The accidental taste for portrait has, unfortunately, con tinued to predominate in this country down to the present time, and, being so mechanical a branch of the art, in which genius has little if any scope for employment; it cannot fail materially to have depressed whatever talent for the higher branches of painting may, from time to time, have arisen in the country. 'When any predilection for historical painting showed itself, it was liable to wither for want of encouragement, and naturally dropped into the more lucrative course of portrait or landscape. It is in this last branch of the art that the practice of this coun try possesses much title to claim the distinction of a pe culiar school ; particularly of late years, when many art ists of pre-eminent merit as landscape painters have ap peared.
There is another style of painting, in which an English artist not only stands unrivalled, but never has, in this or in any other country, even met with a competitor. We allude to Hogarth, who struck out for himself a path en tirely new and untrodden in the subject of satire ; and whose genius at once raised this branch of the art to that height of perfection which has immortalised his name. Our observations on the state of British art will therefore fall to be comprised under these three heads of Satirical, Portrait, and Landscape painting.
Satirical Painting.
Hogarth is unquestionably the greatest and most origi nal genius that England ever possessed in the sphere of painting ; and in whom she can boast of a satiric artist, such as no age or country ever produced whether he is considered as a writer of comedy or as a painter of cha racter. His pictures are powerful satires on the morals, manners, and follies, of the age in which he lived, expos ed with a degree of wit and humour, and heightened by strokes of the most comic and playful vivacity, which place his works on a par with the best comedies of Mo liere. In fact, if we consider the series of pictures, in which he has represented the various acts and scenes of his subject ; the manner in which the plot is carried on, and the story told, with all the eccentricities of character and exuberance of wit in every stroke of his pencil ; we must acknowledge that they are as complete comic dramas as ever were represented on the stage. Lord Orford es timates the genius of Hogarth as follows: " Moiiere, in imitable as he proved, brought a rude theatre to perfec tion. Hogarth had no model to follow and improve upon. He created his art ; and used colours instead of language, His place is between the Italians, whom we may consider as epic poets and tragedians, and the Flemish painters, who are as writers of farce, and editors of burlesque na ture. Hogarth resembles Butler, but his subjects are more universal ; and, amidst all his pleasantry, he observes the true end of comedy, reformation ; there is always a moral to his pictures Sometimes he rose to tragedy, not in the catastrophe of kings and heroes, but in mark ing how vice conducts insensibly and incidentally to misery and shame. He warns against encouraging cru
elty and idleness in young minds, and discerns how the different vices of the great and the vulgar lead, by various paths, to the same unhappiness. The fine lady in Mar riage a-la-mode,' and Tom Nero in rile Four Stages of Cruelty,' terminate their story in blood—she occasions the murder of her husband, he assassinates his mistress. How delicate, and superior too, is his satire, where he in timates, in the college of physicians and surgeons that preside at a dissection, how the legal habitude of viewing shocking scenes hardens the human mind, and renders it. unfeeling. The president maintains the dignity of insen sibility over an executed corpse, and considers it but as the object of a lecture. In the print of the Sleeping Judges,' this habitual indifference only excites our laugh ter." " It is to Hogarth's honour, that, in so many scenes of satire or ridicule, it is obvious that ill-nature did not guide his pencil. His end is always reformation, sod his reproofs general. He touched the folly, but spared the person. Another instance of his genius is, his not con descending to explain his moral lessons by the trite po ve iy of allegory ; if he had an emblematical thought, he expressed it with wit, rather than by a symbol, such as that of the harlot setting fire to the world in the Rake's Progress,' the spider's web extended over the poor's box in a • Parish Church,' and a thousand in the Strollers D essing in a Barn,' which, for wit and imagination, with out any other end, I think the best of all his works ; as for useful and deep satire, that on the methodists is the most sublime." We cannot, however, go along with Lord Or ford in underrating the merits of Hogan') as a painter merely. The preser‘ation of his works enables the world to judge for itself witi.out the intervention of his lordship's meagre praise. He seems to have written the account of Hogarth contained in his " Anecdotes of Painters," with feelings scarcely worthy of an historian, by detracting from the transcendent qualities of this great man in a few trifling particulars of character and execution, which he thought himself at liberty to question. Lord Orford, fan cying himself the Mecxnas of England, looked for that deference, and those assiduities, which the independence of Hogarth's di,position very probably led him to overlook. But it is always dangerous to the credit of a biographer to season the mead of praise ‘) hich it was impossible to withhold, by the spicery of any little grovelling feelings of personal dislike. Lord Orford was not aware how much a greater man, in the estimation of the world, than himself, he had to deal with, so as to turn back the point of his censure more sharply on himself.