Atlantic Monthly - - (free e books to read txt) 📗

English by adoption, though not by birth. We could spare his fame without great loss, but it would not do for us to give up that of our popular historian. In the next great assemblage of the portraits of the worthies of the English race and speech, perhaps those born on this side of the Atlantic may appear in larger numbers and in even rank of honor.

The first portrait on the catalogue is that of King Henry IV.; but he has displaced here, as in life, his predecessor on the throne. Henry VI. and Richard III. follow in near succession; but it is not till Henry VIII.‘s time that we really enter upon the field of English portraiture. We begin with the king himself. Here is Holbein’s famous picture of him; a picture that represents a man so gross, so sensual, so disgusting in appearance, that one recognizes its truth, and wonders that the court-painter did not lose his head for such a libellous sincerity.

Wolsey is near his master; his face is that of a man “exceeding wise, fair-spoken, and persuading”; he has a large, full brow, narrow and shrewd eyes, a delicate nose, and somewhat heavy and sensual cheeks. A little later the portraits become more numerous. Of Queen Elizabeth there are seven here, and in them may be traced the great changes of her face,—from that of the plain, awkward, not altogether unpleasing, red-haired girl, to that of the hard, bitter, disappointed old woman. Some of her courtiers surround her;—Leicester, with a treacherous uncertainty of expression; and Burleigh, riding on a mule, and holding flowers in his hand,—an odd representation of the great Lord Treasurer. And here, too, is Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, finding a deserved place among the chief men of his time,—for he was Shakspeare’s friend, and to him the “Rape of Lucrece” was dedicated, with the words, “What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have devoted yours.” Here is Holbein’s portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, with the face of a true knight. Sidney is not here, but “Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,” has an honored place,—and though her portrait is not of so “fair” a woman as one might desire to have seen her, it has the look of a woman “wise and good.” And here are Shakspeare and Ben Jonson themselves;—the Chandos portrait of Shakspeare, with which all the world is familiar, more interesting from its own fame than from its being either an authentic or a satisfactory likeness of the poet; and Ben Jonson close by, with his strong features and manly face. And Fletcher, and Shirley, and Dick Burbadge, who first acted Hamlet, and whose picture explains why the queen should say, “He’s fat and scant of breath,”—and others of the same great band of contemporaries. Their heads belong for the most part to one broad type; their common characteristics are strongly marked. There were never finer heads than these;—the broad, uplifted, solidly based skulls; the strong and vigorous marking of the features, giving evidence, both in shape and in expression, of the union of pure intellect and pure imagination. Compare with them the heads of the wits and statesmen of Charles II.‘s time. See the difference;—the high, wide arch of the skull is lowered or narrowed; the broad brow cramped; the features finer cut, but losing in force what they gain in fineness. Look, for instance, at this Vandyck of Sir John Suckling,—only the next generation after the great men; but his portrait is that of an idler, his head that of a man without great thoughts or great interests. The age of imagination had passed; the age of fancy was setting in. Here and there in the later days one finds a man who might belong to the earlier time;—for instance, this likeness of Sir Henry Wotton, also by Vandyck, gives us a broad and noble head; but one sees the time to which he belonged in his somewhat affected meditative attitude, and in the word Philosophemur, which is inscribed upon the canvas. The finest type of head which England has had since the time of Elizabeth was that developed among the Roundheads. Round heads they were, and noble heads too. They are well represented here. Look at this portrait of Cromwell;—it has the same character and expression with that still nobler likeness of him which he sent to the Duke of Tuscany, and which hangs now in one of the back halls of the Pitti Gallery, a stern, silent monitor to the dull Florentines. Frederick Tennyson said of it, that it was the best battle-piece he ever saw;—“In its red ruggedness it looks as if it had been sketched in by the gleam of Dunbar’s cannon flashes.” Hampden, Eliot, and Pym, with wide individual differences, all belong to the same class;—the lines of their faces, which in Hampden and in Eliot have settled into a cast of resolute melancholy, and in Pym betray the sternness of his nature, tell in all of the hard discipline of their lives, and the upright patriotism of their hearts. Compare the faces of these patriots with those of the leaders of the French Revolutions. The Cavaliers, with a type of head less fine, were for the most part handsomer men than the Roundheads. Here is Lovelace, the poet, for instance; Aubrey says of him, “He was an extraordinary handsome man,” and this likeness bears out the assertion. His face has a look of enthusiasm and of gallantry, appropriate to the man who could write, “Stone walls do not a prison make.” With the portraits of Brooke, and Fairfax, and Falkland, and Astley, and others of the time, the comparison between Roundhead and Cavalier might be carried still farther,—but we must pass on.

The portrait of Hobbes of Malmesbury, as an old man, hangs near that of Sir Thomas Browne. It is a curious contrast between the imaginative and the unimaginative philosopher,—between the student of innumerable books, and the cynic who declared that “he should know as little as other men, if he had read as many books.”

There is a whole bevy here of the famous beauties of Charles II.‘s court,—full of the affected airs and languishing graces which Sir Peter Lely knew well how to paint, and rarely showing any thing in their portraits of the sprightliness which some of them at least possessed in life. The only one of Sir Peter’s full-length beauties, who calls up any associations but such as belong to Grammont’s Memoirs, is Margaret Lucas, the Duchess of Newcastle. Who does not know her through Charles Lamb, and love her for Charles Lamb’s sake? She looks out of place here, between Charles II. and the Duchess of Cleveland; and it was not in a fancy dress of most fantastic style that she wrote her memoir of her husband,—in which she tells of what My Lord would eat at dinner, as well as collects the wise things which dropped from My Lord’s lips.

The worthy Secretary Pepys appears here, in “an excellent conceited picture,” of which he himself has told the story in his Diary:—

“1666, March 17. To Hales’s, and paid him £14 for the picture, and £1 5s. for the frame. This day I began to sit, and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture. He promises it shall be as good as my wife’s; and I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder, to make the posture for him to work by.”

“March 30. To Hales’s, and there sat till almost quite dark upon working my gowne, which I hired to be drawn in; an Indian gowne.”

“April 11. To Hales’s, where there was nothing found to be done more to my picture, but the musique, which now pleases me mightily, it being painted true.” [Footnote: Mr. Peter Cunningham has quoted these passages in his excellent catalogue of the gallery.]

And here is Kneller’s familiar portrait of John Evelyn, the other diarist of the times. And Lely’s portrait of Rochester, the roué, represented in the characteristic act of crowning his monkey with laurel,—laurel to which he sometimes aspired himself. And Kneller’s portrait of Lord William Russell, with a face that answers better to the character of the man, as it appeared before he was brought face to face with death, and forced to exert and to display the manlier qualities of his nature.

The men of letters of the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century appear here in great force. With the faces of most of them the world is familiar. Here are six of the Kit-Kat Club portraits that were painted for Jacob Tonson. First in order Tonson himself, the very personification of the nourishing publisher and patron of authors, with the pleasant air of the happy discoverer of genius, and the maker of its fortune as well as of his own. He holds a folio copy of “Paradise Lost”; it is Tonson patting Milton on the back. Dryden, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Steele, Addison, and Lord Chancellor Somers are the other five of these celebrated portraits. What a congress of wits! But we have besides, Atterbury, and Pope, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Prior, and Tickell, and Swift. Pope’s face, as given in Kneller’s portrait, (which recalls the poet’s stolen complimentary verse to the painter,) has a sad and weary look, and is marked by that pallor, and that peculiar hollowness of eye and cheek, which often accompany bodily deformity. Swift’s face betrays but little of the bitterness of his soul; but it was painted in his best days, before the cloud of darkness had begun to settle down upon him. It is the portrait of him as he was in London, among his set,—not as he was in the half-banishment of his Irish life.

The end of the century brings us to other familiar portraits, and at length to portraits painted by great native artists. Gainsborough and Reynolds appear in full rivalry. Here are Gainsborough’s Johnson, the well-known profile portrait, and Sir Joshua’s Boswell; Gainsborough’s Garrick, a most delightful portrait of Garrick’s pleasantest expression, and Sir Joshua’s Gibbon, which looks as ugly and as conceited as the little man himself. One of Reynolds’s most pleasing portraits is his likeness of himself in spectacles. It has suffered from the fading of colors and the cracking of the paint, as so many of Sir Joshua’s best pictures have done; but it still presents him amiable, cultivated, and unpretending, the accomplished artist and the kindly friend, and affords the best possible illustration of the character which Goldsmith drew of him in his “Retaliation.”

We pass rapidly before the portraits of the present century. Every one knows by heart the faces of Scott and Byron, Southey and Coleridge. But there is one little portrait, hung at the end of the gallery, in front of which we pause. It has no remarkable merit as a work of art, but it is the portrait of Keats, painted in Rome by his friend Severn. The young poet is resting his 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