THE BEGINNINGS OF "PAYSAGE INTIME"
How it was that the secrets of _paysage intime_ were reserved for our
own century--and this assuredly by no mere accident--can only be
delineated in true colours when some one writes a special history of
landscape painting, a book which at the present time would be the most
seasonable in the literature of art. Wereschagin once declared that in
the province of landscape the works of the old masters seem like the
exercises of pupils in comparison with the performances of modern art;
and certain it is that the nineteenth century, if it is inferior to
previous ages in everything else, may, at any rate, offer them an
equivalent in landscape. It was only city life that could produce this
passionately heightened love of nature. It was only in the century of
close rooms and over-population, neurosis and holiday colonies, that
landscape painting could attain to this fulness, purity, and sanctity.
It was only our age of hurry and work that made possible a relation
between nature and the human soul, which really has something of what
the Earth Spirit vouchsafed to Faust: "to gaze into her heart as into
the bosom of a friend."
In France also, the tendency which since the eighteenth century had made
itself felt in waves rising ever higher, had been for a short time
abruptly interrupted by Classicism. Of the pre-revolutionary
landscapists _Hubert Robert_ was the only one who survived into the new
era. His details of nature and his _rococo_ savour were pardoned to him
for the sake of his classic ruins. At first there was not one of the
newer artists who was impelled to enter this province. A generation
which had become ascetic, and which dreamed only of rude, manly virtue,
expressed through the plastic and purified forms of the human body, had
lost all sense for the charms of landscape. And when the first
landscapes appeared once more, after several years, they were, as in
Germany, solemn stage-tragedy scenes, abstract "lofty" regions such as
Poussin ostensibly painted. Only in Poussin a great feeling for nature
held together the conventional composition, in spite of all his
straining after style; whereas nothing but frigid rhetoric and sterile
formalism reigns in the works of these newer painters, works which were
created at second-hand. The type of the beautiful which had been
borrowed from the antique was worked into garden and forest with a
laboured effort at style, as it had been worked into the human form and
the flow of drapery. A _prix de Rome_ was founded for historical
landscapes.
_Henri Valenciennes_ was the Lenôtre of this Classicism, the admired
teacher of several generations. The beginner in landscape painting
modelled himself upon Valenciennes as the figure painter upon Guérin.
His _Traité élémentaire de perspective pratique_, in which he formulated
the principles of landscape, contains his personal views as well as the
æsthetics of the age. Although, as he premises, he "is convinced that
there is in reality only one kind of painting, historical painting, it
is true that an able historical painter ought not entirely to neglect
landscape." Rembrandt, of course, and the old Dutch painters were
without any sort of ideal, and only worked for people without soul or
intelligence. How far does a landscape with cows and sheep stand below
one with the funeral of Phocion, or a rainy day by Ruysdael below a
picture of the Deluge by Poussin! Hardly does Claude Lorrain find grace
in the eyes of Valenciennes. "He has painted with a pretty fidelity to
nature the morning and evening light. But just for that very reason his
pictures make no appeal to the intelligence. He has no tree where a
Dryad could dwell, no spring in which nymphs could splash. Gods,
demigods, nymphs, satyrs, even heroes are too sublime for these regions;
shepherds could dwell there at best." Claude, indeed, loved Italy, but
knew the old writers all too little, and they are the groundwork for
landscape painters. As David said to his pupil Gros, "Look through your
Plutarch," Valenciennes advised his own pupils to study Theocritus,
Virgil, and Ovid: only from these authors might be learnt what were the
regions suitable for gods and heroes.
"Vos exemplaria græca
Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna."
If, for example, the landscapist would paint Morning, let him portray
the moment when Aurora rises laughing from the arms of her aged spouse,
when the hours are yoking four fiery steeds to the car of the sun-god,
or Ulysses kneels imploring before Nausicaa. For Noon the myth of Icarus
or of Phaëton might be turned to account. Evening may be represented by
painting Phoebus hastening his course as he nears the horizon in flaming
desire to cast himself into the arms of Thetis. Having once got his
themes from the old poets, the landscape painter must know the laws of
perspective to execute his picture; he must be familiar with Poussin's
rules of composition, and occasionally he ought even to study nature.
Then he needs a weeping willow for an elegy, a rock for the death of
Phaëton, and an oak for the dance of the nymphs. To find such motives he
should make journeys to the famed old lands of civilisation; best of all
on the road which art itself has traversed--first to Asia Minor, then to
Greece, and then to Italy.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
HUBERT ROBERT. MONUMENTS AND RUINS.]
These æsthetics produced _Victor Bertin_ and _Xavier Bidault_, admired
by their contemporaries for "richness of composition and a splendid
selection of sites." Their methodical commonplaces, their waves and
valleys and temples, bear the same relation to nature as the talking
machine of Raimundus Lullus does to philosophy. The scholastic landscape
painter triumphed; a school it was which nourished itself on empty
formulas, and so died of anæmia. Bidault, who in his youth made very
good studies, is, with his stippled leaves and polished stems, his grey
skies looking sometimes like lead and sometimes like water, the peculiar
essence of a tiresome Classicism; and he is the same Bidault who, as
president of the hanging committee, for years rejected the landscapes of
Théodore Rousseau from the Salon. It is only the figure of _Michallon_,
who died young, that still survives from this group. He too belongs to
the school of Valenciennes, through his frigid, meagre, and pedantically
correct style; but he is distinguished from the rest, for he endeavoured
to acquire a certain truth to nature in the drawing of plants, and was
accounted a bold innovator at the time. He did not paint "the plant in
itself," but burs, thistles, dandelions, everything after its kind, and
through this botanical exactness he acquired in the beginning of the
century a fame which it is now hard to understand. In the persons of
_Jules Cogniet_ and _Watelet_ the gates of the school were rather more
widely opened to admit reality. Having long populated their classic
valleys with bloodless, dancing nymphs and figurants of divine race,
they abandoned historical for picturesque landscape, and "dared" to
represent scenes from the environs of Paris, castles and windmills. But
as they clung even here to the classical principles of composition, it
is only nature brushed and combed, trimmed and coerced by rules, that is
reflected in their painting. Even in 1822, when Delacroix exhibited his
"Dante's Bark," the ineffable Watelet shone in his full splendour.
Amongst his pictures there was a view of Bar-sur-Seine, which the
catalogue appropriately designated not simply as a _vue_, but as a _vue
ajustée_. Till his last breath Watelet was convinced that nature did not
understand her own business, and was always in need of a painter to
revise her errors and correct them.
Beside this group who adapted French localities for classical landscapes
there arose in the meantime another group, and they proceeded in the
opposite direction. Their highest aim was to go on pilgrimage to sacred
Italy, the classic land, which, with their literary training and their
one-sided æsthetics, they invariably thought more beautiful and more
worthy of veneration than any other. But they tried to break with
Valenciennes' arbitrary rules of composition, and to seize the great
lines of Italian landscape with fidelity to fact. In going back from
Valenciennes to Claude they endeavoured to pour new life into a style of
landscape painting which was its own justification, compromised as it
had been by the Classic school. They made a very heretical appearance in
the eyes of the strictly orthodox pupils of Valenciennes. They were
called the Gothic school, which was as much as to say Romanticists, and
the names of _Théodore Aligny_ and _Edouard Bertin_ were for years
mentioned with that of Corot in critiques. They brought home very pretty
drawings from Greece, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and Bertin did
this especially. Aligny is even not without importance as a painter. He
aimed at width of horizon and simplicity of line more zealously than the
traditional school had done. He is, indeed, a man of sombre, austere,
and earnest talent, and the solemn rhythm of his pictures would have
more effect if the colour were not so dry, and if a fixed and monotonous
light were not uniformly shed over everything in place of a vibrating
atmosphere.
_Alexandre Desgoffe_, _Paul Flandrin_, _Benouville_, _Bellel_, and
others drew from the same sources with similar conviction and varying
talent. Paul Flandrin, in particular, was in his youth a good painter in
the manner of 1690. His composition is noble and his execution certain,
recalling Poussin. Ingres, his master, said of him, "If I were not
Ingres I would be Flandrin." It was only later that the singular charm
of Claude Lorrain and the Roman majesty of Poussin were transformed
under the brush of Flandrin into arid still-life, into landscapes of
pasteboard and wadding.
But not from this quarter could the health of a school which had become
anæmic be in any way restored. French landscape had to draw a new power
of vitality from the French soil itself. It was saved when its eyes were
opened to the charms of home, and this revelation was brought about by
Romanticism. In the Salon notices, from 1822 onwards, the complaints of
critics are repeated with increasing violence--complaints that, instead
of fair regions, noble character, and monumental lines, nothing but
"malarious lakes, desolate wastes, and terrible cliffs" should be
painted, which, in the language of Classicism, means that French
landscape painting had taken firm hold of the soil in France. The day
when Racine was declared by the young Romanticists to be a maker of fine
phrases put an end to the whole school of David and to Classical
landscape at the same time. It fell into oblivion, as, sooner or later,
every artistic movement which does not rest on the nature and
personality of the artist inevitably must. The young revolutionaries no
longer believed that an alliance with mythological subjects and "grand
composition" could compensate for the lack of air and light. They were
tired of pompous, empty, and distant scenery. They only thought of
nature, and that amid which they lived seemed the less to forego its
charms the more Italy came under suspicion as the home of all these
ugly, unpleasant, and academical pictures. That was the birthday of
French landscape. At the very time when Delacroix renewed the
_répertoire_ of grand painting, enriching art with a world of feeling
which was not merely edited, a parallel movement began in landscape.
"Dante's Bark" was painted in 1822, "The Massacre of Chios" in 1824.
Almost at the same hour a tornado swept through the branches of the old
French oaks, and bent the rustling corn; the sky was covered with
clouds, and the waters, which had been hard-bound for so long, sped
purling once more along their wonted course. The little paper temples,
built on classic heights, toppled down, and there rose lowly rustic
cottages, from the chimneys of which the smoke mounted wavering to the
sky. Nature awoke from her wintry sleep, and the spring of modern
landscape painting broke with its sadness and its smiles.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
VICTOR HUGO. RUINS OF A MEDIÆVAL CASTLE ON THE RHINE.]
This is where the development of French art diverges from that of
German. After it had stood under the influence of Poussin, the German
long continued to have a suspicious preference for scenery that was
devoid of soul, for beautiful views, as the phrase is, and it penetrated
much later into the spirit of familiar nature. But as early as the
twenties this spirit had revealed itself to the French. It was only in
the province of poetry that they went through the period of enthusiasm
for exotic nature--and even there not to the same extent as Germany.
Only in Chateaubriand's _Atala_ are there to be found pompously
pictorial descriptions of strange landscapes which have been in no
degree inwardly felt. Chiefly it was the virgin forests of North America
that afforded material for splendid pictures, which he describes in
grandiloquent and soaring prose. A nature which is impressive and
splendid serves as the scenery of these dramas of human life. But with
Lamartine the reaction was accomplished. He is the first amongst the
poets of France who conceived landscape with an inward emotion, and
brought it into harmony with his moods of soul. His poetry was made
fervent and glorified by love for his home, for his own province, for
South Burgundy. Even in the region of art a poet was the first
initiator.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
MICHEL. A WINDMILL.]
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DE LA BERGE. LANDSCAPE.]
_Victor Hugo_, the father of Romanticism in literature, cannot be passed
over in the history of landscape painting. Since 1891, when that
remarkable exhibition of painter-poets was opened in Paris--an
exhibition in which Théophile Gautier, Prosper Merimée, the two de
Goncourts, and others were represented by more or less important
works--the world learnt what a gifted draughtsman, what a powerful
dramatist in landscape, was this great Romanticist. Even in the
reminiscences of nature--spirited and suggestive of colour as they
are--which he drew with a rapid hand in the margin of his manuscripts,
the fiery glow of Romanticism breaks out. The things of which he speaks
in the text appear in black shadows and ghostly light. Old castles stand
surrounded by clouds of smoke or the blinding glare of fire, moonrise
makes phantom silhouettes of the trees, waves lashed by the storm dash
together as they spout over vessels; and there are gloomy seas and dark
unearthly shores, fairy palaces, proud citadels, and cathedrals of
fabled story. Whenever one of his finished drawings is bequeathed to the
Louvre, Hugo is certain to receive a place in the history of art as one
of the champions of Romanticism.
The movement was so universal amongst the painters that it is difficult
at the present time to perceive the special part that each individual
played in the great drama. This is especially true of _Georges Michel_,
a genius long misunderstood, a painter first made known in wider circles
by the World Exhibition in 1889, and known to the narrower circle of art
lovers only since his death in 1843. At that time a dealer had bought at
an auction the works left behind by a half-famished painter--pictures
with no signature, and only to be identified because they collectively
treated motives from the surroundings of Paris. A large, wide horizon, a
hill, a windmill, a cloudy sky were his subjects, and all pointed to an
artist schooled by the Dutch. Curiosity was on the alert, inquiry was
made, and it was found that the painter was named Georges Michel, and
had been born in 1763; that at twelve years of age he had shirked school
to go drawing, had run away with a laundress at fifteen, was already the
father of five children when he was twenty, had married again at
sixty-five, and had worked hard to his eightieth year. Old men
remembered that they had seen early works of his in the Salon. It was
said that Michel had produced a great deal immediately after the
Revolution, but exceedingly tedious pictures, which differed in no
respect from those of the other Classicists; for instance, from Demarne
and Swebach, garnished with figures. It was only after 1814 that he
disappeared from the Salon; not, as has been now discovered, because he
had no more pictures to exhibit, but because he was rejected as a
revolutionary. During his later years Michel had been most variously
employed: for one thing, he had been a restorer of pictures.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
CABAT. LE JARDIN BEAUJON.]
In this calling many Dutch pictures had passed through his hands, and
they suggested to him the unseasonable idea of looking more closely into
nature in the neighbourhood than he had done in his youth--nature not as
she was in Italy, but in the environs of the city. While Valenciennes
and his pupils made so many objections to painting what lay under their
eyes, Georges Michel remained in the country, and was the first to light
on the idea of placing himself in the midst of nature, and not above
her; no longer to arrange and adapt, but to approach her by painting her
with directness. If any one spoke of travelling to Italy, he answered:
"The man who cannot find enough to paint during his whole life in a
circuit of four miles is in reality no artist. Did the Dutch ever run
from one place to another? And yet they are good painters, and not
merely that, but the most powerful, bold, and ideal artists." Every day
he made a study in the precincts of Paris, without any idea that he
would count in these times among the forerunners of modern art. He
shares the glory of having discovered Montmartre with Alphonse Karr,
Gérard de Nerval, and Monselet. After his death such studies were found
in the shops of all the second-hand dealers of the Northern Boulevard;
they were invariably without a frame, as they had never seemed worth
framing, and when they were very dear they were to be had for forty
francs. Connoisseurs appreciated his wide horizons, stormy skies, and
ably sketched sea-shores. For, in spite of his poverty, Michel had now
and then deserted Montmartre and found means to visit Normandy.
Painfully precise in the beginning, while he worked with Swebach and
Demarne, he had gradually become large and bold, and employed all means
in giving expression to what he felt. He was a dreamer, who brought into
his studies a unison of lights, and, now and then, beams of sun which
would have delighted Albert Cuyp. A genuine offspring of the old Dutch
masters--of the grand and broad masters, not of those who worked with a
fine brush--already he was aiming at _l'expression par l'ensemble_, and
since the Paris Universal Exhibition he has been fittingly honoured as
the forerunner of Théodore Rousseau. His pictures, as it seems, were
early received in various studios, and there they had considerable
effect in setting artists thinking. But as he ceased to date his
pictures after 1814 it is, nevertheless, difficult to be more precise in
determining the private influence which this Ruysdael of Montmartre
exerted on men of the younger generation.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ PAUL HUET.]
One after the other they began to declare the Italian pilgrimage to be
unnecessary. They buried themselves as hermits in the villages around
the capital. The undulating strip of country, rich in wood and water,
which borders on the heights of Saint-Cloud and Ville d'Avray, is the
cradle of French landscape painting. In grasping nature they proceeded
by the most various ways, whilst they drew everything scrupulously and
exactly which an observing eye may discern, or wedded their own
temperament with the moods of nature.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
HUET. THE INUNDATION AT ST. CLOUD.]
That remarkable artist _Charles de la Berge_ seems like a forerunner of
the English Pre-Raphaelite school. He declared the ideal of art to
consist in painting everything according to nature, and overlooking
nothing; in carrying drawing to the most minute point, and yet
preserving the impression of unison and harmony in the picture--which is
as easy to say as it is difficult to perform. His brief life was passed
in this struggle. His pictures are miracles of patience: to see that it
is only necessary to know the "Sunset" of 1839, in the Louvre. There is
something touching in the way this passionate worker had branches and
the bark of trees brought to his room, even when he lay on his deathbed,
to study the contortions of wood and the interweaving of fibres with all
the zeal of a naturalist. The efforts of de la Berge have something of
the religious devotion with which Jan van Eyck or Altdorfer gazed at
nature. But he died too young to effect any result. He copied the
smallest particulars of objects with the utmost care, and in the
reproduction even of the smallest aimed at a mathematical precision,
neutralising his qualities of colour, which were otherwise of serious
value, by such hair-splitting detail.
_Camille Roqueplan_, the many-sided pupil of Gros, made his first
appearance as a landscape painter with a sunset in 1822. He opposed the
genuine windmills of the old Dutch masters to those everlasting
windmills of Watelet, with their leaden water and their meagre
landscape. In his pictures a green plain, intersected by canals,
stretches round; a fresh and luminous grey sky arches above. That
undaunted traveller _Camille Flers_, who had been an actor and ballet
dancer in Brazil before his appearance as a painter, represented the
rich pastures of Normandy with truth, but was diffident in the presence
of nature where she is grand. His pupil, _Louis Cabat_, was hailed with
special enthusiasm by the young generation on account of his firm
harmonious style. His pictures showed that he had been a zealous student
of the great Dutch artists, and that it was his pride to handle his
brush in their manner, expressing as much as possible without injuring
pictorial effect. He is on many sides in touch with Charles de la Berge.
Later he even had the courage to see Italy with fresh eyes, and in a
simple manner to record his impressions without regard for the rules and
theories of the Classicists. But the risk was too great. He became once
more an admirer of imposing landscape, an adherent of Poussin, and as
such he is almost exclusively known to us of a younger generation.
[Illustration: _Baschet._ J. M. W. TURNER.]
_Paul Huet_ was altogether a Romanticist. In de la Berge there is the
greatest objectivity possible, in Huet there is impassioned expression.
His heart told him that the hour was come for giving passion utterance;
he wanted to render the energy of nature, the intensity of her life,
with the whole might of vivid colouring. In his pictures there is
something of Byronic poetry; the conception is rich and powerful, the
symphony of colour passionately dramatic. In every one of his landscapes
there breathes the human soul with its unrest, its hopelessness, and its
doubts. Huet was the child of an epoch, which at one moment exulted to
the skies and at another sorrowed to death in the most violent contrast;
and he has proclaimed this temper of the age with all the freedom and
power possible, where it is only earth and sky, clouds and trees that
are the medium of expression. Most of his works, like Romanticism in
general, have an earnest, passionate, and sombre character; nothing of
the ceremonial pompousness peculiar to Classical landscapes. He has a
passion for boisterous storms and waters foaming over, clouds with the
lightning flashing through them, and the struggle of humanity against
the raging elements. In this effort to express as much as possible he
often makes his pictures too theatrical in effect. In one of his
principal works, the "View of Rouen," painted in 1833, the breadth of
execution almost verges on emptiness and panoramic view. Huet was in the
habit of heaping many objects together in his landscapes. He delighted
in expressive landscapes in the sense in which, at that time, people
delighted in expressive heads. This one-sidedness hindered his success.
When he appeared in the twenties his pictures were thought bizarre and
melancholy. And later, when he achieved greater simplicity, he was
treated by the critics merely with the respect that was paid to the Old
Guard, for now a pleiad of much brighter stars beamed in the sky.
[Illustration: TURNER. A SHIPWRECK.]
[Illustration: J. M. W. TURNER. THE OLD TÉMÉRAIRE.]
But we must not forget that Michel and Huet showed the way. Rousseau and
his followers left them far behind, as Columbus threw into oblivion all
who had discovered America before him, or Gutenberg all who had
previously printed books. The step on which these initiators had stood
was more or less that of Andreas Achenbach and Blechen. They are good
and able painters, but they still kept the Flemish and Dutch masters too
much in their memory. It is easy to detect in them reminiscences of
Ruysdael and Hobbema and the studies of gallery pictures grown dim with
age. They still coloured objects brown, and made spring as mournful as
winter, and morning as gloomy as evening; they had yet no sense that
morning means the awakening of life, the youth of the sun, the
springtide of the day. They still composed their pictures and finished
and rounded them off for pictorial effect. The next necessary step was
no longer to look at Ruysdael and Cuyp, but at nature--to lay more
emphasis on sincerity of impression, and therefore the less upon
pictorial finish and rounded expression--to paint nature, not in the
style of galleries, but in its freshness and bloom. And the impulse to
this last step, which brought French landscape painting to its highest
perfection, was given by England.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
TURNER. DIDO BUILDING CARTHAGE.]
The most highly gifted work produced in this province between the years
1800 and 1830 is of English origin. At the time when landscape painting
was in France and Germany confined in a strait-waistcoat by Classicism,
the English went quietly forward in the path trodden by Gainsborough in
the eighteenth century. In these years England produced an artist who
stands apart from all others as a peculiar and inimitable phenomenon in
the history of landscape painting, and at the same time it produced a
school of landscape which not only fertilised France, but founded
generally the modern conception of colour.
That phenomenon is _Joseph Mallord William Turner_, the great
pyrotechnist, one of the most individual and intellectual landscape
painters of all time. What a singular personality! And how vexatious he
is to all who merely care about correctness in art! Such persons divide
the life of Turner into two halves, one in which he was reasonable and
one in which he was a fool. They grant him a certain talent during the
first fifteen years of his activity, but from the moment when he is
complete master of his instrument, from the moment when the painter
begins in glowing enthusiasm to embody his personal ideal, they would
banish him from the kingdom of art, and lock him up in a madhouse. When
in the forties the Munich Pinakothek was offered a picture by Turner,
glowing with colour, people, accustomed to the contours of Cornelius,
knew no better than to laugh at it superciliously. It is said that in
his last days he sent a landscape to an exhibition. The committee,
unable to discover which was the top or which the bottom, hung it
upside-down. Later, when Turner came into the exhibition and the mistake
was about to be rectified, he said: "No, let it alone; it really looks
better as it is." One frequently reads that Turner suffered from a sort
of colour-blindness, and as late as 1872 Liebreich wrote an article
printed in _Macmillan_, which gave a medical explanation of the alleged
morbid affection of the great landscape painter's eyes. Only thus could
the German account for his pictures, which are impressionist, although
they were painted about the middle of the century. The golden dreams of
Turner were held to be eccentricities of vision, since no one was
capable of following this painter of momentary impressions in his
majesty of sentiment, and the impressiveness and poetry of his method of
expression.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
TURNER. JUMIÈGES.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
TURNER. LANDSCAPE WITH THE SUN RISING IN A MIST.]
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
TURNER. VENICE.]
In reality Turner was the same from the beginning. He circled round the
fire like a moth, and craved, like Goethe, for more light; he wanted to
achieve the impossible and paint the sun. To attain his object nothing
was too difficult for him. He restrained himself for a long time; placed
himself amongst the followers of the painter of light _par excellence_;
studied, analysed, and copied Claude Lorrain; completely adopted his
style, and painted pictures which threw Claude into eclipse by their
magnificence and luminous power of colour. The painting of "Dido
building Carthage" is perhaps the most characteristic of this phase of
his art. One feels that the masses of architecture are merely there for
the sake of the painter; the tree in the foreground has only been
planted in this particular way so that the background may recede into
farther distance. The colour is splendid, though still heavy. By the
union of the principles of classic drawing with an entirely modern
feeling for atmosphere something chaotic and confused is frequently
introduced into the compositions of these years. But at the hour when it
was said to him, "You are the real Claude Lorrain," he answered, "Now I
am going to leave school and begin to be Turner." Henceforth he no
longer needs Claude's framework of trees to throw the light beaming into
the corners of his pictures. At first he busied himself with the
atmospheric phenomena of the land of mist. Then when the everlasting
grey became too splenetic for him he repaired to the relaxing, luxuriant
sensuousness of Southern seas, and sought the full embodiment of his
dreams of light in the land of the sun. It is impossible in words to
give a representation of the essence of Turner; even copies merely
excite false conceptions. "Rockets shot up, shocks of cannon thundered,
balls of light mounted, crackers meandered through the air and burst,
wheels hissed, each one separately, then in pairs, then altogether, and
even more turbulently one after the other and together." Thus has
Goethe described a display of fireworks in _The Elective Affinities_,
and this passage perhaps conveys most readily the impression of Turner's
pictures. To collect into a small space the greatest possible quantity
of light, he makes the perspective wide and deep and the sky boundless,
and uses the sea to reflect the brilliancy. He wanted to be able to
render the liquid, shining depths of the sky without employing the earth
as an object of comparison, and these studies which have merely the sky
as their object are perhaps his most astonishing works. Everywhere, to
the border of the picture, there is light. And he has painted all the
gradations of light, from the silvery morning twilight to the golden
splendour of the evening red. Volcanoes hiss and explode and vomit forth
streams of lava, which set the trembling air aglow, and blind the eyes
with flaring colours. The glowing ball of the sun rises behind the mist,
and transforms the whole ether into fine golden vapour; and vessels sail
through the luminous haze. In reality one cannot venture on more than a
swift glance into blinding masses of light, but the impression remained
in the painter's memory. He painted what he saw, and knew how to make
his effect convincing. And at the same time his composition became ever
freer and easier, the work of his brush ever more fragrant and
unfettered, the colouring and total sentiment of the picture ever more
imaginative and like those of a fairy-tale. His world is a land of sun,
where the reality of things vanishes, and the light shed between the eye
and the objects of vision is the only thing that lives. At one time he
took to painting human energy struggling with the phenomena of nature,
as in "Storm at Sea," "Fire at Sea," and "Rain, Steam, and Speed"; at
another he painted poetic revels of colour born altogether from the
imagination, like the "Sun of Venice." He is the greatest creator in
colour, the boldest poet amongst the landscape painters of all time! In
him England's painting has put forth its greatest might, just as in
Byron and Shelley, those two great powers, the English imagination
unrolled its standard of war most proudly and brilliantly. There is only
one Turner, and Ruskin is his prophet.
[Illusration: _L'Art._
OLD CROME. A VIEW NEAR NORWICH.]
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ JOHN CONSTABLE.]
As a man, too, he was one of those original characters seldom met with
nowadays. He was not the fastidious _gourmet_ that might have been
expected from his pictures, but an awkward, prosaic, citizen-like being.
He had a sturdy, thick-set figure, with broad shoulders and tough
muscles, and was more like a captain in the merchant service than a
disciple of Apollo. He was sparing to the point of miserliness, unformed
by any kind of culture, ignorant even of the laws of orthography, silent
and inaccessible. Like most of the great landscape painters of the
century, he was city-bred. In a gloomy house standing back in a foggy
little alley of Old London, in the immediate vicinity of dingy,
monotonous lodging-houses, he was born, the son of a barber, on 23rd
April 1775. His career was that of a model youth. At fifteen he
exhibited in the Royal Academy; when he was eighteen, engravings were
already being made after his drawings. At twenty he was known, and at
twenty-seven he became a member of the Academy. His first earnings he
gained by the neat and exact preparation of little views of English
castles and country places--drawings which, at the time, took the place
of photographs, and for which he received half a crown apiece and his
supper. Thus he went over a great part of England, and upon one of his
excursions he is said to have had a love-affair _à la_ Lucy of
Lammermoor, and to have so taken it to heart that he resolved to remain
a bachelor for the rest of his life. In 1808 he became Professor of
Perspective at the Academy, and delivered himself, it is said, of the
most confused utterances on his subjects. His father had now to give up
the barber's business and come to live with him, and he employed him in
sawing, planing, and nailing together boards, which were painted yellow
and used as frames for his pictures. The same miserly economy kept him
from ever having a comfortable studio. He lived in a miserable lodging
where he received nobody, had his meals at a restaurant of the most
primitive order, carried his dinner wrapped up in paper when he went on
excursions, and was exceedingly thankful if any one added to it a glass
of wine. His diligence was fabulous. Every morning he rose on the stroke
of six, locked his door, and worked with the same dreadful regularity
day after day. His end was as unpoetic as his life. After being several
times a father without ever having had a wife, he passed his last years
with an old housekeeper, who kept him strictly under the yoke. If he was
away from the house for long together he pretended that he was
travelling to Venice for the sake of his work, until at last the honest
housekeeper learnt, from a letter which he had put in his overcoat
pocket and forgotten, that the object of all these journeys was not
Venice at all, but Chelsea. There she found him in an attic which he had
taken for another mistress, and where he was living under the name of
Booth. In this little garret, almost more miserable than the room in the
back street where he was born, the painter of light ended his days; and,
to connect an atom of poetry with so sad a death, Ruskin adds that the
window looked towards the sunset, and the dying eyes of the painter
received the last rays of the sun which he had so often celebrated in
glowing hymns. He left countless works behind him at his death, several
thousands of pounds, and an immortal fame. This thought of glory after
death occupied him from his youth. Only thus is it possible to
understand why he led the life of a poor student until his end, why he
did things which bordered on trickery in the sale of his _Liber
Studiorum_, and kept for himself all those works by which he could have
made a fortune. He left them--taken altogether, three hundred and
sixty-two oil-paintings and nineteen thousand drawings--to the nation,
and £20,000 to the Royal Academy, and merely stipulated that the two
best pictures should be hung in the National Gallery between two Claude
Lorrains. Another thousand pounds was set aside for the erection of a
monument in St. Paul's. There, in that temple of fame, he lies buried
near Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great ancestor of English painting, and
he remains a phenomenon without forerunners and without descendants.
[Illustration: CONSTABLE. WILLY LOTT'S HOUSE.]
[Illustration: CONSTABLE. CHURCH PORCH, BERGHOLT.]
For it does not need to be said that Turner, with his marked
individuality, could have no influence on the further development of
English painting. The dramatic fervour of Romanticism was here expressed
just as little as Classicism. It was only the poets who fled into the
wilderness of nature, and sang the splendour and the mysteries of the
mountains, the lightning and the storm, the might of the elements. In
painting there is no counterpart to Scott's descriptions of the
Highlands or Wordsworth's rhapsodies upon the English lakes, or to the
tendency of landscape painting which was represented in Germany by
Lessing and Blechen. Wordsworth is majestic and sublime, and English
painting lovely and full of intimate emotion. It knows neither ancient
Alpine castles nor the sunsets of Greece. Turner, as a solitary
exception, represented nature stately, terrible, stormy, glorious,
mighty, grand, and sublime; all the others, like Gainsborough, loved
simplicity, modest grace, and virginal quietude. England has nothing
romantic. At the very time when Lessing painted his landscapes, Ludwig
Tieck experienced a bitter disappointment when he trod the soil where
Shakespeare wrote the witch scenes in _Macbeth_. A sombre, melancholy,
primæval maze was what he had expected, and there lay before him a soft,
luxuriant, and cultivated country. What distinguishes English landscape
is a singular luxuriance, an almost unctuous wealth of vegetation. Drive
through the country on a bright day on the top of a coach, and look
around you; in all directions as far as the eye can reach an endless
green carpet is spread over gentle valleys and undulating hills;
cereals, vegetables, clover, hops, and glorious meadows with high rich
grasses stretch forth; here and there stand a group of mighty oaks
flinging their shadows wide, and around are pastures hemmed in by
hedges, where splendid cattle lie chewing the cud. The moist atmosphere
surrounds the trees and plants like a shining vapour. There is nothing
more charming in the world, and nothing more delicate than these tones
of colour; one might stand for hours looking at the clouds of satin, the
fine ærial bloom, and the soft transparent gauze which catches the
sunbeams in its silver net, softens them, and sends them smiling and
toying to the earth. On both sides of the carriage the fields extend,
each more beautiful than the last, in constant succession, interwoven
with broad patches of buttercups, daisies, and meadowsweet. A strange
magic, a loveliness so exquisite that it is well-nigh painful, escapes
from this inexhaustible vegetation. The drops sparkle on the leaves like
pearls, the arched tree-tops murmur in the gentle breeze. Luxuriantly
they thrive in these airy glades, where they are ever rejuvenated and
bedewed by the moist air of the sea. And the sky seems to have been made
to enliven the colours of the land. At the tiniest sunbeam the earth
smiles with a delicious charm, and the bells of flowers unfold in rich,
liquid colour. The English look at nature as she is in their country,
with the tender love of the man nurtured in cities, and yet with the
cool observation of the man of business. The merchant, enveloped the
whole day long in the smoke of the city, breathes the more freely of an
evening when the steam-engine brings him out into green places. With a
sharp practical glance he judges the waving grain, and speculates on the
chances of harvest. And this spirit of attentive, familiar observation
of nature, which is in no sense romantic, reigns also in the works of
the English landscape painters. They did not think of becoming
cosmopolitan like their German comrades, and of presenting remarkable
points, the more exotic the better, for the instruction of the public.
Like Gainsborough, they relied upon the intimate charm of places which
they knew and loved. And as a centre Norwich first took the place of
Suffolk, which Gainsborough had glorified.
[Illustration: CONSTABLE. DEDHAM VALE.]
_John Crome_, known as Old Crome, the founder of the powerful Norwich
school of landscape, is a healthy and forcible master. Born poor, in a
provincial town a hundred miles from London, in 1769, and at first an
errand boy to a doctor, whose medicines he delivered to the patients,
and then an apprentice to a sign-painter, he lived completely cut off
from contemporary England. Norwich was his native town and his life-long
home. He did not know the name of Turner, nor anything of Wilson, and
perhaps never heard the name of Gainsborough. Thus his pictures are
neither influenced by the contemporary nor by the preceding English art.
Whatever he became he owed to himself and to the Dutch. Early married,
and blessed with a numerous family, he tried to gain his bread by
drawing-lessons, given in the great country-houses in the neighbourhood,
and in this way had the opportunity of seeing many Dutch pictures. In
later life he came to know Paris at a time when all the treasures of the
world were collected in the Louvre, and this enthusiasm for the Dutch
found fresh nourishment. Even on his deathbed he spoke of Hobbema.
"Hobbema," he said, "my dear Hobbema, how I have loved you!" Hobbema is
his ancestor, the art of Holland his model.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
CONSTABLE. THE ROMANTIC HOUSE.]
His pictures were collectively "exact" views of places which he loved,
and neither composed landscapes nor paintings of "beautiful regions."
Crome painted frankly everything which Norfolk, his own county, had to
offer him--weather-beaten oaks, old woods, fishers' huts, lonely pools,
wastes of heath. The way he painted trees is extraordinary. Each has its
own physiognomy, and looks like a living thing, like some gloomy
Northern personality. Oaks were his peculiar specialty, and in later
years they only found a similarly great interpreter in Théodore
Rousseau. At the same time his pictures of the simplest scenes have a
remarkable largeness of conception, and a subtlety of colour recalling
the old masters, and reached by no other painter in that age. An
uncompromising realist, he drew his portraits of nature with almost
pedantic pains, but preserved their relation of colour throughout. And
as a delicate adept in colouring he finally harmonised everything in the
manner of the Dutch to a juicy brown tone, which gives his beautiful
wood and field pictures a discreet and refined beauty, a beauty in
keeping with the art of galleries.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
CONSTABLE. THE CORNFIELD.]
Crome took a long time before he made a way for himself. His whole life
long he sold his work merely at moderate prices: for no picture did he
ever receive more than fifty pounds. Even his end was uneventful. He had
begun as a manual worker, and he died in 1821 as a humble townsman whose
only place of recreation was the tavern, and who passed his leisure in
the society of sailors, shopkeepers, and artisans. Yet the principles of
his art survived him. In 1805 he had founded in Norwich, far from all
Academies, a society of artists, who gave annual exhibitions and had a
common studio, which each used at fixed hours. _Cotman_, whose specialty
was ash-trees, _the younger Crome_, _Stark_, and _Vincent_, are the
leading representatives of the vigorous school of Norwich; and by them
the name of this town became as well known as an art-centre in Europe as
Delft and Haarlem had been in former times.
Their relation to the Dutch was similar to that of Georges Michel in
France, or that of Achenbach in Germany. They painted what they saw,
rounded it with a view to pictorial effect, and harmonised the whole in
a delicate brown tone. They felt more attracted by the form of objects
than by their colour; the latter was, in the manner of the Dutch, merely
an epidermis delicately toned down. The next step of the English
painters was that they became the first to get the better of this Dutch
phase, and to found that peculiarly modern landscape painting which no
longer sets out from the absolutely concrete reality of objects, but
from the _milieu_, from the atmospheric effect; which values in a
picture less what is ready-made and perfectly rounded in drawing than
the freshly seized impression of nature.
Hardly twenty years have gone by since "open-air painting" was
introduced into Germany. At present, things are no longer painted as
they are in themselves but as they appear in their atmospheric
environment. Artists care no longer for landscapes which float in a
neutral brown sauce; they represent objects flooded with light and air.
People no longer wish for brown trees and meadows, for the eye has
perceived that trees and meadows are green. The world is no longer
satisfied with the indeterminate light of the studio and the
conventional tone of the picture gallery; it requires some indication of
the hour of the day, since it is felt that the light of morning is
different from the light of noon. And it is the English who made these
discoveries, which have lent to modern landscape painting its most
delicate and fragrant charm.
The very mist of England, the damp and the heaviness of the atmosphere,
necessarily forced English landscape painters, earlier than those of
other nations, to the observation of the play of light and air. In a
country where the sky is without cloud, in a pure, dry, and sparkling
air, nothing is seen except lines. Shadow is wanting, and without shadow
light has no value. For that reason the old classical masters of Italy
were merely draughtsmen; they knew how to prize the value of sunshine no
more than a millionaire the value of a penny. But the English understood
the charm even of the most scanty ray of light which forces its way like
a wedge through a wall of clouds. The entire appearance of nature, in
their country, where a damp mist spreads its pearly grey veil over the
horizon even upon calm and beautiful summer days, guided them to see the
vehicle of some mood of landscape in the subtlest elements of light and
air. The technique of water-colour painting which, at that very time,
received such a powerful impetus, encouraged them to give expression to
what they saw freshly and simply even in their oil-paintings, and to do
so without regard for the scale of colour employed by the old masters.
_John Robert Cozens_, "the greatest genius who ever painted a
landscape," had been the first to occupy himself with water-colour
painting as understood in the modern sense. _Tom Girtin_ had
experimented with new methods. _Henry Edridge_ and _Samuel Prout_ had
come forward with their picturesque ruins, _Copley Fielding_ and _Samuel
Owen_ with sea-pieces, _Luke Clennel_ and _Thomas Heaphy_ with graceful
portrayals of country life, _Howitt_ and _Robert Hills_ with their
animal pictures. From 1805 there existed a Society of Painters in
Water-Colours, and this extensive pursuit of water-colour painting could
not fail to have an influence upon oil-painting also. The technique of
water-colour accustomed English taste to that brightness of tone which
at first seemed so bizarre to the Germans, habituated as they were to
the prevalence of brown. Instead of dark, brownish-green tones, the
water-colour painters produced bright tones. Direct study of nature, and
the completion of a picture in the presence of nature and in the open
air, guided their attention to light and atmosphere more quickly than
that of the oil-painters. An easier technique, giving more scope for
improvisation, of itself suggested the idea that rounded finish with a
view to pictorial effect was not the final aim of art, but that it was
of the most immediate importance to catch the first freshness of
impression, that flower so hard to pluck and so prone to wither.
The first who applied these principles to oil-painting was _John
Constable_, one of the greatest pioneers in his own province and one of
the most powerful individualities of the century.
East Bergholt, the pretty little village where Constable's cradle stood,
is fourteen miles distant from Sudbury, the birthplace of Gainsborough.
Here he was born on 11th June 1776, at the very time when Gainsborough
settled in London. His father was a miller, a well-to-do man, who had
three windmills in Bergholt. The other famous miller's son in the
history of art is Rembrandt. At first a superior career was chosen for
him; it was intended that he should become a clergyman. But he felt more
at home in the mill than in the schoolroom, and became a miller like his
fathers before him. Observation of the changes of the sky is an
essential part of a miller's calling, and this occupation of his youth
seems to have been not without influence on the future artist; no one
before him had observed the sky with the same attention.
[Illustration: CONSTABLE. COTTAGE IN A CORNFIELD.]
A certain Dunthorne, an eccentric personage to whom the boy often came,
gave him--always in the open air--his first instruction; and another of
his patrons, Sir George Beaumont, as an æsthetically trained
connoisseur, criticised what he painted. When Constable showed him a
study he asked: "Where do you mean to place your brown tree?" For the
first law in his æsthetics was this: a good painting must have the
colour of a good fiddle; it must be brown. Sojourn in London was without
influence on Constable. He was twenty-three years of age, a handsome
young fellow with dark eyes and a fine expressive countenance, when, in
1799, he wrote to his teacher Dunthorne: "I am this morning admitted a
student at the Royal Academy; the figure which I drew for admittance was
the Torso. I am now comfortably settled in Cecil Street, Strand, No.
23." He was known to the London girls as "the handsome young miller of
Bergholt." He undertook the most varied things, copied pictures of
Reynolds, and painted an altar-piece, "Christ blessing Little Children,"
which was admired by no one except his mother. In addition he studied
Ruysdael, whose works made a great impression on him, in the National
Gallery. In 1802 he appears for the first time in the Catalogue of the
Royal Academy as the exhibitor of a landscape, and from this time to the
year of his death, 1837, he was annually represented there, contributing
altogether one hundred and four pictures. In the earliest--windmills and
village parties--every detail is carefully executed; every branch is
painted on the trees, and every tile on the houses; but as yet one can
breathe no air in these pictures and see no sunshine.
But he writes, in 1803, a very important letter to his old friend
Dunthorne. "For the last two years," he says, "I have been running after
pictures, and seeking the truth at second-hand. I have not endeavoured
to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set
out, but have rather tried to make my performance look like the work of
other men. I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this
summer, nor to give up my time to commonplace people. I shall return to
Bergholt, where I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of
representing the scenes that may employ me. There is little or nothing
in the exhibition worth looking up to. _There is room enough for a
natural painter._" He left London accordingly, and worked, in 1804, the
whole summer "quite alone among the oaks and solitudes of Helmingham
Park. I have taken quiet possession of the parsonage, finding it empty.
A woman comes from the farmhouse, where I eat, and makes my bed, and I
am left at liberty to wander where I please during the day." And having
now returned to the country he became himself again. "Painting," he
writes, "is with me but another word for feeling; and I associate 'my
careless boyhood' with all that lies upon the banks of the Stour; those
scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful." He had passed his whole
youth amid the lovely valleys and luxuriant meadows of Bergholt, where
the flocks were at pasture and the beetles hummed; he had wandered about
the soft banks of the Stour, in the green woods of Suffolk, amongst old
country-houses and churches, farms and picturesque cottages. This
landscape which he had loved as a boy he also painted. He was the
painter of cultivated English landscape, the portrayer of country life,
of canals and boats, of windmills and manor-houses. He had a liking for
all simple nature which reveals everywhere the traces of human
activity--for arable fields and villages, orchards and cornfields. A
strip of meadow, a watergate with a few briars, a clump of branching,
fibrous trees, were enough to fill him with ideas and feelings.
Gainsborough had already painted the like; but Constable denotes an
advance beyond Gainsborough as beyond Crome. Intimate in feeling as
Gainsborough undoubtedly was, he had a tendency to beautify the objects
of nature; he selected and gave them a delicacy of arrangement and a
grace of line which in reality they did not possess. Constable was the
first to renounce every species of adaptation and arbitrary arrangement
in composition. His boldness in the rendering of personal impressions
raises him above Crome. Crome gets his effect principally by his
accuracy: he represented what he saw; Constable showed how he saw the
thing. While the former, following Hobbema, has an air reminiscent of
galleries and old masters, Constable saw the world with his own eyes,
and was the first entirely independent modern landscape painter. In his
young days he had made copies after Claude, Rubens, Reynolds, Ruysdael,
Teniers, and Wilson, which might have been mistaken for the originals,
but later he had learnt much from Girtin's water-colour paintings. From
that time he felt that he was strong enough to trust his own eyes. He
threw to the winds all that had hitherto been considered as the chief
element of beauty, and gave up the rounding of his pictures for
pictorial effect; cut trees right through the middle to get into his
picture just what interested him, and no more.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
CONSTABLE. THE VALLEY FARM.]
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
COX. CROSSING THE SANDS.]
He set himself right in the midst of verdure; the nightingales sang, the
leaves murmured, the meadows grew green, and the clouds gleamed. In the
fifteenth-century art there were the graceful spring trees of Perugino;
in the seventeenth, the bright spring days of those two Flemings Jan
Silberecht and Lucas Uden; in the nineteenth, Constable became the first
painter of spring. If Sir George Beaumont now asked him where he meant
to put his brown tree, he answered: "Nowhere, because I don't paint
brown trees any more." He saw that foliage is green in summer,
and--painted it so; he saw that summer rain and morning dew makes the
verdure more than usually intense, and--he painted what he saw. He
noticed that green leaves sparkle, gleam, and glitter in the sun--and
painted them accordingly; he saw that the light, when it falls upon
bright-looking walls, dazzles like snow in the sunshine--and painted it
accordingly. There was a good deal of jeering at the time about
"Constable's snow," and yet it was not merely all succeeding English
artists who continued to put their faith in this painting of light, but
the masters of Barbizon too, and Manet afterwards.
[Illustration: _Mansell_
BONINGTON. LA PLACE DES MOULARDS, GENEVA.]
The problem of painting light and air, which the older school had left
unsolved, was taken up by him first in its complete extent. Crome had
shown great reserve in approaching the atmospheric elements. Constable
was the first landscape painter who really saw effects of light and air
and learnt to paint them. His endeavour was to embody the impression of
a mood of light with feeling, without lingering on the reproduction of
those details which are only perceptible to an analytical eye. Whereas
in the old Dutch masters the chief weight is laid on the effect of the
drawing of objects, here it rests upon light, no matter upon what it
plays. Thus Constable freed landscape painting from the architectonic
laws of composition. They were no longer needed when the principle was
once affirmed that the atmospheric mood gave greater value to the
picture than subject. He not only studied the earth and foliage in their
various tones, according as they were determined by the atmosphere, but
observed the sky, the air, and the forms of cloud with the
conscientiousness of a student of natural philosophy. The comments which
he wrote upon them are as subtle as those in Ruskin's celebrated
treatise on the clouds. A landscape, according to him, is only beautiful
in proportion as light and shadow make it so; in other words, he was the
first to understand that the "mood" of a landscape, by which it appeals
to the human spirit, depends less on its lines and on objects in
themselves than on the light and shadow in which it is bathed, and he
was the first painter who had the secret of painting these subtle
gradations of atmosphere. In his pictures the wind is heard murmuring in
the trees, the breeze is felt as it blows over the corn, the sunlight is
seen glancing on the leaves and playing on the clear mirror of the
waters. Thus Constable for the first time painted nature in all its
freshness. His principle of artistic creation is entirely opposed to
that which was followed by the Pre-Raphaelites at a later date. Whilst
the latter tried to reconstruct a picture of nature by a faithful,
painstaking execution of all details--a process by which the expression
of the whole usually suffers--Constable's pictures are broadly and
impressively painted, often of rude and brutal force, at times solemn,
at times elegant, but always cogent, fresh, and possessing a unity of
their own.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
COX. THE SHRIMPERS.]
A genius in advance of its age is only first recognised in its full
significance when following generations have come abreast with it. And
that Constable was made to feel. In 1837 he died in poverty at
Hampstead, in the modest "country retreat" where he spent the greatest
part of his life. He said that his painting recalled no one, and was
neither polished nor pretty, and asked: "How can I hope to be popular?
I work only for the future." And that belonged to him.
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
MÜLLER. THE AMPHITHEATRE AT XANTHUS.]
Constable's powerful individuality has brought forth enduring fruit, and
helped English landscape painting to attain that noble prime which it
enjoyed during the forties and fifties.
With his rich, brilliant, bold, and finely coloured painting, _David
Cox_ stands out as perhaps the greatest of Constable's successors. Like
Constable, he was a peasant, and observed nature with the simplicity of
one who was country-bred. He was born in 1783, the son of a blacksmith,
in a humble spot near Birmingham, and, after a brief sojourn in London,
migrated with his family to Hereford, and later to Harborne, also in the
neighbourhood of Birmingham. The strip of country which he saw from his
house was almost exclusively his field of study. He knew that a painter
can pass his life in the same corner of the earth, and that the scene of
nature spread before him will never be exhausted. "Farewell, pictures,
farewell," he is reported to have said when he took his last walk, on
the day before his death, round the walls of Harborne. He has treated of
the manner in which he understood his art in his _Treatise on Landscape
Painting_, written in 1814. His ideal was to see the most cogent effect
in nature, and leave everything out which did not harmonise with its
character; and in Cox's pictures it is possible to trace the steps by
which he drew nearer to this ideal the more natural he became. The magic
of his brush was never more captivating than in the works of his last
years, when, fallen victim to a disease of the eye, he could no longer
see distinctly and only rendered an impression of the whole scene.
Cox is a great and bold master. The townsman when he first comes into
the country, after being imprisoned for months together in a wilderness
of brick and mortar, does not begin at once to count the trees, leaves,
and the stones lying on the ground. He draws a long breath and exclaims,
"What balm!" Cox, too, has not painted details in the manner of the
Pre-Raphaelites. He represented the soft wind sweeping over the English
meadows, the fresh purity of the air, the storms that agitate the
landscape of Wales. A delicate silver-grey is spread over most of his
pictures, and his method of expression is powerful and nervous. By
preference he has celebrated, both in oil-paintings and in boldly
handled water-colours, the boundless depths of the sky in its thousand
variations of light, now deep blue in broad noon and now eerily gloomy
and disturbed. The fame of being the greatest of English water-colour
painters is his beyond dispute, yet if he had painted in oils from his
youth upwards he would probably have become the most important English
landscapist. His small pictures are pure and delicate in colour, and
fresh and breezy in atmospheric effect. It is only in large pictures
that power is at times denied him. In his later years he began to paint
in oils, and in this medium he is a less important artist, though a very
great painter. _William Müller_, who died young, stood as leader at his
side.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
DE WINT. NOTTINGHAM.]
He was one of the most dexterous amongst the dexterous, next to Turner
the greatest adept of English painting. Had he been simpler and quieter
he might be called a genius of the first order. But he has sometimes a
touch of what is theatrical; it does not always break out, but it does
so occasionally. He has an inclination for pageantry, and nothing of
that self-sufficiency and quiet tenderness with which Constable and Cox
devoted themselves to home scenery. He was at pains to give a trace of
largeness and sublimity to modest and unpretentious English landscape,
to give to the most familiar subject a tinge of preciosity. His pictures
are grandiose in form, and show an admirable lightness of hand, but
light and air are wanting in them, the local colour of England and its
atmosphere. As a foreigner--he was the son of a Danzig scholar, who had
migrated to Bristol--Müller has not seen English landscape with
Constable's native sentiment. He was not content with an English
cornfield or an English village; the familiar homeliness of the country
in its work-a-day garb excited no emotion in him.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BONINGTON. THE WINDMILL OF SAINT-JOUIN.]
Something in Müller's imagination, which caused him to love decided
colours and sudden contrasts rather than delicate gradations, attracted
him to Southern climes. His natural place was in the East, which had not
at that time been made the vogue. Here, like Decamps and Marilhat, he
found those vivid rather than delicate effects which appealed to his
eye. He was twice in the South--the first time in Athens and Egypt in
1838, and once again in Smyrna, Rhodes, and Lycia in 1843-44. In the
year during which he had yet to live he collected those Oriental
pictures which form his legacy, containing the best that he did. Certain
of them, such as "The Amphitheatre at Xanthus," are painted with
marvellous verve; they are not the work of a day, but of an hour. All
these mountain castles upon abrupt cliffs, these views of the Acropolis
and of Egypt, are real masterpieces of broad painting, their colour
clear and their light admirable. Not one of the many Frenchmen who were
in the South at this time has represented its sunshine and its brilliant
atmosphere with such flattering, voluptuous tones.
_Peter de Wint_, who was far more true and simple, was, like Constable
and Cox, entirely wedded to his own birthplace. At any rate, his sojourn
in France lasted only for a short time, and left no traces in his art.
From youth to age he was the painter of England in its work-a-day
garb--of the low hills of Surrey, of the plains of Lincolnshire, or of
the dark canals of the Thames, which he specially portrayed in
unsurpassable water-colour paintings. His ancestor in art is Philips de
Koning, the pupil of Rembrandt, the master of Dutch plains and wide
horizons.
[Illustration: _Studio._
BONINGTON. READING ALOUD.]
After Cox and de Wint came _Creswick_, more laborious, more patient,
more studious of detail, furnished perhaps with a sharper eye for the
green tones of nature, though with less feeling for atmosphere. It
cannot be said that he advanced art, but merely that he added a regard
for light and sunshine, unknown to the period before 1820, to the study
of Hobbema and Waterloo. With those who would not have painted as they
did but for Constable, _Peter Graham_ and _Dawson_ may be likewise
ranked; and these artists peculiarly devoted themselves to the study of
sky and water. Henry Dawson painted the most paltry and unpromising
places--a reach of the Thames close to London, or a quarter in the smoky
precincts of Dover, or Greenwich; but he painted them with a power such
as only Constable possessed. In particular he is unequalled in his
masterly painting of clouds. Constable had seldom done this in the same
way. He delighted in an agitated sky, in clouds driven before the wind
and losing their form in indeterminate contours; in nature he saw merely
reflections of his own restless spirit, striving after colour and
movement. Dawson painted those clouds which stand firm in the sky like
piles of building--cloud-cathedrals, as Ruskin has called them. There
are pictures of his consisting of almost nothing but great clouds. But
that wide space, the earth, which our eyes regard as their own peculiar
domain, is wanting. Colours and forms are nowhere to be seen, but only
clouds and undulating yellowish mist in which objects vanish like pallid
spectres. _John Linnell_ carried the traditions of this great era on to
the new period: at first revelling in golden light, in sunsets and rosy
clouds of dusk, and at a later time, in the manner of the
Pre-Raphaelites, bent on the precise execution of bodily form.
The young master, who died at twenty-seven, _Richard Parkes Bonington_,
unites these English classic masters with the French. An Englishman by
birth and origin, but trained as a painter in France, where he had gone
when fifteen years of age, he seems from many points of view one of the
most gracious products of the Romantic movement in France, though at the
same time he has qualities over which only the English had command at
that period, and not the French. He entered Gros's studio in France,
which was then the favourite meeting-place of all the younger men of
revolutionary tendencies, but repeated journeys to London did not allow
him to forget Constable. In Normandy and Picardy he painted his first
landscapes, following them up with a series of Venetian sea-pieces and
little historical scenes. Then consumption seized him and took but a
brief time in striking him down. On 23rd September 1828 he died in
London, whither he had gone to consult a specialist. In consequence of
his early death his talent never ripened, but he was a simple, natural,
pure, and congenial artist for all that. "I knew him well and loved him
much. His English composure, which nothing could disturb, robbed him of
none of the qualities which make life pleasant. When I first came across
him I was myself very young, and was making studies in the Louvre. It
was about 1816 or 1817. He was in the act of copying a Flemish
landscape--a tall youth who had grown rapidly. He had already an
astonishing dexterity in water-colours, which were then an English
novelty. Some which I saw later at a dealer's were charming, both in
colour and composition. Other modern artists are perhaps more powerful
and more accurate than Bonington, but no one in this modern school,
perhaps no earlier artist, possessed the ease of execution which makes
his works, in a certain sense, diamonds by which the eye is pleased and
fascinated, quite independently of the subject and the particular
representation of nature. And the same is true of the costume pictures
which he painted later. Even here I could never grow weary of marvelling
at his sense of effect, and his great ease of execution. Not that he was
quickly satisfied; on the contrary, he often began over again perfectly
finished pieces which seemed wonderful to us. But his dexterity was so
great that in a moment he produced with his brush new effects, which
were as charming as the first." With these words his friend and comrade,
the great Eugène Delacroix, drew the portrait of Bonington. Bonington
was at once the most natural and the most delicate in that Romantic
school in which he was one of the first to make an appearance. He had a
fine eye for the charm of nature, saw grace and beauty in her
everywhere, and represented the spring and the sunshine in bright and
clear tones. No Frenchman before him has so painted the play of light on
gleaming costumes and succulent meadow grasses. Even his lithographs
from Paris and the provinces are masterpieces of spirited, impressionist
observation--qualities which he owed, not to Gros, but to Constable. He
was the first to communicate the knowledge of the great English classic
painters to the youth of France, and they of Barbizon and Ville d'Avray
continued to spin the threads which connect Constable with the present.
[Illustration: RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON.]