Page:The English humourists of the eighteenth century. A series of lectures, delivered in England, Scotland, and the United States of America (IA englishhumourist00thacrich).pdf/248

 asserted that it required neither taste nor talents to excel their most popular performances. This interference excited much enmity, because, as my opponents told me, my studies were in another way. You talk, added they, with ineffable contempt of portrait-painting; if it is so easy a task, why do not you convince the world, by painting a portrait yourself? Provoked at this language, I, one day at the Academy in St. Martin's Lane, put the following question: Supposing any man, at this time, were to paint a portrait as well as Vandyke, would it be seen or acknowledged, and could the artist enjoy the benefit or acquire the reputation due to his performance? "They asked me in reply, If I could paint one as well? and I frankly answered, I believed I could "Of the mighty talents said to be requisite for portrait-painting, I had not the most exalted opinion." Let us now hear him on the question of the Academy:— "To pester the three great estates of the empire, about twenty or thirty students drawing after a man or a horse, appears, as must be acknowledged, foolish enough: but the real motive is, that a few bustling characters, who have access to people of rank, think they can thus get a superiority over their brethren, be appointed to places, and have salaries as in France, for telling a lad when a leg or an arm is too long or too short. "France, ever aping the magnificence of other nations, has in its turn assumed a foppish kind of splendour sufficient to dazzle the eyes of the neighbouring states, and draw vast sums of money from this country "To return to our Royal Academy; I am told that one of their leading objects will be, sending young men abroad to study the antique statues, for such kind of studies may sometimes improve an exalted genius, but they will not create it; and whatever has been the cause, this same travelling to Italy has, in several instances that I have seen, reduced the student from nature, and led him to paint marble figures, in which he has availed himself of the great works of antiquity, as a coward does when he puts on the armour of an Alexander; for, with similar pretensions and similar vanity, the painter supposes he shall be adored as a second Raphael Urbino." We must now hear him on his "Sigismunda:"— "As the most violent and virulent abuse thrown on 'Sigismunda' honest face, of which the bright blue eyes shine out from the canvass and give you an idea of that keen