We have seen how Rembrandt, Peter de Hoogh, Cuyp, Rubens, and Van Dyck were all contemporaries, born within an area of ground smaller far than England. Yet the range of their subjects was widely different, and each painter gave his individuality full play. The desires of the public were not stereotyped and fixed, as they had been when all alike wanted their religious aspirations expressed in art. The patrons of that epoch had various likings, as we have to-day, and the painter developed along the lines most congenial to himself. Unless he could make people like what he enjoyed painting, he could not make a living. If they had no eyes to learn to see, he might remain unappreciated, like Rembrandt, until long after his death. Yet Van Dyck's portraits were popular. People could scarcely help enjoying an art that showed them off to such advantage. Having found a style that suited him, he adhered to it consistently, thenceforward making but few experiments. This little picture before us is an admirable example of the gentle poetic grace and refinement always recalled to the memory by the name of Van Dyck. So long as men prize the aspect of distinction, which he was the first Northern painter to express in paint, Van Dyck's reputation will endure.



CHAPTER XII

VELASQUEZ

During the years in which Van Dyck was painting his beautiful portraits of the Royal Family of England, another painter, Velasquez, was immortalizing another Royal Family in the far-away country of Spain. Cut off by the great mountains of the Pyrenees from the rest of Europe, Spain did not rank among the foremost powers until after the discovery of America had brought wealth to her from the gold mines of Mexico and Peru. In the sixteenth century the King of Spain's dominions, actual or virtual, covered a great part of Western Europe, excepting England and France. Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, owned the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. His son was Philip II. of Spain, the husband of our Queen Mary of England, and his great-grandson was King Philip IV., the patron of Velasquez, as Charles I. was of Van Dyck.

It is the little son of Philip IV., Don Balthazar Carlos, whose portrait is before us—as manly and sturdy looking a little fellow as ever bestrode a pony. He was but six years old when Velasquez painted the picture here reproduced. Certainly he was not fettered and cramped and prevented from taking exercise like his little sisters. The princesses of Spain were dressed in wide skirts, spread out over hoops and hiding their feet, from the time they could walk. The tops of the dresses were as stiff as corselets, and one wonders how the little girls were able to move at all. As they grew older the hoops became wider and wider, until in one picture of a grown-up princess, the skirts are broader than the whole height of her body. Stringent Court etiquette forbade a princess to let her feet be seen, but so odd may such conventions be, that it was nevertheless thought correct for the Queen to ride on horseback astride.

It is from the canvases of Velasquez that we know the Spanish Royal Family and the aspect of the Court of Philip IV. as though we had lived there ourselves. The painter was born in the south of Spain in the same year as Van Dyck, and seven years earlier than Rembrandt. To paint the portrait of his sovereign was the ambition of the young artist. When his years were but twenty-four the opportunity arrived, and Philip was so pleased with the picture that he took the young man into his household, and said that no one else should ever be allowed to paint his portrait. Velasquez welcomed with gratified joy the prospect of that life-long proximity, although neither his earnings nor his station at all matched the service he rendered to his sovereign. As the years went on he was paid a little better, but his days and hours were more and more taken up with duties at Court, and his salary was always in arrears. He could not even reserve his own private time for his art, but as he waxed higher in the estimation of the King, the supervision of Court ceremonies, entrusted to him as an honour, deprived him of leisure, and at last brought his life prematurely to a close.

From the time when Velasquez entered the service of the King, he painted exclusively for the Court. We have eight portraits by him of Philip IV., and five of the little Don Carlos, besides many others of the queens and princesses. We can follow the growth of his art in the portraits of Philip IV., as we can follow that of Rembrandt in portraits of himself. But while Rembrandt might make of the same person, himself, or another model, a dozen different people, so that it mattered little who the model was, Velasquez was concerned with a different problem. In the seventeenth century almost any good painter could draw his models correctly, but Velasquez reproduced the living aspect of a man as no one else had done. We have already spoken of the feeling of atmosphere that Cuyp and Peter de Hoogh were able to bring into their pictures. Velasquez, knowing little or nothing of the contemporary Dutchmen, worked at the same art problems all his life, and at last mastered the atmosphere problem completely, whether it was the air of a closed room in the dark palace of Philip, or the air of the open country, as in our picture. In this there is no bright light except upon the face of the little prince. It is dark and gloomy weather, but if on such a day you were to see the canvas in the open air it would almost seem part of the country itself, as Velasquez's picture of a room seems part of the gallery in which it hangs.

It was only by degrees that he attained this quality in his work. He had had the ordinary teaching of a painter in Spain, but the level of art there at the time was not so high as in Holland or Italy. Like Rembrandt he was to a great extent his own master. In his early years he painted pictures of middle-class life, in which each figure is truthfully depicted, as were the early heads in Rembrandt's 'Anatomy.' Like Rembrandt in his youth, he looked at each head separately and painted it as faithfully as he could. The higher art of composing into the unity of a group all its parts, and keeping their perfections within such limits as best co-operate in the transcendent perfection of the whole—this was the labour and the crown of both their lives. Velasquez's best and greatest groups are such a realized vision of life that they have remained the despair of artists to this day.

Velasquez came to Court in the year in which Charles I., as Prince of Wales, went to Madrid to woo the sister of Philip IV. He painted her portrait twice, and made an unfinished sketch of Charles, which has unfortunately been lost. Five years afterwards Rubens was a visitor at the Spanish Court on a diplomatic errand. The painters took a fancy to one another, and corresponded for the remainder of their lives. They must have talked long about their art, and the elder painter, Rubens, is thought to have promoted in Velasquez a desire to see the great treasures of Italy. At all events we find that in the next year he has obtained permission and money from Philip to undertake the journey, which kept him away from Spain for two years.

There is an amusing page, in doggerel verse, which I remember to have read some years ago. I trust the translator will pardon the liberty I am taking in quoting it. It reports a perhaps imaginary conversation between Velasquez and an Italian painter in Rome. 'The Master' in this rhyme is Velasquez.

The Master stiffly bowed his figure tall And said, 'For Raphael, to speak the truth, —I always was plain-spoken from my youth,— I cannot say I like his works at all.'

'Well,' said the other, 'if you can run down So great a man, I really cannot see What you can find to like in Italy; To him we all agree to give the crown.'

Velasquez answered thus: 'I saw in Venice The true test of the good and beautiful; First, in my judgment, ever stands that school, And Titian first of all Italian men is.'

Velasquez in Rome was already a ripening artist, whose vision of the world was quite uncoloured and unshaped by the medieval tradition. Raphael's pictures with their superhumanly lovely saints, their unworldly feeling, and their supernaturally clear light, doubtless imparted pleasure, but not a sympathetic inspiration. Tintoret's immense creative power and the colours of Titian's painting which inspired Tintoret's ambition, as we remember—these were the effective influences Velasquez experienced in Italy. His purchases and his own later canvases afford that inference. On his return from Italy he painted a ceremonial picture as wall decoration for one of the palaces of Philip, and in it we can trace the influence of the great ceremonial paintings of the Venetians. The picture commemorates the surrender of Breda in North Brabant, when the famous General Spinola received its keys for Philip IV. It is far more than a series of separate figures. Two armies, officers and men, are grouped in one transaction, in one near and far landscape. It is a picture in which the foreground and the distances, with the lances of the soldiers and the smoke of battle, are as indispensable to the whole as are the central figures of the Dutchman in front handing the city keys to the courtly Spanish general.

Don Balthazar Carlos was born while Velasquez was in Italy. On his return he painted his first portrait of him at the age of two. The little prince is dressed in a richly-brocaded frock with a sash tied round his shoulder. His hair has only just begun to grow, but he has the same look of determination upon his face that we see four years later in the equestrian portrait. A dwarf about his own height stands a step lower than he does, so as again to give him prominence. Another picture of Don Balthazar a little older is in the Wallace Collection in London.

Velasquez's power with his brush lay in depicting vividly a scene that he saw; thus in portraiture he was at his best. He knew how to pose his figures to perfection, so as to make the expression of their character a true pictorial subject. In our picture it is on high ground that the hoofs of the pony of Don Balthazar Carlos tread. So to raise the little Prince above the eye of the spectator was a good stroke, suggesting an importance in the gallant young rider. The boy's erect figure, too, firmly holding his baton as a king might hold a sceptre, and the well-stirruped foot, are all perfect posing. Velasquez does not give him distinction in the manner of Van Dyck, by delicate drawing and gentle grace, but in a sturdier fashion, with speed and pose and a fluttering sash in the wind. All the portraits of this lad are full of charm. He was heir to the throne, but died in boyhood.



Velasquez paid another visit to Italy, twenty years after his first, for the purpose of buying more pictures to adorn Philip's palaces. Again we find him in Venice, where he bought two Tintorets and a Veronese, and again he made a long stay in Rome, this time to paint the portrait of the Pope. When he returned to Spain in 1651 he had still nine years of work before him. There were portraits of Philip's new Queen to be painted—a young girl in a most uncomfortable dress—and portraits of her child, the Infanta Marguerita. Bewitching are the pictures of this little princess at the ages of three, of four, and of seven, with her fair hair tied in a bow at the side of her head, and voluminous skirts of pink and silver. But sweetest of all is the picture called 'The Maids of Honour' ('Les Meninas'), in which the princess, aged about six, is being posed for her portrait. She is petulant and tired, and two of her handmaidens are cajoling her to stand still. Her two dwarfs and a big dog have been brought to amuse her, and the King and Queen, reflected in a mirror at the end of the room, stand watching the scene. Velasquez himself, with his easel and brushes, is at the side, painting. The picture perpetuates for centuries a moment of palace life. In that transitory instant, Velasquez took his vivid impression of the scene, and has translated his impression into paint. Everything is simple and natural as can be. The ordinary light of day falls upon the princess, but does not penetrate to the ceiling of the lofty room, which is still in shadow. All seem to have come together haphazard without being fitted into the canvas. There is little detail, and the whole effect seems produced by the simplest means; yet in reality the skill involved is so great that artists to-day spend weeks copying the picture, in the endeavour to learn something of the secret of Velasquez.

The best judges are among those who rank him highest, so that he is called pre-eminently 'the painter's painter.' It is impossible for any one but a painter to understand how he used paint. From near at hand it looks a smudge, but at the proper distance every stroke takes its right place. Such freedom was the result of years of careful painting of detail, and is not to be attained by any royal road. Velasquez seldom seems to have made preliminary drawings, but of that we cannot be sure. Certainly he had learned to conceive his vision as a whole, and we may fancy at least that he drew it so upon the canvas—altering the lines as he went—working at all the parts of the picture at once, keeping the due relation of part to part; not as if he finished one bit at a time, or thought of one part of a figure as distinct from the rest. To have drawn separate studies for legs and arms would have been foreign to his method of working.

The pictures painted in this his latest style are few, for the court duties heaped upon him left too little time. Maria Theresa, the sister of Don Balthazar Carlos, was engaged to be married to Louis XIV., King of France. The marriage took place on the border of France and Spain, and Velasquez was in charge of all the ceremonies. The Princess travelled with a cavalcade eighteen miles long, and we can imagine what work all the arrangements involved. The marriage over, the ever loyal Velasquez returned to Madrid, but he returned only to die.



CHAPTER XIII

REYNOLDS AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Hitherto we have travelled far and wide in our search for typical examples of the beautiful in painting. We went from Flanders to Italy, from Italy to Germany, back to Holland, and thence to Spain. It is true that we began in England with our first picture, and that we have returned twice, once with Holbein, and again with Van Dyck, both foreign born and trained artists. We will finish with examples of truly native English art.

In the eighteenth century England for the first time gained a foremost place in painting, though the people of the day scarcely realized that it was so. Even the poet Gray, writing in 1763, could say:

Why this nation has made no advance hitherto in painting and sculpture, it is hard to say.... You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine enough to foresee, that art shall one day flourish in England. I, too, much wish, but can hardly extend my hopes so far.

Yet in 1763 Reynolds was forty years of age and Gainsborough but four years younger. Hogarth was even sixty-six, and at work upon his last plate. Although, hitherto, the best painting in England had been done by foreign artists such as Holbein and Van Dyck, yet there had always been Englishmen of praiseworthy talent who had painted pleasing portraits. Hogarth carried this native tradition to a high point of excellence. He painted plain, good-natured-looking people in an unaffected and straightforward way. But he was a humourist in paint, and as great a student of human nature as he was of art. His insight into character and his great skill with the brush, combined with his sensitiveness to fun, make him in certain respects a unique painter. In the National Gallery there is a picture of the heads of his six servants in a double row. They might all be characters from Dickens, so vividly and sympathetically humorous is each.

In his engravings Hogarth satirised the lives of all classes of the society of his day. When we look at them we live again in eighteenth-century London, and walk in streets known to fame though now destroyed, thronged with men and women, true to life.

As an artist, Hogarth occupies a position between the seventeenth-century Dutch painters of low life and the English painters that succeeded him, who expressed the ideals of a refined society. His portraits have something of the strength of Rembrandt's. His street and tavern scenes rival Jan Steen's; but behind the mere representation of brutality, vice, crime, and misery we perceive not merely a skilled craftsman but a moral being, whom contact with misery deeply stirs and the sight of wickedness moves to indignation.

After 1720 a succession of distinguished painters were born in England. Many of them first saw the light in obscure villages in the depths of the country. Reynolds came from Devonshire, Gainsborough from Suffolk, Romney from the Lake country.

The eighteenth century was a time when politicians and men of letters had the habit of gathering in the coffee-houses of London—forerunners of the clubs of to-day. Conversation was valued as one of life's best enjoyments, and the varied society of actors, authors, and politicians, in which it flourished best, could only be obtained in the town. To the most distinguished circle of that kind in London, our painter Reynolds belonged.

In the eighteenth century, society had also begun to divide its time in modern fashion between town and country. Many of the large country houses of to-day, and nearly all the landscape-gardened parks, belong to that date. Nevertheless it was a time of great artificiality of life. The ladies had no short country skirts, and none of the freedom to which we are accustomed. In London they wore long powdered curls and rouged, and in the country too they did not escape from the artificiality of fashion. Indeed, their great desire seems to have been to get away from everything natural and spontaneous. The artificial poetry of that time deals with the patch-boxes and powder-puffs of the fashionable dames of the town, and with nymphs and Dresden china shepherdesses in the country.

Even on Reynolds' canvases the desire to improve upon nature is apparent. In his young days he painted the local personages of Devonshire. Then he made a journey abroad and spent three years in Rome and Venice. On his return he settled in London, and the most distinguished men and women of the day and their children sat to him. It seems that he would have liked his lords and ladies to look as heroic or sublime as the heroes or gods of Michelangelo. Instead of painting them in the surroundings that belonged to them, as Holbein or Velasquez would have done, he dressed his ladies in what he called white 'drapery,' a voluminous material, neither silk, satin, woollen, nor cotton, and painted them sailing through the woods. The ladies themselves liked to look like nymphs, characterless and pretty, so the fashion of painting portraits in this way became common.

The pictures are pleasing to look at, although so artificial, and after all it was only full-length portraits of ladies that Reynolds treated in this way. They were a small part of his whole output. But he and Velasquez worked in a totally different spirit. Velasquez made the subject before him, however unpromising, striking because of its truth. Reynolds liked to change it on occasion into something quite different, for the sake of making a picture pretty. Nevertheless, his strength lay in straightforward portraiture, and in the rendering of character. His portraits of men, unlike those of women, are dignified, simple, and restrained. His art was one long development till blindness prevented him from working. Every year he attained more freedom and naturalness in his pose and developed more power in his use of colour.



Many would say that his loveliest achievements were portraits of children, yet he did not attain the same freedom in his child poses till late in life. You have all seen photographs, at any rate, of the 'Age of Innocence' and the 'Heads of Angels,' but this little picture of the Duke of Gloucester, nephew of George III., will not be so familiar. I wonder whether it reminds you of anything you know? It reminds me of Van Dyck. The little duke stands with an air of importance upon the hillside, which is raised above the eye of the spectator as Velasquez raised the ground beneath the pony of Don Balthazar Carlos. There is no mistake about the child being a simple English boy, with a nice chubby face and ordinary straight fair hair. But he is a prince and knows it. For the sake of having his picture painted, he poses with an air of conscious dignity beyond his years. He sweeps his cloak around him like any grown-up cavalier, and holds out a plumed hat and walking stick in a lordly fashion. The child is consciously acting the part of a grown-up person, which only emphasizes his childhood. But the air of refinement and distinction in the picture comes straight from Van Dyck. As you look at the portraits of the Duke of Gloucester and William II. of Orange side by side, it may puzzle you to say which is the more attractive. Van Dyck has painted the clothes in more detail. A century later Reynolds has learnt to paint with dash, though not with the mastery of Velasquez. The effect of the cloak of the little Duke, its shimmering shades of mauve and pink, is inimitable. It tones beautifully with the background, varying from dull green to brightest yellow. The background happens to be sky, but it might as well have been a curtain, as long as its bit of colour so set off the clothes of the little Duke.

When Reynolds painted children he delighted in making them act parts. Even in the 'Age of Innocence' the little girl is looking how very very innocent. He painted one picture of a small boy, Master Crewe, dressed to look like Henry VIII. in the style of Holbein. With broad shoulders and a rich dress, he stands on his sturdy legs quite the figure of Henry. But the face is one beam of boyish laughter, and on the top of the little replica of the body of the corpulent monarch the effect of the childish face is most entertaining.

When Reynolds puts away his ideas of the grand style of Michelangelo to paint pictures such as these, he is entirely delightful. He sometimes painted Holy Families and classical subjects, but the more the spirit of medieval sacred art has sunk into us, the less can we admire modern versions of the old subjects. The sacred paintings of the Middle Ages owe some of their charm to the fact that they do not make upon us the impression of life. In Reynolds' Holy Families, the Mother and Child are painted with all the skill of a modern artist and look as human as his portraits of the Duchess of Devonshire and her baby. It is no longer possible to think of them as anything but portraits of the models whom Reynolds employed for his picture.

Another method that modern artists have sometimes adopted in painting sacred subjects, is to imitate the faulty drawing and incomplete representation of life which are present in the art of the Old Masters. But this conscious imitation of bygone ignorance beguiles no one who has once felt the charm of the painters before Raphael.

Reynolds' great contemporary, Gainsborough, has been called 'a child of nature.' He would have liked to live in the country always and paint landscapes. He did paint many of his native Suffolk, but in his day landscapes were unsaleable, so he was driven to the town and to portrait painting to make a living. Less than Reynolds a painter of character, Gainsborough reproduced the superficial expression of his sitters. But he had so natural an eye for grace and beauty, that his portraits always please. He did not attempt Reynolds' wide range of subjects or the same difficulties of pose. Of Reynolds he said: 'How various he is,' but his admiration did not make him stray from his natural path to attempt the variety of another. Reynolds, equally admiring, said of him: 'I cannot make out how he produces his effects.' Perhaps Gainsborough did not know either. He does seem to paint by instinct, and successive pictures became more pleasing. Buoyant in his life as in his art, his last words were: 'We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company.'

Another great contemporary painter was Romney, whose portraits of ladies are delightful. Figured as nymphs too, they are so buoyant with bright expressions and wayward locks, that one wishes he had depicted in their faces a soul.

All over England and Scotland portrait painters flourished at this time. There were so many English artists that in 1768 the Royal Academy was founded, with Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first president. It was to the students of the Royal Academy that he delivered his Discourses upon Art, setting forth the principles which he judged to be sound. He was an indefatigably hard worker until within two years of his death in 1792. All classes of men esteemed and regretted him, clouded though his intercourse with them had been by the deafness from which he suffered during the greater part of his life.

Goldsmith, the author of the Vicar of Wakefield, wrote this character 'epitaph' for him:

Here Reynolds is laid, and to tell you my mind, He has not left a wiser or better behind. His pencil was striking, resistless and grand; His manners were gentle, complying and bland; Still born to improve us in every part, His pencil our faces, his manners our heart. To coxcombs averse, yet most civilly steering When they judged without skill, he was still hard of hearing. When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios and stuff, He shifted his trumpet and only took snuff. By flattery unspoiled ...

The end is missing, for while Goldsmith was versifying so feelingly about his friend, death overtook the writer, eighteen years before the subject of the epitaph.



CHAPTER XIV

TURNER

I wonder which of you, if seeing this picture for the first time, will realize that you are looking at the old familiar Thames? It would seem rather to be some place unknown except in dreams, some phantasy of the human spirit that we ourselves could never hope to see. And yet, in fact, this is what Turner actually did see one evening as he was sailing down the Thames to Greenwich with a party of friends. Suddenly there loomed up before his eyes the great hull of the Temeraire, famous in the fight against the fleet of Napoleon at Trafalgar, and so full of memories of glorious battle, that it was always spoken of by sailors as the Fighting Temeraire. At last, its work over as a battleship, or even as a training-ship for cadets, dragged by a doughty little steam-tug, it was headed for its last resting-place in the Thames, to be broken up for old timber. As the Temeraire hove in sight through the mist, a fellow-painter said to Turner: 'Ah, what a subject for a picture!' and so indeed it proved. The veteran ship, for Turner, had a pathos like the passing of a veteran warrior to his grave.



Turner loved the sea, and was very sensitive to its associations with the toils and triumphs of mankind. Born beside the Thames, he grew up among boats and fraternized with sailors all his life. It was impossible for him to be the beholder of such a scene as the Temeraire's approach to her last moorings, save as a poet-painter; and stirred to the putting forth of all his powers, this Fighting Temeraire is his surpassing poem.

It was in 1775, while Reynolds was at the height of his fame, that Turner saw the light, born of obscure parents in an obscure house, but with a gift of vision that compelled him to the palette and the pencil his whole life long. Yet, when he was apprenticed to an architect to learn architectural drawing, he had to be dismissed after two periods of probation because of his absolute inability to learn the theory of perspective or even the elements of geometry. But the time was not far off when he was to become in his turn Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy.

The popular distaste, or unborn taste, for landscape, which had prevented Gainsborough from following his natural bent, was changing at last. The end of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a return to nature in art as well as in poetry. Some artists in the eastern counties, older than Turner, were already spending their lives in the not too lucrative painting of landscape. These men took for their masters the seventeenth-century painters of Holland. Old Crome, so called to distinguish him from his son, founded his art upon that of Hobbema, and came so close to him in his early years that it is difficult to distinguish their pictures. In the works of this 'Norwich School' the wide horizons of the Dutch artists often occur. But there is a brighter colour, a fresher green, recalling England rather than Holland. Turner never felt the influence of the Dutch painters so strongly as these artists did. Like Gainsborough, and many another artist before him and since, Turner was to be dominated by the necessity of making a living. At the end of the century a demand arose for 'Topographical Collections,' of views of places, selected and arranged according to their neighbourhood. These were not necessarily fine works of art, but they were required to be faithful records of places. Topographical paintings, drawings, and prints took the place now filled by the photograph and the postcard. Turner found employment enough making water-colour sketches to be engraved for such topographical publications. But sketches that might be mere hack-work became under his fingers magically lovely. We may follow him to many a corner of England, Wales, and Scotland, sketching architecture, mountain, moor, mists, and lakes. His earliest sketches are rather stiff and precise. But he developed with rapidity, and soon painted them in tones of blue and grey, so soft that the stars and the horizons merge into one lovely indefiniteness. Not till much later is there a touch of brighter colour in them such as fires the 'Temeraire,' but in all there is the same spirit of poetry. Turner longed to be a poet, although he could hardly write a correct sentence even in prose. But he was a poet in his outlook upon life; he seldom painted a scene exactly as he saw it, but transfused it by an imaginative touch into what on rare occasions, with perfect conjuncture of mist and weather, it might possibly become. He gave extra height to church spires, or made precipices steeper than they were, thus to render the impression of the place more explicit than by strict copying of the facts. Yet he could be minutely accurate in his rendering of all effects of sky, cloud, and atmosphere when he chose.

Other landscape painters have generally succeeded best with some particular aspect of nature, and have confined themselves to that. Cuyp excelled in painting the golden haze of sunshine, and Constable in effects of storm and rain. But Turner attempted all. Sunset, sunrise, moonlight, morning, sea, storm, sunshine: the whole pageantry of the sky. He never made a repetition of the golden hazes of Cuyp, who in his particular field stands alone; but it was a small field compared with that of Turner, who held the mirror up to Nature in her every mood.

Later in life, Turner travelled in France, Germany, and Italy. In Venice his eyes were gladdened by the gorgeous colours above her lagoons. Henceforth he makes his pictures blaze with hues scarcely dared by painter before. But so great was his previous mastery of the paler shades, that a few touches of brilliant colour could set his whole canvas aflame. Even in the 'Temeraire,' the sunset occupies less than half the picture. The cold colours of night have already fallen on the ship, and there remains but a touch of red from the smoke of the tug.

As Venice enriched his vision of colour, Rome stimulated him to paint new subjects suggested by ancient history and mythology. He knew little of Roman history or classical literature, yet enough to kindle his imagination; witness his 'Rise and Fall of the Carthaginian Empire' in the National Gallery. In these the figures are of no importance. The pictures still are landscapes, but freed from the necessity of being like any particular place. In work such as this, Turner had but one predecessor, the French Claude Lorraine. While the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century were painting their own country beautifully, Claude was living in Rome, creating imaginary landscapes. He called his pictures by the names of Scriptural incidents, and placed figures in the foreground as small and unessential as those of Turner. These classical landscapes, with their palaces and great flights of steps leading down to some river's edge, and the sea in the distance covered with boats carrying fantastic sails, never for a moment make the impression of reality. But they are beautiful compositions, designed to please the eye and stimulate the fancy, and are even attractive by virtue of their novel aloofness from the actual world.

Turner set himself to rival Claude in his ideal landscapes, founded upon the stories of the ancient world. In his picture of 'Dido building Carthage,' he painted imaginary palaces, rivers, and stately ships, in the same cool colouring as Claude, and bequeathed his picture to the National Gallery, on condition that it should hang for ever between two pictures by Claude to challenge their superiority. Opinions are divided as to the rank of Turner's 'Carthage,' so when you go to the National Gallery, you must look at them both and prepare to form a preference.

Turner was incited to this rivalry with Claude by the popularity that painter enjoyed among English collectors of the day, who were less eager to buy Turner's great oil-paintings than those of his predecessor. Incidentally this rivalry was the origin of the great series of etchings executed by or for him, known as The Book of Studies (Liber Studiorum). This book was suggested by Claude's Libri di Verita, six volumes of his own drawings (of pictures he himself had painted and sold) made in order to identify his own, and detect spurious, productions. But Turner's book was designed to show his power in the whole range of landscape art. The drawings were carefully finished productions, work by which he was willing to be judged, and many of them he etched with his own hands. His favourite haunts, the abbeys of Scotland and Yorkshire, the harbours of Kent, the mountains of Switzerland, the lochs of Scotland, and the River Wye, he chose as illustrating his best power over architecture, sea, mountain, and river. He repeated several of the same subjects later in oils, such as the pearly hazy 'Norham Castle' in the Tate Gallery.

Turner painted still another kind of imaginary landscape, not in rivalry with any one, but to please himself. Of course you all know the story of Ulysses and the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus, in the Odyssey of Homer? Turner chose for his picture the moment when Ulysses has escaped from the clutches of Polyphemus, and sailing away in his boat, taunts the giant, who stands by the water's edge, cursing Ulysses and bemoaning the loss of his sight. Turner has used this mythical scene as an opportunity for creating stupendous rocks never seen by a pair of mortal eyes, and a galley worthy of heroes or gods. The picture is the purest phantasy, even more like a fairy-tale than the story it illustrates. He has made the whole scene burn in the red light of a flaming sunrise, redder by far than the sunset of the old 'Temeraire.'

The story is told of a gentleman who, looking at a picture of Turner's, said to him, 'I never saw a sunset like that.' 'No, but don't you wish you could?' replied Turner. That is what we feel about the sunrise in the picture of Ulysses and Polyphemus. Next to it in the National Gallery hangs another picture called 'Rain, Steam, and Speed'—the Great Western Railway. From the realm of the mythical, this takes us back to the class of scenes of which the 'Fighting Temeraire' is one, actually beheld by Turner, but magically transfigured by his brush. A train is coming towards us over a bridge, prosaic subject enough, especially in 1844, when railways were supposed to be ruining the aspect of the country and were hated by beauty-loving people. But Turner saw romance in the swift passage of a train, and painted a picture in which smoke and rain, cloud and sunset, river and bridge, boats and trees, are all fused in a mist, pearly and golden as well as smutty and grey. When you look at it, you must stand away and look long, till gradually the vision of Turner shapes itself before your eyes and the scene as he beheld it lives again for you.

We saw how Venice opened his eyes to flaming colour. In his pictures of Venice, her magic beauty is revealed by a delicate sympathy, that re-creates the fairy city in her day of glory. Never tired of painting her in all her aspects, at morning, at even, in pomp, and at peace, a sight of his pictures is still the best substitute for a visit to the city itself.

Other artists have interpreted scenery beautifully, and a few have painted ideal landscapes, but who besides Turner has ever united such diversities of power? He continued to paint water-colour sketches to the end of his life, for these were appreciated by a public that did not understand, and neglected to buy, his oil-paintings. He sketched throughout France and Switzerland for various publications as he had sketched in England. Time has not damaged these drawings, as it has the pictures in oil, for to the end of his life Turner sometimes used bad materials. Even the sky of the 'Fighting Temeraire' has faded considerably since it was painted, and others of his oil-pictures are mere shadows of their former selves. It is pathetic to look upon the wreck of work not a century old and to wonder how much of it will be preserved for future generations.

Turner himself deemed the 'Temeraire' one of his best pictures, and from the beginning intended to bequeath it to the National Gallery, refusing to sell it for any price whatever.

There's a far bell ringing, At the setting of the sun, And a phantom voice is singing Of the great days done. There's a far bell ringing, And a phantom voice is singing Of renown for ever clinging To the great days done.

Now the sunset breezes shiver, Temeraire! Temeraire! And she's fading down the river, Temeraire! Temeraire! Now the sunset breezes shiver, And she's fading down the river, But in England's song for ever She's the 'Fighting Temeraire.'[4]

[Footnote 4: The Fighting Temeraire. Henry Newbolt.]



CHAPTER XV

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Since we began our voyagings together among the visionary worlds of the great painters, five hundred and thirty years ago, at the accession of King Richard II., we have journeyed far and wide, trudging from the rock where Cimabue found the boy Giotto drawing his sheep's likeness. The battleship of Turner has now brought us to the mid-nineteenth century, a time within the memories of living men, and still our journey is not ended.

Hitherto we have been guided in our general preference for certain artists and certain pictures by the concurring opinion of the best judges of many successive generations. But while we are looking at modern paintings, we cannot say, as some one did, that in our opinion, 'which is the correct one,' such and such a picture is worthy to rank with Titian. The taste of one age is not the taste of another. Who can surely pronounce the consensus of opinion to-day? Who can guess if it will concur with that of future decades—of future centuries? We can but hope that learning to see and enjoy the recognized masterpieces of the past will teach us what to like best among the masterpieces of the present.

A great love of the Old Masters inspired the work of a group of young artists, who, about the year 1850, banded themselves together into a society which they called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The title indicates their aim, which was to draw the inspiration of their art from the fifteenth-century painters of Italy. The sweetness of feeling in a picture such as Botticelli's 'Nativity,' the delicacy of workmanship and beautiful painting of detail in Antonello's 'St. Jerome' and other pictures of that date, had an irresistible fascination for them. They fancied and felt that these artists had attained to the highest of which art was capable, so that the best could only again be produced by a faithful study of their methods. The aims of the Brotherhood were not imitation of the artists but of the methods of the past. They held that every painted object, and every painted figure should be as true as it could be made to the object as it actually existed, rather than to the effect produced upon the eye, seeing it in conjunction with other objects.

These men heralded a widespread medieval revival, but all the study in the world could not make them paint like born artists of the fifteenth century. Yet there are those who think that much of the spirit of beauty, which had dwelt in the soul of Botticelli and his contemporaries, was born again in Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Their feeling for beauty of form and purity of colour, and their aloofness from the modern world, impart to their work an atmosphere that may remind us of the fifteenth century, though the fifteenth century could never have produced it.

Rossetti and Burne-Jones, indeed, never formally joined the Brotherhood, though they were influenced by its ideals and pursued the same strict fidelity to nature in all the accessories of a picture. Millais and Holman Hunt, original members of the Brotherhood, painted men and women of the mid-Victorian epoch with every detail of their peaked bonnets and plaid shawls, and were comparatively indifferent to beauty of form and face. But Rossetti and Burne-Jones created a type of ideal beauty which they employed on their canvases with persistent repetition. Burne-Jones founded his type upon the angels of Botticelli, and his drapery is like that of the ring of dancers in the sky in our picture of the 'Nativity.' You are probably familiar with some of his pictures and perhaps have felt the spell of his pure gem-like colouring and pale, haunting faces. It was the people of their minds' eye who sat beside their easels. Rossetti lived and worked in the romantic mood of a Giorgione, but instead of expressing the atmosphere of his fairy city of Venice, he created one as far as possible removed from his own mid-Victorian surroundings. His imaginary world was peopled by women with pale faces and luxuriant auburn hair, pondering upon the mysteries of the universe. Like Rossetti's 'Blessed Damozel,' they look out from the gold bar of heaven with eyes from which the wonder is not yet gone.

One of the best Pre-Raphaelite landscapes is the 'Strayed Sheep' of Holman Hunt. The sheep are wandering over a grass hillside of the vividest green, shot with spring flowers, and every sheep is painted with the detail of the central sheep in Hubert van Eyck's 'Adoration of the Lamb.' The colouring is almost as bright and jewel-like as that of the fifteenth-century painters, for one of the theories of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was that grass should be painted as green as the single blade—not the colour of the whole field seen immersed in light and atmosphere, which can make green grass seem gray or even blue.

In Brett's 'Val d'Aosta,' another Pre-Raphaelite landscape, we look from a hill upon a great expanse of valley with mountains rising behind. Every field of corn and every grassy meadow is outlined as clearly as it would be upon a map. Every stick can be counted in the fences between the fields and every tree in the hedge-rows. When we look at the picture we involuntarily wander over the face of the country. There is no taking in the view at a glance; we must walk through every field and along every path.

After seeing these Pre-Raphaelite landscapes, let us imagine ourselves straightway turning to one of the numerous scenes by Whistler of the Thames at twilight, with its glimmering lights and ghostly shapes of bridges and hulks of steamers. Nothing is outlined, nothing is clearly defined, but the mystery of London's river is caught and pictured for ever. Let us look, too, at his 'Valparaiso,' bathed in a brilliant South American sunshine, where all is pearly and radiant with southern light. Even here the impression is not given by the power of the sun revealing every detail. There are few touches, but like Velasquez, he has made every touch tell.

As the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood kindled their inspiration by the vision of the fifteenth-century painters of Italy, so Whistler and many other modern artists have turned to Velasquez for guidance. Till the last half of the last century his name had been almost forgotten outside Spain. Now, among the modern 'impressionists' so-called, he is perhaps more studied than any other painter. When we were looking at the pictures of this great man, we saw how he and Rembrandt were among the earliest to learn the value of subordinating detail in the parts to the better general effect of the whole, so as to present no more than the eye could grasp in a comprehensive glance. Every tree and stick in Brett's 'Val d'Aosta' is truthfully painted, but the picture as a whole does not give the spectator the impression of truth, for the simple reason that the eye can never see at once what Brett has tried to make it see. All the wonderfully veracious detail in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite does not give the impression of life. Men like Holman Hunt, on the one hand, and on the other hand Whistler, living and working at the same time, exhibiting their works in the same galleries, differ even more in their ideals than Velasquez differed from the fifteenth-century painters of Italy.

Facts such as these make the study of modern art difficult. Before the nineteenth century, pictures of the same date in the same country were painted in approximately the same style. But during the last fifty years many styles have reigned together. At one and the same time painters have been inspired by the Greek and Roman sculptors, by Botticelli, Mantegna, Titian, Tintoret, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Reynolds, and Turner, and the work of each is, notwithstanding, unmistakably nineteenth century, and could never have been produced at any other date. Every artist finds a problem of his own to solve, and attacks it in his own way. When Whistler painted a portrait he endeavoured to express character in the general aspect of the figure, rather than in the face. The picture of his mother is a wonderful expression of the sweetness and peace of old age, given by the severe lines of her black dress and the simplicity and nobility of her pose.

The great painter Watts, who by the face chiefly sought to express the man, never painted a full-length figure portrait. His long life, covering nearly the whole of the century, enabled him to portray many of the foremost men of the age—statesmen, poets, musicians, and men of letters. In his portrait gallery their fine spirits still meet one another face to face. But his portraits, in and through likenesses of the men, are made to express the essence of that particular art of which the man was a spokesman. In his portrait of Tennyson, the bard with his laurel wreath is less Tennyson the man, if one may say so, than Tennyson the poet. The picture might be called 'poetry,' as that of Joachim could be called 'music,' for the violinist with his dreamy beautiful face, playing his heart out, looks the soul of music's self.

Watts was never a Pre-Raphaelite, clothing anew his dreams of medieval beauty; nor a seeker after the glories of Greece and Rome, like Leighton and Alma Tadema; nor a student of the instant's impression, like Whistler. To penetrate beneath the seen to the unseen was the aim of his art. He wrestled to express thoughts in paint that seem inexpressible. When we go to the Tate Gallery in London, to the room filled with most precious works of Watts, we feel almost overawed by the loftiness of his ideas, though they may seem to strain the last resources of the painter's art. One of them is a picture of 'Chaos' before the creation of the world. Half-formed men and women struggle from the earth to force themselves into life, as the half-wrought statues of Michelangelo from the marble that confines them. Near by is a picture of the 'All-pervading,' the spirit of good that penetrates the world, symbolized as a woman gazing long into a globe held upon her knee. Opposite is the 'Dweller in the Innermost,' with deep, unsearchable eyes. These are pictures that constrain thought rather than charm the eye. When the thought is less obscure, it is better suited to pictorial utterance, and Watts sometimes painted pictures as simple as these are difficult.

There is nothing obscure in our frontispiece picture of 'Red Ridinghood.' It sets before us a child's version and vision of a child's fable that is imperishable, and as such makes an immediate appeal to the eye. She is not acting a part or posing as a princess, but is simply a cowering little girl, frightened at the wolf and eager to protect her basket. In her freshness and simplicity, a cottage maiden with anxious blue eyes, most innocent and childish of children, she need not shun proximity to Richard II., Edward VI., William of Orange, Don Balthazar Carlos, and the Duke of Gloucester.

And thus we conclude our procession of royal children with a child of the people. Beginning with Richard II., a portrait of a king rather than a child, we end with a picture in which childhood merely, without the gift of distinction or the glamour of royalty, suffices to charm a great painter's eye and inspire his thought. With the sweetness and grace of modern childhood filling our eyes, may we not well close this children's book?



INDEX

'Adoration of the Lamb,' 56-59

Adoration of the Magi, treatment of, 33

'Age of Innocence,' 171

Alice in Wonderland, 2

'All-pervading,' the, 196

Animals, painting of, 142

Antonello of Messina, 67-69

Art, definition of, 4

Atmosphere, 10 treatment of by Dutch School, 139, 140 by Holbein, 139 by Velasquez, 156

Beauneveu, Andre, of Valenciennes, 43

Bellini, Giovanni, 98, 102

Black Death, influence of, 41

Botticelli, 70-77, 145 influence of, on Burne-Jones, 191

Brett's 'Val d'Aosta,' 192 et seq.

Burne-Jones, 190 et seq.

Byzantium, influence of, 19 Turkish conquest of, 20

'Chaos,' 196

Charles I. employs Rubens, 143 employs Van Dyck, 147 painted by Velasquez, 157

Charles II., 131

Charles V., King of France, 40

Charles V., Emperor, 153

Chillon, Castle of, 11

Churches, medieval grandeur of, 14

Cimabue, Vasari's account of, 24 picture in National Gallery, 25 picture in Santa Maria Novella, 25 training of Giotto, 27

Civilization, definition of, 9

Claude Lorraine, 181-183

Constable, 180

Correggio, 91

Crome, Old, 178

Cuyp, 138-142, 180

'Dido building Carthage,' 182

Don Balthazar Carlos, 154 et seq., 160 et seq.

Douglas, Lady Alfred, 75

Dragons, fear of, 12

Duke of Gloucester, 170-171

Durer, 106-107 compared with Holbein, 113

Dutch expansion in the seventeenth century, 117

'Dweller in the Innermost,' 196

Edward the Confessor, story of, 32

Edward Prince of Wales, 111-115

Eighteenth century, artificiality of, 168

Erasmus, 109-110 portrait of, 114

Etching, process of, 127

Fighting Temeraire, 176 et seq.

Francis of Assisi, life of, 17, 21

Franciscans, foundation of the order of, 22

'Fresco' painting, 39

Gainsborough, 173 et seq.

Garden of Eden, 95

Giorgione, 94-98, 140

Giotto, 27, 28, 35, 50

'Golden Age,' 95-98, 142

Goldsmith, 174

Greeks, influence of, 10, 65

Henrietta Maria, 149

Henry VIII., 109 et seq. employs Holbein, 110 portrait of, 114

Hobbema, 141, 178

Hogarth, 166 et seq.

Holbein, 102-115, 139, 151 'Erasmus' in collection of Charles I., 147

Holman Hunt, 190, 191

Horne, Herbert P., 74

Hubert van Eyck, 46 et seq., 140

Hulin, Dr., 49

Il Penseroso, 83

Impressionism, beginning of, 162

Infanta Marguerita, 161 et seq.

James II., 149

Jerusalem Chamber, 18 view of, taken in 1486, 49

Joachim, portrait of, 195

John, Duke of Berry, 40, 42, 53

John, King of France, 40

John van Eyck, 60 compared with Durer, 107

Josse Vyt, 58

Julius II., Pope, 88

'Knight's Dream,' 78, 82-86

L'Allegro, 83

Landscape painting, beginning of, 50

Lely, Sir Peter, 131

Leonardo da Vinci, 80-81, 89-90, 110 compared with Durer, 107

'Les Meninas,' 162

Liber Studiorum, 183

Louis, Duke of Anjou, 40

Luini, Bernardino, 90-91

'Madonna of the Rocks,' 90

'Man in Armour,' 126-127

Mantegna, 69, 70, 102 'Triumphs of Caesar,' 148

Maria Theresa, 163

Marie de Medicis, 143

Mary Stuart, 149-150

Medieval detail, 37 coronation, solemnity of, 34 guilds, 44

Michelangelo, 80 influence on Reynolds, 169, 172 influence on Tintoret, 99

Millais, 190

Milton, 83

More, Sir Thomas, 109, 110

Mosque of Omar, 49

Newbolt, Henry, 187

'Night Watch,' Rembrandt's, 123-124

'Norham Castle,' 183

'Norwich School,' 178

'Pallas Athene,' 127

Perspective, 66 absence of, 55 Hubert's improvement in, 55 mastery of, in Renaissance, 67

Perugino, 79

Peter de Hoogh, 133-136

Philip IV., 154, 155

Philip the Bold, 40, 41

Philip the Good, 52

Photographs and pictures, the difference between them, 4

Portraiture, in the fifteenth century, growth of, 60

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 189 et seq.

'Rain, Steam, and Speed,' 184

Raphael, 78-89, 140 cartoons, in collection of Charles I., 147 comparison with Giorgione, 94, 97 influence on Velasquez, 159

'Red Ridinghood,' 197

Reformation, effect of on art, 108

Rembrandt, 118-132, 135 'Anatomy,' 122, 157 compared with Peter de Hoogh, 134 compared with Van Dyck, 151 compared with Velasquez, 156 landscapes of, 139 Syndics, 130

Revelations, 57, 74

Revival of learning, 65

Reynolds, 169-175

Richard II., portrait of, 29 et seq. diptych, 47, 50, 139, 197 diptych in collection of Charles I., 147

Roger van der Weyden, 61

Rome, influence on Turner, 181

Rossetti, 190 et seq.

Royal Academy, 174

Rubens, 138, 143-145 friendship with Velasquez, 157 on Charles I., 147

Ruysdael, 141

Santi, Giovanni, 79

St. Catherine, Raphael's, 85 burial of, 90

St. Catherine of Siena, 17

St. Edmund, 33

St. Francis of Assisi, 17, 21 preaching to the birds, 4, 23, 50

St. George slaying the dragon, 100-102

St. Jerome's cell, 6, 63-69 lion of, 142

St. Matthew, 46

Saskia, 121, 122 et seq.

Savonarola, 73-76

Sistine Madonna, 85

Spain, greatness of, in sixteenth century, 153

Stained-glass windows, influence of in the fourteenth century, 36

Steen, Jan, 137, 167

'Strayed Sheep,' 191

'Surrender of Breda,' 159

Tenniel, 2

Tennyson, portrait of, 195

Terborch, 137

'Three Maries,' 46-59 compared with Botticelli's 'Nativity,' 77 compared with Raphael's 'Knight's Dream,' 85 treatment of atmosphere in, 140

Timoteo Viti, 82

Tintoret, 99-102 influence on Velasquez, 159

Titian, 98, 99, 140, 159

Turner, 176-187 sunsets of, 9

'Ulysses deriding Polyphemus,' 184

Umbrian landscape, beauty of, 79

'Valparaiso,' 193

Van Dyck, 145-152 compared with Reynolds, 170 et seq. comparison with Velasquez, 161

Van Eyck's influence in Germany, 105

Vasari, 23, 25

Velasquez, 153-164 compared with Reynolds, 169 influence of, 193

Venice, influence on Turner, 180, 185 influence of on Venetian artists, 93 et seq.

Veronese, 102

Watts, 195-197

Whistler, 192 et seq., 193

William the Silent, 116, 146

William II. of Orange, 146-152

William III., 146

Wood-cutting, process of, 127

Wool industry, importance of, 41



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