nues of the country." Thus intimate are the "dulce and the utile,” the liberal and the useful in art.

Protestantism has always been sufficiently suspicious of religious paintings. "Ordered," says the House of Commons of 23d July, 1645, "that all such pictures and statues there, (York House,) as are without any superstition, shall be forthwith sold for the benefit of Ireland and the north. Ordered, that all such pictures there, as have the representation of the Virgin Mary upon them, shall be forthwith burnt. Ordered, that all such pictures there, as have the representation of the second person in the Trinity upon them, shall be forthwith burnt." The Establishment, of whose rites and usages so large a number strongly savor of their Popish originals, has always, to the great grief of artists, steadily refused its countenance to the reintroduction of the legions of saints and madonnas which the Reformation had swept from the walls of the churches. "No Popish paintings," said the bishop of London, when waited upon by the dean of St. Paul's with the generous offers of West and Reynolds, "while I live and have power, shall enter the doors of the metropolitan church." The image and picture worship of that church to which art is indebted for its greatest achievements, might well excite the jealousy and frowns of the advocates of the primitive simplicity of Christianity; yet, before we pass over to the exclusiveness of Judaism, or adopt the art-annihilating sentiments of those sects of whom Sir Joshua Reynolds has caustically remarked, "If they had had the creation of the world, they would have clothed everything in drab," we should do well to acknowledge our real indebtedness to Romish artists for those masterly illustrations of sacred history, that at the paternal fireside first attracted our infant eyes to the pages of holy writ, powerfully representing to that sense whose impressions are deepest, and most lasting, the dramatic character of its principal events, elucidating its truths, and enkindling desires for a complete knowledge of its doctrines and facts. At this day the power of pictorial illustrations as a mode of initial instruction in history is universally acknowledged, and the world and the church would have had as little to reprehend as to regret, had Romanism never converted to more pernicious uses the sublime and beautiful creations of her own unrivaled

sons.

The superfluous wealth of this country must be indefinitely increased, before a sufficient amount of patronage can be relied on for the remuneration of those who labor in the higher walks of liberal art. Galt says the munificence of the Medici was equaled

Cunningham's Lives, vol. i, p. 46.

† Idem, p. 241.

by the few New-York merchants, who, long before the war of the Revolution, voluntarily took upon themselves the patronage of the young Philadelphia Quaker, who, first of American artists, determined to forward his studies in classic Italy. The liberally rewarded commissions, occasionally executed to young artists, to accomplish the same end in a more delicate way, by removing the sense of unrequited obligation, proves that the generosity of Smith and Kelley, Hamilton and Allen, has not entirely forsaken the guardians of the commercial and civil interests of the goodly cities of Gotham and Brotherly Love. What individuals are unable to accomplish, associated effort may effect. The value of association for the furtherance of art was early appreciated. In this country of voluntary associations, public galleries, academies, and art-unions, have a peculiar appropriateness. Such associations, as well as the general and state governments, may order works entirely without the bounds of individual liberality and wealth. Young as our republics are, they have been no indifferent patrons in the way of passing to future generations the features, and sometimes the forms, of distinguished citizens, duly sprinkled with cockades and ruffles, epaulettes and swords; the war and the oratory of '76; portraitures of political congresses, and battles, with their illustrious actors, and memorable scenes. New state capitals, and rising cities, with spacious halls and crowning domes, are annually increasing the demand for national and politico-heroic subjects; and increasing treasuries will enable them to become increasingly munificent patrons.

Still, the want of a central capital, and the absence of great architectural structures, must necessarily be serious hinderances to the advance of American art. The demand for subjects of a civil and historical character will be limited to the comparatively few state apartments adapted for their reception; our churches, the most numerous and spacious class of edifices with which the country abounds, will never consent to be made picture galleries even for the exhibition of the sublime events which form the theme of incessant meditation and song, as well as of constant discussion and harangue from their reading desks and pulpits. Yet, in spite of all these, and numerous obstacles that might be named, pictures will continue to be made. If we lack materials and incentives for the dramatic and epic, we have abundance of the historical, the national, the semi-heroic, and indeed of the reminiscent poetical, if the imagination will go in quest of it among the obscure traditions, and the half-illuminated story of those nations that are melting away from the face of the wide-spread lands which fate com

pels us to occupy in their stead. If there be any satisfaction in making reparation for the ten thousand injuries, as needless as insults to the wretch already on the tumbrel and bound for the guillotine, added by covetousness and hellish rage to the doom of an irrevocable destiny-if there be any relief to the melancholy of the thought that the Americano-European races are occupying the grave-yard and treading under foot the dust of fourteen millions. of those races that have turned their dying eyes toward the setting sun, to avoid beholding the magical, but nevertheless sacrilegious, transformation of the sepulchres of their fathers into cities full of living multitudes-it will be found, first, in the humane effort to mitigate the condition of the two millions that yet stand, like a herd of their own buffaloes, with eyes flashing alternate fury and despair, on the very verge of that precipice, down which in a few years the last of the race will have plunged; and, secondly, in chronicling their annals, seizing and preserving their lineaments, -their forms gliding noiselessly as spirits among their own old forests, bounding across the prairie with the fleetness of the wind in pursuit of their own familiar game, scaling their green hills, darting along their blue waters, rivaling the dignity of the Roman forum in their council halls, and outdoing Roman fortitude and valor in their own wild and sanguinary warfare. If any class of pioneers is needed in the van of this mighty and irresistible march of civilization, it is that of artists. The forest, the prairie, the rugged mountain, the wild nook, the lake, the stream, should be seized in all their original nature, and peopled with the groups that stand to-day gazing on those loved haunts that to-morrow will resound with the woodman's ax and the clatter of civilization, and all their original magnificence, like the sad feet now unwillingly leaving the spot, will have passed away for ever. Right heartily do we coincide with the views of a critic upon the pictures exhibited this year at the National Academy, who discourses thus eloquently in the May number of the "Literary World :”—

"We wish it were in our power to impress it upon the minds of our landscape painters, particularly, that they have a high and sacred mission to perform; and wo betide them or their memories. if they neglect it. The ax of civilization is busy with our old forests, and artisan ingenuity is fast sweeping away the relics of our national infancy. What were once the wild and picturesque haunts of the red man, and where the wild deer roamed in freedom, are becoming the abodes of commerce and the seats of manufactures. Our inland lakes, once sheltered and secluded in the midst of noble forests, are now laid bare and covered with busy craft;

and even the old primordial hills, once bristling with shaggy pine and hemlock, like old Titans as they were, are being shorn of their locks and left to blister in cold nakedness in the sun. Yankee enterprise has little sympathy with the picturesque, and it behooves our artists to rescue from its grasp the little that is left before it is for ever too late."

The bent of American talent is readily discoverable from the many productions of merit that have already escaped the pencil. The calm, classic dignity, the quiet intellectual grace and military majesty of Washington, have been a favorite study from the days of Trumbull, Stuart, and Peale. The beautiful scenery of the Hudson, of the White Mountains, of our islands and bays, of the picturesque villages springing up along the borders of our lakes and streams, the transparency of our atmosphere, the splendor of western and southern sunsets, the gorgeous beauties of our autumn scenery, the legends of the Highlands, the embarkation and debarkation of the pilgrims, are among the subjects that have employed our artists. The heroic devotion of Catlin, "the medicine," the "big double medicine," in sacrificing for years the enjoyments of civilization to rescue four hundred sketches of Indian character from the oblivion which is fast blotting all traces of that character from existence, is worthy of praise and imitation.

In that branch of art in which British artists have attained distinguished fame, our own painters have long since reached a high point of excellence. To the creation of heads neither Puritanism, democracy, nor political economy, has a word to object; to investing them with the dignity and grace of Jupiters and generals, Venus and the tragic muse, no one, particularly the subject, will oppose an iota of dissent. Paintings make painters, and many a youthful genius has lingered awhile in the galleries of Florence and Venice, and the hoarded plunder of the Louvre, and returned to invest American forms and faces with the graces of the schools, or to create landscapes "steeped in Italian splendor." The American artist, armed with crayons, delineators, and portfolios, is not such a wonder in Italy as in the days when the route from London to Rome was less expeditious than that from New-York at the present day, and when the young Quaker, satirized in his riper

years as

"Europe's worst painter, and poor England's best," excited the admiration of the Italians by likening their favorite statue to one of that fading race, with whom he himself narrowly escaped being classified by the blind Albani. If the young aspirant chooses to accumulate the elements of his art from the reflec

tions of the experience and greatness of former ages, more or less visible in all the works of distinguished contemporaries, he may build for himself both fame and fortune without leaving his native shores. In our own academies he may learn drawing, a branch of the imitative arts in which many practiced painters are deplorably deficient, yet which Fuseli rated, as Demosthenes did action in oratory, the first, second, and third qualification of an artist. He may learn coloring; for, nearly ninety years ago, to the first selfeducated artist that in green youth and inexperience crossed over to the Italian shores, it was said," Young man, you have no occasion to come to Rome to learn to paint." Drawing and painting are one thing; the infusion of life and sentiment, grace and heroism, and the proper balance of motion and repose, is quite another. If the native capability for these exists, the instruction obtainable at home is sufficient to bring it out; if it be wanting, not all the works and instructions of all the foreign masters, living or dead, could save mediocrity from slavish mannerism. To see, to compare, to contrast, to elevate the soul with the terrible outline of the architect of the dome of St. Peter's, to melt it with the softer graces of the divine Sanzio, and perhaps to imbue it with the rough nature of the Dutch Rembrandt and the Flemish Rubens, might all be valuable stimulants to real genius, but would be totally unamericanizing to copying servility.

Before us lies a work, the thorough study of which should precede the voyage to Rome. From the point where the drawingmaster leaves the student, it takes him, and initiates him into all the mysteries of the practice in oil. If it be borne in mind that four years out of the ten required at the hands of the pupil by the ancient masters, were devoted exclusively to linear drawing,-to form and outline,-the modern student will not approach this branch of his art until he is thoroughly practiced in the use of the crayon, and has his mind thoroughly imbued with the elemental principle of the Grecian schools, "that acuteness and fidelity of eye form precision; precision, proportion; proportion, beauty: that it is the 'little more or less,' imperceptible to vulgar eyes, which constitutes grace, and establishes the superiority of one artist over another; that color, grace, and taste, are ornaments, not substitutes, of form, expression, and character; and, when they usurp that title, degenerate into splendid faults." When this department of his education has been thoroughly attended to, let him procure the "Hand-book of Oil-painting." For the aid of genius, or for academic and self-instruction, for the makers of portraits and land

* Fuseli.