1828.] [ 363 ] 
MODERN PICTURES. 
Ir is too much the fashion, among certain popular periodical writers 
of the day, to cry up the “old masters,” at the expense not merely of 
the moderns generally, but of those of our own country and our own 
day in particular. The praise of “old pictures” is a fertile subject ; 
and the writers in question seem to need no other motive for adopting it 
into their list, and recurring to it whenever occasion serves. And 
assuredly we shall not be the persons to contend that too much praise 
and admiration can be bestowed, on such painters as the best of the 
Italian and Flemish schools of the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies. But still 
we must insist, that to compare these painters and their works with those 
of our own day and country, to the disparagement of the latter, is a very 
suspicious mode of proving our love for art and its productions, or even 
of shewing our judgment in regard to them. If comparisons are pro- 
verbially “ odious,” it is because they are for the most part manifestly 
unjust ; and the one to which we are now referring is more unjust, and 
consequently more “ odious,” than almost any other that we are in the 
habit of meeting with, even in this age of comparisons : because the point 
in question is one on which the nature of our information (or rather the 
want of it) prevents us from instituting any just comparison whatever. 
Our attention is directed to a certain exhibition of “ old pictures” (the 
National Gallery, for example, or the annual selection at the British 
Institution)—every individual production forming which exhibition is 
there to claim, not our judgment, but our admiration—since the joint 
suffrages of half-a-dozen generations have already definitively pro- 
nounced it to be excellent in its kind: and we are bid to compare this 
exhibition with one not merely by modern, but by living artists, every 
production forming which is placed there to claim our judgment merely, 
in the first instance, and nol to exact our admiration, unless the latter 
feeling necessarily follows the award of our critical examination. 
—Now what possible conclusions can be drawn as to the relative 
condition of art at two distinct periods, by means of two dif- 
ferent exhibitions coming before us under these circumstances? It 
may be fairly stated, that every distinguished exhibition of pictures 
by the old masters, consists of works selected, on the ground of their 
merits (or supposed merits) merely ; and selected, too, from the best 
works of the best painters of the best ages of painting thatthe world ever 
knew ;—not the best age, but ages ;—and not of’one country, but of all: 
—whereas the collections of modern works with which it pleases our 
would-be critics to compare the above, are the productions of the artists 
of one country and of one year, and are scarcely selected at all, but are, 
in fact, presented to us with an express view to their after selection and 
appreciation. Let the exclusive lauders of “ old pictures,” and the pre- 
tended despisers of our modern Royal Academy Exhibitions, prove to us 
(if they can), that the old masters of any one country ever did or could 
have collected together, on any one spot, a set of productions, all painted 
during the previous year, which were equal in their aggregate of merit 
to any one Royal Academy Exhibition for the last four or five years ; and 
then (but not till then) we may possibly admit the policy, but will never 
admit the justice, of instituting comparisons between se-lections from the 
works of the dead, and col-lections of works of the living. But, in the mean 
time, we must beg to be of opinion that living English artists are very 
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