Part 22
That is true; but Lord Gower forgot the fact that the lady had by her taste and her high-bred elegance conferred distinction on her clothes by the fitness with which she selected them and by the manner in which she wore them.
Thrice in England have pairs of geniuses appeared at the same time, inviting comparison and attracting partisans--Keats and Shelley; Thackeray and Dickens; and Reynolds and Gainsborough.
There should be no partisans. The more we love and admire Keats, the better we are able to admire and love Shelley; the more we appreciate and delight in Dickens, the more we are able to appreciate and delight in Thackeray; and the more we comprehend and enjoy Sir Joshua, the more we are able to comprehend and enjoy Gainsborough.
Although they were rivals--and quite bitter ones at times--the two supreme English painters of the Eighteenth Century admired each other prodigiously.
“Damn him! how various he is!” Gainsborough exclaimed of Reynolds; and Sir Joshua remarked to Sir George Beaumont of Gainsborough; “I cannot imagine how he manages to produce his effects.”
“What is it then that gives Romney his hold upon this generation and will continue to give him a hold so long as a love of art endures among us?” Humphrey Ward asks; and then he answers his own question as follows:
“In part, of course, it is because he shares with Reynolds and Gainsborough the good fortune of having kept alive for us a society of which the fascination is enduring--that limited and privileged society of the Eighteenth Century which has realized such a perfect art of living and with which we can clasp hands across the gap as we cannot with the men and women of Charles the Second’s time, or even of Queen Anne’s. Much more is it because of temperament and training. Romney was an artist in love with loveliness; because he found it in the women and children of his time and stamped it on countless canvases.
“To our problem-haunted painters of to-day it may be seen that his sense of form was ‘generic and superficial’; they may condemn him because he did not try to penetrate deep into character and because he simplified too much, like the Greek sculptors. The lover of mere human beauty will care little for such objections, provided that a portrait gives him the essentials of a beautiful face.
‘The witchery of eyes, the grace that tips The inexpressible douceur of the lips’--
and has blended them with the aristocratic dignity of the Lady Sligo, or with the melting sweetness of many of the sketches of Emma. This is what he finds in every first-rate Romney; and he finds much more. He finds pure and unfaded color, the fruit of the painter’s knowledge and of a self-restraint which forbade him to search for complex effects through rash experiments. He finds a quality of painting which, though it wants the subtlety and preciousness that Gainsborough reached instinctively and Sir Joshua by effort, is a quality to which nobody but a master can attain. To be convinced of this we have only to look closely at the brush-work of the eyes in any of the National Gallery Romneys, or the draperies in such pictures as the _Lady Warwick and Children_ or the _Lady Derby_.
“When all is said, Romney remains one of the greatest painters of the Eighteenth Century and one of the glories of the English name.”
We are apt to think that it was easier to conquer a reputation in the Eighteenth Century than it is to-day and that Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Hoppner, and Raeburn stepped easily into their commanding positions. Let us remember that Horace Walpole mentions the fact that there were two thousand portrait-painters in London in his time!
The story of English Painting previous to the Eighteenth Century is interesting and very different from that of any nation on the Continent.
The Wars of the Roses, which lasted thirty years (1455–1485), coincide with the great developments of Painting in Italy and Flanders. During this period, while York and Lancaster were, like the Lion and the Unicorn, fighting for the Crown, no attention could be paid to the painting of pictures. Up to this period England had had a notable past in portraiture, fresco-painting, and, even more particularly, in the art of illumination and miniature-painting. In the decoration of manuscripts from about 1250 to 1350 the Anglo-Norman painters stood first in this branch of art. The old monastic artists had great traditions to follow and superb models to draw upon, such as the _Book of Kells_ (dating from the Eighth or Ninth Century); and the Winchester School of the Tenth Century stood very high before the advent of the Normans in 1066.
Our own country to-day can show many examples of this splendid work in private collections. After William Caxton set up his printing-press at Westminster in 1471, there was little more need for the laboriously written manuscripts with their exquisite miniature-painting and illumination.
Oliver Cromwell’s Roundhead bandits and other Puritans with their wholesale demolishing and slashing of all art and everything beautiful together with the Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed all the paintings that could have told us just what had been accomplished in England at the time when Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Botticelli were creating masterpieces in Italy and when Roger van der Weyden and Memling were painting gloriously in the great realm of the Dukes of Burgundy. Such works as the _Romaunt de la Rose_ and other Anglo-Norman manuscripts give us a hint of what Painting in England must have been; for, of course, English, or Anglo-Norman Painting, in Plantagenet days must have been--as in other countries--an enlarged version of the brightly colored miniatures touched up with gold-leaf in the manuscripts.
Henry VIII seems to have been the first English King who was a patron of art in the modern sense. But there was no English artist of power to be patronized. The German Hans Holbein (see page 240) was made Court-Painter. Holbein painted all the great personages in Tudor England and his influence lasted long after his death. Miniature-portraits were also popular. The greatest artist in this line was Nicholas Hilliard (1547–1619), a native of Exeter, trained as a goldsmith, a follower of Holbein, and appointed goldsmith, carver, and portrait-painter to Queen Elizabeth (whose portrait he painted many times). Later he was portrait-painter to James I. It was Hilliard, too, who engraved the Great Seal of England in 1587. Hilliard’s pupil, Isaac Oliver (1556–1617?), also a pupil of Federigo Zuccaro, was unsurpassed as a miniature-painter and taught his son Peter (1601–1660), who was famous for his drawings and water-colors as well as for his miniatures. Samuel Cooper (1609–1672), achieved a great reputation as a miniaturist portrait-painter and painted Charles II, Henrietta Maria, all the celebrities of the Court, and also John Milton and Oliver Cromwell. Collectors appreciate his works to-day.
Holbein left no School and there was no one to succeed him. Consequently when Antonio Moro (see page 257), came to England from Spain in 1553 to paint Mary Tudor, he stayed in London for some time painting celebrities.
In Queen Elizabeth’s time another foreign portrait-painter, Federigo Zuccaro (or Zucchero) arrived from Italy with a great reputation, having worked for Pope Gregory XIII and the Cardinal of Lorraine, and also in Antwerp and Amsterdam. Zuccaro painted Queen Elizabeth, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Leicester, and many other English notables.
Another foreigner, Daniel Mytens (1590?–1656), arrived in the reign of James I, became his Court-Painter and continued in the post in the reign of Charles I, until Van Dyck’s popularity sent him back to Holland. Mytens painted in the style of Rubens and Van Dyck. Hampton Court Palace contains many full length portraits by him. A portrait by Mytens of Jeffrey Hudson (see page 191), holding a dog by a leash, hangs in Buckingham Palace.
However, in the reign of Charles I, Anthony Van Dyck (see page 181) dominated Painting just as Holbein had in the reign of Henry VIII. For years after his death every painter tried to follow Van Dyck’s style; but they all missed his distinction, not having his genius to start with.
Civil war and Puritanism killed art completely. Consequently when “Charlie came over the water” and the “King Enjoyed his Own Again,” there was nobody in the kingdom able to paint an acceptable portrait. Again a foreigner met the need. This time it was Peter Lely (1618–1680), who was a Dutchman, born in Westphalia, Germany, the son of Pieter van der Faes, a captain of infantry, who had changed his name to Lely. In 1640 young Lely was in England, painting landscapes and trying to imitate Van Dyck in portraiture. The marriage of Princess Mary to William, Prince of Orange gave Lely his first opportunity and he painted the Royal couple with Charles II, who made him a knight and baronet in 1679. Sir Peter only enjoyed his honors a year, for he died in 1680. Sir Peter Lely painted a great number of portraits, including the “Court Beauties,” which now hang in Hampton Court Palace.
The Court-Painter of Queen Mary II and Queen Anne was another foreigner, Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), a native of Lübeck, a pupil of Ferdinand Bol, Carlo Maratti, and Bernini, with painting experiences in Rome and Venice. Kneller painted portraits of Charles II, Louis XIV, James II, William III, Queen Mary, Queen Anne, and George I. For Queen Mary II he painted the “Beauties” at Hampton Court, in a certain sense a continuation of Sir Peter Lely’s “Beauties.” Kneller was knighted in 1692 and made a baronet in 1715.
Sir Godfrey painted the members of the Kit-Cat Club and every person of distinction in England. In 1705 he settled near Twickenham. Pope wrote an epitaph for Kneller’s monument in Westminster Abbey.
William Hogarth (1697–1764) who now enters the lists, is the first really English painter. Hogarth was a native of London and an engraver as well as a painter. Hogarth became Sergeant-Painter to the King in 1757. He first attracted attention by his prints for Butler’s _Hudibras_ in 1726 and at this time began to paint in oils. In 1731 he painted _The Harlot’s Progress_ and followed this with _Southwark Fair_ and _The Rake’s Progress_ which gave him great fame as a satirist. In 1745 he painted his own _Portrait_ and the _Marriage à la Mode_ (six scenes). The vigor and personality of his portraits, the beautiful coloring of his palette, and the atmosphere of the Eighteenth Century make Hogarth one of the great names in art. England was a long time producing an artist; but when he came he was a very great one.
Hogarth was so pre-eminently a chronicler of the fashions and follies of his time that we are apt to forget his beautiful use of color, and Hogarth’s technique is so solid and so sure that his colors are as fresh to-day as when they were painted.
Hogarth did not believe in his powers of portraiture; but the world does not agree with him. The portrait of _Lavinia Fenton as Polly Peachum in the Beggar’s Opera_, (National Gallery, London) ranks as one of the great portraits of the world. And there are others: _David Garrick and his Wife_ in Windsor Castle; his own _Portrait_ (National Gallery, London); _Archbishop Herring_ (Lambeth Palace); _Peg Woffington_; and many others.
Hogarth’s book _The Analysis of Beauty_ had the following origin. In his own portrait painted in 1745 he drew on a palette in one corner of the picture a serpentine line with the words: “The line of beauty and grace.” So much discussion ensued that Hogarth wrote the book to explain what he meant and to establish a standard of beauty.
The Eighteenth Century saw the great period of English Painting expressed in Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792); Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788); and George Romney (1734–1802). Others of importance were Richard Wilson (1714–1782), famous for his landscapes in many of which ruins were introduced; Francis Cotes (1725–1770), famous portrait-painter; and, lapping over into the Nineteenth Century, Sir William Beechey (1753–1839), who became portrait-painter to the Queen; John Hoppner (1758?–1810), portrait-painter (see page 416); John Opie (1761–1807), historical portrait-painter; Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830); Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823); Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851); John Constable (1776–1837); John Wilkie (1785–1841); and John Crome, known as “Old Crome” (1793–1842).
LADY BETTY DELMÉ.
_Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792)._
_Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert L. Satterlee._
This, one of Sir Joshua’s finest group pictures (93 × 57 inches), was painted in 1777, a year in which the artist made many notable portraits including that of Diana, Viscountess Crosbie (see page 345). Lady Betty Delmé is seated at the base of an old beech-tree on her estate between London and Portsmouth, her arm around her children. The little Scotch terrier seems much interested in his master. The whole is a wonderful study in amber and russet tones. The picture came to Mrs. Satterlee from her father, the late Mr. J. P. Morgan.
Joshua Reynolds was born in Plympton Earl Plymouth, July 16, 1723, the son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, headmaster of the grammar school. Early showing great talent for drawing, young Joshua was apprenticed in 1740 to Thomas Hudson, the portrait-painter, in London. Three years later he returned home and established himself as a portrait-painter at Plymouth Dock, where he met William Gandy, a painter, who had no little influence upon his style. In 1744 Reynolds was back in London and in 1749 back in Devonshire, this time settling in Devonport. In this year he met at Mount Edgcumbe young Commodore Keppel (afterwards Admiral), whose portrait he painted and with whom he formed a great friendship. Accepting Keppel’s invitation to sail with him on the _Centurion_ for a Mediterranean trip, Reynolds eventually reached Rome, where he spent two years. While studying in the Vatican he caught a severe cold which resulted in a life-long deafness. Returning home in 1753, Reynolds took rooms in St. Martin’s Lane, then the headquarters of art, and people began to flock to his studio. He then removed to Newport Street and in 1760 established himself in Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square), which for thirty years was the _rendez-vous_ for the artistic, literary, and distinguished world of London. In 1768 Reynolds was unanimously elected first President of the just-established Royal Academy and in 1769 was knighted by George III. In 1784 Sir Joshua succeeded Allan Ramsay as Painter-in-Ordinary to the King. In 1789 his eyesight began to fail and he soon had to relinquish his art. Sir Joshua died in 1792 and was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral with great pomp. In addition to his enormous list of paintings Sir Joshua designed the windows for New College, Oxford, and Oxford gave him the degree of D. C. L. Sir Joshua’s famous _Discourses on Art_ were delivered between 1769 and 1790 at the Academy “to encourage a solid and vigorous course of study.”
[Illustration:
_Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert L. Satterlee_
LADY BETTY DELMÉ
--_Sir Joshua Reynolds_]
When we think of the thousands of pictures that Sir Joshua painted--all of them _fine_ and many of them _great_--we stand amazed at the capacity of the artist who produced them. They were all creations! The five portraits of little Isabella Gordon known as _Angels’ Heads_ (National Gallery, London), which in lightness, delicacy, and iridescence have been compared to the petals of a flower and the melting softness of the rainbow; _Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse_; the _Strawberry Girl_; the _Age of Innocence_; _Nelly O’Brien_; _Kitty Fisher_; _Penelope Boothby_; _Mrs. Abington_; _Lord Ligonier_; _The Graces Decorating a Terminal figure of Hymen_; _Diana, Lady Crosbie_; _Mrs. Hardinge_; _Lady Cockburn and her Children_;--all belong to the first rank of original and artistic achievement.
“Reynolds,” Sir Walter Armstrong writes, “arrived at results scarcely to be distinguished from those of genius, and did so entirely by the
## action of an original mind and a profound taste upon accumulated
materials. His path towards excellence was conscious, discriminative, judicial. Every step he took was the result of a deliberate choice. He felt no heats driving him into particular expression in his own despite. Just as by fairness of mind he produced the effect of sympathy among his friends, so by unerring judgment he produces the effect of creation on us who value his art. He appears to me the supreme, if not the only, modern instance of a painter reaching greatness along a path, every step of which was trodden deliberately, with a full consciousness of why it was taken and whither it was leading, and with the power unimpaired to turn back or to change the goal at any moment. Superficially the art of Sir Joshua resembled that of Raphael as little as it well could; mentally the processes of the two men were curiously alike. Both possessed taste to such a degree that it became genius; and both were endowed, for the service of their taste, with a mental industry which is rare.”
It is unfortunate that Sir Joshua experimented so deeply with his pigments and glazes so that we can see none of his pictures in their pristine beauty and brilliance. That he was a rare colorist we would know from _Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse_ and the _Angels’ Heads_--the former rich and gorgeous and the latter iridescent and delicate--showing the two extremes.
Here is Sir Joshua’s palette given in the _Farington Diary_ under date of August 14, 1806:
“Marchi (Sir Joshua Reynolds’s assistant) I called on before dinner to desire him to call upon J. Taylor to give his opinion of a picture said to be a portrait of Garrick by Sir J. Reynolds. I desired Marchi to state to me what colors Sir Joshua Reynolds had placed upon his palette and the order in which they were laid. He named them as follows. He used a handle palette as it is called: White; Naples Yellow; Yellow oker; Vermillion; light red; lake; black. Asphaltum he used occasionally, but that he had it in a galley-pot. His vehicles were: Mastick varnish and drying oil made into Macgilp in a pot. Nut oil which he used with his white in a pot. Mastick varnish _only_, which he sometimes used alone; and Marchi observed that it caused his colors to crack and fly off. Wax (white virgin wax) he had in a tin pot which he melted at the fire when he proposed to use it. This vehicle Marchi observed caused his colors to scale off from the canvas in flakes.”
To mention the sitters who came to Leicester Fields and the company that gathered there every evening when Sir Joshua was not dining out would be to list the entire society of London in the Eighteenth Century.
“In these days we are apt to forget that to many of Sir Joshua’s contemporaries, with the stricter notions of social precedency in vogue a century ago,” Sir Walter Armstrong notes, “the painter’s station in London society must have seemed almost an outrage, especially as it had been won without any kind of pretence or undue submission to those who were then called the great. Fond as he was of the best that Society could give, he lived his life in his own way, invited whom he chose to his table, leaving his guests to shake down among themselves as best they could, and, so far as we can discover, paying little heed to prejudices on the matter of birth, and still less to those which had to do with politics or conventional morality.”
Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower has made this very interesting comparison of Romney and Reynolds:
“The mighty events which were in progress around him--the war with the American Colonies, and the supervening naval war with France and Spain--ran their course without personally affecting him, whereas Reynolds was in constant touch with the men who were most vigorously opposing Lord North’s policy, with Burke and Charles Fox; and it was his own intimate friend of nearly thirty years standing, Admiral Keppel, whose trial in this very year 1778, formed the central battle-ground between the Court and the popular party. In all these things Reynolds was intimately concerned, as he was in the lighter events of social life, with his constant dinner-parties at Leicester Fields, his still more constant attendance at the tables of the great and the assemblies of Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Ord, his outings to Streatham, and his mild flirtation with ‘Little Burney.’ But Romney lived remote, as remote in his shyness and isolation as Gainsborough lived in his fondness for a Bohemian world--the world of artists that painted and played and left war to the soldiers and politics to the politician. It is true that a couple of years afterwards politics were brought pretty closely home to both of them, as they were, _nolentibus volentibus_, to all the householders in London. The Keppel riots in 1778, celebrating the acquittal of the popular Admiral, were festive and pleasant enough; noblemen and gentlemen went out with the crowd; young Pitt, it is said, helped to break Lord North’s windows; and young Rogers, the banker-poet, to unhinge the gates of the Admiralty. This was very well and very pleasant; but two years later the mob improved upon their lesson, and in the Lord George Gordon Riots London was ablaze.”
THE STRAWBERRY GIRL.
_Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792)._
_Collection of Mrs. Francis F. Prentiss._
James Northcote in his _Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds_ notes: “The picture of a little _Strawberry Girl_ was painted about this time (1775?) and he considered it one of his best works, observing that no man ever could produce more than about half a dozen really original works in his life; “and this picture,” he added, “is one of mine.”
This little girl is about three years old and is shown at three-quarter length with a handkerchief folded around her head after the fashion of a turban, the curls escaping from her forehead. She wears a lightcolored dress with a pinafore caught over her arm. At her neck is a ribbon bow. Her hands are demurely folded at the waist and over her right arm hangs a cone-shaped strawberry “pottle.” The background is composed of large rocks and trees at the right.
[Illustration:
_Collection of Mrs. Francis F. Prentiss_
THE STRAWBERRY GIRL
--_Sir Joshua Reynolds_]
The picture is painted in oils on canvas (29 × 24 inches) and is a replica of the original in the Wallace Collection, London.
Leslie and Taylor voiced so well the impression that every one has when looking at this fascinating work that what they said bears quoting:
“_The Strawberry Girl_ with her pottle on her arm, creeping timidly along and glancing round her with large, black eyes, might be Little Red Riding Hood hearing the first rustle of the wolf in the wayside bushes, could we substitute a red hood for the odd turban-like head-dress with which the painter has crowned his little maiden, and which even Sir Joshua’s taste can barely make becoming, and hang on her arm the basket of butter and eggs for her sick grandmother instead of the strawberry pottle which gives her a name.”
The model for _The Strawberry Girl_ was Miss Theophila Palmer, Sir Joshua’s favorite niece, who lived with him and looked after him until her marriage. Her name Theophila was divided into two pet names. “The” and “Offie,” upon which Sir Joshua once wrote a playful-verse:
When I’m drinking my tea, I am thinking of The, When I’m drinking my coffee, I’m thinking of Offie, So, whether I’m drinking my tea or my coffee, I always am thinking of thee, my The-Offie.