The English Tradition in Painting
By ANTHONY BLUNT " AWAY with false modesty " is one of the battle cries of the exhibition of British Art which has just opened at Bur- lington House. At last, it is said, after celebrating the glories of the Dutch, Flemish, Italian and French schools we have woken up to the fact that we too have produced painters and to them we are rendering this eleventh hour justice. All this is perfectly true and highly praiseworthy, but, while we abandon false modesty, we must take care to preserve decorum. We must not fly from the one extreme of ignoring English painting to the other of thinking it the equal of the great continental schools. For the English school, though it achieved certain things incomparably, failed completely in many others. So that, for instance, one of the first impressions which forces itself on the visitor to Burlington House is that the exhibition consists, for all practical purposes, of portraits and landscapes. From the larger fields of historical and religious painting there are almost no examples till we reach the Pre-Raphaelites, whom I shall discuss next week. These gaps are, to a certain extent, filled by the genre pieces of Hogarth, one of the few English painters at ease in compositions involving large numbers of figures. But he is an isolated figure covering a limited range of subject and style.
One of the problems which the present exhibition brings forward is the question of the existence of a continuous English tradition in painting. The old view that the history of English painting is that of a number of great personalities working quite independently and springing out of the void will certainly not hold water. We cannot now doubt that Reynolds owed much to Hudson, and Gainsborough much to Hayman and Devis, so that these great artists can be regarded in a sense as the product of an English tradition. On the other hand the English tradition was not like that which existed in Florence, say, in the fifteenth century. It did not bring forth a continuous stream of artists of great merit culminating in a single supreme figure. Rather it served the important but uninspiring function of handing on a certain technical efficiency which was available when there turned up a Reynolds or a Gainsborough to put it to its proper use. The fact is that Devis, Hudson and the like are only important by their relation to Reynolds or Gains- borough, whereas the minor Florentine painters of the Quattrocento would be remembered even if there had never been a Michelangelo.
Leaving aside for a later occasion the great school of English landscape, we may say that the English tradition in figure painting does not come above ground thoroughly till the middle of the eighteenth century. Before that time we drew our petrol from abroad by the channel of Holbein, Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller and so on, and the Englishmen served as little more than the oil which kept the machine running smoothly once it had been set in motion. In one field alone had we shown originality, namely, in miniature painting, of which there had been a lively and independent school from Hilliard to Cooper. In the seventeenth century it is possible to speak of an English tradition in portrait painting, in the sense that there existed men like Dobson who, while imitating the foreigners, produced works as good as theirs. Then suddenly out of the dibris of Kneller's school there sprang up a group of genuinely English painters, mostly minor figures, but including Hogarth who; In spite of all attempts to prove the contrary, still stands out as the first artist since mediaeval times to be great, and at the same time wholly. English. From the tradition of Kneller he learned that fluency of handling, which he was able to put to a worthy use, by combining it with real and honest observation of character, as, in the portrait of Captain Coram (214)—perhaps the first great English portrait—or by applying it to the rendering of a rhythmically moving group of figures, as in the Wansta Assembly (232). Had Hogarth only limited himself to the recording of such keenly perceived scenes he would have been an artist of more even achievement. As it is his passion for satire interferes with his more serious aims. He can just turn such a subject as the March to Finchley into a successful painting (210), though even here there are passages in which he has spoilt his effect by his desire to cari- cature ; but to see how low he could sink, we have only to look at his Taste in High Life (220), in which satire seems to have been his only aim, and, further, satire of a subject on which he did not himself feel strongly, but which had been thrust upon him by a client.
* • The generation immediately following that of Hogarth pro- duced many painters whose interest lies mainly in the light which their works throw on contemporary manners. They were efficient, sincere and uninteresting. Hayman and Devis are of importance, the former because he directly influenced Gainsborough, the latter because he played a considerable part in creating a genre which Gainsborough was to vivify, namely, the conversation picture. This form was well suited to Gainsborough, who, by means of it was able to indulge his passion for landscape while at the same time executing com- missions for portraits, and lie therefore owed much to the earlier painters who popularized this genre. On the other hand, we need only compare characteristic works of Hayman and Devis, such as the Tiers Family (364) and the Van Harthals Family (336), with the four early Gainsboroughs in room V (Nos. 263, 265, 269 and 272) to see that he inherited the tradition of conversation painting as something evolved to record the pleasanter aspects of family life and that he made of it a means for the production of great works of art. Nevertheless, the fact that Gainsborough derived from this relatively homely branch of the English tradition had its effect on his general style of portrait painting, even when he was executing full dress whole lengths. For, in general, Gainsborough was only successful when he could make some direct personal contact with his sitter, when he could find in him some feature, physical or moral, which directly interested him. So, for instance, he could make a good portrait of the solid bulk of Lord Kilniorcy (194) or the foppish elegance of Captain Wade (155), but lie was defeated by the fluttering vacuity of Madame Baceelli (170), though even here he has pulled the game out of the fire by the brilliant painting of the dress.
Reynolds was a portraitist of a fundamentally different type, and he sprang from a different branch of the English tradition. He is linked on through Hudson to the official portrait painting of the Kneller type, and it is as an official portrait painter that lie is successful. Presented with even the most unfavourable of men, Reynolds could be counted on to extract whatever of dignity was in him, to make him look a fine upstanding fellow and a gentleman ; or if the subject was a child Reynolds would give him just the whimsical air which would please the child's parents ; if a great lady, just the distinction which she thought her own. He revelled in the rendering of types, in making abstractions concrete, and while-this saves him from many disasters it makes much of his
• work dull, especially in his later period. For us he is at his most attractive before he had developed his full battery of official technique in such a masterpiece of understanding as the Lady Spencer and Daughter (164).
After Reynolds and Gainsborough the story is melancholy. We sink at once to the sentimental flimsiness of Romney, to the worthiness of Opie and Wright of Derby, to the emptiness of Raeburn, and finally, to the efficient vulgarity of Lawrence. The one bright spot is Andrew Geddes, who is generally ad- mitted as one of the " discoveries " of the exhibition, though many canny Scots claim to have realized his merits for many years. His portrait of Scott (422) puts to shame Lawrence's treatment of the same subject (468) and astonishes by its apparent anticipation of Mallet
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