THE SHAKESPEARE GALLERY.*
" Tax greater part," said Sir Thomas Browne of mankind, "must be content to be as though they had never been," and cer- tainly picture galleries are no exception to this dispiriting rule. Who of the present geueration has so much as heard that there once was a Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall ? And yet the room, at least, still exists, and over the door of it every passer-by may still see the alto-relieve in which Banks, R.A., has depicted the great poet sitting in a most uncomfortable posture, with Poetry on one side of him offering him a laurel wreath, which appa- rently he does not want, and Painting on the other lending her shoulder for his support, while she displays with the utmost freedom at once the beauty of her own bust and the skill of the eminent sculptor who designed her. Of the artists who were employed to paint the pictures how many of us ever saw an inch of the canvass which was covered by J. Downman, and William Hodges, and the Rev. 'William Peters, and Rigaud, and Tresham, and Wheatley ? Yet we have passed silently by the names which are marked out for certain oblivion by the absence of the letters R.A. Reynolds, indeed, is still great in Israel, and Romney counts numerous admirers, and Stothard lives by his illustration of Rogers's poems, and Hoppner by his portrait of Pitt ; but what are Barry, and Fuseli, and Northcote, and Opie, and Smirke, and the Hamiltons, but sounds meaningless though familiar in our ears? Destiny will have her way. They, too, whom their own pencils could not save, will have to join the brave men who lived before Agamemnon, though they wanted neither a sacred poet to be illustrated nor even an eminent printseller to create a Shakespeare Gallery. Alderman Boydell was a remarkable man. When he first began business, he tells us, the whole commerce of prints consisted in importing engravings, mostly French, into this country. Impressed, however, with the idea that the genius of his own countrymen was equal to that of foreigners, he set about creating a school of engraving in Eng- land, and so successful were his exertions that in 1804 he was able to declare that the whole course of commerce was changed, that very few prints were imported, but that English prints were largely exported to Holland, Belgium, and Germany. As early as 1787 the Alderman was already rich, and probably like all speculators sighing for new worlds to conquer. In this mood he went to a dinner party at Hampstead. The tempter, in the form of a guest, asserted that the English were unequal to the pro- duction of any high-class historical pictures, and the Alderman answered him by forming the Shakespeare gallery. Nearly 100 pictures in illustration of Shakespeare, by the principal painters of the day, were collected in a gallery built expressly for them in Pall Mall, at a cost considerably exceeding £100,000, and the engravers were set to work as fast as the pictures were finished. It was to the prints that the magnificent Alderman looked for profit ; the gallery of paintings he intended to bequeath to the nation. But the fame of Fuseli and the Rev. W. Peters, R.A., was not so to be perpetuated. Bonaparte's Continental system put an end at once to the Alderman's foreign trade and his income. The gallery was disposed of by lottery, and the winner, only a few months after Alderman Boydell's death, in December, • The Shakespeare Gallery. A. reproduction in commemoration of the Tercentenary Anniversary of the Poet's Birth, 1864. London : L. Booth, S. Ayling. 1804, put the pictures up to auction. They fetched rather more than £6,000.
The two splendid volumes of prints in atlas folio were com- pleted by the Alderman's nephew and partner in March, 1805, but, like the pictures which they represented, their size was against them, though, as we are bound to declare, not their size alone. The engravings were admirable, but people in general do not care for even a first-rate engraving of an indifferent picture. And the Shakespeare Gallery was well nigh forgotten until Mr. Ayling took advantage of the Shakespeare tercentenary to re- produce these once famous prints by photography in the beautiful volume before us. We think it deserves to succeed. In the first place, the photographs regarded as photographs are admirable—quite equal in clearness to the prints, and with a softness- to which no engraving ever attains. Sometimes they look a little black in the shadows, as certainly is the photograph of Shakespeare's statue by Roubilliac in the hall of the British Museum which forms the frontispiece ; but we are bound to allow that we have not had an opportunity of putting photographs and prints side by side, so that the fault, if any, may well be the engraver's. In the next place, whatever may be the shortcomings of the early historical painters of this country, they had unquestion- ably many great merits. They are, moreover, almost unrepresented in our public galleries, and one would probably find in Lend in a specimen of any mediteval Italian limner of angular saints more easily than of half the artists who were famous here fifty or sixty years ago. Reproduced on a small scale their faults of drawing and expression become less glaring, and though deprived of the charm of colour, which has always been the strong point of our painters, the designs of Fuseli have at least the merit of fancy, those of Opie, force, and of Romney, grace. Where the subject enabled them to confine themselves to a single figure the illus- trators attain to high excellence. It is worth while to compare Romney's picture of Cassandra with his two laboured allegories of the infant Shakespeare, attended by Nature and the Passions, and nursed by Tragedy and Comedy. Not even the lovely face of Joy in the one and of Comedy in the other can atone for the exaggeration which in that day marked historical painting. With Cassandra he had got back to portrait painting, and, though as an illustration of the Cassandra of " Troilus and Cres- sida" she should be more of a scold, and as a Trojan woman and patriot should show more passionate grief, the grace and dignity of the figure are worthy of the Grecian prophetess. So Westall, though sometimes happy in his compositions, as in the photo- graph (lxvii.) of" Wolsey's Arrival at Leicester Abbey," shines more in his "Lady Macbeth." His " Imogeu," which concludes the series of the Shakespeare Gallery, is really an exquisite produc- tion; the feminine fear conquered by desperation with which she approaches the cave is most gracefully and naturally rendered ; and it alone of the whole series of pictures is still a popular print, which greets every beholder with the aspect of an old friend. It wet; also to be expected that the comic illustrations would be better than the serious, and generally they are so. Hogarth is a purely British painter. Thus Sir Robert Smirke is better employed over "Slender," or "Elbow and Froth," or "Dog- berry and Verges," than over the "Seven Ages of Man ;" and we should wonder more that the Rev. W. Peters, R.A., was so com- pletely forgotten if we had his "Merry Wives" and his "Beatrice, without the" Q. leen Catherine Scolding Wolsey," or the "Cranmer Prophesying of the Glory of Queen Bess." On the whole, we can- not say that the public was wrong in not admiring our early his- torical painters. For unintentional humour we know nothing better than Graham's "Othello and Desdemona " in this series (lxxxviii.) Desdemona lies on her bed in the attitude and with the smirk on her face of Poussin's sleeping nymph, while Othello, if more moral, less dignified than Silenus, is running in with a modern bedroom-candlestick, for all the world like a black foot- man with an alarm of fire ; but people will not buy unintentional humour. It was, however, through extravagance, and blunder- ing, and bad drawing that the English school was destined to struggle to the light, and he who desires to study the history of composition in this country will find this volume of Mr. Ayling's invaluable. And whatever may have been the case with poor Alderman Boydell's costly engravings, he will obtain here far more than his money's worth even in pure beauty.
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