xed upon your
man, come to me, and I will tell half-a-dozen, and we will go to them,
and you shall judge for yourself--and if you like miniature, there are
those who will make what is small great. What wonderful power Cooper had
in this way. I recently had in my hands a wondrous and marvellous
portrait of Andrew Marvell by him. The sturdy honest Andrew. This man
Cooper, had such wonderful largeness of style, of execution too, even in
his highest finished small oil pictures--such as in this of Andrew
Marvell. We had an age, certainly, of very bad taste, and it was not
extinct in the days of Sir Joshua and Gainsborough; nay, sometimes under
both of these, I am sorry to say, it was even made worse. The age of
shepherds and shepherdesses--in the case of Gainsborough, brought down to
downright rustics. This, of making the sitters affect to be what they
were not, was bad enough--and it was any thing but poetical. But it was
infinitely worse in the itinerants of the day--and is very well ridiculed
by Goldsmith, who lived much among painters, in his Vicar of Wakefield
and family sitting for the family picture. We have happily quite got out
of that folly. But we are getting into one of most unpoetical
pageantry--portrait likenesses. We have not seen yet a good portrait of
Wellington, and the Queen, or the Prince; and if they must send their
portraits to foreign courts, let them be advised to learn, if they know
not yet how, and we are told they do, to paint them themselves. Montaigne
tells us, that he was present one day at Bar-le-duc, when King Francis
the Second, for a memorial of Rene, King of Sicily, was presented with a
picture the king had drawn of himself. Some how or other, kings and
queens are apt to have too many trappings about them; and the man is
often chosen to paint, who paints velvets and satins best, and faces the
worst. That is the reason we have them so ill done; and even if the faces
are well painted, they are overpowered by the ostentation of the dress.
Now, the Venetian portrait-painters contrived to keep down the glare of
all this ornament, to make it even more rich, but not obtruding. I
remember seeing a portrait of our queen, where, in a large bonnet, her
face looked like a small pip in the midst of an orange. It would be a
good thing, too, if you could contrive to spend a week or so in company
with your painter before you sit, that he may know you. Many a
characteristic may he lose, for want of knowing th