London for more than three hundred years, it has not in the least suffered from smoke; and if it has ever been cleaned, it has sustained no injury from the process. Dr. Waagen urges the importance of so fine a picture being removed to the National Gallery, and thinks an arrangement might be made to that purpose, between the Government and the company that possesses it; 66 a consummation devoutly to be wished." There is not a Holbein in the National Gallery.

While speaking of this great painter, I must not omit to notice the interest given to his picture of the family of Sir Thomas More, by making the background an exact representation of an apartment in More's house. This example might effect a great improvement in portrait, and it would often be found easier to the painter (as well as far more agreeable) to copy realities, than to weary himself with ineffectual attempts to make the eternal pillar and curtain, or the conventional sky and tree, look as well as they do in the backgrounds of Reynolds and Gainsborough.

The question relating to the degree in which personal defects are to be marked must, in every case, be settled by the taste of the painter. Reynolds has not only shown that Baretti was near-sighted, but he has made that defect as much the subject of the picture as the sitter himself, and Baretti's absorption in his book strongly marks the literary man. But near-sightedness is not a deformity, and there can be no doubt that Reynolds abated whatever of malformation he might not for the sake of individuality think it right to exclude, and that he also invariably softened harshness of feature or expression, and diminished positive ugliness, as far as he could do so without losing character. Chantrey did the same; but Lawrence softened harshness so much as often to lose character. The portraits of neither of the three could ever be called ridiculously like, an ex

pression sometimes used in the way of compliment, but in reality pointing exactly to what a portrait should not be; and Wilkie felt this so much that he went to the other extreme, and even deviated into unlikeness in his portraits, from the dread of that un-ideal mode of representation which excites us to laugh.

We undervalue that which costs us least effort, and West, while engaged on a small picture of his own family, little. thought how much it would surpass in interest many of his more ambitious works. Its subject is the first visit of his father and elder brother to his young wife, after the birth of her second child. They are Quakers; and the venerable old man and his eldest son wear their hats, according to the custom of their sect. Nothing can be more beautifully conceived than the mother bending over the babe, sleeping in her lap. She is wrapped in a white dressing-gown, and her other son, a boy of six years old, is leaning on the arm of her chair. West stands behind his father, with his palette and brushes in his hand, and the silence that reigns over the whole is that of religious meditation, which will probably end, according to the Quaker custom, in a prayer from the patriarch of the family. The picture is a very small one, the engraving from it being of the same size. It has no excellence of color, but the masses of light and shadow are impressive and simple, and I know not a more original illustration of the often-painted subject, the ages of man. Infancy, childhood, youth, middle life, and extreme age, are beautifully brought together in the quiet chamber of the painter's wife. Had he been employed to paint these five ages, he would perhaps have given himself a great deal of trouble to produce a work that would have been classical, but, compared with this, commonplace; while he has here succeeded in making a picture which, being intended only for himself, is for that reason a picture for the whole world; and if painters could

always thus put their hearts into their work, how much would the general interest of the Art be increased!

Among the many great lessons in portrait composition, by Rembrandt, are "The Night Watch," at Amsterdam, "The Group of Surgeons assembled round a Corpse," in the Musée at the Hague, and the picture which Mr. Smith, in his "Catalogue Raisonné," calls "Ranier Hanslo and his Mother." A sight of the two first is well worth a journey to Holland. The last is sometimes described as 66 a woman consulting a Baptist minister," and at others, “a woman consulting an eminent lawyer, or an eminent physician." As there are large books on a table and in the background, and the expressions of the heads are earnest and serious, the subject might be either of these. I saw the picture (which belongs to the Earl of Ashburnham) many years ago, and have ever since been haunted with the wish to see it again. Indeed, I was about to make a day's journey for that sole purpose, when it was sent to London for sale. The persons it represents are unknown, the heads of neither are remarkable for beauty, or any other interest than that marked individuality that carries with it a certainty of likeness; and yet it is a picture that throws down every barrier that would exclude it from the highest class of Art; nor do I know anything from the hand of Rembrandt in which he appears greater than in this simple and unpretending work. I remember being surprised to hear Sir Thomas Lawrence object to its treatment, that though the man turns towards the woman, and is speaking earnestly, while she is listening with great attention, yet they do not look in each other's faces. I was surprised that he should not have noticed how frequently this happens, in conversations on the most important subjects, and oftenest, indeed, in such conversations. Rembrandt has repeated these attitudes and expressions, in the two principal personages in "The Night Watch," with the difference only, that the

figures are walking as they converse. There is an engraving of the "Hanslo and his Mother" by Josiah Boydell, which, however, fails in giving the breadth of light on the female head, the color of which is as near to perfection as Art ever approached.

The hands in Rembrandt's portraits, as in those of Holbein, do everything required of them in the most natural and expressive way. But very different are the hands of Vandyke, which have an affected grace, adopted from Rubens, though carried further from Nature, and which may be traced from Rubens to Coreggio. The hands in Vandyke's portraits are always of one type, thin and elegant, with long, tapered fingers. He was followed in these particulars by Lely with still more of affectation, who carried a corresponding mannerism into his faces, losing nearly all individuality in that one style of beauty that was in fashion.

A nobleman said to Lely, "How is it that you have so great a reputation, when you know, as well as I do, that you are no painter?" "True, but I am the best you have," was the answer. And so it is; the best artist of the age will generally, while living, have a reputation equal to the greatest that have preceded him. Lely, however, was a painter, and of very great merit. His color, always pearly and refined, is often very charming. He understood well the treatment of landscape as background, and there are some of his pictures which I prefer to some pictures by Vandyke.

Sir Joshua Reynolds remarks that in general the greatest portrait-painters have not copied closely the dresses of their time. Holbein, however, took no liberties with the doublets, hose, or mantles of the gentlemen he painted, nor with the head-gear or kirtles of the ladies; neither did Velasquez; and their portraits are, therefore, curious records of fashions, picturesque, and sometimes fantastic in the extreme, yet always treated with admirable Art; and I confess I prefer

those of Sir Joshua's portraits in which he has faithfully adhered to the dress of the sitter; which is always characteristic, and often highly so. The manner in which Queen Elizabeth covered herself with jewels, and the splendor with which Raleigh decorated his person, pertain to biography.

In some of Vandyke's portraits, no change is made in the dress, while in many (I believe the most), that which is stiff and formal is loosened, and alterations are introduced that we are only aware of when we compare his pictures with exact representations, by other artists, of the costume of the time. Such deviations from matter of fact were carried much further by Lely and Kneller, particularly in their portraits of ladies; and the first adopted an elegant, but impossible, undress, that assists the voluptuous expression which he aimed at, either to please a dissolute Court, or because it pleased himself; possibly for both reasons.

With Kneller, however, the ideal style of the dress does not affect the prevailing character he gave to the beauties he painted, who seem a higher order of beings than the ladies of Lely. Among the attractions of the latter the expression of strict virtue is by no means conspicuous, while it would seem profane to doubt the purity of the high-born dames of Kneller. Though, as a painter, not to be compared to Lely, his women seem secured from moral degradation by an ever-present consciousness of noble birth, which sits well on them; and though their demeanor is as studied as the grace of a minuet, it does not offend like vulgar affectation. Fielding, the natural Fielding, greatly admired the stately beauties of Kneller, at Hampton Court, and compared Sophia Western to one of them. Conscious that, "when unadorned, adorned the most," they reject the aid of jewellery, and are content with only so much assistance from Art as they receive from well-arranged draperies. The great fault of Lely is the family likeness, closer than