Raffaello Morghen left no scholars who have followed him in portraits; but his own works are still regarded, and a monument in Santa Croce, the Westminster Abbey of Florence, places him among the mighty dead of Italy.
Thus far nothing has been said of English engravers. Here, as in Art generally, England seems removed from the rest of the world,--“_Et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos_.”[169] But though beyond the sphere of Continental Art, the island of Shakespeare was not inhospitable to some of its representatives. Van Dyck, Rubens, Sir Peter Lely, and Sir Godfrey Kneller, all Dutch artists, painted the portraits of Englishmen, and engraving was first illustrated by foreigners. Jacob Houbraken, another Dutch artist, born in 1698, was employed to execute portraits for Birch’s “Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain,” published at London in 1743; and in these works may be seen the æsthetic taste inherited from his father, (the biographer of the Dutch artists,[170]) and improved by study of the French masters. Although without great force or originality of manner, many of these have positive beauty. I would name especially the _Sir Walter Raleigh_ and _John Dryden_.
Different in style was Bartolozzi, the Italian, who made his home in England for forty years, ending in 1805, when he removed to Lisbon. The considerable genius which he possessed was spoiled by haste in execution, superseding that care which is an essential condition of Art. Hence sameness in his work, and indifference to the picture he copied. Longhi speaks of him as “most unfaithful to his archetypes,” and, “whatever the originals, being always Bartolozzi.”[171] Among his portraits of especial interest are several old wigs, as Mansfield and Thurlow; also the _Death of Chatham_, after the picture of Copley in the Vernon Gallery. But his prettiest piece undoubtedly is _Mary, Queen of Scots, with her little Son, James the First_, after what Mrs. Jameson calls “the lovely picture by Zuccaro at Chiswick.”[172] In the same style are his vignettes, which are of acknowledged beauty.
Meanwhile a Scotchman, honorable in Art, comes upon the scene,--Sir Robert Strange, born in the distant Orkneys in 1721, who abandoned the law for engraving. As a youthful Jacobite he joined the Pretender in 1745, sharing the disaster of Culloden, and owing his safety from pursuers to a young lady dressed in the ample costume of the period, whom he afterwards married in gratitude, and they were both happy. He has a style of his own, rich, soft, and especially charming in the tints of flesh, making him a natural translator of Titian. His most celebrated engravings are doubtless the _Venus_ and the _Danaë_ after the great Venetian colorist; but the _Cleopatra_, though less famous, is not inferior in merit. His acknowledged masterpiece is the Madonna of St. Jerome, called “_The Day_,” after the picture by Correggio in the Gallery of Parma; but his portraits after Van Dyck are not less fine, while they are more interesting,--as Charles the First, with a large hat, by the side of his horse, which the Marquis of Hamilton is holding; and that of the same monarch standing in his ermine robes; also the three royal children, with two King Charles spaniels at their feet; also Henrietta Maria, the Queen of Charles. That with the ermine robes is supposed to have been studied by Raffaello Morghen, called sometimes an imitator of Strange.[173] To these I would add the rare autograph portrait of the engraver, being a small head after Greuzé, which is simple and beautiful.