Hans Holbein is ranked by De Piles among the German painters, yet he painted his most celebrated works in England. He was the first painter of eminence encouraged by Henry VIII., who, excited by the fame which his contemporaries Francis I. and Charles V. had gained as patrons of the arts, employed him, and invited Titian to England; but merely as a portrait painter --whether the reward offered was not thought adequate to his merit, or for some other cause, perhaps the knowledge that his talents for historical design would be depreciated, he firmly rejected the overture. The public works of Holbein, in England, are four only, as enumerated by Mr. Walpole, which are rather groups of portraits than history.

Nothing could be more unfavourable to female beauty than the dress of those times: Holbein's men are therefore much more characteristic than his ladies; even his Anna Bullen is deficient in loveliness, as he pourtrayed her. In his likeness of Anne of Cleves he is said to have sacrificed truth to flattery; yet the original, which is in the possession of Mr. Barrett, of Lee, in Kent, is below mediocrity. There are in his late Majesty's collection, a series of portraits of persons of quality in the reign of Henry VIII., sketched upon paper, with crayons, probably taken at a single sitting. They have lately been engraved by Bartolozzi, with all the strength and spirit of the originals.

Holbein was as celebrated in miniature, as in oil colours. He made a great number of designs, for engravers, sculptors, and jewellers. He died at his residence at Whitehall, in those lodgings which were afterwards the paper-offices.

The fame of Isaac Oliver, who flourished about the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, as a miniature painter, is well-known :he received some instructions from Frederico Zucchero, who was in England at that time, where, among other portraits, he painted that of the unfortunate Mary, Queen of Scots. Oliver drew well, and made some admirable copies from the Italian masters. Greatly as Isaac was celebrated, he was afterwards exceeded by his son

f

Peter, who drew portraits of King James I., Prince Henry, Prince Charles, and most of the court.

About this period Cornelius Jansens, a skilful portrait painter came to England from Amsterdam, and painted the king, and many of the nobility; but his merits being eclipsed by Vandyck, of whom he was jealous, and the civil war breaking out, he fled from England. Cornelius Jansens was remarkable for high finishing in his draperies; many of which are black, which seems to add roundness, relief, and spirit, to his figures and carnations. He is said to have used ultramarine in the black colours, as well as in the carnations, to which may be attributed their lustre even at this day. The duke of Beaufort has a capital portrait of Jansens by himself; but one of his best performances is the Rushout family, at Northwick, in Worcestershire.

Daniel Mytens was a popular painter in the reigns of James and Charles I. He had studied under Rubens, and was for some time principal painter to Charles, but was deprived of his place when Vandyck arrived in England. Charles, however, continued his pension during life.

Vandyck had his first instructions from Vanbalen, of Antwerp, but he soon found in Rubens a master every way more suited to direct his genius, and to mature that consummate taste, which he very early showed marks of possessing. Under the instructions of Rubens, he acquired such skill in his art, that the portrait of his master's wife, which he painted while he was yet a disciple, is esteemed one of the best pictures in the Low Countries. He painted for his master two admirable pieces, one representing Christ seized in the garden, and the other the crowning him with thorns. When he left Rubens, he travelled into Italy; and on his return, having established his reputation as one of the first painters of the age, he was invited to England, where he was knighted by Charles I., and married one of the handsomest ladies of the court, the daughter of lord Ruthven, earl of Gowry. Towards the latter end of his life he went to France, in hopes of

being employed in the great gallery of the Louvre; but not succeeding, he returned to England, and proposed to the king to make cartoons for the banquet-house at Whitehall; but his demand of 80,000l. being judged unreasonable, whilst the king was treating with him for a less sum, the gout, and other distempers, put an end to his life.

Dobson had merited from Charles I. the title of the English Tintoret, before his premature death, in 1646, at the age of only 36 years. He was the father of the English school of portrait painting; and though sometimes unequal, had much the manner of his master, Vandyck. He resided much at Oxford, and left there the portraits of himself and wife, and of Sir Tradescant and his friend Zythepsa, the quaker, in the staircase of the Ashmolean Museum. Dobson sometimes painted history. His decollation of St. John, at Wilton, and the astronomer and his family, at Blenheim, are amongst those which are most known and admired.

Lely was, in the former part of his life, a landscape-painter, but was induced to practise portrait-painting, perhaps from the reputation and emolument which its professors obtained in England. Lely was chiefly celebrated for painting females; and it is sometimes objected to him that his fancies have too great a similarity of expression. The languishing air, the drowsy sweetness peculiar to himself,

"The sleepy eye that spoke the melting soul."

is found in nearly all the pictures of females by this painter.

His crayon drawings are admirable. He drew the portrait of Charles I. when a prisoner at Hampton-court. Charles II. knighted him, and made him his principal painter.

Kneller was the fashionable artist in the reigns of James II. and William :-among an infinity of portraits, there are some which bear the marks of excellence. Dr. Wallis, the mathemati cian, and lord Crew, both for colouring and expression, are in a

great style. The latter was admired by Sir Joshua Reynolds for the air of nobility it possesses. Kneller is said to have drawn ten crowned heads, viz. four kings of England, and three queens; the Czar of Muscovy, the Emperor Charles, and Louis XIV. Notwithstanding the negligence which is manifest in most of his works, which arose from the desire of gain, his genius is very apparent.

Thornhill's pencil has produced several great works; those in fresco in the dome of St. Paul's, and the painted hall at Greenwich, are too well known to need describing. The works of his son-in-law, Hogarth, are also known to every one conversant with the art. As a painter of natural humour he stands unrivalled, nor can it be expected that his more serious moral works will ever be equalled, still less surpassed, by any future artist.

Richardson was a portrait painter of eminence: to his treatise on painting we are indebted for the greatest ornament to the art, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who fixed the destination of his mind on the profession by the accidental reading of that work.-Hudson was the best pupil of Richardson.

The merit of Sir Joshua Reynolds, as a portrait painter, cannot be attributed to Hudson's instructions, since his manner seems entirely his own. Sir Joshua was born at Plimpton, in Devonshire, in the year 1723: his relations still preserve some frontispieces to the lives of Plutarch, as specimens of his early predilection for his art, and the promise he gave of becoming eminent in it. He became pupil to Hudson about 1743; who, amongst other advice, recommended him to copy Guerchino's drawings, which he did with such skill, that many of them are preserved in the cabinets of collectors as the originals of that master. About the year 1750 he went to Rome to prosecute his studies, where he remained nearly two years, and employed himself in rather making studies from, than in copying the works of the great painters: he amused himself with painting caricatures, particularly one of all the English then at Rome, in the different attitudes of Raphael's celebrated school at Athens.

An ingenious critic thus delineates Sir Joshua's professional character: "Sir Joshua Reynolds was, most assuredly, the best portrait painter that this age has produced: he possessed something original in his manner, which distinguished him from those painters who preceded him. His colouring was excellent; and his distribution of light and shadow so generally judicious and varied, that it most clearly showed that it was not a mere trick of practice, but the result of principle. In history painting his abilities were very respectable; and his invention and judgment were sufficient to have enabled him to have made a very distinguished figure in that very arduous branch of his profession, if the exclusive taste of his country for portraits had not discouraged him from cultivating a talent so very unproductive and neglected. His drawing, though incorrect, had always something of grandeur in it."

To his own pictures might well be applied what he used to say respecting those of Rubens: "They resemble,” said he, “ a wellchosen nosegay, in which, though the colours are splendid and vivid, they are never glaring or oppressive to the eye." Sir Joshua was a great experimentalist, with respect to the composition of his colours; at first he used preparations from vegetables, which he relinquished for minerals: he is known to have purchased pictures by Titian, or his scholars, and to have scraped off the several layers of colouring, in order to ascertain it, and discover his secret.

The English school of painting must acknowledge Sir Joshua Reynolds as its great founder, under royal auspices, in the establishment of the Academy. The pure precepts which he laid down in his annual orations were exemplified in his own works: his most favourite paintings are:-1. Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy. 2. The Ugolino in prison, in which he has imitated Michel Angelo in his " terribil via," as it is called by Agostino Caracci, in his sonnet on painting. It is Sir Joshua's triumph in the art. 3. The Nativity. 4. The Infant Hercules. 5. The death of Cardinal Beaufort, in which are united the local colouring of Titian, with the chiaro-scuro of