from the banks of the Ohio or from New Holland.”—Vol. II. p. 119.
In opposition to the sentiment here expressed that “Painting is and ought to be, in many points of view and strictly speaking, no imitation at all of external nature,” it is emphatically said in another place—“Nature is and must be the fountain which alone is inexhaustible; and from which all excellences must originally flow.”—Discourse VI. Vol. I. p. 162.
I cannot undertake to reconcile so many contradictions, nor do I think it an easy task for the student to derive any simple or intelligible clue from these conflicting authorities and broken hints in the prosecution of his art. Sir Joshua appears to have imbibed from others (Burke or Johnson) a spurious metaphysical notion that art was to be preferred to nature, and learning to genius, with which his own good sense and practical observation were continually at war, but from which he only emancipates himself for a moment to relapse into the same error again shortly after[1]. The con-
- ↑ Sir Joshua himself wanted academic skill and patience in the details of his profession. From these defects he seems to have been alternately repelled by each theory and style of art, the simply natural and elaborately scientific, as it came
