FOUNDLING HOSPITALS FOR ART.
'TIM Annuals are not only schools for sucking sonnetteers, and 'workhouses for superannuated scribblers and pauper poetasters, but foundling hospitals for the illegitimate progeny of painters. Formerly it was the custom for the artist to illustrate the works of the author; now the author illustrates the production of the artist. Instead of the painter embodying the ideal creations of the poet, it is the poet who idealizes the bodily forms of the painter. He breathes life into the lay-figure ; creates a face of loveliest beauty under a thick veil, a form of symmetry under an empty drapery ; and gives intense expression to the hidden fea- tures of a countenance. This system will wonderfully increase the fecundity of the modern artist's brain : he has only to clothe the anonymous, chance-begotten offspring of his vagrant fancy, in the gay colours of his palette, and lay them at the door of the hos- pital ; and they are taken in, named, and placed out in the ideal world, by the care of their foster-father, the poet or the novelist; who thus literally " gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." Formerly, artists used to take upon themselves the office of sponsors of their easel-born hantlings ; but the ill success which too commonly attended the puling creatures, who were obliged to assume some other name in order to get passed to a parish, in- duced them to leave their baptism to those into whose hands they may chance to fall. This system is most favourable to the effemi- nate fancy of our modern artist. He has only to sit down and sketch a face, a figure, or a scene, at haphazard, which he dresses up in the most approved pictorial fashion, and his work is done : the author creates the interest of the picture, breathes into the person the breath of life, and it becomes a living character. The more vague the indications of character, the wider scope for the inventive genius of the poet. Every random touch is converted into a suc- cessful point. Indecisiveness of character in the picture, becomes, by means of this process, a delicate marking of the minuter shades of feeling and disposition—an indication of mixed motives of action. Each peculiarity of costume is made a peg on which to hang an incidental aid to the development of an idiosyncracy. The art of painting is thus reduced to a same of chance. This discovery is like that of the philosopher s stone, by which the baser tokens and the small money of art are transmuted into fine gold. The author's pen, like the wand of the magician, makes the pageantry of painting stir with life, and "sets the puppets dallying." Henceforth, painters may invent by proxy. They have only to pursue their own inclinations, banish thought, and paint pretty faces, gay costumes, and tastefully-furnished boudoirs, secure of' seeing their merits rising upon the ruins of an author's fame. Poets and prose writers seem very cheerfully to turn them- selves into lamplighters of these transparent devices of the de- signer. The painters furnish forth masks and dresses, and the authors personify the characters of the masquerade; while the lucky artist "waddles away with the glory" of the invention. Hitherto the designer has been content to play second fiddle ; but by this inverse mode of illustration he figures in as leader. The poor author, to be sure, by thus being obliged to write to order—to work to pat- tern—gains only the imputation of dulness, in return for his labo- rious ingenuity and aptitude in furnishing with a soul and a set of sensibilities the dummies so smartly fitted out by the picture maker with waxen cheeks, glass eyes, and silken hair. The au- tomaton model is animated by the machinery of the author's in- vention; and the doll is metamorphosed into a divinity. Some- times, however, the exhibiter and trader in these commodities make havoc of the proprieties of costume and character, by pressing into the service of some temporary purpose personages glaringly inappropriate; as did that venerable genius of wax-work, Mrs. SALMON, who transformed a funeral pageant into a marriage ceremony with fairy-like expedition. The corpse, fitted up with coral lips and a blush on each cheek, made a beautiful bride; the mutes, attired in court suits, made most respectable re- latives ; the chief mourner figured in a bridal dress as the bridegroom, and the coffin was quickly metamorphosed into an altar. So, with the printsellers of the last age, the bald head of the Marquis of Granby became, with the addition of a patch on the skull, a striking resemblance of Figg the bruiser ; and the great Marlborough needed little alteration to become the repre- sentative of Macheath. Similar examples of this felicity of adaptation are furnished in the Forget Me Not for 1833; the frontispiece of which is an engraving, from a sketch by LESLIE, of Autolycus, which is put forth as an illustration of a story of some lost jewels,—the pedlar's glass beads representing the dia- monds and pearls of a Flemish noble. Again, we have in the same Annual a classical Ophelia, by Woon, with sleeveless tunic, armlets, and a garland of wild flowers, doing duty as an Emigrant's Daughter. In another Annual, we have a bond fide Madonna designated as a "Novice." This is simply an old trick of the pie- tare-makers, repeated by the book-makers. Sir JOSFIUA REY- NOLDS'S Puck was a naked child, with its ears pointed, its eyes puckered, and a toad-stool instead of another kind of stool put under it to sit upon. Only, in the present instance, no other me- tamorphosis is considered necessary but that of the name. The latitudinarian book-maker evinces the accommodating spirit of the showman, who, while exhibiting the Battle of Waterloo, being asked by one of his juvenile audience which was the Duke of WELLINGTON, and which was BONAPARTE, politely replied, "Whichever you please, my little dear!"
Previous page
