Recollections of the late William Beckford of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath | Page 2

It has on one side five lofty windows, the
gallery having three on the same side. You have the light streaming
through eight consecutive openings; these openings, with their crimson
curtains, doubled by the reflection, produce a most charming
perspective. From the ceiling hangs a splendid ormolu chandelier, the
floor is covered with a Persian carpet (brought I believe from Portugal),
so sumptuous that one is afraid to walk on it, and a noble mosaic table
of Florentine marble, bought in at an immense price at Fonthill, is in
the centre of the room. Several rows of the rarest books cover the lower
part of the walls, and above them hang many fine portraits, which Mr.
Beckford immediately, without losing any time in compliments, began
to show us and describe.
First we were shown a portrait by de Vos of Grotius; next to it one of
Rembrandt, painted by himself. "You see," said Mr. Beckford, "that he
is trying to assume an air of dignity not natural to him, by throwing
back his head, but this attempt at the dignified is neutralized by the
expression of the eyes, which have rather too much of sly humour for
the character which he wishes to give himself." To praise individual
pictures seems useless when everyone you meet has excellencies
peculiar to itself; in fact, whatever our ideas of the great masters may
be, and we certainly do gain from prints and pictures a tolerable idea of
their style and different beauties (and I have myself seen the Louvre
and many celebrated pictures) there is in Mr. Beckford's chef d'oeuvres
something still more lovely than our imagination, than our expectation.
I speak not now of the St. Catherine, The Claud, The Titian, &c., but all
the pictures, whether historical, landscape, or low life, have this unique
character of excellence. You look at a picture. You are sure it is by
Gaspar, but you never saw one of Poussin's that had such an exquisite
tone of colour, so fresh and with such free and brilliant execution.

But I digress. I forgot that it was the library and its pictures I was
attempting to describe. Well, at the other end hangs a portrait of Pope
Gregory, by Passerotti; the expression of the face Italian, attitude like
Raphael. Over the door a portrait of Cosmo de Medici by Bronzino
Allori, fresh as if painted yesterday. "The works of that master," I said,
"are rare, but a friend of mine, Mr. Day, had a noble one at his rooms in
Piccadilly, St. John in the Wilderness. The conception of the figure and
poetical expression of the face always seemed to me astonishingly fine.
Pray, Sir, do you know that picture?" "Perfectly, it partakes of the
sublime and is amazingly fine." "Your portrait of Cosmo has the
expression of a resolute, determined man, and I think it conveys well
the idea of the monstrous parent, who could with his own hand destroy
his only surviving son after discovering he had murdered his brother.
What a horrible piece of business! The father of two sons, one of whom
murdered the other, and that father is himself the executioner of the
survivor." "It was dreadful certainly," said Mr. Beckford. "However,
we have the consolation of knowing that two broods of vipers were
destroyed."
Mr. Beckford next showed us a Titian, a portrait of the Constable
Montmorency, in armour richly chased with gold; a fine picture, but
sadly deficient in intellectual expression. And no wonder, for as Mr.
Beckford observed, "He could neither read nor write, but he was none
the worse for that." "There is, then, before us," I rejoined, "the portrait
of the man of whom his master, Henri Quatre, said: 'Avec un
Counetable qui re sait pas ecrire, et un Chancelier qui ne sait pas le
Latin, j'ai reussi dans toutes mes entreprises.' It is the very portrait for
which he sat." "The face," I said, "has no great pretensions to intellect,
but then Titian knew nothing of the refined flattery so fashionable
now-a-days that throws a halo of mind and expression over faces more
stupid than Montmorency's, and whose possessors never performed the
chivalrous deeds of the Constable."
"Witness Sir Thomas Lawrence's fine picture of Sir Wm. Curtis, where
the Court painter has thrown a poetical expression over a personage
that never in his life betrayed any predilection for anything but turtle
soup and gormandizing." Mr. Beckford burst out laughing. "Well," said

he, "here is a picture that will perhaps please you. Holbein has certainly
not been guilty of the refined flattery you complain of here; it is the
portrait of Bishop Gardiner, painted at the time he was in Holland and
in disgrace. What think you of it?" "It is admirably painted, and has
scarcely anything of his