Part 13

It was in 1823, I think, that Cotman left Yarmouth: a married man in early middle age, with five young children. He did it to establish himself again at Norwich, hoping perhaps to sell his pictures better there, and expecting again to add to his group of pupils--he still went regularly and frequently to those who learnt of him at Yarmouth. This time it was only a house opposite the Bishop’s Palace--the address, ‘St. Martin’s at Palace’--that sufficed for Cotman’s needs, or Cotman’s ambitions. But before long, though he made no change, his mind suffered tortures from the costliness of his new abode, and the unremunerative character of the adventure. He went to the Dawson Turners in utter gloom, and then it was that his excellent friend wrote to him and to his father letters full of tact, wisdom, and feeling, pointing out to the well-to-do father that Cotman must really be relieved, and pointing out, to the now depressed and now exalted genius of a son, that his position, could he but face it, and retrench a little, was not by any means so bad. The existence of the letters on this subject allows us entrance into the intimacy of these housekeeping troubles, and of the troubles of mind that threatened to be more serious. But we do not get the end of the story. We can only suppose that Cotman’s father, who was really on good terms with him, afforded reasonable help, and that though the house was not moved from with promptitude, the expenses inside it were curtailed. Cotman rubbed on, somehow, and in 1834 he received the appointment which I spoke of at the beginning--that post of drawing-master at King’s College, London, which he was to retain till his death.

Preparing to quit Norwich, and wishing to put money in his purse before doing so, he had a sale by auction of many of his effects. These included nearly twenty of his paintings in oil, and five guineas was the highest price realised for any one of them. He sold, likewise, some copies of his printed book: the demand proving by no means ‘active’--they were indeed rather ‘quiet’ than ‘lively’ or ‘firm’--but of the drawings he wisely kept back all that were still in his possession: they were destined to be serviceable in his King’s College lessons.

After a brief sojourn in Gerrard Street, Soho--a mere preparatory time--Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, was the spot fixed upon by Cotman for his London home. But he went down to Norwich still, now and then, in the autumn. His son, ‘J. J.,’ already gifted, and afterwards eccentric, was settled there. Cotman wrote letters to him, in many moods, now bright and fanciful, now depressed and forlorn. He was fond of the Thames before the Thames was popular--witness Mr. Reeve’s early ‘Twickenham,’ and Mr. Pyke Thompson’s later ‘Twickenham,’ the ‘Golden Twickenham’ of the Turner house at Penarth--and in one of those letters to the son ‘J. J.,’ there is ‘the log’ that records the adventures of Mr. Cotman’s ‘voyage’ with others of the ship’s company to Windsor, where they were ‘not victualled from hence’--from London, that is to say--and so might be expected to put in at Datchet. Then later, the brightness was all gone, and illness was upon him. ‘It was my duty, it was my wish, and I threatened to paint for your sake when you were here, but I could not; I was ill in body, and spiritless.’

Again, still later, ‘I am not quite well, but better. I am painting.’[5] And then he could paint no more. He died, in Hunter Street, in July 1842, and was buried on the 30th of that month, in what is now the dull suburban cemetery behind St. John’s Wood Chapel, within sound of the cheers from ‘Lord’s’ and the screech of the Metropolitan Railway.

[5] These letters, some of which belong to Mr. Reeve, and others to the British Museum, have been quoted from more amply in my _Studies in English Art_.

The beginning of the later period of Cotman’s art dates rather from the days of his visits to Normandy than from those of his removal to King’s College. I used to think that it was a good deal by the composition--by the theme chosen and by the disposition of its different elements--that we could best affix some approximate date to the undated work of this delightful master. And, unquestionably, composition counts; and the tendency as time advanced was towards a greater elegance in this matter--a more elaborate art, a franker departure from that Nature which suffers, in Boucher’s word, the grass to be ‘too green,’ which ‘lacks,’ in Lancret’s answer, ‘harmony and seductiveness.’ But, with a pretty familiar knowledge, now, of at least a couple of hundred of Cotman’s sketches and designs--the most accomplished of his work, with its wise and learned or inspired omissions, is sometimes disparaged as a ‘sketch’--I am inclined to extend the period during which Cotman’s art was wont to be wrought into studied fineness of line, and I would appeal, perhaps, chiefly to colour to settle the question as to the date of this or that drawing, coming from the hand of one who was a poet at the beginning and a poet at the end. Undoubtedly, in the best--in the very best--of Cotman’s later work (in Mr. Pyke Thompson’s ‘Blue Afternoon,’ for instance, and Mr. Bulwer’s ‘Blasting St. Vincent’s Rock’), there is a greater freedom of poetic expression than was reached in the earlier work; an even keener sensibility, an added love of luxury of hue and of forms that have grandeur sometimes in their restraint, or elegance in their abandonment. Certain black-and-white studies done in the last autumn of Cotman’s life--one October and November, when the country around Norwich lay under flood, and Cotman, visiting his native city, went out to depict no definite landscape, but ‘the world afloat’--display that faculty of seizing the spirit of a thing more than its body, which Youth, in any art, can hardly claim--which comes to men, it may be, with the refinement and chastening of the years. But the germs of all this faculty were there from the first. Cotman was indebted for them to no institution, and to no outward training. The Heavens had so willed it that his delightful labour--so sterling, so sober, so poetic--should evade popularity. He was granted his sensibilities that it should be impossible to vulgarise him. Through good report and evil report he was an artist only. And so he accomplished his work.

(_Magazine of Art_, December 1888.)

H. G. HINE

Strangely little notice, considering the artistic importance of the subject, has been taken of the death of H. G. Hine, the eminent artist in water-colours, vice-president of the Royal Institute, who died a fortnight ago, aged eighty-three years. The explanation, I fear, of the scanty comment his death has evoked, is to be sought in the fact that the mass of that public which concerns itself with Art at all, is occupied chiefly with such art as exhibits an easy piquancy of treatment or an obvious interest of subject. Hine’s did neither; yet the best-equipped critics have long done justice to the steady perfection with which he dealt with those themes of serene weather upon ‘the billows of the Downs,’ which--superlatively though they were executed by him--he, with a hankering sometimes after other compositions and other effects, declined to consider his speciality. Yet a speciality, of course, they were: those visions of turquoise or of opal sky, and of grey gold or of embrowned gold turf, with the long, restful sweeps and subtle curves, the luminous shadows, the points of light, with the shepherd and his flock on the ascending hillside, with the ancient thorn-tree bent by the winds of many an autumn.

Singularly unlike the work of strange refinement and unsurpassed subtlety which it was his wont to produce, was Hine himself, with his sturdy and sailorlike personality. Yet the character of the man was, in truth, not less admirable than the artistic finesse of his work. He found his true path somewhat late in life. His genius came to him almost as tardily, but then, perhaps, almost as powerfully, as did David Cox’s. He was long past fifty when--with a charm of composition not less certain than Copley Fielding’s, and with the genius of a far finer and fuller colourist--he began to do justice to the Sussex Downs, amid whose generally unconsidered scenery it had been his excellent fortune to be born.

(_Academy_, 30th March 1895.)

THOMAS COLLIER

English landscape art--the practice of which he had adorned by five-and-twenty years of noble work--sustains a profound loss in the death of Thomas Collier. He was born in the year 1840, at Glossop, on the Derbyshire border. He early addressed himself to the career of a landscape painter; and it is true, no doubt, that his method was founded upon that of David Cox, nor is it possible that he could have set up for himself a better model of delicacy of observation, and of decisive and economical handwork. And the medium of Collier was--like that of David Cox--almost exclusively water-colour. His oil paintings were few, and, like Cox’s, they were executed chiefly in his later time. But, with him, the later time was still only middle age. Collier died when he was fifty-one: David Cox at seventy-six. Had David Cox left us at the age of Collier, he would hardly have been remembered to-day, and could have been an example to no one. Collier passed through no such prolonged period of preparation for mastery. He was already a master in his early manhood. His work cannot well be divided into periods: freedom of manner, largeness of vision and touch, belonged to him almost from the first. To the quite superficial observer of his drawings, it appeared that he painted only two or three subjects, and these on the same grey day. But to the real student of his work, the richness and variety of his resource is revealed. He observed and recorded differences of weather and light which escape all casual and all untrained notice; and if he was among the simplest and most vigorous, he was also among the most poetic recorders of English countryside and homestead--of farm, and coast, and moor. His work, exhibited in France, obtained for him the decoration of a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and here in England he was one of the most distinguished members of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. But it is doubtful whether the opportunities afforded to the large public for seeing his work were frequent enough to secure him that degree of actual popularity which was his due; and it is at all events certain that when the cabinet of sketches which he showed occasionally to his friends shall come to be known more widely, Collier will be accorded, without cavil or questioning, a lasting place among the Masters.

(_Academy_, 23rd May 1891.)

LORD LEIGHTON

By the death of Lord Leighton, the Royal Academy loses a great President and England a many-sided artist, who was certainly not far removed from being a great painter. It was more, perhaps, by the combination of so many various qualities of character and talent than by the firm possession of one especial vein of genius, that ‘our dear President, our admirable Leighton’--to use the words most fittingly applied to him by Sir John Millais--had come, of recent years at least, to be distinguished and known. The painter’s and designer’s art, evidenced in his youth, about forty years ago, by the ‘Procession of Cimabue,’ had not only never fallen into disuse, but had never come to occupy, in his mind, a secondary or comparatively unregarded place. But, along with the well-maintained devotion to the craft to which he had first vowed his affections a full generation ago, there had sprung up, partly of necessity and partly by reason of Lord Leighton’s exceptional temperament, many interests, exclusive of merely official duties, which occupied time and thought--so much so that if he had not added to the tastes of an artist the habits and qualifications of a great man of affairs, it would have been impossible for him to have successfully crowded into his life all the pursuits that engrossed it. It is easy for the ‘admirable Crichton,’ in these modern times, to degenerate into the Mr. Brook of _Middlemarch_--the not unamiable dilettante who was pretty certain to have once ‘taken up’ everything, and was pretty certain also to have dropped it. But Lord Leighton, great as was the diversity of his interests, was absolutely systematic and thoroughgoing; and, outside his especial art (in which his place, whatever may have been his deficiencies, was peculiar and unquestioned), he not only practised but excelled.

Leighton was linguist, student, antiquary, man of fashion, administrator, even philanthropist. His oratory was an accomplishment; albeit, in its addiction to ingenious ornament, his style was not quite of our period. His tact in dealing with men and with affairs was almost faultless. His opinions were decided, and he never concealed them; yet, in uttering them, he hardly ever gave offence--never, indeed, to the reasonable. When all these things are remembered, and when there is added to them the recollection of a presence elegant and stately, and of a manner which, though it could well keep intruders at a distance, had singular and winning charm for the many whom it was intended to please, it will be fully realised what a difficult and heavy honour awaits Lord Leighton’s successor in his great function--that of President of the Royal Academy, and official representative of English Art. The Academy contains several painters of genius; several amiable and distinguished men of the world; but as those who can look back the furthest declare that no past President of whom they had any knowledge ever equalled Lord Leighton, it may well be doubted whether a future President is likely to equal him.

So much by way of rough indication of the character of the man, and of the public man. A further explanation of his individuality must, of course, be discovered in his Art; and even a cursory survey of it--and of the creations which were the events of his life--will disclose something of his strength, and something, too, of his weakness. The son of a physician whose life was extended to a most ripe old age, and grandson of Sir James Leighton, also a doctor--long resident at the Court of St. Petersburg--Frederic Leighton was born at Scarborough, on the 3rd December 1830. A Yorkshireman in fact--like William Etty, and another remarkable artist of a later generation, Thomas Collier--no one could have been less of a Yorkshireman in character than was the late President. To what is understood or conjectured to have been a Jewish strain in his blood are possibly to be attributed his profoundly artistic inclinations, which were manifested very early, and which, as the public knows, dominated the whole of his career. It is recorded that young Leighton received drawing lessons in Rome as long ago as the year 1842; and not two years afterwards he entered as a student at the Academy of Berlin. With Rome, perhaps, began that long series of _Wanderjahre_ which made him so cosmopolitan an artist and so many-sided a man. He had some general education at Frankfort; then, after a removal to Florence, where the American sculptor, Hiram Powers, was consulted with a view to an opinion on his ability, and prophesied that the boy ‘could become as eminent as he pleased,’ young Leighton’s father withdrew his long-standing objections to the adoption of painting as a profession; and the new decision was followed by a sojourn in Brussels and a longer stay in Paris. In Paris the youth attended a life-school, and copied at the Louvre. Next we hear of him at Vienna, where he was a pupil of Steinle, himself a pupil of Overbeck. Of Overbeck’s religious unction, Leighton had never a perceptible share. Something he no doubt owed to the leaders of the German Renaissance of Painting; but amongst these, more, it may be, to Cornelius than Overbeck. After his sojourn in Vienna, he was back again in Rome--these early and most prolonged wanderings are worthy of chronicle, because they had so much to do with the formation of the characteristics of the artist--and it was from Rome that he sent to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1855 a picture which made no bid for immediately popular effect, which was nothing, moreover, of a ‘pot-boiler,’ and which made no concession to ordinary _bourgeois_ liking. It was the canvas in which is depicted, with something of reticence and grace, and with a very learned draughtsmanship, the procession which passed through the streets of Florence, on its way to Santa Maria Novella, when Cimabue’s picture of the Madonna was carried in the midst, and honour and peculiar recognition--in which a whole city joined--were bestowed upon its painter. Elegant as the picture was, it did not lack favour; a certain relative warmth, a certain romantic spirit, the presentation of the ideal, it may be, in more homely form, pleased a generation familiar with Dyce, Maclise, and Cope; and the picture, as it happened, had an immediate success.

Paris was Leighton’s next halting-place, and now, an artist rising above the horizon, he was no longer likely to seek direct instruction from any one of the painters who were there at work; but he was associated with, and was to some extent influenced by, men like Ary Scheffer (whose ‘Augustine and Monica’ was long appreciated in England) and Robert Fleury. He contributed almost without intermission, for the next eight or nine years, to the Royal Academy, and it was in 1864, when he was represented by an ‘Orpheus and Eurydice,’ that he was elected to the Associateship--becoming in 1869 a full member. The year of his election to the Associateship was likewise the year of the exhibition of his charming and seductive invention, ‘Golden Hours.’ To the painter of mediæval or Renaissance history, and of themes avowedly classic, there was vouchsafed the expression of the romantic and the unquestionably poetic, and it is, no doubt, to the certain element of poetry that is in Lord Leighton’s work--far more, at all events, than to its austerer qualities of design, which never had any popularity at all, and which, even amongst painters, have gone terribly out of fashion--that is to be attributed part of the great favour which his art has enjoyed. In 1869 was shown ‘Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon,’ and in 1876 the second great processional, ‘The Daphnephoria.’ Two years later the ‘Arts of War’--not the least dignified and decorative of modern frescoes--was finished for South Kensington, where was already its companion, ‘The Industrial Arts of Peace,’ completed in 1873; another mural painting, that of ‘The Wise and Foolish Virgins,’ having, at an earlier date, been placed in the chancel of a fortunate parish church in Hampshire. The year of the completion of ‘The Arts of War’ was that of Lord Leighton’s election to the Presidency of the Academy, which he obtained, it will be remembered, in direct succession to Sir Francis Grant, with whose courtly qualities, and with whose large and manly sympathies, he combined a width of artistic outlook, a refinement of artistic expression, which had scarcely perhaps belonged to any President of the Academy since the days of its first leader, Sir Joshua Reynolds.

President, and knighted in consequence of that distinction in 1878, Leighton was given a baronetcy in 1886. In the interval he had not only proved beyond dispute his fitness for the responsibilities of the official position, which he filled, but--to mention only some of the most memorable of many works--had completed his own portrait for the Uffizi, had wrought the really grave and impressive canvas of Elisha raising the son of the Shunamite widow, and had, in his peculiar fashion, effected an alliance between luxury in colour and sculpturesque arrangement of ‘line’ in the great ‘Cymon and Iphigenia.’ In actual Sculpture, too--sharing the ambition of the men of the Renaissance for a triumph in various mediums--he had produced ‘The Sluggard.’ It was extraordinarily clever, but perhaps its qualities were less truly sculptural than was some of his design executed in the older and more familiar material. Yet, if this particular work did not possess to the full all the great qualities that might have been expected in it, the order of Lord Leighton’s talent was one, nevertheless, which empowered him to succeed thoroughly in Sculpture, sooner or later; for, in Sculpture, while there was room for the generally unimpeded play of his own skill in design, there might have been a relief found from the exercise of his art in a path in which success to him was more uncertain and capricious--the path of colour.

It is too early, of course, to attempt to settle definitely the place of Leighton in English Art; but it is certain that his influence, whether as President or painter, tended to the extension of its vistas. An upholder of the Classic--never, with all his range, much in love with Realism--he was yet nothing whatever of a partisan, and--it may be mentioned as a characteristic detail of him in his daily ways--he was accustomed from time to time to purchase clever little drawings (sometimes the very last one would have thought he would care for) by artists who esteemed him as a President, but who regarded him very lightly as a practitioner of their own craft. Lord Leighton was perfectly aware that several circumstances limited--especially of late years--the appreciation of his work. He was not altogether insensible of its real defects--at all events, of peculiarities which were defects upon occasion. He knew that his ‘brush-work’ was not absolutely ‘modern.’ He must have allowed that, now and again, when it was by no means one of his aims to seek it, the texture of his flesh was porcelain-like, and thus mainly conventional. He was, confessedly, not greatly occupied with ‘values’ of colour, with the relation of part to part. He was at one--perhaps more than they knew it--with many of our newest artists in demanding a decorative quality; only the decorative quality of his choice was not always--was, indeed very seldom--that of theirs. A successful pattern of colour they could understand the virtue of. The Japanese, or Mr. Whistler, had taught it them. But a successful pattern of line, they were less capable of appreciating. They, for example, or some of them, execrated Bouguereau, and resented in some degree the hospitality prominently offered to that distinguished Frenchman on the walls of the Academy. Lord Leighton, on the other hand, was, very possibly, not fully alive to Bouguereau’s vices or failings--to his mere smoothness, softness, not infrequent vapidness of human expression. But he valued justly Bouguereau’s possession of the best Academic graces, of faultless composition and subtle draughtsmanship. For these things--these best Academic graces--he himself strove. These, too, he generally, though not always, attained.

In regard to this particular matter, there were times when Leighton knew himself to be a _vox clamantis in deserto_. But he had his mission. It is an immense tribute to him to recognise that any one caring, as he undoubtedly cared, to be acceptable amongst his fellows--amongst the younger men, even, who were some day to succeed him--should yet have been so true to his particular message. But Lord Leighton had an admirable courage as well as a great patience and an untiring diligence. And there were times, fortunately, when it was brought home to him beyond cavil, that some educated appreciation existed of his own especial artistic qualities, as well as of those human virtues which made him, in many ways, so estimable a man, and so fitting a leader of men.

(_Standard_, 27th January 1896.)

SIR JOHN MILLAIS