STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART.*
Is this volume Mr. Wedmore discourses of Gainsborough, Mor- land, Wheatley, Reynolds, Stothard, Flaxman, Girtin, Crome, Cotman, Turner, De Wint, Mason, and Walker, devoting a brief essay, or to adopt a word which Mr. Pater brought into fashion, a "study," to each. He informs us in a prefatory note that the essays, which for the most part have appeared in serials, "were meant from the beginning to be chapters of a book ;" but the contemplated book was not intended "even to sketch completely the development of English Art," but merely to touch upon "various and delightful manifestations of the individuality of our Art." Every essay stands on its own merits, and there is not one of them but is able and intet eating ; nevertheless, the interest and usefulness of the book might, we think, have been increased, and its unity as a literary whole promoted, by one or two modifi- cations—some of omission, some of addition—in its contents. In the first place, the studies on George Mason and Frederick Walker might have been left out, not that they are of less excellence than the other studies, or that Mason and Walker were insignificant men, but because their works belong to the most recent of all our phases of art, and are separated by a quarter of a century of change and tumult from the most modern of the artists previously treated of by Mr. Wedmore. Turner and De Wint, dying about the middle of the century, preceded that rebellion of Holman Hunt, Millais, and the other Preraphaelites against Academical tradition which introduced the revolutionary lawlessness of the last twenty-fire years. From Reynolds and Gainsborough to Turner, English art ran through a traceable cycle, and its history and development are not more discontinuous than the intense individualism of English genius rendered in- evitable; but since the Preraphaelite revolt, every English artist has done absolutely what seemed good in his own eyes, and it has become absurd to speak of the whimsical eccentricities which succeed each other in our exhibitions as belonging to anything definable as a "school." Having excluded Mason and Walker, as belonging to another order of things, we would exclude Wheatley, as too decisively a minor painter, too little known, too slight in his influence, and in fact, too attenuated and unsubstantial in his vein of genius, to deserve a place in Mr. Wedmore's group of artists. Room being thus made, we should have filled the dis- posable space with essays on Richard Wilson, John Constable, and David Cox, and by a slight extension in the size of a volume which would be none the worse of being a little larger, we should have found space for Augustus! Callcott, Clarkson Stanfield, Copley Fielding, and J. D. Harding. Thus modified, the work would have presented a tolerably complete bird's-eye view of English landscape art, from its rise, about the middle of last century, to its culmination and—what shall we say, meta- morphosis ?—in the middle of the present. In future editions, Mr. Wedmore might thus add very much to the value of his work as a handbook.
Gainsborough is the first artist of whom Mr. Wedmore gives an account, and Morland the second, and he tells us that the art of Morland "was the child of Gainsborough." Sir Joshua said at an Academy dinner that Gainsborough was "the greatest land- scape painter of his time ;" "the younger artists heard of that," adds Mr. Wedmore, "and heeded it ;" and one of those whom he supposes to have particularly heeded it, and to have gone to worship at the shrine where Sir Joshua's sweet incense had been offered, was George Morland. We are not pre- pared to deny that this may have been the case, and still less to dispute the general accuracy of Mr. Wedmore's estimate of Morland's art ; but we confess that when Gainsborough and Morland come together in our mind, the idea which associates them is that of contrast more than that of resemblance. Gains- borough was a born and mighty genius, an artist in the highest sense, for whom Heaven did all that the most consummate train- ing could have done. His birth-place was Sudbury, in Suffolk— one of the most prosaic places, we fancy, in England—his father
* Studies in enntiali Art. By Frederick Wedmore. London: Bentley and Bon.
was "a substantial clothier and crape-maker," and all the teach- ing in art which we hear of his having had was that which he picked up in London between the age of fifteen and nineteen, when he attended Gravelot's drawing-school. Morland was born in London, his father was an artist, and "from him, from earliest boyhood, he received a tuition unceasing and regular." And yet—we are describing our notion of the relative position of the men—the works of Gainsborough exhibit all that is supreme and incommunicable in art, while the works of Morland cannot, without severe qualification, be pronounced art at all. What- ever Gainsborough touches, be it face, be it figure, be it landscape, he draws from it the highest beauty it can yield. With the ineffable skill that no words can de- scribe, he at one and the same moment preserves the truth of nature, and imparts the idealising spirit that is the life of art You feel that his portraits are like their subjects, and indeed it is certain that no portrait-painter who had not a sure eye in catch- ing likeness could be successful in England ; but you feel also that the artist was instinctively conscious that mere truth of like- ness was not enough for a work of art,—that it was his part to create a picture, to irradiate nature with the light of imagination. The melody of line and the harmony and brilliance of colour which he has got out of his portrait-subjects, or put into them, are a joy to generations that care not a straw about the names of his sitters. It is an astounding satire on what we call " progress " that at this hour, in the land of Gainsborough, artists with high powers of execution are impressed with the idea that by taking one of the ugliest extant specimens of the human being, and painting him with cruel veracity, they produce a work of art. We have spoken of Gainsborongh's genius as powerful enough to enable him to dispense with teaching, but it need not be doubted that the articulate tradition of the great schools of portrait had descended both to Reynolds and Gainsborough through Vandyke, and that thus, had such degradation been other- wise possible for them, they were preserved from that crude literalism which enslaves too many of our living artists.
George Morland, educated in art though he was, strikes us as expressly and pointedly devoid of imagination. There is in him no vision of noble form, his eye brings with it no influence to idealise and transfigure nature. He had very little sense of beauty. His executive power, however, was considerable ; his horses are like horses, his pigs like pigs, his burly farmers and millers doubtless such as were to be seen at every country market. He was popular, for the same reason that makes green fields, and willows, and live-stock, and all rustics who bring with them airs from the fields, popular in London. Those who admired his pictures enjoyed them in the same way in which the woodcuts in the Illustrated London News are enjoyed,—they were interesting ; they were life-like ; whether they had any dignity or beauty elevating them into the world of art was never asked. His workshave now, in the strictest sense, an historical value. They let us see what English agricultural life was in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Clearly it was no such Elysian affair as fanciful writers, from Xenophon to Ruskin, have imagined agri- culture to be. Heavy-footed, blunt-featured peasants, their faces clouded with care and sorrow and toil, trudge wearily beside their strong-boned, patient, over-worked and under-fed horses. The poor man's old white horse, as you have it in Morland's pictures, standing in the miserable farm-yard, while a hungry pig nuzzles in the straw at its feet, is a pathetic, almost a tragic object. It is to Morland's credit that if he was dead to the higher motives and effects of art, he was superior to the vulgar trimness and flimsy sentimentalism of stage-pastoral. He had a genuine sense of the picturesque. Mr. Wedmore is perhaps right also when he says that Morland rose occasionally to "the fitful recognition of power in nature," referring, by way of illustration, to the picture of "The Travellers," "a bundle-burdened man, a thickly-cloaked, low-bonneted woman, going through a waste and upland country, the way of the wind and the wind-blown tree." But Morland disenchants nature; of his work it may be said with perfect truth, as Ruskin says of Harding's with partial truth, that it "is not grand enough to be natural."
Mr. Wedmore gives us an interesting account of the Norwich school of painters. John Crome and a few indomitable fellow-workers made the capital of the Eastern Counties the seat of a school which will be remembered as long as English art has a history. Crome was the child of poor parents, and was apprenticed to a house-painter. The rough handling of the house-painter was never refined in his works into that delicacy of execution which is indispensable to faultless art. Crome kept him- self alive by teaching drawing, educating himself the while, and painted with energetic veracity what he saw in nature. Mr. Wed- more tells us that "Hobbema was (artistically) his ancestor,— the art of the Low Countries his model and his inspirer." The pictures he saw and reverenced in the country-houses of Norfolk to which he had access were Dutch, and "he died talking of Hobbema." All the same we believe that he owed little to those painters, and that Hobbema had no such imaginative grasp of landscape as he. The " Mousehold Heath" of our National Gallery has a - breadth beyond reach of any Dutchman known to us, unless we are to count Rubens among
Dutch painters. The simple elements of English landscape —the vault of blue, the floor of green broken into one or two billowy swells, the roll of tawny cloud touched on the summit with pale sunlight—were never more grandly seized than in that rudely executed but masterly picture. Until it fades into invisibility, it will be known that John Crome was a great man. There is no master to whom the young artist can more safely be sent to study breadth. His sense of beauty, however, was comparatively slight, and his lack of delicate per- ception and fine execution disabled him from working details of loveliness into his breadth. Had he possessed those qualities, he might have rivalled Turner.
Of this greatest of English landscape artists, Mr. Wedmore has only a partial notice. Sensibly and instructively he describes the Liber Studiorum, giving an admirably clear, comprehensive, and interesting account of the work, and making many just and luminous remarks upon the genius of Turner. "To genius like Turner's, the originality of isolation is denied ;" "nor did he ever, in the vigour of his youth or his maturity, trouble over-much to be strangely new ;" "his genius made his knowledge his servant and helper,— it supplied and fed him, never mastered him ;" he was "impatient of life, patient only of work ;" these and other observations which could be gleaned from the essay are, as Mr. Carlyle might say, windows into the real Turner. The studies of Cotman and of De Wint are also excellent. In fact, the book, on the whole, is entitled to high commendation. There are one or two slight blemishes in style, owing, perhaps, to acci- dents in the printing, and Mr. Wedmore speaks of the " constrain- ing " eye of the Ancient Mariner, whereas Coleridge's memorable epithet is "glittering ;" but generally speaking, the composition is correct, animated, and felicitous. There is a conspicuous absence of that most detestable habit, which some critics have, of vapouring away about their admiration, without render- ing a reason for their ecstasies. Mr. Wedmore never parades his own feelings, always gives adequate proof or sufficient refer- ence for what he affirms. He has evidently gone through a great deal of close and honest work, and in particular, has accumulated a number of fresh and interesting details about the successive schools of engraving which have marched in the rear of our schools of art. The book, in short, is one which it will be a pleasure to read and an advantage to know.
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