, we should think, obtain a great deal of spurious, catchpenny reputation, and lose a great deal of that genuine tribute of approbation to which he is otherwise entitled, by turning the attention of the well-informed and unprejudiced part of the community from his real and undoubted merits to his groundless and exaggerated pretensions. Self-praise, it is said, is no praise; but it is worse than this. It either shows great weakness and vanity for an artist to talk (or to get another to talk) of his own work, which was produced yesterday, and may be forgotten to-morrow, with the same lofty, emphatic, solemn tone, as if it were already stamped with the voice of ages, and had become sacred to the imagination of the beholder; or else the doing so is a deliberate attempt to encroach on the right of private judgment and public opinion, which those who are not its dupes will resent accordingly, and endeavour to repel by acts of precaution or hostility. An unsuccessful effort to extort admiration is sure to involve its own punishment.

We should not have made these remarks, if the ‘Description of the Picture of Death’ had been a solitary instance of the kind; but it is one of a series of descriptions of the same sort—it is a part of a system of self-adulation which cannot be too much discouraged. Perhaps Mr. West may say, that the Descriptive Catalogue is not his; that he has nothing to do with its composition or absurdities. But it must be written with his consent and approbation; and this is a sanction which it ought not to receive. We presume the artist would have it in his option to put a negative on any undue censure or flagrant abuse of his picture; it must be equally in his power, and it is equally incumbent upon him, to reject, with dignified modesty, the gross and palpable flatteries which it contains, direct or by implication.

The first notice we received of this picture was by an advertisement in a morning paper, (the editor of which is not apt to hazard extravagant opinions without a prompter,) purporting that, ‘in consequence of the President’s having devoted a year and a half to its completion, and of its having for its subject the Terrible Sublime, it would place Great Britain in the same conspicuous relation to the rest of Europe in arts, that the battle of Waterloo had done in arms!’ We shall not stay to decide between the battle and the picture; but the writer follows up the same idea of the Terrible Sublime in the Catalogue, the first paragraph of which is conceived in the following terms:—

‘The general effect proposed to be excited by this picture is the terrible sublime, and its various modifications, until lost in the opposite extremes of pity and horror, a sentiment which painting has so seldom attempted to awaken, that a particular description of the subject will probably be acceptable to the public.’