The National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, without taking Ruskin’s word
for it, is the most important collection of paintings in Europe. The
most expensive purchases are the “Blenheim Raphael,” “Blenheim Van
Dyke,” the “Pisani,” “Veronese,” the two “Correggios,” and “Lord
Radnor’s” three. They are splendid specimens of the greatest of the
English old masters and so many of their successors; whilst the large
collection of Turner’s is unrivalled and incomparable. In order to
insure the high level of the National Gallery in point of quality, an
act was passed in 1883 authorizing the sale of unsuitable works,
thinning out the gallery in favor of provincial collections. The result
of this wise weeding is that, though there are many galleries in which
there are more pictures to be seen, there are none in which they are
more really worth seeing. There is another way in which pictures
interest the spectator in after ages: a painter inevitably shows us
something of himself in his work. He shows us something of his age—of
its costumes, its manner of life, and, if a portrait painter, the
characters and physiognomy of its men and women. It is necessary to
study them in historic order, as we find painting has in each school
been a progressive one. I first studied the early Flemish pictures,
which are a striking contrast to the Italian pictures. There is no
feeling or beauty in them. What is it, then, that gives these pictures
their worth, and causes their painters to be included among the
greatest masters of the world? Look at the most famous Van Dyke; the
longer you look the more you will see its absolute fidelity to nature
in dress and detail, especially in portraiture. Here the men and women
of the time are set down precisely as they lived. They were the first
to discover the mixing of oil with colors, and made oil painting much
more popular. Their pictures have an imperishable firmness, with
exquisite delicacy.
The French painters were poorly represented here; especially did it
seem so after viewing their wonderful exhibit at the Exposition. The
Paris school is the chief centre of art teaching in the world; and is
marked for its excessive realism and gross sensuality. This reminds me
of one of their pictures exhibited at the Exposition—so shockingly
realistic it should be barred from any exhibit; no place else would it
be allowed to hang. Of course, the French are ideal painters as well;
Claude Poussin and Greuze are striking contrasts.
The chief glory of the English school of painting consists in its
treatment of landscape. The first man who struck out a more distinctly
English line in landscape painting was Gainsborough; then followed
Constable, whom every student of Adams in “Muncie Art School” is
familiar with. How thoroughly I enjoyed seeing the originals,
Constable’s “Valley Farm,” etc. Here they hang in all their
originality. But greater than all his predecessors, and uniting in the
course of his career the tastes and strength of them all, is Turner.
Great difference of opinion is held upon the question wherein his
greatness consists. Was it for truths that he recorded, or visions that
he invented? It did seem as you looked around at his vast
collection—the contrast between the dark and heavy pictures on one
wall and the bright and aerial on the other—that “The gleam, the light
that never was on sea or land—the consecration and the poet’s dream,”
was there shown. His great aim or artistic ambition was to give a
complete knowledge, and reach a complete representation of light in all
its phases; and his greatest pictures are where he completely attains
his aim. He was the first painter who first represented the full beauty
of sun-color. He ended by painting such visions of the sun in his glory
as in the “Téméraire.” Turner said “the sun was God.” How happy I was
to see the real, original “Téméraire,” that I had tried so hard to
reproduce with the assistance of J. O. Adams and Wm. Forsythe. As for
Turner’s faithful rendering of the forms of natural objects, he was
first, says Ruskin, “to draw a mountain or a stone, no other man having
learned their organization and possessed himself of their spirit. The
first to represent the surface of calm, or the force of agitated,
water.” Turner did this with scientific accuracy, not because he was
himself learned in science, but because of his genius for seeing into
the heart of things and seizing their essential form and character, and
that is what is meant by saying “Turner’s landscape is ideal,” and that
is why he is the great impressionist he is. His pictures are of scenes
not as any one might gather, but as representations of how he himself
saw them. He at all times painted his impressions. The faculty of
receiving such impressions strongly, and reproducing them vividly, is
precisely what distinguishes the poet, whether in language or painting.
He was great because the impressions which natural scenery made upon
him were noble impressions. He not only saw nature in its truth and
beauty, but he saw it in relation and subjection to the human soul. He
paints the loveliness of nature, but he ever connects that loveliness
with the soul and labor of men. Looking round this great room you
cannot help note the spirit of the pictures. I tore myself away as the
last call was heard to vacate the room. My next was to try to
appreciate Rubens, Van Dyke, Rembrandt, of which there is a large
collection, and then Raphael. Just opposite the entrance in Room VI.
your eye rests immediately upon his great canvas, the “Ansidei
Madonna.” If you had never heard of Raphael, the crowd that at all
times surrounds it would attract your attention. His “Garvagh Madonna”
is depicted as merely a human mother; so is the child a purely human
child, the divinity being only indicated by a halo;—the two figures
with a little St. John, the children playing with a pink. As late as
1171 the divinity of the Virgin was insisted upon. I lingered by the
canvas of the Holy Family, painted by Michael Angelo. But what is the
use of trying to study that wonderful exhibition as a whole, with its
Leonardo da Vincis, its Murillos, its Velasquezs, and so on. I lingered
in front of one of Rubens’s—a landscape painted in Italy, but a pure
Flemish scene, just because Ruskin has said: “The Dutch painters are
always contented with their flat fields and pollards,” agreeing with
the Lincolnshire farmer in Kingsley’s “Alton Locke”: “None o’ this here
darned ups and downs o’ hills, to shake a body’s victuals out of his
inwards, but all so vlat as a barn’s vloor for forty miles on end—this
is the country to live in!”
The Portrait of “Gevartius,” by Van Dyke, is considered by Van Dyke
himself as his masterpiece, and before he gained his great reputation
he carried it about with him from court to court to show what he could
do as a portrait painter. I only wish I could reproduce it here, so as
to show the liquid, living lustre of the eye that Van Dyke puts before
you in this great portrait. Then there’s Rembrandt’s many pictures. He
is the great master of the school who strive not at representing the
color of the objects, but the contrasts of light and shade upon them.
These effects he attains with magnificent skill and subtlety. The
strong and solitary light, with its impenetrable obscurity around, is
the characteristic feature of many of his best works, just such an
effect as would be produced by the one ray of light admitted into the
lofty chamber of a mill, from the small window, its ventilator. “The
Woman Taken in Adultery” is a “tour de force” in the artist’s specialty
of contrasts of light and shade; there is a succession of these
contrasts which gradually renders the subject intelligible. The eye
falls at once on the woman who is dressed in white, passes then to the
figure of Christ, which next to her is the most strongly lighted, and
so on to Peter, to the Pharisees, to the soldiers, till at length it
perceives in the mysterious gloom of the temple, the high altar, with
the worshippers on the steps.
But I am naturally drawn back to Turner’s wonderful room, possibly
because it seems like associating again with dear old friends, for that
which greets my vision as I enter is Turner’s “Crossing the Brook,” so
much copied in the art school, although the original is as large again
as the copy I attempted of J. O. Adams. It seems twice as valuable to
me since I have had the privilege of noting the beautiful expression of
tender diffused daylight over this wide and varied landscape. I think
it was Charles Lamb who said, “My household gods are held down by
stakes deeply driven, and they cannot be removed without drawing
blood.” After all, one’s associates and co-workers go to make up an
important part of one’s life.
I could not leave without once more turning back to my old “Téméraire.”
She, so I have read, was a ninety-eight-gun ship, was the second ship
in Nelson’s line at the battle of Trafalgar, 1805, and, having little
provisions or water on board, was what sailors call “flying light.” So
as to be able to keep pace with the fast sailing “Victory,” when the
latter drew upon herself all the enemy’s fire, the “Téméraire” tried to
pass her to take it in her stead, but Nelson himself hailed to her to
keep astern. She lay with a French 74-gun ship on each side of
her,—both her prizes,—one lashed to her mainmast and one to her
anchor. She was sold out of the service at Sheerness in 1838, and towed
to Rotherhithe to be broken up. The flag which braved the battle and
the breeze no longer owns her. The picture was first exhibited at the
Academy in 1839, with the above lines cited in the catalogue. Ruskin
says this about it: “Of all the pictures, not visibly involving human
pain, this is, I believe, the most pathetic ever painted; the utmost
pensiveness which can ordinarily be given to a landscape depends on
adjuncts of ruin, but no ruin was ever so affecting as this gliding of
the vessel to the grave. This particular ship, crowned in the Trafalgar
hour of trial with chief victory, surely if ever anything without a
soul deserved honor or affection we owe them here. Surely some sacred
care might have been left in our thoughts for her—some quiet space
amid the lapse of English waters. Nay, not so; we have stern keepers to
trust her glory to, the fire and the worm. Never more shall sunlight
lay golden robe on her, nor starlight tremble on the waves that part at
her gliding. Perhaps when the low gate opens to some cottage garden,
the tired traveller may ask idly, ‘Why the moss grows so green on the
rugged wood?’ And even the sailor’s child may not answer, nor know,
that the night dew lies deep in the war rents of the wood of the old
‘Téméraire.’” The spirit of the picture, the pathetic contrast of the
old ship’s past glory with her present end, is caught in the contrast
of the sunset with the shadow. The cold, deadly shadows of the twilight
are gathering through every sunbeam, and moment by moment as you look
you will fancy some new film and faintness of the night has arisen over
the vastness of the departing form. As I remember it, Mrs. Rose B.
Stewart, of the Muncie Art School, and the writer had a fair copy of
the same, thanks to J. O. Adams.
While there is entertainment and recreation in this delightful
collection, yet for my own personal benefit, aside from a few pets, I
prefer the study and the ownership of modern painters and the new
school.