THE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE BRITISH INSTITUTION
We will lay odds that this is a fellow ‘damned in a fair face;’ with white eyes and eye-brows; of the colour of a Shrewsbury cake; a smooth tallow-skinned rascal, a white German sausage, a well-fed chitterling, from whose face Madame de —— would have turned away in disgust,—a transcendental stuffed man! We have no patience that the Arts should be catechised by a piece of whitleather, a whey-face, who thinks that pictures, like the moon, should be made of green-cheese! Shall a roll of double tripe rise up in judgment on grace; shall a piece of dough talk of feeling? ‘Tis too much. ‘Sdeath, for Rembrandt to be demanded of a cheese-curd, what replication should he make? What might Vandyke answer to a jack-pudding, whose fingers are of a thickness at both ends? What should Rubens say, who ‘lived in the rainbow, and played i’ th’ plighted clouds,’ to a swaddling-clout, a piece of stockinet, of fleecy hosiery, to a squab man, without a bend in his body? What might Raphael answer to a joint-stool? Or Nicholas Poussin, charged in the presence of his _Cephalus and Aurora_ with being a mere pedant, without grace or feeling, to this round-about machine of formal impertinence, this lumbering go-cart of dulness and spite? We could have wished that as the fellow stood before the portrait of Rembrandt, chattering like an ape, making mocks and mows at it, the picture had lifted up its _great grimy fist_, and knocked him down.
The _Catalogue Raisonné_ of the British Institution is only worth notice, as it is pretty well understood to be a declaration of the views of the Royal Academy. It is a very dull, gross, impudent attack by one of its toad-eaters on human genius, on permanent reputation, and on liberal art. What does it say? Why, in so many words, that the knowledge of Art in this country is inconsistent with the existence of the Academy, and that their success as a body of men instituted for promoting and encouraging the Fine Arts, requires the destruction or concealment of all works of Art of great and acknowledged excellence. In this they may be right; but we did not think they would have come forward to say so themselves. Or that they would get a fellow, a low buffoon, a wretched Merry Andrew, a practical St. Giles’s joker, a dirty Grub-Street critic, to vent his abominations on the _chef-d’œuvres_ produced by the greatest painters that have gone before them, to paw them over with his bleared-eyes, to smear the filth and ordure of his tongue upon them, to spit at them, to point at them, to nickname them, to hoot at them, to make mouths at them, to shrug up his shoulders and run away from them in the presence of these divine guests, like a blackguard who affects to make a bugbear of every one he meets in the street; to play over again the nauseous tricks of one of Swift’s Yahoos—and for what? Avowedly for the purpose of diverting the public mind from the contemplation of all that genius and art can boast in the lapse of ages, and to persuade the world that there is nothing in Art that has been or ever will be produced worth looking at but the gilt frames and red curtains at the Exhibition of the Royal Academy! We knew before that they had no great genius for the Arts; but we thought they might have some love of them in their hearts. They here avow their rankling jealousy, hatred and scorn, of all Art and of all the great names in Art, and as a bold put indeed, require the keeping down of the public taste as the only means of keeping up the bubble of their reputation. They insist that their only hope of continued encouragement and support with a _discerning public_ is in hood-winking that public, in confining their highest notions of Art to their own gross and superficial style of daubing, and in vilifying all works of standard genius.—This is right English. The English are a shop-keeping nation, and the Royal Academy are a society of hucksters in the Fine Arts, who are more tenacious of their profits as chapmen and dealers, than of the honour of the Art. The day after the _Catalogue Raisonné_ was published, the Prince Regent, in the name and on behalf of his Father, should have directed it to be burned by the hands of the hangman of their Committee, or, upon refusal, have shut up their shop. A society for the encouragement and promotion of Art has no right to exist at all, from the moment that it professes to exist only in wrong of Art, by the suppression of the knowledge of Art, in contempt of genius in Art, in defiance of all manly and liberal sentiment in Art. But this is what the Royal Academy professes to do in the _Catalogue Raisonné_.