Chapter 8

Of the dreary waste of "historical" and arbitrarily composed landscapes, even in the simpler honest productions of the Dutch preceding this century, nearly all were painted from drawings; color had been applied according to recipe; the brown tree was rampant through all the seasons represented, from primavernal spring to golden autumn. At the most, only studies in colors were made out of doors--unrelated portions of pictures, stained rather than painted, with timid desire to enregister details. These were then transported to the studio, where they underwent a process of arrangement, of "cookery," as the typically just French expression puts it; from which the picture came out steeped in a "brown sauce," conventional, artificial, and monotonous, but pleasing to the Academy-ridden public of the time. The young "miller of Bergholt"--for it was there in the county of Suffolk that young Constable first saw the light, on June 11, 1776--determined in 1803 to have done with convention. He writes to a friend, one Dunthorne, who had had much influence on his early life and was his first teacher: "For the last two years I have been running after pictures and seeking truth at second hand;" adding that he would hereafter study nature alone, convinced that "there is [was] room enough for a natural painter."

This was henceforth the aim of his life; and from constant study out of doors he learned that natural objects exist to our sight not isolated, but in relation one to another; that the whole is more important than a part; and that the bark of a tree, a minutely defined plant, or a conscientiously geologically studied rock, may mar the effect of a whole picture, while the scene to be represented has a character of its own more subtle, more evanescent, but also infinitely more true than any single element of which it is composed. More than that, through living on such intimate terms with Mother Nature, he learned to value the smiles of her sunshine, and to cunningly adjust her cloud-veils when she frowned. His object was no longer that of the earlier painters, who--and along with others even faithful Crome--had aimed to paint a "view" for its topographical value, suppressing or altering, like mediocre portrait painters, any feature which was thought to be displeasing. Constable painted the moods of nature; the simplest subjects seen under ever-varying effects of light were his choice; and though his pictures bear the names of various places, and divers existing features of these places are portrayed, it is always the beauty of the scene, or that of the moment of the day or night, which affects the spectator.

By a public which was used to the conventional tones of the older painters, and which understood or was interested in Turner's daring variations on the theme of classical landscape, these fresh, simple pictures which to-day look so natural to us were regarded with distrust. Not even the shepherd, much less the warrior or the demigod, inhabited these quiet scenes. A picture which any rural gentleman could see from his front door, smacked too little of art for the modish town. Moreover, Constable, no doubt sighing for something lighter and more brilliant, was accustomed, in a vain effort to rival the clear light of out-of-doors, to use the lightest colors of his palette. On a varnishing day at the Royal Academy, the word was passed around among the astonished painters that in portions of his picture of the year Constable had actually used pure white!

In 1829, however, the world moving, Constable was elected to membership in the Royal Academy. The most notable triumph of his life, though, befell seven years earlier, in 1822, when he sent three pictures to be exhibited in the Salon in Paris. The Hay-Wain, and Hampstead Heath, both at present in the National Gallery, London, were of the three, and excited the greatest enthusiasm among the group of young painters who, with Delacroix at their head, were warring against the academic rule imposed by David. Constable's work thenceforward was the dominant influence in France, and from it can be directly traced the great group of landscape painters which we to-day miscall the "Barbizon" school.

It is pleasant to recall that official honor--the first which he received--came to Constable by the award of the great gold medal of the Salon at this time. For a number of years after this he sent his work to the successive Salons. Pecuniary success, such as fell to the lot of Turner, was never his; the first painter who looked at nature in the open air "through his temperament," as Zola aptly expresses it, was perforce contented to live a modest life at Hampstead, happy in his work, grateful to nature who disclosed so many of her secrets to him.

"I love," he said, "every stile and stump and lane in the village; as long as I am able to hold a brush, I shall never cease to paint them." He ceased to "hold a brush" on the 30th of March, 1837.

Turner, who was born a year before Constable, on April 23, 1775, was, unlike the miller's son of Bergholt, a child of the city. He was born in London, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, where his father was a hair-dresser; and when only fourteen entered the Royal Academy schools as a student. The next year he exhibited a drawing of Lambeth Palace; and in 1799 was made an associate, and in 1802 a member, of the Royal Academy. His career was probably more successful than that of any other artist of modern times. Of his life the more that is said in charity the better; for as the sun rises oftentimes from a fog bank, so the luminous dreams of color by which we know Turner emanated from an apparently sour, prosaic cockney. A bachelor implicated in low intrigues, dying under the assumed name of "Puggy Booth" in a dreary lodging in Chelsea, after a long career of miserly observance and rapacious bickering--of his life naught became him like the leaving. He died December 19, 1851. His will directed that his pictures--three hundred and sixty paintings and nearly two thousand drawings--should become the property of the nation, the only condition attached being that two of the pictures should be placed between two paintings by Claude Lorraine in the National Gallery. Twenty thousand pounds were left to the Royal Academy for the benefit of superannuated artists; and one thousand pounds were appropriated for a monument in St. Paul's, where this curious old man knew the English people would be proud to lay him.

For many years Turner had refused to sell certain of his pictures; while for others, and for the published engravings after his work, he had exacted prices of a character and in a manner that smacked of dishonesty. But as in obscure and dingy lodgings his brain had evolved the splendor of sunset and mirage, so, undoubtedly, his imagination had foreshadowed the noble monument which the Turner room at the National Gallery has created to his memory.

Turner's work, as has been said before, is peculiarly his own. It is true that in the earlier pictures the influence of Claude Lorraine is evident; but upon this root is engrafted an audacity in the conception of color, a research of luminosity in comparison with which nearly all painting is eclipsed. That this refulgence is tinged now and then with exaggeration, with a forcing of effect that destroys the sense of weight and solidity in depicted objects where this sense should prevail, is certain. But it is not the least of his merits that he was endowed with a sureness of taste which enabled him to avoid the rock on which all his imitators have split--his work is never spectacular. It is perhaps at its best when he has the simple elements of sea and sky as his theme. Here, with the intangible qualities of air and light, textureless and diaphanous, he is most at home. When it becomes a question of the representation of earth, buildings, or trees, one feels the lack of loving subservience to nature; the spirit against which the art of Constable is eloquent lurks here too much.

The stone-pines of Italy are seen through the distortion of convention, the palaces of Venice were never builded by the hand of man; and we lose by this the contrast which nature provides between solid earth and filmy cloud. The onlooker must indeed be devoid of imagination, however, if he can stand before those pictures of Turner where the limitless sky is reflected in the waters, without profound emotion. They may not seem _natural_ in such sense as one finds works of more realistic aim; but one must at least agree with Turner, in the time-worn story of the lady who taxed him with violation of natural law, saying that she had never seen a sky like one in the picture before them. "Possibly," growled the unruffled painter; "but don't you wish you could?"

Another phase of art--English, like that of Constable and Turner--rose to its greatest popularity at about the same time. It had an origin more easily traceable--the presence of Vandyke in England in the seventeenth century having given an impulsion to portrait painting which had been maintained by Reynolds and Gainsborough in the century preceding our own. George Romney, who was born at Dalton, in Lancashire, December 15, 1734, divided with these last two painters the patronage of the great and wealthy of his time. He was but eleven years younger than Reynolds, and seven years the junior of Gainsborough; but by the fact of his living until November 15, 1802, he may be considered in connection with the painters of this century. He possessed great facility of brush, which led him occasionally into careless drawing, and he lacked the refined grace of Reynolds and the simple charm of Gainsborough. Nevertheless, a superabundance of the qualities which go to make up a painter were his, and his art is less affected by influences foreign to his native soil than that of any painter of his time.

Romney was preëminently a painter of women, as were the majority of his followers--English art at that time being possessed of more sweetness than force. Lady Hamilton, the Circe who succeeded in ensnaring the English Ulysses, Nelson, was a frequent model for Romney, and the list of notable names of the fair women whose beauty he perpetuated would be a long one. His life offers one of the most curious examples of the engrossing nature of a painter's work, if we accept this as the explanation of his strange conduct. Having come to London from Kendal in 1762, leaving his wife and family behind him in Lancashire, he remained in the metropolis for thirty-seven years, making, during this time, but two visits to the place which he never ceased to consider his home. It does not appear that anything but absorption in work was the cause of this neglect. His wife and children remained all the time in their northern home. In 1799, three years before his death, the husband and father awoke to a realization of their existence, and returned to live with them.

John Opie, known as the "Cornish genius" when his first works, executed at the age of twenty, were exhibited in the Royal Academy, was a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was born at Truro in May, 1761, the son of a carpenter. His precocity attracted the notice of Dr. Wolcot ("Peter Pindar"), who introduced him to Reynolds.

Opie is thoroughly English in his manner, having, however, more affiliation to Hogarth and the earlier painters of his century than to his master. A certain hardness and lack of color are his principal defects; but, on the other hand, his work is sincere to a degree which none of the other painters of his time show, preoccupied as were even the best of them by a somewhat conventional type of beauty. He was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy in 1805, but delivered only one course of lectures, dying, at the age of forty-six, April 9, 1807.

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth, the fashionable portrait painters of London were John Hoppner and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The latter, living twenty years longer than Hoppner, was able to generously say of him, in a letter written shortly after Hoppner's death: "You will believe that I sincerely feel the loss of a brother artist from whose works I have often gained instruction, and who has gone by my side in the race these eighteen years."

Born in Whitechapel, London, April 4, 1758, Hoppner's first vocation was that of chorister in the Chapel Royal. By lucky accident his first efforts at painting attracted the attention of the king, George III., who granted him a small allowance which enabled him to study in the Royal Academy, where, in 1782, he gained the medal for oil painting. He first exhibited in 1780, and for some years devoted himself to landscape. Gradually changing to portraiture, he was appointed portrait painter to the Prince of Wales in 1789, and in 1793 he was made an associate of the Academy, receiving full membership in 1795. For twenty years and until his death, January 23, 1810, he was extremely successful, and his productions, though less in number than those of Reynolds, or his contemporary, Lawrence, were numerous. In the course of thirty years he contributed one hundred and sixty-six works to the Academy exhibitions. These were chiefly portraits of women and children, and are marked by unaffected grace and appreciation of character.

Time has enhanced the value of Hoppner's work somewhat at the expense of his great rival, Lawrence. While the latter remains, from youth to comparative old age, a most astonishing example of facile and brilliant execution, the less obtrusive, possibly more timid, attitude of Hoppner in the presence of nature gives him a greater claim to our sympathy to-day. He was apparently preoccupied above all in rendering the individual characteristics of his sitter; and there are many instances in his work where a painter can see that he has chosen to retain certain qualities of resemblance, rather than risk their loss by an exhibition of _bravura_ painting. Sir Thomas Lawrence is one, on the contrary, before whose pictures it is felt that the principal question has been to make it first of all a typical example of his work.

Lawrence, born at Bristol, May 4, 1769, was the son of the landlord of the Black Bear Inn at Devizes; and the child was not yet in his teens when some chalk drawings of his father's customers gave him a local reputation. We are told that "at the age of ten he set up as a portrait painter in crayons at Oxford; and soon after took a house at Bath, the then fashionable watering-place, where he immediately met with much employment and extraordinary success." When seventeen, his success called him to London, where in 1791, though under the age required by the laws of the Academy, he was elected as associate when twenty-two. The year before, he had painted the portraits of the king and queen; in 1794 he was made Academician, in 1815 was knighted, in 1820 was unanimously elected President of the Royal Academy, and in 1825 was created chevalier of the Legion of Honor in France.

This list of official honors is but little in comparison with the success which he had socially. Of a charming personality, he was admitted to the intimacy of all that Europe boasted of aristocracy and royalty. In 1815 he went to the congress at Aix-la-Chapelle, where his facile brush portrayed the august features of the allied sovereigns assembled there. He contributed, from 1787 to 1830 inclusive, three hundred and eleven pictures to the exhibitions of the Royal Academy.

It goes without saying that production of this quantity cannot be in every instance of the first quality. But the average merit of Lawrence's work is nevertheless of a high order. Of feminine charm (like many of his time and many of his predecessors) he was a master; no one has ever succeeded better in giving a certain aristocratic bearing to his sitters than he. It can be accounted a fault that this becomes somewhat stereotyped--that we feel that, were it wanting in the person before him, the amiable Sir Thomas could easily supply it. The English race has not changed so much in the short period which has elapsed since his time that the demeasurably large and liquid eyes, the swan-like necks, and the sloping shoulders, which mark it as his own in Lawrence's work, should be to-day of more rare occurrence. With this great and important limitation, among the pictures of Lawrence can be found a certain number of canvases, not always the most typical, of exceeding merit. Few men have ever conveyed better the impression of the depth and living quality of an eye, nor have many painters succeeded in giving to every part of their canvas the same qualities of color and brilliancy of execution as he.