POPE AS A PAINTER.
tTo THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR.") SLE,—The discussion which commenced under the above heading seems to be drifting into a dissertation on likenesses of Pope. To return to the original subject, is it too much to hope that some one who has seen the portrait in Arundel Castle, said to be the work of the poet, will kindly give a description of it ? I quite agree with Mr. Lane that Jervas wee no mean painter; further, I regard him as a great artist, whose reputation has unjustly suffered from malicious pleasantries on the part of Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and from ill- informed criticism by Horace Walpole. Kneller's joke about
the drawing I have already quoted; it is an example of the kind of mud that sticks. Walpole, amongst other disparage- ments, described Jervas's style of painting as " thin and fan- like." Reynolds, whose ungenerous habit of depreciating the work of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors was notorious, alluding in a certain house to the absence of pictures by Jervas, said that they were probably " up in the garret." The impression left on one's mind by this correspondence is that Pope was a good amateur, and that if he had begun seriously to study painting earlier in life (he was twenty-five when he went to Jervas) he might have achieved some distinc- tion in that art, but the world would have been poorer by his failure to apply himself constantly, to use his own words, "not only to that art; but to that single branch of an art to which his talent was most powerfully bent."—I am, Sir, &c.,
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