CHAPTER VI

LANDSCAPE PAINTING

It is the purpose of this chapter to indicate how far and in what way painting lent itself to the expression of that new love for Nature which, as we have seen, gradually became dominant in the realm of poetry, fiction, travels, and gardening. Such an inquiry is beset with peculiar difficulties in the case of pictures because they are seldom dated. At best we usually know only whether a picture is early or late in the artist’s career. After the beginning of public exhibitions with catalogues, which was not till 1760, something like accuracy in dates becomes possible, but the information thus obtained is not entirely reliable for the reason that pictures were not always exhibited the year they were painted, and it is certainly inadequate because so small a proportion of the pictures painted reached any exhibition. Furthermore, the pictures most important in establishing the early use of landscape would come before 1760. A second difficulty arises from the inaccessibility of much of the material, especially the important early material. Whatever was printed in a book had many chances of survival. A single brief poem indicative of a new love of Nature, even though a poem but lightly regarded by the author and his contemporaries, would hold its small place in his works and share in the reduplicated life of the tragedies, satires, and didactic poems to which he intrusted his fame. But an equally slight picture, though equally indicative of a new tendency, would have no such fate. Unregarded, unpurchased, its ultimate destiny would be destruction, or, possibly, burial in some attic. Even such of these pictures as still hold their own in some collection are widely scattered and often in private galleries not open to public inspection.

This inaccessibility of much of the original material would be an insuperable difficulty from the point of view of the student of technique, but is less formidable in the present study which has to do not with qualities that would give the picture high or low artistic rank so much as with the thoughts the artist strove to express, his tastes, his feelings, the conception of Nature that guided his work. For this purpose we have as authentic material not only original pictures whenever obtainable, but also reproductions of various sorts, along with biographies, letters, and critical essays. From these scattered sources it becomes possible to make a brief but not wholly inadequate statement concerning the place of the external world in English eighteenth-century art.

I. LANDSCAPE IN PORTRAITURE

As a picturesque accessory in portraiture landscape received early recognition in English art. Even the miniaturists found space for landscape backgrounds,[566] and Vandyck, who was painting in England from 1621 to 1641, established the use of landscape elements in large portraits in oil. Sometimes, where the portrait is inevitably in the open air, as in the equestrian portrait of Charles I in the National Gallery, the landscape is worked out with much beauty of detail, but as a rule Vandyck makes use of Nature as an accessory rather than as a full background. Various devices, as an open window or door, a space framed in by heavily draped curtains and massive pillars, or an outlook over a balustrade, serve to enrich the picture by a glimpse of sky, a bright horizon line, or a stretch of vaguely indicated country. He also frequently uses a rock as the direct background, the rock revealing itself as such only at the edge where tufts of foliage or a gnarled tree branch out against the sky and an indeterminate landscape.[567] In no case does Vandyck subordinate the portrait to the landscape, nor does he combine the portrait and the landscape with the idea of securing a general decorative effect. The landscape remains always simply as background or as an enlivening detail.

[Illustration: JOHN MAITLAND, DUKE OF LAUDERDALE

_By Sir Peter Lely_]

Vandyck’s most important successor, Sir Peter Lely, who was in England from 1641 to 1680, but whose great vogue was after 1660, made frequent use of open-air settings, especially in his portraits of women. The “Windsor Beauties”[568] sufficiently attest his command of landscape effects. Princess Mary as Diana, the duchess of Cleveland as Minerva, the duchess of Richmond, the countess of Falmouth, Mrs. Middleton as Pomona, Mrs. Stewart, are fair women whose picturesque beauty is enhanced by the poetic and romantic landscapes against which they stand. There is, to be sure, no attempt at verisimilitude. There is no thought of a real landscape to which the person in the picture has some natural relation. Walpole says in derogation of Lely that his nymphs trail their embroideries and fringes through the thorns and briars of pastoral landscapes, but the fact is that these Dianas and Minervas and innocent shepherdesses of the Nell Gwynn variety are no more _in_ these landscapes than they are actual goddesses or country maidens. The landscape is but a sort of wall-painting or figured tapestry used as a decorative background. These portraits are of importance in the present study because they show that while Lely as portrait painter rightly cared especially for the figure, he had yet an appreciation not common in his time of the beauty of the world about him.

It would seem as if the example of Vandyck and Lely and their great fame would have established the use of landscape as a portrait convention, and it is true that Lely’s pupils[569] made some attempts in this direction, but under the leadership of Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723) the custom gradually fell into disuse. Kneller, practically supreme in England during the half-century before his death, painted the kings and queens and royal families of England, the beaux and the belles, the statesmen and the wits, so that a gallery of his portraits would afford a survey of the notable social and intellectual England of his day. Commissions came in upon him too rapidly to allow much time for carefully studied backgrounds. Sometimes he uses a rock background in the manner of Vandyck, but even more conventionalized, as in his “Madam Turner,”[570] and there is an occasional landscape in the manner of Lely, as in the “Countess of Ranelagh.”[571] The “Hampton Court Beauties,”[572] painted in emulation of the “Windsor Beauties,” are the portraits in which we should expect the richest use of landscape, and Kneller’s tall, elaborately gowned ladies, do stand in front of gardens with pillars and balustrades, with hints here and there of a red sunset, but not even the best of these backgrounds, that in the portrait of Lady Middleton with lamb and crook, has Lely’s grace and poetic suggestiveness. Now and then, when there is some reason to emphasize the portrait as a picture, Kneller brings all his ingenuity into play and crowds the canvas with decorative detail. The little duke of Gloucester, for instance, is rendered almost pathetically childish by his varied and elaborate surroundings,[573] but the combination of draped curtains, marble steps, massive pillars, a huge sculptured urn loaded with flowers, a balustraded terrace, and, beyond it, a park landscape under a cloudy sky, gives an impression of confused magnificence, with none of the artistic restraint of Vandyck, none of the elusive, romantic charm of Lely.

After Kneller, Jervas (1675–1739), Richardson (1665–1745), Hudson (1701–79), and Highmore (1692–1780) were leaders in portrait painting. Jervas has occasional effects reminiscent of Lely as in the portraits of Dorothy Walpole and Mrs. Howard.[574] Hudson’s “Duchess of Ancaster,”[575] clad in the richest brocade, roped with pearls, stands stiffly erect in front of a rock that harks back to Vandyck. These pictures and others of their class well illustrate the wooden and unmeaning use of landscape characteristic of the mid-eighteenth century. Certain conventions from the great days of a century earlier still remained, but deprived of all charm or significance. With the successors of Kneller portrait painting reached the lowest point of the decline that had been steadily going on since Vandyck, or, at least, since Lely. Walpole, who had a high opinion of Kneller, said of his successors,

They have either left us hideous and literal transcripts of the awkward, tight-laced, behooped, and bewigged generation of beaux and belles before them; or, quitting all probability, or even possibility, have given us Arcadian shepherdesses, and soi-disant Greeks and Romans, where wigs and flounces and frippery mingle with crooks, sheep, thunderbolts, and Roman draperies.[576]

The darkness that seemed thus at the middle of the century to be settling down around the art of portrait painting was, however, the darkness that precedes the dawn, or, in this instance, the full day, for with the first portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds after he returned from Rome in 1752, and with the work of Thomas Gainsborough, his immediate contemporary, we enter upon the supreme period of British portraiture, a period in which there seemed suddenly to spring into being all the grace and skill, all the sense of beauty and poetry, all the power of imaginative interpretation, that had been waning in English art annals since the days of Vandyck. And with this great revival in the art there came a striking revival of interest in the use of landscape in portraiture.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) made use of landscape backgrounds in portraits of various kinds. His full-length portrait of Keppel was completed in 1753 and was the picture that established his fame. It is thus described by Lord Gower: “The gallant young sailor is represented as literally walking out of the canvas. His countenance is full of animation, and as he seems to step briskly, bareheaded, across the beach, his locks are blown backward from his forehead by the gale.... In the background a wild sea breaks on the shore.” This portrait, says Lord Gower, “made an epoch in that form of art.”[577] The epoch-making characteristics of the picture were, in the first place, the striking animation and naturalness of the figure as opposed to the monotony and woodenness of pose adopted by artists such as Hudson, and, in the second place, the genuine open-air effect of the whole picture, the perfectly simple and natural union of the figure and the landscape. In some other portraits of men Reynolds made use of landscape backgrounds, as in the half-lengths of Admiral Keppel (1780) and that of Lord Heathfield (1787) in which the figures stand forth boldly against a stormy sky with a suggestion of an ocean view. Some landscapes show reminiscences of Vandyck, as in the backgrounds of the equestrian portraits of Captain Orme (exhibited 1761) and Lord Ligonier[578] (about 1760), or in the conventionalized tree-trunks and distant view in the half-length of the archbishop of Armagh.[579] It is, however, in full-lengths of women and children, either singly or in groups, that Sir Joshua makes freest use of landscape. The little Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, a chubby baby rolling on the grass with her dog; Prince William of Gloucester in plum-colored cavalier costume standing on a hill against the sky; the Lady Caroline Montague Scott, a bright-eyed little maiden standing in a snowy landscape, her hands in a big muff; little Miss Cholmondeley valiantly carrying her dog over a brook; the four-year-old Viscount Althorp, a quaint little figure outlined against lovely effects of sky and foliage, are but a few of the children Reynolds has painted with admirable life and charm and in the midst of natural out-door surroundings. Even more elaborate attention is given to the landscape backgrounds in the full-lengths of women. Such portraits as those of the Marchioness Camden, Mrs. Crewe as St. Geneviève, the Viscountess Crosbie, Lady Betty Compton, the Duchess of Devonshire, the countess of Salisbury, Miss Mary Moncton, the Duchess of Rutland, Lady Bampfylde, Mrs. Bonfoy, or Mrs. Carnac, show abundantly the skill with which Reynolds united figures, drapery, and landscape so as to secure a harmonious and decorative general effect.[580] It often happens, indeed, that the faces of these tall aristocratic ladies are hardly remembered, so strongly is the attention caught by the flow of line, the shimmer of fabrics, the abundance of charming scenic detail. Mrs. Jameson says that Reynolds was the first English artist to venture upon light and gay landscape backgrounds. In his portraits of women we do not find the stormy skies, rude rocks, and blustering weather against which Lely’s ladies posed. Reynolds delights in typical English park scenery, with its variety of wood and water, its soft, dim distances, its rich clumps of trees. He often uses, too, the architectural elements appropriate to a park, but never in a hard or obtrusive fashion. His steps and balustrades, his columns and urns, gleam out from masses of foliage or are overhung with a wealth of vines and flowers. The whole effect is rich and stately, suggestive of lovely order and nurture, and is particularly well suited to the fashionable dames who are thus enshrined. In general we may say that Sir Joshua’s use of landscape in portraiture surpasses in amount that of any preceding master, and that his scenic backgrounds are unrivaled in the qualities of naturalness and charm, and in artistic suitability for the personages portrayed.[581]

[Illustration: MRS. CARNAC

_By Sir Joshua Reynolds_]

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88) uses landscape with as much insistence as Reynolds, but not in the same manner. His backgrounds are not so elaborately worked out, yet with all their slightness and sketchiness they are more imaginatively suggestive. It is, indeed, astonishing to perceive with how little reality of detail Gainsborough contrives to call up a vital impression of Nature in her most enchanting aspects. A still subtler source of charm rests in his power to fuse figures and landscape into an effect of perfect unity. The “Musidora” in the National Gallery is a picture before which, even in its present state, one could linger long in absorbed contemplation, without once mentally separating the figure and its surroundings. There is such a harmonious blending of lovely lines, of soft, rich hues, that the whole picture seems to have sprung from a single impulse. Sir Walter Armstrong says that in general Gainsborough’s landscape backgrounds “are nothing more than the extension over the unoccupied part of the canvas of the sentiment governing the sitter.”[582] Mr. Van Dyke points out the effect of the landscape in the famous portrait of “Mrs Graham,” where “the castle wall, the deep glen at the left, the loneliness of the background, add to the romance of her face.”[583] The portrait of Mrs. Robinson as “Perdita”[584] or that of “Mrs. Sheridan”[585] are even more convincing proofs of his ability to present a landscape inexplicably akin to the personality of the sitter, a landscape that in some indefinably but most real way interprets and emphasizes that personality. It is in full-length portraits of women whose beauty is enhanced by an air of pensive melancholy that this subtle use of landscape is mainly found. But in group portraits such as that of “Mrs Moody and her Children,” or, lovelier still, that of “Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickell,”[586] are landscape backgrounds every line and color of which serve to carry out and complete the grace and tenderness characteristic of the figures. In the “Squire Hallet and his Wife”[587] there is a harmony so penetrating that it haunts the mind like music. In “The Mall”[588] where there is no individual portraiture we seem at first to have but a Watteau-like effect of fashionably attired dames in a setting of rich park scenery. But presently we perceive that the whole picture conveys a sense of pathos. The ancient trees stretching up against the soft sky in immemorial majesty and beauty give to the onlooker a keen sense of the futile and evanescent life fluttering away its brief hour under their solemn and mysterious shadows.[589]

[Illustration: SQUIRE HALLET AND HIS WIFE

_By Thomas Gainsborough_]

On the same wall in the Wallace collection hang Reynolds’ “Mrs. Carnac” and Gainsborough’s “Perdita.” Both pictures exemplify the possible heightened attractiveness of a portrait in which the artist has made skilful use of a landscape background. They also serve to illustrate a central point of unlikeness in the use of landscape by the two great artists. In Reynolds’ picture the beautiful setting can be conceived of as a landscape quite apart from the stately lady whose pose, figure, and draperies it so advantageously sets off. There is artistic harmony but there is no essential union. But Gainsborough’s background cannot be thought of by itself. It merely makes us conscious that the fair Perdita is out in the light and air, that behind her are real forest depths, that the pensive, appealing charm of her face is enhanced by the pathetic loveliness of Nature herself. With Gainsborough we have reached the subtlest and most perfect use of Nature in portraiture, and his supremacy is based on the fact that his landscapes serve the true purpose of backgrounds. They never offer an individual beauty that rivals or eclipses that of the person, but they contribute to build up an impression the very heart of which is the characteristic effect made by the sitter.

After Gainsborough, from the studios of great artists such as Romney, Raeburn, Opie, and Hoppner, Sir Thomas Lawrence and Sir Thomas Beechey, and many of lesser note, came many portraits with landscape work of power and significance, but it is not, in pursuance of this topic, necessary to take up their work in detail, for the reason that Reynolds and Gainsborough led the way, and for the further reason that after them there arose no new or superior way of using Nature in portraiture.

II. LANDSCAPE PAINTING

English landscape painting from 1660 to 1800 falls naturally into three periods. During the first of these which ends in 1707 with the death of the younger Van de Velde, there was considerable landscape work, but nearly all of it was by foreign artists.[590] We do, to be sure, find early in the period an Englishman, Robert Streater (1624–80), who, in addition to his fame as a painter of historical and mythological subjects on walls and ceilings, was counted “incomparable” in landscape. His contemporary popularity is attested by the fact that in James II’s collection were five of his landscapes, but such examples of his work as are accessible in public galleries hardly substantiate his reputation. He founded his style, it is said, on “the late Italians.”[591] At the end of the period is Francis Barlow (1626–1702) who, anticipating the themes of George Morland, crowded his farmyard scenes with fowls of many varieties, with pigs, sheep, horses, cows, donkeys, and even deer. A tinted drawing by him in the South Kensington Gallery illustrates his lively conceptions, and indicates his clever use of landscape backgrounds. Working with Barlow as an engraver was Francis Place[592] (1647–1728) whose best plates were of animals, but who sometimes etched landscapes “for his own amusement.” A print of his “View of Scarborough” in the Print Room of the British Museum shows, in spite of the conventional wool-bag clouds, a notable attempt to represent truly a bold and rugged cliff with a distant sea-view and waves rolling gently in on a curving beach. But with these unimportant exceptions the painters of landscape in England before 1707 were foreigners. And of the foreign artists only the Van de Veldes, father and son, achieved more than local and temporary fame. Willem Van de Velde the Elder (1610–93) was already a famous painter of sea-pieces when Charles II called him to England in 1675. At Hampton Court may still be seen many of his huge canvases, chiefly important as pictorial chronicles of English naval achievement, but showing also effective use of sea and sky. The eighteenth-century estimate of Willem Van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707) is expressed in Walpole’s dictum, “Pre-eminence is no more to be contested with Raphael for history than with Van de Velde for sea-pieces,” and he still ranks as one of the great marine painters. English galleries, both public and private, are rich in beautiful examples of his work.[593] No other name so illustrious occurs in Walpole’s annals of this period. Of the other foreign painters it is sufficient to say that they were men whose habits of thought, whose tastes, as well as their technique, had been established in Holland, Flanders, or Italy, and who did their mature work in England because the desire of Charles II to revive the art activities fostered by his father seemed to offer a good professional opening. The fact that they painted in England had hardly more influence on the course of English art than would have been exerted by the importation of their pictures. They founded no schools, they excited little emulation or even imitation. They were merely second- or third-rate workmen who painted along in a manner studiously reminiscent of their earlier masters. Such slight effect as their work had in developing the love of Nature in England came from the fact that Englishmen at last saw depicted some of the wild or romantic scenes of their own country, scenes from Scotland and the Isle of Jersey, from the neighborhood of Derbyshire Peak, from along the banks of the Thames. But such slight influence as this attention to local scenery might have had, was, it must be insisted, nearly neutralized by the fact that these representations of English scenery were always so “touched up” in the style of some Dutch or Italian master as to be practically unrecognizable. Instead of observing Nature the artists “composed” pictures, using elements conventionally accepted as picturesque. They trained themselves to see England through the eyes of Salvator Rosa or Ruysdael or Claude Lorraine or the Poussins.

[Illustration: A CALM

_By Willem van de Velde_]

The second period of landscape art in England comprises the forty-eight years between the death of the younger Van de Velde (1707) and the return of Richard Wilson from Italy in 1755. In studying this period a convenient point of departure is given by M. Rouquet’s “L’état des arts en Angleterre,” published in 1755. His only reference to landscape art is in the following interesting but rather vague paragraph:

Rien n’est si riant que les campagnes de ce pays-là, plus d’un Peintre y fait un usage heureux des aspects charmans qui s’y présentent de toutes parts: les tableaux de paysage y sont fort à la mode, ce genre y est cultivé avec autant de succes qu’aucun autre. Il y a peu de maîtres dans ce talent qui ayent été beaucoup supérieurs aux Peintres de paysage qui jouissent aujourd’hui en Angleterre de la première réputation.[594]

M. Rouquet’s words seem to imply a much larger amount of successful and popular landscape work than extant pictures or the meager annals of the time would indicate. Possibly in the landscapes that were “fort à la mode” were included important Italian works, or the works of foreigners painting in England. There must have been, also, more landscape production than is in any way recorded, so that M. Rouquet doubtless had knowledge of pictures now practically non-existent. And even the following summary of such names and works as have survived a century and a half will give his words a modified justification.

Peter Monamy (1670–1749) was a marine painter of the school of the younger Van de Velde. “The Old East India Wharf at London Bridge,” a large and interesting canvas at the South Kensington Gallery, and “The Calm,” a small but very attractive picture at Dulwich, go far toward the maintenance of his great contemporary reputation. A second marine painter of much promise was Charles Brooking (1723–59). Of the few pictures by him in London galleries the most delightful is “The Calm,” a picture recently added to the National Gallery. A series of his naval reviews was reproduced by Boydell in 1753, and other works were engraved by Canot and Ravenet. Samuel Scott (1710–72), after Van de Velde the most important marine painter of the century, did some of his fine views of the Thames and old London bridges as early as 1745. Excellent examples of his work are in the National Gallery and at South Kensington.

[Illustration: DUNNINGTON CLIFF

_By Thomas Smith_]

There were also during this period several men whose chief pictures were of animals, but with considerable incidental use of landscape. James Seymour (1702–52), known as a portrait painter of fine horses, also painted many hunting-scenes where horses and dogs are trooping at full speed through broken country. Contemporary with Seymour was John Wootton (d. 1765) the excellence of whose representations of animals is well shown by his illustrations of Gay’s “Fables” in 1731. Wootton was also painting landscapes in the Italian manner before 1751. George Stubbs (1724–1806) began his work as an animal painter before the middle of the century. In 1740 he broke away from conventions by resolving never to copy any picture but “to look into Nature for himself and consult and study her only.” This sturdy independence ripened in 1754 into a determination to visit Italy in order to test his opinion that “Nature is superior to all Art,” a dictum worthy of note so early in the century.

Landscape painting specifically so called begins with the topographical draughtsmen of the early eighteenth century. If a draughtsman had any susceptibility to the beauties of Nature his sketch almost insensibly took on various adjuncts from the scenes about him till his work gradually merged into landscape painting for its own sake. One of the earliest topographers was Samuel Buck (1696–1779) who, with his brother Nathanael, brought out over five hundred views between 1723 and 1753.[595] Their work, stiff and crude as it is, did not confine itself to buildings or bird’s-eye views but shows some attempts at adornment by the introduction of sky and foliage. William Taverner (1703–72), another early topographer and landscape painter as well, is represented in South Kensington by one sepia drawing of a path by a river, and by a singularly attractive water-color landscape, a composition in the Italian style. Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse refers also to a view of a sand-pit at Woolwich, and to “an extensive and beautiful landscape” (now at Whitworth Institute, Manchester) showing the view from Richmond Hill. Taverner’s reputation was justly high in his own day. Smollett in “Humphrey Clinker” makes Matthew Bramble say of Taverner in a letter to Dr. Lewis (May 19),

This young gentleman of Bath is the best landscape painter now living: I was struck with his performances as I had never been by painting before. His trees not only have a richness of foliage, and warmth of colouring which delight the view; but also a certain magnificence in the disposition and spirit in the expression, which I cannot describe.... If there is any taste for ingenuity left ... this artist, I apprehend, will make a capital figure, as soon as his works are known.[596]

[Illustration: DERWENTWATER

_By William Bellers_]

After Taverner’s death “The Gentleman’s Magazine” for 1772 reiterated Smollett’s statement but in a stronger form calling Taverner “one of the best landscape painters England ever produced.” Mr. Monkhouse speaks of him as “the artist who could most justly challenge Paul Sandby’s claim to the title of the father of the English school of water-colours in the production of faithful landscape.”[597] About contemporary with Taverner is George Lambert (1710–65), engravings from whose landscapes were published in 1749. In the Print Room of the British Museum his work is represented by six attractive engravings, and there is a fresh, modern looking painting by him in the National Gallery.[598] Lambert chose as themes mixed country of slow streams or quiet lakes, with bushy shores; low, wooded hills; stretches of arable land with thatched cottages under embowering trees. In most of his pictures the rich, peaceful scene is enlivened by the presence of domestic animals, cows standing lazily in pools, sheep huddling along the road, horses coming heavily home from the day’s work. There are also men, women, and children engaged in various country sports or occupations. George Lambert is one of the first English artists to attempt what may be called domestic landscape. Contemporary with Lambert is Thomas Smith (d. 1767), known as “Smith of Derby” from the town where he chiefly resided. His “Views of Chatsworth” are dated 1744, and Vivares engraved some of his views of Derbyshire in 1745. A print from his “View of Dunnington Cliff,” dated 1745, shows a river winding in tortuous fashion into the remote distance, with wooded hills on one side, balanced on the other by meadows stretching away to a low hill crowned with a little church. The foreground shows scraggly trees, a waterfall, a lock, cattle grazing, and figures variously occupied. The crowded canvas lacks unity of impression and is thoroughly conventional in arrangement, but the details are English and are painted with manifest appreciation and a very evident attempt at fidelity. George Smith (1714–76), or “Smith of Chichester,” belongs in time with Lambert and Thomas Smith. He and his brothers were the first to establish a local school of landscape art. In 1760 he was awarded a premium of fifty pounds for “A Landskip, half-length,” the first premium given by the “Society of Arts” for landscape work, but he had done considerable Claudesque painting before this time. In spite of his imitative manner his themes are the lovely scenes about Chichester, and he painted them with genuine affection. A pleasing example of his Italian style is in the South Kensington Gallery. A dark line of foreground with tufted brownish trees on each side frames in a still lake; a fine effect of distance is given by misty blue hills beyond the lake; and sunset effects--a tender blue sky with grayish little clouds softly brightened by yellow light from the diffused golden glow along the horizon--are delicately repeated in the mirror-like water. Another early artist of whom little seems to be known is William Bellers.[599] Numerous engravings by Mason from landscapes “Painted after Nature by William Bellers” occur from 1752 to 1759. He was a Cumberland man and nearly all of his pictures are of scenes in that county and in Westmoreland. As art his work cannot rank high, but not even his fluffy hills, tossed together without a suggestion of rock foundation, nor his lack of aërial perspective, can obscure the delight with which he painted the picturesque scenery of his native regions. Bellers was apparently the first one of the long line of Lake Country artists and his pictures antedate by some years the known descriptions in poetry, travels, and fiction. Thomas Smith also painted in Westmoreland and other northern counties but there is no means of determining whether his pictures are earlier or later than those of Bellers. Alexander Cozens (d. 1786), was sent to study art in Italy. He returned to England in 1746 and exhibited from 1760 to 1781. There are at South Kensington several examples of his work, especially two interesting mountain landscapes. In the British Museum are fifty-four drawings which belong to his Italian period. Some of these are extensive views. Some of them show interesting experiments such as the attempt to represent sunlight streaming through clouds. “Altogether,” says Mr. Monkhouse, “these show that Cozens before his arrival in England, was a well-trained artist who observed Nature for himself, and was not without poetical skill” and Mr. Monkhouse finds in the “imagination, ingenuity, and trained skill” of the father adequate explanation of his son, John Robert Cozens, whose work will be noted in the next section.[600] The work of Alexander Cozens was particularly that of teaching art.[601] John Boydell (1719–1804), better known as a publisher of prints than as an original artist, yet did some interesting early work. In 1736 his interest in scenery was aroused by “a book of well-executed landscape engravings.” In 1745 he brought out a series of “landscapes for learners” the tremendous success of which laid the foundation of his great fortune, and throughout his life his activities as publisher were largely affected by his love of scenery. He was the first artist to paint in Wales. A large print done by him from one of his own pictures and bearing the date 1750 is an attempt to represent Mount Snowdon. Paul Sandby (1725–1809) is of more importance in the history of landscape art than any of the men already mentioned, but most of his work belongs after 1755. His sketches in the Highlands, whither he went as draughtsman on a road survey, were, however, made during the years 1746–51[602] and his exquisite aquatint studies of the country about Windsor belong about 1751–52 when he was with his brother Thomas at the deputy ranger’s lodge at Windsor.

[Illustration: MOUNT SNOWDON

_By John Boydell_]

That early landscape painting was not confined to England may be shown by reference to some Scotch and Irish artists. Alexander Runciman (1736–85) was born in Edinburgh. He began to paint landscapes before he was twelve. “Furnished with pencils, and brushes, and colours, he took to the fields; his first sketches were rocks, trees, and waterfalls.” At fourteen he was placed in the studio of John and Robert Norris where he showed himself “one of the wildest enthusiasts that ever devoted themselves to the art.” “Other artists,” it was said, “talked meat and drink, but Runciman talked landscape.” By 1755 Runciman set up as landscape painter on his own account, but he speedily learned that though landscape might bring applause it was not an art whereby even a moderate livelihood could be obtained and by 1760 the young painter had turned to other realms.[603] John Norris, of whom little is known except that he was Runciman’s teacher, was nevertheless in his day reckoned “a celebrated landscape painter.” Brydall says that he was “probably the first to create, or at least to minister to the taste for landscape in the Scottish metropolis.”[604] In Ireland was an obscure artist named Rogers who has been called “the father of landscape art” in that country. His pupil, Butts (d. 1764), painted early landscapes said to be “impressive copies of the wild scenes which abound in the county of Cork, and the romantic views that abound on the margin of Black Water.”

From this catalogue of names and dates several facts emerge. In the first place, nearly all the landscape work mentioned belongs after 1740. From 1707 to about 1740 English landscape art can hardly be said to exist at all. Even the foreign artists so much in evidence in the preceding period are no longer to be found in England.[605] George II frankly hated “boetry and bainting” and the reigns before him were hardly more hospitably inclined to aesthetic claims outside the realms of portraiture and history painting. This lack of royal patronage would sufficiently account for the dearth of foreign painters, and perhaps, also, for the lack of English landscape painters. All native art-impulse would likewise feel the inevitably deadening effect of the universal and rigid acceptance of foreign canons of art. But whatever the cause, the fact remains that most of the English landscapes M. Rouquet speaks so enthusiastically of in 1755 must have been painted in the preceding fifteen years.

In the second place, the landscape art, though technically not of high rank, is yet, by its amount, the range of its themes, and its suggestions of a new personal feeling toward the external world, an important contribution to the growing love of Nature. The output of the years 1740–55 is really surprisingly large and correspondingly varied in theme. There are three artists who paint successful marines, and three whose studies of animal life take good rank. In landscapes we find much emphasis on the pastoral beauty of England, its hills, streams, lakes, woods, meadows, and thatched cottages. Wilder scenery is also portrayed, for by the middle of the century the Highlands of Scotland, Derbyshire and Yorkshire, the Lake District, and Wales, have all received recognition as true subjects for landscape art. And there is, in the case of every artist, even of those who feel most strongly the dominance of foreign masters, a very evident study of the details of English landscapes and an eagerness to record in painting the charms felt by the artist. It should also be noted that, though nearly all the more important pictures were the work of English artists, yet native artists began to paint scenery at about the same time in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

The period from 1755 to 1800 is throughout rich in landscape production, but the thirty years between 1755 and 1785 is the most significant portion of the period. These are the years during which landscape art was established in England and during which it won the greatest laurels it was to have before the great days of the early nineteenth century. The two famous artists of this notable thirty years were Wilson and Gainsborough and it will simplify the account if we take up their work before that of their lesser contemporaries.

[Illustration: THE SUMMIT OF CADER-IDRIS

_By Richard Wilson_]

Richard Wilson (1714–82) was born at Penegoes near Machynlleth, Montgomeryshire, Wales, but while still a child, his father, the Rev. John Wilson, went to live at Mold, Flintshire, and there the lad was brought up. Talent of some sort as an artist he early evinced and at fifteen he was sent to London to study portrait painting, a profession at which he worked steadily for twenty-one years, and by which he apparently made a fair income though his portraits never rose much above mediocrity.[606] At thirty-six he went to Italy for further study. During his six years there he devoted himself exclusively to landscape. He remained in Venice a year; with William Lock he made a slow tour from Venice to Rome; with Lord Dartmouth he went to Naples; from Rome as his headquarters he made many excursions into the surrounding regions; and throughout all these travels he was tireless in the production of studies, sketches, pictures. Through the generous praise of recognized authorities such as Zucarelli, Mengs, and Vernet, a report of his surprising achievements reached England, and when he returned to London in 1755 it was to find his reputation practically established. His solemn style did not, however, at once commend itself to the artists of his time. Wright says that his return excited “some interest and much criticism in the coteries of art,” and that certain artists “who then constituted themselves, what they called _A Committee of Taste_, and led the understanding of the public in art” sat in judgment on Wilson’s work and resolved “That the manner of Mr. Wilson was not suited to the English, and that if he hoped for patronage he must change it for the lighter style of Zucarelli.” When this committee waited on Wilson it was met with cool contempt,[607] and he painted on in his own fashion. But the committee’s estimate of patronage was apparently correct, for during the lifetime of the artist, in spite of the fact that during a period of twenty-five years he assiduously painted landscapes, he did not achieve an even moderately comfortable livelihood. His life was one of sordid financial shifts and of growing bitterness of spirit, until, in 1780, through a small inheritance, he was enabled to retire to a little patrimony in Wales, where, broken and enfeebled, he spent the two years before his death.

Wilson’s work as a landscape painter began certainly as early as 1750 in Italy, and all probabilities are in favor of the supposition that it began earlier in England. To be sure, no juvenile sketches, no anecdotes of youthful tendencies, remain to substantiate this conjecture. Even the “View of Dover,” the one landscape known to have been painted before the Italian visit, is no longer in existence. But the fact that this picture was at once engraved by J. S. Miller would seem to indicate that it was counted a work of some importance. Furthermore, when Wilson began his work in Italy there was no apprentice period. Work done in the early years there shows a management of landscape detail and composition quite equal to that of his later work, and such as would not be prepared for by the most zealous study in portraiture. It is, indeed, hardly believable that a pronounced passion for landscape such as characterized Wilson should never have tempted his brush till he was thirty-six, and should then, at the chance words of a fellow-artist suddenly open out before him as his life-work. Edwards Edwardes is responsible for the anecdote that attributes Wilson’s change from portraiture to landscape to the advice of Zucarelli. But we have, on the other hand, the more probable account given by Mr. Hastings in a volume of etchings made by him from the Ford collection of Wilson’s paintings. Mr. Hastings gives Mr. R----s (probably Mr. Samuel Rogers, the author of “Italy” and an art connoisseur) as authority for the statement that an influential patron of the arts, Mr. William Lock of Norbury, perceived Wilson’s bent toward landscape of the grand sort, and urged him to go to Italy as the best place to perfect himself in that art. Mr. Beaumont Fletcher, Wilson’s latest biographer, considers that the artist was fully conscious of his powers as a landscape painter, and that his visit to Rome was premeditated for the purpose of study in that particular line.[608] Sir Walter Armstrong also maintains the probability, almost certainty, of landscape work by Wilson prior to the Italian tour.[609]

The landscapes painted by Wilson between 1755 and 1760, the date of the first public exhibition of pictures[610] in England, cannot be absolutely identified, but he was probably spending much of his time in painting from the sketches made in Italy. In the exhibition of 1760 was his “Niobe.” In the same year he painted an upright picture of the Arno for the drawing-room mantel-piece of a patron in Platt Hall, Manchester. In 1761 were exhibited “The Lake of Nemi” and other Italian pictures. The “Phaeton” appeared in 1763, the “L’Anconetta” in 1764, the “Villa Madama” in 1765, and many other Italian pictures in these and successive years. By 1768 he had exhibited about thirty landscapes nearly all of which were based on his Italian sketches, and it was his custom through his life to paint pictures the chief elements of which were the sunny skies and ruined temples of classic regions.

A recognition of the great influence of Italy over Wilson’s mind and art should not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that he gave equally sympathetic response to the scenes of his own land. When Stothard was a student at the Royal Academy he asked Wilson to suggest to him something to copy, and Wilson, who happened to be looking out over the Thames, responded that there could not well be anything better to copy than that. That he loved English scenery becomes apparent when we study such pictures as the lovely “English Landscape”[611] in the possession of the Rev. Stopford Brooke, the “River Scene with Castle” in the South Kensington Gallery, the “View on the Wye”[611] in the National Gallery, the “De Tabley House” in the possession of A. T. Hollingsworth,[612] “Wilton in Wiltshire,”[613] “View in Kew Gardens,”[614] “Sion House,” and “A View near Chester.” The dates of these English pictures can seldom be determined, but it is evident that he made occasional sketching tours, for the exhibitions record views in Bedfordshire, Devonshire, and Cheshire, besides those of places in the immediate neighborhood of London such as St. James’ Park, Windsor Great Park, Kew Gardens, and Hounslow Heath.

But none of these English pictures, and few even of his Italian ones, can compare in dignity and beauty with his notable Welsh views. He certainly visited Wales before 1766 for in that year he exhibited two views from North Wales, “Carnarvon Castle” and “Northwest View of Snowdon.” It seems very likely that when he was painting at Manchester and Chester in 1760 he took the opportunity to visit his old home, but there are no dated Welsh pictures before 1766. But even this date gives him no predecessors among artists painting in Wales except men so inferior as John Boydell and Anthony Devis. Other Welsh pictures were exhibited by Wilson in 1771 and 1774. In 1775 Boydell published “Six Views in Wales,” engravings by Byrne and Rooker from Wilson’s pictures. Britton in his “Fine Arts in England” (1805) said that “Wilson’s ‘Six Views’ were the most important topographical views ever published in England.” But they only partially represent the great amount of work done by Wilson on Welsh subjects. In the Print Room of the British Museum are engravings from many other fine Welsh pictures such as “The Great Bridge over the Taafe,” engraved by Canot, “Kilgarren Castle,” engraved by Elliott, “Pembroke Castle” by Mason, “Carnarvon Castle” by Byrne, “Snowdon Hill” by Woollett, “The Summit of Cader Idris” by E. and M. Rooker. Even in the engravings these are pictures of very great nobility and charm. One original “Snowdon” picture is in the Manchester Art Gallery. It is called “A Welsh Valley with Snowdon Hill” and is of the rarest beauty. The rough foreground slopes, the distant mountain bathed in light and delicately outlined against the softest of skies, the mists rising from the hidden valleys, are magically combined into a picture adequate in its presentation of the facts of Nature, and having, also, a strong poetic and imaginative appeal. A beautiful print after Wilson in the British Museum is another, “Snowdon Hill,” by Woollett. The loneliness, the serenity, the majesty, and the beauty of mountain regions are portrayed by Wilson with an essentially modern feeling.

[Illustration: KILGARREN CASTLE

_By Richard Wilson_]

It was many years before any other artist so well illustrated Blake’s phrase, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet,”[615] as did Wilson. For fifteen impressionable years he had lived in North Wales and his mind and heart had been insensibly affected by the sublimity of mountain scenes. Wales had given as important and effective tutelage to him as did the Lake District to the youthful Wordsworth sixty years later. Wilson is reported to have said that Wales “afforded every requisite for a landscape painter” but we need no testimony beyond his pictures to show with what power these rugged cliffs and deep ravines, these silent lakes and tarns, these tumultuous streams and waterfalls, these lonely mountain masses towering into the sky, spoke to him both as an artist and as a man when, in mature life with mature power, he returned to the land of his birth. He painted Welsh scenes with boldness and freedom, with grandeur, dignity, and impressiveness, and with a power of divination that must put him high in the ranks of painters of mountain scenery in any age.[616]

In one characteristic Wilson’s Italian and Welsh pictures are alike. He was temperamentally susceptible to the pathos of ruins. His Italian pictures are steeped in a sense of inescapable sadness. Through the loveliness of Nature runs the mournful memory of fallen grandeur, of races who have lived and loved and are no more. But the ruined strongholds and castles of his own land touched him even more deeply. The bright stillness of Kilgarren Castle on its rocky cliff, mirrored in the smooth surface of the river below, is more beautiful and more subtly suggestive of “old, unhappy, far-off things” than are the Italian pictures.

Through all Wilson’s pictures we feel, furthermore, a quality of genuineness in both observation and feeling. He studied the great masters of landscape, but not as a copyist. He compared their work with Nature which he studied for himself. Ruskin says of him,

Here, at last, we feel, is an honest Englishman, who has got away out of all the Camere, and the Loggie, and the Stanze, and the schools, and the Disputas ... and has laid himself down with His own poor eyes and heart, and the sun casting his light between ruins--possessor, he, of so much of the evidently blessed peace of things--he and the poor lizard in the cranny of the stones beside him.[617]

Mr. Beaumont Fletcher in developing this conception of Wilson as one able to see with his own eyes, very justly points out that his idealism, even in the Italian pictures, is based on a singularly close representation of the facts of Nature. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds when he objects to Wilson’s use of classical figures incidentally testifies to the truth of his landscapes which are, says Sir Joshua, “too near common nature to admit the supernatural.”[618]

Wilson has been called “a painter’s painter,” and various testimonies show how deeply impressed later distinguished artists were by his work. Sir James D. Linton[619] points out that “Turner carried Wilson’s methods so far in some of the works of his early middle period as almost to amount to imitation,” and notes a picture by Turner of “Kilgarrin Castle” “so like Wilson in manner, treatment, and colour that it might fairly be called a ‘Wilson Turner.’” Constable, also, though he did not choose the grand themes, and though he rejected the classical mannerisms of Wilson, was yet one of his great admirers. Of a visit to the gallery of Sir John Leicester in 1823 he wrote, “I recollect nothing so much as a large, solemn, bright, warm, fresh landscape by Wilson, which still swims in my brain like a delicious dream. Poor Wilson! think of his fate, think of his magnificence.”[620] Of Wilson’s place in the development of art Ruskin says, “I believe that with the name of Richard Wilson the history of sincere landscape art, founded on a meditative love of nature, begins with England.”

[Illustration: A WELSH VALLEY WITH SNOWDON HILL

_By Richard Wilson_]

Thomas Gainsborough, though mainly known as a portrait painter, showed an early and persistent bent toward landscape. Before he was twelve it was his delight to spend his mornings in the woods near his home at Sudbury in Suffolk, sketching from streams, trees, cattle, sheep, and peasants. In 1741, at fourteen years of age, he went to London and studied, first under Gravelot, then under Hayman, and finally set up a studio of his own. His ostensible work was portraits for which he charged from three to five guineas, but he likewise painted landscapes for such prices as they would bring. From 1745 to 1759 he was again in Suffolk, but this time at Ipswich, twenty-two miles east from his old home at Sudbury, and in the region between the Orwell and the Stour, the region afterward made famous by Constable. During the Ipswich period he was slowly building up a reputation as a portrait painter; but here, too, he made “Madam Nature, not man, his sole study.” He did much sketching along the picturesque banks of the Orwell and in the groves of oaks and elms in the neighborhood of Ipswich. That he painted many landscapes while at Ipswich is indicated by the fact that Governor Thicknesse called upon him in 1754,[621] and was much struck by the great beauty of the small landscapes mingled with the rather stiff portraits in the artist’s studio. None of these landscapes can now be identified, but it was their excellence that gained from Governor a commission to paint “Landguard Fort,” important as the earliest known of Gainsborough’s landscapes, though, even in this case, the original picture has perished and is known only through Thomas Major’s engraving. To the latter part of the Ipswich period belong the “Cornard Wood,” “View of Dedham” and two small uprights in the National Gallery, besides seven or eight other canvases attributed to these years. The landscapes of this period were strongly influenced by Dutch artists. The most noteworthy picture of the Ipswich years, the “Cornard Wood,” might almost, says Mr. Boulton, have been painted by Both or Berghem. The Dutch fidelity to the details of the scene in this picture was shown in two other probably contemporary landscapes of which Mr. Fulcher wrote, “They were both drawn and coloured in the open air: in one of them a young oak is painted leaf for leaf, while ferns and grasses are portrayed with microscopic fidelity.”[622] Gainsborough’s life at Bath (1760–74) was marked by almost exclusive attention to portraiture, yet in the midst of his successes here he wrote, “I’m sick of portraits and wish very much to take my viol-da-gam and walk off to some sweet village where I can paint landskip and enjoy the fag-end of life in quietness and ease.” Quin said at this time that when a portrait was on the easel Gainsborough was disposed to growl at all sublunary things, but if he was engaged on a landscape “he was all gaiety, his imagination in the skies.” He employed the intervals between sittings in studying the fine trees in his neighborhood. He painted numerous landscapes and rural scenes during the Bath period, the more celebrated ones, such as the “Market Cart” of the National Gallery, the “Harvest Wagon,” and the “Cottage Door,” belonging to the later years of that period. During Gainsborough’s last or London period (1774–88) he still kept up his interest in Nature and took a house on Kew Green that he might have a convenient center for sketching tours along the banks of the Thames, and many landscapes were produced during these years. Walpole says of one exhibited in 1777 that it was “by far the finest landscape ever painted in England, and equal to the great masters.” Another in 1779 Walpole called “most natural, bold, and admirable.” Six landscapes in 1780 he characterized as “charming, very spirited, as admirable as the great masters.”[623] Walpole’s favorable opinion of Gainsborough was quite generally shared by artists and critics, but even in his case there was but a small purchasing public, so that when he died in 1788 his house was found to be filled with unsold landscapes. This fact, and the large sums he could command for portraits, make it all the more striking that out of a total of eight hundred and eighty-seven pictures about a fifth should be landscapes.[624]

[Illustration: THE MARKET CART

_By Thomas Gainsborough_]

In the landscapes of the Bath and London periods the labored accuracy of the early work gives place to the “landscape generalization” by which Gainsborough’s mature paintings are characterized. In these later landscapes, of which the great “Watering Place” in the National Gallery may be taken as the supreme example, there is an apparent ignoring of the separate facts of Nature. No oaks are painted leaf for leaf. There is not even sufficient definiteness to make the kind of tree unmistakable. Yet the effect of Nature is adequately rendered. The mind is conducted into genuine woodland coolness and shade. As we look we become gradually conscious of the mysterious charm of Nature herself. These landscapes not only satisfy the eye by wonderful harmonies of color and flowing line, but they speak appealingly to the emotions. Constable says of them, “They are soothing, tender, and affecting. The stillness of noon, the depths of twilight, and the dews and pearls of morning are all to be found on the canvases of this most benevolent and kind-hearted man. On looking at them we find tears in our eyes and we know not what brings them.”[625]

In theme Gainsborough is distinctively English, and even within this limit his range is narrow. The grander elements in Nature did not stir his imagination. Mountains, the ocean, storms, were, to be sure, not entirely absent from his pictures. In 1781 he had apparently been painting along the coast, for Walpole comments on two pictures “of sea and land,” “so fine and natural that one stepped back for fear of being splashed.” One of these was, Mr. Conway thinks, the Duke of Westminster’s “Coast Scene,” “a sparkling picture, articulately suggestive of a single delightful idea,” a windy day on an estuary. In 1783 Gainsborough made a trip to Cumberland and Westmoreland, gaily predicting that on his return he would show “your Grays and Dr. Browns to be but tawdry fan-painters.”[626] Sir Walter Armstrong reproduces a chalk drawing subsequent to this period in which “the hills in the distance are thoroughly true in mass, perspective, and aërial envelope;”[627] Mr. Fletcher is of the opinion that had Gainsborough “lived a few years longer, he would undoubtedly have taken a new departure in landscape art;”[628] and Mr. Boulton finds in the pictures after 1783 a new tendency to deal with rocky foreground and mountain scenery.[629] Yet a few successful coast scenes and a late and certainly rather slight interest in mountain regions can hardly affect the statement that Gainsborough was, on the whole, but little moved by the grander aspects of Nature. He cared as little for the majestic, the terrible, the awe-inspiring, as he did for the trim, the formal, and the precise. What he loved to portray was the gently varied and picturesque scenery of his own countryside. He sought out woodland roads, lanes with steep grassy banks, trees heavy with foliage, tangled copses, pools of still water, skies glowing with sunset hues, or deepening into twilight, or with the blue showing through rifted storm clouds. Cumberland and Westmoreland had for him no appeal comparable to the remembered charm of Suffolk.

Gainsborough’s pictures of rural life do not properly come under the head of landscape painting, but the representation of country activities, and pure landscapes run into each other by many gradations. If we consider those pictures in which landscape elements distinctly predominate we shall find that the figures of men and animals are hardly more than animating or decorative details. One of the artist’s rare theoretical statements was to the effect that a landscape should admit only such figures as “create a little business for the eye to be drawn from the trees in order to return to them with more glee.”[630] Accordingly the figures whether of men or animals were painted because they helped out the scheme of light, of color, of form in the picture as a whole. But while this is true, it is likewise true that his rustic groups, his shaggy horses, his cattle, and goats, and donkeys, and pigs are something more than picturesque elements in the landscape. They help to individualize and interpret it, and they give it a quaint, homely charm. The grandeur of Wilson’s themes, the solemnity of his tone, make the few small figures in his pictures seem strikingly incongruous with the scene, but Gainsborough’s figures have an intimate union with the landscape.

However impossible it may be to determine who is the “father” of English landscape art, there can be no question as to the value of having at the formative period of that art two men so unlike in education, temperament, and taste as Wilson and Gainsborough. One brought in the Italian, the other the Dutch influence, yet each was too strong an individuality to be a mere copyist. The one painted with poetic comprehension and in a grand manner, not only the sunny skies, clear air, bright lakes, and ruined temples of classic lands, but also, and with equal power, scenes of dignity, grandeur, and pathos, in his own land, while the other painted with genuine tenderness and affection the lovely scenes of rural England. Both loved Nature passionately and strove to express that love in their pictures. From the point of view of a growing taste for the beauties of the out-door world, both artists are of the greatest importance. The transfer of interest from man to Nature is as marked in their pictures as in any other realm of thought and emotion.

Contemporary with Wilson and Gainsborough were many artists of lesser note whose work is nevertheless important because of the cumulative testimony it bears to the growing interest in Nature. The catalogues of the Society of Artists (1761–91), of the Free Society (1761–83), and of the Royal Society which began its exhibitions in 1769,[631] supplemented by some other scattered sources of information, give an idea of the scope and the themes of this work, though not many of the original pictures are now accessible.

We find, in the first place, that nearly all the artists who were painting from Nature before 1755 continued their work for periods of considerable length after that date. Boydell published forty plates from the “Derbyshire Views” of Thomas Smith who continued to exhibit till 1767.[632] Samuel Scott exhibited occasional sea and shore views to 1771. Between 1761–74 George Smith of Chichester exhibited over a hundred landscapes some of which show a reaching-out into new realms. He has not only _genre_ pictures such as “A Country Family Picking Their Own Hops” (1761)[633] and “Cottages in a Wood” (1773), but experiments such as “Moonlight,” “Mist,” “Sunset,” and eighteen “Frost” or “Snow” scenes. William Bellers is credited, between 1761–73, with seventy-seven landscapes, twenty-eight of them being views in the Lake District. Alexander Cozens lived till 1786 and exhibited many small landscapes in which he paid especial attention to “chiaro-oscuro.” His chief work, however, was as a teacher, and he published some books on art, notable among them being “The Shape, Skeleton, and Foliage of Thirty-Two Species of Trees” (1771, republished 1786). Taverner was also working as late as 1772. George Stubbs was constantly represented in exhibitions from 1761 to 1803.

[Illustration: PEMBROKE CASTLE

_By Paul Sandby_]

Of far more importance than any of the artists mentioned in the foregoing paragraph is Paul Sandby,[634] who, as has already been indicated, was the first to make known to art the wild and beautiful scenery of the Scotch Highlands. In 1773 he exhibited his first Welsh picture, and after that he did much work in Wales. Though not the first to paint in that region--for Boydell, Wilson, Farington, and Devis were ahead of him--he yet did much to show its picturesque possibilities. His important Welsh “aquatint views taken on the spot” appeared in four sets of twelve plates each, beginning in 1775, the very year of Boydell’s publication of Wilson’s “Six Views.” These mountain pictures, especially those of the second series, justly rank as the most vital landscape work contemporary with Wilson and Gainsborough. “Llangolin in Denbigh,” “Conwyd Mill,” “Llanberis Lake and Great Mountain Snowdon,” “Pont-y-Pair over the River Conway” are but a few of the many pictures that show with what enthusiasm Sandby surrendered himself to impressions from the grand scenery of Wales. The striking change from early eighteenth-century topographical sketches where the building was merely rendered slightly more attractive by washed-in skies and greensward is evidenced by such pictures as Sandby’s “Wynnestay, Seat of Sir Watkins William Wynne” which is a pure landscape with no house visible. So, too, in “Chirk Castle” there is but the faintest indication of the castle in the distance. Sandby’s original purpose may have been topographical but the outcome was pure landscape of great interest and significance.

There are, in addition to these older men, several artists whose work begins about 1760 or soon after. Anthony Devis exhibited in 1761–63 eight pictures, chiefly “Views in Wales.” He would thus antedate all painters of Welsh scenery except Boydell. In 1761–78 James Lambert exhibited numerous landscapes including many with titles such as “A Misty Morning with Ewes and Lambs,” “Landscape with Ewes and Lambs,” “A Farm-yard with Cattle.” George Barret (1732–84) was an Irish painter who had taken a premium for landscape from the Dublin Society before he came to England in 1762. Of the fifty-five landscapes exhibited by him in England during the years 1764–82 the earliest were of Powerscourt Park in Ireland, but from 1769 to 1772 he shows Scotch and Lake District views, and in 1776–77 three pictures of “Llanberis Pool in the Mountains of Snowdon.” The list of his pictures shows some interesting special studies as “A Moonlight, with the Effect of a Mist; a Study from Nature” (1767); “A Group of Beech Trees” (1776); “A View of Windermere Lake, in Westmoreland, the effect, the sun beginning to appear in the morning, with the mists breaking and dispersing” (1781). Barret was a very popular painter. Of his premium picture in 1764 Barry wrote, “My friend and countryman, Barret, does no small honour to Landscape amongst us; I have seen nothing to match his last year’s premium picture. It has discovered to me a very great want in the aërial part of my favourite Claude’s performances.” Barret’s work brought prices never before paid for landscapes, Lord Dalkeith having given fifteen hundred pounds for three of them. The Rev. John Lock commissioned him to paint the principal rooms of his house from skirting to ceiling with landscape scenes.[635] Richard Wright (1735–75) was a marine painter known sometimes as “Wright of the Isle of Man.” In 1764 he took a premium of fifty guineas for a sea-piece from which Woollett engraved “The Fishery.” Such themes as “A Ship in a Squall,” “The Sun Dispersing a Fog,” “A Fresh Gale,” “A Moonlight,” show attempts at the representation of other aspects of the sea than merely as a background for England’s navy. Wright exhibited till 1773. Another marine painter, John Cleveley, exhibited from 1764–86. Fleets, royal yachts, ships of war, distinguished naval events, are his chief themes. Dominic Serres (1722–93) exhibited after 1765. He, too, was chiefly occupied with naval affairs, particularly so after 1780 when he became marine painter to his majesty. The Rev. William Gilpin (1723–1804) contributed to the interest in home scenery by numerous sketches and, especially, by his book, “Forest Scenery” (1786). Far more gifted was his younger brother, Sawrey Gilpin (1733–1807), who excelled as an animal painter. His most abundant as well as his most spirited and accurate work is in portraits of fine horses and dogs. But he painted other animals also, birds, deer, foxes, tigers, and even “American Bears” (1798). There is in the South Kensington Museum a beautiful canvas by Gilpin called “Cows in a Landscape.” It has a smooth, clear, decorative effect, the cows are broadly, simply, but realistically painted, and the landscape gives in most suggestive fashion the mists, the faintly illumined sky, the dewy feeling, of early morning.[636]

[Illustration: LODORE WATERFALL

_By Joseph Farington_]

The men enumerated in the preceding paragraph did all of their work, or, in a few cases such as Paul Sandby and Sawrey Gilpin who painted through the century, did much of their most characteristic work, before 1785. There is still another group of men who were born about the middle of the century the bulk of whose work, or whose most significant work, belongs before 1800. Of professional marine painters we have Robert Cleveley who began to exhibit in 1780; the more celebrated Nicholas Pocock (1741–1821); and John Thomas Serres (1759–1825), all of whom carried on the traditional representation of noted ships, harbors, and naval actions. David Allan’s (1744–96) best work is his set of illustrations of “The Gentle Shepherd.” He went to the Pentland Hills and studied both the places and the people he wished to represent. “He visited,” says Cunningham, “every hill, dale, tree, stream, and cottage, which could be admitted into the landscape of the poet.... Glaid’s farm house, the Monk’s burn, the Linn, the Washing Green, Habbie’s How, New Hall House, and that little breast-deep basin in the burn, called Peggie’s pool, were all carefully drawn.” It was Allan’s endeavor to do in painting what Ramsay had done half a century before in poetry, and though his pictures are far from expressing the brightness and beauty of the poem, they fairly take rank as important attempts to represent native landscapes from careful, first-hand observation. James de Loutherbourg (1740–1812) came to England about 1770, and was constantly represented in the exhibitions during the rest of the century. His vigorous storms and sea-scapes were long popular. The public taste that could laud De Loutherbourg’s pictures and neglect Wilson’s was severely satirized by “Peter Pindar.”[637] But De Loutherbourg has another claim to recognition in that he was one of the staunchest defenders of the picturesque scenery of the British Isles as against that of other lands. He maintained that no English painter need go abroad for inspiration when he had access to the Highlands of Scotland, the Lake District of Cumberland, and the mountainous region of North Wales. It was to further this idea that he opened his panorama of English scenery in 1782, a show by which Gainsborough was fascinated, and which, apparently, prompted his visit to the Lakes in 1783.[638] Thomas Hearne (1744–1817) is of importance in the early history of water-color. In 1777 he began a series of tours through Great Britain for the purpose of illustrating “The Antiquities of Great Britain” for which he made fifty-two drawings. Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse praises him for close and fresh observation of Nature, for excellence in atmospheric perspective, for truth of sunlight, and for beauty of trees and skies.[639] Though he lived well into the nineteenth century, much of his most finished work belongs before 1800. Joseph Farington (1747–1821) was a pupil of Richard Wilson. He exhibited almost yearly from 1765 to 1813. He may possibly have been with Wilson in Wales before 1766. At any rate he exhibited in 1768 and 1770 views of Snowdon Hill and Penmaenmawr. Between 1778 and 1784 are views of “Ambleside,” “Skiddaw and Derwentwater,” “Lodore,” “Rydal Waterfall,” “Borrodale Grange,” “Winandermere from High-harig.” Mr. Gilpin in his book on Cumberland (1786) says that descriptions are useless since there are prints so accurate and beautiful as these of Mr. Farington. Mr. Farington also has many views from Kent, Sussex, Devonshire, Oxford, and Buckinghamshire. John Rathbone (1750–1807), sometimes called “the Manchester Wilson,” began to exhibit in 1785. Of his forty-eight recorded landscapes eleven represent Lake District scenes, and most of the others are from similar scenery in Derbyshire, Lancashire, on the Wye, or in Wales. Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759–1817) painted Welsh views after 1796 and Cumberland views after 1798. He is best known, however, as a skilful painter of animals and of groups of gay, rollicking rustic figures in an agreeable landscape setting. Of the six pictures by him in the South Kensington Museum the one called “Jack in his Glory” is most characteristic. The “Conway Castle, North Wales” (1794) has the added interest of being a moonlight scene. Abraham Pether (1756–1812) began to exhibit in 1777. From 1784 to 1800 at least a fifth of his exhibited pictures were simply entitled “Moonlight.” He painted “a water-mill,” “an iron foundry,” “a waterfall,” “a fire,” and “ruins” by moonlight. He also chose as themes “Evening,” “Sunset,” “Morning just before Dawn,” “Evening and Rain,” and other unusual and delicately discriminated natural phenomena. Edward Dayes (1763–1804), the master of Girtin, made many studies in the Lake District after 1790. The “Windermere” and “Keswick Lake” in the gallery at South Kensington attest the truthfulness and charm of his work.

The most important landscape painters of the second half of the century have yet to be mentioned, Morland, Girtin, and Cozens. John Robert Cozens (1752–99) began to exhibit when only fifteen years of age. At twenty-four he was taken by Mr. Robert Payne Knight to Switzerland to make sketches of the scenery. Of the work done on this trip Mr. Monkhouse says,

These drawings of 1776 are remarkable in the history not only of English water-colour painting and English art, but in the history of landscape painting of all time. They are the first successful[640] attempt to give a true impression of Alpine scenery. From the first Cozens seems to have found his way to render its character, to convey the grandeur of its snow-crowned peaks, the depth of its valleys, the solitude of its lakes, the appearance of its slopes, “fledged,” as Shelley sang, “with pines,” the sun striking through the gorges on high-perched cot, or village, the chill of the shaded hollows filled with mist, the cloaks of cloud about the shoulders of the hills,--and all this not in a pretty conventional or a grand conventional manner, but with a style that was Nature’s own.... His mountains look their height, and suggest their bulk and weight.[641]

Cozens was in England again by 1779. A second visit to Italy with Mr. Beckford ended in 1783 and resulted like the first tour in a large number of water-color drawings. Mr. Thornbury comments on a view of a glacier valley executed at this time as “worthy of all praise for its multitudinousness, breadth, and grand, harmonious simplicity, as well as for the dazzling purity of its colour.”[642] Constable said of Cozens that he was “all poetry,” and that “he was the greatest genius that ever touched landscape;” and Turner said that from Cozens’ “Hannibal Crossing the Alps” (1776) he had learned more than from anything he had before seen.[643]

Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) had a short life but he came early to the maturity of his genius. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1794 to 1801. In about 1796 he went to the north of England and to Scotland with James Moore, and there “made many sketches of pure landscape, recording the grand effects of light and shade upon the swelling moors and rolling downs, with a breadth and simplicity and a large regard to truth never equalled before.”[644] In the South Kensington Gallery are many water-colors by Girtin that show his excellent drawing and his skill in the use of color. Four Yorkshire views, a “Coast Scene,” and three river scenes well illustrate the truth and vigor with which he represented landscape. Mr. Ruskin said of Girtin’s work, “He is often as impressive to me as Nature herself; nor do I doubt that Turner owed more to his teaching and companionship than to his own genius in the first years of his life.”[645]

[Illustration: THE WOOD CUTTERS

_By George Morland_]

George Morland (1763–1804) exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of ten, and from that time on each year saw many pictures from his brush. He seldom painted pure landscapes. But whatever his theme the landscape setting is almost invariably worthy of particular attention. In many notable pictures of gipsies or wood-cutters it is, in fact, not the fat, invertebrate figures of men and women that hold the eye. The imagination is captured instead by the bower of shade, by the deep wild-wood of the background. So, too, in various coast scenes, the chalk cliffs against which breakers dash in blinding spray, the trees bending before the wind, the rifts of blue sky showing through scattering storm clouds, the feeling of rain in the air, certainly count for as much in the general impression as do the men tugging at the rope or lading wagons with the spoils of the sea. Nearly all of Morland’s domestic pictures have an exquisite framework of old oak trees, climbing vines, and flowering shrubs. J. T. Smith[646] says that Morland was “the first artist who gave the sturdy oak its peculiar character in landscape painting.”

As a painter of animals Morland excels. His horses are of especial interest for he does not expend his art on portraits of noted racers or thoroughbreds, but on work-horses, and preferably on such horses at the moment of release from toil. “The Inside of a Stable” (1791) in the National Gallery, and “Horses in a Stable” (1791) in the South Kensington Gallery are two of his finest works; and they show not only his power of painting dim old interiors in the softest blend of color, but they show particularly the attentive sympathy with which he had studied horses. Many similar pictures could be cited but chief among them for pathetic understanding is “The Blind White Horse.” Pigs were among Morland’s favorite subjects. So frequently did he introduce them into his pictures that the title-page of a book of his sketches portrayed him leaning over a fence and making a drawing of three fat sows. The animals in his pictures were all studied from the life. The white horse so often depicted by him was modeled from an old nag he bought and kept for a fortnight in his painting room. He regularly kept by him various sorts of animals for study, “dogs, rabbits, guinea-pigs, fowls, ducks, pigeons, mice, and many other kinds of livestock,”[647] and sooner or later these were sure to appear in his pictures with convincing realism.

Morland rather defiantly declared that “the barn, the cow-house and the piggery” were his favorite themes, but he has another class of subjects, his numerous pictures of children, in which the out-door setting is of great charm. Reynolds had painted beautiful pictures of high-born, well-dressed children; and Gainsborough had given lovely, pathetic, somewhat idealized representations of cottage children; but Morland takes us into the realm of childhood itself, and his gay, romping lads and lasses swing on gates, play games, go nutting, sail toy boats, in the midst of most delightfully real out-of-door surroundings.[648] All that Morland does is simple, genuine, spontaneous, and has a permanent appeal, and his landscape without being especially beautiful or at all novel, has a sort of homely, intimate, and obvious charm.

A survey of the century shows that there has been from 1700 to 1800 a remarkable change in the attitude of painting toward the external world. From a predominating interest in man as shown in history-painting and portraiture, with, at the best, landscape as an unimportant background or adornment, we come to a period when landscape is not only a very important element in portraiture, but is counted as so valuable in itself that figures take rank as hardly more than insignificant landscape detail. The development of the love of Nature is shown in painting in England somewhat later than in poetry: Thomson antedates the early English landscape painters, and Wordsworth’s characteristic poetry of Nature is somewhat earlier than the great paintings of Turner and, Constable. But in abundance and variety of theme the English landscape artists have, by the end of the century, surpassed even the poetry of the period. Pastoral England receives especially full recognition. The ocean is, however, comparatively unimportant as a source of inspiration, even as we have seen it to be in the poetry of the same years. Perhaps the most striking fact is the remarkable influence of mountains in reawakening the love of Nature. The most enthusiastic and original landscape work was based on the wild scenery of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the Lake District.[649]

Two other facts that bear upon the period as a whole should, in conclusion, be noted. The first of these is the stimulus given to the interest in Nature in England by the sketches brought home by artists who had been in foreign lands. Nearly every artist studied in Italy so that separate mention of Italian scenes is not necessary. But some artists went into newer fields. Charles Fox (1749–1809) is interesting as being the first recorded artist to visit Norway, Sweden, and Russia for the purpose of representing the wild scenery of those countries. Draughtsmen accompanied almost every public or private expedition to remote regions. William Pars went with Dr. Chandler to Greece, 1764–66, and with Lord Palmerston to various parts of the continent in 1767. Thomas Hearne was in the Leeward Islands with Sir Ralph Payne in 1771–75. John Cleveley went with Sir Joseph Banks to the Hebrides in 1772, and with Captain Phipps to the North Sea in 1774. John Webber was with Captain Cook on his last voyage to the South Seas in 1776–80. A. M. Devis was in the Orient for the East India Company in 1788. And William Alexander went with Lord Macartney to China in 1792. These men brought back hundreds of views, many of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy and later appeared as illustrations in the books describing the various tours. The interest aroused by these pictures is an evidence of the new romantic delight in whatever is remote, and especially in the landscape characteristic of distant lands. But it must be noted that the importance of this work is lessened by the two facts that most of it belongs late in the century, after English landscape art was already fairly well established, and that, in the second place, much of it is of merely curious interest and intended to show the oddities in flora or fauna or in human life in the various countries.

The second point is the prolonged dominance of foreign models. Walpole in his “Anecdotes of Painting” (1762–71) said quite justly that English artists drew “rocks and precipices and castellated mountains” not because they saw such objects in England but because “Salvator wandered amongst Alps and Apennines.” But the artists were not alone in preferring to look at Nature through Italian spectacles. Poets, too, gave praise to the Poussins, Salvator Rosa, and Claude Lorrain. When Thomson in “The Castle of Indolence” (1748) had the cool airy halls of his palace decorated with landscapes he chose

Whate’er Lorraine light-touch’d with softening hue Or savage Rosa dash’d or learned Poussin drew.

A quarter of a century later we find these artists in undiminished authority, for Mason (“The English Garden,” 1772) declares that the true law-givers in the realm of the picturesque are Claude, Salvator Rosa, and Ruysdael. An interesting illustration of the general acceptance of the Italian or Dutch masters comes in 1754 from the realm of house decoration. In that year Mr. Jackson of Battersea published “An Essay on the Invention of Engraving and Printing ... and the Application of it to the Making of Paper Hangings” in which he advised, in order to show “the Taste of the owner,” “the introduction into the Pannels of the Paper” of prints taken from “the works of Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, Gasper Poussin, Berghem, or Wouverman or any other great master” in landscape. But perhaps, after all, no class of writers shows more clearly the tendency to regard English scenes from the point of view of Italian landscape art than do the early travelers. Dr. Brown in his famous “Letter from Keswick” says that to give a complete idea of the beauty of that region would require the united powers of Claude, Salvator, and Poussin. “The first should throw his delicate sunshine over the cultivated vales, the scattered cots, the groves, the lake, and wooded islands. The second should dash out the horror of the rugged cliffs, the steeps, the hanging woods, and foaming waterfalls; while the grand pencil of Poussin should crown the whole with the majesty of impending mountains.” So, too, Mr. Cradock says his utmost of Snowdon when he boldly declares that it is as rich a region to him as Tivoli or Frascati, and that “the romantic imagination of Salvator Rosa was never inspired with a more tremendous idea, nor his extravagant pencil never produced a bolder precipice.” Mr. Hutchinson in praising Keswick and Skiddaw says that “Claude in his happiest hour never struck out a finer landscape.” In a summary of the glories of the Lake District he says, “The painters [_sic_] of Poussin describe the nobleness of Hulls-water; the works of Salvator Rosa express the romantic and rocky scenes of Keswick; and the tender and elegant touches of Claude Loraine, and Smith, pencil forth the rich variety of Windermere.” West’s “Guide” is professedly written in the interests of landscape painting, but not of English landscape art, though by 1778 there was strong and abundant English work. In each scene West still finds suggestions of Italian painters only. Throughout his tour he marked many “Stations” from which the artist in search of material could get hints for pictures. On Coniston Lake he would find verified “the delicate touches of Claude,” on Windermere-water “the noble scenes of Poussin,” on Derwentwater “the stupendous, romantic ideas of Salvator Rosa.” A traveler across Lancaster Sands would see the mountain of Ingleborough from “as happy a point of view as that selected by Claude in his picture of Soracte on the Tyber.” The region of the Langdale Pikes is “as grand an assemblage of mountains, dells, and chasms, as ever the fancy of Poussin suggested, or the genius of Rosa invented.”

Later in the century the scenic school of the Italians partially gave way before the growing supremacy of the Dutch artists. In 1795 “Anthony Pasquin” in a critical review of the pictures exhibited in that year says,

When many of our present race of landscape painters wish to make a _study_, they do it by their firesides; they take an old perished copy of Wynants, Ruysdael, or Hobbima, or a damaged copy from some eminent artist, and _compose_ by stealing a tree from one, a dock-leaf from another, and a waterfall from a third. By this means we have Flemish landscapes peopled with English figures, and the same unvaried scenes served up _ad infinitum_.

That the taste of the purchasing public remained, until late in the century, steadily in favor of foreign work may be shown in various ways. Hogarth’s satires on the rage for “Old Masters” and Foote’s comedy “Taste” (1752) in which a picture is pronounced excellent until discovered to be by “an Englishman _now living_” when it is discarded as “not worth house-room,” are significant mid-century attacks on the undiscriminating demand for continental pictures. Records of sale by the celebrated auctioneer Longford illustrate the same fact. In 1764 he sold a collection of two hundred and fifty paintings belonging to Roger Hearne. About one third of these were landscapes, but not a single English artist, unless Van de Velde should be so counted, is represented in the list. In 1765 the pictures of “Mr. Samuel Scott, Painter (who is retiring into the Country)” were sold. Of these pictures thirty-three were his own landscapes. Of the remaining ninety canvases nearly all were landscapes, but again with no English names in the list except Lambert and Marlow. In 1768 Mr. Thomas Payne’s collection, largely made up of landscapes, has one each by Monamy, Swaine, Lambert, Scott, and three by Wootton. In 1769 the pictures of Smith of Derby were sold. He had five by Brooking, but all the rest were his own unsold canvases of Lake District, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire views. George Barret’s sale in 1771 was an attempt to dispose of sixty-seven of his own views in Wales, Ireland, and the Lake District. He advertised “waterfalls, effects of morning, of evening, of moonlight, a remarkable great tree, etc., etc.” It is not till 1790 that we come upon a distinctively English collection. In that year “Mr. Serres, Jun., Marine Painter (Going to Italy)” offered for sale five hundred and fifteen pictures nearly two hundred of which were landscapes by English artists. Thirty-two artists were named in the list. This slow development of English appreciation for English landscape art makes all the more evident the vitality of the impulse that led to productivity so ample and varied in that field.