Punch (51.1866)

November 24, 1866.]

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

209

THE SERVANTS’ BALL.

(OP COURSE PATRONISED BY THE FAMILY.

Admiring and Envious Housemaid. “You see, Emma, James is so

Pleasant to the Ladies, and

BRAVO, BOXALL ! WELL DONE, WORNUM !

We have to record an act of heroism on the part of the Director and
Superintendent of the National Gallery. Not the muzzling of Me.
Gregory, nqr the taking off of Mr. Ayrton or Mr. Cavendish Ben-
tinck by poison, nor the dexterous dispatching of Mr. Morris Moore
to a world where there are no Raphaels in the market but his own.
They have done a feat far more heroic than any of these. They have
dared to brave the bray of the noodles and the nincompoops—a very
powerful body among the connoisseurs—and to have the dirt taken
off some of the National Pictures ! Not off all, unhappily, but off
just enough to give us a relish of the beauty that lies drowned,
fathom deep, under Sir George Beaumont’s liquorice-water, and the
late Mr. Seguier’s favourite brown varnish. These men have actually
had the pluck to dive to the bottom of these filthy brown standing
jiools, and to bring up the jewels of Rubens, and Poussin, and
Salvator Rosa, as bright as when they left the hand that set
them.

. They have ventured to let us see trees green, and skies blue, as these
ridiculously naif old masters actually had the courage to paint them.
They have removed the crust and the rust, and the patina of venerable
antiquity,—m other words, the old cleaner’s dirty work,—till we stand,
for the first time in this generation, face to face with the Chateau of
Stein, the grey walls, the small stone-framed windows aflame with sun-
set, and the briery copses of the chase, where the keeper is stalking
the sitting covey, and the hay-wain comes lumbering home; and the grey-
green willows of the polders, square on square, through which the full
streams course lazily, for miles of flat, to where the towers of
Antwerp twinkle against the sky in the golden smile of the setting
sun. If they never did another stroke of work in the Gallery, Mr.
Boxall and Mr. Wornum have earned the nation’s gratitude, the
freedom of the city of London, the Humane Society’s first prize for
saving persons apparently drowned, and the Geographical Society’s
gold medal for the most interesting discovery of the year, by stripping
the Beaumont stucco of brown varnish off Rubens’s Chateau.

MUCH IN THE DRAWING-ROOM, HE KNOWS HOW TO. MAKE HIS8ELF

Feels quite at Home, like ! ”

They have done an equally successful work, and one quite as much
wanted, for Gaspar Poussin and Salvator Rosa. But though
Abraham and Mercury look all the better for having their faces washed,
there was no such beauty as Rubens’s to bring to light from under the
yellow mask.

Of course, these bold innovators can’t hope to escape the penalty of
their pluck. They must expect to be abused by old fogies of the
Beaumont school, who like their trees brown, and their skies black; by
snarlers of the Morris Moore breed, who find everything a National
Gallery Director does ill done • and by the echoes always ready
to swell the chorus of Noodledom. The pack has opened already.
An idiot, writing in the Telegraph, raves over the ruin of the renovated
Rubens, and talks about its having been “painted over with lemon-
yellow and filthy megilps,” the fact being that not a touch of colour or
a drop of megilp has been put on to the canvas, only some inches of
filth most carefully removed, under the Director’s own eye, by a dex-
terous Italian hand. So well has that hand done its work, that it
deserves to be immortalised in our columns, and it shall be.. The
dirt-destroyer in all these cases, is one Signor Pinto. No relation to
the well-known Ferdinand Mendez—for he tells no lie when tie calls
himself “ a cleaner.”

Mr. Punch, in the name of the nation, thanks Mr. Boxall and
Mr. Wornum for their good sense and courage, and congratulates
them on the triumph which they have achieved. And looking round
his National Gallery with pride and pleasure—which culminate as he
takes his hat off before the homely but most touching pathos of Rem-
brandt’s “ Christ Blessing Little Children,” the new Director’s first
purchase, and a noble one—he notes how of his Art-treasures some of
the grandest—notably, the Lazarus of Sebastian del Piombo—still
wear the “ coat of darkness,” which we have read about in Jack the
Giant-Killer, and which renders the wearer invisible. Turning from
the renewed Rubens to the sunken and smothered Sebastian, he asks
why the courage and skill which have bared for us the real face of the
one, should not be employed,—under close and competent superin-
tendence,—in taking the mask of dirt off the other ?

(