400 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

5.The large Cuyp¹ is, I think, nearly uninjured. Many portions of the foreground painting have been revealed, which were before only to be traced painfully, if at all. The distance has indeed lost the appearance of sunny haze, which was its chief charm, but this I have little doubt it originally did not possess, and in process of time may recover.

6. The “Bacchus and Ariadne”² of Titian has escaped so scot free that, not knowing it had been cleaned, I passed it without noticing any change. I observed only that the blue of the distance was more intense than I had previously thought it, though, four years ago, I said of that distance that it was “difficult to imagine anything more magnificently impossible, not from its vividness, but because it is not faint and aerial enough to account for its purity of colour. There is so total a want of atmosphere in it, that but for the difference of from it would be impossible to distinguish the mountains from the robe of Ariadne.”*

Your correspondent is alike unacquainted with the previous condition of this picture, and with the character of Titian distances in general, when he complains of a loss of aerial quality resulting in the present case from cleaning.

7. I unfortunately did not see the new Velasquez³ until

* Modern Painters, vol. i. p. 146 [Vol. III. p. 269].

¹ [“Landscape, with Cattle and Figures-Evening” (No. 53). Since the bequest of the somewhat higher “large Dort” in 1876 (No. 961), it has ceased to be “the large Cuyp.”]

² [No. 35. This and the two pictures already mentioned were the typical instances of “spoilt pictures” quoted by “Verax.”]

³ [“Philip IV. of Spain, hunting the Wild Boar” (No. 197), purchased in 1846, and thereupon cleaned. The Committee of 1853 elicited some curious information about this picture. Lord Cowley, its former owner, had sent it to a Mr. Thane, a picture dealer, to be relined. A too hot iron was used, and a portion of the paint entirely disappeared. Thane was in despair. The picture haunted him at nights. He saw the figure of it in his dreams becoming more and more attenuated until at length it appeared a skeleton. He was near going mad over it, when a good angel came to his rescue in the shape of Lance, the flower and fruit painter, who offered to restore the missing parts out of his head. The parts which Lance claimed to have thus painted in were the groups on the left of the foreground, and some of the middle distance. “I endeavoured,” he says, “to fill up the canvas, such as I supposed Velasquez would have done; and I had great facility in doing that, because if there was a man without a horse, here, there was a horse without a man there, so I could easily

[Version 0.04: March 2008]