Part 7

The historic side of _genre_ painting is further illustrated in the present collection in the person of Maclise, who, like his great forerunner, William Hogarth, was attracted again and again by the art of the theatre. But Maclise brought to his task certain larger qualities of design and composition which he had won from the study of the great masters of style; and although he never achieved the highest triumphs in the region of the ideal his efforts in that direction left an impress upon his painting that served to distinguish it from the achievements of those who laboured in obedience to a more modest tradition.

The English theatre has attracted the talent of a long line of artists, some of whom, like Clint, are little known in any other sphere. Perhaps the greatest of them all (if we except the name of Hogarth himself) was Johann Zoffany, whose paintings, admirable in the rendering of incident and character, are even more remarkable for his great qualities as a colourist and his perfect mastery over the secrets of tone. As a student of the theatre he may perhaps be seen to best advantage in the several fine examples in the possession of the Garrick Club; but Lord O’Hagan’s picture of Charles Townley the collector, presented in his library with his marbles, asserts with convincing force his right to rank among the great painters of his time.

Among other pictures in this category whose high claims deserve a fulness of consideration which the exigencies of space alone forbid me to grant, I may mention the Eastern study by Lewis, the “Dawn” by E. J. Gregory, and the group of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle by John Pettie.

I have hinted already that in the brief story of our national school of painting we are constantly reminded of the abiding splendours of the art of Italy, and even in the work of men whose genuine victories were won in another sphere there are constant echoes of the larger language moulded by the great masters of the south. For although, at the first, it is only in the allied departments of portrait and landscape that the art of England claims and owns unquestioned supremacy, yet in the career of the gifted painter who may be said to have first firmly established our claim to rank among the schools of Europe we are not allowed to forget the glorious victories of the Italian Renaissance.

It has been sometimes alleged of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s occasional experiments in the grand style that their failure to rival the masters he most admired proves how futile were his studies in that branch of art in which he could never hope to excel. But this, I think, is to take only a shallow and superficial view of the factors that make for excellence in any chosen field of artistic endeavour; for if Sir Joshua’s essays in ideal design now fade into insignificance by comparison with the solid and enduring work he achieved in portraiture, it remains none the less true that the study of those great models towards which his ambition led him has served to grant to his interpretation of individual face and form a measure of added dignity and power that could have been won from no other source. His sketch-book--preserved in the Print Room of the British Museum--while it forms an interesting record of his sojourn in Italy is no less instructive as illustrating his untiring devotion to those great masters who laboured in a realm of art that his own genius was never destined to inhabit; and there is something infinitely touching in the concluding sentences of his valedictory address to the students of the Royal Academy wherein, while frankly confessing his own failure, he reiterates his undiminished admiration of the greatest of the great Florentines. “It will not,” he says, “I hope, be thought presumptuous in me to appear in the train, I cannot say of his imitators, but of his admirers. I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities and to the tastes of the time in which I live. Yet, however unequal I feel myself to that attempt, were I now to begin the world again I would tread in the steps of that great master. To kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections, would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious man. I feel a self-congratulation in knowing myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite. I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man; and I desire that the last words I should pronounce in this academy and from this place might be the name of Michael Angelo.”

In the same year in which these words were uttered there is yet another reference to his earlier ambitions which is scarcely less pathetic. Writing to Sheridan, who desired to purchase the beautiful picture of St. Cecilia, for which Mrs. Sheridan had served as the model, he says:

“It is with great regret that I part with the best picture I ever painted; for though I have every year hoped to paint better and better, and may truly say ‘Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendum,’ it has not been always the case. However, there is now an end of the pursuit; the race is over, whether it is won or lost.”

The judgment of Time has left the land that owned him in no doubt that the race had been worthily won. The prize awarded to him by the acclaim of subsequent generations was not perhaps the prize he coveted the most; and yet if the goal towards which he set his feet was never reached, the time spent in the study of the great masters of the past affords no story of wasted ambition. For without the example of those great masters he loved to study, his own achievement would have been shorn of certain elements of greatness which have served to place him foremost in the ranks of the portrait painters of his time.

In certain styles of painting we are rightly modest in asserting the claims of the English school, but in that goodly list of artists at whose head stands the name of Sir Joshua we may boast a national possession which the art of the time could scarcely rival and most assuredly could not surpass. Europe was then in no mood to take over the rich inheritance of the great Florentines; the successful study of the principles they had expounded had to wait the coming of a later day; but in those departments wherein the art of Europe was still vital England certainly was, at that time, not lagging behind her rivals. Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Hoppner, Raeburn--what names in the contemporary art of the Continent can be cited as their superiors in those branches of painting which they cultivated? Disparagement is no part of the business of criticism, and the victories of one land assuredly take nothing from the triumphs justly won in another. France, too, at that epoch could boast gifted artists greatly distinguished in various fields; but when it is remembered that Watteau, the most distinguished of French colourists, had died two years before Reynolds was born, the outburst of artistic activity, which the men whose names I have cited heralded to the world, may well be viewed as a phenomenon almost unparalleled in the modern history of painting. For it is as colourists, in the truest and highest sense of the term, that the English school at this period of revival makes its claim to supremacy; and it was here that the teaching of Italy--not as expounded through the work of the Florentines, but rather as it travelled northwards, carrying with it the surviving splendours of the Venetians--found a full and worthy response from these gifted exponents of our native art.

The present collection is rich in finely chosen examples of the masters I have named. Reynolds boasted to Malone that he had painted two generations of the beauties of England, and as we turn from the “Kitty Fisher,” lent by the Earl of Crewe, to the portrait of “Anne Dashwood,” or to that of the “Marchioness of Thomond,” from Sir Carl Meyer’s collection, we may well own that no man was more rightly equipped for the task that had fallen upon him. No man save perhaps his rival, Thomas Gainsborough, who, in the alertness and delicacy of his observation as well as by a natural affinity with the gentler sex that was born of a sweet and gracious disposition, seemed specially destined to interpret with loving fidelity the lightest no less than the most characteristic realities of feminine beauty. In weight and dignity of style, the outcome, as I have already hinted, of a diligent study of the great models of the past, in masculine grip and gravity of interpretation, displayed more especially in the portraiture of the most distinguished men of his time, Reynolds, it must be conceded, remains even to this day without a rival in our school. But in the native gifts of a painter Gainsborough owned no superior, and it would be difficult to trace to any individual master of the past, or indeed to any other source than his inborn love of nature, those peculiar qualities of sweetness and grace which set the finest achievements of his brush in a category of their own. A measure of kinship with the great Dutchmen may be discerned in his earlier essays in landscape--a branch of art which he may be said almost to have founded in England; and the final words with which he took leave of the world, “We are all going to heaven and Van Dyck is of the company,” give warrant for the belief that even in portraiture he would willingly have owned his allegiance to the famous pupil of Rubens; but in his actual practice as a portrait painter his own modest and yet commanding personality quickly effaced all record of indebtedness to any other influence than his own inspiration.

It would be easy, if space permitted, to institute an interesting comparison between his own accomplishment and that of his contemporary Sir Joshua. The same personalities sometimes figure upon the canvases of both. The winning beauty of Miss Linley’s face, employed by Sir Joshua in his picture of St. Cecilia, had no less strongly attracted the genius of Gainsborough; and here, as well as in the rendering of the features of Mrs. Siddons, we may note the divergent gifts which these painters separately brought to their task and the varying and matchless qualities which nature surrendered ungrudgingly to both. Speaking generally, it may, I think, be conceded that Gainsborough’s art registered with greater felicity those fleeting graces of gesture and expression that would sometimes escape his more serious rival; while Reynolds, constantly preoccupied by the intellectual appeal made by his sitter, was perhaps more apt to dwell in the features he portrayed upon those deeper and more permanent truths that would serve to mirror mind and character.

That Gainsborough’s vision was not, however, limited to forms of female beauty is shown clearly enough by the several notable examples here exhibited. His portraits of John Eld and Dr. William Pearce, no less than the head of the artist himself, prove that he could acquit himself nobly even when he was not engaged in the more sympathetic task of presenting with faultless grace the lovely women of his time; while Lord Jersey’s “Landscape and Cattle” affords sufficient evidence of what the school of English landscape owes to his initiative.

Of the other distinguished masters of portrait in the century in which these two great names stand pre-eminent we find here adequate representation. Romney is not always faultless as a colourist, nor does his draughtsmanship yield the searching penetration displayed by Reynolds or the more delicate apprehension of the finer facts of expression which constitutes so large a part of Gainsborough’s ineffable charm; but judged at his best, and art may justly appeal against any less generous verdict, he takes his rightful place by the side of both. How good was his best may be seen in Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s fine full-length of Mrs. Scott Jackson, as well as in the group of Mrs. Clay and her child, lent by Mrs. Fleischmann. But Romney had one sitter whose beauty overpowered all others in the appeal it made to the artist, and it is therefore fortunate that the collection includes a portrait of Lady Hamilton, whose fame may be said to be inseparably linked with his own. She, too, in her own person awakens echoes from Italy, for it was at Rome she won the admiration of Goethe in those dramatic assumptions of classical character that are preserved for succeeding generations in Romney’s constantly repeated studies of the face he worshipped.

From these three commanding personalities, which yield brightness to the dawn of our English school of portraiture, we advance by no inglorious progression to the masters who, though now deceased, belong of right to our own day. Hoppner, the younger contemporary of the men I have named, whose career carries us into the next century, is here superbly represented in the contributions from Mrs. Fleischmann and Lord Darnley. Raeburn also, whose masculine and sometimes rugged genius speaks to us with the accent of the north--Raeburn, who at the instigation of Sir Joshua journeyed to Italy to study the great Italian masters--is here seen at his best in the splendid portrait of “The MacNab,” lent by Mrs. Baillie-Hamilton; while near by we find characteristic examples of the art of his fellow-countrymen, Allan Ramsay and Andrew Geddes. Sir Thomas Lawrence may be said to have brought to a close the tradition established by Reynolds, and his practice may therefore be held to form a link with the more modern school. His claims here receive justice in the two portraits lent by Lord Bathurst and Lord Plymouth; nor is the collection without worthy specimens of the art of Opie, whose practice frankly confesses the example and influence of Sir Joshua himself. Among the portrait painters of the younger day, in whose ranks may be counted Frank Holl and Frederick Sandys, Brough, and Furse, two names stand pre-eminent. Watts and Millais in their different appeal register the high-water mark of portraiture during what may be called the Victorian era. The former owned in common with Sir Joshua an unswerving devotion to the great traditions of Italian painting, and may claim equally with Sir Joshua to have won for his work in this kind an imaginative quality legitimately imported from the study of ideal design. Millais stands alone. Of both I shall have to speak again in respect of other claims which their art puts forward, but the position of Millais as a painter of portrait is as independent in its appeal as that of Gainsborough himself.

The incursions into the realm of ideal and decorative art made by English painters of the eighteenth century may not be reckoned among the accepted triumphs of our school. Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon, all alike inspired by high ambition and capable, as was shown by their untiring devotion and sacrifice in the cause they had espoused, lacked the means and the endowment to appear with any solid measure of success to an age that was in itself unfitted to receive the message they sought to convey. The untutored and undisciplined genius of William Blake affords an isolated example in his time of a true and deeper understanding of the secrets of the kind of art which these men vainly pursued; but even if Blake had possessed more ample resources as a painter he would none the less have spoken in a language that was strange to the temper of his time; and it was reserved for a later day to forge the means which would secure a genuine revival of the forgotten glories of imaginative design.

The movement associated with the name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood stands as a landmark in the modern history of our school, nor has it been without lasting influence upon the art of Europe. In the year 1848, which gave it birth, the outlook for painting which aimed at the presentation of any imaginative ideal was not encouraging. Etty, a painter of genuine endowment, still survived, and his unquestioned gifts as a colourist are plainly asserted in the single example included in the present exhibition; but the practice of his later years, as Holman Hunt has justly observed, scarcely offered the most fitting model to a young artist of serious ambition. On the other hand, the waning accomplishment of men who had passed their prime cried aloud for the need of a new return to nature; and the accepted conventions of style, either in themselves outworn or else imperfectly revealed by hands enfeebled and grown old, left the hour ripe for the advent of that small but greatly gifted group of young men whose rebel practice was destined to leave so strong an imprint upon their own and succeeding generations. It would perhaps be difficult to find three painters of equal power whose art was so differently inspired and whose achievement was destined to take such separate and widely divergent forms as Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who stand as the acknowledged heads in this new movement; but their efforts, at the time of which I am speaking, were bound together by a common purpose which prevailed then and has since continued to keep their names linked together in the modern history of our English school. In protest against the fetters imposed upon painting by the tradition of the past--fetters that were by common consent only to be removed by a renewed return to the facts of nature--they trod, in the season of their youth, the same road, although the ultimate development of their separate personalities led them, before many years passed, into paths widely divergent from one another. To judge Rossetti’s talent justly from works collected on the present occasion we must group together the examples in oil and water-colour. The religious phase in his career is indicated by “The Annunciation of the Virgin,” lent by Mrs. Boyce; while the freedom with which his imagination afterwards roamed over those great legends already made memorable in literature is shown by the “Mariana” and the “Dante meeting Beatrice” among the paintings in oil, and perhaps even more conclusively in the exquisite water-colour drawing of “Paolo and Francesca,” lent by Mr. Davis, which may be accepted as a capital instance of his unrivalled power to render the truths of human passion without violating the laws inherent in the art he professed. In his water-colours even more decisively than in his paintings in oil Rossetti clearly announces his great claims as a colourist; and his paintings bear this distinctive mark in their invention of colour that the ordered harmonies he can command are not only beautiful in themselves but that their beauty stands in clear and direct response to the nature of the chosen subject. In this regard assuredly neither of the two men who stand associated with him in the Pre-Raphaelite movement can claim to be his superior. It is perhaps unfortunate for purposes of comparison that the range of Millais’s talent is here not completely represented. “Sir Isumbras at the Ford” is indeed a characteristic example of his earlier period, though it hardly shows the qualities he could then command in the same degree of perfection as would be rendered by the presence of “Lorenzo and Isabella” or of “Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop.” We have, on the other hand, in the “Black Brunswicker” a notable example of that transitional period in Millais’s art wherein the claims of fancy and invention and the overmastering gifts of the realist--gifts that afterwards availed to set him as the greatest portrait painter of his time--are held in momentary balance; and we may find herein expressed an element of Millais’s painting which had already received supreme embodiment in the famous picture of “The Huguenot.” No artist of his time--perhaps no artist of any time--has ever excelled him in the rendering of certain phases of human emotion that transfigure without disturbing the permanent beauty of feminine character. This power remained to him to the end of his career, and it was the perception of it which caused Watts to write to him in 1878, in regard to “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which had received deserved decoration in Paris: “Lucy Ashton’s mouth is worthy of any number of medals.” It is impossible to say in the presence of work of this kind how much has been contributed by the model, how much conferred by the artist; but that the artist’s share in the result is predominant is proved by the fact that nobody else has combined in the same fashion the portraiture of individual features with the most delicate suggestion of the emotion that moves them. In the art of Holman Hunt, always masculine in its character and marked by the signs of indefatigable industry, emphasis is so evenly laid upon all the confluent qualities that contribute to the result that it is hard to signalise or to describe the dominating characteristics of his personality. In his treatment of religious subjects he showed a constant reverence that nevertheless scarcely touched the confines of worship; for the same earnestness of purpose, the same reverent research of truth, asserts itself no less in whatever subject engages his brush. Rare qualities of a purely pictorial kind nearly all his work may claim, and yet it is not always possible to concede to the result, however astonishing in its power, that final seal of beauty without which Art’s victory can never be deemed absolutely complete. “The Scapegoat,” here exhibited, was fiercely disputed at the date of his first appearance, and it is even now not difficult to understand that its appeal must have seemed strange to the temper of the time; but there can be no barrier at any rate to the generous appreciation of the noble qualities displayed in the “Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” or the austere simplicity and sincerity of “Morning Prayer.”

Around these three men who bravely heralded the new movement in English art are grouped the names of others who in different degrees were equally inspired by the principles the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to enforce. For although their earlier efforts encountered bitter attack from the accredited organs of public opinion, they met at the outset with warm response from within the ranks of art itself. The company of their followers at first, indeed, was small; but the quickened spirit of the time had already been in part prepared for the reception of the message they bore. The writings of John Ruskin, in whatever degree his particular judgments upon art matters may be disputed, had already availed to stir the conscience of his generation and to restore to art its rightful place in life. Henceforth it was not possible to think of painting as a thing of mere dilettantism, serving only to minister to the trivial demands of the taste of the hour. He proved to the world that at every season when art has held a dominating place its spirit has been fast linked with the heart and life of the people; and the deep earnestness which in _Modern Painters_ he brought to the task of historical criticism found a ready reflex in the more serious and concentrated intensity of feeling which coloured the work of men of the younger school.