William Cosmo Monkhouse

“ As Suffolk to Constable and Norfolk to Old Crome, so was North Wales to Cox. He painted well wherever he went—London, Hereford, Yorkshire, Lancashire, or Calais— but it was Wales that he loved and understood best; it was Wales that drew from him his deepest notes of poetry, his noblest sympathy with his kind. He is the greatest interpreter of her scenery and her life. ”

“ Hunt was a man of little culture or intellectual power outside his art. He was debarred by his infirmity from active exercise, and in later years his health prevented him from drawing in the open air. Many, if not most, of his landscapes were drawn from windows. To these causes is to be ascribed not only the limited range of his subjects, but also the perfection to which he attained in rendering them. No one, perhaps, has ever realised so fully the beauty of common objects seen in sunlight at a short distance, but no one has ever employed so many years in pursuit of this almost solitary aim. ”

“ An instance of such fortunate finding, accompanied by wonderful sympathy of treatment, is the ‘Mousehold Heath’ in the National Gallery (Trafalgar Square) , where a simple slope rising bare against a sky warm with illuminated clouds suffices, with a few weeds for foreground, to make a noble and poetical picture, full of the solemnity of solitude and the calm of the dying day. ”

“ Gibson had dreamed that he was carried by an eagle to Rome, and to Rome he determined to go, ‘if he went there on foot.’ He went thither, taking his unfinished bust of Roscoe with him, but not before he had been introduced to Fuseli, West, Flaxman, Blake, and Chantrey. ”

“ Lawrence must be acquitted of any intentions dishonourable or unkind. If his character was of no great depth, he was always kind-hearted and generous to his family, his friends, and his servants. Though solicitous for his own advancement in the world, he never disparaged his rivals, young or old, whether Hoppner or Owen, and to young students he was ever ready with advice and commissions, and he allowed them to study his fine collection of drawings. ”

“ Hoppner was always a great lover of nature, and began by painting landscape, his great taste for which is seen in the backgrounds to his portraits and the numerous sketches in chalk with which he amused his leisure hours. ”

“ Nevertheless Kent easily made his way in high society by his winning manners and the authority with which he spoke on questions of art, and he soon became the fashionable oracle in all matters of taste. His skill in design was so prized that, according to Horace Walpole, ‘he was not only consulted for furniture, as frames of pictures, glasses, tables, chairs, &c., but for plate, for a barge, for a cradle. ”

“ They were left without any resources, and the Royal Academy granted a pension to the widow.
As a man Jackson was simple and sincere, silent in society, but companionable and even lively with one or two friends. As a portrait-painter he was wanting in vivacity and elevation, but very faithful and vigorous in character. ”

“ He lived in a fine house, which was a perfect museum of art treasures, and included the finest collection of drawings by the old masters ever made by a private person ; he held every distinction which could fall to one of his profession, and was courted by the highest society scarcely less as a man than as an artist. ”

“ In portraits he was scarcely less original, painting his ladies and gentlemen in a manner entirely pure and unaffected, yet with such spirit, grace, and dignity as nature had endowed them with. He chose to represent them in their most quiet and unconscious moments with the ‘mind and music breathing from the face.’ Principally because he painted his sitters so, he became the rival of Reynolds, weak where he was strong, and strong where he was weak, and yet often approaching him so nearly that the distance between them is scarcely measurable. ”

“ I would rather avoid contemplating such objects.’ It was not to be expected that sculpture executed with strict regard for such strict principles should be ‘popular’ in England in Gibson's time, but there was little excuse for the abuse which the press poured on many of his finest works. They were always pure in sentiment, refined in form, and executed with perfect skill. His brother artists felt and recognised his merit, and he had always a cultivated circle of admirers who smoothed the way of life for him by affectionate companionship and plentiful employment. ”

“ This life cannot be better described than in his own words: ‘I worked on all my days happily, and with ever new pleasure, avoiding evil, and with a calm soul—making images, not for worship, but for the love of the beautiful.’
Gibson may be said to have been the last and one of the best of the ‘old school’ of European sculpture, based on the teaching of Winckelmann, and carrying out strictly the ‘purist’ view of sculpture as the embodiment of abstract ideas in beautiful form. ”

“ But Constable followed nobody, not even in method—he painted effects which had never been painted before in a style unassociated with the name of any great painter. Moreover, his subjects were humble, no lakes or castles, mountains or temples, and it was scarcely yet recognised that the daily beauties of ordinary English scenery were worthy subjects for a great artist, and worthy possessions for men of taste. ”

“ Commencing as an architectural draughtsman, but with a mind well stored with history and archæological detail, his imagination soon began to fill with their ancient life the buildings which he drew, and his art was naturally inspired with that romantic spirit which, long felt in literature, had culminated in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. ”

“ When he returned to settle for the rest of his life in England, Eastlake possessed perhaps the most cultivated understanding on art then existing. He travelled always ‘handbook in hand,’ and observed, noted, and criticised with the strictest care everything, whether picture, architecture, or scenery, which came in his way. To complete his knowledge of the picture galleries of Europe, he had on his return to Rome in 1828 taken a tour through Holland, Belgium, and Germany, and on his way to England in 1830 he had visited Vienna. ”

“ If we have none of his greatest pictures in our national collections in London, the galleries at Trafalgar Square and South Kensington contain a number of his minor works, which display to advantage his peculiar qualities as a painter, his rich and radiant colour, his exquisite flesh painting, and his grace of composition. ”

“ The charms of Maclise's society are vividly painted by Forster in his ‘Life of Dickens.’ They seem to have consisted partly in a ‘grand enjoyment of idleness,’ in keen observation under a mask of indifference, in a varied knowledge of literature, and complete unconsciousness of his own genius and good looks. ”

“ He was not, and did not wish to be, original. ‘It is the desire of novelty that destroys pure taste,’ he said. He studied from nature incessantly, but ever strove to treat her in the manner of the Greeks. He once expressed an opinion that Pheidias would have said of Michael Angelo, ‘Here is a most clever and wonderful sculptor, but a barbarian.’ He refused to execute the statues of Huskisson and Sir Robert Peel (Westminster Abbey) unless he was allowed to drape them classically. He said: ‘The human figure concealed under a frock coat and trousers is not a fit subject for sculpture. ”

“ It is to this class of art that Opie belongs, the class of serious realism and strength of light and shade. His realism was not only serious but intellectual, for he painted with his brains as well as his brush. ”

“ But Landseer was more playful in his humour, more kind in his satire, trying only to show what was human in the brute, whereas Hogarth only displayed what was brutal in the man. But Landseer was a poet as well as a humorist, and could strike chords of human feeling almost as truly and strongly as if his subjects had been men instead of dogs and deer. ”

“ It is true that the Boydell 'Shakespeare,' taken as a whole, seems now to shed little lustre on the English school, but this was not Boydell's fault; he employed the best artists he could get—Reynolds, Stothard, Smirke, Romney, Fuseli, Opie, Barry, West, Wright of Derby, Angelica Kauffman, Westall, Hamilton, and others. It must also be remembered that this was the first great effort of the kind ever made by English artists, and its influence cannot easily be overestimated. Boydell deserves great credit for his patriotism, generosity to artists, and public spirit. ”

“ There is little or nothing in the exhibition worth looking up to. There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth. Fashion always had and always will have its day, but truth in all things only will last, and can only have just claims on posterity. ”

“ Thomas Landseer was an engraver of great power and originality, and may be said to have invented a style in order to render more faithfully and sympathetically the works of his brother. A master of all methods of engraving on metal, he employed in his most effective plates all the resources of the art, making especially a free use of the etched line in order to render more truly the textures of fur and hide. ”

“ Some verge on good-humoured caricature, like Sydney Smith and Sir Walter Scott; others are simply elegant and familiar likenesses, like those of the ladies and Leigh Hunt. Some, like Benjamin Disraeli and Count D'Orsay, idealise the dandyism of the day; others are almost cruel in their truth, like Samuel Rogers, which frightened Goethe, and one at least is a satire tragic in its intensity, that of Talleyrand asleep in his chair. The original sketches for many of these, with a number of others by the same dexterous hand, now form part of the Forster collection at South Kensington Museum. ”

“ In this year he sent from Italy his solitary contribution to the exhibitions of the Royal Academy, called ‘A Landscape, with Hannibal, in his March over the Alps, showing his army the fertile plains of Italy,’ a picture said to have been in oil colours, and so fine that Turner spoke of it as a work from which he learned more than anything he had seen before. ”

“ William Mason, in the ‘English Garden,’ praises Kent's landscape gardening at the expense of his painting; and even Horace Walpole, who regarded him as a genius in other branches of art, tells us that Kent's portraits ‘bore little resemblance to the persons who sat for them, and the colouring was worse,’ and that ‘in his ceilings Kent's drawing was as defective as the colouring of his portraits, and as void of every merit.’ He adds that Sir Robert Walpole would not permit him to work in colours at Houghton, but restrained him to chiaroscuro. ”

“ If his vanity and his unscrupulousness in money matters transcended all ordinary standards, so also did his energy and his power of endurance. Unfortunately his dreams for the glory of art and the glory of his country were so bound up with the glory of Haydon as to taint his whole career with egotism. As Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., wrote, ‘his pictures are himself, and fail as he failed.’ They had the same fault of self-assertion and violence. With an occasional approach to the sublime, as in his head of Lazarus, they are seldom without some exaggeration which repels. ”

“ He had previously delivered some lectures on art at the Royal Institution, which had been well received in spite of some want of method and abruptness. He now threw his whole mind into his task, and embodied the result of years of sincere thought in four lectures on (1) design, (2) invention, (3) chiaro scuro, and (4) colouring. With the exception of those of Sir Joshua Reynolds, no series of lectures emanating from the Royal Academy are better worth reading. Their views are original and just, and they contain much excellent criticism in language which is clear and vigorous. ”

“ In execution he was rapid and masterly. ‘It was a great treat to see Girtin at his studies,’ says one writer, who proceeds to describe his extraordinary facility; another speaks of ‘the swordplay of his pencil;’ and his drawings, from their mere technical dexterity, are still the admiration of artists. By increasing the range of atmospheric effect in painted landscape, by the purity and force of his artistic gift, by his feeling of natural poetry, and in many other ways, he has exercised a vast and noble influence on modern landscape-painting. ”

“ In March he was admitted to the antique school of the Royal Academy, in April to Sir Charles Bell's school of anatomy, in December to the life school of the Academy; in April 1810 he obtained the silver medal of the Society of Arts for a drawing of a bas-relief, and about the same time Mr. Harman, the banker, gave him his first commission for a picture. He read the classics for two hours a day regularly until he could read Virgil and Homer without a dictionary, but this was part of what he deemed necessary for his education as an historical painter. ”

“ His earlier and more ideal works, like ‘Ino and Bacchus,’ ‘Innocence,’ and ‘The Mother,’ were marked by a natural grace and freshness of conception which were at that time rare in modern sculpture. His later figure of ‘Egeria’ is touched with finer poetry, and in his conception of ‘Caractacus’ he displayed that vigour of imagination and grasp of character which distinguished his statues of public men from the work of most of his contemporaries. His three noble equestrian statues of Indian worthies are perhaps his greatest works. They are all very different from one another ”

“ It has been said that Hoppner was ‘the most daring plagiarist of Reynolds, and the boldest rival of Lawrence,’ and this expresses with some approach to accuracy his position as a portrait-painter, if it does not give him the credit he deserves. Without the marked individuality of either his senior or his junior, of whom alternately his works remind us, he is more manly than Lawrence, and, especially in his portraits of women and children, more simple and natural. ”

“ In 1852 appeared his second Egyptian drawing, ‘An Arab Scribe, Cairo,’ a work of distinct character and high finish; and though he did not send anything to the next exhibition of the Water-colour Society, he became again an annual exhibitor in 1854, when he also made his reappearance at the Royal Academy. The drawings of ‘Camels and Bedouins,’ 1854, and ‘The Well in the Desert’ and ‘The Greeting in the Desert,’ 1855, with their truthful representation of Arab life in the desert, then a novelty in art, and by their masterly rendering of shade and sunshine, greatly increased his fame. ”

“ He writes on 29 April 1815: ‘Never have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits and ether in his soul.’ But the progress of his picture was much interrupted from weakness of his eyes and a controversy about the Elgin marbles. ”

“ Without accepting Jackson's theory that Gainsborough thought he could acquire the art of the musician by purchasing his instrument, we may well believe him when he says that ‘though possessed of ear, taste, and genius, he never had application enough to learn his notes,’ and that ‘there were times when music seemed to be Gainsborough's employment and painting his diversion.’ Both had something to do with his flight to London in the summer of 1774, the immediate cause being a quarrel with Thicknesse about that eccentric gentleman's unfinished portrait and his wife's viol-di-gamba. ”

“ He was distinguished by his technical skill in oil and water-colour and with the point. He was in short a man of rare and genuine artistic faculties, cultivated with great assiduity, and combined constant observation of nature with careful study of the methods of the old masters. In principle he was eclectic, desiring to unite the merits of all previous schools, and his pictures vary greatly in style an method. His earlier work in oils is marked by its impasto, especially in pictures where costumes form a string feature, but he modified this greatly in his later work. ”

“ Haydon enjoyed and studied the masterpieces collected in the Louvre, and the soldiers of all nations crowding the streets. In his absence the British Institution had voted him a hundred guineas for his ‘Solomon,’ and the freedom of Plymouth was conferred upon him. Yet the triumph of ‘Solomon’ brought him no commissions, and the exhibition of it in Plymouth, Liverpool, and Birmingham was a failure. He now set to work with renewed energy on his ‘Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,’ which took him six years to complete. ”