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ing which the reader may already have been surprised at my silence, that of G. Cattermole. There are signs in his works of very peculiar gifts, and perhaps also of powerful genius; their deficiencies I should willingly attribute to the advice of ill-judging friends, and to the applause of a public satisfied with shallow efforts, if brilliant; yet I cannot but think it one necessary characteristic of all true genius to be misled by no such false fires. The Antiquarian feeling of Cattermole is pure, earnest, and natural; and I think his imagination originally vigorous, certainly his fancy, his grasp of momentary passion considerable, his sense of action in the human body vivid and ready. But no original talent, however brilliant, can sustain its energy when the demands upon it are constant, and all legitimate support and food withdrawn. I do not recollect in any, even of the most important of Cattermole's works, so much as a fold of drapery studied out from nature. Violent conventionalism

of light and shade, sketchy forms continually less and less developed, the walls and the faces drawn with the same stucco color, alike opaque, and all the shades on flesh, dress, or stone, laid in with the same arbitrary brown, forever tell the same tale of a mind wasting its strength and substance in the production of emptiness, and seeking, by more and more blindly hazarded handling, to conceal the weakness which the attempt at finish would betray.

This tendency of late, has been painfully visible in his architecture. Some drawings made several years ago for an annual illustrative of Scott's works were for the most part pure and finely felt (though irrelevant to our present subject, a fall of the Clyde should be noticed, admirable for breadth and grace of foliage, and for the bold sweeping of the water, and another subject of which I regret that I can only judge by the engraving; Glendearg at twilight-the monk Eustace chased by Christie of the Clint hill-which I think must have been one of the sweetest pieces of simple Border hill feeling ever painted)— and about that time his architecture, though always conventionally brown in the shadows, was generally well drawn, and always powerfully conceived.

Since then, he has been tending gradually through exaggeration to caricature, and vainly endeavoring to attain by inordi

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is only to be hed by purity of proportion and majesty of line. It has pained me deeply, to see an artist of so great original er indulging in childish fantasticism and exaggeration, and stituting for the serious and subdued work of legitimate The evil in imagination, monstre machicolations and colossal of view of cusps and crockets. While there is so much beautiful architecture daily in process of destruction ral subject. around us, I cannot but think it treason to imagine thing; at least, if we must have composition, let the design. he artist be such as the architect would applaud. But it is ly very grievous, that while our idle artists are helping their inventions by the fall of sponges on soiled paper, glorious dings with the whole intellect and history of centuries conrated in them, are suffered to fall into unrecorded ruin. A does not now pass in Italy without the destruction of some hty monument; the streets of all her cities echo to the mer, half of her fair buildings lie in separate stones about places of their foundation; would not time be better spent elling us the truth about these perishing remnants of majestic ight, than in perpetuating the ill-digested fancies of idle rs? It is, I repeat, treason to the cause of art for any man vent, unless he invents something better than has been ined before, or something differing in kind. There is room ugh for invention in the pictorial treatment of what exists. re is no more honorable exhibition of imaginative power, than he selection of such place, choice of such treatment, introtion of such incident, as may produce a noble picture without ation from one line of the actual truth; and such I believe e, indeed, in the end the most advantageous, as well as the t modest direction of the invention, for I recollect no single ance of architectural composition by any men except such as nardo or Veronese, who could design their architecture oughly before they painted it, which has not a look of ity and absurdity. The best landscapes and the best archiural studies have been views; and I would have the artist shame to himself in the exact degree in which he finds himobliged in the production of his picture to lose any, even of smallest parts or most trivial hues which bear a part in the

great impression made by the reality. The difference between the drawing of the architect and artist* ought never to be, as it now commonly is, the difference between lifeless formality and witless license; it ought to be between giving the mere lines. and measures of a building, and giving those lines and measures with the impression and soul of it besides. All artists should be ashamed of themselves when they find they have not the power of being true; the right wit of drawing is like the right wit of conversation, not hyperbole, not violence, not frivolity, only well expressed, laconic truth.

Among the members of the Academy, we have at present only one professedly architectural draughtsman of note, David Roberts, whose reputation is probably farther extended on the

$35. Works of David Roberts:

grace.

continent than that of any other of our artists, extheir fidelity and cept Landseer. I am not certain, however, that I have any reason to congratulate either of my countrymen upon this their European estimation; for I think it exceedingly probable that in both instances it is exclusively based on their defects; and in the case of Mr. Roberts, in particular, there has of late appeared more ground for it than is altogether desirable in a smoothness and over-finish of texture which bears dangerous fellowship with the work of our Gallic neighbors.

The fidelity of intention and honesty of system of Roberts have, however, always been meritorious; his drawing of architecture is dependent on no unintelligible lines, or blots, or substituted types: the main lines of the real design are always there, and its hollowness and undercuttings given with exquisite feeling; his sense of solidity of form is very peculiar, leading him to dwell with great delight on the roundings of edges and angles; his execution is dexterous and delicate, singularly so in oil, and his sense of chiaroscuro refined. But he has never done himself justice, and suffers his pictures to fall below the rank they should assume, by the presence of several marring characters, which I shall name, because it is perfectly in his power to avoid them. In looking over the valuable series of drawing of the Holy Land, which we owe to Mr. Roberts, we cannot but be

* Indeed there should be no such difference at all. Every architect ought to be an artist; every very great artist is necessarily an architect.

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azed to find how frequently it has happened that there was ething very white immediately in the foreground, and someng very black exactly behind it. The same thing happens petually with Mr. Roberts's pictures; a white column is always ing out of a blue mist, or a white stone out of a green pool, white monument out of a brown recess, and the artifice is always concealed with dexterity. This is unworthy of so ful a composer, and it has destroyed the impressiveness as I as the color of some of his finest works. It shows a poverty onception, which appears to me to arise from a deficient it of study. It will be remembered that of the sketches for work, several times exhibited in London, every one was exeed in the same manner, and with about the same degree of pletion being all of them accurate records of the main itectural lines, the shapes of the shadows, and the remnants rtificial color, obtained, by means of the same grays, throughand of the same yellow (a singularly false and cold though venient color) touched upon the lights. As far as they went, hing could be more valuable than these sketches, and the lic, glancing rapidly at their general and graceful effects, Id hardly form anything like an estimate of the endurance. determination which must have been necessary in such a nate to obtain records so patient, entire, and clear, of details nultitudinous as (especially) the hieroglyphics of the Egyptemples; an endurance which perhaps only artists can estie, and for which we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Roberts t difficult to discharge. But if these sketches were all that artist brought home, whatever value is to be attached to them tatements of fact, they are altogether insufficient for the proing of pictures. I saw among them no single instance of a nright study; of a study in which the real hues and shades ky and earth had been honestly realized or attempted; nor › there, on the other hand, any of those invaluable-blottedminutes works which record the unity of some single and nificent impressions. Hence the pictures which have been ted from these sketches have been as much alike in their t of impressiveness as the sketches themselves, and have r borne the living aspect of the Egyptian light; it has always impossible to say whether the red in them (not a pleasant

one) was meant for hot sunshine or for red sandstone-their power has been farther destroyed by the necessity the artist seems to feel himself under of eking out their effect by points of bright foreground color, and thus we have been encumbered with caftans, pipes, scymetars, and black hair, when all that we wanted was a lizard, or an ibis. It is perhaps owing to this want of earnestness in study rather than to deficiency of perception, that the coloring of this artist is commonly untrue. Some time ago when he was painting Spanish subjects, his habit was to bring out his whites in relief from transparent bituminous browns, which though not exactly right in color, were at any rate warm and agreeable; but of late his color has become cold, waxy, and opaque, and in his deep shades he sometimes permits himself the use of a violent black which is altogether unjustifiable. A picture of Roslin Chapel exhibited in 1844, showed this defect in the recess to which the stairs descend, in an extravagant degree; and another exhibited in the British Institution, instead of showing the exquisite crumbling and lichenous texture of the Roslin stone, was polished to as vapid smoothness as ever French historical picture. The general feebleness of the effect is increased by the insertion of the figures as violent pieces of local color unaffected by the light and unblended with the hues around them, and bearing evidence of having been painted from models or draperies in the dead light of a room instead of sunshine. On these deficiencies I should not have remarked, but that by honest and determined painting from and of nature, it is perfectly in the power of the artist to supply them; and it is bitterly to be regretted that the accuracy and elegance of his work should not be aided by that genuineness of hue and effect which can only be given by the uncompromising effort to paint not a fine picture but an impressive and known verity.

The two artists whose works it remains for us to review, are men who have presented us with examples of the treatment of every kind of subject, and among the rest with portions of architecture which the best of our exclusively architectural draughtsmen could not excel.

The frequent references made to the works of Clarkson Stanfield throughout the subsequent pages render it less necessary for

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