British painting in the 17-18th centuries (Британская живопись 17-18 вв.)
1)
Some Famous Illuminated Manuscripts.
It is usual to regard English painting as
beginning with the Tudor period and for this are several reasons. Yet the fact
remains that painting was practised in England for many hundred years before
the first Tudors came to the throne.
The development of the linear design in
which English artists have always excelled can be traced back to the earliest
illuminations brilliantly evolved in irish monastic centres and brought to
Northumbria in the seventh century. Its principal feature is that wonderful
elaboration of interlaced ornament derived from the patterns of metal-work in
the Celtic Iron Age, which is to be found in the Book of Kells and Lindesfarne
Gospel, its Northumbrian equivalent.
The greatest achievement in Irish manuscript
illumination, the Book of Kells is now generally assigned to the late
eighth or early ninth century. The Book of Kells is a manuscrept of the
gospes of rather large size(33*24 cm)written on thick glazed vellum. Its pages
were originally still larger; but a binder, a century or so ago, clipped away
their margins, cutting even into edges of the illuminations. Otherwise the
manuscript is in relatively good condition, in spite of another earlier
misadventure. The great gospel, on account of its wrought shrine, was wickedly
stolen in the night from the sacresty of the church and was found a few months
later stripped of its gold, under a sod. Finally the manuscript passed to
trinity college, where it is today.
No manuscript approaches the book of kells
for elaborate ornamentation. A continuous chain of ornamentation runs through
the text. The capitals at the beginning of each paragraph--two, three, cour to
a page--are made of brightly coloured entwinements of birds, snakes, destorted
men and quadrupeds, fighting or performing all sorts of acrebatic feats. Other
animals wander about the pages between the lines or on top of them.
The thirteenth century had been the century
of the great cathedrals, in which nearly all branches of art had their share.
Work on these immense enterprises contunued into the fourteenth century and
even beyond, but they were no longer the main focus of art. We must remember
that the world had changed a great deal during that peiod. In the middle of
the twelfth century Europe was still a thinly populated continent of peasants
with moasteries and baron's castles as the main centres of power and learning.
But a hundred and fifty years later towns had grown into centres of trade whose
burghers felt increasingly independent of the poweof the Church and the fuedal
lords. Even the nobles no longer lived a life of grim seclusion in their
fortified manors, but moved to the cities with their comfort and fashionable
luxury there to display their wealth at the courts of the mighty. We can get a
very vivid idea of what life in the fourteenth century was like if we remember
the works of Chaucer, with his knights and squires, friars and artisans.
The love of fourteenth-century painters for
graceful and delicate details is seen in such famous illustrated manuscripts as
the English Psalter known as Queen Mary's Psalter(about 1310). One of
the pages shows Christ in the temple, conversing with the learned scribes.
They have put him on a high chair, and he is seen explaining some point of
doctrine with the characteristic gesture used by medieval artists when they
wanted to draw a teacher. The scribes raise their hands in attitude of awe and
astonishment, and so do Christ's parents, who are just coming on to the scene,
looking at each other wonderingly. The method of telling the story is still
rather unreal. The artist has evidently not yet heard of Giotto's discovery of
the way in which to stage a scene so as to give it life. Christ is minute in
comparison with the grown-ups, and there is no attempt on the part of the
artist to give us any idea of the space between the fugures. Moreover we can
see that all the faces are more of less drawn according to one simple formula,
with the curved eyebrows, the mouth drawn downwards and the curly hair and
beard. It is all the more surprising to look down the same page and to see
that another scene has been added, which has nothing to do with the sacred
text. It is a theme from the daily life of the time, the hunting of ducks with
a hawk. Much to the delight of the man and woman on horseback, and of the boy
in front of them, the hawk has just got hold of a duck, while tow others are
flying away. The artist may not have looked at real boys when he painted the
scene above, but he had undoubtedly looked at real hawks and ducks when he
painted the scene below. Perhaps he had too much reverence for the biblical
narrative to bring his observationn of actual life into it. He preferred to
keep the two things apart: the clear symbolic way of telling a story with
easily readable gestures and no distracting details, and on the margin of the
page, the piece from real life, which reminds us once more that this is
Chaucer's century. It was only in the cours of the fourteenth century that the
two elements of this art, the graceful narrative and the faithful observation,
were gradually fused. Perhaps this would not have happened so soon without the
influence of Italian art.
2) 16th and 17th
Centuries.
When Henry VII abolished Papal
authority in England in 1534 and ordered the dissolution of the monasteries in
1536 he automatically brought to an end the tradition of religious art as it
had been practised in the middle ages and in monastic centres. The break was
so complete that painting before and after seem entirely different thing, in
subject, style and medium. The local centres of culture having vanished, the
tendency of painting to be centralized in London and in the service of the
court was affirmed. Secular patronage now insisted on portraiture, and the
habit grew up of useng foreign painters--an artificial replacement of the old,
international interchange of artists and craftsmen. Yet the sixteenth century
was the age of Humanism which had created a new interest in the human
personality.
3)
Painting In The 16th --17th Centuries.
In the sixteenth century Holbein came to
England, bringing with him a much more highly developed pictorial tradition
with a much fuller sense of plastic relief. Holbein himself was a supreme
master of linear design; he could draw patterns for embroidery and jewellery as
no one else, but he never entirely sacrificed the plastic feeling for form to
that, and in his early work he modelled in full light and shade. Still, it was
not difficult for him to adapt himself somewhat to the English fondness for
flat linear pattern. Particularly in hes royal portraits, e.g. the portrait of
Henry VIII, we find and insistence on the details of the embroidered patterns
of the clothes and the jewellery, which is out of key with the careful
modelling of hands and face.
Finally, by Elizabeth's reign almost all
trace of Holbein's plastic feeling was swept away and the English instinct for
linear description had triumphed completely.
But the English were not left long in peace
with their linear style. Charles I, who had travelled abroad was bound to see
that Rubens represented a much higher conception of art than anything England
possessed, and invited him over. He was followed by Van Dyck, who came to
stay. And although he too could not help feeling the influence of the bias of
English taste and learned to make his images more flatly decorative and less
powerfully modelled, than had been his wont, none the less, he set a new
standard of plastic design, and this was carried on by Lely. Lely was not a
great artist, but he was thoroughly imbued with the principles of three
demensional plastic design. Though his portraits lack psychological subtlety,
and fail to reveal clearly the sitter's individuality, they are firmly and
consistently constructed.
Kneller of the next generation caried on the
same tradition.
What of native English talent? The approach
of the Civil war stripped away the polish and brought out a sterner strain of
character no less in the aristocratic opponents. In the realism with which he
depicted the militant Cavalier, William Dobson(1610-46) marks a breakaway from
Van Dyckian elegance. Born in London, Dobson comes suddenly into prominence in
royalist Oxford after the Civil War had broken out.
The painting of Endymion Porter, thefriend
and agent of Charles I in the purchase of works of art, is generally accounted
Dobson's masterpiece. The most striking aspect of the work is its realism.
Though Endymion Porter is portrayed as a sportsman who has just shot a hare,
there is a stern look about his features which seems to convey that this is
wartime.
The solemnity of the times is also reflected
in the portraiture produced during the Commonwealth period and one would naturally
expect an even greater refection of elegance than that of Dobson during the
Puritan dominance. Indeed a prospect of unsparing realism is set out in
Cromwell's admonition--to "remark all these ruffness, pimples, warts"
and paint " everything as you see in me".
The corresponding painter to Dobson on the
Parliamentary side, however, Robert Walker, was a much less original artist and
still closely imitated Van Dyck's graceful style.
A number of other portrait painters are of
interest by reason of their subjects. John Greenhill (c. 1644--76) is of some
note as one of the first artists to depict English actors in costume. John
Riley (1646--91) was an artist whose work is distinguished by a grave
reticence. In succession to Lely he painted many eminent people, including
Dryden, and some minor folk, as for example the aged housemaid Bridget Holmes.
He was described by Horace Walpole as "one of the best native painters who
have flourished in England".
4) Painting In
The 18th Century.
The eighteenth century was the great
age of British painting. It was in this period that British art attained a
distinct national character. In the seventeenth century, art in Britain had
been dominated largely by the Flemish artist, Anthony van Dyck. In the early
eighteenth century, although influenced by Continental movements, particularly
by French rococo, British art began to develop nindependently. William
Hogarth, born just before the turn of the century, was the first major aritst
to reject foreign influence and establish a kind of art whose themes and
subjects were thoroughly British. His penetrating, witty portrayal of the
contemporary scene, his protest against social injustice and his attack on the
vulgtarities of fashianable society make him one of the most original and
significant of British artists.
Hogarth was followed by a row of illustrious
painters: Thomas Cainsborough, with his lyrical landscapes, "fancy
pictures" and portraits; the intellectual Sir Joshua Reynolds, who painted
charming society portraits and became the first president of the Royal Academy;
and George Stubbs, who is only now being recognized as an artist of the
greatest visual perception and sensitivity. There are many others, including
Wright of Derby, Wilson, Lawrence, Ramsay, Raeburn, Romney, Wheatley, and the
young Turner.
5) Satirical
Genre Painting
5.1)
William Hogarth(1697--1764)
William Hogarth was unquestionably one of
the greatest of English artists and a man of remarkably individual character
and thought. It was his achievement to give a comprehensive view of social
life within the framework of moralistic and dramatic narrative. He produced
portraits which brought a fresh vitality and truth into the jaded profession of
what he called "phizmongering". He observed both high life and low
with a keen and critical eye and his range of observation was accompanied by an
exceptional capacity for dramatic composition, and in painting by a technical
quality which adds beauty to pictures containing an element of satire of
caricature.
A small stocky man with blunt pugnacious
features and alert blue eyes, he had all the sharp-wittedness of the born
Cockney and an insular pride which led to his vigorous attacks on the
exaggerated respect for fereign artists and the taste of would-be connoisseurs
who brought over (as he said) "shiploads of dead Christs, Madonnas and
Holy Families" by inferior hands. Thereis no reason to suppose he had
anything but respect for the great Italian masters, though he deliberately took
a provocative attitude. What he objected to as much as anything was the absurd
veneration of the darkness produced by time and varnish as well as the
assumption that English painters were necessarily inferior to others. A
forthrightness of statement may perhaps be related to hes North-country
inheritance, for his father came to London from West-morland, but was in any
case the expression of a democratic outlook and unswervingly honest
intelligence.
The fact that he was apprenticed as a boy to
a silver-plate engraver has a considerable bearing on Hogarth's development.
It instilled a decorative sense which is never absent from his most realistic
productions. It introduced him to the world of prints, after famous masters or
by the satirical commentators of an earlier day. It is the engraver's sense of
line coupled with a regard for the value of Rococo curvature which governs his
essay on aesthetics, The Analysis of Beauty.
As a painter Hogarth
may be assumed to have learned the craft in Thornhill's "academy",
though his freshness of colour and feeling for the creamy substance of oil
paint suggest more acquaintance than he admitted to with the technique of his
French contemporaries. His first success as a painter was in the
"conversation pieces" in which his bent as an artist found a logical
beginning. These informal groups of family and friends surrounded by the
customary necessariesof their day-to-day life were congenial in permitting him
to treat a pictureas astage. He was not the inventor of the genre, which can
be traced back to Dutch and Flemish art of the seventeenth century and in which
he had contemporary rivals. Many were produced when he was about thirty and
soon after he made his clandestine match with Thornhill's daughter in 1729,
when extraefforts to gain a livelihood became necessary. With many felicities
of detail and arrangement they show Hogarth still in a restrained and decorous
mood. A step nearer to the comprehensive view of life was the picture of an
actual stage, the scene from The Beggar's Opera with which he scored a
great success about 1730, making sveral versions of the painting. Two
prospects must have been revealed to him as a result, the idea of constructing
his own pictorial drama comprising various scenes of social life, and that of
reaching a wider public through the means of engraving. The first successful
siries: "The Harlot's Progress, " of which only the engraving now
exist, was immediately followed by the tremendous verve and riot of "The
Rake's Progress", c. 1732; the masterpiece of the story series the
"Marriage à la Mode" followed after an interval of twelve
years.
As a painter of social life, Hogarth shows
the benefit of the system of memory training which he made a self-discipine.
London was his universe and he displayed his mastery in painting every aspect
of its people and architecture, from the mansion in Arlington Street, the
interior of which provided the setting for the disillusioned couple in the
second scene of the "Marriage à la Mode", to the dreadful
aspect of Bedlam. Yet he was not content with one line of development only and
the work of his mature years takes a varied course. He could not resist the
temptation to attempt a revalry with the history painters, though with little
successs. The Biblical compositions for St. Bartholomew's Hospital on which he
embarked after "The Rake's Progress" were not of a kind to convey his
real genius. He is sometimes satirical as in "The March of the Guards
towards Scotland", and the "Oh the Roast Beef of Old England!(Calais
Gate)", which was a product of his single expeditionabroad with its John
Bull comment on the condition of France, and also the
"Election"series of 1755 with its richness of comedy. In portraiture
he displays a great variety. The charm of childhood, the ability to compose a
vivid group, a delightful delicacy of colour appear in the "Graham
Children" of 1742. The portrait heads of his servants are penetrating
studies of character. The painting of Captain Coram, the philanthropic sea
captain who took a leading part in the foundation of the Foundling Hospital,
adapts the formality of the ceremonial portrait to a democratic level with a
singularlyengaging effects. The quality of Hogarth as an artist is seen to
advantage in his sketches and one sketch in particular, the famous "Shrimp
Girl" quickly executed with a limited range of colour, stands alone in his
work, taking its place among the masterpieces of the world in its harmonyof
form and content, its freshness and vitality.
The genius of Hogarth is such that he is
often regarded as a solitary rebel against a decaying artificiality, and yet
though he had no pupils, he had contemporaries who, while of lesser stature in
one way and another, tended in the same direction.
William Hogarth expressed in his art the new
mood of national elation, the critical spirit of the self-confident bourgeoisie
and the liberal humanitarianism of his age. He was the first native-born
English painter to become a hero of the Enlightenment. One reason for his popularity
was that the genius of the age found its highest expression in wit. From Molière to Votaire, from Congreve through Swift and Pope to
Fielding, the literature of wit was enriched on a scale unprecedent since
antiquity. The great comic writers of the century exposed folly, scarified
pretension and lashed hypocrisy and cruelty.
It was the great and single-handed
achievement of Hogarth to establish comedy as a category in art to be rated as
highly as comedy in literature. According to the hierarchy of artistic
categories that was inherited from the Renaissance, istoria, --the narrative
description of elevated themes, especially from the Bible and antiquity --was
the highest branch of art measured by a scale which placed low-life genre at
the bottom.
Hogarth was actually sensitive to the
categorical deprecation of comic art, and with his friend Henry Fielding set
about a campaign to raise its standing.
In a number of works and statements Hogarth
identified his cause with comic literature. In his self -portrait of 1745 the
oval canvas rests on the works of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift. Because his
reasons for invoking literature were misunderstood, Hogarth exposed himself to
the charge of being a "literary" artist. The legend of the literary
painter can be traced back to his own age. "Other pictures we look at,
"wrote Charles Lamb, "his prints we read." Some of the blame
for aesthetic deprecation must be placed on the shoulders of Hogarth himself.
He seems to have even encouraged an image which mystified his critics. He
remarked of the connoisseurs "Because I hate them, they think I hate
Titian and let them!" He outraged Horace Walpole by saying that he could
paint a portrait as well as Van Dyck. He compared nature with art, to the
desadvantage of the latter.
If his statements are examined carefully, it
becomes apparent that he did not attack foreign art as such, that he
passionately admired the Old Masters.
What manner of man was he who executed thse
portraits--so various, so faithful, and so admirable? In the London National
Gallery most of us have seen the best and most carefully finished series of his
comic paintings, and the portrait of his own honest face, of which the bright
blue eyes shine out from the canvas and give you an idea of that keen and brave
look with which William Hogarth regarded the world. No man was ever less of a
hero; you see him before you, and can fancy what he was --a jovial, honest
London citizen, stout and sturdy; a hearly, plain-spoken man, loving his laugh,
his friend, his glass, his roast-beef of Old England, and having a proper
bourgeois scorn for foreign fiddlers, foregn singers, and, above all, for
foreign painters, whom he held in the most amusing contempt.
Hogarth's
"Portraits of Captain Coram"
Hogarth painted his portrait of Capitain
Coram in 1740, and donated it the same year to the Foundling Hospital.
It was painted on Hogarth's own initiative,
without having been commissioned, and was presented to a charitable institution
in the making, one of whose founder members Hogarth was, and it depicts a
friend of his, the prime mover of the whole undertaking. The very format of
the picture shows that Hogarth was exerting all his powers to produce a
masterpiece. It measures about 2.4 by 1.5 metres, the biggest portrait Hogarth
ever painted.
In producing a work like this, of monumental
proportions, where there was no purchaser to sistort the artist's intentions,
Hogarth mst have had a definite aim or aims, and it is probable that he desired
his work to express something of significance to him at this period of time.
The portrait is conceived in the great
style, with foreground plus repoussoir, middle-ground, background, classical
column and drapery. Coram is depicted sitting on a chair, which is placed on a
platform with two steps leading up to it.
Hogarth makes use of the conventional
scheme, traditional in portraits of rulers and noblemen, with its column,
drapery and platform as laudatory symbols to stress the subject's dignity, a
composition, which in the England of that time, was usually associated with Van
Dyck's much admired but old-fashioned protraits of kings and noblemen.
Hogarth's painting, with its attributes and symbols is not far removed form
history painting. But the subject is a sea-captain, whose social position did
not, by the fixed conventions for this category of picture, entitle him to this
kind of portrayal. His relatively modest position in society is emphasized by
his simple dress, a broad-coat of cloth, by the absence of the wig obligatory
for every parson of standing, and by the intimace and realism with which the
artist has depicted this figure with his broad, stocky body, shose short, bent
legs do not reach the floor.
The mode of depiction refers back to , and
creates in the beholder an expectation of a somewhat schematized and idealized
manner of human portrayal. But by depicting Coram in an intimate and realistic
fashion Hogarth breaks the mould. In one and the same work he has made use of
the means of expression of both the great and the low style. By making
apparent the low social status of his subject, Hogarth seems also to wish to
breach the classic doctrine, whose scale of values provided the foundation of
the theories about the division of painting into distinct categories, where the
nature of the theme determined a picture's place on the scale "high"
to "low".
5.2)
Sir Joshua Reynolds(1723-1792)
To feel to the full the contrast between
Reynolds and Hodarth, there is no better way than to look at their
self-portraits. Hogarth's of 1745 in the Tate Gallery, Reynolds's of 1773 in
the Royal Academy. Hogarth had a round face, with sensuous lips, and in his
pictures looks you straight in face. He is accompanied by a pug-dog licking
his lip and looking very much like his master. The dog sits in front of the
painted oval frame in which the portrait appears--that is the Baroque trick of
a picture within a picture. Reynolds scorns suck tricks. His official
self-portrait shows him in an elegant pose with his glove in his hand, the body
fitting nicely into the noble triangular outline which Raphael and Titian had
favoured, and behind him on the right appears a bust of Michelangelo.
This portrait is clearly as programmatic as
Hogarth's. Reynolds's promramme is known to us in the greatest detail. He
gave altogether fifteen discourses to the students of the Academy, and they
were all printed. And whereas Hogarth's Analysis of Beaty was admired
by few and neglected by most--Reynolds's Discourses were international
reading.
What did Reynolds plead for? His is on the
whole a con sistent theory. "Study the great masters...who have stood the
test of ages, " and especially "study the works to notice"; for
"it is by being conversant with the invention of others that we learn to
invent". Don't be "a mere copier of
nature", don't "amuse mankind with the minute neatness of your
imitations, endeavour to impress them by the grandeur of [...] ideas".
Don't strive for "dazzling elegancies" of brushwork either, form is
superior to colour, as idea is to ornament. The history painter is the painter
of the highest order; for a subject ought to be "generally
interesting". It is his right and duty to "deviate from vulgar and
strict historical truth". So Reynolds would not have been tempted by the
reporter's attitude to the painting of important con-temporary events. With
such views on vulgar truth and general ideas, the portrait painter is ipso
facto inferior to the history painter. Genre, and landscape and still life rank
even lower. The student ought to keep his "principal attention fixed upon
the higher excellencies. If you compass them, and compass nothing more, you are
still first, class... You may be very imperfect, but still you are an imperfect
artist of the highest order".
This
is clearly a consistent theory, and it is that of the Italian and even more of
the French seventeenth century. There is nothing specifically English in it.
But what is eminently English about Reynolds and his Discourses is the
contrast between what he preached and what he did. History painting and the
Grand Manner, he told the stu-dents, is what they ought to aim at, but he was a
portrait painter most exclusively, and an extremely successful one.
Reynold's "Mrs Siddons as
the Tragic
Muse": the Grand Manner
Taken
Seriously
For anyone coming to the painting with a fresh eye the
first impression must surely be one of dignity and solem-nity. It is an
impression created not only by the pose and bearing
of the central figure herself, and her costume, but also by the attitude of her
two shadowy attendants, by the arrangement of the figures, and by the colour.
The colour must appear as one of the most remarkable features of the painting.
To the casual glance the picture seems monochromatic. The dominant tone is a
rich golden brown, interrupted only by the creamy areas of the face and arms
and by the deep velvety shadows of the background. On closer examination a much
greater variety in the colour is appar-ent, but the first impression remains
valid for the painting as a unit.
The central figure sits on a thronelike chair. She does not
look at the spectator but appearsan deep contemplation; her expression is one
of melancholy musing. Her gestures aptly reinforce the meditative air of the
head and also contribute to the regal quality of the whole figure. A great pendent
cluster of pearls adorns the front of her dress. In the heavy, sweeping
draperies that envelop the figure there are no frivolous elements of feminine
costume to conflict with the initial effect of solemn grandeur.
In the background, dimly seen on either side of the throne,
are two attendant figures. One, with lowered head and melancholy expression,
holds a bloody dagger; the other, his features contorted into an expression of
horror, grasps a cup. Surely these figures speak of violent events. Their
presence adds a sinister impression to a picture
already eavily charged with grave qualities.
At the time the
portrait was painted, Sarah Siddons was in her late twenties, but she
already.had a soli.d decade of acting experience behind her. She was born in
1755, the daughter of Roger Kemble, manager of an itinerant com-pany of actors.
Most of her early acting experience was with her father's company touring
through English provincial centres. Her reputation rose so quickly that in
1775, when she was only twenty, she was engaged by Garrick to perform at Drury
Lane. But this early London adventure proved premature; she was unsuccessful
and retired again to the provincial circuits, acting principally at Bath. She
threw her full energies into building her repertory and perfecting her acting
technique, with the result that her return to London as a tragic actress in the
autumn of 1782, was one of the great sensations of theatre history. Almost overnight
she found herself the unquestioned first lady of the British stage, a position
she retained for thirty years. The leading intellectuals and statesmen of the
day were among her most fervent admirers and were in constant attendance at
her performance.
Among the intelligentsia who flocked to
see the great actress and returned again and again was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the
august president of the Royal Academy. He was at the time the most respected
painter in England, and he also enjoyed a wide reputation as a theorist on art.
Reynolds moved with
ease among the great men of his day. Mrs Siddons remarks in her memoirs:
"...At his house were assembled all the good, the wise, the talented, the rank
and fashion of the age."
The painting is in fact a
brilliantly successful synthe-sis of images and ideas from a wide variety of
sources.
The basic notion of
representing Mrs Siddons in the guise of the Tragic Muse may well have been
suggested to Reynolds by a poem honouring the actress and published early in 1783.
The verses themselves are not distinguished, but the title and the poet's
initial image of Mrs Siddons enthroned as Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, may
have lodged in Reynolds's memory and given the initial direction to his thinking
about the portrait.
It has long been recognized
that in the basic organiza-tion of the picture Reynolds had Michelangelo's
prophets and sybils of the Sistine ceiling in mind. Mrs Siddons's pose'recalls
that of Isaiah, and of the two attendant figures the one on the left is very
closely modelled on the simi-larly placed companion of the prophet Jeremiah.
Reynolds's attitude
toward this sort of borrowing from the works of other artists may seem a little
strange to us today. He thought that great works of art should serve as a
school to the students at the Royal Academy: "He, who borrows an idea from
an ancient, or even from a modern artist not his contemporary, and so
accommodates his own work, that it makes a part of it, with no seam or joining appearing,
can hardly be charged with plagiarism: poets practise this kind of borrowing,
without reserve. But an artist should not be content with this only; he should
enter into a competition with his original, and endeavour to improve what he is
appropriating to his own work. Such imitation is ... a perpetual exercise of
the mind, a continual invention." From this point of view "The Tragia
Muse" is a perfect illustration of Reynolds;s
advice to the student.
If the arrangement of
the figures in the portrait of Mrs Siddons suggests Michelangelo, other aspects
of the painting, particularly the colour, the heavy shadow effects, and the
actual application of the paint, are totally unlike the work of Michelangelo
and suggest instead the paintings of Rembrandt.
But the amazing thing
is that the finished product is in no sense a pastiche. The disparate elements
have all been transformed through Reynolds's own visual imagination and have
emerged as a unit in which the relationship of all the parts to one another
seems not only correct but inevitable. This in itself is an achievement
commanding our admiration.
In "The Tragic
Muse" Reynolds achieved an air of grandeur and dignity which he and his
contemporaries regarded as a prime objective of art and which no other portrait
of the day embodied so successfully.
5.3)
George Romney (1734-1802)
Romney is best known to the
general public by facile portraits of women
and children and by his many studies of Lady
Hamilton, whom he delighted to portray in various historical roles, these are not however his best works. His visit to Italy at a time when
New Classical movement was gaming ground made a lasting impression on him and some
of his portrait groups, e. g. "The Gower Children", 1776, are
composed with classical statuary in mind, particularly in the treatment of the
draperies. He painted a number of impressive male portraits., and some
fashionable groups of great elegance, e. g. "Sir Cristopher and Lady Sykes",
1786. His output was large,,but he never exhibited at the Royal Academy.
Romney was of an
imaginative, introspective, and nervous temperament. He was attracted to
literary circles and William Hayley and William Cowper were among his
friends. He had aspirations to literary subjects in the Grand Manner, and,
painted for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. His sepia drawings, mostly designs
for literary and historical subjects which he never carried put, were highly prized;
there is a large collection of them in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
5.4) Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)
The methods of the two painters are
sufficiently indicated by their respective treatment of Mrs Siddons. Reynolds,
when the portrait was finished, signed his name along the edge of her robe, in
order to send his name "down to posterity on the hem of her garment".
Gainsborough made no attempt, as he had no wish, to record the art of
"Queen Sarah"; but he was interested in the woman as she rustled into
his studio in her blue and white silk dress. Her hat, muff and fur delighted
him, and he proceeded to paint her as though she were paying him a call. As an
actress, she was one of those sitters with whom he could be informal; and while
drawing her striking profile, he is said to have remarked, "Damn it,
madam, there is no end to your nose." The man who made such a remark was,
clearly, no courtier, but a brusque and friendly being, concerned to rid his
sitter of all sense of restraint. For a painter's studio is to the sitter a
nerve-racking place.
Gainsborough had from
the first shown peculiar skill in representing his sitters as out-of-doors, and
thus uniting portraiture with landscape. In his youth he had painted a portrait
of Mr and Mrs Andrews sitting in a wheat-fieM - a lovely picture, fresh as the
dew of morning, in which Gainsborough's two major interests seem almost equally
balanced; and at the close of his career his love of scenery sometimes
prevailed over his interest in human beings, and resulted not so much in a
portrait as in a picture of a garden or a park, animated by gallant men and
gracious women. The tendency to prefer the scenery to the persons animating it
reaches a climax in the famous canvas "Ladies Walking in the Mall".
It is a view of the central avenue of the Mall, near Gainsborough's residence,
behind Carlton House. The identity of the fashionable ladies taking an afternoon
stroll in the park is happily ignored. The rustling of the foliage is echoed,
as it were, in the shimmer of the ladies' gowns, so that Horace Walpole wrote
of the picture that it was "all-a-flutter, like a lady's fan". It has
the delicate grace of Lancret or Pater, and betrays
the painter's ingenious escape from his studio to the greenest retreat.
Joshua
Reynolds
on the Art of Thomas Gainsborough
"Whether he
most excelled in portraits, landscapes or fancy-pictures, it is difficult to
determine [...] This excel-lence was his own, the result of his particular
observation and taste; for this he was certainly not indebted [...] to any
School; for his grace was not academical, or antique, but selected by himself
from the great school of nature [...]
[...] The peculiarity of his
manner or style, or we may call it - his language in which he expressed his
ideas, has been considered by many, as his greatest defect. But... whether this
peculiarity was a defect or not, intermixed, as it was, with great beauties, of
some of which it was probably the cause, it becomes a proper subject of
criticism and enquiry to a painter. [...]
[...] It is certain, that
all those odd scratches and marks which, on a close examination, are so
observable in Gainsborough's pictures; ... this chaos, this uncouth and shape-less
appearance, by a kind of magic, at a certain distance assumes form, and all the
parts seem to drop into their proper places; so that we can hardly refuse
acknowledging the full effect of diligence, under the appearance of chance and
hasty negligence. [...]
[...]
It must be allowed, that the hatching manner of Gainsborough
did very much contribute to the lightness of effect which is so eminent a beauty in his
pictures." [...]
6) Eighteenth
Century Lanscape
By the time of Hogarth's death in 1764,
a new genera-tion had already established itself in London, with a new kind of
art and a new attitude to art. By 1750, a number of native-born artists were
making very fair .livings in branches other than the "safe" one of
portrait-painting. There were distinguished painters in landscape, sea-painting,
and animal painting, quite apart from Hogarth's innovation of satirical comic
painting. For Englishmen it may be true that landscape and animal painting, and
to an extent sea-painting, have always been best loved when they retain
something of portraiture - are portraits, in fact,
recognizable likenesses of their own parks, houses, or towns, of their cities,
of their ships or sea-battles.
The best landscapes
painted in England at the closje of the seventeenth and the beginning of the
eighteenth centu-ries were topographical in nature. In marine painting the leading
figure was Samuel Scott (1702-1772), a contemporary of Hogarth, who began by
painting in the manner of Van de Veldes, but who later switched to townscape almost
certainly in answer to a demand that had been created by Canaletto. His
(Canaletto's) paintings were widely known here, brought back by young
Englishmen^as perfect souvenirs, before he himself came in 1746.
Scott, following close in Canaletto's
footsteps in his views of London, caught perhaps more of the veil of moisture
that is almost always in English skies. But Scott lacked the Venetian's
spaciousness and the logic of picture-making.
Richard Wilson
(1714-1782) developed a stronger, more severe style, in which the classic
inspiration of the two French masters of the Italian landscape, Claude and GaspardPoussin,
is very clear; as also, rather later, is that'of "the broad shimmering
golden visions of the Dutchman, Cuyp.
Wilson's English work of
the sixties and seventies, more various than is often thought, is at its best
of a calm, sunbasking, poetic distinction; to the English landscape he transferred
something of the miraculously lucid Roman light, in which objects in the
countryside can seem to group themselves consciously into picture. On other
occasions Wilson found in the Welsh and in the English scene a ra-diant yet
brooding tenderness, the placid mystery of wide stretches of water, over which
the eye is drawn deep into the picture to the far Haze on the horizon where
sight seems to melt. Sometimes he also made a bid to align his compositions
with the classic example of Claude by peopling them with classic or
mythological figures.
The most remarkable of
Gainsborough's landscapes have, in fact, only found a full appreciation this
century. These are very early landscapes,
painted in Suffolk about 1750; strictly they are
not pure landscapes as they include portraits, but the synthesis of the two
genres is so perfect that the pictures become portraits of more than a person -
of a whole way of life, of a country gentry blooming modestly and naturally
among their woods and fields, their parks and lakes. The directness of
characterization is
so
traightforward as to seem almost naive. The light on land and tree and water
has a rainwashed brilliance, and a strange tension of stillness - sometimes it
is almost a thunderlight.
In his later pure
landscapes, the woodenness melts under the brush of a painter who loved the
radiant shimmering fluency of his medium as perhaps no other English painter
has ever done.
Wilson and Gainsborough form the two main
peaks in eighteenth century landscape painting.
Gainsborough's
Landscapes
As a landscape painter
Gainsborough was influenced in his early years by Dutch seventeenth century
pictures seen in East Anglia; and the landscape backgrounds in his Ipswich
period portraits are all in that tradition. But during his Bath period he saw
paintings by Rubens and thereafter that influence is apparent in his landscape
compositions. The landscapes of Gainsborough's maturity have spontaneity
deriving from the light rapid movement of his brush;- but they are not rapid
sketches from nature, he never painted out-of-doors; he painted his landscapes in
his studio from his drawings, and from the scenes which , he constructed in a
kind of model theatre, where he took bits of cork and vegetables and so on and
moved them about, and moved the light about, till he had arranged a
composi-tion. It is possible that some of his preliminary black and white chalk
landscape drawings were done out-of-doors; but the majority were done in the
studio from memory when he returned from his walk or ride; and some of the
finest of the drawings, the "Horses by a Shed", for example, resulted
perhaps from a combination of the two procedures - a rough pencil note made on
the spot and reconsidered in terms of composition with the aid of his candle
and the model theatre after dinner. At his highest level he went far beyond the
current formulae and achieved a degree of integrated three-dimensional
arrangement.
Wilson's "River Scene with Bathers"
Probably the most
lasting impression made on many people by Richard Wilson's "River Scene
with Bathers" is of the golden light that suffuses the painting. It is a
sort of light we associate with a warm summer evening. Actual sunlight doesn't
often have such a mellow tone, but this colour accords perfectly with the image
many of us hold of what evening light ideally should be. Almost everything about
this painting has a similar elysian quality. None of us has seen a view exactly
like this one, and yet it immediately strikes a sympathetic chord: the cattle
lazing in the late sun while the herders take a swim; the softly rounded hills
with masses of unruffled foliage; the quiet river meandering toward the distant
mountain and the still more distant, unclouded horizon. There is even a ruined
temple, picturesquely placed as a gentle reminder of the transitory character
of man's achievement in the face of nature. Eve-rything about this painting
contributes to this idyllic mood. It is a little too good to be true; but we
wish it might be true.
Richard Wilson himself had
never seen this view any more than we have, because it does not exist. It was
for him, as it is for us, an ideal landscape, sensitively developed in his
imagination from his recollections of things encountered, both in nature and in
art. It was an attitude that was widely accepted in Wilson's day. The artistic climate
that produced a painting such as "River Scene with Bathers" is akin
to that which accounts for "Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse".
Underlying the interest in
creating an "ideal" landscape was the assumption that art should
aspire to something more than mere sensuous gratification; that it should elevate
the thoughts of the spectator and purge his mind of petty considerations. This
was to be achieved both by what was included and (equally important) the way in
which it was represented. The scene, with its ruin, spacious vista, and warm
summer light, is meant to remind us of Italy, or at least the Mediterranean
area, and to arouse by association a train of thought concerned with pastoral
idylls of the classical past. But this effect is strongly supported by the way
in which Wilson has organized the elements in his painting to sustain a mood of
quiet and repose. The picture is carefully balanced around the centrally placed
ruin. The hill to the right finds just the proper counter-poise in the distant
mountain and the broad stretch of valley to the left. The group of bathers on
the left is balanced by the cattle on the right. The whole view is enframed by
trees on either side and set comfortably back in space by a dark' foreground
ledge. The sense of balance involves many factors, including shape, light,
texture and distance. Nothing appears forced, but every element in the picture
has been conceived and placed with regard to its relation to the
whole.
7) SCIENCE AND ANIMAL PAINTING
Joseph Wright of
Derby (1734-1797) and George Stubbs (1724-1806)
A most interesting figure was Joseph Wright of Derby,
an able enough painter with a remarkable range of interests. He was
conventionally London-trained in portraiture, and made the, by then,
conventionally necessary trip to Italy but it is to his native Midlands that he
returned in the end. In his work there comes through something of the hard-headed,
practical yet romantic excitement of the dawn'of the Industrial Revolution. He
saw the world in a forced and sharpening
light'- sometimes artificial, the mill-windows brilliant in the night, faces
caught in the circle of the lamp, or the red glow of an iron forge, casting
mon-strous shadows. This was an old trick - deriving from Caravaggio and the
Dutch candlelight painters - but with it Wright brought out a sense of
exploration and exploitation - scientific, intellectual and commercial, the spirit
of the Midlands of his time. His patrons were men like the industrialist
Arkwright of the spinning Jenny, and Dr Priestley, the poetic seer of the new
science (both of whom he painted).
The "Experiment on a
Bird in the Air-Pump", painted in 1768, is perhaps his masterpiece.
Air-pumps were in considerable production in the Midlands at the time, but this
is not merely an excellently painted and composed study of scientific
experiment. It is raised to the pitch of a true and moving drama of life by the
tender yet un-sentimental exploration of a human situation. The bird in the
globe will die, as the vacuum is created in it; the elder girl on the right
cannot bear the idea and hides her face in her hands, while the younger one
though half-turned away also, looks up still to the bird with a marvellous and marvelling
expression in which curiosity is just overcoming fear and pity. The moon, on
the edge of cloud, seen through the window on the right, adds another dimension
of weird-ness and mystery.
This is a picture that
exists on many levels but, as it was not expressed in terms of the classical
culture of the age, Wright's subject pictures were for long not given their
due. He himself stood apart from that (classical) culture; although he early
became an associate of the Royal Academy, he soon quarrelled with it.
George Stubbs presents in some ways a
similar case: he never became a full member of the Royal Academy. He was, for
his contemporaries, a mere horse-painter. In the last few years he has been much
studied, and his reassess-ment has lifted him to the level of the greatest of
his'time. His life has been fairly described as heroic. The son of a Liverpool
currier, he supported himself at the begin-ning of his career" in northern
England by painting por-traits, but at the same time started on his study of
anatomy, animal and human, that was to prove not only vitally im-portant to his
art but also a new contribution to science. Stubbs was one of the great
English empiricists. He took a farm-house in Lincolnshire and in it, over
eighteen months, he grappled with the anatomy of the horse. His models were the
decaying carcasses of horses, which he gradually stripped down, recording each
revelation of anatoT my in precise and scientific drawing. The result was his
book The Anatomy of the Horse, a pioneering work both in science and
art.
All his painting is based on knowledge drawn from
ruthless study, ordered by a most precise observation. In the seventies, his
scientific interests widened from anatomy to chemistry, and helped by Wedgwood,
the enlightened founder of the great pottery firm, he experimented in enam) el
painting. His true and great originality was not on-conventional lines, and
could not be grasped by contemporary taste.