Exhibition of the Pictures of Reynolds at the British Physiognomy-Holbein-West's Family Picture-Rem- brandt-Lely-Kneller-Reynolds-Gainsborough— SECTION I. On the Imitation of Nature, and on Style. IN comparing Art with Nature, we are as apt to underrate it, as in considering it by itself we are sometimes disposed to elevate it unduly; and both errors stand in the way of our improvement. Though, in a comprehensive sense, it be true that "all Nature is but Art," and "all Chance direction;" and though it be of great importance that we should keep these truths always in mind, yet that Painting cannot rival the beauties of Nature is not a defect, for it can only be defective where it fails to do what is possible; and how far the painter may do some thing else, and something valuable, and something which Nature herself refuses to do, though she teaches it, I shall endeavour to show. The axiom that the most perfect Art is that in which the Art is most concealed, is directed, I apprehend, against an ostentatious display of the means by which the end is accomplished, and does not imply that we are to be cheated into a belief of the artist having effected his purpose by a happy chance, or by such extraordinary gifts as have rendered study and pains unnecessary. On the contrary, we always appreciate and therefore enjoy a picture the more in B proportion as we discover ourselves, or are shown by others, the why and the wherefore of its excellences, and much of the pleasure it gives us depends on the intellectual employment it affords. Nor does the concealment of Art mean concealment of imitation, or that what it gives is to pass on us for a reality, for then we should immediately want what we never miss in a fine picture, motion and sound. Both of these it is a great triumph of the painter to suggest. Rubens was pre-eminently successful in giving action. to his figures, and Hogarth's "Enraged Musician," as Fielding says, "is deafening to look at." But could the eye be deceived, from that moment the figures of Rubens would stand still, and the din of Hogarth's groups would cease; and, indeed, such Art would be unnatural, because, unless in the representation of still life, it would have the motionless and speechless appearance of wax-work-the most life-like, in externals, of all the modes of imitating Nature, and for that very reason the most lifeless. These remarks are so obvious that they may seem superfluous. I may be told that deception is not attempted, and is, indeed, generally impossible, from the circumstances of pictures being bounded by their frames, and the diminutive scale on which natural objects are most often represented. Still, as this lowest kind of truth is sometimes the aim of the painter, though it has never been the aim of a true artist, and as I have often heard it highly applauded when to a certain degree successful, and even by painters, it seems to me of importance that we should clearly understand that the illusion of Art is quite |