CHAPTER XVII

ENGLISH PAINTING TO 1850

"The English 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 department _Works of our Fathers_ in 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 them _James 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-sided _James 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 as _preceptor 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's _Midsummer Night's Dream_, in the London National Gallery, is probably the best. His pupil _William Etty_ was 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 assiduous _Benjamin 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's _Lear_: "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 half _bourgeois_ and 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 doubt that 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 the imaginative 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 of _Sir 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 real vitality. 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 tender _John Hoppner_, the attractively superficial _William Beechey_, the celebrated pastellist _John Russell_, and the vigorously energetic _John Jackson_ had their share with him in public favour, whilst _Henry Raeburn_ shone 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 famous _bon vivant_ and 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 insipid painting 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 indescribable _furia_ of 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 West_ has 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 his entry 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 "_genre_ pictures," 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 true of 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 compatriot _John 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 of _Daniel 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 to transplant 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 Charles I. 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 Wootton_ and _George Stubbs_ were 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 afterwards _George Morland_ made 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 little tavern 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 engraver _James Ward_, born in 1769 and dying in 1859, united this old English school with the modern. The portrait which accompanies the obituary notice in the _Art Journal_ is 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 his horses 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, was _Edwin 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 suffered greatly 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 search after 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. Here he 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 continually growing. 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 English _genre_ painting.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century _David Wilkie_, the English Knaus, was the chief _genre_ painter of the world. Born in 1785 in the small Scotch village of Cults, where his father was the clergyman, he passed a happy childhood, and possibly had to thank his youthful impressions for the consistent cheerfulness, the good-humour and kindliness that smile out of his pictures, and make such a contrast with Hogarth's biting acerbity. At fourteen he entered the Edinburgh School of Art, where he worked for four years under the historical painter John Graham. Having returned to Cults, he painted his landscapes. A fair which he saw in the neighbouring village gave the impulse for his earliest picture of country life, "Pitlessie Fair." He sold it for five and twenty pounds, and determined in 1805 to try his luck with this sum in London. In the very next year his "Village Politicians" excited attention in the exhibition. From that time he was a popular artist. Every one of his numerous pictures--"The Blind Fiddler," "The Card Players," "The Rent Day," "The Cut Finger," "The Village Festival"--called forth a storm of applause. After a short residence in Paris, where the Louvre gave him a more intimate knowledge of the Dutch, came his masterpieces, "Blind-Man's Buff," "Distraining for Rent," "Reading the Will," "The Rabbit on the Wall," "The Penny Wedding," "The Chelsea Pensioners," and so forth. Even later, after he had become an Academician, he kept to plain and simple themes, in spite of the reproaches of his colleagues, who thought that art was vulgarised by the treatment of subjects that contained so little dignity. It was only at the end of his life that he became untrue to himself. His reverence for Teniers and Ostade was not sufficient to outweigh the impression made on him during a tour taken in 1825 through Italy, Spain, Holland, and Germany, by the artistic treasures of the Continent, and especially Murillo and Velasquez. He said he had long lived in darkness, but from that time forth could say with the great Correggio: "_Anch' io sono pittore._" He renounced all that he had painted before which had made him famous, and showed himself to be one of the many great artists of those years who had no individuality, or ventured to have none. He would have been the Burns of painting had he remained as he was. And thus he offered further evidence that the museums and the Muses are contradictory conceptions; since the modern painter always runs the risk of falling helplessly from one influence into another, where he is bent on combining the historical student of art with the artist. Of the pictures that he exhibited after his return in 1829, two dealt with Italian and three with Spanish subjects. The critics were loud in praise; he had added a fresh branch of laurel to his crown. Yet, historically considered, he would stand on a higher pedestal if he had never seen more than a dozen good pictures of Teniers, Ostade, Metsu, Jan Steen, and Brouwer. Now he began to copy his travelling sketches in a spiritless fashion; he only represented _pifferari_, smugglers, and monks, who, devoid of all originality, might have been painted by one of the Düsseldorfers. Even "John Knox Preaching," which is probably the best picture of his last period, is no exception.

"He seemed to me," writes Delacroix, who saw him in Paris after his return from Spain,--"he seemed to me to have been carried utterly out of his depth by the pictures he had seen. How is it that a man of his age can be so influenced by works which are radically opposed to his own? However, he died soon after, and, as I have been told, in a very melancholy state of mind." Death overtook him in 1841, on board the steamer _Oriental_, just as he was returning from a tour in Turkey. At half-past eight in the evening the vessel was brought to, and as the lights of the beacon mingled with those of the stars the waters passed over the corpse of David Wilkie.

In judging his position in the history of art, only those works come into consideration which he executed before that journey of 1825. Then he drew as a labour of love the familiar scenes of the household hearth, the little dramas, the comic or touching episodes that take place in the village, the festivals, the dancing, and the sports of the country-folk, and their meeting in the ale-house. At this time, when as a young painter he merely expressed himself and was ignorant of the efforts of continental painting, he was an artist of individuality. In the village he became a great man, and here his fame was decided; he painted rustics. Even when he first saw the old masters in the National Gallery their immediate effect on him was merely to influence his technique. And by their aid Wilkie gradually became an admirable master of technical detail. His first picture, "Pitlessie Fair," in its hardness of colour recalled a Dutch painter of the type of Jan Molenaer; but from that time his course was one of constant progress. In "The Village Politicians" the influence of Teniers first made itself felt, and it prevailed until 1816. In this year, when he painted the pretty sketch for "Blind-Man's Buff," a warm gold hue took the place of the cool silver tone; and instead of Teniers, Ostade became his model. The works in his Ostade manner are rich in colour and deep and clear in tone. Finally, it was Rembrandt's turn to become his guiding-star, and "The Parish Beadle," in the National Gallery--a scene of arrest of the year 1822--clearly shows with what brilliant success he tried his luck with Rembrandt's dewy _chiaroscuro_. It was only in his last period that he lost all these technical qualities. His "Knox" of 1832 is hard and cold and inharmonious in colour.

So long as he kept from historical painting, art meant for him the same thing as the portrayal of domestic life. Painting, he said, had no other aim than to reproduce nature and to seek truth. Undoubtedly this must be applied to Wilkie himself with considerable limitation. Wilkie painted simple fragments of nature just as little as Hogarth; he invented scenes. Nor was he even gifted with much power of invention. But he had a fund of innocent humour, although there were times when it was in danger of becoming much too childlike. "Blind-Man's Buff," "The Village Politicians," and "The Village Festival," pictures which have become so popular through the medium of engraving, contain all the characteristics of his power of playful observation. He had no ambition to be a moralist, like Hogarth, but just as little did he paint the rustic as he is. He dealt only with the absurdities and minor accidents of life. His was one of those happy dispositions which neither sorrow nor dream nor excite themselves, but see everything from the humorous side: he enjoyed his own jests, and looked at life as at a pure comedy; the serious part of it escaped him altogether. His peasantry know nothing of social problems; free from want and drudgery, they merely spend their time over trifles and amuse themselves--themselves and the frequenters of the exhibition, for whom they are taking part in a comedy on canvas. If Hogarth had a biting, sarcastic, scourging, and disintegrating genius, Wilkie is one of those people who cause one no lasting excitement, but are always satisfied to be humorous, and laugh with a contented appreciation over their own jokes.

And in general such is the keynote of this English _genre_. All that was done in it during the years immediately following is more or less comprised in the works of the Scotch "little master"; otherwise it courts the assistance of English literature, which is always rich in humorists and excellent writers of anecdote and story. In painting, as in literature, the English delight in detail, which by its dramatic, anecdotic, or humorous point is intended to have the interest of a short story. Or perhaps one should rather say that, since the English came to painting as novices, they began tentatively on that first step on which art had stood in earlier centuries as long as it was still "the people's spelling-book." It is a typical form of development, and repeats itself constantly. All painting begins in narrative. First it is the subject which has a fascination for the artist, and by the aid of it he casts a spell over his public. The simplification of motives, the capacity for taking a thing in at a single glance, and finding a simple joy in its essentially pictorial integrity, is of later growth. Even with the Dutch, who were so eminently gifted with a sense for what is pictorial, the picture of manners was at first epical. Church festivals, skating parties, and events which could be represented in an ample and detailed fashion were the original materials of the _genre_ picture, which only later contented itself with a purely artistic study of one out of countless groups. This period of apprenticeship, which may be called the period of interesting subject-matter, was what England was now going through; and England had to go through it, since she had the civilisation by which it is invariably produced.

Just as the first _genre_ pictures of the Flemish school announced the appearance of a _bourgeoisie_, so in the England of the beginning of the century a new plebeian, middle-class society had taken the place of the patrons of earlier days, and this middle class set its seal upon manners and communicated its spirit to painting. Prosperity, culture, travel, reading, and leisure, everything which had been the privilege of individuals, now became the common property of the great mass of men. They prized art, but they demanded from it substantial nourishment. That two colours in connection with straight and curved lines are enough for the production of infinite harmonies was still a profound secret. "You are free to be painters if you like," artists were told, "but only on the understanding that you are amusing and instructive; if you have no story to tell we shall yawn." When they comply with these demands, artists are inclined to grow fond of sermonising and develop into censors of the public morals, almost into lay preachers.

Or, if the aim of painting lies in its narrative power, there is a natural tendency to represent the pleasant rather than the unpleasant facts of life, which is the cause of this one-sided character of _genre_ painting. Everything that is not striking and out of the way--in other words, the whole poetry of ordinary life--is left untouched. Wilkie only paints the rustic on some peculiar occasion, at merry-making and ceremonial events; and he depicts him as a being of a different species from the townsman, because he seeks to gain his effects principally by humorous episodes, and aims at situations which are proper to a novel.

Baptisms and dances, funerals and weddings, carousals and bridal visits are his favourite subjects; to which may be added the various contrasts offered by peasant life where it is brought into contact with the civilisation of cities--the country cousin come to town, the rustic closeted with a lawyer, and the like. A continual roguishness enlivens his pictures and makes comical figures out of most of these good people. He amuses himself at their expense, exposes their little lies, their thrift, their folly, their pretensions, and the absurdities with which their narrow circle of life has provided them. He pokes fun, and is sly and farcical. But the hard and sour labour of ordinary peasant life is left on one side, since it offers no material for humour and anecdote.

Through this limitation painting renounced the best part of its strength. To a man of pictorial vision nature is a gallery of magnificent pictures, and one which is as wide and far-reaching as the world. But whoever seeks salvation in narrative painting soon reaches the end of his material. In the life of any man there are only three or four events that are worth the trouble of telling; Wilkie told more, and he became tiresome in consequence. We are willing to accept these anecdotes as true, but they are threadbare. Things of this sort may be found in the gaily-bound little books which are given as Christmas presents to children. It is not exhilarating to learn that worldly marriages have their inconveniences, that there is a pleasure in talking scandal about one's friends behind their backs, that a son causes pain to his mother by his excesses, and that egoism is an unpleasant failing. All that is true, but it is too true. We are irritated by the intrusiveness of this course of instruction. Wilkie paints insipid subjects, and by one foolery after another he has made painting into a toy for good children. And good children play the principal parts in these pictures.

As a painter, one of George Morland's pupils, _William Collins_, threw the world into ecstasies by his pictures of children. Out of one hundred and twenty-one which he exhibited in the Academy in the course of forty years the principal are: the picture of "The Little Flute-Player," "The Sale of the Pet Lamb," "Boys with a Bird's Nest," "The Fisher's Departure," "Scene in a Kentish Hop-Garden," and the picture of the swallows. The most popular were "Happy as a King"--a small boy whom his elder playmates have set upon a garden railing, from which he looks down laughing proudly--and "Rustic Civility"--children who have drawn up like soldiers, by a fence, so as to salute some one who is approaching. But it is clear from the titles of such pictures that in this province English _genre_ painting did not free itself from the reproach of being episodic. Collins was richer in ideas than Meyer of Bremen. His children receive earrings, sit on their mother's knee, play with her in the garden, watch her sewing, read aloud to her from their spelling-book, learn their lessons, and are frightened of the geese and hens which advance in a terrifying fashion towards them in the poultry-yard. He is an admirable painter of children at the family table, of the pleasant chatter of the little ones, of the father watching his sleeping child of an evening by the light of the lamp, with his heart full of pride and joy because he has the consciousness of working for those who are near to him. Being naturally very fond of children, he has painted the life of little people with evident enjoyment of all its variations, and yet not in a thoroughly credible fashion. Chardin painted the poetry of the child-world. His little ones have no suspicion of the painter being near them. They are harmlessly occupied with themselves, and in their ordinary clothes. Those of Collins look as if they were repeating a copybook maxim at a school examination. They know that the eyes of all the sightseers in the exhibition are fixed upon them, and they are doing their utmost to be on their best behaviour. They have a lack of unconsciousness. One would like to say to them: "My dear children, always be good." But no one is grateful to the painter for taking from children their childishness, and for bringing into vogue that codling which had its way for so long afterwards in the pictures of children.

_Gilbert Stuart Newton_, an American by birth, who lived in England from 1820 to 1835, devoted himself to the illustration of English authors. Like Wilkie, he has a certain historical importance, because he devoted himself with great zeal to a study of the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century and to the French painters of the eighteenth, at a time when these masters were entirely out of fashion on the Continent and sneered at as representatives of "the deepest corruption." Dow and Terborg were his peculiar ideals; and although the colour of his pictures is certainly heavy and common compared with that of his models, it is artistic, and shows study when one thinks of contemporary productions on the Continent. His works ("Lear attended by Cordelia," "The Vicar of Wakefield restoring his Daughter to her Mother," "The Prince of Spain's Visit to Catalina" from _Gil Blas_, and "Yorick and the Grisette" from Sterne), like the pictures of the Düsseldorfers, would most certainly have lost in actuality but for the interest provided by the literary passages; yet they are favourably distinguished from the literary illustrations of the Düsseldorfers by the want of any sort of idealism. While the painters of the Continent in such pictures almost invariably fell into a rounded, generalising ideal of beauty, Newton had the scene played by actors and painted them realistically. The result was a theatrical realism, but the way in which the theatrical effects are studied and the palpableness of the histrionic gestures are so convincingly true to nature that his pictures seem like records of stage art in London about the year 1830.

_Charles Robert Leslie_, known as an author by his pleasant book on Constable and a highly conservative _Handbook for Young Painters_, had a similar _repértoire_, and rendered in oils Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Molière, with more or less ability. The National Gallery has an exceedingly prosaic and colourless picture of his, "Sancho Panza in the Apartment of the Duchess." Some that are in the South Kensington Museum are better; for example, "The Taming of the Shrew," "The Dinner at Mr. Page's House" from _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, and "Sir Roger de Coverley." His finest and best-known work is "My Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman," which charmingly illustrates the pretty scene in _Tristram Shandy_: "'I protest, madam,' said my Uncle Toby, 'I can see nothing whatever in your eye.' 'It is not in the white!' said Mrs. Wadman. My Uncle Toby looked with might and main into the pupil." As in Newton's works, so in Leslie's too, there is such a strong dose of realism that his pictures will always keep their value as historical documents--not for the year 1630 but for 1830. As a colourist he was--in his later works at any rate--a delicate imitator of the Dutch _chiaroscuro_; and in the history of art he occupies a position similar to that of Diez in Germany, and was esteemed in the same way, even in later years, when the young Pre-Raphaelite school began its embittered war against "brown sauce"--the same war which a generation afterwards was waged in Germany by Liebermann and his followers against the school of Diez.

_Mulready_, thirty-two of whose pictures are preserved in the South Kensington Museum, is in his technique almost more delicate than Leslie, and he has learnt a great deal from Metsu. By preference he took his subjects out of Goldsmith. "Choosing the Wedding Gown" and "The Whistonian Controversy" would make pretty illustrations for an _édition de luxe_ of _The Vicar of Wakefield_. Otherwise he too had a taste for immortalising children, by turns lazy and industrious, at their tea or playing by the water's edge.

From _Thomas Webster_, the fourth of these kindly, childlike masters, yet more inspiriting facts are to be obtained. He has informed the world that at a not very remote period of English history all the agricultural labourers were quite content with their lot. No one ever quarrelled with his landlord, or sat in a public-house and let his family starve. The highest bliss of these excellent people was to stay at home and play with their children by the light of a wax-candle. Webster's rustics, children, and schoolmasters are the citizens of an ideal planet, but the little country is a pleasant world. His pictures are so harmless in intention, so neat and accurate in drawing, and so clear and luminous in colour that they may be seen with pleasure even at the present day.

The last of the group, _William Powell Frith_, was the most copious in giving posterity information about the manners and costumes of his contemporaries, and would be still more authentic if life had not seemed to him so genial and roseate. His pictures represent scenes of the nineteenth century, but they seem like events of the good old times. At that period people were undoubtedly good and innocent and happy. They had no income-tax and no vices and worries, and all went to heaven and felt in good spirits. And so they do in Frith's pictures, only not so naturally as in Ostade and Beham. For example, he goes on the beach at a fashionable English watering-place during the season, in July or August. The geniality which predominates here is quite extraordinary. Children are splashing in the sea, young ladies flirting, niggers playing the barrel-organ and women singing ballads to its strains; every one is doing his utmost to look well, and the pair of beggars who are there for the sake of contrast have long become resigned to their fate. In his racecourse pictures everything is brought together which on such occasions is representative of London life: all types, from the baronet to the ragman; all beauties, from the lady to the street-walker. A rustic has to lose his money, or a famished acrobat to turn his pockets inside out to assure himself that there is really nothing in them. His picture of the gaming-table in Homburg is almost richer in such examples of dry observation and humorous and spirited episode.

This may serve to exemplify the failures of these painters of _genre_. Not light and colour, but anecdote, comedy, and genial tale-telling are the basis of their labours. And yet, notwithstanding this attempt to express literary ideas through the mediums of a totally different art, their work is significant. While continental artists avoided nothing so much as that which might seem to approach nature, the English, revolting from the thraldom of theory, gathered subjects for their pictures from actual life. These men, indeed, pointed out the way to painters from every country; and they, once on the right road, were bound ultimately to arrive at the point from which they no longer looked on life through the glasses of the anecdotist, but saw it with the eye of the true artist.