Sir Joshua never worked without real care and
forethought; and that his apparent slovenliness was a purpose, and a
long studied acquirement. He ever had in view the maxim--_Ars est celare
artem_; but he did not always succeed, for he shows too evidently the
art with which he concealed what first his art had effected. Looking
carefully at these pictures, we see intention every where: there is no
actual random work. We believe him to have finished much more than has
been supposed; that there is, in reality, careful drawing and colouring,
at least in many of his pictures, _under_ that large and general
scumbling and glazing, to which, for the sake of making a whole, he
sacrificed the minor beauties. And we believe that many of those
beauties were not lost when the works were fresh from his easel, but
that they lave been obscured since by the nature of the medium and the
materials he used. That these were bad we cannot doubt, for we plainly
see that some of these pictures, his most laboured for effect, are not
only most wofully cracked, (yet that is not the word, for it expresses
not the gummy separation of part from part,) but that transparency has
been lost, and the once-brilliant pigments become a _caput mortuum_.
Hence there is very great _heaviness_ pervading his pictures; so that
even in colouring there is a want of freshness. A deep asphaltum has
overpowered lightness and delicacy, and has itself become obscure. Sir
Joshua did not leave his pictures in this state. It is as if one should
admire, in the clear brown bed of a mountain river, luminous objects,
stone or leaf, pebble or weed, most delicately uncertain in the magic of
the waving glaze; and suddenly there should come over the fascination an
earthy muddying inundation. In estimating Sir Joshua's mind, we must, in
imagination, remove much that his hand has done. Nor was Sir Joshua,
perhaps, always true to his subject in his intention of general
colouring. His "Robinettas," and portraits, or ideals of children, are
not improved by that deep asphaltum colouring, so unsuitable to the
freshness, and may we not add, purity of childhood. And there appears,
at least now in their present state, that there is too universal a use
of the brown and other warm colours; Rembrandt invariably inserted among
them cool and deep grays, very seldom blue, which, as too active a
colour, is apt to destroy repose, the intended effect of deep colouring.
Titian uses it for the sake of its