There is
supposed to be about a third of the good pictures here which England
contains; and it is said that the Tory nobility and gentry have
contributed to it much more freely and largely than the Whigs. The Duke
of Devonshire, for instance, seems to have sent nothing. Mr. Ticknor,
the Spanish historian, whom I met yesterday, observed that we should not
think quite so much of this Exhibition as the English do after we have
been to Italy, although it is a good school in which to gain a
preparatory knowledge of the different styles of art. I am glad to hear
that there are better things still to be seen. Nevertheless, I should
suppose that certain painters are better represented here than they ever
have been or will be elsewhere. Vandyke, certainly, can be seen nowhere
else so well; Rembrandt and Rubens have satisfactory specimens; and the
whole series of English pictorial achievement is shown more perfectly
than within any other walls. Perhaps it would be wise to devote myself
to the study of this latter, and leave the foreigners to be studied on
their own soil. Murillo can hardly have done better than in the pictures
by him which we see here. There is nothing of Raphael's here that is
impressive. Titian has some noble portraits, but little else that I care
to see. In all these old masters, Murillo only excepted, it is very
rare, I must say, to find any trace of natural feeling and passion; and I
am weary of naked goddesses, who never had any real life and warmth in
the painter's imagination,--or, if so, it was the impure warmth of an
unchaste woman, who sat for him.
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