of whenever we hear that of Reynolds, was in many ways the very
antithesis of his more illustrious rival. In his private life he most
certainly was, and so far as his practical influence on his
contemporaries is concerned, he is altogether overshadowed by the first
President of the Royal Academy. With respect to their works there is a
diversity of opinion, and it is largely a matter of personal feeling
whether we prefer those of the one or of the other. Both were great
artists, and on the common ground of portraiture they contended so
equally, and in some cases with such similarity of method, that it is
impossible to say impartially which was the greater. How is it possible
to decide except on the ground of individual taste, as to whether we
would rather lose Gainsborough or Reynolds as a portrait painter,
without considering for a moment that the former was a great landscape
painter as well? And, putting aside Wilson, whose landscape was
essentially Italian, whether executed in Italy or not, the first
landscape painter in England was Gainsborough. We are so accustomed to
bracket him with Reynolds as a great portrait painter, so thrilled over
the sale of a Gainsborough portrait for many thousands of pounds, that
we are apt to forget him altogether as a landscape painter. And yet two
or three of his best works in the National Gallery are landscapes, and
two of them at least famous ones--_The Market Cart_ and _The Watering
Place_. How many more beautiful landscapes by him there must be in
existence it is impossible to say, but there can be no doubt that there
are not a few which are only waiting their turn for a fashionable
market, but are now reposing unappreciated in private hands. In the
Metropolitan Museum at New York is a splendid example, the like of which
I have never seen in this country, but which is so much closer in
feeling to his numerous drawings and sketches in chalk or pencil that it
is impossible to believe that no similar examples exist. If we could
only bring them to light!
The fact is that the state of society in the middle of the eighteenth
century was, with all its brilliance and intellect, the cause of
hampering the natural development of the three great painters of that
period. Reynolds came back from his stay in Italy an ardent disciple of
the grand style, burning to follow the example of Raphael and
Michelangelo. Romney, too, was all for Italian art, but looked further
back, and worshipped the classics. Gainsborough was a born landscape
painter, and his whole time was devoted, when he was not executing
commissions for portraits, to making sketches and studies of woods and
valleys and trees. But so bent on having their likenesses handed about
were the brilliant personages of their time, that Reynolds, Gainsborough
and Romney were compelled in spite of themselves to turn their
attention to portraiture, to the exclusion of every other branch of
their art, and as portrait painters they have made themselves and their
country famous.
In the numerous sketches and studies that Gainsborough has left us, we
can see how much we have lost in gaining his wonderful portraits. He
loved landscape, from his earliest youth to his dying day. Loved it for
itself. For among all the drawings of his which I have ever seen, I do
not remember one which can be identified as any particular place. In the
eighteenth century there was a perfect mania among the smaller fry for
making topographical drawings, in pencil or water-colour, views of some
town or mountain or castle. But with Gainsborough the place was
nothing--it was the spirit of it that charmed him. A cottage in a wood,
a glade, a country road, a valley, was to him a beautiful scene,
whatever it was called or wherever it happened to be, and out of it
accordingly he made a beautiful picture, or at least a drawing. That his
pictures of landscape are so extraordinarily few while his drawings are
so numerous, may be accounted for in a great measure by the exigences of
portrait painting, but not entirely; and the probability is that there
are many more which are now forgotten.
For an estimate of Thomas Gainsborough both in regard to his place in
the story of the English School and to the abilities and methods by
which he attained it, it is needless to look elsewhere than to that of
Sir Joshua Reynolds, contained in the discourse delivered shortly after
Gainsborough's death:--
"When such a man as Gainsborough rises to great fame without the
assistance of an academical education, without travelling to Italy, or
any of those preparatory studies which have been so often recommended,
he is produced
[Illustration: PLATE XLI.--THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
THE MARKET CART
_National Gallery, London_]
as an instance how little such studies are necessary, since so great
excellence may be acquired without them. This is an inference not
warranted by the success of any individual, and I trust that it will not
be thought that I wish to make this use of it.
"It must be remembered that the style and department of art which
Gainsborough chose, and in which he so much excelled, did not require
that he should go out of his own country for the objects of his study;
they were everywhere about him; he found them in the streets, and in the
fields; and from the models thus accidentally found he selected with
great judgment such as suited his purpose. As his studies were directed
to the living world principally, he did not pay a general attention to
the works of the various masters, though they are, in my opinion, always
of great use even when the character of our subject requires us to
depart from some of their principles. It cannot be denied that
excellence in the department of the art which he professed may exist
without them, that in such subjects and in the manner that belongs to
them the want of them is supplied, and more than supplied, by natural
sagacity and a minute observation of particular nature. If Gainsborough
did not look at nature with a poet's eye, it must be acknowledged that
he saw her with the eye of a painter; and gave a faithful, if not a
poetical, representation of what he had before him.
"Though he did not much attend to the works of the great historical
painters of former ages, yet he was well aware that the language of the
art--the art of imitation--must be learned somewhere; and as he knew he
could not learn it in an equal degree from his contemporaries, he very
judiciously applied himself to the Flemish school, who are undoubtedly
the greatest masters of one necessary branch of art, and he did not
need to go out of his country for examples of that school; from _that_
he learned the harmony of colouring, the management and disposition of
light and shadow, and every means of it which the masters practised to
ornament and give splendour to their works. And to satisfy himself, as
well as others, how well he knew the mechanism and artifice which they
employed to bring out that tone of colour which we so much admire in
their works, he occasionally made copies from Rubens, Teniers and Van
Dyck, which it would be no disgrace to the most accurate connoisseur to
mistake at the first sight for the works of those masters. What he thus
learned he applied to the originals of nature, which he saw with his own
eyes, and imitated not in the manner of those masters but in his own.
"Whether he most excelled in portraits, landscapes, or fancy pictures,
it is difficult to determine; whether his portraits were most admirable
for exact truth of resemblance, or his landscapes for a portrait-like
representation of nature, such as we see in the works of Rubens,
Ruisdael, or others of those schools. In his fancy pictures, when he had
fixed on his object of imitation, whether it was the mean and vulgar
form of the woodcutter, or a child of an interesting character, as he
did not attempt to raise the one, so neither did he lose any of the
natural grace and elegance of the other; such a grace and such an
elegance as are more frequently found in cottages than in courts. This
excellence was his own, the result of his particular observation and
taste; for this he was certainly not indebted to the Flemish school, nor
indeed to any school; for his grace was not academic, or antique, but
selected by himself from the great school of nature....
"Upon the whole we may justly say that whatever he attempted he carried
to a high degree of excellence. It is to the credit of his good sense
and judgment that he never did attempt that style of historical painting
for which his previous studies had made no preparation.
"The peculiarity of his manner or style," Reynolds continues a little
later, "or we may call it the language in which he expressed his ideas,
has been considered by many as his greatest defect.... A novelty and
peculiarity of manner, as it is often a cause of our approbation, so
likewise it is often a ground of censure, as being contrary to the
practice of other painters, in whose manner we have been initiated, and
in whose favour we have perhaps been prepossessed from our infancy: for
fond as we are of novelty, we are upon the whole creatures of habit.
However, it is certain that all those odd scratches and marks which on a
close examination are so observable in Gainsborough's pictures, and
which even to experienced painters appear rather the effect of accident
than design; this chaos, this uncouth and shapeless appearance, by a
kind of magic, at a certain distance assumes form, and all the parts
seem to drop into their proper places; so that we can hardly refuse
acknowledging the full effect of diligence under the appearance of
chance and hasty negligence.
"That Gainsborough himself considered this peculiarity in his manner,
and the power it possesses of exciting surprise, as a beauty in his
works, I think may be inferred from the eager desire which we know he
always expressed, that his pictures at the exhibition should be seen
near as well as at a distance.
"The slightness which we see in his best works cannot always be imputed
to negligence. However they may appear to superficial observers,
painters know very well that a steady attention to the general effect
takes up more time and is much more laborious to the mind than any mode
of high finishing or smoothness without such attention. His handling,
the manner of leaving the colours, or, in other words, the methods he
used for producing the effect, had very much the appearance of the work
of an artist who had never learnt from others the usual and regular
practice belonging to the art; but still, like a man of strong intuitive
perception of what was required, he found a way of his own to accomplish
his purpose."
To Reynolds's opinion of this technique as applied to portraits, we may
listen with even more attention. "It must be allowed," he continues,
"that this hatching manner of Gainsborough did very much contribute to
the lightness of effect which is so eminent a beauty in his pictures;
as, on the contrary, much smoothness and uniting the colours is apt to
produce heaviness. Every artist must have remarked how often that
lightness of hand which was in his dead-colour (or first painting)
escaped in the finishing when he had determined the parts with more
precision; and another loss which he often experiences, which is of
greater consequence: while he is employed in the detail, the effect of
the whole together is either forgotten or neglected. The likeness of a
portrait, as I have formerly observed, consists more in preserving the
general effect of the countenance than in the most minute finishing of
the features or any of the particular parts. Now, Gainsborough's
portraits were often little more in regard to finishing or determining
the form of the features, than what generally attends a first painting;
but as he was always attentive to the general effect, or whole
together, I have often imagined that this unfinished manner contributed
even to that striking resemblance for which his portraits are so
remarkable."
IV
THE CLOSE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Not until the year of Gainsborough's death, 1788, was there born another
landscape painter. This was JOHN CROME, and he too came from the east of
England, nearest to Holland, being born in Norfolk, the neighbouring
county to Gainsborough's native Suffolk. Within ten years more, two
still greater landscapists were born, also in the east, Constable in
Essex, still closer to Sudbury, and Turner in London.
John Crome--Old Crome, as he is usually called to distinguish him from
his less distinguished son, John Bernay Crome--was born at Norwich, and
had to support himself most of his life by teaching drawing, not to
professional pupils unfortunately; but incidentally he founded "The
Norwich School" of landscape painters, who loyally carried forward the
traditions he had inculcated. But having to spend his time as a
drawing-master, he was not free like the old Dutch painters to put out
pictures when and as often as he would, and his work in oils is
therefore comparatively scarce. The three examples at the National
Gallery are typical of his varied powers, _The Slate Quarries_,
_Household Heath_, and _Porringland Oak_ are all of them masterpieces.
JOHN SELL COTMAN, born in 1782, was, after Crome, the most considerable
of the Norwich School. He, too, was compelled to earn a livelihood by
being a drawing-master, for there was not as yet a sufficient market,
nor for some time later, for landscape pictures, to support existence,
however humble. Cotman devoted much of his energies to water-colours,
and he is better known in this branch of the art than in painting; that
is the only excuse for the National Gallery in having purchased as his
the very inferior picture called _A Galliot in a Gale_. The other
example, _Wherries on the Yare_, is more worthy of him, though it by no
means exhibits all his wonderful power and fascination.
In GEORGE MORLAND (1763-1804) we have something more and something less
than a landscape painter. Landscape to him was not what it was to
Wilson, Gainsborough or Crome,--the only end in view; nor was it merely
a background for his subjects. But, as it generally happened, it was
both. To Morland, the landscape and the figures were one and the same
thing. Out of the fulness of his heart he painted pictures of _Boys
Robbing an Orchard_, _Horses in a Stable_, or a _Farmer on Horseback_
staying to talk to a group of gypsies beside a wood, and whether or not
the picture might be classed as a landscape depended entirely on the
nature of the scene itself. Whatever he saw or chose to see he painted
with equal skill and with equal charm; and as his choice of vision lay
in the simple everyday life that surrounded him, his variety is not the
least of his attractions.
The fact that his mother was a Frenchwoman (his father was Henry
Morland, the painter of the delightful pair of half-lengths, _The
Laundry Maids_) suggests to my mind the wild surmise that she may have
been the daughter of Chardin. For in the technique as well as in the
temperament of Morland,--making allowance for difference of
circumstances,--there is something remarkably akin to those of the great
Frenchman. Both eschewed the temptation to become fashionable, both
painted the humble realities of middle-class life with a zest that could
not possibly have been affected, and both painted them with much the
same extraordinary charm. At his best, Morland is not much inferior to
Chardin, and but for his unfortunate wildness and his susceptibility to
the temptations of strong drink, he might easily have excelled the
other. The feeling exhibited in two such different subjects as Lord
Glenconner's _Boys Robbing an Orchard_, and _The Interior of a Stable_,
in the National Gallery, certainly equals that of Chardin's most famous
pieces, I mean the feeling for the particular scene he is depicting. The
nearest, in fact the only, approach that Morland made to portrait
painting was in such pieces as _The Fortune Teller_ in the National
Gallery, which brings to mind the "Conversation Pieces," introduced by
Hogarth and Highmore into English painting, but which were never widely
attempted. In the Portfolio monograph "English Society in the Eighteenth
Century" I tried to collect as many examples as I could of this form of
art, but found it difficult to fill even a small volume, so entirely was
the single figure portrait the vogue. A few notable instances are worth
mentioning, if only as exceptions to the general rule. Gainsborough's
_Ladies Walking in the Mall_, belonging to Sir Audley Neeld; Reynolds's
large group of _The Marlborough Family_ at Blenheim, and a very early
group of _The Elliott Family_, consisting of eleven figures, belonging
to Lord St Germans; John Singleton Copley's _Children of Francis
Sitwell, Esq._, at Renishaw; and lastly Zoffany's _Family Party_, at
Panshanger.
For life-like representation of the English people we look to Hogarth
and Morland, and yet nothing could be more different than the motives
which inspired the two, and the way they went to work upon their
subject. Hogarth was above all things theatrical, Morland natural.
Hogarth first conceived his idea, then laid his scene, and lastly
peopled it with actual characters as they appeared--individually--before
him. Morland simply looked about him and painted what he happened to see
at the precise moment when what he saw coincided with his natural
inclination, or we may even say inspiration, to paint it. It was much
the same difference as between the work of Zola and that of Thomas
Hardy. The one had a moral to preach, the other a story to tell.
* * * * *
When the most we hear of GEORGE ROMNEY nowadays is the price that has
been paid for one of his portraits at Christie's, it is refreshing as
well as informative to turn to the criticism of one of his greatest
though not in these times so highly priced contemporaries, I mean John
Flaxman. "When Romney first began to paint," he writes, "he had seen no
gallery of pictures nor the fine productions of ancient sculpture; but
then women and children were his statues, and all objects under the
canopy of heaven formed his school of painting. The rainbow, the purple
distance, or the silver lake, taught him colouring; the various actions
and passions of the human figure, with the forms of clouds, woods, and
mountains or valleys, afforded him studies of composition. Indeed, his
genius bore a strong resemblance to the scenes he was born in; like
them, it partook of the grand and beautiful; and like them also, the
bright sunshine and enchanting prospects of his fancy were occasionally
overspread with mist and gloom. On his arrival in Italy he was witness
to new scenes of art and sources of study of which he could only have
supposed previously that something
[Illustration: PLATE XLII.--GEORGE ROMNEY
THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER
_National Gallery, London_]
of the kind might exist; for he there contemplated the purity and
perfection of ancient sculpture, the sublimity of Michelangelo's Sistine
Chapel, and the simplicity of Cimabue and Giotto's schools. He perceived
those qualities distinctly, and judiciously used them in viewing and
imitating nature; and thus his quick perception and unwearied
application enabled him, by a two years' residence abroad, to acquire as
great a proficiency in art as is usually attained by foreign studies of
a much longer duration.
"After his return, the novelty and sentiment of his original subjects
were universally admired. Most of these were of the delicate class, and
each had its peculiar character. Titania with her Indian votaries was
arch and sprightly; Milton dictating to his daughters, solemn and
interesting. Several pictures of Wood Nymphs and Bacchantes charmed by
their rural beauty, innocence, and simplicity. The most pathetic,
perhaps, of all his works was never finished--Ophelia with the flowers
she had gathered in her hand, sitting on the branch of a tree, which was
breaking under her, whilst the moody distraction in her lovely
countenance accounts for the insensibility to danger. Few painters have
left so many examples in their works of the tender and delicate
affections; and several of his pictures breathe a kindred spirit with
the _Sigismonda_ of Correggio. His cartoons, some of which have
unfortunately perished, were examples of the sublime and terrible, at
that time perfectly new in English art. As Romney was gifted with
peculiar powers for historical and ideal painting, so his heart and soul
were engaged in the pursuit of it whenever he could extricate himself
from the importunate business of portrait painting. It was his delight
by day and study by night, and for this his food and rest were often
neglected. His compositions, like those of the ancient pictures and
basso-relievos, told their story by a single group of figures in the
front, whilst the background is made the simplest possible, rejecting
all unnecessary episode and trivial ornament, either of secondary groups
or architectural subdivision. In his compositions the beholder was
forcibly struck by the sentiment at the first glance: the gradations and
varieties of which he traced through several characters, all conceived
in an elevated spirit of dignity and beauty, with a lively expression of
nature in all the parts. His heads were various--the male were decided
and grand, the female lovely. His figures resembled the antique--the
limbs were elegant and finely formed. His drapery was well understood,
either forming the figure into a mass with one or two deep folds only,
or by its adhesion and transparency discovering the form of the figure,
the lines of which were finely varied with the union or expansion of
spiral or cascade folds, composing with or contrasting the outline and
chiaroscuro. Few artists since the fifteenth century have been able to
do so much in so many different branches; for besides his beautiful
compositions and pictures, which have added to the knowledge and
celebrity of the English School, he modelled like a sculptor, carved
ornaments in wood with great delicacy, and could make an architectural
design in a fine taste, as well as construct every part of the
building."
After the death of Reynolds and the retirement of Romney, in the last
decade of the eighteenth century, the field of portraiture was left
vacant--in London at least--for JOHN HOPPNER, whose name is now
generally included with those of Lawrence and Raeburn among the first
six portrait painters of the British
[Illustration: PLATE XLIII.--GEORGE ROMNEY
MRS ROBINSON--"PERDITA"
_Hertford House, London_]