S. R. Koehler

“ We have seen, likewise, that many of the English painters of the latter days of the seventeenth century were decorators rather than artists, who, forsaking all truth and nature, covered the walls and ceilings of houses with simpering shepherdesses and impossible deities. The time of change came, however, and with it the man who was to be the first original painter of his country. It is to plain William Hogarth, the son of the Cumberland schoolmaster, the apprentice of the silver-plate engraver, Ellis Gamble, that we owe the origin of the English school of painting. ”

“ PAINTING IN AMERICA.
INTRODUCTION. THE history of art in America is in reality the record only of the dying away of the last echoes of movements which had their origin in Europe. Although the western continent has given birth to new political ideas and new forms of government, not one of its States, not even the greatest of them all, the United States of North America, to which this chapter will be confined, has thus far brought forth a national art, or has exercised any perceptible influence, except in a single instance, on the shaping of the art of the world. ”

“ During a long and successful career Romney only visited his family twice, to find on the second occasion his daughter dead, and his son grown up and in Holy Orders. The painter's strange, selfish life ended in imbecility, and the patient wife who had nursed the youth of twenty-three, soothed the last hours of the man of seventy, whose fame she had never shared. Romney was as eccentric in life as in his genius. Shunning the society of his fellow artists, he complained of their neglect, and refused to enter the Royal Academy. ”

“ The little care which has been taken of early English pictures and their destruction, sometimes accidental, sometimes wilful, have led many to imagine that ancient England had no art of her own. It has been customary to imagine that in Italy alone, in the thirteenth century, existed the Renaissance and growth of modern design. Later research has, however, shown that the Renaissance in painting was not the sudden creation of Giotto, nor that of sculpture the work of Niccola Pisano. ”

“ Englishmen are essentially domestic, and pictures small enough to hang in small houses, and illustrative of home life, suit their necessities, and appeal to their feelings far more strongly than vast canvases representing battles or sacred histories. In genre painting the Dutch school has ever been prominent; to it we doubtless owe much of the popularity of this branch of art in England, where our painters have chosen familiar subjects, without descending to the coarse or sensual incidents in which some old Dutch artists delighted. ”

“ It remained to our artists towards the end of the last, and early in the present century, to give a new and higher character to water-colour art, which from obscure beginnings has risen to be a purely national and original school. Practised by a succession cf men of great genius, a distinct branch of art has been created, taking rank with works in oil. More luminous, and hardly less powerful than pictures in that medium, it has lent itself, in skilled hands, to the fullest expression of nature, and perfect rendering of the ideal. ”

“ There is no denying that there is some truth in this charge, but later experience has taught, also, that a more insinuating style is apt to lead the artists to ignore subject altogether. It is precisely the comparative unattractiveness of the methods employed which enabled these painters to create what may be called an American school, while, had they been as much absorbed in technical processes, or in the solving of problems of colour, as some of their successors, they would probably have rivalled them also in the neglect of the national element. ”

“ In 1786, Alderman Boydell, a successful engraver and art publisher, proposed a Shakespeare Gallery, with the view of proving that England contained really good painters of history. Fuseli executed nine out of the eighty-six examples in this gallery. His studies of the works of Michelangelo fitted him for the just treatment of the subjects, including Hamlet and the Ghost, and Lear and Cordelia. It has been objected that his men are all of one race, whether in reality classic, mediæval, or Scandinavian, and that Shakespeare's women are, in his pictures, all alike, too masculine and coarse. ”

“ And we must not forget the poetic fancies of Romney, the dramatic force of Opie, the grace of Stothard, the great inspiration of Blake, and the wild nightmare illustrations of Fuseli. We have seen art too long wedded to literature, and yet making great advances under the treatment of those who turned their attention to book illustration and miniature-painting, rising to a high pitch of popularity. ”

“ It was reserved for the German Lely and his successor Kneller to lay the foundation of a manner which, by pretending to unite portrait with history, gave a retrograde direction for nearly a century to both; a mob of shepherds and shepherdesses in flowing wigs and dressed curls, ruffled Endymions, humble Junos, withered Hebes, surly Allegros, and smirking Pensierosos usurp the place of propriety and character." We can see the triumphs of allegory over nature fully illustrated in Hampton Court Palace. ”

“ It is pleasant to think of the kindly minded painter enjoying music with his friends; and, rewarding some of them more lavishly than wisely, he is said to have given The Boy at the Stile to Colonel Hamilton, in return for his performance on the violin. It is pleasant, too, to know that whatever soreness of feeling existed between him and Sir Joshua, passed away before he died. When the President of the Royal Academy came to his dying bed, Gainsborough declared his reconciliation, and said, "We are all going to heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company." ”

“ The Revolutionary Period is, in many respects, the most interesting division, not only in the political, but also in the artistic history of the United States. It is so, not merely because it has left us the pictorial records of the men and the events of a most important epoch in the development of mankind, but also because it brought forth two painters who, while they were thoroughly American in their aspirations, were at the same time endowed with artistic qualities of a very high order. ”

“ In spite of poverty and neglect, the poet-painter was contented. Rescued from the hosier's business, for which he was intended, Blake at the age of fourteen was apprenticed to the younger Basire, an engraver. Throughout his life he worked not for money but for art, declaring that his business was "not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes, expressing godlike sentiments." Hard work with the graver gave him bread, and when the day's toil was over he could illustrate teeming fancies in pictures and in verses. He worked at first chiefly at book illustrations. ”

“ In the sixteenth century several foreign artists of more or less celebrity were induced to visit and stay in England. Foremost of these was Holbein, and to his example English artists are deeply indebted. In the next century there were a few excellent miniature painters, whose work is not to be surpassed at the present day, and then came a succession of foreigners—Rubens and Van Dyck from Flanders, Lely and Kneller from Germany, and a host of lesser men, who seem to have in a great measure monopolized portrait painting—then in vogue among the nobility—for more than a hundred years. ”

“ West started in life at eighteen as a portrait painter; first at Philadelphia, then at New York. In 1760, he visited Italy, and, after remaining there three years, proceeded to England. He had intended to return to America, but became so successful that he settled in London. In Rome the young American created a sensation, and the blind Cardinal Albani, whose acquaintance with Americans must have been limited, asked if he was black or white. ”

“ In proceeding to speak of artists of the English school, we must remember that we have not to deal with men gathered round a great master, as is the case with many foreign painters. Each English artist has originality, and stands by himself. It will be most convenient therefore to treat them according to the special branch of art which they severally followed, i.e. Historic, Portrait, Landscape, or Animal painting. HISTORICAL PAINTING had hitherto found little favour in England, nor were the pictures produced in that line worthy of much regard. ”

“ Here, though his drawings and engravings were mostly confined to heraldic devices and the like, the young artist gained accuracy of touch, to which he added truthfulness of design, and prepared himself to delineate that London life which was to furnish him with models for his art. He tells us how he determined to enter a wider field than that of mere silver-plate engraving, though at the age of twenty to engrave his own designs on copper was the height of his ambition. The men and women who jostled him in London streets, or rolled by him in their coaches, were his models. ”

“ Redgrave says of his art, "Leslie entered into the true spirit of the writer he illustrated. His characters appear the very individuals who have filled our mind. Beauty, elegance, and refinement, varied, and full of character, or sparkling with sweet humour, were charmingly depicted by his pencil; while the broader characters of another class, from his fine appreciation of humour, are no less truthfully rendered, and that with an entire absence of any approach to vulgarity. ”

“ As a portrait-painter he does not stand very high. T. B. READ, the "painter-poet," enjoyed one of those fictitious reputations which are unfortunately none too rare in America. Without any real feeling for colour, and with a style of drawing which made up in so-called grace for what it lacked in decision, he attained a certain popularity by a class of subjects such as The Lost Pleiad, The Spirit of the Waterfall, &c., which captivate the unthinking by their very superficiality. Several of his productions, among them his Sheridan's Ride, may be seen at the Pennsylvania Academy. ”

“ So far as technical skill goes, Americans—native as well as adopted—have always shown a remarkable facility of acquisition, and the rapidity with which carpenters, coach-painters, and sign-painters, especially in the earlier period of the country's history, developed into respectable portrait-painters, almost without instruction, will always remain cause for astonishment. Of those who went abroad at that time, England readopted four men who became famous (West, Copley, Newton, Leslie) , and she still points to them with satisfaction as among the more conspicuous on her roll of artists. ”