INTRODUCTION
Thehistorian who wishes to relate the history of painting in the nineteenth century is confronted with quite other demands than await him who undertakes the art of an earlier period. The greatest difficulty with which the latter has to cope is the deficiency of sources. He manifestly gropes in the dark with regard to the works of the masters as well as to the circumstances of their lives. After he has searched archives and libraries in order to collect his biographical material, the real critical problem awaits him. Even amongst the admittedly authentic works, those which are undated confront those whose chronology is certain. To these must be added those nameless ones, as to whose history there is a doubt; to these again, those whose origin is to be ascertained. It needs a quick eye to separate the schools and groups, and finally to recognise the notes which are peculiar to the master.
With none of these difficulties is the historian of modern art confronted. The painters of the nineteenth century have very seldom forgotten to attach a name and date to their works, and the circumstances of their lives are related with an accuracy that was, earlier, rarely the lot of the foremost men in history. It is all the more difficult, face to face with such a chaos of pictures, to discover the spiritual bond which connects them all, to construct a building out of the immense supply of accumulated bricks, the piled-up mass of rough material. The evolution of modern painting is more complicated and varied than that of the art of an earlier period, just as modern life itself is more complicated and varied than that of any previous age.
How quietly, slowly, and surely was the evolution of that older period carried out. One simple proportion was maintained between art and the universal life of culture. Customs, views of life and art, were so intimately bound up together, that the knowledge of the age in general naturally comprises that of art. Standing before some old altar-piece of the school of Cologne, it is as though one were watching in some broad high dome; everything is quiet all round, and the august figures in the picture lead their calm, grave existence in illustrious grandeur. The message of Christianity, “My kingdom is not of this world,” meets in art, too, with a clear expression. Humility and devotion are joined together, making for a refinement in the feeling of life that is unsurpassed in its hieratic tenderness and gracious innocence. In the fifteenth century, the age of discoveries, a new spirit entered the world. Commerce and navigation discovered new worlds, painting discovered life. Thehuman spirit grew freer and more joyous; it was no longer satisfied with yearning for the other world alone, it felt itself at home also in this world, in the glory of the earth. Pictures, too, were inspired with some of those joyous perceptions with which the citizens of the fifteenth century issued from their narrow walls out under God’s free heaven, something of that Easter Day mood inFaust. People still went on painting Madonnas and saints, subjects of a religion which had spread from the far East over the whole West; but with the severe simplicity of the heavenly, there was universal awakening of all the charm and roguery and energy of the earthly. It is the first virginal contact of the spirit with nature. On men’s works there rests the first morning-dew of spiritual life; they remind one of woodlands in spring: Botticelli, Van Eyck, Schongauer.
After the Italians had become vigorous realists in the fifteenth century, they rose in the sixteenth, the century of inspired humanism, to majesty. The time of hard grappling with the overwhelming fulness of actuality is over. Those great masterpieces ensue in which the unlaboured effort shines forth in the most felicitous achievement: Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian. At the same time the German manner is most directly opposed to the Romance. They disdain to ingratiate themselves into men’s minds by outward grace of form, but win the heart by their deep religious feeling and intimate sensibility. They are German to the core, racial even to the stiffness of the German character, but full of feeling and truth to life. Dürer in his woodcuts and copper engravings is “inwendig voller figur”; in them he offers the “concentrated, homely treasure of his heart.” Holbein is great by the incomparably real art of his portraits. The century of that joyous revival of Paganism, the Olympian vivacity of the Renaissance, is followed by the age to which the Jesuits gave life and character. For those stately churches in the Jesuit style, with theirfortissimoeffect, their huge, sculptured ornaments and their gleaming, gold decorations, the classic quietness of the old masters ceases to be appropriate. It is a question of a more stirring and impressive treatment of sacred subjects, wherein the whole passion of renewed Catholicism should be brought to expression. Spain, the country of the Inquisition, set the classic stamp on this enhanced religious feeling. Here all that monarchical and sacerdotal impulse which founded and aggrandised the Spanish nation, founded too its true representative in painting. Painters endowed their church pictures with a passionate fervour and a flush of extravagant sensuousness of the national, Spanish, local colour, such as are found united in the art of no other age or country. Necessarily, moreover, such a feudal system as that of Spain, with its grandees and princes of the Church, involved also an art of portrait painting which ranks with the highest that has issued in this kind from any country whatever: Murillo, Velasquez. In Flanders, the second stronghold of the Jesuits, we have the titan Rubens. A joyously fleshly Fleming, he seizes nature by the throat and drags her there where he stands erect, as thoughhe were lord of the world. Freedom had found its way into victorious and Protestant Holland. Here there flourished an art neither courtly nor fostered by the Church. It stood in the closest connection with the burgesses, showed clear signs of the struggle through which country and people had won independence. In the first place, painting celebrated as its worthiest subject the free burgher, the tighter in the heroic struggle for freedom. At no time was portrait-painting practised to such an extent, and the sitters not aristocratic courtiers, but proud burgesses of a free community; the men grave, strong, self-reliant; the women faithful, pure, and modest. The workmanship is correspondent: simple, solid, domestic; and soon there followed the glorification of that which they prized the more after their struggles had been accomplished: the quiet, comfortable delight of hearth and home.
During the War of Independence the Dutch had learnt to love their fatherland, and they were the first, as artists, fully to grasp the poetry of landscape. Art now no longer shines only upon the eyes of Mary and the Hosts of Heaven: it settles upon arid country hills, streams upon the sea waves, is at home in peasants’ houses and the dark woods, wanders through the streets and alleys, makes a temple of every market. The religious sentiments, however, which stirred Protestant Holland had to find appropriate expression; the living essence of biblical subjects was to be released from a narrow, ecclesiastical sphere, and approached anew with all the deep, German inwardness. These tendencies were all united in Rembrandt—perhaps of all masters, since the Christian era, the mightiest proclaimer of the great Pan; to him the cosmic powers of light and air signified the divinity that Michael Angelo had painted under a beautiful human form.
Finally, in the eighteenth century, comesrococo, with its rustlingfrou-frouand its delicate charm. The whole life of that noble society, which exchanged court costume for silken pastoral garments, formality and rank for charm and grace, was a lively play, an extravagant game. The king played with his crown, the priest with his religion, the philosopher with his wisdom, the poet with the art of rhyme. They did not hear as yet the hoarse threatening voice of the disinherited, “Car tel est notre plaisir.” What this age possessed of beauty and charm, its peculiar grace and wanton vivacity, its reckless, inassailable frivolity, was proper also to its art. Light and gracious as the whole life of that harmless, merry generation, it glided through the age untroubled, led by Cupidons, and kissed by the wandering winds. It is only to-day that we understand once more the charming masters of that elegant century.
The painters of every epoch looked at nature with their own eyes, and also with the eyes of their age and of their country. So the art of every period appears as “the mirror and abstract chronicle” of its age. With irresistible majesty, and conscious of its inspiration, it lays hold of the external world, and gives back to it its own picture infinitely exalted. It is the enlightened expression of the age, as upright, as fresh, as fanatic,or as unnatural as its generation. Therein lies the strength of the painters ofrococo, that they painted the artificiality of the time with such unsurpassable naturalness. It is just these infinitely various manners of paying court to nature—unceasingly throughout the course of centuries, now violently, now softly and tenderly, at times, too, not without passing infidelity,—it is just these which determine the beauty and value, the mystery and essence of art, and are in the history of art all that tends to its variety and unsurpassable charm.
The nineteenth century not only shows a new age, but probably begins a new section of universal history. It is probable that in contrast with this epoch of stirring movement, during which the readjustment of all political and social relations, the new discoveries in the instruments of commerce, trade, and industry have given an entirely new aspect to the world, the next thousand years will sum up all the previous centuries as the “old world.” New men require a new art. One would be inclined to surmise from this that the art of the nineteenth century presented itself as something essentially personal, with a sharply distinctive style. Instead of this it offers at first view, in contrast with those old ages of uniform production, a condition like that of Babylon. The nineteenth century has no style—the phrase that has been so often quoted as to have become a commonplace. In architecture the forms of all the past ages live again. The day before yesterday we built Greek, yesterday Gothic; hereBaroque, there Japanese: but amidst all these products of imitative styles there rise up stations and market-places which, with the robust elegance of their iron colonnades, herald the greatness of fresh conquests. In the province of painting there are similar extremes. In no other age have minds so diverse flourished side by side as Carstens and Goya, Cornelius and Corot, Ingres and Millet, Wiertz and Courbet, Rossetti and Manet. And the existing histories excite a belief that the nineteenth century is a chaos into which it is possible only for some later age to bring order.
Perhaps, however, it is already quite possible, if one only resolves uncompromisingly to apply to the new age those principles which have been tested in the treatment of theoldhistories of art, if one endeavours to study those artists who are in part still our contemporaries as objectively as though they were masters long dead. That is to say: one is wont, in a review of an older period in art, not to inquire what it had caught from an earlier age, but rather what it had introduced that was new. It was not because they imitated in their turn that the old masters became great; not because they looked backwards, but rather because they went forwards, that they made the history of art. We are not grateful, for instance, to the Dutchmen of the middle of the sixteenth century—Frans Floris and his contemporaries—that they forsook Dutch naturalism, and bootlessly exerted themselves in the way of Michael Angelo and Raphael. We can see no remarkable merit in the fact that the Bolognese at the beginning of the seventeenth century gathered their honey from the flowers of the Cinquecento. And we are even less inclinedto see in the contemporaries of Adrian van der Werff, who endeavoured to refine the rugged, primeval Dutch art by the study of the Italians, more than clumsy imitators.
Just as much will the interest of the historian of the art of the nineteenth century be bestowed in the first degree upon the works which have really created something independent and transcending all the earlier ages. He will not give especial prominence to those domains which had their flowering-time in other days than our own, but he will ask: Where is that distinctive element which appertains to the nineteenth century only? What are the new forms which it has found, the new sentiments to which it has given expression? Not those whose activity lay in clothing—however cleverly—the artistic necessities of the age in the store of already transmitted forms, but the pathfinders, who went forwards and created anew, require our attention. Even if, after the old masters, they can only be granted a place in the third or fourth class, they must nevertheless always take precedence of those others, because they exhibited themselves as they were, instead of making themselves large by standing on the shoulders of the dead. Many of those who were once valued highly, who, thriving on the inheritance of the past, accomplished what was apparently of importance, measured by this standard will arouse little interest, because their artistic speech, depending on a foundation of the established canonical works of old, is not their own but borrowed. In others, on the contrary, who, apart from the dominating tendency, had the courage rather to be insignificant, and yet remain themselves, observing with their own eyes nature which surrounded them, or naïvely abandoning themselves to the disposition of their artistic fantasy, in them will be seen the essential vehicles of the modern spirit. And then it will be apparent that the art of the nineteenth century as well as that of every earlier period had its peculiar garment, even if for official occasions it preferred to unpack from its wardrobe the state costumes of earlier ages. It is only because this distinction between the eclectic and the personal, the derived and the independent, has not yet been carried out with sufficient strictness, that it has hitherto, in my opinion, been found so difficult to discover the distinctivestyleof modern art, and to make clear the logic and sequence of its evolution.
BOOK I
THE LEGACY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
COMMENCEMENT OF MODERN ART IN ENGLAND
Ifthe question arises, why modern art has been compelled to find expression for itself in a form different from that of the art of the earlier centuries, we must first call attention to the change that has taken place in the fundamental conditions of society. Formerly, the chief supporters of art were the two leading powers of Church and King. The most noted works of Raphael and Michael Angelo, of Velasquez and Murillo, of Rubens and Van Dyck, were executed either for the churches or for the reigning princes of their country. The patron of modern art is the citizen. The old culture of the clerics and aristocrats has been superseded by that of the middle classes, and the beginnings of modern art must therefore be sought in the country in which this class first developed its distinctive character—in England.
England, as early as the eighteenth century, was already a land of citizens. At a time when there was to be found on the Continent acute mockery of what was old and outworn, conjoined with the most enthusiastic and joyous faith in the future, the great and wealthy England had established herself in the van of the new age. Here Voltaire saw with astonishment for the first time, when he arrived in London as an exile at the age of thirty-two, the free, open life of a great people; here he learnt to know a country where there is “much difference of rank, but none that is not based on merit; where one could think freely without being restrained by slavish terror.” Here was the idea of a modern free state already accomplished at a time when, upon the Continent, the thunderclouds of the impending storm hardly cast their first shadow. Here the notion of a united family life had first developed, upon the foundation of a civil order and security. Here, therefore, were first broken down those barriers around the territory of literature and art within which the spirit of the Renaissance had raised its wonderful flowers, and the road was begun along which the nineteenth century should advance.
Simultaneously with the growth of the middle classes there arose the need for a domestic, practical literature. Books were required which people could read by their fireside, in the seclusion of the family circle, in country districts. For that, the stiff and antiquated poetry of courtiers and academicians, which had hitherto been poured out upon the world from France, was hardly suitable.
To the cold Classicism represented by Pope, there succeeded in English literature—far earlier than was the case elsewhere—the delineation of what was immediately contemporary. At the same time that Mdlle. de Scudéry—when it was a question of describing the court of the Great King, the society of LouisXIV—felt herself bound to translate her theme into the antique and write aCyrus, the English novel had taken its motives from actual life. Defoe’sRobinson Crusoeis the first book in which man and nature are depicted without the introduction of antique types or fairies; the first novel in which the details of real life are displayed, and what had been hitherto neglected is granted an exact delineation. At a time when people in other countries were occupied with representations of the antique, the English novelists had embarked on the intimacy of the family circle. After Richardson, who laboriously yet with animation described everyday life, followed Fielding, with his sharp observation, homely and humorous; then Goldsmith, with his serene outlook of untroubled equanimity, his unsurpassed miniatures; Smollett, with his crude and satirical character sketching; and the audacious and witty Laurence Sterne, whom Nietzsche has called the most “gallant” of all authors. At the same time tragedy, too, descended from the court and the nobility into the sphere of domestic life; showing that here too were significant fortunes and conflicts, which stories strike a truer human note than those of kings and heroes.
Painting moved along the same road; and whilst in other countries, with the beginning of the century, the high, aristocratic art, which was the offspring of the Renaissance, gradually waned, the plebeian paintings of Hogarth laid the foundations of that art which prevailed in thebourgeoisnineteenth century. English art had this advantage in playing a pioneering part, that it had no old traditions to stand in its way; it had no great past. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England had been content to offer hospitality to Holbein and Van Dyck, and to collect the works of foreign masters in her galleries. Her art sprang into existence suddenly and unexpectedly at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and thence developed exclusively on native lines. Since the English could not lean either upon an old or a foreign model, nor enter into a round of subjects that had already been brought to perfection, they turned from the outset quite naturally into the road which was only to be trodden later by the other nations still in the bondage of tradition. They took up, to a certain extent, the thread which the Dutch, who appeared in the seventeenth century as the most modern people in art, had let drop: the progressive ideas of Holland had come over to England with the “glorious revolution,” with William of Orange and Queen Anne; whilst in Holland itself the French invasion of 1672 had caused a reaction to the courtly idea, against which the English took up an attitude of conscious and rigid protest. This opposition is clearly expressed by the English æsthetic writers.
The most important name to be mentioned is that of Shaftesbury.Beneath the favour of the court in France, he says, art has suffered. We Englishmen live in an age in which freedom has arisen. Such a people does not require, in order that art may prosper, an ambitious king to breed, by means of his pensions, a race of flattering Court painters. Our civil liberty affords us a sufficient foundation, and our liberty leads us toabsolute verityin art.
Thus did Shaftesbury enunciate his leading æsthetic doctrine; it was his constant message, and it was constantly repeated with great emphasis: “All beauty is truth.” “The search after truth leads you to nature.” “Truth is the mightiest thing in the world, since it exercises sovereign rights over the creations of the imagination.”
But what must art be in order to produce truth? “The strictest imitation of nature.” By this word Shaftesbury does not understand what we understand by the word “nature”; not, in the first instance, so much the nature surrounding us, in its outward manifestations, but, above all, an intimate human reality. Let the painter represent the reality of humaninwardness. Still life, the animal world, landscape,—all that, Shaftesbury explains, is most valuable. But another and a higher life exists in man than in the beasts and the woods, and there is the true object of art. In no case should the artist proceed from external vision; for then he will obtain fashionable attitudes, theatrical unreality, or, in the most favourable instance, a formal, decorative embellishment. Of what value is that in comparison with a single real presentation of character? How insignificant would every external form seem in contrast to each single feature of this intimate manner! Here is the second characteristic of English painting. It proceeds neither, like that of the sixteenth century, from formulas, nor, like the Dutch, from the picturesque, but, like to the English novel of character, from an intellectual impulse; it strives not after beauty of form and physical, sensuous grace, but, in the first place, after intellectual expression.
And from this there follows immediately a third trait. If art is to make the inwardness of man its subject, the artist cannot remain an indifferent portrayer. He will make great distinctions, will bring into prominence what is meritorious or censurable in every character—he will become a moralist. Only so can he conform to that last and highest function which Shaftesbury assigns to the painter.
The liberty which the English nation had fought for in the “glorious Revolution” brought forth, in the course of years, while Shaftesbury was writing, a fruitful crop of dissoluteness and licence. The mortification of the flesh of the Puritans was followed by so violent a recrudescence of sensuality that it was as though the whole menagerie of the passions had been unchained. London swarmed with criminals; drunkenness was an epidemic. The moral idea awoke amongst the cultivated classes. Might it not be possible, with the help of education, for that to be overcome? And so Shaftesbury’sview of art comprised a third, and very dangerous, element; namely, that to fulfil the most serious mission of that culture which had ensued from the free and natural conditions in England—even in the realm of æsthetics—the painter, like the poet, must appear as the moral teacher of his age. Imagine an artist who fulfils these conditions and you have, as a result,Hogarth, with all his qualities and defects.
What marks the greatness of Hogarth is his freedom from foreign and ancient influences. The eighteenth century came in as an academic age in art. Turning away from life, it spent itself in allegory and the imitation of typical figures that had been inherited from the Renaissance and petrified into academic work. Gods, in whom no one any longer believed, hovered, at least in paint, over a race which was without enthusiasm. Then came Hogarth, and his quick vision discovered the new way. He looked out upon the life surrounding him, with its manifold idiosyncrasies, and felt himself with pride to be the son of a new age, in which rigid, conventional forms were everywhere penetrated by the modern ideas of free thought, the rights of man, conformity to nature in morals and manners. This world which confronted him he depicted truly as it was, in all its beauty and its ugliness. With him was the origin of modern art. Before his paintings and engravings pale idealism disappeared. It was he who resolved and set out to bring into the world a new and independent observation of life. He was a painter who, with as little aid from foreign influences as from those of the past, went his own way and kept to it, and devoted his art, unblemished by the pallor of a borrowed ideal of beauty, soberly and exclusively to the realities of surrounding life.
“It seemed to me unlikely,” writes he, “that by copying old compositions I could acquire facility for those new designs which were my first and greatest ambitions.” Works of old Italian masters, artistic contemplations, whichwent back to Raphael and the Caracci, were ignored and ridiculed by him. His rude strength of painting, directed to the living truth, was a protest against all that idealism which was the heritage of the Renaissance, and had grown quite bombastic under the hands of its imitators. Nature, he writes, is simple, plain, and true in all her works; and with this principle he has founded a strong English school on the solid foundation of truth to nature.
An Englishman by birth, character, and disposition, he depicted his fellow-countrymen; he made his sketches in the midst of the hubbub of the street. His world is London, the world-city, “old merry England,” which, in contrast with the Puritanism of to-day, still lived through its golden age of riot. In such a world—a world existing to this day, only more decently berouged—moved Hogarth; in the company of wine-bibbers, in gambling hells, in rooms of poets, in cellars of highwaymen, in the death-chambers of fallen maidens. “The Harlot’s Progress,” which he produced in a series of pictures, brought him his first success. He then published further series of similar careers over crooked courses—“The Rake’s Progress,” “Marriage à la Mode.” He painted the rabble of London, their society and their morals; those who went in cotton and rags and those in satin and silk. In his writings he censures the old painters plainly because in their historical style they had quite passed over the middle classes. And he went with great knowledge to these new subjects. In the National Gallery, which possesses the originals of “Marriage à la Mode,” one is astounded at the technical qualities of Hogarth’s painting. Whoever has been misled by the engraved reproductions, and looks for bad, distorted drawing, may here learn to know him as a painter in the fullest sense of the word. There is no sign left of the defective caricature which disfigures the engravings; there is a severe, unadorned manifestation of realism, of an art that has from the outset rooted itself in modern life. Under the manners and graces of the age Hogarth stands a “self-made”man, a healthy Anglo-Saxon personality, full of sturdy independence and impeccable common sense. He attracts by a sharpness of observation, a penetration into idiosyncrasies of character, a grip upon the most trivial changes in men’s emotions and play of features, the like of which is to be found in hardly one of his predecessors.
Against these qualities it must be understood that an equal number of defects is to be set off. The inartistic part of him was that he followed the æsthetic theories of the age, and looked upon art as merely a means to ends alien to itself. With him painting was an instrument to disseminate the inventions of his poetic-satiric humour; it was a form of speech to him. He is not unjustly called on that account a comedian of the pencil, the Molière of painting. We look at other pictures, but his we read. The commentaries on them are in some respects the rendering back of the pictures into their proper element. Lessing called the drama his pulpit; with Hogarth his art was a pulpit. He wanted, like Hamlet, to “hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Pictures beneath his hands became moral sermons.
In the six pictures in “The Harlot’s Progress,” with which he started in 1733, and which to-day, since the originals have perished, can be considered only in the copper engravings after them, all these attributes are recognisable. Mary Hackabout comes innocent from the country to the town with the intention of seeking a situation as a servant-girl. She speedily falls a victim to temptation, becomes the mistress of a Jewish banker, whom she soon loses by her infidelity, descends to be a thief, and comes to the work-house. Released from there, she becomes the companion of a highwayman, until she ends her pitiful life in a disorderly house, leaving behind her a poor crippled boy, who, at his mother’s funeral, is playing with a top. The conclusion of the paintings shows how the other women bid farewell to the corpse,and buoy themselves up for their coming pleasures by drinking from the spirit bottle, which stands on the coffin, while the priest, who is come to give the blessing, announces his visit for the evening.
The second series, which is to be seen to-day in the Soane Museum, describes in eight tableaux the somewhat similar life of a young man, the “Rake.” As an Oxford student he has promised marriage to a pretty but poor girl, when suddenly the death of a wealthy uncle throws him into the vortex of London life. He wishes to buy himself freedom from his sweetheart, but she disdainfully refuses the money and supports herself and her child honestly with the labour of her hands. The seducer, winning fame in the world of women and sport, rapidly paces the road to ruin; yet he repairs his finances once again by a marriage with a rich and one-eyed old lady. Once more on his feet, he flings himself into games of chance, and comes to the sponging-house, whither his better half follows him. It is the last straw when a play which he has offered to a manager is refused, and he can no longer buy himself a pint of ale; there remains only the final fall into the misery of frenzy, and in the last picture we find him amongst the lunatics bound in chains as a madman. Only his student love, Sarah Young, of Oxford, whom he had treated so scurvily, cannot forget him, and, with tears, seeks him out again in the madhouse.
The third and most famous series was completed many years after the “Rake”—in 1745. Hogarth has admittedly taken particular pains with the six oil paintings of “Marriage à la Mode,” which have been placed in the National Gallery; and these painted novels reveal in strength and beauty of execution the high-water mark of his work as a painter. The whole is quieter, simpler, less overloaded with ingenious accessories. The impoverished lord has married his son, who is already worn out with excesses, to the strong and healthy daughter of a city alderman. A girl is born; then they go their separate ways. The husbandsurprises the wife with a lover, and is stabbed by him; the unfaithful wife, moved by this, begs her dying husband for forgiveness. As a young widow, deprived of her woman’s honour, she goes back to thebourgeois, Philistine ennui of her father’s house, and when she learns of her lover’s condemnation she escapes from the burden of her misery by means of poison. The father is sufficiently provident to take the wedding ring off her finger before the body is cold, lest it should be stolen from the corpse. In the last sequence Hogarth passed over completely to the moral sermon and the study of crime. The series “Industry and Idleness,” in 1747, was comprised in twelve sheets, which he produced only in rough engravings, as he wished exclusively to influence the masses. Two apprentices enter a cloth-weaving business at the same time, of whom one rises, through his zeal for the interests of the business, to a marriage with his master’s beautiful daughter, to the rank of alderman, and finally to be Lord Mayor of London. The idle apprentice grows, on the down grade, from a gambler into a vagabond. He is transported, comes back again, and ends on the scaffold. The two comrades meet for the last time when the honest man announces his death-warrant to the knave.
Garrick, as we can see from his epitaph on Hogarth, has not unjustly characterised his art, in these words—
“Farewell, great painter of mankind!Who reached the noblest point of art,Whose pictured morals charm the mind,And through the eye correct the heart.”
“Farewell, great painter of mankind!
Who reached the noblest point of art,
Whose pictured morals charm the mind,
And through the eye correct the heart.”
Hogarth painted stirring and humorous scenes, full of effective morality, with which he sought to cheer, terrify, and improve humanity. His five-act tragedies end always with the triumph of Virtue and the punishment of Vice. As one of his contemporaries said, he exercised the art of “hanging in colours.” The twelve plates of the parallel biographies of “Industry and Idleness” he employed as an illustrated weekly sermon for the benefit of the working classes, and he was able to observe with satisfaction that they had an actual influence on the conduct of the people, as instanced in the diminution of gin shops. Yet for all that, in the elevation of public morality, the highest aim of art is not, as Garrick asserted, fulfilled. Who has ever seen such a painter? Would he be a painter? It is exactly by this moralising with the brush that Hogarth stands in such abrupt opposition to his predecessors, the Dutch. They were painters, nothing but painters, and in their painting reckoned on eyes which could appreciate their pictorial subtilty. Man was for them a patch of colour; the real delight of their eyes was the rich light that came mellowed through the shadows, and played upon the ruffed garments and the clumsy forms. With Hogarth, in the place of the idea of colour, the anecdote is brought in. He saw the world not so much with the eyes of the painter, as with those of the physician, the criminologist, the pastor. The familiar element, that serene and comfortable observation of an everyday occurrence upon which Dutch art was based, has altogether disappeared in his pictures. He did not paint because something pictorial urged him, but saw in men the actors of the parts which he had in his mind. This departure from the purelypicturesque is in part explained by the predominance of literature in England at that time. In a country where the tragedy of familiar life as well as the domestic novel had arisen there was imminent peril that a young school of painting working without traditions should branch off also on to those lines. Hogarth desired to give painting a new manner; he seized upon what was epic or dramatic, and painted the pictorial counter parts to Smollett’s and Richardson’s novels. In the age of enlightenment the painter makes way for the writer. With this idea he himself wrote: “I have endeavoured to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, my men and women my players, who, by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb show.”
Moreover, to explain the growth of this sort of literary hybrid, one is forced to consider the changed conditions under which painting was introduced into England at large. Art, which hitherto had shone forth her enchantment upon the few, was conducted from the first in free England along the broad road of popularity, and given over to a public which had to be educated to art by degrees; and this admission of the mass of the people to the enjoyment of art, in a proportion hitherto unheard of, must inevitably have a retrogressive effect upon painting itself. Instead of the earlier amateur of really distinguished culture, there stood “the People.”
But just as in the Middle Ages works of art were seen to be a sort of picture-writing for the people—picturis eruditur populus, said Gregory the Great,—so now the new patrons could hardly require other than those works of art in which a story was pictorially told. These could be understood even by the man whose understanding was otherwise wholly closed to matters of art; and hence it came about that almost all thegenrepainters—for very nearly a century—followed with more or less intelligence in the footsteps of Hogarth. To treat him, as is frequently done, because of this popularisation of art, because of this transformation of the picture into the picturestory, as a pattern instance of tastelessness, would lead to very dangerous consequences, and should be the less employed because Hogarth’s pictures are, at least, comparatively well painted, whereas many of his successors could escape the deluge only in the Noah’s Ark of their talent for narration. What Hogarth could do when he put off the schoolmaster, he has shown moreover in his portraits. There he is an entirely great painter. His pictures have none of that Van Dyck elegance, which had become the mode in England before him; they are robust, crude, Anglo-Saxon, strongly and broadly painted withal, sketches, in the best sense of the word. His “Shrimp Girl,” in the National Gallery, for instance, is a masterpiece to which the nineteenth century can hardly produce a rival.
In the history of painting it is notorious that the latter half of the last century belongs especially to portraiture, and here the English occupy the first rank. Neither Hogarth nor Reynolds nor Gainsborough was a genius like Titian, Velasquez, or even Frans Hals. Their art is not to be compared with that of the greatest of all portrait painters, but they surpassed all the painters of the eighteenth century; they were not only the greatest in England since Van Dyck, but the first portrait painters in Europe at the time.
Reynolds and Gainsborough lived almost at the same period. The former, born in 1723, died in 1792; the latter, born in 1727, died in 1788. They had as models men and women of the same society. They went the same road, side by side. Many celebrities strayed from one studio to the other, and were painted by Reynolds as well as by Gainsborough. These are just the pictures which show us so distinctly how widely the two, who were usually mentioned in the same breath, differed from each other in spite of having grown up on the same soil. Even their outward man displays this dissimilarity.
Reynolds appears in his “Portrait of Himself” in the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence, in the red mantle of the President of the Academy, the official cap on his head, while the hand resting on the table holds a copy of hisDiscourses; close by is a bust of Michael Angelo. The complexion is that of a man whosits much within doors. A pair of spectacles with large, round glasses leads one to conclude that he injured his eyesight early with much reading. Gainsborough, with his refined Roman nose, the haughty, curved sensuous lips, and the expression of his face which speaks at once of innocence and refinement, gives an impression far more than Reynolds of the child of nature and the gentleman. His cheeks are fresh and rather ruddy; a depth of soul lies within the large blue eyes, that are somewhat melancholy, yet have such a free outlook upon life.
Joshua Reynolds’father was a clergyman, a most learned man, who kept a Latin school. He gave the boy, it is recorded, that most uncommon Christian name, for the remarkable reason that he hoped thereby to draw the attention of a great personage, who bore the same name, towards his young namesake. His son was to become a physician. But books on other subjects which he read at his desk at school made a greater impression on the boy. In the well knownTreatise on Painting, by Richardson, he discovered his vocation. From the perusal of this book he developed a taste for things artistic, studied the works on perspective of Pater Pozzo, read everything he could find on art, and copied as a preliminary all that fell into his hands in the way of woodcuts and copper engravings. One of the earliest drawings which remain from his childhood represents the interior of a library. At the age of nineteen he came to London to a well-known master, Hudson, the favourite painter with the gentry of the day, who required £120 with a pupil. He was already convinced that only in London could he find the means to attain fame, and even as early as 1744 he took a fine establishment and kept open house in order to attract attention. He was soon in a position to complete his artistic education by means of residence in Italy. In 1746 he had painted the portrait of a Captain Keppel, who shortly afterwards was appointed Commodore of the Mediterranean squadron, and invited the young painter to go for a cruise in his ship. They sailed in 1749, and Reynolds was able to spend three years in Italy.
His first impression was one of bitter disappointment. Where was that rich colouring in the Italian classics which he had been led to expect from English mezzotints? Everything struck him as lifeless, pale, insipid. Whereuponhe affected the opinion that there was no more to be seen in Rome. Raphael, in particular, appeared to him to be a mediocre painter, whom only a remarkable chance had brought to such a pitch of fame. Surrounded by the great masterpieces of the Cinquecento, he employed himself in drawing caricatures, and made a sort of travesty of theSchool of Athens, in which he drew caricatures of the English colony in Rome at that time, in the attitudes of figures in the pictures of Raphael. But he very speedily changed his opinion, and began to follow the paths of the great dead. He went indefatigably through the galleries of Rome, from Rubens to Titian, from Correggio to Guido and Raphael. He studied so hard in the Vatican, that he took a chill in the cold rooms, which left him all his life a little deaf. That sojourn at Rome was to Reynolds what, a hundred years later, his visit to Spain was to Lenbach.
He had already at Hudson’s acquired great facility as a copyist, and of Guercino, in particular, he had made numerous copies. During this Italian tour, however, he became the greatest connoisseur of old masters that the eighteenth century possessed.
It is related that the Chevalier Van Loo, when he was in England in 1763, vaunted himself one day, in Reynolds’ presence, upon his unfailing discrimination in telling a copy from an original. Whereupon Reynolds showed him one of his own studies of a head, after Rembrandt. The Chevalier judged it to be, indisputably, a masterpiece by the great Dutchman.
He left Rome in April 1752, and made a further visit to Naples, to the cities of Tuscany, and to Venice. The careless notes of travel that he made on this journey show the clear insight which he had attained into the Italian schools. They all deal with questions of technique, on effects of light and shadow, on the mystery ofchiaroscuro. For Titian, in particular, he had an extravagant devotion,—he would ruin himself, he said, if he might only possess one of the great works of Titian.
When he returned to England in 1752, at the age of thirty, his talent was fully developed, and the connoisseurs were unanimous in hailing him as a new Van Dyck. With the portrait of MissGunning, afterwards the Duchess of Hamilton, he appeared in 1753 as a power in English art. As early as 1755, when Hogarth was compelled to give up portrait painting for lack of patrons, one hundred and twenty-five persons sat for Reynolds, and after that about one hundred and fifty people were painted by him annually; and this brought him in a yearly income of about £16,000.
At first he took up his quarters in St. Martin’s Lane, which was then the most fashionable place of residence for artists; but in 1760 he bought a house, No. 47 Leicester Square, the most select quarter of London, and furnished it with the most palatial splendour. The studio, which he built for himself, was as large as a ballroom, and furnished with a quite modern luxury. The large corridor that led to it had a gallery of pictures by old masters. It was the age of the great literary and dramatic revival in England. Garrick stood at the zenith of his popularity, Burke had already made himself a name, Johnson had produced hisDictionary, Richardson had reached the summit of his fame, Smollett had writtenPeregrine Pickle, Gray had attracted notice by his verse. All these and others who set the vogue in literature and the drama, the principal figures in politics, the leaders of fashion, lounged in that luxurious studio and gossiped with Reynolds of the theatre, both before and behind the scenes, of the doings in Parliament and the scandal of the Court, of literature and of art. At the time when Goldsmith was putting the finishing touches to hisTravelshe was a guest of the house. Gibbon, the historian, and Sterne, whoseSentimental Journeywas just then the talk of the town, spent their vacant hours with him; and Burke as well, while he discussed with him his treatise on theSublime and the Beautiful. All these claimed a niche in Reynolds’ portrait gallery, where all the talents were met together. The whole English nobility also flocked to him. For forty years onwards from 1752 it was considered the proper thing to be painted by him. His pictures were multiplied immediately at the hands of the engravers. In the complete catalogue of Reynolds’ works, Hamilton counts, so far back as 1820, no fewer than 675 plates, engraved after Reynolds by more than a hundred artists, and amongst these the mezzotints of SamuelCousins are by far the finest. Only an incredible industry, enabling him for a long succession of years to paint almost without intermission with a facility and regularity like that of Rubens, rendered it possible for Reynolds to complete, exclusive of portraits, quite a number of religious and mythological pictures, of which he himself was especially proud. He painted with great speed and dexterity, rose very early, breakfasted at nine o’clock, was in his studio punctually at ten; and there till eleven he worked on pictures which had been commenced. On the stroke of eleven the first sitter arrived, who was succeeded by another an hour later. Thus he painted till four o’clock, when he made his toilette, and thenceforward belonged to society, for in spite of his scholarly temperament one can by no means consider Reynolds as a solitary eccentric. Although he remained a bachelor after Angelica Kauffmann had declined his hand, his house was a central gathering-point for noble London. He gave balls to which the whole of “Society” was invited, and drove in a magnificent carriage, with coachmen in blue and silver liveries. The Literary Club was founded at his instigation, where with Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and Garrick he shared in conversation both profound and brilliant. He was made a baronet, and when the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, became its first president. The dinners of the Academy, which he organised at the distribution of prizes, play a part in the history of English cookery. Reynolds had promised that on each of these reunions he would speak on some question of art. In this manner originated, during his twenty-three years of office, those fifteen discourses upon painting which show the highest result of his literary energy. They were not his maiden essays. As far back as 1758 Johnson had invited him to publish an article upon Art in a journal which he had founded,The Idler. In 1781 he made a journey through Holland and Flanders, upon which, anticipating Fromentin, he wrote an exceedingly fine book. In hisDiscoursesso high a degree of literary talent was displayed that they were at one time said to be the work of Johnson or Burke.
They are æsthetic treatises and essays in the history of art, of an enduring value. Originating from a vast insight, and expressed in a precise style, they treat of the laws of classic art, the variation in styles, the causes of the finest bloom in art. Certainly eclecticism is preached too. The modern artist, it is declared, can only stand on the shoulders of his forebears. The great Italians must be his models, and of these the greatest is Michael Angelo. His last essay closes with these words: “I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man, and I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might be the name of Michael Angelo.”
When he died, his friend Edmund Burke wrote in the funeral oration which he dedicated to him: “Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on many accounts, one of the most memorable men of his time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and harmony of colouring, he was equal to the greatest masters of the renowned ages.... In full affluence of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert in art and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed by sovereign powers and celebrated by distinguished poets, ... the loss of no man of his time can be felt with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow.” He was buried with great pomp in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The pictures left unfinished at his death fetched at auction £37,000; the whole fortune which he left is estimated at £80,000.
The biography ofThomas Gainsboroughreads quite differently.
The traveller who rides from London to Birmingham passes through some of the fairest scenery in the island. He finds himself in the heart of fresh and tender English nature. Small rivulets flow through the gently undulating country. Wide meadows clothe the soft hollows in the valleys with abundant green. In grassy enclosures deer and roes are feeding; they push forwards inquisitively as the train passes. Fragrant linden trees rise dreamily in the suave, park-like landscape, through which the Stour windsalong like a riband of silver. On the bank of this enchanting stream Thomas Gainsborough, the son of a simple clothier, was born. Reynolds’ vocation had been brought about through the perusal of a book. In the scenery and the woods that were in the neighbourhood of his home, Gainsborough, who was so alive to all the beauty of nature, received the decisive impression of his life. Here he roamed as a boy, while he neglected his school lessons. “Tom will be hung some day,” reflected his schoolmaster; “Tom will be a genius,” thought his parents. He sketched the parks and castles of the neighbourhood. In his later life he used to say that there was no picturesque old tree trunk, no meadow or woodland glade or stream within a four-mile radius of Sudbury, that he did not retain a recollection of from his childish years. Like Constable, when he was an old man, he still thought with gratitude of his home, of all that beauty upon which he had looked, and which had made him a painter. Here, in the green woods and fresh pastures of his birthplace, he trained himself. At the age of ten he was a painter.
A sojourn of four years in London seems to have added little to his ability. Elegant in his manners, lively in his conversation, a born gentleman, he might have become completely the man of fashion. But he was far too diffident, with his naïve simplicity, to force himself amongst the stars of the world of art in London, far too distinguished and retiring to join in the race after the favour of the public, and so at the age of eighteen he returned to his native place with the unencouraging prospect of playing the part of a simple painter in the provinces. First and last, the woods remained his chief delight. One morning, as he was painting there, he looked up from his easel and saw a young and beautiful girl in a light summer dress, peeping coquettishly from behind the trunk of a tree. She blushed, he spoke to her shyly. Soon afterwards Margaret Burr became his wife, and the whole history of his life with her remains a charming idyll, like the spring morning on which he made her acquaintance. Married at the age of nineteen, he installed himself at Ipswich, his wife’s native place, and there he spent fifteen years in great happiness, firm in the conviction that he would end his days there. Therehe painted his first portraits, which, from 1761, were forwarded by a carrier’s cart to London for exhibition in the Royal Academy. From Ipswich he went to Bath, the fashionable watering-place, where he painted the visitors who came in the summer for the cure. Finally, in the end his portraits met with approval in London. That gave him courage in 1764 to proceed thither himself; and there he took very modest rooms. On his arrival he was as yet very little known; he came from the provinces, which he had till then never left, at a time when Reynolds stood at the pinnacle of his fame, and had visited Italy and Spain. Yet he gradually won a reputation. Franklin was one of the first to sit to him. Soon he became the favourite painter of the king and the royal family. GeorgeIIIwas painted eight times by him, Pitt seven times, Garrick five. Lord Chancellor Camden, Sir William Blackstone, Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Richardson, Burke, Sheridan, Mrs. Graham, Lady Montagu, Mrs. Siddons, Lady Vernon, Lady Maynard, and the names of many other celebrities and beauties are bound up with his. His life-work, excluding sketches, consists of no more than three hundred pictures, of which two hundred and twenty are portraits—a very small number in comparison with the four thousand paintings of Joshua Reynolds. Thomas Gainsborough painted irregularly. Even when he was in his studio he might be seen standing for hours gazing out of his window dreamily at the grass. In other features of his life too he was equally different from Reynolds: unaccountably, he was one moment a brilliant, animated companion, the next plunged in melancholy. He dreamed much, while Reynolds painted and wrote. In the evenings he usually sat at home with his dear little wife, completed no treatises or discourses on his art, but made sketches or sometimes music. Reynolds was a scholar-painter, Gainsborough a painter-musician. It was said of him that he painted portraits for money and landscapes for amusement, but that he made music because he needs must. He collected musical instruments as Reynolds did a library. Even in his pictures he gives his people, for preference, violins in their hands. To the Musical Club which he had founded in Ipswich he remained faithful all his life, and in that neighbourhood, or in Richmond or Hampstead, he spent the summer every year. Here amidst that green nature it was also his wish to be buried.His funeral was a very quiet one. In the peaceful graveyard at Kew, Thomas Gainsborough sleeps tranquilly under the shady willows, far from the noise and tumult of the great city. Sir Joshua said at his grave: “Should England ever become so fruitful in talent that we can venture to speak of an English school, then will Gainsborough’s name be handed down to posterity as one of the first.” Yes, one might say to-day, as the first of all.
Joshua Reynolds is certainly a great painter, and deserves the high veneration in which his compatriots hold him. It is not without a certain awe that, in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy, one can look upon the armchair that he used during his sittings, upon which all who were famous in eighteenth-century England have sat. Reynolds is one of the greatest English portrait painters, and, resembling most the classical masters, showed in the highest degree the qualities we admire in them. His colouring is of an amazing softness, depth, and strength; hischiaroscurois warm and vaporous. There are portraits by him which, in the subtlety of their tone, resemble the best of Rembrandt’s; others, whose noble colouring approaches thechef-d’œuvresof Van Dyck. Master of the whole mechanism of the human body, he possessed in the highest degree the rare art of setting persons surely and unconstrainedly on their feet. His portraits are pictures; one needs no whit to be acquainted with the persons they represent; they satisfy as works of art in themselves, and as psychological studies by a man who had the capacity of sounding the depths of the human heart. The complete catalogue of all those who sat for Sir Joshua during the space of half a century forms an uninterrupted commentary on the contemporary history of England.
There we see the skilful portrait of Sterne, with his look of witty mockery; the marvellous Bohemian, Oliver Goldsmith, who even then had the manuscript of hisVicar of Wakefieldin his pocket; Johnson, who, in one, sits at his writing-table, on which stands an ink-pot and a volume of hisEnglish Dictionary, and in another is peering into a book with his short-sighted eyes screwedup tightly, and his whole posture awkward and unwieldy. Garrick, who went from one studio to the other, appears also more than once in Reynolds’ portrait gallery. Amongst his portraits of military dignitaries, that of General Lord Heathfield, the famous defender of Gibraltar, whom he painted in full uniform, is one of the most noticeable. Strong as a rock he stands there, with the key of the fortress in his hand. What a contrast between these figures and those of the contemporary French portraits! There, those friendly and smiling ministers, those gallant and dainty ecclesiastics, those scented, graceful marquises, who move with such elegant ease about the parquet floor, and from whose faces a uniform refinement has erased all the roughness of individuality; here, expressive, thoughtful heads, characters hardened in the school of life, many of the faces coarse and bloated, the glance telling of cold resolution, the attitude full of self-reliant dignity and gnarled, plebeian pride. The samebourgeoiselement predominates in the pictures of the ladies. Van Dyck’s noble, eminently intellectual figures always wore the glamour of the Renaissance. In the background an artistically arranged curtain, a column, or the view of the quiet avenues of some broad park. From Reynolds we get strong active women in their everyday clothes, and with thoughtful countenances: good mothers, surrounded by their children, whom they kiss and enfold in a tender embrace. The idea of half-symbolical representation has vanished, and in its place is introduced the idea of home and the family. The pictures of children by this childless old bachelor were an artistic revelation to the existing generation, and are the delight of the world of to-day. In other portraits of ladies, that noticeable characteristic of the English nation, their predilection for domestic animals and for sport, finds an expression. The beautiful Duchess of Devonshire he painted as she gently restrained with her finger her little daughter’s caresses, which would fain have disordered hercoiffure; a whole gallery of noble ladies he represented feeding their poultry or petting their lap-dogs; Lady Spencer in her riding-habit, her whip in her hand, her horse reined in, her cheeks flushed from her gallop. Nelly O’Brien looks an actress, a woman who turned men’s heads, and she does it still to-day in Reynolds’ picture. There lurks something enigmatic, perplexing in the smile of this sphinx—only Monna Lisahad such a smile, but Nelly’s eyes are deeper, more desirous. One feels that in the three centuries since Monna Lisa love has taken on a new and subtlernuance. The portrait of Mrs. Siddons is the most famous of the pictures of actresses which Reynolds painted, and Mrs. Siddons, of all the women of that time, is the one whose portrait occupied the painters most. She was the daughter of Roger Kemble, the actor, and sister of that pretty actress, Mrs. Twiss, whose portrait by Reynolds (in 1784) we also have, and of the famous John Philip Kemble, who figures so often in the portrait gallery of Lawrence, as Hamlet, Cato, Coriolanus, RichardIII, etc. Born to the boards, as it were, she had, when still a child, joined her parents on their Thespian pilgrimages, and had had many engagements in the provinces, at Birmingham, Manchester, and Bath, before she was recruited by the playwright Sheridan for the Drury Lane company in London. She made herdébutthere on 10th October 1782, and was hailed forthwith as the greatest actress of her time. Lady Macbeth was her great part; in that she was painted both by Romney and Lawrence. Reynolds painted her as the Tragic Muse. A diadem encircles her hair, she sits upon a throne, the throne rests upon clouds. Behind her stand two allegorical beings, Crime and Remorse, two quite unfortunate figures. But the principal figure is truly great, in its noble, regal attitude, and quite unconstrained in its dramatic pose. Reynolds had the composition in his mind many weeks before Mrs. Siddons sat for him in the autumn of 1783. “Take your seat upon the throne for which you were born, and suggest to me the idea of the Tragic Muse.” With these words he conducted her to the pedestal. “I made a few steps,” the actress relates, “and then took at once the attitude in which the Tragic Muse has remained.” When the picture was finished, says Sir Joshua, gallant as ever: “I cannot lose this opportunity of sending my name to posterity on the hem of your garment.” And he, who hardly ever signed his pictures, wrote in large characters his name and the date on the gold-embroidered border of the dress. The original picture has been in the possession of the Grosvenor family since 1822; a second copy is in the gallery at Dulwich.
Reynolds loved to depict his sitters in mythological or historical settings. Thus he painted Mrs. Hartley, her son as a nymph and the youthful Bacchus, the threeMisses Montgomery as the Three Graces crowning a term of Hymen, a little girl sitting on the grass as the “Age of Innocence,” Lady Spencer as a gipsy telling her brother’s fortune, Mrs. Sheridan as St. Cecilia. The five “Heads of Angels,” as they are called, in the National Gallery, are five different studies of the lovely child-head of little Isabella Gordon. Garrick, in one of his pictures, is set between the allegorical figures of Tragedy and Comedy. Reynolds himself was frankly proud of these portraits in the mood of history. He was, as he said, in general only a portrait painter because the world required it; that which he aspired after was the great manner of historical painting. Nevertheless, pictures, such as the “Little Hercules with the Serpent,” “Cupid unfastening the Girdle of Venus,” “The Death of Dido,” “The Forbearance of Scipio,” “The Childhood of the Prophet Samuel,” or “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” do not cause us to deplore too bitterly that he rarely found time for such mythological and historical pictures. Hisputtiare derived from Correggio; in the arrangement of drapery he resembles Guido; in his “Venus” he is a coarser Titian. Reynolds’ own manner in these pictures is merely the eclectic accumulation of the peculiarities of the old masters—he brought no new element into historical painting.
And herein lies his principal weakness. Hogarth declared: “There is only one school, that of nature.” Reynolds: “There is only one doorway to the school of nature, and of that the old masters hold the key.” The great men of old were for him the object of constant and conscious thought. He has endeavoured in his writings to propound a sort of general foundation of painting, has adopted the principles of the best painters in every land, was indefatigable in exploring the secrets of the old masterpieces, and has therefore won the praise of having set the English school, which had hitherto possessed no perfected tradition of painting, technically on firm feet. He was the founder of a scientific technique of painting derived from the ancients,—the Lenbach of the eighteenth century. Upon the mixture of colours, the gradations of light and shade, technically and æsthetically, no artist has pondered morethan he, who knew the great Netherlanders, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt, as well as, or better than, his particular favourites, the Italians. He made experiments all his life long to discover the stone of the wise Venetians; but he met with the same experience as Lenbach. And these experiments in the direction of the colour effects of the old masters were the bane of his pictures’ durability. It was well said by Walpole: “If Sir Joshua is content with his own blemished pictures, then he is happier than their possessors, or posterity. According to my view, he ought to be paid in annual instalments, and only so long as his works last.” And Haydon opined that “Reynolds sought by tricks to obtain results which the old masters attained by the simplest means.” He endeavoured by means of asphaltum to give his pictures the artistic tones of the galleries, with the result that, to-day, the majority have lost every sign of freshness.
With regard to the pose also, and similar conceptions, one can never quite get away from the thought of Van Dyck and other old masters. Reynolds’ chief endeavour, not only as regards colouring, but also in other respects, was to resemble the ancients, and this has brought into his pictures something imitative and laboured. He dearly loved the Romans and Venetians; we believe to-day that he loved almost too dearly the Bolognese. And just that fine, artistic education which he received in Italy and Holland, and the scientific method in which he practised his art, did harm to Reynolds, and brought into his pictures too much reminiscence, too many alien touches. He has in most cases understood it—how to bring into uniformity the numerous borrowings of his palette, all that he had taken from Leonardo, Correggio, Velasquez, and Rembrandt. Yet he has never quite forgotten the old masters and looked only at his model, for the sake of the very daintiest lady or the freshest English boy. For his children he thought of Correggio’s “Cherubim,” for his schoolboys of Murillo, for the portrait of Mrs. Hartley of Leonardo da Vinci, for that of Mrs. Sheridan of Raphael. There lacked in him that spontaneity which denotes the great master. By hiserudition in art, Sir Joshua elevated himself on the shoulders of all who had preceded him. He obtained thereby the piquant effects in his portraits, but it was at the price of the penalty that from many of his works it is rather a rancid odour of oil and varnish which exhales than the breath of life.
Gainsborough can certainly not be compared with Reynolds in the mass of his work. He was master neither of his powers of industry nor of his smooth and brilliant methods of painting that were always sure of their effect. In many of his pictures he gives the impression of a self-taught man, who sought to help himself to the best of his power. Just as little has he the psychological acuteness of Reynolds. A portrait painter puts no more into a head than he has in his own; thus the acute thinker, Reynolds, was able to put a great deal into his heads, whilst Gainsborough, the dreamer, was often enough quite helpless when he confronted a conspicuously manly character. In his whole temperament a painter of landscape, before his model too he sat as before a landscape, with eyes that perceived but did not analyse. What, with Reynolds, was sought out and understood, was felt by Gainsborough; and therefore the former is always good and correct, while Gainsborough is unequal and often faulty, but in his best pictures has a charm to which those of the President of the Academy never attained. Gainsborough, too, at his death murmured the name of an old master. “We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company.” But what distinguishes him from Reynolds, and gives him a character of greater originality, is just his naïve independence of the ancients, which resulted partly from the different nature of his education in art. Reynolds had lived for two years in Rome and explored all the principal cities of Italy, had visited Flanders and Holland, learnt to wonder at Rembrandt, and developed an enthusiasm forchiaroscuro. Gainsborough in his rural seclusion had been able neither by travel on the Continent to study the great masters of the past, nor to assimilate the traditions of the studio. He contented himself with the beauties which he saw in his native country, studied them in their touching simplicity, without troubling himself about academic rules. He lived in London until his death, without once leaving England; and that gives to his pictures a distinctnuance. The one studied pictures and books, the other only the “bookof nature.” His portraits never aim at any external effect, nor are they raised into the historical; they seek to give no other impression than that of a quite subjective truth to nature, both in arrangement and in colouring. Nothing intruded between his model and himself, no “sombre old master” obscured his canvas. His execution is more personal, his colour fresher and more transparent. The very personages seem with him to be more elegant, more gracious, more modern than with Reynolds, in whose work, through their kinship to the Renaissance, they received a suggestion of style, classical and ancient.