ART.

THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN LANDSCAPE PAINTING.

NOT long since, in discussing various theories of painting and its• influence with an artist friend of mine, the question came to be' debated between us as to what was the value of the human element in any painting chiefly concerned with landscape ; and whether• such a painting was not weakened, particularly in cases where the- scene to be represented was one of extreme grandeur, by the in- troduction of any human interest whatever. That such was the case was decidedly his opinion, expressed to me many times, in• similar terms to those of the following extract which I take. from a letter ix propos of a picture the writer was painting for me, of a very splendid sunset over a calm bay, with a cirrhus sky of crimson and gold. I had thought the picture would be improved by the introduction of one solitary figure in the foreground, which the artist here objects to :—" For me, there are only two classes of landscape painting, glorious dreaming, and splendid reality,—Turner's Temdraire ' and Polyphemus ' on one side,. Brett's ' Granite Boulders' and Mount's Bay' on the other ; yet the finest parts of the Tdrneraire ' and the Polyphemus' are the real ones, and the most real picture of the two, the Tdmoraire,' is the finest. I have seen the mist in the morning roll over the menu tains like a monster" (alluding to the ' Polyphemus of Turner) ;- " I have also seen a sky very like the T6meraire.' As the power of dreaming is not given to every one, it is better to keep to the truth, which is difficult enough for most artists. I cannot agree with your suggestions for the improvement of the sunset I have• to paint for you. I have a dislike to figures in the immediate foreground. In a real scene they seem to me to spoil it, the same in a picture, especially if there is any grandeur in the scene ; their place, I think, is in the middle-distance. In the four pictures already mentioned, and in the grandest subjects of the Liber Studiorum, there are no figures in the foregrounds. The boat would be worse, for if there is one thing more remarkable than another about Douglas Bay' it is the absence of boats lying about the sand or drawn up on the beach. You seem to have- forgotten the picture, so I enclose a sketch of it, and I think you will say that the large stone is a sufficient balance and not so. obtrusive as a figure."

This extract, from a very straightforward, clever letter, is well worthy of notice, for it seems to touch the very heart of this matter. Here is the deliberate opinion of an artist, whoi as I know, has been trained in no Government academy of "expensive ignorance," nor had his native talent modified or crushed by the traditional practice of his predecessors. An ordinary house-painter and decorator, he some ten years ago was roused by Mr. Ruskin's works to attempt to draw ; and since that time, in every scanty interval of his business, in the early morning and the late evening, he has laboured to teach himself, with no other guidance than such as he could derive from Nature;.. no other encouragement than he could get from Ruskin's assur- ance " that if he will take the trouble, every man may learn to draw, though not to colour."

Naturally, from such training he became a draughtsman, a mag- nificent one, and being always face to face with nature, and having his eyes unobscured by prejudice and precept, he gained also that deep sense of the marvellous beauty of Nature's colouring which may almost be called a religion, so powerful is its effect upon some natures ; and so we come back to his dictum that in his eyes landscape painting consists in glorious dreaming or splendid reality, and I think there can be little doubt but that his words express the opinion of many other thoughtful persons. And yet I believe him to be quite wrong in this, and having already tried to answer him personally, I now wish to try to answer all those who share this opinion,—who think that figure painting is one thing and landscape painting is another, that a figure, except as a local light or dark, is out of place in a landscape, and vice versa. It is hardly a subject which admits of direct proof, but a com- parison and analysis of some well-known pictures may help us to arrive at a conclusion.

And first, let me put plainly the question I am desirous of answering, which is, whether landscape is improved by the addi- tion of human interest, and if so, in what degree ; whether, in fact, a large stone will or will not do as well or better than a figure in any given picture ? As there can be no fairer method' of argu- ment than one which is founded upon your adversary's own in- stances, let us in the first place consider the four pictures which my friend brings forward in support of his argument. These are the

have simply a glorified Brett. I forget which) to himself, where all these pictures can be seen Then in the " Tdmdraire ;" it is true that here there are no daily. I speak (it is almost unnecessary to say) of Elijah Walton. figures in the foreground (as my friend incorrectly stated of the These drawings, amongst other peculiarities which I cannot here Polyphemus "), but surely the person who saw the picture and pause to analyse, have one very remarkable point, and that is, thought its chief beauty to be the sky would miss Turner's mean- that in the great majority there is absolutely no connection ing. It would only weary my readers to describe what must be with humanity whatever. A few stone pines in the foreground, so well known to most of them, even if it were within my power a wreath of cloud filling the valley, a blue mountain be- to paint in words the pathos and beauty of that most wonder- yond, and above all, the snowy crest of an Alp, golden ful picture. The story of noble work done and toil ended, the in the sunset or grey in the dawn,—such is a fair do- peaceful, dignified close of a worthy life, with something of pity scription of the style of the majority of the works, though for the inevitable end of all the gallant aspirations and deeds which I must not forget to add that for delicacy and purity of are connected with the old man-of-war, all this does the picture bright colour they are almost unsurpassable. Well, what is the say more clearly than any words can express. Does any one result which these paintings of the most beautiful scenery in the think that a sunset at Gravesend by itself would rouse such world produce upon the spectator ? As far as I know, and I have emotions and thoughts, were it not connected with human sym- questioned many friends about them, they produce absolutely no pathies ? And it is worth while noting that in comparing the two effect whatever ; one says, "They are pretty," and they straightway pictures about which I have spoken so much, it becomes quite pass out of the mind altogether.

apparent that it is in the nearness with which the picture con. I do not profess to be able to entirely explain the feeling netts itself to our daily life that its greatest power lies. For about which I have written so much, but I venture to though in n Polyphemus " Turner gave free scope to perhaps the offer two or three suggestions as to its possible causes. In most vivid imagination that a painter ever possessed, and inter- the first place, a landscape which bears upon it no mark of wove it with an incident familiar to every schoolboy, yet does the man's presence upon the earth, suggests what may almost be called unusualness (the unreality, if you will) of the scene detract in a lie,—for there must have been one man to see it, or the scene some measure from the intensity of the feelings which it raises,— could not have been painted ; and after all, the painting is not so that the smaller picture, connected, as it is, in many ways nature itself, but only nature as she appeared to that man's mind, with the experiences of our daily life, becomes with us a much which looked at her through the medium of a thousand quite un-

more vivid recollection, and affects us much more deeply. known prejudices, thoughts, and feelings. Again, in most parts And now I may come to the second part of my subject, and of the world, it is excessively rare to find a landscape without some ask why it should be necessary to have any human interest in traces of man or man's work ; and when such a landscape is found a landscape painting? I can imagine an objector saying, ' I and painted, it appears strange to us, from our powerlessness to frequently see the most beautiful scenes without noticing any fasten on any of the small facts which we aro accustomed to see figures. On the sea especially the beauty of the waves is only around us. There is a very good reason at the bottom of the old marred by the introduction of a boat into the vast expanse of joke about putting a cow into your landscape, if it does not sell water. In a sunrise or a sunset, I do not want to see Bossy, the without. What the majority of mankind want is a cow, or some- milkmaid, at her matutinal operations, or the muffin-man making thing of a similar nature ; something which they are accustomed

two Turners, 44 The Tern&afro " and the "Polyphemus," and the night hideous with his bell. Why may I not enjoy nature undis- two by Brett, 4' Amongst the Boulders " and 44 Mount's Bay." turbed in my own way, in a picture, as in reality ? '

The first thing which we may be quite sure of (I suppose) with With regard to this part of the question, I wish to say, first of

regard to these four pictures is that the two former are the finer ; all, that by 46 human interest " I do not mean that it is actually

no one (at least to my knowledge) has as yet ranked Brett with necessary to have figures in every landscape subject, but that

Turner. But what I want to get at is why they are the finer ? I will the total separation of the human interest from the landscape not mention the 44 Mount's Bay," to which there might be some decreases its pictorial interest. The element of connection objections, but taking 44 Amongst the Boulders," I think we may with man's doings may of course be present in the title

fairly say that for literal reproduction of nature it is hard to con- of the picture, though there may be no sign of living beings ceive how it could be bettered. It is now four years since I saw in the work itself, I remember seeing, very many years ago, it in the Academy, and I can still remember the wonderful paint- in my brother's scrap-book, a picture of "The Black Sea

ing of the grey rocks, half-covered with seaweed, and the way before the Passage of the British Fleet," one of those coloured they were embedded in the shining sand. But still, one leaves the lithographs which were common about the period of the Crimean

picture, and then one has only shining sand and grey rock and the war. I remember the picture well ; it was an expanse of very

artist's cleverness to remember. Now think of the 4( Polyphemus." dark green sea, with a leaden sky, and some white sea-birds (gulls, Most of my readers must surely know that picture, with the huge I fancy they were) flying low over the surface of the waves. This

Greek galley, surrounded by Sirens in the foreground, the blinded is a very typical example of what I mean, for here the personal giant on the cliff above, and beyond, the sun setting in a lake of element existed only in the spectator's mind, and was awakened by crimson, and throwing great golden rays up to the zenith. Now the name alone. I must have seen, one way and another, since then,

this picture, I suppose, would come under the head of " glorious many hundreds of solitary sea-stapes, most of them certainly of far dreaming," but what I want to insist upon is that it is not this greater merit than my brother's old lithograph, but they have passed grand imaginative power which originally and in the first instance me and left no trace, because, as I hold, the key-note to their mean- severs the work from that of Brett. What Turner has done in ing was not granted to me. Take another example. Stansfield the 44 Polyphemus 4' he has done also in such simple subjects as was (after Turner) the greatest of our marine painters, and most " Crossing the Brook," which, though it would by no means be of our readers must have seen many of his harbour-scenes and called a (4 glorious dream,,, would have just the same mastery in sea-stapes, generally crowded with sailors and shipping. But comparison with Brett. What he has done is this,—he has inter- Stansfield painted one picture without a figure in it, which was woven the sea and sky with the emotions and the history of man, nevertheless the most powerful one of his life, a picture that it is and he has in so doing heightened the interest and value both of almost 'impossible to look at without feeling a sympathetic sad- the historical incident and the phase of nature. Ulysses, as he ness. This was " The Abandoned," a dismasted ship, rocking stands with upraised arms deriding his blind tyrant, does give to on a stormy sea, with the light streaming down from a momentary the sunset and the waves an interest and a beauty which they break in the heavy clouds. Here, again, it was the connection would not have possessed without him, and the flood of light with man, and the sort of semi-humanity which the title suggested which stretches far away into the distance from the rocky island as belonging to the ship, which gave the real force to the painting, gains a new meaning, as we look upon it as the road down which —a force which wave and sky would have been unable to the Greeks will escape to freedom and home. A picture like this gain of themselves. I have given several examples of pie- leaves one with no desire to think of how clever was the painting tures and painters where this connection of mind and of this or that portion, but takes you out of yourself, with the matter is evident. Let me now give one or two of works thoughts raised by the scene it depicts. Again, my friend says the in which it is absent, and try to find out whether they most real part (i.e., the sky) is the finest, and this seems to me to suffer in consequence. I think most of my readers will grant show that he has missed the real beauty of the picture. Take away that Alpine landscape offers as great attractions to the artist, and the ships, the writhing giant, the scornful Greek, the mermaidens, affords as great a scope for his powers, as that of any country and the groups of sailors, and what remains but a rocky coast and whatsoever. Now, there is one of our artists, and a man of no a fine sunset ; and how many of such pictures have we not seen mean ability, who has devoted himself for years to the delineation and admired and forgotten ? In fact, the vivifying power here is of the Alps, under every phase of light and shade, storm and the blending of the human and the material. Omit that, and you sunshine, and has had an exhibition in Pall Mall (or Bond Street,

to, and can understand and appreciate. It appears to be an un- doubted truth that the mind is subject to biliousness when it feeds on an over-rich diet just as much as the stomach, and needs a little wholesome, easily-digested victual, to keep it in thorough order. You may overfeed a man with sunsets, just as you may with caviare ; and the sunset, like the sturgeon, needs a substratum of fact, or bread-and-butter.

All that we know of Nature is connected with our personal feelings and sympathies and with those of our neighbours. If we are to be raised to any noble emotion by a painting, it must be by its appeal to what is noblest in us ; and no mere record of beauty of colour or form can be compared to the appeal which common work-a-day humanity makes every day of our lives. Those who remember Fred Walker's picture of " Man goeth forth unto his Work and to his Labour until the Evening," will at once recognise how landscape may gain nobility and significance by the intro- duction of human interest, and as long as great painting consists in inspiring us with great ideas, so long will it be necessary not to divide the representation of man from that of the scenes of his labour and the skies above his head.