LESLIE'S HANDBOOK FOR YOUNG PAINTERS..

This work consists mainly of the lectures delivered by Mr. Leslie at the Royal Academy as Professor of Painting, recast and extended. It takes up the questions of the principal elements of pictorial art, and its broad divisions, presents views upon them, rather than argumentative theories, and illustrates the positions with some copiousness from existing works, selecting such as are accessible to the English student, as far as this can conveniently be done, and dwelling to a considerable extent on English productions themselves.

The views of a practical man on his own craft are always to be received with a predisposition to respect, and generally yield some information and profit. One may be pretty sure of finding in them a comprehensive grasp of results from a certain point of view, whether tke theories be broad or narrow, the mode of stating them vague or defined. Cant gene-

ralities and offensive platitudes are the less likely to intrude, or, at any rate, run the chance of being brought to a practical test before the writer has done with them. Wisdom may be deficient, but of knowledge there ; must necessarily be some. Mr. Leslie is not only an artist, but an emi- , nent and excellent one. He therare possesses in a high degree the prima facie' claims to an attentive hearing, and his opinions become matter of curiosity simply as being his, without reference to their intrinsic value for the guidance of others.

He does not stand in need, however, of such personal advantages, but can leave his book to rest upon its own substantial merits. It dis- plays reflection, much good sense, a superiority to verbal spider-webs, , and a quiet power for disposing of fallacies. It is not strikingly original or eloquent, does not shake old systems or establish new, or compel a re- luctant or unquestioning acquiescence by the despotism of intellectual might ; but it supplies much food for the mind, and sound regimen for digesting it. No superfluous amount of technicality detracts from its being both intelligible and interesting to the general reader. There is

nothing tawdry or extreme about Mr. Leslie ; he speaks -without preju- dice, and if he did not state a truth, would not mystify you into suppos-

ing it to be one. His sympathies are as catholic as can rationally be wished ; and he pays homage to many heroes without prostrating himself as to gods or demigods. In a word, the work is very much what might be anticipated from the quality of Mr. Leslie's paintings—well based, mature, and in good taste. Two noticeable points are the slighting opinion of classification in art, and the high regard paid to deceased painters of the Bri- tish school. Mr. Leslie attaches little value to what is called high art, as such. The thing to be looked for is not that a person should at- tempt a great subject, but that he should handle any subject greatly. This indicates both the practical man and the man of sense. With re- spect to the second point, although the present day will scarcely bear, and in many things has got greatly beyond, being lectured from the works of Opie or Fuseli in historic art, or of Wilson in landscape, it is cheering to find a stand made on maintainable grounds for our countrymen. For Hogarth Mr. Leslie professes the most entire reverence; and towards him , it could hardly be exaggerated. "In invention and expression," he says, "the only master whose works, taken altogether, I would compare with those of Raphael, is Hogarth." Stothard also is a special favourite. For

Barry he appears to have small predilection. Turner and Constable he discusses with Mr. Ruskin, in a spirit of candid dissent as to details—in

some points, with more exact knowledge of the facts—but without any of that professional pique and asumed superiority which some persons whose claims have been overhauled by the critic find it convenient to parade. He does not grudge justice to the anti-Academic Haydon ; but

the short note which he gives will not convince many "that all the charges in the autobiography of Mr. Haydon unfavourable to the

Royal Academy are unfounded." Of the only three instances he dis- cusses, one is manifestly left very much where it was—we mean the complaint as to the hanging of the "Dentatus." It may be perfectly true that "a good place in the anteroom was better than an indiffe-

rent one in the great room " : the question is, whether the picture did not demand a good place in the great room, better than many that got

one; and we believe most competent persons who have seen it (which we have not) will affirm that it did,—Mr. Leslie among them, doubt- less, in his unofficial moments. That Academic hangers should fail to render such strict justice where their own and their colleagues' works • A Handbook for Young Painters. By C. R. Leslie, R.A., Author of the "Life of Constable." With Illustrations. Published by Murray. are concerned, is natural, but it is not the leas unfair ; and the fact that unfairness comes to be natural is the very complaint against a body so constituted.

Amid much recognized truth, and not a little which carries conviction with it as propounded by Mr. Leslie, there are some other statements to which one may respectfully demur. " The gentleness, so utterly re- moved from insipidity, of Raphael, is a thing of which true taste never tires." Assuredly, admitting the premises ; but some tastes affirm that the insipidity is not always avoided. In one of his old critical papers, Thackeray—no common appraiser of art—calls certain of the numerous Madonnas " smirking," and other unhandsome terms ; and pronounces, with a mock-heroism which is not all mock, that, after them, it was time that Raphael should die. Afterwards, Mr. Leslie compares the painter of the Cartoons with Giotto, aud implies by contrast that the latter was " confined to the cloister, not entering into the world, nor adapted to the world, nor sympathizing with all that is human"; a loose notion which may pass current among superficial observers, but which we are surprised to find a painter of distinction indorsing. Giotto was preeminently the reverse of this, the discarder of this, the emancipator from this—distinc- tively the painter of human manners and emotions in religious a:orks ; and we feel confident that, if Mr. Leslie were to estimate him apart from any comparison with Raphael, he would pronounce his movement in art to have been, in the face of far greater trammels than Raphael had to break through, the anti-monastic movement par excellence. Another assertion is, that the earlier Italian masters have no claim to rank, as pro- fessors of high art, with Raphael, and that not only Rembrandt, but Os- tade, is more entitled to the companionship. Here we conceive that the power of expressing life, as life, is rated higher than that of conwey- ing in an abstract or approximate manner the highest emotions of which man is capable : with what justice we cannot, for our own part, feel any difficulty in deciding. Of Rembrandt, Mr. Leslie says. elsewhere, in opposition to the idea of his having been a gloomy man—" To me, the prevailing tone of Rembrandt's mind, as shown in his art, is serenity. Where the subject allows him, his natu- ral disposition seems always tranquil. He is the painter of re- pose." We confess that this characterization is quite as unsatisfactory to us as the other. Rembrandt may not have been gloomy, but we feel strongly in him a something latent and abrupt which lies very far indeed from what we understand by serenity. What would have been in a man of the literary class brooding thought, appears to us to have been in him brooding observation ; and we would prefer that term to serenity as an approach to the true epithet. Our final objection shall be taken to the disparaging manner in which Mr. Leslie speaks of some of the earlier Italian works lately bought for the National Gallery, and especially of the so-called Giorgione—whether an actual Giorgione or not. Surely it would be deplorable if anything contained in this volume should turn the Trustees backwards to their old repertory of mean Guides and feelingless Caraccis, however "better drawn" or "more lifelike" in the lowest sense they may be.

The subjoined remarks on the beauty of death—one of the salient passages of the book—will indicate Mr. Leslie's style as a writer.

"But the beauty of death is not so easily explicable. How far its strange fascination may arise from the idea suggested of a repose compared with which that of the most tranquil sleep is agitation, I will not pretend to de- termine. I knew a man of the highest order of mind, a man of fine feelings, but of great simplicity, and far above all affectation, who, standing by the corpse of his wife, said—qt gives me very pleasurable sensations.' And yet he had truly loved her. "The exquisite lines in 'The Giaour' ' in which the present aspect of Greece is compared to a beautiful corpse, are familiar to every reader. Lord Byron, in a note to the passage, remarks that 'this peculiar beauty remains but a few hours after death.' But I have been told, by those in the habit of making caste, that on the second day the expression is generally improved, and even on the third day it is often still finer. I have, in several instances, been asked to make drawings from the dead ; and though in every case I have entered the room where the body lay, somewhat reluctantly, yet I have in- variably felt reluctant to quit it.

"At Kreutaberg, near Bonn, there is a church, under the pavement of

which lie, in one vault, the bodies of twenty-five monks, in open coffins. The dryness of the air has preserved them from decay, though the last buried has lain there for more than a century. I visited this church with a party of ladies, who at first hesitated to descend into the abode of the dead. We all, however, went down, each carrying a lighted taper ; and such was the fascination of this singular scene that we lingered in it for some time. The air was perfectly pure and we seemed to be in another world, with its own eternal interests effacing for the time all other interests. It seemed to us a mistake that death should be represented by poets or by painters as a hideous phantom. We could not contemplate those withered faces of old men—for they seemed all old—and think of death otherwise than as a gentle friend. Their attitudes were varied, and all had a kind of grace, which, though we knew it to be arranged by their friends, seemed perfectly natural. One, the gardener, had a chaplet of withered leaves round his head. All were clothed in the dress of their order ; and their clothes, as well as their bodies, though the last were dried to mummies, appeared to be little decayed. "Lord Byron says, 'In death from a stab, the countenance preserves its traits of feeling or ferocity and the mind its bias, to the last.' I can only I say, that in all the casts have seen from those whose deaths have been violent or painful, I have noticed the same repose of the features and the zintitehflininottlinedrication oaaussemsilwehtolliit unconnected eienteconstitutingwititi staththe of mindor feeling at the time of dissolution contribute, in individual cases, to beautify the features. The cast taken, very imperfectly, by Dr. Antonomarchi, from the face of Napoleon, is more handsome than any bust or portrait of him;. and, indeed, has the look of a much younger man than he appears in the latest portraits. This is easily accounted for. Illness had reduced the superabundant fleshiness of the lower part of his face, and brought it back to the condition of an early period ; and death, by leaving the mouth slightly open, had destroyed that expression of selfish determination which the thin compressed lips give to every portrait of Napoleon. The profile of the cast is the most perfectly beautiful profile of a man I ever saw : and it should here be noticed, that as in this instance the beauty added by death to a face originally of very fine proportions has nothing to do with metaphysical causes, so I believe it is the case in every instance; the faint smile being caused by the last slight convulsion after all consciousness has ceased. "From sheer indolence great mistakes are often made in the representa- tion of death. Painters sometimes omit to leave the mouth open ; and I have seen a naked corpse painted with the chest raised, as it could only be in the act of drawing breatb,—studied, of course, from a living model."