nce the harmony of his general
tones--upon which, as the subject required them, he laid his more
vivid colours. I believe the best painters have used the simplest
palette--the fewest colours. Our own Wilson is said to have replied to
one who told him a new brown was discovered, "I am sorry for it." But
by far the most injurious of all our pigments is asphaltum; it always
gives rather rottenness than depth.

[11] Mr Etty has written a letter, which has been lithographed and
widely circulated, bearing so directly upon this subject, that I
cannot refrain from noticing it. And this I do, because the authority
of a Royal Academician, and one, I believe, selected to be judge in
the distribution of the prizes in Westminster Hall Exhibition, cannot
but have an influence, both with the public and the rising professors
of the art.

He speaks of his high purposes in his choice of the subject of Joan of
Arc and other pictures, and the process by which those purposes were
brought to completion. He tells us, that in his enthusiasm he visited,
as a pilgrim, the spot where the heroic and tragic scenes of his
subject were enacted. He presumes that the houses there are now pretty
much what they were then; and he has thought an exact representation
of them necessary to historical truth, and he has accordingly
introduced them.

Enthusiasm is good, but it should in this, as in all human concerns of
importance, be under the guidance of strong principles. Now here the
principles of historical painting, which separate that great act from
the lower and imitative, are violated.

Had an eyewitness described as he felt the event which Mr Etty has
undertaken to paint, would he have told of or portrayed to the mind's
eye, and prominently, the very houses, with all their real accidents
of material and colours, so that, were a tile off a roof, your
sympathy must be made to stay for the noticing it?

This precision is not for historical painting, for it is in antagonism
with poetry, (which is feeling high-wrought, by imagination.) It is
wrong in colouring as in design. With regard to the first, the
question should be asked--How would memory have coloured it to the
spectator in his after vision? How would imagination colour it in the
page of history? Details of this kind are sure to vulgarise a subject,
and by their little truths destroy the greater--the heroism, the
devotion--to which the eye would most naturally have been riveted, so
as to have