ART
The Eighteenth Century
THERE they sit, in Sir Philip Sassoon's house, glaring at each other across the corner of the room, Queen Caroline and Captain Coram, the two poles of English art in their day and the two poles of English society, or at any rate of all that counted in English society. And between these extremes is spread out a display of art of different kinds all vaguely and yet happily grouped together under the title of " Old London," and shown for the benefit of the Royal Northern Hospital.
Hogarth's Captain Coram is perhaps the one heroic piece of realism produced in English painting in the eighteenth century ; and Zoffany's Queen Caroline is as near as English art ever got to the rococo. So it is not surprising that they make poor wall-companions. The Queen wanted naturalism of detail to show off the beauty of her satin and the fancy-dress of her children ; and Captain Coram inspired realism because he was a worthy man.who had done his duty towards the world in which he lived and did not mind letting the world know that his face was knobbly and his waistcoat irregularly buttoned. The Queen wanted her rococo clock and her chinoiserie porce- lain round her ; Captain Coram wanted to be painted holding the Charter of the Foundling Hospital which he had created, with a globe and a log-book on the floor near him, to show that he had sailed about on the seas for many years. In his case the truth was worth telling, and he ready • to risk its being told. In the other case neither artist nor sitter was prepared to bare their souls and their faces before the public. It is characteristic that such a piece of realism should be demanded by a man who had devoted his life to doing good works for the city of which he was a member. He had shown a civic con- sciousness which was rare at that time, and in so doing he expressed the higher aspirations of his class in an unusually attractive and lofty form. His good conscience made it possible for him to be painted in this way.
But there are other paintings in this admirable exhibition which must not be neglected. The King and the Duke of Richmond have lent four of the finest Canalettos painted in this country, all views of London. There are many examples of the rather dry style of topographical accuracy which his English imitators, such as Scott and Marlow, evolved ; and for comparison with them is the set of views of the London Hospitals painted by Gainsborough, Wilson and others.
Queen Caroline may look rococo, but English painting never went more than ankle deep into the style. In France, however, it swamped court art to such an extent that even in a neo- classical painter like Hubert Robert there are still many traces of it. His paintings on view at Wildenstein's do not show him at his most typical, but they include many pieces of interest. Not the least revealing is La Tentation de l'Hermite in which the story of St. Anthony, deprived of the super- natural terror which it had in late mediaeval versions and of the sensual attractions which it took on in the Renaissance, is made into a playful anecdote. The mock romanticism of Guerriers jouant, showing soldiers gambling among solemn ruins, belongs to that great tradition which begins with Salvator Rosa, and ends perhaps with the scene in The Return of the Native in which the two characters gamble at night on Rainbarrow by the light of glow-worms ! The element of parody and the deliberate exploitation of the contrast between the nobility of the setting and the meanness of the action is already clear in Robert. Many of the landscapes are purely decorative and were presumably designed to form part of some larger decorative scheme. They need some such setting to give point to their otherwise too vague statement, which can catch but not hold the attention. How different was all this playing at being classical, this mock cult for the antique, which filled a gap in the conversation of the later eighteenth century, from that other classicism which was only a little later to be invented by David for quite opposite and infinitely serious purposes. Robert's ruins are only an extension of the romantic escape which runs all through the rococo. In Watteau the escape was into the sort of charade-life which people of the day actually lived. In Robert's time something more remote and more melancholy was needed, and so it is in ruins of ancient buildings that the mock pastorals take place. But from David's classicism all these play elements have disappeared ; and the artist's weapons are directed towards conveying a serious moral and political truth. ANTHONY BLUNT.
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