National Progress page 4

Sir David Wilkie, the greatest of modern Scotch painters, claims a few words here, which shall be confined to the latter part of his brilliant career. In 1820-1 he accomplished his masterpiece, " The Chelsea Pensioners listening to the News of Waterloo," for which he received 1,200 guineas from the Duke of Wellington. His subsequent works did not increase his reputation, chiefly because he abandoned the style in which he excelled, and adopted a new one. In 1830 he was made painter in ordinary to His Majesty, on the death of Lawrence, and became a candidate for the presidentship of the Royal Academy, but had only one vote recorded in his favour. Between 1830 and 1840 he painted a considerable number of works, among which were " John Knox preaching before Mary," and " The Discovery of the Body of Tippoo Saib," painted for the widow of Sir David Baird, at £1,500. In 1836 he was knighted, and in 1840 he set out on a tour to the East, and went as far as Jerusalem, which he viewed with rapture. At Constantinople he had the honour of painting the Sultan for the Queen. He returned by Egypt, but never saw his native land again. He died off Gibraltar, and, the burial service having been read by torchlight, his body was committed to 'the deep, on the 1st of June, 1841.

In the lives of English painters the story of Benjamin Robert Haydon is perhaps the saddest. In youth he devoted himself with such zeal to the study of art, that people wondered how he ever found time to eat. He was one of those men of genius who may be called " unlucky." He was in pecuniary difficulties, though his father allowed him £200 per annum, in the earlier part of his career. He applied for admission into the Academy, but did not obtain a single vote; and he got involved in controversies, which continued to embitter his life. He succeeded at last, however, by his energy, in commanding public attention and winning fame. For the " Judgment of Solomon " he received £700, with £100 voted to him by the directors of the British Institution, and the freedom of Plymouth. He wrote a long and elaborate essay on painting, for the " Encyclopaedia Britannica," which has been twice reprinted. In 1823 he was confined in the King's Bench as a debtor, and there he produced " The Mock Election," for which George IV. gave him £500, and this enabled him to purchase his release. He produced several pictures now in rapid succession - " Napoleon at St. Helena," for Sir Robert Peel; " Waiting for the Times," purchased by the Marquis of Stafford; and several others. In 1834 he completed "The Reform Banquet," which contained 197 portraits. He might have lived independently by his profession if he had possessed common prudence; but his mind was peculiarly ill-regulated, as appears by his autobiography, which contains a self-portraiture as full and frank as that of Rousseau's " Confessions."

Believing that he had a grand mission, as the apostle and martyr of high art, he felt that he had a right to the sympathy and support of the nation, which led him to indulge in loud self-laudation, and to levy contributions on his friends without scruple. In pursuance of his mission, he delivered lectures throughout England and Scotland, which were distinguished by great ability, his language being powerful, fluent, and appropriate, and his style enlivened with wit and humour and a play of fancy, which presented a strange contrast to the settled anxiety of his mind and the usually tempestuous state of his feelings.

The want of a guiding moral power within had at length a fatal result. On the 22nd of June, 1846, in the sixty- first year of his age, he was discovered lying dead on the floor of his studio, immediately in front of " Alfred the Great and the First British Jury " - a colossal picture on which he had been just engaged; his white hair saturated with blood, shed by his own hand. He had been in great pecuniary distress, which had been relieved by a donation from Sir Robert Peel of £50, the last sum he had received. The same generous benefactor obtained for his widow a pension of £50 a year, to which Lady Peel added a pension of £25 a year. Other friends came to the assistance of the family, among whom were Lord Carlisle, Mr. Justice Talfourd, and Count D'Orsay. A public subscription was opened, which produced £2,000 for their benefit.

A vigorous writer on art asks: - "Why is it that sculpture, generally confessed the noblest of the fine arts, has no real hold on the. thousands who are interested by painting? Why will these pages be less looked at than the rest of the book? The answer is not difficult; but so much unpleasant matter must come out in making it, that the writer enters on his task with the most real reluctance. Sculpture was first misdirected, then degraded, until the art fell to its present forlorn state, divided for the most part between mythology, sentimentalism, smoothness, and slovenliness. What it might be, even what it has been, are questions rarely asked. There seem no standard and no aim about it in the minds of artists or spectators; no one compares a statue with nature, or asks if her fine lines and surfaces have been slurred or rendered. The sculptor works, not like the painter, for the sympathy and interest of thousands, but for the personal fancy of a patron, or the conventional orders of a committee, turning out an angel or a Cupid with equal facility, and ready with a monument, which might be the study of a life, at a moment's notice. If sculpture appeals at all to popular sympathies, they are the sympathies of ignorance, for mechanical truth or mechanical grandeur, for sensual polish or spasmodic distortion, for 'picturesque' sculpture, or the facetious or 'sweetly pretty' style - everything, in short, which the art should shun - not for deep or tender feeling, truth to nature, freshness of invention, refinement in handling, loftiness in aim; for those qualities, in a word, without which the block in the mountain side is far more living than the statue. That so few look for such work, or will take the pains to understand it, is another grievous obstacle; and the writer hence wishes it to be remembered how strongly sculpture has been depressed by these powerful causes from without, dulling the invention and staying the hand of naturally gifted men, and filling the ranks with many who cannot rise beyond the manufacturer, or gain a success ruinous to their art by greedy haste or charlatan cleverness."

The substantial truth of this statement cannot be denied, and therefore there is not much to record of the progress of sculpture. Several of the most distinguished artists in this department, who flourished during the last two reigns, were mentioned in a former volume; and those that might now be added belong more properly, in the maturity of their fame, to the present reign. The taste for statuary, as well as for painting and music, has no doubt been extensively diffused among the people of late years; but during the period under review they can scarcely be said to have been popularised, as we shall find them to be hereafter, by means of exhibitions, concerts, and illustrated publications. Still, it was during that period that art gradually found greater freedom of action, and came to rely for support more upon the many than the few - more upon the nation than upon the government; and accordingly assimilated itself more to natural tastes, opening resources of pleasure and enjoyment that at one time, from notions now deemed false and pedantic, were not thought to be within its proper province. The invention and rapid development of photography within that period contributed largely to bring about this result. The founders of the British school of arts thought it essential that it should be taken under the especial care of government. Sir Joshua Reynolds earnestly inculcated this principle; Barry, Benjamin West, Stothard, Hilton, and Haydon exerted all their eloquence and influence to enforce it; and the last of these, when the only remaining representative of the old dogma, was at length borne down by bitter disappointment at finding that the benefits so confidently predicted by the trial which the government gave, in connection with the ornamentation of the Houses of Parliament, had not been realised.

The outcry against academies and public exhibitions which accompanied the clamour for government patronage has also gone down, and the most sensitive artist, however he may complain of unfairness in the hanging of his pictures, now admits that for the man of true merit the best chance of fame and fortune is to have his works exhibited before the public. Judges and juries may err; but, with all its drawbacks, no better mode of causing works of art to be properly appreciated has been yet devised. It brings to bear the principle of competition, which more than anything stimulates genius to excel.

" The extent and value of the various collections of modern art in London and the other emporiums of manufacture and merchandise are quite marvellous; and these and similar collections, for the most part, have been formed, not with a view of qualifying their possessors to be ranked as connoisseurs - though, certainly, the frequent exercise of judgment must lead to knowledge - but on the sound principle of making art the means of imparting to themselves and their friends pleasure of a highly intellectual kind; while, from the exercise of those large but keen views that enter so much into the mercantile character, the sums invested on art property are, in most cases, at any time capable of being turned to good account. Hence the great vigour displayed by art in this country, and the enormous patronage bestowed on it by the public within the last few' years, must be set down to the circumstance of its being now admitted by artists and the public generally to be a settled principle that, in a community socially and politically constituted like ours, art cannot and ought not to depend for encouragement on government patronage. Freed from the notion of government employment that obstructed so many of our painters some years ago, the artist can now give his whole attention to produce a work that will interest the public, from its attracting sympathy by touching the feelings, or by recalling and illustrating past events of importance, or by perpetuating momentous occurrences of the times, or by placing before the eye scenes of beauty and grandeur; and when this is done, he knows his efforts will not pass unnoticed, for, in the exhibitions now opened in all our large cities, his productions, if up to a certain standard, will be admitted, and brought before an assemblage eager to find out works evincing talent, and, by praising and purchasing them, to reward the artist by whom they are executed."

In architecture, the first place is due to the patriarch of the science, Sir John Soane, who was employed in erecting or improving numerous public edifices in the metropolis and elsewhere. In 1826 he built the Freemasons' Hall, in Great Queen Street, having been chosen grand superintendent of works to the fraternity of Freemasons some years before. In 1833 he completed the new State Paper Office. He was now in his eightieth year, and he retired from the active labours of the profession in which he had been engaged for sixty years, during forty-five of which he had been in the service of the Bank of England. A most munificent benefactor of his own art, he gave £500 towards the erection of the Freemasons' Hall, and the same amount to the Royal British Institution, Pall Mall. He subscribed £1,000 towards erecting the monument to the Duke of York; and he bequeathed his collection of works of ancient and modern art, valued at more than £50,000, in perpetuity to the nation, for the benefit of students in the arts, and especially for the advancement of architectural knowledge. At his death, which occurred January 20th, 1837, his splendid house and museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields became also the property of the public.

Sir Charles Barry was the architect of numerous buildings, but his greatest work was the New Palace of Westminster. When the old Houses of Parliament were burned down in 1834, amongst the numerous designs sent in, Mr. Barry's was selected, and he had the honour of constructing the magnificent temple of legislation, in which the most powerful body in the world debates and deliberates, upon the old, classic site, rendered sacred by so many events in our history. It has been disputed whether the style of the building is altogether worthy of the locality and the object, and whether grander and more appropriate effects might not have been produced by the vast sums expended. But it has been remarked in defence of the artist, that the design was made almost at the commencement of the revival of our national architecture, and that, this fact being considered, the impression will be one of admiration for the genius of the architect that conceived such a work; and the conviction will remain that, by it, Sir Charles Barry has done incalculable service to the progress of English art.

The two Pugins, father and son, had much to do with the revival of Gothic architecture among us. The father, Augustus, born in France in 1769, came over to London to practise his profession. In 1821-3 he published " Specimens of Gothic Architecture," selected from various ancient edifices in England; and in 1825-8 " Specimens of the Architectural Antiquities of Normandy." The year before his death, in 1832, he assisted his son in producing a work entitled " Gothic Ornaments," selected from various buildings in England and France. Augustus Welby Pugin, who was born in 1811, very soon eclipsed his father's fame. Having resolved to devote his time to the archeological study of style and symbolism in architectural ornaments, he settled down at Ramsgate in 1833, and carried his resolution into effect, both with pen and pencil. In 1835 he published designs for furniture, in the style of the fifteenth century; and designs for iron and brass work, in the style of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The year following appeared his "Designs for Gold and Silver Ornaments, and Ancient Timber Houses." His exclusive and ardent devotion to these studies, aided, no doubt, by his habits of seclusion, began to produce a morbid effect upon his intellect, which was shown in the overweening arrogance of a tract entitled " Contrasts; or, a Parallel between Ancient and Modern Architecture." This morbid tendency probably was increased by his becoming a member of the Roman Catholic church, in which a great field was opened for the display of his peculiar tastes, by the construction of buildings which he expected would shame the degenerate taste of the age, but which, too often, are found to be gloomy and inconvenient. His principal works are the Cathedral of St. George, Southwark, the Church of St. Barnabas, at Nottingham, the Cistercian Abbey of St. Bernard, in Leicestershire, the cathedral churches of Killarney and Enniscorthy, Alton Castle, and the model structure which he erected at his own place near Ramsgate. The Mediaeval Court in the Exhibition of 1851 was associated in all minds with the name of Pugin. In his case genius was too nearly allied to madness. The awful boundary was passed towards the close of his life, when his friends were obliged to confine him in a lunatic asylum, from which he returned only to die in 1852. He did not, however, live entirely in vain. The influence he exerted on the architecture of the age was not confined to the Roman Catholic body; it led, not only to the improvement of the churches of the Establishment, but also to those of the Dissenters of every denomination, who have extensively adopted the Gothic style in their places of worship, which, it must be confessed, present a striking contrast to the unsightly, barn-like structures that had been the fashion in past times, when it seemed to have been the study of architects to associate ecclesiastical buildings with all that is ugly, repulsive, and contrary to good taste.