Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians Yet there, sometimes, are Nature's tints despis'd, 309 As scathing and as personally vituperative as a modern French journalist, when he comes to the detested Northcote, Peter Pindar does not leave untouched even Reynolds himself, yet, on the whole, shows for his art an unfeigned, and it may be assumed, a disinterested admiration : "Yet, Reynolds, let me fairly say, With pride I pour the lyric lay To most things by thy able hand exprest Compared to other painting men, Thou art an angel to a wren !—" Of Wilson he says:— . . old red-nosed Wilson's art By Britain left in poverty to pine. But, honest Wilson, never mind; Thou start'st at my prophetic rhymes; Don't be impatient for those times, Wait till thou hast been dead a hundred year." At this very time Wilson was dying at the village of Llanberry in Denbighshire, in a cottage to which he had succeeded on the death of a brother, just in time to find in it a peaceful refuge for the few remaining months of his miserable life of constantly-renewed struggle and privation. His noble art had never succeeded in conquering for itself an assured place in the estimation even of the art-lovers of the time, and he was misunderstood, or under-estimated, even by gentle, equitable Sir Joshua; not out of hostility, of which he has been foolishly accused, but manifestly out of lack of sympathy. Though, since the exhibition of the "Niobe" in Spring Gardens, in 1760, his position in the front rank of landscape painters had not been seriously denied, liberal patrons were few and far between, his canvases exhibited at the Royal Academy remained as often as not unsold, and he was compelled to hawk about his sketches to dealers at prices so trifling that one must blush to quote them. The best proof of his failure to win popular favour is to be found in the circumstance that, although one of the original members of the Royal Academy, he exhibited there in all only thirty-one pictures-from 1769 to 1780 inclusive. Yet, while his landscapes lack, to a certain extent, the witching colour, the easy breadth, the seductive charm of Gainsborough's, the best of them stand on a level far above that on which we must place the performances, in this branch, of the more popular artist. Notwithstanding the Claude-like classicality of Wilson's conceptions, and his generalised treatment of nature, he showed an incomparably deeper knowledge of her secrets, a far more serious skill in dealing with problems of light and atmospheric effect, than did the more superficial if, to the casual observer, more attractive artist, to whom has somewhat too lightly been accorded the first place among the English landscape-painters of the eighteenth century. Northcote relates that at a meeting of the Artists' Club, Sir Joshua arrived, having just seen a fine landscape by Gainsborough, and in describing it with enthusiasm to the members, wound up by saying: "Gainsborough is certainly the first landscape-painter now in Europe." Whereupon Wilson, who, unnoticed by Sir Joshua, was present, burst out irefully: "Well, Sir Joshua, and it is my opinion that he is also the greatest portrait-painter at this time in Europe." Sir Joshua, thus rebuked, would appear to have felt, not anger, but regret, and to have frankly apologised, as was the fashion in those days, for making the observation in Wilson's presence. Fuseli, who had come to the front in 1780 with "Satan starting from the Touch of Ithuriel's Spear" and "Jason appearing before Pelias,” achieved his first popular success at this exhibition of 1782 with "The Nightmare," rendered so familiar by J. R. Smith's mezzotint. This portentous composition was the unfortunate result, like most of the Swiss painter's most characteristic productions, of his untiring study of Michelangelo, for whom he professed a passionate worship in excess even of Sir Joshua's platonic love. Even here, however, as well as later on in the contributions to Boydell's Shakespeare's Gallery, and later still, in the ill-starred Milton Gallery-the canvases making up which were entirely furnished by Fuseli-the painter exhibits imaginativeness of a quality not exactly common in the terre-à-terre eighteenth century. This has, unfortunately, to force its way to the surface through the grotesque exaggerations of his style and the livid monotony of his colouring, now practically reduced by time to a monochrome, but which must always have been uninviting in the extreme. No better example of his genuine powers of invention, marred as are their results by grotesqueness and overreaching ambition, is at present to be found than the fanciful "Titania and Bottom," once in the Boydell Gallery, and now on the great staircase of the National Gallery. It would be interesting to make out the exact artistic relations existing between the three men who, at this period, possessed the largest measure of this peculiar imaginativeness-Fuseli, Flaxman, and Blake; to show the influences exercised over each other by these friends and fellow-workers in fields of art contiguous, if not absolutely identical. Other sitters at this time were Wedgwood, the head of the great potteries at Etruria; the Burkes, father and son, and the fashionable beauty, Mrs Musters. Sir Joshua had already painted her in 1777, shortly after her marriage, in a full-length which is at Petworth; and again in the celebrated full-length in which she personates Hebe, the date for which in the pocket-book is May 1780. The picture now painted may possibly have been the halflength, in which the "reigning toast of the day"—as Miss Burney describes her-appears in a low-necked dress of light-coloured satin, with her hair dressed high and some curls falling over her shoulders. This is now in the collection of Sir Charles Tennant, and was by him contributed to the Old Masters in 1793. Miss Burney, whose vogue in the worlds of literature and fashion is very shortly to be enhanced by the publication-in July of this year (1782)—of her second novel, Cecilia, or the Memoirs of an Heiress, has left a lively account of one of Sir Joshua's June dinner-parties at his Richmond villa. Here she meets Gibbon, the Dean of St Asaph's and his daughter, the handsome selfpossessed Miss Shipley, young Mr Burke, and, more interesting to her than any of them, Burke himself, whom she belauds in such romantic, young-lady fashion, that she does not succeed in characterising him with all her usual felicity of touch. Among other sitters was the naval hero, Captain Sir Joshua sits to Gainsborough 313 Jervis, and there was also a commission from the Duke of Rutland to paint a posthumous portrait of his brother, Lord Robert Manners, who commanded the Resolution in Rodney's action, and died of his wounds on his way home. Among the politicians were Dunning-now metamorphosed into Lord Ashburton-Fox, and Dundas. Mrs Abington reappeared, too, after a long interval, and the lovely Duchess of Rutland posed for a portrait, which is most probably the one burnt in the great fire at Belvoir Castle. To this or the preceding year must belong one of the most universally popular of the Reynolds portraits of children and deservedly so, in virtue of its genuine naïveté, its spontaneity and truth of movement, and its high-bred grace-the "Lady Catherine Pelham-Clinton feeding Chickens," now in the collection of Lord Radnor at Longford Castle. There is no trace of the picture having been exhibited, unless it be the anonymous "A Girl" which Walpole admired in the Academy of this year, but it was in 1782 mezzotinted by J. R. Smith. It should by no means be confounded with the equally well-known " Mrs Pelham feeding her Chickens," painted as far back as 1770, and which the Earl of Yarborough lent to the Reynolds Exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, where its reappearance, after undergoing a too drastic process of cleaning, excited dismay even among those most accustomed to note the progressive ravages of time-and time's ally, the picture-restorer-in Sir Joshua's canvases. On Sunday, the 3rd of November, Sir Joshua actually gave a sitting to Gainsborough for a portrait, which, had it been completed, it would have been infinitely interesting to compare with the President's numerous versions of his own physiognomy. But it never was completed, for, after this sitting, which was to have been followed by another |