Painting is one of the most purely imitative of the arts, and the utmost licence which its greatest masters have allowed it, is simply the power of choosing and combining what is pleasing to the eye, and rejecting all that can offend it. This, however, does not content the present school of painting in France. They must have something such as never was, and never will be, and in their colouring especially they have succeeded to a miracle.
David's naked Spartans are brilliant instances of how far art can go beyond nature; for certainly never was any thing seen under heaven like the skins of those polished gentlemen. Take away the shields and helmets, and a very slight alteration would convert the three hundred arming for Thermopylæ, into Diana and her nymphs bathing; and even then they would be somewhat too pretty, for without doubt the goddess's hunting-parties, gave her a much more russet tint than David has thought proper to bestow upon the hardy warriors of Greece.
Perhaps the great corrector of all things, time, may deprive these pictures of their adventitious glare of colouring; but even then, though they may be admired for their fine bold outline, one violent defect can never be banished, the forced and extravagant attitudes of some of the principal figures. David had certainly a strange penchant for sans-culotteism; he never missed an opportunity of leaving his heroes without any apparel except a helmet, which sits rather preposterously on a naked man.
The grand and dignified simplicity of the ancient masters forms a most striking contrast with the laboured and overcharged productions of the present French school. A modern painter, certainly possessing very great talent, has attempted a picture of the deluge. He has crowded into it great many horrors, all very horrible; but the principal group will be sufficient. It consists of a family vainly endeavouring to escape from the surrounding destruction by climbing a rock in the foreground. The agonies of such a moment might have been expressed most touchingly, had the artist chosen to keep within the bounds of moderation: but no, he must out-herod Herod; and, consequently, he has contrived to make one of the most dreadful situations the human mind can conceive actually ludicrous.