Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/286

202 in Queen Anne's Drawing-Room. This artist, so greatly belauded in his day, and of so singular a history, can nowhere be studied, for his defects and his not inconspicuous merits, so well as here.

The first of American artists, he was born at Springfield, Chester, Pennsylvania, on October 10, 1738; he studied in Rome, became an honorary member of the Academies of Parma, Bologna, and Florence, and in London not only competed as a portrait painter and in classical scenes with the great artists of his day, but successfully introduced a revolution in historical portraiture. His classical and his Scriptural pictures at Hampton Court show him at his weakest, when he does not even rise to be "the king of mediocrity." They are utterly tame and cold, and profoundly dull. Stilted, antiquarian, stiff, academic, he endeavoured what artists such as Wilhelm Kaulbach and Charles le Brun had in their different ways achieved with more success—a spiritless representation of the past according to the methods of the cinque-centisti. His portraits are certainly much better. There is a quaint one of Queen Charlotte with her thirteen children, quite small, seen as it were in a vision; a quite pretty picture of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, and another of the Duke of Clarence and the Duke of Kent. George III. (No. 318) in military uniform, with a view of Coxheath Camp in the background, and Lords Amherst and Lothian in attendance, is well worth attention. This plain, sober, straightforward picture, thoroughly natural