ENGLISH PAINTING TO 1850
"The English school has an advantage over others in being young: its
tradition is barely a century old, and, unlike the Continental schools,
it is not hampered by antiquated Greek and Latin theories. What
fortunate conditions it has for breaking away into really modern work!
whereas in other nations the weight of tradition presses hard on the
boldest innovators. The English do not look back; on the contrary, they
look into life around them." So wrote Burger-Thoré in one of his Salons
in 1867.
Yet England was not unaffected by the retrospective tendency on the
Continent. Perhaps it might even be demonstrated that this movement had
its earliest origin on British soil. England had its "Empire style" in
architecture fifty years before there was any empire in France; it had
its Classical painting when David worked at Cupids with Boucher, and it
gave the world a Romanticist at the very time when the literature of the
Continent became "Classical." _The Lady of the Lake_, _Marmion_, _The
Lord of the Isles_, _The Fair Maid of Perth_, _Old Mortality_,
_Ivanhoe_, _Quentin Durward_, who is there that does not know these
names by heart? We have learnt history from Walter Scott, and that
programme of the artistic crafts which Lorenz Gedon drew up in 1876,
when he arranged the department _Works of our Fathers_ in the Munich
Exhibition, had been carried out by Scott as early as 1816. For Scott
laid out much of the money he received for his romances in building
himself a castle in the style of the baronial strongholds of the Middle
Ages: "Towers and turrets all imitated from a royal building in
Scotland, windows and gables painted with the arms of the clans, with
lions couchant," rooms "filled with high sideboards and carved chests,
targes, plaids, Highland broadswords, halberts, and suits of armour, and
adorned with antlers hung up as trophies." Here was a Makartesque studio
very many years before Makart.
Amongst the painters there were Classicists and Romanticists; but they
were neither numerous nor of importance. What England produced in the
way of "great art" in the beginning of last century could be erased from
the complete chart of British painting without any essential gap being
made in the course of its development. Reynolds had had to pay dear for
approaching the Italians in his "Ugolino," his "Macbeth," and his "Young
Hercules." And a yet more arid mannerism befell all the others who
followed him on the way to Italy, among them _James Barry_, who, after
studying for years in Italy, settled down in London in 1771, with the
avowed intention of providing England with a classical form of art. He
believed that he had surpassed his own models, the Italian classic
painters, by six pompous representations of the "Culture and Progress of
Human Knowledge," which he completed in 1783, in the theatre of the
Society for the Encouragement of Arts. The many-sided _James Northcote_,
equally mediocre in everything, survives rather by his biographies of
Reynolds and Titian than by the great canvases which he painted for
Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. That which became best known was "The
Murder of the Children in the Tower." _Henry Fuseli_, who was also much
occupied with authorship and as _preceptor Britanniæ_, always mentioned
with great respect by his numerous pupils, produced a series of
exceedingly thoughtful and imaginative works, to which he was incited by
Klopstock and Lavater. By preference he illustrated Milton and
Shakespeare, and amongst this series of pictures his painting of
"Titania with the Ass," from Shakespeare's _Midsummer Night's Dream_, in
the London National Gallery, is probably the best. His pupil _William
Etty_ was saturated with the traditions of the Venetian school; he is
the British Makart, and followed rather heavily and laboriously in the
track of Titian, exploring the realms of nude beauty, and toiling to
discover that secret of blooming colour which gleams from the female
forms of the Venetians. The assiduous _Benjamin Robert Haydon_, a spirit
ever seeking, striving, and reflecting, became, like Gros in France, a
victim of the grand style. He would naturally have preferred to paint
otherwise, and more simply. The National Gallery possesses a charming
picture by him of a London street (for some years past on loan at
Leicester), which represents a crowd watching a Punch and Judy show.
But, like Gros, he held it a sin against the grand style to occupy
himself with such matters. He thought it only permissible to paint
sacred subjects or subjects from ancient history upon large spaces of
canvas; and he sank ever deeper into his theories, reaching the
profoundest abyss of abstract science when he made diligent anatomical
studies of the muscles of a lion, in order to fashion the heroic frames
of warriors on the same plan. His end, on 26th June 1846, was like that
of the Frenchman. There was found beside his body a paper on which he
had written: "God forgive me. Amen. Finis," with the quotation from
Shakespeare's _Lear_: "Stretch me no longer on the rack of this rough
world." All these masters are more interesting for their human qualities
than for their works, which, with their extravagant colour, forced
gestures, and follies of every description, contain no new thing worthy
of further development. Even when they sought to make direct copies from
Continental performances, they did not attain the graceful sweep of
their models. The refinements which they imitated became clumsy and
awkward in their hands, and they remained half _bourgeois_ and half
barbaric.
The liberating influence of English art was not found in the province of
the great painting, and it is probably not without significance that the
few who tried to import it came to grief in the experiment. There can be
no doubt that such art goes more against the grain of the English
nature than of any other. Even in the days of scholastic philosophy the
English asserted the doctrine that there are only individuals in nature.
In the beginning of modern times a new era, grounded on the observation
of nature, was promulgated from England. Bacon had little to say about
beauty: he writes against the proportions and the principle of selection
in art, and therefore against the ideal. Handsome men, he says, have
seldom possessed great qualities. And in the same way the English stage
had just as little bent for the august and rhythmical grandeur of
classical literature. When he stabbed Polonius, Garrick never dreamed of
moving according to the taste of Boileau, and was probably as different
from the Greek leader of a chorus as Hogarth from David. The peculiar
merits of English literature and science have been rooted from the time
of their first existence in their capacity for observation. This
explains the contempt for regularity in Shakespeare, the feeling for
concrete fact in Bacon. English philosophy is positive, exact,
utilitarian, and highly moral. Hobbes and Locke, John Stuart Mill and
Buckle, in England take the place of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and
Kant upon the Continent. Amongst English historians Carlyle is the only
poet: all the rest are learned prose-writers who collect observations,
combine experiences, arrange dates, weigh possibilities, reconcile
facts, discover laws, and hoard and increase positive knowledge. The
eighteenth century had seen the rise of the novel as the picture of
contemporary life; in Hogarth this national spirit was first turned to
account in painting. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, again,
the good qualities of English art consisted not in bold ideality, but in
sharpness of observation, sobriety, and flexibility of spirit.
[Illustration: GEORGE ROMNEY.]
Their proper domain was still to be found in portraiture, and if none of
the new portrait painters can be compared with the great ancestors of
English art, they are none the less superior to all their contemporaries
on the Continent. _George Romney_, who belongs rather to the eighteenth
century, holds the mean course between the refined classic art of Sir
Joshua and the imaginative poetic art of Thomas Gainsborough. Less
personal and less profound in characterisation, he was, on the other
hand, the most dexterous painter of drapery in his age: a man who knew
all the secrets of the trade, and possessed, at the same time, that art
which is so much valued in portrait painters--the art of beautifying his
models without making his picture unlike the original. Professional
beauties beheld themselves presented in their counterfeit precisely as
they wished to appear, and accorded him, therefore, a fervent adoration.
And after his return from Italy in 1775 his fame was so widespread that
it outstripped Gainsborough's and equalled that of Reynolds. Court
beauties and celebrated actresses left no stone unturned to have their
portraits introduced into one of his "compositions"; for Romney eagerly
followed the fashion of allegorical portraiture which had been set by
Reynolds, representing persons with the emblem of a god or of one of the
muses. Romney has painted the famous Lady Hamilton, to say nothing of
others, as Magdalen, Joan of Arc, a Bacchante, and an Odalisque.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
ROMNEY. LADY HAMILTON AS EUPHROSYNE.]
Great as his reputation had been at the close of the eighteenth century,
it was outshone twenty years later by that of _Sir Thomas Lawrence_.
Born in Bristol in 1769, Lawrence had scarcely given up the calling of
an actor before he saw all England in raptures over his genius as a
painter. The catalogue of his portraits is a complete list of all who
were at the time pre-eminent for talent or beauty. He received fabulous
sums, which he spent with the grace of a man of the world. In 1815 he
was commissioned to paint for the Windsor Gallery the portraits of all
the "Victors of Waterloo," from the Duke of Wellington to the Emperor
Alexander. The Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle gave him an opportunity for
getting the portraits of representatives of the various Courts. All the
capitals of Europe, which he visited for this purpose, received him with
princely honours. He was member of all the Academies under the sun, and
President of that in London; but, as a natural reaction, this
over-estimation of earlier years has been followed by an equally
undeserved undervaluation of his works in these days. Beneath the
fashionable exterior of his ceremonial pictures naturalness and
simplicity are often wanting, and so too are the deeper powers of
characterisation, firm drawing, and real vitality. A feminine coquetry
has taken the place of character. His drawing has a banal effect, and
his colouring is monotonous in comparison with that realism which
Reynolds shares with the old masters. It is easy to confound the
majority of his pictures of ceremonies with those of Winterhalter, and
his smaller portraits with pretty fashion plates; yet one cannot but
admire his ease of execution and nobility of composition. Several of his
pictures of women, in particular, are touched by an easy grace and a
fine charm of poetic sensuousness in which he approaches Gainsborough.
Not many at that time could have painted such pretty children's heads,
or given young women such an attractive and familiar air of life. With
what a girlish glance of innocence and melancholy does Mrs. Siddons look
out upon the world from the canvas of Lawrence: how piquant is her white
Greek garment, with its black girdle and the white turban. And what
subtle delicacy there is in the portrait of Miss Farren as she flits
with muff and fur-trimmed cloak through a bright green summer landscape.
The reputation of Lawrence will rise once more when his empty formal
pieces have found their way into lumber-rooms, and a greater number of
his pictures of women--pictures so full of indescribable fascination, so
redolent of mysterious charm--are accessible to the public.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
LAWRENCE. MRS. SIDDONS.]
As minor stars, the soft and tender _John Hoppner_, the attractively
superficial _William Beechey_, the celebrated pastellist _John Russell_,
and the vigorously energetic _John Jackson_ had their share with him in
public favour, whilst _Henry Raeburn_ shone in Scotland as a star of the
first magnitude.
He was a born painter. Wilkie says in one of his letters from Madrid,
that the pictures of Velasquez put him in mind of Raeburn; and certain
works of the Scot, such as the portrait of Lord Newton, the famous _bon
vivant_ and doughty drinker, are indeed performances of such power that
comparison with this mighty name is no profanation. At a time when there
was a danger that portrait painting would sink in the hands of Lawrence
into an insipid painting of prettiness, Raeburn stood alone by the
simplicity and naturalistic impressiveness of his portraiture. The three
hundred and twenty-five portraits by him which were exhibited in the
Royal Scottish Academy in 1876, gave as exhaustive a picture of the life
of Edinburgh at the close of the century as those of Sir Joshua gave of
the life of London. All the celebrated Scotchmen of his time--Robertson,
Hume, Ferguson, and Scott--were painted by him. Altogether he painted
over six hundred portraits; and, small though the number may seem
compared with the two thousand of Reynolds, Raeburn's artistic qualities
are almost the greater. The secret of his success lies in his vigorous
healthiness, in the indescribable _furia_ of his brush, in the harmony
and truth of his colour-values. His figures are informed by a startling
intensity of life. His old pensioners, and his sailors in particular,
have something kingly in the grand air of their calm and noble
countenances. Armstrong has given him a place between Frans Hals and
Velasquez, and occasionally his conception of colour even recalls the
modern Frenchmen, as it were Manet in his Hals period. He paints his
models, just as they come into contact with him in life, in the frank
light of day and without any attempt at the dusk of the old masters; of
raiment he gives only as much as the comprehension of the picture
demands, and depicts character in large and simple traits.
[Illustration: LAWRENCE. PRINCESS AMELIA.]
The importance of West and Copley, two Americans who were active in
England, is that they were the first to apply the qualities acquired in
English portrait painting to pictures on a large scale.
_Benjamin West_ has undoubtedly been over-praised by his contemporaries,
and by a critic of the present day he has, not unfairly, been designated
"the king of mediocrity." At his appearance he was interesting to
Europeans merely as an anthropological curiosity,--as the first son of
barbaric America who had used a paint brush. A thoroughly American puff
preceded his entry into the Eternal City in 1760. It was reported that
as the son of a quaker farmer he had grown up amongst his father's
slaves in the immediate neighbourhood of the Indians, and had painted
good portraits in Philadelphia and New York without having ever seen a
work of art. People were delighted when, on being brought into the
Vatican, he clapped his hands and compared the Apollo Belvidere to an
Indian chief. In the art of making himself interesting "the young
savage" was ahead of all his patrons; and as he followed the ruling
classical tendency with great aptitude, within the course of a year he
was made an honorary member of the Academies of Parma, Bologna, and
Florence, and praised by the critics of Rome as ranking with Mengs as
the first painter of his day. In 1763, at a time when Hogarth and
Reynolds, Wilson and Gainsborough, were in the fulness of their powers,
he went to London; and as people are always inclined to value most
highly what they do not possess, he soon won an important position for
himself, even beside these masters. Hogarth produced nothing but
"_genre_ pictures," Wilson only landscapes, and Reynolds and
Gainsborough portraits: West brought to the English what they did not as
yet possess--a "great art."
[Illustration: LAWRENCE. THE ENGLISH MOTHER.]
His first picture--in the London National Gallery--"Pylades and Orestes
brought as Hostages before Iphigenia," is a tiresome product of that
Classicism which upon the Continent found its principal representatives
in Mengs and David: it is stiff in drawing, its composition is
suggestive of a bas-relief, and its cold grey colouring is classically
academic. His other pictures from antique and sacred history stand much
on the same level as those of Wilhelm Kaulbach, with whose works they
share their stilted dignity, their systematically antiquarian structure,
and their mechanical combination of forms borrowed in a spiritless
fashion from the Cinquecentisti.
Fortunately West has left behind him something different from these
ambitious attempts; for on the occasions when he turned away from the
great style he created works of lasting importance. This is specially
true of some fine historical pictures dealing with his own age, which
will preserve his name for ever. "The Death of General Wolfe" at the
storming of Quebec on 13th September 1759--exhibited at the opening of
the Royal Academy in 1768--is by its very sobriety a sincere, honest,
and sane piece of work, which will maintain its value as an historical
document. It was just at this time that so great a part was played by
the question of costume, and West encountered the same difficulties
which Gottfried Schadow was obliged to face when he represented Ziethen
and the Old Dessauer in the costume of their age. The connoisseurs held
that such a sublime theme would only admit of antique dress. If West in
their despite represented the general and his soldiers in their
regulation uniform, it seems at the present time no more than the result
of healthy common sense, but at that time it was an artistic event of
great importance, and one which was only accomplished in France after
the work of several decades. In that country Gérard and Girodet still
clung to the belief that they could only raise the military picture to
the level of the great style by giving the soldiers of the Empire the
appearance of Greek and Roman statues. Gros is honoured as the man who
first ceased from giving modern soldiers an air of the antique. But the
American Englishman had anticipated him by forty years. As in
Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa," it was only the pyramidal composition
in West's picture that betrayed the painter's alliance with the
Classical school; in other respects it forecast the realistic programme
for decades to come, and indicated the course of development which leads
through Gros onwards. If in Gros men are treated purely as accessories
to throw a hero into relief, in West they stand out in action. They
behave in the picture spontaneously as they do in life. That is to say,
there is in West's work of 1768 the element through which Horace
Vernet's pictures of 1830 are to be distinguished from those of Gros.
This realistic programme was carried out with yet greater consistency by
West's younger compatriot _John Singleton Copley_, who after a short
sojourn in Italy migrated to England in 1775. His chief works in the
London National Gallery depict in the same way events from contemporary
history--"The Death of the Earl of Chatham, 7th April 1778" and "The
Death of Major Pierson, 6th January 1781,"--and it is by no means
impossible that when David, in the midst of the classicising tendencies
of his age, ventured to paint "The Death of Marat" and "The Death of
Lepelletier," he was led to do so by engravings after Copley. In the
representation of such things other painters of the epoch had draped
their figures in antique costume, called genii and river-gods into
action, and given a Roman character to the whole. Copley, like West,
offers a plain, matter-of-fact representation of the event, without any
rhetorical pathos. And what raises him above West is his liquid, massive
colour, suggestive of the old masters. In none of his works could West
set himself free from the dead grey colour of the Classical school,
whereas Copley's "Death of William Pitt" is the result of intimate
studies of Titian and the Dutch. The way the light falls on the perukes
of the men and the brown, wainscoted walls puts one in mind of
Rembrandt's "Anatomical Lecture"; only, instead of a pathetic scene from
the theatre, we have a collection of good portraits in the manner of the
Dutch studies of shooting matches.
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo_
LAWRENCE. CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, QUEEN OF GEORGE IV.]
[Illustration: LAWRENCE. THE COUNTESS GOWER.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
RAEBURN. SIR WALTER SCOTT.]
That this unhackneyed conception of daily life has its special home in
England is further demonstrated by the work of _Daniel Maclise_, who
depicted "The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher," "The Death of Nelson,"
and other patriotic themes upon walls and canvases several yards square,
with appalling energy, promptitude, and expenditure of muscle. By these
he certainly did better service to national pride than to art.
Nevertheless, with their forcible, healthy realism they contrast
favourably with the mythological subjects so universally produced on the
Continent at that time.
Beside the portrait painters of men stand the portrait painters of
animals. Since the days of Elias Riedinger animal painting had fallen
into general disesteem on the Continent. Thorwaldsen, the first of the
Classicists who allowed animals to appear in his works (as he did in his
Alexander frieze), dispensed with any independent studies of nature, and
contented himself with imitating the formal models on the frieze of the
Parthenon; or, in lack of a Grecian exemplar, simply drew out of the
depths of his inner consciousness. Especially remarkable is the sovran
contempt with which he treated the most familiar domestic creatures.
German historical painting knew still less what to make of the brute
creation, because it only recognised beauty in the profundity of ideas,
and ideas have nothing to do with beasts. Its four-footed creatures have
a philosophic depth of contemplation, and are bad studies after nature.
Kaulbach's "Reinecke" and the inclination to transplant human
sentiments into the world of brutes delayed until the sixties any
devoted study of the animal soul. France, too, before the days of
Troyon, had nothing to show worth mentioning. But in England, the land
of sport, animal painting was evolved directly from the old painting of
the chase, without being seduced from its proper course. Fox-hunting has
been popular in England since the time of Charles I. Racing came into
fashion not long after, and with racing came that knowledge of
horseflesh which has been developed in England further than elsewhere.
Since the seventeenth century red deer have been preserved in the
English parks. It is therefore comprehensible that English art was early
occupied with these animals, and since it was sportsmen who cared most
about them, the painter was at first their servant. He had not so much
to paint pictures as reminiscences of sport and the chase. His first
consideration in painting a horse was to paint a fine horse; as to its
being a fine picture, that was quite a secondary matter. _John Wootton_
and _George Stubbs_ were in this sense portrayers of racehorses. The
latter, however, took occasion to emancipate himself from his patrons by
representing the noble animal, not standing at rest by his manger, or
with a groom on his back and delighting in the consciousness of his own
beauty, but as he was in action and amongst pictorial surroundings.
[Illustration: WEST. THE DEATH OF NELSON.]
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo_
MACLISE. THE WATERFALL, CORNWALL.]
[Illustration: COPLEY. THE DEATH OF THE EARL OF CHATHAM.]
[Illustration: MACLISE. NOAH'S SACRIFICE.]
Soon afterwards _George Morland_ made his appearance. He made a
specialty of old nags, and was perhaps the most important master of the
brush that the English school produced at all. His pictures have the
same magic as the landscapes of Gainsborough. He painted life on the
high-road and in front of village inns--scenes like those which Isaac
Ostade had represented a century before: old horses being led to water
amid the sunny landscape of the downs, market carts rumbling heavily
through the rough and sunken lanes, packhorses coming back to their
stalls of an evening tired out with the day's exertions, riders pulling
up at the village inn or chatting with the pretty landlady. And he has
done these things with the delicacy of an old Dutch painter. It is
impossible to say whether Morland had ever seen the pictures of Adriaen
Brouwer; but this greatest master of technique amongst the Flemings can
alone be compared with Morland in verve and artistic many-sidedness; and
Morland resembled him also in his adventurous life and his early death.
To the spirit and dash of Brouwer he joins the refinement of
Gainsborough in his landscapes, and Rowlandson's delicate feeling for
feminine beauty in his figures. He does not paint fine ladies, but women
in their everyday clothes, and yet they are surrounded by a grace
recalling Chardin: young mothers going to see their children who are
with the nurse, smart little tavern hostesses in their white aprons and
coquettish caps busily serving riders with drink, and charming city
madams in gay summer garb sitting of a Sunday afternoon with their
children at a tea-garden. Over the works of Morland there lies all the
chivalrous grace of the time of Werther, and that fine Anglo-Saxon aroma
exhaled by the works of English painters of the present day. Genuine as
is the fame which he enjoys as an animal painter, it is these little
social scenes which show his finest side; and only coloured engraving,
which was brought to such a high pitch in the England of those days, is
able to give an idea of the delicacy of hue in the originals.
[Illustration: MACLISE. MALVOLIO AND THE COUNTESS.]
[Illustration: _Mansell & Co._
MORLAND. HORSES IN A STABLE.]
Morland's brother-in-law, the painter and engraver _James Ward_, born in
1769 and dying in 1859, united this old English school with the modern.
The portrait which accompanies the obituary notice in the _Art Journal_
is that of a very aged gentleman, with a grey beard and thick, white,
bristly hair. The pictures which he painted when he had this
appearance--and they are the most familiar--were exceedingly weak and
insipid works. In comparison with Morland's broad, liquid, and
harmonious painting, that of Ward seems burnished, sparkling, flaunting,
anecdotic, and petty. But James Ward was not always old James Ward. In
his early days he was one of the greatest and manliest artists of the
English school, with whom only Briton Rivière can be compared amongst
the moderns. When his "Lioness" appeared in the Royal Academy Exhibition
of 1816 he was justly hailed as the best animal painter after Snyders,
and from that time one masterpiece followed another for ten long years.
What grace and power there are in his horses and dogs! In pictures of
this sort Stubbs was graceful and delicate; Ward painted the same horse
in as sporting a manner and with the same knowledge, but with an
artistic power such as no one had before him. His field of work was
wide-reaching. He painted little girls with the thoroughly English
feeling of Morland, and had the whole animal world for his domain.
Lions, snakes, cats, pigs, oxen, cows, sheep, swans, fowls, frogs are
the characters in his pictures. And characters they were, for he never
humanised the looks of his four-footed models, as others did later. The
home of his animals is not the drawing-room, but the woods and meadows,
the air and the gardens. His broad, weighty manner was transformed first
into extravagant virtuosity and then into pettiness of style during the
last thirty years of his life, when he became senile. His reputation
paled more than he deserved before the star of the world-famous
Landseer.
[Illustration: MORLAND. THE CORN BIN.]
The most popular animal painter, not merely of England but of the whole
century, was _Edwin Landseer_. For fifty years his works formed the
chief features of attraction in the Royal Academy. Engravings from him
had such a circulation in the country that in the sixties there was
scarcely a house in which there did not hang one of his horses or dogs
or stags. Even the Continent was flooded with engravings of his
pictures, and Landseer suffered greatly from this popularity. He is
much better than the reproductions with their fatal gloss allow any one
to suppose, and his pictures can be judged by them just as little as can
Raphael's "School of Athens" from Jacobi's engraving.
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
MORLAND. GOING TO THE FAIR.]
Edwin Landseer came of a family of artists. His father, who was an
engraver, sent him out into the free world of nature as a boy, and made
him sketch donkeys and goats and sheep. When he was fourteen he went to
Haydon, the prophet on matters of art; and, on the advice of this
singular being, studied the sculptures of the Parthenon. He "anatomised
animals under my eyes," writes Haydon, "copied my anatomical drawings,
and applied my principles of instruction to animal painting. His genius,
directed in this fashion, has, as a matter of fact, arrived at
satisfactory results." Landseer was the spoilt child of fortune. There
is no other English painter who can boast of having been made a member
of the Royal Academy at twenty-four. In high favour at Court, honoured
by the fashionable world, and tenderly treated by criticism, he went on
his way triumphant. The region over which he held sway was narrow, but
he stood out in it as in life, powerful and commanding. The exhibition
of his pictures which took place after his death in 1873 contained three
hundred and fourteen oil paintings and one hundred and forty-six
sketches. The property which he left amounted to £160,000; and a further
sum of £55,000 was realised by the sale of his unsold pictures. Even
Meissonier, the best paid painter of the century, did not leave behind
him five and a half million francs.
One reason of Landseer's artistic success is perhaps due to that in him
which was inartistic--to his effort to make animals more beautiful than
they really are, and to make them the medium for expressing human
sentiment. All the dogs and horses and stags which he painted after
1855, and through which he was made specially familiar to the great
public, are arrayed in their Sunday clothes, their glossiest hide and
their most magnificent horns. And in addition to this he "Darwinises"
them: that is to say, he tries to make his animals more than animals; he
lends a human sentimental trait to animal character; and that is what
distinguishes him to his disadvantage from really great animal painters
like Potter, Snyders, Troyon, Jadin, and Rosa Bonheur. He paints the
human temperament beneath the animal mask. His stags have expressive
countenances, and his dogs appear to be gifted with reason and even
speech. At one moment there is a philosophic dignity in their behaviour,
and at another a frivolity in their pleasures. Landseer discovered the
sentimentality of dogs, and treated them as capable of culture. His
celebrated picture "Jack in Office" is almost insulting in its
characterisation: there they are, Jack the sentry, an old female dog
like a poor gentlewoman, another dog like a professional beggar, and so
on. And this habit of bringing animals on the stage, as if they were the
actors of tragical, melodramatic, or farcical scenes, made him a
peculiar favourite with the great mass of people. Nor were his
picture-stories merely easy to read and understand; the characteristic
titles he invented for each of them--"Alexander and Diogenes," "A
Distinguished Member of the Humane Society," and the like--excited
curiosity as much as the most carefully selected name of a novel. But
this search after points and sentimental anecdotes only came into
prominence in his last period, when his technique had degenerated and
given way to a shiny polish and a forced elegance which obliged him to
provide extraneous attractions. His popularity would not be so great,
but his artistic importance would be quite the same, if these last
pictures did not exist at all.
[Illustration: MORLAND. THE RETURN FROM MARKET.]
But the middle period of Landseer, ranging from 1840 to 1850, contains
masterpieces which set him by the side of the best animal painters of
all times and nations. The well-known portrait of a Newfoundland dog of
1838; that of the Prince Consort's favourite greyhound of 1841; "The
Otter Speared" of 1844, with its panting and yelping pack brought to a
standstill beneath a high wall of rock; the dead doe which a fawn is
unsuspectingly approaching, in "A Random Shot," 1848; "The Lost Sheep"
of 1850, that wanders frightened and bleating through a wide and lonely
landscape covered with snow,--these and many other pictures, in their
animation and simple naturalness, are precious examples of the fresh and
delicate observation peculiar to him at that time. Landseer's portrait
reveals to us a robust and serious man, with a weather-beaten face, a
short white beard, and a snub bulldog nose. Standing six feet high, and
having the great heavy figure of a Teuton stepping out of his aboriginal
forest, he was indeed much more like a country gentleman than a London
artist. He was a sportsman who wandered about all day long in the air
with a gun on his arm, and he painted his animal pictures with all the
love and joy of a child of nature. That accounts for their strength,
their convincing power, and their vivid force. It is as if he had become
possessed of a magic cap with which he could draw close to animals
without being observed, and surprise their nature and their inmost life.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
LANDSEER. A DISTINGUISHED MEMBER OF THE HUMANE SOCIETY.]
Landseer's subject-matter and conception of life are indicated by the
pictures which have been named. Old masters like Snyders and Rubens had
represented the contrast between man and beast in their boar and lion
hunts. It was not wild nature that Landseer depicted, but nature tamed.
Rubens, Snyders, and Delacroix displayed their horses, dogs, lions, and
tigers in bold action, or in the flame of passion. But Landseer
generally introduced his animals in quiet situations--harmless and
without fear--in the course of their ordinary life.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
LANDSEER. THE LAST MOURNER AT THE SHEPHERD'S GRAVE.]
Horses, which Leonardo, Rubens, Velasquez, Wouwerman, and the earlier
English artists delighted to render, he painted but seldom, and when he
painted them it was with a less penetrating comprehension. But lions,
which had been represented in savage passion or in quiet dignity by
artists from Rubens to Decamps, were for him also a subject of long and
exhaustive studies, which had their results in the four colossal lions
round the base of the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square. Here the
Englishman makes a great advance on Thorwaldsen, who designed the model
for the monument in Lucerne without ever having seen a lion. Landseer's
brutes, both as they are painted and as they are cast in bronze, are
genuine lions, cruel and catlike, although in savageness and bold
passion they are not to be compared with those of Delacroix, nor with
those of his elder compatriot, James Ward. On the other hand, stags and
roes were really first introduced into painting by Landseer. Those of
Robert Hills, who had previously been reckoned the best painter of
stags, are timid, suspicious creatures, while Landseer's are the true
kings of the forest, the shooting of which ought to be punished as an
act of assassination. His principal field of study was the Highlands.
Here he painted these proud creatures fighting on the mountain slopes,
swimming the lake, or as they stand at a gaze in their quiet beauty.
With what a bold spirit they raise their heads to snuff the mountain
air, whilst their antlers show their delight in battle and the joy of
victory. And how gentle and timid is the noble, defenceless roe in
Landseer's pictures.
[Illustration: LANDSEER. HIGH LIFE.]
He had also a delight in painting sheep lost in a snow-storm. But dogs
were his peculiar specialty. Landseer discovered the dog. That of
Snyders was a treacherous, snarling cur; that of Bewick a robber and a
thief. Landseer has made the dog the companion of man, an adjunct of
human society, the generous friend and true comrade who is the last
mourner at the shepherd's grave. Landseer first studied his noble
countenance and his thoughtful eyes, and in doing so he opened a new
province to art, in which Briton Rivière went further at a later period.
But yet another and still wider province was opened to continental
nations by the art of England. In an epoch of archæological
resuscitations and romantic regrets for the past, it brought French and
German painters to a consciousness that the man of the nineteenth
century in his daily life might be a perfectly legitimate subject for
art. Engravings after the best pictures of Wilkie hang round the walls
of Louis Knaus's reception-room in Berlin. And that in itself betrays to
us a fragment of the history of art. The painters who saw the English
people with the eyes of Walter Scott, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Dickens
were a generation in advance of those who depicted the German people in
the spirit of Immermann, Auerbach, Gustav Freytag, and Fritz Reuter. The
English advanced quietly on the road trodden by Hogarth in the
eighteenth century, whilst upon the Continent the nineteenth century had
almost completed half its course before art left anything which will
allow future generations to see the men of the period as they really
were. Since the days of Fielding and Goldsmith the novel of manners had
been continually growing. Burns, the poet of the plough, and
Wordsworth, the singer of rustic folk, had given a vogue to that poetry
of peasant life and those village tales which have since gone the round
of all Europe. England began at that time to become the richest country
in the world, and great fortunes were made. Painters were thus obliged
to provide for the needs of a new and wealthy middle class. This fact
gives us the explanation both of the merits and the faults which are
characteristic of English _genre_ painting.
[Illustration: LANDSEER. LOW LIFE.]
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century _David Wilkie_, the
English Knaus, was the chief _genre_ painter of the world. Born in 1785
in the small Scotch village of Cults, where his father was the
clergyman, he passed a happy childhood, and possibly had to thank his
youthful impressions for the consistent cheerfulness, the good-humour
and kindliness that smile out of his pictures, and make such a contrast
with Hogarth's biting acerbity. At fourteen he entered the Edinburgh
School of Art, where he worked for four years under the historical
painter John Graham. Having returned to Cults, he painted his
landscapes. A fair which he saw in the neighbouring village gave the
impulse for his earliest picture of country life, "Pitlessie Fair." He
sold it for five and twenty pounds, and determined in 1805 to try his
luck with this sum in London. In the very next year his "Village
Politicians" excited attention in the exhibition. From that time he was
a popular artist. Every one of his numerous pictures--"The Blind
Fiddler," "The Card Players," "The Rent Day," "The Cut Finger," "The
Village Festival"--called forth a storm of applause. After a short
residence in Paris, where the Louvre gave him a more intimate knowledge
of the Dutch, came his masterpieces, "Blind-Man's Buff," "Distraining
for Rent," "Reading the Will," "The Rabbit on the Wall," "The Penny
Wedding," "The Chelsea Pensioners," and so forth. Even later, after he
had become an Academician, he kept to plain and simple themes, in spite
of the reproaches of his colleagues, who thought that art was vulgarised
by the treatment of subjects that contained so little dignity. It was
only at the end of his life that he became untrue to himself. His
reverence for Teniers and Ostade was not sufficient to outweigh the
impression made on him during a tour taken in 1825 through Italy, Spain,
Holland, and Germany, by the artistic treasures of the Continent, and
especially Murillo and Velasquez. He said he had long lived in darkness,
but from that time forth could say with the great Correggio: "_Anch' io
sono pittore._" He renounced all that he had painted before which had
made him famous, and showed himself to be one of the many great artists
of those years who had no individuality, or ventured to have none. He
would have been the Burns of painting had he remained as he was. And
thus he offered further evidence that the museums and the Muses are
contradictory conceptions; since the modern painter always runs the risk
of falling helplessly from one influence into another, where he is bent
on combining the historical student of art with the artist. Of the
pictures that he exhibited after his return in 1829, two dealt with
Italian and three with Spanish subjects. The critics were loud in
praise; he had added a fresh branch of laurel to his crown. Yet,
historically considered, he would stand on a higher pedestal if he had
never seen more than a dozen good pictures of Teniers, Ostade, Metsu,
Jan Steen, and Brouwer. Now he began to copy his travelling sketches in
a spiritless fashion; he only represented _pifferari_, smugglers, and
monks, who, devoid of all originality, might have been painted by one of
the Düsseldorfers. Even "John Knox Preaching," which is probably the
best picture of his last period, is no exception.
"He seemed to me," writes Delacroix, who saw him in Paris after his
return from Spain,--"he seemed to me to have been carried utterly out of
his depth by the pictures he had seen. How is it that a man of his age
can be so influenced by works which are radically opposed to his own?
However, he died soon after, and, as I have been told, in a very
melancholy state of mind." Death overtook him in 1841, on board the
steamer _Oriental_, just as he was returning from a tour in Turkey. At
half-past eight in the evening the vessel was brought to, and as the
lights of the beacon mingled with those of the stars the waters passed
over the corpse of David Wilkie.
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo_
LANDSEER. JACK IN OFFICE.]
[Illustration: WILKIE. BLIND-MAN'S BUFF.]
In judging his position in the history of art, only those works come
into consideration which he executed before that journey of 1825. Then
he drew as a labour of love the familiar scenes of the household hearth,
the little dramas, the comic or touching episodes that take place in the
village, the festivals, the dancing, and the sports of the country-folk,
and their meeting in the ale-house. At this time, when as a young
painter he merely expressed himself and was ignorant of the efforts of
continental painting, he was an artist of individuality. In the village
he became a great man, and here his fame was decided; he painted
rustics. Even when he first saw the old masters in the National Gallery
their immediate effect on him was merely to influence his technique. And
by their aid Wilkie gradually became an admirable master of technical
detail. His first picture, "Pitlessie Fair," in its hardness of colour
recalled a Dutch painter of the type of Jan Molenaer; but from that time
his course was one of constant progress. In "The Village Politicians"
the influence of Teniers first made itself felt, and it prevailed until
1816. In this year, when he painted the pretty sketch for "Blind-Man's
Buff," a warm gold hue took the place of the cool silver tone; and
instead of Teniers, Ostade became his model. The works in his Ostade
manner are rich in colour and deep and clear in tone. Finally, it was
Rembrandt's turn to become his guiding-star, and "The Parish Beadle," in
the National Gallery--a scene of arrest of the year 1822--clearly shows
with what brilliant success he tried his luck with Rembrandt's dewy
_chiaroscuro_. It was only in his last period that he lost all these
technical qualities. His "Knox" of 1832 is hard and cold and
inharmonious in colour.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
WILKIE. A GUERILLA COUNCIL OF WAR IN A SPANISH POSADA.]
So long as he kept from historical painting, art meant for him the same
thing as the portrayal of domestic life. Painting, he said, had no other
aim than to reproduce nature and to seek truth. Undoubtedly this must be
applied to Wilkie himself with considerable limitation. Wilkie painted
simple fragments of nature just as little as Hogarth; he invented
scenes. Nor was he even gifted with much power of invention. But he had
a fund of innocent humour, although there were times when it was in
danger of becoming much too childlike. "Blind-Man's Buff," "The Village
Politicians," and "The Village Festival," pictures which have become so
popular through the medium of engraving, contain all the characteristics
of his power of playful observation. He had no ambition to be a
moralist, like Hogarth, but just as little did he paint the rustic as he
is. He dealt only with the absurdities and minor accidents of life. His
was one of those happy dispositions which neither sorrow nor dream nor
excite themselves, but see everything from the humorous side: he enjoyed
his own jests, and looked at life as at a pure comedy; the serious part
of it escaped him altogether. His peasantry know nothing of social
problems; free from want and drudgery, they merely spend their time over
trifles and amuse themselves--themselves and the frequenters of the
exhibition, for whom they are taking part in a comedy on canvas. If
Hogarth had a biting, sarcastic, scourging, and disintegrating genius,
Wilkie is one of those people who cause one no lasting excitement, but
are always satisfied to be humorous, and laugh with a contented
appreciation over their own jokes.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
WILKIE. THE BLIND FIDDLER.]
And in general such is the keynote of this English _genre_. All that was
done in it during the years immediately following is more or less
comprised in the works of the Scotch "little master"; otherwise it
courts the assistance of English literature, which is always rich in
humorists and excellent writers of anecdote and story. In painting, as
in literature, the English delight in detail, which by its dramatic,
anecdotic, or humorous point is intended to have the interest of a short
story. Or perhaps one should rather say that, since the English came to
painting as novices, they began tentatively on that first step on which
art had stood in earlier centuries as long as it was still "the people's
spelling-book." It is a typical form of development, and repeats itself
constantly. All painting begins in narrative. First it is the subject
which has a fascination for the artist, and by the aid of it he casts a
spell over his public. The simplification of motives, the capacity for
taking a thing in at a single glance, and finding a simple joy in its
essentially pictorial integrity, is of later growth. Even with the
Dutch, who were so eminently gifted with a sense for what is pictorial,
the picture of manners was at first epical. Church festivals, skating
parties, and events which could be represented in an ample and detailed
fashion were the original materials of the _genre_ picture, which only
later contented itself with a purely artistic study of one out of
countless groups. This period of apprenticeship, which may be called the
period of interesting subject-matter, was what England was now going
through; and England had to go through it, since she had the
civilisation by which it is invariably produced.
[Illustration: WILKIE. THE PENNY WEDDING.]
Just as the first _genre_ pictures of the Flemish school announced the
appearance of a _bourgeoisie_, so in the England of the beginning of the
century a new plebeian, middle-class society had taken the place of the
patrons of earlier days, and this middle class set its seal upon manners
and communicated its spirit to painting. Prosperity, culture, travel,
reading, and leisure, everything which had been the privilege of
individuals, now became the common property of the great mass of men.
They prized art, but they demanded from it substantial nourishment. That
two colours in connection with straight and curved lines are enough for
the production of infinite harmonies was still a profound secret. "You
are free to be painters if you like," artists were told, "but only on
the understanding that you are amusing and instructive; if you have no
story to tell we shall yawn." When they comply with these demands,
artists are inclined to grow fond of sermonising and develop into
censors of the public morals, almost into lay preachers.
Or, if the aim of painting lies in its narrative power, there is a
natural tendency to represent the pleasant rather than the unpleasant
facts of life, which is the cause of this one-sided character of _genre_
painting. Everything that is not striking and out of the way--in other
words, the whole poetry of ordinary life--is left untouched. Wilkie only
paints the rustic on some peculiar occasion, at merry-making and
ceremonial events; and he depicts him as a being of a different species
from the townsman, because he seeks to gain his effects principally by
humorous episodes, and aims at situations which are proper to a novel.
[Illustration: WILKIE. THE FIRST EARRING.]
Baptisms and dances, funerals and weddings, carousals and bridal visits
are his favourite subjects; to which may be added the various contrasts
offered by peasant life where it is brought into contact with the
civilisation of cities--the country cousin come to town, the rustic
closeted with a lawyer, and the like. A continual roguishness enlivens
his pictures and makes comical figures out of most of these good people.
He amuses himself at their expense, exposes their little lies, their
thrift, their folly, their pretensions, and the absurdities with which
their narrow circle of life has provided them. He pokes fun, and is sly
and farcical. But the hard and sour labour of ordinary peasant life is
left on one side, since it offers no material for humour and anecdote.
[Illustration: NEWTON. YORICK AND THE GRISETTE.]
Through this limitation painting renounced the best part of its
strength. To a man of pictorial vision nature is a gallery of
magnificent pictures, and one which is as wide and far-reaching as the
world. But whoever seeks salvation in narrative painting soon reaches
the end of his material. In the life of any man there are only three or
four events that are worth the trouble of telling; Wilkie told more, and
he became tiresome in consequence. We are willing to accept these
anecdotes as true, but they are threadbare. Things of this sort may be
found in the gaily-bound little books which are given as Christmas
presents to children. It is not exhilarating to learn that worldly
marriages have their inconveniences, that there is a pleasure in talking
scandal about one's friends behind their backs, that a son causes pain
to his mother by his excesses, and that egoism is an unpleasant failing.
All that is true, but it is too true. We are irritated by the
intrusiveness of this course of instruction. Wilkie paints insipid
subjects, and by one foolery after another he has made painting into a
toy for good children. And good children play the principal parts in
these pictures.
As a painter, one of George Morland's pupils, _William Collins_, threw
the world into ecstasies by his pictures of children. Out of one hundred
and twenty-one which he exhibited in the Academy in the course of forty
years the principal are: the picture of "The Little Flute-Player," "The
Sale of the Pet Lamb," "Boys with a Bird's Nest," "The Fisher's
Departure," "Scene in a Kentish Hop-Garden," and the picture of the
swallows. The most popular were "Happy as a King"--a small boy whom his
elder playmates have set upon a garden railing, from which he looks down
laughing proudly--and "Rustic Civility"--children who have drawn up like
soldiers, by a fence, so as to salute some one who is approaching. But
it is clear from the titles of such pictures that in this province
English _genre_ painting did not free itself from the reproach of being
episodic. Collins was richer in ideas than Meyer of Bremen. His children
receive earrings, sit on their mother's knee, play with her in the
garden, watch her sewing, read aloud to her from their spelling-book,
learn their lessons, and are frightened of the geese and hens which
advance in a terrifying fashion towards them in the poultry-yard. He is
an admirable painter of children at the family table, of the pleasant
chatter of the little ones, of the father watching his sleeping child of
an evening by the light of the lamp, with his heart full of pride and
joy because he has the consciousness of working for those who are near
to him. Being naturally very fond of children, he has painted the life
of little people with evident enjoyment of all its variations, and yet
not in a thoroughly credible fashion. Chardin painted the poetry of the
child-world. His little ones have no suspicion of the painter being near
them. They are harmlessly occupied with themselves, and in their
ordinary clothes. Those of Collins look as if they were repeating a
copybook maxim at a school examination. They know that the eyes of all
the sightseers in the exhibition are fixed upon them, and they are doing
their utmost to be on their best behaviour. They have a lack of
unconsciousness. One would like to say to them: "My dear children,
always be good." But no one is grateful to the painter for taking from
children their childishness, and for bringing into vogue that codling
which had its way for so long afterwards in the pictures of children.
_Gilbert Stuart Newton_, an American by birth, who lived in England from
1820 to 1835, devoted himself to the illustration of English authors.
Like Wilkie, he has a certain historical importance, because he devoted
himself with great zeal to a study of the Dutchmen of the seventeenth
century and to the French painters of the eighteenth, at a time when
these masters were entirely out of fashion on the Continent and sneered
at as representatives of "the deepest corruption." Dow and Terborg were
his peculiar ideals; and although the colour of his pictures is
certainly heavy and common compared with that of his models, it is
artistic, and shows study when one thinks of contemporary productions on
the Continent. His works ("Lear attended by Cordelia," "The Vicar of
Wakefield restoring his Daughter to her Mother," "The Prince of Spain's
Visit to Catalina" from _Gil Blas_, and "Yorick and the Grisette" from
Sterne), like the pictures of the Düsseldorfers, would most certainly
have lost in actuality but for the interest provided by the literary
passages; yet they are favourably distinguished from the literary
illustrations of the Düsseldorfers by the want of any sort of idealism.
While the painters of the Continent in such pictures almost invariably
fell into a rounded, generalising ideal of beauty, Newton had the scene
played by actors and painted them realistically. The result was a
theatrical realism, but the way in which the theatrical effects are
studied and the palpableness of the histrionic gestures are so
convincingly true to nature that his pictures seem like records of stage
art in London about the year 1830.
[Illustration: WEBSTER. THE RUBBER.]
[Illustration: C. R. LESLIE. SANCHO AND THE DUCHESS.]
_Charles Robert Leslie_, known as an author by his pleasant book on
Constable and a highly conservative _Handbook for Young Painters_, had a
similar _repértoire_, and rendered in oils Shakespeare, Cervantes,
Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Molière, with more or less ability. The
National Gallery has an exceedingly prosaic and colourless picture of
his, "Sancho Panza in the Apartment of the Duchess." Some that are in
the South Kensington Museum are better; for example, "The Taming of the
Shrew," "The Dinner at Mr. Page's House" from _The Merry Wives of
Windsor_, and "Sir Roger de Coverley." His finest and best-known work is
"My Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman," which charmingly illustrates the
pretty scene in _Tristram Shandy_: "'I protest, madam,' said my Uncle
Toby, 'I can see nothing whatever in your eye.' 'It is not in the
white!' said Mrs. Wadman. My Uncle Toby looked with might and main into
the pupil." As in Newton's works, so in Leslie's too, there is such a
strong dose of realism that his pictures will always keep their value as
historical documents--not for the year 1630 but for 1830. As a colourist
he was--in his later works at any rate--a delicate imitator of the
Dutch _chiaroscuro_; and in the history of art he occupies a position
similar to that of Diez in Germany, and was esteemed in the same way,
even in later years, when the young Pre-Raphaelite school began its
embittered war against "brown sauce"--the same war which a generation
afterwards was waged in Germany by Liebermann and his followers against
the school of Diez.
[Illustration: MULREADY. FAIR TIME.]
_Mulready_, thirty-two of whose pictures are preserved in the South
Kensington Museum, is in his technique almost more delicate than Leslie,
and he has learnt a great deal from Metsu. By preference he took his
subjects out of Goldsmith. "Choosing the Wedding Gown" and "The
Whistonian Controversy" would make pretty illustrations for an _édition
de luxe_ of _The Vicar of Wakefield_. Otherwise he too had a taste for
immortalising children, by turns lazy and industrious, at their tea or
playing by the water's edge.
From _Thomas Webster_, the fourth of these kindly, childlike masters,
yet more inspiriting facts are to be obtained. He has informed the world
that at a not very remote period of English history all the agricultural
labourers were quite content with their lot. No one ever quarrelled with
his landlord, or sat in a public-house and let his family starve. The
highest bliss of these excellent people was to stay at home and play
with their children by the light of a wax-candle. Webster's rustics,
children, and schoolmasters are the citizens of an ideal planet, but the
little country is a pleasant world. His pictures are so harmless in
intention, so neat and accurate in drawing, and so clear and luminous in
colour that they may be seen with pleasure even at the present day.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
FRITH. POVERTY AND WEALTH.]
The last of the group, _William Powell Frith_, was the most copious in
giving posterity information about the manners and costumes of his
contemporaries, and would be still more authentic if life had not seemed
to him so genial and roseate. His pictures represent scenes of the
nineteenth century, but they seem like events of the good old times. At
that period people were undoubtedly good and innocent and happy. They
had no income-tax and no vices and worries, and all went to heaven and
felt in good spirits. And so they do in Frith's pictures, only not so
naturally as in Ostade and Beham. For example, he goes on the beach at a
fashionable English watering-place during the season, in July or August.
The geniality which predominates here is quite extraordinary. Children
are splashing in the sea, young ladies flirting, niggers playing the
barrel-organ and women singing ballads to its strains; every one is
doing his utmost to look well, and the pair of beggars who are there for
the sake of contrast have long become resigned to their fate. In his
racecourse pictures everything is brought together which on such
occasions is representative of London life: all types, from the baronet
to the ragman; all beauties, from the lady to the street-walker. A
rustic has to lose his money, or a famished acrobat to turn his pockets
inside out to assure himself that there is really nothing in them. His
picture of the gaming-table in Homburg is almost richer in such examples
of dry observation and humorous and spirited episode.
[Illustration: MULREADY. CROSSING THE FORD.]
This may serve to exemplify the failures of these painters of _genre_.
Not light and colour, but anecdote, comedy, and genial tale-telling are
the basis of their labours. And yet, notwithstanding this attempt to
express literary ideas through the mediums of a totally different art,
their work is significant. While continental artists avoided nothing so
much as that which might seem to approach nature, the English, revolting
from the thraldom of theory, gathered subjects for their pictures from
actual life. These men, indeed, pointed out the way to painters from
every country; and they, once on the right road, were bound ultimately
to arrive at the point from which they no longer looked on life through
the glasses of the anecdotist, but saw it with the eye of the true
artist.