In looking through a collection of Reynolds, Gainsboroughs, Dobsons,
Morlands, we are moved by something more than the artistic beauty of
the pictures. Seeing that peaceful farmyard by Morland, a dim remote
life, a haunting in the blood, rises to the surface of the brain, like
a water-flower or weed brought by a sudden current into sight of the
passing sky. Seeing that quiet man talking with his swineherd, we are
mysteriously attracted, and are perplexed as by a memory; we grow
aware of his house and wife, and though these things passed away more
than a hundred years ago, we know them all. That other picture,
"Partridge Shooting", by Stubbs, how familiar and how intimate it is
to us! and those days seem to go back and back into long ago, beyond
childhood into infancy. The life of the picture goes back into the
life that we heard from our father's, our grandfather's lips, a life
of reminiscence and little legend, the end of which passed like a
wraith across the dawn of our lives. For we need not be very old to
remember the squire ramming the wads home and calling to the setter
that is too eagerly pressing forward the pointer in the turnips. A man
of fifty can remember seeing the mail coach swing round the curve of
the wide, smooth coach roads; and a man of forty, going by road to the
Derby, and the block which came seven miles from Epsom. And so do
these pictures take us to the heart of England, to the heart of our
life, which is England, to that great circumstance which preceded our
birth, and which gave not merely flesh and blood, but the minds that
are thinking now. We have only to pass through a doorway to see
sublimer works of art. But though Troyon and Courbet were greater
artists than Morland, Morland whispers something that is beyond art,
beyond even our present life; as a shell with the sound of the sea,
these canvases are murmurous with the under life.
That young lady so charmingly dressed in white, she who holds a rose
in her hand, is Miss Kitty Calcraft, by Romney. Do we not seem to know
her? We ask when we met her, and where we spoke to her; and that
mystic when and where seem more real than the moment of present life.
The present crowd of living folk fades from us, and we half believe,
half know, that she spoke to us one evening on that terrace
overlooking those wide pasture lands. We see the happy light of her
eyes and hear the joy of her voice, and they stir in us all the
impulses of race, of kith and kin.
Romney is often crude, but the worst that can be urged against this
portrait is that it is superficial. But what charm and grace there is
in its superficiality! Romney was aware of the grace and charm of the
young girl as she sat before him in her white dress: he saw her as a
flower; and in fluent, agreeable, well-bred and cultivated speech he
has talked to us about her. The portrait has the charm of rare and
exquisite conversation; we float in a tide of sensation. He was only
aware of her white dress, her pretty arm and hand laid on her soft
lap. But while we merely see Kitty, we perceive and think of
Gainsborough's portrait of Miss Willoughby. We realise her in other
circumstances, away from the beautiful blue trees under which he has
so happily placed her; we can see her receiving visitors on the
terrace, or leaning over the balustrade looking down the valley,
wondering why life has come to her so sadly. We see her in her
eighteenth-century drawing-room amid Chippendale and Adams furniture,
reading an old novel. No one ever cared much about Miss Willoughby.
There is little sensuous charm in her long narrow face, in her hair
falling in ringlets over her shoulders; and we are sure that she often
reflected on the bitterness of life. But Kitty never looked into the
heart of things: when life coincided with her desires, she laughed and
was glad; when things, to use her own words, "went wrong", she wept.
And in these two portraits we read the stories of the painters' souls.
But the question of nationality, of country, in art detains us.
Beautiful beyond compare is the art of Tourguenieff; but how much more
intimate, how much deeper is the delight that a Russian finds in his
novels than ours! However truly the purely artistic qualities may
touch us--great art is universal--we miss our native land and our
race in Tourguenieff. We find both in Dickens, in Thackeray. Miss
Austen and Fielding have little else; and vague though Fielding may be
in form, still his pages are England, and they whisper the life we
inherited from long ago. The superb Rembrandt in the next room, the
Gentleman with a Hawk, lent by the Duke of Westminster, is a human
revelation. We only perceive in it the charm, the adorableness, the
eternal adventure of youth; nationality disappears in the universal.
This beautiful portrait was painted in 1643, a year after the
"Night-watch". The date of the portrait of the Lady with the Fan is
not given. They differ widely in style; the portrait of the man is ten
years in advance of the portrait of the woman; it seems to approach
very closely, to touch on, the great style which he attained in 1664,
the year when he painted the Syndics. Of his early style, thin,
crabbed, and yellow, there is hardly a trace in the portrait of the
Man with the Hawk; it is almost a complete emancipation, yet it would
be rash to say that the Lady with the Fan is an early work, painted in
the days of the Lesson in Anatomy. In Rembrandt's work we find sudden
advancements towards the grand final style, and these are immediately
followed by hasty returnings to the hard, dry, and essentially
unromantic manner of 1634. The portrait of the Young Man with the Hawk
was painted in middle life. But if it contains something more than the
suggestion of the qualities which twenty years later he developed and
perfected for the admiration of all time, if the immortal flower of
Rembrandt's genius was still unblown, this is blossom prematurely
breaking. The young man is shown upon darkness like a vision: the face
is illuminated mysteriously, the brush-work is large and firm, the
paint is substantial without being heavy, the canvas is smoky, an
unnatural and yet a real atmosphere surrounds the head. The black
velvet cap strikes in sharp relief against the background, which
lightens to a grey-green about the head. The modelling of the face is
extraordinarily large and simple, and yet without omissions; we have
in this portrait a perfect example of the art of being precise without
being small. The young man is a young nobleman. He stands before us
looking at us, and yet his eyes are not fixed; his moustache is golden
and frizzled; his cheeks are coloured slightly; but the picture is
practically made of a few greys and greens, and white, slightly tinted
with bitumen; yet we do not feel, or feel very little, any lack of
colouring matter. Rembrandt realised in the romantic young man his
ideal of young masculine beauty. Truly a beautiful work, neither the
boyhood nor the manhood, but the adolescence of Rembrandt's genius.
Between the portrait of the Lady with a Fan and Sir Joshua's portrait
of Miss Frances Crewe it would be permissible to hesitate; but to
hesitate even for one instant between Miss Crewe and the Young Man
with the Hawk would be unpardonable. Sir Joshua painted as he thought;
he had an instinctive sense of decoration and a deep and tender
feeling for beauty; he was especially sensible to the agreeable and
gay aspect of things; his eyes at once seize the pleasing and
picturesque contour, and his mind divined a charming and effective
scheme of colour. He saw character too; all the surface
characteristics of his model were plain to him, and when he was so
minded he painted with rare intelligence and insight. He did not see
deeply, but he saw clearly. Gainsborough did not see so clearly, nor
was his hand as prompt to express his vision as Sir Joshua's; but
Gainsborough saw further, for he felt more keenly and more profoundly.
But light indeed were their minds compared with Rembrandt's. Rembrandt
was a great visionary; to him the outsides of things were symbols of
elemental truths, which he expressed in a form mighty as the truths
themselves. There is no question of comparison between him on one hand
and Reynolds and Gainsborough on the other. Yet we should hesitate to
destroy our Reynolds and Gainsboroughs, to preserve any works of art,
however beautiful. Were we to keep what our reason told us was the
greatest, we should feel as one who surrendered England to save the
rest of the world, or as a parent who sacrificed his children to save
a million men from the scaffold.