FOOTNOTES:

Guide de l'Amateur au Musée du Louvre(Paris, 1882).

FOOTNOTES:20Private audiences of the King.

20Private audiences of the King.

After her 3,700 battles with the Moors and the conquest of Granada, Spain had a splendid outburst of literary and artistic glory. In painting, the four schools of Valencia, Toledo, Madrid, and Seville suddenly shone forth with that conception of the real and that care for sharp relief which they owed to the brilliancy of their sunshine, while amid the fogs of the North the outline is more wavering and the vision less clear. Under the influence of this original realism, their works instinctively reproduced that two-fold character which the land of Spain, smiling in her valleys and savage in her mountains, shows in sharp contrast. But the Spaniards are, in truth, much more realistic in their execution than in their inspiration.

The school of Seville, founded by Luis de Vargas, counted among its illustrious masters the greatest painter of that sunlit and passionate Andalusia, Murillo (Bartolomé-Estéban), 1617-1682, Spain's most popular painter, "the painter of the Conceptions," as she called him.

The Immaculate Conception. Murillo.The Immaculate Conception.Murillo.

The Immaculate Conception.Murillo.

His uncle, Juan del Castillo, a mediocre artist but a good teacher, initiated him into his dry, stiff, and hard manner,—that of the old Florentine school. In his studio young Estéban Murillo had young Pedro de Moya as afellow-student. One day the former took a fancy to go to Cadiz, where, miserable enough, he painted on pieces of serge some Madonnas for traffic in the West Indies, while the latter went to London to work in Van Dyck's studio. On his return Pedro de Moya brought several studies of the Flemish master, and Murillo, suddenly revolutionized and suddenly illuminated, no longer dreamed of anything but of going to Flanders or Italy, passing—happily—through Madrid. In Madrid, the Velasquez of the Court of Charles II. stopped him on the way, gave him admission to the royal collections, where he copied Titian, Veronese, and Rubens, and then opened his purse to him, and, lastly, revealed the secrets of his mighty art.

Thus taught and thus inspired, Murillo returned to Seville, where he settled once for all, immuring himself in his studio, where—modest, timid, and gentle—he lived with that single love for his art which soon enriched him, two years later adding to it the adoration of his wife, a noble lady of Pilas. It was from this studio that almost all of his laborious, numerous, and superb works issued, sometimes scarcely signed. From the very beginning, Murillo possessed all the qualities of a great master, and henceforth we have only to separate his own personality and originality.

Murillo had three periods, as he also had three styles according to the nature of the subjects he had to treat: the first period, under the influence of the Florentine formulas of Juan del Castillo, was somewhat that of happy and masterly imitations; the second, under the memories of Van Dyck, brought back by Pedro de Moya and of thecopies painted at Madrid, belongs to the Flemish school. But, at thirty-five, in full possession of his genius, he revealshimself, with his superb colouring, his consummate ease, his great science, his rich and inexhaustible imagination, his exquisite and tender sentiment, and his harmony, often produced with feminine delicacy and childish grace, with his vigour, his trivialities, and his mysticism.

The genius of Murillo, in fact, obeyed a double current, which carried him forward, on the one hand towards the sky, and on the other towards the earth, towards the Catholic ideal or towards vulgar realities, gentle Madonnas alternately with knavish beggars. Very sincerely and observantly religious, with the contemplative soul of the land of great men and great mysteries, Saint John of the Cross and Saint Theresa, this chaste artist, who never painted a nude woman, has the exalted sentiment of faith of the Spanish artists, a sentiment which is somewhat ennobled by their realism of nature.

"Why don't you finish that Christ?" asked one of his friends.

"I am waiting until he comes to speak to me," replied Murillo.

With these works he enriched the chapter-house of the Seville Cathedral, the Hospital de la Caridad, that of the Hospital de los Venerables, the convents of the Capuchins, the Augustines, etc.

I have said that Murillo had three styles, almost three pencils, not like the pencils of gold, of silver, and of iron that the Venetians attributed to the unequal genius of Tintoret, but in sympathy with the subjects he had to treat. TheSpaniards have distinguished and qualified these styles as follows:Frio, calido y vaporoso, cold, warm, and vaporous.

In the cold style he painted broadly, boldly, and frankly his beggars and hismuchachos, so true to life and in strong relief, with a certain brutality almost approaching triviality. A very well-known work of this kind is thePouilleuxin the Museum of the Louvre, and a masterpiece in the Pinacothek of Munich, the Grandmother and Infant. He sought these types in some old Moorish dwelling, on the deck of a ship from Tunis or Tripoli anchored in a Spanish harbour, or in among a band of wanderingGitanoson the banks of the Guadalquivir.

In the vaporous manner, which he used in rendering the ecstasies of the saints, he painted (under indescribable transparencies of light and atmospheric shade which is really only extinguished light),Saint Francis in Ecstasy,The Angel Kitchen(Miracle of San Diego) running through several scales of tones in a marvellous chord and softening all the outlines "dulcemente perdidos," as Céan Bermudez says.

In his warm style, come hisAnnunciations,Conceptions, and all those gentle and graceful Madonnas, sweet and poetic young mothers rather than divine Virgins "whom Jews might kiss and Infidels adore," as Pope says, and which remind us of Correggio's effeminacy, unknown to Murillo, and in which he plays with ease with harmonies, contrasts, and reflections of colour.

The Immaculate Conception, in the National Museum of the Louvre, is of this style. Certainly it is not more beautifulthan theConceptionin Madrid, of such extraordinary brilliance, and of such a virginal expression of innocence, piety, and melancholy; and above all not more beautiful than that of Seville—The Great Conception, or thePearl of Conceptions, making the Virgin Mother's face into a beautiful and intense face of an archangel. That had its day of resounding triumph.

Every one knows that Marshal Soult accepted this work in Spain for the pardon of two monks condemned to be hanged as spies. On the 29th of May, 1852, this canvas was sold at auction. Around it the greatest nations were represented with their rival gold, and loud applause accompanied each royal bid. When, for the sum of 615,300 francs, it was knocked down—"To France, gentlemen!" cried the Count de Nieuwerkerke—then broke forth the delirium of a battle won.

In a diaphanous atmosphere gilded with an invisible clearness as of Paradise, the winged heads and bodies of little angels are moving: the former gracefully grouped, the latter boldly and skilfully disposed. The celestial infants have followed all the way to the earth the rays of celestial light in its elusive gradations of colour under its imperceptible glazing. In the centre, in the act of ascent, the Virgin rises in ecstasy. One corner of a cloud, the crescent moon, and a masterly group of little angels, naked and enraptured, bear the Immaculate aloft. Gracefully and statuesquely posed, and broadly draped in a white robe with sober folds enriched by an ample scarf of light blue, she modestly hides her feet under the drapery and chastely crosses her hands over the breast in which she feels theconception of the Son of God operating. Her head under its dishevelled waves of black hair, a little turned back and bending slightly to one side, is raised to heaven with uplifted eyes and open mouth, as if to receive in every sense the flow of the spirit. The face, in the exquisite sweetness of a surrender to piety, reflects the bliss of Faith, of mystical voluptuousness, and divine ecstasy. The expression is religious, but the Virgin is human, and full of life in the firmness of her lines and the warmth of her flesh-tints. Beneath the suppleness of the drawing and the soft touches we recognize in Mary the Immaculate, the woman and even the Andalusian.

The whole work is a most harmonious and well-balanced composition, of the greatest opulence of colour, solidly laid in, and here and there lightly glazed over in the Venetian manner; a superb work this, in which Murillo has found the right point where his idealism and his materialism meet and mingle.

If I remember rightly, we know one hundred and thirty canvases of Murillo, to any one of which our admiration hesitates to award the pre-eminence,—and if the crown of laurels which a Pope laid upon the funeral couch of Raphael is the consecration of the sovereignty of the painter of Urbino for History, the universally popular name of Murillo has also sanctified the incontestable genius of the painter of Seville.

Jouin,Chefs-d'œuvre: Peinture, Sculpture Architecture(Paris, 1895-97).

It is a characteristic—(as far as I know, quite a universal one)—of the great masters, that they never expect you to look at them;—seem always rather surprised if you want to; and not overpleased. Tell them you are going to hang their picture at the upper end of the table at the next great City dinner, and that Mr. So-and-So will make a speech about it;—you produce no impression upon them whatever, or an unfavourable one. The chances are ten to one they send you the most rubbishy thing they can find in their lumber-room. But send for one of them in a hurry, and tell him the rats have gnawed a nasty hole behind the parlour door, and you want it plastered and painted over;—and he does you a masterpiece which the world will peep behind your door to look at for ever.

I have no time to tell you why this is so; nor do I know why, altogether, but so it is.

Giotto, then, is sent for, to paint this high chapel: I am not sure if he chose his own subjects from the life of St. Francis: I think so,—but of course can't reason on the guess securely. At all events, he would have much of his own way in the matter.

St. Francis before the Soldan. Giotto.St. Francis before the Soldan.Giotto.

St. Francis before the Soldan.Giotto.

Now you must observe that painting a Gothic chapel rightly is just the same thing as painting a Greek vase rightly. The chapel is merely the vase turned upside-down, and outside-in. The principles of decoration are exactly the same. Your decoration is to be proportioned to the size of your vase; to be together delightful when you look at the cup, or chapel, as a whole; to be various and entertaining when you turn the cup round; (you turnyourselfround in the chapel;) and to bend its heads and necks of figures about, as best it can, over the hollows, and ins and outs, so that anyhow, whether too long or too short—possible or impossible—they may be living, and full of grace. You will also please take it on my word to-day—in another morning walk you shall have proof of it—that Giotto was a pure Etruscan-Greek of the Thirteenth Century: converted indeed to worship St. Francis instead of Heracles; but as far as vase-painting goes, precisely the Etruscan he was before. This is nothing else than a large, beautiful, coloured Etruscan vase you have got, inverted over your heads like a diving-bell. The roof has the symbols of the three virtues of labour—Poverty, Chastity, Obedience.

A. Highest on the left side, looking to the window. The life of St. Francis begins in his renunciation of the world.

B. Highest on the right side. His new life is approved and ordained by the authority of the church.

C. Central on the left side. He preaches to his own disciples.

D. Central on the right side. He preaches to the heathen.

E. Lowest on the left side. His burial.

F. Lowest on the right side. His power after death.

Besides these six subjects, there are, on the sides of the window, the four great Franciscan saints, St. Louis of France, St. Louis of Toulouse, St. Clare, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The Soldan, with an ordinary opera-glass, you may see clearly enough; and I think it will be first well to notice some technical points in it.

If the little virgin on the stairs of the temple reminded you of one composition of Titian's, this Soldan should, I think, remind you of all that is greatest in Titian; so forcibly, indeed, that for my own part, if I had been told that a careful early fresco by Titian had been recovered in Santa Croce, I could have believed both report and my own eyes, more quickly than I have been able to admit that this is indeed by Giotto. It is so great that—had its principles been understood—there was in reality nothing more to be taught of art in Italy; nothing to be invented afterwards except Dutch effects of light.

That there is "no effect of light" here arrived at, I beg you at once to observe as a most important lesson. The subject is St. Francis challenging the Soldan's Magi,—fire-worshippers—to pass with him through the fire, which is blazing red at his feet. It is so hot that the two Magi on the other side of the throne shield their faces. But it is represented simply as a red mass of writhing forms of flame; and casts no firelight whatever. There is no ruling colour on anybody's nose; there are no black shadows under anybody's chin; there are no Rembrandtesque gradations of gloom, or glitterings of sword-hilt and armour.

Is this ignorance, think you, in Giotto, and pure artlessness? He was now a man in middle life, having passed all his days in painting, and professedly, and almost contentiously, painting things as he saw them. Do you suppose he never saw fire cast firelight?—and he the friend of Dante! who of all poets is the most subtle in his sense of every kind of effect of light—though he has been thought by the public to know that of fire only. Again and again, his ghosts wonder that there is no shadow cast by Dante's body; and is the poet's friendbecausea painter, likely, therefore, not to have known that mortal substance casts shadow, and terrestrial flame, light? Nay, the passage in thePurgatoriowhere the shadows from the morning sunshine make the flames redder, reaches the accuracy of Newtonian science, and does Giotto, think you, all the while, see nothing of the sort?

The fact was, he saw light so intensely that he never for an instant thought of painting it. He knew that to paint the sun was as impossible as to stop it; and he was no trickster, trying to find out ways of seeming to do what he did not. I can paint a rose,—yes; and I will. I can't paint a red-hot coal; and I won't try to, nor seem to. This was just as natural and certain a process of thinking withhim, as the honesty of it, and true science, were impossible to the false painters of the Sixteenth Century.

Nevertheless, what his art can honestly do to make you feel as much as he wants you to feel, about this fire, he will do; and that studiously. That the fire beluminousor not, is no matter just now. But that the fire ishot, he would have you to know. Now, will you notice whatcolours he has used in the whole picture. First, the blue background, necessary to unite it with the other three subjects, is reduced to the smallest possible space. St. Francis must be in grey, for that is his dress; also the attendant of one of the Magi is in grey; but so warm, that, if you saw it by itself, you would call it brown. The shadow behind the throne, which Giotto knows hecanpaint, and therefore does, is grey also. The rest of the picture21in at least six-sevenths of its area—is either crimson, gold, orange, purple, or white, all as warm as Giotto could paint them; and set off by minute spaces only of intense black,—the Soldan's fillet at the shoulders, his eyes, beard, and the points necessary in the golden pattern behind. And the whole picture is one glow.

A single glance round at the other subjects will convince you of the special character in this; but you will recognize also that the four upper subjects in which St. Francis's life and zeal are shown, are all in comparatively warm colours, while the two lower ones—of the death, and the visions after it—have been kept as definitely sad and cold.

Necessarily, you might think, being full of monks' dresses. Not so. Was there any need for Giotto to have put the priest at the foot of the dead body, with the black banner stooped over it in the shape of a grave? Might he not, had he chosen, in either fresco, have made the celestial visions brighter? Might not St. Francis have appeared in the centre of a celestial glory to the dreaming Pope, or his soul been seen of the poor monk, risingthrough more radiant clouds? Look, however, how radiant, in the small space allowed out of the blue, they are in reality. You cannot anywhere see a lovelier piece of Giottesque colour, though here you have to mourn over the smallness of the piece, and its isolation. For the face of St. Francis himself is repainted, and all the blue sky; but the clouds and four sustaining angels are hardly retouched at all, and their iridescent and exquisitely graceful wings are left with really very tender and delicate care by the restorer of the sky. And no one but Giotto or Turner could have painted them.

For in all his use of opalescent and warm colour, Giotto is exactly like Turner, as, in his swift expressional power, he is like Gainsborough. All the other Italian religious painters work out their expression with toil; he only can give it with a touch. All the other great Italian colourists see only the beauty of colour, but Giotto also its brightness. And none of the others, except Tintoret, understood to the full its symbolic power; but with those—Giotto and Tintoret—there is always, not only a colour harmony, but a colour secret. It is not merely to make the picture glow, but to remind you that St. Francis preaches to a fire-worshipping king, that Giotto covers the wall with purple and scarlet;—and above, in the dispute at Assisi, the angry father is dressed in red, varying like passion; and the robe with which his protector embraces St. Francis, blue, symbolizing the peace of Heaven. Of course certain conventional colours were traditionally employed by all painters; but only Giotto and Tintoret invent a symbolism of their own for every picture. Thusin Tintoret's picture of the fall of the manna, the figure of God the Father is entirely robed in white, contrary to all received custom; in that of Moses striking the rock, it is surrounded by a rainbow. Of Giotto's symbolism in colour at Assisi I have given account elsewhere.22

You are not to think, therefore, the difference between the colour of the upper and lower frescos unintentional. The life of St. Francis was always full of joy and triumph. His death, in great suffering, weariness, and extreme humility. The tradition of him reverses that of Elijah: living, he is seen in the chariot of fire; dying, he submits to more than the common sorrow of death.

There is, however, much more than a difference in colour between the upper and lower frescos. There is a difference in manner which I cannot account for; and above all, a very singular difference in skill,—indicating, it seems to me, that the two lower were done long before the others, and afterwards united and harmonized with them. It is of no interest to the general reader to pursue this question; but one point he can notice quickly, that the lower frescos depend much on a mere black or brown outline of the features, while the faces above are evenly and completely painted in the most accomplished Venetian manner:—and another, respecting the management of the draperies, contains much interest for us.

Giotto never succeeded, to the very end of his days, in representing a figure lying down, and at ease. It is one of the most curious points in all his character. Just the thing which he could study from nature without the smallesthindrance, is the thing he never can paint; while subtleties of form and gesture, which depend absolutely on their momentariness, and actions in which no model can stay for an instant he seizes with infallible accuracy.

Not only has the sleeping Pope, in the right hand lower fresco, his head laid uncomfortably on his pillow, but all the clothes on him are in awkward angles, even Giotto's instinct for lines of drapery failing him altogether when he has to lay it on a reposing figure. But look at the folds of the Soldan's robe over his knees. None could be more beautiful or right; and it is to me wholly inconceivable that the two paintings should be within even twenty years of each other in date—the skill in the upper one is so supremely greater. We shall find, however, more than mere truth in its casts of drapery, if we examine them.

They are so simply right, in the figure of the Soldan, that we do not think of them;—we see him only, not his dress. But we see dress first, in the figures of the discomfited Magi. Very fully draped personages these, indeed,—with trains, it appears four yards long, and bearers of them.

The one nearest the Soldan has done his devoir as bravely as he could; would fain go up to the fire, but cannot; is forced to shield his face, though he has not turned back. Giotto gives him full sweeping breadth of fold; what dignity he can;—a man faithful to his profession, at all events.

The next one has no such courage. Collapsed altogether, he has nothing more to say for himself or his creed. Giotto hangs the cloak upon him in Ghirlandajo's fashion, as from a peg, but with ludicrous narrowness of fold. Literally, heis a "shut-up" Magus—closed like a fan. He turns his head away, hopelessly. And the last Magus shows nothing but his back, disappearing through the door.

Opposed to them, in a modern work, you would have had a St. Francis standing as high as he could in his sandals, contemptuous, denunciatory; magnificently showing the Magi the door. No such thing, says Giotto. A somewhat mean man; disappointing even in presence—even in feature; I do not understand his gesture, pointing to his forehead—perhaps meaning, "my life, or my head, upon the truth of this." The attendant monk behind him is terror-struck; but will follow his master. The dark Moorish servants of the Magi show no emotion—will arrange their masters' trains as usual, and decorously sustain their retreat.

Lastly, for the Soldan himself. In a modern work, you would assuredly have had him staring at St. Francis with his eyebrows up, or frowning thunderously at the Magi, with them bent as far down as they would go. Neither of these aspects does he bear according to Giotto. A perfect gentleman and king, he looks on his Magi with quiet eyes of decision; he is much the noblest person in the room—though an infidel, the true hero of the scene, far more so than St. Francis. It is evidently the Soldan whom Giotto wants you to think of mainly, in this picture of Christian missionary work.

He does not altogether take the view of the Heathen which you would get in an Exeter Hall meeting. Does not expatiate on their ignorance, their blackness, or their nakedness. Does not at all think of the Florentine Islingtonand Pentonville, as inhabited by persons in every respect superior to the Kings of the East; nor does he imagine every other religion but his own to be log-worship. Probably the people who really worship logs—whether in Persia or Pentonville—will be left to worship logs to their hearts' content, thinks Giotto. But to those who worshipGod, and who have obeyed the laws of heaven written in their hearts, and numbered the stars of it visible to them,—to these, a nearer star may rise; and a higher God be revealed.

You are to note, therefore, that Giotto's Soldan is the type of all noblest religion and law, in countries where the name of Christ has not been preached. There was no doubt what king or people should be chosen: the country of the three Magi had already been indicated by the miracle of Bethlehem; and the religion and morality of Zoroaster were the purest, and in spirit the oldest, in the heathen world. Therefore, when Dante in the nineteenth and twentieth books of the Paradise, gives his final interpretation of the law of human and divine justice in relation to the gospel of Christ—the lower and enslaved body of the heathen being represented by St. Philip's convert ("Christians like these the Ethiop shall condemn")—the noblest state of heathenism is at once chosen, as by Giotto: "What may thePersianssay untoyourkings?" Compare also Milton,—

"At the Soldan's chair,Defied the best of Paynim chivalry."

"At the Soldan's chair,

Defied the best of Paynim chivalry."

Mornings in Florence(Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent, 1875).

FOOTNOTES:21The floor has been repainted; but though its grey is now heavy and cold, it cannot kill the splendour of the rest.22Fors Clavigerafor September, 1874.

21The floor has been repainted; but though its grey is now heavy and cold, it cannot kill the splendour of the rest.

22Fors Clavigerafor September, 1874.

"Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve),That, ere the snake's her sweet tongue could deceive,And her enchanted hair was the first gold.And still she sits, young while the earth is old,And, subtly by herself contemplative,Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave,Till heart and body and life are in its hold."The rose and poppy are her flowers; for whereIs he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scentAnd soft-shed kisses and soft-shed sleep shall snare?Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so wentThy spell through him, and left his straight neck bentAnd round his heart one strangling golden hair."Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

"Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told

(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve),

That, ere the snake's her sweet tongue could deceive,

And her enchanted hair was the first gold.

And still she sits, young while the earth is old,

And, subtly by herself contemplative,

Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave,

Till heart and body and life are in its hold.

"The rose and poppy are her flowers; for whereIs he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scentAnd soft-shed kisses and soft-shed sleep shall snare?Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so wentThy spell through him, and left his straight neck bentAnd round his heart one strangling golden hair."Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

"The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where

Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent

And soft-shed kisses and soft-shed sleep shall snare?

Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went

Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent

And round his heart one strangling golden hair."

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Lilith. Rossetti.Lilith.Rossetti.

Lilith.Rossetti.

It is well-known that the painter of whom I now propose to speak has never suffered exclusion or acceptance at the hand of any academy. To such acceptance or such rejection all other men of any note have been and may be liable. It is not less well known that his work must always hold its place as second in significance and value to no work done by any painter of his time. Among the many great works of Mr. D.G. Rossetti, I know of none greater than his two latest. These are types ofsensual beauty and spiritual, the siren and the sibyl. The one is a woman of the type of Adam's first wife; she is a living Lilith with ample splendour of redundant hair;

"She excelsAll women in the magic of her locks;And when she winds them round a young man's neckShe will not ever set him free again."

"She excels

All women in the magic of her locks;

And when she winds them round a young man's neck

She will not ever set him free again."

Clothed in soft white garments, she draws out through a comb the heavy mass of hair like thick spun gold to fullest length; her head leans back half sleepily, superb and satiate with its own beauty; the eyes are languid, without love in them or hate; the sweet luxurious mouth has the patience of pleasure fulfilled and complete, the warm repose of passion sure of its delight. Outside, as seen in the glimmering mirror, there is full summer; the deep and glowing leaves have drunk in the whole strength of the sun. The sleepy splendour of the picture is a fit raiment for the idea incarnate of faultless fleshly beauty and peril of pleasure unavoidable. For this serene and sublime sorceress there is no life but of the body; with spirit (if spirit there be) she can dispense. Were it worth her while for any word to divide those terrible tender lips, she too might say with the hero of the most perfect and exquisite book of modern times—Mademoiselle de Maupin—"Je trouve la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la vertu."Of evil desire or evil impulse she has nothing; and nothing of good. She is indifferent, equable, magnetic; she charms and draws down the souls of men by pure force of absorption, in no wise wilful or malignant; outside herself she cannot live, she cannot even see: and because ofthis she attracts and subdues all men at once in body and in spirit. Beyond the mirror she cares not to look, and could not.

"Ma mia suora Rahel mai non si smaga,Dal suo miraglio, e siede tutto 'l giorno."

"Ma mia suora Rahel mai non si smaga,

Dal suo miraglio, e siede tutto 'l giorno."

So, rapt in no spiritual contemplation, she will sit to all time, passive and perfect: the outer light of a sweet spring day flooding and filling the massive gold of her hair. By the reflection in a deep mirror of fervent foliage from without, the chief chord of stronger colour is touched in this picture; next in brilliance and force of relief is the heap of curling and tumbling hair on which the sunshine strikes; the face and head of the siren are withdrawn from the full stroke of the light.

Essays and Studies(London, 1875).

Italy, that beautiful enchantress, whose irresistible charms have caused many of Germany's greatest men to forget their native land, and array themselves beneath her colours, did not fail to exercise over Dürer, in the course of the year and more that he spent beyond the Alps, that subtle influence which elevates the understanding and expands the mind. He thought, as did Goethe after him, with a sort of shudder, of his return to cloudy skies, and of the less easy nature of the life which awaited him at home. But, though he enjoyed himself very much at Venice, and gave in willingly in many external things to the prevailing taste there, the essential nature of his art remained untouched by foreign influences, and he returned to Nuremberg unitalianized, and true to his original principles. The fame which his works enjoyed in Italy only encouraged him to continue in the path he had already chosen. Perhaps the exuberance of life displayed in Venetian painting inspired him, even under the altered circumstances of his home life, with the determination to devote all his energies to large easel pictures. To theAdoration of the Magiin 1504, and theFeast of the Rosaryin 1506, succeeded theAdam and Evein 1507, theMartyrdom of the Ten Thousand Saintsin 1508, theAssumption of the Virginin 1509, and the All Saints picture orAdoration of the Trinityof 1511. Dürer was at the height of his power when he created these masterpieces, small, indeed, in number, but remarkable for their conception, composition, and entire execution by his own hand. To complete a large picture to his satisfaction, Dürer required the same time as Schiller did for a tragedy, viz., a whole year....

Adoration of the Magi. Dürer.Adoration of the Magi.Dürer.

Adoration of the Magi.Dürer.

It was in the year 1504 that Dürer finished the first great picture, which, from its excellent state of preservation, must have been entirely executed with the greatest care by his own hand, even to the most minute detail. This picture is theAdoration of the Magi, now in the Tribune of the Uffizi at Florence. Mary sits on the left, looking like the happiest of German mothers, with the enchantingly naïve Infant on her knees; the three Wise Men from the East, in magnificent dresses glittering with gold, approach, deeply moved, and with various emotions depicted on their countenances, while the whole creation around seems to share their joyous greeting, even to the flowers and herbs, and to the great stag-beetle and two white butterflies, which are introduced after the manner of Wolgemut. The sunny green on copse and mountain throws up the group better than the conventional nimbus could have done. The fair-haired Virgin, draped entirely in blue with a white veil, recalls vividly the same figure in the Paumgärtner altarpiece. Aërial and linear perspective are still imperfect, but the technical treatment of the figures is as finished as in Dürer's best pictures of the later period. The outlines are sharp, thecolours very liquid, laid on without doubt in tempera, and covered with oil glazes; the whole tone exceedingly fresh, clear, and brilliant. If it was Barbari's fine work which incited Dürer to this delicate and careful method of execution, he has certainly far surpassed the Venetian, not only in form and ideas, but also in the solidity of his technique. This technique is undoubtedly of Northern origin, as is also the harmony of colour, which Dürer here realizes, and does not soon again abandon. It must not be forgotten, however, that the difference between this technique and that practised by Giovanni Bellini is one of degree and not of principle; judging at least by the unfinished painting of Giovanni's in the Uffizi, in which the design is sketched either with the pencil or brush, and the colours then laid on in tempera, and afterwards repeatedly covered with oil glazes. Dürer appears to have owed the opportunity of producing this his first masterpiece in painting to a commission from the Elector Frederick of Saxony. Christian II. presented it to the Emperor Rudolph II. in 1603, and in the last century it was sent from the imperial gallery, in exchange for thePresentation in the Temple, by Fra Bartolomeo, to Florence, where it now shines as a gem of German art amongst the renowned pictures in the Tribune of the Uffizi.

The Life and Works of Albert Dürer, translated from the German and edited by Fred. A. Eaton (London, 1882).

Nevertheless, if the main circumstances of the painter's career should still remain unaltered, there must always be a side of his work which will continue to need interpretation. In addition to painting the faults and follies of his time, he was pre-eminently the pictorial chronicler of its fashions and its furniture. The follies endure; but the fashions pass away. In our day—a day which has witnessed the demolition of Northumberland House, the disappearance of Temple Bar, and the removal of we know not what other time-honoured and venerated landmarks—much in Hogarth's plates must seem as obscure as the cartouches on Cleopatra's Needle. Much more is speedily becoming so; and without some guidance the student will scarcely venture into that dark and doubtful rookery of tortuous streets and unnumbered houses—the London of the Eighteenth Century.

Marriage A-la-Mode. Hogarth.Marriage A-la-Mode.Hogarth.

Marriage A-la-Mode.Hogarth.

Were it not beyond the reasonable compass of a methodical memoir, it would be a pleasant task to loiter for a while in that vanished London of Hogarth, of Fielding, of Garrick;—that London of Rocque's famous map of 1746, when "cits" had their country-boxes and "gazebos" at Islington and Hackney, and fine gentlemen their villas atMaryboneandChelsey; when duels were fought in the "fields" behind the British Museum, and there was a windmill at the bottom of Rathbone Place. We should find the Thames swarming with noisy watermen, and the streets with thick-calved Irish chairmen; we should see the old dusky oil-lamps lighted feebly with the oil that dribbled on the Rake when he went to Court; and the great creaking sign-boards that obscured the sky, and occasionally toppled on the heads of his Majesty's lieges beneath. We should note the sluggish kennels and the ill-paved streets; and rejoice in the additional facilities afforded for foot-passengers at the "new Buildings nearHanoverSquare." We might watch King George II. yawning in his Chapel Royal of St. James's, or follow Queen Caroline of Anspach in her walk on Constitution Hill. Or we might turn into the Mall, which is filled on summer evenings with aBeau-Mondeof cinnamon-coloured coats and pinknégligés. But the tour of Covent Garden (with its column and dial in the centre) would take at least a chapter, and the pilgrimage of Leicester Fields another. We should certainly assist at the Lord Mayor's Show; and we might, like better folks before us, be hopelessly engulfed in that westward-faring crowd, which, after due warning from the belfry of St. Sepulchre's, swept down the old Tyburn Road on "Execution Day" to see the last of Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers, or the highwayman James M'Lean. It is well, perhaps, that our limits are definitely restricted.

Moreover, much that we could do imperfectly with the pen, Hogarth has done imperishably with the graver.Essentially metropolitan in his tastes, there is little notable in the London of his day of which he has not left us some pictorial idea. He has painted the Green Park, the Mall, and Rosamond's Pond. He has shown us Covent Garden and St. James's Street; Cheapside and Charing Cross; Tottenham-Court Road and Hog-Lane, St. Giles. He has shown us Bridewell, Bedlam, and the Fleet Prison. Through a window in one print we see the houses on old London Bridge; in another it is Temple Bar, surmounted by the blackened and ghastly relics of Jacobite traitors. He takes us to a cock-fight in Bird Cage Walk, to a dissection in Surgeons' Hall. He gives us reception-rooms in Arlington Street, counting-houses in St. Mary Axe, sky-parlours in Porridge Island, and night-cellars in Blood-Bowl Alley. He reproduces the decorations of the Rose Tavern or of the Turk's Head Bagnio as scrupulously as the monsters at Dr. Misaubin's museum in St. Martin's Lane, or the cobweb over the poor-box in Mary-le-bone Old Church. The pictures on the walls, the Chinese nondescripts on the shelves, the tables and chairs, the pipes and punch-bowls, nay, the very tobacco and snuff, have all their distinctive physiognomy and prototypes. He gives us, unromanced and unidealized, "the form and pressure," the absolute details and accessories, the actualmise-en-scène, of the time in which he lived.23

But he has done much more than this. He has peopled his canvas with itsdramatis personæ,—with vivid portraits of the more strongly-marked actors in that cynical and sensual, brave and boastful, corrupt and patriotic age. Not, be it understood, with its Wolfes and Johnsons,—he was a humourist and a satirist, and goodness was no game for his pencil,—rather with its Lovats and Chartres, its Sarah Malcolms and its Shebbeares. He was a moralist after the manner of eighteenth-century morality, not savage like Swift, not ironical like Fielding, not tender-hearted at times like Johnson and Goldsmith; but unrelenting, uncompromising, uncompassionate. He drew vice and its consequences in a thoroughly literal and business-like way, neither sparing nor extenuating its details, wholly insensible to its seductions, incapable of flattering it even for a moment, preoccupied simply with catching its precise contortion of pleasure or of pain. In all his delineations, as in that famous design of Prud'hon's, we see Justice and Vengeance following hard upon the criminal....

A hint of the new series had already been given in theBattle of the Pictures, where the second scene, still inoffensively reposing upon the easel, is wantonly assaulted by a copy of theAldobrandini Marriage. In April following the set of engravings was issued, the subscription ticket being the etching of heads known asCharacters and Caricaturas. Plates I. and VI. were engraved by Scotin, Plates II. and III. by Baron, and Plates IV. and V. by Ravenet. Exactly two years earlier, Hogarth had heralded them by the following notification in theLondon Daily Post, and General Advertiserof April 2nd, 1743:

"Mr.Hogarthintends to publish by Subscription,six printsfrom Copper-Plates, engrav'd by the best Masters in Paris, after his own Paintings; representing a Variety ofModern Occurrences in High-Life, and calledMarriage A-la-Mode. Particular Care will be taken, that there may not be the least Objection to the Decency or Elegancy of the whole Work, and that none of the Characters represented shall be personal." Then follow the terms of subscription. The last quoted lines are probably a bark at some forgotten detraction, and if not actually ironical, doubtless about as sincere as Fielding's promise, in the Prologue to his first comedy, not to offend the ladies. Those who had found inelegancy and indecency in the previous productions of the painter, would still discover the same defects in the masterpiece he now submitted to the public. And although it may be said that the "characters" represented are not "personal" in a satirical sense, his precautions, as he himself tells us, "did not prevent a likeness being found for each head, for a general character will always bear some resemblance to a particular one."

But what, no doubt, interested his critical contemporaries even more than these preliminary protestations, was the painter's promise to represent, in his new work, "a variety of modern occurrences in high-life." Here, it may be admitted, was a proposition which certainly savoured of temerity. What could one whose pencil had scarcely travelled beyond the limits of St. Giles's, know of the inner secrets of St. James's? A Hervey or a Beauclerk, or even a Fielding, might have sufficed; but a Hogarth of Leicester Fields, whose only pretence to distinction (as High Lifeconceives it) was that he had run away with Thornhill's handsome daughter,—what special title had he to depict that charmed region of cards and folly, ringed with its long-resounding knockers, and flambeau-carrying footmen! This was, however, to reckon without genius, which over-leaps loftier barriers than these. It is true that the English Novel of Manners, which has since stimulated so many artists, had only just made its appearance; andPamelaandJoseph Andrewsbut falteringly foreshadowedClarissaandTom Jones. Yet there is nothing in the story ofMarriage A-la-Modewhich was beyond the powers of aspectator ab extra, always provided he were fairly acquainted with the Modelys and Wildairs of the stage, and the satires of Johnson and Pope. The plot, like that of all masterpieces, is extremely simple. An impoverished nobleman who marries his son to a rich citizen's daughter; a husband who, pursuing his own equivocal pleasures, resigns his wife to the temptations of opportunity; a foregone sequel and a tragic issue:—this material is of the oldest, and could make but slender claim to originality. Submitted to Colman or Garrick as thescenarioof a play for Yates and Mrs. Woffington, it would probably have been rejected as pitifully threadbare. Yet combined and developed under the brush of Hogarth, set in an atmosphere that makes it as vivid as nature itself, decorated with surprising fidelity, and enlivened by all the resources of the keenest humour, it passes out of the line of mere transcripts of life, and, retaining the merits of the specific and particular, becomes a representative and typical work, as articulate to-day, as direct and unhesitating in its teaching, as it was when it was first offered to the world.

How well-preserved, even now, these wonderful pictures are! It would almost seem as if Time, unreasoning in his anger, had determined to ignore in every way the audacious artist who treated him with such persistent indignity. Look at them in the National Gallery. Look, too, at the cracks and fissures in the Wilkies, the soiled rainbows of Turner,—the bituminous riding-habit of Lady Douro in Sir Edwin'sStory of Waterloo. But these paintings of William Hogarth are well-nigh as fresh to-day as when, new from the easel, they found their fortunate purchaser in Mr. Lane of Hillingdon. They are not worked like a Denner, it is true, and the artist is often less solicitous about his method than about the result of it; yet they are soundly, straight-forwardly, and skilfully executed. Lady Bingley's red hair, Carestini's nostril, are shown in the simplest and directest manner. Everywhere the desired effect is exactly produced, and without effort. Take, as an illustration, the inkstand in the first scene, with its bell and sand-caster. In these days it would be a patienttrompe-l'œil, probably better done than the figures using it. Here it is merely indicated, not elaborated; it holds its exact place as a piece of furniture, and nothing more. And at this point it may be observed that if in the ensuing descriptions we should speak of colour, the reader will remember we are describing, not the performances of Messrs. Ravenet and the rest, but Hogarth's original pictures at Trafalgar Square. It is the more necessary to bear this in mind, because, besides being reversed, the paintings frequently differ in detail from the engravings.

The first of the series represents the signing of the marriagecontract. The scene, as the artist is careful to signify by the ostentatious coronets on the furniture and accessories (they are to be discerned even on the crutches), is laid in the house of an earl, who, with his gouty foot swathed in flannels, seems with a superb—if somewhat stiff-jointed—dignity to be addressing certain pompous observations respecting himself and his pedigree (dating from William the Conqueror) to a sober-looking personage opposite, who, horn-spectacles on nose, is peering at the endorsement of the "Marriage Settlem^t of the R^t Hon^ble. Lord Vincent [Squanderfield]."24This second figure, which is that of a London merchant, with its turned-in toes, the point of the sword-sheath between the legs, and the awkward constraint of its attitude, forms an admirable contrast to the other. A massive gold chain denotes the wearer to be an alderman. Between the two is a third person, perhaps the merchant's confidential clerk or cashier, who holds out a "Mortgage" to the Earl. Gold and notes lie upon the table, where are also an inkstand, sealing-wax, and a lighted candle in which a "thief" is conspicuous. At the back of this trio is the betrothed couple—the earl's son and the alderman's daughter. It is, in fact, an alliance ofsacs et parchemins, in which the young people are involved rather than interested. The lady, who looks young and pretty in her bridal-dress, wears a mingled expression ofmauvaise honteand distaste for her position, and trifles with the ring, which she has strung upon her handkerchief, while a brisk and well-built young lawyer, who trims a pen, bends towards her with a whispered compliment. Meantime theViscount—a frail, effeminate-looking figure, holding an open snuff-box, from which he affectedly lifts a pinch—turns from hisfiancéewith a smirk of complacent foppery towards a pier-glass at his side. His wide-cuffed coat is light blue, his vest is loaded with embroidery. He wears an enormoussolitaire, and has high red heels to his shoes. Before him, in happy parody of the ill-matched pair, are two dogs in coupling-links:—the bitch sits up, alert and curious, her companion is lying down. The only other figure is that of an old lawyer, who, with a plan in his hand, and a gesture of contempt or wonder, looks through an open window at an ill-designed and partly-erected building, in front of which several idle servants are lounging or sitting. Like Pope's "Visto," the Earl has "a taste," and his taste, interrupted for the moment by lack of funds, is the ruinous one of bricks and mortar.

The pictures on the wall exemplify and satirize the fashion of the time. The largest is a portrait in the French style of one of the earl's ancestors, who traverses the canvas triumphantly. A cannon explodes below him, a comet is seen above; and in his right hand, notwithstanding his cuirass and voluminous Queen-Anne peruke, he brandishes the thunderbolt of Jupiter.Judith and Holofernes,St. Sebastian,The Murder of Abel,David and Goliath,The Martyrdom of St. Laurence, are some of the rest, all of which, it is perhaps needless to note, belong to those "dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental," against which we have already heard the painter inveigh. Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, isPharaoh in the Red Sea. From a sconce at the side,a Gorgon surveys the proceedings with astonishment. Hogarth has used a similar idea in theStrolling Actresses, where the same mask seems horrified at the airy freedom of the lightly-clad lady who there enacts the part of Diana.

In the picture of theContract, the young people and "Counsellor Silvertongue," as he has been christened by the artist, are placed in close proximity. These are the real actors in the drama. Buildingimmemor sepulcri, the old earl had but few years to live. Henceforth he is seen no more; and the alderman reappears only at the end of the story....

We have only dealt briefly with these concluding pictures, the decorations and accessories of which are to the full as minute and effective as those of the one that precede them. The furniture of the bagnio, with its portrait of Moll Flanders humorously continued by the sturdy legs of a Jewish soldier in the tapestryJudgment of Solomonbehind, the half-burned candle flaring in the draught of the open door and window, the reflection of the lantern on the ceiling and the shadow of the tongs on the floor, the horror-stricken look on the mask of the lady and the satanic grin on that of her paramour, all deserve notice. So do the gross Dutch pictures in the alderman's house, the sordid pewter plates and the sumptuous silver goblet, the stained table-cloth, the egg in rice, and the pig's head which the half-starved and ravenous dog is stealing. There is no defect of invention, no superfluity of detail, no purposeless stroke in this "owre true tale." From first to last it progresses steadily to its catastrophe by a forwardmarch of skilfully linked and fully developed incidents. It is like a novel of Fielding on canvas; and it seems inconceivable that, with this magnificent worken évidence, the critics of that age should have been contented to re-echo the opinion of Walpole that "as a painter Hogarth had but slender merit," and to cackle the foot-rule criticisms of the Rev. William Gilpin as to his ignorance of composition. But so it was. Not until that exhibition of his works at the British Institution in 1814, was it thoroughly understood how excellent and individual both as a designer and a colourist was this native artist, whom "Picture-dealers, Picture-cleaners, Picture-frame-makers, and other Connoisseurs"—to use his own graphically ironical words—had been allowed to rank below the third-rate copyists of third-rate foreigners.

Beyond the remark that the "jaded morning countenance" of the Viscount in Scene II. "lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as anything in Ecclesiastics," Lamb's incomparable essay inThe Reflectormakes no material reference toMarriage A-la-Mode. His comments, besides, are confined to the engravings. But Hazlitt, who saw the pictures in the above-mentioned exhibition in 1814, devotes much of his criticism to the tragedy of the Squanderfields, chiefly, it would seem, because Lamb had left the subject untouched. Hazlitt's own studies as an artist, his keen insight and his quick enthusiasm, made him a memorable critic of Hogarth, whose general characteristics he defines with admirable exactitude. Much quotation has made his description of the young Lord and Counsellor Silvertongue sufficiently familiar. But he is equally goodin his vignette of the younger woman in the episode at the Quack Doctor's, a creation which he rightly regards as one of Hogarth's most successful efforts. "Nothing," he says, "can be more striking than the contrast between the extreme softness of her person and the hardened indifference of her character. The vacant stillness, the docility to vice, the premature suppression of youthful sensibility, the doll-like mechanism of the whole figure, which seems to have no other feeling but a sickly sense of pain—show the deepest insight into human nature, and into the effects of those refinements in depravity, by which it has been good-naturedly asserted that 'vice loses half its evil in losing all its grossness.'" In the death of the Countess, again, he speaks thus of two of the subordinate characters:—"We would particularly refer to the captious, petulant self-sufficiency of the apothecary, whose face and figure are constructed on exact physiognomical principles, and to the fine example of passive obedience, and non-resistance in the servant, whom he is taking to task, and whose coat of green and yellow livery is as long and melancholy as his face. The disconsolate look, the haggard eyes, the open mouth, the comb sticking in the hair, the broken gapped teeth, which, as it were, hitch in an answer—everything about him denotes the utmost perplexity and dismay." Some other of Hazlitt's comments are more fanciful, as, for example, when he compares Lady Squanderfield's curl papers (in the "Toilet Scene") to a "wreath of half-blown flowers," and those of the macaroni-amateur to "achevaux-de-friseof horns, which adorn and fortify the lack-lustre expression and mild resignation of the face beneath."With his condemnation of the attitude of the husband, in the scene at the "Turk's Head Bagnio," as "one in which it would be impossible for him to stand, or even fall," it is difficult to coincide; and it is an illustration of the contradictions of criticism that this very figure should have been selected for especial praise, with particular reference to the charges made against the painter of defective drawing, by another critic who was not only as keenly sympathetic as Hazlitt, but was probably a better anatomist—the author ofRab and his Friends.

To Hazlitt's general estimate of Hogarth we shall not now refer. But his comparison of Hogarth and Wilkie may fairly be summarized in this place, because it contains so much excellent discrimination of the former. Wilkie, Hazlitt contends, is a simple realist; Hogarth is a comic painter. While one is a "serious, prosaic, literal narrator of facts," the other is a moral satirist, "exposing vice and folly in their most ludicrous points of view, and, with a profound insight into the weak sides of character and manners in all their tendencies, combinations, and contrasts.... He is carried away by a passion for theridiculous. His object is not so much 'to hold the mirror up to nature' as 'to show vice her own feature, scorn her own image.' He is so far from contenting himself with still-life that he is always on the verge of caricature, though without ever falling into it. He does not represent folly or vice in its incipient, or dormant, orgrubstate; but full-grown, with wings, pampered into all sorts of affectation, airy, ostentatious, and extravagant.... There is a perpetual collision of eccentricities—a tilt and tournament ofabsurdities; the prejudices and caprices of mankind are let loose, and set together by the ears, as in a bear-garden. Hogarth paints nothing but comedy or tragi-comedy. Wilkie paints neither one nor the other. Hogarth never looks at any object but to find out a moral or a ludicrous effect. Wilkie never looks at any object but to see that it is there.... In looking at Hogarth, you are ready to burst your sides with laughing at the unaccountable jumble of odd things which are brought together; you look at Wilkie's pictures with a mingled feeling of curiosity and admiration at the accuracy of the representation." The distinction thus drawn is, in the main, a just one. Yet, at certain points, Wilkie comes nearer to Hogarth than any other English artist; and that elegant amateur, Sir George Howland Beaumont, reasoned rightly when he judged the painter ofThe Village Politiciansto be, in his day, the only fit recipient of Hogarth's mahl-stick.

To return toMarriage A-la-Mode. Notwithstanding that the pictures were, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, announced for sale in 1745, it was five years before they actually found a purchaser, although, in the interval, they seem to have been freely exhibited both at the "Golden Head" and at Cock's Auction Rooms. In 1750, however, they were at last disposed of by another of those unfortunate schemes devised by Hogarth for disposing of his works. The bidding, said the announcement in theDaily Advertiser, was to be by written notes; no dealers in pictures were to be admitted as bidders; and the highest bidder at noon on the 6th June was to be the purchaser.

Whether this mode of sale, coupled with the characteristic manner of its notification, "disobliged the Town" or not, it is impossible to say; but it is certain that when Mr. Lane, "of Hillingdon, near Uxbridge," who was to become the lucky proprietor of the pictures, arrived on the date appointed at the "Golden Head," he found he was the only bidder who had put in an appearance.25In fact, there was no one in the room but the painter himself and his friend Dr. Parsons, Secretary to the Royal Society. The highest written offer having been declared to be £120, Mr. Lane, shortly before twelve, said he would "make the pounds guineas," but subsequently much to his credit, offered the artist a delay of some hours to find a better purchaser. An hour passed, and as, up to that time, no one had appeared, Hogarth, much mortified, surrendered the pictures to Mr. Lane, who thus became the owner of the artist's best work, and the finest pictorial satire of the century, for the modest sum of £126, which included Carlo Marratti frames that had cost Hogarth four guineas a-piece. Mr. Lane, who readily promised not to sell or clean the pictures without the knowledge of the painter, left them athis death to his nephew, Colonel J.F. Cawthorne, by whom they were put up to auction in March, 1792, but were bought in again for 910 guineas. In 1797 they were sold at Christie's for £1,381 to Mr. John Julius Angerstein, with the rest of whose collection they were acquired in 1824 for the National Gallery.

Back to Index Next