Henry T. Tuckerman

‘Look on this picture, and on this.’
Hamlet.

It is not surprising that pictures, with all their attraction for eye and mind, are, to many honest and intelligent people, too much of a riddle to be altogether pleasant. What with the oracular dicta of self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers on art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the endless theories about colour, style, chiaro-oscuro composition, design, imitation, nature, schools, painting has become rather a subject for the gratification of vanity and the exercise of pedantic dogmatism, than a genuine source of enjoyment and culture, of sympathy and satisfaction,—like music, literature, scenery, and other recognized intellectual recreations. In these latter spheres it is not thought presumptuous to assert and enjoy individual taste; the least independent talkers will bravely advocate their favourite composer, describe the landscape which has charmed or the book which has interested them; but when a picture is the subject of discussion, few have the moral courage to say what they think; there is a self-distrust of one’s own impressions, and even convictions, in regard to what is represented on canvas, that never intervenes between thought and expression where ideas or sentiments are embodied in writing or in melody. Nor is this to be ascribed wholly to the technicalities of pictorial art, in which so few are deeply versed, but in a great measure to the incongruous and irrelevant associations which have gradually overlaid and mystified a subject in itself as open to the perception of a candid mind and healthy senses as any other department of human knowledge. Half the want of appreciation of pictures arises from ignorance, not of the principles of art, but of the elements of nature. Good observers are rare. The peasant’s criticism upon Moreland’s ‘Farmyard’—that three pigs never eat together without one foot at least in the trough—was a strict inference from personal knowledge of the habits of the animal; so the surgeon found a head of the Baptist untrue, because the skin was not withdrawn somewhat from the line of decollation. These and similar instances show that some knowledge of or interest in the thing represented is essential to the appreciation of pictures. Soldiers and their wives crowded around Wilkie’s ‘Chelsea Pensioners,’[9] when first exhibited; French soldiers enjoy the minutiÆ of Vernet’s battle-pieces; a lover can judge of his betrothed’s miniature; and the most unrefined sportsman will point out the niceties of breed in one of Landseer’s dogs. To the want of correspondence so frequent between the subject of a picture and the observer’s experience may, therefore, be attributed no small degree of the prevalent want of sympathy and confident judgment. ‘Gang into an exhibition,’ says the Ettrick Shepherd, ‘and only look at a crowd o’ Cockneys, some with specs and some wi’ quizzing-glasses, and faces without ae grain o’ meaning in them o’ ony kind whatsomever, a’ glowering, perhaps, at a picture o’ one o’ nature’s maist fearfu’ or magnificent warks! What, I ask, could a Prince’s Street maister or missy ken o’ sic a wark mair than a red deer wad ken o’ the inside o’ George’s Street Assembly-rooms?’

The incidental associations of pictures link them to history, tradition, and human character, in a manner which indefinitely enhances their suggestiveness. Horace Walpole wove a standard collection of anecdotes from the lives and works of painters. The frescoes of St. Mark’s, at Florence, have a peculiar significance to the spectator familiar with Fra Angelico’s life. One of the most pathetic and beautiful tragedies in modern literature is that which a Danish poet elaborated from Correggio’s artist career. Lamb’s great treasure was a print from Da Vinci, which he called ‘My Beauty,’ and its exhibition to a literal Scotchman gave rise to one of the richest jokes in Elia’s record. The pen-drawing Andre made of himself, the night before his execution—the curtain painted in the space where Faliero’s portrait should have been, in the ducal palace at Venice, and the head of Dante, discovered by Mr. Kirkup, on the wall of the Bargello, at Florence—convey impressions far beyond the mere lines and hues they exhibit; each is a drama, a destiny. And the hard but true lineaments of Holbein, the aËrial grace of Malbone’s ‘Hours,’ Albert Durer’s mediÆval sanctities, Overbeck’s conservative self-devotion, a market-place by Ostade, Reynolds’s ‘Strawberry Girl,’ one of Copley’s colonial grandees in a New England farmer’s parlour, a cabinet gem by Greuze, a dog or sheep of Landseer’s, the misty depths of Turner’s ‘Carthage,’ Domenichino’s ‘Sibyl,’ Claude’s ‘Sunset,’ or Allston’s ‘Rosalie’—how much of eras in art, events in history, national tastes, and varieties of genius, do they each foreshadow and embalm! Even when no special beauty or skill is manifest, the character of features transmitted by pictorial art, their antiquity or historical significance, often lends a mystery and meaning to the effigies of humanity. In the carved faces of old German church choirs and altars, the existent facial peculiarities of race are curiously evident; a Grecian life breathes from many a profile in the Elgin marbles, and a sacred marvel invests the exhumed giants of Nineveh; in the cartoons of Raphael, and the old Gobelin tapestries, are hints of what is essential in the progress and the triumphs of painting. Considered as a language, how definitely is the style of painters associated with special forms of character and spheres of life! ‘There certainly never was a painter,’ says a traveller in Spain of Murillo, ‘who, without much imagination, and telling no story, could yet vision his eyes with such pure love, and make lips so parting with prayer, as Murillo; himself a father, he loved to paint the child-Saviour in conjunction with thin-faced saints.’ It is this variety of human experience, typified and illustrated on canvas, that forms our chief obligations to the artist; through him our perception of and acquaintance with our race—its individuality and career, its phases and aspects—are indefinitely enlarged. ‘The greatest benefit,’ says a late writer, ‘we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying our experience and extending our contact with our fellow-creatures beyond the bounds of our personal lot.’

‘A room with pictures in it, and a room without pictures,’ says an Æsthetic essayist, ‘differ by nearly as much as a room with windows and a room without windows. Nothing, we think, is more melancholy, particularly to a person who has to pass much time in his room, than blank walls with nothing on them; for pictures are loopholes of escape to the soul, leading it to other spheres. It is such an inexpressible relief to the person engaged in writing, or even reading, on looking up, not to have his line of vision chopped square off by an odious white wall, but to find his soul escaping, as it were, through the frame of an exquisite picture, to other beautiful and perhaps idyllic scenes, where the fancy for a moment may revel, refreshed and delighted. Is it winter in your world? Perhaps it is summer in the picture; what a charming momentary change and contrast! And thus pictures are consolers of loneliness; they are a sweet flattery to the soul; they are a relief to the jaded mind; they are windows to the imprisoned thought; they are books; they are histories and sermons—which we can read without the trouble of turning over the leaves.’

The effect of a picture is increased by isolation and surprise. I never realized the physiognomical traits of Madame de Maintenon until her portrait was encountered in a solitary country-house, of whose drawing-room it was the sole ornament; and the romance of a miniature by Malbone first came home to me when an ancient dame, in the costume of the last century, with trembling fingers drew one of her husband from an antique cabinet, and descanted on the manly beauty of the deceased original, and the graceful genius of the young and lamented artist. Hazlitt wrote an ingenious essay on A Portrait by Vandyke, which gives us an adequate idea of what such a masterpiece is to the eye and mind of genuine artistic perception and sympathy. Few sensations, or rather sentiments, are more inextricably made up of pleasure and sadness than that with which we contemplate (as is not infrequent in some old gallery of Europe) a portrait which deeply interests or powerfully attracts us, and whose history is irrevocably lost. A better homily on the evanescence of human love and fame can scarcely be imagined: a face alive with moral personality and human charms, such as win and warm our stranger eyes; yet the name, subject, artist, owner, all lost in oblivion! To pause before an interesting but ‘unknown portrait’ is to read an elegy as pathetic as Gray’s.

The mechanical processes by which nature is so closely imitated, and the increase of which during the last few years is one of the most remarkable facts in science, may, at the first glance, appear to have lessened the marvellous in art, by making available to all the exact representation of still-life. But, when duly considered, the effect is precisely the reverse; for exactly in proportion as we become familiar with the mechanical production of the similitudes of natural and artificial objects, do we instinctively demand higher powers of conception, greater spiritual expression in the artist. The discovery of Daguerre and its numerous improvements, and the unrivalled precision attained by photography, render exact imitation no longer a miracle of crayon or palette; these must now create as well as reflect, invent and harmonize as well as copy, bring out the soul of the individual and of the landscape, or their achievements will be neglected in favour of the fac-similes obtainable through sunshine and chemistry. The best photographs of architecture, statuary, ruins, and, in some cases, of celebrated pictures, are satisfactory to a degree which has banished mediocre sketches, and even minutely-finished but literal pictures. Specimens of what is called ‘Nature-printing,’ which gives an impression directly from the veined stone, the branching fern, or the sea-moss, are so true to the details as to answer a scientific purpose; natural objects are thus lithographed without the intervention of pencil or ink. And these several discoveries have placed the results of mere imitative art within reach of the mass; in other words, her prose language—that which mechanical science can utter—is so universal, that her poetry—that which must be conceived and expressed through individual genius, the emanation of the soul—is more distinctly recognized and absolutely demanded from the artist, in order to vindicate his claim to that title, than ever before.

Perhaps, indeed, the scope which painting offers to experimental, individual, and prescriptive taste, the loyalty it invokes from the conservative, the ‘infinite possibilities’ it offers to the imaginative, the intimacy it promotes with nature and character, are the cause of so much originality and attractiveness in its votaries. The lives of painters abound in the characteristic, the adventurous, and the romantic. Open Vasari, Walpole, or Cunningham, at random, and one is sure to light upon something odd, genial, or exciting. One of the most popular novelists of our day assured me that, in his opinion, the richest unworked vein for his craft, available in these days of civilized uniformity, is artist-life at Rome, to one thoroughly cognizant of its humours and aspirations, its interiors and vagrancies, its self-denials and its resources. I have sometimes imagined what a story the old white dog, who so long frequented the ‘Lepri’ and the ‘CaffÉ Greco,’ and attached himself so capriciously to the brother artists of his deceased master, could have told, if blessed with memory and language. He had tasted the freedom and the zest of artist-life in Rome, and scorned to follow trader or king. He preferred the odour of canvas and oil to that of conservatories, and had more frolic and dainty morsels at an al fresco of the painters, in the Campagna, than the kitchen of an Italian prince could furnish. His very name betokened good cheer, and was pronounced after the manner of the pert waiters who complacently enunciate a few words of English. Bif-steck was a privileged dog; and though occasionally made the subject of a practical joke, taught absurd tricks, sent on fools’ errands, and his white coat painted like a zebra, these were but casual troubles; he was a sensible dog to despise them, when he could enjoy such quaint companionship, behold such experiments in colour and drawing, serve as a model himself, and go on delicious sketching excursions to Albano and Tivoli, besides inhaling tobacco-smoke and hearing stale jests and love soliloquies ad infinitum. I am of Bif-steck’s opinion. There is no such true, earnest, humorous, and individual life, in these days of high civilization, as that of your genuine painter; impoverished as it often is, baffled in its aspirations, unregarded by the material and the worldly, it often rears and keeps pure bright, genial natures whose contact brings back the dreams of youth. It is pleasant, too, to realize, in a great commercial city, that man ‘does not live by bread alone,’ that fun is better than furniture, and a private resource of nature more prolific of enjoyment than financial investments. It is rare comfort here, in the land of bustle and sunshine, to sit in a tempered light and hear a man sing or improvise stories over his work; to behold once more vagaries of costume; to let the eye rest upon pictorial fragments of Italy—the ‘old familiar faces’ of Roman models, the endeared outlines of Apennine hills, the contadina bodice and the brigand hat, until these objects revive to the heart all the romance of travel.

Vernet’s sympathies were excited by the misfortunes of a worthy tradesman of Marseilles, and he attended the sheriff’s auction at the bankrupt’s house, where, among the crowd, he recognized a would-be connoisseur in art, of ample wealth. The painter fixed his eyes upon a dim and mediocre picture on the wall, and bid fifteen francs; immediately the rich amateur scented a prize; a long contest ensued, and at length the picture was knocked off to Vernet’s antagonist for so large a sum that the honest bankrupt was enabled to pay his creditors in full, and recommence business with a handsome capital. With the progress of civilization pictures have grown in permanent market value. A Quaker who incurred the reproach of his brethren for securing a Wouverman for a large sum, was excused for this ‘vanity’ by his shrewd friends, when he demonstrated to them that he had made an excellent investment. Literature affords many illustrations of the romance of the pictorial art, of which, among our own authors, Allston and Hawthorne have given memorable examples in Monaldi and Twice-told Tales. Unknown portraits have inspired the most attractive conjectures, and about the best known and most fascinating hover an atmosphere of intensely personal interest or historical association. Vasari, Mrs. Jameson, Hazlitt, and other art-writers have elaborated the most delectable facts and fancies from this vast individual sphere of the picturesque.

The technicalities of art, its refinements of style, its absolute significance, are, indeed, as dependent for appreciation on a special endowment as are mathematics; but the general and incidental associations, in which is involved a world of poetry, may be enjoyed to the full extent by those whose perception of form, sense of colour, and knowledge of the principles of sculpture, painting, music, and architecture are notably deficient. It is a law of life and nature, that truth and beauty, adequately represented, create and diffuse a limitless element of wisdom and pleasure. Such memorials are talismanic, and their influence is felt in all the higher and more permanent spheres of thought and emotion; they are the gracious landmarks that guide humanity above the commonplace and the material, along the ‘line of infinite desires.’ Art, in its broad and permanent meaning, is a language—the language of sentiment, of character, of national impulse, of individual genius; and for this reason it bears a lesson, a charm, or a sanction to all—even to those least versed in its rules, and least alive to its special triumphs. Sir Walter Scott was no amateur, yet, through his reverence for ancestry and his local attachments, portraiture and architecture had for him a romantic interest. Sydney Smith was impatient of galleries when he could talk with men and women, and made a practical joke of buying pictures; yet Newton and Leslie elicited his best humour. Talfourd cared little and knew less of the treasures of the Louvre, but lingered there because it had been his friend Hazlitt’s Elysium. Indeed, there are constantly blended associations in the history of English authors and artists; Reynolds is identified with Johnson and Goldsmith, Smibert with Berkeley, Barry with Burke, Constable and Wilkie with Sir George Beaumont, Haydon with Wordsworth, and Leslie with Irving. The painters depict their friends of the pen, the latter celebrate in verse or prose the artist’s triumphs, and both intermingle thought and sympathy; and from this contact of select intelligences, of diverse vocation, has resulted the choicest wit and the most genial companionship. If from special we turn to general associations, from biography to history, the same prolific affinities are evident, whereby the artist becomes an interpreter of life, and casts the halo of romance over the stern features of reality. Hampton Court is the almost breathing society of Charles the Second’s reign; the Bodleian Gallery is vivid with Britain’s past intellectual life; the history of France is pictured on the walls of Versailles; the luxury of colour bred by the sunsets of the Euganean hills, the waters of the Adriatic, the marbles of San Marco, and the skies and atmosphere of Venice, are radiant on the canvas of Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese; Michael Angelo has embodied the soul of his era, and the loftiest spirit of his country; Salvator typified the half-savage picturesqueness, Claude the atmospheric enchantments, Carlo Dolce the effeminate grace, Titian the voluptuous energy, Guido the placid self-possession, and Raphael and Correggio the religious sentiment of Italy; Watteau put on canvas the fÊte champÊtre; the peasant life of Spain is pictured by Murillo, her asceticism by the old religious limners; what English rustics were before steam and railroads, Gainsborough and Moreland reveal; Wilkie has permanently symbolized Scotch shrewdness and domesticity, and Lawrence framed and fixed the elegant shapes of a London drawing-room; and each of these is a normal type and suggestive exemplar to the imagination, a chapter of romance, a sequestration and initial token of the characteristic and the historical, either of what has become traditional or what is for ever true.

The indirect service good artists have rendered by educating observation has yet to be acknowledged. The Venetian painters cannot be even superficially regarded, without developing the sense of colour; nor the Roman, without enlarging our cognizance of expression; nor the English, without refining our perception of the evanescent effects in scenery. Raphael has made infantile grace obvious to unmaternal eyes; Turner opened to many a preoccupied vision the wonders of atmosphere; Constable guided our perception of the casual phenomena of wind; Landseer, that of the natural language of the brute creation; Lely, of the coiffure; Michael Angelo, of physical grandeur; Rolfe, of fish; Gerard Dow, of water; Cuyp, of meadows; Cooper, of cattle; Stanfield, of the sea; and so on through every department of pictorial art. Insensibly these quiet but persuasive teachers have made every phase and object of the material world interesting, environed them with more or less of romance, by such revelations of their latent beauty and meaning; so that, thus instructed, the sunset and the pastoral landscape, the moss-grown arch and the craggy seaside, the twilight grove and the swaying cornfield, an old mill, a peasant, light and shade, form and feature, perspective and anatomy, a smile, a gesture, a cloud, a waterfall, weather-stains, leaves, deer—every object in nature, and every impress of the elements, speaks more distinctly to the eye, and more effectively to the imagination.

The vicissitudes which sometimes attend a picture or statue furnish no inadequate materials for narrative interest. Amateur collectors can unfold a tale in reference to their best acquisitions which outvies fiction. Beckford’s table-talk abounded in such reminiscences. An American artist, who had resided long in Italy, and made a study of old pictures, caught sight at a shop window in New Orleans of an ‘Ecce Homo’ so pathetic in expression as to arrest his steps and engross his attention. Upon inquiry, he learned that it had been purchased of a soldier fresh from Mexico, after the late war between that country and the United States; he bought it for a trifle, carried it to Europe, and soon authenticated it as an original Guercino, painted for the royal chapel in Madrid, and sent thence by the government to a church in Mexico, whence, after centuries, it had found its way, through the accidents of war, to a pawnbroker’s shop in Louisiana. A lady in one of our eastern cities, wishing to possess, as a memorial, some article which had belonged to a deceased neighbour, and not having the means, at the public sale of her effects, to bid for an expensive piece of furniture, contented herself with buying for a few shillings a familiar chimney-screen. One day she discovered a glistening surface under the flowered paper which covered it, and when this was torn away, there stood revealed a picture of ‘Jacob and Rachel at the Well,’ by Paul Veronese; doubtless thus concealed with a view to its secret removal during the first French Revolution. The missing Charles First of Velasquez was lately exhibited in this country, and the account its possessor gives of the mode of its discovery and the obstacles which attended the establishment of its legal ownership in England is a remarkable illustration both of the tact of the connoisseur and the mysteries of jurisprudence.[10]

Political vicissitudes not only cause pictures to emigrate like their owners, but to change their costume—if we may so call a frame,—with equal celerity: that which now encloses Peale’s Washington, at Princeton, once held the portrait of George the Third; and there is an elaborate old frame which holds the likeness of a New England poet’s grandfather whence was hurriedly taken the portrait of Governor Hutchinson, in anticipation of a domiciliary visit from the ‘Sons of Liberty.’

There is scarcely, indeed, an artist or a patron of art, of any eminence, who has not his own ‘story of a picture.’ Like all things of beauty and of fame, the very desire of possession which a painting excites, and the interest it awakens, give rise to some costly sacrifice, or incidental circumstance, which associates the prize with human fortune and sentiment.

A friend of mine, in exploring the more humble class of boarding-houses in one of our large commercial towns, in search of an unfortunate relation, found himself, while expecting the landlady, absorbed in a portrait on the walls of a dingy back parlour. The furniture was of the most common description. A few smutched and faded annuals, half-covered with dust, lay on the centre-table, beside an old-fashioned astral lamp, a cracked porcelain vase of wax-flowers, a yellow satin pincushion embroidered with tarnished gold-lace, and an album of venerable hue filled with hyperbolic apostrophes to the charms of some ancient beauty; which, with the dilapidated window-curtains, the obsolete sideboard, the wooden effigy of a red-faced man with a spyglass under his arm, and the cracked alabaster clock-case on the mantel, all bespoke an impoverished establishment, so devoid of taste that the beautiful and artistic portrait seemed to have found its way there by a miracle. It represented a young and spirituelle woman, in the costume, so elegant in material and formal in mode, which Copley has immortalized; in this instance, however, there was a French look about the coiffure and robe. The eyes were bright with intelligence chastened by sentiment, the features at once delicate and spirited; and altogether the picture was one of those visions of blended youth, grace, sweetness, and intellect, from which the fancy instinctively infers a tale of love, genius, or sorrow, according to the mood of the spectator. Subdued by his melancholy errand, and discouraged by a long and vain search, my friend, whose imagination was quite as excitable as his taste was correct, soon wove a romance around the picture. It was evidently not the work of a novice; it was as much out of place in this obscure and inelegant domicile, as a diamond set in filigree, or a rose among pigweed. How came it there? who was the original? what her history and her fate? Her parentage and her nurture must have been refined; she must have inspired love in the chivalric; perchance this was the last relic of an illustrious exile, the last memorial of a princely house.

This reverie of conjecture was interrupted by the entrance of the landlady. My friend had almost forgotten the object of his visit; and when his anxious inquiries proved vain, he drew the loquacious hostess into general conversation, in order to elicit the mystery of the beautiful portrait. She was a robust, gray-haired woman, with whose constitutional good-nature care had waged a long and partially successful war. That indescribable air which speaks of better days was visible at a glance; the remnants of bygone gentility were obvious in her dress; she had the peculiar manner of one who had enjoyed social consideration; and her language indicated familiarity with cultivated society; yet the anxious expression habitual to her countenance, and the bustling air of her vocation which quickly succeeded conversational repose, hinted but too plainly straitened circumstances and daily toil. But what struck her present curious visitor more than these casual traits were the remains of great beauty in the still lovely contour of the face, the refined lines of her mouth, and the depth and varied play of the eyes. He was both sympathetic and ingenious, and ere long gained the confidence of his auditor. The unfeigned interest and the true perception he manifested in speaking of the portrait rendered him, in its owner’s estimation, worthy to know the story his own intuition had so nearly divined. The original was Theodosia, the daughter of Aaron Burr. His affection for her was the redeeming fact of his career and character. Both were anomalous in our history. In an era remarkable for patriotic self-sacrifice, he became infamous for treasonable ambition; among a phalanx of statesmen illustrious for directness and integrity, he pursued the tortuous path of perfidious intrigue; in a community where the sanctities of domestic life were unusually revered, he bore the stigma of unscrupulous libertinism. With the blood of his gallant adversary and his country’s idol on his hands, the penalties of debt and treason hanging over him, the fertility of an acute intellect wasted on vain expedients—an outlaw, an adventurer, a plausible reasoner with one sex and fascinating betrayer of the other, poor, bereaved, contemned,—one holy, loyal sentiment lingered in his perverted soul—love for the fair, gifted, gentle being who called him father. The only disinterested sympathy his letters breathe is for her; and the feeling and sense of duty they manifest offer a remarkable contrast to the parallel record of a life of unprincipled schemes, misused talents, and heartless amours. As if to complete the tragic antithesis of destiny, the beloved and gifted woman who thus shed an angelic ray upon that dark career was, soon after her father’s return from Europe, lost in a storm at sea, while on her way to visit him, thus meeting a fate which, even at this distance of time, is remembered with pity. Her wretched father bore with him, in all his wanderings and through all his remorseful exile, her picture—emblem of filial love, of all that is beautiful in the ministry of woman, and all that is terrible in human fate. At length he lay dangerously ill in a garret. He had parted with one after another of his articles of raiment, books, and trinkets, to defray the expenses of a long illness; Theodosia’s picture alone remained; it hung beside him—the one talisman of irreproachable memory, of spotless love, and of undying sorrow; he resolved to die with this sweet relic of the loved and lost in his possession; there his sacrifices ended. Life seemed slowly ebbing; the unpaid physician lagged in his visits; the importunate landlord threatened to send this once dreaded partisan, favoured guest, and successful lover to the almshouse; when, as if the spell of woman’s affection were spiritually magnetic, one of the deserted old man’s early victims—no other than she who spoke—accidentally heard of his extremity, and, forgetting her wrongs, urged by compassion and her remembrance of the past, sought her betrayer, provided for his wants, and rescued him from impending dissolution. In grateful recognition of her Christian kindness, he gave her all he had to bestow—Theodosia’s portrait.

The indiscriminate disparagement of the old masters which has so long been the paradox of Ruskin’s beautiful rhetoric, Haydon’s suicidal devotion to the ‘grand style,’ Mrs. Jameson’s gracious exposition of religious art, and the extravagant encomiums which the fashionable painter of the hour elicits from accredited critical journals, indicate the antagonistic theories and tastes that prevail; and yet these are all authentic and recognized oracles of artistic knowledge—all more or less true; and yet, in a comparative view, offering such violent contrasts as to baffle and discourage a novice in search of the legitimate picturesque.

So thoroughly identified with the possibility and probability of deception is the very name of a picture-dealer, that to the multitude an ‘Old Master’ is a bugbear;—the tricks of this trade form a staple of Paris correspondents and travelled raconteurs. The details of manufacture in perhaps this most lucrative branch of spurious traffic are patent; and, although the legitimate products of world-renowned painters are authenticated and on record, scarcely a month passes without some extensive fraud. The amateur in literature, sculpture, and music, is comparatively free from this perpetual danger; the sense of mystery does not baffle his enthusiasm; and while the pictorial votary or victim is disputing about an ‘Andrea del Sarto,’ or a ‘Teniers,’ or bewildered by the conflicting theories of rival artists in regard to colour, tone, composition, foreshortening, chiaro-oscuro, &c., he enjoys, without misgiving, the noi ci darem of Mozart, revels over the faded leaves of his first edition of a classic, or discourses fluently about the line of beauty in his copy of a Greek statue. ‘God Almighty’s daylight,’ wrote Constable, ‘is enjoyed by all mankind, excepting only the lovers of old dirty canvas, perished pictures at a thousand guineas each, cart-grease, tar, and snuff of candle.’ The practical lesson derivable from these anomalous results of ‘Pictures’ is that we should rely upon our individual impressions, enjoy what appeals gratefully to our consciousness, repudiate hackneyed and conventional terms, judgments, and affectations, and boldly declare with the poet, before the picture which enchants us,—

There are heads of men and women delineated hundreds of years ago, so knit into the mystic web of memory and imagination, so familiar through engravings, cameos, and other reproductive forms of art, and so identified with tragic experience, ideal aspiration, or heroic deeds, that the first view of the originals is an epoch in life; we seem to behold them down a limitless vista of time, and they appeal to our consciousness like the faces of the long-loved, long-lost, and suddenly restored. It is as if we had entered a spiritual realm, and were greeted by the vanished idols of the heart, or the ‘beings of the mind and not of clay,’ once arbiters of destiny and oracles of genius. Beatrice Cenci, through soulful eyes, infinitely deepened by a life of tears dried up by the fever of intense anguish, looks the incarnation of beauty and woe—beauty we have adored in dreams, woe we have realized through sympathy. With the first sight of that alabaster skin, those lips quivering with pain, those golden locks, the theme of poets, that corpse-like headband; the fragility, the fervour, the sensibility, and the chaste, ineffable grace; above all, the soulful world of terror, pity, and meekness in the lustrous and melancholy orbs, how familiar, yet how new, how pathetic, yet sublime! The hoary wretch who called her child, seems lurking somewhere in that hushed and sombre palace; the brother whose fair brow was lacerated by parental violence; the resigned mother, the infernal banquet, the prison, the tribunal, the bloody axe, flit with fearful distinctness between our entranced vision and the picture; for tradition, local association, Shelley’s muse, the secret pen of the annalist, and the pencil of Guido, combine to make absolutely real an unparalleled story of loveliness and persecution, maidenhood and martyrdom. It is but recently that the true history of this picture has been authenticated. According to Guerazzi, who has minutely explored contemporary archives, the ‘study’ from which it was painted, Ubaldo Ubaldini made from memory, to console his sister for the loss of Beatrice. He was one of the many artists who loved the beautiful victim, with the passion of youth and the fancy of a painter; one of the courageous but inadequate band who conspired to rescue her at the scaffold;[11] and it was long believed that he died of indignant grief after the catastrophe. Imagine him with the shadow of that mighty sorrow upon his soul, his hand inspired by tender recollection, secluded with her image stamped on his broken heart, and patiently reproducing those delicate features and that anguished expression—his last offering to her he so quickly followed into the valley of death! His ‘study’ fell into the hands of Maffei Barberini, and furnished Guido Reni the materials for this, his most effective and endeared creation. Its marvellous, almost magnetic expression, doubtless gave rise to the belief, so long current, that he sketched Beatrice on her way to execution; but the later explanation is more accordant with probability and more satisfactory to the mind, for such a work requires for the conditions of success both the inspiration of love and the aptitude of skill. Ubaldini furnished one, and Guido the other.

Many travellers, especially women, have expressed great disappointment with the ‘Fornarina.’ They cannot associate a figure so much the reverse of ethereal, and charms so robust, with the refined taste and delicate person of Raffaelo. But such objections are founded on an imaginative not philosophic theory of love. There never was a genuine artist who, in matters of feeling, was not a child of Nature; and we have but to recognize the idiosyncrasies of poet and painter to find a key to their human affinities. What a peculiar interest we feel in the objects of love whose affection cheered, and whose sympathy inspired those products of pen and pencil, which have become part of our mental being! I have seen a crowd of half-bashful and wholly intent English girls watch the carriage which contained the obese, yet still fair-haired Countess, whose youthful charms so long made Byron a methodical hermit at Ravenna; and the respectable matron who, as a child, was deemed by sentimentalists in Germany and her own exaggerated fancy the object of GoËthe’s senile passion, was long courted on that account, at tea-drinkings, by foreign visitors enamoured of Faust and Wilhelm Meister. Still more natural is the sentiment which lures us to earnest acquaintance with the countenance, on which he who gave an angelic semblance to maternity and caught the most gracious aspect of childhood used to gaze with rapture; the eye that responded to his glance, the smile that penetrated his heart, and were fixed on his canvas. The impression which the ‘Fornarina’ of the Tribune instantly gives, is that of genuine womanhood: there is generosity, a repose, a world of latent emotion, an exuberance of sympathetic power, in the full impassioned eye, the broad symmetrical bosom, the rich olive tint; it is precisely the woman to harmonize by her simple presence, and to soothe or exalt by her spontaneous love, the mood of a man of nervous organization and ardent temper. There is a tranquil self-possession in the face and figure which the sensitive and excitable artist especially finds refreshing—a candid nature such as alone can inspire such a man’s confidence, a majestic simplicity peculiar to the best type of Roman women, more delightful to the over-tasked brain and sensibilities than the highest culture of an artificial kind; and there is the fresh, unperverted, richly-developed, harmoniously-united heart and physique, which, notwithstanding the modern standard of female charms, is the normal and the essential basis of honest, natural affinity. I could never turn, in the Florence Gallery, from the pale, delicately-rounded, ideal brow, the almost pleading eye, and the cherubic lips of Raffaelo, instinct with the needs as well as the immortal longings of genius, to the mellow, calm, self-sustained, and healthful ‘Fornarina,’ without fancying the support, the rest, the inexhaustible comfort—in Othello’s sense of that expressive word—which the sensitive artist could find in the cheerful baker’s daughter, the irritable seeker in the serene and satisfied woman, the delicate in the strong, the gentle in the hearty, the ideal in the real, the poetic in the practical, the spiritual in the human; and I contemplated her noble contour, her contented smile, her beaming cheek, and eye undeepened by the experience that withers as it teaches—yet soulful with latent emotion, with an ever-increasing sense of her native claims to Raphael’s love.

Musical organizations are especially sensitive to the pictorial spell; the letters of Mendelssohn indicate how it influenced his development. Writing from Venice of church services he attended, he says:—‘Nothing impressed me with more solemn awe than when, on the very spot for which they were originally created, the “Presentation of Mary and the Child in the Temple,” “The Assumption of the Virgin,” “The Entombment of Christ,” and “The Martyrdom of St. Peter,” in all their grandeur, gradually steal forth out of the darkness in which the long lapse of time has veiled them. Often I feel a musical inspiration, and since I came here have been busily engaged in composition.’ And from Florence he writes:—‘There is a small picture here which I discovered for myself. It is by Fra Bartolomeo, who must have been a man of most devout, tender, and earnest spirit. The figures are finished in the most exquisite and consummate manner. You can see in the picture itself that the pious master has taken delight in painting it, and in finishing the most minute details, probably with a view of giving it away to gratify some friend; we feel as if the painter belonged to it, and still ought to be sitting before his work, or had this moment left.’ This personal magnetism about pictures is an authentic evidence of their vital relation to character, and it is felt often in an incredible way by the imaginative and susceptible. The same gifted and generous composer, who thus wrote of Titian and Fra Bartolomeo, speaks of the impression he received from Raphael’s portrait by himself:—‘Youthful, pale, delicate, and with such inward aspirations, such longing and wistfulness in the mouth and eyes, that it is as if you could see into his very soul; that he cannot succeed in expressing all that he sees and feels, and is thus impelled to go forward, and that he must die an early death;—all this is written on his mournful, suffering, yet fervid countenance.’

Vandyke’s portraits of Charles the First impress the spectator with regal fanaticism, and a tragic destiny, more than some of the written histories of his reign. The exquisite hands of Leonardo’s ‘Gioconde’ are as eloquent of feminine grace and sensibility as the most elaborate description. Correggio’s ‘Magdalen,’ in the remorseful abandon and beautiful sadness of its expression, reveals her who ‘loved much,’ repented, and was forgiven. Giovanni di Medici, in the Uffizzi Gallery, fulfils to the imagination the ideal of mediÆval Italian soldiership. Stuart’s ‘Washington’ embodies the serene conscience, the self-control, the humane dignity and birthright of command, which consecrate our peerless chief; and Delaroche’s ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’ perpetuates the intense purpose and insatiable ambition that won so many battles and died of anxiety on an ocean-rock. Such instances, which might easily be multiplied, prove how a single department of art, and that the least estimated, is allied to history, patriotism, and sentiment, and capable of touching their secret springs and unveiling their limitless perspective at a glance. Guercino’s ‘Hagar’ is a biblical poem. Hamlet’s filial reproaches borrow their keenest sting from two ‘counterfeit presentments,’ and Trumbull’s faithful and assiduous pencil has transmitted the individualities of our Revolutionary drama. And thus the art of portraiture, even in its general relations, may become, through illustrious subjects and rare fidelity, the romance which association of ideas breeds from reality.

I was never more impressed with the absolute line of demarcation between the imitative and the inventive, even in the lighter processes of art, than when examining the graphic series of illustrations of The Wandering Jew. Nature is represented under all forms—the woods, the desert, the ocean, caves, meadows, and skies; and these fixed elemental features might be well reflected by mechanical aids, photographed or reproduced through chemical and optical means; but the true meaning of each picture consisted in the ever-present shadow pursuing the Wanderer—the form of the Holy One bowed under his cross: it glimmered in the water, was stamped on the rock, outlined in the gnarled forest branches, pencilled in the floating vapour, reflected in the ice-mirrored lake, with a latent and inevitable yet unobtrusive and apparently accidental omni-presence, as if wrought into the texture of nature through the creative anguish of conscience—which emphatically announced an intelligence far beyond all mechanical art, and interfused the material with the abstract, the imaginative, and the human, as only genius can. The same thing is evinced by comparing the best photographs of architecture, figures, or landscapes with the sketch-book of a genuine artist; in certain points there will be found a special intelligence and feeling which transcend the most remarkable imitative truth. How much of this is suggested, for instance, by the mere catalogue of an album on the table at a Parisian soirÉe: fleurs de RedontÉ, chevaux de Carl Vernet, Bedouins d’Horace, aquarelles de Ciceri, petit paysages de GÉniole, caricatures de Grandville et de Monnier, beaux brigands de Schnetz—‘tous chÉfs d’oeuvre au petit pied.’

A portrait of little Fritz drumming, in the Berlin Gallery, Carlyle hails, in his Life of Frederick the Great, as ‘one tiny islet of reality amid the shoreless sea of fantasms, Flaying of Bartholomews, Rape of Europas,’ &c. Napoleon was delighted to remember that his mother reclined on tapestry representing the heroes of the Iliad, when she brought him into the world.

For how long and with what vividness are certain pictures associated with localities. Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy,’ and Reynolds’s ‘Strawberry Girl,’ are among the salient retrospective images of the English school at the Manchester Exhibition. We think of Correggio with Parma, Perugino with Perugia, Fra Angelico with Florence, Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ and Guercino’s ‘Hagar’ with Milan, Murillo with Seville, Vandyke with Madrid, Rubens with Antwerp, Watteau with Paris, and Paul Potter’s ‘Bull’ with the Hague.

The Dutch school, in a philosophical estimate, is but the compensation afforded by the romance of art for its deficiency in nature; the element of the picturesque not found in mountains, forests, and cataracts, the lowland painters wrought from flowers and firesides; the radiant tulips and exquisite interiors, the humble but characteristic in life and manners. To seize upon individuality is the conservative tact of both painter and poet; whoever does this effectively contributes to the world’s gallery of historical portraits, and keeps before the living the faces, costume, and actions of bygone races and heroes. Catlin’s aboriginal portraits introduced the American native tribes to Europe; a naturalist abroad has but to turn over Audubon’s portfolio to become intimately acquainted with every bird whose plumage or song makes beautiful our woodlands and seashore; the traveller who rests an hour at Perugia may trace on the walls of a church the original, crude, yet pious expression which Raphael developed into angelic beauty. Vernet has, by the very multiplicity of his battle-pieces, signalized on canvas the military genius of the French nation; the faith which so distinguishes the fifteenth from the speculation of the eighteenth century is manifest to us most eloquently in the masterpieces of religious art which yet remain in peerless beauty to attest the holy convictions that inspired them; and all that is peculiar in Grecian culture has found no exponent like the statues of her divinities. Hogarth preceded Crabbe and Dickens in making palpable the shadows of want, crime, and luxury. The Italian satirist, who endowed animals with speech and made them represent the absurdities of humanity, hinted their possible significance less than Landseer who individualized their most salient traits, or Kaulbach who revealed the brute creation in the highest intuitive expression. There is a piquant rustic beauty by Greuze, which embodies and embalms, in its exquisite suggestiveness, the special claim of naÏve brightness and grace that belongs almost exclusively to French lovable women; and there is a portrait of an American matronly belle of the days of Washington, by Stuart, which represents the type of mingled self-reliance and womanly loveliness that has made the ladies of our Republican court so memorably attractive.