July 28th, 1857. —
Day before yesterday [ie, 26th July 1857] I paid a second visit to the Exhibition, and devoted the day mainly to seeing the works of British painters, which fill a very large space, — two or three great saloons at the right side of the nave.
Among the earliest are Hogarth’s pictures, including the Sigismunda, which I remember to have seen before, with her lover’s heart in her hand, looking like a monstrous strawberry;
and the March to Finchley, than which nothing truer to English life and character was ever painted, nor ever can be;
Captain Coram by William Hogarth, 1840
and a large stately portrait of Captain Coram, and others, all excellent in proportion as they come near to ordinary life, and are wrought out through its forms.
All English painters resemble Hogarth in this respect. They cannot paint anything high, heroic, and ideal, and their attempts in that direction are wearisome to look at; but they sometimes produce good effects by means of awkward figures in ill-made coats and smallclothes, and hard, coarse-complexioned faces, such as they might see anywhere in the street. They are strong in homeliness and ugliness, weak in their efforts at the beautiful.
Sir Thomas Lawrence attains a sort of grace, which you feel to be a trick, and therefore get disgusted with it.
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Reynolds is not quite genuine, though certainly he has produced some noble and beautiful heads.
But Hogarth is the only English painter, except in the landscape department; there are no others who interpret life to me at all, unless it be some of the modern Pre-Raphaelites.
Pretty village scenes of common life, — pleasant domestic passages, with a touch of easy humor in them, — little pathoses and fancynesses, are abundant enough; and Wilkie, to be sure, has done more than this, though not a great deal more. His merit lies, not in a high aim, but in accomplishing his aim so perfectly.
It is unaccountable that the English painters’ achievements should be so much inferior to those of the English poets, who have really elevated the human mind; but, to be sure, painting has only become an English art subsequently to the epochs of the greatest poets, and since the beginning of the last century, during which England had no poets.
I respect Haydon more than I once did, not for his pictures, they being detestable to see, but for his heroic rejection of whatever his countrymen and he himself could really do, and his bitter resolve to achieve something higher, — failing in which, he died.
No doubt I am doing vast injustice to a great many gifted men in what I have here written, — as, for instance, Copley, who certainly has painted a slain man to the life;
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And there is a picture called “The Evening Gun” by Danby, — a ship of war on a calm, glassy tide, at sunset, with the cannon-smoke puffing from her porthole; it is very beautiful, and so effective that you can even hear the report breaking upon the stillness, with so grand a roar that it is almost like stillness too.
The only modern pictures that accomplish a higher end than that of pleasing the eye — the only ones that really take hold of my mind, and with a kind of acerbity, like unripe fruit — are the works of Hunt, and one or two other painters of the Pre-Raphaelite school.
They seem wilfully to abjure all beauty, and to make their pictures disagreeable out of mere malice; but at any rate, for the thought and feeling which are ground up with the paint, they will bear looking at, and disclose a deeper value the longer you look.
Never was anything so stiff and unnatural as they appear; although every single thing represented seems to be taken directly out of life and reality, and, as it were, pasted down upon the canvas. They almost paint even separate hairs. Accomplishing so much, and so perfectly, it seems unaccountable that the picture does not live; but Nature has an art beyond these painters, and they leave out some medium, — some enchantment that should intervene, and keep the object from pressing so baldly and harshly upon the spectator’s eyeballs.
With the most lifelike reproduction, there is no illusion. I think if a semi-obscurity were thrown over the picture after finishing it to this nicety, it might bring it nearer to nature.
I remember a heap of autumn leaves, every one of which seems to have been stiffened with gum and varnish, and then put carefully down into the stiffly disordered heap. Perhaps these artists may hereafter succeed in combining the truth of detail with a broader and higher truth. Coming from such a depth as their pictures do, and having really an idea as the seed of them, it is strange that they should look like the most made-up things imaginable.
One picture by Hunt that greatly interested me was of some sheep that had gone astray among heights and precipices, and I could have looked all day at these poor, lost creatures, — so true was their meek alarm and hopeless bewilderment, their huddling together, without the slightest confidence of mutual help; all that the courage and wisdom of the bravest and wisest of them could do being to bleat, and only a few having spirits enough even for this.
After going through these modern masters, among whom were some French painters who do not interest me at all, I did a miscellaneous business, chiefly among the watercolors and photographs, and afterwards among the antiquities and works of ornamental art.
I have forgotten what I saw, except the breastplate and helmet of Henry of Navarre, of steel, engraved with designs that have been half obliterated by scrubbing.
I remember, too, a breastplate of an Elector of Saxony, with a bullet-hole through it. He received his mortal wound through that hole, and died of it two days afterwards, three hundred years ago.
There was a crowd of visitors, insomuch that, it was difficult to get a satisfactory view of the most interesting objects. They were nearly all middling-class people; the Exhibition, I think, does not reach the lower classed at all; in fact, it could not reach them, nor their betters either, without a good deal of study to help it out. I shall go to-day, and do my best to get profit out of it.
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