And bares thee to his friends an unselect few! Thy "hypochondrium" part, To Liston,-gravely gazing on the "humerus"! * Of course thy head Has been well Combed by some phrenologist- Did not the patient Abernethy come, And Home-sweet Home, ere now the mermaid's chum,- Did not the Great Lessee (His Unserene Highness With something like a shade-but I beg pardon, VII. Oh go into the Caledonian Fane! And with that ghostly form thou shalt explain Though silent be thy breath, More gaunt, and bonily eloquent than Irving!— The candlesticks and preach "Death and the Lady"-to rebuke her pride,- And read thy lecture to the whole world wide! * "Mr. Liston will never forget Seurat, at whom he looked unutterable things." + Mr. Combe, author of various phrenological works. Every Day Book. THE BRITISH INSTITUTION. No. II. IN proceeding to give an account of the pictures in this splendid gallery, the first remark we have to make is, that it is now only, and for the first time in the history of British art, that the public has been enabled to judge fairly of the merits of our own artists. We do not mean to give very high praise to the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy which we have seen for some years past, always excepting the present highly meritorious one. Yet, on the contrary, we cannot join the popular clamour against them, and accuse our artists of want of power and want of knowledge, because its walls are disfigured by a large proportion of bad pictures. This is a natural and necessary consequence, which must occur in every school of painting; and which will assuredly be most conspicuous where the largest number of pictures is produced, or where the demand is greatest. It will also happen, where the demand lies with the middling classes of society, or where the uneducated take a considerable place among the consumers. There are also other causes which tend to make the number of bad pictures conspicuous and predominant. Among these we may name the fashion of illustrating common books with prints, and the diffusion of engraving, and of the demand for ordinary prints as ornaments; a state of things partly produced by the monopoly and the system of publishers, and partly by the general diffusion of an imperfect or bad taste in art through society, and by the possession of wealth enabling them to gratify that taste. To this we may add, an excess of the population in a certain class of society, which, unable to find vent in professions and trades, adopts art as a trade, stimulated by self-confidence, or the persuasions of friends, or other causes, which we need not stay to enumerate. Thus, also, our system of female education is a productive cause; generating artists, who not seldom also, for reasons tolerably obvious, occupy the very lowest regions of art, and tend to augment the number of bad or indifferent pictures. There is a demand for masters, for boarding schools and for private instruction; and these naturally take rank among the artists, often exhibiting their poor works, but sometimes indeed rising to eminence in painting. These causes, and others which we might enumerate, are the reasons why so many bad pictures are seen at our exhibitions, why they predominate over the good, and why other societies have been required for the purpose of displaying works which the Royal Academy could not accommodate. But it would be as unjust to accuse the literature of Britain, and to condemn its men of letters and science, because, from similar causes, the British press is encumbered with bad books, and that our monthly catalogues rarely show a work which an educated man can endure to read. This last effect is, in some measure, equally inseparable from the peculiar state of a society where an imperfect education is widely diffused, where all must read something, without a knowledge of what to read, and without that cultivation which would enable them to read any thing that required previous information or power of thought. It is also connected with that system by which the publication of books has become a leading monopoly, which necessarily finds its interest in catering for the general or depraved taste, in supplying with trash, the great demand of those who can read nothing else. We would recommend to those who find nothing but bad pictures in our public exhibitions, to adopt a rule which may serve them in many other situations in the business of life, and which, if it were more widely adopted, would save much unhappiness, and, we may safely add, much evil of many other kinds. Dr. Franklin has well illustrated it in the history of the good and the bad leg; a tale which ought to be known to all our readers, and which, therefore, we will not repeat. There is a bad propensity in human nature, a propensity unquestionably derived from the great parent of all evil, to look on the wrong side of things, on the seamy side of the world; to seek for faults and deformities, and to overlook merits and beauties. As if the cultivation of unhappiness was our duty and our pleasure. This is not the Christian spirit; and as that is an argument of marvellously little avail, we may add, it is not good policy. Who seeks for virtues, even in his friend, when he can find faults? or looks at beauty, except to say that its nose is too long or too short. He who seeks for merit and virtue will find it; he who looks for beauty only, will find all women beautiful. And he who goes to an Exhibition of Pictures that he may see beautiful pictures, will not fail to see them, even at Somerset House. If indeed, as is usual, he finds more delight in faults than beauties, if all his pleasures are of this diabolical stamp, he must enjoy himself as he best can; but it is not for him that we are writing. Now if we have given the real reasons why a large proportion of bad pictures must necessarily be produced in a society constituted as Britain is at present, we also conjecture, that hence has in some measure arisen the difference between our own and the ancient schools of painting. We cannot very easily prove this, or rather we cannot prove it at all, because we know not what has perished from the productions of ancient art. It is a reasonable supposition however, that among many good pictures which have descended to us, the bad have disappeared, as unworthy of preservation; since no artist can have become a Raphael or a Titian at once; and since it is probable that ambition had induced many to attempt that in which they were incapable of succeeding. But besides this, the state of society was then different. Wealth was less widely and generally diffused, education and literature were still more limited. Books were rare, and engraving was either not common, or little known. There were no misses and boarding schools, learning and teaching cardracks and fire-screens; and probably therefore no Burgesses, no Corboulds, no Burneys, no Dightons, none of all " hoc genus omne," including Ormes and Ackermans, to whom we guess that we are mainly indebted for that senseless obloquy which forgets that we have also Lawrences, Turners, Wilkies, and Hiltons. The purchasers of pictures were Popes and Cardinals and Abbots, and their places were Cathedrals, Churches, and Convents. They were the prince merchants of Venice and of Genoa, and the nobles of the fair land of Italy; and with pictures these men adorned their spacious halls and lengthened galleries. There was no reason for painting bad pictures, and bad pictures were not painted. Hence then we cannot fairly institute a comparison between our own schools and those of ancient Italy, or even of Flanders, unless we are allowed to apply an analysis and to form a selection. And that we are not unreasonable in demanding this privilege, we can prove by the state of the Dutch school, even as it now stands, purified by the expurgations of nearly a century, from a very large portion, doubtless, of the trash with which it was originally encumbered. Those who know Dutch pictures, not as we possess them in our own country, selected at high prices, hundreds out of thousands, but as they exist in the towns of Holland and Flanders, scattered through the houses of proprietors without end, know full well the infinite quantity of bad or of abominable productions which they comprise. We possess a few paintings of Teniers, Douw, Ostade, Potter, Jan Steen, Vandervelde, Mieris, Brawer, and so on; selections of the best artists, and selections of the best works of these, and then are idle enough to imagine that we are acquainted with the Dutch school; and that this is the Dutch school. It is the Dutch school, indeed, we admit; but then we also will select the best pictures of Wilkie, and Mulready, of Turner and Fielding, of Hilton, and Etty, and Lawrence, and Howard, and Shee, and Martin, and Danby, and Reinagle, and that shall be our British school. We will not ask our readers to make themselves hoarse or crack their jaws with pronouncing a long list of low Dutch names; but if they will please to look into Pilkington first, and go to Holland afterwards, they will not be long in discovering that there have been bad artists, and bad pictures, at other places and in other days, than at Somerset House, and in the reign of George the Fourth. We say nothing of the forgotten; forgotten artists, forgotten pictures; men and works which have had the fame which now attends Suffolk street and its labourers. For the first time, therefore, we have done for our artists and our school what we ought to have done long since, or which, while we did not perform it, we were bound to wait for, and to suspend our criticisms. The British Institution has done a duty which it should have performed much sooner; for the attempt of Sir John Leycester, however meritorious, was too limited, and that of Mr. Fawkes too partial. It has performed the work of time, as well as of taste and justice; and we have at length a gallery by which we can judge of the British school. We stand now on a fair level with ancient and foreign schools; and now that we can make a fair comparison, we are not afraid to provoke one. But in making that comparison, it is essential that the spectator should divest himself of all the prejudices of connoisseurship, and that he should recur to those principles of judgment which are the only just ones. It is not that he must not have studied ancient pictures; for without that, it is certain that he can never know what art is, or may be, or ought to be. But his study of those should refer to their principles, and to the principles by which they were produced; it should extend to nature, and it should teach him to divest himself of styles, and manners, and names, and antiquity, and of all else that belongs to prejudice and fallacy. Thus only can he judge fairly; and if to this he adds literature, reflection, and a study of the very principles of art, still better if he add practice, he will be the judge whom the British school need not fear. But let him also divest himself of the feeling, that the man whose works he is contemplating is now living and breathing before him; that his name is Hilton or Wilkie; and that his picture is fresh from the easel. We are strangely unwilling to grant to our contemporaries the merit and praise which we readily surrender to the dead; and there is a mystery, too, enveloping the name of him who has long been but a name, which tends to magnify it and all its actions in our estimation, as mountains are increased by mist and uncertainty. We contemplate Cæsar and Alexander far otherwise than we look at Nelson and Wellington; and there is a magnificence even in the crimes of a Verres which we cannot discover in those of, we must not give the name. But we must terminate these general remarks. And as we have already introduced, and shall hereafter have occasion to notice, much of what might have been excited by the contemplation of specific pictures in this collection, our observations on those which we shall select may be proportionably brief. We have yet some general remarks on this art in reserve for future communications; and if their order shall appear sometimes inverted, it is because we were desirous of pointing out individual pictures while they were yet open to public inspection. In examining this collection, we shall not enter on detailed descriptions of the pictures, being sensible that this practice, however general, conveys no distinct ideas, and merely fatigues the reader. Hence it is that we turn over, unread, the wearisome annual criticisms on our exhibitions. No ideas of the composition or expression of a picture can be conveyed by words; and it is equally vain to describe colours. With respect to our remarks, where they may notice faults, we can only say, that to praise all is to praise none; to lavish the same commendation on the good and the bad, is to censure the good; and to deal in approbation alone, is to lead to the suspicion of want of discrimination, or want of truth. We are sorry to offend any, where we esteem all; but we cannot esteem all equally, and if the exceptions which we may make should prove offensive, we can only say, that they arise from |