FINE ARTS.
ENGRAVED WORKS OF THE BRITISH PAINTERS.
WE are glad to see separate collections of the works of native painters among our picture periodicals. REYNOLDS'S works, in mezzotint, are republishing in parts; the publication of those of LAWRENCE and NEWTON, also in mezzotint, has just begun, on a similar scale with LIVERSEEGE'S, lately completed. BONNINGTON has found a COM. genial translator into lithography in HARDING; and 'the venerable" WEsr's Gallery, or rather a portion of it, has been done in outline by Moses. These are favourable signs that the public are beginning to feel a pride in the artists of their own country—one of the first and most gratifying tokens of a national interest in the progress of art. It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the inherent love of mankind for graphic representations, painting and sculpture seem to have stood in need of adventitious aid to foster their growth among nations. Religion has been the most prolific "nursing mother" of the arts of design ; and next to it self-love, and its extended modifications—pa- triotism and family pride. In this country religion has rather checked than encouraged the promotion of art ; and patriotic calls have met with hit a faint response in "the whisper of a faction," which has been fatally mistaken for the voice of the whole body of artists. Individual vanity has been, hitherto, the strongest support of art in this country; and the perpetuation of the phizzes of our kings and warriors, friends and relatives, dogs and horses, the chief employment of our artists. Can we wonder then that we have so few great painters? The modern artist is the creature of fashion : the mass of the people know nothing of art, and take no interest in it. They may have an annual gape at the Exhibition at Somerset House, as they visit the Zoologi.. cal Gardens, aid talk of LANDSEER'S picture and the giraffes, WILKIE% and the chimpanzee, with equal want of knowledge. They go to the National Gallery, and wonder what there is in the dingy pictures that coat so much ; and walk round the ElginMarbles at the al useum, think- ing perhaps the figures ought to have heads put on to make them look sightly. Well —be it so : we may smile at the ignorance of John Bull in these matters, but let us not sneer at the nascent condition of his taste. The want to know—that vacuum of the mind craving to be filled—is the womb in which is matured the germ of science. Let us be content that at present people look at pictures for the story they tell and the characters and scenes delineated, as they read stories for amusement merely ; the excitement thus made necessary to them will soon become refined by a preference founded on a discriminating knowledge of the art. Wear's pictures and the popular admiration of theca did a great deal of good; they pleased, where better works would have puzWed, The inventions of eommouvlace minds are useful to direct the taste and excite the sympathies of those who are by their means made to see and feel in a congenial manner. " Christ Rejected" was the beau ideal of conventional Scriptural painting ; and " Death on the Pale Horse" doubtless seemed to the many a realization of the vision of St. John. RAFFAELLE might have put them out, and MICHAEL ANGELO would have frightened them. WEST'S battle pieces—" La Hogue," " The Boyne," the " Death of Wolfe "—were considered to be the perfection of grand historical pictures. There is the outward form and arrangement proper to the dignity of the event, and a.smtig affectation of energy of expression that both the painter and his ad- mirers mistook for the real thing. They are full-dress rehearsals of historic scenes. Honour to old BENJAMIN WEST ! Ile devoutly believed himself to be a great painter, and we should have been sorry had he lived to find out his mistake. It is a grand deficiency in this Gallery, by the way, that it contains none of these we have mentioned —his greatest and most popular works ; neither " Christ Healing the Sick " nor the " Last Supper" in the National Gallery, nor his great altar-piece in the chapel at Greenwich Hospital—" St. Paul Shaking the Viper off his Hand ;" the painter's notion of which may be guessed at from his affecting to think lightly of it, by saying, in reply to some one who praised it, " a little burst of genius, Sir." The eighteen pictures in the Gallery form but a small portion of the pro- ductions of WEsT's industrious pencil. The fact we take to be, that the work has been prematurely closed—discontinued, not completed : it came too late. The fame of but few modern painters will outlive them.
There are other painters of the old school—of which brave old STOTHARD was the last and the greatest--whose works we would wish to see multiplied ; and they would be popular, too. There is GAINS- BOROUGH, for one—the most truly English painter in his style, feeling, and choice of subjects. LANE made a few admirable lithographic fac- similes of Gansimonoucit's sketches, that show what unaffected ele- gance he could throw into his female figures, and what refined art he mingled with the literal truth of nature : his works embody the genuine sentiment of the scene. He was the GOLDSMITH of painting. Those who see nothing but a scrubby mannerism in his " Market Cart" and " The Watering Place," in the National Gallery, may doubt their own perceptions of English rustic nature : his whole-length portrait of Mr. Schomberg makes you stop to see if it will move, so unaffectedly and individually life-like is it. REYNOLDS was " of the court, courtly : " he stood up for the dignity of art; assumed an air of greatness in his painting ; aimed at being a poetical painter—and succeeded, in the opi- nion of many. His portraits have a grace arid nobleness characteristic of high breeding, to which the force and grandeur of character gave an intellectual elevation. REYNOLDS'S people of fashion look like "born gentlefolk," not unconscious of their superiority, but neither assuming airs nor obtruding their consequence upon you, as LAWRENCE'S do, with their factitious appearance of gentility and affectation of elegance and amiability.
Then we have OPIE—heavy and monotonous but sterling, and with force of character and individuality in his portraits ; NORTIICOTE, who was ONE at second-hand, and very much weakened by the descent ; BARRY-8 wrong-headed pedant, who might have been great in a school of art, and done good service ; Fusw, a mad painter, who caricatured MICHAEL ANGELO in sober sadness; WILSON, who tried to lift him- self up above the ground of nature on the stilts of CLAUDE and Pous- SIN, but who was most charming when he pictured the stream winding through a verdurous valley, to whose simplicity he gave a heightening touch of elegance without lessening one jot of its homefelt beauty ; and last, MOILLAND, whose pictures of rural scenes, though coarse, are truthful, and redeemed the sottish character of the man by the unso phisticated fidelity that gives a charm to his grossest subjects. Here is a goodly array of names on the bead-roll of fame ; and at the head of them stands Hoomerii, the creator of a new style of pictur- ing human life, in which the grotesqueness of caricature is blended harmoniously with elegance, pathos, and historical character. HOGARTH'S prints have been multiplied in all sizes and shapes. REY- NOLDS'S pictures, too, have been collectively engraved ; though not with the care they required—many being copied from prints : for this, however, the projector of the publication is hardly to be blamed, seeing how much he risked to complete his great and costly undertaking, that must have been labour of love to him. OPIE and BARRY, like WEST, are gone by ; and the lovers of art will be contented with specimens of their genius in the national work of the British School of Painting which Messrs. FINDEN have in band; where FUSELI'S visions and NORTHCOTE'S inanities may range side by side with BLAKE'S hallucina- tions and the Commonplaces of TRESHAM, HAMILTON,SMIRKE,ROMNEY, SINGLETON, COOK, and WESTALL—names now almost forgotten. But GAINSBOROUGH and WILSON both deserve the memento of a separate work ; and even MoRsaNn too : and, as beautiful landscapes are un- derstood by all, we think the speculation would be successful. STOTHARD—who caught some of the grace and sweetness of RAF- FAELLE, of the rich hues of TITIAN, the gayety and elegance of WAT- TEau, and the gorgeous flutter of Runs:Ns, and infused into his very imperfections a charm that none but an amiable fancy could give—left behind him myriads of sketches "made to order" for booksellers, none of them utterly worthless, and many extremely beautiful. Most of his designs have been engraved, 'tis true : we are glad to greet his meek-eyed women and bland gallants in a volume of Bell's Poets or the Novelist's Magazine; but a collection, or selection of them, might repay publication. Of the new school, BONINGTON and LIVERSEEGE are the first whose works have been engraved; and both have been successful speculations. Those of LAWRENCE and NEWTON promise to be SO too; LAWRENCE for his name and the interest of the portraits, NEWTON for his clever- ness. We have been rather disappointed with COUSINS'S mezzotint of Lady Lyndhurst in Part II. of Lawrence's iVorks : the engraving is mannered, and the eyes are of unequal size ; the effect is powerful, however; and perhaps the recent sight of DERBY'S glowing miniature of the picture may have spoiled us for the print. The portrait of the Mirza Abul Taleb Khan is one of the painter's best : the character and expression are sober, and the rich dress, though flimsily painted, makes a much better picture than a modern coat. Master Hope, as a Bacchant, is too much in the drawinginaster's style. The First Part of NEWTON'S Works is not a good beginning by any means. The pictures have all been engraved before, and, what is worse, these copies are very inferior to the other prints. The subjects are " The Forsaken sweet face, though the expression does not an- swer to its title; and that popular pair of prints " The Girl at her Devotions "—the god of whose idolatry is her lover in miniature ; and " The Girl at her Studies "—a more literal and less happy piece of picto- rial irony. The mezzotint of "The Forsaken" is not objectionable, though it will not stand the test of comparison with the larger line engraving of the picture ; but the other two are very far inferior to the exquisite lithographs by LANE, in expression, texture, and effect: indeed they are positively bad, as works of art,—being cold, hard, and meagre, and not truly characteristic of the originals. We hope to be able to report more favourably of the second part. NEWTON was a painter of sterling talent and refined skill, but he was a mannerist, and spoiled his conceptions by affectation. Ile excelled in scenes of arti- ficial life and manners ; his humour was of a sarcastic, saturnine kind, and he inclined to painful or uncomfortable subjects. In this respect he differed from his rival, LESLIE; who chooses livelier scenes, and treats them with a more mirthful pleasantry. The best, and indeed the only way of impressing upon the public the merits of the great paisters of our own country, has beeli strangely, and, we may say, blamefully, neglected by those whose dutyit was, were it not their pleasure, to d) SO—that is, by the exhibition of all the pro- ductions that could be got together of each painter. One year the works of the three Presidents of the Academy were collected at the British Gallel, and a most interesting display it was; but though WILSON, GAINSBOROUGH, MORLAND, OPIE, and STOTHARD, were not Presidents, they were fine painters; and, as it is proved by the election of Sir M. A. SHEE that the Academy chose a President not because he was the first painter, but the most glib speaker and the finest gentle- man, it follows that to limit the collected exhibitions of British painters to Presidents of the Academy is absurd and unjust. Until, however, the Academy is reformed,—and this day is now at hand,—it is useless to expect that body to take the trouble of forming a series of such exhibi- tions: but the Directors of the British Institution, whose Governors possess perhaps three-fourths of the pictures required, might properly undertake the duty ; and in so doing, they would most effectually further the grand object of the Institution. The efforts of the Society of British Artists to bring before the public the works of deceased painters, were most praiseworthy ; but they lacked " patronage,"— which is still, unhappily, the pabulum, while it is also the bane, of fine art.
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