REYNOLDS AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Hitherto we have travelled far and wide in our search for typical
examples of the beautiful in painting. We went from Flanders to Italy,
from Italy to Germany, back to Holland, and thence to Spain. It is
true that we began in England with our first picture, and that we have
returned twice, once with Holbein, and again with Van Dyck, both
foreign born and trained artists. We will finish with examples of truly
native English art.
In the eighteenth century England for the first time gained a foremost
place in painting, though the people of the day scarcely realized that
it was so. Even the poet Gray, writing in 1763, could say:
Why this nation has made no advance hitherto in painting and sculpture,
it is hard to say.... You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine
enough to foresee, that art shall one day flourish in England. I, too,
much wish, but can hardly extend my hopes so far.
Yet in 1763 Reynolds was forty years of age and Gainsborough but four
years younger. Hogarth was even sixty-six, and at work upon his last
plate. Although, hitherto, the best painting in England had been done
by foreign artists such as Holbein and Van Dyck, yet there had always
been Englishmen of praiseworthy talent who had painted pleasing
portraits. Hogarth carried this native tradition to a high point of
excellence. He painted plain, good-natured-looking people in an
unaffected and straightforward way. But he was a humourist in paint,
and as great a student of human nature as he was of art. His insight
into character and his great skill with the brush, combined with his
sensitiveness to fun, make him in certain respects a unique painter.
In the National Gallery there is a picture of the heads of his six
servants in a double row. They might all be characters from Dickens,
so vividly and sympathetically humorous is each.
In his engravings Hogarth satirised the lives of all classes of the
society of his day. When we look at them we live again in
eighteenth-century London, and walk in streets known to fame though
now destroyed, thronged with men and women, true to life.
As an artist, Hogarth occupies a position between the
seventeenth-century Dutch painters of low life and the English
painters that succeeded him, who expressed the ideals of a refined
society. His portraits have something of the strength of Rembrandt's.
His street and tavern scenes rival Jan Steen's; but behind the mere
representation of brutality, vice, crime, and misery we perceive not
merely a skilled craftsman but a moral being, whom contact with misery
deeply stirs and the sight of wickedness moves to indignation.
After 1720 a succession of distinguished painters were born in England.
Many of them first saw the light in obscure villages in the depths
of the country. Reynolds came from Devonshire, Gainsborough from
Suffolk, Romney from the Lake country.
The eighteenth century was a time when politicians and men of letters
had the habit of gathering in the coffee-houses of London--forerunners
of the clubs of to-day. Conversation was valued as one of life's best
enjoyments, and the varied society of actors, authors, and politicians,
in which it flourished best, could only be obtained in the town. To
the most distinguished circle of that kind in London, our painter
Reynolds belonged.
In the eighteenth century, society had also begun to divide its time
in modern fashion between town and country. Many of the large country
houses of to-day, and nearly all the landscape-gardened parks, belong
to that date. Nevertheless it was a time of great artificiality of
life. The ladies had no short country skirts, and none of the freedom
to which we are accustomed. In London they wore long powdered curls
and rouged, and in the country too they did not escape from the
artificiality of fashion. Indeed, their great desire seems to have
been to get away from everything natural and spontaneous. The
artificial poetry of that time deals with the patch-boxes and
powder-puffs of the fashionable dames of the town, and with nymphs
and Dresden china shepherdesses in the country.
Even on Reynolds' canvases the desire to improve upon nature is
apparent. In his young days he painted the local personages of
Devonshire. Then he made a journey abroad and spent three years in
Rome and Venice. On his return he settled in London, and the most
distinguished men and women of the day and their children sat to him.
It seems that he would have liked his lords and ladies to look as heroic
or sublime as the heroes or gods of Michelangelo. Instead of painting
them in the surroundings that belonged to them, as Holbein or Velasquez
would have done, he dressed his ladies in what he called white
'drapery,' a voluminous material, neither silk, satin, woollen, nor
cotton, and painted them sailing through the woods. The ladies
themselves liked to look like nymphs, characterless and pretty, so
the fashion of painting portraits in this way became common.
The pictures are pleasing to look at, although so artificial, and after
all it was only full-length portraits of ladies that Reynolds treated
in this way. They were a small part of his whole output. But he and
Velasquez worked in a totally different spirit. Velasquez made the
subject before him, however unpromising, striking because of its truth.
Reynolds liked to change it on occasion into something quite different,
for the sake of making a picture pretty. Nevertheless, his strength
lay in straightforward portraiture, and in the rendering of character.
His portraits of men, unlike those of women, are dignified, simple,
and restrained. His art was one long development till blindness
prevented him from working. Every year he attained more freedom and
naturalness in his pose and developed more power in his use of colour.
[Illustration: THE DUKE OF GLOUCESTER
From the picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in Trinity College, Cambridge]
Many would say that his loveliest achievements were portraits of
children, yet he did not attain the same freedom in his child poses
till late in life. You have all seen photographs, at any rate, of the
'Age of Innocence' and the 'Heads of Angels,' but this little picture
of the Duke of Gloucester, nephew of George III., will not be so
familiar. I wonder whether it reminds you of anything you know? It
reminds me of Van Dyck. The little duke stands with an air of importance
upon the hillside, which is raised above the eye of the spectator as
Velasquez raised the ground beneath the pony of Don Balthazar Carlos.
There is no mistake about the child being a simple English boy, with
a nice chubby face and ordinary straight fair hair. But he is a prince
and knows it. For the sake of having his picture painted, he poses
with an air of conscious dignity beyond his years. He sweeps his cloak
around him like any grown-up cavalier, and holds out a plumed hat and
walking stick in a lordly fashion. The child is consciously acting
the part of a grown-up person, which only emphasizes his childhood.
But the air of refinement and distinction in the picture comes straight
from Van Dyck. As you look at the portraits of the Duke of Gloucester
and William II. of Orange side by side, it may puzzle you to say which
is the more attractive. Van Dyck has painted the clothes in more detail.
A century later Reynolds has learnt to paint with dash, though not
with the mastery of Velasquez. The effect of the cloak of the little
Duke, its shimmering shades of mauve and pink, is inimitable. It tones
beautifully with the background, varying from dull green to brightest
yellow. The background happens to be sky, but it might as well have
been a curtain, as long as its bit of colour so set off the clothes
of the little Duke.
When Reynolds painted children he delighted in making them act parts.
Even in the 'Age of Innocence' the little girl is looking how very
very innocent. He painted one picture of a small boy, Master Crewe,
dressed to look like Henry VIII. in the style of Holbein. With broad
shoulders and a rich dress, he stands on his sturdy legs quite the
figure of Henry. But the face is one beam of boyish laughter, and on
the top of the little replica of the body of the corpulent monarch
the effect of the childish face is most entertaining.
When Reynolds puts away his ideas of the grand style of Michelangelo
to paint pictures such as these, he is entirely delightful. He
sometimes painted Holy Families and classical subjects, but the more
the spirit of medieval sacred art has sunk into us, the less can we
admire modern versions of the old subjects. The sacred paintings of
the Middle Ages owe some of their charm to the fact that they do not
make upon us the impression of life. In Reynolds' Holy Families, the
Mother and Child are painted with all the skill of a modern artist
and look as human as his portraits of the Duchess of Devonshire and
her baby. It is no longer possible to think of them as anything but
portraits of the models whom Reynolds employed for his picture.
Another method that modern artists have sometimes adopted in painting
sacred subjects, is to imitate the faulty drawing and incomplete
representation of life which are present in the art of the Old Masters.
But this conscious imitation of bygone ignorance beguiles no one who
has once felt the charm of the painters before Raphael.
Reynolds' great contemporary, Gainsborough, has been called 'a child
of nature.' He would have liked to live in the country always and paint
landscapes. He did paint many of his native Suffolk, but in his day
landscapes were unsaleable, so he was driven to the town and to portrait
painting to make a living. Less than Reynolds a painter of character,
Gainsborough reproduced the superficial expression of his sitters.
But he had so natural an eye for grace and beauty, that his portraits
always please. He did not attempt Reynolds' wide range of subjects
or the same difficulties of pose. Of Reynolds he said: 'How various
he is,' but his admiration did not make him stray from his natural
path to attempt the variety of another. Reynolds, equally admiring,
said of him: 'I cannot make out how he produces his effects.' Perhaps
Gainsborough did not know either. He does seem to paint by instinct,
and successive pictures became more pleasing. Buoyant in his life as
in his art, his last words were: 'We are all going to Heaven, and Van
Dyck is of the company.'
Another great contemporary painter was Romney, whose portraits of
ladies are delightful. Figured as nymphs too, they are so buoyant with
bright expressions and wayward locks, that one wishes he had depicted
in their faces a soul.
All over England and Scotland portrait painters flourished at this
time. There were so many English artists that in 1768 the Royal Academy
was founded, with Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first president. It was
to the students of the Royal Academy that he delivered his Discourses
upon Art, setting forth the principles which he judged to be sound.
He was an indefatigably hard worker until within two years of his death
in 1792. All classes of men esteemed and regretted him, clouded though
his intercourse with them had been by the deafness from which he
suffered during the greater part of his life.
Goldsmith, the author of the _Vicar of Wakefield_, wrote this character
'epitaph' for him:
Here Reynolds is laid, and to tell you my mind,
He has not left a wiser or better behind.
His pencil was striking, resistless and grand;
His manners were gentle, complying and bland;
Still born to improve us in every part,
His pencil our faces, his manners our heart.
To coxcombs averse, yet most civilly steering
When they judged without skill, he was still hard of hearing.
When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios and stuff,
He shifted his trumpet and only took snuff.
By flattery unspoiled ...
The end is missing, for while Goldsmith was versifying so feelingly
about his friend, death overtook the writer, eighteen years before
the subject of the epitaph.