The Visionary Painters
British Romantic Artists. By John Piper. (Collins. 4s. 6d.)
THERE were good poets, good painters, flourishing in England in the first years of the eighteenth century, and yet it was not quite our great day. When that came (to be known as the Romantic Movement) it came with an immense and ubiquitous power, and we are still trying to define to ourselves what and whence this trans- forming energy was. Mr. Piper, who has both written and painted with vision, is not inclined to support any theory that Romantic Art is drowsy ; though he says that in England it is curiously connected with the weather, which is sometimes misty. For him, it is particular, and the first name of an artist to appear in his pages is Thomas Bewick. The last is Graham Sutherland, of whose pictures Mr. Piper says finely, "To become absorbed by one of them is to know the meaning Of Wordsworth's
. . . Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees."
As for theories about the Romantic. Movement, I do not believe that they are more than agreeable digressions from the subjects before us. Whatever is said, "much yet remains to sing." Nature, as Mr. Piper says is obviously a deity much worshipped by the con- temporaries of `Wordsworth and J. M. W. Turner, yet his catalogue of painters rightly includes B. R. Haydon—surely the most dashing devotee of Romantic Art among them all, but far from a poet of Nature. No I cannot sit brooding over the prolegomena nor in fact does Mr. Piper long detain us before he comes to the particular. He has the pleasant and appropriate task of leading us from artist to artist, and there is no other fault in his tour, picturesque, sublime or fantastic, except that it is brief. Nevertheless, he does not end it at the period when Thackeray was trying to laugh the Books of Beauty into sense, but, as I mentioned, traces the theme as he perceives a continuity through the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and on to these days. Moreover, he finds room to pay a tribute to unfamiliar people—to the other Turner, of Oxford, who can be great, even to the "good critic," Robert hunt, whose skirmish with William Blake is all that is usually allowed him.
This, then, might be described as a critical sketch-book from the Romantics since Alexander Cozens, and Mr. Piper can sketch ; he observes, for instance " Fuseli was once heard muttering aloud about some angels that he was drawing : 'They shall rise without wings.' But he was not William Blake. His incantations were stage directions, and his angels would not rise without wings. Blake's incantations were rules of life." Descriptions of pictures by Mr. Piper read rather like evocations of favourite scenes, and we should have welcomed more.
In this now famous series, the illustrations are always scanned and valued very eagerly ; the selection in British Romantic Artists is largely made from pictures which the majority of us have not seen hitherto. A few do not seem to me to belong to our Romantic Art, but on that point perhaps the passage of time and study of Mr. Piper's chronicle will convince me later. The "Harvest Moon" by Samuel Palmer, and " Clippersby Church, Norfolk," are infallible instances of the original mystery ; both are Odes to Autumn worthy of the association with the poems of Keats, Clare and Hood. "A Romantic Landscape," ascribed to F. Danby, introduces a name which was for a time thought by some to promise work comparable in meditative beauty with that of Keats. This picture alone would tell how that thought arose. Mr. Piper would be the man to bring us more of Danby, of James Smetham and even John Martin, whose English landscapes are perhaps more romantic
Previous page
