July 30th, 1857
Entrance to the Botanical Gardens, Old Trafford
— We all, with Rose and Fanny, went to the Exhibition yesterday [ie, 29 July, 1857], and spent the day there; not Julian, however, for he went to the Botanical Gardens. After some little skirmishing with other things, I devoted myself to the historical portraits, which hang on both sides of the great nave, and went through them pretty faithfully.
Portrait of Richard II (1367-1400)
The oldest are pictures of Richard II. and Henry IV. and Edward IV. and Jane Shore, and seem to have little or no merit as works of art, being cold and stiff, the life having, perhaps, faded out of them; but these older painters were trustworthy, inasmuch as they had no idea of making a picture, but only of getting the face before them on canvas as accurately as they could.
16th century painting of Henry IV (1367-1413)
1540 posthumous portrait of Edward IV (1442-1483)
All English history scarcely supplies half a dozen portraits before the time of Henry VIII.; after that period, and through the reigns of Elizabeth and James, there are many ugly pictures by Dutchmen and Italians; and the collection is wonderfully rich in portraits of the time of Charles I. and the Commonwealth.
Charles I by Anthony van Dyck, painted c.1635
Vandyke seems to have brought portrait-painting into fashion; and very likely the king’s love of art diffused a taste for it throughout the nation, and remotely suggested, even to his enemies, to get their pictures painted.
Elizabeth I “the Armada portrait” 1588, artist unknown
Elizabeth has perpetuated her cold, thin visage on many canvases, and generally with some fantasy of costume that makes her ridiculous to all time.
Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1567) by Francois Clouet 1558
There are several of Mary of Scotland, none of which have a gleam of beauty; but the stiff old brushes of these painters could not catch the beautiful.
Of all the older pictures, the only one that I took pleasure in looking at was a portrait of Lord Deputy Falkland, by Vansomer, in James I.‘s time, — a very stately, full-length figure in white, looking out of the picture as if he saw you. The catalogue says that this portrait suggested an incident in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto; but I do not remember it. [The portrait came to life]
Charles I by van Dyck, 1633
I have a haunting doubt of the value of portrait-painting; that is to say, whether it gives you a genuine idea of the person purporting to be represented. I do not remember ever to have recognized a man by having previously seen his portrait.
Van Dyck by Van Dyck. Not an Englishman
Vandyke’s pictures are full of grace and nobleness, but they do not look like Englishmen, — the burly, rough, wine-flushed and weather-reddened faces, and sturdy flesh and blood, which we see even at the present day, when they must naturally have become a good deal refined from either the country gentleman or the courtier of the Stuarts’ age.
I can’t find the portrait described by Hawthorne of Gervoyse Holles, so here is one of his son, Frescheville Hollis with Sir Robert Holmes.
Fresche and Bob had attacked the Dutch fleet in the English Channel in 1672, which lead to the Third Dutch War.
There is an old, fat portrait of Gervoyse Holles, in a buff-coat, — a coarse, hoggish, yet manly man. The painter is unknown; but I honor him, and Gervoyse Holles too, — for one was willing to be truly rendered, and the other dared to do it.
Henry VIII, artist unknown
It seems to be the aim of portrait-painters generally, especially of those who have been most famous, to make their pictures as beautiful and noble as can anywise consist with retaining the very slightest resemblance to the person sitting to them. They seldom attain even the grace and beauty which they aim at, but only hit some temporary or individual taste.
Queen Mary II, copy of a work by Sir Peter Lily
Vandyke, however, achieved graces that rise above time and fashion, and so did
Sir Peter Lely, in his female portraits; but the doubt is, whether the works of either are genuine history. Not more so, I suspect, than the narrative of a historian who should seek to make poetry out of the events which he relates, rejecting those which could not possibly be thus idealized. I observe, furthermore, that a full-length portrait has seldom face enough; not that it lacks its fair proportion by measurement, but the artist does not often find it possible to make the face so intellectually prominent as to subordinate the figure and drapery.
Vandyke does this, however. In his pictures of Charles I., for instance, it is the melancholy grace of the visage that attracts the eye, and it passes to the rest of the composition only by an effort. Earlier and later pictures are but a few inches of face to several feet of figure and costume, and more insignificant than the latter because seldom so well done; and I suspect the same would generally be the case now, only that the present simplicity of costume gives the face a chance to be seen.
Rembrandt by Rembrandt
I was interrupted here, and cannot resume the thread; but considering how much of his own conceit the artist puts into a portrait, how much affectation the sitter puts on, and then again that no face is the same to any two spectators; also, that these portraits are darkened and faded with age, and can seldom be more than half seen, being hung too high, or somehow or other inconvenient, on the whole, I question whether there is much use in looking at them.
So who is this, then?
The truest test would be, for a man well read in English history and biography, and himself an observer of insight, to go through the series without knowing what personages they represented, and write beneath each the name which the portrait vindicated for itself.
After getting through the portrait-gallery, I went among the engravings and photographs, and then glanced along the old masters, but without seriously looking at anything.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Old Trafford
Hawthorne went amongst the photographs and failed to be scandalised by The Two Ways of Life by Rejlander.
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British, born Sweden, 1813–1875), The Two Ways of Life, 1857.
“Seeking to elevate photography to the status of fine art, Rejlander created The Two Ways of Life in imitation of traditional history painting.
His photograph illustrates the protagonist’s allegorical choice between vice and virtue,
with lust, gambling, and idleness represented on the left side
and righteous prayer, marriage, and charity on the right.
After photographing each figure and background separately, Rejlander combined more than thirty negatives to create this complex scene. Although nineteenth-century viewers were accustomed to seeing nudes in paintings and in sculpture, the presumed verisimilitude of Rejlander’s nudes made the work controversial. His image sparked intense debate regarding the use of nudity in photography and the merits of Pictorialism’s painterly effects in comparison with more ostensibly factual photography.
Despite the controversy, Queen Victoria purchased the work as a gift for Prince Albert when it was shown in the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857.”
The scandal was also referred to in The Guardian in 2018, reviewing a photographic exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, before going on to criticise the PreRaphaelites in exactly the same terms as Hawthorne did in 1857.
Rejlander also scandalised the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857 with a hugely ambitious composite photograph full of nudes, grapes, gambling and general sinfulness. . . the most exciting thing happening in Victorian art was photography. British painting was drowning in pre-Raphaelite regressive nonsense, while over in Paris, a brilliant avant garde led by Édouard Manet was inventing modern art. If you want to find the equivalent of Manet in Victorian Britain you won’t find it in painter’s studios, where male artists were getting women to pose in bathtubs or play dead. Instead you will find it in the revolutionary, unprecedented art of Cameron and Hawarden.
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