The perfect whiteness of the ground being thus secured, a transparent warm oil-priming, in early practice flesh-coloured, was usually passed over the entire picture. This custom, says Mr. Eastlake, appears to have been a remnant of the old habit of covering tempera pictures with a warm varnish, and was sometimes omitted.' When used it was permitted to dry thoroughly, and over it the shadows were painted in with a rich transparent brown, mixed with a somewhat thick oleo-resinous vehicle; the lighter colours were then added with a thinner vehicle, taking care not to disturb the transparency of the shadows by the unnecessary mixture of opaque pigments, and leaving the ground bearing bright through the thin lights. (?) As the art advanced, the lights were more and more loaded, and afterwards glazed, the shadows being still left in untouched transparency. This is the method of Rubens. The later Italian colourists appear to have laid opaque local colour without fear even into the shadows, and to have recovered transparency by ultimate glazing. Such are the principal heads of the method of the early Flemish masters, as stated by Mr. Eastlake. We have marked as questionable the influence of the ground in supporting the lights: our reasons for doing so we will give, after we have stated what we suppose to be the advantages or disadvantages of the process in its earlier stages, guiding ourselves as far as possible by the passages in which any expression occurs of Mr. Eastlake's opinion. The reader cannot but see that the eminent character of the whole system is its predeterminateness. From first to last its success depended on the decision and clearness of each successive step. The drawing and light and shade were secured without any interference of colour; but when over these the oil-priming was once laid, the design could neither be altered nor, if lost, recovered; a colour laid too opaquely in the shadow destroyed the inner organization of the picture, and remained an irremediable blemish; and it was necessary, in laying colour even on the lights, to follow the guidance of the drawing beneath with a caution and precision which rendered anything like freedom of handling, in the modern sense, totally impossible. Every quality which depends on rapidity, accident, or audacity was interdicted; no affectation of ease was suffered to disturb the humility of patient exertion. Let our readers consider in what temper such a work must be undertaken and carried through—a work in which error was irremediable, change impossible-which demanded the drudgery of a student, while it involved the deliberation of a master-in which the patience of a mechanic was to be united with the foresight of a magician-in which no licence could be indulged either to fitfulness of temper or felicity of invention— in which haste was forbidden, yet languor fatal, and consistency of conception no less incumbent than continuity of toil. Let them reflect what kind of men must have been called up and trained by work such as this, and then compare the tones of mind which are likely to be produced by our present practice, a practice in which alteration is admitted to any extent in any stage-in which neither foundation is laid nor end foreseen-in which all is dared and nothing resolved, everything perilled, nothing provided forin which men play the sycophant in the courts of their humours, and hunt wisps in the marshes of their wits a practice which invokes accident, evades law, discredits application, despises system, and sets forth with chief exultation, contingent beauty, and extempore invention. But it is not only the fixed nature of the successive steps which influenced the character of these early painters. A peculiar direction was given to their efforts by the close attention to drawing which, as Mr. Eastlake has especially noticed, was involved in the preparation of the design on the white ground. That design was secured with a care and finish which in many instances might seem altogether supererogatory.* The preparation by John Bellini in the Florentine gallery is completed with exhaustless diligence into even the portions farthest removed from the light, where the thick brown of the shadows must necessarily have afterwards concealed the greater part of the work. It was the discipline undergone in producing this preparation which fixed the character of the school. The most important part of the picture was executed not with the brush, but with the point, and the refinements attainable by this instrument dictated the treatment of their subject. Hence the transition to etching and engraving, and the intense love of minute detail, accompanied by an imaginative communication of dignity and power to the smallest forms, in Albert Durer and others. But this attention to minutiæ was not the only result; the disposition of light and shade was also affected by the method. Shade was not to be had at small cost; its masses could not be dashed on in impetuous generalization, fields for the future recovery of light. They were measured out and wrought to their depths only by expenditure of toil and time; and, as future grounds for colour, they were necessarily restricted to the natural shadow of every object, white being left for high lights of whatever hue. In consequence, the character of pervading daylight, almost inevitably produced in the prepara *The preparations of Hemling, at Bruges, we imagine to have been in water-colour, and perhaps the picture was carried to some degree of completion in this material. Van Mander observes that Van Eyck's dead colourings were cleaner and sharper than the finished works of other painters.' tion, was afterwards assumed as a standard in the painting. Effectism, accidental shadows, all obvious and vulgar artistical treatment, were excluded, or introduced only as the lights became more loaded, and were consequently imposed with more facility on the dark ground. Where shade was required in large mass, it was obtained by introducing an object of locally dark colour. The Italian masters who followed Van Eyck's system were in the constant habit of relieving their principal figures by the darkness of some object, foliage, throne, or drapery, introduced behind the head, the open sky being left visible on each side. A green drapery is thus used with great quaintness by John Bellini in the noble picture of the Brera Gallery; a black screen, with marbled veins, behind the portraits of himself and his brother in the Louvre; a crimson velvet curtain behind the Madonna, in Francia's best picture at Bologna. Where the subject was sacred, and the painter great, this system of pervading light produced pictures of a peculiar and tranquil majesty; where the mind of the painter was irregularly or frivolously imaginative, its temptations to accumulative detail were too great to be resisted-the spectator was by the German masters overwhelmed with the copious inconsistency of a dream, or compelled to traverse the picture from corner to corner like a museum of curiosities. The chalk or pen preparation being completed, and the oilpriming laid, we have seen that the shadows were laid in with a transparent brown in considerable body. The question next arises What influence is this part of the process likely to have had upon the colouring of the school? It is to be remembered that the practice was continued to the latest times, and that when the thin light had been long abandoned, and a loaded body of colour had taken its place, the brown transparent shadow was still retained, and is retained often to this day, when asphaltum is used as its base, at the risk of the destruction of the picture. The utter loss of many of Reynolds' noblest works has been caused by the lavish use of this pigment. What the pigment actually was in older times is left by Mr. Eastlake undecided. A rich brown, which, whether an earth or mineral alone, or a substance of the kind enriched by the addition of a transparent yellow or orange, is not an unimportant element of the glowing colouring which is remarkable in examples of the school. Such a colour, by artificial combinations at least, is easily supplied; and it is repeated, that, in general, the materials now in use are quite as good as those which the Flemish masters had at their command. -Ib. p. 488. At p. 446 it is also asserted that the peculiar glow of the brown of Rubens is hardly to be accounted for by any accidental variety in the Cassel earths, but was obtained by the mixture of a trans parent parent yellow. Evidence, however, exists of asphaltum having been used in Flemish pictures, and with safety, even though prepared in the modern manner :— 'It is not ground' (says De Mayerne), but a drying oil is prepared with litharge, and the pulverized asphaltum mixed with this oil is placed in a glass vessel, suspended by a thread [in a water bath]. Thus exposed to the fire it melts like butter; when it begins to boil it is instantly removed. It is an excellent colour for shadows, and may be glazed like lake; it lasts well.'-Ib. p. 463. The great advantage of this primary laying in of the darks in brown was the obtaining an unity of shadow throughout the picture, which rendered variety of hue, where it occurred, an instantly accepted evidence of light. It mattered not how vigorous or how deep in tone the masses of local colour might be, the eye could not confound them with true shadow; it everywhere distinguished the transparent browns as indicative of gloom, and became acutely sensible of the presence and preciousness of light wherever local tints rose out of their depths. But however superior this method may be to the arbitrary use of polychrome shadows, utterly unrelated to the lights, which has been admitted in modern works; and however beautiful or brilliant its results might be in the hands of colourists as faithful as Van Eyck, or as inventive as Rubens; the principle on which it is based becomes dangerous whenever, in assuming that the ultimate hue of every shadow is brown, it pre-supposes a peculiar and conventional light. It is true, that so long as the early practice of finishing the under-drawing with the pen was continued, the grey of that preparation might perhaps diminish the force of the upper colour, which became in that case little more than a glowing varnisheven thus sometimes verging on too monotonous warmth, as the reader may observe in the head of Dandolo, by John Bellini, in the National Gallery. But when, by later and more impetuous hands, the point tracing was dispensed with, and the picture boldly thrown in with the brown pigment, it became matter of great improbability that the force of such a prevalent tint could afterwards be softened or melted into a pure harmony; the painter's feeling for truth was blunted; brilliancy and richness became his object rather than sincerity or solemnity; with the palled sense of colour departed the love of light, and the diffused sunshine of the early schools died away in the narrowed rays of Rembrandt. We think it a deficiency in the work before us that the extreme peril of such a principle, incautiously applied, has not been pointed out, and that the method of Rubens has been so highly extolled for its technical perfection, without without the slightest notice of the gross mannerism into which its facile brilliancy too frequently betrayed the mighty master. Yet it remains a question how far, under certain limitations and for certain effects, this system of pure brown shadow may be successfully followed. It is not a little singular that it has already been revived in water-colours by a painter who, in his realization of light and splendour of hue, stands without a rival among living schools-Mr. Hunt; his neutral shadows being, we believe, first thrown in frankly with sepia, the colour introduced upon the lights, and the central lights afterwards further raised by body colour, and glazed. But in this process the sepia shadows are admitted only on objects whose local colours are warm or neutral; wherever the tint of the illumined portion is delicate or peculiar, a relative hue of shade is at once laid on the white paper; and the correspondence with the Flemish school is in the use of brown as the ultimate representative of deep gloom, and in the careful preservation of its transparency, not in the application of brown universally as the shade of all colours. We apprehend that this practice represents, in another medium, the very best mode of applying the Flemish system; and that when the result proposed is an effect of vivid colour under bright cool sunshine, it would be impossible to adopt any more perfect means. But a system which in any stage prescribes the use of a certain pigment, implies the adoption of a constant aim, and becomes, in that degree, conventional. Suppose that the effect desired be neither of sunlight nor of bright colour, but of grave colour subdued by atmosphere, and we believe that the use of brown for an ultimate shadow would be highly inexpedient. With Van Eyck and with Rubens the aim was always consistent: clear daylight, diffused in the one case, concentrated in the other, was yet the hope, the necessity of both; and any process which admitted the slightest dimness, coldness, or opacity, would have been considered an error in their system by either. Alike, to Rubens, came subjects of tumult or tranquillity, of gaiety or terror; the nether, earthly, and upper world were to him animated with the same feeling, lighted by the same sun; he dyed in the same lake of fire the warp of the wedding-garment or of the winding-sheet; swept into the same delirium the recklessness of the sensualist, and rapture of the anchorite; saw in tears only their glittering, and in torture only its flush. To such a painter, regarding every subject in the same temper, and all as mere motives for the display of the power of his art, the Flemish system, improved as it became in his hands, was alike sufficient and habitual. But among the greater colourists of Italy the aim was not always so simple nor the method so determinable. We find Tintoret passing like a fire-fly |