besides; and then, coming back to London in 1752, he entered himself at the St. Martin's Lane Academy; was soon, while still a student, recognised a master, so that, prospering greatly in material things, he could move quickly onwards on to a house of his own purchasing, a gallery of his own erecting, on the western side of Leicester Square; and there, for thirty years, he practised his craft with a good fortune constant to him to the end. A bachelor, devoted to art and to society, Sir Joshua found time, during those thirty years, to make great friendships, to paint three hundred pictures, and to amass the then considerable estate of eighty thousand pounds. He was born in a grammar school, and buried at St. Paul's. His painting room was so frequented that wit and fashion and beauty had no surer meeting-place; his lectures at the Royal Academy were not only among the most thoughtful, but quite the most finished expressions of a painter's mind in an art other than his own; and he earned such praise of Samuel Johnson, that Samuel Johnson said of him that he knew no one who observed life better, and "When Reynolds tells me anything, I am possess ed of an idea the more." II. Catching something of the dignity of his Italian masters, and adding to it the dignity of gentle life in England in his day, Sir Joshua had little of their inventiveness when he touched high themes. He was accepted in his own time as a painter of history, because he draped and posed models, and gave them historical names. But invention and a high imagination were lacking to him. Scenes which were meant to have the reality and force of history became theatrical. His allegory, when he essayed allegory, was of the least fanciful, was of the simplest, the most obvious kind. So that the more one considers his work and becomes impressed with its great qualities, from which no familiarity can detract, the more also one must perceive its limitations. He lived with what was loveliest and most refined in England, and something of the loveliness and of the refinement that surrounded him he carried into his ideal work. Thus, the five angelic heads in the National Gallery, five studies of the head of one child, Frances Gordon-a harmony in rose and gold-may match in beauty and sweetness of form and of color the angelic heads imagined and realised by the masters of Italy. But in rapt expression, in religious thought, in pathetic intensity, they stand for how little against the .wistful faces of the child-world of Botticelli. But the lighter themes touched by the allegory of his day-the themes which delighted Cipriani and his school, and of which the flowing unlabored treatment gave popularity to the facile touchand-go pencil of Angelica Kaufmannthese Sir Joshua took up as with a master's hand: he is sometimes perfect in these. See, for instance, his exquisite group of two: Hope nursing Love.' It is the portrait of one knows not what child, but the young English Madonna, from whose breast the child takes suck with so pure and significant a zest, is the exquisite Miss Morris, now with the mobile supple plumpness of young girlhood quickly developed, but already with hectic flush bespeaking the fate which her story tells us. The picture is of that time which those who are careful to divide an artist's work into periods would claim as Sir Joshua's best. Painted in 1768, it is an achievement of his full maturity, when his endeavor had relaxed nothing of its strenuousness. Its subject is the idealisation of a healthy human appetite, the idealisation of zest; its success is in a treatment felt, as one looks at the picture, to be so wholly ideal and refined. Nor in its own slight way, even, is the damsel's face-Hope's face-in this picture devoid of subtlety. There is no touch here of a mother's abandonment, of a mother's joy. Against the child's eagerness stands in contrast the hesitation, the uncertainty, the timidity almost, of the girl. So much for the mind in the picture-it points the level Sir Joshua could reach, is on the boundary line of his attainment-but it is also a composition somewhat more intricate than usual, and freer in its flow of the lines of the figure; less dependent than usual upon draperies for its grace, and in command and contrivances of color even more than commonly admirable. The red hair, for example, strong and abundant as it is, falls subtly *She became poor. She tried the stage, and failed through alarm. She died on the day on which this picture of her was first shown at the Royal Academy. into tone with the pale red gown and the red-browns of the hanging leafage. Successful as he is here, with the highest success any such subject can claim, we have seen Sir Joshua more often quickly limited in his ideal work, and the conditions of his life made limits for him in portraiture. The range is great indeed from Garrick as Kitely' to the Child feeding Chickens' (Lady Catherine Pelham Clinton). But such a picture as the 'Parish Clerk' of Gainsborough is outside of it-beyond it altogether. From his habitual practice Gainsborough escaped at times to the ideal, and found it in English landscape. Sir Joshua escaped, too, from the long lines of draped countesses and donothing peers waiting to be immortalised, and found the best ideal for him in 'Hope nursing Love,' and in those heads of the child-angel. But Gainsborough found it to boot, sometimes, within the range of his habitual practice, and showed, in an art of no gently trivial humor," and guided by no "wave of a feather," nor "arrested by the enchantment of a smile," what I should call a deeper appreciation of natural character, of the record of years, of the havoc of time, of the caprices of fate, of the not-to-be-forbidden brooding on the final things. Sir Joshua was a painter not so much of the whole of character, as of certain manifestations of it in dignity and charm. Whole sides of it are closed to him-to him and the observers of his work. His sitters are either before the eyes of society, or relaxing themselves with that graceful, neverabandoned relaxation which has a sense of habits formed and to be immediately resumed-an ease on which the shadow of elaborate manner still rests. 66 He was from first to last a paid painter of portraits, and his sitters were the accomplished players on a large stage; and that accounts for something of this fact. But it does not account for all of it. There was wanting to Reynolds the greatest portrait painter's complete sense of the dignity of man and of work, and that unswerving truthfulness of Velasquez or Rembrandt, which could make at need a monarch like a poor man, and a poor man like a monarch. And so Sir Joshua, having never quite forgotten the social distinctions of an aristocratic time and of an exclusive society, rarely, I think, sounded the depths of human character, touched its deepest and half-veiled pathos, depicted the strenuousness of human endeavor. For these things, and for the complex expressions of absorbed attention and rapt thought unconscious of self which these demand-in a word, for portraits in the highest sense dramatic, since utterly untinged with the prejudice or predilection of the artist, we must go, if once we are out of Italy, to Hals and Holbein, Rembrandt and Velasquez-not to Reynolds. He is hardly even of the class, at all, which is headed by these immense masters. But of the second and much larger class below their own-the class admitting men who, with whatever high gifts, were not always and altogether proof against the portraitist's temptation towards a somewhat superficial effectiveness, in the place of an entire truth-of that, second and much larger and much more popular class, Reynolds is well nigh the chief. It does not follow, however, that he always yielded to the portraitist's temptation. The momentary expression sought and rendered in the Garrick as Kitely,' in 'Every Man in his Humor,' is the revealing expression of an individuality and of a whole. And that may be true also of the Bowood picture of Garrick in propria persona. Nor can much less be said of the portrait of Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in Love for Love.' The Garrick as Kitely' is of the middle time; it belongs to the same year as the Hope nursing Love,' and it is one not of two only, but of several portraits of the great comedian painted by Sir Joshua himself, not to speak of those others painted by Hogarth, De Loutherbourg, Zoffany, Gainsborough. Garrick was fifty-two, actor and painter, both in the fullest possession of their means, and the painter has caught the full sagacity of that sagacious head, a finesse, a seeming mobility of facial expression none the less marked and true because the painter has caught also the steady fixed eye so characteristic of a comedian, whose features, completely controlled, are half the weapons he has to use to give not only effect to his impersonation, but to gain mastery over his audience. Habit and need have sometimes made a great comedian's eye as "constraining" as the Ancient Mariner's. Mrs. Abington, as Miss Prue, in 'Love for Love,' though far from standing among the loveliest of Sir Joshua's works-in deed by reason of that very fact, that it does not so stand-may be named, as I said, with this Garrick. Several times, too, did Sir Joshua paint Mrs. Abington, now as Roxalana in The Sultan,' in which thought and vivacity have made the face beautiful; now as the Comic Muse,' of which I shall a few lines farther on; but no portrait of the versatile comedian who was the original Lady Teazle, is as generally fascinating, and certainly none is in expression as subtle and complex as this of Lord Morley's, which is a late work, moreover, painted in 1787. Mrs. Abington was never a purely formal beauty, but the charms of saucy and exuberant youth, immense vivacity, and alert intelligence were hers when Sir Joshua painted her. Though otherwise in good condition, her colors, I think, have somewhat gone; but in her own way the representative of Miss Prue is unique, as she, from her fine Chippendale chair, the envy of collectors-she with frothy drapery and neat arm bare to the elbow-turns round upon the spectator the face of as sparkling and triumphant a damsel as Sir Joshua, in all his gallery, has to show. 6 More characteristic, certainly, of the unhurried grace which we associate with the time and master is the portrait of Mrs. Abington as the Comic Muse,' familiar to us, at least, through Watson's engraving. With head slightly inclined, as in an interval of rest, she stands neither too erect to be at ease, nor too lounging to be serenely elegant. The dropped hand at her side holds the discarded mask, and all the figure rests, from its high haircrowned head to where the foot peeps below the edge of figured gown, and the face surveys an imaginary audience, with an unconcern for which the quiet absorption and quiet self-dependence sufficiently account. And to this the most complete companion is Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse'; the majestic woman, full length, seated on a throne in the clouds. Behind her stand two mutes, one representing Remorse, and he holds a bowl; the other Pity, and he holds a dagger dropping blood-and behold the insignia of tragedy. More or less closely this has been repeated; but it was the original, now belonging to the Duke of Westminster, that called from Mrs. Siddons, when it was painted, in 1784, the expression of a hope that Sir Joshua would not go further and finish it-it could not be improved. He took her counsel, and left the unfinished face-that is, the unelaborated face-as it stood at that successful moment; an allegorical portrait of a very simple sort, a commanding figure set off in admirably sober harmonies of brown; brown hair, brown furs, amber necklace, fawn-colored robe. Beyond such simple allegory Sir Joshua does not go, or goes but once successfully, as in Hope nursing Love,' and even there, though charming, is still light. The imagination is not a profound one, with Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic, Mrs. Abington as the Comic, Muse. Dignity secured by classic dress, or at least, as he says, in his seventh discourse, not imperilled by modern; grace which leans a little for its maintenance on draperies of which the value was found in Italy, and not on lines of the true Greek puritythat dignity, that grace, never quite supreme, never quite beyond a thought of posing-you get these in Sir Joshua ; happiest when brought into the service of reproducing the great world of his day; least happy when strained to tasks which that courtly and splendid talent must needs be short of accomplishing-the transfer or realisation, say, in the art of painting, of the highest imaginings of the art of poetry; records of a real and not theatrical terror; glimpses of a paradise only open to the art of Italy; strange fables of love and death. With these, Sir Joshua has little to do. They are beyond him-all these things. One high theme, however, he draws from nature and Italy-the relations of mother and child. In Italy, it was the divine mother and the divine child. A dozen reasons have been given why that one subject, of the Madonna and Child, was endlessly acceptable, and much of its acceptance has been assigned to material causes; this church, that monastery needed its decoration, and its walls must teach a lesson. But why, among all the subjects of sacred history, this, with everlasting reiteration ?-and often chosen at moments hardly dramatic; barren, one would say, of definite subject; no action, no narration, but just the Virgin and Child, and again the Virgin and Child; and this still lingering, when the devoutest time was past, and early art, the art of Angelico and Perugino and Bartolomeo, was no more, and in the flush of the Italian Renaissance the world of heaven had yielded precedence to the world of earth. Why, it is the human relationship in its most ideal form. Representations of that relationship in Modern Art we are inclined to scoff at. Twaddling literature and trivial painting have played with it at will, so that we see it awry. And unconsciously our mind throws on the subject something of the reproach of the habitual weakness of the treatment in modern times. But the theme remains a great theme, have we but the master to treat it; a relationship giving worth and poetry and the interest of high moments and great possibilities to the dullest lives, the humblest and the commonest. Nor are we to get good art by passing it by merely because it is familiar, for, treat, what we will life will be the same in its elemental forces, its springs of pathos and joy. Well, it is his recognition of some such common truth as this, that the root of art is in the feeling of men, that has given something of an imperishable charm to the canvas of Sir Joshua. And so, in his portrait groups-color and composition apart-there is something of an inheritance from the elder masters of Italy; not in religious significance, but in that message of human relationship and the nobility of affection. The time was past for Immaculate Virgin and Immaculate Child past, first, as a spiritual need in Perugino and Bellini; next, as a formal presence in the later work of Raphael. That was long gone, and gone never more wholly than from the eighteenth century, whose intellect was serious only in its scepticism. But in the homely life of the eighteenth century, in its art and literature and common ways, there was much to encourage a sense of the sweetness of children and women and of all the tender relationship between the two. And that with infinite variations of dignity and grace-Sir Joshua painted. III. A notice of Sir Joshua Reynolds can hardly close with no word given to the prints after his works. They were bought during the painter's life much as common photographs or flashy popular engravings are bought by the many in our own day; not of course so extensively, since there existed neither the supply nor the demand; but the prints were bought then, there can be small doubt, with little general appreciation of their artistic value as singularly perfect reproductions of the mind and grace of the master. Reproduction by means of mezzotint engraving was indeed the fashionable process for reproduction and multiplication at the moment. But the great engravers of that day hardly knew themselves that they were great. The generation that lost them had to find that out. The generation that kept them paid them for their work; and work paid for at the moment-work with a moderate market value-is not generally held to be immortal at the time that it is done. Sir Joshua himself was, however, one of the first to recognise the surpassing merit of these mezzotint engravings-the perfection which the method had then attained. Looking at a print by McArdell, after one of his works, he said, "By this man I shall be immortalised!" When he said that, was he thinking only of the excellence of the print and of its wide publication, or was he foreseeing the day when owing to his never-tiring experiments with the palette so much of the charm of the color of his own work should be gone? when time should have ruined, or at the least damaged too much. He was happy in living in an age when there were men to translate or to transcribe his work; for transcripts even more than translations these prints may indeed be called, for many of them reproduce the touch with a fidelity second only to that with which they reproduce the subject. To us, too, these things have all the interest of an art that is peculiarly English. If we are first in water colors, we are almost alone in mezzotint. The art, if not of English invention, is essentially of English practice. And mezzotint engraving reached its highest point when the best of these works after Sir Joshua were executed. That was chiefly during the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, when the work of Morland was popularised in the same way, and when fine things were done-but more rarely done from the work of Gainsborough. Of the engravers, some lived on a good many years into the nineteenth century. One or two of them took part in that combined work of etching and of mezzotint by which, between 1807 and 1819, the great Liber Studiorum' was produced. 6 But the work in pure mezzotint, executed during the last part of the last century, was the finest any such work could be, and was the best of all possible means for conveying the impression of Sir Joshua's paintings-subject, spirit, and touch. Unlike the prints of Liber Studiorum' these prints are wanting in the severe beauty and value of line, which of course mezzotint, pure and simple, can never have. The whole process forbids it. Turner got that by his etched work in 'Liber Studiorum,' and of many etchings proper, this beauty of line is a very high and peculiar property. But Liber Studiorum' is well nigh the only work which combines the extreme softness and richness of mezzotint with this beauty of line-now fine, now strong-which is at the command of a great etcher. Of the men who practised mezzotint engraving, many were themselves painters. Hodges, the engraver of the Contemplative Youth' and of 'Lady Dashwood,' was a portraitist of some distinction. Dr. Hamilton tells us that he spent many years in Holland, and that he is there considered as a Dutch artist. Richard Houston was a miniature painter. S. W. Reynolds, who produced some of the smaller plates, began as a landscape painter. But generally the greater maswere engravers only. The entire company numbers one hundred and three, ters and probably the greatest among these are McArdell-an Irishman-James Watson, J. Raphael Smith, and Valentine Green. Raphael Smith-first, and I suppose most industrious of them all-himself executed more than forty plates after Sir Joshua: men, women, children; an archbishop, a dancer, a woman of the great world. He began his work young, and before he was thirty years old he had done much of that which is now most famous. Engraving altogether one hundred and fifty plates, he died, hardly an old man, at Doncaster, in 1812. His print of Mrs. Carnac' alone would be enough to mark his distinction. But the history of these men, the achievements of these men, we cannot here follow out in detail. They were for generations neglected. Now a caprice of fashion, of which we take no count, has restored them to fame. Some slight general view did nevertheless require to be had of them ere we turned the page on which they had helped us to estimate Sir Joshua's art. For to know them is to live with the artist and his times. Mrs. Carnac,' 'Emma Hart as a Bacchante,' 'Miss Bingham,'Miss Jacobs,' Nelly O'Brian'-to see them is to drink "At such a magic cup as English Reynolds once compounded." -Temple Bar. |