Gainsborough and his place in English art

Contents

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Introduction i

CHAP.

Chapter I English Art And The Precursors Of Gainsborough

NE of the strangest facts in the history of art is the carefully fostered prejudice against which English painting had to fight until yesterday. Nearly all foreign estimates of our pictorial art used to begin by asserting that we had no school at all. Funnily enough they generally went on to disprove their own words, and to show that, even according to their own definition, we had a very decided school indeed. " We understand by a school," says one of the most readable if not the most profound of French critics,* " a certain unity of thought presiding over the choice of subject and its treatment, a certain discipline and harmony in executive processes, a succession of masters marching under the same standard of principle." He then proceeds to describe and criticise English work in such a way as to prove that it fulfils as fully as that of other nations these conditions, and yet his conclusion is that we have " no school properly speaking." To the perfectly candid critic, the critic who is as quick to see beauties as to see faults, England not only has a school, but one of the most decisive, most easily recognised, and most national * Feuillet de Conches, Causeries d'un Curleux. '9 of all the schools. On those comparatively rare occasions when English pictures have been exhibited on the other side of the Channel, they have excited a vivid, though often shortlived, interest, and have afforded material for critiques which sometimes ended with a more or less grudging admission that, after all, there might be something to be called a school au dela de la Manche.

The apparition of Constable at the Salon of 1821, the en masse of 1855, 1867, 1878, and 1889, came no doubt as successive shocks to the continental theorists, but it can hardly be said that the lesson is finally learnt even now. In 1889, it must be allowed, the English collection on the Champ de Mars was sufficiently eulogised. The French artists, never ungenerous, found a charm in many things which seemed, to us, to have little but novelty to commend them. The new note then sounded was taken up too by the officials, so that quite a respectable little show of English work is now included in the Luxembourg collections. But this change, so far as it goes, has been brought about, I fancy, not so much by a greater readiness to listen to the best criticism, as by the sudden popularity into which the English school of the eighteenth century has been lifted by the events of the last five-and-twenty years. A quarter of a century ago two English painters of the Georgian era had all the credit to themselves. Reynolds and Gainsborough were famous names, and their works were fought for by those who had enough money in their purses. But the rest of those excellent artists who made the English school of portraiture the greatest school of the eighteenth century excited no enthusiasm whatever. Romney, Raeburn, Hoppner and Lawrence were seldom mentioned, even for faint praise, while those smaller practitioners who are now seen to have formed their quite respectable entourage, were absolutely ignored.

The change to a better state of things is mainly due, no doubt, to forces which have little enough to do with art. The final cause, if we went deep enough, would be found to be the virgin soil of Western America ! Agricultural depression and the consequent impoverishment of so many old English families coincided with vast accretions of wealth to the more commercial classes, and also with the establishment of a sort of glorified bazaar in which the latter could get rid of some of their superfluous cash. The first exhibition of " works by the old masters, and by deceased masters of the British School," took place at Burlington House in 1870. Public interest was at first excited mainly by the treasures of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had not been seen in London since the palmy days of the British Institution, but it was soon diverted, in large measure, to the masters of our own school. The splendid series of portraits by Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Romney, and their contemporaries, took opinion by storm. It was seen that they were not only fine things in themselves, but also superb decorations, suiting as no other pictures did those eighteenth-century interiors which were being re-established. The natural consequence was an immense competition among those fortunate people who, being comparatively unaffected by the price of wheat, had been daily growing richer, while those whose prosperity was rooted in land had been watching a steady shrinking of their incomes. Prices went up until hundreds who had never given a thought to art in their lives were turned by pure curiosity into habitues of Christie's. Attention once excited, a fairer judgment of English painting became only a question of time. We are at last becoming conscious that the school founded, shall I say, by the disciples of Holbein, was a real school, a school with principles of its own, with principles rooted in the national idiosyncrasy, principles which are none the less active, unchanging, and easily recognisable, because they have been, in the main, unsupported by any conscious formulation. Truth to your own individuality is as much a principle as any other. It must be confessed that those who used to deny aptitude for the arts to the natives of these islands had some excuse. Even Englishmen themselves were slow to perceive and assert the greatness of their Georgian painters, while during the long centuries which saw the rise and decay of the schools of Italy, the Low Countries, Germany and Spain, the three kingdoms had produced no picture-maker of serious importance. It is true that France was almost in the same predicament, but her poverty in good painters had a compensation in a wealth of decorative art which we could not boast to anything like the same degree.

But even Great Britain was not so destitute of remarkable artists before the time of Hogarth as it used to be the fashion to declare. Materials no longer exist, I fear, for any detailed account of what our painters were doing in the centuries which elapsed between the Reformation and the Revolution. In the preface to his " Anecdotes " Horace Walpole was able to say with truth that " this country ... has not a single volume to show on the works of its painters." Practically our only literary source of information is that from which Walpole drew his own materials, namely, George Vertue's great collection of notes and memoranda, now in the British Museum. But a sufficient number of mostly anonymous portraits have come down to us to prove that at all periods since the renaissance of the arts a few good English painters existed. A portrait has recently been added to the National Gallery which shows that John Bettes — in Walpole merely a name — was a very good master indeed of the second rank. A number of portraits are sprinkled about Europe, from which we may fairly conclude that Gwillim Street, or Strete, who was probably an Englishman, by no means wasted his time when he was in Holbein's studio. William Dobson, at his best, was an excellent painter ; if he was really the author of the series of Tradescant portraits now in the University galleries at Oxford, he deserves a place very high up in the second class of seventeenth-century masters. The influence of Van Dyck stimulated many other Englishmen and at least one Scot to respectable work. The contents of the National Portrait Gallery are alone sufficient to show that even in the days of Holbein and Van Dyck, British painters were equal to tasks more arduous than any laid upon them. But in spite of all this, England gave but a feeble echo of the great artistic clamour of the continent, and the pictures painted by her own sons between the beginning of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth centuries are not of a kind to excite enthusiasm. During the three generations which elapsed between the arrival of Holbein at the Court of Henry VIII. and the acceptance of Charles I.'s invitation by Van Dyck, all English life-size portraiture bore traces of the positive Teutonic manner. With Van Dyck came a lighter and more airy taste, a greater readiness to select and summarise, and, generally, a turn towards that distinction which has ever since been one of the features of English portraiture. Whether this change was entirely brought about by the Fleming's example, or whether it was at least partly due to wider and more national causes will be discussed presently. In any case the Stuarts were to go and the house of Hanover to be well settled on their throne, before those tendencies which are now confessedly English were to find any conspicuous expression in our native picture-painters.

That being so the reader may fairly ask whether the heading to this chapter can be justified. Had the English painters of the eighteenth century any native precursors at all ? Are there any grounds for depriving Hogarth of his credit as creator, ab initio^ of a new school of Art ? The answer, I think, is to be found not by seeking among our few painters of life-size portraits, nor even by quoting once more that name which was so often on the lips of Gainsborough himself, but by remembering that England, like Germany, had a fascinating school of "Little Masters" of her own. The pedigree of our eighteenth-century school runs up through the English miniaturists, through those men who started even before the advent of Holbein, who, having the traditions of the great illuminators of the middle ages in their blood, have handed down to us such delightful records of the men and women who made history in England under the Tudor and Stuart dynasties.

In the early ages of English criticism attention was almost entirely devoted to those aspects of art which appealed to the national love of morality, using that word in its widest sense. The treatment of every subject was praised or blamed according to the vigour with which it threw down the gauntlet to the poet, the novelist, the biographer. This was carried so far that, even in the case of Hogarth, who translated dramatic action into line, colour, and chiaroscuro with more success than any other man, before or since, the commentators did their best to persuade their public that he was not so much a painter as a moralist, and that the indelible impression he leaves on the memory was due to

GENERAL HONYVVOOD Messks. Agnew & S )N

THE PRECURSORS OF GAINSBOROUGH a righteous indignation with his kind, and to his undeniable opulence of incident. Hogarth's supremacy rests on his gift for combining dramatic significance with esthetic necessity. His men and women do a great deal more than tell a story. They exist in a coherent artistic faishion. Their forms, their movements, their expressions, their sizes, and their places both on the plane of the canvas and in the perspective, their colour and handling, all these work vigorously together to bring our esthetic impressions into line with those moral reactions at which the painter aimed. Hogarth's immortality, in short, depends not at all upon his sava indignatio, but upon the extraordinary skill with which he drove art to support his thesis. He was a good, almost a first-rate, painter, as well, but without his extraordinary felicity of arrangement he could never have taken the place he now occupies in the history of the eighteenth century. All this sounds like digression as well as platitude, but it has a purpose. I began this paragraph by saying that the critics of a generation or two ago gave nearly all their attention to am aspect of art— it is no real part of art itself— which is, after all, the least important. At the present moment there is a tendency to run into another extreme, and to speak as if art began and ended with realisation, or in otJier words as if the rank of an artist ought to be determined by nothing but his power to carry out no matter what conception. Art for art's sake is a phrase too often misunderstood, even by those who are readiest to use it. All artistic materials are so pregnant with expression that the keenest enjoyment may be derived from their use, even when there has been no antecedent preparation in the creative faculties. We are told by a great authority that in literature the subject is nothing, the treatment everything ; but this is only true if we make the word treatment include the mental processes of determination and selection, before materials are touched. In short, criticism should occupy itself more than it does with the artistic fitness of a painter's conceptions, and with the artistic value of his personal and racial modifications of what may be called standard truth.

So far as I know there is at present but one writer who has made any serious attempt to differentiate schools on lines approaching to those here suggested, and many of the practitioners of what is called scientific criticism ignore them altogether. The critic who confines an inquiry into the characteristics of a school to the strictly technical side of its productions sets too close a limit to his field. All technique, no doubt, is or should be art, but all art is not technique. I once heard a good painter declare that there is no art outside technique, but such an assertion will only hold water if we give such a generous extension to the scope of the term '* technique " as to deprive it of all definable meaning. The decisions arrived at in the artist's brain are, of course, governed by his knowledge of technical necessities, but technique itself only begins with the carrying out. However, I need not labour this particular point, for it is only a question of definition. Whether we include them in the term technique or not, no one will contend that the mental activities of an artist, or of a school, are, as a fact, less distinctive than the management of materials. The work of Art begins when it takes form in the mind, and the process of selecting impressions is governed by exactly the same esthetic instincts as those which control the hand. The characteristics of a school are, in short, to be found in its ways of seeing nature and selecting among her phenomena, just as much as in its technical methods and predilections. I might go farther, and say that[in the former we find a safer test. Technical methods are more liable to change, are more easily influenced by individuals, by fashion, by scientific discoveries, by the accidents of supply and demand.

Systems of execution may be taught, and history shows that they vary immensely at different periods with one and the same people. By all this I do not in the least mean that conception is more important than execution in the final result. The two are, of course, mutually dependent. But as conception must, in the nature of things, come chronologically before execution, it afli^ects it decisively in the long run and afli^ords more immediate tests. I shall presently make an attempt to define, or rather to describe, the permanent and unchanging features of our national art, but first it may be convenient to sketch what I take to be the real track across the centuries of English pictorial ideas.

During the middle ages the most consummate of the pictorial arts was illumination. It was a metier that could be easily mastered in the monastic solitudes and easily transmitted from one generation of monks to another. It made, moreover, its chief intellectual demand on that quality of patience in which monks were presumably richer than the rest of the world. From the mere decoration of initials it progressed to illustrations, in the modern sense, and finally to portrait miniatures. The scribe begat the feintre ymagier ; the peintre ymagier begat the portraitist in little, whose first works were decorations to the written page, just as the first portraits of the painter at large were set modestly in the corners of votive altarpieces. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the traditions of the illuminator must have been still alive in England, where the art of decorating manuscripts had once reached a level unsurpassed even in France or Italy. The impulse towards a secular use of the art seems to have been given by Holbein. At any rate the first English miniaturist of whom we have any substantial knowledge is his disciple, Nicholas Hilliard ; and yet a phrase used by Hilliard himself suggests that he might have followed other masters had he pleased : " Holbein's manner of limning I have ever imitated, and hold it for the best," he declares in his essay on miniature painting. Certain it is, too, that when we turn from Holbein to the Englishman we find the latter animated by an entirely non-Teutonic spirit. In no portrait by the great German is there any visible pre-occupation with elegance as we understand the word. That he was very far from being insensible to a somewhat formal kind of grace we know from his designs for goldsmithery, but in portraiture he was content with dignity of arrangement and fidelity of interpretation. Even in his most graceful works, such as the Duke of Norfolk's " Christina, Duchess of Milan," we find little trace of that peculiar elegance of movement, of that subtly careless harmony of line, in which Hilliard is so rich. One of the best of this master's works is the portrait of himself, now or recently in the collection of Mr. Jeffrey Whitehead. Contrast it with Holbein's miniature of the little Duke of Suffolk at Windsor, and you will see at once the radical difference between the Teuton and the Anglo-Saxon. The Holbein is entirely natural, absolutely sincere, and realised as completely as if it were a life-size portrait. In the Hilliard you will discover a touch of artifice and an abundant slightness of execution. But the movement is full of elegance, while the head and figure are admirable in contour, and occupy the field with extraordinary felicity. Holbein posed his sitters, perhaps even dressed them,

ELIZA AND THOMAS LINLEY. 1768 The Lord Sackvili.e with the greatest solicitude, and then copied the result. Hilliard selected like an impressionist, and never lost sight either of elegance or of the exact form and scale of the narrow surface on which his work had to be carried out. And in this he was perhaps the first exponent of the principles which have governed the better English portrait-painters from his day to our own.

After Hilliard came the Olivers, Isaac and Peter. Isaac began in a style which may be easily confounded with that of Hilliard, but as time went on he simplified his manner, until at last he painted in a dry, oversystematic fashion which inclines one towards belief in the theory that the Oliver blood was partly French. Two of his finest miniatures are Lord Derby's " Countess of Essex " and the portrait of himself in the Royal Collection at Windsor. The latter is a little miracle of execution, and leaves the slighter art of Hilliard far behind. His larger miniatures — the " Henry, Prince of Wales " and "Sir Philip Sidney," at Windsor; the "Earl of Dorset," at South Kensington — are more ambitious and elaborate, but in them the qualities we are tracing are less conspicuously displayed. Peter Oliver and the Hoskinses — if we accept the tradition of two, father and son — supply the transition from the later and dryer manner of Isaac to the freer and broader methods which began to prevail in the reign of Charles I. This improvement is generally put down entirely to the credit of Van Dyck, but dates cast some doubt upon such a conclusion. The change seems to have begun before the Fleming settled in England. We can point to miniatures dated before 1632, the year of his arrival, which are conceived and executed entirely in the style associated with his example. Van Dyck paid indeed a short visit to this country in 162 1, and perhaps another ten years later.

But it was not until 1632 that he came to stay, and began his great series of English portraits. Again it must not be forgotten that the Fleming's manner, both of conceiving and carrying out a picture, underwent a notable change when he entered the service of Charles I. Van Dyck was, in fact, one of the most adaptable of all great painters. His art went through four distinct phases, and it passed from one to the other with extraordinary rapidity. Before his Italian journey he painted so like Rubens that it takes some experience to distinguish between the two. In Italy he picked up Venetian colour and Genoese dignity with no apparent effort. Back in Antwerp we find him working in a style compounded of Italian and Flemish elements, and then in England he undergoes a fourth transformation. Is it unreasonable to suppose that such a man would be affected by, as much as he would affect, any new milieu in which he found himself ? The dignity of his Genoese portraits was suggested by the Genoese, and so the peculiar distinction which marked his art in England was inspired partly by the grand air of the English aristocracy, partly by the methods he found in vogue with the humble but not inefficient native painters. There is no denying the fact that before he crossed the Channel English miniaturists had already begun to do work displaying, on a minute scale, exactly those characteristics which were only to become conspicuous in Van Dyck after 1632. England and the pupil of Rubens acted and reacted on each other. After his advent the shrinking from the Teutonic precision of Holbein was hastened, but facts as well as probabilities are against the theory that the new movement was entirely due to his influence and example.

It is extremely difficult to compare, in any convincing way, the work of a miniaturist with that of a painter at large. No one, perhaps, will deny that a great artist can show his greatness just as easily on the back of a playing card as on a Sistine ceiling, but the mechanical difficulties of work on a large scale come in to pervert our judgment, and to make us refuse to set a miniaturist on the same plane as an equally gifted person working to the scale of life. It is, therefore, with some diffidence that I venture to suggest that in Samuel Cooper Van Dyck had a successor equal, in specific endowment, to himself. Cooper had by far the stronger grip on character. In his better miniatures we meet individuals more unmistakable than any we can find in Van Dyck. No portrait by the Fleming, not even the finest of the Charleses or the " Cornelius Van der Gheest *' of the National Gallery, brings us into such intimate relation with a personality as Samuel Cooper continually does. His portraits of Cromwell, of Charles II., of James II., of Edmund Waller, of Monk, to name a few of the best, are historical documents vastly more trustworthy than a State paper. And how profoundly artistic they are also ! Each occupies its narrow surface to perfection, each is a masterpiece of design, of drawing, of modelling, and even of colour ; and each stops exactly where it should. There is no effort to tell more than the conditions will allow, no attempt to rival work on a larger scale. Solicitude is concentrated on the heads, and there every touch helps to add intensity to the artist's record of the man before him. A fine Cooper is a triumph of selection, of precision in the right place, of suggestion in the right place, of balance and harmony all over. Some of his virtues were inherited by his pupils and successors, Laurence Crosse, Thomas Flatman — who occasionally came very near to the master himself — ^the Dixons, and others of less importance ; but, speaking broadly, the first great period of

English miniature painting came to an end with the close of the seventeenth century. It fell for a time into the hands of derelict foreigners, dull dogs mostly, whose work is without individuality or charm. It was to revive later and have a second period of glory, but it was never again to develop such a consummate artist as Samuel Cooper.

Now what is it that distinguishes our English miniaturists from their rivals on the Continent and gives them their own peculiar charm Is it not, to put it shortly, a finer sense of the limitations of their art ? Do they not show an instinctive perception of those constituents of the intelligent human animal which tell to advantage when reproduced on a very small scale French and German miniaturists almost invariably give their works the air of reduced pictures. On a surface of two or three square inches they reproduce detail so elaborately that the result looks too often like a mechanical reduction. Many of their portraits would lose little or nothing by being enormously magnified, an experiment which would play havoc with any Englishman with, perhaps, a single exception. John Smart's best miniatures are quite extraordinary for their fusion of surface, and for the completeness of their modelling. In these respects, indeed, they excel all other English things of the kind, and even the most elaborate of the French School. But Smart was an exception, to be classed, from the sesthetic point of view, rather with enamellers than with miniature painters proper, and, in any case, he belongs to a period later than that with which we are now concerned. From the days of Nicholas Hilliard down to the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, English miniaturists were distinguished by the qualities to which I have alluded. Both in conception and in execution they were more immediately controlled by the peculiar conditions of their art than their foreign rivals. They understood that a portrait no bigger than a crown piece should not aim at the encyclopasdic treatment suitable to an eight-foot canvas. When a sitter presented himself, they saw that certain aspects, certain details of his personality, would lend themselves to reproduction on a minute scale, and would, after fitting treatment, result in a work of art thoroughly organised within itself, bearing a pleasant relation to the surface on which it existed, to the means by which it was created, and to the purpose to which it was to be put. They made no attempt to astonish with their skill or to pose for anything but what they were. In a word they were content to work simply and sincerely under the conditions imposed by their metier.

We see then that from the very beginning of anything like portrait-painting in England, by Englishmen, certain traditions, habits, or predilections began to establish themselves. Speaking generally, these were confined to the native painters, and were not shared by the foreigners who worked by their sides. To recapitulate is to be more tedious than ever, but even so I must repeat the idea I wish to impress upon the reader. The really distinguished foreigners who worked here were. Holbein, Cornelis Janssen Van Ceulen, Van Dyck, and Sir Peter Lely ; Rubens was a meteor, who shone in the English sky only for a moment, and Kneller was a nobody. Holbein was practically unaffected by his English milieu. His art was fixed before he came here at all, and we cannot claim to have changed it — except in so far as a Duke of Norfolk was more picturesque than a Swiss burgomaster. Cornelis Janssen, again, was entirely a Dutchman — in spite of the possibility that he was English by birth — and in Holland he painted his best pictures. Van Dyck was of different metal. His art was modified wherever he went. In Antwerp he realised Flemish ideals ; in Genoa, Genoese ; in England, English. His influence upon the painters in London was as if he had apostrophised them thus : " I see the material you have to work upon and what you are trying to do with it ; quite right, but have more courage ; do it thus, and thus ! " He did not say, like Torrigiano, " You are beasts of English," you are all wrong, begin again at the beginning. He simply put himself at their head, combined their ideals with his own, and worked the combination up to something like perfection. Lely repeated the experiment, from a lower but even more sympathetic standpoint. His equipment came from Van Dyck, but early in his career he began to direct it to very English aims. For one reason and another the great ability of Sir Peter Lely has never won a proper recognition. He worked in declared sympathy with the English genius, and applied the large and sound methods of the Butch and Flemings to the more selective conceptions which he found popular in this country. In most people's minds he is bracketed with the far inferior Kneller, and even by serious critics his pictures are dismissed as if they were little more than fashion plates. And yet without going even so far as Hampton Court, you may see pictures which prove him to have been the real link between Van Dyck and the English miniaturists on the one hand, and the school led by Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, and Romney on the other. The National Portrait Gallery, among other things, possesses a portrait of the Comtesse de Grammont — La Belle Hamilton " — in which the distinctive features of English painting a century later are foreshadowed with curious complete-