mation; and that when original genius has afterwards appeared, it has always been benefited by them. Lebrun, with all his talents, was, in the ordinary sense of the words, an academic artist, and he was so before the establishment of the French Academy. Some time after that institution had been in operation, Watteau appeared; not that he was formed by the Academy, for he was formed by the study of Nature and the art of Rubens-but the Academy did not hinder his appearance, nor destroy him after he became one of its members.

Neither Raphael nor

But I will go further back. Michael Angelo were able to transmit the essence of their art to their pupils. The art of Raphael died with him, and if it has in any degree revived, it has done so in our own Academy, in Flaxman and in Stothard. Michael Angelo, with all the pains he took, was unable to make a historical painter of Sebastian del Piombo, whose genius could not rise above dignified portrait; and Vasari, also the scholar and enthusiastic admirer of Michael Angelo, became but the founder of a school of Machinists.

The obligations of Hogarth and of Reynolds to Academies have been denied. Hogarth, indeed, did not acquire his Imagination, his inexhaustible fertility of Invention, his humour or his pathos in an Academy; but he acquired his knowledge of the human figure (without which all these great qualities must have remained unknown to the world) in the subscription Academy opened by Sir James Thornhill. It is very true that Reynolds had not studied in an Academy. But it was a cause to him of lamentation, not of

boasting. Hear his own modest words-" Not having the advantage of an early academical education," he says, "I never had the facility of drawing the naked figure which an artist ought to have." After this we may fairly say, when we are told of eminent artists who have not studied in Academies, that it would have been better for them if they had done so.

It has been said by a modern opponent of all such Institutions, that "to produce other Raphaels they must go through the same process that Raphael himself went through." This I believe; but I believe also that the process must be gone through with powers of mind and delicacy of taste equal to Raphael's ;—and then I doubt not that the success may be as complete in a modern Academy as it was in the school of Perugino.*

*

It should be known to the public that all the charges in the autobiography of Mr. Haydon, unfavourable to the Royal Academy, are unfounded. The council never made a law, as there stated, after the students had presented a testimonial to Fuseli, that they should not again pay such a compliment to an officer. Many years afterwards the students gave a silver vase to Mr. Hilton, when keeper, and the same tribute of respect was paid to his successor, Mr. Jones. It is also untrue, that the election of Sir Martin Shee to the presidential chair was hurried through, without the usual forms, in the fear that a command might be received from the King to elect Wilkie. It was perfectly well known that George IV. would have been pleased had the choice fallen upon Wilkie, and equally known that the King would never interfere with any election of that body, unless he thought it right to exercise the privilege of

a veto.

Haydon's quarrel with the Academy originated in the belief that a clique of portrait-painters, in the body, tried to crush

him by placing his "Dentatus" in a bad situation.

The truth, however, was quite the reverse. The picture was hung in the ante-room, in an excellent light, because it was considered that a good place in that room was better than an indifferent one in the great room. It was hung where pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds had been placed year after year,-where one of the finest of Lawrence's portraits, the whole-length of Master Lambton, was afterwards placed,—and where I remember hanging a picture by Sir Martin Shee, when he was president, while there were fine pictures by Mr. Roberts and Mr. Herbert (not then members) in the same room, but on which account those gentlemen never thought of quarrelling with the Academy.

I SHALL here confine myself to the consideration of composition, as it relates to lines and forms only.

Nature, everywhere, arranges her productions in clusters; and to this end she employs a variety of means. The heavenly bodies are grouped by attraction, flowers and trees by the natural means by which they are propagated, while the social instincts congregate man and most other animals into societies,— and the same instincts impel, in man, as well as in many of the inferior creatures, the grouping of their habitations. Grouping is therefore a universal law of nature; and though there are cases in which a scattered display of objects may, in parts of a composition, greatly aid, by contrast, the more compact portions, and cases in which scattered objects may help to tell the story, yet in the composition of a picture, taking the whole together, a scattered general effect is always a fault.

In observing crowds we notice many repetitions of similar attitudes; and in herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, etc., we remark this also. Repetitions of forms and shapes are likewise of frequent occurrence in trees, flowers, the outlines of mountains, clouds,

etc.

Now the picturesque styles of composition, as they are called, avoid the imitation of these appearances, as too formal for Art; but this, like every other rejection of a natural principle, only produces mannerism,—which sort of mannerism was carried to its greatest extreme by the French painters of the time of Louis XV., painters who are now all but forgotten.

It is true the repetitions of forms and lines, if managed with too much regularity or appearance of study, become pedantic; but in the compositions of Masaccio, of Raphael, and of Poussin, these repetitions have the accidental look of Nature,—and in the works of the best landscape painters, and particularly of the Dutch and Flemish Schools, we see the repetitions of forms given with the same unaffected truth. It is such modes of treatment in which the true artlessness of Art, if I may use the expression, consists ;-artlessness which is indeed the perfection of Art, and the furthest possible removed from that artlessness which arises from ignorance, the artlessness of very early Art, and of the designs of clever children.

All improvements in composition, from the infancy of Painting to its full maturity, are the result of the gradual discovery of the principles by which Nature makes assemblages of objects agreeable to the eye,sometimes by giving variety to regular forms or groups, sometimes by giving regularity to forms in themselves irregular, and always by giving unity to multitude, and subordination of many objects to one, or to a few; and in all that relates to forms or to lines it is chiefly perspective that does these things.