______________________ r yiy "V V A - V \ VS. V >!• Vy/ ES'v m GAINSBOROUGH CONSTABLE s^j£^^f^^j^A^^£!rjsrj^^^^m^^iSfii!!rAsrjjj^ BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME PROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF iienrg W. Sage 1891 An/iz j..z-^^- arV18128 Galnsborouj Cornell University Library I h ; Constable / .3 1924 031 274 511 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031274511 ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHIES OF THE GREAT ARTISTS. THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, R.A. JOHN CONSTABLE, R.A. ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHIES OF THE GREAT ARTISTS. The follmvin^ volumes, each illustrated with from 14 to 20 Engravings, are now ready, price y. 6d. Those marked with an asterisk are 2s. bd. SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. By F. S. Pulling, M.A. WILLIAM .HOGARTH. By Austin Dobson. GAINSBOROUGH and CONSTABLE. By G. Brock-Arnold, M.A. LAWRENCE and ROMNEY.* By Lord Ronald Gower, F.S.A. TURNER. By Cosmo Monkhouse SIR DAVID WILKIE. By J. W. Mollett, B.A. SIR EDWIN LANDSEER. By F. G. Stephens. GIOTTO. By Harry Quilter, M.A. FRA ANGELICO and BOTTICELLI. By C. M. Phillimore. FRA BARTOLOMMEO and ANDREA DEL SARTO. By Leader Scott. MANTEGNA and FRANCIA. By Julia Cartwright. GHIBERTI and DONATELLO.* By Leader Scott. LUCA DELLA ROBBIA and CELLINL* By Leader Scott. LEONARDO DA VINCI. By Dr. J. Paul Richter. MICHELANGELO BUONARROTL By Charles Clement. RAPHAEL. By N. D'Anvers. TITIAN. By R. F. Heath, M.A. TINTORETTO. By W. R. Osler. CORREGGIO.* By M. Compton Heaton. VELAZQUEZ. By E. Stowe. M.A. MURILLO.* By Ellen E. Minor. ALBRECHT DURER. By R. F. Heath, M.A. THE LITTLE MASTERS OF GERMANY. By W. B. ScoTT HANS HOLBEIN. By Joseph Cundall. OVERBECK. By J. Beavington Atkinson. REMBRANDT. By J. W. Mollett, B.A. RUBENS. By C. W. Kett, M.A. VAN DYCK AND HALS. By P. R. Head, B.A. FIGURE PAINTERS of HOLLAND. By Lord RoNALD GoWER, F.S.A. CLAUDE LORRAIN. By Owen J. Dullea. WATTEAU. By J. W. Mollett, B.A. VERNET and DELAROCHE. By J. Ruutz Rees. MEISSONIER.* By J. W. Mollett, B.A. PORTRAIT OF THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, R.A. Missing Page {All rights reserved,) RICHARD CLAY AMD SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNGAY. P E E F A C E. TO a few lovers of English Landscape Art this little volume will, I hope, be acceptable, notwithstanding its obvious deficiencies. The lives of these eminent painters of our rural scenery present many striking points of resemblance, and some sad points of contrast. Born amidst the same scenes, and educated under like influences, they were alike in their adoration of Nature, their allegiance to true Art, and their unwearying life of toil ; but their professional careers were very difierent. Gainsborough started on his career with the warm sympathy and approval of all whose opinion he valued ; and although his merits as a landscape painter did not obtain adequate recognition in his lifetime, his career as a portrait-painter was a history of successes almost from the first. Constable, at the outset, was dejected and enfeebled by the opposition of his relatives, and, during his career as «. painter, had a few clear-sighted admirers, but many severe and misguided critics; and, save for the conviction which always sustained him, that posterity would do him justice by its verdict, he lived and died a disappointed man. Both these painters were men of manly and independent character^ Dissatisfied to some extent with the style of the great continental masters, thinking them not natural enough, that they displayed too much art and design, unable VI PEEFACK to acquiesce in their tenets, they both went to Nature to find where the improvement was required. For the biographicsi,! information contained in the fol- lowing pages 1 am almost entirely indebted to the works of Messrs. Fulcher and C. R. Leslie. These books, though admirable in many respects, are not very rich sources of information. In Gainsborough's case this is not surprising. In Ipswich, where he had lived for many years. Constable was unable, in 1797, " to learn anything of consequence respecting him," and, with the exception of Thicknesse's contemptible pamphlet, no biographical notice of the artist appeared until the year 1829. In that year Allan Cun- ningham, devoted twenty-eight pages of his " Lives of the Painters " to Gainsborough. Fulcher's labours were inter- rupted by death, and had to be completed by his son. Probably, apart from his' professional labours, his life was somewhat uneventful, and from the year 1745 onwards might well be summed up in the familiar phrase, " he married and lived happily ever afterwards." The anecdotes recorded in his biography seem to me for the most part singularly uninteresting, and I have quoted two or three only. Leslie's life of Constable is a charming work, but is for the most part made up of the artist's letters, as the title states. It gives one a delightful insight into the inner life of the artist ; but the reader who seeks to collect many facts respecting the events of Constable's life will find that it was not the author's chief aim to supply them. I have also consulted with much pleasure and benefit Messrs. Redgraves' Century of Painters ; "Wornum's Epochs of Fainting ; Dr. Waagen's Art Treasures in Great Britain ; and an admirable essay in the Quarterly Review, February, 1809. G. M. B-A. Beisbton, October, 1880. CONTENTS, THOMAS GAINSBOKOUGH. PAGE IHTEODUCTOET CHAl'TEn — THE EEITISH SCHOOL OF LANDSCAPE PAINTEES 1 CHAPTER I. BIOGEAPHIOAL SKETCH — Boni at Sudbiiry — Education — Sent to London— Returns to Sudbury — Marries Margaret Burr — Meets with Pliilip Thicknesse — Takes a house at Bath — Made a Royal Academician — Returns to London — His fame — His Death . . 17 CHAPTER II. THE GENIUS OF GAINSBOEOUGH 54 CHRONOLOGY OF GAINSBOEOUGH 76 JOHN CONSTABLE. CHAPTER I. BIOGEAPHIOAL SKETCH — Bom at East Bergholt — Seat to School at Lavenham, and afterwards at Dedham — Introduced to Sir George Beaumont — Sent to London — Marries Maria Bicknell — Made an Associate of the Royal Academy — Takes a house in Well Walk, Hampstead — Death of his Wife — Made a Royal Academician — The zenith of his career — His Death 79 CHAPTER II. HIS PEODUCTIONS 110 PIOTUEES BY GAINSBOEOUGH 123 PICTURES BY CONSTABLE 124 OHBONOLOGY OF CONSTABLE 125 INDEX 126 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. GAINSBOROUGH. PAGE PORTRAIT OF THOMAS GAINSBOEOUGH, It.A. ... FrmitispUce ^^ THE BROOK '"' YOUNG LAVINIA ^- THE BLUB EOT *2 THE HONOUEABLE MRS. GRAHAM 50 THE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE 55 KUSTIO CHILDREN 64 THE COTTAGE DOOR '^ CONSTABLE. PORTRAIT 01? JOHN CONSTABLE, K.A. ... . . FrontispiMC A LOCK ON THE STOUR . 78 ON THE STOUB 83 YARMOUTH PIER 91 OSMINGTON, NEAR WEYMOUTH 99 SALISnURY CATHEDRAL, FROM THE MEADOWS 105 THE CORN-FIELD 109 THE VALLEY FARM 117 GAINSBOROUGH. INTEODUCTOEY CHAPTEE. THE BRITISH SCHOOL OF LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. IT was in the last quarter of the last century that the British School of Painters assumed a position so pronounced that continental critics could no longer either ignore or deny its claims. Until then they had looked down on this country with sovereign disdain, considering it a land of mere unenlightened barbarians, wealthy in money but uncultivated in all matters relating to the Fine Arts j a splendid market indeed for the sale of their own artists' productions, but beyond a consideration as to the price which our collectors, and those who fancied they were connoisseurs, might be induced to pay for the paintings and sculpture created by their own heaven-born genius, unworthy of one serious thought. But at the epoch of which we are speaking a school of native artists sprung up in this country, and its •distinctive characteristic was Landscape, the most modem branch of the Art of Painting. The present high fame and reputation of this English School, which has during its comparatively brief existence already produced so many painters of more than average LP B 2 GAINSBOEODGH. merit, and several wortliy to be ranked with the most gifted geniuses of Italy, Holland, and Flanders, is in no small degree owing to the number of artists who have excelled in , depicting the scenery of Nature as she appears in all her pristine glory. The English landscape painters as a body have distanced all others in the excellence to which they have brought this branch of their art, and by their skill thereia they have raised it to a more important position than it has ever before occupied in the whole history of art. "Wbat the Quattrocento and Cinquecento paiuters of Italy did for painting as a whole — what Titian did, up to a certain point, for landscape when he intro- duced it into his pictures — that have the English done for the art of representing nature, pure and simple, on their canvases. That such should be the case is not surprising ; for the loveliness of our native country, with its exquisite verdiire prevailing throughout the year, its sweet woodlands with their infinite variety of foliage, its budding hedge-rows, fairylike forest-glades, picturesque homesteads and hamlets, golden corn-fields and emerald meadows, and above all the indescribable atmospheric effects of our northern skies, the boundless wealth and glory of godlike light and shade, those wondrous cloud pictures, unknown to Italian painters — would alone supply subjects more than sufficient to fill the canvases of every painter who has ever lived or is yet to come, and convey to minds, even the most conventional and unimpressionable, a vivid perception of the surpassing, aU- sufficient beauty of Nature. What is surprising, however, is that an English School of painters should not have long before sprung up, and by representing the scenes by which they were on all sides surrounded, have won such deathless fame as did the Cinquecento painters in other branches. But the manifestation of the aesthetic genius of a nation is often controlled by remote causes, and operated upon by circumstances that escape the observation of any but the most inquiring and persevering historian. The tardy uprising of the English School of painting is a subject which opens out a field of INTItODUCTIOTSr. 3 speculation too wide for our present consideration. ^ It is sufficient for our purpose that such a school did arise ; and it is of the circumstances attendant upon the development of the art of landscape-painting especially, in the last century, that we , now propose to take a retrospect. During the transient sunshine which in the early reign of Charles I. had thrown its -vivifying rays on art, some seeds of true taste had been sown, which from time to time during the succeeding century here and there cropped up, resulting at last in a harvest of native artists whose genius and merits, though for a time neglected and ignored in favour of the claims of foreigners and their English imitators, finally triumphed in the firm establishment of a healthy, flourishing, permanent, genuinely English School. But for the seventy years following the Eestoration, the tale of Art in England is a sorry one. , Kneller had succeeded Lely in 1680, and succeeded, too, in debasing art to the lowest possible pitch. This man, who in the course of his career painted portraits of ten Sovereigns, of everyone known to fame between the years 1674 and 1723, and of many now buried in oblivion, did more to lower and vitiate the public taste than did ever Commonwealth, neglect, indifi^er- ence, or any other adverse circumstance. The baneful influence of his style was felt so late as 1752, when Joshua Eeynolds was told that if he wished to succeed as a portrait painter, he must imitate Kneller's style — " Shakespeare in poetry — Kneller in painting — damme," was the coxcomb Ellis's insolent remark to our great portrait painter. It is to Kneller, however, that England is indebted for the establishment of the first regular academy for instruction in drawing in this country. This was in 1711 ; Kneller himself, ' Dr. Waagen ia his ' Treasures of Art in Great Britain,' London, 1854, gives a curious summary of this consideration on p. 7, vol. i. ■ B 2 4 GAINSBOROUGH. wlio certainly knew how to draw, was at its head. It was held at a house in Covent Garden, and amongst the pupils who studied there was Veetoe the engraver. During all these seventy years the painter's art consisted of portrait-taking, sign -painting, coach -painting, house-painting, decorating, and the like. Truthful imitation of general character- istics was permissihle, but exact copying of minute details was far more esteemed. Poetry had nothing to do with painting. Portraiture was the most profitable line a painter could engage in ; mediocre and indifferent artists • found plenty of employment in furnishing shopkeepers with signs. In the fashionable society journal of that day, 'The Tatler,' for 1710, we read that the use of pictures is " to raise in our minds either agreeable ideas of our absent friends, or high images of eminent personages." Even twenty years later Hogarth, the emancipator of English art from the thraldom of Continental conventionalism, writing to Lord Bute against the formation of an Art Academy in England, says : " In Holland, selfishness is the ruling passion ; in England, vanity is united with it. Portrait painting, therefore, ever has succeeded, and ever will succeed, better in this country than in any other." It seems that the practical, shrewd Hogarth at that time doubted whether art, for its own sake, -would ever be appreciated here. In this opinion subsequent events prove him to have been mistaken ; and, in fact, the departure from his extremely successful and felicitous Style of comic descriptive art for ill- advised attempts at historical composition show that he recog- nised at one time the possibility of a higher taste existing among his fellow - countrymen. To Hogarth is due the gratitude of every admirer of the highest form of landscape painting, for his relentless attacks on the formulas and con- ventionalism of an enervated and deteriorated foreign style, which in his day choked every attempt to depict nature truth- fully. Endowed with genius, yet shrewd and practical, and INTEODUCTION. 5 at the same time sensible, in a far higher degree than is commonly supposed, to poetical and emotional influences, his fearless attacks on the purblind worshippers of the "black masters," and the sledge-hammer force of his common sense arguments (which so shocked and scandalised the elegant and sensitive critics of the day), that the true art of a painter is to depict objects as they really appear, and that to this end he should make living nature rather than the canvases of dead masters his prototype, marked the birth of a higher and purer taste. From 1723, a year marked by the death of Kneller and the birth of Joshua Ebynolds and George Bareet, we are enabled to follow with more satisfaction the history of English painting, and to mark many unmistakeable signs of the growth of a high appreciation and recognition of the incomparable and infinite beauties of nature, untrammelled by the formal restrictions of a false art, undisfigured by artificiality and gross allegory. Here let us point out a few significant signs of the early century that had heralded the downthrow of the dark era of false art. Early in the eighteenth century Brid'geman and Kent had done much to popularise a love of nature unadorned, by intro- ducing a form of landscape-gardening, in which they utterly discarded the trim walks, the geometrical flower-beds, and the fantastically-sculptured shrubs, clipped into the stiff resemblance of almost all things in the air, or the earth, or in the sea, which the French gardener, Le K"otre, had first introduced.^ Several essays in the ' Spectator,' pointing out the superiority of Nature over formality in questions of beauty, also appeared about this time (1714). Pastoral poetry, also, began to take a truer form. In 1 7 1 4- Gay published his ' Shepherd's Week,' which in literature recalled Englishmen to the beauty and simplicity of nature, and consigned to the Umbo of indifference the unnaturalistic, so-called ' Among the works of Kent may be mentioned Kensington Gardens, Claremont, Bsher, Lord Burlington's at Chiswick, and the grounds at Stowe. b GAINSBOROUGH. pastoral poetry of Ambrose Phillips and Pope. In the same year Allan Eamsay, father of the portrait painter, published the first portion of ' The Gentle Shepherd,' and the encouragement this met -with led him to continue the work in 1723. These events show that the characteristic English love of nature was not dead. The artistic and literary productions of any age will hardly create such a love, but they may do much to foster it ; and we can always find that when contemporaneous popularity attends on such productions, a deeply-rooted true taste is some- where existent in the hearts of the people. The love of nature was innate in the hearts of the English people. Their habits and mode of living had brought them into the closest constant, communion with nature in all her phases — in the woods and forests, at the covert side, in the meadows, on the moors, by the brook ■ hunting, fishing, husbandry, tending flocks and cattle — all their pursuits, participated in more or iess by the highest as well as the lowest, were invincible enemies to conventional and unnaturalistic art. Even under the chilling influence of so entirely unsympathetic a monarch as. George II. some hopeful indications of better things might be discovered. But still it was a period of darkness, and if the nation did not entirely go with their monarch when with taste and accent alike bad he pronounced his unlucky dictum — " I hate Boetry and Bainting " — still there can be no doubt that the Eoyal mind to some extent presented a reflex of the sentiments of society, for paint- ing, and more especially landscape-painting, found but little favour for some years after he ascended the throne. Ifeverthe- less Horace "Walpole dilates upon the interest which was taken in the fine arts, accounting this reign a shining era in comparison with the deplorable darkness of the preceding one. The state of society was not favourable to the cultivation of the peaceful arts. The rage was gambling. It was the vice of nearly the whole of the eighteenth century. Basset, ombre, tic- tao, crimp, were the most absorbing occupation of all classes of society , the rattle of the dice-box was the music they loved, IXTEODUCTION. 7 and many a broad pasture-land changed hands over the green cloth. The poverty of poor Wilson, the miserable remuneration which Hogarth obtained for his pictures, and the depressed con- dition of English painters generally, attest the difficulty of obtaining fame and honour beneath the shadow of a Eoyal frown. " Face painters," as Hogarth termed them, found toler- able employment, but others, whose genius was undoubted, were glad to earn a precarious livelihood, as we have said, by decorat- ing ceilings and staircases, and painting signboards for trades- men's shops. But matters began to improve. "Fashion," says Mr. Button Cook, " began to take up with taste. Dilettanteism became the vogue. Objects of virtii were now for the first time indispensable appendages of the houses of the aristocracy and the rich." Unfortunately for the English artist the taste was not for his works. Foreign artists and ancient masters were the rage. Cracked canvas and broken marble commanded high prices. The supply was fully equal to the demand. A race of old picture jobbers and antiquity dealers soon sprang into exist- ence from whom a little real and much spurious ware was readily obtained. The 'London Magazine' for 1737, in an article attributed to Hogarth, inveighs bitterly against these speculators and their endeavours to depreciate any English work in order to enhance the value of their imported ship loads of Christs, Holy Families, and Madonnas, the sweepings of the (Continental markets. In Foote's comedy, ' Taste,' which was jjlayed at Drury Lane in 1752, the absurd foUy of the day was the subject of slashing satire. One of the scenes represents an auction-mart. A picture is brought forward and pronounced an excellent one until it is discovered to be by an Englishman yet limng, when it is immediately condemned as " not worth house room.'' Fragments of statuary, trunks without limbs, a hand of the god- dess Venus, a leg of Juno, with a swelling on one of the toes, (which the auctioneer explains is a corn), are lauded as master- pieces of the sculptor's art, — and other objects equally and even 8 GAINSBOROUGH more absurd are puffed up in. like manner. The piece apparently hit the public too hard, for after a very brief run it was with- drawn. That it did not run far wide of the truth is evident from the fact, that at the sale of the eifects of the sculptor EoubiUac (d. Jan. 1762), a picture by Josbua Eeynolds with seven others were knocked down for the enormous sum of ten shillings. A contemporary author who has given us the most readable sketch of Hogarth and his time, speaking of a period a little later, draws a dismal picture of' this period, but furnishes us with an addi- tional explanation of the coming revival in Art taste. "Al- though it is difficult to imagine anything more confused, mis- understood, and hampered with rags and tatters of ignorance than was English art in 1727, Cimmerian darkness did not wholly reign. There were men alive who had heard their fathers tell of the glories of Charles I.'s gallery at Whitehall; there were some princely English nobles then as now, patrons and collectors. There were treasures of Art in England, and there were amateurs to appreciate them." Perhaps ' the tide turned when Caroline of Anspach, George II. 's q^ueen, a witty, handsome, and accomplished woman, ex- tended the encouragement her lord was slow to give. The revival began, although timidly and with scarce any notice, and Hogarth's victory over folly and bad taste was won. The fathers of the English Landscape School practised for the most part in oU. But there is another class of painters whose influence is, perhaps, more marked, and who contributed more largely, possibly, towards the unbounded success of this school than did the followers of the older style. We refer to the water-colour painters, whose practice, originating from a totally different source, at first grew up side by side with, and gradually merged in and became assimilated to, the more ancient method. In one respect the water-colourists had a great advantage over the oil painters in bringing the treatment of landscape to per- fection. From the very first they found themselves face to face with Nature herself : they had to found their style upon INTRODUCTION. 9 her, not upon that of bygone masters. In the works of the early topographic draftsmen, -who were the precursors of the water-colour artists, truth of representation was looked for and demanded ; not a general effect, calculated to remind the spectator of some particular master, whose name was a hall- mark whereby the most superficial tyro- in connoisseurship might safely pretend to recognise genius and excellence in a picture. Thus, truth, the foundation of excellence in painting, was insisted upon. Beauty, from the very nature of the topographer's employment, would be sure to assert herself. It is true that the original employment of the topographers and parly water-colour painters — an outcome of the fashion for antiquarian research and the topographical taste which sprang up early in the last century — was principally confined to making accurate representations of the objects they saw — to making surveyor's elevations of buildings, and panoramic illustrations, bird's-eye views of localities, — and did not aim at works of high art ; it was no business of the draftsmen to introduce such improvements as cloud and light effects into their work, or to busy themselves with poetic conceptions ; they were to induce in the spectator's mind a faithful conception of all the objects they depicted ; but they had no occasion to strive to guide the spectator's mind to those objects most worthy of contemplation, or to express the thoughts and feelings with which the artist regarded those objects. But the everlasting truth, that, to all who are willing to study her, Nature is an open book, that her inexhaustible treasure-gallery of beauty is open to all mankind, was too assertive to permit of any barrier existing between the artists and Nature, or to allow them to be con- fined within any limits circumscribed by set rules or patrons' instructions. It is unnecessary here to point out how the old art of water- colour painting with opaque pigments was altogether different treatment from that now practised; or that the present art is not even a development of the old one, or a continuation 10 GAINSBOEOUGH. of that of the old miniaturists — among whom Cooper and Hill- iard, Englishmen, figure so prominently — although these artists did occasionally use transparent colours. Its origin is wholly with the topographic artists of the last century ; who from making pen and ink sketches of the scenes they were employed to depict, gradually got to filling in the outlines with cold neutral tints ; from that they proceeded to introduce the local colours. " By degrees they began to feel the charm with which a scene may be impressed by passing clouds, sunshine, mists, and other atmospheric effects, no less than by the varying beauties of local colour as affected by the changes of season. The result of this appreciation of the lovely effects of nature was that the cold, spiritless, topographical drawings gradually gave way to the beauties and signal excellence of the Water-colour School of Painting in Great Britain." ^ Of course the earliest water-colour drawings — stained drawings — topographical views — whatever you like to call them, were not equal in merit to the oU paintings of the same time — for the technicalities of oil painting had been carried to the utmost pitch of perfection long before, and where the manipulative processes in this branch of the art were faulty, it was because the artists had forgotten some of the traditions and secrets of their craft. Water-colour painting, on the contrary, was just starting into life, and it is astonishing that in little more than half a century from the time of the topographers' coloured ink sketches to the time when Turner produced his magnificent drawings, a new art should have been born and perfected. That it had its influence on oil-painting, is evident from the great bound with which the new-born British School leapt up. Most of the oil painters practised in water-colours occasionally, and vice versa. Gainsborough painted sometimes in water-colours, and John Cozens, essentially a water-colourist, 1 Preface to the Catalogue of the Royal Academy Exhibition of 'Water- colour Drawings. 1861. INTRODUCTION'. 1 1 painted sometimes in oil. The two branches, happily for English Art, in an incredibly short time became intertwined. The water-colourists painted in the lace of Ifature and became steeped in her influence. These were the men who could then appreciate "Wilson, because they had learnt to appreciate nature ; appreciating, they would examine his work and compare it with their own, and exert themselves to get greater power out of their system. Then the oil painters, being in the majorit}' of cases water-colourists also, saw innumerable beauties and effects that a close study of nature revealed to such inquirers as Girtia — to such adorers as Cozens. But words, we think, are needless to proclaim the close relationship that existed between the early water-colour and oil painting — does not Turner live in his works to this day t And whence did he spring ^ Such men burst forth into the world like a meteor of blinding brilliancy — so it appears to their successors. In reality Turner was the offspring of the two branches of art, at first distinct, and afterwards united - in a bond of perfect sympathy. This sketch would be incomplete without a mention of the Jlarine Painters. At the time, when Hogarth was coming into fame, and beginning to know everybody, when his father-in-law had forgiven him for running away with the fair Anne, in con- sideration of his approved genius, his domestic ties did not prevent him from merrymaking now and then at Vauxhall Gardens and elsewhere with professional comrades, such as Frank Hayman ; and in 1732 we are introduced to Samuel Scott, marine and landscape painter, who made one of a party of five on a junket to the Isle of Sheppey. Marine paintings, the only branch of landscape art that had then received any appreciable patronage in England, was followed by a few artists with fair success. It might be supposed that this line of art would have been peculiarly attractive to Englishmen, and that, considering their traditional tastes and pursuits, and the stimulus afforded by the remembrance of the nation's naval glory, a large number of artists excelling in the branch would have -been produced. But 1 2 GAINSBOROUGH. such -^vas not the case. The Dutch Van de Veldes, father and soii, were never excelled or even equalled by our countrymen of that age in depicting marine subjects ; and Monamy, Scott, Brooking, and Serres only imitated them, aided mote or less by original observation. Had our space permitted, it would have been convenient and interesting to have traced the steps which led to the establish- ment of the Eoyal Academy of Arts in 1768. But we must be content with a bare mention of this most important event in the history of English Art ; and also of that ingenious device by which Hogarth and nineteen brother painters brought it to the knowledge of the British public in general, and the world of fashion in particular, that this country had native artists possessed of merit of the highest order ; we allude to the gratuitous decoration of the walls of the Foundling Hospital with the productions of this combiaation of English painters. The plan succeeded admirably. Another valuable source of encouragement to art progress at this period was the Society of Arts, established in 1754, a society which during a period of twenty years expended nearly £8000, besides gold and silver medals and palettes, in premiums and rewards for painting, sculpture, and architecture. Sir Joshua Eeynolds, who hadtakenno part in the preliminaries, was induced to accept the Presidency of the newly-established Eoyal Academy, and amongst the original members were "Wilson, Hayman, Gainsborough, and other distinguished painters of the day. In 1769 the first of a series of exhibitions, which have been continued annually down to the present time, was held. For a few years the Incorporated Society of Artists existed contemporaneously with them ; the king, after the rupture which led to the foundation of the Eoyal Academy, had publicly assured this older body that they had his royal favour as well as any other body of artists, an assurance which he made more valuable by a donation of £100. But the Incorporated Society INTRODUCTION. 1 3 faded in the brilliancy of the Eoyal Academy, and after 1791 was no more heard of. The Free Society of Artists should also be mentioned. "WTien the Incorporated Society was established, some of the younger artists, hankering after the premiums and rewards of the Society of Arts, elected to remain under the patronage of that body and to exhibit at their room in the Adelphi. In 1765-6 they held exhibitions on their own account in Maiden Lane. Then they changed to Mr. Christie's Auction Eoom in Pall Mall, which they assisted him to build. The Tree Society came to an end in 1774. Of the four splendid names in the annals of art, rendering the eighteenth century so remarkable — Hogarth, Reynolds, "Wilson, and Gainsborough — the two latter shine out brightly amongst the most famous of the world's landscape painters. Of Wilson, our first English landscape painter, the Messrs. Redgrave say : " Certainly there is this praise due to our countryman ; that our landscape art, which had hitherto been derived from the meaner school of Holland, following his great example, looked thenceforth to Italy for its inspiration ; that he proved the power of native art to compete, on this ground also, with the art of the foreigner, and prepared the way for the coming men, who, embracing Nature as their mistress, were prepared to leave all and follow her."i Possibly there are some who consider that to Gainsborough is most properly due the title of the first English landscapist; for Wilson was not always free from a tinge of conventionalism in his treatment of landscape. Indeed it would surprise us, when we consider his training, the influence of his Italian study, the neglect with which those of his productions showing original simplicity were received, and the absolute lack of any encourage- ment accorded him by the British public, if he had courted starvation more than he did in order to educate the public to 1 'A Century of Painters,' Lond. 1866, p. 98, vol. i. 14 GAINSBOROUGH. iindei'stand the true ■wealth, of natural beautj^. His career resembled that of many another comhater of ignorance — poverty, neglect, heart-breaking indifference and apathy. Still as far as possible he was loyal to the principles of true art. Mr. Wornum says of his pictures with much truth and judgment : " They generally display the beauties of Salvator Rosa, Euysdael, and Claude combined." ^ The same writer says : " The landscape painters of the last generation were more allied to those of the present school in style than the historical painters are to their successors of our time. The works of Wilson had more influence upon his contemporaries than those of Gains- borough ; he is the pioneer of the English School of landscape painters." Considering the painters of this period as a school, we are at once struck with the vastly differing style and treatment characterising its leading masters : " In other countries artists arranged themselves in the studios of great masters, and followed their precepts, transmitting them as traditions from age to age ; hence there was more than a national similarity in their works. In the British School each artist followed the bent of his own genius ; and if placed under a master in his early career he soon broke loose from such teaching, and sought a way of his own as soon as possible." ^ Wilson studied under the great masters of Home — studied examples by the greater masters of bygone days — was taken in hand by Zaccarelli and Vernet, most fashionable authorities — aud left them all to seek a way of his own ; he found one, floundered along it, lost heart, hope, position, everything but the way — he never lost that ; and others following after him were guided by his tracks. Gainsborough, who received as little human instruction as almost any painter, threw over the Datch masters who had been set up as an example for him to follow, aud sought a way of his own — a way that he kaew led to nature ' ' Epochs of Painting.' London. 1864. ' ' A Oentuiy of Painters,' p. 174, voL L INTRODUCTION. 15 for it was to nature that he looked to guide him. He, too, at- tained a place with Wilson on the summit of excellence ; like him he reached it by an independent path — by a way of his own seeking. Barret, disdaining human assistance and instruction, sought a way of his own, knowing that nature's light would illumine it for him. It is a matter for regret that this painter did not condescend to learn more of the technicalities of his art — that he did not, so to speak, learn to walk surely and strongly before he ventured abroad in search of the way ; but a road he made for all that. "Wright of Derby sought a way for himself, but it did not lead to such an eminence as some others. Cozens, Girtin, and Payne were not content to follow the beaten track which the topographers and Sandby had beaten out. The results of this independence and unrestraint of the founders of the British School of landscape must be looked for in the next generation — in the names and works of Turner, of Constable, of David Cox, and many others whom it would be invidious to particularise. We have a British School of landscape — not a school of Wilson, of Gainsborough, of Wright, or of Cozens. Of the technical merits of the school of the eighteenth cen- tury we may be justly proud, considering the drawback of the impatience of our artists at instruction of every description, and the low state to which the mechanical or technical methods of painting had, all over Europe, at that time declined, pari passu with the style and ideal of art. Sir Charles Eastlake was of opinion, in 1828, that all the excellencies of painting are to be found in the Flemish schools, " to whose level we have v never risen, for Eeynolds, Gainsborough, WUson, Hogarth, aud a few others cannot match the hosts of Flanders and Holland." But this opinion seems scarcely sound. In the works of our own artists are to be found as great and as many excellencies of painting as in the works of the artists of any one country. Of course it would be easy to pick out points of excellence in the paintings of several foreign artists, and declare that such an aggregate of perfection is not exhibited by any one painter of 16 GAINSBOEOUGH. onr school. But wliere can such an aggregate of perfection as is contained in the works of the four artists above mentioned, be seen in any work of any foreign painter 1 "We will conclude this sketch with a quotation from M. Eouquet's interesting little work 'L'Etat desArts en Angleterre,' a passage, the truth of which is as pertinent to-day as it was in 1755, and which is the keynote to which all observations on English landscape art must resolve. " Si les peintres s'attachent toujours h, I'etude de la nature comme il paroit raisonnable de le supposer, ceux qui font le paysage en Angleterre doivent exceller. Rien n'est si riant que les campagnes de ce pays 1^, plus d'un peintre y fait usage heureux des aspects charmants qui s'y presentent de toutes parts : les tableaux de paysage y sont fort a la mode, ce genre y est cultiv^ avec autant de succes qu'aucun autre. II y a peu de maftres dans ce talent qui ayent &ti beaucoup sup^rieurs aux peintres de paysage qui jouissent aujourd'hui en Angleterre de la premiere reputation." ^ • 'L'Etat des Arts en Angleterre,' par M. Rouciuet, p. 92. THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. CHAPTEE I. BIOOEAPHICAL SKETCH. TEAVELLEES by the line between Haverhill and Sudburj pass through some of the sweetest rural scenery in England. The valley of the Stour is alike remarkable for its beauty and its fertility. In the latter respect it may be compared with the rich . luxuriance of the valleys of the Nile. The heaviest wheat and the brightest barley that the world can produce is grown in this district. The Stour is a sluggish stream but it is a favourite with anglers. The " greedy pike " basks in its shallows and lies secure in its deep holes, covered overhead with the rich foliage of the yellow and the white water-lily. The perch grows fat on the minnows which swarm ia the throat of each little tributary that loses itself in the lazy river. The roach in shoals roam up and down its reaches and lurk in the reedy fringe of its banks or among the thick bulrushes. The wary tench is found there and an abundance of eels. At short intervals the stifled roar of the "undershot" water-mill tells the angler of lively water in the mill-pool, and tyro indeed must he be in the " gentle art " if he cannot fill his creel before the moorhen pipes her shrill c 18 THOMAS GAINSBOEOUGH. croak for her evening meal. It was on the banks of this river, at the little town of Sudbury, that Thomas Gainsborough was born in the year 1727, which would be three years after the birth of Eichard WUson, the father of English landscape painting. The exact day of his birth is not kno-ma, but it must have been some time in the spring, for he was baptized in the Independent Meeting House at Sudbury on the 14th of May. His father, Mr. John Gainsborough, seems to have been a man whom many loved and all may admire. He must have changed his trade more than once, being described in 1722 as a "milliiier," in 1725 as a "clpthier," and in 1735 as a "crape maker." He maintained and educated with credit and comfort a family of five_sQna_and_iQTirdaughters. He had a good and well estab- lished connection, and seems to have been a ma n of e nterprise and resource, for he introduced into Sudbury the shroud trade, in whicIrCbventry had formerly enjoyed a monopoly. He was a fine old man, very particular about the parting of his hair, and remarkable for the regularity and whiteness of his teeth. His demeanour was grave, and the simple country folk used to regard him with awe, hinting that concealed beneath his cloak he always carried some deadly weapons. He was a skilled fencer, and possessed the knack of using his weapon in either hand. He might, perhaps, nave become wealthy, but his great kindn ess of heart rendered him unwilKng to press a defaulting debtor and sadly adverse to setting in motion the myrmidons of the law. This amiable weakness becoming notorious, bad debts multiplied and profits diminished. To his honour it should be recorded that he steadily refused to receive "toll," an iniquitous ilack mail then generally levied in the trade, and amounting to nearly one- third of the spinners' earnings. In religion he was an Inde- pendent, and if he sometimes did a little traf&c in contraband goods — for which his occasional trips to Holland on legitimate business gave him many facilities — we must remember that in those days smuggling, so far from being considered morally BIOGEAPHIOAL SKETCH. 19 culpable, was almost regarded as a meritorious act. Fulcher has an amusing story to tell of the manner in which Mr. Gainsborough once routed an extremely weak-minded Eevenue Officer. That zealous official stopped the old gentleman's cart one night at a short distance from Sudbury, and not unreasonably suspecting him of carrying some brandy and other contraband articles, stoutly demanded to see what he had in his cart. "I'll show you," was the ready answer, and catching up a shroud' he enveloped his tall figure in the ghostly dress, to the astonishment, and speedy departure of his weak-nerved visitor. Mr. Gainsborough died in 1748 at the age of sixty-five. Mrs. Gainsborough, the artist's mother, was a woman of much refinement and cultivation. She excelled in the graceful art of flower-painting, and it was doubtless she who with tender affection guided Tom's baby hand to trace his first outline. In one respect she was more fortunate than her husband, for she lived to see the public recognition of that artistic genius which both husband and wife had been quick to perceive and prompt to encourage. She was a kind and indulgent mother, proud of her children and of her family, which was " of old standing, weU to live and of unblemished reputation." Her sons were aU distinguished above their companions by their talents. Her maiden name was Burroughs, and she was the sister of the Eev. Humphrey Burroughs, curate of St. Gregory's, Sudbury, and Head Master of the Grammar School. She died in 1769, when her son was in high repute at Bath, and she is buried in the Independent Cemetery at Sudbury. John Gainsborough, the eldest son, familiarly and somewhat disrespectfully known in the neighbourhood of Sudbury as " Scheming Jack," was an eccentric genius, much given to theories and experiments and the construction of models, an occupation which absorbed all his time and most of the money he contrived to get hold of. He was never successful at anything, for what- ever he did — whether he tried to discover the philosopher's stone, — or to invent wings which should enable men to fly in the air, or c 2 20 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. to construct a time-piece which, would correct the longitude, or a self-working cradle, or a wheel that turned in a still bucket of water — nothing was ever completed so as to become profitable to the inventor. " Curse it,'' was the schemer's way of putting it, "some little thing was wrong; if I ha4 but gone on with it I am sure I should have succeeded, but a new scheme came across me." After his death a stupendous collection of brass and tin models of every size and form was discovered in his house at Sudbury, but most of them were in an unfinished state. Humphrey, the second brother, became an Independent minister, and settled at Henley-on-Thames. He also possessed great mechanical skill and taste. Indeed, it is stated with some good authority that he was the real inventor of that form of the steam-engine for which Watts obtained a patent in 1769. His favourite scientific pursuits do not appear to have hindered the faithful discharge of his duties, and the zeal and efficiency which he displayed elicited an offer, from some influential personage in the neighbourhood, of Church preferment, if he would consent to take Holy Orders. But he declined the offer. The circum- stances of his death from heart disease were very tragic. He had an engagement to dine with a friend, who finding that he had not arrived at the appointed time; went out to meet him and found his dead body by thfe road-side. The artist was much attached to this excellent and accomplished man, and has left us a portrait of him, which is worthy of his genius and reputation. Of the painter's remaining brothers there is little to be said. Matthias died in boyhood from an accident. Eobert migrated to Lancashire, and nothing of the smallest interest is recorded of him. Gainsborough's four sisters were all married — Mary to Mr. Gibbon, a dissenting minister at Bath ; Susannah to Mr. Gardiner of the same city; Sarah to Mr. Dupont of Sudbury; and Elizabeth to Mr. Bird, also a Sudbury worthy. As appears to have been the case with all truly great artists, Thomas Gainsborough's art was born in him. From the time he was able to toddle about he commenced to observe nature and BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 21 to love her ; and in after years he was wont to say that " there ■was not a picturesque clump of trees, nor even a single tree' of any beauty, nor hedge-row, stem or post " for miles around his home that was not perfectly imprinted on his boyhood's mind, so that had he possessed the necessary executive power he could have reproduced them with his pencil at any moment. Eound about Sudbury, the country (at that time more thickly wooded than now) is eminently calculated to stimulate a love for landscape. The scenery of the Stour valley, with its gently- rising banks, its emerald pastures, its lovely woodlands, and all the surroundings of rustic felicity, could never fail to charm a mind formed by nature to feed on the beautiful. Like Constable he used gratefully to acknowledge, in after years, that these scenes made him a painter. He has affectionately portrayed these loved haunts of his boyhood in several pictures, as in A view of Henny Church; a Woody Scene (Cornard, near Sudbury) ; and A view near Sudbury. The town of Sudbury is of respectable antiquity and full of interest. At that day it consisted of unpaved streets, and con- tained many quaint, ancient, and frequently dilapidated build- ings, with overlapping stories which overshadowed the thorough- fare. It was in these houses that the Flemish weavers brought over by Edward III. had . lived and taught their art to the former natives of Sudbury, which, by the way, was not called Sudbury in those days, but Southburgh, by way of contrast with Norwich, the K"orthburgh. Not the least picturesque of these houses was that in which Gainsborough was born, which had formerly been an inn, known by the sign of TJie Black Horse. Here and there in the town, heavy picturesque porches, projecting far out from the main buildings to which they were adjuncts, were ornamented with " antediluvian monsters and zoology-defying griffins," all manner of cunningly carved im- possibilities. In a niche in the chancel wall of St. Gregory, a grim stone head of Simon Sudbury, erstwhile Archbishop of Canterbury, had for generations looked down upon all passers 22 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. by ; and hard by stood the ruins of the unfortunate prelate's palace 1 (then used as a poor-house), presenting, with its old Gothic arches and the crumbling tracery of its ruined windows festooned with delicate ivy tendrils, an appearance of picturesque decay. Amid such objects were Gainsborough's early years spent, and it is likely that not only his attention but his pencil also was engaged npon them from a very tender age. ] Like many other great artists, he began his art education very early in life — early enough indeed, if, as Allan Cunningham says, " At ten years old he had made some progress in sketching, and at twelve was a confirmed painter.'' Before he was yet ten years old he was placed at his uncle's Grammar School, where, instead of employ- ing his time in toilsome eifort to acquire the learning of the schools, he employed himself in making sketches of persons and places on the covers of his books and the backs of his exercises , much to the dehght of his schoolfellows, who worked out his sums and ■wrote out his exercises for him. Little Tom did not make any very great progress with his book learning, as might be expected under the circumstances. Like Constable, however, he showed great proficiency in hand- writing, and this skill he once utilized for his own advantage in the following way. Master Tom much preferred freedom and fresh air to the confinement of the school-room, and he would occasionally coax his parents to give him a holiday, which he would spend in rambling about the neighbourhood filling his sketch-book. Having one day unsuccessfully begged his father to give him this treat, Tom thought perhaps he could arrange the matter diplomatically; so he wrote out the usual form of note, " Please give Tom a holiday," and imitated his father's handwriting so cleverly that Mr. Burroughs was com- pletely deceived, and the juvenile forger started off for a glorious afternoon, returning in the evening probably with all sorts of sketches of woodland scenery, ' Simon Sudbury was beheaded by Wat Tyler's rabble. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 23 " Clumps of trees and winding glades, Sunny nooks and running water." But, such is the malignity of fate, during the day his father desir- ing liis presence had sent to the school for him, and so the forgery was detected. It was thus probahly old Gainshorough, after a somewhat rude fashion, first learnt that he had a son who was a genius. When the irate parent was shown the cleverly forged letter he exclaimed, " Tom will one day be hanged," but when the gentle mother dexterously substituted the little truant's marvellously clear sketches, paternal pride and aflPection overcame his anger, and he declared that Tom would one day be a genius. Very convinced, indeed, must his parents and schoolmates have been that little Tom possessed native genius of no ordinary calibre, for after many solemn family consultations, to which Uncle Burroughs and his wife (who, by the way, was a daughter of the celebrated Dr. Busby) were doubtless invited, it was decided to send him to London, he being then in his fifteenth year. "We say that they were doubtless deeply impressed wijh , his powers, because Art was considered, and was, a very hazardous profession to undertake in those days. So in 1741 he was sent to the great city, and placed under the care of a worthy silver- smith, through whose influence and kindness he obtained an introduction to Gravelot an engraver, and teacher of drawing, who at once recognized the abilities of the youthful aspirant, and obtained for him admission to the St. Martin's L^ne Academy. Under Gravelot he obtained some valuable instruction, par- ticularly in etching. Most of Gainsborough's biographers say that he only etched three prints, viz. "one for his friend Kirby's work on Perspective; the second, An oak tree with gipsies; and the third, A man ploughing on the side of a rising ground." Fulcher, however, points out that this is an erroneous statement, and says that he inspected " drawings from fifteen prints, designed and engraved by Gainsborough, and representing other subjects than those enumerated." 24 THOMAS GAINSBOEOUGH. / For tiiree years he drudged away at tlie St. Martin's Lane (^Academy assisted by roystering Frank Hayman, the historical painter, for he had now attached himself to his studio in order to learn the mysteries and practices of his art. Hayman was a man of great reputation, hut on the whole his pupil must have profited httle by the connection, acquiring from him, as Fulcher says, "little of painting and_lesa. of morality." He was more addictedldliissipation, wine, and pugilism than to Art. StiU he was cle ver in the m echanical processes and manipulative tricks. It does not matter so very much, after all^ who happens to have been the instructor of any great artist. In the case of "Wilson and some of his pupils we have an instance of the impossibility of manufacturing an aHist, even when a truly great master takes the matter in hand. In Gainsborough the fire of genius was already existent, and it would be as reasonable to say that the preceptor who taught Alfred Tennyson prosody and grammar gave the world ' In Memoriam ' as that Hayman taught Gains- borough how to paint The Cottage Girl or The Woodman in the , Storm. /Whilst studying at the St. Martin's Lane Academy he fell 'slightly under the influence of the Flemish masters. During these years he was exposed to many temptations, and it was the most malleable period of his life. He must have seen far more of the dissipation arid excesses into which Hayman and his boon companions plunged than was good and safe for a lad of his age. But he worked hard and earnestly, never flinching before seem- ingly insurmountable difficulties, until at last he began to feel strong enough to walk alone. Then he hired three rooms in f Hatton Garden, where, whilst waiting for customers to come and have their portraits painted, he did a little modelling, and pro- duced a few small landscapes. The latter he sold to the dealers ■ for whatever he could get ; for his portraits, which were of a small size, he charged from three to five guineas. But, as yet, there was no patronage to spare for him ; sitters were few and far between ; the picture-dealers ground him down till he would BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 25 .tear with them no longer; and after a year's experience of [^atton Garden and public apathy, he packed up his belongings and Tvended his way back to Sudbury. He had now extracted all the goodness obtainable from the dried husks of insipid conventionalities which passed current in those days for the grammar of Art. On his return to Sudbury in 1745 he set up there as a por- /trait painter, occasionally alsopainting a small landscape for the V dealers. It is worthy of remark that these landscapes exhibit /in a marked degree the influence of Gainsborough's London ^training. They are all in the style of the Dutch landscapists, and it was not until he had unlearnt the instruction he had been saturated with, and had become strong enough to paint Mature as she is, as he saw her, and knew her, and loved her, that he painted the pictures that entitle him to rank with Wilson and other masters. At this period he seems to have been undaunted by his want of success in London ; he had plighted his troth to Art, and to her he meant to devote his life. But as a provincial painter he thought he had a better chance of making a good start in life, than by remaining amongst the firmly-established " stars " of the London artistic world, and struggling with a crowd of hungry aspirants for fame. Above all he would be able to paint now face to face with Nature — not the false Nature of the Haymans and the studios. So he did wisely in relinquishing the bare possi- bility of being caught up by Fortune's wheel, and the probability of exciting some hostility and then being left to starve in a garret, the ordinary fate of those who are in any way " deadly true." And more, than this, in learning the grammar and mech- -anism of his art he had, as we have said, imbibed a touch of ( conventionalism which he could now shake off. So he did wisely \nd well in returning to his rural home in the sweet valley of the Stour. He was now in his eighteenth year. During his stay in London he bad acquired a manner that to the inhabitants of Sudbury represented the highest possible degree of polish and 26 THOMAS GAINSBOEOUGH. elegance. Bright, witty, vivacious in Ms conversation, elegant in his bearing, and, with all his advantages, modest in the ex- treme, no wonder that his society was eagerly courted. But he did not give himself up to social enjoyment, for he knew that as yet he had only learnt how to study; he was constantly employed in sketching and painting in the open air. " The Suffolk ploughmen often saw him in the early morning, sketchbook in hand, ' brushing with hasty steps the dew away,' and lingering in the golden light of evening taking lessons from the sunset clouds floating, in changeful beauty as if an angel's hand had traced the scene." 1 On one occasion, when painting a lovely scene that might have been taken from fairy land, looking up after a few moments' abstraction from his easel, he beheld a most lovely damsel emerging from behind some trees on whose branches wood-doves were perched , and beneath the shade of which some sheep were reposing. He at once fell a victim to the lady's beauty and sweetness ; and she, who happened to be a princess in disguise, was conquered by his devotion and elegance, and forthwith sur- rendered her heart and her fortune into his keeping. They were ( married, and lived happily together for ever after. This charm- ing idyl, for long taken as an accurate account of the painter's wooing and marriage, is, unfortunately for the lovers of romance, a somewhat highly-coloured narrative. The princess in disguise, one year Gainsborough's junior, was a young lady named Margaret Burr, concerning whose parentage there is much mystery. Some say that she was the natural daughter of one of our exiled princes, but in the 'Diary of a Lover of Literature'^ she is spoken of as a natural daughter of the Duke of Bedford. Her fortune took the shape of an annuity of £200 a year, whence emanating none could say apparently, but it was regularly paid to her account at a London bank. Her brother was a traveller in old Mr. Gains- ' Fuloher, ' Life of Thomas Gainsborough,' p. 32. London, 1856. ^ Thomas Green. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 27 borough's employ, and it is therefore probable that she and Tom had been friends and playmates for years. It was not -whilst he -was sketching that Miss Burr's great beauty first struck him, but during the many sittings which she gave him for her portrait. But, however it came about, the love was there, and in 1745 the boy-husband led his girl-bride to the altar, and a sweet, faithful, and prudent wife she proved. After a brief residence in Friar Street, Sudbury, they removed to Ipswich, and settled down to love in a cottage, for which the rent was £6 a year. Ipswich did not much affect the fine arts in 1745. If she do so now, the change must have been comparatively recent. In Gainsborough's early days the Ipswichians were essentially prac- tical and business-like people. To their minds the finest scenery in. the neighbourhood was to be found amongst the blocks of warehouses on their wharves ; they admired the masts of the vessels that glided with their merchandise on the bosom of the stately Orwell far beyond any woodland trees ; and the leaves of their broad ledgers were to them far dearer than any leaves in ■^he forest. From such people Gainsborough was not likely to receive much patronage, and when at last a wealthy squire did send for him our painter found to his unutterable disgust, on calling to receive his instructions, that a painter and glazier was wanted to paint the outside of a house and repair some broken windows and hothouse frames. But he did not put his hands in his pockets and remain content to wait and hope only ; he kept on working — for ever sketching, studying, and painting ITature in the open air. Every single part of her he made a study of; he knew her in all her changeful moods. Of some water-colour drawings of this period two are studies simply illus- trative of the effect of sunbeams piercing through clouds. It was whilst sketching near Frestoh Tower, on the banks of the Orwell, that a sober-looking gentleman casually introduced himself to Gainsborough as Joshua Kirlnj. The acquaintance thus formed ripened into a warm friendship, and at Kirby's death, in 1771, 28 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. Gainsljorough deeply mourned his loss, and expressed his desire to be buried, when his time should come, by the side of his old friend. ^ In 1754 it was that Gainsborough met Philip Thicknesse, who had recently been appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Landguard Fort, near Harwich. Thicknesse was walking in a friend's garden when he saw a melancholy-faced man with his arms locked to- gether, looking over the boundary wall. The friend, whose attention Thicknesse directed to the object, said that the figure had been there all day, and that the man was probably mad or else miserable. Thicknesse then went up to the figure, when he found that what he had taken to be a man was a shaped and painted panel. On hearing that the artist (Gainsborough) lived in the town, Thicknesse lost no time in calling, and being introduced into his painting-room, upbraided him for imposing upon people a shadow for a substance. ~ At this interview, Thick- nesse mentions having seen several portraits, including one of Admiral Vernon, " truly drawn, perfectly like, but stiffly painted, and worse coloured." /7 His little landscapes, however, are described as charming ^works of fancy, affording to beholders infinite delight. For these landscapes, we may observe parenthetically, Gainsborough charged from three to five guineas each. Soon after the com- mencement of their acquaintanceship, Thickne^e_commissioned Gainsborough to paint a landscape of the- Yachts passing the garrison under the salute of the guns. This work, for which Gainsborough received fifteen guineas, was soon afterwards taken to London by its purchaser and engraved by Major. The engraving represents a S.E. view of Landguard Fort, which being a most unpicturesque structure is wisely made to occupy bilt a very small portion of the landscape. The foreground is relieved by various groups of figures and cattle, remarkable for their ease and grace. The original picture perished long before the painter's death, sea-water having been used for the mortar of the wall on which it was hung. The engraving helped much to BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 29 spread the artist's reputation far 'beyoiid the limited circle ia •which he had hitherto been known. Thicknesse, who from 1754 to 1774 devoted himself with untiring assiduity to Gainsborough's affairs, was a' man on whom nearly every sketcher of the painter's life has heaped so much abuse and contempt that we will only say he appears to have been a fussy, ostentatious, irrepressible busybody without the faintest conception of modesty, and seems, also, to have entertained some notion that he had a sort of heaven-boru right to patronize Gainsborough. On the other hand, he describes himself as a "very innocent and unoffending man except to rogues and_ rascals." During the early period of their acquaintance the two men^ seein to have got on very well together. Thicknesse lent Gainsborough a violin, which the latter soon learnt to play better than the owner. And though we smile at the Governor's modest assertion that he " was the first man who perceived through clouds of bad colouring, what an accurate eye he (Gains- borough) possessed, and the truth of his drawings, and who dragged him from the obscurity of a country town at a time that all his neighbours were as ignorant of his great talent as he was Jbimself," it is probable that Thicknesse was kindly influential in / obtaining some commissions ; and in a small place like Ipswich an acquaintance more or less would make a great difference in a man's social circle! During his career in Suffolk Gainsborough XJas chiefly employed in painting portraits of the wives and ( daughters of the people living round Ipswich ; and at Colchester he had some patrons, one of whom, Mr. Edgar, a lawyer, it seems, /gave him a sitting before the painter knew much about him ; for /in a letter from Gainsborough, dated 13th March, 1758, to this ^gentleman, is the following passage : " I little thought you were a lawyer when I said that not one in ten was worth hanging. I told Clubb of that, and he seemed to think that I was lucky that I did not say one in a hundred. It's too late to ask your pardon now, but really. Sir, I never saw 30 THOMAS GAINSBOEOUGH. one of your profession look so honest in my life, and that's the reason I concluded you were in the wool trade." At this time he sometimes sketched the parks and mansions of the neighbduring gentry, hut there was then very little demand for landscape paintings — at least not for English landscapes. /On the whole, however, he made a very comfortable living ; his ( society was eagerly sought, and he was hospitably received at Vjnany houses in the neighbourhood, amongst others at that of the Kev. Mr. Hingeston of Southwold, with whom he was a /^reat favourite. His affable and agreeable manners endeared { him to all with whom he came in contact, alike at the cottage and the castle. Long after he had left that part of the country, at mention of his name the countenances of the aged peasants would brighten up with a grateful recollection of his many acts (of benevolence and kindness. He delighted in presenting friends ^with memorials of his skill, and the panels of several of the rooms in Mr. Hingeston's houseware adorned with the productions of his genius. One of these especially, a landscape in Gains- borough's most felicitous style, in which the artist's two daughters Margaret and Mary are introduced chasing a butterfly, is a most charming description of one of the happiest aspects of nature. J As a diversion - irom .pain±ing__lie_ cultivated music; and (occasionally gave concerts at his own house. One of his pictures represents himself and several of the members of a musical club in Ipswich to which he belonged. In the foreground stand Gainsborough and his friend Captain Clarke, their heads turned towards a violin player who is accompanied by another player on the violoncello — in the centre of the room is a table at which a fifth figure is sleeping — ^probably intended for a sarcastic hint as to the quality of the music. It is a candlelight scene ; Gains- borough has a glass in his hand ; two other figures are on the table, and the third has rolled npon the floor temporarily in the condition of* the gentleman described in one of Bret Harte's poems, of whom it is recorded that " the subsequent proceedings interested him no more." From this picture, and from the BIOGKAPHIOAL SKETCH. 31 fact that an ancient Ipswichian once told somebody that Gainsborough and his companions were " pretty boys in theii day," it has been suggested that the artist's habits were somewhat too coiivivial. We have purposely mentioned this that we may state our total disagreement with any such conclusion ; our imagination is not sufficiently fertile to enable us to picture the gentle, refined Gainsborough as a roysterer, and we never saw any evidence of his being more than a thoroughly sociable man, able and willing to enjoy the good things of the world in a legitimate and decorous way. Undoubtedly Gainsborough would have been well content to yglid his days at Ipswich, where he was now comfortably settled, / and had spent fifteen years in his cottage of content, years of V such pure happiness as fall to the lot of few of us. He was well known through all the country round, and had some pupUs — certainly two, of whom one was the son of his friend Joshua Kirby. But in the eternal fitness of things it was not meet (^ that so great a genius should remain unknown to a larger world. Thicknesse had a house and good social standing at Bath, Cthan which, except London, no city then offered greater advan- tages for a portrait painter. To have their portraits taken has been a peculiar temptation to idle people with money in their pockets ever since the art of portrait painting became known, and there were many idle and frivolous, but wealthy people at Bath. . Beau Nash, who had in Ijis halcyon days rendered the fair " Queen of the West '' the resort of all the fashionable world, was there spending his old age in such glory as the office of Master of the Ceremonies afforded, and he still gathered around him aU the wit and wealth and fashion of the day. / Hither Thicknesse advised and prevailed upon Gainsborough (to move. Of course the painter could not live amongst the butterflies of fashion in the same humble style in which he had /"been so happy in Ipswich, so be took apartments in the newly- i erected Circus at a rental of £50 a year — much to his prudent wife's alarm, who asked him if he were going to throw himself 32 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. into a gaol; but TMcknesse, who, — wlien not patronizing, — played the part of a family fidiis Achates, explained that the only alternative to this arrangement would be to take a house at £150 a year, and he even offered to pay the rent of such a house if Gainsborough were unable to do so, so confident was he of the artist's success.\ There was little cause for anxiety, however, for from the very first business came in so fast that Gainsborough had no leisure to finish a head of Thicknesse commenced and intended to have been used as an advertisement or decoy duck to allure the visitors to have their portraits taken. The " painter in the Circus " was spoken of in the public rooms as a " clever fellow who could paint a head as well as Mr. Hoare ; " ^ he was /oDliged, in order to keep his patrons within manageable numbers, ( to raise his charge from five to eight guineas for a head ; and finally he settled them at forty guineas for a half-length and one 1 hundred guineas for a full-length portrait, and so prosperously ffid he thrive that his house was christened Gain's Borough. Since Gainsborough had left London public interest in modem works of art had shown symptoms of awakening, and one of the good results had been the foundation of the Society of Artists in 1764, and the establishment of the Koyal Academy in 1768, the former body being the immediate outcome of the exhibition of pictures held under the auspices of the Eoyal Society of Arts, the first of which was in 1760. To this Gains- borough did not contribute ; but the following year he sent to London a full-length Portrait of Mr. Nugent ; and at the sub- sequent exhibitions till 1768 inclusive, fifteen portraits and two landscapes from his brush were hung. Among these may be mentioned Portraits of General Honywood, Quin,' Garrich, Ladij Grosvenor, . Duke of Argyll, and Mr. Poyntz ; a Large Landscape (1763) ; and a Large Landscape with Figures ' William Hoare, one of the original R.A.s, was also a Suffolk man, having been born at Eye in 1706. After a very complete art education in this country and on the continent he settled at Bath as a portrait painter. His productions are now forgotten. THE YOUMG LAVINIA. By Gainsborough. /'•iineeJ for MacklMs ^'British Pods. BIOGEAPHIOAL SKETCH. 33 (1766). Quin was extremely unwilling to allow tis portrait to be painted, and it was only at Gainsborough's appeal, " If you will let me take your likeness, I shall live for ever," that he consented. Garrick at first played ■'uch pranks with his coun- tenance that the poor artist was puzzled how to make any likeness at all, for at one moment the actor had a horrible squint, the next he appeared " as handsome as Lord Townshend ; " now the distracted painter saw in his sitter an old man with a bloated face, and in a moment the figure changed, and presented " the pinched aspect and withered features of Sir John Hawkins.'' In all probability, however, Garrick merely desired to gratify his vanity by a display of his marvellous gift of mimicry, and wished perhaps to relieve the tediousness of a lengthy sitting. Certainly the portrait proved a great success, and Mrs. Garrick pronounced it to be " the best portrait ever painted of her Davy." VGarriok sufficiently approved of it to present it to the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon. But by far the most important of these / portraits was that of General Honywood. This is one of Gains- \ borough's finest pictures : " Through a richly wooded scene, where the sturdy oak and silvery-barked beech are conspicuous, the , soldier, mounted on a bay horse, appears to be passing. His scarlet dress contrasts finely with the mass of surrounding foliage. Nothing can be easier than his attitude, as with one hand he curbs in his charger, and with the other holds his sword, which seems to flash in the sunbeams." When George III. saw this picture, he admired it so much that he wished to become the possessor, and Horace Walpole marked it in his catalogue as one of the features of the Exhibition. In 1767 and the following year Gainsborough sent five paintings to the Artists' Exhibition. They were Portraits of Lady GrTOSvenor ; John, Duke of Argyle ; Mr. Vernon; Captain Needham ; and Captain Augustus Hervey. By no means the, least appreciative of our painter's Bath admirers was Mr. Wilt- shire, the carrier between that city and London, whose homage to Gainsborough's genius took the form of refusing to take any LP D 34 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. payment for the transport of the Academy pictures to and from London. The two were great friends, and Gainsborough pre- sented Wiltshire with several paintings, which have been religiously preserved in the carrier's family as heirlooms. "Wiltshire, in return, gave Gainsborough a horse which the latter had greatly admired, and which served as a model for many pictures. Amongst others, it figures in The Return from Harvest, a present to Mr. Wiltshire. A little peasant girl seated in a waggon, the driver of which is stopping his team in order to allow another little lass to mount ; the children are portraits of the painter's daughters. / Gainsborough's passion for music grew with his years, and at (times it seemed as if painting were his diversion and music the business of his life. Once he heard Giardiui play the violin, and became so enamoured of the music that he insisted upon buying the identical instrument from which he had heard the enchanting tones produced. Then Abel came to Bath with his viol-di-gamba, and Gains- borough must needs buy it. Then he heard Fischer play the hautboy, and he swore by wind instruments. Then Crosdill played the violoncello at a concert where Gainsborough was, and the painter could talk of nothing else for a month. One day he was shown a picture by his favourite Van Dyck, in which a lute was introduced, and a lute he must have. He heard that such an instrument was owned by a German professor, to whose residence he immediately repaired, and found the professor in a garret, smoking his pipe after a dinner of roasted apples. The following conversation then took place. It is thoroughly charac- teristic of the impetuous and boyish nature of Gainsborough. " I have come to buy your lute ; name your price and I will pay it." " I cannot sell my lute." " Not for a guinea or two, perhaps, but you must sell at some price and so I tell you." " My lute is worth much money — ten guineas." BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 35 "Indeed it is — quite that; see, here's your money. Good day." Then taking up the instrument and placing the ten guineas on the table Gainsborough left the room ; but before he had got half-way down the stairs, he returned, and said — " I have forgotten something. What is your lute to me if I have not your book of airs 1 " " Ah, Master Gainsborough, I cannot part with my book." " Nonsense ; you can make another at any time. See, here's the book I want — and here's another ten guineas for it." Once more did the impetuous painter-musician withdraw, but only for a few seconds, when back he came. "Dear me, what is the use of your book to me if I don't understand it, or of your lute if I cannot play on it 1 Come home with me at once and give me the first lesson." " I wiU go to-morrow." " Come now." " I must dress." " You are admirably dressed." " I must shave." " I honour your beard." " I must, however, put on my wig." " D — n your wig, your cap and beard become you well enough. Do you think if Van Dyck wanted to paint you he'd let you be shaved ? Come on at once." Gainsborough's connection with the Eoyal Academy is some- what obscure. His residence at Bath and the difference between the means of communication then and now might have occasioned the omission of his name from the directorate of the pioneer Incorporated Society, though his works at the previous exhibi- tions ought to have marked him as a giant among painters. Of this Society, too, his old mastef, Frank Hayman, was vice- president, and Francis Cotes, who must have met Gainsborough at Bath, was a director. It is curious, too, that Gainsborough's name was not included in either of the two lists of original D 2 V 36 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. members submitted for George III.'s approval ; though. E.A. is appended to his name in the first catalogue. " It is evident," says Mr. Tom Taylor, " that there was a determination to secure him for the new Academy ; and that he let himself he secured, but he seems never to have taken any part whatever in the work of the Academy, and his membership is hardly traceable in the Academy records, except by a quarrel, occasionally, about the hanging of his pictures." ^ It was the law of the Eoyal Academy that every member should signalize his election by presenting to the Institution one of his paintings. Gainsborough, who was one of the original thirty-six, contributed A Romantic Landscape with Sheep at a Fountain. /' Between 1769 and 1773 Gainsborough sent, altogether, thirty- three works to the annual exhibitions, including whole length painting of Isabella, Lady Molyneiix ; portrait of George Pitt, eldest son of Lord Eivers ; A Large Landscape ; A Boy's Head; three-quarters length of Oar rich ; Portrait of. a Gentle^ man ; Lady Stissex and Child ; Lord Ligonier, with a Horse ; Lady Ligonier, in a Fancy Dress; Captain Wade, M.C. at Bath. It is well known that he sometimes painted his subjects / to be viewed at a certain light and at a particular distance ; in 1773 and the three following years he did not exhibit at all, being dissatisfied with the action of the authorities — probablj^ his expressed wishes on the subject had been ignored by the Hanging Committee in 1772. v In 1775 the E.A. Council moved that Mr. Gainsborough's name be omitted from their lists, " he ha^^.ng declined to accept any office in the Academy, and never attending ; " the motion was, however, rescinded at the next General Meeting. In 1777 Gainsborough again figures in the catalogue, and his name con- tinues to appear as a large contributor down to 1783 inclusive. On April 24th, 1784, the following paragraph appeared in a London journal in explariation of a previous notification on the same subject : " Mr. Gainsborough's picture which the Eoyal ^ Leslie's ' Life of Reynolds,' note on p. 297, vol. L BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 37 Academy Inquisition has refused to hang agreeably to his -wishes, contains the portraits of the Princess Royal, Princess Augusta, and Princess Elizabeth, at full length. It was painted for the Prince of Wales's state-room in Carlton Palace for a height already ascertained, as the frame which is to receive it is formed in the panels. The requisition the artist made, to hang it at the panel height in the Exhibition Eoom, ought surely to have been attended to in so particular an instance, particularly when it is remembered that the colouring is tender and delicate ; so that the effect must be destroyed by an injudicious elevation.'' Gainsborough withdrew the whole of his pictures, and never again sent any contribution to the Exhibitions. It is well known that from the very first the Hanging Committee of the Academy were governed by certain inexorable rules, unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, one of which was that all full- length portraits must be hung in what is known as the " full- length line ; " and though the relaxation of the rule in such a " case as Gainsborough's need not, per se, have been attended with any detrimental result either to the other exhibitors or to the dignity of the Academy as a body, it is easy to see what reasons influenced the " Inquisition " in their decision. Intrigue, parti- sanship, jealousy, and favouritism were as rampant in artistic and all other 'fcircles in the eighteenth century as they are in the nineteenth and will be in the 190th century, and in order to maintain anything like authority over the many cliques and | parties into which artists were divided, the Eoyal Academicians knew it was absolutely necessary to act with unswerving partiality. They felt their position should be like that of Ctesar's wife — above suspicion — and they therefore treated Gainsborough with exactly the same justice — harsh justice it may now appear — as they would have dealt out to any other painter. Reynolds in Gainsborough's place would have accepted the decision as a matter of business, have taken a pinch of snuff, and have painted a better portrait for the next Exhibi- tion, intended to be viewed from the full-length line. But 38 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. Gainsborotigli was not a man of the -world. Pettiness, jealousy, envy, and intrigue were things he had heard of but could not com- prehend; and judging mankind by the standard of his own simple, innocent, kindly nature, he knew not the necessity for grappling with these noxious moral weeds, nor could he understand the means taken by the Academy to keep their own ground as clear as possible from such encumbrances. He could only put down the non-observance of his wishes with regard to the hanging of his pictures to inconsiderate obliviousness, or to non-appreciation of his genius. But if he misunderstood the Somerset House arbiters, we think that his biographers have misunderstood his action in this matter. In no ease did he quarrel with his judges. Wrangling and dispute were so utterly foreign to his peaceable disposition that he retired altogether from the ground where he might have been drawn into angry discussion ; and who shall say he was not wise to wish rather to enjoy the unruffled calm of domestic life with his lute and viol-de-gamba than to engage in angry recrimination in the avenging of an imaginary slight. Whilst at Bath Gainsborough was not unmindful of his relations. His eldest sister with his approval was happily married to a Mr. Gibbon of Bath. He also took upon himself the rearing of a nephew, Gaiusborough Dupont.^ Eichardson the novelist, Sterne, Chatterton (it is said), Cramer the metal- lurgist, and Lord Camden, besides Garrick and Quin, were amongst the many eminent personages whose portraits Gains- borough painted during his career at Bath. Here, too, he was a universal favourite in society, in which he freely mixed, and would often amuse his friends by modelling their faces in any material ready to his hand, the wax from the candles serving when nothing else could be had. In his profession he had been successful beyond his expectations, and it is probable he would ' Afterwards a portrait painter of considerable merit and much promise, during Gainsborough's ilife-time his assistant ; and who, before his death at the age of thirty (in 1797), painted a picture containing the portraits of the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House, which was deservedly praised. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 39 have remained at Bath for the rest of his life but for the irre- pressible Thicknesse, who either from kindly motives or from inveterate officiousness, still continued a system of interference ■which began to be unendurable and amounted almost to perse cution. But, as in the case of the removal from Ipswich, the change of residence to London proved to have been a wise_ step. In 1774 a wretched squabble took place between the Thicknesses and the Gainsboroughs. The painter had presenteii (Mrs. Thicknesse with a portrait of herself, and she was desirous of possessing a companion one of her husband. Thicknesse, knowing the professional charge to be 100 guineas, and unwilling to accept sa valuable a work without making some adequate return, made the painter a present, through his wife, of a very /'^ choice old viol-di-gamba (worth at least 100 guineas) which Gainsborough greatly coveted. The artist was delighted and gratefully promised Mrs. Thicknesse a portrait of her husband. One sitting was given, but for some cause or other the picture was then abandoned. Mrs. Thicknesse was mortally offended, and expressed herself to Gainsborough in uncompromisingly uncomplimentary terms ; the painter returned the viol-di-gamba and sent the unfinished picture to Thicknesse, who returned it, however, requesting the painter to " blot it out, and then blot out from his heart the truest friend he had ever possessed." Without entering into any further details we may safely say that there seem to have been faults of temper and judgment on both sides. Certainly the explanation which the Gainsboroughs gave, that the artist not only undertook to paint the portrait, but also privately sent Mrs. Thicknesse a cheque for a hundred guineas as the price of the instrument, knowing that money would be acceptable ai the time, does make Thicknesse's impatience and f ussiness about the painting appear unreasonable, and would justify the artist's subsequent conduct. But Thick- nesse in his angry pamphlet gave a contradictory account. This squabble is said to have been the immediate cause / of Gainsborough's leaving Bath, but independently of any one 40 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. ,particular episode, he was naturally glad of any excuse for running away from the fussy interference and patronage of such an arch-bore as Mr. Philip Thicknesse. /2 So, in 1774, for a second time, Gainsborough set up in practice in London. But since he had relinquished the Hatton Garden studio, where sitters would not come in sufficient numbers to warrant his keeping it on, his position had vastly changed. In his Ipswich cottage he had made a sure living ; in the compara- tively pretentious Bath apartments he had more than, prospered ; /aiiid now, in the possession of a large income and a splendid name, he felt no hesitation in renting for .£300 a-year from Astley (the portrait painter, who in former days had lined his waistcoat with " a waterfall " cut from one of his unhonoured landscapes, but had now made a short cut to fortune by marriage -with a rich widow), part of Schomberg House, a noble mansion in Pall Mall. Thicknesse (to show that he nurtured no malice) wrote requesting Lord Bateman to give Gainsborough countenance and to malte him known, a scarcely necessary proceeding, seeing that Gains- borough's pictures in the different Exhibitions since 1761 had attracted great attention and caused much interest to be taken in the painter of works which displayed such high merit. Eeynolds, the President of the Academy, was one of the first to call upon him, but most unfortunately, Gainsborough had not been able to understand the real cause of the Hanging Committee's decision in 1772, and laid himself open to the charge of churlishness by neglecting to return the visit. George III. had noticed the beauty of Gainsborough's works, and sent for him to the palace ; before long the king and queen sat for their portraits ; nearly all the aristocracy followed the royal example ; commissions fell in so fast that, rapid as was Gainsborough's execution, he was unable to keep pace with the demand upon his services. In December, 1774, he ^as elected on the Council of the Eoyal Academy, and actually received a vote for the Presidency — the Popedom of British Art. BI0GE4.PHICAL SKETCH. 41 la his ever-increasing prosperity lie never forgot his poorer relations. Scheming Jack was not only supplied with money for expenses at Sudbury, but there were always warm welcome and comfortable quarters for him at Schomberg House. To his. sister at Bath Gainsborough wrote affectionately, and was solicitous about her position and welfare ; and it was in rambles with his brother Humphrey, amidst the Thames valley scenery, that he spent many of the few hours he was able to steal from his numerous engagements. In 1777 Gainsborough reappeared at the Academy with the portraits of his friend Ahel, the Duke and JDucliess of Cumber- land ; Lord Gage, ; Two Young Gentlemen ; and A Large Land- scape, which Lord Orford said, was " in the style of Eubens, and by far the finest landscape ever painted in England, and equal to the great masters." The following year Horace Walpole said of Gainsborough's Duchess of Devonshire, that it was " very hard and washy ; " but then Lady Di Beauclero had just before painted a portrait of her Grace, which had been engraved by Bartolozzi ; and the dictator of Strawberry Hill, true to his orders, had resolved that Lady Di's Duchess should be the one of the season. / In this year Gainsborough was represented on the Academy walls with unusual profusion, as he contributed no less than eight portraits and two landscapes. Among the portraits was one of Christie the auctioneer, a present from the artist. In 1779 Gainsborough was at the zenith of his fame. In that year he wrote : " My present position with regard to encourage- ment, etc., is all that heart can desire, and I live at a full thou- sand pounds a-year expense." The most eminent men in every walk of life sat to him j and those _critij;s who had any discern- ment thought his landscapes were superior to his portraits. The favourite painter of the king and royal family, he was frequently at the palace, and amongst other commissions he was requested to make a portrait of one of the little princes who had just died. 42 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. /Jit was about this time that the portrait of Master Battall, ' /known as The Blue Boy, was painted, as a practical refutation I (it is said) of Eeynolds' dictum, that in the masses of light in a picture, the cool colours should he subordinate to the azure tints. In several of Gainsborough's happiest portraits, however, he has /'shown that the cool colours may, with the most pleasing effect, predominate. This year Gainsborough exhibited Portraits of the Duchess of Gloucester, and the Duchess of Cumberland, with half-lengths of Two Ladies, and Judye Perrin. He also contributedta most impressive picture of the Duke of Argyll. To the 1780 Exhibition, as we learu from a contemporary pamphlet entitled ' A Candid Eeview of the Exhibition,' Gains- borough sent six landscapes and nine or ten portraits, including paintings of General Conway, Governor of Jersey ; Henderson the Actor studying a tragedy part ; and Mr. George Coyte. The latter painting was so life-like that it became known as " Coyte alive." Among the portraits was one of Mr. Bate, who was then Editor of the ' Morning Post,' and afterwards became Sir Bate Dudley, Bart. A political opponent of Dudley speaking of a second portrait of him by the same artist, representing him standing in a garden vpith his dog, wittily but spitefully said that " the man wanted execution, and the dog wanted hanging." / It is strange that, whilst living, Gainsborough's popularity was ^almost entirely owing to his skill as a portrait painter. In eighteen years he had only sent half-a-dozen landscapes to the Exhibitions ; the walls of the passage from his haU to his painting- room were covered with landscapes, which his visitors for the most part scarcely deigned to look at, and never thought of inquiring the price of. Even that splendid outcome of his genius, The Woodman in the Storm, painted in 1787, when powerful critics had dragged the public attention to his landscape art, was only admired. 'So purchaser could be found willing to pay a hundred guineas for it whilst the painter was alive ; but directly he died it was snapped up by Lord Gainsborough at five times that price. But Gainsborough knew weU his own land ■* -'s - ^ THE BLUE BOY. By Gainsborough. /« f/ir po.isetsioii of the Duke of Westminster, See P;ii^e 4" BIOGRAPHIOAL SKETCH. 43 scape power, and in the next four years exhibited thirteen land- scapes. In 1781 appeared the Portrait of Queen Cliarlotte, of which a writer said : " I do believe that Opie would have made a calf's head look sensible, as Gainsborough made our old Queen Charlotte look picturesque ; " also Tliree Landscapes, of two of which Walpole said : " Gainsborough has two pieces with land and sea, so free and natural that one steps back for fear of being splashed." In 1782 he exhibited his CHrl and Pigs, of which Northcote remarks, that " the expression and truth of nature it displays were never surpassed," and with which even the fastidious Sir Joshua could find no fault, merely expressing the very character- istic opinion that the artist should have made the girl a beauty. A very striking criticism of this painting is said to have emanated from a countryman, who remarked : " They be deadly like pigs, but nobody ever saw pigs feeding together but what one on 'em had a foot in the trough.'' It attracted the notice of Peter Pindar, who in his ' Ode to the Eoyal Academicians' devotes three stanzas to Gainsborough ; in the last he counsels him to pursue his charming forte, and to have the " modest grace '' to devote his attention to landscapes ; and again he says — " Gainsborough ! Nature plaineth sore That thou hast kicked her out of door ; « « « K « # 4^ Lo ! all thy efforts without her are vain, Go, find her, kiss her, and be friends again." Gainsborough sent to the Academy in 1783, A Landscape; Two Shepherd Boys with Fighting Dogs ; A Sea-piece, a Calm ; and numerous portraits, including those of Mrs. Sheridan, Lord Cornwallis, Duchess of Devonshire, and Sir Harbord Harhord. This was the year in which he exhibited Portraits of the Royal Family, fifteen in number, but heads only. Peter Pindar made merry over this picture, describing it as " a nest of royal heads." 44 THOMAS GAINSBOBOUGH. The portraits of Colonel St. £eger, painted, in 1782, and Sir Harhord Harbord, contributed to the Academy in the following year, are among the finest of Gainsborough's paintings, the former being equal to the celebrated picture of Genieral Honywood, and resembling it in many respects. About 1784 Gainsborough painted the Mushroom Girl. The subject is fanciful— a rustic girl, wearied of her occupation of gathering mushrooms, is sleeping beneath an elm tree with her head resting upon her arms. A peasant is gazing at the sleeping beauty with evident admiration, whilst a little terrier looks indignantly at the intruder, but fears to bark lest he should wake his mistress. Gainsborough once offered his nephew, Mr. Dupont, the choice of .any of his pictures, and he selected this unfinished one. The View in the Mall of St. Jameis Parh is a charming picture, painted in the year 1786. Amongst some twenty figures Avhich it contains is a portrait of the artist himself. Fulcher describes it as " brilliant in colouring, charming in composition, and more than usually careful in execution." Tlie Gottage Girl with her Dog and Pitcher, which Leslie so much admires^ was painted from the same young lady depicted in the Gii'l and Pigs. Whether the verses of the burly satirist "Wolcot hit their mark, ^or whether from other causes, after the close of this Exhibition Gainsborough resolved to rest for a while from the fatigues of portrait painting, and to refresh his mind and body by an excur- sion to the Lake district. In this tour, liowever, he did not intend to let his brush grow stiff, for he wrote to a friend that on his return he 'meant showing that aU the delineators of our Lake scenery had, as hitherto, been but " tawdry fan painters." " I purpose," said he, " to mount aU the Lakes at the next Exhibition in the great style — and if the people don't like them, it is only jumping into one of the deepest from off a wooded island, and my reputation will be fixed for ever." BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 45 But at the next Exhibition the public saw neither the Lake scenes nor anything else from the great artist's easel. In con- sequence of the disagreement about the hanging of the Princesses to which we have referred, Gainsborough withdrew all his pictures, and till his death he was afterwards only remembered at the Spring gatherings by his absence. Fischer, the hautboy player and friend of Gainsborough, had secretly wooed the painter's youngest daughter. "When, in 1780, ■Gainsborough's consent to their union was asked, he said that it was then too late to alter anything without causing total unhappi- ness on both sides, though he had serious misgivings, on account of Fischer's oddities and temper, as to the desirability of the match. The marriage did not turn out a happy one, for before long Mrs. Fischer's mental aberrations rendered a separation necessary. In spite of Fischer's " oddities and temper," Gains- borough found in him a congenial companion ; and these two would often leave their wives to their own resources for a whole evening, while, the one with his flageolet and the other with his viol-di-gamba, they would become so engrossed and wrapped up in their music that for aught they knew the house might have been broken into and cleared. Music enthralled Gainsborough more than ever ; once when Colonel Hamilton, considered one of the finest violinists of the day, was playing to him, Nollekens entered the studio. Gainsborough put up his hand as a sign not to interrupt, and as soon as the air was finished he said, " Now, my dear Colonel, if you will but go on I will give you that picture of the Boy at the Stile you have so wished to purchase of me," at the same time telling Nollekens to select two, drawings for himself from a portfolio. For nearly half an hour Gains- borough's attention, was rivetted to the music, and then the Colonel drove off in a hackney-coach with his easily earned prize. / The musical accessories in Gainsborough pictures are always / /painted with a loving care;, take the portrait of Fischer, for ' example, in whose face we can see the music breathing. 46 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. painted at Bath ; the violin is perfect ; the polish on the Cremona denotes how lovingly the instrument has been pre- served ; whilst the maker's name even is not forgotten on the piano. ' Gainsborough's impulsive ways sometimes give rise to embar- rassing results. On first seeing Velasquez' picture of the young Duke of Asturias, he said to a servant of Mr. Agar, the possessor, " Go and tell your master I'U give a thousand pounds for that picture." The servant did as he was told. But by that time Gainsborough's enthusiasm had become tempered with common sense, and he was forced to admit he could not afford to pay such a fancy price. ^ His favourite suburban retreat for the summer months was / Richmond, where he had a cottage. There were few poor people I in the neighbourhood strangers to his generosity and benevolence; ' and when in his rambles he met any particularly picturesque- looking peasant children, he would send them off at once to his painting-room, and the remuneration he lavished on children and parents on such occasions was bountiful. He was so taken with the appearance of one lad, John Hill,^ that he actually adopted him; and though the boy, after a short experience, elected to run away and enjoy the freedom of his native lanes and fields rather than conform to the unaccustomed refinements of the painter's household, he was, after the latter's death in 1788, pro- vided for by Mrs. Gainsborough with an admission into Christ's Hospital. In the early months of 1787, Sir George Beaumont, Sheridan, and Gainsborough dined together ; the latter excelled himself in sparkling wit, briUiant conversation, and conspicuous cheerful- ness. So delightful was the party, that another such meeting was arranged for an early date. But when the day came and the three friends were met, a strange change was seen in Gains- borough. He was utterly different from"i&e Gainsborough of their ' The painter has painted this handsome lad in the pictures, Jcwh EUl, in a Cottage; Jack Hill, with his Gat, in a Wood. BIOaRAPHIOAL. SKETCH. 4 ( recent merry meeting. He was despondent and gloomy, and sat in silence, with a look of iixed melancholy which neither witti- cisms nor raillery could dissipate. At last he took Sheridan apart and led him out of the room. Outside the door he said : " Now, don't laugh, but listen. I shall die soon ; I know it — I feel it. I have less time to live than my looks infer — but for this I care not. "What oppresses my mind is this. I have many acquaint- ances and few friends ; and as I wish to have one worthy man to accompany me to the grave, I am desirous of bespeaking you — will you come — aye or no 1 " Sheridan, who was shocked by the solemnity of the request, gave the desired promise, and the two returned to the table. Then, as if by magic, Gainsborough's gloom disappeared, his brilliancy returned more strikingly sparkling than ever ; his wit and humour flowed forth faster and faster ; and the remainder of the evening was spent in unohequered merriment and enjoyment. His gloomy forebodings of course resulted from the effect of an • over-worked body on a highly sensitive brain, but they were very soon realized. In 1788 the trial of Warren Hastings commenced, and to it flocked all the beauty, wit, learning, and fashion of the kingdom. Infected with the prevalent fever, Gainsborough joined the crowd which thronged "Westminster Hall. Sitting thus, with his back to an open window, he suddenly felt an icy cold touch, as he described it, at the back of his neck. Mentioning this to his wife when he got home, she looked, and found a mark about the size of a shilling, harder to the touch than the surrounding skin, and this he said still felt cold. A doctor who was sent for declared that it was nothing more than a swelling of the glands which the warm weather would dissipate. Eemoving to Eich- mond for change of air, Gainsborough's symptoms became worse, so he returned to Schomberg House. The doctors now declared the protuberance to be a cancer, on which Gainsborough said, " If this be a cancer, I am a dead man ; " and with the utmost composure he began to settle his earthly affairs, and to put his 48 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. house in cider. In July he became rapidly ■worse, and he knew that his end was very near. If any regret tinged the gentle (painter's contemplation of the approaching change, it was only on account of his Art — he had hoped to do so much more for her — he had meant in future works to remedy defects, supply defici- encies, and achieve greater things than he had yet accomplished ; he had meant to makei his Ait perfect. But as this was not to be, as the inexorable decrep had gone forth, he waited with resigna- tion the coming of that sleep which follows life's fitful fever, and as this approached he remembered there was one towards whom his feelings had not alway.? been of the kindliest. He would not die then doubting the fact that he was at peace with all men ; so Reynolds was sent for and came and stood by his brother-painter's death-bed, and bending over the dying man caught those last faintly-whispered words — " We are all going to heaven, and Van Dyck is of the party.'' According to his own desire he was buried in Kew church- yard, near the grave of his friend Joshua Kirby. The President of the Eoyal Academy was one of the pall-bearers. A large con- course of England's most honoured and most gifted sons paid their last sad tribute to the departed genius, and reverently fol- lowed his body to the grave ; and amongst the throng there was one who remembered sorrowfully how but eighteen months before he had solemnly promised the musician-painter that one true friend should follow him to the grave. Gainsborough was a tall, fair man, handsome and well propor- tioned. His features were regular, a forehead broad and strongly marked, a Roman nose, and eyes and mouth indicating humour and refinement. His personal bearing was as elegant as his moral nature was attractive, and his skill as a painter was only excelled by his kindness as a man. After his rupture with the Academy in 1784 he revisited Sudbury, where he created quite a sensation in his rich suit of drab, with laced ruffles and cocked hat. His wants were easily satisfied, and his " thousand pounds a year expense " amply sup- BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 49 plied everything he desired. He was too natural and too true to imagine pleasure in ostentation and display — hence some havo brought against him the charge of parsimony, but nothing could be wider of the truth. Gainsborough was, as a matter of fact, generous to a fault, and gave away the productions of his studio as freely as he dispensed the hospitalities of his table. He pre- sented Colonel Hamilton with his Boy at the Stile, a picture which he had long desired, in return for a solo on the violin ; his friends were almost free to choose for themselves presents from his sketches, and one lady had so many that she papered the walls of her dressing-room with them. He had a ready sense of humour. When Fischer was on one occasion thrown, whilst riding to Salisbury, his mare taking flight at a heavily-laden waggon, Gainsborough to whom he had mentioned the incident sent him a rough sketch, which exhibited considerable power in caricature. Fischer is represented lying prostrate, whilst the waggoner grins at the disaster, and the mare shows a clean pair of heels in the distance. Beneath the picture was written the following doggrel — " A runaway horse you here may see, A ■warning sent, my friend, to thee ; Better it is to shun the wheel. Than ride a blood to look genteel." This was a hit at poor Fischer, who was a man of rather a vain disposition and fond of making a display. Gainsborough was not willing to put up with anything like insolence or patronage. On one occasion when commissions were flowing into Schomberg House more rapidly than even his facile - brush could execute them, and he was compelled to disappoint many impatient sitters, one gentleman completely lost his temper, and the painter overheard him asking the porter, " Has that fellow Gainsborough finished my portrait 1 " Being shown into the studio he beheld his picture; and was delighted with the artist's work. As profuse now in his approbation as he had been LP B 50 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. discourteous in his impatience, he smilingly remarked, " I may as ■well give you a cheque for the other fifty guineas." " Stay a minute," said the offended painter, " it just wants the finishing stroke ; " and snatching up a background hrush, he ruthlessly dashed it across the smiling features, indignantly exclaiming, " Sir, where is my fellow now 1 " Amongst Gainsborough's sitters there came a gentleman whom Thioknesse calls an alderman, and Allan Cunningham a lord, but whose importance, whether derived from a corporation or a peer- age, was very apparent in his erect mien, his richly laced coat, and well powdered wig. Placing himself in an advantageous situa- tion as to light, he began to arrange his dress and dictate his attitude in a manner so, ludicrously elaborate, that Gainsborough muttered — "This will iever do." His Excellency having at length satisfactorily adjusted his person exclaimed, " Now, sir, I desire you not to overlook the dimple in my chin." " Confound the dimple in your chin," said Gainsborough ; " I shall neither paint the one or the other." And he refused to proceed with the picture.^ He was extremely capricious at times, and in illustration of this trait of his character, Fulcher mentions how when Sir Joshua had sat to him for his portrait at Gainsborough's special request, but had suddenly discontinued the sittings, being obliged by iU health to quit London, the variable artist, although courteously informed by the President of his convalescence, merely sent a message that he was " glad to hear Sir Joshua had recovered," but never again touched the picture. Yet these two rival geniuses paid each other graceful compliments occasionally. Gainsborough once said of Eeynolds that his pictures " in their most decayed state were better than those of any other artist when in their best." And on one occasion when at the Academy Exhibition, noticing the unusual number of pictures sent by the President, he remarked in his bluff way to Sir George Beaumont as he glanced with evident approbation, "D — n him, how various he is." ' Fulcher's ' Life of Gainsborough,' p. 62, 2nd ed. I HI- HONOI'KAI'-LE MI'S (.KAHAM. J-t\ (.'. MNSROKOl'l'.ll 111 the Suiwiiiil iioUery. hiiinlnniiii. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 51 Eeynolds once said to Northcote, wlieii speaking of Gainsborougli, " I cannot make out how he produces Ms effects," and after all rivalry had been trampled out hy his rival's death, Sir Joshua paid an eloquent and generous tribute to his genius. Gainsborough had infirmities of temper, but his anger was generally easily appeased. Fulcher tells us that " whenever he spoke crossly to his wife, a remarkably sweet-tempered woman, he would write a note of repentance, sign it with the name of his favourite dog " Fox," and address it to his Margaret's pet spaniel " Tristram." Fox would take the note in his mouth and duly deliver it to Tristram. Margaret would then answer — " My own dear Fox, " You are always loving and good, and I am a naughty little female ever to worry you as I often do, so we will kiss and say no more about it. " Your own affectionate " This." Northcote says of him, "He was a natural gentleman, and with aU his simplicity he had wit too." Allan Cunningham gives us a charming sketch of his ordinary daily life. " He generally rose early, commenced painting between nine and ten o'clock, wrought for four or five hours, and then gave up the rest of the day to visits, to music, and to domestic enjoyment. He loved to sit by the side of his wife during the evenings, and make sketches of whatever occurred to his fancy, all of wJiich he threw below the table save such as were more than commonly happy, and these were preserved and either finished as sketches or expanded into paintings. In summer he had lodgings at Hampstead for the sake of the green fields and the luxury of the pure air ; and in winter he was often seen refreshing his eyes with light at the window when fatigued with close employment." The same writer speaking of his love of music remarks, that " he seems to have been kept under a spell by aU kinds of melodious sounds." On the occasion of his presenting Colonel Hamilton E 2 52 THOMAS GAINSBOKOUGH. with the Boy at the Stile we are told that Gainsborough stood spellbound by the exquisite strains, and that there were " tears of rapture on his cheeks.'' Dr. Wolcot once paid him a very high compliment. He was in an adjoining room, and hearing Gainsborough playing he exclaimed, " That must be Abel." Poor Hayman has been made accountable for a certain freedom, bordering sometimes on coarseness, which characterized Gains- borough's conversation, and often renders his letters somewhat unpleasing. He certainly did not beat about the bush when he wished to give advice. Writing to his friend Henderson the actor in 1773, he advises him to imitate Garrick, whom he describes as " the greatest creature living ; " but he follows up this excellent counsel with these remarks : " Look upon him, Henderson, with your imitative eyes, for when he drops you'll have nothing but poor old Nature's book to look in. You'll be left to grope about alone, scratching your pate in the dark, or by a farthing candle. !N"ow is your time, my lively fellow ! And, do ye hear, don't eat so devilishly ; you'll get too fat when you rest from playing." Writing to the same person he again attacks him on this last point. " If one may judge by your last spirited epistle you are in good keeping ; no one eats with more grateful countenance, or swallows with more good nature than yourself. .... Ifow any one who sees you eat pig and plum- sauce immediately feels that pleasure which a plump morsel, smoothly gliding through a narrow, glib passage into the regions of bliss, and moistened with the dews of imagination, naturally creates. Some iron-faced dogs, you know, seem to chew dry in- gratitude and swallow discontent. Let such be kept to under parts and never trusted to support a character. In all but eating stick to Garrick ; in that let him stick to you, for I'll be curst if you are not his master.'' He concludes by saying that the inten- tion of Nature " must not be crossed. If it is she will tip the wink to Madam Fortune, and you'll be kicked down-stairs." Probably if poor Gainsborough could ever have anticipated the insertion of these letters in his biography he would have BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 53 paid more attention to style. He evidently did not write letters intended for the public. Such things as these are the little blemishes, the faults and eccentricities, which bring genius down to the ordinary human level. We owe a debt of gratitude to Gainsborough, and as Englishmen we should be proud of him. His genius was essentially of native production. He never went abroad to study, and there never was an artist who was freer from foreign influences in his art ; and from first to last his highest ambition was to be a faithful painter of English scenery. His life res^tnbled, in its calm serenity, one of the peaceful land- scapes he loved so well to paint, and if a cloud occasionally darkened the scene, as for instance when the fussy patronage of Thicknesse was too predominant, or when fancy seemed to hint that the Hanging Committee of the Royal Academy slighted him, the shadow would speedily pass away, leaving the simple, soft- hearted, emotional painter-musician happy and content in large- minded devotion to his art. CHAPTEE ir. THE GBNIDS OP THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. "Art with no common gifts her Gainsborough graced, Two different pencils in his hand she placed ; ' This shall command,' she said, ' with certain aim, A perfect semblance of the himian frame ; This, Ughtly sporting on the village green, Paint the wild beauties of the rural scene.' " A Pindaric Ode on Painting. London, 1768. " TF ever this nation should produce a genius sufficient to X acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in this history of the art, among the very first of that rising name." This was the opinion expressed by the President of the Royal Academy within a few months of the death of his great brother-artist; and now, nearly a century later, the splendid genius which marked Gainsborough as a worthy compeer' of I Hogarth, Wilson, and Reynolds — a genius which not even Turner with his "golden dreams" and visions in tinted vapour could eclipse — is still pointed at with pride by those who believe in the existence of Native art. Incomplete as must be the result within our prescribed limits, it may not be altogether unprofitable to review some of the causes which led to Gainsborough's high J THE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE. By Gainsborough. In the possession of Viscountess Clifden. Sec Page 55. THE GENIUS OP THOMAS GAINSBOEOUGH. 55 degree of excellence as an artist and stamped his productions as those of an nndouhted master-painter. Whether we consider him as a portrait painter, a landscape painter, or a delineator pi humble peasant life and scene, it is the powerful impression /of nature exhibited in all his works that calls forth our 'vAdmiration, and rivets our attention. The striking general truth in all his productions which convinces us, when we see a picture of his, that we are looking on a representation of something that is, could only have been fixed on his canvases by one in /vhom an intense love for his art was combined with an intense Vand all-absorbing love of nature. The story of his life shows that this was the case with him. Nothing but his best was good enough ; when the Duchess of Devonshire, " then in the bloom of youth, at once the loveliest of the lovely and the gayest of the gay," sat to him for her portrait, his work did not satisfy him, so, saying only, " Her Grace is too hard for me," he drew his wet brush across a mouth, " which all who saw thought most exquisitely lovely." And yet, within the last few years, upwards raSl 0,000 was given for this painter's portrait of the same lovely woman. K'orJKas-hflJfiSS-partioular and painstaking in. the other branches of his art ; only there he was enabled to study longer and more minutely from the original objects. During his rambles he would carefully notice every aspect of nature, and point out to the companions of his walks every combination and effect that struck him as being in any way picturesque. Did he see a graceful bough, a tree-stump of more than ordinary beauty, or a fantastic stone, he would not only note their salient features in his mind, but would frequently carry home with him the objects which had excited his admiration ; the tree cuttings he acquired in this way would, it is said, have made a goodly sized wood- stack; when animals were introduced into his pictures, it was no unusual thing to see the living models posed in his painting-room. Did he meet abroad a labourer of picturesque appearance, a peasant girl whose cheeks were beautified with the bloom of health, or a beggar child whose simplicity and 56 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH beauty interested him, he would straightway accost them and strive to induce them to attend at his studio that he might add to his store of reflected nature. Naturally, his great love for his /art led him to an enthusiastic determination to attain excellence, and this determination he triumphantly carried through hy the ^only means by which real excellence can ever be attained — by dint of unflagging perseverance, much hard work, and never- ceasing endeavours to improve upon his latest productions. From the" time when, as a student at the St. Martin's Lane Academy, /finding there was nothing to be learnt from the works of his contemporaries, he set resolutely to work to find out how the \great Flemish masters produced their wealth of colour, mastering their secrets one by one until at last he could make copies of Eubens, and Teniers, and Van Dyck, which "it would be no disgrace for the most accurate connoisseur to mistake at first sight for the work of these masters," until his death, he kept untiringly pressing forward towards that goal which -we know no mortal Cpan in any walk of life quite reach — perfection. On his death- bed " his regret at losing life was principally the regret of losing his art ; and more especially as he now began, he said, to see "what his deficiencies were, which he thought in his last works were in some measure supplied." ^ /The study of the Flemish masters, by which Gainsborough jindoubtedly learnt much that was valuable and true in the ^'language of his art — harmony of colouring, the management and disposition of light and shadow, and other means which its ^masters practise to ornament and give chiaroscuro to their works — was not unattended with some danger, and in the case of a less true or a less enthusiastic artist than Gainsborough, might have been the means of destroying that originality which is a com- - ponent pai't of genius. In his early landscapes he did indeed show traces of the influence of the Flemish School; but, by great study, he soon discarded everything of mannerism that he had acquired J and what he had learned that was the common property 1 Sir J. Reynolds, 14th Disoom'se. THE GENIUS OP THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. 57 ,of any painter, he applied to the originals of nature which he saw with his own eyes ; and imitated these, not in the manner , of bygone masters, but in his own. It is true that "there may be traced a lingering likeness in his landscapes to those of Eubens ; but this arose more from his generalization of details, his sinking the parts in the whole, than to any imitation of the great Fleming. It is like the recollection of some sweet melody which the musician weaves into his theme, all unconscious that it is a memory and not a child of his own creation." ^ Much difference of opinion exists as to the advantages to be derived from copying works of acknowledged masters as a part of art education. As the art of painting does not depend for its excellence upon the mere skill shown in the mechanical laying on of colour over a mathematically accurate outline — as a picture should have a soul — and as a painter should be a poet, it seems to us that the mechanism of copying, in the art of painting, is analogous to the art of translating in literature. One man can produce a translation of the ' Iliad,' a grammatically accurate but lifeless one, and therefore valueless except as a translation ; another, through a score lines will breathe the soul and reveal the inspiration of Homer ; this is better, and his few lines are worth all the pages of the lifeless translation. But half a dozen hues of the original ' Iliad ' are worth more than all the other two put together. But stiU we would not say that either translator had wasted time or power in his work ; for even the wooden one (if we may call him so) must in his task have acquired facility in the use of language — the tools of his art — and may in consequence become a better writer of English than if he had never looked for an idea or a thought beyond a Blue Book or a Parliamentary Eeport, whilst anyone possessed of the smallest spark of genius could not make the acquaintance of the greatest poet's masterpiece without having that spark kindled by the fire of genius therein. And so with painters ; by close study and analysis of the masterpieces of the great ones of their art, * Redgrave's 'Century of Painters.' 58 THOMAS GAINSBOEODGH. they learn to discover wherein genius truly lies, and to distinguish between it and mannerism, conventionalism, affectation, and false- hood. Eeynolds could not discover genius in Michael Angelo or Rafaelle until he had long and carefully studied their works, and Gainsborough profited by judicious copying of the methods of the Elemings. As it is undenied that great poets may without degrading their art translate the verses of their brethren who have sung in other tongues, so it is no disgrace that our greatest colour-poets have reproduced the works of their brethren of the brush. In both cases the exercise is most excellent practice, and especially in the case of beginners in the arts. In both cases the excellence of the performance lies in the retention of the spirit breathed into the original by its creator ; — and in neither case is the reproduction of equal worth with the original. ^ ' "It is a question worth considering, how far the arts have been advanced by the greatly increased facilities afforded during the last half- century for studying and copying the works of others — not only of the old masters, but also of contemporary painters, extending to many of the permanent and even some of the annual exhibitions. ' We cannot, at the present day, realize the position of a youth entering upon the pursuit of art wholly deprived of the means of studying past or contemporary works, and thus obhged to commence from the beginning, and achieve for himself every new step in the road to excellence. But of course all limitation in the means of access to other pictures, and of obtaining art information, must have a tendency to place him in this isolated position. Yet for healthy stimulus to action and for showing by what has been done what may be done, for shortening the path in matters which are only means to the end sought and not the end itself ; for preventing conceit by the sight of excellence, and even by showing what to avoid, the opportunities afforded for seeing past and contemporary art must be highly valuable. " On the contrary, it may be said that studying the works of others induces dependence, and tends to destroy individuaUty, originality, freshness of feeling, and even of execution. Moreover, while art properly studied enables the student to arrive readily at the rules and principles which have guided his predecessors in their treatment of subjects, in composition, arrangement of form, of colour, of light and dark, &c.,it tends no doubt to fix him in dependence on Uke rules and to render his art somewhat con- ventional. However this may be, the balance of advantage is very largely in favour of such study ; it will help an original mind rapidly to reach the THE GENIUS OF THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. 59 ^Perhaps Gainsborough's highest gift was that of colour, and / there can. be little doubt that this was intensified and made well ^ nigh perfect by his early study of the Flemish works. In this /^spect he is entitled to rank with Eubens himself, and as Mr. C Euskin says, " in management and quality of single and par- ticular tint, in the purely technical part of painting, Turner is a child to Gainsborough." The same critic then gives splendid testimony to Gainsborough's hand, "light as the sweep of a cloud, as swift as the flash of a sunbeanl ; " to his masses " broad as the first division in heaven, of light from darkness," to his grand, simple, and ideal forms ; to the fact that he never loses sight of his pictures as a whole, and to his immortality as a painter. /Much as study of the practice of other masters may have had ko do with the development of Gainsborough's power of colour, I it is probable that his habit of painting after daylight disclosed Vnany secrets to him in this respect. Eeynolds, speaking of this custom, after pointing out that it was an additional proof of Gainsborough's great love for his art, since he could find no such agreeable means of amusing himself in the evening, says: "By candlelight, not only objects appear more beautiful, but from their being in a greater breadth of light and shadow, as well as , /having a greater breadth and uniformity of colour, nature appears (^^ a higher style; and even the flesh seems to take a richer and higher colour ; " ^ and in support of his statement he gives it as his opinion that the two great colourists, Titian and Correggio, point at which to rest on its own resources, and where only average talent is possessed will smooth the way past many difficulties. These remarks, however, do not refer to the now general practice of copying, which degrades art to a trade, and is the resort of mere mediocrity and feebleness. Copying pictures will never be resorted to by the true artist, except as a means to acquire execution or handling, or to arrive at the technical process by which any peculiar quality of art that has pleased him may be achieved." • ' Reynolds, 14th Discoinse. * " A Century of Painters," pp. 157-8, vol. i. 60 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. formed theii' high, ideas of colouring from the effect of objects seen in an artificial light. One of the means Gainsborough /employed in order to obtain the effect of the red shadows of Eubens was a lamp, the sides painted with vermilion, so that when it was used to illuminate the objects, he could paint the shadows as he saw them, and make them like what Jackson calls "the splendid impositions of Eubens." In illustration of a class of artificial light subjects not generally associated with Gainsborough's style, we give the following extract from the 'Somerset House Gazette' of April 10th, 1824. "Exhibition of drawings, Soho Square. . . The Cottage (Gainsborough) repre- senting a most powerful effect of firelight in the interior. The artist has given considerable interest to this subject by introducing the cottager opening the door : the contrast between the light of the cottage and that of the moon excites the most pleasing association in the miud." Another (outdoor) Moonlight Scene was on view at the same exhibition ; a few sheep scattered in the foreground, and a rippling stream in which the moon, just risen above some hills in the background, is brilliantly reflected. . WhUst speaking of Gainsborough's magic power of colour, it will be convenient to refer to the examples he has left, which show with what impunity a great master may break through a rule set up by another master whose reputa;tion is as great, and who ranks higher as an authority in questions of practice. Eey- tolds, who found it difficult to determine whether Gainsborough lost excelled in portraits, landscapes, or fancy pictures, had laid down the dogma that the cool colours (blue, grey, or green), should not enter into the masses of light in a picture, which ' should be composed of warm mellow colours (yellow, red, or a \ yellowish white). In one of Gainsborough's best known pictures, The Blue Boy (a portrait of Master Buttall), the figure is clad in a dress of cerulean blue. Concerning this picture and Sir Joshua's dictum, that eminent critic Dr. Waagen has thus written : " In spite of the blue dress, Gainsborough has succeeded in producing a harmonious and pleasing effect ; nor can it be doubted that in THE GENIUS OF THOMAS GAINSBOEOUGH. 61 the obol scale of colours, in whicli blue acts the chief part, there are very tender and pleasing harmonies which Sir Joshua, with his way of seeing, could not weU appreciate. On the whole, too, he may be so far right, that painters would do well to avoid as much as possible the use of pure unbroken blue in large masses. The Blue Boy is tender, remarkable for animation and spirit, and careful solid painting." Of other portraits by this master, in /I which a similar treatment has been adopted, we may mention the ^portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Hallett and that of Mrs. Siddons. As a matter of fact, Gainsborough could do anything he liked with /^lour J but a similar affection for the cool tints may be observed vin some of the portraits of Van Dyck. It is impossible to think of Gainsborough as a landscape painter without thinking of his unhappy and neglected contem- porary, whose genius is now the triumphant boast of English art. Eichard Wilson, never excelled and rarely equalled in his power of uniting originality of conception and treatment with truth and grandeur of expression, was a true poet, and equally so was Gainsborough. But the poetry of these two men was vastly dififerent. Wilson's genius was nurtured amidst the rich and glowing scenery round Eome. The love of nature and the beautiful that Eome begets is strong but reverent ; not a familiar love, but one somewhat tinctured with awe ; tender, but very solemn. " In Eome, Art and Nature strain together in perpetual con- flict for supremacy ; a struggle of a Titan with a God that holds on-lookers breathless. . .. . Who with any power of vision or soul of artist in them can live a day blind to the vast and sublime beauties of the capital of the world ? — who can fail to grow at once the humbler and the greater by dwelling on that sacred soiir'i That Wilson's art was permanently influenced by his residence in that country where the Campagna, studded with the ruins of temples and ancient buildings, calls up, in our contemplation of ' Preface to ' Pascary,' by Ouida. 62 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. the living beauty of the scene, reeoUectious of by-gone glory and vanished splendour, is evident in the spirit of nearly all his land- scape works ; and in his Lake Avenms it is particularly evident. The poetry of his nature was that of ' The Bard,' and his restless and yearning soul sought for comfort* in the contemplation of some " rock whose haughty brow Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood." ' Or in listening " How each giant oak and desert cave, Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath." ^ Gainsborough, on the other hand, who never quitted England, spent his infancy and matured his art education in a country teeming with homely rural associations ; and amidst such unam- bitious scenery he found congenial food for his mind and subject for his pencil. " His uplands are the abode of ruddy health and labour ; the by-paths, the deep-intrenched roads, the team, and the clownish waggoner all lead us to the pleasing contemplation of rustic scenery and domesticate us with the objects he has so faithfully dehneated." ' Such subjects are very different from WUson's classical concep- tions, but- in them is embodied no less true poetry — such poetry as Burns sang, and such as is contained in the ' Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' Gainsborough. knew and loved the " low- ing herd," the "ivy-mantled tower;" he rested often "beneath the rugged elm and yew trees's shade,'' and he loved well to sketch some nodding beech that " wreathed its old fantastic forms " by a brook that ran babbling by.* 1 Gray's 'Bard.' « Ibid. 3 ' Quarterly Review,' Feb. 1809. * A writer in 'Blackwood'(Oct. 1833), thus describes one of Gainsborough's landscapes : — " An evening sky with a far-off perspective — a river stealing through a valley skirted with wood — ^Ln the foreground are two oaks, with the Uchens strongly marked on their trunks ; these connect themselves with the second distance of wood, which rethes in the course of the stream THE GENIUS OF THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. 63 Eeynolds, on the whole just in his estimation of GainslDorough, made the following somewhat paradoxical statement : " If Gains- horough did not look at Nature with a poet's eye, it must be acknowledged that he saw her with the eye of a painter ; and gave a faithful, if not a poetical, representation of what he had before him." Now it must be remembered that these words formed part of a Discourse to the Academy Students, throughout which the necessity that children in art should submit themselves to their elders for instruction and advice, and the advantage of conforming to recognized methods and studying the works of the old masters, is dwelt upon. towards a village only indicated by a church spire ; beyond that is a distant wood on rising ground, but still low in the picture, towards which the water is lost. The composition is extremely simple. There is the ' sere and yellow leaf,' the sombre brown partaking much of the red, and very solemn dull green, scarcely bearing that name, interspersed in trees and on the ground. The river among the trees is scarcely perceptible, so near the hue of all about them, but in the distance it is marked by a strong yet somewhat broken line of light. It is long ere you see some cattle very indistinctly indicated in repose in the meadows. The clouds are broken into parts, and all perspectively going ofiF to their rest— grey, amid a faint yellowish evening light — and in perfect concord with them are rooks returning for the night. It is just before that time when— " Fades the glimmering landscape on the sight." You could easily imagine the poetic sounds, from the distant church, where " the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." Tou might hear the curfew that " tolls the knell of parting day," and the cawing of the rooks in their homeward passage. Gainsborough had put in a figure— apparently a countryman, leaning over some broken hurdles that separate the bank of foreground from the wood behind, but has judiciously painted over it ; you can just see it has been there, but that discovery is only made when the pictui'e is well known. It is not seen nor thought of when you look at it. The whole melancholy of "parting day" is thus preserved. A figure would have been an intrusion. The spectator is the figure, the subject will bear no other. He feels at once that even the rooks will soon lie still in their nests— " And leave the world to darkness and to me." 64 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. Eeynolds argued that as Gainsborough's particular line of art (as regards his landscapes and fancy pictures) required that his studies should be directed to the living world principally, he did not, nor was it necessary that he should, pay a general atten- tion to the works of the various masters. It would never do that the pupils at the Academy of which Sir Joshua was Presi- dent should be too independent ; and as Gainsborough's excel- lence in his own line of art could not be denied, Eeynolds discovered that that line was not poetical. In another place the President, speaking of Gainsborough's fancy pictures, talks of " the mean and vulgar form of a woodcutter." Those who are acqua;inted with Gainsborough's figure pieces will surely agree with us that his woodcutters and ploughmen are not mean and vulgar ; humble and homely would perhaps describe them accur- ately. Gainsborough might have found both woodcutters and royal personages, doubtless, to whom these adjectives would apply ; but he did not select his models so badly as to introduce such into his pictures ; wherever and whenever he met a face or form that struck his artist's eye as being elegant, or graceful, or pictur- esque, he endeavoured to secure it for his canvas. Some of his pictures are brimming over with humour. Take The Race, for example. The expression of the donkey's faces is exquisite. The foremost one, galloping along with head almost on the ground, is casting out of the corner of its eye a look of keen enjoyment of the fun ; whilst its companion in the rear is smiling (literally), though evidently anxious about the lost ground to be made up. The riders, too, bareheaded and coatless, bestriding their bare-backed steeds which they urge on to redoubled effort, are only donkey boys ; yet there is nothing unpleasing about them, but rather much picturesqueness. And what of the face of The Woodman in the Storm, painted as it is said from a small model which Gainsborough made of the man who stood for the picture 1 What of the Shepherd Boy in the Shower, of which Haylett thus speaks : " I remember being once driven by a shower of rain for shelter into a picture-dealer's shop in Oxford RUSTIC CHILDREN. B-s Gainsborough. In the National Gallar- I; THE GENIUS OP THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. 65 Street, where there stood on the floor a copy of Gainsborough's Shepherd Boy with the thunder-storm coming on. What a truth and beauty was there ! He stands with his hands clasped, look- ing up with a mixture of timidity and resignation, eyeing a magpie chattering over his head, while the wind is rustling in the branches. It was like a vision breathed on the canvas." Some modern painters and those critics who follow them have a poor opinion of Gainsborough's art. They say that his drawing is faulty, and that his landscapes have not sufficient detail to rank as finished pictures. There is, of course, some reasons for their censure, and we do not attempt to deny that Gainsborough's style is sketchy. But if, as we believe, it is the aim of a land- scape painter to bring before the spectator the representation of yipme scene as a whole, Gainsborough certainly succeeded better (^than any of the later painters who crowd into their canvases as many minutely painted details of natural features as they possi- bly can, and then label the collection a Landscape. If it were possible to paint every detail of a scene exactly and equally finished — every tree, shrub, blossom, petal, blade of grass, tiny stone, &c., there would not be much objection to so doing, pro- vided always that the artist never lost sight of the fact that a mere agglomeration of details is valueless unless the general spirit of the scene bind them together. But when one or two features are, to any marlted extent, detailed beyond the others, then the picture is no longer a landscape, but becomes in fact the portrait of a cow, or a plough, or a tree, or what not, relieved by a more or less pleasing background in landscape style. If one places before a casual observer a landscape photograph (that has not been touched up or toned down by an artist's hand) it is ten chances to one that the first observation will be, " How well that figure in the foreground, or that hut in the middle distance, or that oak, or that cluster of marsh-mallows comes out ! " Then the eye wanders to other parts of the view, but ever returns after a brief survey to the one prominent spot that stands out with such fa,tal distinctness. From the very nature of the lens 66 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. by which the image was reproduced it was impossible that more than, one point could have been in exact focus ; all others must have been, in degree, less distinctly shadowed on the sensitive plate. Yet what painter would attempt to draw every detail of a landscape with equal fidelity and minuteness to that obtainable ' in a photograph 1 Gainsborough felt that the true charm of a landscape lay not in its details but in its spirit, and he attempted to make his pictures convey a similar general impression to the spectator to that which would be derived from a contemplation of the original scene. A To accomplish this, his practice was to paint the whole of his (picture at once, not building it up by parts, but working at fore- ground, middle distances, background, trees, figures, sky, and every part indiscriminately ; the result_ was invariably a -har- monious, whole. And that he might the more readily conjure Tip the whole scene in his mind's eye without delay or stopping in his work, he would arrange on his table a rough plan of his landscape, using broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking-glass. He made little laymen for human figures, he modelled his horses and cows, and knobs of coal sat for rocks. The value of such a system will be readily understood by any one who has ever recalled every feature of some almost forgot- ten but once familiar scene' by merely glancing at a bird's-eye view of the place. These views are not really representations of anything at all, but they are admirable aids to memory. Thus Gainsborough's principal aim in landscape— we are speaking of his best style, after he had eschewed the tenets of the Flemish and Dutch Schools — was to grasp the whole, knowing that if he did that well the part must be right. And to our mind he succeeded admirably. Mr. Euskin thus praises and at the same time finds fault with the landscape-presented by Gainsborough to the Eoyal Academy : i " Nothing can be more attractively /luminous or aerial than the distance of the Gainsborough, 'nothing more bold or inventive than the forms of its crags, and 1 ' Modem Painters,' vol. i. p. 91. THE GENIDS OF THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. 67 the dififusion of the broad distant light upon them, where a vul- gar aWist would have thrown them into dark contrast But it will he found that the light of the distance is brought out by a violent exaggeration of the gloom in the valley ; that the forms of the green trees which bear the chief light are careless and in- effective ; that the markings of the crags are equally hasty ; and that no object has realization enough to enable the eye to rest upon it." 1 "With regard to the first objection, if " nothing can be more attractively luminous or aerial than the distance," why take exception to the only means by which that effect could be pro- duced? As there is no pigment known that can equal the light of heaven in purity or intensity of tint, and as it was the painter's endeavour to keep the same relation between the gloom and the light in the picture as was observable in nature ; as, moreover, the light of nature is absolutely inimitable, it was necessary to deepen the gloom in order to keep the relation. The other objections may be summed up in the modern critic's cry — want of detail and insufficient realization. We have already mentioned that Gainsborough painted landscapes in the whole and not in part, but for all that he knew well enough that ' It should be mentioned that in the same section from which ive have quoted, Mr . Raskin has said of Gainsborough : "A great name his, whether of the English or any other school, the greatest colourist since Rubens, and the last, I think, of legitimate colourists ; that is to say, of those who were fully acquainted with the use of their material ; pure in his English feeling, profound in his seriousness, graceful in his gaiety, there are never- theless certain deductions to be made from his worthiness which I dread to make because my knowledge of his landscape works is not extensive enough tn justify me in speaking of them decisively ; but this is to be noted of all that I know, that they are rather motives of feeling and colour than earnest studies ; that their execution is in some degree mannered, and always hasty ; that they are altogether wanting in affectionate detail ; and that their colour is in some degree dependent on a bituminous brown and conventional green, which have more of science than of truth in them. " He then proceeds to say that this fault may be noticed in the picture we have referred to. F 2 68 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. the effect of the whole would be hopelessly marred, or even dtestroyed, by one false detail. We have mentioned how his paanting-room was filled with bits of trees, stones, mosses, &c. ; and he studied how to represent these faithfully and unobtru- sively — for they could not be represented unobtrusively if not faithfully. His early works were remarkable for portrait-like ■^adherence to local scenery and minute and detailed finish, and Fulcher mentions one of his numerous studies of trees — a young ^ oak, "painted leaf for leaf, whilst ferns and grapes are portrayed with/ microscopic fidelity." In his portrait of Fischer, as we before mentioned, he gives us a fine example of the care he could bestow upon details if he chose, or thought it desirable to do so. Eedgrave remarks upon his power of detail as displayed in this picture : "The fiddle in the chair is a notable example — -a connois- seur in the instrument would at once name the builder ; a Dutchman would spend three months of labour and produce nothing like its reality." In his sea pieces, too, though he never pretended to minute .■Correctness of rigging, his general effects o f sea, sea-coast, and vessels are described as truly masterly. Gainsborough only painted abou't four sea pieces, although he generally introduced the sea and a ship by way of background to his portraits of sailors. Towards the close of his career he painted his best picture of this class, described in Carey's ' Catalogue of the /"Leicester Gallery ' as A Sea-shore with Boats and Figures?- But perhaps the complaints of his want of detail and finish are made by those who examine a picture with the finger and nose, feeling and smelling it instead of regarding it with their eyes. How little Gainsborough himself cared for this class of criticism is evident from his letter to Mr. Edgar, whose portrait haiJ been sent home and criticized : — " You please me much by saying that no other fault is found in your picture than the roughness of the surface, for that part being of use in giving force to the effect at a proper distance, , ' See Fulcher's ' Life of Gainsborough,' 2nd ed., p. 144. THE GENIUS OF THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. 69 and -what a judge of painting knows an original from a copy by ; I am mucli better pleased that they should spy out things of that kind than to see an eye half an inch out of its place, or a nose out of drawing when viewed at a proper distance. I don't think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colours smell offensive than to say how rough the paint lies." Sir Godfrey Kneller used to tell them " that pictures were not made to smell of." Eeynolds also speaks of " all those odd scratches and marks, which, on a close examination, are so observable in Gainsborough's pictures, and which even to experienced painters appear rather the effect of accident than design : this chaos, this uncouth and shapeless 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 fuU effect of diligence under the appearance of chance and hasty negligence." Eeading between the lines of Sir Joshua's ' Discourse ' we fancy we see throughout the whole pamphlet ; " This man undoubtedly produced splendid results, but his practice was not in strict conformity with our recognized academic rules, therefore some- thing ought to be wrong." And some later critics say : " Gainsborough's practice was unorthodox — we will not, there- fore, under any circumstances allow his productions to rank with those of the great masters." Smith tells us that it was Gainsborough's practice in portrait t painting to sometimes use brushes with handles six feet long, so that he, his easel, and his sitter forming the apices of an \ equUateral triangle, he could touch the features in his canvas Xrom the same distance as that at which he viewed his sitter. This -may account for some of the '■ odd scratches and marks " which appear on close examination, and for the " reedy " execu- tion in the portraits of the Countess of Lincoln and the Countess of Ligonier ; and for the " tree touch " on the eyebrow of Lord Chesterfield — all of which portraits viewed at a proper distance are perfect. rO THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. As a portrait painter Gainsborough may rank with Reynolds as of equal e:!^cellence though in a different direction. Many would, of course, contest this statement. Those who have the opportunity and the capacity of judging from the works of the two painters may easily satisfy themselves on this point. Those who prefer to take up their position beneath the shelter of professional art critics we refer to one of the earliest disbelievers in Gainsborough as a portrait painter, who, in the ' Quarterly Eeview' for February, 1809, states that Eeynolds formally denied Gainsborough's power of giving a just resemblance. Sir Joshua's own words on this point are : " It is difficult to determine whether his portraits were most admirable for exact truth of resemblancer-or his landscapes for portrait-like representation of Nature." A Mr. Tom Taylor says with great truth that in the gradation / of light, shade, and colour, Gainsborough is superior to Eeynolds V That he was also superior to him in the technical use of materials time has .proved, for his pigments have certainly lasted better than Sir Joshua's. One very noticeable feature in Gainsborough's portraits is the /brilliant freshness of his flesh tints which, even now, " stand ( out like enamel." Gainsborough always made a carefal and intelligent study of his subjects, and knew instinctively when a careful reproduction of the features and when a conscientious intro- duction of all the details of a sumptuous toilette would be most esteemed. The Duchess of Beaufort is an example of Gains- borough's skiU in painting decorative drapery. But if he some- times stooped towards the level of the Japanese artist, who cares nothing usually for the countenance of the sitter and everything for his attire, still he kept the best efforts of his genius for sub- jects of intellectual pre-eminence. As illustrations we may instance the portraits of William Pitt, "calm, passionless, states- manlike ; " Mrs. Siddons at the age of twenty-five, " in the prime of her glorious beauty ; " Garrick, the man " worth studjring in every action," the peerless actor, the "gracious and sincere friend j" THE GENIUS OF THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. 71 Abel, the musician; Dr. Schomberg ; and above all Benjamin FranJdin. As we have said, Mrs. Garrick pronounced Gains- borough's to be the best portrait of " her Davy," and he has certainly produced a more pleasing and gentlemanly figure than Sir Joshua, who painted a front view of the same actor. Apart from the playful vagaries by which Foote and Garrick provoked from the painter the expression of comic despair, " Eot them for a couple of rogues, they have everybody's faces but their own," Garrick's face seems to have been a difficult subject to treat. Abel, the musician, is very carefully painted, and the picture was a favourite one of the artist's. The left hand is especially notice- able for its careful execution. The musician is represented in the act of performing, and his face suggests rapt attention to the sounds he is producing. The portrait of Dr. Schomberg is considered one of the finest in the world, and the landscape background is worthy of the painter. Never was Gainsborough more successful than in portraying Franklin, "the good, great man of noble bearing." The figures of Gainsbproughare deliciousLynaturaLand simple, .and in this respect as well as in the permanent brilliancy of ^colour they contrast favourably with Sir Joshua's paintings. " The children of Sir Joshua are indeed beautiful creations," says Allan Cunningham ; " free, artless, and lovely ; but they seem all to have been nursed in velvet laps and fed with golden spoons. There is a rustic grace, an untamed wildness about the children of the other (Gainsborough) which speaks of the country and of neglected toilets. They are the offspring of Nature, running free amongst woods as wild as themselves. They are not afraid of disordering their satins and wetting their kid shoes. They roll on the green sward, burrow like rabbits, and dabble in the running streams daily." Gainsborough^j^as^ painted many beautiful women, and his female portraits are all characterized by purity of expression. He paints women alike able to inspire admiration and worth) of retaihiiTg pure and reverential love. What can surnass tlie 72 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. grace and artistic treatment exkibited in such portraits as The 'Duchess of Cumberland; the Countess of Lincoln; and Lady Ligonier t The delicacy of conception and harmony of execution are beyond all praise. The pure delicate features are delineated l?ith_ exquisite tenderness, the "lovingly liquid" eyeslooK" out from the canvas as though from a living person ; there is a marvellous purity of colour in the cheeks ; a sweet womanly grace in the pose of the figure ; a careless grace in the drapery, which stamp these delicious paintings as the loving productions of a master's hand. And where shall we find a more attractive portrait than that of the Honourable Mrs. Graham, wife of General Graham ? Never was Gainsborough's marvellous power in controlling and contrasting colour more strikingly displayed than in this picture. The clear cool tones of the dress are con- trasted with the warm crimson colouring of the lower part of the figure with wondrous skill. The grace of the full-length figure is perfect; the features are delicate and highly characteristic, in what Dr Waagen happily calls their " expression of youthful disdain.'' The modelling of the face and the careful painting of the beautiful hands is marvellously accurate. The beautiful original of this picture was cut off by a premature death, and thus a sad interest attaches to a work which upon its artistic merits may rank as one of Gainsborough's masterpieces. -^ There is a graceful fitness in the fact that the artist never exercised his genius more lovingly or successfully than in the portrait of his sweet, faithful Margaret. Mrs. Gainsborough's charms glow as freshly on the canvas to-day as on that happy morn when the painter led 'his youthful bride to the altar. As Allan Cunningham says very prettily, these paintings "are like himself, they glow with animation, and there is a magic touch which none can describe." His works show that he was capable of minute execution and the most delicate handling, but these he looked upon only as the means whereby an end might be attained. He never mistook them for the end itself. In some cases, however, he undoubtedly did not pay sufficient attention THE GENIUS OP THOMAS GAINSBOEOUGH. 73 to detail, relying too much on the colouring and. motive, and not making his pictures sufficiently finished studies to permit of ,our classing them as perfect. The impatience of his nature, and the rapidity with which he worked, has in many cases resulted in imperfect execution. "We do not know," says Fulcher, " that, like Eeynolds on quitting the studio of Hudson, Gains- borough ever painted a sitter with one hat on. his head and another under his arm — but mistakes no less ludicrous appear in some of his landscapes. In one picture an owl is perched on a tree in broad daylight ; in another cattle are introduced lying so close to the sea that the next wave must certainly cover them." In the Shepherd Boy in the Shower, the boy is placed on the wrong side of the hedge, so that the rain is blowing full upon him. The same fault is visible in many of his best portraits. But Sir Joshua has pointed out that the slightn ess which we see in so many of his best works,~is~siot^b miich a. fault oi negligent execution as'"a manner of the artist's. Such a genius as Gainsborough's might be permitted to deal sportively with some / / details ; but occasionally he carries this airy indifference to too ^ great a length. His numerous drawings were for the most part masterly, and equal in point of character to his most finished productions. His friend Jackson says that he has seen fuUy a thousand of these, and that " they have all great length and singular freedom of handling." Many of these were copied and published by the painter's nephew, Richard Lane, to whom AUan Cunningham paid the high compliment of saying that " most of the artist's spirit survived in him." Our Ifational Collection contains a few fine specimens of Gainsborough's Art. Those numbered from 308 to 311, are — 308. Musidora bathing lier Feet; 309. The Watering Place; 310. Woody Landscape, Sunset ; 311. Rustic Children. TlfS-J^tepmg^'Place is one of those pictures in which Gains- borough specially delighted and which most of all are indicative of his character. It is one of his strong delineations of simple 74 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH rustic life. In the foregrouud is a placid pool of water with three cows drinking, the cowherd in slouched hat of the genuine Suffolk labourer's type, standing lazily on the brink. The green banks are shaded by noble trees, and away in the distance rises a fine old Norman castle, which very closely resembles Hedingham Castle, a few miles from Sudbury, for which it was probably intended ; but if so the hill behind it was borrowed for the occasion from Cumberland, as there is not one of the size within the boundaries of Essex, and Suffolk. It /is an enchanting picture, full of delicious quiet and repose. Gainsborough disposed of his landscapes very slowly, and after his death his widow held an exhibition of his works at Pall Mall, consisting of fifty-six paintings and one hundred and forty-eight engravings. The object was to sell the pictures, and many of them were sold at the time. The Blue Boy, and The Cottage Door, after some vicissitudes, found a permanent home in the 'Grosvenor Collection. The latter picture is greatly admired, and is thus described by Cunningham : "It represents a cottage , matron with an infant in her arms and several older children around her enjoying thems^ves at the door of^a little xustie cabin. This lodge in the wilderness is deeply shut up in a close wooded nook ; through the shafts of the trees glimpses of knolls and streams are obtained There is uncommon breadth and mass about it, with a richness (of colouring, a sort of brown and glossy goldenness, which is common in the works of the artist. The matron herself is the perfect beau-ideal of a youthful cottage dame — rustic loveliness exalted by natural gentility of expression." ^■Upwards of three hundred paintings, besides over a thousand /drawings, make up the record of Gainsborough's life-work. Of \his paintings, over two hundred and twenty are portraits. George III. was painted by him no less than eight times ; Pitt was painted seven times ; Garrick five. Amongst his portraits of lawyers are those of Lord Chancellor Camden and Sir "William Blackstone; Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Eichardson, Clive, Burke, Missing Page THE GENIUS OF THOMAS GAINSBOEOUGH. 75 Sheridan, Windham, Franklin, and Canning ; — Mrs. Graham, Lady Mary "Wortley Montagu, Lady Vernon, and Lady Maynard; — the ]5ishops of Worcester and Feras ; — Quin and Mrs. Siddons, are a few of the names which are associated with Gainsborough's art as a portrait painter. And though his skill in this department "was so great that, had he no other merit, it would have entitled him to a foremost place in British Art, it is as a painter of the €intry that we love to think of him— for every time we see B of his landscapes we realize how soothing, tender, and Bcting is the artist's skill. " The stillness of noon, the depths of twilight, and the dews and pearls of the morning," says Con- stable, " are al'. to be found on the canvases of this most benevo- 'd.ent and kindhearted man. On looking at them we find tears (in our eyes and know not what brings them. The lonely haunts- of the solitary shepherd — the return of the rustic with his bill and bundle of wood — the darksome lane or dell — .the sweet little cottage-girl at the spring with her pitcher — were the things /he delighted to paint, and which he painted with exquisite / refinement, yet not a refinement beyond nature." ^ " Gainsborough is an immortal painter" is the conclusion of one not lavish of his praise. This high eulogium must not blind us to his shortcomings. His vegetation, his rocks, his water, all the properties, — the hooks as it were on which he liangs out Ifature — should have to the lover and knower of Nature more characteristic forms than Gainsborough gives them. His imitation of the forms of Nature is not sufficiently finished. But the golden wealth of sunlight, ib. 'U>«' l' »E ^ '// D C s OS < ALTAR-PIECE FOR NAYLAND CHURCH. 91 has ever steered a truer course between the conventionalism of the " hrown fiddle, brown picture " school, and the " original execution" painters such as he who held his brush between his toes instead of his hand in order to be thought original. In 1804 Constable did not exhibit at the Academy, but this ypar he painted an altar-piece for Bentham Church, Christ blessing Little Children. All the figures, which are life-size, are standing, except an infant in our Saviour's arms. The picture is devoid of merit beyond a creditable arrangement of the masses, and his only other attempt in this branch of art was in 1809, when he painttd a single half-length figure of Christ blessing the Bread and Wine,^ as an altar-piece for JSTay land Church. The colouring of this second attempt shows some agreeable originality, and the general effect is pleasing ; it is an advance on his first attempt at Scriptural composition, but the execution is very slight, and, altogether, the work does not justify the idea that the painter would ever have shone in subjects of this class. In 1803 Constable had made a coasting trip in the East India- man " Coutts " between London and Deal, and during the month he was on board he made a large number of sketches, includ- ing one of the " Victory," from which he afterwards painted his large picture, E.M.S. Victory in the Battle of Trafalgar- between Two French Ships of the Line, exhibited at the Academy in 1806. , His pictures at the Exhibitions of 1807-8-9 consisted principally of the results of a two months' tour he made in 1806 in the Westmoreland and Cumberland lake district, during which he accumulated a large number of sketches, but none of the pictures he painted from these are considerable. He used to say that the solitude of the mountains oppressed his spirits ; and though he could appreciate the scenery painted by others, such as Cozens or Girtin, his own nature led him to the enjoyment of a far different kind of landscape, with cornfields, windmills, villages, wagons, navigable rivers, and other objects suggestive of on which account Mr. Euskin thus writes of him: human industry This painting, whioli had suffered rapid deterioration from damp, was sent to London, to be restored, in 1880, 92 CONSTABLE. " His early education and associations were also against him ; they induced in him a morbid preference of subjects of a low class." ^ As a parallel example of the abiding influence of early impressions we may instance bhe poet Cowper, whose love of the country had first been awakened by the sluggish streams and the willows of Olney, and who was oppressed and almost overcome by the grand scenery of the South Downs when Hayley tempted him to visit Eastham. A somewhat similar observation is recorded of Crabbe. About this time (1807) he was employed by the Earl of Dysart to copy a number of pictures, principally works, by Eeynolds. He maintained an irreproachable reputation ; his uncle wrote expressing warm approval of his character and conduct. About the year 1800 John Constable had made the acquaint- ance of a little girl, Maria Bicknell (daughter of the solicitor to the Admiralty), who was in the habit of going down to East Bergholt to visit her grandfather, Dr. Ehudde, rector of Bran- tham and Bergholt. The acquaintance had ripened with years into a tenderer feeling, and we gather from certain letters that in 1811 the young people entertained some ideas of marriage. Miss, Bicknell, however, seems to have been just as dutiful a daughter as Constable was a son, and her parents, but more particularly her grandfather, forbidding any engagement between the lovers, she wrote in a strain which may be recommended as a model of propriety for all young ladies similarly situated. In the first letter we are favoured with (dated Nov. 1811), she addresses her lover as " My dear sir." She has consulted papa — vows to be entirely guided by him — and concludes, " with the most ardent wishes for your health, believe me, my dear sir, your obliged friend, Maria E. Bicknell." Altogether a most discreet letter. Her father was, however, hardhearted, or at any rate indisposed to give his consent to a union which might be the cause of his daughter being cut out of Dr. Rhudde's wiU. The objections of Miss Bicknell's friends to the engagement with the painter seems to have been entirely based upon pecuniary considerations, for ' ' Modern Painters,' 3rd edition, vol. i. p. 92. MARIAN BICKNBLL. 93 JoTin Constable was only a second son. Accordingly two days after the date of the letter just quoted we find Maria writing to say that she had received her father's answer, and that his only objection was on the score of " that necessary evil, money." So as she does not think that papa will relent she had better not write to Mr. John Constable any more, not at least until she " can coin." Of course the enamoured youth would not accept such a mild repulse as this, nor was his affection diminished even when his own father wrote, reminding him that his prospects and position were extremely critical ; that lie feared his chosen profession would not do more for him than cover the cost of living single ; and advised him to apply himself diligently to his profession, and to " such parts that pay best." Advice given to people in such cases is generally physic thrown to dogs. la spite of Miss Bicknell's repeated determinations not to write any more, there are several other letters from her in which we catch allusions to stolen interviews in the parks and at picture galleries. The young lady's letters, however, throughout exhibit her in the character of an extremely matter-of-fact, prudent — some might say worldly-minded — young lady. On one occasion she wrote : " Indeed, my dear John, people cannot now live upon £400 a- ,year. It is a bad subject, so don't allude to it ;" and on another she won't hear of his living as a recluse, as " popularity, which represents money, is only to he gained by mixing in the world." During the course of this engagement, which did not run very smoothly — but then the course of true love never does — Con- stable constantly wrote to Miss Bicknell sensible, newsy letters, from one of which we learn that he had just paid a yisit of ceremony to the obstructive Dr. Ehudde, which shows they were not on terms of the deadliest hatred. In another he gives an account of a fire at his lodgings where the people were burnt out. On this occasion he assisted in saving the goods, and when it was difficult and dangerous to pass up and down stairs on account of the great heat and smoke, he rushed up to a garret to save a poor female-servant's pockets which contained all her little wealth. 94 CONSTABLE, But he did not neglect his profession during this time. He worked very hard and diligently, exhibiting Flafford Mill in 1812, probably the picture which elicited the opinion from Mr. West, that the painter of it had already attained true excellence. Still, many of his friends even then urged hiui to relinquish " a profession so unpropitious." He painted two portraits of Dr. Fisher and his wife, wJiich were much admired ; and then his mother urged him, that, as he so greatly excelled in portraiture and Fortune seemed within his grasp, he should pursue that path most likely to bring him fame "and wealth." Miss Bicknell's letters constantly reminded him to look sharply after the main chance, and she plainly told him to "make money before he made love." His charge for a head, in 1813, was fifteen guineas, and his reputation as a portrait painter was on the increase. On May 3rd of that year he wrote in high spirits : " I am now leaving London for the first time with my pockets full of money. I am entirely free from debt, and I have required no assistance from my father." In 1814 Constable sold the two pictures he exhibited in the British Gallery, a small one to Mr. Allnutt, and a large one of A Lock, to a perfect stranger, Mr. James Carpenter, who bought it merely because he liked it; thinking, however, that the sky might be improved, the purchaser employed another painter to put in a new one, the result being an inharmonious whole. Some years afterwards, Mr. Carpenter got a friend of his to ask Constable if he would restore the original sky, and at the same time cut down the picture, in order that it might form a companion to one of Callcott's. Constable consented to do this. When Mr. Carpenter called to see the work completed, he found that Constable had painted an entirely new picture for him, of the same size as the Callcott, which he offered in exchange, and that he would make no charge whatever for his work, explaining that Mr. Carpenter had been the means of making a painter of him, by buying the first picture he had ever sold to a stranger. Without for a moment wishing to question HIS MARRIAGE. 95 Constable's gratitude in this transaction, we might point out that perhaps he was also influenced by another motive. Tt is well known that Constable was fond of getting back into his possession the pictures which marked the epochs in his career — and undoubtedly A Loclc would be one of those that he would desire to have back. Again, he was of opinion that to cut down \)r alter a picture could seldom be done without injury to it ; and for the sake of his reputation — especially when his painting was, to hang as a companion to one of Callcott's — lie preferred giving a new picture altogether to mutilating an old one. In 1815 Constable received permission to again see Miss Bicknell at her father's, as an occasional visitor. In this year each of the young couple received a heavy blow — both Mrs. Constable and Mrs. Bicknell died ; and the mutual need of sympathy and consolation knitted their hearts together more firmly than ever. The following year Constable lost his father ; and after that event the two lovers made up their minds to delay no longer a union which they each felt must sooner or later be effected. So, in spite of opposition on the part of Miss Bicknell's friends, they were married in October at St. Martin's Church by the Eev. John Fisher. Mr. Bicknell did not long retain his resentment ; and after a brief honeymoon at Osming- ton, the young couple settled down in Keppel Street, EusseU Square. , Constable's life-friend was this Eev. John Fisher (afterwards Archdeacon Fisher), son of the Master of the Charterhouse, and a nephew of, and chaplain to, the Bishop of Salisbury. Constable was essentially a sociable man, besides which his nature required some sympathetic souj. to which he could unburden himself, and pour out unreservedly all his grievances and troubles. Of course his wife occupied the first place in his affection, and Dunthorne and J. T. Smith were, to a certain extent, his confidants ; Leslie, especially during the latter part of the painter's career, was a very near friend. But the friend 96 CONSTABLE. of friends — his oimi particular friend — was Fisher, who during his whole life acted the part of Constable's patron, adviser, admirer, and consoler. Fisher was, himself, no contemptible critic, and as an amateur he practised the art of painting a little. The least mental annoyance or trouble reacted upon Constable's physical nature to a most lamentable extent, and the opposition he had met with in his suit had frequently caused him to suflfer much ill-health during its progress. His close application to his profession also acted injuriously on his system. In June 1812, when he had marked out a path for himself very distinctly, and was desirous of pursuing it uninterruptedly, he steadfastly remained at his toilsome post in Lor don, copying and repainting for Lady Heathcote, and looking forward to the time when he would be enabled to utilize his art to grander ends. His health was then sadly failing, and Fisher, anxious lest he should permanently injure his constitution by over-application, sent him this invitation : " We will try and coax you here, dear Constable, by an account of the life you will lead. We will risexwith the sun, breakfast, and then sit out for the Test of the day. If we tire of drawing we can read, or bathe, and then home to a short dinner. We will drink tea at the Bensons', or walk the great aisle of the cathedral, or, if the maggot so bites, puzzle out a passage or two in ' Horace.' I think this life of Arcadian or Utopian felicity must tempt you." On another occasion Fisher wrote : "I was the other day fishing in the New Forest, in a fine, deep, broad river ; with mills, roaring black water, withy beds, &c. I thought often of you during the day. I caught two pike, was up to my middle in watery meadows, ate my dinner under a willow, and was as happy as when I was a careless boy." From these extracts we can form a very clear notion of the sort of life Constable led in the country; and of his tastes and proclivities. Not only did Fisher constantly keep up Constable's spirits with most charming, invigorating letters, full of sympathy in adversity, congratula- STEATFORD MILL. 97 tions in success,- and frequent kind advice, carefully hinted at rather than given ; but he was also a substantial patron, pur- chasing the first two large landscapes that Constable executed — The White Horse, and Stratford Mill. The White Horse was exhibited at the Academy in 1819, being then called, A Scene on the River Stour, and received the name by which we now know it from a white horse in a barge near the foreground. It is one of the artist's best works, and he himself spoke of it as one of his " happiest efforts on a large scale, being a placid representation of a serene grey morning in summer." Stratford Mill was Constable's large picture in the 1820 Academy Exhibition. In the foreground are some children fishing, the largest boy " undergoing the agony of a bite," as Sir George Beaumont has expressed it. On the extreme left of the spectator the wheel and part of a water-mill are seen. To the right and in the middle distance a barge lies with extreme elegance of perspective in the smooth river, light clouds throw their rising shadows over a rising distance of great beauty, and a group of tall trees forms the centre of the composition." )[ There are some men so constituted that they can in the "durance vile" of a debtor's prison compose with a collected brain a brilliant article which will, the next morning, charm the world by the refinement of its imagery and the felicity of its expression ; there are those who can leisurely give the last, dainty, finishing touches to a picture which has been painted to pay out the sheriff's officer who waits in a corner of the studio. Johnson, as a publisher's hack at £4 a month, could pour forth his giant soul from a garret ; Morland was happy in a sponging- house. Such a one was Constable, and although there is nothing to show that he was ever actually in need of pecuniary assist- ance (save on one occasion of probably temporary embarrassment when he borrowed .£20 or £30 of Fisher), yet he seems to have been rendered constantly uneasy on the score of money matters. But as Dr. Ehudde (who died in 1819) left his granddaughter LP H 98 CONSTABLE. (Mrs. Constable) a legacy of J4000, and as in the same year Constable received, a like amount as his share of his father's pro- perty, it does not appear that there was much cause for anxiety on this point, especially as Constable, unlike Wilson in that respect, did occasionally find purchasers for his landscapes, and his prices, though undoubtedly below the real value of the paintings, were an advance upon Wilson's pot of beer and the remains of a Stilton cheese for Geyx and Alcyone. For each of the six-foot landscapes, The White Horse and Stratford Mill, Constable received one hundred guineas. In 1824 he sold two large Landscapes and a smaller one to a Frenchman for exhibition in Paris for £250, and the same year he sold A Boat passing a Lock for £157 10s. on the first day of its exhibition, and he seems always to have had plenty of small commissions. In 1825 he complained of the irksomeness of having to paint a family group, the three grandchildren of an old friend, to send to their parents in India, which necessitated his neglecting a large landscape just then commenced ; so that though Constable did not, perhaps, earn his money in the way most congenial to his inclinations, yet he was better off than many other unappreciated painters have been. Of course when we speak of him as an " unappreciated painter " we use the ex- pression in a restricted sense ; there was always a certain num- ber of discriminating judges ready and able to understand his art ; but for the English public, during his lifetime, his works Iiad little or no interest, and his treatment being something novel and unfamiliar to his critics was condemned by them as eccentric and mannered. In 1819 Constable was elected an Associate of the Eoyal Academy. Up to this period the most important pictures he had produced were Dedham Vale and A Ohurch Porch (1811) ; Flatford Mill (1812); Boat Building (1815); Gottage in a Cornfield (1817). This is the period of Constable's most perfect art, and it is doubtful whether in his latter years he quite kept up to the standard of Tlie White Horse and Stratford Mill and lkl MADE A.E.A. 99 Hay Wain years. The Cliureh Porch is that of Bergkolt. It is really an extremely simple composition ; a woman and a girl, sitting on a tomb, are listening in the summer afternoon to the words of an old man. There is nothing in it to attract one's attention ; it has very few parts, but when once noticed it engages the mind of the spectator in a strange degree. In JDedham Vale, through a haze of sun-pierced mist an extensive range of country is seen ; in the foreground is a slight tree of incomparable delicacy and taste; but these pictures were too unobtrusive to catch the attention or suit the taste of the public. Constable's whole life was one of incessant, earnest hard work. He never, even for a moment, save when prostrated with iUness, ceased striving after the highest attainable excellence. At the same time, the duty of providing for his family for ever presented itself to him, .and to fulfil this appears to have been as important an object with him as the attainment of his ideal in art. Thus, he did not abandon portrait painting, which brought in a fair income. Amongst his portraits, in addition to those we have already mentioned, are those of General and Mrs. Behow, and of a gentleman " who was " a dissenter, but without knowing why, "only that his wife would not let him go to church." That liis pictures were really good, and that their sterling value would some time or other be appreciated by the public. Constable never douhted ; but that their recognition might be delayed until after his death was a contingency which he looked boldly in the face. In 1821 he had become convinced of his fate, and he thus wrote to bis friend : " I now fear (for my family's sake) that I shall never make a popular artist, a gentlemen and ladies' . painter ; " and on another occasion : " The Londoners, with all their ingenuity as artists, know nothing of the feelings of a country life, the essence of landscape." It was in this year, wien his early dream of distinction as a living artist had been dispelled, that he exhibited the third picture he had painted on a six-foot canvas, Landscape — Noon. This picture, which was afterwards known as The Hay Wain, H 2 100 CONSTABLE. is one of his important productions, and was one of those ■wMcfb he sold to a Prenehman in 1824. It was greatly admired in Paris j in fact, Constable's art seems to have always been more appreciated in that capital than it was in England. He was assured that, if he would consent to visit Paris, the artists of that city would receive hinrwith great eclat, and he was commissioned to paint seven smaller landscapes, and to have twelve of his draw- ings engraved in London for publication in Paris. In 1825 the Prenoh King awarded him a gold medal for his large Landscapes which were exhibited at the Louvre,^ and he was afterwards applied to for the loan of .a picture for an Exhibition at Lisle. It happened that just at this time he had in his possession Tlie White Horse (Archdeacon Fisher's property), and this he sent to Prance. This picture was as inuoh admired as The Hay Wain had been, and he was awarded a gold medal for it. Of course in Paris, as in London, the professional critics would not admit that his art was true, for in his pictures they could only see nature ; and they naturally expected in a good painting, in one that they could rely upon as being correct in style, to see Claude, or Cuyp, or some other master whom it was the recognized thing to worship. Still the professional critics were not everybody, and they found it a difficult matter to answer such observations as : " Look at these landscapes by the Englishman — the ground appears to be covered with dew." Constable was in the habit of spending a good deal of his time at Hampstead, which has always justly been a favourite resort of artists. It was from here that he wrote in the autumn of 1821 : "I have done a good deal of skying, for I am deter- mined to conquer all difficulties, and that among the rest ; " and in 1822 he made fifty studies of sky effects. Out of twenty of these which were in Leslie's possession in 1845, there is only one in which the least vestige of landscape is introduced. They are painted in oil, on large sheets of thick paper, all dated, with ' On this occasion Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose pictures had also been exhibited at the Louvre, was created a Knight of the Legion of Honour. WELL WALK, HAMPSTEAD. 101 the time of the day and other memoraada at the back, as, for example: "5th September, 1822, 10 o'clock, morning, looking south-east, brisk wind at west. Very bright and fresh grey clouds running fast over a 'yellow bed about half-way in the sky. Very appropriate to the coast at Osmington.'' Several of Constable's happiest productions are views in the neighbourhood of Hampstead, the Heath there being a favourite subject which he painted several times. In 1827 he took a house in Well Walk, Hampstead, and this was his " country residence" for the rest of his life. He had previously removed from Keppel Street — Euysdael House, as Fisher christened it — to 35, Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, where, after taking the Well Walk house, he retained . for professional purposes two parlours, large front attic, painting-room, gallerj'-, &c. ; this continued to be used as his studio till the time of his death. Occasionally seeking change of scene, if not relaxation of study, in visits to his old home in Suffolk which he loved so well, or to Fisher at Gillingham, or to Sir George and Lady Beaumont at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, or with his wife and children to Brighton, perhaps no painter has ever worked harder than did Constable, altering, adding, taking out, retouching his sub- jects, with which he was never satisfied so long as any improve- ment could be suggested. He was never above taking a hint, even from those most unqualified to tender advice. On one occasion, however, in 1830, after he had been elected an E.A., he gave a well-deserved snub.- He was finishing a picture called A Dell, at Hehningham Par^,, and had adopted some alteration that an onlooker suggested, after which he made a stand, saying, " Very true, but don't you see I might go on and make the picture so good that it would be good for nothing." Constable was always extremely anxious about his children^ and their least ailment caused him a great deal of uneasinesSc; on one occasion one of them had the whooping-cough, which alarmed him very much, as he said it was a disorder which the medical men knew nothing about. His eldest son, too, was ill in 1825 102 CONSTABLE. the effect of ■which was to almost prostrate the father. In the autumn of that year Fisher had been expecting him to pay a visit to Osmington, and had sent him a gentle reminder that time was flying, in the shap6 of a pen and ink sketch of an hour- glass with wings, and twelve days later he followed this with a letter in which he says : " It struck me after I had despatched my blank memorandum that the illness of yourself or some of the family was the cause of your non-appearance here." Then with much of the most kindly-expressed sympathy and condol- ence, the large-hearted Archdeacon places his Salisbury House at Constable's disposal as a sanatorium for his sick chUd, and says : " As for money matters, do not make yourself uneasy. Write for anything you want, and send me any picture in pledge you think proper. . . . Whatever you do, Constable, get rid of anxiety. It hurts the stomach more than arsenic. . . . You want a staff just at present. Lean upon me, hard." In 1825 Constable exhibited at the Academy a picture known as The Jumping Horse. The chief object in its foreground is a horse mounted by a boy, leaping one of the barriers which cross the towing-path along the Stour to prevent the cattle straying out of their pasture grounds. As these bars have no gates, the barge horses are all taught to leap ; their harness, ornamented over the collar with crimson fringe, lends a very picturesque appearance, and Constable, availing himself of this advantage to relieve the dark chestnut-coloured horse, produced a very imposing effect. The same year he had two Landscapes in the Exhibition, one of which was described in a newspaper at the time as "a scene without any prominent features of the grand or beautiful, but with a rich, broken foreground, sweetly pencilled, and a very pleasing and natural tone of colour throughout the green distance." Nevertheless the public would not take the trouble to understand the art of the painter. 1828 was a most eventful year to Constable. In January his seventh child, a son, was born. Then a large copyright Landscape of his was favourably noticed in the ' John Bull ' ROYAL ACADEMICIAN. 103 newspaper, wliicli spoke of it as " a redeemer ; " and a smaller one was purchased by Chantry ; in this year, also, Mr. BickneU died, by which event a large fortune, some £20,000, came to him. " This," he wrote, " I will settle on my wife and children, and I shall then he able to stand before a six-foot canvas with a mind at ease, thank God." Towards the close of the year he suffered an irreparable loss by the death of his wife, who had always been consumptive, and the bereaved husband was thus left with the care of seven children, the youngest an infant not yet a year old, and the memory of one of the most amiable and devoted wives man was ever blessed with. As might be expected Constable was sadly depressed by this melancholy occurrence, and he wrote that his only chance of being carried away from his own thoughts was to get afloat on a six-foot canvas. In the beginning of 1829 he received a commission to paint a Mermaid for a sign for an inn in Warwickshire. No doubt the person who gave the order had heard Constable spoken of as a good landscape painter, and remembering that many of his pre- decessors, such as Wilson, Monamy, Morland, Clarkson, and Cotton had not disdained to paint signs, thought the artist would be glad of the commission. Constable himself thus wrote of this order : " This is encouraging, and affords no small solace after my previous labour in landscape for twenty years. How- ever, I shall not quarrel with the lady now, she may help to educate my children." He made a very pretty and finished sketch of the Mermaid, and gave it to Mr. Evans, his medical attendant and a friend of Archdeacon Fisher and himself, but the matter went no further. Soon after this he was elected a Royal Academician. This was an honour he had long coveted ; and how keenly he,ielt in the matter of its tardy bestowal we can understandTfom his complaint that, " it has been delayed until I am solitary and cannot impart it." At this time he was engaged in the preparation of his ' English Landscape,' a work which he published, to quote from the prospectus, "with the desire to increase the interest for, and promote the study of, the 104: CONSTABLE. rural scenery of England, with. aU its endearing associations and even in its most simple localities." In the preface to this book we see that Constable was fully aware of the obstacles which prevented him — as they had prevented Wilson — from being justly appreciated. " In art," he wrote, " there are two modes by which we aim at distinction. In the one by a careful appli- cation to what others have accomplished, the artist imitates their works or selects and combines their various beauties j in the other he seeks excellence at its primitive source — Nature. In the first, he forms a style upon the study of pictures, and pro- duces imitative or selective art ; in the second, by a close observ- ation of Nature he discovers qualities existing in her which have never been portrayed before, and thus forms a style which is original. The results of the one mode, as they repeat that with which the eye is already familiar, are soon recognised and esti- mated, whilst the advances of the artist in a new path must necessarily be slow, for few are qualified to judge of that which deviates from the usual course, or are qualified to appreciate original studies." The original edition of this work as published by Constable contained twelve mezzotint engravings by Lucas from the painter's sketches. The frontispiece is a representation of the house at East Bergholt where he was born, under which are the lines : " Hio locus setatis nostrse primordia novit Annos feUces, Isetitiseque dies. Hie locus ingenuis pueriles imbuit annos Artibus, et nostras laudis origo f uit. Erom the time of his election as E.A. until his death. Con- stable was little, if any, better appreciated by the public, but he went on working hard and bravely, sometimes with a light heart even, attending carefully to his duties as a member of the Com- mittee of Management, and as a visitor at the Life School, doing his utmost to elevate and refine the art he loved so well. In 1830 his pictures at the Academy were — A Dell at Helminqham Park : A Lmidscape ; and A Heath, Harnpstead. / l' II 'l ii , ' I III ' ' I ii a H a w ^; o u ■>< n 1 '?? CHARLES ROBERT LESLIE. 105 In this year died Sir Thomas Lawrence, who was succeeded in the Presidency of the Eoyal Academy by Sir M. Shea. In 1831 Constable's Academy pictures were his large Salis- bury Cathedral from the Meadows, and Tarmoutli Pier. The former of these, which was engraved by Lucas, is one of his chief works, of great truth of detail and general effect, and is a picture displaying extraordinary power. The artist, indeed, thought that it would eventually be considered his chef d'peuvre, as, though others might be more finished, this conveys the fullest impression of the compass of his work. It must be remarked that it is difficult to fix the date when many pictures painted by this artist may be said to have Toeen finished, for he was always anxious to improve his work, and many of his best known pictures received their finishing-touches long after the year of their exhibition. The picture in question and Jiis large Waterloo Bridge are notable examples of this. Parley, the well-known drawing-master and astrologist, one day called upon Constable to show him a sketch, and chatted away for some time, unreservedly pointing out what he con- sidered the defects in the artist's works. Constable, wishing to possess the sketch, asked Parley its price. " A guinea and a half to a gentleman', but a guinea only to an artist," was the reply. " I gave him the extra half-guinea," said Constable, relating this some time afterwards, "for he had conclusively proved that I was no artist." In this year Constable was in terrible anxiety owing to the Eeform Bill agitation, doubting the security of the Funds, and fearful that he would lose all his invested money. Ill-health had much to do with th,is, and in the spring of 1832 he had a very serious illness. Whilst he was barely convalescent and was still in a very low bodily state from the attack, the illness of his eldest daughter so filled him with trouble and anxiety that he fell into a most grievous state of dejection, and used to take a gloomy view of everything, giving vent to such utterances as these : " I do not contemplate a happy old age, even if I should 106 CONSTABLE. attain it." The loss of two of his friends also stiU further depressed him. In September died at Boulogne, Archdeacon Fisher ; and a little later, at Berghplt, John Dunthorne, son of Constable's first preceptor in art, who had long acted as his assistant, succumbed to consumption. But Constable had by this time many friends, so the voids thus occasioned were less perceptible. There was C. E. Leslie, who was the great friend of his later days, and there was George Constable (no relation of the painter) ; and Mr. Purton of Hampstead, who in his leisure hours' painted landscape, and who formed his opinions of Con- stable's style solely from a comparison with Nature, being deaf to the cant of the art criticism then prevailing. Of the eight works Constable exhibited at the Eoyal Academy in 1832, his large painting of Waterloo Bridge is by far the most important. Constable.had had this work in progress since 1819, and during the years between then and its exhibition he had often taken it up, and as often put it aside, with alternating emotions of hope and fear. He was always very nervous about its success, and the absence from it of all rural associations made it somewhat distasteful to him, but the expanse of sky and water invariably tempted him to go on with it. It possesses great breadth, and when it first appeared it was described as being remarkable for its brightness of colour, Leslie saying that it looked as though painted with liquid gold and silver, yet " in little more than a . year after his death its silvery brightness was doomed to be covered over with a coat of blacking, laid on by the hand of a picture-dealer ; that this was done by way of giving tone to the picture I know from the best authority, the lips of the operator, who assured me that sevetal noblemen considered it greatly im- proved by the process. The blacking was laid in with vfater and secured by a coat of mastic varnish." In 1833 he exhibited a view of a Heafh — showery — noon, which is one of his best works ; a Cottage in a Cornfield, engraved afterwards by Lucas ; and two others. In June of this year he delivered a lecture at Hampstead on the history of landscape THE VALLEY FARM. 107 painting, tlie success of which induced him to repeat it in the following year, and he subsequently developed it into four lectures which he delivered at the British Institution ; the notes that have heen preserved of these addresses are unfortunately very scant. The extreme sensitiveness of his disposition was as marked as ever. When his two eldest sons were about to leave him to go to a school at Folkestone, he wrote : " To part with my dear John is breaking my heart, but I am told it is for his good." In the Spring of 1834 Constable had another very painful illness, an attack of acute rheumatic fever, confining him to his room in February, and lasting for two months. He was con- sequently prevented from completing aiiy important work for the Academy Exhibition, where he was only represented by three water-colour drawings. In the autumn of this year he, in company with Leslie, visited Lord Egremont at Petworth. At this time he would rise early, and would often make some beautiful sketch in the park before breakfast. Leslie going into his room one morning found him setting one of his sketches with isinglass. His dressing-table was covered with flowers, feathers of birds, and pieces of brick with lichens and mosses adhering to them, which he had brought home for the sake -of their beautiful tints. Mr. George Constable used to relate how, whilst the painter was on a visit to him, he brought home from a common in the neighbourhood at least a dozen different specimens of sand and earth, of colours from pale to deep yellow, and of light reddish hues to tints almost crimson. The richness of these colours, contrasted with the deep greens of the furze and other vegetation on that picturesque, heath, delighted him exceedingly, and he carried these earths home, carefully preserved in bottles, and also many fragments of variously-coloured stone. Once, when in the company of Mr. George Constable, as they were passing some slimy posts near an old mill, he said, " I wish you could cut off those tops and send them to me." In 1834 he exhibited The Valley Farm, which is a view of a farm-house on the banks of the Stour, near Flatford MUl, known 108 CONSTABLE. as " Willy Lett's House," from the name of its eccentric occupier, who, it is said, during eighty years was never away from it tor four whole days. It was a favourite subject of Constable's, and figures in several of his works. This picture (now in the B'ational -Gallery) was purchased by Mr. Yernon after he had seen it for the first time in the studio, and it received an enormous amount of attention from Constable ; from October to the end of the year he was constantly hard at work upon it (after it had been exhibited at the Eoyal Academy), and he said that " oiling out, marking out, polishing, etc., seemed to agree with it wonderfully. The sleet and snow ^ have disappeared, leaving in their place silver, ivory, and a little-gold." It was again publicly exhibited in the British Gallery, in 1836, in which year Constable was only represented at the Academj'' by a view of the Cenotaph erected by Sir George JBoaumont to the memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and by a water-colour of Stonehenge. He had con- templated sending in a large picture of Arundel Mill, but this was not in a sufficiently advanced state to be admitted even as a sketch. Constable's death was extremely sudden. On the evening of 30th March, 1837, he attended a meeting at the Eoyal Academy, and walked home, accompanied part of the way by C. _ E. Leslie, being then apparently in good health. His kindness of heart showed itself on that occasion in his comforting a little girl who had slipped down in Oxford Street, and healing her hurts by the gift of a shilling. The following day he worked until evening at his large picture for the forthcoming Academy Exhibition, and then went out on a charitable errand in connection with the " Artists' Benevolent Association," of which body he was President. On his return he ate a hearty supper, ' The peculiar effect of bedewed leaves glistening in sunlight, which Constable loved to introduce into his pictures, puzzled the critics of his day sadly, for they were but very imperfectly acquainted with the real appear- ances of nature, and they invented the phrase, " Const3.ble snows," to indicate what they could not understand. z o u s o Q 15 a! O !J W K H THE COENFIBLD. 109 and retired to rest between ten and eleven o'clock. In the night he was taken ill, and before the next dawn he expired. The cause of his death could, at a post-mortem examinat'ion, only be traced to indigestion, as there -were no other indications of disease suf3&cient to have produced death. Constable's close application and sedentary habits undoubtedly helped to under- mine a constitution which might otherwise have enabled him to live to a ripe old age. After his death, a few of his friends subscribed together and bought from his executors his picture of the Tlie Cornfield, ex- hibited in the Eoyal Academy Exhibition in 1826, and at the British Gallery in 1827, and presented it to the nation. A field of ripe corn, the principal feature of this landscape, is seen in the middle ground, between two groups of trees occupying the sides of the picture. In the extreme distance is seen a village church towering above the humble dwellings in its vicinity. The only other example of this artist's work in the National Gallery is The Valley Farm., already noticed as having been purchased from the easel by Mr. Vernon. In the Sheepshanks Gallery are six of his works. CHAPTEB II. JOHN CONSTABLES PRODUCTIOKS. IN" considering the genius of any painter as exhibited in his productions, it is difficult altogether to avoid reference to the works of other artists, and sometimes to speak of them in terms calculated to cause pain ; or, on the other hand, to withdraw from the subject of our consideration his full meed of praise. In considering the works of John Constable, his style and his genius, the temptation to compare his pictures with those of Turner and others is very great, but our endeavour should rather be to consider them as works of art by themselvesiand oil their own merits. Earnestly as we may desire to awaken or strengthen the appreciation of Constable's undoubtedly great genius, we should be unwUling to crown him with garlands stripped from the tombstones of some of our noblest painters, garlands placed there as tributes of affection by loving and reverent hands. And yet more than one even highly gifted and culti- vated critic has fallen into this error. In order to avoid it then in our few remarks on John Constable's productions we shall endeavour to keep in mind an important truth which that painter expressed in these words : " Every truly original picture is a separate study, and is governed by laws of its own ; so that what is right in one would JOHN constable's productions. Ill be entirely wrong transferred to another." This is of course applicable to the details of art ; the grand priaciples which are in- variably associated and co-existent with true genius — uprightness, earnestness, generosity, sensibility, imagination, and taste — we may be as certain of finding in the nature of Constable as in that of Turner, even as they were to be seen in the natures of Wilson, of MUton, of Dante, and of every other man of genius that the world has ever produced. These qualities, so far as they are present in the productions of such men, may best be considered and judged by their individual intrinsic worth. When we com- mence to compare men of genius one with another, we may very easily lose that nice sense of discrimination necessary for the proper appreciation of different degrees and sorts of merit, for though all have some things in common, the productions of each one must be judged separately, and each production considered as a complete whole. For this reason, it is false criticism to compare the parts of Constable's pictures with the parts of Turner's or Canaletto's ; or even to compare the pictures themselves except by reference to the principles of all true art of whatever kind soever ; for every true work of art has its own excellence, and " what is right in one would often be entirely wrong if transferred to another." The author of ' Modern Painters ' in his summing up of Con- stable's art speaks of tire necessity as well as the dignity of an earnest, faithful, loving study of Nature as she is, rejecting all that man has done to alter and modify her. He also points out that it is those artists who receive the word of God from clouds, and leaves, and waves, and keep it, endeavouring to render to the world purity of impression, who are fit objects of the critic's praise. But he adds in a footnote : " The feelings of Constable with respect to his art might be almost a model for the young student were it not that they err a little on the other side, and are perhaps in need of chastening and guiding from the work of his fellow-men. We should use pictures, not as authorities, but as comments on nature, just as we use divines, not as authorities, 112 CONSTABLE. but as commeiits on the Bible. Constable, in Ms dread of saint- worship, excommunicates himself from all benefit of the Church, and deprives himself of much instruction from the Scripture to ■which he holds because he wiU not accept aid in the reading of it from the learning of other men." JSTow, as a matter of fact. Constable is remarkable as one of the first — perhaps the first — of En glish L andscape Painters with genius of a very high order who -was "from first to last ■wholly and entirely independent of any of the conventionalism of the Foreign Schools, or even of anything borro^wed from the English School. This is the sum total of his offending. So great ■was his love of nature, so great his horror of conventionalism, that he almost feared to learn the mechanical and technical methods of the art ■which ■were kno^wn to his predecessors and contemporaries. AVe say " almost " feared to learn, because that he did ■with much patient labour learn these modes there is ample proof in the admirable mani- pulation of many of his ■works, some of ■which sho^w finish and detail equal to that of any master of the later, literal school. A View of Hampstead Heath, No. 36 in the Sheepshanks Collection at South Kensington, is a minute and careful study, perfect in its handling ; and in the glimpses of his practice that ■we get from his biographer, ■we gather that Constable's dread ■was not so much that of saint-worship as of being overpowered and mannerized by false teachers and commentators, and becoming ingulfed in the swamp, of conventionalism. Constable did study such pictures as he could rely upon as being authentic imprints of genius. His earliest studies were pen and ink copies of EafaeUe's cartoons, and afterwards he copied etchings of Euys- dael ; throughout life, but especially in his student days, he made careful copies of paintings by Claude, Eubens, Eeynolds, Euysdael, Teniers, and Wilson ; and we are told that some of these copies might well pass for originals. Then again, at the commencement of his career, he had-Girtin's drawings, made direct from nature, to examine and study, and to read from them how to reproduce certain effects of nature. The copying that JOHX constable's productions. 113 he did, except that done for payment in the regular course of his professional experience, was performed in order that he might acquire facility of execution (so he tells us himself) ; and after he had learnt by careful examination and experiment how cer- tain effects in the works of the masters which he copied had been . produced, he could then learn by inference how to pro- duce other effects. He knew that if two genuine artists painted the same scene, the result would be two totaHy distinct pictures, not, as in the case of two photographs from ihe same negative, the one a duplicate of the other. He observed on one occasion : " The world is wide : no two days are alike, nor even two hours, neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world ; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other." Going more into details, we find Mr. Euskin speaking of Constable's genius and art in the following terms : " Unteach- ableness seems to have been a main feature of his character, and there is a corresponding want of veneration in the way he approaches Nature herself. His early education and associations were also against him ; they induced in him a morbid preference of subjects of a low order. I have never seen any work of his in which there were signs of his being able to draw, and hence the most necessary details are painted by him insufficiently. His works are also eminently wanting both in rest and refinement ; and Fuseli's jesting compliment is too true ; for the showery weather in which the artist delights misses alike the majesty of storm and loveliness of calm weather ; it is great-coat weather and nothing more. There is a strange want of depth in the mind which has no pleasure in sunbeams but when piercing painfully through clouds, nor in foliage but when shaken by the wind, nor in light itself but when flickering, glistening restless and feeble. Yet with all these deductions, his works are to be deeply respected as thoroughly original, thoroughly honest, free from affectation, manly in manner, frequently successful in cool colour, and especially realizing certain motives of English scenery, with LP I 114 CONSTABLE. perhaps as much affection as such scenery, unless when regarded through media of feeling derived from higher sources, is calcu- lated to inspire." + The place which Constahle filled in art is one which has hitherto been unoccupied either by "Wilson, or Gainsborough, or Cozens, or Girtin, or even by Turner. He was a genuine painter of English cultivated scenery, of cornfields and of farm- steads, and of the haunts of rustic humanity. His sce nes te em with human associations ; he paints canals, barges, windmills, locks. This is perhaps what is meant by the charge that he had " a morbid preference for subjects of a low order." But surely these subjects as he treated them should scarcely be so classed. If he painted a barge, he also painted God's leaves, and waves, and clouds ; painted them in a style that leaves little doubt as to the veneration with which he approached Nature. His early education and associations can scarcely be said to have been against him, for these were in the midst of that pastoral land- scape he loved so well. He has told how he loved the sound of water escaping from mill-dams ; willows ; old moss-covered planks and brickwork; slimy posts — how with him painting was but another word for feeling — how he associated his careless boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the Stour, " the scenes which had made him a painter," and how he had often thought of pictures of them before he ever touched a pencil. Surely, unless it were better that he had lived only to grind corn, and unless it were better for the world that such pictures as The Valley Farm, The Cornfield, and The White Horse, had never been produced, it is no matter for regret that John Constable's 'boyhood was passed in the midst of such scenery as lies round East Bergholt, with "ifs*'; gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow-flats, sprinkled with flocks and herds, its weU- cultivated uplands, its woods and rivers, with numerous scattered villages and churches, farms; and picturesque cottages." Such was the nature that Constable began by loving ; from loving it he proceeded to study it, and then to paint it. He never JOHN constable's peoductions. 115 swerved from his affection for this class of scenery, though, that he could and did appreciate fully other classes of landscape is evident from his extravagant praises of Cozens, whom he called "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape;" and of Turner, than whose landscapes it were difficult to imagine any- thing lovelier except the actual scene he portrayed. But he did not aspire to he a universal painter; he frequently expressed himself to the effect that he would rather paint one thing well than all things moderately ; he considered that to hring the whole of nature within the domain of his art was too great a task for any one painter ; and as he commenced so he continued, regardless whether he might not, hy changing his subjects, have been able to tickle the public fancy. " Change of weather and effects," he observed, " will always afford variety." What if Van de Velde had quitted his sea-pieces and Ruysdael his water- falls, and Hobbema his native woods ! — the world would have lost so many features in art." He was not to be tempted from the path he had rigidly marked out. After observing that a par- ticular novel effect might gain him some new admirers but it would be sure to lose him many old ones, he on one occasion said : " I imagine myself to be driving a nail. I have driven it some way, and by persevering I may drive it home ; by quitting it to attack others, though I may amuse myself I do not advance beyond the first whilst, the particular nail stands still." The most complete answer to the absurd accusation that Constable was unable to draw is to point to his works. It may be mentioned that Constable was in the habit o f making a sketch of every large picture he painted ; in these sketches he laid in the subjects with the palette-knife, in a grand and large manner, with great breadth. Describing two of these, i. e. The Hay Wain and The Jumping Horse, Eedgrave says : " Various glazings have been passed over the parts (thus laid in with the knife) to bring together and enrich them (even the skies are glazed) ; and then the whole has had enhancing points of colour I 2 116 CONSTABLE. added, and brightness and daylight oMained by further draggingg and knife-touches. With the exception of the glazings it would seem as if the brush had not been used upon them ; hence there is a complete absence of any sort of detail. In The Jumping Horse are several figures in a boat on the canal ; they are in shadow, and are merely flat masses of grey ; the chestnut horse jumping the bar, with his red-waistcoated driver, are mere blots of colour, yet of the purest local truth. The trees are masses of green, with grand, simple, grey branches, but no indications of leafage. Viewed at a distance the scheme of the picture is complete, the local truth of the colour beautifully felt, and the freshness and daylight are startling." It has been suggested that Mr. Euskin's criticism would apply to the impression Kkely to be received from some of these sketches, for as they are complete in effect though not in detail they are sometimes mistaken for the pictures. In this case not only the ignorance of drawing, but also the want of reverence in approaching nature, with which Constable was charged, are explained away. It was not only in his sketches, but also in his finished pictures, that Constable used the palette-knife instead of a brush for laying in the colour. This plan he adopted in order to get chiaroscuro, which he was determined his pictures should have if they had nothing else. In pursuit of that, and of the brightness of nature, the reproduction of which baffles all the ordinary processes of painting, he, in his painting of Waterloo Bridge, indulged in this mode of execution (which of course precludes great detail) to such an extent that the critics were much ofifended with what they called the un- finished state of the work, though the effect wished for, that of noontide splendour, was complete. Still, lest this means should degenerate with him into a manner, he stated after the exhibition of that picture that he had laid down the palette-knife, but not until after he had "cut his own throat with it." ' w JOHN constable's PRODUCTIONS. 117 Supposing it were true that Constable painted "great-coat weather and nothing more ; " supposing he had not depicted the most glorious golden warmth and sunshine of English summer in such pictures as Waterloo Bridge and Boat Building ; sup- posing that one did not feel the summer in the White Horse, in Stratford Mill, and in The Hay Wain, with which pictures it appears Mr. Euskin is unacquainted, but in some of which it has been truly observed that the tremulous vibration of the heated air near the ground may be seen ; what does this criticism amount to but that Constable was not a universal genius, and did not attempt more than he was able to perform % But it is difficult to read the reflection on the strange want of depth in the mind which takes no delight in sunbeams, nor foliage, nor light, except at certain times, and under certain conditions in which the artist happens to be peculiarly successful in painting them, without concluding that the writer had not sufficiently studied the artist's works, and knew little or nothing of his character or tastes. Apart from the question whether showery weather, breeze- shaken foliage, and sun-pierced clouds (we do not know the circumstances under which sunbeams are considered to pierce painfully through clouds) are or are not subjects of too low an order to be worthy of any but the morbid preference of such an artist as John Constable, it must be pointed out that the artist has, in works we have already mentioned, shown that he could take keen delight in scenery such as all critics admit to be worthy of admiration, and was capable of regarding such "through media of feeling derived from higher sources." Indeed, that Constable loved aU nature very much is as plainly evident to the most casual observer of his pictures as it was to the President of the Eoyal Academy, when the disap- pointed painter took him the rejected picture of Flatford Mill in order to be taught how to improve in his art, and in all humility learn from his fellow-artists. But to the careful and sympathetic reader of his pictures there is a yet deeper love 118 CONSTABLE. revealed, a love whicli amounts to veneration. And yet, if Constable had never painted a picture in his life, his writings abound with passages showing in what reverence he held Nature in all her phases. One passage alone will suflS.ce to illustrate this : " The landscape painter must walk in the field with an humble mind. JSo arrogant man was ever permitted to see Nature in all her beauty. If I may be allowed to use a very solemn quotation, I would say most emphatically to the student, ' Eemember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.' " Much of the querulous opposition to Constable was undoubt- edly owing to the fact that he was essentially a new man, claiming to choose for himself not only the subjects he should paint but the style in which they were to be represented, and the treatment to be employed in order to gain the end he had in view. He cared nought for what had been done, simply because it was a style or treatment that had hitherto been recognized ; but whilst taking advantage to the utmost of those means which school-painters held to be alone legitimate, he hesitated not to avail himself of any means whatever that he could think of in order to produce a desired effect. For this reason it was he employed his palette-knife so largely, and of course in so doing avoiding all littleness of execution ; paying no attention to mere details as long as he could gain a greater advantage by treating the general truths of nature as to colour and chiaroscuro largely and simply. In this mode of execution Constable from the first regarded his picture as a whole, pro- ducing the general effect, and afterwards working in sufficient details to satisfy truth of form without detracting from the generalization he aimed at. This is an exactly contrary method to that adopted by the New School — for School it is in the ordinary sense of the word — of English Landscape Painters, which is founded on pre-EaphaeHsm, and in which, by careful and laborious execution of every detail and part, it is endeavoured at last to produce a general efifect — a whole. Without entering into a technical discussion as to which of these modes is move JOHN constable's rRODUCTIONS. 119 likely to produce the desired end — a faithful representation of the appearance of nature — we may observe that we have not hitherto seen any landscapes of the New School equal in power and general truth to those of Constable, Wilson, and some others. Perhaps the part of inanimate nature to which Constable paid the greatest attention was the sky. How closely he studied this may be gathered from his remarks in the letter-press accompanying the engraving called Spring, in the ' English Landscape.' ■' The natural history, if the expression may be used, of the skies, which are so particularly marked in hailstorms at this time of the year, is this : — ^The clouds accumulate in very large masses, and from their loftiness seem to move but slowly : immediately upon these large clouds appear numerous opaque patches, which are only small clouds passing before them, and consisting of isolated portions, detached probably from the larger clouds. These, floating much nearer the earth, may perhaps fall in with a stronger current of wind, which, as well as their comparative lightness, causes them to move with greater rapidit}"; hence they are called by wind-millers and sailors, messengers, and always portend bad weather. They float mid- way in what may be termed the lanes of the clouds ; and from being so situated are almost uniformly in shadow, receiving a reflected light only from the clear blue sky immediately above them. In passing over the bright parts of the large clouds they appear as darks, but in passing the shadowed parts they assume a grey, a pale, or a lurid hue." On another occasion he wrote : " That landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids. Sir Joshua Reynolds, speaking of the landscapes of Titian, of Salvator^ and of Claude, says: 'Even their skies seem to sympathize with their subject' I have often been advised to consider my sky as a white sheet thrown behind the objects. .Certainly, if the sky is obtrusive, as mine is', it is bad ; but if it is evaded, as mine are 1 20 CONSTABLE. not, it is worse ; it must and always shall with me make an effective part of the composition. It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key-note. . . . The sky is the source of light in nature, and governs everything. . . . My skies have not been neglected though they have often failed in execution, no doubt, from an over-anxiety about them, which will alone destroy that easy appearance which I^ature has in all her movements." In most of Constable's skies are masses of soft, warm, grey colour, the edges appearing to be touched with liquid silver; and through these, far beyond, one catches an occasional glimpse of the blue empyrean. He could not understand the "white sheet " theory when his beloved clouds offered such indescribable con- trasts of glowing sunbeam and cool shadow. Some of Constable's sky effects are admirably illustrated in engravings from his works, amongst which we may mention particularly Spring, YaiTnouth, Bwmnn&r Afternoon after a Shower, Hadleigh Castle, Sunmtfer Evening, and A Summer-land. Another feature of his art is the dewy freshness of his grass and his emerald foliage. He was essentially a summer painter, and revelled in depicting the special characteristics of our lovely land in the heyday of its beauty. When Sir George Beaumont asked him if he did not find it sometimes difficult to know where to place his " brown tree " in a landscape, he repKed, " No, for I never paint one." He saw that the foliage in summer was green — and painted it so ; he saw that the summer shower and the morning dew gave the verdure additional beauty — and painted what he saw ; he saw that in the summer sun the green leaves sparkle, and glisten, and glitter — and thus he painted them ; and so he was told that his dazzling white light looked like sleet and snow ; and then " Constable's snow " became a rare joke with the connoisseurs, who avoided brightness and light as they would a plague-stricken thing, and who had hob-nobbed with Sir George Beaumont, convinced that the "brown fiddle, brown picture" theory was the correct one. And after poor Constable's death, some JOHN constable's peoductions. 121 barbarian hand robbed The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, the picture that had cost him over thirteen years' anxiety and appli- cation before he could give it the wealth of noontide brightness it at last possessed ; some barbarian hand robbed that picture of its very soul, clouded out its sun with a coat of filthy blacking and mastic varnish, to tone it and make it to the taste of "several noblemen." We have referred to the phrase " Constable's snow," and it may be weU to say a few words on his practice of painting land- scapes when the sun was high in the heavens, out of the picture, and well in front of his easel. TiU his time landscape painters had usually painted sunlit landscapes when the sun was behind them, and either on the right or on the left, and they had looked on the subject from the same quarter as the sun; some had painted the sun in the picture, and Claude's and Cuyp's lovely sunsets, where the glow from the orb sinking below the horizon floods over the earth in a glorious golden mist, are, perhaps, as fine specimens of this effect as any in the art. But our summer painter loved well the noontide splendour; and nature, seen right under the sun, reveals many beauties which are not otherwise to be seen; under the sun the shadows are broad, and their colours full and rich; the white light, too, is transmitted through the thinner foliage of the trees, and, unneutralized by the reflected blue or grey of the heavens, is seen 'in vivid contrast with the full shadows ; and he also saw that all leaves, to a greater or a lesser extent, were fitted to reflect light, and glittered and sparkled in the glad sunshine like jewels reflecting rays of pure white light — this he painted. The result was that critics who knev; everything about painting and nothing about nature could not ■understand his truth. The great faithfulness with which he produced the effects of summer light, and painted heat even, was due to a departure from the recognized school-methods of execu- tion. It had been the custom, and even Turner had followed it, to use the warm colours (red, orange, and yellow), to convey the idea of warmth. 122 CONSTABLE. In firelight effects this would be all very well, but Constable hardly used these colours at all when he painted his summer lieat, because he could not see them in nature. His predominant masses were blues, greens, and greys. Eed, orange, and yellow are only seen in the sky in the coolest hours of the day — night and morning — and sunlight only intensifies its natural glories ; white seeming a more intense white, and blue remaining a per- fect blue untinged with green, because the light of the sun is the purest, whitest light imaginable. This, and his nearly universal choice of summer as the time in his subjects, also accounts for his greenness, for it is only in spring, autumn, and winter that brown tints prevail in the foliage of England ; in summer our country is essentially and characteristically green. A celebrated German critic thus expresses his opinion of Con- stable's style and genius : " This painter gives us everything that can be possibly desired in a landscape artist of realistic tendency ; his lively feeling for the picturesque as seen in the simplest forms of nature, perfect truthfulness in every part, transparent and powerful colouring, and free yet careful execu- tion, enable him to place the rural scenes of England before us in the most unpretending and attractive form." PICTURES BY GAINSBOROUGH IN PUBLIC GALLERIES IN ENGLAND. LoNDOfT. National Gallery. The Market-Cart. The Watering-Place. Musidora Bathing her Feet. The Watering-Place. Woody Landscape, Sunset. Rustic Children. Study for a Portrait {Mr. Ahel Moysey). Portrait of Mrs. Siddons. Painted in \1 Si. Balf-length. Portrait of Ralph Schomberg, Esq., M.D. Portrait of Orpin, Parish Clerk of Bi;adford, Wiltshire. Portraits of Mr. J. BaiUie, of Ealing Grove, his Wife and four Children. Landscape ("Gainsborough's Forest "). Dxilwich Gallery, Portraits of Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickell. Portrait of P. J. de Loutherbourg, Esq., R.A. Portrait of Thomas Linley, Esq. Born in 1730. Portrait of Samuel Linley, Esq., R.N. (" There is a tradition that thishead was painted in forty -eight minutes.") Portrait of Thomas Linley, Esq. Born in 1756. Portrait of Mrs. Moodey and her Children. 124 PICTUBES BY GAINSBOKOUGH AND CONSTABLE. London. South Kensington Museum. Group of the Princesses Charlotte Augusta Matilda, Augusta Sophia, and Elizabeth, elder daughters of King George III. Sketch for a whole-length portrait of a Female (pencil and wash). CaiTying Lambs {chalk). Sketch for the Portrait of Master Buttall, known as "The Blue Boy" [pencil and water-colowr). View of a Mansion [ehallc and India imk). Landscape with Buildings {ehallc and India ink). National Portrait Oallery. Portrait of Jeffery, first Lord Amherst. Portrait of Charles, first Marquis Cornwallis. Portrait of George Colmau. Hampton, Court. Portrait of Fischer, the Musician. Portrait of Colonel St. Leger. Edinbukgh. National Gallery. The Honourable Mrs. Graham, Wife of General Lord Lynedoch. {A first study made ly the painter for the head of the full-length, lent by Mr. Maxton Graham of Cultoquhey, is also in the Gallery. ) Dublin. National Gallery. Portrait of Hugh Duke of Northumberland, K.G. Bom in 1712. PICTURES BY CONSTABLE IN PUBLIC GALLERIES IN ENGLAND. London. Naiional Gallery. The Com Field (or Country Lane). Painted in 1826. The Valley Farm (Willy Lett's House). ExhihUed at the Hayal Academy in 1835. A Cornfield with Figures. Barnes Common. CHEONOLOGT. 125 London. South Kensington Musmi/m. Salisbury Cathedral. Signed and dated 1823. Dedham Mill. Signed and dated 1820. Hampstead Heath. ExMnted at the Royal Academy in 1830. Signed on the hack. Hampstead Heath. ExhibUed at the Royal Academy in 1827. Boat-Building, near Flatford Mill. Water Meadows, near Salisbury. CHRONOLOGY. CONSTABLE. 1776 Birth. June 17. 1795 Introduced to Farrington. 1799 Becomes Student of the Eoyal Academy. 1803 Takes Coasting Trip in the " Coutts." 1812 ^s)ahiti Flatford Mill. 1815 Marriage. Death of Mother. 181? Exhibits White Sorse. Elected A.E.A. 1825 Receives Gold Medal from the French King. 1827 Takes house at Hampstead. 1828 Death of Mrs. Constable. 1829 Elected R.A. ]S37 Death. March 30. INDEX. Altar pieces^ Goustable'Sj 91. " Antiquity," Smith, 85, 95. Art education, copying as a branch of, 57. Arundel Mill, 108. Barret, George, 5, 15. Bate, Mr., portrait of, 42. Beaucierc, Lady Di, 41. Beaumont, Sir G., 46, 49, 84, 108, 121. Mue Boy, The, 42, 60, 74. Boat Building, 117. Boat passing a Lock, 98. Boy at the Stile, 45. Bridgeman and Kent, 5. Brookes, Dr., 88. Burroughs, Humphrey, 19. Bute, Lord, 4. Caroline of Anspach, Queen, 8. Ceyx and Alcyone, 98. Charles I., 3, 8. Chesterfield, Lord, portrait of, 69. Christie the auctioneer, 13, 41. Claude, 14, 121. Cloud studies, Constable's, 100, 120. Cloud studies, Gainsborough's, 27 Colourist, Gainsborough as a, 59, 70. Constable's courtship, 92. „ French critics, 100. „ George, 107. ** Constable's snow," 121. Cooper, the miniaturist, 10. Correggio, 59. Cornfield, The, 109, 115. Cottage in a Cornfield, 106. Cottage Door, The, 74. Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher, 44. Cotes, Francis, 35. » Coyte Alive," 42. Cozens, John, 10, 15, 91, 114. Cunningham's Lives of Painters, 51. Cuyp, 121. Dedham Vale, 99. Dell at Helmingham Park, 101. Duchess of Devonshire, 41, 55. Dunthorne, John, 83, 95, 106. Dupont, Gainsborough, 38. Dutch Landscapists, The, 13. Eastlake, Sir Charles, 15. Edgar, Mr., 29, 68. Egremont, Lord, 107. "English Landscape," 103, 119. Etty, 81. INDEX. 127 Farrirgtoa, Joseph, 85. Female portraits, Gainsborough's, 72. Fischer, the musician, 45, 49. Fisher, Archdeacon, 88, 95, 102. Fisher, Dr., 89. Flatford Mill, 89, 94, 118. Flemish Masters, The, 56. Foote's " Taste," 7. Free Society, of Artists, 13. Gainsborough, Humphrey, 20. „ John, senior, 18. „ Jack, 19, 41. „ Mrs., 19. „ Mrs. Thomas, 26 et 1 Gainsborough's sisters, 20. Garrick, David, 33. Girl and Pigs, 43. Girtin, T., 91, 1-14. Gravelot, the engraver, 23. Hallet, Mr. and Mrs., portrait of, 61. Hamilton, Colonel, 45. Hayman, Francis, 11 et seq., 2i, 35. Hiiy Wain, The, 116. Helmingham Parle, 87. Henderson, the actor, 52. Hilliard, the miniaturist, 10. Hiugeston, Mr., Southwold, 48 et seq. Hobbema, 115. Hogarth, 4 et seq., 7 et seq., 11 et seq. Honywood, General, portrait of, 33, 44. Incorporated Society of Artists, 12. Ipswich, Gainsborough at, 27 et seq. Ipswich Musical Club, The, 30 Jack Hill, 46. Jumping Horse, The, 102, 116. Kirby, Joshua, 27, 48. , KneUer, Sir Godfrey, 3. " Lake Avemus," 'Wilson's, 62. Landguard Fcrt, View of, 28. Le Notre, the gardener, 5. LesUe, C. E., 86, 95, 106. Ligonier, Countess of, portrait of, 69. Lincoln, Countess of, portrait of, 69. London Magazine, 7. Lock, A., 94. Marine Painters, The, 11. National Gallery, The, 84 Nayland altar-piece, 91. Payne, W., 15. Peter Pindar, 43 et seq. Philips, Ambrose, 6. Portraits, Constable's, 99. Purton, Mr., 106. Queen Charlotte, portrait of, 43. Quin, the actor, portrait of, 33. Race, The, 64. Baphael, 84. Bamsay, AUan, 6. Eedgrave, Messrs., "A Century of Painters," by, 13, 59. Kembrandt, 81. Return from Harvest, The, 34. Heyuolds, Sir Joshua, 3, 5, 8, 12 et seq., 37, 48, 50 et seq., 58 et seq., 63, 69. Rhudde, Dr., 92. Romantic Landscape, with Sheep at a Fountain, 36. Roubiliac, the sculptor, 8. Eouquet, M., 16. Eoyal Academy, The, 12, 32, 35 et seq., 79. Eoyal Institution, 114. Eubens, 56. Euysdael, 14, 115. Euskin's "Modem Painters," 66 et seq., 92, 111, 113, 116. 128 INDEX. St. Leger, Colonel, portrait of, 44. St. Martin's Lane Academy, 24. Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 105. Salvator Bosa, 14. Schomberg Hoase, 40. Scott, Samuel, 11. Sea Shore with Boats and Figures, 68. Shepherd Boy in the Shower, 64, 73. Sheridan, E. B., 46. Society of Arts, The, 12, 32. Spring, 84, 119. Stour Valley, The, 17, 80, 115. Stratford Mill, 97 et seq., 117. Sudbury, the town of, 21. " Taste," Foote's, 4. "Tatler,"The,4. Teniers, 56. Thicknesse, Philip, 28, 31, 39. Titian, 2, 59. Turner, J. "W. M., 10, 54, 59. VcHley Farm, The, 107. Van de Velde, 12, 107, 115. Van Dyck, 34, 56, 61. Vemet, Horace, 14. Vertue, the engraver, 4. View of Hampstead Heath, Il2. View in Mall, St. James's Park, 44. Victory, S.M.S., Constable's picture of, 91. Waagen, Dr., 3 (note), 60. Walpole, Horace, 6. Warren Hastings, trial of, 47. Water colourists. The, 8 et seq. Watering Place, The, 73. Waterloo Bridge, 105 et seq., 117, 120. Watts, the engineer, 20. West, Benjamin, 89. WhaUey, Mrs., 88. White Horse, The, 97, 98, 100, 115. « Willy Lott's House," 108. Wilson, K., 7, 11 et seq., 18. 61, 114, 119. Wiltshire, the carrier, 33. Woodman in the Storm, The, 42, 64. Womum's " Epochs of Painting," 14. Wright, of Derby, 15. Yarmouth Pier, 105. Zuccarelli, 14. RicHAEp Clav and Sous, Limited, London and Bungay. Ijf^Jfl^llW MHW I I II MmH I JWJI^MJP^ \ '--X -% ^ \ •^ \>.