_National Gallery, London_]
first success in that art. I mean the full-length portrait of Captain
Keppel, painted in 1752. This originality and boldness in disregarding
the tame but universal convention in posing the sitter was peculiarly
Hogarth's own. With him it amounted almost to perverseness. He would not
let anybody "sit" to him, if he could help it. When he did, as in the
portraits of Quinn, the actor, and Hoadly, Bishop of Winchester, in the
National Gallery, the result is not the happiest; for, with all their
force, these portraits lack the grace that a conventional pose requires
to render it acceptable in the terms of its convention. If a man must
put on the accepted evening dress of his time, he must see that it
conforms in the spirit as well as in the letter of the fashion, or he
will only look like a dressed-up greengrocer. Hogarth was too sturdy and
too wilful to put on court clothes. If he had to, he struggled with
them.
Hogarth's father was a man of literary tastes, and a scholar. He had
written a supplement to Littleton's Latin Dictionary, but was unable to
get it published. "I saw the difficulties," writes the artist, "under
which my father laboured; the many inconveniences he endured from his
dependence, living chiefly on his pen, and the cruel treatment he met
with from booksellers and printers. I had before my eyes the precarious
situation of men of classical education; it was therefore conformable to
my wishes that I was taken from school and served a long apprenticeship
to a silver-plate engraver." This is printed in Allan Cunningham's _Life
of Hogarth_, together with many more extracts from autobiographical
memoranda, from which we may learn at first hand a great deal of
information bearing on the state of painting at this period, and the
circumstances under which it received such a stimulus from Hogarth,
before the sun had fully risen (in the person of Reynolds) to illumine
the whole period of British art.
"As I had naturally a good eye and fondness for drawing," Hogarth
continues, "_shows_ of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when young,
and mimicry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early
access to a neighbouring painter drew my attention from play, and I was
at every possible opportunity engaged in making drawings.... My
exercises at school were more remarkable for the ornaments which adorned
them than for the exercise itself. In the former I soon found that
blockheads with better memories would soon surpass me, but for the
latter I was particularly distinguished.
"The painting of St. Paul's and Greenwich Hospital, which were at that
time going on, ran in my head, and I determined that silver-plate
engraving should be followed no longer than necessity obliged me to it.
Engraving on copper was, at twenty years of age, my utmost ambition. To
attain that it was necessary that I should learn to draw objects
something like nature, instead of the monsters of heraldry, and the
common methods of study were much too tedious for one who loved his
pleasure and came so late to it.... This led me to consider whether a
shorter road than that usually travelled was not to be found.... I had
learned by practice to copy with tolerable correctness in the ordinary
way, but it occurred to me that there were many disadvantages attending
this method of study, as having faulty originals, etc.; and even when
the prints or pictures to be imitated were by the best masters, it was
little more than pouring water out of one vessel into another. Many
reasons led me to wish that I could find a shorter path--fix forms and
characters in my mind--and, instead of copying the lines, try to read
the language, and if possible find the grammar of the art, by bringing
into one focus the various observations I had made, and then trying by
my power on the canvas how far my plan enabled me to combine and apply
them to practice....
"I had one material advantage over my competitors, viz., the early habit
I acquired of retaining in my mind's eye, without coldly copying on the
spot, whatever I intended to imitate.... Instead of burdening the memory
with musty rules, or tiring the eye with copying dry or damaged
pictures, I have ever found studying from nature the shortest and safest
way of obtaining knowledge in my art...."
"I entertained some thoughts," he writes again, "of succeeding in what
the puffers in books call the great style of history painting, so that,
without having had a stroke of this grand business before, I quitted
small portraits and familiar conversations, and with a smile at my own
temerity commenced history painter, and on a great staircase at St.
Bartholomew's Hospital painted two Scripture stories, _The Pool of
Bethesda_ and _The Good Samaritan_, with figures seven feet high. These
I presented to the charity, and thought that they might serve as a
specimen to show that, were there an inclination in England for
encouraging historical pictures, such a first essay might prove the
painting them more easily attainable than is generally imagined. But as
Religion, the great promoter of this style in other countries, rejected
it in England, and I was unwilling to sink into a
portrait-manufacturer--and still ambitious of being singular, I soon
dropped all expectations of advantage from that source, and returned to
the pursuit of my former dealings with the public at large."
Few seemed disposed to recognise, in any of Hogarth's works, a higher
aim than that of raising a laugh. Somerville, the poet, dedicated his
_Rural Games_ to Hogarth in these words--"Permit me, Sir, to make choice
of you for my patron, being the greatest master in the burlesque way.
Your province is the town--leave me a small outride in the country, and
I shall be content." Fielding had a different opinion of his merits: "He
who would call the ingenious Hogarth a burlesque painter would in my
opinion do him very little honour, for sure it is much easier, much less
the subject of admiration, to paint a man with a nose, or any other
feature of a preposterous size, or to expose him in some absurd or
monstrous attitude, than to express the affections of man on canvas. It
hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his figures
seem to breathe, but surely it is a much greater and nobler applause
that they appear to think."
In answer to criticism of his _Analysis of Beauty_, Hogarth writes:
"Among other crimes of which I am accused, it is asserted that I have
abused the 'Great Masters'; this is far from being just. So far from
attempting to lower the ancients, I have always thought, and it is
universally admitted, that they knew some fundamental principles in
nature which enabled them to produce works that have been the admiration
of succeeding ages; but I have not allowed this merit to those
leaden-headed imitators, who, having no consciousness of either symmetry
or propriety, have attempted to mend nature, and in their truly ideal
figures, gave similar proportions to a Mercury and a Hercules."
Another and a better spirit influenced him in the following passage--he
is proposing to seek the principles of beauty in nature instead of
looking for them in mere learning. His words are plain, direct, and
convincing. "Nature is simple, plain, and true in all her works, and
those who strictly adhere to her laws, and closely attend to her
appearances in their infinite varieties are guarded against any
prejudicial bias from truth; while those who have seen many things that
they cannot well understand, and read many books which they do not fully
comprehend, notwithstanding all their parade of knowledge, are apt to
wander about it and about it; perplexing themselves and their readers
with the various opinions of other men. As to those painters who have
written treatises on painting, they were in general too much taken up
with giving rules for the operative part of the art, to enter into
physical disquisitions on the nature of the objects."
After this it would be unfair to withhold the praise of Benjamin West
(who succeeded Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy)--a painter,
prudent in speech, and frugal in commendation. "I remember, when I was a
lad," says Smith, in his account of Nollekens, "asking the late
venerable President West what he thought of Hogarth's _Analysis of
Beauty_, and his answer was, 'It is a work of the highest value to
everyone studying the art. Hogarth was a strutting consequential little
man, and made himself many enemies by that book; but now that most of
them are dead, it is examined by disinterested readers, unbiassed by
personal animosities, and will be more and more read, studied and
understood.'"
In his memoranda respecting the establishment of an Academy of Art in
England, Hogarth writes well and wisely. Voltaire asserts that after
the establishment of the French Academy not one work of genius appeared,
for all the painters became mannerists and imitators. Hogarth agrees
with him, declaring that "the institution will serve to raise and
pension a few bustling and busy men, whose whole employment will be to
tell a few simple students when a leg is too long, or an arm too short.
More will flock to the study of art than genius sends; the hope of
profit, or the thirst of distinction, will induce parents to push their
offspring into the lecture-room, and many will appear and but few be
worthy. The paintings of Italy form a sort of ornamental fringe to their
gaudy religion, and Rome is the general storeshop of Europe. The arts
owe much to Popery, and Popery owes much of its universality to the
arts. The French have attained to a sort of foppish magnificence in art;
in Holland, selfishness is the ruling passion, and in England vanity is
united with selfishness. Portrait-painting, therefore, has succeeded,
and ever will succeed better in England than in any other country, and
the demand will continue as new faces come into the market.
"Portrait painting is one of the ministers of vanity, and vanity is a
munificent patroness; historical painting seeks to revive the memory of
the dead, and the dead are very indifferent paymasters. Paintings are
plentiful enough in England to keep us from the study of nature; but
students who confine their studies to the works of the dead, need never
hope to live themselves; they will learn little more than the names of
the painters: true painting can only be learnt in one school, and that
is kept by Nature."
Hogarth disliked a formal school, says Cunningham, because he was the
pupil of nature, and foresaw that students would flock to it from the
feeling of trade rather than the impulse of genius, and that it become a
manufactory for conventional forms and hereditary graces. Opulent
collectors were filling their galleries with the religious paintings of
the Romish Church, and vindicating their purchases by representing these
works as the only patterns of all that is noble in art and worthy of
imitation. Hogarth perceived that all this was not according to the
natural spirit of the nation; he well knew that our island had not yet
poured out its own original mind in art, as it had done in poetry; and
he felt assured that such a time would come, if native genius were not
overlaid systematically by mock patrons and false instructors.
"As a painter," says Walpole, "Hogarth has slender merit." "What is the
merit of a painter?" Cunningham concludes. "If it be to represent
life--to give us an image of man--to exhibit the workings of his
heart--to record the good and evil of his nature--to set in motion
before us the very beings with whom earth is peopled--to shake us with
mirth--to sadden us with woeful reflection--to please us with natural
grouping, vivid action, and vigorous colouring--Hogarth has done all
this--and if he that has done so be not a painter, who will show us
one?"
III
SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS AND THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Whether or not SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS is entitled to be ranked among the
very greatest painters, there can be no question that he has a place
among the most famous, not only on account of his actual painting, but
also because of the influence exerted by his whole-hearted devotion to
his art, and his strong character in forming, out of such unpromising
elements, a really vigorous school of painting in this country. The
example he set in the strenuous exercise of his profession, the precepts
he laid down for the guidance of students, and the dignity with which he
invested the whole practice of painting which, until he came, had
degenerated into a mere business, were of incalculable benefit to his
own and succeeding ages, and Edmund Burke was paying him no empty
compliment but only stating the bare truth when he said that Sir Joshua
Reynolds was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant
arts to the other glories of his country.
Joshua Reynolds was born at Plympton in Devonshire on the 16th July
1723; the son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds and his wife Theophila Potter.
He was on every side connected with the Church, for both his father and
his grandfather were in holy orders, his mother was the daughter of a
clergyman, and his maternal grandmother also. His father's elder
brother, too, was a clergyman, a fellow of Eton College and Canon of St.
Peter's, Exeter. So that here, as in Italy, we start with a basis of
religion.
The young artist's first essays were made in copying several little
things done by his elder sisters, and he afterwards took great delight
in copying such prints as he met with in his father's books,
particularly those in Plutarch's _Lives_, and in Jacob Cats's _Book of
Emblems_, which his great-grandmother by his father's side, a Dutch
woman, had brought from Holland. When he was only eight years old he
read with great avidity a book called _The Jesuits Perspective_, an
architectural, not a religious work, and made himself so completely
master of it that he never afterwards had occasion to study any other
treatise on the subject. In fact, a drawing which he then made of
Plympton School so filled his father with wonder that he said to him,
"Now this exemplifies what the author of the _Perspective_ says in his
preface--that by observing the rules laid down in his book a man may do
wonders, for this is wonderful!"
From these attempts he proceeded to draw likenesses of his friends and
relations with tolerable success. But what most strongly confirmed him
in his love of the art was Richardson's _Treatise on Painting_, the
perusal of which so delighted and inflamed his mind, that Raphael
appeared to him superior to the most illustrious names of ancient or
modern times--a notion which he loved to indulge all the rest of his
life.
Before he was eighteen years old his father placed him as a pupil with
Thomas Hudson, who was then the most distinguished portrait-painter in
England; but having some disagreement with his master, the young man
returned to Devonshire, where he practised portrait painting with more
or less success until in 1749 he accompanied Admiral Keppel to the
Mediterranean, and remained for two or three years studying the old
masters in Italy.
As this period of Reynold's career had so determining an influence not
only on himself but on the whole course of the history of painting in
England--inasmuch as it formed the greater part of the groundwork of his
discourses when President of the Royal Academy, it is worth having an
account of it at first hand from the painter himself. "It has frequently
happened," he says, "as I was informed by the Keeper of the Vatican,
that many of those whom he had conducted through the various apartments
of that edifice when about to be dismissed, have asked for the works of
Raphael, and would not believe that they had already passed through the
room where they are preserved, so little impression had those
performances made on them. One of the first painters now in France once
told me that this circumstance happened to himself, though he now looks
on Raphael with that veneration which he deserves from all painters and
lovers of the art. I remember very well my own disappointment when I
first visited the the Vatican: but on confessing my feelings to a
brother student, of whose ingenuousness I had a high opinion, he
acknowledged that the works of Raphael had the same effect on him, or
rather that they did not produce the effect which he expected. This was
a great relief to my mind, and on inquiry further of other students I
found that those persons only who from natural imbecility appeared to be
incapable of ever relishing those divine performances, made pretensions
to instantaneous raptures on first beholding them.
"In justice to myself, however, I must add that though disappointed and
mortified at not finding myself enraptured with the works of this great
master, I did not for a moment conceive or suppose that the name of
Raphael, and those admirable paintings in particular, owed their
reputation to the ignorance and prejudice of mankind; on the contrary,
my not relishing them as I was conscious I ought to have done was one of
the most humiliating circumstances that ever happened to me. I found
myself in the midst of works executed upon principles with which I was
unacquainted: I felt my ignorance, and stood abashed. All the indigested
notions of painting which I had brought with me from England where the
art was in the lowest state it had ever been in (it could not indeed be
lower) were to be totally done away and eradicated from my mind. It was
necessary, as it is expressed on a very solemn occasion, that I should
become _as a little child_.
"Notwithstanding my disappointment, I proceeded to copy some of those
excellent works. I viewed them again and again; I even affected to feel
their merit and to admire them more than I really did. In a short time a
new taste and new perceptions began to dawn upon me, and I was convinced
that I had originally formed a false opinion of the perfection of art,
and that this great painter was well entitled to the high rank which he
holds in the estimation of the world."
"When I was at Venice," he writes in a note on Du Fresnoy's _Art of
Painting_ about the chiaroscuro of Titian, Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,
"the method I took to avail myself of their principles was this. When I
observed an extraordinary effect of light and shade in any picture, I
took a leaf of my pocket-book and darkened every part of it in the same
gradation of light and shade as the picture, leaving the white paper
untouched to represent the light, and this without any attention to the
subject or to the drawing of the figures. After a few experiments I
found the paper blotted nearly alike; their general practice appeared to
be to allow not above a quarter of the picture for the light, including
in this portion both the principal and secondary lights; another quarter
to be as dark as possible, and the remaining half kept in mezzotint or
half shadow.
"Rubens appears to have admitted rather more light than a quarter, and
Rembrandt much less, scarce an eighth; by this conduct Rembrandt's light
is extremely brilliant, but it costs too much, the rest of the picture
is sacrificed to this one object."
The results of these studies in Rome and Venice were at once observable
on his return to England in the beautiful portrait of _Giuseppe Marchi_,
one of the treasures belonging to the Royal Academy. It was altogether
too much for the ignorant British artists, and it excited lively
comment. What chiefly attracted the public notice, however, was the
whole-length portrait which he painted of his friend and patron Admiral
Keppel. On the appearance of this Reynolds was not only universally
acknowledged to be at the head of his profession, but to be the greatest
painter that England had seen since Van Dyck. The whole interval, as
Malone observes, between the time of Charles I. and the conclusion of
the reign of George II. seemed to be annihilated, and the only question
was whether the new painter or Van Dyck were the more excellent.
Reynolds very soon saw how much animation might be obtained by deviating
from the insipid manner of his immediate predecessors, and instead of
confining himself to mere likeness he dived, as it were, into the minds
and habits and manners of those who sat to him, and accordingly the
majority of his portraits are so appropriate and characteristic that the
many illustrious persons whom he has delineated are almost as well known
to us as if we had seen and conversed with them.
Very soon after his return from Italy his acquaintance with Dr Johnson
commenced, and their intimacy continued uninterrupted to the time of
Johnson's death. How much he profited thereby, especially in the
practice of art, he has recorded in a paper which was intended to form a
part of one of his discourses. "I remember," he writes, "Mr Burke
speaking of the _Essays_ of Sir Francis Bacon, said he thought them the
best of his works. Dr Johnson was of opinion 'that their excellence and
their value consisted in being the observations of a strong mind
operating upon life; and in consequence you find there what you seldom
find in other books,' It is this kind of excellence which gives a value
to the performances of artists also.... The observations which he made
on poetry, on life, and on everything about us, I applied to our art;
with what success others must judge. Perhaps an artist in his studies
should pursue the same conduct, and instead of patching up a particular
work on the narrow plan of imitation, rather endeavour to acquire the
art and power of thinking."
In another passage from his memoranda, quoted by Malone, Sir Joshua lets
us into some more of the secrets of his pre-eminence in his art, both of
painter and preceptor: for we are to remember that the British School of
painting owes more to the influence of Reynolds than perhaps any other
school to the example of one man:--
"I considered myself as playing a great game," he writes, "and instead
of beginning to save money, I laid it out faster than I got it in,
purchasing the best examples of art that could be procured; for I even
borrowed money for this purpose. The possessing portraits by Titian, Van
Dyck, Rembrandt, etc., I considered as the best kind of wealth. By
studying carefully the works of great masters, this advantage is
obtained--we find that certain niceties of expression are capable of
being executed, which otherwise we might suppose beyond the reach of
art. This gives us a confidence in ourselves, and we are thus incited to
endeavour at not only the same happiness of execution but also at other
congenial excellencies. Study indeed consists in learning to see nature,
and may be called the art of using other men's minds. By this kind of
contemplation and exercise we are taught to think in their way, and
sometimes to attain their excellence. Thus, for instance, if I had never
seen any of the works of Correggio, I should never perhaps have remarked
in nature the expression which I find in one of his pieces; or if I had
remarked it I might have thought it too difficult, or perhaps impossible
to be executed.
"My success and continual improvement in my art (if I may be allowed
that expression), may be ascribed in a good measure to a principle which
I will boldly recommend to imitation; I mean the principle of honesty;
which in this as in all other instances is according to the vulgar
proverb certainly the best policy: I always endeavoured to do my best.
"My principal labour was employed on the whole together, and I was never
weary of changing and trying different modes and different effects. I
had always some scheme in my mind, and a perpetual desire to advance. By
constantly endeavouring to do my best, I acquired a power of doing that
with spontaneous facility that which at first was the effort of my whole
mind."