and considered as they are to be found in the works of the best masters, whether in paintings or drawings, to recommend the art. But this is such an idea of it as it would be of a man to say, he has a graceful and noble form, and performs many bodily actions with great strength and agility, without taking his speech and his reason into the

account.

The great and chief ends of painting are to raise and improve nature, and to communicate ideas, not only those which we may receive otherwise, but such as without this art could not possibly be communicated, whereby mankind is advanced higher in the rational state, and made better, and that in a way easy, expeditious, and delightful. The business of painting is not only to represent nature, and to make the best choice of it, but to raise and improve i from what is commonly or even rarely seen, to what never was, or will be in fact, though we may easily conceive it might be.

I will add but one article more in praise of this noble, delightful, and useful art, and that is this:-the treasure of a nation consists in the pure productions of nature, or those managed, or put together and improved, by art. Now there is no artificer whatever that produces so valuable a thing from such inconsiderable materials of Nature's furnishing as the painter it is next to creation. This country is many thousands of pounds the richer for Van Dyck's hand, whose works are as current money as gold in most parts of Europe, and this with an inconsiderable expense of the productions of Nature. What a treasure then have all the great masters here and elsewhere given to the world!—Richardson. *

* I have quoted largely from Richardson's works on painting, not only because they are little known and I believe out of print, but because, with all their faults of style, bad grammar, and quaint expressions, they are written with an earnestness and elevation of feeling, a fulness

III. When such a man as Plato speaks of painting as only an imitative art, and that our pleasure proceeds from observing and acknowledging the truth of the imitation, I think he misleads us by a partial theory. It is in this poor, partial, and so far false view of the art, that Cardinal Bembo has chosen to distinguish even Raphael himself, whom our enthusiasm honours with the name of divine. The same sentiment is adopted by Pope in his epitaph on Sir Godfrey Kneller; and he turns the panegyric solely on imitation, as it is a sort of deception. Though the best critics must always have exploded this strange idea, yet I know that there is a disposition towards a perpetual recurrence to it, on account of its simplicity and superficial plausibility. The truth is, painting is not to be considered as an imitation, operating by deception; so far from it that it is, and ought to be, in many points of view, and strictly speaking, no imitation at all of external nature. Perhaps it ought to be as far removed from the vulgar idea of imitation as the refined civilized state in which we live is removed from a gross state of nature; and those who have not cultivated their imagina

of conviction, which would win toleration for greater faults. Sir Joshua Reynolds once declared that the perusal of Richardson's book had made him a painter.

Jonathan Richardson was born in 1665, and died in 1745: he was a portrait-painter of no particular merit, though Walpole calls him the best painter of a head that had appeared in this country. In 1719 he published “ An Essay on the Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting;" and "An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur." At this time art and all criticism relating to it were at the very lowest ebb, and the enthusiasm of Richardson, and the just and pure principles of art laid down in his books, were little understood and appreciated, were even met by open ridicule, while that puppy Jervas was hymned into immortality by his friend Pope, and Smollet, Young, Fielding, Sterne, made the taste for art and pictures a favourite subject for banter and satire. Had it been a fashion, it had perished; but it was founded in truth, and it survives.

tions, which the majority of mankind certainly have not, may be said, in regard to the arts, to continue in this state of nature. Such men will always prefer imitation to that excellence which is addressed to another faculty that they do not possess; but these are not the persons to whom a painter is to look, any more than a judge of morals and manners ought to refer controverted points upon those subjects to the opinions of people taken from the banks of the Ohio or from New Holland.

It is the lowest style only of art, whether of painting, poetry, or music, that may be said, in the vulgar sense, to be naturally pleasing; the higher efforts of those arts we know by experience do not affect minds wholly uncultivated. This refined taste is the consequence of education and habit: we are born only with a capacity of entertaining this refinement.

If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art, there is no doubt, indeed, but the minute painter would be more apt to succeed: but it is not the eye, it is the mind, which the painter of genius desires to address; nor will he waste a moment upon those smaller objects which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart.-Leave it to the vulgar to suppose that those are the best pictures which are most likely to deceive the spectator.-Sir J. Reynolds.

IV.—If in a picture the story be well chosen and finely told, at least, if not improved ;-if it fill the mind with noble and instructive ideas, I will not scruple to say it is an excellent picture, though the drawing be as much short of precise correctness as that of Correggio, Titian, or Rubens; the colouring as disagreeable even as that of Polidore, Battista Franco, or Michael Angelo: nay, though there is no other goodness but that of colouring and the pencil, I will venture to call it a good picture-that is, that it is good in these re

spects-in the first instance, here is a fine story artfully communicated to my imagination, not by speech nor writing, but in a manner preferable to either of them in the other, there is a beautiful and delightful object, and a fine piece of workmanship, to say no more of it. There never was a picture in the world without some faults, and very rarely is there one to be found which is not notoriously defective in some of the parts of painting. In judging of its goodness, one should pronounce it such in proportion to the number of the good qualities it has, and their degrees of goodness. I will add that, as a philosopher, one should only consider the excellency we see, and enjoy that, as being all belonging to it; no more regretting what it has not, nor thinking of it so much as to diminish our pleasure in that it has, than we do want of taste in a rose, speech in a picture of Van Dyck, or life in one of Raphael.-Richardson.

V. He that paints a history well must be able to write it: he must be thoroughly informed of all things relating to it, and conceive it clearly and nobly in his mind, or he can never express it upon the canvas. He must have a solid judgment with a lively imagination, and know what figures and what incidents ought to be brought in, and what every one should say and think. A painter therefore of this class must possess all the good qualities requisite to an historian, unless it be language, which, however, seldom fails of being beautiful when the thing is clearly and well conceived. But all this is not sufficient to him; he must moreover know the forms of the arms, the habits, customs, buildings, &c., of the age and the country in which the thing was transacted more exactly than the other need to know them; and as his business is not to write the history of a few years, or of one age or country, but of all ages and all nations, as occasion offers, he must have a proportionable fund of ancient and modern learning of all kinds.

As to paint a history a man ought to have the main qualities of a good historian, and something more, he must yet go higher, and have the talents requisite to a good poet, the rules for the conduct of a picture being much the same with those to be observed in writing a poem; and painting, as well as poetry, requiring an elevation of genius beyond what pure historical narration does. The painter must imagine his figures to think, speak, and act, as a poet should do in a tragedy or epic poem, especially if his subject be a fable or an allegory. If a poet has, moreover, the care of the diction and versification, the painter has a task perhaps at least equivalent to that, even after he has well conceived the thing (over and above what is merely mechanical, and other particulars which shall be spoken to presently), and that is, the knowledge of the nature and effects of colours, lights, shadows, reflections, &c.; and as his business is not to compose one Iliad or one Æneid only, but perhaps many, he must be furnished with a vast stock of poetical as well as historical learning.

Besides all this, it is absolutely necessary to a historypainter that he understands anatomy, osteology, geometry, perspective, architecture, and many other sciences, which the historian or poet has no occasion to know.

I thought fit to do justice to the art of painting in the first place; and, before I entered upon the rules to be observed in the conduct of a picture, to tell the painter what qualities he himself ought to have: to which I will add (but not as the least considerable), that, as his profession is honourable, he should render himself worthy of it by excelling in it, and by avoiding all low and sordid actions and conversations, all base and criminal passions. His business is to express great and noble sentiments; let him make them familiar to him, and his own, and form himself into as bright a character as any he can draw. His art is of a vast