The National Portrait Exhibition.

THE object of the present paper is that it may serve as a familiar guide or companion to the fine Exhibition of National Portraits now on view at South Kensington. There is, of course, a catalogue of those portraits; and considering the range and difficulty of the subject, it is very creditably executed. But they are 1,030 in number to begin with, which confines the compilers of the catalogue within the narrowest possible limits. And, in the second place, the exhibition is of a nature too peculiar to be a proper subject for ordinary catalogue treatment. The mass of the pictures composing it are not interesting as works of art, but as illustrations of history; and their interest varies so prodigiously in degree on this account, that some deserve as many pages as others do lines of commentary. Our duty would therefore seem to be to select from the whole body those works which are most worthy a visitor's attention; indicating great artistic merit where it is generally allowed to exist by experts in those matters; but mainly remembering that portraiture is a kind of biography, and that the people here portrayed have, on the whole, been the leaders of English life, and ought to be remembered with some familiarity. But before beginning the task as thus conceived by us, a few words must be given to the history of the undertaking. The suggestion of it came from the Earl of Derby, whose powerful influence has mainly contributed to its success; and the collection has been formed under the superintendence of Mr. Samuel Redgrave, by Mr. Soden Smith, the Rev. James Beck, and Mr. R. F. Sketchley, who has acted as secretary. Most of the great houses of England, from Windsor downwards, such as Althorp, Longleat, Knowsley, Chatsworth, &c., have furnished portraits, and their example has been followed by colleges, corporations, and the halls of country squires. In fact, there has been a good creaming of our English portrait galleries; not a final one, for more yet remains, and must be made use of next year; but still one which gives a fair representation of our English portraits down to 1688. Next year, those of later dates come on. But it is also intended, we are glad to learn, that a second creaming shall take place, before then, of the earlier times; and now that the country is getting widely informed about the whole affair, treasures will come to light the existence of which is hardly yet suspected. Only the other day we learned by accident that an old Yorkshire family possesses a complete or nearly complete series of the famous Whartons down to the eccentric duke, immortalized by Pope, who died at Tarragona in 1731. But their possessor, it seems, never knew that any such project as that of the Exhibition was in the wind. The search for

future materials must be more minute than it has been hitherto; and it would be well if those who have old portraits of any kind in their possession would put themselves in communication with the South Kensington authorities.

After this brief preamble, let us commence our ciceroneship by advising the reader to do his work chronologically. For this purpose, he ascends the stairs instead of entering the gallery immediately before him, and finds himself in the Eastern Corridor amongst the old potentates of the Plantagenet reigns. Portraiture, he sees at once, is a thing of comparatively modern date in England. There are only a few portraits of very ancient times, and of these, some are trashy fictions, many are of artificial origin, and nearly all are of uncertain date and authorship. The first class is represented by a "Rosamond Clifford " (No. 1), purely imaginary; and by a "Sir William Wallace" (No. 2), in a tartan scarf, evidently drawn from some Argyleshire cattle-lifter under sentence of death at Glasgow about the period of the Union. There is a significance in this imposture which illustrates the whole subject of portrait-manufacture. To put Wallace in tartan could only have been an idea originating in modern times. He was a Lowland gentleman of English descent, his name "Waleys" being one which occurs among English barons and lord mayors of his century, and which first appears in the chartulary of Paisley along with the founders of the house of Stewart whom the Waleyses evidently accompanied to Renfrewshire from Shropshire. But there is a fictitious portraiture which belongs to art, as well as a fictitious portraiture which only belongs to fable. During the middle ages, our herald-painters and illuminators of MSS. were in the habit of making representations of their heroes or patrons; and the effigies on tombs and church-windows were certainly intended to be likenesses as much as the heads on classical or on modern coins. When these came to be used during the revival of art, as models from which to make larger portraits, the result was a portraiture-often quaint enough indeed—but by no means contemptible or untrustworthy. Chaucer was painted in miniature in old MSS.; and down to the last century a picture of him was visible on his tomb at Westminster. If, then, the two "Chaucers" in the Exhibition (Nos. 8 and 9) are not taken from life, as is certain enough, there is no reason to doubt their being like life. And they both represent the poet as a man of sensibility and intellect, though with all the gravity of expression which belongs to early schools of art. The author of the Canterbury Tales was a humourist as decidedly as a poet; but the power of giving the familiar, comic, or everyday view of a face belongs to the later ages of art rather than to the first ones.

The

Henry IV." (No. 13, compare No. 10) remained long at Hampton Court, Herefordshire, which was built by a knight in Henry's service, who married a Fitzalan related to the king. It has thus an excellent pedigree, and was no doubt copied in large from a miniature illumination. The "John Talbot, first Earl of Shrewsbury" (No. 19), makes

the old warrior, who is in a tabard, look like a playing-card. This portrait, which is in oil upon panel, was discovered by Pennant at CanonsAshby, the seat of Lord Northampton, whose descendant, the Marquis, has lent it to the Exhibition. It is of the age of Henry VI., and a duplicate of it, which used to hang near the earl's tomb in old St. Paul's, was brought to the Herald's College after the fire of London. The tabard recalls a fine scene which old writers tell us took place when

that great Alcides of the field,

Valiant John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury,

lay dead upon the field of Chastillon. His herald found the body of the aged fighting-man, he was eighty years old, and had been victorious in forty pitched battles and skirmishes,—and kissing it, broke out into "these compassionate and dutiful expressions,"-"Alas, it is you! I pray God pardon all your misdoings. I have been your officer of arms forty years or more, 'tis time I should surrender it to you." And, "while the tears trickled plentifully down his face," goes on the account, "he disrobed himself of his coat-of-arms, and flung it over his master's body." Another portrait taken from life in this antique second-hand way is that of "Sir Thomas Lyttelton" (No. 36), Lord Lyttelton's ancestor, which was evidently done some generations after the famous old judge's time, probably from portraits in the windows of Frankley or Halesowen churches. The "Jane Shores" (Nos. 33, 34, 35,) disappoint one as far as beauty is concerned. But the Eton College portrait (No. 34) deserves attention on the ground pointed out by Horace Walpole,—that her confessor was provost of Eton, and received through her intercession some lands of which the college had been despoiled. The pictures thus specified are all good, or, at lowest, curious samples of the old feudal retrospective portraiture, as we may call it. But there are two works in the Eastern Corridor of greater authority and higher merit than any of them. These "Edward Grimston" (No. 17) and "Sir John Donne and Lady Donne " (No. 18). The first is a portrait by Petrus Christus, a pupil of Van Eyck, of an ancestor of Lord Verulam's, who was employed in the Low Countries in the fifteenth century. It is executed with the greatest power and truthfulness, and has the additional and unique interest, as far as we can see, of being the earliest portrait directly from life, on that scale, in the whole Exhibition. This is the more remarkable because very little is known about the Grimston family to the world at large, by whom they have been chiefly heard of as holding the title and possessing the estate once belonging to Bacon. The "Sir John and Lady Donne " is a noble religious picture by Van Eyck, in which the knight and his lady are kneeling before the Virgin and Child. Such pictures were presented by men of influence to religious houses in the middle ages, and the introduction into them of the patrons was a kind of return for their generosity. This one has the true realism and deep thoughtful sentiment of the old Christian schools. Like the "Edward Grimston," its interest VOL. XIII.-No. 78. 36.

are

is entirely different from that of the vast majority of the works in the Exhibition. Its interest is wholly in the painter, and not in the subject; whereas most of the portraits are valuable for the subject; and only a few are at once great in subject and in execution.

On leaving the Eastern Corridor, we find ourselves in the Eastern Gallery, which looks pleasantly out on the Horticultural Gardens, and is divided into nine bays or compartments, devoted to the men and women of the Tudor reigns. Almost the first portrait that meets the eye herethat of "Thomas Stanley, first Earl of Derby" (No. 42)-suggests the uncertainty of all early works of the kind. Not only is the costume that of a later date, but the earl himself is the "double" of a Duke of Somerset of Elizabeth's reign, who figures elsewhere in the collection (No. 386). Nay more, his son, Lord Strange (No. 69), and his grandson, the second earl (No. 70), have a similar look of manufacture about them. This remark does not apply to the illustrious second wife of the first earl -Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby-a connection, by the way, which makes a certain confusion between Stanley and Beaufort portraits in some degree intelligible. Lord Derby's portrait of that lady (No. 48) essentially resembles the one sent by St. John's College, Cambridge (No. 47), of which she was a foundress. Near her hangs "Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham" (No. 44, and see No. 71). This is the Buckingham of Shakspeare's Henry VIII., who says of Wolsey,

This butcher's cur is venom-mouth'd, and I

Have not the power to muzzle him;

and whose death on the scaffold was an incident in that war between the old nobility and the new, which is a salient feature of our aristocratic history under the Tudors. His daughter Elizabeth married the third Duke of Norfolk-by whom she was infamously treated-and was the mother of the illustrious Earl of Surrey-the flower of the house of Howard-of whose undutifulness, we regret to say, she made heavy complaints. But we are giving the nobles precedence over the sovereigns, which will never do. Let us observe first, then, that of all the Henry VIII.'s,-burly, florid, vigorous, and tant soit peu brutal as they are,the best is No. 99, from Warwick Castle. Let us next call attention to the fine picture of "Henry VII. and Ferdinand of Arragon" (No. 54), and to the exquisite Mabuse, called (it is thought erroneously) "The Children of Henry VII." (No. 58), but which, under any other name, would be equally a rose of art. There is also a fine comely full-length of "Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland" (No. 53), whose marriage with James IV. of that kingdom ultimately brought the English crown to the Stuarts; who was at once a grandmother of Mary and of Darnley; and who is the link which connects her Majesty with all the older sovereigns of England. Queen Margaret's sister, the Princess Mary, is also represented (Nos. 76 and 80), with her pleasant, jolly-looking husband, "Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk," whom Henry evidently

pardoned all the more readily because he recognized in his handsomeness, his animalism, and his high spirit, a nature kindred to his own.

The presiding genius of this part of the exhibition is the great Hans Holbein the Swiss whose genius, like the Rhine, took its rise among the Alps and flowed northwards-the friend of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, one of the earliest, truest, wisest, and most finished of all portraitpainters. Recent investigation has shown that Holbein died sooner than used to be thought, and this has thrown doubt on several portraits formerly honoured by bearing his name. But there are enough unquestioned specimens of him at South Kensington to give the visitor a thorough taste of his genius. We may instance, particularly, the "Sir William Butts" (No. 110) and "Lady Butts" (No. 115). Butts, who was physician to Henry the Eighth, has had the curious luck of being immortalized at once by Holbein and by Shakspeare:

By holy Mary, Butts, there's knavery,

says Shakspeare's Henry when Butts shows him from the window Cranmer kept waiting among lackies outside the Council Chamber by the Lords of Council. Holbein, however, has done the wife even better than the husband, or the picture has been luckier in its history; for a more characteristic human head was hardly ever put upon canvas. The "Sir Richard Southwells," also (Nos. 108 and 112) are very good, and make one think of the man who accused Surrey of treason, and whom Surrey offered to fight "in his shirt." Still more interesting, because the painter's genius is employed on a higher man, is Holbein's "William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury" (No. 86), a fine, honest, tender old face, rugged but gentle, alive with intellectual light, and soft with moral patience. Warham held Canterbury immediately before Cranmer, and was one of the Conservative Reformers, like Erasmus and More, who hoped that the Church might be improved, chiefly through literature, without disruption of its unity and without social convulsion. Of hardly any man does the great and delightful Sage of Rotterdam speak with heartier warmth than of Warham. And we are now in the thick of Erasmus's friends. We have not, indeed, reached as yet the More family, one of the glories of the whole Exhibition. There is, however, an excellent "Linacre" (No. 96), attributed either to Holbein or Quintin Matsys, and an inferior Dean Colet (No. 60), which makes no such pretensions. The poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, Surrey's friend, one of the many men of that age who combined the pursuit of letters with active life, certainly sat to Holbein, as his contemporary, the antiquary Leland, affirms. But the painter's hand is not visible in the poet's head as we have it from the Bodleian (No. 68), though on the whole we prefer the Bodleian Wyatt to the one sent by Mr. John Bruce (No. 98). The family portraits of our great families begin to be authentic as the sixteenth century advances, though the artists are often unknown. The "Sir William Cavendish" (No. 81) of this epoch is significantly like the shrewd persevering loyal Gentleman