ner and effect possessed
"to an unexampled degree of excellence;" but "the sacrifice which he
made, to this ornament of our art, was too great." We confess we do not
understand Sir Joshua, nor can we reconcile "the _heavy_ negligence"
with this "lightness of manner." Mr Burnet, in one of his notes,
compares Wilson with Gainsborough; he appears to give the preference to
Wilson--why does he not compare Gainsborough with Sir Joshua himself?
the rivalry should have been in portrait. There is a long note upon Sir
Joshua's remarks upon Wilson's "Niobe." We are not surprised at
Cunningham's "Castigation." He did not like Sir Joshua, and could not
understand nor value his character. This is evident in his Life of the
President. Cunningham must have had but an ill-educated classic eye when
he asserted so grandiloquently,--"He rose at once from the tame
insipidity of common scenery into natural grandeur and magnificence; his
streams seem all abodes for nymphs, his hills are fit haunts for the
muses, and his temples worthy of gods,"--a passage, we think, most
worthy the monosyllable commonly used upon such occasions by the manly
and simple-minded Mr Burchell. That Sir Joshua occasionally transgressed
in his wanderings into mythology, it would be difficult to deny; nor was
it his only transgression from his legitimate ground, as may be seen in
his "Holy Family" in the National Gallery. But we doubt if the critique
upon his "Mrs Siddons" is quite fair. The chair and the footstool may
not be on the cloud, a tragic and mysterious vapour reconciling the
bodily presence of the muse with the demon and fatal ministers of the
drama that attend her. Though Sir Joshua's words are here brought
against him, it is without attention to their application in his
critique, which condemned their form and character as not historical nor
voluminous--faults that do not attach to the clouds, if clouds they must
be in the picture (the finest of Sir Joshua's works) of Mrs Siddons as
the Tragic Muse. It is not our business to enter upon the supposed fact,
that Sir Joshua was jealous of Wilson; the one was a polished, the other
perhaps a somewhat coarse man. We have only to see if the criticism be
just. In this Discourse Sir Joshua has the candour to admit, that there
were at one time jealousies between him and Gainsborough; there may have
been between him and Wilson, but, at all events, we cannot take a just
criticism as a proof of it, or we must convict him