Dutton Cook

“ The miniature painter can hardly help improving and refining the subjects he deals with; for one reason, because the delicate nature of the material upon which he works, its exquisite surface and delicate texture, imparts a marked purity to all his tints. The coarsest complexion gains in lustre and smoothness when attempt is made to render it upon ivory; the dainty groundwork gleams through and gives beauty and clearness to the swarthiest hues. And then, in addition to this, Cosway had in full the portrait-painter's faculty of flattering his sitters. ”

“ A state of confusion between a man and his office, or his works, is by no means confined to those whom it is the fashion to designate as 'the masses.' Are we not continually meeting ladies and gentlemen, of otherwise commendable intellectual endowments, bent upon bewildering themselves with the notion, that the sentimental novelist is necessarily a creature of sentiment—that the comic actor, out of his part and off his stage, is still laughable and amusing—that the writer of poetry, as a consequence, lives poetry, and the career of the painter is inevitably picturesque? ”

“ Hogarth dead and buried, the window shutters re-opened, and heaven's glad light once more permitted to stream into the rooms, the red eyes of the household a little cooled and staunched, came the widow's dreadful task of examining the property of the deceased, of picking up the fragments that remained. How to live? Survivors have often to make that painful inquiry. There was little money in the house. The painter's life had been hard-working enough; the labourer was willing, but the harvest was very scanty. Such a limited art public! ”

“ He thought a great painter should gesticulate more, should sacrifice the gentlemanly to the eccentric as he did, should be feverish and frothy and unconventional and absurd as he was. And then he possessed a quick mimetic talent. He had soon acquired great part of Lawrence's manner. People are always prone to think themselves equal to those they can imitate, and he was far ahead of all the other young gentlemen who entered the studio; indeed it may be said that no one has ever approached more closely to the peculiar style and character of Lawrence's art than his pupil Harlow. ”

“ It is difficult to conceive any correspondence, any rapport between workmanship so exquisite, and a workman in every way so unattractive, so little estimable. But just as from the small dusky insect in the hedges at night proceeds a phosphorescent flame of great power and beauty—just as from a miserable-looking, coarse, common flint are emitted sparks of superb brilliance,—so from the hands of this strange, sordid, shambling man came art-achievements almost without precedent in the history of painting. ”

“ At what period in his career is he to cease leaning on his teacher, and to pursue his own devices unaided and alone? He may have tied his leading-strings so tightly about him that liberty of thought and action has become almost impossible to him, and the free use of his limbs, so to speak, has gone from him. It is quite true that the artist should be a student all his life; but then he should be a student of art generally, not of any one professor of art in particular, or he will be simply the pupil of a great master to the end of the chapter, never a great master himself. ”

“ A little, meagre man, not more than five feet high, in a shabby, patched dressing-gown, almost as old as himself, leading a quiet, cold, penurious life. He never married. He had never even been in love. He had never had the time, or he had never had the passion necessary for such pursuits, or he was too deeply devoted to his profession. He was always, brush in hand, perched up on a temporary stage, painting earnestly, fiercely, 'with the inveterate diligence of a little devil stuccoing a mud wall!' cried flaming Mr. Fuseli. ”

“ Can it have been that from the painter's native Strasbourg had come to him unimpeachable accounts of Cagliostro's feats during his stay there, which had preceded his nefarious expedition to Paris? But the artist is ever excitable, receptive, impressible—the ready prey of the dealer in illusion and trickery. De Loutherbourg is soon at the feet of the quack Gamaliel; soon he is proclaiming himself an inspired physician, practising mesmerism. Cosway and his wife declared themselves clairvoyants. Other painters of the period were dreaming dreams and seeing visions. ”

“ He is a somebody, or he is a nobody; a gentleman of distinguished origin or an utterly unknown creature with the vaguest views about his lineage: a waif of the wayside, a stray of the streets, his rise from obscurity to eminence being entirely attributable to his own intrinsic merits and exertions.
To this last-mentioned method of biographical treatment has been subjected Richard Cosway, painter and Royal Academician of the last century: a man of fame in his day, though that fame may not have come down to us in a very good state of preservation. ”

“ Of course Runciman had his opinion about Hogarth and his art, despising both, no doubt, and agreeing with Fuseli in deeming him a caricaturist merely, and his works 'the chronicle of scandal and the history book of the vulgar.' It was so much nobler to portray wild-contortions from Ossian, demoniac nightmares and lower region revelations, than to paint simply the life around they had but to stretch out a hand to grasp. Yet with all their talk, in the humbler merits of colour, expression, and handling, they were miles behind Hogarth. ”

“ Roubiliac was content to live that easy pleasant tavern life favoured by the men of letters and artists of the eighteenth century, and with which Johnson and Boswell have made us so intimately acquainted. A bottle of claret and a game of whist solaced his leisure hours; and these were not numerous: he was constantly to be found in his studio, late at night, hard at work long after his assistants had retired: a vivacious, honest, warm-hearted man, much and justly esteemed by his friends and contemporaries. ”

“ And yet, with all this realism in detail, their works are unreal and artificial in general effect; as a glance at any statue by Roubiliac will sufficiently demonstrate.
This arises possibly from the artist's fondness for attitude. He seems to have regarded posture-making as a peculiar attribute of genius. His figures are always in a constrained and over-studied pose: twisting about in the throes of giving birth to a great idea: filled with the divine afflatus, even to the bursting of their buttonholes and the snapping of their braces. ”

“ Ruskin's old enemy, Salvator, receives more lenient treatment than of yore. True, he still regards him as a lost spirit, rendering Michelet's, 'Ce damné Salvator' tenderly as 'that condemned Salvator.' But Mr. Ruskin now perceives in him the 'last traces of spiritual life in the art of Europe, the last man to whom the thought of a spiritual existence presented itself as a conceivable reality. All succeeding men, however powerful,—Rembrandt, Rubens, Vandyck, Reynolds,—would have mocked at the idea of a spirit. They were men of the world, they are never in earnest, and they are never appalled. ”

“ A less honest source of emolument than his own pencil provided, Cosway found in helping to supply the demand then existing for specimens of the old masters. The love of the connoisseurs for ancient art, even to its most suspicious examples, had survived the satire of Hogarth and the indignation of Barry. The patrons of the day were warmer friends to the picture-dealers than to the painters. Modern works of any pretence were at an alarming discount: the productions of the past were at high premium. Cosway skilfully contrived to reap profits in the double capacity of dealer and painter. ”

“ It is with a sense of relief we turn from the contemplation of the imperfect man to consider the nearly perfect artist. The meanness, the squalor, the degradation of his morale and life are not discernible in his works. The affluence of beauty of some of these is indeed marvellous. But this fallen man had extraordinary gifts as a painter, and these he heightened and intensified by labour and industry the most ceaseless. It would be difficult to conceive any one endowed with a keener sensibility to colour, or with a more devotional love for its glories ”

“ The statue of Handel, the first original work that can, with any certainty, be ascribed to Roubiliac, may be regarded as a fair specimen of the artist's manner. He was of the school of Bernini. He followed the sculptors who infinitely prefer unrest to repose in art. He dearly enjoyed a tour de force in stone. He liked to deal with marble as though it were the most plastic of materials: to twist it this way and that, and rumple and flutter it as though it were merely muslin. To have carved a wig in a gale of wind would have been a task particularly agreeable to this class of artists ”

“ His small plain person was to be seen in all public places clothed in a mulberry silk coat profusely embroidered with scarlet strawberries, with sword and bag and a small three-cornered hat perched on the top of his powdered toupée. He assumed a mincing, affected air—a tone of excessive refinement and exquisite sensibility. He pretended to an absurd superiority over his fellows, and striving to conceal his real and more honest situation as a hard-working artist, posed himself incessantly as a creature of fashion. ”

“ I am to be presented to the Pope either on the 2d or 3d of next month. Cardinal Gonsalvi will let me know when the day is fixed, and I leave Rome directly after; perhaps the next day—a day that I most sincerely dread—for I have become so attached to the place and the people that I expect a great struggle with myself. I should be the most ungrateful of human beings if I did not acknowledge the endless favours they have bestowed on me. It is the place of all others for an artist, as he is sure to be highly appreciated if he has any talent ”

“ But even a greater celebrity at Devizes than Mr. Lawrence was his son Thomas, born in 1769, youngest of the sixteen children. He seems to have been regarded on all hands as a sort of infant prodigy of great use in attracting visitors to the inn. He could stand on a chair and recite poetry, or he could wield his blacklead pencil and take the portrait of any one who would condescend to sit to him. 'A most lovely boy,' writes Miss Burney,—with long, luxuriant, girl-like tresses, that tumbled down and hid his face when he stooped to draw. ”

“ From that year dates the rise of a third society—the Royal Academy of Arts: an institution which has long outlived its rivals, which has indeed fed upon and gained strength from their decay and decease, as at the outset it owed its existence to the success of their previous efforts, and which, in spite of constant opposition and bitterest attack, flourishes still, as though possessed of that longevity which is proverbially the attribute of the threatened. ”

“ Upon a story of a love affair in the painter's early life, we are inclined to lay no great stress. There is no evidence that it affected his after-life, or that any excuse can be found in it for the faults of his character. Speaking of his own love of money, he would sometimes say apologetically, 'Dad never praised me for anything but saving a halfpenny.' A disappointment in love is more likely to make a man a profligate than a miser; if it affects him at all seriously, it will more likely produce a reckless waste than a sordid passion for money-making. ”

“ No one will dispute the justice of the reversal of judgment which has taken place; the elevation of Rembrandt at the expense of Kneller. But it may be a question whether George Romney has not been unfairly abased, even though it may be agreed on all hands that Sir Joshua Reynolds has not been unduly exalted. Possibly, however, when a man rises or is lifted up to a high pitch of celebrity, it is inevitable that he should in some degree mount upon the prostrate and degraded reputations of his contemporaries. ”

“ He almost preferred a painted to a real human being—a picture landscape to a view from a hill-top. He was satisfied that things should come to him filtered through the canvases of his predecessors—content to see with their eyes. He was apt to think painting was little higher than legerdemain, was a conjurer's feat to be detected by constantly watching the performer, was a secret that he might be told by others or might discover for himself by examining their works: not a science open under certain conditions to all who will take the trouble to learn. ”

“ Finally, I would suggest—referring with all due modesty to my own efforts in this direction—that the lives and labours of our Art worthies form wholesome as well as curious subjects for popular study. I do not desire to set up the artist—merely in right of his professing himself an artist—as peculiarly or romantically entitled to public regard. But a nation's Art is, in truth, an important matter. ”

“ He was himself somewhat deficient in education—had few rules—only a marvellous love and perception of the beautiful, and an instinctive talent for its reproduction on his canvas. It was as certain as it was innate, but not to be expressed in words, or communicated or reasoned upon in any way. The deeds of genius are things done, as of course, for no why or wherefore, but simply because there is no help for it but to do them. So the pupils painted in the studio of their pseudo-preceptor for a certain number of years, copying his works ”

“ He imitated Gainsborough for landscape, and Reynolds for portraits.' He held Northcote, Sir Joshua's pupil, however, in great aversion. 'I can fancy a man fond of his art who painted like Reynolds,' Hoppner would say; 'but how a man can be fond of art who paints like that fellow Northcote, Heaven only knows!' There was no love lost between them. 'As to that poor man-milliner of a painter Hoppner,' said Northcote, 'I hate him, sir, I ha-a-ate him!'
According to Haydon, he was bilious from hard work at portraits and the harass of fashionable life. ”

“ Sherwin was charged by certain of the ladies portrayed in the picture with partiality and favouritism. One beauty had been shown too prominently in the design, greatly to the prejudice of other beauties, who were unfairly restricted to the background. And why should one lady be displayed so advantageously—in a light so brilliant—while other ladies not less attractive, as they opined, were exhibited in so strangely subdued a way, with ugly shadows marring the lustre of their loveliness? And then why, was indignantly asked, why had the artist arranged the portraits so cruelly? ”