A second cause was the restriction of chamber decorations to portraits
and engravings; and a third, the craze of the connoisseur for Hogarth's
hated "Black Masters," the productions of defunct foreigners. And this
naturally brings about the following digression, quite in Hogarth's own
way, against that contemporary charlatan, the picture-dealer:--"English
painters have an obstacle to overcome, which equally impedes the
progress of their talents and of their fortune. They have to contend
with a class of men whose business it is to sell pictures; and as, for
these persons, traffic in the works of living, and above all of native
artists, would be impossible, they make a point of decrying them, and,
as far as they can, of confirming amateurs with whom they have to deal
in the ridiculous idea that the older a picture is the more valuable it
becomes. See, say they (speaking of some modern effort), it still shines
with that ignoble freshness which is to be found in nature; Time will
have to indue it with his learned smoke--with that sacred cloud which
must some day hide it from the profane eyes of the vulgar in order to
reveal to the initiated alone the mysterious beauties of a venerable
antiquity."
These words are quite in the spirit of Hogarth's later "Time smoking a
Picture.
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