Rhymes on Art, published in America. But all the writings of our English painters, before eight or nine years ago, prove nothing to those disappointed candidates for admission into the Royal Academy. According to their candid judgment, all our former artists wrote in ignorance and incapacity; and the same grave authorities, who have thus sought to dishonour and defame the illustrious first President in his tomb, have, also, sought to blast the moral and professional character of the present venerable President, West, by indirectly representing him, in effect, and by inuendo, as a man who, with duplicity and envious malevolence, had been in the base practice of covertly employing writers and the press, to knock every body living on the head; that is, to blacken and vilify every living artist, (p. 81, 85, No. viii.) They exhibit his painting-room in the same indirect manner, as a slaughter-house of professional reputation, (Ib.) and gravely assure the world, in proof of their good intentions, that West is not a great artist (No. viii. p. 81, A.F.A.); that he is refined in nothing (Ib.); and that "our leading artists" are, in the vulgar slang phrase of "one and all," a mass of "imbecility (Ib. 112.) Really, this is giving the artists of England "a lift in the scale of intellect," with a vengeance; and such a lift as those simpletons, the Richardsons, Barry, Reynolds, Opie, Shee, Fuseli, Hoppner, Northcote, Days and Tresham, never dreamed of giving them!
Again we find them repeat the same anti-British attempt to rob England of the honour of her artists, under a different form of words—"Sir Joshua Reynolds knew very little of the antique, his mind was not qualified to understand it: in short, it is quite astonishing, even in Winkleman, to see how all men wrote in the dark about the genius of the ancients, before the appearance of the Elgin marbles." (No. xi. p. 537, A.F.A.) As the despicable quacks, from whom we have quoted, would convert a reverence for the Bible into a scoff and personal obloquy; so there are others, who would make use of our admiration of the Elgin marbles, as a means of defaming the dead and the living, and dishonouring the genius of their country. Thus, (in page 88, No. viii.) they obliquely interdict the nobility, gentry, and all literary men, from giving a written opinion on the fine arts, by declaring—"we are quite convinced, that one line written by an artist, does more good to public taste than huge volumes written by technical amateurs," Yet after all this heavy souse of cold water upon the stupid amateurs of England, who, of course, must be utterly ignorant of the arts, we find the same formidable judges, in the preceding extracts, decidedly of opinion that all the English painters, and all other painters, wrote in darkness, and produced a doubt of the capability of painters to write their thoughts, before the appearance of the Elgin marbles. From thence, in the following question, we are led to the brilliant sun, whose beams we are to understand, enlightened all our benighted faculties. "Was he (Haydon) not the first to affirm the excellence of the Elgin marbles?" (No. ix. p. 334.) So that, according to these Anti-British and empirical falsehoods, the people of England were plunged in such a night of barbarism, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, that it is to be feared the divine works of the immortal Phidias, addressed to the eye and the mind of mankind, would have remained unappreciated and misunderstood, if Mr. Haydon had not, by his writings, given the nation, artists, amateurs, shopkeepers, and all, a gratuitous lift in the scale of intellect, and opened our eyes to their beauties! In point of fact, this is another audacious falsehood; for the venerable West affirmed the excellence of the Elgin marbles in the presence of the Bishop of Durham, within a fortnight or three weeks after the cases were opened in Park Lane; and he began to draw from them immediately, at that time, (in 1806) being almost nearly two years before Haydon saw them; which he did not until after he had begun his Dentatus, in 1808.
We do not mean, in imitation of those anti-British impostors, to convert the Elgin marbles into a means of disgracing the British character, by falsely assigning to any one artist or amateur, an exclusive claim to the discovery or first affirmation of their excellence in this country. Spon, Wheler and Nointel, between the years 1670 and 80, and the concurring testimony of artists and amateurs, who have visited Greece since their time, had made known their beauties to Europe long before a thought existed of our ever being their possessor. A reference to the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, (p. 31) will shew, that it is to
