In Furious Lusts Begot
MORE than 250 years have passed since Defoe delivered his vigorous attack on that mythical creature The Trueborn Englishman, a thorough' bred type, he declared, that did not exist and could never have existed, the English race being the hybrid product of indiscriminate miscegena- tion—
In eager rapes and furious lusts begot Between a painted Briton and a Scot; Whose gendering offspring quickly learned to bow And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough. . • •
Racial characteristics, one must admit, change astonishingly during the course of ages; and the talkative, gregarious, music-worshipping English- men who made their appearance in the sixteenth century—they were so effusive, Erasmus corn- plained, that a foreigner was constantly embraced and kissed when he set foot in an English house, which was sometimes amusing and gratifying but also frequently embarrassing—can have borne remarkably little resemblance to their dour descendants of the present day. Is there, never- theless, such a thing as the English Face? And can any real connection be distinguished between the men and women who sat to Nicholas Hilliard and those who were immortalised by WilliaM Hogarth? For that matter, is there not a striking difference between Hogarth's solid and sober patrons and the aristocratic and romantic person- ages who, soon afterwards, were visiting the studios of Gainsborough and Reynolds? Although he fails, I think, to solve the basic problem—whether an English Face exists, how it has developed and just what its typical lineaments are—Mr. David Piper has produced a delightful book which covers the whole extensive field of English portrait-painting. A brilliant sketch of Chaucer, on the margin of an illuminated manu- script executed about 1410, is the earliest portrait, in the modern sense, of a famous English man of letters; while the first deliberately realistic representation of an English king or queen-- except, perhaps, for the funeral image of Edward III still preserved at Westminster Abbey—is the statue, again at Westminster, of Edward's ill-fated grandson Richard II, commissioned during the monarch's- lifetime from Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest, citizens and coppersmiths of Lon- don. It shows a weak but sensitive face, with a round forehead, an attenuated, oddly pointed nose and a small receding, nearly bearded chin —the features of a nervous dilettante. hopelessly unsuited to his difficult role. , One of the charms of Mr. ,Piper's book is the splendidly catholic selection a plates he includes. Naturally, almost every period is dominated by some outstanding artist; and whereas many of these painters were evidently shrewd psycholo- gists, skilled in portraying the qualities of the individual mind and heart, they were apt to impose on their subjects the sense of style that they themselves favoured. Thus Van byck and, later, Gainsborough helped to create an ideal aristocracy; and we have only to ,compare Van Dyck's portraits of Charles 1 and his courtiers with the impressions left by other artists, to understandhOw'he transformed and ennobled the flesh-and-blood material of his pictures. He set a fashion that his sitters subsequently followed : Nature learned to imitate Art.,
Hogarth, of course, was a glorious exception— he took humanity as he found it; yet,.in his‘magni- ficent portrait of Captain Coram (which Mr.
Piper, rather inexplicably, does not reproduce), he combined straightforward pictorial realism with a look of unself-conscious grandeur. During the Victorian Age, in portrait-painting as in so much else, the artist's inspiration,began to decline. But Watts did his best to produce a gallery of Victorian, Worthies; and Some' of his portraits— for example, his picture of Carlyle, which the old man bitterly resented—throw an important side- light on the English nineteenth-century genius. At the same time, Mr. Piper pays a tribute to the achievements of the early photographers, and places Watts's portrait of Tennyson side by side with Julia Margaret Cdmeron's equally impres- sive photographic study. Altogether, this is a fascinating volume, which provoke; a number of important, questions, even though it does not answer them. The reader is encour::ged to draw his own conclusions; and a conclusion the swill probably draw is that, despite the numerous changes it has suffered, the English character remains a very strong one. Vitality Is more common than beauty in Mr. David Piper s gallery of heads; but there is an air of singular alertness and aliveness, of humour and wisdom allied to strength of feeling, about the English face as he presents, it.
PETER QUENNELL
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