r is assisted by
the colouring, or the chiaroscuro. The colouring, though it has a gold
background, is not rich, for the gold is pale, even to a straw colour,
and the pattern on it rather gives it a straw texture. We presume it is
meant to represent the dry Byzantine style of colouring, purposely
avoiding the richer colours; as power is lost, by this adoption, it is
impossible to give either the tones or colours of nature--there is no
transparency. To preserve this old simplicity, softening and blending
shadows are avoided, by which a positive unnaturalness offends the eye;
hence the hands and feet not only look hard, but clumsy--they may not
be, but they look, ill drawn. The figures, indeed, look like pasteboard
figures stuck on; there is a leaden hue pervading all the flesh tints.
It fails, too, in simplicity and antique air, which we suppose to be the
objects of the school. For there is too much of art in the composition
for the former, too little quaintness for the latter; and indeed its
perfect newness of somewhat raw paint prevents the mind from going back
to ancient time; and that failure makes the picture as a whole, a
pretension. It does not, then, appear to gain what that old style is
intended to bestow--and it loses nearly all the advantages of the
after-improvements of art--of its extended means. It rejects the power
of giving more intensity to feeling, of adding the grace of nature, the
truth and variety of more perfect colouring, by the opaque and the
transparent, and does not in any other way attain any thing which could
not have been more perfectly attained without the sacrifice. The
collection of the British school contains good and bad--few of the best
of each master. West's best picture is among them, his "Death Of
Wolfe"--everyone knows the print; the picture is good in colour and
firmly painted, and contrasts with some others where we see the
miserable effect of the megillups and varnishes which our painters were
wont to mix with their colours. We should have been glad to have seen
better specimens of Fuseli's genius--we suppose we must say that he had
genius. The best piece of painting of his hand in the room is the boy in
Harlowe's picture of the "Kemble Family;" a picture of considerable
artistic merit, but ruined by the coarse vulgarity of a caricature of
Mrs Siddons. How unlike the Lady Macbeth! The corpulent velvet dark mass
and obtruding figure is most unpleasant. It is much to be regretted Mr.