There is an old, fat portrait of Gervoyse
Holles, in a buff-coat,--a coarse, hoggish, yet manly man. The painter
is unknown; but I honor him, and Gervoyse Holles too,--for one was
willing to be truly rendered, and the other dared to do it. It seems to
be the aim of portrait-painters generally, especially of those who have
been most famous, to make their pictures as beautiful and noble as can
anywise consist with retaining the very slightest resemblance to the
person sitting to them. They seldom attain even the grace and beauty
which they aim at, but only hit some temporary or individual taste.
Vandyke, however, achieved graces that rise above time and fashion, and
so did Sir Peter Lely, in his female portraits; but the doubt is, whether
the works of either are genuine history. Not more so, I suspect, than
the narrative of a historian who should seek to make poetry out of the
events which he relates, rejecting those which could not possibly be thus
idealized.
I observe, furthermore, that a full-length portrait has seldom face
enough; not that it lacks its fair proportion by measurement, but the
artist does not often find it possible to make the face so intellectually
prominent as to subordinate the figure and drapery. Vandyke does this,
however. In his pictures of Charles I., for instance, it is the
melancholy grace of the visage that attracts the eye, and it passes to
the rest of the composition only by an effort.
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