though, like other human actions, it is often
complicated with pride, yet even such pride is more laudable than that
by which palaces are covered with pictures, that, however excellent,
neither imply the owner's virtue, nor excite it.

Genius is chiefly exerted in historical pictures; and the art of the
painter of portraits is often lost in the obscurity of his subject. But
it is in painting as in life; what is greatest is not always best. I
should grieve to see Reynolds transfer to heroes and to goddesses, to
empty splendour and to airy fiction, that art which is now employed in
diffusing friendship, in reviving tenderness, in quickening the
affections of the absent, and continuing the presence of the dead[1].

Yet in a nation great and opulent there is room, and ought to be
patronage, for an art like that of painting through all its diversities;
and it is to be wished, that the reward now offered for an historical
picture may excite an honest emulation, and give beginning to an English
school.

It is not very easy to find an action or event that can be efficaciously
represented by a painter.

He must have an action not successive but instantaneous; for the time of
a picture is a single moment. For this reason, the death of Hercules
cannot well be painted, though, at the first view, it flatters the
imagination with very glittering ideas: the gloomy mountain, overhanging
the sea, and covered with trees, some bending to the wind, and some torn
from their roots by the raging hero; the violence with which he rends
from his shoulders the envenomed garment; the propriety with which his
muscular nakedness may be displayed; the death of Lycas whirled from the
promontory; the gigantick presence of Philoctetes; the blaze of the
fatal pile, which the deities behold with grief and terrour from the
sky.

All these images fill the mind, but will not compose a picture, because
they cannot be united in a single moment[2]. Hercules must have rent his
flesh at one time, and tossed Lycas into the air at another; he must
first tear up the trees, and then lie down upon the pile.

The action must be circumstantial and distinct. There is a passage in
the Iliad which cannot be read without strong emotions. A Trojan prince,
seized by Achilles in the battle, falls at his feet, and in moving terms
supplicates for life. "How can a wretch like thee," says the haughty
Greek, "intreat to live, when thou knowest that the time must come when
A