ndle in his cap and a mallet in his hand.
Gainsborough was ambitious of attaining excellence, regardless of
riches. The style chosen by Gainsborough did not require that he should
go out of his own country. No argument is to be drawn from thence, that
travelling is not desirable for those who choose other walks of
art--knowing that "the language of the art must be learned somewhere,"
he applied himself to the Flemish school, and certainly with advantage,
and occasionally made copies from Rubens, Teniers, and Vandyke. Granting
him as a painter great merit, Sir Joshua doubts whether he excelled most
in portraits, landscapes, or fancy pictures. Few now will doubt upon the
subject--next to Sir Joshua, he was the greatest portrait painter we
have had, so as to be justly entitled to the fame of being one of the
founders of the English School. He did not attempt historical painting;
and here Sir Joshua contrasts him with Hogarth; who did so
injudiciously. It is strange that Sir Joshua should have characterised
Hogarth as having given his attention to "the Ridicule of Life." We
could never see any thing ridiculous in his deep tragedies. Gainsborough
is praised in that he never introduced "mythological learning" into his
pictures. "Our late ingenious academician, Wilson, has, I fear, been
guilty, like many of his predecessors, of introducing gods and
goddesses, ideal beings, into scenes which were by no means prepared to
receive such personages. His landscapes were in reality too near common
nature to admit supernatural objects. In consequence of this mistake, in
a very admirable picture of a storm, which I have seen of his hand, many
figures are introduced in the foreground, some in apparent distress, and
some struck dead, as a spectator would naturally suppose, by lightning:
had not the painter injudiciously, (as I think,) rather chosen that
their death should be imputed to a little Apollo, who appears in the sky
with his bent bow, and that those figures should be considered as the
children of Niobe." This is the passage that gave so much offence;
foolish admirers will fly into flame at the slightest spark--the
question should have been, is the criticism just, not whether Sir Joshua
had been guilty of the same error--but we like critics, the only true
critics, who give their reason: and so did Sir Joshua. "To manage a
subject of this kind a peculiar style of art is required; and it can
only be done without impropriety, or even w