EASTLAKE ON OIL PAINTING.

be this thick volume, an octavo of nearly six hundred pages, we have a hook which contains much that is valuable, but which ought not to have been published. It is a substitute fur the book which ought to have been published ; and, as compared with that, is what a bale of cotton would be instead of a dozen shirts. We take no great exception to the cha- racter which Mr. Eastlake claims for his work ; it will be observed that he calls it only "Materials for a History " : but in general, when a well-informed and judicious person feels constrained to apply that desig- nation to his book, it is to be regarded as a spontaneous admission that his work is not done—that he has not put his book in a fit state for giving it forth to the world. In cases of important and disputed his- torical questions, it may at times be advisable to have the original ma- terials; but a technical and synoptical history of oil paintingis not within that category of subjects. Books are so numerous, the evils of bulk are so notorious, that any writer of repute who publishes ought to be able to show that he calls uponattention for nothing but a complete work, freed from all its dross and with all its vacancies supplied as far as his capacity would admit. Mr. Eastlake's title is a confession that he has not taken that pains. Perhaps he is pressed for time : but the complete work a year hence would have been worth ten times the raw material now.

Meanwhile, the author is not without some plea for appearing before tlie public; and we cannot state it better than his own plain and un- pretending words.

"The following work was undertaken with a view to promote the objects of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts. It professes to trace the recorded practice of oil painting from its invention; and, by a comparison of authentic traditions with existing works, to point out some of the causes of that durability for which the earlier examples of the art are remarkable. It was considered that such an inquiry, if desirable on general grounds, must be especially so at a time when the beat efforts of our artists are required for the permanent decoration of a national edifice.

"The want of a sufficiently extensive investigation of original authorities re- lating to the early practice of oil painting has led to various contradictory theo- ries; and the uncertainty which has been the result has too often induced an im- pression that the excellence of art in former ages depended on some technical ad- vantages which have been lost. It is the object of the present work to supply, as far as possible the facts and authorities which have hitherto been wanting, so as to enable the :wider to form a tolerably accurate notion respecting the origin and purpose of the methods described, and to estimate the influence of the early cha- racteristics of the art even on its consummate practice. Whatever may be the value of the methods in question considered in themselves, a knowledge of them

cannot fail to be, at least indirectly, useful. * • " The history of oil painting divides itself into two sections; one relating to the Flemish, the other to the Italian system. The Flemish method, the investigation of which forms the subject of the present volume necessarily precedes the other: the earliest traces of the art are found in the North, and the process which VMS invented or improved in Flanders was there developed with reference to a pecu- liar climate. The modifications which that process underwent in Italy may be the subject of inquiry hereafter.

" The original materials to which the author has bad access during the prose- cution of his task have been numerous: accounts of several are added in the form of notes at the end of some of the chapters and elsewhere in the work. The national records have furnished many hitherto unpublished and carious facts; and the author, not forgetting his obligations to the Commissioners on the Fine Arts, who supported his application to obtain extracts from these documents, takes this opportunity of thanking the authorities in the Record Offices for their va- luable aid. To the officers in the British Museum, for their no less important as- sistance, he also begs to express his acknowledgments."

Good. The thing to be regretted is, that Mr. Eastlake has not more fully supplied the want which he describes. His materials serve leas to elucidate the history of " oil painting" than of oil pigments. He deals. far less with " practice" or methods" in the art of painting than with modes of preparing pigments, oils, varnishes, and grounds. Even with that limitation, his work is chargeable with serious deficiencies. A his- tory of the painter's implements and materials, which would be a valuable work, would require a number of details that are here omitted,—such as a good deal more of precise information respecting substances which paint- ers have selected as the field for their paintings—the canvass, panel, &c.; and it would demand a much more clear and intelligible arrangement. A large portion of the volume before us is filled with receipts, in eretenso, for the preparation of oil and pigments, bad, good, and indifferent ; trans- lation in the text, the original Latin, Italian, French, or Spanish, in a foot-note. The author has adhered neither to a chronological order nor to a classification of subjects ; so that he is betrayed into endless and con- fusing repetitions ; " linseed oil," " drying oil," and a hundred familiar oils and oleo-resinous compounds, recur to notice again and again: the ins and outs of the modes for preparing in this century and in that, by this painter and by that, are so intricate, that when you lay down the book, it might also be said you have arrived at no definite conclusion on any one point—you have no distinct idea, in any given case, as to the re- lation of the early and crude preparation of the article, the specimen at its completest stage, and the article degenerate. Without calling upon the author for an opinion which might outrage his discreet reserve, you might expect him so to have set forth his materials that you should be able to pitch upon the page which should describe the best substratum for this or that purpose, the best "ground," the best oil or "vehicle":: but it is not so. The materials for a judgment may be there, in some cases ; but you must extricate them for yourself from the confused heap.

It is possible, indeed, that the subsequent volume which the author half promises may supply some defects in the present ; but we can only judge of what is before us ; and if we therefore do the writer scanty jus- tice, that hardship is incidental to the piecemeal mode of publication. We have said that there is much in the "Materials " which is valuable. Many of the receipts will be perused with the deepest interest by the painter ; and taken cumulatively they convey one important lesson, as to the elaborate care which the early and great masters bestowed on the preparation of their pigments,—very different from the insouciance of too many painters in our own day. We often encounter such passages as the following.

"Modem writers have sometimes expressed the opinion, that, as the alteration of oils is unavoidable, it is better to use them at first in the coloured state which they must ultimately attain. That this was not the opinion of earlier investi- gators, will be abundantly proved in this chapter. The best painters seem to have left nothing undone to render oils as colourless as possible before they were need, and to prevent their rising in pictures and forming what is called a horny surface. Leonardo da Vinci elsewhere gives directions for preparing nut oil." Estimating his time by too purely a commercial scale, the English painter leaves too much to the colour-dealer, a mere tradesman. It is true, that the value of what Mr. Babbage calls "verification" is a thing now well understood in trade, and that the respectable colour-dealer charges in the price a certain fraction as fee for the guarantee which his name for honesty affords that you are buying a "genuine article"; true also that all professed dealers obtain divers advantages from a division of employments unknown to earlier ages. But the real painter is working for a longer time than any trading guarantee will cover—for more than the money-price of his picture; and no purely mercantile motives can supply the sacred zeal which animated the early painter while pursuing with patient labour the drudgery of mechanical preparatives. In another re- spect the early painters enjoyed advantages which are prevented in our time, at once by a more trading spirit and the affectation of a gentility above trade : trusting more implicitly to the nobility of his art, the painter became a true workman at it, and consorted more with his apprentices and assistants ; proportionately elevating them by the sense that they were sharing the immortal labours of the great master. What a study for a pupil to be permitted to labour on those very works which have descended to posterity as the products of a Raphael or a Rubens Of course, the subordinates who surrounded a painter were inspired by a share of his higher ambition : instead of executing his task under the mere coercion of the Saturday night's wages, and looking to no test but the cold scrutiny of the shopkeeper, even the colour-grinder was fired by a portion of the sacred ambition which was common to the whole workshop. Hence, we suspect, no small share of durability in early paintings every grain of pigment was laborated with a conscience. One of the most important questions elucidated by Mr. Eastlake's labours, is that respecting the existence of some admirable " vehicle " known to the early painters but now lost. What he has to say of the Venetian school remains to be seen from the subsequent volume ; but so far as the present volume goes, the existence of any such painter's elixir is disproved. Of all known arts, that of producing a luminous effect by means of pigments, many of them heavy and dull, is perhaps the most difficult ; and it is not surprising that the eager student, wearied with incessant failure, should find consolation in the surmise that the masters of his art knew some secret which delivered them from that body of death that seems to clog the palette. But the fact is, that the state of mind induced by modern practices and habits of thought or feeling is not conducive to fine painting. It is an art which, in its highest parts, defies the influence of mechanical " progress ": the adaptation of these dull

pigments to produce that aspect of living colour and light, presupposes a state of mind partaking at once of leisurely repose and inspired excite- ment, totally at variance with the go-ahead and nonchalant habits of modern society. There may have been a lost " vehicle "; but as Pap- nini could take up any wretched fiddle, and, without tuning it, discourse the most eloquent music, so a truly great painter could produce light out of the grossest pigments, which ineffectually weary the left arm of the modern. The magic vehicle of the early painter, his elixir, was the en- joying and excited state of mind in which he pursued his vocation.

Too mush of Mr. Eastlake's space is devoted to pigments and oils, too little to the processes by which the painters used those materials. We have indeed some account of the manner in which early painters laid in the design upon the ground; general descriptions of the manner in which some few laid their colours in juxtaposition or in succession, whether blended or not, and so forth ; and more specific notices of the manner in which Rubens worked ; also extracts from the WARS of Reynolds. But these notices are scanty. The history of a picture from its commence- ment to its finish is nowhere recounted, at least with any fulness. Now, the nature and composition of pigments are very important things, but the mode in which great artists used the pigments is still more im- portant; especially when we consider the small change that has w- owed in their essentials. The use of colours in correction of each other, by superposition and translucent influences, forms a most essential but obscure branch of the history of oil painting; it seems to be the key to right colouring; and in the historian of the art one would expect more attention to that part. If written records are scanty, the internal evi- dence of paintings is not so, however its difficulty of analysis may con- duce to the toil of the inquirer. Mr. Eastlake does not wholly neglect this part of his subject ; bat he treats of it cursorily and imperfectly. Perhaps his fullest treatment of it will be found in the note on the "ex- tract from the notes of Sir Joshua Reynolds "; not, we think, a happy selection. The literary merit of Reynolds's tasteful and agreeable writ- ings is not denied ; but for practical teaching he was too much a man of generalizing and unsettled mind ; his precepts are vague, his practice was as unstable as water; and the grievous defects of his works—their want of relief and durability—mark him for a hazardous guide. Mr. East- lake, by the effect of copiousness, seems to hold Reynolds out as a model ; and although he supplies a caution, it is, we think, not sufficiently emphatic or sweeping.

Mr. Eastlake announces a forthcoming work under the editorship of Mr. Robert Ilendrie junior, for which his own extracts excite the utmost curiosity. It is a manuscript in the British Museum, consisting mainly ef notes, by Sir Theodore de Mayerne, a physician of Charles the First's time, who devoted great attention to the study of painting, was the per- sonal friend of the great painters in his day, including Rubens, and re- corded many facts connected with the practice of the art communicated by them or drawn from his own observation of their methods.

It would be a most useful enterprise, if Mr. Eastlake or some other would undertake the technical history of oil painting, in a compressed— we do not mean abridged—and intelligible form. It is remarkable how little progress has been made in the didactic writing on the subject since teonsaido dã Vinci put forth his collection of recipes : there is not a work whick we have seen but fails in one of two respects, often in both—it is either crude and ill-arranged, or meagre and vague. Two works, the most recent, lie before us, representing the two extremes of literary efficiency in the author and the reverse—Mr. Eastlake's book, and Mr. T. H. Fielding's "On the Knowledge and Restoration of Oil Paintings " : wicle as the difference is between the two, they both in a degree exhibit the common defects—want of arrangement, slovenly lavishness of undi- gested quotations, want of distinctness, and of that substantial grasp of subject in each part which enables the reader to seize the fruits of know- ledge as he reads. There is some consolation, however : in England We must always have a paraphernalia of " inquiry " before we can do anything: if ever our Raphaels and Titians are to come, they must be preceded by cart-loads of blue books and treatises ; and these mul- tiplying books on art raise the flattering hope that "the Campbells are doming."

In spite of its technical nature, there are many passages of considerable and varying interest strewed about Mr. Eastlake's volume. The most substantial, such as the accounts of Rubens and his practice, cannot be conveniently taken oat of the text; but we select a few specimens culled here and there.

ANTIQUITY OF ETCHETG.

Various passages in this manuscript [Sloane MSS. in British Museum, 416] prove that the art of etching was understood and practised long before it occurred to the monks, or to Masa Finiguerra, to take impressions from plates. For ex- ample: "To prepare a powder for engraving on iron.—Take Roman vitriol [sul- phate of iron] 1 ounce, corrosive sublimate 1 ounce, nitre 4 ounce, verdigris ounce; reduce these to a fine powder; then take your iron plate and cover it with liquid varnish; dry it at the fire; and afterwards draw on it what you wish to engrave. Take wax and make a hedge round your drawing; pour very strong vinegar within it, and then add the before-mentioned powder, leaving it till the desired effect is produced." Elsewhere the preparation of liquid corrosives under the name of aqua fortis (bat not exactly corresponding with the usual nitric acid) is described, "for engraving on iron."

The following account of transparent water-painting is from Le Begue's copy of the manuscript of Alcherius : the Theodoric mentioned gave cer- tain receipts to the writer in the year 1410.

"The aforesaid Theodoric, from when I had these receipts, said that in Eng- land the painters work with these water colours on closely woven linen saturated with gum-water. This, when dry, is stretched on the floor over coarse woollen and frieze cloths; and the artists, walking over the linen with clean feet, proceed to design and colour historical figures and other subjects. And because the linen irlaid quite flat oaths woollen cloths, the water colours do not flow and spread, but remain where they are placed; the moisture sinking through into the woollen cloths underneath, which absorb it. In like manner, the outlines of the brush remain defined, for the guru in the linen prevents the spreading of such lines. Yet after this linen is painted its thinness is no more obscuredthan if it was not painted at all, as the colours have no body."

BOLDNESS OF ITALIAN DESIGNERS.

The Italian painters, though attentive to the preparation of materials with a view to the durability of their works, seem to have made it no part of their stay to lessen executive difficulties. Their ambition was to overcome such difficulties by Superior skill rather than by mechanical contrivances. Thus, fresco, ulti- mately, was proposed to be executed without retouching. As if on the IMMO principle, the tempera, which was found to dry too fast for the less expert de- signers of the North, was retained by the Italians in a climate where it dried still faster.

CURIOUS ETYMOLOGY.

With the later Pagan and early Christian painters, the word "encaustic "was confined to wax painting (with the brush) by means of fire. The prevalence of the method at a subsequent period accounts for the gradual application of the term to all kinds of painting,—an application which, in the later vicissitudes of art, may be said to have survived the process itself. Thus' a Greek philologist, writing at the close of the fifteenth century, explains a term equivalent to en- caustic by the synonyme "painted, because artists who paint on walls are called eneautai." Other modes of painting, and even illuminating, were sometimes in- cluded. The purple and vermillion used for the imperial signatures and in cal- igraphy, received the name of encaustic. By degrees the more ordinary material of writing acquired the designation: the " incaustum" of Theophilus and other medieval writers is, in substance as well as in name, the " inchiostro" of the Italians, and the source of the English "ink:'