recovered glories of Sir Joshua! They who believed themselves best acquainted with his works, and entitled by their knowledge to speak of them with enthusiasm, felt how much of that knowledge they had forgotten; how inadequate to their merits was the praise they had bestowed. The prejudices, so injurious to modern art, were gone. Time seemed to have advanced the future with double speed, and presenting truth, invested her with new radiance! The few remaining competitors and scholars of this great artist saw him then with the eyes of posterity, and beheld, in their own narrow period, the sure stability of his fame.

"It is singular that the judgment, the unpretending sense and manly simplicity, so generally acknowledged to have marked the character of Sir Joshua, should have been impugned only on those opinions of Art, which seem to have been the most deliberately formed, and were enforced by him with parental zeal, as his last remembrance to this Academy. Sufficient proof of the sincerity of his admiration of Michael Angelo had previously existed in the actions of some of his finest groups having been taken from him; but we want no other evidence of its truth, than his picture of Mrs. Siddons— a work of the highest epic character, and indisputably the finest female portrait in the world.

“The link that united him to Michael Angelo was the sense of ideal greatness-the noblest of all perceptions. It is this sublimity of thought that marks the first-rate genius; this impelling fancy, which has nowhere its defined form, yet everywhere its image; and while pursuing excellence too perfect to be attained, creates new beauty that cannot be surpassed! It belongs only to the finer sagacity, which sees the essence of the beautiful or grand, divested of incongruous detail; and whose influence on the works of the great President is equally apparent in the calm, firm defender of the national Poet, as in the dying Queen of Virgil, or the grandeur of the Tragic Muse.

"To a mind so enlarged and liberal as Sir Joshua's, who decried not the value of an art that gave the world its Shakspeare, and in whose society a Garrick and a Kemble lived in grateful intercourse with Mr. Burke and Dr. Johnson, we may well imagine how gratifying were the contemplation and progress of that divine work; and allowing much to anticipate fame, we may equally believe, that part of the noble purpose was, protection of the genius he admired, to affix to

passing excellence an imperishable name; extend the justice. withheld by the limits of her art; and in the beauty of that unequalled countenance, fixed in the pale abstraction of some lofty vision, whose 'bodiless creations' are crowding on her view and leave in suspended action the majestic form, to verify the testimony of tradition, and, by the mental grandeur that invests her, record in resistless evidence the enchantment

of her power.

"That the works, Gentlemen, of this illustrious man should have the strongest influence upon you cannot be matter of surprise that the largest style of painting that perhaps is known, should captivate the scholar as it has charmed the teacher, is the most natural result that could have been produced in minds of sensibility and taste; but let it not mislead them. If they determine to make the labours of Sir Joshua their example, let them first examine by what only means their excellence was acquired.

:

"His early pictures bear evidence of the utmost delicacy of finishing; the most careful imitation. The sensitiveness of taste, which probably from boyhood he possessed, could never have permitted him to enter into the mean details of Denner; or content himself with the insipidity of Cornelius Jansen but in mere finishing he was inferior to neither; and the history of the greatest masters is but one. Truth is the Key of Art, as Knowledge is of Power: within the portals you have ample range, but each apartment must be opened by it. The noblest work that perhaps was ever yet projected, the loftiest in conception, and executed with an unequalled breadth, is the ceiling of Michael Angelo: the miniatures of Julio Clovio are not more finished than his studies.

"On you, Gentlemen, who, with the Candidates of this evening, are entering on the first department of the Art, the conduct of Sir Joshua should act with treble force. Mr. Burke says of him: In painting portraits he appeared not to be raised upon that platform, but, to descend to it from a higher sphere!' To that sphere let his example guide you, and it will lead you to the highest to Correggio, to Titian, to Raffaelle, to Michael Angelo! To those divine men, in whose presence, (to use his own language,) 'it is impossible to think or invent in a mean manner; and by the contemplation of whose works a state of mind is acquired, that is disposed to receive those ideas of art only which relish of grandeur or simplicity.'"

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, R.A.

BIRTHPLACE AND PARENTAGE OF GAINSBOROUGH.

THIS eminent painter, who, with Richard Wilson, laid the foundation of our School of Landscape, was born at Sudbury, in Suffolk, in 1727,-the day or the month is not recorded. He was baptised at the Independent Meeting-house of the town, on May 14th in the same year. The house in which he was born was originally the Black Horse inn, and was one of the picturesque dwellings, with lofty gables and overhanging storeys, of the ancient town of Southburgh, as Sudbury was originally named. Here the Flemish weavers settled in the reign of Edward II., and taught the English their art. They excelled in making "sags" and crapes; and Gainsborough's father is described at different periods, as a milliner, clothier, and crape-maker: he also introduced into Sudbury the shroud trade from Coventry. He was a fine old man, and in full dress, wore a sword, and was an adroit fencer. He had a family of nine children, of whom Thomas was the youngest of five sons. The painter's mother was an accomplished woman, and excelled in flower-painting; she affectionately encouraged her son Thomas in his boyish attempts at drawing, and she lived to witness his high artistic fame.

The ancient buildings of Southburgh, doubtless, had the effect of forming young Gainsborough's taste; and he told Philip Thicknesse, his first patron, that "there was not a picturesque clump of trees, nor a single tree of any beauty, nor even hedge-row, stem, or post" in or around his native town, which was not, from his earliest years, treasured in his memory. Two of his brothers were men of mechanical genius : one, "Scheming Jack," contrived a pair of wings to fly with, a self-rocking cradle, and a singing cuckoo; and Humphry

Gainsborough constructed a working model of a steam-engine, which he unsuspiciously showed to a stranger said to have been connected with Watt as an engineer.*

*

At ten years old, Thomas Gainsborough made sketches of trees, rocks, shepherds, ploughmen, and pastoral scenes, while at the Grammar School in Sudbury, then kept by his uncle ; and he usually passed his holidays in rambling through the rich hanging woods, and sketching their majestic oaks and elms, winding glades, and sunny nooks. He is also said to have cut a caricature of his master upon the school-wall; and sketched a peasant who came to rob an orchard, which effort was preserved for many years, and ultimately made into a finished painting, as "Tom Pear-tree's Portrait." To obtain a holiday, he once forged the written request of his father, who muttered, "Tom will come to be hanged"; but, on learning that Tom employed the holiday in sketching, his parent. with very opposite feelings, exclaimed, "The boy will be a genius." He had little technical instruction, or graphical education. It has been truly said of him that "Nature was his teacher, and the woods of Suffolk were his Academy."

GAINSBOROUGH COMES TO LONDON.

At the age of fifteen, Gainsborough left Sudbury for the metropolis here he resided with a silversmith, who introduced him to Gravelot, the engraver, from whom he learned etching and aqua-tint. He then obtained admission to the Academy in St. Martin's-lane; and next associated with Hayman, from whom, however, he learned little of painting, and less of morality. Within three years, he hired rooms in Hatton Garden, and began to paint landscapes, which he sold to picture-dealers; and portraits at from three to five guineas. He also modelled excellently, cows, dogs, and horses: a cast in the plaster-shops, of an old horse modelled by Gainsborough, obtained conventional reputation. This employment, however, proved so unprofitable, that Gainsborough packed up his canvas and colours, and returned to Sudbury, after four years' absence.

*There is in the British Museum a curious sun-dial with "Humphry Gainsborough" deeply cut in it; he anticipated the contrivance of fireproof boxes, and received the Society of Arts premium of 50l. for a tide-mill of his invention. These pursuits occupied the leisure hours of Humphry, who was a dissenting minister at Henley-upon-Thames.

GAINSBOROUGH'S MARRIAGE.

The young painter now began to study landscape in the woods and fields of Suffolk. About this time he became acquainted with Margaret Burr, the memory of whose extraordinary beauty, (says Mr. Fulcher,*) is still preserved in Sudbury. She sat to the young artist for her portrait: she alike admired the picture and the artist, and after a short courtship they were married, the lady bringing with her hand an annuity of 2007. She is said to have been the natural daughter of one of our exiled princes, which she did not forget; for, many years after, when her husband was in high fame, she vindicated some little costliness in her dress, by whispering to her niece: "I have some right to this, for you know, my love, I am a prince's daughter." Mr. T. Green, of Ipswich, states her to have been a "natural daughter of the Duke of Bedford." About six months after his marriage, Gainsborough hired a house at Ipswich, at the rent of six pounds a-year.

DETECTIVE PORTRAITS.

When Gainsborough was living at Ipswich, one day seeing a country fellow with a slouched hat, looking wistfully over his garden-wall at some wind-fall pears, he caught up a piece of board, and painted him so faithfully, that, the figure being shaped out, and set upon a wall, in a gentleman's garden at Ipswich, induced many persons to speak to that melancholylooking man.

One of Gainsborough's neighbours was a clergyman named Coyte, whose garden had been robbed of a great quantity of wall-fruit, without the thief being detected. Young Gainsborough having, one summer morning, risen at an early hour, and walked into the garden te sketch an old elm, seated him-" self in an obscure corner, when he observed a man peeping over the garden-wall next the road, to see if the coast was clear. He made a sketch of the head of the man, and so accurate was the resemblance, that he was identified as coming from a neighbouring village, and proved to be the fellow who had robbed the parson's garden.

* Life of Thomas Gainsborough, R.A. By the late George William Fulcher, edited by his Son, 1856: a charming work, to which we are indebted for corrective details.

Gainsborough painted one of Mr. Coyte's sons, so true to nature that the portrait was known as "Coyte alive."