ART.
THE WINTER EXHIBITION AT BURLINGTON HOUSE.
[FIRST NOTICE.—D1OLBEIN'S PORTRAITURE.] This is an exhibition full of interest, both to the artist and the ordinary visitor, though the chief attraction of the galleries is one which is generally apt to prove rather wearisome to the latter, and consists of examples in a branch of art which is pro- bably less understood than any other. Now-a-days, what with art histories, essays, and lectures, it is difficult for any one who cares at all to look at pictures, to avoid gaining some notion of what are the chief merits and defects of the works by the Old Masters, which they hear spoken of so constantly. The teat ties 'of the Parthenon, and the curves of Ionic draperies, are scarcely less familiar, by name at least, to the ordinary Englishmen of to-day, than were the pigs of Morland and the barges of Cot- man to those of the last generation ; and on the various branches of art pursued just now, glib talk, more or less intelli- gent, may be heard continually on all subjects but one. The one
branch on which our " oracles are dumb " is portraiture, and it is, strangely enough, the one branch in which our countrymen have
chiefly excelled, ever since there was painting at all in our laud.
If we can boast of anything in our national art, it is of the beauty of our old portrait-painters ; and when we had none of our own, we seem to have lost no opportunity of securing the best that there were to be had from " far countries beyond the sea." Such were Vandyke and Holbein, who seem almost to belong to us by right of adoption, and whose pictures are to be found scattered up and down England, from the Thames to the Tyne. It is a collection of Holbein's works that occupies one .of the rooms at Burlington House this winter, and forms the chief attraction of the exhibition, though that attraction is one that gives little scope for descriptive-writing, for nothing can well be flatter than a description in words of a celebrated. portrait, un- less it be one spun out of the writer's inner consciousness. Take, for instance, the two following examples,—one, the description given by the Royal Academy of the portrait of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, by Peter Pourbus ; the other, a specimen of writing from the inner consciousness of the critic, carefully imitated by the present writer from the most approved. aesthetic journals of to-day :—
" The favourite of Queen Elizabeth, son of Dudley, Duke of North- umberland, born about 1532, served Edward VI. and Queen Mary, was Master of the Horse to Queen Elizabeth ; created Earl of Leicester ; accused of many crimes, among others of the murder of Amy Robsart, his wife ; died, 1588. Half-length, three-quarter-face to right ; black, jewelled cap, with brown feathers, richly-embroidered doublet, sewn with pearls, white ruff; chain, with pearls, twice round the neck, with a jewel attached; right hand on a helmet, left hand on a sword-hilt ; dark background. Inscribed on the sword-hilt, `1Etatis 28, 15**. Panel, 35f by 28 inches.' " So much for the bare facts of the picture. Now listen to the following— "'The dews of summer night did fall,
The moon, sweet regent of the sky, Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall, And many an oak that grew thereby.'
'Can we not fancy that moon casting her saddened light on this face, pregnant with many memories ? From out the troublous
silence of the past centuries, do we not see the gleam of pas- sionate eyes piercing the gloom of night, and hear the sweet
low voice again raised. in entreaty, as old wives fable that it may still be heard under the walls of Cumnor Hall ? Alas for the ill-fated. Amy Robsart ! alas for all whose fate depended upon the will of Robert Dudley, on the fiercely-poten- tial actualities of his concrete personality, even such as this old painter conceived, and having ' heedfully mastered,' set them upon canvas as we see them now. Well does the sable head-gear, sewn with orient pearl, the gloomy feathers, the massive chain, the dark background, the hands upon sword-hilt and helmet (signifying death and defiance),--well, we say, do all these details find their fitting coincidence with that storm-tossed being iu the waves of whose dark passions did. one lonely soul become submerged for ever, and the recollection of whose perfidy troubled the latest moments of an English Queen." So, perhaps, can the descrip- tion of the portraits of historical personages be made in some degree sensational to the general reader, without entering upon details such as those given in our extract from the catalogue, or upon the critical merits of each special work ; but we question whether such writing be worth the reading, or is calculated to produce any effect upon a sensible reader's mind., except one of confused. metaphor and general nausea. And this brings us back to the reason for our first assertion, that portraiture is a very little understood branch of Art, that most people do not know in what a good. portrait consists, that most painters even do not attempt to produce it. Assuming, then, for a minute, that these portraits by Holbein are good, let us try to find. out wherein they chiefly differ from those of the present day, and thereby, perhaps, gain some ideas on which to base our judgment for the future.
First of all, we find it necessary to answer this question,—Why is it that these portraits seem to be so much fuller of individu- ality than most portraits by great men ?—for it mast be noticed that they are in some ways more actually representative of the sitters, than even the great pictures of the Venetian and Florentine schools. Perhaps, the quickest way of stating the chief reason for this extra individuality is by saying that before Carlyle, Holbein had written a " Sartor Resartus," or more correctly, had mastered the " philosophy of clothes."
Suppose Mr. Pettie, R.A., had lived. in the sixteenth century, and painted. the men and women we see in the gallery, what would have been the result ? Why, Robert, Earl of Leicester, would have gone down to posterity as Robin Hood, and Henry VIII. as a Scotch chieftain, or a knight of the middle-ages. That is to say, we should have had every oue, or half every one (for the habitual dress is half), in clothes which did not belong to him, simply for the sake of making an effective picture. And so we should. only have had half the man, and that half disguised. Or take an Italian painter, say Tintoretto; when he painted a portrait, he did as Raphael and as Titian did, painted the face alone, and cast all the rest of the picture into obscurity. Now, it may well be the greater art that refuses to recognise the little weaknesses and concessions to public fashion and private vanity that regulate a man's dress ; but it will easily be seen that as the first thing oue notices in life is dress, as the easiest road to judging of a man at first sight is by what he wears, so the painter who can manage to bring his sitter and that sitter's dress together in such a way as that the man stands before you in " his habit as he lived," will necessarily give the stronger impression of what is easiest for all of us to under- stand, the little surface peculiarities that find their vent in per- sonal attire.
And this will be still more true, if it be evident that the painter has not insisted unduly upon any detail, for the sake of exhibiting his skill in dealing with it, but has given to each that degree of prominence which it appears to him to have de- served. In the portrait of "The Burgomaster," which is the only genuine Albrecht Diirer to be found at Nuremberg, there is an instance of the painting of detail which produces almost the reverse effect from Holbein's, simply because it is impossible to avoid seeing that the artist has given the most marvellous labour and skill, without exercising any choice or gaining any adequate result. The picture is one of an old chap with a beard and moustache, and frizzy head of hair,—and every hair in these is painted separately, and the hairs can actually be counted ; and the same is the case in the fur border to his cloak. So, then, let us say that one great merit of Holbein is that he paints his model as the model was, soberly and truly. He is not a great genius, like some of the Italian masters ; he does not see down to the inner depths of a man's nature, and give us a face in which a life's history is compressed, as Kingsley once said of these old portraits, but he sees a good. deal of character, and reads it attentively ; he sees that his model likes a certain kind. of chain and collar, or whatever it is, and lie gives him that in the picture, and he does his best to paint it well. Never was there a man, we should think, certainly never a painter, with less of affectation in his nature. We might look through his pictures in vain for a single tricky effect or strained attitude. And this is one of the great differences between his works and those of Reynolds and Gainsborough. These latter painters, owing, no doubt, greatly to the influence of the times iu which they lived, were always affecting something, and even their magnificent genius cannot prevent many of their best pictures looking, to this day, theatrical and absurd. Garrick, in a Court dress, leaning on a bust of Shakespeare in a wood ; Lady this, as Psyche ; and the Countess that, as Hebe, and Tragic Muses, and love-sick maidens writing on trees, and all the rest of the twopenny-half- penny sentiment of the time, all this goes far to spoil our reverence for these English masters. But in Holbein there is none of it ; his people are not passionless, but they are not in a passion. Had Mrs. Siddous acted in his time, she would not have rolled her eye for ever in a fine plum sy, as Sir Joshua has made her do, but would have been plain Sarah Siddons in bonnet and gown. This absence of affectation extends to everything in the picture, even to the light in which it is painted, which is generally devoid of all violent contrasts of light and shade, and only just sufficient to light the model fully.
The characteristics we have mentioned are, we think, chiefly those by which Holbein is separated from other masters, especially from those of the present day. Being an artist, he is yet content to make the personality of his sitter the first object in his pictures, the artistic merit of the composition being always put in the second place. Should this make ns refuse him the highest artistic rank, or rather, is it a sign that he was not of that rank ? We fear the answer must be,— yes, it is such a sign. The artist's feeling for his picture is like Aaron's rod,—it proves its superiority by swallowing up all the rest ; the greatest painter may paint the greatest portrait, but the greatest portrait painter can hardly be the greatest artist. With which apparent paradox, we must bid our readers good-bye, for the present week.
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