Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

202
HAMPTON COURT
in Queen Anne's Drawing-Room. This artist, so
greatly belauded in his day, and of so singular a
history, can nowhere be studied, for his defects and
his not inconspicuous merits, so well as here.
The first of American artists, he was born at
Springfield, Chester, Pennsylvania, on October io,
1738; he studied in Rome, became an honorary
member of the Academies of Parma, Bologna, and
Florence, and in London not only competed as a
portrait painter and in classical scenes with the great
artists of his day, but successfully introduced a revolution
in historical portraiture. His classical and
his Scriptural pictures at Hampton Court show him
at his weakest, when he does not even rise to be " the
king of mediocrity." They are utterly tame and
cold, and profoundly dull. Stilted, antiquarian, stiff,
academic, he endeavoured what artists such as Wilhelm
Kaulbach and Charles le Brun had in their different
ways achieved with more success — a spiritless representation
of the past according to the methods of
the cinque-centisti. His portraits are certainly much
better. There is a quaint one of Queen Charlotte
with her thirteen children, quite small, seen as it
were in a vision; a quite pretty picture of the Prince
of Wales and the Duke of York, and another of the
Duke of Clarence and the Duke of Kent. George III.
(No. 318) in military uniform, with a view of Coxheath
Camp in the background, and Lords Amherst
andLothianin attendance, is well worthattention. This
plain, sober, straightforward picture, thoroughly natural