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almost all Roubiliac's more ambitious works, and destroy the pleasure which the design of many of the figures and the execution of all would otherwise produce. Roubiliac's real power is most shown, however, in his portrait statues where he had little opportunity for the exhibition of extravagancies like these, but which he too often placed in affected attitudes, and enveloped in drapery which is deficient in everything resembling sculpturesque simplicity and repose. The statues by which he is best known are those of Newton in Trinity College, Cambridge-a work of a very high order, by far the finest he ever produced, and surpassed by few of later date,-Handel in Westminster" Abbey, and Shakspere in the Hall of the British Museum. Roubiliac was an imitator of Bernini, and a constructor of allegories in marble, and to his example and authority it is that we are indebted for no small portion of the monumental absurdities which disfigure our two great metropolitan and most of our provincial cathedrals.

We turn now to Painting. Whatever might be the state of the arts in other respects, England had not for several generations been without portrait painters of distinguished ability. Henry VIII. employed Holbein; Mary patronised Antony More; Elizabeth, Zucchero and De Heere. Under James flourished Mytens and Vansomer; and about this time Mirevelt, Hilliard, and the elder Oliver found employment for their pencils. Vandyck was the court painter to Charles I., but he found in an Englishman, Dobson, no unworthy rival. The features of Cromwell and the Commonwealth chiefs were preserved to us by the manly pencil of our countryman Walker. Under the Restoration, as we have seen, Lely was the royal favourite; and his successor, Sir Godfrey Kneller, had risen into distinction when William ascended the throne.

Kneller, a German by birth, was fortunate in the country he chose for his abode, and fortunate in the time of choosing it. He learned painting under Rembrandt and Ferdinand Bol, but he had afterwards studied in Rome and practised in Venice. He came to England while Lely was at the height of his celebrity, but he was patronized by the duke of Monmouth, and granted a sitting by Charles II., and he soon found that England was a profitable field of labour. He lived till far in the reign of George I., but no change of sovereign or of dynasty produced any change in his fortune. Walpole thinks that "had he lived in a country where his merit had been rewarded according to the worth of his productions, instead of the number, he might have shone in the roll of the greatest masters." * This may well be doubted. There was something beyond his cupidity which would have prevented that; and we certainly need not regret that of all the sovereigns who sat to him,† not one of them discovered that he was fit for more than preserving their likeness." For most painters it would have been abundant honour to have had such sitters. Kneller was not only fortunate as the painter of so many sovereigns, but even more fortunate as reckoning among his sitters an array of names illustrious in the annals of England, such as perhaps no other painter can boast, and such as would have caused the canvases of a far less worthy

* "Anecdotes of Painting," ii. p. 586.

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+ Walpole gives the list-Charles II., James II. and his queen, William and Mary, Anne, George I., Louis XIV., Peter the Great, and the emperor Charles VI.

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[1709-1742. painter to be carefully cherished: Marlborough, Godolphin, Somers, Bentinck, Russell, Stanhope, Harley, among statesmen and soldiers; Newton, Wren, Locke, Dryden, Evelyn, Gibbons, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Pope, Atterbury, Steele, Addison, among men of science, art, and letters; are but a few of the more famous for whose likenesses we are chiefly indebted to him. Yet Kneller was far from being a good painter. The Beauties of the Court of William and Mary, which he painted by Mary's desire, in rivalry with Lely's Beauties of Charles II., show that when doing his best Kneller was but an indifferent painter of female loveliness. But another series of pictures produced in his later years, and when his hand was growing feeble, the Kit-Cat portraits, evince equally with his famous head of Dryden, and several others named above, that he could paint a fine manly representation of a really intellectual countenance. In truth, Kneller was a shrewd man and a great lover of money. He saw that his fashionable customers cared little for the higher qualities of art so that he gave them smooth features and bright drapery. Portraits of this kind were easily painted, yet, even with the help of a staff of drapery painters, he found difficulty in meeting the demand for his productions. But he was a man of keen intellect, and fond of the society of intellectual men, and when he had to paint the head of one of that order, he set about it with a heartiness which ensured a favourable result. His state portraits, therefore, are for the most part smooth, unmeaning, meretricious things; his portraits of eminent men have some of them great merit as works of art, while nearly all bear the stamp of unmistakeable intellect.

Contemporary with Kneller during the early part of his career was an Englishman, John Riley, who was a portrait painter of very considerable ability, but he died young in 1691. The portrait painters who shared largest in the popular favour after Kneller at this time were, however, nearly all foreigners. Michael Dahl and John Closterman were, perhaps, the most conspicuous in England; Sir John Baptist Medina having been persuaded to settle in Scotland, where he painted nearly all the nobility of that country.

The rival during his later years, and the successor of Kneller as the fashionable portrait painter, was Charles Jervas, whose manner was founded on that of Kneller, but who possessed little of Kneller's knowledge of art or native ability. Pope has embalmed his memory in verses which must either be regarded as a remarkable illustration of the complacency of his muse in administering to the vanity of his friend, or of his want of judgment in painting. Along with Jervas flourished Jonathan Richardson, an amiable man, and a pleasing writer on art, but a very poor painter: his skill may be judged of by the portrait of lord chancellor Talbot in the National Portrait Gallery. Portrait painting had been steadily declining in England from the days of Vandyck, Dobson, and Walker. The corruption of the art was commenced by Lely, continued by Kneller, and carried on with constantly accelerating force by Jervas, Richardson, and their compeers, till it was consummated by Hudson; by whose pupil, Reynolds, however, it was once more restored to all its ancient honour.

Turning to other branches of painting we have only to record the same

These portraits, forty in number, were painted for Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, who was secretary of the Kit-Cat Club. They now belong to Tonson's representative, Mr. W. R. Baker, of Bayfordbury, Herts.

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process of decline. Charles I. invited Rubens to adorn the ceilings of the palaces of Whitehall and Greenwich, with gorgeous allegories. Charles II. employed Verrio to cover those of Windsor with similar productions. But the Neapolitan had none of the genius which enabled the brilliant Fleming to fascinate the observer, in spite of the coarseness of his forms and the extravagance of his inventions. The paintings of Rubens remain the delight of the connoisseur and the artist. The cold voluptuous allegories of Verrio have become a bye-word and a laughing-stock. Yet his pencil was sought after for similar works as long as he could wield it, and through the reign of William he continued to cover the saloons of the nobility with his prodigious compositions. Laguerre exceeded him in folly, and rivalled him in coarseness. Thornhill, who followed in the same line, and in whom it came to an end, was of a colder temperament; but if his works are more decent, they are also more dull. The best of Laguerre's productions are at Blenheim; the best of Thornhill's on the dome of St. Paul's, and the hall of Greenwich Hospital. Henry Cooke, who painted the choir of New College Chapel, deserves a word of praise in passing for not having quite ruined the cartoons of Raffaelle, which he was directed by William to repaint and restore. Other of these ceiling-painters were Antonio Pellegrini; Sebastian Ricci, a Venetian of real ability, who seemed inclined to make England his home, but left it in dudgeon on Thornhill being appointed to paint St. Paul's; and his nephew, Marco Ricci.

In other branches of painting we might mention as practising with success in this country, the names of the Vandeveldes, the famous sea-painters— the founders of a school which has never wanted followers; Hemskerk, patronised by William for his Dutch drinking pieces; Dirk Maas, the Dutch battle-painter; Godfrey Schalken, whose candle-light subjects are still eagerly purchased; Boit, the enamel painter; Monnoyer, the flower painter; Louis Cradock, who painted birds and animals; and many more of unquestionable ability. But it would be idle to dwell on them. The story would be merely a repetition of what has already been related. There was throughout a certain encouragement of painters, with little knowledge of painting. England possessed neither a school of painting, nor galleries of pictures, nor writers on art. There were no means of instruction for patrons or for students. The demand for pictures was supplied almost wholly by foreign painters of second-rate ability, who found here an amount of patronage they could not hope for in their native places. Art was almost necessarily therefore at the mercy of Fashion. The leading connoisseur or the court painter set the mode, and all of inferior rank hastened to conform to it.

The true regenerator of painting in England was William Hogarth, the sturdy asserter of truth and matter of fact in painting. His merit as a satirist, a painter of manners, and a moralist have to be spoken of in another chapter. Even his contemporaries admitted his ability in these respects, though they hardly perhaps took the full measure of his genius. But Walpole only gave utterance to the common belief when he said that Hogarth was no painter. When Hogarth lived and Walpole wrote, the worship of the "Old Masters" of painting had seized hold of those whose talk was of pictures. Walpole meant that Hogarth did not imitate the composition, and copy the chiaroscuro, and borrow the colours, of the painters of

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[1709-1742. the Netherlands or Italy. But though Hogarth looked out on nature for himself, and painted what he saw in the manner it appeared to his own eyes, he always placed his figures so that they would tell the story in the clearest way; drew them with skill; gave to them a truth and force of characteristic expression such as few painters of any other school ever equalled; arranged the light and shadow so as that every object should have just that measure of each which belonged to it, yet every figure and every part of the composition should hold its true place in respect of all the rest, and of the picture as a whole; coloured truly and forcibly, and in harmony with the serious purpose of his pictures, although not in accordance with the traditions of painting-rooms and picture galleries; and finally in the manipulation showed an amount of dexterity in the handling of his tools such as many a painter, who is known only as a painter, might well have envied.

With the mention of Hogarth we close this sketch. He forms the link which unites this period with that in which the English school sprang into a sturdy existence, and therefore claimed notice here; but his proper place as a painter undoubtedly is at the head of the school of which he was the founder.

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Hogarth as the historian of manners in the transition-time between Anne and George III. - His art essentially dramatic-Society, in Hogarth's pictures, appears a sort of chaos-The life of the streets-The anarchy out-doors a type of the disorder in houses of public resortGenteel debauchery-Low profligacy and crime-The Cockpit -The Gaming-House-The Prison-Bedlam-The Rake's Levee-The lady's public toilette-Marriage à-la-mode-The Election Prints-The Sleeping Congregation-Fanaticism.

WHEN Defoe, in 1724, had given to the world three novels, in which the incidents in the various fortunes of a low abandoned woman, of a more refined courtesan, and of a young thief, are related with a circumstantiality that is "like reading evidence in a court of justice,"* there was an artist engraving shop-bills and silver plate for a livelihood,-who was also looking with a curious eye upon the world around him. As he walked about London, all its strange exhibitions of pomp and misery,-its habitual contrasts of velvet and rags,-its eccentric characters, its grotesque faces,-were to him materials for artistical study and for moral reflection. Did the genius of Hogarth take any direction from the genius of Defoe ? Had he read "Moll Flanders," when he painted his first great fiction of the "Harlot's Progress ?" Had he read " Colonel Jack" when he painted that never-to be forgotten figure in "Industry and Idleness" of the young blackguard who is gambling on a grave-stone with Tom Idle-some such as Defoe described as "brutish, bloody, and cruel in his disposition; sharp as a street* Charles Lamb, in a contribution to Wilson's "Life of Defoe."

VOL. V.

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