Note 82 — STRAWBERRY HILL.

I have mentioned this fine picture in the catalogue of Salvator Rosa’s works now in England. But I had not then seen it; nor was I then aware how enthusiastic an admirer of Salvator Lord Orford was, until I recently read his admirable introduction to the “Ædes Walpolianæ.” In the passage I allude to, he observes,—“The greatest genius Naples ever produced resided generally at Rome—a genius equal to any that city itself ever bore. This was the great Salvator Rosa! His thoughts, his expression, his landscape, his knowledge of the force of shade, and his masterly management of horror and distress, have placed him in the first class of painters. In Lord Townsend’s ‘Belisarius’ one sees a majesty of thought equal to Raphael, an expression great as Poussin’s. In Lord Orford’s ‘Prodigal’ is represented the extremity of misery and low nature, not foul and burlesque, like Michel Angelo Caravaggio’s, nor minute, circumstantial, and laborious, like the Dutch painters. Salvator Rosa was a poet and a satirist. Here again was a union of those arts: his pictures contain the genius and true end of satire, though, heightened and expressive as his pictures are, they still mean more than they speak. Pliny describes Salvator in ‘Timanthes:’—In omnibus ejus operibus intelligitur plus semper quam pingitur,” &c.