John Timbs

“ This gallery has a great attraction, owing principally to the taste of its present possessor: it contains some excellent works of modern English painters. Near to the famous “Rising of the Gale,” by Van de Velde, hangs the “Gale at Sea,” by Turner, not less sublime, not less true to the grandeur and the modesty of nature; and by Edwin Landseer, the beautiful original of a composition which the art of the engraver has made familiar to the eye, the “Return of the Hawking Party,” a picture which has all the romance of poetry and the antique time, and all the charm and value of a family picture. ”

“ POETRY OF THE SEA. Campbell was a great lover of submarine prospects. “Often in my boyhood,” says the poet, “when the day has been bright and the sea transparent, I have sat by the hour on a Highland rock admiring the golden sands, the emerald weeds, and the silver shells at the bottom of the bay beneath, till, dreaming about the grottoes of the Nereids, I would not have exchanged my pleasure for that of a connoisseur poring over a landscape by Claude or Poussin. ”

“ The picture was indeed one of the finest that ever came from Raphael’s pencil; but it was only so much the more a source of grief to the unhappy Francia. He assisted, as desired, in placing it in the situation for which it was intended; but never afterwards had he a happy hour. In one moment he had seen all that he had ever done, all that had been once so much admired, thrown quite into the shade. He was too old to entertain any hope, by renewed efforts, of coming up with the excellence of Raphael, or even approaching it. ”

“ JOHNSON’S CLUB-ROOM. In a paper in the Edinburgh Review, we find this cabinet picture:—The club-room is before us, and the table, on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke, and the tall thin form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerc, and the beaming smile of Garrick; Gibbon tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. ”

“ Hope, in an enormous cabbage of a cap, with her hair over her eyes, is blowsy and vulgar in spite of Reynolds.
To our view, the average costume of Sir Joshua was excessively beautiful. We go through a gallery of his portraits with feelings of intense satisfaction, that there should have been a race of women who could dress so decorously, so intellectually, and withal so becomingly. Not a bit of the costume appeals to any of the baser instincts. There is nothing to catch the vulgar, or fix the vicious. All is pure, noble, serene, benevolent. ”

“ As the studios of eminent painters or sculptors afford a favourite lounge for men of taste and leisure; so, to those to whom such a pleasure is denied, or as regards those sovereigns of the pencil and chisel who are at rest from their labours, there is a peculiar gratification in being placed, in fancy, in contact with the creators of immortal things of beauty and of power. Artists, besides, have been and are, in very many cases, also men of culture and wit, of refined taste and powerful intellect—men remarkable quite apart from their performances on canvas or in marble. ”

“ They found Italian painting rude in form, without spirit, and without sentiment. They let out their own hearts fully in their compositions, and to this day their works are highly esteemed for grave dignity of character, and for originality of conception. Of these great Florentines, Giotto, the shepherd, is confessedly the more eminent: in him we see the dawn, or rather the sunrise, of the fuller light of Raphael. ”

“ IMMORTALITY OF PAINTING. It is painful to think how soon the paintings of Raphael, and Titian, and Correggio, and other illustrious men, will perish and pass away. “How long,” said Napoleon to David, “will a picture last?” “About four or five hundred years—a fine immortality!” The poet multiplies his works by means of a cheap material; and Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, and Tasso, and Moliere, and Milton, and Shakspeare, may bid oblivion defiance; the sculptor impresses his conceptions on metal or on marble, and expects to survive the wreck of nations, or the wrongs of time ”

“ You said it was done all but the coat the last time I was here.” “I said the goat, and please your Majesty,” replied the artist. “Ay!” rejoined the King; “the goat or the coat, I care not which you call it; I say I will not have the picture,” and was about to leave the room, when Zoffani, in agony, repeated, “It is the goat that is not finished,” pointing to a picture of a goat that hung up in a frame, as an ornament to the scene at the theatre. The King laughed heartily at the blunder, and waited patiently till “the goat” was finished. ”

“ Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers, are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labours amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight ”

“ Thomas Sydney Cooper, a young artist, who had been for many years settled at Brussels, as a drawing-master, but had been driven from that city by the Revolution, which had deprived him of his pupils, among whom were some of the members of the royal family; and, unable to obtain employment in London as a cattle-painter, he had, with the generous self-devotion which most ennobles a man of genius, supported his family by making lithographic drawings of fashionable caps and bonnets, I suppose, as a puff for some milliner, or some periodical which deals in costumes. ”

“ Writing of himself, Hogarth says:—“The portrait which I painted with most pleasure, and in which I particularly wished to excel, was that of Captain Coram, for the Foundling Hospital;” and he adds, in allusion to his detraction as a portrait-painter, “If I am so wretched an artist as my enemies assert, it is somewhat strange that this, which was one of the first I painted the size of life, should stand the test of twenty years’ competition, and be generally thought the best portrait in the place, notwithstanding the first painters in the kingdom exerted all their talents to vie with it.” ”

“ DISINTERESTEDNESS OF ENGLISH PAINTERS. There are no examples in the history of painting, of such noble disinterestedness as has ever been shown by the English Historical Painters. Hogarth and others adorned the Foundling for nothing; Reynolds and West offered to adorn St. Paul’s for nothing, and yet were refused! Barry painted the Adelphi without remuneration; but, as Burke beautifully says, “the temple of honour ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be open through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.”—Haydon’s Lectures. ”

“ THE CAT RAPHAEL. Gottfried Mind, a celebrated Swiss painter, was called the Cat Raphael, from the excellence with which he painted that animal. This peculiar talent was discovered and awakened by chance. At the time when Frendenberger painted his picture of the Peasant cleaving wood before his Cottage, with his wife sitting by and feeding her child with pap out of a pot, round which a cat is prowling, Mind cast a broad stare on the sketch of this last figure, and said, in his rugged, laconic way, “That is no cat!” ”

“ I foresaw at once a mighty revolution in the art of the world for ever! I saw that union of nature and ideal perfected in high art, and before this period pronounced by the ablest critics as impossible! ”

“ When Claude wrote the last date, he was seventy-eight years old, and he died two years afterwards. On the back of every drawing is the number, with his monogram, the place for which the picture was painted, and usually the person by whom it was ordered, and the year; but the “Claudio fecit” is never wanting. According to his will, this book was to remain always the property of his own family; and it was so faithfully kept by his immediate descendants, that all the efforts of the Cardinal d’Estrées, the French ambassador at Rome, to procure it, were in vain. ”

“ They seem as if they would care for nothing we could offer them, if our deepest reverence were not with it. We stand before them like Satan before Eve, “stupidly good,” ready to abjure all the fallacies of the Fathers, all the maxims of the moderns—ready to eat our own words if they disapproved them—careless what may have been the name or fame, family or fortune, of such lofty and lovely creatures—yea, careless of their very beauty, for the soul that shines through it. ”

“ When he is jocular, he is strong; when he is serious, he is like Samson in a wig. Call him a legislator, a reasoner, and the conductor of the affairs of a great nation, and it seems to me as absurd as if a butterfly were to teach bees to make honey. ”

“ In the year 1800, M. Masquerier had occasion to go to Paris on family matters. Like a sensible man, who made all his pursuits available to the purposes of his profession, he conceived the happy thought of obtaining permission to make a portrait of Bonaparte, (then First Consul,) and afterwards portraits of his generals the whole of which were concentrated in one grand picture, of the size of life, and exhibited in this country as “Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guard.” ”

“ Davenant lived quite near enough to Shakspeare’s time to have obtained a genuine portrait of the poet whom he admired—in an age, too, when the Shakspeare mania was not so strong as it is now. There is no doubt that this was the portrait which Davenant believed to be like Shakspeare, and which Kneller, before 1692, copied and presented to glorious John Dryden, who repaid the painter with one of the best of his admirable epistles.
“The Chandos Shakspeare is a small portrait on canvas, 22 inches long by 18 broad. The face is thoughtful, the eyes are expressive, and the hair is of a brown black. ”

“ The subject to be represented was a great battle, fought and won; and the same truth which gives laws to the historian should rule the painter; that he wanted to mark the place, the time, the people, and to do this he must abide by the truth.
The objectors went away, and returned when West had finished the picture. Reynolds seated himself before it, and examined it with deep and minute attention for half an hour; then rising, said to Drummond, “West has conquered—he has treated his subject as it ought to be treated. ”

“ There is no real English poet prior to the middle of the eighteenth century; and we believe no great author of any sort, except Clarendon and Shaftesbury, of whose blood we have any inheritance amongst us. Chaucer’s only son died childless; Shakspeare’s line expired in his daughter’s only daughter. None of the other dramatists of that age left any progeny; nor Raleigh, nor Bacon, nor Cowley, nor Butler. The grand-daughter of Milton was the last of his blood. ”

“ Dryden, it seems, obtained the reputation of being the author of the Essay on Satire, in which Lord Rochester was severely dealt with, and which was, in reality, written by Lord Mulgrave, afterwards the Duke of Buckinghamshire. Rochester meditated on the innocent Dryden a base and cowardly revenge, and thus coolly expressed his intent in one of his letters: “You write me word that I am out of favour with a certain poet, whom I have admired for the disproportion of him and his attributes. He is a rarity which I cannot but be fond of, as one would be of a hog that could fiddle, or a singing owl. ”

“ When he had worn himself down in the service of the public or the booksellers, there scarce was left of all his slender remunerations, at the last stage of life, enough to convey him to a cheap country and a restoring air on the Continent. Gradually perishing in a foreign land, neglected by the public that admired him, deriving no resources from the booksellers who were drawing the large profits of his works, Smollett threw out his injured feelings in the character of Bramble, in Humphrey Clinker: the warm generosity of his temper, but not his genius, seeming to fleet away with his breath. ”

“ This active and regular mode of life could alone have enabled Rubens to satisfy all the demands which were made upon him as an artist; and the astonishing number of works he completed, the genuineness of which is beyond all doubt, can only be accounted for through his union of extraordinary diligence with the acknowledged fertility of his productive powers.
DILIGENCE OF RUBENS. Like other great painters, Rubens was an architect, too ”

“ The venerable artist was between seventy and eighty years old when he executed these; and they possess all the spirit and vigour of imagination that distinguished his best days. As a whole, there is not, perhaps, to be found a more interesting series of historical designs of any country in ancient or modern times. The drawing of this frieze ought to have been in the possession of the King; but they were sold at Christie’s, with other works, on the decease of the painter. ”

“ After the wine had led them into the gravest strain of moralising, they agreed that life was but a state of misery; that the greatest happiness consisted in having been born, and the next greatest in an early death ”

“ Sad, then, to relate, in one unlucky night, the picture and the house were entirely burnt in an accidental fire; not even a sketch or study was saved from destruction; and the property was wholly uninsured. As a specimen of glass painting, the work was very successful: the colours were very brilliant, and the ruby red of old was all but equalled. The artistic treatment was altogether original; the painters, in no instance, borrowing from the contemporary picture of the same scene in the Hampton Court collection. ”

“ Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is recklessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together, in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them ”

“ One must confess that if the poets were an order of beings of too great sensibility for this world, the painters laboured still more under this malady of genius. Zoppo, a sculptor, having accidentally broken the chef d’œuvre of his efforts, destroyed himself. ”

“ Turner, the painter, is a ready wit. Once at a dinner where several artists, amateurs, and literary men were convened, a poet, by way of being facetious, proposed as a toast the health of the painters and glaziers of Great Britain. ”