HALF ΑΝ HOUR IN THE ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS AT PHILADELPHIA. BY A PHILADELPHIAN. Ir is a hot morning, and we have been strolling in Chestnut street to refresh our fancy with the various female wonders of Nature and Art, with which every great city abounds. We have not, it must be confessed, been very successful in our search, for Chestnut street we find is losing very decidedly the character for high fashion which it once enjoyed, and Walnut street is beginning to usurp its best glories. There is no place in the world where fashion (we allude to the selectest) is so sensitive, or capricious, as in Philadelphia: the moment that a place is so attractive or so well known that "every body" is supposed capable of going there, and the frequenting of it ceases to be a distinction, that instant it is pronounced vulgar, and people of ton fly from it with horror. In consequence of this foolish fastidiousness the most agrecable places in this city, (as Washington square,) are entirely in the hands of second or third rate persons. Our Chestnut street walk has therefore brought us little but a red-hot face and pair of dusty boots. Now the only cool place in Philadelphia, when the weather is hot, is the Academy of Fine Arts; we will, therefore, drop in there for a few moments, to regain our due personal solidity, and amuse our sight by turning from painted faces to painted canvas. When we recover from the astonishment produced by the appearance of an enormous pile of plaster in the centre of the outer room which seems placed there for no other purpose than to prevent a single picture from being seen at the proper distance, and to injure the sight in judging of colors, the first thing that engages our attention is Alston's huge painting of the dead man restored to life, by touching the corpse of Elisha, (catalogue No. 46.) The painter is what the cant of the times denominates "a native artist," and it is therefore a high offence against patriotism, honor, good feeling, and the seven cardinal virtues in a lump, to bestow on the performance any thing else than "honied words of praise." Phew! The delineator of such a monstrosity aught to be rolled up in his canvas, and both of them burnt together on the altar of beauty. The taste which selected this subject for the pencil was unacquainted with that strict boundary line within which the graces have encircled this art. Pleasure is the sole end of painting; beauty is the sole source of unqualified pleasure: beauty then is the supreme law of this, and all the other, arts of design. The Greeks I take to be the despotic law-givers for the world in all that concerns art: they painted, not to display their skill or exhibit a resemblance, but to produce an object whose loveliness should gratify the spectator. Impression, which most modern artists seek, was not their aim; beauty was their constant Latium; and if they ever selected subjects of a tragical nature they softened down the terror under the control of beauty. Laocoon in Virgil shrieks with the wild horror of irrepressible agony: such an emotion would in stone be too violent to give pleasure, and the extended mouth would have been ungraceful; in the sculpture, therefore, there is nothing seen of this but what Sadoleto has called, "the stifled sigh of anguish." When Timanthes painted the sacrifice of Iphigenia, he drew a veil over the father's face; not from inability to represent his grief in adequate power, for the more violent the emotion the more strongly are the features disposed, and the more easy, in consequence, is the painter's task; but because the deep passion of that deadly suffering would have carried him beyond the bounds of beauty. Let me fortify my position by the authority of Winkelmann: "There are some sorts of sensation," says the best of all modern critics, "which are displayed in the countenance by the most shocking contortions, and throw the entire figure into postures so violent that all those lines of grace, which its forms evolved when its disposition was tranquil, are destroyed. These passions the ancients either avoided entirely, or represented them under such modifications as admitted a certain proportion of beauty. The images of rage and despair deformed none of their works. Anger was subdued into severity. Jupiter hurling thunder was, in the verse of the poet, furious with indignation; in the marble of the sculptor he was only grave." According to the poetical tradition, Love made the first trial at the fine arts: and the fable of the birth prefigured the history. The matter was deemed worthy of the interposition of government; and a well-known law of the Thebans commanded the exclusive imitation of the beautiful, and punished by a fine the delineation of any thing offensive to the sight. A Greek epigram records, with high commendation, that a painter refused to portray a certain man because he was ugly; and the triumph of the portrait-statue was limited to those who had three times borne the laurel, that the chances of an ill-looking subject might be small. Pauson, alone of Grecian painters, selected deformed and hideous objects, and he passed his life in abject poverty. Aristotle strongly advises that no young person should be allowed to see his works, that their imagination might be filled only with beauty. It is a striking illustration of the truth of our remarks, that among all the works of ancient art, recorded or remaining, statues, bas-reliefs, and pictures, not a single representation of a Fury is to be found. If these principles be just, Mr. Alston and his putrefactions perish together. I will venture to say that if this picture had been shown in Athens, the people would either have shivered it into threads as Jerdan did Maclise's Soane, or a law would have been passed for its suppression. Modern designers forget that they are artists as well as painters; they do not perceive that their profession is not simply to represent nature, but to represent it according to the laws of art.* To paint merely for impression or resemblance, without reference to the inherent spirit of the craft, is entitled to as little praise as a musician's imitation of a storm without regard to harmony and the laws of his instrument. The Greeks and the Germans are almost the only people who have appreciated the high value of art, for art's sake; and have perceived the high and peculiar pleasure arising from the mere manner of description or representation, quite independent on the beauty of the thing described. Half the charm of a Greek ode springs from seeing with what skilful grace the poet moves beneath his fetters-how dominant are the laws of art-how imposing is the thraldom of genius working out its self-defined task-how nobly severe is the conscience of taste. It is the perception of high artistic talent that makes the prose of Suckling, Walpole, and Beckford, so fascinating, and renders Gray the favorite poet of the scholar. Mr. Alston has not bowed under this flowery yoke. On another ground we disapprove this painting. The artist can exhibit but a single moment of time and a single point of view, and his production, moreover, is to be often examined, and long dwelt on. The portrait painter should therefore seize that expression of the face which is the most strictly natural, which is the centre and hinge of every other phase of the countenance, to which every phase can be referred and from which all can be derived: the historical painter should select that moment of the story which is the most pregnant with future meaning, and leads on to higherand higher interest; the most elevated point of excitement should not be chosen, but the prelude to it. A common artist in Greece painted Medea slaying her children: Timomachus more wisely showed her meditating their death. Something must be left to the fancy, or else pictures become lifeless, and the art ceases to be poetic, and becomes meanly mimetick. The sculptor of Laocoon chisels a sigh; imagination superadds a shriek; had he exhibited a shriek, imagination could do nothing. The business of art is to stimulate interest, not satisfy it. Now Mr. Alston has seized a passion and a state of it which admits of no progression of wonder; the next moment and a second glance will destroy it. There is no climax of emotion, no aggrandizement of interest: there is no future to the story; the present comprises and concludes all: the drama is fairly over, and the excitement ended. Had he shown us a fiend or giant thus rising on his astonished enemies, we should have been chained in expectant interest; now there is nothing to follow; the next instant will unknit the corrugated brows of the bystanders, and turn surprise to simple joy. The subject in fact is poetical and not pictorial; but as the painter did select it, he should have shown us the dead man rising before the company were aware of it, so that we might be arrested in wonder as to what they would think when they perceived the miracle. We cannot help suspecting Mr. Alston of a bit of sly satire in representing the wife in tears at the recovery of her husband; one remembers the lines of Byron in Don Juan; Tears shed into the grave of the connection If the painter merely meant to show us a picture of life just revived, as the poet of "The Giaour" has given us one of existence just departed, his failure is signal. On all hands it is a miserable piece of business, alike disgraceful to the artist, the academy, the city, the state, the nation, and the world; and even reflecting some discredit on the universe. Let us turn then from this work of native genius, to some of the foreign pictures, which are around us, of which the only valuable ones are those collected by Mr. Powel in France, during the revolution of the barricades, and by his permission now in the academy. • The lawyers have a nice distinction of this kind, in their tenure "at the will of the lord, according to the custom of the manor." D 1. VOL. V.-NO. II. Here we have the Cecilia of Guido, (No. 37.,) said to be the original. It may be so, and if it is so, it is the most valuable picture in America, for Guido's Cecilia is world-famous. On comparing Morghen's engraving of the veritable original with this one, some variations, especially in the turban, are perceptible; and the proprietor may be compelled to resort to the convenient supposition of possessors, that his is a duplicate by the same great master. It is assuredly an exquisite picture, and no artist could regret the imputation of its authorship. The rapt and almost insensible posture of an enthusiast communing with the spirit which maddens it, has never been better exhibited. The abandon of the person, without either stiffness or ungracefulness,-the awful stillness of every feature in the repose of intense excitement, the moody air of the countenance as of one past the first stage of enthusiasm, which is glad aspiration, and attaining the last, which is masterless possession by the o'er-swaying presence-the merger of personal in spiritual emotion-the listlessness of one "over whom her Immortality broods like the day, a master o'er a slave," of one "that, deaf and silent, reads the eternal deep" of harmony," haunted for ever by the eternal mind” of music,—all this is in the highest style of genius, and quite sets the painter on a level with the poet. Guido's creation realizes all that Wordsworth has conceived of That serene and blessed state In which the affections gently lead us on The whole state and attitude of this figure presents itself to our mind as such a simple and harmonious whole, that we can scarcely persuade ourselves that it has been elaborated by the successive additions of partial labor,—that it was "the mellow fruit of toil intense." One thinks of the question of the Esquimaux woman when standing in the dome of St. Paul's, "was this thing put here, or was it made?" Turn we to this "Holy Family, after Raphael D' Urbino"-or, as it should be called, the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth, (no. 15.;)—a fine gala-day picture,—like a Persian morning in summer, bright and brilliant, wildly joyous and splendidly glad. The colors are fresh, and a little glaring; but time will take care of that matter. The story goes that the copy was made for the Duchess of Berri, and ere the oil was dry she was obliged to leave Paris, and the painting being exposed to sale, Mr. Powel became the possessor. The artist, being a secret adherent of the exiled party, refused to give up his name for fear of displeasing the citizen king. This picture calls to mind the notion of Byron, or Browne, of the music of a beautiful face. The forms are disposed in commingling curves, with such liquid grace,-the dark and manly face of Joseph and the age-brown and care-withered, yet pleasing, countenance of Elizabeth relieve so harmoniously the young and glowing cheeks of all the rest,—that musical, is the epithet that at once occurs to every spectator. The expression has been charged with a false license of metaphor, but it is strictly true to the laws of mind, and if metaphysics ever come to be written by a man who knows how to think, it will be stated that all sensations and impressions—thoughts, sounds, odors, and all others—present themselves to the mind as images; and, being homogeneous, may of course be compared. Go over an overture in your own mind, and you will find that it is a picture. I went many years ago, to see old Beethoven, and found him sitting before an enormous instrument, which he called his piano-organ, consisting of an organ with a bank of forte-piano keys above, of which the wires were at the side,—an affair of his own contriving. He was in glorious spirits, and resuming his seat at my request, begged me to choose a subject, then exclaimed immediately, "wait, I'll play you a Cathedral; it shall be Strasburgh, for I know it by heart: and I will do what Napoleon meditated, for my cathedral shall have both towers." He began; planting the solid masonry with the deep tones of the organ, and running out the tracery at the same time with the gay notes of the piano. Every limb of the old gentleman was in action; both elbows frequently on one instrument, while the fingers were on the other; he held also in his mouth a wand, which he called his tongue-finger, shod with lead enough to weigh down any of the organ-keys on which it fell, and this he directed with astonishing success. I can only say that I recognized every part of his musical structure, and felt the same emotions which the present building had excited. The face of the infant Christ is an exhaustless field for pictorial genius; for it is capable of being charged with a thousand different yet appropriate expressions. In Raphael's vision of Sextus you have as much mere intelligence in the countenance as the soft features of youth will bear: in this you see nothing but the glad animal delight of a boy rushing to the arms of his mother. I confess that in no painting have I found that blending of divinity with humanity, in the pictured countenance, which belonged so mysteriously to the real character. What magnificence of color in that Madonna by Sussoferald! (16) The sky of Italy is less "darkly, deeply, beautifully blue" than that splendid band above the head. Yet the face, though you cannot take exception to a single feature, has something of cold and wily in its beauty: that part of the coloring may perhaps have faded. No painter, I suspect, ever fully succeeded in representing personal beauty, or, never gave satisfaction to all by his attempts; and this by the necessary defect of his art. Let us stop a moment to compare the power of the painter and the poet in the exhibition of female beauty. The poet operates by the description of effects, and these are universal; the painter by the exhi bition of causes, and these are particular; the former are uniform in character, the latter are various in influence; the first shall meet the sympathy of all, the second touch the feelings of only a part. When the poet tells us of the impression which his Genevieve produces on his heart, every reader can appropriate the emotion to himself; each calls to mind the particular lady whom he most admires, and the poem seems to him precisely and exclusively applicable to her; because the same passion has been felt by all, though produced by qualities as various as the nature of each. But of all these causes the painter is limited to a single set; and what he places on his canvas can affect only that fraction of beholders who may happen to agice with him in definite notions of the highest beautya number in any case small, and farther narrowed by the power of moral qualities in warping the natural conceptions of ideal fairness. His most beautiful woman must be an individual; she must be either of the Spanish sort, warm and impassioned, or of Saxon blood, with azure eyes and flaxen. hair, all light and smiles: and being such will not arrest the regard of one who has associated a dif ferent style of face with all he knows of gladness or feels of love. This inferiority is inseparable from painting, because it belongs to the real objects. Herein lies the reason why nine persons out of ten are utterly disappointed in the illustrations of a favorite poet, notwithstanding the admitted excellence of the figures; from the bard we collect " a vision of our own, the treasured dream of time," and when we turn to the engraving we feel " that though 'tis fair, it is some other Yarrow." You read a popular Persian poem, and your sympathy with your author is complete; you look at an admired Persian painting and are outraged at seeing the eyebrows meet on the top of the nose. This then is the amount of the differences between the provinces of the arts; that painting may accidentally be more decided in its impression, but poetry must essentially be more universal in its appieciation. It is the business of every artist to ascertain the strong points of his art, and develope them with all his ability. From the distinction which we have deduced, we infer that the poet is availing himself of the full advantages of his art, then, only, when he describes persons by impressions and not by delineations, and that when he individualizes his pictures of beauty he leaves his tower of strength, and accepts the fetter of a rival. This test distinguishes the artistic skill of poets with nice success, and in fact draws a line between the very highest class of artists and all others. When Byron makes all his descriptions portraits, we must conclude either that he did not understand his art with consummate delicacy, or that if he did, the strong pleasure of evolving his own personal impressions was "the fatal Capua for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it." Shakspeare manages the matter differently; he never describes the appearance of his heroines, but the archeress is detected by her penetrating shaft. Who knows whether Ophelia had blue or black eyes, or who can tell whether Desdemona's hair was ebon or hazel? When we see Othello bursting from the strong tangles of his doubt, as she looks round on him, and exclaiming with impressive fervor, "Perdition seize my soul but I do love thee !" and when we behold even the steeled murderer intoxicated by her sweet breath, then it is that we realize what a rich pearl she was. Of Cleopatra even, whose historical character and traditionary qualities might have seduced a less rigid artist, we have nothing but such gorgeous generalities as " Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." Sadi might object to a blue eye, and Scott to a black one, but Jew, Turk, Heretic, and Infidel bow alike before this grand impression. Look, too, at old Homer; what do we know from the poet of the face or form of her who "for nine long years had set the world in arms?" Have we any thing about the "bright, black eye," the dimpling cheek, the glossy hair? Not a bit of it. "She was the most beautiful woman in the world," says Homer, and there's an end of it. But when we see the cold and hoary sages of the council rising to look after her as she leaves the room-when we reflect that she was all that Venus could contrive, all that Paris could demand, all that Menelaus wished for-when we remember that for her Achilles struck, for her great Hector died-then we feel how wise was the forbearance of the poet, and how superior is poetry when rightly managed, to the best performance of the painter. We see Helen as we see the wind; only by the commotion which her presence occasions. Ah! those old fellows knew what they were about. What a darling picture is this of the marriage of St. Catharine (No. 4.) by Parmegiano! the darling'st of the darling kind. It is too exquisite to criticize: but I shall dream of it to-night. 66 A fine Madonna is this! (No. 81;) there is a subdued and sacred air about it which is good; it is a prayer-book picture. By Corregio" says the catalogue; sed quære de hoc. I know too well the value of Corregios in Europe, ever to expect to see one of this size in any cis-Atlantic collection. To account for its being here, a story is told of its having been concealed in one of the Royal galleries at the time of the "distribution bill" of the allies, by having a frame of stucco work wrought over it, and being sold when those galleries were thrown open by the mob. Unfortunately I am "one of those lank rascals," as Savage says, "who will never agree upon any thing but doubting." I should call it a fine copy; a fine picture it certainly is, and when it hung in the gallery of the pro prietor, in whose princely mansion it had a small room to itself, was well lighted by a single large window, and was capable of being seen at a becoming distance, it must be allowed that it exhibited much of what Sterne calls "Corregiosity;" the figures seemed to float in the air like the filmy forms of the valley gossamer. 66 Here are a couple of landscapes, or woodscapes, by Ruysdale, (Nos. 65. and 79.) which it is worth while to walk forty miles any day to look at. There is a depth of perspective and a precision of natural representation which are wholly wonderful. Landscapes are the peculiar subjects of the painter," says Lessing, " and the poet should never attempt them, for his business is with successive incidents, not contemporary circumstances." Not quite so fast. Not facts, but the perception of them concern art: it is quite true that in point of fact the painter shows you the whole scene at once; but as the perception of it is by successive parts, it stands, in relation to the spectator, precisely on a footing with description. That when the details have been studied, the whole may be viewed in mutual dependency, is an advantage on the side of painting; that when the whole has been understood, the parts in a second reading may be again contemplated separately, and successive perception again be enjoyed, is in the favor of poetry; the latter has also a superiority in being able to illustrate, and especially to shade and color, by the aid of moral emotions, of which "Cooper's Hill" is a capital instance. Lessing says that action, and not description, is the poet's true strength, and he says justly. But he was not aware of the resources of a consummate artist; he did not know that by representing a diversified landscape, not as it stood, but as its various features rose upon the mind, all the spirit of action might be imparted to description. The most successful example of this which I am acquainted with, is Pope's* moonlight scene, in the eleventh book of his translation of Homer. We are supposed to be looking through the eyes of some actual spectator; every thing is shown in reference to him, and by a figure of Berkleian boldness the scene is exhibited as rising into existence according as it is consecutively observed by the looker-on. Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, A flood of glory bursts from all the skies. Surely to transform description into creation without offending taste, and to bring a new domain under the sceptre, not by distorting the arm, but by transporting the transmuted field, is the triumph of art. Wordsworth and Coleridge having adopted an absurd system whose existence required the overthrow of Pope, have ridiculed the passage which I have alluded to, as melodious nonsense; but both of them understood the meaning and motive of the poet, as little as they understood the beauty of modesty. Poetry never won richer laurels than when Sandy Pope fought her battles; and he never conducted a more brilliant enterprize than when he vindicated description from the charge of dullness. A less striking instance of the same manœuvie may be found in Milton; "straight my eye has caught new pleasures," etc. Let us give one glance to " Death on the Pale Horse," which stands in the next room. I have always had a profound contempt for West, as the most common-place and wooden of painters; but this figure compels admiration. It has not one quality of his usual manner; and is the only thing on which his fame as a great artist can be established. It is a great conception;-the face of a being naturally detestable and odious, yet elevated into somewhat of exalted dignity by the high commission which he has from the Almighty;-apalling, but not malignant; hideous, but not shocking; horrible, but not disgusting. Yet the picture is a leap, not a flight of genius: in the filling up of the canvas,—in the unworthy idea of a particular death in the midst of a general wasting of the world,we detest the essential meanness of West's imagination,—that innate grovelling temper from which he never long escaped. Almighty heaven! when the incarnate spirit of destruction was galloping on his pallid courser over the earth robed in night, and his extended fists flashing hell-fires, and universal life was fainting beneath his deadly breath, was it a time to think of lions snapping at horses' noses, or bulls tossing boys! Faugh! I could kick the unworthy corner out of the picture. But we came here to get cool, and must not allow ourselves to grow warm in anger. • Lessing quotes with triumph, what Warburton tells us of Pope's mature contempt for the pic. torial essays of his own youthful muse; but when he compared description to a heavy feast of sauces, he was certainly only condemning the manner usually practised. |