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this kind, by their accumulation, block up the path of genius; and that all attempts at distinction lead, after a certain period, to a mere lifeless copy of what has been done before, or à vapid, distorted, and extravagant caricature of it. This is but a poor prospect for those who set out late in art, and who have all the excellence of their predecessors, and all the fastidious refinements of their own taste, the temptations of indolence, and the despair of vanity, to distract and encumber their efforts. The artists who revel in the luxuries of genius thus prepared by their predecessors, clog their wings with the honeyed sweets, and get drunk with the intoxicating nectar. They become servitors and lacqueys to Art, not devoted servants of Nature;-the fluttering, foppish, lazy retinue of some great name. The contemplation of unattainable excellence casts a film over their eyes, and unnerves their hands. They look on, and do nothing. In Italy, it costs them a month to paint a hand, a year an eye: the feeble pencil drops from their grasp, while they wonder to see an Englishman make a hasty copy of the Transfiguration, turn over a port-folio of Piranesi's drawings for their next historical design, and read Winckelman on virtù! We do much the same here, in all our collections and exhibitions of modern or ancient paintings, and of the Elgin marbles, to boot. A picture-gallery serves very well for a place to lounge in, and talk about; but it does not make the student go home and set heartily to work:-he would rather come again and lounge, and talk, the next day, and the day after that. He cannot do all that he sees there; and less will not satisfy his expansive and refined ambition. He would be all the painters that ever were-or none. His indolence combines with his vanity, like alternate doses of provocatives and sleeping-draughts. He copies, however, a favourite picture, (though he thinks copying bad in general),—or makes a chalk-drawing of it-or gets some one else to do it for him.-We might go on: but we have written what many people will call a lampoon already!

There is another view of the subject more favourable and encouraging to ourselves, and yet not immeasurably so, when all circumstances are considered. All that was possible had been formerly done for art in Italy, so that nothing more was left to be done. That is not the case with us yet. Perfection is not the insurmountable obstacle to our success: we have enough to do, if we knew how. That is some inducement to proceed. We can hardly be retrograde in our course. But there is a difficulty in the way,-no less than our Establishment in Church and State. Rome was the capital of the Christian and of the civilized world. Her mitre swayed the sceptres of the earth; and the G

VOL. XXXIV. No. 67.

of a people who were in themselves learned, ingenious, and highly cultivated in all things, excepting the arts of design.

In consequence of this privation, it was conceived that a Public Exhibition of the works of the most eminent Artists could not fail to make a powerful impression; and if occasionally repeated, might ultimately produce the most satisfactory effects. The scheme was no sooner proposed than adopted; and being carried into immediate execution, the result exceeded the most sanguine expectations of the projectors. All ranks of people crowded to see the delightful novelty; it was the universal topic of conversation; and a passion for the arts was excited by that first manifestation of native talent, which, cherished by the continued operation of the same cause, has ever since been increasing in strength, and extending its effects through every part of the Empire.

The history of our Exhibitions affords itself the strongest evidence of their impressive effect upon public taste. At their commencement, though men of enlightened minds could distinguish and appreciate what was excellent, the admiration of the many was confined to subjects either gross or puerile, and commonly to the mean est efforts of intellect; whereas, at this time, the whole train of subjects most popular in the earlier exhibitions have disappeared. The loaf and cheese, that could provoke hunger, the cat and canary-bird, and the dead mackarel on a deal-board, have long ceased to produce astonishment and delight; while truth of imitation now finds innumerable admirers, though combined with the high qualities of beauty, grandeur, and taste.

To our Public Exhibitions, and to arrangements that followed in consequence of their introduction, this change must be chiefly attributed. The present generation appears to be composed of a new, and at least, with respect to the arts, a superior order of beings. Generally speaking, their thoughts, their feelings, and language on these subjects differ entirely from what they were sixty years ago. No just opinions were at that time entertained on the merits of ingenious productions of this kind. The state of the public mind, incapable of discriminating excellence from inferiority, proved incontrovertibly that a right sense of art in the spectator can only be acquired by long and frequent observation; and that, without proper opportunities to improve the mind and the eye, a nation would continue insensible of the true value of the fine arts.

The first or probationary Exhibition, which opened April 21st, 1760, was at a large room in the Strand, belonging to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, which had then been instituted five or six years. It is natural to conclude, that the first artist in the country was not indifferent to the success of a plan which promised to be so extensively useful. Accordingly, four of his pictures were for the first time here placed before the public, with whom, by the channel now opened, he continued in constant intercourse as long as he lived.

Encouraged by the successful issue of the first experiment, the artistical body determined that it should be repeated the following year. Owing, however, to some inconveniences experienced at their former place of exhibition, and also to a desire to be perfectly independent in their proceedings, they engaged, for their next public display, a spacious room near the Spring Gardens' entrance into the Park; at which place the second Exhibition opened, May 9th, 1761. Here Reynolds sent his fine picture of Lord Ligonier on horseback, a portrait of the Rev. Laurence Sterne, and three others....

The artists had now fully proved the efficacy of their plan; and their income exceeding their expenditure, affording a reasonable hope of a permanent establishment, they thought they might solicit a Royal Charter of Incorporation; and having applied to his Majesty for that purpose, he was pleased to accede to their request. This measure, however, which was intended to consolidate the body of artists, was of no avail: on the contrary, it was probably the cause of its dissolution; for in less than four years a separation took place, which led to the establishment of the Royal Academy, and finally to the extinction of the incorporated Society. The charter was dated January 26th, 1765; the secession took place in October, 1768; and the Royal Academy was instituted December 10th in the same year.' p. 53.

On this statement we must be allowed to make a few remarks, First, the four greatest names in English art, Hogarth, Reynolds, Wilson* and West, were not formed by the Academy, but were formed before it; and the first gave it as his opinion, that it would be a death-blow to the art. He considered an Academy as a school for servile mediocrity, a hotbed for cabal and dirty competition, and a vehicle for the display of idle pretensions and empty parade.

Secondly, we agree with the writer as to the deplorable state of the art and of the public taste in general, which, at the period in question, was as gross as it was insipid: but we do not think that it has been improved so much since, as Mr Farington is willing to suppose; nor that the Academy has taken more than half-measures for improving or refining it.

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They found it poor at first, and kept it so.

They have attended to their own interests, and flattered their customers, while they have neglected or cajoled the public, They may indeed look back with triumph and pity to the cat and canary-bird, the dead mackarel and Deal board;' but they seem to rest satisfied with this conquest over themselves, and, leaving the things that are behind, have not pressed forward (with equal ardour) to the things that are before. Theirs is a

*This name, for some reason or other, does not once occur in these Memoirs,

very moderate, not a Radical Reform in this respect. We do not find, even in the latest Exhibitions at Somerset House, innumerable examples of truth of imitation, combined with the high qualities of beauty, grandeur, and taste.' The mass of the pictures exhibited there are not calculated to give the English people a true notion, not merely of high art (as it is emphatically called), but of the genuine objects of art at all. We do not believe to take a plain test of the progress we have madethat nine-tenths of the persons who go there annually, and who go through the Catalogue regularly, would know a Guido from a daub-the finest picture from one not badly executed perhaps, but done in the worst taste, and on the falsest principles. The vast majority of the pictures received there, and hung up in the most conspicuous places, are pictures painted to please the natural vanity or fantastic ignorance of the artist's sitters, their friends and relations, and to lead to more commissions for half and whole lengths-or else pictures painted purposely to be seen in the Exhibition, to strike across the Great Room, to catch attention, and force admiration, in the distraction and dissipation of a thousand foolish faces and new-gilt frames, by gaudy colouring and meretricious grace. We appeal to any man of judgment, whether this is not a brief, but true summary, of the annual show' at the Royal Academy? And is this the way to advance the interests of art, or to fashion the public taste? There is not one head in ten painted as a study from nature, or with a view to bring out the real qualities of the mind or countenance. If there is any such improvident example of unfashionable sincerity, it is put out of countenance by the prevailing tone of rouged and smiling folly, and affectation all around it.

The only pictures painted in any quantity as studies from nature, free from the glosses of sordid art and the tincture of vanity, are portraits of places; and it cannot be denied that there are many of these that have a true and powerful look of nature: but then, as if this was a matter of great indifference, and nobody's business to see to, they are seldom any thing more than bare sketches, hastily got up for the chance of a purchaser, and left unfinished to save time and trouble. They are not, in general, lofty conceptions or selections of beautiful scenery, but mere common out-of-door views, relying for their value on their literal fidelity; and where, consequently, the exact truth and perfect identity of the imitation is the more indispensable.-Our own countryman, Wilkie, in scenes of domestic and familiar life, is equally deserving of praise for the arrangement of his subjects, and care in the execution; but we have to lament that

he too is in some degree chargeable with that fickleness and desultoriness in the pursuit of excellence, which we have noticed above as incident to our native artists, and which, we think, has kept him stationary, instead of being progressive, for some years past. He appeared at one time as if he was near touching the point of perfection in his peculiar department; and he may do it yet! But how small a part do his works form of the Exhibition, and how unlike all the rest!

It was the panic-fear that all this daubing and varnishing would be seen through, and the scales fall off from the eyes of the public, in consequence of the exhibition of some of the finest specimens of the Old Masters at the British Institution, that called into clandestine notoriety that disgraceful production, the Catalogue Raisonnée. The concealed authors of that work conceived, that a discerning public would learn more of the art from the simplicity, dignity, force and truth, of these admired and lasting models, in a short season or two, than they had done from the Exhibitions of the Royal Academy for the last fifty years that they would. see that it did not consist entirely in tints and. varnishes and megilps and washes for the skin, but that all the effects of colour, and charms of expression, might be united with purity of tone, with articulate forms, and exquisite finishing. They saw this conviction rapidly taking place in the public mind, and they shrunk back from it with jealous leer malign. They persuaded themselves, and had the courage to try to persuade others, that to exhibit approved specimens of art in general, selected from the works of the most famous and accomplished masters, was to destroy the germ of native art; was cruelly to strangle the growing taste and enthusiasm of the public for art in its very birth; was to blight the well-earned reputation, and strike at the honest livelihood of the liberal professors of the school of painting in England. They therefore set to work to decry these productions as worthless and odious in the sight of the true adept: they smeared over, with every epithet of low abuse, works and names sacred to fame, and to generations to come: they spared no pains to heap ridicule and obloquy on those who had brought these works forward: they did every thing to disgust and blind the public to their excellence, by showing in themselves a hatred and a loathing of all high excellence, and of all established reputation in art, in which their paltry vanity and mercenary spite were not concerned. They proved, beyond all contradiction, that to keep back the taste of the town, and the knowledge of the student, to the point to which the Academy had found it practicable to conduct it by its example, was the object of a powerful and active party

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