We propose under this head to furnish our readers with a connected view of the progress of sculpture and painting in this country; and to render this really useful to the student and amateur, we shall not only furnish an account of the transactions of the various institutions for art in this and foreign countries, but occasionally enrich our pages with essays on the various branches of classical, historical, and decorative art, with especial reference to education and the diffusion of a knowledge and love of art among the people, particularly among those who have the youthful population of the country under their charge-the Schoolmasters of England.

In accordance with this intention, we shall in the present number of our Review, give a slight sketch of the progress of painting and sculpture from the earliest ages, which will be followed by a historical and critical account of modern art, and of the productions of our most celebrated painters and sculptors. It has been sometimes doubted whether sculpture or painting should have the priority in point of historical invention; but a moment's consideration will serve to show that the first rude efforts of the artist would be directed to the selection of the block of stone nearest in point of form to the object to be represented, and as such, it would be easier to become an artist on these materials than on a flat surface, where both outline and relief would be required. Dædælas, the first artist who acquired sufficient celebrity to have his name handed down to posterity, is said to have flourished three generations before the Trojan war; and, secondly, to the most generally-received chronology, about fourteen hundred years before the Christian era. His principal and best executed works were large statues in wood, some of which remained until the general destruction of art under the later Roman emperors; and, in spite of the rudeness of their forms, struck an intelligent traveller of the period with the grandeur and dignity of their air and character.

The spoils of the defeated armies of Xerxes in Greece, a tenth of which by immemorial custom belonged to the gods, afforded ample means of employment to the great sculptors who succeeded, among whom we find the names of Phidias, Alcamenes, Critias, Thestocles, Agoracritus, and Hegias; who were soon followed by Algelades, Callo, Polycletus, Phradmo, Gorgias, Laco, Myro, Pythagoras, Scopas, and Perelius.

Of Phidias' general style of composition, the friezes and metopes of the temple of Minerva at Athens, published by Mr. Stuart, and since brought to England, may afford us competent information; but as these are merely architectural sculptures executed from his designs and under his directions, probably by workmen scarcely ranked among artists, and meant to be seen at the height of more than forty feet from the eye, they can throw but little light upon the more important details of his art. From the degree and mode of relief in the friezes they appear to have been intended to produce an effect like that of the simplest kind of monochromatic painting, when seen from

their proper point of sight; which effect must have been extremely light and elegant. The relief in the metopes is much higher, so as to exhibit the figures nearly complete; and the details are more accurately and elaborately made out: but they are so different in their degrees of merit, as to be evidently the works of many different persons; some of whom would not have been entitled to the rank of artists in a much less cultivated and fastidious age.

One of the peculiarities of the early artists was a desire to produce powerful and striking effects by gigantic figures, and this was peculiarly displayed in the animal kingdom. The practice of placing colossal lions of stone at the entrance of a temple was both an Egyptian and Hindoo usage. Abdallatif describes two that he saw at Memphis, opposite to one another, and of proportions far beyond those of nature. He says the sight of them inspired fear, for the sculptor had maintained with perfect skill all the exactness of form and proportion. These lions, he tells us, were afterwards broken and covered with earth.

It was sometimes the practice of the Egyptians to paint their colossal statues, as we learn from Abdallatif's account of the great colossus which he saw in the ruins of Memphis. Traces of red paint are still discernible on the face of the great sphynx, and on one of the four colossal figures attached to the front of the temple of Ipsambul. Among the Greeks we find colossal statues not uncommon, and several which Pausanius mentions were 30 feet high and upwards. The people of Elis set up a bronze statue of Jupiter, 27 Greek feet high, in the Altis or sacred grove near Olympia, and the chryselephantine statue of the same deity, placed in his temple on the banks of the Apheus, was probably not less than 60 feet high. Among the Greeks the most common colossal statue was the chryselephantine, though occasionally marble, and still more frequently metal, was used for the same purpose; but as it is simply our object to show how widely this taste for colossal figures was spread, it may be enough for us to cite the celebrated work of Chares (the colossus of the sun), which was set up at Rhodes. This work of Grecian art surpassed any thing that the world has ever seen.-"It was 70 cubits high (105 Roman feet.) After standing fifty-six years, it was thrown down by an earthquake, but it is still a wonder even in its prostrate condition. Few men can embrace its thumb; and its fingers are larger than most statues. Huge caverns are seen in the fractured limbs, and within them immense stones which had been put there for the purpose of keeping it steady. This enormous statue is said to have cost 300 talents, and twelve years' labour." The colossus which Nebuchadnezzar set up in the plain of Dura, was “an image of gold, whose height was threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof six cubits." Herodotus also mentions a colossal statue twelve cubits high and of solid gold.

After this introductory view of the early history of sculpture, we may at once proceed to our illustrations of British art.

The art of sculpture was imported by our Roman conquerors into Britain at a very early period. The remains of Roman and British art in England are well imagined, but executed with so little skill as to admit the conjecture, that the gods and altars, as well as the roads of the time, were executed by the soldiers. The warlike invaders left something like the love of art behind them when Etius withdrew his last legion. A brazen statue of King Lud was erected on Ludgate Hill. But the colossal dimensions, and fierce countenance which Bede celebrates, are bad symptoms of the power of the sculptor's art. Amplitude had been taken for sublimity, and gigantic ferocity for heroic grandeur.

The Saxons succeeded the Romans, and whatever they did had a dash of the wildness of that blunt people. Their attempts to imitate the human form are savage and hideous. But riches and repose began to aid them in softening down the barbarous rudeness of imitation; and in their sacred architecture they had begun to display some taste, when their progress was arrested by the Normans, a people as fierce as themselves. To this band of

conquering adventurers we owe, among other benefits, the introduction of a better kind of sculpture. The tombs of the days of William the Norman and his sons, were good examples of the Gothic taste; and the forms sculptured upon them were stiff but natural, and intelligible though coarse.

Of the state of the fine arts in France during the middle ages, but little is correctly known; but as we pass along the stream of time, the beauty of church architecture increases; and the devout meaning and skilful execution of its accompanying sculptures became more and more remarkable. The return of the Crusaders brought a taste for the Grecian art, which was then visible wherever they had marched. The church became strong, rich, ambitious, and desirous of splendour. Magnificent abbeys were built, and the whole skill and genius of the land were employed in embellishing them with traditions of the saints and legends of the church. In the days of the third Henry, the desire to excel seemed universal, and many works of true genius adorned our cathedrals. For several centuries our demands for sculpture were mostly supplied by foreign hands; and often from a foreign market. The heathen gods, under the protection of modern names, had gained a footing in the island; and a crowd of allegorical creatures came after them. If we examine our cathedrals, where plainness and simplicity should preside, there this marble offspring of affection and idle learning are seated. It is painful to hear sculpture speaking over English dust with an alien tongue. The artists of those days did, however, undertake sometimes to represent nature; but they gave only the lifeless image, they missed the serenity of slumber, and carved the horror of death. If we pass on to a later period, it will be found that the sculpture of the last hundred years has partaken more largely of English feeling and intellect; and, though often deformed by allegory and affectation, debased sometimes by vulgarity and in general unelevated and monotonous, it contains works of a high and pure order. Of some of her domestic monuments in particular England may be justly proud; here the soundness of heart has happily prompted many daring acts of rebellion against the false tendency of professional taste.

Cibber was among the first of our artists who returned to sense and nature, and his statues of raving and melancholy madness, are the earliest of our works after the Reformation, which show an original grasp of mind. The cold insult of Pope is forgotten as we look on those "brainless brothers," who yet stand foremost in conception and second in execution among all the productions of English sculpture.

Rysbrach succeeded Cibber, and Sheemaker came and divided with him the public patronage. Though feeble, literal, and languid, they maintained something of the elevation of style which Cibber introduced; produced several recumbent figures which seem nature transcribed rather than nature exalted by art, yet they are nature still, and welcome from that novelty. They were heavy and ungraceful; they had not the skill to use allegory so as to make it understood, or nature so as to render it attractive.

Roubiliac's name still stands deservedly high, though it is at this period suffering under something like an eclipse. His ideas are frequently just and natural, and his execution is always careful and delicate. But he sacrificed nature and simplicity for the sake of effect; his works are all too lively and too active. He has little sedate beauty, little tranquil thought. Violent passion can be carved by a commoner hand than men imagine. A broad mark is easily hit: but quiet agony of mind and deep thought are less palpable things that demand the hand of a master. Roubiliac dealt largely in abstract ideas, nor did he use them wisely. We may take his monument of Mrs. Nightingale as an example; it is his most celebrated work, and a work of beauty and pathos-a dying wife and an agonized husband. So far all is natural and consistent. But he could not be satisfied with nature and with simple emotion. He opens an iron door, and sends forth a skeleton; a Death projecting his allegorical dart against the woman, while the man seeks to stay it with a hand of flesh and blood. Can any thing be more absurd than this strange mixture of shadow and substance? See with what discretion

Milton has escaped from the difficulty of describing Death, and yet we feel satisfied with the indistinct image which he gives:

"What seemed his head

The likeness of a kingly crown had on."

We have no grinning jaws nor marrowless bones here. When blood was first shed on earth, the same great poet makes Death rejoice as a bird of prey smelling coming carnage:

"So scented the grim Feature, and upturn'd

His nostrils huge into the dusky air."

The poet saw the difficulty; ordinary minds see none; and hence the sculptor has given us an image which startles and disgusts.

Bacon infused more English sense into sculpture than any of his predecessors. Amidst his personifications of cities and countries, and virtues and qualities, and his crowd of chubby boys, large about the middle and long in the wing, there frequently appeared something of a better nature; his happier judgment seemed often on the point of vanquishing allegory, but the dark abstraction always prevailed. Forms which came without the pain of study or the labour of meditation, were made too welcome; he was ambitious of finding a new labour for Hercules, and a christian employment for Minerva. The bust sculpture of Nollekens is deservedly esteemed. This popular branch of the art, when confined to legislators, warriors, orators, and poets, becomes the handmaid of history; but the calls of vanity bring a thousand heads to the sculptor's chisel, which have no other claim to distinction than what money purchases, while a man of genius contents himself with the fame of his productions, and is either too poor or too careless to confer a marble image of his person to posterity. Nollekens, like Bankes, had the ambition to introduce a purer and more tasteful style of art. His busts, which he considered as the mere small change that enabled him to buy his marble and pay his men, will alone preserve his name.

In Flaxman's mind the wish to work in the classic style of Greece, and the love to work in the original spirit of England, long held an equal war, sometimes forming natural and beautiful unions, and often keeping purely and elegantly asunder. To the aid of his art he brought a loftier and more poetical mind than any of the preceding sculptors; and learning unites with good sense and natural genius in all the works which came from his hand. He has penetrated with a far deeper sense of the majesty of Homer, into the Iliad and Odyssey, than Canova, who dedicated his whole life to the renovation of the antique; nor has he failed to catch the peculiar inspiration of whatever poet his fancy selected for illustration. We feel that he has rarely failed to reflect a true general image of the great original; we see the same grave majesty, and the same simplicity, and we own the group at once as the offspring of the spirit of Homer, Eschylus, or Dante. These works have spread the fame of Flaxman far and wide. On the bulk of his works in marble he has impressed the same serene and simple spirit; he always thinks justly, his conceptions are all inspired by strong sense and by the severer part of poetic feeling. Westmacott has shared largely in public and in private favour, and some of the most expensive of our monuments have been confided to his talents. He has in so far profited by the wise example of West and the good sense of Flaxman, obeyed the admonition of our cold climate, and respected the blushes of our ladies, and clothed some of his works in the costume of the country. In his Hindoo Girl there is a certain wildness of the eye; the stamp of a remote land is upon her; and in his Widowed Mother and Child he has attained the pathos of truth.

The renovation of the statue of Achilles in honour of Wellington and Waterloo surpasses all imaginable absurdity. By what perversity of fancy the cast of an antique figure was thought a fit visible record of English glory, it is impossible to say. The statue of Achilles (if Achilles it be) had already told its story to the world, and it was a strange piece of folly on the part of

Mr. Westmacott to press it into the British service; but in our service it cannot abide; remove the inscription, and the Greek is a Greek again. We hardly blame Westmacott for this; it is honourable enough to make money in an honest way, and we are obliged to the hand which extends our acquaintance among works of genius. But who would dedicate a translation of the Iliad as a national trophy to the honour of the heroes of Waterloo ?

England may justly be proud of Chantrey; his works reflect back her image as a mirror; he has formed his taste on no style but that of nature, and no works of any age or country but his own can claim back any inspiration which they have lent him. He calls up no shapes from antiquity: he gives us no established visions of the past: the beauty and the manliness which live and move around him are his materials, and he embodies them for the gratification of posterity. He seems to work as if he were unconscious of any other rival but nature. The antique is before him, but he prefers flesh and blood, and it would certainly cost him far more labour to imitate the work of another school, than to create an image from the impulse of his own feeling. Robert Burns said, that the muse of his country found him as Elijah did Elisha, at the plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over him; and the same may be said of Chantrey: it was in a secluded place, a nameless spot, into which art had never penetrated, that the inspiration of sculpture fell upon him. The Greeks charmed the whole earth by working exactly in the same spirit as this great man. But the liberties which they took with their Olympus gave them an advantage over modern sculptors. A Christian artist allows not his fancy to invade the sanctities of heaven-he presumes not to embody its shapes-he dares not to define the presence of his Creator. Mr. Chantrey's groups, though the most admired, are not, perhaps, the happiest of his works.

Of all Mr. Chantrey's busts, perhaps that of the late Sir Walter Scott is the best. The poet possesses a face as changeable and various as the characters he drew in his works, and an expression which nothing but genius something akin to his own can hope to seize. In this remarkable bust the brow is full of thought, the eyes look through the spectator, and there is a grave humour about the mouth which seems ready to escape in speech. The whole face is finished with the most fascinating skill.

We may here observe, that this beautiful bust has been the parent of nearly all those which have appeared about the streets of the metropolis since the death of the above distinguished individual. Chantrey charged two guineas for the plaster cast-the Italians, who have moulded it from the original, charge half-a-crown.

Bailey studied under Flaxman. His conceptions are in general just, and his workmanship almost always good. His Eve is loveliness personified, and though undraped, yet breathes the purest spirit of chastity. Simple description indeed can hardly do justice to the peculiar beauty, simplicity, and modesty of this figure. There is a grace and almost infantine simplicity in the figure, which serves to place it in the highest order of sculpture. It is now in the possession of the Bristol Literary and Scientific Institution. Mr. Lough has highly distinguished himself by a variety of figures, which are now exhibiting in his own gallery, and his best group is a masterly representation of Duncan's Horses, which Shakspeare describes as devouring each other, forming one of the portents of the death of their royal master.

Of Mr. Thom, the Scottish sculptor, we had reason to expect much, but since the completion of his figures illustrative of Burns, his career has not at all realized his early promise.

In the present enumeration of sculptors, we must not omit to notice one who has peculiarly distinguished himself by the useful application of his art to the purposes of architecture. Mr. Bubb has established a depôt in Graftonstreet East, in which a material called Lithargelite, is modelled, and converted into figures much superior in point of durability to many sorts of marble. There are more than fifty statues executed by this artist in the Regent's Park, and, amongst other works, we may particularly notice a