Note 11 — WAS RUBENS A COLOURIST?

Mr Etty has written a letter, which has been lithographed and widely circulated, bearing so directly upon this subject, that I cannot refrain from noticing it. And this I do, because the authority of a Royal Academician, and one, I believe, selected to be judge in the distribution of the prizes in Westminster Hall Exhibition, cannot but have an influence, both with the public and the rising professors of the art.

He speaks of his high purposes in his choice of the subject of Joan of Arc and other pictures, and the process by which those purposes were brought to completion. He tells us, that in his enthusiasm he visited, as a pilgrim, the spot where the heroic and tragic scenes of his subject were enacted. He presumes that the houses there are now pretty much what they were then; and he has thought an exact representation of them necessary to historical truth, and he has accordingly introduced them.

Enthusiasm is good, but it should in this, as in all human concerns of importance, be under the guidance of strong principles. Now here the principles of historical painting, which separate that great act from the lower and imitative, are violated.

Had an eyewitness described as he felt the event which Mr Etty has undertaken to paint, would he have told of or portrayed to the mind's eye, and prominently, the very houses, with all their real accidents of material and colours, so that, were a tile off a roof, your sympathy must be made to stay for the noticing it?

This precision is not for historical painting, for it is in antagonism with poetry, (which is feeling high-wrought, by imagination.) It is wrong in colouring as in design. With regard to the first, the question should be asked—How would memory have coloured it to the spectator in his after vision? How would imagination colour it in the page of history? Details of this kind are sure to vulgarise a subject, and by their little truths destroy the greater—the heroism, the devotion—to which the eye would most naturally have been riveted, so as to have seen little else, and to have been quite out of a condition to arithmetise the pettinesses of things. Such treatment would better suit the levity of the author of the "Pucelle" than the grave historian or the still more serious and impressive historical painter. It is very important that Mr Etty, if he is likely to be again selected to pronounce judgment upon works of the competitors for rewards in historical painting and honour, revise his opinions, and test them by the established principles which are applicable alike to poetry and to painting; and without the practical use of which, genius, if it could co-exist, would be but an inane and objectless extravagance.