At the period when in France David and his followers had resuscitated
a dead and gone art, and by dint of governmental patronage had infused
into it a semblance of life, across the Channel, in a provincial town
of England, a little group of painters were quietly doing work which,
if it did not in itself change the face of modern art, was at least
indicative of the change soon to be accomplished by the advent of
Constable.
The leader of this group, which has been of late years in the hands
of zealous amateurs and dealers elevated to the rank of "school," was
John Crome, born at Norwich, December 22, 1768. The son of a publican,
he was first an errand boy to a local physician and afterwards
apprenticed to a sign painter. Without instruction, hampered by
an early marriage, he forsook his occupation, and sought to paint
landscapes; meanwhile finding in the houses of the neighboring gentry
pupils in drawing. The lessons gave him a living; and in the houses
where he taught were many Dutch pictures which he carefully studied,
so that he is in a sense a follower of the Holland school. But his
greatest and best teacher was the quiet Norfolk country; and the
environs of Norwich, from which he seldom strayed, found in him an
earnest student.
[Illustration: GEORGE ROMNEY, PAINTER OF "THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER,"
SHOWN ON PAGE 257. FROM A MEDALLION BY THOMAS HALEY.]
In 1805, in conjunction with his son (the younger Crome) and Cotman,
Stark, and Vincent, Crome founded at Norwich an artists' club, where
the members exhibited their pictures and had a large studio in common.
Some of the members of the Norwich "school," a title to which none of
them in their own time pretended, left their native town, and went to
London; but its founder remained true to the city of his birth, where
he died April 22, 1821. Late in life he visited Paris, where the
Louvre still held the treasures of Europe, garnered after every
campaign by Napoleon; and his enthusiasm for the great Dutch painters
found fresh nourishment.
It is by this link in the great chain of art that Crome gained his
first consideration in the world's esteem; but more important to us of
to-day is the fact that he was the first of his century to return to
nature. No evil that the frivolous eighteenth century had wrought,
or that the classicism of the early years of the nineteenth had
perpetuated in art, was so great as the substitution of a conventional
type of picture instead of that directly inspired by nature; and
this artificial standard, which diverted figure painting from its
legitimate field, bore even more heavily on the art of landscape
painting.
Crome, by his isolation at Norwich, escaped this tendency. The Norwich
painters, however, were, to a certain degree, an accident. In the
London of their time, the almost total cessation of intercourse with
continental Europe, due to the war with France, had not prevented the
academical standard from penetrating and taking root. The independence
of Hogarth in the preceding century had been without result; and Sir
Joshua Reynolds, in principle if not always in practice, had preached
the doctrine of submission to accepted formulas. Benjamin West, who
had succeeded him as president of the Royal Academy, was little but an
academic formula himself; and landscape (whose greatest representative
had been, until his death in 1782, Richard Wilson, a painter of
merit, who had united to a charming sense of color an adherence to
the strictest classical influence) was wallowing in the mire of
conventionality.
[Illustration: THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER. FROM A PAINTING BY GEORGE ROMNEY
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.
This portrait, from an unknown model, gives Romney with all his charm
and more than his usual sincerity.]
To the London of 1800, however, were to be given two landscape
painters who may fairly claim the honor of placing their art on a
higher pinnacle than it had ever before reached. One of them,
John Constable, remains to-day the direct source from which all
representation of the free open air is derived, be the painter Saxon,
Gallic, or Teuton. The other, Joseph Mallord William Turner, may be
said to reach greater heights than his contemporary; but, unlike him,
his art is so based on qualities peculiar to himself that he stands
alone, though having many imitators who have never achieved more than
a superficial resemblance to his work.
Constable, founding his work on nature with close observance of
natural laws, was able to exert an influence by which all painters
have since profited. When he came to London, at the age of
twenty-three, to study in the school of the Royal Academy, he
attracted the attention of Sir George Beaumont, an amateur painter
who, by his taste and social position, was all-powerful in the
artistic circles of the metropolis. It was he who asked the young
painter the famous question, "Where do you place your brown tree?"
this freak of vegetation being one of the essential component parts
of the properly constructed academical landscape of the period. For
a year or two the youth placed brown trees, submissively enough, in
landscapes painfully precise in detail and deficient in atmosphere.
Then he did that which to a common, sensible mind would seem the most
obvious thing for a landscape painter to do, but which had been done
so rarely that the simple act was the boldest of innovations. He took
his colors out of doors, and painted from nature.
[Illustration: JOHN CONSTABLE. FROM AN ENGRAVING BY LUCAS, AFTER A
PORTRAIT BY C.E. LESLIE
Reproduced, by the courtesy of W.H. Fuller, from "Memoirs of the Life
of John Constable, Esq., R.A., Composed Chiefly of his Letters, by
C.R. Leslie, R.A." Quarto, London, 1843. This noble memoir, which
makes one love the man as one admires the painter, is unfortunately
out of print.]
Of the dreary waste of "historical" and arbitrarily composed
landscapes, even in the simpler honest productions of the Dutch
preceding this century, nearly all were painted from drawings; color
had been applied according to recipe; the brown tree was rampant
through all the seasons represented, from primavernal spring to
golden autumn. At the most, only studies in colors were made out of
doors--unrelated portions of pictures, stained rather than painted,
with timid desire to enregister details. These were then transported
to the studio, where they underwent a process of arrangement, of
"cookery," as the typically just French expression puts it; from
which the picture came out steeped in a "brown sauce," conventional,
artificial, and monotonous, but pleasing to the Academy-ridden public
of the time. The young "miller of Bergholt"--for it was there in the
county of Suffolk that young Constable first saw the light, on June
11, 1776--determined in 1803 to have done with convention. He writes
to a friend, one Dunthorne, who had had much influence on his early
life and was his first teacher: "For the last two years I have been
running after pictures and seeking truth at second hand;" adding that
he would hereafter study nature alone, convinced that "there is [was]
room enough for a natural painter."
[Illustration: FLATFORD MILL, ON THE RIVER STOUR. FROM A PAINTING BY
JOHN CONSTABLE, NOW IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.
This picture was given to the National Gallery by the painter's
children. It is possibly one of three pictures on which Constable
obtained the gold medal of the Paris Salon in 1822--the one which in
the Salon catalogue is entitled "A Canal." The other two were "The
Hay-Wain" (shown on the next page) and "Hampstead Heath," both now in
the National Gallery.]
This was henceforth the aim of his life; and from constant study
out of doors he learned that natural objects exist to our sight not
isolated, but in relation one to another; that the whole is more
important than a part; and that the bark of a tree, a minutely defined
plant, or a conscientiously geologically studied rock, may mar the
effect of a whole picture, while the scene to be represented has a
character of its own more subtle, more evanescent, but also infinitely
more true than any single element of which it is composed. More than
that, through living on such intimate terms with Mother Nature, he
learned to value the smiles of her sunshine, and to cunningly adjust
her cloud-veils when she frowned. His object was no longer that of the
earlier painters, who--and along with others even faithful Crome--had
aimed to paint a "view" for its topographical value, suppressing
or altering, like mediocre portrait painters, any feature which was
thought to be displeasing. Constable painted the moods of nature; the
simplest subjects seen under ever-varying effects of light were his
choice; and though his pictures bear the names of various places, and
divers existing features of these places are portrayed, it is always
the beauty of the scene, or that of the moment of the day or night,
which affects the spectator.
[Illustration: THE HAY-WAIN. FROM A PAINTING BY JOHN CONSTABLE, NOW IN
THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.
This picture was first exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1821. It
is also one of three exhibited by Constable in the Paris Salon the
following year. It is one of Constable's best known pictures. The
thoroughly English character of the scene, painted with truth and
simplicity, makes it, after a lapse of seventy-five years, as modern
as though it were painted yesterday.]
By a public which was used to the conventional tones of the older
painters, and which understood or was interested in Turner's daring
variations on the theme of classical landscape, these fresh, simple
pictures which to-day look so natural to us were regarded with
distrust. Not even the shepherd, much less the warrior or the demigod,
inhabited these quiet scenes. A picture which any rural gentleman
could see from his front door, smacked too little of art for the
modish town. Moreover, Constable, no doubt sighing for something
lighter and more brilliant, was accustomed, in a vain effort to rival
the clear light of out-of-doors, to use the lightest colors of his
palette. On a varnishing day at the Royal Academy, the word was passed
around among the astonished painters that in portions of his picture
of the year Constable had actually used pure white!
In 1829, however, the world moving, Constable was elected to
membership in the Royal Academy. The most notable triumph of his
life, though, befell seven years earlier, in 1822, when he sent three
pictures to be exhibited in the Salon in Paris. The Hay-Wain, and
Hampstead Heath, both at present in the National Gallery, London, were
of the three, and excited the greatest enthusiasm among the group of
young painters who, with Delacroix at their head, were warring against
the academic rule imposed by David. Constable's work thenceforward was
the dominant influence in France, and from it can be directly traced
the great group of landscape painters which we to-day miscall the
"Barbizon" school.
It is pleasant to recall that official honor--the first which he
received--came to Constable by the award of the great gold medal of
the Salon at this time. For a number of years after this he sent his
work to the successive Salons. Pecuniary success, such as fell to the
lot of Turner, was never his; the first painter who looked at nature
in the open air "through his temperament," as Zola aptly expresses it,
was perforce contented to live a modest life at Hampstead, happy in
his work, grateful to nature who disclosed so many of her secrets to
him.
[Illustration: THE "FIGHTING TEMERAIRE" TUGGED TO HER LAST BERTH. FROM
A PAINTING BY J.M.W. TURNER.
The "Fighting Téméraire" was a line-of-battle ship of ninety-eight
guns which Lord Nelson captured from the French at the battle of the
Nile, August 1, 1798. In the battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805,
she fought next to the "Victory"--the ship from which Nelson commanded
the battle, and aboard which, in the course of it, he was killed. She
was sold out of the service in 1838, and towed to Rotherhithe to be
broken up. Turner's painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy
of 1839. His picture touched the popular heart, and though no
reproduction in black and white can approach the splendor of color in
the original, the engraving renders faithfully the sentiment of the
picture.]
"I love," he said, "every stile and stump and lane in the village; as
long as I am able to hold a brush, I shall never cease to paint them."
He ceased to "hold a brush" on the 30th of March, 1837.
Turner, who was born a year before Constable, on April 23, 1775, was,
unlike the miller's son of Bergholt, a child of the city. He was
born in London, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, where his father was a
hair-dresser; and when only fourteen entered the Royal Academy schools
as a student. The next year he exhibited a drawing of Lambeth Palace;
and in 1799 was made an associate, and in 1802 a member, of the Royal
Academy. His career was probably more successful than that of any
other artist of modern times. Of his life the more that is said in
charity the better; for as the sun rises oftentimes from a fog bank,
so the luminous dreams of color by which we know Turner emanated from
an apparently sour, prosaic cockney. A bachelor implicated in low
intrigues, dying under the assumed name of "Puggy Booth" in a dreary
lodging in Chelsea, after a long career of miserly observance and
rapacious bickering--of his life naught became him like the leaving.
He died December 19, 1851. His will directed that his pictures--three
hundred and sixty paintings and nearly two thousand drawings--should
become the property of the nation, the only condition attached being
that two of the pictures should be placed between two paintings by
Claude Lorraine in the National Gallery. Twenty thousand pounds were
left to the Royal Academy for the benefit of superannuated artists;
and one thousand pounds were appropriated for a monument in St.
Paul's, where this curious old man knew the English people would be
proud to lay him.
For many years Turner had refused to sell certain of his pictures;
while for others, and for the published engravings after his work,
he had exacted prices of a character and in a manner that smacked of
dishonesty. But as in obscure and dingy lodgings his brain had evolved
the splendor of sunset and mirage, so, undoubtedly, his imagination
had foreshadowed the noble monument which the Turner room at the
National Gallery has created to his memory.
[Illustration: JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER. FROM A DRAWING BY SIR
JOHN GILBERT.
This portrait, made many years ago, is a sketch from life, and
realizes the crabbed, sturdy painter, Turner, as we may imagine him.]
Turner's work, as has been said before, is peculiarly his own. It is
true that in the earlier pictures the influence of Claude Lorraine is
evident; but upon this root is engrafted an audacity in the conception
of color, a research of luminosity in comparison with which nearly all
painting is eclipsed. That this refulgence is tinged now and then
with exaggeration, with a forcing of effect that destroys the sense
of weight and solidity in depicted objects where this sense should
prevail, is certain. But it is not the least of his merits that he was
endowed with a sureness of taste which enabled him to avoid the rock
on which all his imitators have split--his work is never spectacular.
It is perhaps at its best when he has the simple elements of sea
and sky as his theme. Here, with the intangible qualities of air and
light, textureless and diaphanous, he is most at home. When it becomes
a question of the representation of earth, buildings, or trees, one
feels the lack of loving subservience to nature; the spirit against
which the art of Constable is eloquent lurks here too much.
[Illustration: PEACE--BURIAL AT SEA OF THE BODY OF SIR DAVID WILKIE.
FROM A PAINTING BY J.M.W. TURNER IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY.
"The midnight torch gleamed o'er the steamer's side,
And merit's corse was yielded to the tide."
--_Fallacies of Hope._
The "Fallacies of Hope" was an imaginary poem from which Turner
professed to quote whenever he wanted a line or a couplet to
explain his pictures, the avowed quotation being really of his own
composition. Sir David Wilkie, the distinguished painter, died at sea
on his way home from the Orient, June 1, 1841. His body was consigned
to the sea at midnight of that day. The picture was exhibited at the
Royal Academy in 1842.]
The stone-pines of Italy are seen through the distortion of
convention, the palaces of Venice were never builded by the hand of
man; and we lose by this the contrast which nature provides between
solid earth and filmy cloud. The onlooker must indeed be devoid of
imagination, however, if he can stand before those pictures of Turner
where the limitless sky is reflected in the waters, without profound
emotion. They may not seem _natural_ in such sense as one finds works
of more realistic aim; but one must at least agree with Turner, in the
time-worn story of the lady who taxed him with violation of natural
law, saying that she had never seen a sky like one in the picture
before them. "Possibly," growled the unruffled painter; "but don't you
wish you could?"
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A BOY. FROM A PAINTING BY JOHN OPIE, IN THE
NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.
This is believed to be a portrait of the painter's younger brother,
William Opie.]
Another phase of art--English, like that of Constable and Turner--rose
to its greatest popularity at about the same time. It had an origin
more easily traceable--the presence of Vandyke in England in the
seventeenth century having given an impulsion to portrait painting
which had been maintained by Reynolds and Gainsborough in the
century preceding our own. George Romney, who was born at Dalton, in
Lancashire, December 15, 1734, divided with these last two painters
the patronage of the great and wealthy of his time. He was but
eleven years younger than Reynolds, and seven years the junior of
Gainsborough; but by the fact of his living until November 15, 1802,
he may be considered in connection with the painters of this century.
He possessed great facility of brush, which led him occasionally into
careless drawing, and he lacked the refined grace of Reynolds and the
simple charm of Gainsborough. Nevertheless, a superabundance of the
qualities which go to make up a painter were his, and his art is less
affected by influences foreign to his native soil than that of any
painter of his time.
Romney was preëminently a painter of women, as were the majority
of his followers--English art at that time being possessed of more
sweetness than force. Lady Hamilton, the Circe who succeeded in
ensnaring the English Ulysses, Nelson, was a frequent model for
Romney, and the list of notable names of the fair women whose beauty
he perpetuated would be a long one. His life offers one of the most
curious examples of the engrossing nature of a painter's work, if we
accept this as the explanation of his strange conduct. Having come to
London from Kendal in 1762, leaving his wife and family behind him
in Lancashire, he remained in the metropolis for thirty-seven years,
making, during this time, but two visits to the place which he never
ceased to consider his home. It does not appear that anything but
absorption in work was the cause of this neglect. His wife and
children remained all the time in their northern home. In 1799, three
years before his death, the husband and father awoke to a realization
of their existence, and returned to live with them.
[Illustration: JOHN HOPPNER. FROM A DRAWING BY GEORGE DANCE, NOVEMBER
10, 1793.]
John Opie, known as the "Cornish genius" when his first works,
executed at the age of twenty, were exhibited in the Royal Academy,
was a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was born at Truro in May, 1761,
the son of a carpenter. His precocity attracted the notice of Dr.
Wolcot ("Peter Pindar"), who introduced him to Reynolds.
Opie is thoroughly English in his manner, having, however, more
affiliation to Hogarth and the earlier painters of his century than
to his master. A certain hardness and lack of color are his principal
defects; but, on the other hand, his work is sincere to a degree which
none of the other painters of his time show, preoccupied as were even
the best of them by a somewhat conventional type of beauty. He was
appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy in 1805, but
delivered only one course of lectures, dying, at the age of forty-six,
April 9, 1807.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A LADY. FROM A PAINTING KNOWN AS "THE CORAL
NECKLACE," BY JOHN HOPPNER.
From the collection of George A. Hearn of New York, by whose courtesy
it appears here. Quaint and charming as a picture, of great beauty of
color in the original, this is an admirable example of this painter.
The original painting is at present on exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum, New York.]
During the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first years
of the nineteenth, the fashionable portrait painters of London were
John Hoppner and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The latter, living twenty years
longer than Hoppner, was able to generously say of him, in a letter
written shortly after Hoppner's death: "You will believe that I
sincerely feel the loss of a brother artist from whose works I have
often gained instruction, and who has gone by my side in the race
these eighteen years."
Born in Whitechapel, London, April 4, 1758, Hoppner's first vocation
was that of chorister in the Chapel Royal. By lucky accident his first
efforts at painting attracted the attention of the king, George III.,
who granted him a small allowance which enabled him to study in the
Royal Academy, where, in 1782, he gained the medal for oil painting.
He first exhibited in 1780, and for some years devoted himself
to landscape. Gradually changing to portraiture, he was appointed
portrait painter to the Prince of Wales in 1789, and in 1793 he was
made an associate of the Academy, receiving full membership in
1795. For twenty years and until his death, January 23, 1810, he was
extremely successful, and his productions, though less in number than
those of Reynolds, or his contemporary, Lawrence, were numerous. In
the course of thirty years he contributed one hundred and sixty-six
works to the Academy exhibitions. These were chiefly portraits
of women and children, and are marked by unaffected grace and
appreciation of character.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A CHILD. FROM A PAINTING BY SIR THOMAS
LAWRENCE.
This picture, in the National Gallery, London, has inscribed on the
canvas: "Lady Giorgiana Fane; 1800. Æt 5." It shows Lawrence's method
of treating a child's portrait, in the style dear to our ancestors,
as a "fancy" portrait. It is also typical of his pronounced mannerism,
which would lead one to believe that before the days of photography
sitters were easily contented on the score of resemblance. The head
in this picture, for instance, is almost identical with that of
Napoleon's son in the "Roi de Rome," executed fifteen years later.]
[Illustration: MRS. SIDDONS. FROM A PAINTING BY SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE.
The greatest of all English actresses, at least in tragic parts--is
the common judgment on Mrs. Siddons. She was almost born and reared on
the stage, her father, Roger Kemble, being the manager of a travelling
company of actors, with one of whom, William Siddons, she had married
when she was eighteen. She was born at Brecon, in Wales, July 5, 1755,
and had already attained to some distinction as an actress in 1775,
when she made her first appearance in London. From then until her
retirement in 1812 her career was a succession of triumphs. She died
in London, June 8, 1831. Naturally, she was a favorite subject with
the portrait painters of her time. The sweet-faced girl shown in
the above portrait has as little resemblance to the stately lady of
Gainsborough, or the "Tragic Muse" of Sir Joshua Reynolds, as it has
to our imagination of what a "tragic queen" should be. The picture is,
nevertheless, a portrait of _the_ Mrs. Siddons, and was presented to
the National Gallery, London, where it now is, by her daughter, Mrs.
Cecelia Combe, in 1868.]
Time has enhanced the value of Hoppner's work somewhat at the expense
of his great rival, Lawrence. While the latter remains, from youth
to comparative old age, a most astonishing example of facile and
brilliant execution, the less obtrusive, possibly more timid, attitude
of Hoppner in the presence of nature gives him a greater claim to our
sympathy to-day. He was apparently preoccupied above all in rendering
the individual characteristics of his sitter; and there are many
instances in his work where a painter can see that he has chosen to
retain certain qualities of resemblance, rather than risk their loss
by an exhibition of _bravura_ painting. Sir Thomas Lawrence is one,
on the contrary, before whose pictures it is felt that the principal
question has been to make it first of all a typical example of his
work.
[Illustration: LADY BLESSINGTON. FROM A PAINTING BY SIR THOMAS
LAWRENCE.
This portrait of the gifted and brilliant woman who, as Lady
Blessington, and the intimate friend of Count d'Orsay, alternately
shocked and ruled the literary London of Byron's time, is
representative of Lawrence's extreme mannerism; but, despite its
"keepsake" prettiness, has great charm. Besides her distinguished
beauty, Lady Blessington offered much, in her life and surroundings,
to inspire a painter. Born in Ireland in 1789, she was forced at
fourteen into marrying one Captain Farmer. She could not live with
him, and they separated after three months. Farmer was killed in 1817,
and the next year she married the Earl of Blessington. Then began that
brilliant social career by virtue of which her fame now most survives.
Her house became the resort of the most distinguished people of
the time; and she herself, by her remarkable grace, cleverness, and
vivacity, ever kept pace with the best of her company. She derived a
large estate from her husband at his death, in 1829; and besides,
for nearly twenty years she had ten thousand dollars a year from her
novels (for she was also an author); but she lived most profusely,
and had finally, in company with Count d'Orsay, to flee from her
creditors. She died in Paris, June 4, 1849.]
Lawrence, born at Bristol, May 4, 1769, was the son of the landlord of
the Black Bear Inn at Devizes; and the child was not yet in his teens
when some chalk drawings of his father's customers gave him a local
reputation. We are told that "at the age of ten he set up as a
portrait painter in crayons at Oxford; and soon after took a house at
Bath, the then fashionable watering-place, where he immediately met
with much employment and extraordinary success." When seventeen, his
success called him to London, where in 1791, though under the age
required by the laws of the Academy, he was elected as associate when
twenty-two. The year before, he had painted the portraits of the king
and queen; in 1794 he was made Academician, in 1815 was knighted, in
1820 was unanimously elected President of the Royal Academy, and in
1825 was created chevalier of the Legion of Honor in France.
This list of official honors is but little in comparison with the
success which he had socially. Of a charming personality, he was
admitted to the intimacy of all that Europe boasted of aristocracy and
royalty. In 1815 he went to the congress at Aix-la-Chapelle, where his
facile brush portrayed the august features of the allied sovereigns
assembled there. He contributed, from 1787 to 1830 inclusive, three
hundred and eleven pictures to the exhibitions of the Royal Academy.
It goes without saying that production of this quantity cannot be
in every instance of the first quality. But the average merit of
Lawrence's work is nevertheless of a high order. Of feminine charm
(like many of his time and many of his predecessors) he was a master;
no one has ever succeeded better in giving a certain aristocratic
bearing to his sitters than he. It can be accounted a fault that this
becomes somewhat stereotyped--that we feel that, were it wanting in
the person before him, the amiable Sir Thomas could easily supply it.
The English race has not changed so much in the short period which has
elapsed since his time that the demeasurably large and liquid eyes,
the swan-like necks, and the sloping shoulders, which mark it as his
own in Lawrence's work, should be to-day of more rare occurrence. With
this great and important limitation, among the pictures of Lawrence
can be found a certain number of canvases, not always the most
typical, of exceeding merit. Few men have ever conveyed better the
impression of the depth and living quality of an eye, nor have many
painters succeeded in giving to every part of their canvas the same
qualities of color and brilliancy of execution as he.
[Illustration: SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE. AFTER A PAINTING BY CHARLES
LANDSEER.]
[Illustration: MISS BARRON, AFTERWARDS MRS. RAMSEY. FROM A PAINTING BY
SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE.
This picture, owned by R.H. McCormick of Chicago, by whose courtesy it
is here reproduced, represents Lawrence in his least mannered aspect.
The simplicity of young girlhood is well expressed, the head is drawn
and modelled with great subtlety, and we are fortunate to have so good
an example of Lawrence's work in this country.]
Lawrence died in his beautiful house on Russell Square in London,
surrounded by rare works of art which he had collected, on January
7, 1830. Nine years later Sir William Beechey, born at Burford in
Oxfordshire in 1753, died in London at the age of eighty-six. He had
come to London in 1772; and in 1798, having acquired consideration and
a lucrative practice as a portrait painter, and after having painted a
picture, now at Hampton Court, representing the king, George III., the
Prince of Wales, and the Duke of York at a review, he was knighted.
The same year saw his election to the Academy, of which he had been an
associate since 1793.
One of Beechey's distinctions is to have outnumbered even Lawrence in
his contributions to the Academy, as three hundred and sixty-two
of his works appeared on its walls. Of hasty execution or too great
dependence on a dangerous facility, there is, however, little trace
in his work. He was occupied exclusively with painting; he lived more
than twenty years longer than Lawrence, and was never diverted by
the claims of society upon his time. With his healthy, English color,
recalling Reynolds, a sober style not devoid of charm, he is fairly
typical of his time; and may fitly close this brief review of the
earlier English portraitists. Their task has never been taken up by
their successors in art, English portraiture to-day having much the
same qualities and defects which mark the contemporaneous painters of
all nations.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A BROTHER AND SISTER. FROM A PAINTING BY
SIR WILLIAM BEECHEY.
The original painting is now in the museum of the Louvre, and is a
picture charming in color--the warm white of the dress, and the rich
surroundings, in the manner of Reynolds, making an admirable foil to
the children's heads.]
The exclusive choice of feminine portraits in this article has been
dictated by a desire to show, in the space at command, the painting
most typical of the time and people. While all these painters produced
portraits of men, their work in this field was, as a rule, inferior to
the art of France. Lawrence is perhaps an exception; as it would
seem that occasionally in the presence of a masculine sitter he rose
superior to his manner and, painting with all sincerity, gave his
remarkable gifts full play. The lack, however, of serious training in
drawing, the over-reliance on charm of color and sentiment, give to
the English work a degree of weakness as compared with the thorough
command of form and austere fidelity to resemblance that was preached
to the French with "drawing is the probity of art" for a text.
[Illustration: GARFIELD IN 1881, WHILE PRESIDENT. AGE 49.