Pictorial Poor Relations

There is a department of pictorial art, if art it can be called, that has had little at tention bestowed upon it, but with which most persons, if they stop to think, will find themselves familiar. Having said this, may I remind the reader of a certain pathetic collection of prints which form themselves in the imagination into a mournful gallery, composed of engravings which we have seen sometimes in highly respectable but somewhat old-fashioned parlors, but more often in the cheerless “ reception - room ” of a city boarding-house or at the waiting-room of the elderly dentist in a small town ? These pictures once enjoyed (in the days of horsehair furniture) a brief season of prosperity, gradually became distanced by more favored rivals, drifted to the auction - room, were bought by people who, like themselves, had seen better days, and finally decorated some apartment in which they made forlornity more forlorn.

For instance, which of us has not seen the print of Franklin at the Court of Versailles, and admired the republican simplicity of that acute statesman, as he stands patient amid billows of crinoline adorning the figures of numerous people of distinction, placed in various attitudes expressive of “ the assurance of their highest consideration " ? One of the ladies, it will be remembered, is crowning him with a laurel wreath, an attention which the old gentleman receives with the phlegmatic air of being measured for a hat. Another work, of more imposing nature, which filled my childish imagination with an awful joy, was a series of allegorical pictures called The Voyage of Life. These four plates were named Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age. They represented, under varying vicissitudes, a " mortal" in a “shallop,” accompanied by a guardian angel, who, after voyaging through terrific whirlpools, mid beetling crags, finally emerged in a land of delight, in which could be seen the blessed, accompanied by angels (and a large menagerie of amiable beasts), wandering in a forest, arranged in the highest style of landscape gardening. Beyond and above this agreeable region, in the dim distance, ascended an immense structure, of cloudlike whiteness but of quite well - defined architectural peculiarities, surrounded by an aurora in full play. This cheerful piece was, however, scarcely able to dispel the terrors occasioned by the dangers already pictured, since an inky tempest invariably lurked in each of the three engravings of the series of which this was the final print. Of late years, a feeble imitation of these works has been issued under the name of The Guardian Angel, or some like title, in which two children, in a remarkably unseaworthy boat, are being conducted directly toward a dangerous reef by two well-meaning but inexperienced spirit shapes, by them unseen, although, alas ! visible to the spectator. This bears the same relation to the original theme that Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable has to Defoe’s masterpiece.

For melodramatic horror, The Flood and The Destruction of Babylon possibly “bear away the bell.” The first is remarkable chiefly for its waves, which, curling in most irreproachable breakers, are greedily engulfing the inhabitants of the earth. The Babylonish catastrophe is striking from the terrific glare, which illumines a great number of rather monotonous courts, palaces, and terraces, filled with a flying multitude. But these pictures are not common, and seem to have proved a little too strong even for that Millerite public to whose taste they were intended to appeal.

A critic said, not long ago, of Swift’s Tale of a Tub, that it was one of those volumes to which an allusion was always expected to be both understood and acceptable in polite society, and it seems to us that the same rather Johnsonian remark is equally true of the print of John Knox Preaching before Mary Queen of Scots. That vigorous exhorter is represented in a very high pulpit, over which he leans and violently addresses Mary, who, surrounded by her women and some frowning bishops in mitres (evidently assumed in compliment to Knox’s well-known prelatical tendencies), is apparently alarmed lest he should lose his balance. This and The Trial of Effie Deans, which I remember chiefly for its lofty barred windows and the high lights shed on the barristers’ wigs, are usually to he found together.

Of a higher class than those I have mentioned is another inseparable pair, the Coronation and Marriage of Queen Victoria, highly ornate, and of some actual artistic merit, in which the queen figures as a “young female of sensibility,”amid a crowd of ladies whose plumed head-dresses overtop the faces of virtuous and admirable British matrons. An air of Church-and-State respectability pervades these two prints, and when framed in wide gilt frames, with extensive margins, their effect is indeed suffocating upon one not a British householder.

The mahogany-fuinished library of a simpler day, when adorned with anything besides a saffron-colored map of the United States, — with an ornamental border composed of views in the principal cities, — usually possessed engravings of Shakespeare and his Friends, Scott and his Friends, or Washington Irving and his Friends. Of these, the Shakespeare was vastly the most attractive, and the picturesque costumes of the various poets therein depicted made the observer oblivious to the fact that many of the characters assembled probably had not the most distant acquaintance with one another. This is even truer of Irving, whose assemblage could have been brought together but little better than one could make an evening party of all the A’s in a biographical dictionary.

I cannot refrain from adding the name of one old favorite, always to be found in houses where the father of the family was of a political turn of mind. This is not Webster Addressing the Senate. That is also time-worn, but not so time-worn as The Death-Bed of Daniel Webster, in which his chief associates, clad almost too prematurely in black, stand about the white bed on which the statesman lies. It is not a pleasing picture, nor a particularly moving one, since the assemblage is also manifestly artificial in its personnel. But be this as it may, the gloomy engraving has enjoyed a vast popularity, and is still common in New England “ best parlors.”

Any one familiar with these pictures will, no doubt, detect many inaccuracies in this slight description of them. But the writer knows not where to find examples by which to correct his remembrances. And so these wails and strays, whom every one recognizes, but whom no one desires, must be content with these few lines, or never be chronicled at all.