lace
to a more "elegant familiar." This has necessarily brought into play a
nicer attention to mechanical excellence, and indeed to all the minor
beauties of the art. We almost fear too much has been done this way,
because it has been too exclusively pursued, and led astray the public
taste to rest satisfied with, and unadvisedly to require, the less
important perfections. From that great style which it may be said it was
the sole object of the Discourses to recommend, we are further off than
ever. Even in portrait, there is far less of the historical, than Sir
Joshua himself introduced into that department--an adoption which he has
so ably defended by his arguments. But nothing can be more unlike the
true historical, as defined in the precepts of art, than the modern
representation of national (in that sense, historical) events. The
precepts of the President have been unread or disregarded by the
patronized historical painters of our day. It would seem to be thought a
greater achievement to identify on canvass the millinery that is worn,
than the characters of the wearers, silk stockings, and satins, and
faces, are all of the same common aim of similitude; arrangement,
attitude, and peculiarly inanimate expression, display of finery, with
the actual robes, as generally announced in the advertisement, render
such pictures counterparts, or perhaps inferior counterfeits to Mrs
Jarley's wax-work. And, like the wax-work, they are paraded from town to
town, to show the people how much the tailor and mantua-maker have to do
in state affairs; and that the greatest of empires is governed by very
ordinary-looking personages. Even the Venetian painters, called by way
of distinction the "Ornamental School," deemed it necessary to avoid
prettinesses and pettinesses, and by consummate skill in artistical
arrangement in composition, in chiaro-scuro and colour, to give a
certain greatness to the representations of their national events. There
is not, whatever other faults they may have, this of poverty, in the
public pictures of Venice; they are at least of a magnificent ambition:
they are far removed from the littleness of a show. We are utterly gone
out of the way of the first principles of art in our national historical
pictures. Yet was the great historical the whole subject of the
Discourses--it was to be the only worthy aim of the student. If the
advice and precepts of Sir Joshua Reynolds have, then, been so entirely
disregarded,