claims of the English school, but in that goodly list of artists at
whose head stands the name of Sir Joshua we may boast a national
possession which the art of the time could scarcely rival and most
assuredly could not surpass. Europe was then in no mood to take over
the rich inheritance of the great Florentines; the successful study of
the principles they had expounded had to wait the coming of a later
day; but in those departments wherein the art of Europe was still vital
England certainly was, at that time, not lagging behind her rivals.
Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Hoppner, Raeburn--what names in the
contemporary art of the Continent can be cited as their superiors in
those branches of painting which they cultivated? Disparagement is
no part of the business of criticism, and the victories of one land
assuredly take nothing from the triumphs justly won in another. France,
too, at that epoch could boast gifted artists greatly distinguished
in various fields; but when it is remembered that Watteau, the most
distinguished of French colourists, had died two years before Reynolds
was born, the outburst of artistic activity, which the men whose names
I have cited heralded to the world, may well be viewed as a phenomenon
almost unparalleled in the modern history of painting. For it is as
colourists, in the truest and highest sense of the term, that the
English school at this period of revival makes its claim to supremacy;
and it was here that the teaching of Italy--not as expounded through
the work of the Florentines, but rather as it travelled northwards,
carrying with it the surviving splendours of the Venetians--found a
full and worthy response from these gifted exponents of our native art.
The present collection is rich in finely chosen examples of the
masters I have named. Reynolds boasted to Malone that he had painted
two generations of the beauties of England, and as we turn from the
“Kitty Fisher,” lent by the Earl of Crewe, to the portrait of “Anne
Dashwood,” or to that of the “Marchioness of Thomond,” from Sir Carl
Meyer’s collection, we may well own that no man was more rightly
equipped for the task that had fallen upon him. No man save perhaps
his rival, Thomas Gainsborough, who, in the alertness and delicacy of
his observation as well as by a natural affinity with the gentler sex
that was born of a sweet and gracious disposition, seemed specially
destined to interpret with loving fidelity the lightest no less than
the most characteristic realities of feminine beauty. In weight and
dignity of style, the outcome, as I have already hinted, of a diligent
study of the great models of the past, in masculine grip and gravity
of interpretation, displayed more especially in the portraiture of the
most distinguished men of his time, Reynolds, it must be conceded,
remains even to this day without a rival in our school. But in the
native gifts of a painter Gainsborough owned no superior, and it would
be difficult to trace to any individual master of the past, or indeed
to any other source than his inborn love of nature, those peculiar
qualities of sweetness and grace which set the finest achievements of
his brush in a category of their own. A measure of kinship with the
great Dutchmen may be discerned in his earlier essays in landscape--a
branch of art which he may be said almost to have founded in England;
and the final words with which he took leave of the world, “We are
all going to heaven and Van Dyck is of the company,” give warrant for
the belief that even in portraiture he would willingly have owned his
allegiance to the famous pupil of Rubens; but in his actual practice
as a portrait painter his own modest and yet commanding personality
quickly effaced all record of indebtedness to any other influence than
his own inspiration.
It would be easy, if space permitted, to institute an interesting
comparison between his own accomplishment and that of his contemporary
Sir Joshua. The same personalities sometimes figure upon the canvases
of both. The winning beauty of Miss Linley’s face, employed by Sir
Joshua in his picture of St. Cecilia, had no less strongly attracted
the genius of Gainsborough; and here, as well as in the rendering of
the features of Mrs. Siddons, we may note the divergent gifts which
these painters separately brought to their task and the varying and
matchless qualities which nature surrendered ungrudgingly to both.
Speaking generally, it may, I think, be conceded that Gainsborough’s
art registered with greater felicity those fleeting graces of gesture
and expression that would sometimes escape his more serious rival;
while Reynolds, constantly preoccupied by the intellectual appeal
made by his sitter, was perhaps more apt to dwell in the features he
portrayed upon those deeper and more permanent truths that would serve
to mirror mind and character.
That Gainsborough’s vision was not, however, limited to forms of female
beauty is shown clearly enough by the several notable examples here
exhibited. His portraits of John Eld and Dr. William Pearce, no less
than the head of the artist himself, prove that he could acquit himself
nobly even when he was not engaged in the more sympathetic task of
presenting with faultless grace the lovely women of his time; while
Lord Jersey’s “Landscape and Cattle” affords sufficient evidence of
what the school of English landscape owes to his initiative.
Of the other distinguished masters of portrait in the century in
which these two great names stand pre-eminent we find here adequate
representation. Romney is not always faultless as a colourist, nor
does his draughtsmanship yield the searching penetration displayed
by Reynolds or the more delicate apprehension of the finer facts
of expression which constitutes so large a part of Gainsborough’s
ineffable charm; but judged at his best, and art may justly appeal
against any less generous verdict, he takes his rightful place by
the side of both. How good was his best may be seen in Mr. Pierpont
Morgan’s fine full-length of Mrs. Scott Jackson, as well as in the
group of Mrs. Clay and her child, lent by Mrs. Fleischmann. But Romney
had one sitter whose beauty overpowered all others in the appeal it
made to the artist, and it is therefore fortunate that the collection
includes a portrait of Lady Hamilton, whose fame may be said to be
inseparably linked with his own. She, too, in her own person awakens
echoes from Italy, for it was at Rome she won the admiration of Goethe
in those dramatic assumptions of classical character that are preserved
for succeeding generations in Romney’s constantly repeated studies of
the face he worshipped.
From these three commanding personalities, which yield brightness
to the dawn of our English school of portraiture, we advance by no
inglorious progression to the masters who, though now deceased, belong
of right to our own day. Hoppner, the younger contemporary of the
men I have named, whose career carries us into the next century, is
here superbly represented in the contributions from Mrs. Fleischmann
and Lord Darnley. Raeburn also, whose masculine and sometimes rugged
genius speaks to us with the accent of the north--Raeburn, who at
the instigation of Sir Joshua journeyed to Italy to study the great
Italian masters--is here seen at his best in the splendid portrait of
“The MacNab,” lent by Mrs. Baillie-Hamilton; while near by we find
characteristic examples of the art of his fellow-countrymen, Allan
Ramsay and Andrew Geddes. Sir Thomas Lawrence may be said to have
brought to a close the tradition established by Reynolds, and his
practice may therefore be held to form a link with the more modern
school. His claims here receive justice in the two portraits lent
by Lord Bathurst and Lord Plymouth; nor is the collection without
worthy specimens of the art of Opie, whose practice frankly confesses
the example and influence of Sir Joshua himself. Among the portrait
painters of the younger day, in whose ranks may be counted Frank Holl
and Frederick Sandys, Brough, and Furse, two names stand pre-eminent.
Watts and Millais in their different appeal register the high-water
mark of portraiture during what may be called the Victorian era. The
former owned in common with Sir Joshua an unswerving devotion to the
great traditions of Italian painting, and may claim equally with Sir
Joshua to have won for his work in this kind an imaginative quality
legitimately imported from the study of ideal design. Millais stands
alone. Of both I shall have to speak again in respect of other claims
which their art puts forward, but the position of Millais as a painter
of portrait is as independent in its appeal as that of Gainsborough
himself.
The incursions into the realm of ideal and decorative art made by
English painters of the eighteenth century may not be reckoned among
the accepted triumphs of our school. Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon, all
alike inspired by high ambition and capable, as was shown by their
untiring devotion and sacrifice in the cause they had espoused, lacked
the means and the endowment to appear with any solid measure of success
to an age that was in itself unfitted to receive the message they
sought to convey. The untutored and undisciplined genius of William
Blake affords an isolated example in his time of a true and deeper
understanding of the secrets of the kind of art which these men vainly
pursued; but even if Blake had possessed more ample resources as a
painter he would none the less have spoken in a language that was
strange to the temper of his time; and it was reserved for a later
day to forge the means which would secure a genuine revival of the
forgotten glories of imaginative design.
The movement associated with the name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
stands as a landmark in the modern history of our school, nor has it
been without lasting influence upon the art of Europe. In the year
1848, which gave it birth, the outlook for painting which aimed at
the presentation of any imaginative ideal was not encouraging. Etty,
a painter of genuine endowment, still survived, and his unquestioned
gifts as a colourist are plainly asserted in the single example
included in the present exhibition; but the practice of his later
years, as Holman Hunt has justly observed, scarcely offered the most
fitting model to a young artist of serious ambition. On the other
hand, the waning accomplishment of men who had passed their prime
cried aloud for the need of a new return to nature; and the accepted
conventions of style, either in themselves outworn or else imperfectly
revealed by hands enfeebled and grown old, left the hour ripe for
the advent of that small but greatly gifted group of young men whose
rebel practice was destined to leave so strong an imprint upon their
own and succeeding generations. It would perhaps be difficult to find
three painters of equal power whose art was so differently inspired
and whose achievement was destined to take such separate and widely
divergent forms as Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, who stand as the acknowledged heads in this new movement; but
their efforts, at the time of which I am speaking, were bound together
by a common purpose which prevailed then and has since continued to
keep their names linked together in the modern history of our English
school. In protest against the fetters imposed upon painting by the
tradition of the past--fetters that were by common consent only to be
removed by a renewed return to the facts of nature--they trod, in the
season of their youth, the same road, although the ultimate development
of their separate personalities led them, before many years passed,
into paths widely divergent from one another. To judge Rossetti’s
talent justly from works collected on the present occasion we must
group together the examples in oil and water-colour. The religious
phase in his career is indicated by “The Annunciation of the Virgin,”
lent by Mrs. Boyce; while the freedom with which his imagination
afterwards roamed over those great legends already made memorable in
literature is shown by the “Mariana” and the “Dante meeting Beatrice”
among the paintings in oil, and perhaps even more conclusively in the
exquisite water-colour drawing of “Paolo and Francesca,” lent by Mr.
Davis, which may be accepted as a capital instance of his unrivalled
power to render the truths of human passion without violating the
laws inherent in the art he professed. In his water-colours even more
decisively than in his paintings in oil Rossetti clearly announces his
great claims as a colourist; and his paintings bear this distinctive
mark in their invention of colour that the ordered harmonies he can
command are not only beautiful in themselves but that their beauty
stands in clear and direct response to the nature of the chosen
subject. In this regard assuredly neither of the two men who stand
associated with him in the Pre-Raphaelite movement can claim to be his
superior. It is perhaps unfortunate for purposes of comparison that
the range of Millais’s talent is here not completely represented. “Sir
Isumbras at the Ford” is indeed a characteristic example of his earlier
period, though it hardly shows the qualities he could then command in
the same degree of perfection as would be rendered by the presence of
“Lorenzo and Isabella” or of “Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop.” We have,
on the other hand, in the “Black Brunswicker” a notable example of
that transitional period in Millais’s art wherein the claims of fancy
and invention and the overmastering gifts of the realist--gifts that
afterwards availed to set him as the greatest portrait painter of his
time--are held in momentary balance; and we may find herein expressed
an element of Millais’s painting which had already received supreme
embodiment in the famous picture of “The Huguenot.” No artist of his
time--perhaps no artist of any time--has ever excelled him in the
rendering of certain phases of human emotion that transfigure without
disturbing the permanent beauty of feminine character. This power
remained to him to the end of his career, and it was the perception of
it which caused Watts to write to him in 1878, in regard to “The Bride
of Lammermoor,” which had received deserved decoration in Paris: “Lucy
Ashton’s mouth is worthy of any number of medals.” It is impossible to
say in the presence of work of this kind how much has been contributed
by the model, how much conferred by the artist; but that the artist’s
share in the result is predominant is proved by the fact that nobody
else has combined in the same fashion the portraiture of individual
features with the most delicate suggestion of the emotion that moves
them. In the art of Holman Hunt, always masculine in its character
and marked by the signs of indefatigable industry, emphasis is so
evenly laid upon all the confluent qualities that contribute to the
result that it is hard to signalise or to describe the dominating
characteristics of his personality. In his treatment of religious
subjects he showed a constant reverence that nevertheless scarcely
touched the confines of worship; for the same earnestness of purpose,
the same reverent research of truth, asserts itself no less in whatever
subject engages his brush. Rare qualities of a purely pictorial kind
nearly all his work may claim, and yet it is not always possible
to concede to the result, however astonishing in its power, that
final seal of beauty without which Art’s victory can never be deemed
absolutely complete. “The Scapegoat,” here exhibited, was fiercely
disputed at the date of his first appearance, and it is even now not
difficult to understand that its appeal must have seemed strange to
the temper of the time; but there can be no barrier at any rate to the
generous appreciation of the noble qualities displayed in the “Finding
of the Saviour in the Temple” or the austere simplicity and sincerity
of “Morning Prayer.”
Around these three men who bravely heralded the new movement in English
art are grouped the names of others who in different degrees were
equally inspired by the principles the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
sought to enforce. For although their earlier efforts encountered
bitter attack from the accredited organs of public opinion, they met
at the outset with warm response from within the ranks of art itself.
The company of their followers at first, indeed, was small; but the
quickened spirit of the time had already been in part prepared for
the reception of the message they bore. The writings of John Ruskin,
in whatever degree his particular judgments upon art matters may be
disputed, had already availed to stir the conscience of his generation
and to restore to art its rightful place in life. Henceforth it was not
possible to think of painting as a thing of mere dilettantism, serving
only to minister to the trivial demands of the taste of the hour. He
proved to the world that at every season when art has held a dominating
place its spirit has been fast linked with the heart and life of the
people; and the deep earnestness which in _Modern Painters_ he brought
to the task of historical criticism found a ready reflex in the more
serious and concentrated intensity of feeling which coloured the work
of men of the younger school.
William Dyce, by his declared devotion to the painters of the
Quattrocento, had already in part anticipated the practice of the
Pre-Raphaelites; and Ford Madox Brown, here represented both as a
painter of portrait and as a master of design, though never formally
enrolled in the brotherhood, claims by the inherent qualities of his
work a prominent place in the revolution that was then in progress. He
had been Rossetti’s first master, and to the end of his life, as I can
testify, Rossetti retained for him the warmest affection, and Holman
Hunt’s somewhat ungracious protest that the direction of his art would
have clashed with the aims the Pre-Raphaelites had then in view must
be surely deemed unconvincing in the presence of his great picture
entitled “Work,” wherein an unflinching reliance upon nature is the
dominant characteristic. Frederick Sandys, here admirably represented
by the portrait of Mrs. Clabburn and by “Medea,” showed even more
conclusively in his varied work in design his right to be reckoned side
by side with the leaders I have named; while Burne-Jones, who always
generously acknowledged his indebtedness to Rossetti, displayed as his
powers developed a kindred attachment to the kind of beauty in painting
which finds its well-spring in the art of Florence. The water-colours
in the present collection represent him at a time when Rossetti’s
example and influence were still dominant, but “Love among the Ruins,”
lent by Mrs. Michie, and “The Mirror of Venus,” from the collection of
Mr. Goldman, reveal to us the painter in the plenitude of his powers,
when with full mastery of resource he revelled in the interpretation
of themes of imaginative significance. A great colourist in the sense
in which the Florentines use colour--a great designer, gifted from the
outset with the power of striking into symbol forms of beauty that
might equally serve to fire the fancy of a poet, Burne-Jones holds a
unique position in our school; nor are his claims to admiration likely
to suffer from the fact that the principles he professed have sometimes
been adopted by imitators not sufficiently endowed for so high an
endeavour.
In the story of a movement that limitations of space must needs leave
inadequate it would be impossible to ignore or to omit the names of two
men who worthily occupied a distinguished place in the art of their
time. G. F. Watts and Lord Leighton may both be said to stand apart
from the particular current of artistic revolution associated with
the names I have already cited. The former was already deeply imbued
with the spirit of the great Venetians even before the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood had come into being, but the poetic impulse, which he owned
in common with his younger contemporaries, sets much of his work in
clear alliance with theirs. His “Love and Death” illustrates in a form
of unquestioned beauty the attempt to combine the sometimes divergent
qualities of the two great schools of Italy; and the example set by
both reappears in a union that is entirely satisfying when Watts turns
to the task of portraiture. Nor could any better examples of his
accomplishment have been procured than the figure of Lord Tennyson or
the head of Mr. Walter Crane.
Lord Leighton’s finely cultivated talent, though his early sojourn at
Florence had coloured the work of his youth, reveals at the hour of its
maturity an undivided allegiance to classic ideals. His mediaevalism
was a garb quickly discarded. “By degrees,” he once wrote to me,
“my growing love for form made me intolerant of the restraints and
exigencies of costume and led me more and more, and finally, to a
class of subjects, or more accurately to a state of conditions, in
which supreme scope is left to pure artistic qualities, in which no
form is imposed upon the artist by the tailor, but in which every
form is made obedient to the conception of the design he has in hand.
These conditions classic subjects afford, and as vehicles therefore
of abstract form, which is a thing not of one time but of all time,
these subjects can never be obsolete, and though to many they are a
dead letter, they can never be an anachronism.” With this confession
of faith before us we may measure how far the unceasing labours of
a long career availed to satisfy the noble purpose of his youth. A
certain lack of virility, an imperfect sense of energy and movement
which is needed to give the final sense of vitality to all art, however
directed, may perhaps be alleged even against the most complete of
his achievements; but the saving sense of grace, revealed in forms
often finely proportioned and justly selected, remains as an abiding
element in his constant pursuit of classic perfection, and is clearly
enough illustrated in such works as the “Summer Moon” and the “Return
of Persephone,” which the committee have secured for the present
exhibition.