Joshua Reynolds, Lady Smith
(Charlotte Delaval) and her Children
(George Henry, Louisa, and Charlotte), 1787.

Oil on canvas, 140.7 x 112.1 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 

 

John Opie has no great feeling for beauty. The female portrait given to the Louvre by L’Art in 1881 is an excellent example of his work as a portrait painter. It is a large, ponderous, unpretentious painting, and though wanting in delicacy and charm, its decided air of faithfulness and realistic appearance shows a powerful hand. Opie’s talent was very suitable for portraying the Saxon type of beauty, florid and massive.

Sir Thomas Lawrence[5] is the last of the English portrait painters who devoted themselves to the aristocracy of their country. At the age of twenty he had already gained renown, and, in 1792, he succeeded Reynolds, his master, in the honorary post of First Painter to the King. Lawrence is an attenuated Reynolds; like him, only in a greater degree, he effects his work by artifice. He manages to conceal his numerous defects, and admirably feigns the most splendid qualities. He cannot draw well, yet his subjects are life-like; his colouring is not good, yet his faces have a certain harmonious brilliance. He never understood either power or truth. He is tricky, everywhere and on every occasion. Simple beauty has no charm for him. He wants to depict an elegant and stylish woman, and he paints her in washy blue and pink colours, without depth, and utterly unsubstantial. And the woman thus travestied turns out charming.

He worships the fashions in dress. Furbelows, furs, velvets, long or short waists, the hair worn more or less high, fillets or turbans, these are the things that especially attract his attention. Utterly unlike Reynolds or Gainsborough, particularly the latter, who, although never giving in to any freak of fashion, so quickly and always found some safe means to represent it by which it might be divested of its ephemeral character. Lawrence himself sets the fashion; he paints on a canvas that will last for centuries, a style of dress, a particular cut of coat, which will only last for a day.

Certainly Lawrence has done some fine work; the portrait of Pius VII, in which he cannot altogether forget David’s Pope Pius VII in the Coronation; the portraits of George IV, Sir William Curtis, the little Countess of Shaftesbury, and Lady Dover. They are ingenious, clever, and intelligent, but there is nothing great in them. Take John Philip Kemble’s portrait as Hamlet, in the cemetery scene (“Alas, poor Yorick!”), which is so highly praised. I have carefully studied it, and am bound to pronounce it painfully stagey and heavily painted; the hands are beautiful, but that is not everything. What a different comprehension of Shakespeare’s genius has Eugène Delacroix several times rendered this singularly poetical subject, of which he was so fond!

I can understand Lawrence’s enormous success, not so much because he was an attractive painter, in spite of his faults, as because he knew how to place art at the disposal of pretty, vain women, empty-headed, affected coquettes. He possessed a species of genius which I do not at all despise in an artist, but which requires to be ably supported by more solid qualities; he had the skill of depicting grace in dress.

At what a remote distance is his celebrated Master Lambton, The Boy in Red, from Gainsborough’s Blue Boy! And yet all the people at the Paris Salon in 1824 raved about this melancholy little fellow. It was not worthy of so much mention. Let us, however, give this English artist credit for having accurately learned his own capabilities, and for not having been tempted, in spite of some efforts, to throw himself into the vague difficulties of historical painting. Lawrence will always interest us and attract our attention, because he has left evidence of his time, his country, and his contemporaries, rather varnished, it is true, but still life-like under said varnish.