A Text-Book of the History of Painting Part 16

GENRE-PAINTERS: From Blake to Morland (1763-1804) is a step across s.p.a.ce from heaven to earth. Morland was a realist of English country life, horses at tavern-doors, cattle, pigs. His life was not the most correct, but his art in truthfulness of representation, simplicity of painting, richness of color and light, was often of a fine quality. As a skilful technician he stood quite alone in his time, and seemed to show more affinity with the Dutch _genre_-painters than his own countrymen. His works are much prized to-day, and were so during the painter's life.

Sir David Wilkie (1785-1841) was also somewhat like the Dutch in subject, a _genre_-painter, fond of the village fete and depicting it with careful detail, a limpid brush, and good textural effects. In 1825 he travelled abroad, was gone some years, was impressed by Velasquez, Correggio, and Rembrandt, and completely changed his style.

He then became a portrait and historical painter. He never outlived the nervous constraint that shows in all his pictures, and his brush, though facile within limits, was never free or bold as compared with a Dutchman like Steen. In technical methods Landseer (1802-1873), the painter of animals, was somewhat like him. That is to say, they both had a method of painting surfaces and rendering textures that was more "smart" than powerful. There is little solidity or depth to the brush-work of either, though both are impressive to the spectator at first sight. Landseer knew the habits and the anatomy of animals very well, but he never had an appreciation of the brute in the animal, such as we see in the pictures of Velasquez or the bronzes of Barye.

The Landseer animal has too much sentiment about it. The dogs, for instance, are generally given those emotions pertinent to humanity, and which are only exceptionally true of the canine race. This very feature--the tendency to humanize the brute and make it tell a story--accounts in large measure for the popularity of Landseer's art.

The work is perhaps correct enough, but the aim of it is somewhat afield from pure painting. It ill.u.s.trates the literary rather than the pictorial. Following Wilkie the most distinguished painter was Mulready (1786-1863), whose pictures of village boys are well known through engravings.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 98.--TURNER. FIGHTING TeMeRAIRE. NAT. GAL.

LONDON.]

THE LANDSCAPE PAINTERS: In landscape the English have had something to say peculiarly their own. It has not always been well said, the coloring is often hot, the brush-work brittle, the attention to detail inconsistent with the large view of nature, yet such as it is it shows the English point of view and is valuable on that account.

Richard Wilson (1713-1782) was the first landscapist of importance, though he was not so English in view as some others to follow. In fact, Wilson was nurtured on Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet and instead of painting the realistic English landscape he painted the pseudo-Italian landscape. He began working in portraiture under the tutorship of Wright, and achieved some success in this department; but in 1749 he went to Italy and devoted himself wholly to landscapes.

These were of the cla.s.sic type and somewhat conventional. The composition was usually a dark foreground with trees or buildings to right and left, an opening in the middle distance leading into the background, and a broad expanse of sunset sky. In the foreground he usually introduced a few figures for romantic or cla.s.sic a.s.sociation.

Considerable elevation of theme and spirit marks most of his pictures.

There was good workmanship about the skies and the light, and an attentive study of nature was shown throughout. His canvases did not meet with much success at the time they were painted. In more modern days Wilson has been ranked as the true founder of landscape in England, and one of the most sincere of English painters.

THE NORWICH SCHOOL: Old Crome (1769-1821), though influenced to some extent by Wilson and the Dutch painters, was an original talent, painting English scenery with much simplicity and considerable power.

He was sometimes rasping with his brush, and had a small method of recording details combined with mannerisms of drawing and composition, and yet gave an out-of-doors feeling in light and air that was astonishing. His large trees have truth of ma.s.s and accuracy of drawing, and his foregrounds are painted with solidity. He was a keen student of nature, and drew about him a number of landscape painters at Norwich, who formed the Norwich School. Crome was its leader, and the school made its influence felt upon English landscape painting.

Cotman (1782-1842) was the best painter of the group after Crome, a man who depicted landscape and harbor scenes in a style that recalls Girtin and Turner.

The most complete, full-rounded landscapist in England was John Constable (1776-1837). His foreign bias, such as it was, came from a study of the Dutch masters. There were two sources from which the English landscapists drew. Those who were inclined to the ideal, men like Wilson, Calcott (1779-1844), and Turner, drew from the Italian of Poussin and Claude; those who were content to do nature in her real dress, men like Gainsborough and Constable, drew from the Dutch of Hobbema and his contemporaries. A certain sombreness of color and manner of composition show in Constable that may be attributed to Holland; but these were slight features as compared with the originality of the man. He was a close student of nature who painted what he saw in English country life, especially about Hampstead, and painted it with a knowledge and an artistic sensitiveness never surpa.s.sed in England. The rural feeling was strong with him, and his evident pleasure in simple scenes is readily communicated to the spectator. There is no attempt at the grand or the heroic. He never cared much for mountains or water, but was fond of cultivated uplands, trees, bowling clouds, and torn skies. Bursts of sunlight, storms, atmospheres, all pleased him. With detail he was little concerned. He saw landscape in large patches of form and color, and so painted it.

His handling was broad and solid, and at times a little heavy. His light was often forced by sharp contrast with shadows, and often his pictures appear spotty from isolated glitters of light strewn here and there. In color he helped eliminate the brown landscape and subst.i.tuted in its place the green and blue of nature. In atmosphere he was excellent. His influence upon English art was impressive, and in 1824 the exhibition at Paris of his Hay Wain, together with some work by Bonington and Fielding had a decided effect upon the then rising landscape school of France. The French realized that nature lay at the bottom of Constable's art, and they profited, not by imitating Constable, but by studying his nature model.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 99.--BURNE JONES. FLAMMA VESTALIS.]

Bonington (1801-1828) died young, and though of English parents his training was essentially French, and he really belonged to the French school, an a.s.sociate of Delacroix. His study of the Venetians turned his talent toward warm coloring, in which he excelled. In landscape his broad handling was somewhat related to that of Constable, and from the fact of their works appearing together in the Salon of 1824 they are often spoken of as influencers of the modern French landscape painters.

Turner (1775-1851) is the best known name in English art. His celebrity is somewhat disproportionate to his real merits, though it is impossible to deny his great ability. He was a man learned in all the forms of nature and schooled in all the formulas of art; yet he was not a profound lover of nature nor a faithful recorder of what things he saw in nature, except in his early days. In the bulk of his work he shows the traditions of Claude, with additions of his own. His taste was cla.s.sic (he possessed all the knowledge and the belongings of the historical landscape), and he delighted in great stretches of country broken by sea-sh.o.r.es, rivers, high mountains, fine buildings, and illumined by blazing sunlight and gorgeous skies. His composition was at times grotesque in imagination; his light was usually bewildering in intensity and often unrelieved by shadows of sufficient depth; his tone was sometimes faulty; and in color he was not always harmonious, but inclined to be capricious, uneven, showing fondness for arbitrary schemes of color. The object of his work seems to have been to dazzle, to impress with a wilderness of lines and hues, to overawe by imposing scale and grandeur. His paintings are impressive, decoratively splendid, but they often smack of the stage, and are more frequently grandiloquent than grand. His early works, especially in water-colors, where he shows himself a follower of Girtin, are much better than his later canvases in oil, many of which have changed color. The water-colors are carefully done, subdued in color, and true in light. From 1802, or thereabouts, to 1830 was his second period, in which Italian composition and much color were used. The last twenty years of his life he inclined to the _bizarre_, and turned his canvases into almost incoherent color ma.s.ses. He had an artistic feeling for composition, linear perspective, and the sweep of horizon lines; skies and hills he knew and drew with power; color he comprehended only as decoration; and light he distorted for effect.

Yet with all his shortcomings Turner was an artist to be respected and admired. He knew his craft, in fact, knew it so well that he relied too much on artificial effects, drew away from the model of nature, and finally pa.s.sed into the extravagant.

THE WATER-COLORISTS: About the beginning of this century a school of water-colorists, founded originally by Cozens (1752-1799) and Girtin (1775-1802), came into prominence and developed English art in a new direction. It began to show with a new force the transparency of skies, the luminosity of shadows, the delicacy and grace of clouds, the brilliancy of light and color. Cozens and Blake were primitives in the use of the medium, but Stothard (1755-1834) employed it with much sentiment, charm, and _plein-air_ effect. Turner was quite a master of it, and his most permanent work was done with it. Later on, when he rather abandoned form to follow color, he also abandoned water-color for oils. Fielding (1787-1849) used water-color effectively in giving large feeling for s.p.a.ce and air, and also for fogs and mists; Prout (1783-1852) employed it in architectural drawings of the princ.i.p.al cathedrals of Europe; and c.o.x (1783-1859), Dewint (1784-1849), Hunt (1790-1864), Cattermole (1800-1868), Lewis (1805-1876), men whose names only can be mentioned, all won recognition with this medium.

Water-color drawing is to-day said to be a department of art that expresses the English pictorial feeling better than any other, though this is not an undisputed statement.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 100.--LEIGHTON. HELEN OF TROY.]

Perhaps the most important movement in English painting of recent times was that which took the name of

PRE-RAPHAELITISM: It was started about 1847, primarily by Rossetti (1828-1882), Holman Hunt (1827-), and Sir John Millais (1829-1896), a.s.sociated with several sculptors and poets, seven in all. It was an emulation of the sincerity, the loving care, and the scrupulous exactness in truth that characterized the Italian painters before Raphael. Its advocates, including Mr. Ruskin the critic, maintained that after Raphael came that fatal facility in art which seeking grace of composition lost truth of fact, and that the proper course for modern painters was to return to the sincerity and veracity of the early masters. Hence the name pre-Raphaelitism, and the signatures on their early pictures, P. R. B., pre-Raphaelite Brother. To this attempt to gain the true regardless of the sensuous, was added a morbidity of thought mingled with mysticism, a moral and religious pose, and a studied simplicity. Some of the painters of the Brotherhood went even so far as following the habits of the early Italians, seeking retirement from the world and carrying with them a Gothic earnestness of air. There is no doubt about the sincerity that entered into this movement. It was an honest effort to gain the true, the good, and as a result, the beautiful; but it was no less a striven-after honesty and an imitated earnestness. The Brotherhood did not last for long, the members drifted from each other and began to paint each after his own style, and pre-Raphaelitism pa.s.sed away as it had arisen, though not without leaving a powerful stamp on English art, especially in decoration.

Rossetti, an Italian by birth though English by adoption, was the type of the Brotherhood. He was more of a poet than a painter, took most of his subjects from Dante, and painted as he wrote, in a mystical romantic spirit. He was always of a retiring disposition and never exhibited publicly after he was twenty-eight years of age. As a draughtsman he was awkward in line and not always true in modelling.

In color he was superior to his a.s.sociates and had considerable decorative feeling. The shortcoming of his art, as with that of the others of the Brotherhood, was that in seeking truth of detail he lost truth of _ensemble_. This is perhaps better exemplified in the works of Holman Hunt. He has spent infinite pains in getting the truth of detail in his pictures, has travelled in the East and painted types, costumes, and scenery in Palestine to gain the historic truths of his Scriptural scenes; but all that he has produced has been little more than a survey, a report, a record of the facts. He has not made a picture. The insistence upon every detail has isolated all the facts and left them isolated in the picture. In seeking the minute truths he has overlooked the great truths of light, air, and setting. His color has always been crude, his values or relations not well preserved, and his brush-work hard and tortured.

Millais showed some of this disjointed effect in his early work when he was a member of the Brotherhood. He did not hold to his early convictions however, and soon abandoned the pre-Raphaelite methods for a more conventional style. He has painted some remarkable portraits and some excellent figure pieces, and to-day holds high rank in English art; but he is an uneven painter, often doing weak, harshly-colored work. Moreover, the English tendency to tell stories with the paint-brush finds in Millais a faithful upholder. At his best he is a strong painter.

Madox Brown (1821-1893) never joined the Brotherhood, though his leaning was toward its principles. He had considerable dramatic power, with which he ill.u.s.trated historic scenes, and among contemporary artists stood well. The most decided influence of pre-Raphaelitism shows in Burne-Jones (1833-), a pupil of Rossetti, and perhaps the most original painter now living[18] of the English school. From Rossetti he got mysticism, sentiment, poetry, and from a.s.sociation with Swinburne and William Morris, the poets, something of the literary in art, which he has put forth with artistic effect. He has not followed the Brotherhood in its pursuit of absolute truth of fact, but has used facts for decorative effect in line and color. His ability to fill a given s.p.a.ce gracefully, shows with fine results in his pictures, as in his stained-gla.s.s designs. He is a good draughtsman and a rather rich colorist, but in brush-work somewhat labored, stippled, and unique in dryness. He is a man of much imagination, and his conceptions, though ill.u.s.trative of literature, do not suffer thereby, because his treatment does not sacrifice the artistic. He has been the b.u.t.t of considerable shallow laughter from time to time, like many another man of power. Albert Moore (1840-1893), a graceful painter of a decorative ideal type, rather follows the Rossetti-Burne-Jones example, and is an ill.u.s.tration of the influence of pre-Raphaelitism.

[Footnote 18: Died 1898.]

OTHER FIGURE AND PORTRAIT PAINTERS: Among the contemporary painters Sir Frederick Leighton (1830-1896), President of the Royal Academy, is ranked as a fine academic draughtsman, but not a man with the color-sense or the brushman's quality in his work. Watts (1818-1904) is perhaps an inferior technician, and in color is often sombre and dirty; but he is a man of much imagination, occasionally rises to grandeur in conception, and has painted some superb portraits, notably the one of Walter Crane. Orchardson (1835-) is more of a painter, pure and simple, than any of his contemporaries, and is a knowing if somewhat mannered colorist. Erskine Nicol (1825-), Faed[19] (1826-), Calderon (1833-), Boughton (1834-1905), Frederick Walker (1840-1875), Stanhope Forbes, Stott of Oldham and in portraiture Holl (1845-1890) and Herkomer may be mentioned.

[Footnote 19: Died 1900.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 101.--WATTS. LOVE AND DEATH.]

LANDSCAPE AND MARINE PAINTERS: In the department of landscape there are many painters in England of contemporary importance. Vicat Cole (1833-1893) had considerable exaggerated reputation as a depicter of sunsets and twilights; Cecil Lawson (1851-1882) gave promise of great accomplishment, and lived long enough to do some excellent work in the style of the French Rousseau, mingled with an influence from Gainsborough; Alfred Parsons is a little hard and precise in his work, but one of the best of the living men; and W. L. Wyllie is a painter of more than average merit. In marines Hook (1819-) belongs to the older school, and is not entirely satisfactory. The most modern and the best sea-painter in England is Henry Moore (1831-1895), a man who paints well and gives the large feeling of the ocean with fine color qualities. Some other men of mark are Clausen, Brangwyn, Ouless, Steer, Bell, Swan, McTaggart, Sir George Reid.

MODERN SCOTCH SCHOOL: There is at the present time a school of art in Scotland that seems to have little or no affinity with the contemporary school of England. Its painters are more akin to the Dutch and the French, and in their coloring resemble, in depth and quality, the work of Delacroix. Much of their art is far enough removed from the actual appearance of nature, but it is strong in the sentiment of color and in decorative effect. The school is represented by such men as James Guthrie, E. A. Walton, James Hamilton, George Henry, E. A. Hornel, Lavery, Melville, Crawhall, Roche, Lawson, McBride, Morton, Reid Murray, Spence, Paterson.

PRINc.i.p.aL WORKS: English art cannot be seen to advantage, outside of England. In the Metropolitan Museum, N. Y., and in private collections like that of Mr. William H. Fuller in New York,[20] there are some good examples of the older men--Reynolds, Constable, Gainsborough, and their contemporaries. In the Louvre there are some indifferent Constables and some good Boningtons. In England the best collection is in the National Gallery. Next to this the South Kensington Museum for Constable sketches. Elsewhere the Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Windsor galleries, and the private collections of the late Sir Richard Wallace, the Duke of Westminster, and others. Turner is well represented in the National Gallery, though his oils have suffered through time and the use of fugitive pigments. For the living men, their work may be seen in the yearly exhibitions at the Royal Academy and elsewhere. There are comparatively few English pictures in America.

[Footnote 20: Dispersed, 1898.]

CHAPTER XX.

AMERICAN PAINTING.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED: _American Art Review_; Amory, _Life of Copley_; _The Art Review_; Benjamin, _Contemporary Art in America_; _Century Magazine_; Caffin, _American Painters_; Clement and Hutton, _Artists of the Nineteenth Century_; c.u.mmings, _Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design_; Downes, _Boston Painters_ (_in Atlantic Monthly Vol. 62_); Dunlap, _Arts of Design in United States_; Flagg, _Life and Letters of Washington Allston_; Galt, _Life of West_; Isham, _History of American Painting_; Knowlton, _W.

M. Hunt_; Lester, _The Artists of America_; Mason, _Life and Works of Gilbert Stuart_; Perkins, _Copley_; _Scribner's Magazine_; Sheldon, _American Painters_; Tuckerman, _Book of the Artists_; Van d.y.k.e, _Art for Art's Sake_; Van Rensselaer, _Six Portraits_; Ware, _Lectures on Allston_; White, _A Sketch of Chester A. Harding_.

AMERICAN ART: It is hardly possible to predicate much about the environment as it affects art in America. The result of the climate, the temperament, and the mixture of nations in the production or non-production of painting in America cannot be accurately computed at this early stage of history. One thing only is certain, and that is, that the building of a new commonwealth out of primeval nature does not call for the production of art in the early periods of development. The first centuries in the history of America were devoted to securing the necessities of life, the energies of the time were of a practical nature, and art as an indigenous product was hardly known.

After the Revolution, and indeed before it, a hybrid portraiture, largely borrowed from England, began to appear, and after 1825 there was an attempt at landscape painting; but painting as an art worthy of very serious consideration, came in only with the sudden growth in wealth and taste following the War of the Rebellion and the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. The best of American art dates from about 1878, though during the earlier years there were painters of note who cannot be pa.s.sed over unmentioned.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 102.--WEST. PETER DENYING CHRIST. HAMPTON CT.]

THE EARLY PAINTERS: The "limner," or the man who could draw and color a portrait, seems to have existed very early in American history.

Smibert (1684-1751), a Scotch painter, who settled in Boston, and Watson (1685?-1768), another Scotchman, who settled in New Jersey, were of this cla.s.s--men capable of giving a likeness, but little more.

They were followed by English painters of even less consequence. Then came Copley (1737-1815) and West (1738-1820), with whom painting in America really began. They were good men for their time, but it must be borne in mind that the times for art were not at all favorable.

West was a man about whom all the infant prodigy tales have been told, but he never grew to be a great artist. He was ambitious beyond his power, indulged in theatrical composition, was hot in color, and never was at ease in handling the brush. Most of his life was pa.s.sed in England, where he had a vogue, was elected President of the Royal Academy, and became practically a British painter. Copley was more of an American than West, and more of a painter. Some of his portraits are exceptionally fine, and his figure pieces, like Charles I.

demanding the Five Members of House of Commons are excellent in color and composition. C. W. Peale (1741-1827), a pupil of both Copley and West, was perhaps more fortunate in having celebrated characters like Washington for sitters than in his art. Trumbull (1756-1843) preserved on canvas the Revolutionary history of America and, all told, did it very well. Some of his compositions, portraits, and miniature heads in the Yale Art School at New Haven are drawn and painted in a masterful manner and are as valuable for their art as for the incidents which they portray.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 103.--GILBERT STUART. WASHINGTON (UNFINISHED).

BOSTON MUS.]

Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) was the best portrait-painter of all the early men, and his work holds very high rank even in the schools of to-day. He was one of the first in American art-history to show skilful accuracy of the brush, a good knowledge of color, and some artistic sense of dignity and carriage in the sitter. He was not always a good draughtsman, and he had a manner of laying on pure colors without blending them that sometimes produced sharpness in modelling; but as a general rule he painted a portrait with force and with truth. He was a pupil of Alexander, a Scotchman, and afterward an a.s.sistant to West. He settled in Boston, and during his life painted most of the great men of his time, including Washington.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 104.--W. M. HUNT. LUTE PLAYER.]

Vanderlyn (1776-1852) met with adversity all his life long, and perhaps never expressed himself fully. He was a pupil of Stuart, studied in Paris and Italy, and his a.s.sociations with Aaron Burr made him quite as famous as his pictures. Washington Allston (1779-1843) was a painter whom the Bostonians have ranked high in their art-history, but he hardly deserved such position. Intellectually he was a man of lofty and poetic aspirations, but as an artist he never had the painter's sense or the painter's skill. He was an aspiration rather than a consummation. He cherished notions about ideals, dealt in imaginative allegories, and failed to observe the pictorial character of the world about him. As a result of this, and poor artistic training, his art had too little basis on nature, though it was very often satisfactory as decoration. Rembrandt Peale (1787-1860), like his father, was a painter of Washington portraits of mediocre quality. Jarvis (1780-1834) and Sully (1783-1872) were both British born, but their work belongs here in America, where most of their days were spent. Sully could paint a very good portrait occasionally, though he always inclined toward the weak and the sentimental, especially in his portraits of women. Leslie (1794-1859) and Newton (1795-1835) were Americans, but, like West and Copley, they belong in their art more to England than to America. In all the early American painting the British influence may be traced, with sometimes an inclination to follow Italy in large compositions.

THE MIDDLE PERIOD in American art dates from 1825 to about 1878. During that time, something distinctly American began to appear in the landscape work of Doughty (1793-1856) and Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Both men were substantially self-taught, though Cole received some instruction from a portrait-painter named Stein. Cole during his life was famous for his Hudson River landscapes, and for two series of pictures called The Voyage of Life and The Course of Empire. The latter were really epic poems upon canvas, done with much blare of color and literary explanation in the t.i.tle. His best work was in pure landscape, which he pictured with considerable accuracy in drawing, though it was faulty in lighting and gaudy in coloring. Brilliant autumn scenes were his favorite subjects. His work had the merit of originality and, moreover, it must be remembered that Cole was one of the beginners in American landscape art. Durand (1796-1886) was an engraver until 1835, when he began painting portraits, and afterward developed landscape with considerable power. He was usually simple in subject and realistic in treatment, with not so much insistence upon brilliant color as some of his contemporaries. Kensett (1818-1872) was a follower in landscape of the so-called Hudson River School of Cole and others, though he studied seven years in Europe. His color was rather warm, his air hazy, and the general effect of his landscape that of a dreamy autumn day with poetic suggestions. F. E. Church (1826-[A]) was a pupil of Cole, and has followed him in seeking the grand and the startling in mountain scenery.

With Church should be mentioned a number of artists--Hubbard (1817-1888), Hill (1829-,) Bierstadt (1830-),[21] Thomas Moran (1837-)--who have achieved reputation by canvases of the Rocky Mountains and other expansive scenes. Some other painters of smaller canvases belong in point of time, and also in spirit, with the Hudson River landscapists--painters, too, of considerable merit, as David Johnson (1827-), Bristol (1826-), Sandford Gifford (1823-1880), McEntee (1828-1891), and Whittredge (1820-), the last two very good portrayers of autumn scenes; A. H. Wyant (1836-1892), one of the best and strongest of the American landscapists; Bradford (1830-1892) and W. T. Richards (1833-), the marine-painters.

[Footnote 21: Died, 1900.]