John Miller Gray

“ He now attracted the attention of Scott, for whom he painted a portrait of a favourite cat, and who recommended him to adopt such a branch of decorative art as house-painting—‘a department of obvious and direct utility, in which the mass of the people are concerned’—rather than the higher walks of the profession. ”

“ Surely it was with true significance that Rosemary Dacre’s seal—the seal which always descends to her name-child in the house of Penicuik—was engraved with the sign of a single star, shedding a benign and steadfast light over a pathless vastitude of air and a fluctuating waste of sea; for the Lady’s memory seems to have shone with an ideal light through many human lives. ”

“ Then in the ’fifties we have the numerous etchings of sporting scenes, contributed, together with woodcuts, to the Handley Cross novels.
Turning to Leech’s lithographic work, we have, in 1841, the Portraits of the Children of the Mobility, an important series dealing with the humorous and pathetic aspects of London street Arabs, which were afterwards so often and so effectively to employ the artist’s pencil. Amid all the squalor which they depict, they are full of individual beauties in the delicate or touching expression of a face, in the graceful turn of a limb. ”

“ There is in this group none of the strong, positive, insufficiently gradated colour, which is sometimes rather distressing in Raeburn’s work. It is far quieter and more delicate than is altogether usual in his art, full of tenderness and subtlety; the faces exquisitely lit by reflected light, their half-shadows softly luminous and delicate exceedingly, never sinking with a crash into blackness and opacity. The artist has seldom produced a finer or more artistic group, has seldom given us a more fascinating portrayal of well-born manhood and of female loveliness. ”

“ His father was a connoisseur and collector of prints; the son was so strongly drawn to art that he spent his leisure in sketching and copying engravings, and, when he was free to choose his own way of life, he resolved—fortified by the advice of John Clerk, afterwards Lord Eldin—to proceed to London and study as a painter. In 1806 he began to attend the schools of the Royal Academy, and in the same year exhibited there his first picture, a ‘St. John in the Wilderness.’ In 1810 he opened a studio in York Place, Edinburgh, and was soon in good practice as a portrait-painter. ”

“ The earnestness and gravity of moral purpose which is so constant a note in the work of Hogarth is indeed far less characteristic of Leech, but there are touches of pathos and of tragedy in such of the Punch designs as the “Poor Man’s Friend” (1845) , and “General Février turned Traitor” (1855) , and in “The Queen of the Arena” in the first volume of Once a Week, which are sufficient to prove that more solemn powers, for which his daily work afforded no scope, lay dormant in their artist. The purity and manliness of Leech’s own character are impressed on his art. ”

“ WILKIE, SIR DAVID (1785–1841) , Scottish painter, was born on the 18th of November 1785, the son of the parish minister of Cults in Fifeshire. He very early developed an extraordinary love for art. In 1799, after he had attended school at Pitlessie, Kettle and Cupar, his father reluctantly yielded to his desire to become a painter; and through the influence of the earl of Leven Wilkie was admitted to the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh, and began the study of art under John Graham, the teacher of the school. ”

“ The Baronet stands by her side, with his left arm—on whose shoulder the lady’s hand rests—circling her waist, and his right relieved against the background as it stretches across the canvas, pointing, over the river, to the mansion of Penicuik,—which is manifestly visible to the pair in the distance, though unseen to the spectator of the picture. He wears a soft felt hat, broad-brimmed, low-crowned, and Quaker-like in fashion, with an oval metal clasp set in front in its band. ”

“ As an etcher Geddes ranks even higher than as a painter; his plates may be regarded as among the very earliest examples in modern English art of the brilliancy, concentration, and spirited selection of line proper to a ‘painter's-etching.’ His dry-points and etchings include portraits, landscapes, and a few copies from the old masters. ”

“ Over the fireplace to the right is an excellent portrait, by William Aikman, of Allan Ramsay the elder, a man who, though his verses may seem a little artificial and a little dull to the readers of our own day, is worthy of all honour, not only for having aided in turning Scottish poetry into a freer and more natural channel, but also for having established a theatre and the first circulating library in Edinburgh, and so distinctly served the cause of culture in Scotland. ”

“ One of his first patrons in London was Stodart, a pianoforte maker, a distant connexion of the Wilkie family, who commissioned his portrait and other works and introduced the young artist to the dowager-countess of Mansfield. This lady’s son was the purchaser of the “Village Politicians,” which attracted great attention when it was exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1806, where it was followed in the succeeding year by the “Blind Fiddler,” a commission from the painter’s lifelong friend Sir George Beaumont. ”

“ Geddes began the systematic practice of art comparatively late, and his works occasionally show defects of form; but he improved himself by a study of the great masters, and from the first his sense of colour and tone was unerring. He is represented in the National Gallery of Scotland by five works. The ‘Portrait of the Artist's Mother’ is entitled to rank as the painter's masterpiece. ”

“ The last opening was the work of the tempest, which, by overturning a trunk or two, disclosed a glimpse of the distant Peeblesshire moor behind, giving just that final touch, that hint of the beyond “over the hills and far away,” which perfects the view,—not only to the painter, as completing the lines of its composition, but to the poet as well, by adding that sense of extended outlook, as of a vista piercing into the breadth of the world, which is needful, for finest imaginative effect, in every landscape. ”

“ The present picture, a cabinet-sized bust, is somewhat amateurish in its execution, but still full of character and individuality; the features of the shrewd, wrinkled face, its definitely curved nose, sharply-cut mouth, thin compressed lips, and dark, brilliantly blue eyes beneath the bushy white eyebrows, combine into what is doubtless a faithful rendering of that friend of whom Scott wrote in his Diary, in 1825, “I have known him intimately since our college days; and to my thinking I never met a man of greater powers or more complete information on all desirable subjects.” ”

“ Deeply impressed by the paintings of Raeburn, he began, at the age of about twenty-five, to study as a portrait-painter. His productions gained for him Raeburn's friendship, and he worked in Raeburn's studio. In 1812, when he was residing in Shakespeare Square, he contributed a portrait of a gentleman to the Exhibition of Associated Artists, Edinburgh, and he continued to contribute to the same exhibitions from 1814 to 1816. ”

“ This is carried over the upper edge of the picture, across nearly its whole extent, repeating, by its mass of dark against the sky, the arm of the male figure standing beneath, which is extended, dark against the distant expanse of dimly-lighted landscape{33} background. The sky, against which the heads of the figures are set, is filled with the soft mellow light of a sunset after rain, struggling with films of fluctuating misty clouds,—a sky in the treatment of which Raeburn has used a portrait-painter’s licence, making it lower in tone than would have been the case in such a natural effect. ”

“ This vigorous, ruddy, bearded countenance is quite unlike the worn, shaven, student’s face which appears in the Chancellor’s authentic portraits by Holbein,—in his two drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor, and in the pen sketch, for the lost oil picture of the Family of Sir Thomas More, which he himself sent to his friend Erasmus, by the hand of the painter, when Holbein returned to the Continent in 1529, a sketch still preserved in the Museum of Basle. ”

“ Certainly by John Runciman is the excellent picture of “Belshazzar’s Feast,” hung in the Billiard-room, a work so delicate in its handling, so mellow in the golden and ruddy tones of its colouring, as to support the opinion held by some discerning critics, that this artist’s brief life afforded definite promise of his becoming a far subtler and more refined painter than the better-known member of his family ever was.
XIII.
In the Drawing-room hang many admirable and interesting works, to a few of which we may direct attention. ”

“ The light comes from behind the figures, and the edges of the dress, catching its brightness, are the highest tones of the picture. The lady’s face is one of mature comeliness and dignity, the hair brown and slightly powdered, the light touching and outlining sharply the rounded contours of cheek and chin, and the edge of the throat, which rises from the masses of pure soft muslin—itself still purer and more delicate in tone and texture. Her left hand hangs down by her side, fingering a little among the folds of the dress and compressing its filmy fabric ”

“ The well-balanced, handsome, oval face, with its ripe mouth, rippling in its lines and dimpled at the corners, fine dark-blue eyes, and rounded, slightly cleft chin, is turned in three-quarters towards the right, and surmounted by a voluminous powdered wig. Another portrait of Aikman by himself is preserved at Florence in the Painters’ Gallery of the Uffizi. ”

“ It is to be noted, however, that the account-book gives no information as to who the personages are that appear in the pictures; that there is no contemporary inscriptions on the works themselves to prove that it is the first Baronet and his wife that are portrayed and not merely two of their friends; that in the male portrait the face is delicate in its curves and contours, with a long thin nose, drooping at the point, quite unlike the countenance which appears in the pictures certified in the handwriting of the son as representing the first Baronet ”