which seemed irreparably injured by fire, were truly wonderful. Here I can speak feelingly. A picture of my own was so changed by heat and smoke (in some parts light colours turned to black), that I could do nothing towards its recovery short of repainting the whole; yet it was restored by Mr. Bentley. Another remarkable instance of skill in this art is the well-known reunion of the halves of one of the very finest pictures of Cuyp, the sunset view of Dort, belonging to Mr. Holford.* This was effected. by Mr. Brown, the difficulty being rendered very great by the circumstance that the picture had been cut through a portion consisting of bright sky and water. Such are the triumphs of restoration, of which I could mention other instances within my own knowledge, effected by Mr. Seguier, who has been so often assailed for having removed nothing but dirt from those pictures in the National Gallery with the cleansing of which he was entrusted. But then, on the other hand, I could tell of injuries nearly amounting to destruction, inflicted by ignorant pretenders to the art. I remember some of the most beautiful works of Sir Joshua Reynolds at the British Gallery in 1813, almost as they came from his hand, which I have since met with, rubbed down to the dead colour, and then again, after a short interval, smeared over with

* In this picture there is a beautiful gradation from warm to cool colour in the sky; and when divided, the warmer half was called " Evening," and the cooler "Morning."

I have heard that the picture of the "Ages of Human Life," in the Bridgewater collection, narrowly escaped being cut in two when it was brought to England.

brown varnish, under the pretence of restoring the tone.

The attacks that have been so unsparingly directed against the cleaning of pictures in the National Gallery, have been generally founded on the assumption that the tone of a fine picture is always imparted to it by a general glazing, and that, in the removal of this, its most valuable quality is destroyed. But it is so far from being true that the best colourists finished their pictures with a general glaze, that I believe the cases in which they have done so have been exceptional. Reynolds sometimes, but not always, did this; and it appears, by his own account, to have been the invariable practice of Mr. Haydon: but I know it was not the practice of Turner, of Etty, of Constable, or of Wilkie, and I feel confident it was not of Paul Veronese, Rubens, Claude, the Poussins, or Cannalletti.

Much has been said about what has been taken from the pictures in the National Gallery, but nothing about what has been put on them. I do not believe that anything injurious has been added to them since the establishment of the Gallery, unless it may be oil varnish, which has become more yellow; but about the beginning of the present century it was not unfrequent for the possessors of old pictures to have them toned, as it was called. The noble landscape by Rubens, then the property of Sir George Beaumont, was saturated with linseed oil to prevent its scaling from its panel, and this was suffered to dry on the surface. There is, therefore, under the deep yellow coating that now covers it, a fresh and natural

picture, the picture Rubens left, and which the world may never be permitted to see again. The "St. Nicholas" of Paul Veronese has been happily relieved from the brown glaze or oil bestowed on it forty or fifty years ago; but Sebastian Del Piombo's "Raising of Lazarus "* remains still under the gradually-deepening obscurity it was consigned to about the same time; and so do the large landscape by Salvator Rosa, the landscape called "Phocian," by Nicolo Poussin, and others, which, taking these as guides, will easily be discovered as involved in the same misfortune. Goldsmith, in the "Vicar of Wakefield," tells us, what no doubt he himself had seen, that a would-be connoisseur in an auction-room, "after giving his opinion that the colouring of a picture was not mellow enough, very deliberately took a brush with brown varnish that was accidentally lying by, and rubbed it over the piece with great composure before the company, and then asked if he had not improved the tints." I have myself seen a common workman in an auction-room smear a thick coat of varnish over a fine picture, in the most hurried and careless manner, to make it look well at the sale,— and I am sorry to say that even respectable dealers are apt to load with varnish, to an injurious degree, pictures they are anxious to sell.

* In the great room of the Louvre hangs a fine picture by Sebastian, "The Meeting of Mary and Elizabeth," which remains as the painter left it, and there cannot be a greater contrast in tone than it presents to the " Raising of Lazarus.”

SECTION XIII.

On the Colour of Raphael's Cartoons, and their
Preservation.

In the last section I briefly alluded to the colour of Raphael's Cartoons, a thing, however, not to be slightly passed over, as I believe they are the most entire specimens of the work of his own hand, when in the meridian of his powers, that exist. The very fact of their being Cartoons, as I have before noticed, seems conclusive; and though the herons in the "Miraculous Draught of Fishes," were painted by Giovanni d'Udine,* and the pillars of the "Beautiful Gate" by another assistant, I have no doubt that in the faces, figures, and draperies; in all, indeed, excepting those subordinate parts which might as well be trusted to others, we see the work of Raphael's own fingers.

* Fuseli objects to the introduction of the herons, but when it is remembered that these birds were and are held sacred in the East, being considered emblematic of piety, their presence is certainly not out of place, and their tameness in approaching so close to the figures is accounted for. One of them elevates its head in the act of drinking, an action noticed by Bunyan in domestic fowls as expressive of giving thanks to Heaven, and it may not, perhaps, be an over-refinement to suppose that such a thought occurred also to Raphael.

If they have not the excellences of Paul Veronese, still the colour of the Cartoons is clear, healthy, and vigorous, and the value of grey in everywhere setting off the positive colours, is as fully felt as in works that may be referred to as models of colour. The finest in effect appears to me to be the "Punishment of Elymas," a picture that would not, when the limits of distemper are considered, detract from a Venetian reputation.

Among the changes in them by time or accident, the loss of red from the mantle of the Saviour in the "Miraculous Draught of Fishes" cannot admit a doubt. The reflection of it in the water is red, and we know that red and blue are colours very rarely departed from in the drapery of the Saviour, excepting at the transfiguration and after the resurrection. The white, shaded with umber, of the mantle as it now appears, is evidently according to a method in which many of the draperies have been prepared, and to which colour has been added by a thin glaze or wash. In the "Sacrifice at Lystra," the dress of the priestess who kneels immediately behind the man holding the bull, has been prepared in this manner, after which a tint of green has been passed over it, which time or accident has completely removed from the greater portion of the umber and white, as the red is gone from the drapery in the "Miraculous Draught." If the experiment be tried, of making a coloured sketch of this cartoon, substituting a red mantle for the white one, it will be seen at once that a balance of colour is given to the picture, which it now wants.

A probable difference between the choice of colours