Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/50

42 head on his hand, as if it were heavy and tired. His face has a look of illness; his eyes are large, and the spaces around them are hollow. His wide and well-formed brow, and all the features, betray a temperament delicate, passionate, and sensitive to excess. This portrait was painted, according to tradition, in the little summer-house studio, at the corner of the Via Strozzi. The windows look out over the garden with its cypress walks, its old pine trees, its rows of cabbages and artichokes, its weather-stained statues and bits of ancient marbles. Beyond are the walls of Rome, and beyond these the Campagna stretches away in level lines of beauty to the blue billow of the Alban hills. On this view the eyes of the dying poet rested, while his heart gave no prophecy to him of coming fame. Would it have cheered him, during those last disheartened days, to have foreseen that so soon England would rank him among her honored children, and place his portrait in the gallery of the most worthy of her dead; while a line of his writing, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," should be emblazoned in glowing letters at the end of the great hall of her first great Palace of Art?

We come now to the northern aisle, the aisle which contains the works of the British school of painters. It is the most complete of the sections of this great collection of pictures, and the lessons which are to be learned from it of the present condition and prospects of Art are of the highest interest. Here are six hundred pictures, the English record of about a hundred years of painting. Never before has there been such a collection of the works of English painters, and never before has there been an opportunity of studying so fully and satisfactorily the course and progress of the English school.

The beginning of this school hardly dates before the first quarter of the last century. Public taste was then at its lowest level. The fall of Art in Italy, in the preceding century, had carried down with it both the appreciation and the feeling for what was truly good. A factitious taste had taken the place of honest and simple likings. The worst things were often preferred, the worst pictures bought. Artists, as a class, had given up the study of Nature as the foundation of Art; and in the place of Nature, they had put other men's pictures. They had substituted a system of conventional rules and traditional methods, for the infinite variety and the unceasing study of truth. They preferred falsehood, they liked imitation, and their patrons soon came to consider the feeble results of falsehood and imitation as better than honest work and strong originality. Of course, here and there was a man whose native love of truth or spirit of opposition would give him strength to break loose from the fetters of artistic convention and prevailing taste, and to exhibit the truth in his pictures. Such a man was the first great artist of the English school, Hogarth; the greatest humorist of a century rich in humorists, with a knowledge of human nature that reminds one sometimes of Fielding's in its clearness and variety, sometimes of Goldsmith's in its tender pleasantry. But Hogarth had to struggle all his life against the taste of his time, which was unable to appreciate his merit. He was too natural for an artificial age. Among the pictures exhibited here is one from his famous series of the Harlot's Progress. It is too well known by the engravings to need description; but when the eight masterly pictures which compose this series were sold at auction during Hogarth's life, they brought the sum of fourteen guineas each! The March of the Guards to Finchley, so admirable in composition, so full of incident and character, so rich in humor, could not be sold by the artist, and he disposed of it in a lottery, in which many tickets were left on his hands. And while this was the fate of works which still stand unsurpassed in their peculiar field, the amateurs were paying enormous prices for worthless pictures of