Viewing page 9 of 39

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

9
than even the neglect of real merit.

Something in its same spirit. Mr Morse deprecates the interventions of any but professer artists in the management of academies. We doubt whether he is right in this. We are inclined to look on this exclusion, as one cause of those bad effects, which he admits to have preceeded from ill-constituted academies. It tends to the formation of a school; which is little else than a system of errors and deviations from that imitation of general nature, which cannot be too exact [[strikethrough]] for [[/strikethrough]] even for ideal beauty; there is but one nature, and there can be but one true way of painting. Artists may differ, indeed, in their choice of subjects and circumstances; but independently of these, their peculiar manners are chiefly their peculiar defects. Yet it is exceedingly difficult, in the examination of nature, to overcome the prejudices of a famile system of art. In the same scene, one painter will see nothing but light and shade, while to another it will seem full of color. Fuseli, no doubt, thought he was painting naturally, when he imitated humanity so abominally; and his students, if they have been confined to his instructions, would have learned to see in nature the contortions and extravagances of their