Note 21 — Chapter II

I am not sufficiently versed in the palette biography of the day to know who are the painters that these stars, etc. etc. etc. allude to. Abbé le Blanc, in his letter to the Abbé du Bos on the state of painting and sculpture in England, notices the whole body in the following very flattering terms: "The portrait painters are at this day more numerous and worse in London than ever they have been. Since Mr. Vanloo came hither, they strive in vain to run him down; for nobody is painted but by him. I have been to see the most noted of them; at some distance one might easily mistake a dozen of their portraits for twelve copies of the same original. Some have the head turned to the left, others to the right; and this is the most sensible difference to be observed between them. Moreover, excepting the face, you find in all the same neck, the same arms, the same flesh, the same attitude; and to say all, you observe no more life than design in those pretended portraits. Properly speaking, they are not painters; they know how to lay colours on the canvas, but they know not how to animate it. Nature exists in vain for them; they see her not, or if they see her, they have not the art of expressing her."