SOME PORTRAITS AT SOUTH KENSINGTON.
To tourists in London at this season, we would sug- gest an hour or two with the portraits that have been rescued from the oubliette of the British Museum, and transferred to the walls of the National Portrait Gallery at South Kensington. The visitor to the National Portrait
Gallery should bear in mind that he must enter the building on the Horticultural-Gardens' side of the bewildering region whose ins and outs no one ever pretends to understand. Then, if he bears up bravely against the depressing influence of the dreary passage, and the bored-to-death policeman, who evidently wonders why on earth anybody should come there who is free to remain away ; and especially if he does not even glance towards a fearsome place to the left, where damp canoes hang from mouldy rafters above an ill-smelling earthen floor, with a risky platform at the side, whence mournful visitors may con- template the spectacle, and summon up ghosts of Canadian boatmen, if so disposed,—he may put in some of his tourist time under tolerably pleasant circumstances. He will be struck, on entering the now gallery with the monstrous ugliness and in- convenience of a number of huge benches with high backs, like the " settles " of two centuries ago, which by their staring-yellow colour clash hideously with the mellow-tinted pictures on the walls ; but on the whole, he will be glad that he has come there, and that is more than most sight-seers can say of most sight- seeing.
It is like reading a history of England with copious illus- trations, to make the tour of those well preserved, handsomely framed portraits, which have resumed their proper functions, after a long seclusion in the British Museum, where, as though the first intention of that institution were the careful con- cealment of its contents from human ken, they hung above the huge, tall cases of " specimens " in the upper Zoological Gallery, and were consequently about as accessible as the Mikado used to be. The new portraits belong to several different eras in English history, and their subjects are very various in importance ; as one looks into the faces, many visions pass before one's imagination, and they are for the most part of a tragic kind. Occupying a portion of one wall, there is a very suggestive group of portraits. What passion, and crime, murder, cruelty, baseness, and misery, mixed up with the splen-
dour of royalty and the romance of history, the pictured faces, mostly smiling and looking their beet, amid jewels and rich
attire, bring to one's remembrance. The first in chrono- logical order is that of " the Lady Margaret," mother of King Henry VII.—it was said he inherited his avarice from the " careful " Countess—and among the other faces are those of her grandson, Henry VIII., and her great- granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth, the latter represented by two staring, sharp-nosed portraits, with hideous red wigs. Very prim and prayerful stands the Countess of Richmond and Derby, with dark brown, knowing eyes. One wonders what, supposing the dwellers in the next world know anything of the doings of this, she came to think of the development of the results of her son's victory at Bosworth Field,--from that grand stroke of policy, the marriage with the Lady Elizabeth, which combined the rival Roses, to the end of the violent and blood-loving Tudor line, by the death of the two childless heart-broken Queens, Mary and Elizabeth. Hard by, very bland, smiling, plump, and comfortable, is Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, brother-in-law to King Henry VIII.,—a dis- tinction for which his kinsfolk paid so dearly. He is re- presented as an elderly man, and looks happy, with a little nosegay of pinks and pansies in his hand. Are his thoughts of tho grand wedding-day, when Mary Tudor, Queen-Dowager of France (who had changed King Louis's breakfast-hour from eight a.m. to noon, but otherwise treated the old man well) gaily gave her emancipated hand to her English lover, and he adopted the famous motto :-
" Cloth of gold, do not despise,
Though thou be matcht with cloth of frieze. Cloth of frieze, be not too bold, Though thou be mateht with cloth of gold P" At sight of this portrait, a ghostly procession flits before us, and the foremost shade is the learned and gentle "Epiphany Queen," Lady Jane Grey. • Here, too, we find Bacon, a heavier and coarser man than he is represented in the bronze statue which appropriately presides over the vestibule downstairs ; Burghley, in so stiff a ruff that it cannot have been that one he wore on the occasion of his celebrated nod, for it holds his head immovable ; and Cranmer, with the face we know among Lodge's Portraits. Of course, Mary, Queen of Scots, is here ; hers is a " White Queen" portrait; she wears her weeds for Francois II., the dross to which Brantome alludes in the lines,-
" lion void, sous blanc-atour En grand deuil et tristesse." The face is hard, with brown eyes, and looks forty ; it has no likeness to either of the two other portraits of Queen Mary, to be found side by side in the lower gallery, and one of which is exquisitely sweet and lovely, with beam- ing dark grey-blue eyes. The second—it was painted while she was imprisoned at Sheffield—is, like the new one, hard and handsome, and the dress is singularly rich and beautiful. In this lower gallery there is a dreadful portrait of the Countess of Lennox, Darnley's mother. It is like Dickens's Arthur Gride, and has the peculiarly convincing look of a good like- ness. It is suggestive—if a portrait can suggest—of the doom of crime and woe and violent death which pur- sued the Stuarts in the illegitimate as well as the lawful line, from the great-grandfather of James I., to Monmouth and to Derwentwater. The Countess' grandson, King James, is here, among the new portraits, as a young boy, as middle- -aged, and also as an old man. In the second portrait he looks like a red clown, in the third he looks like a keen, intelligent gentleman. We may glance from the first of these pictures to the portrait of the pedagogue, Buchanan, with a cold, harsh face. All the Stuarts resemble one another ; the Duke of Monmouth is the handsomest of them ; ho is strikingly like Henrietta Maria, his grand- mother. From a coppery, lurid William III., peevish and sickly, we glance across at the " Old Chevalier," with his sons. The disinherited Prince is a stalwart gentleman in this picture, very like his mother, Mary of Modena, and with a look of his uncle Charles II. also; the two bright boys are perfect images of their own mother. It is hard to realise that the limpid-eyed, fair-skinned, light-limbed youth on Prince James's right can ever have become " the Young Chevalier" of history and of Sir Horace Mann's "Letters" Here, however, is a tell- -tale portrait of him, as an old man,—it is that of a blear-eyed sot; and near it hangs the picture of his wife, a stolid, broad- laced, vulgar woman, as little like the ideal wife of a :prince, as she is like the ideal mistress of a poet. Here, too, is another family group, not without its suggestiveness, —James II., looking sea-sick ; Anne Hyde, a vulgar like- ness of her daughter and namesake, with a comfortable, inn- keeping air ; the buxom Princess of Denmark herself, and, heading by her gown, the poor little prince 4vhom she beat with a cane to counteract water-on-theJbrain, and make him lively ; lastly, " Est-il possible P" her Highness's husband, by whose dull good-looks one is surprised. Had anybody ever any motion that George of Denmark was a handsome dolt P Opposite, is Katharine of Braganza, by no means the worst off among queens-consort, a cheery, beady-eyed person, with a loop of hair on her forehead, and the loveliest lace ; and the Electress Sophia—also an ancestress, with somewhat direful results— :slim and graceful, with beautiful, shy eyes. On the oppo- site wall hangs the portrait of her grand-child, Dorothea, the only daughter of King George I., and his unhappy wife, Sophia of Zell, who languished away her life in cruel imprison- ment. Dorothea has a fine face, but a mournful one, as becomes a woman who was not only the daughter of George I. of England, but also wife to that " dumb poet," with a taste for torture, King Frederick William I. of Prussia, and mother to Frederick the Great, a perhaps not altogether heroic personage in private life. If ever a woman looked, on canvas, tired of her life, and almost frightened out of it, that woman is the Princess Dorothea. One almost wonders 'that she dared to look like that, and that the portrait-painter ;dared to be so honest. Here is a dreadful picture of George IL, in 'his disreputable old age, a goggle-eyed, pendulous-lipped, " little Sultan," contrasting strangely with a portrait of his wife, Caroline of Anspach, in her bloom ; a handsome, bold, red- and-white young woman, with a fine carriage, and a hot temper showing in every feature ; just the woman to hate such per- sons as her son and his wife, ardently. Here are, William, Duke of Cumberland, "the Butcher," looking the part; the Princes George and Henry, of Wales, good-looking, stupid boys ; and a host of notable personages, of a time at which the gross and conscienceless sensuality of the period of George IT., which is so marked a characteristic of the faces of that day, gives place to something better and higher. For the refined in expressionone must look farther back,—to the face of Vanderbank's Sir Isaac Newton, in which there is great
depth and placidity ; tole f I t face of Kneller's Lady Russell, lull of thought, sense, and
Barrow ; to the face of Wissing's Mary of Modena, that which bent over the royal child one eventful night, in the shadow of the doorway at.Lambeth Palace. The older grace, too, is seen in "la belle Hamilton," as the famous beauty caresses a real lamb (people had not come to carrying about toy ones in her time, and life in general was not so much made up of sham and tinsel) ; in the Countess of Pem- broke (just above her portrait hangs Ben Jonson's), in Algernon Sidney ; in Harrington, the Republican, author of "Oceans," who was with King Charles on the scaffold ; in Bishop Juxon, who saw the father's head struck off, and lived to place the crown upon the head of the son ; and in many others of the more romantic time.
What interest there is in the miscellaneous portraits also One may wander among them, unhampered. by chronology, taking them at random, and find history in them all,—the history of war, of seamanship, of statesmanship, of law, of letters. Lord Anson, with a prim face and a stiff back ; Lord. Chesterfield, grown'very old ; the clever Lady Temple; Lord North, with a head like one of the Abb6 Domenech's Indians, in whom we used not to believe ; Sir Robert Walpole, contemplating a like- ness of himself on the painter's easel with artless pleasure ; a stony Lord Lyttelton, busy with the "Dialogues of the Dead ;" Hogarth, at sixty-one, jolliest of dogs ; the first Duke of Chandos, in an absurd costume, partly fur cloak, but more bare legs ; an impossible Shelley ; a Keats with starry eyes, as though "the shadow of our night" had never darkened them ; Pope, with wonderfully brilliant eyes also, but of quite another order of shining, and with curious pleats about his cheeks. Hero are Reynolds's Pulteney, Earl of Bath ; the first Earl Camden, who looks like a cleanly, good-natured head-nurse John, Lord Hervey, very " white-curd "-like, indeed ; Jonathan Swift, with a fine, open, steady face, as little like incipient mad- ness as can be imagined ; Lord Mansfield, in the library which was afterwards sacked by the "Gordon" rioters. And when we have soon all those, they are but a few of the pictures of men and women, dead, yet speaking from the walls of the National Picture Gallery.
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