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The room in which Northcote worked while with Sir Joshua was, he tells us, a small one "next to his own painting room. There were" (in it) "a great number of those portraits which had been rejected and left on his hands: round the sides of the room were shelves, on which were placed large heads, casts from the antique, and at a great height, for the room was lofty; and over these hung some old portraits by Lely and others. In this room, as I was one day busily employed in painting a drapery to one of his portraits, I suddenly heard a noise as if something had fallen, when, looking up to the place, I saw that one of these pictures by Lely had dropt from its nail, and falling on the shelf threw down two or three very large plaster heads. I had but a moment to get up in the corner of this little room, when the whole fell down on the floor, just where I had been at work, with a violence that would have certainly proved fatal to me had I not got out of the way, as a moment would have been too late. The easel was knocked down, together with the picture on which I was at work, and driven with violence through five or six of those unfortunate rejected portraits, as they happened to be placed one before the other, whilst the floor was covered with the fragments of the broken plaster heads. The great noise that this made alarmed even Sir Joshua, although deaf, and brought him into the room in a hurry to know what was the matter."

1 Not only portraits, but some of his finest poetic subjects, were often in this room. I have heard Lord Egremont say he bought a picture from it containing portraits of two

VOL. I.

children of Nelly O'Brien, with a dog; and he regretted that he had not bought others, for the prices asked by Sir Joshua were not high.

2 E

In speaking of the work Reynolds gave him to do, Northcote says, "It was very provoking, after I had been for hours labouring on the drapery of one of his portraits from a lay-figure, to see him, with a few masterly sweeps of his pencil, destroy nearly all my work, and turn it into something much finer;-and yet, but for my work, it would not have been what he made it."

"I remember once when I was disposing the folds of drapery with great care on the lay-figure, in order to paint from it into one of his pictures, he remarked that it would not make good drapery if set so artificially, and that, whenever it did not fall into such folds as were agrecable, I should try to get it better, by taking the chance of another toss of the drapery stuff, and by that means I should get Nature, which is always superior to Art."

And yet Northcote, after recording this, said to Hazlitt, "If I had any fault to find with Sir Joshua, it would be that he was a very bad master in Art. It was like the boy teaching the other to swim. 'How do you do when you want to turn?' 'How must you do when you turn? Why, you must look that way! Sir Joshua's teaching amounted to little more."

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But the truth is, that little more can be taught in Art, though everything may be learned, by an apt scholar. Vandyke soon equalled Rubens in execution, because he was Vandyke; but Northcote was not a Vandyke; and, therefore, though not without ability, he remained for ever at an infinite distance from the great painter in whose house he lived five years, and whose works he saw daily in every stage of progress. Opie, without

any such advantages, came from Cornwall to London, already an artist of great power; and Northcote afterwards became, in a great degree, his imitator; in which he succeeded to some extent, because it was much easier to imitate the force of Opie than the refinement of Reynolds.

[At the sale of the prints and original drawings collected by Richardson the painter, and his son, which took place this year at Old Langford's room, under the piazza, Covent Garden, Northcote attended, he tells us, by Sir Joshua's direction, to bid for the lots which Sir Joshua had marked-"a vast number of extraordinary fine drawings and prints by and from old masters."

The fourth Discourse was delivered, as usual, at the distribution of premiums,' on the 10th of December. Its main purpose is to show that generality ennobles art; particularity debases it. The concluding paragraph sums up the argument. "On the whole," concludes the President, "it seems to me that there is but one presiding principle which regulates and gives stability to every art. The works, whether of poets, painters, moralists, or historians, which are built upon general nature, live for ever; while those which depend for their existence on particular customs and habits, a partial view of nature, or the fluctuations of fashion, can only be coeval with that which first raised them from obscurity. Present time and future may be con

The gold medal for painting | Vangelder; that for architectural de(Venus entreating Vulcan to forge the armour of Achilles) was won by Mr. W. Ball; that for a bas-relief (the Choice of Hercules), by P. M.

sign (a nobleman's villa), by Mr. John Yenn, afterwards an Academician, and successor to Sir W. Chambers as tre surer of the Academy.-ED.

Discourses among the unsafest of all guides to the student. I should like to see an appendix of limitations and cautions bound up with every copy of the look given away by the Academy to the winners of its medals. The best thing to be said for it is that the President's teaching, however misdirected, tends, as I have said already, undeniably upwards.

Take the opening passage of his fourth Lecture : "The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed on it, or the mental pleasure produced by it." Such a doctrine was of inestimable value in those days of rising effort among painters, of hollow taste and shallow connoisseurship among patrons. But when Sir Joshua pitches upon "exertion of mind " as the great distinction between the Roman and Venetian schools, the judgment declines to follow him-even though he afterwards explains, that in speaking of the Venetian school he excepts Titian. What right has he to except Titian? If Titian could conciliate with splendour of colour the gravest senatorial dignity in portraiture, the most fervent ecstacy, the loftiest faith, the most earnest reverence and tenderness in religious painting, how can it be contended, as Sir Joshua contends, that Venetian colour is not only "too brilliant, but too harmonious to produce that solidity, steadiness. and simplicity of effect, which heroic subjects require"? Does the glory of Venetian colour impair the ecstatic majesty of the Assumption, the grandeur of the Peter Martyr, the intensity of worship in the Magdalen who creeps on her knees to Christ in the Garden? Or.to take painters whom Sir Joshua does not except from

Venetian school,-is their Venetian colour out of

keeping with the awfulness of Tintoret's Christ before Pilate, or the dignity of Veronese's Darius? Here, again, Sir Joshua is led away by too great eagerness for generalization, and fails to guard himself by proper limitations. Because much of the Venetian painting was decorative, he extends to the whole school arguments and considerations which apply to the purely decorative examples of the school only if even to

these; and lands himself in difficulties which force him to such expedients as the excepting of Titian, in speaking of that school of which Titian is the greatest

master.

Nor can I agree with him when he argues that "the same reasons which have been urged to show that a mixture of the Venetian school cannot improve the great style, will hold good in regard to the Flemish and Dutch schools."

The reasons are certainly not the same in the two cases. It is not the intense grasp of local circumstance in the Dutch pictures which sinks them into the lower regions of art, but the singular coarseness, grossness, or unloveliness of the local circumstances which make up Dutch life, and are reflected by Dutch art. But Dutch art was nevertheless the best art possible in the Low Countries, by virtue of its truth. If the Dutch school had striven after "general ideas," we may be sure they would have given us something immeasurably more worthless than the lowest "droll" of Jan Steen, or the most abject scullery-piece of Maes, Teniers, and Ostade. By Venetian artists-with the partial exception of the Bassans-local life and circumstance has rarely

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