of Chinese gardeners to construct scenes with the express purpose of arousing certain emotions. The "fancies and surprises" of Chinese effects were pleasing to those who, as Sir William Chambers, thought Kent's English gardens "no better than so many fields." The popularity of writings on oriental gardening is furthermore significant of the enlarged horizons, the prevailing interest in the new and the remote, characteristic of one phase of romanticism, and it is to be classed as a sign of the times along with the interest in oriental eclogues in the realm of poetry. Incomplete and cursory as so short a study of so great a subject must be, the facts here presented seem to warrant the following statements: The feeling toward Nature in the period studied shows in gardening the same order of development, nearly the same dates, and the same phases as in poetry. There was first in both a pleased recognition of the supremacy of man, a rigid exclusiveness, a love of order, of symmetry, and of definite limits. Then came, in the early eighteenth century, a tentative turning from art to Nature; then an epoch-making statement in each art, Thomson's "Seasons" from 1726 to 1730, and Pope's "Epistle" in 1731. From this point. on the development was in mass and variety rather than in the enunciation of hew principles. The growing love for wild Nature in the poetry, and the passion for the picturesque in gardening proceed side by side. At the end of the century all is ready in both arts for the splendid work of the new era. Throughout the century both have had curiously correspondent offshoots or temporary fads-sentimental melancholy in poetry, and the ruins, artificial and real, in gardening; foreign eclogues and studies of distant countries in the one art, and Chinese gardens in the other. CHAPTER VI LANDSCAPE PAINTING It is the purpose of this chapter to indicate how far and in what way painting lent itself to the expression of that new love for Nature which, as we have seen, gradually became dominant in the realm of poetry, fiction, travels, and gardening. Such an inquiry is beset with peculiar difficulties in the case of pictures because they are seldom dated. At best we usually know only whether a picture is early or late in the artist's career. After the beginning of public exhibitions with catalogues, which was not till 1760, something like accuracy in dates becomes possible, but the information thus obtained is not entirely reliable for the reason that pictures were not always exhibited the year they were painted, and it is certainly inadequate because so small a proportion of the pictures painted reached any exhibition. Furthermore, the pictures most important in establishing the early use of landscape would come before 1760. A second difficulty arises from the inaccessibility of much of the material, especially the important early material. Whatever was printed in a book had many chances of survival. A single brief poem indicative of a new love of Nature, even though a poem but lightly regarded by the author and his contemporaries, would hold its small place in his works and share in the reduplicated life of the tragedies, satires, and didactic poems to which he intrusted his fame. But an equally slight picture, though equally indicative of a new tendency, would have no such fate. Unregarded, unpurchased, its ultimate destiny would be destruction, or, possibly, burial in some attic. Even such of these pictures as still hold their own in some collection are widely scattered and often in private galleries not open to public inspection. This inaccessibility of much of the original material would be an insuperable difficulty from the point of view of the student of technique, but is less formidable in the present study which has to do not with qualities that would give the picture high or low artistic rank so much as with the thoughts the artist strove to express, his tastes, his feelings, the conception of Nature that guided his work. For this purpose we have as authentic material not only original pictures whenever obtainable, but also reproductions of various sorts, along with biographies, letters, and critical essays. From these scattered sources it becomes possible to make a brief but not wholly inadequate statement concerning the place of the external world in English eighteenth-century art. I. LANDSCAPE IN PORTRAITURE As a picturesque accessory in portraiture landscape received early recognition in English art. Even the miniaturists found space for landscape backgrounds,' and Vandyck, who was painting in England from 1621 to 1641, established the use of landscape elements in large portraits. in oil. Sometimes, where the portrait is inevitably in the open air, as in the equestrian portrait of Charles I in the National Gallery, the landscape is worked out with much beauty of detail, but as a rule Vandyck makes use of Nature as an accessory rather than as a full background. Various As illustrative see Isaac Oliver's (1566-1617) portrait of Sir Philip Sidney who is represented as seated on a turf-covered rock, leaning against a broad tree-trunk, while in the rear is a formal arcaded garden with a distant row of trees sending up slender green spires against a sunset sky. (Reproduced in Gosse and Garnett, "An Illustrated History of English Literature.") Compare also Oliver's portrait of himself where is seen through the open window a broad river flowing at the base of castle-crowned crags. (Reproduced in Horace Walpole, "Anecdotes of Painting," III, 176.) |