CHAPTER VI.

LANDSCAPE PAINTING.

Two serious difficulties present themselves in any attempted study of the development of English landscape painting up to 1800. One difficulty is that most of the pictures are practically inaccessible, many of them being known only by name and the more famous ones being scattered through various private and public galleries. The second difficulty in tracing any progress or development is that the pictures are usually undated. As a rule the most that can be known is that such and such a picture belongs in the earlier or later portion of the artist's productive period. Furthermore, any adequate study would require close knowledge of artistic technicalities and mechanical processes, for much of the development is along the line of improved paper, better pigments, new methods of work.

A recognition of these difficulties confines the following brief sketch to very narrow lines. But fortunately the objective point in the present study renders first-hand and technical knowledge less imperative than it would otherwise be. It is not so much the artist's method or his degree of success that is here of interest. It is rather what his tastes led him to wish to do, what subjects he thought worthy of serious study, what conception of nature guided his work. Such information may be fairly gleaned from biographies, letters, historical accounts, and critical essays.1

In this sketch the following works have been used:

Adolph Siret: Dictionnaire Historique des Peintres.

Spooner: Dictionary of Painters.

Champlin and Perkins: Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings.

Bryan Dictionary of Painters and Engravers.

Cunningham British Painters.

Brydall Art in Scotland.

Redgrave: Water Colour Painting in England.

Up to 1725 English painting is almost entirely concerned with portraits and occasional historical pictures. Even a landscape background is of rare occurrence. The same spirit prevails throughout the eighteenth century; the predominating interest is in such aspects of painting as have especially to do with man. But along with this interest in portraits and historical representations, there was growing up an interest in landscape for its own sake; and in the pictures where the human element still ruled there was a change from the portrait of the noble lord or lady, to pictures of humble life in rustic surroundings. It is this twofold change that is to be briefly indicated here.'

Though Gainsborough and Wilson are usually counted the founders of the modern English school of landscape painting, we find indications that before their day some essays had been made towards the representation of nature. Francis Place (d. 1728) is casually mentioned as having painted "a few landscapes" for his own amusement. Samuel Scott, whose work comes after 1725, was called the best marine painter of his time. Two fine examples of his work are Westminster Bridge, 1745, and London Bridge, 1745. George Lambert (1710-1765) is said by Bryan to be "the first English painter who treated landscape with a pleasing and picturesque effect." John Wooton (d. 1765) painted chiefly racehorses and hunting scenes. In 1727 he illustrated Gay's Fables. He also painted "excellent landscapes

'Biese in Die Entwickelung des Naturgefühls, pp. 209-248, gives a brief résumé of the development of landscape painting in Germany. He calls Rubens and his school the first to make the painting of nature an independent branch of art, while Ruysdael (1681) is the one in whom "die ganze Poesie der Natur" finds expression. His chapter closes with these words: "Alle diese grossen Niederländer eilen weit der Poesie ihrer Zeit voraus; Gebirge und Meer finden im Wort erst 100 Jahre später ihre begeisterten Schilderer, und ein in sich stimmungsvoll, abgeschlossenes, lyrisches Landschaftsbild wird erst am Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts in der deutschen Dichtung geboren." In England, it will be observed, the love of nature finds earlier and more abundant expression in poetry than in painting, and its completest expression in Wordsworth's poetry precedes its complete expression in the great English landscape painters of the early 19th century. See also for brief résumé of "Landschaftsmalerei" as an indication mainiy of the increasing knowledge of distant lands new forms of vegetation, etc., Humboldt, Kosmos, Vol. 2, pp. 47-58.

in the Italian style. The Smiths of Chichester were brothers who attained much local celebrity by the landscapes they painted of the scenery in their own neighborhood. Their work comes after

Of more importance is Paul Sandby (1725-1809), a talented artist who at eighteen went as a draughtsman with the Duke of Cumberland through the Scotch Highlands, and who was so deeply impressed with the beautiful scenery that he brought back many drawings of it. Nine years later he made seventy drawings of the scenery about Windsor. He also traveled in North and South Wales and made many drawings of the picturesque scenery there. He is called "the first to infuse nature into topographical drawings." An Irish painter of this period was John Butts (d. 1764), the talented pupil of a mediocre artist named Rogers, who is called the father of landscape art in Ireland. Butts's early landscapes were "impressive copies from the wild scenes which abound in the county of Cork, and the romantic views that abound on the margin of Black Water." Brydall says that James Norris was "probably the first to create, or at least to minister to the taste for landscape painting in the Scottish metropolis." Alexander Runciman (1736-1785) began to paint landscapes when he was but twelve years old. "Other artists," it was said, "talked meat and drink, but Runciman talked landscape." He exhibited landscapes in 1755, but finding that no one would buy his pictures he turned, in 1750, to historical paintings. One of Runciman's most romantic undertakings was the decoration of the hall at Pennycuik with paintings representing the poems of Ossian.

From this brief summary of landscape art in Great Britain before 1755 it will be seen that, late and feeble as were these beginnings, they are yet significant of the coming treatment of nature in art. There is an effort to represent landscape, an evident enjoyment of it, some first-hand study, and some pleasure in the wilder aspects of the external world.

'Scott, in his Essay on Painting, speaks of "Smith's delightful spots" and 'Sandby's pleasant fields." In the same Essay he proposes hay-fields and hopgrounds as new subjects of landscape, acknowledging that he is indebted for the idea to Walpole.

The period before 1755 may properly be called the period of inception. The rest of the century is the period of establishment, at the very beginning of which stand Gainsborough and Wilson.

Richard Wilson (1713-1782) intended to be a portrait painter and went to Italy to study under Zuccarelli. While there he sketched a landscape in "an idle hour" and was straightway persuaded by Zuccarelli and Vernet that he had found his true work. His success was almost immediate. In 1755 he returned to England and in 1760 exhibited the "Niobe" which estabtablished his reputation as a landscape painter. For the representation of nature he had a twofold preparation, his youth in Wales and his years of study in Italy. "He had long," says Allan Cunningham, "been insensibly storing his mind with the beauties of natural scenery, and the picturesque mountains and glens of his native Wales had been to him an academy when he was unconscious of their influence." In Italy he was led by his extravagant admiration of Claude to study such landscape effects as Claude had produced. His appreciation of nature was doubtless, as Cunningham says, greatly strengthened by his early surroundings, but it was the years in Italy that determined his choice of artistic themes. He always preferred scenes of classic fame. The four pictures in the Vernon Gallery, "The Ruined Temple," "Ruins in Italy," "Hadrian's Villa," and " Lake Avernus," are fine characteristic specimens of his work. But though his pictures are foreign in subject and manner of treatment, and though he did sometimes introduce "gods, goddesses and ideal beings' into his landscapes, he was nevertheless the first of English artists to show the possibilities of landscape art. He loved his work passionately and became so devoted to it that he lost all interest in men or in animals except as they "composed well" in his landscapes. He did not copy other painters, but depended on nature for his inspiration. While he counted painting "facsimiles of scenes" mere "unpoetic drudgery," he was always true to the general spirit of the landscape. Cunningham says that he caught the very "hue and character of Italian scenery." He observed Nature in all her appearances," says Fuseli, “and had a

characteristic touch for all her forms." There was, moreover, a grandeur and sublimity of conception, a depth and tenderness of poetic feeling about Wilson's pictures such as is not found in English landscapes again before Girtin. Cunningham sums up his work in the following words: "Wilson had a poet's feeling and a poet's eye, selected his scenes with judgment and spread them out in beauty and in all the fresh luxury of nature. He did for landscape what Reynolds did for faces-with equal genius, but far different fortune."

Sir George Beaumont, himself an amateur artist of no small ability, said that Wilson's genius had the qualities of Gray's poem The Bard, while Gainsborough was more akin to The Elegy.

The point of this remark so far as Gainsborough (1727-1788) is concerned must be simply that he was distinctively the painter of rural England. His love of nature was early shown. Before he was twelve it was his delight to spend his mornings in the woods of Suffolk sketching from streams, trees, cattle, sheep, and peasants. From fourteen to eighteen he was in a London academy studying portrait painting, but though he made that his business, "landscape had his heart." "Madam Nature, not man, was his sole study," says Thickesse speaking of later days at Ipswich. He said himself that to be well-read in the volume of nature was all the learning he wished. He rebelled against the doctrine of the schools. He said that landscape could be studied only from nature herself and felt with Hogarth that the canvas should not be "thrust between the student and the sky-tradition between him and God." So far as earlier artists influenced him at all it was the Dutch and Flemish schools whose methods he studied. He gave especial attention to Wynants and Ruysdael. His earlier pictures show "close adherence to local scenery and minute and careful finishing," as for instance the "young oak painted leaf for leaf." Reynolds speaks of his "portrait like representation" of nature, and adds: "If Gainsborough did. not look at nature with a poet's eye it must be acknowledged that he saw her with the eye of a painter, and gave a faithful if not a poetical representation of what he had before him." To this