BRITISH PAINTING.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED: Armstrong, _Sir Henry Raeburn_;
Armstrong, _Gainsborough_; Armstrong, _Sir Joshua Reynolds_;
Burton, _Catalogue of Pictures in National Gallery_;
Chesneau, _La Peinture Anglaise_; Cook, _Art in England_;
Cunningham, _Lives of the most Eminent British Artists_;
Dobson, _Life of Hogarth_; Gilchrist, _Life of Etty_;
Gilchrist, _Life of Blake_; Hamerton, _Life of Turner_;
Henderson, _Constable_; Hunt, _The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood_ (_Contemporary Review, Vol. 49_); Leslie, _Sir
Joshua Reynolds_; Leslie, _Life of Constable_; Martin and
Newbery, _Glasgow School of Painting_; McKay, _Scottish
School of Painting_; Monkhouse, _British Contemporary
Artists_; Redgrave, _Dictionary of Artists of the English
School_; Romney, _Life of George Romney_; Rossetti, _Fine
Art, chiefly Contemporary_; Ruskin, _Pre-Raphaelitism_;
Ruskin, _Art of England_; Sandby, _History of Royal Academy
of Arts_; William Bell Scott, _Autobiography_; Scott,
_British Landscape Painters_; Stephens, _Catalogue of Prints
and Drawings in the British Museum_; Swinburne, _William
Blake_; Temple, _Painting in the Queen's Reign_; Van Dyke,
_Old English Masters_; Wedmore, _Studies in English Art_;
Wilmot-Buxton, _English Painters_; Wright, _Life of Richard
Wilson_.
[Illustration: FIG. 94.--HOGARTH. SHORTLY AFTER MARRIAGE. NAT. GAL.
LONDON.]
BRITISH PAINTING: It may be premised in a general way, that the
British painters have never possessed the pictorial cast of mind in
the sense that the Italians, the French, or the Dutch have possessed
it. Painting, as a purely pictorial arrangement of line and color, has
been somewhat foreign to their conception. Whether this failure to
appreciate painting as painting is the result of geographical
position, isolation, race temperament, or mental disposition, would be
hard to determine. It is quite certain that from time immemorable the
English people have not been lacking in the appreciation of beauty;
but beauty has appealed to them, not so much through the eye in
painting and sculpture, as through the ear in poetry and literature.
They have been thinkers, reasoners, moralists, rather than observers
and artists in color. Images have been brought to their minds by words
rather than by forms. English poetry has existed since the days of
Arthur and the Round Table, but English painting is of comparatively
modern origin, and it is not wonderful that the original leaning of
the people toward literature and its sentiment should find its way
into pictorial representation. As a result one may say in a very
general way that English painting is more illustrative than creative.
It endeavors to record things that might be more pertinently and
completely told in poetry, romance, or history. The conception of
large art--creative work of the Rubens-Titian type--has not been given
to the English painters, save in exceptional cases. Their success has
been in portraiture and landscape, and this largely by reason of
following the model.
EARLY PAINTING: The earliest decorative art appeared in Ireland. It
was probably first planted there by missionaries from Italy, and it
reached its height in the seventh century. In the ninth and tenth
centuries missal illumination of a Byzantine cast, with local
modifications, began to show. This lasted, in a feeble way, until the
fifteenth century, when work of a Flemish and French nature took its
place. In the Middle Ages there were wall paintings and church
decorations in England, as elsewhere in Europe, but these have now
perished, except some fragments in Kempley Church, Gloucestershire,
and Chaldon Church, Surrey. These are supposed to date back to the
twelfth century, and there are some remains of painting in Westminster
Abbey that are said to be of thirteenth and fourteenth-century origin.
From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century the English people
depended largely upon foreign painters who came and lived in England.
Mabuse, Moro, Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller--all were there
at different times, in the service of royalty, and influencing such
local English painters as then lived. The outcome of missal
illumination and Holbein's example produced in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries a local school of miniature-painters of much
interest, but painting proper did not begin to rise in England until
the beginning of the eighteenth century--that century so dead in art
over all the rest of Europe.
FIGURE AND PORTRAIT PAINTERS: Aside from a few inconsequential
precursors the first English artist of note was Hogarth (1697-1764).
He was an illustrator, a moralist, and a satirist as well as a
painter. To point a moral upon canvas by depicting the vices of his
time was his avowed aim, but in doing so he did not lose sight of
pictorial beauty. Charm of color, the painter's taste in arrangement,
light, air, setting, were his in a remarkable degree. He was not
successful in large compositions, but in small pictures like those of
the Rake's Progress he was excellent. An early man, a rigid stickler
for the representation, a keen observer of physiognomy, a satirist
with a sense of the absurd, he was often warped in his art by the
necessities of his subject and was sometimes hard and dry in method,
but in his best work he was quite a perfect painter. He was the first
of the English school, and perhaps the most original of that school.
This is quite as true of his technic as of his point of view. Both
were of his own creation. His subjects have been talked about a great
deal in the past; but his painting is not to this day valued as it
should be.
[Illustration: FIG. 95.--REYNOLDS. COUNTESS SPENCER AND LORD ALTHORP.]
The next man to be mentioned, one of the most considerable of all the
English school, is Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). He was a pupil of
Hudson, but owed his art to many sources. Besides the influence of Van
Dyck he was for some years in Italy, a diligent student of the great
Italians, especially the Venetians, Correggio, and the Bolognese
Eclectics. Sir Joshua was inclined to be eclectic himself, and from
Italy he brought back a formula of art which, modified by his own
individuality, answered him for the rest of his life. He was not a man
of very lofty imagination or great invention. A few figure-pieces,
after the Titian initiative, came from his studio, but his reputation
rests upon his many portraits. In portraiture he was often beyond
criticism, giving the realistic representation with dignity, an
elevated spirit, and a suave brush. Even here he was more impressive
by his broad truth of facts than by his artistic feeling. He was not a
painter who could do things enthusiastically or excite enthusiasm in
the spectator. There was too much of rule and precedent, too much
regard for the traditions, for him to do anything strikingly original.
His brush-work and composition were more learned than individual, and
his color, though usually good, was oftentimes conventional in
contrasts. Taking him for all in all he was a very cultivated painter,
a man to be respected and admired, but he had not quite the original
spirit that we meet with in Gainsborough.
Reynolds was well-grounded in Venetian color, Bolognese composition,
Parmese light-and-shade, and paid them the homage of assimilation; but
if Gainsborough (1727-1788) had such school knowledge he positively
disregarded it. He disliked all conventionalities and formulas. With a
natural taste for form and color, and with a large decorative sense,
he went directly to nature, and took from her the materials which he
fashioned into art after his own peculiar manner. His celebrated Blue
Boy was his protest against the conventional rule of Reynolds that a
composition should be warm in color and light. All through his work we
meet with departures from academic ways. By dint of native force and
grace he made rules unto himself. Some of them were not entirely
successful, and in drawing he might have profited by school training;
but he was of a peculiar poetic temperament, with a dash of melancholy
about him, and preferred to work in his own way. In portraiture his
color was rather cold; in landscape much warmer. His brush-work was as
odd as himself, but usually effective, and his accessories in
figure-painting were little more than decorative after-thoughts. Both
in portraiture and landscape he was one of the most original and most
English of all the English painters--a man not yet entirely
appreciated, though from the first ranked among the foremost in
English art.
[Illustration: FIG. 96.--GAINSBOROUGH. BLUE BOY.]
Romney (1734-1802), a pupil of Steele, was often quite as masterful a
portrait-painter as either Reynolds or Gainsborough. He was never an
artist elaborate in composition, and his best works are bust-portraits
with a plain background. These he did with much dash and vivacity of
manner. His women, particularly, are fine in life-like pose and
winsomeness of mood. He was a very cunning observer, and knew how to
arrange for grace of line and charm of color.
After Romney came Beechey (1753-1839), Raeburn (1756-1823), Opie
(1761-1807), and John Hoppner (1759-1810). Then followed Lawrence
(1769-1830), a mixture of vivacious style and rather meretricious
method. He was the most celebrated painter of his time, largely
because he painted nobility to look more noble and grace to look more
gracious. Fond of fine types, garments, draperies, colors, he was
always seeking the sparkling rather than the true, and forcing
artificial effects for the sake of startling one rather than stating
facts simply and frankly. He was facile with the brush, clever in line
and color, brilliant to the last degree, but lacking in that
simplicity of view and method which marks the great mind. His
composition was rather fine in its decorative effect, and, though his
lights were often faulty when compared with nature, they were no less
telling from the stand-point of picture-making. He is much admired by
artists to-day, and, as a technician, he certainly had more than
average ability. He was hardly an artist like Reynolds or
Gainsborough, but among the mediocre painters of his day he shone like
a star. It is not worth while to say much about his contemporaries.
Etty (1787-1849) was one of the best of the figure men, but his Greek
types and classic aspirations grow wearisome on acquaintance; and Sir
Charles Eastlake (1793-1865), though a learned man in art and doing
great service to painting as a writer, never was a painter of
importance.
William Blake (1757-1827) was hardly a painter at all, though he drew
and colored the strange figures of his fancy and cannot be passed over
in any history of English art. He was perhaps the most imaginative
artist of English birth, though that imagination was often disordered
and almost incoherent. He was not a correct draughtsman, a man with no
great color-sense, and a workman without technical training; and yet,
in spite of all this, he drew some figures that are almost sublime in
their sweep of power. His decorative sense in filling space with lines
is well shown in his illustrations to the Book of Job. In grace of
form and feeling of motion he was excellent. Weird and uncanny in
thought, delving into the unknown, he opened a world of mystery,
peopled with a strange Apocalyptic race, whose writhing, flowing
bodies are the epitome of graceful grandeur.
[Illustration: FIG. 97.--CONSTABLE. CORN FIELD. NAT. GAL. LONDON.]
GENRE-PAINTERS: From Blake to Morland (1763-1804) is a step across
space from heaven to earth. Morland was a realist of English country
life, horses at tavern-doors, cattle, pigs. His life was not the most
correct, but his art in truthfulness of representation, simplicity of
painting, richness of color and light, was often of a fine quality. As
a skilful technician he stood quite alone in his time, and seemed to
show more affinity with the Dutch _genre_-painters than his own
countrymen. His works are much prized to-day, and were so during the
painter's life.
Sir David Wilkie (1785-1841) was also somewhat like the Dutch in
subject, a _genre_-painter, fond of the village fête and depicting it
with careful detail, a limpid brush, and good textural effects. In
1825 he travelled abroad, was gone some years, was impressed by
Velasquez, Correggio, and Rembrandt, and completely changed his style.
He then became a portrait and historical painter. He never outlived
the nervous constraint that shows in all his pictures, and his brush,
though facile within limits, was never free or bold as compared with a
Dutchman like Steen. In technical methods Landseer (1802-1873), the
painter of animals, was somewhat like him. That is to say, they both
had a method of painting surfaces and rendering textures that was more
"smart" than powerful. There is little solidity or depth to the
brush-work of either, though both are impressive to the spectator at
first sight. Landseer knew the habits and the anatomy of animals very
well, but he never had an appreciation of the brute in the animal,
such as we see in the pictures of Velasquez or the bronzes of Barye.
The Landseer animal has too much sentiment about it. The dogs, for
instance, are generally given those emotions pertinent to humanity,
and which are only exceptionally true of the canine race. This very
feature--the tendency to humanize the brute and make it tell a
story--accounts in large measure for the popularity of Landseer's art.
The work is perhaps correct enough, but the aim of it is somewhat
afield from pure painting. It illustrates the literary rather than the
pictorial. Following Wilkie the most distinguished painter was
Mulready (1786-1863), whose pictures of village boys are well known
through engravings.
[Illustration: FIG. 98.--TURNER. FIGHTING TÉMÉRAIRE. NAT. GAL.
LONDON.]
THE LANDSCAPE PAINTERS: In landscape the English have had something to
say peculiarly their own. It has not always been well said, the
coloring is often hot, the brush-work brittle, the attention to
detail inconsistent with the large view of nature, yet such as it is
it shows the English point of view and is valuable on that account.
Richard Wilson (1713-1782) was the first landscapist of importance,
though he was not so English in view as some others to follow. In
fact, Wilson was nurtured on Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet and
instead of painting the realistic English landscape he painted the
pseudo-Italian landscape. He began working in portraiture under the
tutorship of Wright, and achieved some success in this department; but
in 1749 he went to Italy and devoted himself wholly to landscapes.
These were of the classic type and somewhat conventional. The
composition was usually a dark foreground with trees or buildings to
right and left, an opening in the middle distance leading into the
background, and a broad expanse of sunset sky. In the foreground he
usually introduced a few figures for romantic or classic association.
Considerable elevation of theme and spirit marks most of his pictures.
There was good workmanship about the skies and the light, and an
attentive study of nature was shown throughout. His canvases did not
meet with much success at the time they were painted. In more modern
days Wilson has been ranked as the true founder of landscape in
England, and one of the most sincere of English painters.
THE NORWICH SCHOOL: Old Crome (1769-1821), though influenced to some
extent by Wilson and the Dutch painters, was an original talent,
painting English scenery with much simplicity and considerable power.
He was sometimes rasping with his brush, and had a small method of
recording details combined with mannerisms of drawing and composition,
and yet gave an out-of-doors feeling in light and air that was
astonishing. His large trees have truth of mass and accuracy of
drawing, and his foregrounds are painted with solidity. He was a keen
student of nature, and drew about him a number of landscape painters
at Norwich, who formed the Norwich School. Crome was its leader, and
the school made its influence felt upon English landscape painting.
Cotman (1782-1842) was the best painter of the group after Crome, a
man who depicted landscape and harbor scenes in a style that recalls
Girtin and Turner.
The most complete, full-rounded landscapist in England was John
Constable (1776-1837). His foreign bias, such as it was, came from a
study of the Dutch masters. There were two sources from which the
English landscapists drew. Those who were inclined to the ideal, men
like Wilson, Calcott (1779-1844), and Turner, drew from the Italian of
Poussin and Claude; those who were content to do nature in her real
dress, men like Gainsborough and Constable, drew from the Dutch of
Hobbema and his contemporaries. A certain sombreness of color and
manner of composition show in Constable that may be attributed to
Holland; but these were slight features as compared with the
originality of the man. He was a close student of nature who painted
what he saw in English country life, especially about Hampstead, and
painted it with a knowledge and an artistic sensitiveness never
surpassed in England. The rural feeling was strong with him, and his
evident pleasure in simple scenes is readily communicated to the
spectator. There is no attempt at the grand or the heroic. He never
cared much for mountains or water, but was fond of cultivated uplands,
trees, bowling clouds, and torn skies. Bursts of sunlight, storms,
atmospheres, all pleased him. With detail he was little concerned. He
saw landscape in large patches of form and color, and so painted it.
His handling was broad and solid, and at times a little heavy. His
light was often forced by sharp contrast with shadows, and often his
pictures appear spotty from isolated glitters of light strewn here and
there. In color he helped eliminate the brown landscape and
substituted in its place the green and blue of nature. In atmosphere
he was excellent. His influence upon English art was impressive, and
in 1824 the exhibition at Paris of his Hay Wain, together with some
work by Bonington and Fielding had a decided effect upon the then
rising landscape school of France. The French realized that nature lay
at the bottom of Constable's art, and they profited, not by imitating
Constable, but by studying his nature model.
[Illustration: FIG. 99.--BURNE JONES. FLAMMA VESTALIS.]
Bonington (1801-1828) died young, and though of English parents his
training was essentially French, and he really belonged to the French
school, an associate of Delacroix. His study of the Venetians turned
his talent toward warm coloring, in which he excelled. In landscape
his broad handling was somewhat related to that of Constable, and from
the fact of their works appearing together in the Salon of 1824 they
are often spoken of as influencers of the modern French landscape
painters.
Turner (1775-1851) is the best known name in English art. His
celebrity is somewhat disproportionate to his real merits, though it
is impossible to deny his great ability. He was a man learned in all
the forms of nature and schooled in all the formulas of art; yet he
was not a profound lover of nature nor a faithful recorder of what
things he saw in nature, except in his early days. In the bulk of his
work he shows the traditions of Claude, with additions of his own. His
taste was classic (he possessed all the knowledge and the belongings
of the historical landscape), and he delighted in great stretches of
country broken by sea-shores, rivers, high mountains, fine buildings,
and illumined by blazing sunlight and gorgeous skies. His composition
was at times grotesque in imagination; his light was usually
bewildering in intensity and often unrelieved by shadows of sufficient
depth; his tone was sometimes faulty; and in color he was not always
harmonious, but inclined to be capricious, uneven, showing fondness
for arbitrary schemes of color. The object of his work seems to have
been to dazzle, to impress with a wilderness of lines and hues, to
overawe by imposing scale and grandeur. His paintings are impressive,
decoratively splendid, but they often smack of the stage, and are more
frequently grandiloquent than grand. His early works, especially in
water-colors, where he shows himself a follower of Girtin, are much
better than his later canvases in oil, many of which have changed
color. The water-colors are carefully done, subdued in color, and true
in light. From 1802, or thereabouts, to 1830 was his second period,
in which Italian composition and much color were used. The last twenty
years of his life he inclined to the _bizarre_, and turned his
canvases into almost incoherent color masses. He had an artistic
feeling for composition, linear perspective, and the sweep of horizon
lines; skies and hills he knew and drew with power; color he
comprehended only as decoration; and light he distorted for effect.
Yet with all his shortcomings Turner was an artist to be respected and
admired. He knew his craft, in fact, knew it so well that he relied
too much on artificial effects, drew away from the model of nature,
and finally passed into the extravagant.
THE WATER-COLORISTS: About the beginning of this century a school of
water-colorists, founded originally by Cozens (1752-1799) and Girtin
(1775-1802), came into prominence and developed English art in a new
direction. It began to show with a new force the transparency of
skies, the luminosity of shadows, the delicacy and grace of clouds,
the brilliancy of light and color. Cozens and Blake were primitives in
the use of the medium, but Stothard (1755-1834) employed it with much
sentiment, charm, and _plein-air_ effect. Turner was quite a master of
it, and his most permanent work was done with it. Later on, when he
rather abandoned form to follow color, he also abandoned water-color
for oils. Fielding (1787-1849) used water-color effectively in giving
large feeling for space and air, and also for fogs and mists; Prout
(1783-1852) employed it in architectural drawings of the principal
cathedrals of Europe; and Cox (1783-1859), Dewint (1784-1849), Hunt
(1790-1864), Cattermole (1800-1868), Lewis (1805-1876), men whose
names only can be mentioned, all won recognition with this medium.
Water-color drawing is to-day said to be a department of art that
expresses the English pictorial feeling better than any other, though
this is not an undisputed statement.
[Illustration: FIG. 100.--LEIGHTON. HELEN OF TROY.]
Perhaps the most important movement in English painting of recent
times was that which took the name of
PRE-RAPHAELITISM: It was started about 1847, primarily by Rossetti
(1828-1882), Holman Hunt (1827-), and Sir John Millais (1829-1896),
associated with several sculptors and poets, seven in all. It was an
emulation of the sincerity, the loving care, and the scrupulous
exactness in truth that characterized the Italian painters before
Raphael. Its advocates, including Mr. Ruskin the critic, maintained
that after Raphael came that fatal facility in art which seeking grace
of composition lost truth of fact, and that the proper course for
modern painters was to return to the sincerity and veracity of the
early masters. Hence the name pre-Raphaelitism, and the signatures on
their early pictures, P. R. B., pre-Raphaelite Brother. To this
attempt to gain the true regardless of the sensuous, was added a
morbidity of thought mingled with mysticism, a moral and religious
pose, and a studied simplicity. Some of the painters of the
Brotherhood went even so far as following the habits of the early
Italians, seeking retirement from the world and carrying with them a
Gothic earnestness of air. There is no doubt about the sincerity that
entered into this movement. It was an honest effort to gain the true,
the good, and as a result, the beautiful; but it was no less a
striven-after honesty and an imitated earnestness. The Brotherhood did
not last for long, the members drifted from each other and began to
paint each after his own style, and pre-Raphaelitism passed away as it
had arisen, though not without leaving a powerful stamp on English
art, especially in decoration.
Rossetti, an Italian by birth though English by adoption, was the type
of the Brotherhood. He was more of a poet than a painter, took most of
his subjects from Dante, and painted as he wrote, in a mystical
romantic spirit. He was always of a retiring disposition and never
exhibited publicly after he was twenty-eight years of age. As a
draughtsman he was awkward in line and not always true in modelling.
In color he was superior to his associates and had considerable
decorative feeling. The shortcoming of his art, as with that of the
others of the Brotherhood, was that in seeking truth of detail he lost
truth of _ensemble_. This is perhaps better exemplified in the works
of Holman Hunt. He has spent infinite pains in getting the truth of
detail in his pictures, has travelled in the East and painted types,
costumes, and scenery in Palestine to gain the historic truths of his
Scriptural scenes; but all that he has produced has been little more
than a survey, a report, a record of the facts. He has not made a
picture. The insistence upon every detail has isolated all the facts
and left them isolated in the picture. In seeking the minute truths
he has overlooked the great truths of light, air, and setting. His
color has always been crude, his values or relations not well
preserved, and his brush-work hard and tortured.
Millais showed some of this disjointed effect in his early work when
he was a member of the Brotherhood. He did not hold to his early
convictions however, and soon abandoned the pre-Raphaelite methods for
a more conventional style. He has painted some remarkable portraits
and some excellent figure pieces, and to-day holds high rank in
English art; but he is an uneven painter, often doing weak,
harshly-colored work. Moreover, the English tendency to tell stories
with the paint-brush finds in Millais a faithful upholder. At his best
he is a strong painter.
Madox Brown (1821-1893) never joined the Brotherhood, though his
leaning was toward its principles. He had considerable dramatic power,
with which he illustrated historic scenes, and among contemporary
artists stood well. The most decided influence of pre-Raphaelitism
shows in Burne-Jones (1833-), a pupil of Rossetti, and perhaps the
most original painter now living[18] of the English school. From
Rossetti he got mysticism, sentiment, poetry, and from association
with Swinburne and William Morris, the poets, something of the
literary in art, which he has put forth with artistic effect. He has
not followed the Brotherhood in its pursuit of absolute truth of fact,
but has used facts for decorative effect in line and color. His
ability to fill a given space gracefully, shows with fine results in
his pictures, as in his stained-glass designs. He is a good
draughtsman and a rather rich colorist, but in brush-work somewhat
labored, stippled, and unique in dryness. He is a man of much
imagination, and his conceptions, though illustrative of literature,
do not suffer thereby, because his treatment does not sacrifice the
artistic. He has been the butt of considerable shallow laughter from
time to time, like many another man of power. Albert Moore
(1840-1893), a graceful painter of a decorative ideal type, rather
follows the Rossetti-Burne-Jones example, and is an illustration of
the influence of pre-Raphaelitism.
[Footnote 18: Died 1898.]
OTHER FIGURE AND PORTRAIT PAINTERS: Among the contemporary painters
Sir Frederick Leighton (1830-1896), President of the Royal Academy, is
ranked as a fine academic draughtsman, but not a man with the
color-sense or the brushman's quality in his work. Watts (1818-1904)
is perhaps an inferior technician, and in color is often sombre and
dirty; but he is a man of much imagination, occasionally rises to
grandeur in conception, and has painted some superb portraits, notably
the one of Walter Crane. Orchardson (1835-) is more of a painter, pure
and simple, than any of his contemporaries, and is a knowing if
somewhat mannered colorist. Erskine Nicol (1825-), Faed[19] (1826-),
Calderon (1833-), Boughton (1834-1905), Frederick Walker (1840-1875),
Stanhope Forbes, Stott of Oldham and in portraiture Holl (1845-1890)
and Herkomer may be mentioned.
[Footnote 19: Died 1900.]
[Illustration: FIG. 101.--WATTS. LOVE AND DEATH.]
LANDSCAPE AND MARINE PAINTERS: In the department of landscape there
are many painters in England of contemporary importance. Vicat Cole
(1833-1893) had considerable exaggerated reputation as a depicter of
sunsets and twilights; Cecil Lawson (1851-1882) gave promise of great
accomplishment, and lived long enough to do some excellent work in the
style of the French Rousseau, mingled with an influence from
Gainsborough; Alfred Parsons is a little hard and precise in his work,
but one of the best of the living men; and W. L. Wyllie is a painter
of more than average merit. In marines Hook (1819-) belongs to the
older school, and is not entirely satisfactory. The most modern and
the best sea-painter in England is Henry Moore (1831-1895), a man who
paints well and gives the large feeling of the ocean with fine color
qualities. Some other men of mark are Clausen, Brangwyn, Ouless,
Steer, Bell, Swan, McTaggart, Sir George Reid.
MODERN SCOTCH SCHOOL: There is at the present time a school of art in
Scotland that seems to have little or no affinity with the
contemporary school of England. Its painters are more akin to the
Dutch and the French, and in their coloring resemble, in depth and
quality, the work of Delacroix. Much of their art is far enough
removed from the actual appearance of nature, but it is strong in the
sentiment of color and in decorative effect. The school is represented
by such men as James Guthrie, E. A. Walton, James Hamilton, George
Henry, E. A. Hornel, Lavery, Melville, Crawhall, Roche, Lawson,
McBride, Morton, Reid Murray, Spence, Paterson.
PRINCIPAL WORKS: English art cannot be seen to advantage,
outside of England. In the Metropolitan Museum, N. Y., and
in private collections like that of Mr. William H. Fuller in
New York,[20] there are some good examples of the older
men--Reynolds, Constable, Gainsborough, and their
contemporaries. In the Louvre there are some indifferent
Constables and some good Boningtons. In England the best
collection is in the National Gallery. Next to this the
South Kensington Museum for Constable sketches. Elsewhere
the Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Windsor galleries, and
the private collections of the late Sir Richard Wallace, the
Duke of Westminster, and others. Turner is well represented
in the National Gallery, though his oils have suffered
through time and the use of fugitive pigments. For the
living men, their work may be seen in the yearly exhibitions
at the Royal Academy and elsewhere. There are comparatively
few English pictures in America.
[Footnote 20: Dispersed, 1898.]