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randmothers and great-grandmothers were strangely vilified in their unpleasing likenesses. The somewhat loose satin evening-dress, with the shepherdess's crook, was absurd enough; and no very great improvement upon the earlier taste of complimenting portraits with the personation of the heathen deities. The poetical pastoral, however, very soon descended to the real pastoral; and, as if to make people what they were not was considered enough of the historical of portrait, even this took. We suspect Gainsborough was the first to sin in this degradation line, by no means the better one for being the furthest from the divinities. He had painted some rustic figures very admirably, and made such subjects a fashion; but why they should ever be so, we could never understand; or why royalty should not be represented as royalty, gentry as gentry; to represent them otherwise, appears as absurd as if our Landseer should attempt a greyhound in the character of a Newfoundland dog. A picture of Gainsborough's was exhibited, a year or two ago, in the British Institution, Pall-Mall, which we were astonished to hear was most highly valued; for it was a weak, washy, dauby, ill-coloured performance, and the design as bad as well could be. It was a scene before a cottage-door, with the children of George the Third as peasant children, in village dirt and mire. The picture had no merit to recommend it; if we remember rightly, it had been painted over, or in some way obscured, and unfortunately brought to light. Although Sir Joshua Reynolds generally introduced a new grace into his portraits, and mostly so without deviating from the character as he found it, dispensing indeed with the old affectation, we fear he cannot altogether be acquitted from the charge of deviating from the true propriety of portrait. Ladies as Miranda, as Hebe, and even as Thais, no very moral compliment, are examples--some there are of the lower pastoral. Mrs Macklin and her daughter were represented at a spinning-wheel, and Miss Potts as a gleaner. There is one of somewhat higher pretensions, but equally a deviation from propriety, in his portraits of the Honourable Mistresses Townshend, Beresford, and Gardiner. They are decorating the statue of Hymen; the grace of one figure is too theatrical, the others have but little. The one kneeling on the ground, and collecting the flowers, is, in one respect, disagreeable--the light of the sky, too much of the same hue and ton
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