fiur Art5.
THE BRITISH INSTITUTION: OLD MASTERS.
The pleasure of publicity seems to be enforcing itself upon the minds of our collectors. After furnishing forth the wondrous show at Man., cheater last year, they are now coming forward with quite exceptional strength and liberality at the British Institution : the collection which opened to private view last Saturday, of works by old masters and de- ceased British painters, is of extraordinary interest. Indeed, it is & gathering of masterpieces ; sumptuous in great names, and bringing be- fore us several men who have been little more than names hitherto to the' general ear. An exhibition which contains six Da Vincis, (or nominal Da Vincis,) besides the most important copy extant of his Last Supper, belonging to. the Royal Academy, must be an exceptional one on that ground alone. Of the six we fully believe in three. "The Infant Savour and St. John " is profoundly lovely ; the heads beautiful for truth and, that kind of naiveté in which a great mind can be traced ; the flesh,- and the painting generally, most soft and firm. The poor grey-whit& curly lamb, however, does not come in for the share which he might certainly have claimed in this softness. We do not remember any other Da Vinci in England which bears to our eyes such indisputable: sign manual of the master as this small work, the property of Lord( Ashburton. The remaining two are coloured cartoon studies for heads in the Last Supper—" The Saviour' " the same head of grari cious sorrow as in the picture, but without the moustache and beard; and " An Apostle "—the last but one to the right, very grandly done:. among the changes adopted in the fresco, one can see that Leonardo has, given this head a more decidedly Jewish look. A fourth of these Da Vincis, "La Vierge aux Koshers," is a duplicate of the wonderful: masterpiece in the Louvre, and was exhibited here a few years ago. How far it is safe to assume that this comes from the very hand of Leo.■ nardo we cannot pronounce; but some connoisseurs consider it to be even more valuable than the Louvre picture in its present state. The same collector, the Earl of Suffolk, sends the De, Vinci of "The, Virgin and Child" which has been so much talked about of late as "the stolen picture." Its authenticity does not impress us as being beyond dispute. If a real Da Vinci, it is far from being a first-rate one : if an imitation, the copyist knew the master's trick well. The hard white coldness of the flesh chills one's sympathy. Nearly the same remarks will apply to another "Virgin and Child," the property of Mr. Davenport Brom- ley : only that, while its charm is perhaps greater, its strength is less. Another "stolen picture " here once again present is the famous Ani- bal Caracci, "Le Baboteur " ; a work whose temporary eclipse must have drawn at least a score of sighs from Dilettanteism, for one that True Art vouchsafed to it.
Glorious Venice was never more glorious than in the Giorgione which appears here under the title " Giorgione, his Mistress, and Pupil," and which is celebrated in the well-known stanzas of Byron's Beppo, where the resplendent fair one is "made an honest woman of" as the painter's "wife," and the "pupil" brought nearer to his heart as his "son." Perhaps there is as little foundation for the one set of titles as for the other : connoisseurs are very fond of finding, in every beautiful woman a painter limned, his mistress. " But such a woman! love in life!" says Byron : and a perfect right he had to say so, though the lady's jaw may be a trifle too heavy. " But such colour !" we are still more tempted to exclaim. The splendour and the depth of it are indeed incredible : we can use no fainter term. And having said so much, we shall leave this miracle of art in silence : none but the burning words of poetry can cope with a thing like this, to which the dull level of critical prose is almost an insult. Titian too appears in a magnificent full length, "The Em- peror Charles V." at an age not much past thirty ; in a fine " Portrait of a Physician," one of those heads, far from uncommon, which combine the evidence of thought and culture with a gross natural type; and in a " Venus, Cupid, and Psyche,"—a study of Venetian glow of colour in its curious yellowed flesh-tints and whites, and exceedingly grand in the background glimpse and male figures. Tintoret's portrait—" Don Piero Richetti "—almost surpasses Titian's ; so wonderful is its life, 60 tremendous its power, so entire its simplicity. And Bellini's por- trait of an Italian woman—a browned face, just such as you might ex- pect to meet this very summer, with a single blue line of sea behind, against the horizon,—scarcely falls below Tintoret. (Is this Gentile Bel- lini, or the better known Giovanni ? We rather fancy, the former.)
Frances Knevet, Countess of Rutland," also, is a very interesting por- trait by Zucehero—who seems to have taken kindly to that injunction of good Queen Bess, by no means so absurd as people suppose, that he should paint her face without shadow. The management of the man and bright tints of red in this full-length is exquisitely chaste. Even the brazen and iron ages of Venetian art show to some advantage in the gallery : the Vecchia is picturesque in more of the modern way than usual, and the Duke of Newcastle's Canalettos are remarkably fine ones.
For its specimens of the early Italian schools the Institution is mainly indebted to Mr. Barker. The ascetic fervour of Crivelli is most nobly displayed in the " Portrait of the Beato Ferretti, Ancestor of the Reign- ing Pontiff," whose hungry zeal, which glowers in his hot eyes, and channels his discoloured cheeks, is rewarded by a heavenly vision of the Virgin and Infant Christ. If Crivelli is ascetic in this masterpiece, he is almost savagely fanatic in the tone of his two little saint-trios in arched recesses of stone festooned with fruit,—" St. Louis, St. Jerome, and St. Peter" • " St. Paul, St. Basil, and St. Chrvsostom." The Pietro della Francesca and the Lippo Lippi are both interesting works : but each of them suggests a doubt. The former is catalogued as "Isotta da Rimini' the Wife of Siesmund Pandolfo Malatesta." Now, if the portrait at the National Gallery by the same painter, and professedly of the same lady, is really Isotta, this cannot be ; for no process of art, nor yet of nature, can convert a nose with a decided tendency to the aquiline nto a nose with a marked preference for the retrousse. We suspect„ however, that the better claim is on the part of Mr. Barker's picture. The Lippi purports to be a religious composition, with " authenticated Portraits of Cosmo and Lorenzo de' Medici and Savonarola." As far as face goes, we might be inclined to recognize the reforming monk in the elderly St. Francis ; but we find scarcely a trace of the known features of either the Father of his Country or the Magnificent, and equally little probability, in an historical point of view, that the two figures referred to—a man of some sixty, and another of from eighteen to twenty years of age—could have been painted from them both. When Cosmo died at the age of seventy-five, Lorenzo was but fifteen ; and the very year in which Lorenzo came into power at the age of twenty, 1469, was the year of Lippi's death. Tested historically, the portrait of Savonarola is almost an impossibility—quite so, if the St. Francis is the figure referred to ; for, when Lippi died, Savonarola was a youth of seventeen; when Cosmo died, a child of twelve ; when Cosmo was of about the age here represented, actually unborn. Such is " authentica- tion." It is true, however, that the well-known connexion of Lippi with the Medici family, and the association in the picture of these two 4f grave citizens " with the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence, favours the idea that, unlike as they are to other portraits, they may probably be intended for some members of the great house; and we might even stretch our faith so far as to suppose that the younger figure was painted from the living. Lorenzo, and the elder a reminiscence of the dead Cosmo. The Luca Signorelli of " St. George " looks archaic, especially at first sight, but has some very fine design in the naked corpses of the foreground. "The Virgin and Child, with Angels" bearing a canopy, is a delightfully sweet example of Gozzoli, which we think had been included in a former exhibition here. Of a somewhat later style is the Ortolano, "St. Sebas- tian, St. Demetrius, and St. Roque" ; the Demetrius a noble chivalrous figure, but the work generally deficient in qualities of colour. This may be the fault of a restorer. " St. Catharine and St. Lucia," by Dosso Dossi, presents the character of a great period of art, after its genuine vitality had departed . the " Portrait of a Man" by the same painter might be Don Quixote in his youth. Two superior Claudes are the "Landscapes and Figures" belonging to Earl Howe; the first, with nymphs and fauns, formal, but agreeable ; the second, with cattle in the foreground, luminous and fine in its pink-tinged afternoon hori- zon, and mounded distance beyond the stream.
Of the Spanish pictures, the only one specially remarkable is Mr. Gladstone's large Murillo of "A Saint [we think St. Francis] with two monks, walking on the water"; more properly, crossing the sea on his dispread cloak, which wafts him ashore, where he is awaited by a calmly surprised population of citizens and children. The work belongs evidently to the painter's earlier period, when he aimed at the strong manner of Velasquez, and is far more ponderous and severe in feeling than the pictures by which the huge but unjustified popularity of Mu- rillo is mostly sustained in England.
The Flemish and Dutch paintings, spite of the unexampled absence of Ruben, and the restriction of Vandyck to a single head, of average ex- cellence, represent the school capitally. Several of the Rembrandts are admirable. " Tobias and the Angel "—or rather, Tobias, under the Angel's direction, restoring Tobir s sight,—is a most wonderful piece of art, notwithstanding the debased, and almost ruffianly, character of the grimy bridegroom and the bottlenosed archangel. There is intense truth
and astonishing power, both of design and expression, in old Tobit, who, submitting nervously to be operated upon, seems to be recovering his first blink of the cherished day. " The Tribute-money " is another pre- cious example of the gloom and the magic of Rembrandtism. Not less marvellous is " Rembrandt's Mother "—the kindly, frosty, shrivelled old lady in her ruff; and very fine the-valetudinarian "Goldsmith of Ant- werp." Two little landscapes complete the representation of the cycle of the strange master's power. A small Holbein and a small Van Eyck are both full of matter ; the former particularly, a portrait of " Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk," being of most pure and lovely style. Cuyp, the painter of quiet., healthy', enjoyable sunshine, is in brilliant strength with the " Scene on the Ice," and " Cattle and Figures"; examples which could hardly be surpassed, whether as typical of the mas- ter or for intrinsic excellence. Admirable also is the landscape—a sullen bird's-eye view of river-broken flats—by De Koninok; the only Dutch landscape-painter who rivals—and we think often equals- Rembrandt. Teniers appears to great advantage in the pictures of the Duke of Newcastle, who has done as much to strengthen the Flemish and Dutch section of the gallery as Mr. Barker for the Italian : the "Cow-shed" is a special chef-d'oeuvre in its able simplicity. Jan Steen, a man whose faculties appear, however degraded, to have been natu- rally far higher than those of his fellow illustrators of Dutch smoking and beer-swilling, is finely represented by " The Hurdy-gurdy": the smile of the man seated to the right, with a child on his knee, and his cap half across his face, is a signal point of quiet life. On Ruysdael, Both, Wouvermans, Le Duc, Bol, and Denner, we cannot pause indi- vidually ; but all of them are at their best. The British works begin with our earliest name, Dobson, and go down to the last two Academicians whom death has privileged to appear in this company, Cook and 17wine. The Robson, "William Cavendish, the loyal Duke of Newcastle,' Captain-General of the Forces of Charles I. in the North," is a specially fine work of the Vandyck school ; the face is marked by cold immovable positiveness. The Cook and Uwins are the diploma-pictures of those painters. The former, wholly un- known to the present g•eneration of picture-seers, shows himself a re- putable classicist in "Iris descending to comfert Ceres for the loss of Proserpine "; and the latter treats with some effectiveness, though, not with genuine power, the strong subject, " A Neapolitan Widow, mourning over her dead child, is distracted at the joyous sounds of the Carnival." The two great competitors, Reynolds and Gainsborough, " divide the crown." Naughty, captivating Nelly O'Brien, who won all hearts at Manchester with that saucy face of her's, on which Sir Joshua has fixed for ever the re- flected sunlight, reappears here in two portraits ; one of them, with all its sweetness, a little sentimentalized, but the other (128) almost better than the Manchester marvel. "Miss Cholmondeley," the merry little gipsy carrying her funny curly poodle across the brook, and perhaps going to souse him in it on the sly, is one of the most perfect of Rey- noldses as of the most famous. The peremptory disciplinarian head of "Admiral Keppel," and the soldierly "Marquis of Granby," (with a most disproportionate charger,) are also excellent examples ; and the Titianesque " Woody Landscape " an uncommon and most delightful one. Gainsborough's vivid breadth appears in the " Landscape with Figures" of the gipsy class, and the. "Landscape with a Man Plough- ing," which appears to take its inspiration from the Dutch school. It is an exceptional and most striking little picture, with an enormous puff of white cloud over the central windmill. The " Two Monks' Heads" are spirited and mortified; "Lady Mary Boulby" is a head instinct with refined play of life, and perfect in purity of colour. An early Turner, " Landscape, Evening,"—a rounded bay, with the evening light coming down the gorge of the castle mound, is equally impressive in its depth, and rich and tender in the brilliancy of its lighted distance. A powerful and truthfully expressive group of "Children" by Opie, Ropiney's " Mrs. Fitzherbert," Wilson's " Evening," and Bird's " Sa- turday Night," a village-choir practising for the morrow's service, are all laudable examples of their painters, and of the qualities of the British school towards the beginning of the century.
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