it may be asked what benefit he has conferred upon the
world by his Discourses. We answer, great. He has shown what should be
the aim of art, and has therefore raised it in the estimation of the
cultivated. His works are part of our standard literature; they are in
the hands of readers, of scholars; they materially help in the formation
of a taste by which literature is to be judged and relished. Even those
who never acquire any very competent knowledge of, or love for pictures,
do acquire a respect for art, connect it with classical poetry--the
highest poetry, with Homer, with the Greek drama, with all they have
read of the venerated works of Phidias, Praxiteles, and Apelles; and
having no too nice discrimination, are credulous of, or anticipate by
remembering what has been done and valued--the honour of the profession.
We assert that, by bringing the precepts of art within the pale of our
accepted literature, Sir Joshua Reynolds has given to art a better
position. Would that there were no counteracting circumstances which
still keep it from reaching its proper rank! Some there are, which
materially degrade it, amongst which is the attempt to force patronage;
the whole system of Art Unions, and of Schools of Design, the "in forma
pauperis" petitioning and advertising, and the rearing innumerable
artists, ill-educated in all but drawing, and mere degrading still, the
binding art, as it were, apprenticed to manufacture in such Schools of
Design; connecting, in more than idea, the drawer of patterns with the
painter of pictures. Hence has arisen, and must necessarily arise, an
inundation of mediocrity, the aim of the painter being to reach some
low-prize mark, an unnatural competition, inferior minds brought into
the profession, a sort of painting-made-easy school, and pictures, like
other articles of manufacture, cheap and bad. We should say decidedly,
that the best consideration for art, and the best patronage too, that we
would give to it, would be to establish it in our universities of
Cambridge and Oxford. In those venerated places to found professorships,
that a more sure love and more sure taste for it may be imbedded with
every other good and classical love and taste in the early minds of the
youth of England's pride, of future patrons; and where painters
themselves may graduate, and associate with all noble and cultivated
minds, and be as much honoured in their profession as any in those
usually called "learned."