Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. Marries : paints small Conversations, which subjects he quits for familiar prints; attempts History ; but finding it not encouraged in England, returns to engraving from his own designs. Occasionally takes portraits large as life, for which he incurs much abuse. To prove his powers and vindicate his fame, paints the admirable portrait of Captain Coram, and presents it to the Foundling Hospital. I THEN married, and commenced painter of small Conversation pieces, from twelve to fifteen inches high. This having novelty, succeeded for a few years. But though it gave somewhat more scope to the fancy, was still but a less kind of drudgery ; and as I could not bring myself to act like some of my brethren, and make it a sort of a manufactory, to be carried on by the help of back ground and drapery painters, it was not sufficiently profitable to pay the expenses my family required. I therefore turned my thoughts to a still more novel mode, textit viz. painting and engraving modern moral subjects, a field not broken up in any country or any age. The reasons which induced me to adopt this mode of designing were, that I thought both writers and painters had, in the historical style, totally overlooked that intermediate species of subjects, which may be placed between the sublime and grotesque ; I therefore wished to compose pictures on canvas, similar to representations on the stage ; and further hope that they will be tried by the same test, andcriticised by the same criterion. Let it be observed, that I mean to speak only of those scenes where the human species are actors, and these I think have not often been delineated in a way of which they are worthy and capable. In these compositions, those subjects that will both entertain and improve the mind, bid fair to be o...
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