Lionel Henry Cust

“ It is not likely that such pioneers in criticism as Crowe and Cavalcaselle should invariably be found to be infallible, but the greater part of their work has maintained its authority. That their works should be considered at all out of date some thirty years or more after publication is a tribute to the great impetus which these works gave to the study of the subject with which they were concerned. A new edition of the 'History of Painting in Italy' had been projected by Crowe, but only one volume had been completed at the time of his death ”

“ His father made a large fortune as a merchant, and gave Lepipre a liberal education, but he showed a genius for art, and devoted himself to drawing. Having no need to earn his livelihood, he drew for his amusement, selecting subjects of a humorous or comical nature. His memory was so good that he could draw exact likenesses of any one whom he had only passed in the street. He was of a genial nature, fond of the bottle and good living, and a great favourite among his friends. Some of his best drawings were made for taverns, such as the Mitre in Stocks Market and the Bell in Westminster. ”

“ The whole course of painting in England was altered by the brilliant career and achievements of Van Dyck. He destroyed the somewhat hard and narrow traditions of portraiture which had obtained before, and established a principle by which nearly all his successors in England have been guided. His merits as an historical painter have received less recognition in England, and even at Antwerp and elsewhere on the continent they have been overshadowed by the overwhelming and colossal genius of Rubens. ”

“ The works of Crowe and Cavalcaselle caused a complete revolution in the general style of criticism with which the paintings of the old masters had been wont to be received. Their method of examination not only called attention to the immense wealth of paintings, almost unknown, which existed in North and Central Italy, but recalled into existence numberless painters whose works had been overshadowed or submerged by those of their better known and more successful contemporaries. ”

“ While endeavouring to tread in the ‘terribil via’ of Michelangelo, he followed the precepts of Lavater in expressing by attitude, gesture, or other movements of the limbs or features, the passions or emotions which he wished to delineate in his characters. The artist most akin to him was William Blake, who engraved some of his drawings; Blake owed a great deal to the friendship of Fuseli, and both entertained a mutual esteem and affection for each other, with undoubted advantage on both sides. ”

“ Lady Marian Alford was an accomplished artist, inheriting her tastes in this direction from both her parents, and, although she enjoyed no regular education in art, her drawings and paintings attain a very high standard. Her house in London, Alford House, Prince's Gate, was built mainly from her own designs. She was also a liberal and intelligent patron of artists in England and Italy, and a friend of the leading artists of the day. ”

“ Standing as they did on the brink of the civil wars, the gallant cavaliers and fair ladies of the court form a regiment of youth and beauty, of dignity and heroism, that has never been rivalled elsewhere, and are in themselves a history of their time, written from one point of view. ”

“ It is small wonder that the cause of the cavaliers has ever been dear to the lovers of beauty and romance, and that Charles I's faults and weaknesses have been redeemed in their sight by the fascinating melancholy of his face as portrayed by Van Dyck. ”

“ As a contemporary of David Cox, Copley Fielding, G. Cattermole, S. Prout, and others, he adhered throughout his life to the old style and manner of water-colour painting. Though he cannot be said to have attained the first rank in his profession, he showed great taste and discrimination in the treatment of his subjects, and, if these indicated little variation, he exhibited so refined a feeling for nature that they are highly valued by artists and others as examples of a thoroughly good workman in his art. ”

“ Forde very soon displayed a talent for art, and though Cork did not offer much to inspire a youthful artist, his taste for literature helped to nourish and foster the high aspirations which distinguished, even in his schoolboy days, the numberless sketches on which he employed himself. He became a student in the Cork Academy, drawing from the collection of casts which Lord Listowel had obtained for that institution. The master, Chalmers, was also a scene painter, and taught Forde distemper painting, so that he was able to be employed at the theatre. ”

“ In the next generation Walpole described his pictures as ‘of a light flimsy kind of fan-painting, as large as life.’ His contemporary, Kneller, remarked, on hearing that Jervas had set up a carriage and four horses, ‘Ah, mine Cot, if his horses do not draw better than he does, he will never get to his journey's end.’ Though at the best but a second-rate painter, his portrait of the Duchess of Queensberry at the National Portrait Gallery suffices to rescue him from the censure generally passed on him by later critics. ”

“ Landells was soon known among the artists of his time in London, both as an industrious and deserving artist and as an agreeable companion. He always retained a great love for Newcastle, and when a large staff of assistants was working under him on wood-engraving, they nicknamed him ‘Toochit-oop,’ from his strong Northumbrian accent, which, never deserted him. ”

“ He did not return to England until the end of 1635, when he resumed his duties to the court and nobility until the middle of 1640. It was in these years that he executed the greater part of those works which are scattered among the mansions of the nobility in England and in the royal palaces, including the well-known groups of the children of the king and queen, first the three children in 1635, and then the five in 1637. There is hardly any noble family of antiquity in England which does not boast of an ancestor painted by Van Dyck. ”

“ Kneller enjoyed continuous good health, and was thus able to accomplish an enormous amount of work up to the last year of his life. He amassed great wealth, and though he lost heavily in the speculations of the South Sea Bubble, he left a large fortune. About 1703 he purchased a house in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, where he resided until his death, and he invested money in other property in London. He purchased an estate at Whitton, near Hounslow, where he built himself a magnificent house, decorated with mural paintings by Laguerre and with many of his own works. ”

“ The so-called portraits of Holbein and his wife at Windsor have no claim to represent them; they are, moreover, painted on canvas, and signed by Hans Bock, a later painter at Basle. No artist's name has been so frequently and so wilfully misused in England as that of Hans Holbein. Very few authentic portraits by him remain in England. Among the many which bear his name, none can safely be considered authentic, in addition to those already mentioned, except the anonymous portrait of a man in the collection of Sir J. E. Millais, and the exquisite small square portrait of Henry VIII at Althorp. ”

“ A life of Gardelle (published in 1761) narrates that he became acquainted with Voltaire at Geneva, drew his portrait and enamelled it on a snuff-box, went to Paris with a recommendation from Voltaire to Surugue, the chief engraver to the king, and was advised by the Duc de Choiseul to try his fortune in London. The sordid circumstances of Gardelle's life render this account very doubtful. He arrived in London in 1760 and soon found employment as a miniature-painter. He lodged in Leicester Square in a house kept by a Mrs. Anne King, a woman of light character. ”

“ His paintings vary in excellence, the best being of the highest order, while others, even when authenticated, seem unworthy of a great reputation. He was always a student of the works of other great portrait-painters, and at one time quite changed his style of colouring, owing to his admiration for certain portraits by Rubens. The monotony of dress and attitude in Kneller's portraits is due much more to the compulsion of fashion and the imitative tendency in the English character than to the painter himself. ”

“ Lines took a large share in the foundation of the Birmingham School of Art in 1821, and on the subsequent foundation of the Birmingham Society of Artists he was elected treasurer and curator, holding those offices till he reached the age of eighty, when he resigned, and was elected an honorary member. Nearly all the artists of the neighbourhood and many from other parts of the country received instruction in drawing at Lines's academy. A good landscape-painter himself, he possessed a great faculty of teaching others, and many of his pupils attained to much excellence. ”

“ Lanière is said to have fallen a victim to her attractions in England, like the painter Romanelli of Viterbo at Naples, who painted her portrait. She was especially famous for her portraits, but produced other remarkable works, including a ‘Judith’ and a ‘Magdalen’ in the Pitti Gallery at Florence; the former, by some considered her finest work, displays a temperament hardly feminine. She also painted a nude figure of ‘Inclination’ for Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger, which was considered so indecorous by his descendants that they employed a painter to fit it with suitable drapery. ”

“ For his scientific researches he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Knowles is best known, however, from his long, intimate friendship with Henry Fuseli the painter, and the circle to which that artist belonged. He was the executor of Fuseli's will, and a devoted admirer of his art. In 1830 he published an edition of Fuseli's ‘Lectures on Painting,’ and in 1831, in 3 vols. 8vo, the life of Fuseli, written as a labour of love, to which was added an edition of the painter's writings on art. As a biography the work has some merit. ”

“ Under his direction Faulkner devoted himself to assiduous study of the first principles of the art, and spent upwards of two years in the study of the antique alone. He then came to London, and practised as a portrait-painter; but he was of so diffident a character and so retiring a disposition that his merits were not held in the same estimation in London as they were in his native town. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1821, sending two portraits, and he continued to exhibit regularly up to the year before his death. ”

“ Hone at an early age, and without any instruction, began to practise as a portrait-painter. He came over to England while still young, and went to Italy to study. He was at Rome in 1750 and 1751, and at Florence in 1752, as we learn from the notebooks of Sir Joshua Reynolds, in one of which there is a small caricature portrait of Hone. On returning home Hone practised as an itinerant portrait-painter about England, and, while engaged in his profession at York, married a lady of some property. ”

“ Clarke and other friends enabled Jervas to go to Rome, where he set himself to study drawing, a branch of his art which he had hitherto neglected. He studied the antique statues, and made copies from the works of famous painters, some copies by him after Carlo Maratti being especially noticed for their excellence. He returned to England about 1709. His facile style of portrait-painting, and the original taste and fancy of his costumes, secured him the patronage of fashionable society. ”

“ In reality the faults of taste in his decorative paintings are characteristic of the age in which he lived rather than of the artist himself. He was employed by Charles II to graft into England upon the new italianised architecture of Wren, Vanbrugh, and other architects, the gaudy decorations which had been brought into such prominence and fashion in France, especially at Versailles. In his earlier paintings at Windsor Verrio's designs were infinitely superior to those at Hampton Court, by which in this day he is principally known. ”