and the Commonwealth. Vandyke seems to have brought
portrait-painting into fashion; and very likely the king's love of art
diffused a taste for it throughout the nation, and remotely suggested,
even to his enemies, to get their pictures painted. Elizabeth has
perpetuated her cold, thin visage on many canvases, and generally with
some fantasy of costume that makes her ridiculous to all time. There are
several of Mary of Scotland, none of which have a gleam of beauty; but
the stiff old brushes of these painters could not catch the beautiful.
Of all the older pictures, the only one that I took pleasure in looking
at was a portrait of Lord Deputy Falkland, by Vansomer, in James I.'s
time,--a very stately, full-length figure in white, looking out of the
picture as if he saw you. The catalogue says that this portrait
suggested an incident in Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto; but I do not
remember it.
I have a haunting doubt of the value of portrait-painting; that is to
say, whether it gives you a genuine idea of the person purporting to be
represented. I do not remember ever to have recognized a man by having
previously seen his portrait. Vandyke's pictures are full of grace and
nobleness, but they do not look like Englishmen,--the burly, rough,
wine-flushed and weather-reddened faces, and sturdy flesh and blood,
which we see even at the present day, when they must naturally have
become a good deal refined from either the country gentleman or the
courtier of the Stuarts' age.
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