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the rich, in a little time, become useful to the inferior and middling ranks of people. They are able to purchase them when their superiors grow weary of them; and the general accommodation of the whole people is thus gradually improved, when this mode of expense becomes universal among men of fortune. In countries which have long been rich, you will frequently find the inferior ranks of people in possession both of houses and furniture perfectly good and entire, but of which neither the one could have been built, nor the other have been made for their use. What was formerly a seat of the family of Seymour, is now an inn upon the Bath-road. The marriage-bed of James the First of Great Britain, which his queen brought with her from Denmark as a present fit for a sovereign to make to a sovereign, was, a few years ago, the ornament of an ale-house at Dunfermline. In some ancient cities, which either have been long stationary or have gone somewhat to decay, you will sometimes scarce find a`single house which could have been built for its present inhabitants. If you go into those houses, too, you will frequently find many excellent, though antiquated pieces of furniture, which are still very fit for use, and which could as little have been made for them. palaces, magnificent villas, great collections of books, statues, pictures, and other curiosities, are frequently both an ornament and an honour not only to the neighbourhood, but to the whole country to which they belong. Versailles is an ornament and an honour to France, Stowe and Wilton to England. Italy still continues to command some sort of veneration by the number of monuments of this kind which it possesses, though the wealth which produced them has decayed, and though the genius which planned them seems to be extinguished, perhaps from not having the same employ

ment.

Noble

XLI.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.

1723-1792.

THE biography of Sir Joshua Reynolds is contained almost entirely in his paintings, like that of many other great artists. He was the son of a Devonshire clergyman, and was born in 1723: he shewed from his earliest years a strong inclination to express his ideas in lines and colours, and his father moderately and sensibly encouraged him. At seventeen, he became the pupil of Hudson, a portrait painter of deserved local reputation, who seems to have contributed in some degree to his pupil's sense of English character and power over likeness. Reynolds' successes began early, and were scarcely interrupted throughout life. His first patrons were Lords Mount Edgecumbe and Keppel, whom he accompanied, in 1749, on a long yachting tour to the Mediterranean. Soon after his return, his portraits were compared to those of Vandyke. His claims as against the great Fleming rest chiefly on his painting of women and children. In rapid insight into character, in the faculty of seizing passing expressions, in subtle sympathy, and above all in purity and evenness of mind, he stands by the side of Velasquez, whom of all men, next to Michael Angelo, he most admired. He acknowledged Titian as his master in colour. He visited Holland and Belgium in 1781 and 1783, and was the first President of the Royal Academy in 1768.

His Discourses are fair examples of the 'plain style of English,' as Swift defined it, since they are distinguished for the simple use of 'proper words in proper places;' but he had not sufficient power of analysis to lay down broad theoretical prin

ciples. He found British art utterly degraded: he knew that there was a great style, having seen the works of Raffaelle and Michael Angelo, and he thought it possible that their style might be separated from their personal qualities, so that ordinary men might become great by following them. He felt he had himself, in a sense, done so, and the grave humility of his character made him habitually look on himself as a rather ordinary man of faculty, whom average men might imitate with success. His own technical triumphs depended on the most delicate and watchful study of nature in its most attractive form, for he painted, as he said, the beauties of two generations, and lived in continual attention to the faintest varieties of feature and most refined shades of colour.

Goldsmith pronounced Sir Joshua the best and wisest and mildest of men. Great natural gifts, sound though limited early teaching, the society of great and gentle persons throughout life, and the close friendship of men like Johnson and Burke until death—these things, combined with a constant avoidance of evil in all its forms, all contributed to make the character and career of the re-creator of modern English art.

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WHEN such a man as Gainsborough arrives to great fame, without the assistance of an academical education, without travelling to Italy, or any of those preparatory studies which have been so often recommended, he is produced as an instance how little such studies are necessary, since so great excellence may be acquired without them. This is an inference not warranted by the success of any individual; and I trust it will not be thought that I wish to make this use of it.

It must be remembered that the style and department of

art which Gainsborough chose, and in which he so much excelled, did not require that he should go out of his own country for the objects of his study; they were everywhere about him; he found them in the streets and in the fields, and, from the models thus accidentally found, he selected with great judgment such as suited his purpose. As his studies were directed to the living world principally, he did not pay a general attention to the works of the various masters, though they are, in my opinion, always of great use, even when the character of our subject requires us to depart from some of their principles. It cannot be denied, that excellence in the department of the art which he professed may exist without them; that in such subjects, and in the manner that belongs to them, the want of them is supplied, and more than supplied, by natural sagacity, and a minute observation of particular nature. If Gainsborough did not look at Nature with a poet's eye, it must be acknowledged that he saw her with the eye of a painter, and gave a faithful, if not a poetical, representation of what he had before him.

Though he did not much attend to the works of the great historical painters of former ages, yet he was well aware that the language of the art-the art of imitation-must be learned somewhere; and as he knew that he could not learn it in an equal degree from his contemporaries, he very judiciously applied himself to the Flemish School, who are undoubtedly the greatest masters of one necessary branch of art; and he did not need to go out of his own country for examples of that school: from that he learnt the harmony of colouring, the management and disposition of light and shadow, and every means which the masters of it practised, to ornament and give splendour to their works. And to satisfy himself as well as others, how well he knew the

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mechanism and artifice which they employed to bring out that tone of colour which we so much admire in their works, he occasionally made copies from Rubens, Teniers, and Vandyck, which it would be no disgrace to the most accurate connoisseur to mistake, at the first sight, for the works of those masters. What he thus learned, he applied to the originals of nature, which he saw with his own eyes; and imitated, not in the manner of those masters, but in his

own.

Whether he most excelled in portraits, landscapes, or fancy pictures, it is difficult to determine: whether his portraits were most admirable for exact truth of resemblance, or his landscapes for a portrait-like representation of nature, such as we see in the works of Rubens, Ruysdael, and others of those schools. In his fancy pictures, when he had fixed on his object of imitation, whether it was the mean and vulgar form of a wood-cutter, or a child of an interesting character, as he did not attempt to raise the one, so neither did he lose any of the natural grace and elegance of the other; such a grace, and such an elegance, as are more frequently found in cottages than in courts. This excellence was his own, the result of his particular observation and taste; for this he was certainly not indebted to the Flemish School, nor indeed to any school; for his grace was not academical or antique, but selected by himself from the great school of nature; and there are yet a thousand modes of grace, which are neither theirs nor his, but lie open in the multiplied scenes and figures of life, to be brought out by skilful and faithful observers.

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THE sudden maturity to which Michael Angelo brought our art, and the comparative feebleness of his followers and

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