Part 8

The servants of his neighbor, Dr. Radcliffe, abused the liberty of a private entrance to the painter’s garden, and plucked his flowers. Kneller sent him word that he must shut the door up; whereupon the doctor peevishly replied, “Tell him he may do any thing with it but paint it.” “Never mind what he says,” retorted Sir Godfrey; “I can take anything from him but physic.” He once overheard a low fellow cursing himself. “God damn _you_, indeed!” exclaimed the artist in wonder; “God may damn the Duke of Marlborough, and perhaps Sir Godfrey Kneller; but do you think he will ever take the trouble of damning such a scoundrel as you?” To his tailor, who proposed his son for a pupil, he said, “Dost thou think, man, I can make thy son a painter? No, God Almighty only makes painters.” He gave a reason for preferring portraiture to historical painting, which forms an admirable _bon-mot_, for its shrewdness, truthfulness, and ingenuity. “Painters of history,” said he, “make the dead live, and do not begin to live till they are dead. I paint the living, and they make me live!”

KNELLER’S KNOWLEDGE OF PHYSIOGNOMY.

In a conversation concerning the legitimacy of the unfortunate son of James II., some doubts having been expressed by an Oxford Doctor, Kneller exclaimed, with much warmth, “His father and mother have sat to me about thirty-six times apiece, and I know every line and bit of their faces. Mein Gott! I could paint King James _now_ by memory. I say the child is so like both, that there is not a feature of his face but what belongs either to father or mother; this I am sure of, and cannot be mistaken; nay, the nails of his fingers are his mother’s, the queen that was. Doctor, you may be out in your letters, but I cannot be out in my lines.”

KNELLER AS A JUSTICE OF THE PEACE.

Sir Godfrey acted as a justice of the peace at Wilton, and his sense of justice induced him always to decide rather by equity than law. His judgments, too, were often accompanied with so much humor, as caused the greatest merriment among his acquaintance. Thus, he dismissed a poor soldier who had stolen a piece of meat, and fined the butcher for purposely tempting him to commit the crime. Hence Pope wrote the following lines:

“I think Sir Godfrey should decide the suit, Who sent the thief (that stole the cash) away, And punished him that put it in his way.”

Whenever he was applied to by paupers, he always inquired which were the richest parishes, and settled them there. He could never be induced to sign a warrant to distrain the goods of a poor man, who could not pay a tax, and he took pleasure in assisting the honest poor with his advice and purse. He disliked interruption, and if the case appeared trivial, or was the result of a row, he would not be disturbed. Seeing a constable coming to him one day, with two men, having bloody noses, and a mob at his heels, he called out to him, “Mr. Constable, do you see that turning? Go that way, and you will find an ale-house--the sign of the King’s Head. Go and make it up.” A handsome young woman came before him one day to swear a rape; struck with her beauty, he continued examining her as he sat painting, till he had taken her likeness. Perceiving from her manner that she was not free from guilt, he advised her not to prosecute her suit, but seek some other mode of redress. These instances show the goodness of his heart, and refute the many absurd and malicious stories that are told of him.

KNELLER AND CLOSTERMANS.

When Clostermans, an inferior artist, sent a challenge to Kneller to paint a picture in competition with him for a wager, he courteously declined the contest, and sent him word that “he allowed him to be his superior.”

THE CAVALIERE BERNINI.

Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, whose renown filled all Europe in the seventeenth century, was called the Michael Angelo of his age, because, like that great artist, he united in an eminent degree, the three great branches of art--painting, sculpture, and architecture, though he was chiefly renowned in the two last.

BERNINI’S PRECOCITY.

Bernini manifested his extraordinary talents almost in infancy. At the age of eight years, he executed a child’s head in marble, which was considered a wonder. When he was ten years old, his talents had become so widely known, that Pope Paul V. wished to see the prodigy who was the astonishment of artists, and on his being brought into his presence, desired him to draw a figure of St. Paul, which he did in half an hour, so much to the satisfaction of the pontiff that he recommended him to Cardinal Barberini, saying, “Direct the studies of this child, who will become the Michael Angelo of this century.”

BERNINI’S STRIKING PREDICTION.

During Bernini’s distinguished career, Charles I. of England endeavored in vain to allure him to visit his court. Not succeeding in this, he employed Vandyck to paint two excellent portraits of himself, one in profile and the other in full face, and sent them to Bernini, to enable him to execute his bust. The sculptor surveyed them with an anxious eye, and exclaimed, “Something evil will befall this man; he carries misfortune in his face.” The tragical termination of the monarch’s career, verified the sculptor’s knowledge of physiognomy. Bernini made a striking likeness, with which the king was so much pleased, that, in addition to the stipulated price, six thousand crowns, he made him a present of a diamond ring, worth six thousand more.

BERNINI AND LOUIS XIV.

Bernini received the most flattering and pressing invitations from Louis XIV. to visit Paris. At length, he was persuaded by the great Colbert to undertake the journey, and having with great difficulty obtained permission of the Pope, he set out for France, at the age of sixty-eight, accompanied by one of his sons, and a numerous retinue. Never did an artist travel with so much pomp, and under so many flattering circumstances. By order of the King, he was received everywhere on his way with the honors due to a prince, and on his arrival at Paris, he was received by the king with every mark of distinction, and apartments assigned to him in the royal palace. Louis defrayed all the expenses of his journey, and to immortalize the event, had a medal struck, with the portrait of the artist, and on the reverse, the Muses of the Arts, with this inscription, “_Singularis in singularis; in omnibus, unicus_.” When he returned to Rome, Louis presented him with ten thousand crowns, gave him a pension of two thousand, and one of four hundred to his son, and commissioned him to execute an equestrian statue of himself, in marble, of colossal proportions. The statue was executed in four years, and sent to Versailles, where it was afterwards converted into _Marcus Curtius_, and where, as such, it still remains.

BERNINI’S WORKS.

Bernini designed and wrought with wonderful facility; his life was one of continued exertion, and he lived to the great age of eighty-two years, so that he was enabled to execute an astonishing number of works. Richly endowed by nature, and favored by circumstances, he rose superior to the rules of art, creating for himself an easy manner, the faults of which he knew well how to disguise by its brilliancy; yet this course, as must ever be the case, did not lead to a lasting reputation. “The Cav. Bernini,” says Lanzi, “the great architect and skillful sculptor, was the arbiter and dispenser of all the works at Rome, under the pontificates of Urban VIII. and Innocent X. His style necessarily influenced those of all the artists, his cotemporaries. He was affected, particularly in his drapery. He opened the way to caprice, changed the true principles of art, and substituted for them the false. At different times, the study of painting has taken the same vicious course; above all, among the imitators of Pietro da Cortona, some of whom went so far as to condemn a study of the works of Raffaelle, and even to decry, as useless, the imitation of nature.” Bernini lived in splendor and magnificence, and left a fortune of 400,000 Roman crowns (about $700,000), to his children.

BERNINI AND THE VEROSPI HERCULES.

When the Verospi statue of Hercules killing the Hydra was first discovered, some parts of it, particularly the monster itself, were wanting, and were supplied by Bernini. Some years after, in further digging the same piece of ground, they found the hydra that originally belonged to it, which differs very much from Bernini’s supplemental one; yet the latter is given in Maffei’s Statues, and other books of prints, as the antique. The statue was removed from the Verospi palace to the Capitol, where it now is; and the original hydra, with a horned sort of a human face, snakes for hair, and a serpentine body, is there also, in the same court.

FANATICISM DESTRUCTIVE TO ART.

Queen Elizabeth was a bitter persecutor of art; she ordered all sacred pictures in the churches to be utterly destroyed, and the walls to be white-washed, so that no memorial of them might remain. In her reign, it became fashionable to sally forth and knock pictures and images to pieces. Flaxman says, “The commands for destroying sacred paintings and sculpture prevented the artist from suffering his mind to rise to the contemplation or execution of any sublime effort, as he dreaded a prison or a stake, and reduced him to the lowest drudgery in his profession. This extraordinary check to our national art occurred at a time which offered the most essential and extraordinary assistance to its progress.” Flaxman proceeds to remark, “the civil wars completed what fanaticism had begun, and English art was so completely extinguished that foreign artists were always employed for public or private undertakings.”

Charles I. was a great lover and patron of the fine arts, and during his reign they made rapid advances in England; but the blind zeal of the Puritans dispersed his splendid gallery, and destroyed almost every vestige of art. In the Journal of the House, July 23d, 1645, it is “Ordered, that all pictures having the second person of the Trinity, be burnt.” Walpole relates that “one Blessie was hired at half-a-crown a day to break the painted windows in Croydon church.” One _Dowsing_ was employed from June 9th, 1642, to October 4th, 1644, in this _holy_ business, and by calculation it is found that he and his agents had destroyed about 4660 pictures, evidently not all glass, because when they were glass he so specified them.

“The result of this continued persecution,” says Haydon, “was the ruin of high art, for the people had not taste enough to feel any sympathy for it independently of religion, and every man who has pursued it since, who had not a private fortune, and was not supported by a pension, like West, became infallibly ruined.”

PAINTINGS EVANESCENT.

“Few works are more evanescent than paintings. Sculpture retains its freshness for twenty centuries. The Apollo and the Venus are as they were. But books are perhaps the only productions of man coeval with the human race. Sophocles and Shakspeare can be produced and reproduced forever. But how evanescent are paintings, and must necessarily be! Those of Zeuxis and Apelles are no more, and perhaps they have the same relation to Homer and Æschylus, that those of Raffaelle and Guido have to Dante and Petrarch.

“There is however, one refuge from the despondency of this contemplation. The material part, indeed, of their works must perish, but they survive in the mind of man, and the remembrances of them are transmitted from generation to generation. The poet embodies them in his creations, and the systems of philosophers are modeled to gentleness by their contemplation; opinion, that legislator, is infected with their influence; men become better and wiser; and the unseen seeds are perhaps thus sown which shall produce a plant more excellent than that from which they fell.”--_Shelley._

There is at least another _refuge_. Paintings are now rendered as permanent as books by engraving, or statuary, by mosaics. In the time of Pliny, there were Greek paintings in Rome 600 years old. There is a painting at Florence dated 886. It is also to be hoped that christianity and civilization have made such advances, that no more Goths, Vandals, Turks, and fanatics, will take pleasure in demolishing works of art as in ages past.

THE ENGLISH NATIONAL GALLERY.

“A fine gallery of pictures is a sort of illustration of Berkeley’s theory of matter and spirit. It is like a palace of thought--another universe, built of air, of shadows, of colors. Everything seems palpable to feeling as to sight: substances turn to shadows by the arch-chemic touch; shadows harden into substances; ‘the eye is made the fool of the other senses, or else worth all the rest.’ The material is in some sense embodied in the immaterial, or at least we see all things in a sort of intellectual mirror. The world of art is an enchanting deception. We discover distance in a glazed surface; a province is contained in a foot of canvass; a thin evanescent tint gives the form and pressure of rocks and trees; an inert shape has life and motion in it. Time stands still, and the dead reappear by means of this so potent art!

“What hues (those of nature mellowed by time) breathe around, as we enter! What forms are there woven into the memory! What looks, which only the answering looks of the spectator can express! What intellectual stores have been yearly poured forth from the shrine of ancient art! The works are various, but the names the same; heaps of Rembrandts frowning from their darkened walls--Rubens’ glad gorgeous groups--Titian’s more rich and rare--Claude always exquisite, sometimes beyond compare--Guido’s endless cloying sweetness--the learning of Poussin and the Caracci--and Raphael’s princely magnificence, crowning all. We read certain letters and syllables in the catalogue, and at the well-known magic sound a miracle of skill and beauty starts to view.

“Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts passing through the mind. It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind,--to con over the relics of ancient art bound up ‘within the book and volume of the brain, unmixed, (if it were possible) with baser matter.’ A life passed among pictures, in the study and love of art, is a happy, noiseless dream: or rather it is to dream and to be awake at the same time, for it has all ‘the sober certainty of waking bliss,’ with the romantic voluptuousness of a visionary and abstracted being. They are the bright consummate essence of things, and he who knows of these delights, ‘to taste and interpose them oft, is not unwise!’”--_Hazlitt._

THE NUDE FIGURE.

“It is difficult to discover any settled rules of propriety in the different modes of dress, as all ages and nations have fluctuated with regard to their notions and fashions in this matter. The Greek statues of the Laocoön, Apollo, Meleager, Hercules; the Fighting and Dying Gladiator, and the Venus de Medicis, though altogether without drapery, yet surely there is nothing in them offensive to modesty, nothing immoral: on the contrary, looking on these figures, the mind of the spectator is taken up with the surprising beauty or sublimity of the personage, his great strength, vigorous and manly character; or those pains and agonies that so feelingly discover themselves throughout the whole work. It is not in showing or concealing the form that modesty or the want of it depends; _that_ rises entirely from the choice and intentions of the artist himself. The Greeks and other great designers came into this practice (of representing the figure undraped) in order to show in its full extent the idea of character they meant to establish. If it was beauty, they show it to you in all the limbs; if strength, the same; and the agonies of the Laocoön are as discernible in his foot as in his face. This pure and naked nature speaks a universal language, which is understood and valued in all times and countries, where the Grecian dress, language, and manners are neither regarded or known. It is worth observing also that many of the fair sex do sometimes betray themselves by their over-delicacy (which is the want of all true delicacy) in this respect. But I am ashamed to be obliged to combat such silly affectations; they are beneath men who have either head or heart; they are unworthy of women who have either education or simplicity of manner; they would disgrace even waiting-maids and sentimental milliners-.”--_Barry._

“There is no more potent antidote to low sensuality than the adoration of beauty. All the higher arts of design are essentially chaste, without respect of the object. They purify the thoughts, as tragedy, according to Aristotle, purifies the passions. Their accidental effects are not worth consideration. There are souls to whom even a vestal is not holy.”--_A. W. von Schlegel._

DIFFERENT SCHOOLS OF PAINTING COMPARED.

“The painters of the Roman school were the best designers, and had more of the antique taste in their works than any of the others, but generally they were not good colorists. Those of Florence were good designers, and had a kind of greatness, but it was not antique. The Venetian and Lombard schools had excellent colorists, and a certain grace, but entirely modern, especially those of Venice; but their drawing was generally incorrect, and their knowledge in history and the antique very little. And the Bolognese school of the Caracci is a sort of composition of the others; even Annibal himself possessed not any part of painting in the perfection which is to be seen in those from whom his manner is composed, though, to make amends, he possessed more parts than perhaps any other master, and all in a very high degree. The works of those of the German school have a dryness and ungraceful stiffness, not unlike what is seen amongst the old Florentines. The Flemings were good colorists, and imitated nature as they conceived it--that is, instead of raising nature, they fell below it, though not so much as the Germans, nor in the same manner. Rubens himself lived and died a Fleming, though he would fain have been an Italian; but his imitators have caricatured his manner--that is, they have been more Rubens in his defects than he himself was, but without his excellencies. The French, excepting some few of them (N. Poussin, Le Sueur, Sebastian Bourdon), as they have not the German stiffness nor the Flemish ungracefulness, neither have they the Italian solidity; and in their airs of heads and manners they are easily distinguished from the antique, how much soever they may have endeavored to imitate it.”--_Richardson._

THE OLD MASTERS.

“The duration and stability of the fame of the old masters of painting is sufficient to evince that it has not been suspended upon the slender thread of fashion and caprice, but bound to the human heart by every chord of sympathetic approbation.”--_Sir J. Reynolds._

PRICES OF GALLERIES.

The prices given for the three great collections of paintings sold in England within the last century, may perhaps not be uninteresting. The Houghton gallery, of two hundred and thirty-two pictures, collected by Sir Robert Walpole, was sold to the Empress Catharine of Russia for £43,500. The Orleans gallery of two hundred and ninety-six pictures was sold in London, in 1798, for £43,555; and the Angerstein collection of thirty-eight pictures was bought by the British government, in 1823, for £57,000. This last purchase was the commencement of the English National Gallery.

LOVE MAKES A PAINTER.

Quintin Matsys, called the Blacksmith of Antwerp, was bred up to the trade of a blacksmith or farrier, which business he followed till he was twenty years of age, when, according to Lampsonius, his love for a blue-eyed lass, whose cruel father, an artist, refused her hand to any one but a painter, caused him to abandon his devotion to Vulcan, and inspired him with the ambition to become a worshipper at the shrine of the Muses. He possessed uncommon talents and genius, applied himself with great assiduity, and in a short time produced pictures that gave promise of the highest excellence, and gained him the fair hand for which he sighed. The inscription on the monument erected to his memory in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, at Antwerp, records in a few expressive words the singular story of his life:

“_Connubialis amor de Mulcibre fecit Apellem._”

JOHN WESLEY JARVIS.

Jarvis, though a wayward and eccentric man, unfortunately for himself and the world too much given to strong potations, was “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy,” whose “gambols, songs, and flashes of merriment were wont to set the table on a roar.” He was a merry wag, and an inimitable story-teller and mimic. Some of his stories were dramatized by Dunlap, Hackett, and Matthews, the best of which is the laughable farce of Monsieur Mallet. Dunlap says, “Another story which Matthews dressed up for John Bull, originated with Jarvis. From a friend I have what I suppose to be the original scene. My friend was passing the painter’s room, when he suddenly threw up the window, and called him in, saying, ‘I have something for your criticism, that you will be pleased with.’ He entered, expecting to see a picture, or some other specimen of the fine arts, but nothing of the kind was produced--he was, however, introduced with a great deal of ceremony, to Monsieur B----, ‘celebrated for his accurate knowledge of the English language, and intimate critical acquaintance with its poetry--particularly Shakspeare.’ Mr. A----, as I shall call my friend, began to understand Jarvis’ object in calling him in. After a little preliminary conversation, Jarvis said, ‘I hope, Monsieur B----, you still retain your love of the drama?’ ‘O certainly, sir, wid my life I renounce it.’ ‘Mr. A----, did you ever hear Monsieur recite?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Your recitations from Racine, Monsieur B----, will you oblige us?’