CHAPTER XXIV

THE BEGINNINGS OF "PAYSAGE INTIME" How it was that the secrets of _paysage intime_ were reserved for our own century--and this assuredly by no mere accident--can only be delineated in true colours when some one writes a special history of landscape painting, a book which at the present time would be the most seasonable in the literature of art. Wereschagin once declared that in the province of landscape the works of the old masters seem like the exercises of pupils in comparison with the performances of modern art; and certain it is that the nineteenth century, if it is inferior to previous ages in everything else, may, at any rate, offer them an equivalent in landscape. It was only city life that could produce this passionately heightened love of nature. It was only in the century of close rooms and over-population, neurosis and holiday colonies, that landscape painting could attain to this fulness, purity, and sanctity. It was only our age of hurry and work that made possible a relation between nature and the human soul, which really has something of what the Earth Spirit vouchsafed to Faust: "to gaze into her heart as into the bosom of a friend." In France also, the tendency which since the eighteenth century had made itself felt in waves rising ever higher, had been for a short time abruptly interrupted by Classicism. Of the pre-revolutionary landscapists _Hubert Robert_ was the only one who survived into the new era. His details of nature and his _rococo_ savour were pardoned to him for the sake of his classic ruins. At first there was not one of the newer artists who was impelled to enter this province. A generation which had become ascetic, and which dreamed only of rude, manly virtue, expressed through the plastic and purified forms of the human body, had lost all sense for the charms of landscape. And when the first landscapes appeared once more, after several years, they were, as in Germany, solemn stage-tragedy scenes, abstract "lofty" regions such as Poussin ostensibly painted. Only in Poussin a great feeling for nature held together the conventional composition, in spite of all his straining after style; whereas nothing but frigid rhetoric and sterile formalism reigns in the works of these newer painters, works which were created at second-hand. The type of the beautiful which had been borrowed from the antique was worked into garden and forest with a laboured effort at style, as it had been worked into the human form and the flow of drapery. A _prix de Rome_ was founded for historical landscapes. _Henri Valenciennes_ was the Lenôtre of this Classicism, the admired teacher of several generations. The beginner in landscape painting modelled himself upon Valenciennes as the figure painter upon Guérin. His _Traité élémentaire de perspective pratique_, in which he formulated the principles of landscape, contains his personal views as well as the æsthetics of the age. Although, as he premises, he "is convinced that there is in reality only one kind of painting, historical painting, it is true that an able historical painter ought not entirely to neglect landscape." Rembrandt, of course, and the old Dutch painters were without any sort of ideal, and only worked for people without soul or intelligence. How far does a landscape with cows and sheep stand below one with the funeral of Phocion, or a rainy day by Ruysdael below a picture of the Deluge by Poussin! Hardly does Claude Lorrain find grace in the eyes of Valenciennes. "He has painted with a pretty fidelity to nature the morning and evening light. But just for that very reason his pictures make no appeal to the intelligence. He has no tree where a Dryad could dwell, no spring in which nymphs could splash. Gods, demigods, nymphs, satyrs, even heroes are too sublime for these regions; shepherds could dwell there at best." Claude, indeed, loved Italy, but knew the old writers all too little, and they are the groundwork for landscape painters. As David said to his pupil Gros, "Look through your Plutarch," Valenciennes advised his own pupils to study Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid: only from these authors might be learnt what were the regions suitable for gods and heroes. "Vos exemplaria græca Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna." If, for example, the landscapist would paint Morning, let him portray the moment when Aurora rises laughing from the arms of her aged spouse, when the hours are yoking four fiery steeds to the car of the sun-god, or Ulysses kneels imploring before Nausicaa. For Noon the myth of Icarus or of Phaëton might be turned to account. Evening may be represented by painting Phoebus hastening his course as he nears the horizon in flaming desire to cast himself into the arms of Thetis. Having once got his themes from the old poets, the landscape painter must know the laws of perspective to execute his picture; he must be familiar with Poussin's rules of composition, and occasionally he ought even to study nature. Then he needs a weeping willow for an elegy, a rock for the death of Phaëton, and an oak for the dance of the nymphs. To find such motives he should make journeys to the famed old lands of civilisation; best of all on the road which art itself has traversed--first to Asia Minor, then to Greece, and then to Italy. [Illustration: _Baschet._ HUBERT ROBERT. MONUMENTS AND RUINS.] These æsthetics produced _Victor Bertin_ and _Xavier Bidault_, admired by their contemporaries for "richness of composition and a splendid selection of sites." Their methodical commonplaces, their waves and valleys and temples, bear the same relation to nature as the talking machine of Raimundus Lullus does to philosophy. The scholastic landscape painter triumphed; a school it was which nourished itself on empty formulas, and so died of anæmia. Bidault, who in his youth made very good studies, is, with his stippled leaves and polished stems, his grey skies looking sometimes like lead and sometimes like water, the peculiar essence of a tiresome Classicism; and he is the same Bidault who, as president of the hanging committee, for years rejected the landscapes of Théodore Rousseau from the Salon. It is only the figure of _Michallon_, who died young, that still survives from this group. He too belongs to the school of Valenciennes, through his frigid, meagre, and pedantically correct style; but he is distinguished from the rest, for he endeavoured to acquire a certain truth to nature in the drawing of plants, and was accounted a bold innovator at the time. He did not paint "the plant in itself," but burs, thistles, dandelions, everything after its kind, and through this botanical exactness he acquired in the beginning of the century a fame which it is now hard to understand. In the persons of _Jules Cogniet_ and _Watelet_ the gates of the school were rather more widely opened to admit reality. Having long populated their classic valleys with bloodless, dancing nymphs and figurants of divine race, they abandoned historical for picturesque landscape, and "dared" to represent scenes from the environs of Paris, castles and windmills. But as they clung even here to the classical principles of composition, it is only nature brushed and combed, trimmed and coerced by rules, that is reflected in their painting. Even in 1822, when Delacroix exhibited his "Dante's Bark," the ineffable Watelet shone in his full splendour. Amongst his pictures there was a view of Bar-sur-Seine, which the catalogue appropriately designated not simply as a _vue_, but as a _vue ajustée_. Till his last breath Watelet was convinced that nature did not understand her own business, and was always in need of a painter to revise her errors and correct them. Beside this group who adapted French localities for classical landscapes there arose in the meantime another group, and they proceeded in the opposite direction. Their highest aim was to go on pilgrimage to sacred Italy, the classic land, which, with their literary training and their one-sided æsthetics, they invariably thought more beautiful and more worthy of veneration than any other. But they tried to break with Valenciennes' arbitrary rules of composition, and to seize the great lines of Italian landscape with fidelity to fact. In going back from Valenciennes to Claude they endeavoured to pour new life into a style of landscape painting which was its own justification, compromised as it had been by the Classic school. They made a very heretical appearance in the eyes of the strictly orthodox pupils of Valenciennes. They were called the Gothic school, which was as much as to say Romanticists, and the names of _Théodore Aligny_ and _Edouard Bertin_ were for years mentioned with that of Corot in critiques. They brought home very pretty drawings from Greece, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and Bertin did this especially. Aligny is even not without importance as a painter. He aimed at width of horizon and simplicity of line more zealously than the traditional school had done. He is, indeed, a man of sombre, austere, and earnest talent, and the solemn rhythm of his pictures would have more effect if the colour were not so dry, and if a fixed and monotonous light were not uniformly shed over everything in place of a vibrating atmosphere. _Alexandre Desgoffe_, _Paul Flandrin_, _Benouville_, _Bellel_, and others drew from the same sources with similar conviction and varying talent. Paul Flandrin, in particular, was in his youth a good painter in the manner of 1690. His composition is noble and his execution certain, recalling Poussin. Ingres, his master, said of him, "If I were not Ingres I would be Flandrin." It was only later that the singular charm of Claude Lorrain and the Roman majesty of Poussin were transformed under the brush of Flandrin into arid still-life, into landscapes of pasteboard and wadding. But not from this quarter could the health of a school which had become anæmic be in any way restored. French landscape had to draw a new power of vitality from the French soil itself. It was saved when its eyes were opened to the charms of home, and this revelation was brought about by Romanticism. In the Salon notices, from 1822 onwards, the complaints of critics are repeated with increasing violence--complaints that, instead of fair regions, noble character, and monumental lines, nothing but "malarious lakes, desolate wastes, and terrible cliffs" should be painted, which, in the language of Classicism, means that French landscape painting had taken firm hold of the soil in France. The day when Racine was declared by the young Romanticists to be a maker of fine phrases put an end to the whole school of David and to Classical landscape at the same time. It fell into oblivion, as, sooner or later, every artistic movement which does not rest on the nature and personality of the artist inevitably must. The young revolutionaries no longer believed that an alliance with mythological subjects and "grand composition" could compensate for the lack of air and light. They were tired of pompous, empty, and distant scenery. They only thought of nature, and that amid which they lived seemed the less to forego its charms the more Italy came under suspicion as the home of all these ugly, unpleasant, and academical pictures. That was the birthday of French landscape. At the very time when Delacroix renewed the _répertoire_ of grand painting, enriching art with a world of feeling which was not merely edited, a parallel movement began in landscape. "Dante's Bark" was painted in 1822, "The Massacre of Chios" in 1824. Almost at the same hour a tornado swept through the branches of the old French oaks, and bent the rustling corn; the sky was covered with clouds, and the waters, which had been hard-bound for so long, sped purling once more along their wonted course. The little paper temples, built on classic heights, toppled down, and there rose lowly rustic cottages, from the chimneys of which the smoke mounted wavering to the sky. Nature awoke from her wintry sleep, and the spring of modern landscape painting broke with its sadness and its smiles. [Illustration: _L'Art._ VICTOR HUGO. RUINS OF A MEDIÆVAL CASTLE ON THE RHINE.] This is where the development of French art diverges from that of German. After it had stood under the influence of Poussin, the German long continued to have a suspicious preference for scenery that was devoid of soul, for beautiful views, as the phrase is, and it penetrated much later into the spirit of familiar nature. But as early as the twenties this spirit had revealed itself to the French. It was only in the province of poetry that they went through the period of enthusiasm for exotic nature--and even there not to the same extent as Germany. Only in Chateaubriand's _Atala_ are there to be found pompously pictorial descriptions of strange landscapes which have been in no degree inwardly felt. Chiefly it was the virgin forests of North America that afforded material for splendid pictures, which he describes in grandiloquent and soaring prose. A nature which is impressive and splendid serves as the scenery of these dramas of human life. But with Lamartine the reaction was accomplished. He is the first amongst the poets of France who conceived landscape with an inward emotion, and brought it into harmony with his moods of soul. His poetry was made fervent and glorified by love for his home, for his own province, for South Burgundy. Even in the region of art a poet was the first initiator. [Illustration: _Baschet._ MICHEL. A WINDMILL.] [Illustration: _Baschet._ DE LA BERGE. LANDSCAPE.] _Victor Hugo_, the father of Romanticism in literature, cannot be passed over in the history of landscape painting. Since 1891, when that remarkable exhibition of painter-poets was opened in Paris--an exhibition in which Théophile Gautier, Prosper Merimée, the two de Goncourts, and others were represented by more or less important works--the world learnt what a gifted draughtsman, what a powerful dramatist in landscape, was this great Romanticist. Even in the reminiscences of nature--spirited and suggestive of colour as they are--which he drew with a rapid hand in the margin of his manuscripts, the fiery glow of Romanticism breaks out. The things of which he speaks in the text appear in black shadows and ghostly light. Old castles stand surrounded by clouds of smoke or the blinding glare of fire, moonrise makes phantom silhouettes of the trees, waves lashed by the storm dash together as they spout over vessels; and there are gloomy seas and dark unearthly shores, fairy palaces, proud citadels, and cathedrals of fabled story. Whenever one of his finished drawings is bequeathed to the Louvre, Hugo is certain to receive a place in the history of art as one of the champions of Romanticism. The movement was so universal amongst the painters that it is difficult at the present time to perceive the special part that each individual played in the great drama. This is especially true of _Georges Michel_, a genius long misunderstood, a painter first made known in wider circles by the World Exhibition in 1889, and known to the narrower circle of art lovers only since his death in 1843. At that time a dealer had bought at an auction the works left behind by a half-famished painter--pictures with no signature, and only to be identified because they collectively treated motives from the surroundings of Paris. A large, wide horizon, a hill, a windmill, a cloudy sky were his subjects, and all pointed to an artist schooled by the Dutch. Curiosity was on the alert, inquiry was made, and it was found that the painter was named Georges Michel, and had been born in 1763; that at twelve years of age he had shirked school to go drawing, had run away with a laundress at fifteen, was already the father of five children when he was twenty, had married again at sixty-five, and had worked hard to his eightieth year. Old men remembered that they had seen early works of his in the Salon. It was said that Michel had produced a great deal immediately after the Revolution, but exceedingly tedious pictures, which differed in no respect from those of the other Classicists; for instance, from Demarne and Swebach, garnished with figures. It was only after 1814 that he disappeared from the Salon; not, as has been now discovered, because he had no more pictures to exhibit, but because he was rejected as a revolutionary. During his later years Michel had been most variously employed: for one thing, he had been a restorer of pictures. [Illustration: _Baschet._ CABAT. LE JARDIN BEAUJON.] In this calling many Dutch pictures had passed through his hands, and they suggested to him the unseasonable idea of looking more closely into nature in the neighbourhood than he had done in his youth--nature not as she was in Italy, but in the environs of the city. While Valenciennes and his pupils made so many objections to painting what lay under their eyes, Georges Michel remained in the country, and was the first to light on the idea of placing himself in the midst of nature, and not above her; no longer to arrange and adapt, but to approach her by painting her with directness. If any one spoke of travelling to Italy, he answered: "The man who cannot find enough to paint during his whole life in a circuit of four miles is in reality no artist. Did the Dutch ever run from one place to another? And yet they are good painters, and not merely that, but the most powerful, bold, and ideal artists." Every day he made a study in the precincts of Paris, without any idea that he would count in these times among the forerunners of modern art. He shares the glory of having discovered Montmartre with Alphonse Karr, Gérard de Nerval, and Monselet. After his death such studies were found in the shops of all the second-hand dealers of the Northern Boulevard; they were invariably without a frame, as they had never seemed worth framing, and when they were very dear they were to be had for forty francs. Connoisseurs appreciated his wide horizons, stormy skies, and ably sketched sea-shores. For, in spite of his poverty, Michel had now and then deserted Montmartre and found means to visit Normandy. Painfully precise in the beginning, while he worked with Swebach and Demarne, he had gradually become large and bold, and employed all means in giving expression to what he felt. He was a dreamer, who brought into his studies a unison of lights, and, now and then, beams of sun which would have delighted Albert Cuyp. A genuine offspring of the old Dutch masters--of the grand and broad masters, not of those who worked with a fine brush--already he was aiming at _l'expression par l'ensemble_, and since the Paris Universal Exhibition he has been fittingly honoured as the forerunner of Théodore Rousseau. His pictures, as it seems, were early received in various studios, and there they had considerable effect in setting artists thinking. But as he ceased to date his pictures after 1814 it is, nevertheless, difficult to be more precise in determining the private influence which this Ruysdael of Montmartre exerted on men of the younger generation. [Illustration: _L'Art._ PAUL HUET.] One after the other they began to declare the Italian pilgrimage to be unnecessary. They buried themselves as hermits in the villages around the capital. The undulating strip of country, rich in wood and water, which borders on the heights of Saint-Cloud and Ville d'Avray, is the cradle of French landscape painting. In grasping nature they proceeded by the most various ways, whilst they drew everything scrupulously and exactly which an observing eye may discern, or wedded their own temperament with the moods of nature. [Illustration: _Baschet._ HUET. THE INUNDATION AT ST. CLOUD.] That remarkable artist _Charles de la Berge_ seems like a forerunner of the English Pre-Raphaelite school. He declared the ideal of art to consist in painting everything according to nature, and overlooking nothing; in carrying drawing to the most minute point, and yet preserving the impression of unison and harmony in the picture--which is as easy to say as it is difficult to perform. His brief life was passed in this struggle. His pictures are miracles of patience: to see that it is only necessary to know the "Sunset" of 1839, in the Louvre. There is something touching in the way this passionate worker had branches and the bark of trees brought to his room, even when he lay on his deathbed, to study the contortions of wood and the interweaving of fibres with all the zeal of a naturalist. The efforts of de la Berge have something of the religious devotion with which Jan van Eyck or Altdorfer gazed at nature. But he died too young to effect any result. He copied the smallest particulars of objects with the utmost care, and in the reproduction even of the smallest aimed at a mathematical precision, neutralising his qualities of colour, which were otherwise of serious value, by such hair-splitting detail. _Camille Roqueplan_, the many-sided pupil of Gros, made his first appearance as a landscape painter with a sunset in 1822. He opposed the genuine windmills of the old Dutch masters to those everlasting windmills of Watelet, with their leaden water and their meagre landscape. In his pictures a green plain, intersected by canals, stretches round; a fresh and luminous grey sky arches above. That undaunted traveller _Camille Flers_, who had been an actor and ballet dancer in Brazil before his appearance as a painter, represented the rich pastures of Normandy with truth, but was diffident in the presence of nature where she is grand. His pupil, _Louis Cabat_, was hailed with special enthusiasm by the young generation on account of his firm harmonious style. His pictures showed that he had been a zealous student of the great Dutch artists, and that it was his pride to handle his brush in their manner, expressing as much as possible without injuring pictorial effect. He is on many sides in touch with Charles de la Berge. Later he even had the courage to see Italy with fresh eyes, and in a simple manner to record his impressions without regard for the rules and theories of the Classicists. But the risk was too great. He became once more an admirer of imposing landscape, an adherent of Poussin, and as such he is almost exclusively known to us of a younger generation. [Illustration: _Baschet._ J. M. W. TURNER.] _Paul Huet_ was altogether a Romanticist. In de la Berge there is the greatest objectivity possible, in Huet there is impassioned expression. His heart told him that the hour was come for giving passion utterance; he wanted to render the energy of nature, the intensity of her life, with the whole might of vivid colouring. In his pictures there is something of Byronic poetry; the conception is rich and powerful, the symphony of colour passionately dramatic. In every one of his landscapes there breathes the human soul with its unrest, its hopelessness, and its doubts. Huet was the child of an epoch, which at one moment exulted to the skies and at another sorrowed to death in the most violent contrast; and he has proclaimed this temper of the age with all the freedom and power possible, where it is only earth and sky, clouds and trees that are the medium of expression. Most of his works, like Romanticism in general, have an earnest, passionate, and sombre character; nothing of the ceremonial pompousness peculiar to Classical landscapes. He has a passion for boisterous storms and waters foaming over, clouds with the lightning flashing through them, and the struggle of humanity against the raging elements. In this effort to express as much as possible he often makes his pictures too theatrical in effect. In one of his principal works, the "View of Rouen," painted in 1833, the breadth of execution almost verges on emptiness and panoramic view. Huet was in the habit of heaping many objects together in his landscapes. He delighted in expressive landscapes in the sense in which, at that time, people delighted in expressive heads. This one-sidedness hindered his success. When he appeared in the twenties his pictures were thought bizarre and melancholy. And later, when he achieved greater simplicity, he was treated by the critics merely with the respect that was paid to the Old Guard, for now a pleiad of much brighter stars beamed in the sky. [Illustration: TURNER. A SHIPWRECK.] [Illustration: J. M. W. TURNER. THE OLD TÉMÉRAIRE.] But we must not forget that Michel and Huet showed the way. Rousseau and his followers left them far behind, as Columbus threw into oblivion all who had discovered America before him, or Gutenberg all who had previously printed books. The step on which these initiators had stood was more or less that of Andreas Achenbach and Blechen. They are good and able painters, but they still kept the Flemish and Dutch masters too much in their memory. It is easy to detect in them reminiscences of Ruysdael and Hobbema and the studies of gallery pictures grown dim with age. They still coloured objects brown, and made spring as mournful as winter, and morning as gloomy as evening; they had yet no sense that morning means the awakening of life, the youth of the sun, the springtide of the day. They still composed their pictures and finished and rounded them off for pictorial effect. The next necessary step was no longer to look at Ruysdael and Cuyp, but at nature--to lay more emphasis on sincerity of impression, and therefore the less upon pictorial finish and rounded expression--to paint nature, not in the style of galleries, but in its freshness and bloom. And the impulse to this last step, which brought French landscape painting to its highest perfection, was given by England. [Illustration: _L'Art._ TURNER. DIDO BUILDING CARTHAGE.] The most highly gifted work produced in this province between the years 1800 and 1830 is of English origin. At the time when landscape painting was in France and Germany confined in a strait-waistcoat by Classicism, the English went quietly forward in the path trodden by Gainsborough in the eighteenth century. In these years England produced an artist who stands apart from all others as a peculiar and inimitable phenomenon in the history of landscape painting, and at the same time it produced a school of landscape which not only fertilised France, but founded generally the modern conception of colour. That phenomenon is _Joseph Mallord William Turner_, the great pyrotechnist, one of the most individual and intellectual landscape painters of all time. What a singular personality! And how vexatious he is to all who merely care about correctness in art! Such persons divide the life of Turner into two halves, one in which he was reasonable and one in which he was a fool. They grant him a certain talent during the first fifteen years of his activity, but from the moment when he is complete master of his instrument, from the moment when the painter begins in glowing enthusiasm to embody his personal ideal, they would banish him from the kingdom of art, and lock him up in a madhouse. When in the forties the Munich Pinakothek was offered a picture by Turner, glowing with colour, people, accustomed to the contours of Cornelius, knew no better than to laugh at it superciliously. It is said that in his last days he sent a landscape to an exhibition. The committee, unable to discover which was the top or which the bottom, hung it upside-down. Later, when Turner came into the exhibition and the mistake was about to be rectified, he said: "No, let it alone; it really looks better as it is." One frequently reads that Turner suffered from a sort of colour-blindness, and as late as 1872 Liebreich wrote an article printed in _Macmillan_, which gave a medical explanation of the alleged morbid affection of the great landscape painter's eyes. Only thus could the German account for his pictures, which are impressionist, although they were painted about the middle of the century. The golden dreams of Turner were held to be eccentricities of vision, since no one was capable of following this painter of momentary impressions in his majesty of sentiment, and the impressiveness and poetry of his method of expression. [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ TURNER. JUMIÈGES.] [Illustration: _L'Art._ TURNER. LANDSCAPE WITH THE SUN RISING IN A MIST.] [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ TURNER. VENICE.] In reality Turner was the same from the beginning. He circled round the fire like a moth, and craved, like Goethe, for more light; he wanted to achieve the impossible and paint the sun. To attain his object nothing was too difficult for him. He restrained himself for a long time; placed himself amongst the followers of the painter of light _par excellence_; studied, analysed, and copied Claude Lorrain; completely adopted his style, and painted pictures which threw Claude into eclipse by their magnificence and luminous power of colour. The painting of "Dido building Carthage" is perhaps the most characteristic of this phase of his art. One feels that the masses of architecture are merely there for the sake of the painter; the tree in the foreground has only been planted in this particular way so that the background may recede into farther distance. The colour is splendid, though still heavy. By the union of the principles of classic drawing with an entirely modern feeling for atmosphere something chaotic and confused is frequently introduced into the compositions of these years. But at the hour when it was said to him, "You are the real Claude Lorrain," he answered, "Now I am going to leave school and begin to be Turner." Henceforth he no longer needs Claude's framework of trees to throw the light beaming into the corners of his pictures. At first he busied himself with the atmospheric phenomena of the land of mist. Then when the everlasting grey became too splenetic for him he repaired to the relaxing, luxuriant sensuousness of Southern seas, and sought the full embodiment of his dreams of light in the land of the sun. It is impossible in words to give a representation of the essence of Turner; even copies merely excite false conceptions. "Rockets shot up, shocks of cannon thundered, balls of light mounted, crackers meandered through the air and burst, wheels hissed, each one separately, then in pairs, then altogether, and even more turbulently one after the other and together." Thus has Goethe described a display of fireworks in _The Elective Affinities_, and this passage perhaps conveys most readily the impression of Turner's pictures. To collect into a small space the greatest possible quantity of light, he makes the perspective wide and deep and the sky boundless, and uses the sea to reflect the brilliancy. He wanted to be able to render the liquid, shining depths of the sky without employing the earth as an object of comparison, and these studies which have merely the sky as their object are perhaps his most astonishing works. Everywhere, to the border of the picture, there is light. And he has painted all the gradations of light, from the silvery morning twilight to the golden splendour of the evening red. Volcanoes hiss and explode and vomit forth streams of lava, which set the trembling air aglow, and blind the eyes with flaring colours. The glowing ball of the sun rises behind the mist, and transforms the whole ether into fine golden vapour; and vessels sail through the luminous haze. In reality one cannot venture on more than a swift glance into blinding masses of light, but the impression remained in the painter's memory. He painted what he saw, and knew how to make his effect convincing. And at the same time his composition became ever freer and easier, the work of his brush ever more fragrant and unfettered, the colouring and total sentiment of the picture ever more imaginative and like those of a fairy-tale. His world is a land of sun, where the reality of things vanishes, and the light shed between the eye and the objects of vision is the only thing that lives. At one time he took to painting human energy struggling with the phenomena of nature, as in "Storm at Sea," "Fire at Sea," and "Rain, Steam, and Speed"; at another he painted poetic revels of colour born altogether from the imagination, like the "Sun of Venice." He is the greatest creator in colour, the boldest poet amongst the landscape painters of all time! In him England's painting has put forth its greatest might, just as in Byron and Shelley, those two great powers, the English imagination unrolled its standard of war most proudly and brilliantly. There is only one Turner, and Ruskin is his prophet. [Illusration: _L'Art._ OLD CROME. A VIEW NEAR NORWICH.] [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ JOHN CONSTABLE.] As a man, too, he was one of those original characters seldom met with nowadays. He was not the fastidious _gourmet_ that might have been expected from his pictures, but an awkward, prosaic, citizen-like being. He had a sturdy, thick-set figure, with broad shoulders and tough muscles, and was more like a captain in the merchant service than a disciple of Apollo. He was sparing to the point of miserliness, unformed by any kind of culture, ignorant even of the laws of orthography, silent and inaccessible. Like most of the great landscape painters of the century, he was city-bred. In a gloomy house standing back in a foggy little alley of Old London, in the immediate vicinity of dingy, monotonous lodging-houses, he was born, the son of a barber, on 23rd April 1775. His career was that of a model youth. At fifteen he exhibited in the Royal Academy; when he was eighteen, engravings were already being made after his drawings. At twenty he was known, and at twenty-seven he became a member of the Academy. His first earnings he gained by the neat and exact preparation of little views of English castles and country places--drawings which, at the time, took the place of photographs, and for which he received half a crown apiece and his supper. Thus he went over a great part of England, and upon one of his excursions he is said to have had a love-affair _à la_ Lucy of Lammermoor, and to have so taken it to heart that he resolved to remain a bachelor for the rest of his life. In 1808 he became Professor of Perspective at the Academy, and delivered himself, it is said, of the most confused utterances on his subjects. His father had now to give up the barber's business and come to live with him, and he employed him in sawing, planing, and nailing together boards, which were painted yellow and used as frames for his pictures. The same miserly economy kept him from ever having a comfortable studio. He lived in a miserable lodging where he received nobody, had his meals at a restaurant of the most primitive order, carried his dinner wrapped up in paper when he went on excursions, and was exceedingly thankful if any one added to it a glass of wine. His diligence was fabulous. Every morning he rose on the stroke of six, locked his door, and worked with the same dreadful regularity day after day. His end was as unpoetic as his life. After being several times a father without ever having had a wife, he passed his last years with an old housekeeper, who kept him strictly under the yoke. If he was away from the house for long together he pretended that he was travelling to Venice for the sake of his work, until at last the honest housekeeper learnt, from a letter which he had put in his overcoat pocket and forgotten, that the object of all these journeys was not Venice at all, but Chelsea. There she found him in an attic which he had taken for another mistress, and where he was living under the name of Booth. In this little garret, almost more miserable than the room in the back street where he was born, the painter of light ended his days; and, to connect an atom of poetry with so sad a death, Ruskin adds that the window looked towards the sunset, and the dying eyes of the painter received the last rays of the sun which he had so often celebrated in glowing hymns. He left countless works behind him at his death, several thousands of pounds, and an immortal fame. This thought of glory after death occupied him from his youth. Only thus is it possible to understand why he led the life of a poor student until his end, why he did things which bordered on trickery in the sale of his _Liber Studiorum_, and kept for himself all those works by which he could have made a fortune. He left them--taken altogether, three hundred and sixty-two oil-paintings and nineteen thousand drawings--to the nation, and £20,000 to the Royal Academy, and merely stipulated that the two best pictures should be hung in the National Gallery between two Claude Lorrains. Another thousand pounds was set aside for the erection of a monument in St. Paul's. There, in that temple of fame, he lies buried near Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great ancestor of English painting, and he remains a phenomenon without forerunners and without descendants. [Illustration: CONSTABLE. WILLY LOTT'S HOUSE.] [Illustration: CONSTABLE. CHURCH PORCH, BERGHOLT.] For it does not need to be said that Turner, with his marked individuality, could have no influence on the further development of English painting. The dramatic fervour of Romanticism was here expressed just as little as Classicism. It was only the poets who fled into the wilderness of nature, and sang the splendour and the mysteries of the mountains, the lightning and the storm, the might of the elements. In painting there is no counterpart to Scott's descriptions of the Highlands or Wordsworth's rhapsodies upon the English lakes, or to the tendency of landscape painting which was represented in Germany by Lessing and Blechen. Wordsworth is majestic and sublime, and English painting lovely and full of intimate emotion. It knows neither ancient Alpine castles nor the sunsets of Greece. Turner, as a solitary exception, represented nature stately, terrible, stormy, glorious, mighty, grand, and sublime; all the others, like Gainsborough, loved simplicity, modest grace, and virginal quietude. England has nothing romantic. At the very time when Lessing painted his landscapes, Ludwig Tieck experienced a bitter disappointment when he trod the soil where Shakespeare wrote the witch scenes in _Macbeth_. A sombre, melancholy, primæval maze was what he had expected, and there lay before him a soft, luxuriant, and cultivated country. What distinguishes English landscape is a singular luxuriance, an almost unctuous wealth of vegetation. Drive through the country on a bright day on the top of a coach, and look around you; in all directions as far as the eye can reach an endless green carpet is spread over gentle valleys and undulating hills; cereals, vegetables, clover, hops, and glorious meadows with high rich grasses stretch forth; here and there stand a group of mighty oaks flinging their shadows wide, and around are pastures hemmed in by hedges, where splendid cattle lie chewing the cud. The moist atmosphere surrounds the trees and plants like a shining vapour. There is nothing more charming in the world, and nothing more delicate than these tones of colour; one might stand for hours looking at the clouds of satin, the fine ærial bloom, and the soft transparent gauze which catches the sunbeams in its silver net, softens them, and sends them smiling and toying to the earth. On both sides of the carriage the fields extend, each more beautiful than the last, in constant succession, interwoven with broad patches of buttercups, daisies, and meadowsweet. A strange magic, a loveliness so exquisite that it is well-nigh painful, escapes from this inexhaustible vegetation. The drops sparkle on the leaves like pearls, the arched tree-tops murmur in the gentle breeze. Luxuriantly they thrive in these airy glades, where they are ever rejuvenated and bedewed by the moist air of the sea. And the sky seems to have been made to enliven the colours of the land. At the tiniest sunbeam the earth smiles with a delicious charm, and the bells of flowers unfold in rich, liquid colour. The English look at nature as she is in their country, with the tender love of the man nurtured in cities, and yet with the cool observation of the man of business. The merchant, enveloped the whole day long in the smoke of the city, breathes the more freely of an evening when the steam-engine brings him out into green places. With a sharp practical glance he judges the waving grain, and speculates on the chances of harvest. And this spirit of attentive, familiar observation of nature, which is in no sense romantic, reigns also in the works of the English landscape painters. They did not think of becoming cosmopolitan like their German comrades, and of presenting remarkable points, the more exotic the better, for the instruction of the public. Like Gainsborough, they relied upon the intimate charm of places which they knew and loved. And as a centre Norwich first took the place of Suffolk, which Gainsborough had glorified. [Illustration: CONSTABLE. DEDHAM VALE.] _John Crome_, known as Old Crome, the founder of the powerful Norwich school of landscape, is a healthy and forcible master. Born poor, in a provincial town a hundred miles from London, in 1769, and at first an errand boy to a doctor, whose medicines he delivered to the patients, and then an apprentice to a sign-painter, he lived completely cut off from contemporary England. Norwich was his native town and his life-long home. He did not know the name of Turner, nor anything of Wilson, and perhaps never heard the name of Gainsborough. Thus his pictures are neither influenced by the contemporary nor by the preceding English art. Whatever he became he owed to himself and to the Dutch. Early married, and blessed with a numerous family, he tried to gain his bread by drawing-lessons, given in the great country-houses in the neighbourhood, and in this way had the opportunity of seeing many Dutch pictures. In later life he came to know Paris at a time when all the treasures of the world were collected in the Louvre, and this enthusiasm for the Dutch found fresh nourishment. Even on his deathbed he spoke of Hobbema. "Hobbema," he said, "my dear Hobbema, how I have loved you!" Hobbema is his ancestor, the art of Holland his model. [Illustration: _L'Art._ CONSTABLE. THE ROMANTIC HOUSE.] His pictures were collectively "exact" views of places which he loved, and neither composed landscapes nor paintings of "beautiful regions." Crome painted frankly everything which Norfolk, his own county, had to offer him--weather-beaten oaks, old woods, fishers' huts, lonely pools, wastes of heath. The way he painted trees is extraordinary. Each has its own physiognomy, and looks like a living thing, like some gloomy Northern personality. Oaks were his peculiar specialty, and in later years they only found a similarly great interpreter in Théodore Rousseau. At the same time his pictures of the simplest scenes have a remarkable largeness of conception, and a subtlety of colour recalling the old masters, and reached by no other painter in that age. An uncompromising realist, he drew his portraits of nature with almost pedantic pains, but preserved their relation of colour throughout. And as a delicate adept in colouring he finally harmonised everything in the manner of the Dutch to a juicy brown tone, which gives his beautiful wood and field pictures a discreet and refined beauty, a beauty in keeping with the art of galleries. [Illustration: _L'Art._ CONSTABLE. THE CORNFIELD.] Crome took a long time before he made a way for himself. His whole life long he sold his work merely at moderate prices: for no picture did he ever receive more than fifty pounds. Even his end was uneventful. He had begun as a manual worker, and he died in 1821 as a humble townsman whose only place of recreation was the tavern, and who passed his leisure in the society of sailors, shopkeepers, and artisans. Yet the principles of his art survived him. In 1805 he had founded in Norwich, far from all Academies, a society of artists, who gave annual exhibitions and had a common studio, which each used at fixed hours. _Cotman_, whose specialty was ash-trees, _the younger Crome_, _Stark_, and _Vincent_, are the leading representatives of the vigorous school of Norwich; and by them the name of this town became as well known as an art-centre in Europe as Delft and Haarlem had been in former times. Their relation to the Dutch was similar to that of Georges Michel in France, or that of Achenbach in Germany. They painted what they saw, rounded it with a view to pictorial effect, and harmonised the whole in a delicate brown tone. They felt more attracted by the form of objects than by their colour; the latter was, in the manner of the Dutch, merely an epidermis delicately toned down. The next step of the English painters was that they became the first to get the better of this Dutch phase, and to found that peculiarly modern landscape painting which no longer sets out from the absolutely concrete reality of objects, but from the _milieu_, from the atmospheric effect; which values in a picture less what is ready-made and perfectly rounded in drawing than the freshly seized impression of nature. Hardly twenty years have gone by since "open-air painting" was introduced into Germany. At present, things are no longer painted as they are in themselves but as they appear in their atmospheric environment. Artists care no longer for landscapes which float in a neutral brown sauce; they represent objects flooded with light and air. People no longer wish for brown trees and meadows, for the eye has perceived that trees and meadows are green. The world is no longer satisfied with the indeterminate light of the studio and the conventional tone of the picture gallery; it requires some indication of the hour of the day, since it is felt that the light of morning is different from the light of noon. And it is the English who made these discoveries, which have lent to modern landscape painting its most delicate and fragrant charm. The very mist of England, the damp and the heaviness of the atmosphere, necessarily forced English landscape painters, earlier than those of other nations, to the observation of the play of light and air. In a country where the sky is without cloud, in a pure, dry, and sparkling air, nothing is seen except lines. Shadow is wanting, and without shadow light has no value. For that reason the old classical masters of Italy were merely draughtsmen; they knew how to prize the value of sunshine no more than a millionaire the value of a penny. But the English understood the charm even of the most scanty ray of light which forces its way like a wedge through a wall of clouds. The entire appearance of nature, in their country, where a damp mist spreads its pearly grey veil over the horizon even upon calm and beautiful summer days, guided them to see the vehicle of some mood of landscape in the subtlest elements of light and air. The technique of water-colour painting which, at that very time, received such a powerful impetus, encouraged them to give expression to what they saw freshly and simply even in their oil-paintings, and to do so without regard for the scale of colour employed by the old masters. _John Robert Cozens_, "the greatest genius who ever painted a landscape," had been the first to occupy himself with water-colour painting as understood in the modern sense. _Tom Girtin_ had experimented with new methods. _Henry Edridge_ and _Samuel Prout_ had come forward with their picturesque ruins, _Copley Fielding_ and _Samuel Owen_ with sea-pieces, _Luke Clennel_ and _Thomas Heaphy_ with graceful portrayals of country life, _Howitt_ and _Robert Hills_ with their animal pictures. From 1805 there existed a Society of Painters in Water-Colours, and this extensive pursuit of water-colour painting could not fail to have an influence upon oil-painting also. The technique of water-colour accustomed English taste to that brightness of tone which at first seemed so bizarre to the Germans, habituated as they were to the prevalence of brown. Instead of dark, brownish-green tones, the water-colour painters produced bright tones. Direct study of nature, and the completion of a picture in the presence of nature and in the open air, guided their attention to light and atmosphere more quickly than that of the oil-painters. An easier technique, giving more scope for improvisation, of itself suggested the idea that rounded finish with a view to pictorial effect was not the final aim of art, but that it was of the most immediate importance to catch the first freshness of impression, that flower so hard to pluck and so prone to wither. The first who applied these principles to oil-painting was _John Constable_, one of the greatest pioneers in his own province and one of the most powerful individualities of the century. East Bergholt, the pretty little village where Constable's cradle stood, is fourteen miles distant from Sudbury, the birthplace of Gainsborough. Here he was born on 11th June 1776, at the very time when Gainsborough settled in London. His father was a miller, a well-to-do man, who had three windmills in Bergholt. The other famous miller's son in the history of art is Rembrandt. At first a superior career was chosen for him; it was intended that he should become a clergyman. But he felt more at home in the mill than in the schoolroom, and became a miller like his fathers before him. Observation of the changes of the sky is an essential part of a miller's calling, and this occupation of his youth seems to have been not without influence on the future artist; no one before him had observed the sky with the same attention. [Illustration: CONSTABLE. COTTAGE IN A CORNFIELD.] A certain Dunthorne, an eccentric personage to whom the boy often came, gave him--always in the open air--his first instruction; and another of his patrons, Sir George Beaumont, as an æsthetically trained connoisseur, criticised what he painted. When Constable showed him a study he asked: "Where do you mean to place your brown tree?" For the first law in his æsthetics was this: a good painting must have the colour of a good fiddle; it must be brown. Sojourn in London was without influence on Constable. He was twenty-three years of age, a handsome young fellow with dark eyes and a fine expressive countenance, when, in 1799, he wrote to his teacher Dunthorne: "I am this morning admitted a student at the Royal Academy; the figure which I drew for admittance was the Torso. I am now comfortably settled in Cecil Street, Strand, No. 23." He was known to the London girls as "the handsome young miller of Bergholt." He undertook the most varied things, copied pictures of Reynolds, and painted an altar-piece, "Christ blessing Little Children," which was admired by no one except his mother. In addition he studied Ruysdael, whose works made a great impression on him, in the National Gallery. In 1802 he appears for the first time in the Catalogue of the Royal Academy as the exhibitor of a landscape, and from this time to the year of his death, 1837, he was annually represented there, contributing altogether one hundred and four pictures. In the earliest--windmills and village parties--every detail is carefully executed; every branch is painted on the trees, and every tile on the houses; but as yet one can breathe no air in these pictures and see no sunshine. But he writes, in 1803, a very important letter to his old friend Dunthorne. "For the last two years," he says, "I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second-hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set out, but have rather tried to make my performance look like the work of other men. I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to commonplace people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me. There is little or nothing in the exhibition worth looking up to. _There is room enough for a natural painter._" He left London accordingly, and worked, in 1804, the whole summer "quite alone among the oaks and solitudes of Helmingham Park. I have taken quiet possession of the parsonage, finding it empty. A woman comes from the farmhouse, where I eat, and makes my bed, and I am left at liberty to wander where I please during the day." And having now returned to the country he became himself again. "Painting," he writes, "is with me but another word for feeling; and I associate 'my careless boyhood' with all that lies upon the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful." He had passed his whole youth amid the lovely valleys and luxuriant meadows of Bergholt, where the flocks were at pasture and the beetles hummed; he had wandered about the soft banks of the Stour, in the green woods of Suffolk, amongst old country-houses and churches, farms and picturesque cottages. This landscape which he had loved as a boy he also painted. He was the painter of cultivated English landscape, the portrayer of country life, of canals and boats, of windmills and manor-houses. He had a liking for all simple nature which reveals everywhere the traces of human activity--for arable fields and villages, orchards and cornfields. A strip of meadow, a watergate with a few briars, a clump of branching, fibrous trees, were enough to fill him with ideas and feelings. Gainsborough had already painted the like; but Constable denotes an advance beyond Gainsborough as beyond Crome. Intimate in feeling as Gainsborough undoubtedly was, he had a tendency to beautify the objects of nature; he selected and gave them a delicacy of arrangement and a grace of line which in reality they did not possess. Constable was the first to renounce every species of adaptation and arbitrary arrangement in composition. His boldness in the rendering of personal impressions raises him above Crome. Crome gets his effect principally by his accuracy: he represented what he saw; Constable showed how he saw the thing. While the former, following Hobbema, has an air reminiscent of galleries and old masters, Constable saw the world with his own eyes, and was the first entirely independent modern landscape painter. In his young days he had made copies after Claude, Rubens, Reynolds, Ruysdael, Teniers, and Wilson, which might have been mistaken for the originals, but later he had learnt much from Girtin's water-colour paintings. From that time he felt that he was strong enough to trust his own eyes. He threw to the winds all that had hitherto been considered as the chief element of beauty, and gave up the rounding of his pictures for pictorial effect; cut trees right through the middle to get into his picture just what interested him, and no more. [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ CONSTABLE. THE VALLEY FARM.] [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ COX. CROSSING THE SANDS.] He set himself right in the midst of verdure; the nightingales sang, the leaves murmured, the meadows grew green, and the clouds gleamed. In the fifteenth-century art there were the graceful spring trees of Perugino; in the seventeenth, the bright spring days of those two Flemings Jan Silberecht and Lucas Uden; in the nineteenth, Constable became the first painter of spring. If Sir George Beaumont now asked him where he meant to put his brown tree, he answered: "Nowhere, because I don't paint brown trees any more." He saw that foliage is green in summer, and--painted it so; he saw that summer rain and morning dew makes the verdure more than usually intense, and--he painted what he saw. He noticed that green leaves sparkle, gleam, and glitter in the sun--and painted them accordingly; he saw that the light, when it falls upon bright-looking walls, dazzles like snow in the sunshine--and painted it accordingly. There was a good deal of jeering at the time about "Constable's snow," and yet it was not merely all succeeding English artists who continued to put their faith in this painting of light, but the masters of Barbizon too, and Manet afterwards. [Illustration: _Mansell_ BONINGTON. LA PLACE DES MOULARDS, GENEVA.] The problem of painting light and air, which the older school had left unsolved, was taken up by him first in its complete extent. Crome had shown great reserve in approaching the atmospheric elements. Constable was the first landscape painter who really saw effects of light and air and learnt to paint them. His endeavour was to embody the impression of a mood of light with feeling, without lingering on the reproduction of those details which are only perceptible to an analytical eye. Whereas in the old Dutch masters the chief weight is laid on the effect of the drawing of objects, here it rests upon light, no matter upon what it plays. Thus Constable freed landscape painting from the architectonic laws of composition. They were no longer needed when the principle was once affirmed that the atmospheric mood gave greater value to the picture than subject. He not only studied the earth and foliage in their various tones, according as they were determined by the atmosphere, but observed the sky, the air, and the forms of cloud with the conscientiousness of a student of natural philosophy. The comments which he wrote upon them are as subtle as those in Ruskin's celebrated treatise on the clouds. A landscape, according to him, is only beautiful in proportion as light and shadow make it so; in other words, he was the first to understand that the "mood" of a landscape, by which it appeals to the human spirit, depends less on its lines and on objects in themselves than on the light and shadow in which it is bathed, and he was the first painter who had the secret of painting these subtle gradations of atmosphere. In his pictures the wind is heard murmuring in the trees, the breeze is felt as it blows over the corn, the sunlight is seen glancing on the leaves and playing on the clear mirror of the waters. Thus Constable for the first time painted nature in all its freshness. His principle of artistic creation is entirely opposed to that which was followed by the Pre-Raphaelites at a later date. Whilst the latter tried to reconstruct a picture of nature by a faithful, painstaking execution of all details--a process by which the expression of the whole usually suffers--Constable's pictures are broadly and impressively painted, often of rude and brutal force, at times solemn, at times elegant, but always cogent, fresh, and possessing a unity of their own. [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ COX. THE SHRIMPERS.] A genius in advance of its age is only first recognised in its full significance when following generations have come abreast with it. And that Constable was made to feel. In 1837 he died in poverty at Hampstead, in the modest "country retreat" where he spent the greatest part of his life. He said that his painting recalled no one, and was neither polished nor pretty, and asked: "How can I hope to be popular? I work only for the future." And that belonged to him. [Illustration: _Portfolio._ MÜLLER. THE AMPHITHEATRE AT XANTHUS.] Constable's powerful individuality has brought forth enduring fruit, and helped English landscape painting to attain that noble prime which it enjoyed during the forties and fifties. With his rich, brilliant, bold, and finely coloured painting, _David Cox_ stands out as perhaps the greatest of Constable's successors. Like Constable, he was a peasant, and observed nature with the simplicity of one who was country-bred. He was born in 1783, the son of a blacksmith, in a humble spot near Birmingham, and, after a brief sojourn in London, migrated with his family to Hereford, and later to Harborne, also in the neighbourhood of Birmingham. The strip of country which he saw from his house was almost exclusively his field of study. He knew that a painter can pass his life in the same corner of the earth, and that the scene of nature spread before him will never be exhausted. "Farewell, pictures, farewell," he is reported to have said when he took his last walk, on the day before his death, round the walls of Harborne. He has treated of the manner in which he understood his art in his _Treatise on Landscape Painting_, written in 1814. His ideal was to see the most cogent effect in nature, and leave everything out which did not harmonise with its character; and in Cox's pictures it is possible to trace the steps by which he drew nearer to this ideal the more natural he became. The magic of his brush was never more captivating than in the works of his last years, when, fallen victim to a disease of the eye, he could no longer see distinctly and only rendered an impression of the whole scene. Cox is a great and bold master. The townsman when he first comes into the country, after being imprisoned for months together in a wilderness of brick and mortar, does not begin at once to count the trees, leaves, and the stones lying on the ground. He draws a long breath and exclaims, "What balm!" Cox, too, has not painted details in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites. He represented the soft wind sweeping over the English meadows, the fresh purity of the air, the storms that agitate the landscape of Wales. A delicate silver-grey is spread over most of his pictures, and his method of expression is powerful and nervous. By preference he has celebrated, both in oil-paintings and in boldly handled water-colours, the boundless depths of the sky in its thousand variations of light, now deep blue in broad noon and now eerily gloomy and disturbed. The fame of being the greatest of English water-colour painters is his beyond dispute, yet if he had painted in oils from his youth upwards he would probably have become the most important English landscapist. His small pictures are pure and delicate in colour, and fresh and breezy in atmospheric effect. It is only in large pictures that power is at times denied him. In his later years he began to paint in oils, and in this medium he is a less important artist, though a very great painter. _William Müller_, who died young, stood as leader at his side. [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ DE WINT. NOTTINGHAM.] He was one of the most dexterous amongst the dexterous, next to Turner the greatest adept of English painting. Had he been simpler and quieter he might be called a genius of the first order. But he has sometimes a touch of what is theatrical; it does not always break out, but it does so occasionally. He has an inclination for pageantry, and nothing of that self-sufficiency and quiet tenderness with which Constable and Cox devoted themselves to home scenery. He was at pains to give a trace of largeness and sublimity to modest and unpretentious English landscape, to give to the most familiar subject a tinge of preciosity. His pictures are grandiose in form, and show an admirable lightness of hand, but light and air are wanting in them, the local colour of England and its atmosphere. As a foreigner--he was the son of a Danzig scholar, who had migrated to Bristol--Müller has not seen English landscape with Constable's native sentiment. He was not content with an English cornfield or an English village; the familiar homeliness of the country in its work-a-day garb excited no emotion in him. [Illustration: _L'Art._ BONINGTON. THE WINDMILL OF SAINT-JOUIN.] Something in Müller's imagination, which caused him to love decided colours and sudden contrasts rather than delicate gradations, attracted him to Southern climes. His natural place was in the East, which had not at that time been made the vogue. Here, like Decamps and Marilhat, he found those vivid rather than delicate effects which appealed to his eye. He was twice in the South--the first time in Athens and Egypt in 1838, and once again in Smyrna, Rhodes, and Lycia in 1843-44. In the year during which he had yet to live he collected those Oriental pictures which form his legacy, containing the best that he did. Certain of them, such as "The Amphitheatre at Xanthus," are painted with marvellous verve; they are not the work of a day, but of an hour. All these mountain castles upon abrupt cliffs, these views of the Acropolis and of Egypt, are real masterpieces of broad painting, their colour clear and their light admirable. Not one of the many Frenchmen who were in the South at this time has represented its sunshine and its brilliant atmosphere with such flattering, voluptuous tones. _Peter de Wint_, who was far more true and simple, was, like Constable and Cox, entirely wedded to his own birthplace. At any rate, his sojourn in France lasted only for a short time, and left no traces in his art. From youth to age he was the painter of England in its work-a-day garb--of the low hills of Surrey, of the plains of Lincolnshire, or of the dark canals of the Thames, which he specially portrayed in unsurpassable water-colour paintings. His ancestor in art is Philips de Koning, the pupil of Rembrandt, the master of Dutch plains and wide horizons. [Illustration: _Studio._ BONINGTON. READING ALOUD.] After Cox and de Wint came _Creswick_, more laborious, more patient, more studious of detail, furnished perhaps with a sharper eye for the green tones of nature, though with less feeling for atmosphere. It cannot be said that he advanced art, but merely that he added a regard for light and sunshine, unknown to the period before 1820, to the study of Hobbema and Waterloo. With those who would not have painted as they did but for Constable, _Peter Graham_ and _Dawson_ may be likewise ranked; and these artists peculiarly devoted themselves to the study of sky and water. Henry Dawson painted the most paltry and unpromising places--a reach of the Thames close to London, or a quarter in the smoky precincts of Dover, or Greenwich; but he painted them with a power such as only Constable possessed. In particular he is unequalled in his masterly painting of clouds. Constable had seldom done this in the same way. He delighted in an agitated sky, in clouds driven before the wind and losing their form in indeterminate contours; in nature he saw merely reflections of his own restless spirit, striving after colour and movement. Dawson painted those clouds which stand firm in the sky like piles of building--cloud-cathedrals, as Ruskin has called them. There are pictures of his consisting of almost nothing but great clouds. But that wide space, the earth, which our eyes regard as their own peculiar domain, is wanting. Colours and forms are nowhere to be seen, but only clouds and undulating yellowish mist in which objects vanish like pallid spectres. _John Linnell_ carried the traditions of this great era on to the new period: at first revelling in golden light, in sunsets and rosy clouds of dusk, and at a later time, in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, bent on the precise execution of bodily form. The young master, who died at twenty-seven, _Richard Parkes Bonington_, unites these English classic masters with the French. An Englishman by birth and origin, but trained as a painter in France, where he had gone when fifteen years of age, he seems from many points of view one of the most gracious products of the Romantic movement in France, though at the same time he has qualities over which only the English had command at that period, and not the French. He entered Gros's studio in France, which was then the favourite meeting-place of all the younger men of revolutionary tendencies, but repeated journeys to London did not allow him to forget Constable. In Normandy and Picardy he painted his first landscapes, following them up with a series of Venetian sea-pieces and little historical scenes. Then consumption seized him and took but a brief time in striking him down. On 23rd September 1828 he died in London, whither he had gone to consult a specialist. In consequence of his early death his talent never ripened, but he was a simple, natural, pure, and congenial artist for all that. "I knew him well and loved him much. His English composure, which nothing could disturb, robbed him of none of the qualities which make life pleasant. When I first came across him I was myself very young, and was making studies in the Louvre. It was about 1816 or 1817. He was in the act of copying a Flemish landscape--a tall youth who had grown rapidly. He had already an astonishing dexterity in water-colours, which were then an English novelty. Some which I saw later at a dealer's were charming, both in colour and composition. Other modern artists are perhaps more powerful and more accurate than Bonington, but no one in this modern school, perhaps no earlier artist, possessed the ease of execution which makes his works, in a certain sense, diamonds by which the eye is pleased and fascinated, quite independently of the subject and the particular representation of nature. And the same is true of the costume pictures which he painted later. Even here I could never grow weary of marvelling at his sense of effect, and his great ease of execution. Not that he was quickly satisfied; on the contrary, he often began over again perfectly finished pieces which seemed wonderful to us. But his dexterity was so great that in a moment he produced with his brush new effects, which were as charming as the first." With these words his friend and comrade, the great Eugène Delacroix, drew the portrait of Bonington. Bonington was at once the most natural and the most delicate in that Romantic school in which he was one of the first to make an appearance. He had a fine eye for the charm of nature, saw grace and beauty in her everywhere, and represented the spring and the sunshine in bright and clear tones. No Frenchman before him has so painted the play of light on gleaming costumes and succulent meadow grasses. Even his lithographs from Paris and the provinces are masterpieces of spirited, impressionist observation--qualities which he owed, not to Gros, but to Constable. He was the first to communicate the knowledge of the great English classic painters to the youth of France, and they of Barbizon and Ville d'Avray continued to spin the threads which connect Constable with the present. [Illustration: RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON.]