Under Louis Philippe began the true modern period of French caricature, the flourishing time when really great artists devoted themselves to it. It never raised its head more proudly than under thebourgeoisking, whose onion head always served the relentless Philippon as a target for his wit. It was never armed in more formidable fashion; it never dealt more terrible blows. Charles Philippon’s famous journalLa Caricaturewas the most powerful lever that the republicans used against the “July government”; it was equally feared by the Ministry, thebourgeoisie, and the throne. When theCharivarifollowedLa Caricaturein 1832, political cartoons began to give way to the simple portraiture of manners in French life. The powder made for heavy guns exploded in a facile play of fireworks improvised for the occasion.
French society in the nineteenth century has to thank principallyDaumierandGavarnifor being brought gradually within the sphere of artistic representation. These men are usually called caricaturists, yet they were in reality the great historians of their age. Through long years they laboured every week and almost every day at their great history, which embraced thousands of chapters—at a true zoology of the human species; and their work, drawn upon stone in black and white, proves them not merely genuine historians, but really eminent artists who merit a place beside the greatest.
When in his young days Daubigny trod the pavement of the SistineChapel in Rome, he is said to have exclaimed in astonishment, “That looks as if it had been done by Daumier!” and from that time Daumier was aptly called the Michael Angelo of caricature. Even when he is laughing there is a Florentine inspiration of the terrible in his style, a grotesque magnificence, a might suggestive of Buonarotti. In the period before 1848 he dealt the constitutional monarchy crushing blows by his drawings. “Le Ventre legislatif” marks the furthest point to which political caricature ever ventured in France. But when he put politics on one side and set himself free from Philippon, this same man made the most wonderful drawings from life. His “Robert Macaire” giving instructions to his clerk as a tradesman, sending his patients exorbitant bills as doctor to the poor, lording it over the bourse as banker, taking bribes as juryman, and fleecing a peasant as land-agent, is the incarnation of thebourgeoismonarchy, a splendid criticism on the money-grubbing century. Politicians, officials, artists, actors, honest citizens, old-clothes-mongers, newspaper-boys, impecunious painters, the most various and the basest creatures are treated by his pencil, and appear on pages which are often terrible in their depth and truthfulness of observation. The period of Louis Philippe is accurately portrayed in these prints, every one of which belongs to the great volume of the human tragicomedy. In his “Émotions parisiennes” and “Bohémiens de Paris” he deals with misfortune, hunger, the impudence of vice, and the horror of misery. His “Histoire ancienne” ridiculed the absurdity of Classicismà laDavid at a time when it was still regarded as high treason to touch this sacred fane. These modern figures with the classical pose, which to some extent parodied David’s pictures, were probably what first brought his contemporaries to a sense of the stiffness and falsity of the whole movement; and at a later period Offenbach also contributed his best ideas with much the same result. Moreover, Daumier was a landscape-painter of the first order. No one has more successfully rendered the appearance of bridges and houses, of quays and streets under a downpour, of nature enfeebled as it is in the precincts of Paris. He was an instantaneous photographer without a rival, a physiognomist such as Breughel was in the sixteenth century, Jan Steen and Brouwer in the seventeenth,and Chodowiecki in the eighteenth, with the difference that his drawing was as broad and powerful as Chodowiecki’s was delicate and refined. This inborn force of line, suggestive of Jordaens, places his sketches as high, considered as works of art, as they are invaluable as historical documents. The treatment is so summary, the outline so simplified, the pantomime, gesticulation, and pose always so expressive; and Daumier’s influence on several artists is beyond doubt. Millet, the great painter of peasants, owes much to the draughtsman of thebourgeois. Precisely what constitutes his “style,” the great line, the simplification, the intelligent abstention from anecdotic trifles, are things which he learnt from Daumier.
During the years when he drew for theCharivari,Gavarniwas the exact opposite of Daumier. In the one was a forceful strength, in the other a refined grace; in the one brusque and savage observation and almost menacing sarcasm, in the other the wayward mood of the butterfly flitting lightly from flower to flower. Daumier might be compared with Rabelais; Gavarni, thespiritueljournalist of thegrand mondeand thedemi-monde, the draughtsman of elegance and ofrouésandlorettes, might be compared with Molière. Born of poor parentage in Paris in 1801, and in his youth a mechanician, he supported himself from the year 1835 by fashion prints and costume drawings. He undertook the conduct of a fashion journal,Les Gens du Monde, and began it with a series of drawings from the life of thejeunesse dorée:les Lorettes,les Actrices,les Fashionables,les Artistes,les Étudiants de Paris,les Bals masqués,les Souvenirs du Carnaval,la Vie des Jeunes Hommes. A new world was here revealed with bold traits. The women of Daumier are good, fat mothers, always busy, quick-witted, and of an enviable constitution; women who are careful in the management of their household, and who go to market and take their husband’s place at his office when necessary. In Gavarni the women are piquant and given to pouting, draped in silk and enveloped in soft velvet mantles. They are fond of dining in thecabinet particulier, and of scratching the name of their lover, for the time being, upon crystal mirrors.
Gavarni was the first who seized the worldly side of modern life; he portrayed elegant figures full ofchic, and gave them a garb which fitted them exactly. In his own dress he had a taste for what was dandified,and he plunged gaily into the enjoyment of the Parisian life which eddied around in a whirl of pleasure. The present generation feels that the air in such old journals of fashion is heavy. In every work of art there is, in addition to what endures, a fine perfume that evaporates after a certain number of years, and is no longer perceptible to those who come afterwards. What is fresh and modern to-day looks to-morrow like the dried flowers which the botanist keeps in a herbarium. And those who draw the fashions of their age are specially liable to this swift decay. Thus many of Gavarni’s lithographs have the effect of pallid pictures of a vanished world. But the generation of 1830 honoured in him the samecharmeur, the same master of enamoured grace, which that of 1730 had done in Watteau. He was sought after as an inventor of fashions, whom the tailor Humann, the Worth of the “July Monarchy,” regarded as his rival. He was the discoverer of all the fairy costumes which formed the chief attraction at masquerades and theatres, the delicategourmetof the eternal feminine; and having dangled much after women, he knew how to render the wave of a petticoat, the seductive charm of a well-proportioned leg, and the coquettishness of a newcoiffurewith the most familiar connoisseurship. He has been called the Balzac of draughtsmen. And the sentences at the bottom of hissketches, for which he is also responsible, are as audacious as the pictures themselves. Thus, when the young exquisite in the series “La Vie des Jeunes Hommes” stands with his companion before a skeleton in the anthropological museum, the little woman opines with a shudder, “When one thinks that this is a man, and that women lovethat”!
But that is only one side of the sphinx. He is only half known when one thinks only of the draughtsman of ladies’ fashions who celebrated the free and easy graces of thedemi-mondeand the wild licence of the carnival. At bottom Gavarni was not a frivolous butterfly, but an artist of a strangely sombre imagination, a profound and melancholy philosopher who had a prescience of all the mysteries of life. All the mighty problems which the century produced danced before his spirit like spectral notes of interrogation.
The transition was made when, as an older man, he depicted the cold, sober wakening that follows the wild night.Constantin Guyshad already worked on these lines. He was an unfortunate and ailing man, who passed his existence, like Verlaine, in hospital, and died in an almshouse. Guys has not left much behind him, but in that little he shows himself the true forerunner of the moderns, and it is not a mere chance that Baudelaire, the ancestor of thedécadence, established Guys’ memory. These women who wander aimlessly about the streets with weary movements and heavy eyes deadened with absinthe, and who flit through the ball-room like bats, have nothing of the innocent charm of Monnier’s grisettes. They are the uncanny harbingers of death, the demoniacal brides of Satan. Guys exercised on Gavarni an influence which brought into being hisInvalides du sentiment, hisLorettes vieilles, and hisFourberies de femmes. “The pleasure of all creatures is mingled with bitterness.” The frivolous worldling became a misanthrope from whom no secret of the foul city was hidden; a pessimist who had begun to recognise the human brute, the swamp-flower of over-civilisation, the “bitter fruit which is inwardly full of ashes,” in the queen of the drawing-roomas in the prostitute of the gutter. Henceforth he only recognises a love whose pleasures are to be reckoned amongst the horrors of death. His works could be shown to no lady, and yet they are in no sense frivolous: they are terrible and puritanic.
If Daumier by preference showed mastery in his men, Gavarni showed it in his women as no other has done. He is not the powerful draughtsman that Daumier is; he has not the feeling for large movement, but with what terrible directness he analyses faces! He has followed woman through all seasons of life and in every grade, from youth to decay, and from brilliant wealth to filthy misery, and he has written the story of thelorettein monumental strophes: café chantant, villa in the Champs Elysées, equipage, grooms, Bois de Boulogne, procuress, garret, and radish-woman, that final incarnation which Victor Hugo called the sentence of judgment.
And Gavarni went further on this road. His glance became sharper and sharper, and the seriousness of meditation subdued his merriment; he came to the study of his age with the relentless knife of a vivisectionist. Fate had taught him the meaning of the struggle for existence. A journal he had founded in the thirties overwhelmed him with debts. In 1835 he sat in the prison of Clichy, and from that time he meditated on the miserable, tattered creatures whom he saw around him, with other eyes. He studied the toiling masses, and roamed about in slums and wine-caves amongst pickpockets and bullies. And what Paris had not yet revealed to him, he learnt in 1849 in London. Even there he was not the first-comer. Géricault, who as early as 1821 dived into the misery of the vast city, and brought out a series of lithographs, showed him the way. Beggars cowering half dead with exhaustion at abaker’s door, ragged pipers slouching round deserted quarters of the town, poor crippled women wheeled in barrows by hollow-eyed men past splendid mansions and surrounded by the throng of brilliant equipages—these are some of the scenes which he brought home with him from London. But Gavarni excels him in trenchant incisiveness. “What is to be seen in London gratis,” runs the heading of a series of sketches in which he conjures up on paper, in such a terrible manner, the new horrors of this new period: the starvation, the want, and the measureless suffering that hides itself with chattering teeth in the dens of the great city. He went through Whitechapel from end to end, and studied its drunkenness and its vice. How much more forcible are his beggars than those of Callot! The grand series of “Thomas Vireloque” is a dance of death in life; and in it are stated all the problems which have since disturbed our epoch. By this work Gavarni has come down to us as a contemporary, and by it he has become a pioneer. The enigmatical figure of “Thomas Vireloque” starts up in these times, following step by step in the path of his prototype: he is the philosopher of the back streets, the ragged scoundrel with dynamite in his pocket, the incarnation of thebête humaine, of human misery and human vice. Here Gavarni stands far above Hogarth and far above Callot. The ideas on social politics of the first half of the century are concentrated in “Thomas Vireloque.”
Of course the assumption of government by NapoleonIIImarked a new phase in French caricature. It became more mundane and more highly civilised. All the piquancy and brilliance, waywardness and corruption, looseness and amenity, mirth and affectation of this refined city life, which in those days threw its dazzling splendour over all Europe, found intelligent and subtle interpreters in the young generation of draughtsmen. TheJournal pour rirecomes under consideration as the leading paper. It was founded in 1848, and in 1856 assumed the title ofJournal amusant, under which it is known at the present day.
Au premier Mosieu.—“Attendez-moi ce soir, de quatre à cinq heures, quai de l’Horloge du Palais.—VotreAugustine.”Au deuxième Mosieu.—“Ce soir, quai des Lunettes, entre quatre et cinq heures.—VotreAugustine.”Au troisième Mosieu.—“Quai des Morfondus, ce soir, de quatre heures à cinq.—VotreAugustine.”À un quatrième Mosieu.—“Je t’attends ce soir, à quatre heures.—TonAugustine.”
Au premier Mosieu.—“Attendez-moi ce soir, de quatre à cinq heures, quai de l’Horloge du Palais.—VotreAugustine.”
Au deuxième Mosieu.—“Ce soir, quai des Lunettes, entre quatre et cinq heures.—VotreAugustine.”
Au troisième Mosieu.—“Quai des Morfondus, ce soir, de quatre heures à cinq.—VotreAugustine.”
À un quatrième Mosieu.—“Je t’attends ce soir, à quatre heures.—TonAugustine.”
Gustave Doré, to the lessening of his importance, moved on this ground only in his earliest period. He was barely sixteen and still at school in his native town Burg, in Alsace, when he made an agreement with Philippon, who engaged him for three years on theJournal pour rire. His first drawings date from 1844: “Les animaux socialistes,” which were very suggestive of Grandville, and “Désagréments d’un voyage d’agrément”—something like the GermanHerr und Frau Buchholz in der Schweiz—which made a considerable sensation by their grotesque wit. In his series “Les différents publics de Paris” and “La Ménagerie Parisienne” he represented with an incisive pencil the opera, theThéâtre des Italiens, the circus, theOdéonand theJardin des Plantes. But since that time the laurels of historical painting have given him no rest. He turned away from his own age as well as from caricature, and made excursions into all zones and all periods. He visited the Inferno with Dante, lingered in Palestine with the patriarchs of the Old Testament, and ran through the world of wonders with Perrault. The facility of his invention was astonishing, and so too was the aptness with which he seized for illustration on the most vivid scenes from all authors. But he has too much Classicism to be captivating for very long. His compositions dazzle by an appearance of the grand style, but attain only an outward and scenical effect. His figures are academic variations of types originally established by the Greeks and the Cinquescentisti. He forced his talent when he soared into regions where he could not stand without the support of his predecessors. Even in his “Don Quixote” the figures lose in character the larger they become. Everything in Doré is calligraphic, judicious, without individuality, without movement and life, composed in accordance with known rules. There is a touch of Wiertz in him, both in his imagination and in his design, and his youthful works, such as the “Swiss Journey,” in which he merely drew from observation without pretensions to style, will probably last the longest.
In broad lithographs and charming woodcuts,Chamhas been the most exhaustive in writing up the diary of modern Parisian life during the period 1848-78. The celebrated caricaturist—he has been called the most brilliant man in France under NapoleonIII—had worked in the studio of Delaroche at the same time as Jean François Millet. After 1842 he came forward as Cham (his proper name was Count Amadée de Noë) with drawings which soon made him the artist most in demand on the staff of theCharivari. Neither so profound nor so serious as Gavarni, he has a constant sparkle of vivacity, and is a draughtsman of wonderfulverve. In his reviews of the month and of the year, everything which interested Paris in the provinces of invention and fashion, art and literature, science and the theatre, passes before us in turn: the omnibuses with their high imperials, table-turning and spirit-rapping, the opening of theGrands Magasins du Louvre, Madame Ristori, the completion of the Suez Canal, the first newspaper kiosks, New Year’s Day in Paris, the invention of ironclads, the tunnelling of Mont Cenis, Gounod’sFaust, Patti and Nilsson, the strike of the tailors and hat-makers, jockeys and racing.Everything that excited public attention had a close observer in Cham. His caricatures of the works of art in the Salon were full of spirit, and the International Exhibition of 1867 found in him its classic chronicler. Here all the mysterious Paris of the third Napoleon lives once more. Emperors and kings file past, the band of Strauss plays, gipsies are dancing, equipages roll by, and every one lives, loves, flirts, squanders money, and whirls round in a maëlstrom. But the end of the exhibition betokened the end of all that splendour. In Cham’s plates which came next one feels that there is thunder in the air. Neither fashions nor theatres, neither women nor pleasure, could prevent politics from predominating more and more: the fall of Napoleon was drawing near.
There was a greater division of labour amongst those who followed Cham,since one chose “little women” as a speciality, another the theatre, and another high-life. Assisted by photography,Nadarturned again to portraiture, which had been neglected since Daumier, and enjoyed a great success with his series “Les Contemporains de Nadar.”Marcellinis the first who spread over his sketches from the world of fashions and the theatre all thechicand fashionable glitter which lives in the novels of those years. He is the chronicler of the great world, of balls andsoirées; he shows the opera and theThéâtre des Italiens, tells of hunting and racing, attends the drives in the Corso, and at the call of fashion promptly deserts the stones of Paris to look about him in châteaux and country-houses, seaside haunts in France, and the littlewatering-places of Germany, where the gaming-tables formed at that time the rendezvous of well-bred Paris. Baden-Baden, where all the lions of the day, the politicians and the artists and all the beauties of the Paris salons, met together in July, offered the draughtsman a specially wide field for studies of fashion andchic. Here began the series “Histoires des variations de la mode depuis le XVI siècle jusqu’à nos jours.” In a place where all classes of society, the great world and thedemi-monde, came into contact, Marcellin could not avoid the latter, but even when he verged on this province he always knew how to maintain a correct and distinguished bearing. He was peculiarly the draughtsman of “society,” of that brilliant, pleasure-loving, tainted, and yet refined society of the Second Empire which turned Paris into a great ball-room.
Randonis as plebeian as Marcellin is aristocratic. His speciality is the stupid recruit who is marched through the streets with his “squad,” or the retired tradesman of small means, as Daudet has hit him off in M. Chèbe, the old gentleman seated on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne: “Let the little ones come to me with their nurses.” His province includes everything that has nothing to do withchic. The whole life of the Parisian people, the horse-fairs, the races at Poissy, and all the more important occurrences by which the appearance of the city has been transformed, may be followed in his drawings. When he travelled he did not go to watering-places, but to the provinces, to Cherbourg and Toulon, or to the manufacturing towns of Belgium and England, where he observed life at the railway stations and the custom-house, at markets and in barracks, at seaports and upon the street. Goods that are being piled together, sacks that are being hoisted, ships being brought to anchor, storehouses, wharfs, and docks—everywhere there is as much life in his sketches as in a busy beehive. Nature is a great manufactory, and man a living machine. The world is like an ant-hill, the dwelling of curious insects furnished with teeth, feelers, indefatigable feet, and marvellous organs proper for digging, sawing, building, and all things possible, but furnished also with an incessant hunger.
Soon afterwards there cameHadol, who made his début in 1855, withpictures of the fashions;Stop, who specially represented the provinces and Italy;Draner, who occupied himself with the Parisian ballet and designed charming military uniforms for little dancing girls.Léonce Petitdrew peasants and sketched the charms of the country in a simple, familiar fashion—the mortal tedium of little towns, poor villages, and primitive inns, the gossip of village beldames before the house-door, the pompous dignity of village magistrates or of the head of the fire brigade. He is specially noteworthy as a landscape artist. The trees on the straight, monotonous road rise softly and delicately into the air, and the sleepy sameness of tortuous village streets is pregnantly rendered by a few strokes of the pencil. The land is like a great kitchen garden. The fields and the arable ground with their dusty, meagre soil chant a mighty song of hard labour, of the earnest, toilsome existence of the peasant folk.
AndrieuxandMorlanddiscovered thefemme entretenue, though afterwards her best known delineator wasGrévin, an able, original, facile, and piquant draughtsman, whom some—exaggerating beyond a doubt—called the direct successor of Gavarni. Grévin’s women are a little monotonous, with their ringleted chignons, their expressionless eyes which try to look big, their perverse little noses, their defiant, pouting lips, and the cheap toilettes which they wear with so muchchic. But they too have gone to their rest with the grisettes of Monnier and Gavarni, and have left the field to the women of Mars and Forain. In these days Grévin’s work seems old-fashioned, since it is no longer modern and not yet historical; nevertheless it marks an epoch, like that of Gavarni. Thebals publics, thebals de l’Opéra, those of theJardin Mabille, theCloserie des Lilas, the races, the promenades in theBois de Vincennes, the seaside resorts, all places where thedemi-mondepitched its tentin the time of NapoleonIII, were also the home of the artist. “How they love in Paris” and “Winter in Paris” were his earliest series. His finest and greatest drawings, the scenes from the Parisian hotels and “The English in Paris,” appeared in 1867, the year of the Exhibition. His later series, published as albums—“Les filles d’Ève,” “Le monde amusant,” “Fantaisies parisiennes,” “Paris vicieux,” “La Chaîne des Dames”—are a song of songs upon the refinements of life.
It does not lie within the plan of this book to follow the history of drawing any further. Our intention was merely to show that painting had to follow the path trodden by Rowlandson and Cruikshank, Erhard and Richter, Daumier and Gavarni, if it was to be art of the nineteenth century, and not to remain for ever dependent on the old masters. Absolute beauty is not good food for art; to be strong it must be nourished on the ideas of the century. When the world had ceased to draw inspiration from the masterpieces of the past merely with the object of depicting by their aid scenes out of long-buried epochs, there was for the first time a prospect that mere discipleship would be overcome, and that a new and original painting would be developed through the fresh and independent study of nature. The passionate craving of the age had to be this: to feel at home on the earth, in this long-neglected world of reality, which hides the unsuspected treasure of vivid works of art. The rising sun is just as beautiful now as on the first day, the streams flow, the meadows grow green, the vibrating passions are at war now as in other times, the immortal heart of nature still beats beneath its rough covering, and its pulsation finds an echo in the heart of man. It was necessary to descend from ideals to existing fact, and the world had to be once more discovered by painters as in the days of the first Renaissance. The question was how by the aid of all the devices of colour to represent the multifarious forms of human activity: the phases and conditions of life, fashion as well as misery, work and pleasure, the drawing-room and the street, the teeming activity of towns and the quiet labour of peasants. The essential thing was to write the entire natural history of the age. And this way, the way from museums to nature, and from the past to the world of living men, was shown by the English to the French and German painters.
CHAPTER XVII
ENGLISH PAINTING TO 1850
“TheEnglish school has an advantage over others in being young: its tradition is barely a century old, and, unlike the Continental schools, it is not hampered by antiquated Greek and Latin theories. What fortunate conditions it has for breaking away into really modern work! whereas in other nations the weight of tradition presses hard on the boldest innovators. The English do not look back; on the contrary, they look into life around them.” So wrote Burger-Thoré in one of his Salons in 1867.
Yet England was not unaffected by the retrospective tendency on the Continent. Perhaps it might even be demonstrated that this movement had its earliest origin on British soil. England had its “Empire style” in architecture fifty years before there was any empire in France; it had its Classical painting when David worked at Cupids with Boucher, and it gave the world a Romanticist at the very time when the literature of the Continent became “Classical.”The Lady of the Lake,Marmion,The Lord of the Isles,The Fair Maid of Perth,Old Mortality,Ivanhoe,Quentin Durward, who is there that does not know these names by heart? We have learnt history from Walter Scott, and that programme of the artistic crafts which Lorenz Gedon drew up in 1876, when he arranged the departmentWorks of our Fathersin the Munich Exhibition, had been carried out by Scott as early as 1816. For Scott laid out much of the money he received for his romances in building himself a castle in the style of the baronial strongholds of the Middle Ages: “Towers and turrets all imitated from a royal building in Scotland, windows and gables painted with the arms of the clans, with lions couchant,” rooms “filled with high sideboards and carved chests, targes, plaids, Highland broadswords, halberts, and suits of armour, and adorned with antlers hung up as trophies.” Here was a Makartesque studio very many years before Makart.
Amongst the painters there were Classicists and Romanticists; but they were neither numerous nor of importance. What England produced in the way of “great art” in the beginning of last century could be erased from the complete chart of British painting without any essential gap being made in the course of its development. Reynolds had had to pay dear for approaching the Italians in his “Ugolino,” his “Macbeth,” and his “Young Hercules.” And a yet more arid mannerism befell all the others who followed him on the way to Italy, among themJames Barry, who, after studying for years in Italy,settled down in London in 1771, with the avowed intention of providing England with a classical form of art. He believed that he had surpassed his own models, the Italian classic painters, by six pompous representations of the “Culture and Progress of Human Knowledge,” which he completed in 1783, in the theatre of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. The many-sidedJames Northcote, equally mediocre in everything, survives rather by his biographies of Reynolds and Titian than by the great canvases which he painted for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. That which became best known was “The Murder of the Children in the Tower.”Henry Fuseli, who was also much occupied with authorship and aspreceptor Britanniæ, always mentioned with great respect by his numerous pupils, produced a series of exceedingly thoughtful and imaginative works, to which he was incited by Klopstock and Lavater. By preference he illustrated Milton and Shakespeare, and amongst this series of pictures his painting of “Titania with the Ass,” from Shakespeare’sMidsummer Night’s Dream, in the London National Gallery, is probably the best. His pupilWilliam Ettywas saturated with the traditions of the Venetian school; he is the British Makart, and followed rather heavily and laboriously in the track of Titian, exploring the realms of nude beauty, and toiling to discover that secret of blooming colour which gleams from the female forms of the Venetians. The assiduousBenjamin Robert Haydon, a spirit ever seeking, striving, and reflecting, became, like Gros in France, a victim of the grand style. He would naturally have preferred to paint otherwise, and more simply. The National Gallery possesses a charming picture by him of a London street (for some years past on loan at Leicester), which represents a crowd watching a Punch and Judy show. But, like Gros, he held it a sin against the grand style to occupy himself with such matters. He thought it only permissible to paint sacred subjects or subjects from ancient history upon large spaces of canvas; and he sank ever deeper into his theories, reaching the profoundest abyss of abstract science when he made diligent anatomical studies of the muscles of a lion, in order to fashion the heroic frames of warriors on the same plan. His end, on 26th June 1846, was like that of the Frenchman. There was found beside his body a paper on which he had written: “God forgive me. Amen. Finis,” with the quotation from Shakespeare’sLear: “Stretch me no longer on the rack of this rough world.” All these masters are more interesting for their human qualities than for their works, which, with their extravagant colour, forced gestures, and follies of every description, contain no new thing worthy of further development. Even when they sought to make direct copies from Continental performances, they did not attain the graceful sweep of their models. The refinements which they imitated became clumsy and awkward in their hands, and they remained halfbourgeoisand half barbaric.
The liberating influence of English art was not found in the province of the great painting, and it is probably not without significance that the few who tried to import it came to grief in the experiment. There can be no doubtthat such art goes more against the grain of the English nature than of any other. Even in the days of scholastic philosophy the English asserted the doctrine that there are only individuals in nature. In the beginning of modern times a new era, grounded on the observation of nature, was promulgated from England. Bacon had little to say about beauty: he writes against the proportions and the principle of selection in art, and therefore against the ideal. Handsome men, he says, have seldom possessed great qualities. And in the same way the English stage had just as little bent for the august and rhythmical grandeur of classical literature. When he stabbed Polonius, Garrick never dreamed of moving according to the taste of Boileau, and was probably as different from the Greek leader of a chorus as Hogarth from David. The peculiar merits of English literature and science have been rooted from the time of their first existence in their capacity for observation. This explains the contempt for regularity in Shakespeare, the feeling for concrete fact in Bacon. English philosophy is positive, exact, utilitarian, and highly moral. Hobbes and Locke, John Stuart Mill and Buckle, in England take the place of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant upon the Continent. Amongst English historians Carlyle is the only poet: all the rest are learned prose-writers who collect observations, combine experiences, arrange dates, weigh possibilities, reconcile facts, discover laws, and hoard and increase positive knowledge. The eighteenth century had seen the rise of the novel as the picture of contemporary life; in Hogarth this national spirit was first turned to account in painting. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, again, the good qualities of English art consisted not in bold ideality, but in sharpness of observation, sobriety, and flexibility of spirit.
Their proper domain was still to be found in portraiture, and if none of the new portrait painters can be compared with the great ancestors of English art, they are none the less superior to all their contemporaries on the Continent.George Romney, who belongs rather to the eighteenth century, holds the mean course between the refined classic art of Sir Joshua and theimaginative poetic art of Thomas Gainsborough. Less personal and less profound in characterisation, he was, on the other hand, the most dexterous painter of drapery in his age: a man who knew all the secrets of the trade, and possessed, at the same time, that art which is so much valued in portrait painters—the art of beautifying his models without making his picture unlike the original. Professional beauties beheld themselves presented in their counterfeit precisely as they wished to appear, and accorded him, therefore, a fervent adoration. And after his return from Italy in 1775 his fame was so widespread that it outstripped Gainsborough’s and equalled that of Reynolds. Court beauties and celebrated actresses left no stone unturned to have their portraits introduced into one of his “compositions”; for Romney eagerly followed the fashion of allegorical portraiture which had been set by Reynolds, representing persons with the emblem of a god or of one of the muses. Romney has painted the famous Lady Hamilton, to say nothing of others, as Magdalen, Joan of Arc, a Bacchante, and an Odalisque.
Great as his reputation had been at the close of the eighteenth century, it was outshone twenty years later by that ofSir Thomas Lawrence. Born in Bristol in 1769, Lawrence had scarcely given up the calling of an actor before he saw all England in raptures over his genius as a painter. The catalogue of his portraits is a complete list of all who were at the time pre-eminent for talent or beauty. He received fabulous sums, which he spent with the grace of a man of the world. In 1815 he was commissioned to paint for the Windsor Gallery the portraits of all the “Victors of Waterloo,” from the Duke of Wellington to the Emperor Alexander. The Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle gave him an opportunity for getting the portraits of representatives of the various Courts. All the capitals of Europe, which he visited for this purpose, received him with princely honours. He was member of all the Academies under the sun, and President of that in London; but, as a natural reaction, this over-estimation of earlier years has been followed by an equally undeserved undervaluation of his works in these days. Beneath the fashionable exterior of his ceremonial pictures naturalness and simplicity are often wanting, and so too are the deeper powers of characterisation, firm drawing, and realvitality. A feminine coquetry has taken the place of character. His drawing has a banal effect, and his colouring is monotonous in comparison with that realism which Reynolds shares with the old masters. It is easy to confound the majority of his pictures of ceremonies with those of Winterhalter, and his smaller portraits with pretty fashion plates; yet one cannot but admire his ease of execution and nobility of composition. Several of his pictures of women, in particular, are touched by an easy grace and a fine charm of poetic sensuousness in which he approaches Gainsborough. Not many at that time could have painted such pretty children’s heads, or given young women such an attractive and familiar air of life. With what a girlish glance of innocence and melancholy does Mrs. Siddons look out upon the world from the canvas of Lawrence: how piquant is her white Greek garment, with its black girdle and the white turban. And what subtle delicacy there is in the portrait of Miss Farren as she flits with muff and fur-trimmed cloak through a bright green summer landscape. The reputation of Lawrence will rise once more when his empty formal pieces have found their way into lumber-rooms, and a greater number of his pictures of women—pictures so full of indescribable fascination, so redolent of mysterious charm—are accessible to the public.
As minor stars, the soft and tenderJohn Hoppner, the attractively superficialWilliam Beechey, the celebrated pastellistJohn Russell, and the vigorously energeticJohn Jacksonhad their share with him in public favour, whilstHenry Raeburnshone in Scotland as a star of the first magnitude.
He was a born painter. Wilkie says in one of his letters from Madrid, that the pictures of Velasquez put him in mind of Raeburn; and certain works of the Scot, such as the portrait of Lord Newton, the famousbon vivantand doughty drinker, are indeed performances of such power that comparison with this mighty name is no profanation. At a time when there was a danger that portrait painting would sink in the hands of Lawrence into an insipidpainting of prettiness, Raeburn stood alone by the simplicity and naturalistic impressiveness of his portraiture. The three hundred and twenty-five portraits by him which were exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy in 1876, gave as exhaustive a picture of the life of Edinburgh at the close of the century as those of Sir Joshua gave of the life of London. All the celebrated Scotchmen of his time—Robertson, Hume, Ferguson, and Scott—were painted by him. Altogether he painted over six hundred portraits; and, small though the number may seem compared with the two thousand of Reynolds, Raeburn’s artistic qualities are almost the greater. The secret of his success lies in his vigorous healthiness, in the indescribablefuriaof his brush, in the harmony and truth of his colour-values. His figures are informed by a startling intensity of life. His old pensioners, and his sailors in particular, have something kingly in the grand air of their calm and noble countenances. Armstrong has given him a place between Frans Hals and Velasquez, and occasionally his conception of colour even recalls the modern Frenchmen, as it were Manet in his Hals period. He paints his models, just as they come into contact with him in life, in the frank light of day and without any attempt at the dusk of the old masters; of raiment he gives only as much as the comprehension of the picture demands, and depicts character in large and simple traits.
The importance of West and Copley, two Americans who were active in England, is that they were the first to apply the qualities acquired in English portrait painting to pictures on a large scale.
Benjamin Westhas undoubtedly been over-praised by his contemporaries, and by a critic of the present day he has, not unfairly, been designated “the king of mediocrity.” At his appearance he was interesting to Europeans merely as an anthropological curiosity,—as the first son of barbaric America who had used a paint brush. A thoroughly American puff preceded hisentry into the Eternal City in 1760. It was reported that as the son of a quaker farmer he had grown up amongst his father’s slaves in the immediate neighbourhood of the Indians, and had painted good portraits in Philadelphia and New York without having ever seen a work of art. People were delighted when, on being brought into the Vatican, he clapped his hands and compared the Apollo Belvidere to an Indian chief. In the art of making himself interesting “the young savage” was ahead of all his patrons; and as he followed the ruling classical tendency with great aptitude, within the course of a year he was made an honorary member of the Academies of Parma, Bologna, and Florence, and praised by the critics of Rome as ranking with Mengs as the first painter of his day. In 1763, at a time when Hogarth and Reynolds, Wilson and Gainsborough, were in the fulness of their powers, he went to London; and as people are always inclined to value most highly what they do not possess, he soon won an important position for himself, even beside these masters. Hogarth produced nothing but “genrepictures,” Wilson only landscapes, and Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits: West brought to the English what they did not as yet possess—a “great art.”
His first picture—in the London National Gallery—“Pylades and Orestes brought as Hostages before Iphigenia,” is a tiresome product of that Classicism which upon the Continent found its principal representatives in Mengs and David: it is stiff in drawing, its composition is suggestive of a bas-relief, and its cold grey colouring is classically academic. His other pictures from antique and sacred history stand much on the same level as those of Wilhelm Kaulbach, with whose works they share their stilted dignity, their systematically antiquarian structure, and their mechanical combination of forms borrowed in a spiritless fashion from the Cinquecentisti.
Fortunately West has left behind him something different from these ambitious attempts; for on the occasions when he turned away from the great style he created works of lasting importance. This is specially trueof some fine historical pictures dealing with his own age, which will preserve his name for ever. “The Death of General Wolfe” at the storming of Quebec on 13th September 1759—exhibited at the opening of the Royal Academy in 1768—is by its very sobriety a sincere, honest, and sane piece of work, which will maintain its value as an historical document. It was just at this time that so great a part was played by the question of costume, and West encountered the same difficulties which Gottfried Schadow was obliged to face when he represented Ziethen and the Old Dessauer in the costume of their age. The connoisseurs held that such a sublime theme would only admit of antique dress. If West in their despite represented the general and his soldiers in their regulation uniform, it seems at the present time no more than the result of healthy common sense, but at that time it was an artistic event of great importance, and one which was only accomplished in France after the work of several decades. In that country Gérard and Girodet still clung to the belief that they could only raise the military picture to the level of the great style by giving the soldiers of the Empire the appearance of Greek and Roman statues. Gros is honoured as the man who first ceased from giving modern soldiers an air of the antique. But the American Englishman had anticipated him by forty years. As in Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” it was only the pyramidal composition in West’s picture that betrayed the painter’s alliance with the Classical school; in other respects it forecast the realistic programme for decades to come, and indicated the course of development which leads through Gros onwards. If in Gros men are treated purely as accessories to throw a hero into relief, in West they stand out in action. They behave in the picture spontaneously as they do in life. That is to say, there is in West’s work of 1768 the element through which Horace Vernet’s pictures of 1830 are to be distinguished from those of Gros.
This realistic programme was carried out with yet greater consistency by West’s younger compatriotJohn Singleton Copley, who after a short sojourn in Italy migrated to England in 1775. His chief works in the London National Gallery depict in the same way events from contemporary history—“The Death of the Earl of Chatham, 7th April 1778” and “The Death of Major Pierson, 6th January 1781,”—and it is by no means impossible that when David, in the midst of the classicising tendencies of his age, ventured to paint “The Death of Marat” and “The Death of Lepelletier,” he was led to do so by engravings after Copley. In the representation of such things other painters of the epoch had draped their figures in antique costume, called genii and river-gods into action, and given a Roman character to the whole. Copley, like West, offers a plain, matter-of-fact representation of the event, without any rhetorical pathos. And what raises him above West is his liquid, massive colour, suggestive of the old masters. In none of his works could West set himself free from the dead grey colour of the Classical school, whereas Copley’s “Death of William Pitt” is the result of intimate studies of Titian and the Dutch. The way the light falls on the perukes of the men and the brown, wainscoted walls puts one in mind of Rembrandt’s “Anatomical Lecture”; only, instead of a pathetic scene from the theatre, we have a collection of good portraits in the manner of the Dutch studies of shooting matches.
That this unhackneyed conception of daily life has its special home in England is further demonstrated by the work ofDaniel Maclise, who depicted “The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher,” “The Death of Nelson,” and other patriotic themes upon walls and canvases several yards square, with appalling energy, promptitude, and expenditure of muscle. By these he certainly did better service to national pride than to art. Nevertheless, with their forcible, healthy realism they contrast favourably with the mythological subjects so universally produced on the Continent at that time.
Beside the portrait painters of men stand the portrait painters of animals. Since the days of Elias Riedinger animal painting had fallen into general disesteem on the Continent. Thorwaldsen, the first of the Classicists who allowed animals to appear in his works (as he did in his Alexander frieze), dispensed with any independent studies of nature, and contented himself with imitating the formal models on the frieze of the Parthenon; or, in lack of a Grecian exemplar, simply drew out of the depths of his inner consciousness. Especially remarkable is the sovran contempt with which he treated the most familiar domestic creatures. German historical painting knew still less what to make of the brute creation, because it only recognised beauty in the profundity of ideas, and ideas have nothing to do with beasts. Its four-footed creatures have a philosophic depth of contemplation, and are bad studies after nature. Kaulbach’s “Reinecke” and the inclination totransplant human sentiments into the world of brutes delayed until the sixties any devoted study of the animal soul. France, too, before the days of Troyon, had nothing to show worth mentioning. But in England, the land of sport, animal painting was evolved directly from the old painting of the chase, without being seduced from its proper course. Fox-hunting has been popular in England since the time of CharlesI. Racing came into fashion not long after, and with racing came that knowledge of horseflesh which has been developed in England further than elsewhere. Since the seventeenth century red deer have been preserved in the English parks. It is therefore comprehensible that English art was early occupied with these animals, and since it was sportsmen who cared most about them, the painter was at first their servant. He had not so much to paint pictures as reminiscences of sport and the chase. His first consideration in painting a horse was to paint a fine horse; as to its being a fine picture, that was quite a secondary matter.John WoottonandGeorge Stubbswere in this sense portrayers of racehorses. The latter, however, took occasion to emancipate himself from his patrons by representing the noble animal, not standing at rest by his manger, or with a groom on his back and delighting in the consciousness of his own beauty, but as he was in action and amongst pictorial surroundings.
Soon afterwardsGeorge Morlandmade his appearance. He made a specialty of old nags, and was perhaps the most important master of the brush that the English school produced at all. His pictures have the same magic as the landscapes of Gainsborough. He painted life on the high-road and in front of village inns—scenes like those which Isaac Ostade had represented a century before: old horses being led to water amid the sunny landscape of the downs, market carts rumbling heavily through the rough and sunken lanes, packhorses coming back to their stalls of an evening tired out with the day’s exertions, riders pulling up at the village inn or chatting with the pretty landlady. And he has done these things with the delicacy of an old Dutch painter. It is impossible to say whether Morland had ever seen the pictures of Adriaen Brouwer; but this greatest master of technique amongst the Flemings can alone be compared with Morland in verve and artistic many-sidedness; and Morland resembled him also in his adventurous life and his early death. To the spirit and dash of Brouwer he joins the refinement of Gainsborough in his landscapes, and Rowlandson’s delicate feeling for feminine beauty in his figures. He does not paint fine ladies, but women in their everyday clothes, and yet they are surrounded by a grace recalling Chardin: young mothers going to see their children who are with the nurse, smart littletavern hostesses in their white aprons and coquettish caps busily serving riders with drink, and charming city madams in gay summer garb sitting of a Sunday afternoon with their children at a tea-garden. Over the works of Morland there lies all the chivalrous grace of the time of Werther, and that fine Anglo-Saxon aroma exhaled by the works of English painters of the present day. Genuine as is the fame which he enjoys as an animal painter, it is these little social scenes which show his finest side; and only coloured engraving, which was brought to such a high pitch in the England of those days, is able to give an idea of the delicacy of hue in the originals.
Morland’s brother-in-law, the painter and engraverJames Ward, born in 1769 and dying in 1859, united this old English school with the modern. The portrait which accompanies the obituary notice in theArt Journalis that of a very aged gentleman, with a grey beard and thick, white, bristly hair. The pictures which he painted when he had this appearance—and they are the most familiar—were exceedingly weak and insipid works. In comparison with Morland’s broad, liquid, and harmonious painting, that of Ward seems burnished, sparkling, flaunting, anecdotic, and petty. But James Ward was not always old James Ward. In his early days he was one of the greatest and manliest artists of the English school, with whom only Briton Rivière can be compared amongst the moderns. When his “Lioness” appeared in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1816 he was justly hailed as the best animal painter after Snyders, and from that time one masterpiece followed another for ten long years. What grace and power there are in hishorses and dogs! In pictures of this sort Stubbs was graceful and delicate; Ward painted the same horse in as sporting a manner and with the same knowledge, but with an artistic power such as no one had before him. His field of work was wide-reaching. He painted little girls with the thoroughly English feeling of Morland, and had the whole animal world for his domain. Lions, snakes, cats, pigs, oxen, cows, sheep, swans, fowls, frogs are the characters in his pictures. And characters they were, for he never humanised the looks of his four-footed models, as others did later. The home of his animals is not the drawing-room, but the woods and meadows, the air and the gardens. His broad, weighty manner was transformed first into extravagant virtuosity and then into pettiness of style during the last thirty years of his life, when he became senile. His reputation paled more than he deserved before the star of the world-famous Landseer.
The most popular animal painter, not merely of England but of the whole century, wasEdwin Landseer. For fifty years his works formed the chief features of attraction in the Royal Academy. Engravings from him had such a circulation in the country that in the sixties there was scarcely a house in which there did not hang one of his horses or dogs or stags. Even the Continent was flooded with engravings of his pictures, and Landseer sufferedgreatly from this popularity. He is much better than the reproductions with their fatal gloss allow any one to suppose, and his pictures can be judged by them just as little as can Raphael’s “School of Athens” from Jacobi’s engraving.
Edwin Landseer came of a family of artists. His father, who was an engraver, sent him out into the free world of nature as a boy, and made him sketch donkeys and goats and sheep. When he was fourteen he went to Haydon, the prophet on matters of art; and, on the advice of this singular being, studied the sculptures of the Parthenon. He “anatomised animals under my eyes,” writes Haydon, “copied my anatomical drawings, and applied my principles of instruction to animal painting. His genius, directed in this fashion, has, as a matter of fact, arrived at satisfactory results.” Landseer was the spoilt child of fortune. There is no other English painter who can boast of having been made a member of the Royal Academy at twenty-four. In high favour at Court, honoured by the fashionable world, and tenderly treated by criticism, he went on his way triumphant. The region over which he held sway was narrow, but he stood out in it as in life, powerful and commanding. The exhibition of his pictures which took place after his death in 1873 contained three hundred and fourteen oil paintings and one hundred and forty-six sketches. The property which he left amounted to £160,000; and a further sum of £55,000 was realised by the sale of his unsold pictures. Even Meissonier, the best paid painter of the century, did not leave behind him five and a half million francs.
One reason of Landseer’s artistic success is perhaps due to that in him which was inartistic—to his effort to make animals more beautiful than they really are, and to make them the medium for expressing human sentiment. All the dogs and horses and stags which he painted after 1855, and through which he was made specially familiar to the great public, are arrayed in their Sunday clothes,their glossiest hide and their most magnificent horns. And in addition to this he “Darwinises” them: that is to say, he tries to make his animals more than animals; he lends a human sentimental trait to animal character; and that is what distinguishes him to his disadvantage from really great animal painters like Potter, Snyders, Troyon, Jadin, and Rosa Bonheur. He paints the human temperament beneath the animal mask. His stags have expressive countenances, and his dogs appear to be gifted with reason and even speech. At one moment there is a philosophic dignity in their behaviour, and at another a frivolity in their pleasures. Landseer discovered the sentimentality of dogs, and treated them as capable of culture. His celebrated picture “Jack in Office” is almost insulting in its characterisation: there they are, Jack the sentry, an old female dog like a poor gentlewoman, another dog like a professional beggar, and so on. And this habit of bringing animals on the stage, as if they were the actors of tragical, melodramatic, or farcical scenes, made him a peculiar favourite with the great mass of people. Nor were his picture-stories merely easy to read and understand; the characteristic titles he invented for each of them—“Alexander and Diogenes,” “A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society,” and the like—excited curiosity as much as the most carefully selected name of a novel. But this searchafter points and sentimental anecdotes only came into prominence in his last period, when his technique had degenerated and given way to a shiny polish and a forced elegance which obliged him to provide extraneous attractions. His popularity would not be so great, but his artistic importance would be quite the same, if these last pictures did not exist at all.
But the middle period of Landseer, ranging from 1840 to 1850, contains masterpieces which set him by the side of the best animal painters of all times and nations. The well-known portrait of a Newfoundland dog of 1838; that of the Prince Consort’s favourite greyhound of 1841; “The Otter Speared” of 1844, with its panting and yelping pack brought to a standstill beneath a high wall of rock; the dead doe which a fawn is unsuspectingly approaching, in “A Random Shot,” 1848; “The Lost Sheep” of 1850, that wanders frightened and bleating through a wide and lonely landscape covered with snow,—these and many other pictures, in their animation and simple naturalness, are precious examples of the fresh and delicate observation peculiar to him at that time. Landseer’s portrait reveals to us a robust and serious man, with a weather-beaten face, a short white beard, and a snub bulldog nose. Standing six feet high, and having the great heavy figure of a Teuton stepping out of his aboriginal forest, he was indeed much more like a country gentleman than a London artist. He was a sportsman who wandered about all day long in the air with a gun on his arm, and he painted his animal pictures with all the love and joy of a child of nature. That accounts for their strength, their convincing power, and their vivid force. It is as if he had become possessed of a magic cap with which he could draw close to animals without being observed, and surprise their nature and their inmost life.
Landseer’s subject-matter and conception of life are indicated by the pictures which have been named. Old masters like Snyders and Rubens had represented the contrast between man and beast in their boar and lion hunts. It was not wild nature that Landseer depicted, but nature tamed. Rubens, Snyders, and Delacroix displayed their horses, dogs, lions, and tigers in bold action, or in the flame of passion. But Landseer generally introduced his animals in quiet situations—harmless and without fear—in the course of their ordinary life.
Horses, which Leonardo, Rubens, Velasquez, Wouwerman, and the earlier English artists delighted to render, he painted but seldom, and when he painted them it was with a less penetrating comprehension. But lions, which had been represented in savage passion or in quiet dignity by artists from Rubens to Decamps, were for him also a subject of long and exhaustive studies, which had their results in the four colossal lions round the base of the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square. Here the Englishman makes a great advance on Thorwaldsen, who designed the model for the monument in Lucerne without ever having seen a lion. Landseer’s brutes, both as they are painted and as they are cast in bronze, are genuine lions, cruel and catlike, although in savageness and bold passion they are not to be compared with those of Delacroix, nor with those of his elder compatriot, James Ward. On the other hand, stags and roes were really first introduced into painting by Landseer. Those of Robert Hills, who had previously been reckoned the best painter of stags, are timid, suspicious creatures, while Landseer’s are the true kings of the forest, the shooting of which ought to be punished as an act of assassination. His principal field of study was the Highlands. Herehe painted these proud creatures fighting on the mountain slopes, swimming the lake, or as they stand at a gaze in their quiet beauty. With what a bold spirit they raise their heads to snuff the mountain air, whilst their antlers show their delight in battle and the joy of victory. And how gentle and timid is the noble, defenceless roe in Landseer’s pictures.
He had also a delight in painting sheep lost in a snow-storm. But dogs were his peculiar specialty. Landseer discovered the dog. That of Snyders was a treacherous, snarling cur; that of Bewick a robber and a thief. Landseer has made the dog the companion of man, an adjunct of human society, the generous friend and true comrade who is the last mourner at the shepherd’s grave. Landseer first studied his noble countenance and his thoughtful eyes, and in doing so he opened a new province to art, in which Briton Rivière went further at a later period.
But yet another and still wider province was opened to continental nations by the art of England. In an epoch of archæological resuscitations and romantic regrets for the past, it brought French and German painters to a consciousness that the man of the nineteenth century in his daily life might be a perfectly legitimate subject for art. Engravings after the best pictures of Wilkie hang round the walls of Louis Knaus’s reception-room in Berlin. And that in itself betrays to us a fragment of the history of art. The painters who saw the English people with the eyes of Walter Scott, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Dickens were a generation in advance of those who depicted the German people in the spirit of Immermann, Auerbach, Gustav Freytag, and Fritz Reuter. The English advanced quietly on the road trodden by Hogarth in the eighteenth century, whilst upon the Continent the nineteenth century had almost completed half its course before art left anything which will allow future generations to see the men of the period as they really were. Since the days of Fielding and Goldsmith the novel of manners had been continuallygrowing. Burns, the poet of the plough, and Wordsworth, the singer of rustic folk, had given a vogue to that poetry of peasant life and those village tales which have since gone the round of all Europe. England began at that time to become the richest country in the world, and great fortunes were made. Painters were thus obliged to provide for the needs of a new and wealthy middle class. This fact gives us the explanation both of the merits and the faults which are characteristic of Englishgenrepainting.