The best works of the modern men are in private collections, many in the United States, some examples of them in the Amsterdam and Hague Museums. Also some examples of the old Dutch masters in New York Hist. Society Library, Yale School of Fine Arts, Met. Mus. New York, Boston Mus., and Chicago Institute.



CHAPTER XVIII.

GERMAN PAINTING.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED: Colvin, A. Durer, his Teachers, his Rivals, and his Scholars; Eye, Leben und Werke Albrecht Durers; Foerster, Peter von Cornelius; Foerster, Geschichte der Deutschen Kunst; Keane, Early Teutonic, Italian, and French Painters; Kuegler, Handbook to German and Netherland Schools, trans. by Crowe; Merlo, Die Meister der altkolnischer Malerschule; Moore, Albert Durer; Pecht, Deutsche Kunstler des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts; Reber, Geschichte der neueren Deutschen Kunst; Riegel, Deutsche Kunststudien; Rosenberg, Die Berliner Malerschule; Rosenberg, Sebald und Barthel Beham; Rumohr, Hans Holbein der Jungere; Sandrart, Teutsche Akademie der Edlen Bau, Bild-und Malerey-Kunste; Schuchardt, Lucas Cranach's Leben; Thausig, Albert Durer, His Life and Works; Waagen, Kunstwerke und Kunstler in Deutschland; E. aus'm Weerth, Wandmalereien des Mittelalters in den Rheinlanden; Wessely, Adolph Menzel; Woltmann, Holbein and his Time; Woltmann, Geschichte der Deutschen Kunst im Elsass; Wurtzbach, Martin Schongauer.

EARLY GERMAN PAINTING: The Teutonic lands, like almost all of the countries of Europe, received their first art impulse from Christianity through Italy. The centre of the faith was at Rome, and from there the influence in art spread west and north, and in each land it was modified by local peculiarities of type and temperament. In Germany, even in the early days, though Christianity was the theme of early illuminations, miniatures, and the like, and though there was a traditional form reaching back to Italy and Byzantium, yet under it was the Teutonic type—the material, awkward, rather coarse Germanic point of view. The wish to realize native surroundings was apparent from the beginning.

It is probable that the earliest painting in Germany took the form of illuminations. At what date it first appeared is unknown. In wall-painting a poor quality of work was executed in the churches as early as the ninth century, and probably earlier. The oldest now extant are those at Oberzell, dating back to the last part of the tenth century. Better examples are seen in the Lower Church of Schwarzrheindorf, of the twelfth century, and still better in the choir and transept of the Brunswick cathedral, ascribed to the early thirteenth century.



All of these works have an archaic appearance about them, but they are better in composition and drawing than the productions of Italy and Byzantium at that time. It is likely that all the German churches at this time were decorated, but most of the paintings have been destroyed. The usual method was to cover the walls and wooden ceilings with blue grounds, and upon these to place figures surrounded by architectural ornaments. Stained glass was also used extensively. Panel painting seems to have come into existence before the thirteenth century (whether developed from miniature or wall-painting is unknown), and was used for altar decorations. The panels were done in tempera with figures in light colors upon gold grounds. The spirituality of the age with a mingling of northern sentiment appeared in the figure. This figure was at times graceful, and again awkward and archaic, according to the place of production and the influence of either France or Italy. The oldest panels extant are from the Wiesenkirche at Soest, now in the Berlin Museum. They do not date before the thirteenth century.

FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES: In the fourteenth century the influence of France began to show strongly in willowy figures, long flowing draperies, and sentimental poses. The artists along the Rhine showed this more than those in the provinces to the east, where a ruder if freer art appeared. The best panel-painting of the time was done at Cologne, where we meet with the name of the first painter, Meister Wilhelm, and where a school was established usually known as the

SCHOOL OF COLOGNE: This school probably got its sentimental inclination, shown in slight forms and tender expression, from France, but derived much of its technic from the Netherlands. Stephen Lochner, or Meister Stephen, (fl. 1450) leaned toward the Flemish methods, and in his celebrated picture, the Madonna of the Rose Garden, in the Cologne Museum, there is an indication of this; but there is also an individuality showing the growth of German independence in painting. The figures of his Dombild have little manliness or power, but considerable grace, pathos, and religious feeling. They are not abstract types but the spiritualized people of the country in native costumes, with much gold, jewelry, and armor. Gold was used instead of a landscape background, and the foreground was spattered with flowers and leaves. The outlines are rather hard, and none of the aerial perspective of the Flemings is given. After a time French sentiment was still further encroached upon by Flemish realism, as shown in the works of the Master of the Lyversberg Passion (fl. about 1463-1480), to be seen in the Cologne Museum.



BOHEMIAN SCHOOL: It was not on the Lower Rhine alone that German painting was practised. The Bohemian school, located near Prague, flourished for a short time in the fourteenth century, under Charles IV., with Theodorich of Prague (fl. 1348-1378), Wurmser, and Kunz, as the chief masters. Their art was quite the reverse of the Cologne painters. It was heavy, clumsy, bony, awkward. If more original it was less graceful, not so pathetic, not so religious. Sentiment was slurred through a harsh attempt at realism, and the religious subject met with something of a check in the romantic mediaeval chivalric theme, painted quite as often on the castle wall as the scriptural theme on the church wall. After the close of the fourteenth century wall-painting began to die out in favor of panel pictures.

NUREMBERG SCHOOL: Half-way between the sentiment of Cologne and the realism of Prague stood the early school of Nuremberg, with no known painter at its head. Its chief work, the Imhof altar-piece, shows, however, that the Nuremberg masters of the early and middle fifteenth century were between eastern and western influences. They inclined to the graceful swaying figure, following more the sculpture of the time than the Cologne type.

FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES: German art, if begun in the fourteenth century, hardly showed any depth or breadth until the fifteenth century, and no real individual strength until the sixteenth century. It lagged behind the other countries of Europe and produced the cramped archaic altar-piece. Then when printing was invented the painter-engraver came into existence. He was a man who painted panels, but found his largest audience through the circulation of engravings. The two kinds of arts being produced by the one man led to much detailed line work with the brush. Engraving is an influence to be borne in mind in examining the painting of this period.



FRANCONIAN SCHOOL: Nuremberg was the centre of this school, and its most famous early master was Wolgemut (1434-1519), though Plydenwurff is the first-named painter. After the latter's death Wolgemut married his widow and became the head of the school. His paintings were chiefly altar-pieces, in which the figures were rather lank and narrow-shouldered, with sharp outlines, indicative perhaps of the influence of wood-engraving, in which he was much interested. There was, however, in his work an advance in characterization, nobility of expression, and quiet dignity, and it was his good fortune to be the master of one of the most thoroughly original painters of all the German schools—Albrecht Duerer (1471-1528).

With Duerer and Holbein German art reached its apogee in the first half of the sixteenth century, yet their work was not different in spirit from that of their predecessors. Painting simply developed and became forceful and expressive technically without abandoning its early character. There is in Duerer a naive awkwardness of figure, some angularity of line, strain of pose, and in composition oftentimes huddling and overloading of the scene with details. There is not that largeness which seemed native to his Italian contemporaries. He was hampered by that German exactness, which found its best expression in engraving, and which, though unsuited to painting, nevertheless crept into it. Within these limitations Duerer produced the typical art of Germany in the Renaissance time—an art more attractive for the charm and beauty of its parts than for its unity, or its general impression. Duerer was a travelled man, visited Italy and the Netherlands, and, though he always remained a German in art, yet he picked up some Italian methods from Bellini and Mantegna that are faintly apparent in some of his works. In subject he was almost exclusively religious, painting the altar-piece with infinite care upon wooden panel, canvas, or parchment. He never worked in fresco, preferring oil and tempera. In drawing he was often harsh and faulty, in draperies cramped at times, and then, again, as in the Apostle panels at Munich, very broad, and effective. Many of his pictures show a hard, dry brush, and a few, again, are so free and mellow that they look as though done by another hand. He was usually minute in detail, especially in such features as hair, cloth, flesh. His portraits were uneven and not his best productions. He was too close a scrutinizer of the part and not enough of an observer of the whole for good portraiture. Indeed, that is the criticism to be made upon all his work. He was an exquisite realist of certain features, but not always of the ensemble. Nevertheless he holds first rank in the German art of the Renaissance, not only on account of his technical ability, but also because of his imagination, sincerity, and striking originality.



Duerer's influence was wide-spread throughout Germany, especially in engraving, of which he was a master. In painting Schaeufelin (1490?-1540?) was probably his apprentice, and in his work followed the master so closely that many of his works have been attributed to Duerer. This is true in measure of Hans Baldung (1476?-1552?). Hans von Kulmbach (?-1522) was a painter of more than ordinary importance, brilliant in coloring, a follower of Duerer, who was inclined toward Italian methods, an inclination that afterward developed all through German art. Following Duerer's formulas came a large number of so-called "Little Masters" (from the size of their engraved plates), who were more engravers than painters. Among the more important of those who were painters as well as engravers were Altdorfer (1480?-1538), a rival rather than an imitator of Duerer; Barthel Beham (1502-1540), Sebald Beham (1500-1550), Pencz (1500?-1550), Aldegrever (1502-1558), and Bink (1490?-1569?).

SWABIAN SCHOOL: This school includes a number of painters who were located at different places, like Colmar and Ulm, and later on it included the Holbeins at Augsburg, who were really the consummation of the school. In the fifteenth century one of the early leaders was Martin Schoengauer (1446?-1488), at Colmar. He is supposed to have been a pupil of Roger Van der Weyden, of the Flemish school, and is better known by his engravings than his paintings, none of the latter being positively authenticated. He was thoroughly German in his type and treatment, though, perhaps, indebted to the Flemings for his coloring. There was some angularity in his figures and draperies, and a tendency to get nearer nature and further away from the ecclesiastical and ascetic conception in all that he did.

At Ulm a local school came into existence with Zeitblom (fl. 1484-1517), who was probably a pupil of Schuechlin. He had neither Schoengauer's force nor his fancy, but was a simple, straightforward painter of one rather strong type. His drawing was not good, except in the draperies, but he was quite remarkable for the solidity and substance of his painting, considering the age he lived in was given to hard, thin brush-work. Schaffner (fl. 1500-1535) was another Ulm painter, a junior to Zeitblom, of whom little is known, save from a few pictures graceful and free in composition. A recently discovered man, Bernard Strigel (1461?-1528?) seems to have been excellent in portraiture.



At Augsburg there was still another school, which came into prominence in the sixteenth century with Burkmair and the Holbeins. It was only a part of the Swabian school, a concentration of artistic force about Augsburg, which, toward the close of the fifteenth century, had come into competition with Nuremberg, and rather outranked it in splendor. It was at Augsburg that the Renaissance art in Germany showed in more restful composition, less angularity, better modelling and painting, and more sense of the ensemble of a picture. Hans Burkmair (1473-1531) was the founder of the school, a pupil of Schoengauer, later influenced by Duerer, and finally showing the influence of Italian art. He was not, like Duerer, a religious painter, though doing religious subjects. He was more concerned with worldly appearance, of which he had a large knowledge, as may be seen from his illustrations for engraving. As a painter he was a rather fine colorist, indulging in the fantastic of architecture but with good taste, crude in drawing but forceful, and at times giving excellent effects of motion. He was rounder, fuller, calmer in composition than Duerer, but never so strong an artist.

Next to Burkmair comes the celebrated Holbein family. There were four of them all told, but only two of them, Hans the Elder and Hans the Younger, need be mentioned. Holbein the Elder (1460?-1524), after Burkmair, was the best painter of his time and school without being in himself a great artist. Schoengauer was at first his guide, though he soon submitted to some Flemish and Cologne influence, and later on followed Italian form and method in composition to some extent. He was a good draughtsman, and very clever at catching realistic points of physiognomy—a gift he left his son Hans. In addition he had some feeling for architecture and ornament, and in handling was a bit hard, and oftentimes careless. The best half of his life fell in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and he never achieved the free painter's quality of his son.

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) holds, with Duerer, the high place in German art. He was a more mature painter than Duerer, coming as he did a quarter of a century later. He was the Renaissance artist of Germany, whereas Duerer always had a little of the Gothic clinging to him. The two men were widely different in their points of view and in their work. Duerer was an idealist seeking after a type, a religious painter, a painter of panels with the spirit of an engraver. Holbein was emphatically a realist finding material in the actual life about him, a designer of cartoons and large wall paintings in something of the Italian spirit, a man who painted religious themes but with little spiritual significance.

It is probable that he got his first instruction from his father and from Burkmair. He was an infant prodigy, developed early, saw much foreign art, and showed a number of tendencies in his work. In composition and drawing he appeared at times to be following Mantegna and the northern Italians; in brush-work he resembled the Flemings, especially Massys; yet he was never an imitator of either Italian or Flemish painting. Decidedly a self-sufficient and an observing man, he travelled in Italy and the Netherlands, and spent much of his life in England, where he met with great success at court as a portrait-painter. From seeing much he assimilated much, yet always remained German, changing his style but little as he grew older. His wall paintings have perished, but the drawings from them are preserved and show him as an artist of much invention. He is now known chiefly by his portraits, of which there are many of great excellence. His facility in grasping physiognomy and realizing character, the quiet dignity of his composition, his firm modelling, clear outline, harmonious coloring, excellent detail, and easy solid painting, all place him in the front rank of great painters. That he was not always bound down to literal facts may be seen in his many designs for wood-engravings. His portrait of Hubert Morett, in the Dresden Gallery, shows his art to advantage, and there are many portraits by him of great spirit in England, in the Louvre, and elsewhere.

SAXON SCHOOL: Lucas Cranach (1472-1553) was a Franconian master, who settled in Saxony and was successively court-painter to three Electors and the leader of a small local school there. He, perhaps, studied under Gruenewald, but was so positive a character that he showed no strong school influence. His work was fantastic, odd in conception and execution, sometimes ludicrous, and always archaic-looking. His type was rather strained in proportions, not always well drawn, but graceful even when not truthful. This type was carried into all his works, and finally became a mannerism with him. In subject he was religious, mythological, romantic, pastoral, with a preference for the nude figure. In coloring he was at first golden, then brown, and finally cold and sombre. The lack of aerial perspective and shadow masses gave his work a queer look, and he was never much of a brushman. His pictures were typical of the time and country, and for that and for their strong individuality they are ranked among the most interesting paintings of the German school. Perhaps his most satisfactory works are his portraits. Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515-1586) was the best of the elder Cranach's pupils. Many of his pictures are attributed to his father. He followed the elder closely, but was a weaker man, with a smoother brush and a more rosy color. Though there were many pupils the school did not go beyond the Cranach family. It began with the father and died with the son.



SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES: These were unrelieved centuries of decline in German painting. After Duerer, Holbein, and Cranach had passed there came about a senseless imitation of Italy, combined with an equally senseless imitation of detail in nature that produced nothing worthy of the name of original or genuine art. It is not probable that the Reformation had any more to do with this than with the decline in Italy. It was a period of barrenness in both countries. The Italian imitators in Germany were chiefly Rottenhammer (1564-1623), and Elzheimer (1574?-1620). After them came the representative of the other extreme in Denner (1685-1749), who thought to be great in portraiture by the minute imitation of hair, freckles, and three-days'-old beard—a petty and unworthy realism which excited some curiosity but never held rank as art. Mengs (1728-1779) sought for the sublime through eclecticism, but never reached it. His work, though academic and correct, is lacking in spirit and originality. Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) succeeded in pleasing her inartistic age with the simply pretty, while Carstens (1754-1798) was a conscientious if mistaken student of the great Italians—a man of some severity in form and of academic inclinations.

NINETEENTH CENTURY: In the first part of this century there started in Germany a so-called "revival of art" led by Overbeck (1789-1869), Cornelius (1783-1867), Veit (1793-1877), and Schadow (1789-1862), but like many another revival of art it did not amount to much. The attempt to "revive" the past is usually a failure. The forms are caught, but the spirit is lost. The nineteenth-century attempt in Germany was brought about by the study of monumental painting in Italy, and the taking up of the religious spirit in a pre-Raphaelite manner. Something also of German romanticism was its inspiration. Overbeck remained in Rome, but the others, after some time in Italy, returned to Germany, diffused their teaching, and really formed a new epoch in German painting. A modern art began with ambitions and subjects entirely disproportionate to its skill. The monumental, the ideal, the classic, the exalted, were spread over enormous spaces, but there was no reason for such work in the contemporary German life, and nothing to warrant its appearance save that its better had appeared in Italy during the Renaissance. Cornelius after his return became the head of the

MUNICH SCHOOL and painted pictures of the heroes of the classic and the Christian world upon a large scale. Nothing but their size and good intention ever brought them into notice, for their form and coloring were both commonplace. Schnorr (1794-1872) followed in the same style with the Niebelungen Lied, Charlemagne, and Barbarossa for subjects. Kaulbach (1805-1874) was a pupil of Cornelius, and had some ability but little taste, and not enough originality to produce great art. Piloty (1826-1886) was more realistic, more of a painter and ranks as one of the best of the early Munich masters. After him Munich art became genre-like in subject, with greater attention given to truthful representation in light, color, texture. To-day there are a large number of painters in the school who are remarkable for realistic detail.

DUSSELDORF SCHOOL: After 1826 this school came into prominence under the guidance of Schadow. It did not fancy monumental painting so much as the common easel picture, with the sentimental, the dramatic, or the romantic subject. It was no better in either form or color than the Munich school, in fact not so good, though there were painters who emanated from it who had ability. At Berlin the inclination was to follow the methods and ideas held at Dusseldorf.

The whole academic tendency of modern painting in Germany and Austria for the past fifty years has not been favorable to the best kind of pictorial art. There is a disposition on the part of artists to tell stories, to encroach upon the sentiment of literature, to paint with a dry brush in harsh unsympathetic colors, to ignore relations of light-and-shade, and to slur beauties of form. The subject seems to count for more than the truth of representation, or the individuality of view. From time to time artists of much ability have appeared, but these form an exception rather than a rule. The men to-day who are the great artists of Germany are less followers of the German tradition than individuals each working in a style peculiar to himself. A few only of them call for mention. Menzel (1815-1905) is easily first, a painter of group pictures, a good colorist, and a powerful pen-and-ink draughtsman; Lenbach (1836-1904), a forceful portraitist; Uhde (1848-), a portrayer of scriptural scenes in modern costumes with much sincerity, good color, and light; Leibl (1844-1900), an artist with something of the Holbein touch and realism; Thoma, a Frankfort painter of decorative friezes and panels; Liebermann, Gotthardt Kuehl, Franz Stuck, Max Klinger, Greiner, Truebner, Bartels, Keller.



Aside from these men there are several notable painters with German affinities, like Makart (1840-1884), an Austrian, who possessed good technical qualities and indulged in a profusion of color; Munkacsy (1846-1900), a Hungarian, who is perhaps more Parisian than German in technic, and Boecklin (1827-1901), a Swiss, who is quite by himself in fantastic and grotesque subjects, a weird and uncanny imagination, and a brilliant prismatic coloring.

PRINCIPAL WORKS: BOHEMIAN SCHOOL—Theoderich of Prague, Karlstein chap. and University Library Prague, Vienna Mus.; Wurmser, same places.

FRANCONIAN SCHOOL—Wolgemut, Aschaffenburg, Munich, Nuremberg, Cassel Mus.; Duerer, Crucifixion Dresden, Trinity Vienna Mus., other works Munich, Nuremberg, Madrid Mus.; Schaeufelin, Basle, Bamberg, Cassel, Munich, Nuremberg, Nordlingen Mus., and Ulm Cathedral; Baldung, Aschaffenburg, Basle, Berlin, Kunsthalle Carlsruhe, Freiburg Cathedral; Kulmbach, Munich, Nuremberg, Oldenburg; Altdorfer and the "Little Masters" are seen in the Augsburg, Nuremberg, Berlin, Munich and Fuerstenberg Mus.

SWABIAN SCHOOL—Schoengauer, attributed pictures Colmar Mus.; Zeitblom, Augsburg, Berlin, Carlsruhe, Munich, Nuremberg, Simaringen Mus.; Schaffner, Munich, Schliessheim, Nuremberg, Ulm Cathedral; Strigel, Berlin, Carlsruhe, Munich, Nuremberg; Burkmair, Augsburg, Berlin, Munich, Maurice chap. Nuremberg; Holbein the Elder, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Basle, Staedel Mus., Frankfort; Holbein the Younger, Basle, Carlsruhe, Darmstadt, Dresden, Berlin, Louvre, Windsor Castle, Vienna Mus.

SAXON SCHOOL—Cranach, Bamberg Cathedral and Gallery, Munich, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Stuttgart, Cassel; Cranach the Younger, Stadtkirche Wittenberg, Leipsic, Vienna, Nuremberg Mus.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS: Rottenhammer, Louvre, Berlin, Munich, Schliessheim, Vienna, Kunsthalle Hamburg; Elzheimer, Stadel, Brunswick, Louvre, Munich, Berlin, Dresden; Denner, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Berlin, Brunswick, Dresden, Vienna, Munich; Mengs, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Munich, St. Petersburg; Angelica Kauffman, Vienna, Hermitage, Turin, Dresden, Nat. Gal. Lon., Phila. Acad.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS: Overbeck, frescos in S. Maria degli Angeli Assisi, Villa Massimo Rome, Carlsruhe, New Pinacothek, Munich, Staedel Mus., Dusseldorf; Cornelius, frescos Glyptothek and Ludwigkirche Munich, Casa Zuccaro Rome, Royal Cemetery Berlin; Veit, frescos Villa Bartholdi Rome, Staedel, Nat. Gal. Berlin; Schadow, Nat. Gal. Berlin, Antwerp, Staedel, Munich Mus., frescos Villa Bartholdi Rome; Schnorr, Dresden, Cologne, Carlsruhe, New Pinacothek Munich, Staedel Mus.; Kaulbach, wall paintings Berlin Mus., Raczynski Gal. Berlin, New Pinacothek Munich, Stuttgart, Phila. Acad.; Piloty, best pictures in the New Pinacothek and Maximilianeum Munich, Nat. Gal. Berlin; Menzel, Nat. Gal., Raczynski Mus. Berlin, Breslau Mus.; Lenbach, Nat. Gal. Berlin, New Pinacothek Munich, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Zuerich Gal.; Uhde, Leipsic Mus.; Leibl, Dresden Mus. The contemporary paintings have not as yet found their way, to any extent, into public museums, but may be seen in the expositions at Berlin and Munich from year to year. Makart has one work in the Metropolitan Mus., N. Y., as has also Munkacsy; other works by them and by Boecklin may be seen in the Nat. Gal. Berlin.



CHAPTER XIX.

BRITISH PAINTING.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED: Armstrong, Sir Henry Raeburn; Armstrong, Gainsborough; Armstrong, Sir Joshua Reynolds; Burton, Catalogue of Pictures in National Gallery; Chesneau, La Peinture Anglaise; Cook, Art in England; Cunningham, Lives of the most Eminent British Artists; Dobson, Life of Hogarth; Gilchrist, Life of Etty; Gilchrist, Life of Blake; Hamerton, Life of Turner; Henderson, Constable; Hunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Contemporary Review, Vol. 49); Leslie, Sir Joshua Reynolds; Leslie, Life of Constable; Martin and Newbery, Glasgow School of Painting; McKay, Scottish School of Painting; Monkhouse, British Contemporary Artists; Redgrave, Dictionary of Artists of the English School; Romney, Life of George Romney; Rossetti, Fine Art, chiefly Contemporary; Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism; Ruskin, Art of England; Sandby, History of Royal Academy of Arts; William Bell Scott, Autobiography; Scott, British Landscape Painters; Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum; Swinburne, William Blake; Temple, Painting in the Queen's Reign; Van Dyke, Old English Masters; Wedmore, Studies in English Art; Wilmot-Buxton, English Painters; Wright, Life of Richard Wilson.



BRITISH PAINTING: It may be premised in a general way, that the British painters have never possessed the pictorial cast of mind in the sense that the Italians, the French, or the Dutch have possessed it. Painting, as a purely pictorial arrangement of line and color, has been somewhat foreign to their conception. Whether this failure to appreciate painting as painting is the result of geographical position, isolation, race temperament, or mental disposition, would be hard to determine. It is quite certain that from time immemorable the English people have not been lacking in the appreciation of beauty; but beauty has appealed to them, not so much through the eye in painting and sculpture, as through the ear in poetry and literature. They have been thinkers, reasoners, moralists, rather than observers and artists in color. Images have been brought to their minds by words rather than by forms. English poetry has existed since the days of Arthur and the Round Table, but English painting is of comparatively modern origin, and it is not wonderful that the original leaning of the people toward literature and its sentiment should find its way into pictorial representation. As a result one may say in a very general way that English painting is more illustrative than creative. It endeavors to record things that might be more pertinently and completely told in poetry, romance, or history. The conception of large art—creative work of the Rubens-Titian type—has not been given to the English painters, save in exceptional cases. Their success has been in portraiture and landscape, and this largely by reason of following the model.

EARLY PAINTING: The earliest decorative art appeared in Ireland. It was probably first planted there by missionaries from Italy, and it reached its height in the seventh century. In the ninth and tenth centuries missal illumination of a Byzantine cast, with local modifications, began to show. This lasted, in a feeble way, until the fifteenth century, when work of a Flemish and French nature took its place. In the Middle Ages there were wall paintings and church decorations in England, as elsewhere in Europe, but these have now perished, except some fragments in Kempley Church, Gloucestershire, and Chaldon Church, Surrey. These are supposed to date back to the twelfth century, and there are some remains of painting in Westminster Abbey that are said to be of thirteenth and fourteenth-century origin. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century the English people depended largely upon foreign painters who came and lived in England. Mabuse, Moro, Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller—all were there at different times, in the service of royalty, and influencing such local English painters as then lived. The outcome of missal illumination and Holbein's example produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a local school of miniature-painters of much interest, but painting proper did not begin to rise in England until the beginning of the eighteenth century—that century so dead in art over all the rest of Europe.

FIGURE AND PORTRAIT PAINTERS: Aside from a few inconsequential precursors the first English artist of note was Hogarth (1697-1764). He was an illustrator, a moralist, and a satirist as well as a painter. To point a moral upon canvas by depicting the vices of his time was his avowed aim, but in doing so he did not lose sight of pictorial beauty. Charm of color, the painter's taste in arrangement, light, air, setting, were his in a remarkable degree. He was not successful in large compositions, but in small pictures like those of the Rake's Progress he was excellent. An early man, a rigid stickler for the representation, a keen observer of physiognomy, a satirist with a sense of the absurd, he was often warped in his art by the necessities of his subject and was sometimes hard and dry in method, but in his best work he was quite a perfect painter. He was the first of the English school, and perhaps the most original of that school. This is quite as true of his technic as of his point of view. Both were of his own creation. His subjects have been talked about a great deal in the past; but his painting is not to this day valued as it should be.



The next man to be mentioned, one of the most considerable of all the English school, is Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). He was a pupil of Hudson, but owed his art to many sources. Besides the influence of Van Dyck he was for some years in Italy, a diligent student of the great Italians, especially the Venetians, Correggio, and the Bolognese Eclectics. Sir Joshua was inclined to be eclectic himself, and from Italy he brought back a formula of art which, modified by his own individuality, answered him for the rest of his life. He was not a man of very lofty imagination or great invention. A few figure-pieces, after the Titian initiative, came from his studio, but his reputation rests upon his many portraits. In portraiture he was often beyond criticism, giving the realistic representation with dignity, an elevated spirit, and a suave brush. Even here he was more impressive by his broad truth of facts than by his artistic feeling. He was not a painter who could do things enthusiastically or excite enthusiasm in the spectator. There was too much of rule and precedent, too much regard for the traditions, for him to do anything strikingly original. His brush-work and composition were more learned than individual, and his color, though usually good, was oftentimes conventional in contrasts. Taking him for all in all he was a very cultivated painter, a man to be respected and admired, but he had not quite the original spirit that we meet with in Gainsborough.

Reynolds was well-grounded in Venetian color, Bolognese composition, Parmese light-and-shade, and paid them the homage of assimilation; but if Gainsborough (1727-1788) had such school knowledge he positively disregarded it. He disliked all conventionalities and formulas. With a natural taste for form and color, and with a large decorative sense, he went directly to nature, and took from her the materials which he fashioned into art after his own peculiar manner. His celebrated Blue Boy was his protest against the conventional rule of Reynolds that a composition should be warm in color and light. All through his work we meet with departures from academic ways. By dint of native force and grace he made rules unto himself. Some of them were not entirely successful, and in drawing he might have profited by school training; but he was of a peculiar poetic temperament, with a dash of melancholy about him, and preferred to work in his own way. In portraiture his color was rather cold; in landscape much warmer. His brush-work was as odd as himself, but usually effective, and his accessories in figure-painting were little more than decorative after-thoughts. Both in portraiture and landscape he was one of the most original and most English of all the English painters—a man not yet entirely appreciated, though from the first ranked among the foremost in English art.



Romney (1734-1802), a pupil of Steele, was often quite as masterful a portrait-painter as either Reynolds or Gainsborough. He was never an artist elaborate in composition, and his best works are bust-portraits with a plain background. These he did with much dash and vivacity of manner. His women, particularly, are fine in life-like pose and winsomeness of mood. He was a very cunning observer, and knew how to arrange for grace of line and charm of color.

After Romney came Beechey (1753-1839), Raeburn (1756-1823), Opie (1761-1807), and John Hoppner (1759-1810). Then followed Lawrence (1769-1830), a mixture of vivacious style and rather meretricious method. He was the most celebrated painter of his time, largely because he painted nobility to look more noble and grace to look more gracious. Fond of fine types, garments, draperies, colors, he was always seeking the sparkling rather than the true, and forcing artificial effects for the sake of startling one rather than stating facts simply and frankly. He was facile with the brush, clever in line and color, brilliant to the last degree, but lacking in that simplicity of view and method which marks the great mind. His composition was rather fine in its decorative effect, and, though his lights were often faulty when compared with nature, they were no less telling from the stand-point of picture-making. He is much admired by artists to-day, and, as a technician, he certainly had more than average ability. He was hardly an artist like Reynolds or Gainsborough, but among the mediocre painters of his day he shone like a star. It is not worth while to say much about his contemporaries. Etty (1787-1849) was one of the best of the figure men, but his Greek types and classic aspirations grow wearisome on acquaintance; and Sir Charles Eastlake (1793-1865), though a learned man in art and doing great service to painting as a writer, never was a painter of importance.

William Blake (1757-1827) was hardly a painter at all, though he drew and colored the strange figures of his fancy and cannot be passed over in any history of English art. He was perhaps the most imaginative artist of English birth, though that imagination was often disordered and almost incoherent. He was not a correct draughtsman, a man with no great color-sense, and a workman without technical training; and yet, in spite of all this, he drew some figures that are almost sublime in their sweep of power. His decorative sense in filling space with lines is well shown in his illustrations to the Book of Job. In grace of form and feeling of motion he was excellent. Weird and uncanny in thought, delving into the unknown, he opened a world of mystery, peopled with a strange Apocalyptic race, whose writhing, flowing bodies are the epitome of graceful grandeur.



GENRE-PAINTERS: From Blake to Morland (1763-1804) is a step across space from heaven to earth. Morland was a realist of English country life, horses at tavern-doors, cattle, pigs. His life was not the most correct, but his art in truthfulness of representation, simplicity of painting, richness of color and light, was often of a fine quality. As a skilful technician he stood quite alone in his time, and seemed to show more affinity with the Dutch genre-painters than his own countrymen. His works are much prized to-day, and were so during the painter's life.

Sir David Wilkie (1785-1841) was also somewhat like the Dutch in subject, a genre-painter, fond of the village fete and depicting it with careful detail, a limpid brush, and good textural effects. In 1825 he travelled abroad, was gone some years, was impressed by Velasquez, Correggio, and Rembrandt, and completely changed his style. He then became a portrait and historical painter. He never outlived the nervous constraint that shows in all his pictures, and his brush, though facile within limits, was never free or bold as compared with a Dutchman like Steen. In technical methods Landseer (1802-1873), the painter of animals, was somewhat like him. That is to say, they both had a method of painting surfaces and rendering textures that was more "smart" than powerful. There is little solidity or depth to the brush-work of either, though both are impressive to the spectator at first sight. Landseer knew the habits and the anatomy of animals very well, but he never had an appreciation of the brute in the animal, such as we see in the pictures of Velasquez or the bronzes of Barye. The Landseer animal has too much sentiment about it. The dogs, for instance, are generally given those emotions pertinent to humanity, and which are only exceptionally true of the canine race. This very feature—the tendency to humanize the brute and make it tell a story—accounts in large measure for the popularity of Landseer's art. The work is perhaps correct enough, but the aim of it is somewhat afield from pure painting. It illustrates the literary rather than the pictorial. Following Wilkie the most distinguished painter was Mulready (1786-1863), whose pictures of village boys are well known through engravings.



THE LANDSCAPE PAINTERS: In landscape the English have had something to say peculiarly their own. It has not always been well said, the coloring is often hot, the brush-work brittle, the attention to detail inconsistent with the large view of nature, yet such as it is it shows the English point of view and is valuable on that account. Richard Wilson (1713-1782) was the first landscapist of importance, though he was not so English in view as some others to follow. In fact, Wilson was nurtured on Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet and instead of painting the realistic English landscape he painted the pseudo-Italian landscape. He began working in portraiture under the tutorship of Wright, and achieved some success in this department; but in 1749 he went to Italy and devoted himself wholly to landscapes. These were of the classic type and somewhat conventional. The composition was usually a dark foreground with trees or buildings to right and left, an opening in the middle distance leading into the background, and a broad expanse of sunset sky. In the foreground he usually introduced a few figures for romantic or classic association. Considerable elevation of theme and spirit marks most of his pictures. There was good workmanship about the skies and the light, and an attentive study of nature was shown throughout. His canvases did not meet with much success at the time they were painted. In more modern days Wilson has been ranked as the true founder of landscape in England, and one of the most sincere of English painters.

THE NORWICH SCHOOL: Old Crome (1769-1821), though influenced to some extent by Wilson and the Dutch painters, was an original talent, painting English scenery with much simplicity and considerable power. He was sometimes rasping with his brush, and had a small method of recording details combined with mannerisms of drawing and composition, and yet gave an out-of-doors feeling in light and air that was astonishing. His large trees have truth of mass and accuracy of drawing, and his foregrounds are painted with solidity. He was a keen student of nature, and drew about him a number of landscape painters at Norwich, who formed the Norwich School. Crome was its leader, and the school made its influence felt upon English landscape painting. Cotman (1782-1842) was the best painter of the group after Crome, a man who depicted landscape and harbor scenes in a style that recalls Girtin and Turner.

The most complete, full-rounded landscapist in England was John Constable (1776-1837). His foreign bias, such as it was, came from a study of the Dutch masters. There were two sources from which the English landscapists drew. Those who were inclined to the ideal, men like Wilson, Calcott (1779-1844), and Turner, drew from the Italian of Poussin and Claude; those who were content to do nature in her real dress, men like Gainsborough and Constable, drew from the Dutch of Hobbema and his contemporaries. A certain sombreness of color and manner of composition show in Constable that may be attributed to Holland; but these were slight features as compared with the originality of the man. He was a close student of nature who painted what he saw in English country life, especially about Hampstead, and painted it with a knowledge and an artistic sensitiveness never surpassed in England. The rural feeling was strong with him, and his evident pleasure in simple scenes is readily communicated to the spectator. There is no attempt at the grand or the heroic. He never cared much for mountains or water, but was fond of cultivated uplands, trees, bowling clouds, and torn skies. Bursts of sunlight, storms, atmospheres, all pleased him. With detail he was little concerned. He saw landscape in large patches of form and color, and so painted it. His handling was broad and solid, and at times a little heavy. His light was often forced by sharp contrast with shadows, and often his pictures appear spotty from isolated glitters of light strewn here and there. In color he helped eliminate the brown landscape and substituted in its place the green and blue of nature. In atmosphere he was excellent. His influence upon English art was impressive, and in 1824 the exhibition at Paris of his Hay Wain, together with some work by Bonington and Fielding had a decided effect upon the then rising landscape school of France. The French realized that nature lay at the bottom of Constable's art, and they profited, not by imitating Constable, but by studying his nature model.



Bonington (1801-1828) died young, and though of English parents his training was essentially French, and he really belonged to the French school, an associate of Delacroix. His study of the Venetians turned his talent toward warm coloring, in which he excelled. In landscape his broad handling was somewhat related to that of Constable, and from the fact of their works appearing together in the Salon of 1824 they are often spoken of as influencers of the modern French landscape painters.

Turner (1775-1851) is the best known name in English art. His celebrity is somewhat disproportionate to his real merits, though it is impossible to deny his great ability. He was a man learned in all the forms of nature and schooled in all the formulas of art; yet he was not a profound lover of nature nor a faithful recorder of what things he saw in nature, except in his early days. In the bulk of his work he shows the traditions of Claude, with additions of his own. His taste was classic (he possessed all the knowledge and the belongings of the historical landscape), and he delighted in great stretches of country broken by sea-shores, rivers, high mountains, fine buildings, and illumined by blazing sunlight and gorgeous skies. His composition was at times grotesque in imagination; his light was usually bewildering in intensity and often unrelieved by shadows of sufficient depth; his tone was sometimes faulty; and in color he was not always harmonious, but inclined to be capricious, uneven, showing fondness for arbitrary schemes of color. The object of his work seems to have been to dazzle, to impress with a wilderness of lines and hues, to overawe by imposing scale and grandeur. His paintings are impressive, decoratively splendid, but they often smack of the stage, and are more frequently grandiloquent than grand. His early works, especially in water-colors, where he shows himself a follower of Girtin, are much better than his later canvases in oil, many of which have changed color. The water-colors are carefully done, subdued in color, and true in light. From 1802, or thereabouts, to 1830 was his second period, in which Italian composition and much color were used. The last twenty years of his life he inclined to the bizarre, and turned his canvases into almost incoherent color masses. He had an artistic feeling for composition, linear perspective, and the sweep of horizon lines; skies and hills he knew and drew with power; color he comprehended only as decoration; and light he distorted for effect. Yet with all his shortcomings Turner was an artist to be respected and admired. He knew his craft, in fact, knew it so well that he relied too much on artificial effects, drew away from the model of nature, and finally passed into the extravagant.

THE WATER-COLORISTS: About the beginning of this century a school of water-colorists, founded originally by Cozens (1752-1799) and Girtin (1775-1802), came into prominence and developed English art in a new direction. It began to show with a new force the transparency of skies, the luminosity of shadows, the delicacy and grace of clouds, the brilliancy of light and color. Cozens and Blake were primitives in the use of the medium, but Stothard (1755-1834) employed it with much sentiment, charm, and plein-air effect. Turner was quite a master of it, and his most permanent work was done with it. Later on, when he rather abandoned form to follow color, he also abandoned water-color for oils. Fielding (1787-1849) used water-color effectively in giving large feeling for space and air, and also for fogs and mists; Prout (1783-1852) employed it in architectural drawings of the principal cathedrals of Europe; and Cox (1783-1859), Dewint (1784-1849), Hunt (1790-1864), Cattermole (1800-1868), Lewis (1805-1876), men whose names only can be mentioned, all won recognition with this medium. Water-color drawing is to-day said to be a department of art that expresses the English pictorial feeling better than any other, though this is not an undisputed statement.



Perhaps the most important movement in English painting of recent times was that which took the name of

PRE-RAPHAELITISM: It was started about 1847, primarily by Rossetti (1828-1882), Holman Hunt (1827-), and Sir John Millais (1829-1896), associated with several sculptors and poets, seven in all. It was an emulation of the sincerity, the loving care, and the scrupulous exactness in truth that characterized the Italian painters before Raphael. Its advocates, including Mr. Ruskin the critic, maintained that after Raphael came that fatal facility in art which seeking grace of composition lost truth of fact, and that the proper course for modern painters was to return to the sincerity and veracity of the early masters. Hence the name pre-Raphaelitism, and the signatures on their early pictures, P. R. B., pre-Raphaelite Brother. To this attempt to gain the true regardless of the sensuous, was added a morbidity of thought mingled with mysticism, a moral and religious pose, and a studied simplicity. Some of the painters of the Brotherhood went even so far as following the habits of the early Italians, seeking retirement from the world and carrying with them a Gothic earnestness of air. There is no doubt about the sincerity that entered into this movement. It was an honest effort to gain the true, the good, and as a result, the beautiful; but it was no less a striven-after honesty and an imitated earnestness. The Brotherhood did not last for long, the members drifted from each other and began to paint each after his own style, and pre-Raphaelitism passed away as it had arisen, though not without leaving a powerful stamp on English art, especially in decoration.

Rossetti, an Italian by birth though English by adoption, was the type of the Brotherhood. He was more of a poet than a painter, took most of his subjects from Dante, and painted as he wrote, in a mystical romantic spirit. He was always of a retiring disposition and never exhibited publicly after he was twenty-eight years of age. As a draughtsman he was awkward in line and not always true in modelling. In color he was superior to his associates and had considerable decorative feeling. The shortcoming of his art, as with that of the others of the Brotherhood, was that in seeking truth of detail he lost truth of ensemble. This is perhaps better exemplified in the works of Holman Hunt. He has spent infinite pains in getting the truth of detail in his pictures, has travelled in the East and painted types, costumes, and scenery in Palestine to gain the historic truths of his Scriptural scenes; but all that he has produced has been little more than a survey, a report, a record of the facts. He has not made a picture. The insistence upon every detail has isolated all the facts and left them isolated in the picture. In seeking the minute truths he has overlooked the great truths of light, air, and setting. His color has always been crude, his values or relations not well preserved, and his brush-work hard and tortured.

Millais showed some of this disjointed effect in his early work when he was a member of the Brotherhood. He did not hold to his early convictions however, and soon abandoned the pre-Raphaelite methods for a more conventional style. He has painted some remarkable portraits and some excellent figure pieces, and to-day holds high rank in English art; but he is an uneven painter, often doing weak, harshly-colored work. Moreover, the English tendency to tell stories with the paint-brush finds in Millais a faithful upholder. At his best he is a strong painter.

Madox Brown (1821-1893) never joined the Brotherhood, though his leaning was toward its principles. He had considerable dramatic power, with which he illustrated historic scenes, and among contemporary artists stood well. The most decided influence of pre-Raphaelitism shows in Burne-Jones (1833-), a pupil of Rossetti, and perhaps the most original painter now living[18] of the English school. From Rossetti he got mysticism, sentiment, poetry, and from association with Swinburne and William Morris, the poets, something of the literary in art, which he has put forth with artistic effect. He has not followed the Brotherhood in its pursuit of absolute truth of fact, but has used facts for decorative effect in line and color. His ability to fill a given space gracefully, shows with fine results in his pictures, as in his stained-glass designs. He is a good draughtsman and a rather rich colorist, but in brush-work somewhat labored, stippled, and unique in dryness. He is a man of much imagination, and his conceptions, though illustrative of literature, do not suffer thereby, because his treatment does not sacrifice the artistic. He has been the butt of considerable shallow laughter from time to time, like many another man of power. Albert Moore (1840-1893), a graceful painter of a decorative ideal type, rather follows the Rossetti-Burne-Jones example, and is an illustration of the influence of pre-Raphaelitism.

[Footnote 18: Died 1898.]

OTHER FIGURE AND PORTRAIT PAINTERS: Among the contemporary painters Sir Frederick Leighton (1830-1896), President of the Royal Academy, is ranked as a fine academic draughtsman, but not a man with the color-sense or the brushman's quality in his work. Watts (1818-1904) is perhaps an inferior technician, and in color is often sombre and dirty; but he is a man of much imagination, occasionally rises to grandeur in conception, and has painted some superb portraits, notably the one of Walter Crane. Orchardson (1835-) is more of a painter, pure and simple, than any of his contemporaries, and is a knowing if somewhat mannered colorist. Erskine Nicol (1825-), Faed[19] (1826-), Calderon (1833-), Boughton (1834-1905), Frederick Walker (1840-1875), Stanhope Forbes, Stott of Oldham and in portraiture Holl (1845-1890) and Herkomer may be mentioned.

[Footnote 19: Died 1900.]



LANDSCAPE AND MARINE PAINTERS: In the department of landscape there are many painters in England of contemporary importance. Vicat Cole (1833-1893) had considerable exaggerated reputation as a depicter of sunsets and twilights; Cecil Lawson (1851-1882) gave promise of great accomplishment, and lived long enough to do some excellent work in the style of the French Rousseau, mingled with an influence from Gainsborough; Alfred Parsons is a little hard and precise in his work, but one of the best of the living men; and W. L. Wyllie is a painter of more than average merit. In marines Hook (1819-) belongs to the older school, and is not entirely satisfactory. The most modern and the best sea-painter in England is Henry Moore (1831-1895), a man who paints well and gives the large feeling of the ocean with fine color qualities. Some other men of mark are Clausen, Brangwyn, Ouless, Steer, Bell, Swan, McTaggart, Sir George Reid.

MODERN SCOTCH SCHOOL: There is at the present time a school of art in Scotland that seems to have little or no affinity with the contemporary school of England. Its painters are more akin to the Dutch and the French, and in their coloring resemble, in depth and quality, the work of Delacroix. Much of their art is far enough removed from the actual appearance of nature, but it is strong in the sentiment of color and in decorative effect. The school is represented by such men as James Guthrie, E. A. Walton, James Hamilton, George Henry, E. A. Hornel, Lavery, Melville, Crawhall, Roche, Lawson, McBride, Morton, Reid Murray, Spence, Paterson.

PRINCIPAL WORKS: English art cannot be seen to advantage, outside of England. In the Metropolitan Museum, N. Y., and in private collections like that of Mr. William H. Fuller in New York,[20] there are some good examples of the older men—Reynolds, Constable, Gainsborough, and their contemporaries. In the Louvre there are some indifferent Constables and some good Boningtons. In England the best collection is in the National Gallery. Next to this the South Kensington Museum for Constable sketches. Elsewhere the Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Windsor galleries, and the private collections of the late Sir Richard Wallace, the Duke of Westminster, and others. Turner is well represented in the National Gallery, though his oils have suffered through time and the use of fugitive pigments. For the living men, their work may be seen in the yearly exhibitions at the Royal Academy and elsewhere. There are comparatively few English pictures in America.

[Footnote 20: Dispersed, 1898.]



CHAPTER XX.

AMERICAN PAINTING.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED: American Art Review; Amory, Life of Copley; The Art Review; Benjamin, Contemporary Art in America; Century Magazine; Caffin, American Painters; Clement and Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century; Cummings, Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design; Downes, Boston Painters (in Atlantic Monthly Vol. 62); Dunlap, Arts of Design in United States; Flagg, Life and Letters of Washington Allston; Galt, Life of West; Isham, History of American Painting; Knowlton, W. M. Hunt; Lester, The Artists of America; Mason, Life and Works of Gilbert Stuart; Perkins, Copley; Scribner's Magazine; Sheldon, American Painters; Tuckerman, Book of the Artists; Van Dyke, Art for Art's Sake; Van Rensselaer, Six Portraits; Ware, Lectures on Allston; White, A Sketch of Chester A. Harding.

AMERICAN ART: It is hardly possible to predicate much about the environment as it affects art in America. The result of the climate, the temperament, and the mixture of nations in the production or non-production of painting in America cannot be accurately computed at this early stage of history. One thing only is certain, and that is, that the building of a new commonwealth out of primeval nature does not call for the production of art in the early periods of development. The first centuries in the history of America were devoted to securing the necessities of life, the energies of the time were of a practical nature, and art as an indigenous product was hardly known.

After the Revolution, and indeed before it, a hybrid portraiture, largely borrowed from England, began to appear, and after 1825 there was an attempt at landscape painting; but painting as an art worthy of very serious consideration, came in only with the sudden growth in wealth and taste following the War of the Rebellion and the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. The best of American art dates from about 1878, though during the earlier years there were painters of note who cannot be passed over unmentioned.



THE EARLY PAINTERS: The "limner," or the man who could draw and color a portrait, seems to have existed very early in American history. Smibert (1684-1751), a Scotch painter, who settled in Boston, and Watson (1685?-1768), another Scotchman, who settled in New Jersey, were of this class—men capable of giving a likeness, but little more. They were followed by English painters of even less consequence. Then came Copley (1737-1815) and West (1738-1820), with whom painting in America really began. They were good men for their time, but it must be borne in mind that the times for art were not at all favorable. West was a man about whom all the infant prodigy tales have been told, but he never grew to be a great artist. He was ambitious beyond his power, indulged in theatrical composition, was hot in color, and never was at ease in handling the brush. Most of his life was passed in England, where he had a vogue, was elected President of the Royal Academy, and became practically a British painter. Copley was more of an American than West, and more of a painter. Some of his portraits are exceptionally fine, and his figure pieces, like Charles I. demanding the Five Members of House of Commons are excellent in color and composition. C. W. Peale (1741-1827), a pupil of both Copley and West, was perhaps more fortunate in having celebrated characters like Washington for sitters than in his art. Trumbull (1756-1843) preserved on canvas the Revolutionary history of America and, all told, did it very well. Some of his compositions, portraits, and miniature heads in the Yale Art School at New Haven are drawn and painted in a masterful manner and are as valuable for their art as for the incidents which they portray.



Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) was the best portrait-painter of all the early men, and his work holds very high rank even in the schools of to-day. He was one of the first in American art-history to show skilful accuracy of the brush, a good knowledge of color, and some artistic sense of dignity and carriage in the sitter. He was not always a good draughtsman, and he had a manner of laying on pure colors without blending them that sometimes produced sharpness in modelling; but as a general rule he painted a portrait with force and with truth. He was a pupil of Alexander, a Scotchman, and afterward an assistant to West. He settled in Boston, and during his life painted most of the great men of his time, including Washington.



Vanderlyn (1776-1852) met with adversity all his life long, and perhaps never expressed himself fully. He was a pupil of Stuart, studied in Paris and Italy, and his associations with Aaron Burr made him quite as famous as his pictures. Washington Allston (1779-1843) was a painter whom the Bostonians have ranked high in their art-history, but he hardly deserved such position. Intellectually he was a man of lofty and poetic aspirations, but as an artist he never had the painter's sense or the painter's skill. He was an aspiration rather than a consummation. He cherished notions about ideals, dealt in imaginative allegories, and failed to observe the pictorial character of the world about him. As a result of this, and poor artistic training, his art had too little basis on nature, though it was very often satisfactory as decoration. Rembrandt Peale (1787-1860), like his father, was a painter of Washington portraits of mediocre quality. Jarvis (1780-1834) and Sully (1783-1872) were both British born, but their work belongs here in America, where most of their days were spent. Sully could paint a very good portrait occasionally, though he always inclined toward the weak and the sentimental, especially in his portraits of women. Leslie (1794-1859) and Newton (1795-1835) were Americans, but, like West and Copley, they belong in their art more to England than to America. In all the early American painting the British influence may be traced, with sometimes an inclination to follow Italy in large compositions.

THE MIDDLE PERIOD in American art dates from 1825 to about 1878. During that time, something distinctly American began to appear in the landscape work of Doughty (1793-1856) and Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Both men were substantially self-taught, though Cole received some instruction from a portrait-painter named Stein. Cole during his life was famous for his Hudson River landscapes, and for two series of pictures called The Voyage of Life and The Course of Empire. The latter were really epic poems upon canvas, done with much blare of color and literary explanation in the title. His best work was in pure landscape, which he pictured with considerable accuracy in drawing, though it was faulty in lighting and gaudy in coloring. Brilliant autumn scenes were his favorite subjects. His work had the merit of originality and, moreover, it must be remembered that Cole was one of the beginners in American landscape art. Durand (1796-1886) was an engraver until 1835, when he began painting portraits, and afterward developed landscape with considerable power. He was usually simple in subject and realistic in treatment, with not so much insistence upon brilliant color as some of his contemporaries. Kensett (1818-1872) was a follower in landscape of the so-called Hudson River School of Cole and others, though he studied seven years in Europe. His color was rather warm, his air hazy, and the general effect of his landscape that of a dreamy autumn day with poetic suggestions. F. E. Church (1826-[A]) was a pupil of Cole, and has followed him in seeking the grand and the startling in mountain scenery. With Church should be mentioned a number of artists—Hubbard (1817-1888), Hill (1829-,) Bierstadt (1830-),[21] Thomas Moran (1837-)—who have achieved reputation by canvases of the Rocky Mountains and other expansive scenes. Some other painters of smaller canvases belong in point of time, and also in spirit, with the Hudson River landscapists—painters, too, of considerable merit, as David Johnson (1827-), Bristol (1826-), Sandford Gifford (1823-1880), McEntee (1828-1891), and Whittredge (1820-), the last two very good portrayers of autumn scenes; A. H. Wyant (1836-1892), one of the best and strongest of the American landscapists; Bradford (1830-1892) and W. T. Richards (1833-), the marine-painters.

[Footnote 21: Died, 1900.]



PORTRAIT, HISTORY, AND GENRE-PAINTERS: Contemporary with the early landscapists were a number of figure-painters, most of them self-taught, or taught badly by foreign or native artists, and yet men who produced creditable work. Chester Harding (1792-1866) was one of the early portrait-painters of this century who achieved enough celebrity in Boston to be the subject of what was called "the Harding craze." Elliott (1812-1868) was a pupil of Trumbull, and a man of considerable reputation, as was also Inman (1801-1846), a portrait and genre-painter with a smooth, detailed brush. Page (1811-1885), Baker (1821-1880), Huntington (1816-), the third President of the Academy of Design; Healy (1808-[22]), a portrait-painter of more than average excellence; Mount (1807-1868), one of the earliest of American genre-painters, were all men of note in this middle period.

[Footnote 22: Died 1894.]

Leutze (1816-1868) was a German by birth but an American by adoption, who painted many large historical scenes of the American Revolution, such as Washington Crossing the Delaware, besides many scenes taken from European history. He was a pupil of Lessing at Dusseldorf, and had something to do with introducing Dusseldorf methods into America. He was a painter of ability, if at times hot in color and dry in handling. Occasionally he did a fine portrait, like the Seward in the Union League Club, New York.

During this period, in addition to the influence of Dusseldorf and Rome upon American art, there came the influence of French art with Hicks (1823-1890) and Hunt (1824-1879), both of them pupils of Couture at Paris, and Hunt also of Millet at Barbizon. Hunt was the real introducer of Millet and the Barbizon-Fontainebleau artists to the American people. In 1855 he established himself at Boston, had a large number of pupils, and met with great success as a teacher. He was a painter of ability, but perhaps his greatest influence was as a teacher and an instructor in what was good art as distinguished from what was false and meretricious. He certainly was the first painter in America who taught catholicity of taste, truth and sincerity in art, and art in the artist rather than in the subject. Contemporary with Hunt lived George Fuller (1822-1884), a unique man in American art for the sentiment he conveyed in his pictures by means of color and atmosphere. Though never proficient in the grammar of art he managed by blendings of color to suggest certain sentiments regarding light and air that have been rightly esteemed poetic.



THE THIRD PERIOD in American art began immediately after the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876. Undoubtedly the display of art, both foreign and domestic, at that time, together with the national prosperity and great growth of the United States had much to do with stimulating activity in painting. Many young men at the beginning of this period went to Europe to study in the studios at Munich, and later on at Paris. Before 1880 some of them had returned to the United States, bringing with them knowledge of the technical side of art, which they immediately began to give out to many pupils. Gradually the influence of the young men from Munich and Paris spread. The Art Students' League, founded in 1875, was incorporated in 1878, and the Society of American Artists was established in the same year. Societies and painters began to spring up all over the country, and as a result there is in the United States to-day an artist body technically as well trained and in spirit as progressive as in almost any country of Europe. The late influence shown in painting has been largely a French influence, and the American artists have been accused from time to time of echoing French methods. The accusation is true in part. Paris is the centre of all art-teaching to-day, and the Americans, in common with the European nations, accept French methods, not because they are French, but because they are the best extant. In subjects and motives, however, the American school is as original as any school can be in this cosmopolitan age.

PORTRAIT, FIGURE, AND GENRE PAINTERS (1878-1894): It must not be inferred that the painters now prominent in American art are all young men schooled since 1876. On the contrary, some of the best of them are men past middle life who began painting long before 1876, and have by dint of observation and prolonged study continued with the modern spirit. For example, Winslow Homer (1836-) is one of the strongest and most original of all the American artists, a man who never had the advantage of the highest technical training, yet possesses a feeling for color, a dash and verve in execution, an originality in subject, and an individuality of conception that are unsurpassed. Eastman Johnson (1824-) is one of the older portrait and figure-painters who stands among the younger generations without jostling, because he has in measure kept himself informed with modern thought and method. He is a good, conservative painter, possessed of taste, judgment, and technical ability. Elihu Vedder (1836-) is more of a draughtsman than a brushman. His color-sense is not acute nor his handling free, but he has an imagination which, if somewhat more literary than pictorial, is nevertheless very effective. John La Farge (1835-) and Albert Ryder (1847-) are both colorists, and La Farge in artistic feeling is a man of much power. Almost all of his pictures have fine decorative quality in line and color and are thoroughly pictorial.



The "young men," so-called, though some of them are now on toward middle life, are perhaps more facile in brush-work and better trained draughtsmen than those we have just mentioned. They have cultivated vivacity of style and cleverness in statement, frequently at the expense of the larger qualities of art. Sargent (1856-) is, perhaps, the most considerable portrait-painter now living, a man of unbounded resources technically and fine natural abilities. He is draughtsman, colorist, brushman—in fact, almost everything in art that can be cultivated. His taste is not yet mature, and he is just now given to dashing effects that are more clever than permanent; but that he is a master in portraiture has already been abundantly demonstrated. Chase (1849-) is also an exceptionally good portrait painter, and he handles the genre subject with brilliant color and a swift, sure brush. In brush-work he is exceedingly clever, and is an excellent technician in almost every respect. Not always profound in matter he generally manages to be entertaining in method. Blum (1857-) is well known to magazine readers through many black-and-white illustrations. He is also a painter of genre subjects taken from many lands, and handles his brush with brilliancy and force. Dewing (1851-) is a painter with a refined sense not only in form but in color. His pictures are usually small, but exquisite in delicacy and decorative charm. Thayer (1849-) is fond of large canvases, a man of earnestness, sincerity, and imagination, but not a good draughtsman, not a good colorist, and a rather clumsy brushman. He has, however, something to say, and in a large sense is an artist of uncommon ability. Kenyon Cox (1856-) is a draughtsman, with a strong command of line and taste in its arrangement. He is not a strong colorist, though in recent work he has shown a new departure in this feature that promises well. He renders the nude with power, and is fond of the allegorical subject.

The number of good portrait-painters at present working in America is quite large, and mention can be made of but a few in addition to those already spoken of—Lockwood, McLure Hamilton, Tarbell, Beckwith, Benson, Vinton. In figure and genre-painting the list of really good painters could be drawn out indefinitely, and again mention must be confined to a few only, like Simmons, Shirlaw, Smedley, Brush, Millet, Hassam, Reid, Wiles, Mowbray, Reinhart, Blashfield, Metcalf, Low, C. Y. Turner, Henri.



Most of the men whose names are given above are resident in America; but, in addition, there is a large contingent of young men, American born but resident abroad, who can hardly be claimed by the American school, and yet belong to it as much as to any school. They are cosmopolitan in their art, and reside in Paris, Munich, London, or elsewhere, as the spirit moves them. Sargent, the portrait-painter, really belongs to this group, as does also Whistler (1834-[23]), one of the most artistic of all the moderns. Whistler was long resident in London, but has now removed to Paris. He belongs to no school, and such art as he produces is peculiarly his own, save a leaven of influences from Velasquez and the Japanese. His art is the perfection of delicacy, both in color and in line. Apparently very sketchy, it is in reality the maximum of effect with the minimum of display. It has the pictorial charm of mystery and suggestiveness, and the technical effect of light, air, and space. There is nothing better produced in modern painting than his present work, and in earlier years he painted portraits like that of his mother, which are justly ranked as great art. E. A. Abbey (1852-) is better known by his pen-and-ink work than by his paintings, howbeit he has done good work in color. He is resident in England.

[Footnote 23: Died, 1903.]



In Paris there are many American-born painters, who really belong more with the French school than the American. Bridgman is an example, and Dannat, Alexander Harrison, Hitchcock, McEwen, Melchers, Pearce, Julius Stewart, Weeks (1849-1903), J. W. Alexander, Walter Gay, Sergeant Kendall have nothing distinctly American about their art. It is semi-cosmopolitan with a leaning toward French methods. There are also some American-born painters at Munich, like C. F. Ulrich; Shannon is in London and Coleman in Italy.

LANDSCAPE AND MARINE PAINTERS, 1878-1894: In the department of landscape America has had since 1825 something distinctly national, and has at this day. In recent years the impressionist plein-air school of France has influenced many painters, and the prismatic landscape is quite as frequently seen in American exhibitions as in the Paris salons; but American landscape art rather dates ahead of French impressionism. The strongest landscapist of our times, George Inness (1825-[24]), is not a young man except in his artistic aspirations. His style has undergone many changes, yet still remains distinctly individual. He has always been an experimenter and an uneven painter, at times doing work of wonderful force, and then again falling into weakness. The solidity of nature, the mass and bulk of landscape, he has shown with a power second to none. He is fond of the sentiment of nature's light, air, and color, and has put it forth more in his later than in his earlier canvases. At his best, he is one of the first of the American landscapists. Among his contemporaries Wyant (already mentioned), Swain Gifford,[25] Colman, Gay, Shurtleff, have all done excellent work uninfluenced by foreign schools of to-day. Homer Martin's[26] landscapes, from their breadth of treatment, are popularly considered rather indifferent work, but in reality they are excellent in color and poetic feeling.

[Footnote 24: Died 1894.]

[Footnote 25: Died 1905.]

[Footnote 26: Died 1897.]

The "young men" again, in landscape as in the figure, are working in the modern spirit, though in substance they are based on the traditions of the older American landscape school. There has been much achievement, and there is still greater promise in such landscapists as Tryon, Platt, Murphy, Dearth, Crane, Dewey, Coffin, Horatio Walker, Jonas Lie. Among those who favor the so-called impressionistic view are Weir, Twachtman, and Robinson,[27] three landscape-painters of undeniable power. In marines Gedney Bunce has portrayed many Venetian scenes of charming color-tone, and De Haas[28] has long been known as a sea-painter of some power. Quartley, who died young, was brilliant in color and broadly realistic. The present marine-painters are Maynard, Snell, Rehn, Butler, Chapman.

[Footnote 27: Died 1896.]

[Footnote 28: Died 1895.]



PRINCIPAL WORKS: The works of the early American painters are to be seen principally in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Athenaeum, Boston Mus., Mass. Hist. Soc., Harvard College, Redwood Library, Newport, Metropolitan Mus., Lenox and Hist. Soc. Libraries, the City Hall, Century Club, Chamber of Commerce, National Acad. of Design, N. Y. In New Haven, at Yale School of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia at Penna. Acad. of Fine Arts, in Rochester Powers's Art Gal., in Washington Corcoran Gal. and the Capitol.

The works of the younger men are seen in the exhibitions held from year to year at the Academy of Design, the Society of American Artists, N. Y., in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere throughout the country. Some of their works belong to permanent institutions like the Metropolitan Mus., the Pennsylvania Acad., the Art Institute of Chicago, but there is no public collection of pictures that represents American art as a whole. Mr. T. B. Clarke, of New York, had perhaps as complete a collection of paintings by contemporary American artists as anyone.



POSTSCRIPT.

SCATTERING SCHOOLS AND INFLUENCES IN ART.

In this brief history of painting it has been necessary to omit some countries and some painters that have not seemed to be directly connected with the progress or development of painting in the western world. The arts of China and Japan, while well worthy of careful chronicling, are somewhat removed from the arts of the other nations and from our study. Moreover, they are so positively decorative that they should be treated under the head of Decoration, though it is not to be denied that they are also realistically expressive. Portugal has had some history in the art of painting, but it is slight and so bound up with Spanish and Flemish influences that its men do not stand out as a distinct school. This is true in measure of Russian painting. The early influences with it were Byzantine through the Greek Church. In late years what has been produced favors the Parisian or German schools.

In Denmark and Scandinavia there has recently come to the front a remarkable school of high-light painters, based on Parisian methods, that threatens to outrival Paris itself. The work of such men as Kroeyer, Zorn, Petersen, Liljefors, Thaulow, Bjoerck, Thegerstroem, is as startling in its realism as it is brilliant in its color. The pictures in the Scandinavian section of the Paris Exposition of 1889 were a revelation of new strength from the North, and this has been somewhat increased by the Scandinavian pictures at the World's Fair in 1893. It is impossible to predict what will be the outcome of this northern art, nor what will be the result of the recent movement here in America. All that can be said is that the tide seems to be setting westward and northward, though Paris has been the centre of art for many years, and will doubtless continue to be the centre for many years to come.



INDEX.

(For additions to Index see page 289.)

Abbate, Niccolo dell', 134.

Abbey, Edwin A., 271.

Aelst, Willem Van, 219.

Aetion, 30.

Agatharchos, 27.

Aime-Morot, Nicolas, 167.

Albani, Francesco, 126, 131.

Albertinelli, Mariotto, 90, 97.

Alemannus, Johannes (da Murano), 79, 84.

Aldegrever, Heinrich, 231.

Alexander, John, 262.

Alexander, J. W., 272.

Aligny, Claude Francois, 149.

Allegri, Pomponio, 108, 109.

Allori, Cristofano, 127, 131.

Allston, Washington, 263.

Alma-Tadema, Laurenz, 199, 202.

Altdorfer, Albrecht, 231, 239.

Alvarez, Don Luis, 184.

Aman-Jean, E., 165.

Andrea da Firenze, 52, 56.

Angelico, Fra Giovanni, 54, 55, 56, 65, 67.

Anselmi, Michelangelo, 108, 109.

Antiochus Gabinius, 35.

Antonio Veneziano, 52, 56.

Apelles, 30.

Apollodorus, 27, 28.

Aranda, Luis Jiminez, 185.

Aretino, Spinello, 53, 56.

Aristides, 29.

Artz, D. A. C., 220.

Aubert, Ernest Jean, 155.

Backer, Jacob, 210.

Backhuisen, Ludolf, 218, 222.

Bagnacavallo, Bartolommeo Ramenghi, 105, 109.

Baker, George A., 266.

Baldovinetti, Alessio, 63, 71.

Baldung, Hans, 230, 239.

Bargue, Charles, 167.

Baroccio, Federigo, 125, 130.

Bartolo, Taddeo di, 54, 56.

Bartolommeo, Fra (Baccio della Porta), 90, 92, 95, 97.

Basaiti, Marco, 83, 85.

Bassano, Francesco, 119-121.

Bassano, Jacopo, 119-121.

Bastert, N., 221.

Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 166.

Baudry, Paul, 163.

Beccafumi, Domenico, 103, 108.

Becerra, Gaspar, 177, 185.

Beckwith, J. Carroll, 270.

Beechey, Sir William, 246.

Beham, Barthel, 231.

Beham, Sebald, 231.

Bellini, Gentile, 81, 85, 94.

Bellini, Giovanni, 74, 77, 81, 82, 83, 85, 112-115, 214, 229.

Bellini, Jacopo, 79, 81, 85.

Boltraffio, Giovanni Antonio, 102.

Benjamin-Constant, Jean Joseph, 165.

Benson, Frank W., 270.

Beraud, Jean, 170.

Berchem, Claas Pietersz, 217, 222.

Berne-Bellecour, Etienne Prosper, 167.

Berrettini, Pietro (il Cortona), 127, 131.

Berruguete, Alonzo, 176, 185.

Bertin, Jean Victor, 149, 157.

Besnard, Paul Albert, 170.

Bierstadt, Albert, 265.

Billet, Pierre, 161.

Bink, Jakob, 231.

Bissolo, Pier Francesco, 83, 85.

Bjoerck, O., 276.

Blake, William, 247, 254.

Blashfield, Edwin H., 270.

Blommers, B. J., 220.

Blum, Robert, 270.

Boecklin, Arnold, 238, 240.

Bol, Ferdinand, 210, 221.

Boldini, Giuseppe, 130, 131.

Bonfiglio, Benedetto, 66, 67, 72.

Bonheur, Auguste, 160.

Bonheur, Rosa, 160.

Bonifazio Pitati, 119-121.

Bonington, Richard Parkes, 157, 252.

Bonnat, Leon, 164.

Bonsignori, Francesco, 76, 84.

Bonvin, Francois, 168.

Bordone, Paris, 119, 121.

Borgognone, Ambrogio, 71, 72.

Bosboom, J., 220.

Bosch, Hieronymus, 205, 221.

Both, Jan, 217, 222.

Botticelli, Sandro, 61, 63, 71.

Boucher, Francois, 141, 145, 146.

Boudin, Eugene, 171.

Boughton, George H., 258.

Bouguereau, W. Adolphe, 162, 163.

Boulanger, Hippolyte, 200.

Boulanger, Louis, 153.

Bourdichon, Jean, 133.

Bourdon, Sebastien, 138.

Bouts, Dierich, 190, 191, 201, 205.

Bradford, William, 265.

Breton, Jules Adolphe, 161.

Breughel, 193, 201.

Bridgman, Frederick A., 272.

Bril, Paul, 193, 201, 214, 222.

Bristol, John B., 265.

Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo), il, 124, 131.

Brouwer, Adriaan, 198, 202.

Brown, Ford Madox, 257.

Brown, John Lewis, 170,

Brush, George D. F., 270.

Bugiardini, Giuliano di Piero, 91, 97.

Bunce, W. Gedney, 273.

Burkmair, Hans, 232, 233, 239.

Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 257.

Butler, Howard Russell, 274.

Cabanel, Alexandre, 162, 163.

Caillebotte, 170.

Calderon, Philip Hermogenes, 258.