Part 12

The large ‘View at the Mouth of the Thames’ is one of the most realistic, one of the least poetic, of Gainsborough’s pictures. It is an instance of how well this curiously flexible genius could at need perform that which somebody else could still perform much better. And if it had not to be remembered that Collins and Turner came after Gainsborough, instead of before him, we should say the same about the Duke of Westminster’s ‘Coast Scene.’ Here a sea that has only enough of movement to give it vivacity and sparkle, runs up to a narrow breadth of beach, behind which a cliff rises. Three figures are on the beach--a group of country or of fisher folk; a man kneeling by a basket hands up a fish, to be inspected by two girls, who bend towards him. The inspiration of an ancient master and some concession to ancient traditions are discernible in the umber and golden shores of another piece. It is in the ‘River Scene with Cattle’ that Gainsborough is more characteristic; it is there that he delights us in full measure with that which is his own. The scene is at a ferry somewhere in the Eastern Counties, where the stream is wide, the land large and flat, the sky ample, the horizon infinite. At the edge of a miniature cliff, stands a group of cattle. Below them are figures in shadow, and from the water, to the right, rise high into the sky the tall and narrow sails of two fishing-smacks drawn up together. Here the scene is an everyday place, but Gainsborough has known how to choose the hour; his selection of objects has been justified by a fortunate grouping; he has secured a rhythm of line second only to that which lies at the service of a subtle draughtsman of the figure or a great Ornamentist; and the hues of silvery blue and golden grey with which his picture is flooded, are those that gather only on the palette of a born colourist. When this picture has been adequately seen, and its calm radiance appreciated, the student has little need to go further to find what Gainsborough was as a poetical recorder of earth and sky, and what as a pure painter. But for variety’s sake, and for the sake of noting how much Gainsborough saw for himself, and how much he was influenced, too, by the ways in which predecessors as different from each other as Hobbema and Cuyp had seen the world and presented it, it is well to look carefully at some of the smaller landscapes in the other and larger room. There are, perhaps, especially the ‘Small Landscape,’ with luminous white clouds, remote in a lofty sky; the ‘Forest Scene,’ and the unfinished sketch, in which Gainsborough has given to a little group of gypsies and their beasts a greater dignity than a Fleming could have bestowed on a Flight into Egypt. There are, of course, larger works not claiming less attention; and one and all, by their deficiencies as well as by their merits, show that the greatness or the general attractiveness of Gainsborough as a landscape painter is due not much to his naturalism--which was naturalism only in his own day, and is seen to have been almost idealism in ours. His greatness as a landscape painter consists much more in his continual endowment of Nature with the grace and magic of Style.

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In Portraiture, the only failing that can be laid to Gainsborough’s charge--and it may at times be a serious one--is that he was apt to be less impressed by individuality of character than by the occasion which his subject presented for the painter’s triumph in brush-work. Facile observer as he was, and wonderful draughtsman, it was not often that he braced himself to such an effort of stern realism as was made in the portrait of ‘Judge Skinner.’ This light of the law, sitting robed--with the keen, sagacious face perfectly dominant over all the splendour of attire--was painted (on the canvas of which we are now speaking) for Christ Church, Oxford, of which in 1742 he had been a student; but the Grosvenor Gallery contains another, though a less admirable, presentment of the same person. This, though inferior, comes likewise from an unimpeachable quarter--it is lent by the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn. Of portraits of William Pitt, there are several by Gainsborough; but his best representation of all, of the young man who governed England, is that which comes, like the second portrait of Skinner, from Lincoln’s Inn. The natural charm of the model here accorded with that which was the frequent preoccupation of Gainsborough’s art, and sincere must have been the painter’s pleasure in dealing with a face which--like the face of Dickens in his youth, two generations later--expressed sweetness with firmness, and placidity with boundlessness of resource. The portrait of ‘David Garrick’ is less satisfactory as an effort of craftsmanship. The shrewd little lady who succeeded the great and genial Peg Woffington in Garrick’s love, declared that it was the ‘best portrait ever painted of her Davy,’ so we will not attempt to dispute the excellence of the likeness; but the thought that inspired the composition was comparatively trivial and commonplace. In a park-like scene, the background somewhat suggestive of Garrick’s favourite retreat at Hampton, the actor whose attentions were wont to be divided between the Tragic and the Comic Muse--as Sir Joshua has expressed so suggestively in his happy allegory--stands by a pedestal on which is placed the bust of Shakespeare, and Garrick has his arm round the bust, and almost familiarly caresses it. More valuable would have been a picture in which the head of the actor had been more dominant than the _dégagé_ gesture. The head of Garrick, however, if the story goes truly, was always a puzzle to Gainsborough. Of Garrick and of Foote--mobile comedians, baffling beyond all men--he is said to have exclaimed, when he essayed to paint them, ‘Rot them for a couple of rogues, they have everybody’s faces but their own.’

Generally, it may be noted, the full-lengths of men--sometimes, also, the full-lengths of women--are less attractive than the half-lengths and the busts, though whatever could be done by any artist to overcome the difficulty of making the full-length interesting, could be done by Gainsborough, since he was a master of draperies, and skilled, as a pupil of Gravelot’s should have been, in the secrets of dignified and gracious carriage. But, to remain for the moment with the men’s portraits, one’s admiration of the elegance and harmony of Tenducci’s portrait must be in excess of any feeling that can rightly be prompted by the ‘Garrick.’ This, again, is the portrait of an artist--Gainsborough’s sympathies were with artists--and Tenducci is said to have ‘warbled so divinely.’ And then, to take an instance from the women’s portraits, and to single out a full-length figure, in which the face is modelled with exceptional exactness, and is one, too, of peculiar refinement, take the portrait of Lady Sheffield, with her aquiline nose and her almond-shaped eyes--even here the importance of the countenance is a little effaced by the brilliant light on the showy drapery of the skirt. No one could assert that, for real charm, that picture--masterly as it is in its own kind--is equal to any one of half a dozen busts or half-lengths in the same Gallery. But, on the other hand, the ‘Sir Bate Dudley,’ ‘skilled in the nice conduct of a clouded cane,’ is an instance of Gainsborough’s occasional triumph, even with the full-length male figure; and the ‘Mrs. Graham,’ at Edinburgh, is one of the most fascinating full-length portraits of a woman that has been painted since the days of the Venetians. Furthermore, three more quite masterly full-length male portraits are in the Grosvenor Gallery itself: they are first, those that are lent by the Queen, the portrait of Colonel St. Leger, the portrait of ‘Fischer’ the musician, and last, the familiar ‘Blue Boy,’ a work directed possibly at the theories of Sir Joshua and inspired by the practice of Van Dyck.

As one looks over the subjects of Gainsborough’s portraits, one understands in part how it was that, comparing them with Sir Joshua’s, or perhaps even with Romney’s, so few of them were engraved. Romney was, above all things, seductive: he saw Lady Hamilton--or when not Lady Hamilton, then some one who was almost equally pretty--in everything, and the public liked what he saw. Sir Joshua was a courtier, careful to be on the best of terms with the great world. Gainsborough courted nobody, and the world talked much less about him. Though, after the lapse of years, he succeeded in getting a hundred guineas for a full-length picture, and moved, without imprudence, from the cottage at Ipswich, rented at six pounds, first to the Circus at Bath, and then to the west wing of Schomberg House, Pall Mall, he was never really in his own time Sir Joshua’s rival in the public favour. And much of his best work in Portraiture--over and above that work in landscape which confessedly engaged his choice--was devoted to the record of people of the artistic rather than the fashionable world; people of professions the members of which were not in those days motioned to the velvet of the social sward.

We have already spoken of more than one instance--and ‘Giardini,’ the fiddler, is another--of such a natural selection which governs Gainsborough’s art. It is as characteristic of him in portraiture as it is of Watteau in _genre_ pieces and gallant pastorals. But there is a little canvas, the portrait of an unknown Mrs. Carr, which holds its own either against portraits of people from the artistic world or people from Georgian ‘Society.’ It is curiously natural and refined in expression, exquisitely suggestive of elegant carriage, though so small a portion of the figure is seen, and as a piece of flesh-painting, it is unsurpassed by any of the more famous examples of Gainsborough’s skill. Who was ‘Mrs. Carr’? And had Gainsborough, we may wonder, some further interest in her than that which is aroused in any qualified observer of Humanity by the vision of such agreeable beauty? For Gainsborough, as a rule, painted best the models he knew the most. Executing every touch with his own hand, and doing his most picturesque with every model because he was so essentially artistic, he yet must have undertaken many a portrait of fashionable persons or of enriched _bourgeois_, into the dull recesses of whose character he did not care to penetrate. Where he knew and liked, he painted with delight. He was so profoundly impressionable: what he enjoyed stirred him: if somebody played the fiddle particularly well, tears of rapture stood on Gainsborough’s cheek.

His wife, who was in her youth a rose and brown coloured beauty, and whose countenance was long afterwards lustrous enough under the becoming grey of her powdered hair, Gainsborough painted several times, and always with distinction and conspicuous artistry. His handling of the subject is best in the portrait numbered 175--a worthy companion to his own sensitive and high-bred countenance (No. 185). And his portraits of his daughters--his only children--are at the least satisfying. One is a group--the two together; another is a half-length of Mrs. Fischer; another, again, a half-length of the brighter personality who remained ‘Miss Gainsborough.’ There is some likeness between the two young women, in the general contour of the head and in the fulness of the under-lip. ‘Miss Gainsborough,’ with her clear brown eyes, delicate eyebrows, compact and intelligent forehead, is the greater beauty; but to Mrs. Fischer there belongs a winning expression of pathetic reverie. Both are felt to be the true daughters of their father: the one by her possession of the gaiety and fire of temper which characterised Gainsborough in his happiest times; the other by her obvious inheritance of what proved more than her share of Gainsborough’s keen perception of the sadness of so much of human fortune. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was almost wholly intellectual and ‘practical,’ who lived on the outside of things, had nothing of Gainsborough’s sense of profundity and pathos. And, in so far as he had nothing of this, he was, in the essentials of character, the less of an artist. For Goethe said--and when he said it he was uttering one of the deepest of his truths--‘To be artistic is to be serious.’

(_The Standard_, 1st and 6th January 1885.)

COTMAN

It remained for the Norwich Art Circle to hold, for the first time, an exhibition of the drawings of an artist who was nothing less than a great master in water-colour, but whose place in the ranks of Art was for many a year, by the general public, not so much contested as ignored. Cotman was born a few years after Turner. Possessed of a sensibility as keen, but of less tremendous vitality, he died a few years before him. Turner was amongst Cotman’s friends; not a ‘chum,’ perhaps, but an advocate, strenuous and judicious--and strenuous and judicious advocacy may claim to be called friendship. Had it not been for Turner, it is unlikely that the less-known artist would have received that post at King’s College which afforded him comfort, though not affluence, in the last years of his life. Like Dewint, Cotman taught drawing. But in London his connection was less influential than that of Dewint, whose usual fee of a guinea an hour was no doubt never reached by the draughtsman from Norwich. The appointment of drawing-master at King’s College was therefore very serviceable: the more so that Cotman’s original work, though it was produced with the enthusiasm and the untiring enjoyment, and the sweat of the brow besides, which in any art are the real artist’s equivalents or substitutes for mechanical diligence--Cotman’s original work, I say (like a little of Mozart’s best music), was produced ‘for himself and two friends.’ Even the connoisseur, as a rule, held back. The public? But can you for an instant expect the public to understand work which, frankly, makes no bid for its sympathies, which is never furnished ‘according to sample,’ which is bound to be itself and wholly fresh, and is content to be excellent? An intelligent criticism might perhaps have drummed into the big public, not the real sense, but at all events some tacit acceptance, of Cotman’s peculiar merit. But where was the intelligent criticism of 1820 and 1830? There was little critical writing then--at all events in the papers--that was either an influence or an art.

John Sell Cotman was born at Norwich on the 16th of May 1782. His father was a well-to-do haberdasher, established at that time in Cockey Lane, but afterwards, when able to retire from business, living in a villa at Thorpe, with a garden that looked on the river. Cotman himself drew the garden--and idealised it--in the last year of his life. His father survived him; dying very old--at eighty-four. Cotman died at sixty.

Whatever troubles there had been on the subject of Cotman’s trade or profession, they were got over by the simple process of his going his own way, and of his father’s forgiving him. The boy was educated at the grammar school, and at sixteen years old, after much discussion about his future--after the interposition of Opie, with the not very measured remark that the boy ‘had far better black shoes than be an artist’--young Cotman chose the less desirable of these unhappy alternatives, and, that he might be an artist, journeyed to London. A young man at that period, and especially a young man who was wishing to be a landscape painter, had little opportunity of artistic training, unless indeed it might be that best kind of training which consists in familiarity with people of mind, and with the works of art that bygone genius has produced, and with those natural scenes which, like the voice or the face of your friend, stimulate and enrich and endow with a new experience. Cotman in these things was happy. He was trained by the world, and by those lessons in noble by-past Art which he was so well fitted to receive. His own true taste, and the faculty of real development--which some of us call, like Wordsworth, ‘a leading from above: a something given’--made him independent of academic influence; and in his case no one undertook the academic task, and made the too-confident promise to turn into fine gold what is brass at the beginning, and must be brass to the end. Cotman was fine gold. He was, that is to say, an artist born, not manufactured.

At the hospitable house of Dr. Munro, in the Adelphi Terrace, the young man fell into association with a group of painters, most of whom were his seniors. At eighteen years old he exhibited six drawings at the Royal Academy, and while he was still extremely young, he presided over a little society--a sketching club, one may call it--of which Varley and Dr. Munro were members. At very moderate prices his drawings seem to have found a sale, and he began to make excursions into remote parts of the country--into Yorkshire and Lincolnshire--besides visiting his family at Norwich. It was either at Norwich or Yarmouth, in the first years of the century, that he made the acquaintance of Dawson Turner, the antiquary. That acquaintance became a friendship, and, to use the phrase of Charles Lamb in regard to such matters, ‘a friendship that answered.’ Dawson Turner was at once, and for many a year afterwards, a help to Cotman. And as a serious student--not only a rich dilettante--he knew that he gained as much as Cotman from their association. ‘We value him greatly,’ Dawson Turner wrote to Cotman’s father, very long after their first introduction, and when it was wanted to arouse the father to an understanding of Cotman’s position, and of his depressed state.

In November 1805 we find Cotman established in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, writing to Dawson Turner that he had been in Yorkshire and Durham all the autumn, ‘making many close copies of the fickle Dame Nature--copies,’ writes Cotman, not very elegantly, ‘consequently valuable on that account.’ A hope of settling in Norwich--of working, and founding a drawing-class there--was now growing upon him, and in 1806 it was accomplished. A young bachelor of four-and-twenty--personally a little extravagant, but taking his art very seriously--he possessed himself of an excellent house in Luckett’s Court, Wymer Street. I saw the house this summer. A dignified house, with gables of the Seventeenth Century, and much of the interior woodwork seemingly of the early Eighteenth. For six years Cotman lived there. There, was wrought almost all the best of his earlier art: Mr. J. J. Colman’s ‘St. Luke’s Chapel’; Mr. Reeve’s ‘Twickenham’ (from a yet earlier sketch); the same collector’s ‘Mousehold Heath’; my own ewe lamb, ‘Bishopgate Bridge’; and a mass of work besides--much of which, unquestionably, has been mislaid, neglected, ruined, forgotten.

The exhibition held at Norwich--to which I began by referring--gave us an excellent opportunity of really studying this rarer and earlier art. I am not thinking of the insignificant fact that there was to be seen there a puerile yet rather clever performance which dates from Cotman’s twelfth year; but to the assemblage of work of the early time when he was really an artist--from 1800, say, to 1812. What was the character of his labour then? With whom did he sympathise? Whom did he at all resemble? The influence of Turner and of Girtin is to be detected in some of the work of this period--in the noble architectural work, especially--and it is not in the slightest degree unlikely that, in his turn, Cotman exercised some influence over Turner; at a much later time I mean, when everyday sobriety sufficed for neither of them, and when Cotman, surely quite as much as Turner, led the way to revelries of colour. Between Cotman and Girtin there could be no such reciprocity of influence, for Girtin died, an accomplished master of water-colour, though less than thirty years old, in 1802, and Cotman was then but twenty.

Mr. Colman’s large and solid and sober drawing of ‘Durham’ (it has these qualities, and yet is, somehow, without charm) reminds me of an early Girtin; while a Girtin of the finer sort, just as simple, just as straightforward, yet with something of the later magic of the hand, is recalled by Mr. Reeve’s ‘Bridge over the Greta.’ A quiet realism; a sense of the picturesque, entertained but yet subdued; a composition, ordered, yet not seemingly artificial; a breadth that was never thereafter for a moment departed from--these are, perhaps, the characteristics of the mature and noble drawings of the earlier period, such as ‘St. Luke’s Chapel,’ ‘Bishopgate Bridge,’ and ‘Mousehold Heath.’ Wherever there is opportunity for it--as, in my ‘Bishopgate Bridge,’ in the yew-tree to the left and the slope of the bank to the river--there comes in Cotman’s sense of grace, his appreciation of style and of dignity, his avoidance of mere topography; but it is in Mr. Reeve’s ‘Twickenham’--thanks to the occasion of which the scene itself is lavish--that that sense of grace dominates, and the stately trees throw their shadows over the lawn by the water.

In 1812, Cotman removed to South Town, Yarmouth; Dawson Turner being, presumably, at the bottom of the change. The painter’s association with the interesting antiquary became more and more intimate. Purely architectural, or, as one might say, monumental, draughtsmanship was at this time a good deal occupying him. He was issuing at the moment the first part of the _Antiquities of Norfolk_. In the year 1817, he paid, on the advice of Dawson Turner, a first visit to Normandy. He went there again in 1819 and 1820; and, two years after the third visit, his _Architectural Antiquities of Normandy_ saw the light. It was not until 1838 that he produced the book which best represents the characteristics of his style--the book in which, fettered by no established task, his sense of elegance, his genius for composition in line and in light and shade, had free play--I mean, of course, his _Liber Studiorum_: soft ground-etchings of unquestioned force and charm. But at Yarmouth he had much to engage him. His range of subjects increased. There it was that he acquired the close knowledge of coast ‘effects’ and of marine architecture which made him, in addition to all his other capacities, so excellent a painter of the shore and sea.