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Updated: June 4, 2025
Upon his return to Court, taking up apartments which the royal favour had reserved for him at Versailles, Saint-Simon secretly entered upon the self-appointed task for which he is now known to fame a task which the proud King of a vainglorious Court would have lost no time in terminating had it been discovered the task of judge, spy, critic, portraitist, and historian, rolled into one.
Upon his return to Court, taking up apartments which the royal favour had reserved for him at Versailles, Saint-Simon secretly entered upon the self-appointed task for which he is now known to fame a task which the proud King of a vainglorious Court would have lost no time in terminating had it been discovered the task of judge, spy, critic, portraitist, and historian, rolled into one.
There is the true key of Van Dyck. He met Rubens as a portraitist and took no odds of him. Lucas Cranach's Adam and Eve is a variation of the picture in the Brussels gallery.
But where to begin, where to end in this high carnival of over three thousand pictures! The ticketed favourites, starred Baedeker fashion, sometimes lag behind their reputation. The great Van der Helst and a prime portraitist he is, as may be seen over and over again is The Company of Captain Bicker, a vast canvas.
Houdon is one of the finest examples of the union of vigor with grace. He will be known chiefly as a portraitist, but such a masterpiece as his "Diana" shows how admirable he was in the sphere of purely imaginative theme and treatment.
We next note 659, a fine portrait group by Nattier: Mlle. de Lambec as Minerva, arming her brother the young Count of Brienne. To the same skilful portraitist are due: 660, a Knight of Malta; and 661, A Daughter of Louis XV. as a Vestal Virgin. By Boucher are: 48, R. of entrance, The Painter in his Studio, and R. wall, 47, The Three Graces; 46 and 49, L. wall, Venus and Vulcan, and Vulcan's Forge.
William Darlington Ponkapog, the poet, whose epic on the "Reign of Gold" is one of the longest, and some writers say the thickest, in the English language; James Whistleton Potts, the eminent portraitist, whose limnings of his patients have won him a high place among the caricaturists of the age, Robert Dozyphrase, the expatriated American novelist, now of London, whose latest volume of sketches, entitled Intricacies, has been equally the delight of his followers and the despair of students of the occult; and, what is more to the purpose of our story, Major-General Carrington Cox, U.S.A., retired.
In 1815, as in 1919, the world pacifiers had their court painters, and Isabey, the French portraitist, was as much run after as was Sir William Orpen in 1919. In some respects, however, there was a difference. "Isabey," said the Prince de Ligne, "is the Congress become painter. Come! His talk is as clever as his brush."
Velasquez is never rhetorical, nor does he paint for the sake of making beautiful surfaces as often does Titian. His practice is not art for art as much as art for life. As a portraitist, Titian's is the only name to be coupled with that of Velasquez. He neither flattered his sitters, as did Van Dyck, nor mocked them like Goya.
In all Europe there is no school of portraiture worth notice; the so-called portrait-painters are only likeness-makers, comparing with the true portraitist as a topographical draughtsman does with a landscape artist.
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